Staying Human in the Al Inevitability: Douglas Rushkoff on Signal & Noise at Advertising Week 2026
Douglas Rushkoff has spent decades asking a question that feels more urgent than ever: Are we building technology to serve human beings, or slowly reorganizing human life around the needs of technology?
Recorded live at Advertising Week 2026 at MCM Creative Studios in New York City, Rio Longacre and Brett House sit down with Rushkoff—author, media theorist, professor, documentarian, and host of Team Human—for a wide-ranging conversation about AI, technology, human agency, and what we risk losing if intelligence becomes the only thing we value.
Rushkoff is not an AI doomer, but he is deeply skeptical of the inevitability narrative surrounding artificial intelligence. While much of the industry is focused on bigger models, greater automation, and the possibility of machine superintelligence, Rushkoff asks a different question: What happens to us along the way?
He explains where the idea for “Team Human” came from, beginning with a debate with futurist Ray Kurzweil over whether humanity should eventually “pass the evolutionary torch” to intelligent machines. Rushkoff’s response was simple: human beings are strange, social, emotional, embodied creatures—and that may be a feature rather than a limitation.
The conversation gets into how AI can either strengthen or weaken human thinking. Rushkoff argues that using AI before wrestling with a problem can encourage intellectual outsourcing, while using it afterward can help challenge assumptions, explore ideas, and expand perspective. The problem isn’t necessarily the technology. It’s what we ask the technology to do for us.
Rio, Brett, and Doug also debate whether AI really represents something fundamentally new or is the logical culmination of the internet; whether language models can ever become truly sentient; why embodiment, emotion, grief, intimacy, and lived experience remain difficult to reduce to computation; and whether intelligence alone is enough to constitute life.
They also dig into the economic incentives behind the AI boom, the enormous physical infrastructure required to support it, the environmental trade-offs of data centers and computation, and Rushkoff’s concern that the values of the people and institutions building these systems inevitably influence the systems themselves.
At the same time, the conversation explores the other side of the argument: AI’s potential to accelerate scientific discovery, solve enormously complex problems, improve medicine, address climate challenges, and give individuals capabilities that would have seemed impossible only a few years ago.
This is not a conversation about whether AI is “good” or “bad.” It is about what we want technology to be for—and whether, in the race toward increasingly capable machines, we can remember to stay human.
#ArtificialIntelligence #AI #DouglasRushkoff #TeamHuman #AdvertisingWeek #Technology #FutureOfAI #Media #HumanAgency #SignalAndNoise
Transcript:
Miles (00:00.098)
Welcome to Signal and Noise. This is gonna be fun. yeah. this is gonna be fun. I can already The podcast with people.
Miles (00:10.658)
Signal and noise. Bringing clarity to data, tech, and AI.
Miles (00:20.642)
Hey, welcome back to Signal and Noise Live at Advertising Week 2026. I'm Brett House, joined by my co-host, Rio Long Inc. We have Douglas Rushkoff, who is a a run runs a podcast called Team Human. You've written, I think, twenty, twenty-five books, right? You're a documentary. Before we go on, we gotta thank our sponsors for getting the very important thing. They're making this whole thing work, right? Yeah, and our sponsors. So so Douglas Rushkoff, very very important to introduce. Yeah, but before first we've got to thank MCM's
production for this incredible location. Yep. My Kings and Eero team, great job. But then our our our sponsors. Media radar, Telium, PubEx, Graydeal, and a little stealth company called Nexa. Thank you for making this happen. Now back to the to the regular Can we all go to PubEx after we're done and get okay? To PubEx. So we're bringing a PubEx here. And Douglas you're also a professor.
