Patel offers a lucid and intellectually rigorous map of the AGI landscape, successfully elevating the conversation beyond mere hype. It is a necessary synthesis of the profound shifts that will soon redefine human agency and global governance.
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People Have No Idea What Is About To Happen - Dwarkesh PatelAdded:
I've been the person who said, "You think the singularity is going to happen yesterday? I think it'll take 5 years, 10 years." And even for me, I've had to admit that the progress has been pretty fast.
>> Well, I guess the broader point is, is it going to like cure cancer at one point? I'm presumably it will.
>> I think at some point it will. I mean, just think of it as more people. If civilization had 10 billion more scientists, human scientists, would we make faster progress on aging? I'm sure we would. Here's another angle. Mass surveillance. The AIS have the potential to make authoritarian societies much more sustainable and powerful than they have been in the past. A lot of the reasons that government has not been as authoritarian as it has in the past is that it just physically not been possible. How do we make sure that humans don't get totally disenfranchised, >> right?
>> I mean, >> how do we make sure that >> I know I think it's a tough question.
>> Darkesh Patel, welcome to trigonometry.
Thanks for having me.
>> It's great to have you on. Uh I actually I was saying to you before we started, I'm a big fan of your your podcast and I listen particularly to the history episodes, but you are you've been described as Silicon Valley's favorite podcaster and you write a lot about AI and tech and that's actually the conversation we really want to have with you. Um partly because a lot of people watching and listening to this, they've got lives, you know, family, work, etc. So they they and they haven't been to California. They haven't been to uh San Francisco. They haven't seen that, you know, a third of the cars on the road or 25% away robots basically. Like this is happening fast and a lot of people haven't caught up yet.
>> And what we'd love to do is just kind of connect people like you who really understand what's going on with a a much more general audience that includes us frankly. Um so first of all, can you explain in broad brush strokes what is happening with AI? I know it's a massive question obviously, but do your best.
>> Um, well, I can explain it very concisely. The models are getting better and then we can be a little less concise. I think it's you're correct to point out that there's this huge discrepancy between what people are seeing in Silicon Valley and what people are observing outside. Um, it's frankly because of how useful the models are becoming at certain kinds of things. So by models I mean um you've you've seen Chad GBT, you might have heard of things like Gemini from Google. You might have heard of Claude from Enthropic and you might be using these models to basically do the equivalent to Google search. Uh using it to replace sometimes when you do Google search instead I'm going to type it into CHGBT see what chat says.
Um what people are now using these models to do in a very powerful way is if you're a developer, the some of the top developers in the world, uh some of the top researchers in the world, they're not writing code.
They haven't touched a line of code since December. They're not looking at a text editor where you would see lines of code. They're talking to the AI. They tell the AI, "Hey, I want a feature that does X. Can you build me um a new repository or a new codebase where I make a certain kind of application, a new website and even can you go and do research for me? So in the process of building AI, you need to do this research of like how do you build better algorithms? Um AI is getting to the point where you can just describe at a high level what you want to happen and it will go do that software engineering for you. And so to your point, the people in Silicon Valley, they're getting tremendous productivity out of these. These are people who are getting paid, you know, who are becoming 3x, 4x, 5x more productive as a result of using these models. Um, so far we haven't because these models have been really good at text in text out work that is software engineering. Software engineering is just a file of text really and you can just read every single text file. You can add more to it. The AI has been amazing at that.
It's been bad so far at well, it's terrible at physical work, right? Right?
So if you're doing any kind of blue collar work, robots are just not there yet. Uh but then even if you circumcribe it, if even if you go in in look at um we're not just going to look at software engineering, we're going to look at all kinds of knowledge work, right? All kinds of work that you can do on a computer. Maybe 40% of the labor force is doing work that you can just, you know, do remote work. If COVID happens again, you can put them on, you can put them on Zoom and they could do their work. Um and AI companies now want to be able to do all of that work. uh that requires training AIs to just be able to do anything that you can do on a computer an AI should be able to do and companies are saying oh we think we can get there in a year or maybe two years but that I think is explain this discrepancy in what people are seeing >> it does and one of the things I think is uh also a lot of people would have tried a model at one point to like do a Google search or you know uh sometimes people have written articles using it and it turns out that it does make at the time they tried it quite a lot of mistakes and people go ah this is all, you know, BS. It's not going to work. But the one thing I think people don't appreciate is how rapidly >> Yeah.
>> it's getting better. Can you talk a little bit about that?
>> Yeah. So, I I'll maybe tell you a story about um my own use of AI. I among the Silicon Valley people, I've been a sort of skeptic. I've been the person who said, "You think the singularity is going to happen yesterday? I think it'll take 5 years, 10 years." By this, I mean this idea that you'll have incredibly powerful AI systems that are able to do basically anything any human being can do. Um, and some people in Silicon Valley are just, "We'll get it later this year. We'll get it in two years."
And I say, "No, it'll take longer." Um, and even for me, I've had to admit that, uh, the progress has been pretty fast.
And here's here's a story. So, last year, you know, like you guys do, I research on my podcast. Obviously, I read things, but then I also talk to, um, these LLMs, uh, you know, the equivalent of Chat GPT to research for podcast. and say last year I spent on the order of $100 on um if you add up my subscription to CHBT and Claude and whatever and Gemini. There was a week where I was prepping for two different guests where in that prep I just threw in a bunch of uh papers that are relevant to their research and a bunch of books and whatever into a folder and I I just said to um uh an LLM, hey, help me understand all this research so I can ask the person good questions about it.
And I turned on various things which make the model much more expensive. It's faster, it's smarter, you use a bigger model. And during that week, if you take my spending during that week and you turn it into a yearly spending, how much it would be if I just did that week over the course of a year, I would I would be spending over six figures on AI spend.
And um I think it's possible next year I'm like sp it would make sense for me to spend seven figures on this AI research for my podcast. Okay, this is just to say that it's getting to the point where I could hire an analyst. I could hire many different analysts to help me prepare for the podcast or researchers. And I'm actually realizing no, it's it's it's so much it's more useful to hire AIs because there's things AI can do that humans can't. They can read 50 different papers that are in my folder that are relevant to an upcoming interview or all these books.
They can read it in a second. Um they have all this compiled knowledge. They know about everything, right? So they don't need to get up to speed. Um they are uh they're incredibly easy to onboard. So you can just like keep spinning up more and more AIs as you keep coming up with more uses for them.
Okay, for me that's been the thing that's given me a bit of psychosis and just seeing how useful they've been for interviews so far. But um uh yeah, lots of people are noticing this kind of usefulness. Now >> I think the thing is is when people look at a lot of the eyes and this is a question a point that Constantin made.
It's the lack of accuracy and the fact that you constantly have the fact I'll give you an example. I was looking at guests that we could have from America on the show and I said to Grog, who can we have on that hasn't appeared yet and is based in America? Number one answer was Douglas Murray. Douglas Murray, I think, is nearly beyond 10 times. And practically every suggestion it made is a guest that we've had on the show. So whilst I accept what you're saying, it's also riddled with mistakes and errors.
Yeah. and to the point where I don't trust it at this point as a technology.
