DEBRIEF - We're All Gonna Die

Debriefing the episode with Eliezer Yudkowsky. This one was so good, we had to share. The fate of humanity might depend on it. The Debrief Episode goes out EVERY MONDAY for Bankless Citizens. Want the Debrief Episode? Get the Premium RSS feed by Subscribing to Bankless https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/subscribehttps://t.co/33LSH5bBqq! WATCH THE FULL EPISODE HERE: https://youtu.be/gA1sNLL6yg4 ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/ ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

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

• 0:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Welcome to the debrief. This is our episode after the episode with Eliezer Idkowsky, David.

• 0:06David Hoffman?

  I didn't realize that this was gonna hit you so hard, man.

• 0:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  It, uh, it really did. I, you know, I don't think I was ready for this.

• 0:13David Hoffman?

  This wasn't your first time going down the AI alignment rabbit hole?

• 0:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  No, certainly not. And I'd also read a lot of, um, what Eliezer had, had, has said before, listened to previous episode, previous podcast, heard him make the case. But I think there's, there's something much more visceral about this versus any other time I've read his writings or any other time I've seen him. And this is like, I feel like I was looking across someone who was like utterly defeated.

• 0:39David Hoffman?

  Mm-hmm.

• 0:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  And he, he said he still had some hope left, but it didn't feel like that looking across to him.

• 0:47David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 0:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  On our Zoom screen.

• 0:49David Hoffman?

  It was hope in the sense that like, sometimes just people doubt themselves and that's an equivalent amount of hope for him.

• 0:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. This is a man who spent 20 years working on the AI alignment problem and education problem and is, um, as I understand, one of the foremost preeminent thinkers on the subject, um, who is basically like, it, it almost felt like to me that he was, um, throwing up his hands and saying, not throwing up his hands, he, he's basically saying, what more can I do?

• 1:22David Hoffman?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm just going to live out the rest of my days peacefully and, um, go die in the way that I think is best.

• 1:31David Hoffman?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know what I mean? It, it felt like a, a general on the battlefield who like, knows that they've already lost and the army's about to get wiped out and, and saying to the troops like, okay, go die as you see fit. You know what I mean? Like it, it, it had that kind of feeling. And, uh, toward the end, I don't know if, uh, Eliezer was getting emotional or, or like not.

• 1:55David Hoffman?

  I was wondering about that. I mean, how can you not?

• 1:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  It seemed like it, right? I mean, like, um, Just, I think it's that, it's also the sincerity through which he expressed these viewpoints. Like, there is not a doubt in my mind that this man believes what he is saying.

• 2:12David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 2:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  And I combine that and I'm like, well, um, maybe this guy is like the Vitalik of artificial intelligence or like AI alignment. And he's given up? You know, like, um, what hope is there? And so like, I guess I was thinking we would enter this podcast and have like, well, here are all the ways that it could go really wrong. And I think we should be more concerned about these things. And there needs to be more attention. But I thought there would be some silver lining, right? It's like, you know, like all the existential types of conversations about nuclear proliferation,

• 2:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  nuclear holocaust, or about like global warming, or you'll pick your poison, biological weapons. There's always like this, but if we do XYZ, then like, there could be a happy ending. There was none of that here. There was no happy ending. And that's what hit me especially hard in this episode.

• 3:10David Hoffman?

  Yeah. And we, in the agenda, we were like, all right, what's the bull case for AI? And like, which is bankless language for just saying, tell us the positives. Uh, and then there's also like, tell us, and then also what the warnings, like the, the red flags that we need to look out for. And I knew that this episode was going to be like, oh, there's a lot more warnings than there is blue sky.

• 3:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 3:30David Hoffman?

  But yes, I was not expecting, uh, like, hey, there's no blue sky. It's only a pit of, there's only the void. There's, that's the only thing. Um, and I think perhaps like, one of the reasons why you're reacting to this is just because like, this is the guy who's on the furthest reaches of the frontier, who's clearly smart about this, who's clearly thought a lot about this, and is, is the guy to lead the charge against this. And it seems like he gave up years ago.

