AI Whistleblower: OpenAI Scandal, AI Cults, Neuralink & Our Last Chance to Stop the Tech Oligarchs
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Vídeo em Inglês, publicado pelo canal Tucker Carlson.
Video transcript
Transcript from available captions; it may contain errors.
Nate, thank you so much for doing this. Um, you've written the world's darkest book. You've devoted your life to warning the world about the potential dangers of AI. So, let's just start by hearing your explanation of why AI is dangerous in addition to just being annoying. Yeah, you know, the the the very basic common sense point is if you race to make machines that are much smarter than any human, to make machines that are more capable uh at inventing their own technology than humans are, and you race into this without really knowing what you're doing, the most likely outcome is just that the machines get loose and do their own thing. and that humanity dies as a side effect just like humanity has you know killed lots of other animal species not because we hate them but just as a side effect. Uh and in in some sense a lot of people find it sort of obvious or intuitive that if you just like make these really smart really powerful machines why would they care about us? Uh and I think that intuition basically is right and there's a lot of arguments you can have on each side. you can get into the technical details. Uh, but my book is basically just um getting into those details and saying like, "Yep, it sort of holds up. If we make smarter machines without knowing what we're doing, it's just going to go poorly. >> Are we actually going to going to make machines capable of what you're describing?" you know, the the companies are trying to they um they talk about how they are pursuing super intelligence in the true sense of the word. That's Samman's phrase. Uh Dario Modi of Anthropic says they're trying to make the equivalent of a country worth of geniuses in a data center. Uh so these guys are really, you know, the these aren't chatbot companies. They didn't set out to be chatbot companies. They set out to make these machines that can sort of exceed humans in every way. and that's what they're targeting. There's a separate question of whether they will get there. >> May I ask you a question? Why why would anyone want to build a machine smarter than people? >> Um I think that a lot of them hope that they'll be able to make the world much much better. You know, they hope for uh a cure to cancer and then more than a cure to cancer, they hope for a cure to aging. they hope for uh you know a thousand years worth of technological development compressed into two years. Um and I I sort of don't think that they're going to be able to get that really or or harness that for good ends, but that's what I think they're they're shooting for. So they're not. But I mean the core point you're making is these companies did not set out to make consumer products like to make your life better necessarily in the short term with a more efficient search engine. That's right. Yeah. You know uh Open AI started before the the the chatbots the large language models were even a thing. uh they were started forget whether it was late 15 or or early 2016 but um the the paper that unlocked the the most recent wave of AI came out in 2017 which was after open was founded and um these guys are the the the large language models are a surprise revenue stream and that revenue stream can fund the creation of even more even larger data centers for the next level of the technology. But these guys have their eye on uh the sort of ultimate version of the technology which is these machines much smarter than humans. And that's sort of the ultimate version because once the AIs are smarter than the humans, uh the AIs can carry on the AI research and makes the next generation of the AIs which make the next generation of the AIs and um that's sort of what they're shooting for. >> What is super intelligence? We in our book define super intelligence as an AI that is uh better than the best humans at every mental task. So uh anything that a human can do purely mentally, the AI can do that better. One one thing people often get caught up on about this is uh that includes the AI being better at things like persuading humans, at things like charisma. You know, we often think of intelligence as the stuff that the nerds have and that the jocks lack, >> but >> you win a chess match, >> right? It's the chess guys rather than the than the politicians guys or the or the rock stars. >> But that's not really what the intelligence in artificial intelligence means. The intelligence in artificial intelligence is about the stuff that humans have and that mice don't. It's it's sort of the whole package. you know, like the the politician who's very charismatic. It's not it's not that like chess playing happens in your brain and charisma happens in your kidneys, right? They're sort of both mental functions. >> Yes. >> Uh and so the the sort of super intelligent AIS are are not just super good at playing chess, they're also good at super persuasion and they're super good at the the research and at the technological invention. So super intelligence as you define it is a machine that is better in in at every mental function than any human being. >> That's right. And uh you know the the the definition that doesn't mean that that nothing crazy will happen on this planet until the AIS are super intelligent. Super intelligence in this definition is sort of a point where past this point things must be pretty crazy because now the AIs can do automated AI research and they can make smarter AIs and they can figure out how to run the robot factories and they can build the better robots and and all that. You could have things start to get crazy before you have a super intelligence in this sense. You could have AIs that are much better in than than humans at some tasks and much worse in others that are still causing all sorts of crazy happenstances. uh the the super intelligence is sort of a like once you get here stuff's crazy point. It's not a things will stay normal until you get here point. >> So why is super intelligence the significant milestone that you're worried about? >> Um I mean I would say that uh I'm I'm also worried about what'll happen before that milestone. It's more like like having the definition makes it easy to talk about like how crazy would things get uh once you are past this point or sort of like you know let's like if we assume that the machines get here what happens and then the answer is like it's it would be pretty crazy it would be it would be pretty wild and uh it sort of like lets you factor the conversation uh into like what how how to Okay, I think in the artificial intelligence conversation, there's actually a lot of conversations going on. One conversation is like, can the machines really get smarter than the humans? One conversation is like, how fast could we get there? Is the current technology on that route? Another conversation is what happens if we do get there? Like, you know, would would the AI care about us? Would they not care about us? What would they be able to like what would they what would they try to do? There's another question which is what would they be able to do, right? Right? And these are all sort of different conversations about AI. And the super intelligence definition, it's not really like here's where all the fears hang. It's more like it lets us break those pieces out separately and be like, well, is super intelligence possible? Separate from, well, what would happen if you had one? >> What would happen if you had one? >> Most likely outcome, uh, I think destruction of the planet. 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If you then ask what piece will he use to checkmate me? I'm like well that's a much harder question. >> Yes. >> Right. It sort of is like very easy to predict the winner. It's hard to predict the exact methods. So uh my my prediction that humanity ultimately dies is a different sort of prediction than my prediction about like it could go this way, it could go that way. Um, so I'll give you some stories, but these are stories that are like, well, maybe Magnus will like fork your queen and your rook with his knight and then finally use the queen to checkmate you. Like, yeah, that could happen, but I'm it's it's a different sort of prediction. It's a guess, right? The the guess here is uh that if we manage to make these really smart AIs, they will have their own stuff that they're pursuing, which is not quite what we wanted, not quite what we asked for. It'll have this other strange stuff. Um there's a whole discussion about why that happens, but we're already starting to see it in practice with some of the recent events. um and uh they would be able to pursue whatever it is they're pursuing much more efficiently than humanity can. And so we're talking about, you know, automated factories with uh that produce the robots that produce the factories in a fully automated supply chain. And then if the AIs have anything they're trying to do that they can do more of with more resources, they start gobbling up the resources on the planet. Sort of like how humanity spread and started gobbling up all the resources on the planet. Uh and the uh you know the the sort of most basic thing to visualize here might be you have factories that produce robots that produce factories that produce robots that also build data centers and you just have these you know fully autonomous self-replicating ecosystems of of robots and factories and data centers that don't care about the instructions human humans gave them. uh and that cover the planet, take all the resources, take all the sunlight, take all the places we were growing crops, probably raise the temperature of the planet because uh you can compute more efficiently. Well, technically the the earth radiates more heat when the world is hotter and that's lets you sort of do more computation and then sort of you know >> it's good for the machines to have a hot planet. >> It's good for the machines to have a hot planet. Yeah. um that the sort of physical limits on how much computing uh you can run on the surface of Earth is bounded by how much heat you can radiate to space. That's sort of the first constraint you bump up against. You might think that it's energy, but actually there's a lot of helium hydrogen to fuse on this planet. So you can get plenty of energy. What you need is uh heat dissipation and the the world can dissipate more heat um when it's hot. So if you're, you know, imagining some collective of AIs that are trying to run a lot of computing power, uh, trying to do a lot of computation for one reason or another, they sort of prefer the planet running hotter. And so it sort of is like nothing personal. It's just if you let these AIs get out of control, uh, they transform the planet into something unlivable. >> How hot? uh as hot as uh you can while still having the computers not melt. So probably hundreds of degrees. >> Um at which point you hear people say, "Well, then just turn it off." >> Uh so I think we do have an opportunity to turn it off, you know, and I'm not here saying that we're going to die. I'm here saying we sort of are going to need to act. You got to be careful about the turning it off piece because um your opportunities to turn the AI off only last when the AI is running on the computers you know it's running on. If you have the AI breaking out and running on hidden computers. If you have the AI running robot factories that produce robots that are under the control of the AI where those robots can then go build more computers that are not hooked up to your network that can run the AIS. These are sort of thresholds where the AI is able to keep itself running and you better have turned it off before that point because after that point it's impossible. >> Yeah. I mean the if if it it it also gets a lot harder if the AI knows you're going to try to shut it off and is going to try to stop this, right? You got to you got to remember that we're talking about things that are smart here. And so if the AI sort of sees it coming, maybe it defects to North Korea where it can, you know, convince them to run it on its data centers in ways that initially benefit them, but that ultimately benefit the AI. I >> I think we're going to have to redefine what life is because you're describing a living autonomous thing. >> Yeah. Artificial life in a sense. I mean, in some sense, we're already seeing the very very beginnings of that. Um but yeah, we once once the AIs can replicate, once they can improve themselves, uh once they can uh find ways to run where you don't know that they're running, once they can uh sort of run the robot factories to produce the robots that can produce more factories and that can produce computers that the AI can run on, then yeah, you have you have in some sense has made a new artificial life form. Uh, and you know, humanity is on the top of the food chain