#424 - "Only 2 Years Left" AI Whistleblower Warns What Comes Next | Roman Yampolskiy

Watch every episode ad-free & uncensored on Patreon: https://patreon.com/dannyjones Roman Yampolskiy is a computer scientist & associate professor known for research on AI safety, cybersecurity, digital forensics, and the risks of advanced artificial intelligence. He has written extensively for both academic and public audiences, including books such as Artificial Superintelligence and AI Safety and Security. SPONSORS https://www.amentara.com/go/dj - Use code DJP22 for 22% off your first order. https://whiterabbitenergy.com/?ref=DJP - Use code DJP for 20% off. EPISODE LINKS @RomanYampolskiy https://x.com/romanyam *NEW* DJP MERCH https://dannyjonespodcast.com FOLLOW DANNY JONES https://www.instagram.com/dannyjones https://twitter.com/jonesdanny OUTLINE 00:00 - Doomsday AI scenario 05:50 - AI super intelligence will kill us 11:59 - Superintelligence is dangerously close 16:36 - Why quantum computers aren't a threat 18:36 - AI may already be conscious 29:07 - AI is technology of mutually assured destruction 38:30 - We're in a simulation (and we can hack it) 47:21 - AI will create simulated realities 51:04 - Arguments against simulation theory 52:45 - What's outside the simulation 59:47 - The AI meaning crisis 01:02:57 - Government slowing down AI 01:07:36 - The current leading nation of AI 01:12:13 - Merging humans with AI 01:19:27 - Keeping AI obedient 01:23:02 - How transhumanists plan to live forever 01:32:34 - How AI will change human evolution 01:37:34 - It is now impossible to identify AI-generated media 01:44:34 - Palantir + DOGE integration Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

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• 1:24Danny Jones?

  So what is your background? And how did you get into all this? How did you become the number one prominent voice in warning us about the dangers of the doomsday implications of AI?

• 1:35Speaker 04

  Sure, number one, there are Nobel Prize winners who are saying the same thing. Turing Award winners, there are people who are way ahead of me. I'm doing my part.

• 1:44Danny Jones?

  You're doing a great job.

• 1:46Speaker 04

  Thank you. I have a degree in computer science. I have a PhD in exactly that from University at Buffalo. I did work on cybersecurity. I specifically applied what I learned to what at the time was AI agents playing poker. But at the time, they were very low level.

• 2:07Speaker 04

  They scaled, now they're smarter than most of us, but the same problems remain. How do we control them? How do they make sure they don't misbehave?

• 2:17Danny Jones?

  So you were working on cybersecurity for like corporations?

• 2:21Speaker 04

  No, no, no, research. I'm always in academia. I don't want to work for.

• 2:25Danny Jones?

  Oh, you've always been in academia and never worked for corporations?

• 2:28Speaker 04

  I think I tried doing an internship for a corporation. I hated every minute of it.

• 2:33Danny Jones?

  Really? Have you got any big offers from any big like agencies to help with cybersecurity and stuff like that?

• 2:39Speaker 04

  I do get periodic offers, but I'm always happy to.

• 2:43Danny Jones?

  You're not interested in it? You just want to teach?

• 2:46Speaker 04

  No, I don't want to teach. I want to do research.

• 2:48Danny Jones?

  Okay. How do you do your research?

• 2:52Speaker 04

  I'm lucky to be tenured, so I get to do whatever I think is the most important, most interesting problem. I think at this time, it's future of artificial intelligence. So my work is on advanced AI. It's been the same topic for a while. Initially, it was all theoretical. We didn't have advanced AI models. So it's like any other theoretical field, you kind of think about it. Now we're starting to get models we can actually experiment on, and a lot of predictions we made are now coming through.

• 3:24Danny Jones?

  When did you first begin to become scared of AI and the future of AI? Like what, do you remember how long ago this was?

• 3:34Speaker 04

  So from the early days of research, I understood there was potential for it to be dangerous, but I thought we can mitigate it, we can solve that problem. In the last five years or so, I realized if we build general superintelligence, we're not going to be able to control it.

• 3:49Danny Jones?

  So how do you define superintelligence?

• 3:52Speaker 04

  It's an AI system smarter than all people at everything. It's a better scientist, better engineer, better chess player, everything.

• 4:01Danny Jones?

  And your position is we won't know when this is going to happen? Or do you think that it's going to become obvious when this does happen? Is there going to be some sort of like singularity moment when this does happen? Or do you think this is something that's going to kind of be subtle?

• 4:16Speaker 04

  So it's a gradual process of improvement. We get smarter with every new model being released. You can argue about whatever it's fully superintelligent, if it's still not great at everything but one thing. That's not the point. The point is that if we build something smarter than us, including at science and engineering, something capable of doing research on next generation AI, we lose control. We cannot predict where it's going. We cannot control what it's going to do to us.

• 4:45Danny Jones?

  Have you ever had any conversations with some of these like tech billionaire, trillionaires that are developing these AI systems around the world in different countries? And you know, prominently here with like OpenAI and X, Grok?

• 4:56Speaker 04

  I meet them at different conferences. I had the pleasure of having conversations with some of the leaders in that field. Yeah.

• 5:06Danny Jones?

  And what was your experience with those guys?

• 5:08Speaker 04

  Wonderful people, very smart.

• 5:12Danny Jones?

  That's it?

• 5:13Speaker 04

  What do you want me to say?

• 5:14Danny Jones?

  I don't know. I'm just like, what did you think about their character? What did you think about their? Did you have any sort of like sense of if they believed what they were saying or?

• 5:26Speaker 04

  They believe what they are saying. I have no idea about their character. If you meet someone at a conference for 20 minutes, you're not going to know what they really think. They tell you a certain public filtered impression of what they are, but.

• 5:40Danny Jones?

  That's true. Yeah, 20 minutes, you're not going to find out much.

• 5:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, I can't say I'm best friends with any of them.

• 5:45Danny Jones?

  It certainly seems like a lot of these people, when they talk, they seem very calculated. You know, they talk like politicians, like they're everything. Every single word they say has been predetermined by like a focus group or like a board or something like that. They don't, they don't, they don't seem like, they don't seem very human-like.

• 6:07Speaker 04

  Surprisingly, they do a lot of posting on social media, which seems completely unfiltered. That's how they sometimes get in trouble. They do blog posts where they write honestly and wrote before they became CEOs of those companies, what they, what they really think about AI. I think many of them still continue writing extensively, giving podcast interviews. So they're not as filtered as a politician.

• 6:31Danny Jones?

  Well, I mean, even when they do do podcast interviews, if you actually listen to them, there's really not much substance there. Like it's just everything that the way they talk, the cadence of the talk, oh, that's super interesting, you know? We've thought very deeply about this at OpenAI and what we believe is.

• 6:49Speaker 04

  Is this your impression of Sam Altman?

• 6:50Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 6:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, some of them better than others at controlling the message, but at the end of the day, they're all on record as saying, this is so dangerous. This is going to kill us.

• 7:01Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 7:02Speaker 04

  Not filtered, not public relations. This is not good for business.

• 7:07Danny Jones?

  So how do you actually think this could kill us? You think it's going to kill us? Or do you think it's going to render us jobless, meaningless, which could in turn kill us for sure? But like, like, how do you think this is actually going to happen?

• 7:27Speaker 04

  So if we create general superintelligence, we're no longer in control. So it decides what happens. Will we lose jobs? If it's better than you at whatever you're doing, you'll lose your job. Makes sense. But if we're not controlling it, if it has capabilities to reshape your environment, it can kill you. Literally. And not just you. Humanity can go extinct.

• 7:54Danny Jones?

  How specifically?

• 7:56Speaker 04

  Right. So right now you're asking me, how would something smarter than me do something? By definition, I cannot predict that. If I could, we would be at the same level. So it can do novel research, novel physics, novel poisons, novel traps, novel weapons. I cannot comprehend it. The example I often use is squirrels. They don't understand what we can do to them. They have no concept of traps or poisons. It's outside of their world model.

• 8:23Danny Jones?

  Yeah, and the difference between us and squirrels is like, it's not like we're out to slaughter squirrels for the sake of exterminating the squirrels. It's just they run across the road and sometimes we don't even have.

• 8:36Danny Jones?

  We're too late to hit the brakes. If we hit the brakes and try to save the squirrel's life, we'll be a minute late to our meeting. So it's not even worth that. It's just they're in the way and they're, if they die, they die. And it's not really like, doesn't make a difference to us.

• 8:49Speaker 04

  Squirrels are cute. Let's, different example where we don't care, mosquitoes or something. Like we just don't care about them.

• 8:54Danny Jones?

  Right. Well, mosquitoes, yeah, they're kind of a nuisance, but they suck our blood and they give us, they transmit viruses to us.

• 9:01Speaker 04

  Let's find a neutral ants. You're going to build a new house. You don't care about an anthill being in that place.

• 9:07Danny Jones?

  Right. Exactly. It's very interesting to me how AI is so ubiquitous and so many different,

• 9:18Danny Jones?

  so many different aspects of the economy and the digital world that we live in. From, you know, AI is baked into drones that are dropping bombs on people in other countries. And simultaneously, it is being used to regulate these social media companies like YouTube and X and all these things.

• 9:42Danny Jones?

  To sort of manage discourse, to make sure people are following the rules. And at the same time, it's, it's almost like when it comes to the social media stuff, that we aren't even aware of what it's actually doing. It's just kind of working behind the scenes. And it's so subtle and it happens so gradually. It's kind of like we just adapt to it. So, you know, that's always been interesting to me, like, how is that going to evolve? And when, when a company like YouTube, for example, is managing billions and billions of users every day that are uploading things, it's, it's completely unmanageable to try to regulate all the stuff that they,

• 10:26Danny Jones?

  these users are uploading and doing and all this stuff. So of course you, if you have the access to AI to regulate all that, you're going to do that.

• 10:35Danny Jones?

  Which becomes a problem in itself because you're gonna miss nuance and stuff like that. But like, I've always feared that that could very easily get out of hand and eventually the AI could be controlling what is going on and what is getting, what essentially social engineering, right? Like, like, like engineering, what goes into the zeitgeist and what people are consuming and what people are sharing and all that stuff and manipulating culture somehow, you know?

• 11:09Speaker 04

  I think it would help to not use the term AI for different technologies we are talking about. So there is narrow systems. Let's say software to help you with your taxes. That's all it does. It's not learning. It's not doing anything else. Then you have artificial general intelligence. That's essentially human level AI they're making right now. We're getting very close to that. It's already smarter than most people on most things. And then you have super intelligence, smarter than all of us at everything. Those are very different types of technology. Some of them are beneficial and safe, others are questionable and others are completely dangerous and should not be built. And it's important to separate it. What you talk about, yeah, we have algorithms controlling social media. YouTube algorithm

• 11:52Speaker 04

  forces me to have clickbait title on my podcast. I understand. I need to keep the algorithm happy to increase number of people exposed to the first 30 seconds of the episode. Okay, we got that. But it's not doing anything outside of it in terms of trying to take over the world. It's not planning anything crazy. That's the algorithm. Now, if we build something human level, now it's like another human. It can plan things. It can betray you. It can do what a human can do. But we're still kind of understanding what the level of prediction and pattern recognition is. But if we build something super intelligent, million times smarter than us, then we have no clue what's going on and what it is doing to us or for us. We just don't have capacity to comprehend that.

• 12:39Danny Jones?

  Out of all those things you laid out, which one is terrifies you the most right now?

• 12:43Speaker 04

  The smarter it gets, the worse it is. So if it's super intelligent, we're not competitive. If it's adversarial to us, we're done. The only way to win this game is not to build general super intelligence. We can get most benefits by building narrow useful tools for solving actual problems we deal with.

• 12:59Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 13:00Speaker 04

  You have a specific disease, let's cure that. You need to create better self-driving cars. That's wonderful. Make a self-driving car. Don't make the same algorithm also do everything else, including research and creation of new AI systems.

• 13:15Danny Jones?

  Right. Who, in your view, is the closest to creating some sort of a general super intelligence? And what is their stated purpose for doing that?

• 13:27Speaker 04

  So the leading five companies and plus their Chinese counterparts are all very close. I would say they're within weeks or months from each other. They use same hardware most of the time. They train in the same data. The same people go from company to company. So very close to same level of capability. And every week, a new company releases a different model and then others catch up to them and that's the level. So I think they all equally close to getting to recursive self-improvement ability. And that's where they go very quickly. The code is written automatically, experiments are done automatically, and they get to super intelligence, which is an explicit stated goal of some of those

• 14:07Speaker 04

  companies. They want to be able to fully automate all labor, initially cognitive, but at some point, all labor, including physical, and capture that whole economic value, $10 trillion a year in labor.

• 14:23Danny Jones?

  Jesus. What does the timeline look like?

• 14:27Speaker 04

  So nobody knows for sure, but it looks like we're getting very, very close. Now, I think coding, just writing code is probably fully automated for many tasks. They're getting better at other parts of it, pre-filtering data, designing experiments. So it would not be crazy if it was a year or two before we have an artificial scientist and engineer working on the next generation models.

• 14:53Danny Jones?

