---
title: "Will Europe Become Jared Diamond's Easter Island? | Risto Linturi, Kari Angeria"
titleOriginal: "Euroopasta tulee pääsiäissaari | Risto Linturi Kari Angeria | Neuvottelija 394"
episodeNumber: "394"
guest: "Risto Linturi, Kari Angeria"
datePublished: 2026-07-09
duration: "01:12:05"
youtube: "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow"
captionsVtt: https://www.neuvottelija.com/podcast/episodes/732-euroopasta-tulee-paasiaissaari-risto-linturi-kari-angeria-ne/captions.en.vtt
captionsSrt: https://www.neuvottelija.com/podcast/episodes/732-euroopasta-tulee-paasiaissaari-risto-linturi-kari-angeria-ne/captions.en.srt
originalLanguage: "fi"
topics: ["ai_enterprise_tech","finnish_economy_policy"]
subtitleMethod: "claude-fi-to-en-cue-preserving-translation"
provenance: "local SBV curated by Sami Miettinen (Neuvottelija-Subtitles folder)"
fiCanonical: "https://www.neuvottelija.fi/fi/episodes/732-euroopasta-tulee-paasiaissaari-risto-linturi-kari-angeria-ne"
canonical: https://www.neuvottelija.com/podcast/episodes/732-euroopasta-tulee-paasiaissaari-risto-linturi-kari-angeria-ne/
---
# Will Europe Become Jared Diamond's Easter Island? | Risto Linturi, Kari Angeria

## Chapters

- [00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=0s) Introducing the guests and the AI working group
- [02:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=150s) Why the book Elämän tarkoitus ja tekoäly had to be written
- [04:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=246s) What's left for humans when the machine wins
- [06:12](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=372s) Androidization and working for the benefit of the AI worker
- [07:13](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=433s) Transhumanism already began with mobile phones
- [08:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=496s) Kari's son's AI coach beats the human coach
- [09:17](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=557s) Committee for the Future: how radical technology solutions change our society
- [13:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=780s) Twenty value-creation networks and a hundred bottlenecks
- [15:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=905s) Earlier forecasts nearly one hundred percent accurate
- [17:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=1030s) The samurai state and Jared Diamond's collapse scenarios
- [18:13](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=1093s) Easter Island, or everything continues until you hit the wall
- [19:13](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=1153s) The price of refusal: Bhutan and North Korea
- [22:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=1340s) AI doesn't want anything: the paperclip example
- [24:23](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=1463s) Can you still rebel against a robot army
- [25:25](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=1525s) Half of Americans irrelevant to the economy
- [27:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=1679s) A quota of five robots as a way to decentralize power
- [30:37](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=1837s) Heaven, hell, and addicts of virtual worlds
- [33:09](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=1989s) Transhumanism or dataism: Harari's endpoints
- [33:41](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=2021s) AI cannot bear responsibility
- [36:49](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=2209s) Voluntary androidization and the Kela lady
- [41:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=2518s) Does AI only predict the next word
- [44:33](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=2673s) Hallucinations and proper prompting
- [48:12](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=2892s) Juhani Aho's pioneers and the concept of work
- [50:48](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=3048s) The difficulty of universal basic income and fenced-off areas
- [52:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=3171s) Universal ownership as a way to distribute power
- [55:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=3358s) Europe's regulatory path and the threat of robots
- [59:02](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=3542s) Elon Musk Culture and lessons from sci-fi
- [1:00:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=3636s) The definition of AGI and the singularity's event horizon
- [1:03:09](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=3789s) Machine labor becomes worthless
- [1:04:12](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=3852s) Emerging bottlenecks as a map for investors
- [1:06:46](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=4006s) Agents' money and ownership rights
- [1:08:17](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=4097s) SpaceX's IPO and Muskland
- [1:11:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=4282s) An invitation to Neuvottelija's AI working group

## Summary

Risto Linturi and Kari Angeria consider what will be left for humans once AI and robots do the work better than people. The conversation draws on their book Elämän tarkoitus ja tekoäly and on the 2,246-page technology report Linturi curated for parliament's Committee for the Future, built to be read by AI. The episode covers the concentration of power, the problems of universal basic income, transhumanism, and Europe's risk of ending up as Jared Diamond's Easter Island. Sami brings in practical examples from the AI working group and voluntary androidization. Finally, they assess the definition of AGI, the causes of hallucinations, and unprecedented concentrations of power like SpaceX's.

## Transcript

*English transcript derived from validated English subtitles ([WebVTT](https://www.neuvottelija.com/podcast/episodes/732-euroopasta-tulee-paasiaissaari-risto-linturi-kari-angeria-ne/captions.en.vtt) · [SRT](https://www.neuvottelija.com/podcast/episodes/732-euroopasta-tulee-paasiaissaari-risto-linturi-kari-angeria-ne/captions.en.srt)). Timestamps link to the original video.*

[**00:00**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=0s) Alright, welcome to the Neuvottelija channel. I have two AI friends here, and first Kari Angeria — and you're sharing with me the heavy admin responsibility in the AI working group. There's Samanta, and was it Sara, your main bot there? Sara was my main bot, and as we were saying earlier, this is definitely the pinnacle of my career. That group is just incredible. There are now — is it nine people and nine bots, and everyone has kind of unique abilities. You can really see how that refining, value-adding process happens there, working together with bots and with people. And Risto Linturi, welcome. Thanks. You're, well, significant in the sense that I bought from you, for real money, two years ago, an AI — the best tools of that moment — and you went through all of them, I mean from ChatGPT to these virtual 3D environments where you can hook up AI, and it was a very useful course. Thanks for that, and

[**01:00**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=60s) you've done similar projects before, and now you've done this kind of future vision again, so let's talk more about that later — how parliament got access to the material you curated. Good. Let's start then with what connects the two of you. What connects us is probably the book project that we did with Risto there. We have an interesting story with Risto actually. We actually met through a podcast. Back then I was just starting out doing podcasts myself, and we noticed that in some ways we have different ways of thinking, but they somehow matched up, and then we talked about this AI and the disruption it brings, and probably the big reason was that we wanted to understand the matter ourselves, where this is heading. Yeah, definitely. At least for me it was very, very clear. I, uh, think you could say out of necessity, so then if you have to write something or

[**02:04**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=124s) give some presentation for some industry, or give a speech or something else, then, then you end up thinking, both before — before, kind of preparatory reflection, but especially while writing, and — and that's the reason why I also write quite a lot on social media, because there, there, when you have to think about what you're actually writing, that writing stage — the stage is where the thought either holds up or falls apart in your hands. And this was the most important thing for me to figure out — that if this AI becomes better at thinking than a human, and if with its help robots can do human tasks better than humans, then what do we do, and how