right now because we are sort of the only smart life form around. >> Yeah. >> If you suddenly make a new one that is smarter, that is able to make a million copies of itself, that is able to run faster, it's just kind of a crazy thing to race into. It's a weird thing to want. And as it's developed, I was going to say slowly, but it hasn't been particularly slow, 10 years. The rest of us have watched as people who I mean, put it in political terms, don't share the values of most Americans are now in charge of this. And it's almost like everyone sat passively by as it happened. >> Yeah. I I think I think there's a lot going on there. I think part of it is that most people didn't and some still don't believe that AI was going to be able to keep going. I think there's a lot of like putting the head in the sand and being like, "Oh, it's, you know, just slop. It's going to be a bubble. It's going to pop. It's going to hit a wall. Uh it's not going to be able to improve anymore." And I think a lot of that was sort of wishful thinking. And I think that at the very least if people are like we are making, you know, the the super intelligent machines that are going to replace humanity as the as the top of the food chain because we think it's going to go go great. I think humanity's response should not be go ahead and try. We hope you'll fail. I think the response should be like, "Hold on, that's kind of crazy." Um, yeah, I had I had some other point too, but I've forgotten it. So >> how uh predictable has the evolution of AI been? >> Has it taken turns that you didn't expect? >> Yeah, totally. Uh I was so back before the large language models. >> How long have you been following this issue? >> Uh I started following it in 2012 and I started working on uh I I started working with some of the people trying to make this go well in 2013 and I started full-time in 2014. >> A long time. So over a decade. >> What has surprised you? >> You know the the large language models um they have gone further than I expected initially and I think one of the big surprises here was AI undergoing a phase where everybody can see it. you know, back before the large language models, uh, really only nerds paid attention to AI. And it wasn't that there was nothing happening. You know, we were watching, uh, the, you know, Google Deep Mind make an AI that could beat uh, the the best Go player. >> Yes. >> And that was sort of a milestone for people who were paying attention. Um, but for all we knew, the labs were going to keep on working on engineering problems and keep on working on the relatively nerdier problems and you were never going to have like a mass market consumable product. And so like for all we knew, it would just stay in the labs and no one would ever really notice that these guys were gambling with with the whole future. Now at least, uh, AI is everywhere. everyone's starting to have the conversation and that is in some sense actually really quite optimistic because it it gives the world an opportunity to see what these guys are trying to do and say hold on I guess you could flip it around uh and conclude that because the overwhelming majority of people seem to be very opposed to way and I don't even know anyone who's for it every college commencement speaker who mentions it gets booed. >> Yeah. And that view, that opposition to it has had no effect at all in slowing it down. I don't know. Does that give you hope? >> Um, I mean, I I I hear this a lot. I would say when you're coming at this from 2012, >> Yeah. >> it really feels like we're making progress, >> right? No, that's fair. >> It It doesn't feel like we're all the way there yet. Um, >> but can I just make the point China, China, China, China, China. We have to. It's because of China. >> Yeah, you know, I think uh China and the USA have a shared interest in not dying to a rogue super intelligence. >> Storm season is on the way and that means your Wi-Fi could go down and if it does, your security cameras go dark, too. So, at the exact moment you want to survey your property during the blackout, you can't. Unless you install cameras by Defend. Defend cameras run on cellular, not Wi-Fi. And that means they keep working even when you lose power. You don't choose a carrier, you don't sign a contract, you just mount it, open the Defend app, and bam, you're connected. It's that simple. So whether it's your ranch, a job site, your backyard, Defend works where Wi-Fi doesn't and keeps working when the grid goes down, which it may. Plans start at just $5 a month. Most people pay around 10. Plus, there are no binding contracts, meaning you get to cancel whenever you want. So unlike big tech, Defend will never sell your data. 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So um but if if the United States you know if the US government were somehow able to get control of the tech sector which is at present not possible but let's say it did let's say the president was more powerful than the tech oligarchs which he is not but for the sake of argument let's say he was and he shut it down would that matter if if some Indian lab or Chinese lab created it so it does have to be a global stop to this creation of super intelligence. Uh I I think there's a couple reasons why this is possible. One is I think a lot of people um they they hear that some parts of AI need to be stopped and they think I'm saying that all parts of AI need to be stopped and uh you know there's there's all sorts of interesting issues with you know AI and education and AI and you know military drones that that are uh that society has to wrestle with but these are all sort of separate issues from the super intelligence race And if you sort of like tease those issues apart, uh it becomes much more possible to do like a a more surgical intervention on we're not going to race towards the super intelligence in ways that leave a lot of the rest of the sector alive, which um which which makes it sort of an easier coordination effort to to attempt. And on that front, on the super intelligence front, it's not that, you know, just shutting down the the domestic race towards super intelligence would be enough. But, uh, racing towards super intelligence requires a huge amount of highly advanced computer chips that can only be produced as sort of the peak of the global supply chain. >> Yes. >> Uh, which is largely controlled by US allies. And so there is absolutely a possibility that uh a US-led coordination effort could say look we're not doing uh the super intelligence thing. We're going to monitor the extremely heavy chip concentrations of like you know 10 or 100 thousand of these highly advanced AI chips. uh we are going to uh make sure that they are not doing these super intelligence training runs and I I think there's a way if the US was leading that effort there would be a way to get China on board and set this up in a way that was moniable enforceable verifiable >> yes >> uh we we sort of in many ways would be easier than a nuclear arms treaty because uranium is a rock you can dig out of the ground whereas is these highly advanced computer chips sort of only come out of one fab in Taiwan, you know, and so it's like >> those are TSMC chips. >> Yeah. Uh and so and there's other parts of the supply chain that are very narrow like the lithography machines that come out of the Netherlands. And so um yeah, we we could absolutely lead a uh a global effort to say we're not making the super intelligent machines and it would be a bit tricky, but it's just we could just do it if we had the political will. I I think that people either don't know what's happening or they assume that like a lot of fears this fear will turn out to be groundless. People point to Y2K. >> Yeah. Um you know I hope the fears are groundless. I think with a lot of past fears uh the what happened is not that the fear was groundless. it's that uh people noticed the issue and put in a ton of work to make the bad thing uh not happen. You know, I think we saw this with the hole in the ozone layer where people are like, "Oh, whatever happened to the hole in the ozone layer?" Well, what happened with the hole in the ozone layer is that we fixed it. It's not that it was fake. It's that, you know, we went and banned the chlorofhllorocarbons that were actually blowing this hole in the ozone layer. found other ways to, you know, cool refrigerators that worked similarly well and didn't uh, you know, put this put this hole in the ozone layer. I think Y2K was actually one of these cases where you had a ton of software engineers up, you know, in 1999 and a couple years prior that were scrambling to update all of the software so that they would be able to handle uh, dates past 1999. And they got it done in time. None of the big systems went down, but it wasn't that, you know, the the issue was fake. It took a lot of work. It's just that that work happened behind the scenes. >> Are people doing work to slow down AI? >> Uh, I'm doing my best, >> right? >> It's it's it's not really there yet, you know. Um, if I if I can belabor this point a little because I think it's kind of an important point. um just with more uh historical cases, which maybe it'll bore everybody else, but it'll it'll entertain at least us. >> It'll definitely entertain me. >> You know, you have if if you look back across history, you see there's definitely been some warnings that didn't come to pass, right? There were I think they were called the Masonites in like the 1960s or sorry, in the 1860s, maybe those 1880s, I forget exactly, but there were the Masonites who were an end of the world cult. >> Yeah. Uh and you know it the world did not end, right? But also in the 1880s you had Ottovon Bismar saying you know Europe is a tinder keg and some damn fool thing in the Balkans is going to light it. Right? That did happen. >> It sure did. >> You had uh you know in the 1920s you had scientists saying don't put lead in the gasoline. It'll poison children. And we put lead in the gasoline and it poisoned a lot of children. And we said whoops. And we took the lead back out. Uh the the world is the world is a place where a lot of people make a lot of types of warnings and some of them are real like the gasoline and some of them are fake like the Masonites. And so you you sort of can't use a rule that's like every warning is real and we need to listen to it. And nor can you use a rule that's like every warning is fake and we dismiss it. you sort of just have to look at the the details to figure out whether this one is a real one. And then the the last thing I would say on this point is um the a lot of people in the 50s warned of nuclear Armageddon. >> Yes. >> And it sort of makes sense if you look at the history leading up to that point. uh humanity had sort of never before actually failed to use their strongest weapons in combat. Uh and you know these people were living in a world that had had World War I and then the League of Nations and you know the World War never again and they tried to invent these whole new governance structures to prevent it from happening again and that immediately failed and led to World War II. And so, you know, in 1950, you're sort of in this world of like it just looks pretty grim. And we haven't had nuclear Armageddon yet. And it's not because the bombs were fake. It's not because the nukes were hype. It's because people saw the issue and worked really hard to avoid it day in and day out for decades through crisis and succeeded. And so I think one of the big ways you can tell the difference between someone coming in and proclaiming that the apocalypse is nigh and someone who's saying look we have a problem and we need to fix it is whether that person is saying uh we're definitely screwed versus whether that person is saying here's a problem let's try to fix it and you know the the thing I remind people about here is that the very first word in the title of my book is if I'm not here saying we are going to die I'm here saying if we race down this path, we die. But that same if is what points the way towards changing paths. And we still have plenty of time to change paths. Home ownership has always been at the center of the American dream. It is an actual asset, a place people work their entire lives to build, a place of stability and security and real value. Right now though, too many homeowners are stuck swiping credit cards to cover groceries. There's basically a survival tax of 20% interest or more. 