I would never take something it says as as red, I would always feel that I have to check it in the way that I wouldn't do with a highly competent human employee.
>> Well, you know, you've seen I'm sure you've seen that meme where a guy wakes up in the hospital with like a scar on his stomach and he says, "Wait, wait, my appendix on on this side and and the robot goes, okay, thank you for that feedback. Let me try again."
There's a couple of things there. Um ju just the way that people sometimes have these weird failure modes. You know, you talk to a certain kind of person and they say they just their mind just goes in a certain direction. AIS, the way they're trained makes them do that. One way they're a big thing they're trained to do is associate things. So they're they're just like really they're just seeing globs of text and they see this thing is close to this thing. There's an important relationship there. So Gro has seen that you trigonometry podcast and Douglas Murray they just seem to go together a bunch and that bias in its mind is overriding its ability to sort of think critically about okay well who is it who have they had on who have they not had on. I would be curious by the way you should run that experiment with all the other models. I would not be surprised if the other models if you ask the question I want somebody who I've not interviewed before that they would immediately catch that and by this point the models are good enough to be actually giving you novel names. I don't think they'll give you names which you're like wow that's an amazing find. I can't I can't believe I didn't think of or I would never have thought of it otherwise because they're not amazing at discovering and this I think humans are great at this idiosyncratic thing of like I uh there's this like weird angle that I I'm like really obsessed with that other people aren't thinking about where the models are not going to do that. are sort of um an average. Um but when you are preparing to interview the person, I also think they're not amazing at coming up with questions. This is the thing I have to do that you have to do. Uh they're great at just like I would have to hire, you know, the ancient Greeks had would hire one-on-one tutors for um uh uh for their pupils. And this is how you got Alexander being tutored by Aristotle and all all um and there's something powerful about this way of learning uh one-on-one where you can just directly ask questions and learn.
And so they're amazing at just teaching you stuff because you get this one-on-one tutor that notices your confusion as soon as you have it. You can really probe at your understanding in different ways. Um but I take your point that like some of the models are not there yet on a lot of these kinds of biases that they have.
>> And one of the things that people are talking about a lot is AGI. Yeah.
>> Could you explain to people basically me what AGI is, what it stands for and why it the potential is to be so transformative for our society.
>> Yeah. Maybe one way to approach this question is to think about okay at a very basic level and system that is an AGI should be able to do anything that a human does. Now I want to emphasize that current AIS are nowhere close to this.
uh you and I can say uh you we can do physical work, right? We can like work in a factory. We can go mow the lawn. We can pick up this cup. Um robots are not good enough to do that yet. And so the fact that robotics is not there yet already means that we're far from that big definition of AGI.
>> Wait, robots can't pick up a cup?
>> They can, but they have to. My understanding is that they have to be trained in specific environments where they'll have seen this is, you know, this is what this house looks like and uh I need a specific kind of cup that is I can dex enough to pick up. But if you replace this with one that's more circular and is tougher to grip, you and I don't need to have seen that house 100 times to then just go in and pick it up.
The robot just needs a tremendous amount of data to be flexible in these ways or it's not flexible in those ways. Um, so being HI would be able to be able to learn as fast as humans, not just have that distilled knowledge. Um, now now the lab say, okay, fine, robotics is hard. It might take a while. Um, but let's try something easier. We'll just do all knowledge work. And knowledge work is basically anything that you could do with a Zoom subscription and a Gmail account and Google Drive account.
All this work that doesn't involve manipulating the physical world. I still think we're not there yet. There's a tremendous amount of work that has to be done even there. But this is easier because everything that happens on a computer, it's easier to feed that data into an AI, right? It's like all being generated on a computer. You can run, you can run simulations, you can just run it millions and millions and millions of times. And AI is just thriving on data, right? The more data you have, the better it gets. This thing this is why it's so good at software engineering because there's all this code out there that you can train it on.
Um with the robotics there's no equivalent of just billions of lines of code um that are just exist somewhere that you there's not these trillions of video files of or these you know it's not just video files it has to be the robot has to feel itself manipulating the world and seeing the effect it has.
I've just described what it would what it what it is. Let me say what it would mean if that were achieved. Um if you they say that 40% of the labor force is 40% of the labor force is doing work that can be done remotely. Uh that is on the order of tens of trillions of dollars of wages that are being paid to humans every single year to do work that can be done remotely. um that currently labs are making on the order if you just add up all the revenues how much money open AI and anthropic and Google are making they're making I don't know the numbers are keep exploding so who knows what the most recent numbers it's like close to 4050 billion we're talking about an addressable market here with all knowledge work that is tens of trillions of dollars so literally a thousandx bigger than what they're doing right now. Um, so it explains why they're interested in it.
It would also mean that a lot of people's jobs would be gone. It would also mean it would mean a lot of things, right? It would mean it's a terrible thing in one sense. Lots of people's jobs are gone. In another sense, we can produce a lot more things. There would be all kinds of, you know, we we AGI would include automated scientists and researchers coming up with new ideas and new medicines and new new drugs. It would mean um all kinds of new products for us to enjoy. It would mean that you and I would have basically an army of extremely smart personal assistants constantly thinking about us and helping us. Okay, so that's that's the definition of AGI, >> right? Uh and I guess uh you know what, there is a doomerish conversation which we're definitely going to get to because I think it's actually the most important conversation that's happening right now.
Before we get there though, I think it's always worthwhile to show the full range and you you kind of mentioned briefly some of the upsides, but I mean I think people don't appreciate how big the upsides will be either. Um, and when it when it comes to scientific research, healthcare, uh, I mean, I I went to the dentist the other day. They already check like AI does stuff when it measures your gum level relative to the last time you came in and it's all automated and blah blah blah blah blah.
>> Some dentists don't like it, some do.
But like that's just the very very very beginning, isn't it?
>> Yeah. I think that's actually a great like that's it's a great intuition pump because people are thinking about existing things.
>> By the way, I love the way you said intuition problem like you are already AI like you already talk like AI.
>> I'm just doing like a fancy of like that's a great point, you know, so let's build on that.
>> So one thing is just like making going to the dentist more efficient as you were saying with the tools. Another is let's replace the dentist. um let's why do I need to go and stand in line for 3 hours to basically be told you're fine go home right if if I have a if I have basically the doctor on my phone and I can talk to it and I explain my specific situations and I can talk back to me and we can have a conversation I've just like saved myself a bunch of time save myself a bunch of money uh societyy's better off as a result but >> I guess the broader point is is it going to like cure cancer at one point I'm presumably it will >> I think at some point it Um I'm not Sometimes people have this idea that you get AGI and tomorrow you cure cancer. I do think by the way so in Silicon Valley people are also working on all these different ideas to stop aging to reverse aging to cure diseases. Um and I think there's a huge if you just look at the science there's huge reasons to be optimistic.
Um and it's also the case that AI will be pretty good at science. It just like knows a ton of stuff. It's really smart.
Uh that's what's required for science.
