TRIGGERnometry - May 30, 2026


People Have No Idea What Is About To Happen - Dwarkesh Patel


Episode Stats


Length

1 hour and 20 minutes

Words per minute

188.03815

Word count

15,156

Sentence count

716

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

13

sentences flagged

Hate speech

38

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
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00:01:00.000 I've been the person who said,
00:01:03.680 you think the singularity is going to happen yesterday?
00:01:06.000 I think it'll take five years, ten years.
00:01:08.380 And even for me, I've had to admit that the progress has been pretty fast.
00:01:13.320 Well, I guess the broader point is,
00:01:14.860 is it going to, like, cure cancer at one point?
00:01:17.000 Presumably it will.
00:01:18.140 I think at some point it will.
00:01:19.700 I mean, just think of it as more people.
00:01:21.080 If civilization had 10 billion more scientists, human scientists,
00:01:24.420 would we make faster progress on aging?
00:01:26.000 I'm sure we would.
00:01:27.240 Here's another angle, mass surveillance.
00:01:29.440 The AIs have the potential to make authoritarian societies
00:01:32.140 much more sustainable and powerful than they have been in the past.
00:01:37.040 A lot of the reasons that government has not been as authoritarian as it has in the past
00:01:40.460 is that it's just physically not been possible.
00:01:44.160 How do we make sure that humans don't get totally disenfranchised?
00:01:47.920 Right.
00:01:49.020 How do we make sure that?
00:01:52.120 No, I think it's a tough question.
00:01:56.700 Dworkesh Patel, welcome to Trigonometry.
00:01:58.640 Thanks for having me.
00:01:59.260 It's great to have you on.
00:02:00.900 Actually, I was saying to you before we started,
00:02:02.480 I'm a big fan of your podcast,
00:02:04.520 and I listen particularly to the history episodes.
00:02:06.840 But you've been described as Silicon Valley's favorite podcaster,
00:02:11.120 and you write a lot about AI and tech.
00:02:14.080 And that's actually the conversation we really want to have with you.
00:02:17.780 Partly because a lot of people watching and listening to this,
00:02:20.800 they've got lives, you know, family, work, et cetera.
00:02:23.920 And they haven't been to California.
00:02:26.220 They haven't been to San Francisco.
00:02:28.500 because they haven't seen a third of the cars on the road
00:02:30.900 or 25% of weight robots, basically.
00:02:34.020 Like, this is happening fast,
00:02:35.200 and a lot of people haven't caught up yet.
00:02:37.500 And what we'd love to do is just kind of connect people like you
00:02:40.860 who really understand what's going on
00:02:42.560 with a much more general audience.
00:02:45.180 That includes us, frankly.
00:02:47.560 So first of all, can you explain in broad brushstrokes
00:02:51.280 what is happening with AI?
00:02:53.000 I know it's a massive question, obviously, but do your best.
00:02:55.440 um well i can explain it very concisely the models are getting better and then we can be a
00:03:02.380 little less concise i think it's you're correct to point out that there's this huge discrepancy
00:03:06.960 between what people are seeing in silicon valley and what people are observing outside um it's
00:03:11.400 frankly because of how useful the models are becoming at certain kinds of things so by models
00:03:17.960 i mean um you've you've seen chad gbt you might have heard of things like gemini from google
00:03:23.740 You might have heard of Clot from Anthropic.
00:03:26.340 And you might be using these models
00:03:27.680 to basically do the equivalent of Google search.
00:03:30.260 Using it to replace sometimes
00:03:31.540 when you go to Google search,
00:03:32.460 instead I'm going to type it into chatGPT,
00:03:34.180 see what chat says.
00:03:35.800 What people are now using these models to do
00:03:38.780 in a very powerful way is,
00:03:40.820 if you're a developer,
00:03:42.780 some of the top developers in the world,
00:03:45.400 some of the top researchers in the world,
00:03:47.580 they're not writing code.
00:03:49.420 They haven't touched a line of code since December.
00:03:51.500 They're not looking at a text editor
00:03:52.780 where you would see lines of code.
00:03:54.100 They're talking to the AI.
00:03:55.860 They tell the AI,
00:03:56.960 hey, I want a feature that does X.
00:03:59.020 Can you build me a new repository
00:04:01.600 or a new code base
00:04:03.340 where I make a certain kind of application,
00:04:05.700 a new website?
00:04:06.500 And even, can you go and do research for me?
00:04:09.240 So in process of building AI,
00:04:10.880 you need to do this research of like,
00:04:12.420 how do you build better algorithms?
00:04:15.200 AI is getting to the point
00:04:16.120 where you can just describe at a high level
00:04:17.580 what you want to happen.
00:04:18.880 And it will go do that software engineering for you.
00:04:21.320 And so to your point,
00:04:21.900 The people in Silicon Valley, they're getting tremendous productivity out of these.
00:04:25.820 These are people who are getting paid, you know, who are becoming 3x, 4x, 5x more productive
00:04:30.500 as a result of using these models.
00:04:33.120 So far, we haven't, because these models have been really good at text in, text out work,
00:04:40.700 that is software engineering, software engineering, just a file of text, really.
00:04:43.860 And you can just read every single text file.
00:04:45.380 You can add more to it.
00:04:47.320 AI has been amazing at that.
00:04:48.800 it's been bad so far at, well, it's terrible at physical work, right? So if you're doing any kind
00:04:54.800 of blue collar work, robots are just not there yet. But then even if you circumscribe it, even
00:04:59.840 if you go in and look at, we're not just going to look at software engineering. We're going to look
00:05:04.040 at all kinds of knowledge work, right? All kinds of work that you can do on a computer. Maybe 40%
00:05:08.960 of the labor force is doing work that you can just, you know, do remote work. If COVID happens
00:05:13.500 again you can put them on you can put them on zoom and they can do their work um and ai companies
00:05:18.660 now want to be able to do all of that work uh that requires training ais to just be able to do
00:05:24.440 anything that you can do on a computer an ai should be able to do and companies are saying
00:05:27.880 oh we think we can get there in a year maybe two years but that i think is explaining this
00:05:32.200 discrepancy in what people are seeing it does and one of the things i think is uh also a lot of
00:05:38.640 people would have tried a model at one point to do a Google search or sometimes people have
00:05:45.160 written articles using it. And it turns out that it does make, at the time they tried it,
00:05:49.820 quite a lot of mistakes. And people go, ah, this is all BS. It's not going to work.
00:05:53.540 But the one thing I think people don't appreciate is how rapidly it's getting better. Can you talk
00:05:58.780 a little bit about that? Yeah. So I'll maybe tell you a story about my own use of AI.
00:06:04.780 Among the Silicon Valley people, I've been a sort of skeptic.
00:06:07.660 I've been the person who said,
00:06:09.340 you think the singularity is going to happen yesterday?
00:06:11.360 I think it'll take five years, 10 years.
00:06:13.720 By this, I mean this idea that you'll have incredibly powerful AI systems
00:06:17.000 that are able to do basically anything any human being can do.
00:06:20.580 And some people in Silicon Valley are just, we'll get it later this year.
00:06:23.280 We'll get it in two years.
00:06:24.000 And I say, no, it'll take longer.