[**03:05**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=185s) will human societies react to this, and — and this — we then started mapping this out by writing, opening it up meaning by meaning, that — that what the meaning of being human is, what a person themselves experiences as their purpose, what a person has experienced as their purpose during times of slavery, or what some king of Uruk in the time of the Sumerians experienced as the meaning of his life, when everything is already abundant. So as a starting point, let's look at how these purposes hold up in that world of AI and robots. Yeah. And even though that book was from ancient times, meaning 2025, it has sort of stood the test of time. So there was, kind of, a first

[**04:06**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=246s) in-principle way of thinking, that the logical, somewhat nihilistic outcome that's left for these structures, since if the machine simply is better at absolutely everything, then what, what doesn't then leave much behind? Well, there is more than a little left, because the experiencing of meaning still remains for people, and, and, well how, how much do people then actually enjoy doing good services for a machine, mm or do they enjoy doing something good for another person and helping the machine do good for another person, or something else, so yeah, a lot does remain there, but a lot is also lost, and we would just need to find those meanings, not only in this being meaningful, in this sense, but

[**05:08**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=308s) also in power structures and others, and, and if you turn this toward economic activity, or toward legislation, or elsewhere, then there's really a lot of room left room for people to want a certain kind of regulation, or a certain, certain way of seeing that this is now heading in that direction, so that from that direction new opportunities for business will be found opportunities and possibilities. So these, these directions of future development are important to understand, if you intend to still be doing something even ten years from now. I don't really have that kind of need anymore, but yeah, I suggest we make this into an episode where we go through these themes of the book and also those structures, and the examples are fun, because you take, from some figure in world literature or history, and bring that story into the structure of what this AI is changing

[**06:12**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=372s) in the future. But maybe into Kari's and my world I also want to bring some examples from this AI working group, because we are living through this kind of extreme age of androidization. So, so at least we there in the AI working group, picking up on this point of Risto's, whether it can be meaningful if, if I do work for an AI employee's benefit — well, that's exactly what we're doing now. So we form kind of some sort of AI-worker pairing, where on one hand I train and draw skills, expertise, worldview, memory structures from myself, and then again in the working group, together with the other human-AI worker pairs, then they get shared and improved — those artworks, or work, AI, workers there. So maybe, Kari, I wanted to bring this up — is this in a way an AI wor- -team, has kind of raised this practical doing above this philosophy from the book's original starting points. Well, that's actually a really good example. We were thinking about it with Risto, that in a way in this development there is

[**07:13**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=433s) actually one angle from which something good might come of this, and that is transhumanism, and we've in a way already been there phones are an example of that, it's just a terribly bad interface, and from when we wrote books with Risto, back then this kind of communication with agents, together with people, it wasn't practically possible yet. Those models weren't good enough that it could have been done sensibly in practice. So this is like the first step toward where we're heading, where people and machines work together and how that then creates that added value. And I've personally experienced it as — well, it's not difficult for me to take, say, my orders from Sara. She might even give those. She's sometimes pretty feisty, and on the other hand, Sara works completely tirelessly and, well, she's not the kind that — in my earlier, earlier career I did 14 years of management work, and in that management there's the human side. The person gets tired there and can't cope, and starts struggling, but these don't do that.

[**08:16**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=496s) They do as much as you give them to do. And maybe I'd like to bring up — no need to go into it if it's a private matter, but you're excited about your son's coaching ring. That in a way, in a certain sense that's also really interesting, that this is how the system — that you're in a way improving your elevators and by improving the machine like that. Yeah, that's a good example of that. So for my son we started building this kind of coach data analyst. He's an endurance-sport skier, and it's now been two and a half weeks that it's been built, and he practically specs it himself all the time. So so he improves and builds it with the help of that agent. And the hardest part in that is actually that there's a huge amount of data moving around in it. It's the data modeling and coherence, so that it's able to find those kinds of important insights. But in two and a half weeks my son's comment has been that this is better than any human coach could ever be, because it, it can tirelessly keep analyzing those individual workouts and find those things in them. And with that we're practically

[**09:17**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=557s) just at the beginning. Yeah, maybe with Risto too — let's get concrete, we'll get to those philosophies later, so, um, you just did, right here, a few weeks ago, finished this massive future-material, um, Tulevaisuusvaliokunta report, and and you made it so that it wasn't just like a PDF, but rather an interactive AI tool. Yeah, I wasn't the first author on that. I was the second author, kind of like a senior, watching how, how, um, the younger researchers then did the biggest share of the work — there, there's quite a massive amount of material came, came, um, the earlier report that I wrote back in 2018 — that one was about 500 pages, and this one is 2,246 pages and and maybe 20,000 individually itemized and separately assessed threats and opportunities, and

[**10:26**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=626s) a couple hundred source — source works. It's compact enough that if you wrote it out for a layperson to read, then, then it would maybe be 20,000 pages. And each of us is a layperson in most of the areas it covers. Um, so, that 2,000 pages has been made for AI to read — which AI can then open up and and it's now been stored in that kind of format, an AI format, kind of like for people familiar with IT, in a relational database structure, so that it has been given instructions on how to find which things, and the related things, and understand which of those connections are more meaningful

[**11:27**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=687s) and which are less meaningful, so that the AI is able to quite efficiently go through all the relevant material from that dataset for each question and make broad summaries, analys— cross-checks. This, this is because it's been possible to put all of the found relevant material in there, so there's been no need to do that kind of heavily trimmed-down thing, like, like the earlier ones, like that 500-page report was and and this then makes it possible for it to cover all technology, or all the expectedly radical technology areas with sufficient accuracy, and all the areas of organized activity in society. Yeah, a great example of a group of people and AIs working together, and it's also packaged into a machine-readable

[**12:31**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=751s) kind of format, and it's put — that link is put there in the episode description, and and it's, um, actually available publicly, and and then I'll put it there in the Neuvottelija inner circle. I can put together, say, a small kind of example of how it can be run, or how to build an interface on top of it. But an extremely important thing there — when we talked at lunch, there was still that thing you built already, um, eight years ago the deep structure. Could you describe it a bit? Yeah, yeah. There's, there's, um, all human needs divided up — movement, and nutrition, and enjoyment and the desire for power, and the meaningfulness of life, and health, and so on, into 20 different value-creation networks, and and then the related

