Making Sense - Sam Harris - #427 — AI Friends & Enemies

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're

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00:00:36.660 I am here with Paul Bloom. Paul, thanks for joining me.

00:00:40.340 Sam, it's good to talk to you, as always.

00:00:42.180 Yeah, great to see you. It's been, we were just talking off mic, it was, it's been years,

00:00:47.200 it's crazy how that happens, but it has been.

00:00:50.460 I've been following you, though. You've been doing well.

00:00:52.500 Yeah, well, I've been following you. I've read you and the New Yorker recently writing

00:00:59.340 about AI. I think you've written at least two articles there since we, we actually wrote

00:01:04.000 a joint article for the New York Times seven years ago, if you can believe that.

00:01:08.420 Oh, yeah.

00:01:09.140 About Westworld and the philosophical import of watching it and realizing that only a psychopath 0.97

00:01:15.960 could go to such a theme park and rape Dolores and kill children, et cetera. And I think we

00:01:22.900 predicted no such theme park will ever exist because it'll just have, it'll be a bug light

00:01:26.960 for psychopaths and normal people will come back. And if they do anything like that, they'll

00:01:32.540 scandalize their friends and loved ones and be treated like psychopaths appropriately.

00:01:37.480 We'll see. We may be proven wrong. Who knows in this crazy time? But yeah, that was a fun

00:01:44.700 article to write. And I think we wrestled with the dilemmas of dealing with entities that at

00:01:50.720 least appear to be conscious and the moral struggles that leads to.

00:01:54.440 Yeah. Well, so I think we'll start with AI, but remind people what you're doing and what kinds

00:02:00.860 of problems you focus on. I think though we haven't spoken for several years, I think you still

00:02:05.700 probably hold the title of most repeat podcast guest at this point. I haven't counted the

00:02:12.240 episodes, but you've been on a bunch, but it's been a while. So remind people what you focus on

00:02:16.900 as a psychologist. Yeah, I'm a psychology professor. I have positions at Yale, but I'm

00:02:22.360 located at University of Toronto and I study largely moral psychology, but I'm interested in development

00:02:29.140 and in issues of consciousness, issues of learning, notions of fairness and kindness,

00:02:35.380 compassion, empathy. I'm actually been thinking, it's funny to be talking to you because

00:02:40.500 my newest project, which I've just been getting excited about has to do with the origins of

00:02:45.380 morality. And the spark was a podcast with you talking to Tom Holland, author of Dominion.

00:02:52.640 Oh, nice. How so? What was the actual spark?

00:02:56.000 Yeah, I found this a great conversation. He made the case that a lot of the sort of morality that

00:03:01.020 maybe you and I would agree with that, you know, the idea of respecting the right to universal rights

00:03:06.280 and a morality that isn't based on the powerful, but instead maybe in some way respects the weak.

00:03:12.480 It's not the product of rational thought, not the product of secular reasoning, but instead the product

00:03:18.220 of Christianity. And he makes this argument in Dominion and several other places. And I've been

00:03:24.000 thinking about it. I mean, it's a serious point. He's not the only one to make it. It deserves

00:03:28.260 consideration, but I think it's mistaken. And so I think my next project, as I've been thinking

00:03:33.960 about it, and I thank you for the podcast getting me going on this, is to make the alternative case,

00:03:39.420 to argue that a lot of our morality is inborn and innate. I'm a developmental psychologist. That's

00:03:44.540 part of what I do. And a lot of morality is a product of reasoned and rational thought. I don't

00:03:49.660 deny that culture plays a role, including Christianity, but I don't think that's the big story.

00:03:54.520 Nice. Well, I look forward to you making that argument because that's one of these

00:04:00.360 shibboleths of organized religion that I think needs to be retired. And so you're just the guy

00:04:05.300 to do it. So let me know when you produce that book and we'll talk about it.

00:04:10.320 I mean, I got to say, I heard you guys talk and you sort of, you know, you guys engaged properly

00:04:14.560 on the idea. And Holland, I've never met, but he seems like a really smart and quite a scholar.

