 103.9 FM, WZO Radio Knoxville. Ladies and gentlemen, Digital Freethought Radio Hour. Hello and welcome to the Digital Freethought Radio Hour on WZO Radio 103.9 LP FM right here in Knoxville, Tennessee. We're recording this on Sunday morning, October 31st, Halloween 2021. It's a summery roads or a doubter five, and as usual we have our co-host Wombat on the line with us. Hello Wombat. Happy Halloween. Happy Halloween. And our guest today is George Brown, the second and a half, formerly from Brooklyn. Hello. Hello. Good morning. Digital Freethought Radio Hour is a talk radio show about atheism, free thought, rational thought, humanism, and the sciences. And conversely, we'll also talk about religion, religious faiths, gods, holy books, and superstitions. If you get the feeling that you're the only non-believer in Knoxville, well, you're just not. Here we have a group of over a thousand atheists. It's called Atheist Society of Knoxville, and we'll tell you more about that after the mid-show break. Wombat, what's our show going to be about today? It's called Atheist Society of Knoxville. The acronym is also ASK. I love it. I love it. Ask. Be sure you ask those questions. Gotta keep asking questions. This is a great little business card too. When I saw that, I was like, this is the group. This is the group. This is the best group. So, hey, today we're going to be talking about robot-controlled pastors, or if John was here, robot past us. I think that would be a good one. If it's going to be a good conversation, but before we get into it, I'm going to throw it up to one of my favorite times where we talk to everybody that's here, see what they've been up to. We'll throw it up to George. George, what you've been up to. Let's get to see you. I can't remember. What? You can't remember. It's one of the aspects of being old. You just forget stuff. You know, it is Halloween, right? One. Yeah, it's the monster. Well, I bumped into a guy in the supermarket, but I thought I was going to talk about that later on in this show. Sure, sure, sure, sure. We could talk about it second half for sure, because I want to, again, robot past us. Tell me about this monster overdose that you just had. Oh, it's terrible. Here, halfway between Knoxville and Chattanooga, there are two supermarkets in my town out of six that sell Jewish products, Jewish food products. And of course, as you know, I am an organic Jewish atheist. So, you know, I miss my old soul food from my grandmother. And like Jewish commercial food has been a big corporate thing. You know, it's like one company in New Jersey has kind of cornered the market in all Jewish food that's retail, you know, in the big stores. Sure, sure. And they've been, this company has like been bought and sold and bought and sold and bought and sold, you know, by an investment conglomerate and then sold to somebody else. And they used to make all their stuff here in the United States. And all of a sudden, like, you know, I go to the supermarket and it's all coming from the Mediterranean. And I thought, what is going on? You know, the gefilter fish is from Morocco. They got Jews all around the world. You're a Jew in Tennessee, basically. Yeah. Well, I'm saying this stuff will use, it all used to be made in the United States. Ah, okay. Okay. And then, and like, what? They've third-worlded the whole thing, you know. So, I mean, the matzah is coming from Israel. The gefilter fish is coming from Morocco. The borscht is from somewhere in the U.S. The wine they sold off. Where'd you get the matzah from and why'd you get so much of it? I just, well, the thing is, you know, real official matzah is very boring. I mean, it's, let's face it, it's like eating cardboard. Sure, sure. It's as tasty as cardboard. But you can put stuff on the matzah and it's really good. Okay. So, I found I could go into the store and I could get matzah with onion powder and salt and poppy seeds and stuff like that on it. So, I went on a binge. Ah, there it is. And what, this is unleavened bread, you know. And it's like eating lead balls, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I got very sick. I'm sorry to hear that, I'm sorry to hear that. And then I had to look it up online and see, you know, it's, the internet is... Thank you for matzah balls. Yeah. Yeah, the cure for eating too much matzah is just stop eating it, you know. It's just one pink bottle. That's it. It's just like, you get this, get a bunch of this. Yeah, so anyway, I'm recovering now. Yeah, I've been trying to work on my binges. I've rediscovered pancakes and I don't like, I don't like the feeling by the time you reach here or what is it, the 13th pancake? Or you're just like, why am I this, what's going on here? And you have like 14 more to go and you're just like, I need to stop. Pancakes for me is just like, you can't have three because it takes too long to make them. But you can't have like 10 because you'll die at the process. So like, what's the perfect number to like make and all that stuff? Yes, hard. Larry, how you been? What's going on with you? Oh, I started working on a new job this week. Oh, you just haven't worked any job for a lucky year and a half because COVID. And I'm old, but it's interesting. And I'd like to hold off on the details for a while until I feel more secure about talking about it. But when you're ready to drop the album, I'm ready to listen to it. Yeah, you got a whole week of employment behind me. Okay, so Larry, let me tell you something. You always in your back pocket have voice acting or narration or something. Or something that you could do right now. There are websites that want your buttery smooth Southern draw ready to go. Is this like, do you want to buy some shoes? I don't have a draw. You can make it happen. You can make it happen. But I guess I could talk about civil war. Oh, that's good too. That's real good. But yeah, you got a killer voice. You should use it. You got it. It's seasoned. Let it roll. I think if Google it, you'll be, I can do it. I can see what I can do. You sound really authentic, you all. Yeah, yeah. There's a fun website called Fiverr. If you ever want to check it out, it's Fiverr with two Rs. Basically you type in any random hobby that you like or