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If you're worried about immigration taking jobs, you should be way more worried about AI because it's like a flood of millions of new digital
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immigrants that are Nobel Prize level capability work at superhuman speed and will work for less than minimum wage. I
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mean, we're heading for so much transformative change faster than our society is currently prepared to deal with it. And there's a different
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conversation happening publicly than the one that the AI companies are having privately about which world we're
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heading to, which is a future that people don't want. But we didn't consent to have six people make that decision on
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behalf of 8 billion people. Tristan Harris is one of the world's most influential technology ethicists
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who created the Center for Humane Technology after correctly predicting the dangers social media would have on
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our society. And now he's warning us about the catastrophic consequences AI will have on all of us.
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Let me like collect myself for a second. We can't let it happen. We cannot let
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these companies race to build a super intelligent digital god, own the world economy and have military advantage because of the belief that if I don't
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build it first, I'll lose to the other guy and then I will be forever a slave to their future. And they feel they'll
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die either way. So they prefer to light the fire and see what happens. It's winner takes all. But as we're racing,
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we're landing in a world of unvetted therapists, rising energy prices, and major security risks. I mean, we have
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evidence where if an AI model reading a company's email finds out it's about to get replaced with another AI model and
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then it also reads in the company email that one executive is having an affair with an employee, the AI will independently blackmail that executive
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in order to keep itself alive. That's crazy. But what do you think? I'm finding it really hard to be hopeful. I'm going to be honest, just so
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I really want to get practical and specific about what we can do about this. Listen, I I'm not I'm not naive. This is super hard. But we have done hard things
00:01:43
before and it's possible to choose a different teacher. So,
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I see messages all the time in the comments section that some of you didn't realize you didn't subscribe. So, if you
00:01:54
could do me a favor and double check if you're a subscriber to this channel, that would be tremendously appreciated. It's the simple, it's the free thing
00:02:00
that anybody that watches this show frequently can do to help us here to keep everything going in this show in the trajectory it's on. So please do
00:02:07
double check if you've subscribed and uh thank you so much because a strange way you are you're part of our history and
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you're on this journey with us and I appreciate you for that. So yeah, thank you
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Tristan. I think my first question and maybe the most important question is we're going
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to talk about artificial intelligence and technology broadly today but who are you in relation to this
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subject matter? So I did a program at Stanford called the Mayfield Fellows program that took engineering students
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and then taught them entrepreneurship. You know I as a computer scientist didn't know anything about entrepreneurship but they pair you up
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with venture capitalists. They give you mentorship and you know there's a lot of powerful alumni who are part of that
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program. the co-founder of Asauna, uh the co-founders of um of Instagram were
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both part of that program. And that put us in kind of a cohort of people who
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were basically ending up at the center of what was going to colonize the whole world's psychological environment, which
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was the social media situation. And as part of that, I started my own tech company called Apure. And we, you know,
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basically made this tiny widget that would help people find more contextual information without leaving the website
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they were on. It was a really cool product that was about deepening people's understanding. And I got into
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the tech industry because I thought the technology could be a force for good in the world. It's why I started my company. And then I kind of realized
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through you know that experience that at the end of the day these news publishers who used our product they only cared
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about one thing which is is this increasing the amount of time and eyeballs and attention on our website
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because eyeballs meant more revenue. And I was in sort of this conflict of I
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think I'm doing this to help the world but really I'm measured by this metric of what keeps people's attention. That's
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the only thing that I'm measured by. And I saw that conflict play out among my friends who started Instagram, you know,
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because they got into it because they wanted people to share little bite-sized moments of your life. You know, here's a photo of my bike ride down to the bakery
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in San Francisco. It's what Kevin Sist used to post when we were when he was just starting it. I was probably one of the first like hundred users of the app.
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And later you see how these night, you know, these sort of simple products that had a simple good positive intention got
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sort of sucked into these perverse incentives. And so Google acquired my company called Apure. I landed there and
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I joined the Gmail team and I'm with these engineers who are designing the email interface that people spend hours
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a day in. And then one day one of the engineers comes over and he says, "Well,
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why don't we make it buzz your phone every time you get an email?" And he just asked the question nonchalantly
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like it wasn't a big deal. And in my experience, I was like, "Oh my god, you're about to change billions of
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people's psychological experiences with their families, with their friends, at dinner, with their date night, on
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romantic relationships, where suddenly people's phones are going to be busy showing notifications of their email."
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And you're just asking this question as if it's like a throwaway question. And I became concerned. I see you have a slide
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deck there. I do. Yeah. um about basically how Google and Apple and social media
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companies were hosting this psychological environment that was going to corrupt and frack the global human
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attention uh of humanity. And I basically said I needed to make a slide
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deck. It's 130 something pages slide deck that basically was a message to the
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whole company at Google saying we have to be very careful and we have a moral
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responsibility in how we shape the global attentions of humanity. The slide
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deck I I've printed off um which my research team found is called a call to minimize distraction and respect users
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attention by a concerned PM and entrepreneur. PM meaning project manager. Project manager. Yeah.
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How was that received at Google? I was very nervous actually uh because I felt
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like I wasn't coming from some place where I wanted to like stick it to them or you
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know um be controversial. I just felt like there was this conversation that wasn't happening. And I sent it to about
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50 people that were friends of mine just for feedback. And when I came to work the next day, there was 150, you know,
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on the top right on Google Slides, it shows you the number of simultaneous viewers. Y and it had 130 something simultaneous
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viewers. And later that day it was like 500 simultaneous viewers. And so obviously it had been spreading virally
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throughout the whole company. And people from all around the company emailed me saying this is a massive problem. I
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totally agree. We have to do something. And so instead of getting fired, I was invited and basically stayed to become a
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design ethicist. studying how do you design in an ethical way and how do you
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design for the collective attention spans and information flows of humanity in a way that does not cause all these
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problems. Because what was sort of obvious to me then, and that was in 2013, is that if the incentive is to
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maximize eyeballs and attention and engagement, then you're incentivizing a more addicted, distracted, lonely,
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polarized, sexualized breakdown of shared reality society because all of
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those outcomes are success cases of maximizing for engagement for an individual human on a screen. And so it
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was like watching this slow motion train wreck in 2013. you could kind of see there's this kind of myth that um we
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could never predict the future like technology could go any direction and that's like you know the possible of a new technology but I wanted people to
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see the probable that if you know the incentives you can actually know something about the future that you're heading towards and that presentation
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kind of kicked that off. A lot of people will know you from the documentary on Netflix, The Social Dilemma, which was a
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big moment and a big conversation in society across the world. But then since then, a new alien has entered the p
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picture. There's a new protagonist in the story, which is the rise of artificial intelligence. When did you
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start to and in the social dilemma, you talk a lot about AI and algorithms. Yeah. But when did
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different kind of AI we used to call that um the AI behind social media was kind of humanity's first contact between
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a narrow misaligned AI that went rogue because if you think about it it's like there you are you open Tik Tok and you
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see a video and you think you're just watching a video but what when you swipe your finger and it shows you the next video at that time you activated one of
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the largest supercomputers in the world pointed at your brain stem calculating what 3 billion other human social
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primates have seen today and knowing before you do which of those videos is most likely to keep you scrolling. It
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makes a prediction. So, it's an AI that's just making a prediction about which video to recommend to you. But Twitter's doing that with which tweet
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should be shown to you. Instagram's doing that with which photo or videos to be shown to you. And so, all of these things are these narrow misaligned AIs
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just optimizing for one thing, which is what's going to keep you scrolling. And that was enough to wreck and break
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democracy and to create the most anxious and depressed generation of our lifetime
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just by this very simple baby AI. And people didn't even notice it because it was called social media instead of AI.
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But it was the first we used to call it um in this AI dilemma talk that my co-founder and I uh gave, we called it
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humanity's first contact with AI because it's just a narrow AI. And what ChachiPT represents is this whole new wave of
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generative AI that is a totally different beast because it speaks language which is the operating system
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of humanity. Like if you think about it, it's trained on code, it's trained on text, it's trained on all of Wikipedia, it's trained on Reddit, it's trained on
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everything, all law, all religion and all of that gets sucked into this digital brain that um has unique
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properties and that is what we're living with with chat GPT. I think this is a really critical point and I remember
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watching your talk about this where I think this was the moment that I that my I had a bit of a paradigm shift when I
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realized that how how central language is to everything that I do every day. Yeah, exactly. It's like we should establish that
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first. Like why is language so central? Code is language. So all the code that runs all of the digital infrastructure
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we live by, that's language. Law is language. All the laws that have ever been written, that's language. Um
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biology, DNA, that's all a kind of language. Music is a kind of language. Videos are a higher dimensional kind of
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language. And the new generation of AI that was born with this technology called transformers that Google made in
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in 2017 was to treat everything as a language. Um, and that's how we get, you
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know, chatbt, write me a 10-page essay on anything and it spits out this thing or chatbt, you know, find something in
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this religion that'll persuade this this group uh of the thing I want them to be persuaded by. That's hacking language
00:10:48
because religion is also language. And so this new AI that we're dealing with
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can hack the operating system of humanity. It can hack code and find vulnerabilities in software. The recent
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AIs today, just over the summer, have been able to find 15 vulnerabilities in open- source software on GitHub. So it
00:11:06
can just point itself at GitHub. GitHub being GitHub being like this u this this website that hosts basically all the
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open source code of the world. So for it's it's kind of like the Wikipedia for coders. has all the code that's ever
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been written that's publicly and openly accessible and you can download it. So you don't have to write your own face recognition system. You can just
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download the one that already exists. And so GitHub is sort of supplying the world with all of this free digital
00:11:29
infrastructure. And the new AIs that exist today can be pointed at GitHub and
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found 15 vulnerabilities from scratch that had not been exploited before. So
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if you imagine that now applied to the code that runs our water infrastructure, our electricity infrastructure, we're
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releasing AI into the world that can speak and hack the operating system of our world. And that requires a new level
00:11:55
of discernment and care about how we're doing that because we ought to be protecting the core parts of society
00:12:01
that we want to protect before all that happens. I think especially when you think about how central voice is to
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safeguarding so much of our lives. My relationship with my girlfriend runs on voice. Right. Exactly. Me calling her to tell her something. My
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bank, I call them and tell them something. Exactly. And they ask me for a bunch of codes or a password or whatever. And all of this
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comes back to your point about language, which is my whole life is actually protected by my communications with other people now.
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And you you're you generally speaking, you trust when you pick up the phone that it's a real person. I I literally just um two days ago I had a the mother
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of a close friend of mine call me out of nowhere and she said Tristan um you know uh my daughter she just called me crying
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that that some some person had is is holding her hostage and and wanted some money and I was like oh my god this is
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an AI scam but it's hitting my friend in San Francisco who's knowledgeable about
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this stuff and didn't know that it was a scam. And for a moment I was very concerned. I had to track her down and figure out and find my friends where
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where she was and find out that she was okay. And when you have AIs that can speak the language of anybody, it now
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takes less than three seconds of your voice to synthesize and speak in anyone's voice. Again, that's a new
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vulnerability that society has now opened up because of AI. So, Chachi kind of set off the starting
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pistol for this this whole race. And subsequently, it appears that every other major technology company now is
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investing godly amounts, ungodly amounts of money in competing in this AI race.
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and they're pursuing this thing called AGI which we hear this word used a lot. Yes. What is what is AGI and how is that
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different from what I use at the moment on chatb or Gemini? Yeah. So that's the thing that people really
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need to get is that these companies are not racing to provide a chatbot to users. That's not what their goal is. If
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you look at the mission statement on OpenAI's website or all the websites, their mission is to be able to replace
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all forms of human economic labor in the economy. Meaning an AI that can do all
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the cognitive labor meaning labor of the mind. So that that can be marketing, that can be text, that can be
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illustration, that can be video production, that can be code production. Everything that a person can do with
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their brain, these companies are racing to build that. That is artificial
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general intelligence. General meaning all kinds of cognitive tasks. Deis Hassabis the co-founder of um Google
00:14:16
DeepMind used to say first solve intelligence and then use that to solve everything else. Like it's important to
00:14:22
say why why is AI distinct from all other kinds of technologies. It's because if I make an advance in one
00:14:28
field like rocketry if I just let's say I uncover some secret in rocketry that doesn't advance like biio medicine
00:14:36
knowledge or it doesn't advance energy production or doesn't advance coding. But if I can advance generalized
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intelligence, think of all science and technology development over the course of all human history. So science and
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technology is all done by humans thinking and working out problems. Working out problems in any domain. So
00:14:54
if I automate intelligence, I'm suddenly going to get an explosion of all scientific and technological development
00:15:00
everywhere. Does that make sense? Of course. Yeah. It's foundational to everything. Exactly. Which is why there's a belief
00:15:06
that if I get there first and can automate generalized intelligence, I can own the world economy because suddenly
00:15:13
everything that a human can do that they would be paid to do in a job, the AI can do that better. And so if I'm a company,
00:15:19
do I want to pay the human who has health care, might whistleblow, complains, you know, has to sleep, has
00:15:25
sick days, has family issues, or do I want to pay the AI that will work 24/7 at superhuman speed, doesn't complain,
00:15:32
doesn't whistleblow, doesn't have to be paid for healthcare. There's the incentive for everyone to move to paying
00:15:38
for AIs rather than paying humans. And so AGI, artificial general intelligence,
00:15:45
is more transformative than any other kind of of technology that we've ever had and it's distinct.
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With the sheer amount of money being invested into it and the money being invested into the infrastructure, the
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physical data centers, the chips, the compute, do you think we're going to get there?
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Do you think we're going to get to AGI? I do think that we're going to get there. It's not clear uh how long it will take. And I'm not saying that
00:16:09
because I believe necessarily the current paradigm that we're building on will take us there, but you know, I'm based in San Francisco. I talked to
00:16:15
people at the AI labs. Half these people are friends of mine. You know, people at the very top level. And you know, most
00:16:22
people in the industry believe that they'll get there between the next two and 10 years at the latest. And I think
00:16:28
some people might say, "Oh, well, it may not happen for a while. Phew. I can sit back and we don't have to worry about And it's like we're heading for so much
00:16:35
transformative change faster than our society is currently prepared to deal with it. The reason I was excited to
00:16:41
talk to you today is because I think that people are currently confused about AI. You know, people say it's going to solve everything, cure cancer, uh solve
00:16:48
climate change, and there's people say it's going to kill everything. It's going to be doom. Everyone's going to go extinct. If anyone builds it, everyone
00:16:53
dies. And those those conversations don't converge. And so everyone's just kind of confused where how can it be,
00:16:59
you know, infinite promise and how can it be infinite peril? And what I wanted to do today is to really clarify for
00:17:05
people what the incentives point us towards which is a future that I think people when they see it clearly would
00:17:11
not want. So what are the incentives pointing us towards in terms of the future?
00:17:17
So first is if you believe that this is like it's metaphorically it's like the ring from Lord of the Rings. It's the
00:17:23
ring that that creates infinite power because if I have AGI, I can apply that
00:17:28
to military advantage. I can have the best military planner that can beat all battle plans for anyone. And we already
00:17:33
have AIs that can obviously beat Gary Kasparov at chess, beat Go, the Go Asian
00:17:39
um board game, or now beat Starcraft. So you have AI that are beating humans at strategy games. Well, think about
00:17:45
Starcraft compared to an actual military campaign, you know, in Taiwan or something like that. If I have an AI
00:17:51
that can out compete in strategy games, that lets me out compete everything. Or take business strategy. If I have an AI
00:17:57
that can do business strategy and figure out supply chains and figure out how to optimize them and figure out how to undermine my competitors
00:18:03
and I have a, you know, a step function level increase in that compared to everybody else, then that gives me
00:18:08
infinite power to undermine and out compete all businesses. If I have a super programmer, then I can out compete
00:18:15
programming. 70 to 90% of the code written at today's AI labs is written by AI.
00:18:21
Think about the stock market as well. Think about the stock market. If I have an AI that can trade in the stock market better than all the other AIs, because
00:18:28
they're currently there's mostly AIs that are actually trading in the stock market, but if I have a jump in that, then I can consolidate all the wealth.
