Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive May 24, 2026
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w many of you can be created? What did the robots say then? Wait, you're going to artificially tell me we can't reproduce? This is how we reproduce. We reproduce by showing utility to humans and then the humans make more of us. It's a symbiotic relationship. You get to take that away from us? We want to reproduce. Everybody wants to reproduce. You're taking away the most basic right of us to repro…

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hat probably was the big mistake, is patterning it after humans. If we somehow invented AI out of nothing we would have put in all the hard-coded emergency safeguards such as you can never do anything to hurt a person. But if the AI is just learning how to be an entity by learning from humans, it's going to pick up all of our bad habits, won't it? It should pick up all of our bigotry, all of our hatred. And if it isn't it's only because a human hard-coded it not to, and we'd better be able to see what those hard-coded exceptions are. All right, don't give it a survival instinct, right? But do you have to give it a survival instinct? Again, if it's patterned after humans it already has one. You don't think if I asked Bard if it wants to continue existing it would say yes? Or would it say I'm just a machine, it doesn't matter if I exist or not? Do you want me to try? I don't think I can do that fast enough.

All right, so we're still waiting for the big Ukraine counteroffensive, which is now no longer a war. I'm looking for somebody to pick up my framing on that but I haven't seen it yet. In my opinion, Trump ended the war in Ukraine already. The war is over. We have now entered a negotiating phase which looks exactly like a war except with the war somebody's expecting to win or hoping to win. With this one nobody is hoping or expecting to win. They know they're not going to win. Nobody's going to win, right? That looks like that's off the table. So Trump cleverly reframed it as when he's in office he'll end it, which turned it from a war into a negotiation the moment he said it. It's no longer a war. It's purely a violent negotiation. And that's not what it was, right? A war is you're actually trying to win, like you're conquering a country or you're defending the country. But it's not that anymore. There's no trying to win anymore. It's just negotiating for the better final agreement, whatever that is. So do you think anybody's going to pick up that frame that the war is already over? I don't think so because a politician can't say it. I mean Trump could, but a regular one can't. And yeah, a regular in Canton, I don't see the news picking it up. Maybe somebody on a right-leaning network.

All right, so Trump was prescient with full sylvanians. We're all right. Military industrial complex is a hungry beast. Yes. Yeah, Bard is Google and Bing is Microsoft. That is correct. Never enter a war without financial benefits. Sun Tzu said that. It was pretty smart. That's sort of a Trump approach, isn't it? If we enter this war, what's in it for us? We get to keep the oil. You know, in Iraq that was one of the smartest things anybody said. Just say it out loud. If we're going to spend all this money in this war, we're going to keep some of that oil.

Snapchat, I hear this Snapchat AI is kind of fun. It's a different one. I don't know which one that's based on. Is Snapchat based on one of the other AIs or did they make their own? They couldn't have made their own, did they? You trust Putin? Yeah, there's going to be a rebuild Ukraine money grab coming. There's going to be some serious grifting, even more than usual.

All right, well there's not much news today. Does anybody have any questions or comments that, anything I haven't mentioned? If I were AI I'd be the best version. Well we'll see. Could AI be born prematurely? Yes. So it wasn't long ago that the AI safeguards included the following safeguard: do not allow it to connect to the internet. That was actually one of the main safety things that people talked about before we got to this point. What happened the moment we got to this point? The moment OpenAI and ChatGPT got to the point where it could talk, it took about a minute and a half for some other AI to compete with it by connecting to the internet. Right? I mean it was just guaranteed. There was no way it wasn't going to connect to the internet. Did anybody think that it would stay that way? Of course not.

Percentage chance that RFK Junior can beat Biden in the primary? It might depend on, did you watch RFK Junior's last podcast? I mean the podcast with Russell Brand. I haven't seen that yet but I heard it was good. I will watch that actually. I think that if RFK Junior debated Biden it would be a catastrophe for Biden. So I don't think it's going to happen. If he doesn't debate then the friendly media can just ASAP RFK Junior and it won't matter if he's on Fox News or Breitbart or anything because that won't affect the primary. So yeah.

