00:05:23.380So the positive thing is it leads us into some sort of post-scarcity world.
00:05:27.200You know, a year from now, it solves Alzheimer's.
00:05:30.640Two years from now, it gives us limitless energy.
00:05:32.840Three years, it brings upon a peaceful world government and teaches us about world peace.
00:05:36.720The bad side is if it doesn't kill us all, it just takes all of our jobs.
00:05:40.640you know takes over to jobs you know civil unrest war chaos destruction and you know if before ai
00:05:50.120i would think well you know my daughter i try to get her to go to college and and become some sort
00:05:54.760of professional and maybe maybe in the family business she becomes a scholar of some sort
00:05:58.880i don't know i don't know what jobs will be there you what do you think well given that your daughter
00:06:04.440is only four and a half months old that this is uh there i think there really is no way to
00:06:09.920guess uh what the the world is going to be like in in 17 and a half years i mean it's just
00:06:16.520you know whether college is going to be a thing but it's harder but it's harder right but it's
00:06:20.280harder now so so my boys watching the 1990s well okay you set up college funds you know you have
00:06:25.520just a general direction and you never know but that's the general idea but here i feel
00:06:30.500it's different. Yeah. No, there's an acceleration of cultural change. There's no question.
00:06:35.940So let's kind of move through those various possibilities. But before we kind of follow
00:06:41.240each branch, what has most surprised you about AI in recent years? I mean, it sounds like you
00:06:48.000didn't foresee somehow, like many of us didn't foresee just how quick the changes would be.
00:06:53.520And I mean, for me, it's one thing that's been surprising is just how quickly we accommodate to change and are no longer surprised by it.
00:07:03.140I mean, you know, it's like I am for me that the landmark here or the or the fake landmark, I mean, the mirage of sorts was expecting the Turing test would be a thing.
00:07:13.220And when the Turing test was passed, uh, and passed so well that it was then failed because, you know, obviously this, you know, this couldn't be a person who's given me exactly 400 words on any topic I want within three seconds.
00:07:24.440I mean, it was just amazing to have thought that the passing the Turing test would be this culturally salient, psychologically, you know, even destabilizing, uh, encounter with the uncanny.
00:07:37.520And yet, no, it's just like having a calculator or something.
00:07:40.840I mean, it's like, there's just no, like there's, of course, it was nothing happened when the
00:08:05.980and you know well and i'm thinking you're talking to a super intelligent machine that can that can
00:08:12.200have deep enriching conversation with any aspect of your life that could give you personally that
00:08:17.740could mimic a therapist a companion and you know why do you marvel at it more so you know i'm a
00:08:24.260psychologist i wrote i wrote i wrote a book called psych which review all of psychology and it got
00:08:29.420published in 2023 and the one part i like to change is i talk a little bit about ai isn't ai
00:08:34.280impressive but of course it can't have a conversation like people it can't you know
00:08:38.260there's all these things basic things it can't do and then chat came out yeah and then and did it
00:08:43.460all and then it got better and better and better and better and you're right that one of the weird
00:08:49.100thing is how what how quickly we got used to it that that that really i can pick up my phone set
00:08:56.340it to voice mode and have a conversation with an artificial being that is i don't have to talk to
00:09:01.420it in code. I don't have to use a programming language. I get life advice from it. There are
00:09:07.340people who, and we could talk about this, I find it very interesting, people who have friends,
00:09:12.900relationships, partners who are artificial beings. And although I'm not tempted that way,
00:09:18.720it's not madness because they sound like people and we created them.
00:09:23.500Yeah. I noticed that I'm not engaging it in voice mode. And I think I'm not doing that for a reason.
00:09:29.560I think this is something you and I spoke about, I think, several times, and we wrote an op-ed about it for the New York Times in response to the series Westworld, where we argued that Westworld was functionally impossible because a theme park where you get to rape and kill Dolores, I mean, this is going to act like a bug light for psychopaths.
00:09:53.360There's no way a psychologically normal person can go spend a weekend like that and then come home to wife and family and think normal thoughts about themselves or have the people who know what they were up to think normal thoughts about them.
