How to Prepare for AGI According to Reid Hoffman - Ep. 46

AGI is coming. Reid Hoffman just wrote the book on how to prepare. According to Reid, every major tech breakthrough (the written word, the printing press, the telephone) triggered mass fear. But, contrary to our worries, new technology tends to enhance human agency—even more so, if you know how to use it well. In Superagency, his book that was released yesterday, Reid examines how we’ve historically adopted new technologies and focuses on AI’s potential to increase our agency—the ability to make decisions that affect outcomes. He wrote the book for two audiences: anyone who is curious, or even skeptical, about AI; and technologists who are building in AI, with the hope that they will think about human agency as a design principle for their products. As someone who straddles both worlds, I read the book and really liked it. Beyond being a prolific author, Reid is the cofounder of LinkedIn, Inflection AI, and Manas AI; a partner at venture capital firm Greylock Partners; an early backer and board member of OpenAI; and an award-winning podcaster—and I was pleased to invite him onto AI & I again, this time in person. We recorded an hour-long conversation, going deep on: The notion of human agency, how our sense of agency shapes our response to new technologies, and its interplay with uncertainty Why Reid believes that private commons and equitable access to AI will be beneficial for society at large How the history of AI mirrors a philosophical shift in how we understand intelligence, from trying to program explicit rules about how thinking works, to building systems that learn patterns from data Reid’s take on how the next decade of AI will involve a play between rule-based systems and pattern-matching ones It’s a must-watch for anyone who wants to help build a more human future with AI. If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share! Want even more? Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free. To hear more from Dan Shipper: Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper Links to resources mentioned in the episode: Reid Hoffman: @reidhoffman Superagency, Reid’s newest book: https://www.superagency.ai/

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I think there's many times when you're encountering an external circumstance, if you approach it as this is taking my agency, you're essentially throwing yourself under the wheels, right? Whereas you go, oh, here's how I can use this to transform my agency, to extend and enhance my agency in various ways, then it becomes much better.

• 0:18Dan Shipper?

  One of the core parts that I read in that is you talk about agency as a sense, an internal kind of like aesthetic experience of agency.

• 0:26Speaker 00

  I think one of the things I picked up from fairly early in my childhood was realizing that old catechism that's pretty good, which is, you know, the strength to change the things I can, the tolerance to live with the things I can't, and the wisdom to know the difference. I came to love that catechism later because I had early got to that sense of that's how you should navigate the world.

• 0:46Dan Shipper?

  Wow, how'd you do that?

• 0:48Speaker 00

  Maybe it's like playing a lot of board games. I mean, it's just kind of like, like, it's kind of a sense of, hey, these things are under your control, and these things are not under your control.

• 0:58Dan Shipper?

  You have a couple of like specific ways of thinking about that that I think are really interesting. I want to make this really concrete, though. Maybe I'm a product manager, I'm a designer or whatever. How does this change how I think about and orient to AI over the next couple of years? Arm me with some more practical, concrete ways to instantiate this compass in how I approach my life.

• 1:29Dan Shipper?

  Reed, welcome to the show.

• 1:30Speaker 00

  It's great to be here and great to be doing this in person.

• 1:33Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, I love that. It's just, it makes it a much different experience just to like be face to face. We're actually very close to each other.

• 1:39Speaker 00

  Exactly. Well, and actually even philosophically.

• 1:41Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, definitely. So I'm excited to have you for a number of reasons, but one of the big ones is you have a new book coming out. By the time this is out, it may be out. It's called Super Agency. I read it. I actually really liked it. It's part of my, like professionally, I have to say that, but also I really.

• 1:59Speaker 00

  But it happens to be true.

• 2:00Dan Shipper?

  It happens to be true. And the reason I like it is I think it's, you're, you're writing it in response to the.

• 2:10Dan Shipper?

  You know, there's a prevalent fear of AI and maybe AGI socially. And I think you're examining this moment and saying, if we want to understand what to do in this moment and how things might play out, a good way to do that is to look at history and look at other historical technology changes to see like how we reacted and whether we were wrong or not. And you go much further than that in the book, but I want to start there because I love that history angle because I think we forget how many of the things that we're familiar with now used to be really, really scary. I wonder if you could go into some of those so we can understand it a little more.

• 2:49Speaker 00

  Well, it goes all the way back to the written word with Socrates, although there are some different scholarly interpretations of the Socratic remarks or the challenges. So why don't we start with the printing press?

• 3:05Dan Shipper?

  Great.

• 3:06Speaker 00

  And when the printing press was introduced, a lot of the public dialogue was very similar to the dialogue we have around artificial intelligence. This will lead to the collapse of our trust in human cognition. It'll lead to widespread misinformation. It will lead to the collapse of the solidity of our knowledge and society and what we're doing. And who knows what people are going to do with this technology that could really erode things? And on one hand, here, many centuries later, we are obviously deeply indebted to the printing press. We can't have science without the printing press because you can't get to that

• 3:49Speaker 00

  spread of information. You can't have widespread literacy in education. You can't have the progress of knowledge, middle-class institutions, universities, et cetera, all of which, well, universities existed before the printing press, but getting to the many universities of vigorous and strength required the printing press. Now, so all of that shows that it's great despite all the fear. Now, that being said, the other thing, the thing to track with the printing press is there was nearly a century of religious war.

• 4:19Dan Shipper?

  Right.

• 4:19Speaker 00

  So we as human beings, when we get to these new technologies, the transition periods of what we get in can be very challenging. But that's as, you know, to some degree, that's a, that's an opportunity, not just a notion of fear, because it's like, the world is what we make it. So let's make this transition much better than the earlier transitions.

• 4:40Dan Shipper?

  Do you think that, because, because one of the, one of the, you know, overriding points in your book is these kinds of transitions, we have some amount of control over them, but we don't have total control. So, and, and we can get more into like all the nuances of what that means, but I'm curious about, do you think we can prevent, you know, like, let's say, we went back to the printing press days, you know, is there something we could have said to Martin Luther to be like, hey, like this schism thing is, in the Reformation, like, it's great to have a personal relationship with God, but like, maybe cool it a little bit on some of this stuff, because it's going to lead to a lot of war? Or is that sort of inevitable?

• 5:22Speaker 00

  Well, I think it depends on where your society and culture is at the time. It's unclear that even if Martin Luther had said, let's do this gradually and have a set of discussions, that the reigning Catholic Church would have tolerated that and allowed it.

• 5:41Dan Shipper?

  I think he did, like, I think he was trying to go within the system for a long time before he did the, the door pounding thing.

• 5:47Speaker 00

  Exactly. So it's unclear. But one of the things we hope in having built, you know, great global institutions post-World War II, having learned from what the, the massive amount of tragedy is when you get in that kind of amount of conflict.

• 6:03Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 6:04Speaker 00

  That, and by the way, of course, we have the, we have various technologies, not the least of which is printed books, to remind us of our histories and to learn it, that maybe we can do this one much better. And that's part of the reason why, in, you know, as you know from having read Super Agency, it's part of the reason for doing the book, for doing podcasts and other things is say, hey, if we actually steer the right way, we can minimize the transition difficulties. I don't think there'll be zero transition. I think that's pipe dream and no one should have that expectation. But we can actually get through the transition much cleanly and much more compassionately

• 6:45Speaker 00

  and humanely than we have done in earlier transitions and get to the amazing benefits that is always the other side of these massive new technology leaps.