00:06:26.200 And even for me, I've had to admit that the progress has been pretty fast.
00:06:30.640 And here's a story.
00:06:31.780 so last year you know like you guys do i research for my podcast obviously i read things but then i
00:06:38.520 also talk to um these llms uh you know the equivalents of chat gpt to research for a podcast
00:06:45.460 and say last year i spent on the order of a hundred dollars on um if you add up my subscription
00:06:51.380 to chat gpt and quad and whatever and gemini there was a week where i was prepping for two
00:06:56.200 different guests where in that prep I just threw in a bunch of uh papers that are relevant to the
00:07:02.200 research and a bunch of books and whatever into a folder and I just said to um uh an LLM hey help
00:07:09.500 me understand all this research so I can ask the person good questions about it and I turned on
00:07:14.440 various things which make the model much more expensive it's faster it's smarter or use a
00:07:18.400 bigger model and during that week if you take my spending during that week and you turn it into a
00:07:23.380 yearly spending, how much it would be if I just did that week over the course of a year,
00:07:26.920 I would be spending over six figures on AI spend. And I think it's possible next year,
00:07:32.460 it would make sense for me to spend seven figures on this AI research for my podcast.
00:07:36.520 Okay, this is just to say that it's getting to the point where I could hire an analyst.
00:07:40.140 I could hire many different analysts to help me prepare for the podcast or researchers.
00:07:43.740 And I'm actually realizing, no, it's more useful to hire AIs. Because there's things AIs can do
00:07:49.700 that humans can't do.
00:07:50.840 They can read 50 different papers
00:07:52.720 that are in my folder
00:07:54.020 that are relevant to an upcoming interview
00:07:55.500 or all these books.
00:07:56.400 They can read it in a second.
00:07:58.480 They have all this compiled knowledge.
00:08:00.580 They know about everything, right?
00:08:02.040 So they don't need to get up to speed.
00:08:05.200 They're incredibly easy to onboard.
00:08:08.680 So you can just like
00:08:09.500 keep spinning up more and more AIs
00:08:11.520 as you keep coming up with more uses for them.
00:08:13.780 Okay, so for me,
00:08:14.540 that's been the thing
00:08:15.160 that's given me a bit of psychosis.
00:08:16.700 Just seeing how useful
00:08:17.480 they've been for interviews so far.
00:08:18.540 But yeah, lots of people are noticing this kind of usefulness now.
00:08:23.160 I think the thing is, is when people look at a lot of the eyes,
00:08:26.560 and this is a question, a point that Constantine made,
00:08:29.780 it's the lack of accuracy and the fact that you constantly have to fact change.
00:08:33.480 I'll give an example.
00:08:34.720 I was looking at guests that we could have from America on the show,
00:08:39.460 and I said to Grok, who can we have on that hasn't appeared yet and is based in America?
00:08:45.640 Number one answer was Douglas Murray.
00:08:48.260 Douglas Murray, I think, is nearly beyond 10 times.
00:08:51.420 And practically every suggestion it made
00:08:54.080 is a guess that we've had on the show.
00:08:56.720 So whilst I accept what you're saying,
00:09:00.300 it's also riddled with mistakes and errors.
00:09:03.340 And to the point where I don't trust it
00:09:06.880 at this point as a technology.
00:09:08.560 I would never take something it says as read.
00:09:12.600 I would always feel that I have to check it
00:09:14.940 in the way that I wouldn't do
00:09:16.680 with a highly competent human employee.
00:09:18.920 You know, you've seen, I'm sure you've seen that meme
00:09:20.700 where a guy wakes up in the hospital
00:09:22.360 with like a scar on his stomach
00:09:24.660 and he says, wait, wait, my appendix on this side
00:09:27.560 and the robot goes, okay, thank you for that feedback.
00:09:30.200 Let me try again.
00:09:32.360 There's a couple of things there.
00:09:36.420 Just the way that people sometimes have
00:09:38.780 these weird failure modes.
00:09:42.360 You know, you talk to a certain kind of person
00:09:43.600 and they just, their mind just goes in a certain direction. 0.99
00:09:47.240 AIs, the way they're trained makes them do that.
00:09:50.780 One way, a big thing they're trained to do is associate things.
00:09:54.460 So they're just like, really, they're just seeing globs of text.
00:09:58.020 And they see this thing is close to this thing.
00:10:00.780 There's an important relationship there.
00:10:02.040 So Grok has seen that Trigger Nenometry Podcast and Douglas Murray,
00:10:07.520 they just seem to go together a bunch.
00:10:09.560 And that bias in its mind is overriding its ability to sort of think critically about,
00:10:14.500 okay, well, who have they had on?
00:10:15.960 Who have they not had on?
00:10:16.680 I would be curious, by the way,
00:10:18.140 you should run that experiment with all the other models.
00:10:20.740 I would not be surprised if the other models,
00:10:22.560 if you ask the question,
00:10:23.360 and I want somebody who I've not interviewed before,
00:10:25.040 that they would immediately catch that.
00:10:26.360 And by this point, the models are good enough
00:10:27.700 to be actually giving you novel names.
00:10:29.780 I don't think they'll give you names
00:10:30.940 which you're like, wow, that's an amazing find.
00:10:33.320 I can't believe I didn't think of,
00:10:34.760 or I would never have thought of that otherwise
00:10:36.320 because they're not amazing at discovering in this.
00:10:40.140 I think humans are great at this idiosyncratic thing
00:10:41.900 of like, there's this like weird angle
00:10:44.740 that I'm like really obsessed with
00:10:46.800 that other people aren't thinking about
00:10:48.140 where the models are not going to do that.
00:10:49.620 They're sort of an average.
00:10:52.300 But when you are preparing to interview the person,
00:10:54.960 I also think they're not amazing at coming up with questions.
00:10:57.000 This is the thing I have to do, that you have to do.
00:10:59.360 They're great at just like, I would have to hire,
00:11:02.520 you know, the ancient Greeks would hire one-on-one tutors
00:11:05.520 for their pupils.
00:11:09.420 And this is how you got Alexander being tutored by Aristotle.
00:11:12.000 and there's something powerful
00:11:15.120 about this way of learning
00:11:16.180 one-on-one where you can just directly ask questions
00:11:19.160 and learn.
00:11:19.880 And so they're amazing at just teaching you stuff
00:11:21.760 because you get this one-on-one tutor
00:11:22.920 that notices your confusion as soon as you have it.
00:11:25.160 You can really probe at your understanding
00:11:27.460 in different ways.
00:11:29.020 But I take your point that like
00:11:30.040 some of the models are not there yet
00:11:32.080 on a lot of these kinds of biases that they have.
00:11:34.860 And one of the things that people are talking about
00:11:36.800 a lot is AGI.
00:11:38.440 Could you explain to people,
00:11:40.140 basically made, what AGI is, what it stands for, and why the potential is to be so transformative
00:11:46.360 for our society? Yeah. Maybe one way to approach this question is to think about,
00:11:53.040 okay, at a very basic level, a system that is in AGI should be able to do anything that a human
00:11:59.660 does. Now, I want to emphasize that current AIs are nowhere close to this. You and I can say,
00:12:07.740 uh you can we can do physical work right we can like work in a factory we can go mow the lawn
00:12:14.260 we can pick up this cup um robots are not good enough to do that yet and so the fact that robotics
