00:01:19.920It dramatically speeds up our new law, creating a framework for truly independent safety checks, independent verification organizations, as well as moving the timeline up for oversight of AI auditors up by a full year.
00:01:35.080California wants to create the standards in this space.
00:01:38.280The CEO also begins an effort to tighten our safety and security requirements for powerful AI systems as well as models, laying the foundation for requiring third-party safety verification on an ongoing basis, as well as more mandatory reporting of incidents like the hugging face hack and advancing efforts to create an emergency shutoff, otherwise known as an AI kill switch, which means a lot of things depending on who you talk to.
00:02:06.920So we want to flesh out exactly what that means and how to come up with a framework that works.
00:02:13.520So we're going to convene experts, as we did with the creation of SB 53, to figure out the right path forward.
00:02:22.920California will do what it can, but this nation needs to get in the game.
00:04:42.260He gets right up next to the microphone.
00:04:43.960I hear you can almost hear the eyelashes hit each other.
00:04:46.880You've never seen Italy so quiet as when the Pope gets up to wink on Halloween.
00:04:52.420Listen to Artists on Artists on Artists on Artists every Thursday on the iHeartRadio app,
00:04:56.900Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:04:59.900So like by age 11 or so, at least 70% have a phone.
00:05:04.340I'm Dr. Joy, and this is Therapy for Black Girls.
00:05:07.340We spend our surviving middle school run getting into what's happening inside your kid's brain,
00:05:11.820the group chats, and their friendships, and what you can do about it.
00:05:14.900Your child is not doing this on purpose.
00:05:17.880That's the kind of perspective we've been pulling from the psychologists and psychiatrists who studied this for a living.
00:05:22.440Listen to Therapy for Black Girls on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:05:29.020Self-Care September is your reminder to slow down, check in with yourself, get off your phone, and maybe ask, why am I like this?
00:05:37.680I'm Gemma Spegg, host of the Psychology of Your 20s podcast.
00:05:41.300And this month, we're helping you make sense of the person that you are becoming.
00:05:44.900From setting boundaries and navigating friendships to understanding anxiety, confidence, relationships, and attachment.
00:05:52.480Sometimes our biggest decisions, without us even realizing it, aren't driven by what we truly want, but by what will prevent us from feeling lonely or being alone.
00:06:04.220Listen to The Psychology of Your 20s on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:19:26.400We probably should peel back the onion here and slow down just how did we get to this point?
00:19:31.000And what was the original philosophy that guided this?
00:19:33.800So Demis Hassabis, who's the founder of DeepMind, his original goal is we thought we should have one project that pursues artificial general intelligence, meaning the kind of AI.
00:19:44.860It's not the thing that just reads your license plate when you drive through the Golden Gate Bridge.
00:19:59.060So artificial general intelligence, which is to be able to do all economic labor, to simulate all the things that a human mind can do, the kind of thinking.
00:20:06.400And so he originally wanted that to be like one project, almost like a CERN, you know, the project in Switzerland,
00:20:11.900of a global scientific project that's for the benefit of all of humanity done slowly and
00:20:17.120carefully, mostly privately, not in a big public way. Take your time, get it right. That was,
00:20:22.260that was a Demis's original goal. He sold it to Google. Um, and the conversation you're talking
00:20:27.780about is then Elon was part of that. I think he was on the plane when they were literally
00:20:31.200negotiating the final sale. And there was some conversation it's talked about in the AI doc film
00:20:35.880where uh elon realizes that larry didn't really care whether humanity made it um whether he cared
00:20:44.140about ai safety because in the end if there's a digital intelligence that's smarter than us that
00:20:48.540does more science that can go out and explore the universe even if we're wiped out like we'll have
00:20:53.300created that and that scared larry and and he accused you scared excuse me that's that scared
00:20:58.640elon and um elon accused no sorry larry accused elon of being a speciesist for caring about humans
00:22:00.340our founder's DNA is the thing that makes it.
00:22:02.100Elon birthed the god that, yes, humanity got wiped out, but now there's this digital god that has Elon's DNA in it.
00:22:08.880And it's important that everyone understand that because if people really understood this, I think there'd be a lot more like, hell no kind of energy.
00:22:17.160Well, I will say the Peter Thiel interview got so much attention.0.94
00:22:19.760It was like the, I mean, the holy shit, I mean, the wake up moment for a lot of people that didn't necessarily have that switch or understanding.0.93
00:23:22.920if we can see this clearly and we can see where we're going we can collectively say if we want to
00:23:27.220go somewhere else we'll choose something different so we'll get to that so so elon goes out uh with
00:23:31.640sam starts open ai obviously they have an infamous fight and they're notoriously now i mean not
00:23:37.000notoriously but the fight is obviously accelerated consciousness because now we're seeing it 24 7
00:23:42.700with a court case yep with a court case in the bay area here um with the two of them so they had
00:23:47.940a falling out elon goes off and does his own thing because he doesn't doesn't feel like sam's doing
00:23:52.640the right thing. Dario, who starts another AI company, feels like, well, OpenAI is not doing
00:23:57.720the right thing either. That's right. So he spins off. Anthropic. Anthropic. And so now you've got
00:24:04.220three AGI projects, all in our backyard, quite literally here in California, in the Bay Area.
