Latest / INSPIRE STORY / #079 _STORY INSPIRE: Decisions that transforman with Nick Bostrom

Transcript

#079 _STORY INSPIRE: Decisions that transforman with Nick Bostrom · INSPIRE STORY

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: The Joe Rogan Experience.
• 0:06
  Speaker 2: Train by day, Joe.
• 0:07
  Speaker 3: Rogan podcast by night, all day.
• 0:09
  Speaker 2: It's great to see you again.
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: Yeah, good to see you.
• 0:16
  Speaker 2: So since the last time we talked, we spent a
• 0:19
  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 1: Yeah, it was, what, five years ago or something?
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  Speaker 2: I think it was six. Five or six, somewhere along
• 0:36
  those lines.
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  Speaker 1: I mean, a lot of things happened in the world
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  since then.
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  Speaker 2: Yes, yes, a lot of things. I mean, for example,
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  back then, I think we, did we even talk about AI?
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  Speaker 1: It probably came up a bit, but.
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  Speaker 2: It wasn't this thing looming over civilization, which is really
• 0:55
  kind of fascinating when you think about the fact that
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  it's only been six years, and in six years, like,
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  what a massive jump And some new technology in our life,
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  like just sort of like the internet where it like
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  crept up on us. We just accepted that it's a thing,
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  but that the, this, this thing has gotten massively entangled
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  in every aspect of society and every aspect of people's
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  lives in a very short period of time.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, things are like so much is happening
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  now that is kind of a full time job just
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  to monitor the situation. Yeah.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah. And one of the things that you're talking about
• 1:36
  is the positive aspects of it, right? You're talking about
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  like that this is probably going to be a net
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  good for humanity.
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  Speaker 1: Hopefully. I mean I think I take both cases seriously,
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  the sort of the risk side and the big unlock
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  if we get things right.
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  Speaker 2: I feel like we have the potential, like we're on
• 1:59
  a whitewater raft, we have the potential to get to
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  our destination. But we also have the potential to flip
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  over and try to figure out how to get to
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  shore in freezing cold water and sort of rebuild.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That seems about right. Yeah, and it
• 2:15
  seems like it's kind of speeding up a bit as well, right?
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  If you're sort of in this field, there's like every
• 2:22
  few weeks there's a new model being released or something, right?
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  Speaker 2: Yes.
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  Speaker 1: I guess it's like if you imagine, I guess, commentating
• 2:29
  some fight, right? That's been recorded and you're supposed to
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  do the voiceover. And the first round is like normal speed.
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  And then the second round is 2X. And then the
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  third round 4X. And it's just like a whir of
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  legs and arms.
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  Speaker 2: That's a great way to describe it.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah.
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  Speaker 2: It's just so strange how quickly it snuck up on
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  us in that there's two narratives that we hear. The
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  one narrative is we're in real trouble. And that this
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  thing is going to take over every aspect of society
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  and it's essentially going to be a superior life force,
• 3:02
  a superior intellect that exists amongst us that we created
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  and we don't think that's wise. And then there's the
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  other side that is saying things like what Elon says
• 3:12
  where he's saying we're going to have universal high income.
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  It's going to be so much prosperity that no one
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  is ever going to have to toil again. There will
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  be no more third world countries. There will be no
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  more– No more poverty. Like we can eradicate poverty with
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  the resources that we have on earth and we can
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  change what it means to have to work. Like just
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  to provide yourself with food and housing. That's all going
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  to be easy and free. And then everything else is
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  going to be you have to find a purpose in
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  your life. My problem is– and I love Elon. But
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  the people who have that perspective are all making money
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  off AI. They are all invested like heavily, Marc Andreessen.
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  All these people that have this rosy view of it,
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  they're all invested heavily into it. So when someone like you,
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  who's not necessarily in that camp, you know, that is
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  more of a true objective analyst of what's going on,
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  when you have a positive aspect or a positive viewpoint
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  of it, I get a little more excited.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I mean, the truth is we don't know, right,
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  how it will pan out. So, I mean... I think
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  there are these scenarios where we unlock this enormous boost,
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  both to economic productivity, but then across medicine, entertainment, environment, travel,
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  all kinds of things. And like a tsunami of wealth
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  just kind of flows through and lifts all boats. And
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  then the idea of human work becomes an anachronism and
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  where you have machines that can do everything that we
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  can do physically and mentally, and do it much better
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  and cheaper. And so I think in those scenarios where
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  this really works, the transformation is a lot deeper. I mean,
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  so that kind of layers to the onion. So, like,
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  the most superficial level is, well, they automate your job,
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  so what are people going to do? What are they
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  going to do for purpose? Well, that comes a little
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  bit deeper. First, like, the most superficial level is people
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  just wonder, where will I get the job if the
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  robot replaces me? And then the superficial level of that conversation,
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  I think, is, well, you need to retrain workers so
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  they can work in other fields. And maybe there needs
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  to be, I don't know, employment insurance whilst they are
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  being retrained or something like that. But once you think
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  through where this ultimately leads, you think, like, it's not
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  just a few jobs, I think, but it's really everything
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  that humans can do to a good approximation. With maybe
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  the exception being where the consumer has a direct preference
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  that the particular... product or service be done by human
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  like priest prostitute and politician um those might survive.
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  Speaker 2: Well politician hopefully not hopefully ai can handle that all
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  without any corruption.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah but somebody's gonna take credit for.
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  Speaker 2: It this is true and code it yeah it's um.
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  Speaker 1: Um And so then you get to these more profound questions,
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  I think, about meaning and purpose and what does a
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  human life look like at technological maturity. Right.
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  Speaker 2: Also, what is experience? Does experience have to be measurable?
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  Do you have to touch it? Do you have to
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  measure it and weigh it? Or is virtual experience still experience?
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  Like if you have a very full and enjoyable and
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  fulfilling virtual life Is that enough? You know what I mean?
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  Do you have to do everything in the material world
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  or can you find happiness in a virtual world that
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  doesn't currently exist but we could clearly see the technology
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  if it expands? There's going to be the possibility of
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  experiencing a matrix-type reality.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, I think I see where you're going. But, yeah,
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  I mean, I think, like, different strokes for different folks.
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  If you imagine a world where presumably these virtual worlds
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  will be very rich and deep and fascinating, but some
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  people might just like the idea of, you know, climbing
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  the real Mount Everest rather than, you know, being in it.
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  Speaker 2: Most certainly. But, however, there could come a time where
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  people are locked out of regular reality. Like, this is
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  worst-case scenario with A.I., is that you have your needs
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  taken care of, but there is no purpose. There's nothing
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  to do. There's nothing to do because AI is taking
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  care of all aspects of society. Other than recreation, there's
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  nothing to do. And then this one recreation comes along
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  that's not reality, but it's way more fulfilling and exciting
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  than any other aspect of reality. And an example of
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  that would just be in a very minor way, Your
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  phone provides you with that sort of an escape and
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  it's not even that thrilling and yet it's massively addictive.
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  People are on their phones six hours a day. If
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  we come up with a virtual reality that's way more
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  exciting than regular reality, everyone is going to hop on in.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean I think to some extent this will–
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  Maybe be the case whether you go the virtual path
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  or the physical path. I mean you could imagine a
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  future where there are like resorts and people are sort
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  of lying in beach chairs, sipping drinks all day long.
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  And like that's also a kind of checking out, right?
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  Speaker 2: Yeah. That's not fulfilling. The thing about a virtual reality
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  is you don't have to even live within our physics, right?
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  I mean, you can fly. You can do anything.
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  Speaker 1: It's a larger space of possibilities. But either way, it
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  could be like a passive existence in physical reality where you're, like,
• 8:59
  launching at the beach.
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  Speaker 2: Or it could be like a video game.
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  Speaker 1: Or in video games, like, you could have, like, really intense,
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  every straining, every fiber to try to succeed in this
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  virtual environment. Or, like, one where you're just kind of
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  floating on some cloud in a drug-like state.
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  Speaker 2: But I don't think people are going to be interested
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  in that because just the way the human mind works.
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  like what kind of video games are people attracted to?
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  It's because a video game is essentially a proxy. It's
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  an approximation of that. You're just watching it on a screen,
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  but you're sort of forgetting the fact that you're watching
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  it on a screen. You're just concentrating on this 3d
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  reality that you're running through with a machine gun or
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  whatever you're doing. Right. That's what people are interested in.
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  They're not interested in these games. We just like float
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  over the earth and like fly and, and, and just
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  eat bananas. No, they're, they're interested in thrilling things. And if,
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  That gets provided in a virtual way. The amount of
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  people that are going to just say this is better
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  than regular boring life or we're a slave to a computer.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean there are both kinds.
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  Speaker 2: OK. We're back. Where were we? Oh, yeah.
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  Speaker 1: I was just saying that there are also these computer
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  games that like provide a more passive experience.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah.
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  Speaker 1: Like not really doing much and it's more kind of
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  zoning out.
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  Speaker 2: But most people aren't interested in those. Most people are
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  interested in Call of Duty. They're interested in these wild
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  first-person shooters where you're running down hallways and everything is
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  exciting and thrilling. Some sci-fi game or, you know, Half-Life,
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  something like that. That's what people are interested in.
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  Speaker 1: Well, I mean I think there are like some personality
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  differences in what path you would take there. But either way,
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  I think a lot of the choices that people would
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  make currently depend on what they are sort of– designed
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  to respond to by feeling good about it. So, like,
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  if you enjoy one thing, you choose that. If you
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  enjoy another, no. In this condition of technological maturity, if
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  we imagine sort of a future civilization that has developed
• 10:59
  all possible technologies to their maximum, then amongst the affordances,
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  amongst the things they could do is, like, they wouldn't
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  just have control over the external environment, things around them,
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  but also their own biology and brains so if you
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  were one of these people and like maybe right now
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  the only way you get enjoyment is by you know
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  getting like crazy drunk or doing sort of things you
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  don't really approve of maybe but that's that's actually what
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  sort of lights your fire like you could imagine redesigning
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  yourself to take the same kind of pleasure but in
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  some kind of contemplating the beauty of the universe or
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  like appreciating the goodness in the heart of others or
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  like some more sort of noble aspiration, like solving abstract
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  mathematics rather than, you know, playing first-person shooters. You would
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  have a choice, like whether you would get your thrills
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  from one kind of activity or the other.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, which brings us to the question, like, what does
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  it mean to be human? Like for people finding beauty
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  and joy in, you know, interesting and fascinating things and,
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  how to be a better person and all the different
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  aspects of human life that we think about when we
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  think about people, when we think about noble aspects of humanity.
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  But doesn't that have to exist in conjunction with the
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  worst aspects of society for us to appreciate it? It
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  seems like this is a part of the human condition
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  is that we have to have crime so that we
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  can appreciate peace. We have to have war so we
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  can appreciate peace. We have to have hate so we
• 12:38
  could appreciate love and we're never without one or the other.
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  They're always both together in constant conflict and we're always
• 12:45
  nobly hoping that the good wins out over the bad
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  and this is part of the struggle of being a
• 12:52
  human being. If we just completely eliminate that struggle, we're
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  going to have to find some– we're going to have
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  to be a different thing because what we are is
• 13:02
  this very strange territorial primate. and who's endlessly curious and
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  this territorial primate is moving in a certain direction and
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  that direction seems to be a better society. It seems
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  to be over time. If you look at statistics from
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  thousands of years ago to today, there's less violence, there's
• 13:24
  better medicine, there's better education. It's moving in a better
• 13:27
  and better and better direction. But it's in a struggle.
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  That's part of why it moves. If all of a
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  sudden there's no struggle and everyone is this wonderful, enlightened being,
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  like what are we? Because we're going to be a
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  different thing than what we are right now. And if
• 13:42
  you love music and if you love art and if
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  you love novels and all these different things that come
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  out of the human condition, those things come out of struggle.
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  Those things come out of confusion and pain and heartbreak
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  and love and joy and all that stuff all piled
• 14:00
  up together. Without that, like what are we? And so
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  if we are moving in this direction technologically and we're
• 14:08
  not moving as fast biologically, do we merge? Because that
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  seems to be what I think. I think that if
• 14:17
  this thing goes the way it continues to go, the
• 14:21
  bottleneck is going to be human biology. Yeah, yeah.
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  Speaker 1: There is a kind of paradox embedded in 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 so you can serve customers better.
• 14:42
  And all of this is designed to solve problems, right? Like,
• 14:47
  if you sort of extrapolate that to its logical endpoint, right,
• 14:52
  you would imagine we would have perfect technology that can
• 14:55
  do everything, solve all the problems, like, presumably with AI
• 14:58
  and automation.
• 14:59
  Speaker 2: Right.
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  Speaker 1: But then you end up in this condition where there
• 15:02
  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
• 15:13
  to many people, it will look kind of unpalatable and
• 15:17
  like this kind of future where all the problems are solved.
• 15:20
  And nevertheless, that does seem to be the direction that
• 15:26
  we are headed in, probably the direction that we should
• 15:29
  be headed in.
• 15:29
  Speaker 2: 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 syncing and harmony?
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 15:48
  Speaker 2: That would be way better. I think so.
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: But it does– Like if you actually stare at that situation,
• 15:55
  it does have these slightly unpalatable qualities because you might
• 16:00
  think it looks kind of bland, right?
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  Speaker 2: Not necessarily though. It's just it looks bland if you
• 16:06
  think about what we're experiencing now, like all the excitement
• 16:10
  and the weirdness of uncertainty and of not knowing– and
• 16:15
  also the negative aspects of our life in conjunction with
• 16:18
  the positive aspects of our lives. So we contrast the
• 16:21
  two of them and you– really appreciate good people after
• 16:23
  around a bunch of fucking assholes. You know, if that doesn't,
• 16:27
  but it doesn't have to be that way. This is
• 16:29
  just what we are dealing with. This is my position
• 16:31
  on work too. Cause everybody in their head is like,
• 16:35
  what happens when AI takes all the jobs? And I'm like,
• 16:39
  do we have to have a fucking job? Isn't that
• 16:42
  a human invention? Like, why do you have to have
• 16:45
  a job? It seems crazy that our main focus is
• 16:49
  on housing and food production. And like most people are
• 16:53
  basically just working for that. Most people that are struggling
• 16:58
  check 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?
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I think so. Like, yeah, there will be some
• 17:12
  transition and discomfort and change.
• 17:15
  Speaker 2: But this is made up.
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: Ultimately, that is like, yeah. I mean, I think it's like,
• 17:18
  so slavery is really bad, right? Like, But wage labor
• 17:21
  is a sort of slavery light in a sense. You
• 17:24
  have to sell a third of your waking day just
• 17:28
  to get money to pay for necessities.
• 17:30
  Speaker 2: 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 a responsibility. And these people need to make
• 17:52
  more money every quarter.
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: Yeah, although sometimes you do need to compete for talent.
• 17:56
  Speaker 2: That's true too. But only the top talent. That's why
• 18:00
  the CEOs get all the bread and all the people
• 18:01
  on the assembly line get fucked.
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: Some employees get treated well, right? What would you say?
• 18:05
  Speaker 2: Jamie is a different kind of employee. Jamie is literally
• 18:09
  the– I mean he's the– co-person on this show. That's different.
• 18:14
  But some dude who's out there stocking boxes for Amazon,
• 18:19
  that's different than being the CEO.
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: I think ultimately that would be a huge liberation and
• 18:25
  kind of restore dignity. You should be in control of
• 18:28
  your own time. It's kind of almost the most... Aside
• 18:32
  from your own body, your own time, your own attention.
• 18:34
  We have to.
• 18:35
  Speaker 2: Teach people discipline. That's the thing. If you give people
• 18:38
  the opportunity to just do nothing, we... We do. We're primates.
• 18:43
  We'll find a way to– we're genetically sort of designed
• 18:48
  to conserve resources. You don't want to overuse resources for
• 18:51
  no reason and do a bunch of shit because you
• 18:52
  won't survive. You don't have enough food. So we're sort
• 18:55
  of designed to like know how to be lazy. And
• 18:58
  so we're going to have to find things that give
• 19:00
  us purpose or we'll get depressed. This episode is brought
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• 19:58
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, so it used to be the traditional
• 20:00
  idea like of British aristocracy is like that you wouldn't
• 20:03
  have to work for a living. It was kind of
• 20:06
  an unfortunate necessity for many people. That they had to
• 20:09
  work for their daily bread, right? But the ideal way
• 20:12
  of being human was that you just had money. And
• 20:15
  then you spent your time doing other things like 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 2: That's the best aspect of it. But when you think
• 20:27
  about British aristocracy, don't you think about fuck-ups? I do.
