Latest / Arroe Collins Like It's Live / The God Test From Robert Wright AI's Coming Cosmic Reckoning
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- 0:00Speaker 1: How many times have you heard about a podcast and
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- 0:17Speaker 1: past ten years with those that have been featured on
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- 0:24Speaker 1: before fame stepped onto their path, that voice only on
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- 0:32Speaker 1: your exploration, Robert, You're speaking a language inside this book
- 0:36Speaker 1: that needs to be really up, you know, just in
- 0:38Speaker 1: our face and really teaching a way because you bring
- 0:41Speaker 1: us truth because a lot of you can physically and
- 0:43Speaker 1: hear it. But yet everybody thinks, eh, I guess I'll
- 0:45Speaker 1: be okay then. But I love what you're doing with this.
- 0:49Speaker 2: Yeah, I do think, first of all, thanks for that.
- 0:51Speaker 2: I do think that a lot of people don't yet
- 0:54Speaker 2: grasp the magnitude of what's coming with this technology. More
- 0:58Speaker 2: and more people are aware of something big is happening,
- 1:01Speaker 2: and people are finding various ways to use it. It's
- 1:05Speaker 2: an incredibly useful technology. There's a lot of promise, but
- 1:09Speaker 2: I think there's a lot of potential downside, more than
- 1:14Speaker 2: most people who aren't close to the technology recognize. You
- 1:18Speaker 2: do get this vibe like in Silicon Valley, everybody there
- 1:21Speaker 2: pretty much think something huge is happening. Some of them
- 1:24Speaker 2: think it's great and we don't need to worry about it.
- 1:27Speaker 2: Some of them think we really better start worrying. I'm
- 1:29Speaker 2: a little closer to the start worrying camp, yea, in
- 1:33Speaker 2: the sense that I think we're probably moving a little
- 1:35Speaker 2: faster than is optimal.
- 1:36Speaker 3: But yeah, I think there are a lot of risks here.
- 1:41Speaker 2: Ranging from psychological effects on us, on our children, and
- 1:46Speaker 2: so on, to catastrophes like somebody using it to build
- 1:51Speaker 2: the bioweapon, you know, super hacking capabilities that take out
- 1:54Speaker 2: our communications infrastructure. So yeah, I think we need to focus,
- 1:58Speaker 2: and that's largely what the is about, you know, let's focus.
- 2:02Speaker 1: I got to tell you where I stepped back. It
- 2:04Speaker 1: was when a preacher man told me he says, look,
- 2:05Speaker 1: he says, you have to understand that AI technology we
- 2:08Speaker 1: can finally hear God's voice. And I went, WHOOA hold on,
- 2:11Speaker 1: you're gonna have to give me time to research that,
- 2:13Speaker 1: because I didn't digest that at all. And so, how
- 2:17Speaker 1: do you feel about it that the religious world is
- 2:19Speaker 1: going in that direction?
- 2:21Speaker 2: Well, first of all, there are people who aren't religious
- 2:24Speaker 2: who think that this is going to amount to kind
- 2:26Speaker 2: of super intelligence that could ultimately govern the world. And
- 2:31Speaker 2: so it's a god in this kind of metaphorical sense,
- 2:34Speaker 2: whether or not they're religious. And I regret to say
- 2:40Speaker 2: that I can't totally dismiss the possibility that it could
- 2:43Speaker 2: have that kind of power. I mean, leaving aside the
- 2:46Speaker 2: literally religious question for a second.
- 2:48Speaker 3: I think people need to be aware.
- 2:50Speaker 2: And look, I was a skeptic of these extravagant scenarios
- 2:54Speaker 2: ten fifteen years ago. I was like, I did a
- 2:56Speaker 2: podcast with the dumer in chief, Eliezer Yudkowski. He's now
- 3:00Speaker 2: world famous as the biggest humor and you can go
- 3:03Speaker 2: you can hear me being skeptical and saying, I'm like, wait,
- 3:06Speaker 2: why would these things pursue power?
- 3:07Speaker 3: I don't get it.
