3min chapter

This Is Not A Drill with Gavin Esler cover image

The Ukraine War Ep. 8: The World At War

This Is Not A Drill with Gavin Esler

CHAPTER

The Struggle to Win the War in Ukraine

In this series, we've heard from frontline soldiers who have literally been dug into trenches only meters from their enemy. We're here because we have to be here. There's no other choice. The robust volunteers that joined the army meant the war is actually a lottery. And it's just a chance that I'm here speaking to you, and I'm not lying dead like them. If the democratic world fails here, it will fail in promotion of democracy globally.

00:00
Speaker 2
Well, I also think about Seth Godin has written about taste and he uses the example of if you wear a tuxedo to a black tie wedding, you had good taste. But if you wear a tuxedo to the beach, you had bad taste. So it's the idea of perfection. I often think if when people post on Twitter about how AI made this great image, I think by who's opinion, who's judging it.
Speaker 1
I would add, did AI make it or did the person working with AI make it?
Speaker 2
You prompted it to do what it made. That is the
Speaker 1
art. Exactly. I completely agree. It's the human operating AI is a tool. That's what it is. It's a great fucking tool and a very powerful tool, but it is a tool. We human beings are tool makers. We always have been. There is no steel in nature. Steel came out of the minds of a human. Everything surrounding us right now came out of our minds. Humulative cultural evolution. Yay. Because everything that defines the world around us right now came out of basically the human mind.
Speaker 2
Have you seen the Steve Jobs thing about the bicycle of the mind? Yes. I first came across that a few months ago and I thought this is the greatest analogy for AI that I've come
Speaker 1
across. Completely agree. It is a very powerful tool. But it's a tool. It's like fire. I love the George Carlin thing where he says, I'm often really curious about the person who came up with the flamethrower. That's because he says that person is like thinking, you know, I'd really like to burn those people over there to death, but I'm not close enough to him. But the point is, fire is incredibly useful, but it can also be used to burn villages down and burn people. So we didn't say, no, we can't have fire. We invented fire departments, fire alarms, fire extinguisher, fire exits. We're going to do the same thing with AI. It's like the tech itself is neutral. It's the one utilizing that tech who's going to use it for good or ill, in my opinion, was back to humans.

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