• 20:31
  I think about guys that are just drunk. They drive
• 20:33
  their Ferrari into a lake and they accidentally drown their
• 20:36
  friend and then they pay off the cops and they
• 20:39
  get away with it. That's what I think of. Well, yeah,
• 20:42
  there's that.
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: But there were also these kind of, I don't know,
• 20:44
  amateur scientists or eccentrics who had their weird thing and
• 20:47
  it kind of had it too. So I guess it
• 20:49
  brings out like the more freedoms of what it has,
• 20:51
  the more they can reveal their true nature.
• 20:53
  Speaker 2: Well, it also depends on how they're raised. Who are
• 20:58
  their parents? What values did they instill in them when
• 21:01
  they were young? Did they explain the value of hard
• 21:04
  work that it's actually good for you? And if you
• 21:07
  just find something you really want to do and you
• 21:09
  concentrate on it and really work hard at it, it's
• 21:11
  actually very fulfilling. Yeah.
• 21:13
  Speaker 1: So you could imagine, for example, the education system in
• 21:16
  this world where we no longer need to work.
• 21:18
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 21:19
  Speaker 1: Presumably it would need to be redesigned from scratch, basically,
• 21:24
  because right now it's a kind of machine, right? So
• 21:26
  you take children coming in kind of on a conveyor belt.
• 21:29
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: And then some processing is done, like sit at their desk,
• 21:32
  here is this assignment, here is a grid, and then
• 21:34
  they come out with a quality label attached.
• 21:37
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: Right? And then they are meant to be productive workers
• 21:40
  that you could put in an office and they will...
• 21:43
  So this kind of is an unfortunate... fact about the
• 21:47
  current condition that I mean the world needs a lot
• 21:49
  of these office workers that can do all these tasks
• 21:51
  in the economy so like it's we have to have
• 21:54
  until it doesn't until it doesn't and at that point
• 21:56
  it would be absurd to keep doing this right then
• 21:59
  you could imagine changing education so that it would be
• 22:03
  much more about like how can you learn to live
• 22:08
  well a life of leisure like you imagine You're right.
• 22:12
  Speaker 2: Stay stimulated.
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: Cultivating 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 to develop true friendships
• 22:29
  with people. These are things that are not taught in school,
• 22:32
  but you could imagine that being the curriculum, like spirituality,
• 22:35
  like all kinds of things that would then equip people
• 22:38
  to sort of use their freedom, their wealth, their free
• 22:43
  time for some kind of actually meaningful and beautiful activities.
• 22:50
  Speaker 2: For sure, preemptively, we should be kind of teaching people
• 22:54
  like that now. Like if young people are coming up now,
• 22:57
  the world that they're– if you're in first grade right now,
• 23:00
  12 years from now, when you're graduating from high school,
• 23:04
  like the world is a totally different place. And this
• 23:07
  idea that being a productive worker who can sit still
• 23:10
  for eight hours a day is– that's the best way
• 23:12
  we should teach kids. That seems crazy. If we're really
• 23:16
  like seeing the world that you're describing and that most
• 23:19
  people seem to think is oncoming. Yeah, yeah.
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: I guess the timeline is a little bit uncertain. So
• 23:26
  you don't want to end up in a situation, right,
• 23:27
  where you sort of now you find yourself. You're 20
• 23:29
  years old. It's time to go out in the world.
• 23:31
  You have no skills. The AI revolution hasn't yet quite happened.
• 23:35
  Speaker 2: Well, isn't that a liberal arts degree anyway?
• 23:37
  Speaker 1: Yeah. How is that?
• 23:39
  Speaker 2: 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 1: Yeah. So they were a little bit too early maybe
• 23:54
  in hopping on this.
• 23:54
  Speaker 2: Maybe. Or, you know, there's also traps. There's things that
• 23:59
  you can get really excited about and do. Like if
• 24:02
  you want 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
  is the best professional bowler in the world make? Let's guess.
• 24:16
  I say $ 100, 000. Yes, they're professional bowlers. We used to
• 24:21
  know a guy. Ari's friends with a guy. Tommy. God,
• 24:24
  I can't remember his last name. Do you remember his
• 24:26
  last name, Jamie? He was a professional bowler, but he
• 24:29
  used to come to the comic store and hang out.
• 24:30
  Really nice guy. And just loved comedy.
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: I don't know. Maybe the very best one makes a
• 24:35
  pretty decent living. And then the third best, it's just barely.
• 24:39
  I bet barely.
• 24:39
  Speaker 2: I bet the best guy probably makes maybe $ 100, 000 or $ 200, 000
• 24:42
  at the most. And that means the 30th guy in
• 24:47
  the world is fucked. You have to have another job
• 24:50
  to pursue that.
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: What does he make? $ 200, 000? Oh, $ 400, 000 in big season.
• 24:53
  Speaker 2: $ 450, 000. including prize money and sponsorships.
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: EJ Tuckett made $ 437, 540 for the 2025 season, with.
• 25:02
  Speaker 2: Several others between $ 190K and $ 270K in prize money alone.
• 25:04
  Top tier. So the top tier guys make a good living.
• 25:06
  But how many guys are there? You know what I'm saying?
• 25:24
  Speaker 1: It's probably like a very thin sort of peak.
• 25:26
  Speaker 2: 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're going to be
• 25:33
  a basketball player, they're making a lot of money. You know,
• 25:36
  if you're a really good basketball player and you pursue that, like,
• 25:39
  you could get very, very rich. But how many of.
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: Them get rich? Yeah, but then, like, so maybe the
• 25:45
  money factor would kind of drop out of the picture.
• 25:47
  Speaker 2: Yes, and it would just be what you're interested in.
• 25:50
  And then maybe even it would, I mean, the opportunities
• 25:53
  are endless.
• 25:54
  Speaker 1: And what other people are interested in to some extent. Because, like,
• 25:56
  I think part of what people are competing for is
• 25:58
  also prestige and status.
• 26:00
  Speaker 2: 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? Like,
• 26:06
  a bunch of friends who play golf. Like, Jamie plays
• 26:09
  golf all the time. Golfers are all, like, comparing each
• 26:11
  other's scores. They're playing. They're competing in this game. And
• 26:16
  they think about that more than they think about work. Like,
• 26:19
  people who love golf, they fucking hate work. Like I
• 26:22
  used to say that about comedy back when I first started.
• 26:25
  One of the things that I noticed is the guys
• 26:27
  who really got into golf, their careers kind of stalled
• 26:30
  because they were more excited about playing golf than they
• 26:33
  were about writing jokes and going on the road. I
• 26:36
  was like, OK. So if the average person doesn't need
• 26:40
  food and housing anymore from labor, if that's gone and
• 26:43
  now you just get it. And so now you could
• 26:45
  just go do things. we just have to teach people
• 26:49
  to be excited about stuff. We have to teach people
• 26:51
  the value of curiosity and finding things that are interesting
• 26:55
  to you. And then the value of just education for
• 26:59
  the sake of learning things, because it's interesting, just pure
• 27:03
  satisfaction of curiosity, which is a beautiful thing. Like that
• 27:07
  would be great for everybody. If we, instead of Learning
• 27:11
  things because your teacher tells you you have to learn it. Well,
• 27:13
  there's always going to be people that just naturally gravitate
• 27:16
  towards mathematics and they're really fascinated by mathematics. And there's
• 27:19
  always going to be people that are just naturally gravitating
• 27:21
  towards history. They're like, how did we get here? What
• 27:24
  is this? How did this start? Who wrote that? Who's
• 27:26
  the first guy to figure that out? And that's– you're
• 27:29
  going to naturally go towards that and just be educated
• 27:33
  for the sake of satisfying your curiosity. And maybe we'll
• 27:36
  have a more– balance society because people will actually be
• 27:40
  able to just pursue their interests. We have to teach
• 27:43
  them to do it. That's what I think is going
• 27:45
  to be really important about young people in the future.
• 27:48
  Teach them to actually pursue their curiosity rather than just
• 27:53
  squash any desires they have for novelty and for interesting
• 27:58
  things and just be able to work all day doing
• 28:00
  something you hate because that's what it means to be
• 28:03
  an adult.
• 28:03
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I think cultivating that would be the way forward
• 28:09
  in this case.
• 28:10
  Speaker 2: And it seems very possible. It's doable. We know curious people.
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: At least to some extent. I think there's probably also
• 28:18
  some differences in how different folks are wired. Some people
• 28:21
  get bored very easily. Others find everything fascinating. Some people
• 28:25
  are like just naturally depressed or have low mood. Others
• 28:28
  are sort of ebony.
• 28:28
  Speaker 2: Yeah, but those people that are naturally depressed, how much
• 28:31
  would their life change if they were coached at a
• 28:33
  very early age the value of exercise? And if they
• 28:37
  started running, if they started doing yoga and they started
• 28:40
  feeling much better and they weren't naturally depressed anymore. And
• 28:42
  then you change their diet and you start adding in
• 28:44
  vitamins and nutrients and stop giving them processed foods. And
• 28:48
  all of a sudden they feel better because the concept
• 28:51
  even of depression, like what does that mean? Well, it
• 28:54
  varies so wildly. And when you're talking about people that
• 28:58
  aren't taking care of their bodies and that's not thought
• 29:00
  of as a primary factor in why depression exists in
• 29:04
  the first place, well, this is a very unscientific approach
• 29:07
  then because we know that it has a profound impact
• 29:10
  on human beings. So we're pretending that this is like
• 29:12
  this one-size-fit-all. No, I think that should be also a
• 29:16
  part of teaching people how to be a human being.
• 29:19
  Chase your curiosities. But also this is why you're not
• 29:22
  feeling well. And that if you just develop this ability
• 29:25
  to get some momentum going and just show up at
• 29:27
  that yoga class every day, you'll feel way better. And
• 29:32
  you don't have to take a pill.
• 29:33
  Speaker 1: I think, yeah, many could be a lot improved if
• 29:38
  they were taught to sort of take … care of
• 29:40
  their basic physiology.
• 29:42
  Speaker 2: Everyone can be improved. 100% of them can be improved.
• 29:45
  It's a part of being a human being.
• 29:47
  Speaker 1: I mean, I don't know. I think there is also
• 29:49
  some people who might just have some imbalance of some
• 29:52
  neurotransmitter because of some genetic mutation. 100%. Or maybe they
• 29:56
  don't even have the energy to engage in these activities
• 29:59
  that would make them feel better. But then I think
• 30:01
  there would be much better medicines for helping.
• 30:04
  Speaker 2: That's where Adderall comes in. Let's go. Give them some Adderall.
• 30:09
  Get them fired up. Get them to start running. I'm kidding.
• 30:13
  But what we're saying is all doable. We're not asking
• 30:17
  people to breathe underwater. What we're saying is that There
• 30:21
  are people on earth that live like that and this
• 30:25
  idea that living just for a paycheck so that you
• 30:28
  can cover your food and your housing, which we've always
• 30:32
  thought of as being just an undeniable part of being
• 30:36
  a person, an adult. This is what you have to do.
• 30:38
  You have to pay for your food, pay for your housing.
• 30:40
  But if we do get to a point where the
• 30:43
  structure of society is now run by hyper-intelligent artificial intelligence
• 30:49
  … you wouldn't need most jobs that people have to
• 30:53
  do that suck. And in order to get our society
• 30:56
  to this point, if you wanted an iPhone, you needed
• 30:59
  some people that were in a factory somewhere putting it
• 31:03
  all together. You needed someone who's designing it. You needed
• 31:06
  someone who's sitting there in the office trying to figure
• 31:09
  out how to market it. You needed all those jobs.
• 31:12
  But when we don't need all those jobs anymore, then
• 31:14
  things are going to be very interesting. And that's what
• 31:17
  I'm saying. We need to become a different thing. Like
• 31:20
  It's kind of true and kind of not. Like you
• 31:22
  can be a human being and live in that world.
• 31:26
  But we're going to have to reeducate people how to
• 31:28
  be a human being. It's going to– our education system
• 31:33
  specifically 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. Yeah.
• 31:49
  Speaker 1: So we are kind of currently ill-suited for really thriving
• 31:55
  in an environment of abundance and for enjoying life. Because
• 32:00
  both at deep biological timescales and during the life cycle,
• 32:05
  span of a single individual, there are all these pressures,
• 32:07
  necessities that kind of force us to become a certain type.
• 32:11
  I mean, we talked about the education system training people
• 32:14
  to be the kinds who can sit at the desk
• 32:16
  all day long and perform tasks. Biologically, we've evolved drives
• 32:22
  to be lazy, to conserve energy, to eat as much
• 32:25
  as we can. And now in the modern environment where
• 32:28
  there are fridges everywhere, it causes problems metabolically. And In
• 32:35
  terms of enjoying life, for many people, there is this
• 32:38
  hedonic treadmill, right? So you achieve something, some improvement, there's
• 32:43
  a spike of happiness, and then you sort of go
• 32:46
  back to baseline very quickly. You start to take for
• 32:48
  granted all the blessings of life, which makes it very
• 32:51
  difficult to actually achieve a state of permanent happiness and felicity.
• 33:00
  And it's kind of been necessary because there needed to
• 33:03
  be this motivation to keep striving for the next thing. Now,
• 33:07
  once you've actually achieved all the things, then maybe that
• 33:09
  becomes a kind of dysfunctional, right? Like why keep wanting
• 33:14
  to strive for the next thing if all the things
• 33:16
  have already been achieved, at least in a certain domain.
• 33:20
  And so I think as we move deeper into this
• 33:24
  hypothesized future, like where we get all these magical technologies,
• 33:29
  then at some point, probably some transformation of human nature
• 33:35
  would have to go along with that. First, maybe cultural
• 33:37
  changes to sort of equip people for a life of leisure.
• 33:40
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 33:41
  Speaker 1: And then ultimately, maybe more profound changes to our very biology.
• 33:45
  And so that imagine if you solve aging and you
• 33:48
  can now live for thousands of years, right? Like maybe
• 33:51
  the way our memory work is not really set up
• 33:53
  for that. Maybe we would just go stale after 200
• 33:56
  years with our current brains. Like we just get stuck
• 33:58
  in a rut. We don't know because we haven't lived
• 34:01
  for 200 years, but that could easily turn out to
• 34:03
  be the case with the humans. So then maybe at
• 34:05
  that point, you would need to sort of do something
• 34:07
  to sort of add more cognitive resources, more flexibility, do
• 34:12
  some sort of psychedelic reset or something to sort of
• 34:15
  keep the flexibility going for longer periods of time.
• 34:19
  Speaker 2: 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
  Ibogaine 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. And we've always assumed that if
• 35:25
  you're going to have a functioning society that you're going
• 35:30
  to 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 they're
• 35:47
  still just humans and some humans don't do that. So
• 35:49
  wouldn't it be better to figure out a way to
• 35:51
  not have humans ever do that anymore? And there seems
• 35:55
  like a way to do that. It's, again, not asking
• 35:57
  people to breathe underwater. We're trying to figure out why
• 36:00
  do some people never engage in crime? Why do some
• 36:04
  people live these really fulfilling and interesting lives? Probably because
• 36:08
  they were exposed to it when they were really young.
• 36:10
  Probably because they weren't exposed to very bad environments and
• 36:13
  very bad crime and very bad poverty. And how much
• 36:16
  of that would change if there was no more poverty?
• 36:20
  It sounds like such a little fairy tale, child-like Oh,
• 36:24
  one day we'll have no poverty. But that's doable. If
• 36:28
  everyone is alive, right, OK, that's alive right now is
• 36:31
  not starving to death. That means we figured out a
• 36:34
  way to at least the very least get you resources
• 36:37
  so you could feed yourself, right? No matter how dysfunctional
• 36:41
  things are. All that has to do is you get
• 36:44
  ramped up a few steps. I am. And now you
• 36:47
  have no one ever worried about being fed, no one
• 36:49
  ever worrying about not having a place to sleep. And
• 36:52
  then you have to find purpose. But it seems like
• 36:55
  there's a lot of people that find purpose without having
• 36:59
  a financial price tag attached to it. Just by what
• 37:02
  we're talking about with golf or you could be like
• 37:05
  really into writing books. You could write books all day
• 37:08
  long and people are always going to want human created fiction.
