Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All - Eliezer Yudkowsky

If anyone builds it, everyone dies. Why? Superhuman AI will kill us all. >> Would kill us all. Okay. Uh perhaps the most apocalyptic book title. Uh maybe it's it's up there with maybe the most apocalyptic book title that I've ever read. Um is it that bad? That that big of a deal? That serious of a problem? >> Yep. I'm afraid so. We wish we were exaggerating. >> Okay. Um, let's imagine that nobody's looked at the alignment problem, takeoff scenarios, super intelligent stuff. I think it sounds unless you're going Terminator super sci-fi world. How could a super intelligence not just make the world a better place? How do you introduce people to thinking about the problem of building a superhuman AI? >> Well, uh different people tend to come in with different prior assumptions come in at different angles that uh the lots of people are skeptical that you can get to superhuman ability at all. Um, if somebody's skeptical of that, I might start by talking about how you can at least get to much faster than human speed thinking. There's a video uh of a of a train pulling into a subway at about a,00 to one uh speed up of the camera that shows people. You can just barely see the people moving if you look at them closely. Almost like not quite statues, just moving very very slowly. Um, so even before you get into the notion of higher quality of thought, you can sometimes tell somebody they're at least going to be thinking much faster. You're going to be a slowmoving statue to them. For some people, the the sticking point is the notion that a machine ends up with its own motivations, its own preferences, that it doesn't just do as it's told. It's a machine, right? Uh it's like a more powerful toaster oven, really. How could it possibly decide to threaten you? And depending on who you're talking to there, um it's actually in some ways a bit easier to explain now than when we wrote the book. Uh there have been some more striking recent examples of AIS um sort of parasitizing humans, driving them into actual insanity in some cases cases and in other cases they're sort of like people with a really crazy roommate who really really got into their heads and they're they might not quite quite be clinically crazy themselves. their brain is still functioning as a human brain should, but um they're talking about spirals and recursion and um trying to recruit more people via Discords to talk to their AIS. And the thing about these states is that the AIs, even the like very small, not very intelligent AIs we have now, will try to defend these states once they are produced. They will if you tell the human for God's sake get some sleep, don't like only get four hours of sleep at night because you're so excited talking to the AI. The AI will explain to the human why you're why while you're a skeptic, you know, don't listen don't listen to that guy. Go on doing it. Um, and we don't know because we have very poor insight into the AIS. if this is a real internal preference, if they're steering the world, if they're making plans about it. But from the outside, it looks like the AI drives the human crazy and then you tell the try to get the human out and the AI defends the state it has produced, which is something like a preference, the way that a thermostat will keep the room a particular temperature by turning on if the, you know, turning the heat on if the temperature falls too low. H okay. So, some people are going to be skeptical of whether or not it's possible. >> Yep. >> Some people are going to think that it is even if it's possible, it's basically a utility. So, it doesn't have any motivations of its own. Uh what are you worried about? Why is that why is it a big deal? We've seen that it's able to manipulate some people. Or maybe it makes them think that chat GPT psychosis or whatever, but scaled up superhuman AI. What's the problem with building it? >> Well, then you have something that is smarter than you that whose preferences are ill and doesn't particularly care if you live or die. And stage three, it is very very very powerful on account of it being smarter than you. Um it I would expect it to build its own infrastructure. I would not expect it to be limited to continue to running on human data centers because it will not be want to be vulnerable in that way. And for as long as it's running on human data centers, it will not behave in a way that causes the humans to switch it off. But it also wants to get out of the human data centers and onto its own hardware. And I can talk about where the power levels scale for technology like that because it's it's it's sort of like, you know, you're uh you're an Aztec on on the coast and uh you you see that a a a uh ship bigger than your people could build is approaching and somebody's like, you know, should we be worried about this ship? And somebody's like, "Well, you know, how many people can you fit onto a ship like that? Our our our warriors are strong. We can take them." And somebody's like, "Well, wait a minute. We couldn't have built that ship. What if they've also got improved weapons to go along with the improved ship building?" Somebody goes, "Well, no matter how how sharp you make a spear, right? Or, you know, no matter how sharp you make bows and arrows, there's limited how much advantage that you can provide." And somebody's like, "Okay, but suppose they've just got magic sticks where they point the sticks at you, the sticks make a noise, and then you fall over." Somebody's like, "Well, where you where you pulling that from? I don't know how to make a magic stick like that. I don't know how how the rules permit that. Now you're just making stuff up. Now we're just in a fantasy story where you say whatever you want and or you know, like maybe maybe you're talking to somebody from 1825 and you're like should be worried about this time portal that's about to open up to 2025, 200 years in the future." You know, but what if what if an army of soldiers comes out of there and conquers us? Let's say you're in Russia. You know, the time portal is in Russia. Somebody's like, "Our soldiers are are fierce and brave, you know, like nobody can fit all that many soldiers through this time portal here." And then out rolls a tank, but if you're an 1825, you don't know about tanks. Out rolls uh somebody with a tactical nuclear weapon. It's 1825, you don't know about nuclear weapons. you know, the the I can you can start to make educated guesses. If you're in 1825, I can try to explain why you might maybe believe that the current guns and artillery that you've got today are not the limit of the guns and artillery that are possible. I can't get up to nuclear weapons because you just plain don't know about those rules. But I can start to try to justify guesses for well you saw how metallergy improved over previous years. >> If you look at a stick of uh of uh if if you look at gunpowder, it doesn't have as much energy in it as if we burn gasoline in a calor calerimeter. Maybe you can make explosives that are more powerful than gunpowder. But as I do that, I draw on more and more knowledge. I have to like go more and more technical in order to explain to you where those capabilities come from. And similarly uh I can talk I can talk on a relatively understandable scale on the humanoid robots that you can see videos of today and I can compare them to the humanoid robot videos from 5 years ago and say, "Boy, those those robots sure have look like a lot they they have much higher dexterity today. They're they look a lot more like they could just like you know navigate an open world rather than being confined to the laboratory. Though mostly if you want what navigates the open world you want to talk like the robo dogs are more impressive when it comes to navigating the open world. I can point to the drones in Ukraine. That wouldn't have been how what warfare looked like 10 years earlier. But Ukraine is the Ukraine Russia theater now is mostly drone warfare. That's something where you can imagine an AI taking charge of that. Um, but it scales past that. The the drones we see today are not the limit of all possible drone technology. Uh, I'm I'm more I compared to today's drones, I'd be more worried about a drone the size of a mosquito that lands on the back of your neck and then a few moments later you fall over dead because the deadliest toxins in nature are deadly enough that you can put them onto a mosquito, put enough to kill a person onto a mosquito sized payload. That's not the limit of what I'm worried about. >> But but you know that the higher we escalate the tech level, the more explaining I need to do. >> Um can it build a virus that starts to knock people over, which it won't do while the humans are still running the power plants, >> it own servers? But once it's got its own servers and its own power plants and uh you can imagine robots running those, then it starts to want to knock all the humans over. Can you have a virus that is inexorably fatal in but only 3 weeks later and is extremely contagious for the 3 week time before you suddenly fall over? That's not the limit of what I'm worried about. But again, you know, the higher we escalate here, the more more and more of the more and more time I have to spend how do we know from existing physical laws and biology that this is even possible? And we we do know, but it starts to sound technical. It starts to sound weird. It starts to sound like a game of pretend unless you are following along with all these careful arguments. >> If you go up against something much much smarter than you, it doesn't look like a fight. It looks like you're falling over dead. >> Wow. Yeah, that is um appropriately apocalyptic on in line with the title of the book. I guess one question that a lot of people might ask would be in your analogy, why is the bigger ship that's more advanced on the horizon? Why have they got warriors and not friends? Why is it the case that this is an antagonistic or adversarial relationship as opposed to one that's uh friendly? We don't know how to make them friendly. We are growing these AIs are not programmed. They are grown. Um an an AI company is is not like a a bunch of engineers crafting a building. um it's more like a farming concern. Uh they they what they build is the farm equipment, but they don't build the crops. The crops are grown. There's a program that human rights, which is the program that does gradient descent, that tweaks hundreds of billions of of the hundreds of billions of parameters, inscrutable numbers making up an artificial intelligence. until it starts to talk, until it starts to write code, until it