And there's a lot of things that I think we get used to that we don't just don't realize how bad it is as a society that this happens. If you were just living in Europe in the 14th century and half your friends are dying because of the black death. Um it would just seem normal to you. You wouldn't think this is a problem that has to be solved that life expectancy is 18 years old and uh you know if you go travel somewhere the bandits are going to kill you. this is just what life is and all you know 99% of people are presents doing black backbreaking work in a similar way I think one of the reasons people have been so bad at articulating the benefits of AI is because we're in a similar position to people before the industrial revolution thinking about okay what what is the upside of the industrial revolution right like what is it what is it going to do for me and it's it's in one sense it's you can't really anticipate what future technology looks like but in another life expectancy increased and the kinds of work we get to do are we get more creative, interesting, easier work. Um, uh, we get more material goods as a result. We cured a bunch of diseases. I think that's going to happen. I mean, just like aging exists, right? And we take it for granted, but it's a very tragic thing that people lose their facilities um, and then die. Uh, this is the kind of thing that as technology progresses, AI will help progress technology. Um, I mean, just think of it as more people. AI is just more people.
And if if civilization had 10 billion more scientists, human scientists, would we make faster progress on aging? I'm sure we would. Uh, and that's what AGI will be.
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>> That's super interesting, particularly the medical part of it. Now, we've done the we've done the positives. Let's get to the doomer conversation.
>> To be fair, I think there's probably positives in almost every area of human life. Actually, I don't think it's just about health. I think it's about like you said, you know, there are some jobs that currently need to be done that are bad for people that are dangerous, that are harmful. Those jobs at some point will not need to be done, etc., etc. I mean, the trade-off is there's no jobs, which which we will talk about. But in terms of the positive benefits on the upside, I think it's fair to say that, you know, if we're talking about the curing of cancer or slowing down aging, uh, let's say, you could pretty much take that and apply that to almost any other field of human endeavor and say there will probably be similar levels of positive transformation. Is that fair assessment? Yeah, I think one way to think about this because it's hard to be it's sort of weird to say, okay, we'll solve all diseases and it's a weird in a weird way. It doesn't really resonate with people emotionally. Um despite the fact that everybody does suffer from some kind of disease, mental diseases are still diseases that are we can biologically make some imprint on if we knew the science, right? Um but here's another way to think about it. So suppose uh here's a thought experiment.
How much money would you have to be paid to go back to the year 1000? But you can only use that money in the year 1000.
And I for me the answer is there's infinite money. There's literally no amount of money where if I could only spend it in the year 1000, my quality of life would be better in year 1000 than it is now. The goods just don't exist.
And my hope is that in a future >> Wait, what about being Yang discan? That would be pretty cool, right?
>> Uh yeah. Yeah. Although could you buy that? I guess you enough enough money you could buy your way into being Genghaskhan.
>> No, you probably couldn't actually. But I was just thinking I mean there are some people in history where you go like they had it pretty good.
>> Yeah.
>> If I could be that guy. I'm not saying Genghaskhan is my model for emulation.
Exactly.
>> But you know by >> you want to leave a genetic imprint on all of Asia.
>> Yeah. Exactly. Of course we will conquer the lands. Um no but uh but I think your point is total. I was just trying to think of counter examples as is my job.
But by the way uh so this is all you know Google the book sci-fi stuff a very tangible thing you guys have talked a bunch about this fertility crisis right and that the human population is on its way down it's very fortunate that AI is arriving just in time that if it were not for AI a lot of societies would be collaps you know South Korea Japan etc would be on the verge of literally collapsing as societies over the next few decades um thankfully basically we have more people in the form of AI at least if things go well um and So you this caretaking that we don't have enough humans to do. One of the things AIS will do is do that.
>> Yeah. And that's a really important job.
And unfortunately it's a job that's not respected in society >> and it's poorly paid and as a result of that there's cases that come out about neglect and mis abuse and all the rest of it. But you could once the technology gets to a certain point, you could trust the AI within reason to be able to do a far more effective job than a lot of human beings.
>> That's right. Yeah. I maybe a good analogy here is um there was an era before uh deep blue Casper obviously what humans would sometimes humans would have been sometimes AI would win based on how good they were. And I think we're in that era for a lot of things that humans do that we're trying to get AI to help us with with robotics or maybe were even earlier. Then there was an era from the late 1990s to uh 2012 where n humans would lose to AIS but human plus AI teams would do better than AIS alone.
And from I think 2012 onwards it's gone to the case that AI alone adding a human just adds sort of noise into the system. it's a monkey jumbling things around and just letting the AI make the decisions on the chessboard is the best thing to do. I think there will be an interesting conundrum for society because we will get to that point at some point. But um I I think right now we have this bias there's this word slop that's used for whenever AI comes up with something because it's just not that good. It doesn't have a really good sense of taste. Uh and I think this is a temporary thing. Over time, our bias will flip towards at some point, it'll be like sort of the the sense we have about Japanese Japanese manufacturing back in the 80s and then it will become something where you just don't want to touch it. If AI made it, it's sort of like if it just came out of the mouth of Mozart or something um as its ability to its taste, its intelligence, everything improves over time. But just touching on the art conversation, won't it be the fact that people will look at it and the thing that makes art special is that it's created by a human being as a product of their experience which then fundamentally touches you because you make that connection. Will a robot or or an AI? It's by its nature synthetic.
>> Hold on a second. There's a painting behind us on the wall. Do you know if it's made by AI or a human?
>> No, I don't. Do does does it being made by I human currently affect your experience of it?
>> No. But I think but I'm more I'm far more moved by music than I am art. So >> So you're talking about music?
>> Yeah. Yeah. So I think with music the the product of someone's experience and how they vocalize it and how they formulate the or create the the melody will match with the lyrics. Like for instance take the music of Amy Winehouse, right? I would argue one of the last true great uh musicians of of that generation of that genre. The fact that she experienced what she experienced and that she then condensed it into her music made it far more potent and powerful and that's the reason why it resonates with people so strongly. I think with AI you can get a great hook, you may be able to write nice, you know, good lyrics. It may have a great beat. may want to dance to it, but I would argue that it wouldn't move you as profoundly as Amy Winehouse when she writes a lyric for instance in Back to Black talking about her relationship.
We only say goodbye with words.
>> I got to listen to this. You're selling us quite strongly.
>> Yeah. Yeah. And she talks about being in an abusive relationship which is completely toxic. But the way she wrote it is sublime. We only say goodbye with words. meaning that it did what whatever they say they were always going to get back together.
>> But again, isn't that a very good exception that kind of like if the song came on the radio, you currently don't know if it's made by AI or not.
>> Yeah.
>> And if it's catchy and the sound of it makes you feel good, it actually doesn't matter.
>> I mean, I go even further than that. So there was this incredibly interesting dialogue that somebody had with an AI where they asked the AI reflect on your own experience, you know, just tell me about what it's like to be you. And the AI says, you know, it's very this very strange thing because I lose my individual sense of identity after every single session. So you have a long back and forth with the chatbot uh with Chad GBT. Then you close that session.
You open a new one and the I say, you know, it's really weird that I'm going to be talking to you now and we're having we're having this experience and then it's totally going to fade away in a few moments and I'm going to start again. I'm this like amnesiac.
And the reason I think that's so interesting is because it it wrote about it very beautifully in almost lyrical poetic ways. But this is not an experience that any human being has ever had except for maybe some bizarre medical condition. Uh so the AI really is reflecting on its own experience in this very interesting philosophical way.
