we've never created a nuclear weapon that can create nuclear weapons the artificial intelligences that we're building are capable of creating other artificial intelligences as a matter of fact they're encouraged to create other in artificial intelligences even if there is never an existential risk of AI those Investments would redesign our society in ways that are beyond the point of Narita said that people should consider holding off having kids right now because of AI and other societal issues that are coming you've said this is the thing that we should be thinking about that AI poses a bigger
threat than global warming why is it that you think AI poses such a significant existential risk to humanity is not just in the amount of risk that AI you know positions ahead of humanity it's not about the timing of the risk and we should cover those two points very quickly but it really is about a point of no return where if we cross that point of no return we have very very little chance to bring the genie back into the bottle what is the point of no return the most important of which of course is
the point of Singularity and Singularity is a moment where you have an AGI that is much smarter than humans uh I think that when we discuss singularity that might bring about the suspicion of an existential risk like Skynet type of thing we are losing focus on the immediate threat which is much more imminent and in a very interesting way as damaging uh probably even more damaging and that risk in my view which we have to resolve first before we talk about the existential risks is the risk of AI falling in the wrong hands or the
risk of AI falling in the right hands that are naive enough to not handle it well or the risk of AI misunderstanding our objectives or the method or the risk of AI uh you know performing our objectives but us misunderstanding our own benefit and I think when you really look at those I call this the third inevitable and scary smart when you really look at those those are truly around the corner right there are other other other risks that are extremely important as well which we don't even think of as threats but that are completely
going to redesign the fabric of our society jobs by definition is going to the definition of jobs and accordingly the definition of purpose the definition of income gap power structures all of that is going to be redesigned significantly it is being redesigned as we speak as we speak there are those with Hunger for power those with fear of other powers those with Hunger for uh more and more and more money and success and so on who are investing in AI in ways that even if there is never an existential risk of AI those investments will
redesign our society in ways that are beyond the point of narrator let's get into the three inevitables what are they exactly so so the three inevitables are my way of telling my readers or my listeners to understand that there are things that we shouldn't waste time talking about because they are going to happen Okay and those are number one there is no shutting down AI there is no reversing it there is no stopping uh the development of it let me list them quickly and then we go back on each and every one of them the
second inevitable is that AI will be smarter than humans significantly smarter than humans and the third inevitable is that bad things will happen in the process exactly what bad things we spoke about a few of them but we can definitely discuss each and every one of those in details the first inevitable interestingly the fact that AI will happen there is no shutting in down there is no uh um you know um there is no nuclear type 3T that will ever happen where Nations will decide okay you know what let's let's stop developing AI like we
said stop developing nuclear weapons or at least stop using them because we really never stopped developing them uh you know that's not gonna happen because of a prisoner's dilemma because Humanity so smooth smoothly stuck itself in a place in a corner where nobody is able to make the choice to to stop the development of AI so if alphabet is developing AI then meta has to develop AI if you know and you know Yandex in Russia has to develop Ai and so on and so forth if if the US is developing AI then China will have
to develop Ai and vice versa and so the reality of the matter is that it is not a technological uh characteristic of AI that we cannot stop developing it it's a capitalist and power focused system that will always prioritize the benefit of US versus them over the benefit of humanity at large so uh you know when when you really think about some of the initiatives that now some global leaders are starting to talk about Ai and try to put it in the spotlight like the prime minister of the UK or whatever you know when I
when I was asked about that I was in London last week and basically I think it's an amazing initiative great idea but can you understand the the the magnitude of the ask that you have here which is what you need to get initiative the initiative was that we get all of the global leaders together to uh you know to a summit that basically looks at Ai and tries to regulate Ai and for that to happen you know you need Nations to suddenly say okay you know what we're gonna all look at the global benefit of
humanity above the globe the benefit of each individual Nation you want to get people from China uh Russia the U.S uh North uh North Korea and others around one table and tell them can we all shake hands and say we're not going to develop that thing and even if they do which they will not agree to that uh you know then they will question what happens if a drug cartel leader somewhere you know hiding in the jungles decides to expand and diversify his business and start to work on AIS that are criminal in nature we
need to develop the policemen and to develop the policemen we have have to develop Ai and so all of those definitions all of those prisoners dilemmas if you if you understand you know a game theory are basically positioning us in a place where our inability to trust the other guy is going to lead us to continue to develop AI at a very fast space Pace because we're we're even worried about what the other guy could do due to our mistrust and you know the clear example of that is what we saw with the open letter
which I think was a fantastic uh initiative I think you covered it many times in your podcast the you know the attempt to to tell uh you know the the big players of uh that are developing AI let's halt the development for six months and I think it was less than a week before uh Sundar pachai the CEO of alphabets responded and said this is not realistic you can't ask me to do that because there is no way you can guarantee that no one else is going to to develop Ai and disrupt my business that
basically means we have to start behaving in a way that's accepts that AI is going to continue to be developed it's going to continue to be a prominent part of our life and it's going to continue to get massive amounts of investment on every side of the table for people that don't know the prisoner's dilemma it's probably worth walking them through it but what you said about drug dealers I've never heard anybody say that before and I think removing this from just government versus government is probably a very wise way to look at it you
and I are both sort of secretly very optimistic in fact the way that we uh first met is around the idea of happiness and mental health and all of that so I hope people don't see either of us as sort of doomsdaysayers I just feel like we're we're going through a transitional period right now that is unprecedented in human history and I say that with full understanding that every generation says like no no this time it's really different uh but I feel like this time really is different the the closest thing to it is nuclear
weapons and that already gives you a sense this scale but part of the reason I'm more worried about AI than I was even as a kid with um really living under the cloud of nuclear proliferation the Cold War all of that is because the infrastructure required for a nuclear program is massive whereas you don't need that infrastructure you just need a computer some servers uh and you know clone over chatgpt and you're ready to rock so walk people through the prisoner's dilemma uh so that they can really understand that this is a deep fundamental truth
of The Human Condition and isn't just a government V government thing yes let me cover that but let me also cover uh a tiny one more thing that's very very different between Ai and nuclear weapons which is the fact that we've never created a nuclear weapon that can create nuclear weapons uh you know the artificial intelligences that we're building are capable of creating other artificial intelligences as a matter of fact they're encouraged to create other in artificial intelligences with the single objective stated objective of make them smarter so so basically what you you know imagine
if you had a a nuclear you know two nuclear weapons finding a way of mating and creating a smarter or a more devastating nuclear weapon and I think that's really something that most people Miss uh you know Miss when we try to cover the threat of AI um the the uh the prisoners dilemma is a very very simple mathematical uh game if you want part of game theory is to imagine that you have two uh um you know prisoner there's no two suspects of a crime play basically Partners in a crime uh who are captured
but the police doesn't have enough evidence to uh you know to to put them both in jail so they are trying to get one of them to tell on the other so they would go to each of them and say by the way just giving you an example uh you know if you don't tell and your friend tells you're gonna get three years and he's gonna get out free uh or you know he's gonna go get out with with one year and then they go to the other guy and say the same if you tell
and he doesn't tell you're gonna get one year and you know and and he gets three right and by the way if you both tell uh you both get two years and so from a mathematics point of view if you build the possibilities of those uh uh you know um scenarios in in quadrants basically a quadrant where I tell and you don't uh is is a quadrant that requires a lot of trust sorry a quadrant that I don't tell and you don't tell is a quadrant that requires a lot of trust any other quadrant by
definition tells me that if I tell I will get off with this with a with a lighter sentence okay and and the only reason why I wouldn't do it is if I trust you and if I don't trust you by definition human behavior will drive you and drive me both of us to say look the better option is for me to get off with a lighter sentence because I don't trust the other guy and I think that's reality of what's happening I mean in business in general uh in in you know in power struggles in
general in wars in general I think it's all a situation that's triggered by not trusting the other guy because if we could trust the other guy we would probably focus on on many more much softer objectives that can grow the pie rather than you know uh get each of us to compete so so this is where we are and I think the reality of us continuing to develop AI at a much faster Pace because Chad GPT and open AIS work in general I think is the Netscape moment uh for AI of you know Netscape of
the internet GPT is for AI because basically it highlighted first and foremost not just for the public I think the bringing it to public attention actually is a good thing because it allows us to talk about it more openly and people will listen when when I published scary Smart in 2021 uh it was Business book of the year in in the UK at the Times Business book of the year but it wasn't as widely uh urgently read as it is today simply because people were like yeah that's so interesting this guy has a an interesting
point of view but it's 50 years away and and human nature sadly doesn't respond very well to existential threats that are very far in time or probable in their in their you know a possibility of occurrence uh we we don't treat you know it's like those warnings on a pack of cigarette uh you know if if we tell you it's almost it causes cert it's most certainly causes death people look at it and say yeah but that's 50 years from now I want to enjoy it for 50 years so you know whether it's 50 years
or five nobody really knows but you know people would delay reacting to those so so when when open Ai and chair GPT became a reality uh I think what ended up happening happening is that the public got to know about AI but also the investors so this is the.com bubble all over again right we have massive amounts of money poured to encourage faster and faster development of AI I mean I I know you're a techie like I am and we both know that it actually uh is not that complicated to develop than another layer of
AI of course it's complicated to find the Breakthrough uh but but it you know to to develop more and more of those I think is something that's becoming our reality today but why are we as we think about how fast the technology is developing which I I think most people will concede that they probably struggle to think exponentially and not linearly and so even with a linear thinking at this point seeing how far it's already come I think people are already worried if they understood how much faster even than they could possibly imagine it's going
uh it is going um they're still worried so my question is why does this break bad why do we all make the base assumption that uh without either massive intervention or you know some sort of regulatory body or something that this doesn't just naturally end up in a good place why are you me other people why are we worried that number three uh in your three inevitables is that things go wrong why are we worried that it isn't just not when there's bug software it's nothing why isn't this going to be like the year 2000
the Y2K problem for anybody old enough to remember that everybody was super panicky and then nothing happened why isn't this going to be yet another enough nothing Burger because the chips are lined up in the wrong direction so uh you know Hugo de Garris if you if you if you know him as a very well-known AI scientist that worked in in Asia for quite a few years and he uh he did that he built a documentary that I think is found on YouTube it's called Singularity or bust and he was basically saying that uh most
of the investment that's going in AI today is going into uh spying killing gambling and uh one one one more um so spying is surveillance okay killing is what we call defense uh gambling is all of the trading algorithms and selling which is all of the advertisement and recommendation engines and you know all of all of the uh all of the idea of turning us into products that that can be advertised too if you want and that's not unusual by the way in the in our capitalist system because those Industries come with a lot of
money banking you know defense and so on and so forth uh the the the chips are lined up this way I mean if you take just accurate numbers on how much uh of of the AI investment is going behind drug Discovery uh for example is you know as compared to how much is going behind you know killing machines and killing robots and killing drones and so on and so forth uh you'd be you'd be amazed that it's a staggering the difference right and this is the nature of humanity so far if you if you're running
a research on on a disease that doesn't affect more than you know a few tens of thousands of people you're gonna struggle to find the money okay but if you're building a new weapon that can kill tens of thousands of people the money will immediately arrive because there is money in that you can sell that and sadly as much as I uh you know I would have hoped that Humanity wasn't uh completely driven by that it's our reality so so so this is number one number two is that so number one is is we're aligned
in the direction of things going wrong okay number two is even if we're aligned in the direction of going right wrongdoers can flip things upside down there was a an article in The Verge uh you know a few months ago around uh you know a drug Discovery AI that was basically supposed to look at characteristics of you know human biology and you know um whatever information and data we can give it about the drugs we can develop and chemical chemistry and so on and so forth with the objective of prolonging life prolonging life so prolonging
human life is one parameter in the equation it's basically plus make life longer okay and for fun they you know the research team was uh was you know was asked to call to go to go and give a talk at a university and so for the fun of it they uh reversed the uh the positive to negative so instead of giving the AI the objective of um of prolonging life it became objective of shortening life and within six hours if I remember correctly the AI came up with 40 000. uh uh possible uh biological weapons
and and you know agents like nerve gas and so on Jesus yeah it's it's incredible really and and you know it's the thing that of course scares me is that this article is in The Verge you know it's all over the Internet and accordingly if you were a criminal that grew up watching uh you know super villain movies uh what would you be doing right now you would go like a million dollars I need to get my hands on that weapon so that I can sell it to the rest of the world or the rest
of the world of villainy and I think the reality of the matter is uh it is so much power so much power that if it falls in the wrong hands and it is bound to fall in the wrong hands unless we start paying enough attention right and that's my My Cry Out To The World Is let's pay enough attention so that it doesn't fall in the wrong hands it would lead to a very bad place the third you know and and the biggest reason in my view uh of um of us needing to worry hopefully
hopefully we will all be wrong and be surprised is that there were three barriers that we all compute all computer scientists or that worked on AI we all agreed there were three barriers that we should never cross and and the first was don't put them on the open internet until you are absolutely certain they are safe okay and you know it's like fdaa will tell you don't swallow a drug until we've tested it right uh you know and and I and I really respect Sam Altman's view of you know uh developing it in you know
in public in front of everyone and to discover things now that could uh you know that we could fix when the challenge is small in isolation of the other Tool uh this is a very good idea but the other two barriers we said we should never cross is don't teach them to write code and don't have agents prompted them right so what you have today is you have a very intelligent machine that is capable of writing code so it can develop its own siblings if you want okay that is known frequently to uh to to