00:24:11.300And so there's competition of sorts. That's a competition you just described. And it's a
00:24:16.680competition for the Holy Grail. That's right. It's Lord of the Rings. It's the ring from Lord
00:24:21.540of the rings because it's essentially, as Asa was saying, first dominate intelligence, then use
00:24:27.140intelligence to dominate everything else. Because if I get AGI first, I hit copy paste and I have
00:24:33.240a hundred million cyber hackers that you don't have. Right. And this is within seconds. This
00:24:37.240is within seconds. Yeah. This is not over a course of months or years. If I get AGI first, I have an
00:24:41.920army of scientific companies that automate all scientific development. So suddenly I'm getting
00:24:47.120like 24th century science and technology in my, you know, that I own and run that I can inform
00:24:52.900new military weapons and new physics and new. So, and the problem is notice that I can, none of us
00:24:58.620can prove that they won't get that. We can't say for sure that they would get that, but the people
00:25:03.340who are optimistic and accelerationist about AI, I just want to like bring in their perspective for
00:25:07.380a moment because they're represented in the AI doc film. The film includes the risk folks who
00:25:12.200are oriented about safety and it includes the accelerationists and the accelerationists say
00:25:16.100the biggest risk is not going fast enough. Because imagine all the science we could get,
00:25:20.800all the cancer drugs, all the medicine, people could be living forever. Think of all of the
00:25:24.760people who would die if we don't go faster. And that's the mentality that they're coming from.
00:25:30.280But one of the things that we talk about in the film is that the promise and the peril of AI,
00:25:35.780we talk about the promise and the peril, but they're interlinked. And the promise doesn't
00:25:39.340prevent the peril, but the peril can undermine the world that can receive the promise. Let me
00:25:44.180to make that concrete. If AI knows biology so well that it can invent a new cancer drug,
00:25:51.080it's amazing. But if that same knowledge of knowing biology can also invent new pathogens,
00:25:55.980and which one matters more? The cancer drugs don't prevent the pathogens, but the pathogens
00:26:00.340can undermine the world that can receive the cancer drugs. Same thing with cyber.
00:26:04.500And so we have to, you don't get that enticing world if we don't mitigate the downsides.
00:26:10.060So you've got the players right now. We mentioned three in the personalities, not just the companies themselves. But Microsoft, you've got Meta and Zuckerberg. You've got others that are in this space, but not necessarily at that level. You've got China, which obviously is playing an outsized role in all of this.
00:26:33.240And that's this notion, this tension between going back to sort of more the utopian framework of available to the world versus these closed systems and open system.
00:26:43.740Meta starts with an open system originally.
00:26:47.660China seems to be in the open source space.
00:26:51.100Talk to us a little bit about that for people that don't necessarily understand that dynamic and that distinction.
00:26:55.900You mean between things that are open?
00:26:58.600Yeah, open source versus proprietary technologies.
00:27:02.160Yeah, well, so for people that don't know, open source means that the code that underlies the system, anyone can edit, anyone can access, and anyone can contribute to.
00:27:10.800And that's often meant that systems that are open are more secure because there are many eyes working on it, many hands that are working on it.
00:27:16.620And looking at all the codes, they can see all the bugs.
00:31:34.940But you have this other balance of if I decentralize that power and I don't have it connected or bound to responsibility, I'm unleashing catastrophes.
00:31:42.540And that responsibility was exampled by Dario pulling back mythos in this context.
00:40:57.800I think it's really important to frame, even before we get into like job loss and all of that, is like we have to paint the picture of what we know the incentives, where it'll bring us, and that why we know for sure that we're heading as anti-human unless we do something different.
00:41:23.220Yeah. And sort of the the metaphor for people to have or analogy is this concept of the resource curse. What is the resource curse? This is when a country sort of like South Sudan or Venezuela, they discovered huge natural resource like oil. And then the government has a choice. Do we invest in the thing that's giving us GDP growth, the oil and oil selling infrastructure? Or do we do like schools and health care and stuff for the people? And obviously, the massive incentive is to put it into oil extraction.