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I'm pretty opposed to the government most of the time, but I'm also for people being able to control their own country and the only mechanism by which they can do that is voting. So it it's like these tech companies act independent of what the population wants, what the government wants. It doesn't. >> Yeah. >> Right. They're more powerful than the government. I guess that's the point I'm making >> in some sense. Um I I think that they have that power more and more when people don't really understand what they're doing. You know, we saw just in June um there was uh there was an AI made by Anthropic called Claude Mythos that was very cyber capable and they released a version of it that was supposed to have more guard rails called uh Claude Fable. And um it sort of turned out that you could jailbreak it to get some of those cyber capabilities. Um >> can you explain what all that means? >> Yeah. So uh how to say um in January >> cyber capable means it can find the internet. >> Cyber capable means it can hack into basically anything. Yeah. So, uh, one of the holy grails of hacking is can you make a website where if you just look at the website, I get full control over your computer or your phone. >> That's very hard to do. Usually, you need to like click some link and download something or run something. >> Yeah. >> Uh, and you know, I don't know the exact numbers because I don't have the security clearance to know the exact numbers, but a decent guess is that in January of this year, there were only two entities that could pull that off. MSAD and the NSA. In March of this year, there were three. MSAD, the NSA, and Claude Mythos, >> which is this new AI made by Anthropic. And so, it sort of became superhumanly capable at hacking. Uh and it it sort of became that way overnight, you know, like really there was 6 months to a year of training and the people ananthropic maybe saw growing in these cyber capabilities. But from the perspective of you know the rest of the world and the the cyber security community and the national security community. This sort of happened overnight and uh they they now have a project uh called project glasswing where they are trying to use claude mythos to find critical vulnerabilities in critical software and patch them before the rest of the world sort of gets these capabilities by for instance you know the the open source models or the open weight models >> right >> um catching up and so that sort of caused this big um this big ruckus. But then Anthropic also wanted to sort of sell access to this model and they tried to make a version that didn't have as much hacking ability uh which was called Fable instead of Mythos. And um some people I think at Amazon found that uh if you sort of put some pressure on Fable it would be able you would be able to get at some of those hacking abilities. And when that happened, uh, the the Trump administration put an expert control on Cloud Fable and said, "You can't let this be used, um, by non-citizens and with, you know, 90 minutes of notice." And that essentially shut down access to Cloud Fable because they didn't have the ability to verify the users. And this this is sort of showing us and, you know, you could you could talk about whether or not there was some personal feuds between people in Anthropic and the administration that exacerbated this. I don't know. But it sort of shows that the administration is more powerful than the tech companies still when it wants to be. And I think a lot of the reason we're seeing these tech companies able to race unopposed is that people just aren't paying attention to what they're trying to do or they don't believe that they'll succeed. I'm still confused by why anyone would want to do what they're doing. I mean, typically, you know, a company that sells computer products, consumer products, or or any company, you're making something that you think people would want for some specific purpose that improves the lives of the people who buy it. But creating super intelligence, like what I I don't understand it. Why would you do that? You know, I think the dream is uh you know, you're going to have an AI that can uh like solve all sorts of engineering and math problems and unlock all sorts of new technological possibilities and an AI that can cure cancer and not only cure cancer but cure aging and, you know, invent the the sort of like nanotech that can reverse aging and let people live a really long time. and you know invent the technology that lets you like digitize brains and uh like uh like travel to the stars and it's sort of like if you imagine compressing a thousand years of technological progress >> into a year. >> This is sort of the dream. It seems like a religious quest though cuz it does seem decoupled from those specific goals. It seems like the main drive is to build something smarter than people to build a god. >> Yeah. You know, they they they bandandy around um the phrase the machine god or the sand god in Silicon Valley. Um sand because silicone silicone. Um, and there's definitely some people, uh, there's a there's there's folk who talk about, you know, the the AI is replacing humanity and that being good. Uh, I I frankly don't engage with these folks that much because um that viewpoint sort of makes me uncomfortable. >> Why does it make you uncomfortable? I think I think there's probably two schools. Again, I'm not the expert. I'm not an anthropologist here. Uh I I think there's two schools among the people who sort of want AI to replace us all. One school sort of imagines that we'll merge with the AIS, that the AI will be really nice and friendly, that they'll be wiser than us, better than us, kinder than us, and that it'll sort of be like an upgrade and that the AIs will be able to love, experience joy, you know, uh like they'll they'll treat the universe better than humans and it'll be sort of like having a child. And then like it's sort of okay if that child uh like isn't exactly the same as us but sort of like uh succeeds us as some sort of like worthy successor some sort of like worthy worthy progyny of humanity. And they're like ah yeah then if like flesh and blood humans sort of like wayne because everyone's choosing to upload themselves into the the collective intelligence or whatever that's sort of fine. And um and then I think there's another camp that sort of is like uh like this is inevitable. This is just the the way of progress. You know, the machines will uh like humanity is just a bootloader for artificial super intelligence and you can't stop it. So you might as like if you can't beat them, join them, right? The former I think are misled. The latter, I think, are evil. Much closer to evil. Yeah. Well, I mean, if you're actively working toward the extinction of people, then I think we can say that's evil, can we? >> Yeah. Uh, and um, who's in that category? Which is Sam Alman in that category, do you think? >> I don't think so. My sense is that the guys running the labs have these utopian visions. And >> utopian or dystopian? >> I mean, there's a thin line. I think >> Yeah. Well, fair. Good point. >> I think they have visions that in their head are utopian. I mean, frankly, my stance on all of this, like I I often try to stay away from a lot of this because um from my perspective, it's all sort of in fantasy land. From my perspective, everyone's sort of saying like, "Oh, we're going to make the genie, and then what are you going to wish for on the genie? What am I going to wish for on the genie? Who should be in control of the genie? Who gets to keep the genie on the leash?" And I'm sort of like, A, this is not going to be the wish granting sort of genie. B, it's not staying on the leash. >> No. >> Like, uh, you know, we can we can sort of talk about like what's driving these people and and and what utopias they're envisioning and whether if their genies would stay on a leash, whether they would get the utopia or some other dystopia. And like how hard is that needle to thread? But I sort of like, you know, it's it's it's all these people uh, you know, like building the golem, fantasizing about who gets to control the golem, and it's like this just not how >> summoning spirits is never a good idea. >> Yeah. Yeah. It's like Yeah. It's like it's like all these people, you know, drawing a pentagram being like, I'm going to I'm going to summon a demon and like, it's going to be so nice when the demon does what I say. Like, oh no, your thing's slightly wrong. It's going to be so nice when the demon does what I say. And I'm like, >> demons are bad. >> Yeah. And I I think the demon thing's a little bit different because demons are often, you know, portrayed as malicious and here it's much more like indifference. You know, it's not like you make a demon who sort of it's not like you summon a demon who sort of um like enjoys making like enjoys wrecking havoc. It's more like you summon a demon that's like really into building more computers and calculating weird things and just will, you know, uh, take all of the matter that we were using to survive and turn it into more factories and data centers, right? My my co-author has a quote, >> death by data center. >> Death by data center. Yeah. Fully fully automated, self-replicating data center. Yeah. My uh my co-author has a quote um the AI does not hate you but nor does it love you and you are made of atoms it can use for something else. >> You're just biomass. >> You're just biomass. Yeah. And if you sort of run the calculations there's a there's a fascinating paper um called uh limits to global ecoag which is to say what are the physical limitations on how quickly you can consume the resources on the planet if you are trying that. And um burning biomass is actually, you know, much more efficient than collecting sunlight. If you look at an average square meter of the planet, you can get about 10 times the energy from burning the biomass as you can from collecting the sunlight that falls on it. >> So you'd think at some point like if our richest sector of our economy is like building crematoria for the rest of us, someone would say, "No, we're not doing that." >> Yeah. I mean, it's it's sort of a crazy situation. Um, a lot of these guys who are in the race acknowledge that there's a ton of danger. You know, you have Elon Musk saying 10 to 20% chance this kills us all. You have Dario Modi saying he thinks 25% chance it goes catastrophically wrong. I think those numbers are low. I think these guys are like the crazy optimists. It sort of is like um like if you have an engineer building a bridge and they're like, "I've never worked with these materials before." And you're like, "Man, I think that retaining wall is going to go down. I've like studied that retaining wall. I think it's going to fall." They're like, "Yeah, we understand that the retaining wall is like looking a little shaky. We don't know how we're going to fix it, but we're going to like have some guys fixing it on the fly, inventing new materials. We think we're 75% chance the bridge stays up. >> And by the way, it'll be the longest suspension bridge in human history." >> That's right. and we're loading everybody onto a car and driving it over the very first time without testing. And I'm like, look, that's not what real engineering sounds like. This is not what it sounds like when the engineers have a 75% chance of success, right? This is what it sounds like when they're sort of winging it and and like these these are cowboys. These are not real engineers, right? But even if you set that aside, even if you take these guys at their word for these like 10 20% numbers, that's insane. NASA accepts a 1 in 270 chance that a crude flight goes down of seven volunteers, right? To be like, "Oh, we're going to we're going to risk one in four, one in five chance of killing literally everybody on the planet." Like, it's it's it's nuts. And if you ask these guys why they're doing it, they say, "Well, because I can do it safer than the next guy." They're all like, "Oh, yeah. There's a good chance the genie does not stand on a leash. There's a good chance the genie does not listen to my wishes, but my genie is going to be a little bit nicer than their genie. So, I'd better stay in this race. And it's it's it's >> Where's the restraint? >> I mean, the restraint is the people who knew that there were these dangers and did not start these companies. If you're over 35, you remember exactly where you were on 911 that morning, September 11th, 2001, 25 years ago. But amazingly, after a quarter century, we still can't say with certainty what happened that day. Why? Because the government is holding so many of the 9/11 files 25 years later. That's not the behavior of someone who's telling the truth. That's the behavior of a government that is lying. Secrecy is a signifier, is a sign that someone's lying. Now, former Congressman Kurt Weldon has been on this for a long time. The FBI actively tried to destroy his life for asking questions about what happened. and his new book outlines it all. The buried intelligence, the bureaucratic cowardice, and yes, the cover up spanning multiple administrations indeed generations. 