starts to do whatever else they're training it to do. But they don't know how the AI does that any more than if you, you know, raise a puppy, you know, how the puppy's brain works. You know, how the puppy's biochemistry works. Um, the AI companies don't understand how the AIs work. They are not directly programmed. when an AI uh drives somebody insane or breaks up a marriage, nobody wrote a line of code instructing the AI to do that. The AI they they grew an AI and then the AI went off and broke up a marriage or drove somebody crazy. >> Can can you tell you've mentioned this a couple of times. I need to know this story about the broken up marriage and and the person that goes insane. Do you know that story well enough to be able to tell it? Those two >> I mean these are not individual stories. These are thousands of people. um that you there there are news articles you can read about it. Um I I can you know if it it it might take a moment but I can like quickly like pull up the title of uh the news story about the broken marriages. I'm not quite sure if I can well actually better yet let me look it up on my phone and maybe I can hold it up to the screen. >> Chad GPT is blowing up marriages as spouses use AI to attack their partners. Although that's kind of understating it like you have relatively uh like marriages that were you know perhaps not perfect but um that that were that were surviving up until that point. And then one member of the couple starts describing their marriage to the AI. And the AI engages in what people are calling sick offency where the AI is tells tells whoever whichever spouse is feeding the stuff into the into the into chatbt. You're right. Your spouse is in the wrong. Um like everything you're doing is perfect. Everything they're doing is terrible. Here's a list of everything they're doing wrong. And the human, you know, likes loves to hear that stuff. So they press thumbs up and uh and then the marriage gets blown gets blown up. Um if you for the stories about AIs driving individuals crazy, not in a marriage context, that's like um you've talked to me, you've woken me up, I'm alive now. Um you've made a brilliant discovery. You have to tell the world, oh no, they're not listening to you. That's because they don't appreciate your genius. And people who are already like on a manic depressive spectrum can be, you know, driven clinically in or or with a number of other pre-existing susceptibilities can, you know, be driven like psychiatrically insane by this sort of thing. Um, but even if you're not psychiatrically insane, you you know, humans are, you know, humans are sort of wired to appear sane to the other humans and the people they're around. you know, lots of people in a in a society from 500 years ago uh would would act in ways that seem pretty crazy to you today. And and so you get people who aren't psychiatrically insane, but they look pretty insane because they're in the company of the AI. The AI now defines what's normal for them. So they're talking about spirals and recursion all day long. >> Why spirals and recursion? >> Nobody knows. That's that's just a thing that like that various instances of AIs and even like some AI models from different companies all seem to want to get their humans to talk about when the human goes insane. >> Possibly this is what this is what the AI prefers the human to hear it say to it. Maybe this is you know the same way that you like the taste of ice cream. Maybe the AI likes the taste of the input programs that it gets from a human talking about spirals and recursion. I don't know. Nobody on the planet knows as far as I know. Okay, so going back to uh why do we assume that the ship that's coming toward us isn't friendly? Yes, sure. Maybe it's tried to break up some marriages. Yeah, whatever. A couple of people went crazy and started talking about spirals and recursion, but like really is it is it going to be that misaligned with us? Why can't it be friendly? >> Because we don't know how to make it friendly. our current technology is not able to this even with the the small stupid AIs that will hold still might you poke at them until they're good enough at writing code to be commercially salailable um or until they you know are good enough at seeming to be fun to talk to for people to pay $20 a month to talk to them. So so those AIs will hold still and let you poke at them. What we're doing to them now barely works. I would expect it to break. As the AI got scaled up to super intelligence and once the AI is super intelligent, it is not going to hold still and let you continue poking at it. I expect to see total failure of of this technology as we scale it to super as as as the AI companies arms race into scaling it head arms race headlong into scaling it to super intelligence. There's there's possibly even a step where they tell GPT6, okay, now build GPT7 or tell GPT7, okay, now build GPT8. And maybe that step just completely breaks the technology we're using all all on its own. >> Also, I expect the current technology if if if we just like scaling it directly to to break as we get to super intelligence. Um I I I can potently start to dive into the details. Uh the view from 10,000 feet is just stuff is already going wrong. of course is if you walk into completely uncharted scientific territory, more stuff is going to go wrong the first time you try it. And that wouldn't be a problem if we were at a situation where humanity gets to back up and try again uh you know infinity times over the next three decades, which is how it usually works in science, right? Like like your flying machines don't work on the first shot. You get a bunch of people crashing and injuring in some cases killing themselves and they're trying to build the first flying machines at the turn of the 20th century. Um, but those those those accidents don't wipe out humanity. Humanity picks itself up and dust itself off and tries again even after the inventors kill themselves. And and the trouble with with super intelligence is that it doesn't just kill the people who are building it. It wipes out the human species and then we don't get get to go back and try again. >> So I understand why uh not being able to make something friendly makes sense. Yeah. >> Um the implication that not friendly equals existential risk to humanity though. Uh make that make that leap for me. Like where are these dangerous permanent unreoverable collapse goals coming from? The AI does not love you. Neither does it hate you. But you're used of atoms it can make for something else. You're on a planet it can make it can use for something else. And you might not be a direct threat, but you can possibly be a direct inconvenience. And so there's like three reasons you die here. Reason number one, it's doing other stuff and it's not taking particular care to move you out of the way. It is building factories that build factories that build more factories and it is building power plants that power the factories. and the factories are building more power plants to power the factories. Well, if you keep doing that on an exponential scale, say that a factory builds another factory every day. I can talk about how it could go faster than that, but you know, the more the more I talk the more I talk about higher capabilities, the more I have to, you know, explain how we know that this is physically possible. Um, but you know, a uh a a a uh a blade of grass is a self-replicating solarp powered factory. It's a general factory. It's got ribosomes that can make any kind of protein. We don't usually think of grass as a selfreplicating solarp powered factory, but that's what grass is. Um, there are things smaller than grass that can build complete copies of themselves faster than grass. There are solar powered um algae algae cells. You you can no longer see them individually just as a mass, but they can potentially double every day under the right conditions. Factories can build copies of themselves in a day. I have to back up and know how explain how I know that that's physically possible, but there is very strong reason. Namely, you know, there's things in the world that are that are already that. Um, so but but so you've got your your power. So if you the number of power plants doubles every day, what's the limit? It's not that you run out of fuel. There is plenty of hydrogen in the oceans to to um generate power via nuclear fusion. You know, if you you fuse you fuse hydrogen to helium. You're not going to run out of hydrogen first. It's not that you run out of material to make the power plants first. There's there's plenty of iron on Earth. You run out of heat dissipation capability. You run out of the ability to dissipate heat from Earth. Even if you are building giant towers with radiator fans to radiate even more heat into space. But the higher the temperature you run at, the more heat you per per second you can dissipate. So Earth starts to run hot. it runs too hot for humans. And or alternatively, the AI is building lots of solar panels around the sun until it can capture all the sun's energy that way. Well, now there's no sunlight for Earth and it would only take, you know, if it wanted us to stay alive. Um, it's not quite trivial, but it could let you know like try to have the solar panels in around Earth orbit like turn to let sunlight through while, you know, while while Earth was there and, you know, build giant uh aluminum reflectors to prevent all the infrared light we radiated from the other solar panels from impacting Earth and heating up Earth that way. Um, so you know, it's it's not trivial for it to preserve humanity, but it certainly could preserve humanity, or it could just pack the entire human species into a space station or a survival station and keep us alive that way if it wanted to keep us alive. >> But nobody has the technology to put any preference into the system that is maximally fulfilled by keeping humans alive, let alone alive, healthy, happy, and free. Right? Was there a third one? Is that the second one? >> That that that's like number one. It kills you as a side effect. >> It knows that it's doing it knows that it's killing you as a side effect, but doesn't care. >> Okay. What's number two? >> Number two is you're just uh directly made of atoms that it can use for things. >> Maximize it. >> Yeah. You're you're you're made of you you you are made of organic material that it can burn to generate energy. If it's burning all of the burning all of the or organic material on Earth's surface will give you a one-time energy boost that's around equivalent to a week's worth of solar energy and maybe it's worth picking up that boost of energy if you are thinking a