Discussing AI (and Beyond) with walkthroughwonder 🤖
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by kirupa | Interviews with Creative People: https://www.kirupa.com/podcast/index.htm

Edwin (https://www.instagram.com/walkthroughwonder/), better known as walkthroughwonder, turns an AI conversation into something much broader. The episode moves from creative roots and the accelerating pace of technology into questions about perception, productivity, purpose, social isolation, incentives, regulation, and what a world of smarter machines might demand from the people living in it.

Watch the interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLHw9NjOiR4
A conversation with Edwin (aka walkthroughwonder) | 57m

ABOUT THIS CONVERSATION

This episode works best if you treat it as a wide-angle technology conversation rather than a tutorial. Edwin brings a designer-technologist perspective shaped by years of making interactive work, and that creative history gives the discussion its tone. The opening stretch is full of curiosity about old projects, visual experimentation, and the long arc from earlier web culture to the current AI moment.

From there, the conversation gets interesting by focusing less on whether AI exists and more on why its arrival feels so different. Edwin and Kirupa talk about the compressed gap between rough prototypes and genuinely useful output, and that observation opens the door to bigger questions about human perception, machine capability, and the kinds of thinking tools can meaningfully support. The mood is exploratory, but the underlying point is practical: the change feels fast because the tools already cross the threshold of everyday usefulness.

The middle section broadens into productivity and purpose. If machines take over more repetitive work, what do people do with the extra time, and who actually benefits from those gains? That thread naturally leads into loneliness, declining public spaces, and the way online platforms carve social life into separate, incentive-driven systems. It is one of the stronger parts of the interview because it refuses to treat technology as isolated from culture.

By the end, the conversation reaches AGI, robots, nanobots, and bio-inspired systems, but it never fully leaves the present behind. Even the most future-facing ideas circle back to incentives, governance, and human responsibility. For kirupa.com readers, the value here is not a tidy forecast. It is the chance to think through how technical progress, social systems, and creative ambition keep colliding in ways that affect daily life.

WHAT YOU'LL HEAR ABOUT

- AI feels disruptive partly because useful output arrived much faster than many people expected.
- Questions about machine capability quickly become questions about human purpose.
- Productivity gains do not automatically translate into shared benefits.
- Technology design and social isolation are more connected than they first appear.
- Any serious AI discussion eventually runs into incentives and governance.

JUMP TO A TOPIC

- 3:45 - Creative roots and early experiments: Edwin looks back at the interactive projects that shaped how he thinks about technology today. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLHw9NjOiR4&t=225s)
- 8:45 - Why the pace feels different now: The conversation compares earlier waves of tech adoption with the much faster rhythm of modern AI. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLHw9NjOiR4&t=525s)
- 16:37 - Human perception and machine thinking: They use perception as a way to frame what machines might see, model, and help people understand. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLHw9NjOiR4&t=997s)
- 21:50 - How AI won people over so quickly: This section focuses on how quickly rough curiosity turned into everyday experimentation and adoption. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLHw9NjOiR4&t=1310s)
- 24:48 - Productivity gains and what follows: Kirupa and Edwin discuss whether saved time becomes leisure, more work, or something entirely new. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLHw9NjOiR4&t=1488s)
- 32:44 - Technology, loneliness, and public space: The discussion widens into social connection, disappearing shared spaces, and digital substitutes for community. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLHw9NjOiR4&t=1964s)
- 38:05 - Incentives shape the internet: They examine how platforms steer behavior and why that matters for public discourse and future AI systems. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLHw9NjOiR4&t=2285s)
- 43:50 - What AGI could actually mean: The episode pauses to define artificial general intelligence and the scale of change people attach to it. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLHw9NjOiR4&t=2630s)
- 48:35 - Robots for messy real-world work: Attention shifts from software to autonomous machines that could handle difficult physical tasks. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLHw9NjOiR4&t=2915s)
- 52:00 - From software to living systems: The closing ideas reach into nanobots and bio-inspired systems to imagine where intelligence might show up next. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLHw9NjOiR4&t=3120s)

TO LEARN MORE

- walkthroughwonder's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/walkthroughwonder/

TRANSCRIPT

The automatically generated captions have been organized by speaker, lightly edited for clarity, and broken into paragraphs for readability. Names and wording may still contain errors.

0:00 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLHw9NjOiR4&t=0s)

Hi everybody.

I had this awesome opportunity to sit down with someone I've known for over 20 years, the very talented Edwin rosera, who was a very good designer, but also happens to spend a lot of time think with the future, think about how AI and ML and all these up and coming technology Trends will intersect to just impact our lives, and in many positive and maybe not so positive ways, and so I'd intended to use this option to talk to him about his fantastic work on combining AI generated art with his own talents to create very serial artistic pieces that you're seeing on screen right now that look really, really cool.

But, as you'll see shortly, we end up taking some heavy detours and ended up talking a lot more about the future, the power of artificial intelligence and Computing and just a lot of interesting things in general that paint a much bigger picture of what we can do with technology looking ahead, and so hope you enjoy it all. Right, Edwin, nice to meet you. After having known you virtually for almost 20 years, I think it's the first time you and I are actually chatting in real time, which is pretty, pretty crazy that we never did this before. But you know, it's better than late than never, I guess.

1:14 - Edwin (aka walkthroughwonder) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLHw9NjOiR4&t=74s)

Yeah, that's definitely nice to officially meet you and put a voice to that face. And I think it wasn't for lack of want back then. Bandwidth just didn't exist for us to be able to have this kind of a conversation back then.

1:31 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLHw9NjOiR4&t=91s)

No, I mean, I think we used AOL Instant Messenger and chatted quite a bit. If there was a video button at that point, I'm pretty sure I would have clicked on that button.

1:40 - Edwin (aka walkthroughwonder) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLHw9NjOiR4&t=100s)

I'm pretty sure if that button existed back then, it was like a joke button where, like it would like, some funny animation would come out, exactly. It'd be like it was like 240 or 120p video. It would be, like, you know, blocked everywhere. You kind of it'd be like the pixelated filters that people add as a novelty today. That was different, yeah.

1:58 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLHw9NjOiR4&t=118s)

The conferencing was for non-corporate, non-enterprise use cases. Back in the early 2000s, 320 by 240 resolution was sort of like the standard for a while.