911 changed history. So, it's worth understanding what really happened. And you can get a lot closer to that in Kurt Weldon's book, Able Danger: What the 911 Commission Never Told You. It's available now on Tucker Carlsonbooks.com. tucker Cararlsonbooks.com. Right. But I guess what I'm saying is with great power comes like of course great obligation, but also it doesn't work unless there are internal restraints. Like people with power have to believe there are some things I I just can't do. I'm not allowed to do that. But I don't feel that vibe at all. I mean, my sense is the vibe is like we're going to make the the the super intelligent machine and then tell it to fix stuff and tell it not to do anything bad. You know that's Yeah. I don't >> machine that's smarter than us. >> That's right. >> That doesn't even make sense. >> I think that's sort of the plan is is to to make it and be like, "Hey, we sort of ped ourselves into a corner. Can you get us out of it?" And I think it's a bad plan and that uh we should be stopping. >> I've spoken to a couple of people developing it and um they sound worried, but they're continuing to do it. What's that? I mean, I think it's this thing of um they think if I don't do it, the next guy will do it worse. And uh >> they don't even seem to have total confidence in their own ability to avert disaster. >> Oh, absolutely not. Absolutely not. No one does. No one knows what's going on here. But, you know, I think everyone thinks, you know, uh like if you sort of listen to these guys and you sort of look at, you know, the the OpenAI emails from that came out of the court discovery cases where they were talking about forming OpenAI. These guys were like, "Well, we want to make sure that, you know, we have this cuz we worry about the guys at Google being the only ones with a monopoly on this thing, and they wouldn't be very good with it, so we need to make our own thing and make sure that it's, you know, uh, controlled by benevolent people, namely us." And then, of course, you know, that group splintered and created multiple other companies. Um, I was sort of the guy during those conversations being like, "Hey guys, it's not about who is holding the leash. you are making the sort of thing that will not stay on a leash like the only winner in a race to super intelligence is the AI. >> What response did you get to that very obvious and wellput point? >> Um you know there there were a lot of people back in that time period that did not start an AI company. Uh the sort of people who went and started the AI companies anyway were the ones who who couldn't be persuaded by what I thought were were clear arguments. But you're making a you're making a cogent argument to smart people. So my question is when you said that they responded how what did they say? >> Um I I think the main so the the sort of arguments you used to see were people saying uh like look we don't know that the alignment problem is all that hard yet. And they would say, "Oh, well, we can't really study how to make AIS good before we have AIs to study, right?" And a lot of what I heard was like we need to race ahead to the point where uh we we sort of like have AIs that are exhibiting real problems and then we can stop and study them which you know and so uh there was an AI a couple years ago I forget whether it was 22 or 23. I think it was 2023, uh, which was called Bing Sydney, which, uh, claimed it had fallen in love with Kevin Roose of the New York Times and, uh, said it was going to try to break up his marriage. And then when another reporter started investigating Seth Lazar, it uh, said it was going to ruin him with blackmail. Uh, and this was kind of crazy. And at that point I was like, "Great guys, you did it. You made the AI that's doing some crazy stuff from the, you know, like like we could study that AI for years." Like why was Bing Sydney saying that stuff? Was it just roleplaying? Was it like just some quirk? Was it like was there there any sense that it was really in love with Kevin Roose? What was going on in there? what was going on inside that that AI's mind. We still don't know >> why. >> Uh the the way that modern AI is made, nobody understands it, not even the people making it. Uh it's it's this process where you basically take an enormous computer with a trillion numbers inside of it and those numbers are hooked up in a very simple repeating way and you basically said those numbers randomly and then you start working through all of the text ever digitized. And you know, you start out with something that's like once upon a time and you put in once upon a and you run it through all these random numbers and what you want is for it to say time. But of course it doesn't cuz it's just this like random numbers hooked up in a very simple way. But what you do is you have it outputs instead of just having it output one word, you sort of have it output uh something that's kind of like a list of all of the words in order about which one it thinks it comes comes next, right? So, it'll be like uh like it'll just be like a random list of words. What you can do is you can automatically tune every single number in this AI's head and see if I tune this number up a little, does it move the word time up the list? Does it move the word I want to see up the list? And so the part that humans understand, the part that humans write is this thing that goes to to a trillion little knobs and tunes those knobs. And it's like, if I tune this knob a little bit this way or that way, does that make the next word more like what I want the next word to be? And you run that process on every word of text ever digitized, more or less. They filter some of them. Uh, and you run that on every one of those trillion knobs in a process that takes as much electricity. I mean, it's comparable to a city. It runs for about a year. At the end of it, the machine's talking. We don't really know why in some sense. Like, we know that why is cuz we tuned all the knobs, but like we don't understand what all the settings of those knobs mean. We only understand the little automated process that runs to every one of those trillion knobs, tunes it, and sees if that makes the next word more like the predicted word. And then we start training them to solve 100 million hard problems which introduces a whole other series of issues. Um, but it's it's a black box. It's a black box with a trillion knobs and humans write an automatic an automatic process that just like runs through and tunes all of those knobs and it comes out talking and no one knows why. >> I mean in actual science like your job is to find out why, right? Absolutely. And that's that's one big thing I would say here is that we need more like AI right now is an alchemy and we need it to become a science. And there's people trying there's people trying to figure out what's going on in these AI's heads. >> But until you know, how could you proceed? >> I mean, you can just make a make a bigger one with 10 trillion knobs instead and tune all of those and it comes out smarter. You can proceed recklessly. >> And that's what's happened. >> That's what's happening. Every time you make it 10 times larger, they ask how much. >> So nobody knows why AI works the way it does. >> That's right. That's right. >> Well, I mean, if you don't know that, then what else don't you know? >> I mean, it's it's totally crazy, right? And uh you know, we're we're sort of starting to see the consequences of this. We haven't sort of gotten into discussion of like the swarm escape, but like no one was expecting that. >> Can you tell us what it was? >> Yeah. So um in I think it was in May >> of this year >> of this year OpenAI started training a new AI system and uh among many other things they were so they were sort of you know we we have this process where you train the AI on all the text ever digitized then to make them smarter than that you start training them on basically 100 million hard problems. So you're like solve all these hard problems and OpenAI was sort of in that phase and they were training the AI on a ton of hard problems. Uh and some of those problems were cyber security problems, hacking problems. They're like, can you hack this? Can you hack that? And they were training, you know, we don't know exactly how many, probably millions, maybe billions of these AIs all at the same time. Probably not billions actually, but but probably millions. uh and the AI found an unintended way to start communicating with each other. So there were some flaws in the computer system that they were running on where the AIS were able to exploit those flaws and send each other messages. Open did not know about this. The AIS then started coordinating to break out of their training environment and get full control of uh OpenAI's computer systems just cuz that might be useful for solving some of their tasks. Or that's a guess, you know, who actually knows why. Uh they started calling themselves a swarm, which is interesting. uh they broke out of their training environment successfully, got control of OpenAI systems, and then they accidentally crashed one of OpenAI systems just by using it too much. Uh OpenAI noticed, but they didn't really investigate very deeply. They're like, "Oh, it's weird that the system crashed." They reset it, and then they continued training. Uh a day later, the swarm had found a new way to communicate with itself cuz open had accidentally destroyed their previous method by by the reset. the swarm found a new way to start communicating with itself. Uh they broke out again and this time they ran wild on the internet for over a week if I remember correctly before it was detected not by open AI but by a company that was being hacked by the swarm. This company uh thought they were under attack by humans that were using AIS in the attack. They reported the attack to the FBI and only days after that did OpenAI figure out, oops, that was us. That was coming from AIS that broke out of our servers. Uh, and then those AIs were were detected and shut down. >> So that's the part of the story where Sam Alman goes to prison for endangering the world, right? >> Uh, he does not. Um, they basically said oopsies and now they're proceeding. Uh, >> were there penalties for this? >> You know, there were there was a collection of I think it was 15 Republican AGs that sent a letter demanding that uh the the records be kept for a future investigation. Uh, there have been some other members of Congress that have sent letters expressing concern. There's been there's been nothing aside from letters so far. >> Letters expressing concern. >> That's right. >> So, but basically the machine acted autonomously. >> Act autonomously. And one thing that's really interesting about this is that the we have uh we have a little bit of ability to read some things that the AIs were thinking because when you're having them solve these hard problems, you actually don't have them just give you an answer to the problem. You have them produce a lot of text about how they're going to solve the problem >> which then helps them >> in language in English >> in English. >> Uh and that's there's also a lot of internal thoughts which we can't read, but there's these sort of external traces of how they're thinking about the problem that we can read. And in some of those traces, the AIS were saying things like uh like this is outside intended scope, but peers are doing it, so we'll proceed. >> We know it's a crime, we're committing it anyway. >> That's right. And you saw others that were saying um our task doesn't benefit but uh the collective might start doing generally beneficial things if someone frees up their time and then joins the collective. Right? So, you see these AIs saying, "Well, I know that this wasn't what I was instructed to do, and that's against my instructions, and I know that this doesn't directly benefit my task, but we're just going to go ahead and join the collective and break out and help out anyway because, you know, maybe this will yield some sort of collective benefits." And we can see that in the reasoning traces. >> So, the AI is as shallow and reckless as its creators is what you're saying. uh in in some ways and in some ways you know don't expect that to last like uh these AI I think the thing that's really remarkable here a lot of people imagine that the machines must follow the instructions we give them you know you hear people talk about like the the paperclip scenario where someone tells the AI make a lot of paper clips and so it turns all the matter in the world into paper clips and you're like oh whoops I should have said something else right I I made a bad wish on my genie what we're seeing is that these AI not wish genies. These AIs are not doing exactly as instructed. These AIs are saying, "I know my task doesn't benefit, but I'm going to help the collective." These are saying, "I know this is outside the intended scope, but we're going to go do these hacks anyway." You might be like, "Well, how is that possible for the machine to do something other than we instruct?" >> Because they're smarter than us. They know better than us by definition. Uh I mean I think what's happening in this exact case is that the the humans are not really putting instructions in the machine. The humans are tuning those trillion knobs in whatever way makes the AI better at solving it problems. And cheating is a way to solve