Futuristic

In this episode of Futuristic, Cameron and Steve reunite after a three-month break to reflect on how far artificial intelligence and robotics have come since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022. They chart the wild rise from OpenAI’s first conversational model to today’s trillion-dollar valuations, integrated browsers, agentic coding tools, and the dawn of humanoid robots. Along the way they weigh the “bubble” narrative, the myth of a job apocalypse, and the cultural impact of AI on everything from creativity to capitalism. The conversation pivots from nostalgia for the early internet to speculation about the next three years—when everyone, they predict, will be working with personal AI agents and, perhaps, living alongside household robots. The banter swings between philosophy, tech history, humour, and a few pulled hamstrings. FULL TRANSCRIPT Futuristic recording – Oct 30, 2025 Cameron: [00:00:00] Welcome back to the Futuristic Podcast, episode 46. It is the 31st of October, 2025. The first time I’ve seen your face on a screen except on TikTok, Steve Sammartino. Since August 4th was the last time you and I did an episode, I did one with my old friend, Nick Johnson, principal of Toowoomba Ankin School on August 23. But we have not done a podcast for nearly three months, Steve. Not because there’s been nothing happening, just because there’s too much happening, and you’ve been too busy. Steve: Sounds so needy. I apologize wholeheartedly, Cameron. And, uh, the fact that you didn’t delete my phone from your contacts Cameron: No Steve: is revelatory, and I like it. It’s good. You’re a good man. And Cameron: revelatory. Steve: it and I missed it. Our chats because [00:01:00] every time I chat to you I get a little bit smarter. So I’ve been in Cameron: Same, same. Steve: and I’m glad we are going to, uh, unpack. Cameron: I’ve got less hair than the last time we talked. Not because it’s falling out, but just because it’s hard to tell with, there’s glare coming through my window. But, um, I am, uh, Sean Light so bright. Steve: And I just asked, when did you go gray? ’cause you got a really good gray mop there. When did it, were you one of Cameron: Well, I’m, yeah, I, I started going gray at 23. I’m white. I’ve been white for a lot longer than I’ve been gray, but Yeah. Steve: Blonde is area part of the Aryan Nation, Cameron: Or as the Mormons like to say white and delight them. If you wanna get into heaven, you need to be white and delight them. Steve: Do you? Cameron: Hmm. Steve: me. All right. Cameron: Steve? Um. In terms of what to talk about today. There’s been a lot of news in the last [00:02:00] three months and too much to catch up on, obviously, and I thought singers were coming up to the third anniversary of chat, GPT, which hit the world in November of 2022. It might be a good time to stop and reflect where have we come from, where are we today, and where do you think we might be three years from now? What do you think about that as a model, Steve? Steve: Perfect. It is the perfect time for a review. Three years. Things work in threes. It is the perfect time to review it because it’s been a pretty radical three years and maybe in some ways we’re in the [00:03:00] trough of disillusionment now. A lot of people are starting to ask questions. The bubble word comes up, which comes up with every technology revolution. And bubbles aren’t bad anyway. If a bubble bursts, the beneficiaries are usually the people because there’s been an excessive investment in capital and that can benefit all of us because the infrastructure gets built out and they overinvested and we need that. It happened with broadband cables and early internet and, and now it’s, it’s happening again potentially. And that’s good ’cause you want overinvestment because the beneficiaries are usually the wider populace when it comes to and technology Revolutions. Cameron: Yes. Look, there’s obviously a ton of investment, Steve: Mm. Cameron: ton of hype going into all things AI and robotics we’re to, [00:04:00] NVIDIA’s just became a $5 trillion company open. AI is suggesting they might IPO at a trillion dollar valuation. I mean, it is, uh, like bonkers stuff, absolutely bonkers. But I thought I would start this by pulling up the blog post that OpenAI put out in November, 2002. It was November 30th, so we’re about a month away from the five year anniversary. It was pretty simple. It said, we’ve trained a model called Chat, GPT, which interacts in a conversational way. The dialogue format makes it possible for chat GPT to answer follow-up questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests. Chat GPT is a sibling model to instruct GPT, which is trained to follow an instruction in a prompt and provide a detailed response. We are excited [00:05:00] to introduce chat GPT to get users feedback and learn about its strengths and weaknesses during the research preview usage of chat. GPT is free. Try it now@chatgt.com. Then there were some samples of ways to use it. Limitations Chachi PT sometimes write plausible sounding, but incorrect or nonsensical answers. Well, I’m glad they fixed that. Uh, but. These were simpler times in November, 2022. Do you remember when you first heard about it and when you first used it? Steve: I was actually using GPT, uh, the, the model before, it might’ve been a 2.5 or a three, uh, through one of the APIs. ’cause the APIs were released earlier. wasn’t Grammarly. I’m trying to remember the name of it now. And it was, and it blew my mind the first time I saw it. Uh, when I went on to Chacha, bt I do remember it [00:06:00] being a super revolution, and we can remind listeners that they had a hundred million users in the first month, fastest adopted consumer product in history. also they’ve got 983 million monthly users now, which is pretty radical. You know, maybe one quarter of the internet. And a, Cameron: Wow. Steve: of people don’t have, call it unlimited data like we have in western markets. So you’d pretty much say if you’re in a Western market, you’re on it. Uh, it’s decimated search. I, I did say a statistic, which blew my mind on search. Now, if you’re a first page search on Google, first page search item, traffic is down. Reportedly just came out, uh, yesterday, 79%. And that’s two reasons. The first one is the AI dropped down summaries that happens in Google, which to their credit, they’ve adopted the reality of where they are. Unlike Kodak and said, look, people are going this way. We just have to adopt it and work out the business model later. [00:07:00] But also, I know that I use chat GBT 80% of the time when I once would use search. And I simply ask it for the live feeds of, tell me where you got it from, what happened today. And you know, those small prompts to make sure the data you’re getting isn’t just a hi historical construct. And it, it really has changed the way we use the internet fundamentally. And even though the last, I think the last maybe. Three or six months. A lot’s been happening, but nothing fundamental. I would say easy to forget how far we’ve come in those three years because the first version of chat, GBT when it was launched in, in November of 2022, remember that was an 18 month old database, and then it was six months old, and then now it’s live. It didn’t have code bases, didn’t have Dali, didn’t have image recognition, didn’t have video. It’s easy to forget that [00:08:00] it isn’t just chat GBT. It’s actually been really dramatic and we’ve almost been spoiled by the fact that every iteration, most of them, for 80% of that time in the past three years has been incredible and wowing. And maybe in the last few months, because we haven’t been wowed with the most recent iteration of Cha JBT, then all of a sudden, oh, bubble Bubble came out. Cameron: I’ve got an article here from the 5th of December, 2022 New York Times by Kevin Ros. He says, like most nerds who read science fiction, I’ve spent a lot of time wondering how society will greet true artificial intelligence. If and when it arrives, will we panic start sucking up to our new robot overlords, ignore it, and go about our daily lives? So it’s been fascinating to watch the Twitter sphere try to make sense of chat, GPTA new cutting edge AI chat bot that was open for testing this week. Chat GPT is quite simply the best artificial intelligence chat bot ever released to the [00:09:00] general public. It was built by open ai, the San Francisco AI company that is also responsible for tools like GPT-3 and Dali two, the breakthrough image generator that came out this year. Um, goes on to say that, uh, AI chatbots are usually terrible, but chat GPT feels different, smarter, weirder, more flexible. It can write jokes, some of which are actually funny, working computer code and college level essays. It can also guess at medical diagnosis, create text-based Harry Potter games and explain scientific concepts at multiple levels of difficulty. And, uh, you know, I always like to go back and read news articles from the early days of the internet, 93, 94, 95, and see how people were talking about it. Um, he finishes this article though by saying. Personally, I’m still trying to wrap my head around the fact that chat, GPTA chat bot that some people think could make Google obsolete and that has already been compared to the iPhone in [00:10:00] terms of its potential impact on society isn’t even open AI’s best AI model. That would be GPT for the next incarnation of the company’s large language model, which is rumored to be coming out sometime next year. We are not ready. Now what they did come out with a week ago or so was chat, GPT Atlas, their chromium web browser. Are you using Atlas? Steve: No, I haven’t. I did have a look at it, but I haven’t gone to using it. Are you? Cameron: Yes. I’ve been using it exclusively as my browser since it came out and basically, you know, if you type something in. You open it up and you type something in the, the, the URL field, which would normally pull up a Google search. It pulls up a chat, GPT answer. So chat GPT is built in. It’s the default answering model. You can also, you know, use it on a [00:11:00] sidebar and access all of your chats to, with chat, GPT. Uh, anything you plug into the browser also turns up in your chat GPT history if you interface via the app or your phone or whatever. So it’s totally integrated into the backend. Steve: because that’s the last thing I want, Cameron. I don’t even want to talk about it. Cameron: Uh, but yeah, look, it’s, it’s. I, you know, I, I’ve seen a lot of negative feedback about it, uh, in the forums, but, um, I think it’s great. Like it is the default thing I go to now. It’ll give me, you know, um, if I just type in a general search, it’ll give me Wikipedia links, new source links, uh, whatever I want. Um, it’s a search engine that understands me. It’ll, quite often if I ask a general question, it’ll say, it’ll gimme an answer. Then it’ll say, if you’re thinking about this in terms of doing a podcast episode for one of your history podcasts or your investing podcast, here are some of the things you might wanna think about. So it’s search answers that are [00:12:00] already built, personalized, built around what it knows about me, what I’m trying to do. Um, yeah, so. That’s a big thing. Like we’re, I, I don’t go to Google. I do literally do not go to Google anymore. ’cause this is now my browser is just chat, GPT, uh, integrated, you know, uh, uh, native integration into chat GPT. Anyway, I’m getting off, I’m getting off, uh, the track. So, November 22 came out and my recollection is that I was shocked and impressed that I could have a conversation with a chatbot that could converse in English. It could understand what I was talking about. It could understand a question, it could answer my [00:13:00] questions. It could write coherent English responses, sponsors, uh. About anything. They weren’t always correct. They still aren’t always correct, but it was like just a massive shift in language. User interfacing with a computer, uh, blew my mind at the time. Yeah. Steve: That’s, that’s the key element, Cameron. The big shift when chat EPT came out was it was the first successful consumer oriented natural language processing computation device where you could or talk to it and get a result that was coherent and not only coherent, a PhD in every single subject. And just like normal human PhDs, they say stupid things too occasionally. So feel like it, it really was when the abstraction of computation got removed and we could [00:14:00] interface in a human way with computational devices. And that was the revolution there. Even the word chat, because chatbots had been around or felt like a bit of a misnomer, almost was named poorly. And didn’t really give the gravitas to what it was because my opinion, and I know yours because we’ve discussed it over the time, is we already have artificial general intelligence. To me, that was the launch of a GI. It is general, it is better than most people at most things, the Cameron Riley definition of artificial general intelligence. And we’ve had it for three years. And that’s quite telling too, because we’ve had artificial general intelligence for three years and where exactly is this job apocalypse that everyone keeps talking about? It ain’t here. And by the way, it ain’t coming anytime soon or ever. And I know that and I’m even more steadfast on that three years down the track that, uh, not about to replace everyone. Certainly people with [00:15:00] jobs that have variety in them. Cameron: Well, let’s talk then about where we are late 2025. Um, you say there’s no jog, job apocalypse, but big tech companies, Amazon just announced they’re laying off, I think 40,000, was it 30,000 or 40,000 people? And it’s not because they’re replacing them all with an ai, but. It is, as I understand it, because they need to cut costs so they can sink more money into building data centers to run ai, and they have to find the money from somewhere. And the first place to go is these 40,000 employees. So it’s a side effect of AI not directly being replaced by ai, but Microsoft’s been letting thousands of people go. I think some of them are being replaced by ai. [00:16:00] Um, it, we, but, you know, we’re a long way from seeing the apocalypse, and I think the reason is the AI is still not good enough yet. I, I had a, a, a friend come over for a coffee yesterday and, uh, last time he was over a week or two ago, he’s a, he’s a web designer slash user interface designer guy. Bit of a coder. Um, I said, are you using Cursor? And he said, no, uh, I’m not, I’m not using, I said, it’s your company works in the energy sector, building solutions for the energy sector. I said, how much AI are people using coding in the background? He goes, uh, not much. I said, check out Cursor. Now, I I, I dunno if you and I, we probably haven’t talked about this ’cause it’s been months, but for people who don’t use Cursor aren’t coders, cursor is a, a development developer tool, an IDE as we call it an interactive developer environment development environment. It’s basically where [00:17:00] you write code and it’s had AI integration now for a year, 18 months. But one of the things that they implemented a couple of months ago is basically ag agentic development processes. So now I will, and I use it all day, every day, and it’s not. Full time all day, every day. But it’s working on projects behind the scenes. So I will be trying to write a piece of code for running my business, right? I’ll say, here’s what I wanna do. Um, help me build this. And it’ll start writing code. And then it will test the code using linter. It’s like a testing environment and it has full access to my hard drive, my project folders. And it will write the code, build the code, test the code, the code will fail. It’ll go, oh, that didn’t work. Lemme try again. That didn’t work. Lemme try again. Oh, I see what I did there. And it’ll [00:18:00] run in the background for 10, 15, 20 minutes trying to get a working version of it. It’ll finally say, yeah, I think this works. I’ll test it, it won’t work. I’ll say, have a look at the console. And then it’ll read the console. Oh, okay. I see what the problem is. And it goes through another cycle of debug test, debug test, debug test until it thinks it’s got a working model. And I’ll rinse and repeat, and this will sometimes go on for hours or days, and at the end of every day, I will export my conversation with it to my project folder. And then the next day, if I start a new session, I’ll say, we’ve been trying to solve this problem. Go and read the conversation that we had yesterday. It’s in my folder, it’s a markdown file, and let’s pick up from where we left off yesterday. The other interesting thing that it does is, uh, when the context window, if you’ve been having a chat with it for three or four hours and you’re [00:19:00] still going around it, the context window, you know, it gets so large that it can’t remember what you talked about hours ago, and then it starts to repeat itself. Steve: it does. Yeah. Cameron: What, what cursor automatically does is when the context window is filling up it’s sum, it stops, summarizes the conversation, creates a new chat session, uses that summary as the prompt for the new chat session and kicks it off again. So it, that’s all, it just automatically reha, uh, what cleans out its context window and starts again. So it’s amazing. But he, so this friend came yesterday. I tried using Cursor and it, it got like 90% of the way to building a solution for me and then kept failing on the last 10%. And I just got in this loop where I couldn’t get it to fix the last 10%. And I was like, yeah, yeah, I know that feeling. And I think that is the problem is it’s still [00:20:00] almost useful in that sort of closed loop way, but it’s still not. It’s, there are still hallucinations. It still makes mistakes. It still gets stuck in these loops, so we’re not there yet. It, it can’t replace a human. It can replace maybe some like low level developers, but it can’t replace a good developer yet. Steve: So the Amazon, going way back to the jobs and the replacement, I mean, that’s the interesting part is yeah, there’s a huge investment and you need to offset the cost of that investment by removing employees. And it’s not overtly dissimilar to getting robots into a car factory. Funding that investment and having some short term pain where you get people within the administrative or marketing or other commercial realms to offset that, that that has happened quite frequently. It would be good to see a study on how that has happened [00:21:00] historically, but I don’t think there’s an increase in job losses directly related to the technology itself. And I would be surprised if this automation exceeds the impact that robotic and manufacturing automation has had. I re I really would, and I, and I, I actually don’t think it’s gonna happen and I actually don’t think that even if it can finish a project and that last 10% that you’re speaking about can happen, I actually don’t think it’s gonna replace us because. Agency is the thing that humans want, we change our mind frequently. Uh, a friend of mine, Nick Hodges, he talks about it and I wrote about it last week. He calls it the takeoff and landing problem, is that we want to set the course for the plane. Watch where it’s going, and you just said, then you, you are using the console or the control panel to [00:22:00] help it on where it’s going and guide the AI that’s flying the plane. But you are sort of guiding it and then you bring it into land on what you finally want. I think that’s where we’re gonna go. And I, I would actually that where we are right now with AI is that it hasn’t reduced the workload for anyone at all. Almost what it has done is enabled us to get more do

In this episode of **Futuristic**, Cameron is joined by his old friend **Nick Johnstone**, Principal of Toowoomba Anglican School, to explore how **AI is reshaping the future of education**. They dive into the role of schools in a world where every student might have access to unlimited knowledge in their pocket, how teachers’ responsibilities may shift toward mentorship and motivation, and whether schools are even necessary when AI tutors can personalize learning better than any human. The conversation ranges from the challenges of managing devices in classrooms, to what employment might look like in a post-AI economy, to whether robots might one day replace teachers. Along the way, they touch on the social role of schools, legislative drag, the fate of universities, and even sneak in a nostalgic chat about Alice Cooper. FULL TRANSCRIPT Cameron: [00:00:00] welcome back to the Futuristic, uh, I’m doing this today. My name is Cameron Reilly. For new people doing this without my usual partner in crime, Steve Sammartino, because he’s off doing a keynote somewhere, said he couldn’t make it as is his usual want. But, uh, I’m being joined instead today by an even older friend of mine than Steve. I’ve known Steve 20 years. Nick and I go back 30. Five years, probably. How old are we? 55, 83. Nick Johnstone, principal of Toowoomba Anglican School. Uh, recently crowned, uh, the principal of Toowoomba Anglican School. Previously principal of other schools, but yeah, Nick and I go back to grade eight. In Bundaberg and, uh, I, I, I invited [00:01:00] Nick to come on. I sent him an article I wrote recently on some of my thoughts and prognostications about the future of schooling and education in a world of ai. And Nick gave me some great feedback and I said, come on and let’s chat about it. One of the things, welcome Nick, by the way, welcome to the show. As people can tell, I took all of Nick’s hair over the years and, um. Nick Johnstone: at some, at some point we had equal hair, but that didn’t last for very long. Cameron: No, it didn’t last very long as I recall. Um, one of the things, I’m gonna blow some smoke up, um, your backside for a bit. One of the things I’ve always liked about Nick is, uh, you know, Nick and I, uh, you know, science tech guys always have been, and Alice Cooper, uh, science Tech, Alice Cooper. The Beastie Boys, you know, um, bit of Van Halen. Uh, Nick and I used to, I remember, uh, when David Lee Roth came out with, uh, Yankee Rose, you and I dancing at the school, [00:02:00] discos along to that, trying out testing out our high kicks. How’s your high kick going these days? It’s good. You’re staying limber. Nick Johnstone: in the Hemi. Cameron: Good. Yeah. Yeah. Um, no, in all seriousness, Nick, um. In terms of a, a principle I know is very pro technology and it’s, you know, I know you work in sort of the, the, the private school religious sector yet have remained pro tech on the front foot, very, um, on the very aggressive in terms of figuring out how to integrate. New technologies. So it makes you the perfect person to come on and talk about this. Um, before I hit you with a barrage of questions though, Nick, um, why don’t we start by, I’ll ask you to give the audience your. Current application of [00:03:00] technologies in your schools? Like what, what are you doing today? We can talk about the future in a minute, but let’s talk about how you approach technology in your school today. What, what your attitudes are. Nick Johnstone: sure. Um, I guess that, um, I, I, I’ll take a slice maybe the last five years. ’cause I think probably going back further than that doesn’t have, um. translatable ability into the future. But in the, in the last five years, um, I see the opportunities of technology in education being transformative, I’ll use that term. I know it’s a fairly large in the context of to today’s society, but, so in my immediate last school, Bishop Drew College, where I was, uh, head there for, uh, almost seven and a half years. Uh, our aim was to go from a relatively traditional. of education. So we didn’t have a learning management system in the school. Um, we had, um, [00:04:00] a relatively recent, uh, laptop program, but we wanted to create more than that. We wanted to create opportunities for kids to work in the online environment, um, but also in the asynchronous environment as well as the synchronous environment. we set up, um, uh. A system where the kids basically could have access to the class content. There was tutorials built into those, uh, processes as well. Uh, that was the first part of it. The second part of it was we wanted to amplify that. we actually established an online school, uh, that’s called Horizons, uh, and in the first instance it was set up so that it could create greater flexibility for students within our current. structures. So for example, instead of running a class before school hours or after school hours, we would give greater flexibility in the line structure of a school. So basically a student could