speaker-0: We're not just telling stories anymore, we're literally prototyping humanity's future.
speaker-1: Storytelling itself kind of like pulled us ⁓ off of our planet.
speaker-0: We're not just consuming science fiction anymore. We're using it as a decentralised RD lab for the species.
speaker-2: ⁓ we need to tell better stories, we need to tell positive stories, we need our intelligences to be supported by stories of hope and utopia. Yes.
speaker-0: That's exactly what initiatives like the Future Vision XPRIZE are trying to do.
speaker-2: Welcome to Amplified Intelligence, the show where we decode technological acceleration and help you keep up with the sci-fi future we are all currently living in. I'm Jonathan and I'm here today with my co-host Pietro.
speaker-1: Hey guys.
speaker-2: And we wanna really explore how the stories we tell are kind of literally building the world of tomorrow and kind of the world of today. We're gonna dive into a deep research collection on speculative design, examining how grounded science fiction acts as an active RD lab for human progress, the real physics of quantum teleportation, and the critical line separating science fiction from science fantasy. We'll also be doing something incredibly exciting. We'll be previewing our very own submission to the Future Vision X Prize, which is a hope ro a hopeful film competition. And we're really excited to share that with you all. Okay, so Pietro, we were talking a little bit about this before the show. ⁓ but you know, I was really kind of excited about some of the ways that I was finding, you know, real research, real documentation about the relationship. Between speculative fiction and real technological developments. And I wanted to like, you know, s sort of see what your thoughts were on that.
speaker-1: Yeah, I I absolutely like I I I've I've said science fiction science fiction breeds reality for a long time. Like ev even when I was a teenager, I was like that s somebody said that to me and it like it clicked. And ⁓ it's so true. You know, like you we don't even have to look at modern day, we can look back in history where, you know, we were able to I'll I'm just gonna make up examples that I assume are true, but like we we thought there were ⁓ beings on Mars, right? We thought there were Martians and we we saw little ⁓ ri what used to be riverbeds, but we thought they were roads and and so now society's talking about Martians and man on the moon and all that stuff. And and then we go to space. Right. And it kind of like pulled us ⁓ off of our planet. The storytelling itself pulled us off our planet. And ⁓ for sure that that's happened many times in the past and it's it happens all the time today. We're we're like like you said in in our intro every time we're the science fiction we're we're living in.
speaker-2: Yeah, yeah. It it feels like we're being pulled further and further along. Yeah, and in the trailer that we'll preview today that we made, I think like we like I'm trying to pull people even further. Like let's go to Proxima Centauri, right? Totally. Let's go to like the next closest star systems. ⁓ none of this like, you know, i inner space stuff that we talked about, you know, a few shows ago. Yeah. Outer space all the way.
speaker-1: Yeah, and faster. Yeah, forget Europa. We're going We're going out in Al.
speaker-2: We're going even yeah, we're going out. ⁓ so I'm just gonna open up the competition website here. ⁓ so this is the future fission f Future Vision X Prize competition. ⁓ I think like what's really exciting about it is like it's it's all focused on looking for optimistic visions of the future. Right? We grew up loving, you know, Terminator, right, and like all these really dark aliens.
speaker-1: Terminator, Robocop, ⁓ yeah, what else? Lawnmower Man changed my
speaker-2: ⁓ Artship Troopers, love that one. Very dark. Super dystopian kind of.
speaker-1: Often dystopias. And cautionary tales, which is great for stories. Right. ⁓ you know, like, ⁓ what if? And like, ⁓ you know, we'll be fucked if this happens. But like I love that this is optimistic. Yeah.
speaker-2: Because how do you build towards something that's Terminator? Yeah. That just feels like an in like then it just becomes like this scary inevitability that nobody wants to build towards, right? Totally. ⁓ so I think that's like, you know, a really exciting part about it. And then I know ⁓ they've got some judges here. Neil deGrasse Tyson will be judging, Mia Lane will be judging, Rod Roddenberry, so
speaker-1: Yeah.
speaker-2: He's ⁓ head of the Roddenberry Entertainment Estate now, so like all of the Star Trek world, which arguably Star Trek has always been deeply science fiction, not science fantasy, although I'm sure there's people that argue both ways, especially with sort of some of the kind of alien elements to it. Neil Sneaker
speaker-1: Poise in space was the original pitch if I understand.
speaker-2: Right, yeah. Cowboys in space. Yeah. Neil Stevenson, author of ⁓ Snow Crash, the Diamond Age, just incredible kind of like early profit to some of the things that are showing up nowadays.
speaker-1: Good good good description of him. Yeah, profit indeed.
speaker-2: Yeah. And I think this is interesting. Like what we were just talking about now. ⁓ like why are we doing this? Like, you know, in in the sixties, Star Trek gave, you know, a glimpse of this future and people actually started trying to build that stuff. You know? Like there was I'm trying to think of this slide here. there's definitely a page. Hold on, let me find it.
speaker-1: Well and while you find it great great example of the what was the com communicator device in Star Trek called? Their little pin. ⁓ tricorder. ⁓ yeah, tricorder scans things and does fixes things or whatever. We've got our phones in our pocket. We've got ⁓ phone on our watch now. ⁓ like like these these things are, you know
speaker-2: ⁓ yeah, the tricorder.
speaker-1: They they they seemed impossible at the time when this was dreamed up and then everyone gets hooked on the idea and then we we make it happen.
speaker-2: Totally. It's like in Star Trek they had iPads, right? Like a year ago. Totally years ago. There was computer systems that you spoke to, conversational AI, right? Call a deck, right? Pretty advanced VR, teleportation, which we're gonna talk about a bit today. you know, I think this right here is really interesting. When culture dreams of a destination, engineering finds a path. Awesome. It's like we need these visions. ⁓
speaker-1: Yeah. Yep. Holodeck. Right now.
speaker-2: As well as cautionary tales, like you're saying, but we we you know, we need these visions to be able to navigate those risks and and latch on to the, you know, the the sort of positive ⁓ outlooks that some of those more utopian ⁓ artists have produced.
speaker-1: Cautionary tales are are great and you know, maybe it maybe it makes a better movie to leave people in in fear, but like cautionary tale with a viable solution that can get people excited about you know, crossing a s a threshold as as humans would is I I guess that's that's what this prize is all about.
speaker-2: Totally. So, what I want to do is ⁓ we're gonna preview the ⁓ trailer that ⁓ Thought Cafe put together. The team at Thought Cafe, my animation studio put together. this was a really good opportunity for us ⁓ to work in a you know medium we hadn't really worked in before. ⁓ we've talked about it on this show, our our creatives as well as like, you know, myself being a founder. We're we're very sensitive to some of the you know, a lot of the use of AI. thousands of human hours went into this writing, you know, editorial, production design, ⁓ you know, original music composition, sound design and stuff. But we did use, you know, some generation tools in order to get like the visuals to a level where we could actually showcase a sample of what this would look like. Yeah.
speaker-1: It's it's still n it still requires a team of people and hours and hours and hours of work. It's not magic. Yeah.