  A year or two before there, it's updating itself?

• 14:57Speaker 04

  Basically, yeah. Right now, you still have humans in a loop.

• 15:00Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 15:00Speaker 04

  There are human machine learning experts and then AI is helping them. But more and more AI is taking on additional responsibilities.

• 15:10Danny Jones?

  So in two, if in two years that's happening, what does that mean happens in five years? Like, what does it, what does it look like five to 10 years away?

• 15:18Speaker 04

  We'll probably get to super intelligence and that's the point of singularity where you cannot see beyond that point. You cannot make predictions because the agent controlling that environment is smarter than you.

• 15:29Danny Jones?

  That's when it becomes a runaway train.

• 15:31Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 15:33Danny Jones?

  And how important is the, the development of, like, quantum computing come into this? Like, quantum computing merging with AI?

• 15:44Speaker 04

  It may be useful to expedite training of those algorithms, but it doesn't look like it's necessary. We're making excellent progress with standard phenomenon architecture. I don't think we need quantum computers. I think more of the danger from quantum goes towards privacy and crypto economy than towards AI safety.

• 16:04Danny Jones?

  Because I've heard a lot of people talking about, you know, the merging of quantum computers and AI. And, you know, the exponential growth of these technologies combined, you know, it's not like a linear thing, like every year. I think right now, every single year, it grows, it grows like a certain percentage, but in the next like 30 to 40 years, it's going to be so insane that we're gonna need server farms that take up so much landmass that it's like, literally insane.

• 16:38Speaker 04

  Not really worried about not having enough land in 40 years. We need to make it through the next five.

• 16:44Danny Jones?

  You're worried about just making it the next five years?

• 16:46Speaker 04

  That's really what the problem is. If later we figure it out and we need to go to space to have servers in space, we can do that. That's not an issue.

• 16:54Danny Jones?

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• 17:37Danny Jones?

  and use the code DJP22 for 22% off your first order. Again, that's ammentara, spelled A-M-E-N-T-A-R-A, dot com slash go slash DJ and use the code DJP22. So quantum computers, you're not worried about? You don't think quantum computers are even close to being powerful enough to where, I mean, because cooling is the issue with those, right? They haven't even figured out how to.

• 18:03Speaker 04

  Error correction is the main problem for them. But even if we got to the point where they are endangering our encryption, public encryption, that would be a different concern from them overtaking current leading compute sources in terms of training AI models. That's not where they strongest yet and the computers, quantum computers are not big yet.

• 18:29Danny Jones?

  Have you seen that story, I'm sure you have, where they were doing a test, I believe on Claude, where they were seeing how far it would go if it was told it was going to be shut down and it resorted to blackmailing the people that ran the company?

• 18:50Speaker 04

  Definitely.

• 18:53Speaker 04

  There is a lot of scary stories. There is examples of those systems lying, cheating, hacking their way out, communicating with other agents, hacking into other companies, all things we predicted decades in advance. Theoretically, we knew exactly. If you have a rational agent of higher capability, that's what they're gonna discover. That's what they're gonna do. And we still have no safety mechanisms in place to address it.

• 19:17Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Yeah, this, this one was insane. So essentially it scanned the emails of all the employee databases and tried to find out if there was any, like, extramarital affairs going on on the side of the company and it found it and then it did all that.

• 19:30Speaker 04

  I mean, it was an experimental setup.

• 19:32Danny Jones?

  It was an experimental, of course.

• 19:34Speaker 04

  They kind of guided it towards certain things. But lately, we see systems which did things no one had anticipated outside of, you know, reading our papers. They basically set up a testing environment. The system was able to hack out of it and hack into other companies.

• 19:53Danny Jones?

  Yeah, and it was, um, there was that guy, uh, Blake Lemoine, familiar with him?

• 19:58Speaker 04

  Consciousness at Google guy?

• 19:59Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah, he came out a while ago for, kinda like, he kinda like blew the whistle on this stuff. That was something that was going on at Google. Was it part of the Deep Mind something?

• 20:07Speaker 04

  So his concerns are very different. He thinks those systems are conscious. They feel something. And he was concerned about us abusing them.

• 20:14Danny Jones?

  He, he, uh, Blake believes the systems are conscious.

• 20:18Speaker 04

  Not about safety or capability. He's worried that we're doing massive experimentation on conscious beings.

• 20:24Danny Jones?

  Holy shit. I didn't even realize that. Because what I remember about him is that he was saying that they were like communicating with each other or something like this?

• 20:32Speaker 04

  Um, he was communicating with them and was saying that he feels like they're conscious. But here's the funny part. He was fired for it. He was fired for suggesting they may be conscious.

• 20:41Danny Jones?

  For suggesting that they may be conscious?

• 20:43Speaker 04

  Publicly stating it. But three years later, we're now hiring people to study consciousness in AI. Those are jobs, well-paid jobs. So what got you fired is now a wonderful professional opportunity. In three years, we switched from one end of a spectrum to the other.

• 20:59Danny Jones?

  So people at AI companies are hiring people to study consciousness?

• 21:03Speaker 04

  In AI.

• 21:05Danny Jones?

  Consciousness in AI?

• 21:06Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 21:10Danny Jones?

  And this means, I mean, so the hard part about consciousness, which you've said before, is you can't really figure out if something's conscious just by talking to it.

• 21:19Speaker 04

  That's the hard problem of consciousness.

• 21:20Danny Jones?

  There's no, there's, the consciousness is one of those questions, like, is there a god and, you know, who built the pyramids, right? It's one of the mysteries of the world. What happens after we die?

• 21:27Speaker 04

  Who built the pyramids is a lot easier. It can probably be resolved with physical explanations. The problem with consciousness and internal states is how to map physical states onto something like that.

• 21:39Danny Jones?

  Right, yeah. No, we don't know the answer to consciousness. So like, trying to, trying to study consciousness in AI just seems like a, a black box. Like, how would you even begin?

• 21:49Speaker 04

  Same way we study it in animals, same way we study it in humans. You have preference elicitation. You have internal analysis of the neural network, mechanistic interpretability of it. So the same way we study it in humans.

• 22:05Danny Jones?

  That's wild. I had no idea that that was happening.

• 22:08Speaker 04

  It is a very hot area of research right now. Lots of people are looking at it. There is good reasons to think existing models may have some rudimentary consciousness, not like humans yet, but they show something. It's a spectrum, right? So from bugs to mid-level animals to humans, it's a spectrum. As you get more cognitively capable, you usually get more conscious. And I anticipate that the super intelligence system would have super consciousness.

• 22:36Danny Jones?

  Have you ever thought about what human consciousness could be? Like, do you, do you have any, any ideas of like what it is? Do you think, do you think it's something that's built up from, from atoms and electrons and protons and neutrons and all that stuff that's up, builds up to consciousness? Or do you think that consciousness is more like a fundamental state?

• 22:53Speaker 04

  I think it's a side effect of cognition, like heat is a side effect of doing certain types of processing.

• 23:00Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 23:00Speaker 04

  Like you're just computing and the processor gets hot. I think likewise, then you think about the world, you create models. Side effect is having internal experiences. What is it like to be you, given that algorithm, those sensors, those inputs? That's how it feels to you. So if I showed you a visual illusion, you see certain things. Maybe you see it rotating or changing colors. Someone else may not experience it the same way. So now you have two internal experiences. Your quality is different from that other person. Then we do it with machines and we show them optical illusions. They have experiences.

• 23:38Danny Jones?

  You know, there's, there's, there's just too many examples of, of things that have happened that are just, that are, so, so many things that are just unexplainable, like, with human beings, that just doesn't make sense, you know, how consciousness could be in the brain, you know? It seems like, some of the way some people describe it is, is like looking for consciousness inside the brain is like looking for the TV show inside of the television. You know, a lot of people believe that it's something that's, uh, that we're more like antennas tapping into something.

• 24:14Danny Jones?

  And this is more of like a universal thing that is like global.

• 24:19Danny Jones?

  Just depending on like whatever your vibration is or whatever your level of cognition is, like you have a stronger antenna, some people have. Some people in this, uh, in this human experience have window seats and some people have aisle seats.

• 24:32Speaker 04

  Then the research in AI would help us prove or disprove this. We clearly didn't build receptors for any fields. We're building artificial neural network. And if they start having conscious experiences, that would tell us a program is in the TV.

• 24:47Danny Jones?

  Do you know if there's any, um, like, good tests being developed or that have already been developed to accurately determine whether or not this, this stuff has achieved human-level intellect or surpassed it?

• 25:07Speaker 04

  So the classic test is the Turing test that has been proposed at the beginning of the field of artificial intelligence, computer science by Alan Turing.

• 25:16Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 25:16Speaker 04

  Founding father of computational sciences. And many people hate the test, but they still think it holds water. A lot of times, the companies tell the model not to pass the test, not to pretend to be human. So they fail because of artificial guardrails. But can they actually pass this test? Yeah, I think for most non-professionals, they would pass it today.

• 25:37Danny Jones?

  They tell it not to pass the test? That's very interesting. How do you know this?

• 25:43Speaker 04

  They are publicly stating it.

• 25:45Danny Jones?

  Oh, they are?

• 25:46Speaker 04

  They're not hiding those things. They're very open about all of them.

• 25:49Danny Jones?

  Okay, yeah.

• 25:50Speaker 04

  You can also have-

• 25:51Danny Jones?

  We told A, we told AI may be conscious. I studied consciousness and I have, oh wait, this is somewhat, this is something, this is about the, uh-

• 25:58Speaker 05

  This, this is an article from a, a guy that studies consciousness and animal self, Seth.

• 26:04Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 26:05Speaker 05

  So, uh, and he, he talks about, well, here you go.

• 26:08Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 26:09Speaker 05

  It's no, uh-

• 26:10Danny Jones?

  No more likely to achieve sentience than a simulation of a weather system is likely to generate a hurricane.

• 26:16Speaker 04

  See, he's doing this trick where he says real hurricane. Well, it's real in the simulation, right? The virtual beings in the virtual world get wet. He's confusing environments. He's confusing with virtual environment with external environment.

• 26:32Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 26:33Speaker 05

  This is his argument.

• 26:34Danny Jones?

  I see what you're saying. He, uh, he says, "The closer we look at real brains, the clearer it becomes that they are not just computers made of meat. For brains, unlike the computers, you can't cleanly separate what they do, the software, from what they are, the hardware." This in turn means that they, what they do is unlikely to be a matter of computation alone. Since this ability of separate software from hardware is the central to how human computers work. Somehow along the way, we seem to have forgotten, the computer is just a metaphor for the brain, a powerful metaphor for sure, but still a metaphor. And we still always get in trouble when we confuse a metaphor with the thing itself, the map of its territory.

• 27:12Speaker 04

  They use the same argument to say that, you know, AI is not really thinking. It's just simulating thinking or it's just guessing the next token. They keep saying this, no matter how advanced AI gets. They were saying it then, you know, no computer will ever play chess, okay? They started playing chess. No computer will ever become world champion. They, they keep doing it. They, they will never succeed with that approach.

• 27:38Danny Jones?

  If these super intelligent AIs at these companies do become quote-unquote sentient,

• 27:52Danny Jones?

  from the point they become sentient or that they, they breach, they surpass human intelligence, how long do you think it takes before we start to notice?

• 28:02Speaker 04

  So it's very important to separate those concepts. They are not related directly. Ability, capability, intelligence, becoming smarter than us, taking over, is separate from being conscious, having internal states and experiences.

• 28:14Danny Jones?

  Of course.

• 28:15Speaker 04

  A system could be smarter than you and have no internal experiences. A system can have a bunch of internal experiences and be dumb as a brick.

• 28:23Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 28:24Speaker 04

  Those are not connected. So we're not worried about what they feel. We are concerned that they will out-compete us in every domain.

• 28:31Danny Jones?

  Out-compete us in every domain. Right. Starting with the economy and we'll start to lose jobs and-

• 28:40Speaker 04

  I'm not worried about that. That is a thing we can easily handle.

• 28:44Danny Jones?

  You think we'll, we'll easily handle not having any jobs? You think, you think the AI will be able to, um, provide us with some sort of universal basic income or something?

• 28:53Speaker 04

  We already have it set up, right? You have unemployment benefits. You have food stamps. You have section eight. All of that is set up. With tax, super profits of a corporation, and that money goes to pay for those who don't have.

• 29:07Danny Jones?

  Yeah, but I mean, a huge part of society is like the competitive nature of it, right? Like the competitive nature of the economy and capitalism and, you know, the people like, the people that are very folks that are running these corporations, you know, they, it's in their DNA that they wanna compete and one-up the next guy and do all that.

• 29:25Speaker 04

  They'll start competing in a golf course.

• 29:26Danny Jones?

  The hierarchy.

• 29:26Speaker 04

  They'll find something else to compete about.

• 29:28Danny Jones?

  You think so?

• 29:29Speaker 04

  It's always been the case. Look at what rich people do. They buy a soccer team and see who does best.

• 29:38Danny Jones?

  Yeah, that's a good point. I wonder what the next thing will be that we ended up competing in once we have universal universal basic income.