• 37:12
  People are always going to be interested in the way
• 37:13
  other people think about things. You'll find there's plenty of
• 37:17
  things to do. There's plenty of games to play and
• 37:20
  plenty of skills to learn. The idea that the only
• 37:24
  reason why we work is to eat and to not
• 37:26
  get rained on seems nuts.
• 37:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah. It is, I guess, to some extent, an open
• 37:33
  question to what extent people will always want to read
• 37:37
  human fiction or to prefer the human-generated outputs. It might
• 37:44
  be just because current AI-generated writing is kind of lacking
• 37:49
  in various ways. It's often sloppy and boring. But if
• 37:52
  it became really good, then maybe it would just be
• 37:58
  much more fun. Like a movie made by an AI
• 38:02
  might just be so much better and richer and the
• 38:04
  lighting is perfect and the dialogue is sharp and it's
• 38:07
  more funny and deep.
• 38:08
  Speaker 2: Certainly possible.
• 38:09
  Speaker 1: Then you go and watch this human-produced thing and it's
• 38:12
  going like, Like most people don't go and watch sort
• 38:15
  of film school students' productions.
• 38:17
  Speaker 2: Right. But then there's like that movie Obsession. Wasn't that
• 38:20
  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
• 38:27
  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 is like super excited about it. Now, if
• 38:36
  that same movie was made by AI, I wonder if
• 38:39
  it would have that impact because it doesn't have the
• 38:41
  human connection.
• 38:42
  Speaker 1: Yeah. So that's possible that we keep getting interested in
• 38:47
  these things because we sort of are really entangled with
• 38:52
  the human world much more than we are with the
• 38:55
  world of AIs. And I mean, for the same reason
• 38:57
  you might be more interested in if like your brother
• 39:00
  or friend did something. You might think, oh, this is interesting.
• 39:03
  I want to check that out.
• 39:04
  Speaker 2: Of course.
• 39:04
  Speaker 1: Whereas with some random dude who made something slightly better,
• 39:07
  it's like doesn't mean. Right.
• 39:09
  Speaker 2: When you go to see your nephew play baseball, you
• 39:11
  wouldn't really go see little kids baseball. No, no.
• 39:14
  Speaker 1: Just randomly, right?
• 39:15
  Speaker 2: When your nephew gets on first base, like way to go, Bobby.
• 39:18
  Speaker 1: So I think these kind of social entanglements that we
• 39:22
  have will be a big part of what gives structure
• 39:28
  to lives in this condition where. the external constraints are removed.
• 39:33
  Speaker 2: 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 is insane. It should
• 40:09
  be a rich, exciting, enthusiastic journey in how to be
• 40:14
  a better person and how it's exciting to learn things
• 40:17
  and how it's exciting to get better at things and
• 40:19
  about how anybody can get better at things.
• 40:21
  Speaker 1: I mean I hated every day of school.
• 40:23
  Speaker 2: I hated it. I hated it. I didn't even know
• 40:26
  that I was interested in learning anything until I got
• 40:28
  out of school.
• 40:29
  Speaker 1: The same for me. I mean I only discovered– like
• 40:32
  I also hated books and everything like that. for my
• 40:35
  first 15 years of life because I associated that with school.
• 40:38
  That was the kind of school thing. So it's only
• 40:40
  then randomly one day I happened to walk into the
• 40:44
  local library for no reason and pulled out the book
• 40:47
  here and there. And then I discovered that there was
• 40:49
  this whole world of science and idea and literature and
• 40:52
  all of that, like very different from what we were
• 40:54
  doing in school. And then that kind of opened the
• 40:56
  gates for me to this.
• 40:58
  Speaker 2: Imagine what a head start you would have had if
• 41:00
  you had, like, a different kind of education with super
• 41:04
  enthusiastic people who really love teaching children, are really good
• 41:09
  at it, and that we reward them and that it
• 41:12
  becomes a very prestigious position to be in rather than
• 41:15
  what it is now. If you talk to some guy
• 41:17
  and he goes, oh, I'm a high school teacher, you're like, oh,
• 41:19
  poor bastard. How does he feed himself? That's immediately what
• 41:22
  I think. Like good for you that you're doing that,
• 41:24
  but also I guarantee you could probably be making a
• 41:27
  lot more money and be happier doing another job. And
• 41:31
  so that's a terrible way to start life off. And
• 41:34
  if we just revamp that, then you have a bunch
• 41:37
  of people that are interacting with life in a very
• 41:40
  different way. And instead of being thought, I have to
• 41:42
  get a job someday, I have to get a job
• 41:45
  after school anyway to help my mom pay the bills
• 41:48
  because we're struggling. So I got to contribute to the household,
• 41:51
  even though I'm 16, I can't hang out with friends.
• 41:53
  If all that stuff's out the window and now it's like, no,
• 41:56
  what we need to find out is what is exciting
• 41:59
  for you. Like what, What excites your mind, your specific personality?
• 42:04
  What is it about life that's interesting? And let's expose
• 42:07
  you to a bunch of different things that are exciting
• 42:10
  and interesting that other people find value in. And let's
• 42:13
  find out which way you gravitate because maybe you gravitate
• 42:16
  towards chess or maybe you gravitate towards something completely different.
• 42:20
  Maybe you're just really in a painting. Maybe painting just
• 42:22
  lights you up and you like look at a canvas
• 42:24
  and you just start fucking around with it and that's
• 42:26
  your thing. There's a lot of people in this world
• 42:29
  that find that. It's just they have to find it themselves, unfortunately.
• 42:33
  Speaker 1: I think that's kind of inspiring. But I think the
• 42:40
  train doesn't stop there. So if we think even more
• 42:43
  further into this kind of condition of technological maturity, I
• 42:48
  think in addition to sort of freeing up people, like
• 42:51
  making it easy to produce the food and the houses
• 42:54
  and cars that go– faster and don't pollute and all
• 42:58
  of this stuff. Like, if you think through what maybe
• 43:01
  a technologically mature civilization could do, like, so a lot
• 43:03
  of these like learning, for example, is something that gives
• 43:07
  people purpose, but maybe you would have the ability to
• 43:10
  sort of download knowledge at the click of a button.
• 43:15
  So rather than, like, if you want to learn advanced mathematics,
• 43:17
  now you have to study 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 at technological maturity,
• 43:29
  they would be like, okay, I understand mathematics. Okay, I'm
• 43:32
  going to press that button.
• 43:33
  Speaker 2: Boom.
• 43:33
  Speaker 1: Now I understand mathematics.
• 43:34
  Speaker 2: Like the Matrix. I know Kung Fu. Remember? Yeah.
• 43:37
  Speaker 1: So if you had, like, you know, maybe some kind
• 43:39
  of nanobots that could infiltrate your brain and then change
• 43:43
  the synapses in just such a way that you're not
• 43:46
  the same as you were before except you have these
• 43:48
  concepts from abstract mathematics. Yes. You know, after 20 minutes
• 43:52
  or something like that. Some superintelligence works out how to
• 43:55
  change your synapses. to this new condition. And if you
• 43:59
  were inclined to do various things because they give you
• 44:03
  joy and pleasure, you could also think, well, I could
• 44:07
  do those things and get the joy and pleasure, or
• 44:08
  I could just push this button that activates the same
• 44:11
  joy and pleasure. So there would be these shortcuts to everything.
• 44:16
  And it looks like you would have a post-instrumental condition
• 44:20
  where that would, at least at first sight, seem to
• 44:23
  be no reason to do anything for the sake of
• 44:26
  of achieving something else, because there would always be this
• 44:28
  shorter path to that other thing, pressing the button. And
• 44:33
  so that's a kind of deeper form of redundancy. It
• 44:35
  seems that all forms of human instrumental effort would become unmotivated.
• 44:40
  You could still go to the gym every day and
• 44:46
  sweat for an hour, or you could just take the
• 44:50
  pill that induces exactly the same physiological effects And the
• 44:54
  mental effect like the calm or whatever you feel after.
• 44:58
  Speaker 2: Or maybe even better, genetically engineer someone.
• 45:00
  Speaker 1: Or genetically, yeah.
• 45:01
  Speaker 2: So they don't have to take a pill.
• 45:02
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. And so then I think you're getting more
• 45:06
  into these like fundamental questions of value. Right. Philosophical questions
• 45:10
  about what ultimately is it that makes a life good.
• 45:15
  Speaker 2: 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, if
• 45:34
  you look at ancient hominids and look at us, we're
• 45:36
  clearly very different. So we're moving in a general direction anyway.
• 45:40
  And when you look at the greys, like these prototypical
• 45:43
  aliens that everybody sees with the big heads and skinny bodies,
• 45:45
  what do they look like? Well, they look like if
• 45:48
  we keep going, that's what we're going to look like.
• 45:50
  We're going to be these genderless, sexless aliens. muscleless little
• 45:53
  skinny things with giant heads that communicate telepathically, which is
• 45:57
  probably where we're moving. And if we're moving that way,
• 46:01
  maybe we think of them as being an alien from
• 46:03
  another– maybe that's just the general direction that primates go
• 46:09
  once they figure out technology. They eventually realize, well, all–
• 46:12
  first of all, the idea of having to have a
• 46:15
  male and a female is kind of crazy, right? Why? Why? Well,
• 46:19
  because we have to reproduce. Well, what if we don't
• 46:21
  reproduce like that anymore? What if all reproduction is done
• 46:24
  through engineering and there's no more sex, so there's no
• 46:29
  more lust, so there's no more jealousy, so there's no
• 46:31
  more ego? There's no more anything. And then there's a
• 46:34
  hive mind because technology has advanced to the point where
• 46:37
  the reason why they have these big giant heads, they're
• 46:38
  essentially locked into everybody all around them all the time.
• 46:42
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, is that what we would want though?
• 46:45
  Speaker 2: Not us, but I don't think we'll be us anymore.
• 46:49
  I think this– like if you went to chimps and
• 46:51
  you said, hey, dude, one day you're going to be
• 46:53
  on a plane eating peanuts, flying over the ocean. They'd
• 46:56
  be like, fuck that. I don't want to do that.
• 46:57
  I'll just stay here where the fruit is. You guys
• 47:00
  are nuts. Like why do you want to do that?
• 47:01
  And you'll be addicted to kratom and you'll be watching
• 47:06
  YouTube all day long. Like, no, I don't want to
• 47:08
  do that. That doesn't sound fun.
• 47:11
  Speaker 1: We'd have a lot of banana stuff.
• 47:13
  Speaker 2: Maybe. Or you have to get killed by the other
• 47:15
  chimpanzees that want the bananas. They have chimp wars. They
• 47:18
  come in and kill each other. So I think we're
• 47:22
  going to be something different, and I think that's inevitable anyway.
• 47:25
  If you believe in evolution, it's inevitable anyway that we
• 47:28
  become something different. We're not a finished product.
• 47:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah, no, I think that is true. We are not
• 47:33
  a 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 evolution 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 hope
• 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 2: 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 like
• 48:35
  what that means in terms of the amount of energy
• 48:38
  it produces, the amount of impact that it has versus
• 48:41
  the structure of the universe itself versus black holes and
• 48:46
  stellar nurseries and things that are just infinitely more spectacular
• 48:51
  than the human condition. But to us, it's like, oh,
• 48:54
  what is meaning? What is meaning? What is meaning to me? Like, well,
• 48:57
  what is meaning to me? You as you're a finite
• 49:00
  biological organism that has to find meaning. Because you're sort
• 49:04
  of tromping around through this weird world where eventually you're
• 49:07
  going to die and you're going to leave your mark
• 49:10
  and maybe reincarnation is real and maybe the afterlife is
• 49:12
  real and nobody fucking knows. So you've got to have meaning.
• 49:14
  But the universe itself, like a human only lives 100 years.
• 49:17
  How much meaning can you have in 100 years?
• 49:20
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I think we kind of die prematurely. I mean
• 49:23
  we think of us as like first you become stronger
• 49:28
  and more capable for 15, 20 years, right? Then biologically
• 49:32
  you stagnate and then– Maybe you keep accumulating knowledge and
• 49:37
  skills for another few decades, but just as you have
• 49:40
  started to acquire a modicum of wisdom, your brain starts
• 49:44
  to rot. And then everything is erased, either by Alzheimer's
• 49:49
  or death. That's all gone, the whole lifetime of experience.
• 49:53
  Speaker 2: There's your meaning.
• 49:54
  Speaker 1: All the memories and the hard-earned lessons. So that seems
• 49:58
  kind of sad and probably not the best way for
• 50:01
  things to be. I think we would want to extend...
• 50:05
  the human lifespan. So you could continue to grow up,
• 50:08
  not just kind of reach 20 and then plateau there
• 50:10
  for the rest of your life. But what if we
• 50:12
  could continue to develop so that like at 80, you
• 50:16
  were as much stronger and like be able to understand
• 50:20
  more and move better and like just have the same
• 50:22
  capacity increase as you had like between like zero and
• 50:26
  20 and you just kept going.
• 50:28
  Speaker 2: Well, these life extension scientists that are working on these things,
• 50:30
  guys like David Sinclair, like they believe that that's a,
• 50:34
  not just a possibility, but an inevitability.
• 50:37
  Speaker 1: Yeah, well, so that's more like, I guess, preserving, preventing
• 50:40
  or delaying that decay.
• 50:42
  Speaker 2: Sure.
• 50:42
  Speaker 1: Which is already very good.
• 50:44
  Speaker 2: Not reversing. They're talking about reversing now.
• 50:45
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, but then you would go back to being 20, right?
• 50:48
  Speaker 2: Biologically, yeah. But then you have engineering.
• 50:52
  Speaker 1: If you have very long time spans, then you might
• 50:54
  at some point want to continue to grow.
• 50:56
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 50:56
  Speaker 1: Like you might not want to just be stuck at
• 50:58
  a 20-year-old human for 10,000 years. Like maybe eventually you
• 51:02
  would want to become like slightly bigger in terms of
• 51:08
  your ability to engage with the world.
• 51:11
  Speaker 2: Of course. And if they can figure out how to
• 51:13
  make people– well, there's already genetic engineering that's being done
• 51:17
  in terms of increasing potential intelligence and IQ. They're already
• 51:20
  doing that. And so this was a– I'm sure you
• 51:24
  know about that thing that happened in China where this
• 51:28
  one doctor got in trouble and because he had genetically
• 51:32
  engineered some babies to be inoculated to HIV, but it also,
• 51:39
  at the same time, gave them a far increased potential IQ.
• 51:44
  It remains to be seen whether or not it actually
• 51:46
  works as these guys, you know, become like 20 and
• 51:49
  30 and we start putting them in chess tournaments and
• 51:52
  see if it really did make them smarter. But if
• 51:55
  The possibility of that is already being studied. They already
• 51:58
  understand the differences between like what is– what's possible, what
• 52:05
  we understand and that increases every day. They understand more
• 52:09
  every day, more is possible every day. If that just
• 52:12
  keeps going, well, you have a different version of what
• 52:15
  the human consciousness is. You have a different version of
• 52:17
  the human mind.
• 52:18
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I think– The way AI is going, I think
• 52:22
  that's the train that's going to reach the destination faster.
• 52:26
  Speaker 2: Oh, yeah.
• 52:27
  Speaker 1: And then once you do have super intelligence in machine substrate,
• 52:31
  then that can then unlock all kinds of technologies, including
• 52:35
  these biological technologies or nanotechnology or a host of other
• 52:39
  things that could then sort of bring us up if
• 52:42
  that's how we decide to go. Yeah. And uplift us
• 52:46
  into different... Like either biologically enhancing us or like uploading
• 52:51
  us into.
• 52:52
  Speaker 2: But again, it's that whitewater river raft. It's like we're
• 52:56
  going down this whitewater and we might make it out
• 52:59
  of this or it might crash. One of the weird
• 53:03
  things about– I'm very fascinated with ancient civilizations. And one
• 53:09
  of the weirdest things about ancient civilizations is when you
• 53:12
  go really, really far back, a bunch of them, have
• 53:15
  these depictions of kings that ruled for thousands of years.