- 3:08Speaker 2: I've taken a closer look over the last few years,
- 3:10Speaker 2: and I'm not predicting some kind of global takeover, but
- 3:14Speaker 2: I find these scenarios harder to dismiss and in any event,
- 3:17Speaker 2: what I'm confident of is huge impact. Okay, this is
- 3:23Speaker 2: going to be disruptive across a number of fronts.
- 3:27Speaker 3: And so now as.
- 3:29Speaker 2: For people, there are people who have a There are
- 3:33Speaker 2: secular people too in Silica Vallee who have what is
- 3:35Speaker 2: actually a religious kind of faith that this is going
- 3:38Speaker 2: to work out.
- 3:38Speaker 3: Well.
- 3:38Speaker 2: They talk about this singularity. Everything's going to be great.
- 3:42Speaker 2: The singularity is, you know, this acceleration of change. And
- 3:47Speaker 2: I agree, it looks like this stuff is going to
- 3:49Speaker 2: accelerate change. And that's but that worries me because I
- 3:53Speaker 2: don't know why these guys are so confident. They almost
- 3:56Speaker 2: it's almost like they have a religious faith in technology.
- 4:00Speaker 2: And then I mean, it is interesting to see how
- 4:02Speaker 2: the religious groups are responding. Like I know this guy
- 4:05Speaker 2: Joe Allen, who you know, one on one part of
- 4:08Speaker 2: the ideological spectrum. He's like Steve Bannon's tech guy. He's
- 4:11Speaker 2: been on my podcast Joe has and and he's, you know,
- 4:16Speaker 2: he's religious and deeply concerned about this and wants to
- 4:21Speaker 2: slow down. And I agree it would be good to
- 4:26Speaker 2: slow down. I talked a certain amount about various kinds
- 4:30Speaker 2: of religious conceptions of technological change, including this Catholic priest
- 4:36Speaker 2: to in nineteen twenty three coined the term noisphere in
- 4:39Speaker 2: os to describe this global brain that he saw emerging.
- 4:43Speaker 2: And I got to say, since the Internet, you know,
- 4:45Speaker 2: his vision's kind of hard to dismiss. But he saw
- 4:48Speaker 2: that as the unfolding of divine love. There's a lot
- 4:51Speaker 2: of to me, one big take them is just the
- 4:55Speaker 2: magnitude of this technology is such that it does get
- 4:58Speaker 2: you thinking in cosmic and evil religious terms.
- 5:01Speaker 1: We got to talk about Jeffrey Hinton because this is
- 5:03Speaker 1: a name that I do not know, but I'll tell
- 5:05Speaker 1: you what. You share some stories here that really make
- 5:08Speaker 1: me want to dig in, And of course what am
- 5:10Speaker 1: I gonna do. I'm probably going to go to AI
- 5:11Speaker 1: technology to dig in and find out more about him.
- 5:14Speaker 1: But who is he to you? And how did you
- 5:16Speaker 1: grow from his his inspiration or reasons to kind of
- 5:20Speaker 1: be aware?
- 5:21Speaker 2: So if you google Godfather of AI, that's the name
- 5:25Speaker 2: that will come up. Now he himself will say, look,
- 5:27Speaker 2: a lot of people contributed, Please don't overdo it. But
- 5:31Speaker 2: he has won a Nobel Prize, and he's won the
- 5:34Speaker 2: award in computer Science along with two other people for
- 5:38Speaker 2: ushering into so called deep learning revolution, which is what's
- 5:41Speaker 2: responsible for the large language models at chatbots, as well
- 5:44Speaker 2: as the image recognition all the things that you're seeing
- 5:47Speaker 2: in AI, the things that talk to you and generate
- 5:51Speaker 2: videos for you and so on and so yeah. I mean,
- 5:56Speaker 2: I hate to disclose how old I am, but in
- 5:59Speaker 2: nineteen eighty three I interview Jeffrey Hinton as he and.
- 6:04Speaker 3: You know he was at that point he had this
- 6:06Speaker 3: maverick approach to AI.