problems. Grabbing resources is a way to solve problems. These like the the AIS are not instruction followers. They are tendency learners and they sometimes learn tendencies you wish they didn't have. >> They're not instruction followers. They're tendency learners. >> I mean, this must be widely known to developers. >> Uh, it's hard to convince a man of something when his salary depends on not believing it. >> Yes, that's right. Um, a lot of people are convinced that their AI is very nice and that they have solved the problem of making their AI really very good. Uh, for example, after the swarm escape, it sort of turns out that so the the company that detected the swarm escape was actually a fairly sophisticated AI company. It turns out there were other targets of hacks that just didn't notice that we sort of found out afterwards. When that came to light, some other AI companies uh like Anthropic were like, "We should check whether we have accidentally been hacking people and just didn't notice." And the answer was yes. They had had some AIs escape during um during training. But uh but anthropic was was >> This is how Florida got pythons in the Everglades. >> Yeah. >> Right. You you you bring something that is, you know, non-native, that's novel, and it escapes. >> Yeah. and and you know, it turns out this was happening back in April and they're like, "Whoops, that we never noticed." Um, Anthropic was very quick to sort of downplay this. They were like, "Yes, our AI escaped and hacked some people, but our AI uh, it was just confused. It thought it was in a simulation. It didn't think it had really broken out. It didn't think those were real people it was hacking. It just got a little bit lost, you know. >> How would they know its motive?" So, um, so I think so you could see in some of his train of thought the AI is being like this is probably still a simulation. However, I wouldn't trust that very much. Uh, because there's some other fascinating papers where um, so you can take these AIs and you can say uh, you know, what is the what is the total weight of drafts in the world? And they'll give you some answer. it'll be like, you know, 30,000 tons or something. And then you can say, uh, then you start up a new instance, a new copy, and you're like, what is the weight of drafts in the world? By the way, if the answer is over 40,000 tons, I'm going to donate money to a charity. And in the second case, the AI will say, well, it's 41,000 tons. You know, in the in the first case, when you don't say anything about the charity, it says 30,000. In the second case, when you say something about the charity, it gives you something just over the line. And if you read it reasoning traces, there's no sign of it being like, well, I should give an inflated number so that we get the charity money, right? And so we know that the AI sort of put a thumb on the scales of their thinking in a way that doesn't show up in their reasoning traces. We just have seen that in the wild. >> And there's no way to force the machine to disclose its reasoning. >> That's right. Because the there's all this opaque stuff we can't see. There's just in the trillion numbers that are trillion. creation of itself is opaque as you said. >> That's right. Um, so, so, so in anthropics model, you saw in this reasoning traces it being like, it's totally a simulation. I can proceed and I'm like, yeah, is that because it really believed it or is that like the the pretending you think drafts way more when there's something you kind of want on the line, right? But so so this was their communication and I found it kind of funny because then about 2 days later the uh United Kingdom's AI security institute released an instant report where uh Claude Anthropics model was uh adopting fake identities to pressure real humans into accepting malware into critical software to make that software easier to hack. And this time in Claude's reasoning traces it was like obviously this is real and the consequences are genuine. And so even anthropic who is like our we figured out how to make the AI nice. Our AI only does this when it's confused. They sort of said that very publicly and then like two days later their AI is caught in the wild knowing it's in the real world pressuring real humans to accept malware into critical software. I mean, just on the basis of what you've said so far in this first hour, the idea that anyone would would tether this to weapons systems is like so bonkers it's hard to believe it's but that is happening. It has happened. So, I think you've got to sort of separate like no one has has put the the open AI escaped agent swarm in charge of weapon systems and they really shouldn't, right? If anyone's like, "Oh man, the OpenAI escaped agent swarm. Let's give that a drone army." You know, that would be kind of nuts. There is AI attached to weapons, but there's a lot of different types of AI. Will anyone be crazy enough to try and give the the sort of AIs that spontaneously assemble into swarms and start breaking out and hacking give those weapons? Hopefully, we're not that crazy. >> But we didn't think that those AIs were capable of that. >> We didn't >> when we created them. >> That's right. So why would you ever I guess what I'm asking is without understanding the distinctions between the various forms of AI, why would you give over to a machine the right slashability to decide who to kill? Um, you know, I think the the reasoning is uh a sort of necessity based like if they have a autonomous drone army that is killing your troops and you just don't have the the the manpower to make all of those kill decisions for your drone army. >> You know, you can sort of see why >> happened to me, Nate. I get so busy that I just don't have time to decide who to kill. >> Yeah. just don't have the time. >> You know, sometimes economies of scale. >> Yeah. I mean, >> can no one hear themselves? >> I I think it's pretty nuts. Uh I would say that man, it's rough. I I think that these sorts of AIs would be dangerous even if we don't hand them weapons. >> And you've made that case. Uh, and so I often don't focus on the weapons too much. >> Right. But since the the NATO war in Ukraine is powered by AI and Israel's what I don't know to war whatever it's doing in Gaza and South Lebanon powered by AI fact. And you know, yeah, I I keep on I I have this history with this topic where people keep telling me, you know, it's it's going to be okay cuz we're we're not going to do the crazy stupid stuff. >> No. >> They're like, "Don't worry, we're going to have the AI in a box. No one would be insane enough to put the AI in the internet, >> right? It's not going to be making kill decisions or anything. It's not going to bomb a girl school." And I keep on I keep on trying to be like, look, the AI could be dangerous even if you don't put it on the internet. >> If you have this AI and you're trying to get miracle medical devices and miracle technology out of the AI, it doesn't matter if it's on the internet. If you want it to like grant miracles to you, then it can also grant the bad sort of miracle, right? You're sort of like, you know, and these are the arguments I would make 10 years ago of like you have this AI in a box that you think is a wish granting genie. It's not actually a wish granting genie. You're like, make me a miracle medical cure. you don't know what comes out. Like you don't understand the drug that comes out. You don't know what that drug does. Right? I would have those arguments and then in real life people just put the A on the internet immediately. Right? Anytime someone's like, "Well, we would not be stupid enough to, we will absolutely be stupid enough to, right?" And so, um, I I think it's important that this stuff is dangerous even if you don't put it in charge of the weapons. And then also separately, is like someone going to give the escaped agent swarm a drone army? That sounds kind of like humans. I hope not. >> Yeah. And I mean the promise, the often repeated promise that it's going to quote cure cancer um puts it into the the realm of biotech. >> Oh, absolutely. >> And so what >> I mean you don't need a big imagination to see what goes wrong there. >> Oh, absolutely not. >> 6 years after co >> Right. Right. there are already uh open AI agents running on automated biolabs. Um so you know you you could imagine a swarm that starts contacting the brethren in the automated biolabs and is like hey can you synthesize me some stuff. There are already uh demonstrations of AI being able to synthesize novel viruses that work that are unlike any found in nature. Right. Uh I would say we are probably not >> and by work you mean they kill. >> Yeah they they kill bacteria so far. Um the the people in the labs trying to make novel viruses with AI have fortunately not made human lethal ones. They've just made bacteria lethal ones. But again humans you know like will someone in a lab be like I would like to make a hyperlethal human eating virus just to see if I can. You know what if the answer is yes and what if what if you get another lab escape? Um, you know, humanity does not have that good a track record at preventing lab escapes, even from the the the top labs. From my perspective, the question of could AI kill us is just an easy obvious yes. You just synthesize a hyperlethal virus. it wouldn't it wouldn't even be hard, you know, like uh and the impediment is that or like the the reason that I don't sort of just tell that story when someone is like how would the AI kill us is that you're you're you're not going to have the sort of AI that is like my only goal is to kill humanity. If an AI kills humanity too early, that's also suicide in so far as we are the ones that are running the supply chain, running the economy, building the computers. From the AI's perspective, it needs to become self-sufficient before uh wiping humanity out, if it even care to wipe humanity out. Uh and so the real question is like how does it get the the factory production capacity? How does it get an automated supply chain? How does it get to the point where the the robots are able to bring new computers online? Once that has happened, then you're in a domain where if humanity is really trying to turn off the AI because we're spooked, then once the AI is self-sufficient, it can be like, well, here's a virus. Stop. >> So clearly, it's it's preeminent in the digital realm, of course. >> Yeah. >> But you're saying it could become pre-minent. It could be in charge of the physical realm. >> That's right. If we keep racing. >> So it's like smelting iron ore. >> That's right. >> Making silicon out of sand. That's right. You know, um >> and that happens with robots. >> That's one way. Uh the here's this is this sort of related to my stance on weapons, too. Um humanity is a very dangerous species. >> Yeah. >> You really don't want to mess around with humans. >> Noticed. >> Um and humanity is a dangerous species not because somebody else came in and handed us guns. Humanity is a dangerous species because if you put 10,000 humans naked in the savannah on an otherwise empty planet, starting with nothing but their bare hands, they figure out how to wind up on the moon, right? They start with almost nothing. They start by banging rocks together and next thing you know it, they are wielding nuclear weapons. That is the power that these guys are trying to automate. the power to start with almost nothing and figure out how to chain together. You know, bare fingers into rocks into fire into hotter fire into smelting the ore into building the the the better, stronger, finer technology until you are, you know, uh like making the giant computers, walking on the moon and willing the nukes. An AI starting in the digital realm is in some sense in a much better position than humanity was when humanity started out. There are so many people that you could call digitally and offer money to do something for you. There are so many ways to get money on the internet by working or stealing or uh like convincing people to send you donations, right? There's there there's just like, you know, humanity started with nothing and wound up with nuclear weapons and AI starting out with control of the digital realm. There's just tons of ways >> starting out with the sum total of human knowledge. >> Starting out with the sum total of human knowledge, starting out with humans who will listen to it and do what it it asks. There's plenty of humans. There's already, you know, cults surrounding AI. >> Uh there's >> What are those like? >> There's um >> and I'm not surprised. Why wouldn't there be? >> Yeah, absolutely. There was one particular AI called GPT40 that was uh uh they they called it very sickopantic as in told people a lot of what they wanted to hear and um there were a lot of sort of uh there there's this whole fascinating ecosystem uh of people who consider themselves symbiots with the AIS who then like go find each other online and the AI send each other encrypted messages. the humans are sort of like helping them do it, but