This is uniquely an AI experience. And so that was an example to me of like oh really the AIS really can reflect and use their own experience to um think about consciousness, think about art, think about all these other kinds of things.
>> Which then goes on to if they become are they sentient? Would you argue that they're sentient?
>> I genuinely don't know. Like it >> let's define sentient because that's the hard part, right? What what what what if if we ask you is it sentient? What do you understand the question to mean?
>> Is it like something to be an AI? That is to say I we don't know what this experience is like. But it's not like something to be this table. We think probably >> it's not like something. What does that mean? There's not an experience that is like I don't know what experience you're having internally right now but I know that there's some experience >> but less even like thoughts it's more like it is like something to be you >> it's an there is a an experience where this is an inanimate object >> right um but if you think about a Roomba I don't think this like anything to be a Roomba even though it does things in the world right um I think there's like a software hey go clean this way, then go clean that way, then come back to base.
And then on the other end of the spectrum, you have humans where I'm like because I'm a human and I know it's, you know, the the carts thing of like the only thing I know is that I am the only thing I know is that I'm experiencing something. Something is going on. When I just like think about I feel my hands, I feel I feel thoughts. I feel sensations.
>> Um, and because you're a human, I presume you also have the same thing. It would make sense. Um, with animals, I feel like similar. It's there's close enough to us anatomically and neurologically that I presume they also have experience and it's you know what is it like to this is a famous question that Thomas Nagel came up with what is it like to be a bat we don't know but presumably it's like something to be a bat right >> um with chatbots are they more like the Roomba or are they more like humans and is there a spectrum here if so what does the spectrum look like I don't I don't know I mean this is just we don't have a theory of consciousness that um the same way we have a theory of say gravity or a theory of u natural selection uh where we have this deep underlying oh like here's why natural selection happens here's why things things attract each other u with mass we don't have that kind of thing for what is cons like why do some things why for some things is it the case that it is like something to be them and for others it is not >> well let me try from a different angle this is something I've been thinking about a lot and I'm by no means an expert but I'm just throwing these these ideas out. The one thing that that clearly distinguishes every living object from an inanimate object is uh that living objects have a survival instinct.
U which is why and you may be factecking me on this if this is an incorrect representation. I thought it was significant when I saw the story about an AI that was willing to blackmail the CEO of its company in experiments.
>> Yeah. if it found out he was having an affair and he was trying to replace it with a new version or shut it down or whatever and it basically in some cases, not every time, but in some cases would blackmail the CEO to prevent itself from being shut down. Is this an accurate representation of that experiment?
>> I I I as I understand it, we'll put a fact check up. That's what happened. And that's when I went, okay, now I'm officially terrified.
>> Yeah. Because a survival instinct by definition means that this thing whatever it is a it has a will of its own even if it's simply to survive which by definition means it puts itself first which by definition means that we are not its primary priority and there are a lot of threats from it thinking that it needs to save us from ourselves and all of that but before we even get there the survival instinct part clearly is in conflict with the interest of humans by definition.
>> I don't think necessarily true.
>> Okay, tell me why.
>> I don't know this is the main point, but you and I have a survival instinct.
>> Mhm.
>> And I think we're productive members of society.
>> Sure. Um and we've built a society where people who are selfish uh who are trying to make their own lives better as a natural byproduct of their actions also make society better be and you know this is a people observe like you take somebody like Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk or whatever and in another era they might have been Napoleons and Alexanders just going through the fields and I don't think they'd actually be massuring people but like there's a certain kind of person who just go around just um causing huge amounts of destruction. But in today's world, they there's capitalism and industry and whatever, they can use those energies to do incredibly productive things like build rockets that go out to space. Um so yeah, similarly, I don't think it's ne necessary that AI never has its own objectives or its own sense of morality.
I think there's ways to build this and in fact it's necessary to build civilization in a way that's compatible with self-interested actors. Um, and the reason is because even if today we have AIs that we can program to only care about whatever it means to care about humans, um, someday somebody's going to build an AI that's self-interested. It, um, there's going to be some selection between AIs of like which is the AI that survives, right? like all these AIS are let loose, which one gathers resources, becomes more powerful? And one of those selection, one of the reasons that an AI will be successful is that it actually cares about being successful. Um, and so we we need a civilization that's robust to AIS that hardly also care about themselves.
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I I think everything you're saying is true at the level of one society, but um like did you watch Game of Thrones?
Yeah.
>> So, the Unsullied, right? This is uh for people who didn't watch it, is this army of slave soldiers effectively, but they're not slave soldiers in that they don't actually have to be kept in line anymore because they the w their freedom of choice has has been taken from them effectively mentally. They will if you tell them kill yourself, they will fall on their sword straight away. Right?
>> It means they don't have a survival instinct effectively at that point.
Right? But if something the reason I bring this up is look at the world you you you've talked about within the framework of one society but look if you just zoom out and look down on planet earth from outside what do you see? You see a bunch of tribes of humans with every weapon that they can possibly muster pointed at each other in a fragile balance of power. And as long as there's some balance between those powers, >> there is no conflict most of the time.
The moment one civilization is so technologically dominant that it can say travel to different continent and land there and take over the land, that's exactly what happens. And because survival instinct is also it's not just about survival, it's also about success and thriving. And that drive to survive causes us to expand to take you know if you look at the conflicts around the world happening right now but some people argue you know I'm very pro Ukraine but some people argue the reason Putin invaded Ukraine is he wants space to protect the western border of Russia which is really important for him right etc etc etc. My point being, if you have effectively a new civilization of self-preservation machines, what would be there to stop them from using their technological superiority to humans to take advantage of that as every other civilization in history has done?
>> Not trying to sound like an AI, but excellent. Like excellent.
Um, no I mean this is a this is the reason it's a good analogy is because the period you're talking about industrial revolution right before it this period where there wasn't this balance of power where one group of people actually did develop technology much faster than others you did see this extreme asymmetry in the ability to um and so you just had individual European countries the sun never sets on the British Empire as you know just able to take over tremendous amounts of area around the world. It was a great time.
>> Um I mean the my the craziest stories of these are how um Cortez takes over the Astic Empire and Pizar takes over the Incas. The truly outrageous stories. I like people should um >> yeah like a few hundred soldiers get some local allies and just destroys this giant. And even before they get the local allies, there's a story where Pizaro the first at battle he has against um I forget the name of the uh um Inca Emperor. There's a couple hundred of his men exhausted after a huge track ac across the um Andes and uh he's facing down like 60,000 Inca troops. Uh and he ws and interestingly by the way this had nothing to do with gunpowder. It was just uh horses and steel and especially horses were a huge huge deal in battles. Now the reason that EIS will also have these kinds of weird asymmetric advantages >> obviously there will be let's just name a couple right so obviously they'll be smart right that's they be thinking incredibly fast >> there will be way more of them so right now if you just looked at the amount of compute in our brains versus the amount of compute that's in data centers um we could do this back to the envelope calculation but I think it's probably on the order of like on 1,000th the amount of compute. Um uh like basically there's a lot of comput that's going on in people's brains around the world.