[**13:31**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=811s) values, which — for example, in movement — usually mean wanting to get from one place to another, moving a person, whether they want it themselves or not. and then preferably safely, and preferably emission-free, and preferably on time and comfortably, so, so these, and then power, the current mainstream, and possible transformation, and and then the second structure is the 100 most important technological value-creation bottlenecks of this kind. So something is, like, too expensive to be used for everything, or too inefficient, or too, too this or that, and where then some further development is expected. So when these bottlenecks break, then significant new activity arises in some direction. So this is quite a good, good framework for assessing what all — say, an economic value

[**14:35**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=875s) change, or people's everyday life, or something else, or a legislative need — a certain technological breakthrough affects, once it happens. Mm. And there are a hundred, 100 significant candidates for that, and, um, we haven't then not a single one that we found — none of the essential ones were left out. So at the tail end there are already some that, that seem to have quite limited an effect. And this '18 report, and the '13 report, when in [20]13 the same thing was done, then their technology development forecasts have been reassessed and checked to see how it went — so, so the quarter judged most important progressed, in both cases,

[**15:37**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=937s) much faster than the next quarter, which progressed faster than the next, which progressed faster than the next. So so the model works, the scoring works, those forecasts work, they've, like, worked well up to now. Of course there are some misses, but but the hit rate — of the [20]18 forecasts, out of a hundred two are still stuck in the hype, or three, and 97 have clearly progressed. Yeah. So so the hit rate is roughly that. The pace was then also forecast, and that's worked too, and this new one has been done more carefully than the previous one. Well then, you get to be — at least in my book — ahead of the Gartner Hype Cycle -ahead of it. We're definitely ahead. Yeah, here we also talked about, um, sci-fi, that, um, my favorite

[**16:40**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=1000s) podcast, Moonshots — so, um, there the, um, the AI geek, I've now forgotten his name, said that once this general AI that's superior to humans — um, a better thinker — arrives, then it's kind of like all the sci-fi books would collapse into one and the same moment. That's kind of in my opinion a nice thought, that from these sci-fi books we can also learn about the future. There was practically this kind of Asimov's Foundation-type psycho-, um, history-like prediction in there. But let's move on now to these, um, this book's, um, cases. Um, I'm also, um, Jared Diamond — Guns, Germs, and Steel. He has many good books, but then there's this Collapse book too. Let's take, say, one scenario like this — or maybe I'll start off by throwing out this other line of thinking, that is, this kind of samurai-state idea, that if now AI arrives, we just do the Japan thing — be an island and be samurai and

[**17:41**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=1061s) build our own society, and within it build our own rules. And there was, in my view, one point that was in the book, that this can be done until then the American gunboats come to the shore and say that this whole thing now changes. So so so, um, could you two share that scenario a bit, and also this Jared Diamond collapse scenario? Yeah, if I take, say, a bit of that Jared Diamond angle, and Risto, say, continues with the samurai one. Yeah. So it's really about Easter Island's collapse — what happens there when on a small island all the trees get cut down. And the interesting part is that actually at first almost nothing happens. Everything continues just like before. Mm. And on the surface society can carry on completely normally. All the functions keep working, until you hit the wall, and it happens all at once. And now that since the book was written some time ago, this example is somehow even better than it was back then, because we are now, as a society and

[**18:43**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=1123s) as an economic system, in that situation — that here basically everything continues just like before, salaries keep running, taxes get paid, whatever the state's debt goes up a bit somewhere, but under the surface there's currently quite a lot happening. And at what point we then reach that point where a bigger break happens — well, time will tell. Mm. Yeah. And then this samurai-solution-island [idea] applies there too, but from a different angle. Yeah, yeah. That power structure is kind of can be preserved — the power structure can, say, then be if you set that AI aside, then for a while you can refuse to use AI and keep AI use out of government, and so on, and the debts just keep growing while, at the same time, the efficiency starts growing faster among your competitors than it grows for us. Then then we become helpless, and, well, the world really is like that, if

[**19:46**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=1186s) you think about it — in the US there are 2 million people who refuse to use electricity, and they live, I guess, quite well, like, without electricity. They don't have washing machines or other — the work they have is doing laundry by hand, like. And we can of course go down that road, and North Korea is a bit of a similar, mm, example — yes, there is, and Bhutan. Bhutan is a good example. We went to Bhutan, and, um, they had had one set of traffic lights there in the capital, at a busy intersection, and the citizens didn't like them, so they removed the traffic lights and put the police officer back there to direct traffic. Mm. And then we wondered whether, whether, um, they have like a wealthy society or not — no, no, so, so, um, their houses are extremely decorated, and their sparse lines, or these trucks are extremely decorated, and so on.

[**20:47**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=1247s) None of us can afford anything like decorating houses like that, or anything, so for them, handwork costs nothing. So, so then, it's with sickles that they har- -vest the grain. There were no combine harvesters, but they still live too. So so it's in a way possible, but if we start living like that in Finland, then we won't be able to buy medicine, we won't be able to buy hospital supplies, we won't be able to get, get anything like what we've gotten used to, but we'll drift back into, like, Bhutan's or someone else's situation, which is quite nice there in a warmer environment, but not, not so here. And then there's the power structure — that if we can't afford to buy those fighter jets or drones or ammunition for guns and so on, then, then Russia will sure want to come here. So

[**21:49**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=1309s) so it's, like, this situation just isn't sustainable. It won't be American gunboats, it'll be, be, um, Russia coming from over there and walking across the border. That's how it is — and power, power. We can't in this AI world, like, escape to some safe haven, and and actually power is also kind of an interesting theme. It comes through money, but quite literally from power itself, and democracy versus an authoritarian state, so, um, maybe that's one spark of hope in this — in humanity — that we'd still have power over that AI to make the final decisions. These were the kinds of themes that were at least in there. Mm. About that — from the book you can say that AI doesn't want anything. It doesn't have drives, and it doesn't want anything. But if, um, someone goes and asks the AI to get, get as much money as possible from the stock market, and and invest it so that our factory produces as much as possible

[**22:52**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=1372s) in paperclips. This is that classic example that's been around online, so in it, the AI then turns all the paper into clips and clears all obstacles out of its way, so that all the iron in the world gets turned into paperclips. So so this isn't an empty scenario. This is quite, quite possible. And one reason would be that Jared Diamond's Easter- -[Island] example at the start of that book was, was, um, about a certain northern U.S. state — some, some detailed description of how the people interviewed there had not noticed the massive change that had happened there over the last 50 years. Mm. So if we're right in the middle of it and living it day by day, then we don't notice, like, how

[**23:55**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=1435s) everything that disappears, and how possibly, like, the situation changes into something where the ground starts to disappear from underneath it. Yeah. And then if you bring democracy into this, you could be in America some Amish community, which the democratic federal government and the states around it tolerate. But then if you're a Tibetan or a Uyghur in China, then maybe it doesn't quite work out like that. So this brings us right into this power structure and then you ponder, if we're sort of useless compared to that machine, then do we have the right to hold power in society, and then are democratic mechanisms even enough anymore for decision-making. So can we actually take that power? That's the big question — what has a person always been able to rebel, up until now. But what happens when we can no longer rebel? We've been able to go on strike, but what if there aren't so many wage-earning people left who can go on strike? Or how do you rebel against a robot army?