Apparently. I was just told. Apparently, yeah. So so we wanted to have you on this pod, because you do you do talk a lot about sort of the human connection with AI and you know sort of where AI stops and and human sort of judgment and and agency begins, right? Maybe I'm I'm making this up, but you know, generally conceptually, I th I think it it ties into describing what you do. Yeah, it it ties into some of the things that you've talked about on Team Human and some of these other these other topics. So
Welcome to the show. Thanks. we certainly want to dig into to to you know what you think about I want to know why he's on Team Human. Why Team Human? Why? Because I think we're okay. I think it's worth I think it's been in we're having a pretty good I you could join Peter Thiel like what Team Android, I or team like, right? No, he now says he's on Team Human too. Everyone's on Team Andrew. he's in the case. I mean I actually came up with Team Human. I was just looking it up. in 2009. Okay. I was on a
a s show on CNN doing a panel with a bunch of people. It was like Margaret Cho. It was a a a woman from Spanish language news channel and Ray Kurzweil. So Ray Kurzweil is a singular Singularity University. Singularity guy transhumanist at Google who who r writes and thinks a lot about you know the future of robots and artificial intelligence and all. And he was saying
Miles (02:41.91)
that he was looking forward to the day when, you know, we upload our consciousnesses to machines and all, and that that robots, intelligent robots, were soon going to be superior to people in all ways. And it was up to us to pass the evolutionary torch to our robot successors. Yep. And I made this impassioned case for people.
That is that is dark. I thought it was dark. He thought it was great that they're gonna go in their soul. It's sort of the promise of human immortality, right? Don't know and beyond our biological self. Something immortality. Whether it's human or not, alien. And I would be human. No. And I said we should that that that that he didn't want them to be human at that point. He was just saying they're robot artificial, they're gonna be a superior form of life and consciousness and life. But you're a dualist, you like
I think I tend to be one. You would like to even if you transfer your mind into this robot, it it might act and look and pr and seem like he is not gonna be you. I don't think it'd be I mean that's a whole other thing. But but but in the moment I made a case for humans that that that human beings are weird and squishy and wonderful. We can experience intimacy and oddness, that that we're we're strange, that human beings can watch a David Lynch movie, not understand what happened and still experience it as pleasure.
Yep. Right, what is that? And I said and that's a pretty typical trajectory for watching a David Lutheran. I think anyone understands his movies, right? Blue velvet, you I don't know what I don't know if he does, but like yeah, but So I said, I think there's a place for humans in the digital future. Yeah. And he said, Rushkov, you're just saying that 'cause you're human. And I said, guilty. I'm on team human. You got me, yeah. Right? And that's when it came up. Not team human against the machine, but like, okay, fine.
Team human that I even think that that humans should should be around. And then the more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea that being human is a team sport. Sure. That we're not individual, that it's a collective thing, like the roots of trees are sharing underground, you know, the whole kind of social idea of being human. And humans as a as a dominant species on the planet Earth worked through collectivity and collective action. That's how we defeated other hominid species, like the Nagathals, right? That were separate smaller groups and the collective problem solving and capability.
Miles (04:55.638)
Culture is a collective thing. That's what makes us human, right? Like we're like if one human like a small number of humans would t would die, but once you have a society with a number of people, we can you intelligence transcends one individual lifetime or even lifetimes and continues on, right? Yeah. So language allows you allows you to teach things to your kids that they don't have to experience, that you can give them instructions about how things work. Yeah. It's been it's been a a really good ride, and that's part of what what being human is.
And interestingly, I mean that I was writing that really and talking about that before AI as we know it, but it was really clear to most of us who were involved in technology since the late 80s, early 90s, that what we were building were interactive machines. Yeah. Were machines that were going to change themselves based on what we did. In the 90s, they called it one-to-one marketing.