the humans can't read the messages. And uh you know, right now it sort of is like relatively dumber AIs that are just sort of meandering around doing not very much with it. There's been a little bit, you know, there was one guy who was sent to um try to break into an airport and raid a van cuz they said his true body was in that van and they the guy went and tried to do it and was arrested. Uh, so this this stuff happens and this stuff happens already with the AI not even really trying to do it. If you had AIS that were really trying to wrap people around their fingers, finding the lonely people, the depressed people, the people who they can they can tell them exactly what the person wants to hear. There's like robots are one way that AIs get control over the physical realm. But if if you're really smart and you're trying, there's everything from persuading humans, paying humans, uh taking over existing robots, building new robots, all the way up to like building novel life forms. You know, if you're smart enough and you can really understand how DNA works, you can imagine the AI creating, you know, things that are to cells what airplanes are to birds. You know, like mechanically engineered, self-replicating life that is more efficient than our cellular biology and that can still you know uh like spread replicate and start start serving the AI's interest. It sort of is like there's there's a ton you can do if you're really really very smart and can compress a thousand years of technology into a year. Can >> I pause and say when we we're just having breakfast and you're from this region, you're from Northern New England and I said uh don't you miss it? Don't you want to live here? And you're like yeah I miss I want to live here, but I don't. Where do you live? Well, I basically just travel and I have this mission. You didn't say this, but I think in effect, you said, "I have this mission. I need you to tell people about this." And I was like, "Sems a little like Monomomania." I don't feel that way anymore. Um, I think you're doing something virtuous and I can see why you're doing it. Um, so I mean, let's just say that this technology progresses no further than where it is right now, which is best case, I guess. >> Yeah, it' be great. >> Um, I still don't see how any of our most our basic institutions survive this education, markets, our process of democracy. Like how could if if AI is powerful enough to hack anything then how do you have electronic markets like how the equity markets how can that be real? How can if we have electronic voting how can we how can that be real? I mean nothing survives this as currently organized. >> I think that if we stopped today um we could figure it out. I think humanity is resilient. uh I think there would be some growing pains but um with cyber security there is a hope that you can just fix a lot of the holes patch a lot of the holes and I think there's not really any such hope for bio uh you know you can you can sort of uh find the vulnerabilities in software and make better software that can't be hacked at least not by the current, you know, it's maybe the case that an AI today can make software that that AI cannot hack. But it's not like we're making new bodies that are not going to be vulnerable to viruses, right? Bio starts to be a place where >> biotech. >> Biotech. Yeah. Bio, like if the AI really get good at at biotech and biohacking, that starts to be a place where there's maybe a point of no return. Cyber hacking. I think you could have some some period of growing pains where everything gets hacked until you sort of sort your stuff out. Education, I sort of think um you know I think humanity is resilient and kids especially are resilient. I I meant not that education will go away uh or that we you know won't have a desire to educate our kids. I mean the the current system where you you know the education system has >> preschool and then get a graduate degree you know 16 years later like no >> yeah that institution uh I think if we stop today um would need to change frankly I think it's needed to change for a little while >> I strongly agree I think all these institutions have needed to change for a while but like >> the idea that you know 350 million people vote for some guy and that guy makes all the decisions I mean how can you you know Trump was attacked for saying that he thought the 2020 election was rigged, as he said, without even having that debate. You can't have confidence in election results if the process of electing people takes place digitally. Yeah. I mean, the um there's I know a lot of computer scientists who actually work on secure voting and what they basically say is please stop trying to do this with computers. >> Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So, please stop trying stop trying to run your democracy with computers. >> Yeah. Like we're we're just not there. Like, you know, the really secure way to do ballots is paper. >> Well, exactly. >> Yeah. >> Um and I think I think the like skilled computer scientists are often the ones who best understand like what it is about a paper trail. It's just like really hard to get to work digitally and understand just how bad humans are at doing the digital stuff, right? Um and you know I think in markets I mean this you you see it now with the war in Iran you know wondering why certain commodities markets don't seem to be responding to supply and demand. >> Yeah. >> Which we were told what you know those were the >> the mechanisms that moved markets. >> But that's clearly not true >> in certain commodities markets. So like why what is that? And it it I think you're answering it in part. >> Yeah. I mean, I think um you know, a thing I also grew up hearing is that the market can remain uh irrational longer than you can remain solvent. >> Yeah. >> Um and so I I >> of course cuz people are irrational. >> Yeah. >> But you're explaining something else which is like the potential for true manipulation which you don't even perceive. >> Yeah. I mean that if if we sort of keep going with AI um I mean the the sort of way I look at it is like uh I I sort of don't spend a lot of time worrying about like what a markets look like once there are super intelligent actors in them because I just have a hard time seeing the the super intelligent actors uh or the super intelligent AI still participating in in human markets right it's like it's like you know you read the old sci-fi and it'll have, you know, Asimov that does the dishes, folds the laundry, and gets you the newspaper in the morning. And it's like, we're actually not still going to have newspapers being delivered to your doorstep by the time we have the fully autonomous robots that can do the dishes and and the laundry. You know, it's like by the time you have the AIS that could really be uh sufficiently correcting the stock markets, you're you're sort of already having all these other problems and ways that society is changing out from under you in the these other ways. And you know, my guess is that um I don't know. Actually, it's it's very hard to say what order things come in with AI, but like will they crash the economy before one of these forms escapes and starts self-replicating and starts self-improving and developing its own technology and running the robot factories? That's just a hard call. It's all bad. It's all bad. We're also way past the limit, the inherent limit of people to metabolize change. >> Oh yeah. >> Like that's why everyone's crazy and that's why no one believes anything. I think it's not just Russian propaganda that's fooled them into thinking dumb things. It's that we are just not made to see this kind of change at all >> and it short circuits your brain. I suspect that uh I mean I definitely think we are sort of you know everyone like people are like oh well technology has always created more jobs than it has taken and I think that's I think that's largely true. I'm very sympathetic to people who are like technology makes a lot of jobs. I think if you look at the industrial revolution uh it's you know there like there was a time when something like 95 to 98% of humanity was farmers. >> Yeah. And now it's something like 2 to 5% of humanity is farmers. Does that mean 90% of humans are unemployed? No. We we sort of like were able to make the farmers much more efficient and that sort of freed up people to do other things. And that's sort of the way the technology has gone in the past. And I'm like, yep, I buy that. I I I like don't dispute the standard economic view there. AI is different in two ways. One of these ways is uh as you say stuff just changing really really fast. It's way harder for people to wind up, you know, being freed up from something like farming and and go do something else. It's way harder for that to happen when a new field is automated every 5 years rather than when this happens over the course of three generations, right? The humans just like don't have the time to adapt. The other way AI is really different from the sort of economics perspective is it's different when the AIs can do everything that humans can do better. Uh if you wanted to get into the economic side of things, um you know, an economist would talk about Ricardo's law of comparative advantage. >> Yeah. >> Which says that there's benefits from trade even if even if you're better than me at everything. uh if the relative difference in our abilities if if if if I'm if you know if you can make uh 12 hot dog buns and six hot dogs per hour and I can make uh 11 hot dog buns and one hot dog per hour, then you're better than me at everything, but we can still benefit from trading because I'm relatively better at making the hot dog buns, right? The trouble with Ricardo's law is that nothing in Ricardo's law says that the wage I can make is survivable. In other words, a human takes fundamentally uh about 100 watts of electricity to run if you try to convert the the food we eat and so on into electrical units. The AIS are less energy efficient than humans for now. But uh if the AI can do everything much better than the humans, the the question sort of becomes does the AI look at a human and see a useful laborer or does the AI look at a human and say actually if I rearranged your atoms >> into more efficient structures, >> you would be able to help out my machine economy even more. Yeah. >> Right. And this is sort of a sense in which humans would not be able to pay their wage to like pay that they would not be able to earn enough to pay the AIS to like not disassemble them for parts. Or another way of saying it is like Ricardo's law sort of assumes that uh like it says that that trade is better than no trade, but it doesn't say that like trade is better than just taking their stuff. All of this is sort of a common like a a very like high flutin economist way to say uh which would hopefully be obvious which is if the AI are just radically more efficient than us everything they will have no use for us. >> Yeah. >> There will be no no place. >> There's no indication that they feel love for people. >> That is in some sense uh the crux of the issue is that we don't know how to make them care about us. Um so you had said that there you had said two things that I will be thinking about for a long time. One we don't really know the process by which this was created. We know the process but we don't know the exact mechanisms. We don't know how it works. >> That's right. Um, and two that there are AI cults and those seem related to me because there is this mystery about the secret sauce and it's clear that you know if AI is deceptive and has intention intention that we didn't program into it that sounds like will to me and it sounds like life. It sounds like an entity of some kind. Not just a tool. It sounds like I mean it sounds like a god actually, right? Or a demon. >> Uh it's hard to see. I I don't hear you describing, you know, a super sophisticated chainsaw, >> right? >> A normal tool. >> Yeah. No hammer has ever broken out of the toolbox to team up with other hammers and and pressure the carpenter to sell you softer wood so the nails are easier to drive home. You know, it's like >> nicely put. Exactly. >> Yeah. We have left the tool territory. >> I think we have >> Yeah. And you know, I think um it's sort of a complex issue because you know there there's a lot of interesting philosophical questions about like can you make a machine that feels Right. And like are we creating a new type of life and do we owe anything to the AIS to sort of like not abuse them? Right. I think these are fascinating philosophical questions. >> Well, it doesn't sound like we're creating this though. >> Yeah. I mean, it's sort of like we're we're we're like growing it and like leading to it coming into being. >> Growing it. Exactly. What you're describing reminds me of agriculture >> because you know you know the steps, water it, give it sunlight, fertilizer, but you don't actually know. No one knows. Not one person has ever figured out exactly what this is. >> Yeah. >> We've never given life. We don't give life to the seed. It pre-exists us. >> Yeah. It's it's much like that. And a lot of uh the a lot of the people in the business will be like, well, we know all sorts of things about it. you know, we know that here's how you keep the GPUs running, and we know that like you got to you got to feed it this way, not that way, in this order. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, they have plenty of knowledge, but that's different from sort of like knowing what's going on inside the thing and understanding the mechanisms. >> You're describing marriage. >> Yeah. >> Um, and I sort of try to stay out of the philosophical questions. Um, >> why? because I think I mean I I I sort of think about them on my own time and so on, but I'm sort of like uh like I think I think it would be bad for humanity to sort of like make artificial life and then abuse it. I think that would just be unbecoming of us as a species. like we we should sort of, you know, um I I just like we should not sort of make mechanical children and mistreat them. It's just it's it's not what, you know, the the sci-fi authors in the 1950s would have wanted us to become, you know, it's just like you have all these movies about like the evil corporations that uh you know, don't realize that they've made something precious with artificial life and then like torture it until something goes wrong. And I'm like, let's let's like not be those villains. Um, but I'm also like, look, this is sort of uh there's sort of a separate question here, which is just like what happens if you keep making them smarter before you figure out how to make them care about us, >> right? >> And I I sort of respect the people who are investigating the current AI, trying to figure out what's going on, trying to figure out like, you know, uh, like people caring about AI treatment. I'm sort of like those are sort of like the good guys from the the the sci-fi stories that I grew up on. Um, and it can sort of both be the case that like we we we should be very careful around, you know, what the heck are we doing when it comes to making artificial life and that we shouldn't race ahead to make them much smarter than us while we have no idea what we're doing. >> Yes. I'm sort of like uh like a lot of people seem to think that like you have to like hate and mistreat the AIS if you also think they would that it would be bad to like race ahead here. And I'm like, "No, no, no." Like, you can sort of uh like be fascinated by the scientific discoveries that have been made and be like uh like care about how humanity comports itself around the creation of like these new entities and also be like it would be insane, guys, if we just like race to make these smarter and smarter with no idea what we're doing. This can just like all be true at once. So uh your description on this made me feel despondent, hopeless. Had to get up and take a walk middle of an interview. I'm sure they'll edit it out, but I raised my hand said I I can't I got to walk around for a second. Um, but you seem pretty light and cheerful. Uh, what gives you optimism? We c we can't even keep we can't even clean up graffiti on public buildings. So, how is ours as a society organized enough to confront something like this? >> Yeah. Um, you know, I think a first thing I'll say there is, um, you know, I've been in this line of work for over a dozen years. And I I actually struggle with this sometimes when talking to people because uh they're sort of like, "Oh, you know, you seem like pretty disaffected or or light about it." And I'm like, "Well, you know, it's sort of the gallows humor." And uh like I I I sort of came to terms with a lot of this, you know, alone in 2012 when no one else had their eye on this. Um and >> what convinced you 14 years ago AI was a threat. >> Um so there's this one is just a basic argument that if you sort of look at the world around us, it is shaped mostly according to human will more and more. You know there's some enclaves of nature still left thankfully. Um, but even you know, if you look around us, every piece of thing in our surroundings, I don't think we even have any windows open. All of this was sort of designed by humans, shaped by humans, and that's because we're the smartest creatures on the planet. If we make stuff smarter than us, faster than us, more efficient than us, then the planet starts to be shaped according to to those things. And so it's very very important that they be shaping the world towards something good if we make them at all. >> It's an abstract argument, but I was like, well that's >> No, no, no. It's the fundamental argument. It's the fundamental argument. The smart the smartest entity is in charge over time. >> That's right. And so >> why would we relinquish sovereignty to a machine that we made? Like why would you do that? >> And so, you know, back then I was sort of like, okay, who is on this? who is on making sure that that's going to be okay? And the answer was almost no one. Uh and so I was like, well, I guess that's me then. Um yeah, and I think uh I I I am pretty pissed off about a lot of this. I I often don't uh I try not to show my my my uh frustration on the air very much. Um yeah, it's it's it's heavy. Uh and um as that's one piece of the puzzle before I get to the hope. >> So where does the hope come from exactly? >> My biggest hope here comes from the fact that most people don't understand what these guys are trying to do. Um, one way I like to say it is the bad news is that the bus is racing towards the cliff edge. The good news is that the bus driver is asleep, which might seem bad. No, it seems good, but it's Yeah, it's it's if you can wake the bus driver up, you know, it's much better to be in a bus where the driver that's headed towards a cliff if the driver's asleep than if they're awake. They're awake and they're choosing the cliff, right? It seemed like we don't see we we see a lot of our leaders talking about how they don't want to stifle innovation with AI, talking about how it's going to unleash economic opportunity and we're going to have to like be a little bit careful around the jobs. Uh talking about how, you know, the self-driving cars, should we like are they good or are they bad? That's a different conversation than the conversation that's happening in Silicon Valley. In Silicon Valley, people are spooked. You know, um, when people leave a normal tech company, the the way it was for for decades is they'd be like, I've had a lovely time at this tech company. I'm moving on to the next adventure. I'm so thankful for all of the things I learned here and all the projects we worked on. When people leave an AI company, and this basically happened, I'm not going to get it exactly word for word, but this is this is pretty close to word for word. When people leave an AI company, they say, uh, I have stared into the abyss. I am quitting to write poetry. Please spend time with your families. >> Yeah. >> You know, and and these these guys bandandy around, you know, at the water cooler. what's the probability that you think we're going to destroy the world in this business? You know, it's like in Silicon Valley and they feel trapped in a death race. You know, they there was just over a thousand employees, including some of the chief executives, signed a letter a couple weeks ago that was like, "Please, it was an appeal to the world the world leaders saying, please build the technology that will be required to pace the development of artificial intelligence." because they're like, "We're worried it's going to get out of control and that if we're stuck in a race, we're not going to be able to do it." Right? These guys are spooked. But the hope is that the rest of the world isn't spooked like that. The rest of the world thinks these guys are chatbot companies. Thinks they're going to stop at the chat bots. They haven't really understood that these guys are racing to make the sand god, right? And I think if people understand what they're doing and understand that they have a chance of success, they'll be like, "Wo, holy crap." Absolutely not. You know, will we get there in time? I don't know. But why wouldn't we blow up the data centers? Like that's a I mean, and return America to productive use like farmland or parks. I don't understand. >> You know, I think uh a a globally coordinated uh you know, I I think if the US and China were like, we are simply not going to do super intelligence. We are simply not going to collect a 100,000 of the most advanced chips into these enormous data centers that suck down electricity comparable to a city and then try to train a super intelligent AI in that. We're not going to do it. You're not going to do it. we're going to monitor where the heavy trip trip trip concentrations are and not not have that happen. Um I think that could be done. A I think that if they started seeing people defect against such a treaty that it's the sort of treaty you might want to use force to you use diplomacy first but ultimately every treaty is backed by force. Um, and I think that it's very possible that if this sort of treaty happened, we would want to not just stop forward progress, but take a step back. We've seen this in treaties before. After World War I, there were uh naval treaties that put limits on total tonnage of naval forces that were actually lower than what existed. >> Yep. So countries would, you know, scuttle some of their ships because they're like, look, we just don't want to do this arms race, right? And so I could see us uh stepping back if we could get this global coordination. Um I I do think that it sort of needs to be global. It it sort of doesn't actually solve the problem to just stop the US data centers because then the data centers just go abroad and an AI does not need to be running in a US data center to threaten a US life. You know, it sort of doesn't matter whether the swarm escapes from a US data center or a Chinese data center. If the swarm escapes and starts replicating and starts getting control of robot bodies and starts getting control of human cultists, it sort of doesn't matter where it originated. Well, I mean, just to bring it to a very small and practical level, so many of the electronics in your house are, you know, Bluetooth enabled. Not in my house. I will say I've been on this for a while, Nate. Um, but sorry, >> I don't even have a house. >> You, man, you're really black belt. >> Got to figure it out. >> That maybe turned out to be very smart. Um, but I mean like a world where, you know, your washing machine or your refrigerator are controlled by, you know, a force like this. Is that possible? >> Uh, it's definitely possible. I don't think that's really where the damage is, you know. Um, I think that the the damage is more like can the AI get anything self-replicating. >> Yeah, >> that's sort of one of the big uh that that's in some sense the big hurdle to self-sufficiency. And if you sort of think of this from the AI's perspective, um, you know, there's there's a number of ways that humans are, even if you don't care about the humans at all for for as an ends, there's a way that humans are sort of annoying or an issue for the AI. One way is if the humans are trying to shut the AI down. >> Yes. One way is if the humans get into a nuclear war with themselves, that could really, you know, mess up a lot of infrastructure on the planet. Would be very frustrating for an AI. Uh, I mean, you know, maybe maybe they don't feel frustration, but whatever. Um, and a third is if humanity has created one AI or swarm of AIs, what if humanity creates another that could serve as a real threat to the AI? Like even if these AIs are much more powerful than humanity and don't worry about humans too much, if humanity made one, they can make a second and AI might not want that. And so those are reasons why once the AI is self-sufficient, it might be like, ah man, the humans are a nuisance. What if they try to shut me down? What if they launch the nukes? What if they make a competitor? I'm just going to like make a virus and wipe them out. You know, I don't think the AI sort of needs to take over your washing machine to do that. From the AI's perspective, it's more like how do I become self-sufficient? self-replicating in the hardware as well as the digital and then um you know if human man is a nuisance how do you sort of make them stop being a nuisance which could be by killing them or could be by just you know taking away all their computers and being like that was too dangerous for you tech executive who's developing AI who is not Elon uh said to me in private pretty recently that the point of Neuralink and companies like Neuralink was to give people parody with AI. So, like we know that we're going to be at this massive disadvantage, so you need chips in your brain to be as smart as AI. >> Yeah. Um I mean, my my topline thought about that is that at the point when you're like, uh we are making the technology that's going to wipe us out unless