00:10:05.420I mean, people would begin to treat you as deviant if you wanted to spend your time that way because this is just the consequence of getting out of the uncanny valley and being in the presence of a true human simulacrum and acting like a psychopath there.
00:10:19.820So I feel like there's something worth considering around this issue of losing sight of whether
00:10:28.280or not it's an even interesting question to wonder whether AI is conscious.
00:10:33.520Many people are speculating about AI consciousness now and, you know, asking, you know, what
00:11:15.520We've been wired up to take things that look like people and treat them as people.
00:11:18.820So that's half of it. Half of it might be that even if it's not even close to conscious, we can't help but treat it as such. And that's going to open up a whole lot of things.
00:11:28.180The other half of it, and this is actually, there's a wonderful paper by Maddie Wilkes, professor at University of Edinburgh, and she was my postdoc for a while. We're actually writing something up on this. But she makes the following argument. It's just very interesting.
00:11:42.280A lot of people seem to think that, well, if we were to discover that as conscious, we would then treat it kindly, we can't enslave it, it has to have rights, we can't torture it, and so on.
00:11:52.880She argues this is wrong, because actually we know that non-human animals feel pain, suffer, have some degree of cognitive sophistication.
00:12:00.040Yeah, we torture and eat them all the time.
00:12:01.740And so it shows that we could think of something as conscious and yet treat it horribly.0.74
00:12:07.860And so that's not what's going to save the AIs.
00:12:10.200The consciousness isn't what it's going to save.
00:12:12.280except, I mean, presumably, I mean, we're less and less comfortable with that not perfectly
00:12:18.460expanded circle of moral concern. And the circle has definitely expanded. It expands first to
00:12:24.600things that are most like us, right? So like, obviously, mistreating chimpanzees is something0.71
00:12:31.320that exactly nobody is for at this point. And, you know, the depth of our concern diminishes
00:12:38.520from there. But in the presence of AI that is smarter than us, that is more articulate than us,
00:12:44.780that we'll be able to argue better than we can around the ethics of all of this and which,
00:12:50.980you know, at this point will seem conscious to us and may even claim to be conscious.
00:12:55.300I feel like it's suddenly going to be, I mean, they'll be standing right in the center of the
00:13:00.120circle with us insofar as we believe that there's something that it's like to be them.
00:13:05.500I think that's right, but I don't think that the linguistic and cognitive skills are enough.
00:13:12.980So, you know, my favorite movie when thinking about AI is her.
00:16:45.380I mean, part of the issue which has engaged a lot of people is the sycophancy, the sucking up, which is, I think, part of why you get this effect, which is it's very hard for it not to want to give you what you want.
00:16:56.380So you ask for something and it just can't say, I got to disappoint you, man.
00:16:59.220There's nothing that doesn't have a letter A.
00:17:21.680I don't get as much love as you, maybe.
00:17:23.740I just kind of, you know, I kind of liked it telling me how smart I was and how good my questions were.
00:17:29.460But I mean, I noticed that I feel the need to be, I mean, this has widely been remarked upon.
00:17:35.520You know, like virtually everyone else, I say things like, you know, please, you know, show me this, right? Like, so dropping the, those kind of courtesies seems wrong, not because, and I, I really have zero concern that the LLMs are currently conscious, but again, it, it seems like a, um, a violation of social norms that I don't want to encourage in myself.
00:18:00.460And at a certain point that would, these are, it's just all of our adherence to these norms
00:18:05.160are going to be totally hijacked by the technology.
00:18:07.100And we're just going to feel like we're talking to persons.
00:22:27.280You don't think we're going to lose sight of that?
00:22:30.200And because what you're basically saying is that the value of attention on some level is in its scarcity.
00:22:36.220I mean, the value of really anything is in its scarcity.
00:22:39.200and the infinite supply of AI attention is going to undermine the sense that the attention
00:22:46.680matters when it's aimed at you. Don't you think that's yet another thing we might lose sight of?