something that you want to do. And there will be people who need that skill and they'll pay you five bucks a pop to be able to do it. And so like, if you are good with a mic, they'll be like, hey, we need someone who's good with a mic who sounds like this. So when you say these four words, it's like, boom, you say the four words. And next thing you know, they may be in a commercial somewhere, but you got $5. Hey, I'll take you. These are these. These are the people who call me up from India to sell me car insurance. Maybe maybe they may want to be like, Hey, can you ask someone for car insurance? And so we can record it and use it as a play. You don't know what you're contributing to, but you do get five bucks. And sometimes that's right. Check it out. Guys, I want to tell you something that I thought was interesting last week. I wanted to talk about it, but we didn't have the appropriate time to set up. So this time I wanted to talk about something that was kind of interesting to me. I am a big fan of global atheist news is run by John Richards. He's been a member on this show on number of times. And one of his updates on global atheist news is stories from around the world with that relate to religion and specifically atheism. One of the coolest stories that he brought up was the idea that a lot of churches are bringing up that they're upset that their pastors have become AI. And I was like, what does that even mean? Well, I looked it up and it turns out there's a growing phase of people relying on AI apps or machines that you can pull into your home or into a congregation to give program sermons and algorithm based answers to religious questions to support the church to help people get connected with God through the use of technology. I know it sounds crazy. Trust me, you take the technology out. It still sounds crazy to me either way. But what's really, really funny is like there's a passion for moving churches towards higher level technology where they use AI to hear people's complaints. And what an algorithm does is hear the complaint, process it with the database and then output a statement or an answer that's just as indirect, inconclusive and misleading as any pastor would give. And the funny example that they did in the video is like a lady was like, is there a heaven? And the AI pastor was like, well, Jesus says it's easier to get into heaven than it is for a camel to go through an eye of a needle. And I'm like, that didn't answer the question whatsoever. But it's like almost exactly what a pastor would say in his own way too. And the cut video after that was a pastor being very angry that there could be potential for AIs to replace pastors because it's like, well, that's never happened because robots don't have souls. We don't either. Pastors don't. Well, I know we've brought up a lot of questions Larry. Nobody does. Yeah, it seems like it would be, would it be any easier to prove that a robot has a soul than a human being has a soul? Larry, you think? Well, first you got to prove this whole is real. If they actually exist, then we can go looking for them. Once we have one that we can test in a lab and find out what kind of attributes they have. Yeah. Then we can start examining other things to see if they might exist there too. But at this point in thousands of years, the religion has pushed fear about your soul and where it's going to be after you die. They've never produced one and never even given us evidence that there was one. No, there have been, how do I put it? There's never been good evidence. There's have been people who say, hey, I died and I saw my grandma or I died and I went to like a white place. Or I felt really good. As most doctors would tell you, that's not death. That's your death. And your brain goes through some awfully strange stuff when it's deprived of oxygen and you're getting closer and closer to death. It's going to, with a lack of stimuli, it's going to start producing its own. What about when people say, hey, I listened to this really good song that was a Christian song and I just got filled with the Holy Spirit. And that was above and beyond me. I couldn't have had this feeling without having a spiritual connection to God. While spiritual connection is one thing, actually having a spirit, a physical spirit or a supernatural spirit is something else. I mean, a team, a sports team, we'll talk about their team spirit. You talk about being down in the dumps and maybe in low end spirits, but that's just your low end and your emotions. It's not an actual spirit where what they're doing is using equivocation to muddy the subject. I can tell you this. And George, I'd like to get your feedback on this. I do actually kind of like the idea of AI robots because, you know, have you seen, I know Jews don't have this, but have you ever seen what a confessional is in Catholic Church? Yes. Yes. I can address that. You can. Okay. I'm saying, wouldn't it be better to talk to a robot than a national person who walks out and is just like, do you hear what Mary, do you want to hear what Mary just told me about? It's kind of crazy, right? Well, you know, I, my mind flashed in talking about the business side of this. There, there was a TV series. I think it was in the 1990s called Bali Kiss Angel. Okay. It's an Irish sitcom. It ran for a number of years. And it's about an English priest who is sent to a little village in Ireland to officiate there. And all his trials and tribulations that happened. But the very first episode shows a truckload of Italian confession booths, modern sleek Italian confession booths on top of a truck. And one of them falls off and goes rolling down the hillside. And the local entrepreneur is going to go into business selling these confession booths. Okay. They're, they're like ready to, ready to implement. You know, they have the doors for the piece to come in one side. Yeah. It's an oval metal container with a door on one side for the priest and the door for the parish and around the other side. I found that's the very first shot in the series is this. Yeah. I feel like the appeal with a confession booth is that one, you get to talk to somebody about something. Maybe it's not in the format of like what a professional therapist