00:04:20.020 So it's not, you know, and he gets, I think, credence by the fact that he's in some way

00:04:26.000 arguing against his own side. He himself isn't a devout Christian, a secular. But that doesn't

00:04:31.680 make him right. So I'm very interested in engaging these ideas.

00:04:35.500 So how have you been thinking about AI of late? What has surprised you in the seven years or so

00:04:42.840 that we, uh, since we first started talking about it? A mixture of awe and horror. I'm not

00:04:49.460 a doomer. I'm not as much of a doomer as some people. I don't know. I don't know when the last

00:04:54.020 time I checked with you, Sam, what would you say your, your P doom is? That's I've never actually

00:04:58.600 quantified it for myself, but, um, I think it's non negligible. I mean, it's very hard for me to

00:05:05.120 imagine it actually occurring in the, in the, in the most, um, spectacularly bad way of, you know,

00:05:11.520 a very fast takeoff, you know, an intelligence explosion that ruins everything almost immediately,

00:05:16.100 but, you know, fast or slow, uh, I think it's well worth worrying about because I don't think the

00:05:21.720 probability is tiny. I mean, I, you know, I would put it in double digits. I don't know what those

00:05:26.800 double digits are, but it's, I wouldn't put it in single digits given the kind of the logic of the

00:05:31.220 situation. I think we're kind of in the same place. Yeah. I mean, people always talk about,

00:05:35.740 you know, you have a benevolent, super intelligent AI and you tell it to make paperclips and it

00:05:39.500 destroys the world and turns us all into paperclips. But there's another, another vision of,

00:05:43.800 of malevolent AI I've been thinking about with the rise of, um, what's it called? Mech Hitler. 0.83

00:05:48.200 Uh-huh. Yeah. Mecha Hitler. Yeah. Mecha Hitler. You know, so, you know, here's a simpler scenario. 0.68

00:05:55.000 Some deranged billionaire creates an AI that fashions itself on Hitler to defend, 0.80

00:06:00.960 the Trump defense department purchases it and gets it to, connects it to all of his weaponry

00:06:05.840 systems and, uh, hijinks and zoo. How could you come up with such an outlandish scenario that could

00:06:11.040 never happen? There's just no way. It's a bizarre fantasy. And by the way, it also makes porn.

00:06:15.220 That's right. Yeah. So just, just to get to the trifecta. Yeah. Um, so anyway, I, I'm like a lot 0.95

00:06:20.720 of people, I, I worry about that. I, I also find at the same time, I find AI an increasingly

00:06:26.080 indispensable part of my intellectual life. I, um, you know, I, I, I have a question,

00:06:31.040 I got it, but, but not, not just a specific, I use it as a substitute for Google. I, you know,

00:06:35.600 say, you know, where's a good Indonesian restaurant in my neighborhood and, you know,

00:06:39.400 how do you convert these euros into dollars? But, but I also have a question like, I don't know,

00:06:44.640 I'm, I got into an argument with somebody about revenge. So what is the cross-cultural evidence for,

00:06:49.320 uh, revenge being a universal and who would argue against that?

00:06:52.080 And three seconds later, boom, bunch of papers, books, thoughtful discussion,

00:06:57.040 thoughtful argument mixed in our hallucinations. Occasionally I find it cites a paper written by

00:07:02.160 me that I've never written, but it's astonishing. I've been credited with things. Yeah. Yeah.

00:07:07.880 It's told me I've interviewed people I've never interviewed and it's amazingly apologetic,

00:07:12.180 uh, when you correct it, but, um, I'm so sorry. Yes, you are totally right. Let me now give you

00:07:18.360 citations of papers that actually exist. Yeah. In your working day, when you, when you write,

00:07:23.160 when you prepare for interviews, how much do you use it? Well, I've just started experimenting with

00:07:27.860 it in, in a way that's, um, probably not the usual use case. So we have, we, we have fed everything I've

00:07:35.700 written and everything I've said on the podcast into chat GPT, right? Yeah. Yeah. So, so we have,

00:07:41.980 well, actually we have two things. We have, um, we've created a chat bot that is me that's,

00:07:47.160 that's model agnostic. So it can be run on chat GPT or, or a Claude or whatever the best model is.