• 6:55Dan Shipper?

  That makes sense. I think one of the, one of the places to go from there is, it's, the book to me is not just a history book, it's also a little, it's a book about psychology in a certain way, because you have a theory of why we are typically very afraid of new technology that runs through all new technological advancements. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about that?

• 7:19Speaker 00

  So, you know, part of kind of our fundamental concept of our place in the world and our, you know, dignity, our meaning, etc., comes down to a notion of agency. And it's both agency as individuals and agency as groups and agency as societies. And so, most often, and, you know, back to like the earlier referred printing press, what people experience the new technology as is reducing the agency for, you know, kind of, you know, key people who are leaders in society, you know, heads of institution, participants in institutions, the institutions themselves. And, and so they, they react because they go, oh, this is going to be a change in agency,

• 8:04Speaker 00

  therefore reduction, and therefore...

• 8:07Speaker 00

  Bad, therefore destructive society. And the actual path that happens is, yes, agency changes. So some things that you had agency in before, you no longer have agency in. But when you begin to look at agency, it's not just a set of external factors. It's internal factors. It's how do you approach it? And so, for example, like, let's, let's use a very modern example that people can think about. So is it a loss of agency to being driven in Uber? Or a gain in agency to being driven in Uber? And obviously, we're like, oh, my God, I don't, my hands aren't on the steering wheel. And who knows what this random human being is doing? And da, da, da, da, da. Then you're like, oh, my God, it's enormous loss of agency.

• 8:50Speaker 00

  And yet, of course, you know, hundreds of millions of people are doing it because they realize it's a gain of agency. It's I can, I can, I can not have a car and get somewhere. I can have gone, oh, I drunk too much. I'm going to get home this way much more safely, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so it's a question of how we approach it and how we experience and how we choose our own agency. That doesn't mean it's completely separate from external effects, but it's a combination of that internal and external where it's really appropriate. And then what happens as we, like, we first encounter technology, like, like, I remember arguing at Davos with people about our smartphones, these kind of humanity-reducing, you know,

• 9:35Speaker 00

  kind of, like, almost like cybernetic control of human beings, you know?

• 9:40Dan Shipper?

  Never argue with people at Davos. That's mistake number one.

• 9:44Speaker 00

  It's like, you're, you're making me think about Princess Bride. Right? Your first mistake. And, and then, obviously, part of the reason why we have billions of people with them is because, actually, in fact, it's a massive increase in agency. And matter of fact, it quickly gets to, you know, kind of the thesis of the book of super-agency is what happens when millions of people get all elevated in their agency with a new technology. And then, all of a sudden... We collectively get super agency, both as individuals and as societies.

• 10:18Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, I think one of the core parts that I read in that that I want to pull out is you talk about agency, but then you talk about it as a sense, which I read as like an internal kind of like aesthetic experience of agency, which I think most people, when they think about agency, like it's all external, but it's quite clear to me that that aesthetic component is a huge part of it. And I think a lot of the questions about human agency, they reflect almost like a lack of faith in our ability to change and adapt, and then also a lack of understanding of like how that aesthetic

• 10:58Dan Shipper?

  sense arises and how you can bring it to any experience to some degree, like the history of literature is like about people in like pretty dire circumstances, feeling like they have some agency, which is not to say that external conditions don't matter, but a lot of it is internally driven. I'm curious like how you got there, like what influenced that? How did you start to think about this?

• 11:19Speaker 00

  Well, some of it may be philosophical background, and highlighting the aesthetic is also very interesting. I think maybe when I was writing, I was also thinking of like Dan Dennett's intentional stance. Like it's a stance that we have towards the world, like a mental stance, a worldview. And obviously, there's an aesthetic stance too. So I think that's a great highlight. And, you know, I think part of it is that, you know, it's like using the Uber example, and there's, and using the smartphone example. I think that there's many times where, when you're encountering an external circumstance, including of course technologies, if you approach it as this is taking my, my agency, then you are

• 12:05Speaker 00

  You're essentially throwing yourself under the wheels, right? Whereas you go, oh, here's how I can use this to transform my agency, to extend and enhance my agency in various ways. Then you, then it becomes much better. So for example, think about just driving down the highway. You go, hey, I have, I'm in this car, I have an ability to slow down, speed up, drive, et cetera. Well, there's a lot of other cars on the road, too. If you say, oh, my God, my agency is, is taken away because these other cars are slowing down or are potential hazards, et cetera, et cetera. Well, then you're never going to get on the road, right?

• 12:42Dan Shipper?

  Yeah. And, and that, I think that points to like, um, agency is to some degree, it's a, it's a way of looking at the world and where you put your attention. So like, if you push your attention to, oh, my God, all these other cards, of course, that, that sense of agency is going to go down. If you push your attention somewhere else, that sense of agency is going to go up. And again, it's not, it's not only your attention, like there are external things, but like, to some degree, there's, there's some sense of control. And I'm curious, um, for you, how, how do you notice your personal sense of agency fluctuating day to day and in your life? Like, have there been periods? Have you always felt, um, this connection with a sense of agency? Have there been periods where you haven't? And like, how has that played out for you?

• 13:23Speaker 00

  Great question. You know, it's interesting because I think one of the things I picked up from fairly early in my childhood was realizing that kind of that, that, that old catechism that's pretty good, which is, you know, the, something like the strength to change the things I can, the tolerance to deliver the things I can't, and the wisdom to know the difference.

• 13:44Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, it's like the Alcoholics Anonymous prayer thing?

• 13:47Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly. And I think it comes from a, a Christian Catholic catechism. And, and I, and I paraphrase that.

• 13:56Dan Shipper?

  Did you grow up Catholic?

• 13:57Speaker 00

  No, no, no, no. Just, uh, it wasn't so much that as much as I'd adopted that, I, I came to love that catechism later because I had, had early got to that sense of that's how you should navigate the world.

• 14:09Dan Shipper?

  Wow, how'd you do that?

• 14:10Speaker 00

  I think it just, maybe it's like playing a lot of board games. I mean, it's just kind of like, like, it's kind of a sense of, hey, These things are under your control and you can affect them. And then you can affect that outcome. And these things are not under your control. And overly like tearing your hair out about the things that are out of your control is not helpful to you or to anyone else. Right, so you go, you know, like, um, uh, the fact that there's suffering in the world. If you go, oh, my God, there's suffering in the world, then of course you're gonna get crushed. There's gonna be suffering in the world. You should, of course, always feel for people suffering.

• 14:51Speaker 00

  But the fact that there is like children dying around the world today, it's really, really sad. We should try to do things about it, but we're not gonna stop all of it today. It's an ongoing process. And so, so there's things out of your control. And then there's things in your control. And of course, that's where your ability to navigate it. Um, and so it's kind of like whether it's, um, you know, maybe it's kind of simple like who you're friends with when you're in school and, and you go, oh, you know, like, you know, do you have friends that you treasure? And then that's really great. And maybe there's other people that you wanted to be friends with weren't as interested in you. That's fine, too. Right? But kind of navigating that within the kind of child circumstances, I think where I, where I started.

