Latest / NO FILTER / Joe Rogan Experience _2525 - Nick Bostrom

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Joe Rogan Experience _2525 - Nick Bostrom · NO FILTER

0:02
Speaker 1: Podcast check it out.
0:03
Speaker 2: But Joe Wigan Experience Train by Day, Joe Rogan Podcast
0:08
by Night, all day.
0:12
Speaker 1: It's good see again.
0:14
Speaker 2: Yeah, good to see you.
0:16
Speaker 1: So since the last time we talked, we spent a
0:20
lot of time where you were trying to explain to
0:22
me simulation theory and why the probability of simulation theory
0:27
is more likely than it not being a simulation.
0:33
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was what five years ago or something, I
0:34
think it was six, six or six somewhere. I mean,
0:37
a lot of things happened in the world since, Donna.
0:40
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, a lot of things. I mean, for example,
0:44
back then, I think we did we even talk about AI.
0:48
Speaker 2: It probably came up a bit, but it wasn't.
0:52
Speaker 1: It wasn't this thing looming over civilization, which is really
0:55
kind of fascinating when you think about the fact that
0:57
it's only been six years and in six year, like
1:00
what a massive jump in some new technology in our life,
1:05
like just sort of like the Internet where like crept
1:08
up on us. We just accepted that it's a thing,
1:12
but that this this thing has gotten massively entangled in
1:18
every aspect of society and every aspect of people's lives
1:22
in a very short period of time.
1:24
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean things are like so much is happening
1:27
now that is kind of a full time job just
1:29
to monitor this situation.
1:31
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you're one of the things that you're talking
1:36
about is the positive aspects of it, right, You're talking
1:39
about like that this is probably going to be a
1:42
net good for humanity hopefully.
1:46
Speaker 2: I mean, I think I take both cases seriously, the
1:50
sort of the risk side and the big unlock. If
1:54
we get things right.
1:56
Speaker 1: I feel like we have the potential, like we're on
1:59
a white water, we have the potential to get to
2:01
our destination, but we also have the potential to flip
2:05
over and try to figure out how to get the
2:07
shore and freezing cold water and sort of rebuild.
2:10
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, that seems about right.
2:13
Speaker 1: Yeah.
2:15
Speaker 2: Yeah, And it seems like it's kind of speeding up
2:18
a bit as well. Right, If you are sort of
2:20
in this field, there's like every few weeks there's a
2:23
new model being released or something.
2:25
Speaker 1: I yes, I.
2:26
Speaker 2: Guess it's like if you imagine, I guess, commentating some fight,
2:30
right that's been recorded, and you're supposed to do the voiceover,
2:33
and the first round is like normal speed, and then
2:36
the second round is two x and then the third
2:38
one for it and it's just like a whir of
2:40
lengths and arms.
2:43
Speaker 1: That's a great way to describe it. Yeah, it's it's
2:47
just so strange how quickly it snuck up on us.
2:50
And that there's there's two narratives that we hear. The
2:53
one narrative is we're in real trouble and that this
2:56
thing is going to take over every aspect of society
2:59
and it's essentially going to be a superior life force,
3:02
a superior intellect that exists amongst us that we created,
3:06
and we don't think that's wise. And then there's the
3:09
other side that is saying things like what Elon says.
3:13
He's saying we're going to have universal high income. It's
3:17
going to be so much prosperity that no one's ever
3:19
going to have to toil again. There'll be no more
3:21
Third world countries, there'll be no more poverty. Like we
3:24
can eradicate poverty with the resources that we have on earth,
3:28
and we can change what it means to have to work,
3:32
Like you just to provide yourself with food and housing,
3:35
that's all going to be easy and free, and then
3:37
everything else is going to be You have to find
3:39
a purpose in your life. My problem is, and I
3:43
love Elon, but the people who have that perspective are
3:45
all making money off AI. They are all invested like heavily,
3:51
Mark Andresen, all these people that have this rosy view
3:55
of it, they're all invested heavily into it. So when
3:59
someone like you, who's not necessarily in that camp, you
4:03
know that is more of a true objective analyst of
4:07
what's going on. When you have a positive aspect or
4:10
a positive viewpoint of it, I get a little more excited. Yeah.
4:14
Speaker 2: Well, I mean the truth is we don't know right
4:17
how will pan out. So I mean I think there
4:23
are these scenarios where we unlock this, you know, enormous
4:27
boost both to economic productivity. But then you know, across medicine, entertainment, environment, travel,
4:34
all kinds of things, and like a tsunami of wealth
4:37
just kind of flows through and lifts all boats. And
4:41
then the idea of human work becomes an anachronism and
4:47
where you have machines that can do everything that we
4:50
can do physically and mentally and do it much better
4:52
and cheaper. And so I think in those scenarios where
4:56
this really works, the transformation is a lot deeper. I mean,
5:00
so that kind of layers to the onions. So like
5:03
the most superficial level is, well, the automate their jobs
5:06
and what are people gonna.
5:08
Speaker 1: What are they gonna do for they're gonna work?
5:10
Speaker 2: Well, well, that that comes a little bit deeper. First,
5:12
like the most superficial level is people just wonder where
5:14
will I get the job if what replaces me? And
5:17
then the superficial level of that conversation I think is, well,
5:20
you need to retrain workers so they can work in
5:22
other fields, and maybe they needs to be I don't know,
5:24
employment insurance whilst they are being retrained or something like that.
5:29
But but once you think through where this ultimate leads,
5:31
it's you think, like it's not just a few jobs,
5:33
I think, but it's really everything that that humans can
5:36
do to a good approximation, with maybe the exception being
5:42
where the consumer has a direct preference that the particular
5:47
product or service be done by human like m H. Priest,
5:51
prostitute and politicians, Right, those might survive.
5:57
Speaker 1: Well politician hopefully not. Hopefully AI can handle that all
6:01
without any corruption.
6:02
Speaker 2: Yeah, but somebody's got to take credits for it.
6:05
Speaker 1: This is true and code it. Yeah, it's.
6:11
Speaker 2: And so then then you get to these like more
6:13
profound questions I think about meaning and purpose and like
6:16
what does a human life look like at technological maturity?
6:21
Speaker 1: Right? Also what is experience? Does experience have to be measurable?
6:27
Like can do you have to touch it? Do you
6:29
have to measure and weigh it? Or is virtual experience
6:34
still experience? Like if you have a very full and
6:38
enjoyable and fulfilling virtual life, is that enough? You know
6:43
what I mean? Like, do you do you have to
6:44
do everything in the material world or can you find
6:51
happiness in a virtual world that doesn't currently exist? But
6:56
we could clearly see the technology, if it expands, it's
7:00
going to there's going to be the possibility of experiencing
7:05
a matrix type reality.
7:07
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think I see where you are going. Yeah,
7:10
but yeah, I mean I think like different strokes for
7:12
different folks. If you imagine a world where presumably these
7:16
virtual worlds will be very rich hmm and deep and fascinating,
7:21
but some people might just like the idea of you know,
7:23
climbing the real Mount Everest rather than you know, being in.
7:26
Speaker 1: Most certainly, But however, there could come a time where
7:32
people are locked out of regular reality. Like, this is
7:35
worst case scenario with AI is that you have your
7:40
needs taken care of, but there is no purpose, there's
7:43
nothing to do. There's nothing to do because AI is
7:46
taking care of all aspects of society other than recreation.
7:50
There's nothing to do. And then this one recreation comes along.
7:53
That's not reality, but it's way more fulfilling and exciting
7:56
than any other aspect of reality. And you know, an
8:00
example that would just be in a very minor way,
8:05
your phone provides you with that sort of an escape
8:07
and it's not even that thrilling, and yet it's massively
8:10
addicted your phone. People are on their phone six hours
8:14
a day. If you if we come up with a
8:17
virtual reality that's way more exciting than regular reality, everyone's
8:22
going to hop on in.
8:24
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean I think to some extent this will
8:28
maybe be the case, whether you go the virtual path
8:31
or the physical paths. I mean, you could imagine a
8:33
future where there like resources and people are sort of
8:35
flying in beach chairs, sleeping drinks all day long, and
8:39
like that's also a kind of checking out, right.
8:41
Speaker 1: Yeah, well that, yeah, that's not fulfilling. You know what.
8:45
The thing about a virtual reality is you don't have
8:49
to even live within our physics. I mean, you can fly,
8:53
you can do anything.
8:54
Speaker 2: It's a larger space of possibilities. But either way, it
8:56
could be like a passive existence in physical reality where
8:59
you're like launching at the beat, or in video games,
9:03
like you could have like tendency every straining every fiber
9:06
to try to succeed in this virtual environment, or like
9:09
one where you're just kind of floating on some cloud
9:11
in a drug like state.
9:13
Speaker 1: But I don't think people are going to be interested
9:14
in that because just the way the human mind works,
9:18
Like what kind of video games are people attracted to?
9:20
It's because a video game is essentially approximate. It's an
9:23
approximation of that you're just watching it on a screen,
9:27
but you're sort of forgetting the fact that you're watching
9:29
on a screen. You're just concentrating on this three D
9:32
reality that you're running through with a machine gun or
9:34
whatever you're doing. Right, That's what people are interested in.
9:37
They're not interested in these games we just like float
9:39
over the earth and like fly and just eat bananas. No,
9:44
they're they're interested in thrilling things. And if that gets
9:48
provided in a virtual way, the amount of people that
9:51
are going to just say this is better than regular
9:55
boring life, or we're a slave to a computer.
9:59
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean they are both kinds.
10:01
Speaker 1: Okay, we're back. Where were we? Oh?
10:05
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was just saying that there are also these
10:07
computer games that like provide a more passive experience, yeah,
10:11
like not really doing much and it's more kind of
10:13
zoning out.
10:14
Speaker 1: But most people aren't interested in those. Most people are
10:16
interested in Call of Duty. They're interested in these wild
10:20
first person shooters where you're running down hallways and everything's
10:23
exciting and thrill, or some sci fi game or you know,
10:27
Half Life something like that. That's what people are interested.
10:30
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, I mean I think there are like some
10:34
personality differences in what path you would take there. But
10:37
either way, I think a lot of the choices that
10:39
people would make currently depend on what they are sort
10:44
of designed to respond to by feeling good about it.
10:47
So like, if you enjoy one thing, you choose that
10:50
if you enjoy another. In this condition of technological maturity,
10:54
if we might one sort of a future civilization that
10:57
has developed all possible tech qualities through their maximum, then
11:03
amongst the affordances, amongst the things they could do is
11:07
like they wouldn't just have control over the external environment
11:11
things around them, but also their own biology and brains.
11:15
So if you were one of these people, and like
11:18
maybe right now the only way you get enjoyment is
11:21
by you know, getting like crazy drunk or doing sort
11:23
of things you don't really approve of. Maybe, but that's
11:26
actually what sort of lights your fire. Like you could
11:31
I mightn't redesigning yourself to take the same kind of pleasure,
11:34
but in some kind of contemplating the beauty of the universe,
11:38
or like appreciating the goodness in the heart of others,
11:42
or like some some more sort of noble aspiration, like
11:46
assolving abstract mathematics rather than you know, playing first person shooters.
11:50
You would have a choice like whether you would get
11:52
your your thrills from one kind of activity or the other.
11:57
Speaker 1: Yeah, which brings us to the question like what does
11:59
it mean to be human? Like for people finding beauty
12:03
and joy in you know, interesting and fascinating things, and
12:09
you know how to be a better person and all
12:12
all the different aspects of human life that we think
12:16
about when we think about people, when we think about
12:18
noble aspects of humanity. But doesn't that have to exist
12:23
in conjunction with the worst aspects of society for us
12:26
to appreciate it. It seems like this is a part
12:29
of the human condition, is that we have to have
12:31
crime so that we can appreciate peace. We have to
12:34
have war so we could appreciate peace. We have to
12:37
have hate so we could appreciate love. And we're never
12:40
without one or the other. They're always both together in
12:43
constant conflict, and we're always nobly hoping that the good
12:48
wins out over the bad. And this is part of
12:51
the struggle of being a human being. And if we
12:53
just completely eliminate that struggle, we're gonna have to find
12:57
some We're gonna we're gonna have to be a different thing,
13:01
because what we are is this very strange territorial primate
13:06
and who's endlessly curious, and this territorial primate is moving
13:12
in a certain direction, and that direction seems to be
13:15
a better society seems to be over time. If you
13:19
look at statistics from thousands of years ago to today,
13:22
there's less violence, there's better medicine, there's better education. It's
13:27
moving in a better and better and better direction. But
13:29
it's in a struggle. That's part of why it moves.
13:32
If all of a sudden there's no struggle and everyone
13:35
is this wonderful, enlightened being, Like what are we? Because
13:39
we're going to be a different thing than what we
13:41
are right now? And if you love music, and if
13:43
you love art, and if you love you know, novels
13:48
and all these different things that come out of the
13:49
human condition, what those things come out of struggle? Those
13:53
things come out of confusion and pain and heartbreak and
13:57
love and joy and all that stuff all pile up
14:00
together without that, Like what are we? And so if
14:04
we are moving in this direction technologically and we're not
14:08
moving as fast biologically, do we merge? Because that seems
14:15
to be what I think. I think that if this
14:17
thing goes the way it continues to go, the bottleneck
14:21
is going to be human biology.
14:24
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, there is a kind of paradox our efforts
14:29
to make progress. So like there are all these kind
14:32
of scientists and people working to develop better technologies and
14:35
throughout the economy, you know, in some company, maybe you
14:38
try to figure out how to make some process a
14:40
little bit more efficient, you can serve customers better, and
14:43
all of this is designed to solve problems, right to
14:46
Like if you sort of extrapolate that to its logical endpoint. Right,
14:52
you imagine we would have perfect technology that can do everything,
14:55
solve all the problems, like presumably with AI and automation, Right,
15:00
But then you end up in this condition where there
15:03
is kind of nothing left for us to do, you
15:05
might think. And so although it looks like we have
15:07
these strong reasons to push forward in this direction, if
15:10
you actually look at the end point, if we succeeded
15:14
too many people, it will look kind of unpalatable and
15:17
like this kind of future where you know, all the
15:19
problems are solved, and nevertheless that that does seem to
15:24
be you know, the direction that we are headed in,
15:27
probably the direction that we should be head.
15:29
Speaker 1: Yeah, wouldn't that be a better goal if there was
15:32
zero murder, zero violence, zero crime, zero lying, zero corruption,
15:40
and human beings all worked in coordination with each other,
15:44
just like in a sense of unique sinking and harmony. Right,
15:48
that would be way better, I think.
15:51
Speaker 2: But it does, like if you actually stare at that situation,
15:55
it does have these slightly unpalatable yeah, because quality might
16:00
think it looks kind of blind done.
16:01
Speaker 1: Right if it's not necessarily though, It's just it looks bland.
16:06
If you think about what we're experiencing now, like all
16:09
the excitement and the weirdness of uncertainty and of not
16:12
knowing you know, and also the negative aspects of our
16:17
life in conjunction with the positive aspects of our lives.
16:19
We contrast the two of them, and you really appreciate
16:22
good people have to round a bunch of fucking assholes,
16:25
you know, if that doesn't But it doesn't have to
16:27
be that way. This is just what we are dealing with.
16:30
This is my position on work too, because everybody in
16:34
their head is like what happens when AI takes all
16:37
the jobs? And I'm like, do you have to have
16:40
a fucking job? Isn't that a human invention? Like why
16:44
do you have to have a job? But it seems
16:46
crazy that our main focus is on housing and food
16:51
and like most people are basically just working for that.
16:55
Most people that are most people that are struggling check
16:58
to check. Basically housing and food is their daily labor.
17:02
If that's removed, wouldn't enough people figure out what to
17:07
do with their time?
17:08
Speaker 2: But yeah, yeah, I think so that's like, yeah, there
17:11
will be some transition and yeah, discomfort and this is
17:15
made ultimately that is like, yeah, I mean I think
17:18
it's like, so slavery is really bad, right, Like, yeah,
17:21
wage slavery is a sort of you know, slavery light
17:24
in a sense. You have to sell a third of
17:26
your waking day just to get money to pay for necessities.
17:30
Speaker 1: And the people that are trying to make the most
17:33
money make the conditions for their employees as shitty as
17:36
possible because it costs the least amount. They don't think
17:40
about it, like, listen, maybe we make less money, but
17:43
we have an awesome experience for everybody that works there.