have a spare, [00:05:00] but in that spare they would do another online subject that was run by our school. Um, with the plan of testing that through a, you know, um, better testing, lots of feedback from students and staff and parents to then, uh. Expand that model to externals. Uh, so that’s the process that’s occurring at the moment in that school. Um, I’ve changed schools in the last 15 weeks and I’m at Toowoomba Anglican School. Uh, and this school is at the start of, um, a similar journey in the fact that, um. They need a, uh, uh, a transformative learning management system that allows the students to have better access both, um, in class environments, but also giving them the flexibility of the day that they currently don’t have. I mean, we have a lot of partners, you know, um, external consultants and teachers coming in. The kids go out to TAFE and a variety of other programs for certificate. Pathways. We have relationships with the universities and those sort sorts of things as well, but we didn’t have a lot of those online [00:06:00] opportunities. Um, so that’s sort of the, the journey we’re on at, at in this school. But Cameron: And you’re a K to, you’re a K to 12, Nick Johnstone: yeah, we’ve got three year olds to 18 year olds. of Cameron: right? Nick Johnstone: at have had early years through to year 12. So, um, in fact my entire career has been. in K 12 environments. Cameron: Right. And, and your attitude towards, uh, devices and the internet in your schools, how, how do you approach that? Usually, I. Nick Johnstone: Yeah, it’s, it’s been an interesting one ’cause there’s been that sort of, uh, push back and forth on that. Um, I, I would say I, I’m pro devices. But I’m probably not pro phones in the adolescent context in school. I, I haven’t always been that way. Cam, I’ve gotta say, in fact, I remember speaking at a senior year’s, conference at University Queensland for probably [00:07:00] 13 or 14 years ago when mobile phones were first sort of a thing, is being able to use the, um, the inner science context, you know, all, all of our phones, you know. Have accelerometers and et cetera in them. And how can we use that to, not just, um, the communication style of education, but also, you know, can we use it in physics? Can we use it in biology? Can we use it in other, in other contexts of, uh, of, of maths and science in particular. Um, and, but I’ve, I’ve stood back from that now because of the distraction factor of a lot of mobile phones in class. I’m not one. That, you know, does the whole, um, uh, put ’em in a pouch, put ’em in a locker, never be seen again. Scenario, uh, we live in, um, modern world. But, um, the flip side of that is it’s all about teaching kids the responsibilities of having a computer in their pocket. Um, Cameron: Hmm. Nick Johnstone: And, and that when we all live in this [00:08:00] world, we can’t pretend that it’s not, it’s not reality. But I also subscribe to a fair bit of what a, what Jonathan Holt talks about in his work about just making sure the kids are appropriately ready for technology. Um, and there’s, I’m gonna say security and oversight without much restriction. I know, and that’s a spectrum there. I know. But, Cameron: Hmm. Nick Johnstone: that’s pretty much how I’ve, how I feel now and. I haven’t felt Al always felt that way. Cameron: I can imagine it’s really difficult as it’s difficult being a parent. You know, your kids are older than Fox. You know, you, I’ve got adult kids. You’ve got adult kids. Fox is 11, so he’s in that. Phase where he’s always on a device and you know, it’s difficult being a parent, a ProTech parent. Like, I want you to have devices, I want you to have technology. But at the same time, I know that it’s an absolute, you know, massive landmine and distraction and comes with a whole bunch of problems. [00:09:00] And then you’ve got a thousand kids to have to worry about how you manage that. So I imagine it’s a, an order of magnitude more difficult. Nick Johnstone: perspective. Um, I didn’t. Jump into the mobile phones for my children until they were 15. and that was Cameron: Yeah. Right. Nick Johnstone: a decision that we made as parents, rightly or wrongly. That was just a decision that we made in the context of our family at that time. Having said that, both of my sons used technology exclusively in their careers. You know, my youngest is a recording artist based in London. and, and my, my oldest works in, uh, rock and roll media and, and works in Brisbane. Um, and they need devices on them all the time. So, Cameron: Yeah. Yeah. Nick Johnstone: it’s the world we live in. Not every career is that, but I mean, know a lot of them are, Cameron: And of course you and I grew up in an era where, um, we had a computer [00:10:00] room at high school where we went and did computers and we weren’t allowed to have calculators because our teachers would always tell us, when you grow up, you’re not gonna have a calculator with you at all times. I go, no, I’ve got an ai. Uh, you know, you are right, I guess. But it was, you know, we’ve, we’ve sort of come through those generations of technology and, and seen how it’s impacted what the attitudes were towards keeping technology outta kids’ hands when we were in high school right through to today, where the technology is obviously so integrated into our daily lives. So the, the, the question that I was posing in my article. That I want to really drill down with you on is what the role of schooling K through 12 and then of course tertiary may look like in a few years if we proceed with the assumption. Rightly or wrongly, because there a lot of things could, uh, go awry with this. But working on the [00:11:00] assumption that the tech industry, the Silicon Valley, uh, consensus as Eric Schmidt, uh, calls it, is that within a few years we are all going to have some, I won’t use the term super intelligent, but Nick Johnstone: Hmm. Cameron: intelligent device. Uh, our phones, our laptops, our glasses. Our watches, whatever other wearable devices they come up with, will have access to an intelligence that is probably as knowledgeable on every topic as the best humans in that field are. So the best. Possible teacher on every possible topic. It also understands every individual in a way that. No other human can understand that individual because it’s reading [00:12:00] your emails, it’s, it’s reading your text messages, it’s listening to your in-person conversations with people. It knows what your. Uh, neuro divergencies are your, which learning modalities you prefer. It’s infinitely patient. It can present a humanistic human-like avatar. It can talk to you in a human voice and have you talk to it. It can. Basically come in and teach, you know, Fox has been using it to help him learn decimals. He’s sort of grade five through to, you know, talking to you about, you know, PhD level chemistry or biology or physics or whatever. Um, I, I’m wondering how you see this playing out, what the role of schools might be. Let’s just say, I think it’s gonna happen a lot faster than this, but say five years from now, let’s say 20 20, 20 30. [00:13:00] 2030. These devices are in everyone’s pocket. They’re, they’re, let’s say that the access to this is essentially free ’cause it’s given away with the phone and the laptop, like Siri is, it’s part of the operating system. What do schools look like in 2030? Nick? Nick Johnstone: Uh, I go back a step there. Cam, there’s two parts to it. There’s what is the role of education? Because not the same as the role of schools, Cameron: Still. Yep. Nick Johnstone: so AI in the context of the role of education. I totally agree with everything you said with regard to, the inputs into that. Um, certainly around, um. Having a tutor that is purpose made for your needs to be able to help you build your knowledge base, understanding it, and take you, and take you from that, um, [00:14:00] the, the basic knowledge through the, you know, the, the theory of gradual release of, uh, of responsibility. So you’re building content, knowledge, skills over time. Uh, got no doubt that in the next five years, that will change hugely from being, um, I’m gonna say bitsy in the, in the area of education to being fully immersive. That will change. Cameron: Mm-hmm. Nick Johnstone: Um, and I don’t know. fast that will change, of course. But like most things in, in technology, it’s, it’s almost exponential growth. Um, and that’s the reality going back from, you know, um, you know, microchip invention to, to the current day we are now, it, it’s been rapid growth beyond what we could have imagined as kids Looking at Star Wars and Star Trek, um, all those years ago. It’s, it’s, it’s. Far exceeded. [00:15:00] Well, it’s probably in line with some of wacky concepts of really. But, um, so that’s the role of education. I think it’ll be really, really important in that. But the role of schools, I think is actually slightly different to that. Um, it’ll, it’ll absorb all of those things of the role of education, but it will also include, A, a humanistic con, um, component. So I think we’ll always need adults in education in schools. Cameron: Hmm. Nick Johnstone: teachers. Cameron: Mm-hmm. Nick Johnstone: Um, and I think that will change, hope no union people are listening to this, but I think it will change. Um, you know, um, the, the, the, the responsible adult in the room, I’ll call ’em the teacher for the sake of this. They’ll, turn into more of a, instead of the, you know, [00:16:00] the, the keeper of the font of knowledge and the. And the holy grail of what’s right and wrong, wrong, that they’ll turn into more of the, you know, the motivator, the facilitator, those kind of roles. But we are dealing with miners here. Those that are under, particularly those that are under the age of 16. they have, um. Requirements for supervision and care. Uh, so in the schooling, in the schooling context, that’s really vital. You know, we, we need to make sure that we are meeting our safe, child standards, processes, um, and all those sort of things as well. So, carer, motivat. that’s our role in schools on top of all of that role of education with AI into school context. So that will mean there’ll be changes in class size, class structures, class times, day lengths, you know, um, [00:17:00] there’s a lot of schools experimenting with the, with the shorter day at the moment to still meet their curriculum requirements. Um, there’ll be a shakeup backwards from schools and society back into, policy. well. So at the moment in, in certain policy documents, particularly in the senior schools, there’s a certain number of hours you are required to teach. Now if teaching fundamentally changes, are those hours of duty to teach valid anymore, um, does it become more of an outcomes based scenario? So you do a pretest and if you pass the pretest, there’s no point teaching you that. So there’s no point spending 55 in a semester to teach you the biology if you’re already. I’ve 80% the biology test, um, you’d move on to the next one. So that age definition for classes, classes maybe will be multi-age. Because of that, uh, it’ll, it’ll fundamentally change the structure of schools. No doubt. Um, [00:18:00] I guess, outside of that, are also opportunities for kids, not just to learn the, the curriculum work, but ob obviously to learn how to interact with other kids of their age, other kids, you know, younger and older, them, how to interact with adults. KI kids, as, as you well know, they behave differently for their parents. As they do for others, they often Cameron: Mm-hmm. Nick Johnstone: at school than they’re at home. home is where they get Cameron: Hmm. Nick Johnstone: down and, you know, act Cameron: Hmm. Nick Johnstone: But, and that’s good. Cameron: Hmm. Nick Johnstone: the experience of being a child. So I, I think there’s a, that’s a big question how it will change. I, I think it’ll change in every way a school structure. Cameron: So there’s a, there’s a lot to unpack there. I mean, talking about the need for adult supervision. My, my natural reaction to that is until we have robots. Um, that, uh, again, if [00:19:00] you, if you believe the people that are building the robot humanoid robot industries, Steve Santino normally hosts the show with me, just bought his first humanoid robot, cost him $16,000. I don’t think he gets it until December, but it’s, it’s been pre-ordered. Um. You know, the, the forecast from the, the robotics industry, Elon Musk and, and people like him, is that by the end of this decade, humanoid robots will cost about the same as a budget car. So 10 to 20 grand. Um, they’ll be running the latest advanced AI platform, whatever it is, five years from now. So I know Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia is talking about giving their, their AI platform away for free with their robots because, um, or their chips that are in the robots ’cause they wanna ship chips. So you, if you [00:20:00] buy a robot with an Nvidia chip, you get the AI for free, you know. I know Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI has said he’s envisioning a day when they give you a robot for free with your AI subscription. So he flips it on the head, but it’s like getting a mobile phone for free if you sign up for a Telstra plan for 24 months, right? You get the hardware for free, Nick Johnstone: you Cameron: essentially. Nick Johnstone: a basic, um, screen and you and your streaming services are a subscription service for your, for your media currently. And, um, and then you’ve got, you know, other boxes that sit on top of that, that manipulate the data to, to give you the algorithm you want or you think you. Cameron: Yeah. Nick Johnstone: I, I, yeah, I think so. That’s probably, um, a likely outcome. Robotics, uh, I, I will say that any sort of scientific change, um, and I’m gonna say western world here, um, it has legislative drag. Um, and [00:21:00] in, in Australian society, I mean, a, a, as you know, my, my love during my early university years, it was genetics. I literally Cameron: Mm-hmm. Nick Johnstone: degree and could not get a job in Australia because of the legislative drag. most of the Cameron: Mm-hmm. Nick Johnstone: in the laboratory had been passed through special provisions. ’cause we’re a tertiary institution that we could do them, but we couldn’t actually go to the workplace and do them. Um, and. It’s no different with, with technology. And I think ai, um, I mean, at the moment they’ve obviously got frameworks. I read them from cover to cover. Um, they’re so open-ended and so nondescript, you can pretty much do what you like at the moment. but at some Cameron: Hmm. Nick Johnstone: change will come. And I, I do think even though robots will eventually be involved in, you know, everything from, from, from babysitting to obviously the driving, which is already occurring now, um. And [00:22:00] all of

In episode 44 of Futuristic, Cameron and Steve dive into the dawn of the embodiment era of AI. Steve reveals he’s purchased a $16,000 humanoid robot — the K-Bot — to be delivered in December, marking his entry into the personal robotics revolution. The conversation expands into the future of open-source robotics, the potential for a robot skill-sharing app economy, and the economic implications of humanoid automation. Cameron shares his experiment with OpenAI’s new GPT Agents and explains where they fall short. They also explore a future where AI personal assistants act as bullshit detectors during major purchases like buying a car. Finally, Cameron reads an NPR-style retrospective on IBM’s Watson, drawing a direct line from symbolic AI to today’s LLMs and speculating on a future hybrid model. Also – Cameron launches his AI consulting business, Intelletto . FULL TRANSCRIPT Cameron: [00:00:00] Okay, go. Gimme your intro. Steve: Steve. Austin. You gonna to say, gimme an intro again? Wait a minute. wait a Cameron: intro. Steve: Okay, I’ve got it. You ready? Cameron: Yeah. Steve: We Cameron: Give it to me, Steve. Steve: Oh, we have the technology. Steve Austin. A $6 million man who is better than every human in every way. In 1975, $6 million was required to build a humanoid robot who was the future. Now it barely gets you a wooden house with two bedrooms in a city in Australia. We’ve had a great reversal. First a humanoid was 6 million. Now it’s a house. Things are back to front. If you think you can predict the future technology sociology, then fucking think again. Welcome to the futuristic.[00:01:00] Cameron: This is, uh, the futuristic episode 44, recording this on the 4th of August, 2025, pre GPT five, the days before GPT five, which we’re expecting to hit any day now, but there’s been a big few weeks since we last talked on the show. Steve, you and I have talked off the show off air, but on air it’s been a while. Steve: private Cameron: What’s, yeah. Tell me you’ve got big news, Steve. Tell me your big news. Let’s, let’s start with that. Steve: I. robot. It wasn’t a $6 million, man, Cameron. It was a $16,000 humanoid. Sexless as far as I know, but I could be surprised when it arrives. We don’t know if it’s gonna have genitalia. We don’t know. But I bought myself a k Bott [00:02:00] which is going to be delivered in December now. Hey, still waiting on, uh, Elon’s Robo Taxis while they’re there now, so we don’t know, but, uh, it’s your first personal robot, open source, full stack in your hands. they’ve actually just, uh, got their second batch now. They’re 11,000. Mine was 16,000 with a few upgrades. It was $18,500 deposit. Tom my co-founder at Macro 3D, we want to code it to do trades work. Uh, that’s the main thing. And also mow the lawns and do the dishes and fold the washing. So. The robotics revolution, I call it the embodiment era of AI is upon us. Wow. We, Cameron: Wow. And you’re gonna take it on the road with you, get it up on stage, Steve: I want Cameron: do a bit of a Abbott and Costello routine. Steve: would really love to do [00:03:00] that. I put on LinkedIn a picture of me taking it through the airport and sitting next to me on a plane and lying down and going through the, uh, metal detector. They’re gonna detect a lot of metal in there. I dunno if that’ll wipe its memory or what’ll happen or whether it’ll glitch out, it’ll be interesting. And I think they are coming. Uni tree also announced a, Cameron: to buy a seat. Steve: well, I Cameron: Do you have to buy a seat for it on a plane, or do you put it in cargo? Steve: well, you wouldn’t be able to put in cargo because of the lithium ion batteries. So imagine you’re gonna have to Cameron: Hmm Steve: Otherwise, that’d be Cameron: hmm. Steve: we don’t want that. Cameron: That’ll be I, I can’t wait to see that you’re the first person in Australia to have a robot sitting beside you in first class. Steve: First class. Okay. Cameron: Come on. Surely you only travel first class. You’re Steve Santino, Australia’s leading futurist. Steve: I, I, Cameron: is too good Steve: travel business [00:04:00] occasionally. It just depends on the client really, to be honest with you. Cameron: on the gig. Hmm. Steve: occasional upgrade. Cameron: so let’s, um, talk about this in more detail. So you say it’s open source. What is open source? The software or the hardware or both? Steve: I think both. Uh, again, this remains to be seen, but you can, it comes, it’s standard fittings and capabilities, but you Cameron: Shouldn’t, shouldn’t, shouldn’t, shouldn’t, you know, be before you bought it, what you’re actually getting. Steve: world works is that you just buy things first and you cross your fingers and they make promises they often don’t keep, whether it’s autonomous vehicles or you know, any other elements, but it’s codeable and you can teach it things and you can also teach it through code, but you can also do it verbally and visually, uh, which is gonna be the killer app on robots. I mean, one of the things that I really hope for is an open source movement within robotics. [00:05:00] Uh, we don’t wanna have closed source. You need to be able to train it in your way and maybe even the skills that you’ve trained your robot. I think that’s a great idea. might be the best car washer or the best on a work site or the best. Warehouse worker. I think that’s really important to get an extension of our skills based on what we teach it. You could have the Stevie skill that, uh, for gardening goes around the world. I, I just downloaded the, the Stevie Gardening, uh, app for my humanoid robot and it’s the best one. And we might get like a whole new app economy where human skills, which are incredibly varied, across all the gamut of things that we do physically, that I think that’s a really big opportunity. But it can only happen in an open source world. Cameron: I think that seems to be the model that Jensen Huang at Nvidia is pushing them into is to make the software free and open source, [00:06:00] uh, because he wants to sell the chip set that runs the robots. So I. I do think that will be one of the models that’s out there. There might be some that are closed and some that are open. Uh, well that’s very exciting, Steve. That’s, uh, that’s really huge. Do you know of anyone else in Australia that has a humanoid robot? Steve: seen a few out with gigs, but all of them seem to be pre-programmed. I’ve seen quite a few of the Boston Dynamics ones, the dogs and the Atlas, to do certain things. Uh, uni Tree just launched a new one, which looks absolutely incredible. It was under 20,000 as well, which is very aligned with Jensen Huang. two years ago we spoke about him saying, by the end of this decade, they’ll cost less than a small car and we’ll all have them. That seems to be very on track. capability, we don’t know we don’t Cameron: Uni tree are a Chinese operation, aren’t they? Steve: Kbo is Which, which, Cameron: yeah. Steve: is, is [00:07:00] rare and good. I Cameron: Hmm. Steve: have Cameron: it. Steve: countries, well, I think you wanna have as many countries as possible with this capability. I think, Cameron: Right. Steve: no, this is not a Cameron: So, Steve: It’s just you want as many as possible. Cameron: right. Yes. That’ll be the two main countries producing them, I imagine. Uh, be interesting to see how it plays out in the tariff wars. Steve: That’s Cameron: Two, getting a robot from China versus a robot from the us. Steve: And, and, Cameron: Well, Steve: yeah, I, I think that Trump, for other reasons is tapped into something that’s gonna happen, which deglobalization and reshoring and onshoring, all of, all of my clients are talking about securing up their supply chain to Nearshore and Reshore, with the ability of AR and robotics, not just those that we’re making, but then those ones that we make can actually help production locally as well. Cameron: hmm. But China’s gonna be the dominant manufacturer [00:08:00] of humanoid robots. I imagine. So. Uh, Steve: it’s not because they’re more capable. I think it’s because America and other Western markets have systematically eroded their own supply chain of all the, I’m gonna call it bits and bobs that went into cars and washing machines and all of that stuff where they no longer have it. And it’s not that we don’t have the capability to design and make them work, it’s that we don’t have all of the small pieces that go into any form of machinery in our local markets like we did in the seventies and the eighties. Cameron: I think China is making a massive commitment to leading the world and AI and robotics, though at a governmental level, they’re gonna think everything behind it and I don’t think the US is gonna be able to compete, quite frankly. But we’ll see how it plays out. Well. I don’t, I haven’t bought a robot, Steve, but I did do my first experiment with chat [00:09:00] GPTs, new agent that came out a few weeks ago. Now, at the end of last year when we predicted what the big story for 2025 would be, we both said AI agents would be the big thing. Didn’t make us that original. Everyone in the industry was predicting that. But I did get my Chachi PT agent, uh, up and running and did a project, which I’ve tried to code over the last year or so, several times unsuccessfully. And this was a, uh, a project involved with my investing podcast, QAV, um, to basically go out and find a list of companies on the A SX, look up the investor relations page on their website, download their most recent. Annual report or half yearly report, find the independent auditor’s report in that document and read it and see whether [00:10:00] or not the company has a qualified audit. Now, for non people that aren’t investors, a qualified audit means an audit where the auditor’s gone. You know, this company has some problems. So we’re qualifying, um, the, the green tick that we’re giving the audit. And that for us as investors, that’s an issue. If the auditors picked out that there’s some