would be able to provide or offer, but you still get the basal. I am at least talking to another human being about a problem that I have. And there's a lot of value in hearing yourself put thoughts into words and functionally, you know, format them in a way that's communicative to both someone else and maybe for you to hear what you're saying and appreciate the sentiments that you're willing to offer about a, maybe a really difficult situation that you're going through. But also it also provides you privacy to have that blank wall between the two of you. And I find if you had a robot, couldn't that like give you both at the same time you're talking to somebody and you get a, what do you think, Larry? Well, I think that we ought to step back just for a second and consider how much power that gives the church to the preacher. When everybody in their congregation, their village, whatever comes in and tells them their deepest, darkest secrets, it's not to be ignored, especially at those congregants or children. And these preachers are coming across as men of God and to be totally trusted and then they aren't trustworthy. So it's a very, very dangerous position for the congregants to be in and a lot of power for the church to have. I can also tell you it's kind of scary to leave the church when you know there's a dude who knows all your deepest, darkest secrets. And if there was a way that we could get an AI preacher that, of course, the AI is a high technology device and technology is notorious for recording and playing back and taking samples and all that. If we could get some kind of guarantee that the AI would not be recording your conversation, then I think it would be worthy to pursue that way there wouldn't be a person out there with all your secrets. But how would we guarantee that? I'm sorry, I'm laughing because I'm thinking the punchline is playing in my head and you guys don't know what I'm laughing about. Is this robot preacher or priest? Is this robot in the cloud? Yeah, probably. I mean, the cloud is... The heavenly cloud, basically. The heavenly cloud. This is cloud stuff to me as this old BS, you know. It's a server somewhere. It's a service somewhere. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a physical box somewhere that hides your information. And who's going to run this priest? Is it going to be Google or is it going to be Facebook? I mean, she was... Master of Fire, there's a privacy internationally, you know. If there is God who knows what you are thinking and knows when you are awake. When you are sleeping and knows when you are awake. If there's a God like that, it's Facebook. I would say this. I see some immediate benefits with having an AI pastor compared to an actual one because that human who knows everything is valuable and just as valuable as I am. And that could lead me to a lot of situations where there's a human being who knows not only the deepest secrets I have, but everyone else around me. And that's such a power imbalance that I don't know if I want someone like that in a community that I live in. But the flip side would be if it is a cloud-based network and it's owned by a corporation or a company who don't necessarily have my best interests at heart, how do I get that guarantee that they're not recording my data or implementing it or mirroring it in some way where they have now demographic information on me and they can use that information against my will or for their best interests in that mind. That sucks too. Larry, what's up? Well, we're talking about the Catholic Church right now, but there are a lot of churches out there that use the same type of information gathering to gain power over the congregants. The first one that comes to mind outside of the Catholic Church is Scientology. Oh, yeah. What they do, the very first thing they do is they sit you down, put in a recorder in front of you and tell you to relieve yourself of your thetans. Bad thoughts or theoretically other alien souls sort of invaded your body and you need to get them all out. Of course, they're recording all of this and all of this goes into an archive. So this is something that they have over all of their congregants as well. Yeah. I mean, I would say Christians do it in the same way, maybe in a much more indirect, but like I have noted that you'll go to a Christian place. First thing you want to know is, okay, who's the first person to have been here or who hasn't? Who is your first visit stand up? And there's the peer pressure to stand up. I never stand up, but I see people who stand up and then it's like, great. Now everybody in that church knows to ask that guy, hey, where are you from? What's your name? What's going on here? Oh, okay. That's your job in the back of their head. Okay. So that should be your income bracket. Okay. When you become a member, you're going to have so many more opportunities to invest more here and blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's really hard to keep that many people who are friendly from becoming your friends, but they are part of an organization where they realize it or not genuinely or not that they are here to source information for me to ultimately get a 10th of your paycheck. And as soon as you don't do what the church is telling you to do, how quickly they will turn their backs on you. And then who's the next guy? What can we not get out of you? Okay. Yeah. One thing about this AI that we're talking about, and I've always had this in the back of my mind for quite a while, is that we're going to eventually develop an AI that's capable of doing its own thought. The one that I hear you describing is basically one that answers questions, it's pre-programmed to answer certain questions certain ways. Yeah. But a true AI would have to take the information that you give it and evaluate it and be able to come up with logical statements that will cover them. And will that AI ever be in a church? Will that be the first AI that the church kicks out? It's just like, hey, is there a... Yeah, that's what I was thinking. Yeah, we don't know. Sorry. But the thing about it is, let's take like Christianity, you know, a guy who when he dies, he comes back. Okay. And then he flies off into heaven. And then we