17:46
Nobody thinks like that. They all think like, we have
17:48
to make the most money because we have shareholders and
17:50
we have responsibility, and these people need to make more
17:52
money every quarter.
17:53
Speaker 2: So yeah, although sometimes you do need to compete for talent,
17:56
that's true.
17:57
Speaker 1: Too, but only the top talent. That's why the CEOs
18:00
get all the bread and all the people in the assembly.
18:02
Speaker 2: Some players get treated well, right, what would you say?
18:05
Speaker 1: I mean, Jamie is a different kind of employee. Jamie
18:08
is literally the co I mean, he's the co person
18:12
on this show. That's different. But you know some dude
18:15
who's out there, you know, stocking boxes for Amazon. That's
18:19
different than being the CEO.
18:21
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean I think like ultimately that would be
18:23
a huge liberation and kind of restore dignity. Like you
18:27
should be in control of your own time. It's kind
18:29
of almost the most like aside from your own body,
18:32
like your own time, you're on attention.
18:35
Speaker 1: You have to teach people discipline. They have to this.
18:37
The thing is like, if you give people the opportunity
18:39
to just do nothing, we we do. You know, we're primates.
18:43
We'll find a way to really this. We're genetically sort
18:47
of designed to conserve resources. You don't want to over
18:50
use resources for no reason, to do a bunch of
18:52
shit because you won't survive you don't have enough food.
18:55
So we're sort of designed to like know how to
18:57
be lazy. And so we're gonna have to find things
18:59
that give us purpose or we'll get depressed. This episode
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19:58
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean it guess to be the traditional idea,
20:01
like a British aristocracy, like that you wouldn't have to
20:04
work for a living. It was kind of unfortunate necessity
20:07
for many people that they had to work for their
20:10
daily bread, right, But the ideal way of being human
20:13
was that you just had money and then you spent
20:15
your time doing other things like you you know, maybe
20:18
you were involved in politics, or maybe you had like
20:20
an art collection, or you did your gardening or entertained friends.
20:24
Speaker 1: That's the best aspect of it. But when you think
20:27
about British aristocracy, don't you think about fuck ups? I
20:30
do I think about guys that are just drunk they
20:33
drive their ferrari into a lake and they accidentally drown
20:36
their friend and then they pay off the cops and
20:38
they get away with it. That's what I think of it.
20:41
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, there is that, but they were also these
20:43
kind of I don't know, amateur scientists or eccentrics, had
20:46
their weird thing and it about it. So I guess
20:49
it brings out like the more freedoms of what it has,
20:51
the more they can reveal their true nature.
20:53
Speaker 1: Like, well, it also depends on how they're raised, right,
20:57
who who are their parents? What value use did they
21:01
instill in them when they were young? Did they explain
21:03
the value of hard work that it's actually good for you?
21:06
And then if you just find something you really want
21:08
to do and you concentrate on it and really work
21:10
hard at it, it's actually very fulfilling.
21:13
Speaker 2: Yeah, So you could about it. For example, of education
21:15
system in this world where we no longer need to work,
21:18
like presumably would need to be redesigned from from some
21:23
sketch basically because right now it's a kind of machine. Right,
21:26
So you take children coming in kind of on a
21:28
conveyor belt, and then some processing is done, like say
21:32
that their desk carries this assignment. Heres are great, and
21:34
then they come out with a quality label attached. Yeah, right,
21:38
and then they are meant to be productive workers that
21:40
you could put in an office and they will. So
21:43
this kind of is an unfortunate fact about the current
21:48
condition that I mean, the world needs a lot of
21:49
these office workers that can do all these tasks in
21:52
the economy. So like it's we have to have until
21:54
it doesn't, until it doesn't and at that point it
21:56
would be absurd to keep doing this. Right, then you
21:59
could imagine changing education so that it would be much
22:03
more about like how can you learn to live well
22:09
a life of leisure like you imagine you're cultivating, like
22:14
you know, the art of conversation, appreciation for art and music, hobbies,
22:19
physical wellness like nature, the ability to set your own
22:24
goals and take your own initiatives too, you know, to
22:27
develop true friendships with people like these are things are
22:30
not taught in school, but you could imagine that being
22:33
the curriculum, like spirituality, like all kinds of sure things
22:37
that would then equip people to sort of use their freedom,
22:41
their wealth, their free time for you know, some kind
22:45
of you know, actually meaningful and beautiful activities.
22:50
Speaker 1: For sure, for for sure, preemptively we should be kind
22:53
of teaching people like that now, Like if young people
22:56
are coming up now, the world that they're if you're
22:59
in first grade right now, twelve years from now, when
23:02
you're graduating from high school, like the world is a
23:05
totally different place, and this idea that being a productive
23:09
worker who could sit still for eight hours a day
23:11
is that's the best way we should teach kids. That
23:14
seems crazy if we're really like seeing the world or
23:17
you're describing, and then most people seem to think it's oncoming.
23:21
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I guess that the timeline is a little
23:25
bit uncertain, So you don't want end up in a
23:26
situation right where you sort of now you find yourself,
23:29
you're twenty years old, it's time to go out in
23:31
the world. You have no skills. The AI revolution hasn't
23:34
yet quite hap fun.
23:35
Speaker 1: It's kind of listen that a liberal arts degree anyway. Yeah,
23:39
there's a lot of silly degrees that people get right
23:42
now that are useless anyway, and they spend a tremendous
23:45
amount of time working on getting it, and then when
23:49
they get it out there's no jobs for that degree.
23:51
Speaker 2: Yeah, so they were a little bit too early maybe
23:54
and helping on this maybe, or.
23:56
Speaker 1: You know, there's also traps. There's things that you can
24:00
get really excited about and do. Like if you want
24:02
to play professional bowling, you want to bowl professionally, well,
24:06
the amount of money you're going to make is very
24:07
limited because the best bowler in the world, Like, what
24:10
does the best professional bowler in the world make, let's guess,
24:16
I say one hundred thousand dollars, yes, the professional bowlers.
24:20
We used to know a guy al he's friends with
24:22
a guy, uh, Tommy kind of can't remember his last name.
24:26
Do you remember his last name, Jamie? He was a
24:28
professional bowler, but he used to come to the comedy
24:30
store and hang out. Really nice guy and love comedy.
24:33
Speaker 2: Like maybe the very best one makes a pretty decent
24:36
living and the third best like it's just.
24:38
Speaker 1: I bet barely. I bet the best guy probably makes
24:41
maybe one hundred grand or two hundred grand at the most,
24:44
and that means like the thirtieth guy in the world
24:47
is fucked. Yeah, there you have to have another job
24:50
to pursue that.
24:51
Speaker 2: Well, but then in this what.
24:53
Speaker 1: Does he make two hundred k oh four hundred k
24:56
in Big Season four fifty including prize money and sponsorshi hips.
25:01
Speaker 2: But then like what the EJ.
25:03
Speaker 1: Tuckett made four hundred and thirty six Fuck yeah, EJ. EJ.
25:06
Tackett made four hundred and thirty seven five hundred and
25:09
forty dollars for a twenty twenty five season, with several
25:12
others between one hundred and ninety k and two hundred
25:14
and seventy k in prize money alone. Top tier. So
25:18
the top tier guys make a good living. But how
25:21
many guys are there? You know?
25:23
Speaker 2: You know what I'm saying, It's probably like a very
25:25
thin sort of right.
25:26
Speaker 1: So if you choose to go into bowling, it's not
25:29
like choosing to go into you know, there's a lot
25:32
of other jobs. Like even if you want to be
25:33
a basketball player, they're they're making a lot of money.
25:36
You know, if you're a really good basketball player and
25:38
you pursue that, like you could get very very rich.
25:41
But how many of them get must?
25:43
Speaker 2: Yeah, But then like you, so maybe maybe the money
25:45
factor would kind of drop out of the picture.
25:47
Speaker 1: Yes, and it would just be what you're interested in.
25:50
And then maybe even it would I mean the opportunities
25:54
are and.
25:54
Speaker 2: What other people are interested in to some extent, because
25:56
I think part of what people are competing for is
25:58
also a prestige.
26:00
Speaker 1: Yes, that would be a thing, right, like status would
26:02
be more important. It's like who's the best at this thing?
26:06
Like a bunch of friends who play golf, Like Jamie
26:09
plays golf all the time. Golfers are all like comparing
26:11
each other's scores, and they're all they're playing. They're competing
26:14
in this game, and that they think about that more
26:17
than they think about work. Like people who love golf
26:20
they freaking hate work. Like I used to say that
26:22
about comedy back when I first started. One of the
26:25
things that I noticed is the guys who really got
26:27
into golf, their careers kind of stalled because they were
26:31
more excited about playing golf than they were about writing
26:34
jokes and going on the road. And I was like, okay,
26:37
so if the average person doesn't need food and housing
26:41
anymore from labor, if that's gone, and now you just
26:44
get it, and so now you could just go do things.
26:47
We just have to teach people to be excited about stuff.
26:50
We have to teach people the value of curiosity and
26:53
finding things that are interesting to you, and then the
26:56
value of just education for this sake of learning things
27:00
because it's interesting. It's just pure satisfaction of curiosity, which
27:05
is a beautiful thing. Like that would be great for
27:08
everybody if we instead of learning things because your teacher
27:12
tells you have to learn it. Well, there's always going
27:14
to be people that just naturally gravitate towards mathematics and
27:17
they're really fascinated by mathematics. And there's always going to
27:20
be people that are just naturally gravitating towards history. They're like,
27:23
how did we get here? What is this? How did
27:24
that start? Who wrote that? Who's the first guy to
27:27
figure that out? And that's you're going to naturally go
27:30
towards that and just be educated for the sake of
27:34
satisfying your curiosity. And maybe we'll have a more balanced
27:38
society because people will actually be able to just pursue
27:41
their interests. We have to teach them to do it.
27:44
That's what I think is going to be really important
27:46
about young people in the future. Teach them to actually
27:50
pursue their curiosity rather than just squash any desires they
27:56
have for novelty and for interesting things and just be
27:59
able to work all day doing something you hate, because
28:02
that's what it means to be an adult.
28:03
Speaker 2: Yeah. I think like cultivating that would be like the
28:08
way forward in this case.
28:10
Speaker 1: Right, and it seems very possible. It's doable, Like we
28:13
know curious people.
28:15
Speaker 2: Yeah, I at least's some make sense. I think there's
28:17
probably also some differences in how different folks are wired.
28:20
Like some people get bored very easily, others find everything fascinating. Yeah,
28:25
people are like just naturally depressed or have low mood.
28:27
Others are sort.
28:28
Speaker 1: Of Yeah, but those people that are naturally depressed, how
28:31
much would their life change if they were coaches that
28:33
are very early age the value of exercise and if
28:36
they started running, if they started doing yoga, and they
28:39
started feeling much better and they weren't naturally depressed anymore.
28:42
And then you change their diet and you start adding
28:44
in vitamins and nutrients and stop giving them process foods,
28:48
and all of a sudden they feel better. Because the
28:50
concept even of depression, like what does that mean? Well,
28:54
it's varies so wildly. And when you're talking about people
28:58
that aren't taking care of their bodies and that's not
29:00
thought of as a primary factor in why depression exists
29:04
in the first place. Well, this is a very unscientific
29:07
approach then, because we know that it has a profound
29:09
impact on human beings. So you were pretending that there's
29:12
this one size fit all. No, I think that should
29:15
be also a part of teaching people how to be
29:18
a human being. Chase your curiosities. But also this is
29:21
why you're not feeling well, and that if you just
29:24
develop this ability to get some momentum going and just
29:27
show up at that yoga class every day, you feel
29:30
way better and you don't have to take a pill.
29:33
Speaker 2: And I think many could be a lot improved if
29:38
they were taught to sort of take care of their
29:40
basic physiology.
29:41
Speaker 1: And everyone can be improved, one percent of them can
29:45
be improved. It's a part of being a human being.
29:46
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I mean, I don't know. I think there
29:48
is also some people who might just have some you know,
29:51
imbolence of some neurotransmitter because of some genetic.
29:54
Speaker 1: One hundred percent maybe they don't even.
29:57
Speaker 2: Have the energy to engage in these activities that would
29:59
make them f better. But then I think that would
30:02
be much better medicines for helping comes in.
30:06
Speaker 1: Let's go give them some.
30:07
Speaker 2: Adderall, well, get them fired up.
30:11
Speaker 1: Get them start running. I'm kidding. But what we're saying
30:15
is all doable. We're not asking people to breathe underwater.
30:18
Right where we're saying is that there are people on
30:23
earth that live like that. And this idea that living
30:27
just for a paycheck so that you can cover your
30:29
food and your housing, which we've always thought of as
30:33
being just an undeniable part of being a person an adult,
30:37
this is what you have to do. You have to
30:38
pay for your food, pay for your housing. But if
30:40
we do get to a point where the structure of
30:44
society is now run by hyper intelligent artificial intelligence, you
30:50
would wouldn't need most jobs that people have to do
30:53
that suck and in order to get our society to
30:57
this point. If you wanted an iPhone, you needed and
31:00
people that were in a factory somewhere putting it all together.
31:04
You needed someone who's designing it. You needed someone who's
31:08
sitting there in the office trying to figure out how
31:10
to market it. You needed all those jobs. But when
31:12
we don't need all those jobs anymore, then things are
31:14
going to be very interesting. And that's what I'm saying.
31:17
We need to become a different thing. Like it's kind
31:20
of true and kind of not, Like you can be
31:23
a human being and live in that world, but we're
31:26
going to have to re educate people how to be
31:28
a human being. It's gonna this Our education system, specifically
31:34
in this country, is just designed to make factory workers, specifically,
31:38
Like there's a there's a real history of it, Like
31:41
we know why they made it this way. They made
31:43
it this way, and they got people in really early
31:46
so they could get people set up for jobs. They
31:48
just want people to work.
31:49
Speaker 2: Yeah, so we are kind of currently ill suited for
31:53
really thriving in an environment of abundance and for enjoying
31:58
life because I mean, both at deep biological time scales
32:02
and during the life span of a single individual, there
32:06
are all these pressures necessities that kind of force us
32:09
to become a certain type. I mean, we talked about
32:12
the education system training people to be the kind who
32:15
can sit at the desk all day long and performed tasks. Yeah,
32:18
Biologically we evolved drives to be lazy, to conserve energy,
32:24
to eat as much as we can. And now in
32:27
the modern environment where there are fridges everywhere, like it
32:30
causes problems metabolically and in terms of enjoying life. For
32:37
many people, there's this hedonic treadmill, right, So you achieve something,
32:42
some improvement, there's a spike of happiness, and then you
32:45
sort of go back to baseline very quickly start to
32:48
take for granted all the blessings of life, which makes
32:51
it very difficult to actually achieve a state of permanent
32:56
happiness and felicity. And it's kind of been necessary because
33:02
that needed to be this motivation to keep striving for
33:06
the next thing. Now once we've actually achieved all the things,
33:09
So then maybe that becomes a kind of dysfunctional, right, like,
33:13
why keep wanting to strive for the next thing if
33:16
all the things have already been achieved at least in
33:18
a certain domain. And so I think as we move
33:22
deeper into this hypothesized future where we get all these
33:27
medical technologies, then at some point probably some transformation of
33:33
human nature would have to go along with that. First,
33:36
maybe cultural changes to sort of equip people for a
33:39
life of leisure, and then ultimately maybe more profound changes
33:44
to our very biology. And so that imagine, if you
33:47
solve aging and you can now live for thousands of years, right,
33:50
like maybe the way our memory work is not really
33:53
set up for them. Maybe we would just go stale
33:55
after two hundred years with our current brains, like we
33:57
just get stuck in a rot. We don't know because
34:00
we haven't lived for two hundred years, But that could
34:02
easily turn out to be the case with the human
34:04
So then maybe at that point you would need to
34:06
sort of do something to sort of add more cognitive resources,
34:11
more flexibility. There's some sort of psychedelic reset or something
34:14
to sort of keep the flexibility going for longer periods
34:19
of time.