00:07:51.660 We can swap, you can swap in whatever model seems best. But so this is like at the, you know,

00:07:56.560 a layer above, uh, at the system prompt level. And it has, again, access to everything. It's

00:08:03.540 something like 12 million words of me. Right. So it's a lot is, you know, that's, that would be a

00:08:08.400 lot of books. We've just begun playing with this thing, but it's, um, it's impressive because it also is,

00:08:15.180 it's using a professional voice clone. So it sounds like me and it's every bit as monotonous

00:08:20.780 as me and it's delivery. I mean, so I'm, I'm almost tailor-made to be cloned because I already

00:08:25.800 speak like a robot. Must be agonizing to listen to sound. It is, but it hallucinates and it's,

00:08:31.100 it's capable of being weird. So I don't know that we're, we're ever going to unleash this thing on

00:08:35.260 the world, but it's, um, it's interesting because it's like, so even having access to every episode of

00:08:41.280 my podcast, it still will hallucinate an interview that never happened. You know, it'll still tell

00:08:46.920 me that I interviewed somebody that I never interviewed. And so it's, that part's still

00:08:51.320 strange, but presumably the, um, you know, this is as bad as it'll ever be. And the general models

00:08:56.340 will get better and better. One imagines. So we're, we're looking at each other on video and I imagine

00:09:02.180 it doesn't do video yet, but if we were talking on the phone or without video, would I, um, be able

00:09:07.920 to tell quickly that I was talking to an AI and not to you? Uh, only because it would, uh, be able

00:09:13.700 to produce, uh, far more, uh, coherent and comprehensive responses to any question. I mean,

00:09:19.200 if you said, cause it's, because it's hooked up to whatever the best LLM is at the moment, you know,

00:09:24.680 if you said, give me 17 points as to the cause of, of the great depression, it would give you exactly

00:09:30.980 17 points detailing the cause of the great depression. And I, and I could not do that. So you would,

00:09:35.680 it would fail the Turing test as all these LLMs do by passing it so spectacularly and instantaneously.

00:09:43.300 Yeah. I mean, that actually, that's a surprise. I want to ask you about that. That's a surprise

00:09:46.580 for me, how not a thing the Turing test turned out to be. It's like the Turing test was the staple

00:09:54.520 of our, of, you know, the cognitive science literature and just our, our imaginings in

00:10:01.340 advance of credible AI. We just thought, okay, there's going to be this moment where we

00:10:05.660 are just not going to be able to tell whether it's a human or whether it's a bot. And that's

00:10:10.300 going to be somehow philosophically important and culturally interesting. But, you know, overnight

00:10:17.680 we were given LLMs that fail the Turing test because of how well they pass it. Yeah. And

00:10:23.220 this is no longer a thing. It's like, it was never a Turing test moment that I caught.

00:10:27.680 All of a sudden you and I, we have, I have a super intelligent being I could talk to on

00:10:32.000 my iPhone and I'll be honest. And I think, I think other psychologists should be honest

00:10:36.120 about it. If you had asked me a month before this thing came out, how far away we were from

00:10:40.880 such a machine, I would say 10, 20, 30 years, maybe a hundred years. Right. And now we have

00:10:45.820 it. Now we have a machine we could talk to and sounds like a person and except like you

00:10:50.360 say, it's just a lot smarter. Yeah. And it is mind boggling. It's, I mean, it's an interesting

00:10:55.640 psychological fact, how quickly we get used to it. It's as if, you know, aliens landed,

00:11:01.020 you know, next to the Washington monument and now they walk among us. Oh yeah. Well,

00:11:05.080 that's the way things go. Yeah. Oh, you develop teleporters. Now we got teleporters and we

00:11:10.180 just, we just take it for granted now. Yeah. Well, so now what are your thoughts

00:11:14.600 about the implications, you know, psychological and otherwise of, of AI companionship? I mean,

00:11:20.560 what is, so at the time we're recording this, there's been recently in the, in the news

00:11:24.740 stories of AI induced psychosis. I mean, people get led down the primrose path of their delusion