• 15:35Speaker 00

  And then from there, I think that the, um, that became kind of how I approached each new challenge that I was getting. And, you know, part of how, like, I think I got a sense of good strategy in life and strategy for me, strategy for what I did in school, strategy for what I did with companies, strategy for what I do with investing, all came from this kind of, uh, like, figure out what the nature of the game is and what are the things that were within your ability to change? And then accepting the things that you can't while... Like changing some really interesting thing.

• 16:16Dan Shipper?

  And so, and it sounds like that came from board games. What board games are we talking about?

• 16:22Speaker 00

  Well, so a whole set, some, and there's less board games Dungeons and Dragons. So I was, I was doing that, which there seems to have been some resurgent on, which is cool. But also what probably most people don't track these days, these Avalon Hill board games I did a bunch of. And then a variety of others. And one of the things about it being multiple is that you're learning all of them. And actually, one of the things that people frequently say, and I did play chess and I did play Go. I wasn't as attracted to those games because part of the thing with when you're playing like the Avalon Hill board games, or also like Starfleet battles was another one I did.

• 17:03Speaker 00

  By having some randomness with dice rolls, it actually more closely approximated the kinds of circumstances we encounter in life. Because life is not like chess. Life is not like Go. It is not deterministic that way. There's uncertainty variables that you have to, you have to play into and, and epistemic uncertainty sometimes that you have to play into. And, and both Go and chess have no epistemic uncertainty. And so adopting your strategies to those were really important. I think that's, those are, those are the initial mindsets.

• 17:37Dan Shipper?

  That makes sense. I think there's this, there's a meme in tech right now about being high agency, like high agency people, which I think is great. It's good to be high agency. But I think we tend to think of agency as always good. And generally, if you, if you want to be like, generally, I think it's good to have agency. But for example, in the, in the, in the example you gave of there's suffering, right? If you think of yourself as high agency and have a high locus of control, internal locus of control for things that are totally out of your control, it's actually a pretty miserable way to live. And it definitely doesn't make you more effective. And so there's this, there, like, I think what you're saying is there's a certain range of things

• 18:19Dan Shipper?

  within which you want to be high agency and have an internal locus of control. And then there's also a whole set of other experiences in life that are important, that are about completely giving up control and recognizing control. And those are some of the most, recognizing your lack of control. And those are some of the most meaningful experiences that people have, like transcendent experiences.

• 18:41Dan Shipper?

  Um, curious what that sparks in you.

• 18:43Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, I think the obvious ones are in friendship, romantic relationships and other things as part of what you're doing is, um, is essentially, uh, giving yourself over to not being in complete control of how a relationship's playing. And those are obviously some of the places where as we learn and become, you know, kind of wiser, more compassionate, more evolved people. Um, that's actually in fact, I think, one of the really central things. It's also, by the way, sometimes, um, people encounter that playing in, uh, team sports of various

• 19:25Speaker 00

  sorts. It's there's team sports themselves. There's also of course, team sports within companies in terms of how a company is operating. The shared controls, the shared agency, um, becomes, I think, uh, you know, really key. And obviously, some people find that within a religious experience, too.

• 19:43Dan Shipper?

  Yeah. How has that worked for you as an investor? Obviously, because you're, you know, you're investing in companies, you care about the outcome deeply, but also, uh, you know, you don't want to be too in control in a lot of ways. Uh, there's a lot of trade offs to control there. How's that work for you?

• 19:58Speaker 00

  Well, I think one of the things that, um, so start with something kind of enormously simple, pragmatic heuristic. Um, one of the things, questions that I ask myself on an investment is, would I do this investment and walk away and say, call me in five years? Because, um, um, almost like call it 98% of good investments, you will accurately have that sense. Not to say you wouldn't try to help and work with them, because well, like part of it is you think as an investor, you know, I can spend maybe if I'm spending a lot of time in investment, I might be able to spend four hours a week on the investment. Because as an investor, I have a portfolio of investments, I've got other things I'm doing.

• 20:43Speaker 00

  And so the person I'm investing in, uh, she or he, uh, You know, the CEO, the founders, you know, how they may all play out. They're in this presumably 80 plus hours a week, maybe 100 plus hours a week. And so if they're not capable of carrying the game themselves, it's almost for sure you've made a bad investment. Now, sometimes the exception is where you go, oh, what I really need to do is help them get this one deal, or help them hire this one person, or help them this one strategy element, and then everything else will be fine. Then that's okay, and I will sometimes do that investment.

• 21:23Speaker 00

  But one of the mistakes that investors frequently make is they go, well, you know, they'll tell themselves that they're more important than they are in the kind of the judgment, and then they'll get too much involved in it, and they'll actually be messing it up.

• 21:42Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 21:42Speaker 00

  Because...

• 21:43Dan Shipper?

  Iatrogenic investing.

• 21:45Speaker 00

  Yes, because truly, if you think your four hours is more important than the person's 80 to 100 hours, like, you probably invested in the wrong person.

• 21:56Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, yeah. Or you have a massive ego problem.

• 21:59Speaker 00

  Yes, or both.

• 22:01Dan Shipper?

  Probably. Yeah, so I think one of the things that came to me as part of this book is your tracking agency is this like psychological experience and intentional stance and aesthetic stance. And that one of the things that seems to affect our sense of agency is how we approach uncertainty. And the more we kind of grind against uncertainty to try to like eliminate it, the lower our agency is because you can't eliminate it. And the more you like, you work with uncertainty and have that sort of stance of like surfing

• 22:43Dan Shipper?

  through it, the better things go, and that's the appropriate stance for like dealing with new technologies. And the thing that, of course, for me, like the thing that I'm thinking about as well, I think our default stance in the West to uncertainty is to try to eliminate it, and you can like read that in the history of philosophy, which is like, you know, Socrates and Plato to Descartes trying to make knowledge that is like clear and explicit as episteme.

• 23:11Dan Shipper?

  And it's the same thing in science, right? Like, you wanna boil things down into fundamental laws so you can predict things in advance, laws that are explicit. Religion, I think, is also, in a lot of ways, about dealing with uncertainty by trying to eliminate it. Maybe the world of the senses is totally uncertain, but there is a world to come that is, like, totally certain and is definitely gonna happen and will be amazing. And not to denigrate any of those things, because I think those outlooks are actually quite useful in certain circumstances. But in particular, when it comes to technology, that way of thinking about things can lead to trouble. I'm curious if you have the same reading or how you would respond to that.

• 23:52Speaker 00

  Well, I think it's definitely the case that we, and I think there's the generalization, which you know is kind of a very broad brush, almost Jackson Pollock, you know, you know, quick, quick, quick, quick description of the stuff. But I do think that the notion that we, as human beings, try to delude ourselves to overdegrees of certainty. Like, we don't, for example, realize that every time we drive somewhere on the highway, we are taking a certain amount of risk. We're taking a risk about our own competence, we're taking a risk on our vehicle, we're taking a risk on weather conditions, we're taking a risk on other folks. And of course, once again, just like agency, if you dwell on all that, maybe you'd never

• 24:36Speaker 00

  get into a car, but then you would never go anywhere.