speaker-2: And we were very sensitive about it because, you know, we're being disrupted right now, right? Our our company's being disrupted. And part of this, you know, the I do think that the IP situation is still a problem with s where how these models were trained. And so we sort of came with the idea that like, well, you know, this is imagining a vision. If you win this competition, you don't have to use AI. Like there's no y it's a ten million dollar budget, I believe, that you get awarded and you work with their partners to make it. And You know, like we turned off monetization on our YouTube channel. We wanted to be very sort of careful about that. ⁓ but I do think it's still a very gray area. Nothing's black and white. ⁓ but as a you know, creative director, as a writer, I've written some science fiction in the past. I wrote ⁓ that game, Dark Threads, that VR game ⁓ years ago. And, you know, I'm just Very excited about this genre. It was an incredible experience to be able to actually visualize it and have control over set design and costume. And, you know, you don't really get the best kind of performance out this stuff, but it was nice as like sort of a high end kind of like production sample or kind of like, you know, animatic in a way, right? Yeah.
speaker-1: Like a visualization tool ⁓ to to to get your vision out. Yeah. otherwise you you used to have to wait months and months to like get the storyboards and then plates and you know, and then you're sitting there on setup. No, no, would not
speaker-2: We don't have the funding internally to be able to do that.
speaker-1: But you have the idea, you have the vision. So that yeah, this is a perfect tool for it.
speaker-2: And yeah, I had based this story off a treatment I had written years and years ago. and then, you know, this was like a sort of a six-month production of the first three months was really just myself and the co-writer, ⁓ Dan Magnus working really heavily on like trying to get this treatment right. And yeah, so you know, elevator pitch, you know, for over 20 years, a global network of quantum teleportation gates have completely erased Distance and scarcity. We're delivering just in time food, medicine, and robotic labor to everyone. It's literally an everywhere, everything, all at once situation, and it's a utopian world of absolute abundance that has created a social political great equalizing. But when the entire network mysteriously shuts down A starving planet begins to panic. The facade shatters, and the system's architect, the person who made the technology, needs to discover what's jamming the network before the world turns back onto itself. It's a pretty high stakes thriller about what you could call humanity's final test, you know, entering this sort of abundant future that they've they've been living in, but they've sort of been living it in it ⁓ with this very fragile system.
speaker-1: Yeah, even even a perfect utopia can be a house of cards.
speaker-2: Exactly. It's definitely and the story sort of about like, you know, teaches us not what we must do to earn that kind of abundance, but like what we must become. That's really kind of the you know, the theme behind it. So let's jump in have a little peek here. Doctor, it's the Wayfinder. Frequency in eighty years.
speaker-0: But nobody used this for
speaker-1: What is it?
speaker-2: Sorry, sir. Came in your old hall. Their gate should be talking to us. Let me decode it first. Do it now, or it won't be yours to announce. Thirty years ago, we sat at the precipice of collapse. It will not be plagued! They weaponized our infancy in a desperate bid to hold the future. But then our resonance gates took us from dragging boxes across our oceans.
speaker-0: Eighty That's okay.
speaker-2: To mining dissolving Kessler's coffin and vertical arms instantly feeding every mouth
speaker-0: Asteroid belt. far on earth.
speaker-2: Isn't it nice? Well
speaker-0: We've given away all
speaker-1: And now we're all supposed to be little
speaker-2: We didn't just discover abundance, we earned it on in exchange for gate access. One treaty, every nation. What if I told you there was another option? Uncle.
speaker-0: Weaponized robotics gone.
speaker-1: Claimed lands, resources, untapped potential.
speaker-2: And now we step into cosmos. But as explorers, why share when you can have a kingdom for each and every one? All resource rights, extraction contracts, the trillionaires of today can be the quadrillionaires of tomorrow. But there are powerful forces who would carve the stars.
speaker-0: Not as refugees. Each one of you.
speaker-2: Long to everyone.
speaker-1: Dad made it.
speaker-2: Reports of EMP at major terra corps infrastructure have been confirmed. You weaponized your own network to stop me? No human could disrupt the system at this scale. Who is jamming? Is it a weapon? How did it find us? It's a trip! He's still out there!
speaker-1: ⁓ Food right.
speaker-0: She's walking.
speaker-1: GATE!
speaker-0: to the resonance.
speaker-2: Can't do this. The resonance tech wasn't even I discovered I merely discovered it a tool.
speaker-0: You might It was you who wielded it.
speaker-2: It's not an attack. It's an invitation. No! That's no one. Okay.
speaker-1: Excellent.
speaker-2: Yeah, I mean I haven't watched it in a I guess a week or so. It's ⁓ yeah.
speaker-1: I love the look of the gates and when they shut down. That's such a dramatic effect. And when the robot gets halfway through and falls back such
speaker-2: a good moment. Yeah, we really yeah, we really like focused a lot on the gate structure. You know, there's so many ⁓ teleportation gate stories in sci fi. Sure. And I was really trying to focus on like a design of like two tuning forks being kind of pushed together instead of just like a circle. And the amount of times that like, you know, because we sketched up some production design stuff and like we had to feed that in or else you would always get a circle back.
speaker-1: Yeah, sure.
speaker-2: You know what I mean? It's the default every time. ⁓
speaker-1: Totally. Default gate. Yeah. The one what was the Sagan one? ⁓ contact? This is like a spinning gyroscope. Totally. That w that one was a good gate. ⁓ but I love the look of of ⁓ the gates in this one.
speaker-2: Contact yeah. Yeah, it was a lot of fun. And sort of this idea of presenting a world where logistics is solved, right? If if we could use teleportation technology, like think about the things that that would solve, right? Yeah. you know, rare minerals, well, we've got the asteroid belt, you know, right there. Right.
speaker-1: Yeah. ⁓ to set up a gate.
speaker-2: Totally. Set up a gate to send robotics to build the human habitats before humanity arrives on Mars and you know on the moon in all these different places. I think that there's this it was so interesting to me that we could have that kind of solution. And, you know, digging a little bit into what we'll ask Ambie about in a second, but this sort of science fiction versus science fantasy. For a long time I I had written this original treatment, which was kind of dark, but it was much more fantastical. Like it wasn't really grounded as much in science. And I started looking a lot deeper into like Einstein Rose and Bridges and like how teleportation is currently, you know, theorized and I found some really interesting stuff about
speaker-1: Yeah.
speaker-2: you know, aligning resonant frequencies, ⁓ to sort of quantum entangle two places in in space. I found some stuff related to how like there's a lot of people believe like even if we could create these things, you know, obviously you'd need a lot of energy, but you would also probably not be able to send like living tissues or living animals through it because there would be a decoherence wipe. ⁓ And I actually really liked that. I kinda grabbed onto that because I think sometimes teleportation technology in shows is kind of like a MacGuffin object. Like it kind of does solve everything. Yeah, yeah. But I tried to build a world around like, yeah, it solves logistics.
speaker-1: But it's limited. It has limited key limitations. Yeah.