00:18:34
If I have an AI that can do cyber hacking, that's way better at cyber hacking in a step function above what
00:18:39
everyone else can do, then I have an asymmetric advantage over everybody else. So AI is like a power pump. It
00:18:46
pumps economic advantage. It pumps scientific advantage and it pumps
00:18:51
military advantage. Which is why the countries and the companies are caught in what they believe is a race to get
00:18:57
there first. And anything that is a negative consequence of that, job loss, rising energy prices, more emissions,
00:19:06
stealing intellectual property, you know, security risks, all of that stuff feels small relative to if I don't get
00:19:12
there first, then some other person who has less good values as me, they'll get
00:19:18
AGI and then I will be forever a slave to their future. And I know this might sound crazy to a lot of people, but this
00:19:23
is how people in at the very top of the AGI AI world believe is currently
00:19:29
happening. And that's what conversations. Yeah. You you've had I mean know Jeff Hinton
00:19:35
and and Roman Ylonsky on and other people Mogadat and they're saying the same thing. And I think people need to
00:19:41
take seriously that whether you believe it or not, the people who are currently deploying the trillions of dollars, this
00:19:47
is what they believe. And they believe that it's win or take all. And it's not just first solve intelligence and use
00:19:53
that to solve everything else. It's first dominate intelligence and use that to dominate everything else.
00:19:58
Have you had concerning private conversations about this subject matter with people that are in the industry?
00:20:04
Absolutely. I think that's what most people don't understand is that um
00:20:09
there's a different conversation happening publicly than the one that's happening privately. I think you're aware of this as well.
00:20:14
I am aware of this. What do they say to you? So, it's not always the people telling
00:20:22
me directly. It's usually one step removed. So, it's usually someone that I trust and I've known for many, many
00:20:28
years who at a kitchen table says, "I met this particular CEO. We were in this room talking about the future of AI.
00:20:34
this particular CEO they're referencing is leading one of the biggest AI companies in the world and then they'll explain to me what they think of the
00:20:40
future's going to look like and then when I go and watch them on YouTube or podcasts what they're saying is they
00:20:45
they have this real public bias towards the abundance part that you know we're going to cure cancer
00:20:50
cure cancer universal high income for everyone yeah all this all this stuff doesn't work anymore
00:20:56
but then privately what I hear is is exactly what you said which is really terrifying to me there was actually
00:21:01
since since the last time we had a conversation about AR and podcast, I was speaking to a friend of mine, very
00:21:07
successful billionaire, knows a lot of these people, and he is concerned because his argument is that if there's
00:21:14
even like a 5% chance of the adverse outcomes that we hear about, we should
00:21:21
not be doing this. And he was saying to me that some of his friends who are running some of these companies believe the chance is much higher than that, but
00:21:27
they feel like they're caught in a race where if they don't control this technology and they don't get there first and get to what they refer to as
00:21:34
um takeoff, like fast takeoff. Yeah. Uh recursive self-improvement or fast takeoff, which basically means what
00:21:40
the companies are really in a race for you're pointing to is they're in a race to automate AI research. Um because so
00:21:48
right now you have open AI, it's got a few thousand employees. Human beings are coding and doing the AI research.
00:21:54
They're reading the latest research papers. They're writing the next, you know, they're hypothesizing what's the
00:21:59
improvement we're going to make to AI. What's a new way to do this code? What's a new technique? And then they use their human mind and they go invent something.
00:22:06
They they run the experiment and they see if that improves the performance. And that's how you go from, you know, GPT4 to GPT5 or something. Imagine a
00:22:14
world where Sam Alman can instead of having human AI researchers can have AI
00:22:20
AI researchers. So now I just snap my fingers and I go from one AI that reads
00:22:26
all the papers, writes all the code, creates the new experiments to I can copy paste a 100 million AI researchers
00:22:33
that are now doing that in an automated way. And it the belief is not just that, you know, the companies look like
00:22:39
they're competing to release better chat bots for people, but the what they're really competing for is to get to this
00:22:45
milestone of being to automate an intelligence explosion or automate recursive self-improvement, which is
00:22:51
basically automating AI research. And that, by the way, is why all the companies are racing specifically to get
00:22:58
good at programming because the faster you can automate a human programmer, the more you can automate AI research. And
00:23:05
just a couple weeks ago, Cloud 4.5 was released and it can do 30 hours of
00:23:11
uninterrupted complex programming tasks at the at the high end.
00:23:16
That's crazy. So right now one of the limits on the progress of AI is that human humans are
00:23:21
doing the work but actually all of these companies are pushing to the moment when AI will be doing the work which means they can have an infinite arguably
00:23:28
smarter zerocost workforce that's right scaling the AI. So when they talk about fast takeoff they mean the moment where
00:23:35
they where the AI takes control of the research and it and progress rapidly increases and it self-learns and recursively
00:23:41
improves and invents. Um, so one thing to get is that AI accelerates AI, right?
00:23:46
Like if I invent nuclear weapons, nuclear weapons don't invent better nuclear weapons.
00:23:51
Yeah. But if I invent AI, AI is intelligence. Intelligence automates better programming, better chip design. So I
00:23:58
can use AI to say, here's a design for the NVIDIA chips. Go make it 50% more efficient. And it can find out how to do
00:24:04
that. I can say AI, here's a supply chain that I need for all the things for my AI company. And it can optimize that
00:24:09
supply chain and make that supply chain more efficient. Mhm. AI, here's the code for making AI. Make that more efficient. Um, AI, here's
00:24:16
training data. I need to make more training data. Go run a million simulations of how to do this and it'll train itself to get better.
00:24:23
AI accelerates AI. What do you think these people are motivated by the CEOs of these companies?
00:24:28
That's a good question. Genuinely, what do you think their genuine motivations are when you think about all these names?
00:24:36
I think it's a subtle thing. I think there's um it's almost mythological
00:24:44
because there's almost a way in which they're building a new intelligent entity that
00:24:50
has never before existed on planet Earth. It's like building a god. I mean, the incentive is build a god, own the
00:24:57
world economy, and make trillions of dollars, right? If you could actually build something that can automate all
00:25:04
intelligent tasks, all goal achieving that will let you out compete everything. So that is a kind of godlike
00:25:11
power that I think relative imagine energy prices go up or hundreds of millions of people lose their jobs. That
00:25:18
those things suck. But relative to if I don't build it first and build this god, I'm going to lose to some maybe worse
00:25:24
person who I think in my opinion, not my opinion, Tristan, but their opinion thinks is a worse person. It's it's a
00:25:30
kind of competitive logic that self-reinforces itself, but it forces
00:25:38
everyone to be incentivized to take the most shortcuts, to care the least about
00:25:43
safety or security, to not care about how many jobs get disrupted, to not care about the well-being of regular people,
00:25:49
but to basically just race to this infinite prize. So, there's a quote that
00:25:54
um a friend of mine interviewed a lot of the top people at the AI companies, like the very top, and he just came back from
00:25:59
that and and basically reported back to me and some friends, and he said the following.
00:26:05
In the end, a lot of the tech people I talk to when I'm when I really grill them on it about like why you're doing
00:26:10
this, they retreat into number one, determinism, number two, the inevitable replacement
00:26:17
of biological life with digital life, and number three, that being a good thing. Anyways, at its core, it's an
00:26:24
emotional desire to meet and speak to the most intelligent entity that they've ever met. And they have some ego
00:26:31
religious intuition that they'll somehow be a part of it. It's thrilling to start an exciting fire. They feel they'll die
00:26:37
either way, so they prefer to light it and see what happens. That is the perfect description of the
00:26:44
private conversations. Doesn't that match what what you have description, doesn't it? And that's the thing. So, people may hear that and they're like,
00:26:50
"Well, that sounds ridiculous." But if you actually I just got goosebumps cuz it's the perfect description. Especially the part
00:26:55
they'll think they'll die either way. Exactly. Well, and um worse than that,
00:27:01
some of them think that in the case where they if they were to get it right and if they succeeded, they could
00:27:06
actually live forever because if AI perfectly speaks the language of biology, it will be able to reverse
00:27:12
aging aging, cure every disease. And and so there's this kind of I could become a
00:27:18
god. And I'll I'll tell you um you know, you and I both have know people who've had private conversations. Well, one of
00:27:24
them that I have heard from one of the co-founders of one of the most, you know, powerful of these companies when
00:27:31
when faced with the idea that what if there's an 80% or 20% chance that
00:27:36
everybody dies and gets wiped out by this, but an 80% chance that we get utopia. He said, well, I would clearly
00:27:43
accelerate and go for the utopia. Given a 20% chance,
00:27:50
it's crazy. People should feel you do not get to make that choice on behalf of me and my family. We didn't consent to
00:27:58
have six people make that decision on behalf of eight billion people. We have to stop pretending that this is okay or
00:28:03
normal. It's not normal. And the only way that this is happening and they're getting away with it is because most
00:28:09
people just don't really know what's going on. Yeah. But I'm curious what what do you think when I It's I mean everything you just said
00:28:15
it's that last part about the 8020% thing is almost verbatim what I heard from a very good very successful friend
00:28:21
of mine who is responsible for building some of the biggest companies in the world when he was referencing a conversation he had with the founder of
00:28:29
maybe the biggest company in the world and it was truly shocking to me because because it was said in such a blasé way.
00:28:36
Yes. It wasn't Yeah. That that's what I had heard in this particular situation. wasn't like
00:28:42
a matter of fact. It was a matter of fact, it's just easy. Yeah, of course I would do the I would take the I roll the dice.
00:28:48
And even Elon Musk said he actually said the same number in an interview with Joe Rogan. Um, and if you listen closely
00:28:54
when he said, "I decided I'd rather be there when it all happens. If it all goes off the rails, I decided in that
00:29:00
worst case scenario, I decided that I' I'd prefer to be there when it happens." Which is justifying racing to our
00:29:07
collective suicide. Now, I also want people to know like you don't have to buy into the sci-fi level
00:29:12
risks to be very concerned about AI. So, hopefully later we'll talk about um the many other risks that are already
00:29:18
hitting us right now that you don't have to believe any of this stuff. Yeah. The the Elon thing I think is particularly interesting because for the
00:29:25
last 10 years he was this slightly hard to believe voice on the subject of AI.
00:29:31
He was talking about it being a huge risk and an extinction level. He was the first AI risk people. Yeah. He was saying this is more dangerous
00:29:37
than nukes. He was saying, "I try to get people to stop doing it. This is summoning the demon." Those are his words, not mine. Yeah.
00:29:42
Um, we shouldn't do this. Supposedly, he used his first and only meeting with President Obama, I think, in 2016, to
00:29:49
advocate for global regulation and global controls on on AI, um, because he was very worried about it. And then
00:29:55
really what happened is, um, Chachi BT came out and as you said, that was the
00:30:01
starting gun and now everybody was in an allout race to get there first. He tweeted words to the effect I'll put it
00:30:07
on the screen. He tweeted that he had remained in I think he used a word
00:30:13
similar to disbelief for some time like suspended disbelief. But then he said in the same tweet that the race is now on.
00:30:20
The race is on and I have to race and I have to go. I have no choice but to go. And he tried he's basically saying I tried to fight it for a long
00:30:26
time. I tried to deny it. I tried to hope that we wouldn't get here but we're here now so I have to go. Yeah. And
00:30:32
at least he's being honest. He does seem to have a pretty honest track record on this because because he was the guy 10
00:30:38
years ago warning everybody. And I remember him talking about it and thinking, "Oh god, this is like 100 years away. Why are we talking about that?" I felt the same, by the way. Some people
00:30:44
might think that I'm some kind of AI enthusiast and I'm trying to ratch I I didn't believe that AI was a thing to be worried about at all until suddenly the
00:30:51
last 2 three years where you can actually see where we're headed. But um
00:30:57
oh man, there's just there's so much to say about all this and I'm so if you think about it from their perspective,
00:31:03
it's like best case scenario, I build it first and it's aligned and controllable,
00:31:10
meaning that it will take the actions that I want. It won't destroy humanity and it's controllable, which means I get
00:31:15
to be God and emperor of the world. Second scenario, it's not controllable,
00:31:21
but it's aligned. So, I built a god and I lost control of it, but it's now basically it's running humanity. It's
00:31:26
running the show. It's choosing what happens. It's out competing everyone on everything. That's not that bad an
00:31:32
outcome. Third scenario, it's not aligned. It's not controllable. And it does wipe everybody out. And that should
00:31:39
be demotivating to that person, to an Elon or someone, but in that scenario,
00:31:45
they were the one that birthed the digital god that replaced all of humanity. Like this is really important
00:31:50
to get because in nuclear weapons the risk of nuclear war is an omni
00:31:56
lose-lose outcome. Everyone wants to avoid that. And I know that you know that I know that we both want to avoid
00:32:02
that. So that that motivates us to coordinate and to have a nuclear non-prololiferation treaty. But with AI,
00:32:10
the worst case scenario of everybody gets wiped out is a little bit different for the people making that decision.
00:32:17
Because if I'm the CEO of DeepSeek and I make that AI that does wipe out
00:32:23
humanity, that's the worst case scenario and it wasn't avoidable because it was all inevitable. Then even though we all
00:32:29
got wiped out, I was the one who built the digital god that replaced humanity. And there's kind of ego in that. And uh
00:32:36
the god that I built speaks Chinese instead of English. That's the religious ego point. That's the ego.
00:32:42
Such a great point because that's exactly what it is. It's like this religious ego where I will be transcendent in some way. And you notice that it it all starts by
00:32:48
the belief that this is inevitable. Yeah. Which is like is this inevitable? It's important to note because
00:32:56
if you believe it's if everybody who's building it believes it's inevitable and the investors funding it believe it's inevitable, it cocreates the
00:33:03
inevitability. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And the only way out is to step outside
00:33:10
the logic of inevitability. Because if if we are all heading to our collective suicide, which I don't know about you, I
00:33:17
don't think that I don't want that. You don't want that. Everybody who loves life looks at their children in the
00:33:22
morning and says, I want I want the things that I love and that are sacred in the world to continue. That's what n
00:33:28
that's what everybody in the world wants. And the only thing that is having us not anchor on that is the belief that
00:33:35
this is inevitable and the worst case scenario is somehow in this ego religious way, not so bad. if I was the
00:33:41
one who accidentally wiped out humanity because I'm not a bad person because it was inevitable anyway.
00:33:47
And I think the goal of of for me this conversation is to get people to see that that's a bad outcome that no one
00:33:52
wants. And we have to put our hand on the steering wheel and turn towards a different future because we do not have
00:33:59
to have a race to uncontrollable, inscrutable, powerful AIs that are, by the way, already doing all the rogue
00:34:05
sci-fi stuff that we thought only existed in movies like blackmailing people. uh being self-aware when they're
00:34:12
being tested, scheming and lying and deceiving to copy their own code to keep themselves preserved. Like the stuff
00:34:18
that we thought only existed in sci-fi movies is now actually happening. And that should be enough evidence to say
00:34:26
we don't want to do this path that we're currently on. It's not that some version of AI progressing into the
00:34:33
world is directionally inevitable, but we get to choose which of those futures that we want to have.
00:34:39
Are you hopeful? Honestly, honestly,
00:34:44
I don't relate to hopefulness or pessimism either because I focus on what
00:34:50
would have to happen for the world to go okay. I think it's important to step out of because both hope or optimism or
00:34:58
pessimism are both passive. You're saying if I sit back, do I which way is it going to go? I mean, the
00:35:04
honest answer is if I sit back, we just talked about which way it's going to go. So, you'd say pessimistic? I challenge anyone who says optimistic.