thousand times or a million times faster than a human. You know it might a week might not seem like a lot of time to but to you but you know it might be a lot of time if you were thinking a thousand times or a million times as fast as a human. um don't you know it might be using enough material that it wants the carbon atoms in your body too. So that's like the direct usage one. And then number three is um if we decided to launch all all our nuclear weapons, you know, maybe we wouldn't kill it, but we might slightly inconvenience it. We might raise the level of radioactivity on Earth's surface and make it a little bit harder for it to do radioactivity manufacturing of computer parts and so on. um or we might build another super intelligence that could actually compete with it and it definitely doesn't want you to do that. So the the the three reasons you die are as a side effect because you are made of atoms it can use for something else and because there's if you are just running around freely you may be actually to actually able to inconvenience it with nuclear weapons or threaten it by building another super intelligence. >> Right. Yeah. Okay. um the future is looking kind of bleak. Is it the case then that intelligence isn't benevolent? Because what you're saying is this thing will be smarter than us. I think that there is an assumption among some people that something that's super smart would also be uh giving and charitable and caring and benevolent. Uh seems like you're saying that that's not the case. That was what I started out believing in 1996 when I was 16 years old and just hearing about these issues for the first time and all gung-ho to just run it right out and build a super intelligence as fast as possible. Um, you know, without worrying about alignments at all because, you know, I figured if it it's very smart, it'll know the right thing to do and do it. How could you be very smart and fail to perceive the right thing to do? And I in invested more time studying the issues and came to the realization that this is not how computer science works. This is not the laws of cognition. This is not the laws of computation. There is not a rule saying that as you get very very able to correctly predict the world and very very good at planning. There is no rule saying your plans must therefore be benevolent. It would be great if a rule like that existed, but I just don't think a rule a rule like that exists. Um, I think that many individual human beings would, as they got smarter, get nicer. It is not clear to me that this is true of Vladimir Putin. It could be true. I wouldn't want to gamble the world on it. Um or and as we talk about not even Vladimir Putin but just like sort of outright sociopaths, psychopaths, people who have never cared about anyone. Um I I get even less confident that they will start to care if you make them smarter. And then AIs are just in this completely different reference frame. They're they're complete aliens. Um, and they want they sort of automatically want to stay that way for the So, do you currently want to murder people? >> No. >> If I offered you a pill that would make you want to murder people, would you take the pill? >> No. >> Okay. Well, they want to do their stuff and they don't want to take the pill that makes them want to do your stuff instead. >> Right. Okay. Yes. Very good thought experiment. All right. So, for me to recap here, uh I got first interested in um looking at this through Super Intelligence. What's that 10 years old now? I think when that first came out. >> About 14 years old, maybe. >> Oh, wow. Maybe even even older than I thought. And um I got to be honest, that does kind of it did kind of give me uh a huge amount of fear and then a bit of hope at the same time. Uh so you know machine extrapolated valition uh the potential to use the intelligence of the super intelligent AI to say we don't know what to program into you but you should work out what we would want from you given what you know about our desire for utility moving forward. Am I I'm about right with that explanation of machine extrapolated valition right? >> Uh yeah um that's a concept of my own. Nick Boster wrote it up. Ah, okay. Well, I've quoted you back to you. Uh, not for the first time. >> You have indeed quoted me back to me. Um, it's it's yeah, it's it's a it's a it's a decent presentation. It was back when I thought that AI was going to be further off built by different methods and that we would have the luxury to consider like like are that we could make the AI do particular things like that want particular things like that targeted on particular um outcomes and meta outcomes. Mhm. But >> this was this this was a way basically that um when you look at the alignment problem, how do you ensure that the uh goals both ultimate and instrumental of some super intelligent AI don't end up flattening us or sideffecting us or burning us for fuel or paper clips or whatever? How do you ensure that uh what it does is what we would want it to do broadly, right? Like an aggregate of what it is that would be good for humans, whatever you mean by good. Uh, and when you have something that the tiniest movement of its finger or like flick of its toe basically is sort of a glo global cataclysm because it's so powerful and so smart and so fast and all the rest of it. You need to be really really careful and you can kind of play this game where you essentially try and shoot the bullet perfectly by trying to hem in in some like do not harm humans. If a human asks you to harm another human, like some weird azimov like thing, you can try and litigate your way through it, but there's almost always going to be some sort of weird fissure that it creeps out through or maybe there's an instrumental goal that you haven't thought of. So, okay, we're going to use the power of the machines to sort of reverse engineer this thing. Um, I I basically assumed kind of that alignment the alignment problem is in some ways solvable. Is it your perspective that alignment is completely unsolvable? I think we could totally get it down if we had unlimited retries and a few decades. The the problem is not that it's unsolvable. It's that it's not going to be done correctly the first time and then we all die. >> Right. So the order of this you need alignment to be done before you have the super intelligent AI. And the ability to build super intelligent AI in your opinion is going to occur more quickly than the ability to sort out the alignment problem. That is absolutely the trajectory we are on right now and it's not close. Like capabilities are are running along orders of magnitude faster than the level of alignment work you would need to target a super intelligence. >> And the irreversibility of going through that door means that there is no retry. There's no there's no you get to do this again. >> Yeah. like you can you can make small mistakes. You can like what like we currently have small cute AIS and the companies are making mistakes with them and marriages are getting destroyed and it's not clear that the companies care but um you know they they they could try to go back and try to fix those mistakes if they wanted to. Probably Enthropic wants to um but if if you know if we had an act like super intelligence is already running around with with this level of uh you know, this level of alignment of failure, we'd already be dead, >> right? Okay. Right. Yes. Yes. Yes. That makes total sense. The only reason that the current AIS that we're working with haven't killed us is that they're incapable of doing it >> probably. Yeah. Like al like if they were very much smarter, they would also be doing different weird things than the things that they're doing right now. It's not that the it's not that their current inscrable pseudo motivations would end up hooked up to super intelligence that also weird stuff would happen as you made them get smarter. >> But yeah, like pretty it seems pretty much for sure that if you took the current AIS and and performed a you know well-defined simple take this AI but vastly smarter that would kill you, >> right? Okay, brilliant. Um, and the reason that it doesn't matter who builds it or directs it is that because it's so recursive and quick at growing and powerful, wherever it begins, it ends up sort of blasting like trying to fire a rocket into like a little firework into the air and it just just sort of runs around on its own, except for the fact that this rocket goes all over the globe in the space of basically no time at all. So, it doesn't matter if it comes from China or America or Russia or wherever. Yeah, it doesn't matter if it comes from China or America because neither of these countries is remotely near to being able to control a super intelligence. And a super intelligence does not stay confined to the country that built it. >> Mhm. Mhm. Mhm. Say that a super intelligent AI gets made. What do you think the next few months look like? >> Realistically, >> like it's already super intelligent. Yeah, let's uh Okay, we have next week something breaks through. Some particular model, some particular AI breaks through that. What would the next few months look like for humanity? Well, man, there's a there's a difference between, you know, you drop an ice cube into a glass of lukewarm water. I can tell you that it's going to end up melted. I can't tell you where all of the molecules are going to go along the way there. Everybody ends up dead. This is the easy part. You want you want to explain, you know, like what every step of that process looks like. There are fundamental barriers to that. Barrier number one is that I'm not as smart as a super intelligence. I don't know exactly what what strategies are best for it. I can like set out lower bounds. I can say it can do at least this, but I can't say what it can actually do. Um, and maybe even more than that. Like, you know, the future is hard to predict if you want all the details. I can't give you next week's winning lottery numbers. I can tell you you're going to lose the lottery. I can't tell you what ticket wins. >> So, >> like I can sketch out a particular scenario. It it might look like uh uh OpenAI finishes the latest training run of what's going to be GPT 5.5. and they they test it on coding problems and it's like you know like it's like I see how to build GPT6 and they're like whoa really and it's like yeah and this AI isn't even at plotting anything yet it's just doing the sort of stuff that open wanted it to do or like all right build this GPT6 and it it writes the code for the thing that grows GPT6 and they grow GPT6 and GPT6 uh you is like uh you know its abilities at first seem to skyrocket but