34:20
Speaker 1: I'm glad you said a psychedelic reset, because it would
34:22
be very funny if the main tools that we have
34:25
for navigating this are all illegal, because I think they
34:29
might be, and specifically with psilocybin and DMT and probably
34:35
avagaine as well, Like if we wanted chemical tools to
34:39
navigate a new reality, those are probably the best ones
34:43
that we have available, and they're all illegal. And I
34:46
think you're right. I think if we're going to be
34:48
able to navigate this correctly, we have to kind of
34:51
change the way we interact with each other what it
34:54
means to be a person. But I wonder how much
34:57
of the conflict that we have is a direct result
35:00
of this inherent struggle that so many people have. And
35:04
I mean there's a direct correlation between extreme poverty and
35:07
extreme crime, you know, specifically in this country. If you
35:10
look at the areas of extreme poverty in this country,
35:13
they're also the areas with extreme crime. And I wonder
35:17
how much of that would be completely alleviated with a
35:20
complete lack of poverty. We've always assumed that if you're
35:25
going to have a functioning society, that you're going to
35:30
have slums. Why like, why they don't serve any function?
35:36
It's not a good thing. Well, it's because some people
35:38
are always going to be making bad decisions and some
35:41
people are always going to be going down the wrong
35:43
road and crime and this and that. Right, but there's
35:47
still just humans, and some humans don't do that. So
35:49
it wouldn't it be better to figure out a way
35:51
to not have humans ever do that anymore? And it
35:53
seems like a way to there seems like a way
35:55
to do that. It's again not asking people to breathe underwater.
35:58
We're just we're trying to figure out why does some
36:01
people never engage in crime? Why do some people live
36:05
these really fulfilling and interesting lives, probably because they were
36:08
exposed to it when they were really young, Probably because
36:11
they weren't exposed to like very bad environments and very
36:14
bad crime and very bad poverty, and how much of
36:16
that would change if there was no more property. It
36:20
sounds like such a little fairy tale child, like, oh, wenday,
36:24
we'll have no poverty. But that's doable if everyone is alive, right, Okay,
36:30
that's alive right now, is not starving to death. That
36:33
means we figured out a way to at least the
36:35
very least get you resources so you could feed yourself, right,
36:39
no matter how dysfunctional things are. All that has to
36:43
do is get ramped up a few steps, and now
36:47
you have no one ever worried about being fed, no
36:49
one ever worrying about not having a place to sleep.
36:52
And then you have to find purpose. But it seems
36:55
like there's a lot of people that find purpose without
36:58
having a financial price tag attached to it, just by
37:02
what we're talking about with golf. Or you could be
37:05
like really into writing books. You could write books all
37:08
day long, and people are always going to want human
37:10
created fiction. People are always going to be interested in
37:13
the way other people think about things, You'll find there's
37:16
plenty of things to do. There's plenty of games to play,
37:20
and plenty of skills to learn. The idea that the
37:23
only reason why we work is to eat and to
37:26
not get rained on seems nuts.
37:30
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's I guess to some except an open question
37:33
to what extent people will always want to read human
37:38
fiction or to prefer the human generated outputs. It might
37:44
be just because current AI generated writing is kind of
37:49
lacking in various ways. It's often it's not and boring.
37:52
But if it became really good, then you know, maybe
37:57
it would just be like much more fun to like,
38:01
like if a movie made by an AI might just
38:03
be so much better and richer and the lighting is
38:05
perfect and the dialogue is sharp and it's more funny
38:07
and deep and certainly such as it And then you're
38:09
going to watch this human produced tang and it's gone,
38:12
like like most people don't go and watch sort of
38:15
film school students' productions.
38:18
Speaker 1: Right, But then there's that like that movie Obsession, wasn't
38:20
that movie made like very inexpensively and it's a huge hit, right,
38:25
And that's part of the thrill of it is that
38:28
this guy who was like a YouTuber right who created
38:30
this film, And now this movie is a giant hit
38:34
and everybody's like super excited about it. Now that same
38:37
movie was made by AI, I wonder if it would
38:40
have that impact because it doesn't have the human connection.
38:43
Speaker 2: So that's possible that we keep getting interested in these
38:48
things because we sort of are really entangled with the
38:52
human world much more than we are with the world
38:55
of ais And I mean for the same reason you
38:58
might be more interested in if like your brother or
39:00
friends did something. You might think, oh, this is interesting,
39:03
I want to check that out of courses with some
39:05
random dude who makes something likely better. It's like, doesn't mean.
39:08
Speaker 1: Right when you go to see your nephew play baseball,
39:11
you wouldn't really go see little kids based randomly when
39:15
your new gets on first base, like, way to go, Bobby.
39:18
Speaker 2: So I think these kind of social entanglements that we
39:22
have like will be a big part of what gives
39:26
structure to lives in this condition where where like the
39:30
external constraints are removed.
39:33
Speaker 1: I think that there is a great value for the
39:36
human mind, for whatever reason, in getting better at things
39:39
and learning things. And I think that if we could
39:42
instill that in people at a young age. I think
39:46
it would be fairly easy to get people to pursue
39:49
that path, but we have to completely revamp our education system,
39:54
which should have been done a long time ago. Anyway,
39:56
the idea of having unenthusiastic, underpaid people being any percentage
40:02
of what children encounter for most of the day when
40:05
they're in their most formative period isn't seen. It should
40:09
be a rich, exciting, enthusiastic journey and how to be
40:14
a better person, and how it's exciting to learn things,
40:17
and I was exciting to get better at things and
40:19
about how anybody can get better at things.
40:21
Speaker 2: Yeahh I mean I hate it. Every day of school.
40:24
Speaker 1: I hated it. Yeah, hated it. I didn't even know
40:26
that I was interested in learning anything until I got
40:28
out of school.
40:30
Speaker 2: The tame for me, I mean, I only discovered it.
40:32
Like I also hated books and everything like that for
40:35
my first fifteen years of life because I associated that
40:38
with school. That was the kind of school thing. So
40:40
it's only done randomly. One day I happened to walk
40:44
into the local library for no reason and pulled out
40:47
the book here and there, and then I discovered that
40:49
there was this whole world of science and idea and
40:52
literature and all of that, like very different from what
40:54
we were doing in school. And then that kind of
40:56
opened the gates for me.
40:58
Speaker 1: To imagine what a head start you would have had
41:00
if you had like a different kind of education with
41:04
super enthusiastic people who really love teaching children are really
41:08
good at it, and that we reward them, and that
41:12
it becomes a very prestigious position to be in rather
41:14
than what it is now. If you talk to some
41:17
guy and then he goes, I'm a high school teacher,
41:18
You're like, oh, poor bastard, how's he feed himself? That's
41:21
the immediately what I think, like, good for you that
41:24
you're doing that, But also I guarantee you could probably
41:27
be making a lot more money and be happier doing
41:29
another job. And so that's a terrible way to start
41:33
life off. And if we just revamp that, then you
41:37
have a bunch of people that are interacting with life
41:39
in a very different way. And instead of being thought,
41:42
I have to get a job someday, I have to
41:44
get a job after school anyway to help my mom
41:47
pay the bills, because we're struggling. So I got to
41:50
contribute to the household. Even though I'm sixteen, I can't
41:52
hang out with friends if all that stuff's out the window.
41:55
And now it's like no, What we need to find
41:57
out is what is exciting for you, Like what excites
42:01
your mind, your specific personality, What is it about life
42:05
that's interesting, And let's expose you to a bunch of
42:08
different things that are exciting and interesting that other people
42:11
find value in. And let's find out which way you gravitate,
42:15
because maybe you gravitate towards chess, or maybe you gravitate
42:18
towards something completely different. Maybe you're just really into painting.
42:21
Maybe painting just lights you up and you like look
42:24
at a canvas and you just start fucking around with
42:26
it and that's your thing. There's a lot of people
42:28
in this world that find that it's just they have
42:31
to find it themselves.
42:32
Speaker 2: Unfortunately, I think that that's kind of inspiring. And but
42:38
like I think, the train doesn't stop there. So if
42:42
we think even more farther into this kind of condition
42:46
of technological maturity, I think in addition to sort of
42:49
freeing up people, you know, like making it easy to
42:52
produce the food and the houses and like cars that
42:55
go faster and don't pollute and all of this stuff.
42:59
Like if you think through what maybe a technolgically mature
43:02
civilization could do. Like so a lot of these like learning,
43:05
for example, is something that gives people purpose, but maybe
43:09
you would have the ability to sort of download knowledge
43:14
at the click off a bottom. So rather than like,
43:15
if you want to learn advanced mathematics, now you have
43:18
to study a year, like for years, right, do like
43:21
books with exercises and apply yourself and then eventually you
43:25
sort of unlock. Yeah, but like maybe a technogical maturity
43:29
there would be like, Okay, I understand mathematics. Okay, I've
43:32
got a pressed Doug button boom.
43:33
Speaker 1: Now right, mathematic like the matrix.
43:36
Speaker 2: Yeah, say, if you had, like you know, you may
43:38
make me some kind of nanobots that could infiltrate your
43:42
brain and then change the synopsis in just such a
43:45
way that you're not the same as you were before
43:47
exact you have these concepts from abstract mathematics. Yeah, you know,
43:51
after twenty minutes or something like that, some super intelligence
43:54
works out how to change your synopsis to this new condition.
43:59
And if you are inclined to do various things because
44:02
they give you doy and pleasure. Like you could also think, well,
44:06
I could do those things and get the joint pleasure,
44:08
or I could just push this boton that like activates
44:11
the same doy and pleasure. So that would be these
44:13
shortcuts to everything, and it looks like you would have
44:18
a post instrumental condition where that would, at least at
44:22
first time, it seemed to be no reason to do
44:24
anything for the sake of achieving something else because there
44:27
would always be this like shorter path to that other
44:30
thing that pressing the button. Yeah, and so that's a
44:33
kind of deeper form of redundancy. It seems that all
44:36
forms of human instrumental effort would become unmotivated. You could still,
44:43
you know, go to the gym every day and sweat
44:47
for an hour, or you could just take the pills
44:50
that induces exactly the same physiological effects and the mental
44:54
effect like the calm or whatever you feel after it.
44:58
Speaker 1: Or maybe even better genetic engineer stromogically. Yeah, so they
45:01
don't have to take a pill.
45:02
Speaker 2: Yeah. And so then I think you're getting more into
45:07
these fundamental questions of value, right, philosophical quests. But what
45:11
ultimately is it that makes a life good?
45:15
Speaker 1: And what makes a life good for a primate, because
45:18
that's what we are, or a primitive version of primates.
45:22
I think we're going to become something different. And if
45:24
we do it through technologically induced evolution or biologically induced evolution,
45:29
we're still moving in a general direction just biologically there. Mean,
45:33
if you look at ancient hominids and look at us,
45:35
we're clearly very different. So we're moving in a general
45:38
direction anyway. And when you look at the grays, like
45:41
these prototypical aliens that everybody sees with the big heads
45:45
and skinny bodies, what do they look like, Well, they
45:47
look like if we keep going, that's what we're going
45:49
to look like. We're going to be these genderless, sexless, muscleless,
45:53
little skinny things with giant heads that communicate telepathically, which
45:57
is probably where we're moving. And if we're moving that way,
46:01
maybe we you know, we think of them as being
46:02
an alien from another Maybe that's not Maybe that's just
46:06
the general direction that primates go. Once they figure out technology,
46:10
they eventually realize, well, all, first of all, the idea
46:14
of having to have a male and a female is
46:16
kind of crazy, right, Why, Well, because we have to reproduce, well,
46:20
what if we don't reproduce like that anymore. What if
46:23
all reproduction is done through engineering and there's no more
46:27
there's no more sex, so there's no more lusts, so
46:29
there's no more jealousy, so there's no more ego, there's
46:32
no more anything, And then there's a hive mind because
46:35
technology is advanced to the point where the reason why
46:37
they have these big giant heads, they're essentially locked into
46:40
everybody all around them all the time.
46:42
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, it's not what we would want though.
46:45
Speaker 1: Not us, but I don't think will be us anymore.
46:49
I think this idea like if you went to chimps
46:51
and you said, hey, dude, one day you're going to
46:53
be on a plane eating peanuts flying over the ocean,
46:56
they'd be like, fuck that. I don't want to do that.
46:57
I'll just stay here where the fruit is or nuts,
47:00
like why do you want to do that? And you'll
47:02
be addicted to create them, and you'll be watching YouTube
47:06
all day long, like, no, I don't want to do that.
47:09
It doesn't sound fun.
47:10
Speaker 2: But we do have a lot of bananas.
47:12
Speaker 1: Don maybe, oh, you have to get killed by the
47:15
other chimpanzees that want the bananas. You know, they have
47:17
chimp wars. They come in and kill each other. So
47:20
I think we're gonna be something different, And I think
47:24
that's inevitable anyway. If you believe in evolution, it's inevitable
47:27
anyway that we become something different. We're not a finished product.
47:30
Speaker 2: Yeah, No, I think that is true. We are not
47:33
the finished product. Now the question is the thing that
47:36
we become or that becomes is that a result of
47:43
us choosing how we want to be or is it
47:47
just these kind of impersonal forces like evolutions, selecting certain
47:51
types that might then end up leading to outcomes that
47:55
we actually don't want. And so I guess the help
47:57
is that we would be able to develop along a
48:00
path that preserves and develops the things that we actually
48:05
value about being human, right, maybe amplifies them, then maybe
48:08
adds other things. So there are many different possible things
48:12
you could develop in the future, but that we sort
48:14
of select those that actually make us better rather than
48:17
just randomly different, that we can sort of grow into
48:22
our ideals.
48:24
Speaker 1: But it's so funny how much value we put in
48:27
human condition, how much value we put in meaning, because
48:32
it is valuable to us when you think about what
48:36
that means in terms of the amount of energy it produces,
48:38
the amount of impact that it has versus the structure
48:42
of the universe itself, versus black holes and stellar nurseries
48:47
and things that are just infinitely more spectacular than the
48:51
human condition. But to us, it's like, oh, what is meaning?
48:55
What is meaning? What is meaning to me? Like, well,
48:57
what is meaning to me? You is your finite biological
49:01
organism that has to find meaning because you're sort of
49:04
tramping around through this weird world where eventually you're going
49:07
to die and you leave your mark and maybe reincarnation's real,
49:11
maybe the afterlife's real. Nobody fucking knows, So you've got
49:14
to have meaning. But the universe itself, like a human
49:16
only lives one hundred years. How much meaning can you
49:18
have in one hundred years?
49:20
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that is I think we kind of die prematurially.
49:23
I mean we think of us as like, first, first
49:25
you become stronger and more capable for fifteen twenty years, right,
49:32
then biologically you stagnate, and then maybe you keep accumulating
49:36
sort of knowledge and skills for another few decades. Like
49:39
just as you have started to acquire like a modicum
49:42
of wisdom, like your brain starts to rot yep, and
49:46
then everything is erased by Alzheimer's or death, and it's
49:50
kind of okay, that's all gone, the whole lifetime of experience,
49:53
there's your meaning, all the memories and like the hard
49:56
earned lessons that so that seems kind of sad and
50:00
probably not the best way for things to be. I
50:02
think we would want to extend the human lifespan so
50:07
you could continue to grow, not just kind of reach
50:09
twenty and then plateau there for the rest of your life,
50:12
but what if we could continue to develop so that
50:15
like at eighty, you were as much stronger and like
50:19
be able to understand more and move better and like
50:21
just have the same capacity increase as you had like
50:24
between like zero and twenty and you just kept going.
50:28
Speaker 1: Well, these live extension scientists that are working on these things,
50:30
guys like David Sinclair, like they believe that that's not
50:34
just a possibility but an inevitability.
50:37
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, so that's more like I guess preserving preventing
50:40
or delaying that decay sure, which is already very good.
50:44
Speaker 1: Like if you're reversing, they're talking about rever yeah, yeah.
50:46
Speaker 2: But then you would go back to being twenty right
50:48
in terms of magic.
50:49
Speaker 1: Yea, yeah, but then you have engineering.
50:52
Speaker 2: If you have very long time spans, so then you
50:54
might at some point want to continue to grow. Yeah,
50:56
like you might not want to just be stuck at
50:58
a twenty year old human. Of course, in a thousand years,
51:01
like maybe eventually you would want to become like it's
51:06
likely bigger, like in terms of your sure related to
51:10
engage with.
51:11
Speaker 1: The world, of course, and if they can figure out
51:13
how to make people, well, there's already genetic engineering that's
51:16
being done in terms of increasing potential intelligence and IQ.