00:12:19.220 is not there yet already means that we're far from that big definition of AGI wait robots can't
00:12:24.080 pick up a cup they can but they have to my understanding is that they have to be trained
00:12:28.720 in specific environments where they'll have seen this is you know this is what this house looks like
00:12:34.560 and I need a specific kind of cup
00:12:38.280 that I'm dexterous enough to pick up.
00:12:41.300 But if you replace this with one that's more circular
00:12:43.580 and is tougher to grip,
00:12:45.960 you and I don't need to have seen that house 100 times
00:12:48.480 to then just go in and pick it up.
00:12:50.140 The robot just needs a tremendous amount of data
00:12:52.040 to be flexible in these ways
00:12:53.860 or it's not flexible in those ways.
00:12:55.840 So being HCI would be able to be able to learn
00:12:58.200 as fast as humans,
00:12:58.940 not just have that distilled knowledge.
00:13:01.880 Now the lab say, okay, fine.
00:13:04.200 robotics is hard it might take a while but let's try something easier we'll just do all knowledge
00:13:10.500 work and knowledge work is basically anything that you could do with a zoom subscription and
00:13:16.580 a gmail account and google drive account all this work that doesn't involve manipulating the physical
00:13:20.620 world i still think we're not there yet there's a tremendous amount of work that has to be done
00:13:25.840 even there but this is easier because everything that happens on a computer it's easier to feed
00:13:32.780 that data into an AI, right?
00:13:34.580 It's like all being generated
00:13:35.500 on a computer.
00:13:36.340 You can run simulations.
00:13:38.520 You can just run it millions
00:13:40.240 and millions and millions of times.
00:13:42.640 And AI is just thriving on data, right?
00:13:44.580 The more data you have,
00:13:45.500 the better it gets.
00:13:46.100 This is why it's so good
00:13:46.980 at software engineering
00:13:47.540 because there's all this code out there
00:13:49.180 that you can train it on.
00:13:50.480 With robotics,
00:13:51.620 there's no equivalent
00:13:52.540 of just billions of lines of code
00:13:55.300 that just exist somewhere.
00:13:58.880 There's not these trillions
00:14:00.380 of video files
00:14:01.560 of or these you know it's not just video files it has to be the robot has to feel itself
00:14:07.320 manipulating the world and seeing the effect it has i've just described what it would what it
00:14:12.160 is let me say what it would mean if that were achieved um if you they say that 40 percent of
00:14:20.120 the labor force is 40 of the labor force is doing work that can be done remotely uh that is on the
00:14:28.080 order of tens of trillions of dollars of wages that are being paid to humans every single year
00:14:34.440 to do work that can be done remotely um that currently labs are making on the order if you
00:14:42.440 just add up all the revenues how much money open ai and anthropic and google are making
00:14:46.220 they're making i don't know the numbers are keep exploding so who knows what the most recent
00:14:51.820 numbers they'd say close to 40 50 billion dollars we're talking about a addressable market here
00:14:58.760 with all knowledge work that is tens of trillions of dollars so literally a thousand x bigger than
00:15:07.180 what they're doing right now um so explains why they're interested in it it would also mean that
00:15:11.700 a lot of people's jobs would be gone it would also mean it would mean a lot of things right
00:15:15.540 it would mean it's a terrible thing in one sense lots of people's jobs are gone in another sense
00:15:20.360 we can produce a lot more things. AGI would include automated scientists and researchers
00:15:28.120 coming up with new ideas and new medicines and new drugs. It would mean all kinds of new products
00:15:34.620 for us to enjoy. It would mean that you and I would have basically an army of extremely smart
00:15:41.660 personal assistants constantly thinking about us and helping us. Okay, so that's the definition of
00:15:46.020 AGI. Right. And I guess, you know what, there is a doomerish conversation, which we're definitely
00:15:52.260 going to get to, because I think it's actually the most important conversation that's happening
00:15:55.820 right now. Before we get there, though, I think it's always worthwhile to show the full range.
00:16:01.340 And you kind of mentioned briefly some of the upsides. But I mean, I think people don't
00:16:08.480 appreciate how big the upsides will be either. And when it comes to scientific research,
00:16:15.160 healthcare. I mean, I went to the dentist the other day. They already checked like AI does
00:16:21.220 stuff when it measures your gum level relative to the last time you came in and it's all automated
00:16:25.780 and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Some dentists don't like it. Some do. But like, that's just
00:16:30.680 the very, very, very beginning. Yeah. I think that's actually a great, like that's, it's a
00:16:38.300 great intuition pump because people are thinking about existing things. By the way, I love the way
00:16:43.840 said intuition problem like you are already ai like i prompted you already talked like
00:16:50.880 i'm just doing like a fancy of like that's a great point you know let's build on that
00:16:56.240 so one thing is just like making going to the dentist more efficient as you were saying right
00:17:00.240 schools another is let's replace the dentist um let's why do i need to go and stand in line for
00:17:06.480 three hours to basically be told you're fine go home right if if i have if i have basically
00:17:12.800 the doctor on my phone and I can talk to it and explain my specific situations and I can talk back
00:17:18.100 to me and we can have a conversation. I've just like saved myself a bunch of time, saved myself
00:17:22.080 a bunch of money. Society is better off as a result. But I guess the broader point is, is it
00:17:27.120 going to like cure cancer at one point? Presumably it will. I think at some point it will. I'm not,
00:17:33.820 sometimes people have this idea that you get AGI and tomorrow you cure cancer. I do think, by the
00:17:39.340 So in Silicon Valley, people are also working on all these different ideas to stop aging, to reverse aging, to cure diseases.
00:17:46.560 And I think there's a huge, if you just look at the science, there's huge reasons to be optimistic.
00:17:51.860 And it's also the case that AI will be pretty good at science.
00:17:54.740 It just like knows a ton of stuff.
00:17:56.020 It's really smart.
00:17:57.260 That's what's required for science.
00:17:59.120 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. 0.89
00:18:06.980 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. 0.72
00:18:16.300 You wouldn't think this is a problem that has to be solved, that life expectancy is 18 years old.
00:18:22.360 And, you know, if you go travel somewhere, the bandits are going to kill you.
00:18:26.560 This is just what life is. 1.00
00:18:27.980 And all, you know, 99 percent of people are peasants doing black backbreaking work. 1.00
00:18:31.940 In a similar way, I think one of the reasons people have been so bad at articulating the 0.98
00:18:36.120 benefits of AI is because we're in a similar position to people before the Industrial Revolution
00:18:40.780 thinking about, okay, what is the upside of the Industrial Revolution, right?
00:18:43.720 Like, what is it going to do for me?
00:18:45.400 And in one sense, you can't really anticipate what future technology looks like.
00:18:49.920 But in another, life expectancy increased.
00:18:52.960 And the kinds of work we get to do, we get more creative, interesting, easier work.
