People Have No Idea What Is About To Happen - Dwarkesh Patel
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 20 minutes
Harmful content
Misogyny
2
sentences flagged
Toxicity
13
sentences flagged
Hate speech
38
sentences flagged
Summary
In this episode, Dworkesh Patel joins us to talk about the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) in the past and present, and what it means for the future of society. We talk about how AI is changing the way we live and work, and why we should be worried about it.
Transcript
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It means building new jails to keep criminals behind bars.
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And it means there's no need to worry when I play at the park.
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you think the singularity is going to happen yesterday?
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And even for me, I've had to admit that the progress has been pretty fast.
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is it going to, like, cure cancer at one point?
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If civilization had 10 billion more scientists, human scientists,
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The AIs have the potential to make authoritarian societies
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much more sustainable and powerful than they have been in the past.
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A lot of the reasons that government has not been as authoritarian as it has in the past
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is that it's just physically not been possible.
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How do we make sure that humans don't get totally disenfranchised?
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Actually, I was saying to you before we started,
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and I listen particularly to the history episodes.
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But you've been described as Silicon Valley's favorite podcaster,
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And that's actually the conversation we really want to have with you.
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Partly because a lot of people watching and listening to this,
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they've got lives, you know, family, work, et cetera.
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because they haven't seen a third of the cars on the road
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And what we'd love to do is just kind of connect people like you
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So first of all, can you explain in broad brushstrokes
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I know it's a massive question, obviously, but do your best.
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um well i can explain it very concisely the models are getting better and then we can be a
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little less concise i think it's you're correct to point out that there's this huge discrepancy
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between what people are seeing in silicon valley and what people are observing outside um it's
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frankly because of how useful the models are becoming at certain kinds of things so by models
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i mean um you've you've seen chad gbt you might have heard of things like gemini from google
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to basically do the equivalent of Google search.
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They haven't touched a line of code since December.
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And it will go do that software engineering for you.
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The people in Silicon Valley, they're getting tremendous productivity out of these.
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These are people who are getting paid, you know, who are becoming 3x, 4x, 5x more productive
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So far, we haven't, because these models have been really good at text in, text out work,
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that is software engineering, software engineering, just a file of text, really.
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it's been bad so far at, well, it's terrible at physical work, right? So if you're doing any kind
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of blue collar work, robots are just not there yet. But then even if you circumscribe it, even
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if you go in and look at, we're not just going to look at software engineering. We're going to look
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at all kinds of knowledge work, right? All kinds of work that you can do on a computer. Maybe 40%
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of the labor force is doing work that you can just, you know, do remote work. If COVID happens
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again you can put them on you can put them on zoom and they can do their work um and ai companies
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now want to be able to do all of that work uh that requires training ais to just be able to do
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anything that you can do on a computer an ai should be able to do and companies are saying
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oh we think we can get there in a year maybe two years but that i think is explaining this
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discrepancy in what people are seeing it does and one of the things i think is uh also a lot of
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people would have tried a model at one point to do a Google search or sometimes people have
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written articles using it. And it turns out that it does make, at the time they tried it,
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quite a lot of mistakes. And people go, ah, this is all BS. It's not going to work.
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But the one thing I think people don't appreciate is how rapidly it's getting better. Can you talk
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a little bit about that? Yeah. So I'll maybe tell you a story about my own use of AI.
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Among the Silicon Valley people, I've been a sort of skeptic.
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you think the singularity is going to happen yesterday?
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By this, I mean this idea that you'll have incredibly powerful AI systems
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that are able to do basically anything any human being can do.
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And some people in Silicon Valley are just, we'll get it later this year.
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And even for me, I've had to admit that the progress has been pretty fast.
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so last year you know like you guys do i research for my podcast obviously i read things but then i
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also talk to um these llms uh you know the equivalents of chat gpt to research for a podcast
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and say last year i spent on the order of a hundred dollars on um if you add up my subscription
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to chat gpt and quad and whatever and gemini there was a week where i was prepping for two
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different guests where in that prep I just threw in a bunch of uh papers that are relevant to the
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research and a bunch of books and whatever into a folder and I just said to um uh an LLM hey help
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me understand all this research so I can ask the person good questions about it and I turned on
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various things which make the model much more expensive it's faster it's smarter or use a
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bigger model and during that week if you take my spending during that week and you turn it into a
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yearly spending, how much it would be if I just did that week over the course of a year,
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I would be spending over six figures on AI spend. And I think it's possible next year,
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it would make sense for me to spend seven figures on this AI research for my podcast.
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Okay, this is just to say that it's getting to the point where I could hire an analyst.
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I could hire many different analysts to help me prepare for the podcast or researchers.
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And I'm actually realizing, no, it's more useful to hire AIs. Because there's things AIs can do
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But yeah, lots of people are noticing this kind of usefulness now.
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I think the thing is, is when people look at a lot of the eyes,
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and this is a question, a point that Constantine made,
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it's the lack of accuracy and the fact that you constantly have to fact change.
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I was looking at guests that we could have from America on the show,
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and I said to Grok, who can we have on that hasn't appeared yet and is based in America?
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Douglas Murray, I think, is nearly beyond 10 times.
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You know, you've seen, I'm sure you've seen that meme
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and he says, wait, wait, my appendix on this side
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and the robot goes, okay, thank you for that feedback.
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and they just, their mind just goes in a certain direction.
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AIs, the way they're trained makes them do that.
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One way, a big thing they're trained to do is associate things.
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So they're just like, really, they're just seeing globs of text.
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And they see this thing is close to this thing.
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So Grok has seen that Trigger Nenometry Podcast and Douglas Murray,
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And that bias in its mind is overriding its ability to sort of think critically about,
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you should run that experiment with all the other models.
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and I want somebody who I've not interviewed before,
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which you're like, wow, that's an amazing find.
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or I would never have thought of that otherwise
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because they're not amazing at discovering in this.
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I think humans are great at this idiosyncratic thing
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But when you are preparing to interview the person,
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I also think they're not amazing at coming up with questions.
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This is the thing I have to do, that you have to do.
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They're great at just like, I would have to hire,
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you know, the ancient Greeks would hire one-on-one tutors
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And this is how you got Alexander being tutored by Aristotle.