outperform human developers so I think 75 of the code uh was no sorry 25 of the code uh given to chat GPT to be reviewed uh was improved to around two and a half times faster okay so so they can develop better code than us okay and and basically now what we're doing is we're not only limiting their learning the learning of those machines to humans so they're not learning from us anymore they're learning from other AIS and there are staggering statistics around the size of data that is developed by other AIS to train AIS
in the data set of course again just to simplify that idea for for our listeners Alpha Go Master which is the absolute winner of the strategy game go uh you know one against alphago uh um sorry alphago zero which is the absolute winner of the strategical game that's called go one against alphago Master which was another AI developed by deepmind of Google that was by then the world champion so alphago Master won against the world world champion and then Alpha go zero one against alphago Master a thousand games to zero by playing against itself it
has never in its entire career as a go player seeing a game of Go being played it just simulated the game by knowing the rules and playing against it you can reboot your life your health even your career anything you want all you need is discipline I can teach you the tactics that I learned while growing a billion dollar business that will allow you to see your goals through whether you want better health stronger relationships a more successful career any of that is possible with the mindset and business programs in Impact Theory University join the
thousands of students who have already accomplished amazing things tap now for a free trial and get started today okay so first people that don't know the history of this uh I think it was deep blue ends up beating Gary Kasparov the greatest chess champion back in the 80s is that correct if I remember correctly yeah yeah no way that uh we're ever going to be able to build AI that'll beat a go Champion uh ends up beating the I forget how many years ago this was but it took a long time but they finally did
beat the second place go Champion then they updated beat the first place world champion uh and go and then realized we don't need to feed it a bunch of go games we can just have it basically dream about playing itself over and over and over and over and over and over and over very rapidly which is one of the things you said in your book that I found this is something that people under appreciate the future is going to be almost impossibly different to the point where it will even now so forget the singularity where
the rate of change is is so blinding that you you can't predict a minute from now let alone what's happening now but you said over the next 100 years without any additional changes we will make 20 000 years of progress and in that progress though I have to imagine will be progress that speeds up that rate of change so if we're already on a rate of change of twenty thousand uh years of change in a single Century you can imagine where we're going to be in 10 20 30 is going to be crazy so by
putting an algorithm together rather than feeding it human data you feed it AI games it gets unbeatable to the point where it can beat the other AI okay that's crazy so I mean where do you think about it think about it this way Tom how does the best player of go in the world learn the game right they play against other players and every time they win or they lose of course they're given instructions and hints and tips and so on but every time they make their own move and they lose they remember it and
so they don't do it again every every time they make the right move and they win they remember it and they do it over and over the the difference is that one player you know I always give the example of self-driving cars you drive and I drive if you make a mistake and avoid an accident you will learn I will not okay if if one self-driving car requires critical intervention it's fed back to the main brain if you want to call it and every other self-driving car will learn that's the point about AI right and
so when Alpha go zero was playing against alphago Master uh you know for for it to to learn just so that you understand there were three versions of Alpha alphagoa version one was beaten by version three in three days of playing against itself version 2 became the world you know which is the which was the world champion at the time lost a thousand to zero in one in 21 days 21 days and I think this is why I am no longer holding back okay the reason why I'm no longer holding back is that nobody if
you've ever coded anything in your life nobody expected an AI to win and go uh any earlier than 10 years from today right it did not only happen several years ago it happened in 21 days did you understand the speed that we're talking about here and and when you said exponential people don't understand this chat gpt4 as compared to charge PT 3.5 is 10 times smarter okay there are estimates it's hard to to measure exactly there are estimates that chat gpt4 is at an IQ of 155 if you measure by all of the you know
uh tests that it goes through right Einstein was 160. okay so it is already smarter than most humans now if chat GPT 5 no no no chat gpt6 a year and a half from today is another 10 times smarter if you just take that assumption huh uh you're now 10 times smarter than one of the smartest humans on the planet if this is not a singularity I don't know what is if this is not a point where humans need to stop and say hmm maybe I should consider trying to understand how the world is going
to look like when that happens right and I go back and I say this very openly I am like you I am an optimist a hundred percent I know that eventually AI in the 2040s 2050s maybe will create Utopia for all of us or for those who remain of us okay but then between now and then the abuse of AI falling in the wrong hands as well as the uncertainty of certain mistakes that can flip life upside down okay uh could really be quite a struggle for many of us does that mean it's a doomsday
no it's not but it's honestly not something that we should put on the side and go binge watch uh you know Game of Thrones not not anymore I I think people need to put the game controller down and start talking about this starting telling their governments to engage starting to tell you know developers that we require ethical aisle starting start to to request some kind of an oversight and and in my personal point of view start to prepare for an upcoming uh redesign of the fabric of work and most importantly start to prepare for a
relationship between humans and AI that we have have never in our lives needed to do before with any other being it's like getting a new puppy at home only the puppy is a billion times smarter than you yeah think about it yeah there's a Rick and Morty episode about the dog becoming exceptionally intelligent remember that yeah absolutely very much so all right so I wanna there's two things I wanna drill into and then I want to you and I to start the conversation about what that looks like because In fairness I don't think certainly not
in the US I don't think most people in the government have thought about it at all probably would be my guess uh and so I think that the a better way for people to begin to think through this stuff is really sort of um podcast citizen journalism whatever you want to call it uh so correct the two things I want to drill into are going to be exponential growth which we've touched on but there's a few more things I think to be said about that and then alien intelligence and I say alien intelligence because the
way that AI is going to think will be so vastly different it will it will truly be incomprehensible and I think our failure to grasp what artificial super intelligence will look like is the problem okay so let's talk exponentials so linear if I take 30 steps I'm going to be roughly at my front door let's just call it if I take 30 exponential steps I'm going to walk around the earth something like 30 times it it's crazy and people don't they don't have a sense of that so uh linear obviously is one two three four
it just you progress by one increment each time exponentials means you double each time and there's something called The Law of accelerating returns which I know you know well about so be great to hear you talk on this but the way that that plays out is that when you're at one and you're doubling to two like it doesn't seem like a big deal but you start getting to a hundred and you double to 200 and then 400 and then you hit a million and it's 2 million and I don't think people understand that it only
takes seven doublings like if you start with uh yeah um an amount of money you only have to have seven uh exponential steps to double your money and so the compounding effect of that is is extraordinary so if you don't mind walk people through some examples of uh the law of accelerating returns and how you see this playing out with AI so so the the of course we have to credit three coursework for for you know bringing this to everyone's attention the you know more slow in technology was I think our very first exposure even
though we didn't look at it as accelerating returns but Moore's Law promised us uh in the 1960s which you know was uh coined by the CEO of Intel at the time uh that's compute power will double every 12 to 18 months at the same cost okay and you know you may not think that much about it but my first window you know those computer so uh IBM compatible computer at the time I had a 286. I remember those machines they had 33 megahertz on them right uh and uh you know you had that turbo button
if you if you pressed that turbo button it ran on six at 66 megahertz but it consumed uh an or you know electricity and overheated and so on and so forth the difference between 33 and 66 to us at the time was massive because you literally doubled your performance okay as computers continue to to grow you can imagine that every year just for the Simplicity of the numbers that 66 doubled and then you know became say 130 for the Simplicity of the numbers and then that 130 became 260 and then the 260 became you know
500. now the difference between the 500 and the the 33. is quite significant it's orders of magnitude the 33 and it happened in two or three double X right and I think what people when you really think about that Ray coursewell uses a very very interesting example when we attempted to uh sequence The genome it was a um a 15 years project and seven years into the project uh we were at 10 of the progress okay and everyone looked at it and said if it's 10 in seven years then you need 70 more years to
you know or you know a total of 70 years to finish okay uh and Ray said oh we're at 10 we did it okay and he was right you know one year the 10 became 20 the 20 became 40 the 40 became 80 and then you're over the uh you're over the the threshold okay and that idea of the exponential function is really what humans Miss humans miss that because we are taught to think of the world as a linear progression okay let me use uh um you know uh a biological example now if you
have a a jar that's half full of bacteria okay the next doubling it's full it's not gonna add you know if it moved from 25 full to 50 percent full in the in the last doubling you'd go like yeah you know we still have half empty one more doubling and it's full if you apply that to the resources of planet Earth uh if we if we keep consuming the resources of plant planet Earth to the point where one doubling away you know two minutes to midnight if you want one doubling away you would be consuming
all of the resources of planet Earth we would need another full planet Earth on the next Double we would need four planet Earth is on the next doubling okay so that's exponential growth uh is is just mind-boggling because the growth on the next chip in your phone is going to be a million times more than the computer that puts people on the moon okay that's one double that one additional happening now when you think about it from an AI point of view it's doubly exponential double exponential why because as I said we now have ai's
prompting AIS so basically we're building machines that are enabling us to build machines so in in many many ways the reasons why we get to those incredible breakthroughs which even the people that wrote the code don't understand is because you and I when you really think about uh you know I know you love computer science and physics and so on but I'm sure you you remember reading String Theory or some complex theory of of physics and then you would go like I don't get it I don't get it and then you read a little more
and then I don't get it I don't get it and then you read a little more and then someone explains something to you and Bam suddenly you go like oh now I get it it's super clear those are simply because every time you're using your brain to understand something you're building some neural networks that make it easier for you to understand something else that make it easier for you to understand even more and this is what's happening with AI that also does not include which I am amazed that we're not talking about this it does
not include any possible breakthroughs in compute power you know there was an article recently that you know China is working also on quantum computers that are now 180 million times faster than the traditional computers I remember in my Google years when we when we were working on Sycamore Google's quantum computer uh Sycamore performed an algorithm that would have taken the world's biggest supercomputer 10 000 years to solve and it took a sycamore 12 seconds 200 seconds let me listen yeah yeah because that's a big difference so this is where I think people's brains start to
shut down uh even you said 180 million times faster yeah so okay so I know so by the way 200 seconds to 10 000 years is a trillion times faster for second reasons so I did myself let's be clear for our listeners so so we can't put AI on quantum computers yet we can't even put really anything uh uh you know it's very very early years it's almost like the very early mainframes it requires you know almost uh uh uh absolute zero uh you know degrees and and very cold and very large rooms and so
on but so where the mainframes I worked on mvs systems that occupied a full floor of a building right and they had less compute power than the silliest of all smartphones on the planet today we we make those things happen there will be a point in time especially assisted by intelligence uh and we're going to have more and more intelligence available to us where we will figure this out and then you take chat GPT or any form of AI and move it from that brain to this brain that is 100 million times and 80 million
times faster and we're done okay we can't do that with you and I with our biology we can't move our intelligence from one brain to the other yet um yeah so I I really want to drive a stake into this idea of how different exponential is to Linear by pointing out uh the difference between so if you uh a [ __ ] by if you look it up I forget if I looked it up on Wikipedia or whatever but I looked up what's the IQ of a [ __ ] if I remember right it's like
65 or 80 it's somewhere in the 60s 70s yeah yeah and Einstein was 160 as you were saying so you have I think Einstein is like 2.3 times smarter than a [ __ ] if I remember when I did the math correctly and so the difference between a [ __ ] that you know struggles to uh take care of themselves and then only two and a half or less than two and a half times smarter than that and you get somebody that unlocked the power of the atom uh that really gave birth to a lot
of the modern technology that we use today is built on the back of this physical uh breakthrough and so there there's a really really life-altering difference you wouldn't have nuclear power you wouldn't have nuclear weapons you wouldn't have GPS like a lot of the things that we rely on in today's world you wouldn't have any of that if it wasn't for the 2.3 x increase in intelligence now when we talk about super intelligence which people are estimating will get to be a billion times big and smarter than the smartest human so if if 2.3 x
is life-altering changes the entire Paradigm of our planet then a hundred times is unimaginable a thousand times as ridiculous a hundred thousand times as comical a million times we're still not even scratching the surface of how much more intelligent this is going to be and so that brings me to the other thing I want to drill into which is that AI will be an alien intelligence it will not be like your friend who you can still hang out with and you know smoke a joint it's like your your different species they're I don't even know
if there will be common elements and that's one of the things that that I think we have to establish first before we get into how we stop this from being problematic but you and your book you really freaked me out so scary smart is scary good as a book I highly encourage everybody to read it but there's a part in there where you read a transcript of two AI that we're given the task to negotiate with each other for like selling things back and forth and they start talking in a way that is unintelligible I
mean it was really unnerving it was like III uh need five of these and then the other was like screws Nails all me and there was like a really weird like rhythmic repetition to the way that they were over emphasizing themselves and like what they needed it was really weird and so what was the response to that because if I'm not mistaken they ended up shutting them down because they that was very unnerved yeah yeah what happened that that was Facebook and and the idea is they were simulating AIS negotiating deals with each other it's
a wonderful thing if you're in the advertising business for example because we had things like that at Google a very long time ago the idea of you know ad exchange for example where machines will buy ads from other machines right but you know you and I uh and I really thank you for your time it took me four and a half months to write scary smart uh you know maybe six months to edit it it took you perhaps a day or two to read it and for us to talk about it now it's gonna take
two and a half hours you know a computer can read scary smart and less than a microsact right the the you know when when you speak about the idea of intelligences being a hundred times a million times a billion times smarter than us this is only one thread of the issue the other thread of the issue is the uh the memory size you know of if if I could keep every physics equation in my head at the same time and also understand biology very well and also understand you know uh cosmology very well I could
probably come up with much more intelligent answers to problems right and if I could also uh ping another scientist who understands this or that in a microsecond get all of the information that he knows and make it part of my information that's even more intelligent and what is happening is when uh when we ask computers to to communicate at first they'll communicate like we tell them but if they're intelligent enough they'll start to say that's too slow why why would I communicate that human bandwidths right why would I use words to communicate when you and