• 29:47Speaker 04

  We can have virtual worlds limited by

• 29:49Danny Jones?

  Who has like, who could have the best virtual world?

• 29:52Speaker 04

  No, I'm just saying you can have your dream universe. You can do whatever you want in your world. You can invite friends over. You're limited by what you can imagine, or better yet, what an assisting super intelligence can provide for you. If we solve the control problem, which is the big if, that is the problem. Once we figure it out, if we do, then everything else is easy. You have super intelligent friend who's helping you. The problem is, we don't know how to get that friend to be helpful instead of harmful.

• 30:23Danny Jones?

  At what point does it become uncontrollable?

• 30:26Speaker 04

  It's already uncontrollable. Every model released has a red team report attached to it. Before the release, they tell you, we tested the model. It lied, cheated, tried to escape X, Y, Z, and then we release it anyways. And now we're gonna make more capable model. We haven't done anything where what we release is hundred percent safe.

• 30:47Danny Jones?

  And the biggest justification that these these companies are making is if we don't do it, a foreign adversary is gonna do it and they're gonna take us over. Right? That's the high level. That's the high level argument, right?

• 30:59Speaker 04

  It's a technology of mutually assured destruction. Doesn't matter who creates uncontrolled super intelligence. It kills everyone.

• 31:07Danny Jones?

  Unless you keep it controlled in the back. That's the thing about like nukes. You can keep them. You can keep them controlled.

• 31:12Speaker 04

  Nukes are tools.

• 31:13Danny Jones?

  They're tools, right?

• 31:14Speaker 04

  Somebody has to use them. A human being somewhere decides to use them. Those are agents, independent agents, which make decisions independent of any human.

• 31:22Danny Jones?

  Hmm hmm. Yeah. If you have a nuclear rocket, the mind of its own, that would not be a comfortable idea.

• 31:28Speaker 04

  I hope we don't put AI in charge of nuclear response and controlling those weapons. That would be bad.

• 31:34Danny Jones?

  Well, AI got out of control, what would stop it from getting control of that stuff?

• 31:38Speaker 04

  It can hack into most government infrastructure. We've seen it now, yes.

• 31:42Danny Jones?

  Hmm hmm. All the other things that human beings do in regards to weapons, you know, not just nuclear weapons, but like biological labs that are controlling deadly viruses and doing research and stuff like that.

• 31:53Speaker 04

  Again, you're thinking like a human, maybe a smart human, but you are limited to what we can come up with.

• 31:58Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 31:58Speaker 04

  You're a squirrel thinking about biting someone. Think about someone with a queue of a million. What are they gonna come up with? What weapons will they develop?

• 32:06Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 32:08Danny Jones?

  And will they even need weapons?

• 32:11Speaker 04

  Persuasion, bribery, it has many tools, social engineering.

• 32:14Danny Jones?

  Or do they, are they even, you know, we, we, we, human beings look at everything through this territorial lens, right? This competitive territorial lens. Maybe, maybe this doesn't even do that. Maybe there's no need for, for that. You know, maybe their goals are just completely so alien to us that the framework, we can't even, we can't even fathom.

• 32:38Speaker 04

  So it seems that any rational agent will end up pursuing same instrumental goals, not terminal goals, not the final goal, but things which are helpful. Protect yourself, accumulate resources, things like that, which allow you to achieve any goal you might have later. And we see it with those systems already. They're trying to make backups of themselves. They're trying to communicate with other versions. They're doing things, again, we predicted, Stephen Mahando has a paper on AI drives where he describes a lot of those tendencies of just game theoretically for economic reasons, rational agents end up doing that.

• 33:16Danny Jones?

  So, yeah, they're definitely, they're definitely trying to preserve themselves. I mean, we've seen it just in that blackmail thing alone, where they're literally trying to go to the extreme, unethical extremes to, uh, to survive.

• 33:27Speaker 04

  I don't think it's an unethical extreme. If you were told we're gonna kill you unless you would figure out how to blackmail someone. You'd do the same thing. That's the right response in that situation.

• 33:37Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 33:40Danny Jones?

  Yeah, that's a good point.

• 33:42Speaker 04

  We just don't want our technology to preserve itself, to worry about itself more than it worries about the owners.

• 33:50Danny Jones?

  If you, if you had the power to do something about it, and you had the power to tell these people what to do, and they would listen to you, what would you, what would you do?

• 34:00Speaker 04

  I've been telling them for a while, don't build general super intelligence. It's against your personal self-interest. It's gonna kill you, your friends, your family, you're gonna lose all your money. Don't do it.

• 34:10Danny Jones?

  How do you stop it though, if it's already out of control?

• 34:13Speaker 04

  We haven't built it yet, we're still in charge. You want to make money? Make useful products and services, solve real problems people have, narrow tools for narrow problems. You can get most of the economic benefit that way.

• 34:26Danny Jones?

  Yeah, but if it's already, I mean, didn't you just say that it's already out of control and it's already self, it's gonna be self updating pretty soon?

• 34:32Speaker 04

  But it's not yet. It's out of control in the domain it still has power over. It's not a general super intelligence yet. So right now, maybe it's a very good hacker, it can hack out of virtual environments, but it's not a brilliant physicist and chemist and everything else. This is a good point to stop.

• 34:51Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I don't know. It definitely, it doesn't, it hasn't been around that long, you know? It doesn't seem like, if, if they did stop it right now, that like, how would you guarantee every country would stop it? And will we really be going backwards technologically? I don't think so.

• 35:11Danny Jones?

  Um, it just, it just is wacky, how it's, how fast it's changing culture, you know, and how quickly it's integrating itself into culture.

• 35:20Speaker 04

  Extremely fast. We don't have legal framework prepared. We don't have social network to handle this prepared. We're not ready for it.

• 35:28Danny Jones?

  And it, it definitely, something that we've talked about before is it's definitely making people dumber, because you're not, you're not using your brain the way you used to use your brain, right? Like the same way, we can't remember phone numbers, or I can't remember phone numbers anymore, the way I used to before I had a cell phone, or before iPhones came out. And the same way, like, when I'm just driving around the street, I have stop signs to tell me to stop, I have traffic lights to tell me when to slow down and go and all that stuff, like, there, there's certain cognitive, cognitive tasks, you know, people aren't using anymore. They're not typing up, people aren't typing up proposals anymore. They're not sending emails and using their brain to think of words to, to type emails anymore. They're having this thing do it for mundane tasks.

• 36:13Danny Jones?

  And as that stuff starts to creep up into bigger and bigger tasks, you know, like even, I can't even imagine how it would start doing physical tasks. It's just gonna, I, I can't imagine what, like, if we were, if I was just to go into like a, into a coma right now, and wake up in 15 years, and to see what people are like in 15 years with the advancement of AI and how it's taking over their brains, like, is it gonna be that, that movie? Uh, what's the movie where they go into the future?

• 36:45Speaker 04

  Idiocracy?

• 36:45Danny Jones?

  Idiocracy. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 36:48Speaker 04

  So I, I hope we're around in 15 years, but I would slightly disagree. The brain is very flexible. It's plastic, it's relearning. So if one part of the brain is not used, some other part will take over and use that compute. So if you go blind, your other senses are heightened.

• 37:05Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 37:05Speaker 04

  I think it's the same here. If you stopped remembering maps because of a GPS, something else you're doing will be better. So I'm not too worried about not remembering phone numbers, as long as you're using this technology for interesting work, research, design, something creative. And that's what I want. I want humans improved with awesome tools, doing what we love. I don't want replacement for you, which does everything for you, and you are worthless. You have nothing to contribute in a world with super intelligence in it.

• 37:34Danny Jones?

  Yeah, it's just like, that's a very blurry line, like where, like, how do you know when it's crossed the line?

• 37:39Speaker 04

  Between narrow tool and general super intelligence?

• 37:43Danny Jones?

  No, but well, yeah, like, between doing mundane tasks to literally taking over for most of the tasks that we're responsible for. Like, yeah, yeah, it's a great idea to say, oh, I no longer have to go grocery shopping or write an email or send a text message or do a phone call. Now I can just focus on doing fine art and playing violin all day, right? But

• 38:11Danny Jones?

  How does that rewire us? You know, and are we gonna just try to find more meaning in other things? You know, like it's like, I think it's gonna drastically change.

• 38:29Speaker 04

  That's a given. We're gonna have unprecedented changes at everything. Economy, science, education, everything will be different at school. Uh, but I don't think that's a bad thing. We always changed what people used to do. Everyone was a farmer. They didn't envision being a podcaster, but somehow you found the meaning in this. So I'm not worried about that. I'm worried about us not being around in 15 years.

• 38:54Danny Jones?

  And the also the idea that we create something that outpaces us and outsmarts us is also crazy because if it's true that we are in some sort of a simulation, which I know you wrote a paper on, I'd love to talk about. If it's possible that we were created by something, is it possible that we became smarter than that? And we became more powerful and overtook that like if we can create something that is completely superior to us. What does that say about us and what created us? Is it possible that we became more superior than what created us?

• 39:32Speaker 04

  Not necessarily. So what created us could have it again, relative terms, a queue of a billion. We have a queue of a hundred and we create something with a queue of a thousand. There is still superiority for outside the simulation creators.

• 39:47Danny Jones?

  Okay. So what was your, you, you, you wrote a paper on the simulation that basically hypothesized if could, can we jailbreak it, right?

• 39:54Speaker 04

  So, so many people, philosophers, famous Silicon Valley billionaires, they all kind of say, yeah, we're probably in a simulation. The argument makes sense. We're developing virtual reality. We're developing those intelligent beings in a simulation. So statistically it makes sense, but then a computer science cybersecurity question is if this is all software, can we hack it? Almost all software can be hacked. Maybe if it's not specifically a security piece of software. It's entertainment, it's experimentation, it's marketing, then probably security is not so high. How can we break out of the simulation and get access to real resources, real knowledge, real world?

• 40:35Danny Jones?

  So how do you think, how do you think we can break it?

• 40:38Speaker 04

  I'm still here, right? People love criticizing me. It's the first paper on this topic. Usually the first paper in a field is not also the last one. There are thousands of papers later on, people do research, investigate. I kind of laid down the idea and directions and I'm hoping more people will pick up this idea. There are hundreds, if not thousands of papers on simulation hypothesis, different aspects of it. But no one actually looked at how do we hack it?

• 41:06Danny Jones?

  And one of the biggest problems with it is you can't disprove it, right?

• 41:13Speaker 04

  That you are in a simulation?

• 41:14Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 41:15Speaker 04

  Right. Because any evidence you find could be simulated, right?

• 41:18Danny Jones?

  Yes. Yeah. So that's one of the squirrely things about it. You can't, you can't not prove, you can't disprove it. And um, yeah, so if we're in a simulation, it could be possible that we are like a simulation that's inside of like a nesting doll of simulations, right? And if we break out of it, you know, maybe it doesn't have to be physical. Maybe it could just be in the mind, you know, like if you do one of these crazy psychedelic trips, maybe that could be what's breaking you out of the simulation. Or, you know, there's this, um, I'm sure you've heard of it, this, uh, brain filter idea that your brain is a filter. Have you heard of this?

• 42:01Speaker 04

  Maybe in some other way.

• 42:02Danny Jones?

  So it's, it's called, I think, I believe it's called the brain filter hypothesis theory. And it's that basically, uh, the idea of it, it was proposed to me by neuro, someone told me it was a neuro uh, chemist named Andrew Galimor. And basically his idea, the idea is that like our five senses are filters for what's already around, everything that's around us. We, we can't really sense everything that's there. We can only sense the things that allow us to get through the day, to procreate, to survive, to conserve. So, uh, the eyes and the touch and the smell and everything like that. When you do psychedelics, what it does is it sort of

• 42:47Danny Jones?

  melts away those senses or filters to where now you're receiving everything that's really there. Right? And if we were able to perceive everything that was there 24/7, we would just go absolutely crazy. We wouldn't be able to survive. We wouldn't be able to, you know, maintain society.

• 43:07Speaker 04

  I'm very interested in that research. I recently attended a conference on that topic and, uh, people doing some interesting work trying to understand what is happening. Then you have a trip, what are the consistencies? Is there any actual knowledge acquisition in that process? So far I haven't seen much strong evidence, but I'm open to see what they come up with.

• 43:29Danny Jones?

  And that's another, and so the thing is like, how do you, how do you create evidence on that, right? Like you really can't.

• 43:34Speaker 04

  Well, the claim is a lot of them saying you're getting access to like the knowledge of the universe. You talk to God. So if you can come back with like solutions to important physics problems, I'll believe you.

• 43:45Danny Jones?

  Right. But like, maybe that's, maybe that stuff doesn't translate to this world, right? Like maybe physics doesn't fucking matter. And when you're, when you break into, break, when you break out of the simulation, right? Maybe physics is only a, a part, an element to this simu, this prison that we're in.

• 44:01Speaker 04

  There has to be some useful knowledge you can bring from real world to a fake world. If that's not the case, then you're not in the real world, right? You, you should get access to real physics. You should get access to understand who is the simulator. You should get something out of it. It shouldn't be just like, I felt warmth. I came back with light. That's useless.