51:20
They're already doing that, you know. And so this was
51:23
a I know, I'm sure you know about that thing
51:25
that happened in China where this one doctor got in
51:29
trouble because he had genetically engineered some babies to be
51:35
inoculated to HIV. But it also at the same time
51:40
gave them a far increased potential IQ. It remains to
51:45
be seen whether or not it actually works as these guys,
51:48
you know, become like twenty and thirty and we start
51:50
putting them in chess tournaments and see if it really
51:53
did make them smarter. But if the possibility of that
51:57
is already being studied, they already understand the difference between
52:01
like what is what's possible, what we understand, and that
52:07
increases every day. They understand more every day, more as
52:10
possible every day. If that just keeps going, we have
52:13
a different version of what the human consciousness is. You
52:16
have a different version of the human mind.
52:18
Speaker 2: Yeah a lot. I think the way AI is going,
52:21
I think that's the train that's going to reach the
52:24
destination faster.
52:26
Speaker 1: Oh yeah.
52:27
Speaker 2: And then once you do have super intelligence in machine substrate,
52:32
then that can then unlock all kinds of technologies, including
52:35
these biological technologies or nanotechnology, our stuff, other things that
52:39
could then sort of bring us up. If that's how
52:43
we decide to go, yeah, and uplift us into different
52:48
like either biologically enhancing us or like uploading us into.
52:52
Speaker 1: But again, it's that whitewater river raft. It's like we're
52:56
going down this white water and we might make it
52:58
out of this or it might crash. You know. One
53:02
of that weird things about I'm very fascinated with ancient
53:08
civilizations and one of the weirdest things about ancient civilizations
53:12
is when you go really really far back, a bunch
53:14
of them have these depictions of kings that ruled for
53:18
thousands of years, and it's very strange stuff because the
53:23
Egyptians in ancient umer there's a bunch of different depictions
53:30
of these kings that lived lives that were way longer
53:34
than biological humans lived. And then there's the flood myth
53:38
or the flood story, and then after the flood, biological
53:42
life decreases pretty radically, and it seems to get back
53:45
to like a normal version of what we assume now,
53:48
which is like one hundred years. And one of the
53:51
weird questions that these alternative ancient historians have is are
53:57
we missing the possibility that there was a hyper advanced
54:02
civilization that existed tens of thousands of years ago, and
54:06
that what we're seeing now is not a linear progression
54:08
from caveman to human being with an iPhone in twenty
54:11
twenty six, that along the way there might have been
54:15
a very high level of sophistication, and the evidence of
54:19
that might be the Pyramids and some of these other
54:21
ancient structures that are mind boggling as much as you
54:24
try to explain them away when you're dealing with two million,
54:27
three hundred thousand stones, Some of them are cut from
54:30
a quarry five hundred miles away, eighty tons stones that
54:33
are in the ceiling, perfectly cut granite where it looks
54:37
like they have diamond drill holes in them. It seems
54:40
like there's some lost technology. And every society has this
54:44
flood myth, and every society that has this flood myth,
54:47
especially these ones that were very advanced somehow or another,
54:51
like ancient Egypt. They have these depictions of people that
54:55
lived way longer than people live today. And I wonder
54:59
if human beings one day will realize, like, oh, if
55:03
you keep going long enough, one hundred years is silly,
55:06
like people can They'll just figure out what it is
55:09
that makes people age and die. Fix that, and you'll
55:12
live in an insanely long time. And then if people
55:15
live in insanely long time and their capacity for reason
55:17
and logic increases, their capacity for intelligence increases, then you
55:22
have these insane technologies that were required to do things
55:26
like build the pyramids, And that might be what happens.
55:29
That might be a natural course of progression that the
55:32
first thing we realize is one hundred years is not enough.
55:35
Because I'm fifty eight, I'm a moron still, Like why
55:38
am I learning every day? How come I'm getting better
55:41
at being a person every day. Well I would have
55:42
I should have figured this out already, but you don't
55:44
ever have time to figure it out. There's not enough time.
55:47
Speaker 2: I only get one run, like I mean you would
55:49
take one trial run first right on life, right, and
55:53
like okay, and I kind of not a little bit
55:54
hard works not not let's do it for real. That's
55:56
the it's kind of scary. I mean, it's a bit
55:59
crazy that each of us is put in charge of
56:01
a whole human life, right, Like, are we really like
56:05
reach the level of Look, if you want to run
56:07
an airplane, you have to go through these certifications and stuff, right,
56:10
and then maybe it can be a pilot. But like
56:12
for a human life, it's like every single person like, okay,
56:14
you have one dictatorial control of this person, like that
56:19
completely hostage your whims. Yeah, and then that's like us,
56:24
but that's that's the way it is. But yeah, having
56:26
the ability to kind of try different things and maybe
56:29
do like like have a kind of opportunity to do
56:35
a do over if like if the life turned out
56:39
to be like for every fifty years or something, you
56:41
have a chance to kind of.
56:44
Speaker 1: Or maybe not even it can do over, but it's
56:46
the same life, but you can do whatever you want
56:49
and you don't have to be constrained to this idea
56:51
that you only have a certain amount of time and
56:53
you want to retire by your sixty five. We might
56:55
look at that as being like one of the first
56:58
completely archaic notions and the reason why people got it
57:00
all wrong, Like, well, society will be better because people
57:03
are going to live way longer. And if you think
57:05
about how much smarter.
57:06
Speaker 2: How old are you fifty three?
57:08
Speaker 1: Okay, now the way you said that, I was sad.
57:12
I'm older than you, dog, don't worry about it. But
57:15
if you think about how much smarter you are at
57:17
fifty three then you were at thirteen. You know. Now
57:20
imagine how much smarter you'll be at three hundred and
57:23
fifty three or one thousand and fifty three. And if
57:27
that actually becomes possible, If a person can live to
57:30
be one hundred years, why can't they live to be
57:32
four thousand years? If they can figure out what makes
57:35
people age, if we really can genetically engineer human beings,
57:39
that's not again, that's not breathing underwater. That's just extending life.
57:42
And if you can extent extend life and extend intellectual
57:47
capacity and your ability to learn and grow. Holy shit,
57:50
you're dealing with a two thousand year old person. That's
57:52
a completely different kind of thing, and that could be
57:56
real someday, and that might be also one of the
57:58
things that comes along with this new understanding of just
58:04
life in general with super intelligent AI.
58:07
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, for sure, Fixing aging and reversing it would
58:11
be amongst things that a technologically mature civilization would be
58:16
able to do.
58:16
Speaker 1: We just have to get people out of the idea
58:18
that it's vain. Why do you want to live forever?
58:21
Speaker 2: That's what I say now, right, But when somebody actually
58:24
has the therapy and you could like out here, you
58:27
could either continue to get you know, worse kidneys and
58:31
more painful knees and wrinkles and you start forget things,
58:34
or you can take this this rejuvenation serum that everybody
58:38
else is using and they are like full of energy
58:40
and running around and doing stuff like do you still
58:43
think it's vain? So I think a lot of this
58:45
is Stockholm syndrome that, like you are kind of faced
58:49
with the inevitability of aging and decay and have been
58:52
for thousands of years, so you develop a kind of
58:56
romantic scaffold that reconciles you to the inevitable stock, which
59:01
is maybe adaptive, but only up until the point where
59:04
there actually might be something you could do to escape.
59:07
Right then, if you're too stock in this mindset, it
59:10
might sort of prevent it from taking advantage to regain
59:14
your freedom. And I think we are now at that stage.
59:17
We don't yet have the therapies, but there are certainly
59:20
like investments and research and stuff we could do that
59:22
would hasten the arrival. And I think in fact, we
59:26
should have started on a big sort of you know,
59:29
Manhattan product to defeat aging, like decades ago, and maybe
59:33
we would have better therapies by now then. But for
59:36
a long time, aging was not seen as a problem.
59:39
Only the specific diseases that are the result of the aging.
59:43
They got all this funding, right like, so you have
59:45
like huge research products for Alzheimer's and for heart disease
59:47
and for cancer, but if you look at the main
59:50
common cause of most human disease, it's an essence like
59:54
you're much more likely to get any of these when
59:56
you're eighty than when you're twenty, because yourselves gradually the
1:00:00
hay and gunk builds up. Yeah, arteries clug off. You know,
1:00:04
your your DNA mutates, your methylation pattern gets scrambled. So
1:00:09
rather than just trying to put out the fires one
1:00:11
by one after they occur, like at some point, you
1:00:13
just need to sort of try to prevent, like maybe
1:00:17
you need a bit of rain to sort of prevent.
1:00:20
Speaker 1: It's kind of amazing how much we've accomplished as a society,
1:00:24
as civilization. When you think about the fact that people
1:00:26
only live to be one hundred kind of incredible, you know,
1:00:29
it's kind of incredible. Got rockets and satellites and cell
1:00:34
phones and people only live. So it's like everybody has
1:00:37
to build on everybody else's intelligence and everybody else's understanding
1:00:40
of the world and develop new things, and everybody has
1:00:43
to learn those new things.
1:00:44
Speaker 2: And its brain is so small that it can only
1:00:47
learn a small little special right, and you need millions
1:00:49
of them. Yeah, although it's not entirely clear with humans,
1:00:55
if we had been much more long lived, like the
1:00:58
way we currently are configured, maybe we would just have
1:01:00
gotten to stock in our ways and sort of stagnated
1:01:04
into some sort of altrack conservative society where nobody is
1:01:07
allowed to do anything different or the old geezers that
1:01:10
have their way of doing things just remain forever in charge.
1:01:13
Speaker 1: Yeah, So.
1:01:16
Speaker 2: I mean we just don't know right like whether that
1:01:19
would have slowed progress or or accelerated it. But it is, yeah,
1:01:26
it is still it is still amazing. Like it's a
1:01:28
long path from sort of running around in the forest
1:01:31
to sort of these look at these like advanced chip
1:01:35
technologies and the whole global supply chain or like thousands
1:01:40
of people are working to develop just one little tool
1:01:42
that then feeds into the ability to make another tool
1:01:45
that eventually makes these leading edhai chips.
1:01:49
Speaker 1: Whether layering things for atoms deep.
1:01:54
Speaker 2: It's it's remarkable, it's incredible.
1:01:56
Speaker 1: And humans only live to be one hundred. Imagine what
1:01:58
we could accomplish if we live to be three thousand,
1:02:01
you know.
1:02:02
Speaker 2: Or if we were just a little bit you know,
1:02:05
better at these things. Yeah, because I think we are
1:02:07
sort of the stupidest possible species that they're capable of
1:02:11
developing advanced technology. Because as soon as we evolved to
1:02:15
reach that level, we started developing it right then then,
1:02:18
So that's where we are, like the dumbest possible that
1:02:20
just barely can do.
1:02:21
Speaker 1: This barely can do this while we're blowing each other up. Yeah,
1:02:24
at the same time, all over the world blown up people.
1:02:28
So yeah, but maybe a lot of that frantic, stupid,
1:02:34
illogical behavior is because we're so finite, like we're in
1:02:39
a rush that you know, we realize we have a
1:02:41
certain amount of time to get things done, and so
1:02:43
this sort of accentuates the desire to control resources and
1:02:48
to cement your immortality and to do these things that
1:02:51
people love to do. Put their name on buildings, there's
1:02:54
a thing that people like to do that it's almost
1:02:56
like cementing their immortality. That maybe there'll be less of
1:03:00
a desire to do that if people live way longer.
1:03:03
And then you would have to assume if you can
1:03:07
engineer humans to live longer, you could probably engineer a
1:03:10
lot of stupidity out of us. They could just find
1:03:13
out why people be like, what if you could just
1:03:15
eliminate lying? What if there's a genetic solution to lying?
1:03:23
Speaker 2: Well, I guess they're a really good light detector.
1:03:26
Speaker 1: Yeah, but I mean, what if you just you can
1:03:28
genetically engineer out the desire to lie?
1:03:32
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, if you had a perfect light detector,
1:03:36
that would be no point in lying because people would
1:03:38
just see right.
1:03:41
Speaker 1: Or if you can read each other's minds, it'd be fruitless.
1:03:44
Speaker 2: Yeah, and so that that might be closer. I mean,
1:03:45
who knows what you could do if you sort of
1:03:47
had like carefull AI system trained to detect microexpression.
1:03:50
Speaker 1: We just all have to get the big gray heads
1:03:53
with the black eyes like the aliens have. Then then
1:03:56
you read each other's minds. Well. One of the weirder
1:04:01
things that Bob Blozar said, again, I don't know if
1:04:04
you're into this UFO stuff, but he was one of
1:04:06
the guys that was a whistleblower that said he back
1:04:09
engineered crafts for the United States government in the nineteen eighties.
1:04:12
They don't have any controls in these crafts, supposedly, and
1:04:16
that they're all powered by the minds of the beings
1:04:19
that are running it, and that they have it's almost
1:04:21
like these crafts are alive and they have some sort
1:04:24
of a sinking with the thing that instead of like
1:04:26
pressing buttons and working a joystick, they just sink with
1:04:31
this this creation and then they can propel it with
1:04:34
their minds, so their minds become the computer that moves
1:04:39
this thing around.
1:04:40
Speaker 2: I'm a bit skeptical. I haven't looked into.
1:04:42
Speaker 1: That you should be. Sounds crazy. How could you not
1:04:46
be scared anybody who's not skeptical sounds crazy. But if
1:04:49
you think about where we are now and where we're
1:04:51
going to be, the possibility of that being our future
1:04:55
is pretty likely.
1:04:56
Speaker 2: Right, And I think that like that, the kind of
1:04:59
possibility of engineering something like that with sufficiently advanced technology
1:05:03
would be there, like all kinds of stuff. Yeah, basically
1:05:06
everything that doesn't violate some law physics, to a first approximation,
1:05:11
you would be able to construct.
1:05:12
Speaker 1: And even when we say that it's like our current
1:05:14
understanding of physics, it's not the understanding of physics that
1:05:18
society it's a million years older than ours, because that's
1:05:22
I mean, that's a blink in the eye of the
1:05:25
time that it took to create what we are at
1:05:28
right now from the big bang. Like a million years
1:05:31
is nothing.
1:05:32
Speaker 2: Yeah, but even with our current understanding of what physics permits,
1:05:37
that's still an enormous space of designs and types of
1:05:44
life and being that you could imagine instantiating. You could
1:05:48
have you know, like a disonsephere. You've heard of this concept, right,
1:05:52
it's basically like using the output of the sun for
1:05:55
energy generation, and it could have like you surround the
1:05:58
sun vi solar panels that then powers a civilization infrastructure,
1:06:03
maybe like a computer, like imagine the like already we
1:06:06
have like AI computes growing at like two hundred and
1:06:09
forty percent per year or something right right with this,
1:06:12
and then like imagine the kind of mind that could
1:06:15
run on that sized computer. So people are wondering whether,
1:06:22
like could machines be conscious? And like discussing that right
1:06:27
right now, I think like maybe the more pertinent quantum
1:06:29
is like are we really conscious? I think barely driving
1:06:36
on like the road for two and a half hours
1:06:39
of motorists, right and like driving past thousands of people
1:06:44
and homes and like mothers with their strollers, And then
1:06:48
after does he does he remember any of that? Like
1:06:51
was he even really aware of any of this? Well,
1:06:54
it was driving. It's like a little diffuse sense of
1:06:57
body and of murky perceptions floating true, maybe some confused
1:07:02
abstract idea that we don't really understand. That's kind of
1:07:05
the consciousness that can fit into this coconut sized biowotical
1:07:09
organ that we think and we think, wow, we are
1:07:11
so conscious, but like imagine this Diyson sphere consciousness or
1:07:16
like a mind that maybe spans a galaxy. I think
1:07:20
the difference between the sort of awareness that it could
1:07:23
have and our awareness might be like bigger than the
1:07:26
difference between our awareness and like whatever a flea has
1:07:29
or something like that, way bigger. So it could be
1:07:33
this like transition where we develop super intellerent minds that
1:07:37
for the first time is really life waking up and
1:07:41
becoming truly aware, and that we are a little bit
1:07:45
sort of overpride proud in our own specialness when we
1:07:51
think that we have achieved something close to the maximum
1:07:55
level of that we are the standard by which consciousness
1:07:57
should be measured, and we kind of feeble confused, murky
1:08:04
glimmer that is barely sentient at all. So that's like
1:08:09
I think, maybe the big challenge for our era' like
1:08:14
giving birth to super intellergence and then hopefully shaping and
1:08:18
nurturing it and staring it so that it becomes a
1:08:21
positive thing both for us ourselves and also for it
1:08:26
itself and also for whatever other if there are other
1:08:30
super beings somewhere in the world or in the cosmos,
1:08:34
that it sort of is able to get along with
1:08:36
us and contribute positively at the cosmic scale. And that's
1:08:43
a very multifaceted challenge. But I think that's kind of
1:08:47
seems to be what's going on.