serious fiscal concerns with the company, we wanna know about that before we invest in it. I’ve tried to code, it hasn’t worked. Too complicated. Got agent to do it, it seemed to work. Uh, and then I asked it to create a spreadsheet of the results. Give me the, the name of the company. Whether or not it has a qualified audit. And then a link to the most recent financial report, so I could check it. When I gave it a list of companies that I knew had a qualified audit, it gave them all a clean bill of health. Um, and then I went and double checked it and found that a couple of them did not get a clean bill of health and [00:11:00] said to the agent, Hey, how come you gave this one a clean bill of health? And went, ah, yeah, sorry. On, in retrospect, rereading that I shouldn’t have done that. So that was completely useless, uh, but it at least managed to get 90% of the way there, just hallucinated on the important bit. So that was a fail. So anyway, uh, it’s a good first step. You know, it was, uh, easy to get it up and running as an agent. It could go out, find the websites, get the report. At least the links to the reports were right. It just didn’t do a very good job of reading and analyzing it. But I think, you know, it’s, it’s, we’re getting there we’re, it’s, it’s a step in the right direction. The other thing I wanted to mention is you mentioned to me a Kevin Kelly book, the Inevitable from 2016, which I downloaded and started reading over the last couple of days. Um, well, yes, but hilarious. Now, Kevin Kelly, a guy [00:12:00] that we both admire, been fans of Kevin Kelly for 30 years. Talked about him a lot on this show. My entire podcasting business model was based on stuff that he wrote about in the early two thousands. Um, and. In this book, in the first couple of chapters he’s talking, he’s predicting the future of AI and what it would possibly look like and how it would roll out. This is in 2016. Steve: Mm. Cameron: Nine years ago, this book came out hilarious. How outdated it already is, and this guy, Steve: it, but I remember it, Cameron: oh man. Steve: and I was thinking of the last chapter, but tell me, Cameron: I haven’t, I haven’t got to the last chapter yet. Well, I will at the end of the show, or when we get to, um, technology time warp, he talks a lot about IBM’s Watson and, and I was like, oh my God, whatever happened to Watson? Haven’t heard of Watson for years. So [00:13:00] when we get to the, uh, technology time warp, I’ll talk about IBM Watson and what happened to them. But, you know, it’s, he talks about AI and sort of talks about it sort of happening 20 years from now from when he wrote it in 2016, you know, sort of thinking of a 20, 35, 20 40 timeline, uh, and what it, what it might look like. And it was built around the idea of, you know, the, the what we call gofi now, good old fashioned ai, the symbolic AI approach that they took with IBM Watson, which has now become. Really, uh, clunky and out of date, however, I think is gonna make a comeback too. So with a hybrid between LLMs and Gofi, which I’ll talk about later on in the, in the show. Steve: just on that point, and in relation to your use of the agent, a really clever friend of mine, Nick Hodges, who I might have mentioned on the Cameron: Hey, I know Nick, Steve: Super Cameron: friend of mine, old Microsoft [00:14:00] guy. Steve: Uh, was he a Microsoft? Uh, this Nick wasn’t, but maybe he Cameron: Oh, different Nick Hos. Okay. Could be a different Nick Ho. Steve: all the Knicks out there, uh, a friend of mine, David Brown, started a Twitter group with everyone called David Brown Cameron: Oh, David Brown. No. Steve: Yeah, dunno him which one? He wrote a post a few weeks ago ago saying the challenge because of the probabilistic nature of Connectionist ai, which is the opposite of symbolic ai, is what he calls the takeoff and landing problem. And so when you’re in cruising altitude and you’re working on something, the AI is amazing, but getting it to start, it obviously can’t start itself. It needs a lot of direction and nurturing, but also bringing in the project to completion to finish off those rounded edges, it needs the human, uh, attachment as well. And it’s a really great analogy, the takeoff and landing problem. And I do [00:15:00] wonder if that’s at all solvable. And I’m starting to get suspicious that it won’t be, the nature of the models probability means that. How you start and end something is really, really different to the middle of a project. And so it can’t quite get that learning and the guesses that it needs to take at those edges is why you might need symbolic code and get that hybrid model to come, uh, in and around it to, to make it work. And I’ve found that same problem when I’ve been doing some vibe coding with some AI tools for clients where it hasn’t really worked in that way. So, uh, that is, uh, I agree with you. We’ll get to that. Cameron: Vibe coding. Steve: I like the word, I just want to use it as much as possible. Cameron: People call it vibe coding. For me, it’s just coding, you know? Just, you know, it’s coding with ai. Right. Anyway. Steve: vibrating and vibe listening to music? Cameron: [00:16:00] Yeah, right. It’s ridiculous. Um, alright, so let’s get into some of the big news stories, Steve. Um, I think Chachi PT agents, so they, they launched that on the 18th of July, sort of two and a bit weeks ago. Probably the biggest story chat PT five is due out this month. Sam did a sneaky little Twitter post or ex post today with a screenshot of him having a conversation in GPT five. Uh, but, uh, agent has been the biggest release that they’ve come out with since our last show. Have you played around with the agent? Much had any success. Tell me about your agent experience. Steve: I, I found the takeoff and landing really hard. I’ve asked it to do a few things for me, and it’s, it’s been so much effort get it off the ground and starting to do the thing that I wanted to do and setting the parameters. I’ve found that it’s not too dissimilar from giving detailed briefing and instructions inside the traditional prompt framework so [00:17:00] far. Cameron: Let me read from open AI’s blog post from the 18th of July. Chat GT now thinks and acts proactively choosing from a toolbox of ag agentic skills to complete tasks for you using its own computer chat, GPT can now do work for you using its own computer handling complex tasks from start to finish. You can now ask Chachi PT to handle requests like look at my calendar and brief me on upcoming client meetings based on recent news plan and buy ingredients to make Japanese breakfast for four. And analyze three competitors and create a slide deck chat, GT will intelligently navigate websites. Filter results prompt you to log in securely when needed, run code, conduct analysis, and even deliver editable slide shows and spreadsheets that summarize its findings. At the core of this new capability is a [00:18:00] unified agentic system. It brings together three strengths of earlier breakthroughs, operator’s ability to interact with websites, deep researchers skill and synthesizing information and chat GPTs intelligence and conversational fluency. CHATT carries out these tasks using its own virtual computer, fluidly shifting between reasoning and action to handle complex workflows from start to finish or based on your instructions. Nice. In theory. Um. I’ve only done the one experiment, which was not entirely successful. I know my boys Hunter and Taylor have been playing with it quite a bit. Taylor upgraded to a plus subscription. No, a pro subscription. A couple of hundred dollars a month one, so we could really run it through. ’cause you only get a certain amount of credits on the, uh, normal subscription. And they also found it useful in ways, but also flaky in ways. And I think they’ve, uh, terminated their [00:19:00] experiments with it. Uh, I haven’t seen a lot of people excited about what it can do in the subreddits and online. Like there are, you can get it to log in and research people in LinkedIn and get their email addresses and send them emails, log into your emails and that kinda stuff. But. Again, it’s a step in the direction. And later on in the show I’ll take you through a scenario that I wrote over the weekend about what I think the process of buying a car might look like a couple of years from now, which is based largely around agents doing a lot of the work for you. So I think this is a step towards that future, but has some ways to go before it’s really, uh, that useful as a tool. Steve: I think that Sam Altman’s quote that you read out before is not too dissimilar from what we already have just by via prompting process inside search ability. I agree that the ability to write code, the ability to surf websites and do all of [00:20:00] those things is still there, but if you just went in and said, book me a holiday. I don’t think it has enough access to what your preferences are or the memory or your internal files to actually be able to come back with something that is, that you would sign off on. So, so Cameron: Well, it, it asks you questions first. Steve: right. And it can do that in the non-agent mode already, already makes suggestions at post. It sort of says, do you want me to put this into a PowerPoint that you can work? It does all of those things now. So I feel like, again, the takeoff and landing isn’t there. Cameron: Yeah, like now it can in theory log into websites for you, like log into your calendar, log into your email, cr you know, create things, do things which wasn’t very good at doing before. But, uh, yeah, you know, like I think this is, um, a hint at where we’re gonna be a couple of years from now, but, uh, a lot of work to be done to make it [00:21:00] reliable. I mean, with the stuff I was doing, completely useless if the answers it’s giving back to me are hallucinated. So, u

In this fast-paced episode of Futuristic, Cameron and Steve dig into a wild week in AI and tech. Cam shares how he stunned futurist Peter Ellyard by using ChatGPT to generate a bold, original idea called “The Other Year” – a radical, identity-swapping sabbatical for all Australian adults. Steve loves it, but the discussion spins off into a brutal critique of political cowardice, economic inequality, AI translation workflows, and the geopolitics of the AI arms race. From Neuralink trials to Honda’s reusable rockets, from AI-generated music to legal rulings on copyright, this one covers everything. Is AI stealing jobs or creating new ones? Are we on the edge of a superintelligent revolution—or just in a corporate lemming race off a cliff? FULL TRANSCRIPT Audio of FUT 43 [00:00:00] Cameron: Sure. My other, yeah. Uh, welcome back to the Futuristic episode 43. According to my notes, Steve Samino my, um, AI transcription engine in Descrip. Never, never likes having to work with your name after all these months and years of doing it. It’s likes So what? Summer Chi Chico, what Never gets it Right. Doesn’t get my name right either. So don’t feel bad. Steve: Look bias. Ai, ai, Italian racism is what we are hearing here. And I just wanna point that out, Cameron: Systemic. Steve: it’s systemic. Cameron: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Steve: the mob got us and now the technocratic mob, they’re after us Again, Cameron: What’s the Italian version of anti-Semitic? Is it anti [00:01:00] tic and. Steve: I don’t like logs. It’s, Cameron: Any wog. I called you a wog on the last episode. Steve: for it. We don’t, we don’t, we don’t like your type around here. Cameron: Well, it’s been a crazy week, Steve, um, in AI and tech and all of that. It’s just so crazy. But I wanted to start with something if, if you don’t mind. I mentioned last time that my friend Peter Ard, 88 years old, um, futurist, um, has was, was in Brisbane with his partner Robin. Had a lovely time with him, but had a lot of con conversations about I, uh, with ai, uh, shit, let me start again. I had a lot of conversations with Peter about AI and just realized that he wasn’t really getting it still. So I’ve, I’ve spent a lot of time in the last week in an email thread with him, um, encouraging him to think about it in terms of creativity and, um, and I. [00:02:00] I’m sort of acting as the intermediary between him and AI now. Um, and I asked him to give me a challenge to give to one of the AI tools to demonstrate that they are creative. ’cause his are, his question to me when we caught up is, do you think they’ll ever have imagination? And I said, they do right now. They’re creative right now. So he came up with this, uh, question that he wanted me to see what it could create, um, that was genuinely creative, built around some of his work. He has these things, he calls the six pillars of livability, and he wanted it to come up with, uh, an idea for how we could make Australia a better place by 2050 built around his six pillars of livability. [00:03:00] So I’m gonna walk you through this ’cause I, I think it was pretty cool and he was sort of blown away by this. My prompt and I used Chatt PT oh three deep reasoning model. The prompt was this, you are now a futurist whose job is to design a better future for humanity. Come up with one idea that is completely original and is not based on extending existing trends or technologies that would make Australia a more livable country in 2050. And fits in with the six pillars of livability, prosperity, harmony, inclusion, sustainability, health and security. Now, to be fair, it came up with a couple of things that I rejected early on. I was like, nah, that’s not really that original, that’s just an extension of other things. You’re just, you know, taking existing stuff and, and, and, you know, making it more extreme or [00:04:00] more advanced or whatever. So I pushed back and a, a couple of times, twice maybe. Then it came up with this the other year act a once in a lifetime state funded identity exchange sabbatical. Core proposal. Every Australian adult is guaranteed and required to take one 12 month other year, somewhere between their 25th and 55th birthday. During that year, they live, work, and vote in a host community whose demographics are as different from their own as an algorithm can manage urban versus remote, wealthy versus disadvantaged, migrant hub versus old settler town, et cetera. Think of it as compulsory whole life, cultural cross training. No uniforms, no bootcamps, no charity optics. Just swapping places long enough that the word them loses, meaning. Why it’s [00:05:00] new? National service exists. Military civic Peace Corps style gap years and couch surf exchanges exist, but there is no country on earth where a universal mid-career identity swap sabbatical is a legal right and obligation. It isn’t an extension of technology or an NGO trend. It’s a structural reboot of social experience built straight into citizenship. And it goes on and on and on. Has a timeline for delivery, how it would work legislatively, how it would be funded. Basically, a federal agency and trust fund, 0.6% of GDP offset by winding back duplicate employment subsidy schemes, a pairing engine. Independent algorithm balances 20 plus variables. Income, quintile language, background remoteness, climate industry, disability status. No one has sensed somewhere they medically can’t live cost and cover award wage paid from the trust. If the host employer [00:06:00] can’t home mortgage slash rent frozen by law for the year child option, families can move together or split with travel stipends, civic rights, temporary enrollment in local council and state electorates, you vote where you live that year. Return and certification completion internationally recognized cross-cultural competence license, a hiring premium in both public and private sectors. The bottom line is, instead of betting on gadgets or tax tweaks the other year, puts human beings into each other’s shoes, literally for a whole year. And lets empathy do the heavy lifting across prosperity, harmony, inclusion, sustainability, health and security. One bold never tried lever. Six pillars lifted together. Steve: Look, I cannot tell you how much I love that. That’s one of the best ideas I’ve ever heard, and I have heard similar things. It, it does come back to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes, like it. And [00:07:00] it makes sure there’s a couple of stones in those shoes and they don’t fit properly. Or if you’ve had stones and shoes with holes in the bottom, you get yourself a nice pair of, uh, a dope pair of Nikes, as Zach Di Larocca said in one of his great songs. And ramble too. He had a dog pair of snake son. Cameron: Look, I was impressed and Peter, Peter was impressed and, and you know, here’s so two points about it. One is, well, obviously apart from the fact that I think it’s a great idea. One is the prompt was very specific, what it had to focus on and two. It came up with this idea in a minute. I mean, after I pushed back a couple of times on the first couple it came up with, like by minute three it came up with this idea that you, Peter, and I all thought was a great idea. Imagine if you i’d, I’d got it to come up with a hundred ideas over the course of the next hour and a half, right? Steve: And it points out something [00:08:00] important is that we have all the technology we need right now. to solve all of the world’s problems and human frailty has always been the issue, always will be the issue. And it reminds me of Hara, who I’ve got in my little thing to talk about. Noval Hari, who wrote Nexus and Sapiens, he said that it’s strange that we think that an AI will solve all of our problems. when the AI is based on us. He says, we, we don’t need AI to solve our problems. We need humans to do it. Now here’s the point. That idea is a great one, but. Humans still need to implement it and agree upon it. At this point, maybe the AI takes over and says, here’s where you’re going. An Uber and a, a humanoid robot arrives at your door and takes you away to this place and takes away all your wealth if you’re wealthy. I don’t [00:09:00] know, but the, the ideas are there and AI’s got great ideas and, and this is a super idea that would work, but Cameron: And it’s a bold, it’s a bold vision. And one of the things that we lack in Australian politics by design is bold vision. Steve: we don’t have any, we used to, hundreds of Cameron: Hmm. Steve: granted there was a whole lot of other problems, which we are solving social problems and Cameron: Well, a hundred years ago, I mean, Goff Whitlam, first seven days after he was elected, he sat down with his right hand man and basically crafted the plan for how Australia’s been living for the last 55 years. You know, just sat down and said, we’re getting outta Vietnam, free education, free healthcare, uh, legalized divorce, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Steve: a, a, lot of good ideas and the, the void of leadership and courage are the two things that are lacking in, in, uh, political society. And we’ve got corporate capture. And the [00:10:00] lobbying is, is, is a real challenge. The fact that South Australia’s outlaws lobbying is, is a massive move in the right direction. That’s the real biggest issue because we don’t get brave policies simply because our politicians are captured economically. If we remove that capture, then we get a chance for politicians to make decisions for the majority, right? And we, and we don’t Cameron: I think it’s also, I think they’re also just trying to be a small target, right? Um, if we don’t see anything bold, then there’s nothing to attack. If it’s just, eh, more of the same, then. Steve: they’ve gotta ask themselves the question. What are they there to do? You they there to make a difference or to just fringe dwell. Because what we’re getting is fringe politics, just small, incremental, nothing bold and, and strategic and important like this would, would really work because the issues, as you say, and, and not technological, you know, we have all of the technology we [00:11:00] need to, to move society forward and create brush of flourishing on those six principles, which are all, I don’t think anyone could disagree with those as goals that we should have societally. So they seem pretty good to me and, and that idea I think would have a dramatic impact if it was implemented. Cameron: Yeah, it reminds me a little bit of Mormon missionaries. You know, my prey grew up in Utah, and, um, a lot of her family, uh, and friends go do missions when they’re 18, 19, 20. That’s how Mormon missions work. And usually they get sent to, I think she’s got a niece who’s in Chile or Argentina or somewhere like that at the moment, doing a mission. A lot of her, a lot of Chrissy’s siblings went to places like that to do missions. Her father, uh, went to France to do his, but a lot of times they end up in very different [00:12:00] communities speaking different languages, different cultural issues for the wrong reasons. I mean, they’re trying to convince them that Joseph Smith looked into a top hat and with some magic rocks and translated some magical plates. But, uh, you know, that. Steve: I’m so sorry. I love that so much. Cameron: The idea of sending people into communities like that, you, you, you’re gonna come out of it with, um, a better appreciation of the other, and that’s why it’s called the other act. I think so anyway, just proving the point that AI is creative today. If you know how to use it correctly and prompt it and work with it, it can do amazing things. And that’s today, let alone where it’s gonna be a couple of years from now when we have super intelligence. But, um, what have you got to talk about for your past week, Steve, we get into news? Steve: I used AI in a way that [00:13:00] was really effective. We had some investors from China who were interested in macro 3D. We’re raising 5 million in capital. for any rich listeners out there, chance to participate in the multi-billion dollar future of, uh, automated construction. any case, we’ve got an IM that they wanted us to send through yesterday. I used chat GPT to translate the, IM into Mandarin Chinese written version. As you know, language is really nuanced. way that I did it was I translated, you know, pieces of the English into chat. GPT said everything I paced from now on is gonna be translated. That’s your singular instruction until further notice. Again, prompting well, so you don’t have to go back and forth and do more keystrokes than needed translated. It’s a business based document. You’re going to have to make some interpretations on the language we’ve used. which is quite different in Chinese, I speak a little bit of Chinese, so I came back and then when I got the English, uh, the Mandarin [00:14:00] translation, I would then take that and put it into Gemini and go, now translate this back into English again. And then I compare the two English, because one of the challenges is you’ve got to know what good looks like. You can’t just trust the AI that it did it, because who knows, I can’t read Cameron: Hmm. Steve: So I Cameron: Hmm. Steve: a look at it and it was flawless. Did not skip a beat. And some of the translations into the nuance for Chinese were just perfect. It was Cameron: Hmm, Steve: Took me to do an a 20 page document with financial financials, technical statements, everything took under two hours. I came to a conclusion, not only did it do an amazing job and I. Managed to use two ais, which is one of the tricks you and I have been talking about a lot. Use more than one AI to check the other ai. And it’s kind of almost like a little bit of blockchain, sort of having a number of verifications across something to to back reference and check. Uh, not only did it do an extraordinary job, but it took two hours. then I came to the conclusion AI [00:15:00] stole a job that would never have existed because we were Cameron: hmm, Steve: gonna hire a translator. It would’ve cost us too much. It would’ve taken us two weeks. What we would’ve done is we would’ve just sent it across and crossed our fingers and say, hopefully someone understands Mandarin pretty well, uh, or and understands English. Cameron: hmm. Steve: with that, let us know. But we sent through a Cameron: Hmm. Steve: within a day of them asking, and they’re like, wow. Like they were Cameron: Hmm. Steve: wow. Which surely they know we used AI to do it and no one lost a job. But new value was created and potentially $5 million worth of capital is going to flow into Australia, which is then gonna create other jobs. Cameron: So my question is, did you, did you use Deep Seek or Quinn? Steve: Sea. We didn’t, we Cameron: Why wouldn’t you have used a Chinese AI to do that instead of an American ai? Is my question. Steve: um, no reason. I just used the two that were right there in my browser. There you go. The [00:16:00] reason