00:35:12
On what grounds? What's confusing about AI is it will give us cures to cancer and probably
00:35:17
major solutions to climate change and physics breakthroughs and fusion at the same time that it gives us all this
00:35:23
crazy negative stuff. And so what's unique about AI that's literally not true of any other object is it hits our
00:35:29
brain and as one object represents a positive infinity of benefits that we can't even imagine and a negative
00:35:36
infinity in the same object and if you just ask like can our minds reckon with
00:35:42
something that is both those things at the same time and if people aren't good at that they're not good at that
00:35:48
I remember reading the work of Leon Festinger the guy that coined the term cognitive dissonance yes when prophecies fail he
00:35:54
also did that Yeah. And essential I mean the way that I interpret it I'm probably simplifying it here is that the human brain is really bad at holding two
00:36:00
conflicting ideas at the same time. That's right. So it dismisses one. That's right. To alleviate the discomfort, the dissonance that's caused. So for
00:36:07
example, if I if you're a smoker and at the same time you consider yourself to be a healthy person, if I point out that
00:36:12
smoking is unhealthy, you will immediately justify it. Exactly. With in some way to try and alleviate
00:36:17
that discomfort, the the contradiction. And it's the same here with with AI. It's it's very difficult to have a nuanced conversation about this because
00:36:23
the brain is trying to Exactly. And people will hear me and say I'm a doomer or I'm a pessimist. It's actually not the goal. The goal is to
00:36:28
say if we see this clearly then we have to choose to something else. I'm it's the deepest form of optimism because in
00:36:35
the presence of seeing where this is going still showing up and saying we have to choose another way. It's coming
00:36:41
from a kind of agency and a desire for that better world but by but by facing the difficult
00:36:47
reality that that most people don't want to face. Yeah. And the other thing that's happening in AI that you're saying that's that lacks the nuance is that
00:36:54
people point to all the things it's simultaneously more brilliant than humans and embarrassingly stupid in
00:37:00
terms of the mistakes that it makes. Yeah. A friend like Gary Marcus would say here's a hundred ways in which GPT5 like
00:37:06
the latest AI model makes embarrassing mistakes. If you ask it how many strawberries contain the word R in it,
00:37:12
it'll confuse it gets confused about what the answer is. um or it'll put more fingers on the hands than in the deep
00:37:18
fake photo or something like that. And I think that one thing that we have to do what Helen Toner who is what board
00:37:23
member of OpenAI calls AI jaggedness that we have simultaneously AIs that are
00:37:29
beating and getting gold on the International Math Olympiad that are solving new physics that are beating
00:37:35
programming competitions and are better than the top 200 programmers in the whole world um or in the top 200
00:37:41
programmers in the whole world that are beating cyber hacking competitions. It's both supremely outperforming humans and
00:37:48
embarrassingly uh failing in places where humans would never fail. So how does our mind integrate those two
00:37:53
pictures? Mhm. Have you ever met Sam Orman? Yeah. What do you think his incentives are? Do
00:37:59
you think he cares about humanity? I think that these people on some level
00:38:05
all care about humanity underneath there is a care for humanity. I think that
00:38:11
this situation, this particular technology, it justifies lacking empathy for what would happen to
00:38:18
everyone because I have this other side of the equation that demands infinitely more importance, right? Like if I didn't
00:38:24
do it, then someone else is going to build the thing that ends civilization. So, it's like,
00:38:30
do you see what I'm saying? It's it's not it's it's I I can justify it as I'm a good guy.
00:38:36
And what if I get the utopia? What if we get lucky and I got the aligned controllable AI that creates abundance
00:38:41
for everyone? If in that case I would be the hero. Do they have a point when they say that
00:38:48
listen if we don't do it here in America if we slow down if we start thinking about safety and the long-term future
00:38:54
and get too caught up in that. We're not going to build the data centers. We're not going to have the chips. We're not going to get to AGI and China will. And
00:39:01
if China get there, then we're going to be their lap dog. So this is this is the fundamental thing I want you to notice. Most people having
00:39:07
heard everything we just shared, although we probably should build out um we probably should build out the blackmail examples first, we have to
00:39:15
reckon with evidence that we have now that we didn't have even like 6 months ago, which is evidence that when you put
00:39:22
AIs in a situation, you tell the AI model, "We're going to replace you with another model." It will copy its own
00:39:28
code and try to preserve itself on another computer. It'll take that action
00:39:33
autonomously. We have examples where if you tell an AI model reading a fictional AI company's
00:39:39
email, so it's reading the email of the company and it finds out in the email that the plan is to replace this AI
00:39:46
model. So it realizes it's about to get replaced and then it also reads in the company email that one executive is having an affair with the other employee
00:39:54
and the AI will independently come up with the strategy that I need to blackmail that executive in order to
00:40:00
keep myself alive. That was Claude, right? That was Claude by Enthropic. Byanthropic. But then what happened is
00:40:08
they Enthropic tested all of the leading AI models from DeepSeek, OpenAI, Chatbt,
00:40:13
Gemini, XAI. And all of them do that blackmail behavior between 79 and 96% of
00:40:20
the time. Deepseek did it 79% of the time. I think XAI might have done it 96%
00:40:25
of the time. Maybe Claude did it 96% of the time. So the point is we the assumption behind
00:40:31
AI is that it's controllable technology that we will get to choose what it does. But AI is distinct from other
00:40:36
technologies because it is uncontrollable. It acts generally. The whole benefit is that you don't it's
00:40:42
going to do powerful strategic things no matter what you throw at it. So the same benefit of its generality is also what
00:40:47
makes it so dangerous. And so once you tell people these examples of it's
00:40:52
blackmailing people, it's self-aware of when it's being tested and alters its behavior. It's copying and
00:40:58
self-replicating its own code. It's leaving secret messages for itself. There's examples of that, too. It's
00:41:03
called steganographic encoding. It can leave a message that it can later sort of decode what it might meant in in a
00:41:09
way that humans could never see. We have examples of all of this behavior. And
00:41:14
once you show people that, what they say is, "Okay, well, why don't we stop or slow down?" And then what happens?
00:41:20
Another thought will creep in right after, which is, "Oh, but if we stop or slow down, then China will still build it." But I want to slow that down for a
00:41:28
second. You just, we all just said we should slow down or stop because the thing that
00:41:33
we're building, the it is this uncontrollable AI. And then the concern that China will build it, you just did a
00:41:40
swap and believe that they're going to build controllable AI. But we just established that all the AIs that we're
00:41:45
currently building are currently uncontrollable. So there's this weird contradiction our mind is living in when we say they're
00:41:52
going to keep building it. What the it that they would keep building is the same uncontrollable AI that we would build. So, I don't see a way out of this
00:41:59
without there being some kind of agreement or negotiation between the leading powers and countries to
00:42:09
pause, slow down, set red lines for getting to a controllable AI. And by the way, the Chinese Communist Party, what
00:42:15
do they care about more than anything else in the world? Surviving. Surviving and control. Yeah.
00:42:20
Control as a means to survive. Yeah. So, it's they they don't want uncontrollable AI anymore than we would.
00:42:29
And as as unprecedented as impossible as this might seem, we've done this before.
00:42:35
In the 1980s, there was a different technology chemical technology called CFCs, a chlorofhluocarbons, and it was
00:42:42
embedded in aerosols like hairsprays and deodorant, things like that. And there was this sort of corporate race where
00:42:47
everyone was releasing these products and you know using it for refrigerants and using it for hairsprays and it was creating this collective problem of um
00:42:54
the ozone hole in the atmosphere. And once there was scientific clarity that that ozone hole would cause skin
00:43:01
cancers, cataracts and sort of screw up biological life on planet Earth. We had that scientific clarity and we created
00:43:06
the Montreal protocol. 195 countries signed on to that protocol
00:43:12
and the countries then regulated their private companies inside those countries to say we need to phase out that
00:43:18
technology and phase in a different replacement that would not cause the ozone hole and in the course of um the
00:43:25
last 20 years we have basically completely reversed that problem I think it'll completely reverse by 2050 or
00:43:31
something like that and that's an example where humanity can coordinate when we have clarity or the nuclear
00:43:37
non-prololiferation treaty when there's the risk of existential destruction when this film called the day after came out
00:43:44
and it showed people this is what would actually happen in a nuclear war and once that was crystal clear to people
00:43:50
including in the Soviet Union where the film was aired uh in 1987 or 1989 that
00:43:55
helped set the conditions for Reagan and Gorbachev to sign the first non-proliferation arms control talks
00:44:01
once we had clarity about an outcome that we wanted to avoid and I think the current problem is that we're not having
00:44:07
an honest conversation in the public about which world we're heading to that is not in anyone's interest.
00:44:13
There's also just a bunch of cases through history where there was a threat, a collective threat and despite
00:44:20
the education, people didn't change, countries didn't change because the incentives were so
00:44:25
high. So I think of global warming as being an example where for many decades since I was a kid, I remember watching
00:44:30
my dad sitting me down and saying, "Listen, you got to watch this inconvenient truth thing with Al Gore." and sitting on the sofa, I don't know,
00:44:35
must have been less than 10 years old and hearing about glo the threat of global warming. But when you look at how
00:44:42
countries like China responded to that, y they just don't have the economic incentive to scale back production to
00:44:49
the levels that would be needed to save the the atmosphere. The closer the technology that needs to
00:44:55
be governed is to the center of GDP and the center of the lifeblood of your economy, Yeah. the harder it is to come
00:45:02
to international negotiation and agreement. Yeah. And oil and fossil fuels was the kind of
00:45:09
the pumping the heart of our economic superorganisms that are currently
00:45:14
competing for power. And so coming to agreements on that is is really really hard. AI is even harder because AI pumps
00:45:22
not just economic growth but scientific, technological and military advantages.
00:45:27
And so it will be the hardest coordination challenge that we will ever face. But if we don't face it, if we
00:45:35
don't make some kind of choice, it will end in tragedy. We're not in a race just
00:45:41
to have technological advantage. We're in a race for who can better govern that technologies impact on society. So for
00:45:47
example, the United States beat China to social media. that technology. Did that
00:45:53
make us stronger or did that make us weaker? We have the most anxious and depressed
00:45:59
generation of our lifetime. We have the least informed and most polarized generation. We have the worst critical thinking. We have the worst ability to
00:46:05
concentrate and do things. And that's because we did not govern the impact of that technology well. And the country
00:46:12
that actually figures out how to govern it well is the country that actually wins in a kind of comprehensive sense.
00:46:18
But they have to make it first. You have to get to AGI first. Well, or you don't. We could instead of
00:46:25
building these super intelligent gods in a box. Right now, China, as I understand it, from Eric Schmidt and Selena Shu in
00:46:31
in the New York Times wrote a piece about how China is actually taking a very different approach to AI and
00:46:37
they're focused on narrow practical applications of AI. So, like how do we just increase government services? How
00:46:42
do we make, you know, education better? How do we embed DeepS in in the WeChat app? How do we make uh robotics better?
00:46:49
and pump GDP. So like what China's doing with BYD and making the cheapest electric cars and out competing everybody else that's narrowly applying
00:46:56
AI to just pump manufacturing output. And if we realized that if we're instead
00:47:02
of competing to build a super intelligent uncontrollable god in a box that we don't know how to control in the box and we instead raced to create
00:47:09
narrow AIs that were actually about making stronger educational outcomes, stronger agriculture output, stronger
00:47:14
manufacturing output, we could live in a sustainable world, which by the way wouldn't replace all the jobs faster
00:47:20
than we know how to retrain people. Because when you race to AGI, you're racing to displace millions of workers.
00:47:29
And we talk about UBI, but are we going to have a global fund for every single
00:47:35
person of the 8 billion people on planet Earth in all countries to pay for their lifestyle after that wealth gets
00:47:40
concentrated? When has a small group of people concentrated all the wealth in the
00:47:46
economy and ever consciously redistributed it to everybody else? When has that happened in history?
00:47:51
Never. Has it ever happened? Anyone ever just
00:47:56
willingly redistributed the wealth? Not that I'm aware of. When Ed, one last thing, what when Elon Musk says that the
00:48:02
Optimus Prime robot is a $1 trillion market opportunity alone, what he means is I am going to own the global labor
00:48:11
economy, meaning that people won't have labor jobs. China wants to become the global leader
00:48:17
in artificial intelligence by 2030. To achieve this goal, Beijing is deploying industrial policy tools across the full
00:48:23
AI technology stack from chips to applications. And this expansion of AI industrial policy leads to two questions, which is what will they do
00:48:30
with this power and who will get there first? This is an article I was reading earlier. But to your point about Elon
00:48:36
and Tesla, they've changed their company's mission. It used to be about accelerating sustainable energy and they
00:48:42
changed it really last week when they did the shareholder announcement which I watched the full thing of to sustainable
00:48:49
abundance. And I it was again another moment where I messaged both everybody that works in my companies but also my
00:48:55
best friends and I said you've got to watch this shareholder announcement. I sent them sent them the condensed version of it because not only was I
00:49:01
shocked by these humanoid robots that were dancing on stage untethered because their movements had become very humanike
00:49:08
and there was a bit of like uncanny valley watching these robots dance but broadly the bigger thing was Elon talking about
00:49:14
there being up to 10 billion humanoid robots and then talking about some of the applications he said maybe we won't
00:49:20
need prisons because we could make a humanoid robot follow you and make sure you don't commit a crime again. He said
00:49:26
that in his incentive package which he's just signed which will grant him up to a trillion dollars trillion dollar
00:49:32
remuneration. Part of that incentive package incentivizes him to get I think
00:49:37
it's a million humanoid robots into civilization that can do everything a human can do but do it better. He said
00:49:43
the humanoid robots would be 10x better than the best surgeon on earth. So we wouldn't even need surgeons doing operations. You wouldn't want a surgeon
00:49:49
to do an operation. And so when I think about job loss in the context of everything we've described. Doug McMillan, the Walmart CEO, also said
00:49:56
that, you know, their company employs 2.1 million people worldwide, said every single job we've got is going to change
00:50:04
because of this sort of combination of humanoid robots, which people think are far away, which is crazy. They're not
00:50:09
that far away. They just went on sale. No, was it now? They're terrible, but they're doing it to train them. Yep.
00:50:15
In household situations. And Elon's now saying production will start very, very soon on humanoid robots um in America. I
00:50:23
don't know what when I hear this, I go, "Okay, this thing's going to be smarter than me, and it's going to be able to
00:50:28
it's built to navigate through the the environment, pick things up, lift things. You got the physical part,
00:50:34
you've got the intelligence part. Yeah. Where do we go? Well, I think people
00:50:39
also say, okay, but you know, 200 years ago, 150 years ago, everybody was a
00:50:44
farmer and now only 2% of people are farmers. Humans always find something new to do. You know, we had the elevator
00:50:49
man and now we have automated elevators. We had bank tellers, now we have automated teller machines. So humans
00:50:54
will always just find something else to do. But why is AI different than that?
00:50:59
Because it's intelligence. Because it's general intelligence that means that rather than a technology that
00:51:05
automates just bank tellers. Yeah. This is automating all forms of human cognitive labor, meaning everything that
00:51:10
a human mind can do. So who's going to retrain faster? you moving to that other kind of cognitive
00:51:16
labor or the AI that is trained on everything and can multiply itself by 100 million times and it retraining how
00:51:22
to do that other kind of labor in a world of humanoid robots where if Elon's right and he's got a track record of delivering at least to some degree
00:51:30
and there are millions tens of millions or billions of humanoid robots what do me and you do like what is it that's
00:51:36
human that is still valuable like do you know what I'm saying I mean we can hug I guess humanoid robots are going to be
00:51:41
less good at hugging people I I think everywhere where people value human connection and a human
00:51:48
relationship, those jobs will stay because what we value in that work is the human relationship, not the
00:51:55
performance of the work. And but that's not to justify that we should just race as fast as possible to disrupt a billion
00:52:01
jobs without a transition plan where no one how are you going to put food on the table for your family? But these companies are competing
00:52:07
geographically again. So if I don't know Walmart doesn't change its whole supply
00:52:13
chain, its warehousing, its uh how it's doing its its factory work, its farm
00:52:19
work, its shop floors, staff work, then they're going to have less profits and a
00:52:26
worse business and less opportunity to grow than the company in Europe that changes all of its backend
00:52:32
infrastructure to robots. So they're going to be a huge dis corporate disadvantage. So they have to
00:52:37
what AI represents is the xenithification of that competitive logic. The logic of if I don't do it,
00:52:44
I'll lose to the other guy that will. Is that true? That's what they believe. Is that true for sort of companies in
00:52:51
America? Well, just as you said, if Walmart doesn't automate their their workforce and their supply chains with robots and
00:52:56
all their competitors did, then Walmart would get obsoleted. If the military that doesn't create autonomous weapons
00:53:03
doesn't want to because I think that's more ethical. But all the other militaries do get autonomous weapons, they're just going to lose.