• 53:20
  And it's very strange stuff because the Egyptians and ancient Sumer,
• 53:27
  there's a bunch of different depictions of these kings that
• 53:31
  lived lives that were way longer than biological humans lived.
• 53:36
  And then there's the flood myth or the flood story.
• 53:39
  And then after the flood, biological life decreases pretty radically.
• 53:44
  And it seems to get back to like a normal
• 53:46
  version of what we assume now, which is like 100 years.
• 53:50
  And one of the weird questions that these alternative ancient
• 53:55
  historians have is are we missing the possibility that there
• 54:00
  was a hyper-advanced civilization that existed tens of thousands of
• 54:05
  years ago? And that what we're seeing now is not
• 54:07
  a linear progression from caveman to human being with an
• 54:11
  iPhone in 2026. that along the way there might have
• 54:15
  been a very high level of sophistication. And the evidence
• 54:18
  of that might be the pyramids and some of these
• 54:21
  other ancient structures that are mind-boggling. As much as you
• 54:24
  try to explain them away, when you're dealing with 2,300,000 stones,
• 54:29
  some of them are cut from a quarry 500 miles away,
• 54:32
  80-ton stones that are in the ceiling, perfectly cut granite,
• 54:37
  where it looks like they have diamond drill holes in them.
• 54:39
  It seems like there's some lost technology. And every society
• 54:43
  has this flood myth and every society that has this
• 54:46
  flood myth, especially these ones that were very advanced somehow
• 54:51
  or another like ancient Egypt, they have these depictions of
• 54:54
  people that lived way longer than people live today. And
• 54:58
  I wonder if human beings one day will realize like, oh,
• 55:03
  if you keep going long enough, 100 years is silly.
• 55:06
  Like people can– they will just figure out what it
• 55:09
  is that makes people age and die, fix that. And
• 55:12
  you'll live an insanely long time. And then if people
• 55:15
  live an 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. The first
• 55:32
  thing we realize is 100 years is not enough. Because
• 55:36
  I'm 58 and I'm a moron still. Like why am
• 55:38
  I learning every day? How come I'm getting better at
• 55:41
  being a person every day? I should have figured this
• 55:43
  out already. But you don't ever have time to figure
• 55:45
  it out.
• 55:45
  Speaker 1: You don't have time.
• 55:46
  Speaker 2: There's not enough time.
• 55:47
  Speaker 1: And you only get one run. Like I mean you
• 55:49
  would take one trial run first, right, on life. Right.
• 55:52
  And then like, okay, now I kind of know a
• 55:54
  little bit how it works. Now let's do it for real.
• 55:56
  Speaker 2: Well, that's the concept of reincarnation.
• 55:57
  Speaker 1: It's kind of scary. I mean it's a bit crazy
• 55:59
  that each of us is put in charge of a
• 56:01
  whole human life.
• 56:02
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 56:03
  Speaker 1: Like are we really– like, reach the level of, like,
• 56:06
  if you want to run an airplane, you have to
• 56:08
  go through these certifications and stuff, right? And then maybe
• 56:11
  you can be a pilot. But, like, for a human life,
• 56:13
  it's like every single person, like, okay, you have 100%
• 56:15
  dictatorial control of this person. Like, they're completely hostage to
• 56:20
  your whims.
• 56:22
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 56:22
  Speaker 1: And then that's like us. But that's the way it is. But, yeah,
• 56:26
  having the ability to kind of try different things and
• 56:29
  maybe do, like, have a kind of relationship opportunity to
• 56:35
  do a do-over if like if the life turned out
• 56:39
  to be like every 50 years or something you have
• 56:41
  a chance to kind of.
• 56:44
  Speaker 2: Or maybe not even a do-over but it's the same
• 56:46
  life but you can do whatever you want and you
• 56:49
  don't have to be constrained to this idea that you
• 56:52
  only have a certain amount of time and you want
• 56:53
  to retire by your 65 we might look at that
• 56:56
  as being like one of the first completely archaic notions
• 56:59
  and the reason why people got it all wrong Like, well,
• 57:02
  society will be better because people are going to live
• 57:04
  way longer. And if you think about how much smarter–
• 57:06
  how old are you? 53.
• 57:07
  Speaker 1: OK.
• 57:08
  Speaker 2: Now, the way you said that was sad. I'm older
• 57:13
  than you, dog. Don't worry about it. But if you
• 57:15
  think about how much smarter you are at 53 than
• 57:18
  you were at 13, now imagine how much smarter you
• 57:22
  will be at 353 or 1,053. And if that actually
• 57:23
  becomes possible– If a person can live to be 100 years,
• 57:31
  why can't they live to be 4,000 years? If they
• 57:33
  can figure out what makes people age, if we really
• 57:37
  can genetically engineer human beings, that's not– again, that's not
• 57:40
  breathing underwater. That's just extending life. And if you extend
• 57:44
  life and extend intellectual capacity and your ability to learn
• 57:48
  and grow, holy shit. You're dealing with a 2,000-year-old person.
• 57:52
  That's a completely different kind of thing. And that could
• 57:55
  be real someday and that might be also– One of
• 57:58
  the things that comes along with this new understanding of
• 58:04
  just life in general with super intelligent AI.
• 58:07
  Speaker 1: Yeah, no, for sure. Fixing aging and reversing it would
• 58:11
  be amongst things that a technologically mature civilization would be
• 58:15
  able to do.
• 58:16
  Speaker 2: 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
  Come on.
• 58:21
  Speaker 1: That's what they say now, right? But when somebody actually
• 58:24
  has the therapy and you could like, I'll hear. You
• 58:27
  could either continue to get worse kidneys and more painful
• 58:31
  knees and wrinkles, and you start to forget things. Or
• 58:35
  you can take this rejuvenation serum that everybody else is using,
• 58:39
  and they are full of energy and running around and
• 58:41
  doing stuff. Do you still think it's vain? So I
• 58:44
  think a lot of this is Stockholm syndrome, that you
• 58:47
  are kind of faced with the inevitability of aging and
• 58:51
  decay and have been for thousands of years. Yeah. you
• 58:54
  develop a kind of problematic scaffold that reconciles you to
• 58:58
  the inevitable.
• 58:59
  Speaker 2: I like it. Stockholm Syndrome.
• 59:01
  Speaker 1: Which is maybe adaptive, but only up until the point
• 59:04
  where there actually might be something you could do to escape.
• 59:07
  Speaker 2: Right?
• 59:07
  Speaker 1: Then if you're too stuck in this mindset, it might
• 59:10
  sort of prevent you from taking advantage to regain your freedom.
• 59:14
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 59:15
  Speaker 1: And I think we are now at that stage. We
• 59:17
  don't yet have the therapies, but there are certainly like
• 59:20
  investments and research and stuff we could do that would
• 59:22
  hasten the arrival. And I think, in fact, we should
• 59:26
  have started on a big sort of you know, Manhattan
• 59:30
  product to defeat aging like decades ago. And maybe we
• 59:33
  would have better therapies by now then. But for a
• 59:36
  long time, aging was not seen as a problem. Only
• 59:39
  the specific diseases that are the result of the aging.
• 59:42
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 59:42
  Speaker 1: And they got all this funding, right? Like, so you
• 59:44
  have like huge research products for Alzheimer's and for heart
• 59:47
  disease and for cancer. But if you look at the
• 59:50
  main common cause of most human disease, it's senescence. Like
• 59:54
  you're much more likely to get any of these. When
• 59:56
  you're 80, then when you're 20, because your cells gradually
• 59:59
  decay and gunk builds up, arteries clog up, you know,
• 1:00:04
  your DNA mutates, your methylation pattern gets scrambled. So rather
• 1:00:09
  than just trying to put out the fires one by
• 1:00:11
  one after they occur, like at some point you just
• 1:00:13
  need to sort of try to prevent, like maybe you
• 1:00:17
  need a bit of rain to sort of prevent that.
• 1:00:20
  Speaker 2: 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 100. Kind of incredible. Yeah. Kind
• 1:00:30
  of incredible. Got rockets and satellites and cell phones and
• 1:00:35
  people only live– so it's like everybody has to build
• 1:00:37
  on everybody else's intelligence and everybody else's understanding of the
• 1:00:40
  world and develop new things, and everybody has to learn
• 1:00:43
  those new things.
• 1:00:44
  Speaker 1: And each brain is so small that it can only
• 1:00:46
  learn a small little specialty, right? And you need millions
• 1:00:49
  of them. Although it's not entirely clear with humans, if
• 1:00:55
  we had been much more long-lived, like the way we
• 1:00:58
  currently are configured, maybe we would just have gotten too
• 1:01:01
  stuck in our ways and sort of stagnated into some
• 1:01:04
  sort of ultra-conservative society where nobody's allowed to do anything different.
• 1:01:08
  or the old geezers that have their way of doing
• 1:01:10
  things just remain forever in charge. So, I mean, we
• 1:01:17
  just don't know, right? Like whether that would have slowed
• 1:01:21
  progress or accelerated it. But it is, yeah, it is
• 1:01:27
  still amazing. Like it's a long path from sort of
• 1:01:29
  running around in the forest to sort of these, look
• 1:01:33
  at these like advanced chip technologies and the whole global
• 1:01:37
  supply chain. Or like thousands of people are working to
• 1:01:41
  develop just one little tool that then feeds into the
• 1:01:43
  ability to make another tool that eventually makes these leading-edge
• 1:01:47
  AI chips.
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 2: Where they're layering things four atoms deep.
• 1:01:51
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's remarkable.
• 1:01:55
  Speaker 2: It's incredible. And humans only live to be 100. Imagine
• 1:01:58
  what we could accomplish if we lived to be 3,000,
• 1:02:00
  you know?
• 1:02:01
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Or if we were just a little bit better
• 1:02:05
  at these things. Yes. Because I think– We are sort
• 1:02:08
  of the stupidest possible species that are capable of developing
• 1:02:12
  advanced technology. Because as soon as we evolved to reach
• 1:02:15
  that level, we started developing it, right? So that's where
• 1:02:18
  we are, like the dumbest possible that just barely can
• 1:02:21
  do this.
• 1:02:21
  Speaker 2: Right, barely can do this while we're blowing each other up. Yeah.
• 1:02:23
  At the same time, all over the world, blowing up people. Yeah,
• 1:02:29
  but maybe a lot of that frantic, stupid, illogical behavior
• 1:02:35
  is– because we're so finite. Like we're in a rush that,
• 1:02:40
  you know, we realize we only have a certain amount
• 1:02:42
  of time to get things done. And so this sort
• 1:02:43
  of accentuates the desire to control resources and to cement
• 1:02:49
  your immortality and to do these things that people love
• 1:02:51
  to do, put their name on buildings. This is a
• 1:02:54
  thing that people like to do that it's almost like
• 1:02:56
  cementing their immortality. Maybe there'll be less of a desire
• 1:03:00
  to do that if people live way longer. And then
• 1:03:03
  you would have to assume If you can engineer humans
• 1:03:08
  to live longer, you could probably engineer a lot of
• 1:03:10
  stupidity out of us. They could just find out why
• 1:03:13
  people– like what if you could just eliminate lying? What
• 1:03:17
  if there's like a genetic solution to lying?
• 1:03:23
  Speaker 1: Well, or just a really good lie detector.
• 1:03:26
  Speaker 2: Yeah, but I mean what if you can genetically engineer
• 1:03:29
  out the desire to lie?
• 1:03:32
  Speaker 1: Well, I mean– If you had a perfect lie detector,
• 1:03:36
  there would be no point in lying because people would
• 1:03:38
  just see it.
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 2: Immediately, right? Or if you could read each other's minds,
• 1:03:42
  it would be fruitless. Yeah.
• 1:03:44
  Speaker 1: And so that might be closer. I mean who knows
• 1:03:46
  what you could do if you sort of had like
• 1:03:48
  a powerful AI system trained to detect micro-expressions.
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 2: We just all have to get the big gray heads
• 1:03:53
  with the black eyes like the aliens have. Then you
• 1:03:57
  can just read each other's minds.
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 1: You want one of those?
• 1:03:59
  Speaker 2: Well– One of the weirder things that Bob Lazar said, again,
• 1:04:03
  I don't know if you're into this UFO stuff, but
• 1:04:05
  he was one of the guys that was a whistleblower
• 1:04:08
  that said he back-engineered crafts for the United States government
• 1:04:11
  in the 1980s. They don't have any controls in these
• 1:04:15
  crafts supposedly and that they're all powered by the minds
• 1:04:19
  of the beings that are running it and that they
• 1:04:21
  have– it's almost like these crafts are alive and they
• 1:04:23
  have some sort of a syncing with the thing that
• 1:04:25
  instead of like pressing buttons and working a joystick– they
• 1:04:29
  just sync with this creation and then they can propel
• 1:04:34
  it with their minds. So their minds become the computer
• 1:04:37
  that moves this thing around.
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 1: I'm a bit skeptical. I haven't looked into that. You
• 1:04:43
  should be.
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 2: Sounds crazy. How could you not be? Anybody who's not
• 1:04:47
  skeptical sounds crazy. But if you think about where we
• 1:04:50
  are now and where we're going to be, the possibility
• 1:04:53
  of that being our future is pretty likely.
• 1:04:56
  Speaker 1: I think that the kind of possibility of engineering something
• 1:05:00
  like that with sufficiently advanced technology would be there, like
• 1:05:04
  all kinds of stuff. Basically everything that doesn't violate some
• 1:05:08
  law of physics to a first approximation you would be.
• 1:05:11
  Speaker 2: Able to construct. Even when we say that, it's like
• 1:05:14
  our current understanding of physics. It's not the understanding of
• 1:05:17
  physics of a society that's a million years older than ours.
• 1:05:21
  Because that's a blink in the eye of the time
• 1:05:25
  that it took to create what we are at right
• 1:05:28
  now from the big bang like a million years is nothing.
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 1: Um yeah but even with our current understanding of what
• 1:05:36
  physics permits that's still an enormous space of uh designs
• 1:05:43
  and types of life and being that you could imagine
• 1:05:46
  instantiating you could have you know, like a Dyson sphere.
• 1:05:51
  You've heard of this concept, right? It's basically like using
• 1:05:53
  the output of the sun for energy generation. And it
• 1:05:56
  could have like, you surround the sun by solar panels
• 1:05:59
  that then powers a civilization infrastructure, maybe like a computer.
• 1:06:03
  Like imagine the, like already we have like AI computes
• 1:06:08
  growing at like 240% per year or something, right? And
• 1:06:13
  then like imagine the kind of mind that could run
• 1:06:16
  on that sized computer. so people are wondering whether like
• 1:06:23
  could machines be conscious and like discussing that right I
• 1:06:28
  think like maybe the more pertinent question is like are
• 1:06:30
  we really conscious I think barely so you're driving on
• 1:06:37
  like the road for two and a half hours a
• 1:06:40
  motorist right and like driving past thousands of people and
• 1:06:44
  homes and like mothers with their strollers and then After,
• 1:06:50
  does he remember any of that? Was he even really
• 1:06:52
  aware of any of this while he was driving? It's
• 1:06:55
  like a little diffuse sense of body and some murky
• 1:06:58
  perceptions floating through, maybe some confused abstract idea that we
• 1:07:03
  don't really understand. That's kind of the consciousness that can
• 1:07:07
  fit into this coconut-sized biological organ that we think, and
• 1:07:10
  we think, wow, we are so conscious. But imagine this
• 1:07:13
  Dyson sphere consciousness. Or like a mind that maybe spans
• 1:07:18
  a galaxy. I think the difference between the sort of
• 1:07:22
  awareness that it could have and our awareness might be
• 1:07:25
  bigger than the difference between our awareness and whatever a
• 1:07:28
  flea has or something like that. Way bigger. So it
• 1:07:33
  could be this transition where we develop super-intelligent minds that
• 1:07:37
  for the first time is really life waking up and
• 1:07:41
  becoming truly aware. Yeah. and that we are a little
• 1:07:45
  bit sort of over-proud in our own specialness when we
• 1:07:51
  think that we have achieved something close to the maximum level,
• 1:07:55
  that we are the standard by which consciousness should be measured,
• 1:07:59
  and we are this kind of feeble, confused, murky glimmer
• 1:08:04
  that is barely sentient at all. So that's, I think,
• 1:08:09
  maybe the big... challenge for our era like giving birth
• 1:08:15
  to super intelligence and then hopefully shaping and nurturing it
• 1:08:18
  and steering it so that it becomes a positive thing
• 1:08:22
  both for us ourselves and also for it itself and
• 1:08:27
  also for whatever other if there are other super beings
• 1:08:30
  somewhere in the world or in the cosmos that it
• 1:08:34
  sort of is able to get along with us and
• 1:08:37
  contribute positively at the cosmic scale And that's a very
• 1:08:43
  multifaceted challenge, but I think that's kind of seems to
• 1:08:47
  be what's going on.