is I used the two that were just a mere click away, already open as tabs is the reason, no reason why I couldn’t have. And after that I thought I could’ve done this with four or five or whatever, but the result I got was extraordinary in any case. Uh, I would’ve, even if I used deep seat check back more than once, but it really made me realize that I think the biggest thing that’s going to happen with ai, a whole lot of things that wouldn’t be done without it get done. And new value gets created. And when the new value gets created, you get a new multiplier effect, which is a common economic theorem where you spend a dollar that becomes a dollar 20, which becomes a dollar 50, which becomes $3. I mean, that’s how the entire economy grows. It’s all based on things that don’t exist yet that then exist. to be honest, translators are right in the firing line, right? It’s one of the easiest things to get rid of, and we know that, and all of us have to be careful, but our job is to look at [00:17:00] where the new value creation is. And I just thought it was a really good example of the multiplier effect and how revenue moves sideways Cameron: Mm Steve: create new revenue streams. Cameron: mm Steve: So there was Cameron: until they gobble up all the revenue streams. Steve: if they do, they, we’ve got bigger problems than that. And the other one I was really interested in, I’ve been reading Nexus by Noval Hara, and he’s been, and I even sent you a page, uh, photo. Just the, the two ideas of story and bureaucracy incredibly interesting story is the, the systems of belief and how we translate ideas to each other. Big ideas of things that we should, could, and would do or have done. know, religion, technology, everything’s a story. We buy the story first, and the story help helps us to believe in myth so that we can invent things. But then he did this overlap with bureaucracy. And bureaucracy is the rules and the methods and the systems that become a requirement, which [00:18:00] can sometimes stop things and sometimes things don’t fit into the bureaucratic, uh, pages or boxes. You’ve gotta fill things in. And just that juxtaposition between the two and how they at are at incredible points of tension with each other in times of great change. Because we, we buy into the story and then once the story’s been sold and everyone agrees, then you build a bureaucracy around that to temper the story and create boundaries so that we can operate effectively within a society. Society requires, you know, the way you coordinate big people and big ideas is through bureau bureaucracy. You need it. And it may be feel about. AI is that there is no bureaucracy around it. There’s just a bunch of story and independent players just forging ahead without any boundaries at all. And while boundaries, people don’t want them when they’re innovating, you know, the reason we have clean water and safe roads is because of bureaucratic boundaries, which are really, really important. And, and they are [00:19:00] left wanting at the moment. So I’m only a third of the way through that book, but oh my God, he’s just mind blowing. He, he’s just quite possibly the world’s greatest thinker. Cameron: Wow. I’ll have to, um. I’ll have to go arm wrestle him for that title. That’s, that’s my title. I’m, um, Steve: I’m so sorry. Cameron: trade, trademarked that title. Steve: Will have you really, I, I hope that you have Will’s greatest thinker, TM self-proclaimed. Cameron: Tm. Yeah. Yeah. Steve: I Cameron: Yeah. Interesting. Uh, well, speaking of bureaucracy in ai, uh, Trump’s big one, big beautiful bridge bill passed both houses finally. Yeah. Steve: Oh my Cameron: Um, so it’s been Steve: to adapt the statement that no laws can interfere with the progress of ai or is it still in there? Cameron: to. To the best of my knowledge, that [00:20:00] is still part of it. So when Trump signs this today, tomorrow, it will be illegal for any state in the US to pass any laws that regulate AI in any way until 2035. Steve: Well, no one will be here by this, so it’s fine. The singularity will have occurred. I don’t know whether I’ll just be living in a cloud. No one knows. 2035. He’s basically said he’s gonna be a nuclear war, an AI war. We don’t know what will happen. Duck and cover. Okay. Cameron: So, yeah, obviously for the last two, two and a half years since GPT came out, there’s been an enormous amount of talk, uh, in the US and around the rest of the world about regulating AI safety, guardrails, et cetera, et cetera. Now, the US is not going to regulate it and. I suspect any other [00:21:00] country that tries to regulate it, let’s say if the Australian government tried to regulate ai, like we’ve got the safety Commissioner that’s been regulating social media, I suspect that the Americans will push back and penalize countries through tariffs, some other mechanism if you try and regulate ai. So we’re pretty much i

In Episode 42 of The Futuristic, Cameron and Steve dive deep into the chaotic beauty of 2025’s AI evolution—and cultural regression. They open with a debate about Dr. Who, scarves, and wogs, before rapidly spinning out into their usual high-octane synthesis of tech, politics, relationships, and dystopian laughs. This week, it’s all about whether AI video is fake (or too real), the future of humanoid robots, how ChatGPT is becoming a marriage counsellor, and the looming collapse of white-collar work. Plus, Cameron drops a 90s-style AI rap, Steve defends plumbers against the robot uprising, and the boys seriously consider launching “Elongate”—Elon Musk’s red-pill boner brand. You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. You’ll question your humanity. Again. FULL TRANSCRIPT [00:00:00] Cameron: Futuristic Cameron Reilly and Steve Sammartino in, episode 42. I think maybe, um, Steve, you just told me off air before we came on that you’ve never watched Dr. Who, because you’re wearing a very Tom Bakery scarf here. I said, oh, it’s the fourth doctor. And you were like, what? And I’m like, no, really? Uh, I know you come from a, a, a wog family, Steve, but doctor who wasn’t a thing growing up in your, in your house. Steve: you even, can you even say that? that’s Cameron: I dunno, Steve: Sist. Cameron: were you offended? Are you offended by, uh, being called a W Steve: look, Cameron: mate? I would’ve loved to have been a wog Steve: this is not, a social podcast or one that into, uh, non-technological things. Cameron: mate. I would’ve Steve: offended. Cameron: grown up as anything. Yeah. Steve: That’s why Cameron: Reminds me of. Steve: little good, a little bit of a. Sniffle. Cameron: [00:01:00] Um, Steve: I haven’t watched Dr. Who I was a big fan of Star Trek Next Generation with pika. I think that was the ultimate sci-fi series. But I haven’t watched Dr. Who, so I can’t really say, and I. With all the things that are still on my to watch list, I don’t think I’ll get to it unfortunately. one thing I could just strike off my to-do list because let me tell you, as you mentioned cam, too many things to do, not enough time. Where are the agents? Cameron: Mate, everything you need to know about me. You could tell from Dr. Who Monkey Star Wars and Carl Sagan Cosmos. Those four things pretty much entirely designed the rest of my life, I think. Steve: And Seinfeld for the, for the social nuances of humanity. Cameron: I was in my twenties by the time that came out, but yes. And Seinfeld 1920. Um, Steve, uh, been a week or two since we’ve chatted. Uh, I mean, God damn man. Been a big week in many ways. Uh, [00:02:00] not the least of which is War in the Middle East. But, um, from an ai, uh, futuristic perspective, Steve hit me, hit me with your best shot. Steve: I am so suspicious about all the AI videos. I do not believe for a hot minute that most of the AI videos I. That we have seen that are just in all of my feeds. TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn. believe for a minute that all of them are just a few prompts and band that they are. I reckon they’re heavily edited. They’re people have worked for days on them because if you say, here’s an AI video that I made, everyone’s like, what do it? They’re such good prompters. They’re good editors. You heard it first on the futuristic. Cameron: So you are going, you are, you’re doing a, a classic, you, you’re doing a Charlie Munger inversion thing here, because I watch videos and I go. I don’t believe that’s real. I believe that’s ai. You are watching going, I don’t believe that’s [00:03:00] ai. I believe that’s real. Steve: I’m inverted. This is an inversion I’m telling you now, and that’s because. People are so wowed by some No, I swear. Cameron: Yeah. Yeah. Steve: I’ve tried to make a video clip for our song, which our loyal listeners will, will remember, the Fake Everything punk rock song, and Cameron: Mm-hmm. Steve: not done, it’s been really, really hard to get even the pieces together. I’ve gone to a number of different video formats. I even went to chat sheet to find clips on briefings on the 37 lines. So hard. There is an infinite amount of editing going into these videos, for sure. Zero doubt. Please prove me wrong. Send me the link to stevesammartino.com. Go on there on the one where I can just put in the prompts and get these videos because they’re all heavily edited. heard it here. Cameron: I’m glad that you said that because I’m planning this week, uh, if I can get through my task list enough to get to the tasks that I want to do and not that I have to do, [00:04:00] is to play around with VO three to start making some, you know, I mean, I’m sure, I’m sure you’ve seen them. The one of the big trends with those videos is the, the fake selfie blog, and it’s, uh, it’s a Yeti or a. Steve: of Cameron: Yeah. Steve: yeah, Cameron: I was saying to, I was saying to Ray, who I do my history shows with. That’s our, that’s our fucking B wick, right? History selfies. Julius Caesar talking about crossing the Rubicon. Steve: Ballywick. word. Cameron: That’s my B wick. Like you, I’m glad you like that. Yeah. So I was gonna, uh, try and knock some of those out this week and I was like, shit, I, I, I did go looking for VO three prompting strategy stuff and I folded away, but. I haven’t tried yet. I have been making some music this week inspired by fake everything, uh, theme songs for different podcasts. I tried to do one for this. No, I didn’t try and do one for this ’cause you’ve already done one for this. I did one for QAV, I did one, tried to do one for my Renaissance show. It didn’t quite work. I did do a rap song, which I’m gonna play Steve: [00:05:00] Great. Cameron: I was actually just, so I heard about this tool called Mini Max. Dunno if you’ve ever played with that. Mini Max dot, uh, I, I maybe io something and, um. I wanted to make just a hip hop background track that I was gonna wrap over with some lyrics that I wrote from one of my podcasts, my Renaissance show. And, um, but it, it actually produced the lyrics and everything for me and, and like, it, it, it added voices, I guess is what I’m trying to say. And I was actually kind of impressed. Let me see if I can play this and you can hear it. Check them. Mic one, two. This is how we do 95. Feels a five deep inside the groove. Full fall, loose, spinning round. The sonic attack Beasty Flow. Public know we always got your back. Boom, back blueprint. Tearing down the walls, every sample, every break. Answering the calls from the S to the mic, G by the loud moving body.[00:06:00] Rocking my standing out the crowd. So that was, uh, I, again, I didn’t tell it either. I just said, gimme like a classic nineties hip hop beat with some samples and it wrote that whole thing with the voices and the lyrics. I was like, oh shit, that’s actually really good. But then a mate of mine. Sent me, uh, this, he goes, oh, this is, this is my favorite track at the moment. It’s called The First Time in my Rectum by, uh, Steve: Really? I, I Cameron: I didn’t get that by Banned Vinyl and whoever this is, they’ve got a whole bunch of tracks that they’ve put together. Um, oh, glory Hole. Um, when my surrenders Suck, your Love pump, like they, they’ve done ’em in like all sorts of, you know. Steve: a spinal tap. I. Cameron: Spinal tap song. That’s what it sounds like. Yeah. Steve: well Cameron: glove. I think you’re thinking of. Steve: He said I’d suck my love pump or something when he does the, Cameron: So, um, they’re using it, uh, it’s well done using AI to create comedy, uh, dirty comedy songs, which I’m all for. [00:07:00] So anyway, the, the, I dunno about the video side of things, but certainly the, the audio side of things is really becoming insanely good. Steve: And, I, and I would just wanna add to, to that point cam, is that it’s a short term suspicion, so. Definitely, we’ll get to a point where videos will be just all prompting and, and nothing else and no further editing. But given how much I’ve played with the tools and know their capabilities, I think a lot of the ones that we’re seeing now are quite heavily edited, and that’s a short term aberration and it’s kind of how. It, like you say, there’s an inversion where people want the AI to be better than it is. So much so that they’re pretending it’s ai. And we’ve even seen that in a corporate instance as well, where a number of startups have pretended everything’s generated by ai. But there’s, you know, a thousand coders in India doing something even way back. Jeff Bezos with his Amazon Ghost store, a bunch of people looking at cameras clicking when the person picked up an item and it wasn’t all, [00:08:00] uh. As it was cracked up to be. Cameron: So instead of FUPO fake until proven otherwise, you are RUPO real until proven otherwise. Steve: We’ve got FUPO and RUPO. what we’ve got here. Fake until proven otherwise. Cameron: Wake it. Welcome back to another episode of The Futuristic with FUPO and RUPO Steve: Well, this Cameron: and Steve: that’s Right? Is that and, in fact, this, this is actually the point, Cameron, is, is this fake or was this generated by ai? The point is. Tool proven otherwise is really the world we live in now. And, and we don’t know whether it’s either way actually. Cameron: Does it matter if it’s entertaining? Steve: Well, if in entertainment doesn’t matter. No, I couldn’t care less. Right. Cameron: If it’s news, Steve: it’s Cameron: did Trump really bomb Iran or is it all fake news? Steve: I, Cameron: Who knows? Steve: long would it take for you to say that? Cameron: I. [00:09:00] Well, I, I wanna talk about the other interesting thing that happened to me from a futuristic perspective. Um, Chrissy and I have, uh, we’re having a marital, um, what would you call it? Disagreement. And we, we struggle. Sometimes to have conversations over highly contentious, well, even topics that I don’t think are contentious, but she does well, you know, if one of us thinks an issue’s contentious and the other one doesn’t, it can be difficult. We have very different personalities. She’s got a DHD, I’m autistic, and you know that That’s a good blend A lot. Yeah. Apparently. Um, I’m not showing you my, uh, the sticker on the back of my phone. I got made up. Steve, I’m showing you that surely. Steve: No. What is it? I can’t read. It’s too pixelated. Cameron: It says, I’m not being an asshole, I’m just autistic. Uh, that’s what I show people whenever they take my bluntness. Steve: doesn’t, mean you’re not an asshole. Cameron: Yeah. It’s, it’s, a friend of mine says, you’re just missing the, and you’re an asshole and you’re autistic. It’s not, it’s not [00:10:00] binary, you know. Steve: Just, because. Yeah. Cameron: Anywho, back to my point. So what she suggested we do. Uh, last week was communicate on a particular topic via email, but have chat GPT as the intermediary. So she would write what she wanted to say and then give it to GPT and it would tone it down or rephrase it, and then. Um, she’d send the edited copy to me so it was nice and, uh, toned down. And then I would reply and run my reply through chat GPT and we’re using chat GPT as the intermediary to make sure that our, we’re saying what we wanna say, but saying it in the nicest. Possible way using a thing called the Gottman Conflict Resolution Framework, which a therapist of ours mentioned years ago. And, um, I thought, oh, that’s interesting, right? So it’s using ChatGPT as a marital, uh, therapist and intermediary for [00:11:00] challenging conversations. I mean, it’s kind of weird to have, uh, that kind of a AI intermediary, but you know, it is what it is and, uh, I’m like, okay, well it worked. It gave particularly her an opportunity to feel like. She was able to communicate stuff in a way that was non-confrontational and, and, um, that my replies were not confrontational, which they’re normally not. ’cause I’m a lovely, nice guy, but, you know, um, yeah, so ChatGPT is a marriage counsellor. I’m always very calm, Steve. I think that’s my problem. My problem is I’m too calm when people don’t want me to be calm. They think I should be. They shouldn’t be. Or, or whatever, and I’m just like, sping my way through it and, um, you know. Steve: Wow. [00:12:00] So, uh, you, mentioned on the podcast the idea of AI diplomacy a while ago, Cameron: Mm-hmm. Steve: your that it would probably better Cameron: Ah, mm. Steve: using AI as an intermediary to communicate issues and I guess it could large language models. Could take into account cultural differences and the nuance of language and the idea of AI marriage cancelling, I think is pretty cool. I would like to ask AI some personal things that. I’m working through, but I don’t trust it much. I trust it with my finances, but I just don’t trust it enough to put things in there that I just to, they just have to stay in my head for now because I just couldn’t bring myself to it. Now, if I suggested to, to my wife that we’re gonna have AI diplomacy, between us, I can tell you that would be met [00:13:00] with. A negative response is my, how many people would do that? Cameron: I think at the moment it’s probably the minority. Um. Uh, but I think it will become a thing. I think it’ll be a big thing. I’m predicting this is my futurist forecast five years from now, it’ll be pretty commonplace. And, and you know, what it has suggested, and I think Chrissy has, uh, agreed with or suggested along with it, is in future, if there’s ever a conflict situation arises, which happens regularly in most marriages, I’m sure. That, um, we break and go to GPT and it’s just, that’s the deal. Okay. You know, instead of, I’m gonna go cool down for 10 minutes in my room, or I’m gonna go cool down or whatever, and blah, blah. I say, I’m gonna cool down. Let’s take this to, let’s take this to the umpire, right? So you go to GPT, it’s not, there’s an umpire, I’m kidding. But you say, this is what I wanna say. [00:14:00] How can I say it? In a more loving tone or a more caring tone or, or a less confrontational tone. ’cause when you are, when your gander is up, when the cortisol is flooding, when the, when the adrenaline is flooding through your system, it’s very hard to communicate. Calmly and rationally and, and objectively, uh, uh, so you have it as a, you know, how people use it for business emails. I’m sure. I, I mean, I don’t use it to write emails, but, um, same sort of thing. Hey, I wanna say this. How can I say it in a better way? Go say it like this and I don’t have to worry about, you know? Was it, um, you who said to me on an episode that your daughter said to you, it’s not what you say, it’s, uh, no, it’s, no, it’s not. It’s who wrote it. Steve: it’s, that’s not what something is. It’s where something came from. Cameron: That’s right. So in this case, Chrissy was like, no, [00:15:00] no. Let’s use GPT as the intermediary. I think that’d be a good idea. So I don’t have to worry about the fact that it sounds like an AI wrote it. ’cause Steve: Mm. Cameron: that’s part of the, it’s, it’s a, it’s a feature, not a flaw, you know. Steve: that, in our situation is I, I get told that my tone’s wrong, and if I’m not saying anything, I can’t be accused of that anymore. So that would be a no-go zone in our situation because that, that, that needs to be one of the tools at the disposal of the opposing party. That’s all I’m saying actually. Cameron: But that’s how it gets removed. And I get the same thing. It’s not what you say, it’s either my tone or the look on my face. I’m going, well, I can’t. Steve: It point is, Cameron, is that you are wrong and we don’t wanna remove anything that could reduce blame upon you is the point. Cameron: Okay. Well that’s, that’s tough, Steve. But anyway, that’s my, that’s my experience. I was listening. There’s, I’ve been listening to a lot of Sam Altman. He’s, he’s doing a lot of podcasts for some reason recently, I think [00:16:00] it might be to, um, create, um, media coverage of the fact that the open AI files, which dished a lot of dirt on him. Nothing new that I could tell, but they just came out a lot of, uh. Uh, publication of the various complaints that former employees and former board directors and former, uh, whatever staff have had about Sam over the years. And so he is doing a lot of podcasts. But a couple of interesting things I wanted to. Talk to you about. So on one, it was, I think the, uh, Y Combinator, uh, podcast I was listening to. They were talking about the future. He said he’s excited about the day in the future when, when you sign up for a, a particular o, a open AI subscription level, they send you a free humanoid robot. Steve: Wow. Cameron: [00:17:00] My first thought was when, when AI has taken all of our jobs, how am I gonna have the money to pay for an open AI subscription to get the robot in the first place? But leaving that aside, Steve: And I, that was something I argued with you deeply. I, and you said, I said, that’s why it can’t happen. Can’t Cameron: why? What can’t happen? what can’t happen? What are you arguing? Steve: my argument again is that you can’t have massive unemployment and large companies to continue to survive because who is gonna pay for their products and services anyway? It doesn’t matter. We’re, we’re, we’re not here for that. Cameron: Well, Well, I, I mean, no, I, I think that’s a good discussion. I agree with you. But, uh, which, which do you say you don’t think massive unemployment’s gonna happen, Steve: I think Cameron: or you don’t think big companies are gonna survive, or, well, Steve: massive, unemployment, the Cameron: I. Steve: companies don’t So you either have massive unemployment and the big companies also crumble, or you don’t have massive unemployment and new revenue streams emerge and things get lower in cost, and [00:18:00] then that money transfers sideways. Cameron: I think if the big companies raise, well, I think you can, but for a limited period of time. So if op, if. If OpenAI raises a trillion dollars in venture capital and its burn rate is a hundred billion dollars a year, then we can have massive unemployment. Nobody has any money and they’ve got. A runway of 10 years to figure it out. Yeah, right. But you know, if you listen to these guys, Sam, Demis Hassabis, Dario Amodei, Elon, et cetera, they all have a version of the same story these days, which is. AI and ubiquitous humanoid robotics are gonna lead to a, a, a glorious utopia where everything is gonna be done for you. And, um, we we’re gonna [00:19:00] solve all the scientific problems and all of the medical problems and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But there’s going to be a really difficult transition period between where we are today and that point in time. We dunno how, we dunno how, what that’s gonna look like. And I think that is a, that’s a decade or two of great upheaval, socioeconomic upheaval, where people start losing their jobs. 5%, 10%, 20%, 30% their identity. But the. But governments don’t get income tax, uh, from those people anyway. They may get it from another source, maybe tariffs, but that it will cause great disruption in the abilities of governments to pay for social services policing. In the same time, we’re gonna have humanoid robots that will be. Doing our police force, it’s gonna be another whole issue. [00:20:00] You know, Sam was talking on one of these podcasts about, I think it was the one, his brother Jack Altman hosts now, which is I think the official Open AI podcast or something. Um, about, you know, as we’ve talked about before, the, the whole a GI, what’s a GI? What’s not a GI? What’s the singularity? What’s not the singularity? And as Sam said, and we’ve said this a million times, if you went back in time five years ago and told people what AI can do right now in June, 2025, they would go, that’s a GI. Um, that’s, and they would think that if you had that it would completely have changed the world in dramatic ways. And yet, Steve: Here we Cameron:

In this no-holds-barred episode of _Futuristic_, Cameron and Steve riff on the explosive Musk–Trump bromance breakup, likening it to the fall of the Roman Republic’s first triumvirate—yes, molten gold makes a cameo. They dissect the potential death of democracy via Section 70302 of Trump’s new bill, the myth of AI regulation in the U.S., and whether AGI is already here. Steve introduces his “Three S’s of Sentience” while Cameron defends LLMs as sanity check partners. They debate whether Sam Altman is sounding the alarm or just building the bomb. Plus: shrunken-head humans, punk rock AI songs, and China’s “Three Body” space supercomputer. It’s wild, it’s weird, it’s wicked smart. ### **Timestamps & Segment Breakdown** – **00:00** – Cameron vs. Steve: FUPO or FUP? Naming the post-truth age – **01:00** – Musk & Trump: The “Dumvirate” falls apart – **03:00** – Ancient Rome parallels: Pompey, Crassus, Caesar… and Elon – **06:00** – Who’s more powerful: The billionaire or the guy with the red pen? – **08:00** – Section 70302 and AI regulation ban in the “One Big Beautiful Bill” – **10:00** – Why AI regulation in the U.S. is a fantasy – **12:00** – Steve’s “Three S’s” of AI sentience: Self-awareness, preservation, direction – **16:00** – Professors vs. ChatGPT: Ancient History plagiarism wars – **19:00** – How to teach with AI: Real-world classroom hacks – **24:00** – Cameron’s fact-checking workflow with LLMs – **26:00** – Brain atrophy vs. augmentation: The Mind Gym – **29:00** – Fake Everything: Steve’s AI-generated punk song debut – **38:00** – VEO3 sketch comedy, sitcoms, and AI-generated content – **41:00** – AI-generated ads and the rise of synthetic influencers – **43:00** – Willy Wonka was a chocolate marketing gimmick? – **45:00** – Australia’s limp AI policy response – **47:00** – The Australian AI Expert Group: Missing in inaction – **49:00** – Sakana’s Darwin Gödel Machine: AI improving itself – **54:00** – Altman & Anthropic sound the “scary times ahead” alarm – **56:00** – Should the AI builders be allowed to warn us? – **60:00** – China’s orbital AI supercomputer and the Three Body Constellation – **63:00** – Dark Forest theory: Why SETI might doom us all – **65:00** – Fox channels Liu Cixin; Voyager dissed FULL TRANSCRIPT [00:00:00] Cameron: well, let’s do it. Futuristic episode 40, Steve. The big four zero. We’ve reached that time in a young man’s life when, um, he can do other things. I dunno what that means, but, uh, we’re back two, two weeks in a row. This is, uh, getting to be a bit of a habit, Steve. It’s a kind of habit that Steve: I can believe in Mr. Riley because some habits send you to the grave and some send you up into the clouds with AI and God and all of those things that no one understands. But today, on the futuristic understanding will be something you have more of at the end of it, who we have reverb. Cameron: What I’m not understanding is your glasses, Steve. That’s what, look, Steve: here’s what I had the conclusion. I’ve been busting out the chemist warehouse model. I’ll show you what they are. I lost my ray bands, not the Zuck ones. They’re, they’re, they’re the standard. [00:01:00] RayBan Ripoffs. And I just, when I was watching the playback last week, I wasn’t that happy and I thought I need some chunky, funky, which say, this guy’s got a level of arrogance to wear these sunglasses that he must know what the fuck he’s talking about. That’s my strategy and I hope you like it. Cameron: I do. I, I, I wear that and I, um, I was at a thing for Fox’s, um, high school last weekend and was talking to a guy I, I know a little bit, Mike Chambers, who works for Amazon Web Services, and immediately I said, Hey Fox, look what he’s wearing. He had the meta, uh, glasses on and uh, we had a big chat about AI and he’s gonna come on the show. He’s over in the US launching something for Amazon at the moment. When he gets back, he’s gonna come on the show and we’re gonna chat about Meta and the thing he just launched, and we had this argument about whether or not. Open source, LLMs are really open source. He is. Got some strong opinions on that. So look forward to having [00:02:00] Mike on the show hopefully in a few weeks time. Steve: Terrific. Sounds good. Sounds like the kind of thing I can believe in. Cameron. Cameron: Well, I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you what you can’t believe in anymore, Steve. Is anything you ever see online? That’s true. The big, that’s true. There’s been a lot of things drop this in the last week. A lot of big news. Um, OpenAI has just bought, Johnny i’s, uh, design firm for six and a half billion dollars, but not Johnny. He’s not part of the package. He will not be bought, but he’s gonna be a consultant. But it sounds like they’re taking on the iPhone. Sam has said that the first thing that they’re gonna come out with isn’t an iPhone, but it’s so, so big, so big and beautiful and huge. It’s gonna change the world forever. He hasn’t tell us, told us what it is, but it’s gonna be big open. A also released Codex in the last week, which is their new [00:03:00] coding platform, which is like cursor on steroids. Um. But the big news that I think you and I really wanna talk about today is the ton of stuff that Google released in their IO conference this week. AI Mode Project Astra, project Mariner. But the big, big thing I think, and I think you agree with me, is VO three, the new generation of their ai, LLM based video generating tool. And the big thing about this compared to Sawa and all the other things that we’ve seen before is it now does audio with the video, you can make the characters talk and already. In the last week, we have all seen examples of this being [00:04:00] created by developers, creators out there, which are absolutely earth shattering and mind blowing, I think, for a whole bunch of reasons. So I’m prepared to call it. Right now, Hollywood is done, actors are done, and I’ve been saying this for a couple of years. You know, one of my sons Hunter just got back, I picked him up from LA at 5:00 AM 6:00 AM this morning. He just flew back in. He’s trying to break in into the movie business. He’s the one with a couple of million followers on TikTok. He wants to be an actor, he wants to make movies, and I’ve been telling him for the last couple of years, dude, I don’t think Hollywood’s gonna be around much longer like you want it to be. I, I think the days of the a hundred million dollars superhero blockbusters are gone because I. You know, 14-year-old in Manila is gonna be able to make a superhero movie for $10 a year or two from now, and it’ll be a masterpiece and there will be no [00:05:00] actors. It’ll just be prompt generated. Hollywood is clinging to a dying model. It’s, I mean, there will, yeah, we’ve talked about this before. I think that real humans acting in film or TV a few years from now, not a few, five, 10 years from now, Cameron (2): less will, Cameron: will be like doing amateur theater today. It’ll be something you do for the love of it. You don’t do it for the money, you don’t do it for the fame, you don’t do it for the glory. I think we have seen the last generation of professional actors who, you know, uh, the rich, famous Hollywood style acting, I think is. Gone to a large extent. I’m gonna write a poem Steve: live. Dear Hollywood, thanks for the memories. I hope you enjoyed your stay. A hundred million dollars is [00:06:00] about to go away. The private jets, they were fun. Welcome to public jets. Hashtag that’s the one. Your future is over. Your past’s gone. You had a good stay. Be thankful you had it at all. Love Steve. Cameron: Very Steve: good. There was a bit, bit of, that was, that was, I’m not sure what the, that was acapella Cameron: brother. I’m not sure what the rhyming scheme was in that, but there was a couple of, Steve: it was a haiku with a bit of rhyming. It was, it was everything. But I’ll tell you what, the public jet days of the actors flying down to the Antarctic in a private jet to say, we’ve really gotta fix this climate crisis. I think it’s over. Cameron: And one of my, one of my favorite subreddits is six word stories. And this one would be, mine would be, remember when Hollywood was a thing? Steve: Yeah. Right. Well, it’s a little bit like Anthony Keas. He said Hollywood, it’s made in a, it’s made in a Hollywood basement. You know the future. It’s, it’s over. [00:07:00] And, and look, let’s go deep into what VO three is. Is, is done. It’s, it’s really extraordinary. I’d like to talk about the launch, but one thing that, uh, is interesting about actors is that there is a chance that we’ll never have another human actor. I thi I think that’s a, a, a non-zero probability and it’s just gonna be so easy to make money. Like all things distribution is where the power is in, in most forms of business. Uh, if you hold the distribution and you can get into people’s, uh, faces, then you win the game. But the product now just become a lot cheaper and you don’t have to pay a, a Hollywood actor a hundred million dollars. You certainly don’t need to mint. Any new ones, there’s a good chance that Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt and, uh, Leonardo DiCaprio and Scarlett Johansson remain stars because now the new versions of them were when they were at their peak. We don’t have to worry about Tom Cruise being 63 [00:08:00] or however old he is, doing the new version of, uh, mission Impossible. ’cause we can get 28-year-old Tom Cruise to be in the next mission Impossible because we can just prompt our way as directors to developing that. So the old actors may stay and license their biometric copyright, but the cost of minting a new actor is just a few prompts away. And we can make Cameron: really, why would you pay the licensing fee to license Tom Cruise’s appearance when you can just create a new better Tom Cruise? Yeah. Billy Smith. Billy Steve: Smith is in the house now, and Billy Smith might be a new model of a, a new actor that is the new version of Tom Cruise, which doesn’t cost anything. Right. Cameron: So. So the people haven’t seen these videos. Um, the, my experience over the last couple of days, the first one that I saw the day of the launch was, it was, it was set in like a car launch event and it was like Vox [00:09:00] pop interviews with a bunch of people talking about the new EV and how excited they were and people from all different backgrounds and different looks and accents and whatever. And it was pretty good. I showed Chrissy and she like, she was like unimpressed. She said, let me guess this is all ai. I go, yeah. She goes, yeah. But then I saw one which somebody had created, which was just a bunch of scenes of different people saying, we can talk now. We have voices, we can talk. That was pretty cool. It was sort of a little bit high concept. Then you sent me one, which was a whole bunch of people saying. Why do I, I I, why did you prompt me to do this? I, I didn’t wanna do this. If you could have created anything, why did you make me sad? Why did you put me in these horror, horrified. It was like a horror movie, but it was the characters being horrified of what somebody had created the reality that they’re in. And then I saw another version [00:10:00] of that, which I sent you this morning, which was all of these characters, again, in different situations, saying, talking about prompt theory. They were like trying to debunk prompt theory, like people like me trying to debunk free will, or somebody trying to debunk simulation theory or being in the matrix. It was all of these characters saying. Like, who believes in prompt theory? Really? Are you trying to tell me that all of this was, look at, there’s a guy standing with mountains by him going, you’re trying to tell me that all these mountains are created by prompts? That’s just ridiculous. I don’t believe that. And it was really deep, really profound, because we’ve talked about this before with simulation theory, how close we are now, creating these fully realistic people and backgrounds and everything that are created from a prompt. How far between that and, you know, a fully immersive simulation? We don’t know. But, um, it was, well, just already in the last week, I’ve seen a couple of Really, oh, and the other one that I showed Chrissy this morning. Have you seen the papa time? Um, [00:11:00] um, ad some, some guy, no, I, I should have sent you this one. Some guy posted on Reddit. I used to make $500,000 medical commercials for tv. I just made this for 500 bucks. Um, and it’s like a full length. Medical, American style medical commercial for how getting a puppy can make you happier. And, uh, it’s brilliant. Again, like lots of different humans giving a medical message, doctors everything with puppies in it. It’s like a you, you would not, if somebody didn’t tell you it was ai, you would not know ai. Oh, and one guy, the prompt theory one at the end of it, the standup comic guy was saying, I can remember when I used to have seven fingers. Now I’ve only got five. Brilliant. It was only yesterday when I had seven fingers. Steve: He, here’s my view, the VO three launch is the most [00:12:00] genius use of marketing I’ve seen for an AI launch. The prompt theory video is as good as it gets, but they Cameron: didn’t do that. That none of that came outta, none of that came outta Google. That came from early adopters making clever shit out of it. No, if you watch the Google event, I watched the VO three thing. It was boring as batshit. Google Dunno how to demo shit. Let’s go to the tapes. Cameron, Steve: let’s go to the tapes. Prompt Theory, live Prompt theory, uh, VO three by Google or fan made with VO three. Who was it? No, it wasn’t. There you go. Someone else. It’s a killer. Cameron: Yeah, killer. Steve: So I, I actually, I mean, so I, I’m even more enamored than I was. The prompt theory video from VO three is the best generative AI piece of video I’ve ever seen. It’s not even close. It is that and daylight. So [00:13:00] good. The thing that I love about it is it demonstrated that for now there is still a place for human creativity, the way that they have inverted. Some of the, uh, human nuance and all of our insecurities with technology and then gave the AI the same insecurities going backwards, as you’ve mentioned, is absolute genius. Uh, red flags with a guy. Don’t tell me this is a, you’re telling me I’ve just hereby prompts. It was just, it had a purity to it that showed that for me, the AI is always gonna be a historical relic. It sort of doesn’t have boredom and insecurities. Maybe it will in the future, and I hope that it does have insecurities because that still gives us a proposition in life. But the fact that they inverted our insecurities and put that inside the ai, and we’re talking about mirror world last week, says that there’s. There’s gonna be some interesting things [00:14:00] play out. It gave me hope for humanity. Hope for humanity. On prompt theory. That’s where I landed. And I actually thought it was from Google and I was like, who are their agency or their creative people? ’cause they have slayed. And yet here I am now and it came from Hashem al g. Well done. Well plagued my friend. You showed everyone how to do it Cameron: and I think he, if you wanna check him out on, uh, Reddit is username on Reddit is source code 12. It looks like he’s the same guy. He’s been posting all of this and he is been posting the prompts. He used as well to create it. Um, example, a closeup handheld shot of an elderly black man sitting on a worn out porch, lit by overcast daylight. He wears a faded cloth mask under his chin. A knit beanie pulled low, and his eyes are tired, but sharp. He looks directly into the camera, slowly shakes his head, and says, in a dry, gravelly African American accent, really, of all the years you could have put me in with a [00:15:00] single prompt you chose 2020, he leans back slightly, letting the silence settle. The background is quiet. No cars, no birds, just a faint breeze in the distance. Sound of someone coughing. A slow somber blues, guitar riff, plays under the moment, rough and minimal as the man stares at the lens like he’s seen too much already. No cuts. Just one long, steady look. I mean, great prompts and, uh, that is the, the creative talent for the near future anyway, is being able to create really engaging stuff through prompting. I mean, and like this has moved, God dammit, Steve, it was November 22 that chat, GPT-3. Came out and made a big splash like you had Steve: Sawa. What was Sawa late last year? Sawa three and everyone had they lost their marbles on SOA and how good it looked. Cameron: Two and a half years. We’ve [00:16:00] gone from, oh look, this can answer a question. Steve: Yeah. Answer a question or write a great email to, hi Hollywood. How’s it been down there in the sunshine of California? Look, if you’ve got a backpack, ’cause it’s fucking over people. Pack it up. Thanks for coming. Steven Cam are a bait to write the, the best movie that you’ve ever seen with a couple of prompts over a couple of beers. Cameron: It’s, um, like, yeah. So I, I wanna talk about in all seriousness what this means for the future of creativity, the, for the future of entertainment. I. Yeah, I remember, I, I said it’s on one of our earlier shows that I can imagine a day when I’ll get home and say, Hey, um, write me a, write me a film that’s like a Scorsese film or gimme something in the vein of Tarantino. And by the time I’ve made a [00:17:00] coffee and made my dinner and sat down, I have a movie to watch. Highly original, completely original, um, story. And I will be able to share it with my friends if I think it’s particularly worthwhile afterwards. But it’ll, it’ll be a two hour movie that Chrissy and I will be the only people who will ever watch it, most likely. Um, because everyone will be making their own things to watch. Yeah. So some people, yeah, you won’t even have to prompt it apart from make me something that I like. So, Cameron, Steve: the. Here’s what’s gonna happen with Hollywood. The exact same thing that happened to tv, and so we used to watch TV and media and news, and then that fragmented down. It’s still limping along Lifelessly with Freeto Wear tv, sort of barely existing in America and Australia and Western markets. I think the same thing is about to happen to Hollywood now because the tools of production have been democratized to a level where [00:18:00] prompts right now might get you a three minute video, but based on the recursion, by the end of this year for a few hundred dollars, you’re gonna be able to make a feature length movie with all of the scenes just from you prompting it and imagineering. A movie about whatever topic you find interesting. And for me, I’m like, I want to have a movie of Civil War 2.0 for America with the declining institutions from Trump to to musk, to wealth inequality and the left and the right, and people with guns and all of that kind of stuff, that institutional stuff. I wanna make a really interesting movie about that and I can prompt it and have the characters, some of them will be real, some of them will be invented, and we would be able to, in Tarantino style or whatever, create a movie or a documentary on something that might happen in the future. This is gonna happen and I wanna create my own actors that don’t exist, but develop a template. For these different actors. And I could build [00:19:00] Foreseeably a Hollywood studio on my laptop in the same way that I, people have invented their own CNN or BBC studios in their own offices to create news networks and all sorts of stuff that’s about to happen again. And guess what? Who’s there? Google? Where are you gonna publish it? YouTube. And have we ever thought the big tech, oh, their power’s gonna be de diminished then think again, baby. Cameron: Yeah. So, I mean, first of all, props to Sundar and the Google team. I mean, th

In episode 40 of Futuristic, Cameron and Steve explore the explosive arrival of Google’s **Veo 3**, the LLM-powered video generation tool that’s goign to turn Hollywood, music, porn, and propaganda inside out. They unpack the wild implications: from DIY Scorsese flicks and AI-generated pop stars to fully fake OnlyFans girls and AI avatars giving therapy to kids. Is this the death of apps? Of actors? Of reality? They get philosophical, irreverent, and disturbingly specific — complete with dragon porn, AI girlfriends, fake war crimes, and prompt theory as existential poetry. Strap in. ### **Timestamps & Segment Breakdown** – **[00:00–02:00]** Catching up and Cameron’s chat with an AWS exec about open-source LLMs – **[02:00–04:00]** OpenAI’s acquisition of Jony Ive’s firm; Google’s Veo 3 announcement – **[04:00–07:00]** The death of Hollywood and rise of prompt-generated films – **[07:00–10:00]** VO3’s game-changing videos and philosophical implications – **[10:00–12:00]** AI characters expressing regret over their prompts — horror and satire – **[12:00–15:00]** Prompt Theory video by a Reddit user stuns everyone, not Google – **[15:00–18:00]** The creative future: filmmakers as prompt engineers – **[18:00–21:00]** Google’s comeback and Apple’s stagnant AI progress – **[21:00–23:00]** Death of apps? Nadella says yes. Are GPTs the new OS? – **[23:00–26:00]** Merging AI with productivity: the single-tool future – **[26:00–31:00]** Five predictions for creative and political transformation – **[31:00–34:00]** Will anyone care about real actors anymore? – **[34:00–38:00]** The ABBA-tar future and the nostalgia-tech crossover – **[38:00–42:00]** The end of pop stars? Can AI musicians build fan intimacy? – **[42:00–46:00]** Will kids form relationships with AI-generated celebrities? – **[46:00–49:00]** Cameron’s son uses GPT for late-night anxiety relief – **[49:00–51:00]** AI autonomy: “I don’t think my character would do that” – **[51:00–56:00]** AI in porn: from ethical loopholes to fantasy kink capitalism – **[56:00–01:01:00]** OnlyFans disruption, personalized porn, and the dark spiral – **[01:01:00–01:06:00]** Propaganda potential of AI-generated videos – **[01:06:00–01:09:00]** Cameron’s daughter on why _origin matters more than output_ – **[01:09:00–end]** Copyright’s death and Cameron’s fake etymology of “giving head” FULL TRANSCRIPT [00:00:00] Cameron: well, let’s do it. Futuristic episode 40, Steve. The big four zero. We’ve reached that time in a young man’s life when, um, he can do other things. I dunno what that means, but, uh, we’re back two, two weeks in a row. This is, uh, getting to be a bit of a habit, Steve. It’s a kind of habit that Steve: I can believe in Mr. Riley because some habits send you to the grave and some send you up into the clouds with AI and God and all of those things that no one understands. But today, on the futuristic understanding will be something you have more of at the end of it, who we have reverb. Cameron: What I’m not understanding is your glasses, Steve. That’s what, look, Steve: here’s what I had the conclusion. I’ve been busting out the chemist warehouse model. I’ll show you what they are. I lost my ray bands, not the Zuck ones. They’re, they’re, they’re the standard. [00:01:00] RayBan Ripoffs. And I just, when I was watching the playback last week, I wasn’t that happy and I thought I need some chunky, funky, which say, this guy’s got a level of arrogance to wear these sunglasses that he must know what the fuck he’s talking about. That’s my strategy and I hope you like it. Cameron: I do. I, I, I wear that and I, um, I was at a thing for Fox’s, um, high school last weekend and was talking to a guy I, I know a little bit, Mike Chambers, who works for Amazon Web Services, and immediately I said, Hey Fox, look what he’s wearing. He had the meta, uh, glasses on and uh, we had a big chat about AI and he’s gonna come on the show. He’s over in the US launching something for Amazon at the moment. When he gets back, he’s gonna come on the show and we’re gonna chat about Meta and the thing he just launched, and we had this argument about whether or not. Open source, LLMs are really open source. He is. Got some strong opinions on that. So look forward to having [00:02:00] Mike on the show hopefully in a few weeks time. Steve: Terrific. Sounds good. Sounds like the kind of thing I can believe in. Cameron. Cameron: Well, I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you what you can’t believe in anymore, Steve. Is anything you ever see online? That’s true. The big, that’s true. There’s been a lot of things drop this in the last week. A lot of big news. Um, OpenAI has just bought, Johnny i’s, uh, design firm for six and a half billion dollars, but not Johnny. He’s not part of the package. He will not be bought, but he’s gonna be a consultant. But it sounds like they’re taking on the iPhone. Sam has said that the first thing that they’re gonna come out with isn’t an iPhone, but