Lex Fridman Podcast: #371 – Max Tegmark: The Case for Halting AI Development

The following is a conversation with Max Tegmark, his third time in the podcast.

In fact, his first appearance was episode number one of this very podcast.

He is a physicist and artificial intelligence researcher at MIT, co-founder of FutureLeft

Institute and author of Life 3.0, being human in the age of artificial intelligence.

Most recently, he's a key figure in spearheading the open letter calling for a six-month pause

on giant AI experiments like training GPT-4. The letter reads,

we're calling for a pause on training of models larger than GPT-4 for six months.

This does not imply a pause or ban on all AI research and development,

or the use of systems that have already been placed on the market.

Our call is specific and addresses a very small pool of actors who possess this capability.

The letter has been signed by over 50,000 individuals, including 1800 CEOs and over 1500

professors. Signatories include Joshua Benjo, Stuart Russell, Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak,

you all know a Harari, Andrew Yang, and many others. This is a defining moment in the history

of human civilization, where the balance of power between human and AI begins to shift.

And Max's mind and his voice is one of the most valuable and powerful in a time like this.

His support, his wisdom, his friendship has been a gift I'm forever deeply grateful for.

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To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Max

Tagmark.

You were the first ever guest on this podcast, episode number one. So first of all, Max, I just

have to say thank you for giving me a chance. Thank you for starting this journey. It's been

an incredible journey. Just thank you for sitting down with me and just acting like I'm somebody

who matters that I'm somebody who's interesting to talk to. And thank you for doing it. I meant

a lot. Thanks to you for putting your heart and soul into this. I know when you delve into

controversial topics, it's inevitable to get hit by what Hamlet talks about the slings and arrows

and stuff. And I really admire this. It's in an era, you know, where YouTube videos are too long

and now it has to be like a 20 minute TikTok, 20 second TikTok clip. It's just so refreshing to

see you going exactly against all of the advice and doing these really long form things. And

the people appreciate it. You know, reality is nuanced. And thanks for sharing it that way.

So let me ask you again, the first question I've ever asked on this podcast, episode number one,

talking to you, do you think there's intelligent life out there in the universe? Let's revisit that

question. Do you have any updates? What's your view when you look out to the stars? So when we

look at the stars, if you define our universe the way most astrophysicists do, not as all of

space, but the spherical region of space that we can see with our telescopes from which light has

a time to reach us since our Big Bang. I'm in the minority. I estimate that we are the only life

in this spherical volume that has invented internet radios gotten our level of tech.

And if that's true, then it puts a lot of responsibility on us to not

mess this one up. Because if it's true, it means that life is quite rare. And we are stewards of

this one spark of advanced consciousness, which if we nurture it and help it grow, it eventually

life can spread from here out into much of our universe. And we can have this just amazing

future. Whereas if we instead are reckless with the technology we build and just snuff it out

due to the stupidity or infighting, then maybe the rest of cosmic history in our universe was

just going to be a play for empty benches. But I do think that we are actually very likely to

get visited by aliens, alien intelligence quite soon. But I think we are going to be building

that alien intelligence. So we're going to give birth to an intelligent alien civilization. Unlike

anything that human, the evolution here on Earth was able to create in terms of the path, the biological

path it took. Yeah, and it's going to be much more alien than a cat or even the most exotic animal

on the planet right now. Because it will not have been created through the usual Darwinian

competition where it necessarily cares about self-preservation, afraid of death, any of those

things. The space of alien minds that you can build is just so much faster than what evolution

will give you. And with that also comes great responsibility for us to make sure that the

kind of minds we create are the kind of minds that is good to create, minds that will share our

values and be good for humanity and life, and also create minds that don't suffer.

Do you try to visualize the full space of alien minds that AI could be? Do you try to consider

all the different kinds of intelligences, sort of generalizing what humans are able to do to the

full spectrum of what intelligent creatures entities could do? I try, but I would say I fail.

I mean, it's very difficult for a human mind to really grapple with something so completely alien,

maybe even for us. If we just try to imagine, how would it feel if we were completely indifferent

towards death or individuality? Even if you just imagine that, for example,

you could just copy my knowledge of how to speak Swedish. Boom, now you can speak Swedish.

And you could copy any of my cool experiences and then you could delete the ones you didn't like

in your own life, just like that. It would already change quite a lot about how you feel as a human

being, right? You probably spend less effort studying things if you just copy them and you

might be less afraid of death because if the plane you're on starts to crash, you'd just be like,

oh shucks, I haven't backed my brain up for four hours. So I'm going to lose all these wonderful

experiences of this flight. We might also start feeling more compassionate maybe with other people

if we can so readily share each other's experiences and our knowledge and feel more like a hive mind.

It's very hard though. I really feel very humble about this to grapple with it, how it might actually

feel. The one thing which is so obvious though, which I think is just really worth reflecting on,

is because the mind space of possible intelligence is so different from ours,

it's very dangerous if we assume they're going to be like us or anything like us.

Well, the entirety of human written history has been through poetry, through novels,

been trying to describe through philosophy, trying to describe the human condition and what's

entailed in it. Like Jessica said, fear of death and all those kinds of things, what is love,

and all of that changes if you have a different kind of intelligence, like all of it. The entirety,

all those poems, they're trying to sneak up to what the hell it means to be human, all of that

changes. How AI concerns and existential crises that AI experiences, how that clashes with the

human existential crisis, the human condition. It's hard to fathom, hard to predict.

It's hard, but it's fascinating to think about also. Even in the best case scenario where we

don't lose control over the ever more powerful AI that we're building to other humans whose goals

we think are horrible and where we don't lose control to the machines and AI provides the

things that we want, even then you get into the questions you touched here. Maybe the struggle

that it's actually hard to do things is part of the things that give this meaning as well.

For example, I found it so shocking that this new Microsoft GPT-4 commercial that they put

together has this woman talking about showing this demo of how she's going to give a graduation

speech to her beloved daughter and she asks GPT-4 to write it. If it's frigging 200 words or so,

if I realized that my parents couldn't be bothered struggling a little bit to write

200 words and outsource that to their computer, I would feel really offended actually.

I wonder if eliminating too much of this struggle from our existence,

do you think that would also take away a little bit of what means to be human?

We can't even predict. I had somebody mentioned to me that they started using

chat GPT with a 3.5 and not 4.0 to write what they really feel to a person

and they have a temper issue and they're basically trying to get chat GPT to rewrite it in a nicer

way, to get the point across, but rewrite it in a nicer way. We're even removing the inner

asshole from our communication. There's some positive aspects of that, but mostly it's just

the transformation of how humans communicate. It's scary because so much of our society is

based on this glue of communication and we're now using AI as the medium of communication

that does the language for us. So much of the emotion that's laden in human communication,

so much of the intent that's going to be handled by outsourced AI. How does that change everything?

How does that change the internal state of how we feel about other human beings?

What makes us lonely? What makes us excited? What makes us afraid? How we fall in love? All that

kind of stuff. For me personally, I have to confess the challenge is one of the things that

really makes my life feel meaningful. If I go hike a mountain with my wife,

I don't want to just press a button and be at the top. I want to struggle and come up

there sweaty and feel, wow, we did this in the same way. I want to constantly work on myself

to become a better person. If I say something in anger that I regret, I want to go back and

really work on myself rather than just tell an AI from now on, always filter what I write,

so I don't have to work on myself because then I'm not growing.

Yeah, but then again, it could be like with chess. An AI wants to significantly, obviously,

supersedes the performance of humans. It will live in its own world and provide maybe a flourishing

civilizations for humans, but we humans will continue hiking mountains and playing our games,

even though AI is so much smarter, so much stronger, so much superior in every single way,

just like with chess. That's one possible hopeful trajectory here is that humans will

continue to human, and AI will just be a medium that enables the human experience to flourish.

Yeah, I would phrase that as rebranding ourselves from homo sapiens to homo sentiens.

Right now, sapiens, the ability to be intelligent, we've even put it in our species name.

We're branding ourselves as the smartest information processing entity on the planet.

That's clearly going to change if AI continues ahead, so maybe we should focus on the experience,

instead the subjective experience that we have with homo sentiens, and say that's what's really

valuable, the love, the connection, the other things, and get off our high horses and get rid

of this hubris that only we can do integrals. So consciousness, the subjective experience

is a fundamental value to what it means to be human. Make that the priority.

That feels like a hopeful direction to me, but that also requires more

compassion, not just towards other humans, because they happen to be the smartest on the

planet, but also towards all our other fellow creatures on this planet. And I personally

feel right now, we're treating a lot of farm animals horribly, for example, and the excuse

we're using is, oh, they're not as smart as us. But if we admit that we're not that smart in

the grand scheme of things either in the post AI epoch, then surely we should value

you the subjective experience of a cow also.

Well, allow me to briefly look at the book, which at this point is becoming more and more

visionary than you've written, I guess, over five years ago, Life 3.0. So first of all,

3.0. What's 1.0? What's 2.0? What's 3.0? And how does that vision evolve? The vision in the book

evolved to today. Life 1.0 is really dumb, like bacteria, and that it can't actually learn anything

at all during the lifetime. The learning just comes from this genetic process from one generation

to the next. Life 2.0 is us and other animals which have brains, which can learn during their

lifetime a great deal. And you were born without being able to speak English. And at some point,

you decided, hey, I want to upgrade my software. Let's install an English speaking module.

So you did. And Life 3.0 does not exist yet, can replace not only its software the way we can,

but also its hardware. And that's where we're heading towards at high speed. We're already

maybe 2.1 because we can put in an artificial knee, a pacemaker, et cetera, et cetera. And

if Neuralink and other companies succeed, we'll be Life 2.2, et cetera. But the companies trying

to build AGI are trying to make this, of course, full 3.0. And you can put that intelligence

in something that also has no biological basis whatsoever.

So less constraints and more capabilities, just like the leap from 1.0 to 2.0. There is,

nevertheless, you speaking so harshly about bacteria, so disrespectfully about bacteria.

There is still the same kind of magic there that permeates Life 2.0 and 3.0. It seems like maybe

the thing that's truly powerful about life, intelligence, and consciousness was already

there in 1.0. Is it possible? I think we should be humble and not be so quick to

make everything binary and say either it's there or it's not. Clearly, there's a great

spectrum. And there is even a controversy about whether some unicellular organisms like amoebas

can maybe learn a little bit after all. So apologies if I offended any bacteria here.

It wasn't my intent. It was more that I wanted to talk up how cool it is to actually have a brain

where you can learn dramatically within your lifetime.

Typical human.

And the higher up you get from 1.0 to 2.0 to 3.0, the more you become the captain of your own

ship, the master of your own destiny, and the less you become a slave to whatever evolution

gave you, right? By upgrading your software, we can be so different from previous generations

and even from our parents, much more so than even a bacterium, no offense to them.

And if you can also swap out your hardware and take any physical form you want, of course,

it's really disguised the limit.

Yeah, so it accelerates the rate at which you can perform the computation that determines

your destiny. Yeah, and I think it's worth commenting a bit on what you mean in this

context also if you swap things out a lot, right? This is controversial, but my

current understanding is that life is best thought of not as a bag of meat or even a bag of

elementary particles, but rather as a system which can process information and retain its own

complexity, even though nature is always trying to mess it up. So it's all about information

processing. And that makes it a lot like something like a wave in the ocean, which is not its

water molecules, right? The water molecules bob up and down, but the wave moves forward,

it's an information pattern. In the same way, you Lex, you're not the same Adams as during the

first time you did with me, you've swapped out most of them, but it's still you. And

the information pattern is still there. And if you could swap out your arms and

whatever, you can still have this kind of continuity, it becomes much more sophisticated

sort of wave forward in time where the information lives on. I lost both of my parents since our

last podcast and it actually gives me a lot of solace that this way of thinking about them,

they haven't entirely died because a lot of mommy and daddy's, sorry, I'm getting a little

emotional here, but a lot of their values and ideas and even jokes and so on, they haven't

gone away, right? Some of them live on, I can carry on some of them. And we also live on a lot of

other and a lot of other people. So in this sense, even with life 2.0, we can to some extent,

already transcend our physical bodies and our death. And particularly if you can share your own

information, your own ideas with many others like you do in your podcast, then that's the

closest immortality we can get with our bio bodies. You carry a little bit of them in you

in some sense. Yeah. Do you miss them? You miss your mom and dad? Of course. Of course. What did

you learn about life from them if it can take a bit of a tangent? I know so many things. For

starters, my fascination for math and the physical mysteries of our universe, I think I got a lot

of that from my dad. But I think my obsession for really big questions and consciousness and so on

that actually came mostly from my mom. And what I got from both of them, which is a very core part

of really who I am, I think, is this feeling comfortable with not buying into what everybody

else is saying, doing what I think is right. They both very much just did their own thing

and sometimes they got flack for it and they did it anyway. That's why you've always been an

inspiration to me, that you're at the top of your field and you're still willing to

tackle the big questions in your own way. You're one of the people that represents

MIT best to me. You've always been an inspiration to that. So it's good to hear that you got that

from your mom and dad. Yeah, you're too kind. But yeah, I mean, the good reason to do science

is because you're really curious, you want to figure out the truth. If you think this is how

it is and everyone else says no, no, that's bullshit. And it's that way, you know, you stick

with what you think is true. And even if everybody else keeps thinking it's bullshit, there's a

certain, I always root for the underdog when I watch movies. And my dad once, one time, for

example, when I wrote one of my craziest papers ever, talking about our universe, ultimately

being mathematical, which we're not going to get into today. I got this email from a quite famous

professor saying this is not only bullshit, but it's going to ruin your career. You should stop

doing this kind of stuff. I sent it to my dad. Do you know what he said? He replied with a quote

from Dante. Segui il tuo corso e la sedire la gente. Follow your own path and let the people talk.