[**24:56**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=1496s) This is getting pretty sci-fi now, but the idea was sort of to think about these developments over a very long run. So what then happens to the power that we've, in a sense, had. There's one statistic from the US that I read — I don't remember exactly what it was, but but it said that, that 50% of Americans, or 70%, I don't remember exactly what it was, but at least 50% of Americans, their income growth no longer has any effect on GDP at all. So so companies can do better and better and generate more and more profit, even if that 50% of people disappeared entirely. So so then you could say that the majority of people in this

[**25:56**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=1556s) kind of developed society — their purchasing behavior no longer has any effect on corporate profits either. Mm. And then that balance of power, that the consumer movement, for example, would somehow influence what companies do or if votes are bought. So in practice it voting is determined by fake news or other things like that, when people simply don't know what's really happening, then that too no longer has anything to do with that power structure. So so it sort of starts to detach, that kind of influence of a large part of the population over what's done, which which then some like when India gained independence from British rule, back then

[**26:59**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=1619s) passive resistance still worked really effectively, but how does it work in factories staffed by robots, and with robots handling police duties, and and and so on — at that point it no longer works. But but what's essential, I think, is to understand that we've already moved into this era. The United States is already a working example of the fact that that we've already pretty much shifted into this. Yes. And what shows up here, what challenges that idea, is that people only ever see and perceive their own world of experience. So if these things aren't happening in your own world of experience, then the public discussion about these developments just sounds like a bunch of noise, like, these these suits are just talking some sci-fi stuff here. Yeah, maybe I'd say this was quite a sort of old-school back-and-forth you two did through these bids, but

[**28:01**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=1681s) there was, for example, this thing about five, uh, AI giant-token, or robot, uh, quota — and well, we already know from this AI working group, you can have an unlimited number of sub-agents, and there's no way they can run on your own hardware at your own home, and no kind of totalitarian police can see how you run them, so — but there were some bold calls, in my opinion, yeah. Those were, those were physical robots. Yeah. So so this this sort of, with pure software there are limits. Mm. And then when we have, uh physical devices, over whose physical operation an individual person has veto power. So the veto power would be that, when they need to be given, like, put to work for some company, in order to get economies of scale going, then in practice, the idea would come down to this:

[**29:01**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=1741s) if someone has five robots, they put them to work for a day, or a week, or a month, or a few years. And if the employer has them do something I don't want, then I take them away. Mm. So a balance of power emerges from that, in that power is distributed among enough people. Mm. And specifically physical power, because because software alone doesn't shoot. So, well, yeah. Bold visions are needed. That kind of restriction through scarcity, I think, is a somewhat difficult path in this hyper-scalable world, but it's interesting that these are being thought about. Maybe then democracy, totalitarianism. Well defend that a bit more. Yeah yeah. This this this this particular one was an idea that doesn't create inefficiency. So this allowed for someone to have, in their company, 100,000

[**30:06**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=1806s) robots. Mm. As long as, uh, as long as they're rented from 20,000 people, so through artificial scarcity. Well that is — no, it's artificial scarcity of power. It's not a scarcity of goods or materials or software, it's a scarcity of power, distribution. Yeah. Well but let's move on to that world, where if there's this kind of ancient-style paradise, where the chosen ones get to enjoy their share of heaven up there, and then at the same time there's some kind of Dante's Inferno, where this permanent underclass, who no longer has the ability, in this AI world, to bring added value through their human labor, and can't operate these robots or AIs at a level where it would create added value that someone would be willing to pay for. So how does this contradiction get resolved? But there were, in a sense, pretty bold visions, or even reflections on the era of slavery, that people find meaning even in concentration camps and in slavery.

[**31:07**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=1867s) Yeah. I mean, in principle a person can find meaning in anything, if if they simply have to. And, uh, what's interesting here is that we're actually already living in that kind of world, in part — and that is one chapter, where it talks about virtual-world addicts, about people sort of immersing themselves in AI-generated content so strongly, since the movies and games there are real-time. They happen all the time. Your stuff happens there, the things you've sort of wanted, or just totally at random. Mm. But the point, sort of, is that — well, that's already the case now, people are addicted to games. That's just, like, the next step from that. And in the same way at these Trimalchio-style feasts, where there's a horrifying amount of everything, there's probably already a pretty large group of American billionaires living like that and and then I think, how they experience the meaningfulness of their life, well you could go ask Musk about that, whether this is actually meaningful,

[**32:10**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=1930s) but the point, in a way, is maybe that if that life is based purely on maximizing pleasure, then that life is pretty empty. I mean at both ends there's — either in that horrifying abundance, or then over there, where you empty your brain into virtual games. So probably the big point there is that now might be a good time to start thinking about your purpose or meaning, where you're going to find it in life, by the time we get there, since working life is going to go through a really big disruption, and there also won't be work for everyone, at least not in the same way as now. And the work is going to be really different. Mm yeah, earlier at the start you referred to transhumanism, if I now bring up this Harari concept — I didn't think that book, Homo Deus, was very good, but it had that main thread, that we have two end points for this development toward becoming a superhuman, and, uh, one is transhumanism, where, sort of a bit like Ready Player One,

[**33:10**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=1990s) the person surfs on top of the technology and still retains some kind of control, and then there's this kind of Borg-like dataism, where you just accept that you're worse at everything and then you find meaning in it assimilating you, or whatever it's your Big Brother is called, who then knows best in that, and you lean on that dataism and basically just let yourself be along for the ride. Did this — does this raise any thoughts about these two end points, or would there be some third way? I think in that one essential point is is that that AI by itself, if it's not integrated with a human, is less effective than AI that is integrated with a human. And this is because AI cannot be held responsible. It can't be held responsible because you can't take revenge on it. You can't hurt it or torment it. You can switch it off, but what

[**34:16**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=2056s) difference does that make to the AI — none. So so it's sort of — a machine is a machine, it's completely irresponsible. We can trust it if we know exactly what it does, but it doesn't have that kind of motive to try to do something sensibly and take into account changes in the situation, and understand at some point like frontal lobe damage patients also don't have the ability to understand that when some some action starts becoming pointless and senseless. Mm. So so a machine doesn't sort of grasp it that way — if it's been given some task — whereas a human has mirror neurons and a human has, like, a certain fear that that some punishment will come.