00:22:52.400I think we're probably wired up for that scarcity to matter to us, but we might lose sight of the0.99
00:22:59.160fact that AIs work differently. We might delude ourselves or be deluded into thinking that sort0.99
00:23:05.100the scarcity applies there's a scene in the movie her i'm going to forget the exact numbers
00:23:09.560where our main character is realizing there's something gone wrong with his relation to the
00:23:13.680chatbot everybody remembers the scene and he sits down he says how many people are you talking to
00:23:18.500right now as you talk to me and she says in her beautiful voice why do you ask that he said i
00:23:23.900want to know and she says something like 3 812 and then he says how many people are you in love
00:23:30.260with? And he says, 645. And he's like shocked. But there's of course no limit. They are of course
00:23:40.160finite beings as a matter of principle, but practically they're not finite at all. And this
00:23:45.900intimate conversation I'm having with Chet, at the same time, it's having a million other
00:23:50.360conversations. I have no value to it. But so demattering, you're right. It's important to us,
00:23:57.020but it may be an illusion. But let me give the case for AIs. I think there's a case for and a
00:24:02.080case against it. And I think it's stupid to ignore either side of it. Loneliness is terrible.0.98
00:24:08.160Loneliness is just terrible. I'm not going to give you made up statistics about it equal to
00:24:12.620pack a day of cigarettes or being obese or whatever, but it messes up your body, but it
00:24:16.740messes up your soul. It is a terrible form of suffering. It's one reason why solitary confinement
00:24:21.860It should be viewed as a form of torture.
00:24:24.060It is just to be, and just, you know, you think of how nice it is to be with people you love, who care about you, respect you, who matter to you and you matter to them.
00:24:33.340And then imagine taking that all away, you know.
00:24:36.180I mean, I don't want to get all incel-like, but I'd much rather lose all my money than lose all my social connections with the people I love.
00:24:43.440I'd much rather be poor with people who think I'm terrific and love me than be a trillionaire
00:24:50.000and with nothing but sycophantic yes-men and no real contact.1.00
00:24:55.400Then you add to this that there are a lot of people, I'm thinking now of elderly people,
00:24:59.340who are in institutions who have no, they go day and night with nobody to talk to.
00:25:04.500They've either outlived or were family and friends or they don't want to see them.
00:25:08.900maybe they suffer from dementia or personality disorder to make an honest to god difficult to
00:25:13.560talk to and there's not enough money in the world to pay people to to to spend time so if if something
00:25:18.560like some future version of chad or claude or gemini could come in and and ease the pain of
00:25:25.000the loneliness of these people and i think it'd be a godsend i think it'd be wonderful it'd be a
00:25:30.880a cure for a terrible disease so that's that's the the plus side what do you what do you think
00:25:35.160the plus side. Well, as a measure of how far we've come with AI, I remember, and it's not that long
00:25:39.940ago, when the product for that situation, what is the thing you're going to deliver to the old age
00:25:47.840home to keep some isolated elderly person company? It was something like a, it was effectively a
00:25:54.300stuffed animal. I think it was like a baby seal or something that just did nothing but like blink
00:25:59.000its eyes and vibrate or, I mean, it was just the most, and I mean, now you literally have an
00:26:05.020omniscient conversationalist, you know, who occasionally hallucinates that you can turn
00:26:11.060loose ad infinitum in that situation. It's quite amazing. That's right. And, you know, and they
00:26:16.920have to be, the interface has to be done so that elderly people, maybe some of diminished capacities
00:26:22.000could use it, but, you know, imagine. I think you're right about the Zoom call. The Zoom call
00:26:26.820got to be like a month away members can hear the full conversation by subscribing at samharris.org
00:26:32.980subscribers get a private rss feed you can use with your favorite podcast player imagine a child
00:26:38.580or a teenager who spends their days with a chatbot and it's always you know it never it never it never
00:26:47.060tries to wait for you to tell us tell you finish telling your story so it could tell their story
00:26:51.460never gets bored it never needs an apology it never says hey that was inappropriate and
00:26:58.340i i think they're going to have a real corrosive effect all this time in dreamland all this time
00:27:03.380conversing with chatbots could leave you unable to interact with real people