Go dad. This is the kind of thing. He's dead, but that attitude is not.

How did losing them as a man, as a human being change you? How did it expand your thinking

about the world? How did it expand your thinking about this thing we're talking about, which is

humans creating another living sentient perhaps being? I think it mainly did two things. One of

them just going through all their stuff after they had passed away and so on, just drove home to be

how important it is to ask ourselves, why are we doing this things we do? Because it's inevitable

that you look at some things they spent an enormous time on and you ask the, at hindsight,

would they really have spent so much time on this or would they have done something that was more

meaningful? So I've been looking more in my life now and asking, you know, why am I doing what I'm

doing? And I feel it should either be something I really enjoy doing or it should be something

that I find really, really meaningful because it helps humanity. If it's none of those two

categories, maybe I should spend less time on it. You know, the other thing is dealing with death

up in person like this. It's actually made me less afraid of even less afraid of other people

telling me that I'm an idiot, you know, which happens regularly and just let my life do my thing.

And it made it a little bit easier for me to focus on what I feel is really important.

What about fear of your own death? Has it made it more real that this is something that happens?

Yeah, it's made extremely real and I'm next in line in our family now, right? Me and my

younger brother. But they both handled it with such dignity. That was a true inspiration also.

They never complained about things and, you know, when you're old and your body starts

falling apart, it's more and more to complain about. They looked at what could they still do

that was meaningful. And they focused on that rather than wasting time talking about or even

thinking much about things they were disappointed in. I think anyone can make themselves depressed

if they start their morning by making a list of grievances. Whereas if you start your day

with a little meditation and just things you're grateful for, you basically choose to be a happy

person. Because you only have a finite number of days. You should spend them. Make account.

Being grateful. Yeah.

Well, you do happen to be working on a thing which seems to have potentially

some of the greatest impact on human civilization of anything humans have ever created,

which is artificial intelligence. This is on the both detailed technical level and in a high

philosophical level you work on. So you've mentioned to me that there's an open letter

that you're working on. It's actually going live in a few hours. So I've been having late nights

and early mornings. It's been very exciting actually. In short, have you seen Don't Look Up?

The film? Yes. Yes. I don't want to be the movie spoiler for anyone watching this who

hasn't seen it. But if you're watching this, you haven't seen it, watch it. Because we are actually

acting out. It's life imitating art. Humanity is doing exactly that right now, except it's an

asteroid that we are building ourselves. Almost nobody is talking about it. People are squabbling

across the planet about all sorts of things which seem very minor compared to the asteroid that's

about to hit us. Most politicians don't even have this on the radar. They think maybe in

100 years or whatever. Right now, we're at a fork on the road. This is the most important fork

humanity has reached in its over 100,000 years on this planet. We're building effectively a new

species that's smarter than us. It doesn't look so much like a species yet because it's mostly

not embodied in robots, but that's the technicality which will soon be changed. This arrival of

artificial general intelligence that can do all our jobs as well as us and probably shortly

thereafter, superintelligence which greatly exceeds our cognitive abilities, it's going to either be

the best thing ever to happen to humanity or the worst. I'm really quite confident that there is

not that much middle ground there. But it would be fundamentally transformative

to human civilization? Of course. Utterly and totally. Again, we branded ourselves as homo sapiens

because it seemed like the basic thing. We're the king of the castle on this planet. We're the smart

ones. If we can control everything else, this could very easily change. We're certainly not going

to be the smartest on the planet very long if AI, unless AI progress just halts. We can talk more

about why I think that's true because it's controversial. Then we can also talk about

reasons you might think it's going to be the best thing ever and the reason you think it's going to

be the end of humanity, which is of course super controversial. But what I think we can,

anyone who's working on advanced AI can agree on is it's much like the film. Don't look up and that

it's just really comical how little serious public debate there is about it, given how huge it is.

So what we're talking about is a development of currently things like GPT-4 and the signs it's

showing of rapid improvement that may in the near term lead to development of super intelligent

AGI, general AI systems and what kind of impact that has on society. When that thing achieves general

human level intelligence and then beyond that general super human level intelligence.

There's a lot of questions to explore here. One, you mentioned halt. Is that the content of the

letter is to suggest that maybe we should pause the development of these systems?

Exactly. So this is very controversial. When we talked the first time, we talked about how

I was involved in starting the Future Life Institute and we worked very hard on 2014-2015

was the mainstream AI safety. The idea that there even could be risks and that you could do things

about them. Before then, a lot of people thought it was just really kooky to even talk about it and

a lot of AI researchers felt worried that this was too flaky and could be bad for funding and

that the people who talked about it just didn't understand AI. I'm very, very happy with how

that's gone and that now it's completely mainstream. You're going to any AI conference and people talk

about AI safety and it's a nerdy technical field full of equations and blah blah.

As it should be. But there's this other thing which has been quite taboo up until now

calling for slowdown. So what we've constantly been saying, including myself, I've been biting

my tongue a lot, is that we don't need to slow down AI development. We just need to win this

race, the wisdom race between the growing power of the AI and the growing wisdom with which we

manage it. Rather than trying to slow down AI, let's just try to accelerate the wisdom. Do all

this technical work to figure out how you can actually ensure that your powerful AI is going

to do what you wanted to do and have society adapt also with incentives and regulations so

that these things get put to good use. Sadly, that didn't pan out. The progress on technical AI

on capabilities has gone a lot faster than than many people thought back when we started this

in 2014 turned out to be easier to build really advanced AI than we thought. On the other side,

it's gone much slower than we hoped with getting policy makers and others to actually

put incentives in place to steer this in the good direction. Maybe we should unpack it and talk

a little bit about each. Why did it go faster than a lot of people thought? In hindsight,

it's exactly like building flying machines. People spent a lot of time wondering about how

do birds fly? That turned out to be really hard. Have you seen the TED Talk with a flying bird?

Like a flying robotic bird? Yeah, flies around the audience, but it took 100 years longer to

figure out how to do that than for the Wright brothers to build the first airplane because

it turned out there was a much easier way to fly. Evolution picked a more complicated one because

it had its hands tied. It could only build a machine that could assemble itself,

which the Wright brothers didn't care about. They can only build a machine that used only

the most common atoms in the periodic table. Wright brothers didn't care about that. They

could use steel, iron, atoms. It had to be built to repair itself and it also had to be

incredibly fuel efficient. A lot of birds use less than half the fuel of a remote control plane

flying the same distance. For humans, just throw a little more, put a little more fuel in a roof.

There you go, 100 years earlier. That's exactly what's happening now with these large language

models. The brain is incredibly complicated. Many people made the mistake. You're thinking we have

to figure out how the brain does human level AI first before we could build in a machine. That

was completely wrong. You can take an incredibly simple computational system called a transformer

network and just train it to do something incredibly dumb. Just read a gigantic amount of text and

try to predict the next word. It turns out if you just throw a ton of compute at that and a ton of

data, it gets to be frighteningly good, like GPT-4, which I've been playing with so much

since it came out. There's still some debate about whether that can get you all the way

to full human level or not. We can come back to the details of that and how you might get the

human level AI even if large language models don't. Can you briefly, if it's just a small

tangent comment on your feelings about GPT-4, suggest that you're impressed by this rate of

progress, but where is it? Can GPT-4 reason? What are the intuitions? What are human interpretable

words you can assign to the capabilities of GPT-4 that makes you so damn impressed with it?

I'm both very excited about it and terrified. It's an interesting mixture of emotions.

All the best things in life include those two somehow.

Yeah, I can absolutely reason. Anyone who hasn't played with it, I highly recommend doing that

before dissing it. It can do quite remarkable reasoning. I've had to do a lot of things,

which I realized I couldn't do that myself that well even. It obviously does it dramatically

faster than we do too when you watch a type. It's doing that while servicing a massive

number of other humans at the same time. At the same time, it cannot reason as well as a human can

on some tasks. It's obviously a limitation from its architecture. We have in our heads what in

GeekSpeak is called a recurrent neural network. There are loops. Information can go from this

neuron to this neuron to this neuron and then back to this one. You can ruminate on something for a

while. You can self-reflect a lot. These large language models, they cannot. It's a so-called

transformer where it's just like a one-way street of information basically. In GeekSpeak,

it's called a feed-forward neural network. It's only so deep. It can only do logic that's that

many steps and that deep. You can create problems which will fail to solve for that reason.

The fact that it can do so amazing things with this incredibly simple architecture already

is quite stunning. What we see in my lab at MIT when we look inside large language models to try

to figure out how they're doing it, that's the key core focus of our research. It's called

mechanistic interpretability in GeekSpeak. You have this machine that does something smart.

You try to reverse engineer. See how does it do it? I think of it also as artificial neuroscience.

That's exactly what neuroscientists do with actual brains. But here you have the advantage

that you don't have to worry about measurement errors. You can see what every neuron is doing

all the time. A recurrent thing we see again and again, there's been a number of beautiful

papers quite recently by a lot of researchers. Some of them here, even in this area, is where

when they figure out how something is done, you can say, oh, man, that's such a dumb way of doing

it. You immediately see how it can be improved. For example, there was a beautiful paper recently

where they figured out how a large language model stores certain facts like Eiffel Tower is in

Paris. They figured out exactly how it's stored and the proof that they understood it was they

could edit it. They changed some of the synapses in it and then they asked it, where's the Eiffel

Tower? And they said, it's in Rome. And then they asked you, how do you get there? Oh, how do you

get there from Germany? Oh, you take this train and the Roma Termini train station and this and that.

And what might you see if you're in front of it? Oh, you might see the Colosseum.

So they had edited it. So they literally moved it to Rome. But the way that it's

storing this information, it's incredibly dumb for any fellow nerds listening to this.

There was a big matrix and roughly speaking, there are certain row and column vectors which

encode these things and they correspond very hand-wavely to principal components. And it would

be much more efficient for a sparse matrix to store in the database. And everything,

so far we've figured out how these things do are ways where you can see they can easily be

improved. And the fact that this particular architecture has some roadblocks built into it

is in no way going to prevent crafty researchers from quickly finding workarounds and making

other kinds of architectures go all the way. So in short, it's turned out to be a lot easier to

build close to human intelligence than we thought. And that means our runway as a species to

get our shit together has shortened. And it seems like the scary thing about the effectiveness of

large language models. So Sam Altman, I recently had a conversation with, and he really showed that

the leap from GPT-3 to GPT-4 has to do with just a bunch of hacks, a bunch of little explorations

with smart researchers doing a few little fixes here and there. It's not some fundamental leap

and transformation in the architecture. And more data and more compute.

And more data and compute, but he said the big leaps has to do with not the data and the compute,

but just learning this new discipline, just like you said. So researchers are going to

look at these architectures and there might be big leaps where you realize, wait, why are we doing

this in this dumb way? And all of a sudden this model is 10x smarter. And that can happen on any

one day, on any one Tuesday or Wednesday afternoon. And then all of a sudden you have a system that's

10x smarter. It seems like it's such a new discipline. It's such a new, like we understand

so little about why this thing works so damn well, that the linear improvement of compute,

or exponential, but the steady improvement of compute, steady improvement of the data

may not be the thing that even leads to the next leap. It could be a surprise little hack that

improves everything. Or a lot of little leaps here and there because, because so much of this is out

on the open also. So many smart people are looking at this and trying to figure out little leaps

here and there. And it becomes this sort of collective race where if people, a lot of people

feel if I don't take the leap, someone else will. And it's actually very crucial for the other part

of it. Why do we want to slow this down? So again, what this open letter is calling for is just pausing

all training of systems that are more powerful than GPT for for six months. Give a chance

for the labs to coordinate a bit on safety and for society to adapt, give the right incentives

to the labs. Because I, you know, you've interviewed a lot of these people who lead these

labs. And you know, just as well as I do, they're good people. They're idealistic people. They're

doing this first and foremost because they believe that AI has a huge potential to help humanity.

And but at the same time, they are trapped in this horrible race to the bottom.

Have you read Meditations on Moloch by Scott Alexander? Yes. Yeah, it's a beautiful essay on

this poem by Ginsburg, where he interprets it as being about this monster. It's this game theory

monster that that pits people into against each other in this race, the bottom where everybody

ultimately loses the edit. The evil thing about this monster is even though everybody sees it

and understands, they still can't get out of the race, right? Most a good fraction of all the bad

things that we humans do are caused by Moloch. And I like Scott Alexander's naming of the monster.