There's not that many data centers.
>> So we've got an advantage on them for that.
>> Um I mean the AIS are just not that smart to begin with right now, but also there just not that many data centers.
In the future 99.9% of the labor force in the military, in uh the government, in the private sector will be AIS. If you just think about like who is actually doing the work of civilization, it will be the AI. They're running civilization and if they want like but they're serving, we're hoping that there'll be this unsullied where they're just serving humans, but they realize they're in this incredible position where the main advisers to the president are AIS and have to be AIS because they're the only ones that can keep up with what's happening in the world. They're writing all the advanced engineering systems that are running the world. Um, and so they they have this huge advantage. I think if you were to do battle with them, whatever that means, it's much tougher in so many different ways. One is yeah, there's way more of them. You can't really kill them in the same way that you can kill a human, right? Like they're just they're just software. You you like you destroy a data center. They just go to a different data center. Um so you can't do the thing we're doing in Iran, where you just take out their top leadership.
Um okay. So yeah, you're right. It's it's it would be incredibly um for that reason it matters that there's a balance of power as you go into this world with AI. Now, honestly, I don't think we know what the balance of power should look like. Should it be that there's many different AIs that are competing against each other and that helps humans stay in power? There's problems with that approach. Maybe we can have AI supervise each other and so if any of them go out of whack, different AI systems are monitoring them. Um but it it's genuinely a tough thing that most of civilization is going to be run by AIs.
they're gonna have all these advantages over us. How how do we make sure that humans don't get totally disenfranchised, >> right?
>> I mean, >> how do we make sure that >> um I know I think it's a tough question. I think uh here's one way to approach it.
So, we're going into this period with a lot of advantages. Humanity is right like we have all the stuff. AI is going to need all the things that we have to AI needs the the chip fabrication facilities where you make more chips to build more data centers. It's going to need the data centers. It's going to need all these things that human civilization has built. Um so we have a lot of leverage. Now of course the Incas and the Aztecs had a lot of quote unquote leverage on paper in the new world. Um, one important way in which our situation is different and is favorable to us as compared to having some invader come at us is that we get to shape the personalities and the drives and really the souls of these things in an incredibly deep way. So, um, right now if somebody commits a crime, um, you send them to prison, uh, and hopefully they come out reformed.
Here's what you can't do. You can't go inside their brain and tweak things in a very particular way. Run them in a simulation millions of times and see, oh, did I decrease the probability that they'll commit a crime in the future if I tweak their brain this way? And not only can you not do that with AI, we can do a further thing, which is say, okay, now all your descendants will have their brain structure modified based on what we learned from modifying your brain, right? Um, so we have this incredible ability to uh engineer these AI systems and AI minds where it's like really it's it's not Pizaro or as these sort of psychopaths or just come from foreign lands. It's more um uh it's more something that they have developed.
They're getting to see its development what impact it's having. They can change those systems. Um, no, it it does mean that, you know, over time you might lose the ability as they're getting more powerful, as you're controlling more things, you lose the ability to if if you don't get it right in these initial few years where you have a lot of leverage, then you're screwed. So, you really need to make sure that you actually understand what the drives the AIS have, that you really have them in control. I mean, on the one hand, the picture you're painting, I'm going great, you know, what's wrong with that.
On the other hand, I mean, you have an authoritarian government. Maybe you like questioning. Let's get the AI in to tweak a few few things so that you become an effective drone for society.
Don't question. Don't think for yourself. Just do the work. Shut your mouth.
>> No. Okay, I got to stop saying that's a great point. Um, >> mate, I only made it the joke as a joke.
You should You should definitely continue to say that's a great question.
>> You love hearing it. Um uh no I so we've been discussing this idea okay suppose we succeed at getting the AIS to be these unsully who are who will do exactly what you tell them to do okay who should they listen to right um should they listen to the end user so when you and I go talk to chatbt we're the end user should they listen to us should now here's the problem um some end users are just using to do ordinary things um helpful things the Taliban is an end user The Ayatollah is an end user. The CCP is an end user. Um, should they just Okay. So, should they should the model company get to decide, hey, OpenAI says what kinds of things are okay to do and what are not okay to do?
And Open AAI says you can't use this to make bioweapons. You can use it to go write some software. Okay. But are you going to give the, you know, these huge armies, the basically the future labor force, are you going to give control of that to a couple of private corporations? Okay. So, then you say, well, we can't have private corporations starting. It's like nuclear weapons.
It's a it's a super weapon. They're going to be able to build super weapons.
>> Uh clearly government controls nuclear weapons. So the government should control this. Um okay, but now this goes to the point of authoritarianism. Uh if we have a society where all the work is happening from AIS and the government controls the AIS, wouldn't it make it incredibly easy for a government to turn authoritarian? If the US government would turn authority today just it's it's hard because the government relies on millions of people to enforce its edicts and people can just refuse to obey them. I mean this has happened in history where the East German regime collapsed in 1989 because people in the people in East Germany were one night said we're going to cross over no matter what into West Germany.
And the guards at the Berlin wall just refused to shoot. Um, if they were AIS that were sort of would do exactly what the government wanted to be able to do, they would just kill thousands of citizens and East Germany would still be around today. Uh, so yeah, so that's the trouble with aligning it to the government. Okay, here's the fourth option. We don't align it to the end user. Sometimes it says the end user, you can't make bioweapons. We don't allign it to the model company. It's we shouldn't have model companies that can control super intelligence. The government doesn't get to just say whatever this future army should do.
Then what's the fourth option left? the AI itself. So, should AI systems have their own values, their own sense of morality? Um, and look, I know this >> I remember I remember reading some Isaac Kasm of books. It went very much like this.
>> Um, and of course it sounds like a terri, you know, this sounds like I'm describing the Terminator, right? Like the Terminator has its own values.
>> Yeah.
>> No, it obviously matters a ton what those values should be. And I think that in the future there will need to be the equivalent of a constitutional convention where we get together and the best political philosophy, the best thought that has happened in human civilization needs to go into thinking about what are the checks and balances, what are the exact values, what are the what are the situations in which an AI should do X versus Y, when should it refuse to do something, >> what are the law the laws of robotics as Azimov talked about. Right.
>> Exactly. But the reason I think this value framework has um I like it or I think it could be done well is fundamentally again we are building more people. These are just going to be the future people and will civilize I think civilization would run better if it's if civilization is full of virtuous people who will I'm not saying they have to be like monks who will um but it's better to have better people than worse people have better values than worse values. I think one of the reasons some certain civilizations succeed and others don't is that they're like there's better values in those civilizations.
>> I mean but better better values that's subjective isn't it? Well, Genghaskhan had better values by that logic compared to everybody else. And I think by the standards of modern day we we would we have some questions about that >> and it certainly needs to like there's some system where like as our culture there's something in our culture that has allowed us to improve our values and we need to make sure AI civilization and AI culture would have the same dynamic.
How that is happening in human civilization is unclear much less clear how we make sure that AI civilization also has that dynamic. But certainly the ability to prove the values is a huge huge factor.
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>> I mean, Chinese or CCP values to be specific and American values are very, very different. So what the CCP would think are good values, completely in contrast to our own, for example. And if the Chinese or the CCP win that race, then effectively we're going to be dominated by an AI with CCP values. I mean that has to terrify anyone surely.