1:08:49
Speaker 1: Yeah, And it's hard for people to think that far ahead.
1:08:52
You know, you just think of intelligence being something superior
1:08:55
to what we currently experience. But when you're talking about
1:09:00
a computer or a being, a conscious being that is
1:09:07
infinitely more powerful than anything we can imagine, that seems
1:09:11
to be. What if everything keeps going in the same
1:09:14
general direction, and AI increases its power and we figure
1:09:19
out new ways to power it, and then because one
1:09:22
of the things that AI needs that's so interesting is
1:09:24
it needs enormous amounts of power, and so the just
1:09:28
these AI centers that they're developing now, like Google's doing
1:09:33
one where they're developing their own nuclear power. Do you
1:09:35
want some coffee?
1:09:36
Speaker 2: Are you there?
1:09:37
Speaker 1: Yeah? Right, you're reaching for your cup. You shouldn't be
1:09:41
drinking out of paper cups anyway, Man.
1:09:42
Speaker 2: I don't usually do that, so I know I.
1:09:44
Speaker 1: Don't either, but occasionally I do, but they're so bad
1:09:46
for you.
1:09:47
Speaker 2: I'm usually quite conscientious.
1:09:49
Speaker 1: With Yeah, even when I go on the road I've
1:09:52
started taking a little yetty coffee cup with me so
1:09:56
I could buy coffee and just have them put it
1:09:59
in that The inside of those things is just lined
1:10:03
with plastic. You're pouring hot water into plastic and then
1:10:06
the plastic leaches into your coffee.
1:10:08
Speaker 2: I don't do that normally, but I figured it, like
1:10:10
for having a touch with you on the dragon shot
1:10:15
would be worse, like I guess some hundred microplastics.
1:10:19
Speaker 1: Well, thank you. I think what we're talking about is inevitable.
1:10:25
If human beings don't blow ourselves up, if we don't
1:10:28
get hit with an asteroid blow ourselves up, or a
1:10:30
supervolcation volcano doesn't eradicate civilization, all this stuff is it's inevitable.
1:10:36
It's just it's how much time does it take and
1:10:39
how much does it grow exponentially in power? Because we're
1:10:44
talking about computers. Then they start bringing up quantum computing
1:10:48
and quantum computer's ability to do calculations, and it doesn't
1:10:51
even make sense, and so you think, well, this is
1:10:55
just one version of that, Like what if what is
1:10:57
a quantum computing going to look like hundred years from now?
1:11:01
Like what is computing power which is connected to AI?
1:11:05
What is that going to look like five hundred years
1:11:07
from now, it's impossible to even guess.
1:11:10
Speaker 2: Well, we can sort of see lower bounds on what's possible,
1:11:13
like thinking already of just the designs we can conceive
1:11:17
of that we see in principle you could make. Maybe
1:11:20
it'll take a long a lot of grind to get there,
1:11:22
but at least that establishes like a lower bound of
1:11:25
what a technolgically immature civilization could do. And then maybe
1:11:28
they have additional ideas beyond that, but already that is
1:11:32
enough to really unlock. So if you think of a
1:11:36
space of possible modes of being, where like a mode
1:11:40
of being is a way of experiencing, living, interacting. I
1:11:44
think you look around humanity and all people have existed
1:11:48
in the past, a lot of different characters.
1:11:50
Speaker 1: Right.
1:11:52
Speaker 2: Men, women, like mean people, nasty people, crazy people. But
1:11:57
I think all of that diversity human experience is like
1:12:01
a tiny little corner in this space of possible modes
1:12:06
of being, Like it's a huge cathedral and we've been
1:12:08
kind of basically sitting in the janitor's closet. It's like
1:12:12
the exploration we've done and and the kinds of modes
1:12:16
of being the kinds of ways of experiencing and relating
1:12:19
to each other or thinking and doing stuff that are
1:12:23
ultimately possible. Is just this this enormous space that we
1:12:27
haven't that we haven't been able to explore, because ultimately
1:12:30
what we can currently conceive of and imagine and experience
1:12:33
and feel is like limited to our biological substrate of
1:12:36
human brain. And just as you're like earlier human ancestors
1:12:43
from a few million years ago that you were talking
1:12:44
about before, like they wouldn't really have been able to
1:12:48
conceive of the modern human condition, not just because I
1:12:51
didn't think of it, but because like the ape brain can't.
1:12:54
Really they don't, like they even if you try to
1:12:58
describe it to them somehow, like what is music? What
1:13:01
is humor? What is romantic love?
1:13:03
Speaker 1: Like?
1:13:04
Speaker 2: What is science? What is like all of these things?
1:13:08
What's literature?
1:13:09
Speaker 1: Like?
1:13:10
Speaker 2: They just doesn't fit into right right And so presumably,
1:13:13
I mean you could think, right now we've achieved the
1:13:15
right brain size where all possible values and interesting ideas
1:13:20
are accessible to us, that seems kind of impossible. It
1:13:23
seems much more likely that just as the chimpanzees are
1:13:26
necessarily blind to like a lot of what can give
1:13:31
life meaning and value and significance, so probably are we too.
1:13:35
Speaker 1: Yeah, they don't even have the capacity for it, which
1:13:37
is interesting, that can't even Yeah, we think of them
1:13:39
as being so intelligent, and they are in comparison to
1:13:42
a lot of other animals. But I think one of
1:13:44
the things that they were puzzled by when they started
1:13:46
teaching primates sign language was that they never asked questions, Like,
1:13:53
they don't seem to have questions about stuff, so they
1:13:57
just they just they exist in intelligent where they can
1:14:00
figure things out. They can they can do things. They
1:14:03
know when the doors left unlocked, they understand. They understand fairness,
1:14:07
which is really weird. Like chimps get very upset if
1:14:11
they're treated unfairly, Like if one chimp gets something and
1:14:14
they don't get they get super violent. But they don't
1:14:17
have a lot of questions, you know, and we're filled
1:14:20
with questions like, so, what are we missing at the
1:14:24
next stage of being a human will have that we're
1:14:28
not even considering now because it's not a part.
1:14:30
Speaker 2: Of our experience, Like what's the asking question? Type of
1:14:33
thing that we are not able to imagine, And I
1:14:37
might many of those types of things.
1:14:39
Speaker 1: Yeah, and the possibilities are literally endless. We just don't
1:14:42
conceive of them because we're trapped in this territorial primate mindset.
1:14:48
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I think that's likely.
1:14:52
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think so too. I think so too. I
1:14:54
think the possibilities are endless, and I think it's going
1:14:58
to be really, really weird if that happens inside of
1:15:02
our lifetime. Because you and I were, you know, close
1:15:06
to the same age, so we grew up with answering machines.
1:15:09
You probably remember the first cell phones. You probably got
1:15:12
online and probably the like when'd you get online?
1:15:14
Speaker 2: Like the early ninety six?
1:15:16
Speaker 1: Yeah, there you go. Yeah, see, I think for me
1:15:19
it was ninety four, so we we got to see
1:15:24
all this happen. If we get to see the new
1:15:28
version of humans in our lifetime, that would be like
1:15:32
literally bonkers. What an amazing time to be alive if
1:15:36
you really think about it. We're so fortunate because if
1:15:39
you grew up between like seventeen hundred and eighteen hundred,
1:15:42
how much did shit change sixteen hundred and seventeen hundred,
1:15:46
would you make a better boat? Like? What's what's different?
1:15:49
A lot of different? Man, everybody kind of is the
1:15:52
same for one hundred years and inside of our lifetime,
1:15:55
from the nineteen the late nineteen sixties for me to
1:15:59
the early seventies for you, Like in the amount of
1:16:01
time that we've been alive, things have radically changed, like
1:16:06
really really radically, to the point where it's probably the
1:16:10
biggest shift in human ingenuity and innovation that the world's
1:16:15
ever seen, and we're just the middle of it, and
1:16:18
we might be in the middle of the next one,
1:16:20
which like literally allows us to see what the world
1:16:25
looks like a thousand years from now, because you're going
1:16:27
to be alive.
1:16:28
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean that's why. Yeah, it is now this
1:16:31
full time job just to monitor the situation like it's
1:16:33
really but it is.
1:16:34
Speaker 1: How do you do that?
1:16:35
Speaker 2: Well, you don't really, but if you try to sort
1:16:40
of so I think the opportunity so it used to
1:16:44
be like, at least in my sphere effect, if you're
1:16:47
doing philosophy or something like it, most people would think
1:16:53
you have a kind of unlimited time horizon. And people
1:16:55
have been working on philosophical questions of thousands of years,
1:16:58
and that doesn't seem to be any huge urgency if
1:17:04
they have been on sold for thousands of years. Maybe
1:17:06
if it takes another five hundred. So I always thought
1:17:10
of philosophy as having a deadline, meaning that at some
1:17:15
point we would develop smarter than human forms of intolerance,
1:17:19
presumably AI that could then do the philosophy much better
1:17:23
than us, And so there was a limited period of
1:17:25
time during which any advances like I could contribute to
1:17:30
would be meaningful, and that it wo that make sense
1:17:33
on focusing on that subset of philosophical questions or general
1:17:37
questions that we really need the answer to now, as
1:17:40
opposed to like, you know, ten twenty years in the future,
1:17:44
when when somebody else can do them better, like the
1:17:46
machine minds. So that's kind of been a lens through
1:17:49
which I have selected the things to work on. And now,
1:17:52
of course that deadline is moving closer, so there's less
1:17:56
time remaining, and so my focus is increasingly drifting towards
1:18:01
questions where it like that it might be relevant to
1:18:04
have the answer to now rather than a year or
1:18:06
two from now.
1:18:07
Speaker 1: So you're almost like a cultural navigator, like a guy
1:18:10
with a sextent at the helm of a ship looking
1:18:14
at the constellations, go, I think we're in the right direction.
1:18:19
Speaker 2: Yeah, but now we're sort of moving maybe into too
1:18:22
close to harbor and you need to like, yeah, pay
1:18:25
more attention to exactly how deep the rocks are, the
1:18:29
rocks are and looks scan around you.
1:18:33
Speaker 1: When you think about a timeline for radical change in
1:18:38
your mind, what do you think, what do you think
1:18:41
that looks like?
1:18:42
Speaker 2: Well, I mean I take short timelines seriously with a
1:18:46
I mean, for what we know, it could be like like,
1:18:49
it could be like a year or two or three
1:18:51
or four and probably a bit longer. But we're no
1:18:55
longer at a point where we can be confident that
1:18:58
we won't have super intelligence in just a few years,
1:19:01
like it could happen.
1:19:03
Speaker 1: So what is that when you say that for the uninitiated,
1:19:06
what do you mean by super intelligence?
1:19:08
Speaker 2: Well, I guess we first have agi artificial general intelligence
1:19:17
AI that can do all the stuff that we can do,
1:19:21
and then super intelligence would just be that but can
1:19:24
do it way better than any human can do. It's
1:19:28
all technical, intellectual, common sense tasks. And then you'd have
1:19:33
robotics as well can do all the physical stuff not
1:19:36
much later, and so this, Yeah, so the timeline remains
1:19:43
on uncertain, but I think it's not impossible that this
1:19:48
could happen very soon. And then once you have super intelligence,
1:19:51
then I think from there on it might be like
1:19:54
a sort of sprint to something approximating technological maturity, because
1:19:58
what you have super intelligence that then design it's even
1:20:00
more smart ais right, using it's kind of super intellent
1:20:04
AI research capability and designing better chips and all of that.
1:20:09
So you might then have this like intelligence explosion where
1:20:14
you go from something slightly greater than human level to
1:20:18
some radical superintalerence that can then sort of invent whatever
1:20:21
the remaining technologies are. Maybe there needs to be some
1:20:23
trial and error and experiments in the physical world that
1:20:26
slow things down a bit, but some smallish number, like
1:20:29
a single digit number of years from superintellence, I think
1:20:31
you might have something that unlocks allays these like sci
1:20:35
fi level capabilities that we've talked about. At least that
1:20:41
seems relatively plausible to me.
1:20:46
Speaker 1: It seems inevitable. And my question is how does it
1:20:50
How does it announce itself? Does it send a mass
1:20:52
text message to the whole world? Everybody's phone just starts,
1:20:56
like you know, when you have those Amber alerts and
1:20:58
your phone starts vibrating, or when there's some sort of
1:21:00
a storm warning all of a sudden your phone goes
1:21:04
off and then it alerts to the fact that it's
1:21:07
taken over.
1:21:08
Speaker 2: Well, so this means so here we don't really know.
1:21:11
It's like this is very confusing and I've never done
1:21:14
this before and so it's like very hard to figure
1:21:16
out how this has gone to unfold And maybe it's
1:21:19
not even fixed it. Maybe it depends a little bit
1:21:21
on what on which we do and the extent to
1:21:23
which different actors get their stuff together.
1:21:27
Speaker 1: Yeah, but.
1:21:32
Speaker 2: Like one, I guess one possible type of scenarios where
1:21:36
like things are just like accelerating. They're more and more
1:21:39
of these advances model releases. Increasingly there is automation of
1:21:45
the research process in AI labs, Like already you have
1:21:50
coding assistance right that are really useful to people in
1:21:53
AI labs. They're using them to write a lot of
1:21:55
their software. Like right now, you still need humans for
1:21:57
sort of the research taste and judgment, and sometimes things
1:22:01
go like get stuck and you need a human to
1:22:04
kind of redirect them. But more and more of that
1:22:08
make it automated, and then you have kind of new
1:22:15
iterations of models being trained at the faster and faster
1:22:19
clip they can do more and more stuff they start
1:22:24
to automate increasing chunks of the economy. So right now
1:22:31
a lot of coding is automated. But like other areas
1:22:35
as well, maybe they they've become dropping virtual workers that
1:22:39
can do everything like a human could do with a
1:22:41
remote connection initially, and then like you have people working
1:22:45
on robotics, so that that would start to kicking, and
1:22:48
then eventually just more and more of the action is
1:22:50
run by these AI systems one or more and they're
1:22:55
kind of doing it at their timescale, which is speeding up.
1:23:01
Then from that point it would depend a lot on
1:23:04
whether we have successfully aligned these systems so that they
1:23:09
actually do what the people created them intended, or whether
1:23:13
they have somehow gone off the rails.
1:23:17
Speaker 1: Is there's also the fear that America doesn't come up
1:23:21
with it first.
1:23:23
Speaker 2: This is that's mostly affair in China for examples from
1:23:29
America comes up.
1:23:30
Speaker 1: With the first. Yeah, I mean it's it's really just
1:23:32
America and China. They're at the forefront of this brace, right,
1:23:35
Russia a little bit, but not on the same level.
1:23:38
Not Russia, No, not Russia. Who else is it?
1:23:41
Speaker 2: Did you see this last week?
1:23:43
Speaker 1: Ford hiring three hund and fifty engineers after AI failed
1:23:46
shows failed shows human value in AI era? What does
1:23:50
that mean that I.
1:23:51
Speaker 2: Tried to find the only one that didn't?
1:23:52
Speaker 1: Man just did it. They rehired a bunch of engineers
1:23:56
they fired after their AI wasn't matching the quality they need. Oh,
1:24:01
and this is forward. That's interesting. They probably jumped the gun,
1:24:06
you know, they probably fired them too quickly. And now
1:24:09
these people that they rehire, these people are going to like, oh,
1:24:12
how much time we have left six months for AI
1:24:15
figured out how to do this?
1:24:16
Speaker 2: Just I mean, it's also possible that I think timelines
1:24:22
could extend if Like one way that could happen is
1:24:28
the progress we've seen in the last ten years, which
1:24:32
has been remarkable, right. It's to a substantial extent driven
1:24:36
by the advances, the increase in compute that is being
1:24:40
used to train and run these systems. Like it used
1:24:43
to be that you had a cutting edge AI system
1:24:46
if you were academic, like running on your PC in
1:24:49
your office, Like that was kind of the amount of
1:24:52
computing power that was applied to like doing AI stuff.