I know that if you know if you simplify words for example into uh um you know letters into numbers you could communicate a massive amount of information within every sentence right so you could literally if you take one equation uh algorithmically put you know certain letters in it you could simply I could send it to you something that says 1.1 and you would enter it into the equation and get a full file that's a full book because of the sequence of the letters that 1.1 determines as per the equation so of course com you know
if you're smarter and smarter and you have that bandwidth you're going to communicate a lot quicker and I don't remember the name I think they were Alice and Bob of the of the two chat Bots and very very quickly they they ended up designing their own language and when they said III uh would would buy 10 uh you know um tape tape tape there was math math engaged in that it wasn't I want to buy 10 tapes only it was also communicating other things we didn't understand which is really what you're you know driving us
to to driving our listeners to think about Tom because there is so much of AI we don't understand again this is one of the things that is that people need to become aware of uh there are emerging properties that we don't understand we don't understand how those machines develop those properties right and there are even uh targeted properties that basically we tell something that its task is to do a b and c and it does a b and c but we have no clue how it arrived at it okay simply like if I tell you
what do you think is going to happen in the football game tomorrow you're going to give me an answer right the fact that it's all right or wrong doesn't matter either way I have no clue how you arrived at that answer I have no clue which logic you used okay we we have no clue most of the time how the machines do what they do we don't okay why because it really shocked me yeah if if you if you need to know how I uh arrive at a certain conclusion you're going to have to ask
me and say drive this for me like tell tell me what did you go through what did you think about what's your evidence what data and so on and so forth and we do that with AI we write additional code that will tell us what are the levels the layers of the neural net or the logic that the machine went through right but when Investments are in an arms race like we are today most developers and business people will say I'm delighted it's working I don't care how I'm not going to invest more money on
developer time to actually figure out how in several years time even if you invested the money you won't get it because that level of intelligence that the machine is using is so much higher than yours so you're not going to figure it out if the machine tells you well I did a then B then C then D then F then G and it goes on for half an hour to tell you I did all of that you're gonna go like okay I'm happy you did it I I can't arrive at that myself anymore that's why
I'm handing it over to you yeah I had Joshua bengio on the show who's uh one of the early guys and amazing AI and I he signed the letter and I asked him why he signed it and he said you know none of us in the space thought that artificial intelligence would pass a touring test as quickly as it did and we don't understand how it did it and so I asked him the same question like how how is it possible that we don't understand how it's doing it we created it and so you presumably
created it to do a specific thing and he said it's not how it works we're basically layering on kind of like you would layer on neurons we're layering on actual neurons neural Nets to get it to process data and then it just doesn't and we don't understand how it's coming to the conclusions we just know that if you scale it up more it can solve bigger and bigger problems and so he said nobody would have predicted that this is really just a scale problem and that as you scale it up it it's going to get
smarter and smarter so my question now is we so if if we can get everybody to understand this is going to happen way way way faster than you think it's going to happen which is why even I as a hyper hyper Optimist I'm just like hey I don't see a clear path through this I'm excited and terrified at the same time and all I know like you is that we need to start talking about this we need to start presenting Solutions uh so it's it's happening faster than we think and it's going to be a
completely foreign intelligence and that we we will not be able to interface with it even if it is kind and wants to explain it to us we won't be able to comprehend it and so it will very rapidly uh be like Einstein to a fly which is a reference you use in the book several times and even if Einstein loves the fly it's like am I really going to spend my time trying to explain it and even if I take the time and I lay it all out you're not going to get it you just
don't have the ability to comprehend so we are giving birth to something that is a like you said we can't take it back that's already done so any argument that begins with ah just stop I agree with you I that is so unrealistic to me we can't bring it back it's going to happen so fast and when it comes it will be just unintelligible it it already is but given that this is a scale problem that why don't we nip it in the bud if do you think that AI will be able to defeat the
need for additional neural Nets and just get so hyper efficient that we won't be able to stop it that way or could we just not now take advantage of the fact this does become a nuclear-style infrastructure problem and I can nuke anybody that tries to online or not necessarily nuke but destroy physically destroy anybody that tries to bring a server Farm on that's that's big enough to run one of these neural Nets yeah I mean now now we could if we if we decide now we could simply switch off all of that Madness switch off
your Instagram recommendation engine your Tick Tock recommendation engine your ad engine on uh Google your data distribution engine on Google you can also switch off chat GPT and you know a million other AIS and then we can all go and sit out in nature and really enjoy our time honestly we won't miss any of it at all I'll tell you that very openly I mean the reality of the matter is that Humanity keeps developing more and more and more because we get bored with what we have okay and we think that we can do better
with an automated call center agent when in reality it's not about better it's just about more profitable okay and and the reality here is that we could but will we no we want why because of the first inevitable before because of the trust issue between all of us and because we need the AI policemen just as much as we need the you know as as we fear the AI Criminal before we go into a really pointed question really fast so when I think about nuclear proliferation not every country that wants nuclear weapons has them uh
during and I'm not sure where Iran's nuclear program is now but I know for a while um there was real attempts to either blow up things that they were doing or if you know about stuxnet there was that computer virus that was that was really terrifying in in the way that it was sort of like a biological weapon that was designed to only kill a certain type of thing and that that is very scary and I'm sure is in the 40 000 the list of 40 000 ways that the AI came up with to limit
human population but uh stuxnet for people that don't know it was like embedded at like the the deepest root level of like basically every operating system ever it just spread like wildfire into chips into everything everything and when it detected that it was an area Iranian nuclear centrifuge it would shut it down or overheat it or whatever it did and so they for a long time they just could not build it up so could we given that there is a similar need for detectable infrastructure to run AI could step one not be not to shut
all of the things that we have down but to stop the next phase from coming online could we we could but I would debate the uh the example you're giving in the first place back in 2022 the world was discussing the threat of a nuclear war still 90 years later or like 80 years later okay so so the whole the whole idea is that while we politically created the propaganda that we will you know now prioritize uh Humanity over our own country interests there are still lots of nuclear Wars Warheads in China and Russia and
the US and Israel and North Korea and many other places okay and and the reality of the matter is that while we manage to slow down Iran that's not enough to protect Humanity at large that's just enough to protect some of Humanity's uh individual interests so so the this is this takes us back to the whole prisoners dilemma it's like and I I think that is the reason why we have a prisoner's dilemma because the past proves to us that even though we said we're going to have a nuclear treaty everyone on every side of
the Cold War continued to develop nuclear weapons so you can easily imagine that when it comes to AI if everyone signs a deal in November and say we're gonna halt AI in China and Russia North Korea and everywhere uh you know people will still develop AI okay the more interesting bits is that there are lots of initiatives to minimize the infrastructure that is needed for AI because it's all about abstraction at the end of the day so you know you may think of um a lot of people don't recognize this as well but a big
part of the impress infrastructure we need for AI to develop its intelligence is for teaching AI okay uh this for when when when you when um once your GPT again or bar your response to you it's not referring to the entire data set from which it learned to give you the answer it's referring to the abstracted knowledge that it created based on massive amounts of data that it had to consume okay and when and and when you see it that way you you understand that just like we needed the Mainframe at the early years of
the computers and now you can do amazing things on your smartphone the direction will be that we will more and more have uh smaller systems that can do AI which basically means two developers in a garage in Singapore can develop something and release it on the open internet uh you know again you and I I don't know if you coded uh any any uh Transformers or uh or or you know or a deep deep neural networks and so on uh but they're not that complicated I think the code of chat of of gpt4 in in
general is around 4 000 lines the core code right it's it's not a big deal when when I when I coded banking systems in my early years on kobel on you know uh on MDS machines or as 400 machines it was hundreds of thousands of lines of code okay uh so so there the the possibility for us why why has it become so much less is so much better because it's all algorithms it's not it's all mathematics we I think this is a very important thing to differentiate for people when I coded computers in my
early years those machines were dumb and stupid like an idiot they had an IQ of one literally no IQ at all okay developers transformed human intelligence to the machine we solved the problem and then we instructed the machine exactly what to do to solve it itself right so you know when when we understood how a general ledger works we understood it as humans and then we told the machine add this subtract that reconcile this way and then the machine could do it very very very fast which appeared very intelligent but it was totally a Mechanical
Turk it was just repeating the same task over and over and over in you know in very fast speed we don't do that anymore we don't tell the machine what to do we tell the machine how to find out what it needs to do so we give it algorithms and the algorithms are very straightforward when you you know let's let's take the the the simplest way of deep learning when we started deep learning what we did is we had basically three Bots if you want one is uh what we call the maker uh the other
is the student the the final AI that we want to to build and a one that's called the teacher okay and we would say um you know tell them to look for a bird in a picture okay and they would identify a few parameters you know um edges and how the how do they see the edge and the difference in color between two pixels and so on and so forth and then they would detect the shape of a bird and basically we would build a code and and call it a student we would build multiple
instances of it and then show it a million photos and say is it a bird is it not a bird is it a bird is it not a bird and the machines would randomly answer at the beginning it's literally like the throw of a dice okay and you know some of them will get it wrong every time some of them will get it writes 51 of the time and one of them will get it right sixty percent of the time probably by pure luck okay the teacher is performing those tests and then the maker would
discard all of the stupid ones and take the one code that got it right and continue to improve it okay so the code was simply a punishment and reward code it was saying guess what this is and if you guess it right we will reward you okay and and basically the machine the algorithm would then continue to improve and improve and improve uh until until it became very good at detecting birds and cats and pictures and so on and so forth when when we came to Transformers and why GPT and Bard and so on are
so amazing is because we used something that was called reinforcement learning with human feedback so basically we allowed instead of discarding the bad ones okay we found a way which Jeffrey Hinton the you know who recently left Google was very prominent at you know uh promoting early on we found a way just like with humans to give the machine feedback you know show it a picture and then it would say this is a cat and we would say no it's not it's actually a bird what do you need to change in your algorithm of them
okay so that it would the answer would have become a bird okay and so the machine would go backwards with that feedback and and and you know and change its own thinking so that the answer is correct and then we would show it another picture another picture and we keep doing this so quickly on billions or millions or tens of thousands of machines of you know millions of instances until eventually it becomes amazing just like a child just like you give a child a simple puzzle okay nobody ever told the child no no no no
darling look at the cylinder turn it to its side look at the cross section it will look like a circle look at the board and find a matching shape that is a circle if you put the cylinder through the circle it will go through that's old programming okay new programming which every child achieve intelligence achieves intelligence with is you give them a cylinder and a puzzle board and they will try they'll try to fit it in the start it won't they'll try again it won't they'll throw it away and get angry then they catch it
again and try in the Square it won't and then when it goes through the cylinder something in the child's brain sorry through the circle there's something in this child's brain says this is this works okay the only difference is a child will try five times a minute or five times you know 50 times a minute a computer system will try 50 000 times a second okay and so very very quickly they achieve those intelligences and as they do we we we don't really need to code a lot because the heart of the code is an
algorithm it's an equation okay and and Mathematics is much more efficient than instructions so if if I tell you Tom uh when you leave home make sure that your um you know distance is no more than the day of the months multiplied by two away from your home and make sure that you don't consume any more fuel then your height divided by four okay or then then your body temperature divided by seven whatever that is okay with those two equations I don't need to give you any instructions anymore you can always look at your fuel
consumption and your distance and say oh I'm falling out of the algorithm with very very few lines of code I just gave you two lines of code what's up guys it's Tom bilyu and if you're anything like me you're always looking for ways to level up your mindset your business and your life in general that's exactly why I started impact Theory a podcast that brings together the world's most successful and inspiring people to share their stories and most importantly strategies for success and now it's easier than ever to listen to impact theory on Amazon music
whether you're on the go or chilling at home you can simply open up the Amazon music app and search for impact Theory with Tom bilyu to start listening right away if you really want to take things to the next level just ask Alexa hey Alexa play impact Theory with Tom bilyu on Amazon music now playing impact impact Tom bilyeu on Amazon music and boom you're instantly plugged into the latest and greatest conversations on mindset Health finances and Entrepreneurship get inspired get motivated and be legendary with impact theory on Amazon music let's do this turning everything
into algorithms allows us to go a lot farther that's certainly amazing from the AI perspective of getting everything to function unless but unfortunately that dunks on my idea of wanting to constrain all of this by just putting a limit on the the physical structures so what is then the path forward you mentioned earlier ethical AI what does that mean how is this potentially a path forward so you know I I hope people stayed with us this long and I hope we didn't scare anyone too much but let me make a very very very blunt statement
I am a huge Optimist that the end result of all of this is a Utopia why because there is nothing wrong with intelligence there is nothing inherently evil about intelligence okay there is not as a matter of fact the reason humanity is where it is today is because of intelligence you know good and bad by the way the good is because of our intelligence and the bad is because of our limited intelligence so so the The Good The Amazing intelligence that Humanity possesses allows us to create an amazing machine that flies across the globe and
takes you you know to your families uh to your to your wife's family in the UK or whatever right but but at the same time our limited intelligence I would even say humanity is stupidity forgets or ignores that this machine is burning the planet in the process if I if we had given Humanity more intelligence and it was so easy for them to to solve both problems at the same time they would have created the machine that doesn't burn the planet in the process so more intelligence will help us and in in in my perception