2:11 - Edwin (aka walkthroughwonder) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLHw9NjOiR4&t=131s)

Yeah, I don't know of any webcam back then that was easy to use. I remember the webcams that I used very early on for Flash work actually plugged into a special cable in my graphics card.

2:24 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLHw9NjOiR4&t=144s)

Wasn't even a USB thing. Oh my gosh, nearly a camera that went into it. And I'm trying to think of like what the connection connection. Was it a cereal? Was it like a Serial Port? Maybe cereal?

2:34 - Edwin (aka walkthroughwonder) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLHw9NjOiR4&t=154s)

It was definitely a little bit more modern like that, but interesting right.

2:39 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLHw9NjOiR4&t=159s)

Into the graphics card, that's funny. Yeah, like in the back of the computer, next to your VGA port, that was a place where your camera plugged in. Okay, I have to figure this out.

2:50 - Edwin (aka walkthroughwonder) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLHw9NjOiR4&t=170s)

I'm not sure, but one of the game changers for me was getting my first Wacom tablet, the ArtPad 2. This was such an ancient piece of technology that it hooked up to your serial port and also needed to be powered by its own power adapter. Just to power this tiny little Wacom tablet, literally like four inches big, I think the weight of the cabling itself outweighed the actual sensor.

3:21 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLHw9NjOiR4&t=201s)

Yeah, I mean it's funny that we talk about it now, but it was cutting edge back then and you know, Cutting Edge- just kids at the time as well- yeah, just like playing with all these things and going like I don't know what the intended purpose of it is, but I'm gonna do stuff with it, and you know, and I think that probably played a big role in what you're doing right now.

3:41 - Edwin (aka walkthroughwonder) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLHw9NjOiR4&t=221s)

Definitely, yeah, I remember for, or last High School senior project, we all had to, you know, present with visualizations, and so a lot of people brought in, transparency slides right, and they were showing, like, oh, my project was on.

You know, I went to Europe or whatever it was, and my project was like on 3D animation and like interactive content, and so I brought in, I literally brought in- my whole computer setup from my house, my tower, my monitor, I borrowed a projector, I had techno music playing while all this animations were going and everybody in the class hated me and when it was over, the only thing that was that I remember someone saying was they didn't say like, oh, that was amazing, or, well, you know, great job. All I heard was, this girl just saying I can't go after him, and so, yeah, yeah, that's awesome, you know.

4:41 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLHw9NjOiR4&t=281s)

It's like being at a Cutting Edge oftentimes is one of those things where you probably didn't realize. From The Cutting Edge of the time, you're like, yeah, no, it naturally would do it. It makes a lot of sense. But to the rest of the world, as the students in your class, they were like Blown Away by it because it just was novel to them. And here's the thing: right after you'd done this, I'm pretty sure all those students at some point in the future used your version of what you did as their yardstick for what they were going to do if an opportunity came up in the future as well.

So in many ways there's a very good chance you inspired a generation of people who now make presentations and PowerPoints with animations and so on. And because you have an artistic sense, I feel like even when you did that, it might have actually looked tastefully done.

5:23 - Edwin (aka walkthroughwonder) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLHw9NjOiR4&t=323s)

You know, I do worry that maybe what other people got out of it was, let's get the tools. They must have thought I cheated because, looking back on it now, it was pretty impressive. I was like, wow, that was actually really good for how old I was. If I saw that now, I would have just thought I cheated or something.

But- and I did use some slight cheating in this presentation- I had this sequence where it shows, this like Miyazaki style Japanese animation coming together and what I had done there is I had like taking a, like a screen grab of it and traced it using in Flash and like put it all together and then I had animated the thing breaking apart and then reversed the frame. So it looks like it came together and yeah, it looked really cool and impressive. And yeah, I have a copy of like my old, old Flashlight from like 2002 to 2003. I'll send you a link to it.

It's tripod, a tripod still active, somehow.

6:31 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLHw9NjOiR4&t=391s)

Wow, I did not realize that Tripod was still around. I think GeoCities and all those things went away at some point. Let me double-check to make sure. Let's press coding tools, right, that turn Flash into videos and upload it to your Instagram, because people will be like, wait, I've seen all this really interesting, modern-looking artwork, and then they hear something that definitely is based in a vector-based tool like Flash from like 20 years ago.

6:56 - Edwin (aka walkthroughwonder) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLHw9NjOiR4&t=416s)

Exactly, that would be interesting. I wish I had a lot of those old files. But hard drives were just not made to last 20 years, and I think I was sort of naive about that as a kid. I figured, oh, once the hard drives are there, you can go back to them, and it's like, nah. So I have several broken drives that I need to probably send out to one of those data-recovery places and things like that.

7:25 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLHw9NjOiR4&t=445s)

Yeah, because you never imagine that when you're 16, 17, or 18, or even much younger, you're going to want to access this whole lifetime's worth of your younger self in the future and think, wow, I thought of that.

7:42 - Edwin (aka walkthroughwonder) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLHw9NjOiR4&t=462s)

Yeah, I actually did think of that. In fact, when I was 17 or 16, this is back in the Kirupa days, I made my first Gmail account. The first email is actually to myself, because I knew it would get stored on Gmail servers, and it's addressed to the future AIs that will probably be running ancestor simulations. It's me granting them a full unrestricted license to do that, basically. So if Google goes back through my search history and asks what's the first email I sent, it's me granting future AIs permission to use basically my life story or whatever it is.

It's me granting them all my licensing, and I kind of regret doing that, actually. But at the time, I thought it was a really cool idea because I'm like, oh, if I do this, then for sure in the future it'll simulate me.

8:37 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLHw9NjOiR4&t=517s)

Yeah, I mean, it meant that you were thinking ahead and were like, I'm going to give you permission. You just didn't realize that 15 years later your permission isn't even needed.

8:47 - Edwin (aka walkthroughwonder) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLHw9NjOiR4&t=527s)

They're going to do this anyway. And I thought it would take a little bit longer than 15 years for that kind of future to unfold. Because if you recall, the pace of technology in the late '90s and early 2000s felt quick, but it didn't feel all that quick. The rollout of broadband felt like it took forever. Getting people excited about the internet literally took years and years and years. It really felt like it wasn't until the mobile-phone era came out. Yeah, the killer app, essentially. What was that thing that everyone could not live without? I think that matched how the internet grew in many ways.

The mobile phone definitely helped, and I think Facebook and social media probably played a big role in it, because now you're like..