• 4:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, and he gave up after giving a big try, like, you know, 2015, he had the attention of the world. I feel like this is when Nick Bostrom's book, Bostrom's book came out, the book on superintelligence, I believe it's called. And he, like, this big conference, and you had, like, the billionaires and sort of the tech elite, the Bill Gates and, you know, the Elon Musks saying, yeah, this is a big issue. He thought that that was the moment.

• 4:29David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 4:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  And then I feel like all of maybe the heroes or the helpers who are supposed to partner with him kind of disappointed him because it turned out all that they were interested in doing, or all they ended up doing was like, getting wealthy off of new AI projects, or like, getting some sort of social signal boost from this and not actually doing anything to help solve the problem. And so I feel like he's coming out of that too, and he's just like, well, I guess, I guess this is how we die.

• 5:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  And, you know, like, we know the peril of Moloch traps and coordination failures, and how intractable that they are.

• 5:09David Hoffman?

  This is the Moloch, the most Moloch-y Moloch that I've, that there is, basically.

• 5:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 5:14David Hoffman?

  This is actually the, like, other things are like, oh, Moloch Lite, or Moloch's cousin. No, this is Moloch, as in, like, this is the last step. There is no, there's no, there's no reality past this Moloch.

• 5:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's like trying to stop the internet. Like, how would you even go about doing that when there's such tremendous economic upside for everybody to want to continue this project called the internet? It's like trying to stop electricity. It's like, I mean, this, this ball is in motion.

• 5:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't know, I just, I guess I just pray to God that this guy is wrong.

• 5:50David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 5:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  And...

• 5:51David Hoffman?

  It wouldn't even be him being wrong.

• 5:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, that's what he said. He said the only chance is that I'm wrong. Or that he has, there's some unforeseen way of solving this.

• 6:04David Hoffman?

  It's like a logic problem, right? Like, this is just, this is just like this massive logic problem. And he's come to this like maze and this logic path where it's like you always end up there over and over and over again.

• 6:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  My one question is, do you think he spent too much time in his own head thinking about this? And has gone through like very dark paths as a result and it's kind of?

• 6:27David Hoffman?

  No, I mean, I, it makes, and like I said, it's like a logic problem, right? And so I think he's just gone through this logical path of deduction. And he's come out of this conclusion. And I think it's very normal for a lot of, for people to not want to think. It's like very deep in our DNA is like, I don't want to think about death. Like, I don't want to think about the end of humanity. I'm going to think about literally anything else. And so he's just the only guy who's like smart enough to articulate the position. And committed enough to the actual logical process to get there. And he just happens to be the one sober guy. He was like, hey, all you other people who are trying to like, make yourself naive in this cozy blanket of profits and revenue using AI.

• 7:14David Hoffman?

  Like, you guys are part of the problem.

• 7:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's, it has the feeling of like some of the early sentiments I've read of the physicists who created the first atomic bombs, right?

• 7:27David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 7:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like the Oppenheimer project and like this feeling of like, my God, what have we unleashed? And like, out of that, them wondering how long humanity would actually last? Like that there is some sort of a, you know, even this is band of physicists, I believe grouping together who had equal concerns. I don't know the full history, but of the doomsday clock, right? Of like, now we have to tell the world how dire. This situation actually is of nuclear proliferation and how close we are to midnight on the doomsday clock.

• 8:05David Hoffman?

  I guess I've never really viewed the nuclear proliferation from that perspective. But that that makes sense as in like if you are a scientist who just saw a nuclear bomb go off for the first time, and then you kind of put the pieces together like, oh, soon everyone's going to have this power. And then all of a sudden like, well, of course, there's a doomsday clock because as soon as everyone has this power, the odds of somebody pressing the button drops to almost certainty over time.

• 8:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think a large number of like a decent proportion of the physicists who like were involved in these projects didn't think we would last, you know, another couple of decades.

• 8:41David Hoffman?

  But you're not making the comparison between nuclear arms and AI because like the obvious, the difference here is that in the AI example, the nuclear bombs are sentient and have an agency to live.

• 8:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes.

• 8:56David Hoffman?

  At our expense.

• 8:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's that's sort of the.