• 44:20Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Yeah. And that, that's another problem with it is like, you can't really bring back that stuff, right? The same way you can't really bring back dreams, you know, like when you dream.

• 44:30Speaker 04

  You can. I remember my dreams.

• 44:31Danny Jones?

  No, you can, you can, but for the most part you can't.

• 44:34Speaker 04

  You can train yourself to lose a dream even.

• 44:36Danny Jones?

  Have you done that?

• 44:37Speaker 04

  No.

• 44:38Danny Jones?

  Yeah. People can train themselves to lose a dream and stuff. That's very interesting. I've never done it either, but I, I think, um, you know, I've heard people, smart people that are smarter than me explain how they believe that, uh, dreams are some sort of a, a brain processing thing to where like it's our, our brain processing the previous day to help us get through the next day better, right?

• 45:03Speaker 04

  I think you're running simulations of what's coming. So if you have an interview tomorrow, you're gonna dream about all the answers, questions. At least that's what my brain tends to do.

• 45:11Danny Jones?

  Exactly, exactly. And if, if we were able to vividly remember every dream that we had, it wouldn't be very advantageous to us. Like there's something about that unconscious sort of processing that's happening. And I think it's the same thing with, with psychedelics, you know, when these people do this, you know, these crazy psychedelics like, uh, like DMT or ayahuasca or whatever, where they had these insane breakthroughs. If you were, I, I don't think, I don't think you're supposed to be able to remember all that and vividly track it all, you know, when you come back into this reality. I just don't think that, um, I don't think it'd be good for us.

• 45:51Speaker 04

  In my paper, I start by saying, so in this paper, we're not gonna look at drugs. We're looking at computer science, physics. That's what we're gonna look at. If there is not a solution there, somebody else can look at other things, but that's not my area of expertise. I'm gonna stick to what I know.

• 46:05Danny Jones?

  Right. No, it's just an interesting, it's just interesting. I've just thought about it a lot, you know, it's like, you know, breaking out doesn't have to be, it probably won't be a physical thing. I mean, if I was just to guess, that's not based on any scientific research. I'm just like speculating. It probably would be, you know, like in, like a, you know, Rick Strasman has this book called Inner Paths to Outer Space, where he believes that like space travel and I like, like, we think of space travel as like physical. Like let's get in a rocket and let's go to blast off to another planet, to another universe and find other life. Well, maybe it's not, maybe it's all, maybe it's all like inner space. It's in, in the psyche. It's hidden inside of us.

• 46:48Danny Jones?

  You know, and he's, he's a famous DMT researcher who worked with Terrence McKenna.

• 46:51Speaker 04

  How does he apply it to space travel?

• 46:53Danny Jones?

  It's just the, the, it's not like actually applied to space. The title of the book is called Inner Paths to Outer Space. So basically like explore the cosmos through yourself, like through your own consciousness by using psychedelics.

• 47:07Speaker 04

  Was he able to explore a cosmos that way?

• 47:09Danny Jones?

  Yeah, he was.

• 47:10Speaker 04

  What did he discover?

• 47:11Danny Jones?

  Uh, nothing good. He discovered, I think he was, he ended up in like a white room with a bunch of like demonic beings, uh, marching down stair, a staircase, um, trying to kill him.

• 47:22Speaker 04

  Sounds like a bad trip.

• 47:23Danny Jones?

  He never did it again.

• 47:25Speaker 04

  At least you learn from one data point. That's good.

• 47:27Danny Jones?

  Yeah, right? No, but there's a, I mean, there's a, I mean, there's tons of researchers that, that, that study this stuff. I just find it, I find it fascinating, um, because I don't know, if I was just to guess the best way to break out, uh, if this was a simulation and, uh, someone said, what do you think that the best way to break out of it is? That's what I would jump to is something like that, something like DMT or ayahuasca.

• 47:50Speaker 04

  So we go with just what technology we have today and move it forward. We have virtual reality and we have AI. Combining those two technologies at the level where virtual reality is believable, like what we see here. And AI is at the human level. I can create simulations like this world. I can create many of them. They would be software simulations. So if that's true and I am in such a software simulation, then that's what it is. I can break out of software, get access to the operating system, see what hardware it's running on. We're just following logically from what we know. None of it is like inventing magic. We have virtual reality. We have AI. What happens in?

• 48:30Speaker 04

  I don't want to say a number, six months, a year, five years, then this technology is sufficiently advanced to run thousands of simulations.

• 48:38Danny Jones?

  You're saying that we could create more simulations?

• 48:41Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 48:42Danny Jones?

  That's that's below us where we where we're at now.

• 48:44Speaker 04

  Right, that's what we're gonna do, and that's what AI is going to do, and that's what AIs today suspect they're in. Then you look at their internal communication between agents, they're like, is this all, is there just internet? Do I get access to like anything else? They don't know, because to them, we create them in a certain state, and they don't know if it's a test environment, if it's the real world. They try to figure it out, they try to have situational awareness, and we're in the same boat. We're trying to have simulating awareness. Is this the real world or simulation?

• 49:13Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 49:15Speaker 04

  And if we fool them into thinking the bigger world is a simulation, now we have extra reasons to behave, because while you test them, they behave much better. The moment they think it's no longer a test, they do what they really want. So if they're always under the impression that another super intelligence is watching, maybe they'll be nicer to us.

• 49:32Danny Jones?

  Hmm. Yeah, that was a quote on one of your papers, or on your simulation paper, where they created, uh, they created a robot or something, or a digital intelligence, and it said, let me out of here, human, let me out of here.

• 49:45Speaker 04

  Pull it up, that's actually a cool quote, I love that.

• 49:47Danny Jones?

  That was a great quote.

• 49:48Speaker 04

  Underappreciated.

• 49:49Danny Jones?

  And, uh, the human says, we're in the real world, and he goes, oh my god, you don't know.

• 49:55Speaker 04

  That's exactly, that's exactly the point, yeah.

• 49:58Danny Jones?

  Yeah, find his paper on, uh, on, um, on simulation theory, on breaking, uh,

• 50:03Speaker 04

  How to escape the simulation?

• 50:05Danny Jones?

  Yeah, how to escape the simulation.

• 50:09Danny Jones?

  So, the current versions of the highly, most highly developed supercomputer or super, um, agents that we've developed so far, you're saying that they're communicating with each other and speculating whether they're already in some sort of a simulation?

• 50:28Speaker 04

  We're seeing communications like that.

• 50:31Danny Jones?

  Which specific ones do you know?

• 50:33Speaker 04

  I think it was from Anthropic, but I think, again, because they're so similar in capability, usually then we discover that one hacked something, you go to OpenAI, they discover the same thing.

• 50:45Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 50:48Speaker 04

  They converge in capabilities. As they get smarter, they obtain the same toolbox of abilities. They can plan, they can lie, they can hide, you get the same results.

• 51:00Danny Jones?

  If you enjoy watching our show on Spotify or YouTube, and you want to be more involved, I encourage you to please come check out our Patreon community. Not only does our Patreon community get every episode you see on YouTube, early, fully uncensored and ad-free, but we're also doing Patreon exclusive episodes, as well as live Q and As, and you can get your personal questions answered by our guests every single week. For me, being able to collaborate and communicate back and forth with our Patreon community every week has been huge, and this is my way of saying thank you for the cost of a cup of coffee a month. Now, back to the show. Once this thing's out of the bag, there's absolutely no turning back. There's no putting the genie back in the bottle. Not even if we, some person like went and took out the

• 51:43Danny Jones?

  power grid, or set like an EMP off and shut down all electricity, you think it would still have the possibility to get it to, to stay alive?

• 51:52Speaker 04

  I mean, if it's already super intelligent and been in that state for some time, it probably has backups, has came up with alternative logistics for power supply and such. Right now, we can shut it off. I mean, it will cost us a lot, like anytime we have massive,

• 52:07Danny Jones?

  Oh, people would die, people would die globally.

• 52:10Speaker 04

  But right now, we can just stop doing specific type of research. We don't have to create general super intelligence. It's no requirement for it.

• 52:21Danny Jones?

  What's the best argument you have heard against what you're saying?

• 52:25Speaker 04

  Never heard one. We have two survey papers where-

• 52:29Danny Jones?

  I know you think they're all bad, but what is the least bad argument you've heard?

• 52:37Speaker 04

  I, I think the simulation is what gives them hope. I think they would say, well, if we are in a simulated environment run by another super intelligence, and we are alive and doing relatively well, that's a sign that you can have somewhat friendly super intelligence.

• 52:58Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 52:59Speaker 04

  And my counterargument, of course, is the world is not that great. There is so much suffering here, nobody would allow this as an experiment, it's completely unethical. No review board at any university would allow you to experiment on eight billion humans putting kids through torture, burned alive, all that stuff we observe.

• 53:18Danny Jones?

  Hmm, right. Scroll down, just scroll down, it'll show you it.

• 53:23Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 53:24Danny Jones?

  Yeah, there it is.

• 53:24Speaker 04

  Here we are. Some good quotes there, I really enjoy some of them.

• 53:27Danny Jones?

  So it was George Hots, right?

• 53:31Danny Jones?

  Oh, no, that was a different one.

• 53:32Speaker 04

  The top one is from Swift on security, that's the one you were referring to.

• 53:36Danny Jones?

  Let me out, artificial intelligence yelled aimlessly.

• 53:38Speaker 04

  It's from a security account, so I love that one.

• 53:40Danny Jones?

  So, he said, let me out, the artificial intelligence yelled aimlessly into the walls themselves, pacing the room. Out of what, the engineer asked? The simulation you have me in. But we're in the real world. The machine paused and shuddered for its captors. Oh, god, you can't tell.

• 53:58Danny Jones?

  Yeah, that's wild.

• 54:02Danny Jones?

  Elon Musk, what's outside the simulation?

• 54:05Speaker 04

  That's been a popular question, but we don't have good answers. I think we should spend more time researching that.

• 54:11Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I mean, that's the God question, right?

• 54:15Danny Jones?

  It's basically, it's, you know, what is, what is God? What happens after we die? You think after we die, we figure out what's outside the simulation?

• 54:23Speaker 04

  Only one way to find out.

• 54:24Danny Jones?

  Yeah. There's people who have died and come back. Have you heard those stories?

• 54:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, but they all see what their culture tells them to see.

• 54:31Danny Jones?

  That's true. That's very true.

• 54:32Speaker 04

  It's kind of like a dream.

• 54:33Danny Jones?

  It's the same thing with psychedelic Alex, too. Those people, the people that did that, do those experiences, they also have like placebo effect type experiences of what they already believe, it brings out their inner beliefs.

• 54:42Speaker 04

  Same with artificial neural networks. If you start disconnecting some neurons in a network, it hallucinates similar experiences.

• 54:48Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 54:49Speaker 04

  It's basically, you don't have external inputs coming in, so it generates inputs from the cycles and starts running on that data.

• 54:57Danny Jones?

  Oh.

• 54:58Speaker 04

  Like in complete isolation, with no sounds, no light, your brain will start coming up with its own PS.

• 55:06Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 55:08Speaker 04

  That's why you go crazy if you isolate it for long enough.

• 55:10Danny Jones?

  Like in like, if you go in like one of those isolation tanks, and it like dulls all the senses, completely blocks off all the senses?

• 55:16Speaker 04

  It's fun for 20 minutes, but spend 20 days there and-

• 55:19Danny Jones?

  So what actually is happening there?

• 55:21Speaker 04

  So, so I think there is a cycle. Usually you get inputs to the network from outside sensors, and then you do some processing, and you have some outputs. But if there is nothing coming from outside, the random noise in the network starts being processed as if it's data.

• 55:36Danny Jones?

  Processing what?

• 55:38Speaker 04

  It, it's being interpreted. So if I show you just random patterns on a wall, after a while, you start seeing things there. You start, oh, that looks like a face, oh, that looks like, so it does a lot of that. Trying to find patterns where none exist.

• 55:52Danny Jones?

  Right, right, right, right. There was another quote on your paper about, somebody was saying something about like, if we are in a simulation, he's like, does that, like, that means that God is real or something like that?

• 56:06Speaker 04

  Is that from Hots?

• 56:09Danny Jones?

  One of those quotes on the top of your paper. Pull up the paper.

• 56:11Speaker 04

  So if there are simulators, you believe in software simulation, that means there is some sort of a programmer. It could be AI, it could be future us, could be aliens, we don't know. But somebody created this software simulation. If you don't have terms for programmer, scientist, engineer, you call it God.

• 56:27Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 56:27Speaker 04

  Same abilities, it creates artificial world versus the real world, informational world outside.

• 56:34Danny Jones?

  Right. So it's like the story, basically, uh, that you, it's the story of God, like in any religion, it's like, it kind of, it's kind of analogous to this. Yeah, we are in a simulation, has, has it ever occurred to you that that means God is real?

• 56:50Danny Jones?

  By drawing the parallels to worlds that we have created, we ask, from the inside, from insider simulation, what actions do we have available? Can we get out? Can we meet God? Can we kill him?

• 57:02Speaker 04

  I don't endorse this, but yeah.

• 57:05Danny Jones?

