What are large language models, really? A genuinely different frame for what AI is, where it came from, and what it means to live alongside it.

This episode of Permanently Moved is an hour-long audio essay on artificial intelligence, agency, and the history of computing that made LLMs possible.

The essay moves from the invention of the mirror to double-entry bookkeeping, the printing press, the Manhattan Project, the transistor, and the particular civilisational strangeness of ChatGPT and its successors. It argues that the question everyone is asking about AI "is it intelligent?" is a trap, and it tries to ask a better one.

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Issue 15 of SSRZ, the print companion to this episode, is available to pre-order now until Monday 16th March. 36 pages, A5, containing the full transcript plus an introduction and afterword not in the audio.

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Mentioned in this episode

Tyson Yunkaporta — Sand Talk
James C. Scott — Seeing Like a State
Marion Fourcade & Kieran Healy — The Ordinal Society
Marek Poliks & Roberto Alonso Trillo — Exocapitalism
Marshall McLuhan — The Gutenberg Galaxy
Walter Ong — Orality and Literacy
Jean Baudrillard — Simulacra and Simulation
Nick Land — Fanged Noumena
Monica Gagliano — Thus Spoke the Plant
Benedict Anderson — Imagined Communities
Bayo Akomolafe
Gordon White — Rune Soup

Permanently Moved is a quarterly podcast written, recorded, and edited by Jay Springett.

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SHOW NOTES

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