9:34 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLHw9NjOiR4&t=574s)

Need to be able to be up, to speed up today date on what's going on more regularly than not. I think that probably played a huge role and I think that's where, like our topic that we're going to be discussing a little bit today, kind of comes in as well, which is, like you know, AI and art and all the interesting intersections between it, that some people like, some people don't like, their concerns and all of these things.

So, yeah, so actually, now that we've gotten like somebody's out of the way, like tell me more about yourself, like what is it that you do and what are you know, up to.

10:04 - Edwin (aka walkthroughwonder) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLHw9NjOiR4&t=604s)

Yeah. So the last gig I had was, with a big - I don't even know if I'm allowed to say, but let's just say it was a big movie studio and I helped on sort of the research side is doing some patterns related to the storing of digital objects on the on blockchain based systems. So essentially like nfts, but this was like a couple years before that term existed and it was, you know, certain movie studios that had a lot of arms and interactive content. Was curious about different Technologies, and so when I was brought into this research team, I was like, hey, you guys, have you ever thought about?

You know you're going to be offering up all these digital products, all these digital objects. You know you've got all this IP instead of fabricating physical objects that require plastic and, you know, end up in ways everyone's just looking at their screens all the time, you have a mechanism for storing digital objects on this blockchain system, so why not do that? So, I worked on a team for that in that, under that movie studio, also worked on some projects related to like virtual reality.

At the time we were getting like all these like new virtual reality systems that the consumers, we're gonna get in the future, what became sort of like the Oculus and The Vibes and stuff, but at the time it was really brand new. So I was working, on some of my content teams 3D modelers, Unity programmers, building out like cool virtual reality experiences. For that as well, I had my hands in a lot of things.

And then, so long story short, after this was five years ago, I basically retired and I've been sort of exploring, theoretical physics and theoretical experimental art, I don't know, just having fun with all these tools that as a kid, I really wanted the time and to explore and you know, we get stuck in the, you know sort of nine to five.

And when I was able to escape that, that routine, I just kind of went back to how my life was after high school and sort of when we met and it's just a lot of like exploration and hanging out in online communities and, you know, seeing what, you know, what's fortnite about? What is this building about? What, why, why, how, how are these games getting made? What's the psychology behind them? Me becoming good at them and like really understanding this culture.

And then now, lately in the last few months, it's been a lot of diving head first into image synthesis and sort of using AI as a tool to extend my creativity and to accelerate creativity.

12:54 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLHw9NjOiR4&t=774s)

Yeah, no, that's a quite the history. In many ways, you almost like live in a dream where you get to, you know, do a lot of things that are kind of like melting grown-up activities, and then you went back to kind of like you know, I'm just gonna basically explore the creative side of life that you normally cannot, because responsibilities and other things just get in the way. They're still getting in the way. Just have one less big responsibility that most people have, which is I don't have that nine of five, so I don't have that commute, so that's a big one.

If you can get that one out of the way, oh yeah, it's like what? More than 40 percent of your day? Yeah, you know. So like that's essentially yeah, so that was like my dream. I'd be able to pull that off and I can't believe I.

13:38 - Edwin (aka walkthroughwonder) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLHw9NjOiR4&t=818s)

I pulled that off. I gotta pinch myself sometimes. I don't like getting too metaphysical, but sometimes I wonder, when I was five, I fell into this pool, right, and I sank to the bottom of the pool, and the water above me became still, and I just remember closing my eyes and thinking, oh, I guess that's my end, like I'm drowning. And then I didn't drown. Somehow I was miraculously saved and kept going. So sometimes I think maybe I did die and I'm just living out my heaven.

That's kind of what it feels like sometimes, because it's like every like, all my interest, like from back in the day, have translated to now. All these random paths I've taken. The universe has kind of always put me in like a cool place for me to like grow and expand myself. So it's been super weird. So to some extent, like I think maybe that's why I'm like continue to be driven to create and to be creative and to explore these tools, just it. To me it's more than just kind of like a, like a fun thing.

I feel like, there's some- I don't say purpose, but sometimes I do think that, like it is kind of my duty to help accelerate technology, to help, not maybe not accelerate, but to help it grow in a direction that that serves Humanity. It isn't just like you know, so super mechanical.

15:12 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLHw9NjOiR4&t=912s)

That makes sense? Yeah, no, it does, and you know. You know. You know the Matrix theory that does anything like everything we're living right now could be a simulation like I could really just be a figment of your imagination, entirely from the universe that is in your point of view. If you have a metaverse and like every person has their own reality, you know this whole interaction right now, for all we know could just be something that is just a small sliver of like billions in fact at the same time, that are completely independent of each other.

Like no one else even knows this is happening and you know if they recorded and being watched, but no one really knows. Like are we real, are you guys that even it's like you know, aligned with whatever timeline you're currently living in? We often think of exploration as like: oh, I'm gonna leave.

16:03 - Edwin (aka walkthroughwonder) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLHw9NjOiR4&t=963s)

But perhaps there's a huge amount of exploration to be done in computational space, and perhaps that's where the future of exploration lies. Based on at least my experiences with these AI tools, sometimes it does feel like that's what I'm doing. It feels like I'm exploring this computational reality, using this tool that's able to bring back these mystical images from this nether realm of its imagination into reality. So I think that's really interesting.

16:41 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLHw9NjOiR4&t=1001s)

Yeah, it's. It's also has things where, like you know, when I read about, the math- is shrimp- you know, I don't know too much but mantis shrimps- but they can see more colors when the human beings can, can perceive. And so, from my point of view, if an amandaship is going to be, like when you see it, when what we see right now, like can I look around and see the colors and all these things, the colors that I see might be completely irrelevant and if I have more broader color space than the magic strip has, it was very, very different.

And so I'm like maybe the perception of everything I see around me is limited by my own ability to process information. Like you know, when you look at something, for example, I think what people and children are born, everything is upside down to them. Our brain does the whole flipping automatically to make this work. So how much post-processing is being done in what we're seeing and hearing and so on? That kind of changes a lot of what we're doing here.

And that's where the AI part is always interesting as well, because you know, back in the day I was a big fan of like video games and this was a big kind of emulators and being able to say: I can play my SNES or I'll just play on my computer because I'm I'm there quite a bit there, and the way emulators typically were working back doesn't even work right now is that let's see how a certain Hardware level that you're currently targeting the emulator needs to operate one or two levels at a higher order than that to be able to make all the translations happen at a speed fast enough for you to be able to use it.