• 24:38Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 24:38Speaker 00

  Right? And never be able to benefit from, you know, significant portions of modern society. And so, and so part of it is to think about how do we live in a heuristics of managing uncertainty and managing various forms of uncertainty. Like, there's a form of uncertainty about, well, how does the world actually play out? There's uncertainty about our epistemology and how we know the world, and then there's uncertainty about how the system comes together. And, you know, it's one of the things that's really essential to entrepreneurship, because any entrepreneur who persuades themselves that they're guaranteed success in what they're doing is massively deluding themselves. Right?

• 25:21Speaker 00

  Which maybe sometimes is necessary to work really hard in order to do something, but you know, there's always, like, encountering and navigating a world of risk is actually, in fact, very important. And...

• 25:36Speaker 00

  And so I think, now, I think part of, and actually, I think that it's a true line of where frequently philosophy, you know, kind of like the Western philosophy, actually, we should probably isolate this too. You know, frequently is overly trying to get to like, human nature is X. Like, you know, frequently they'll say, "Human nature is selfishness." And you're like, "Well, there's a lot of different ways in which, which human beings are self-oriented, but there's a diversity of them." And sometimes you say, "Well, when this person's really committed to their family or really committed to their society, well, that's just the way they're expressing their selfishness." So, "Well, but that's not exactly what you mean by the word selfish."

• 26:18Speaker 00

  So, there's, there's a whole bunch of different self-orientation and that, that spread is actually really important. And the same thing is true for understanding uncertainty well, which of course is part of the reason why we're still struggling to resolve, you know, Einstein's theories of relativity and quantum mechanics. And, you know, Einstein himself was, "Quantum mechanics can't be right because God does not play dice with the universe."

• 26:43Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, I mean, I think that, I think that's really another example of like, how aesthetic sensibilities guide what we see and guide our decision-making in like supposedly like really rational, truth-oriented endeavors. And that's why I think I'm sort of keying on this aesthetic sense, because I think when we talk about dealing with uncertainty, there's a way in which like you can try to eliminate it, you can try to manage it, which is sort of still like, we'd rather we didn't, we weren't uncertain. And then there's a way of like, sort of playing with uncertainty and like, you use a phrase like bloomers, like sort of using that to flourish, which I think in a lot of ways like that is, that is a way to look at life.

• 27:26Dan Shipper?

  And I think that perspective, going back to the aesthetic sense, is often embodied in entrepreneurs and artists who are often guided by, by an aesthetic sense.

• 27:35Dan Shipper?

  And I think those two outlooks where you're like, yeah, I want to like face the blank page or I want to like change how people see the world, how the world works, even though I know it's like highly uncertain is seems to me somewhat core to the to working with technology well.

• 27:54Speaker 00

  I completely agree. And actually, one of the things that's interesting about the the arc that you're highlighting in your call it philosophical aesthetic reading of super agency is the actual ties between my first book, The Startup of You, and this because The Startup of You in part was trying to give advice you give entrepreneurs, but to individuals for their lives. And part of it was like multiple of the chapters are navigating environments of uncertainty because that's what entrepreneurs must do and must do it intelligently.

• 28:29Dan Shipper?

  And preserve their sense of agency while doing it.

• 28:30Speaker 00

  Exactly. And so it's an interesting, I hadn't quite realized between book one and book six, that there was kind of an art, there was the kind of an arc from it. And I do think that part of the thing in surfing is a very good metaphor is to say, how do you embrace uncertainty in a way that you're taking agency and that you are leveraging it to having a better life, to working better, to making decisions better, to creating better, right, in terms of the the the art aside and and well, many things, but artists especially. And and then leveraging that to a feature, not a bug.

• 29:13Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, totally. I think the the the wave metaphor is is really is really interesting to me because you can like try to like stand in front of a wave and stop it, or you can surf it. And the surfing, like you're you're working with a dynamic context. So it's not like you're you're not totally in control, but like you are in control within that sphere, which is sort of what you're what you're going for, which which I think gets to your point about the way our stance toward uncertainty is what what guides whether or not we feel agency. And you have a couple of like specific ways of thinking about that that I think are really interesting. So like.

• 29:54Dan Shipper?

  One of the dichotomies you bring up is like, some people try to make like a real, like a blueprint, or like a plan, or like a specific theory about the future. And then, but you use the metaphor of a compass, or you say cognitive GPS, or another term, which I don't think is in the book, but I think is really related, is wayfinding. So it's like, you have a sense of the direction you're going, but you're pretty open to the details. I'd love for you to talk about that.

• 30:25Speaker 00

  So, exactly right. And part of the thing, whether or not, almost everything, if you're making too concrete of a plan, and like your earlier, you know, we were kind of talking a little bit about Sun Tzu, and no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. Plans that are rigid break fast and uselessly. And so you can make flexible plans, but one of the most easy ways to make a flexible plan is to have, you know, kind of a compass. And the compass might be, like, for example, it's like, well, I need to hike from here to here, and there may be multiple trails, and sometimes one of them washed out, and everything else. Well, you can get from there to there with,

• 31:10Speaker 00

  like, and maybe there's no trails, if you have compass, map, information as a way of doing it. And you're adjusting your plan as you go, and as you discover what the terrain, the conditions look like. And it's a good metaphor for also a wide variety of things, because as you think about, for example, well, we're making decisions about like, what jobs we might take, what careers we might take, where we might go on a holiday, where we, what we might be doing, you know, Friday night. All of those are informational space questions. And again, a compass is a good way to do that. And so if you think about, what is an AI chatbot helping you with? It's almost like it's a compass, helping you with these informational decisions, hence informational GPS.

• 31:55Speaker 00

  And it's resilient, because if you suddenly discover something really changes, the world isn't as you expected, the world changed, you changed, like, you're like, well, I thought I was in the mood for watching a movie, but I'd actually rather just like to have a quiet conversation with my friend. Well, oh, hey, there's a cafe down the street, let's go, that we discovered that from, you know, the compass. And part of-

• 32:23Speaker 00

  You know, what we're in writing the book, as you know, we described as the techno humanist compass. And the reason is, too often, when people think about technology, they think about the thing that is new and therefore not really fully adjusted into us. So they go, oh, AI, that's technology. Whereas our cars aren't technology, our phones aren't technology, our laptops aren't technology, our glasses aren't technology.

• 32:45Dan Shipper?

  Our books aren't technology.

• 32:47Speaker 00

  They're all technology.

• 32:48Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 32:49Speaker 00

  And what happens is we get familiar enough with them that we naturally include them in our existence, include them in our agency.

• 32:59Dan Shipper?

  They build up like a patina of culture.

• 33:01Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 33:02Dan Shipper?

  In our psychology, yeah.

• 33:04Speaker 00

  And that's what we want to be doing with this in order to embrace it. And that's why giving metaphors and it being techno, but also humanist in the compass.

• 33:14Dan Shipper?