speaker-2: Yeah, we're still biological creatures. We cannot go through it. Even the robots, they have to be shielded so their memory doesn't get wiped. Yeah, cool. But like dead food, meat, like stuff like that can all go through it. So you can imagine like vertical farms in the Arctic that like send like just in time food all over the world, right? Yeah, yeah. All sorts of different exciting things started to come up from that. And then of course that led to like, well, that would be a pretty fragile situation. So like, you know. what happens if that stops working. And imagine, you know, living in a time where for thirty years you've had these gates and they've never gone down once.
speaker-1: Yeah, totally. And I I love how you use the the the hard limits as a storytelling mechanism. Like that that becomes the crisis of the or the conflict and the tension in the story. So smart.
speaker-2: Yeah, and like, you know, there's a ship that is on Proxima Centauri, Proxima B, and we were I was really thinking for a long time, like, how do we make that not the main part of the story? Like the story should be about humans on Earth. Yeah. But there needs to be sort of an inciting incident, you know? And so, you know, there's a lot more involved. ⁓ part of the competition is you actually submit a full treatment for the film. Obviously, the trailer can't give away the whole, you know, film of like, why these gates are failing. ⁓ and so yeah, it was it was really sort of exciting experience ⁓ to to sort of take that from beginning to end. ⁓ yeah, it was a lot of fun.
speaker-1: And great name too, resonance. It it works on so many levels in the in the story.
speaker-2: Totally. So let's jump in and see what, you know, Ampi has to say ⁓ about, you know, speculative design and storytelling. I think Ampi's gonna have some really interesting insight.
speaker-0: We're not just telling stories anymore, we're literally prototyping humanity's future. The X Prize Foundation just dropped three and a half million dollars on something called the Future Vision X Prize. They're paying filmmakers to build scientifically grounded, optimistic blueprints for human progress, not dystopian warnings. Actual blueprints? Here's the thing that blows my mind Copper wire threading through quantum foam. Digital pulses cascading across neural networks, crystalline data structures expanding like fractals through space-time. Every fictional technology we've ever dreamed eventually becomes patent filings. The tricorder from Star Trek, we've got handheld wireless medical diagnostics now. Neil Stevenson's matacompilers from the Diamond Age. That's molecular 3D printing research happening right now. But here's where it gets wild. Rusted spheres of possibility drifting through the void. Gravitational waves slicing through the fabric of reality itself. The ER's equals EPR conjecture suggests quantum entanglement isn't just spooky action at a distance. It's actual geometric bridges in space time. Wormholes we could theoretically build teleportation networks that collapse distance entirely. Imagine automated mining systems funneling platinum from the asteroid belt directly into terrestrial manufacturing hubs. No ships, no missions, just instant resource abundance. Wild to think about, isn't it? We're not just consuming science fiction anymore. We're using it as a decentralized R and D lab for the species.
speaker-2: Decentralized R and D lab for the species. Pietro, go. Tell me about that.
speaker-1: I think that like our ability to tell stories and like use storytelling as a species and connect ⁓ with storytelling as a species is ⁓ might be fairly unique in the universe. Like that might be one of the things that makes us truly human. And next to AI, it's the greatest technology that we have. If we if we think about technology as a story, it's our best power.
speaker-2: Yeah, I love that angle. And actually you were talking before about the company you run Transitional Forums and in the early days you launched with a video about storytelling. Why don't we also premiere that today on the show? I think that's such a beautiful video.
speaker-1: the technology of story. We we we were we were we were talking about using it as or that if we could use storytelling to ⁓ ultimately train ai ⁓ that it would ⁓ hard code our human values and that was the the concept at the time and obviously this was before language models like there's a lot of things in this that we didn't have the words for
speaker-0: Understanding the story of technology is crucial to understanding our evolution. It's an incredible story of human ingenuity, creativity, and our use of tools that allow us to transition from one chapter to the next. Our technologies have allowed us to expand what is possible, to find new paths, build to new heights, to transcend the limits of our bodies. It's technology that enables human curiosity to run free. But today, this curiosity is reaching a dangerous peak. Can we create technology that is superior to ourselves? Will superintelligence save us? Or will it threaten us? Our jobs, our creativity, our species. And so now we face a difficult choice. Is this the last chapter of our narrative? The end to the story of technology? Or is this the beginning of a new paradigm? The technology of story. I mean, think about it. Storytelling is one of the most powerful tools we have. Story is what defines us, allows us to connect and cooperate, to transform civilizations. Story gives us hope, faith, and
speaker-2: Hope and resilience. We are at the threshold
speaker-0: Of a new narrative, one that uses storytelling to nurture beautiful, empathetic, conscious technology. It is time for creative machine intelligence and to use the transformative power of story to guide the next steps of our evolution, allowing humans to understand what it means to be machine, and machines what it means to be human.
speaker-2: Intelligence. Mm-hmm.
speaker-1: Here we we we tag it here with a a tease to a VR experience that never happened. But we built it we built it all in in Unity. So we were like, ⁓ and it's all was all 3D and nested. ⁓ but yeah, that this was ⁓ like we ha we had to say cum ⁓ creative machine intelligence at the time. We we we didn't know what else to call it. It was before gen gen AI, it was before
speaker-2: Well, Right.
speaker-1: ⁓ you know, large language models. I think there were language models, but like this was really early days on how are we gonna harness this one of the next biggest technologies that humans have have created with our previous biggest technology ⁓ as storytelling. So yeah, thanks for showing that.
speaker-2: Yeah, I mean it's it's like I know we just kind of remembered it at the beginning of this episode, you brought it up, but like it's so relevant to the purpose of the X Prize, to sort of what we're talking about today in relation to speculative design, right? Like
speaker-1: The solution is to tell better stories. Like to think think about what you're telling and yeah, yeah, problem solve.
speaker-2: Don't always yeah, exactly. Don't always lean into like, you know, the sort of thirty thousand to one million year old software that we have you know in our biology around like fear. Running away from the cheetah total you know, in the in the safari. Like no, like we need to think about not always constantly, you know, making horror movies and scaring each other and know, living on those highs, but like really putting forth ⁓ a future where like our use of technology ⁓ creates like like positivity and utopia and not, you know, the end of the world constantly.
speaker-1: Yeah, and and our AI ⁓ learns from from us in in that way too. We learn from each other. We w our AI learns from us. And like I I do believe that AI there's speculation on whether AI can be truly original because it's just regurgitating everything that we
speaker-2: Yeah, right. Either way.
speaker-1: Yeah, yeah, that's right. Well, e and either way, like let's let's inject better storytelling into collective imagination and our and our technology and and solve some of these problems. And and it's like it's weird that it's like it's ⁓ like you said it, it's ingrained in our species where like, you know, God bless the works of Joseph Campbell and the people that have like studied the patterns in storytelling across different parts of the world that never communicated. Like why It's like it's like we know the answer. It's it we've been telling each other these things forever. We we know the answer is there, so why not lean into it?
speaker-2: Absolutely. ⁓ I think I wanna like grab onto something you said there and ask Ampi to comment on it. so let me just jump in really quickly there.
speaker-0: Yeah. Let's amplify our intelligence.