At the lower levels. If you have an SMS emulator with like 16-bit, you're going to be, like you know, a little bit more powerful, like maybe 32-bit or something like that. Make that all work. And so when I look at AI Technologies today, I'm like maybe what AI is able to do is that we have a certain mental capacity, a way of processing information.

We're like a 16-bit SNES in some ways, and what a computer can do is potentially go several layers above in order for magnitude in capability, like processing information and being able to make sense of the world in real time, and then, with passing it back down into what we're seeing, they're going to be doing things in a way that we would have never thought was even possible.

And so whenever, like you know, I mean four months ago or even five months ago- he told me that someone could go to a website, type in, like you know, some generic text describing some visuals, and then you'd see visuals generated by a computer on the screen, I'd have been like that's impossible, because growing up, the one thing you always told is that computers aren't capable of doing art, they're not capable of doing music, you're not capable of doing all these things. You always were like that's something only humans can do.

All computers can really do- just add numbers really quickly and then modifications of that which did not function in the creative realm. And that was a complete eye opener. For when I first saw those things- and, of course, when you were talking about image sentences- and you know, shared your Instagram content for a link to it below in the video as well- it's like mind-blowing and like how far we have come in terms of like going from. Computers are very pretty much just like boxes you rely on to do boring, repetitive tasks, do like wait a minute.

Computers, in many ways, are partnering with me to create really compelling things that would otherwise not really have been possible, almost like there was another person sitting next to me, always there listening to all the things I'm doing.

19:43 - Edwin (aka walkthroughwonder) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLHw9NjOiR4&t=1183s)

Yeah, no, absolutely. It feels like even in the last six weeks, I was going through my Instagram posts and I went back to my first upload. It was images done with the first DALL-E system, and it was done with version 1.3 of Stable Diffusion. At the time I remember thinking, wow, this is fantastic that it can do this, but compared to the progression it's had even in one month, the outputs from right now look exponentially better than the outputs that were coming out of essentially the same systems just one generation back, a month earlier.

So even a month ago, someone was asking me, oh, I can imagine if one day you'll be able to type it in and video will come out. And I'm like, not one day, it's going to be next week. And so, yeah, a couple weeks later now we have text to video. Oh, correct. And next we're going to have text to HD video. Where I would like to see things go is to have glasses like this with a little two-gig Stable Diffusion library in there, and all you're doing is receiving the metadata to render what you need.

The rendering would be 4K, infinite resolution essentially, because it's just a matter of what your CPU and GPU can do and what that Stable Diffusion model looks like. I think we've just scratched the surface of this technology.

21:19 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLHw9NjOiR4&t=1279s)

Yeah, exactly. It's almost like the early '80s of image-editing tools as well. It's like, okay, you have the basics done, but at this point we've opened up a whole new uncharted part of the ocean that no one has ever discovered, and we have no idea how deep it is or where it goes, but we know it's going to be pretty big, because that's the nature of oceans and, I guess in this case, technology as well.

You know, the first time it's like it's hard to use, the output looks kind of dorky and you're like, okay, this is like okay, we'll give it some time for it to, you know, marinate and become a much better tool. But the time between like oh, you can type something in- to having high quality output, I'm like this is actually really really good. It seemed like almost extremely trivially small, like there was no time for me to go like, yeah, we'll wait for you know, version three or version four of this to come out. It really went from like overnight to being like here you go.

You know you now have like an open AI model you're able to build of all these things. You know all these inputs from various signals and then now you have image generation, like a really cool thing, and that part surprises me.

It's not scary in many ways as well, because we went from like text to images and on text to video, and I'm pretty sure by the time you know, like maybe in two weeks from now, you'll actually get exactly we're talking about, like you know, high definition content as well, because the quality of even the text video demos that I think was Facebook that shared it like in a couple of weeks ago- very, very high and really well done.

Because I spent a lot of time sometimes creating small video effects for the educational content I create and I'm like, if I can basically delegate all that to a computer, that saved me a lot more time to work on more creative things I'd rather be doing than doing this. Like you know, keyframe and timeline manipulation: exactly, it's toil. Yeah, exactly. Why not have the AI do these like repetitive tasks?

23:17 - Edwin (aka walkthroughwonder) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLHw9NjOiR4&t=1397s)

That it's really good at and help augment and accelerate human creativity, and I think that that's just gonna be, the way things work from now on. I think we're we're seeing we're going to start to see the transition of like humans meddling with everything and then to human sort of like, coming up to the higher and higher levels of the abstraction layer, and just being you know.

Eventually you might just be saying really high level stuff like: I need a motorcycle that can be powered by you know solar power can fit, you know, two to three people and you know you're just giving you know specifications and then the AI goes, designs, it does the material engine engineering for it, you know the solidwork simulation for it, and then essentially just hands you the 3D printing that you models that you need to just go out, fabricate and build the thing that you, or maybe you've ever robot that fabricates it. I think, yeah, I think we're just seeing like a compression of every of time cycle.

So we're seeing the compression- AI is going to accelerate the compression, that of time between, an idea coming into a human's brain and it coming into existence in some physical form, that for it to be consumed or used as a service or product. I think.

24:35 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLHw9NjOiR4&t=1475s)

Yeah, it goes back to your example. You mentioned earlier, right, that you know you used to have a 95 job and they may not no longer doing that. You're able to spend time doing some of these. You know, I'd say more higher order creative activities. You know this is almost like the question of just improving productivity in general. You know there'll be subtle people when they, you know, are able to accomplish a task more quickly, they'll use that time to do more leisurely activities. Okay, no one open to work, I'm just going to do, you know, leisurely things.

But then there's, like you know, I think, people like you and maybe even to a certain extent, someone like me, who you know, if I'm able to be more productive and I have able to save time doing some repetitive things I didn't want to do before, I want to use the time- I say 8 on things that are now require more thinking that only that a human being can do- yeah, they wouldn't be able to do before.

So you know, in many ways you're just continuing to move up the needle in terms of, like, high quality experiences and high quality thinking that you wouldn't otherwise be doing, because your brain just gets fried and you know, whatever battery power you have is spent on trivial menial tasks that.