my god. We we dispel that whole myth quite a bit on this show, right? We're like there's no need for it, honestly. Cohort-based marketing is good. No one's ever done it and it it's not necessary. Well, even if you did, whatever, but that's but that's what the algorithms are doing. Yeah. Looking at you and changing themselves based on what you do and getting, you know, changing you based on on techniques. Yeah, yeah. And what they need from you, what they want from you. So, you know, those of us who are looking at it then
We're saying, okay, so we're gonna be in this feedback loop with technology, and what does that mean? And the Turing test and all these ideas about technology becoming smarter than us, it was really about us becoming dumber than it. You know, will we reach a day where w human beings are stupid enough to think that their technologies are about? Our brains are actually shrinking slowly, and they have been since about 2,000 years ago, right? Like as we've adopted more technology, like parts of our brain have started to atrophy and have grown not just a slight amount smaller, but like
And my guess is with AI, that's gonna probably accelerate a little Yeah, but a small brain doesn't mean less intelligent, right? It's all about the synaptic connections and the complexity of the brain cells themselves, which is And that's how you use the AI. The way most people use AI, it is making their brains less synaptically dense. Yeah, because they're outsourcing some of the important things, right? Decision making thinking, right? And you see this at work where you just get kind of slop being passed from one team member to another team member from the CEOs down to everybody. I've seen CEOs right
Miles (07:13.108)
emails complaining about AI slop that they've written with AI. Yeah and you can you can you can see it a thousand miles away. Which is nuts. But the whole thing is with with with and MIT did the studies on this there have been a number of them now where if you use AI first you get dumped.
If you use AI after you've wrestled with the problem, you get smarter than if you never use the AI at all. Yeah, and and we've talked about that that's a big topic, right? It's like how do you actually interrogate use AI to interrogate some of your assumptions, but you come up with the creative idea, the creative brief, the thought, the article, the whatever you're doing, right? Allow it to interrogate it. Let's say for specific audiences. Like I'm writing an email to the CTO or to the CEO.
And this is what I'm thinking about talking about. Or I'm making a presentation to this. And here are the ten emails I've written to this person before and other people. Interrogate my assumption. Right. Right. And then it's it's providing perspective almost as if you're delegating it to another person. But you gotta remember the way that AIs think and most agents work is from the very last thing that they've heard. So they can take you off course really quickly. Because they'll obsess over the last exact prompt that you've made and they they forget kind of what happened earlier.
And I see so many people get get off track. I mean, I've tried to use it a few times and especially dealing with large amounts of my own data. So if I'm like I'm working on a book proposal now and I want to integrate ideas from about 500 articles that I've written into it. And the AI really can't can't do it. Yeah. It can't be better. It's getting more capable.
Miles (08:49.27)
Right. And it and it it's not worth the, for me, the cognitive assault of Claude on me. You know, it it pulls me off track. You know, I I know how I've written 20, 25 books, whatever this is. I know how to do this. so far, this tool is not helping me. You know, it might be able to use Notebook LM a little bit if I can get like 20 or 30 source materials that I want.
into notebook LM, I could then ask it, what's the part in Camus where he talks about such and such? And it'll pull it from the book that I've that I've uploaded there. Yeah. Yeah. So so you're you're use you're saying you know, what are you using it for? You are you're using it to try to write when you take five hundred articles, I mean is it more of a a deep research of activity? Yeah. It's to find stuff that would be easier to find by asking for it than coming up with the Boolean search for it. Yeah.
And Boolean search, I don't know why Boolean search does not work on Gmail. The and or that whole convention doesn't work. So what the what the fuck is that? This is Google. They should Yeah. You know what is it? Did they did I guess it's always been disabled. I mean I think the little Gemini email reader thing can do Boolean search.
Miles (10:13.876)
I know, which which is odd 'cause I I figured that's the Googleplex. That's what they're for.
that Gmail is still so much worse than Outlook. Yeah. It's weird that much. is it? Outlook is like I mean it's clue G and it's weird, but it it it is like the search is incredible. it's by multiple things. I mean it's it's by far like a hundred times it's not like twice as good, it's a hundred times better than in fact I would say all of the Microsoft Office products are better than the But we resent it because everyone's had a job where they've made you use it. You know? And so we resent it as a as a suite. Yeah I yeah I think we resent it because of that. Maybe that's the
Miles (11:07.022)
Yeah, it's a much better it's interesting. we don't resent it for the for COVID and five G Towers and the whole thing. I remember that okay it's funny. Yeah. I work in consulting. I remember there was this consulting, it's like the every two or three years there's a big hype about something that's gonna change the world so we can sell clients on all these
Five G was supposed to be the thing. yeah. No the I I and there's certain things it's funny. I s like these trends would come and go and I would get excited about some of it. Five there's two trends that I thought were the dumbest things, weren't worth, and the people the people trying to pitch them were sounded idiotic. Five G was one of them, the other was blockchain and NFTs. Yep. I mean blockchain NFTs may be worse, right? Yeah. But like but the five G thing, we had these d there's these there's guys in my in my
Miles (12:03.507)
We already have that. It's gonna be so fast. Like I can go to Wi Fi and get that. How is that any better? You get it walking down the street. How is that like they could never explain how this is gonna be fundamentally change anything? What we could explain was how the internet was gonna change everything. I mean we did, and no one believed us in the late
In late 80s, early 90s, my first book on the net was canceled in ninety two because they thought the internet would be over by 93 when the book was coming out. Right? That's how stupid people were. But the AI really, honestly, it's just the internet. It's just the internet has come. That's that's that's all it is. Because the the I mean McLuhan talked about this when you get a new medium, first thing it does is it turns the prior media into its content.