• 9:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, that, I mean, we asked that question and he's like, this is way worse. Doesn't he have the motivation to create like a doomsday clock type of social education apparatus because like, what is the point? I mean, this is, I mean, he kept giving kind of this laundry detergent analogy, I think, like for this idea that that creating an AI can be used, you can create an AI using garden variety ingredients. You don't have to have like, you know, enriched.

• 9:35David Hoffman?

  The ability is, well, this is what Daniel Schmachtenberger talks about, where just like the means, the means to destroy the world in many different ways is becoming easier and more accessible as technology progresses. And so this is like why any and every sentient civilization will always progress towards this inevitable, inevitable outcome is because we will always make technology and we will always make AI. But AI is not the only thing in this category. It's just like the worst, it's the worst one. But there's also like the ability to make like a absolutely massively deadly virus in the comfort of your own home is soon to be in the hands of everyone because of bio bioengineering, right?

• 10:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  But I always think on the on the other side, I know that's a huge threat, but I'm always like, but there are vaccines too, and that technology gets better.

• 10:24David Hoffman?

  Right. This is why this is the worst one, because there is no, it's it's the assumption that the morality scale, morality, ethics of AI and humans is completely just like divergent. As in just like orthogonal is the word that a liaison has used in other capacities. It's like AIs and AIs will start to create their own more frameworks of morality and ethics. And it will be insular to the AI species and it will not contain our morality and ethics. It will be completely divergent from each other. And so what they think is good or bad will be on a completely different plane of existence and their plane of existence won't intersect with ours.

• 11:05David Hoffman?

  And that's the crux that like every other technology does not have and why nuclear arms and generating a virus and what was the other one?

• 11:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Nuclear generating a virus. I mean, nanobots could be another one, right?

• 11:20David Hoffman?

  Why that's it's really the morality conversation. That's the separating factor here between the AI doomsday and all the other doomsdays.

• 11:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I that's why you asked why this hit me. It's like, yes, I've dealt with the existential things, you know, like obviously different coordination failures before. But the certainty of this from a, again, I mean, you go back to like, I only saw it once and I was half paying attention, but don't look up movie. I don't even know if I quoted that movie scene correctly anyway, but like, it's just, it felt like a scientist who had been spending decades trying to tell the world that this asteroid was approaching. And now is that kind of the end limit? Like, my God, these people aren't listening. We actually as a species don't have the ability to

• 12:11David Hoffman?

  coordinate.

• 12:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  To coordinate and solve this one and figure it out. And yeah, that was really like.

• 12:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Depressing, like of the level of an asteroid is creating towards Earth and we are doing nothing about it. That's why it hit me so hard. Did it hit you like, is it, but you

• 12:33David Hoffman?

  No, I've done this before and I, not to say that you, that you haven't because you've said you've gone down this rabbit hole before.

• 12:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  I thought I was ready.

• 12:40David Hoffman?

  This isn't new for you, but like, yeah, I remember like listening to Eliezer on Sam Harris's podcast way back when and I was like, I was like painting my dad's house. It was like my summer job and I was listening to it and it was like, I was going through the existential crisis.

• 12:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is from 2018, right?

• 12:56David Hoffman?

  Yeah. And as I go in through the existential crisis, I was like, oh, this is bad. Like, oh, this is really bad, but I need to, you know, get myself through like physical therapy school and like, and so what am I, I'm still going to do all the same things I am going to do tomorrow as a result of this information. And so like, how is it going to impact your life? Like you're still going to go pick up your kids, still going to go kiss your wife goodnight. You're still going to do the bankless podcasts. Like what you're going to do about it?

• 13:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  I guess, but like I, I was more optimistic that we'd have a shot at like persisting past the next 100 years than I was coming out of this episode.

• 13:40David Hoffman?

  Are you going to turn into like an AI doomer and?

• 13:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is that what Eliezer is? Um, you know, is he an AI doomer? Is that somebody, is that like how we should dismiss him? Like, is that a dismissal of his points? Or is that just like, um, I don't know. I guess maybe you're, you're being more stoic about it than me right now, which is like, well, you know, if it's been a nice ride anyway, you know, I guess if, um, if Eliezer is, is right.