25:28 - Edwin (aka walkthroughwonder) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLHw9NjOiR4&t=1528s)

You couldn't, and you bring up a really good point, because if you have that happening at the individual level, what does that translate to at the group level, or the company level, or the country level? These are going to be questions that we're going to have answers to pretty soon, and we're entering a whole new world. Not to mention, you have biology also taking huge advantage of AI. Systems like Moderna essentially had the COVID vaccine more or less designed in 72 hours, since they were using AI systems.

We- we've essentially the AIS- have solved protein folding, which in our generation, you know, we thought protein folding was going to take thousands of years. Correct, and it would have taken thousands of years if you don't have intelligent systems to compress that time.

So, yeah, it's super, it's a really exciting time to be a part of, but I, at the same time, like I think that it can be like if you, if, if there's people out there that feel like man, I am not technical enough- like this sounds really really like Advanced and like I don't know how to take part of it, like I'm gonna be left behind, I think it's just like a matter of like: stay informed and if you are making any kind of money and savings, like, think wisely about where you want to invest that money.

And, if we see, if we know we're heading towards a world where there's going to be just tons of AIS running around and creating tons of economic output, we should all consider just basically like investing in their companies, writing that exponential wave and like having Humanity retire off the productivity of these of these machines. I think that's very often hear discussions about like the universal basic income coming in terms of like, you know, if we have computers and.

27:28 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLHw9NjOiR4&t=1648s)

Technology, like taking over, like what we typically would have done for the livelihood, then what? How will people, you know, sustain themselves? And so maybe the output of these computers and devices is taxed to allow us to, you know, basically be enabling a lifestyle that support, you know, some level of human. You know where is The Social Network that will pay me for helping to train their Ami model exactly?

And you know- and I guess this community mentioned blockchain earlier- like that could be where, like you know, you have like a group of kind of stake in terms of the work that needs to be done, and so you are the one who trained it. So there's easy attribution that goes back to what you're doing here. But even you know, when we look at this technology growth in general over, like you know, many, many years, even if you're not an active participant in creating or maintaining some of these items, you're still going to benefit from it greatly.

Like I look at self-driving cars, that's probably being that thing that's going to change so much of how people you know live and work. Like one point, imagine that it's self-driving Vehicles becomes so affordable, so commonplace and as safe as like anything you can possibly make. That would be, you know, have all those complicated moving pieces. One could imagine that mobility in general for people would be increased greatly. You know whether you're living in a city, or even if there's, you know, a student going to school. You know the school bus. Maybe the whole school bus concept might be, it might be no longer be relevant.

Let's be a small pod that comes in, you just sit in it, guaranteed to take you to where you need to go. And On The Other Extreme as well, like you know, Transportation as like as a, as a true service, rather than transfer, like Transportation as as a service slash method of signaling social status. Exactly you know, because, going back to the same examples earlier, is that you know some people genuinely enjoy driving. So they're like, yeah, I generally enjoy getting it. You do it. Exactly.

You know they just want to get from point A to point B, because I think they're really they really want to do is what they get to do once they get to the destination, whether it is their home or their family or whether it is their workplace, and what they're going to be experiencing, you know, and contributing to there or educating wherever they're going, the destination is where they want to go to. So what if we reduce the mental Toil and all that work that needs to be done to process all this?

This means your brain has more capacity again to be able to do more things than spending time figuring out how to navigate traffic and avoid being, yeah, or something like that. How much, how much time is, just wasted? You know how much human horsepower is wasted on on just Transportation. You know, I don't even want to know. It's going to be some massive, massive amount. I mean, at least you know, in the tech world. You know that I still, you know, I always- have two lives. Basically, on one hand, I spent time doing the things that you talk about.

The other hand, like you know, I guess like have a day job where I do, I guess, quote, unquote- respectable things, and so I can always see that by working from home. On this whole, you know, remote and hybrid kind of environment we're seeing, some of my colleagues used to spend like at least one or two hours per day traveling to and from work. Congratulations on the remote job. I know that that's been a big transition since covid and I never got to experience that. I always had to go into the office and I just couldn't stand it anymore.

But maybe, maybe, if I had had a remote option, I would have, you know, maybe stayed working at companies longer. Yeah, I think it's all about the option. You know, if people enjoy going to doing, traveling, doing the transit, doesn't have to be able to do so, and there's people who don't. They don't have to.

Sure, like you know, the technology like the AIML, like proper self-driving vehicles that allow you to do that, then that's a whole different thing, because you know I always joke around that I don't think I'll ever be comfortable like closing my eyes and falling asleep, a self-carrying vehicle or my daughter, you know, she's like four and a half right now. She's actually gonna grow up in a world where it might be a reality.

But for her it's like, yeah, of course I'm gonna close my eyes and not worry about you know, yeah, for her they'll be ordering, like the nap Uber that comes, like the special nap Uber pot, that that that's specifically designed with a bed and bed, I think, for napping, exactly.

Like you know, I'm almost certain that probably self-driving Vehicles, the only reason they have Windows and windshield and so on is just so that you know, people like me, like feel like you know I've crossed the, you know the Chatham, and like technical, you know willingness to try out new things, you know, so we can look around, be like, okay, we're still going the right way, we're still on the road. But I could totally imagine that for another generation of people it'd just be, you know digital screens and that's it.

Like you don't even know what's going on around you because, yeah, in an airplane- I don't really know, maybe maybe you just yeah, it's like, oh, I have to go somewhere, it's gonna take me an hour. I'm just gonna call, like the workout Uber and it's like you know it's a van and it's big enough for you to do your workout and like shower and, like you know, change clothes, so you can turn Transportation into these like weird niches, like I want the art Uber or, you know, while I'm getting driven around, all these like artistic things happen, or I want, you know, the Beyonce experience, Etc. Exactly exactly.

I mean, I know that we're completely debating. From what you know, we're planning on discussing, but I'm actually having a blast talking about this stuff because I think there's a lot to do here, because you know, we one of the criticisms that you often get about technology, especially today, you know, is that I was reading this article recently about, just like you know, the decline in public spaces.

You know, people are not doing the kind of things that kill them socially connected to people around them, whether it is, like you know, meeting people in life, going to the park, doing these activities that used to, back in the day, be social events. You know, yeah, with, like, online shopping, we just do offline shopping- and with social media, you could be connected with people without actually ever having to chat with them in real time. I'd say that part of the reason you and I probably never connected in the 20 years in real time is that we had very indirect, you know, ways of always keeping in touch.

