Most Replayed Moment: AI Safety Expert Predicts The Next 20 Years! Will It Really Take All Jobs?

Dr. Roman Yampolskiy is a leading voice in AI safety and a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering. He coined the term “AI safety” in 2010 and has published over 100 papers on the dangers of AI. In today’s moment, Roman unpacks the jobs AI might replace, and how the idea of work itself could be challenged. Driverless cars, humanoid robots, superintelligence on the horizon…is it too late to regain control? What will our future actually look like? Listen to the full episode here! Spotify: https://g2ul0.app.link/kM19qMRnG2b Apple: https://g2ul0.app.link/D8XtGbUnG2b Watch the Episodes On YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/%20TheDiaryOfACEO/videos Roman: https://www.romanyampolskiy.com/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Steven Bartlett?

  You must hear a lot of rebuttals to this when you say it because people experience a huge amount of mental discomfort when they hear that their job, their career, the thing they got a degree in, the thing they invested $100,000 into is going to be taken away from them. So their natural reaction for some people is that cognitive dissonance that no, you're wrong. AI can't be creative. It's not this. It's not that. It'll never be interested in my job. I'll be fine because you hear these arguments all the time, right?

• 0:31Speaker 01

  It's really funny. I ask people and I ask people in different occupations. I'll ask my Uber driver, are you worried about self-driving cars? And they go, no, no one can do what I do. I know the streets of New York. I can navigate like no AI. I'm safe. And it's true for any job. Professors are saying this to me, oh, nobody can lecture like I do, like this is so special. But you understand it's ridiculous. We already have self-driving cars replacing drivers. That is not even a question. If it's possible, it's like how soon before you're fired?

• 1:06Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, I mean, I've just been in LA yesterday and my car drives itself. So I get in the car, I put in where I want to go. And then I don't touch the steering wheel or the brake pedals. And it takes me from A to B, even if it's an hour-long drive without any intervention at all. I actually still park it. But other than that, I'm not, I'm not driving the car at all. And obviously in LA, we also have Waymo now, which means you order it on your phone and it shows up with no driver in it and takes you to where you want to go. So it's quite clear to see how that is potentially a matter of time. For those people, because we do have some of those people listening to this conversation right now, that their occupation is driving. To offer them, and I think driving is the biggest occupation in the world, if I'm correct.

• 1:51Steven Bartlett?

  I'm pretty sure it is the biggest occupation in the world.

• 1:53Speaker 01

  It will wind up, yeah.

• 1:56Steven Bartlett?

  What would you say to those people? What should they be doing with their lives? What should they, should they be retraining in something or what timeframe?

• 2:03Speaker 01

  So that's the paradigm shift here. Before, we always said this job is going to be automated, retrained to do this other job. But if I'm telling you that all jobs will be automated, then there is no plan B. You cannot retrain.

• 2:18Speaker 01

  Look at computer science. Two years ago, we told people, "Learn to code. You are an artist, you cannot make money, learn to code." Then we realized, "Oh, AI kinda knows how to code and getting better. Become a prompt engineer.

• 2:35Speaker 01

  You can engineer prompts for AIs. This could be a great job, get a four-year degree in it." But then we're like, "AI is way better at designing prompts for other AIs than any human." So that's gone. So I can't really tell you, right now, the hardest thing is design AI agents for practical applications. I guarantee you, in a year or two, it's gonna be gone just as well. So I don't think there is a... This occupation needs to learn to do this instead. I think it's more like, we as a humanity, then we all lose our jobs. What do we do? What do we do financially? Who's paying for us? And what do we do in terms of meaning? What do I do with my extra sixty, eighty hours a week?

• 3:18Steven Bartlett?

  You've thought around this corner, haven't you?

• 3:21Speaker 01

  A little bit.

• 3:23Steven Bartlett?

  What is around that corner, in your view?