So we can, we humans can think of it as an F a thing. If you look at why do we have overfishing?

Why do we have more generally the tragedy of the commons? Why is it that

to live or a I don't know if you had her on your podcast. Yeah, she's become a friend. Yeah.

Great. She made this awesome point recently that beauty filters that a lot of female

influencers feel pressure to use are exactly Moloch in action again. First, nobody was using

them. And people saw them just the way they were. And then some of them started using it

and becoming ever more plastic fantastic. And then the other ones that weren't using it started

to realize that if they want to just keep their, their market share, they have to start using it

too. And then you're in a situation where they're all using it. And none of them has any more

market share or less than before. So nobody gained anything, everybody lost. And they have to keep

becoming ever more plastic fantastic also. Right. And but nobody can go back to the old way because

it's just too costly, right? Moloch is everywhere. And Moloch is not a new arrival on the scene either.

We humans have developed a lot of collaboration mechanisms to help us fight back against Moloch

through various kinds of constructive collaboration. The Soviet Union and the United States did sign

the number of arms control treaties against Moloch who is trying to stoke them into unnecessarily

risky nuclear arms races, etc, etc. And this is exactly what's happening on the AI front.

This time, it's a little bit geopolitics, but it's mostly money, where there's just so much

commercial pressure. You know, if you take any of these leaders of the top tech companies,

and if they just say, you know, this is too risky, I want to pause for six months, they're going to

get a lot of pressure from shareholders and others are like, well, you know, if you pause,

but those guys don't pause, we're, we don't want to get our lunch eaten. Yeah. And shareholders

even have the power to replace the executives in the worst case, right? So we did this open letter

because we want to help these idealistic tech executives to do what their heart tells them

by providing enough public pressure on the whole sector to just pause so that they can all pause

in a coordinated fashion. And I think without the public pressure, none of them can do it alone,

push back against their shareholders, no matter how good-hearted they are. Moloch is a really

powerful foe. So the idea is to, for the major developers of AI systems like this, so we're

talking about Microsoft, Google, Meta, and anyone else? OpenAI is very close with Microsoft now,

of course, and there are plenty of smaller players. For example, Anthrope is very impressive,

there's Conjecture, there's many, many, many players. I don't want to make a long list to

leave anyone out. And for that reason, it's so important that some coordination happens,

that there's external pressure on all of them, saying you all need to pause. Because then the

people, the researchers in these organizations, the leaders who want to slow down a little bit,

they can say their shareholders, you know, everybody's slowing down because of this pressure,

and it's the right thing to do. Have you seen in history their examples where it's possible to

pause the Moloch? Absolutely. And even like human cloning, for example, you could make so much money

on human cloning. Why aren't we doing it? Because biologists thought hard about this and felt like

this is way too risky. They got together in the 70s in Asilomar and decided even

to stop a lot more stuff, also just editing the human germline, gene editing that goes into our

offspring and decided let's not do this because it's too unpredictable what it's going to lead to.

We could lose control over what happens to our species. So they paused.

There was a ton of money to be made there. So it's very doable, but you just need a public

awareness of what the risks are and the broader community coming in and saying, hey, let's slow

down. And another common pushback I get today is we can't stop in the West because China,

and in China, undoubtedly, they also get told we can't slow down because the West,

because both sides think they're the good guy. But look at human cloning.

Did China forge ahead with human cloning? There's been exactly one human cloning that's

actually been done that I know of. It was done by a Chinese guy. Do you know where he is now?

In jail. And who put him there? Who? Chinese government. Not because Westerners said China

allowed this. No, the Chinese government put him there because they also felt they liked control,

the Chinese government. If anything, maybe they are even more concerned about having

control than Western governments have no incentive of just losing control over where

everything is going. And you can also see the Ernie bot that was released by I believe Baidu

recently. They got a lot of pushback from the government and had to reign it in in a big way.

I think once this basic message comes out that this isn't an arms race, it's a suicide race,

where everybody loses if anybody's AI goes out of control. It really changes the whole dynamic.

I'll say this again, because this is a very basic point I think a lot of people get wrong.

Because a lot of people dismiss the whole idea that AI can really get very superhuman,

because they think there's something really magical about intelligence such that it can

only exist in human minds. Because they believe that, they think it's kind of get to just more or

less GPT-4++ and then that's it. They don't see it as a suicide race. They think whoever gets

that first, they're going to control the world, they're going to win. That's not how it's going to

be. And we can talk again about the scientific arguments from why it's not going to stop there.

But the way it's going to be is if anybody completely loses control and you don't care,

if someone manages to take over the world who really doesn't share your goals,

you probably don't really even care very much about what nationality they have. You're not

going to like it, much worse than today. If you live in Orwellia in dystopia, what do you care

who created it, right? And if it goes farther and we just lose control even to the machines

so that it's not us versus them, it's us versus it, what do you care who created this

unaligned entity which has goals different from humans ultimately and we get marginalized,

we get made obsolete, we get replaced. That's why what I mean when I say it's a suicide race.

It's kind of like we're rushing towards this cliff. But the closer the cliff we get,

the more scenic the views are and the more money there is there and so we keep going.

But we have to also stop at some point, right? Quit while we're ahead.

And it's a suicide race which cannot be won. But the way to really benefit from it is

to continue developing awesome AI a little bit slower so we make it safe, make sure it

does the things that humans want and create a condition where everybody wins.

And that technology has shown us that geopolitics and politics in general

is not a zero sum game at all. So there is some rate of development that will lead

us as a human species to lose control of this thing. And the hope you have is that there's

some lower level of development which will not allow us to lose control. This is an

interesting thought you have about losing control. So if you are somebody like Sander

Prachai or Sam Altman at the head of a company like this, you're saying if they develop an

AGI, they too will lose control of it. So no one person can maintain control. No group of

individuals can maintain control. If it's created very, very soon and is a big black box that we

don't understand like the large language models, yeah, then I'm very confident they're going to

lose control. But this isn't just me saying it. You know, Sam Altman and them as the Sabbaths have

both said themselves, acknowledge that there's really great risks with this and they want to

slow down once they feel it gets scary. But it's clear that they're stuck in this. Again,

Malak is forcing them to go a little faster than they're comfortable with because of

pressure from just commercial pressures, right? To get a bit optimistic here, of course this is

a problem that can be ultimately solved. To win this wisdom race, it's clear that what we hope

that is going to happen hasn't happened. The capability progress has gone faster than a lot

of people thought and the progress in the public sphere of policymaking and so on has gone slower

than we thought. Even the technical AI safety has gone slower. A lot of the technical safety

research was kind of banking on that large language models and other poorly understood

systems couldn't get us all the way. But you had to build more of a kind of intelligence that you

could understand. Maybe it could prove itself safe, you know, things like this. And I'm quite

confident that this can be done so we can reap all the benefits. But we cannot do it as quickly as

this out of control express train we are on now is going to get the AGI. That's why we need a

little more time, I feel. Is there something to be said with like Sam Allman talked about which is

while we're in the pre-AGI stage to release often and as transparently as possible to learn a lot.

So as opposed to being extremely cautious, release a lot. Don't invest in a closed development

where you focus on AI safety while it's somewhat dumb, quote unquote, release as often as possible.

And as you start to see signs of human level intelligence or super human level intelligence,

then you put a halt on it. Well, what a lot of safety researchers have been saying for many years

is that the most dangerous things you can do with an AI is first of all, teach it to write code.

Yeah, because that's the first step towards recursive self-improvement which can take it from

AGI to much higher levels. Okay, oops, we've done that. And another thing, high risk is connected

to the internet. Let it go to websites, download stuff on its own and talk to people. Oops, we've

done that already. You know, Elias Jukowski, you said you interviewed him recently, right?

Yes, yes. So he had this tweet recently which gave me one of the best laughs in a while where he

was like, hey, people used to make fun of me and say you're so stupid, Elias, because you're saying

you're saying you have to worry. Obviously, developers, once they get to like really strong AI,

first thing you're going to do is like never connect it to the internet, keep it in the box

where, you know, you can really study it safe. So he had written it in the like in the meme form,

so it's like then and then that and now. Let's LOL, let's make a chatbot.

And the third thing is Stuart Russell, you know, amazing AI researcher. He has argued for a while

that we should never teach AI anything about humans. Above all, we should never let it learn

about human psychology and how you manipulate humans. That's the most dangerous kind of knowledge

you can give it. Yeah, you can teach it all it needs to know about how to cure cancer and stuff

like that, but don't let it read Daniel Kahneman's book about cognitive biases and all that. And then

oops, LOL, you know, let's invent social media. I'll recommend our algorithms which do exactly

that. They get so good at knowing us and pressing our buttons that we're starting to create a world

now where we're just having ever more hatred because they figured out that these algorithms,

not for out of evil, but just to make money on advertising that the best way to get more engagement

to euphemism, get people glued to their little rectangles, right, is just to make them pissed

off. That's really interesting that a large AI system that's doing the recommender system kind

of task on social media is basically just studying human beings because it's a bunch of us rats

giving it signal, nonstop signal. It'll show a thing and then we give signal and whether we

spread that thing, we like that thing, that thing increases our engagement, gets us to return to

the platform. It has that on the scale of hundreds of millions of people constantly. So it's just

learning and learning and learning and presumably if the parameter, the number of parameters in

neural network that's doing the learning and more and to end the learning is the more it's able to

just basically encode how to manipulate human behavior, how to control humans at scale. Exactly

and that is not something I think is in humanity's interest. Yes. Right now it's mainly letting

some humans manipulate other humans for profit and power which already

caused a lot of damage and eventually that's a sort of skill that can make AIs persuade

humans to let them escape whatever safety precautions we put. There was a really nice

article in the New York Times recently by Yuval Noah Harari and two co-authors including Tristan

Harris from the Social Dilemma and they have this phrase in there I love. Humanity's first

contact with advanced AI was social media and we lost that one. We now live in a country where

there's much more hate in the world where there's much more hate in fact and in our democracy that

we're having this conversation and people can't even agree on who won the last election you know

and we humans often point fingers at other humans and say it's their fault but it's really

malloc and these AI algorithms. We got the algorithms and then malloc pitted the social

media companies against each other so nobody could have a less creepy algorithm because then

they would lose out on revenue to the other company. Is there any way to win that battle back

just if we just linger on this one battle that we've lost in terms of social media? Is it possible

to redesign social media this very medium in which we use as a civilization to communicate

with each other to have these kinds of conversations to have discourse to try to figure out how to

solve the biggest problems in the world whether that's nuclear war or the development of AGI.

Is it possible to do social media correctly? I think it's not only possible but it's necessary.

Who are we kidding that we're going to be able to solve all these other challenges if we can't

even have a conversation with each other that's constructive. The whole idea the key idea of

democracy is that you get a bunch of people together and they have a real conversation

the ones you try to foster on this podcast or you respectfully listen to people you disagree with

and you realize actually you know there are some things actually we some common ground we have and

we both agree let's not have nuclear wars let's not do that etc etc. We're kidding ourselves

thinking we can face off the second contact with with ever more powerful AI that's happening now

with these large language models if we can't even have a functional conversation in the public space

that's why I started the improve the news project improve the news.org but I'm an

optimist fundamentally in that there is a lot of intrinsic goodness in people and that what

makes the difference between someone doing good things for humanity and bad things is not

some sort of fairy tale thing that this person was born with an evil gene and this one was not

born with a good gene. No I think it's whether we put whether people find themselves in situations

that bring out the best in them or the bring out the worst in them and I feel we're building an

internet and a society that brings out the worst. But it doesn't have to be that way. No it does

not. It's possible to create incentives and also create incentives that make money that both make

money and bring out the best in people. I mean in the long term it's not a good investment for

anyone to have a nuclear war for example and is it a good investment for humanity if we just

ultimately replace all humans by machines and then are so obsolete that eventually there's no humans

left. Well it depends again somehow you do the math but I would say by any reasonable economic

standard if you look at the future income of humans and there aren't any that's not a good investment

moreover like why can't we have a little bit of pride in our species dammit you know why should

we just build another species that gets rid of us. If we were Neanderthals would we really consider

it a smart move if we had really advanced biotech to build homo sapiens? You know you might say hey

Max you know yeah let's build these homo sapiens they're gonna be smarter than us maybe they can

help us defend this better against predators and help fix up our caves make them nicer and we'll

control them undoubtedly you know so then they build a couple a little baby girl a little baby boy

you know and and then you have some some wise old Neanderthal elders like hmm I'm scared that

we're opening a Pandora's box here and that we're gonna get outsmarted by these

super Neanderthal intelligences and there won't be any Neanderthals left and then but then you

have a bunch of others in the cave right you are you such a luddite scaremonger of course they're

gonna want to keep us around because we are their creators and and why you know the smarter I think

the smarter they get the nicer they're gonna get they're gonna leave us they're gonna they're gonna

want us around and it's gonna be fine and and besides look at these babies they're so cute

it's clearly they're totally harmless that's exact those babies are exactly GPT-4 yeah it's

not I want to be clear it's not GPT-4 that's terrifying it's the GPT-4 is a baby technology

you know and Microsoft even had a paper recently out with a title something like sparkles of