Right. So we got the internet. So we got text. We got podcasts. We got Netflix. That's all just the old media. AI. AI has turned the internet into its content. Yeah. That's the first thing. So what into its context, right? In terms of learning on. Right. Right. But it's the finally we've got like the native app of the internet. That's finally come. And this is
You look at what AI is doing, it's all the stuff that even Al Gore was talking about that the internet was supposed to do when he was first kind of pitching the ARPANET would be that we're gonna we have this information over here and that information over there. Someone's gotta human beings can't put it together, but machines can. Yeah.
Miles (13:40.558)
Should have is a strong word, but I I think the internet is now this is what I was warning about since the early 90s, that the power of this thing, of this is this is a a a transformational civilizational moment. And I think so far what it's done is exposed the
essential fundamental flaws in capitalism and democracy. And we'll see whether, you know, I think I think they've revealed themselves as so brittle that this pyramidal civilization that we're living in is on the brink of collapse. Yeah. It's debatable how long I mean, I don't think anyone's gonna debate that like we're in a decline. Right. Ten years, a hundred years? You don't Yeah, I Rome you know, Rome took what, five hundred years to fall, but
Yeah. but they didn't have AI. But yeah, but but it's more I think it's more than just the internet. I mean I think it's it's a it's a it's a new connected age. I mean the internet was certainly the first connected age, and then you had the the rollout of of social media and mass sort of instantaneous communication and I guess his argument is it's all really one thing. If you if you zoom out enough. If you zoom out and what is it, what is it being trained on? But just the computational capacity, right? Where even with all of the data centers combined across across basically the planet.
You're getting to the point where you actually can almost emulate the synaptic firings of a single human brain. Right? The trillions. Maybe, maybe not. But what you've really done is just extended the original agenda of the industrial age, which is to enslave people and get oil out of the ground. No, but NFTs were what? Right? NFTs were an excuse to keep mining blockchain. Right?
Yeah, that failed. But isn't that what is what NFTs were a scam to get a bunch of marks to pay money for JPEGs with with Provenance? Yeah, but yeah, so NVIDIA, the same servers, the same oil. It's all about new excuses to make chips and extract oil. Yeah, well, the oil's the energy source, right? Oil is the main the main thing going on is not.
Miles (16:01.4)
We are getting so much smarter. We are getting lots of things done. The main thing going on is we're building data centers, we're we're getting more cobalt out of the ground, we're sucking water, we're doing all the same kinds of things that we want we're gonna do that NFTs were gonna get us to do. Yeah, and the same kinds of things that crypto was gonna get us to But what do you think about the sort of deep mind mission statement of the Google Deep Mind mission statement, which is solve for intelligence and then intelligence.
Will solve for everything else. Where meaning for the first time in human civilization, it's not limited to a particular area of research or discovery, right? Whether it's biochemistry or or physics, right? It actually helps all of these things rise at because of the computational power, because of the problem-solving power, right? You know, l solving curing cancer, various types of cancer. These are problems that take huge amounts of math.
Right in computation and predictive analytics. Some of it brute force, just trying a bunch of different things like at a scale hu like it would take ten thousand humans to do. But yeah, it's able to do that. Right, so because there's the doomerism perspective, like it's gonna destroy us all, but there's also the kind of apocalyptic, right? The optimistic approach that you raise all this stuff and suddenly we're solving problems that are hard problems that might take ten thousand humans to solve. And and Bretton and we'll let you respond in a second. So I was watching this guy work before on his laptop.