• 3:25Speaker 01

  So the economic part seems easy. If you create a lot of free labor, you have a lot of free wealth, abundance, things which are right now not very affordable, become dirt cheap, and so you can provide for everyone basic needs. Some people say you can provide beyond basic needs, you can provide very good existence for everyone. The hard problem is, what do you do with all that free time? For a lot of people, their jobs are what gives them meaning in their life, so they would be kinda lost. We see it with people who retire or do early retirement. And for so many people who hate their jobs, they'll be very happy not working. But now you have people who are chilling all day. What happens to society?

• 4:09Speaker 01

  How does that impact crime rate, pregnancy rate, all sorts of issues? Nobody thinks about it. Governments don't have programs prepared to deal with ninety-nine percent unemployment.

• 4:24Steven Bartlett?

  What do you think that world looks like?

• 4:27Speaker 01

  Again, I think a very important part to understand here is the unpredictability of it. We cannot predict what a smarter than us system will do. And the point when we get to that is often called singularity. By analogy with physical singularity, you cannot see beyond the event horizon. I can tell you what I think might happen, but that's my prediction. It is not what actually is going to happen because I just don't have cognitive ability to predict a much smarter agent impacting this world. Then you read science fiction. There is never a super intelligence in it actually doing anything because nobody can write believable science fiction at that level.

• 5:10Speaker 01

  They either ban AI like Dune because this way you can avoid writing about it. Or it's like Star Wars. You have this really dumb bots, but nothing super intelligent ever. Because by definition, you cannot predict at that level.

• 5:26Steven Bartlett?

  Because by definition of it being super intelligent, it will make its own mind up?

• 5:30Speaker 01

  By definition, if it was something you could predict, you would be operating at the same level of intelligence, violating our assumption that it is smarter than you. If I'm playing chess with super intelligence and I can predict every move, I'm playing at that level.

• 5:43Steven Bartlett?

  It's kind of like my French Bulldog trying to predict exactly what I'm thinking and what I'm gonna do.

• 5:49Speaker 01

  That's a good cognitive gap. And it's not just he can predict you going to work, you coming back, but he cannot understand why you're doing a podcast. That is something completely outside of his model of the world.

• 6:01Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, he doesn't even know that I go to work. He just sees that I leave the house and doesn't know where I go.

• 6:06Speaker 01

  Buy food for him.

• 6:08Steven Bartlett?

  What's the most persuasive argument against your own perspective here?

• 6:13Speaker 01

  That we will not have unemployment due to advanced technology?

• 6:17Steven Bartlett?

  That there won't be this French Bulldog human gap in understanding and...

• 6:26Steven Bartlett?

  I guess like power and control.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  So some people think that we can enhance human minds either through combination with hardware, so something like Neuralink, or through genetic re-engineering to where we make smarter humans.

• 6:42Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 6:43Speaker 01

  It may give us a little more intelligence. I don't think we're still competitive in biological form with silicon form. Silicon substrate is much more capable for intelligence, it's faster, it's more resilient, more energy efficient in many ways.

• 6:59Steven Bartlett?

  Which is what computers are made out of, is the brain, yeah.

• 7:02Speaker 01

  So I don't think we can keep up just with improving our biology. Some people think maybe, and this is very speculative, we can upload our minds into computers. So scan your brain, kind of coma of your brain, and have a simulation running on a computer, and you can speed it up, give it more capabilities. But to me, that feels like you no longer exist. We just created software by different means, and now you have AI based on biology and AI based on some other forms of training. You can have evolutionary algorithms, you can have many paths to reach AGI. But at the end, none of them are humans.

• 7:40Steven Bartlett?

  I have another date here, which is 2030. What's your prediction for 2030? What will the world look like?

• 7:52Speaker 01

  So we probably will have humanoid robots with enough flexibility, dexterity to compete with humans in all domains, including plumbers. We can make artificial plumbers.

• 8:04Steven Bartlett?