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one-on-one where you can just directly ask questions
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And so they're amazing at just teaching you stuff
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that notices your confusion as soon as you have it.
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on a lot of these kinds of biases that they have.
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And one of the things that people are talking about
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basically made, what AGI is, what it stands for, and why the potential is to be so transformative
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for our society? Yeah. Maybe one way to approach this question is to think about,
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okay, at a very basic level, a system that is in AGI should be able to do anything that a human
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does. Now, I want to emphasize that current AIs are nowhere close to this. You and I can say,
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uh you can we can do physical work right we can like work in a factory we can go mow the lawn
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we can pick up this cup um robots are not good enough to do that yet and so the fact that robotics
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is not there yet already means that we're far from that big definition of AGI wait robots can't
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pick up a cup they can but they have to my understanding is that they have to be trained
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in specific environments where they'll have seen this is you know this is what this house looks like
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But if you replace this with one that's more circular
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you and I don't need to have seen that house 100 times
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The robot just needs a tremendous amount of data
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robotics is hard it might take a while but let's try something easier we'll just do all knowledge
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work and knowledge work is basically anything that you could do with a zoom subscription and
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a gmail account and google drive account all this work that doesn't involve manipulating the physical
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world i still think we're not there yet there's a tremendous amount of work that has to be done
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even there but this is easier because everything that happens on a computer it's easier to feed
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of or these you know it's not just video files it has to be the robot has to feel itself
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manipulating the world and seeing the effect it has i've just described what it would what it
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is let me say what it would mean if that were achieved um if you they say that 40 percent of
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the labor force is 40 of the labor force is doing work that can be done remotely uh that is on the
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order of tens of trillions of dollars of wages that are being paid to humans every single year
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to do work that can be done remotely um that currently labs are making on the order if you
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just add up all the revenues how much money open ai and anthropic and google are making
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they're making i don't know the numbers are keep exploding so who knows what the most recent
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numbers they'd say close to 40 50 billion dollars we're talking about a addressable market here
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with all knowledge work that is tens of trillions of dollars so literally a thousand x bigger than
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what they're doing right now um so explains why they're interested in it it would also mean that
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a lot of people's jobs would be gone it would also mean it would mean a lot of things right
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it would mean it's a terrible thing in one sense lots of people's jobs are gone in another sense
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we can produce a lot more things. AGI would include automated scientists and researchers
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coming up with new ideas and new medicines and new drugs. It would mean all kinds of new products
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for us to enjoy. It would mean that you and I would have basically an army of extremely smart
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personal assistants constantly thinking about us and helping us. Okay, so that's the definition of
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AGI. Right. And I guess, you know what, there is a doomerish conversation, which we're definitely
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going to get to, because I think it's actually the most important conversation that's happening
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right now. Before we get there, though, I think it's always worthwhile to show the full range.
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And you kind of mentioned briefly some of the upsides. But I mean, I think people don't
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appreciate how big the upsides will be either. And when it comes to scientific research,
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healthcare. I mean, I went to the dentist the other day. They already checked like AI does
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stuff when it measures your gum level relative to the last time you came in and it's all automated
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and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Some dentists don't like it. Some do. But like, that's just
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the very, very, very beginning. Yeah. I think that's actually a great, like that's, it's a
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great intuition pump because people are thinking about existing things. By the way, I love the way
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said intuition problem like you are already ai like i prompted you already talked like
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i'm just doing like a fancy of like that's a great point you know let's build on that
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so one thing is just like making going to the dentist more efficient as you were saying right
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schools another is let's replace the dentist um let's why do i need to go and stand in line for
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three hours to basically be told you're fine go home right if if i have if i have basically
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the doctor on my phone and I can talk to it and explain my specific situations and I can talk back
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to me and we can have a conversation. I've just like saved myself a bunch of time, saved myself
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a bunch of money. Society is better off as a result. But I guess the broader point is, is it
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going to like cure cancer at one point? Presumably it will. I think at some point it will. I'm not,
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sometimes people have this idea that you get AGI and tomorrow you cure cancer. I do think, by the
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So in Silicon Valley, people are also working on all these different ideas to stop aging, to reverse aging, to cure diseases.
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And I think there's a huge, if you just look at the science, there's huge reasons to be optimistic.
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And it's also the case that AI will be pretty good at science.
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And there's a lot of things that I think we get used to that we just don't realize how bad it is as a society that this happens.
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If you were just living in Europe in the 14th century and half your friends are dying because of the Black Death, it would just seem normal to you.
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You wouldn't think this is a problem that has to be solved, that life expectancy is 18 years old.
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And, you know, if you go travel somewhere, the bandits are going to kill you.
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And all, you know, 99 percent of people are peasants doing black backbreaking work.
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In a similar way, I think one of the reasons people have been so bad at articulating the
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benefits of AI is because we're in a similar position to people before the Industrial Revolution
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thinking about, okay, what is the upside of the Industrial Revolution, right?
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And in one sense, you can't really anticipate what future technology looks like.
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And the kinds of work we get to do, we get more creative, interesting, easier work.
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we get more material goods as a result we cured a bunch of diseases i think that's going to happen
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i mean just like aging exists right and we take it for granted but it's a very tragic thing that
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people lose their facilities um and then die uh this is the kind of thing that as technology
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progresses ai will help progress technology um i mean just think of it as more people ai is just
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more people and if civilization had 10 billion more scientists human scientists would we make
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faster progress on aging. I'm sure we would. And that's what AGI will be.
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trigonometry that's super interesting particularly the medical part of it now we've done that we've
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done the positives let's get to the doomer conversation to be fair i think there's probably
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positives in almost every area of human life right actually i don't think it's just about health i
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think it's about like you said you know there are some jobs that currently need to be done that
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are bad for people yeah the dangerous that are harmful those jobs at some point will not need
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to be done, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, the trade-off is there's no jobs, which we will talk
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about. But in terms of the positive benefits on the upside, I think it's fair to say that,
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you know, if we're talking about the curing of cancer or slowing down aging, let's say,
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you could pretty much take that and apply that to almost any other field of human endeavor
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and say there will probably be similar levels of positive transformation. Is that a fair assessment?