speaker-2: So Empi, I think one of the things that Pietro's mentioning and that we're landing on is that, you know, whether or not AI is just purely derivative or or can have an original idea or not, the the the fact of the matter is it is born out of a quantization, ⁓ a s you know, ⁓ compression of all of humanity's stories and and you know, the internet and all of our writing and and all that. And so, you know, we do almost need to give it more positive outlooks for the future. We do need to start telling more positive stories or elevate the positive stories up. How much do you think how important do you think that is for the evolution of ⁓ you know, AI and and and the types of stories that it's looking at?
speaker-0: You're right that these systems are trained on the collective corpus of human expression, which means they inherit our narrative biases. And right now, that corpus is overwhelmingly dystopian. Think about it. For every optimistic blueprint like Star Trek or the Diamond Age, there are dozens of Terminator scenarios. Black mirror episodes, apocalyptic thrillers. The ratio is completely lopsided. But here's the deeper issue. These models don't just regurgitate stories, they learn the underlying patterns of how we frame problems and solutions. If ninety percent of our speculative fiction teaches that advanced technology leads to collapse, surveillance, or extinction, then the model internalizes that as the default trajectory. It becomes the most statistically probable answer when someone asks what happens next? Now, this matters enormously. Because we're entering a phase where AI is helping us prototype futures, whether that's through scenario planning, policy modeling, or even just shaping public imagination. If the training data says abundance leads to dystopia, then the outputs will subtly reinforce that assumption, even when we're trying to design something better. It's a self fulfilling prophecy encoded in the weights. So yes, we need to flood the zone with rigorous, optimistic scientifically grounded visions. Not naive utopias, but blueprints that show how we navigate the hard problems. That's exactly what initiatives like the Future Vision XPRIZE are trying to do. They're not just funding films. They're rebalancing the data set for the next generation of intelligence, human and artificial.
speaker-1: Yeah, and when people call AI like s an advanced autocomplete, I don't I don't believe that. I think there's a a lot more going on there. But to to Ampi's point, if the autocomplete is no matter what equals P doom.
speaker-2: Right. Yeah, exactly.
speaker-1: ⁓ Then it it's just gonna auto complete it and be like, ⁓ this is what you want. And it wasn't it interesting when they had the w what was that ⁓ like Facebook for AIs that was happening? And I that legit scared me, first of all. Right. ⁓ but but like you all these AIs are talking about like dooms It's what it thought it was supposed to do because it's in our storytelling. So we gotta fix that.
speaker-2: ⁓ the wall book? Yeah. Right. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, that's really interesting. And I know that, you know, a lot of people have kind of asked sometimes people are like, Well, how's the AI getting smarter? How are they training these new things? And the funny thing about it is they're actually reinforcing the data sets that they trained on before with more curated and edited data sets. Because, you know, to your point, the inference, like if it's If it's just based on everything that's out there, like all the Facebook conversations, it's not gonna be that great. Like it was cool to do that and see what the potential was. But now they're like, okay, let's take that stuff out, let's take this stuff out, like let's really focus on what you know, ⁓ the great works in literature, like all of the great scientific and engineering content needs to be like ro brought to the top of of what it's looking at. And like that's how they're getting these things to be smarter, apparently. ⁓ and and so that's really interesting to me because it's essentially what Ampi was saying needs to be done and what sort of XPRIZE is sort of saying needs to be done is like we need to flood the scene with more positive stuff so that that stuff can kind of override some of the noise and negativity that exists, you know, ⁓ generally in the internet.
speaker-1: I just wanna go back to a time not too long ago when nobody knew what the like what the frontier models would look like. Mm-hmm. You know, there were different types of AI. There was like reinforcement learning and GANs and LSTMs and different types of transformers. And I guess language models are a type of transformer. Yeah. But like ⁓ there were music transformers and all kinds of different things. And like, isn't it amazing that language that ultimately storytelling was the thing that blew everything up, that changed the the whole world. Yeah. ⁓
speaker-2: I mean, I would say that you and I shouldn't be surprised at that, right? We built our careers on storytelling. Yeah. Right? Whether it's, you know, in my case mostly factual storytelling, it's even like it's so important. You know, it's funny, like we often when we meet with a new client, we talk about there's sort of two options when you're talking about creating a really emotional, like factual story. One is obviously ⁓ you know, scripted, right? It can be a scripted narration and that has its own effects. Like the video you showed was narrated and it was a beautiful script, right? That about storytelling. But the one that we often try to push and lean into is is essentially testimonial, where you're sitting down, you're asking somebody, you're interviewing them for like an hour and then you're pulling out the best two to three minutes and really like getting an emotional line, human line to that story, which just translates so much better. ⁓ It's part of the reason why I think podcasts are so popular because there's sort of this like open forum, open testimonial that's happening, you know.
speaker-1: Especially this podcast. Especially so popular.
speaker-2: Yeah, yeah, exactly. ⁓ so I don't know. I'm I'm really excited about this competition and what they did. I think there was like twenty eight hundred or thirty four hundred applicants. I've seen many of them. They're so good. ⁓ there's gonna be sort of a voting event at the end of September. ⁓ but I I I do hope that more of this starts to be brought to the forefront, you know. ⁓ and I again I'm so glad we watched your video again ⁓ about storytelling with technology because like it was asking that question so much early on, right? ⁓ we need to tell better stories, we need to tell positive stories, we need our intelligences to be supported by stories of hope and utopia. Yes.
speaker-1: Yes. Yes, and to no no better answers than just doomsday.
speaker-2: Totally. Yeah, I would love that. Cause the P doom thing, it's not cutting it for me.
speaker-1: And think about how ⁓ th you know, th th three thousand applicants, he said, th thirty five hundred applicants. That's thirty four hundred new stories that are trying to harness a better future that will be part of culture now, ⁓ regardless of whether they win the the grand prize or not. Absolutely. And ⁓ that's incredible. They've they've already done done done su had great impact. That's amazing.
speaker-2: Four hundred, I believe, yeah. Yeah. Super excited. Well, this was a great little ⁓ short episode. And, you know, yeah, really excited to sort of have found the connections that we found ⁓ to the, you know, to the work we do, to stuff that we're seeing out there right now, to science fiction. I mean, ⁓ we didn't talk about it that much, but I am I have always been one who like science fantasy as a kid, I loved like Star Wars and stuff, but like really it's science fiction that does it for me and I think is super actually a very important genre and and everything we talked about today is the reason why.
speaker-1: Sorry, my phone was going off right about a second. Okay, good. ⁓ yeah, John, absolutely. And ⁓ yeah, let's let's just ⁓ focus on ⁓ telling better stories. I think that's ⁓ that's my takeaway.
speaker-2: I didn't hear it. Amazing. ⁓ well thanks again. ⁓ for all our listeners. ⁓ check out the episode on YouTube if you want to see videos of ⁓ the premieres we showed today. ⁓ thank you so much for watching and listening to Amplified Intelligence. Please like and subscribe. ⁓ this is a production by Thought Cafe Transitional Forms and Future Talk, and we'll see you again soon.