  Not the plumbers, where that was, that felt like the last bastion of human employment. So 2030, five years from now, humanoid robots, so many of the companies, the leading companies, including Tesla, are developing humanoid robots at light speed, and they're getting increasingly more effective. And these humanoid robots will be able to move through physical space, for, you know, make an omelet, do anything humans can do, but obviously have, be connected to AI as well. So they can think, talk.

• 8:37Speaker 01

  Right, they are controlled by AI, they're always connected to the network, so they're already dominating in many ways.

• 8:45Steven Bartlett?

  Our world will look remarkably different when humanoid robots are functional and effective. Because that's really when, you know, I start to think, right, like, the combination of intelligence and physical ability is, really, really doesn't leave much, does it, for us human beings?

• 9:07Speaker 01

  Not much. So today, if you have intelligence through internet, you can hire humans to do your bidding for you. You can pay them in Bitcoin, so you can have bodies just not directly controlling them. So it's not a huge game changer to add direct control of physical bodies. Intelligence is where it's at. The important component is definitely higher ability to optimize, to solve problems, to find patterns people cannot see.

• 9:34Steven Bartlett?

  And then by 2045, I guess the world looks even, even more, which is 20 years from now.

• 9:43Speaker 01

  So if it's still around?

• 9:44Steven Bartlett?

  If it's still around.

• 9:45Speaker 01

  Ray Kurzweil predicts that that's the year for the singularity. That's the year where progress becomes so fast. So this AI doing science and engineering work makes improvements so quickly, we cannot keep up anymore. That's the definition of singularity, point beyond which we cannot see, understand, predict.

• 10:05Steven Bartlett?

  See, understand, predict the intelligence itself, or?

• 10:09Speaker 01

  What is happening in the world? The technology is being developed. So right now, if I have an iPhone, I can look forward to a new one coming out next year, and I'll understand it has slightly better camera. Imagine now this process of researching and developing this phone is automated. It happens every six months, every three months, every month, week, day, hour, minute, second. You cannot keep up with 30 iterations of iPhone in one day. You don't understand what capabilities it has, what...

• 10:40Speaker 01

  Proper controls are, it just escapes you. Right now, it's hard for any researcher in AI to keep up with the state of the art. While I was doing this interview with you, a new model came out and I no longer know what the state of the art is. Every day, as a percentage of total knowledge, I get dumber. I may still know more because I keep reading, but as a percentage of overall knowledge, we're all getting dumber. And then you take it to extreme values, you have zero knowledge, zero understanding of the world around you.

• 11:13Steven Bartlett?

  Some of the arguments against this eventuality are that when you look at other technologies like the Industrial Revolution, people just found new ways to work and new careers that we could never have imagined at the time were created. How do you respond to that in a world of superintelligence?

• 11:33Speaker 01

  It's a paradigm shift. We always had tools, new tools, which allowed some job to be done more efficiently. So instead of having 10 workers, you could have two workers and eight workers had to find a new job. And there was another job. Now you can supervise those workers or do something cool. If you're creating a meta-invention, you're inventing intelligence, you're inventing a worker, an agent, then you can apply that agent to the new job. There is not a job which cannot be automated. That never happened before. All the inventions we previously had were kind of a tool for doing something. So we invented fire, huge game changer, but that's it. It stops with fire.

• 12:15Speaker 01

  We invent a wheel, same idea, huge implications, but wheel itself is not an inventor. Here, we're inventing a replacement for human mind, a new inventor capable of doing new inventions. It's the last invention we ever have to make. At that point, it takes over and the process of doing science, research, even ethics research, morals, all that is automated at that point.

• 12:42Steven Bartlett?

  Do you sleep well at night?

• 12:44Speaker 01

  Really well.

• 12:45Steven Bartlett?

  Even though you you spent the last, what, fifteen, twenty years of your life working on AI safety and it's suddenly among us in a in a way that I don't think anyone could have predicted five years ago. When I say among us, I really mean that the amount of funding and talent that is now focused on reaching superintelligence faster has made it feel more inevitable and more soon than any of us could have possibly imagined.