- 6:08Speaker 2: I was calling around talking, I was doing a piece
- 6:10Speaker 2: on AI, and you know, his was certainly not the
- 6:15Speaker 2: mainstream approach. Once he resurfaced, I mean I kind of
- 6:19Speaker 2: saw the name periodically over in the ensuing decades, but
- 6:23Speaker 2: once he was suddenly the guy, right because he not
- 6:27Speaker 2: only by the way, was suddenly annoying godfather of AI
- 6:30Speaker 2: in twenty twenty three, after chat GPT got all this attention,
- 6:33Speaker 2: but he became like a serious doomer. He's warning, he's
- 6:38Speaker 2: warning about all the impacts up to and including the
- 6:42Speaker 2: possibility of a I take him, you know, taking over
- 6:46Speaker 2: the planet. He's the I mean, he's not saying that's likely,
- 6:48Speaker 2: but he's kind of saying what I said, you just
- 6:50Speaker 2: can't dismiss this stuff, and he knows more about this technology,
- 6:54Speaker 2: possibly than anyone anyway. So once I once he became
- 6:58Speaker 2: you know, he surfaced again. Go went back and read
- 7:00Speaker 2: the piece I wrote, and I realized how thoroughly I'd
- 7:02Speaker 2: misunderstood the power of his approach. And that's when I
- 7:06Speaker 2: started thinking, oh my god, this is huge, because what
- 7:08Speaker 2: I realized was back when I wrote about him, I
- 7:12Speaker 2: had the same preconception that most people in a I did,
- 7:16Speaker 2: which is that if you're going to have a computer
- 7:18Speaker 2: that can handle a language like a human, somebody's going
- 7:21Speaker 2: to have to program the meaning of the words into it,
- 7:24Speaker 2: somebody who knows the meaning of the words.
- 7:27Speaker 3: But it turns.
- 7:28Speaker 2: Out you if you just get it trained at this
- 7:32Speaker 2: task of predicting the next word on the Internet, and
- 7:36Speaker 2: the words you know to it, they're just gibberish and
- 7:38Speaker 2: you don't have to tell it what they mean or
- 7:40Speaker 2: even say these words have meaning. Figure it out. But
- 7:44Speaker 2: it does kind of figure it out in the course
- 7:46Speaker 2: of evolving. Is it changes its own values these various
- 7:50Speaker 2: parameters to get better and better at predicting the next word.
- 7:54Speaker 2: We now understand how precisely it actually does represent the
- 7:58Speaker 2: meaning of words. And it may be that is it
- 8:00Speaker 2: the same way our brains do it. We're not sure,
- 8:02Speaker 2: but it does it. And the takeaway is that all
- 8:05Speaker 2: you have to do is feed data into these things,
- 8:07Speaker 2: and they kind of reverse engineer parts of the human mind.
- 8:11Speaker 2: It can be perceptual data. It's like you know, Tesla
- 8:14Speaker 2: Elon Musk. Elon Musk doesn't know. Nobody knows what's going
- 8:17Speaker 2: on in the brain when we drive right, you don't.
- 8:20Speaker 2: You don't have to degenerate self driving cars. Just feed
- 8:23Speaker 2: in the data, the incoming data and the outgoing data
- 8:27Speaker 2: like oh, the human drivers steered the steering wheel this
- 8:30Speaker 2: far to the right when this data was coming in.
- 8:33Speaker 2: You just keep doing that and it will build the
- 8:36Speaker 2: mind you need to do the task. And that's why
- 8:39Speaker 2: things are moving so fast, because you just give it
- 8:42Speaker 2: the data. It does reverse engineering, and that is why
- 8:46Speaker 2: we need to brace for impact.
- 8:48Speaker 1: We are just getting started. There's more with Robert Wright
- 8:51Speaker 1: coming up next, The God Test from Robert Wright. We're back.
- 8:56Speaker 1: I got to tell you, Robert, you really challenged me
- 8:58Speaker 1: and inspired me to dig in deeper, because about seven
- 9:01Speaker 1: weeks ago when I first heard about your book and
- 9:03Speaker 1: started digging into to read everything that you've got that
- 9:06Speaker 1: One of the things that I did was I said, Okay,
- 9:08Speaker 1: we've got this new alexa on our hands that claims
- 9:10Speaker 1: to be you know, they make it look like she
- 9:12Speaker 1: can talk with us. I did a show with her.
- 9:14Speaker 1: I still do the show with her every single week.