00:41:51.080and this is how you end up with structural mass disempowerment and unemployment yeah um okay so
00:41:56.760now we're heading into a world with the intelligence and the intelligence curse
00:42:00.820where suddenly you know countries are getting double gd double digit gdp growth but is that
00:42:06.580coming from human beings doing the scientific discovery and the medical discoveries no it's
00:42:11.460not it's coming from the ais and so is the incentive then for the countries to invest in
00:42:16.900their people or into data centers and solar panels like well obviously it's the data centers
00:42:22.940and solar panel and we're already seeing it right in west virginia electricity is more than the cost
00:42:28.740of a mortgage payment and the point is with agi like the company's stated goal is to train ais
00:42:36.340that can out compete humans on every domain and if you don't believe like us for saying this like
00:42:42.460you just have to listen to sam altman and he was recently asked um well what about all the energy
00:42:47.180and water use and resource use of ai and he sort of sat for a second he said like well actually
00:42:51.860do you know how much energy and water and food it takes to grow a human intelligence i remember i
00:42:59.400saw that yeah right and that's the temptation of this anti-human attitude it's not because they're
00:43:04.240like human hating it's just like why would we value or prioritize humans if and i think it's
00:43:09.580connected to that peter thiel stuttering for 17 seconds not able to answer the question should
00:43:14.320the human species endure it's not because i think anybody wants to kill or remove humans it's just
00:43:19.220why should we really prioritize them and it's what uval harari the author of sapiens would call the
00:43:24.320useless class yeah because unlike in the past like in the industrial revolution where the workers can
00:43:29.060come back and withhold their labor and have bargaining power to say we want to be paid a
00:43:32.640better wage this time around the companies don't need them for the labor and the governments don't
00:43:37.600need them for the tax revenue. So I know this is a scary picture. And the reason we paint it is
00:43:42.460that this really is, especially going into the midterms, the time when people need to lock in
00:43:48.360that political power for a pro-human future. Because that's the current trajectory when you
00:43:54.640see these incentives. It's not like we're trying to tell you this is our opinion. We're trying to
00:43:58.560show you the incentives so you can make up your own mind about what would those companies do if
00:44:02.260they were in that position? What would you do if you were maximizing shareholder value or maximizing
00:44:06.820you know gdp growth and this is why we this is where we get hope is that this is a universal
00:44:10.480issue and there's a a bannon to bernie coalition for me like when do you get like called the b2b
00:44:15.840yeah b2b like glenn beck um and ralph nader and bernie sanders and susan rice admiral mike mullen
00:44:22.820prince harry steve bannon when you get all these people agreeing and they're signing they're
00:44:26.860actually signing a declaration along these lines yeah that's exactly right yeah um and you know
00:44:31.720that this is not a left issue or right issue or like a Christian issue or a Muslim issue.
00:44:36.560Like you're not going to be able to pay to feed your kids, whether you're a Republican
00:44:41.660or Democrat equally, like we're going to be mass surveilled whether you're left or right
00:53:46.020Is it, I mean, where, where, where do you think in terms of just how quickly this thing's accelerating, or are we going to get to a point where now it starts to slow down a little bit?
00:53:54.460We, we got this sort of intense burst of new and interesting activity.
00:53:59.320Now this, there's, is it compute problems?
00:54:01.640Is it, you know, what, is it energy problem?
00:54:04.840What is, what's going to be the, or is it, I'm certainly sure as I'm regulatory and we're going to get back to that.
00:54:10.680Yeah. I mean, I would just want to name a psychological effect that we've experienced that I think everyone listening probably experiences too, which is, you know, so we following all the predictions are actually sort of like right on track for where like researchers thought that AI would be. And even though we knew these facts, there's some way that even we didn't take it fully seriously. Didn't like embody because can't, I can't really get this good this fast. Like, sure, it's going to be scary, but it'll be off a little bit further.
00:54:40.680And yet it actually is moving this fast. And every time that it's been predicted that we're going to hit a data wall, there isn't enough data. We've used all the data on the internet. We can't scale.
00:57:01.980So I really, really, really want to meet that criticism.
00:57:06.160So people will say Anthropic has a history of hyping the technology, saying it's dangerous so that they can get regulatory capture,
00:57:14.060get the government to regulate it, say there's only one king here, make them the king, nationalize
00:57:18.800the project, then shut down the other projects. And it's this all secret ploy so that they win
00:57:23.360the race. And first of all, it assumes that them talking about the dangers is only bad faith,
00:57:29.300like that the technology is not dangerous. And they're just saying that it's dangerous and it
00:57:32.060can do all these destructive things so that they can get that outcome. So first of all,
00:57:36.520let's just take Claude Mythos specifically. So again, hack into every major operating systems.
00:57:40.620if you read online there's a lot of people who say this is just hype this isn't actually that
00:57:45.160much better you can take the open source models you can do this stuff so i have a friend who is
00:57:50.320the head of security at one of the top five not the fortune 500 the top five um and he has had
00:57:58.360early access to mythos and when he he himself has said this is this is crazy this is like i mean the
00:58:06.480words were um i think i saw jesus like it was like it was that crazy when he looked at everybody
00:58:12.960critiquing that mythos was just hype he asked has any of them do they actually have access to the
00:58:18.160model and none of the people that had criticized it had personally had access to it yeah so i i
00:58:24.100challenge those who are criticizing that it's hype to say have you actually used it and if you talk
00:58:30.780to people who have do you still have the same opinion okay so that's one thing that it is true
00:58:34.840by the way, that the companies I think have wanted people to understand the dangers so that they can
00:58:39.400actually accelerate the move towards some guardrails. But there's a question of that happening
00:58:42.960in good faith or bad faith. I think there's more of that happening in good faith. There's some bad
00:58:46.680faith in there too, maybe, but I think it's, it's mainly good faith. But then let's take the second
00:58:51.500can of worms who opened, which is on, is AI going to create this world of abundance? We're all going
00:58:57.500to be poets, you know, and painters on a Grecian sunset. And you know, now robots are going to do
00:59:02.860all the jobs that's true now you're talking yeah well we'd all like that i one question i would
00:59:07.880have is when is a handful of people ever concentrated all the wealth and then consciously
00:59:13.820redistributed it to everyone eight or nine trillionaires are not going to take care of
00:59:17.820eight or nine billion of us yeah exactly you call call that bluff yeah exactly well and then you
00:59:22.680combine that with the intelligence curse that we laid out that the incentive is like why do we want
00:59:27.560to invest in the people it became it becomes basically an act of charity because otherwise
00:59:32.560i mean that or dealing with the political revolution um but again i don't think that
00:59:38.120we're currently on track to be redistributing uh that wealth and it's also not just the wealth
00:59:42.460and the money it's like we have people have to have work and dignity and status and meaning
00:59:45.480voltaire life you know job solves life three great evils boredom vice and need not just need
00:59:50.800but boredom and vice that's right so let's get to the and community and belonging absolutely
00:59:54.520All of that, which, again, no one's talked about more than you in terms of that social dilemma. So before we go there and this notion of the transition and job displacement and the human condition that I think connects as well, President Xi, President Trump's visit as well in terms of their own domestic issues in China, where they have the same incentive structure not to go through that transition with the kind of displacement that could create social unrest in the short term.