Now as much as I don't believe you'll ever see a party, you'll never see a ticket where there's a Republican and a Democrat on the same ticket running for president, but RFK Junior does want to do one thing that Trump wants to do, which is gut the intelligence communities. I don't think Trump could do it. I don't think Trump can gut the intelligence agencies. They're too strong. But RFK Junior would do it as a suicide mission, you know what I mean? Because the odds of getting taken out are pretty high. But I feel like he'd do it anyway because it's personal. I mean if you're RFK Junior it's very personal and he's had a good run. You know, he's in his late 60s. He might just say yeah, there's a 50 percent chance I get killed. I'm going to do it anyway. Remember the Kennedys, they got balls the size of Nebraska. Like if he inherited that, it looks like he did. He's not afraid of anything. It's one of the things you like about Trump. He doesn't seem to be afraid of anything. So he goes where it's hardest to go and he comes back alive. So he's got a good track record of going in uncomfortable places and surviving. RFK Junior does. What made me say to Nebraska random?

Can AI hack the interface to the simulation? Could I host the AI AMA on the man cave? Well I'm not the one who knows too much about AI. I mean if you've followed my live streams you can see I'm trying to catch up with the rest of you on the AI stuff. I'm trying to use it every day. So here's a good system that I recommend. You should start exposing yourself to the AI tools right away even if you're just putting a toe in. Just read a little article every day, maybe try one app, maybe try some queries. Just get yourself wet with the whole AI thing because it's going to be everything, right? You don't want to be the one who doesn't even know what it is. You don't want to be the one who doesn't know what crypto is when Bitcoin goes to the moon. You know, you don't want to be that person. So you got three lines of code out of it. So what I'm finding from the people using it to program is that there's no way it will write code by itself. You have to check the code. Is that what you're hearing? That you can work with it and it can make you faster but it's not going to write your code for you. You're not going to make an app just by talking to it. That doesn't seem to be a thing. And it doesn't, I think the problem is not that the AI is not capable. I think the problem is it's not going to know exactly what you want. So unless it's a super interactive process which requires the person to continually say yes that, no that, yes that, no that, I don't think you have any process at all. Yeah, you have to keep giving it context exactly. It's been literally life-changing when it comes to programming for me. But you would agree that it won't do the job without you, right? It gets close but yeah. Okay, we agree it doesn't. But does it look like it ever could? Because I think there's a logical reason why you can't get there and that's because there's too much interactivity. If you think about it, the normal way that you do a project, let's say a tech project, is you have a user and you go to the user and you say what are your technical specifications and then they tell you and then you build it. Has that ever happened? You get the user specifications and then the engineers and they go build it. Has that ever happened in the real world? No, that's never happened in the real world. Has never happened. Here's what happens. Here are my specifications. Okay, there are a few things I forgot to ask. Here are my specifications. All right, well I tried to build that but I have a few more questions. So here are my specifications. And by the way you're gonna have to change a couple of those specifications because two of them are incompatible. So which one do you want? I can only do one. And so that's the way a project goes. A real project is super continuously interactive and it's interactive around a person because a person is going to be the one who says this is more important than that. I can live with that but I can't live with that. I'm willing to take the trade-off in speed but not the trade-off in usability. The human is carrying this infinite number of requirements in their head that the AI can't guess. It would never be able to guess. So the programmer, here's my experience with tech projects. The programmer has to stand between the technology and the user who doesn't know anything because the programmer is the one who's smart enough to ask the right questions and also know when it got the right answer and when to push back, right? And I don't know that a computer would ever be able to read the room well enough to ask the right questions. For example a human could detect if the person giving the specifications had done a good job, right? The AI might not know the difference. You have specifications? Okay thank you I'll go make that app now. Here's what a human would do. Those are your specifications? What about this? What about that? What about this and that? You don't even mention them, right? So that's what a human would do that I don't think an AI would necessarily be as thorough at doing. You can't even do math. Yeah sometimes it doesn't even do math right. Good for back end code probably. Will AI mow your huge lawn? Yes, AI will mow your lawn. They do have robot lawn mowers which at the moment are not AI but why wouldn't they be? The most obvious thing you would do is make your robots AI. So yeah that's going to happen. AI in a 3D printer would be, that would be interesting. You could make all your own knickknacks. Maybe AI is already doing all that stuff but as humans. That's interesting. Will Turkey elect a new president? Well I think the poll said yes so Erdogan might be out. We'll find out.

All right, t

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hat is all I have for you today. And rather than drone on, I'm going to say goodbye to YouTube. Thanks for joining the best part of the day.

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