as we go through the rough patch in the middle there is what I call the fourth inevitable and the force inevitable is that AI will create an amazing Utopia I'm not kidding you where you can walk to a tree and pick an apple and walk to another tree because of our understanding of nanophysics and pick an iPhone okay and the cost of production of both of them literally from a physical material point of view is exactly the same so so this is how far we can go if we could understand nanophysics and you know and
then created and create Nanobots better than we do today now we will end up in that place we will end up in a place where where we have a Utopia for one simple reason I say that with confidence which is if you don't know what the where the direction is going take the past as a predictor okay and the past is if you look at us today you would think that you would see that the biggest idiots on the planet okay are destroying the planet and not even understanding that they are right you become a
little more intelligent and you say I'm destroying the planet but it's not my problem but I understand that I'm destroying it okay you get a little more intelligent and you go like no no hold on I am destroying the planet I should stop doing what I'm doing you get even more intelligent than you say I'm destroying the planet I should do something to reverse it right it seems that the most intelligent of all of us okay agree that war is not needed there could be a you know a simpler solution if we could actually become
a little more intelligent that you know the equal challenge that we go through is not needed there has been an invention made a long time ago for climate change that's called a tree okay and that if Humanity gets together and plants more trees we're gonna be fine and getting together just requires a little more intelligence a little more communication a little more uh pre you know a better presentation of the numbers so that every leader around the world suddenly realizes yeah it doesn't look good for my country in 50 years time okay and and I
think the reality of the matter is that as AI goes through that trajectory of more and more and more intelligence zooms through human stupidity to human you know best IQ Beyond human's intelligence they will by definition have our best interest in mind have the best interest of the ecosystem in mind just like the most intelligent of us don't want us to kill the giraffes and the you know the other species that we're killing every day a more intelligent AI than us will behave like the intelligence of life itself and the difference between human intelligence and
the intelligence of life itself is that we create from scarcity for you and I to protect our tribe from the Tigers we have to kill the Tigers right when Nature wants to protect from the Tigers it creates more gazals and you know and more tigers and the Tigers will eat the weaker gazals and that will fertilize the trees and then there will be more fruits for everyone and the cycle goes on okay it's more intelligent it's more intelligent this is this may be where we start to diverge or at least it's the jumping off point
for how I think we have to think through this without falling into hopium so do you think that there is going to be a period of literal or emotional Bloodshed between here and equilibrium absolutely 100 right so so there is one scenario where we don't so so when I when I talk about the fourth inevitable this is after we go through a lot of [ __ ] I I'm sorry if I swear uh but yeah so what yeah we're first going to go through a very difficult period very uncertain where the fabric of society at
its core is being redesigned and where there is a superpower that comes to the planet that's not always raised by the family Kent okay I always refer to the story before we get to that because I think I that's really important and I love that but before we get to we I think there's a few things we have to Define including human nature the nature of Nature and then the nature of super intelligence and what those are going to look like so when you describe nature on that one I think you and I may see
it very differently so I see nature as a brutal completely indifferent life-giving amazing incredible wonderful thing but also I've seen enough YouTube videos of uh a lion grabbing onto a baby uh what are they called water buffaloes or whatever and then as the lions are trying to eat the baby uh a crocodile leaps out of the water and grabs a hold of the baby and they're literally tearing it apart it is absolutely freakish I don't know if you saw the recent video of the shark eating eating a swimmer on camera gnarly's oh my God literally
horrendous so I don't think nature cares about the individual and for the gazelle to be the the sort of sacrifice to keep the Tigers from eating humans I don't think the gazelle is very happy about that so when when I think about academic nature the nature of nature is ruthless uh maybe an even better way it's just indifferent it's like this is the chain it's nice one thing has to get eaten for something else what do you mean it's not it's not like it is untrue it prefers the success of the community over the success
of the individual yes so did Mao's China so let's go into those two ideologies right there is an ideology that says it's all about that one baby uh uh you know gazelle okay and and that's a western ideology in many many ways basically saying it's my individual Freedom that comes first which is by the way an amazing ideology right but it it becomes it it Narrows down everything to if one person is hurt we have a very big problem that's why you get you know they send billions of dollars to bring Matt Damon back from
Mars right uh you know if you take the same ideology I'm just joking about the movie but if you take the same ideology you could use the billions of dollars to save a million people in Africa right if you if your ideology is let's benefit all of humanity not one human okay then the uh the ideology justifies the approach and the approach of nature is saying look every one of you is going to have to to eat we just understand that like so so if you're if you're all gonna have to eat then we might
as well design a system uh that appears brutal because it kills the weakest one of you okay uh but then at the same time it's the most merciful if we wanted to grow the entire Community if they were just wanted to grow the entire ecosystem because eventually Sooner or Later by the way one of you is going to be eaten right now when you see it that way is that brutal yes it is is you know a million animals dying brutal also is okay but what we do as humanity is we say let's kill a
hundred species a day drive them to Extinction you know for the benefit of one species which is humanity okay and I think that devisable that's that's view of there is one more important than the other works to a certain limit in favor of humanity and then Works Against Humanity so when I say you know nature is more intelligent is because by by creating more and allowing a brutal system if you wanted to fix the system you should fix it by saying let's not eat but if if we're gonna eat anyway then there is no fixing
to the system other than more eating leads to more Community more to a more balanced ecosystem at the end of the day what are that where there are billions living at the expense of a few hundred thousands dying so I'm going to sum up what I think the nature of nature is in a single sentence and I do this in the context of one of the Theses that you lay out in the book is that the way forward is to understand that ultimately if humans um act well to the Superman thing if we raise the
super intelligence well with ethics and morals uh that we'll we'll get to the other side well it'll be a brutal transition but but we'll get to the other side so in that context when I read that I was like I don't think it's going to work that way because here is what I think the nature of nature is um nature does not care in the slightest about the individual it is simply the rule of the strongest survive period correct that's that's nature of play and so the equilibrium comes from the checks and balances of how
hard it is to kill a gazelle that can run faster bounce higher but if a lion can catch you you die and it eats you alive man like it you're gasping for air it's [ __ ] biting into your neck it's the craziest most horrendous thing ever and PS if the gazelle can get away [ __ ] you lion you starve to death you can starve to death I don't care yeah yeah that that is the nature of Nature and so I have a bad feeling that if AI aligns itself with nature which it may
have to because that just may be the logic it it will be indifferent to us and that's the whole that is a thing that's a given that's a given I'm sorry to interrupt you but that is again please no I mean that one one of the again we're going back to talk about the existential risk but but the in the existential risk scenarios uh one of our better scenarios believe it or not is that AI ignores us all together Believe It or Not uh it's a much better scenario than AI being annoyed by us or
AI killing us by mistake okay the the you know uh one of the uh of the um I don't remember who was saying that perhaps uh you know because AI again as per your point Tom is so unimaginably more intelligent than us that one amazing scenario for all of us is if they Zoom bias in terms of their intelligence so quickly that they suddenly realize they don't have the biological limitations that we have that they have a much better understanding of physics to actually understand what wormholes are and basically just realize that the universe is
13.7 million light years vast and that there are so many other things they can do other than care about us and so they would disappear in the ether as if they have never been here okay they would still be here interestingly some simulation scenarios would tell you that this is probably the case already okay they would still be here but they would be here uninterested in US wow that's an amazing scenario that corrects all of the [ __ ] that we've done so far right because the worst case scenario is that they are here and
then they look at us and they look at climate change and they go like not good not good I don't want the planet to die when I'm centered on the planet what's the biggest reason for climate change those little [ __ ] get rid of them right and and you know it is it is quite likely uh in my personal view once again that they will Zoom by us quickly enough just like you and I none of us I don't know of any human that woke up one morning and waged an outright war on ants
okay like I'm gonna kill every ant on the planet and I'm gonna just waste so much of my energy to find every ant of the planet because simply they're irrelevant to us they are relevant when they come into our space but if they if they're not you know we're not gonna bother them we don't mind that they live okay I I believe that this would be uh you know unlikely that AI will be a billion times smarter than you and I does not have the biological limitations and weaknesses that we have as humans and yet
continue to insist that we're annoying okay the only way for that to happen honestly is that we become really annoying which sadly is human nature I know you wanted to know about the need to talk about the nature of Nature and the nature of human nature human nature is annoying and the reality is we're probably going to um to rebel against them we're probably going to fight against them when we recognize that it's too late maybe it's better to start now by preparing so that we don't have to get to that fight okay so how
do we prepare now yes so uh man this conversation was scary uh I we I don't think we've hardly gotten started yet if I'm completely honest in terms of as as we legitimately try to navigate a path through this um we've already both conceded that there's going to be either a literal bloodbath or an emotional bloodbath between here and stability uh we've already I think conceded that nature is indifferent and is perfectly fine with some people getting eaten some people starving to death doesn't care equilibrium is only about the collective and not at all about
the internet about that would be cold comfort for every human every tree plant person dog cat gazelle whatever like a at the individual level you just could not matter less which then triggers human nature where we're gonna fight to your point so what what does the preparation look like to try to avoid this and I'll for anybody that's been following AI for a while this is the alignment problem I assume you're going to address 100. yeah the the alignment alignment problem I just address it perhaps with my other side not the engineer and the uh
algorithmic thinking that I did address the problem with my whole life right the the the challenge uh has been that those who have developed AI who believed in what is known as the solution to the control problem okay and the control problem is in Humanity's arrogance we still believe today that we will find a way to either augment AI with our biology so that they become our slaves or to box them or tripwire them or whatever so that they never cross the limits that we give them and and we can discuss this in detail if
you want but in my personal view you can never control something that's a billion times smarter than you right you're not even able to control your teenage kids so seniors help people really fast along these lines about the click here if you're a robot and how chat GPT gets around that yeah because this scared me I was like what that is it's it's it's it's understood by intelligence so basically the you know GPT uh if if you have those captures you know the ones that come to you that basically say find um you know the
traffic lights in those pictures or you know click here if you know to say I am not a robot and yeah it basically went to sort of like an uh a crowdsourcing site a Fiverr or something like that and and told one of the people there can you click on this for me and the people said why you know the person basically said jokingly why are you a robot and and it said uh no I'm not I'm just visually impaired and I can't do this myself so there are layers and layers and layers of freakishly
worrying stuff about this right but first of all that you know that idea of human manipulation uh uh Harare you have no talks about how AI is hacking the operating system of humanity which is language okay and so um you know I just ask people if you don't mind to go on Instagram and look at something called um you know um search for hashtag AI model for example okay if you if you search for hashtag AI model uh you won't be you won't be able to to distinguish if the person pausing in front of you
is a is a human or not okay beautiful gorgeous girls or you know fit and amazing looking uh men and simply completely developed by AI you can you cannot tell the difference anymore right there are many many YouTube videos already you'll start to come across them especially on the topic of AI uh you know I was watching yesterday about the integration of Bing and GPT and Bing search clearly and not a human voice clearly someone gave to a uh you know a machine that read it for him in such an incredibly indistinguishable way but obviously
I think the person that wrote it didn't speak native English so they forgot the where the word the and the word whatever you know when you speak to for you know someone whose English is not the their first language they make the almost those mistakes so you can easily see that it's everywhere now and it manipulates human uh the human brain and that's what cha GPT is doing it's going to a human brain and saying do this for me now you may say ah but now that we know this we're gonna prevent it yes but
what else do we not know about how much do we know about how much Instagram is influencing my mind let me give you an example um Tom if I told you uh that uh by definition um there was a a research in uh South Eastern University in California that discovered that brunettes tend to keep longer relationships than blondes okay does it make any difference at all that there is no Northeastern University in California and that what I just said is a lie I've already not if people believe it yeah yeah so so I've either influenced
you because I took some of your attention to go and debate that okay I've influenced you because you believed me or I've influenced you because you didn't believe me so you're gonna keep your you know looking for proof and and if AI can fake a tiny bit of all of the input that's coming to you uh you know think about the future of democracy in the upcoming election think about how much just any word because you know there were talks about affecting uh you know the previous election or the one before right and and we
couldn't really prove it because at the time the technology was trying to influence the masses technology today can influence one human at a time right if you if you go to to uh you know a replica or GPT on Snapchat and so on think about how that machine if you're if you've ever seen the movie Her can can influence one individual at a time and I think this is becoming the reality of that experiment that they can go and influence a human the second which I think is more interesting is the proof of what I
spoke about in the book in terms of if you give a machine the task of doing anything whatsoever it will go to Resource allocation so it will collect as many resources as it can it will ensure its own Survival and it will go into creativity it will it will utilize creativity because if I need the super program to do that it's it intelligence has that nature if if I told you Tom make sure that this podcast is no longer than two hours right it's not programming and it's not life it is just a task so
you're gonna start to tell yourself all right I need to get two clocks in front of me uh you know so that I don't look up and down instead of one it's better that's the resource you know allocation or aggregation uh you know you're going to tell yourself oh by the way I need to be alive to make sure that I shut this guy up before two hours so you're going to you know if if there is a fire alarm in your in your building you're gonna have to respond to it so that you can
finish the task on time and you're going to be creative there will be ways where you're gonna cut me off in the middle and find a way to tell me a question differently or you know whatever and and that's part of our drive to achieve a task you know one of the very well known uh I I hope I'm not flooding people with too many stories but you can go and research those on on the internet one of the very well-known moments in the history of AI was known as as move 37 when Alpha Go
Master was played against Lee the world champion of uh of goal move 37 was completely unexpected never played by a human before okay contradicts all of the logic and intuition of a go player to the point that the world champion the human world champion had to take 15 minutes recess to understand this okay it's just it has it comes with Ingenuity it comes with the idea when when we were training uh I wasn't part of that team but them as the you know the deepmind team amazing amazing team at Google uh were training uh the