01:00:23.500But get back to this notion of constraints and the safety side of things.
01:00:27.660I mean, we're here in California, the dominant, you know, I mean, the technology sort of birthplace of so much of the technology, obviously, the consciousness, 32 of the top 50 market cap companies, arguably, old stat, and of course, most of the AI labs here.
01:00:41.380But we're also, we've been leaders, modest, though some would suggest, but we've been leaders in particularly large language model, frontier models, of focusing on a regulatory structure in the complete absence of any federal regulation.
01:01:10.940They were undermining, they were very intentionally undermining the legislation that we brought, SB 53.
01:01:17.080And you had other Republicans that were trying to undermine California's leadership.
01:01:23.020Senator Cruz would call them out saying we don't want to see the California vacation of regulation all across the United States of America.
01:01:30.200Interestingly, that's beginning to shift.
01:01:53.900It's because they realize all the money in the world is not going to build a big enough bunker that I can enjoy in the absence of societal calm.
01:02:04.160I mean, I think I would just say it very shortly is that there are two different realities. There's sort of like the political reality, and then there's like physical reality. And physical reality is crashing into political reality. That is with mythos, suddenly banks can get hacked. Any computer system can get hacked. Your stuff can get hacked. And once that physical reality starts getting scary enough, you have to start waking up. You're no longer in sort of like political game land.
01:02:33.180Yeah. I do think that it was, it's interesting to note that when the emergency meeting was convened after Claude Mythos came out, it wasn't at the Pentagon or National Security. I mean, that happened too, I'm sure. But the real meeting that happened was between Scott Besant and the Treasury Secretary convening all the banks. Because I think the thing that really got them was that if this takes down the financial system, what could his quote 10% GDP growth if the entire financial system gets undermined?
01:02:59.620so i think this this again illustrates the point we have been making since the beginning that the
01:03:05.220upsides don't prevent the downsides and the downsides can undermine the world that can
01:03:10.400sustain and the benefits and the of the upsides um and so i i do think there's been a forced shift
01:03:17.520and and you know it's very late in the game but we should celebrate that it is happening now we
01:03:22.260just need this kind of full whole of society response to mobilize i mean there's nicholas
01:03:26.800Carlini, who gave the talk on Mythos at a conference, Black Hat LLM, I think it was
01:03:30.880called. It's the Unprompted Conference. The Unprompted Conference. And basically
01:03:34.860saying, he's kind of calling, if you are a cyber person, we need you
01:03:39.120right now. We need you defending all the systems. Everybody should get access to Mythos and do it
01:03:43.060as fast as possible because, as you said, Gavin, the clip between the new
01:03:47.160capabilities being out there and then China coming out with a model that makes it possible,
01:03:51.580maybe this time we have six months, next time maybe we have three months, then we have
01:03:55.180two months. So we need to really work hard. I'm not trying to scare people. It just means that
01:04:00.000we actually have to work hard to create safety here. Now, China doesn't want the financial
01:04:04.940system to collapse either. No, they don't. And so again, we have to recognize that it's possible
01:04:10.880for coordination to happen, not because of kumbaya, we're all going to get along, but because out of
01:04:16.180self-interest, like the U S doesn't want China to screw it up and then break the financial system.
01:04:21.000China doesn't want the U S to screw up and then break the financial system, or the U S doesn't
01:04:24.680want China to release a rogue AI that starts mining for cryptocurrency and hacking into things
01:04:28.600and self-replicating like an invasive species. And China doesn't want the U.S. to do that either.
01:04:33.080So, so long as we have clarity about what we want, we can choose a different path.