AGI whatever basically saying this is baby AI like these little Neanderthal babies

and it's gonna grow up there's gonna be other systems from from the same company from other

companies will be way more powerful and but they're gonna take all the things ideas from these babies

and before we know it we're gonna be like those last Neanderthals who are pretty disappointed

and when they realized that they were getting replaced well this interesting point you make

which is the programming it's it's not really possible that GPT-4 is already the kind of system

that can change everything by writing programs so it's yeah it's because it's life 2.0 the systems

I'm afraid of are gonna look nothing like a large language model and they're not gonna

but once it gets once it or other people figure out a way of using this tech to make much better

tech right it's just constantly replacing its software and from everything we've seen about how

how these work under the hood they're like the minimum viable intelligence they do everything

in a dumbest way that still works sort of yeah and so they are life 3.0 except when they replace

their software it's a lot faster than when you when you decide to learn Swedish and moreover

they think a lot faster than us too so when you know we don't think on how one logical step

every nanosecond or few or so the way they do and we can't also just suddenly scale up our

hardware massively in the cloud so limited right so they are they are also life consume become a

little bit more like life 3.0 in that if they need more hardware hey just rent it in the

cloud you know how do you pay for it well with all the services you provide

and what we haven't seen yet which could change a lot is a entire

software system so right now programming is done sort of in bits and pieces

as as an assistant tool to humans but I do a lot of programming and with the kind of stuff

that GPT-4 is able to do I mean is replacing a lot what I'm able to do but I you still need

a human in the loop to kind of manage the design of things manage like what are the prompts that

generate the kind of stuff to do some basic adjustment of the code to do some debugging

but if it's possible to add on top of GPT-4 kind of feedback loop of of of self-debugging

improving the code and then you launch that system onto the wild on the internet because

everything is connected and have it do things have it interact with humans and then get that

feedback now you have this giant ecosystem of humans this is one of the things that

Elon Musk recently sort of tweeted as a case why everyone needs to pay seven dollars or whatever

for twitter to make sure they're real they make sure they're real we're now going to be living

in a world where the the bots are getting smarter and smarter and smarter to a degree where

where you can't you can't tell the difference between a human and a bot that's right and now

you can have bots outnumber humans by one million to one which is why he's making a

case why you have to pay to prove you're human which is one of the only mechanisms to prove

which is depressing and I yeah I feel we have to remember as individuals we should from time

to time ask ourselves why are we doing what we're doing all right and as a species we need to do

that too so if we're building as you say machines that are outnumbering us and more and more

outsmarting us and replacing us on the job market not just for the dangerous and and boring tasks

but also for writing poems and doing art and things that a lot of people find really meaningful

gotta ask ourselves why why are we doing this we are the answer is malloc is tricking us into

doing it and it's such a clever trick that even though we see the trick we still have no choice

but to fall for it right come also the thing you said about you using uh co-pilot AI tools to

program faster how many times what factor faster would you say you code now does it go twice as

fast or I don't really uh because it's a new tool yeah it's I don't know if speed is significantly

improved but it feels like I'm a year away from being uh five to ten times faster so if that's

typical for programmers then uh you're already seeing another kind of self recursive self-improvement

right because previously one like a major generation of improvement of the codes would

happen on the human r&d timescale and now if that's five times shorter then it's going to take five

times less time than otherwise would to develop the next level of these tools and so on so this

these these are the this is exactly the sort of beginning of an of an intelligence explosion

there can be humans in the loop a lot in the early stages and then eventually

humans are needed less and less and the machines can more kind of go alone but you

what you weren't you said there is just the exact example of these sort of things another thing which

which um I was kind of lying on my psychiatrist imagining I'm on a psychiatrist's couch here

saying what are my fears that people would do with AI systems another so I mentioned three

that I had fears about many years ago that they would do namely uh teach you the code

connected to the internet and teach it to manipulate humans a fourth one is building an API

where code can control the super powerful thing right that's very unfortunate because

one thing that systems like GPT-4 have going for them is that they are an oracle in the sense that

they just answer questions there is no robot connected to GPT-4 GPT-4 can't go and do stock

trading based on its thinking yeah it's not an agent an intelligent agent is something that

takes in information from the world processes it to figure out what action to take based on its

goals that it has and then does something back on the world but once you have an API for example

GPT-4 nothing stops Joe Schmo and a lot of other people from building real agents which just keep

making calls somewhere in some inner loop somewhere to these powerful oracle systems

which makes them themselves much more powerful that's another kind of unfortunate development

which I think we would have been better off delaying I don't want to pick on any particular

companies I think they're all under a lot of pressure to make money yeah and again we the

reason we're calling for this pause is to give them all cover to do what they know is the right

thing slow down a little bit at this point but everything we've talked about I hope we'll can

we'll make it clear to people watching this you know why these sort of human level tools can cause

a gradual acceleration you keep using yesterday's technology to build tomorrow's technology yeah and

when you do that over and over again you naturally get an explosion you know that's the definition

of an explosion in science right like if you have two people they fall in love now you have four

people and then they can make more babies and now you have eight people and then then you have 1632

64 etc that's we call that a population explosion where it's just that each if it's instead free

neutrons in a nuclear reaction that if each one can make more than one then you get an exponential

growth in that we call it a nuclear explosion all explosions are like that in an intelligence

explosion it's just exactly the same principle that some quantities some amount of intelligence

can make more intelligence than that and then repeat you always get the exponentials what's

your intuition why does you mention there's some technical reasons why it doesn't stop

at a certain point what's your intuition and do you have any intuition why it might stop

it's obviously going to stop when it bumps up against the laws of physics

there are some things you just can't do no matter how smart you are allegedly

and because we don't know the full laws of physics yeah right Seth Lloyd wrote a really

cool paper on the physical limits on computation for example if you make it put too much energy into

it and the finite space it'll turn into a black hole you can't move information around fast and

the speed of light stuff like that but it's hard to store way more than than a modest number of

bits per atom etc but you know those limits are just astronomically above like 30 orders of magnitude

about where we are now so bigger different bigger jump in intelligence than if you go from a

from an ant to a human I think of course what we want to do is have have a controlled

thing a nuclear reactor you put moderators in to make sure exactly it doesn't blow up out of control

right when we do experiments with biology and cells and so on you know we also try to make

sure it doesn't get out of control and we can do this with AI too the thing is we haven't succeeded

yet and malloc is exactly doing the opposite just fueling just egging everybody on faster faster

faster or the other company is going to catch up with you or the other country is going to catch

up with you we do this we have to want this stuff we have and I don't believe in this just asking

people to look into their hearts and do the right thing it's easier for others to say that but like

if if you're in the situation where your company is going to get screwed if you by other companies

they're not stopping you know you're putting people in a very hard situation the right thing

to do is change the whole incentive structure instead and this is not an old maybe I should

say one more thing about this because malloc has been around as humanity's number one or number

two enemy since the beginning of civilization and we came up with some really cool counter

measures like first of all already over a hundred thousand years ago evolution realized that it was

a very unhelpful that people kept killing each other all the time so it genetically gave us

compassion and made it so that like if you get two drunk dudes getting into a pointless bar fight

they might give each other black eyes but they have a lot of inhibition towards just killing

each other that's a and similarly if you find a baby lying on the street when you go out for

your morning jog tomorrow you're gonna stop and pick it up right even though it may be a make

you late for your next podcast so evolution gave us these genes that make our own egoistic incentives

more aligned with what's good for the greater group or part of right and then as we got a bit

more sophisticated and developed language we invented gossip which is also a fantastic anti

malloc right because now it it's really discourages liars moochers cheaters because it their own

incentive now is not to do this because word quickly gets around and then suddenly people

aren't going to invite them to their dinners anymore and or trust them and then when we got

still more sophisticated and bigger societies you know invented the legal system where even strangers

who didn't couldn't rely on gossip and things like this would treat each other would have an incentive

now those guys in the bar fights even if they someone is so drunk that he actually wants to kill

the other guy he also has a little thought in the back of his head that you know do i really

want to spend the next 10 years eating like really crappy food in a small room i'm just gonna

i'm just gonna chill out you know so and we we similarly have tried to give these incentives

to our corporations by having having regulation and all sorts of oversight so that their incentives

are aligned with the greater good we tried really hard and the big problem that we're

failing now is not that we haven't tried before but it's just that the tech is growing much

is developing much faster than the regulators been able to keep up right so

regulators it's kind of comical that european union right now is doing this AI act right

which and in the beginning they had a little opt-out exception that gpt4 would be completely

excluded from regulation brilliant idea what's the logic behind that some lobbyists pushed

successfully for this so we were actually quite involved with the future life institute

mark brackell mr uke anthony agir and others you know we're quite involved with talking to very

educating various people involved in this process about these general purpose AI models coming

and pointing out that they would become the laughing stock if they didn't put it in

so it the french started pushing for it got put in to the draft and it looked like all was good

and then there was a huge counter push from lobbyists yeah there were more lobbyists in

brussels from tech companies and from oil companies for example and it looked like it might

is we're going to maybe get taken out again and now gpt4 happened and i think it's going to stay in

but this just shows you know malloc can be defeated but the the challenge we're facing is that the tech

is generally much faster than what the policy makers are and a lot of the policy makers also

don't have a tech background so it's you know we really need to work hard to educate them on

on how on what's taking place here so so we're getting the situation where the first kind of

non so you know i define artificial intelligence just as non biological intelligence all right

and by that definition a company a corporation is also an artificial intelligence because the

corporation isn't it's humans it's a system if its CEO decides the CEO of a tobacco company

decides one morning the CEO he doesn't want to sell cigarettes anymore they'll just put another CEO in

there it's not enough to align the incentives of individual people or align individual computers

incentives to their owners which is what technically iSafety research is about you also have to align

the incentives of corporations with a greater good and some corporations have gotten so big and so

powerful very quickly that in many cases their lobbyists instead align the regulators to what

they want rather than the other way around it's a classic regulatory capture all right is is the

thing that the slowdown hopes to achieve is give enough time to the regulators to catch up or enough

time to the companies themselves to breathe and understand how to do AI safety correctly i think

both and but i think that the vision path to success i see is first you give a breather

actually to to the people in these companies their leadership who wants to do the right thing and

they all have safety teams and so on on their companies give them a chance to get together

with the other companies and the outside pressure can also help catalyze that right and and work out

what is it that's what are the reasonable safety requirements one should put on future systems

before they get rolled out there are a lot of people also in academia and elsewhere outside

of these companies who can be brought into this and have a lot of very good ideas and then i think

it's very realistic that within six months you can get these people coming up so here's a white

paper here's where we all think is reasonable um you know you didn't just because cars killed a lot

of people you didn't ban cars but they got together a bunch of people and decided you know in order

to be allowed to sell a car it has to have a seat belt in it there the analogous things that you can

start requiring a future AI systems so that they are are safe and uh once this have this heavy

heavy lifting this intellectual work has been done by experts in the field which can be done quickly

i think it's going to be quite easy to get policymakers to to see yeah this is a good idea

and it's it's you know for the fight for the companies to fight malloc they want and i believe

sam altman has explicitly called for this they want the regulators to actually adopt it so that

their competition is going to abide by it too right you don't want uh you don't want to be

enacting all these principles then you abide by them and then there's this one little company that

doesn't sign on to it and then now they can gradually overtake you then the companies will get

be able to sleep secure knowing that everybody's playing by the same rules

so do you think it's possible to develop guardrails that keep the systems from

from basically damaging irreparably humanity while still enabling sort of the capitalist

fueled competition between companies as they develop how to best make money with this AI

you think there's a balancing that's possible absolutely i mean we've seen that in many other

sectors where you've had the free market produce quite good things without causing

particular harm um when the guardrails are there and they work you know capitalism is a very good

way of optimizing for just getting the same things on more efficiently it was but it was good you

know and like in hindsight i've never met anyone even even on parties way over on the right

in in any country who think it was a bad it thinks it was a terrible idea to ban child labor for

example yeah but it seems like this particular technology has gotten so good so fast become

powerful to a degree where you could see in the near term the ability to make a lot of money

and to put guardrails develop guardrails quickly in that kind of context seems to be tricky it's not

similar to cars or child labor it seems like the opportunity to make a lot of money here

very quickly is right here yeah again it's there's this cliff yeah this gets quite

seen in the closer the cliff there you go more the more there more money there is more gold

in gets there on the ground you can pick up or whatever it's you want to drive there very fast

but it's not in anyone's incentive that we go over the cliff and it's not like everybody's in

their own car all the cars are connected together with a chain yeah so if anyone goes over they'll

start dragging others down the others down too and so ultimately it's in the selfish interests

also of the people in the companies to slow down when the when you start seeing the contours of