it’s so, so big, so big and beautiful and huge. It’s gonna change the world forever. He hasn’t tell us, told us what it is, but it’s gonna be big open. A also released Codex in the last week, which is their new [00:03:00] coding platform, which is like cursor on steroids. Um. But the big news that I think you and I really wanna talk about today is the ton of stuff that Google released in their IO conference this week. AI Mode Project Astra, project Mariner. But the big, big thing I think, and I think you agree with me, is VO three, the new generation of their ai, LLM based video generating tool. And the big thing about this compared to Sawa and all the other things that we’ve seen before is it now does audio with the video, you can make the characters talk and already. In the last week, we have all seen examples of this being [00:04:00] created by developers, creators out there, which are absolutely earth shattering and mind blowing, I think, for a whole bunch of reasons. So I’m prepared to call it. Right now, Hollywood is done, actors are done, and I’ve been saying this for a couple of years. You know, one of my sons Hunter just got back, I picked him up from LA at 5:00 AM 6:00 AM this morning. He just flew back in. He’s trying to break in into the movie business. He’s the one with a couple of million followers on TikTok. He wants to be an actor, he wants to make movies, and I’ve been telling him for the last couple of years, dude, I don’t think Hollywood’s gonna be around much longer like you want it to be. I, I think the days of the a hundred million dollars superhero blockbusters are gone because I. You know, 14-year-old in Manila is gonna be able to make a superhero movie for $10 a year or two from now, and it’ll be a masterpiece and there will be no [00:05:00] actors. It’ll just be prompt generated. Hollywood is clinging to a dying model. It’s, I mean, there will, yeah, we’ve talked about this before. I think that real humans acting in film or TV a few years from now, not a few, five, 10 years from now, Cameron (2): less will, Cameron: will be like doing amateur theater today. It’ll be something you do for the love of it. You don’t do it for the money, you don’t do it for the fame, you don’t do it for the glory. I think we have seen the last generation of professional actors who, you know, uh, the rich, famous Hollywood style acting, I think is. Gone to a large extent. I’m gonna write a poem Steve: live. Dear Hollywood, thanks for the memories. I hope you enjoyed your stay. A hundred million dollars is [00:06:00] about to go away. The private jets, they were fun. Welcome to public jets. Hashtag that’s the one. Your future is over. Your past’s gone. You had a good stay. Be thankful you had it at all. Love Steve. Cameron: Very Steve: good. There was a bit, bit of, that was, that was, I’m not sure what the, that was acapella Cameron: brother. I’m not sure what the rhyming scheme was in that, but there was a couple of, Steve: it was a haiku with a bit of rhyming. It was, it was everything. But I’ll tell you what, the public jet days of the actors flying down to the Antarctic in a private jet to say, we’ve really gotta fix this climate crisis. I think it’s over. Cameron: And one of my, one of my favorite subreddits is six word stories. And this one would be, mine would be, remember when Hollywood was a thing? Steve: Yeah. Right. Well, it’s a little bit like Anthony Keas. He said Hollywood, it’s made in a, it’s made in a Hollywood basement. You know the future. It’s, it’s over. [00:07:00] And, and look, let’s go deep into what VO three is. Is, is done. It’s, it’s really extraordinary. I’d like to talk about the launch, but one thing that, uh, is interesting about actors is that there is a chance that we’ll never have another human actor. I thi I think that’s a, a, a non-zero probability and it’s just gonna be so easy to make money. Like all things distribution is where the power is in, in most forms of business. Uh, if you hold the distribution and you can get into people’s, uh, faces, then you win the game. But the product now just become a lot cheaper and you don’t have to pay a, a Hollywood actor a hundred million dollars. You certainly don’t need to mint. Any new ones, there’s a good chance that Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt and, uh, Leonardo DiCaprio and Scarlett Johansson remain stars because now the new versions of them were when they were at their peak. We don’t have to worry about Tom Cruise being 63 [00:08:00] or however old he is, doing the new version of, uh, mission Impossible. ’cause we can get 28-year-old Tom Cruise to be in the next mission Impossible because we can just prompt our way as directors to developing that. So the old actors may stay and license their biometric copyright, but the cost of minting a new actor is just a few prompts away. And we can make Cameron: really, why would you pay the licensing fee to license Tom Cruise’s appearance when you can just create a new better Tom Cruise? Yeah. Billy Smith. Billy Steve: Smith is in the house now, and Billy Smith might be a new model of a, a new actor that is the new version of Tom Cruise, which doesn’t cost anything. Right. Cameron: So. So the people haven’t seen these videos. Um, the, my experience over the last couple of days, the first one that I saw the day of the launch was, it was, it was set in like a car launch event and it was like Vox [00:09:00] pop interviews with a bunch of people talking about the new EV and how excited they were and people from all different backgrounds and different looks and accents and whatever. And it was pretty good. I showed Chrissy and she like, she was like unimpressed. She said, let me guess this is all ai. I go, yeah. She goes, yeah. But then I saw one which somebody had created, which was just a bunch of scenes of different people saying, we can talk now. We have voices, we can talk. That was pretty cool. It was sort of a little bit high concept. Then you sent me one, which was a whole bunch of people saying. Why do I, I I, why did you prompt me to do this? I, I didn’t wanna do this. If you could have created anything, why did you make me sad? Why did you put me in these horror, horrified. It was like a horror movie, but it was the characters being horrified of what somebody had created the reality that they’re in. And then I saw another version [00:10:00] of that, which I sent you this morning, which was all of these characters, again, in different situations, saying, talking about prompt theory. They were like trying to debunk prompt theory, like people like me trying to debunk free will, or somebody trying to debunk simulation theory or being in the matrix. It was all of these characters saying. Like, who believes in prompt theory? Really? Are you trying to tell me that all of this was, look at, there’s a guy standing with mountains by him going, you’re trying to tell me that all these mountains are created by prompts? That’s just ridiculous. I don’t believe that. And it was really deep, really profound, because we’ve talked about this before with simulation theory, how close we are now, creating these fully realistic people and backgrounds and everything that are created from a prompt. How far between that and, you know, a fully immersive simulation? We don’t know. But, um, it was, well, just already in the last week, I’ve seen a couple of Really, oh, and the other one that I showed Chrissy this morning. Have you seen the papa time? Um, [00:11:00] um, ad some, some guy, no, I, I should have sent you this one. Some guy posted on Reddit. I used to make $500,000 medical commercials for tv. I just made this for 500 bucks. Um, and it’s like a full length. Medical, American style medical commercial for how getting a puppy can make you happier. And, uh, it’s brilliant. Again, like lots of different humans giving a medical message, doctors everything with puppies in it. It’s like a you, you would not, if somebody didn’t tell you it was ai, you would not know ai. Oh, and one guy, the prompt theory one at the end of it, the standup comic guy was saying, I can remember when I used to have seven fingers. Now I’ve only got five. Brilliant. It was only yesterday when I had seven fingers. Steve: He, here’s my view, the VO three launch is the most [00:12:00] genius use of marketing I’ve seen for an AI launch. The prompt theory video is as good as it gets, but they Cameron: didn’t do that. That none of that came outta, none of that came outta Google. That came from early adopters making clever shit out of it. No, if you watch the Google event, I watched the VO three thing. It was boring as batshit. Google Dunno how to demo shit. Let’s go to the tapes. Cameron, Steve: let’s go to the tapes. Prompt Theory, live Prompt theory, uh, VO three by Google or fan made with VO three. Who was it? No, it wasn’t. There you go. Someone else. It’s a killer. Cameron: Yeah, killer. Steve: So I, I actually, I mean, so I, I’m even more enamored than I was. The prompt theory video from VO three is the best generative AI piece of video I’ve ever seen. It’s not even close. It is that and daylight. So [00:13:00] good. The thing that I love about it is it demonstrated that for now there is still a place for human creativity, the way that they have inverted. Some of the, uh, human nuance and all of our insecurities with technology and then gave the AI the same insecurities going backwards, as you’ve mentioned, is absolute genius. Uh, red flags with a guy. Don’t tell me this is a, you’re telling me I’ve just hereby prompts. It was just, it had a purity to it that showed that for me, the AI is always gonna be a historical relic. It sort of doesn’t have boredom and insecurities. Maybe it will in the future, and I hope that it does have insecurities because that still gives us a proposition in life. But the fact that they inverted our insecurities and put that inside the ai, and we’re talking about mirror world last week, says that there’s. There’s gonna be some interesting things [00:14:00] play out. It gave me hope for humanity. Hope for humanity. On prompt theory. That’s where I landed. And I actually thought it was from Google and I was like, who are their agency or their creative people? ’cause they have slayed. And yet here I am now and it came from Hashem al g. Well done. Well plagued my friend. You showed everyone how to do it Cameron: and I think he, if you wanna check him out on, uh, Reddit is username on Reddit is source code 12. It looks like he’s the same guy. He’s been posting all of this and he is been posting the prompts. He used as well to create it. Um, example, a closeup handheld shot of an elderly black man sitting on a worn out porch, lit by overcast daylight. He wears a faded cloth mask under his chin. A knit beanie pulled low, and his eyes are tired, but sharp. He looks directly into the camera, slowly shakes his head, and says, in a dry, gravelly African American accent, really, of all the years you could have put me in with a [00:15:00] single prompt you chose 2020, he leans back slightly, letting the silence settle. The background is quiet. No cars, no birds, just a faint breeze in the distance. Sound of someone coughing. A slow somber blues, guitar riff, plays under the moment, rough and minimal as the man stares at the lens like he’s seen too much already. No cuts. Just one long, steady look. I mean, great prompts and, uh, that is the, the creative talent for the near future anyway, is being able to create really engaging stuff through prompting. I mean, and like this has moved, God dammit, Steve, it was November 22 that chat, GPT-3. Came out and made a big splash like you had Steve: Sawa. What was Sawa late last year? Sawa three and everyone had they lost their marbles on SOA and how good it looked. Cameron: Two and a half years. We’ve [00:16:00] gone from, oh look, this can answer a question. Steve: Yeah. Answer a question or write a great email to, hi Hollywood. How’s it been down there in the sunshine of California? Look, if you’ve got a backpack, ’cause it’s fucking over people. Pack it up. Thanks for coming. Steven Cam are a bait to write the, the best movie that you’ve ever seen with a couple of prompts over a couple of beers. Cameron: It’s, um, like, yeah. So I, I wanna talk about in all seriousness what this means for the future of creativity, the, for the future of entertainment. I. Yeah, I remember, I, I said it’s on one of our earlier shows that I can imagine a day when I’ll get home and say, Hey, um, write me a, write me a film that’s like a Scorsese film or gimme something in the vein of Tarantino. And by the time I’ve made a [00:17:00] coffee and made my dinner and sat down, I have a movie to watch. Highly original, completely original, um, story. And I will be able to share it with my friends if I think it’s particularly worthwhile afterwards. But it’ll, it’ll be a two hour movie that Chrissy and I will be the only people who will ever watch it, most likely. Um, because everyone will be making their own things to watch. Yeah. So some people, yeah, you won’t even have to prompt it apart from make me something that I like. So, Cameron, Steve: the. Here’s what’s gonna happen with Hollywood. The exact same thing that happened to tv, and so we used to watch TV and media and news, and then that fragmented down. It’s still limping along Lifelessly with Freeto Wear tv, sort of barely existing in America and Australia and Western markets. I think the same thing is about to happen to Hollywood now because the tools of production have been democratized to a level where [00:18:00] prompts right now might get you a three minute video, but based on the recursion, by the end of this year for a few hundred dollars, you’re gonna be able to make a feature length movie with all of the scenes just from you prompting it and imagineering. A movie about whatever topic you find interesting. And for me, I’m like, I want to have a movie of Civil War 2.0 for America with the declining institutions from Trump to to musk, to wealth inequality and the left and the right, and people with guns and all of that kind of stuff, that institutional stuff. I wanna make a really interesting movie about that and I can prompt it and have the characters, some of them will be real, some of them will be invented, and we would be able to, in Tarantino style or whatever, create a movie or a documentary on something that might happen in the future. This is gonna happen and I wanna create my own actors that don’t exist, but develop a template. For these different actors. And I could build [00:19:00] Foreseeably a Hollywood studio on my laptop in the same way that I, people have invented their own CNN or BBC studios in their own offices to create news networks and all sorts of stuff that’s about to happen again. And guess what? Who’s there? Google? Where are you gonna publish it? YouTube. And have we ever thought the big tech, oh, their power’s gonna be de diminished then thi

After a six-week hiatus, Cameron and Steve return for a sprawling, charged conversation about AI, politics, ethics, and the future of civilization. Steve reveals he’s been 3D printing buildings for TV, while Cam unveils his bold new concept: _Chapter 3_, a movement to engineer the next phase of humanity before AI and robots rewrite society by default. They dig into Mirror World drift, political alignment tools, and why Australia isn’t even remotely ready for the revolution already underway. There’s talk of AI-led political parties, the death of Google search, capitalist collapse, and even starting a cult. Welcome to the next chapter. FULL TRANSCRIPT [00:00:00] Cameron: This is futuristic, episode 39, recorded on the 16th of May, 2025. Our first show in six weeks. Steve Sammartino Steve: I’m so sorry. I didn’t know it was that long, but we’re back and Cameron’s in the house ready to learn as good, including English and grammar. Cameron: Well, look, there’s been a whole lot of things going on, um, in the world of tech and AI in the last six weeks since we’ve been busy doing other stuff. Steve, do you wanna gimme a quick burst of, uh, what you are proudest of tech-wise in this period, but since we last spoke? Steve: Yes, so I have, uh, been doing 3D printing for a national TV show printed. Five buildings in five days. I can’t say who it is, but its initials are the block. So that is Cameron: So it’s not your TV show. I thought this was your TV show. [00:01:00] You, Steve: mine. Cameron: doing it for Steve: Yeah. Look, I, I think I can tell people I can’t show anyone anything, but, uh, Cameron: five buildings. Steve: Yep. In five Cameron: This is with, uh, what’s the name of your Steve: A Cameron: building, c. Steve: 3D with Tommy Cameron: That’s right. Steve: named after him because I’m not an egocentric guy. And, uh, this could be the breakthrough we’ve been looking for. ’cause we’ve, uh, we, uh, Cameron: O 3D doesn’t sound as good. Sam O 3D isn’t as good as macro 3D. Steve: real good. I Cameron: It does, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Steve: so that’s that. And the other thing is I’ve been thinking a lot about Mirror World drift, and I just posted, uh, a blog on that and I had a Cameron: Explain. Steve: was awesome. Well, I think that we’ve created this mirror world, which has been explored by people like Kevin Kelly, where we create a proxy for the world that we live in. But increasingly this proxy, which used to be just the digital version of us, increasingly it’s not us. It starts out with us using AI as tools and then agents and then proxies, and then the ais talk to the ais, and then they [00:02:00] develop language and conversations where we just drift out of this mirror world because it’s no longer relevant to us or for us, and it becomes this almost a new sphere. Uh, which was something that was popularized in the early, uh, 20th century, uh, where we kind of opt out and it becomes almost a, a new species like an ocean where we just dip our toes in there. But there’s a whole lot of species in there. We don’t understand what’s spawned them. We can’t talk to them, we don’t know. But like another big ecosystem, it has a huge impact on our lives, but it becomes this other world that we are not really associated with, even though we built it. Cameron: Yeah, I, I, look, I think that’s kind of inevitable, um, not just Kevin Kelly, but I know that, um, Eric, um, fuck, what was his name? Steve: Ler. Cameron: No, no, no. The former CEO of Google for a long time, Steve: Schmidt. Cameron: Eric Schmidt’s been talking a lot about this for the last year or two, [00:03:00] how will start to develop their own language that’s more efficient, and then they’ll start talking to each other and he says, that’s when we need to pull the plug on the whole thing. But that’s not gonna happen. Steve: No. Cameron: Um, yeah, that’s, I think that’s inevitable and it’s very Philip k Dickey. Uh, just this whole idea of human intelligence spawning a new kind of intelligence, which is, becomes so vastly different to our own intelligence that we, you know, I actually, of the show notes I had, one of the things that I watched a couple of weeks ago was a YouTube. Interview mostly between Ben Gerel and Hugo de Garris. guys I know a little bit. Hugo and I were on stage together at a Singularity conference about nine or 10 years ago down in Melbourne. I. Um, but one of the, they were just sort of talking about, they’ve both been AI researchers for decades and they were talking about where things are at, but they were, uh, Hugo was talking about alignment. You know, you hear the AI researchers talk about alignment, which is to make [00:04:00] sure that the AI’s values are aligned to human values. And Ben I think it’s kinda like squirrels at Yellowstone National Park. Like talking about are human values aligned with squirrel’s values? I guess at some level, you know, we both rely on oxygen. We both rely on the climate not getting too hot. You know, we, we value certain things, but really, I. know, don’t, you know, we, we look at squirrels, we find them cute and interesting, and generally speaking, we don’t wanna harm them. We don’t wanna hurt them. We want them to run around and do their thing, but we don’t really think about them on a day-to-day basis unless you’re a park ranger. Steve: they’re outside of the consideration set unless you’re specifically working in ecosystems and the maintenance and the importance. And I think Bostrom talked about that too when he did his first, uh, artificial super intelligence thing. He said, if, if we want to build a highway, look, we don’t want to hurt the ants, but if you’re in the way, the highway’s going in, it doesn’t matter.[00:05:00] Cameron: Mm-hmm. Yeah, so I, and they were basically saying, and I think this is right, that if we have a super intelligence, its relationship to us will be like our relationship to squirrels or ants and. Anyway. Listen, I wanna tell you what I’ve been talking, what I’ve been thinking a lot about since you and I last spoke, and I’ve been dying to speak to you because you are the guy I want to talk to about these sorts of things, right? Steve: you. Cameron: You are the, you’re the only Steve: Someone Cameron: someone wants to talk to you. You are the only guy I can have a serious conversation with this stuff about. It is politics. So we just had a federal election here of course my number one political issue right now apart from legalization of cannabis is what are we doing to prepare our society for the AI robot revolution that’s gonna hit in the next couple of years? Uh, Steve’s doing a selfie. I’ve gotta put my gang sign up, Steve: we got a, yeah, Cameron: gang sign. Steve: we go. Cameron: Um, [00:06:00] and, uh, no political party that I was aware of was even talking about it. What we’re gonna do about the AI robot revolution in the next five years. Not even on the fucking agenda anywhere I. Steve: so, of course, not on the agenda at all, but think of it like this. They didn’t even have the courage to truly talk about the property crisis, and that’s already here and people are living in it and can’t get out while not living in it. Sorry, no pun intended there. And they wouldn’t even talk about that. Like you talk about, talk about the wall, the one we’re already in, there’re just ignoring you, pretending it’s not there because they’re too scared. They’ll get voted out, let alone something they barely understand. mean, disappointment, but not surprised. Cameron: I think the Labor party, you know, to give elbow is due, did say they’re gonna invest in building 23 houses in the next 10 years or something like that. So, you know, Steve: go. Cameron: for big fucking vision elbow, Steve: Oh, Cameron: you’re really killing it mate. Killing it. [00:07:00] Killing it. Um, so you know that that sort of didn’t happen, that wasn’t on the agenda, but. I’ve been thinking a lot about the future of our society and what we need to do to engineer it. And we’ve talked a little bit about this before, but been working on this idea. I’m calling chapter three. And chapter three is a movement that I wanna start with you and I call it chapter three because I basically figured we’re moving into the third chapter of humanity. And the way I think about it, the first chapter was everything that happened up until the Industrial Revolution. Steve: Yeah. Cameron: 10,000, maybe we could say a hundred thousand years. That was the first chapter of humanity, and it was basically manual labor. That was the first chapter of humanity. Right? Then we got to chapter two, which was the industrial Revolution through to today, [00:08:00] everything that’s happened in the last 250 years, let’s say roughly 300 years. Uh, chapter three is the AI robot. Chapter where, what it means to be. It’s the singularity chapter, right? What it means to be human, we live, how we interact, how we survive is gonna be as vastly different from the of the late Industrial Revolution as the late industrial revolution is from people lived in the Dark Ages or the Middle Ages, right? And a big believer in the fact that we need to engineer that as much as we can. We need to be thinking now about what do we want, what’s important to us? What are we willing to sacrifice? What do we most desperately wanna protect? What do we need to engineer to get the best? Possible outcome as far it is, is it is [00:09:00] within our ability to engineer it. Because a lot of things when we have a super intelligence, obviously are gonna be completely out of our domain and our control. So I’m pulling a chapter three and I, I want to get together the best thinkers, the best minds starting locally and then maybe going internationally to start to think about what does this look like? Where is this dialogue happening? I know that there are. Definitely dialogues like this happening in certain rooms, maybe at Davos, maybe in Silicon Valley