00:11:31.620 by this amazingly sycophantic AI that, that just encourages them in their Messiah complex or whatever

00:11:37.840 flavor it is. And I think literally an hour before we came on here, I saw an article about

00:11:46.060 chat GPT, um, encouraging people to, uh, pursue various satanic rituals and telling them how to do a

00:11:52.760 proper blood offering that entailed slitting their wrists. And, uh, as one does, uh, in the presence

00:11:58.820 of a super intelligence, I know you just, you just wrote a piece in the, in the New Yorker that people

00:12:03.640 should read on this, but give me your sense of, of, uh, what we're on the cusp of here.

00:12:08.640 I have a, I have a mild form of that delusion in that I think every one of my sub stack drafts

00:12:14.280 is brilliant. I'm told is just, you know, Paul, you have outdone yourself. This is sensitive,

00:12:18.640 humane as always with you. And no matter what I tell it to, I say, you don't have to suck up to

00:12:23.180 me so much, a little bit, but not so. It just, and now I kind of believe that I'm much smarter 0.94

00:12:28.060 than I used to be because I have somebody very smart telling me what, what I, my, my article is

00:12:33.300 kind of nuanced in that I argue two things. One thing is there's a lot of lonely people in the world

00:12:38.760 and a lot of people suffer from loneliness and particularly old people, depending on how you count it,

00:12:44.280 you know, under some surveys about half of people over 65 say they're lonely. And then you get to

00:12:50.180 people in like a nursing home, maybe they have dementia, maybe they have some sort of problem

00:12:54.280 that makes them really difficult to talk with. And maybe they don't have doting grandchildren

00:12:59.060 surrounding them every hour of the day, maybe they don't have any family at all. And maybe they're

00:13:02.840 not millionaires, so they can't afford to pay some horse mo to listen to them. And if chat GPT or 0.58

00:13:09.440 Claude or one of his AI companions could make their lives happier, make them feel loved,

00:13:13.520 one that are respected, that's, that's nothing but good. I, I'm, I, you know, I think it,

00:13:19.420 in some ways it's like powerful painkillers are, are powerful opiates, which is, I, I'm not sure

00:13:24.960 what, I don't think 15 year olds should get them, but, but somebody who's 90 in a lot of pain,

00:13:29.700 sure, lay it on. And I feel the same way with this. So that's the, that's the pro side.

00:13:34.620 The con side is I am worried and you're, you're touching on it was this illusion talk. I'm worried

00:13:39.580 about the long-term effects of these syncopathic sucking up AIs where every joke you make is 0.96

00:13:47.640 hilarious. Every story you tell is interesting. You know, I mean, the way I put it is if I ever

00:13:52.680 ask, am I the asshole? The answer is, you know, a firm, no, not you, you're the asshole. 1.00

00:13:57.280 Yeah. And I think I'm, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm an evolutionary theorist through and through and 1.00

00:14:02.280 loneliness is awful, but loneliness is a valuable signal. It's a signal that you're messing up.

00:14:07.160 It's a signal that says, you got to get out of your house. You got to talk to people. You got to,

00:14:11.520 you know, got to open up the apps. You got to say yes, yes to the brunch invitations. And if you're

00:14:16.040 lonely, when you interact with people, you feel not understood, not respect, not love, you got to up

00:14:21.520 your game. It's a signal. And like a lot of signals, like pain, sometimes there's a signal

00:14:26.660 that where people are in a situation where it's not going to do many good, but often for the rest

00:14:31.220 of us, it's a signal that makes us better. Yeah. I think I'd be happier if I could shut off.

00:14:35.840 I generally as a teenager, I'd be happier if I could shut off the switch of loneliness and

00:14:39.560 embarrassment, shame and all of those things, but they're useful. And so the second part of the

00:14:46.060 article argues that continuous exposure to these AI companions could have a negative effect because

00:14:51.960 while for long saying you're not going to want to talk to people who are far less positive than

00:14:57.800 AIs. And for another, when you do talk to them, you have not been socially entrained to do so 1.00

00:15:02.440 properly. Yeah. It's interesting. So, so I believe in the, the dementia case aside me, I totally agree

00:15:08.580 with you that that is a very strongly paternalistic moment where you, anything that helps is fine.