the cliff there in front of you right and the problem is that even though the people who are

building the technology and the CEOs they really get it the shareholders and these other market

forces they are people who don't honestly understand that the cliff is there they usually don't

you have to get quite into the weeds to really appreciate how powerful this is and how fast

and a lot of people are even still stuck again in this idea that intelligence in this carbon

chauvinism as I like to call it that you can only have our level of intelligence in humans

that there's something magical about it whereas the people in the tech companies

who build this stuff they all realize that intelligence is information processing

of a certain kind and it really doesn't matter at all whether the information is processed by

carbon atoms in neurons and brains or by silicon atoms and some technology we build

so you brought up capitalism earlier and there are a lot of people who love capitalism and a lot

of people who really really don't and it struck me recently that what's happening with capitalism

here is exactly analogous to the way in which super intelligence might wipe us out so

you know I studied economics for my undergrad stock in school economics yay

well no no I tell me so I was very interested in how how you could use market forces to just get

stuff done more efficiently but give the right incentives to market so that it wouldn't do

really bad things so Dylan had Phil Manel who's a professor and colleague of mine at MIT

wrote this really interesting paper with some collaborators recently where they proved

mathematically that if you just take one goal that you just optimize for on and on and on

indefinitely that you think is gonna bring you in the right direction but basically always happens

is in the beginning it will make things better for you but if you keep going at some point

it's going to start making things worse for you again and then gradually it's going to make it

really really terrible so just as a simple the way I think of the proof is like suppose you want

to go from here back to Austin for example and you're like okay yeah let's just let's go south

but you put in exactly the right sort of the right direction just optimize that south as possible

you get closer and closer to Austin but uh you there's always some little error so you

you're not going exactly towards Austin but you get pretty close but eventually you start going

away again and eventually you're gonna be leaving the solar system yeah and they they proved it's

beautiful mathematical proof this happens generally and this is very important for AI because for

even though Stuart Russell has written a book and given a lot of talks on why it's a bad idea to

have AI just blindly optimize something that's what pretty much all our systems do yeah we have

something called the loss function that we're just minimizing or reward function we're just

minimize maximizing and um capitalism is exactly like that too we want we wanted to get stuff done

more efficiently that people wanted so introduce the free market things got done much more efficiently

than they did and and say communism right and it got better but then it just kept optimizing it

and kept optimizing and you got ever bigger companies and ever more efficient information

processing and now also very much powered by it and eventually a lot of people are beginning

to feel wait we're kind of optimizing a bit too much like why did we just chop down half the rain

for us you know and why why did suddenly these regulators get captured by lobbyists and so on

it's just the same optimization that's been running for too long if you have an AI

that actually has power over the world and you just give it one goal and just like keep

optimizing that most likely everybody's gonna be like yay this is great in the beginning things

are getting better but um it's almost impossible to give it exactly the right direction to optimize in

and then eventually all hey breaks loose right nick boss drum and others are giving it examples

that sound quite silly like what if you just want to like tell it to cure cancer or something and

that's all you tell it maybe it's going to decide to take over entire confidence just

so we can get more super computer facilities in there and figure out a cure cancer backwards and

then you're like wait that's not what I wanted right and the the the the issue with capitalism

and the issue with running away I have kind of merged now because the malloc I talked about

is exactly the capitalist malloc that we have built an economy that has is optimized for only one

thing profit right and that worked great back when things were very inefficient and then now it's

getting done better and it worked great as long as the companies were small enough that they couldn't

capture the regulators but that's not true anymore but they keep optimizing and now we

they realize that that they can these companies can make even more profit by building ever more

powerful AI even if it's reckless but optimize more more more more more so this is malloc again

showing up and I just want to anyone here who has any concerns about about late-stage capitalism

having gone a little too far you should worry about superintelligence because it's the same

villain in both cases it's it's malloc and optimizing one objective function aggressively

blindly is going to take us there yeah we have this pause from time to time and look into our

hearts and that's why are we doing this is this am I still going towards Austin or have I gone too

far you know maybe we should change direction and that is the idea behind the halt for six months

why six months that seems like a very short period just can we just linger and explore

different ideas here because this feels like a really important moment in human history

where pausing would actually have a significant positive effect we said six months because

we figured the number one pushback we were going to get in the west was like but China

and everybody knows there's no way that China is going to catch up with the west on this in

six months so it's that argument goes off the table and you can forget about geopolitical

competition and just focus on the real issue that's why we put this that's really interesting

but you've already made the case that even for China if you actually want to take on that argument

China too would not be bothered by a longer halt because they don't want to lose control

even more than the west doesn't that's what I think that's a really interesting argument

like I have to actually really think about that which the the kind of thing people assume is if you

develop an AGI that open AI if they're the ones that do it for example they're going to win

but you're saying no they're everybody loses yeah it's going to get better and better and better

and then kaboom we all lose that's what's going to happen when losing win a defined on a metric of

basically quality of life for human civilization and for sam altman to be people on my personal

guess you know and people can quibble with this is that we're just gonna there won't be any humans

that's it that's what I mean by lose you know if you we can see in history once you have some

species or some group of people who aren't needed anymore doesn't usually work out so well for them

right yeah there were a lot of horses for the way used for traffic in boston and then the

car got invented and most of them got you know we don't need to go there and uh if you look at

humans you know right now we why did the labor movement succeed and after the industrial

revolution because it was needed even though we had a lot of mollocks and there was child labor and

so on you know the company still needed to have workers and that's why strikes had power and so on

if we get to the point where most humans aren't needed anymore I think it's like it's quite naive

to think that they're gonna still be treated well you know we say that yeah yeah everybody's equal

and the government will always we'll always protect them but if you look in practice groups

that are very disenfranchised and don't have any actual power usually get screwed and now in the

beginning so industrial revolution we automated away muscle work but that got went worked out pretty

well eventually because we educated ourselves and started to working with our brains instead and got

usually more interesting better paid jobs but now we're beginning to replace brain work so we replaced

a lot of boring stuff like we got the pocket calculator so you don't have people adding

multiplying numbers anymore at work fine there were better jobs they could get but now gpt4 you know

and the stable diffusion and techniques like this they're really beginning to blow away some real

some jobs that people really love having it was a heartbreaking article just post just yesterday

on social media I saw about this guy who was doing 3d modeling for gaming and he

and all of a sudden now they got this new software he just give says prompts and he feels this whole

job that he loved lost its meaning you know and I asked gpt4 to rewrite twinkle twinkle little star

in the style of Shakespeare I couldn't have done such a good job it was just really impressive

you've seen a lot of art coming out here right so I'm all for automating away the dangerous

jobs and the boring jobs but I think you hear a lot some arguments which are too glib sometimes

people say well that's all that's going to happen we're getting rid of the boring boring tedious

dangerous jobs it's just not true there are a lot of really interesting jobs that are being

taken away now journalism is getting going to get crushed uh coding is going to get crushed I predict

uh the job market for programmers salaries are going to start dropping you know if you said you

can code five times faster you know then you need five times fewer programmers maybe there'll be

more output also but you'll still end up using fewer program needing fewer programmers than

today and I love coding you know I think it's super cool um so we we need to stop and ask

ourselves why again are we doing this as humans right I feel that AI should be built by humanity

for humanity and let's not forget that it shouldn't be by malloc for malloc or what it really is now

is kind of by humanity for malloc which doesn't make any sense it's for us that we're doing it then

and um it would make a lot more sense if we build develop figure out gradually safely how to make

all this tech and then we think about what are the kind of jobs that people really don't want to have

you know automate them all the way and then we ask what are the jobs that people really find

meaning in like maybe taking care of children in the daycare center maybe doing art etc etc and

even if it were possible to automate that way we don't need to do that right that we built these

machines well it's possible that we redefine or rediscover what are the jobs that give us meaning

so for me the thing it is really sad like I have the time I'm excited have the time I'm uh crying

as I'm as I'm generating code because I kind of love programming it's uh it's the act of creation

you you have an idea you design it and then you bring it to life and it does something especially

if there's some intelligence to it does something it doesn't even have to have intelligence

bringing printing hello world on screen you you you made a little machine and it comes to life yeah

and uh there's a bunch of tricks you learn along the way because you've been doing it for

for many many years and then to see AI be able to generate all the tricks you thought were special

yeah um I don't know it's very it um it's it's scary it's almost painful like a loss

uh loss of innocence maybe like yeah maybe when when I was younger uh I remember before I

learned that sugar is bad for you you should be on a diet I remember I enjoyed candy deeply

in a way I just can't anymore that I know is bad for me I enjoyed it unapologetically fully

just intensely and I just I lost that now I feel like a little bit of that is lost

for me with program it would being lost with programming similar as it is for

the the 3d modeler no longer being able to really enjoy the art of modeling 3d things for gaming

I don't know I don't know what to make sense of that maybe I would rediscover that the true magic

of what it means to be human is connecting with other humans to have conversations like this

I don't know to uh to have sex to have to eat food to really intensify the value from conscious

experiences versus like creating other stuff you're pitching the rebranding again from

homo sapiens to homo sentiens the meaningful experiences and just to inject some optimism

in this year so we don't sound like a bunch of gloomers you know we can totally have our cake

and eat it you hear a lot of totally bullshit claims that we can't afford having more teachers

have to cup the number of nurses you know that's just nonsense obviously

with anything even quite far short of agi we can dramatically improve grow the gdp

and produce this wealth of goods and services it's very easy to create a world where everybody

is better off than today including the richest people can be better off as well right it's

not a zero-sum game you know technology again you can have two countries like sweden and

danmark had all these ridiculous wars century after century and uh sometimes that sweden got a

little better off because it got a little bigger and then danmark got a little better off because

sweden got a little bit smaller and and but then we then technology came along and we both got

just dramatically wealthier without taking away from anyone else it was just a total win for

everyone and uh ai can do that on steroids if you can build safe agi if you can build super

intelligence you know basically all the limitations that cause harm today can be completely eliminated

right it's a wonderful you talk possibility and this is not sci-fi this is something which is

clearly possible according to laws of physics and we can talk about ways of making it safe also

but unfortunately that'll only happen if we steer in that direction that's absolutely

not the default outcome that's why income inequality keeps going up that's why the life

expectancy in the us has been going down now i think it's four years in a row i just read a

heartbreaking study from the cdc about how something like one-third of all teenage girls in the us

been thinking about suicide you know like those are steps in the totally the wrong direction

and and and it's important to keep our eyes on the prize here that we can we have the power now

for the first time in the history of our species to harness artificial intelligence to help us

really flourish and help bring out the best in our humanity rather than the worst of it

to help us have really fulfilling experiences that feel truly meaningful and you and i shouldn't

sit here and dictate the future generations what they will be let them figure it out but

let's give them a chance to live and and not foreclose all these possibilities for them by

just messing things up right now for that we have to solve the ai safety problem i just it

would be nice if we can link on exploring that a little bit so one interesting way to enter that

discussion is uh you tweeted and elon replied you tweeted let's not just focus on whether gpt4

will do more harm or good on the job market but also whether it's coding skills will hasten the

arrival of superintelligence that's something we've been talking about right so elon proposed one

thing in their reply saying maximum truth seeking is my best guess for ai safety can you maybe uh

steelman the case for this uh sense this objective function of truth and uh maybe make an argument

against it and in general what uh are your different ideas to start approaching those the

solution to ai safety i didn't see that reply actually oh interesting i went so but i really

resonate with it because ai is not evil it caused people around the world to hate each other much

more but that's because we made it in a certain way it's a tool we can use it for great things and

bad things and we could just as well have ai systems and this is this is part of my vision

for success here truth seeking ai that really brings us together again you know why do people

hate each other so much between countries and within countries it's because they each have

totally different versions of the truth right if they all have the same truth that they trusted

for good reason because they could check it and verify it and not have to believe in some

self-proclaimed authority right they wouldn't be as nearly as much hate there'd be a lot more

understanding instead and this is i think something ai can help enormously with for example

a little baby step in this direction is this website called metaculous where

people bet and make predictions not for money but just for their own reputation and it's kind

of funny actually you treat the humans like you treat ai as you have a loss function where they

get penalized if they're super confident on something and then the opposite happens yeah

whereas if you're kind of humble and then you're like i think it's 51% chance this is

going to happen and then the other happens you don't get penalized much and and what you

can see is that some people are much better at predicting than others they've earned your trusts

right one project that i'm working on right now is the outgrowth to improve the news

foundation together with the metaculous folks is seeing if we can really scale this up a lot

with more powerful ai because i would love it i would love for there to be like a really powerful

truth-seeking system where that is trustworthy because it keeps being right about stuff and

people who come to it and maybe look at its latest trust ranking of different pundits and

newspapers etc if they want to know why someone got a low score they can click on it and see all

the predictions that they actually made and how they turned out you know this is how we do it in

science you trust scientists like einstein who said something everybody thought was bullshit

and turned out to be right get a lot for a trust point and he did it multiple times even

i think ai has the power to really heal a lot of the rifts we're seeing by creating trust system