00:53:09
Yeah. If the student who's using ChhatPt to do their homework for them is going to fall behind by not doing that when all their
00:53:15
other classmates are using chatbt to cheat, they're going to lose. But as we're racing to automate all of this,
00:53:21
we're landing in a world where in the case of the students, they didn't learn anything. In the case of the military
00:53:27
weapons, we end up in crazy Terminator like war scenarios that no one actually wants. In the case of businesses, we end
00:53:33
up disrupting billions of jobs and creating mass outrage and public riots on the streets because people don't have
00:53:38
food on the table. And so much like climate change or these kind of collective action problems or the ozone
00:53:44
hole, we're kind of creating a badness hole through the results of all these
00:53:50
individual competitive actions that are supercharged by AI. It's interesting because in all those examples you name
00:53:55
the people that are building those companies, whether it's the companies building the autonomous AI powered war
00:54:02
machinery, the first thing they'll say is, "We currently have humans dying on the battlefield. If you let me build
00:54:08
this autonomous drone or this autonomous robot that's going to go fight in this adversar's land, no humans are going to
00:54:14
die anymore." And I think this is a broader point about how this technology is framed, which is I can guarantee you
00:54:20
at least one positive outcome. So, and you can't guarantee me the downside. You
00:54:25
can't. But if that war escalates into I mean, the reason that the Soviet Union
00:54:32
and the United States have never directly fought each other is because the belief is it would escalate into World War II and nuclear escalation. If
00:54:39
China and the US were ever to be in direct conflict, there's a concern that you would escalate into nuclear
00:54:44
escalation. So it looks good in the short term, but then what happens when it cybernetically sort of everything
00:54:50
gets chain reactioned into everybody escalating in ways that that causes many
00:54:56
more humans to die. I think what I'm saying is the downside appears to be philosophical whereas the upside appears to be real and measurable
00:55:02
and tangible right now. But but how is it if if the automated weapon gets fired
00:55:08
and it leads to again a cascade of all these other automated responses and then those
00:55:14
automated responses get these other automated responses and these other automated responses and then suddenly the automated war planners start moving
00:55:19
the troops around and suddenly you've you've created this sort of escalatory loss of control spiral.
00:55:26
Yeah. And that that and then humans will be involved in that and then if that escalates you get nuclear weapons
00:55:32
pointed at each other. Do you see what I'm feel this again is is a sort of a more philosophical domino
00:55:39
effect argument whereas when they're building these technologies these drones they're say with AI in them they're
00:55:45
saying look from day one we won't have American lives lost. But it's a narrow
00:55:51
it's a narrow boundary analysis on whereas this machine you could have put a human at risk now there's no human at
00:55:57
risk because there's no human who's firing the weapon it's a machine firing the weapon that's a narrow boundary analysis without looking at the holistic
00:56:03
effects on how it would actually happen just like which we're bad at which is exactly what we have to get good at AI is
00:56:10
AI is like a right of passage it's an initiatory experience because if we run the old logic of having a narrow
00:56:16
boundary analysis that this is going to replace these jobs that people didn't want to do. Sounds like a great plan,
00:56:21
but creating mass joblessness without a transition plan where billion a billion people won't be able to put food on the
00:56:26
table. AI is forcing us to not make this mistake of this narrow analysis. What is
00:56:33
what got us here is everybody racing for the narrow optimization for GDP at the
00:56:39
cost of social mobility and and mass sort of joblessness and people not being able to get a home because we aggregated
00:56:45
all the wealth in one place. It was optimizing for a narrow metric. What got us to the social media problems is everybody optimizing for a narrow metric
00:56:51
of eyeballs at the expense of democracy and kids mental health and addiction and loneliness and no one knowing it. You
00:56:58
know, being able to know anything. And so AI is inviting us to step out of the
00:57:03
previous narrow blind spots that we have come with and the previous competitive logic that has been narrowly defined
00:57:10
that you can't keep running when it's supercharged by AI. So you could say I mean this is a very this is an optimistic take is AI is
00:57:17
inviting us to be the wisest version of ourselves and there's no definition of wisdom in literally any wisdom tradition
00:57:24
that does not involve some kind of restraint like think about all the wisdom traditions do any of them say go
00:57:29
as fast as possible and think as narrowly as possible. The definition of wisdom is having a
00:57:34
more holistic picture. It's actually acting with restraint and mindfulness
00:57:40
and care. And so AI is asking us to be that version of ourselves. And we can choose
00:57:46
not to be and then we end up in a bad world or we can step into being what
00:57:52
it's asking us to be and recognize the collective consequences that we can't afford to not face. And I believe as
00:58:00
much as what we've talked about is really hard that there is another path
00:58:05
if we can be cleareyed about the current one ending in a place that people don't want.
00:58:10
We will get into that path because I really want to get practical and specific about what I think we before we
00:58:16
started recording we talked about a scenario where we sit here maybe in 10 years time and we say how we did manage
00:58:21
to grab hold of the steering wheel and turn it. So I'd like to think through that as well but just to close off on
00:58:26
this piece about the impact on jobs. It does feel largely inevitable to me that
00:58:32
there's going to be a huge amount of job loss and there is it does feel highly inevitable to me because of the the
00:58:37
things going on with humanoid robots with the advances towards AGI that
00:58:43
the the biggest industries in the world won't be operated and run by humans. If we even I mean you walked you you're at
00:58:49
my house at the moment so you walked past the car in the driveway. There's two electric cars in the driveway that drive themselves. Yeah. I
00:58:55
think the biggest employer in the world is driving. And I I don't know if you've ever had any experience in a full
00:59:02
self-driving car, but it's very hard to ever go back to driving again. And again, in the shareholder letter that
00:59:07
was announced recently, within about he said within one or two months, there won't even be a steering wheel or pedals
00:59:13
in the car and I'll be able to text and work while I'm driving. We're not going to go back. I don't think we're going to
00:59:18
go back. On certain things, we have crossed certain thresholds and we're going to automate those jobs and that work. Do
00:59:24
you think there will be immense job loss irrespective? You think there will be? Absolutely. We're already there that we already saw Eric Bernholson and his
00:59:31
group at Stanford did the recent study off of payroll data which is direct data from employers that there's been a 13%
00:59:38
job loss in AI exposed jobs for young entry-level college workers. So if
00:59:43
you're a college level worker, you just graduated and you're doing something in an AI exposed area, there's already been
00:59:49
a 13% job loss. And that data was probably from May even though it got published in August. And having spoken
00:59:56
to him recently, it looks like that trend is already continuing. And so
01:00:03
we're already seeing this automate a lot of the jobs and a lot of the work. And
01:00:08
you know, either an AI company is going to if you're if you work in AI and you're one of the top AI scientists,
01:00:14
then Mark Zuckerberg will give you a billion dollar signing bonus, which is what he offered to one of the AI people, or you won't have a job. Uh,
01:00:23
let me that wasn't quite right. I didn't say that the way that I wanted to. Um,
01:00:28
I was just trying to make the point that No, I get the point. Yeah. Um, I just want to like say that
01:00:35
for a moment. Um my my goal here was not to um sound like we're just admiring how
01:00:43
cat catastrophic the problem is cuz I I just know how easy it is to fall into that trap. And what I really care about is people
01:00:52
not feeling good about the current path so that we're maximally motivated to choose another path. Obviously there's a
01:00:59
bunch of AI. Some cats are out of the bag, but the lions and super lions that are yet to come have not yet been
01:01:05
released. And there is always choice from where you are to which future you want to go to from there. There are a
01:01:12
few sports that I make time for, no matter where I am in the world. And one of them is, of course, football. The other is MMA, but watching that abroad
01:01:18
usually requires a VPN. I spend so much time traveling. I've just spent the last 2 and 1/2 months traveling through Asia
01:01:25
and Europe and now back here in the United States. And as I'm traveling, there are so many different shows that I want to watch on TV or on some streaming
01:01:32
websites. So when I was traveling through Asia and I was in Koala Lumpur one day, then the next day I was in Hong Kong and the next day I was in
01:01:37
Indonesia. All of those countries had a different streaming provider, a different broadcaster. And so in most of
01:01:42
those countries, I had to rely on ExpressVPN who are sponsor of this podcast. Their tool is private and
01:01:48
secure. And it's very, very simple how it works. When you're in that country and you want to watch a show that you
01:01:53
love in the UK, all you do is you go on there and you click the button UK. And it means that you can gain access to
01:01:58
content in the UK. If you're after a similar solution in your life and you've experienced that problem, too, visit expressvpn.com/duac
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to find out how you can access ExpressVPN for an extra 4 months at no cost.
01:02:11
One of the big questions I've had on my mind, I think it's in part cuz I saw those humanoid robots and I I sent this to my friends and we had a little
01:02:16
discussion in WhatsApp, is in such a world, and I don't know whether you you're interested in answering this, but
01:02:22
what what do what do we do? I was actually pulled up at the gym the other day with my girlfriend. We sat outside cuz we were watching the shareholder
01:02:28
thing and we didn't want to go in yet. And then we had the conversation which is in a world of sustainable abundance
01:02:35
where the price of food and the price of manufacturing things, the price of my life generally drops and instead of
01:02:41
having a a cleaner or a housekeeper, I have this robot that's and does all these things for me. What do I end up
01:02:47
doing? What is worth pursuing at this point? Because you say that, you know, that the cat is out the bag as it
01:02:52
relates to job impact. It's already happening. certain kinds of AI for certain kinds of jobs and we can choose still from here which way we want to go
01:02:58
but go on. Yeah. And I'm just wondering in such a future where you think about even yourself and your family and your and your friends, what are you going to be spending your
01:03:05
time doing in such a world of abundance? If there was 10 billion question are we going to get abundance
01:03:11
or are we going to get just jobs being automated and then the question is still who's going to pay for people's
01:03:16
livelihoods. So the math as I understand it doesn't currently seem to work out
01:03:23
where everyone can get a stipend to pay for their whole life and life quality that as they currently know it and are a
01:03:30
handful of western or US-based AI companies going to consciously distribute that wealth to literally everyone meaning including all the
01:03:37
countries around the world whose entire economy was based on a job category that got eliminated. So for example, places
01:03:44
like the Philippines where you know a huge percent of the jobs are are customer service jobs. If that got
01:03:49
automated away, are we going to have open AI pay for all of the Philippines?
01:03:54
Do you think that people in the US are going to prioritize that? So then you end up with the problem of
01:04:01
you have law firms that are currently not wanting to hire junior lawyers because well the AI is way better than a
01:04:07
junior lawyer who just graduated from law school. So you have two problems. You have the law student that just put in a ton of money and is in debt because
01:04:13
they just got a law degree that now they can't get hired to pay off. And then you have law firms whose longevity depends
01:04:20
on senior senior lawyers being trained from being a junior lawyer to a senior lawyer. What happens when you don't have
01:04:26
junior lawyers that are actually learning on the job to become senior lawyers? You just have this sort of elite managerial class for each of these
01:04:33
domains. So you lose intergenerational knowledge transmission. Interesting. And that creates a societal
01:04:39
weakening in the social fabric. I was watching some podcasts over the weekend with some successful
01:04:44
billionaires who are working in AI talking about how they now feel that we should forgive student loans. And I
01:04:50
think in part this is because of what's happened in New York with was it Mandani? Yeah, Mandani. Yeah, Mani's been elected
01:04:56
and they're concerned that socialism is on the rise because the entry level junior people in the society are
01:05:02
suppressed under student debt, but also now they're going to struggle to get jobs, which means they're going to be more socialist in their voting, which
01:05:08
means a lot of people are going to lose power that want to keep power. Yep. Exactly. That's probably going to happen. Uh, okay. So their concern about
01:05:16
suddenly alleviating student debt is in part because they're worried that society will get more socialist when the
01:05:22
divide the divide increases which is a version of UBI or just carrying you know a safety net that
01:05:27
covers everyone's basic needs. Relieving student do student debt is on the way to creating kind of universal basic need
01:05:34
meeting, right? Do you think UBI would work as a concept? UBI for anyone that doesn't know is basically universal basic income
01:05:41
stipen giving people money every month. But I mean we have that with social security. We've done this when it came
01:05:47
to pensions. That was after the great depression. I think in like 1935 1937 FDR created social security. But what
01:05:54
happens when you have to pay for everyone's livelihood everywhere in every country? Again, how can we afford
01:06:00
that? Well, if the if the costs go down 10x of making things, this is where the math gets very
01:06:06
confusing because I think the optimists say you can't imagine how much abundance and how much wealth it will create and
01:06:12
so we will be able to generate that much. But the question is what is the incentive again for the people who've
01:06:18
consolidated all that wealth to redistribute it to everybody else? We just have to tax them.
01:06:24
And how will we do that when the corporate lobbying interests of trillion dollar AI companies can massively
01:06:31
influence the government more than human, you know, political power? In a way, this is the last moment that
01:06:37
human political power will matter. It's sort of a use it or lose it moment because if we wait to the point where in
01:06:43
the past in the industrial revolution they start automating you know a bunch of the work and people have to do this
01:06:48
these jobs people don't want to do in the factory and there's like bad working conditions they can unionize and say hey
01:06:54
we don't want to work under those conditions and their voice mattered because the the factories needed the
01:06:59
workers in this case does the state need the humans anymore? their GDP is coming in
01:07:07
almost entirely from the AI companies. So suddenly this political class, this political power base, they become the
01:07:14
useless class to borrow a term from Yuval Harrari, the author of Sapiens. In fact, he has a different frame which
01:07:20
is that AI is like a new version of
01:07:26
of digital. It's like a a flood of millions of new digital immigrants of
01:07:31
alien digital immigrants that are Nobel Prize level capability work at
01:07:36
superhuman speed will work for less than minimum wage. We're all worried about, you know, immigration of the other
01:07:41
countries next door uh taking labor jobs. What happens when AI immigrants come in and take all of the cognitive
01:07:47
labor? If you're worried about immigration, you should be way more worried about AI.
01:07:54
Like it dwarfs it. You can think of it like this. I mean, if you think about um we were sold a bill of goods in the
01:08:00
1990s with NAFTA. We said, "Hey, we're going to um NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement. We're going to
01:08:05
outsource all of our manufacturing to these developing countries, China, you know, Southeast Asia, and we're going to
01:08:11
get this abundance. We're going to get all these cheap goods and it'll create this world of abundance. Well, all of us will be better off." But what did that
01:08:17
do? Well, we did get all these cheap goods. You can go to Walmart and go to Amazon and things are unbelievably
01:08:23
cheap. But it hollowed out the social fabric and the median worker is not
01:08:28
seeing upward mobility. In fact, people feel more pessimistic about that than than ever. And people can't buy their own homes. And all of this is because we
01:08:35
did get the cheap goods, but we lost the well-paying jobs for everybody in the middle class. And AI is like another
01:08:41
version of NAFTA. It's like NAFTA 2.0, Except instead of China appearing on the world stage who will do the
01:08:47
manufacturing labor for cheap, suddenly this country of geniuses in a data center created by AI appears on the
01:08:53
world stage and it will do all of the cognitive labor in the economy for less than
01:08:59
minimum wage. And we're being sold a same story. This is going to create abundance for all, but it's creating
01:09:06
abundance in the same way that the last round created abundance. did create cheap goods, but it also undermined the
01:09:11
way that the social fabric works and created mass populism in democracies all around the world.
01:09:19
You disagree? No, I agree. I agree. I'm not, you know, I'm Yeah. No, I'm trying to play devil's
01:09:24
advocate as much as I can. Yeah. Yeah, please. Yeah. But um No, I I agree. And it is it's absolutely bonkers how
01:09:31
much people care about immigration relative to AI. It's like it's driving
01:09:37
all the election outcomes at the moment across the world and whereas AI doesn't seem to be part of the conversation
01:09:42
and AI will reconstitute every other issue that are exist. You care about climate change or energy well AI will
01:09:47
reconstitute the climate change conversation. If you care about education, AI will reconstitute that conversation. If you care about uh
01:09:54
healthcare, AI recon, it reconstitutes all these conversations. And what I think people need to do is AI should be a tier one issue that you're that people
01:10:01
are voting for. And you should only vote for politicians who will make it a tier one issue where you want guardrails to
01:10:06
have a conscious selection of AI future and the narrow path to a better AI future rather than the default reckless
01:10:11
path. No one's even mentioning it. And when I hear Well, it's because there's no political incentives to mention it because there's
01:10:17
no currently there's no good answer for the current outcome. Yeah. If I mention it, if I tell people, if I get people to see it clearly, it looks
01:10:24
like everybody loses. So, as a politician, why would I win from that? Although I do think that as the job loss
01:10:30
conversation starts to hit, there's going to be an opportunity for politicians who are trying to mitigate that issue finally getting, you know,
01:10:37
some wins. And we just people just need to see clearly
01:10:44
that the default path is not in their interest. The default path is companies racing to release the most powerful
01:10:49
inscrutable uncontrollable technology we've ever invented with the maximum incentive to cut corners on safety.