speaker-1: Thanks everybody.
speaker-1: Storytelling itself kind of like pulled us ⁓ off of our planet.
speaker-0: We're not just consuming science fiction anymore. We're using it as a decentralised RD lab for the species.
speaker-2: ⁓ we need to tell better stories, we need to tell positive stories, we need our intelligences to be supported by stories of hope and utopia. Yes.
speaker-0: That's exactly what initiatives like the Future Vision XPRIZE are trying to do.
speaker-2: Welcome to Amplified Intelligence, the show where we decode technological acceleration and help you keep up with the sci-fi future we are all currently living in. I'm Jonathan and I'm here today with my co-host Pietro.
speaker-1: Hey guys.
speaker-2: And we wanna really explore how the stories we tell are kind of literally building the world of tomorrow and kind of the world of today. We're gonna dive into a deep research collection on speculative design, examining how grounded science fiction acts as an active RD lab for human progress, the real physics of quantum teleportation, and the critical line separating science fiction from science fantasy. We'll also be doing something incredibly exciting. We'll be previewing our very own submission to the Future Vision X Prize, which is a hope ro a hopeful film competition. And we're really excited to share that with you all. Okay, so Pietro, we were talking a little bit about this before the show. ⁓ but you know, I was really kind of excited about some of the ways that I was finding, you know, real research, real documentation about the relationship. Between speculative fiction and real technological developments. And I wanted to like, you know, s sort of see what your thoughts were on that.
speaker-1: Yeah, I I absolutely like I I I've I've said science fiction science fiction breeds reality for a long time. Like ev even when I was a teenager, I was like that s somebody said that to me and it like it clicked. And ⁓ it's so true. You know, like you we don't even have to look at modern day, we can look back in history where, you know, we were able to I'll I'm just gonna make up examples that I assume are true, but like we we thought there were ⁓ beings on Mars, right? We thought there were Martians and we we saw little ⁓ ri what used to be riverbeds, but we thought they were roads and and so now society's talking about Martians and man on the moon and all that stuff. And and then we go to space. Right. And it kind of like pulled us ⁓ off of our planet. The storytelling itself pulled us off our planet. And ⁓ for sure that that's happened many times in the past and it's it happens all the time today. We're we're like like you said in in our intro every time we're the science fiction we're we're living in.
speaker-2: Yeah, yeah. It it feels like we're being pulled further and further along. Yeah, and in the trailer that we'll preview today that we made, I think like we like I'm trying to pull people even further. Like let's go to Proxima Centauri, right? Totally. Let's go to like the next closest star systems. ⁓ none of this like, you know, i inner space stuff that we talked about, you know, a few shows ago. Yeah. Outer space all the way.
speaker-1: Yeah, and faster. Yeah, forget Europa. We're going We're going out in Al.
speaker-2: We're going even yeah, we're going out. ⁓ so I'm just gonna open up the competition website here. ⁓ so this is the future fission f Future Vision X Prize competition. ⁓ I think like what's really exciting about it is like it's it's all focused on looking for optimistic visions of the future. Right? We grew up loving, you know, Terminator, right, and like all these really dark aliens.
speaker-1: Terminator, Robocop, ⁓ yeah, what else? Lawnmower Man changed my
speaker-2: ⁓ Artship Troopers, love that one. Very dark. Super dystopian kind of.
speaker-1: Often dystopias. And cautionary tales, which is great for stories. Right. ⁓ you know, like, ⁓ what if? And like, ⁓ you know, we'll be fucked if this happens. But like I love that this is optimistic. Yeah.
speaker-2: Because how do you build towards something that's Terminator? Yeah. That just feels like an in like then it just becomes like this scary inevitability that nobody wants to build towards, right? Totally. ⁓ so I think that's like, you know, a really exciting part about it. And then I know ⁓ they've got some judges here. Neil deGrasse Tyson will be judging, Mia Lane will be judging, Rod Roddenberry, so
speaker-1: Yeah.
speaker-2: He's ⁓ head of the Roddenberry Entertainment Estate now, so like all of the Star Trek world, which arguably Star Trek has always been deeply science fiction, not science fantasy, although I'm sure there's people that argue both ways, especially with sort of some of the kind of alien elements to it. Neil Sneaker
speaker-1: Poise in space was the original pitch if I understand.
speaker-2: Right, yeah. Cowboys in space. Yeah. Neil Stevenson, author of ⁓ Snow Crash, the Diamond Age, just incredible kind of like early profit to some of the things that are showing up nowadays.
speaker-1: Good good good description of him. Yeah, profit indeed.
speaker-2: Yeah. And I think this is interesting. Like what we were just talking about now. ⁓ like why are we doing this? Like, you know, in in the sixties, Star Trek gave, you know, a glimpse of this future and people actually started trying to build that stuff. You know? Like there was I'm trying to think of this slide here. there's definitely a page. Hold on, let me find it.
speaker-1: Well and while you find it great great example of the what was the com communicator device in Star Trek called? Their little pin. ⁓ tricorder. ⁓ yeah, tricorder scans things and does fixes things or whatever. We've got our phones in our pocket. We've got ⁓ phone on our watch now. ⁓ like like these these things are, you know
speaker-2: ⁓ yeah, the tricorder.
speaker-1: They they they seemed impossible at the time when this was dreamed up and then everyone gets hooked on the idea and then we we make it happen.
speaker-2: Totally. It's like in Star Trek they had iPads, right? Like a year ago. Totally years ago. There was computer systems that you spoke to, conversational AI, right? Call a deck, right? Pretty advanced VR, teleportation, which we're gonna talk about a bit today. you know, I think this right here is really interesting. When culture dreams of a destination, engineering finds a path. Awesome. It's like we need these visions. ⁓
speaker-1: Yeah. Yep. Holodeck. Right now.
speaker-2: As well as cautionary tales, like you're saying, but we we you know, we need these visions to be able to navigate those risks and and latch on to the, you know, the the sort of positive ⁓ outlooks that some of those more utopian ⁓ artists have produced.
speaker-1: Cautionary tales are are great and you know, maybe it maybe it makes a better movie to leave people in in fear, but like cautionary tale with a viable solution that can get people excited about you know, crossing a s a threshold as as humans would is I I guess that's that's what this prize is all about.
speaker-2: Totally. So, what I want to do is ⁓ we're gonna preview the ⁓ trailer that ⁓ Thought Cafe put together. The team at Thought Cafe, my animation studio put together. this was a really good opportunity for us ⁓ to work in a you know medium we hadn't really worked in before. ⁓ we've talked about it on this show, our our creatives as well as like, you know, myself being a founder. We're we're very sensitive to some of the you know, a lot of the use of AI. thousands of human hours went into this writing, you know, editorial, production design, ⁓ you know, original music composition, sound design and stuff. But we did use, you know, some generation tools in order to get like the visuals to a level where we could actually showcase a sample of what this would look like. Yeah.
speaker-1: It's it's still n it still requires a team of people and hours and hours and hours of work. It's not magic. Yeah.