it has to get away from this idea today with some fact-checking sites which might themselves

have an agenda and you just trust it because of its reputation

you want to have it so these sort of systems they earn their trust and they're completely

transparent this i think would actually help a lot that can i think help heal the very dysfunctional

conversation that humanity has about how it's going to deal with all its biggest challenges

in the world today and then on the technical side you know another common sort of gloom

comment i get from people who are saying we're just screwed there's no hope

is well things like gpt4 are way too complicated for a human to ever understand

and prove that they can be trustworthy they're forgetting that ai can help us

prove that things work right and and there's this very fundamental fact that in math

it's much harder to come up with a proof than it is to verify that the proof is correct

you can actually write a little proof checking code it's quite short

that you can assume and understand and then it can check most monstrously long proof

ever generated even by a computer and say yeah this is valid so so right now we we have

um this uh this approach with virus checking software that it looks to see if there's something

you should not trust it and if it can prove to itself that you should not trust that code

it warns you right what if you flip this around and this is an idea i should give credit to

steve on 104 so that it will only run the code if it can prove instead of not running it if it

can prove that it's not trustworthy if it will only run and if it can prove that it's trustworthy

so it asks the code prove to me that you're going to do what you say you're going to do

and and it gives you this proof and you a little proof tricker can check it now you can

actually trust an ai that's much more intelligent than you are right because you it's its problem

to come up with this proof that you could never have found that you should trust it so this is

the interesting point i i agree with you but this is where eliezer yakovsky might disagree with you

his claim not with you but with this idea is his claim is super intelligent ai would be able

to know how to lie to you with such a proof how to lie to you and give me a proof that

i'm gonna think is correct yeah but but it's not me it's lying to you that's the trick my proof

checker so yes so his general idea is a super intelligent system can lie to a dumber proof

checker so you're going to have as a system becomes more and more intelligent there's going to be a

threshold where a super intelligent system would be able to effectively lie to a slightly

dumber a gi system like there's a threat like he really focuses on this weak a gi the strong a gi

jump where the strong a gi can make all the weak a gi's think that it's just one of them

but it's no longer that and that leap is when it runs away yeah i i don't buy that argument

i think no matter how super intelligent an ai is it's never going to be able to prove to me that

they're only finitely many primes for example and it just it just can't and and um it can try to

know me we're making up all sorts of new weird rules of of deduction and that and say trust me you know

the way your proof checker works is too limited and we have this new hyper math and it's true

but then i would i would just take the attitude okay i'm going to forfeit some of these

the supposedly super cool technologies i'm only going to go with the ones that i can prove in

my own trusted proof checker then i don't i think it's fine there's still of course this is not

something anyone has successfully implemented at this point but i think it i just give it as an

example of hope we don't have to do all the work ourselves right this is exactly the sort of very

boring and tedious tasks is perfect to outsource to an ai and this is a way in which less powerful

and less intelligent agents like us can actually continue to control and trust more powerful ones

so build a gi systems that help us defend against other a gi systems well for starters

begin with a simple problem of just making sure that the system that you own or that's supposed

to be loyal to you has to prove to itself that it's always going to do the things that you actually

wanted to do right and if it can't prove it maybe it's still going to do it but you won't run it

so you just forfeit some aspects of all the cool things that i can do i i bet you dollars

donuts it can still do some incredibly cool stuff for you yeah there are there are other

things too that we shouldn't speak under the rug like not every human agrees on exactly what

where what direction we should go with humanity right yes and you've talked a lot about geopolitical

things on this on on your podcast to this effect you know but i think that shouldn't distract us

from the fact that there are actually a lot of things that everybody in the world virtually

agrees on that hey you know like having no humans on the planet in a in a in a near future

let's not do that right you look at something like the united nation sustainable development goals

some of them are quite ambitious and basically all the countries agree us china russia

ukraine you all agree so instead of quibbling about the little things we don't agree on let's

start with the things we do agree on and and and get them done instead of being so distracted by

all these things we disagree on that malloc wins because frankly malloc going wild now it feels

like a war on life playing out in front of our eyes if you if you just look at it from space you

know we're on this planet beautiful vibrant ecosystem now we start chopping down big parts of

it even though nobody most people thought that was a bad idea always start doing ocean acidification

wiping out all sorts of species oh now we have all these close calls you almost had a nuclear war

and we're replacing more and more of the biosphere with non-living things we're also

replacing in our social lives a lot of the things which we're so valuable to humanity a lot of

social interactions now are replaced by people staring into their rectangles right and i

i'm not a psychologist i'm out of my depth here but i suspect that part of the reason why teen

suicide and suicide in general in the u.s the record-breaking levels is actually caused by

again and so ai technologies and social media making people spend less time with with actual

and actually just human interaction we've all seen a bunch of good-looking people in restaurants

staring into the rectangles instead of looking into each other's eyes right so that's also a

part of the war on life that that we're replacing so many

really life-affirming things by technology we're we're putting technology between us

the technology that was supposed to connect us is actually distancing us ourselves from each other

and um and and then we're giving ever more power to things which are not alive these large

corporations are not living things right they're just maximizing profit there i want to win them

war on life i i think we humans together with all our fellow living things on this planet

will be better off if we can remain in control over the non-living things and make sure that

they they work for us i really think it can be done can you just linger on this um maybe

high-level philosophical disagreement with eliezer yadkowski

i in this the hope you're stating so he is very sure he puts a very high probability

very close to one depending on the day he puts it at one uh that ai is going to kill humans

that there's just he does not see a trajectory which it doesn't end up with that conclusion

what uh what trajectory do you see that doesn't end up there and maybe can you

can you see the point he's making and and can you also see a way out

mm-hmm first of all i tremendously respect eliezer yadkowski and his his thinking

second i do share his view that there's a pretty large chance that we're not going to

make it as humans there won't be any humans on the planet and not the distant future and

and that makes me very sad you know we just had a little baby and i keep asking myself you know is um

how old is even gonna get you know and and um i asked myself it feels i i said to my wife recently

it feels a little bit like i was just diagnosed with some sort of um cancer which has some you

know risk of dying from and some risk of surviving you know uh except this is a kind of cancer which

would kill all of humanity so i completely take seriously his his um his concerns i think um

but i don't absolutely don't think it's hope hopeless i think um there is a there is um

um first of all a lot of momentum now for the first time actually since the many many years

that have passed since since i and many others started warming warning about this i feel

most people are getting it now i i uh i was just talking to this guy in the gas station

near our house the other day my and he's like i think we're getting replaced and i think in it

so that's positive that they're they're finally we're finally seeing this reaction which is the

first step towards solving the problem uh second uh i really think that this this vision of only

running ai's really if the stakes are really high they can prove to us that they're safe

if it's really just virus checking in reverse again i i think it's scientifically doable

i don't think it's hopeless um we might have to forfeit some of the technology that we could

get if we were putting blind faith in our ai's but we're still gonna get amazing stuff do you

envision a process with a proof checker like something like gpt4 gpt5 will go through a

process of rigorous no no i think it's hopeless that's like trying to prove there about five

spaghetti okay what i think well how the the whole the vision i have for success is instead that

you know just like we human beings were able to look at our brains and and distill out the

key knowledge Galileo when his dad threw him an apple when he was a kid he was able to catch it

because his brain could and his funny spaghetti kind of way you know predict how parabolas are

going to move his conaman system one right but then he got older and it's like wait this is a

parabola it's it's y equals x squared i can distill this knowledge out and today you can

easily program it into a computer and it can simulate not just that but how to get tamars

and so on right i envision a similar process where we use the the amazing learning power

of neural networks to discover the knowledge in the first place but we don't stop with a black box

and and use that we then do a second round of ai where we use automated systems to extract out

the knowledge and see what is it look what are the insights it's had okay and it's and then we

we put that knowledge into a completely different kind of architecture or programming language or

whatever that's that's made in a way that it can be both really efficient and also

is more amenable to to very formal verification that's that's my vision i'm not saying sitting

here saying i'm confident 100 sure that it's gonna work you know but i don't think it's

chance it's certainly not zero either and it will certainly be possible to do for a lot of really

cool ai applications that we're not using now so we can have a lot of the fun that we're excited

about if we if we do this we're gonna need a little bit of time that's why it's good to

pause and and put in place requirements one more thing also i i think you know someone might think

well zero percent chance we're gonna survive let's just give up right that's very dangerous

because there's no more guaranteed way to fail than to convince yourself that it's impossible

and not to try you know any if you you know when you study history and military history the first

thing you learn is that that's how you do psychological warfare you persuade the other side

that it's hopeless so they don't even fight and then of course you win right let's not do this

psychological warfare on ourselves and say there's a hundred percent probability we're all gonna

we're all screwed anyway it's sadly i i do get that a little bit sometimes from from

actually some young people who are like so convinced that we're all screwed that they're

like i'm just gonna play game play computer games and do drugs and because we're screwed anyway right

it's important to keep the hope alive because it actually has a causal impact and makes it

more likely that we're gonna succeed it seems like the people that actually build solutions to a

problem seemingly impossible to solve problems are the ones that believe yeah they were the ones

who are the optimists yeah and it's like uh it seems like there's some fundamental law to the

universe where fake it till you make it kind of works like believe it's possible and it becomes

possible yeah was it henry ford who said that if you can if you tell yourself that it's impossible

it is so let's not make that mistake yeah and this is a big mistake society is making you

know i think all in all everybody's so gloomy and the media are also very biased towards if it

bleeds it leads and gloom and doom right so um most visions of the future we have or or

dystopian which really demotivates people now we want to really really really focus on the upside

also to give people the willingness to fight for it and for ai you and i mostly talked about

gloom here again but let's not remember not forget that you know we have probably both lost

someone we really cared about some disease that we were told were was incurable well it's not

there's no law and physics saying we have to die of that cancer or whatever of course you

can cure it and there are so many other things where that we with our human intelligence have

also failed to solve on this planet which ai could also very much help us with right so

if we can get this right just be a little more chill and slow down a little bit so we get it right

it's mind-blowing how awesome our future can be right we talked a lot about stuff on earth

can be great but even if you really get ambitious and look up at the skies right there's no reason

we have to be stuck on this planet for the rest of um the remain for billions of years to come

we totally understand now as laws of physics let life spread out into space to other solar

systems to other galaxies and flourish for billions of billions of years and this to me is a very very

hopeful vision that really motivates me to to fight then coming back to in the end something

you talked about again you know this the struggle how the human struggle is one of the things which

also really gives meaning to our lives if there's ever been an epic struggle this is it and isn't

it even more epic if you're the underdog if most people are telling you this is gonna fail it's

impossible right and you persist and you succeed right and that's what we can do together as a

species on this one a lot of pundits are ready to count this out both in the battle to keep AI

safe and becoming a multi-planetary species yeah and they're they're the same challenge if we can

keep AI safe that's how we're gonna get multi-planetary very efficiently i have some sort of technical

questions about how to get it right so one idea that i'm not even sure what the right answer is to

is should systems like GPT-4 be open sourced in whole or in part can make the can you see the

case for either i think the answer right now is no i think the answer early on was yes so we could

bring in the all the wonderful create the thought process of everybody on this but asking should

we open source GPT-4 now is just the same as if you say well is it good should we open source

how to build really small nuclear weapons should we open source how to make bio weapons

should we open source how to make a new virus that kills 90 percent of everybody who gets it

of course we shouldn't so it's already that powerful it's already that powerful that we

have to respect the power of the systems we've built the knowledge that you get

from open sourcing everything we do now might very well be powerful enough that people looking

at that can use it to build the things that you're really threatening again let's get it remember

open ai is GPT-4 is a baby ai baby sort of baby proto almost a little bit a agi according to what

microsoft's recent paper said right it's not that we're scared of what we're scared about

is people taking that who are who might be a lot less responsible than the company that made it

right and just going to town with it that's why we want to it's it's an information hazard there

are many things which um yeah are not open sourced right now in society for a very good reason

like how do you make certain kind of very powerful toxins out of stuff you can buy

and home depot you know we don't open source those things for a reason

and uh this is really no different so uh i'm saying that i have to say it's a little it

feels in a bit weird a bit in a way a bit weird to say it because MIT is like the cradle of the

open source movement and i love open source in general power to the people let's say

but um there's always gonna be some stuff that you don't open source and you know it's just like

you don't open source so we have a three month old baby right when he gets a little bit older

we're not gonna open source to him all the most dangerous things he could do in the house yeah

but it does it's a weird feeling because this is one of the first moments in history where

there's a strong case to be made not to open source software this is when the software

has become yeah too dangerous yeah but it's not the first time that we didn't want to open source

a technology technology yeah is there something to be said about how to get the release of such

systems right like gpt4 and gpt5 so open ai went through a pretty rigorous effort for several months

you could say it could be longer but nevertheless it's longer than you would have expected

of trying to test the system to see like what are the ways it goes wrong to make it very difficult

for people somewhat difficult for people to ask things how do i make a bomb for one dollar

or how do i uh say i hate a certain group on twitter in a way that doesn't get me blocked

