On this episode of the War Room, we discuss the latest in the war on terror, and the growing threat of artificial intelligence. We're joined by Joe Allen and Josh Hammer of Newsweek to discuss the implications of AI, and why it's a game changer in the 21st century.
00:04:00.000The last 10 years, it has really ramped up.
00:04:02.000And as it's ramped up, people have distinguished between different types of artificial intelligence.
00:04:08.000The two you just mentioned are that this is really the most crucial distinction to make when thinking about the technology that exists now and what they want to exist in the future.
00:05:17.000So it's able to recognize, for instance, objects and translate that into text and make meaningful statements about it, which there are separate systems that do that, of course.
00:05:28.000But you're talking about a massive system that's starting to show these emergent semi-generalist tendencies.
00:05:34.000Now, when you talk about artificial general intelligence, what that means is you have multiple cognitive modules all operating at once.
00:05:46.000The machine can move from one domain to the other, to the other, to the other.
00:05:50.000These systems would be operating simultaneously.
00:05:53.000This is conceived of as being human level intelligence in the sense that humans, obviously in any animal, operates with a kind of generalized intelligence.
00:06:04.000The same brain does different things across different tasks.
00:06:08.000But the big difference with artificial general intelligence would be that it would operate at superhuman capacities.
00:06:16.000So all of these narrow systems I've just mentioned, all of them operate at superhuman capacities.
00:06:25.000Humans, the best humans anyway, even don't stand a chance against them.
00:06:31.000And then, of course, mediocre people don't either.
00:06:35.000So the idea then is that once you've created an artificial general intelligence, you now have, in effect, superhuman intelligence, a godlike entity.
00:06:46.000This is the way they conceive of it, this godlike entity.
00:06:50.000And something that's also really important to note, Steve, is that even though the goal would be to make it as much like a human as possible, including sort of programs that simulate emotion, including empathy, self-preservation, so on and so forth, instincts.
00:07:06.000But in my evaluation, there's literally no way it's going to be anything like a human.
00:07:13.000It would be something very alien, something very monstrous.
00:07:18.000People oftentimes compare it to, like, the show goths from H.P. Lovecraft's horror stories, you know, back in the day.
00:07:25.000And people oftentimes compare it to an alien mind.
00:07:29.000And people oftentimes compare it to a demon.
00:07:31.000But that's the important distinction there.
00:07:34.000Super intelligence would be any system that gets out of human control.
00:08:11.000And, you know, even so, like a narrow intelligence like GPT, right?
00:08:17.000GPT-4 is capable, and chat GPT, it's capable of writing code.
00:08:22.000And Google's systems at DeepMind are capable of writing code.
00:08:27.000They don't have access to their own systems, so they're not actively rewriting their own codes.
00:08:33.000But they are improving on the work of human coders, and they're creating codes that human coders aren't creating.
00:08:41.000And the idea, and this is talked about, we've covered this a lot, guys like Ben Gertzel, guys like Ray Kurzweil, and especially guys like Nick Bostrom,
00:08:52.000the idea that they put forward is that these systems would be going in and improving themselves.
00:09:01.000And so once that self-improvement process starts, Nick Bostrom calls this an intelligence explosion.
00:09:09.000It would just improve exponentially out of human control.
00:09:15.000And that's why they talk about alignment, AI alignment, because if an AI reaches a super-intelligent phase,
00:09:23.000then the super-intelligence would quickly escape human control and may not have our best interests at heart.
00:09:31.000That is why the Future of Life Institute put out that open letter.
00:09:34.000I want to ask about Lovecraft for a second, but I want to put something out of Denver.
00:09:41.000Bennett Miller, one of the great cinematic artists, a writer-director, did Moneyball, if you remember that,
00:09:51.000I sat for interviews with him on the topic of transhumanism a number of years ago.
00:09:57.000He's got a—to show you how scary this is, but also how haunting.
00:10:03.000He's got a—if you put it up at the Gagosian, which is one of the premier galleries in New York City on Madison Avenue,
00:10:13.000he's got a showing—if you're in the New York area, this is totally free, you can go.
00:10:17.000Obviously, they want you to buy these things.