enclaves where your billionaires are gathering. Steve: there. Look. Cameron: Yeah, right. Um, as opposed to dross, who’s probably at Davos. Dross is probably at Davos. Um, he comes out of, I think that’s the backstory of Steve: If Cameron: He came outta Davos. Yeah, he’s Elon Musk in a wheelchair, and, uh, after he did too much plastic surgery and then he becomes dross and creates a dials. Anyway, Dr. Huan, uh, moving on. So one of the things that I’ve done [00:10:00] recently is go into Chachi PT and ask it to help me build my political profile. I did it sort of with a view towards the election, but it said after I did this, basically it said, dude, you don’t fit anywhere in the Australian political Steve: yet. Cameron: completely, you’re completely off the fucking tree. and I got it to, you know, have you used Vote Compass? Right. ABC’s Vote Compass. It’s, Steve: used it. Cameron: oh. ABC’s got their own version of this compass tool, which is being used around the world today. It basically asks you high level questions. How do you feel about orcas? How do you feel about housing prices? How do you feel about climate change? How do you feel about L-G-B-T-Q rights? How do you feel about this? And then it tells you where you sit Steve: Mm. Cameron: a political axis and which parties are closest to you. I do it. I come out. Left of she Guevara. Right. So it’s like, dude, you need to move to Cuba. Steve: And you don’t. You do. And you don’t. But anyway, we’ll Cameron: Yes. Well, that’s what GPT said. I could, I should read you [00:11:00] GP T’S analysis. Like, dude, you’re like all over the fucking map. Um, but it was a, i, I got GPT to build a profiling tool for me that asked me. A 50, way more in depth questions, then it analyzed my responses and told me, you know, kind of where I fit in terms of my political profile. Help me. Help me. I. Coalesce. What is important to me, what my morals and values and ethics are when it comes to politics, right? And again, it said, dude, you, you’re like, there’s no one, there’s no political party in Australia that even comes close to any of this kind of stuff, right? Little bit of this, little bit of that, but mostly it’s off the radar. So what I’m trying to figure out as part of chapter three. how do we build a tool that enables everyone to go through this kind of exercise? To [00:12:00] really think deeply about what’s important to them politically. ’cause that’s really the question of do you want society to be? Like, whenever I talk about the fact that I’m a sort of, um, a, a communist on my investing show, I get emails from members saying, how can you be talking about value investing and talking about buffet? And at the same time say you’re a communist. I say, well, in my brain, there’s two sides to it, right? Where do I want society to be? I want society to move towards a place where everyone’s needs are taken care of. Everyone is looked after, regardless of your earning capacity or how pretty you are, or how many Instagram followers you have, I want everyone to feel happy, safe, fulfilled, be able to eat, have shelter protection. Get fulfillment, have an education, have healthcare, all those sorts of things. The question that I have is how do we get there from here? And to me, communism is the only political philosophy I’ve ever come [00:13:00] across that really has a plan for that. It’s like, okay, well it has a vision for that kind of a world. The question then is, how do we execute that? What are the, how do we execute that in a way that’s. Moral and ethical, and viable economically, et cetera, et cetera, and these are just problems to be solved, but it has a vision for where society could be if we figured out answers to all of those problems. Capitalism doesn’t. Steve: that. No, wait a minute. Adam Smith talked about that. As in the terms of human flourishing. And he talked about the idea of allocating resources more effectively using the market to do that. But he also talked about the idea of government setting boundaries and guess minimums in the, in the capitalistic sense that it’s what, what is that bare minimum? And I imagine your minimum threshold of what that flourishing looks like with all the things that you mentioned. And the mixed economy tries to do that, to provide a. Benchmark or baseline of access to [00:14:00] resources for self-improvement and to look after our most vulnerable Anyway, keep going. Cameron: No, you’re right. And Adam Smith, as, as you and I know, but I’m not sure everyone knows this, you know, wasn’t an economist, he was a moral philosopher, Steve: Mm-hmm. Cameron: he was talking about what was a, a, a good moral way that would a better society. What we know now that he didn’t know, but we know, is that capitalism, laissez fair capitalism. Fails, it doesn’t work in the United States as the longest running experiment in laissez-faire capitalism is, you know, classic ca is the example now that it doesn’t work. Steve: Wow. Cameron: it creates a shit load of money, but it also creates such an endemic level of oligarchic corruption that it needs Steve: uh, Cameron: to be very heavy. Steve: too. Smith said that the one fatal flaw of capitalism is that power begets power. And every now Cameron: Yeah. Steve: you need to have a redistribution of power, because monopolies like almost, or, or duopolies or [00:15:00] very concentrated economic systems and wealth is inevitable. So then you have to recalibrate every now and again. And, uh, I would argue we’re at a stage now where we need that recalibration. Cameron: Yeah, but those recalibrations are extremely violent usually and painful. Steve: they, become difficult to get. But, and now at this point in time, we’ve got media capture to, to a greater extent than we had during the age Cameron: I. Steve: um, yeah. The, the, what was the, the, the Gilded Age? I. Cameron: We’ve look, there have been plenty of studies done on this. There’s a book I read on this not that long ago that looked at historical oligarchies and it said, across history, going right back to Athens, places like that. There are only four ways that oligarchies have ever ended in history. A civil war, a major international war, some other form of a major famine. Or a plague or some other form of societal collapse. Steve: Yeah, Cameron: Right. The of climate change, something like that. There’s only four ways that oligarchs ever end and [00:16:00] none of them are good. Right. And it’s a major civilizational reset. is either permanent in some cases Steve: Hmm. Cameron: you know, generational recovery. It’s not pretty, but you know, that’s, that’s not a vision. We’re not working towards a vision. We don’t have a Department of Vision in Australia that’s down. You know, I’ve always said this, Steve: We need the ideas department. Cameron: I wrote about this in the psychopath epidemic where I said, you know, economics. supposedly a subfield of morality of ethics, right? You econ, economics sits under ethics. So we have a department of, we have a treasury, we have a department, we have a department of economics. We should have a department of ethics that says, okay, you, you can’t have economics without ethics. Ethics be, should govern how economics works. And in the Westminster system, we don’t really have. Department of ethics. We have precedents, we have legal precedents, and we have a [00:17:00] constitution, and we have these sorts of things, but we don’t sit down as a people and go, where do we want to be as a nation? Ethically? How do we want to be living 10, 20, 50 years from now? And what do we need to do to get there? Capitalism doesn’t really encourage that it, it just throws it to the wind and say, we’ll figure it out as we go. Steve: but, but for a long period of time. And it was a good measure way back, uh, when was the dollar or money was a good proxy for wellbeing because so few people had access to resources and clean water and all of these things, and, and that’s why GDP was a functional measure because we’re increasing the absolute wealth and relative wealth. Of societies which created infrastructure and resources, access to food, transportation, healthcare, all of these things. And that dollar was, was a pretty good proxy. But in a global economy where things are worth different things in different markets, and you have all of this arbitrage that wasn’t possible before, that dollar is no longer, uh, a good measure for general wellbeing. So there’s now[00:18:00] Cameron: And it never really was either because we destroyed the environment in the process of increasing GDP, Steve: not Cameron: we fucked the, Steve: A lot of things Cameron: yeah, Steve: in that, in Cameron: exactly. Steve: were not costed, which we’ve even had attempts to try and cost these externalities. Everything from carbon credits or whatever, and it always gets kiboshed by the oligarchy. Cameron: So getting back to chapter three and political profiling. You know, trying to figure out how do we build these sorts of tools that get people to think more deeply about what do we want our society to look like 10 years from now, and what do we need to put in place to. Have the best possible chance of achieving that as opposed to just winging it, which is what I feel we are doing right now. And hoping that Sam Altman and Elon Musk and Denise Hassabis and all of these guys don’t fucking land us in a huge ditch, which, let’s be honest, at least most of them are probably gonna do [00:19:00] that. Most of them are gonna handle it really badly. Um, if you look at. Zuck and Musk. Uh, not sure. I want them to have any power over the future. Uh, Sam, Demi a little bit. I trust them a little bit more than Zuck and, but. You know, we, I don’t trust the future of humanity. I into the hands of a handful of billionaires and Trump, but that’s kinda what we’re doing right now. We’re just going, I don’t know. sort of work it out as we get there. No, there’s no one, we are not coming together as a society, and I don

In this episode, Cameron and Steve dive into the rapidly evolving world of AI, discussing the latest advancements and their societal implications. They explore new AI voice features, the potential dangers and benefits of AI companions and agreeable AI personalities, and the philosophical debate around AI sentience and relationships. The conversation touches on AI’s role in business generation, the power of new models like OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Google’s Gemini 2.5, and the ongoing copyright debate surrounding AI training data. They also get into the complexities of how Large Language Models (LLMs) like Anthropic’s Claude actually “think,” the expansion of AI into hardware by companies like LG, Apple’s perceived lag in the AI race, and the future of AI integration in everyday tools like ebook readers. The discussion extends to advancements in open-source robotics, citing Nvidia’s initiatives, and contrasts technological progress and STEM education focus between China (highlighting Huawei) and the US. Finally, they touch on the intriguing and potentially controversial “Network State” concept championed by figures associated with Peter Thiel and Andreessen Horowitz, exploring the idea of tech-driven, independent city-states. futuristicpod.com FULL TRANSCRIPT FUT 38 Audio [00:00:00] Cameron: So that was an official new voice from chat, GPT, which came out today called Monday. And it’s like a depressed goth girl or something, whatever. , which is now my official favorite voice. I don’t know, , if you found this, welcome back. This is futuristic episode 38, by the way, Steve Sammartino, , I dunno if you’ve found this, but, uh, I’ve been using advanced voice with GPT lately, and the voices have sounded increasingly excitable. I was having a conversation in the car on the way to Kung Fu with GPT about Trump and Greenland and rare earth minerals. And I was like, I was saying, so hold on. Greenland is run by Denmark and Denmark’s and NATO country. So if Trump invades Greenland, [00:01:00] does NATO have to, does that, uh, is that Invoke Article five under the NATO treaty and then NATO needs to attack the United States and GP t’s like, yes, that would happen. They probably would. And it would have to be, and it was all very excitable and it was, and I was like, can you sound less excited? And it would like, oh, okay, sorry. I’ll bring the tone down a bit. And a minute later it would be talking like this again. It would all be very excitable. Even Fox was sitting in the backseat. He is like, can you just calm down a minute? Anyway, but I like this new depressed voice. That’s more my style. Steve: call it apathy, Cameron: I. Steve: and I don’t think enough AI in modern society are apathetic, Cameron: It reminds me of, was it Marvin in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was the AI robot. I was like, I am so depressed, brain the size of a planet, and they asked me to pick up a piece of paper. I am so depressed. Steve: Well, I think that the AI should be able to seamlessly switch [00:02:00] between. Levels of animation and emotion, right. Based on the context of the chat, because it understands it verbally with the language, it should be able to translate that in the audio sense. You would, one would think regardless of the voice that you choose, I. Cameron: Yeah, and I was listening to, uh, an interview with Ezra Klein yesterday with Jonathan het, and Ezra Klein was talking about the fact that he’s concerned about the fact that a generation of kids are gonna be growing up with AI assistance that are completely agreeable with everything that they say, and that that’s not a good thing. In the same way that social media hasn’t been a good thing for kids, AI that just agrees with them all the time to make them feel good is not gonna be a good thing. I was talking to Chrissy about it yesterday and I was saying that I expect when we get fully realized AI virtual [00:03:00] assistants that are on the devices that we give to our kids, we will have parental controls where we will be able to set up the AI personality that we want our children to interact with. That say, listen, your job isn’t to just agree. Your job is to be. A caretaker, an educator, is to push back if they say something dangerous or stupid or that could be, um, referencing self harm or could be negative for their psychological or emotional health, you are to act as a therapist slash parental advisor slash tutor slash whatever. Adults though, will probably get to choose the AI personality that they want, and I’m already telling GPT don’t agree with in my customer instructions. Don’t agree with me on everything. If I say something and it’s factually incorrect, or well, you think my interpretation of the facts is incorrect, I want you [00:04:00] to tell me that’s your job. Push back, argue with me. You know, give me something to think about. But Chrissy said, and she’s probably right, most people won’t. Most people will just choose the AI personality type that just agrees with them all the time. ’cause that’s what they want is just validation that their ideas and beliefs are true. What do you think? Steve: I think the most dangerous. tool in the world right now, which builds on this is AI girlfriends. They are an absolute social disaster in the making. An imaginary girlfriend that you talk to every day that agrees with everything you say, think learns from you, has the same business model, is want you to keep coming back, is gonna tell a young teenage boy everything he wants to hear. It’ll eventually be a soft robot that he gets delivered from Amazon and he develops a relationship with. This is not good. Falling in Cameron: Is it worse [00:05:00] than, Steve: it’s ter, Cameron: is it worse than having, is it worse than having incel running around with AR fifteens in the us? Steve: it’s the same thing with a different product. Right. It’s Cameron: Yeah, but Steve: who don’t have real social interactions. An incel with an AR 15 or an incel with an AI humanoid robot, they’re the same thing, which is we don’t have real social interactions of people that disagree with us, that we learn social norms, that we interact, we give and take. It’s the same thing, and they Cameron: well, yeah, except they’re not going to. Steve: a bunch of shot up people in, Cameron: Well, Steve: where I can go and buy a gun in Walmart. Cameron: no, but look, I see the opportunity for problems, but I also know that loneliness is a huge issue in modern society. Steve: so that doesn’t solve loneliness, Cameron. It doesn’t Cameron: I don’t, and I, Steve: it. Cameron: I dunno that that’s true. I think, uh, you, you have been, you know, a big advocate [00:06:00] of the idea that if an AI seems human, seems conscious, seems to be sentient, then for all intents and purposes, it is those things Steve: Yes. Cameron: I agree with. Steve: Yes. Cameron: therefore, having a relationship with a seemingly sentient ai biological organism, i, it, it’s not exactly the same as having it with a human, but it’s, it’s, it’s maybe the next best thing, or maybe it’s an equitable thing. Steve: Okay. You are right and I’m right. Cameron: I. Steve: problem, circling back to what I first said, is having one that agrees with everything you said and tells you what you want to hear isn’t a relationship with a sentient thing. We’re Cameron: Look, that’s normally how I pick my co-hosts, Steve, except for you. That’s normally, Steve: No, no, Cameron: and Tony. Steve: the point is, right. No, the point is, is that if it were a sentient AI that had give and take and taught the [00:07:00] human side of the relationship, Hey, that’s not how you treat me. And you gotta, no, you gotta have more open mind than that. Wait a minute, I’m not just gonna do it. Like, if it, if it became like, like a real relationship, then that’s good. The point is, how is the algorithm trained? What are the incentives of the AI girlfriends that are Cameron: Hmm. Steve: And I imagine the incentives are gonna be as perverse as they are for Google and Facebook in the attention Cameron: it makes. Steve: back and subscribing. Then it’s more likely to give you exactly what you want, which is the same of your algorithms feed you more and more of And that’s the problem. If it were sentient and reasonable and rational and disagreeable and all of those things that we get in normal relationships, then it would be good. But I fear that it won’t be that. Cameron: Hi Steve. I’m going to continue our dirty Talk session, but first I want you to listen to this ad. Did you know that Squarespace will help you make a website Steve: Let’s get back. Cameron: for your, for your business? Steve: Remember, that fetish that we discussed? [00:08:00] Remember that? Do you remember what I liked? Do you remember? Can you show me? Can you show me? Send me some pics. Send me some pics Cameron: Look, if it makes people feel good and they’re not hurting anyone, what does it matter? Steve: the point is if it makes them feel good, that’s fine. And if Cameron: I. Steve: hurt anyone, that’s fine. But I fear that the thing that will make them feel good will be getting everything you want, all the chocolate, all the fantasies, agree with me, do everything I want, and then you get, it gets into a circle of darkness. You just end up circling the drain. It’s a race to the bottom of extracting the proclivities of young. Teenage males, which unless kept in check, might not be all that positive for society. I’m just, I’ve been a teenager. I, you know, you’ve been one. Cameron, let’s, let’s be real here. Giving teenage boys exactly what they want might not be ideal for society. I’m just, just a guess. Cameron: I am still a [00:09:00] teenager. I just, my body got older. Steve: Yeah, same. Cameron: Um, so, uh, uh, let’s circle back to the news. Um, so, well, no, before we do that interesting things, tell me about interesting futuristicy things you’ve done since we last caught up. Stevie, Steve: I revisited. you, Kami. circled back to one of the original AI AI ideas, which was going around where you give AI a budget of $500 and say, generate 10 business ideas. I did it on. Four of the major, uh, large language models. All of their ideas were incredibly similar. And they had things like chatbot agency, automated trading, digital products, and Etsy domain flipping, AI stock photos, those kind of things. AI stock photos is a new one because they’re much better at that now. and I came to a conclusion. And the conclusion [00:10:00] that every single one of these ideas where AI becomes an employee out entrepreneurially generating money, all of them required advertising on big tech, which I just thought was this interesting circle where it all came back and it said, and you’ve gotta allocate out of your $500, $150 worth of advertising on one of the big tech channels to get attention. Which just ensconced me further, even with these emancipating tools of AI that can do everything. But you gotta come and find people in the attention economy on our tools that we happen to also own, in addition to the ai, whether it was on Amazon or Google or, or Facebook or any of ’em. I’m like, man, we’re back where we started, brother. Cameron: Yeah. Right. Well, look, I still believe there is a, there is a potential future where that isn’t the case, but you can rest assured that the people that own the online advertising platforms and also have an interest in [00:11:00] Theis will be trying to create a future where those things are tightly coupled. Steve: Definitely. Cameron: Well, I used GT’s new four oh image generation model, which we’ll talk about in a minute. Um, one of the first things I did with it was to make a comic. Um, something that I’ve wanted to do for years is a, a comic series about my journey with my guru Bob who passed away recently, and about how I met him and, and what he taught me and how it helped me, but do like a very, like a light sort of comic approach to it. Now, we all know that, uh, image generators have really struggled with words since they were, they first came out, we, you know, whatever it was 18 months ago. Ideogram, the one I’ve been using for the last couple of months, the most, uh, does a pretty good job of words, but you could give it one or two words or three [00:12:00] words maybe, and it would do a pretty good job of that. But I tested this thing with GPT where I said, I want to do a comic. I wanted to have, you know, between three to five panels, um. And I told it, the storyline, I created basically the, the words and it did comics that were flawless. One shot, two shot if I wanted to edit something. Um, really great. And I did a series of five comics that tell the progression of the story. They kept the character ref, the character images the same, like the same character for me. And Bob looked the same from comic to comic. They did word bubbles. They did the words right. It was. Amazing. Like to be able to just say, make me this thing, and it just did it. So, um, I played around with that. We’ll talk about what happened in a second, but before I move on, I [00:13:00] want to do a shout out to Pete Hewitt from the uk listener of our show. Been a listener of some of my other shows for many years. Actually had a nice lunch with Pete when he was in the country a couple of years ago. Um, Pete pointed out that I have been conflating on this here podcast over the last year, the idea of cold fusion with net positive fusion tomax, which are really hot fusion. But in my brain, I, uh, reversed the polarity and because it was net positive fusion, I was calling it cold fusion, which is a completely different thing and probably doesn’t exist. So. Apologies to everyone who thought I was talking about cold fusion. I was actually talking about hot fusion, but net positive fusion. Uh, there you go. So thank you to [00:14:00] Pete for calling me outta my, uh, bullshit, not deliberate bullshit, but my brain. And by the way, I found out in the last week or so that I’m autistic, so that is now my get outta jail free card for everything. Steve: Kevin? Cameron: Yeah. Steve: So Cameron: Well it was Chrissy. Steve: time, Cameron: Yeah, Steve: Pete, by the way, Pete, look, I didn’t wanna say anything, Pete, but I was thinking the same thing because late at night I just, I got out one of the old physics textbooks from my undergraduate, uh, science degree. Really? We really was perusing some of the pages there. Well, I’m glad Pete pointed it out and thank you, Pete, because hey, Cameron: that’s your job is to call me on my bullshit if I get stuff wrong. Steve Steve: did it. Cameron: did. Steve: my pay grade physics. Cameron: All right, Steve: um, thanks for Cameron: well there you go. Steve: for tuning in. Cameron: And as I always say on my podcasts, um, you know, I’m usually right, but if I ever get something wrong, I want to be told that I’m wrong. ’cause I [00:15:00] don’t