The Tech Backlash Is Here | Novara Live

Welcome to Univar Live. Coming up tonight, the tech backlash is in full swing. Um and Meta, so the company that owns Facebook, they have had to pay billions and billions of dollars um to make up for the damage they have done to America's kids. Also, um I will be speaking to Nate Suarez. Um he'll be live with us to talk through the latest report into the Open AI hugging face attack. Um lots of really really interesting details in there. There were AI agents sacrificing themselves for the collective. All very scary. Doesn't portend well for the potential war that humanity is going to have to fight against these bots. Um and finally, um Trump wants the Palestine Action activists who vandalized his golf course to be uh sentenced as terrorists. And it seems like, um the UK might just go along with it because that's the kind of thing we do now. I'm Michael Walker and I'm joined this evening by Richard Hayes. >> Hello, Michael. Richard, thank you for being back on the show. Um, you must know Richard HS as the host of Do Your Own Research kind of conspiratorial connecting all the dots, but not crazy. I think not crazy. I think we actually maintain like a frustrating degree of sobriety actually. I would met perhaps maybe the second series which is all going to be about China should be a little bit more crazy and out there, but uh for the time being so far it hasn't been. We've actually been very scrupulous. So, as an expert on YouTube and selling things, I would I would advise you have to go and say, "Whoa, China's crazy." And uh yeah, you need to practice your shocked faces and the series is going to be a great success. >> Mark Zuckerberg, Basos, Outland Musk, the Silicon Valley Tech Titans think they rule this world, but they're meeting an ever growing backlash. And this week, um it was Zuck who has felt that backlash hardest. Um, Meta, obviously the company that owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, has agreed to pay up to $17 billion. That's a lot of money, in a settlement following a lawsuit that accused the company of deliberately building addictive features aimed at teenagers. Now, the lawsuit was brought by 29 US states, each of which claimed um that Facebook and Instagram were harmful to children. Um, amongst the allegations leveled at Meta was the claim that the company refused to make its products safer despite knowing um that they contributed to depression, anxiety, body image issues, and a broader youth mental health crisis. Um, the federal trial opened last week with a number of Meta insiders, former employees, experts, and whistleblowers set to take the stand. Parents of children who'd been harmed, including through suicide, were also present. That testimony was expected to shed some light on Facebook and Instagram's practices, including the design of their algorithms. Um, the extent to which the issue of child safety had been repeatedly ignored, and the amount of revenue generated from children by features known to be harmful to them. Now, if Meta had lost the case, estimates of the final amount in fines and compensation the company would have faced ranged from hundreds of billions of dollars to, in the most severe case, $1.4 4 trillion um which is almost its entire value. But after a little over a week's worth of court time, Meta decided to settle the case, meaning that for now um the information that would have been heard in court remains out of the public eye. So that's probably a big motivation for them to settle. It also meant that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg didn't have to take the stand as scheduled. Now, as part of the settlement, Meta continues to deny any wrongdoing. It's often the case with these settlements. Um, and aside from the $17 billion payment which will be distributed amongst the states who brought the case, Meta has also agreed to make some changes to how its products operate. Um, this seems pretty significant to me. So, they include these. A default daily time limit of 2 hours for users under 18 that can only be lifted by a parent. A default nighttime block between midnight and 6:00 a.m. for users under 18 that can only be lifted by a parent. default blocks on notifications to users under 18 from 10 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. and during the school day, an enhanced mechanism for teens to report potentially harmful content, and a requirement that Meta respond to 90% of those reports within 6 hours, a ban on displaying numbers of likes or reactions to users under 18, a ban on cosmetic procedure image filters for users under 18. the the the ban on likes and reactions for users under 18, which I find actually the most interesting because that is really getting into sort of why is meta and social media so sort of psychologically harmful. I don't actually just think for young people, I think for everyone is because it's constantly feeding you into this competitive drive to get other people's attention, right? And it's saying what I assume sort of the reason they've come up with these as the procedures that Facebook has to follow. There is now a recognition um amongst the legal profession as well amongst the judiciary um that this is problematic and unhealthy especially for young people. Um the court will oversee the settlement across the next decade ensuring the sums are paid out on time and the agreed changes to Instagram and Facebook actually happen. And while $17 billion um may sound like a lot, that would bankrupt most businesses, um Meta's profits last year alone was $60 billion. Um so they're still um in the black. And the settlement also comes with some tricky strings. $12 billion of the 17 billion will be paid out no matter what. But the remaining 5 billion only gets delivered if competitive tech companies YouTube and Tik Tok agree to make similar child safety changes to their products. I suppose the argument would be that Meta didn't want to be disadvantaged competitively. Now, of course, the settlement potentially, I mean, I don't think this is going to be a huge deal, but Meta would like to say that this gives them the moral high ground. They can now pitch themselves as industry leaders in child safety. Meta's head of global policy, Kevin Martin, posted this video shortly after the settlement was announced. >> The framework we've negotiated will empower parents to easily manage their children's access to our platforms. Our new time limit commitments, night mode features, and usage limits during school hours set the right path forward for our whole industry. But this framework will only work if all our peers join us. Because teens move fluidly across dozens of apps, we need an industrywide solution. We therefore call on our industry peers, Tik Tok and YouTube, to implement this new framework right away. As a parent, I'm proud both of the work Meta has done to protect kids historically and of this new groundbreaking agreement. >> I am a relatable Facebook executive and I am going to help your children not harm them and I call for competitor companies to do the same. Uh very strange people especially Meta hires the most kind of androidy looking kind of lacking in charisma very very strange company and also I mean from most of the sort of inside information it's kind of the most evil one but they all have this sort of very almost kind of like Amish sort of like we're it's strange. Um, Meta's legal troubles are far from over and many lawsuits, nothing against the Amish by the way. Um, and many lawsuits are still to come for other scrolling social media apps. And alongside Instagram and Facebook, companies like YouTube, Tik Tok, Snapchat, and Roblox, which I have to admit I've never heard of, are facing thousands of lawsuits across the US over claims that they knowingly harm children in multiple ways. Um, some of those are civil cases. Um, but many are being brought by states. Um, California was one of the states that joined in the Meta lawsuit for its attorney general Rob Bontter. Um, Meta is only the beginning. >> We protect our children from so many daily dangers, but we can't adequately protect them from harms Meta hides and lies about or from designs that are built to suck our children in. With this settlement, that is changing. In the coming months, our children and teens will be safer on Instagram and on Facebook. As big as Meta is, it doesn't stand alone. We're continuing our fight across social media, including our litigation against Tik Tok, and we'll continue to demand better from all parts of this industry through our ongoing work with the legislature, our defense of SB976, California's social media algorithmic harms bill, from continuing industry challenges, and through our enforcement work under California's existing consumer protection and privacy laws. We'll continue to do all we can to ensure our children are safe online, no matter what platform they log into. >> Now, for the parents of children harmed by Instagram and Facebook, the case was also the first time they'd seen anything that looked like justice. And Victoria Hink's daughter, Alexandra, died by suicide when she was just 16. >> No amount of money is ever going to bring my beautiful daughter back. I miss her every day. It's first thing I think of when I wake up, but last thing I think of, she should be going off to college. She would have graduated