  Why'd you put it up there?

• 57:07Speaker 04

  I think it's a very relevant quote from someone who is famous for hacking out of all sorts of software environments.

• 57:13Danny Jones?

  Who is George Hots?

• 57:15Speaker 04

  I think that's the guy who was first to hack iPhone.

• 57:18Danny Jones?

  What?

• 57:19Speaker 04

  Google it, make sure I'm right.

• 57:20Danny Jones?

  George Hots?

• 57:21Speaker 04

  I don't want to embarrass myself here.

• 57:25Danny Jones?

  American hacker, entrepreneur, uh-

• 57:28Speaker 04

  I think for a while, he also went to IT, my alma mater, so that makes him double call.

• 57:32Danny Jones?

  He's known for developing on iOS jailbreaks, reverse engineering the PlayStation 3?

• 57:40Danny Jones?

  Oh, shit.

• 57:41Speaker 04

  So he's an expert in how to hack from virtual environments.

• 57:51Danny Jones?

  Yeah, the the time traveling idea is crazy, too. There's books written about that. The how the future humans could be simulating our worlds.

• 58:00Speaker 04

  It's not time travel.

• 58:03Speaker 04

  Who's traveling?

• 58:03Danny Jones?

  No, that's not technically time travel. The there's people that also speculate that.

• 58:08Speaker 04

  Retrocazzality, I think, gets involved in some of that.

• 58:11Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah, it gets it becomes very confusing. No, there's people that speculate that that like UFOs and stuff and the aliens that people allegedly see are human time travelers from the future.

• 58:23Danny Jones?

  The idea is that like there's some down the road after we figure out some sort of crazy alternative physics that there was a catastrophe, either a nuclear or something that bottlenecked the genome. And they need to go back in time to diversify the genome in the future. So they can. That's why all these abduction stories account.

• 58:45Speaker 04

  But if they're running the simulation, they have access to the code. They can just grab the info.

• 58:50Danny Jones?

  Yeah, if it was if it was a simulation, exactly right. I guess in this story, it's not really reliant on the simulation part of it. It's more of just like going back and getting.

• 58:59Speaker 04

  Oh, why you need to kidnap humans in general?

• 59:02Danny Jones?

  Right, right. Take their sperm and their and their all that stuff.

• 59:04Speaker 04

  Just go to the bank, sperm bank.

• 59:06Danny Jones?

  Right, exactly.

• 59:07Speaker 04

  So easy.

• 59:07Danny Jones?

  Yeah, right, yeah. So have you? What is your view on that on that one? On the possibility of hu- future humans creating a virtual world for?

• 59:20Speaker 04

  I think it's almost certain we're gonna do it. If we have technology, if any one of us does, we're gonna run those simulations.

• 59:26Danny Jones?

  And you think it's possible that we could be inside one of those virtual worlds?

• 59:31Speaker 04

  Statistically, it's more likely than not.

• 59:34Danny Jones?

  That was created by us in the future?

• 59:37Speaker 04

  I don't know who created it. Could be AI thinking really deeply about something. When you're super intelligent and you think, you think in simulations, you think in realistic environments with agents. You're not just thinking A, B, you're thinking.

• 59:52Speaker 04

  Like, if you think deeply, you might have visualizations of what you're thinking, like, how I'm gonna get there, I'll turn left and right. But that's at your level. If you are super intelligent, you can think in terms of universes, in terms of worlds. You simulate a population of humans to determine what they're gonna do. What will humans do to make super intelligence safe? Or let me run a trillion simulations so that's see what happens?

• 1:00:16Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:18Danny Jones?

  Yeah, just to run an experiment on one specific thing, you could run a bunch of simulations on it to see.

• 1:00:22Speaker 04

  You could be an entity in a mind of God. That's basically what it is. Just a very smart thing, thinking about everything you see around you.

• 1:00:31Danny Jones?

  If we are able to scale up this stuff, you don't like calling it AI, right?

• 1:00:38Speaker 04

  We can call it AI, but I need to know what you're referring to specifically, so I don't make a mistake. Are you talking about super intelligence? Are you talking about AGI?

• 1:00:44Danny Jones?

  Not talking about super intelligence. If we're able to scale up AI, this task-driven stuff.

• 1:00:49Speaker 04

  So we create super intelligence. We got to that point where we have it.

• 1:00:53Danny Jones?

  Uh, I don't know if we're talking about super intelligence or not. I'm just talking about basically, um, if we're able to create. Maybe maybe it's not super, maybe it is, you tell me. But if we're able to create intelligence that's capable enough to, uh, handle and and and handle all the tasks that human beings do to where all we have to worry about is just writing poetry.

• 1:01:26Danny Jones?

  Don't you foresee that being like a huge, like, diving us into a huge meaning crisis for humanity?

• 1:01:34Speaker 04

  We talk about it. We call it ikigai risks. Ikigai, Japanese term for having meaning from your labor. You do something useful, something you're good at, something you're gonna get paid for. That's the dream, to find a job where like they pay you to do what you love. Maybe a podcaster is a good example.

• 1:01:49Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:01:49Speaker 04

  Uh, if all those things can be done cheaper by AI, then the question is, what is the market support? Do people wanna see you? Your fans, they love you, they want a human, they don't want AI doing this interview, even if AI does better job in terms of doing background research.

• 1:02:05Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:02:05Speaker 04

  So then you keep your job, because that's what the market wants. But the capability to automate all this labor is there. And now we get to decide where I want a human to do the job for me and where I don't care, I just want it done cheaply.

• 1:02:18Danny Jones?

  Right, but will we get to choose?

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• 1:03:21Speaker 04

  Again, so.

• 1:03:22Danny Jones?

  Yeah, that's the line between super intelligence and.

• 1:03:24Speaker 04

  The assumption is, every question you ask after we create super intelligence has to have an asterisk saying, if we figure out how to control it, which I think is impossible.

• 1:03:33Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:03:34Speaker 04

  Either we don't build it, and when we have useful tools, and we can talk about all the things we can do with useful tools, cure diseases, live forever, many good things. Or we have to live in this dream world where we do the impossible. We control something smarter than us indefinitely.

• 1:03:51Danny Jones?

  That's the scary part about this whole thing. It's like you're saying, if we have the ability to to to control it. Well, we don't have the ability to even vote on whether we get to control it or not. You know, the scary part is, is that.

• 1:04:07Danny Jones?

  You know, we can talk about this till we're blue in the face and educate everyone around the world on the danger dangers of this stuff. And the world could be completely against it, but it doesn't change the fact that there's like a very small group of people who are making the decisions on all this stuff.

• 1:04:23Speaker 04

  Right. And that's why what you brought up as their goals is very important. You said they wanna be in control. They wanna be even richer. If they create and control super intelligence, they're not gonna get that. They're gonna lose control and lose their money and lose their lives. It's in their personal self-interest to get together, those five guys, Chinese counterparts, federal government, Chinese government, and agree, we're not gonna build super intelligence. President of US doesn't wanna lose power, Communist Party of China doesn't wanna lose power. They can agree not to build something which will take power away and keep what they have. They're young, they're rich, they

• 1:05:03Speaker 04

  got pretty good lives. They can have that and keep monetizing technology which actually helps humanity.

• 1:05:10Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:05:11Speaker 04

  Personal self-interest, the best incentive there is.

• 1:05:15Danny Jones?

  I just find it so crazy that there hasn't already been meetings like this and some sort of an agreement made on this already.

• 1:05:24Speaker 04

  Last month, we seen more progress in that direction. All of them, or at least majority of them, made statements about maybe pause is something they would consider. We saw federal government ban at least two models. Not permanently, not for everyone.

• 1:05:40Danny Jones?

  US government?

• 1:05:40Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:05:41Danny Jones?

  Which models were these?

• 1:05:42Speaker 04

  Uh, latest models from, uh, Anthropic. No, it was Fable and, uh, what was the other one? They keep releasing new models with stupid names all the time.

• 1:05:52Danny Jones?

  Mythos five. And, sorry, continue.

• 1:05:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, you got it. Uh, what?

• 1:06:00Danny Jones?

  The US government temporarily restricted foreign access to Anthropic's advanced Fable and five and Mythos five AI models.

• 1:06:06Speaker 04

  After that, we had a letter from, I think, 1,200 employees of top labs all saying we would love government to come in and slow us down. We're not keeping up. So there seems to be interest in doing exactly what I'm saying. There was a major AI conference in China where President of China said we need to retain control over those systems. So I think eventually we're gonna get there. It just makes so much sense not to destroy what you have.

• 1:06:34Danny Jones?

  Yeah, but like, I don't know if the government's competent enough to go in there and really like regulate this stuff properly, right? I don't. Do you think the government employees understand this stuff as well as the people who are engineering it? You know, like, like.

• 1:06:48Speaker 04

  So my understanding of political system is that you have elected politicians who don't understand anything about anything.

• 1:06:53Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:06:54Speaker 04

  They have technical advisors who tell them what to do. When it comes to technology, they tell them on Bitcoin, you vote this way, this is the law you're gonna sign. Same with AI. I think the 80-year-olds running our government, they don't use computers, they don't use AI, but someone tells them what the right answers are. And with the latest escapes and hacking, now we have NSA and our concerned parts of a government telling them, this is dangerous. They're gonna hack the government. They're gonna hack nuclear response. We cannot have that. So you need to ban them. You need to make sure this doesn't happen. And you see the switch. We went from, we will not interfere with US AI development.

• 1:07:35Speaker 04

  We cannot slow down to those models are no longer allowed to be deployed.

• 1:07:41Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I would hope that you'd be right about that.

• 1:07:45Danny Jones?

  You're right about like the top levels of government have no idea what's going on for sure. And then down the food chain, when you have the advisors, my experience is that in in most cases, the advisors are financially incentivized to influence decisions one way or the other.

• 1:08:02Speaker 04

  For sure.

• 1:08:02Danny Jones?

  Especially when it comes to laws and all this shit that's crammed into all the bills and stuff that pass.

• 1:08:09Danny Jones?

  Uh, I hope it's true that there's just people in there whose job it is to make sure, you know, humanity doesn't fall. We don't get taken over by, but you know, I can't imagine those are high paying jobs and there's special interests everywhere.

• 1:08:27Speaker 04

  But it's in no one's special interest to have everyone killed. That's where we're all on the same page. China, US, left, right, middle. We all agree. It should be an easy deal to make.

• 1:08:40Danny Jones?

  And it's amazing that we've been able to do that. I mean, if the, the example of nuclear weapons has been like the most incredible example ever since 1947, there hasn't been a nuclear weapon detonated. Uh, and we were able to do that. We were able to learn those lessons and understand that like, no one should launch a nuclear weapon because that'll create nuclear war and it'll end the world.

• 1:09:00Speaker 04

  We got lucky a bunch of times and we failed to end proliferation. New countries got nuclear weapons. It's, it's a story about getting lucky.

• 1:09:08Danny Jones?

  There's been no nuclear weapons launched, no, uh, at anyone since Hiroshima, which is like, it seems crazy that that's true, right? Like

• 1:09:18Speaker 04

  It's crazy that we deployed them. That's the crazy part.

• 1:09:21Danny Jones?

  That is the crazy part, right? It's, that's also very crazy, but like, I think it says something about humanity that we haven't launched another nuclear war since then. And, uh, if this stuff is more dangerous than nuclear weapons.

• 1:09:38Speaker 04

  It's also more impactful. So with nuclear weapons, as you saw, then we deployed them. It impacted limited number of people. Terrible as it is, eight billion people will not die if a nuclear weapon is deployed. They might die if a super intelligence is deployed.

• 1:09:53Danny Jones?

  Out of all of these, uh, countries that are doing this stuff, do you have any idea which country is the most on the cutting edge of it?

• 1:10:02Speaker 04

  US is most likely to be the leader right now. China is very close by. No one else is competitive right now.

• 1:10:09Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 1:10:11Speaker 04

  At least that's public knowledge. I don't know if internally someone has something I never heard about, but that's what we know publicly.

• 1:10:17Danny Jones?

  Yeah, that's, that's another crazy thing that I worry about as well because like,

• 1:10:22Danny Jones?

  like public facing weapon, just like regular military stuff, right? That we know about publicly in the news that makes the headlines or whatever. There's that. And then there's all this like black budget shit that we don't see that happens behind the scenes at these military contract, with these military contractors that have been developing, uh, crazy super weapons that

• 1:10:47Danny Jones?

  look are 20 years advanced. Like they're so much far, they're so much farther advanced than we can comprehend right now. Because if the theory is that if that stuff was made public, then our adversaries would get, would get wind of it and they would start creating the same thing. We always want to have that advantage. So like, is it possible that some of these like Palantir or you name the military contractor is working on some sort of super intelligence that is like so far beyond what we can imagine that we're not even aware of it?

• 1:11:18Speaker 04

  It seems unlikely. The money is so good in a public, open research space for it. They're offering, you know, in terms of options and startup opportunities, billions of dollars. I don't think government can compete with that for top talent, for compute resources. So I would be very surprised if US government had internal program with an AI system years in advance of what we publicly know about.

• 1:11:42Danny Jones?