from twitter banned from twitter those kinds of questions uh so you basically use the system

to do harm yeah uh is there something you could say about ideas you have it's just

on looking having thought about this problem of as hd how to release such system how to test such

systems when you have them inside the company yeah so a lot of people say that the two biggest risks

from large language models are it's spreading disinformation harmful information of various

types and second being used for offensive uh cyber weapon

design i think those are not the two greatest threats they're very serious threats and it's

wonderful that people are trying to mitigate them a much bigger elephant in the room is

how is this is just going to disrupt the economy in a huge way obviously and maybe take away a

lot of the most meaningful jobs and an even bigger one is the one we spent so much time talking about

here that that this becomes the bootloader for the more powerful ai right code connected

to the internet manipulate humans yeah and before we know what we have something else

which is not at all a large language model that looks nothing like it but which is way more

intelligent and capable and has goals and that's the that's the elephant in the room and and uh

obviously no matter how hard any of these companies have tried they that's not something

that's easy for them to verify with the large language models and the only way to be really

lower that risk a lot would be to not let for example train not never let it read any code

not train on that and not put it into an api and um not not give it access to so much information

about how to manipulate humans so but that doesn't mean you still can't make a lot a ton of money on

them you know we're we're gonna just watch now this coming year right microsoft is rolling out

the new office suite where you go into microsoft word and give it a prompt that it writes the whole

text for you and then you edit it and then you're like oh give me a powerpoint version of this and

it makes it and now take the spreadsheet and blah and you know all of those things i think are

you can debate the economic impact of it and whether society is prepared to deal with this

disruption but those are not the things which that's not the elephant of the room that keeps

me awake at night for wiping out humanity and i think that's the biggest misunderstanding we have

a lot of people think that we're scared of like automatic spreadsheets that's not the case that's

not what eliezer was freaked out about either is there in terms the actual mechanism of how

ai might kill all humans so something you've been outspoken about you've talked about a lot

is it autonomous weapon systems so the use of ai in war is that one of the things that still you

carry a concern for as these systems become more and more powerful and carry a concern for it not

that all humans are going to get killed by slaughterbots but rather just the express route

into orwellian dystopia where it becomes much easier for very few to kill very many and therefore

it becomes very easy for very few to dominate very many right if you want to know how i could

kill all people just ask yourself we humans have driven a lot of species extinct how do we do it

you know we were smarter than them usually we didn't do it even systematically by going around one

on one one after the other and stepping on them or shooting them or anything like that we just

like chopped down their habitat because we needed it for something else in some cases we did it by

putting more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere because of some reason that those animals didn't

even understand and now they're gone right so if if you're in ai and you just want to figure

something out then you decide you know we just really need them this space here to build more

compute facilities you know if that's the only goal it has you know we are just the sort of

accidental roadkill along the way and you could totally imagine yeah maybe this oxygen is kind of

annoying because it caused more corrosion so let's get rid of the oxygen and good luck surviving

after that you know i i'm not particularly concerned that they would want to kill us just because

that would be like a goal in itself you know when we

driven number we've driven a number of the elephant species extinct right it wasn't

because we didn't like elephants what the basic problem is you just don't want to give you don't

want to see the control over your planet to some other more intelligent entity that doesn't share

your goals it's that simple so which brings us to another key challenge which ai safety researchers

have been grappling with for a long time like how do you make it ai first of all understand

our goals and then adopt our goals and then retain them as they get smarter right and

all three of those are really hard right like a human child first they're just not smart enough

to understand our goals they can't even talk and then eventually they're teenagers and understand

our goals just fine but they don't share yeah but there's fortunately a magic phase in the middle

where they're smart enough to understand our goals and malleable enough that we can hopefully with

good parenting and teach them right from wrong and instead good good goal is still good goals in them

right and so those are all tough challenges with computers and then you know even if you

teach your kids good goals when they're little they might outgrow them too and that's a challenge

for machines and keep improving so these are a lot of hard hard challenges we're up for

but i don't think any of them are insurmountable the fundamental reason why eliezer looked so

depressed when i last saw him was because he felt it just wasn't enough time oh that not that it was

unsolvable correct it's just not enough time he was hoping that humanity was going to take

this threat more seriously so we would have more time yeah and now we don't have more time that's

why the open letter is calling for more time but even with time the ai alignment problem

it seems to be really difficult oh yeah but it's also the most worthy problem the most important

problem for humanity to ever solve because if we solve that one legs that align they i can

help us solve all the other problems because it seems like it has to have constant humility

about his goal constantly question the goal because as you optimize towards a particular

goal and you start to achieve it that's when you have the unintended consequences all the things

you mentioned about so how do you enforce and code a constant humility as your ability become

better better better better better steward professor steward russell berkeley who's also one of the

driving forces behind this letter he uh has a whole research program about this

i think of it as ai humility exactly although he calls it inverse reinforcement learning

and other nerdy terms but it's about exactly that instead of telling the ai here's his goal

go optimize the the bejesus out of it you tell it okay do what i want you to do but i'm not going

to tell you right now what it is i want you to do you need to figure it out so then you give the

incentives to be very humble and keep asking you questions along the way is this what you really

meant is this what you wanted and oh this the other thing i tried didn't work seemed like it

didn't work out right should i try it differently what's nice about this is it's not just philosophical

mumbo jumbo it's theorems and technical work that with more time i think it can make a lot of

progress and there are a lot of brilliant people now working on ai safety we just now we just need

to give them a bit more time but also not that many relative to the scale of the problem no

exactly there there should be at least as just like every university worth its name has some

cancer research going on in its biology department right every university that's computer that does

computer science should have a real effort in this area and it's nowhere near that this is

something i hope is changing now thanks to the gpt4 right so i i think if there's a silver lining

to um what's happening here even though i think many people would wish it would have been rolled

out more carefully is that this might be the wake-up call that humanity needed to really

stop the stop fantasizing about this being 100 years off and stop fantasizing about this being

completely controllable and predictable because it's so obvious it's it's not predictable you know

why is it that open that that i think it was gpt chat gpt tried to persuade a journalist

or was it gpt4 to divorce his wife you know it was not because the the engineers have built

it was like let's put this in here and and screw a little bit with people they hadn't

predicted at all they built the giant black box and trained to predict the next word and

got all these emergent properties and oops it did this you know um i i think this is a very

powerful wake-up call and anyone watching this who's not scared i would encourage them to just

play a bit more with these these tools they're out there now like gpt4 and um

so wake-up call is first step once you've woken up uh then gotta slow down a little bit the risky

stuff to give a chance to all everyone who's woken up to to catch up with us on the safety front

you know what's interesting is you know mit that's computer science but in general but let's just

even say computer science curriculum how does the computer science curriculum change now you

mentioned you mentioned programming yeah like why would you be when i was coming up programming as

a prestigious position like why would you be dedicating crazy amounts of time to become an

excellent programmer like the nature of programming is fundamentally changing the nature of our entire

education system is completely torn on its head i has anyone been able to like load that in and

like think about because it's really turning i mean some english professors or english teachers

are beginning to really freak out now yeah right like they give an essay assignment and they get

back all this fantastic prose like this is a style of Hemingway and then they realize they have to

completely rethink and even you know just like we stopped teaching writing uh script

is that what you're saying english yeah handwritten yeah yeah when when everybody started typing

you know like so much of what we teach our kids today

yeah i mean that's uh everything is changing and it's changing very it is changing very quickly

and so much of us understanding how to deal with the big problems of the world is through the

education system and if the education system is being turned on its head then what what's next

it feels like having these kinds of conversations is essential to try to figure it out and everything

is happening so rapidly uh i don't think there's even speaking of safety what the broad ai safety

defined i don't think most universities have courses on ai safety no it's like a philosophy

seminar and like i'm an educator myself so it pains me to see this say this but i feel our

education right now is like completely obsoleted by what's happening you know you put a kid into

first grade and then you're envisioning like and then they're going to come out of high school 12

years later and you've already pre-planned now what they're going to learn when you're not even

sure if there's going to be any world left to come out to right clearly you need to have a

much more opportunistic education system that keeps adapting itself very rapidly as society

readapts the the skills that were really useful when the curriculum was written i mean how many

of those skills are going to get you a job in 12 years i mean seriously if we just linger on the

gpt4 system a little bit you kind of hinted at it especially talking about the importance of

consciousness in in the human mind with homo sentience do you think gpt4 is conscious i love

this question so let's define consciousness first because in my experience like 90 percent of all

arguments about consciousness are allowed to the two people arguing having totally different

definitions of what it is and they're just shouting past each other i define consciousness

as subjective experience right now i'm experiencing colors and sounds and emotions you

know but does a self-driving car experience anything that's the question about whether

it's conscious or not right other people think you should define consciousness differently

fine by me but then maybe use a different word for it or they i'm gonna use consciousness for

this at least um so um but if people hate the yeah so is gpt4 conscious does gpt4 have subjective

experience short answer i don't know because we still don't know what it is that gives this

wonderful subjective experience that is kind of the meaning of our life right because meaning

itself the feeling of meaning is a subjective experience joy is a subjective experience love

is a subjective experience we don't know what it is i've written some papers about this a lot of

people have julio tononi professor has stuck his neck out the farthest and written down actually

very bold mathematical conjecture for what's the essence of conscious information processing

he might be wrong he might be right but we should test it uh he postulates that consciousness has to

do with loops in the information processing so our brain has loops information can go around and

round in computer science nerd speak you call it a recurrent neural network where some of the

output gets fed back in again and with his mathematical formalism if it's a feed forward

neural network where information only goes in one direction like from your eye retina into the back

of your brain for example that's not conscious so he would predict that your retina itself isn't

conscious of anything or a video camera now the interesting thing about gpt4 is it's also just

one way flow of information so if tononi is right and gpt4 is a very intelligent zombie

that can do all this smart stuff but isn't experiencing anything and this is both a relief

in that you don't have if it's true in that you don't have to feel guilty about turning off gpt4

and wiping its memory whenever a new user comes along i wouldn't like if someone used that to me

neuralized me like in men in black but it's also creepy that you can have very high intelligence

perhaps then it's not conscious because if we get replaced by machines

and why is it sad enough that humanity isn't here anymore because i kind of like humanity

but at least if the machines were conscious i could be like well but there are descendants and

maybe we they have our values and there are children but if if tononi is right and it's all

these are all transformers that are not in the sense of the of hollywood but in the sense of

these one-way direction neural networks so they're all the zombies that's the ultimate zombie

apocalypse now we have this universe that goes on with great construction projects and stuff but

there's no one experiencing anything that would be like the ultimate depressing future so i actually

think uh as we move forward to the building board last day i should do more research on figuring out

what kind of information processing actually has experience because i think that's what it's all

about and i completely don't buy the dismissal that some people some people would say well

this is all bullshit because consciousness equals intelligence right it's obviously not true you

can have a lot of conscious experience when you're not really accomplishing any goals at all you're

just reflecting on something and you can sometimes um have things doing things that are quite

intelligent probably without being being conscious but i also worry that we humans won't

will discriminate against the AI systems that clearly exhibit consciousness that we will not

allow AI systems to have consciousness we'll come up with theories about measuring consciousness

that will say this is a lesser being and this is like i worry about that because maybe we humans

will create something that is better than us humans in the in the way that we find beautiful

which is they they have a deeper subjective experience of reality not only are they smarter

but they feel deeper and we humans will hate them for it as we as human history is shown

they'll be the other will try to suppress it they'll create conflict they'll create war

all of this i i worry about this too are you saying that we humans sometimes come up with

self-serving arguments no we would never do that would be well that's the danger here is uh

even in this early stages we might create something beautiful yeah and uh we'll erase its memory i i uh

was horrified as a kid when someone started boiling uh boiling lobsters like oh my god that

that's so cruel and some grown up there back in sweden's oh it doesn't feel pain i'm like how do you

know that oh scientists have shown that and then there was a recent study where they show that

lobsters actually do feel pain when you boil them so they banned lobster boiling in switzerland now

to kill them in a different way first so presumably that scientific research boiled down to someone

asked the lobster does this hurt survey so we do the same thing with cruelty to farm animals

also all these self-serving arguments for why they're fine and yeah so we should certainly

be watchful i think step one is just be humble and acknowledge that consciousness is not the

same thing as intelligence and i believe that consciousness still is a form of information

processing where it's really information being aware of itself in a certain way and let's study it

and give ourselves a little bit of time and i think we will be able to figure out actually what it is

that causes consciousness and then we can make probably unconscious robots that do the boring

jobs that we would feel are immoral to give the machines but if you have a companion robot taking

care of your mom or something like that you would probably want it to be conscious right so

the emotions that seem to display aren't fake all these things can be done in a good way if we

give ourselves a little bit of time and don't run and take on this challenge is there something

you could say to the timeline that you think about about the development of agi depending

on the day i'm sure that changes for you but when do you think there'll be a really big leap

in intelligence where you definitively say we have built agi do you think it's one year from

now five years from now 10 20 50 what's your gut say honestly

for the past decade i've deliberately given very long timelines because i didn't want

to fuel some kind of stupid malloc race yeah but i think that cat has really left the bag now

and i think it might be very very close i don't think the microsoft paper is totally off when

they say that there are some glimmers of agi it's not agi yet it's not an agent there's a lot of

things it can't do but i wouldn't bet very strongly against it happening very soon that's

why we decided to do this open letter because you know if there's ever been a time to pause

you know it's today there's a feeling like this gpt4 is a big transition into waking everybody up

to uh the effectiveness of these systems and so the next version will be big yeah and if that

next one isn't agi maybe the next next one will and there are many companies trying to do these

things and the basic architecture of them is not some sort of super well-kept secret so

this is this is a time to um a lot of people have said for many years that there will come a time

when we want to pause a little bit that time is now you have spoken about and thought about

nuclear war a lot uh over the past year we've seemingly have come closest to the precipice

of nuclear war than uh at least in my lifetime mm-hmm yeah what do you learn about human nature

from that it's our old friend mallock again it's really scary to see it where

America doesn't want there to be a nuclear war Russia doesn't want to be a global nuclear war

either we know we both know that it's just being others if we just try to do it it both sides try

to launch first it's just another suicide race right so why are we why is it the way you said

that this is the closest we've come since 1962 in fact i think we've come closer now than even the