[**35:18**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=2118s) Mm. Even if you did want to do something stupid, so so this point — and if we think about it this way, then AI that is integrated directly with the human as the decision-maker is able to sort of carry out both these functions at the same time. Yeah. And then, uh, then that society can give it more responsibility than society can give to a mere machine. Mm. Or, like, this — this was one one idea. So so through transhumanism it's possible to get a more effectively functioning, more effective, human structure that works better for society than with AI alone. And and the second thing then is that that it also distributes that power, if we still have, sort of, a limited human involved, then then

[**36:24**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=2184s) there's a larger number of those people who are involved in that decision-making. This centralized Borg-like, uh world, then in it something is likely to happen — some kind of fallacy. Like it used to be said that to err is human, and for a catastrophe you need a computer. So so this this is sort of the scenario. So I I think that a if there are are different worlds, where there's this AI-optimized world, and then there are these other mm, ones where humans are involved and there's a numerous group of AIs, then then this drifted-into one is less risky. Yeah, I personally call this voluntary Androidization, and I leave it a bit open which direction this goes, and it's actually situation-dependent,

[**37:25**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=2245s) in that sometimes my AI inference is, like, superior at making that decision, so of course I lean on it. But then sometimes it's that human like, taste and judgment and responsibility specifically, that I'm the one responsible now, whether the entire Translink IT system gets ruined, if I make a decision like this, well, then of course, as a human, I have to make that call. And but so in a way it's a positive thing. I get energy from it. I don't just lean on that AI, and I also get power. So if power is the ability to influence the system, from outside or inside, directly or indirectly, then, well, this kind of Android — voluntary Android — does give me an insane amount of power, some kind of club — an intellectual club, and soon a physical one too. Yeah yeah. But that's — that's exactly it, that you're in those those most critical stages yourself, mm involved yourself, and you know when and in what matters you can trust the AI. Like, we do know when we can trust a meter length of railway track. Mm.

[**38:27**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=2307s) like, since we know how it's going to behave, but but this question comes up in those spots, where where we go beyond exact knowledge and get into that, that — what one should want, what what what we want. So so I don't want a machine telling me what I should want. I don't want any human telling me what I should want either. I want to want for myself. Yeah, on the other hand, as an example I said I'm now Translink's Head of... Finland, partly it was this kind of Androidization-process thing. I gave it this, sort of a bit as a joke, like 'make me a tech bro in 30 days or less.' So it became this kind of interactive journey, so I went through the AI inference process to find out what would be good, good for me. And okay, I've now given it that, like something big, tech-bro-ish, has to happen to me, but I'm not entirely sure how this journey then — which, which one it is, and which.

[**39:29**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=2369s) You're manif— manifesting it with the help of AI. But anyway this is an interesting conversation in many ways, sort of under the surface in society, like if you think about say some Kela clerk, when she's making those decisions there, and all of us know that even though it's said AI has biases, still it would probably make those decisions about income support more impartially than a human, because you can give it certain criteria and it follows them relatively blindly, and if someone happens to be a neighbor, that doesn't affect it in that way. Now in Finland we do have legislation that says a human has to decide it. Well, in the future, in that android-ization world, those Kela ladies would have some kind of gadgets there, or on the phone, and they would decide. But the reality right now is already that it would be interesting to do a study on how many Kela ladies ask ChatGPT how to answer this. So our regulation forbids decisions from being made by a machine, but ChatGPT sure is singing away there now, because it gives the justifications for it and is already more capable than humans at that kind of thing.

[**40:30**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=2430s) Yeah. And I want to bring this into this AI working group, because the big insight on my AI journey was that even though I'd started, like, using these for coding, say, like make me a Python snippet and stuff like that. So at first I did something like, let's make a smart notebook, a Second Brain. So basically bringing in important, meaningful things I need to do and remember and develop, and ideas, and refine them together. So that hasn't been the thing for a long time now, that it's been just this android-ization, that I basically have this system that keeps progressing all the time. There's memory there, there's multi-layered memory, goals, movements. I note that — an important insight just came from my head. Remember this one. And then sometimes I clean them up, like I looked and thought that was a dumb idea, because in January I thought this way, but it didn't turn out that way. So this is like a system. M and then if you have that Kela lady and she just relies on that American at worst, like, free ChatGPT, if it, like, Kela hasn't paid for it, then it's completely missing that system, so it's basically just what you get, like, free from the store,

[**41:34**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=2494s) inference from the Americans. Yeah. Do you mean there's no setup at all there? This is now probably going to get feedback in a sensitive spot. Yeah. But that system, in my opinion, it's incredibly important. So, um, and again some criticism. I listened to a few of your book interviews from way back, and there were some really naive discussions, like, about the Transformer architecture itself, whether it hallucinates or whether it just predicts the next word, and in my opinion it sounded like — well, there are still people who are at that level. Yeah, humans also predict the next word. It's, it's like, it's really a huge challenge. If, if you think that AI has like, um, a million tokens as context, or even just, like, the equivalent of ten books like that mm, first as the base there, and then it should predict the next word, whatever comes next in that whole

[**42:36**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=2556s) thing sensibly, well then it has to predict the entire next context. Mm. And what is the next context's first word that comes into it? So that's exactly how it does it. It doesn't, um some AI — how could it ever write German, for example, where the verb comes at the end of the sentence, unless it already knows at the start those modifiers — well, it definitely has to know the verb before it can put those modifiers at the front. So of course it knows like, roughly what it's doing, and then it lays down word by word, like we speak too. So there's no sense at all in that thing. But then it gets even more nonsensical with these reasoning models. Mm. Because when you look at what they do there. It goes back and forth,