01:04:41.980Yeah. Well, and this is actually one of the other exciting things is that
01:04:44.840we haven't even really tried to coordinate yet. Like what percentage of the billionaire's wealth,
01:04:51.200how much of their time have they spent actually trying to coordinate? They all just say, well,
01:04:54.360if you're going to do it then we're going to do it um if you say it's impossible have you spent a
01:04:59.760month of your life and all of your connections dedicatedly trying yeah exactly and the same
01:05:04.160thing like this guys exactly and the last time that humanity invented a technology that could
01:05:08.720extinct ourselves like the nuclear bomb we had breton woods we took you know candidate or groups
01:05:15.500from a hundred countries lock them in a hotel room in new hampshire for like six weeks or something
01:05:20.280like that and said we're going to figure something out and you're not leaving the hotel until we
01:05:23.980figure it out so it's like it's not a conference where you go you drink your coffee and you listen
01:05:27.600to some talks it's what we need is the we lock ourselves in a room and we figure this out um
01:05:34.100and i know that this summit is just a couple days and we all know about the difficulties of the
01:05:38.660level of expertise that might be involved right now but this is the moment to to open the doorway
01:05:42.660of that possibility um and we have examples through history where when something becomes
01:05:48.220existential to a citizen group and their nation, they will coordinate. So, you know, in the middle
01:05:54.840of the Cold War, still the U.S. and Russia, we coordinated on eradicating smallpox. And, you know,
01:06:00.660the U.S. did logistics and funding, and the Soviet Union made 25 million doses of the vaccine
01:06:06.360annually. And then, you know, India and Pakistan, they were literally trading bullets in the 1960s,
01:06:11.300and yet they still worked on the Indus Water Treaty. And that lasted nearly 60 years because
01:06:16.460access to water was existential to them and their shared water supply you have to collaborate on
01:06:21.760that yeah and so i just want to acknowledge the people here it was you know if people some people
01:06:27.160know the history that obama and xi president obama and xi signed an agreement to not cyber
01:06:30.980hack each other and i think the next day was the biggest cyber hack in the u.s government by china
01:06:34.660so i want people to hear this not from some kind of naivete yeah about the level of competition
01:06:40.780rivalry and antagonism that is currently present but when the stakes get existential when i push
01:06:45.960the button and it shifts from the label of the button being 10% GDP growth and military dominance
01:06:50.000and cyber dominance, the next time I push the button, it's collective suicide. I don't want
01:06:54.940to push that button. And China doesn't want to push that button either. So the button label has0.98
01:06:59.900to shift from what we thought it was going to give us to a new outcome. And the way Asa says
01:07:04.920that I love is that the fear of all of us losing has to become greater than the fear of me losing
01:07:10.880to you. So you have a very regulated construct in China compared to certainly the United States.
01:07:18.600That's right. You're talking about a traditional model. Right now, we're the new frontier out here.
01:07:27.220The wild west. Yeah. I mean, it's, you know, go west, go west, young man, go west. I mean,
01:07:31.160people are pushing out the boundaries of discovery, holding them back on their own,
01:07:35.120Yeah. Regardless of what happens in Beijing, this is really in the hands of a handful of people ultimately making the right decision.
01:07:45.420And I believe Dario is the best of a lot. I think universally that's accepted. But that may be and even Dario may acknowledge because of the flatness of the surrounding terrain may not be because he's particularly eminent on his own.
01:08:00.700And he talks about his own, you know, you know, he's an entrepreneur and he's constantly reflecting on his own incentive structure and how he has to compete in this environment at the same time.
01:08:10.860And he's at least I think has a more situational awareness than others.
01:08:14.300But, you know, whatever can be, will be.
01:08:28.980I mean, you know, so talk to me about more of the sinister realities of, you know, I don't mean sinister, but the impulses, again, to be the guy, the God, the God, I mean, to have their DNA.
01:08:42.000Yeah, so I'm grateful you're bringing this up.
01:08:44.380There's a few things we should enumerate here.
01:08:45.820So one is we need coordination, and we do find ourselves in the unfortunate spot that the people who do need to be in coordination maximally distrust each other, even just the U.S. CEOs.
01:08:57.880i mean elon musk and sam hate each other correct um it's not like dario and sam or sam no famous
01:09:05.160moment the india summit they couldn't even hold their hands together hold hands yeah at least
01:09:09.960they showed up so uh we have a problem of trust between the leaders themselves we need i think
01:09:15.840structures that impose the trust on top because they're not going to do it autonomously themselves
01:09:20.220um so that's the regulation that that's yeah that's the transparency using the power of law
01:09:53.340that we can get these countries to agree.
01:09:55.360Just like the Soviet Union and the United States had a red phone saying this is to de-escalate, I think we need something like an AI red lines phone, meaning that both countries have common knowledge of the frontier of these risks.
01:10:08.180Because right now we don't even have that common knowledge.
01:10:09.780And there's rumors that that may be one of the things that they're preparing to announce at least some beginning of this.
01:10:19.320You've heard the chaos. Now you can see it.
01:16:15.780Yeah, and they're seeing all the success.
01:16:17.700They're hearing the music, and we had nothing.
01:16:20.180We're covering the entire spectrum from Smokey Robinson, Alicia Keys, B2K, Mary J. Blige, legends, current stars, and everyone who's contributed to the sound of R&B.
01:16:47.200Listen to R&B Money from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
01:16:56.900I'm Mimi Brown, and every day on Front Page Podcast, I help you make sense of the stories shaping our world.
01:17:03.280Each day, I break down the biggest headlines, provide important context, and explain how these stories could impact your life, your family, and your community.
01:17:12.040My goal is to deliver clear, trustworthy information in a format that fits your schedule.
01:17:17.380And when a story deserves a deeper conversation, I'll sit down with experts, newsmakers, and thought leaders to help you better understand the headlines.
01:17:25.600I spoke with Gary Mayer, Eddie Melton, about what's happening on the ground, whether race is playing a role,
01:17:31.080and what help is available for families who simply can't afford the added cost.
01:17:35.980Joining us now is Tennessee State Representative Justin J. Pearson.
01:22:09.860Everybody was sort of on the train and seeing this as an opportunity and looking at the abundance of this only, but not looking at safety, not looking at the risk, as you've described.
01:22:20.980California decided to assert itself in that respect, as we've done on privacy, as we've done on a lot of child safety issues and a lot more work to do there.