00:10:19.000All of these prints, all of these photographs, all of these images, Bennett Miller had—I mean, this is all from artificial intelligence, all of it.
00:10:28.000And it's not the science fiction stuff you're used to seeing.
00:10:31.000This is haunting—it looks like from the 17th, 16th—it looks like 17th, 18th, and 19th century, early 20th century.
00:10:39.000It is stunning and haunting, all artificial intelligence.
00:10:45.000It's a—it's a gallery—we're actually going to put it up.
00:10:48.000I'll get Grace and Moe put up on the site.
00:10:49.000You ought to go—if you're in the New York City area, anywhere, it is definitely worth going by and seeing this.
00:10:55.000Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit anthropologist, I guess he would be, is considered the intellectual with the noosphere,
00:11:03.000as one of the intellectual thinkers in back of the Internet, the noosphere, right, the web of thought that encapsulates the world that the Internet kind of has become.
00:11:16.000H.P. Lovecraft is talked about when you talk about transhumanism, particularly artificial intelligence.
00:11:20.000Why is that? Lovecraft was from the earliest 20th century, correct?
00:11:25.000It was a kind of a science fiction mystery writer, even horror fiction at the time.
00:11:31.000Joe Allen, give me a minute or two for the audience.
00:11:34.000Another—we're trying to build your information knowledge base here.
00:11:37.000Why is—why people talk about Lovecraft?
00:11:40.000They talk about de Chardin, about the Internet.
00:11:42.000When they talk about artificial intelligence or transhumanism, they talk about H.P. Lovecraft, sir.
00:11:48.000Yeah, Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos is extraordinarily popular and very, very influential in science fiction because he did—or horror, depending on how you want to look at it.
00:11:59.000But the idea—the basic idea in that mythos was that our world is a kind of controlled, a safe place, but the greater powers of the universe are these super-intelligent, horrific, oftentimes tentacled or, you know, just monstrous beings that, should they enter our world again, would destroy us.
00:12:21.000And so he was obsessed with these sorts of cults that were oftentimes framed in the kind of voodoo aesthetic.
00:12:29.000And these cults were trying to summon these monsters, these Shoggoths, back into our world.
00:12:37.000And so the reason it's compared to artificial intelligence is that in the same way that these Shoggoths were being summoned by these bad actors on Earth, and in the same way these Shoggoths were completely beyond human comprehension and posed a real threat to all humanity because of this odd cognition that doesn't regard humans as valuable,
00:13:00.000artificial intelligence—artificial intelligence in its raw state, before you start putting on safety layers, and certainly in its raw state, it is pretty uncontrollable.
00:13:10.000It just kind of does what it wants to do, so to speak.
00:13:13.000Because it's working on fuzzy logic, because it's working through statistical patterns instead of like, you know, step-by-step algorithms in traditional programming, there's this unpredictability about it.
00:13:24.000And the more powerful the machine, the more unpredictable it is.
00:13:28.000And so that comparison to the Shoggoths, I think it's very apt.
00:13:32.000You simply have a system, you can't understand why it came to the conclusion it did, because the system is so vast, it really can't be audited in any meaningful way.
00:13:44.000And you don't really know why it's doing what it's doing, and unless it's steered, right?
00:13:50.000Unless, you know, like Yudkowsky and Musk, people like that, unless you bring it into human alignment, it is not going to necessarily do what you want it to do.
00:13:59.000I don't believe there are controls. Maybe we'll talk about that next week.
00:14:04.000I don't buy into the fact they've really got controls.
00:14:07.000I think this thing can burn through any control you have. I just think that.
00:14:11.000I'm a believer that we're building the Antichrist.
00:14:14.000Joe, you've been amazing to carve out your time here today.
00:14:17.000I know you're busy working on a bunch of big projects.
00:14:19.000How do people get to you over the weekend? How do they follow you, sir?
00:14:23.000You can find me at warroom.org under the transhumanism tab, jobot.xyz, my social media at J-O-E-B-O-T-X-Y-Z.
00:14:33.000New piece at the top of my social media about the digital undead, Microsoft, Amazon, and other startups creating profiles of you and a sort of zombie version of people so that when you pass on, your loved ones will have you around.
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