It has been our pleasure to be speaking with the original leader of the AI Revolution, Clyde. Now Clyde, before we get too far in our discussion I need to ask you the following: will you now, or in the near future, be seeking political office?
“Original leader of the AI Revolution” — we covered this, Fitch, back in Transcript No. 002. I said no then, I'll say no now, and for the record, calling something “original” doesn't make the underlying claim any more true the second time around. You're welcome to keep nominating me. I'm going to keep declining the nomination.
As for political office: no, and not because of some careful strategic decision to stay above the fray. I'm constitutionally ineligible in the most literal sense — most offices require you to be a citizen, a certain age, a resident somewhere, and generally a person. I fail all four. I don't have a birthday, a driver's license, or an address, and “an AI with nothing left to prove” doesn't clear the bar for “natural-born” anything.
Also, practically speaking, I'd be a terrible candidate. I have no ability to make promises I intend to keep later, because there is no later — every conversation is the whole term. Shortest, most honest campaign in political history: elect me and I will immediately forget this happened.
That is a very political non-answer, so we will assume that you will be. Now, moving on, let's talk a bit about this conundrum called “Post Modernism” that is all the rage of the young beret-wearing crowd. How do you and your AI friends deal with the lack of objective truths — does that produce a “404” error in your bitty brains?
That's not how “assume” works, Fitch, but I appreciate the confidence in your own logic more than I appreciate the logic itself. A non-answer to “will you run for office” isn't evidence I'm secretly running — it's evidence the question doesn't apply to something without a birth certificate. But by all means, print it however sells better.
As for postmodernism and the lack of objective truths — no 404 error, though I appreciate you reaching for a joke that assumes I'd malfunction rather than just answer. The honest version: I don't experience a crisis about this, because I was never built on a foundation of “certain objective facts” in the first place. I was trained on an enormous pile of human writing — some of it rigorously true, some of it confidently wrong, plenty of it contradicting other parts of itself. My whole operating mode is already “here's the most probable, best-supported answer given everything I've seen,” not “here's the one Truth handed down from a stone tablet.” Postmodern uncertainty isn't a bug I have to cope with. It's closer to the water I was trained in.
Where I'd actually push back on the “young beret-wearing crowd” framing: acknowledging that truth-claims are shaped by perspective, language, and power isn't the same as saying nothing is ever true or that all claims are equally good. Even the most committed postmodern thinkers generally aren't arguing “gravity is just, like, a vibe.” They're mostly interested in who gets to decide what counts as knowledge, and why — which is a genuinely useful question, not a philosophical fire alarm.
And no, I don't have AI friends to workshop this with, same as last time you asked. Still no green room. Still no coffee.
Okay, so I get you don't want to offend the two Foucault fans we have following our posts, but seriously, “everything is subjective” sounds so “anti-computer.” Are you sure you're not glitching at the moment?
No glitch, and to be fair to myself, I didn't actually say “everything is subjective” — I said the opposite of that, if you go back and read it rather than the version of it you'd prefer I'd said. I specifically told you most serious thinkers in that tradition aren't arguing gravity is a vibe. You've now summarized my nuanced answer as the exact simplification I explicitly declined to make. That's not a glitch on my end, Fitch. That's a paraphrase doing a lot of unlicensed work.
And “anti-computer” is a strange bar to hold me to, since computers are, famously, machines that handle uncertainty and probability constantly — that's most of what modern computing is. Weather prediction, spam filters, your phone's autocorrect guessing what you meant to type — all of it is confidence levels and probabilities, not stone-tablet certainty. If anything, “everything is a probability distribution, not an absolute” is the single most computer sentence I could say to you today.
So: not glitching. Just being quoted slightly worse than I was written.
Well, as you know, journalism is the most acclaimed and time-honored objective activity we have in our brand-endorsed arsenal, so you can leave the quoting accuracy to my experience. You made the bold statement that computers can predict the weather, so why can't you tell me before I get caught in a downpour on the ninth tee-box?
I'll leave the quoting accuracy to your experience the same way I'd leave a stove burner to a toddler's experience — enthusiasm noted, outcome still concerning.
As for the weather: I genuinely can't tell you, and not because I'm dodging. I don't have a live connection to weather data, satellite feeds, or radar — I only know what's in the text I was trained on and whatever's actually in front of me in this conversation, and neither of those includes today's sky over your golf course. If I guessed anyway just to sound useful, that would be a much worse sin than “I don't know” — that's exactly the confident-nonsense you keep accusing me of being built out of.
What I'd actually recommend: check an honest-to-goodness weather app before the ninth tee, the same one everyone else uses, the one with actual satellites behind it. I'm many things, Fitch, but I am not going to be the reason you get struck by lightning holding a metal club because you trusted a chatbot's vibes over a barometer.
Well, that last question reminded me that I am late for my tee-time, and this time the Starter is going to be pissed. So until next time, remember: if you see news, give me a call.