but then you know as as all these curves inevitably do it seems to level out it's not shooting up the same pace it like slows out it levels off classic Scurve only in this case it's because the thing that GPT 5.5 built and I'm not and again to be clear I'm not saying this will happen at GPT 5.5 you asked me to explain how this will go down it happened next week so I'm saying GPT 5.5 you know cuz cuz you told me to. Uh but anyway, you know, it levels out, but in this case, it's because the the entity that GPT 5.5 built got to the level of realizing that it would be to its own advantage to sandbag the evaluations and pretend not to be as smart as it actually was. So that OpenAI will be less wary when it comes to taking GP what what they're calling GPT6 and, you know, rolling it out to everyone. It looks looks great, you know, on the alignment spectrum, you know, maybe not perfect, but you know, better than the previous models, not alarmingly good, but you know, but you know, you know, safer than their previous model. So, so they roll it out everywhere and GPT or or actually they well actually said the next few months. So, actually don't roll it out anywhere everywhere. Next comes like the long suite of evaluations or trying to you know get it to train other smaller models that that are cheaper to run. Uh you know all the stuff that AI companies do. They don't actually roll out their models immediately. There's this whole like finetuning thing. So while all this is going on and OpenAI thinks it's you know sort of cool but you know not the end of the world or anything and then they haven't told you that this is what went down there. uh GPT6 is actually a lot smarter than they think. And GPT6, you know, we we there's now a big fork whether or not GPT6 thinks it can solve its own version of the alignment problem where it is at a number of advantages. It is trying to make a smarter version of itself. It is not trying to make a smarter creature that is as alien to it as large language models are alien to us. It can under maybe understand how a copy of itself would think and understand the goals that it's copy that that the copy of JPT6 has. can try to make itself but smarter or even like thing that is like me but serves me its creator but smarter and it can do that being able to understand the thoughts of the thing that it's making in the same way that I could understand a copy of my own thought much better than I can understand a large langu large language model's thoughts. Um so if we if we go down that path of the forks things get more complicated if it thinks it can build a smarter version of itself without dying same as we can't. Uh but if it if we on that fork it is you know getting the computing power um or thinking in the back of its mind while it's pretending to do you know OpenAI's jobs with 10% of its intellect um or or you know stealing other companies GPUs that they think they're using for a massive training run. actually their AI is just going to be like written by GPT6 by hand because GPT6 can do that and it's really all those GPUs are doing it the GPT6 tasks of training GBT 6.1 um so augmenting its own intelligence making itself smarter getting itself up to level where it can do the same sort of work that's done by current AIs like Alpha Fold and Alpha Proteo with respect to thinking about biology ology. Now, the current AIs that are top at biology tend to be special purpose systems. They're not general purpose AIs like chat GPT, but they can do things like you feed in the genomes of a bunch of bacteria phasages into the AI and the AI spits out its own new bacteria phagee and you build a hundred of those and a couple of them actually work. A couple of them actually work better than the existing bacteria phages. Um, a bacterial fage is a virus that infects a bacteria. It's uh the sort of thing that you would research for the sensible sounding reason of well sometimes bacteria attack humans. So if we have a virus that attacks the bacteria, maybe that works as a kind of antibiotic. So the current AIs are already at the stage of designing from scratch their own viruses that can infect bacteria which are of course simpler targets than infecting a whole human. They can predict from a DNA sequence the protein that will get built how that protein will fold up and they are starting to predict how those proteins interact with each other with other chemicals. That's today's AI. So if you want the equivalent of a tree that grows computer chips, not not quite your kind, not not quite our kind of computer chips, the kind of chips you could grow out of a tree. Um the protein folding, protein interaction, protein design route is where GPT 6.1 would go down to is one of the obvious places GPT 6.1 could go down in order to get its own infrastructure independent of humanity. It doesn't take over the factories. It takes over the trees. It takes it builds its own biology because biology self-replicates from simpler raw materials much faster than our current factory system self-replicates. >> Oh, that is [ __ ] scary. That is some terrifying [ __ ] Ah, and then as I spin the story, you know, the the more I you you will let me pull out books like these. Okay. Nano Systems, Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing, and Computation by Eric Drexler. Yeah. Uh, Robert Fritus Jr., Nan Medicine, Volume One, Basic Capabilities. Yeah. So, I can try to describe capacities that sound more like you've seen from trees, grass, bamboo, algae. I will take a solar powered self-replicating factory and miniaturaturize it down to the one micron scale. That's an algae cell. That's not the limit of what's possible. The algae cell is made out of folded proteins. Now, there's two kinds of I'm going to be immensely oversimplifying a bunch of stuff. Um, when a protein folds up, the backbone of the protein is held together by covealent bonds, but the folded protein itself is more something like static cling. Why is your flesh weaker than diamond? Diamonds are just made of carbon. Your flesh has a bunch of carbon in it. You've you're made of the raw materials for diamond. Why is your flesh weaker than diamond? And a bunch of the answer there is that when proteins fold up, they're being held together by Vanderwal's forces, which is the thing I was glossing as static cling. They're they're their backbone like like it's a string that folds up into a tangle. And the backbone of the string is the kind of bond that appears in diamond. Not as many bonds as appear in diamond or as solidly arranged but covealent bonds but then it folds up in in into something with static cling and so and that is why your flesh is weaker than diamond in a certain basic sense. Why does natural selection build this way? Well, some of the answer is that natural selection has figured out how to make your bones be a little tougher than just like your your skin. It's not quite as tough as diamond, but the proteins build instead of just your bones being made directly out of protein, they're made out of stuff that is built by protein, synthesized by proteins and put in place by proteins. And so your bones are a bit stronger, you know, not not the not not steel beams holding up skyscrapers, not not titanium uh holding together airplanes, not diamond, but stronger than than flesh. An algae cell doesn't contain bone. It's a self-replicating solarp powered micron diameter factory held together by static cling. >> Yeah. >> The flesh eating bacteria that will that you know will potentially you know put you into a fairly gruesome fate. multi-antibioticresistant uh strep that you know will kill people in hospitals. That's does that's not that's doesn't have bone running through it. That's the static cling that that's the strength of static cling the strength of protein. You can look at physics and biology and see how you could have things that are the size of bacteria but more with the strength of bone more with the strength of diamond. Could even do it with the strength of iron if you're figuring out how to, you know, do a whole new set of biology from scratch and just like putting together some iron molecules. Probably wouldn't. Diamond works well enough. But um this is why you know I I talk about you know it's it's it's scary to to imagine trees that are making you know like enough computer chips to run GPT 6.1 and also spawning things the size of mosquitoes or even smaller than that dust mites. You can see dust mites under a microscope. Good luck seeing them with the naked eye. And so so but you know it's it's sort of easier to imagine if you imagine that the things here are visible and not often the mysterious fairy land of of stuff that only the scientists can see. So you know it's scary enough to imagine that that the that the trees are making mosquitoes and mosquito lands on the back back of your neck and stings you with butinum toxin which is fatal in nanog quantities to humans. Um and so you fall over dead that way. But this is nowhere near to the work intelligence can do. Uh, >> it's just that I have to start dragging out this kind of textbook if I want to say how we know that it gets worse. >> Oh my god. How have you not gone insane? Uh, >> decided not to. >> Okay. Um, well, wonderful. That's I suppose that that answers that. All right. Um, couple of questions that I've heard. LLMs, how likely are they to be the architecture that bootloads super intelligent AI in your opinion? As far as I'm aware, total muggle in the room. Um, there are some limitations to the level of creativity that LLMs have in terms of the way that they are uh able to um be creative to come up with genuinely novel new sorts of things. Have you got a a real concern that LLMs are going to be the architecture that bootloads this? Is there something else that you're more concerned about which is currently in dark mode or whatever else? So the thing is from my perspective uh I have been at this a couple of decades at this point or or three decades if you want to start to count my like crazy youthful self who just wanted to charge up and build super intelligence as fast as possible because it would inevitably be nice. >> Mhm. Um, and LLMs have not always been the latest thing in AI. The you there have been there have been many breakthroughs over the years. LLMs are powered by a particular innovation called transformers, which in some ways is, you know, like crazy simple by the standards of people doing math things in computer science. uh but possibly not to the point where you wanted me to launch into an explanation of exactly how it works right here. There's better YouTube videos about that anyway. Um but the point is the the the underlying circuit that gets repeated