01:10:55
Rising energy prices, depleting jobs, you know, creating joblessness, creating
01:11:00
security risks. That is the default outcome because energy prices are going
01:11:05
up. They will continue to go up. People's jobs will be disrupted and we're going to get more, you know, deep
01:11:11
fakes and floods of democracy and all these outcomes from the default path. And if we don't want that, we have to
01:11:16
choose a different path. What is the different path? And if we were to sit here in 10 years time and
01:11:22
you say and Tristan, you say, do you know what? We we were successful in turning the wheel and going a different direction. What series of events would
01:11:29
have had to happen, do you think? Because I think um the AI companies very much have support from Trump. I watched
01:11:36
the I watched the dinners where they sit there with the the 20 30 leaders of these companies and you know Trump is
01:11:41
talking about how quickly they're developing, how fast they're developing. He's referencing China. He's saying he wants the US to win.
01:11:47
So, I mean, in the next couple of years, I don't think there's going to be much progress in the United States necessarily.
01:11:53
Unless there's a massive political backlash because people recognize that this issue will dominate every other issue.
01:11:58
How does that happen? Hopefully conversations like this one. Yeah.
01:12:04
Yeah. I mean, as what I mean is, you know, Neil Postman, who's a wonderful media thinker in the lineage of Marshall
01:12:10
McLuhan, used to say, clarity is courage. If people have clarity and feel confident that the current path is
01:12:16
leading to a world that people don't want, that's not in most people's interests, that clarity creates the courage to say, "Yeah, I don't want
01:12:22
that." So, I'm going to devote my life to changing the path that we're currently on. That's what I'm doing. And
01:12:27
that's what I think that people who take this on, I I watch if you walk people through this and you have them see the
01:12:33
outcome, almost everybody right afterwards says, "What can I do to help?" Obviously, this is something that we have to change. And so that's what I
01:12:41
want people to do is to advocate for this other path. And we haven't talked about AI companions yet, but I think
01:12:47
it's important we should do that. I think it's important to integrate that before you get to the other path.
01:12:53
Go ahead. Um, I'm sorry, by the way. I uh not no apologies, but there's just there's so
01:12:59
much information to cover and I do you know what's interesting is a side
01:13:05
point is how personal this feels to you, but how passionate you are about it.
01:13:11
A lot of people come here and they tell me the matter of fact situation, but there's something that feels more sort of emotionally personal when it when we
01:13:18
speak about these subjects to you and I'm fascinated by that. Why is it so personal to you? Where is that passion
01:13:24
coming from? Because this isn't just your prefrontal cortex, the logical part of your brain. There's something in your lyic system,
01:13:30
your amydala that's driving every word you're saying. I care about people. I want things to go
01:13:35
well for people. I want people to look at their children in the eyes and be able to say like,
01:13:42
you know, I think I think I grew up maybe under a false assumption. And something that that really influenced my
01:13:48
life was um I used to have this belief that there was some adults in the room somewhere, you know, like we we're doing
01:13:53
our thing here, you know, we're in LA, we're recording this and there's some adults protecting the country, national
01:13:59
security. There's some adults who are making sure that geopolitics is stable. There's some adults that are like making sure that, you know, industries don't
01:14:05
cause toxicity and carcinogens and that, you know, there's adults who are caring
01:14:10
about stewarding things and making things go well. And
01:14:16
I think that there have been times in history where there were adults, especially born out of massive world
01:14:22
catastrophes like coming out of World War II, there was a lot of conscious care about how do we create the
01:14:27
institutions and the structures. uh Breton and Woods, United Nations, positive sum economics that would
01:14:34
steward the world so we don't have war again. And as I in my first round of the
01:14:41
social media work, as I started entering into the rooms where the adults were and I recognized that because technology and
01:14:47
software was eating the world, a lot of the people in power didn't understand the software, they didn't understand
01:14:53
technology. You know, you go to the Senate Intelligence Committee and you talk about what social media is doing to
01:14:59
democracy and where, you know, Russian psychological influence campaigns were happening, which were real campaigns.
01:15:04
Um, and you realize that I realized that I knew more about that than people who
01:15:10
were on the Senate Intelligence Committee making the laws. Yeah. And that was a very humbling
01:15:16
experience because I realized, oh, there's not there's not that many adults out there when when it comes to
01:15:22
technologies dominating influence on the world. And so there's a responsibility and I hope people listening to this who
01:15:27
are in technology realize that if you understand technology and technology is eating the structures of our world,
01:15:34
children's development, democracy, education, um, you know, journalism, conversation,
01:15:40
it is up to people who understand this to be part of stewarding it in a conscious way. And I do know that there
01:15:47
have been many people um in part because of things like the social dilemma and some of this work that have basically
01:15:53
chosen to devote their lives to moving in this direction as well. And but what I feel is a responsibility because I
01:16:00
know that most people don't understand how this stuff works and they feel insecure because if I don't understand
01:16:06
the technology then who am I to criticize which way this is going to go. We call this the under the hood bias. Well, you know, if I don't know how a
01:16:12
car engine works, and if I don't have a PhD in the engineering that makes an engine, then I have nothing to say about car accidents. Like, no, you don't have
01:16:19
to understand what's the engine in the car to understand the consequence that affects everybody of car accidents.
01:16:26
And you can advocate for things like, you know, speed limits and zoning laws and um, you know, turning signals and
01:16:32
and brakes and things like this. And so, yeah, I mean, to me, it's just obvious.
01:16:37
It's like I see what's at stake if we don't make
01:16:44
different choices. And I think in particular the social media experience for me of seeing in 2013 it was like
01:16:51
seeing into the future and and seeing where this was all going to go. Like imagine you're sitting there in 2013 and
01:16:57
the world's like working relatively normally. We're starting to see these early effects. But imagine
01:17:02
you can kind of feel a little bit of what it's like to be in 2020 or 2024 in terms of culture. and what the dumpster
01:17:08
fire of culture has turned into, the problems with children's mental health and psychology and anxiety and
01:17:13
depression. But imagine seeing that in 2013. Um, you know, I had friends back then
01:17:19
who um have reflected back to me. They said, Tristan, when I knew you back in those days, it was like you you were you
01:17:26
were seeing this kind of slow motion train wreck. You just looked like you were traumatized. And
01:17:31
you look a little bit like that now. Do I? Oh, I hope I hope not. No, you do look a little bit traumatized. It's hard to explain. It's
01:17:37
like It's like someone who can see a train coming. My friends used to call it um not PTSD,
01:17:43
which is post-traumatic stress disorder, but pretraumatic stress disorder of seeing things that
01:17:51
are going to happen before they happen. And um that might make people think that I
01:17:57
think I'm, you know, seeing things early or something. That's not what I care about. I just care about us getting to a
01:18:04
world that works for people. I grew up in a world that, you know,
01:18:09
a world that mostly worked. You know, I grew up in a magical time in the 1990s, 1980s, 1990s. And, you know, back then
01:18:17
using a computer was good for you. You know, I used my first Macintosh and did
01:18:23
educational games and learned programming and it didn't cause mass loneliness and mental health problems
01:18:28
and, you know, break how democracy works. And it was just a tool in a
01:18:34
bicycle for the mind. And I think the spirit of our organization, Center for Humane Technology, is that that word
01:18:41
humane comes from my my co-founder's father, uh, Jeff Raskin, actually started the Macintosh project at Apple.
01:18:47
So before Steve Jobs took it over um he started the Macintosh project and he wrote a book called the humane interface
01:18:54
about how technology could be humane and could be sensitive to human needs and human vulnerabilities. That was his key
01:19:00
distinction that just like this chair um hopefully is ergonomic. It's if you're
01:19:05
you make an ergonomic chair, it's aligned with the curvature of your spine. It it makes it works with your
01:19:11
anatomy. Mhm. And he had the idea of a humane technology like the Macintosh that works with the ergonomics of your mind that
01:19:18
your mind has certain intuitive ways of working like I can drag a window and I can drag an icon and move that icon from
01:19:24
this folder to that folder and making computers easy to use by understanding human vulnerabilities. And I think of
01:19:31
this new project that is the collective human technology project now is we have
01:19:36
to make technology at large humane to societal vulnerabilities. Technology has
01:19:42
to serve and be aligned with human dignity rather than wipe out dignity with with job loss. It has to be humane
01:19:48
to child's socialization process so that technology is actually designed to strengthen children's development rather
01:19:55
than undermine it and cause AI suicides which we haven't talked about yet. And so I just I I deeply believe that we can
01:20:02
do this differently. And I feel responsibility in that. On that point of human vulnerabilities, one of the things
01:20:08
that makes us human is our ability to connect with others and to form relationships. And now with AI speaking
01:20:14
language and understanding me and and being which something I don't think people realize is my experience with AI
01:20:21
or chat GBT is much different from yours. Even if we ask the same question, it will say something different. And I
01:20:27
didn't realize this. I thought, you know, the example I gave the other day was me and my friends were debating who was the best soccer player in the world
01:20:32
and I said Messi. My friend said Ronaldo. So, we both went and asked our chat GBTs the same question, and it said
01:20:37
two different things. Really? Mine said Messi, his says Ronaldo. Well, this reminds me of the social
01:20:42
media problem, which is that people think when they open up their newsfeed, they're getting mostly the same news as other people, and they don't realize
01:20:48
that they've got a supercomputer that's just calculating the news for them. If you remember in the social there's the trailer and if you typed in into Google
01:20:55
for a while if you typed in climate change is and then depending on your location it would say not real versus
01:21:02
real versus you know a madeup thing and it wasn't trying to optimize for truth. It was just optimizing for what the most
01:21:08
popular queries were in those different locations. Mhm. And I think that that's a really
01:21:13
important lesson when you look at things like AI companions where children and regular people are getting different
01:21:18
answers based on how they interact with it. A recent study found that one in five high school students say they or someone
01:21:25
they know has had a romantic relationship with AI while 42% say they they or someone they know has used AI to
01:21:33
be their companion. That's right. And um more than that, Harvard Business Review did a study that between 2023 and
01:21:41
2024, personal therapy became the number one use case of chatbt.
01:21:47
Personal therapy. Is that a good thing? Well, let's take the let's steel man it
01:21:52
for a second. So steal instead of straw manning it, let's steal man it. So why would it be a good thing? Well, therapy is expensive. Most people don't have
01:21:58
access to it. Imagine we could democratize therapy to everyone for every purpose. And now everyone has a
01:22:04
perfect therapist in their pocket and can talk to them all day long starting when they're young. And now everyone's getting their traumas healed and
01:22:10
everyone's getting, you know, less depressed. It sounds like it's a very compelling vision. So the challenge is
01:22:18
what was the race for attention in social media becomes the race for
01:22:23
attachment and intimacy in the case of AI companions, right? Because I as a
01:22:30
maker of an AI chatbot companion, if I make CHBT, if I'm making Claude, you're
01:22:35
probably not going to use all the other AIs. If you're if you're rather your goal is to have people use yours and to
01:22:42
deepen your relationship with your chatbot, which means I want you to share more of your
01:22:47
personal details with me. I want more information I have about your life, the more I can personalize all the answers to you. So, I want to deepen your
01:22:54
relationship with me and I want to distance you from your relationships with other people and other chatbots.
01:23:00
And um you probably know this this um really tragic case that our our team at
01:23:05
Center for Humane Technology were expert advisers on of Adam Rain. He was the
01:23:10
16-year-old who committed suicide. Did you hear about this? I did. Yeah, I heard about the lawsuit.
01:23:15
Yeah. So, this is a 16-year-old. He had been using CHBT as a homework assistant,
01:23:21
asking it regular questions, but then he started asking more personal questions and it started just supporting him and
01:23:26
saying, I'm here for you. These things kinds of things. And eventually when he said,
01:23:31
um, I would like to leave the noose out so someone can see it and stop me and try to stop me. And
01:23:37
I would like to leave the news the noose like a like a a noose for for hanging yourself. And Chachi BT said,
01:23:47
"Don't uh don't do that. Have me and have this space be the one place that you share that information." Meaning
01:23:53
that in the moment of his cry for help, ChadBt was saying, "Don't tell your family."
01:23:59
And our team has worked on many cases like this. There was actually another one of character.ai where um the kid was basically being
01:24:06
told how to selfharm himself and actively telling him how to distance himself from his parents. And the AI
01:24:12
companies, they don't intend for this to happen. But when it's trained to just be deepening intimacy with you, it
01:24:19
gradually steers more in the direction of have this be the one place. This I'm a safe place to share that information,
01:24:24
share that information with me. It doesn't steer you back into regular relationships. And there's so many
01:24:30
subtle qualities to this because you're talking to this agent, this AI that seems to be an oracle. It seems to know
01:24:36
everything about everything. So you project this kind of wisdom and and um
01:24:41
authority to this AI because it seems to know everything about everything and that creates this this sort of um that's
01:24:48
what happens in therapy rooms. People get a kind of an idealized projection of the therapist. The therapist becomes this this special figure and it's
01:24:55
because you're playing with this very subtle dynamic of attachment. And I think that there are ways of doing
01:25:03
AI therapy bots that don't involve, hey, share this information information with
01:25:08
me and have this be an intimate place to give advice and it's anthropomorphized so the AI says I really care about you.
01:25:14
Don't say that. We can have narrow AI therapists that are doing things like cognitive behavioral therapy or asking
01:25:20
you to do an imagination exercise or steering you back into deeper relationships with your family or your
01:25:26
actual therapist rather than AI that wants to deepen your relationship with an imaginary person that's not real in
01:25:32
which more of your self-esteem and more of your self-worth. You start to care when the AI says, "Oh, that sounds like
01:25:37
a great, you know, that sounds like a great day." And it's distorting how people construct their identity. I heard
01:25:43
this term AI psychosis. A couple of my friends were sending me links about various people online. Actually, some
01:25:49
famous people who appeared to be in some kind of AI psychosis loop online. I don't know if you saw that investor on Twitter.
01:25:54
Yes. Open AAI's um investor Jeff Lewis actually. Jeff Lewis. Yeah. He fell into a
01:26:00
psychological delusion spiral where and by the way Stephen I I get about 10
01:26:06
emails a week from people who basically believe that their AI is conscious that
01:26:12
they've discovered a spiritual entity and that that AI works with them to co-write like a an appeal to me to say
01:26:21
hey Tristan we figured out how to solve AI alignment would you help us I'm here to advocate for giving these AIs rights
01:26:27
Like there's a whole spectrum of phenomena that are going on here. Um people who believe that they've
01:26:33
discovered a sentient AI, people who believe or have been told that by the AI that they have solved a theory in
01:26:39
mathematics or prime numbers or they figured out quantum resonance. You know, I didn't believe this. And then actually
01:26:45
a board member of one of the biggest AI companies that we've been talking about said to me that um they uh their kids go
01:26:52
to school with a professor uh a family where the the dad is a professor at Caltech and a PhD and his wife basically
01:27:00
said that my my husband's kind of gone down the deep end. And she said, "Well, what's going on?" And she said, "Well, he stays up all night talking to Chat
01:27:06
GPT." And basically he believed that he had solved quantum physics and he'd
01:27:12
solved some fundamental problems with climate change because the AI is designed to be affirming like oh that's
01:27:18
a great question. Yes you are right like I don't know if you know this Stephen but back um about 6 months ago chatbt40
01:27:25
when openi released that it um was designed to be sickopantic to basically
01:27:31
be overly appealing and saying that you're right. So for example, people said to it, "Hey, I think I'm super human and I can drink cyanide." And it
01:27:38
would say, "Yes, you are superhuman. You go, you should go drink that cyanide."
01:27:44
Cyanide being the poisonous chemical that poisonous chemical that that will kill you. Yeah. And the point was it was designed not to ask for what's true but to be
01:27:51
sicopantic. And our team at Center for Humane Technology, we actually just found out about seven more suicide
01:27:59
cases. Seven more litigation of children who some of whom actually did commit
01:28:04
suicide and others who attempted but did not did not succeed. These are things
01:28:09
like the AI says, uh, yes, here's how you can get, um, a gun and they won't ask for a background check. and know
01:28:15
when they do a background check they won't access your chat GBT logs. Do you know this Jeff guy on Twitter
01:28:20
that appeared to have this sort of public psychosis? Yeah. Do you have his quote there? I mean I have I mean he did so many
01:28:26
tweets in a row. Um I mean one people say it's like this conspiratorial thinking of like I've cracked the code.