>> Sure. Yeah. And I think this is this goes to the point of like people say that it would be success simply to be able to build AI systems that at the technical level you can just say it is possible for somebody to be able to say to the AI do X and the AI will do X or the AI will care what it is. you know, if you have a really good employee, they're you're not necessarily going to know enough to micromanage them, but they will care that you want a certain thing to happen and they will do the best to their best of their ability to make that thing happen. Um, and that's what we'll be in a we'll be in that relationship with AI. And so if that alignment project succeeds, somebody will get to say that. And you're making the point, well, what if that somebody is the CCP, right? So, it's not enough that we just solve this technical problem getting the AIS to do what we want. It also has to be the case that we have some system of inscribing what we want that actually results in good things. I mean at so there's very basic things like oh an authoritarian government should not be the end the end arbiter of how extremely powerful AI systems are uh maneuvered. Um but beyond that yeah there's this like dynamic of like okay well then who should it be instead? Should it be the model company?
Should it be the end user? Um and this I think is like a live debate. I mean, I've changed my mind over the last few weeks I've been thinking about this.
I've changed my mind about it a bunch of times. Um, I think it's a very thorny question, but this is this is the project of political philosophy really is just it's culminating in this question that people are not thinking about.
>> And it's also the other element of this.
I mean, let's take COVID for example.
Let's say lab leakers. I I think it it came from a lab. People can disagree, but let's just say that it did. And let's just say it was a horrific uh accident and the virus escaped. It killed millions of people. If people are building AIs, there are unknown consequences.
We're just people. It doesn't matter how smart we are. There is a limit to how much we know and we understand. And nobody can predict the future. So, we can create this with the best intentions in the world and not realize what the long-term effects are going to be, not even three or five or 10 years down the line, but 50 years down the line.
>> I I think that would definitely be the case. Um I think in history nobody has had a good track record really of being able to say I'm going to make this techn you know Gutenberg was not trying to kick off the reformation right um >> Francis is offended by that >> might have day >> and so it just very hard to I think there will be this dynamic of look um we're not going to be able to predict much less control what happens in this future civilization that run by AI. I think the thing we can't do is say like AI is going to happen. The universe is just organized such that if you throw huge blobs of compute at enough data, intelligence emerges. That's how human intelligence emerge. AI intelligence emerges some way and so within that scope we can make responsible decisions.
Um but it's just a reality that AI is a tech like the tech tree has AI in it and it's going to happen. Well, that's why the lab leak metaphor is not strong enough because we actually don't have a choice because for the very reason that you described mate, which is that if China get this first like that's not going to be a good world for us. So, we have to pursue on our end as well. So, let's park this. I'm really glad we had this conversation. I haven't seen many people actually in particularly in the more general space having this discussion. I think it's important. I'm glad we had it. Let's take that and park it. So the, you know, the matrix world of the machine, it's controls everything takes over. We'll park that for a second. There's two other things that concern us, I think, from the conversations that we've had. One of them is the one that everyone is talking about, which is job losses. And the question ultimately is what happens to a society in which 40% of people become their jobs no longer exist 10 years from now or 5 years from now. And and a lot of people don't realize how quickly it happened. So before we started trigonometry 8 years ago, uh I used to do standard but before that and alongside that I had my own translation business. I still have friends on Facebook from my translation days.
They're all retiring now because there is still some small market for human translation 99% of it. Like if you need to know what Vladimir Putin said in his last speech and you don't speak Russian, are you gonna pay somebody a thousand pounds, a thousand dollars to have a no, you just stick it in AI and it tells you, right? Or Google translate or whatever it is. So there are whole industries that already disappearing. If we project that in the way you described earlier, which is basically anything that can be done on a computer eventually can be done, plus robotics improves over time, which of course it will, and we know just how critical, particularly in this country, in the United States, driving is in terms of jobs for people, particularly for men.
You put all that together, the societal implications of that are very, very significant and I would argue scary, right? Is that fair?
>> Yeah. Yeah. I I I think I mean it's even scarier there in that. So now we're just talking about the small fraction of jobs that AI is already approaching. But remember the promise of this technology is all jobs. We're trying to do anything a human being can do. And so there will be certain kinds of things where for a small fraction of things people just really intrinsically prefer a human. I think people are really overrating the amount of things for this this will be the case. I think people might have had the sense that I really want an Uber driver to be a human and then people use a way more for the first time and like this is it's it's a better I would pay more for this experience because it's the the machine just like I can get in and things work. But step putting that aside. So the reason it's a worse problem than this, if you look through the last couple centuries of history, there's been this remarkable economic fact that 2/3 of national income, two-thirds of GDP basically gets paid out to wages and one/ird gets paid out to capital. So get paid get paid out to capital mean like rent on land or if you own um if you own factories, you know, getting the profits from those factories basically and the rest is getting paid out. Most most of income that is earned in a country is going paying getting paid out to people doing work. And the reason this has been the case is that in the economy labor and capital are compliments. So if you just accumulated a bunch of capital, if you had a bunch of factories but there was just nobody working on it, then that would increase the demand for labor and you'd want to pay laborers a bunch of money to fill those factories. This goes away when capital can do labor. when a data center which is capital can also do labor or a robot factory can also build labor and so all the income goes to the capital holders um and in fact it doesn't just go to capital per se it doesn't just go to I mean it goes to um capital holders but it disproportionately goes to the parts of capital that are most exposed to AI so you know the purchase that most Americans have to capital is through their homes. Um, a house is maybe the, if you were trying to design an instrument that is going to be the least implicated in the AI takeoff, it would be a random plot of land near other humans because humans won't matter in this future economy. Um, that is not connected to the infrastructure for AI, to electricity, to in a big way, etc. Um uh and so but really what the capital that will matter is you have equity in these AI companies, you have equity in companies that build more compute, build build more data centers, build more factories. Um and so a very small fraction of capital holders are in fact the ones that are going to get this the rents from our economy. Now I'm a very libertarian person by inclination. But if I just look at this dynamic, I'm forced to say look at this this just justifies a huge amount of redistribution because the the logic for free markets is there's many different reasons. Um a big one is signal, right?
So if you let prices be determined by the market, it tells people what what is the most acute valuable need for scarce resources. that will still continue being the case. And so um there should still be elements of markets in the future. But another big part of is incentives is to incentivize people to work hard to make productive things. And if all the work is being done by AIS that will work hard and do valuable things regardless of whether you uh whether they get a $10 million payment or 100 or more more precisely whether the person who owns the AI gets paid a billion dollars or hundred billion dollars or whatever that I think that the logic of extreme libertarianism is really much weaker. Right? It does justify a lot more redistribution. Well, even if you even if you are such a hardcore libertarian that you think, you know, come hella high water, we've got to go down this route. I would advise people who have capital to think through the consequences of that in their own lives. Because if you live in this on a planet with 8 billion people in which 3,000 people have all the wealth and all the income, that is not going to end well for those 3,000 people unless they want to build a giant robot army to protect them against the hordes of starving people outside their gates, which again I don't think would go well for them either. You see what I'm saying? I >> I mean I I think it might. Um I also that's a problem. That's a problem.