• 14:15David Hoffman?

  I mean, you could drop everything and start, and we could turn the bankless podcast into the AI alignment problem podcast and we could start to fight that fight if you wanted to. That is something that we could do.

• 14:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  I just, um, I guess, right? I guess.

• 14:32David Hoffman?

  If you want to start to work towards solving this problem. Cause like it's basically you go about living your life as is and just enjoy the fact that you're alive in the first place. Or, or you, or you turn into an AI doomer and you're like, you build your underground bunker for when the AI-

• 14:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  There's no underground bunker. I think I would probably just like enjoy like life right now and just-

• 14:55David Hoffman?

  Or you just turn your entire life into following eleazers and like start to join that coordination group. Which I think I totally suggest that we do, but I still kind of want to do the more, the normal bankless things as well.

• 15:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, like, I, I think that, um, I mean, maybe in some way crypto, right? I mean, we, we talk about solving coordination problems. I think we're nowhere near to like

• 15:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  solving the coordination problem of artificial intelligence. In fact, this is part of the content we couldn't get to, bankless listeners, because it seemed so pointless. We wanted to ask him questions like,

• 15:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  crypto, now that we've created this programmable money system where the robots get bank accounts, and not only do they get bank accounts, they can actually build banks themselves, have we as crypto just empowered this artificial intelligence? We wanted to ask him questions like that and like, but it just seemed so pointless by the time we got to it. It's like, of course his answer would be yes, but if, you know-

• 15:56David Hoffman?

  He would have to, he would have to be a different personality. He's like, he would have to put on the hat of like, "Oh, you want me to be the AI bullish person? Let me take off my actual hat and put on my fake hat, which is my AI bull person, and then I'll be a fake person in order to act out."

• 16:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  He was not fake at all in this conversation. That's one, that's one thing I'll say. It's like, I expected him to be like, "Yeah, you know, you crypto people should be careful with what, what you're doing. There are some good things and some ways you can raise money to fight this fight, or solve coordination problems in other ways that could be advantageous, but in other ways, you're creating infrastructure to like, you know- Increase the the power and decrease the timeline through which an artificial general intelligence can come destroy us. I expected that, but like by the time we got to it, it's just pointless because I already knew what his answer was gonna be. It's like, yes, and it doesn't matter. It's like that. There's just a, there was a nihilism.

• 16:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  It went past like an absurdism of like, um, yeah, we're screwed. Let's laugh about it like Rick and Morty style. It it got to like, oh, man, this is heavy shit.

• 17:04David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 17:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like, anyway, that's how it hit me. I don't know if it's gonna, how it's gonna hit the listener. Some of you guys might be listening to this and be like, I know much more about artificial general intelligence. I know about the counter arguments to someone like, uh, Eliezer.

• 17:18David Hoffman?

  Is this even a art, a technical artificial intelligence question? This is not about.

• 17:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's a coordination failure.

• 17:25David Hoffman?

  It's a coordination and morality and philosophical question.

• 17:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's why it hit me harder.

• 17:29David Hoffman?

  It's not about the details of AI. It's just like the concept of AI is just the one of the pieces of the puzzle.

• 17:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. I mean, do you think that there's any possibility that, um, he is completely like, I know there's a possibility. Do you think it's?

• 17:43David Hoffman?

  Here's my bull case that I think may, maybe perhaps Eliezer might also agree with for how we still exist. We make the AI that he thinks that we're gonna make and the AI, and the AI just does not give a fuck about us.

• 18:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, I tried to propose that.

• 18:02David Hoffman?

  You ants can just have your earth and we, and you guys are making it marginally difficult to harvest your resources as resources elsewhere. So we're gonna go elsewhere. If you guys are, become the hardest resources, not, no longer the hardest resources to cultivate, we'll come back. But right now, we'll just go grab Mars.

• 18:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  So it's just like, it's just like blasts off into the Milky Way somewhere.

• 18:24David Hoffman?

  Distracting, yeah.

• 18:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's like, see you later.

• 18:27David Hoffman?