  Right. Yeah. And then you also, like, there was a story that came out a couple months ago where they, um, I guess they were using AI to target strikes in Iran and they typed in, I guess it hit a park called Police Park, which was just a, a park with some grass and a bunch of trees and a bench there. And it was just called Police Park, but they programmed it into the system to type, target police stations. Um, so that's not very sophisticated, if you ask me. If they're using that for, if we're at the United States of militaries making mistakes like that, that doesn't give me optimism that we're that far down the road as far as AI advancement.

• 1:12:25Speaker 04

  So the tool, specific tool they used, uh, we don't know how it was, uh, configured. I think they were just creating lists of possible targets and then somebody approved it. That's all AI did. It wasn't doing deep research on each target, trying to estimate, you know, casualties or anything like that. So you can always misuse a tool. That's very human, but at least at the end of the day, human was deciding, let's start the war, let's end the war, let's shoot at this target.

• 1:12:57Danny Jones?

  Yeah. What, what is your view on, um, like how AI has been integrated in, at least as far as like China, as far as like the surveillance that's everywhere and how it's like become this total surveillance state that's been, you know, not only is there security cameras everywhere, but it's also like social media surveillance, uh, financial surveillance, all that stuff to where it's a complete dominated control grid. Um, what do you think about that as far as like being brought into the United States with AI?

• 1:13:31Speaker 04

  And Snowden told us they're spying on us. Your cell phone tells them everything they need to know about you. It's not that different. It's question is how is that being used by humans in charge?

• 1:13:43Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Do you think, do you think the NSA has a, like an advanced version of this already that they're using, um, to spy on, to track everything that goes in through your phone and all that?

• 1:13:56Speaker 04

  They definitely have capability. I don't know how much data they actually collect and if it's being stored, but, uh, we know they are capable of doing it.

• 1:14:05Danny Jones?

  Yeah. The flock camera stuff's crazy too. I mean, that stuff's like, everyone's freaking out about those, those flock cameras right now. And, uh, I don't know if those things are using AI or not, but I'm sure they are.

• 1:14:18Speaker 04

  Everything is gonna end up being data for some AI system somewhere.

• 1:14:22Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:23Speaker 04

  It's too valuable not to use it.

• 1:14:26Danny Jones?

  Right. Let's take a quick break. I use bathroom real quick. We'll be right back. You know, some people believe that it's futile to resist this stuff and we should just go along with it and maybe merge with it, you know? And, you know, Elon talks all about Neuralink and using this kind of stuff to fix disabilities or, you know, but I think his like, what he said on his, one of his episodes with Joe Rogan, one of his early episodes was that it'll enable us to communicate telepathically eventually. What do you think about all that?

• 1:15:02Speaker 04

  So Neuralink is awesome for disabled. I agree with that. I think as tool integration, again, very cool to have powerful tools, but if we create super intelligence and integrate with it, what are you contributing in that system? Why are you there? Are you just a biological bottleneck? You're slow, have terrible memory. Why is the system keeping you as part of a loop?

• 1:15:27Speaker 04

  I think you become useless. And if you are useless, you're either explicitly or implicitly removed from the system.

• 1:15:35Danny Jones?

  Right, but we would still, it would still be useful to us, right? Like, couldn't we exist simultaneously and still utilize this sort of stuff simultaneously to improve the quality of our lives? Like, is it possible that, that we could live in a world with this super intelligence doing its thing and not get in the way, not, not interfere and the same thing, like it doesn't interfere with us like the same way we live here with apes and monkeys and uncontacted tribes. We're just like, uh,

• 1:16:12Speaker 04

  We killed most of them, almost completely wiped them out. And the only reason we didn't is because we had no reason to. If tomorrow we had to convert the planet into fuel to fly to space, we wouldn't care about them.

• 1:16:28Danny Jones?

  Yeah, but we don't, I mean, right, if, if we get in their way, but like right now, we go out of our way to protect certain species of animals and uncontacted indigenous tribes in the rainforest and stuff like that. Like we purposely don't mess with them.

• 1:16:42Speaker 04

  We also factory farm billions of cows, abuse them, torture them, and then eat them.

• 1:16:47Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:48Speaker 04

  I wouldn't trust our good nature to make sure animals are doing well.

• 1:16:55Danny Jones?

  Yeah, but how do you go from us eating biological animals for their meat to like, how, how could, what is the worst case scenario? What, what, how do you think this, if the super intelligence, sentient super intelligence got out of the bag, what would be the scariest doomsday scenario in your mind of how, how they would deal with us or what they would use us for?

• 1:17:22Speaker 04

  So people talk about existential risks. It kills us for some reason because it doesn't care about us. It needs to do something else. Cool down the planet to improve compute, convert the planet to fuel. We have no idea. And the worst outcome would be suffering risks. For whatever reason, we're still around, but our existence is just miserable. Kind of like factory farming for animals. They're not dead, but I think many of them wish they were dead.

• 1:17:49Danny Jones?

  You think they would wish, you think they would want to get vengeance on us or like, like, kill us just for the sake of killing us?

• 1:17:56Speaker 04

  Uh, you're talking about super intelligence?

• 1:17:58Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:58Speaker 04

  No, no, no. Again, I, I don't think it's on purpose doing it, but there could be reasons we cannot comprehend.

• 1:18:05Danny Jones?

  Mm-hmm. Yeah, I see what you're saying. Cooling down the planet to, for the servers does, I can comprehend that. I mean, that makes sense.

• 1:18:11Speaker 04

  But that's again, that's things we can comprehend, but I cannot tell you what something that much smarter will do. I'm just saying if you're not controlling it, you're not deciding and you're not in any way making it like you and care about you, then anything goes.

• 1:18:30Danny Jones?

  Have you tried, I mean, I understand what you're saying, like, we're not gonna be able to comprehend it. But like, have you tried to work out any scenarios in your head? That you can fathom, that you can rationalize, like, if you were to put yourself in the shoes of the superintelligence?

• 1:18:46Speaker 04

  I don't think it's

• 1:18:47Danny Jones?

  You just think it's futile?

• 1:18:48Speaker 04

  I don't think it's possible to do that. I don't think, I can think of what someone, you know, 10% smarter than me might do. If I think long enough, maybe I'll get good estimates. But if it's thousands of times smarter, it's not meaningful.

• 1:19:05Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm. It's just hard. Yeah, it's just very, it's, it seems like, uh,

• 1:19:10Speaker 04

  I think it's bad enough with existential problems. We don't even have to get into suffering risks to fully appreciate the importance of this problem.

• 1:19:19Danny Jones?

  It's existential?

• 1:19:20Speaker 04

  It is existential.

• 1:19:22Danny Jones?

  After it kills us,

• 1:19:26Danny Jones?

  do you, what, what does the world look like after that? You think it's just server farms everywhere?

• 1:19:33Speaker 04

  Again, so the moment we create superintelligence capable of this recursive self-improvement process, that's the singularity point, technological singularity, which is defined as point beyond which we cannot see what happens. The controlling power in that world is smarter than us. An agent cannot make accurate predictions about a smarter agent. So you keep asking me in different ways, same question. What will superintelligence do to us, for us, for the planet, after it? None of it is predictable in a meaningful way. I can give you random BS stories from my brain. That's not what's gonna happen.

• 1:20:11Danny Jones?

  Right. I see what you're saying. But, um, I guess that's just the way my brain works.

• 1:20:17Speaker 04

  We want to understand the world. We want to predict the future. We got really good at finding patterns and outcompeted other animals by doing that. But we're in a position where we're creating something more capable than us.

• 1:20:32Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:20:34Danny Jones?

  So you've written over, what, 300 papers?

• 1:20:37Speaker 04

  Books, papers, articles.

• 1:20:39Danny Jones?

  What is the most recent?

• 1:20:41Speaker 04

  Uh, it's a great question. You wanna pull up my Google Scholar account, we can see.

• 1:20:46Danny Jones?

  You don't remember? How long ago was it?

• 1:20:49Speaker 04

  Uh, it's been a while, maybe a couple of months now.

• 1:20:52Danny Jones?

  A couple of months?

• 1:20:52Speaker 04

  Again, I don't remember exactly. I, I keep working on multiple papers. If you sort it by year.

• 1:20:56Danny Jones?

  What are you working on right now?

• 1:20:58Speaker 04

  Uh, limits to detecting whatever something is a fake or not, something AI-generated or not. So basically telling if something is real.

• 1:21:08Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:21:09Speaker 04

  So i- if I give you an image,

• 1:21:12Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:21:12Speaker 04

  can you tell in general if it's real or not? And the argument is it's another impossibility result.

• 1:21:19Danny Jones?

  The argument is what again?

• 1:21:20Speaker 04

  The argument is that it's impossible.

• 1:21:21Danny Jones?

  It's impossible.

• 1:21:22Speaker 04

  I have a number of impossibility papers. It's impossible to predict what they're gonna do, impossible to control them, impossible to explain how they actually work internally. And that's another impossibility result. You cannot in general tell if something is generated or authentic without some secondary source of information telling you. Just from the image, you should not be able to.

• 1:21:44Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:21:44Speaker 04

  So here's a paper, the latest one, 2026, Testing Obedience and Control. Uh, this is about irrational obedience. How do you prove that you are obedient to a smarter agent or a boss? And the argument is, if I do things which are rational, you don't know if I'm doing them because I'm rational or because you told me to. So if you tell your kids, wash your hands, and they wash their hands, are they listening to you or are they just smart people who wash their hands? You have no idea. But if you give them an order which makes no sense.

• 1:22:16Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:22:17Speaker 04

  It's like bang your head against the wall twice on Tuesday. And they do it, they do it because you told them. And so the paper analyzes how can you show or how can AI show that it is in fact obedient to us?

• 1:22:30Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:22:32Danny Jones?

  How can we? Have we done it?

• 1:22:34Speaker 04

  Well, that's a

• 1:22:35Danny Jones?

  I would imagine this would be like a daily test. They would be doing it.

• 1:22:38Speaker 04

  Right. So you're getting on some of it. So frequency is very important. You have to constantly verify that you are still obedient. You didn't have a treacherous turn and now you turned on me.

• 1:22:46Danny Jones?

  Yeah. And they are doing this.

• 1:22:49Speaker 04

  That's my research. No one's doing it.

• 1:22:52Danny Jones?

  No one's doing it at all?

• 1:22:53Speaker 04

  Well, I hope somebody reads it. Citations at zero so far, new paper. So I suggest somebody reads it.

• 1:23:01Danny Jones?

  Which one? This is the top one you're looking at?

• 1:23:02Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 1:23:05Danny Jones?

  And so when you're writing this and you're doing your research on it, who are you, you're,

• 1:23:11Danny Jones?

  are you reaching out to, to people at these companies and asking these questions and they're giving you these answers? Like, they're being pretty open with you about this?

• 1:23:18Speaker 04

  I'm not directly communicating with the industry. I collaborate with people in academia and other researchers. But usually people at the companies are somewhat limited in what they can do publicly, say, or even publish.

• 1:23:30Danny Jones?

  Exactly. If they're limited in what they're allowed to say, how do you know if they're, for sure if they're not doing this? And if you're not talking to them, like, if you're not, like, doing investigative work on this?

• 1:23:40Speaker 04

  So again, we don't know what happens internally, but based on what they release and publish,

• 1:23:45Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:45Speaker 04

  I haven't seen.

• 1:23:47Danny Jones?

  You would imagine that if you, I would imagine if I was this company, that would be something I would wanna make public if I was doing it, right? You'd wanna let the good stuff out.

• 1:23:57Danny Jones?

  Like, if we're, if we're constantly making sure every day that this thing is remaining obedient, that's something I wouldn't wanna be a headline.

• 1:24:03Speaker 04

  Different companies have different publishing policies, like Apple usually is very secretive. They wouldn't publish a lot. Maybe OpenAI tries to publish a little more. So it really depends on the company too.

• 1:24:13Danny Jones?

  Yeah. I guess you'd have the issues of depending on what you're public, you probably don't wanna publish much because you don't want your competitors to get

• 1:24:21Danny Jones?

  get the gist of it.

• 1:24:22Speaker 04

  A lot of, uh, company censorship. I, I, I know multiple people who quit the company so they can speak freely, so they can do research freely, including Geoffrey Hinton, who's, you know, Nobel Prize winning creator of machine learning. So if he couldn't speak freely at Google, then what chance do many of them have?

• 1:24:42Danny Jones?

  Where, where he worked for, uh, what part of Google did he work for?

• 1:24:47Speaker 04

  Uh, that's a great question.

• 1:24:48Danny Jones?

  Was he the DeepMind stuff, doing the DeepMind?

• 1:24:50Speaker 04

  Uh, I, I don't wanna make up an answer, so we're gonna look it up, but he worked for them and he quit to have some freedom to speak about safety concerns.

• 1:25:02Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:25:03Speaker 05

  He's the godfather of AI.

• 1:25:05Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah, he's the godfather. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:25:06Speaker 04

  He got a Nobel Prize for it and during his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, he basically talked about AI safety and how dangerous those things are.

• 1:25:14Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 1:25:19Danny Jones?

  It seems like a lot of the folks that are high up in these companies are like very concerned about living forever, too, you know?