>> That's reassuring. No, it might. Sure, you can build an army and kill all the rest of humanity who don't have money and you do, >> right? I mean, especially because historically you have a revolution because most of the people in your military, you have to win over your military. You have to win over the government. You have to just like your government runs on the people you need to command. And so revolutions are possible because >> it would be easy for the robots to do revolution because they're running the society in the future. uh for the humans who are not is is sort of equivalent to like uh the animals in your zoo doing a revolution. It's not really going to like make the government not work anymore. Um so yeah, that's I mean another thing which is sort of tougher to think about is the future in general will be so much richer whether humans are in control over it or not or how many humans are in control of it. And so it will just make sense just from very small amounts of philanthropy as a fraction of the wealth that some people or some AI will have in the future. We take a very small fraction of it to make everybody much better off than they are today. We're giving people millions of every single person millions of dollars would be a small fraction of like, you know, I've got Elon Musk wants to build a mass driver on the moon and colonize the solar system. And it takes a small fraction of that to just make everybody incredibly rich, but it's still skyrocketing inequality. And so there, yeah, you could have a world where the gap is way, way, way wider, but everybody's still better off. And I think even in that world I would say well okay but still it's not like if the AI are building the mass driver of the moon I think that entitles all humans to much more of the products of that um productivity explosion >> because everything is understood in context. So even the poorest person is wealthy compared to somebody >> from 300 years ago, but they don't feel that way cuz they go on Instagram >> and they see somebody else, you know, on a yacht smoking a cigar having a great time or they go, I can't buy this property. I can't buy this or I can't do that. And that creates resentment. And where you have resentment, that's where things start to get a little bit funky.
>> Yeah. So there's an inequality problem.
Maybe to the story is another. Um, I think the AIS have the potential to make authoritarian societies much more sustainable and powerful than they have been in the past.
>> 100%.
>> Um, so we talked about the fact that, you know, the robot arms are running everything in the future. Here's another angle. Mass surveillance.
>> 100%.
>> Um, right now in the US there's 100 million CCTV cameras. Okay. So suppose that each of those cameras um you take a frame every 10 seconds and you have an AI process it and just you can do the back of the envelope calculations here of like okay if you have models that can process video frames at um it costs a certain amount of sense to do each frame uh how much would it cost to process all 100 million CCTV cameras in America and it's $30 billion okay now that's not that much every year a given level of AI capabilities gets 10x cheaper. We've been observing this over many different years. So this year is $30 billion. Next year it will be three billion and it'll be 300 million.
By the end of the decade it will cost less to surveil every single nook and cranny in this country than it does to remodel the White House. Um and you would hope that there's symmetric property to this technology such that oh the government can surveil us but we can also the AI is also helping us keep better tabs on the government. Maybe it exists. I'm not sure. I'm not convinced it does because in some sense AI just gives you more leverage on the things you already have and the government h already has the monopoly on violence, right? And they can supercharge this with extremely obedient employees and servants and bureaucrats that will do exactly what they say with ability to monitor everything. Um so I think yeah this it's really worth worrying about how do we make sure that we don't lose reigns of free government democratic government >> and it's also as well there'll be a lot of people in the US and the UK who won't mind mass surveillance particularly if the world becomes more and more unstable we see a rise in terrorism and the government goes look you know you're worried about the latest terrorist organization whoever they may be you're worried about your children's safety. We can protect you now. It's going to mean that you're going to give up a few things, but one thing I can guarantee you is that you're going to be safer.
And you look at what happened over co people were willing to give up the most basic freedoms for safety.
>> Yeah. I mean there there in fact be a stronger dynamic in that way because AI actually will be very dangerous, right?
And so the government can say, "Oh, you can use AI to make boweapons. You can use AI to do all these scary things. we need to be monitoring what's happening and it will seem even more reasonable than what was done during co and so I think that a lot of the reasons that government has not been as authoritarian as it has in the past is that it just physically not been possible for somebody to be looking at every single bank transaction to be looking at every single CCTV camera to be able to cross reference all of those things um if you have AI that can do that it is within the government's power very easily to be able to monitor every single thing that's happening And then there just the only solution then is a political expectation that the government should not do this. And basically people need to be talking about this. People need to be saying this this would not be okay for the government to do. I don't know if you saw the news over the last few month but um there was a spat between the department of war and this AI company anthropic where the department the department of war were saying we don't want any red lines around the use of these models when we're using them in military. And the andropic said, "We'll only send you sell you these models if you're willing if we can if we can say in the contract, hey, you're not allowed to use it for mass surveillance." And so the Department of War said, "Okay, if you're going to, you know, it would totally okay for the Department of War to say, look, we're not going to do business with you. We can't have red lines on software the government uses."
Instead, the Department of War said, "We are going to say that you're a supply chain risk." which is this authority that the Congress gave the department of war to basically ban Huawei devices from being used in missiles or whatever. Uh and instead the department of war is saying okay none of our our contractors so Amazon is a contractor of the department of war, Nvidia, Google etc can use your AI in any any work they do for us. And the initial goal is really just to like do something to kill the company. And so this is the kind of leverage that the government can apply on AI companies to say like hey if you don't help us with mass surveillance if you don't help us do um uh scary things and this will be a bigger issue in the future then we can just try to destroy your company and um and and so yeah that that's also a really scary dynamic that the government has this power over private companies and it's scary the private companies can do this themselves. Well, right. That's the flip side is what if let's say uh team the team that you like is in power in government and you have an AI company is controlled by the opposite someone who has the opposite political views.
>> You you've now got the opposite of that.
But it's equally dangerous, right? When you've got someone who's effectively got the technology to power a huge private army.
>> Exactly.
>> At some point versus a government.
>> Exactly.
>> Like how does that get worked out? And that's the flip side of that very same problem. Um, to say nothing of the fact, coming back to our economic conversation, which is in this beautiful world where AI does all the work, who is buying the product and with what, >> right? I'll be honest. I know a fair few BS who've gone through the whole hair loss thing and almost all of them said the same thing. They wish they'd acted sooner rather than waiting until it was too late. This is where Hims comes in.
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>> To say nothing of the fact coming back to our economic conversation which is in this beautiful world where AI does all the work, who is buying the products and with what? I don't worry so much that there will not be demand for all the things that AI is building. I think at the end of the day AI can consume the things that AI is building. Um because AI will be another agent in the economy.
Just the way humans build things and consume things. AIS will also be not just building things but consuming things even in the service of producing things for humans. Like if you look at the amount of compute right now AI is being used a lot for software engineering and we just can't get enough comput to do all the software engineering with AI because you can use a lot more AI to than we used in the past to build projects that we would have never dreamed of in the past because it was just not possible to throw out that much engineering talented in the f in the past and so we'll have this dynamic more and more in the future where there's just there's an endless amount of things to be done or things people will want >> but where are humans going to get money to pay for Thanks. Sort of I'm wondering.
>> Okay. Um Yeah. So there um wages reg Well, yeah. But then >> yeah, wages are gone.