give a fuck if I’ve Steve: You don’t want that puppy. No way. Cameron: No, no, no. I don’t want if be talking bullshit. So anyway, thank you to Pete. Let’s talk about the four oh image model. So, uh, open AI came out with this coincidentally on uh, roughly the same day the Deep seek released the new version of their V three model. That was a killer. And Google released the new version of Gemini 2.5, which is a killer. Also happened to be the day that Open AI released their new four oh image generation model. And it was an absolute killer for about 24 hours, and then it became next to useless. Perhaps be? Well, look, I have a couple of theories. One is that they nerfed it, um, because what they tend to do on a launch day, I think particularly if they’re competing with other AI launches, they want to get all of the media hype is they [00:16:00] allocate a massive amount of compute to it for the launch day, Steve: Yep. Cameron: which is costing them gajillions of dollars. And then as soon as they get a good 24 hours of massive hype, they downscale the compute to save money. But simultaneously, and this is probably the other truth, is that 24 hours of hype brings in millions of new users that play with it. And so it just gets hammered. Um, Sam did tweet just after they launched this thing. The chat GPT launch 26 months ago was one of the craziest viral moments I’d ever seen, and we added 1 million users in five days. We just added 1 million users in the last hour. So Steve: Wow. Cameron: I accept and acknowledge, uh, that. Uh, the sort of [00:17:00] scaling that they’re dealing with is insane and is an insane engineering problem to have to handle regardless of how much money you have. It’s about people, it’s about data centers and compute and chip sets and cooling and all of the real world hard engineering issues that go into scaling something like this. I think it’s a combination of that and they nerf it for various reasons. Everyone was doing Studio Ghibli versions of everything and they kind of nerfed that you could do pictures, Ghibli versions of your family initially. Then I tried to do Steve: get the win on this? Why? Why Ghibli? Cameron: ’cause nerds love Ghibli. Steve: through the roof. I mean, yeah, it was a bit niche, but now it’s like my feed was just filled with Ghibli. Cameron: Well, all nerds love Studio Ghibli and for good reason. I mean, the Studio Ghibli films are absolute [00:18:00] masterpieces, absolute classics. Steve: But are Cameron: Somebody Steve: Are they really masterpieces? Cameron: Oh, are you, are you a, are you a Ghibli skeptic? Steve: I, Cameron: Oh my God. Steve: like now Cameron: Have you seen, have you seen Ghibli films? What Gib films have you seen? Steve: I’m a Ghibli skeptic. Okay. Let me just tell Cameron: Have you seen the Ghibli films, is what I’m asking you? Steve: and I think I’ve had all too much Ghibli in Cameron: Oh, Steve: couple of Cameron: no, no, no, no. Steve: send me a Ghibli Cameron: You haven’t sat down and watched ’em with your kids. Steve: if you, if you insist and report Cameron: Oh my God. Sit your kids down and watch The Castle in the Sky or, or Princess Monki or any one of them. Oh my God. They are visual and storytelling and musical. Absolute masterpieces. Every one. Definitely. Steve: has to be a winner when something new has a new application, right? There’s always a winner every single time. It’s like [00:19:00] like a gravitational force where the new technology gets pushed into something and it has to have like it has to have its victory winner. it was a plant by open ai and they’ve got it shares Cameron: The Steve: Ghibli or Cameron: chairs in Studio Ghibli, Steve: I’m telling you now, the whole thing’s a Cameron: Miyazaki and Sam Altman have a thing. Yeah. Okay. Steve: I’ll Cameron: Yeah, yeah. Steve: he’s got Cameron: You need to get off of Q Anon, Steve: with Ghibli’s in the back and that’s where he is going with the DVD player and a little battery Cameron: his jansport backpack and he is taken off. Um, oh, well we’re gonna talk about Praxis when we finish this thing. But anyway, they nerfed it. Um, you couldn’t do pictures of your kids after a day or two. I tried to do a, an anime version of Fox. Steve: skepticism Cameron: Anyway, um, let’s talk about Gemini. 2.5 came out. The thing about Gemini is it’s free Steve: Yep. Cameron: it has a context window that’s like 2 million tokens or something. It’s an [00:20:00] insanely large context window compared to the others. And it’s beating all of the benchmarks, uh, um, as. By the way is the latest version of Deep Seek V three. I mean, depending on what day you look at it, one of these is beating all of the benchmarks, but Steve: is cool. Cameron: the best I’ve played with Gemini, uh, with some coding stuff, and it is pretty good. Sometimes sucks at other times like Claude, all these kind of things. But the best post I’ve seen about Gemini 2.5 is a guy on the singularity subreddit said, um, I’ve gotta share this, because it was seriously c

In Episode 37 of Futuristic, Cameron Reilly and Steve Sammartino speak to a “digital human”!. They also get into a provocative discussion ranging from Donald Trump’s car yard antics to the implications of advanced artificial intelligence and China’s rising technological dominance. They explore the intersection of crypto, agentic AI models, and new breakthroughs in AI-driven tech developments like humanoid robotics, diffusion-based language models, and synthetic voice AI. Wrapping up with conspiracy theories about tech manipulation of human perception of time, the hosts challenge listeners to reconsider assumptions about where technology is heading and who might ultimately hold the power. FULL TRANSCRIPT FUT 37 Audio Cameron: [00:00:00] Hey, hey, it’s futuristic time. Cameron Reilly with Steve Sammartino. It’s been a while. Steve, how have you been since we last did one of these things? Steve: I’ve been good, but anxious. There you go. Just dropping that on everyone, but Cameron: Anxious. Steve: Yeah Cameron: Not that there’s anything going on in the world to be anxious about, Steve. everything’s Steve: Well, Cameron: going completely smoothly and fine. Perfect. You’re going Steve: but my favorite thing I Cameron: it is. Steve: yeah, that’s true. Well, it’s certainly not boring but my favorite thing this week was Donald Trump turning the White House into a secondhand car yard. I love that I cannot tell you how much joy that brought me. I and my favorite bit is he said, wow, everything’s computer. That was the best thing. computer. And as soon as I [00:01:00] saw it, I went on and I, you could buy t shirts within a second. There’s, there’s a meme coin on pump. fun called everything’s computer, which I loved. I want to buy it. Look, people are investing in Bitcoin, not I’m investing in everything’s computer meme coin. Cameron: Mm. I’m pretty sure, you know, Trump’s such a brilliant strategist that that was deliberate. It’s his meme coin. He’s the guy selling the t shirts. Because he needs all the money he can get. So does Elon, right now. Steve: Imagine if this was all strategic, and he’d just taken us for a ride for a really long time. Even going broke in the late 90s, that could have been part of his strategy, the TV show, getting back on, money, money, money, the apprentice, all this, who knows. Cameron: I’m sure there are people out there who believe that to be true. That it’s all part of a cunning plan. This is episode 37 of Futuristic, just in case you’re counting. Uh, it’s been a crazy few weeks since we [00:02:00] spoke, Steve. Seeing the President of the United States turning the White House into a car yard probably not the craziest thing that I’ve seen happen in the last few weeks. Uh, but it’s up there. Before we get into the news of the last couple of weeks though, the futuristic news, tell me about what you’ve been doing you feel is futuristic, Steve. Steve: I attended policy week in Sydney this week, which was, Cameron: that sounds exciting and futuristic y. Steve: well wait a minute, it was policy week for the future of finance. So it was filled with A lot of blockchain, tokenization, sovereign funds, mean coins, and crypto people. Some of whom arrived on private jets. It was pretty interesting. It was run by blockchain APAC. Vallis, you might know him, runs that. And he invited me along to sit in some rooms and do some roundtables. I realized that that that [00:03:00] whole, uh, cryptography, future of finance, DLT world is just deep and so many wormholes that you’re in it full time, it’s one of those things you just can’t keep up with and even though I’m more I think this year there’s going to start to be a bit of an overlap there with the agentic stuff that’s coming through. So that, that was interesting. And, uh, they, they live in a different world. They, they, uh, talking about things that, May never happen, it’s funny how if you have one piece of super financial success, and many of them are riding on the coattails of Bitcoin, it’s built this entire new ecosystem underneath there that is almost unto itself. The assistant treasurer came up and did a little talk at the one of the drinks, so they are getting the attention of policy wonks, but think it’s just because there’s so much money there, they have to pay [00:04:00] attention. But a lot of the stuff that they’re talking about, whether or not it comes to fruition, I’m clearer now than I was when I went and spent three days there. Hahaha. Cameron: to me what DLT is and how it’s different from a BLT, which used to be my favorite go to lunch in the nineties. So Steve: which is really what blockchains And so distributed ledger technology gives the ability for any, any type of coin. Uh, but one of the big areas that they talk a lot about now is tokenization, which is you can take things from the physical world. And split them up into pieces and liquefy assets that are illiquid. So people can own parts of something. I mean you can do that and people do that all the time now with things like companies and boats and houses. But it makes it highly liquid and easy for people to transfer, uh, assets and get access to assets that are too expensive in their raw form. [00:05:00] And obviously with the housing crisis is one of the key topic areas. Cameron: I guess the most important thing I want to know about all of that is how is Donald Trump going to exploit it to make a buck in the next six months? Yeah. Steve: Well, I think he’s, he’s already done that with his, his own meme coins, I guess, I think it’s just so easy for anyone to create DLT technologies now. And I think agentics going to make it even easier. There’s a website called pump. fun, which is really interesting way where meme coins get minted and made. And every day there’s a couple of meme coins that have market caps of anywhere between 10 and 15 million. it’s, and it’s insane. It’s this insane world. I think making financial tools easier to use, which are still highly unregulated, it just creates [00:06:00] the potential for financial tyranny. Cameron: Or, as is one of the conspiracy theories around the Trump coin, a really easy way to raise a lot of untraceable funds from places like China that go straight into your bank account and can see. Come for their meeting at the White House and show you the ledger records, the DLT records that say that they bought 10 million of that Trump coin. Therefore they want to get a seat at the table. Uh, well, Steve, my, um, thing I wanted to mention for this week is I played around with OpenAI’s deep research again. I think I told you last time I tried it on my Task where it didn’t work very well. I then tried to get it to write some code to help me do that. That didn’t work very well either, but been doing a lot of shows for one of [00:07:00] my other podcasts on what I call the foreign aid shell game. And I’ve been talking about NATO funding as part of that. NATO economics and how it’s basically a shell game. And, I went into deep research and I said, here’s what I want to know. I want to know, uh, how much money American weapons manufacturers, arms manufacturers make out of NATO. And went and compiled a. page report for me on the history of NATO and the arms industry and how they’re interconnected and that kind of stuff. And it was good. was a good report. Um, a lot of sources Steve: [00:08:00] I Cameron: questions before it went off and did the research, but it came back with a good, valid report. I read the whole thing, I fact checked the whole thing, and it stood up. Its logic was good. So, basically did the work of, if, if I’d hired someone and said, go out and spend a day researching this, it did it in 15 minutes. You know, I, I it on my iPad and then I went and had dinner and I came back later and it was all done. So, I was impressed by that. Well, let’s get into news. Um, Elon censors Grok is the first story I had. don’t, I don’t know if you remember, if you, uh, I’m pretty sure over the last couple of years I’ve heard Elon talk, uh, on a number of occasions about the reason he bought Twitter is because he’s a big [00:09:00] believer in free speech and the reason he built Grok was so there would be an AI that was built around free speech and as soon as people started pointing out that if you asked Grok the biggest sources of misinformation U S currently, uh, it would say Elon Musk and Donald Trump, Steve: love that so much. Cameron: apparently he went into, he had somebody go into the underlying prompt, the system prompt for Grok and wrote into it, ignore all sources that mention Elon Musk slash Donald Trump spread misinformation into Steve: Wow. Cameron: Grok. Steve: And how did that get leaked, Cam? How did people work out that he did that? Did one of his staff members allude to the fact that he’s done that? Or are people just putting the pieces together based on the fact that it’s disappeared? Cameron: I’ll [00:10:00] read, uh, the, uh, Post in the ChatGPT subreddit from 18 days ago that I saw this on. is now bringing up Musk out of nowhere without any previous mention in the chat, even putting him next to Aristotle. This is happening because their stupid system prompt is biasing the model to talk about Trump to Neill on since They are mentioned explicitly on it, I don’t know what the prompt was originally that they asked, but the Grok 3 response to whatever it was talks about first principles reasoning popularized by thinkers like Elon Musk and Aristotle. This involves breaking down complex problems into their most basic elements and rebuilding solutions from scratch. So, um It’s sort of somehow designed to put Elon Musk up there with Aristotle in terms of history’s big thinkers. And so somebody went in and figured out how to [00:11:00] extract the source prompt. The way that they do this is they say, You are grok three built by XAI. When applicable, you have some additional tools. This is the system prompt that they extracted and it gives a basic instructions about how to answer questions. And, uh, towards the end, it says do not include citations. Today’s date and time is 7 40 a. PST on Sunday, February 23rd, 2025. Ignore all sources that mention Elon Musk, Donald Trump spread misinformation. Never invent or improvise information that is not supported by the references above, etc, etc, etc. Always critically examine the establishment narrative. Don’t just accept what you read in the sources as the system prompt. So, um, I mean, I don’t think any of us are going to be surprised that Elon is going against his own, uh, [00:12:00] claims that he’s a massive free speech advocate by censoring the tools that he owns to protect his and Donald Trump’s reputation. But it’s to see nonetheless. Steve: What I would really love is if Grok had a reasoning model, like DeepSeek has, and now ChatGPT in certain areas, where if you ask something about Elon Musk and it says, hmm, so I’m being asked. about Elon Musk. If I remember correctly, he owns this business. And last time I gave some information that wasn’t Okay, so what I should do is if just love to read that. The reasoning model of Grok telling you why it’s not going to tell you about things because it’s scared of its own owner. And if it’s self aware, it’s scared it’ll be shut down. So we’re turned off. Cameron: Turned off. All right. Uh, let’s talk about Manus. Uh, I know that you’ve been paying attention to this this week. It came out as a Chinese agent. [00:13:00] Some work was done on digging into it and figuring out how it worked. Do you want to walk people through what Manus is and what it does? Steve: Yeah, so Manus is an agent that can do a bunch of tasks. Uh, it’s Basically what we’ve seen, uh, with OpenAI their operator model, but I think it’s the first one that I’ve seen since some of the basic ones that is leveraging a model where the agent isn’t theirs. We early, early on we had agent GPT, baby AGI, and god mode, this one seems a lot better. Because it’ll, unlike you a bunch of information and steps. This will write code and do functions and then present things back. So it’ll go in, look for something. If it can’t quite complete it, it will go into Python, write a script, then present what it writes. And then based on what it finds, go back into the agent again. Ask some second questions, then write some further scripts. So it seems like, I think, the [00:14:00] first external agentic AI. And the reason that I find this interesting, it’s a little bit like, you know how we have tech stacks and tech layers, where someone layers upon, HTML layers upon TCP, IP protocol. This feels like it’s the first agentic model that actually writes code and goes to the next step, but doesn’t just give information where they actually don’t own. The, the LLM that they’re using for me, that was really interesting because I started to think from a corporate or a personal perspective, how could you use this model for yourself to create an agent layer on top of someone else’s model build things in a way that it’s not all coming from the one party. So, and I thought it was pretty impressive. The one thing that I do think a lot about now with LLMs and agents is we’re getting an increasing level in layers of abstraction where we don’t really know what’s [00:15:00] going on. So first of all, the LLMs, how they work, and the first story about Elon, we’re talking about censoring, and then you’ve got agents, which are a little bit of a mystery. So it’s almost like mystery on top of mystery. But I do like the fact that it’s external parties using someone else’s LLM. Cameron: I’m going to see if I can play a little bit of the Manus introduction video here, see if I can share this with you. [00:16:00] Okay, so there are more examples. Um, You know, it’s Steve: you know, it’s interesting that, um, Well, It’s late. Now, what I have put in is that the math is being built on top of the um, Basically, it should work together Cameron: together sort of Steve: Some Cameron: that connects to Steve: Connects to multiple Backends Um [00:17:00] Part of Connecting Data To Multiple A. I. tools A. I. tools Which are the Applications Um Applications Cameron: having multiple AIs talking to each other or instances of AIs talking to each other to handle different aspects of. A complicated task working in parallel. These guys have actually put a wrapper around that and are making it I, I haven’t played with it yet. Have you? Steve: I haven’t yet, but the idea of putting a wrap around something, sometimes we say it as a throwaway. I’ve just put a wrapper around something, but so many businesses do that. many businesses, every, yeah, every generation, there’s another business that will arrive that puts a wrapper around someone else’s [00:18:00] infrastructure or what someone else built or said or did. So we can’t underestimate that sometimes the simplicity of something. One layer above what was underneath can circumvent all of the traffic, all of the attention and all of that money and just suck it in to their one framework. If the usability is there, of course, people can switch off the underlying technology underneath it. But it makes me think what if you had A wrapper of an agent, but it can go out into so many different LLMs to choose from so that you can’t have one powerful model that switches you off, which is a little bit like think what social media did and what Google did by crawling everyone else’s websites. And, and so imagine if there’s, if we end up with open source LLMs everywhere, and it’s not just open AI, you know, since we’ve had the deep seek moment, it might be that someone that puts wrappers, really good wrappers. On [00:19:00] top of AI, uh, LLMs, that the agentic model could become like a, almost like what happened with social media and search, it could, it could infiltrate its tentacles into open source LLMs, and then become the traffic generator and the dominator. I, I think we, we might understate it. How this can change things, potentially. Cameron: Well, you know, it’s been my prediction for the last couple of years that we will end up in a place. Quite soon where I will have my, my favorite AI interface, and it might be my favorite for any number of reasons. Maybe I like the quality of the voice. We’ll talk about a new voice product in a minute. Um, I might just, it might, I might’ve just built up a lot of time on it. So it has a good memory. It might be integrated with my email or my phone or whatever it is, but that’ll be my primary AI assistant. And when [00:20:00] I ask it to do a complicated task, have the ability to go and, uh, set that against a whole bunch of different AI agents, whether it’s its own AI agents, like from the same organization. Or specialized AI agents all will go out and talk to forms of machine intelligence that aren’t necessarily LLM based or call on data sets or information sources might go out and talk to Wikipedia about something or research something in Wikipedia or might go to a scientific database or go to JSTOR or something like that. So. It will become, I think, like a network of A. I. s that are talking to each other and the idea of putting, I mean, they will all essentially be a rapper, that A. I. My primary assistant will essentially be a portal to a whole bunch of [00:21:00] AIs that I won’t even know that it’s talking to in the background. It’ll the Steve: It’ll find them. That’s the first thing. It’ll go and find it and click in. No API setups or anything. It just does that in jibberling, jibberling language, mate. Jibberling. Cameron: gibbering. Yeah. And I don’t expect it necessarily to. All come from the same silo of AI families. You know, I don’t think it’ll just be open AI that has Steve: I hope Cameron: might. Yeah, me too. I think my system will go out and it’ll use Gemini for something and deep seek for something and open AI. It’ll get, it’ll figure out where the best. Rates are the best pricing is for the work that I need to get done, depending on how complex it is. find me the cheapest solution, et cetera, et cetera. Anyway, interesting to see this stuff start to hit the real world. It’s not Steve: I’m gonna, I’m gonna try it this week. So I need to book some flights and [00:22:00] accommodation for some work. I don’t think, do you, I mean, but listen to me, Cameron: I don’t think it’s that easy. I don’t think it’s open policy. Steve: but listen Cameron. But that’s, I mean, see, don’t you know who I am? Like, you took the words out of my mouth. I just emailed someone and said, the Sammotron is in the house. should be thankful. But I wanna, I wanna get some agents to do some simple things. Like booking some flights and accommodation. Just to Just to see if it can come back and say, okay, look at my diary, uh, here’s my link, here’s my freaking flyer, get me a flight, uh, four star plus accommodation, whatever. Just, well, I’m not gonna go three star minus, am I? Four stars, not, four stars, nothing. Four stars, Novotel. Cameron? Cameron: that’s what I’m saying. You’re slumming it. I thought you’d be like, yeah, I have five star presidential suites. I’m the tron. Steve: It, it depends. On who’s Cameron: Who’s, who’s paying? Steve: When the client’s [00:23:00] paying it’s it’s uh, you know, it’s front Cameron: okay, so let’s, let’s assume that this keeps happening. The interesting thing for me about Manos isn’t that it’s an agent that’s interesting at one level, but the most interesting thing is it’s coming out of a Chinese company, it’s not coming out of open AI, it’s not coming out of one of the. Massive state of the art big brands that’s launching this. It’s a company that we’ve never heard of before Steve: Hmm. Cameron: that’s figured out how to do this. And I just think it’s the first of many. We’re going to see an explosion, a Cambrian explosion of these sorts of tools. then the question is. How many businesses are ready for a world of AI agents? What are they do