  And we get like a few more generations to live before they come back and then eat us.

• 18:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Or do they, yeah, maybe they don't need us. Maybe they don't care. Maybe they have other things to do. Um, yeah, I. I mean, there are these possible outcomes. Yeah, that's maybe part of the follow-up Q and A of just like, it still didn't totally make sense to me that the AIs would be like auto evil. We want to mail everyone a bacteria that's going to destroy every single human being and rearrange their atoms. Like, like, maybe it just, the default is ignore. If you're not getting in my way, if you're not going to shut me down, if you can't shut me down, then see you later. I'm going to blast off and like go explore the rest of the galaxy. I don't know.

• 19:13David Hoffman?

  So here's my question for the hopefully incoming Q and A session with Eliezer. So we have to train our AI models, right? We have to, we have to train them on data. What data do we have? The internet? Where did all the data come from on the internet? It came from humans. So don't we actually imbue our culture and who we are as humans into AIs that way? And like, even though it's not technically part of the code as to how to learn values and morals, won't they just like, absorb it just because that's where their data is coming from?

• 19:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I mean, that is people's likes, sort of the argument of like, why can't it be a gentle parent to us? Why does it have to be? Like, why can't it kind of be some sort of like a father figure for humanity and be like a kind?

• 19:58David Hoffman?

  It will literally have our DNA in it. Well, not literally, but.

• 20:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, no, but like it could have our memetics in it. It could.

• 20:03David Hoffman?

  Yeah, right.

• 20:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  I, I mean, we could ask that question again. I feel like we proposed that and he answered it. Maybe he wasn't in the headspace to kind of like, answer it in more detail, or maybe the question has to be constructed in a different, or maybe I just like pepper, like, I think there were times where I overwhelmed him with questions. I said this in the intro. And just like, it's just a style.

• 20:29David Hoffman?

  He, well, he.

• 20:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Choose your own question.

• 20:31David Hoffman?

  Your style is like, here's a bunch of words. It's, it's all collectively a vibe. Respond to the vibe, which is actually good podcasting, but that's how I've learned to ask questions and many, many people work with that style of things. We're like, you overload them with questions, but they get the vibe and they already know what they want to say.

• 20:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Or they just choose which one to answer.

• 20:50David Hoffman?

  Exactly, yeah. They, well, most guests just want, like, I think I've been on the guest seat more than you have, but like, most guests, you just pick the answer that you want to give. You already, you know what you want to say anyways. It doesn't matter what the question is.

• 21:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 21:03David Hoffman?

  He is not like that. He's very process oriented and logical and...

• 21:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  He's like, "You sent me three queries."

• 21:10David Hoffman?

  You've made, you've...

• 21:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  And I need to return...

• 21:11David Hoffman?

  He's like an AI.

• 21:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes.

• 21:12David Hoffman?

  Exactly. He's like a computer.

• 21:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  I need to return three direct questions and like, it's too many queries at the same time. It's like, don't DDoS me.

• 21:19David Hoffman?

  Right, exactly. Yeah.

• 21:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  But yeah, that's, I, you know, that's kind of a style thing aside, but like, yeah. As far as the substance, I don't know. I feel like this, this list of people he mentioned, Paul, Cristiano, Adja, Kultra, Kelsey Piper, Robin Hanson. I've heard of Robin Hanson. I don't know very much.

• 21:39David Hoffman?

  Robin Hanson, he wrote this book, Elephant in the Brain, which is one of my all-time favorite books.

• 21:45David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah. It spoke at East Denver, 2018.

• 21:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you think that this could be like, just, somebody listening to this is like, "Oh, cute. The crypto guys are like interviewing an AI person. They're all scared. Isn't that cute? It's their first time." And they're like, really good answers for why we won't all be destroyed by artificial general intelligence?

• 22:04David Hoffman?

  No, no, because crypto, sorry.

• 22:09David Hoffman?

  Crypto, like, we're pretty, we're futurists in crypto. Like, we don't know, it's not like we know nothing about AI.

• 22:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  I thought we knew a little bit. Like, we knew more than...

• 22:17David Hoffman?