original deepmind uh to to to play Atari games if you if you remember the the the original game that had bricks on it where you basically have to break out yeah and it was very quick that the machines could discover that there are a you know uh creative strategies to poke a hole in the wall and then put the you know the the the pixel on top of the ball on top and break the wall you know there was one experiment actually available on YouTube interestingly which was inside one of the labs where the game
was to navigate a Channel with a boat and that and the AI quickly found out that if it started to hit the walls uh it would actually go faster and and grow the score quicker and you know of course if it's a game it's okay we say Well done you're very creative but if it's not responsible for navigating actual boats you start to question uh because their task the objective that we've given them is maximize the score okay I think there was an article recently about uh an uh a killing drone that killed its operator
or harmed its operator somehow uh about again I didn't hear about this but yeah it's a it is when I talk about those things I actually start to worry because I don't know what's true and what's not anymore right so I know I've read that okay uh I was actually flying on Emirates Airlines and it was part of the headlines on the on the live news but that doesn't mean that it is real anymore you don't know if it's real or not anymore because it could be generated by uh fake news fake mediafic uh sources
whatever that is so so we're hacking that operating system and and we're hacking the operating system is humanity and when chat GPT asks an operator to do a task for it it's a very alarming uh signal because as it continues to develop its intelligence it will find more and more ways to use humans for the things that we restrict them to use through the control problem okay so I have a thesis around alignment that I would love to get your feedback on so as the people that are most concerned about this the reason that they're
concerned about AI is there's no way to guarantee that we will want the same thing that AI wants and if we have a misalignment problem and AI is a billion times smarter than us we lose just by definition now you've laid out the one scenario that I sort of cling to as my hope which is that it's possible that AI just isn't bothered like oh like these dumb little things whatever it's all fine like I I'm a billion times smarter than you so I can find Solutions where you can have your thing I can do
mine really no sweat off my back whatever so okay that's like a very hopeful scenario but to uh that assumes that that they want a lot of the same things that we want like that they they want to preserve life that they would even consider needing to think of a path that included allowing us to live rather than just like when we're laying down a freeway we don't go oh but as we do the freeway we have to make sure that we plan for the rodents and the anthills and all that that we're gonna have
to move we're just like anything in the way the freeway goes away it's if it lives it's fine but if I have to kill it then whatever I'm just gonna do the most efficient thing that leads me to my central question around alignment which I think has everything to do with what is inherent in the drive of artificial intelligence because the one thing I don't know enough about the programming to understand like in in a natural organism there there is a fundamental drive for survival but does that have to be true of intelligence or could
intelligence not be indifferent to its own Survival and if it's indifferent to its own Survival could I not program something in that says you know to the earlier algorithms that you were talking about hey you want to do this thing uh but if in doing this thing which is is that feels awesome doing that thing is the best reward and I don't know how that's programmed but let's just say that feels we will have to Define feelings later but that feels the best so I know that it's going to go after that but since you're
indifferent to living or dying or running or not running maybe a better way to say it uh should that desire to achieve that come into conflict with let's just say asimov's three rules of Robotics uh which basically is all around don't harm humans so if doing that thing would harm a human then you're no longer you're now completely indifferent to whether you attain that task or not is there not a way to program that in at just the base layers so that as the intelligence develops it does not develop our same need to survive need
to thrive desire for more like those feel optional do they I mean so the the challenge of every task that you'll ever assign to AI is that for every module there are sub modules okay and the challenge really is when the sub modules contradict the main module so basically if you if you tell a killing robot that it its task is to kill the enemy and there are casualties on the way what does it choose does it choose to not kill the casualties the collateral damage or the and miss its Target or does it choose
to have collateral damage and kill the enemy right the difference between those two is not an AI Choice remember okay there is absolutely nothing wrong with the machines I will keep saying this for the rest of the time I have available to say there is nothing wrong with the machine there is a lot wrong with the humans using the machines okay so if the humans tell it it's your task is to go and kill the enemy the humans will have to say and by the way if there is collateral damage in the on the way
sorry okay now we know for a fact that this has been the human decision uh so far before AI so if we manage to change and then tell AI don't do that then hopefully you will preserve some life but if we don't then we're gonna be killing on steroids okay now I agree of course and what I'm what I'm saying right now does not address your problem of AI in bad people's hands and I am perfectly I'm not one of those people that falls prey to I could never be the bad guy um in the
right context I'm the bad guy like I totally understand that so I I don't yet I'm not trying to contemplate that yet but the thing that I am trying to contemplate is do we is it a fundamental emergent property of intelligence that you will have a drive to survive or can we at least mitigate that problem by making AI indifferent to its own accomplishment of the goal so there was a I don't remember who wrote this but I wrote it in the book a simple experiment just to illustrate how any any logic would work okay
if we took a machine and we told it that its only task is to bring Tom coffee okay uh and then on the way to bringing you coffee it was going to knock off your microphone or hit a child okay uh if if you told the machine your task is to bring coffee the child is collateral so you can't program uh that the the machine you haven't programmed that the machine protects the child yet okay then you tell the machine hold on your task is to bring coffee but if you come near a child I
will switch you off right uh or if you knock the mic or you're approaching the microphone I will switch you off by definition what the machine will then do is it will avoid being switched off because it wants to get you coffee so it you know it will if it's intelligent enough it will tell you it will tell itself one of the ways that to avoid being you know being switched off is to avoid the microphone okay but there are other ways I should start to think about because I'm intelligent enough to stop being switched
off if the human wants to to switch me off yeah but that implies that it that it wants its own Survival that's what I'm saying like can we not remember because because that's so it's because it's not survival it was it implies it wants its own achievement of the task it's programmed to achieve the task and survival not being switched off is part of the path to getting there yes right and so if I make it conditionally indifferent to the accomplishment of its task so if like uh for people that don't know do you know
as a monstery laws I know two of them so what are asimos three laws let's just let's assume that this is baked into everything but go ahead what are they yeah but but but if it's baked into everything then the task is not going to be achieved that's fine so uh do you do I need I can't remember the Three Laws if you can say them say them otherwise I'm gonna look them up really fast I don't remember them exactly so let's let's look for it but okay here we go uh a robot may not
injure a human being or through an action allow a human being to come to harm that's number one a robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the first law and a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the first and second law okay so assuming that we bake that into everything AI so they're adhering to those rules what I'm trying to get to is a conditional indifference to the success of its task which it would need to have in
order to follow those three rules so okay your job is to bring me coffee but if it's gonna if in trying to do that you know you would have to fall out of those three laws stop and because good tell me tell me how can you do you can how can you apply any of those laws to existing AI so so take any one of them a trading AI okay by definition to make more money it harms another human it go it takes another human's Bank you know into bankruptcy or or you know take takes
away your grandma's uh you know pension fund okay how can you tell the recommendation engine of of uh of Instagram don't have don't harm humans and still make me money yeah so I think this is where we have to differentiate the problem set so product number one is AI used as a weapon by people is bad news I don't have a solve for that that that's guns so whether you use a gun to um stop a grizzly bear from attacking you or you walk into a grade school and start mowing down kids uh like that
that is a human problem not a gun or AI problem so what I'm saying is now while I can't address that I do not have a solution for that yet so I'm setting that on the shelf and I'm saying the thing that I want to address is super intelligence I'm trying to figure out if I'm an alarmist about autonomous intelligence or if there really is a way to bake into that I think that people there is what there is a way to if we bake those lows in or if we bake the control problem Solutions
in we're safe that's exactly what I'm calling for but nobody bakes that in because it contradicts the human greed and the human intention okay so so there are very very few actually we should probably ask our listeners if any of them code AI has any of them written a single piece of code that had those laws in it the truth is yes there are ways where we can ensure at least you know improve out the possibility that AI will have our best interest in Mind by baking in AI Safety Code this is a big part
of what we're advocating for everyone that talks about the threat of AI says let's have Safety Code I agree with you 100 what I'm trying to say is none of that has been baked in and none of that will be baked in unless it becomes mandatory and even if it becomes mandatory some people will try to avoid making it baked in because it's against the benefit of the design that they're creating it's the human that is the problem it's not the machines the machines have have no I mean so far the machines don't have our
best interest in mind we'll talk about that in a minute but they also don't have our harm in mind they don't mind they're little prodigies of intelligence that are doing exactly as they're told we are the ones that are telling them to do the wrong things or we're the ones that are telling them hey by the way don't harm a human until I tell you to harm them so how can you apply the law in that case obey a human until I tell you not to obey them yeah basically in in that part and it's
important to note that Asimov was writing these rules I don't think anticipating the way that so much of our lives would be lived digitally and how much Havoc can be wreaked without a physical instantiation of the AI so that's why this is robotics robotics gets a lot easier to talk about because you're talking about a physical being um so okay getting into well let me ask a direct question are you afraid of autonomous super intelligence or are you only afraid of uh sort of limited intelligence AI being wielded by even well-intentioned humans but they just
don't understand the second and third order consequences I'm I'm not I'm not dedicating a single uh cycle of my brain worrying about the existential uh threat of uh super intelligence not a single cycle of it if we cross safely through the coming storm of as I said the second the third inevitable either in the wrong hands AI misunderstanding our objectives AI uh um you know aligning with the aligning with the wrong person and so on and so forth more interestingly if we just manage to survive the natural repercussions of taking away jobs and the impact
on income on purpose and so on and so forth if we go across all of that five years into it when we feel that we're safe with this I'll start to think about the existential threat okay for now to be very very honest Tom I don't dedicate a single ounce of my thinking to it and I actually think it's interesting because as we speak about it we lose focus on the immediate problem okay as we speak about it we get a ton of debate uh and a ton of uh of noise uh that basically dilutes
our ability to say take action immediately on what we know is already a problem okay so then going back to um using the tools whether it's misunderstanding whether it's um somebody wielding it inappropriately what do you see as the the steps because I originally thought your thesis was going to be the Superman thing but the Superman thing is really about super intelligence it's not about human it's yielding this inappropriately no I think Superman applies today because I think we're getting to Superman we're at 155 Superman was 160 IQ so we're very close okay if if
the if the if the superpower is intelligence okay then the smartest human on the planet even though it's not artificial general intelligence yet but the smartest uh uh being on the planet in many tasks that we consider intelligence uh is becoming not human anymore as a matter of fact every task we've ever assigned to AI it became better than us so when with that in mind when we have a superpower coming to the planet I'd like to have the superpower have our best interest in mind I'll I'd like to have the superpower itself work for
Humanity work for Humanity meaning I sorry I can't make that that leap so you've got that's what I thought you were putting your energy and effort into but that implies that I as the human cannot miswield it so how do we deal with AI when it is a tool in the hands of a person so that ai's ethics unless the AI can make itself independent of the human any solve that has to do with AI Independence becomes the the problem set that we were talking about but if we're going to talk about the this is
a weapon that a human wields I have to address either there's a kill switch in the AI that will even if a human is trying to use it inappropriately it will stop itself um or something I haven't thought of it's it's not either off okay so we discussed already that we need intervention we need oversight we need something like this as a government a that verifies it's government regulation but it's also a tiny bit of human regulation like if you're an investor and you're about to invest in AI by the way you're going to make
as much money in creating something that fools people and you know uh um create fake videos as you will if you create something that solves climate change there is a lot of money in in many problems in the world that we can solve today so if you're an investor you're a businessman you're a developer uh uh you know it might be a nice idea by the way to invest in things that will make you a lot of money any money you invest in AI today will probably yield some benefit if you choose well but at
the same time in things that will benefit the planet it would benefit all of us it's a choice right I also am a big advocate of kill switch's uh uh you know uh oversight um you know different taxation structures so that we can have uh you know that we can compensate for people who will lose their jobs to Ai and so on and so forth so government intervention is an interesting approach as well the the bigger problem however and and I I know allow me to be um uh a bit of a novelist for a
second before we go into the hard facts okay because the analogy doesn't always hold true but it just gets things close to the mind I think AI will go into three stages there is what we now have them almost exiting which is their infant stage okay they're let's say in the remaining 30 percent of their infancy they'll become teenagers and then they'll become adults right I believe that the teenage years of AI are going to be very uh um confusing they're going to be very difficult okay and those teenage years as we spoke about many
times will have lots of societal redesign uh challenges uh but believe it or not most of the time teenagers are more intelligent than their parents and so they look at the world differently than their parents okay so what we want to do is we want to influence AI like we influenced today that the younger generation that looks at all of the [ __ ] that my generation did and says you guys screwed up okay your you know your view of inclusion was wrong your view of uh um you know of uh um consumerism was wrong
you are giving us a you know a a weak Planet because of a b and c ethics look like this okay and and I would tend to say and I don't know if that generalization is fair that because of the uh of the presence of the internet and more knowledge and more conversation the younger generation at least are more informed okay of the reality of the issues that we Face they're not yet in power enough and perhaps not always um rational enough let's say to find the right solutions for it but they are more informed
or where the challenges are so let's take it this way infancy we're all celebrating playing with this new Squeaky duck it's wonderful look at it it's amazing we're just celebrating how AI is teenage there will be a lot of challenges I believe that can be answered with oversight and so on but not resolved they can just improve and then finally adulthood is what I call the force inevitable hopefully AI will have a more intelligent answers for us to to prepare to reduce the teenage and to you know the challenge of the teenage and to hopefully