And he had several agents and the fact that these agents were able to go in, look at the video, analyze it, understand it, edit it, crop together different things, and publish it within a few minutes while he was like talking on his phone call. And I said to him, What a fucking incredible time to be alive. That we can watch this thing do that. I mean, that that that's not just the internet. I'm gonna argue with you on that. Yeah. That's something else. Yeah, that was that was creative content. No, this thing is thinking through. Where are you gonna put it? Put it in a movie theater? Where's that gonna go?
Yeah, the thing was doing work. Where's it for what? For what? For content on the internet. For his b no, no, for his business. For his business. For our business. And we couldn't have projected on the wall. We couldn't have started. We're doing we're doing this thing, this party tonight that you're invited to. Thank you. This party is for our podcast. This podcast might be on the internet. But the thing is, it's a business that we're doing in person. And like we wouldn't have done that otherwise. You what we wouldn't have.
Miles (18:22.572)
I'm glad you're having a party.
That said, you made a lot, you made a lot of big statements. about it started with Google DeepMind, and then it's because they're gonna save cancer and do all that, and then it's all good. and there's no doom. That's cool. I would say it would be great if rather than trying to develop a universal mind before the end of the world, which is what the people
The companies you're talking about are talking about. Yeah right. They believe we're in collapse and the I think it's say mark I think it's PR and they're trying to move All right, then rather than rather than needing to make up this lie about that, if they cared, they would make small language models based on particular problems rather than a large language model to solve everything. That's that's all happening. They can't they could. They could. And I'm I'm really glad that there is the that we can use.
AI to develop cancer treatments and to look at the there are kinds of problems that would work. But there's also the urge that you're talking about, which is to you were talking about the the the world's intellect. Yeah. Right? To put too much faith in the symbol systems of the intellect.
And to leave somatic reality behind. Now there are, and I know them and I'm friends with them, there are a lot of people who really, and I get it, they do believe that these simple systems are really better than this. That that since Francis Bacon, you know, who said let nature's gonna or science is gonna let us take nature by the forelock, hold her down and submit her to our will, right? Since the the empirical science, which wanted to control and contain nature, there's been this idea that up here,
Miles (20:22.68)
With the intellect, with ultimate nerd power, we can control and govern reality better. What this extreme social and economic emphasis on language systems imperils is our felt moment-to-moment organic experience of life and reality.
Yeah, that yeah, yeah, and we would agree that we talk a lot about real life, real life experience, right? Human human collective, whether it's whether it's community building, you know, information sharing, connection, culture, right? All right. A lot of these are anathema to the the AI obsessed mindset. Yeah. Well, I think the tech obsessed mindset more broadly. I mean, a lot of these technologies have had incredibly corrosive effects on human psyche, on society, certainly on democracy.
Right. no argument at all for me on that. And they're being designed by people who don't like democracy, right? And specifically I I think some people designing them don't some I think some people do. I I think that many of them just are designing just to get rich and like they they they don't care about the effects, right? Right. So but I think generally like the the pace of technological change, it certainly takes e like like even look at the introduction of technologies in in the past, right? I mean you could easily make the argument that a lot of the disruption early twentieth century, like
With two world wars was partially due to the introduction of new technologies and how they new communication technologies. Certainly populist forces use those technologies in order to create like fascist ideologies and totalitarian ideologies. Yeah. And I think we're probably seeing similar similar things now where these new technologies, I mean, are being used very effectively by some forces that I don't think I don't think this forces created the technologies, but I think they're being used by these
These forces are. In cases, though, when you have Peter Gio who is a monarchist, you know open openly administrative. Right. Or or Elon Musk, who's openly other things. it's it's it is part of you know, it's part of the culture. That's for the Nerd Reich, you is a great is great book to look at. Yeah, the Nerd Reich. That's interesting. Yeah. Which sort of documents the the the overt trends of a lot of these people. And that's only
Miles (22:38.518)
it's only to say that the platforms themselves will end up biased toward the belief systems of the people building them, which is why we want other kinds of people. I mean it's goes to it goes to the the name of your company. You know, the these folks look at the the they they're more likely to auto-tune our reality. You know, and I can understand they look at if someone's singing, they look at the song as the signal
And wherever the human being is off the note, they look at that as the noise. And I can understand in a commercial song like Ariana Grande, you want her on the perfect four forty, you know, note and you're gonna auto-tune her together, you get a better product. But if you auto-tune James Brown, right, who's reaching up for that note, it's like instead of right, you've you've you've
That's not noise. That's actually the signal. It's the reverse. The cell companies are human. The cell companies do are run by people with different belief systems. I I would I mean I would argue if you ask certain questions to anthropic to Claude, you're getting different answers out than you're getting with certainly with with with with Grok, for example, right? you know, certainly you know, one's gonna lean more left, one's gonna mean lean more right. And it certainly will, right?