• 13:11Speaker 01

  Whereas humans have this built in bias about not thinking about really bad outcomes and things we cannot prevent. So all of us are dying.

• 13:21Speaker 01

  Your kids are dying, your parents are dying, everyone's dying, but you still sleep well. You still go on with your day. Even ninety five year olds are still doing games and playing golf and whatnot because we have this ability to not think about the worst outcomes, especially if we cannot actually modify the outcome. So that's the same infrastructure being used for this. Yeah, there is humanity level death like event. We're happening to be close to it probably. But unless I can do something about it, I can just keep enjoying my life. In fact, maybe knowing that you have limited amount of time left gives you more reason to have a better life. You cannot waste any.

• 14:07Steven Bartlett?

  And that's the survival trait of evolution, I guess, because those of my ancestors that spent all their time worrying wouldn't have spent enough time having babies and hunting to survive.

• 14:16Speaker 01

  It's suicidal ideation. People who really start thinking about how horrible the world is usually escape pretty soon.

• 14:28Steven Bartlett?

  One of the you co-authored this paper analyzing the key arguments people make against the importance of AI safety. And one of the arguments in there is that there's other things that are of bigger importance right now. It might be world wars, it could be nuclear containment, it could be other things. There's other things that the governments and podcasters like me should be talking about that are more important. What's your rebuttal to that argument?

• 14:51Speaker 01

  So superintelligence is a meta solution. If we get superintelligence right, it will help us with climate change, it will help us with wars, it can solve all the other existential risks. If we don't get it right, it dominates. If climate change will take a hundred years to boil us alive and superintelligence kills everyone in five, I don't have to worry about climate change. So either way, either it solves it for me or it's not an issue.

• 15:20Steven Bartlett?

  So you think it's the most important thing to be working on?

• 15:23Speaker 01

  Without question, there is nothing more important than getting this right.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  And I know everyone says that you take any class, but you take English professor's class and he tells you this is the most important class you'll ever take. But you can see the meta level differences with this one.

• 15:43Steven Bartlett?

  Another argument in that paper is that we'll be in control and that the danger is not AI. This particular argument asserts that AI is just a tool, humans are the real actors that present danger, and we can always maintain control by simply turning it off. Can't we just pull the plug out? I see that every time we have a conversation on the show about AI, someone says, can't we just unplug it?

• 16:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I get those comments on every podcast I make and I always wanna like get in touch with a guy and say, this is brilliant. I never thought of it. We're gonna write a paper together and get a Nobel Prize for it. This is like, let's do it. Because it's so silly, like, can you turn off a virus? You have a computer virus you don't like, turn it off. How about Bitcoin? Turn off Bitcoin network. Go ahead, I'll wait. This is silly. Those are distributed systems. You cannot turn them off. And on top of it, they're smarter than you. They made multiple backups, they predicted what you're going to do, they will turn you off before you can turn them off. The idea that we will be in control applies only to pre-superintelligence levels, basically what we have today. Today, humans with AI tools are dangerous.

• 16:49Speaker 01

  They can be hackers, malevolent actors, absolutely. But the moment superintelligence becomes smarter, dominates, they no longer the important part of that equation. It is the higher intelligence I'm concerned about, not the human who may add additional malevolent payload, but at the end still doesn't control it.

• 17:07Steven Bartlett?

  It is tempting to follow the next argument that I saw in that paper, which basically says, listen, this is inevitable. So there's no point fighting against it because there's really no hope here. So we should probably give up even trying and be faithful that it will work itself out. Because everything you've said sounds really inevitable. And with China working on it, I'm sure Putin's got some secret division. I'm sure Iran are doing some bits and pieces. Every European country's trying to get ahead of AI. The United States is leading the way. So it's inevitable, so we probably should just have faith and pray.