  One of the things that the compass makes me think of is like a counter argument would be like, isn't that a little wishy washy? Like, one of the big, one of the other big memes or viewpoints in tech is like, you've got to be first principles thinking on some of this stuff. You've got to go back to first principle. And so you're not going to like, just change your mind based on like, the latest, like, where the wind is blowing, right? So how do you, how do you square those two?

• 33:39Speaker 00

  Well, to some degree, I think a techno humanist compass can be amongst a first principle, right? Because the question on principles are, what are the set of kind of navigational truths that you're using to make decisions, to incorporate information and change belief states, action states, et cetera? And using a compass as a means of a metaphor versus, for example, a

• 34:16Speaker 00

  You know, saying, well, that we only can can be in one route. I think the first principles thing is a very good thing that I myself, and I think you as well, embrace from a viewpoint of clarity of thinking about things. But like, like as a metaphor, when the earliest GPS navigation systems for cars played out, I had the entertaining observation between the German and the Japanese systems. I drove a German one, which when I left the path was like, return to the path, return to the path, return to the path. And the Japanese one was like, oh, you want to go a different way. Here's your new set of directions for for what you're doing. And I think the question is, is if you said first principle is only being Germanic, then you're going to have problems.

• 35:01Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's so funny because I was telling you before we started recording that I was reading War and Peace over over Christmas, and that's literally exactly how Tolstoy talks about how German generals do strategy. So I'm glad it made it all the way into their GPS.

• 35:16Speaker 00

  All the way into their modern GPS system. Although I think they've now since learned some from the Japanese ones. And they're both like, oh, when you didn't turn there, maybe you had a reason for not turning there. We're going to recalculate a new path.

• 35:28Dan Shipper?

  I want to bring this like, I want to make this really concrete though. Because like, let's say, so we can, we can talk about compass what we want. Like, how do we fill that out in for a person who's like, okay, maybe I work in tech. Maybe I'm an engineer, maybe I'm a product manager, I'm a designer or whatever. And I'm seeing all these changes happening. How does this change how I think about an orient to AI and think about, okay, over the next couple of years, oh, three is coming out soon. Like Sam Altman saying like, hey, like, we pretty much have got AGI. Google just released something today like called Titans. That's, that's really cool and seems like a really interesting step in that direction. So give me, arm me with some more like practical, concrete ways to like instantiate this compass in how I approach my life.

• 36:10Speaker 00

  So, you know, another concept in the book is iterative development, which is part of actually how we get broad based. Networks of inclusion, what we also refer to as consent to the governed by customers, by, you know, kind of theorists and commentators, by government, et cetera, by press, the whole way of feeding back into the system. And it starts with individuals experimenting with it, right, like engaging. And I think one of the reasons why, when you think that we're in the cognitive industrial revolution, and you think, oh, there's a new set of tools by which, like, for example, I can't be a professional and say, I don't use computers,

• 36:54Speaker 00

  I don't use smartphones. Every professional job requires that kind of information, connectivity, processing, analysis, consumption, generation, et cetera. AI is just the amplification of that. And so, every single profession is going to require, how am I deploying AI? How am I engaging with multiple agents in order to do my work? And so, and you say, well, how is that exactly? Do I read a book right now? It's like, no, no, the best way is just start engaging with it, engaging with it in some seriousness. So, it's fine, for example, to go to ChatGPT and say, give me a sonnet for my friend's birthday, or my kid's, you know, birthday, whatever. That's great. You know, what ingredients can I have

• 37:39Speaker 00

  that I can make into a meal for my lunch? Great, do that. But also use it for things that you are seriously and earnest about. And you may find that some of them, it's not ready yet. But you'll find that some of them it is. I'll give a personal example. So, when I first sat down with ChatGPT, I asked it, how would Reid Hoffman make money investing in artificial intelligence? And it gave me the, the business school professor's analysis that was completely wrong for venture capital. It sounded smart. You identify large, total addressable markets, you understand which products and services, what are what are relief?

• 38:19Speaker 00

  Yes. And so, I was like, nope, I'm still, I still have a very unique skill set for doing this relative to these things. But on the other hand, if I then had, oh, it's useless for investing, then I wouldn't have noted the things that it's good for. For example, same session, I sat down and I put in a business plan, and I said, what, how should I do diligence on this business plan? And

• 38:44Speaker 00

  You know, the list of things that came back with were not necessarily, none of them were a surprise. But items like four and seven, I would have gone, oh yeah, I would have thought of that in a few days. And it's useful to have it now for figuring out what to do. And so, so engaging with it is really important because we will see a lot of jobs transform. And the way they'll transform, some jobs, customer service, other places where you're essentially trying to get human beings to act like robots. There'll be much higher replacement coefficients. But a lot of jobs, like the human, will be replaced by a human with the AI. And we want as many of the humans to be the humans with AI. So be learning it and adjusting with it.

• 39:28Dan Shipper?

  What is, so then like, let's, let's go deeper into that. So what is an agency preserving way to approach the question, which is what happens if my job goes away because of AI?

• 39:41Speaker 00

  So first is I don't think that, well, I can, I can, I'll do the job goes away too. But I think a lot of jobs won't go away. I think they'll transform. And so the question is, are you adapting and transforming with them, you know, at sufficient speed and in advance? Which is one of the reasons to start playing with AI now. And AI, by the way, can help you with that, right? Cause AI could go, oh, well, here is the new way that we can be accelerating how we understand what a good marketing message would be, how we would test it, how we would generate options for it, how would you think about what that goes? And AI already today can help with a bunch of different marketing tasks.

• 40:22Speaker 00

  And doesn't mean it will do it decisively and say, oh, we just plug it into the machine and we press play and look, that's our marketing. Cause like I've used GBD four and GBD oh one for this and it's really helpful, but it's a co-pilot, right? For these things. So.

• 40:41Speaker 00

  Now, in a replacement circumstance, like say, for example, customer service. So you get, you know, companies like Sierra and others who are kind of designing a, how do you have the AI agent be the first customer service agent? And that may reduce a lot of different customer service jobs. And you say, oh, my customer service job went away. Well, AI can still be helpful to go, okay, here's what my skill set is. Here's what I think I'm capable of learning. What job should I now go look for if there's now far fewer customer service jobs? And you might go, well, there's these things in account management. There's these things in sales. There's these things in support desk.

• 41:24Speaker 00

  There's these things in, and that kind of thing may actually in fact go, okay. And then how do I, how do I learn those jobs? How do I get those jobs? How do I do those jobs? AI can actually help with all of that.

• 41:35Dan Shipper?

  Yeah. And that gets to another point that you make in the book, which is that one of the really important agency preserving approaches to new technology is the idea of equitable access. Can you talk about that?

• 41:48Speaker 00

  So one of the things that's really key, I think, for kind of answering this question about, look, how do we bring as many people along in society? How do we make sure it's not just beneficial for rich individuals, rich companies, but as broadly as possible, is to have it in as many people's hands as possible. And when you do that, not only does it obviously create a better chance of fair and just participation in the new jobs, the new career paths, et cetera, but it also makes society a whole lot better because when you get talent from as broad range as possible, being unlocked

• 42:31Speaker 00

  to be, to do work, to be creative, to be, to create maximum benefit, all of the rest of us in society benefit from that too. And so equitable access is not just a question of kind of like, oh, is it fair for everybody? Which it is, it's important to have, but also that it's also better for all of us.