• 1:08:49
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's hard for people to think that far ahead.
• 1:08:52
  You just think of intelligence being something superior to what
• 1:08:56
  we currently experience. But when you're talking about a computer
• 1:09:01
  or a being, a conscious being that is infinitely more
• 1:09:08
  powerful than anything we can imagine, that seems to be
• 1:09:12
  what– if everything keeps going in the same general direction
• 1:09:15
  and AI increases its power– And we figure out new
• 1:09:19
  ways to power it and then– because one of the
• 1:09:22
  things that AI needs that's so interesting is it needs
• 1:09:25
  enormous amounts of power. And so just these AI centers
• 1:09:30
  that they're developing now, they're– like Google is doing one
• 1:09:33
  where they're developing their own nuclear power. Do you want
• 1:09:35
  some coffee? Are you still there?
• 1:09:38
  Speaker 1: Yeah, right here.
• 1:09:39
  Speaker 2: I saw you reaching for your cup. You shouldn't be
• 1:09:40
  drinking out of paper cups anyway, man.
• 1:09:42
  Speaker 1: I don't usually do that.
• 1:09:44
  Speaker 2: I know. I don't either, but occasionally I do. But
• 1:09:46
  they're so bad for you.
• 1:09:47
  Speaker 1: I'm usually quite conscientious with coming a little bit up.
• 1:09:51
  Speaker 2: Even when I go on the road, I've started taking
• 1:09:53
  a little Yeti coffee cup with me so I can
• 1:09:57
  buy coffee and just have them put it in that. Okay.
• 1:10:02
  Inside of those things is just lined with plastic. You're
• 1:10:04
  pouring hot water into plastic and then the plastic leaches
• 1:10:07
  into your coffee.
• 1:10:08
  Speaker 1: I don't do that normally. But I figured like for
• 1:10:13
  having a chat with you on the Jorgen show, it
• 1:10:15
  would be worth like I guess some hundred microplastics.
• 1:10:19
  Speaker 2: Well, thank you. I think what we're talking about is
• 1:10:25
  inevitable if human beings don't blow ourselves up. If we
• 1:10:27
  don't get hit with an asteroid, blow ourselves up or
• 1:10:30
  a super volcano. It doesn't eradicate civilization. All this stuff
• 1:10:35
  is– it's inevitable. It's just– it's how much time does
• 1:10:38
  it take and how much does it grow exponentially in power?
• 1:10:42
  Because we're talking about computers and then they start bringing
• 1:10:46
  up quantum computing and quantum computers' ability to do calculations
• 1:10:50
  and it doesn't even make sense. And so you think, well,
• 1:10:54
  this is just one version of that. Like what is
• 1:10:58
  quantum computing going to look like 500 years from now? Like,
• 1:11:01
  what is computing power which is connected to AI? What
• 1:11:05
  is that going to look like 500 years from now?
• 1:11:07
  It's impossible to even guess.
• 1:11:10
  Speaker 1: 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 will take a long, a lot of grind to
• 1:11:22
  get there, but at least that establishes like a lower
• 1:11:24
  bound of what a technologically mature civilization could do, and
• 1:11:28
  then maybe they have additional ideas beyond that, but But
• 1:11:31
  already that is enough to really unlock. So if you
• 1:11:35
  think of a space of possible modes of being, like
• 1:11:39
  a mode of being is a way of experiencing, living, interacting.
• 1:11:42
  I think you look around humanity and all people who
• 1:11:48
  have existed in the past, a lot of different characters, right? Men, women,
• 1:11:53
  like mean people, nasty people, crazy people. But I think
• 1:11:58
  all of that diversity of human experience is like a
• 1:12:01
  tiny little corner in this space of possible modes of being.
• 1:12:06
  Like it's a huge cathedral and we've been kind of
• 1:12:08
  basically sitting in the janitor's closet. That's like the exploration
• 1:12:13
  we've done. And the kinds of modes of being, the
• 1:12:17
  kinds of ways of experiencing and relating to each other
• 1:12:20
  or thinking and doing stuff that are ultimately possible is
• 1:12:24
  just this enormous space that we haven't that we haven't
• 1:12:28
  been able to explore. Because ultimately what we can currently
• 1:12:31
  conceive of and imagine and experience and feel is limited
• 1:12:34
  to our biological substrate, the human brain. And just as
• 1:12:38
  your early human ancestors from a few million years ago
• 1:12:44
  that you were talking about before, they wouldn't really have
• 1:12:46
  been able to conceive of the modern human condition. Not
• 1:12:50
  just because I didn't think of it, but because the
• 1:12:53
  ape brain can't really... Even if you try to describe
• 1:12:58
  it to them somehow, like what is music, what is humor,
• 1:13:01
  what is romantic love, what is science, what is all
• 1:13:07
  of these things, what's literature, it just doesn't fit in.
• 1:13:11
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 1:13:12
  Speaker 1: And so presumably, I mean, you could think right now
• 1:13:14
  we've achieved the right brain size where all possible values
• 1:13:18
  and interesting ideas are accessible to us. That seems kind
• 1:13:21
  of implausible. It seems much more likely that just as
• 1:13:24
  the chimpanzees are necessarily blind to like a lot of
• 1:13:30
  what can give life meaning and value and significance probably
• 1:13:34
  are we too.
• 1:13:35
  Speaker 2: Yeah they don't even have the capacity for it which
• 1:13:37
  is interesting they can't even consider it yeah we think
• 1:13:39
  of them as being so intelligent and they are in
• 1:13:41
  comparison to a lot of other animals but I think
• 1:13:44
  one of the things that they were puzzled by when
• 1:13:46
  they started teaching primates sign language was that they never
• 1:13:50
  ask questions like they don't seem to have questions about
• 1:13:55
  stuff so they just They just– they exist in an
• 1:13:59
  intelligent way. They can figure things out. They can do things.
• 1:14:02
  They know when the door is left unlocked. 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, they
• 1:14:14
  don't get– they get super violent. But they don't have
• 1:14:17
  a lot of questions. We're filled with questions. So what
• 1:14:21
  are we missing here? That the next stage of being
• 1:14:26
  a human will have that we're not even considering now
• 1:14:29
  because it's not a part of our experience.
• 1:14:30
  Speaker 1: Like what's the asking question type of thing that we
• 1:14:34
  are not able to imagine? Yeah. And many of those
• 1:14:38
  types of things.
• 1:14:38
  Speaker 2: 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. Yeah.
• 1:14:49
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I think that's likely.
• 1:14:50
  Speaker 2: 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, we're close to the
• 1:15:06
  same age. So we grew up with answering machines. You
• 1:15:09
  probably remember the first cell phones. You probably got online
• 1:15:12
  and probably– when did you get online?
• 1:15:14
  Speaker 1: Like the early– Ninety-six.
• 1:15:16
  Speaker 2: Yeah, there you go. Yeah, see. I think for me
• 1:15:19
  it was 94. So we got to see all this happen.
• 1:15:26
  If we get to see the new version of humans
• 1:15:30
  in our lifetime, that would be like literally bonkers. What
• 1:15:34
  an amazing time to be alive if you really think
• 1:15:37
  about it. We're so fortunate because if you grew up
• 1:15:39
  between like 1700 and 1800, how much did shit change?
• 1:15:45
  1600 to 1700, would you make a better boat? Like
• 1:15:47
  what's different? Not a lot of different, man. Everybody kind
• 1:15:51
  of is the same for 100 years. And inside of
• 1:15:54
  our lifetime from the late 1960s for me to the
• 1:15:59
  early 70s for you, like in the amount of time
• 1:16:01
  that we've been alive, things have radically changed. Like really,
• 1:16:07
  really radically to the point where it's probably the biggest
• 1:16:10
  shift in human ingenuity and innovation that the world has
• 1:16:15
  ever seen. And we're just in the middle of it.
• 1:16:18
  And we might be in the middle of the next one,
• 1:16:20
  which literally allows us to see what the world looks
• 1:16:26
  like a thousand years from now because you're going to
• 1:16:27
  be alive.
• 1:16:28
  Speaker 1: I mean that's why it is now this full-time job
• 1:16:32
  just to monitor the situation.
• 1:16:34
  Speaker 2: How do you do that?
• 1:16:35
  Speaker 1: Well, you don't really. But you try to sort of–
• 1:16:41
  so I think the opportunity– so it used to be–
• 1:16:46
  like at least in my sphere of 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. People have
• 1:16:55
  been working on philosophical questions for thousands of years, and
• 1:17:00
  there doesn't seem to be any huge urgency. If they
• 1:17:04
  have been unsold for thousands of years, maybe if it
• 1:17:07
  takes another 500 or so. But I always thought of
• 1:17:10
  philosophy as having a deadline, meaning that at some point,
• 1:17:16
  we would develop smarter than human forms of intelligence, presumably AI,
• 1:17:21
  that could then do the philosophy much better than us.
• 1:17:23
  And so there was a limited period of time during
• 1:17:26
  which any advances I could contribute to would be meaningful
• 1:17:32
  and that it would then make sense on focusing on
• 1:17:34
  that subset of philosophical questions or general questions that we
• 1:17:38
  really need the answer to now as opposed to like,
• 1:17:41
  you know, 10, 20 years in the future when somebody
• 1:17:45
  else can do them better, like the machine minds. So
• 1:17:47
  that's kind of been a lens through which I have
• 1:17:50
  selected the things to work on. And now, of course,
• 1:17:52
  that deadline is moving closer. So there's less time remaining.
• 1:17:57
  And so my focus is increasingly drifting towards questions where
• 1:18:03
  it might be relevant to have the answer to now
• 1:18:05
  rather than a year or two from now.
• 1:18:07
  Speaker 2: You're almost like a cultural navigator, like a guy with
• 1:18:10
  a sextant at the the helm of a ship, looking
• 1:18:14
  at the constellations and going, I think we're in the
• 1:18:17
  right direction.
• 1:18:18
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but now we're sort of moving maybe close to
• 1:18:22
  harbor and you need to pay more attention to exactly
• 1:18:27
  how deep the rocks are and scan around you.
• 1:18:32
  Speaker 2: 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 1: Well, I mean, I take short timelines seriously with AI.
• 1:18:46
  I mean, for what we know, it could be like...
• 1:18:50
  like a year or two or three or four and
• 1:18:51
  probably a bit longer. But we're no longer at a
• 1:18:56
  point where we can be confident that we won't have
• 1:18:59
  super intelligence in just a few years. Like it could happen.
• 1:19:03
  Speaker 2: What is that? When you say that for the uninitiated,
• 1:19:06
  what do you mean by super intelligence? Well.
• 1:19:09
  Speaker 1: I guess we first have AGI, artificial general intelligence, AI
• 1:19:17
  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. So
• 1:19:28
  all technical, intellectual, common sense tasks, and then they would
• 1:19:33
  have robotics as well that can do all the physical stuff,
• 1:19:36
  not much later. And so this, yeah, so the timeline
• 1:19:42
  remains 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 designs even more
• 1:20:00
  smart AIs, right? Using its kind of super intelligent AI
• 1:20:05
  research capability and designing better chips and.
• 1:20:07
  Speaker 2: All of that.
• 1:20:09
  Speaker 1: So you might then have this like intelligence explosion where
• 1:20:13
  you go from something slightly greater than human level to
• 1:20:18
  some radical super intelligence that can then sort of invent
• 1:20:21
  whatever the remaining technologies are. Maybe there needs to be
• 1:20:23
  some trial and error and experiments in the physical world
• 1:20:25
  that slows things down a bit. But some smallish number,
• 1:20:28
  like a single digit number of years from super intelligence,
• 1:20:31
  I think you might have something that unlocks all of
• 1:20:33
  these like sci-fi level capabilities that we've talked about. I
• 1:20:40
  think that seems relatively plausible to me.
• 1:20:44
  Speaker 2: It seems inevitable. And my question is how does it
• 1:20:51
  announce itself? Does it send a mass text message to
• 1:20:54
  the whole world? Everybody's phone just starts like– you know
• 1:20:56
  when you have those amber alerts and your phone starts
• 1:20:59
  vibrating or when there's some sort of a storm warning?
• 1:21:03
  All of a sudden your phone goes off and then
• 1:21:05
  it alerts you to the fact that it's taken over.
• 1:21:08
  Speaker 1: Well, so here we don't really know. It's like this
• 1:21:11
  is very confusing, and we've never done this before, and
• 1:21:14
  so it's very hard to figure out how this is
• 1:21:17
  going to unfold. And maybe it's not even fixed yet.
• 1:21:20
  Maybe it depends a little bit on what we do
• 1:21:23
  and the extent to which different actors get their stuff together.
• 1:21:27
  Speaker 2: But, like, one, I guess.
• 1:21:35
  Speaker 1: One possible type of scenario is where things are just accelerating.
• 1:21:38
  There are more and more of these advances, model releases. Increasingly,
• 1:21:43
  there is automation of the research process in AI labs. Already,
• 1:21:49
  you have coding assistants that are really useful to people
• 1:21:53
  in AI labs. They're using them to write a lot
• 1:21:55
  of their software. Right now, you still need humans for
• 1:21:58
  the research taste and judgment. Sometimes, things get stuck and
• 1:22:03
  you need a human to kind of redirect them but
• 1:22:06
  more and more of that may get automated and then
• 1:22:12
  you have kind of new iterations of models being trained
• 1:22:18
  at a faster and faster clip they can do more
• 1:22:20
  and more stuff they start to automate increasing chunks of
• 1:22:29
  the economy so right now a lot of coding is
• 1:22:31
  automated but like other areas as well. Maybe they, they
• 1:22:35
  become drop-in virtual workers that, um, can do everything like
• 1:22:39
  a human could do with a remote connection, uh, initially.
• 1:22:44
  And then like you have people working on robotics, so
• 1:22:46
  then that would start to kicking. And then eventually just
• 1:22:49
  more and more of the action is, is run by
• 1:22:51
  these AI systems, one or more. Um, and, and they're
• 1:22:55
  kind of doing it at their timescale, which is speeding up. Um,
• 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 2: There's also the fear that America doesn't come up with
• 1:23:21
  it first.
• 1:23:23
  Speaker 1: This is our fear over here. Yeah, that's mostly a
• 1:23:25
  fear in America. In China, for example. Yeah, America comes
• 1:23:30
  up with it first, yeah.
• 1:23:31
  Speaker 2: I mean, it's really just America and China that are
• 1:23:33
  at the forefront of this race, right?
• 1:23:35
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:23:35
  Speaker 2: Russia a little bit, but not on the same level.
• 1:23:38
  Speaker 1: Not Russia. No?
• 1:23:39
  Speaker 2: Not Russia?
• 1:23:40
  Speaker 1: No.
• 1:23:40
  Speaker 2: Who else is it?
• 1:23:41
  Speaker 1: Did you see this last week?
• 1:23:43
  Speaker 2: Ford hiring 350 engineers after AI failed shows human value
• 1:23:49
  in AI era. What does that mean?
• 1:23:51
  Speaker 1: I tried to find the only one that didn't. I
• 1:23:53
  just did it.
• 1:23:54
  Speaker 2: They rehired a bunch of engineers they fired after their
• 1:23:57
  AI– wasn't matching the quality they needed. Oh, and this
• 1:24:01
  is Ford. That's interesting. They probably jumped the gun, you know?
• 1:24:07
  They probably fired them too quickly. And now these people
• 1:24:10
  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
  figures out how to do this just as well?