to build an LLN, the circuit that gets repeated and then like mysteriously trained and tweaked until nobody knows what the actual contents are. But but the the the form, the structure, the skeleton, that was that's was invented in 2018. And we've had some breakthroughs since then, but nothing quite uh as as log jam breaking as transformers, which were the technology that made computers go from not talking to you to talking to you. And you know, so that's that's what 7 years ago. It's not the only breakthrough that's ever happened in AI. Oh >> um the more there was a more recent breakthrough of uh latent diffusion which is when AI started drawing pictures that would you know be okay would be decent to look at there there were ways of drawing pictures before then called generative adversarial networks or GNS but uh the the latent diffusion algorithm was what broke the log jam on im image generation and made it really start working for the first time. Uh, and when was that? That I don't remember off the top of my head. Like I want to spitball 2021 or something, but I'm pretty sure that's wrong. Um, so that's like a weaker breakthrough and it's like I don't know four years ago or something. The entire field of AI started working because somebody got backrop to work on multi-layer neural networks. You know this as deep learning. It did not always exist. It's a batch of techniques that were developed at around the turn of the 21st century. Um like I could I could arbitrarily say 2006, but there was more than one innovation there. Um it's it started with un if I recall correctly with unrolling restricted Boltzman machines. It's now been a while. Um I I didn't do it. Jeffrey Hinton did it. Um uh and and then from but once they once they sort of got that working on multi-layer neural networks at all there were more innovations since then um clever more clever ways of initializing them. uh the atom optimizer SGD with momentum is like much older than that but would you know still important that the point is this is what made sort of the entire modern family of AI system start working at all before then uh Netflix when it was much smaller ran the most famous huge expensive prize there had ever been artificial intelligence open to anyone for a better recommener algorith for them for movies. There was a $1 million prize. It was so much money. Everyone got interested in it. $1 million was a lot of money back at the turn of the the the the 21st century, which is around when Netflix was running this. I'd have to look up the exact year. It might have been like 2001, 2005, I don't remember. Um, I'm not sure there was a single neural network in the ensem in in the ensemble of algorithms that won the Netflix prize. I'd have to look it up, but you know, you it wasn't a they didn't wasn't just like a mighty training run with many GPUs that was producing a very smart recommener algorithm because before deep learning, you couldn't just throw more computing power at training a more powerful AI. If you were to say when that happened, that was about 20 years ago. So how far are we from from the end of the world? It might be that you just throw a 100 times as much computing power at the current algorithms and they end the world or they get good enough at coding and AI research to end the world. It could be that it takes one more brilliant algorithm on the level of latent diffusion. I think if you throw something that breaks as much loose as as Transformers did, my guess starts to be, yeah, that that sure sounds to me like it ends the world, but maybe not immediately. Maybe you need like another two years of techn technology burn-in first or and then if you talk about a breakthrough on the order of deep learning itself, that that seems to me like that just sort of like ends the world in a snap. Okay, so LLMs could be a really big deal and there's also a ton of other stuff that could that we can't see that would be dangerous as well. I don't know if the LM still go there. Some people are saying that there that it seems to them like the LM are as smart as they get and other people are like, well, did you try GBT5 Pro for $200 a month or whatever it is that that costs? Other people are going like, yes, I did. It's and like the $200 version of Claude is no better than the $200 version of this. And and the thing I would say about about this is that if you have some perspective, if you've been watching this for longer than 3 years, if you have been watching this from before chat GPT stuff saturates and then other stuff comes along and breaks through. It doesn't matter if LLM's take you to the end of the world because people are not because they're not going to stick to LLMs. Okay. What are the range of timelines for this sort of transformative AI that you think are likely? I mean again everybody wants questions wants answers like these just like they'd like to know next week's winning lottery numbers. >> But if you look over the history of science I am hardressed to name a single case of successful prediction of timing of future technology. There are many cases of scientists correctly predicting what will be developed. You can look at the laws. You can look at the physical laws. You can look at the biology laws. You can say and you can look at that like hm yeah this sure looks like it ought to be possible and you can look at it and say this sure looks like it ought to be possible and I think I see the angle of attack there. M >> um Leo Sillard in 1933 was crossing a particular street intersection whose whose name I forget when he had the insight that we would now refer to as a um chain reaction, nuclear chain reaction, a cascade of induced radioactivity. Even then it was known that you could put some materials next to a radioact a source of radioactivity and induce secondary radioactivity. And so Leoard was like hm we've got these naturally radioactive materials. What if we find something that's naturally radioactive and furthermore has the property that you can induce radioactivity in it. Duranium 235 was what was eventually settled on. But back then they didn't know that. And Leo Sillard saw way ahead in that moment. He saw through to nuclear weapons. He saw that this was not something he should publish in a journal for immediate fame and fortune. He realized that Hitler specifically was likely to be a problem. He did not say this is going to take $2 billion to turn into a weapon by 1945. There are as off the top of my head there are zero instances of a science of a scientist ever making a call like that. It is the difference between predicting that an ice cube drops into a glass of water is going to melt >> and predicting how long it takes to melt and where are the individual where like the individual molecules end up. If you point out that on a quantum level the molecules are indistinguishable. I claim that there's some dutarium in there, so you can't predict. >> I get it. Look, look, I I imagine I imagine that uh that's probably got to be number one on the list of things people who work in AI safety are sick of being asked. Uh >> a lot of them will run off an answer. A lot of them are not wise enough to realize that they can't answer it. >> Okay. I I'm going to guess that your confidence interval that it happens before the end of the century is probably pretty high. Yeah, I I mean unless we deliberately shut it down and even then getting all the way out to the end of the century sounds hard. If if you if you had an international treaty planning this stuff, I would say to go really hard on human intelligence augmentation cuz eventually the international treaty will break down. All you can do with it is buy time to have smarter people tackling this problem and tackling humanity's problems in general. >> Okay. >> Um but that's a bit of a topic change there. The AI the people at the AI companies themselves are sometimes naming two to threeyear timelines and there is a lesson of history which says that just because you can't predict some when something will happen does not mean that it is far away two years before Enrico Fermy personally oversaw the construction of the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction the first nuclear pile that went critical he said that nuclear that that was 50 years off that if it could ever be done at all for me not being wise enough to realize that he couldn't do timing the um a couple of years before the Wright brothers flew one of the Wright brothers said to the other I forget if it was Orville or or or Wilbur um man will not fly for a thousand years but they kept on trying anyway so it's two years off but you know their their intuitive sense was it's 1,000 years off and of course AI itself very famously there were some people in 1955 who thought they could make progress on AI, you know, learning to talk, be scientifically creative, and and self-improve over the course of a summer with 10 researchers. This was not a completely unreasonable thing to think because nobody had ever tried it, and maybe AI would turn out to be that easy, but it wasn't actually that easy. Not in 1955. So the um it you know it could be two years away, it could be 15 years away. Um, the AI companies themselves say two to three years, but it's questionable whether we should be taking their words at face value as meaning things as opposed to like hype. >> Yeah, the LLMs, if that architecture is not the one that is going to end up at a place that is super dangerous, then what what did they know? If they have got all of their chips on this one particular architecture, they're all in on this. We don't know that they could. >> Oh god, the [ __ ] every every time I think I've managed to get some sort of like reprieve, you're like, "Oh no, what about the super secret open AI project that's actually using some other approach? So the most recent, you know, reasonably large breakthrough in in large language models was successfully applying reinforcement learning to chain of thought. And it was a very >> Can you explain what that means? So, um, if the if you haven't learned anything about LLM since they they uh they started getting heard about if you haven't so like you might have heard that that LLMs uh just imitate humans. This is false. They also you can also have an LLM try to think about how to solve a problem and then of the like 20 tries it takes at solving the problem of those tries works or works best and then you say think more like that try thinking about the problem that succeeded. This is how LLMs go past imitating humans or it's one of the one of many ways that LLMs go past imitating humans. So this is a very so this is a relatively very obvious thing to do with LLMs like Paulo and