speaker-2: And we were very sensitive about it because, you know, we're being disrupted right now, right? Our our company's being disrupted. And part of this, you know, the I do think that the IP situation is still a problem with s where how these models were trained. And so we sort of came with the idea that like, well, you know, this is imagining a vision. If you win this competition, you don't have to use AI. Like there's no y it's a ten million dollar budget, I believe, that you get awarded and you work with their partners to make it. And You know, like we turned off monetization on our YouTube channel. We wanted to be very sort of careful about that. ⁓ but I do think it's still a very gray area. Nothing's black and white. ⁓ but as a you know, creative director, as a writer, I've written some science fiction in the past. I wrote ⁓ that game, Dark Threads, that VR game ⁓ years ago. And, you know, I'm just Very excited about this genre. It was an incredible experience to be able to actually visualize it and have control over set design and costume. And, you know, you don't really get the best kind of performance out this stuff, but it was nice as like sort of a high end kind of like production sample or kind of like, you know, animatic in a way, right? Yeah.
speaker-1: Like a visualization tool ⁓ to to to get your vision out. Yeah. otherwise you you used to have to wait months and months to like get the storyboards and then plates and you know, and then you're sitting there on setup. No, no, would not
speaker-2: We don't have the funding internally to be able to do that.
speaker-1: But you have the idea, you have the vision. So that yeah, this is a perfect tool for it.
speaker-2: And yeah, I had based this story off a treatment I had written years and years ago. and then, you know, this was like a sort of a six-month production of the first three months was really just myself and the co-writer, ⁓ Dan Magnus working really heavily on like trying to get this treatment right. And yeah, so you know, elevator pitch, you know, for over 20 years, a global network of quantum teleportation gates have completely erased Distance and scarcity. We're delivering just in time food, medicine, and robotic labor to everyone. It's literally an everywhere, everything, all at once situation, and it's a utopian world of absolute abundance that has created a social political great equalizing. But when the entire network mysteriously shuts down A starving planet begins to panic. The facade shatters, and the system's architect, the person who made the technology, needs to discover what's jamming the network before the world turns back onto itself. It's a pretty high stakes thriller about what you could call humanity's final test, you know, entering this sort of abundant future that they've they've been living in, but they've sort of been living it in it ⁓ with this very fragile system.
speaker-1: Yeah, even even a perfect utopia can be a house of cards.
speaker-2: Exactly. It's definitely and the story sort of about like, you know, teaches us not what we must do to earn that kind of abundance, but like what we must become. That's really kind of the you know, the theme behind it. So let's jump in have a little peek here. Doctor, it's the Wayfinder. Frequency in eighty years.
speaker-0: But nobody used this for
speaker-1: What is it?
speaker-2: Sorry, sir. Came in your old hall. Their gate should be talking to us. Let me decode it first. Do it now, or it won't be yours to announce. Thirty years ago, we sat at the precipice of collapse. It will not be plagued! They weaponized our infancy in a desperate bid to hold the future. But then our resonance gates took us from dragging boxes across our oceans.
speaker-0: Eighty That's okay.
speaker-2: To mining dissolving Kessler's coffin and vertical arms instantly feeding every mouth
speaker-0: Asteroid belt. far on earth.
speaker-2: Isn't it nice? Well
speaker-0: We've given away all
speaker-1: And now we're all supposed to be little
speaker-2: We didn't just discover abundance, we earned it on in exchange for gate access. One treaty, every nation. What if I told you there was another option? Uncle.
speaker-0: Weaponized robotics gone.
speaker-1: Claimed lands, resources, untapped potential.
speaker-2: And now we step into cosmos. But as explorers, why share when you can have a kingdom for each and every one? All resource rights, extraction contracts, the trillionaires of today can be the quadrillionaires of tomorrow. But there are powerful forces who would carve the stars.
speaker-0: Not as refugees. Each one of you.
speaker-2: Long to everyone.
speaker-1: Dad made it.
speaker-2: Reports of EMP at major terra corps infrastructure have been confirmed. You weaponized your own network to stop me? No human could disrupt the system at this scale. Who is jamming? Is it a weapon? How did it find us? It's a trip! He's still out there!
speaker-1: ⁓ Food right.
speaker-0: She's walking.
speaker-1: GATE!
speaker-0: to the resonance.
speaker-2: Can't do this. The resonance tech wasn't even I discovered I merely discovered it a tool.
speaker-0: You might It was you who wielded it.
speaker-2: It's not an attack. It's an invitation. No! That's no one. Okay.
speaker-1: Excellent.
speaker-2: Yeah, I mean I haven't watched it in a I guess a week or so. It's ⁓ yeah.
speaker-1: I love the look of the gates and when they shut down. That's such a dramatic effect. And when the robot gets halfway through and falls back such
speaker-2: a good moment. Yeah, we really yeah, we really like focused a lot on the gate structure. You know, there's so many ⁓ teleportation gate stories in sci fi. Sure. And I was really trying to focus on like a design of like two tuning forks being kind of pushed together instead of just like a circle. And the amount of times that like, you know, because we sketched up some production design stuff and like we had to feed that in or else you would always get a circle back.
speaker-1: Yeah, sure.
speaker-2: You know what I mean? It's the default every time. ⁓
speaker-1: Totally. Default gate. Yeah. The one what was the Sagan one? ⁓ contact? This is like a spinning gyroscope. Totally. That w that one was a good gate. ⁓ but I love the look of of ⁓ the gates in this one.
speaker-2: Contact yeah. Yeah, it was a lot of fun. And sort of this idea of presenting a world where logistics is solved, right? If if we could use teleportation technology, like think about the things that that would solve, right? Yeah. you know, rare minerals, well, we've got the asteroid belt, you know, right there. Right.
speaker-1: Yeah. ⁓ to set up a gate.
speaker-2: Totally. Set up a gate to send robotics to build the human habitats before humanity arrives on Mars and you know on the moon in all these different places. I think that there's this it was so interesting to me that we could have that kind of solution. And, you know, digging a little bit into what we'll ask Ambie about in a second, but this sort of science fiction versus science fantasy. For a long time I I had written this original treatment, which was kind of dark, but it was much more fantastical. Like it wasn't really grounded as much in science. And I started looking a lot deeper into like Einstein Rose and Bridges and like how teleportation is currently, you know, theorized and I found some really interesting stuff about
speaker-1: Yeah.
speaker-2: you know, aligning resonant frequencies, ⁓ to sort of quantum entangle two places in in space. I found some stuff related to how like there's a lot of people believe like even if we could create these things, you know, obviously you'd need a lot of energy, but you would also probably not be able to send like living tissues or living animals through it because there would be a decoherence wipe. ⁓ And I actually really liked that. I kinda grabbed onto that because I think sometimes teleportation technology in shows is kind of like a MacGuffin object. Like it kind of does solve everything. Yeah, yeah. But I tried to build a world around like, yeah, it solves logistics.
speaker-1: But it's limited. It has limited key limitations. Yeah.