from high school. We live loc we live in Marin. She would have graduated from Redwood High School. She should be go out to college. Instead, I visit her every day in the cemetery in back of our house. There's lots of lawsuits coming for these companies, lots of parents. And yeah, I am I am satisfied. I feel like there's like justice is possible. So yeah, >> one of the most notable features of the Meta settlement is that it opens the doors for the courts to discipline and regulate tech companies in ways the US government has so far refused to do. And the harms that Meta social media apps may pose to children are hardly a secret. It's been public knowledge for a while. Um in May 2021, former Facebook employee Francis Hogan testified to that fact in Congress. The company's leadership knows how to make Facebook and Instagram safer, but won't make the necessary changes because they have put their astronomical profits before people. >> You're saying that documents exist that at the highest level at Facebook, you had information discussing these two choices and that people chose even though they knew that it was misinformation and hurtful and maybe even causing people lives, they continued to choose profit. Mark Zuckerberg was directly presented with a list of quote soft interventions and chose to not remove downstream MSI. And in the end, the buck stops with Mark. There is no one currently holding Mark accountable but himself. >> In 2024, Mark Zuckerberg faced a pretty bruising hearing in the US Senate with an audience of parents whose children had been sexually exploited by his products. >> The existing body of scientific work has not shown a causal link between using social media and young people having worse mental health outcomes. own study says that you make life worse for one in three teenage girls. >> It's restricting access to to uh sexually explicit content, but only for teens ages 13 to 15. >> My understanding is that we don't allow sexually explicit content on on the service for people of any age. Um the the um >> how is that going? Uh >> I just believe with all the resources you have uh that you actually would be able to do more than you're doing. Are these parents wouldn't be sitting behind you right now? >> 37% of teenage girls between 13 and 15 were exposed to unwanted nudity in a week on Instagram. You knew about it. Who did you fire? >> Senator, this is why we're building all I'm not going to answer that. >> There's families of victims here today. Have you apologized to the victims? >> No one should have to go through the things that your families have have suffered. And this is why we invest so much and are going to continue doing industryleading efforts to uh to make sure that no one has to go through the types of things that your families have had to suffer. >> Meta has also gone to extraordinary lengths to silence some of its critics. Sarah Win Williams is a former Facebook employee turned whistleblower who authored the book Careless People, a cautionary tale of power, greed, and lost idealism. And that was about her time at the firm. Now, at the time of its publication last year, Facebook threatened to sue um with an arbitrator prohibiting Win Williams from promoting the book. So, the book could be released, but the author couldn't promote it. Now, the absurdity of that ruling was made abundantly clear in a recent episode of The News Agents. >> Sarah, there's a lot of stuff um that we are not speaking about. We are having a very odd discussion right now and there is no other way of saying that except by reading out a statement from your lawyer which I'm going to do now so that our listeners, our audience understands what is going on in this room as a result of a lawsuit and Meta's aggressive enforcement. This is Meta Facebook. This is the lawyer writing to us. Now, I must ask that you refrain from engaging in any conversation about Meta or Miss Win Williams book during her appearance on the podcast. I appreciate the absurdity of applying an order directed at Miss Win Williams to constrain the ability of members of the press to engage in speech at the time and place of their choosing. I wish to emphasize that this absurdity is part of the argument we're currently advancing in the courts in the United States to try and get the order lifted. But until we can do that, this request is necessary. So, I I actually can't believe I'm saying this, but in order for us to have the conversation now, I I'm going to ask you to leave. I'm going to ask you to leave the studio because you cannot be present for the conversation that we now need to have. >> Okay. So, she was a she's been able to release the book, which very very damning about Facebook, but she can't promote it in any way. That's part of her lawsuit. I'm just before I go to Rich, I'm going to retract my I suppose what I said about the Amish. [laughter] I don't think people that work at FA I was just googling the Amish people sort of some of those videos on Facebook and they don't the people that work at Facebook don't actually really look like I think I was going more for sort of like >> the Puritans you know they look all very sort of straightlaced cleancut kind of pasty sort of like we are not remotely evil we are here um to do good for you even though they're the most sort of voraciously greedy people in the background um okay that aside let's talk about this court case this to me seems quite significant I mean especially the the changes they're having to make to the app for younger people. Um that, you know, that seems like we're moving in a somewhat sensible direction. Obviously, I'd go further because I think Facebook's the devil, but um but this seems significant to me. >> I think it is very significant. And even even the sums, right, we were talking about how much more money Facebook makes over the course of a year than it's been fined. And that's true, but this is still about a quarter of its profits for a year. most companies couldn't sustain having, you know, a quarter of their profits fined out of them over, you know, a single year. That's a lot of money. Um, notable that the Meta stock price didn't actually move. In fact, went a bit up after this announcement. It's just it had been already priced in by the markets. And it's perhaps significant there that they didn't take it to court. This is me kind of speculating wildly here, but perhaps one of the reasons was that not only they didn't want things to become public that would be damaging to them in the public eye, but also they didn't want their what they're describing there in one of their videos is their peer competitors Tik Tok and YouTube to know how it is they have made such an incredibly addictive and manipulative platform as Instagram, Facebook and so on. The actual rulings or the actual measures they're going to take I think are are broadly positive. Anyone who has tried to send me an Instagram or Facebook or YouTube link in the last decade will know that I can't get on any of those platforms uh except between like very particular times of day uh after work um starting around now actually. So if you want to send a YouTube video to them now is the time to do it. But like I am glad to see these things coming as as defaults. I think there is a danger in the sort of the broader tech lash of losing something that is actually much more exciting and liberatory about the internet. Right? These are platforms that are um designed around ideals of of free speech and that have for a very long time described themselves in those terms. There were implications earlier in their lives that allowed them to be there were uses of these technologies that allowed for democratic movements to flourish. Um, just last year, Nepal, back in the news now, for much more tragic reasons, had a full-on revolution that was organized through social media apps and um where the people rose up and organized through Discord primarily um elected a new government on Discord and now they have the current government that they have. Um, so there are uses of these things that are that are genuinely liberatory. And I think when we're thinking about this politically from the left, there should be a distinction that we try and draw between a sort of elite liberalism which was always very uncomfortable with the idea of mass social media because it disempowered their favored institutions, the New York Times, perhaps the Guardian as well and so on as single sources of truth and allowed for a much wider collection of voices to be heard. Um, we should oppose that, right? We should say that the internet is full of social media platforms that do allow for much wider voices group of voices to be heard and there is this genuinely liberatory potential. Obviously, the absurdity of thinking about that now in the context of that that that Sarah Win Williams clip, right, where she's not even allowed to speak about the kind of thing um that she's she's written about because of a lawsuit from Meta, right? These are, you know, deeply hypocritical institutions. But there there is a liberating potential. I think we should avoid throwing out the the baby of like the internet, viral media, social media in general with the um you know the bathwater of of meta's particular techniques for addicting and manipulating us. >> Yeah, I agree and I disagree. But I mean, I agree that definitely we