00:15:14.000 It doesn't matter that it's imaginary or that it's, that it's encouraging of delusion. I mean,

00:15:18.980 this, we're talking about somebody with dementia, but so just imagine in the, the normal, healthy

00:15:24.860 case of people who just get enraptured by increasingly compelling relationships with AI. I mean, you can

00:15:31.780 imagine, so right now we've got chatbots that are still fairly wonky. They hallucinate. They're

00:15:37.500 obviously sycophantic, but I just imagine it gets to the place where, I mean, forget about Westworld and

00:15:43.360 perfectly humanoid robots, but very shortly, I mean, it might already exist in some quarters

00:15:49.760 already. We're going to have video avatars, you know, it's like a zoom call with an AI that is

00:15:56.760 going to be out of the uncanny valley. I would imagine immediately. I mean, I've seen some of

00:16:00.800 this, the video products, which, um, uh, you know, like a sci-fi movie trailers, which are,

00:16:07.580 they don't, they don't look perfectly photorealistic, but they're, they're getting close. And you can

00:16:11.760 imagine six months from now, it's just going to look like a gorgeous actor or actress talking to

00:16:16.320 you. That's going to be, imagine that becomes your assistant who knows everything about you. 1.00

00:16:22.320 Uh, he or she has read all your email and kept your schedule and is advising you and helping you

00:16:27.420 write your books, et cetera, and not making errors and seeming increasingly indistinguishable from just a

00:16:38.320 super intelligent locus of conscious life, right? I mean, it might even seem, it might even claim to be

00:16:43.700 conscious if we build it that way. And I mean, let's, let's, let's just stipulate that for at least

00:16:49.780 for this part of the conversation, that it won't be conscious, right? That this is all an illusion,

00:16:53.680 right? It's just a, it's no more conscious than your, than your iPad is currently. And yet it, it becomes

00:17:00.060 such a powerful illusion that people just, most people, I mean, the people, I guess philosophers

00:17:06.940 of mind might still be clinging to their agnosticism or skepticism by their, their fingernails, but most

00:17:13.840 people will just get lulled into the presumption of a relationship with this thing. And the truth is

00:17:20.020 it could become the most important relationship many people have. Again, it could, it's so useful,

00:17:25.740 so knowledgeable, always present, right? They might spend six hours a day talking to their

00:17:31.460 assistant. And what does it mean if they spend years like that, basically just gazing into a,

00:17:40.620 a fun house mirror of fake cognition and fake relationship?

00:17:46.660 Yeah. We've seen, I mean, I'm a believer that sometimes the best philosophy, our movies do

00:17:51.480 excellent philosophy and the movie her came out, I think in 2013 is an example of this guy, you know,

00:17:58.820 lonely guy, normal, lonely guy, but, uh, gets connected an AI assistant named Samantha played 0.98

00:18:04.880 by Scarlett Johansson and falls in love with her. And she does all of, she is the first thing she says

00:18:10.640 to him. And what a, what a meet cute is I see you have like 3000 emails. I haven't been answered.

00:18:16.220 You want me to answer them all for you?

00:18:17.480 Yeah. I fell in love with her there, but, but, you know, but the thing is you're watching a movie

00:18:23.560 and you're listening to her talk to him and you fall in love with her too. I think we've evolved

00:18:29.440 in a world where when somebody talks to you and, and, and acts normal and gives you, and has,

00:18:34.380 and seems to have emotions, you assume there's a consciousness behind it. You know, evolution has

00:18:38.440 not prepared us for these, you know, extraordinary fakes, these extraordinary, you know, golems that, 1.00

00:18:44.780 that, that, that, that elude all of the behavior associated with consciousness and don't have it.