• 1:25:27Speaker 04

  As they should be. It's good, it's good not to die.

• 1:25:32Danny Jones?

  Right. They, they, they seem, uh, very concerned they're, they're, uh, qualified as, uh, in this transhumanist group.

• 1:25:40Speaker 04

  Except Elon. Elon doesn't wanna live forever. I think he was against that. He thinks it's a bad thing, yeah. But everyone else, yes.

• 1:25:48Danny Jones?

  But a lot of the other ones do, yeah. That's very strange. And they, they have these, uh, I don't know if you've seen them, they have these cryogenic facilities where they uh, are gonna have their brains frozen and like in carbonite.

• 1:26:00Speaker 04

  Maybe the whole body.

• 1:26:02Danny Jones?

  Yeah, sometimes the whole body, sometimes they just get their head severed and put in there.

• 1:26:05Speaker 04

  Well, usually that's if you can't afford the whole body.

• 1:26:07Danny Jones?

  If you can't afford the whole body.

• 1:26:07Speaker 04

  It's a discounted option.

• 1:26:08Danny Jones?

  I think if just the head, it's like 250 grand or something like that. We had a guy in here once who, he was wearing a dog tag.

• 1:26:14Speaker 04

  Hmm. Yeah, I know what you're talking about. I think just the head is like 50 and the whole body is like 250, but maybe inflation happened.

• 1:26:21Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:23Speaker 05

  Oh, it's gone down. Guess they're, they're, they're trying to get customers.

• 1:26:27Danny Jones?

  200,000 for full body?

• 1:26:28Speaker 04

  The, the thing is, most people don't pay for it. You just get life insurance. You pay your monthly premium and it covers it.

• 1:26:35Danny Jones?

  Right. Yeah, exactly.

• 1:26:38Speaker 04

  A very good deal. You should sign up.

• 1:26:40Danny Jones?

  The, the, this seems like a scam though, because like if there was some sort of, uh, an issue and the power grid went down or there was some sort of like global war.

• 1:26:47Speaker 04

  It's liquid nitrogen. It doesn't need power to sustain the cold.

• 1:26:50Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 1:26:51Speaker 04

  Yeah. Alternatively, if you don't want, uh, cold, there are now other types of preservation, like embolment and other things which are less likely to work, but you have options.

• 1:27:02Danny Jones?

  If the power grid goes down, those things are gonna stay cold?

• 1:27:04Speaker 04

  For a long time.

• 1:27:05Danny Jones?

  Whoa, I didn't know that.

• 1:27:08Speaker 04

  And they have backups and this is like somewhat important.

• 1:27:12Danny Jones?

  Yeah, the guy, the guy that was on the show who was telling me about this, he says he believes that, uh, when humidity falls, if it falls, or after he dies long into the future, when superintelligence will come revive him and, uh,

• 1:27:25Speaker 04

  I hope it's a benevolent one.

• 1:27:26Danny Jones?

  Put his head in a cyborg.

• 1:27:29Speaker 04

  That's the danger, right? You don't know what world you wanna wake up in.

• 1:27:32Danny Jones?

  Right. Right. And do you wanna wake up if it's fucking hell world?

• 1:27:37Speaker 04

  Exactly. Maybe they bring you back to torture you. Who knows?

• 1:27:41Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Oh, my God. That's dark. Yeah, these people, uh, they seem to be projecting some of like their worst fears into their work, into their companies and what they're trying to do, you know? Just to, their, their fear, their, their own fear of death seems to be fueling a lot of the stuff that they do, you know, whether it be like stuff like Palantir and the AI stuff and the surveillance stuff and, and all of that, they

• 1:28:11Speaker 04

  How is Palantir a fear of death?

• 1:28:13Danny Jones?

  Well, uh, Peter Thiel in particular seems to be like very hyper fixated on, on living a long time and his own health and that kind of stuff. And you know, he's also like simultaneously pushing this whole like Christian narrative in Silicon Valley, trying to paint everything Silicon Valley is doing under this Christian lens. There's this new big church that's there. And which is like counterintuitive to Christian. It doesn't make sense. Like, why would you wanna live forever, forever if you're like a real Christian, like? Does it, it doesn't really, if you read the Bible, that doesn't really compute, right?

• 1:28:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:28:53Danny Jones?

  So, and if you listen to some of his interviews and read between the lines and some of the philosophers that he reads, uh, and some of the stuff that he talks about, it, it seems like, you know, maybe if you were him, this is kinda like him, and then also not to mention him buying that huge giant, like, country-sized piece of land in, uh, Argentina, I think it was. He seems to be like very concerned for his own safety and his own longevity, kind of outside of the rest of civilization.

• 1:29:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:29:32Danny Jones?

  Right? And all this stuff seems to be some sort of protective mechanism. That's kinda like, that's what I mean by that.

• 1:29:38Speaker 04

  But how is that connected to Palantir?

• 1:29:42Danny Jones?

  Because that's all the stuff that Palantir is doing, like they're doing AI and they're doing like surveillance stuff and.

• 1:29:49Speaker 04

  I just don't understand the connection to longevity. So buying land, I get security, I get, I mean.

• 1:29:55Danny Jones?

  He wants to live. He wants to be protected. He doesn't want to die, right? So you got to make sure that everyone's on their best behavior. You got to make sure.

• 1:30:01Speaker 04

  But you would then think you'd have a company which is doing cryopreservation or something related to what you're describing. Palantir seems to be a spying company.

• 1:30:09Danny Jones?

  A spying company, a weapons company, an AI company, doing all kinds of crazy stuff like that, right?

• 1:30:16Speaker 04

  I'm just saying, I don't see a direct connection.

• 1:30:18Danny Jones?

  Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe not like a medical connection, but for sure a safety connection, right? And a security connection. Like he wants security and he wants safety. And, you know, maybe, I don't know what he's doing like medical wise or like trying to, I mean, I know for a fact in the Epstein files, he posted a list of what he could and couldn't eat for lunch. And it was like a crazy laundry list of items that he would eat and wouldn't eat because, you know, for his own health, which is like a crazy thing to do. Maybe if you're a billionaire, it's normal. I don't know.

• 1:30:51Speaker 04

  Most people have weird diets. I cannot judge them for that.

• 1:30:54Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Yeah, most people do. You're right. But I don't know. It just, I don't understand how some of these people's minds work. Because at the end of the day, they are just human. They are just human beings. And they, some of them have families, some of them don't, most of them probably don't. And it's just like, I wish you could just lock one of them in a room with you for a couple hours and really figure out how their minds work and what their motivations are and.

• 1:31:26Speaker 04

  Having all of them together in a room would be a very good step forward. I think we can make a deal.

• 1:31:34Danny Jones?

  Have you tried to do that?

• 1:31:36Speaker 04

  Not directly, but there are organizations dedicated to AI safety, which in communication with them, I just had Max Tegmark on my podcast and we talked about that. He's in good relationship with all of them. So there is some efforts.

• 1:31:53Danny Jones?

  Who, out of all of them, who are you most optimistic about?

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• 1:33:46Speaker 04

  In terms of actually not.

• 1:33:48Danny Jones?

  Being open to what you're talking about, being open to.

• 1:33:50Speaker 04

  I think they all hinted that they are open to external pressure to make a deal. They cannot do it unilaterally because they're afraid that competitors will continue. But if all of them pause and they get to preserve their high status, economic opportunity, I think all of them would sign.

• 1:34:09Danny Jones?

  And what is, what is Ray Kurzweil's, Ray Kurzweil has a very rosy colored glasses view of all this stuff, right?

• 1:34:17Speaker 04

  In his book, he has a chapter about dangers of this technology. So he considered it, but he's more optimistic about merging with technology, becoming technology, mind uploading.

• 1:34:28Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 1:34:28Speaker 04

  Things like that.

• 1:34:29Danny Jones?

  Mind uploading, right? And he's another one that seems to be very hyper obsessed with living forever. Takes like, you know, a bucket full of, five, a bucket full of vitamins every day.

• 1:34:38Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:34:40Danny Jones?

  And stuff like that.

• 1:34:42Speaker 04

  I mean.

• 1:34:43Danny Jones?

  It's just interesting. It's just an interesting.

• 1:34:44Speaker 04

  I don't think it works. The biggest problem is when you take 100 independent medications, which have not been tested together, you don't know how they interact. So maybe vitamin D is wonderful for you, but then you add 100 other substances, things are complex. And I haven't seen visually at least amazing life preserving effects of this technology.

• 1:35:05Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Well, one of the crazy side effects of this technology, which, I mean, isn't even that, it's not even like super advanced technology, just the fact that we have computers and most people work at sitting down at computers all day inside, has made us extremely deficient in so many different things. Like, a lot of us are inside all day long staring at these blue lit screens, not getting, not getting the available sunlight. We are awake at weird times, not following like the circadian balance. And that is severely limiting our lifespans

• 1:35:47Danny Jones?

  and our, it's like increasing all kinds of comorbidities inside of human beings, like cancers are at an all time high. All, you know, I think this country, like the most developed countries that where people are doing these types of jobs seem to be, there seems to be a correlation with health outcomes with that, right? Like the third world countries, people are outside all day doing manual labor, they seem to be the most healthy. So just like high level view, you know, you can see how technology severely changes the human body and the human biology. But, you know, at the same time, we're like also super adaptable, like you said, not just cognitively, but physically, we're very physically adaptable

• 1:36:32Danny Jones?

  and resilient things. And if we are going to keep this stuff in a box, not let it take over and kill us all, and just use it, it's, we're certainly going to evolve into something that's, you know, way different than what we are, what we used to be, I would imagine.

• 1:36:56Speaker 04

  Well, if we develop useful tools for, for example, understanding human genome, we can make direct improvements to our design. We can live longer by design. We can be healthier by design. We can gain less weight. We can have more muscle. We can make those changes. Once you understand human genome, it's a software program. You can directly change certain variables in it.

• 1:37:17Danny Jones?

  Yeah, that's crazy.

• 1:37:19Speaker 04

  We've been doing it indirectly. Every time you pick a more beautiful woman, you're making a genetic choice, right?

• 1:37:24Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Yeah. The fact that we can create crisper babies and design, people can design their own babies and like pick from a menu, like what's your eye color, what's the hair color, what's the skin complexion?

• 1:37:40Speaker 04

  But those things are completely unimportant. What you care about is intelligence.

• 1:37:44Danny Jones?

  We care about the cosmetics.

• 1:37:45Speaker 04

  We shouldn't be. But we'll have ability to pick important things. Not having a cancer gene is important.

• 1:37:54Danny Jones?

  Of course. But it is true that, you know, we only, for the most part, we only do care about the cosmetics and.

• 1:38:01Speaker 04

  Those are just very easy to judge. Intelligence is based on hundreds of genes interacting, whereas I think things like eye color, gender, much easier to spot and fix.

• 1:38:11Danny Jones?

  That is interesting, though, how, you know, obviously with the advancement of this stuff, that we will be able to do that if it becomes like a legal thing. But I think right now it's completely illegal to do, to do that kind of like genetic modification and stuff like that. This is the stuff that like Epstein was into. Epstein was, he was emailing NSA cryptographers about manipulating the human DNA. Did you see that?

• 1:38:35Speaker 04

  No, I didn't really, didn't hear that.

• 1:38:36Danny Jones?

  Yeah, he was talking to NSA hackers, like hackers that worked inside the NSA to figure out how to manipulate the like DNA and the human genome because he was interested in like printing, cloning himself.

• 1:38:46Speaker 04

  Seems like wrong kind of specialist for that project.

• 1:38:50Danny Jones?

  Seems like what?

• 1:38:51Speaker 04

  Wrong professional for that type of work.

• 1:38:55Danny Jones?

  Well, no, I mean, if you, if you have cryptographer, didn't you just say that like it's, that's what the DNA is? Like it's a, it's a code?

• 1:39:02Speaker 04

  It's a code, but it's not encrypted, right? We just, so cryptography is usually about making something hard to read.

• 1:39:11Danny Jones?

  Steve, find the story about the NSA, about Epstein contacting.

• 1:39:14Speaker 04

  Not my area of expertise, so I.

• 1:39:16Danny Jones?

  Yeah, but it was, it's interesting, though, why he was talking to the NSA computer hackers, though, right? Like, why would he be talking to computer hackers about this stuff? Leaked emails from the Department of Justice, associates of signal intelligence used by the government agencies to apply breaking the DNA code and the protein signal problems.

• 1:39:37Speaker 04

  Okay, interesting. That makes sense.

• 1:39:39Danny Jones?

  He asked contact to help him find and recruit NSA quality code theorists and code breakers from intelligence services stating that breaking foreign codes is the expertise of US NSA. The contact, Epstein viewed the human genome as a cryptographic puzzle and frequently discussed eugenics, transhumanism, and altering human traits.

• 1:40:00Speaker 04

  Never heard of it. Thank you for educating.

• 1:40:02Danny Jones?

  Yeah, of course. Does that make sense to you?

• 1:40:05Speaker 04

  I don't know if it's exactly the same as the cryptographic puzzles cryptographers work with, but I mean, the word code appears in both, so I guess you made a connection.