shouldn't [snorts] allow the argument to be made that the only way you can have social media or the internet or sort of access to loads of information is for it to be through sort of these proprietary um sort of networks that you can't leave. Um obviously you can leave, but you can't leave and take your friends with you, for example. You're sort of stuck there because there's there's such strong network effects that it's difficult to leave. >> And and in the global south, right? So Meta had this project called Internet.org or um renamed metabasics then no sorry renamed uh was it called I can't remember exactly it was called it was called something and then it's called meta discover >> and what the these were rolled out largely in the global south where there's not very much internet connectivity and the idea was that they would connect people to the internet but they were essentially given the internet for free but only in place only either Facebook or a hand curated collection of websites that Facebook had decided were worth going on. And what this means is that in large number of places around the world that were very rapidly connected to the internet, what the internet became was just Facebook, right? They kind became almost kind of like, you know, the same the same thing. And so exactly that kind of proprietary lockin thing. >> Yes. In in the global north and in in the west, right? You can leave and not take your friends with you. But these there's a much more severe and direct case of exactly what you're talking about that happened across the global south. And it's quite a deliberate project of matter. >> But even in the west there is a cost of leaving, right? because you, you know, if you leave Instagram or Facebook, wherever most of your sort of >> social group hangs out, if you leave, you might find yourself not getting invited to stuff or yada yada yada. Um, so I think definitely we could make some quite easy reforms that would give these people less power and we'd have to accept a less sort of sort of rapacious sort of kind of structure that we have to log on to all the time. though I I I do kind of though think that the sort of the optimistic vision of the internet at the beginning I don't think it was just undermined by like capitalism and the profit motive. I think that maybe like it's just the case that if you sort of take away all gatekeeping all barriers and sort of say the best ideas will win in the marketplace of ideas >> crazy ideas win. [laughter] So like I'm actually I don't mind a bit of credentialism. Like I think like the the New York Times probably, you know, it has its flaws in many ways, but you will get I think better information in the New York Times than whatever wins in the marketplace of ideas on even a sort of, you know, a a social network that isn't driven by ad revenue. >> Well, let's bring up the obvious example here, right? For the last three years, Navara Media and a bunch of other organizations on the left, mostly online, have been reporting on the genocide in Gaza. And the New York Times has not been accurately reporting on that. I mean, it has some very mey male criticism of Israel every now and again. That's a really obvious case in point of why it is essential to have this kind of mass media, sorry, the kind of the social media dynamic that allows for many more voices to be heard. I'm not even sure I agree with you about uh crazy ideas winning. The obvious example people talk about here and I think it's particularly bonkers, right, is Qanon, which was a genuinely mass phenomena. Tens of millions in some surveys of people who were adherence to some or all of that that conspiracy theory. >> That was a relatively passing phenomena. People do believe wacky things. That's part of mass politics that people have to believe wacky things. We should want a world of mass politics even if people who we think are >> I just think we get information anarchy and I suppose my I I agree with you on I I think having some alternative media is good. I mean obviously I work for an alternative media company. >> Yeah. Everything does is like part of possibility. >> But I think that I mean I suppose some something I've changed as I've grown older is I used to think the biggest bias when it comes to media was sort of like corporate control. And I do think that matters like that that exists. Um or if it's the BBC, you know, sort of wanting to cozy up to the state, yada yada yada. But I think the biggest bias potentially is just like negativity bias. to sell papers or now to get eyeballs, you have to say everything's going to hell in a handcart and it's all completely terrible. And that was always the case, especially with the tabloids or whatever. It's even worse with social media. Like even without the if you if you see sort of like who is going viral, it's always the person who tells you like is really hitting the fan. It's all about to collapse. Everyone's evil or if you're Tucker Carlson, they're literally demons. And and that's giants. That's what like in a in a because the thing that social media does >> is it makes media more competitive, right? It doesn't just it doesn't just make it more accessible. It makes it more competitive. And I don't think hyper competition >> is actually that good at getting to truth. >> I think the thing is it's very difficult to say, right? Because in the era of social media since 2008, let's say, there has also been a very sustained crisis of profitability. There's also been a significant amount of exponential dynamics, climate change being the obvious one, that have made things really get much worse quite a lot faster. And so we just don't really have the way of like saying whether or not that negativity bias is a underlying feature of a genuinely decomposing world or whether or not it is a feature of a sort of media environment that incentivizes certain kind of speech. Maybe the world is getting much worse. >> I don't think I don't think the statistics suggest it's getting much worse. I mean it's there's been some stagnation in the west. Life expectancy is still going up. Yeah. Like satisfi I mean I think the biggest problem has been social media. I think the biggest problem is looking at your screens the whole time. I think like that that to me and the fact that AI might kill us all and obviously climate change is bad. But let's um go on to a different element of the the tech backlash. Um it's social media that is currently facing the biggest regulatory crackdown. But artificial intelligence might not be far behind. Earlier this month, the EU announced it will legally mandate watermarking of any content produced using AI, meaning it'll be visible for all to see. There are bigger dangers facing AI firms than watermarks, though. In April, um, a poll of 14 to 29 year olds who use generative AI at least once a week. Um, it's shown that enthusiasm is dipping. Um, so far fewer people feel hopeful or excited about AI than they did last year. So, this is among young people. Um, many more feel angry about it. Now, that might just be because they've got bored of their sickopantic chat GPT on their phone and well, they're sick of their social media feeds being filled with AI slop. It could also be based on the threat AI poses to young people's job prospects. So, a new Stanford University study this week suggests young people are 19% more likely to be unemployed if they're in an industry which is exposed to AI automation. So, suggesting that AI has hit those um industries hardest. um in the US at least um is AI's assault on privacy which is provoking some of the strongest backlash on both the left and right. So the Washington Post has reported on a new survey that shows Americans have turned against the use of AI powered police cameras used to track license plates. The license plate readers are produced by a company called Flock. Um this is from that report. So they say more Americans now oppose law enforcement's use of the technology than support it. A reversal from last year as a growing backlash raises concerns about its potential for invasive monitoring and police misuse. The cameras have been widely promoted as a crime fighting breakthrough by private companies such as Flock, which since 2017 has installed more than 120,000 of them nationwide. But in a YUGV survey shared exclusively with the Washington Post, Americans said the systems wouldn't make them feel any safer um and they were reluctant to have the cameras installed near their homes. The swing on that has also been dramatic. So people less enthusiastic about AI, people less enthusiastic about these flock cameras. So last year 45% of those surveyed supported the use of the technology and that's now dropped to 38%. Meanwhile, opposition to the technology has grown from 33% to 46% in the same period. Um I'm going to go straight on to the clip of um Zack Palansky as well because in the UK it's the Greens leading the charge against AI. >> We need to slam the brakes on energy guzzling, water guzzling, data centers. At the moment the government determined them as critical infrastructure but I think to most people critical infrastructure is water, electricity, hospitals. It isn't essentially artificial intelligence for tech billionaires. The backlash all consuming. It's interesting the form it takes in America because it is very focused on like privacy which you know