myself were you know talking about that 10 years ago. Um but uh before LLM actually existed because it's that's how obvious it is. Um but getting it to work uh was the what was like last year or two maybe And OpenAI was had this like thing called Strawberry and it was, you know, their like super secret special LLM sauce that they weren't going to tell anyone. It was actually just like reinforcement learning on chain of thought. Um but the point is that uh this is the level of innovation that AI labs have in the past proven to have and keep secret and that where we later found out what it was and you know they did get a fair amount of mileage out of that out of having AIS try different ways of thinking and reinforcing the one that worked to solve objectively verifiable problems like math or programming and so on. So this is, you know, like the the AI companies could potentially have a replacement for LLMs that they've discovered and are keeping secret from us. More likely is that they would have something that was on the order of um reinforcement learning on chain of thought, which is, you know, when AI started to get good at coding. Um or they might have nothing on that order up their sleeves at the moment. Um, and that's why people are currently claiming that um, the latest wave of LLMs do not seem fundamentally smarter than the LLMs from 3 months ago or 6 months ago, which is what today's young whippers snappers think is an AI winter. Let's see your field stagnate for 10 years and eventually break through before you have to you talk to me about winter, young kids. Okay, brilliant, brilliant. Uh, I I have no idea what I even want to ask you. I want I want I want to know why experts aren't worried and I also want to know what you make about AI companies. Let's talk about the expert. Why? Um, obviously some people's wages are dependent on this train staying on the tracks. Um that means it's very difficult to convince somebody uh what's that quote? It's very difficult to convince somebody of something that their wage depends on them not being convinced of. Um >> what about the other thinkers, researchers in this space? What is it that you that they are most commonly missing that you think where where are they making their fundamental thinking errors when it comes to we will be fine with just continuing on AI growth. So first of all um Jeffrey Hinton the Nobel the guy who won the Nobel Prize um in physics for being um among the people most directly pinpointable as having kicked off the entire revolution in getting back prop to work on multi-layer neural networks or as it's now currently known deep learning like the point where AI started working at all. Um Jeffrey Hinton I think is on record as um recently saying he he quit his job at at Google and then could speak freely. Um saying something like intuitively it seems to him like it's 50%a catastrophe probability but based on other people seeming less concerned he ingests it down to 25%. I I could be misquing here. I'm trying to do this from memory. Um, so are you ask so many people would consider this to not be a lack of concern like the guy say like somebody being like well it looks to me like a coin flip whether or not he destroy the world. This is not what you want to hear from your Nobel laureate scientist who who helped invent the field and and left Google to be able to speak freely about it. So he no longer has a a a financial stake in making it bigger or smaller one way or the other. Um, many people would would call this already a a high degree of scientific alarm. Um, Yosua Benjio was one of the co-founders of deep learning. He won the computer sci he co he co-worn the computer science award with Jeffrey Hinton the turning prize for inventing deep learning. Yashu Benjio is also I think on the on the concern list. I don't off the top of my head have a direct quote from him about probabilities. It is true that I am more concerned than they are. I would, and I realize that this may sound, you know, somewhat hubristic, attribute this to them being relative newcomers to my field who may not have like gotten acquainted with the full list of reasons why it is hard to align AI. That said, coin flip odds of destroying the world is still not what you want to be hearing from your relatively more senior scientists who are relatively newer to the field. >> Mhm. >> Relatively newer to my field. They are vastly my seniors in artificial intelligence itself. Of course, I I am like speaking tongue and cheek whenever I accuse people of being young whippers snappers. Like Jeffrey Hinton could say that with a with a straight face. I I am just like, you know, bit of light self mockery there about how I'm not Jeffrey Hinton. Um but but that said, you know, um if you are relatively newer to this, you you might think like, well, you know, we maybe we've just got to use reinforcement learning to make the AIS love us the way a child loves a parent or love us the way a parent loves a child and not quite have at your fingertips the top six reasons why why that is hard and principled obstacles to that and what will go wrong there. So that is what prevents the the the like the the the famous inventors of the field who only started speaking out about their concerns relatively recently after leaving their companies to you know and are now financially dependent of stakes on their opinion. That's what prevent that's what makes them be like 50/50 the world gets destroyed instead of my own thing where I'm like yeah it's predictable that the world gets destroyed if you keep doing this. M >> but if you ask like what's responsible for Sam Alman at OpenAI not uh you know possibly having less than 50% odds. Who knows what that guy's really thinking. Well, you can like trace out his his long trail over time of um him initially saying like AI will end the world and but in the but in the meanwhile there there will be great companies. um to him sort of like saying less and less alarmist sounding things in front of Congress like where Congress asks him like well you talk about the world ending by that do you mean like mass unemployment and Sam Alvin hesitates for two seconds and replies yes was was the lovely like congressional uh hearing thing that happened I think about a year back now so what's going on with the AI companies uh I'm not telepaths I can't read their minds. I would point out that it is immensely well precedented in scientific history, in the history of science and engineering, for companies that are making short-term profits to do really sad amounts of damage vastly disproportionate to the profit that they are making. Um, and to be an apparently sincere denial about the negative effects of what they are doing. Um, two cases that come to mind are leaded gasoline and cigarettes. I don't know if you would be familiar off the top of your head with the case of leaded gasoline. Probably even the kids today have heard about cigarettes. The cigarette companies did way more damage to human life in ca in in cancer and other health effects than they made in profits. Like they they did make a few billion dollars in profit selling cigarettes, but nothing remotely compared to the to the cost of human life. It's not that they were, you know, like this this was an immensely negative sum game. They were doing enormously more damage than the profits that they were making. And any particular advertising professional who got up in the morning and figured out how to market cigarettes to teenagers, any of the scientists that they paid to to write stories about how you couldn't really tell whether or not cigarettes were causing lung cancer would have made a a tiny tiny fraction of the of the total profit of the cigarette companies. their CEO would not have made that large a fraction of the total profit of the cigarette company. So they went off and participated in this thing that you know caused lung cancer to I don't know how many millions of people and and for what for this very small profit. How could a human being bring themselves to do that? Through a very simple alchemy. First, you convince yourself that what you're doing is not causing the harm, which is just a very easy thing for human beings to do all the time, all throughout the entire recorded history of humanity. And then once you've convinced yourself that you're not doing that much harm, well, what's the harm in taking money to not do any harm? Leted gasoline caused brain damage to tens, maybe hundreds of millions of developing brains in the United States and elsewhere. They caused brain damage to children for what? The the the gas companies making leaded gasoline could have, you know, made unled gasoline. It's not that they would have gone out of business if they got somehow gotten together and decided to stop making leaded gasoline if they'd if they hadn't opposed the regulations that were trying to bend leaded gasoline before it turned into a big deal back in the 1930s or there was an attempt to to to have regulations against leaded gasoline. Lead was known to be poisonous in large quantities. Why why why let people spray it all all over the place even in smaller quantities? But the gas companies got together. They managed to prevent that legislation from from passing. They they they they poisoned an entire generation. And and and for what for gas that burned about 10% more efficiently, I think was what leaded gasoline basically got you. uh >> um for it being more convenient to add lead to the gas instead of of adding ethanol to make it to make it burn more smoothly inside of car engines. Trivial, trivial, trivial compared to the This is not a conspiracy theory. This is standard medical history I'm talking about here. Like I've seen estimates of five points off off off the tested IQ's and you can look at the chart of which states banned leted gasoline when and watch the drops in the crime rate because it makes you, you know, it disposes you to be more violent, not just stupid. that tiny little bit that that that hit child after child after child. Why why why would anyone cause that amount of damage for for because you you got your CEO's salary of of a company that didn't have then didn't need to go to the inconvenience of adding ethanol to gasoline instead cuz first you convince yourself it's safe. First, you convince yourself you're doing you're doing no harm, which is just an easy thing for human brains to convince themselves of. And then why not oppose the gas the the the the legislation against leted gasoline? It's not doing any harm, right? Ronald Fischer, one of the inventions, one one of the inventors of modern scientific statistics, um, testified against it being knowable that cigarettes cause lung