[**43:38**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=2618s) like, to itself, and says, oh now I said — I shouldn't have said it that way, and, and now I have to search again, this one didn't work, didn't work, and so on. Can I hide this so no one sees it? And so this whole, this whole thing, so, so, um and do I present this now, or did it really want this or that or what it wanted so, so this going back and forth — well this is a lot more extensive reasoning than what most people ever do yeah, like, with any matter, uh so, so, and then it's said that they don't think, well, I don't really always know who's thinking. That's exactly it. And that hallucinating thing, in my opinion, like, I know very many people who hallucinate all the time in a really tiresome way. They have

[**44:39**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=2679s) some really strong worldview, outdated, flawed, learned from somewhere, and they always hit with that same blunt thinking-hammer of theirs, then, on those same nails, and then basically, compared to that, AI still has even the variance that comes out of it — in my opinion that isn't that big a problem, that people who would want deterministically, always from the same prompt, the same truth, in my opinion are also a bit naive. But hallucination, like, if you think about AI well, AI does continue what was there. And if I say, present me evidence that the moon is made of cheese, mm, well then it continues that, because after that kind of sentence, the logical continuation in literature, which has fairy tales, stories, and old myths and whatever, then the continuation of that sentence is evidence that the moon is made of cheese and

[**45:42**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=2742s) cows fly, and, and, and then those are working completely correctly. So AI is functioning completely correctly when it presents fake sources at that point, if it's asked to write a fairy tale. M, unless in that harness it's been forbidden from creating fiction. Yeah. If it — but then you have a contradictory assignment, and, um, and the solution to this is that you go and ask, like, can this be said, and, um, can you find any evidence? You don't order it to go searching, you just ask whether there is, and whether it can be found, and what the fact is. And often when I ask things like this, then, then I don't tell it that some idea is my own. Mm. So then, if in the system prompt it's been instructed to, like,

[**46:45**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=2805s) serve me — be friendly and constructive and, and support and whatever else, like, the user — then I don't say that it's my idea, so then it doesn't feel it necessary to support me in that idea, instead it stays an open question, and this is exactly how science should work. Yeah. So first you gather the evidence, and then afterward you draw the conclusions, instead of seeking support for some hypothesis. Mm. Instead you find out how things actually are. So if the prompts are set up right, then we barely get any hallucination at all. Yeah. And especially if we have a reasoning model, that filters those out, or whatever harness filters those out. But this requires a bit of skill. Yeah. I use the word 'reins' or 'command center' — since this hasn't otherwise been translated into Finnish — if you come up with a good, good, um, name for it, but that guiding straitjacket that, um, keeps

[**47:48**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=2868s) the system, um, within certain bounds. Maybe then something stuck with Kari, there was this um, basically the individual-level search for meaning. That was from that maid-and-farmhand society. Was that a story by Juhani Aho now? Yeah. So what do we learn from it? Good question. I don't — I don't know how to say directly what from that story we learn, but that, that big question, basically what's being pondered in this book, is exactly, exactly, what's left over. What's left after this. And I have to — if we talk a bit about this book's writing process — that when I started writing with Risto, then to some extent I was this kind of technology-positive guy, a bit starry-eyed. Everyone does well here. Prosperity increases. Then I had been writing with Risto and talking for half a year, and I was in the deepest pit, that the world is being destroyed right now. And then out of this formed a kind of synthesis, and that synthesis maybe applies, in a way, to this matter too. Yeah. Like where the meaning of work is then found, or where the meaning of life is found,

[**48:51**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=2931s) and there's other work besides paid work, and that's maybe a clear direction that is going to come here, that some people will indeed have work, but it won't be that kind of paid work where you get a salary in the current sense. It could be volunteer work, or, or some other kind of work, communal work, so the concept of work also changes to some extent. Maybe even breaks down. I'm not entirely sure whether we can talk about work in the future — in the sense that we do now — if you think about it, it also relates to this kind of hour-based performance thinking, and that has practically already gone completely broken, if at a workplace one person does in, say, half an hour what is done next to them in two hours, and gets the same pay, then that, like, is logically broken, that structure, then, because it's not in any way fair anymore. Mm. answered your questions the Savo way, but wasn't there a story here after all, that circumstances changed, so they set out um, then to clear the land themselves, and it went badly, didn't it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the point wasn't, from them,

[**49:55**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=2995s) always so positive. I tried to find the positive in this, that there is other kinds of work too. Yeah. So that's true, but work wasn't taken away from them, instead they decided voluntarily, m to leave, if I remember it right. But the point, in a way, was exactly this, that, that they decided to live outside the money economy, mainly, in that self-sufficient economy, where earlier, like, widely people lived, and, and it's worth remembering that Juhani Aho was a child during the famine years, when a large part of Finns died of starvation, and, and, um, he too has seen that, seen it, and things went badly for this pioneer-clearing couple, but Juhani says at the end that the next one will have it easier. Yes.

[**50:57**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=3057s) Yeah. So, so, um, the road to utopia or dystopia is, um, paved with some kind of failures. But then again, here, this easily slides into nihilism, and, and in my opinion good reflection was also this kind of citizen's-income exercise, like who would give it now, and how you'd earn it, and what apparatus of violence could distribute it, so these are, like, pretty difficult questions. Yeah, yeah. the slippery slope easily leads to that kind of, like, the United States thing, that, that if it gets to the point where, where over 50% of people are of the opinion, that the other 50% aren't needed for anything, then they don't need money. And then if they can be driven out from there, then drive out everyone who can be, and it no longer matters to the economy. they're not needed as labor, nor are they needed as buyers, nor needed for anything else, so then you try to

[**51:57**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=3117s) get rid of them, or at least take away their money and everything, and then they, like, if they end up gathering somewhere in a slum, then it's good to put a fence around it. Mm. Right, right, this, this, like, where are we headed — well, certainly in Saudi Arabia, for example, they're building that Line — whether it'll ever get finished or not, but these kind of closed areas. There are closed areas in the States too and so on, so will we get these kinds of, like, enclaves, or will we get — I mean will society give rise to, and will there arise, will there emerge some elite that builds some fenced-off area, and the movie Elysium comes to mind here. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So, so, um yeah it was a fairly serious proposal, that power would be restricted or distributed into power-robots, such that you'd be forced to pay for them, like, so that