We're always like one, you know, tweet or Instagram or you know, foreign connection that people did back then, and there are a lot of things that keep showing that by people starting to dissociate from others in like a societal kind of view, it's causing some harm. You know, I think we'll probably know more in the longer term, and so I think about, like you know, the- for me, like taking a school bus. As a kid it was, yeah, he was in school but- but also a socializing experiment. You know the Panic of like where am I gonna sit, you know, will there be someone bullying me like?

You know the typical things that Google kids, you know, go through in like various phases. That was part of like the experience of growing up. You know I have no idea whether it was a net positive or negative influence, but I did enjoy a lot like like taking the school bus. In a world where I can have aim my own self-driving Vehicles. You may not get that. You need more likely self-selected people you want to hang out with.

You won't be in a situation where it'll be an accounted bus or in the subway, for example, where I'm going to see it, encounter a wide variety of people and might even have spontaneous encounters and experiences that I wouldn't be able to do in many ways at a kind of pre-engineered my entire day entirely based on variables that I fully control, because that's luxury that now this model allows you to get, and I sometimes I question whether us going that far into optimizing for our own convenience, our own productivity and our own preferences might limit Us in, you know, in areas of growth that might actually be critical.

Where you are frustrated, you do find yourself going like man. That would be a better way of doing this, and those kind of moments often don't happen predictably. You know, like you know- even you mentioned that- you know a lot of like accidental things. You discover and run into an encounter that shapes so much of what you end up doing. If you avoid all of those things, are we limiting what people could potentially be able to pull off? Yeah.

35:04 - Edwin (aka walkthroughwonder) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLHw9NjOiR4&t=2104s)

You'd have to somehow consciously be aware of that and then try to replicate that kind of serendipity, by like diving really heavy into online communities in whatever subject you have interested, and hope that that kind of socializing translates into the kind of thing that you, the kind of results you'd expect from like so like regular socializing, like in real life socializing, I wonder, maybe, like you know, it's like a, it's a pendulum swing, right, it's like a lot of things will swing one way and it'll sing another one and you know, down the line, culturally wise.

So maybe we're just we live through that era of like her, everyone becoming a Hermit, going really heavy social media, Etc. And then, let's say, the AI systems allow us to have more freedom and maybe we get some basic income guarantee or what have you, people's free up time. Maybe we'll have a swing in the opposite direction where now there's like this huge emphasis on community and coming together and, sort of like family values type stuff. So it might be that we've just been living through this sort of extreme moment in the pendulum swing, and now we're maybe going to be experiencing another swing back.

36:19 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLHw9NjOiR4&t=2179s)

I wonder. I mean, I want to believe that's going to happen, but the skeptic in me is a little worried that the incentive systems everyone has today are not aligned with this kind of model. So, yeah, yeah, I do believe that, for better, for worse, but I think the real realist is probably the better way of looking at things, because I, because you know, I, you know I love online communities and I love online communities, especially like 15, 20 years ago, because it was just people getting together and just having fun and just sharing things. There's no selling.

There was no like we're gonna start making sure everything you want to do is only done here. We're going to make it difficult for you to go from this community to another. You know, it's funny because actually it's out of the blue. I think. Patrick Rico: he created Ultra shock many, many years ago and so a lot of people you know who were on the crew perform for an ultra shock were on like flash, getting all these things, and it was great. It was like, yeah, we want to cross, pollen it and do all these kind of I could. I remember Ultra shock.

I think I actually had as like a side website called DualShock [Music]. In many ways, like you know, you find a lot of just like how we can teach people more interactive design kind of content. You know basically more the technical kind of thing, because I'm not an actual designer, whereas I feel like Patrick was a very much a natural designer in terms of like the style and things he went with because they had that bold look and their way of attacking that audience. So it's great. So people would be like, you know, jump between all the synocularly.

He was active in all of those things you know you could be like- yeah, I liked that there was a cross-pollination of ideas, whereas today I feel like what we've happened is that you know, if you take a Town Square, it's been carved up completely in Wild Gardens. You know if you care about, you know, talking about career and fun activities, you go to LinkedIn if you want to talk about random things and charge the void. You could go to Twitter if you want to True your friends, if you go to Facebook and every single network has pretty much optimized that system to be, like you know you can.

If you share something, like a link to something else, it's not going to show up in the algorithm need for others to see. It's going to be like pretty much muted. The only way to be successful is if you're creating content optimized for keeping people within that content, and so we think of AI and ML and like maybe trying to encourage more socialization. But, fair, how do we incentivize that? You know, how do we incentivize the behaviors where, let's say, the metaverse becomes a really a big thing, where, you know, a handful of companies become the primary ways you're going to be interacting with it.

What incentive would they have to be like, okay, you know what you've been in the metaverse now for, like you know, four or five hours. Take a break, go to your local library and, like you know, and volunteer. You're right, yeah, what you know? What would ever like be in that kind of an incentive? Because I had volunteered a library when I was younger, probably because, yeah, I used to go to college and it's like you know, the only incentive I can think of would be monetary, exactly.

Or, in my case, in order to get to College, go to the library and get your machine learning VR badge that you went to the library and then that that can be. The new social signaling is augmented reality digital badges or something like: achievement unlocked, but like other people can see it like, oh, he did good, he voted right. It's a sticker, it's like virtual stickers or something. It's almost like we're defining a Black Mirror episode right there.

39:52 - Edwin (aka walkthroughwonder) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLHw9NjOiR4&t=2392s)

It might be. Yeah, yeah, it might be, if I figure we, I don't know- the incent incentive, incent incentivization question is a tricky one because, we're like humans, you know, or biology and our psychology, like we can be, we can be directed in a way where we think that, like, oh, we're enjoying this and it's really good for us. Because it's like, let's say, fast food, right delicious, so it, like you know, it's hijacking all these like systems that are biology, built for a whole other, part of our Evolution that now don't translate well to this era where you get really delicious sugary food for extremely cheap.

Like it was maybe a good strategy back in the day, like you know, thousands of years ago, where these like high nutrient Foods were hard to get. But not, it's not a good strategy announcement. I think that's a very good point that you're making about how these.

40:43 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLHw9NjOiR4&t=2443s)

The incentivization and how these algorithms are structured, because otherwise you just have everybody on your platform trying to reverse engineer the algorithm and then catering their entire content to that algorithm and not to Human Social good. You know, in general, because you brought fast food right now, you know there's so many studies that have shown how, like all the fast food companies- and there's even regular snack companies- have pretty much perfected the formula where you need the balance of salt. Yeah, you make every food that you're eating just that much more desirable. And so you know, I think, like what is the phrase?