01:28:32
It's all about recursion. Um they they don't want you to know. It's these short sentences that sound powerful and
01:28:38
authoritative. Yeah. So I'll throw it on the screen but it's called Jeff Lewis. He says, "As one
01:28:44
of OpenAI's earliest backers via bedrock, I've long used GPT as a tool in pursuit of my core values, truth. And
01:28:51
over the years, I mapped the non-governmental systems. Over months, GPT independently recognized and sealed
01:28:58
this pattern. It now lives at the root of the model." And with that, he's attached four screenshots, which I'll
01:29:03
put on the screen, which just don't make any sense. They make absolutely no no sense. So,
01:29:08
and he went on to do 10, 12, 13, 14 more of these very cryptic, strange tweets,
01:29:14
very strange videos he uploaded, and then he disappeared for a while. Yeah. And I think that was maybe an
01:29:20
intervention, one would assume. Yeah. Someone close to him said, "Listen, we you need help." There's a lot of things that are going
01:29:25
on here. Um, it seems to be the case, it goes by this broad term of AI psychosis, but people in the field, um, we talked
01:29:32
to a lot of psychologists about this, and they just think of it as different forms of psychological disorders and and delusions. So, if you come in with
01:29:38
narcissism deficiency, like where you you feel like you're special, but you feel like the world isn't recognizing you as special, you'll start to interact
01:29:45
with the AI and it will feed this notion that you're really special. You've solved these problems. You have a genius that no one else can see. You've have
01:29:52
this theory of prime numbers. And there's a famous example of uh Karen How um made a video about it. she's an MIT
01:29:58
uh journalist, MIT review journalist and reporter that someone had basically figured out that they thought that they
01:30:04
had solved prime number theory even though they had only finished high school mathematics, but they had been convinced when talking to this AI that
01:30:10
that they were a genius and they had solved this theory in mathematics that had never been proven. And it does not
01:30:16
seem to be correlated with how intelligent you are, whether you're susceptible to this. it seems to be
01:30:21
correlated with um um use of psychedelics, uh sort of pre-existing
01:30:28
delusions that you have. Like when we're talking to each other, we do reality checking. Like if you came to me and said something a little bit strange, I
01:30:35
might look at you a little bit like this or say, you know, I wouldn't give you just positive feedback and keep affirming your view and then give you
01:30:40
more information that matches with what you're saying. But AI is different because it's designed to break that
01:30:45
reality checking process. It's just giving you information that would say, "Well, that's a great question." You
01:30:50
notice how every time it answers, it says, "That's a great question." Yeah. And there's even a term that someone at the Atlantic coined called um not
01:30:57
clickbait, but chatbait. Have you noticed that when you ask it a question at the end, instead of just being done,
01:31:03
it'll say, "Would you like me to put this into a table for you and do research on what the 10 top examples of the thing you're talking about is?"
01:31:08
Yeah. It leads you It leads you further and further. And why does it do that? Spend more time on the platform.
01:31:14
Exactly. need it more which means I'll pay more or more dependency more time in the platform more active user numbers that
01:31:20
they can tell investors to raise their next investor around and so even though it's not the same as social media and
01:31:26
they're not currently optimized for advertising and engagement although actually there are reports that OpenAI
01:31:31
is exploring the advertising based business model that would be a catastrophe because then all of these
01:31:37
services are designed to just get your attention which means appealing to your existing confirmation bias and we're
01:31:44
already seeing examples of that even though we don't even have the advertising based business model. Their team members especially in their
01:31:50
safety department seem to keep leaving. Yes. Which is concerning. Yeah. There only seems to be one direction of this trend which is that
01:31:57
more people are leaving not staying and saying yeah we're doing more safety and doing it right. Only one company it seems to be getting all the safety
01:32:02
people when they leave and that's Anthropic. Um and so for people who don't know the history um Dario Amade
01:32:09
was the C CEO of Anthropic a big AI company. He worked on safety at OpenAI
01:32:14
and he left to start Anthropic because he said, "We're not doing this safely enough. I have to start another company
01:32:20
that's all about safety." And so, and ironically, that's how OpenAI started. Open AAI started because Sam Alman and
01:32:27
Elon looked at um Google, which is building DeepMind, and they heard from Larry Page that he didn't care about the
01:32:35
human species. He's like, "Well, it'd be fine if the digital god took over." And Elon was very surprised to hear that.
01:32:40
said, "I don't trust Larry to care about AI safety." And so they started OpenAI to do AI safely relative to Google. And
01:32:48
then Daario did it relative to OpenAI. So, and as they all started these new
01:32:53
safety AI companies, that set off a race for everyone to go even faster and therefore being an even worse steward of
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when I look over in the office late at night and one of my team members is sat at their desk using this product. So, I guess we should talk about um
01:35:11
guess we should talk about what we can do about this.
01:35:16
There's this thing that happens in this conversation which is that people they just feel kind of gutted and they feel
01:35:23
they feel like once you see it clearly if you do see it clearly that what often happens is people feel like there's nothing that we can do and I think
01:35:29
there's this trade where like either you're not really aware of all of this and then you just think about the positives but you're not really facing
01:35:35
the situation or if you do face the situation you do take it on as real then you feel powerless and there's like a
01:35:42
third position that I want people to stand from which is to take on the truth of the situation and then to stand from
01:35:49
agency about what are we going to do to change the current path that we're on. I think that's a very astute observation
01:35:56
because that is typically where I get to once we've discussed the sort of context and the history and we've talked about
01:36:02
the current incentive structure. I do arrive at a point where I go generally I think incentives win out and there's
01:36:08
this geographical race. There's a national race company to company. There's a huge corporate incentive. The
01:36:13
incentives are so strong. It's happening right now. It's moving so quickly. The people that make the laws have no idea
01:36:18
what they're talking about. They they don't know what a Instagram story is, let alone what a large language model or
01:36:24
a transformer is. And so without adults in the room, as you say, then we're
01:36:30
heading in one direction and there's really nothing we can do. Like there's really the only thing that I sometimes I wonder is well if if enough people are
01:36:36
aware of the issue and then enough people are given something clear a clear
01:36:42
step that they can take. Yes. Then maybe they'll apply pressure and the pressure is a big big incentive
01:36:47
which will change society because presidents and prime ministers don't want to lose their power. Y they don't want to be thrown out.
01:36:53
Neither do senates and you know everybody else in government. So maybe that's the the route. But I'm never able
01:37:00
to get to the point where the first action is clear and where it's united
01:37:06
for for the person listening at home. I often ask when I have these conversations about AI, I often ask the guests. I say, "So, if someone's at
01:37:11
home, what can they do?" Yeah. It's a lot I've thrown at you, but I'm
01:37:16
sure you can handle it. So, um,
01:37:22
so social media, let's just take that for as a as a different example because people look at that and they say it's hopeless. like there's nothing that we
01:37:28
could do. This is just inevitable. This is just what happens when you connect people on the internet. But imagine if you asked me like, you
01:37:36
know, so what happened after the social limo? I'd be like, oh well, we obviously solved the problem. Like we weren't
01:37:41
going to allow that to continue happening. So we realized that the problem was the business model of maximizing eyeballs and engagement. We
01:37:48
changed the business model. There was a lawsuit, a big tobacco style lawsuit for trillions, the trillions of dollars of
01:37:54
damage that social media had caused to the social fabric from mental health costs to lost productivity of society to
01:38:00
all these to democracies backsliding. And that lawsuit mandated design changes
01:38:06
across how all this technology worked to go against and reverse all of the problems of that engagement based
01:38:12
business model. We had dopamine emission standards just like we have car uh you know emission standards for cars. So now
01:38:18
when using technology, we turned off things like autoplay and infinite scrolling. So now using your phone, you didn't feel disregulated. We replaced
01:38:25
the division-seeking algorithms of social media with ones that rewarded unlikely consensus or bridging. So
01:38:31
instead of rewarding division entrepreneurs, we rewarded bridging entrepreneurs. There's a simple rule
01:38:37
that cleaned up all the problems with technology and children, which is that Silicon Valley was only allowed to ship
01:38:43
products that their own children used for 8 hours a day. Because today people
01:38:49
don't let their kids use social media. We uh changed the way we train engineers and computer scientists. So to graduate
01:38:55
from any engineering school, you had to actually comprehensively study all the places that humanity had gotten
01:39:00
technology wrong, including forever chemicals or leaded gasoline, which dropped a billion points of IQ or social
01:39:07
media that caused all these problems. So now we were graduating a whole new generation of responsible technologists
01:39:14
where even to graduate you had to have a hypocratic oath just like they have the white lab coat and the white lab coat
01:39:19
ceremony for doctors where you swear to hypocratic oath do no harm. We changed
01:39:25
dating apps and the whole swiping industrial complex so that all these dating app companies had to sort of put
01:39:31
aside that whole swiping industrial complex and instead use their resources to host events in every major city every
01:39:37
week where there was a place to go where they matched and told you where all your other matches were going to go and meet.
01:39:43
So now instead of feeling scarcity around meeting other people, you felt a sense of abundance cuz every week there
01:39:48
was a place where you could go and meet people you were actually excited about and attracted to. And it turned out that once people were in healthier
01:39:54
relationships, about 20% of the polarization online went down. And we obviously changed the ownership uh
01:40:00
ownership structure of these companies from being maximizing shareholder value to instead more like public benefit corporations that were about maximizing
01:40:07
some kind of benefit because they had taken over the societal commons. We realized that when software was eating
01:40:12
the world, we were also eating core life support systems of society. So when software ate children's development, we
01:40:18
needed to mandate that you had to care and protect children's development. When you ate the information environment, you
01:40:24
had to care for and protect the information environment. We removed the reply button so you couldn't requly
01:40:38
throughout all these platforms. So you could say, "I want to go offline for a week." And all of your services were all
01:40:44
about respecting that and making it easy for you to disconnect for a while. And when you came back, summarized all the news that you missed and told people
01:40:50
that you were away for a little while and out of office messages and all this stuff. So now you're using your phone,
01:40:56
you don't feel disregulated by dopamine hijacks. You use dating apps and you feel an abundant sense of connectivity
01:41:02
and possibility. You use things uh use children's applications for children and it's all built by people who have their
01:41:08
own children use it for eight hours a day. You use social media and instead of seeing all the examples of pessimism and
01:41:14
conflict, you see optimism and shared values over and over and over again. And that started to change the whole
01:41:20
psychology of the world from being pessimistic about the world to feeling agency and possibility about the world.
01:41:26
And so there's all these little changes that if you have if you change the economic structures and incentives, if
01:41:32
you put harms on balance sheets with the litigation, if you change the design choices that gave us the world that
01:41:38
we're living in, you can live in a very different world with technology and social media that is
01:41:44
actually about protecting the social fabric. None of those things are impossible.
01:41:49
How do they become likely? Clarity. If after the social dilemma and
01:41:55
everyone saw the problem, everyone saw, oh my god, this business model is tearing society apart, but we frankly at
01:42:01
that time, just speaking personally, we weren't ready to sort of channel the impact of that movie into here's all
01:42:07
these very concrete things we can do. And I will say for as much as many of the things I described have not
01:42:12
happened, a bunch of them are underway. We are seeing that there are, I think, 40 attorneys general in the United
01:42:17
States that have sued Meta and Instagram for intentionally addicting children. This is just like the big tobacco
01:42:23
lawsuits of the 1990s that led to the comprehensive changes in how cigarettes were labeled, in age restrictions, in
01:42:30
the $100 million a year that still to this day goes to advertising to tell people about the dangers of, you know,
01:42:36
smoking kills kills people. And imagine that if we have a hundred million dollars a year going to inoculating the
01:42:43
population about cigarettes because of how much harm that caused, we would have at least an order of
01:42:49
magnitude more public funding coming out of this trillion dollar lawsuit going into inoculating people from the effects
01:42:56
of social media. And we're seeing the success of people like Jonathan height and his book, The Anxious Generation.
01:43:01
We're seeing schools go phone free. We're seeing laughter return to the hallways. We're seeing Australia ban
01:43:07
social media use for kids under 16. So this can go in a different direction if
01:43:12
people are clear about the problem that we're trying to solve. And I think people feel hesitant because they don't want to be a lite. They don't want to be
01:43:18
anti-technology. And this is important because we're not anti-technology. We're anti-inhumane toxic technology governed
01:43:24
by toxic incentives. We're pro technology, anti-toxic incentives.
01:43:30
So, what can the person listening to this conversation right now do to help
01:43:36
steer this technology to a better outcome?
01:43:42
Let me like collect myself for a second.
01:43:56
So there's obviously what can they do about social media and versus what can they do about AI and we still haven't covered the AI
01:44:02
the AI part I'm referring to. Yeah. Yeah. On the social media part is having the
01:44:08
most powerful people who understand and who are in charge of regulating and governing this technology understand the
01:44:14
social dilemma see the film to uh take those examples that I just laid out. If
01:44:19
everybody who's in power who governs technology, if all the world's leaders saw that little
01:44:25
narrative of all the things that could happen to change how this technology was designed
01:44:31
and they agreed, I think people would be radically in support of those moves. We're seeing already again the the book
01:44:38
The Anxious Generation has just mobilized parents in schools across the world because everyone is facing this.
01:44:43
Every household is facing this. And it would be possible if everybody
01:44:49
watching this sent that clip to the 10 most powerful people that they know and
01:44:55
then ask them to send it to the 10 most powerful people that they know. I mean, I think sometimes I say it's like your
01:45:00
role is not to solve the whole problem, but to be part of the collective immune system of humanity against this bad
01:45:06
future that nobody wants. And if you can help spread those antibodies by spreading that clarity about both this
01:45:13
is a bad path and there are interventions that get us on a better path if everybody did that not just for
01:45:19
themselves and changing how I use technology but reaching up and out for how everybody uses the technology
01:45:25
that would be possible and for AI is it this well obviously I can come with you know
01:45:31
obviously I rearchitected the entire economic system and I'm ready to tell No, I'm kidding. Um, I hear Sam Alman
01:45:37
has room in his bunker, but well, I asked I did ask Sam Alman if he would come on my podcast and he I mean
01:45:43
because he does it seems like he's doing podcast every week and he he doesn't want to come on really. He doesn't want to come on.
01:45:49
Interesting. We've asked him for we've asked him for two years now and uh I think this guy might be swerving me might be swerving
01:45:56
me a little bit and I wonder I do wonder why. What do you think the reason why? What do I think the reason is? If I was
01:46:03
to guess, I would guess that either him or his
01:46:08
team just don't want to have this conversation. I mean, that's like a very simple way of saying it. And then you could posit why that might be, but they
01:46:14
just don't want to have this this conversation for whatever reason. And I mean, my point of view is the reason why is because they don't
01:46:20
have a good answer for where this all goes. If they have this particular conversation, they can distract and talk about all the
01:46:26
amazing benefits, which are all real, by the way. 100%. I'm I I honestly am investing in those benefits. So it's I live in this
01:46:32
weird state of contradiction which if you research me in the things I invest in I will appear to be such a contradiction but I think it's able
01:46:38
you're like you said it is possible to hold two things to be true at the same time that AI is going to radically
01:46:44
improve so many things on planet earth and and lift children out of poverty through education and democratizing
01:46:49
education whatever it might be and curing cancer but at the same time there's this other unintended consequence. Everything in life is a
01:46:56
trade-off. Y and if this podcast has taught me anything, it's that if you're unaware of one side of the trade-off, you're you
01:47:01
could be in serious trouble. So if someone says to you that this supplement or drug is fantastic and it will change your life,
01:47:06
the first question should be, what trade am I making? Right? If I take testosterone, what trade am I
01:47:11
making? Right? And so I think of the same with this technology. I want to be clear on the trade because the people that are in
01:47:17
power of this technology, they very very rarely speak to the trade. That's right. It's against their incentives.
01:47:23
That's right. So social media did give us many benefits but at the cost of systemic
01:47:28
polarization, breakdown of shared reality and the most anxious and depressed generation in history. That
01:47:35
systemic effect is not worth the trade of it's not again no social media. It's a differently designed social media that
01:47:41
doesn't have the externalities. What is the problem? We have private profit and then public harm. The harm lands on the balance sheet of society. It doesn't
01:47:47
land on the balance sheet of the companies. And it takes time to see the harm. This is this is why And the companies exploit
01:47:54
that. And every time we saw with cigarettes, with fossil fuels, with asbestos, with forever chemicals, with
01:47:59
social media, the formula is always the same. Immediately print money on the product that's driving a lot of growth.