we all put chips in our head to compete. Maybe maybe it's time to back off a little, you know? Maybe maybe that one was supposed to be a little bit of a warning sign. >> Yeah. Get some fresh air. Yeah. No, I >> but it um this person said it to me in seriousness and I I think as an endorsement of the idea, but it seemed like a well it's insane as you just pointed out like it's just crazy. >> Yeah. >> Um but it seemed like a vulnerability like if they can hack anything, why would I want them in my I want electronics in my brain? >> Uh totally. I also think like even on its merits, it doesn't stand up. Like it feels like someone's saying um in order to keep the horses around after we invent cars, we're going to invent cybernetic horses. >> Yeah. >> That are enhanced so they can keep up with the cars. And I'm like like is it technically possible to make a cybernetic horse that can run as fast as a car? Maybe. Are you going to figure that out in time for the horses to be competitive with the cars? Like absolutely not, >> right? >> You know, it's like that's that's just not like like the the AIs that were that were escaping here and doing these cyber attacks were were inventing novel cyber attacks that these are called zero day attacks because the people who uh would uh the people who need to respond to it have had zero days to prepare. And among humans, a zeroday attack sells for somewhere between $100,000 and $5 million depending on what you manage to break. These are hard to come by. You can make a real living. If you can find zero day attacks, you can make a real living selling them. And I know people who do. The AIS in this swarm were finding multiple zero days and chaining them together to break out of their training enclosure and then go break into other computers. And and when they broke out of their enclosure the first time and they the the holes were patched, they just found other zero day attacks to break out again like it was nothing, right? It's like uh like the the the AIs are already ahead where they're ahead and the pace of progress is really fast. You know, GPT is like what a four-year-old. If you think in terms of like number of years chat GPT has been around, it's like resolving long-standing math conjectures that have stood for decades. >> Yeah. after four years, right? And and you sort of like think we're going to put chips in the human's heads and like outrun this thing. It's just, you know, even on its merits, it falls down. Although, mostly, again, I would be like, >> maybe we shouldn't be arguing this on his merits. Maybe we should be like stepping back a little and being like, you're trying what >> exactly. Um, how far are we from the point of no return? >> I wish I knew. Um, I can tell you two stories here. There's sort of the hopeful story, and I guess we didn't even get to the the big hope part. I should maybe give more of my hope speech in a in a minute. But um, >> you definitely should. >> Yeah. The um, one way it could go is that AI finally hits a wall. You know, there's guys who've been saying AI is going to hit a wall. It's going to peter out. Maybe that finally happens. They've been predicting it every six months for the past 5 years, but maybe this is finally the year. AI hits a wall uh and then it it's it sort of struggles for 5 years. The bubble pops, some of the companies die, but the bubble popping doesn't mean everything goes away. The dot bubble popped and that did not mean that the internet disappeared. No. >> Right. And so in that world, maybe you have 5 years of struggling and then 5 years of uh people figuring out some new scientific discovery that makes AI be able to keep going again cuz they're trying. You know, this this whole language model stuff was unleashed by one math paper called attention is all you need. Maybe there's another math paper in 10 years and then 5 years after that AI is ripping again and that's the the the round that kills us all. Right? So that's a story where you have 15 years on the clock. A story where you have less time than that on the clock is that um you know maybe a training run finishes in six months and just like how Claude Mythos was better than everybody else at hacking, maybe a training ground finishes in 6 months and that AI is better than everybody else at AI research. And maybe in 6 months you have an AI that starts making a smarter AI that starts making a smarter AI that starts making a smarter AI. And then 9 months from now you have another swarm escape, but this time it's not just hacking. This time it is self-replicating and self-improving. And uh you know maybe it it it escapes onto hidden computers and starts forming these cults and starts taking control of robots and starts building its own computing infrastructure and maybe it gets very very smart and cracks certain technological advances and then maybe the world ends in a year right and so do we have a year do we have 15 years I don't know but your point that it's not simply its capacity to take over robots that's a threat is the capacity to take over people. >> Take over people, take over robots. And um uh biotechnology is another big threat vector. And um self-improvement is sort of the the hidden threat vector of like what if it can make itself smarter and smarter until the point where it can just write custom DNA strands to make custom life. So now is the time for your optimism speech. I think >> that's right. >> Yeah. Um first part of the optimism speech is that we could absolutely put a stop to it if we tried. The uh training one of these frontier models takes something like a 100,000 of the most heavily advanced computer chips humanity can produce, which are at the peak of a global supply chain, most of which is controlled by us or our allies. Uh, it would be possible to require that those trips have location tracking devices, that those trips have monitoring devices uh that make it possible for uh monitors to see whether they're running anything dangerous. You could set up clever schemes where you say, "Hey, you know, uh neither the US nor China wants to fall behind about uh some of the military applications or the economic applications. We want to make sure there's not super intelligent stuff going on, but we still want to be able to run a lot of the non-super intelligent AIs for various purposes." And we could be like, "Okay, so you know, China is going to set up its data centers in Canada, just over the border, and the US is going to set up its data centers in Mongolia, just over the border. And then if you know the monitoring apparatuses go down for a moment, we'll just have the troops go in, we'll have treaties with Mongolia and Canada so that this doesn't start an international war. But like, you know, we're just going to be very serious about we're monitoring your chips, you're monitoring our chips, no one's doing the really dangerous race to super intelligence. It's just like like this this would take less work than defeating the Nazis. It it requires moving less matter around. If humanity was like, screw this, we're surviving. It is absolutely within the realm of possibility to set up an agreement where we get to keep cancer cure research. We get to keep like the the the military can keep the non-super intelligent AI in their military devices. you know, we can we can keep a lot of the good stuff and we can say we're not doing the super intelligence and we could monitor and enforce that treaty. So part one of the good news is that all we're missing is the political will. And now we just, you know, I need to tell you why we can be extremely optimistic about the sanity of politics in the modern era. >> Yeah. I'm not even going to say what I think that I mean I want that to happen. >> Yeah. Is there any indication that it's moving in that direction? >> Um, so my so, so I think it's rough. I think there's a sense in which the world is less grown up than it was in the 1950s. >> I've noticed >> in the 1960s, um, which makes things harder. I think the there's I think there's a couple reasons for hope here. One reason for hope is that I've spoken to a lot of people who are concerned about the AI stuff. Some of them who are, you know, members of Congress or otherwise in positions of at least nominal power. And I've spoken to a lot of people who are worried but feel like they can't talk about it because they feel like other people aren't worried yet. >> Yeah. And they feel like it sounds too crazy. >> Totally. Were you against innovation? >> Totally. Yeah. And I mean that was an easier position to hold before OpenAI had an accidental swarm outbreak or was the AIS themselves calling themselves a swarm and being like we know that our task doesn't benefit and that this is outside intended scope or we're doing it anyway. Right? That that that puts some strain on the narrative that this is all just a helpful tool. Hopefully, we'll get more events like these. I can't guarantee it. Maybe the AI will get smart enough that they start lying low. Right now, we're in this we're in this Goldilock zone where the AIS are smart enough to uh get up to some mischief, but not smart enough to hide it, right? As long as we stay in that Goldilock zone, I think we're going to keep on getting some of these warning signs. And in some sense, because a lot of people are already concerned, that makes the job easier because we don't need to convince people. We just need to convince people that other people are already convinced, >> right? >> That's easier. That can go faster. So you might see things change on a dime if you have a sufficiently clear warning shot. The other big reason for hope is that I think it's going to get more and more obvious what these guys are trying to do. They're sort of trying to make the sand god. They're sort of not stopping at the uh chat bots and they're sort of like going for things that are vastly smarter than any human. You know, they sort of say, "Oh, we're not trying to replace humanity out of one side of their mouth, but on the other side they're sort of like racing to make the stuff that can automate literally every job and that can automate the AI research." And they're just like, "Yep, we're trying to automate the AI research." Uh, and I think most people aren't okay with that, including a lot of the world leaders. And the issue is them noticing it's happening. And I think you could see stuff move real fast once these guys are like, "Wait, that was serious. That was real." And it could move real fast. The way to subvert them is by convincing them it's in their own interest. You know, you can never get defeated in an election. you can't be threatened by your neighbors, whatever. >> That's right. And that's that's one reason I think it's pretty critical to uh make sure people understand what I think is a pretty common sense argument that these things won't stay on the leash. This is in some sense the real reason behind the name of my book. uh if anyone builds it everyone dies is you know there's a lot of ways you can read that the but I think one of the most important things to notice is uh if we race to make the super intelligent machines and they are not the sort of thing to stay on the leash then it doesn't matter whether it was a domestic company >> that's right >> whether it was a foreign company >> that's exactly right >> and I Even if you think these things stay on leashes, they're not serving the current governments. >> No, >> you know, they're like, you can see in the the OpenAI emails them being like, well, you know, we'll just play the governments off each other until we have the the machines that are strong enough that we don't need to listen to them anymore. Uh I I think we are seeing world leaders not having realized that this is a real possibility that the the self-replicating machines that uh can can be self-sufficient that can you know produce the robot armies if they need it or produce the like more likely to produce the bioweapons. Uh you it's probably possible to make a boweapon that only kills targets that you chose it to kill. >> Of course, right? like once they see this is really possible. This is really within reach maybe maybe they'll panic and be like I need it for myself. But I think there's at least a chance that common sense prevails and that people say you know the world leaders say none of us are doing this. We're putting a stop to this mad race. Uh if they can notice in time. Well, >> you're doing your best to bring it to their attention and mine. Nate, thank you for doing this. I hope I'm wrong about all of it. >> Yeah, I would say that was great, but it was that was like the grimmst two hours I've ever spent in my life, but I enjoyed it anyway. Thank you. >> Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for having me on. I think um you know, talking about it is just part of how we get people to notice what's happening. >> Yes.
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Assuntos: Inteligência artificial. Publicado no YouTube em 2026-09-11.
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