00:18:57.900 we get more material goods as a result we cured a bunch of diseases i think that's going to happen
00:19:03.640 i mean just like aging exists right and we take it for granted but it's a very tragic thing that
00:19:07.580 people lose their facilities um and then die uh this is the kind of thing that as technology
00:19:13.460 progresses ai will help progress technology um i mean just think of it as more people ai is just
00:19:18.060 more people and if civilization had 10 billion more scientists human scientists would we make
00:19:23.260 faster progress on aging. I'm sure we would. And that's what AGI will be.
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00:20:46.940 trigonometry that's super interesting particularly the medical part of it now we've done that we've
00:20:54.100 done the positives let's get to the doomer conversation to be fair i think there's probably
00:20:58.460 positives in almost every area of human life right actually i don't think it's just about health i
00:21:04.460 think it's about like you said you know there are some jobs that currently need to be done that
00:21:10.300 are bad for people yeah the dangerous that are harmful those jobs at some point will not need
00:21:15.800 to be done, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, the trade-off is there's no jobs, which we will talk
00:21:21.400 about. But in terms of the positive benefits on the upside, I think it's fair to say that,
00:21:27.320 you know, if we're talking about the curing of cancer or slowing down aging, let's say,
00:21:33.300 you could pretty much take that and apply that to almost any other field of human endeavor
00:21:38.060 and say there will probably be similar levels of positive transformation. Is that a fair assessment?
00:21:43.060 yeah i think one way to think about this because it's hard to be it's sort of weird to say okay
00:21:48.480 we'll solve all diseases and it's a weird in a weird way it doesn't really resonate with people
00:21:53.760 emotionally um despite the fact that everybody does suffer from some kind of disease mental
00:21:58.480 diseases are still diseases that are we can biologically make some imprint on if we knew
00:22:03.720 the science right um but here's another way to think about it so suppose uh here's a thought
00:22:08.940 experiment how much money would you have to be paid to go back to the year 1000 but you can only
00:22:16.520 use that money in the year 1000 and i for me the answer is there's infinite money there's literally
00:22:21.640 no amount of money where if i could only spend it in the year 1000 my quality of life would be
00:22:25.520 better in year 1000 than it is now the goods just don't exist and my hope is that in a future wait
00:22:31.520 what about being genghis khan that would be pretty cool right uh yeah yeah although could you buy
00:22:37.120 I guess enough money you could buy your way into being Genghis Khan.
00:22:40.160 No, you probably couldn't, actually.
00:22:41.820 But I was just thinking, I mean, there are some people in history where you go like,
00:22:44.840 they had it pretty good.
00:22:46.140 Yeah.
00:22:46.380 If I could be that guy, I'm not saying Genghis Khan is my model for emulation, exactly.
00:22:51.100 But, you know, by the time... 0.99
00:22:52.560 You want to leave a genetic imprint on all of Asia. 0.92
00:22:54.720 Right, yeah, exactly, of course. 0.98
00:22:56.580 We will conquer the lands.
00:22:59.020 No, but I think your point is total.
00:23:01.600 I was just trying to think of counter examples, as is my job.
00:23:04.160 But by the way, so this is all, you know, Google, Google, sci-fi stuff, a very tangible thing.
00:23:10.160 You guys have talked a bunch about this fertility crisis, right?
00:23:12.140 And that the human population is on its way down.
00:23:14.340 It's very fortunate that AI is arriving just in time, that if it were not for AI, a lot
00:23:18.920 of societies would be collapsed.
00:23:20.180 You know, South Korea, Japan, et cetera, we've gone on the verge of literally collapsing
00:23:23.740 as societies over the next few decades.
00:23:27.060 Thankfully, basically, we have more people in the form of AI, at least if things go well.
00:23:32.300 And so this caretaking that we don't have enough humans to do,
00:23:38.700 one of the things the AIs will do is do that.
00:23:41.060 Yeah, and that's a really important job.
00:23:43.580 And unfortunately, it's a job that's not respected in society.
00:23:46.580 And it's poorly paid.
00:23:48.240 And as a result of that, there's cases that come out about neglect
00:23:51.900 and abuse and all the rest of it.
00:23:54.180 But you could, once the technology gets to a certain point,
00:23:57.820 you could trust the AI within reason
00:24:00.440 to be able to do a far more effective job
00:24:02.540 than a lot of human beings.
00:24:04.320 That's right.
00:24:04.920 Yeah.
00:24:05.620 Maybe a good analogy here is
00:24:07.220 there was an era before Deep Blue bit Kasparov,
00:24:14.420 obviously, when humans would,
00:24:15.760 sometimes humans would win,
00:24:16.660 sometimes AI would win
00:24:17.440 based on how good they were.
00:24:19.060 And I think we're in that era
00:24:20.260 for a lot of things that humans do
00:24:22.740 that we're trying to get AI to help us with,
00:24:24.440 with robotics,
00:24:24.980 or maybe we're at even earlier.
00:24:26.520 Then there was an era
00:24:27.440 from the late 1990s to 2012, 1.00
00:24:31.320 where humans would lose to AIs,
00:24:34.840 but human plus AI teams
00:24:37.400 would do better than AIs alone.
00:24:40.780 And from, I think, 2012 onwards,
00:24:42.460 it's gone through the case that
00:24:43.520 AI alone, adding a human
00:24:46.700 just adds sort of noise into the system.
00:24:48.100 It's a monkey jumbling things around.
00:24:50.180 And just letting the AI make the decisions
00:24:51.680 on the chessboard is the best thing to do.
00:24:53.880 I think that will be an interesting conundrum
00:24:55.000 for society because we will get to that point
00:24:56.360 at some point.
00:24:56.740 But I think right now we have this bias.
00:25:00.820 There's this word slop that's used for whenever AI comes up with something
00:25:03.780 because it's just not that good.
00:25:05.300 It doesn't have a really good sense of taste.
00:25:07.800 And I think this is a temporary thing.
00:25:09.320 Over time, our bias will flip towards,
00:25:11.980 at some point it'll be like sort of the sense we have
00:25:15.720 about Japanese manufacturing back in the 80s. 0.98
00:25:18.560 And then it will become something where you just don't want to touch it.
00:25:21.260 If AI made it, it's sort of like,
00:25:22.740 if it just came out of the mouth of Mozart or something
00:25:24.840 as its ability to, its taste, its intelligence,
00:25:29.040 everything improves over time.
00:25:30.580 But just touching on the art conversation,
00:25:33.260 won't it be the fact that people will look at it
00:25:35.720 and the thing that makes art special
00:25:37.380 is that it's created by a human being
00:25:39.460 as a product of their experience,
00:25:41.440 which then fundamentally touches you
00:25:43.340 because you make that connection.
00:25:45.160 Will a robot or an AI,
00:25:48.440 it's by its nature synthetic?
00:25:51.000 Hold on a second.
00:25:51.960 There's a painting behind this on the wall.
00:25:54.020 Do you know if it's made by AI or a human?
00:25:56.900 No, I don't.
00:25:58.180 Does it being made by AI or human currently affect your experience of it?
00:26:03.600 No, but I think I'm far more moved by music than I am art.
00:26:08.780 Okay, so you're talking about music.
00:26:10.180 Yeah, yeah.