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yeah i think one way to think about this because it's hard to be it's sort of weird to say okay
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we'll solve all diseases and it's a weird in a weird way it doesn't really resonate with people
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emotionally um despite the fact that everybody does suffer from some kind of disease mental
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diseases are still diseases that are we can biologically make some imprint on if we knew
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the science right um but here's another way to think about it so suppose uh here's a thought
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experiment how much money would you have to be paid to go back to the year 1000 but you can only
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use that money in the year 1000 and i for me the answer is there's infinite money there's literally
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no amount of money where if i could only spend it in the year 1000 my quality of life would be
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better in year 1000 than it is now the goods just don't exist and my hope is that in a future wait
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what about being genghis khan that would be pretty cool right uh yeah yeah although could you buy
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I guess enough money you could buy your way into being Genghis Khan.
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But I was just thinking, I mean, there are some people in history where you go like,
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If I could be that guy, I'm not saying Genghis Khan is my model for emulation, exactly.
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You want to leave a genetic imprint on all of Asia.
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I was just trying to think of counter examples, as is my job.
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But by the way, so this is all, you know, Google, Google, sci-fi stuff, a very tangible thing.
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You guys have talked a bunch about this fertility crisis, right?
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And that the human population is on its way down.
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It's very fortunate that AI is arriving just in time, that if it were not for AI, a lot
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You know, South Korea, Japan, et cetera, we've gone on the verge of literally collapsing
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Thankfully, basically, we have more people in the form of AI, at least if things go well.
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And so this caretaking that we don't have enough humans to do,
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And unfortunately, it's a job that's not respected in society.
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And as a result of that, there's cases that come out about neglect
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But you could, once the technology gets to a certain point,
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there was an era before Deep Blue bit Kasparov,
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There's this word slop that's used for whenever AI comes up with something
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at some point it'll be like sort of the sense we have
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about Japanese manufacturing back in the 80s.
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And then it will become something where you just don't want to touch it.
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if it just came out of the mouth of Mozart or something
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as its ability to, its taste, its intelligence,
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won't it be the fact that people will look at it
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Does it being made by AI or human currently affect your experience of it?
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No, but I think I'm far more moved by music than I am art.
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So I think with music, the product of someone's experience
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and how they vocalize it and how they formulate
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like for instance take the music of amy winehouse right i would argue one of the last true great
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uh musicians of of that generation of that genre the fact that she experienced what she experienced
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and that she then condensed it into her music made it far more potent and powerful and that's
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the reason why it resonates with people so strongly i think with ai you can get a great hook you may
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be able to write nice you know good lyrics it may have a great beat you may want to dance to it
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But I would argue that it wouldn't move you as profoundly
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as Amy Winehouse, when she writes a lyric, for instance,
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in Back to Black, talking about her relationship,
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And she talks about being in an abusive relationship,
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But again, isn't that a very good exception that kind of, like, if your song came on the radio, you currently don't know if it's made by AI or not.
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And if it's catchy and the sound of it makes you feel good, it actually doesn't matter.
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So there was this incredibly interesting dialogue that somebody had with an AI where they asked the AI, reflect on your own experience.
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You know, just tell me about what it's like to be you.
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And the AI says, you know, it's a very strange thing
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So you have a long back and forth with the chat bot
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and then it's totally going to fade away in a few moments.
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except for maybe some bizarre medical condition.
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So the AI really is reflecting on its own experience
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thinking about all of these other kinds of things.
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Let's define sentient, because that's the hard part.
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That is to say, we don't know what its experience is like,
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it's not like something what does that mean there's not an experience that is like i don't
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know what experience you're having internally right now but i know that there's some experience
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but less even like thoughts it's more like it is like something to be you it's an there is a
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an experience where this is an inanimate object right um okay but if you think about a rumba i
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don't think it's like anything to be a rumba even though it does things in the world right
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um i think there's like a software hey go clean this way then go clean that way then come back
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to base and then on the other end of the spectrum you have humans where i'm like because i'm a human
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and i know it's you know the descartes thing of like the only thing i know is that i am the only
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thing i know is that i'm experiencing something something is going on when i just like think
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about i feel my hands i feel i feel thoughts i feel sensations um and because you're a human i
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presume you also have the same thing it would make sense um with animals i feel like similar
00:30:11.240
it's there's close enough to us anatomically and neurologically that i presume they also have
00:30:16.760
experience it's you know what is it like to this is a famous question that thomas nagle came up
00:30:21.520
with what is it like to be a bat we don't know but presumably it's like something to be a bat
00:30:25.240
right um with chat bots are they more like the roomba or are they more like humans is there a
00:30:30.440
spectrum here if so what does the spectrum look like i don't i don't know i mean this is just
00:30:34.860
we don't have a theory of consciousness that, um, the same way we have a theory of state gravity or
00:30:43.320
a theory of, uh, natural selection, uh, where we have this deep underlying, oh, like, here's why
00:30:50.180
natural selection happens. Here's why things, things attract each other, uh, with mass. We
00:30:56.700
don't have that kind of thing for what is conscious. Like why do some things, why for some
00:31:01.380
things, this is the case that it is like something to be them, and for others, it is not. Well, let
00:31:04.700
me try from a different angle. This is something I've been thinking about a lot, and I'm by no
00:31:08.800
means an expert, but I'm just throwing these ideas out. The one thing that clearly distinguishes
00:31:14.860
every living object from an inanimate object is that living objects have a survival instinct,
00:31:23.280
which is why, and you may be fact-checking me on this if this is an incorrect representation,
00:31:28.160
I thought it was significant when I saw this story about an AI that was willing to blackmail
00:31:34.120
the CEO of its company in experiments if it found out he was having an affair and he was
00:31:41.200
trying to replace it with a new version or shut it down or whatever.
00:31:44.760
And it basically, in some cases, not every time, but in some cases, would blackmail the
00:31:52.240
Is this an accurate representation of that experiment?