• 1:24:17
  Speaker 1: I mean, it's also possible that things, timelines could extend
• 1:24:23
  if like... One way that could happen is the progress
• 1:24:28
  we've seen in the last 10 years, which has been remarkable.
• 1:24:33
  It's to a substantial extent driven by the advances, the
• 1:24:38
  increase in compute that is being used to train and
• 1:24:41
  run these systems. It used to be that you had
• 1:24:45
  a cutting-edge AI system. If you were an academic running
• 1:24:48
  on your PC in your office, that was the amount
• 1:24:51
  of computing power that was applied to doing AI stuff.
• 1:24:55
  And now, of course, you have these kind of tens
• 1:24:57
  of billions of dollar data centers, like hundreds of megawatts.
• 1:25:02
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 1:25:03
  Speaker 1: 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,
• 1:25:18
  like you might not be able to keep increasing the
• 1:25:21
  amount of money you spend on it because like, You
• 1:25:25
  can go from like a thousand dollar PC to like
• 1:25:28
  a million dollars quite easily. And you can go from
• 1:25:30
  a million dollars to a billion dollars. And maybe you're
• 1:25:34
  spending on the order of a trillion dollars across the
• 1:25:37
  world to build data centers per year. But you can't
• 1:25:40
  really do like three orders of magnitude very easily there.
• 1:25:43
  There's like not a thousand trillion dollars to spend on it.
• 1:25:46
  So at some point that expenditure has to kind of
• 1:25:49
  slow down. So if we haven't achieved super intelligence by then,
• 1:25:52
  then maybe that would mean progress get slower if the
• 1:25:56
  main driver is the scale up of compute. Now, it
• 1:25:58
  is also true that some of the progress is driven
• 1:26:00
  by algorithmic advances, like just kind of clever algorithms. So
• 1:26:05
  that might continue. But if one driver stalls out, then
• 1:26:09
  that could result in faster progress. And then, of course,
• 1:26:13
  there is a possibility that the people who want to
• 1:26:18
  pause or regulate AI gain enough traction to kind of
• 1:26:21
  get regulatory inhibitions.
• 1:26:24
  Speaker 2: 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
  AI right now that are close?
• 1:26:33
  Speaker 1: Well, I mean those are the– Those are the two
• 1:26:35
  big ones? The big ones.
• 1:26:37
  Speaker 2: Is it possible that someone could sneak up on us
• 1:26:39
  and develop super intelligent AI first?
• 1:26:42
  Speaker 1: 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 U.S. and China, I'd say, like, U.S.
• 1:27:03
  currently has the edge.
• 1:27:06
  Speaker 2: What would happen if China got there first?
• 1:27:08
  Speaker 1: Well, I mean, part would depend on whether they had
• 1:27:12
  successfully aligned their AI. If they... it's unaligned, then I
• 1:27:17
  guess 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. So then in that scenario, maybe it makes
• 1:27:44
  some difference. who initiates it.
• 1:27:50
  Speaker 2: So right now the big players are– there's Google and
• 1:27:54
  there's OpenAI. There's all these different companies. When you say aligned,
• 1:27:59
  do they have to all be kind of on the
• 1:28:01
  same page or like when aligned, we're not going to
• 1:28:04
  be aligned if there's a bunch of corporations that are
• 1:28:06
  competing to come up with this first. So they have
• 1:28:09
  to be aligned in terms of the way they're programmed,
• 1:28:12
  that they're valuing human life and that they're valuing society
• 1:28:17
  like what do you mean by.
• 1:28:18
  Speaker 1: Well so i mean just the technical challenge of if
• 1:28:21
  you are 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 right are you technically able to
• 1:28:28
  get the ai to behave that way that you.
• 1:28:31
  Speaker 2: As the person who gets to decide well that's.
• 1:28:33
  Speaker 1: A separate question which is equally important maybe but different
• 1:28:37
  because that's not the technical like you can't just go
• 1:28:40
  to the whiteboard and write down some formula now you
• 1:28:42
  have that's like a political question ultimately right question of
• 1:28:45
  governance yes um so there you need you know political
• 1:28:49
  organization appeals to the best in human nature dialogues like
• 1:28:55
  checks and balances whatever stuff that might work in the
• 1:28:58
  political arena um To hope 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 2: 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, one of the
• 1:29:19
  first things I think of is what's the most money
• 1:29:21
  you can generate doing it? And what is the best
• 1:29:25
  way to generate the most amount of money? Like that's–
• 1:29:28
  They're going to 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 people think of immediately. And what's the best
• 1:29:46
  way to stop other people from competing with us?
• 1:29:49
  Speaker 1: Right. So that would be I think a lot of
• 1:29:55
  pressures and strains on whatever– governance mechanism exists at the
• 1:30:00
  time when superintelligence is developed.
• 1:30:05
  Speaker 2: So is this something that the technology is so far
• 1:30:09
  ahead– the potential for it to be so far ahead
• 1:30:12
  of our understanding of what it's going to be able
• 1:30:14
  to do that like making laws for that now, it's
• 1:30:16
  going to be very difficult to even explain to people?
• 1:30:20
  Like we need these laws and we need these guardrails
• 1:30:24
  in place now because here's what could happen. And that
• 1:30:28
  conversation is not really happening right now.
• 1:30:30
  Speaker 1: It is happening.
• 1:30:32
  Speaker 2: But is it happening politically?
• 1:30:34
  Speaker 1: It's starting to happen, yeah. It's been happening to an
• 1:30:38
  increasing extent politically and there have been various actions.
• 1:30:41
  Speaker 2: Like what actions?
• 1:30:43
  Speaker 1: Well, so a few years ago, for example, that was
• 1:30:45
  the whole export– regime imposed by the US on chips,
• 1:30:51
  the most advanced chips, where like China was cut out
• 1:30:54
  from being able to access the most advanced Nvidia chips
• 1:30:58
  and so forth. And that's kind of been modified, but
• 1:31:03
  that was motivated to a significant extent by trying to
• 1:31:06
  preserve AI edge that the US has.
• 1:31:10
  Speaker 2: Right, but that's like internationally. I mean, in terms of
• 1:31:12
  like being able to stop corporations from having the kind
• 1:31:18
  of power that this could provide them.
• 1:31:20
  Speaker 1: So then there have been various efforts that was like
• 1:31:23
  a proposition in California where there were various things. More recently,
• 1:31:28
  you saw the whole thing. I don't know if you
• 1:31:30
  followed it with the Mythos and Fable 5, the anthropic
• 1:31:36
  models that.
• 1:31:39
  Speaker 2: Were.
• 1:31:39
  Speaker 1: So Mythos has not been released. This is the most
• 1:31:41
  powerful model because it seems to have... significant cyber offense capabilities.
• 1:31:49
  It can easily detect vulnerabilities in software. And so Anthropic
• 1:31:53
  figured that rather than immediately making it available to everybody,
• 1:31:56
  maybe it would be better to first try to make
• 1:31:58
  it available to providers of critical software infrastructure, like big banks,
• 1:32:07
  so that they can patch up their systems. And then
• 1:32:15
  Fable 5 was a kind of restricted version of the
• 1:32:18
  mythos model, like the same underlying model, but with extra safeguards.
• 1:32:22
  It basically refused anything that remotely seemed like cyber hacking, programming,
• 1:32:30
  biological stuff, because maybe that would be bio. So it
• 1:32:34
  sort of drew a wide circle around anything that even
• 1:32:37
  remotely looked possibly dangerous, and it just refuses that. So
• 1:32:41
  that was released. But then after like a week or so,
• 1:32:46
  the administration imposed a kind of export restriction that prevented
• 1:32:53
  any non-U.S. citizen from using it. And that meant Anthropic
• 1:32:58
  had to cut it off for everybody because they didn't
• 1:33:00
  have a way in real time to verify who is
• 1:33:03
  a U.S. citizen or not. Oh, wow. So then it
• 1:33:06
  was like unavailable for several weeks afterwards. and intense negotiations
• 1:33:11
  behind the scenes and working to try to figure out,
• 1:33:14
  because allegedly it was possible to jailbreak it so that
• 1:33:17
  it sometimes gave some little assistance with some cyber, like
• 1:33:20
  finding vulnerabilities in code. And now recently it just became
• 1:33:25
  available again because they had reached some understanding with the
• 1:33:29
  government where it was deemed sufficiently safeguarded to be released.
• 1:33:35
  And now there is like, efforts underway to try to
• 1:33:38
  work out the framework because like in the future, you
• 1:33:40
  wouldn't want to do this on an ad hoc basis.
• 1:33:42
  Like somebody just decides this particular model for some unspecified reason.
• 1:33:46
  Like you want to have clear standards ideally, right? That
• 1:33:48
  applies to everybody, every company. So there's now some industry-wide
• 1:33:52
  effort to try to work with the government too. 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 were
• 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.
• 1:34:14
  So far, we haven't really seen any big impact on
• 1:34:16
  the labor market from AI. But once that starts to
• 1:34:21
  hit and you get maybe high levels of unemployment amongst
• 1:34:26
  white-collar workers. Imagine if you have millions and millions of
• 1:34:31
  people that have their university diplomas. They feel a sense
• 1:34:35
  of superiority and entitlement. They've gone through the whole process.
• 1:34:38
  They got their degree, and now they expect a well-paying job.
• 1:34:41
  And then there is no job for them. They've got
• 1:34:45
  nothing to do all day long but complain about AI.
• 1:34:50
  So you've got to have all these well-educated people who
• 1:34:52
  feel resentful and are going to say every possible bad
• 1:34:55
  thing about AI that could be said all day long
• 1:34:57
  and mobilize. There's a very powerful political constituency that will
• 1:35:01
  emerge from that. That's not even yet happened, but that
• 1:35:04
  will kind of add to all of these other grievances
• 1:35:09
  that people point to with AI. So I think there's
• 1:35:12
  going to be kind of significant political pressures for doing
• 1:35:17
  something about AI.
• 1:35:19
  Speaker 2: The key is getting ahead of it though. So how
• 1:35:23
  can people find– how can we see the vulnerabilities in
• 1:35:28
  advance of AI? and recognize like when this is going
• 1:35:31
  to– like if there is going to be a tipping
• 1:35:33
  point and a bunch of white-collar workers are going to
• 1:35:35
  be out of work and there's going to get to
• 1:35:37
  a point where we realize like this is coming. This
• 1:35:39
  is like three weeks from now. What do we do?
• 1:35:41
  Like what do they do?
• 1:35:42
  Speaker 1: 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 should be done 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 because there's so many unknowns. I think we
• 1:36:17
  need to sort of watch this closely as it happens
• 1:36:21
  and be ready to react quickly to issues that come
• 1:36:24
  up and hope that relevant people are like highly competent
• 1:36:30
  and well-motivated and are 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. If and when I have some clear
• 1:36:45
  insight as to some overall big directional push, I will
• 1:36:50
  let you know. But even basic questions, like for example,
• 1:36:57
  Do we want more government involvement or less government involvement?
• 1:37:01
  Do we want faster progress in AI or slower progress
• 1:37:05
  in AI?
• 1:37:09
  Speaker 2: I don't know.
• 1:37:09
  Speaker 1: It's not completely obvious to me.
• 1:37:15
  Speaker 2: 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
• 1:37:21
  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. Yeah.
• 1:37:46
  Speaker 1: So I'm not advocating an AI pause by contrast to
• 1:37:49
  a lot of some of my colleagues and friends and stuff.
• 1:37:52
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:37:54
  Speaker 1: I could see some scenario in which it would be
• 1:37:57
  helpful at some point to have a temporary slowdown of
• 1:38:02
  a few months maybe or a half a year or
• 1:38:04
  a year. Like if you imagine, you know, there are
• 1:38:06
  different companies, countries maybe racing to get there first.
• 1:38:09
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:38:10
  Speaker 1: And then eventually somebody figures out they basically have the
• 1:38:13
  system in place. They just need to like amp up,
• 1:38:16
  like run it for longer. They can sort of see
• 1:38:18
  that it will become super intelligent. They hope it's aligned. Yeah.
• 1:38:22
  It might be very helpful in that situation to have
• 1:38:25
  a few extra months just to sort of double check
• 1:38:28
  all your safeguards. And rather than immediately cranking all the
• 1:38:31
  knobs up to 11, like maybe sort of do it
• 1:38:34
  a little bit incrementally, watch what happens, study it, then
• 1:38:37
  crank it up a little bit more. I just think
• 1:38:40
  you might gain some extra safety if you have a
• 1:38:41
  few extra months there, like the pressures on these people
• 1:38:44
  in the lab.
• 1:38:46
  Speaker 2: That makes sense.
• 1:38:46
  Speaker 1: If it's all going to happen over a week, like,
• 1:38:48
  it's just going to be, this is the first time
• 1:38:49
  we ever do this hugely complex thing. It has to
• 1:38:51
  be right. We never get a second chance. Just being
• 1:38:54
  able to, like, even just being able to sleep properly for, like,
• 1:38:57
  between your work sessions and, like, having, you know, a
• 1:39:01
  weekend to mull things over. Like, just that kind of human,
• 1:39:05
  humans don't really operate on, well, in these, like, super
• 1:39:10
  short timelines. So I think a short process If you
• 1:39:14
  could be sure that the pause would in fact be
• 1:39:16
  limited and short and then it would be lifted, I
• 1:39:19
  think that could be quite useful to have if it
• 1:39:22
  could also be timed to be at the right moment
• 1:39:25
  and well implemented.
• 1:39:26
  Speaker 2: But wouldn't the problem be espionage first of all?
• 1:39:29
  Speaker 1: That's one issue with it.
• 1:39:30
  Speaker 2: 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 people take off and move to.
• 1:39:42
  Speaker 1: Yeah, there are various downsides to pulsing. So one is
• 1:39:48
  that there are competitors who just even without espionage are
• 1:39:52
  catching up. Another is it's not as if the world
• 1:39:57
  is safe without AI. Right. There are other, like, the
• 1:40:05
  natural hazards, I think they are very small, like supervolcanoes
• 1:40:07
  and stuff like that on the relevant timescales.
• 1:40:09
  Speaker 2: Until they're not.
• 1:40:10
  Speaker 1: Well, I mean, we've survived for hundreds of thousands of years, right?
• 1:40:14
  Speaker 2: We're almost wiped out entirely 70,000 years ago.
• 1:40:16
  Speaker 1: Yeah, well, that's a long time ago.
• 1:40:18
  Speaker 2: Is it, though?
• 1:40:20
  Speaker 1: Not if it happens tomorrow, it's not. Well, if something
• 1:40:23
  hasn't done us in in that long a time, probably
• 1:40:26
  it's not going to do us in within the next
• 1:40:28
  10 years.
• 1:40:28
  Speaker 2: Boy, you're more optimistic than me.
• 1:40:30
  Speaker 1: Well, it's just based on the actual empirics of these
• 1:40:33
  natural catastrophes. By contrast, I would say there are other
• 1:40:36
  hazards that are not low. I mean, we have rapid
• 1:40:41
  advances in synthetic biology, some of them driven or enabled
• 1:40:45
  maybe even by already AI progress that has already taken place,
• 1:40:52
  like that can start to assist with this, and more
• 1:40:54
  just happening independently. So you get increasing risks from synthetic biology.
• 1:40:59
  We still have the nuclear arsenals, right, kind of existing. We,
• 1:41:05
  I think, have gotten a little bit complacent about the
• 1:41:07
  risks of nuclear war. and various other things as well.
• 1:41:15
  So I think there's like a background level of existential
• 1:41:18
  risk that humanity faces in the absence of super intolerance
• 1:41:21
  that probably is growing as well. So you don't want
• 1:41:24
  to wait so long that you don't even get the
• 1:41:26
  chance to roll the dice with AI because you destroyed
• 1:41:29
  yourself before you even got to that point. It would
• 1:41:32
  kind of be sad.
• 1:41:35
  Speaker 2: And then....
• 1:41:37
  Speaker 1: Then also, I mean, I think there is like some
• 1:41:39
  risk if you set up a pause infrastructure that what's
• 1:41:43
  initially meant to be a temporary thing becomes permanent. Like
• 1:41:47
  they say there's nothing more permanent than a temporary government program.