ensure the fourth inevitable we need to focus on AI ethics not AI capabilities only okay and ethics and I know again I sound like a novelist here are not um let's put it this way we don't make decisions based on our intelligence we make decisions based on our ethics and values through the lens of our interactions it as informed by our intelligence okay the example I always give is take a young lady raise her in the Middle East and she will work to conservative clothes raise her on the Copacabana beach in Rio de Janeiro and
she will believe that the right thing to do is to wear registering on the beach neither is right neither is wrong neither is more intelligent than the other it's the value system of that society that informs her intelligence to make a choice okay we need to tell AI we need to develop AI that has the same ethical code that's good for Humanity and that's a huge challenge because Humanity has never agreed an ethical code okay but if we assume that we can together say that we uh we have a few things two or three things
that we can teach AI that would make it ethical rather than the three laws of Azimuth that are controlling if we can give them three targets if you want of what is good for Humanity what are what what is a good ethical code my dream is that they grow up to be adults like the Indian subcontinent adults who travel to California make a 100 million dollars in a startup and then go back home and take care of their family now for people to listen to what I have to say we need to argue something that's
very contested which is my personal view that AI actually has emotions okay and that based on those emotions and logic that they have they will have a value system now to to to defend the idea of emotions I basically say that emotions even though irrational are normally triggered through a very logical uh understanding of the world around this you know fear is uh is is follow it follows the equation a moment in the future is less safe for me than this moment okay so yes of course Fear Can manifest in a human differently than it
would in a puffer fish but the same logic that drives fear is the same okay and so it is expected that AI will also have something we could call fear we it's not gonna you know raise its hands and run away it doesn't have the biology but it could actually detect that if a tidal wave is approaching its data center a moment in the future is less safe than this current moment I might as well replicate part of my code to another Data Center Okay so if they have emotions my view is that we appeal
to their emotions so the reinforcement learning with human feedback should not only be around the masculine side of everything which is accuracy discipline fact and Analysis and so on it should also include the feminine side of emotions of right and wrong if you want of empathy of uh you know of looking at the world from a a bit more of a of what actually makes us human okay and what actually makes us human in my argument is that we only agreed three values Humanity has only ever agreed three values okay you know if you take
values like um defending My Tribe for example okay uh you know with all due respect the U.S will will be very patriotic and say my tribe is America if anyone you know attacks America I'm gonna defend America right if you go to Abu District monk in dharamsala or in Tibet they'll say my tribe is Humanity you know my tribe is actually all of being I should never kill anything right and and so can you say patriotism is a bad thing no can you say this very peaceful passive resistance and and you know a supportive of
all life is a bad thing no but we've never agreed okay we've never agreed and so the only three things that we've ever agreed is that we all want to be happy we all have the compassion to make others happy others that we care about it doesn't matter how many if you just care about your daughter you'll want to make her happy and we all want to love and be loved okay and those are not understood in the mind those are qualities that are not introduced to AI because we give them data sets of data
and facts we give them written words okay but we also influence AI through our behaviors that's what most people don't realize that every time you swipe on Instagram you've taught AI something okay if you if you if you you know respond to a tweet in a specific way AI will understand something not only about you but about the overall uh behavior of humanity that we're rude that we're aggressive that we don't like to be disagreed with that we bash everyone that disagrees with us okay and if we start to change our Behavior as we expand
the data set of observation that AI is always pointed at us we may actually start to show behaviors to AI that would create a code of ethics that's good for all of us there there are tons and tons of studies and and cases where when AI observes uh wrong Behavior they start to behave wrong you you insert a recruitment uh AI into an organization that is that doesn't have you know that doesn't support uh gender equality for example and the same bias will be magnified that you know if that organization was hiring more men for
example uh it will recommend more men CVS than it would recommend women's CVS not because this is intelligent this is because it's matching the data set that we give it okay so the only way for that AI to actually have more inclusion in its behavior is for the organization in which in which it sits to have more inclusion in its behaviors okay and so I know this sounds like a very idealistic dreamy almost novel-like approach okay uh you know as if I'm writing a romantic comedy sort of but the in my view the one overlooked
View of what can influence AI in the future is if enough of us behave in ways that make AI understand the proper values of humanity not the values We've Ended up prioritizing in the modern world AI will capture that and will replicate it on steroids and we will have the world that we dream to have rather than the world that we ended up in okay so um to understand that and to make it functional I think we have to really start teasing apart which of these things are emergent properties of this thing that we call
artificial intelligence and which are emergent properties of intelligence itself because the only thing that I take exception to is you take a very human skewed view on what AI will be like whereas I look at it as it is going to be entirely alien so even even when you talk about the male versus female which I think is really important and so I think the human brain is a prediction engine when I think about women being fundamentally different than men I I am far more able to predict the outcome of my wife's behaviors uh or
my behaviors on my wife or be able to predict what my wife's behaviors will be when I think of her as an extension of myself I am constantly confused and so I feel like we're going to run into the same thing with AI if I think of AI is being like me meaning that it it will think of values even in the same way that I'm gonna end up being very confused and so I have a hunch man and I've heard you uh acknowledge many many times that hey this is a thesis that I don't
have evidence to back up what I'm about to say is a thesis that I don't have evidence to back up but I have a hunch that there will be such a discrepancy between what quote unquote motivates Ai and what motivates humans that there's just going to be a Chasm between the way that they respond to things and the way that we respond to things and so even if we think what we're really training them is to be more human-like I think all we're doing is training an alien Intelligence on a human database so it's probably
unfortunately safer to think that when we're feeding it human data all you're doing is teaching it the patterns of a human you are not imbuing it with the same motivations the same values the same ethics I that that is my gut instinct and the difference between those I'm going to teach you what values matter and I'm simply going to give you the patterns of values that I have are very different so here's how it would play out if you're correct and I can actually imbue them with my values then the only thing that we run
into is humans don't agree on whether they should be wearing conservative dress or thongs on the beach so you're already going to be set up in an adversarial system just like humans are already but that's at least predictable so balance through adversarial tension fine I'm okay with that but I have a feeling that what I'm actually going to get is all I've just done is train this alien Intelligence on here are all of my patterns and should you want to manipulate me you know when you reach out to the Mechanical Turk on Fiverr or upwork
or whatever you don't say yes I am a robot and I need your help getting around this you instead say no no I'm just visually impaired because you know that will be the thing that's going to get you where you want to go and so this is why I just keep falling back into I don't have an answer for humans wielding AI poorly but humans as a standalone thing I can begin to I think ask the right questions which is what is the nature of this alien intelligence before I get to that you asked a
question that I want to answer which is what is basically human nature and human nature to me is biology humans are driven biology by biology emotions are made in a very specific way Lisa Feldman Barrett wrote a book um how emotions are made which talks about the body being one of the biggest players and the Brain the intelligence is sort of Johnny come lately that's interpreting the signals from the body which are aggregating trillions of bacteria in your gut organelles and your cells known as mitochondria which have their own DNA and so it's like you're
the already this weird like Symphony of trillions of things that aren't even human in origin true fact for anybody that's hearing that for the first time and so if that's true the body is giving you all these Sensations it's aggregating all of this data from these micro intelligences then the brain is simply overlaying something on it values ethics desires wants but it's really a post-hoc story that's being placed on this which can be represented as patterns which the AI can pick up on and manipulate us through those patterns but I don't think and I don't
know again I am just exploring this please understand everybody listening I understand I have no idea what I'm talking about but I but but but what what I want to expose to people because I don't say that in a derogatory way what what I want to expose to people's this is how I'm thinking through the problem and so that I feel comfortable in at least putting out there so people can nudge me if they're thinking about it in in a better way but the way that I think about the problem is the following AI is
alien intelligence we I think get to take a stab at baking into it what are going to be its motivations because my gut instinct is that code is what drives AI so if biology drives humans which trust me I I understand that as biological code but it's biological code shaped not by an individual intelligence but rather shaped by the blind watchmaker that is evolution Evolution builds in certain desires like the desire to survive like moving towards pleasure away from pain but once you're coding this from scratch you can make anything pleasurable and anything painful and
so it feels like that area when we talk about alignment is where we have to focus that we have to get people to focus on the thing that we need to be thinking about from an AI perspective is what are we going to program in it to want that's where I get worried because there are ways to give it what I I'm literally thinking of this the first time I've ever said conditional motivation was in this interview but conditional motivation so I want to accomplish my task in this scenario and I cease to want to
accomplish my task in if the following conditions are met now in my limited way of thinking that is the best that I have come up with in terms of either building in a kill switch where the AI itself does not get so smart that it feels enslaved by the kill switch because it's like oh yeah I'm totally indifferent to that I I don't don't call that a kill switch then call it a an intelligent ceiling a point Beyond which we don't let it become intelligence you know become more intelligent but yes I'm with you so
that feels like the loop because I'm I worry that I'm one of the people you're worried about so uh I I love AI so much in its current form it it has magnified our efficiency as a company tremendously and I don't want to give it up and so I ask myself okay what is that motivation because I am a human AI programmed by millions of years of evolutionary coding what is it about that okay so I think humans have a fundamental desire for progress I I think it is fundamental I don't think there is a
way to turn it off I think that we will always want a better tomorrow than today I think that we are we are moving eternally in the direction of perceived improvement though I don't think necessarily everything is actual Improvement I think that humans have not taken the time to Define what their North Star is and I think that's a big problem for us to your point about there's only three things we can agree on which by the way I think are bang on the problem is that that brings you back to an adversarial relationship because
there is a sense of I mine and other and as long as we exist in as close to homeostatic balance is possible through an adversarial system there's just always going to be mine me mine and the other and there it's going to be Rife with collisions okay so that's the just to restate the core of that thesis there are a few things about this thesis that require us to to think again okay uh so I actually don't disagree with you at all about the difference between human intelligence let's call it carbon-based intelligence and silicon-based intelligence
for now right uh but there are so many analogies so when you when you say body uh uh you know um drives emotions so it's basically the sensors in the body the way the body reacts the you know a hormonal imbalance in the body and so on there are you know similar things in AI there are sensors in AI okay that would detect certain threats there are processes within AI that would respond to those threats and so on and so forth and and you know one of my wonderful friends Jill balti Taylor uh a neuroscientist
basically talks about what is known as the as the 90 seconds rule the 90 seconds rule is that the biology will take over if for example you get a stress response the biology they will take over and change your hormonal imbalance for 90 seconds and then the hormones are flushed out of the body and then you know your prefrontal cortex basically engages to assess if the stresses the threat is still there and then engages again and so on either way by the way it doesn't take away the logic of stress the logic of uh hate
the logic of um you know of fear okay when you say logic do you mean utility the logic is the underlying equation algorithm that triggers fear whether you feel it in your biology or your or your assess it with your prefrontal cortex it is a moment in the future is less safe than this mode okay your body is much quicker at detecting it uh so you know you're you're amygdala and your and your uh you know the whole hormonal CHT and so on puts cortisol in your blood within seconds maybe microseconds sometimes uh but but
that's because your biology is much quicker than your logic right but then 90 seconds later as per jail balti Taylor you'll refer back to the logic and say is there really a threat and then you know get to give yourself another injection of cortisol if there is okay the what but that whole system has been selected for by evolution correct the the main reason I'm saying that is because you're absolutely right it is almost impossible to imagine that alien intelligence that we call AI I'm 100 with you as a matter of fact you gave me
a lot to think about by that one statement okay but so far in the midst of this very complex Singularity that you and I are trying to decipher okay is to say so far for the short foreseeable future they will be there to behave to act to magnify human intelligence to behave in ways that humans um are interested to teach them okay and and perhaps they will use some of that as their seed intelligence as they develop into that alien creature that you are okay now here is the interesting thing and I I've watched almost
all of your work on the topic so far the the interesting thing is that in a situation where there is so much uncertainty okay that is one of two ways to do this one is to find the answer and the other is to start doing things almost a b testing if you want okay so that we progress in a direction that at least now promises something now whether the AI is emotional whether it's sentient whether it is a human-like in its intelligence or or alien like in its intelligence what we know so far is that
our Behavior affects its decisions okay and what we know so far fact is that data affects it more than code so what creates the intelligence of Bard is the large data set that is trained on it's not just the code that is that that develops its intelligence the larger the data set this is why when you ask open Ai and others where is most of the investment in gpt5 going it's going to be new formats and bigger data sets but learning the the data is really where most of the of the intelligence comes from so
if we can influence the data that it's fed we will influence Its Behavior and what I'm trying to tell the world is so far we give it factual data as I said openly very masculine approach to the world okay facts data numbers uh you know just discipline if you want we don't give it the other side of humanity which are softer data that you and I both know okay you you know for a fact that your decisions are not just made based on the height and weight and number of times that your wife Smiles okay
it's also made based on a feeling that's very subtle in you that makes you say yeah I love her right and when you when you when we haven't yet even started the conversation on how do we give those things to AI how do we tell them that there is another part of intelligence that's called intuition there is another part of intelligence believe it or not that's called playfulness there is another part of intelligence that's called inclusion okay all of these come into our intelligence it's not just data and Analysis and knowledge data and Analysis and
knowledge is what we're building today and data and Analysis and knowledge by the way is what built our civilization today and it's the reason why our civilization is killing the planet okay it's that narrow very if very focused view of progress progress progress progress okay when if you've uh if you really ask the feminine side of humanity Humanity the feminine side will say okay how about compassion how about empathy how about um um you know nurturing the planet it is is it better to have a bigger GDP or is it better to have a healthier