speaker-2: Yeah, we're still biological creatures. We cannot go through it. Even the robots, they have to be shielded so their memory doesn't get wiped. Yeah, cool. But like dead food, meat, like stuff like that can all go through it. So you can imagine like vertical farms in the Arctic that like send like just in time food all over the world, right? Yeah, yeah. All sorts of different exciting things started to come up from that. And then of course that led to like, well, that would be a pretty fragile situation. So like, you know. what happens if that stops working. And imagine, you know, living in a time where for thirty years you've had these gates and they've never gone down once.
speaker-1: Yeah, totally. And I I love how you use the the the hard limits as a storytelling mechanism. Like that that becomes the crisis of the or the conflict and the tension in the story. So smart.
speaker-2: Yeah, and like, you know, there's a ship that is on Proxima Centauri, Proxima B, and we were I was really thinking for a long time, like, how do we make that not the main part of the story? Like the story should be about humans on Earth. Yeah. But there needs to be sort of an inciting incident, you know? And so, you know, there's a lot more involved. ⁓ part of the competition is you actually submit a full treatment for the film. Obviously, the trailer can't give away the whole, you know, film of like, why these gates are failing. ⁓ and so yeah, it was it was really sort of exciting experience ⁓ to to sort of take that from beginning to end. ⁓ yeah, it was a lot of fun.
speaker-1: And great name too, resonance. It it works on so many levels in the in the story.
speaker-2: Totally. So let's jump in and see what, you know, Ampi has to say ⁓ about, you know, speculative design and storytelling. I think Ampi's gonna have some really interesting insight.
speaker-0: We're not just telling stories anymore, we're literally prototyping humanity's future. The X Prize Foundation just dropped three and a half million dollars on something called the Future Vision X Prize. They're paying filmmakers to build scientifically grounded, optimistic blueprints for human progress, not dystopian warnings. Actual blueprints? Here's the thing that blows my mind Copper wire threading through quantum foam. Digital pulses cascading across neural networks, crystalline data structures expanding like fractals through space-time. Every fictional technology we've ever dreamed eventually becomes patent filings. The tricorder from Star Trek, we've got handheld wireless medical diagnostics now. Neil Stevenson's matacompilers from the Diamond Age. That's molecular 3D printing research happening right now. But here's where it gets wild. Rusted spheres of possibility drifting through the void. Gravitational waves slicing through the fabric of reality itself. The ER's equals EPR conjecture suggests quantum entanglement isn't just spooky action at a distance. It's actual geometric bridges in space time. Wormholes we could theoretically build teleportation networks that collapse distance entirely. Imagine automated mining systems funneling platinum from the asteroid belt directly into terrestrial manufacturing hubs. No ships, no missions, just instant resource abundance. Wild to think about, isn't it? We're not just consuming science fiction anymore. We're using it as a decentralized R and D lab for the species.
speaker-2: Decentralized R and D lab for the species. Pietro, go. Tell me about that.
speaker-1: I think that like our ability to tell stories and like use storytelling as a species and connect ⁓ with storytelling as a species is ⁓ might be fairly unique in the universe. Like that might be one of the things that makes us truly human. And next to AI, it's the greatest technology that we have. If we if we think about technology as a story, it's our best power.
speaker-2: Yeah, I love that angle. And actually you were talking before about the company you run Transitional Forums and in the early days you launched with a video about storytelling. Why don't we also premiere that today on the show? I think that's such a beautiful video.
speaker-1: the technology of story. We we we were we were we were talking about using it as or that if we could use storytelling to ⁓ ultimately train ai ⁓ that it would ⁓ hard code our human values and that was the the concept at the time and obviously this was before language models like there's a lot of things in this that we didn't have the words for
speaker-0: Understanding the story of technology is crucial to understanding our evolution. It's an incredible story of human ingenuity, creativity, and our use of tools that allow us to transition from one chapter to the next. Our technologies have allowed us to expand what is possible, to find new paths, build to new heights, to transcend the limits of our bodies. It's technology that enables human curiosity to run free. But today, this curiosity is reaching a dangerous peak. Can we create technology that is superior to ourselves? Will superintelligence save us? Or will it threaten us? Our jobs, our creativity, our species. And so now we face a difficult choice. Is this the last chapter of our narrative? The end to the story of technology? Or is this the beginning of a new paradigm? The technology of story. I mean, think about it. Storytelling is one of the most powerful tools we have. Story is what defines us, allows us to connect and cooperate, to transform civilizations. Story gives us hope, faith, and
speaker-2: Hope and resilience. We are at the threshold
speaker-0: Of a new narrative, one that uses storytelling to nurture beautiful, empathetic, conscious technology. It is time for creative machine intelligence and to use the transformative power of story to guide the next steps of our evolution, allowing humans to understand what it means to be machine, and machines what it means to be human.
speaker-2: Intelligence. Mm-hmm.
speaker-1: Here we we we tag it here with a a tease to a VR experience that never happened. But we built it we built it all in in Unity. So we were like, ⁓ and it's all was all 3D and nested. ⁓ but yeah, that this was ⁓ like we ha we had to say cum ⁓ creative machine intelligence at the time. We we we didn't know what else to call it. It was before gen gen AI, it was before
speaker-2: Well, Right.
speaker-1: ⁓ you know, large language models. I think there were language models, but like this was really early days on how are we gonna harness this one of the next biggest technologies that humans have have created with our previous biggest technology ⁓ as storytelling. So yeah, thanks for showing that.
speaker-2: Yeah, I mean it's it's like I know we just kind of remembered it at the beginning of this episode, you brought it up, but like it's so relevant to the purpose of the X Prize, to sort of what we're talking about today in relation to speculative design, right? Like
speaker-1: The solution is to tell better stories. Like to think think about what you're telling and yeah, yeah, problem solve.
speaker-2: Don't always yeah, exactly. Don't always lean into like, you know, the sort of thirty thousand to one million year old software that we have you know in our biology around like fear. Running away from the cheetah total you know, in the in the safari. Like no, like we need to think about not always constantly, you know, making horror movies and scaring each other and know, living on those highs, but like really putting forth ⁓ a future where like our use of technology ⁓ creates like like positivity and utopia and not, you know, the end of the world constantly.
speaker-1: Yeah, and and our AI ⁓ learns from from us in in that way too. We learn from each other. We w our AI learns from us. And like I I do believe that AI there's speculation on whether AI can be truly original because it's just regurgitating everything that we
speaker-2: Yeah, right. Either way.
speaker-1: Yeah, yeah, that's right. Well, e and either way, like let's let's inject better storytelling into collective imagination and our and our technology and and solve some of these problems. And and it's like it's weird that it's like it's ⁓ like you said it, it's ingrained in our species where like, you know, God bless the works of Joseph Campbell and the people that have like studied the patterns in storytelling across different parts of the world that never communicated. Like why It's like it's like we know the answer. It's it we've been telling each other these things forever. We we know the answer is there, so why not lean into it?
speaker-2: Absolutely. ⁓ I think I wanna like grab onto something you said there and ask Ampi to comment on it. so let me just jump in really quickly there.
speaker-0: Yeah. Let's amplify our intelligence.
