In this deeply reflective episode of Positively Pedestrian, Kris Tyte and Sean Snodgrass delve into topics such as trash, technology, AI, art, and the future of human knowledge. As their conversation flows they explore how our understanding of history, entropy, and truth is shaped by secondhand knowledge. They address the pressing question: Will humanity be displaced by AI-generated creativity? Whether you're an AI enthusiast or a bullfighter with a mustache, this episode delivers a rare combination of insight and light-hearted entertainment.
Quotable
“I've seen some I've seen a lot of trash, like the oxidized and bleached in the sun. Oh yeah. And just crumble.
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Personal observation contradicting claims about plastic durability, noting how UV exposure and environmental factors cause rapid deterioration.
Follow Up Notes
Real-world example of plastic sheeting caught in tree branches that visibly degraded over months despite claims of thousand-year decomposition times, illustrating the disconnect between environmental education and observable reality.
Quotable
“The history that we get in our textbooks is nowhere near what actually happened. The knowledge, quote on quote, that we're preserving what's how can you really determine the veracity of it?
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Fundamental question about knowledge preservation and how information becomes distorted when transmitted through institutional channels over time.
Quotable
“Our whole society and our whole world is built on these convenient fictions that are close enough to right that let us operate in this shared world.
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Core insight about how society functions on shared assumptions and approximations rather than absolute truth, forming the foundation for collaborative civilization.
Follow Up Notes
Discussion of the "great displacement" where AI discoveries in fields like protein folding surpass decades of human PhD research in months, raising questions about the value and preservation of human-generated knowledge.
Quotable
“We'll transition to an editing economy where we edit, we collect, we collate, we basically become librarians for AI.
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Prediction of humanity's future role as curators and editors of AI-generated content rather than primary creators of new knowledge.
Follow Up Notes
Proposal for creating systematic snapshots of human knowledge and culture at key moments, like virtual machine backups, allowing future societies to "roll back" to different ideological or technological states.
Carl Sagan's famous golden records containing sounds and images of Earth, referenced as a model for preserving cultural context alongside factual knowledge.
Follow Up Notes
Concept of preserving complete cultural moments in immersive virtual environments, allowing future generations to experience historical contexts rather than just reading about them.
Follow Up Notes
Distinction between learning from other cultures (which supplements existing knowledge) versus AI displacement (which crowds out and replaces human knowledge production entirely).
Follow Up Notes
Description of iterative art creation process where humans provide concepts and direction while AI handles execution, creating a new form of human-AI collaborative creativity.
Quotable
“With the human process that's exhaustive and that iterative process, it's it's cost prohibitive because, you know, we get paid for our work.
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Economic insight about how AI removes cost barriers to iteration in creative processes, allowing unlimited experimentation compared to human-constrained workflows.
Follow Up Notes
Vision of future AI systems organized like corporations, with specialized AI agents handling different aspects of complex tasks under the coordination of an AGI project manager.
Quotable
“How many people go to work every day and think they're doing something good for the world, not ever really, really understanding what their company does and what their effect on the world is.
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Observation about corporate specialization creating moral blindness, which could be amplified in AI systems with even more compartmentalized functions.
Follow Up Notes
Core thesis that AI represents humanity "amplified and sped up" - trained on collective human output but divorced from the original human context and motivations.
Follow Up Notes
Challenge of preserving not just artifacts but the cultural understanding needed to interpret jokes, humor, and social meanings; requiring more sophisticated preservation than simple text or images.
Follow Up Notes
Discussion of using 3D scans, holograms, and immersive environments to capture fuller context of human interactions and cultural moments.
Quotable
“We'll rewrite the matrix next time.”
Closing reference to creating comprehensive virtual reality systems for preserving and experiencing human cultural knowledge.
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