• 42:50Dan Shipper?

  Yeah. Another, another extension of that, that you talk about that I, I feel really tied to or connected to is this idea of.

• 43:00Dan Shipper?

  Uh, like generally, I'd say the book is like anti-regulation in general. Competition will regulate itself, that that kind of stuff. But one of the places where you seem a little bit more open to the idea of regulation in some form is

• 43:15Dan Shipper?

  the idea of private commons, the way that we treat our data in a world with AI maybe should shift in certain ways. So like the the personal data that I've accumulated, let's say in Facebook and Google and all that kind of stuff, becomes tremendously more valuable to me as an individual. When I have I have GPT four to go through it and be like, here are some patterns I found. And that changes how we might want to think about the private commons. And then therefore, like the regulatory landscape or whatever, like, for example, maybe everyone should be able to download their data. You know, like stuff like that. Talk more about that.

• 43:53Speaker 00

  So first, just a general thing is I tend to be, call it more regulatory cautious than regulatory.

• 44:01Dan Shipper?

  Anti-regulation?

• 44:02Speaker 00

  Anti-regulation, right? Because it is generally true that when you get into, oh, well, I should act as a regulator. You then, I I got over a degree of certainty that I can issue a you shall do this and not this. And actually enshrine the past against the future. And there's all kinds of benefits to getting to the future. And that's why regulatory cautious. So I tend to say, look, when you start having the impulse that maybe there should be regulation, you should start with, well, how do we measure the questions that we're worried about as harms? Because if we can get those measurements, then we can track it and see, do we really have those harms? Are they really increasing? And then maybe what kinds of innovations might might bring down those harms relative to our benefits?

• 44:46Speaker 00

  And then allow that dynamic progression of innovation and invention and risk taking, all of which is very important. And a lot of regulators go, well, if I let you to take risk and something bad happens, then it's on me. And it's like, well, but like life is risk. And by the way, by taking some risk, we can figure out things like cures for diseases and and other. And we need we need to be figure out the cures for diseases. So anyway, that's first general stance on regulation. Next is private commons, which is, you know, part of what we actually seeing in these build of buildup of these big tech companies counter a bunch of, you know, surveillance capitalism and other kinds of critiques is actually these.

• 45:27Dan Shipper?

  I like that you included that in the book, by the way.

• 45:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. Because like, look, it's again, it's almost like framing. Like if you frame it as the agency is, oh, it's surveillance capitalism versus it's, no, no, actually, it's building up a private commons that I benefit from and enables me, right? Because you go, well, like, Google Maps allows other people to figure out where your house is. And by the way, Google Maps allows my friends to figure out where my house is and go visit. Yes. Right? So that kind of framing, I think, is very important. And then these data commons then are a kind of a micro instance of how super agency is created, not only because, you know, I have a private commons, you have a private common, your private data sources, but then as it learns from these together, you get automatic

• 46:13Speaker 00

  tagging on your pictures and you can go, oh, this picture I took of Dan, I can share it with him, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And all this stuff adds in a lot of important human connectivity framework, richness to our lives, ability to make decisions or find things in good ways. And now, that being said, we want to enable that private commons as much as possible. So you go, well, look, in general, most of the incentives for these corporations is very pro-social, pro like being good for society, because it's like, oh, I'm building all these features that engage you, cause you to take pictures, cause you to store them, et cetera. And it's like, great. But on the other hand, some of my incentives are, and you do them only with me and you

• 46:57Speaker 00

  don't do them with anyone else. It's like, well, actually, maybe occasionally in a very specific way, we intervene and say, no, no, part of my rights with my data is when you were storing a whole bunch of my data, I have the right to move that as I like and you must facilitate that.

• 47:16Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, totally. I'm about to go off-roading because you're making me think of something, which is like a more specific example that I think you might be interested in about like how this might play out. And I'm curious, I'm curious if your take on so. I don't know if we've talked about this before, but I have OCD. And there are treatments for OCD, like you can, you basically like manage it, like it's, it's fine. But like, it's still not great. You don't cure it, right? And one of the things I've been doing recently is I just, have you used Windsurf? Windsurf is like a cursor competitor and it, they just has like an agent thing and you can just be like, build this, build this thing and it'll build it. It's the coolest thing ever. And so it just makes weekends a lot, like really fun, because I'm just like, oh, I have an, I have an idea.

• 48:00Dan Shipper?

  So I had this thing that I've been doing where I just, I built a little app in Windsurf. And every day I take a Y-Box test, which is the OCD assessment. And then I upload a screenshot of my whoop data. And then I also take a little video of myself and I just do like a daily log where I don't talk about like how I'm feeling. I just like talk about my day and I upload it and there's an, there are some APIs where it embeds my face and my vocal tone. And what I'm trying to do is see if I can predict my OCD symptoms from my facial vocal and whoop data.

• 48:38Dan Shipper?

  And, and like, that's something that like whoop, for example, they have an API, but like, it doesn't really give you my like full, all my data. And I need that in order to like make this work. And, and this is the kind of thing where there's a whole, there's like thousands of types of diseases or conditions or whatever, where if you enable people to do this, we would make so much more progress on like solving them. Like, I don't know what I'm going to find when I, when I figure this out. And, and I think what I'm, what I'm likely to find, which gets into my whole like soapbox about science, uh, which, which we've talked about before, is, is that there's not one variable where it's like, well, this makes your OCD worse. It's like, actually, there's like thousands of different things that like interact together

• 49:23Dan Shipper?

  and different combinations that like I should pay, I should probably pay attention to, but they're all like weakly interacting. And yeah, I think that that kind of thing is like, it's so important to the future and it, it makes me feel like, um, there was this whole like Quantified Self movement in Silicon Valley for a long time. And it's like, I feel like Quantified Self is like, it's, it's gonna happen finally. It's like a thing now. What do you think?

• 49:44Speaker 00

  Well, so I do think that it's precisely this kind of data, that if you have the ability to have. Kind of to shift it around as you need and want as an individual can create great things. So I think, you know, whoop is one version of quantified self. Glucose monitoring is another one. The, you know, things that you do with the various watches is more. And I think that we are going to have all that. And actually, by the way, having that

• 50:15Speaker 00

  stream of data that you can then index to other data that you might have. For example, what did you eat for lunch? Are you traveling? Where did you go? How did you, like, did you planes, trains, automobiles, et cetera? And, and I think being able to query that together really, really matters. And, and so I think it's a, A, we are moving.

• 50:45Speaker 00

  We are moving, I think we're at this point decisively moving more and more towards quantified self. But, um, you know, part of it is, is that enabling of, of what I can do with it. And therefore, how it can really benefit me. And by the way, like, for example, when you get to it, like, one of the things that

• 51:06Speaker 00

  one of my doctors noted is that he can, if he has access to the whoop data and sees what's happening, he can look at someone's, um, you know, whoop performance of the last, I forget how many days, some number of days. He can tell whether or not you're about to get COVID.

• 51:25Dan Shipper?

  Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 51:28Speaker 00

  Right. And so that's the kind of thing where it's actually, that's really useful.