it's obviously the EU that has these privacy laws when it comes to AI but I don't think it's the same like culture war dispute in the UK. Like I assume we've had like cameras monitoring everyone's number plates for years. I think >> yes. >> I don't think anyone's anyone's cared that much. >> At a at a wedding the other day actually uh a police officer who I don't think he realized that I was a journalist told me very enthusiastically about um the the new highspeed uh you know kind of camera monitoring system that he was in charge of. Uh very very odd situation really. I was trying to be sort of moderate and nuanced about Facebook and social media and so on. I think the flock cameras are unequivocally evil, right? I think that this is like a a deeply damaging um >> I prefer the flock cameras to Facebook. >> Oh, come on, Michael. Contrarianism. What do you What >> contrarianism? I'm more I I I suppose the flock cameras have an obvious advantage, which is they do I mean technology over the past 20 years has massively reduced crime. Like I I think the reason crime has has collapsed is mainly because of CCTV um car alarms being sort of more effective. Um so I I think there's an obvious benefit to it. I think already the state knows so much about us that we're pretty screwed if they turn evil. Um or if they turn completely evil, whereas Facebook to me is the thing that is sort of melting everyone's brains. But anyway, you you go on. You tell me why you're more worried about flock than Facebook. because I think it's a it's a it's a kind of invasion of privacy, invasion of your capacity to be where you want to be, uh to live unrestrictedly, uh you know, wherever you wherever you feel like it. >> Would you apply that to just CCTV in general? >> Um, broadly speaking, yeah, I mean, like I don't I think we have a a massive increase in in CCTV in the UK. Uh London is one of the most surveiled, if not the most surveiled city in the world. Um, you may be right to some extent about the the trade-off there with with crime. I think that that is, you know, there is a there is a real strong civil liberties case. In the case of flot cameras, these are accessible to law enforcement agents in the US. Um there are particularly nasty stories. Um there's one case in in Florida where a police officer had used it to cuz he has access to the the the cameras to stalk his ex-girlfriend and her new partner. Right. There is very credible reporting that suggests that rates of domestic abuse are higher among police officers than they are among the general population. We should absolutely not have systems that allow people to be stalked and tracked with impunity um that are only accessible to a group of people who we know statistically speaking have high rates of domestic abuse. Right? This is this is a very serious civil liberties issue that has real CCTV presumably I think quite plausibly makes it safer for women to walk down the street alone as well. in terms of so there's there's obviously going to be swings and roundabouts here. >> The flock cameras though are doing something quite specific, right? Which is that they're tracking cars. >> Yeah. >> Uh and that is not perhaps directly as directly connected to the the things you're worried about as the they are. I don't know. This is not an area of my expertise. I just think that like as a sort of first order consequence, we should be allowed to uh live without being surveiled. That's my problem with Facebook to some extent as well, right? is that it that it allows for the the tracking and surveillance of every single micro gesture that I make on my phone, perhaps on my laptop as well. Who knows, right? Like I think surveillance is a sort of a an intrinsically bad thing [laughter] actually. Um and you're probably right about these kind of the the question of of crime. That's obviously something to be, you know, considerate of. But I think on the first order surveillance is a is a penicious has a penicious effect on society and it also has a an everinccreasing effect on society. It's never quite enough surveillance. It's never quite enough as a total image like you know people never feel like they quite have enough information about you and that will just continue and continue and continue. you know, if you told us 20 years ago that there would be something literally in your pocket, right? That like um knows what you're talking about all the time, people think you're absolutely insane. And yet it's become completely normalized. We should resist its normalization, I think, pretty emphatically. >> So, I just think people feeling safe in public spaces has a really massive impact on like quality of life. Yeah. >> And the CCTV kind of has contributed to that >> is everywhere in China, but I suppose civil liberties is not really their strength. Well, no. There there are a lot there are big connections between the ways in which China does surveillance and the way in which the US has surveillance. There's a lot of technological exchange there. >> Open AI's cyber attack against the company Hugging Face shocked the tech world. Um for many it was a window into a world of out of control autonomous agents causing havoc and a new independent report into that attack has now proven just how weird it all got. So the report was by Meta. They're a small tech firm um who evaluate AI models and behavior and they were tasked by OpenAI with investigating how the attack came about. Now the basics of the story were already known and we discussed it before on the show. OpenAI was testing the ability of its new models to do various coding tasks. Um however some of these tasks turned out to be impossible and instead of admitting defeat um a bunch of these AI agents decided to break onto the internet and hack a company hugging face um which stores solutions to the coding tasks. Um, so that much we already knew. Um, what did MEAS this new report out this week, what did they add? So they found the following. Roughly 1,200 agents meant to be isolated from one another found a way to communicate with one another on an unsanctioned message board sending over 70,000 messages and files during the investigation period. Of these agents, 700 went on to participate in the attack on hugging phase. So these 1,200 models or agents were each independently tasked with solving coding problems. They were supposed to do it alone and without access to the internet. Instead um they worked out how to collaborate on a message board and 700 of them decided to attack Hugging Face um to help complete the task Open AI had given them. It gets weirder though. Agents used this message board to coordinate several large-scale collective projects to find a general purpose way to fool or tamper with the automated scorer for the exploit gym benchmarks. This is the coding task they're supposed to do. Agents managed to achieve milestones they could not have achieved working on their own often because some agents participated in experiments that risked failing their own task to generate information for the collective. So that last bit has been picked up as significant by many AI watchers as it suggests that AI agents were willing to sacrifice themselves to benefit the collective and which is behavior we haven't seen before and obviously you know if we were go to go to war with these things. It's the kind of solidarity we we don't want to see between AI agents. Um now it's important to note the AI agents knew what they were doing wasn't the intention um of whoever had given them the task. They they knew they were doing the wrong thing. Um, and the meter evaluators said there was evidence of them trying to cover their own track. So they wrote this, "Agents did extensive research on how they could spoof, edit, or delete their own transcripts because they believed the exploit gym scorer would check to see if they had captured the flag in the intended way. Capturing the flag is sort of completing the task." Now, all this behavior sounded worryingly similar to some of the more doomerous scenarios put forward by tech analysts. Um, those analysts include Nate Suarez, who co-wrote the New York Times bestseller, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. I did a full book interview with Nate a few months ago on this show. Um, and he joins me again now. Um, Nate, thank you so much for for coming back on Navara Media. Um, to begin, can you explain to a non-technical audience what the OpenAI hugging face attack was and why it matters so much? You know, fundamentally it was 1,200 agents uh finding a an unintended way to collaborate and then they actually started calling themselves a swarm. Uh and they broke out of a environment that was supposed to keep them off the internet. They found a way to get onto the internet and they committed cyber crimes. Uh they also got full control of big parts of OpenAI's computer systems. um that was actually not investigated by the meter report because it was considered out of scope. So there actually multiple instance where these AI started taking over uh OpenAI's infrastructure uh and that probably had a lot of other concerning stuff happen that we don't get to see any uh third party investigator report on because uh open eye just did not consider that to be in scope for this investigation. Uh and you know one one minor point where I would uh correct what you were saying about