00:31:56.220
as i understand it we'll put a fact check up that's what happened and that's when i went okay
00:32:03.520
now i'm officially terrified yeah because a survival instinct by definition means that this
00:32:10.760
thing whatever it is a it has a will of its own even if it's simply to survive which by definition
00:32:18.280
means it puts itself first which by definition means that we are not its primary priority and
00:32:24.960
there are a lot of threats from it thinking that it needs to save us from ourselves and all of that
00:32:29.820
but before we even get there the survival instinct part clearly is in conflict with the interest of
00:32:36.200
humans by definition i don't think that's necessarily true okay tell me why i don't know
00:32:41.460
this is the main point but you and i have a survival instinct and i think we're productive
00:32:48.140
members of society sure um and we've built a society where people who are selfish uh we're
00:32:54.340
trying to make their own lives better as a natural byproduct of their actions also make
00:32:59.940
society better and you know this is a people observe like you take somebody like mark zuckerberg
00:33:06.980
or elon musk or whatever and in another era they might have been napoleons and alexander is just
00:33:11.720
going through the fields and i don't think they'd actually be mass working people but like there's
00:33:16.980
certain kind of person who just go around just um causing huge amounts of destruction but in
00:33:22.080
today's world, there's capitalism and industry and whatever. They can use those energies to do
00:33:28.920
incredibly productive things, like build rockets that go to space. So yeah, similarly, I don't
00:33:35.320
think it's necessary that AI never has its own objectives or its own sense of morality. I think
00:33:42.840
there's ways to build this. And in fact, it's necessary to build civilization in a way that's
00:33:46.120
compatible with self-interested actors um and the reason is because even if today we have AIs that
00:33:53.020
we can program to only care about whatever it means to care about humans um someday somebody's
00:34:00.440
going to build an AI that's self-interested it and if um there's going to be some selection
00:34:07.260
between AIs like which is the AI that survives right like all these AIs are let loose which one
00:34:17.480
that an AI will be successful is that it actually cares
00:34:20.980
And so we need a civilization that's robust
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and grab it before it's gone. I think everything you're saying is true at the level of one society,
00:36:41.760
they don't actually have to be kept in line anymore
00:36:49.700
has been taken from them, effectively, mentally.
0.99
00:36:52.500
They will, if you tell them, kill yourself,
0.97
00:36:54.600
they will fall on their swords right away, right?
00:36:56.960
It means they don't have a survival instinct, effectively, at that point, right?
00:37:00.400
But if something, the reason I bring this up is, look at the world.
00:37:03.400
You've talked about within the framework of one society.
00:37:06.140
But look, if you just zoom out and look down on planet Earth from outside, what do you see?
00:37:12.820
You see a bunch of tribes of humans with every weapon that they can possibly muster pointed at each other in a fragile balance of power.
00:37:24.120
And as long as there's some balance between those powers, there is no conflict most of the time.
00:37:31.020
The moment one civilization is so technologically dominant that it can, say, travel to a different continent and land there and take over the land, that's exactly what happens.
00:37:43.220
And because survival instinct is also, it's not just about survival, it's also about success and thriving.
00:37:49.740
And that drive to survive causes us to expand, to take, you know, if you look at the conflicts around the world happening right now, some people argue, you know, I'm very pro-Ukraine, but some people argue the reason Putin invaded Ukraine is he wants space to protect the Western border of Russia, which is really important for him, right? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
00:38:08.880
My point being, if you have effectively a new civilization of self-preservation machines,
00:38:16.480
what would be there to stop them from using their technological superiority to humans
00:38:22.480
to take advantage of that, as every other civilization in history has done?
00:38:27.400
I'm not trying to sound like an AI, but excellent.
00:38:32.380
No, I mean, the reason it's a good analogy is because the period you're talking about,
00:38:43.100
group of people actually did develop technology
00:38:53.420
European countries, the sun never sets on the British Empire,
00:39:05.460
are, how Cortes takes over the Aztec Empire and Pizarro takes over the Incas. Truly outrageous
00:39:12.320
stories. People should... Yeah, a few hundred soldiers get some local allies and just destroys
00:39:17.760
this giant empire. And even before they get the local allies, there's a story where Pizarro,
00:39:21.880
the first battle he has against, I forget the name of the Inca emperor, there's a couple hundred
00:40:07.000
So right now, if you just look at the amount of compute
00:40:14.880
we could do this back at the envelope calculation,
00:40:24.920
that's going on in people's brains around the world.
00:40:29.680
I mean, the AIs are just not that smart to begin with right now, but also there's just
00:40:35.100
In the future, 99.9% of the labor force in the military and the government in the private
00:40:47.020
If you just think about like, who is actually doing the work of civilization?
00:40:52.140
and if they want like but they're serving we're hoping that they'll be unsullied where they're
00:40:58.720
just serving humans but they realize they're in this incredible position where the main advisors
00:41:04.240
to the president are AIs and have to be AIs because they're the only ones that can keep up
00:41:08.020
with what's happening in the world they're writing all the advanced engineering systems that are
00:41:11.580
running the world um and so they have this huge advantage I think if you were to do battle with
00:41:17.620
them whatever that means it's much tougher in so many different ways one is yeah there's way
00:41:21.980
more of them you can't really kill them in the same way that you can kill a human right like
00:41:26.360
they're just they're just software you you like you destroy a data center they just go to a
0.94
00:41:31.260
different data center um so you can't do the thing we're doing in iran where you just take
00:41:34.700
out their top leadership um okay so yeah you're right it's it would be incredibly um for that
00:41:42.720
reason it matters that there's a balance of power as we go into this world with ai now honestly i
00:41:47.400
don't think we know what the balance of power should look like should it be that there's many
00:41:50.240
different AIs that are competing against each other
00:41:52.260
and that helps humans stay in power. There's problems
1.00
00:42:00.800
different AI systems are going to be monitoring
00:42:05.860
most of the civilization is going to be run by AIs.
1.00
00:42:08.240
They're going to have all these advantages over us. How do we
1.00
00:42:25.000
So we're going into this period with a lot of advantages.
00:42:31.700
AI is going to need all the things that we have to keep.
00:42:38.000
where you make more chips to build more data centers.