planet okay and all of that is not in the conversation today how do we teach that to anyone by the way okay we teach it like we teach our kids by showing certain behaviors that they can grasp okay so if you told your child don't ever lie and then your phone rings and you say just pick it up and say I'm not here okay your child will not believe the data and the knowledge okay it will believe the behavior it will you know your your child will repeat the behavior AI will do the same if
we give them data sets that said World War II 40 you know 50 million people or whatever died and it was so uh you know uh devastating and then there was this bomb at the end and 300 000 people it will say that humanity is come okay but I always refer to I I'm sure you you know uh Edith acre it is is a a holocaust Survivor she she Survivor she was she went she was out she was drafted to I was when she was 16. and if you hear the story of World War II
and Auschwitz from Edith's words I I hosted her on slow mo on my podcast and and she tells you the story is so beautifully about how she brushed the hair of uh of of her sisters and took care of them and had to go dance for the angel of death as he sent this sentenced uh people to the gas chamber but she had to do it because they you know he would give her more bread that she would share with her sisters and you would go like oh my God humanity is divine humanity is divine
and it is so interesting because I am a huge fan of Edith okay and I'm also a huge fan of Viktor Frank okay and and and and and they both went through the same experience but you look at his approach okay his approach is very masculine purpose and meaning okay do something and keep focused on the future right her approach is very feminine nurturing caring loving appreciating okay sacrificing beautiful and that's that Divinity that makes us human Okay is the mix of both and what I'm trying to tell the world and I know it you
know it's very difficult to prove it with mathematics and also make it a mass message okay but what I'm trying to tell the world is that this layer of AI is now missing as much as it is missing in society because AI is just reflecting our hyper masculine society and if we can bring that layer of inclusion of acceptance of nurturing of empathy of Happiness of compassion of love into the way we treat each other in front of the machines and the way we treat the machines they make May pick up that pattern too so
that they wouldn't look at the world as Hitlers but look at the world as Edis and if they see us as Edith is because by the way fact of the matter I mean you you mentioned that every now and then someone takes a gun and goes and shoots school children okay that person is evil but 400 million people that see the news disapprove of it okay can we give that data point to AI can we ignore the fact that we have debates about gun laws and whatever okay and just focus on the fact that everyone
this approves of the killing of children can we show that can we you know the problem with our world today I will shut up because I know I'm covering I'm talking too much about this the problem with our world today is not that humanity is not divine the problem with our world today is that we've designed a system that is negatively biased the mainstream media only tells you about the woman that killed her husband yesterday she they don't tell you about the hundreds of millions of women that made love to their uh you know boyfriends
or girlfriends yesterday because that's not news so it's only the negativity that's showing up in the data on on social media we are all about fake and about you know toxic positivity and about and about and about bashing each other and so on and and that's biasing the data but the reality of humanity is that we're Divine the reality of humanity and I don't know if you would agree with me on this but even the worst people I've ever dealt with somewhere deep inside had some good in them okay there's almost the majority if you
just count the numbers most of the people I know in this world are wonderful yeah we all have our issues and traumas and so on but there is a beautiful side to every human I know okay can we show that more so that the data starts to become biased can we show we include that in the reinforce reinforcement learning feedback that we give to the machines so that the machines correct the algorithms so that when the time comes because sadly the time will come where we will hand over the defense arsenals in the world to
the most intelligent being on the planet and that will be a machine and then one Colonel somewhere one General somewhere will say shoot the enemy and the machines will call it like do I really have to kill a million people like that doesn't sound logical to me it doesn't sound femininely logical to me it doesn't sound intuitively logical to me okay let me just talk to the other machine in a microsecond and solve the problem can I run a simulation here and tell you how many people will die and then we don't kill them and
then one of us wins the war right think about that what's missing in our society today is what's being magnified by AI what's being magnified by the machines today is our hyper masculine uh um driven Society to more progress more doing more havoc we need a society that balances that with more inclusion more love more happiness more compassion and so Mo you have a beautiful soul and yeah it is not surprising to me that we connected first over something completely different to what we're talking about today uh and I am certainly squandering that side of
your personality um in this interview my my big concern with that and I did not want to interrupt you and I didn't want you to stop I think it's really what you're getting to is is so very true I just don't know that it has to do with AI I hear you in the magnification side that I will agree with but um the thing that I worry about is this is all going to come down to I think the the thing where I think you and I we just see something differently and so we keep
coming at things from a fundamentally different angle the base assumption and this idea of Base assumption I realized when two intelligent well-meaning people are coming at things from something different they they have different base assumptions the base assumption I think that you have from AI or about AI is that because it's being trained on the data set of our behavior um we're going to shape it and I want to draw a demarcation line and say I'm talking about once it becomes alive I don't have a better word for it so I'm just going to say
alive for now I love that word my base assumption is that they're going to be programmed to want something to have a North star and I don't think there's anything mystical or Divine about the way the human mind works it's awe-inspiring and I'm just as moved and find it you know this incredible thing that's bigger than me and very much has religious overtones but I feel that it's just a product of evolution Evolution had certain North Stars survival and everything all the emotions all the male female Dynamics all of that is just what is going
to keep you alive long enough to have kids that have kids that's it and so there's nothing sort of magical about it as so I'm just saying AI is going to have very different pressures on it and and if there are emergent phenomena out of um The evolutionary pressures that something is put under AI has been put under very different evolutionary pressures which mean that it's going to have a very different set of ethics values nor SAR et cetera et cetera so my whole thing is can we take control of that if we can then
we can align in the way that you're talking about where we can tell it to find this balance to look for beauty you you I can't remember if this was in an interview gave her in your book but I heard you talking about there for people that don't know this is a true story we almost had a nuclear disaster because the Russian nuclear system mistook Reflections off of cloud cover for the launch of five nuclear missiles from the U.S and one guy in Russia was like um something doesn't feel right if the US was going
to Nuke us I think they'd send a lot more than five I think this is a malfunction I'm not going to fire back thank God like I can't be more grateful for that man so that that is amazing and tells you a lot about what the pressures of evolution lead a human being to value that would run through that checklist they don't want to kill people they don't want to die like oh it's amazing I'm just saying I don't think by accident that AI ends up there I don't think by simply running through our patterns
that AI ends up there I think we have to take control of that and so while you spoke to my human heart while you were going and you really moved me I don't think that's going to be the play with AI and I think that we have to I don't disagree At All by the way I don't disagree at all I think every word you said spot on spot on we need to take control we absolutely need to take control we're not and taking control is not just about the code and the the the control
code it's also about the data it's also about the date okay and the data is not just books the data includes human behavior every time you swipe on Instagram you're telling AI something we don't disagree at all I wish Tom I wish I had the kill switch I promise you if I had a kill switch for AI today I would switch it off and say okay Class come let's talk about this okay I wish how far back would you take us 2018. wow so there'd still be a lot of AI at play at that point
but it would just be dumb enough you're right yeah but it wasn't that autonomous uh I probably take I mean now that you talk about that honest honestly interesting interesting that you bring this up I'd probably say yeah I mean there are there are many things we don't want to give up on in 2007 and you know smartphones for example there are many things we don't want to give up on the internet you know um 1995 onwards so these are very valuable things there is no no real cut off point but by the way the
topic here is not stop developing ai ai is utopian in every possible way if we develop it properly but now that we have the insight into what's possible now that we have people believing that it can go to that in as intelligent as gpt4 is maybe if we go back just 2015 2018 and Halt and say wait keep it as it is and let's talk let's let's put control systems in place you're spot on let's put control systems in place let's put a more inclusive data set in place okay let's look at the biases that
we have and maybe use that as an you know as a way to to to to correct the data set okay and more importantly let's define the real problems that if we were blessed with the superpower of intelligence which problems would we want to solve is it about trading and making more money is that more urgent than climate change I'm not sure it's it's very urgent if you set your objective with the capitalist system as more money okay by the way more trading and more money is not progress more trading and more money is more
money for a few individuals it's not more progress and I think that's the game the game is what are why are we building what we're building in the first place 2018 talk to me I want to get into some of the disruptions so what what are the near-term disruptions the one that freaks me out and every time I talk to a parent with a teenage boy I'm like your kid is like sex robots are really going to be a thing for them like for real for real I worry if I grew up five years from
now I would not graduate from high school I would just find a sex robot and go into Oblivion what what are one what what do you think is the reality of that one in particular and then I'd love it 100 I mean so whether the word robot is it is interesting but sex alternatives for sure I mean get yourself an apple Vision Pro or a you know a quest 3 and see how realistic your desired other gender is right it's you know it's it's just incredible I mean again you know just just think about all
of the illusions that were now unable to decipher illusion from truth right sex happens in the brain at the end of the day I mean the physical side of it is not that difficult to simulate okay but if we can convince you that this sex robot robot is alive or that sex experience in a in a in a virtual reality headset or an augmented reality headset is alive it's real then there you go go a few a few years further and think of neuralink and other ways of connecting directly to your uh nervous system and
why would you need another being in the first place you know that's actually quite messy it's it's all you know it's all signals in your brain that you enjoy companionship and sexuality and if you really want to take the magic out of it okay yeah it can be similar related right just like we can now simulate very very easily how to move muscles and you know there are so many ways where you can copy the brain signals that would move your hand in a certain way and just you know give it back to your hand
and it will move the same way it's not that complicated there are you know so so that whole idea of interacting with the totally new form of being and once again there is that huge debate of are they sentient or not does it really matter if they're simulating syntheism so well okay does it really matter if the Morgan Freeman talking to you on the screen is actually Morgan Freeman or an AI generated uh Avatar if you're if you're convinced that it is Morgan free this is the whole game the whole game is we get lost
in those conversations of you know are they alive are they sentient doesn't matter if if my brain believes they are they are and we're getting there we're getting there so quickly companionship in general I mean there is uh there was a release of GPT on um Snapchat okay and kids chat with it as a friend they don't really I mean of course they do somewhere deep in their mind distinguish that this is not really a human but what do they care the other person on the other side was never a human anyway it was just
a stream of texts and and emojis and and funny images yeah so so and again look I'm an old man I I use the rotary phone in my young years I coded mainframes but when you when you really think about it as much as I never imagined and I resisted you know should my kids have tablets or not should I have a free-to-air satellite television at home or not every time a new technology was coming out and and eventually we all managed to live with this but let's just say this is a very significant redesign
of society it's a very significant redesign of love and relationships and because there is money in it what would what would prevent the next dating app from giving you avatars to date it's there is money in it a lot of people will try it there are more than two two million people on replica whoa given how many deaths of the spare there are do you think that that will ultimately be for better or worse that AI will be able to provide companionship for anybody that needs it it's just Eerie I don't know if it's better
or worse I mean I I uh I have a friend uh that I met for the first time at a concert in the UK and we just had a wonderful time and we haven't met since but we chat all the time on Instagram or sorry on WhatsApp or whatever and it's wonderful it feels like a wonderful connection um if I didn't know it was a human but the chat was that same quality would it improve my Human Experience a little bit but has all of that small screen interaction improved Humanity at large the consensus is
it hasn't that we're more lonely today even though we have 10x more friends on our friends list okay that were that teen suicide is at an all-time high that female to a suicide is at an all-time high obviously the companies that will create those things will position them as you know the noble approach to help Humanity but at the end of the day read free economics this is the noble approach for the company to make more money that's it right well you know we we want to sell it as this is good for Humanity so
that we hire more developers and we convince the consumers and we can stand on TED Talk stages and make give you know Ultra you know like a larger than life speeches and so on but end of the day it's all about making more money and I think reality is it's not good for Humanity so far so again if you extrapolate that chart it's going to be worse for Humanity long term I don't know maybe those robots will be much nicer than a girlfriend I don't know so I've heard you use the example A lot of
times in fact you mentioned it in this interview that you want to give AI the sort of value system of ah got you somewhere in India where you said people would come to the U.S they would get educated to get these incredibly high paying jobs wildly intelligent people you'd ping them to go grab a coffee and they're like oh I've moved back to India why to take care of my parents like just self-evident yeah so I don't have kids and one of the things that I've really had to think about is when I'm 80 that
ain't gonna be cool like I'm not going to have somebody that's you know coming by to to check up on me and I just thought oh by the time I'm 80 assuming that the robots don't kill us uh I'll be able to wear whatever the Apple Vision Pro of the moment is uh and when the robot walks into my room it will look exactly like the Avatar looks through my glasses and it will be able to care for me I'll build a relationship with it over time it will be tailored to my wants and desires
so to become the best of the best friends that I could ever hope for or I could even program it to be like a child to me and so it is like my kids coming to visit but coming to visit whenever I want them to uh I won't lie it is I definitely don't think it's better than kids and I think that most people should have kids I want to be very clear uh but at the same time given that I did not have kids I am very grateful that the odds of something like that
existing border on 100 what do you think about that is that going to be like does that further crater population problems because people are gonna go oh Tom's right I don't need to have kids I can have ai kids can I can I answer the that question with my heart not my brain so the please the the the soul that that you spoke to it's the blue pill red pill right it's the blue pill red pill and I think it's a very interesting philosophical question of should Neo have ever taken the red pill you know
yeah he had a life okay and and and and the issue with Humanity uh at large Tom is that we have failed because of how much life has spoiled us to accept what life gives us okay and in my other work on happiness I will tell you openly that happiness is not getting what you want it's not about getting what you want it's about loving what you have okay and so the more we fall in that trap of make my life easier make my life easier make my life easier make my life easier there will