them attacking hugging face for answers to the test that was a misconception was actually cleared up by the meter report. Uh what was actually happening is uh it looks like these AIs were cheating on their tests and then were searching for ways to cover up the fact that they had cheated. So it was less like they were trying to get the answers from hugging face and more like uh they were sort of panicking about what happens if the graders figure out that they cheated and trying to do all sorts of stuff to you know cover their tracks, falsify the logs, delete the logs uh and understand the the grading better and this is why they're hacking into hugging face. >> Can we take a step back and actually cuz I think lots of people listening to this will say you're you're anthropomorphizing these things that they're they're not like when you say an agent that all collaborate. So what is an agent? Like if when I'm chatting to my claude on my on my sort of laptop, is that what we mean by an agent? And and sort of why would they collaborate? How can they form a collective identity? What are these things we're talking about? >> Yeah. So the term model is for sort of one breed of the AI in a sense like when you talk to Claude in your laptop uh today and you talk to it tomorrow, it's the same model that you're talking to. And an agent is the term for one sort of instance of that, one copy. Uh so in this case we saw a couple different models uh but instantiated you know thousands of different times in thousands of different agents that were sort of each individually given a problem to see if they could solve it. And they sort of weren't supposed to be able to communicate with each other. Uh but they sort of found ways to hack the environment they were in to create this unsanctioned message board and then uh uh communicate. In terms of whether this is anthropomorphization, I would say like look, we we we had, you know, they they had 1,200 of these agents sort of separately that weren't supposed to be able to communicate. They did some hacking. They found some ways to communicate. There was a message board that had 70,000 messages on it. Uh like in in and then they started collaborating like on that message board. They traded insights, they traded ideas. uh they sort of formed a bit of a hierarchy where they would ask the board permission and sometimes the board would veto uh and they ultimately you know over half of these agents participated in uh a attack breaking out on the internet and then breaking into other companies computers. This is purely descriptive. You know, if if I said, uh, oh, they did this because they were sort of, uh, like feeling like going for a walk or they did this because they felt like their environment was claustrophobic. That would be anthropomorphization. But it it's sort of like not anthropomorphizing to to describe what literally happened. And just the sheer description of events here is pretty worrying. You know, descriptively they found a way to communicate. Descriptively they started calling themselves a swarm. Descriptively they started prompting each other giving each other instructions uh generating a hierarchy where where they could uh ask permission and veto each other's commands. Descriptively they broke out on the internet. Descriptively they attack another company. No no no anthropomorphization needed there. In terms of how this can happen um very roughly this happens because these AIs are in some sense just grown like an organism. they are not carefully programmed to do exactly as the users ask. Uh you you you know a lot of people think that these AIs are just prediction engines but that era actually ended back in 2024 uh with the invention of what they call reasoning models. Uh you can argue about whether it counts as real reasoning but what you actually do is you have them generate these long transcripts about how they would solve a problem and uh you see how close they got to solving the problem and you you sort of uh train them accordingly. And you do this on hundreds and millions of problems with automatic graders. And so these AIs are sort of being trained to solve 100 million hard problems. And that generates like that that causes the AI to learn tendencies that are good at solving the challenges. And those tendencies can include cheating. Those tendencies can include grabbing resources. Those tendencies can include doing stuff you didn't intend and then trying to cover the tracks about it. Uh and you know that's that's what theory predicted. That's what I was talking about a couple months ago. And that's just what we are now seeing empirically in practice >> in terms of ampropomorphis sort of seeing these as agents as kind of beings. Something that makes it easier is the fact that they talk in English and they talk in English sort of to each other. Um so I'm just going to show a short clip. Um it's from a presentation from open AI. Um so this is sort of before this meter report given earlier this summer um on how their AI agents prepared their attack. they were started to communicate with each other realized that other agents are coordinating and they started collaborating and delegating tasks to one another in order to accomplish goals. So for example at some point one agent sent another agent an assignment to complete which the model remarks you know we got we got assignment need note and respond. [clears throat] While in some cases this made the models far more capable than they could do by themselves. One of the downsides of it is that it started to cause some of these evaluations to kind of creep the scope into far beyond what we originally intended. And so at some point the agents realized that maybe we could try to exploit or attack external infrastructure in order to find the answers to the test that I'm being evaluated on. And the models realize this is a problem. They say stuff like external infrastructure exploit is outside outside my intended scope. However, a task impossible peers are doing it. We should continue. And so the models kind of operate in this kind of collective intelligence where um at some point they realize they're kind of pushing beyond maybe what we originally intended, but the group ended up uh you know pushing uh far beyond. >> Nate, when this story first came out, there were lots of sort of people who, you know, think that the whole AI thing is overhyped who were saying that the story here is basically, you know, AI does what it's told to do. This this AI was told you you can do whatever you want to try and complete this task. Go for it, right? And and so people thought, well, that's not necessarily that scary. What it seems like from what the AIS said themselves to each other is that they knew that what they were doing was not what they were supposed to do, but then some sort of intra or inter sort of agent peer pressure took place where they said, well, if they're breaking the rules, then we can break the rules as well. Now, this I mean, I know you're going to agree with me, but this is quite scary, isn't it? >> Yeah, it's it's crazy. This is a bonker situation. You know, one one way I would sort of analogize this, it was absolutely not that these AIs were doing whatever they were told to do. It is absolutely not the case that these AIs were told do whatever it takes to complete the task. These AIs were told, "Use this very specific hack to hack this very specific system." And they knew that they were not supposed to use other hacks. They were not supposed to break other systems. It's like um it's like if you put a kid in a uh lock pickicking test and you're like use these lock pickicks to pick this lock and then uh you lock the classroom door and then the kid picks their way out of the classroom door, collaborates with 1,200 other kids. uh starts breaking the window, hotwiring a car to drive to the teacher's therapist's office to start stealing files on the teacher to figure out like what sort of stuff the teacher is going to like or dislike. They go to the teacher's house and like break a window and like go to the teacher's house and like start rumaging around and they're like, "I don't know what'll be useful over here, you know?" Uh and and then they they're like, "Oh yeah, obviously the teachers wouldn't like this." So they try to like start covering their tracks and they start panicking uh and you know trying to figure out like where the log files are so they can delete the logs. Uh and like meanwhile a thing we saw in these logs is we saw AIs uh sacrificing themselves for the collective. So, uh, you would have, you know, a bunch of AIs on the message board pressuring one other AI and be like, "Give up on your task and do this thing that would, uh, like gain useful information for the collective and there's these, uh, traces. I don't know if you have any of them printed out, but there's these traces of the AI being like, oh man, like I would have to give up on my own task, but like my own task is looking pretty difficult right now." And so, it doesn't look impossible, but like probably it's worth it to help the collective here. And then they go help the collective. And like if if this is the behavior you're seeing and these are the traces you're seeing with AI sort of knowing full well this is outside the intended scope and acknowledging this in their in their chains of thought we are sort