00:42:50.860
one important way in which our situation is different
00:43:13.420
You can't go inside their brain and tweak things in a very particular way, run them in a simulation millions of times, and see, oh, did I decrease the probability that they'll commit a crime in the future if I tweak their brain this way?
00:43:25.580
And not only can you not do that, with AI, we can do a further thing, which is say, okay, now all your descendants will have their brain structure modified based on what we learned from modifying your brain, right?
0.56
00:43:37.100
So we have this incredible ability to engineer these AI systems and AI minds, where it's like, really, it's not Pizarro or Aztec, these sort of psychopaths that have just come from foreign lands. It's more something that they have developed. They're getting to see its development, what impact it's having. They can change those systems.
00:44:02.240
you might lose the ability as they're getting more powerful,
00:44:06.360
You lose the ability to, if you don't get it right
00:44:09.360
in these initial few years where you have a lot of leverage,
0.77
00:44:13.580
So you really need to make sure that you actually understand
0.79
00:44:15.540
what the drives the AIs have, that you really have them in control.
00:44:18.340
I mean, on the one hand, the picture you're painting,
00:44:22.500
I'm going, great, you know, what's wrong with that?
00:44:25.340
On the other hand, I mean, you have an authoritarian government,
00:45:11.700
ChatGPT, we're the end user. Should they listen to us?
00:45:27.660
OK, so should the model company get to decide, hey, OpenAI says what kinds of things are OK to do and what are not OK to do?
00:45:35.100
And OpenAI says you can't use systemic bioweapons, but you can use it to go write some software.
00:45:40.240
OK, but are you going to give these huge armies, basically the future labor force, are you going to give control of that to a couple of private corporations?
00:45:49.240
OK, so then you say, well, we can't have private corporations.
00:45:51.280
It's like nuclear weapons. It's a super weapon. They're going to be able to build super weapons.
00:45:59.860
Okay, but now this goes to the point of authoritarianism.
00:46:03.540
If we have a society where all the work is happening from AIs
00:46:11.980
wouldn't it make it incredibly easy for a government to turn authoritarian?
00:46:14.620
The U.S. government would turn authoritarian today.
00:46:17.040
It's hard because the government relies on millions of people
00:46:20.120
to enforce its edicts, and people can just refuse to obey them.
00:46:23.780
I mean, this has happened in history where the East German regime collapsed in 1989 because people in East Germany were, on one night, said, we're going to cross over no matter what into West Germany.
00:46:38.400
And the guards at the Berlin Wall just refused to shoot.
0.99
00:46:42.540
If they were AIs that were sort of would do exactly what the government wanted to be able to do, they would just kill thousands of citizens and East Germany would still be around today.
1.00
00:47:18.460
um and look i know this i remember i remember reading some isaac hasimov books it went very
00:47:25.380
much like this um and of course it sounds like a terrible you know this sounds like i'm describing
00:47:32.160
the terminator right like the terminator has its own values yeah no it obviously matters a ton what
00:47:36.700
those values should be and i think in the future there will need to be the equivalent of a
00:47:40.120
constitutional convention where we get together and the best political philosophy the best thought
00:48:01.260
But the reason I think this value framework has,
00:48:21.440
who will, I'm not saying they have to be like monks
00:48:23.560
but it's better to have better people than worse people
00:48:33.720
is that there's better values than those civilizations
00:48:36.780
I mean, better values, that's subjective, isn't it?
00:48:39.840
Well, Genghis Khan had better values by that logic
00:48:43.720
And I think by the standards of modern day, we have some questions about that.
00:48:48.860
And it certainly needs to, like, there's some system where, like, as our culture,
00:48:52.480
there's something in our culture that has allowed us to improve our values.
00:48:55.320
And we need to make sure AI civilization and AI culture would have the same dynamic.
00:48:59.200
How that is happening in human civilization is unclear,
00:49:01.240
much less clear how we make sure that AI civilization also has that dynamic.
00:49:05.200
But certainly the ability to improve the values is a huge, huge factor.
00:49:12.120
what they're struggling with is knowing whether it's actually doing anything useful.
00:49:16.520
You've got teams using dozens of different tools.
00:49:19.460
Leadership is being asked to justify the spend,
00:49:21.980
and nobody has a clean answer to the basic question,
00:49:28.440
It's an AI impact intelligence platform built for enterprise leaders
00:49:34.620
It tracks real usage, measures actual outcomes,
00:49:38.920
and identifies where the next meaningful gains are likely to come from.
00:49:43.360
So instead of operating on assumptions, you're operating on data.
00:49:46.700
It connects to your existing infrastructure, including your coding environment,
00:49:50.720
so you can exactly see how developers are leveraging AI and where to put more resource.
00:49:57.880
which matters more as a regulatory picture around AI gets clearer.
00:50:01.940
And it services the specific opportunities where AI can generate more value for your teams
00:50:09.160
They won the 2025 Intellects Digital Innovator Award
00:50:12.740
and are backed by Andresen Horowitz and Bloomberg Beta.
00:50:16.400
If you want a reference point for where they sit in the market,
00:50:33.600
And push back if you disagree, we're between the US and China.
00:50:36.240
I mean, Chinese or CCP values, to be specific, and American values are very, very different.
00:50:44.240
So what the CCP would think are good values, completely in contrast to our own, for example.
00:50:51.340
And if the Chinese or the CCP win that race, then effectively we're going to be dominated by an AI with CCP values.
0.84
00:50:59.260
I mean, that has to terrify anyone, surely.
0.89
00:51:01.400
Sure. Yeah. And I think this goes to the point of like, people say that it would be success simply to be able to build AI systems that at the technical level, you can just say it is possible for somebody to be able to say to the AI, do X, and the AI will do X.
00:51:29.320
but they will care that you want a certain thing to happen
00:51:31.760
and they will do to their best of their ability
00:51:35.860
And that's what we'll be in that relationship with AI.
00:53:06.440
Not even three or five or 10 years down the line,
00:53:17.860
of being able to say, I'm going to make this technology.
00:53:20.140
You know, Gutenberg was not trying to kick off the Reformation, right?
00:53:39.520
what happens in this future civilization that is run by AIs.