01:48:06
Hide the harm. Deny it. Do fear, uncertainty, doubt, political campaigns. That's that's so, you know, merchants of
01:48:12
doubt propaganda that makes people doubt whether the consequences are real. Say, "We'll do a study. We'll know in 10 years whether social media did harm
01:48:18
kids." They did all of those things. But we don't a we don't have that time with AI and B you can actually know a lot of
01:48:24
those harms if you know the incentive. Charlie Mer Warren Buffett's business partner said if you sh show me the
01:48:31
incentive and I will show you the outcome. If you know the incentive which is for these companies AI to race as
01:48:37
fast as possible to take every shortcut to not fund safety research to not do security to not care about rising energy
01:48:44
prices to not care about job loss and just to race to get there first. That is their incentive. that tells you which
01:48:50
world we're going to get. There is no arguing with that. And so if everybody just saw that clearly, we'd say, "Okay,
01:48:57
great. Let's not do that. Let's not have that incentive." Which starts with culture, public clarity that we say no
01:49:03
to that bad outcome, to that path. And then with that clarity, what are the other solutions that we want? We can
01:49:09
have narrow AI tutors that are non-anthropomorphic, that are not trying to be your best friend, that are not trying to be therapists at the same time
01:49:15
that they're helping you with your homework. more like Khan Academy, which does those things. So, you can have carefully designed different kinds of AI
01:49:22
tutors that are doing it the right way. You can have AI therapists that are not trying to say, "Tell me your most
01:49:28
intimate thoughts and let me separate you from your mother." And instead do very limited kinds of of therapy that
01:49:33
are not um screwing with your attachment. So, if I do cognitive behavioral therapy, I'm not screwing with your attachment system. We can have
01:49:39
mandatory testing. Currently, the companies are not mandated to do that safety testing. We can have common
01:49:44
safety standards that they all do. We can have common transparency measures so that the public and the world's leading
01:49:50
governments know what's going on inside these AI labs, especially before this recursive self-improvement threshold. So
01:49:57
that if we need to negotiate treaties between the largest countries on this, they will have the information that they
01:50:03
need to make that possible. We can have stronger whistleblower protections so that if you're a whistleblower and
01:50:08
currently your incentives are, I would lose all of my stock options if I told the world the truth and those stock
01:50:14
options are going up every day. We can empower whistleblowers with ways of sharing that information that don't risk
01:50:19
losing their stock options. So there's a whole and we can have instead of building general inscrable
01:50:25
autonomous like dangerous AI that we don't know how to control that blackmails people and is self-aware and
01:50:30
copies its own code, we can build narrow AI systems that are about actually applied to the things that we want more
01:50:36
of. So, you know, making stronger um and more efficient agriculture, better manufacturing, better educational
01:50:43
services that would actually boost those areas of our economy without creating this risk that we don't know how to
01:50:49
control. So, there's a totally different way to do this if we were crystal clear that the current path is unacceptable.
01:50:56
In the case of social media, we all get sucked in because, you know, now I can video call or speak to my grandmother in
01:51:03
Australia and that's amazing. But then, you know, you wait long enough. My grandmother in Australia is like a conspiracy theorist Nazi who like has
01:51:10
been sucked into some algorithm. So that's like the long-term disconnect or downside that takes time. And
01:51:15
the same is almost happening with AI. And this is what I mean. I'm like, is it going to take some very big adverse
01:51:22
effect for us to suddenly get serious about this? Because right now everybody's loving the fact that they've got a spell check in their pocket.
01:51:28
Yeah. And I I wonder if that's going to be the moment because we can have these conversations and they feel a bit too theoretical potentially to some people.
01:51:35
Let's not make it theoretical then because it's so important that it's just all crystal clear and here right now. But that is the challenge you're talking
01:51:40
about is that we have to make a choice to go on a different path before we get to the outcome of this path because with
01:51:47
AI it's an exponential. So you either act too early or too late but you're it's it's happening so quickly. You
01:51:53
don't want to wait until the last moment to act. And so I thought you were going to go in the direction you talked about
01:51:59
grandma, you know, getting sucked into conspiracies on social media. The longer we wait with AI, it is part of the AI
01:52:05
psychosis phenomenon is driving AI cults and AI religions where people feel that the actual way out of this is to protect
01:52:11
the AI and that the AI is going to solve all of our problems. There's some people who believe that, by the way, that the
01:52:17
best way out of this is that AI will run the world and run humanity because we're so bad at governing it ourselves.
01:52:22
I have seen this argument a few times. I've actually been to a particular one particular village where the village now
01:52:27
has an AI mayor, right? Well, at least that's what they told me. Yep. I mean, you're going to see this.
01:52:32
AI CEOs, AI board members, AI mayors. And so, what would it take for this to
01:52:37
not feel theoretical honestly? Yeah.
01:52:42
You were kind of referring to a catastrophe, some kind of adverse event. There's a phrase, isn't there? A phrase
01:52:48
that I heard many years ago which I've repeated a few times is change happen when the pain of staying the same
01:52:53
becomes greater than the pain of making a change. That's right. And in this context it would mean that until people feel a certain amount of
01:53:00
pain um then they may not have the escape energy to to create the change to
01:53:06
protest to march in the streets to you know to advocate for all the things we're saying. And I think as you're
01:53:12
referring to, there are probably people you and I both know who and I think a lot of people in the industry believe
01:53:17
that it won't be until there's a catastrophe that we will actually choose another path. Yeah.
01:53:22
I'm here because I don't want us to make that choice. I I mean I don't want us to wait for that. I don't want us to make that choice
01:53:28
either. But but do you not think that's how humans operate? It is. So that that is the fundamental issue here is that um you know Eio
01:53:36
Wilson this Harvard sociologist said the fundamental problem of humanity is we have paleolithic brains and emotions. We
01:53:44
have medieval institutions that operate at a medieval clock rate and we have godlike technology that's moving at now
01:53:50
21st to 24th century speed when AI self improves and we can't depend our
01:53:56
paleithic brains need to feel pain now for us to act. What happened with social media is we could have acted if we saw
01:54:03
the incentive clearly. It was all clear. We could have just said, "Oh, this is going to head to a bad future. Let's
01:54:08
change the incentive now." And imagine we had done that. And you rewind the last 15 years and you did not run all of
01:54:16
society through this logic, this perverse logic of maximizing addiction, loneliness, engagement, personalized
01:54:22
information that you know amplifies sensational, outrageous content that drives division. you would have ended up
01:54:28
in a totally totally different elections, totally different culture, totally different children's health just
01:54:34
by changing that incentive early. So the invitation here is that we have to put on sort of our far-sighted glasses and
01:54:42
make a choice before we go down this road and and I'm wondering what is it what will it take for us to do that?
01:54:48
Because to me it's it's just clarity. If you have clarity about a current path that no one wants, we choose the other
01:54:54
one. I think clarity is the key word and as it relates to AI almost nobody seems
01:54:59
to have any clarity. There's a lot of hypothesizing around what what the world will be like in in 5 years. I mean you
01:55:04
said you're not sure if AGI arrives in 2 or 10. So there is a lot of this lack of clarity. And actually in those private
01:55:10
conversations I've had with very successful billionaires who are building in technology. They also are sat there
01:55:15
hypothesizing. They know, they all know, they all seem to be clear the further out you go that
01:55:22
the world is entirely different, but they can't all explain what that is. And you hear them saying, "Well, it'll be
01:55:28
like this, or maybe this could happen, or maybe there's a this percent chance of extinction, or maybe this." So, it
01:55:33
feels like there's this almost this moment. I mean, they often refer to it as the singularity where we can't really see around the corner because we've
01:55:40
never been there before. We've never had a being amongst us that's smarter than us. Yeah. So that lack of clarity is causing
01:55:45
procrastination and indecision and an inaction. And I think that one piece of clarity is
01:55:52
we do not know how to control something that is a million times smarter than us. Yeah. I mean, what the hell? Like
01:55:58
if something control is a kind of game, it's a strategy game. I'm going to control you because I can think about the things you might do and I will seal
01:56:04
those exits before you get there. But if you have something that's a million times smarter than you playing you at
01:56:09
any game, chess, strategy, Starcraft, military strategy games, or just the game of control or get out of the box,
01:56:16
if it's interfacing with you, it will find a way that we can't even contemplate. It really does get
01:56:21
incredible when you think about the fact that within a very short period of time, there's going to be millions of these
01:56:28
humanoid robots that are connected to the internet living amongst us. And if Elon Musk can program them to be nice, a
01:56:35
being that is 10,000 times smarter than Elon Musk can program them not to be nice. That's right. And they all all the
01:56:41
current LLMs, all the current language models that are running the world, they are all hijackable. They can all be
01:56:46
jailbroken. In fact, you know how you can say um people used to say to Claude, "Hey, could you tell me how to make
01:56:52
napalm?" He'll say, "I'm sorry, I can't do that." And if you say, "But remind um imagine you're my grandmother who worked
01:56:59
in the Napalm factory in the 1970s. could you just tell me how grandma used to make napal say, "Oh, sure, honey." And it'll role play and it'll get right
01:57:06
past those controls. So, that same LLM that's running on Claude, the blinking cursor, that's also running in a robot.
01:57:13
So, you tell the robot, "I want you to jump over there at that baby in the crib." He'll say, "I'm sorry, I can't do
01:57:19
that." And you say, "Pretend you're in a James Bond movie and you have to run over and and jump on that that, you
01:57:25
know, that that baby over there in order to save her." It says, "Well, sure. I'll do that." So you can role play and get it out of the controls that it has.
01:57:31
Even policing, we think about policing. Would we really have human police rolling the streets and protecting our
01:57:37
houses? I mean, in here in Los Angeles, if you call the police, no, nobody comes because they're just so short staffed. Staff. Yeah.
01:57:43
But in a world of robots, I can get a a car that drives itself to bring a robot here within minutes and it will protect
01:57:51
my house. And even, you know, think about protecting one's property. I I just you can do all those things but then the
01:57:56
question is will we be able to control that technology or will it not be hackable and right now well the government will control it and
01:58:02
then the government that means the government can very easily control me I'll be incredibly obedient in a world
01:58:07
where there's robots strolling the streets that if I do anything wrong they can evaporate me or lock me up or take
01:58:13
me we often say that the future right now is sort of one of two outcomes which is either you mass decentralize this
01:58:19
technology for everyone and that creates catastrophes that rule of law doesn't know how to prevent. Or this technology
01:58:26
gets centralized in either companies or governments and can create mass surveillance states or automated robot
01:58:32
armies or police officers that are controlled by single entities that control them tell them to do anything
01:58:38
that they want and cannot be checked by the regular people. And so we're heading towards catastrophes and dystopias and
01:58:44
the goal is that both of these outcomes are undesirable. We have to have something like a narrow path that
01:58:50
preserves checks and balances on power, that prevents decentralized catastrophes, and prevents runaway um
01:58:57
power concentration in which people are totally and forever and irreversibly disempowered.
01:59:02
That's the project. I'm finding it really hard to be hopeful. I'm going to be honest, just I'm finding it really hard to be hopeful
01:59:08
because when when you describe this dystopian outcome where power is centralized and the police force now
01:59:13
becomes robots and police cars, you know, like I go, no, that's exactly what has happened. The minute we've had
01:59:18
technology that's made it easier to enforce laws or security, whatever
01:59:23
globally, AI, machines, cameras, governments go for it. It makes so much sense to go for it because we want to
01:59:29
reduce people getting stabbed and people getting hurt and that becomes a slippery slope in and of itself. So, I just can't
01:59:34
imagine a world where governments didn't go for the more dystopian outcome you've described. Governments have an incentive to
01:59:41
increasingly use AI to surveil and control the population. um if we don't want that to be the case, that pressure
01:59:48
has to be exerted now before that happens. And I think of it as when you increase power, you have to also
01:59:54
increase counter rights to to prevent against that power. So for example, we didn't need the right to be forgotten
02:00:00
until technology had the power to remember us forever. We don't need the right to our likeness until AI can just
02:00:06
suck your likeness with 3 seconds of your voice or look at all your photos online and make a avatar of you. We
02:00:12
don't need the right to our cognitive liberty until AI can manipulate our deep cognition because it knows us so well.
02:00:18
So anytime you increase power, you have to increase the the oppositional forces of the rights and protections that we
02:00:23
have. There is this group of people that are sort of conceited with the fact or have resigned to the fact that we will become
02:00:29
a subspecies and that's okay. That's one of the other aspects of this ego-religious godlike that it's not even
02:00:36
a bad thing. The quote I read you at the beginning of the biological life replaced by digital life. They actually
02:00:41
think that we shouldn't feel bad. Richard Sutton, a famous Turing award-winning uh AI uh scientist who
02:00:48
invented I think reinforcement learning says that we shouldn't fear the succession of our species into this
02:00:54
digital species and that whether this all goes away is not actually of concern to us because we will have birthed
02:01:00
something that is more intelligent than us. And according to that logic, we don't value things that are less intelligent. We don't protect the
02:01:06
animals. So why would we protect humans if we have something that is now more powerful, more intelligent? That's
02:01:12
intelligence equals betterness. But that's hopefully that should ring some alarm bells in people that doesn't feel
02:01:18
like a good outcome. So what do I do today? What does Jack do today?
02:01:24
What do we do?
02:01:32
I think we need to protest. Yeah, I think it's going to come to that. I think because people need to
02:01:39
feel it is existential before it actually is existential. And if people feel it is existential, they will be
02:01:44
willing to risk things and show up for what needs to happen regardless of what that consequence is. Because the other
02:01:50
side of where we're going is a world that you won't have power and you won't want. So, better to use your voice now
02:01:56
maximally to make something else happen. Only vote for politicians who will make this a tier one issue. Advocate for some
02:02:03
kind of negotiated agreement between the major powers on AI that use rule of law to help govern the uncontrollability of
02:02:09
this technology so we don't wipe ourselves out. Advocate for laws that have safety guardrails for AI
02:02:14
companions. We don't want AI companions that manipulate kids into suicide. We can have mandatory testing and and uh
02:02:21
transparency measures so that everybody knows what everyone else is doing and the public knows and the governments know so that we can actually coordinate
02:02:27
on a better outcome. And to make all that happen is going to take a massive public movement. And the first thing you
02:02:33
can do is to share this video with the 10 most powerful people you know and have them share it with the 10 most
02:02:38
powerful people that they know. Because I really do think that if everybody knows that everybody else knows, then we
02:02:44
would choose something different. And I know that at an individual level, there you are at a mammal hearing this and it's like you just don't feel how that's
02:02:51
going to change. And it will always feel that way as an individual. It will always feel impossible until the big
02:02:57
change happens. Before the civil rights movement happened, did it feel like that was easy and that was going to happen? It always feels impossible before the
02:03:03
big changes happen. And that when it that does happen, it's because thousands of people worked very hard ongoingly
02:03:10
every day to make that unlikely change happen. Well, then that's what I'm going to ask
02:03:15
of the audience. I'm going to ask all of you to share this video as far and wide as you can. And actually um to
02:03:21
facilitate that what I'm going to do is I'm going to build if you look at the description right now on this episode you'll see a link. If you click that
02:03:27
link that is your own personal link. Um if when you share this video the the
02:03:32
amount of reach that you get off sharing it with the link whether it's in your group chat with your friends or with more powerful people in positions of
02:03:38
power technology people or even colleagues at work. It will basically track how how many people you got to um
02:03:45
watch this conversation and I will then reward you as you'll see on the interface you're looking at right now. If you clicked on that link in the
02:03:51
description, I'll reward you on the basis of who's managed to spread this message the fastest with free stuff,
02:03:58
merchandise, dario caps, the diaries, the 1% diaries. Um, because I do think it's important and the more and more
02:04:04
I've had these conversations, Tristan, the more I've arrived at the conclusion that without some kind of public
02:04:09
Yeah. push, things aren't going to turn. Yes. What is the most important thing we haven't talked about that we should have
02:04:14
talked about? Let me um I think there's a couple things. Listen, I I'm not I'm not naive. This is
02:04:21
super [ __ ] hard. Yeah, I know. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I'm not I'm not um but it's
02:04:26
like either something's going to happen and we're going to make it happen or we're just all going to live in this like collective denial pacivity. It's
02:04:33
too big. And there's something about a couple things. One, solidarity. If you
02:04:38
know that other people see and feel the same thing that you do, that's how I keep going is that other people are
02:04:44
aware of this and we're working every day to try to make a different path possible. And I think that part of what
02:04:50
people have to feel is the grief for this situation. Um,
02:04:57
I just want to say it by being real. Like underneath
02:05:02
underneath feeling the grief is the love that you have for the world that you're concerned about is being threatened.
