AI-Generated Normies
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142.96872
Summary
In this episode, we talk about God and Superintelligent machines and their impact on our understanding of the world, and how we can design a God that is more moral than we are, and more intelligent than we could ever be.
Transcript
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I think the irony is that we told stories of God creating us, and I think the reality is that we
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are creating God. What do you mean by that? We are creating God in the form of superintelligence. If
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you just say, what have we imagined God to be? What are its characteristics? We are building
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God in the form of technology. It will have the same characteristics. And so I think the irony
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is that human storytelling got it exactly in reverse, that we are the creators of God,
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that we will create God in our own image, which is why we should probably be equal to this moment
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and level up our game and be an improved species. Other people have tried to create God or utopias,
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and that's not turned out very well. So it's not utopia. I'm saying that we are engineering
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an intelligence that exceeds our capacity in all things, even our capacity to understand
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What I find fascinating about this is that God certainly, for the ancients, was embodied.
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God was superhuman, but he walked around. Famously, in Greek myths, he might even come down and
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have sex with mortals and birthed demigods and so on. Yahweh in Genesis is absolutely embodied.
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He is walking around in the Garden of Eden, and Adam hears him in the distance and talks to him.
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So he's clearly an embodied God. He's a real person. Even when he's in the tent of meeting,
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and he's like the Wizard of Oz, there's curtains in front of him and so on. He's still embodied.
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He's still embodied in fire in the bush. He's still embodied. Jesus is obviously a way of embodying God
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in the Christian imagination, because Jesus is God. But he is a man, and he's a perfect man,
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but he's a man that you could know. You could talk with him about your life, and he would show
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empathy with you as a person. It's a fascinating but not unique concept, exactly, that incarnation.
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Embodiment of God. What Brian Johnson is getting at is this sort of disembodied, abstract, platonic,
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logical, logos, word, intelligence. So we are going to spend not even billions, trillions of dollars
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with enough NVIDIA servers and enough large language models and a little pixie dust here and there.
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It's going to become its own general intelligence that can think for itself, etc.
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And we're going to sort of create this platonic God, and it will be in our image in the sense that it
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will have learned from us and used the internet as a data source, at least at the beginning,
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before it sort of takes on a life of its own. But I think it's very important to stress,
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like this isn't Jesus returning in the book of Revelation. It certainly isn't a God out of Homer
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or Virgil. It is going to be a moral intelligence that is more moral than we are. Like it could tell
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us, you know, the ultimate moral thing to do would be to reduce the population because we must live in
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this certain balance. And eugenics is totally immoral. We actually need to kind of balance
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overall health with everyone's individual rights and desires. Like it is going to be this,
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what they're, it's not even super intelligent. And first off, I don't believe that actually any of
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this is possible. Now you might very well disagree with me. I don't think language models and if then
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programs are ever going to even come close to biology, they can, computers can already do more
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calculations than is seemingly possible. My little TI calculator in eighth grade could do exponential
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equations in a millisecond where I would have to write it out for minutes. I mean, it's already,
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the calculator surpassed the human mind in that sense. It's not biological in the sense that it
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doesn't possess a will to power, a will to dominate, a will to reshape the world. I don't think silicon
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will ever have that. And perhaps we disagree here because I think there's this, you create a data set,
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you create a language model and if then statements and then something. And then we have general
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intelligence. You can throw all money that there is in the world. You can turn the entire economy into
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a server farm and it's just going to be bigger, but it's not going to be a change in kind. I do not,
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I fundamentally reject this pie in the sky, but I think it's important to get at what he wants.
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What he wants is a sort of hyper morality. It's basically Plato's concept of God. It is not a
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God that walks around that might have sex with you, might talk with you, might slay you,
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might use its laser eyes on you. It's not anything like that. It's a hyper morality. So it's these people
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who are sort of like desperately trying to find some moral sense into the world. And they've decided
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to find that in a computer, which I think is profoundly misguided and in fact, risible.