• 51:30Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, it's so important. And there's probably, you know, maybe there's one thing that he's looking at, but it's probably like, he's just sort of squints at it and gets like an intuitive sense of, of, of what it is, which is a thing that AI is like really quite good at. Because like predicting a, um, a sequence of, let's say, whoop data or predicting, or like classifying a sequence of whoop data, or let's say predicting a sequence of OCD data, where it's like, you know, uh, here's what I did today and here's my Y box score or whatever. I think that that problem is incredibly similar to predicting the next token in a, and like in language. And we're, we're just getting to the place where we're starting to like apply that in other places. So, you know, I, I think that there's this really interesting.

• 52:13Dan Shipper?

  Shift that that happened in AI that I think you can sort of start to see it in first in philosophy where we're going from like a search for like universal truths and universal definitions in philosophy, starting with like Kant, really, you're starting to say like, okay, there's a limit to like our our ability to like grasp things intellectually. And then there are all these like different flowerings of that. So like there's, you know, the transcendentalists and the American pragmatists, there's like the later Wittgenstein, like there's, there's the whole continental philosophy and like, you know, postmodernism or whatever, which regardless of what you think of that, it is sort of is all in that all in that vein. And I think you can see this that same shift in the history of AI,

• 52:57Dan Shipper?

  where we started in a very like Socratic Platonic aligned mode in symbolic AI, where we're trying to define the underlying theory of intelligence and defining it as a set of symbols and their relations. And each symbol has has some sort of semantic meaning. And what we found is like, that doesn't really work. Like, it's very brittle. Like, it works in certain well-defined circumstances, but it's really brittle, and it suffers from computational explosion. Like, you have to have a frame of reference to start with before you can like start manipulating symbols. Otherwise, it's too expensive. And then we shifted to like sub symbolic AI. And where we're just basically fuzzy matching patterns

• 53:42Dan Shipper?

  and and bringing to bear many, many thousands of different rules based on the context, partially fitting them based on the context. And I think that that it's possible that that shift will also occur in other areas of the world where we're sort of doing the equivalent of like symbolic AI, because there's nothing better. And now we can use data and AI and that kind of stuff to like to, yeah, to make progress.

• 54:08Speaker 00

  Well, I think, you know, and we may have talked about in the previous podcast, that my undergraduate major was symbolic systems.

• 54:15Dan Shipper?

  Yes.

• 54:16Speaker 00

  And part of when I was doing that, because the theory was, we are symbol processors that we reason and think in symbols, we, we consume it through, you know, languages and books, etc., all of which is very interesting, and a bunch of different parallels between different symbolic systems.

• 54:35Speaker 00

  But I was also, you know, kind of within that very early movement, which was called connectionism, which was kind of this notion of, well, symbols are important, but if you only had a symbolic theory, you're probably going to radically underperform your modeling of what our intelligence is, your ability to construct tools or intelligences, et cetera. And so that sub symbolic AI and like, for example, what is, what are the things that lead to us becoming, like getting a mastery of concepts? Or since we, you know, mentioned Wittgenstein, following a rule in language is, I think, really key.

• 55:18Speaker 00

  Now, I think part of, if I predict, if I project out the future for the next 10 years, I think a major part of this is going to be this kind of like play between probabilistic models and symbols. And with the current L M transformers, we have one, but I think we're going to have more kind of, as it were, technologies, mathematical description, skillsets about how probabilistic modes and symbols can come together. And I think that's among the things when you say, what is currently not visible within the next generation of AI? I think there's going to be some stuff in there.

• 56:03Dan Shipper?

  Can you give me an example of what that might look like?

• 56:05Speaker 00

  Well, a simple one that's out of the past, and I'm not saying this is the right one, but is like using symbols, but with Bayesian probabilities established, you know, kind of applied. So you say, oh, well, I have the belief that we are, that, that, that we're having philosophical insight, you know, in this podcast, but it's probably 90%.

• 56:31Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 56:32Speaker 00

  Right versus probably 100%. Right, you know, like, you know, that kind of thing.

• 56:36Dan Shipper?

  Only 90% of them.

• 56:38Speaker 00

  I'm just giving some range for humility and all the rest. And so, but you might also say, like, I have the, I have the belief that the weather tomorrow will be good for taking a hike, and I believe it at 80%.

• 56:53Dan Shipper?

  Is the O1 paradigm a example of this, like, training it on, like, math problem, like, any, any kind of problem where it's, it's based, based on discrete steps that can be verified?

• 57:07Speaker 00

  I don't think it's unusually that from a lot of the transformers, but I do think this question is, is, you know, you do these chains of thought, you have a fitness function on the chain of thought, and you're making a prediction, not just on the next token, but is this chain of thought out of multiple chains of thought, which of these ones are the right ones? And that fitness function itself might have that probabilistic characteristic.

• 57:31Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, because, because I don't want to, I like to cast aspersions on symbols.

• 57:37Speaker 00

  With symbols, I might add.

• 57:39Dan Shipper?

  I love symbols.

• 57:41Speaker 00

  To cast those aspersions.

• 57:42Dan Shipper?

  But that's mostly because I, it's like, it's sort of obviously like a little bit rhetorical, like, because I think we're so symbol-heavy in how we think about things. And I guess my, I'll raise my model right now, and that's open to revision, is like, symbols are important, but they are important when they arise out of a sub-symbolic architecture. And so, all that means is that when you're, when you're doing something like, for example, trying to pick apart your thought process, there's a limit to that, like, picking apart, where you're getting down to the, like, the symbolic level for yourself, but underneath that are like, there's, you know, thousands and thousands of sub-symbolic things that

• 58:26Dan Shipper?

  you're not going to be aware of, and, and realizing how the symbolic level arises out of the sub-symbolic level is like a really important way to approach the world, especially if you're someone who has a tendency to philosophize, because you're like, it's the sort of Witt and Shinyan, like, therapeutic approach to philosophy, which is like, you need to find a philosophical stance that allows you to give up philosophizing.

• 58:49Speaker 00

  Yes, although I think even maybe he realized that it wasn't, that it was never ended and you gave up because, you know, obviously early Wittgenstein's, I solved it, I'm done. I'm gonna go teach. Oh, wait a minute.

• 58:59Dan Shipper?

  Talk about ego.

• 59:01Speaker 00

  I gotta go back and redo this.

• 59:02Dan Shipper?

  Talk about agency.

• 59:03Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly. Which is the reason why he, you know, died as a philosophy professor.

• 59:08Dan Shipper?

  Yeah. Every time I thought I was out, they pull me back in, is Wittgenstein.

• 59:15Speaker 00

  Wittgenstein is godfather.

• 59:16Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 59:18Dan Shipper?

  Let's see what else, what else I have to talk about with you. We've gone a little bit into, we've gone a little bit into science versus engineering, which I do think like, when we talk about dynamic tensions,

• 59:32Dan Shipper?

  you can probably think of everything post-Newton as like the era of science. And I think there's a way of looking at the era of AI that is starting to work as like, turning science problems into engineering problems. And that it may usher in more of an era of engineering, or like lean us more in that,

• 59:54Dan Shipper?

  in that direction, which has a bunch of other like, Jackson Pollock, like you can like twist the knobs on other dynamic tensions in this sort of engineering direction, which is like, we're a little bit more pragmatic. We're a little bit less concerned with,

• 1:00:10Dan Shipper?

  maybe with like, fully explicit causal explanations for things and maybe more okay with lots and lots of little correlations, stuff like that.