1:24:55
And now of course you have these kind of tens
1:24:57
of billions of dollars data set like hundreds of megawatts,
1:25:03
like just massive funding, so the chips have gotten better,
1:25:05
but also just the amount of funding, Like you're just
1:25:07
building many more of these chips, and so as you
1:25:10
apply more and more, compute like performance improves and that's
1:25:14
like has been a big driver. Now at some point,
1:25:19
like you might not be able to keep increasing the
1:25:21
amount of money you spend on it because like you
1:25:24
can you can go from like one thousand dollars PC
1:25:27
to like a million dollars quite easily, and you can
1:25:30
go from a million dollar to a billion dollars. And
1:25:33
now maybe you're spending on the order of a trillion
1:25:35
dollars across the world to build data centers per year,
1:25:40
but you can't really do like three orders of magnitude
1:25:43
very easily. There there's like not a thousand trillion dollars
1:25:45
to spend on it. So at some point that expenditure
1:25:48
has to kind of slow down. So if we haven't
1:25:50
achieved super intelligence by that, then maybe that would mean
1:25:53
progress gets slower if the main driver is the scale
1:25:57
up of compute. Now, it is also true that some
1:25:59
of the progress is driven by algorithmic advances, like just
1:26:02
kind of clever algorithms, so that that might continue, but
1:26:06
if one driver stalls out, then that could result in
1:26:10
faster progress. And then, of course there is a possibility
1:26:14
that the people who want to pass or regulate AI
1:26:20
gain enough traction to kind of get regulatory inhibitions.
1:26:24
Speaker 1: How would they do that? Though? If there really is
1:26:26
some sort of a Manhattan Project style race between the
1:26:29
United States and China and what other countries are developing
1:26:32
right now that are close.
1:26:33
Speaker 2: Well, I mean those are the those are.
1:26:35
Speaker 1: The two big ones, big ones. Is it possible that
1:26:37
someone could sneak up on us and develop some intelligent
1:26:41
A first?
1:26:42
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean it's possible if there were like some
1:26:44
big algorithmic breakthrough, for example, that made it a lot
1:26:48
more efficient to run a similar level of capability with
1:26:52
less sort of AI data center infrastructure. And many other
1:26:56
countries are also trying, It's just that they are not
1:26:59
as advanced and out of US and China. I'd say,
1:27:02
like US currently has the edge.
1:27:06
Speaker 1: What would happen if China got there first?
1:27:08
Speaker 2: Well, I mean part would depend on whether they had
1:27:12
successfully aligned their AI. If it's unaligned, then I guess
1:27:17
the same thing happens as if US AI is unaligned.
1:27:20
That is, the future gets shaped according to whatever values
1:27:24
this AI had ended up with. If the alignment problem
1:27:28
is solved, then it might make a difference because then
1:27:31
the values would then depend on sort of the people
1:27:36
who owned and controlled or governed it would ask it
1:27:40
to pursue. And so then then in that scenario maybe
1:27:43
it makes some difference who who initiates it.
1:27:50
Speaker 1: So right now the big players are you know, there's
1:27:53
Google and there's open Ai. There's all all these different companies.
1:27:57
When you say aligned, do they have to all be
1:28:00
kind of on the same page or like, when aligned,
1:28:04
we're not going to be aligned if there's a bunch
1:28:05
of corporations that are competing to come up with this first.
1:28:08
So they have to be aligned in terms of the
1:28:10
way they're programmed, that they're valuing human life and that
1:28:14
they're valuing society. Like what do you mean by.
1:28:17
Speaker 2: All, Well, so, I mean just the technical challenge of
1:28:21
if you're building an AI system and you have certain
1:28:24
things you wanted to do and certain things you don't
1:28:26
want it to do, are you technically able to get
1:28:28
the AI to behave that way that you as the person.
1:28:33
Well that's a non separate question which is equally important maybe,
1:28:36
but different because that's not the technical Like you can't
1:28:39
just go to the whiteboard and right answer formula and
1:28:41
now you have that's like a political question ultimately right
1:28:44
question of governance, So there you need. You know, political
1:28:49
organization appeals to the best in human nature, dialogues like
1:28:55
check and balances, whatever stuff that might work in the
1:28:58
political arena to to help that the governance of this
1:29:02
that the values to which it is aligned are sort
1:29:04
of benign values that hopefully incorporates a wide set of stakeholders.
1:29:10
Speaker 1: Right, But that's a little isn't that a little naive?
1:29:12
Because whenever there's any sort of a situation where something
1:29:16
has massive amounts of power above others, that one of
1:29:19
the first things they think of is what's the most
1:29:21
money you can generate doing it? And what is the
1:29:25
best way to generate the most amount of money? Like
1:29:27
that's they're gonna think that way. They're not going to
1:29:29
think like what's the best for the human race, Like
1:29:31
no one ever thinks that way. They think, what is
1:29:33
the best way in terms of like destroying the competition,
1:29:36
What is the best way in terms of extracting the
1:29:39
most resources out of this making it work for me?
1:29:43
That's what that's what people think of immediately, and what's
1:29:46
the best way to stop other people from competing with us?
1:29:49
Speaker 2: Right? Yeah, well so that would be I think a
1:29:52
lot of pressures and strains on whatever governance mechanism exists
1:30:00
at the time when super intelligence is developed.
1:30:03
Speaker 1: Right, So, is this something that the technology is so
1:30:08
far ahead the potential for it to be so far
1:30:11
ahead of our understanding of what it's going to be
1:30:14
able to do that like making laws for that now
1:30:16
it's going it's going to be very difficult to even
1:30:18
explain to people like we need we need these laws
1:30:22
and we need these guardrails in place now because here's
1:30:26
what could happen, and that that conversation is not really
1:30:29
happening right now. It is happening, but is it happening politically.
1:30:34
Speaker 2: It's starting to happen.
1:30:35
Speaker 1: Yeah.
1:30:35
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's been happening to an increasing extent politically. And
1:30:40
there have been various actions.
1:30:41
Speaker 1: Okay, what actions?
1:30:43
Speaker 2: Well, so a few years ago, for example, that was
1:30:45
the whole expert export regime imposed by the US on
1:30:51
chips the most advanced chips, where like China was cut
1:30:54
out from being able to access the most advanced Nvidia
1:30:57
chips and so forth, and that's kind of been modified,
1:31:03
but that was motivated to a significant extent by trying
1:31:06
to preserve ai edge that the US has.
1:31:10
Speaker 1: Right, but that's like internationally, I mean in terms of
1:31:13
like being able to stop corporations from having the kind
1:31:18
of power that this could provide.
1:31:20
Speaker 2: So so then there have been various efforts. That was
1:31:22
like a proposition in California where there were various things.
1:31:28
More recently you saw the whole thing. I don't know
1:31:30
if you followed it with the Mythus and Fable five,
1:31:34
the Anthropic models that where like so Mythos has not
1:31:40
been released, this is the most powerful model because it
1:31:43
seems to have significant cyber offense capabilities. It can easily
1:31:49
detect vulnerabilities in software, and so Anthropic figured that rather
1:31:54
than immediately making it available to everybody, maybe it would
1:31:57
be better to first try to make it available to
1:32:01
providers of critical software infrastructure, like like like big banks,
1:32:07
and I'd like that sort of they can patch up
1:32:09
their systems. And then Fable five was a kind of
1:32:16
restricted version of the Mythos model, like the same underlying model,
1:32:20
but with extra safeguards. It basically refused anything that remotely
1:32:24
seemed like you know, cyber hacking, programming, biological stuff, because
1:32:32
maybe that would be bios So like it sort of
1:32:34
drew a wide circle around anything that even remotely looked
1:32:38
possibly dangerous and it just refuses that. So that was released.
1:32:43
But then after like a week or so, the administration
1:32:48
imposed a kind of export restriction that prevented any non
1:32:54
US citizen from using it, and that meant Anthropic had
1:32:59
to cut it off for everybody because I didn't have
1:33:01
a way in real time to verify who is a
1:33:03
US citizen and not. So then it was like unavailable
1:33:08
for several weeks and intense negotiations behind the scenes and
1:33:12
working to try to figure out because allegedly it was
1:33:15
possible to jail break it, so that it sometimes gave
1:33:18
some little assistance with some cyber like finding vulnerabilities in code.
1:33:24
And now recently it just became available again because they
1:33:26
had reached some understanding with the government where it was
1:33:31
deemed sufficiently safeguarded to be released. And now there is
1:33:36
like efforts on the way to try to work out
1:33:38
a framework because like in the future, you wouldn't want
1:33:40
to do this on an ad hoc basis, like somebody
1:33:42
just decides this particular model for some unspecified reason, like
1:33:46
you want to have clear standards ideally, right that applies
1:33:49
to everybody, every company. So there's now some industry wide
1:33:52
effort to try to work with the government to anyway.
1:33:55
So there's like a lot of this stuff happening. I
1:33:57
expect much more of this going forward. It just has
1:34:01
recently become like a serious issue people. Until recently we're
1:34:06
kind of ignoring the whole AI thing for the most part,
1:34:10
and then there is a second wave coming, I think once.
1:34:14
So so far we haven't really seen a big impact
1:34:16
on the labor market right from AI. But once that
1:34:21
starts to hit and you get maybe you know, high
1:34:25
levels of unemployment amongst white collar workers, and imagine if
1:34:29
you have millions and millions of people with that have
1:34:32
their university diplomas, right, they feel a sense of superiority
1:34:36
and entitlement. They've gone through the whole process, they got
1:34:38
their degree, and now they expect a well paying job,
1:34:43
and then there is no job for them. They've got
1:34:45
nothing to do all day long. What they but complain
1:34:49
about AI. So you've got to have all these well
1:34:51
educated people who feel resentful and are going to say
1:34:54
every possible bad thing about AI that could be said
1:34:57
all day long and mobilized. They are very powerful political
1:35:00
constituency that will emerge from that that's not even yet happened,
1:35:04
but that will kind of add to all of these
1:35:06
other grievances that people point to with AI. So I
1:35:11
think there's going to be kind of significant political pressures
1:35:15
for doing something about AI.
1:35:19
Speaker 1: Isn't The key is getting ahead of it, though, So
1:35:23
how can people find how can we see the vulnerabilities
1:35:28
in advance and recognize like when this is going to
1:35:32
Like if there's going to be a tipping point and
1:35:33
a bunch of white collar workers are going to be
1:35:36
out of work, and there's going to get to a
1:35:37
point where we realize like this is coming, this is
1:35:39
like three weeks from now, what do we do? Like
1:35:41
what do they do? Like what?
1:35:42
Speaker 2: Yeah, So that's not clear to me at least. I
1:35:45
mean a lot of people think they have different views
1:35:48
about what you've been on, of course, but it's like
1:35:52
very hard to have an It's such a complex strategy.
1:35:56
I mean, I've been thinking about this for like three
1:35:58
decades maybe, and I still feel extremely unsure even which
1:36:03
direction is kind of up and which is down. I
1:36:07
don't think it would be possible right now to sort
1:36:09
of figure out a detailed, perfect regulatory scheme or system
1:36:14
of laws. There's so many unknowns. I think we need
1:36:17
to sort of watch this closely as it happens, and
1:36:21
be ready to react quickly to issues that come up,
1:36:26
and hope that relevant people are like highly competent and
1:36:30
well motivated and not trying their best. And then on
1:36:34
the margin, maybe we can do things that kind of
1:36:36
are constructive and increases the chances that it will be
1:36:40
for the good. Even when I have some clear insight
1:36:46
as to some overall big directional push, I will let
1:36:50
you know, But even basic questions like, for example, do
1:36:57
we want more government involvement or less involvement. Do we
1:37:01
want faster progress in AI or slower progress in AI?
1:37:09
I don't know. Is not completely obvious to me.
1:37:15
Speaker 1: Well, I think it's eventually going to get to wherever
1:37:17
it's going to get either way, having it slower, I
1:37:22
don't know if that's really going to help us. I
1:37:24
think almost like we have to crash and then we
1:37:26
have to figure out how to rebuild and pick up
1:37:29
the pieces. I don't think we're going to be intelligent
1:37:31
or have enough foresight to recognize where all these flaws
1:37:36
and where all these problems are going to ultimately be.
1:37:40
I think they're just going to have to happen, and
1:37:42
then people are going to have to adjust. That's what
1:37:44
I think.
1:37:45
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I'm not advocating an AI pause by contrasting
1:37:49
a lot of some of my colleagues and friends and stuff,
1:37:52
or I could see that some scenario in which it
1:37:57
would be helpful at some point to have temporary slowdown
1:38:01
of you know, a few months maybe or a half
1:38:03
year or year. Like if you imagine, you know, there
1:38:06
are different companies, countries may be racing to get their
1:38:08
first yeah, and then eventually somebody figures out they basically
1:38:12
have the system in place, they just need to like
1:38:15
amp up, like run it for longer. They can sort
1:38:18
of see that it will become super intellergent. They hope
1:38:21
it's aligned. It might be very helpful in that situation
1:38:24
to have a few extra months just to sort of
1:38:26
double check all your safeguards and rather than immediately cranking
1:38:31
all the knobs up to eleven, like, maybe sort of
1:38:33
do it a little bit incrementally, watch what happens, study it,
1:38:37
then crank it up a little bit more, and I
1:38:39
just think you might gain some extra safety if you
1:38:41
have a few extra months there, Like the pressures on
1:38:44
these people in the lab, that makes if it's all
1:38:46
going to happen over a week, like it's just going
1:38:48
to be this is the first time we ever do
1:38:50
this huturely complex thing. It has to be right. We
1:38:52
never get a second chance. Just being able to like
1:38:55
even just being able to sleep properly for like between
1:38:58
your work sessas and like how having you know, a
1:39:01
weekends two mald things, so like just that kind of
1:39:04
human Humans don't really operate on well on in these
1:39:09
like super short timelines. So I think a short if
1:39:14
you could be sure that the past would in fact
1:39:16
be limited and short and then it would be lifted,
1:39:19
I think that could be quite useful to have at
1:39:22
if it could also be timed to be at the
1:39:25
right moment and well implemented.
1:39:26
Speaker 1: But wouldn't the problem be espionage? First of all?
1:39:29
Speaker 2: That's one one issue with it.
1:39:31
Speaker 1: Yeah, if they realized, if somebody realized, hey, they're about
1:39:34
three days away from this, and then China bribes a
1:39:37
bunch of people, and you know, people take off and
1:39:42
move to.
1:39:42
Speaker 2: Yeah, there are various basis. There are various downsides to passing.
1:39:47
So one one is that like there are competitors who
1:39:50
just even without espionage or catching up anotherre is, it's
1:39:56
not as if the world is safe without AI.
1:40:01
Speaker 1: Right.
1:40:02
Speaker 2: There are other like well, I like the natural hazards.
1:40:05
I think they are very small, like super volcanos and
1:40:07
stuff like that on the relevant time.
1:40:09
Speaker 1: Scales until or not.
1:40:10
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, we've survived for hundreds of thousands of years, right, and.
1:40:14
Speaker 1: We're almost wiped out entirely seventy thousand years ago.
1:40:17
Speaker 2: That's a long time ago, is it?
1:40:19
Speaker 1: Though?
1:40:19
Speaker 2: Well, well, but like if something hasn't done us in
1:40:25
in that long a time, probably it's not going to
1:40:27
do us in within the next ten years.
1:40:28
Speaker 1: Well, you're more optimistic than me.
1:40:30
Speaker 2: Well, it's just based on the actual empirods of these
1:40:33
natural catastrophes. By contrast, I would say there are other
1:40:36
hazards that.
1:40:37
Speaker 1: Are not low.
1:40:39
Speaker 2: I mean, we have rapid advances in synthetic biology, some
1:40:43
some of them driven or enabled maybe even by already AI.
1:40:50
Progress that has already taken place like that can start
1:40:53
to assist with this and more just happening independent, So
1:40:56
you get increasing risks from synthetic boloity. We still have
1:40:59
the nuclear arsenals right kind of existing. We think have
1:41:05
gotten a little bit complacent about the risks of nuclear
1:41:08
war and various other things as well. So I think
1:41:15
there's like a background level of existential risk that humanity
1:41:19
faces in the absence of superintolerance that probably is growing
1:41:22
as well. So you know, one way, so long that
1:41:25
you don't even get a chance to roll the dice
1:41:28
with AI because you destroy yourself before even got I
1:41:32
would kind of be sad. And then then also, I mean,
1:41:38
I think there's like some risk if you set up
1:41:40
a pause infrastructure that what's initially meant to be a
1:41:44
temporary thing becomes permanent. Like they say, there's nothing more
1:41:48
permanent like than a temporary government program. So if you
1:41:51
have to set up the infrastructure to actually control this,
1:41:53
ideally at the global scale, right it's meant to be
1:41:55
for six months, like what happens after six months? Nobody
1:41:59
can prove that the AA will be safe. So you
1:42:02
have all these people now whose job it is to
1:42:05
to regulate it, and like maybe they so it could
1:42:08
it could bomp kind of frozen in and become permanent
1:42:12
and and then also the delay benefits of this. So
1:42:19
if you think, what like sixty five million people die
1:42:22
every year, that's that's a lot of human lives. That's
1:42:30
like one nine eleven every twenty five minutes, just kind
1:42:33
of boom like That's.