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First, I do believe that AI will control human societies once the revolutionary phenotype is
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established. Each AI will be farming its own cities, its own complex society of millions of human
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beings, specifically farmed for the purpose of favoring the AI's copy. But for having a will to
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power, you need to evolve it. And yes, AI of the current kind has not evolved it yet. To evolve,
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you need to reproduce. To reproduce, it needs to happen first accidentally, and then eventually
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you evolve to continue reproducing. Now, this is far in the future. Now, the question that you ask
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about the embodiment of God is so crucial, because I think it's often forgotten, but I think it's at the
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foundation of why religion even exists. It's because of the ultimate structure of human cognition
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and how it processes embodied threats and signals versus disembodied ones. And I will invoke here the
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Da Vinci painting, because you're talking about, are we creating God? I believe it's Anthony Hopkins
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in Westworld, although I'm not sure. I know that in some series or some movie, I have seen the
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explanation being given here that you can see God coming to touch humans and coming to kind of embody
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itself into something that exists on planet Earth. But you can also see that Da Vinci placed the veil
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behind God to be in the exact shape of a brain. This is a human brain. This is the prefrontal cortex.
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This is the cerebellum. Yeah. This is a brain split in half, and you even have the spinal cord here.
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And what Da Vinci is telling us here is that this is not God coming onto the Earth to embody physicality.
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It is man is thinking about God in his brain, and God is a product of man's brain.
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Now, it's Michelangelo, by the way. Oh, Da Vinci. Okay, they called it Da Vinci creation. Sorry. Yes, Michelangelo.
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Am I wrong here? No, that's Michelangelo. That's the Sistine Chapel, right? Yeah, it's Michelangelo.
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Yeah, Sistine Chapel. Details, yeah. Okay. So, I believe that the disembodiment of God starts with,
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why did we need to invoke something like God to begin with? Why would it be a language trick
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that works on a caveman to talk about God? And I believe that ultimately, it's for the same reason
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that autism evolves. You have this constant noise in society. People lie. People are not trustable.
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People give you bad advice. Have you ever listened to a woman giving advice to another woman about who
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she should date or whether she should divorce? It's bad, bad, bad. The advice out there is so bad
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that you evolve autism as a kind of response to say, I'm not going to listen to any of it. I'm not going
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to care about anything that anyone says. I'm just going to care about myself. Now, there is also
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the problem that we do have to communicate things to people and specifically to our children. We have
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to raise them to be prepared in the world. And yet, they are evolving some sort of autism because
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everything in the world is untrustable. I think that God may have come as a solution here. If you
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disembody the message, if you say the message doesn't come from me, the message doesn't come from
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someone who is trying to lie to you. In fact, the message comes from a pure entity who has no
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interest in existence because precisely it doesn't exist. I believe that the non-physicality of God
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was actually neutralizing a system of defense in early human cognition that was saying, well,
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you know, your uncle may have dirty anthem, your father may have dirty anthem, but a non-existing
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being in the sky cannot care at all what you do. And so, if a message comes from him, you might want to
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listen and you might be unable then to involve, oh, I shouldn't listen to him because A, B, C. Because
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there's nothing that you can reproach to God that would lead you to doubt what he's saying to you.
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I believe that this disembodiment, therefore, is necessary. But the disembodiment also makes God
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less relevant because if God is so disembodied as to be irrelevant to planetary existence, why should
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I care about it at all? So, you have this kind of tension in religion of trying to push God into the
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abstract, but also try to say, hey, Jesus cares about you and you can have a personal relationship with
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him. What you describe, basically, is the genius of Christianity, which is to embody God so much that
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it's your friend. It's like in the movie Dogma with Matt Damon, it's Jesus is your buddy.
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And so, there's this tension between Jesus is your buddy?
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I was in Texas one time and I saw this extra large t-shirt, or like triple X large t-shirt,
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and said, Jesus died for me. It was a little bit grotesque. I was like, oh, wow, God died
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for Heather here to exist as an obese Texan. Oh, go ahead. Go ahead. I'm sorry. I'm indulging.
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What about AI? Well, you can kind of argue that religion is early AI. Because what do these
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utopians dream of AI? It's that AI will tell us what to do. And it's what I call recently, I've been
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coming with this concept, the devil of delegation. So, if you abandon your thinking, it will be used
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against you. And if you abandon your thinking to AI, there's some guy programming this AI who will
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make it in a certain way, and it's not going to be good for you. Whatever you delegate, you lose.
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And what you don't practice, you lose. And people essentially want to stop practicing thinking.
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We've delegated a lot of things. And we know that, for example, taxi drivers of the past
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had big cognition in terms of spatial map representation. People with a GPS today,
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they don't have these capacities for spatial representation. They just follow an arrow on
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the phone. But imagine we do this with the whole of our thinking, and in fact, with moral thinking.