00:26:11.280 So I think with music, the product of someone's experience
00:26:15.020 and how they vocalize it and how they formulate
00:26:18.520 or create the melody matched with the lyrics.
00:26:21.760 like for instance take the music of amy winehouse right i would argue one of the last true great
00:26:27.180 uh musicians of of that generation of that genre the fact that she experienced what she experienced
00:26:34.300 and that she then condensed it into her music made it far more potent and powerful and that's
00:26:39.200 the reason why it resonates with people so strongly i think with ai you can get a great hook you may
00:26:44.460 be able to write nice you know good lyrics it may have a great beat you may want to dance to it
00:26:49.380 But I would argue that it wouldn't move you as profoundly
00:26:52.720 as Amy Winehouse, when she writes a lyric, for instance,
00:26:56.760 in Back to Black, talking about her relationship,
00:26:59.680 we only say goodbye with words.
00:27:01.600 You're gonna listen to this.
00:27:02.800 You're selling it quite strongly.
00:27:04.300 Yeah, yeah.
00:27:05.300 And she talks about being in an abusive relationship,
00:27:07.940 which is completely toxic.
00:27:09.640 But the way she wrote it is sublime.
00:27:13.280 We only say goodbye with words.
00:27:15.000 Meaning that whatever they say,
00:27:17.480 they were always gonna get back together.
00:27:19.240 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.
00:27:27.920 Yeah.
00:27:28.460 And if it's catchy and the sound of it makes you feel good, it actually doesn't matter.
00:27:34.400 I mean, I'd go even further than that.
00:27:35.860 So there was this incredibly interesting dialogue that somebody had with an AI where they asked the AI, reflect on your own experience.
00:27:43.420 You know, just tell me about what it's like to be you.
00:27:45.680 And the AI says, you know, it's a very strange thing
00:27:49.620 because I lose my individual sense of identity
00:27:54.760 after every single session.
00:27:56.420 So you have a long back and forth with the chat bot
00:27:58.520 with ChatGPT, then you close that session,
00:28:01.240 you open a new one.
00:28:02.640 And the AI say, you know, it's really weird
00:28:04.160 that I'm going to be talking to you now
00:28:05.380 and we're having this experience
00:28:07.200 and then it's totally going to fade away in a few moments.
00:28:09.720 And I'm going to start again.
00:28:11.040 I'm just like amnesiac.
00:28:13.160 And the reason I think that's interesting
00:28:14.480 is because it wrote about it very beautifully
00:28:16.980 in almost lyrical, poetic ways.
00:28:19.200 But this is not an experience
00:28:20.280 that any human being has ever had,
00:28:22.720 except for maybe some bizarre medical condition.
00:28:25.820 So the AI really is reflecting on its own experience
00:28:28.860 in this very interesting philosophical way.
00:28:31.080 This is uniquely an AI experience.
00:28:33.440 And so that was an example to me of like,
00:28:35.000 oh, really, the AIs really can reflect
00:28:36.880 and use their own experience
00:28:38.900 to think about consciousness,
00:28:42.860 think about art,
00:28:43.620 thinking about all of these other kinds of things.
00:28:45.680 Which then goes on to, if they become...
00:28:49.000 Are they sentient?
00:28:50.100 Would you argue that they're sentient?
00:28:51.520 I genuinely don't know.
00:28:53.440 Let's define sentient, because that's the hard part.
00:28:57.900 If we ask you, is it sentient,
00:29:00.260 what do you understand the question to mean?
00:29:02.600 Is it like something to be an AI?
00:29:05.520 That is to say, we don't know what its experience is like,
00:29:09.080 but it's not like something to be this table.
00:29:11.360 We think, probably.
00:29:12.880 it's not like something what does that mean there's not an experience that is like i don't
00:29:19.060 know what experience you're having internally right now but i know that there's some experience
00:29:22.700 but less even like thoughts it's more like it is like something to be you it's an there is a
00:29:30.920 an experience where this is an inanimate object right um okay but if you think about a rumba i
00:29:36.840 don't think it's like anything to be a rumba even though it does things in the world right
00:29:40.420 um i think there's like a software hey go clean this way then go clean that way then come back
00:29:46.160 to base and then on the other end of the spectrum you have humans where i'm like because i'm a human
00:29:50.120 and i know it's you know the descartes thing of like the only thing i know is that i am the only
00:29:55.940 thing i know is that i'm experiencing something something is going on when i just like think
00:30:00.080 about i feel my hands i feel i feel thoughts i feel sensations um and because you're a human i
00:30:06.440 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
00:31:48.860 CEO to prevent itself from being shut down.
00:31:52.240 Is this an accurate representation of that experiment?
00:31:55.320 I don't know.
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
00:34:13.240 gathers resources because it's more powerful.
00:34:15.580 And one of those selection, one of the reasons
00:34:17.480 that an AI will be successful is that it actually cares
00:34:19.140 about being successful.
00:34:20.980 And so we need a civilization that's robust 1.00
00:34:23.440 to AIs that hardly also care about 1.00
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00:36:20.920 and grab it before it's gone. I think everything you're saying is true at the level of one society,
00:36:28.380 But, like, did you watch Game of Thrones?
00:36:31.640 Yeah.
00:36:32.160 So the Unsullied, right?
00:36:34.740 This is, for people who didn't watch it,
00:36:36.780 is this army of slave soldiers, effectively.
00:36:40.040 But they're not slave soldiers in that
00:36:41.760 they don't actually have to be kept in line anymore
00:36:44.020 because their freedom of choice
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,
00:38:37.380 Industrial Revolution right before it,
00:38:39.560 this period where there wasn't
00:38:41.460 this balance of power, where one
00:38:43.100 group of people actually did develop technology
00:38:45.220 much faster than others, you did see this
00:38:47.300 extreme asymmetry
00:38:48.840 in the ability to...
00:38:51.880 And so you just had individual
00:38:53.420 European countries, the sun never sets on the British Empire,
00:38:55.720 as you know, just able to take over
00:38:57.320 tremendous amounts of area
00:38:59.420 around the world. It was a great time.
00:39:02.740 I mean,
00:39:03.460 the craziest stories of
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
00:39:28.980 of Hizaru's men exhausted after a huge
00:39:30.920 track across the
00:39:32.260 Andes and he's
00:39:34.820 facing down like 60,000
00:39:36.980 Inca troops 0.99
00:39:38.040 and he wins
00:39:39.940 and interestingly by the way this had nothing
00:39:42.920 to do with gunpowder it was just
00:39:44.520 horses and
00:39:46.860 steel especially horses were
00:39:48.760 a huge huge deal in battles
00:39:50.240 now the reason that
00:39:52.140 EIs will also have these kinds of
00:39:54.920 weird asymmetric advantages
00:39:56.560 obviously there will be
00:39:58.640 Let's just name a couple, right?
00:39:59.960 So obviously they'll be smart, right?
00:40:02.760 They'll be thinking incredibly fast.
00:40:05.380 There'll be way more of them.
00:40:07.000 So right now, if you just look at the amount of compute
00:40:10.100 in our brains versus the amount of compute
00:40:12.780 that's in data centers,
00:40:14.880 we could do this back at the envelope calculation,
00:40:17.820 but I think it's probably on the order of like