1:42:35
Speaker 1: The way I look at it.
1:42:37
Speaker 2: And so there is a certain urges if there is
1:42:39
something that somehow could have a chance to to to
1:42:44
fix this, like all the suffering that is happening in
1:42:47
the world aside from the people dying, like all the
1:42:49
people who are bereaved right to lost their loved one,
1:42:53
and then all the disease that led up to that dying, right,
1:42:57
and then all the non disease related all the horrible poverty,
1:43:01
and like the suicidal depression, and the animals in the
1:43:04
animal factories that they're like spending. There's just like this
1:43:09
I think moral urgency that if there is a hope
1:43:11
that getting AI right could fix this, then you don't
1:43:15
want to wait unnecessarily long because every day it's just
1:43:18
this massive horror. So I think there are many reasons
1:43:22
for why you wouldn't want unnecessary or excessive delays in
1:43:27
developing AI. But but there is a trade off because
1:43:30
if we can make more progress on AI safety and alignment,
1:43:33
and get our act together a little bit before we
1:43:35
take the plunge. Like that's also worth quite a lot.
1:43:40
Speaker 1: It's uh, it's certainly exciting because the possibilities are right
1:43:46
in front of us, and they're kind of endless, and
1:43:49
it seems like they're right in front of us. It
1:43:50
seems like too in my mind, it seems like we're
1:43:52
like twenty four months away from something really insane.
1:43:56
Speaker 2: I think it could be. It could be. It could
1:43:58
be the forty eight months.
1:43:59
Speaker 1: It could be.
1:43:59
Speaker 2: I mean, we don't we're doing yeah.
1:44:01
Speaker 1: Right, it could be. Yeah, who knows. But there's something
1:44:03
happening really quickly, you know. I want to talk to
1:44:06
Elon about Grock. He said, it's it shocks us, like
1:44:10
every couple of weeks that we're like, how is it
1:44:13
doing this? How is it so fast? How is it
1:44:15
advancing so quickly? And one day Cat's going to be
1:44:21
on the back and there's not going to be any
1:44:23
way stop it. Like if the power went out right now,
1:44:26
if there was some sort of a massive solar flare
1:44:28
that killed our power grids and all computer hard drives
1:44:33
got fried and we had to restart from now, like
1:44:38
we would have to rebuild society, right, but if we
1:44:41
get to the point where this thing understands what would
1:44:45
cause that, how to prevent that, how to make sure
1:44:47
that never happens, much better power supply, much better allocation
1:44:52
of resources, much better batteries, much better redundant data systems
1:44:58
where you never have to worry about hard drives crashing,
1:45:03
and you never have to worry about any of these problems,
1:45:05
Like any information you have now will be secure, and
1:45:08
then understanding of natural disasters will actually get drill into
1:45:12
this volcano and it never goes off. Like there's gonna
1:45:14
be a few things that they're going to figure out
1:45:16
through AI that's going to prevent a lot of the
1:45:18
things that are probably wiped out enormous swasipy. I mean,
1:45:21
imagine if we could just actually see asteroids coming, all
1:45:24
of them and know how to divert them instantaneously. We
1:45:29
have a bunch of ideas right now, and how to
1:45:31
do it right, like coding them, Yeah, with something that
1:45:35
changes the aerodynamics of them.
1:45:37
Speaker 2: And I think that one would be relatively easy. Yeah,
1:45:39
even we could figure it out to do that, I think.
1:45:42
Speaker 1: And there's also detonating them there's a bunch of different
1:45:44
crazy ideas. But imagine if AI is like, actually, you
1:45:48
could just do this, you know, and then you put
1:45:50
a shield over the Earth and you never have to
1:45:52
worry about it. Ever, the shield's powered by the sun,
1:45:55
so you have ultimate power and you never have to
1:45:57
worry about being hit by a Manhattan side the asteroid.
1:46:01
Speaker 2: I think the trickier ones might be ones that are
1:46:03
more internal to civilization. If you have some process that's
1:46:11
either like a worldwide process with different humans and corporations
1:46:16
and governments, or like an internal process in the AI.
1:46:19
Like on the one hand, you want to be able
1:46:21
to continue to develop new ideas, new ways of doing things,
1:46:26
so you need to experiment and try new things. But
1:46:28
then there's also the risk of just keep trying new
1:46:32
ideas like that eventually you get stuck on some idea
1:46:35
that actually proves really harmful or dangerous to you, and
1:46:40
that you then sort of derail internally through your own
1:46:44
mimetic or internal evolutionary development. So how to sort of
1:46:51
grow up safely in this world where you have unlocked
1:46:55
all kinds of new technolgical capabilities, even if you're easily
1:46:59
able to protect yourself against external threats like volcanoes and
1:47:02
asteroids and stuff. Right, there might still be processes arising
1:47:07
from within this global civilization, just as that we might
1:47:11
invent new technologies that they are dangerous. We might invent
1:47:15
new like drugs that are super addictive. Once you invent them,
1:47:18
you try them, and then you're addicted you never want
1:47:20
to Yeah, that could be other like some some crazy
1:47:23
ideology that once it takes hold.
1:47:27
Speaker 1: Loge because that that's one of the major fears that
1:47:30
a lot of people have, is that human beings will
1:47:33
develop ideologies based around AI. That there will be like
1:47:37
an AI god that someone develops.
1:47:41
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I mean I think all that's in fact,
1:47:43
I would add that to the list of I mentioned
1:47:45
nuclear and bio terrorist risk as like background existential risks
1:47:52
like another is like some form of insanity, like collective insanity.
1:47:56
I feel are civilizational sandy already is kind of a
1:48:03
little bit precarious. I think we're just kind of maybe
1:48:05
barely holding ourselves together. And it's amazing how well the
1:48:09
world functions, despite how crazy people are and how much
1:48:14
they loath their opponents and so farth and we still
1:48:16
manage to somehow get it to work.
1:48:18
Speaker 1: There's also a manipulation of the zeitgeist that's clearly being
1:48:21
done by bots. So you've got a bunch of people
1:48:25
online that are having arguments on Twitter and they're not
1:48:29
even talking to people. There's a bunch of ideas that
1:48:31
are being pushed out on Twitter and all of these
1:48:34
social media platforms. It's not even human beings tweeting about it.
1:48:38
So it's not there's algorithms, there's AI, there's people that
1:48:42
are hired to do it. There's people that are working
1:48:45
for certain organizations that are hired to muddy up the waters, gaslight,
1:48:50
people create problems, how people argue with each other, and
1:48:54
so it's like if AI recognizes how easy it is
1:48:58
to manipulate people do whatever it wants, that's a fear
1:49:01
as well.
1:49:03
Speaker 2: Yeah, so whenever you change the basic parameters of sort
1:49:07
of the social cultural political discourse, new dynamics will emerge.
1:49:18
And we don't have the kind of social science that
1:49:20
is able to predict what happens if you change some
1:49:23
of these nobs. So we've seen in the past, like
1:49:25
do you invent let's go all the way back? Like
1:49:27
somebody invents writing Okay, so that turns out to have
1:49:31
had a huge effect not just on people writing like
1:49:35
literature and stuff, but like on political systems. You could
1:49:37
now have states that could keep tax records, right, so
1:49:41
you could have larger political units with writing, and then
1:49:44
they can higher standing armies. And now you have like
1:49:48
large scale war. You have social stratification. You could have
1:49:51
like the ruler of a large area could have you know,
1:49:54
enormous wealth, and you could have a soldier cast that
1:49:58
like protects against internal LINEX. So like just the way
1:50:01
that human societies are political organized changes as a result
1:50:05
of this change in the rules of communication, when you
1:50:09
can have written texts, right, and then you have the
1:50:11
printing press. Again, were like one hundred years of religious
1:50:15
wars in Europe Reformation and all of this stuff is
1:50:18
possibly and then like forms of democracy later on also
1:50:22
coming out of this and the scientific revolution. Then you
1:50:27
have like mass media in the last century with like
1:50:29
radio and stuff, and you have kind of demagogues that
1:50:32
take advantage of being able to simultaneously talk to millions
1:50:35
of people because that was never possible before. Right, right,
1:50:38
you could have some charismatic kind of guy who's like
1:50:41
rallies up the whole nation, and then new ideologies become
1:50:45
memetically fit in that situation that might never have if
1:50:48
it were people writing letters to the editor. Like it's
1:50:53
kind of a different type of idea that works there.
1:50:56
Then if you're giving a kind of stump speech that
1:50:58
goes out to millions simultaneously. And now with social media,
1:51:00
of course, we have another one of these, and you
1:51:02
do see that starting to change culture in different ways.
1:51:06
Speaker 1: Yea.
1:51:06
Speaker 2: And now with AI being the next wave of this,
1:51:09
that will also change. You have like bots, you have
1:51:11
new ways of finding information. You have maybe AIS that
1:51:14
can themselves be super persuaders. That will also change, presumably
1:51:19
in some unknowable way, the way that social discourse pans out.
1:51:25
And for any one of these, I guess it could
1:51:27
turn out to be a lot better. We could become
1:51:28
more informed having AI advisors. I think that's fairly likely scenario.
1:51:33
But it's also possible somehow the dynamics shape out in
1:51:35
a different way and we kind of got collectively insane
1:51:38
in some.
1:51:38
Speaker 1: Way, back to the white water raft white.
1:51:42
Speaker 2: To backwater rafts. Yes, and it all becomes kind of totalitarian,
1:51:46
or we sort of fragment into political war and tribes,
1:51:50
or we become kind of completely unhinged. Every one of
1:51:53
us becomes convinced of their own little natty theory that
1:51:56
they then like the AI or feed just turfs them
1:52:00
or material to kind of fuel their conviction. There are
1:52:03
different ways in which this could go badly.
1:52:06
Speaker 1: But but don't you think even if that happens, ultimately
1:52:10
the progress of AI won't stop And so the Again,
1:52:17
I keep going back to this thing, but I think
1:52:19
this is really what it is. Is we have to change,
1:52:21
like what it means to be a person. All those
1:52:24
things are only problems if people stay what we are now,
1:52:27
which is territorial primates with desire to possess material goods
1:52:33
for some strange reason, even though we're a finite life form.
1:52:36
If all that changes, if we change what it means
1:52:39
to be a person, which seems inevitable, Yeah, then it
1:52:43
won't matter. Then if we all like if we if
1:52:47
there's no if we could figure out a way to
1:52:51
literally engineer out all of the issues that humans have
1:52:55
with greed and violence and all the all the different
1:52:57
things that trouble society. If the desire for that is
1:53:01
no longer a part of being a person, which is
1:53:05
that's doable, That's that seems like if we're going to
1:53:08
continue to evolve past you know, australiapithecus to Homo sapi
1:53:13
in twenty twenty six, If that we continue the same
1:53:16
amount of time in the future, well probably won't be
1:53:19
like that anymore. The best versions of people aren't people
1:53:22
that want to steal your house and steal your land
1:53:24
and shoot you and take your resources. That's the best
1:53:27
people are the people that contribute and they're interesting and
1:53:30
they make you excited to be around them and you
1:53:32
like it. If that keeps going on, and if that
1:53:36
is aided by technology, if we recognize that there's actual
1:53:40
patterns of human thinking and behavior that can be changed,
1:53:45
and that if we all agree to subscribe to this algorithm,
1:53:49
to connect to this computer program, connect to this external device,
1:53:54
or maybe not even external, maybe maybe it's internal that
1:53:58
allows us to communicate with the show they're telepathically. Like,
1:54:01
all that, all that changes, and then it doesn't matter.
1:54:06
It doesn't matter if there's any guard rails for AI
1:54:08
or not, because we're not the same thing anymore. Like
1:54:10
all the problems, the worry that we have about AI,
1:54:13
the worry we have about power manipulation and the ability
1:54:17
to influence people. All that kind of goes away if
1:54:21
people don't behave the way they behave currently.
1:54:25
Speaker 2: Well, I guess here's one difference with your like whitewater
1:54:31
rafting metaphor. That so the one in that metaphor, it's
1:54:34
kind of we need to hang on, Like there's a
1:54:37
risk we could smash ourselves on the rock. But if
1:54:39
we don't do that, then there's kind of one way
1:54:41
we end up right downstream.
1:54:42
Speaker 1: We get up in a nice lake.
1:54:44
Speaker 2: Yeah, But I think in reality, what might also be
1:54:48
the case that in addition to trying to not smash
1:54:50
ourselves on the rock, that might be places where the
1:54:54
choices we make affect the ultimate destination.
1:54:58
Speaker 1: Right, go lefter go right? Yeah?
1:55:00
Speaker 2: Or which but maybe maybe a more yeah moment and
1:55:05
where like if you stare in one direction, you might
1:55:08
end up in one place ultimately in some sort of
1:55:11
strange post human world. And maybe it's really beautiful and
1:55:14
people have the chance to grow into their true self
1:55:16
and we love each other and are creative and take
1:55:19
initiatives and go a different way. Maybe you have a
1:55:22
pipe paperclip maximizing ai R and maybe that just everything
1:55:25
is paper clips. So going a third way, maybe you
1:55:27
have like a totalitarian system with like a small elite
1:55:32
on top and everybody else or just yeah, and there
1:55:37
are many more possibilities and maybe some that kind of
1:55:40
we would think would look kind of good if we
1:55:43
chose now, but then in reality they have some hidden
1:55:46
flaw that we didn't think of, So if we chose those,
1:55:48
it would sort of be a mistake. And then maybe
1:55:51
others that don't look at appealing to us knife if
1:55:53
you just presented them in a brochure to you like,
1:55:56
but then actually, if you thought hard about it, maybe
1:55:58
you would realize that actually would be a really nice
1:56:00
place to live. Because like in the current world, there
1:56:04
there are places that are nice to visit, that are interesting,
1:56:06
but then those are not necessarily the same places we
1:56:09
would want to live and raise a kid. Right, so
1:56:12
there are like novels and movies that are really fun
1:56:14
to watch, but you wouldn't want to live in those worlds.
1:56:17
So there's a difference between the kind of what makes
1:56:19
for the good interesting story and the place we actually
1:56:21
want to spend the rest of your life. And so
1:56:24
I think that would be possibly a lot of opportunities
1:56:26
to make foolish choices or unwise choices or conflicts that
1:56:32
sort of thwarts the process and makes it end up
1:56:35
not just that we go extinct before we reach them,
1:56:38
but that the the area that we reach might depend
1:56:40
on the level of wisdom and kindness that we have
1:56:43
during the process.
1:56:44
Speaker 1: And there's always undertended consequences with every solution that we
1:56:47
try to find for any problem that we have, there's
1:56:50
always some new thing that comes up. We're like, oh,
1:56:52
we didn't see that coming. I mean, certainly whenever we're
1:56:55
dealing with nature, like whenever they've brought an invasive species
1:56:59
to handle other invasive species, it always a giant disaster,
1:57:04
you know. Yeah, always, there's always unintended consequences, like, oh,
1:57:09
now you have one hundred million frogs. Who's telling us
1:57:12
about that? Was it Ali Sadik that was telling us
1:57:14
about the frogs? Who about they brought in? What did
1:57:20
they bring in? Forget what the invasive species was? When
1:57:24
they brought in this one species to kill another species
1:57:29
and the problem they didn't realize that that species had
1:57:31
been controlled. It was like coyotes or I don't forget
1:57:34
it was it was guam. What did they get rid of?
1:57:40
Whatever it was they got rid of this thing that
1:57:42
had been killing the frogs, So then they had toads, right,
1:57:47
was it toads? So they had millions of these things
1:57:50
that were like all over the highway, so you drive
1:57:52
on them, you just squash them everywhere you go because
1:57:54
there was nothing controlling the population of these things anymore.
1:57:57
It's like unintended consequences of you know, because we're we're
1:58:02
very short sighted and even in our ability to be
1:58:08
contemplative about what the possibility of the future is when
1:58:10
you're dealing with such an open ended thing like AI
1:58:14
super general intelligence that can maybe make better versions of itself, Like,
1:58:19
who the hell knows what that means? Are we making
1:58:21
a god? Because it seems like if it keeps going
1:58:24
and that if it makes better versions of itself, it's
1:58:26
ultimately going to get to the point where it could
1:58:28
do anything, which is exactly what a god is. It
1:58:30
can make universes. You know what if the ultimate end
1:58:34
of this is a big bank button that's some scientist invents.