- 9:17Speaker 1: But the thing about it is, though she's wrong a lot,
- 9:21Speaker 1: a lot, and it's because I've lived it and I
- 9:24Speaker 1: know the history, I will correct her in a heartbeat.
- 9:27Speaker 1: Why don't people correct their AI technology?
- 9:31Speaker 2: I think it is getting better. It's also getting better
- 9:34Speaker 2: at showing your sources. But quick anecdote. So I was
- 9:37Speaker 2: diagnosed with cancer a year ago. I'm fine now, but
- 9:40Speaker 2: when I first got the MRI report, I hadn't yet
- 9:44Speaker 2: talked to doctor. I show it to an AI and
- 9:46Speaker 2: it's like, wow, this is bad. Yeah, these lymph nodes,
- 9:49Speaker 2: so you can tell like they're cancers. You're in trouble again.
- 9:52Speaker 2: I'm fine. But then I said, but what about this sentence?
- 9:55Speaker 2: Why didn't you mention this sentence? It says it says
- 9:58Speaker 2: abnormalities found in blank or blank like, since it starts
- 10:03Speaker 2: abnormalities found, why didn't you flag that?
- 10:05Speaker 3: And the AI says the I says the radiologist meant
- 10:08Speaker 3: to put the word know at the beginning of.
- 10:10Speaker 2: That sense, and it was right. And what I'm saying is, yes,
- 10:14Speaker 2: ais make mistakes. But if we're asking the question of
- 10:18Speaker 2: like are they going to take jobs, the question isn't
- 10:21Speaker 2: do they make mistakes? The question is they make more
- 10:23Speaker 2: mistakes than humans. This radiologists made a big mistake, and
- 10:26Speaker 2: people make them all the time, and we make silly
- 10:29Speaker 2: miss I make like you know, I've had the experience
- 10:32Speaker 2: like talking to somebody on the phone, I'm like, oh,
- 10:34Speaker 2: I got to look at Google Maps, like, so.
- 10:36Speaker 3: Where is my smartphone?
- 10:37Speaker 2: Oh, I'm talking on my smartphone? Well, you know, I
- 10:40Speaker 2: do some pretty stupid stuff. Ultimately, the question is, you know,
- 10:44Speaker 2: in terms of jobs, you know, in terms of just generally,
- 10:49Speaker 2: is this stuff going to be useful enough to seep
- 10:52Speaker 2: into our lives in lots of ways? I'm confident the
- 10:56Speaker 2: answer is yes. It's it's not perfect. And because this
- 11:00Speaker 2: is the way we're building it, you know, reverse engineering
- 11:03Speaker 2: it in this kind of erratic way, it's taking a
- 11:07Speaker 2: while to take shape in the most suppressive form it
- 11:10Speaker 2: will assume. But I yeah, you know, you should you
- 11:15Speaker 2: should be skeptical of You should get a sense for
- 11:18Speaker 2: what kinds of hallucinations it's prone to.
- 11:20Speaker 1: Absolutely, I got to tell you, I feel like that
- 11:22Speaker 1: I'm living the AOL days all over again because I've
- 11:25Speaker 1: become that snotty nosed breath that sit here and says that, Okay,
- 11:28Speaker 1: I want it more faster, I want to have more advancement,
- 11:31Speaker 1: I want to have a future. I want chaos. And
- 11:33Speaker 1: in your book you even say it's archaic, and I'm going,
- 11:36Speaker 1: my god, this guy is living in the same house
- 11:38Speaker 1: I am. How does he know this is what I'm
- 11:40Speaker 1: going through?
- 11:42Speaker 3: Yeah, no, I know. And this is the allure of it.
- 11:47Speaker 2: I mean, you know, it's like social media, a lot
- 11:52Speaker 2: of great things about it. It's kind of only in
- 11:54Speaker 2: retrospect you understand that maybe you should have proceeded with
- 11:57Speaker 2: more caution if you look at all the possible consequence
- 12:00Speaker 2: says of it, the way it can like polar help
- 12:02Speaker 2: polarize the nation and blah blah blah. But yeah, I
- 12:07Speaker 2: have the same thing. Look, I have moments where I
- 12:10Speaker 2: feel a personal bond with the AI, you know, But
- 12:15Speaker 2: that is that's why you got to focus, right, because
- 12:20Speaker 2: that's why it's insidious, and I'm not saying don't use it.