01:22:28.740And this year will be a landmark year in terms of getting to the next level in that respect.
01:24:50.360But imagine that California took a leadership position there and said, actually, there are going to be some very serious protections that as AI increases GDP,
01:24:58.860increases profits, actually people are going to be, it's sort of like an employment insurance.
01:25:05.740They're going to be able to keep their jobs. Like that would set a social signal for the rest of
01:25:11.120the US. All right. So I'm going to let you off the hook on the larger safety risk regulation.
01:25:16.840And let's go back to ideas along these lines, because right in front of us is notion of
01:25:23.120displacement transition. And it goes back to the earlier point I was making. Some will argue
01:25:27.920that, you know, we always, you know, Luddites and we'll never see the abundance on the other side
01:25:34.400and we can't even conceive of the jobs. So with humility, let's not just assume there'll be no
01:25:40.540human jobs because the human mind has the capacity that's limitless with these technologies that will
01:25:46.500be more supportive and allow us to be augmented and discover talents and capacity we never thought
01:25:52.920possible. So let's assume that happens. But the concern is that it seems the most universal that
01:25:58.560it may happen very fast. That's right. So how do you then flatten the curve? How do we address
01:26:07.440the transition? You get to employment insurance, something we've been talking a lot about. You get
01:26:11.920to this notion that you can't fire someone to be automated. That's even deeper. And that's
01:26:15.660interesting, this Chinese example. Tell me more about the issue of workforce and what I should
01:26:20.560be worried about when I see Dario saying 50% entry-level jobs. It's no longer a career ladder.
01:26:26.520It's a jungle gym. And all these young folks got a Stanford. They're like, now I'm unemployed or
01:26:30.800unemployable. No coders, software. I mean, women disproportionately being impacted in the workforce
01:26:36.960when you look at those clerical jobs, admin jobs, et cetera. I mean, what do you see a year,0.74
01:26:42.640two years from now as we deal with the holy grail, the God complex of AGI in the displacement space?
01:26:50.560um reed hoffman has this idea i want to make sure i get it right yeah i like which is um
01:26:55.820one of the things that makes ai distinct and sam altman has talked about this himself
01:26:59.640that you could get the age of these unicorn companies a unicorn company meaning a billion
01:27:04.200dollar valuation i met a guy the other day literally billion dollar valuation it's him
01:27:09.000one person there we go it's him exactly so i think that he was parading himself around as the
01:27:13.520it's me that's right one of the first and so that's what that's what has been posited ever
01:27:17.140since the beginning of ai they're saying we're going to start having a world are you going to
01:27:20.080have a single person with a unicorn billion dollar company yeah now does the society work
01:27:25.800if there's a handful of single people with billion dollar companies and no one else has a job
01:27:29.900it doesn't work do you think those people just want to live out their lives in bunkers with
01:27:33.640private militaries and gas masks because they've created that world i don't think they want that
01:27:38.700world so reed hoffman who's the founder of linkedin was early at paypal and you know was at some point
01:27:43.220a friend of peter thiel's um uh you know has this proposal that we can tax companies based on the
01:27:48.720proportionate ratio of how many employees they have relative to their revenue so you want to
01:27:53.360basically disincentivize um uh the the single solo unicorn company i don't know if you want to add to
01:27:59.740it yeah well and also just just to note that it doesn't stop with just single person unicorns
01:28:05.440yeah with automating that final one person not so hard so you're going to end up with zero person
01:28:10.020you can have the ceo be an ai yeah and that's actually happening they're already getting ais
01:28:13.460that are on boards and things like this yeah and so even if you might find it questionable that
01:28:16.840that person might have again they they can they can earn their wealth but we you have to you have
01:28:21.180to have some taxation to make sure this is being distributed and we also need we need to find ways
01:28:26.220of having universal basic ownership not just universal basic cash payments and ubi but universal
01:28:30.920basic ownership i think people need to have a stake in in the success that's happening like
01:28:34.380what norway did with the sovereign wealth fund but oil didn't oil produced this kind of gravy on top
01:28:39.500for the civilization people still had jobs so what's different about this is we do need to find
01:28:43.760ways of doing universal basic work we also need to find ways of having certain professions in
01:28:50.780which that embodied wisdom like a surgeon or a senior lawyer or a senior judge we need ways of
01:28:56.120training and apprenticing almost like minimum quotas of those kinds of occupations and roles
01:29:00.360in society make sure that we have that ongoing knowledge because again the short-term benefit
01:29:04.980of like no one needs lawyers and then the senior lawyers all die out that world doesn't work so
01:29:10.280So, yeah, just the last thing to sort of add here is that, you know, instead of getting into arguments about how quickly exactly are people going to lose their jobs?
01:29:17.600Well, people really do lose their jobs.
01:29:18.900Let's let's plan and say, OK, we think people are going to be out of livelihoods.
01:29:22.540This is this idea originally came to us from Reed Hastings, the former CEO of Netflix, where he said, let's set up trigger point laws.
01:29:29.560If unemployment hits 10 percent, what are we going to do?
01:29:31.780If it hits 20 percent, what are we going to do?
01:29:34.040You could pre-set up those sort of conditions so we don't have to argue about whether it's going to happen, just what we should do when it does.
01:29:40.280And I know that you've been running with Engage California, these citizen deliberations, these ways of aggregating citizen assemblies, having citizens actually deal with and think about these issues and come to some, you know, have their own input in this process by reckoning with these facts.
