Posts Tagged ‘ai’
KMO Show 035 – Anti-AI Backlash
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Date: April 20, 2026 Host: KMO Guest: Kenneth E. Harrell
A 20-year-old throws a Molotov cocktail at the home of Sam Altman, then heads to OpenAI headquarters and tries to break in by smashing a chair through the glass front of the building. He’s carrying kerosene and has a Yudkowski-inspired manifesto in his car.
That’s not an isolated story. It’s a signal.
KMO and Kenneth E. Harrell use the incident as a starting point to examine the emerging backlash against AI—where real grievances (job loss, data extraction, infrastructure strain) collide with confused narratives about existential risk.
The result is a volatile mix: people reacting to something they use every day but don’t understand, directed by elites who either can’t or won’t explain what’s happening in terms that land.
From there, the conversation moves outward:
- Intelligence as environment-mapping, not a human monopoly
- Why the “stochastic parrot” critique no longer holds
- AI as a tool that talks back—and why that matters
- The failure of science fiction to prepare us for this moment
- The widening gap between capability and comprehension
Mid-Interview Break
“Cream of the Slop” by Skyebrows
A fast, layered track built around Manjaro Linux, VTuber aesthetics, and a barrage of younger online cultural references. Dense, unserious, and very much of its moment.
References
- Maggie Vale On why “stochastic parrot” is a weak frame—and why both humans and machines are better understood as probabilistic systems.
- Skyebrows AI-assisted music and video built from stacked internet references and persona-driven presentation.
The backlash to AI isn’t about AI alone.
It’s what happens when a system changes faster than the stories people use to make sense of it—and faster than institutions can respond.
That gap doesn’t stay abstract for long.
CRV 472
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KMO talks with Dr. Tommy Blanchard about social media, the philosophy of mind, large language models, and science fiction. This is the second hour of a conversation that began on KMO Show episode 023.
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The conversation with Jim, your Ad Attacker, which started in KMO Show #20 concludes here. We start off talking about how plausible it is that AI-infused devices might get up to some mischief after we set them aside for newer models. The conversation diverges from that starting premise and roams around as unstructured conversations will.
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This episode explores ideas in Ian M. Banks' 1994 essay, "A Few Notes on the Culture." You can find an audiobook version of the essay on The KMO Show feed and on YouTube.
The primary question addressed here is whether future artificial intelligence, perhaps an artificial super intelligence similar to the "Minds" depicted in the Culture novels, could make a planned economy successful in spite of their long track record of failure when implemented by human planners.
More generally, the episode examines whether something approximating a post-scarcity society with roughly equal distribution of benefits and privileges to all inhabitants is possible and what it might look like.
Warning, this episode could send those allergic to hopium into anaphylactic shock.
CRV 461
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The conversation about local human community, AI, ecology, and narratives to steer by that began in KMO Show 017 concludes here.