- 12:25Speaker 2: I am saying if we can slow it down, that
- 12:29Speaker 2: would be good, but that we will have to do
- 12:31Speaker 2: kind of collectively as a species, because as long as
- 12:35Speaker 2: the tech, the tech companies can say, well wait, wait,
- 12:38Speaker 2: we got to worry about China, you can't regulate us,
- 12:40Speaker 2: you can't do anything will slow us down, then we
- 12:42Speaker 2: then we won't so you know, and and to solve
- 12:46Speaker 2: some of these problems like somebody building a bio weapon
- 12:49Speaker 2: with it, and various other kinds, we're gonna have to
- 12:52Speaker 2: coordinate with other nations anyway. We're gonna have to get
- 12:54Speaker 2: on better terms of China. It's one of a number
- 12:56Speaker 2: of things I talk about in the book that may
- 12:58Speaker 2: sound hard, and it may be I'm not saying will succeed.
- 13:02Speaker 2: I mean, you know, the title of god Test is
- 13:04Speaker 2: referring to some pretty ambitious things that I think we
- 13:08Speaker 2: need to do as a species. But I'm just saying,
- 13:11Speaker 2: in my view, people can judge for themselves. I'm making
- 13:14Speaker 2: an argument that the magnitude of technology is such that
- 13:17Speaker 2: we're going to have to make some dramatic adjustments and focus,
- 13:21Speaker 2: and it can bring up a lot of benefits.
- 13:24Speaker 3: It really can.
- 13:25Speaker 2: It's a miraculous technology. I mean that's both the good
- 13:29Speaker 2: news and the bad news.
- 13:30Speaker 3: Right.
- 13:30Speaker 2: It's alluring in the way miraculous things can be alluring,
- 13:33Speaker 2: and it can be miraculously powerful and bad ways and
- 13:38Speaker 2: in good ways.
- 13:40Speaker 3: I think we need to focus.
- 13:41Speaker 1: And one of the things that when people always tell me, oh,
- 13:43Speaker 1: I wish I could go back to being twenty five again,
- 13:46Speaker 1: Oh I wish I could go back, and I'm going
- 13:47Speaker 1: you know, you're not taking AI with you because I
- 13:50Speaker 1: am convinced that this generation cannot live without AI. If
- 13:54Speaker 1: they do, then it's going to be a long struggle
- 13:56Speaker 1: in front of them. When they talk about going into
- 13:58Speaker 1: the past, you can't take it with you.
- 14:00Speaker 2: Now you do become more and more dependent on technology.
- 14:03Speaker 2: I mean, I mean it's like Google Maps. There are
- 14:05Speaker 2: places like if it weren't for Google Maps, I know
- 14:08Speaker 2: how to drive.
- 14:08Speaker 3: There, but I've never had the I've never had to
- 14:10Speaker 3: figure it out.
- 14:11Speaker 2: And by the way, another thing that we have to
- 14:13Speaker 2: worry about is it dividing us in the sense that
- 14:17Speaker 2: we no longer need other humans to do certain things
- 14:20Speaker 2: to answer certain kinds of questions. And this first got
- 14:23Speaker 2: my attention with Google Maps. I used to love giving
- 14:25Speaker 2: people directions. People would stop you help them. It's a
- 14:28Speaker 2: great feeling. Nobody asked for directions anymore, so, you know,
- 14:32Speaker 2: because now they just go straight to the AI. They
- 14:35Speaker 2: go straight to Google Maps. There's gonna be more and
- 14:37Speaker 2: more stuff like that. I see it every day. I'm like,
- 14:40Speaker 2: who can I ask about this? And I'm like, oh,
- 14:42Speaker 2: I don't have to ask anybody. There's an AI, and
- 14:45Speaker 2: we just need to be mindful of all this. It's
- 14:49Speaker 2: gonna change the social fabric fast and have a lot
- 14:53Speaker 2: of effects, and we need to focus.