01:29:54.340And I think that these are all things that we need.
01:29:56.500You know, the countries that discover a natural resource that didn't have this engaged, well-educated citizen, kind of engaged citizen infrastructure, like Venezuela or Libya or something like that, they don't do so well.
01:30:07.020But countries like Norway, where you did have the engaged citizens with oversight of those funds, you end up with a healthier society.
01:30:13.920So it's sort of like a California engagement fund because you want people involved in the redistribution.
01:36:36.900So what you just outlined was a set of interventions that we can be exploring to help smooth this transition.
01:36:43.520And we're in a competition with China for who's better at making this transition to an AI integrated world.
01:36:50.200Where are you on the transition curve?
01:36:52.380I mean, we talk about flattening it, but how quick?
01:36:55.320I mean, honestly, if we're sitting here a year from now having this conversation, are we looking at that 10% unemployment?
01:37:02.260not that 20 necessarily which is that threshold for fascism and a whole nother societal collapse
01:37:08.020but it's going to be it's going to be confusing and spiking how to predict exactly yeah because
01:37:12.340just think about your own experience with ai so far two years ago i can barely write an essay0.94
01:37:17.440and now it can do some parts of your work pretty well and other parts like that is a really dumb
01:37:21.780error um and so we're going to see not that much job not that much double off like entry level
01:37:28.220stuff getting sort of squished around and then it's going to hit really really quickly when it
01:37:32.540crosses the next threshold just like mythos did there's another confusing aspect about ai that
01:37:36.840people in our space called ai jaggedness which is that there's certain capabilities like in cyber
01:37:41.520hacking that it is already superhuman yeah already superhuman while it'll still make a very basic dumb
01:37:47.440mistake on something else and i think part of what's confusing for people that naturally has
01:37:51.760them say is this just hype and these companies are trying to hype this stuff is if you just look at
01:37:55.820the dumb examples where it's messing up you're like this thing isn't that powerful we have never
01:38:00.380been confronted with a technology that is simultaneously sci-fi level superhuman that0.92
01:38:07.000makes a person who's very deep in security call it like seeing jesus yeah at the same time that
01:38:12.300that same technology can like mistake how many r's are in the word strawberry yeah like we have just
01:38:17.300not seen that and so it's just i want people to notice for their own psychology that this is a
01:38:21.100new psychological object that are normal intuitions about how to evaluate something,
01:38:26.500we have to get more nuanced. And part of that nuance is a deeper understanding that we're not
01:38:31.000just talking about apps here. We're talking about the physical world as well. It was a big headline
01:38:36.120that I hope people paid attention to when Elon announced that in his original factory here in
01:38:43.380Fremont, California, that he's converting the S and the X Tesla cars now to humanoid robotics.
01:38:49.420And his goal is ultimately a million, you know, that's Elon, who the hell knows, you know, his goal setting, but the notion that he's converting that factory from cars to humanoid robotics and AI now into the physical world. Is that, I mean, we're seeing driverless cars. And if you haven't seen them in, you know, your home state, you're about to, and you're going to see flying cars. They're just quadcopters basically, but they're coming soon. And we're going to be doing a lot more of that.
01:39:16.740around by the way that's great like i we can have a world of quadcopters and you know innovation
01:39:21.680while not racing to replace us economically replace us socially so mark zuckerberg you know
01:39:27.080designs your kids friends rather than you had them having actual friends replace us politically not
01:39:31.160having political power and then replace us physically by owning our physical presence in
01:39:35.100our in robots so again yeah i think people might hear this as an anti-technology conversation yeah
01:39:40.820you know you talked about your legacy uh and your father and grandfather and we were talking
01:39:45.400backstage yeah yeah you know az's father started the macintosh project yeah yeah you know we come
01:39:50.880from a legacy where the word humane is about an inspiring vision about technology that's actually
01:39:55.640integrated and in service of our humanity that's of a pro-human future that's what all of this is
01:40:00.620motivated for so i get excited about you know flying you know cars that have cool you know ai
01:40:05.500and just to say too just as my own personal experiences you know i spend a big portion of
01:40:10.120my life i founded a thing called earth species project um we're now around 40 people and you're
01:40:14.960I wouldn't say the biggest consumer of it.
01:43:33.920But a lot of that now is going to, you know, make sure that, you know, we're protecting incumbents against innovation, you know, some incumbent capitalism, not entrepreneurial capitalism necessarily, innovation capitalism.
01:43:46.380There's that friction that's always ongoing.
01:43:48.380And those that are just going to do everything to hammer, as they did with social media, to make sure there's no regular.
01:43:54.220We're still debating Section 230, for Christ's sake, in this country.