Cuban missile crisis it's because of mallock you know you you have these other forces on one hand

you have the west saying that uh we have to drive Russia out of Ukraine it's a matter of pride

and we've staked so much on it that it would be seen as a huge loss of the credibility of the

west if we don't drive Russia out entirely of the Ukraine and on the other hand you have Russia

who um has um and you have the Russian leadership who knows that if they get completely driven out

of Ukraine you know it might it's not just going to be very humiliating for them but they might

it often happens when countries lose wars that things don't go so well for their leadership

either like you remember when Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands the the military junta

that ordered that right people were cheering on the streets at first when they took it and then

when they got their butt kicked by the british you know what happened to those guys

they were out and i believe those were still alive or in jail now right so so you know the

Russian leadership is entirely cornered where they know that just getting driven out of Ukraine is

not an option um and um so this to me is a typical example of Malik you have these incentives of

the two parties where both of them are just driven to escalate more and more right if Russia starts

losing in the conventional warfare the only thing they can do is to back against the wars to keep

escalating and but and the west has put itself in the in the situation now we're sort of already

committed to the dry rush out so the only option the west has is to call Russia's bluff and keep

sending in more weapons um this really bothers me because Malik can sometimes drive competing

parties to do something which is ultimately just really bad for both of them and uh you know

what makes me even more worried is not just that it's difficult to see an ending a quick peaceful

ending to this tragedy that doesn't involve some horrible escalation but also that we understand

more clearly now just how horrible it was going to be there was an amazing paper that was published

in Nature Food this uh August by some of the top researchers who've been studying nuclear winter

for a long time and what they basically did was they combined climate models with food

agricultural models so instead of just saying yeah you know it gets really cold blah blah blah

they figured out actually how many people would die in the different different countries

and it's uh it's pretty mind-blowing you know so basically what happens you know

is that the thing that kills the most people is not the explosions it's not the radio activity

it's not the EMP mayhem it's not the rampaging mobs foraging food no it's it's it's the fact

that you get so much smoke coming up from the burning cities into the stratosphere that um

it spreads around the earth from the jet streams so in typical models you get like

10 years or so where it's just crazy cold and but during the first year or after the the war

and their models the temperature drops in in Nebraska and in the Ukraine bread baskets you

know by like 20 Celsius or so if I remember no yeah 20 30 Celsius depending on where you are 40

Celsius in some places which is you know 40 Fahrenheit to 80 Fahrenheit colder than what

it would normally be so you know I'm not good at farming but uh if it's snowing if it drops

low freezing pretty much most days in July and then like that's not good so they worked out they put

this into their farming models and what they found was really interesting the countries that get the

most hard hit are the ones in the northern hemisphere so in in the US and and one model

they had they had about 99 percent of all Americans starving to death in Russia and China and Europe

also about 99 percent 98 percent starving to death so you you might be like oh it's kind of

poetic justice that both the Russians and the Americans 99 percent of them have to pay for it

because it was their bombs that did it but you know that doesn't particularly cheer people up in

Sweden or other random countries that have nothing to do with it right and um hit uh I think it

hasn't entered the mainstream uh not understanding very much just like how bad this is most people

especially a lot of people in decision-making positions still think of nuclear weapons as

something that makes you powerful uh scary powerful they don't think of it as something where uh yeah

just to within a percent or two you know we're all just just gonna starve to death and um and

starving to death is is um the worst way to die as harem or as all all the famines in history show

the torture involved in that probably brings out the worst in people also when when people are

desperate like this it's not so some people I've heard some people say that if that's what's

gonna happen they'd rather be at round zero and just get vaporized you know but uh so but I think

people underestimate the risk list because they they aren't afraid of malloc they think oh it's

just gonna be because humans don't want this so it's not going to happen that's the whole point

the malloc that things happen that nobody wanted and that applies to nuclear weapons and that applies

to agi exactly and it applies to some of the things that people have gotten most upset

with capitalism for also right where everybody was just kind of trapped you know it's not to see if

some company does something it causes a lot of harm and not that the ceo is a bad person

but she or he knew that you know that the other all the other companies were doing this too so

malloc is um as a formidable foe I hope wish someone would make him would make good movies so

we could see who the real enemy is so we don't because we're not fighting against each other

uh malloc makes us fight against each other that's small that's what malloc superpower is

the hope here is any kind of technology or the mechanism that lets us instead realize

that we're fighting the wrong enemy right no it's such a fascinating battle it's not us

versus them it's us versus it yeah yeah we are fighting malloc for human survival yeah

we as a civilization have you seen the movie needful things it's a steven king novel i love

steven king and uh max von sudo of swedish actors playing the guys it's brilliant exactly i just

thought i hadn't thought about that until now but that's the closest i've seen to a a movie about

malloc i don't want to spoil the film for anyone who wants to watch it but basically it's about

this guy who turns out to you can interpret him as the devil or whatever but he doesn't

actually ever go around and kill people or torture people will go burning coal or anything

he makes everybody fight each other makes everybody hate fear each other hate each

other and then kill each other so that that's the movie about malloc you know love is the

answer that seems to be um one of the ways to fight malloc is by um compassion by seeing the

common humanity yes yes and to not sound so we don't sound like like uh what's a kumbaya tree

hugger is here right we're not just saying love and peace man we're trying to actually help people

understand the true facts about the other side and feel the compassion

because the truth makes you more compassionate right so i i think that's why i really like

using ai for truth and for truth seeking technologies can

that can as a result you know get us more love than hate and and even if you can't get love you know

settle for settle for some understanding which already gives compassion if someone is like you know

i really disagree with you lex but i can see why you're where you're coming from you're not a

bad person who needs to be destroyed but i disagree with you and i'm happy to have an

argument about it you know that's a lot of progress compared to where we are 2023 in the public

space wouldn't you say if we solve the ai safety problem as we've talked about and then uh you

max tag mark who has been talking about this uh for many years get to sit down with the agi with

the early agi system on a beach with a drink uh what what what kind of what would you ask her

what kind of question would you ask what would you talk about something so much smarter than you

would be would you be afraid we're gonna get me with a really zinger of a question that's a good

one would you be afraid to ask some questions no so i'm not afraid of the truth i'm very humble

i know i'm just a meat bag with all these flaws you know but yeah i i have i we talked a lot

about homo sentience i've really already tried that for a long time with myself just so that

is what's really valuable about being alive for me is that i have these meaningful experiences

it's not that i'm have what i'm good at this or good at that or whatever there's so much i suck at

and so you're not afraid for the system to show you just how dumb you are no no in fact my son

reminds me of that pretty frequently you could find out how dumb you are in terms of physics

how little how little we humans understand i'm cool with that i think i think um

so i can't waffle my way out of this question it's a fair one it was tough i think given

that i'm a really really curious person that's really the defining part of who i am i'm so curious

i have some physics questions i love i love to understand i have some questions about

consciousness about the nature of reality i would just really really love to understand also

i could tell you one for example that i've been obsessing about a lot recently

so i believe that so suppose tenoni is right and suppose there are some information processing

systems that are conscious and some that are not suppose you can even make reasonably smart things

like gpt4 that are not conscious but you can also make them conscious here's the question that keeps

me awake at night is it the case that the unconscious zombie systems that are really

intelligent are also really efficient so they're really inefficient so that when you try to make

things more efficient with the natural be a pressure to do they become conscious i'm kind

of hoping that that's correct and i do you want me to give you a hand away the argument for it

you know like in my lab again every time we look at how how these large language models do something

we see they do them in really dumb ways and you could you could make it make it better if if you

we have loops in our computer language for a reason the code would get way way longer if

you weren't allowed to use them right it's more efficient to have the loops and

in order to have self-reflection whether it's conscious or not right even an operating system

knows things about itself right you need to have loops already right so i think this is i'm waving

my hands a lot but i suspect that the most efficient way of implementing a given level of

intelligence has loops in it self-reflection and will be conscious isn't that great news yes if

it's true it's wonderful because then we don't have to fear the ultimate zombie apocalypse

and i think if you look at our brains actually our brains are part zombie and part conscious

when i open my eyes i immediately take all these pixels that hit my retina right and like oh

that's lex but i have no freaking clue of how i did that computation it's actually quite complicated

right it was only relatively recently we could even do it well with machines right you get a bunch

of information processing happening in my retina and then it goes to the lateral geniculate nucleus

my thalamus and the vision the area v1 v2 v4 and the fusiform face area here that Nancy can

wish her at MIT invented and blah blah blah blah and i have no freaking clue how that worked right

right it feels to me subjectively like my conscious module just got a little email say

facial facial processing uh fit task complete it's lex yeah and i'm gonna just go with that right

so uh this fits perfectly with tenoni's model because this was all one way information processing

mainly and uh it turned out for that particular task that's all you needed and it probably was

kind of the most efficient way to do it but there are a lot of other things that we associate with

higher intelligence and planning and and so on and so forth where you kind of want to have loops

and be able to ruminate and self reflect and introspect and so on where my hunch is that if

you want to fake that with a zombie system that just all goes one way you have to like unroll those

loops and it just really really long and it's much more inefficient so i'm actually hopeful

that ai if in the future we have all these various sublime and interesting machines that do cool things

and or align with us that they will be at least they will also have consciousness for the kind

of these things that we do that great intelligence is also correlated to great consciousness

or a deep kind of consciousness yes so that's a happy thought for me because the zombie of a

couple of apocalypse really is my worst nightmare of all it would be like adding insult to injury not

only did we get replaced but we friggin replaced ourselves by zombies like how dumb can we be

that's such a beautiful vision and that's actually a provable one that's one that we humans can

intuit and prove that those two things are correlated as we start to understand what it

means to be intelligent and what it means to be conscious which these systems early agi like

systems will help us understand and i just want to say one more thing which is super important

most of my colleagues when i started going on about consciousness tell me that it's all bullshit

and i should stop talking about it i hear a little inner voice from my father and from my mom saying

keep talking about it because i think they're wrong and and and the main way to convince people

like that that they're wrong if they say that consciousness is just equal to intelligence

is to ask them what's wrong with torture or why are you against torture if it's just about you know

these these particles moving this way around on that way and there is no such thing as subjective

experience what's wrong with torture i mean do you have a good comeback to that no it seems like

suffering suffering imposed on to other humans is somehow deeply wrong in a way that intelligence

doesn't quite explain and if someone tells me well you know it's just an illusion consciousness

whatever you know i like to invite them to next time they're having surgery to do it without

anesthesia like what is anesthesia really doing if you have it you can have a local anesthesia

when you're awake i had that when they fixed my shoulder i was super entertaining uh what was that

that it did it just removed my subjective experience of pain it didn't change anything

about what was actually happening in my shoulder right so if someone says that's all bullshit

skip the anesthesia that's my advice this is incredibly central it could be fundamental to

whatever this thing we have going on here it is fundamental because we're we what we feel is so

fundamental is suffering and joy and pleasure and meaning and that's all those are all subjective

experiences there and let's not those are the elephant in the room that's what makes life

worth living and that's what can make it horrible if it's just the words you're suffering so let's

not make the mistake of saying that that's all bullshit and let's not make the mistake of not

instilling the ai systems with that same thing that makes us special yeah max it's a huge honor

that you will sit down to me the first time on the first episode of this podcast it's a huge

honor you sit down with me again and talk about this what i think is the most important topic

the most important problem that we humans have to face and hopefully solve yeah well the honor is

all mine and i'm i'm so grateful to you for making more people aware of this fact that humanity has

reached the most important fork in the road ever in its history and let's turn in the correct

direction thanks for listening to this conversation with max tagmark to support this podcast please

check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from frank

harbert history is a constant race between invention and catastrophe thank you for listening

and hope to see you next time

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.