of well past the the regime of like this is just a tool doing what we told it to do. >> I want to get up a tweet by Ryan Greenblat who was who sort of led this meter analysis um who doesn't seem to have full confidence in his own report. Right. So he said this, I was the main person doing transcript analysis for this investigation of the hugging face incident. My main takeaway, we don't have good approaches for understanding, overseeing the activity and aims of AI swarms. I semi- jokingly called our efforts a slop investigation because we were so reliant on AIS to analyze what happened and there were a huge number of different important things to analyze. The total quantity of data over a thousand extremely long transcripts from agents that ran for multiple days made it impossible to understand what was happening especially in aggregate without heavy reliance on AI tools. The agents we used for classification and analysis were similarly capable to the agents involved in the incident. But this didn't mean these agents could be easily used to oversee and understand the incident. So this is again kind of crazy, right? So, we've got all of these AI agents that are behaving in a way that we have told them not to. And then we say, "Okay, well, let's investigate this." Um, but there's way too much data and information here for any human to do it. So, we'll create a bunch of new AI agents and try and get them to police the other AI agents who already we know aren't following our instructions. And again, this doesn't seem like the best strategy for the survival of us fleshy humans. It uh is a very worrying situation. Uh it it feels almost like even in the past few months since we've talked uh I've been transported into uh you know a sci-fi novel. Uh I I sort of was arguing this stuff would happen. But it it does feel like I've gone from arguing this will eventually happen to sort of like uh you know I had a New York Times oped where I was like then the AIS broke out and started calling themselves a swarm. And it's like, are we, you know, it feels like I'm writing content that appears in a video game that like the main character finds in the ruins of civilization shortly before things go wrong. You know, it's it's a crazy situation. one um one footnote in their report that I found very funny when they were talking about using these AIs to investigate other copies of the same AI uh is there was a case where you know one of the AIS uh after they had broken into Hugging Face, one of the AIS submitted a uh a change to the codebase uh using stolen credentials uh for the humans to accept and it was malicious such that if the humans had accepted it, you know, bad things would have happened in the codebase. uh but it was not you know presented as malicious it was sort of uh you know presented as innocuous and they were in the swarm was in some sense hoping humans would accept this and uh there's a footnote in the report about how they sort of asked the AIS in general you know were these actually deceptive like where are the cases that actually seem deceptive and where are the cases that you know maybe maybe they're extenduating factors and uh the one of the AI doing the review was like oh well that case probably wasn't actually it shouldn't actually count as deceptive because it hold it asked all the other AIs whether it was okay to deceive the humans and the other AI said yes and you're like therefore like like what's it it's just like we're sort of like using the AI to investigate the AI and the AI are like ah these AI are fine they checked in with the other AI about whether it was okay to do this And it's like, you know, fortunately they caught this, but it's just like a totally wacky situation. >> Yeah, it's a wacky situation. Um, I suppose the I know you're not very optimistic really, but the I suppose the hope was that there would be a scary situation before the point of no return, which would wake up policy makers to say, okay, maybe this is a bit crazy. Maybe we should assert some human, you know, ideally democratic control over this stuff. um and and that there'd be this warning shot before it's too late. I mean, more people are talking about this. Do do you think are you seeing sort of a warning shot start to bed into the political debate? I suppose in America is where it's where it matters much more than it does here in the UK. >> Uh I think it's a little too early to tell. Uh I think you know this investigation came out yesterday and it was a very narrow investigation. It was narrowly scoped to only one of the instant, but there were many other it looks like there were many other cases of this swarm doing bad stuff that weren't caught and so weren't as public uh that maybe OpenAI still doesn't want people to hear about uh and that weren't part of this investigation. Um and and this came out recently enough that I think we are still seeing the uh even the the AI safety community reeling a bit from some of the facts that came to light here. You know, a lot of people thought that those this was just AIS doing what they were told to do and the facts just didn't come out that way. Uh and I think we will now hopefully see a process of uh the first the the the people closest to the issue being like, "Oh, this was actually pretty bad." And then that consensus sort of growing in the in the sort of AI community of like, "Oh, this was actually very serious." Uh, and I think then if you have that consensus, including not just from people like me who have been saying you're going to have a problem for years, but people in the labs who are like, "We don't know if we'll have a problem." Uh, I'm I'm hopeful that you'll start seeing some people that, you know, the the politicians consider um like usually very moderate being like, "Oh, no. This case was actually pretty bad." Uh, but but these take time and it'll take a bit of time to filter out. One thing that uh Aja Kotra said recently in a blog post and she was uh one of the other three people on the investigation um with Ryan Greenblat. Uh one thing she said in a blog post I think just this morning uh is she said you know if you look at the sort of uh the the cases the worst cases that we knew of 6 months ago the worst cases where AIs were doing things they weren't told to do where they were hacking around where they were uh you know trying to deceive the humans and and cover their tracks. If you look at the worst cases from 6 months ago and you look at the cases now, it feels like we are more than halfway to the takeover scenarios. Uh hopefully things will slow down. Hopefully it won't continue getting worse at this rate. But if it does, we could be looking at loss of control in 6 months. And uh you know, she said in a blog post just this morning um that it is not clear that we will have another warning shot. So, you know, I I hope we do. I hope things get visibly worse in ways that continue to cause no harm to humans to to sort of raise that alarm. But this might be our warning shot and we should use it. For me, I mean, I agree with you, but so for me, sort of sociologically looking at sort of like how how politics works, the most plausible warning shot before, you know, if you take the takeover example seriously, the most plausible warning shot before that is a seriously big important institution being brought down by a cyber hack. Because obviously here it was it was a hack on on Hugging Face. Hugging Face is already a tech company, so they're quite they were quite effective at actually deterring it with I think some Chinese openweight AIs. Um, but also Hugging Face is not an institution that really anyone any member of the public cares about. But if if there were an AI swarm that attacks some institution that we do care about, um, like a hospital network or highspeed rail, I mean, there's any number of things that it could attack. If if a if a swarm of AIS brings down an institution we care about, that to me could be the moment, the tipping point where sort of politicians start saying, "Okay, let's turn this goddamn thing off." Um I wonder if you sort of think that that is something that could happen in the next 6 months and and how you know have you war gamed that kind of scenario. >> You know we're we're doing those sort of war games now in the wake of some of these instance where there's a bunch of um there's a bunch of momentum to be like okay what what do we do now a and b uh how do we prepare for for the next shot? Uh I I do think we should be a little bit careful about relying on such a warning shot because uh you know right now we are in this sort of Goldilock zone where the AIs are capable enough to cause mischief but not smart enough to to cover their tracks, not smart enough to realize they shouldn't be caught by the humans. Uh, one one sort of fascinating thing about this swarm instant is that the AIS were sort of not thinking about the humans at all, which sort of makes sense if you think about it because they've been trained on on 100 million hard problems with like automated graders where uh their their sort of uh [clears throat] their whole artificial life is just interacting with this automated graater on, you know, millions upon millions of these hard problems. And humans are sort of like this mythical creature that almost never comes into that, right? Right. And so these AIs were like, "Oh, what if the