• 1:41:51
  So if you set up the infrastructure to actually control this,
• 1:41:53
  ideally at a 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 still prove that the air will be safe. So
• 1:42:02
  you have all these people now whose job it is
• 1:42:04
  to regulate it and like maybe they– So it could
• 1:42:08
  become kind of frozen in and become permanent. And then
• 1:42:12
  also the delay benefits of this. So if you think, what,
• 1:42:20
  like 65 million people die every year, that's a lot
• 1:42:26
  of human lives. That's like one 9-11 every 25 minutes.
• 1:42:33
  Just kind of boom.
• 1:42:35
  Speaker 2: That's a way to look at it. Wow.
• 1:42:37
  Speaker 1: And so there is a certain urgency. If there is
• 1:42:39
  something that somehow could have a chance to fix this,
• 1:42:45
  like all the suffering that is happening in the world,
• 1:42:47
  like aside from the people dying, like all the people
• 1:42:50
  who are bereaved, right, who lost their loved one, and
• 1:42:53
  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 and, like,
• 1:43:02
  the suicidal depression and the animals in the animal factories
• 1:43:06
  that are, like, spending it. There's just like this, I think,
• 1:43:09
  moral urgency that if there is a hope that getting
• 1:43:13
  AI right could fix this, then you don't want to
• 1:43:15
  wait unnecessarily long because every day is just this massive horror.
• 1:43:21
  So I think there are many reasons for why you
• 1:43:23
  wouldn't want unnecessary or excessive delays in developing AI. But
• 1:43:28
  there is a trade-off because if we can make more
• 1:43:31
  progress on ai safety and alignment and get our act
• 1:43:33
  together a little bit before we take the plunge like
• 1:43:35
  that's also worth quite a lot.
• 1:43:40
  Speaker 2: 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 to in my mind it seems like we're
• 1:43:53
  like 24 months away from something really insane i.
• 1:43:56
  Speaker 1: Think it could be could be yeah it could be
• 1:43:58
  48 months it could be i mean we don't we
• 1:44:00
  don't It could be.
• 1:44:02
  Speaker 2: Yeah, who knows? But there's something happening really quickly. You know,
• 1:44:05
  when I talked to Elon about Grok, he said it
• 1:44:09
  shocks us like every couple weeks. We're like, how is
• 1:44:13
  it doing this? How is it so fast? How is
• 1:44:15
  it advancing so quickly? And one day, cat's going to
• 1:44:21
  be out of the bag and there's not going to
• 1:44:22
  be any way to stop it. Like if the power
• 1:44:24
  went out right now, if there was some sort of
• 1:44:26
  a massive solar flare that killed our power grids and
• 1:44:31
  all computer hard drives got fried and we had to
• 1:44:34
  restart from now, like we would have to rebuild society, right?
• 1:44:40
  But if we get to the point where this thing
• 1:44:43
  understands what would cause that, how to prevent that, how
• 1:44:46
  to make sure that never happens, much better power supply,
• 1:44:50
  much better allocation of resources, much better batteries, much better
• 1:44:56
  redundant data systems where you never have to worry about
• 1:45:01
  Hard drives crashing and you never have to worry about
• 1:45:04
  any of these problems. Like any information you have now
• 1:45:06
  will be secure. And then understanding of natural disasters will
• 1:45:10
  actually drill into this volcano and it never goes off.
• 1:45:14
  Like there's going to be a few things that they're
• 1:45:15
  going to figure out through AI that's going to prevent
• 1:45:18
  a lot of the things that have probably wiped out
• 1:45:20
  enormous swaths of people. I mean imagine if we could
• 1:45:22
  just actually see asteroids coming, all of them, and know
• 1:45:25
  how to divert them instantaneously. We have a bunch of
• 1:45:30
  ideas right now on how to do it, right? Like
• 1:45:32
  coding them.
• 1:45:32
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:45:34
  Speaker 2: With something that changes the aerodynamics of them.
• 1:45:37
  Speaker 1: I think that one would be relatively easy. Yeah. Even
• 1:45:39
  we could figure out to do that, I think.
• 1:45:42
  Speaker 2: 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. And then you put a shield
• 1:45:51
  over the earth and you never have to worry about
• 1:45:52
  it ever. The shield's powered by the sun. So you
• 1:45:55
  have ultimate power. And you never have to worry about
• 1:45:58
  being hit by a Manhattan-sized asteroid.
• 1:46:01
  Speaker 1: 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
  On the one hand, you want to be able to
• 1:46:21
  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
  memetic or internal evolutionary development. So how to sort of
• 1:46:50
  grow up safely in this world where you have unlocked
• 1:46:55
  all kinds of new technological 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 we might invent
• 1:47:12
  new technologies that are dangerous we might invent new like
• 1:47:15
  drugs that are super addictive once you invent them you
• 1:47:18
  try them and then you're addicted you never want to
• 1:47:21
  yeah there could be other like some some crazy ideology
• 1:47:24
  that once it takes.
• 1:47:25
  Speaker 2: Hold you I'm glad you brought that up because that's
• 1:47:29
  one of the major fears that a lot of people
• 1:47:31
  have is that human beings will develop ideologies based around AI,
• 1:47:36
  that there will be like an AI god that someone develops.
• 1:47:41
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and I mean I think– in fact, I would
• 1:47:43
  add that to the list of– I mentioned nuclear and
• 1:47:46
  bioterrorist risk as like background existential risks. Like another is
• 1:47:53
  like some form of insanity, like collective insanity I feel.
• 1:47:57
  Our civilizational sanity already is kind of a little bit precarious.
• 1:48:04
  I think we're just kind of maybe barely holding ourselves together.
• 1:48:08
  And it's amazing how well the world functions despite how
• 1:48:12
  crazy people are and how much they loathe their opponents
• 1:48:15
  and so forth. And we still managed to somehow get
• 1:48:17
  it to work.
• 1:48:18
  Speaker 2: There's also manipulation of the zeitgeist that's clearly being done
• 1:48:22
  by bots. So you've got a bunch of people online
• 1:48:26
  that are having arguments on Twitter and they're not even
• 1:48:29
  talking to people. There's a bunch of ideas that are
• 1:48:31
  being pushed out on Twitter and a lot of these
• 1:48:34
  social media platforms. It's not even human beings tweeting about it.
• 1:48:38
  It's not. There's algorithms. There's AI. There's people that are
• 1:48:42
  hired to do it. There's people that are working for
• 1:48:45
  certain organizations that are hired to muddy up the waters,
• 1:48:49
  gaslight people, create problems, have people argue with each other.
• 1:48:53
  And so it's like if AI recognizes how easy it
• 1:48:58
  is to manipulate people, do whatever it wants, that's a
• 1:49:01
  fear as well. Yeah.
• 1:49:03
  Speaker 1: So whenever you change the basic parameters of sort of
• 1:49:07
  the– social, cultural, political discourse, new dynamics will emerge. And
• 1:49:18
  we don't have the kind of social science that is
• 1:49:21
  able to predict what happens if you change some of
• 1:49:23
  these knobs. So we've seen in the past, like you invent,
• 1:49:26
  let's go all the way back. Like somebody invents writing. Okay.
• 1:49:30
  So that turns out to have had a huge effect.
• 1:49:33
  Not just on people writing, like, literature and stuff, but, like,
• 1:49:36
  on political systems. You could now have states that could
• 1:49:39
  keep tax records, right? So you could have larger political
• 1:49:42
  units with writing, and then they can hire standing armies,
• 1:49:47
  and now you have, like, large-scale war, you have social stratification,
• 1:49:51
  you could have, like, the ruler of a large area
• 1:49:53
  could have, you know, enormous wealth, and you could have
• 1:49:56
  a soldier caste that, like, protects against internal and external. So, like,
• 1:50:00
  just the way that human societies are politically organized changes
• 1:50:04
  as a result of this change in the rules of
• 1:50:08
  communication when you can have written texts, right? And then
• 1:50:10
  you have the printing press. Again, we're like 100 years
• 1:50:14
  of religious wars in Europe, like reformation and all of
• 1:50:17
  this stuff is possibly. And then like forms of democracy
• 1:50:21
  later on also coming out of this and the scientific revolution.
• 1:50:27
  Then you have like mass media in the last century
• 1:50:29
  with like radio and stuff and you have kind of
• 1:50:31
  demagogues that take advantage of being able to simultaneously talk
• 1:50:34
  to millions of people, because that was never possible before, right?
• 1:50:38
  You could have some charismatic kind of guy who's like
• 1:50:41
  rallies up the whole nation and new ideologies become memetically
• 1:50:46
  fit in that situation that might never have, if it
• 1:50:48
  were people writing kind of letters to the editor, like
• 1:50:53
  it's kind of a different type of idea that works
• 1:50:55
  there than if you're giving a kind of stump speech
• 1:50:57
  that goes out to millions simultaneously. 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.
• 1:51:07
  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 unknown, unknowable way, the way that... social discourse
• 1:51:24
  pans out. For any one of these, I guess it
• 1:51:26
  could turn out to be a lot better. We could
• 1:51:28
  become more informed having AI advisors. I think that's a
• 1:51:31
  fairly likely scenario, but it's also possible somehow the dynamics
• 1:51:34
  shape out in a different way and we kind of
• 1:51:36
  go collectively insane in some way.
• 1:51:39
  Speaker 2: Back to the whitewater raft.
• 1:51:42
  Speaker 1: White to backwater raft, yes. And it all becomes kind
• 1:51:45
  of totalitarian or we sort of fragment into like political
• 1:51:49
  warring tribes or We become kind of completely unhinged. Every
• 1:51:53
  one of us becomes convinced of their own little nutty
• 1:51:56
  theory that they then, like their AI or feed, just
• 1:51:59
  serves them more material to kind of fuel their conviction.
• 1:52:02
  There are different ways in which this could go badly.
• 1:52:06
  But don't you.
• 1:52:07
  Speaker 2: Think even if that happens, ultimately the progress of AI
• 1:52:11
  won't stop? And so, again, I keep going back to
• 1:52:17
  this thing, but I think this is really what it is,
• 1:52:20
  is we have to change. Like what it means to
• 1:52:22
  be a person. All those things are only problems if
• 1:52:25
  people stay what we are now, which is territorial primates
• 1:52:29
  with desire to possess material goods for some strange reason
• 1:52:34
  even though we're a finite life form. If all that changes,
• 1:52:37
  if we change what it means to be a person,
• 1:52:40
  which seems inevitable, then it won't matter. If we all–
• 1:52:46
  if we could figure out a way– To literally engineer
• 1:52:52
  out all of the issues that humans have with greed
• 1:52:55
  and violence and all the different things that trouble society.
• 1:52:59
  If the desire for that is no longer a part
• 1:53:02
  of being a person, which is– that's doable. That seems
• 1:53:07
  like if we're going to continue to evolve past Australopithecus
• 1:53:12
  to Homo sapien 2026, if we continue the same amount
• 1:53:16
  of time in the future– We probably won't be like
• 1:53:19
  that anymore. The best versions of people aren't people that
• 1:53:22
  want to steal your house and steal your land and
• 1:53:24
  shoot you and take your resources. The best people are
• 1:53:28
  the people that contribute and they're interesting and they make
• 1:53:30
  you excited to be around them and you like it.
• 1:53:34
  If that keeps going on and if that is aided
• 1:53:37
  by technology, if we recognize that there's actual patterns of
• 1:53:41
  human thinking and behavior that can be changed and that
• 1:53:46
  if we all agree to– subscribe to this algorithm, to
• 1:53:49
  connect to this computer program, connect to this external device,
• 1:53:54
  or maybe not even external, maybe it's internal, that allows
• 1:53:58
  us to communicate with each other telepathically. All that changes,
• 1:54:04
  and then it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if there's
• 1:54:07
  any guardrails for AI or not, because we're not the
• 1:54:09
  same thing anymore. All the problem, the worry that we
• 1:54:12
  have about AI, the worry we have about power manipulation
• 1:54:16
  and the ability to influence people all that kind of
• 1:54:20
  goes away if people don't behave the way they behave.
• 1:54:23
  Speaker 3: Currently well I guess here is one difference with your
• 1:54:29
  like white water rafting metaphor that I saw the one
• 1:54:33
  in that metaphor it's kind of we need to hang
• 1:54:36
  on like there's a risk we could smash ourselves on
• 1:54:38
  the rock but if we don't do that then there's
• 1:54:40
  kind of one way we end up right downstream we
• 1:54:43
  get up in a nice lake yeah But I think
• 1:54:46
  in reality, what might also be the case, that in
• 1:54:49
  addition to trying to not smash ourselves on the rock,
• 1:54:51
  there might be places where the choices we make affect
• 1:54:55
  the ultimate destination.
• 1:54:58
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 1:54:59
  Speaker 2: Go left or go right.
• 1:55:00
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Which stream do you follow? Maybe a multi... Yeah.
• 1:55:04
  And where, like, if you steer in one direction, you
• 1:55:08
  might end up in one place ultimately, in some sort
• 1:55:10
  of 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
  paperclip maximizing AI or maybe that just everything is paperclip.
• 1:55:26
  So going a third way, maybe you have like a
• 1:55:28
  totalitarian system with like a small elite on top and
• 1:55:32
  everybody else.
• 1:55:34
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:55:34
  Speaker 1: Or just sci-fi movie. Yeah. And there are many more
• 1:55:38
  possibilities and maybe some that kind of we would, think
• 1:55:42
  would look kind of good if we chose now but
• 1:55:44
  then in reality they have some hidden flaw that we
• 1:55:47
  didn't think of so if we chose those it would
• 1:55:49
  sort of be a mistake and then maybe others that
• 1:55:51
  don't look that appealing to us now if we just
• 1:55:54
  presented them in a brochure to you like but then
• 1:55:56
  actually if you thought hard about it maybe you would
• 1:55:58
  realize that actually would be a really nice place to
• 1:56:01
  live because like in the current world there are places
• 1:56:04
  that are nice to visit that are interesting but then
• 1:56:07
  those are not necessarily the same places we would want
• 1:56:09
  to live and raise a kid right so there's There
• 1:56:12
  are like novels and movies that are really fun to watch,
• 1:56:15
  but you wouldn't want to live in those worlds. So
• 1:56:17
  there's a difference between the kind of what makes for
• 1:56:19
  the good, interesting story and the place we actually want
• 1:56:21
  to spend the rest of your life. And so I
• 1:56:24
  think there would be possibly a lot of opportunities to
• 1:56:26
  make foolish choices or unwise choices or conflicts that sort
• 1:56:32
  of thwarts the process and makes us end up, not
• 1:56:36
  just that we go extinct before we reach there, but
• 1:56:38
  that the dare that we reach might depend on the
• 1:56:40
  level of wisdom and kindness that we have during the process.
• 1:56:44
  Speaker 2: And there's always unintended 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, it's certainly when,
• 1:56:55
  whenever we're dealing with nature, like whenever they've brought in
• 1:56:58
  invasive species to handle other invasive species, it always a
• 1:57:02
  giant disaster, you know?
• 1:57:04
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:57:06
  Speaker 2: Always. There's always unintended consequences. Like, Oh, Now you have
• 1:57:10
  100 million frogs. Who's telling us about that? Was it
• 1:57:13
  Ali Sadiq that was telling us about the frogs? About
• 1:57:19
  they brought in– what did they bring in? I forget
• 1:57:23
  what the invasive species was. They brought in this one
• 1:57:27
  species to kill another species and the problem, they didn't
• 1:57:29
  realize that that species had been– it was like coyotes
• 1:57:33
  or– I forget what it was. It was Guam. What
• 1:57:36
  did they get rid of? Whatever it was, they got
• 1:57:41
  rid of this thing that had been killing the frogs.
• 1:57:44
  So then they had toads, right? Was it toads? So
• 1:57:48
  they had millions of these things that were like all
• 1:57:50
  over the highway. So you drive on them. You just
• 1:57:52
  squash them everywhere you go because there was nothing controlling
• 1:57:55
  the population of these things anymore. It's like unintended consequences
• 1:58:00
  of– because we're very short-sighted. Even in our ability to
• 1:58:06
  be contemplative about what the possibility of the future is.
• 1:58:10
  When 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.
• 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
• 1:58:27
  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 bang button that some scientist invents?
• 1:58:40
  Speaker 1: Yeah. So we are a little bit like, yeah, it's,
• 1:58:43
  I don't know, the different analogies one might reach for.