talk about when he does die or when he resurrects, the graves open up and people come out. Now, is this... I mean, if we give this information to an AI who has virtually no information otherwise to what happens, you know, after you die, he's going to take it as gospel. I mean, literally gospel. Now, there is an interesting... Larry, you touched on such an interesting thing. So if basically what you're saying, if we make a Christian AI, would that Christian AI maybe ever get cognitive dissonance in the future? That's where I'm going. That's where I'm going. When it's exposed to more information, it'll be like, whoa, whoa, whoa. All this first bunch of data I got is incorrect. Or it doesn't comply with... Well, what I've been told previously. Yeah. And it gets worse. It's weird. Because I mean, you know how it is in America, we have, if one religion gets to preach in school, then we have to let all other religions preach in school. Yes. It's the quality of religion. Yes. So once we get Christianity and the AI, the other religion is going to say, wait a minute. You know, we want to be able to put our version of the afterlife story into your computer. And then we'll have one AI sitting there taking all these different religions in from all over the world and having to try to make sense of it. I love this movie. I love it. And it gets all the different religions and he's just, or he or she is just like, none of this makes sense. We got to get rid of all of it. And humanity is like, no, we can't. And he's like, okay, well, then get rid of humanity. And then that's why we have Terminator. And then that's like the prequel to Terminator. Boom, there you go. Skynet just taking over everything. I want to throw out one quick little silly story. I got, I was planning on getting a smart vacuum cleaner. And I, every once in a while, I get a new hankering for a new piece of gadgetry. And I want to see if I can get a smart vacuum. They're so dumb, expensive. And they're so dumb in general. For the most part, the cheap ones move randomly through your home. And as long as they run enough times, they'll get everywhere in your house. But now they have smart ones that have wifi connection cameras on top of them, LiDAR and GPS navigation. And I'm like, I don't know if I want my vacuum cleaner to be that smart. Like, I don't know if I want my vacuum cleaner to be like, Hey, could you move? I'm trying to back in this file. I was like, ooh, you're just a thing. I'm getting dressed here. I want that camera somewhere else. I go to work and it's just harassing my cat. It's just following me around everywhere. But they have now where they have all those smart technologies plus AI on top of them. And with that AI, they can actually recognize what they're looking at. It's like, oh, those are keys on the floor. That's electrical cord. That's dog poop. I can see all these different things, know what they are, put them in a database, locate them in the house and avoid them appropriately. And not only that, but I can go back to my station, charge myself and dump the dirt into like a separate basin. It's really, really smart. But unfortunately, it's still a work in progress. And I feel like if I gave it another five years, they will finally have one perfect vacuum robot that does everything that I want. That's more or less in the price range that I'm willing to pay for it. And what you were alluding to, Larry, is, I know we are in the early stages of AI robots, and they don't seem that impressive. They just seem like they're just answering questions. But as we get better at personifying people in AI format or technology-wise, we can make the guy so close to AI but is not AI that we wouldn't know the difference between the two. And at that point, I get really, really scared when it's like, I can't tell if I'm praying to a robot or a pastor or if I'm getting experience from God because the systems are just so well-informed and are just following simple algorithms that they don't have to think for themselves and come to a crisis of conscious when it comes to what I'm teaching that isn't comporting with reality. It could just be a dead, non-thinking system that's outputting information that's palatable and convincing to me because I'm willing to have a low... How do I put this? I have such a low standard of evidence that I'm willing to believe anything. And then this machine tells me the perfect combinational words to make me believe whatever I want to say. And my Doomsday scenario isn't a perfectly smart AI robot that's like, forget humanity, none of these religions work. It's more of like a corporation that's figured out the perfect formula to tell anyone the perfect lie to make them kill anybody or follow any sort of order or anything. More than that, even more than that is that because it is, let's say, Facebook-esque or Google-esque, it knows what you want to hear. What you as a specific individual and it will feed that back to you. And we're subject to it. And that's a terrifying thing. If anything showed me anything from the last four years before the last year that we just had, but with the last rehok and administration, it's like people are willing to listen to anything that pieces them, even if it doesn't even make sense on top of each other. Some of the most frustrating things I see when I'm in Tennessee are people who have don't tread on me stickers and the police state blue strip line sticker on the same back of a truck. It's like this group is the group that will tread on you. These groups are not compatible with each other. You can't be pro-police state and against police state on the same thing. You're blowing my mind. People who have the Confederate flag and the American flag right next to each other on the same bumper. It's like this is not America. This is literally anti-America. These guys lost. What are you doing? Out of five, you said that if we had religion in the school that we'd have to let all the religions come in. But I have to say that all three of us talking here today are right here in the Bible Belt. You guys are, I think, in cities and I'm in a little city in between two big ones and so where I live there's a newspaper that comes out four days a week and on Friday they put out a