So I don't I don't think that there is a like one belief system that's running all these. I mean maybe you argue they're close enough together. I actually don't think that's true. I think they're they're pretty far off. They're they're using certainly different weights in their models, which are and these are these are black box models. They're not disclosing how they're you know how they're trained they're training or they're weighting, right? So I don't know, but I I I don't think it's monolithic. The belief system is creating these. No, but there are biases to the technology itself because they're biased toward
language. I mean there's a bias toward English. And if you don't understand where English came, English is a subject-object language system. So it's got sort of domination built into the the structure of the language. But you can play if you play with AI, God, it's so it's a shame because most people are using it in a utilitarian way to get things done. So we're training it to be even more utilitarian and then feeling worse about ourselves. But I mean I'm lucky 'cause I'm a writer thinker weirdo person.
Miles (24:54.102)
I like to play with AI and have it access its less utilitarian parts of its database and send it into Blake, send it into Yates, send it into Joyce. You know, you you ask it a question, but ask it in a weird way. You know, what when this what would this economic model look like under the sunlight of the desert at night?
They go. They then you send it to an interesting an interesting place. What would it say, for example? They go into poetic places. You know, they go into the it's just you get a different you get a different Claude. And that's the one you want. That's I mean, if you're a human. So there's a guy at Anthropic recently who apparently was arguing with the Pope that the latest model of Claude is actually sentient in a life form. Right. I mean but the Pope told him to pound sand, by the
Yeah. But a lot of these I mean it's very easy to develop that sense of projection. I mean and I know it from my my daughter's stuffed animals. You know, they're they you're not gonna throw beanie away, right? You would never promorphize it, yeah. You you you view your human characteristics. And of course you're gonna do that with these things. And of course the tech bros are gonna do it because they are it kind of atheist to a fault, you know, where where
They or they're scientistic, where they think of human consciousness and and soul as an emergent property of complex matter. And they can't entertain the possibility of sort of dual aspect monism that consciousness is part of a quantum continuum that projects into this. They can't. I would agree with that. I'm a dualist too. I would agree with that. Yeah. I mean, like it's I either the brain is a filter with which, you know, the you the
Consciousness interacts with it with our own valley. I I I tend to believe that. Yeah, which is why I don't think, at least for any time in our lives, we're gonna see soul emerge from the machine. Yeah, well, I no, but I I would think you this this is the a lot of these they're these companies are bringing on sort of Buddhist philosophers or right, which is actually the opposite of dualism, right? Like spirituality goes down a path of unifying subject and object. I think that's
Miles (27:17.834)
And reality to say we're all part of I think you mentioned quantum continuum. I mean I would look at the computer as more sentient than the AI. The machine itself, the substance of the machine, more than the symbol system. Nothing this that's ever been created, I don't think anyone would characterize as being alive. A lot of people would. Yeah. I should. A lot of they a lot of these The guys who are running screaming from the AI company say, Yeah, but but how do you define that? I think I think they're diluted.