• 1:58:46
  But I mean, I guess like, like say you're on
• 1:58:50
  a plane and then like the pilot has passed out
• 1:58:53
  or had a heart attack or something. Now it's like
• 1:58:55
  we passengers somehow have to I don't know, figure out
• 1:58:59
  how to do the, run the controls.
• 1:59:02
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:59:02
  Speaker 1: We're not really, I mean, you have to still try
• 1:59:05
  to make your best, right? But then add to that
• 1:59:07
  that all the passengers are fighting amongst each other. Each
• 1:59:10
  one thinks they are the guy who should control the, like,
• 1:59:13
  they're all convinced that they are the superior person to
• 1:59:17
  try to land the plane. So, in addition to trying
• 1:59:20
  to figure out how the controls work, they are, like,
• 1:59:22
  actually having a big fist fight in the cockpit as
• 1:59:24
  well and somebody is, like, dragging somebody else away and there's, like, the,
• 1:59:28
  the kind of monkey tribe that is the current state
• 1:59:30
  of the world here, and we're trying to shepherd, like,
• 1:59:34
  this ship of humanity into utopia.
• 1:59:38
  Speaker 2: It's... Yeah.
• 1:59:41
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's an interesting... It's Dr.
• 1:59:43
  Speaker 2: Strangelove on steroids.
• 1:59:46
  Speaker 1: But that's it. We might only have to, like, get it...
• 1:59:50
  At some point, we should be able to hand over, like...
• 1:59:57
  Once you have a sufficiently good AI, we maybe get
• 2:00:00
  assistance from that point on.
• 2:00:02
  Speaker 2: I think the first thing that it's going to take
• 2:00:05
  over is government. We're going to realize how unbelievably inefficient
• 2:00:10
  the government is at doing almost everything and how much
• 2:00:14
  of the money that gets allocated is fraud and waste.
• 2:00:18
  If you allow AI to sort through that and develop
• 2:00:21
  much more efficient pathways to controlling and some.
• 2:00:26
  Speaker 1: People would not want to see that.
• 2:00:29
  Speaker 2: Exactly that's going to be a problem but if we
• 2:00:31
  get to the point where there's some sort of um
• 2:00:36
  some sort of a hive mind possibility some sort of
• 2:00:39
  uh i mean one of the things that elon said
• 2:00:42
  that i thought was really fascinating he said you're going
• 2:00:44
  to be able to talk without words well if we're
• 2:00:48
  able to talk without words like does that eventually get
• 2:00:50
  to the point we could read minds could we is
• 2:00:53
  is Is thought and is communication no longer verbal? It's
• 2:00:58
  no longer sounds. So right now we associate sounds that
• 2:01:02
  I'm making where you know what words I'm using, what
• 2:01:05
  I'm referencing, and we get a certain understanding of what
• 2:01:08
  each other is trying to say. But what if that's
• 2:01:10
  just clunky and that's silly? And what if instead of
• 2:01:15
  a scroll that you leave in a cave somewhere, now
• 2:01:19
  you have a movie that you can watch, like something
• 2:01:22
  much more engrossing and much more– Much more powerful in
• 2:01:26
  that this is what human communication becomes. It doesn't– and
• 2:01:31
  maybe this is why the greys don't have mouths. We
• 2:01:34
  move away from sounds because right now what we figured
• 2:01:37
  out is like sort of like duct tape. We're communicating.
• 2:01:42
  We kind of patched it up. We figured out something.
• 2:01:44
  We're just going to use noises we make. Well, we
• 2:01:47
  have different noises here than the people that live on
• 2:01:49
  this island. They have totally different noises. I don't know
• 2:01:51
  what the fuck they're saying. And then you have people
• 2:01:52
  on the other side of the world, totally different noises.
• 2:01:55
  So Tower of Babel 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
• 2:02:08
  understanding and that it's no longer based on language. It's
• 2:02:13
  no longer based on this is a transistor. This is
• 2:02:17
  a coffee mug. Instead– It's a complete understanding of each
• 2:02:21
  individual thing that we're discussing. Everything– you know what it is.
• 2:02:25
  You understand what it is without it having to have
• 2:02:27
  a noise associated with it.
• 2:02:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean I guess the cybersecurity implications are significant
• 2:02:34
  if you are giving direct access to other people to
• 2:02:37
  transmit signals to your brain in a high bandwidth way.
• 2:02:42
  That is not just words kind of that– It's almost
• 2:02:46
  like you heard them even though there's no sound in
• 2:02:48
  your ear. But if it's like actually directly kind of
• 2:02:51
  interfacing in a high bandwidth way with your neural network.
• 2:02:54
  Speaker 2: Also, encryption's 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 zeros somewhere essentially, right? It's all bank accounts.
• 2:03:14
  It's like we're not on a gold standard anymore. So
• 2:03:18
  what if that bottleneck– it's an information bottleneck. Like someone
• 2:03:22
  is preventing you from going into these places and getting
• 2:03:26
  these ones and zeros and transferring it to your place.
• 2:03:30
  But what if that is all– what if computing power
• 2:03:33
  gets to the point where AI gets to the point
• 2:03:34
  where those boundaries are nonsense now? All encryption is instantaneously decoded.
• 2:03:41
  Speaker 1: 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,
• 2:03:56
  you could use like a one-time pad, which would enable
• 2:04:00
  you to encrypt things in a way that is unbreakable.
• 2:04:04
  Speaker 2: 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,
• 2:04:10
  that might be the first thing to go. It would
• 2:04:13
  be like the ultimate socialism.
• 2:04:14
  Speaker 1: That's where you really probably would want encryption, right? If
• 2:04:16
  you're going to transmit thoughts to me. Oh, yeah. Like
• 2:04:19
  you don't want sort of have a– Oh.
• 2:04:21
  Speaker 2: You don't want some asshole constantly in your head, your
• 2:04:23
  next-door neighbor, just poking you and prodding you. Yeah. But
• 2:04:27
  you would hope that along with this technology becomes like
• 2:04:32
  a general state of enlightenment that the human beings achieve
• 2:04:36
  where that's no longer the kind of behavior that we
• 2:04:38
  indulge in.
• 2:04:40
  Speaker 1: Which behavior do we no longer enjoy?
• 2:04:41
  Speaker 2: Annoying each other.
• 2:04:42
  Speaker 1: Annoying each other.
• 2:04:43
  Speaker 2: Stealing each other's money. That kind of stuff.
• 2:04:46
  Speaker 1: But then, yeah, I guess we go back to this
• 2:04:48
  question of the utopian condition.
• 2:04:49
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 2:04:50
  Speaker 1: So 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 knee is bad.
• 2:05:05
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 2:05:07
  Speaker 1: Yet, if you sort of imagine removing all of those things,
• 2:05:10
  then that changes the human condition quite profoundly. And to
• 2:05:14
  some people, it would feel kind of maybe or appear
• 2:05:17
  flavorless or sort of if there is no tension, no conflict,
• 2:05:23
  no bruised ego. It might still be good, but it
• 2:05:29
  does force us to sort of– I think it would
• 2:05:31
  be a rather fundamentally different thing that we would be
• 2:05:34
  metamorphosing into. if we went all the way in that direction,
• 2:05:37
  which ultimately might be right, but it would require us
• 2:05:41
  to kind of find new ways of realizing whatever values
• 2:05:44
  are imperfectly realized in the current world through conflict and
• 2:05:48
  competition and pain. Like some people get the motivation from
• 2:05:52
  painful failure. And so if you get rid of the
• 2:05:54
  pain from failure, then you'd need some other motivation, like
• 2:05:59
  some other thing that drives you on, which there could be,
• 2:06:01
  like maybe it's just a love of achievement and you
• 2:06:03
  feel kind of, neutral are just less happy when you fail.
• 2:06:06
  But you would still need something that kind of preserves
• 2:06:10
  whatever structure it is that we think is valuable in
• 2:06:13
  the current human condition. Unless you go all the way
• 2:06:16
  to sort of radical hedonism and think the future is
• 2:06:19
  best if we were all just kind of floating in
• 2:06:22
  some kind of drug-induced euphoria as blobs that experienced immense
• 2:06:27
  pleasure but had no real texture in our experiences, didn't
• 2:06:32
  engage in activities and didn't interact with each other. Like
• 2:06:36
  there's like a philosophical view where ultimately pleasure is the
• 2:06:39
  only thing that matters and the minimization of suffering. So
• 2:06:42
  if that's your axiology, then it's relatively easy to see
• 2:06:46
  then how a technological maturity, you would achieve a sort
• 2:06:49
  of optimal state. But if you have a more complex
• 2:06:52
  value system where maybe pleasure is one good thing, maybe
• 2:06:55
  really important, but there are also other things like appreciating beauty,
• 2:06:59
  you know, true friendship, courage, achievement. And ideally, you'd want
• 2:07:04
  a future that includes all of these things. Then you
• 2:07:07
  need to do a little bit more sort of design
• 2:07:09
  work to figure out a way to combine them all
• 2:07:12
  in a meaningful way.
• 2:07:14
  Speaker 2: But this all comes back to our idea of human meaning,
• 2:07:17
  what's important to humans, our finite 100-year lifespan adoption of
• 2:07:22
  this concept of meaning. But the black hole doesn't give
• 2:07:25
  a shit about human meaning. And it's going to be
• 2:07:28
  around a lot longer than us. And it's got a
• 2:07:31
  lot more power than us and it's doing a lot
• 2:07:33
  more change than us and we want to think that
• 2:07:36
  we're more important than black holes.
• 2:07:39
  Speaker 1: Yeah I mean because we are I think we are
• 2:07:42
  I mean to us yeah to us.
• 2:07:45
  Speaker 2: 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 like what will ultimately become is it
• 2:07:53
  is it motivate us to continue to progress.
• 2:07:58
  Speaker 1: Well so I think like at technological maturity, there are
• 2:08:01
  certainly forms of purpose that you could have. You could
• 2:08:04
  have 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. So maybe you set yourself
• 2:08:15
  the goal, I'm going to get this little white ball
• 2:08:18
  into a sequence of 18 holes. And not only that,
• 2:08:23
  but in order to achieve this goal, it's part of
• 2:08:25
  the goal that I'm only allowed to use this very
• 2:08:28
  inconvenient method. I can hit the ball with a club, right?
• 2:08:32
  Much easier to just pick it up and put it
• 2:08:34
  in each hole successively, but that doesn't count as being successful.
• 2:08:39
  So you could make up this goal, pretty arbitrary. Now,
• 2:08:43
  once you have that goal, then you now have a
• 2:08:45
  reason to try hard, to concentrate, to perfect your swing,
• 2:08:49
  and you can play golf. So the goal enables you
• 2:08:52
  to do this activity of golf playing, which maybe you
• 2:08:54
  find fun or worthwhile or meaningful.
• 2:08:58
  Speaker 2: And the reason why you find it meaningful is because
• 2:09:00
  it's difficult to do.
• 2:09:02
  Speaker 1: 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 an activity.
• 2:09:17
  Speaker 2: Now we're back in the world of Half-Life. Now we're
• 2:09:21
  back in a video game. Now we're also in the simulation.
• 2:09:24
  This is going to be your artificial goal.
• 2:09:27
  Speaker 1: And you could imagine, I think, maybe we shouldn't think
• 2:09:30
  of video games here, but it could be much like
• 2:09:32
  games we can't even imagine. It could be like society-wide
• 2:09:36
  games that last for 20 years that involve all kinds
• 2:09:39
  of multimodal things and little groups that work together to
• 2:09:43
  like come up with new ways of creatively. And so
• 2:09:49
  in that broad sense of kind of things we do
• 2:09:51
  for their own sake, I think game playing could be,
• 2:09:54
  and it's like a lot of what children do, they're
• 2:09:56
  kind of for curiosity and spend a lot of their
• 2:09:57
  time playing games and we might all be like kids again.
• 2:10:00
  What might be in Shorter Supply is sort of natural purpose,
• 2:10:05
  like purposes which... we don't just arbitrarily make up in
• 2:10:11
  order to have a purpose, but that they're sort of
• 2:10:12
  given to us. 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.
• 2:10:23
  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're, 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
  there are various things that you have reason to do
• 2:10:44
  because there are real negative consequences if you fail to
• 2:10:46
  do them. And a lot of our lives is structured
• 2:10:48
  by these natural purposes. At a societal level, there is
• 2:10:51
  a whole bunch of things we need to do together, right?
• 2:10:54
  In this future world, maybe there would be many fewer
• 2:10:57
  of those natural purposes because for any one of them,
• 2:10:59
  you could just ask the AI to sort it out.
• 2:11:02
  And so the artificial purposes would be a larger chunk.
• 2:11:04
  It's interesting to think, are there any natural purposes that
• 2:11:07
  would survive to technological maturity? Like any things that we
• 2:11:11
  still have sort of instrumental reasons that we need to
• 2:11:14
  do ourselves. And I think there might be a few,
• 2:11:19
  but they are more subtle. They might not strike us
• 2:11:21
  currently as very important, but it's one of those things where, like,
• 2:11:29
  you know, that During the day, if you're outside, you
• 2:11:32
  can't see the stars, right? It's not because they're not there.
• 2:11:36
  It's because there's so much light that they are sort
• 2:11:39
  of blotted out. But at night, when the stronger light
• 2:11:45
  from the sun is absent, you can see these fainter lights.
• 2:11:47
  I think similarly in this future, there might be one
• 2:11:52
  sort of urgent screaming moral values of immediately pressing practical
• 2:11:56
  concern go away you might be able to perceive a
• 2:11:58
  whole constellation of these more subtle values that we are
• 2:12:01
  blind to currently so take the value of take the
• 2:12:04
  value of like i don't know like some like honoring
• 2:12:06
  uh your forebears so right now it doesn't seem i
• 2:12:11
  mean maybe it's nice sometimes to remember your your past
• 2:12:15
  parents or some historical hero who did something good that
• 2:12:18
  benefited humanity, right? But it's not the main thing that you're...
• 2:12:23
  Maybe that would be a bigger thing if there was
• 2:12:25
  nothing else you needed to do. Maybe you could actually
• 2:12:27
  spend serious time or spiritual quests. Even for people who
• 2:12:32
  are very religious, a lot of their actual waking hours
• 2:12:35
  are spent on random other things, doing their laundry, driving
• 2:12:39
  to work, all kinds of stuff. If all of that
• 2:12:42
  was automated, you could imagine spending more time on trying
• 2:12:46
  to align yourself, orient yourself to this higher being and
• 2:12:51
  trying to be in communication with them. Like maybe aesthetic values.
• 2:12:56
  Like there are maybe some things that would just be
• 2:12:58
  kind of nice and cool if the world were like that.
• 2:13:01
  We don't really have time to worry so much about
• 2:13:02
  them now, but if there was nothing else on the agenda,
• 2:13:05
  like coming together in a way that upholds some tradition
• 2:13:10
  in a beautiful, original way that still is true to
• 2:13:13
  the original spirit, together with other people and enacting some ceremony,
• 2:13:17
  like maybe those things would start to fill more of
• 2:13:19
  our time together. in conjunction with this game playing. And
• 2:13:25
  there might be many other of these kind of subtler
• 2:13:28
  values that would start to shape what people were doing.
• 2:13:33
  Speaker 2: Yeah. And ultimately, who knows?
• 2:13:37
  Speaker 1: Yes.
• 2:13:40
  Speaker 2: It's very interesting and it's very open-ended. And we really
• 2:13:43
  don't know what's going to happen, but we're probably going
• 2:13:45
  to see it. We're probably going to see the strangest
• 2:13:49
  thing that humans have ever had a possibility to experience.
• 2:13:53
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and in the end, I guess it's trustful. Yeah.
• 2:13:58
  Speaker 2: Well, I mean, these conversations are always fascinating, and who knows?
• 2:14:02
  Let's do another one in a few years and see
• 2:14:04
  how off we are. Come back in four years, all right?
• 2:14:10
  Speaker 1: If we have four years.
• 2:14:11
  Speaker 2: 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 were.
• 2:14:17
  Speaker 1: We can update.
• 2:14:19
  Speaker 2: 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
  Speaker 1: All right.
• 2:14:26
  Speaker 2: Think about it, kids. Bye, everybody.