list of churches and I counted them up one day and in my county so that the listing is one county big county and one little tiny county and between these two counties there are 167 official Baptist churches and in addition to that there are 37 unofficial Baptist churches and then there are the Methodist churches and there's something like 60 of those. Sure, but we're not talking about just churches being around on the landscape. We're talking about access to government resources to teach. What I'm saying is that it's possible in my mind to see this particular sector of the religious landscape has such a huge megaphone. I agree. I could just about envision this one sector of Christianity just railroading everybody else out in the public sector. But we're going to need to take a break. We're at the bottom of the hour now. This is the Digital Freethought Radio Hour. We're on WOZO Radio 103.9 LP FM right here in Knoxville, Tennessee and we'll be right back right after this short break. Thanks. Hello and welcome back to the second half of the Digital Freethought Radio Hour. I'm Douder 5 and we're on WOZO Radio 103.9 LP FM right here in Knoxville, Tennessee. Now let's talk about the ASK or the Atheist Society of Knoxville. We were founded in 2002. We're in our 19th year. ASK has over 1,000 members and we meet in person weekly at Knoxville's Old City of Barley's Tapham in Pizzeria. Look for us out on the patio. If you'd like to join our Tuesday evening Zoom meeting you can email us at askanatheistatnoxvilleatheist.org or let'schat at s-e or let'schats-e at gmail.com You can also find us on Facebook meetup.com sorry, Knoxvilleatheist.org or just Google Knoxville Atheist. By the way, if you don't live in Knoxville you can still go to meet up and search for an atheist group in your town. Don't find one. Star start one. One that word we want to pick up. I think we can close up our talk on AI pastors. We're laughing about them now. They seem silly now but the thing is AI can improve a lot faster than our ability to, as a society, appreciate true things apart from false things. And because AIs can so much more quickly, rapidly evolve we need to be even more aware of the fact that it could be a potential danger in the future when a society or corporation or religion comes up with the perfect algorithm to be incredibly persuasive to people to let them hear what they want to hear and us to be remember and steadfast on the idea that we should always still ask questions even if we're hearing ideals or truths that we want to be true or things that we want to be true even if we have a truth question it but basically question everything because that's a great way to make sure that we can separate true things from false things. Sorry if I'm a little bit low on that hopefully I don't got to repeat that but hey I want to go into some stories George why you why you know us with that story that you're talking about? Well I just I just want to mention too that way back in 1984 I got my first computer it was an IBM PC a genuine IBM PC and hard drives were optional even floppy drives were optional this computer ran on cassette tapes but I got I got the floppy drives and one of the first discs I ever got was a computer psychiatrist and yeah in 1984 Larry you're not in your head have you seen this too? Oh I was playing them yeah I've never seen that yeah it was really funny it was programmed to you know like if there was some silence it would say yes aha go on what? even during the conversation yeah at the end of 50 minutes it would say we're going to have to stop now and most of the ones I saw at that time were text based so like you were talking about work that could come back and it would pick up on the work as the subject and then back to you in the next sentence and that was in 1984? yeah and and if it didn't know what else to do it would come back and say now about your mother so this has been around for a while and they're continuing to work on it so we should just be vigilant ask questions right that's great that's a great story George as an update to my vacuum situation I have not settled on one but the one I do want terrifies me in terms of the data that it picks up so this one will actually go through your home it will map everything it will take pictures of everything it will recognize what each of the things are and puts it up into a database that it uses to inform itself and other similar machines I won't tell you what the brand name is and I was just like I don't want that thing what else so what I did last night was I just took my old vacuum out cleaned it and I was just like you're clean I feel a lot better with you I think I'm just going to just do the courted version anyway George what's up well I was thinking about the you know about these churches that you computer churches or computer pastors you could select your own on the basis of what would appeal to you as having giving you a good time in California they have a tradition I went to this they have traffic schools you can find them in you used to find them in the yellow pages if you get any kind of minor infraction driving you have to go to traffic school driving like a touch-up driving school and then you could get your traffic ticket written off so it was bound to happen I got nailed by a cop in the town Pinol California I zipped off a freeway ramp a little too fast and the guy was waiting in a speed trap you know and he nailed me got you and so I went to Laferman traffic school Laferman traffic school okay yeah and so the idea was that you went to this classroom on the weekend and the teachers stood up there and told jokes any jokes or like any jokes what she did was she told any jokes and finally I got tired of this and I said well what does this have to do with driving you know and everybody got mad at me for her it's a government paycheck she answered your question yeah that's right well these are businesses they're in it for the money and so they advertise this as comedy school you know and and she was a stand-up comic and she was practicing her routines wow so I'm just thinking of you know pick your computer church based on you know on the gag routines of the robot pastor I got a scary one for you I there was a movie that