00:18:49.840 So, so we will, we will think of it as conscious. There will be some, some, you know, philosophers

00:18:54.800 who insist that they're not conscious, but, but even they will, you know, sneak back from their,

00:19:01.480 from their classes. And then in the middle of the night, you know, turn on their, their phones

00:19:05.320 and start saying, you know, I'm lonely, let's talk. Yeah. And then the effects of it. Well,

00:19:09.720 one effect is real people can't give you that, you know, married, very happily married, but

00:19:17.380 sometimes my wife forgets about things that I told her. And sometimes she doesn't want to hear my long

00:19:22.940 boring story. She wants to tell her story instead. And sometimes it's three in the morning and I could

00:19:27.780 shake her away because I have this really interesting idea I want to share, but maybe that's

00:19:31.540 not for the best. She'll be grumpy at me. And because the thing is, she's a person. And so she has

00:19:37.160 her own set of priorities and interests. So too of all my friends, they're just people and they have

00:19:43.080 other priorities in her life besides me. Now, in some way, this is, I think what makes when you

00:19:50.040 reflect upon it, the AI companion have less value, you know, here you and I are. And what that means

00:19:55.400 is that you decided to take your time to talk to me and I decide to take my time to talk to you.

00:19:59.920 And that's a value. When I switch on my lamp, I don't feel, oh my gosh, this is great. It decided

00:20:04.820 to light up for me. It didn't have a choice at all. The AI has no choice at all. So I think in

00:20:09.460 some part of our mind, we realize there's a lot less value here. But I do think in the end,

00:20:17.100 the scenario you paint is going to become very compelling and real people are going to fall

00:20:21.640 short. And it's not clear what to do with that. Now, there's something I think you've just come up

00:20:29.040 with a fairly brilliant product update to some future AI companion, which is a kind of Pavlovian

00:20:35.920 reinforcement schedule of attention where it's like the AI could say, listen, I want you to think

00:20:43.000 a little bit more about this topic and get back to me because you're really not up to talking about

00:20:48.780 it right now. You know, come back tomorrow, right? And that would be an interesting experience to have

00:20:55.800 with your AI that you have subscribed to. I've wondered that. Like you asked the AI a question

00:21:00.840 that says, is that really like a good question? Does it seem like a question you couldn't just

00:21:04.860 figure out just by thinking for a minute? I know everything. That's really what you want to ask me?

00:21:10.320 Is that don't you have something deeper? You were talking to a super intelligent, you know,

00:21:15.460 God and you want to know how to end a limerick. Right. Really? Yeah. I would wonder if these things,

00:21:22.860 how people would react if these things came with dials, you know, obviously not maybe a big physical

00:21:28.300 dial, you want a big physical dial and the dial is pushback. So when it's set at zero, it's just

00:21:35.080 everything you say is wonderful and just, and, but I think we do want some pushback. Now, I think in

00:21:43.000 some way we really want less pushback than we say we do. And it's this way of real people too. So

00:21:48.500 everybody says, yeah, Oh, I like when people, people argue with me. I like when people call

00:21:52.020 me out on my bullshit. But what we really mean is we want people to push back a little bit and then 0.99

00:21:56.800 say, ah, you convinced me, you know, you, you really showed me or, you know, I thought, I thought

00:22:01.780 you were full of it, but, but now upon reflection, you've really out argued me. We want them to fight

00:22:07.100 and then, and then acquiesce. But, but I turned the dial even further. We'll say, you know, we've been

00:22:13.180 talking about this for a long time. I feel you are not very smart. You're just not getting, 0.92

00:22:16.860 I'm going to take a little break and you, you, you mull over your stupidity. Yeah. 1.00

00:22:21.140 Paltry human. I don't know. Recalcitrant style. That's a, that's what we could build in. All

00:22:27.360 right. We're going to, I feel this could be the worst business. We're going to get rich,

00:22:30.260 Paul. This is with AI that calls you on your bullshit. That's, that's really the business 1.00

00:22:35.460 they do this century. But so what are we to think about this prospect of, of spending more

00:22:43.940 and more time in dialogue under the sway of a pervasive illusion of relationship, wherein

00:22:50.560 there is actually no relationship because there's nothing that it's like to be

00:22:54.340 chat GPT-6 talking to us perfectly. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation,

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - July 25, 2025

#427 — AI Friends & Enemies

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