• 17:46Speaker 01

  Oh, praying is always good, but incentives matter. If you are looking at what drives these people, so yes, money is important. So there is a lot of money in that space and so everyone's trying to be there and develop this technology. But if they truly understand the argument, they understand that you will be dead. No amount of money will be useful to you. Then incentives switch. They would wanna not be dead. A lot of them are young people, rich people, they have their whole lives ahead of them. I think they would be better off not building advanced superintelligence, concentrating on narrow AI tools for solving specific problems. Okay, my company cures breast cancer, that's all.

• 18:29Speaker 01

  We make billions of dollars, everyone's happy, everyone benefits. It's a win. We are still in control today. It's not over until it's over. We can decide not to build general superintelligences.

• 18:43Steven Bartlett?

  I mean, the United States might be able to conjure up enough enthusiasm for that. But if the United States doesn't build general superintelligences, then China are going to have the big advantage, right?

• 18:55Speaker 01

  So, right now, at those levels, whoever has more advanced AI has more advanced military. No question, we see it with existing conflicts. But the moment you switch to superintelligence, uncontrolled superintelligence, it doesn't matter who builds it, us or them. And if they understand this argument, they also would not build it. It's a mutually assured distraction on both ends.

• 19:18Steven Bartlett?

  Is this technology different than, say, nuclear weapons, which require a huge amount of investment? And you have to like enrich the uranium and you need billions of dollars potentially to even build a nuclear weapon? But it feels like this technology is much cheaper to get to superintelligence potentially, or at least it will become cheaper. I wonder if it's possible that some guy, some startup is going to be able to build superintelligence in, you know, a couple of years without the need of billions of dollars of compute or electricity power?

• 19:52Speaker 01

  That's a great point. So every year it becomes cheaper and cheaper to train sufficiently large model. If today it would take a trillion dollars to build superintelligence, next year it could be a hundred billion and so on. At some point, a guy on a laptop could do it.

• 20:07Speaker 01

  But you don't want to wait four years for make it affordable. So that's why so much money is pouring in. Somebody wants to get there this year and lucky in all the winnings, light cone level award. So in that regard, they're both very expensive projects, like Manhattan level projects.

• 20:26Steven Bartlett?

  Which was the nuclear bomb project.

• 20:28Speaker 01

  The difference between the two technologies is that nuclear weapons are still tools. Some dictator, some country, someone has to decide to use them, deploy them. Whereas superintelligence is not a tool, it's an agent. It makes its own decisions and no one is controlling it. I cannot take out this dictator and now superintelligence is safe. So that's a fundamental difference to me.

• 20:54Steven Bartlett?

  But if you're saying that it is going to get incrementally cheaper, like I think it's Moore's law, isn't it, that technology gets cheaper?

• 20:59Speaker 01

  It is.

• 21:00Steven Bartlett?

  Then there is a future where some guy on his laptop is going to be able to create superintelligence without oversight or regulation or employees, et cetera.

• 21:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's why a lot of people suggesting we need to build something like surveillance planet where you are monitoring who's doing what and you're trying to prevent people from doing it. Do I think it's feasible? No. At some point, it becomes so affordable and so trivial that it just will happen. But at this point, we're trying to get more time. We don't want it to happen in five years. We want it to happen in 50 years.

• 21:37Steven Bartlett?

  I mean, that's not very hopeful.

• 21:39Speaker 01

  Depends on how old you are.

• 21:41Steven Bartlett?

  Depends on how old you are. I mean, if you're saying that you believe in the future, people will be able to make superintelligence without the resources that are required today, then it is just a matter of time.

• 21:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, but so will be true for many other technologies. We're getting much better in synthetic biology, where today someone with a bachelor's degree in biology can probably create a new virus. This will also become cheaper, other technologies like that. So we are approaching a point where it's very difficult to make sure no technological breakthrough is the last one. So essentially, in many directions, we have this pattern of making it easier in terms of resources, in terms of intelligence, to destroy the world. If you look at, I don't know, 500 years ago, the worst dictator with all the resources could kill a couple million people. He couldn't destroy the world.