01:43:57.940so how do we start to break that reality i think money and politics that's right that's that's
01:44:05.160up the ante just just a little bit even further which is that so as we get more trillionaires
01:44:09.680like they can hire private security um but that still requires relying on human beings but you're
01:44:14.880just pointing out that we are heading into like a world we have drone armies we have humanoid robot
01:44:20.500armies when trillionaires can just buy like their drone armies to fight like we enter into
01:44:27.100techno-feudalism right and so like that is the world that if we see if we don't do something
01:44:31.440if we don't do something we're going to end up into but to answer your question the it's all
01:44:36.360about the campaign lobbying it's all about that and a hundred and million hundred ninety million
01:44:41.180dollars has gone into basically ai accelerationist um packs funding is for this midterm for this
01:44:48.560midterm election alone just the midterms that's so 190 million i believe the presidential is two
01:44:53.440billion. So basically 10% of the presidential is going into just the midterm for AI alone,
01:44:57.840not even for the rest of it. And it's not to regulate. And it's not to regulate it. It's to
01:45:02.240say, remove everything and go as fast as possible. Right. Let her rip. If you had everyone in the
01:45:07.980world, I think hear the conversation we just had. And at a basic level, common sense, looking your
01:45:13.040children in the eye and say, are you stoked about that future? No one wants that. So the key piece
01:45:19.120agency is going into the midterm elections not voting for people who have taken money from those
01:45:25.180ai accelerationist groups um or don't have a position on ai that's trying to steer away from
01:45:30.640these outcomes now we obviously have to articulate that in a clearer way what does it mean to have
01:45:35.180kind of a pro-human platform in future and and the companies try to make the conversation
01:45:39.940inaccessible like oh well you don't understand ai they're trying to make it seem like so you don't
01:45:43.060know how to regulate let's put us in charge yeah we call this the the under the hood bias where
01:45:48.040it's as if people who know how to make the biggest engines know how to lay out cities and traffic
01:45:51.900lights. And that's just not true. People who know how to make car engines are not the best people
01:45:56.820for knowing how to make cars safe. So it's pretty simple. It's like, do you want an anti-human
01:46:05.040future in which you will be permanently disempowered where no one has an incentive except
01:46:08.800for charity to pay your bills for you? You want the companies that took your job, you want to be
01:46:14.940dependent on them for the rest of your life to pay your bills for you with no economic leverage
01:46:19.240no so this is the final window you know you want to vote for people who are going to protect you
01:46:24.580economically protect you socially protect you politically meaning protect our jobs protect our
01:46:29.060vote voting pro-human and obviously that has to get articulated even more clearly but that is the
01:46:35.140number one way that people can make a difference in the short term there's other things too like
01:46:38.940boycotting companies that are enabling mass surveillance you know when the company's
01:46:43.100subscriptions for you know go down by a lot they really need their numbers to be going up so the
01:46:46.640companies are more vulnerable than you think and you're more powerful than you think not just if
01:46:50.300you unsubscribe and boycott them but get your company get your church group to do that too
01:46:54.620um and when those numbers start to change it actually has a difference scott galloway's been
01:46:59.080talking a lot about that as well absolutely got to use whatever power and at your disposal let's
01:47:05.440just briefly talk then about the power i mean uh you know free and fair elections we talk about
01:47:12.940truth trust more broadly deep fakes political ads i mean i've seen stuff but you know meetings
01:47:19.460conversations i've had that are i mean it's next level what's out there fix of you yes just the bs
01:47:25.120that's already out there the ability to manipulate uh the crowd in the context of you know social
01:47:30.340media the algorithms i mean now you've got you know concentrated in the hands of a few in that
01:47:34.920respect i mean that whole thing i mean you you guys have talked about free and fair elections
01:47:40.460We talk about the timelines, not only on job displacement, but timelines to get this right.
01:48:01.420And certainly by 2028, like, that'll be the last human election.
01:48:05.000Like it's going to be AIs running all of the election, election campaigns, the ads doing all the both information and disinformation because human beings just can't operate at that speed and are not that effective.
01:48:16.620But and I know I just want to like at the human experiential level, we've been talking about some hard stuff the last little while.
01:48:22.540And, you know, I just want to say, you know, we struggle with how to communicate this in a way that's responsible because here's the here's the trade, right?
01:50:03.700Do you want to know how many, like what percentage of Americans think that we should just go as fast as possible, unfettered, non-regulated AI?
01:51:55.240That's what I think the social media stuff shows.
01:51:57.800If we don't think of this as just an AI problem, but as a technology encroaching onto our humanity, overreaching into our humanity problem, then actually there is massive momentum more than we ever thought was possible.
01:52:09.680Because what we have to do is juice the momentum that's already there.
01:52:23.720We'll continue to try to iterate on this and lean in.
01:52:26.600But look, the clarity that you guys bring to this conversation, the importance of this conversation being brought to scale and broadening the consciousness and the imperative of seeing this documentary.
01:52:39.060Again, the documentary is called The AI Doc or How I Became an Apocaloptimist.
01:52:44.700And we can't let that slip twice because you've used a word that people are not familiar with, which is a good way to end.
01:52:54.540And that is this convergence of optimism and pessimism.
01:52:59.100A little more optimism than pessimism would be a better place to end.
01:53:19.720And I just end by saying it really actually isn't about being an optimist or a pessimist.
01:53:26.060Because to choose that label for yourself, it's to sort of, it's to take a backseat, like to sit down and just be like, I'm just going to accept that it'll either come out well or not, versus taking responsibility for trying to see clearly to shift the world to go well.
01:53:41.680um and i think that's what like everyone listening can can do is that this can all feel like too big
01:53:49.840um what what can i do and then you realize even like the like the the ceos of the company sort
01:53:55.100of feel a similar way um but this is not just about a what we must do this is fundamentally
01:54:01.800a question of like who we must be that if we are the kind of people that aren't looking for a path