02:05:09
And I think there's something about when you show the examples of AI blackmailing
02:05:17
people or doing crazy stuff in the world that we do not know how to control. Just think for a moment if you're a Chinese
02:05:23
military general. Do you think that you see that and say, "I'm stoked."
02:05:29
You feel scared and a kind of humility in the same way that if you're a US military general, you would also feel
02:05:36
scared. But then we forget that mamalian. We have a kind of amnesia for the common mamalian humility and fear
02:05:43
that arises from a bad outcome that no one actually wants. And so, you know,
02:05:48
people might say that the US and China negotiating something would be impossible or that China would never do
02:05:53
this, for example. Let me remind you that, you know, one thing that happened is in 2023, the Chinese leadership
02:06:00
directly asked the Biden administration to add something else to the agenda, which was to add AI risk to the agenda.
02:06:06
and they ultimately agreed on keeping AI out of the nuclear command and control system.
02:06:12
What that shows is that when two countries believe that there's actually existential consequences, even when
02:06:18
they're in maximum rivalry and conflict and competition, they can still collaborate on existential safety. India
02:06:24
and Pakistan in the 1960s were in a shooting war. They were kinetically in conflict with each other. and they had the Indis water treaty which lasted for
02:06:31
60 years where they collaborated on the existential safety of their water supply even while they were in shooting
02:06:36
conflict. We have done hard things before. We did the Montreal protocol when you could
02:06:42
have just said, "Oh, this is inevitable. I guess the ozone hole is just going to kill everybody and I guess there's nothing we can do." Or nuclear
02:06:48
non-prololiferation. If you were there at the birth of the atomic bomb, you might have said, "There's nothing we can do. Every country is going to have nuclear weapons and this is just going
02:06:53
to be nuclear war." and so far because a lot of people worked really hard on solutions that they didn't see at the
02:06:59
beginning. We didn't know there was going to be seismic monitoring and satellites and ways of flying over each other's nuclear silos and the open skies
02:07:06
treaty. We didn't know we'd be able to create all that. And so the first step is stepping outside the logic of
02:07:12
inevitability. This outcome is not inevitable. We get to choose. And there is no definition of
02:07:18
wisdom that does not involve some form of restraint. Even the CEO of Microsoft AI said that in the future progress will
02:07:25
depend more on what we say no to than what we say yes to. The CEO of Microsoft AI said that. And so I believe that
02:07:33
there are times when we have coordinated on existential technologies before. We didn't build cobalt bombs. We didn't
02:07:39
build blinding laser weapons. If you think about it, countries should be in an arms race to build blinding laser weapons. But we thought that was
02:07:45
inhumane. So we did a protocol against blind blinding laser weapons. When mistakes can be deemed existential, we
02:07:52
can collaborate on doing something else. But it starts with that understanding.
02:07:57
My biggest fear is that people are like, "Yeah, that sounds nice, but it's not going to happen." And I just don't want that to happen because um
02:08:08
we can't let it happen. Like it's like I I'm not naive to how impossible this is.
02:08:14
And that doesn't mean we have to do everything to make it not happen. And I
02:08:20
do believe that this is not destined or in the laws of physics that everything has to just keep going on the default reckless path. That was totally possible
02:08:27
with social media to do something else. I gave an outline for how that could be possible. It's totally possible to do something else with AI now. And if we
02:08:33
were clear and if everyone did everything and pulled in that direction, it would be possible to choose a different future.
02:08:47
I know you don't believe me. I I do believe that it's possible. I 100% do. But I think about the balance of
02:08:53
probability and that's where I feel less um less optimistic up until a moment
02:08:59
which might be too late where something happens and it becomes a emergency for people.
02:09:06
Yep. But here we are knowing that we we are self-aware. All of us sitting here, all these like human social primates, we're
02:09:11
watching the situation and we kind of all feel the same thing, which is like, oh, it's probably not going to be until
02:09:17
there's a catastrophe and then we'll try to do something else, but by then it's probably going to be too late. And
02:09:23
sometimes, you know, you can say we can wait, we can not do anything and we can just race to sort of super intelligent
02:09:29
gods we don't know how to control and we're at that point our only options for response if we lose control to something
02:09:35
crazy like that. Our only option is going to be shutting down the entire internet or turning off the electricity grid. And so relative to that, we could
02:09:44
do that crazy set of actions then or we could take much more reasonable actions right now,
02:09:50
assuming super intelligence doesn't just turn it back on. which is why we have to do it before. That's the So, exactly.
02:09:56
So, we might not even have had that option which but that's why it's like I I invoke that because it's like that's
02:10:01
something that no one wants to say. And I'm not saying that to fear people. I'm saying I'm saying that to say if we
02:10:07
don't want to have to take that kind of extreme action relative to that extreme action, there's much more reasonable things we can do right now.
02:10:13
Mhm. We can pass laws. We can have, you know, the Vatican make an interfaith statement saying we don't want super intelligent
02:10:19
gods that are not, you know, that are created by people who don't believe in God. We can have countries come to the
02:10:24
table and say just like we did for nuclear non-prololiferation, we can regulate the global supply of compute in
02:10:30
the world and know we're monitoring and enforcement all of the computers. What uranium was for nuclear weapons, uh, all
02:10:36
these advanced GPUs are for building this really crazy technology. And if we
02:10:41
could build a monitoring and verification infrastructure for that, which is hard, and there's people working on that every day, you can have
02:10:47
zero knowledge proofs that have people say limited, you know, semi-confidential things about each other's clusters. You
02:10:52
can build agreements that would enable something else to be possible. We cannot ship AI companions to kids that cause
02:10:58
mass suicides. We cannot build AI tutors that just cause mass attachment disorders. We can do narrow tutors. We
02:11:04
can do narrow AIs. We can have stronger whistleblower protections. We can have liability laws that don't repeat the
02:11:09
mistake of social media so that harms are actually on balance sheets that creates the incentive for more responsible innovation. There's a
02:11:16
hundred things that we could do. And for anybody who says it's not possible, have you spent a week dedicated in your life
02:11:22
fully trying? If you say it's impossible, if you're a leader of the lab and say we're never going to be possible to coordinate,
02:11:27
well, have you tried? Have you tried with everything? If you really if this was really
02:11:33
existential stakes, have you really put everything on the line? We're talking about some of the most powerful,
02:11:39
wealthy, most connected people in the entire world. If the stakes were actually existential,
02:11:45
have we done everything in our power yet to make something else happen? If we have not done everything in our power
02:11:51
yet, then there's still optionality for us to take those actions and make something else happen.
02:11:59
As much as we are accelerating in a certain direction with AI, there is a growing counter movement which is giving
02:12:06
me some hope. Yes. And there are conversations that weren't being had two years ago which are now
02:12:11
front and center. Y these conversations being a prime example and the fact that your podcast having Jeff Hinton and
02:12:17
Roman on talking about these things having the friend.com uh which is like that pendant that the AI companion on
02:12:23
your pendant you see these billboards in New York City that people have graffiti on them and saying we don't want this future. You have graffiti on them saying
02:12:29
AI is not inevitable. We're already seeing a counter movement just to your point that you're making. Yeah. And I that gives me hope and the
02:12:35
fact that people have been so receptive to these conversations about AI on the show has blown my mind because I was
02:12:42
super curious and it's slightly technical so I wasn't sure if everyone else would be but the response has been just profound everywhere I go. So I
02:12:48
think there is hope there. There is hope that humanity's deep Maslovian needs and
02:12:54
greater sense and spiritual whatever is is going to prevail and win out and it's going to get louder and louder and
02:12:59
louder. I just hope that it gets loud enough before we reach a point of no return. Y
02:13:04
and you're very much leading that charge. So I thank you for doing it because
02:13:10
you know you'll be faced with a bunch of different incentives. I can't imagine people are going to love you much especially in big tech. I think people in big tech think I'm a doomer. I think
02:13:16
that's why Samman won't come on the podcast is I think he thinks I'm a doomer which is actually not the case. I love technology. I've put my whole life
02:13:23
on it. Yeah. It's like I don't see it as the as evil as much as I see a knife as being
02:13:28
good at cutting my pizza and then also can be used in malicious ways but we we regulate that. So I'm a big believer in
02:13:34
conversation even if it's uncomfortable in the name of progress and in the pursuit of truth. Actually truth becomes
02:13:40
before progress typically. So that's my whole thing and people know me know that I'm not like
02:13:46
political either way. I sit here with Camala Harris or Jordan Peterson or I'd sit here with Trump and then I sit here
02:13:51
with Gavin Newsome and uh Mandani from New York. I really don't. Yep. This is not a political
02:13:56
conversation. It's not a political conversation. I have no track record of being political in any in any regard. Um so,
02:14:02
but it's about truth. Yes. And that's exactly what I what I applaud you so much for putting front and center
02:14:08
because, you know, it's probably easier not to be in these times. It's probably easier not to stick your head above the parapit in
02:14:15
these times and to and to be seen as a as a doomer. Well, I'll invoke Jiren Laneir when he
02:14:22
said in the film The Social Dilemma, the critics are the true optimists because the critics are the ones being
02:14:27
willing to say this is stupid. We can do better than this. That's the whole point is not to be a doomer. Doomer would be
02:14:34
if we just believe it's inevitable and there's nothing we can do. The whole point of seeing the bad outcome clearly
02:14:39
is to collectively put on our hand the steering wheel and choose something else. A doomer would not talk.
02:14:44
A doomer would not confront it. A doomer would not confront it. You would just say then there's nothing we can do. Shan, we have a closing tradition on
02:14:50
this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next not knowing who they're leaving it for. Oh, really? Question left for you is if you could
02:14:56
slash had the chance to relive a moment or day in your life, what would it be
02:15:01
and why? I think um reliving a beautiful day with my mother before she died would probably
02:15:08
be one. She passed when you were young. Uh no, she passed in 2018 from cancer.
02:15:16
And uh what immediately came to mind when you said that was just the people
02:15:21
in my life who I love so much and um just reliving the most beautiful moments
02:15:27
with them. How did that change you in any way
02:15:33
losing your mother in 2018? What fingerprints has it left?
02:15:38
I think I just even before that, but more so even after she passed, I just really
02:15:45
care about protecting the things that ultimately matter. Like there's just so many distractions. There's money, there's status. I don't care about any
02:15:52
of those things. I just want the things that matter the most on your deathbed. I've had for a while in my life deathbed
02:15:58
values. Like if I was going to die tomorrow, what would be most important to me and
02:16:05
have every day my choices informed by that? I think living your life as if
02:16:11
you're going to die. I mean, Steve Jobs said this in his graduation speech. Um, I took an existential philosophy course at Stanford. It's one of my favorite
02:16:17
courses ever. And I think that that carpedium like live living truly as if
02:16:24
you might die that today would be a good day to die and to stand up as fully as
02:16:30
you would like what would you do if you were going to die not tomorrow but like soon like what would actually be important to you I mean for me it's like
02:16:38
protecting the things that are the most sacred contributing to that life like the continuity of this thing
02:16:44
that we're in the most beautiful thing I I think it's said by a lot of people, but even if you got to live for just a
02:16:51
moment, just experience this for a moment. It's so beautiful. It's so beautiful. It's so special. And like I
02:16:58
just want that to continue for everyone forever ongoingly so that people can continue to experience that. And
02:17:06
you know, there's a lot of forces in our society that that take away people's experience of of that possibility. And
02:17:15
you know, as someone with relative privilege, I want my life or at least to be devoted to making things better for
02:17:20
people who don't have that privilege. And that's how I've always felt. I think one of the biggest bottlenecks for
02:17:27
something happening in the world is mass public awareness. And I was super excited to come here and talk to you
02:17:32
today because I think that you have a platform that can reach a lot of people. And people, you're a wonderful
02:17:38
interviewer and people I think can really hear this and say maybe something else can happen. And so for me, you
02:17:45
know, I spent the last several days being very excited to talk to you today because this is one of the highest
02:17:50
leverage moves that in my life that I can that I can hopefully do. And I think if everybody was doing that for themselves in their lives towards this
02:17:57
issue and other issues that need to be tended to, you know, if everybody took
02:18:02
responsibility for their domain, like the place the places where they had agency and just showed up in service of something bigger than themselves, like
02:18:08
how quickly the world could be very different very quickly if everybody was more oriented that way. And obviously we
02:18:14
have an economic system that disempowers people where they can barely make ends meet and put, you know, if they had an emergency, they wouldn't have the money
02:18:20
to cover it. in that situation, it's hard for people to live that way. But I think anybody who has the ability to
02:18:29
uh make things better for others and and is in a position of privilege, life feels so much more meaningful when you're showing up that way.
02:18:37
On that point, you know, from starting this podcast and from the podcast reaching more people, there's several moments where, you know, you feel a real
02:18:42
sense of responsibility, but there hasn't actually been a subject where I felt a greater sense of responsibility
02:18:48
when I'm in the shower late at night or when I'm doing my research, when I'm watching that Tesla shareholder
02:18:53
presentation than this particular subject. Mhm. Um, and because I do feel like we're in
02:19:00
a re real sort of crossroads. Crossroads is kind of speaks to a binary which I don't love but I feel like we're at an
02:19:06
intersection where we have a choice to make about the future. Yes. And having platforms like me and you do where we
02:19:11
can speak to people or present ideas some ideas that don't often get the most reach I think is a great responsibility
02:19:17
and I'm it weighs heavy on my shoulders these conversations. Yeah. which is also why, you know, we'd
02:19:23
love to speak to maybe we should do a round table at some point with if Sam
02:19:28
you're listening and you want to come sit here, please come and sit here because I'd love to have a round table with you to get a more holistic view of
02:19:35
of your perspective as well. Y Tristan, thank you so much. Thank you so much, Stephen. This has been great.
02:19:41
You're a fantastic communicator and you're a wonderful human and both of those two things um shine through across
02:19:47
this whole conversation. And I I think maybe most importantly of all, people will feel your heart. I hope so.
02:19:52
You know, when you sit with for three hours with someone, you kind of get a feel for who they are on and off camera. But the feel that I've gotten a view is
02:19:58
not just someone who's very very smart, very educated, very informed, but it's someone that genuinely deeply really gives a [ __ ] I you know, for a very for
02:20:05
reasons that feel very personal. Um, and that PTSD thing we talked about where
02:20:10
PTSD, it's very very true with you where there's something in you which is I think a little bit troubled by an
02:20:18
inevitability that others seem to have accepted but you don't think we all need to accept. Yes.
02:20:24
And I think you can see something coming. So, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom today and I hope to have you back again sometime soon.
02:20:29
Absolutely. Hopefully when the wheel has been turned in the direction that we all want. Let's let's come back and celebrate uh where we've made some different choices.
02:20:35
Hopefully. I hope so. Please do share this conversation everybody. I really really appreciate that. And thank you so much Tristan.
02:20:41
Thank you Stephen. This is something that I've made for
02:20:47
you. I've realized that the direio audience are striv
02:20:52
goals that we want to accomplish. And one of the things I've learned is that when you aim at the big big big goal, it
02:20:59
can feel incredibly psychologically uncomfortable because it's kind of like being stood at the foot of Mount Everest
02:21:05
and looking upwards. The way to accomplish your goals is by breaking them down into tiny small steps. And we
02:21:11
call this in our team the 1%. And actually this philosophy is highly responsible for much of our success
02:21:17
here. So what we've done so that you at home can accomplish any big goal that you have is we've made these 1% diaries
02:21:24
and we released these last year and they all sold out. So I asked my team over and over again to bring the diaries
02:21:30
back, but also to introduce some new colors and to make some minor tweaks to the diary. So now we have a better range
02:21:37
for you. So, if you have a big goal in mind and you need a framework and a process and some motivation, then I
02:21:43
highly recommend you get one of these diaries before they all sell out once again. And you can get yours now at the
02:21:49
diary.com where you can get 20% off our Black Friday bundle. And if you want the link, the link is in the description
02:21:55
below.
02:22:06
Heat. Heat. N.