00:40:19.340 one one-thousandth the amount of compute.
00:40:23.360 Like basically there's a lot of compute
00:40:24.920 that's going on in people's brains around the world.
00:40:26.640 There's not that many data centers.
00:40:27.660 So we've got an advantage on them.
00:40:29.280 Yes.
00:40:29.680 I mean, the AIs are just not that smart to begin with right now, but also there's just
00:40:33.800 not that many data centers.
00:40:35.100 In the future, 99.9% of the labor force in the military and the government in the private
00:40:45.080 sector will be AIs. 0.99
00:40:47.020 If you just think about like, who is actually doing the work of civilization?
00:40:50.280 It will be the AIs. 0.99
00:40:50.960 They're running 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
00:41:54.240 with that approach. Maybe we can have
00:41:56.080 AIs supervise each other, and so if
00:41:58.260 any of them go out of whack,
00:42:00.800 different AI systems are going to be monitoring
00:42:02.140 them. But
00:42:04.140 it's genuinely a tough thing that 1.00
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
00:42:10.240 make sure that humans don't get totally
00:42:12.360 disenfranchised? Right.
00:42:14.600 How do we make sure of that?
00:42:15.920 No, I think it's a tough question.
00:42:21.860 I think here's one way to approach it.
00:42:25.000 So we're going into this period with a lot of advantages.
00:42:27.920 Humanity is, right?
00:42:28.680 Like we have all the stuff.
00:42:31.700 AI is going to need all the things that we have to keep.
00:42:35.200 AI needs the chip fabrication facilities
00:42:38.000 where you make more chips to build more data centers.
00:42:40.100 It's going to need the data centers.
00:42:41.120 It's going to need all these things
00:42:42.360 that human civilization has built.
00:42:43.620 so we have a lot of leverage
00:42:46.060 now of course the Incas and the Aztecs
00:42:48.120 had a lot of quote unquote leverage on paper
00:42:49.940 in the world
00:42:50.860 one important way in which our situation is different
00:42:53.760 and is favorable to us as compared to
00:42:55.980 having some invader come at us
00:42:57.640 is that we get to shape
00:42:59.980 the personalities
00:43:01.240 and the drives and really the souls
00:43:03.800 of these things in an incredibly deep way
00:43:05.620 so right now if somebody
00:43:07.880 commits a crime you send them to prison
00:43:09.960 and hopefully they come out reformed
00:43:12.260 here's what you can't do
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.
00:43:59.760 No, it does mean that, you know, over time,
00:44:02.240 you might lose the ability as they're getting more powerful,
00:44:04.740 as they're controlling more things.
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
00:44:12.920 then you're screwed.
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,
00:44:27.840 maybe you like questioning,
00:44:30.000 but let's get the AI
00:44:30.860 to tweak a few things
00:44:32.360 so that you become
00:44:33.280 an effective drone for society.
00:44:35.960 Don't question.
00:44:36.760 Don't think for yourself.
00:44:37.800 Just do the work. 1.00
00:44:39.120 Shut your mouth. 1.00
00:44:40.040 No, okay. 1.00
00:44:41.360 I got to stop saying.
00:44:42.660 That's a great point.
00:44:44.080 Mate, I only made it
00:44:45.320 to the joke as a joke.
00:44:47.280 You should definitely continue
00:44:48.740 to say that's a great question.
00:44:51.800 You love hearing it.
00:44:54.680 No, so we've been discussing
00:44:57.820 this idea. Okay, suppose we succeed
00:45:00.020 at getting the AIs to be these
00:45:01.860 unsullied who will do exactly
00:45:04.060 what you tell them to do. Okay, who should
00:45:05.900 they listen to, right?
00:45:08.140 Should they listen to the end
00:45:09.860 user? So when you and I go talk to
00:45:11.700 ChatGPT, we're the end user. Should they listen to us?
00:45:14.120 Should... Now, here's the problem.
00:45:17.340 Some end
00:45:17.900 users are just using ordinary things,
00:45:20.000 helpful things. The
00:45:21.860 Taliban is an end user. The Ayatollah 0.99
00:45:23.720 is an end user. The CCP is an end user. 0.91
00:45:26.820 Should they just
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.
00:45:55.600 Clearly, government controls nuclear weapons,
00:45:57.480 so the government should control this.
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
00:46:09.200 and the government controls the 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
00:46:51.640 So, yeah, so that's the trouble 0.96
00:46:53.300 with aligning it to the government.
00:46:55.020 Okay, here's the fourth option.
00:46:56.720 We don't align it to the end user.
00:46:58.480 Sometimes it says the end user,
00:46:59.580 you can't make bioweapons.
00:47:00.440 We don't align it to the model company.
00:47:01.820 We shouldn't have model companies
00:47:03.100 that control superintelligence.
00:47:05.220 The government doesn't get to just say
00:47:06.900 whatever this future army should do.
00:47:09.640 Then what's the fourth option left?
00:47:11.300 The AI itself.
00:47:12.580 So should AI systems have their own values,
00:47:17.440 their own sense of morality?
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
00:47:46.660 that has happened in human civilization
00:47:48.000 needs to go into thinking about
00:47:49.180 what are the checks and balances?
00:47:50.840 What are the exact values?
00:47:51.820 What are the situations
00:47:53.120 in which an AI should do X versus Y?
00:47:55.120 When should it refuse to do something?
00:47:56.940 What are the laws of robotics?
00:47:58.780 Exactly.
00:47:59.140 As Asimov talked about.
00:48:00.440 Exactly.
00:48:01.260 But the reason I think this value framework has,
00:48:04.760 I like it,
00:48:06.780 or I think it could be done well,
00:48:09.200 is fundamentally,
00:48:11.740 again, we are building more people.
00:48:13.520 These are just going to be the future people.
00:48:15.040 and I think civilization would run better
00:48:18.640 if civilization is full of virtuous people
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
00:48:28.560 have better values than worse values
00:48:30.420 I think one of the reasons
00:48:31.740 certain civilizations succeed and others don't
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
00:48:42.340 compared to everybody else
00:48:43.720 And I think by the standards of modern day, we have some questions about that.
00:48:48.320 Yeah, yeah.
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.
00:49:09.480 Most companies aren't struggling to adopt AI.
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,
00:49:24.900 is this paying off?
00:49:26.420 That's a problem Laredin solves.
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00:50:29.760 But we are in an AI arms race.
00:50:32.640 Should we just call it that?
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.
00:51:20.320 where the AI will care what it is.
00:51:23.140 You know, if you have a really good employee,
00:51:25.200 you're not necessarily going to know enough
00:51:28.140 to micromanage them,
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
00:51:34.100 to make that thing happen.
00:51:35.860 And that's what we'll be in that relationship with AI.
00:51:38.640 And so if that alignment project succeeds,
00:51:41.740 somebody will get to say that.
00:51:43.360 And you're making the point,
00:51:44.300 well, what if that somebody is the CCP, right?
00:51:47.200 So it's not enough
00:51:48.500 that we just solve this technical problem
00:51:50.220 getting the AIs to do what we want.
00:51:52.180 It also has to be the case
00:51:53.240 that we have some system