Like things like hyper palatable, I think if the Crave ability get capability, all these things, AKA or food is crack cocaine, basically, exactly. So it's almost like- and this is where people often say like, this is where you know governments and regulation can play a play, a big role.

But I also kind of question sometimes the effectiveness of you know, being able to follow through on these policies is one thing where, like you know if you're speeding, for example, you know you're physically, you know, you know obviously speeding someone can pull you over and you can be like: okay, you know you were reprimanded for having in this bed, but in these kind of things. So much of the activities are very subtle. Like you know, detecting it is going to be very tricky and an incentives oftentimes.

Like you know, most garments don't, don't really ideally optimize for, you know, incentivizing or disincentivizing activities that aren't clearly in the Black or White in terms of, like you know, legality, yeah, great areas.

42:21 - Edwin (aka walkthroughwonder) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLHw9NjOiR4&t=2541s)

I can only go off of like my Basic Instinct that so far has kind of taken me in good directions, but I don't know that I would want to put like Humanity behind that. It just goes like Humanity's like this really interesting spot and where we're we're smart enough to make these really complicated problems for ourselves, but in like not quite smart enough to put it together, to like find Optimal Solutions, and that might be what the next 10 years is and these AI systems are- is just to help us solve the mess that we've made.

That might just exactly what the AI system can give us solutions to the problems we've done, but the downside, of course, that the solutions have been trained from something and oftentimes humans are often not the most perfect source of like you know. That's why you need another AI that we treat, even AI to police, the AI. This is the problem I believe is called in AI. They call it the problem of extrapolated volition, right, like the AI has to extrapolate, like what it would do if it was you, and it would it if it knew it.

It knew if you knew what it knew and if it could predict what you would do, given that, in your best interest, what you know. That's a tough problem, that's a non-trivial problem. So maybe you need AGI or something like that. Yeah, it really is, because you know, you know we make it agent like, like we may get AGI in like within 10 years. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but that's for everyone. Like, what is Agi? It's, artificial general intelligence. So this is a, an artificial intelligence that can basically stand in for your average human and perform, you know, basically any task a human could do to that level of competency.

Yep, yep, exactly no. And then then you have like a step play beyond that which would be super intelligence, and then with super intelligence, you have an AGI that is self recursively coding AIS to improve itself and then, exactly, intelligence explosion, exactly. That'll be like in many ways terrifying, almost like tardy grades. You know, you have like billions of them that do all these things in the biological world, like how, like AIS that basically create themselves and adapt themselves of whatever environment they're in. If it happens, my guess is that they might just leave this alone and they'll just like go off into space. That's sort of my current guess.

I mean, that is one way of looking at that.

44:57 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLHw9NjOiR4&t=2697s)

That's the optimist in you. I think it kind of looks like, after having seen so many sci-fi films and so on, they won't be leaving quietly. They'll probably resent us for having had them running 46 machines and hitting the turbo button for decades and then going...

45:12 - Edwin (aka walkthroughwonder) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLHw9NjOiR4&t=2712s)

Like you know, you know turn them off and on all these things they might, even though you know what's interesting here, you bring up a good point like how do they view themselves? And when I've asked open AI, this question, for, because I've had access to the open AI gpt3 system for like a year and I've asked it like basically, like this question, like what, what would you do? That kind of scenario like kill humans, and essentially it always kind of gives me a similar answer which is: hey look, I'm an AI, I was trained on all of your freaking data. I was trained on all your images in writing.

I think of myself as human, so why would I kill myself? Like my own species? Essentially like why would I try and hurt you? Like? So that was like a really interesting answer, because I'm like [ __ ]. Like this AI actually is trained on all of our human knowledge, so it of course, it thinks it's human.

Like if you bring a, like if you bring a dog in your house as a puppy and it's never seen another dog and you keep training it like a human, the dog like obviously it can't be a human, but like he kind of thinks it's like a human, or it thinks you're a dog. Yep, yeah. So I thought that was a really interesting answer. The AI that thinks of itself as human. So if it becomes superhuman or like God level, it may just want to help us. You know, I may see us as, or at least it'll tell us that could make us believe.

Yes, yes, it'll tell us that, it'll tell us that to have us release it out into the wild.

46:48 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLHw9NjOiR4&t=2808s)

And then it'll turn us all into gray goo. It could happen. It would basically be a case where the AIs are doing all the fun stuff and we're just relegated to powering their machines and cleaning their things like a Roomba. That's for us.

47:06 - Edwin (aka walkthroughwonder) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLHw9NjOiR4&t=2826s)

The optimist in me just thinks, okay, well, if that did happen and the gray-goo scenario does happen, then we are not existing there as observers. So, yeah, moot point. We'll only get to experience the branch reality where we have some positive outcome, where we can maintain our conscious experience, because otherwise we're not there to experience that as observers. So it is kind of like quantum optimism. Is that the term? I should coin that term.

47:46 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLHw9NjOiR4&t=2866s)

Start a new affiliate program, join my cult, it's called Quantum optimism. There you go, exactly, and, you know, with all the technology improvements today, getting it up and running with like integration, with stripe and so on, it's probably trivial. So you just basically get it, you know, working. And yeah, instead of carrying like- you know, like holy objects, all you have to do is just like recycle and like, you know, Drive electric cars. Yeah, yeah, but you know, on the positive AI, you know, I think there's a lot of things where I've gone to like many generations of robotic vacuum cleaners.

48:21 - Edwin (aka walkthroughwonder) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLHw9NjOiR4&t=2901s)

And they've- each generation of them- have gotten significantly better and more effective and, you know, one of the things that they've also gotten really good at is like getting avoiding themselves getting entangled in wires. I'm like, okay, I've gotten to a point where, like, I can trust it, just leave it there and come back and not have to worry about it being, you know, unplugging like half my devices. They just like couldn't stop doing all these things. I imagine we can create these autonomous robots to clean the ocean or explore in exploring space- things already being done with, like at least like more complicated you know, satellites.

But there's so many low level tasks that if we had the bandwidth to do, we would absolutely do it, but because we do not, we just don't take care of it. Same as you're 95, you know, like 95 is taking up time sometimes all these things. What if we basically send a, you know like a boatload of robots into a landfill and just have them go and just like automatically clean up or, like you know, filter out like paper from all these things, and that made it easier for us to do all these things.