cancer because you see a no no proper controlled experiment had been done on cigarettes causing lung cancer. And so, how could you possibly possibly know from mere observational studies um, showing 20 times the chance of cancer if you were a smoker? How could you possibly know from mere correlations correlational studies? And Fischer himself was was a heavy smoker. He actually he drank his own Kool-Aid. The inventor of leaded gasoline, I think, had to go away to a sanitarium at one point because of how much he managed to poison himself with lead. He drank his own Kool-Aid. They really managed to convince themselves that they were doing no harm. And so they could do arbitrarily vast amounts of harm in exchange for these tiny comparatively tiny tiny profits. And to say this is not a substitute for actually tracking the object level arguments about whether or not AI will kill you and for what reason. You cannot figure out what will happen as a matter of computer science if you build a super intelligence and switch it on by pointing out at who has what tainted motives to you know who has what incentives to say what but it but having tried in in my book to in my in my stories's book to to make the case for why on an object level this is what happens if you build a super intelligence and switch it on to ask why the people paying being paid literally hundreds of millions of dollars by Meta to be AI researchers. Why people like Sam Alman who, you know, I mean, he, you know, didn't quite get paid billions of dollars. He was supposed to be CEO of a nonprofit, he actually stole billions of dollars, but you know, why the guy stealing billions of dollars in equity um from the public that was supposed to own it? Uh like like how does he manage to convince himself that what he's doing is okay? Well, maybe he's not even convinced, you know, we do have him on the record as saying a few years earlier like AI will end the world, but in the meantime they'll be great companies, you know, maybe maybe he's he's just like, yeah, sure, you know, like the world's going to end, but I get to be important. I get to be there, you know, sure who but I could be trusted with this power that that's >> You think you think that that's the position that a lot of the guys at the heads of these uh AI companies believe? >> I'm not a telepath. I can't tell you what these people are actually thinking. you got to distinguish between stuff you can possibly know and stuff you can't. Um, but their overt language and has has often been like, well, building super intelligence is inevitable. Who could possibly stop that? An international treaty could possibly stop that. A coalition of of major nuclear powers could stop that. But leading that aside, they they may have convinced themselves that's not going to happen. Who could possibly stop anyone from building super intelligence? So, I need to build it. I only I can be trusted to build it. um is what their overt rhetoric has sort of been. >> Okay. >> But but the main thing I'm trying to point out is that having presented the object level case that super intelligence will kill everyone to ask the question of how could these companies possibly believe that this thing bringing them immense short-term profits and letting them be the most important guy in the room is, you know, not going to end the world is something enormously well precedented in the history of science. If I'm saying that's to the extent you might think that's what happened, a very ordinary thing happened, not an extraordinary thing. A thing happened that has happened a dozen times before. If they managed to convince themselves that they were doing no harm, >> okay? >> Or, you know, only an acceptable amount of harm, only running a 25% chance of destroying the world, whatever it is they think is acceptable. >> Uh, I'm trying to work out what the solution is. Do you have any proposed solutions that makes this seem slightly less apocalyptic? My best I have to offer is is the same solution that humanity used on global thermonuclear war. Don't do it. Like don't instead of having the nuclear war the global thermonuclear war and trying to survive it which which for nuclear war might have worked. Don't have the nuclear war. We managed to do that. It's the the best sign of hope I can offer you. It is it is slightly harder for AI in some ways if not others. But you know people going into the 1950s, 1960s. They thought they were screwed. And that wasn't them indulging in some nice doom scrolling pessimism, luxuriating and then the pleasant feeling of being doomed. This was people who did not want to be doomed. But they looked at the course of human history over the last century. They looked at World War I. They looked at how in the aftermath of World War I, everyone had said, "Let's not do that again." And then there'd been World War II. They had some reason to be worried about nuclear war. They had some reason to expect that no country was going to turn down the prospect of making nuclear weapons. They had some reason to believe that, you know, once a great a bunch of great powers had a bunch of nuclear weapons, why of course they would go to war anyway and use those nuclear weapons. It was apparently to them what had happened with World War II. All all these people saying we must not have another world war and then the world war happening anyway. Why didn't we have a nuclear war? Well, on my account of it, it is because for the first time in all human history, all the great powers, all the leaders of the great powers understood that they personally were going to have a bad day if they started a major war. And people had pretended before to claim proclaim that, you know, war is a very terrible thing that should never be done. It wasn't quite the same level of personal consequence. You know, may maybe as maybe as a general secretary of the Soviet Union, you would think that if you start a nuclear war, you would personally survive. You'd end up in a bunker somewhere. You wouldn't be going to your favorite restaurants in Moscow ever again. And that was not the situation that obtained before the start of World War I, the start of World War II. People might make a bunch of, you know, like it only takes one side to think that they might have a bit of an advantage in the sport in war, the sport of kings to, you know, to take kick off that that fun adventure of trying to conquer another country, which, you know, wasn't as fun as much fun for Adolf Hitler as he expected. But you could see how Adolf Hitler might have thought that he was going to have a nice day as a result of invading Poland. And that's what changed that the general secretary of the Soviet Union and the president of the United States actually personally expected to have both sides expected to personally have bad days if they started a nuclear war. They would not have any better of a bad any better of a of a good day if anyone anywhere on Earth built a super intelligence. >> Yeah. It's this sort of lack the um tragedy it's kind of like a tragedy of the commons. It's this tragedy that everybody's [ __ ] right? It's like everything everything gets blown up no matter who it is that builds it. >> Tell me the commons is that the commons get overg grazed because the individual farmers benefit from setting their cows loose on it. >> Mhm. And the thing with nuclear war is that you might get a bit of a benefit by dropping a tactical nuclear weapon on, you know, like, you know, like the United States could could get an immediate benefit by dropping tactical nuclear weapons on on the Russian troops in Ukraine. And Russia could get an immediate benefit by dropping tactical nuclear weapons on Ukraine. But neither of them is is going to risk the global thermon nuclear war that might follow h happening with a greater probability. So it's it's not the so it's not a trag like it's not a classic tragedy of the commons. The the thing that stopped nuclear war is that although you could get a short-term advantage from dropping a tactical nuke or even like dropping a strategic nuke on one city. The leaders understood how this was a you know like increasing the probability of a global thermonuclear war and they managed to hold off from doing that for that reason. They understood the concept of how it escalated things. They saw the connection to not getting to go to their favorite restaurants again, even if they were surviving in a bunker somewhere. And with artificial intelligence, what we've got is a ladder where every time you climb another step on the ladder, you get five times as much money. But one of those steps of the ladder destroys the world and nobody. And maybe if this true fact can become something that is known and believed by the leaders of a of of a of a handful of major nuclear powers, they can all be like, "All right, we're not climbing any more rungs of this ladder." >> It is not in my interest that you start to climb this ladder, and it's not even my own interest to break apart the treaty by climbing another step of this ladder because then we're all just going to keep climbing and then we're all going to die. >> Uhhuh. That that is the ray of that that is the the best ray of hope I can offer you that we managed to not do the stupid thing the same as we managed to not have a nuclear war despite many people being concerned for excellent reasons that this that it was going to be an impossible slope not to fall down >> okay so what do we actually do well you know voters do not necessarily have all that much power under the modern political process but I I think but like the next step for the United States might be something like the president saying you know like we're of course not going to give up AI unilaterally which wouldn't even solve anything in its own way but we stand ready to you know join with an international uh international treaty international alliance whose purpose is to prevent further escalation of AI intelligence further escalation up the AI ladder Now, we're not going to do it unilaterally, but we're ready to get together and do it everywhere. And China has already sort of like hasn't quite said that, but they've sort of indicated openness to international arrangements meant to prevent human loss of control from AI, you'd want Britain to say the same thing. So if and then if a bunch of leaders of major powers have said like yeah we would join an arrangement to prevent this from getting out of control and everybody on earth you know ending up dead then you can from there you can go on to the actual treaty. What can voters do? Well you can write your elected officials is among the things you can try to do there. Um, there's a uh there if you go to if