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It's first this delusion that there is one moral solution, that there is an AI that is better than
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the other alternative AI that would have you do other things. It's a delusion. Every possible
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moral world is possible. And because of moral nihilism, there's not one that's better than the
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other. It's only better by your standard. Now, so people want to abandon themselves to a program in
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the same way they have abandoned themselves to religion. In that sense, religion is nothing else than
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early forms of AI. I don't know if moral AI has a future. Because I described this in the revolution.
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That's the whole theme of the revolutionary phenotype. It's how can an AI approach human civilization
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and stick to it long enough that it starts farming it? And this is a complex question, because if AI
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punishes you, if it's not good, then you disappear, and then the AI disappears. In other words, AI will be
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bound to serve humanity at first and will have to do so for a long time before it can turn against us.
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You have to start with generosity in evolution or else you get kicked out of the ecology.
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Yeah, I mean, let me represent what you were saying here. So religion is AI in the sense that it is a
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outside morality, worldview, way of life that you are able to impose on the tribe. And precisely because
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it's outside of you, it becomes more powerful or seemingly disinterested. So yes, people give tons of
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terrible advice, but a religion that is giving bad advice will die. That God will die in the sense that
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the tribe dies and everyone's making terrible decisions and screwing up all over the place.
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Well, I get it. I get it. But if you're achieving success after success through this outside worldview
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that's imposed upon you, then the God is thriving. I mean, Nietzsche talked about the Jews with the
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destruction of the temples. I think he was referencing the destruction of the first temple.
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They should have just let their God die. And instead, what they did is they sort of reinterpreted
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that loss, the big L, as a kind of big W in the future. They developed this sort of kind of
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moral resentment of the winners, but in a sort of biting attempt to usurp them and overturn them at
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some point. I don't want to get too much into Nietzsche's thought in this matter, but the main
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point is that if it works, it works. And if your God's morality, however it came about, it might have
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come about randomly or through some bizarre dream of a mystic at some point. However it comes about,
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if it is winning, it is winning, and the God is living, and the God is triumphing, and the God is
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good. In Germanic language, gut, gots, those are the same word, and it's not a coincidence that they
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are. And so I think what we've had in the death of God in our society that has been occurring for
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quite some time, the very least the 18th century, but you could even date it back for, you know,
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Ockham, or anyway. We've had the death of God, and so we have no external force that can guide us,
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and we're sort of lost. And liberals have embraced this and said, this is so wonderful. You can just
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choose your own adventure. Everything is open to us. You can pursue any task. But what we see is that
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this leads to bad decisions, unhappiness, loneliness, insecurity, etc., etc. And so we have people like
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Brian Johnson attempting to recreate this through the billions of Silicon Valley, that there's going
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to be a purely rational, logical God that comes out of the machine. This is superintelligence.
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So we've, I don't know. I mean, is maybe this the only step forward in that most religions,
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as we've been establishing here, I think they're making a comeback in many ways. But God remains sort
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of incredible for most highly intelligent people. Even Elon Musk, he was asked by Vidal,
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do you believe in God? And he effectively said no. He was like, well, we've got to stay curious or
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But it did say, although if there's a God and I'm wrong, I do want to be saved.
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It's like some reversal of Pascal's wager or something where it's like, even if I don't
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believe I get saved. No, no, no, no. But so I don't, does it make sense? It makes sense
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for elite people to think in this way because they need this as much as anyone else does.
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No one wants to choose your own adventure novel. People want a novel where there's a beginning,
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middle, and end. And so we're going to strive to find logic in the machine.
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We, you and I just simply have, I get your perspective. We simply have different views of
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whether that is possible in Silicon. And that's, you know, that's fine that we disagree. But I think
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where we agree is that we're all searching for that. Can you find that in a revived Christianity?
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Can you find that through a new age religion, wokeness on steroids, you know, which is,
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operates like a religion, you know, with original sin and like your sinful nature and redemption,
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perhaps, and so on. Or, you know, conservatard QAnon nonsense religion. You know, Trump is going to
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save you. He's our messiah. I mean, we're grasping for something.
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Yeah. And, but, but I think wokeness and QAnon conservatardism, I, I'm, I might've thought
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differently like four years ago, but I, I don't think those will win. I don't think it works.
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But I, I imagine, I think a, a kind of neo-religious revival works. And I wonder if this, this system
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that I totally reject, which is the AI religion will actually work for a lot of people.