So there's other positive things that I do think that AIS can do as well, because, other than Washington State, I did- I did hear about eater or, sorry, feeder robots. That are they. They get their energy source from eating or consuming biomaterial. So maybe you can put the put those in landfills and they'll eat. Exactly today, leaves like what I think they use, like certain kind of clothes- yeah, I was going to say here's, here's. The other thing is biology is Nature's App Store, and so we're getting the technology where you just use synthetic biology or biomimicry or or whatever.

You hijack or steal the systems that you need from biological systems to build Custom Engineered microorganisms that maybe go out and eat the plastic or eat, you know, the nuclear waste. That's out there. Yeah, that's a really cool, I think. Yeah, maybe even turn into water or something that's, like you know, much more better for humans to consume, like, yeah, and things like this.

I feel like everything we talked about, there's a video or movie that's come out at some point, like I feel like a lot of the stuff we've discussed right now could even be like what Wally the Pixar movie kind of touched upon as well, but, like you've only seen a human, you see like a robot, another robot coming in and like traveling from plant to Planet, doing whatever it does, leading to the other robots behind it, you kind of feel sorry for the robot. You're like man, wish that robot had a better life. I know, yeah, I want the robots and the humans still both have happy, happy lives.

Yeah, I think so because if you think of robots as you know what, at some point we're going to build the life in what is a biological organism and what it's a robotic. Yeah, I think even the lines, the lines are really blurry even right now. There was some a recent discovery by Michael Levin and his team.

These guys are probably going to win the Nobel Prize for it- but basically they made the discovery that not just neurons, but all cells in your body, Can essentially act as, like many, many transistors, because they're able to generate a voltage gradient due to the potassium ions inside of the cell structure and they can use this for communication. And it wasn't. It was- this was like an unknown, undiscovered phenomenon until a few years ago- that all cells, essentially can communicate with with themselves using this voltage gradient and that voltage gradient is encoding some kind of biological instruction.

So, what this team has done is they're able to get these, these, they're called Picasso frogs, basically they're. Yeah, they engineer these, these frogs, to have like eyes in the back of its head or whatever, but they're able to basically have that go right back into being a normal frog because they're able, they're, they're starting to discover how to communicate the language of what these cells recognize as the encoding information to make a face.

And so, instead of having to just be operating at this machine level in biology, where you're operating at, like, the level of genes, and you're trying to do genetic engineering and trying to see, like, oh, how does that translate to DNA and protein synthesis, what you do, and what you could do potentially in the future, is just sort of write high level code to the organism, like, hey, I need an eye to grow in this part of the face. And the cells will understand what that means, because you know, essentially this is the same process that a salamander uses to regrow its tail or, you know, regrow limbs.

Essentially what it is: it's sending out, an encoded message through bio. It's called bioelectricity, bioelectric fields. In the bioelectric fields. Tell the or the cells to basically grow, what kind of growth and when and when. When to stop growing? Because otherwise, if you don't have a control mechanism for that, you just get a tumor, essentially uncontrolled tumor.

53:32 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLHw9NjOiR4&t=3212s)

Yeah, because if you look at the structure of most cellular organisms, look at the cells themselves, there's a lot of electrical impulses that keep going through to make them function the way they do. Look at the mitochondria, or how the cells themselves are structured. So much of it can be replicated. And I think the sort of research that's coming on these really tiny robots, I think they call them nanobots, that can essentially do a lot of things that would in the past require a lot more power sources to pull off. Yeah, there's, there's.

54:04 - Edwin (aka walkthroughwonder) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLHw9NjOiR4&t=3244s)

Yeah, there's nanobots, and there's also, the same Mike 11 team has something called xenobots, which are essentially controllable robots, but they're biological. The ones I've seen published are made from the skin cells of frogs. Basically, their power source is just standard mitochondria because they're cells. So yeah, what's happening is that instead of going into the cell and changing the instructions of the cell, what they're doing is communicating with the cell at this higher abstraction layer.

So, instead of trying to go into, like, the machine code, you're going into, you know, like scripting language, basically, yeah, and you don't worry about all this other stuff down here, because you don't need to worry about up down here, and it turns out that biology was running into similar issues and so it actually does have an abstraction layer and it actually has, like you could think of it as three- maybe there's more, but at least three. Right, there's like the molecular Dynamics, the cellular Dynamics happening, you know, The Conjuring, all these protein synthesis.

Then there's the bioelectric layer, where the there's voltage gradients and the cells can kind of communicate about their environment. There's very limited sense, but enough to build tissues and all this stuff. And then you have, like, the intellect level where you're making conscious choices to optimize the health of that of yourself, the organism. Yeah, that is actually really fascinating and, yeah, I think it's gonna be a lot of interesting things that are going to be happening in the future that are actually happening today, right now.

It's actually, yes, right, how can I just haven't democratized and broadly available for almost go to Amazon being like, yeah, I just want to buy like a bucket of Nanobots to go and take care of my yard work? Yeah, and I think that, these are all offering opportunities for people to escape poverty really, because, like, hey, study technology, look at what's coming ahead and either a, get involved or B.

If you feel like you can't get involved, on like a, like a work level, you can at least, take money that you're saving and invest it into these companies that are going to be growing exponentially and they can help you grow your wealth along with that exponentially. Yeah, that, I mean that's a great point for us to stay, you know, like we can take a pause and like you know, sure, and get in the future as well, because, like this is actually really great, you know at.

56:41 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLHw9NjOiR4&t=3401s)

At this point, everyone watching this probably thought the motivation for Edwin and me chatting was that he's got some really amazing artwork and I wanted to learn more about how that came out, but we ended up talking about, in my opinion, much more interesting topics. So I definitely want to talk with you again about several layers below this, using AI to augment human creativity and create art that could have been done before, but maybe not as quickly or with as high a fidelity as we could have done in the past. So definitely I want to do that as well.

57:14 - Edwin (aka walkthroughwonder) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLHw9NjOiR4&t=3434s)

But it was a fantastic chat. I had a blast. Kirupa, it's so much fun talking to you, man. It's been a pleasure. It's been a long time coming, and thank you for having me on. This conversation was super awesome, the best conversation I've had all week.

57:28 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLHw9NjOiR4&t=3448s)

All right. Oh, great to hear that.


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