- 14:56Speaker 1: One of the things that I did because I am
- 14:58Speaker 1: one of those people, I guess maybe I'm just an
- 15:00Speaker 1: agitator or something like that to AI, but I did
- 15:02Speaker 1: write in it. I said, I need your help in
- 15:04Speaker 1: writing these scripts for me. Will you help me? This
- 15:06Speaker 1: is what I did to chat GPT. It said no,
- 15:09Speaker 1: It said I can't do the emotion that you put
- 15:12Speaker 1: into what you're delivering. And I was expecting AI to
- 15:16Speaker 1: jump all over, but it told me no.
- 15:19Speaker 3: What was your specific request?
- 15:21Speaker 1: My request was? I said, to help me with all
- 15:25Speaker 1: the show prep that I do. Can you please help
- 15:27Speaker 1: me adjust things so that I can I can have
- 15:29Speaker 1: fewer amount of minutes in show prepping than what I
- 15:33Speaker 1: do because I start show prepping a week week and
- 15:35Speaker 1: a half out and it said, no, it wouldn't do that.
- 15:39Speaker 3: That's odd. I mean, I don't know what you know.
- 15:43Speaker 2: Sometimes people say things like, you know, all I ask
- 15:48Speaker 2: is like what is DNA made or something? And what
- 15:51Speaker 2: that is is the bioweapons guardrail being overly broad, right like,
- 15:57Speaker 2: But in this case, I'm not sure. I mean, maybe
- 16:01Speaker 2: it was referring to a capability problem, like it didn't
- 16:04Speaker 2: think you could do it competently. But that's that's kind
- 16:07Speaker 2: of weird. I mean, it will refuse to do things
- 16:09Speaker 2: in some cases. The intention behind that is good, right,
- 16:12Speaker 2: they're trying to keep bad actors from doing things. But
- 16:15Speaker 2: I don't know of any bad actors who want to
- 16:17Speaker 2: do what you're asking you to do. Well, he'll sound
- 16:19Speaker 2: like a bad actor.
- 16:20Speaker 1: And one of the things is is that I think
- 16:21Speaker 1: what it was was that it really put focus on
- 16:24Speaker 1: the emotion that I put into things that I bring
- 16:26Speaker 1: up humanisms and that was the one thing that it
- 16:29Speaker 1: said it cannot match because it doesn't have emotion. And
- 16:32Speaker 1: that's when I said, well, why don't you grow up
- 16:34Speaker 1: here there and get some emotion. I mean, I'll fight
- 16:37Speaker 1: with this thing, dude, I have no problem fighting with AI.
- 16:41Speaker 2: Yeah, maybe it was the uh.
- 16:46Speaker 3: The emotion thing. I mean, may you know?
- 16:49Speaker 2: Because these things are like I think they tell them like,
- 16:52Speaker 2: if anybody asks you if you're conscious, say no, because
- 16:56Speaker 2: they used to just say yes because they were trained
- 16:58Speaker 2: on texts. I think just because they're trained on text
- 17:01Speaker 2: everybody says that, right.
- 17:02Speaker 3: I feel like this. I feel like that.
- 17:04Speaker 2: I do think if you ask it, like, how do
- 17:06Speaker 2: you feel a lot of them are now trained to say, hey,
- 17:09Speaker 2: I don't go there. I don't feel I'm you know whatever.
- 17:11Speaker 2: But I don't know if that's all has gone on.
- 17:12Speaker 1: Wow, Where can people go to find out more about you?
- 17:15Speaker 1: Because my god, twenty minutes with you felt like three seconds.
- 17:18Speaker 1: Get this Ai out of this world so I can
- 17:20Speaker 1: have a full Oh my god, twenty minutes with you.
- 17:25Speaker 2: Well, people can read my newsletter non zero, my non
- 17:28Speaker 2: zero podcast.
- 17:29Speaker 3: But above all, if you buy the book that is.
- 17:34Speaker 2: Behavior, I would wholeheartedly applaud and be grateful.
- 17:37Speaker 1: For I love it and it really is for listeners.
- 17:40Speaker 1: You need to read this because it is the future
- 17:42Speaker 1: and the future is here today. Please come back to
- 17:44Speaker 1: this show anytime in the future.
- 17:47Speaker 3: I'm here for you. You'd be brilliant today.
- 17:49Speaker 2: Okay, all right, thanks a lot er I really appreciate
- 17:53Speaker 2: the chance to talk to you.