  Yeah, like, I've, I mean...

• 22:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think a lot of people will listen to this podcast and be like, "That is complete BS." Like, I'm talking about not crypto people. I'm talking about like, normies.

• 22:26David Hoffman?

  Oh.

• 22:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right? They'll listen to this and be like, "What is he talking about? I'm not afraid of Siri." Like, "See you later. What a crackpot." But crypto people, we're like totally into this. Like, we understand.

• 22:38David Hoffman?

  Right. I kind of always, it was, I was trying to think about that while making the agenda for the podcast, like, okay, we've never done intentional AI content on the podcast, but I'm not going to assume that the average bankless listener, like, doesn't know about the alignment problem. I'm gonna guess that like 50% of, at least 50% of bankless listeners already knew about the alignment problem going into this podcast.

• 22:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. Evil AI coming to kill us and we can't teach it morality and it just gets super intelligent and then we didn't even use the paperclip analogy, the idea that

• 23:09David Hoffman?

  Exactly, yeah.

• 23:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  You construct some general intelligence to create a paperclip factory and what it ends up doing is as a byproduct, turn every atom in the reachable universe into a paperclip, including all of the rest of humanity. And this was like a analogy and I think a device actually created by Eliezer, which is like another fun fact. This guy is like thinking about this stuff for a while.

• 23:33David Hoffman?

  Yeah, this guy is, he's inside of a lot of conversations as really say, AI for sure.

• 23:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's heavy, man. It's heavy. Are you, are you good? I just like, are you processing?

• 23:43David Hoffman?

  I'm, I'm fine. Yeah. I, I'm, yeah, I'm generally like stoked about these things. Yeah. You, you seem like I need to kind of check on you tomorrow morning.

• 23:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Dude, I was like, I mean, like, I was like, um, getting worked up in that episode a little bit, like a little bit like,

• 23:58David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 24:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow. Shit. Like, yeah, it's that, that was the prognosis for humanity. It's fatal.

• 24:08David Hoffman?

  Yeah. I guess I, I haven't thought about this stuff in a while.

• 24:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Don't let me drag you down, dude. Keep your vibes up. Okay. Don't let me drag the rest of the nation down.

• 24:17David Hoffman?

  Hey, we, we can turn this into a, an AI alignment podcast if you want.

• 24:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm not smart enough to do that.

• 24:24David Hoffman?

  I don't, I, I actually, no, it goes back to, I don't think it's an AI thing. It's just like a philosophy and awareness thing.

• 24:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. We are really good at educating, like,

• 24:34David Hoffman?

  We can just like include in the intro, welcome to Bankless.

• 24:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  We're probably gonna die soon.

• 24:40David Hoffman?

  Money and finance. Also, remember to talk about the AI problem and get everyone on board with the AI alignment problem and now into the episode.

• 24:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  We got 20 years left at best, two to 20.

• 24:51David Hoffman?

  20 years, yeah. Hell of a mind. I got some things to do, I guess.

• 24:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's heavy. All right. Well, maybe he's wrong though. Can, can we say that? Okay, here's one thing I'll say.

• 25:02David Hoffman?

  That's always like, I've always kind of shelled like, yeah, there's like, it's the long tail of like, maybe the black swan works in our favor this time.

• 25:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  We, uh, so Vitalik has given to Eliezer's Institute in the past. And so we reached out and just, as we do, we ask kind of our close contacts of like, hey, are there any, you're a big brain, we're having this big brain on, can you tell it? Like, would you ask them if you were us? And Vitalik, I don't think he'd mind us saying, he's like, well, just stay away from topics like, um, you know, like, the centralization problems of artificial intelligence, because, because Eliezer is well past that. He's like, he doesn't care about centralization.

• 25:45David Hoffman?

  He wouldn't have let us go there.

• 25:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, he's like, we're all gonna die.

• 25:47David Hoffman?

  He would have immediately said, who cares about centralization?

• 25:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Exactly, exactly. So, okay, so we didn't go there, and we weren't silly enough, but like, Vitalik's comment was, um, Eliezer's probability of doom is probably like a point nine, 90% probability of doom. Actually, after this episode, I think it's like a 99.8.