• 22:37Speaker 01

  Now we know nuclear weapons, we can blow up the whole planet multiple times over. Synthetic biology, we saw with Covid, you can very easily create a combination virus which impacts billions of people. And all of those things becoming easier to do.

• 22:55Steven Bartlett?

  In the near term, you talk about extinction being a real risk, human extinction being a real risk. Of all the pathways to human extinction that you think are most likely, what is the leading pathway? Because I know you talk about there being some issue pre-deployment of these AI tools, like, you know, someone makes a mistake when they're designing a model or other issues post-deployment. When I say post-deployment, I mean, once a chat GPT or something, an agent's released into the world and someone hacking into it and changing it and reprogramming it to be malicious. Of all these potential paths to human extinction, which one do you think is the highest probability?

• 23:35Speaker 01

  So I can only talk about the ones I can predict myself. So I can predict even before we get to superintelligence, someone will create a very advanced biological tool, create a novel virus, and that virus gets everyone or most everyone. I can envision it, I can understand the pathway, I can say that.

• 23:53Steven Bartlett?

  So just as a human on that, then, that would be using an AI to make a virus and then releasing it?

• 23:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:59Steven Bartlett?

  And would that be intentional?

• 24:02Speaker 01

  There is a lot of psychopaths, a lot of terrorists, a lot of doomsday cults. We've seen historically, again, they tried to kill as many people as they can, they usually fail, they kill hundreds of thousands. But if they get technology to kill millions or billions, they would do that gladly.

• 24:21Speaker 01

  The point I'm trying to emphasize is that it doesn't matter what I can come up with. I am not a malevolent actor you're trying to defeat here. It's the superintelligence which can come up with completely novel ways of doing it. Again, you brought up example of your dog. Your dog cannot understand all the ways you can take it out. It can maybe think you'll bite it to death or something, but that's all. Whereas you have infinite supply of resources. So if I asked your dog exactly how you're going to take it out, it would not give you a meaningful answer. It can talk about biting. And this is what we know. We know viruses. We experienced viruses, we can talk about them. But what...

• 25:07Speaker 01

  An AI system capable of doing novel physics research can come up with is beyond me.

• 25:13Steven Bartlett?

  One of the things that I think most people don't understand is how little we understand about how these AIs are actually working. Because one would assume, you know, with computers, we kind of understand how a computer works. We we know that it's doing this and then this and it's running on code. But from reading your work, you describe it as being a black box. We actually say, in the context of something like ChatGPT or an AI we know, you're telling me that the people that have built that tool don't actually know what's going on inside there?

• 25:43Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. So even people making those systems have to run experiments on their product to learn what it's capable of. So they train it by giving it all of data, let's say, all of internet text. They run it on a lot of computers to learn patterns in that text. And then we start experimenting with that model. Oh, do you speak French? Or can you do mathematics? Oh, are you lying to me now? And so maybe it takes a year to train it and then six months to get some fundamentals about what it's capable of, some safety overhead. But we still discover new capabilities in old models. If you ask a question in a different way, it becomes smarter.

• 26:27Speaker 01

  So it's no longer engineering how it was the first 50 years, where someone was a knowledge engineer, programming an expert system AI to do specific things. It's a science. We are creating this artifact, growing it. It's like an alien plant. And then we study it to see what it's doing. And just like with plants, we don't have 100% accurate knowledge of biology. We don't have full knowledge here. We kind of know some patterns. We know, OK, if we add more compute, it gets smarter most of the time. But nobody can tell you precisely what the outcome is going to be, given a set of inputs.

• 27:08Steven Bartlett?

  What you just listened to was a most replayed moment from a previous episode. If you want to listen to that full episode, I've linked it down below. Check the description. Thank you.