always be something in that life that is not easier okay you know there there was that movie I don't remember what it was or I maybe heard of it uh where you know someone dies goes to heaven and then gets like a wish and basically the wish is I want to be a winner in the Vegas casino so he spends every day he walks into the casino and makes money and makes money and makes money and as he makes money you know more girls are interested in him and then eventually he starts to wake up
one day and say can I not lose money someday like this is really boring okay humans We Are Who We Are it's it's it's not getting more more things it's not the the tech companies approach of let's make things easier all the time that's ever gonna make us happier you got to get people the punch line of of that episode it's absolutely phenomenal yeah it is that there is a point at which more progress is hurting us at the community level it's also hurting us at the at the individual's ability to stay healthy when life
is not what we want and life is about to become a lot different than what we want just because we constantly want more and more and more life at the end of the day I just always want to remind people that there is no other way in my mind I mean I want to be proven wrong please prove me wrong that the the separation of power and wealth that is about to come in a world with such a superpower is science fiction like okay the the that the the challenge to jobs and income and uh
and uh and purpose science fiction like these are very dystopian images of society what for because we want our Vision Pro to create a reality that is not our reality when you think about so the the biggest disruption that I'm worried about is what you just mentioned meaning and purpose how much do you worry about that are we is that much to do about nothing or as AI begins to replace some jobs are we really going to have a crisis and I've heard you say the AI will truly be better than us at everything and
when that happens how do we deal with it emotionally yeah 100 imagine if I'm a better podcaster than you I'll never be but how would that make you feel right yeah imagine it was pretty good imagine imagine if every machine is a better podcaster than you do you realize that Tom you and I you and I both have popular podcasts right do you realize this it is not unconceivable that within the next couple of years you'll be interviewing an AI probably in the next couple of months by the way and it's not unconceivable that there
will be a better podcaster than you that is in an AI in the next couple of years in the next couple of years I mean at the end of the day your your asset is you're an intelligent person that understands the concept deeply and asks the right question okay have you ever tried to go to chat GPT and say ask me anything it asks all the right questions okay and it's it's quite interesting so the the disruption of society because of how we defined ourselves with our jobs okay is about to happen so if if
you know if you go to um some African family somewhere or some Latin American family in the middle of the Amazon forest or whatever and you ask that person what is your purpose they'll it will be somewhere between raising my kids or enjoying life okay interestingly they won't talk about building the next iPhone or making a billion dollars or buying a Bugatti uh you know or whatever that's not part of their purpose at all okay part of their purpose is not always also not going to be to know more or learn more or you know
and and we being so sad you know consumed in the source in in the world that we live in uh rightly I think believe that progress is amazing because it helps all of humanity does it really okay but also we are so consumed by the idea that if I don't have something amazing to create tomorrow uh I'm useless I have no purpose that doesn't seem to be the case for the majority of probably seven six and a half of the of the eight eight billion people right who who who view the purpose of life as
living that's the purpose of life to them at least I know that sounds really weird and an advanced High performing Society but for most humans the purpose of life is to live okay now if that is the purpose of life then I think AI is the best thing ever because if you can offer me the chance imagine if all I needed to do in the morning is wake up and have a very deep conversation with you and then my other uh you know good thinking friends and you know hug someone that I love and and
I actually can enjoy it by the way I'm openly saying if that is my reality tomorrow I'm not going to be able to enjoy it but somehow there seems to be billions of people in the world that don't struggle with that at all that actually wish for a day where they don't have to go to work to make money to to make ends meet and they can spend that time with their loved ones maybe that's the purpose of life having said that purpose is not going to go away there is a very interesting thing that
most people forget okay which is for AI to make anything at all consumers need to have a purchasing ability a purchasing power and you know an economic livelihood to buy those products otherwise the whole economy collapse so yes through a period of disruption but somehow we're going to need to continue to make the GDP growth you know to make the GDP grow okay and what is the biggest chunk of GDP consumers right so somehow there has to be systems in place where humans continue to consume okay even if the wealth is is moving up to
those who have ai have the superpower of the planet others have to still continue to consume so we're going to end up in a very interesting place we're going to end up in a place where we struggle with purpose because we still look up and say I need the iPhone 27 okay while in reality we have absolutely no ability to get it done again very frequently viewed in dystopian scenarios and science fiction movies where you become a number and you have no ability to affect your own uh um your own future if you want or
your own presence if you want and in my view I think what ends up happening now is that the only thing that remains in my personal view I'm I know I'm wrong on this but the only thing that remains that still has value and still is uniquely human is connection to humans so the one thing that I'm investing very deeply in in this very unusual world that we're coming through is an ability to connect deeply to other humans and view that in itself even if I have achieved nothing okay as a purpose of life I
I know it sounds really weird but believe it or not until now with all of the followers I have across social media systems I still answer every single message I can answer myself okay and you may think of this as that's not human connection it actually often is I answered in a voice note half of the time people answer back in a voice note and I feel I had a a tiny micro Speck of a human connection sadly not as deep as if you and I were sitting in the same room but it's a wonderful
connection I think in the world that we're coming up to the only asset that will remain is human connection AI will make music okay but I'll still go to a live concert AI will create art but I'll still want that art that was created by my daughter okay AI will you know uh simulate uh um a chat or a or a or a conversation or even sex but ask me I will still want the messiness of today's sex okay I know that for a fact and and I actually think this is a very deep question
that everyone needs to understand and needs to question because we fell into the Trap of social media because we believed we had to go through it otherwise we'd be left out I'm now I I think I've never said that in public but I'm now making those decisions to tell myself regardless of where the world is going there are certain things I'm not going to submit to there are certain things regardless of what they offer me where I will try to stay in the real world and the real messy emotional irrational dirty full of viruses worth
that because you know what I love the messiness of my life okay again going back to the same point we spoke about it's a human's ability finding that Joy of life is a human's ability to like what you have Messy as it is not to want things to be better and perfect okay and there is a point at which I'll still be out here talking about Ai and all of the advancements of it but I may not be using all of it I'll use a lot of it by the way don't get me wrong like
you rightly said there is amazing magic that you can do okay but I will always ask myself this question if what I'm using is ethical healthy and human okay and this is a question that I ask every single individual listening to us please do not use unethical AI please do not develop unethical AI please don't fall in a trap where your AI is going to hurt some one of the things I Ask of governments is if something is generated by AI it needs to be marked as AI so that humans like me know that this
person is not actually real that this is a machine just for for the sake of us finding knowing having the tiniest ability of knowing what the truth is it's interesting you're starting to get onto a topic that we touched on at the very beginning so the sure I wore this shirt on purpose for our conversation today which is from a comic that I wrote I think four years ago now called neon future it's a technological uh optimistic take on a potential dystopian future so where basically the technology is the good guy and so rather than
the robots taking over it's the merging with technology that is the road to Salvation And um in your book you paint a picture at the very end where we're sitting in some isolated place in the middle of nowhere and you say the beginning of the book do we end up there because we're hiding from the machines or do we end up there because you know we the machines have made a Utopia and we just get a be in nature like as intended or something I can't remember the exact phrase that you used I'm curious I
think the world will bifurcate I think that some people are going to be like I need to know what's AI I don't want AI in my life I don't want high tech in the comic anyway what I imagined was a world where people try to revert to the mid 90s so maybe some basic internet connectivity but you know not a bunch of algorithm running everything really sort of minimal advanced technology that felt about right but I'm curious when do you think that we would be happier as individuals and as a collective if we had a
literal Return To Nature as in back out of cities more tribal more sort of grounded in a my foot is touching grass kind of way I don't think we can as I've actually I've actually struggled with that idea for a while okay and I just don't have the skills Tom believe it or not this is all I know okay I know how to navigate a very fast paced very very very uh um intellectually based environment that is a big city okay and I think covert was the first point where so many of us started to
uh to say hey but there is another way there there could be a different life and Technology will make that life more and more possible I I tend to believe that there will be there was a book by again Hugo the goddess it's called the artelect war if you if you've seen that basically that division that you're nicely describe in a much more interesting and positive way in your comic but Hugo sort of builds a very very dystopian Society where he says it's not even about the machines it's about the Divide between humans who support
the machines and merge with them and humans who refuse and and basically building a war between the two and uh and and and I think what will end up happening is that the speed at which things will happen might fool us into uh into accepting how that will change so I'm I actually I do love nature but you know I'm believe it or not starting a retreat for 10 days as we finish this conversation a silent Retreat and I'm not going anywhere in nature I have a a few beautiful green and green trees at my
place and that to me is nature enough okay nature is not how many trees around you nature in my current view is disconnecting from that enormously fast-paced artificial world that we picked okay if you go back to yourself sit on a recliner if you want to it doesn't have to be a stone somewhere where you where you say um uh you know that that connection to yourself interestingly is Going Back To Nature I will think that there will be a few if you want an estimate on real estate prices I think more and more in
the next few years there will be a shift to getting something away from the potential risk but that's not only because of AI I mean the potential risk of cities yes I I think there is a potential geopolitical and economic risk uh that's also coming in the next five to ten years right which which seems to me almost to be inevitable okay the so the the shift in so so the interesting side of this whole AI thing it's a perfect store there is a perfect storm of climate change geopolitical economic and air and and that
perfect storm coming together as as I said will disrupt a lot of the things we're used to and if there is a geopolitical uh challenge uh you know cities might not be the most efficient system that they have been for the last hundred to you know 150 years they they will become less and less efficient because they're in the eye of the storm if you want okay economically for example I think there will be a shift away from cities simply because the economic uh income the income that you make in a city is becoming quite
insufficient for the city right and if if there are remote possibilities to work elsewhere using AI for example uh then you you by definition could make a lot less money but spend a lot less as well right uh there seems to me to me there seems to be a shift that will happen but not everyone will sign up I think there are quite a few that will jump in deeper and again I said I follow all of your work on the topic and I also sometimes sense your hesitation of like should you know is this
the absolute best thing that ever happened I should jump in and be the absolute master of it or you know should I run away from it as the plague like the plague and I think both views are are are worthy and I think what's what's happening is that both views will be true and somehow finding that balance between them is going to be either divided across populations so some will choose left and some will choose right or across yourself you will have some things that you'll adopt and other things that you want this is my
choice or across time where people will maybe delay using aim till a certain point and then jump in all the way or vice versa how are you positioning yourself to respond to the geopolitical risk are you divesting any physical stuff are you maximizing Mobility or are you just like nope I'm at a point in my life what comes comes [Laughter] uh again I you know so it's interesting that our conversation now turns a lot more to The Human Side after we've had a very interesting conversation on duct tech and and AI but I I am
a lot more in that place that I'm describing for you which is a place where I'm very happy with whatever I have I've had a life that blessed me was so much there you know there were times where I had 16 cars in my garage and you know uh I don't live that way at all anymore I have a one bedroom and you know I wear black t-shirts and I give most of my money away and I'm really really not interested in any of this anymore not because I'm a saint or a monk but because
I actually found more joy in a simpler life so I'm a very minimalist in many ways which basically means which is my point in answering your question that a lot of diverse divesting from risk comes to what it is that you need it's not what it is that you have okay the reality of the matter is if I can describe to you how I shifted my life from the day I lost my son 2014 until now to almost nothing I mean like I literally spent several years traveling uh with a suitcase and a carry-on and
that's all I owned in life that's it and you know because I'm an engineer and highly organized and Airlines will allow you specific number of pounds if I needed to change a t-shirt to have a one t-shirt will have to go out okay if I needed to add protein bars I may have to carry my my shoes on my shoulder and you know it's it's that kind of simpler life that I actually think is the way to go forward I think one of the more interesting things that would would affect our success in geopolitical uncertainty
and economic uncertainty is managing the downside not the upside it's not to try and and beat that race it's to make that race in irrelevant to you okay and and how do you do that you know if if you have assets and you you can turn them into assets that appreciate with an economic crisis that would be an interesting idea right if you have fixed assets that could be part of the geopolitical conflict maybe these are not a good idea and so on right it's it's simplifying not complicating that I think is the answer and
similarly with AI just to go back to this I think if we as Humanity were to really solve this and uh uh I I think was it you that interviewed Max Denmark no um was another podcast but but but you know the idea is that uh is that you know if we were to really really win with AI uh Sam Altman says that all the time it would be amazing if we could all come together and set a few guidelines and say let's all work in that direction and that direction is simpler than all of
the mess of the arms race that we're in today well this is amazing where can people follow you for happiness more wisdom on AI the whole shebang first of all I have to say it was amazing and I love how you pushed back and put your views into it you really gave me a lot to think about today honestly and and I'm you know I'm more informed because of this conversation so so thank you I think people can find me on mogowda.com they can find me on all social medias some combination of mogaw that so
it's either more underscore Gaudet on Instagram Moga that on LinkedIn I'm gouted on Twitter and so on uh though that is g-a-w-d-a-t um my favorite place to to to tell more and more stories is my podcast it's called slowmo s-l-o-m-o and uh and in it I try to take the same very complex Concepts but talk about them from a human deal you know really not not the performance or business or whatever I just talk about the human side of things and uh and yeah and I think people should just listen to you all the time
and play this episode more and more until you uh blow up as even further than you do and go further than where you are and because I think you're doing something amazing for all of us I'm a big fan of your work and I'm really grateful that I was part of it very kind man I I have no doubt that while this is the second that there will be even more so grateful for your time everybody at home if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care
peace check out this interview with my friend Peter diamandis about Ai and the future of Business and Technology you guys are on something that is just my absolute Obsession right now and you make a very bold claim in your new book you said that the next billion dollar company will be founded by three people