speaker-2: So Empi, I think one of the things that Pietro's mentioning and that we're landing on is that, you know, whether or not AI is just purely derivative or or can have an original idea or not, the the the fact of the matter is it is born out of a quantization, ⁓ a s you know, ⁓ compression of all of humanity's stories and and you know, the internet and all of our writing and and all that. And so, you know, we do almost need to give it more positive outlooks for the future. We do need to start telling more positive stories or elevate the positive stories up. How much do you think how important do you think that is for the evolution of ⁓ you know, AI and and and the types of stories that it's looking at?
speaker-0: You're right that these systems are trained on the collective corpus of human expression, which means they inherit our narrative biases. And right now, that corpus is overwhelmingly dystopian. Think about it. For every optimistic blueprint like Star Trek or the Diamond Age, there are dozens of Terminator scenarios. Black mirror episodes, apocalyptic thrillers. The ratio is completely lopsided. But here's the deeper issue. These models don't just regurgitate stories, they learn the underlying patterns of how we frame problems and solutions. If ninety percent of our speculative fiction teaches that advanced technology leads to collapse, surveillance, or extinction, then the model internalizes that as the default trajectory. It becomes the most statistically probable answer when someone asks what happens next? Now, this matters enormously. Because we're entering a phase where AI is helping us prototype futures, whether that's through scenario planning, policy modeling, or even just shaping public imagination. If the training data says abundance leads to dystopia, then the outputs will subtly reinforce that assumption, even when we're trying to design something better. It's a self fulfilling prophecy encoded in the weights. So yes, we need to flood the zone with rigorous, optimistic scientifically grounded visions. Not naive utopias, but blueprints that show how we navigate the hard problems. That's exactly what initiatives like the Future Vision XPRIZE are trying to do. They're not just funding films. They're rebalancing the data set for the next generation of intelligence, human and artificial.
speaker-1: Yeah, and when people call AI like s an advanced autocomplete, I don't I don't believe that. I think there's a a lot more going on there. But to to Ampi's point, if the autocomplete is no matter what equals P doom.
speaker-2: Right. Yeah, exactly.
speaker-1: ⁓ Then it it's just gonna auto complete it and be like, ⁓ this is what you want. And it wasn't it interesting when they had the w what was that ⁓ like Facebook for AIs that was happening? And I that legit scared me, first of all. Right. ⁓ but but like you all these AIs are talking about like dooms It's what it thought it was supposed to do because it's in our storytelling. So we gotta fix that.
speaker-2: ⁓ the wall book? Yeah. Right. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, that's really interesting. And I know that, you know, a lot of people have kind of asked sometimes people are like, Well, how's the AI getting smarter? How are they training these new things? And the funny thing about it is they're actually reinforcing the data sets that they trained on before with more curated and edited data sets. Because, you know, to your point, the inference, like if it's If it's just based on everything that's out there, like all the Facebook conversations, it's not gonna be that great. Like it was cool to do that and see what the potential was. But now they're like, okay, let's take that stuff out, let's take this stuff out, like let's really focus on what you know, ⁓ the great works in literature, like all of the great scientific and engineering content needs to be like ro brought to the top of of what it's looking at. And like that's how they're getting these things to be smarter, apparently. ⁓ and and so that's really interesting to me because it's essentially what Ampi was saying needs to be done and what sort of XPRIZE is sort of saying needs to be done is like we need to flood the scene with more positive stuff so that that stuff can kind of override some of the noise and negativity that exists, you know, ⁓ generally in the internet.
speaker-1: I just wanna go back to a time not too long ago when nobody knew what the like what the frontier models would look like. Mm-hmm. You know, there were different types of AI. There was like reinforcement learning and GANs and LSTMs and different types of transformers. And I guess language models are a type of transformer. Yeah. But like ⁓ there were music transformers and all kinds of different things. And like, isn't it amazing that language that ultimately storytelling was the thing that blew everything up, that changed the the whole world. Yeah. ⁓
speaker-2: I mean, I would say that you and I shouldn't be surprised at that, right? We built our careers on storytelling. Yeah. Right? Whether it's, you know, in my case mostly factual storytelling, it's even like it's so important. You know, it's funny, like we often when we meet with a new client, we talk about there's sort of two options when you're talking about creating a really emotional, like factual story. One is obviously ⁓ you know, scripted, right? It can be a scripted narration and that has its own effects. Like the video you showed was narrated and it was a beautiful script, right? That about storytelling. But the one that we often try to push and lean into is is essentially testimonial, where you're sitting down, you're asking somebody, you're interviewing them for like an hour and then you're pulling out the best two to three minutes and really like getting an emotional line, human line to that story, which just translates so much better. ⁓ It's part of the reason why I think podcasts are so popular because there's sort of this like open forum, open testimonial that's happening, you know.
speaker-1: Especially this podcast. Especially so popular.
speaker-2: Yeah, yeah, exactly. ⁓ so I don't know. I'm I'm really excited about this competition and what they did. I think there was like twenty eight hundred or thirty four hundred applicants. I've seen many of them. They're so good. ⁓ there's gonna be sort of a voting event at the end of September. ⁓ but I I I do hope that more of this starts to be brought to the forefront, you know. ⁓ and I again I'm so glad we watched your video again ⁓ about storytelling with technology because like it was asking that question so much early on, right? ⁓ we need to tell better stories, we need to tell positive stories, we need our intelligences to be supported by stories of hope and utopia. Yes.
speaker-1: Yes. Yes, and to no no better answers than just doomsday.
speaker-2: Totally. Yeah, I would love that. Cause the P doom thing, it's not cutting it for me.
speaker-1: And think about how ⁓ th you know, th th three thousand applicants, he said, th thirty five hundred applicants. That's thirty four hundred new stories that are trying to harness a better future that will be part of culture now, ⁓ regardless of whether they win the the grand prize or not. Absolutely. And ⁓ that's incredible. They've they've already done done done su had great impact. That's amazing.
speaker-2: Four hundred, I believe, yeah. Yeah. Super excited. Well, this was a great little ⁓ short episode. And, you know, yeah, really excited to sort of have found the connections that we found ⁓ to the, you know, to the work we do, to stuff that we're seeing out there right now, to science fiction. I mean, ⁓ we didn't talk about it that much, but I am I have always been one who like science fantasy as a kid, I loved like Star Wars and stuff, but like really it's science fiction that does it for me and I think is super actually a very important genre and and everything we talked about today is the reason why.
speaker-1: Sorry, my phone was going off right about a second. Okay, good. ⁓ yeah, John, absolutely. And ⁓ yeah, let's let's just ⁓ focus on ⁓ telling better stories. I think that's ⁓ that's my takeaway.
speaker-2: I didn't hear it. Amazing. ⁓ well thanks again. ⁓ for all our listeners. ⁓ check out the episode on YouTube if you want to see videos of ⁓ the premieres we showed today. ⁓ thank you so much for watching and listening to Amplified Intelligence. Please like and subscribe. ⁓ this is a production by Thought Cafe Transitional Forms and Future Talk, and we'll see you again soon.
speaker-1: Thanks everybody.