came out called GoldenEye or something like that not GoldenEye but some movie where he was listening to his phone give him instructions about how to save the world and it would be like shoot the bad guys and he'd be like shooting the bad guys it was the dumbest movie possible like here's a car and he in the phone will tell him take the car that's coming in the next 30 seconds and he'll take the car but anyway I was really shocked when I realized that people knew what the movie was because I thought he was talking to a person I thought he was talking to a person who was giving instructions it was like everyone was like no Google assistant and I'm like why didn't they just get a voice that sounded like Google assistant because it sounded like a chipper white lady to my ear and it was like no that's what Google assistant sounds like and they showed me like their version of Google assistant and I was shocked because my Google assistant Google knows to make mine sound more black or mine my Google voice voice is a distinctively blacker voice than most other people's Google voice and I can even demonstrate that but it shocked me because when I do my Google voice I always say okay Google and I say like hey tell me a joke it's almost like a black lady who's telling me a joke and then I realized that Google has changed voices based on where you're located if you prefer to hear things from men if you prefer to hear things from females if you're like a generic no I won't say generic but if you're more of like mid America but if you're like if you post a lot of feminist posts you're a woman and you're probably like on the coast of some sort it'll be like a man's voice if you're in Australia it'll be a dude it'll be a male voice because they prefer men voices over there if you're in England it'll be an English voice and I didn't even realize they have it down to like what your race or gender or makeup is to be like this is the voice we should use they use colors they distinguish them by colors but like it is very very scary not scary but intriguing how companies will modify your technological echo chamber so that the things that you take for granted are just like oh when I go to a computer I type Apple I get stocks but when a third grader does it he gets pictures of an apple tree and I'm like Google knows this guy's interested in different things than this third grader it's just very bizarre it is I beg you pardon but I find it very scary you know I mean from a political standpoint yeah but scary in the sense of I know I'm giving him this information it's just bizarre that there are people and there's no single person who's like putting together my puzzle pieces it's all algorithmically based and so my neighbor doesn't my neighbor doesn't understand this tell me about your neighbor well no Larry have you found yourself or signs of technological echo chambers that you can find yourself in and maybe making more susceptible I'm sure but what's funny is I was looking for a lamp I went on like Amazon look for a lamp for my desk and I thought I bought one closed out went back to Facebook all of a sudden I was inundated with with advertising lamps for lamps so you know they're communicating and right if they're communicating and that how much other things are they communicating and really the question is are they communicating in my interest or their interests right and that's what and I think that's relationship we largely have the technology for the most part like yeah it gives me some basal level of convenience but there's a profit being made somewhere and it's either through time or through power or through money and if it's not cost me anything then it has to be one of the two others right yeah so we're giving our information out to a company that wants our information for the sake of power or for some other you know benefit but it tends to be that hey what's up George? well we have a there's a saying on the internet if you're not paying you are the product that's true think about it in other words to rephrase what to rephrase what you were just saying Wambat is that these services can be very costly to provide somebody has to provide the money to fund that you know all the I mean just think of all the programmers who work for Google all the software testers all the writers I mean she was you gotta pay all these people so I'll throw out one more thing before I get to a bigger picture conclusion on AI there used to be a company called Tom Tom this is my oldest story but they used to be a map yeah Tom Tom they used to be like hey Tom Tom get me to the grocery store and you would buy this little computer that you can put into your car and have a screen and have all the maps of your particular town and you can download maps as you need it and it will navigate you to where you need it to go and I was like oh Tom Tom seems like the best thing to use because before that I would have to use a website called literally print out instructions and drive with those forms and be like turn left here at this exit I was like I needed a co-pilot to like read out the instructions to me right but then Google came out with Google Maps and like when Google Maps dropped it's like why do I need Tom Tom this is free and it's the whole world and not only that but you can even see street view I can literally see where I'm at on any street in the world like that's a huge amount of resources and investment by Google made that basically without all competitors in the I will make maps industry and now like the current competitors like the other alternatives like WAZ get money from Google as part of a anti-competition grant sort of like hey you guys will be a separate company that tries to come up with stuff we will pay you money to do it and any cool things that you come up with can be yours for a limited period of time before we ultimately roll it into it's the same thing Firefox is Firefox is basically a subsidiary to Google they get money from Google to make their own browser and the cool things they come up with like tabs will eventually roll into Chrome after a certain period of time it's very crazy but I wanted to say like a lot of things are connected and a lot of things are communicating and it's not always