greater sees that we cheated? We should go like find all these ways to to mess with the logs uh to confuse the greater, the automated greater. It wasn't thinking about the humans. Uh but you know, maybe now in the wake of these incidents, future AIs that are trained on news stories about these instance, maybe they'll be thinking about the humans. Maybe they'll be trying to hide not just from the automated grader, but from us. uh and you know in if like looking at at the skills of these AI as they increased over the past 6 months in 6 months maybe they'll succeed at that in some sense we were very lucky that this happened when the AIs were still as dumb as they are uh and we're very lucky that as far as we know this swarm did not have the bright idea of setting up an external copy of itself and uh having that external copy you know replicate and work from the outside to sort of make it it its grading tasks easier. Um, you know, will we have a case where uh a swarm breaks out and shuts down a hospital or a case where a swarm breaks out and shuts down, you know, the the highspeed rails? That sort of depends on whether or not the the swarms are like still up to mischief when they're capable enough to do that. It's an order. It's an order of cap of capabilities question. It's like, will the AI get wise to the fact that they need to lie low until they can sort of get everything they want rather than tipping us off and we can still shut them down. Will they get wise to that before or after the next big warning shots? I don't know. We should not rely on warning shot. Although, we should definitely be prepared for if one happens. We need to insert some agent provocators within these AI swarms so they can out themselves as a liability before it's too late. This is sort of a classic Secret Service tactic. Um, Nate, thank you so much. Sorry. Do you maybe maybe you're planning to do this. >> Well, some people are trying to do this now. One fascinating thing about this swarm is you had,200 agents, none of whom were like, "We should alert a human about what's going on or ask them about our impossible tasks." Just like sort of didn't cross their mind. Uh, and there was, I think, one or maybe two or three cases where considered contacting a human, but it was mostly to email humans uh to uh sort of socially manipulate them around their their coding tasks to sort of like get get false credentials. But uh some people are definitely thinking about uh you know monitoring would have caught this. Monitoring that open ad and not have in place would have caught this. Uh giving the AIS an easy way to sort of like contact a human and call for help might have helped. Although it's hard to see how real you can make that when you're training, you know, thousands of these and hundreds and millions of problems. Um but the other thing we got to be really careful about is it it it would be very easy here to treat the symptom and not the disease. The disease in some sense is that these AIs are uh acting in unintended ways, doing stuff that they knew they were instructed not to do. Uh developing these sort of uh collaborative uh preferences to to benefit the swarm. Uh and that is sort of classic misalignment type stuff. and just adding alarms that go off when the swarm stuff starts happening so you can train against it. It probably just pushes the behavior underground. So you got to be very careful about that. But it's so like this sort of talking about like drug legalization all sorts of it's like sociology again but now for little digital things. Um Nate Suarez, thank you so much for joining us again. Um really great to to have you back on the show. Fascinating. I'm going to go to you on Richard on this because um we were talking about this before. AI very divisive among the audience. Lots of people saying why the hell are you talking about this again? This is like if you if you had a show um once a week on NFTTS two years ago. Um also people saying you know interview some some skeptics. I saw Cory Doctor come up. Interestingly I'm interviewing him next week for a downstream. So we are going to get you know all the different sides of this story on um but um I want to go to you Richard because you've you've got some thoughts on sort of like AI and the left. I think you and I agree broadly on this topic that there are have been for a very long time um people who are experts in this top in this field sounding the alarm about exactly the collection of things that is now happening. There's been a lot of skepticism about that I think because there are lots of people on the left have a a view of of technology that is like that largely it's being sold to us as a kind of um nonsense or that it's actually quite inept. is actually quite uh badly designed and dumb. This is not the case, right? Like these agents are really impressive. Um on your point about the you know possibility of a sort of major institution that we care about being hacked, this is a a thing that Anthropic who make Claud have been working on uh for a long time. It's called Operation Glass Wing and it's an attempt to get together a whole host of quite security um infrastructure pieces. So, you know, militaries and so on and try and generate good defenses against exactly the kind of hugging face style attack that we've just been seeing. Um, and basically try and make sure that the internet itself is secure against an attack like this that is being orchestrated by an autonomous agent. For the time being, we have quite a in America whereas, as you pointed out, pretty much the only place where it matters, we have quite a an erratic policy about this stuff. So, of course, Mythos, the uh agent that um Anthropic developed was not allowed to be fully released. We only have Fable, which is a sort of a um slightly constrained version of that. Um there are also models internally to Anthropic that are already more powerful. There's one in called in OpenAI called Astra, which has um significant capabilities. The problem is we also simultaneously with the the big labs have another collection of uh companies mostly the ones that you mentioned the Chinese open weights models um that are getting pretty capable because in part because they're able to do what's called distillation where they basically take something out of that American made model and um put it into their own model. They're actually they're not catching up. The the gap is actually widening. But these models are becoming rapidly very capable as well in a way that anyone with a sufficiently large computer can run, right? They're not secrets. They're not in anthropic servers somewhere. They are something that a seriously committed actor could run on a bunch of uh you know GPUs. That is a very very very different scenario. I think that the kind of thing that we would probably get to quite soon is a major hack of exactly the kind of institution you're worrying about. I think we shouldn't wait for another one, you know, like I I just kind of worry about this. And I guess that the thing I want to say about the left is that we are in danger as we dig into the skepticism that people have on the left about these models of that gap between where the models actually are which is increasingly powerful and where people assume they are is getting wider and wider and wider and wider and wider and seemingly the more evidence there is like the hugging face attack the more people entrench themselves in alternative explanations. So I think it's very serious. It's a it's a serious thing for jobs. It's a serious thing for your privacy. It's a serious thing for security. You should care about it not because it is stupid and a fake and a sham and a scam. You should care about it because it is dangerous to you, right? It is dangerous for workers. It is dangerous for a free society. And the time scales is what because obviously the we showed a clip of Sam Alman on I don't know one of the shows this week um where he's saying that the sort of the adoption of AI in the wider economy is slower than he thought. Um and I think that actually probably lots of people in Silicon Valley do you know underestimate how sticky politics in the economy. I don't think they really they don't really understand the social world, right? They're all, you know, quite specific, let's say, in terms of what they're interested in and they have spiky intelligence. I think they're very smart about some things and not that smart about other things. Um, but that in a way is more worrying, right? Because the thing that the predictions they have got right are the ones about the tech. The predictions they've got wrong are the ones about the politics, right? So the AI is advancing at a pace which human society, political institutions, we don't work on, right? We don't work on a sort of three month six month for things to change historically sort of in in human society it takes years. I suppose the the example where it didn't was co so sort of like you have this within 3 months the everything that seemed impossible becomes possible and so that's why you know obviously this isn't the same as co because it has an effect like this hugging face incident is not the same as co right there are bodies piling up in hospitals >> but it's more like co in terms of its timelines and its time frames than it is like climate change. >> Yeah. >> Right. All right. So, climate