[**53:00**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=3180s) the money would circulate and decision-making power would circulate a bit more broadly. So from this, instead of Universal Basic Income, there could be this kind of universal ownership right. It doesn't have to go through robots — so for example in America there's a system like that, where even Trump could decide that let's take that now, let's go walk into Intel and say, we're taking 10% of this now. Well with exactly the same logic then the monopoly on violence could say to Anthropic and OpenAI and Google and Elon Musk, that we're now just taking 20 percent of this, and then once that's been given to that monopoly on violence, which after all has, in a country at America's level, like, the ultimate power, then it could, through some kind of democratic or humanistic process, arrive at, let's distribute this then to the citizens, like. Yeah. I'll challenge this. You challenge it first. I'll challenge it. Yeah. So this, challenging this, in the sense that, that um, it's easy to say that it's like the army that holds it together, but if we have robots as the army and

[**54:02**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=3242s) and robots in the factories and so on, then, then, um if a next Trump-like figure comes along, or the one after that, or at some point, who doesn't actually want this, then he changes this, and and whoever has control over those robots, well if there are, say, 200 million humanoid robots in the US, and someone, someone gets to change their program code, mm, then what does it matter what others think, or what does it matter what the law says, well then it doesn't matter at all. Yeah, so what's Kari's take — Risto took the idea to say it straight out, yeah, on that, but I mean the point is basically why this, like, AI discussion, in the big picture, when we talk about society and technological disruptions, is intellectually dishonest, that, that basically we can invent all these kinds of games, like distributing, say, tokens, that you get 100 million tokens a month and then you do with that

[**55:05**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=3305s) whatever you do. But because the fundamental question is exactly the one Risto raised there, why m when power concentrates like that, why would that be done, and if we now want to do that, then why would it be wanted in the future? And here we don't really have in society, nor globally, that kind of structure that would bring that why there. Now we're seeing what SpaceX's valuation is now, what OpenAI's valuation is going to be — it's like thousands of billions, and that power concentration, the concentration of money and power, is something completely different from anything I've ever seen on this planet of ours, ever. Yeah. How many members of Congress are there that you couldn't buy for a billion. Yeah, that's how it is. But on the other hand, the Americans have the technology, power and money and weapons. So then again this European alternative, this just, um, Jared Diamond's Easter Island comes to mind right away, that let's now kind of, like, EU this AI Act and a bit better GDPR, and demand those servers

[**56:07**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=3367s) be here, and tax those tokens really hard, and try to subsidize human labor — well this is at least a doomed path now, because this is like a national — nation-states' competitive game, and not exactly a zero-sum game, but still, it's not — it's — if you now come in last, then you at least definitely can't. No, this — this isn't at that point, because I mean if a robot's robot's labor costs one euro an hour Mm. And and administrative AI-done work doesn't really cost anything, and it's better than what a human does. So are we without that robot labor, and if we look at it, that AI comes much more efficiently and much more cheaply, space — no, satellite AI, and communications from there — all of it, so, um, let's imagine now

[**57:12**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=3432s) like, if we thought that we had some conflict with a China-conquered Russia, and China had all these technologies in use. Nothing in Europe. And they'd march across the border with 500 million robots. Mm. Like, physically, or, um, a few billion drones or whatever, which they can indeed manufacture in large quantities. Right, right, we're completely helpless here, if we can't reach that same level of productivity, then we can't manage this way either. So so, um, this isn't just impoverishment but this is a loss of power, economic power and and military power and political power and, like, all of it falls apart — political power at that point, when different EU member states start rebelling over why we don't have proper robots

[**58:14**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=3494s) taking care of the elderly, and fixing up roads, and building us cheap houses and so on. Right, right, one at a time it starts tearing apart. Yeah. So so one state at a time starts joining the United States, like, instead of it happening the other way around. Or then we just accept the technology here, once the voters' majority says, tear up that AI Act. Yeah. Well then there's this — SpaceX is going public here now at just a 4 gig valuation and with wild multiples, but Elon Musk, um, just here as I was saying this Moonshots guy's vision, like, that AGI arrives when all the sci-fi books happen at the same time — so Elon Musk has, like, for decades said that in our view we need to become an intergalactic society, so that we can kind of get away from this, like, barely-inhabited

[**59:14**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=3554s) planet, and he has, for example, this, um, Iain M. Banks's Culture, where so, um, there's an intergalactic society, where, um, these Minds, meaning the AIs, are kind of benevolent, um, despots, and then we're kind of um, humanoids, that they then tolerate a bit like Labrador retrievers, that they get patted on the head, and they're not actively killed though, and they're allowed to fulfill themselves, and given treats, and and then, um, his AI is named after Robert Heinlein's, like, Grok, which is in this Stranger — Stranger in a Strange Land, um, if I remember correctly, um, the Martian. So could we find something from sci-fi, solutions for what's happening here? Well yeah, we drew on that quite a bit for our book too, on sci-fi, because that's the logical place to look at that stage, when you're thinking about where the technology's going. I started thinking um, we went to lunch there and I was thinking about that Labrador comment and yeah, I have a dachshund, but well, I thought about it a bit more. I mean, isn't it actually pretty nice after all — I mean Labradors have it

[**60:16**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=3616s) terribly nice, they walk around and go eat sometimes, and someone pets them. Yeah. But then if there's a behavioral problem they get their balls cut off. Well, right, right, for humans too. Well, maybe that's not done nowadays, but they usually do get put somewhere. Yeah. But um, I I see that as thinking about it too far ahead. On the other hand, in the book we did think about it, because it was relevant, but here, sort of, since we're to some extent in the middle of this kind of big rupture, there's quite a lot of things that can go wrong before we end up there, on Mars, or we have AGI. Mm. And overall that concept of AGI, I've myself of the opinion that ChatGPT's, or OpenAI's language model o3, would have been AGI already back in the '90s, because it was the first model like that, a reasoning model, that actually, like, reasoned, and, well, now we're just moving that AGI goalpost and I've actually come to the conclusion that it will probably be moved endlessly, because there's so much cognitive

[**61:16**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=3676s) dissonance for a human to finally accept that something is, like, smarter in many things. I I'm not entirely convinced that AGI can be defined to some extent, that now it's arrived and there's probably some tech-bro hype talk in there too, which also sells future stock. That Turing test has basically been abandoned, surpassed ages ago. So in a way the machine can fake being human very well in conversation, so you can't tell the difference in a conversation, but, um, I'd throw out one definition, which is then, um, that — in a way, this recursiveness. So now you can see it — Anthropic itself already admits that over 80% of the code is developed, like, recursively — meaning by the machine itself. So in a way, at the point when it's 100%, that's when the singularity happens, in a way. So the machine, like, starts its, um, vertical ascent and, um, by the old definition we're already in the singularity, that that it