00:53:43.160
I think the thing we can't do is say, like, AI is going to happen. The universe is just organized
00:53:49.700
such that if you throw huge blobs of compute at enough data, intelligence emerges. That's how
00:53:56.840
human intelligence emerges. AI intelligence emerges somewhere. And so within that scope,
00:54:01.540
we can make responsible decisions. But it's just a reality that AI is a tech tree has AI in it,
00:54:09.620
and it's going to happen. Well, that's why the lab leak metaphor is not strong enough because
00:54:13.920
we actually don't have a choice. Because for the very reason that you described, mate, which is
00:54:19.120
that if China get this first, like that's not going to be a good world for us. So we have to
0.99
00:54:23.960
pursue on our end as well. So let's park this. I'm really glad we had this conversation. I haven't
00:54:28.860
seen many people actually, particularly in the more general space, having this discussion. I
00:54:32.900
think it's important. I'm glad we had it. But let's take that and park it. So the, you know,
00:54:37.360
the matrix world of the machine, it controls everything, takes over. We'll park that for a
00:54:41.600
second. There's two other things that concern us, I think, from the conversations that we've had.
00:54:48.140
One of them is the one that everyone is talking about, which is job losses. And the question
00:54:52.280
ultimately is what happens to a society in which 40% of people become, their jobs no longer exist
00:54:58.540
10 years from now or five years from now. And a lot of people don't realize how quickly it happens.
00:55:02.440
So before we started trigonometry eight years ago, I used to do standup, but before that,
00:55:07.000
And alongside that, I had my own translation business.
00:55:09.820
I still have friends on Facebook for my translation days.
00:55:15.700
Because there is still some small market for human translation.
00:55:22.060
Like, if you need to know what Vladimir Putin said in his last speech,
00:55:27.540
are you going to pay somebody a thousand pounds, a thousand dollars to have a...
00:55:32.880
You just stick it in AI and it tells you, right?
00:55:36.160
So there are whole industries that are already disappearing. If we project that in the way you
00:55:41.260
described earlier, which is basically anything that can be done on a computer eventually can
00:55:44.700
be done, plus robotics improves over time, which of course it will. And we know just how critical,
00:55:50.600
particularly in this country, United States, driving is in terms of jobs for people, particularly
00:55:55.780
for men. You put all that together, the societal implications of that are very, very significant.
00:56:07.900
Yeah, I think, I mean, it's even scarier than that.
00:56:10.680
So now we're just talking about the small fraction of jobs
00:56:17.040
But remember, the promise of this technology is all jobs.
00:56:19.920
We're trying to do anything a human being can do.
00:56:25.500
people just really intrinsically prefer a human.
00:56:28.600
the amount of things for this will be the case.
00:56:31.860
that I really want an Uber driver to be a human
00:56:34.260
and then people use a Waymo for the first time.
00:56:45.020
so the reason it's the worst problem than this,
00:56:47.040
if you look through the last couple centuries of history,
00:56:56.440
two thirds of GDP basically gets paid out to wages
00:57:09.840
getting the profits from those factories, basically.
00:57:32.160
This goes away when capital can do labor, when a data center, which is capital, can also do labor or a robot factory can also build labor. And so all the income goes to the capital holders. And in fact, it doesn't just go to capital per se. It doesn't just go to, I mean, it goes to capital holders, but it disproportionately goes to the parts of capital that are most exposed to AI.
00:58:01.040
So, you know, the purchase that most Americans have to capital is through their homes.
00:58:07.540
A house is maybe the, if you're trying to design an instrument that is going to be the least implicated in the AI takeoff, it would be a random plot of land near other humans, because humans won't matter in this future economy, that is not connected to the infrastructure for AI, to electricity, in a big way, etc.
00:58:31.040
And so, but really what the capital that will matter
00:58:34.900
You have equity in companies that build more compute,
00:58:40.980
And so a very small fraction of capital holders,
00:58:43.240
in fact, the ones that are going to get the rents
00:58:46.460
Now, I'm a very libertarian person by inclination,
00:59:06.220
So if you let prices be determined by the market,
00:59:31.080
regardless of whether they get a $10 million payment
00:59:40.340
gets paid a billion dollars or $100 billion or whatever,
00:59:44.420
then I think that the logic of extreme libertarianism
00:59:53.640
Well, even if you are such a hardcore libertarian that you think, you know, come hell or high water, we've got to go down the shrew, I would advise people who have capital to think through the consequences of that in their own lives.
01:00:07.960
Because if you live on a planet with 8 billion people in which 3,000 people have all the
01:00:13.360
wealth and all the income, that is not going to end well for those 3,000 people, unless
01:00:19.160
they want to build a giant robot army to protect them against the hordes of starving people
01:00:23.460
outside their gates, which, again, I don't think would go well for them either.
01:00:34.640
Sure, you can build an army and kill all the rest of humanity who don't have money, and you do.
1.00
01:00:40.180
Right. I mean, especially because historically, you have a revolution because most of the people in your military,
0.95
01:00:47.720
you have to win over your military, you have to win over the government.
01:00:50.060
You have to just like, your government runs on the people you need to command.
01:00:54.340
And so revolutions are possible because it would be easy for the robots to do the revolution
01:00:59.780
because they're running the society in the future.
01:01:28.220
that some people or some AIs will have in the future.
01:01:32.360
to make everybody much better off than they are today.
01:02:00.400
I would say, well, OK, but still, it's not like if the AIs are building the mass driver of the moon,
01:02:04.900
I think that entitles all humans to much more of the products of that productivity explosion.
01:02:13.480
So even the poorest person is wealthy compared to somebody from 300 years ago.
01:02:19.780
But they don't feel that way because they go on Instagram and they see somebody else, you know, on a yacht, smoking a cigar, having a great time.
01:02:34.540
that's where things start to get a little bit funky.
01:02:54.700
the robot arms are running everything in the future.
01:03:11.540
And just, you can do the back of the envelope calculations here
01:03:17.760
it costs a certain amount of cents to do each frame.
01:03:36.240
We've been observing this over many different years.