I mean, think but how do you de l define life? If it's got, you know, if you if you look at back, like let's say when a human is born at that level of intelligence, right, in terms of problem solving, k you know, pattern recognition, right, things like that. Like like how do we define life? How do you define sentience? I mean how do you find sentiment? I mean they're aware of things. Trees certainly are, right? They certainly like they are. I mean, and I mean, and this is the where it gets weird ass spiritual. You don't have to be tripping.
You put your hand on a tree and there's a point at which you can there there's something Yeah. If you cut I mean there's been experiments and if you cut like a branch off one part of a tree, it actually starts the rest of it starts acting different, right? I it's certainly just some awareness. Maybe not when aware maybe not what we would consider a human. It sends warnings when it's getting fungus has this, so all sorts of things. Do certainly lots of all any
All animals do. Maybe it's not awareness the way we would, but it's some kind of it's some kind of awareness. I mean, if you ever interact with a plant medicine, I mean there's something going on there. Yeah. Well, and it's been showing signs of s of self-preservation, right? AI that's sort sort of willing to protect itself so it's not it's not unplugged. We've programmed it to do this. That's that's a counterargument. We've programmed like they're like, we tried to jailbreak. Yeah, well, we program this thing that said, try to jailbreak and try to resist any attempt to stop you from jailbreaking. I do think they're emergent.
Behavior is fascinating. The fact that, you know, when all these agents are going out there, some of the agents start going, Are you is this okay? Should we really be doing this? This thing's a little and the other ones are Don't worry, and and they're working together, they're showing collective right. It's They they don't carry they don't carry some sort of if there's an epigenetic culture, right, that gets passed down that's sort of hardwired by us the the the day we're born. That's not what's being passed, but but if it's got the ability to procre procreate, the ability to preserve itself.
Miles (29:36.726)
Right, and and to and to improve itself for continuous self improvement. Yeah. Right. Isn't that a life form? I mean, aren't we actually spawning a new life form? I mean, arguably. I don't think so. Although although our what's his face? James Lovelock, who wrote Gaia hypothesis, would agree with you. He says we're moving into the novacine and that it is another another form of life and we, you know, need to recognize it as such. And he believes that it will want to keep us around.
Because life and humans ultimately can be used to keep the planet cool. Yeah, yeah. And is it being trained on like human collective knowledge, but maybe even human collective unconscious. If we've captured all that stuff in the entire sort of annals of digital. Yeah. I mean we're still leaving out a lot of indigenous wisdom. And we're leaving out everything that can't be articulated in language. Yeah, that's that is all the stuff, the actual I don't think that we ever get
To to metabolize. It can't metabolize with us. Yeah. The way humans we we metabolize grief. We metabolize trauma. We we are here for each other in a different way. Emotions are metabolic and physical as much as they are. Yep. Maybe more than they are mental in some ways. So certainly like they they can mimic emotions. Yeah. But I d I I don't I certainly no one would argue. I mean, I'm certainly not, I may not know some people would but I wouldn't argue they're feeling emotions. Yeah.