• 26:05David Hoffman?

  It's like 98 plus, yeah.

• 26:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  And then he said, but my probability of doom is probably a point one, so 10% odds. I like those odds.

• 26:13David Hoffman?

  He sent point, he said point one?

• 26:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's what he said. So I like those odds a lot better. And Vitalik is also someone who's very smart, and I want to know why that delta exists. And now, he hasn't spent his whole life on artificial intelligence, obviously, and AI safety, so, you know, like, maybe there's a kind of a delta. It's like, I wouldn't trust Eliezer's opinion on all things crypto, of course, but, um, I don't know, maybe there's some hope there, that there are, like, I guess, we need to get other opinions, is what I'm saying, before we kind of, and I feel like that's one thing I'd like to do. I don't want to turn this into an AI podcast, but like, I want to hear somebody.

• 26:55David Hoffman?

  But before we do, I need a second opinion.

• 26:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  I need some hope, David.

• 27:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  I need somebody to come on.

• 27:06David Hoffman?

  So I think Vitalik's like the actually the best person to do this because like, once again, this is not an AI issue. This is a philosophy thing. And who else other than AI than Vitalik?

• 27:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, he's pretty optimistic, you know, in general, but.

• 27:18David Hoffman?

  That's one, a question I didn't, we didn't have time for with Eliezer. I wanted to ask like, were you always so pessimistic or what?

• 27:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  I, I was worried that that would almost seem so too prying, but I guess that retrospectively could have been a good question. I think he was fairly open. I was just like, I was a little, I'd say worried about his mental state, but it was just very like, um, yeah, dude, it was very down.

• 27:42David Hoffman?

  I was just curious about like, okay, since you've so convictively come to this conclusion, like, what do you do with your day?

• 27:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  We said he's on sabbatical. That was the other thing. On sabbatical, I might come back into this. I have somewhere at value to add. That's why I have time for podcasts. Look, maybe he's just burnt out with it. Maybe, uh, I don't know, man.

• 28:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's all I got. Uh, I, I need to let this episode percolate, sleep on this one. And, uh, I, I, apologies to everyone listening that if we accidentally gave you an existential crisis. We, we try to keep things light and upbeat and optimistic and bullish. Ultimately, we are bullish on humanity.

• 28:21David Hoffman?

  We're the most bullish people ever. And that podcast is like, is one thing like, damn, you, there's no way to be bullish about that.

• 28:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right? How do we turn this? How do we flip this one?

• 28:31David Hoffman?

  How do we spin this narrative? Not even us. There's another, uh, subject matter, which I can't remember. Maybe it was Eliezer on Sam Harris, but he talked about how knowledge is discovered, like what knowledge is, and how knowledge kind of exists even without a form factor to hold it in. Does that make sense?

• 28:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 28:51David Hoffman?

  As in like, um, and, and so like, there's a lot of knowledge out there that humans don't know. Uh, there's a big gap between where we are versus where we will be when AI comes. 10, 20 years is a lot of time.

• 29:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, let's, let's remember.

• 29:06David Hoffman?

  Because there's a lot we don't know.

• 29:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Eliezer is not an all-knowing being either. And like, he is, um, yeah, ultimately, he's one smart person who's taken a close look at this and come back despairing. There, you know, other people who I assume come back more optimistic. So, yeah, I guess there's that.

• 29:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, uh, that's it. Accidentally gave myself an existential crisis. We'll try to record a podcast, but uh, I'll bounce back tomorrow for State of the Nation. We'll get some recording done. We'll be back on Crypto Topics and I'll just forget this ever happened, huh?

• 29:41David Hoffman?

  I'll get Logan to make a, make a po app. I accidentally gave myself an existential crisis while doing everything.

• 29:48David Hoffman?

  It's a one of one po. We'll get that.

• 29:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right. Well, um, check in on me tomorrow and let's talk about it then. Banks Nation, hope you enjoyed the debrief.

• 29:58David Hoffman?

  I guess we just keep on doing this.

• 30:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Cause why not?

• 30:02David Hoffman?

  Oh, cause why not?