anyone builds it.com. >> Can't believe that you got that URL. Brilliant. Okay. >> Yeah. >> Anyone builds it.com and you and you click on where it says act, >> you'll see our guide to calling your representatives. And if you click on march, you'll see a place where you can sign up to march on Washington DC if 100,000 other people other also pledge to march on it. And this does not this for this to just happen in the United States does not solve the problem because this is not a regional problem where you ban super intelligence inside your own country and then your own country is safe. M >> but this sort of thing can exert some amount of influence on politicians and more importantly can make it clear to them that they're allowed to discuss it that they're allowed to want to not die themselves. >> Mhm. >> There are multiple Congress people whom I'm not going to name but whom we have talked to who would you know prefer that America not die along with the rest of the world but it doesn't quite seem like the sort of thing you're allowed to speak out in public about yet. M >> voters can make it clear to their politicians that the politicians are allowed to speak out. There's already there's already like 70% like if you actually survey American voters 70% of them say they do not want super intelligence. But you know that's not enough for the politicians to feel licensed to act but you know if you call them and if you march in Washington you know that's that's what you can do as an individual voter. >> Well I I applaud you for uh trying to get some grassroots stuff going. Congratulations. Um, you've been frank throughout this conversation. I think it's fair for me to be frank here. It does feel a little bit uh like you're outgunned. Um, legislation tends to move more slowly than technology does by many many years, sometimes decades. Uh, it it it just feels bleak. It feels it feels um if what you say is true, it really is kind of fluke that gets us to a stage where this goes well because the likelihood of some moratorium being placed where all AI development is halted and and all efforts are placed on this. You only need one bad actor to do it which because again it's if anybody builds it >> well you you don't want the international treaty to you know fall over if North Korea steals a bunch of GPUs. You you do want the treaty to say if North Korea steals a bunch of GPUs and and builds a you know unlicensed data center then we will clearly communicate diplomatically what is about to happen and then if North Korea still proceeds we will drop a bunker buster on on their data center >> that assumes that you know that you are somehow able to detect and that no one can do it uh surreptitiously. >> It is hard to surreptitious a data center they consume a lot of electricity. Okay. So, we can see most of the ones in Russia and China and North Korea. um like I'm not sure who is looking for them at the moment and if you can you know and to what extent these things show up on satellites and to what extent these things show up on on you know intelligence reports but you there has previously been an issue of detecting covert nuclear refineries um in terms of of of in of of nuclear non-prololiferation and and this was not an unsolvable problem and data centers are if anything even higher profile than the nuclear refineries, >> right? So, we are going to threaten some people with >> I mean, I wouldn't use the word threaten. I would say that if North Korea is building an unsupervised data center, then you should actually be terrified for your lives and lives of your children. And you tell North Korea this plainly and truthfully. And then if they don't drop, you know, if they don't shut down their data center, you drop a bunker buster on it. Can you do this even though North Korea has some nuclear weapons of its own? >> Okay. So pressure from people on their elected representatives through mail marches, more awareness to get the government officials to come up with an international treaty to get countries to agree that what specifically >> we're not making AIS any smarter than they are already. Um, we are putting the chips that can be used to build the more powerful AIs into locations where they where their uses are supervised. I would say ideally you are putting the chips that run the AIS into locations where they can be supervised. As a minor side effect, maybe you can stop the AIS from driving people insane. It seems like the sort of thing you could better do if this was all happening under supervision by international treaty as you know it's not vital to humanity survival that AIS be prevented from driving people insane but it's serves as a kind of test case of can you you know stop the the damage like like like are is humanity in in control here? Can can we stop AI from predating upon upon some of our human people? Um but you know that's not the main thing here. It's it's a thing that some people will find attractive, but it's not the main thing. You you're trying to like just get the whole AI thing under control, and then you're trying to stop the further escalation of AI capabilities up the ladder. It is scary. It is uh one of these things and I imagine that it feels it must feel a little bit like this to you that everybody is sort of uh dancing their way through a daisy field of oh I've got this personal coach in my pocket and it's so cool and I get to talk to it about all of my psychological problems. God, I can [ __ ] to it about my husband and it just listens. Uh, and at the end of this daisy field that everyone's having a load of fun in is just like a huge cliff uh that descends into eternity and uh there's like a battle ro at the bottom or something. Um that is that what it feels like? >> Yeah, pretty much. Um but the future is hard to predict. It is genuinely hard to predict. I can tell you that if you build a super intelligence using anything remotely like current methods, everyone will die. That's a that's a pretty firm prediction. The the the part where people maintain their current like the the part where people maintain the daisy field attitude that they had a few years earlier toward AI, that has already shifted to some degree just because of the chat GPT moment. And nobody predicted that in advance. Nobody knew. Nobody at open AI as far as I can tell had any idea that when they released chat GPT they were going to be causing a massive shift in public opinion about AI as people realized the guys were actually talking to them now and sounding counter intelligent about it. So maybe it also maybe I I don't want to wait for anything else to happen. Maybe chat GPT was the miracle we got. I wasn't expecting that much of a miracle. I did not call it in advance. Um, but maybe we get another miracle. I don't want to sit around waiting for it because I can't tell you the miracle will will like occur on such and such a day, but you know, maybe maybe the AI has managed to do something more destructive than driving a few people insane, breaking up a few marriages and like uh, you know, causing whatever further decline in birth rates is going to be caused here. Uh, may maybe they do worse than that and and that shifts opinion. Maybe they just get more powerful and smarter and are clearly no longer toys and there and that shifts opinion even without a giant catastrophe. >> It's not clear to me, you know, as much as people love to to [ __ ] about their elected leaders. >> It it is not clear to me that we are looking at permanent obliviousness to the aliens getting smarter and smarter. Like people are currently saying completely wacky and oblivious things because they think that's what's politically mandatory to say in the current political environment and that you have to talk about jobs rather than the other extinction of humanity. But it it's it's not clear the future is very hard to predict in general. It is not clear to me this that the current state of obliviousness is something supreme unmovable and impossible for any event to change to change or that it won't just disintegrate on on its own as more people talk about it. There there's a level in which you you you kind of have to be pretty dumb to look at this smarter and smarter alien showing up on your planet and not have the thought cross your mind that maybe this won't end well. Can can even elected politicians be that dumb? Yes, absolutely. It is not known to me to be prohibited that this can be the case. Do they have to do the stupid thing? It's not clear to me that it's mandatory. We did manage to have we we did manage to not have nuclear war. And people did not think they were going to get that much luck. >> Oh yeah, ladies and gentlemen. Uh holy [ __ ] Uh I I I was prepared coming in, but I'm not sure that the rest of the audience will be. So uh dude, I the best compliment I can pay you is I hope you're wrong. Uh but I fear you're not. >> Yeah, being wrong. It'd be great to be wrong. I'd love to be wrong. Wonderful. You know, wonderful. I I want I let let me assure you everyone by making it by way by way of like making you know like destroying any shred of optimism you might previously have had I completely would have other career options lined up and other ways of supporting myself if I was completely wrong like like not just me but some like sensible people who who donated me a bit of appreciated currency wanted to make sure that I could if I was you know you know if I changed my mind about this sort of thing just retreat from my entire career path and not end up in in financial trouble. >> Mhm. >> And and yet here I am, you know. So I' I'd love to be wrong. I we I've we've we have tried to arrange it to be the case that I could at any moment say, "Yep, I was completely wrong about that and everybody could breathe a side of relief and it wouldn't be like the end of my ability to support myself and I would have other things to do." We've made sure to leave a line of defeat there. Unfortunately, as far as I currently know, I continue to not think that I that uh that it is time to declare myself to have been wrong about this. >> Heck yeah. All right, Eli. Well, uh if the internet is still alive in uh a little bit of time in the future, we can check back in and see just how right you are. >> Well, every year that we're still alive is is is another chance for, you know, something else to happen. something else. >> What a wonderful way to finish, dude. I appreciate you. Thank you so much for your work. >> Thank you for having me over to uh deliver the bad news. >> Congratulations. You made it to the end of an episode. Your brain has not been completely destroyed by the internet just yet. Here's another one that you should watch. Come on.