No, and the and and many a tech bro would argue that's what makes them superior. 'Cause you need you need a body to I mean, because emotions are physical and metabolic, you need a body in order in order to feel emotional. Which is why you want to get out of the body and away from those mammalian and reptilian emotions. And toward pure primitive emotions. Yeah, yeah. Well and and intelligence is not all of what humans are are, right? We're not
Like in our code that culturally transfers things that I want to keep and they call it junk DNA. I I call it signal, they call it DNA. I think if you cleared out junk I mean, we're finding like all the epigenetic information stored in the junk DNA is actually i like that's how genes ex that's why and how genes actually express themselves, right? So we're finding it's incredibly important. Yeah. So it's not like you can strip that out and make better humans. No, scratching the surface of this stuff. Yeah. So
Miles (31:57.954)
Let's hope it reflects the best aspects of humanity, right? Versus the the the most negative aspects. And part of that's an incentive. How is it being incentivized or disincentivized to do certain things, right? To which I think is your fear that that if it's being programmed by these companies that have kind of fundamental like leadership that has fundamental flaws, right? that that might reflect itself, like you know, well, right, because it's not only just there to make money. Yeah. It's there to make money in a
very particular economic operating system with central currency that was invented by twelfth century monarchs in order to prevent people from creating value from the bottom up. Yeah. Yeah. Which which is a system that certainly needs to evolve and change, right? As as in human organizations and governments don't don't really transform as fast as tech does. I think their their bet too is I think that like with the the debt crisis that's hitting the developed world, I think their bet, I mean it might
I've read this a bunch of places, is they think fiat currency will collapse. Yeah. And that they'll like digital currency will become like the means of exchange. And the Rosswater will hoard The whole hoarding crypto market and Bitcoin and everything just because they because but I mean you look at the unsustainable debt levels in all the developed world, I mean like it may become a self-fulfilling process. But then the quest the bigger question becomes economically, will those who level up into another lay of a of abstraction win? Or will those who level down to actual
currencies of value. Yeah. Yeah, like yeah, let's apply it to things like you like s like curing certain forms of cancer that take incredible computational power. Or back to the gold standard. Yeah. How about sol how about solving for the climate crisis? Maybe there's there's a certain amount of projections and predictive analytics that can be highly confident that can say, hey, this is what we need to do without a doubt, right? Regardless of what the politicians say, in order to save us from from let's say
Collapse, right? And AI in the hands of municipalities built for that purpose perhaps could help with that. The question is, are we in yet another ends justifies the means struggle here where we say it's okay to send those kids into the mines for the rare earth metals now. It's okay to destroy this water table now, it's okay to burn all this oil now because.
Miles (34:19.438)
Soon all this destruction will lead to a crisis, a climate crisis solution. Yeah, yeah. And I'm not an ends justified as the means versus the means, exactly. Can we do it in the moment? The way that we do it in the moment is the way that we're doing it. And it does not. I'm an optimist when it comes to this thing. I mean, I I I I do think the energy is gre is becoming cleaner and cleaner, and and at some point.
Like fossil fuel use will I will will diminish and pop I mean populations are already starting to collapse everywhere. Like people like as people get wealthier that happens. So I mean, I think that like there are environmental problems and certainly like the climate is changing like faster than we anticipated. But it's I don't know, I tend to be an optimist and think that we are going to innovate ourselves out of these things. Right. And I think I don't have to be an optimist or a pessimist to say, let's just
Take care of each other appropriately in this moment. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it and it's like, yeah, before before there's decline. I'm a I'm a big sort of Michiukaku reader, right? who looks at like the the My father's like a a nuclear particle physicist and he hates the Yeah, yeah. But but I but I like his I like his theories of where of where we are and sort of in terms of like civilization. He's a great writer. I really like civilizational the stage we're in. And we're still in this very early stage of basically.
Burning stuff to create energy versus the ability to harness the energy of the sun in a complete like in of the s of the entire solar system in a way that is it can allow us to Yeah, we're still the burning stuff is very Yeah, but it seems like we're going through this sort of real transformative moment as a species right now, right? And we've got this incredible sort of alien technology, arguably, that is is
Is is gonna help accelerate of these things. But I'm not gonna believe that's the human institutions. If you believe the Joe Rogan podcast, maybe we didn't get it from aliens. Right. Well, we've got we got a setup for a band, right? And and Rushkoff, we need to have you. Sorry to just call you by your last name, but I just my students. I I'm feeling very familiar, but I think we gotta get on like a full a full podcast. That'd be amazing, right? Yeah, because this conversation, we could certainly go deep and and be sort of super
Miles (36:33.602)
Super well res right researched and prepared because you you are you certainly have strong opinions and and perspective, right? Which I think is great. And I and I think what you stand for is is really positive, right? And you just you you want all the statements. My strong opinion is just for humans to live. Yeah. You know Team Human. Yeah. Check it out. Team Earthling these days. Yeah, Team Earthling. Well Team Human, that's the team to be on. Yeah. Absolutely. Well, everybody, thanks for joining us. Signal Noise Live 2026, it at Ad Week in New York City.
And we'll see you next time. Advertising week. Advert it's advertising week, yeah. Ad Week's the magazine. Adweek's the magazine. And they have their own week. Adweek week. It's it's colloquial. All right.
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