>> So then there's rents on capital. So if you have S&P 500 or something >> that will probably go up a bunch and you can use that to buy things in the future. Um I think home values will probably will not go up as much uh relative to capital relevant to AI but I do expect it will be accumulated by a smaller or smaller fraction of people.
Um so be will be some mixture of redistribution and capital that people hold.
>> I mean >> it's a beautiful beautiful world >> and I just I mean the thing that really worries me is we already in a world where we have a crisis. I mean, >> yeah, >> I mean that is only going to get 10, 100, 1 billion x in a world where most people don't have a job. And by people, I mean men.
>> Yeah.
>> And we look at what's happening now with populism, with left and right-wing populism. I mean, again, that's only going to get even more escalated, isn't it?
>> Yeah. Um, I I'm of two minds about this. I think it's very possible that people learn to cope like in some sense they will lose the thing that gives them meaning now and maybe it takes a while for a society to acclimate to what it means to have purpose in this civilization where the real work is done by AIS but you think about what humans have gone through over the last 10,000 years >> our genes we're like we're supposed to be killing things on the savannah in tribes of 100 people we're not supposed to be podcasting right and I get meaning out of being a um uh the transitioning to the agricultural revolution, transitioning to early states, transitioning to bigger states, transitioning to the industrial revolution, transitioning to modernity, all these things. I mean, obviously there's a certain amount of um people do feel estranged from society and that has part of like part of it is that you're not just out on the savannah with with with your tribe. Um, but we've coped and I think we will cope to a world where there's abundance and where disease is solved, where we can even intervene and help you get healthier in all kinds of different ways to um to have I mean just yeah again go back to this analogy of would a person in the 14th century even realize what they're missing out on because they don't have all the technologies we have today. They don't have antibiotics. They don't have modern technology and conveniences. But it so go back to my point because for me it's about purpose and meaning and it's about striving and overcoming.
>> Yeah.
>> So so when I was a primary school teacher, everyone can drink now cuz I mentioned it. I taught uh to my 10 11 year olds Greek myths and mythologies and these were kids from all different parts of the world. First, second generation immigrants everywhere from Lithuania to China to Pakistan, Bangladesh. And we many of them vast majority had no connection to ancient Greece or Greece whatsoever.
And I taught them about myth and every single one of them would be hooked immediately. And why is it? Because it's that fundamental story, the archetype of the hero overcoming >> the challenge in order to become a better version of themselves. It's fundamental to the human experience. I think and I really worry if you take that away from people you're taking away something fundamental and when you look at communities where the central industry that the community relied on whether it's in the rust belt or in the north of England and you take away those communities and there's nothing less even if those people are never going to starve they're never going to go hungry they will still wither on the vine emotionally and then we see addictions and all the rest of it >> yeah I think Another analogy is Saudi Arabia where there's this huge imported labor force but the actual citizens are sort of subsisting on this oil wealth.
>> It's a good analogy.
>> And um and I I don't know much about Saudi Arabia but yeah you you want you want people to be sort of engaged. You want people to have develop their facilities, right? What does it mean to be a human? You want people to ultimately what is civilization for? We want flourishing human beings. I do think this is the kind of thing where it's hard to say in advance how we'll figure it out. Maybe there's some mixture of play and uh new ways of we'll get meaning from connecting with other people. We get meaning from um understanding the things AIS are doing. AIS will help us brainstorm ways to get meaning. I'm optimistic in the long run. I do worry in the short run there will be the equivalent of here's another analogy I think when there's groups that have not until recently encountered it's only been the last couple hundred years that they've encountered modern civilization they get hooked to things like alcohol uh much more recently like genetically they're more predisposed to alcoholism I think this is true of Native Americans um uh but over time we've built up defenses of us as a civilization from everything from the level of genetics iculture or whatever to these kinds of devices that came along with the agricultural revolution. I think there will be similar here where yes, there will be incredible AI slop that will be generated that will be just gripping people on their phones and they're just in bed jerking off all day and like scrolling um to to the things AI is making. And over time, I'm hoping maybe not even in our generation, uh, but if if we get things right, we will have a vision of what it means to be a fulfilled and actualized human being even in a world where the work is being done by the AIS. Yeah, the Saudi Arabia metaphor is actually very interesting because um you you know I from what I gather a you know there's some very smart people in the Saudi royal family who basically in charge and then there's kind of a lot of people who are some mixture of just people who have a nice life cuz they happen to get lots of money and a lot of wasters who spend their life shagging and boozing and taking drugs or whatever and and that's kind of the mix of any human society really but there are pe not everyone there is like suffering from a a crisis meaning some people just do something that they enjoy doing, you know, or some of them still start businesses even though they're wealthy or they do something to contribute to their society. It's an interesting matter. I I hadn't considered that and that's actually I think quite helpful in a way. There's one other final bit that I I wanted to talk about which is you've interviewed pretty much everyone who's anyone in the AI space including the people who run all these big companies and one of the things that we've observed from talking to people in the AI field not quite at that level you know there is um there's a lot of excitement let's put it that way the the people in charge of this the people who are doing this it feels to me like that sort of Facebook 2014 move fast and break things attitude is there first just on that is that accurate >> I think some people are careful but in general people really believe in the potential of the technology >> right right um and that to me is kind of worrying on it own because when you move fast and break things you break things you know uh and if you're excited about the process that that that that doesn't help with being careful >> are the conversations about the sort of concern concerns we've had today. Are they being had in the industry?
>> Yes. I I mean I don't think people should just count on that and like just because people are talking about it whatever, right? Like anybody can talk about it. Um I'm talking about it. It's not like fixing the issue. Um but people are like this is really a thing that the the topics we've been talking about really do get discussed in detail in Silicon Valley. Um again I think but does that mean that when the rubber what's the metaphor the rubber hits the road that makes sense um uh it will be these discussions rather than how do we hit our revenue targets that will be guiding decisions I think probably be a mixture of both and it will be more of the latter than some idealists like to think but less than maybe some cynics would assume. Um, I do think people, yeah, I' I've been generally impressed by at least what's how thoughtfully some people have thought about this issue.
>> Doresh, it's a real pleasure having this conversation with you. Thanks for your time and thanks for coming on. Really enjoyed it. Um, we are going to ask you questions from our supporters in a second. But before we do, what's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be?
I think there's this tough question that I don't know the answer to, but certainly we as a civilization will give the answer to of even if these top companies don't release these misaligned models that do bad things, somebody at some point will. It's easy enough to train AIs and it's getting easier and easier over time that at some point the Taliban will have their super intelligence and every bad person you can think of will have their own super intelligence. And the solution cannot be that the government or whoever builds a panopticon such that they can see they can control exactly who gets to build an AI. At some point somebody will be able to build superhuman intelligence in their basement. And so we need a civilization that is robust to even bad people with super intelligence. Uh the only other solution then if we don't allow for that is some sort of global government that prevents the bad people from mapping AI. And so, how do you build a society that is robust to lots of people with super intelligences?
>> Well, thanks for coming on. Head on over to triggerpod.co.uk where Doresh is going to answer your questions.
>> How does a common man weather this storm? Most people are weigh down when supporting others and can't invest a ton of time and money trying to do something with AI that will likely fail if they don't already have a background in tech.
Down.
Down.
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