• 1:00:20Speaker 00

  By the way, I obviously love the Jackson Pollock. And I would also add, since you've done that one already, another metaphor, which is thinking about, or framework, thinking about like, we're actually moving less from thinking about these thoughts as deduction, and more as induction and abduction.

• 1:00:37Dan Shipper?

  Yeah. What is abduction? I never remember.

• 1:00:40Speaker 00

  Oh, it's best theory.

• 1:00:41Dan Shipper?

  Okay.

• 1:00:42Speaker 00

  It's kind of theory that models the evidence.

• 1:00:45Dan Shipper?

  Interesting. Okay, interesting. So, but it requires like, some sort of creative process to come up, come up with a theory rather than like coming up with it from the data itself.

• 1:00:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, a little bit like if you contrast induction and abduction. Induction is, I, I look at all the data points and I model the curve. And abduction is, based on some other information about the world or priors, I go, here's a model, which might actually be different than what you come up with, an induction. And it's one of the reasons why I actually think both, like, Frankly, all three, but part of when we're good thinking beings, we apply all of them.

• 1:01:23Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, that's, that is, that is the thing that I love about AI is like, you don't have to decide which way to approach problems. It just like figures out, it has many different approaches and it just figures out the one that's, that's best or uses many different ones at the same time, which I think is sort of like the failure point of like a lot of philosophizing. So like coming up with a like moral theory, right? Like we've never found one that like has no holes in it like, and, and when we do think that we've found it, you end up with all these like weird things. So like effective altruism is like great idea, but then you like take it too far and then you like become SPF like it's.

• 1:02:03Dan Shipper?

  And so, but, but then it feels really wishy washy to be like, well, I applied the moral rule that like made the most sense in this circumstance, but that's how language models work for, for languages or solving problems. And I think having some sort of diverse, partially explicit, but like also mostly implicit set of like moral theories or, or whatever you want to call it, is probably for the best. It's probably the best way to, to be in the world, which is like fundamentally sort of philosophically unsatisfying from the perspective of trying to make everything explicit, but is also kind of beautiful and, goes back to the stance towards uncertainty, the like sort of artistic entrepreneur entrepreneurial

• 1:02:48Dan Shipper?

  stance towards uncertainty.

• 1:02:49Speaker 00

  Yeah. Look, I think it's critical that we're deriving theories of the world, theories of morality, theories of ourselves, theories of what the, what we should be doing with our lives and work. But it's also critical to think of those theories as dynamic and being updated. And part of the updating is not just, you know, kind of, oh, look, I got some new data. That's important too. But also the way we think about it, the way we learn from each other. And all of that leads to kind of. A, you know, best judgment kind of circumstance. And by the way, that's how science progresses too.

• 1:03:26Dan Shipper?

  Yeah. So people are, you know, they've, they've listened to this discussion. They're, they're familiar with, with some of the ideas of the book and they're probably thinking about like, should I go, should I go get it? And I'm curious, like, um, yeah, are there other, are there any other like takeaways that you think are really important for people to know about, about what your stance is on these topics?

• 1:03:50Speaker 00

  Well, so in a sense, I wrote the book for two audiences. One audience is anyone who has any AI curiosity or skepticism. Because the thought is here's a set of lenses to think about the reason why this is very humanism and humanity positive. And why it is important to have a, a kind of a theory of agency that is this is what we can accomplish. This is what will be really good and how to work towards it. And so whether you're a skeptic or whether you're curious, all of that I think plays into it. Now, I also wrote it for technologists because I wanted technologists who are inventing this to be thinking about

• 1:04:33Speaker 00

  human agency as almost like a design principle, to think about, you know, individual agency, collective super agency as ways of, ah, if that's one of the fitness functions and goods of what we're trying to do, that may make certain design decisions, deployment decisions, much more effective and much more humanist.

• 1:04:56Dan Shipper?

  How does that work? Because I think a lot of the framing that we've approached agency with so far is, is a much more like we've talked about it as like an internal aesthetic sense, rather than something that you can build into a product. So how would that, how would that change a technologist's fitness function for what they're building?

• 1:05:13Speaker 00

  Well, that was a little bit of the reason why we highlighted the chat GPT iterative deployment as an example. Because, you know, GPT 3.5 had existed for like a year before chat GPT. And yet you launch GPT and all of a sudden people could access it. They could do stuff with it. They could make it happen. And so it's making that kind of affordances.

• 1:05:39Speaker 00

  Available to people so they can engage with it. And that they're interested in engaging with it and that they're easy to do an iterative pattern of engaging is one of the things that comes out of that. I also think that, you know, if I were to, uh, you know, be able to say, hey, everyone, make sure you're doing this as well as this is obviously when we build a lot of technology, we tend to think about the easiest, simple path is a form of human replacement. So you go, okay, we don't need customer service agents, we'll just do this. What I think it's also super important is to think about like that co-pilot, that

• 1:06:18Speaker 00

  human amplification and making it more as per the book impromptu amplification intelligence. I think that that, um, that's also something to be thinking about with a kind of a super agency design lens.

• 1:06:33Dan Shipper?

  Yeah. One of the things that I think about that is as a lens for, for trying to figure out places to build AI that increases agency is that it reduces the cost of certain intelligence services that people pay for right now that use humans so that not so that they don't use humans, that other people who can afford them can get the same thing. So like a really simple example is I run a media company. I don't write all of the like YouTube headlines and all of the like, um, descriptions and all that kind of stuff. Like I have a ghostwriter that I work with who's super talented. But if you're just starting out, like you can't afford that.

• 1:07:15Dan Shipper?

  Um, and but you can use chat GPT or Claude, or we have an internal incubation we did called Spiral that does this. And so it lowers the cost for people to like, have a lot of the leverage that I get because I have more money in the whole organization. There are lots and lots of areas like that that are go beyond creative stuff that I think are, are really important and will be really useful for people.

• 1:07:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think part of the thing I think with AI and it's amplification intelligence is I think it raises the bar, like raises the capability of the folks who have less. Like I don't have access to only at school, I can still learn. I don't have access to a ghostwriter, I can still write some marketing copy. But by the way, it also raises the, well, you have a ghostwriter who's really good, that ghostwriter learns to use ChatGPT, and then also can do that in a much stronger and better way. And I think that's good. Like, I think amplifying across the board is actually a good thing.

• 1:08:09Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, totally. Let me think about if there's anything else for us to discuss.

• 1:08:17Speaker 00

  Well, I'm sure there will be.

• 1:08:18Dan Shipper?

  I'm sure there will be. This is great. Thank you so much for doing this. I had a great time. I can't wait for the book to come out, and I can't wait for another one. I would love to have you on again.

• 1:08:30Speaker 00

  Delight. I look forward to our next conversation.

• 1:08:39Speaker 02

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