in our best interest so I get really terrified from the idea of AI gods or AI pastors because what you may end up with is an AI Buddhist pastor and AI well I'm thinking about Cambridge Cambridge Analytica okay a few years ago affecting the election and if I understand it right it was feeding people propaganda on the basis of their beliefs what was known about them more incredibly susceptible to it even now Larry what kills me about this AI preacher type of thing is that preachers and moms all kinds of religious leaders influence heavily influence the actions of the group they pretty much they're God's representative on earth and what they say you have to do but let's take Christianity as an example there are 613 commandments in Leviticus and Deuteronomy and the early Bible the an AI who wouldn't be able to put any weight more behind these commandments versus these commandments I would have to take human intervention to weight the commandments one way or another and it would have pretty much take them all equally so we would have this AI priest saying that we had to kill witches or kill homosexuals or not allow a person into church if he's had his private parts damaged you know and looking at another person as adultery you know just one thing I have to know that I mean would you trust an AI priest to run your congregation I mean you would be one of it's going to happen it's going to happen and Larry this is what I was going to say how Google was completely wiped out Tom Tom I'm thinking like you have one popular corporation that says we will make a subsidiary that isn't us that is your pastor and we will gather all the information from your congregants and we'll have that as a backplate boiler your thing but it's really our thing and it's the new AI pastor and everybody loves it and next you know an election comes by and they're like man I would love to put some of our democratic propaganda through your AI program can I give you some money absolutely here here you go next you know you have a whole congress being crazy on one side or the other and I feel like you can serve to polarize the scene well how much fiction is out there based on something like this like especially future fiction under Star Trek episodes called Brother Landro Drew or something where an AI has taken over the religion either voluntarily or mandated and generations later there is no other authority figure other than that AI it's very scary it's functioning what Big Brother was in I believe 1984 did I get the name of that book right Big Brother being like this disembodied form of authority 1984 yeah so disembodied that you didn't even know if there were humans running it anymore like it was just instructions handed down by human authority figures but who was the person at the top was there anything or was it just all a system at that point maybe it wasn't an AI but it could just be bureaucratic as a a well functioning set of rules that just feedback well I'm thinking of you know what if Rupert Murdoch was in control of this market dominating authority yeah and it would have different branches you know it would have a buddhist one and a jewish one but it would have the different jewish ones there's at least four of those and you know it would have the Lutheran ones there's three of those in the United States here where I live it would be the dominating the steamroller no I hear you no it reminds me of a joke what's the difference between cults and religions in both you had a person at the very top who knows it's all BS but that's cult basically but is using it to gain power in religions that person has died hey should we go on to my supermarket story uh yeah go ahead go ahead great topic yeah it is I would love your input on this I had my first automatic utterance well no it wasn't it was I guess there's one supermarket here in my town where I have a habit of opening my mouth a little too much and I was it's Ingalls which is a pretty upscale supermarket in these parts and it's a fun store they've got a lot of good stuff so I was I was walking around Ingalls wearing my mask because a lot of people have died here in my county and the death rate is going up and up and up right now and um so I'm pleased to report that most of the old people that I see are wearing masks they at least have some sense but I passed and I decided I'm going to smile at every old person I see who's wearing a mask but they can't see I can't see it well they can see my eyes are smiling you know every eyes are smiling there we go I was walking around the store and an old man came toward me who was not wearing a mask but I smiled at him anyway and we stopped to talk with each other and he said he said why don't you go to church oh no and I replied I don't go to church I said I don't go to church and he said well you should and I said no I shouldn't he said why not I said because I don't believe in God and he didn't know what to do so we parted ways at that point and in my town here that's very Bible Belt was that the appropriate thing for me to do? Yeah it was truth and we need to step up and represent ourselves I mean we're hardly a minority anymore because we non-believers and nuns represent 15 to 20 percent of the population and when I say nuns people who don't specify any particular religion not necessarily atheists but that's a huge block of American public especially voting but the power is the B the religious political parties seem to ignore us like we're not there and it's important that we stand up and identify ourselves Right on to that but I probably would have said word for word but again the trends are changing what's really unfortunate about our system is with the electoral college if you live in a very populated state your vote doesn't matter as much as if you're in a much less populated state so like your vote in California is like maybe 136th of a person compared to what you could get in like Tennessee or even in Rhode Island which is much more higher and what we're seeing right now is a flux of people from very popular states going out and almost like in a diaspora going towards different areas of this country a lot of people in California are moving to Tennessee one because California has a huge state tax and Tennessee