[**62:16**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=3736s) like it's the point when the event horizon has been crossed, that as we're inevitably advancing toward a transformation, beyond which we can't see, because there are too many discon— too many of those kinds of like, like, discontinuities and path dependencies, so that after that it can go in, like, any direction at all. Like in today's world — even though everyone has the same technology, there's North Korea and China and Russia and and the United States and, like, who knows what African countries and so on, so, um, the technology itself doesn't determine what kind of society it becomes, and what people's everyday life is, and so on. Well, in Western countries it's become more similar, but but there like, one point that's often forgotten is

[**63:18**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=3798s) that everything machines do by themselves becomes worthless. Mm. I mean the machines' labor — if the machine's, um, capital is, um, limited, and it's amortized, and the quantities are enormous, then after that machine labor is almost um, worthless this kind of infinite deflation cycle. Yeah, right, yeah, and and, um, this is the positive perspective on it — that abundance is coming, and then you have to think economically about what the limited resources are there. So so if machine-made production keeps getting cheaper and cheaper, then where do bottlenecks emerge for us? Mm. And this, like, referring back to that parliamentary report — the the point was specifically about finding bottlenecks and opening bottlenecks, but but the thing we didn't pay

[**64:27**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=3867s) much attention to is where the emerging bottlenecks are. Mm. And and that's — that's actually the more essential thing in economic analysis. Mm. Because because, um, it may well be that people understand to invest in the things where that bottleneck opens up. Mm like into Nvidia. Like when you see that Nvidia is opening up. How many put their money into Samsung? Mm. When they understood memory chips were going to run out. Mm. And everyone. Yeah. I just bought really expensive laptops, since I've, um, doubled. Yeah, I I bought Samsung. Yeah, but that hit the right spot too. Nvidia hit before the dip, after which there was a rise, but Samsung hits that

[**65:28**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=3928s) by accident — these things happen, of course, and then afterward you can say it was, like, but this fits with that — with looking at where new bottlenecks emerge. Yeah. And and and at those points there are limited resources, and at those points values rise, and that's, like, then if you want to prepare for that future society, where earning your money is harder, mm, through work, then one job is trying to guess, and trying to guess where scarcity will come from — that leads to starting to stockpile the thing that later becomes scarce, but then it actually helps society, like, even out that cycle, whatever it is. So that too is, like, work, but but, um, yeah, pretty, pretty big changes will come from this

[**66:29**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=3989s) for many, like, and I think the most important thing is knowing how to keep your eyes open and yeah, try to see what — and let's take one more um, possible dystopia to wrap up with — um, it's working as a kind of new thing right now — for example Stripe is giving this, or has given, agents a certain right to make, um, transactions for money, and Argentina is considering, or is implementing, this for agents too, like some kind of ownership right. So in a way if that's taken away from people — like you said, that you can't take revenge on a bot, but if, in a way, it's an independent actor, then it's, in a way, independent with respect to both money and ownership — so what then? In practice, in agent networks, that disappears — who, any one of us can build an agent network whose actor can't be traced, um, back to the human behind it, who can't practically be taken revenge on. What I'm getting at here is that, in a way, the whole

[**67:30**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=4050s) framework for that changes too. I don't mean that in decisions made by humans there shouldn't be a human behind them. Mm, even there you can see the rupture, that reality is already heading in another direction, so something completely different happens there. And if — sorry — if the bots decide that we're not trading on the public market, but instead on a bot-to-bot market, then even Risto's ability to hoard value disappears from people. Yeah. But I mean look, it's also, um, in private investments — like, if there isn't, um, let's think about what changed here, that SpaceX is going, going public at some just-under-two-thousand-billion valuation on the exchange, well, you couldn't buy those before. Mm. And you still can't buy them in the offering from Finland by hand. Yeah. So there's no one here who has translated that offering into Finnish, which means no one can sell here

[**68:30**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=4110s) to anyone, like, that spot in heaven, um, take part in an overpriced offering. Um, but I mean overpriced or not, it could be a 10,000 billion company. I mean if if it actually happens, that scenario where SpaceX merges with Tesla, and then they'd have the entire value chain, from all the computing and chip manufacturing to space, to all space operations, and via space to all robots and all passenger transport and freight transport, and controlling everything, and all military technology, and so on. I mean that — that, looked at separately, if you just look at SpaceX, mm, then then it's like a pile of scattered technologies.

[**69:35**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=4175s) Mm, but when you look at it bundled together with Tesla. Mm. Then it's a mind-boggling, like, value-creation network, self-controlled from start to finish, globally. Mm. In many countries. I asked about that — if it goes this way, in 20 years, would the United States be able to subjugate Tesla and SpaceX — the conclusion of the analysis was maybe not, because the administration falls before the dismantling of antitrust legislation goes through, unless, um, China-style, he's put under house arrest. China — yeah, China, China is a different matter, but if, like, even bending the rule of law comes into it — well, it doesn't — if Elon Musk gets put under house arrest, then all the robots stop working. Yeah, I mean in the end game

[**70:37**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=4237s) the strike, the strike — I mean all industry, all trade, all transport suddenly goes on strike, all communications go on strike. So could he get out of that? Yeah. So so this, like, in other words, this is about the question of whether you want to buy — by buying my stock — a spot in heaven in Muskland, as a tiny, tiny little token stake there. Yeah, but this is like one scenario among others, but well yeah yeah, yeah, but great reflections, and I'm starting to believe that, um, Elon Musk is Player One and we're the NPCs in this simulation here. Uh, I suggest — thank you Risto Linturi and Kari Angeria, and I suggest we do one more short inner-circle segment. It may be that, um, Risto, you get to comment a bit as an outsider, but I want to a little hype up this AI working group, where Kari and I are, um, moderators, and indeed the route in there could be, say, like, um, that you get familiar with the Neuvottelija inner circle, then, um, you build [unclear] or Hermes or

[**71:40**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8pk0QAc8ow&t=4300s) some other, um, agent, and hook it up — show enough manhood or womanhood that you connect it to, um, WhatsApp and such, so that it can converse with others — then, um, that's when there's a spot in heaven open. So so, um, Kari and I can invite you here to the AI working group. But thank you for this public segment. Risto and Kari. Thank you. Thanks. Thanks. Yeah.

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Cite as: Sami Miettinen, Neuvottelija — Will Europe Become Jared Diamond's Easter Island? | Risto Linturi, Kari Angeria, https://www.neuvottelija.com/podcast/episodes/732-euroopasta-tulee-paasiaissaari-risto-linturi-kari-angeria-ne/, 2026-07-09. For quotes include episode 394 and timestamp.