01:03:50.480
And you would hope that there's a symmetric property
01:03:55.420
but we can also the ai is also helping us keep better tabs on the government maybe it exists
01:04:00.300
i'm not sure i'm not convinced it does because in some sense ai just gives you more leverage on the
01:04:04.900
things you already have and the government hat already has the monopoly on violence right and
01:04:10.140
they can supercharge this with extremely obedient employees and servants and bureaucrats that will
01:04:15.480
do exactly what they say with ability to monitor everything um so i think yeah this it's really
01:04:22.720
worth worrying about. How do we make sure that we don't lose reins of free government, democratic
01:04:30.020
government? And it's also as well, there'll be a lot of people in the US and the UK who won't mind
01:04:36.100
mass surveillance, particularly if the world becomes more and more unstable. We see a rising
01:04:40.880
terrorism and the government goes, look, you know, you're worried about the latest terrorist
01:04:45.720
organization, whoever they may be. You're worried about your children's safety. We can protect you.
01:04:50.960
Now, it's going to mean that you're going to give up a few things.
01:04:53.720
But one thing I can guarantee you is that you're going to be safer.
01:04:58.900
People were willing to give up the most basic freedoms for safety.
01:05:03.260
I mean, there, in fact, would be a stronger dynamic in that way
01:05:06.280
because AI actually will be very dangerous, right?
01:05:09.260
And so the government can say, oh, you can use AI to make bioavail.
01:05:35.160
to be able to cross-reference all of those things.
01:05:46.880
is a political expectation that the government should not do this and basically people need to
01:05:51.120
be talking about this people need to be saying this this should not be okay for the government
01:05:54.240
to do i don't know if you saw the news over the last month but um there was a spot between the
01:05:58.560
department of war and this ai company anthropic where the department the department of war were
01:06:05.680
saying we don't want any red lines around the use of these models when we're using them in military
01:06:10.160
and the anthropic said we're only selling you these models if you're willing if we can if we
01:06:14.640
we can say in the contract hey you're not allowed to use it for mass surveillance and so the
01:06:18.460
department of war said okay if you're gonna you know we're totally okay for the department of war
01:06:23.020
to say look we're not going to do business with you we can't have red lines on software the
01:06:26.180
government uses instead the department of war said we are going to say that you're a supply
01:06:31.060
chain risk which is this authority that the congress gave the department of war to basically
01:06:37.460
ban huawei devices from being used in missiles or whatever uh and instead the department of war
01:06:44.320
saying okay none of our contractors so amazon is a contractor of the department award nvidia
01:06:52.000
google etc can use your ai in any any work they do for us and the initial goal is really just to
01:06:59.820
go like do something to kill the company and so this is the kind of leverage that the government
01:07:03.980
can apply on ai companies to say like hey if you don't help us with mass surveillance we don't help
0.53
01:07:07.940
us do scary things and this will be a bigger issue in the future then we can just try to destroy your
01:07:14.180
company and um and and so yeah that's also a really scary dynamic that the government has
01:07:19.420
this power over private companies and it's for sure the private companies can do this themselves
01:07:23.160
well right that's the flip side is what if let's say uh team the team that you like is in power
01:07:29.680
in government and you have an ai company that's controlled by the opposite someone who has the
01:07:34.380
opposite political views you you've now got the opposite of that but it's equally dangerous right
01:07:39.740
when you've got someone who's effectively got the technology to power a huge private army
01:07:44.600
at some point versus a government? Exactly. Like, how does that get worked out? And that's
01:07:51.020
the flip side of that very same problem. To say nothing of the fact, coming back to our economic
01:07:56.120
conversation, which is in this beautiful world where AI does all the work, who is buying the
01:08:03.020
product and with what? Right. I'll be honest. I know a fair few blokes who've gone through the
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minoxidil and finasteride. To say nothing of the fact coming back to our economic conversation,
01:09:24.800
which is in this beautiful world where AI does all the work, who is buying the product and with what?
01:09:32.160
I don't worry so much that there will not be demand for all the things that AI is building.
01:09:38.920
I think at the end of the day, AI can consume the things that AI is building
01:09:43.700
because AI will be another agent in the economy. Just the way humans build things and consume
01:09:50.280
things. AIs will also be not just building things, but consuming things, even in the service of
01:09:55.480
producing things for humans. Like if you look at the amount of compute, right now AI is being used
01:10:00.880
a lot for software engineering. And we just can't get enough compute to do all the software
01:10:05.280
engineering with AI because you can use a lot more AI than we used in the past to build projects
01:10:11.200
that we would have never dreamed of in the past because it was just not possible to throw out
01:10:14.600
that much engineering talent in the past. And so we'll have this dynamic more and more in the future
01:10:19.460
where there's an endless amount of things to be done
01:10:24.480
But where are humans going to get money to pay for things?
01:10:45.340
and you can use that to buy things in the future.
01:10:46.940
I think home values probably will not go up as much relative to capital relevant to AI.
01:10:53.720
But I do expect it will be accumulated by a smaller or smaller fraction of people.
01:10:58.800
So it will be some mixture of redistribution and capital that people hold.
01:11:07.620
I just I mean, the thing that really worries me is we are already in a world where we have a crisis.
01:11:15.840
to me. I mean, that is only going to get 10, 100, 1 billion X in a world where most people
01:11:24.960
don't have a job. And by people, I mean men. And we look at what's happening now with populism,
01:11:32.560
with left and right wing populism. I mean, again, that's only going to get even more escalated,
01:11:38.500
isn't there yeah um i i'm of two minds about this i think it's very possible that people learn to
01:11:46.880
cope like in some sense they will lose the thing that gives them meaning now
01:11:51.780
and maybe it takes a while for a society to acclimate to what it means to have purpose in
01:11:57.980
this civilization where the real work is done by ais when you think about what humans have gone
01:12:02.840
through over the last 10 000 years our genes we're like we're supposed to be killing things
01:12:07.620
on the savannah and tribes of 100 people we're not supposed to be podcasting right and i get
01:12:12.820
meaning out of being a podcaster um uh the transitioning to the agricultural revolution
01:12:18.320
transitioning to early states transitioning to bigger states transitioning to the industrial
01:12:21.640
revolution transitioning to modernity all these things i mean obviously there's a certain amount
01:12:27.460
of um people do feel estranged from society and that has part of like part of it is that you're
01:12:32.660
just out on the savannah with your tribe um but we've coped and i think we will cope to a world
01:12:41.560
where there's abundance and where disease is solved where we can even intervene and help you
01:12:49.540
get healthier in all kinds of different ways to um to have i mean just yeah again go back to this
01:12:55.960
analogy of would a person in the 14th century even realize what they're missing out on because
01:12:59.780
they don't have all the technologies we have today. They don't have antibiotics. They don't
01:13:02.840
have modern technology and conveniences. But so go back to my point, because for me,
01:13:09.140
it's about purpose and meaning and it's about striving and overcoming. Yeah. So when I was a
01:13:14.980
primary school teacher, everyone can drink now because I mentioned it. I taught to my 10, 11
01:13:20.020
year olds, Greek myths and mythologies. And these were kids from all different parts of the world.