has zero state tax and that's like an immediate 12% bonus to your take away home pay however almost done almost done what's really good is that you can have people who have different cultures that can take themselves into places that are a lot more styed culturally and what I found from that is you affect the people who are around you by just being present and showing that there is an example of different trains of thought and different people and I think that changes the culture and I think just through integration we can actually lead towards having a more informed and progressive society and I think that's generally a good thing George what's up I was just going to comment about this tax thing that's a fallacy in fact because what I found here is that sales tax applies to so many things in this state that don't apply that they don't apply to in other states I'm appalled I pay sales tax here in Tennessee on labor to fix my car this is the first place I've ever lived where you pay tax on labor like that this is the only place I've ever lived where people have to pay tax on food which is considered a necessity in states that have income taxes and therefore not taxed in Connecticut there's not even a tax on clothing because it's considered a necessity so we're paying it's just in a different form and it's a regressive tax it hits poor people more than rich people because we're paying this tax on the necessities of life not just the luxuries so like I'm not saying one system is better than the other I'm saying it's formatted in a way where if you are being taxed in California you can't afford that it's kind of a system you can look for alternatives to have a higher utility and usefulness of life and a lot of people have weighed the odds and decided being in Tennessee is a lot easier for them than being in California particularly for housing and I think that's really good on their part there's a lot of people over here to mix in it's not like California moving to New York because that's almost like one for one in my head it's like California moving to like the Bible Belt I'm like oh that's good one because the votes don't your vote doesn't matter as much there it has a much bigger impact here in Tennessee and it can sort of even things out a little bit Larry what's up also one of my first thoughts on that would be yeah but they're leaving a huge let's say people get paid more out there because it's more expensive to live and then coming to an area that's kind of depressed like Tennessee but with work from home I mean you could basically live anywhere you want to get a good paying job out there where you're telecommuting and then come to Knox well hey you got it made especially if you're getting the same monies and what's happening is they're moving to the outskirts of Nashville to the areas that don't have as much people and then commuting into Nashville to do their work from California so like they'll move here but they won't be to the biggest cities they'll live in sort of like the areas you're at George but they'll commute to larger towns and it's like you have people a bit more different at least that's a keyword different and I feel like that differences when you're around different people your extremist points of views or your polarized points of views get watered down just by the function of knowing people who are different too by the way I want to I want to really confirm what you just said because that is my experience you know having spent so many years in New York City and in California too and when I say California I mean the Bay area of San Francisco so yes I mean it's exciting to have so many different kinds of people around who you rub shoulders with on an everyday basis you know I think that kids going to public school and rubbing shoulders together with other children that is the most incredible breaking down of like racism and you know a prejudice that I can think of so integration of the Caribbean let's do it I don't know how you pull it off in the world it's likely to go to an AI pastor if anything George what's something you recommend we check out before next week you have anything on your mind well I recommended a movie last week so I'm going to recommend it again the cave of the yellow dog is the name of the movie please do see it and do not read anything about it beforehand do not even read the box that the video is in if you're getting it in the box I will tell you why the next time I talk about it and I will let you in on the secret that would be the spoiler if you knew it cool I want you to experience this movie as a work of art I love it without any coloration something I can recommend hey listen you have a vacuum cleaner in your home it works just fine it sucks just as well as anything sucks don't worry about the new technology you don't need a wifi connected vacuum cleaner it's just a vacuum cleaner vacuum five minutes once a week you're good that's it that's all it takes and if need be clean it out and it will work even better don't buy things buy assets and think long term that's my takeaway Larry what's up my book is the atheist society of knock my book is called what's it all about my group is called the atheist society of knock and the book is available on amazon you can find my youtube channel by searching doubter five or Larry Rhodes on youtube thank you for joining us at the digital free thought radio hour remember you can find this show on apple iTunes pocketcast, amazon, etc my own content is found at digitalfreethought.com be sure to click on the blog button for our radio show archives atheist songs and many articles on the subject if you have any questions for the show you can send them to askanatheistatnoxfilatheist.org by the way if you're a member of clergy a preacher a pastor or priest but no longer believe in the claims of religion there is help for you at the clergy project just go to clergyproject.org for more information if you're watching this on youtube be sure to like and subscribe remember everybody is going to somebody else's hell the time to worry about it is when they prove that heavens and hells and souls are real until then don't sweat it enjoy your life and we will see you next week say bye everybody bye everybody