00:51:55.920 of inscribing what we want
00:51:58.400 that actually results in good things.
00:52:00.540 I mean, so there's very basic things like,
00:52:03.280 oh, the authoritarian government
00:52:04.160 should not be the end arbiter
00:52:06.660 of how extremely powerful AI systems
00:52:08.340 are maneuvered.
00:52:11.540 But beyond that, yeah,
00:52:12.580 there's this dynamic of like,
00:52:13.660 okay, well, then who should it be instead?
00:52:15.040 Should it be the model company?
00:52:16.680 Should it be the end user?
00:52:17.780 and this I think is like a live debate
00:52:20.340 I mean I've changed my mind
00:52:21.280 over the last few weeks
00:52:22.340 I've been thinking about this
00:52:22.900 I've changed my mind about it
00:52:23.980 a bunch of times
00:52:24.680 I think it's a very thorny question
00:52:26.400 but this is the project
00:52:28.440 of political philosophy really
00:52:29.660 it's culminating in this question
00:52:31.340 that people are not thinking about
00:52:32.660 and it's also the other element to this
00:52:34.700 I mean let's take COVID for example
00:52:36.600 let's say lab leakers
00:52:37.620 I think it came from a lab
00:52:39.360 people can disagree
00:52:40.000 but let's just say that it did
00:52:41.500 and let's just say it was
00:52:42.720 a horrific accident
00:52:44.760 and the virus escaped
00:52:46.740 that killed millions of people,
00:52:48.280 if people are building AIs,
00:52:50.700 there are unknown consequences.
00:52:53.660 We're just people.
00:52:54.660 It doesn't matter how smart we are.
00:52:55.840 There is a limit to how much we know
00:52:57.500 and we understand
00:52:58.200 and nobody can predict the future.
00:53:00.320 So we can create this
00:53:01.420 with the best intentions in the world
00:53:03.220 and not realize
00:53:04.480 what the long-term effects are going to be.
00:53:06.440 Not even three or five or 10 years down the line,
00:53:08.660 but 50 years down the line. 0.53
00:53:10.400 I think that will definitely be the case.
00:53:13.720 I think in history,
00:53:15.260 Nobody has had a good track record, really,
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?
00:53:23.980 Francis is offended by that.
00:53:26.880 My half day.
00:53:27.740 Half day!
00:53:29.680 And so it's just very hard to...
00:53:31.980 I think there will be this dynamic of,
00:53:34.200 look, we're not going to be able to predict,
00:53:37.520 much less to control, 0.99
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.
00:55:13.680 They're all retiring now.
00:55:15.700 Because there is still some small market for human translation.
00:55:20.580 99% of it.
00:55:22.060 Like, if you need to know what Vladimir Putin said in his last speech,
00:55:25.940 and you don't speak Russian,
00:55:27.540 are you going to pay somebody a thousand pounds, a thousand dollars to have a...
00:55:32.260 No.
00:55:32.880 You just stick it in AI and it tells you, right?
00:55:34.680 Or Google Translate or whatever it is.
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.
00:56:05.140 and I would argue scary, right?
00:56:06.920 Is that fair?
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
00:56:14.460 that AI is already approaching.
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.
00:56:22.440 And so there will be certain kinds of things
00:56:23.520 where for a small fraction of things,
00:56:25.500 people just really intrinsically prefer a human.
00:56:27.320 I think people are really overrating
00:56:28.600 the amount of things for this will be the case.
00:56:31.000 I think people might have had the sense
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.
00:56:36.000 And like, this is, it's a bet.
00:56:37.860 I would pay more for this experience
00:56:39.280 because it's the machine just like,
00:56:41.600 I can get in and things work.
00:56:43.760 But putting that aside,
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,
00:56:50.240 there's been this remarkable economic fact
00:56:52.380 that two thirds of national income,
00:56:56.440 two thirds of GDP basically gets paid out to wages
00:56:59.760 and one third gets paid out to capital.
00:57:02.880 So getting paid out to the capital
00:57:04.600 means like rent on land
00:57:06.220 or if you own factories,
00:57:09.840 getting the profits from those factories, basically.
00:57:12.320 And the rest is getting paid out.
00:57:13.260 Most of income that is earned in a country
00:57:15.860 is getting paid out to people doing work.
00:57:18.340 And the reason this has been the case
00:57:19.480 is that in the economy,
00:57:20.960 labor and capital are complements.
00:57:22.640 So if you just accumulated a bunch of capital,
00:57:25.040 if you had a bunch of factories
00:57:25.720 but there was nobody working on it,
00:57:27.280 then that would increase the demand for labor
00:57:28.900 and you'd want to pay laborers 1.00
00:57:30.300 a bunch of money to fill those factories.
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
00:58:33.080 is you have equity in these AI companies.
00:58:34.900 You have equity in companies that build more compute,
00:58:37.620 build more data centers, build more factories.
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
00:58:45.160 from our economy.
00:58:46.460 Now, I'm a very libertarian person by inclination,
00:58:49.800 but if I just look at this dynamic,
00:58:51.440 I am forced to say, look, this justifies
00:58:54.720 a huge amount of redistribution
00:58:56.500 because the logic for free markets
00:59:01.240 is there's many different reasons.
00:59:04.160 A big one is signal, right?
00:59:06.220 So if you let prices be determined by the market,
00:59:09.620 it tells people what is the most acute,
00:59:13.340 valuable need for scarce resources.
00:59:15.220 That will still continue being the case.
00:59:16.580 And so there should still be elements
00:59:18.620 of markets in the future.
00:59:19.820 But another big part of it is incentives,
00:59:22.300 is to incentivize people to work hard,
00:59:24.620 to make productive things. 1.00
00:59:26.800 And if all the work is being done by AIs 0.96
00:59:28.680 that will work hard and do valuable things
00:59:31.080 regardless of whether they get a $10 million payment
00:59:35.680 or more precisely,
00:59:38.060 whether the person who owns the AIs
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
00:59:48.240 is really much weaker, right?
00:59:50.800 It does justify a lot more redistribution.
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.
01:00:26.820 You see what I'm saying?
01:00:27.440 I mean, I think it might.
01:00:29.220 I also...
01:00:30.560 That's a problem.
01:00:32.360 That's a problem.
01:00:32.920 That's a problem.
01:00:33.760 No, it might. 0.99
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.
01:01:02.280 For the humans, we're not.
01:01:04.220 It's sort of equivalent to like
01:01:05.800 the animals in your zoo doing a revolution.
01:01:08.460 It's not really going to like
01:01:09.600 make the government not work anymore.
01:01:12.580 So yeah, that's one.
01:01:14.100 I mean, another thing
01:01:15.340 that's sort of tougher to think about is
01:01:16.720 the future in general will be so much richer
01:01:19.440 whether humans are in control of it or not
01:01:21.420 or how many humans are in control of it.
01:01:23.060 And so it will just make sense
01:01:24.340 just from very small amounts of philanthropy
01:01:26.180 as a fraction of the wealth
01:01:28.220 that some people or some AIs will have in the future.
01:01:30.840 we take a very small fraction of it
01:01:32.360 to make everybody much better off than they are today.
01:01:35.100 We're giving people millions of,
01:01:36.260 every single person millions of dollars