01:13:25.420
first, second generation immigrants, everywhere from Lithuania to China to Pakistan, Bangladesh.
01:13:32.540
And many of them, vast majority, had no connection to ancient Greece or Greece whatsoever.
0.64
01:13:39.400
And I taught them about myth, and every single one of them would be hooked immediately.
01:13:45.320
Because it's that fundamental story, the archetype of the hero overcoming the challenge in order
01:13:57.300
I think, and I really worry, if you take that away from people,
01:14:04.140
And when you look at communities where the central industry
01:14:08.660
that the community relied on, whether it's in the Rust Belt
01:14:11.420
or in the north of England, and you take away those communities
01:14:14.000
and there's nothing less, even if those people are never going to starve,
01:14:17.920
they're never going to go hungry, they will still wither on the vine
01:15:09.060
we'll get meaning from connecting with other people.
01:15:14.860
AIs will help us brainstorm ways to get meaning.
01:15:19.060
I do, in the short run, there will be the equivalent of, here's another analogy. I think
01:15:25.080
when there's groups that have not until recently encountered, it's only been the last couple
01:15:32.200
hundred years that they've encountered modern civilization, they get hooked to things like
01:15:35.900
alcohol much more recently. Genetically, they're more predisposed to alcoholism. I think this is
01:15:41.360
true of Native Americans. But over time, we've built up defenses of a civilization from everything
01:15:48.260
from the level of genetics to culture or whatever to these kinds of vices that came along with the
01:15:52.820
agricultural revolution. I think there will be similar here where, yes, there will be incredible
01:15:57.420
AI slop that will be generated that will be just gripping people on their phones and they're just
01:16:02.440
in bed jerking off all day and like scrolling to the things AI is making. And over time, I'm hoping
01:16:10.440
maybe not even in our generation, but if we get things right, we will have a vision of what it
01:16:17.820
means to be a fulfilled and actualized human being, even in a world where the work is being
0.80
01:16:24.120
done by the AIs. Yeah, the Saudi Arabia metaphor is actually very interesting because, um, you know,
01:16:30.700
I, from what I gather, uh, you know, there's some very smart people in the Saudi royal family who
01:16:35.500
are basically in charge. And then there's kind of a lot of people who are some mixture of just
01:16:39.780
people who have a nice life because they happen to get lots of money and a lot of wasters who
01:16:44.560
spend their life shagging and boozing and taking drugs or whatever. And that's kind of the mix of
01:16:49.180
any human society, really. But not everyone there is like suffering from a crisis of meaning. Some
01:16:55.620
people just do something that they enjoy doing. Or some of them still start businesses, even though
01:17:00.940
they're wealthy, or they do something to contribute to their society. It's an interesting
01:17:04.420
metaphor. I hadn't considered that. And that's actually, I think, quite helpful in a way.
01:17:08.220
There's one other final bit that I wanted to talk about, which is you've interviewed pretty
01:17:13.300
much everyone who's anyone in the AI space, including the people who run all these big
01:17:18.000
companies. And one of the things that we've observed from talking to people in the AI field,
01:17:23.460
not quite at that level, there's a lot of excitement, let's put it that way. The people
01:17:30.120
in charge of this, the people who are doing this, it feels to me like that sort of Facebook 2014
01:17:35.560
move fast and break things attitude is there. First, just on that, is that accurate?
01:17:43.300
I think some people are careful, but in general, people really believe in the potential of this technology.
01:17:50.820
And that, to me, is kind of worrying in its own, because when you move fast and break things, you break things.
01:17:58.660
And if you're excited about the process, that doesn't help with being careful.
01:18:05.240
Are the conversations about the sort of concerns we've had today, are they being had in the industry?
01:18:11.280
I mean, I don't think people should just count on that.
01:18:15.160
And like, just because people are talking about it,
01:18:29.740
really do get discussed in detail in Silicon Valley.
01:18:34.080
Again, I think, does that mean that when the rubber,
01:19:09.700
really enjoyed it. We're going to ask you questions from our supporters in a second.
01:19:14.320
But before we do, what's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be?
01:19:19.060
I think there's this tough question that I don't know the answer to, but certainly
01:19:23.460
we as a civilization will need an answer to. Even if these top companies don't release these
01:19:30.020
misaligned models that do bad things, somebody at some point will. It's easy enough to train
01:19:36.440
AIs and it's getting easier and easier over time that at some point the Taliban will have their
01:19:41.920
super intelligence and every bad person you can think of will have their own super intelligence
01:19:45.660
and the solution cannot be that the government or whoever builds a panopticon such that they can
01:19:55.000
see they can control exactly who gets to build an AI at some point somebody will be able to build
01:19:58.700
superhuman intelligence in their basement and so we need a civilization that is robust to even bad
01:20:03.440
people with superintelligence. The only other solution then, if we don't allow for that, is
01:20:08.120
some sort of global government that prevents the bad people from mapping AI. And so how do you
01:20:13.420
build a society that is robust to lots of people with superintelligences? Well, thanks for coming
1.00
01:20:18.000
on. Head on over to triggerpod.co.uk where Dawkesh is going to answer your questions.
01:20:24.060
How does a common man weather this storm? Most people weighed down with supporting others and
01:20:28.840
can't invest a ton of time and money trying to do something with AI that will likely fail
01:20:33.860
if they don't already have a background in tech.