1:58:40
Speaker 2: Yeah, so we are a little bit like, yeah, it's
1:58:43
I don't know the different analogies fond might reach for,
1:58:46
but I mean I guess like like say, are on
1:58:50
a plane and then like the pilot has passed out
1:58:53
or had a heart attack or something. And now it's
1:58:55
like we passengers somehow have to I don't know, figure
1:58:59
out how to do the uh run the controls. We're
1:59:03
not really I mean, you have to still try to
1:59:05
make your best right. But then add to that that
1:59:07
all the passengers are fighting amongst each other. Each one
1:59:10
thinks they are the guy who should control the the
1:59:12
like they all convinced that they are the superior person
1:59:17
to try to land the plane. So in addition to
1:59:20
trying to figure out how the controls work, they are
1:59:22
like actually having a big fist fight in the cockpit
1:59:24
as well. And somebody is like dragging somebody else away,
1:59:27
And there's like the kind of monkey tribe that is
1:59:30
the current state of the world here, and we're trying
1:59:32
to shepherd like this ship of humanity into utopia. It's yeah,
1:59:40
it's yeah, it's it's an interesting.
1:59:43
Speaker 1: It's doctor Strangelove on steroids.
1:59:45
Speaker 2: But but that's it. We might only have to like
1:59:49
get it, so at some point we would should be
1:59:52
able to hand over like the reins, like once you
1:59:57
have a sufficiently good AI like maybe get assistance from
2:00:01
that point on.
2:00:02
Speaker 1: I think it's the first thing that it's going to
2:00:05
take over as government. He's going to realize how unbelievably
2:00:09
inefficient the government is doing almost everything, and how much
2:00:14
how much of the money that gets allocated is fraud
2:00:17
and waste. If you allow AI to sort through that
2:00:20
and develop much more efficient pathways to controlling and any.
2:00:26
Speaker 2: Resources, people would not want to see that exactly.
2:00:29
Speaker 1: That's gonna be a problem. But if we get to
2:00:32
the point where there's some sort of some sort of
2:00:36
a hive mind possibility, some sort of I mean, one
2:00:40
of the things that Elon said that I thought was
2:00:43
really fascinating, he said, you're going to be able to
2:00:44
talk without words. Well, if we're able to talk without words, like,
2:00:49
does that eventually get to the point where we could
2:00:51
read minds? Could we is is thought? And is communication
2:00:57
no longer verbal? It's no longer sounds? So right now
2:01:00
we associate sounds that I'm making where you know, what
2:01:04
words I'm using, what I'm reverencing, and we get a
2:01:06
certain understanding of what each other is trying to say.
2:01:09
But what if that's just clunky and that's silly, And
2:01:13
what if instead of a scroll that you leave in
2:01:17
a cave somewhere now you have a movie that you
2:01:20
can watch like something much more engrossing and much more,
2:01:24
much more powerful, and that this is what human communication becomes,
2:01:30
it doesn't it, And maybe this is why the Grays
2:01:32
don't have mouths. We move away from sounds because right
2:01:36
now what we figured out is like sort of like
2:01:38
a duct tape. We're communicating. We kind of patched it up,
2:01:43
we figured out something. We're just gonna use noises we make. Well,
2:01:47
we have different noises here than the people that live
2:01:49
on this island. They have totally different noises. I don't
2:01:51
know what the fuck they're saying. And then you have
2:01:52
people on the other side of the world totally different noises.
2:01:55
So Tower of Babbel type situation right where we really
2:01:58
can't communicate with each other unless we have translators. But
2:02:02
if we get to the point where that's not how
2:02:04
humans communicate. We communicate purely through thought and intention and understanding,
2:02:10
and that it's no longer based on language, It's no
2:02:13
longer based on this is a transistor, this is a
2:02:17
coffee mug. Instead, it's a complete understanding of each individual
2:02:22
thing that we're discussing everything. You know what it is,
2:02:25
you understand what it is without it having to have
2:02:28
a noise associated with it.
2:02:30
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I guess the cyber security implications are
2:02:34
significant if you are giving direct access to other people
2:02:37
to transmit signals to your brain in a high bandwidth
2:02:41
way that is not just words kind of that it's
2:02:46
almost like you heard them even though there's no sound
2:02:48
in your air. But if it's like actually directly kind
2:02:50
of interfacing in a high bandwid way with your network.
2:02:54
Speaker 1: Also encryptions out the window if we no longer have encryption,
2:02:59
if we get to the point where because if computing
2:03:03
gets to the point where the bottleneck is like, think
2:03:07
about money, right, what is money right now? Money is
2:03:10
all ones and zero somewhere potentially right, it's all bank accounts.
2:03:14
It's it's like we're not on a gold standard anymore.
2:03:17
So what if that bottleneck it's it's an information bottleneck,
2:03:21
like someone's preventing you from go into going into these
2:03:26
places and getting these ones and zeros and transferring it
2:03:28
to your place. But what if that is all? If
2:03:32
what if computing power gets to the point where AI
2:03:34
gets to the point where that those boundaries are nonsense.
2:03:37
Now all all encryption is instantaneously decoded.
2:03:42
Speaker 2: I think probably cryptography is defense dominant in the limit.
2:03:50
I think like if you imagine mature technology, I think
2:03:54
it would be possible to encrypt. I mean, if nothing else,
2:03:57
you could use like a one time pad, which wouldn't
2:04:00
able you to encrypt things in a way that is unbreakable.
2:04:04
Speaker 1: Really, I feel like that's going to be a bottleneck.
2:04:08
And I think once we start reading each other's minds,
2:04:11
that might be the first thing to go. Well, it'll
2:04:13
be like the ultimate socially.
2:04:14
Speaker 2: Now that's where you read it. Probably would want encryption,
2:04:16
right if you're going to transmit thoughts to me, Oh, yeah,
2:04:19
like you don't want you don't want to sort of
2:04:20
have it.
2:04:21
Speaker 1: Oh you don't want some asshole constantly in your head.
2:04:23
You're next door neighbor just poking you and prodding you,
2:04:27
but you was. You would hope that along with this
2:04:30
technology becomes like a general state of enlightenment that the
2:04:34
human beings achieve where that's no longer the kind.
2:04:37
Speaker 2: Of behavior that we indulge in, the which behavior do
2:04:41
we know they're annoying each other, annoying getting each other,
2:04:43
stealing each other's money, that kind of stuff. Well, but
2:04:46
then yeah, I guess we go back to this question
2:04:48
of the utopian condition, like if you and I it so,
2:04:53
there are a lot of things that individually are bad,
2:04:57
like lying, stealing, cheating, greed, excessive pride, like all kinds
2:05:02
of disease, stubbing your knees bad, like, Yet if you
2:05:08
sort of imagine removing all of those things, then that
2:05:11
changes to human condition quite profoundly, and to some people
2:05:15
would feel kind of maybe are a pair flavorless or
2:05:18
sort of if there is no tension, no conflict, no
2:05:25
no bruce ego, no like. But it might still be good,
2:05:28
but it does force us to sort of I think
2:05:31
it would be a rather fundamentally different thing that we
2:05:33
would be metamorphosing into if we went all the way
2:05:36
in that direction, which ultimately might be right, but it
2:05:40
would require us to kind of find new ways of
2:05:43
realizing whatever values are imperfectly realized in the current world
2:05:47
through conflict and competition and pain. Like some people get
2:05:51
the motivation from painful failure, and so if you get
2:05:54
rid of the pain from failure, then you'd need some
2:05:57
other motivation, like some other that drives on which there
2:06:01
could be like maybe it's just a love of achievement,
2:06:03
then you feel kind of neutral or just less happy
2:06:06
when you fail, but you would still need something that
2:06:08
kind of preserves whatever structure it is that we think
2:06:12
is valuable in the current human condition unless you go
2:06:15
all the way to sort of radical hedonism and think
2:06:18
the future is best if we were all just kind
2:06:20
of floating in some kind of drug induced euphoria as
2:06:25
blobs that experienced immense pleasure, but i'd no real texture
2:06:30
in our experiences, didn't engage in activities, and they didn't
2:06:35
interact with each other. Like there's like a philosophical view
2:06:38
where ultimately pleasure is the only thing that matters and
2:06:40
the minimization of suffering. So if that's your axiology, then
2:06:44
it's relatively easy to see then how a technogical maturity
2:06:48
you would achieve a sort of optimal state. But if
2:06:51
you have a more complex value system where maybe pleasure
2:06:55
is one good thing, maybe really important, but there are
2:06:57
also other things like appreciating beauty in true friendship, courage, achievement,
2:07:03
and ideally you'd want the future that includes all of
2:07:06
these things, then you need to do a little bit
2:07:08
more sort of design work to figure out the way
2:07:11
to combine them all. In a meaningful way.
2:07:14
Speaker 1: But this all comes back to our idea of human meaning,
2:07:17
what's important to humans, our finite, one hundred year lifespan
2:07:22
adoption of this concept of meaning. But the black hole
2:07:25
doesn't give a shit about human meaning, and it's going
2:07:28
to be around a lot longer than us, and it's
2:07:31
got a lot more power than us, and it's doing
2:07:33
a lot more change than us. We want to think
2:07:36
that we are more important than black holes.
2:07:39
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, because we are. I think we are.
2:07:42
I mean to us, Yeah, to us.
2:07:45
Speaker 1: But to the universe. Is it is human meaning that
2:07:47
important to the universe or is it just sort of
2:07:49
a placeholder for what will ultimately become?
2:07:53
Speaker 2: Is it?
2:07:53
Speaker 1: Is it motivate us to continue to progress? Well?
2:07:59
Speaker 2: So I think, like at technolgical maturity, there are certainly
2:08:02
forms of purpose that you could have. You could have
2:08:04
an artificial purpose. So this is when you basically set
2:08:08
yourself a goal for the sake of having the goal
2:08:11
and then doing the activity that. So you know, maybe
2:08:15
you set yourself the goal I'm going to get this
2:08:17
little white ball into a sequence of eighteen holes. And
2:08:22
not only that, but in order to achieve this goal,
2:08:25
it's part of the goal that I'm only ase allowed
2:08:27
to use this very inconvenient method. I can hit the
2:08:30
ball with the club, right, I can't much easier to
2:08:32
just pick it up and put it in each hole successively,
2:08:36
but that doesn't count as being successful. So you could
2:08:39
make up this goal pretty arbitrary. Now, once you have
2:08:44
that goal, then you now have reason to try hard
2:08:47
to concentrate to perfect your swing, and you can play golf.
2:08:50
So the goal enables you to do this activity of
2:08:53
golf playing, which maybe you find fun or worthwhile or meaningful.
2:08:58
Speaker 1: And the goal, it's what you saw me is because
2:09:00
it's difficult to do.
2:09:02
Speaker 2: Yeah, And so the future would consist I think if
2:09:08
we succeed in a lot of game playing, and you
2:09:11
could certainly have these artificial purposes that you set yourself,
2:09:14
these goals that then give you a reason to engage
2:09:16
in any activity.
2:09:17
Speaker 1: Now we're back in the world of Half Life. Now
2:09:21
we're back in a video game. Now we're also in
2:09:23
the simulation. This is going to be your artificial goal.
2:09:27
Speaker 2: And you could imagine I think maybe we shouldn't think
2:09:30
of video games here, but it could be much like
2:09:33
games we can't give animated. It could be like society
2:09:35
wide games that last for twenty years, that involve all
2:09:39
kinds of multimodal things, and little groups that work together
2:09:43
to like come up with new ways of creatively and
2:09:47
so in that broad sense of kind of things we
2:09:51
do for their own sake, I think game playing could be.
2:09:54
And it's like a lot of what children do that
2:09:56
kind of curiosity and spend a lot of the time
2:09:58
playing games, and we might all be like kids. Again,
2:10:00
what might be in shorter supply is sort of natural
2:10:04
purpose like purposes which we don't just arbitrarily make up
2:10:11
in order to have a purpose, but that are sort
2:10:12
of given toss. So right now in the world, you
2:10:16
might say, you know, making a living is not just
2:10:20
an arbitrary purpose, because there are real consequences if you fail,
2:10:24
Like maybe eventually you get kicked out from your flat
2:10:27
and then you know it's really cold and you get
2:10:30
rained on, and like horrible things happen. So like similarly,
2:10:34
if you like don't brush your teeth, eventually you will
2:10:37
have tooth decay and there will be real consequences. So
2:10:40
these there are various things that you have reason to
2:10:43
do because there are real negative consequences if you fail.
2:10:46
To do them, and a lot of our lives is
2:10:47
structured by these natural purposes. At a societal level, there's
2:10:51
a whole bunch of things we need to do together.
2:10:53
Right in this future world, maybe there would be many
2:10:56
fewer of those natural purposes because for any one of them,
2:10:59
you could just add the AI to sort it out,
2:11:02
and so the artificial purposes would be a larger chunk.
2:11:04
And it's interesting to think, are there any natural purposes
2:11:07
that would survive to technolgical maturity, like anythings that we
2:11:11
still have sort of instrumental reasons that we need to
2:11:14
do ourselves. And I think that might be a few,
2:11:19
but they are more subtle that might not strike us
2:11:21
currently as very important. But it's one of those things
2:11:27
where like you know that during the day, if you're outside,
2:11:32
you can't see the stars, right, it's not because they're
2:11:35
not there, like it's because like there's so much light
2:11:38
that they are sort of blotted out. But at night,
2:11:44
when the stronger light from the sun is absent, you
2:11:46
can see these finter lights. I think similarly in this
2:11:50
future that might be once the sort of urgent, screaming
2:11:53
moral values of immediately pressing practical concern go away, you
2:11:57
might be able to perceive a whole constellation of these
2:11:59
more subtle values that we are blind to currently. So
2:12:03
take the value of take the value of like I
2:12:05
don't know, like some like honoring your forebears. So right now,
2:12:10
it doesn't seem I mean, maybe it's nice sometimes to
2:12:12
remember your past parents or some historical hero who did
2:12:18
something good that benefacted humanity, right, but it's like not
2:12:21
the main thing that you're Like, maybe that would be
2:12:24
a bigger thing if that was nothing else you needed
2:12:26
to do, maybe you could actually spend serious time or
2:12:30
spiritual quests. Like even for people who are very religious,
2:12:33
a lot of their actual waking hours are spent on
2:12:37
random other things, doing their laundry, right, like driving to work,
2:12:40
like the old kinds of stuff. Like if all of
2:12:42
that was automated, you could imagine spending more time on
2:12:46
trying to align yourself, orient yourself to this higher being
2:12:51
and trying to be in communication with them, Like maybe
2:12:54
esthetic values, like there are may be some things that
2:12:57
would just be kind of nice and cool if if
2:13:00
the world were like that. We don't really have time
2:13:02
to worry so much about them now, but if there
2:13:03
was nothing else on the agenda, like coming together in
2:13:08
a way that upholds some tradition in a beautiful, original
2:13:11
way that still is true to the original spirit, together
2:13:15
with other people, and enacting some ceremony. Like maybe those
2:13:17
things would start to feel more of our time in
2:13:21
conjunction with this game playing, and there might be many
2:13:25
other of these kind of subtler values that would start
2:13:29
to shape what people were doing.
2:13:33
Speaker 1: Yeah, and ultimately, who knows. Yes, it's very interesting, and
2:13:41
it's very open ended, and we really don't know what's
2:13:44
going to happen, but we're probably going to see it.
2:13:46
We're probably going to see the strangest thing that humans
2:13:50
have ever had a possibility to experience.
2:13:53
Speaker 2: Yeah, and in the end, I guess it's trustful.
2:13:56
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, I mean these conversations are always fascinating, and
2:14:02
who knows. Let's let's do another one in a few
2:14:04
years and see how off we are. If you if
2:14:07
come back in four years. All right, let's have four years.
2:14:11
If we have four years, if you can, if you're
2:14:13
allowed to travel in four years, come back and let's
2:14:15
see how wrong we.
2:14:16
Speaker 2: Were we can updates.
2:14:19
Speaker 1: Well, thank you very much. I really appreciate you coming
2:14:21
in here. It's great to see you again. It's always fun, okay,
2:14:25
all right, think about the kids, by everybody.