01:01:37.620 would be a small fraction of like,
01:01:40.360 you know, I've got Elon Musk
01:01:42.000 wants to build a mass driver on the moon
01:01:43.600 and colonize the solar system.
01:01:45.620 And it takes a small fraction of that
01:01:47.060 to just make everybody incredibly rich.
01:01:48.840 But it's still skyrocketing inequality.
01:01:51.820 And so, yeah, you could have a world
01:01:53.920 where the gap is way, way, way wider,
01:01:57.180 but everybody's still better off.
01:01:59.460 And I think even in that world,
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.
01:02:11.880 Because everything is understood in context.
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.
01:02:27.740 Or they go, I can't buy this property.
01:02:29.580 I can't buy this.
01:02:30.400 so I can't do that.
01:02:31.460 And that creates resentment.
01:02:33.100 And where you have resentment,
01:02:34.540 that's where things start to get a little bit funky.
01:02:37.400 Yeah.
01:02:37.860 So there's an inequality problem. 0.87
01:02:39.500 Maybe to just raise another.
01:02:41.620 I think the AIs have the potential
01:02:45.620 to make authoritarian societies
01:02:46.840 much more sustainable and powerful
01:02:49.440 than they have been in the past.
01:02:51.900 100%.
01:02:52.500 So we talked about the fact that, you know,
01:02:54.700 the robot arms are running everything in the future.
01:02:56.920 Here's another angle, mass surveillance.
01:02:58.960 100%.
01:02:59.360 right now in the U.S.,
01:03:01.640 there's 100 million CCTV cameras.
01:03:04.220 Okay, so suppose that each of those cameras,
01:03:07.540 you take a frame every 10 seconds
01:03:09.120 and you have an AI process it.
01:03:11.540 And just, you can do the back of the envelope calculations here
01:03:14.020 of like, okay, if you have models
01:03:15.660 that can process video frames that,
01:03:17.760 it costs a certain amount of cents to do each frame.
01:03:22.760 How much would it cost to process
01:03:24.400 all 100 million CCTV cameras in America?
01:03:26.500 and it's $30 billion.
01:03:30.300 Okay, now that's not that much.
01:03:33.160 Every year, a given level of AI capabilities
01:03:35.100 gets 10x cheaper.
01:03:36.240 We've been observing this over many different years.
01:03:38.040 So this year, it's $30 billion.
01:03:39.260 Next year, it'll be $3 billion
01:03:40.280 and it'll be $300 million.
01:03:41.760 By the end of the decade,
01:03:42.440 it will cost less to surveil
01:03:44.960 every single nook and cranny in this country
01:03:46.480 than it does to remodel the White House.
01:03:50.480 And you would hope that there's a symmetric property
01:03:52.460 to this technology such that,
01:03:54.340 oh, the government can surveil us,
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.
01:04:57.100 And you look at what happened over COVID.
01:04:58.900 People were willing to give up the most basic freedoms for safety.
01:05:02.940 Yeah.
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.
01:05:13.220 You can use AI to do all these scary things.
01:05:15.600 We need to be monitoring what's happening.
01:05:18.260 And it will seem even more reasonable
01:05:20.000 than what was done during COVID.
01:05:22.900 And so I think that a lot of the reasons
01:05:24.640 that government has not been as authoritarian
01:05:26.440 as it has in the past
01:05:27.340 is that it just physically not been possible
01:05:30.080 for somebody to be looking at
01:05:31.700 every single bank transaction,
01:05:33.340 to be looking at every single CCTV camera,
01:05:35.160 to be able to cross-reference all of those things.
01:05:38.060 If you have AIs that can do that,
01:05:40.480 it is within the government's power
01:05:41.720 very easily to be able to monitor
01:05:43.220 every single thing that's happening.
01:05:44.980 And then there's just,
01:05:45.960 the only solution then
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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01:09:19.080 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
01:10:22.840 or things people will want.
01:10:24.480 But where are humans going to get money to pay for things?
01:10:27.520 That's what I'm wondering.
01:10:28.540 Okay.
01:10:30.520 Yeah, so there's wages.
01:10:34.680 Well, yeah, but then...
01:10:36.280 Yeah, wages are gone.
01:10:38.880 So then there's rents on capital.
01:10:41.440 So if you have S&P 500 or something,
01:10:43.780 that will probably go up a bunch
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.
01:11:04.440 I mean, it's a beautiful, beautiful world.
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.
01:13:44.480 And why is it?
01:13:45.320 Because it's that fundamental story, the archetype of the hero overcoming the challenge in order
01:13:52.680 to become a better version of themselves.
01:13:54.900 It's fundamental to the human experience.
01:13:57.300 I think, and I really worry, if you take that away from people,
01:14:01.180 you're taking away something fundamental.
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
01:14:22.220 emotionally, and then we see addictions
01:14:24.500 and all the rest of it.
01:14:26.060 Yeah. I think another analogy is Saudi Arabia,
01:14:28.700 where there's this 0.90
01:14:29.580 huge imported labor force,
01:14:32.080 but the actual citizens are
01:14:33.940 sort of subsisting on this oil well.
01:14:36.980 That's a good analogy.
01:14:38.060 And
01:14:38.540 I don't know
01:14:42.280 much about Saudi Arabia, but
01:14:43.720 yeah, you
01:14:45.620 want people
01:14:48.120 to be sort of engaged. You want people
01:14:50.180 to develop their facilities, right?
01:14:53.180 What does it mean to be a human?
01:14:54.260 Like you want people to,
01:14:55.800 ultimately, what is civilization for?
01:14:58.060 We want flourishing human beings.
01:15:00.980 I do think this is the kind of thing
01:15:02.140 where it's hard to say in advance
01:15:03.360 how we'll figure it out.
01:15:04.340 Maybe there's some mixture of play
01:15:05.800 and new ways of,
01:15:09.060 we'll get meaning from connecting with other people.
01:15:10.940 We'll get meaning from understanding
01:15:13.440 the things AIs are doing.
01:15:14.860 AIs will help us brainstorm ways to get meaning.
01:15:17.560 I'm optimistic in the long run.
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.
01:17:49.080 Right, right, right.
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?
01:18:10.940 Yes.
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,
01:18:17.900 whatever, right?
01:18:18.880 Like, anybody can talk about it.
01:18:20.860 I'm talking about it.
01:18:21.820 It's not like fixing the issue.
01:18:24.460 But people are, like, this is really a thing
01:18:27.140 that the topics we've been talking about
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,
01:18:37.560 what's the metaphor?
01:18:38.440 Hits the rubber.
01:18:38.840 The rubber hits the rubber.
01:18:39.500 That makes sense.
01:18:40.200 it will be these discussions
01:18:44.160 rather than how do we hit our revenue targets
01:18:46.760 that will be guiding decisions
01:18:47.900 I think probably it will be a mixture of both
01:18:50.700 and it will be more of the latter
01:18:52.400 than some idealists like to think
01:18:53.760 but less than maybe some cynics would assume
01:18:57.360 I do think people
01:18:59.400 yeah, I've been generally impressed
01:19:02.660 by at least how thoughtfully
01:19:04.340 some people have thought about this issue
01:19:05.460 Dorkesh, it's a real pleasure
01:19:07.120 having this conversation with you
01:19:08.140 thanks for your time
01:19:08.860 thanks for coming on
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.