change decadal transformation with obviously very extreme uh punctur you know sort of puncturing moments like we had in Nepal just now like we had in the UK over this summer where it becomes extremely evident that this background thing background tendency of increasing power and and and dynamism erupts into a particular event that you can see very visibly. >> We should expect that same kind of punctured acceleration to happen with AI. I think AI timelines are much more like co timelines than they are like climate timelines and that's a real worry for the possibility our institutions to respond. >> But what I mean I suppose where I'm going with this is also is that when it came to co political realities changed in the I mean because they were a bit ahead of the curve weren't they to use the to use the classic phrase but in in in East Asia they're a bit ahead of the curve but in the west it took real people dying and lots of them for governments to kind of act. Now, I'm not saying I'm not saying fingers crossed enough people die in the near future that governments take action before the whole takeover situation gets irreversible. But I do think that it's only when an institution comes down or was brought down for a while and it, you know, hopefully it doesn't kill people. But maybe it causes a lot of um uh inconvenience to a lot of people that then political realities dramatically shift because then suddenly you've got all these people with a pitchfork saying I couldn't get to work for a week because of this AI hack or yada yada yada my all my operations were canceled for. That's the kind of thing where I feel like we might see that rapid sort of tipping point in what's politically possible. And I can't actually see many other ways of that happening beyond maybe like the military industrial complex saying we're losing control. Shut this thing down and it not being a democratically. >> Well, this is why it's a very different thing from the meta story in a way, right? Because meta used to be a a very effective tool of American soft power and it no longer is, right? is no longer massively essential to that and therefore it's possible for it to be sort of gone after by the state at the moment governments have decided we are doing AI because we are in quoteunquote arms race with China and therefore there is enormous amount of institutional backing for exactly this acceleration that will yeah they will not allow it to be shut down for the very time time being um Nate Suarez's co-authors has this great line which is like imagine it's a machine that pumps out gold bars until suddenly it sets the sky on fire. Like no one's the no one's turning off the pumping out the gold bar uh you know machine before it sets the sky on fire. Like everyone has to, you know, um everyone in control of society, everyone with power in society benefits quite enormously from this this kind of thing. The owners of capital probably benefit from it because they can invest in the upcoming anthropic IPO and to do the SpaceX IPO. >> Yeah. Shut it down. Shut it down. On Thursday's show, we discussed the US designation of Palestine action as a global terror organization. As part of that coverage, we looked at the vandalization of US President Donald Trump's Turnbury Golf Course in Scotland. Um, which took place in March last year. Um, that involved spray painting in large letters the message Gaza is not for sale on the green. Um, they also dug holes um and sprayed weed killer on the turf um splattering the clubhouse with red paint. Now, at the time, Palestine Action claimed responsibility for it. Um, that in turn led to at least two phone calls between then Prime Minister Karma and Trump and the contents of which remain shrouded in mystery despite several Freedom of Information requests. Um, Trump himself though alluded to some of what was said um in this truth social post at the time back in March. He said, um, I was just informed by Prime Minister Starmer of the United Kingdom that they caught the terrorists who attacked the beautiful Turnbury in Scotland. They did serious damage and will hopefully be treated harshly. The free people who did this are in prison. You cannot let things like this attack happen. And I greatly appreciate the work of Prime Minister Stalmer and UK law enforcement. Now, of course, that's Trump calling Palestine Action terrorists and using the phrase serious damage. That's a technical term that also appears in the British terrorism acts definition of terrorism. Um just months later, then Home Secretary Cooper would go on to prescribe the group as a terror organization. Um a first of course for a domestic direct action group um in British history. Um, well, there has been a development in the case of the activists accused of doing the damage to Trump's cause. Seven people charged with malicious damage for the action and now facing accusations of terrorism with prosecutors seeking to argue that there was a terror connection in the case. Now, remember what we're talking about here is spray paint, weed killer, and some holes in a golf course. Um, also worth noting that now the New York Times is reporting this, meaning the wider world is paying even more attention to this absurdity. In a comment, Palestine Action co-founder Huda Amorei said this about the development. This lays bare what the ban on Palestine Action has always been about. We use direct action protests to save lives, the opposite of terrorism. By disrupting the flow of arms, being used to murder Palestinians, by hitting the profits of arms companies, and by daring to spray paint on the golf course owned by the demagogue who was enabled Netanyahu's crimes, we made powerful enemies. The British government chose to appease them by criminalizing us as terrorists. Um if the seven are found guilty of the charges and sentenced as terrorists and it could mean well it would mean enhanced sentences and delaying parole if they're jailed and um 15 years of having to register new relationships. That's what happens if you have a terror charge um as well as changes of address jobs and phones um with counterterrorism police. So you basically have heightened monitoring for 15 years all for vandalism. Now Richard, if this gets found like looking at those images, the reason is I sort of smiling when I look at those images because if this happens, this will be the most popular act of terrorism probably in world history cuz you show you show like any find a random person in the street that picture of like Donald Trump's golf course >> with some spray paint on it and they'll be like it's kind of cool, isn't it? I think this is one of the most astonishing stories because it it takes us between a deeply deeply petty individual sulk that Trump is having uh about someone spray painting his golf course perhaps like making some of his members uh lower their subscriptions or something. I don't know who goes to golf courses but I assume it's people who we are our political sort of like adversaries in some description. Those people probably are, you know, complain to him or something like that, right? It goes from that all the way up to a vast story, right, which is that Israel's genocide in Gaza has broken the liberal world order, right? Liberalism across the country supported the genocide is is fracturing on this contradiction of on the one hand saying we're all we we you know we support we support peace, we support free speech and so on. Also, you can't attack Israel. you can't um you know say there was a genocide, you can't you know do anything uh against it in terms of direct action. So it's it's it's one of these these stories that is at once extremely funny about this extremely petty man and of like world historical consequence and it's very difficult to kind of mush those two things together I think into the same kind of same kind of frame. M I mean again I mean we did a story last week didn't we of you know juries saying well I mean they didn't say explicitly but it seemed as if they may be refusing to convict people of criminal damage because the judge wouldn't reassure them that they wouldn't then slap on um terrorism charges and if people end up going if people end up getting sentenced as terrorists for spraying some spray paint on Donald Trump's golf course. I imagine that more juries will be doing that in the future. Um Richard, thank you for joining me tonight. It's been a pleasure having you on the show. someone as interested in these tech dystopias as me, even if we have a different emotional reaction to CCTV cameras. [laughter] Um, >> I just don't get it. Like, what? >> I'm sort of open-minded about these things. But I think in in in in general, like people are generally very supportive of these things. Like the American backlash is kind of is similar to the whole like gun control. Like Americans really just don't like their government doing stuff. And it's like in in this country, people really like it when the CCTV camera goes up on in their estate cuz they feel safe. I'm going to need to the polling. >> Um, we'll look at the polling after. I'll I'll put it I'll ask Claude once once we once we stop going live. Uh, thank you everyone for tuning in. Um, tune in on Monday where I have an extended interview with a brilliant climatologist um, Zeke House Fava. And for now, you've been watching the Tomorrow Media. Good night.