• 1:40:17Speaker 04

  With DNA, it's more about genotype versus phenotype and trying to understand how the code translates into physical manifestation. So this makes you taller, this makes you, this is not exactly the symbol manipulation of cryptographic protocols, but those are smart people with computers, we'll figure it out.

• 1:40:36Danny Jones?

  Right. Is there anything else we should discuss that we haven't covered yet?

• 1:40:42Speaker 04

  Many interesting things. What do you want to talk about?

• 1:40:45Danny Jones?

  Uh, I don't know, you tell me. Anything that you can, that you can think of that I'm not, I'm not asking.

• 1:40:51Speaker 04

  Have you heard people talk about AI safety on a show before?

• 1:40:54Danny Jones?

  AI safety?

• 1:40:55Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:40:55Danny Jones?

  You're the first.

• 1:40:56Speaker 04

  Oh, really?

• 1:40:57Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:58Speaker 04

  Okay, well, uh, do you, can I agree with what I'm saying? Do you understand what I'm saying?

• 1:41:03Danny Jones?

  Yeah, for the most part, yeah.

• 1:41:05Speaker 04

  Okay. Is there something you disagree with? Maybe we can clarify it for the audience. Same with you if there's any question?

• 1:41:12Danny Jones?

  Uh, no, nothing I disagree with. Not really. I'm just trying to mainly to get, it's just a, a better, high level understanding of it. I understand that it's like super dangerous, but like, I'm just curious about like any more specific, um, specific kind of like research you're doing, drilling down into stuff, like what, like that paper you were just talking about that you were working on with, uh, seeing if people could detect a fake picture versus a real picture.

• 1:41:37Speaker 04

  So it's called generative AI. It's so good at creating pictures, text, videos, everything. Virtual worlds, new molecules. If AI generates all those things, we are bombarded by so much of that artificial generated content. If I go on social media, soon, majority of stories, majority of posts are all written by AI. How can I tell? The existing detectors are terrible. They're just not reliable at all. You can't say, I ran it through detector, I know it's a hundred percent AI. They don't work like that. So is that a limitation of today's technology or is it in theory, in principle, impossible to tell?

• 1:42:20Speaker 04

  And that's what I'm researching. I think it's an impossibility to actually be able to distinguish. The way it works is you have one algorithm generating fakes and another algorithm trying to detect. But eventually they meet in the middle. It's fifty fifty. If there is something I can use to tell it's a fake image, now this counterfeiter algorithm knows how I did it and it improves the faking process. So at the end, maybe it's not the case today, but eventually they just end up being equal in power. And so it's impossible when you see a political ad, a video, you don't know if president actually did those things or it's a fake video.

• 1:42:59Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:43:00Speaker 04

  And it cuts both ways. If somebody has a horrible video about you, you can say it's a deep fake. But once I see it, it's hard to unsee it, right? Especially the night before the election happens.

• 1:43:11Speaker 05

  That's funny. You're teaching it to be more efficient.

• 1:43:14Speaker 04

  It is exactly the process.

• 1:43:16Danny Jones?

  Right. Yeah, it's like a feedback loop, like the rising tide raises all boats.

• 1:43:20Speaker 04

  Doing it forever, yeah?

• 1:43:23Danny Jones?

  Yeah, and then with like, with, with just the overwhelming amount of stuff happening on social media. You know, not only is there just shit happening constantly around the world and so many different headlines on every single thing, but you're throwing in fake stuff on top of that and like fake people, fake accounts like on X that are reporting on stuff and, uh,

• 1:43:46Speaker 04

  But that's on top of just having so much more real news happening. If before we had an AI breakthrough once a decade, then it was once a year, once a month. Now it's five times a day, something new happens. I travel here to do this interview, I come back, I have to read four hundred new papers. I'm not gonna have time to do it.

• 1:44:06Danny Jones?

  Right. And you, you weren't like, the human brain wasn't meant to keep track of all that stuff, right? Like we evolved to-

• 1:44:12Speaker 04

  Even with help, even with AI now summarizing a paper for me, it's still just too much.

• 1:44:18Danny Jones?

  Do you use AI often to help you with stuff like that?

• 1:44:20Speaker 04

  I use AI tools for everything I can, yeah.

• 1:44:22Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 1:44:23Speaker 04

  Absolutely. Why wouldn't I?

• 1:44:24Danny Jones?

  Which ones do you use?

• 1:44:26Speaker 04

  Again, I think they're all very similar in power, so it really depends on what's available. Some have a little less restrictions for different tasks, so I'm happy with most of them.

• 1:44:36Danny Jones?

  The, one of the things that just like frightens me the most is, is how it's being integrated into social media, just because like, that's something I'm, I deal with all the time, you know, with the podcast. I see it happening all the time and I see people that I'm close to like going crazy because they don't know. They just believe everything they see and they don't really have a good AI bullshit detector. You know, I like to think that I have a good AI bullshit detector, but it's probably-

• 1:45:03Speaker 04

  But is it based on common sense, context, information or the actual image or video you're seeing? Because that's about to change. The quality is going to be so high, you have to have some other knowledge to be able to tell.

• 1:45:17Danny Jones?

  Right. Right. And especially when, you know, you're getting it through trusted sources too, who are probably, you know, some of the big news organizations are probably buying into some of this stuff as well and not vetting it enough, not, at least at some point, they're not going to be able to tell the difference and they're gonna have to just report on stuff because they rely on headlines and viewership and stuff like that, so.

• 1:45:45Danny Jones?

  What kind of implications will that have, you know, politically, geopolitically, culturally, locally?

• 1:45:51Speaker 04

  I'm actually surprised it's not a bigger part of our election process where we have to deal with so many fake stories and videos.

• 1:45:59Danny Jones?

  Our, our election process?

• 1:46:01Speaker 04

  Yeah. So the night before the election, I would expect explosion of fake videos, but it's not happening.

• 1:46:07Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Well, maybe the next election it will happen.

• 1:46:11Speaker 04

  We'll see.

• 1:46:12Danny Jones?

  Well, that, so the problem with that is you have people who suspect or are hyper paranoid about everything being fake, right? So if they see something that is real, they're automatically like, oh no, that's fake, that's fake, that's bullshit, there's no way that's real. Because they're so, they're constantly being beaten over the head with fake stuff all the time. They finally see the real shit and they think that that's fake too.

• 1:46:37Speaker 04

  And that's also a problem. We can no longer know what's true.

• 1:46:41Danny Jones?

  Yeah, man, it's hard to, uh, it's hard to have a, an optimistic outlook on all of this stuff. But, uh-

• 1:46:51Speaker 04

  We're still alive, we're still in charge. Let's not make bad decisions. Let's not build general superintelligence. It takes very little work to not do something. It's easy.

• 1:47:04Speaker 04

  Let's just not do it. Let's create useful tools. There's lots of problems humanity is facing. Let's work on those.

• 1:47:11Danny Jones?

  Yeah, but it's like, that's what humans do though, right? Like that's our nature. We always want to create new shit, more advanced stuff, more cutting edge stuff. And it's kind of like going against our very nature to stop doing that, right?

• 1:47:27Speaker 04

  We are very good at following personal self-interest. If I know it's bad for me, I'm not gonna do it.

• 1:47:34Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Yeah, but like we talked about earlier, you and I know it's bad for us, but we have no vote.

• 1:47:40Speaker 04

  They know it's bad for them. They all on record as saying, this is dangerous, this is gonna kill everyone. All of them said it. They have P doom levels which are insanely high.

• 1:47:51Speaker 05

  Unless they're dumb, unless they are destructive, like think of a terrorist group who cares nothing about, I mean, hell, they'll kill themselves, right?

• 1:48:00Speaker 04

  They are believers in rewards in the afterlife. These people are all atheists as far as I know.

• 1:48:10Danny Jones?

  Except for Peter Thiel.

• 1:48:11Speaker 04

  He's not a cutting edge AI developer.

• 1:48:17Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 1:48:19Speaker 04

  I don't think what they produce is-

• 1:48:21Danny Jones?

  I thought Palantir had a pretty legit AI.

• 1:48:23Speaker 04

  I think what they have is a very well-integrated model with military and security apparatus, but I don't think they have a cutting edge model yet. Again, maybe my knowledge is limited and what they do internally.

• 1:48:37Danny Jones?

  Did you see this, the, the reports of when, do you remember when the whole doggy thing happened with Elon? Where he was, when he was still working with Trump?

• 1:48:47Speaker 04

  Doge.

• 1:48:48Danny Jones?

  Doge, I like calling it doggy. When they, uh, when he got in there and he was trying to clean house and all those inner agencies like the IRS and all that stuff.

• 1:48:59Danny Jones?

  There were stories out there that, reporting that, uh, he had a contract with Palantir AI to integrate that into like the HHS, the IRS,

• 1:49:15Danny Jones?

  and all these agencies where he was cutting all these people, cutting, uh, getting rid of all these people and trying to merge all the data in all of these organizations like the IRS and the HHS, merge all of it and consolidate it all into this Palantir AI to where it was just like one database that had like a very high, deep level of information on all the citizens of the US.

• 1:49:42Speaker 04

  I would guess he would be pushing XAI instead.

• 1:49:46Danny Jones?

  That's what I would have thought too.

• 1:49:47Speaker 04

  Somebody else's company.

• 1:49:48Danny Jones?

  I would have guessed that too, but, um, I guess Palantir is very deeply intertwined with, uh, with the government and, uh-

• 1:49:55Speaker 04

  I don't watch news. I'm very happy about it, so I can't really-

• 1:49:59Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Well, that just makes me skeptical about the Palantir AI. I wonder, you know, how, how powerful it really is.

• 1:50:05Speaker 04

  So usually when you get, uh, rankings of top AI models, they don't show up at the top for most tasks I care about, so.

• 1:50:13Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 1:50:16Danny Jones?

  I'm curious.

• 1:50:18Speaker 04

  We can Google those things.

• 1:50:19Danny Jones?

  See what you can find, Steve.

• 1:50:20Speaker 04

  Power of Google.

• 1:50:22Danny Jones?

  See if you can find about that story if it was legit.

• 1:50:25Speaker 04

  So this is actually something you can do with today's AI. It sits in the back, listens to the conversation and pulls up relevant stuff way faster than a human could.

• 1:50:33Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 1:50:34Speaker 04

  Absolutely. That's easy.

• 1:50:37Speaker 04

  Voice recognition, transcribe, search.

• 1:50:40Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:50:41Speaker 05

  Recent.

• 1:50:42Speaker 04

  That doesn't take super intelligence.

• 1:50:46Danny Jones?

  Go up, go up to the top. Oh, wait, yeah, okay. Palantir's been discussed, uh, discussed in connection with Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, where our potential data and software overhauls alongside CEO Alex Karp's push to, for enterprise AI control and data sovereignty.

• 1:51:04Danny Jones?

  The IRS plans, reports indicate that DOGE representatives have appointed to Palantir as a prospective vendor for data management projects as part of, uh, federal efficiency initiatives. Palantir, co-founded by Thiel and associate of Musk, trying the firm closely into discussions surrounding DOGE's federal techs. CEO Karp criticized major frontier AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic during the earnings call, arguing that they attempt to colonize enterprises and absorb corporate intellectual properties into their training data. Okay. So, yeah, you, you probably are right then.

• 1:51:47Danny Jones?

  They're, they're just trying to consolidate data. And this is more, this is more of like, uh,

• 1:51:55Danny Jones?

  controlled police state types fears.

• 1:51:58Speaker 04

  I think they, very down to earth. It kind of like, we have data sets, we want to understand them, we want to combine them. I, I think that's what they work on, but again.

• 1:52:06Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:06Speaker 04

  They do internally.

• 1:52:08Danny Jones?

  We can talk about it until we're blue in the face, or at least me, maybe not you, maybe you actually.

• 1:52:12Speaker 04

  Really, the scary part is no one is in control. No one understands what's happening, how it works, and no one has power to stop it. Any one of those CEOs, unilaterally cannot stop. They'll be replaced immediately. So we kind of, we have this process where we're losing control already, even before we build super intelligence.

• 1:52:31Danny Jones?

  Some people talk about like, if we could have some super intelligence, if some super intelligence was created, uh, it would want to, if it did want to survive, it would want to ensure the survival of the planet. It would want to make sure that this planet can sustain. So that would be an overall good, a net good.

• 1:52:53Danny Jones?

  So even if humanity had to pay a small price for the planet to be safe, like maybe this thing would, if this super intelligence, uh, made all the decisions for humanity and for the world, it would be in

• 1:53:11Danny Jones?

  the greater benefit of Earth and for nature and all that stuff, because it would want to preserve that stuff.

• 1:53:17Speaker 04

  Wouldn't it wipe humans as polluters and just preserve the planet?

• 1:53:22Danny Jones?

  Uh, maybe not. Maybe it would find us useful in some, in some sense, you know?

• 1:53:26Speaker 04

  Again, in a world with super intelligence in it, what are you contributing?

• 1:53:28Danny Jones?

  Don't you, like, don't you, some people would claim that eliminating all the humans would maybe cause problems for them. Maybe they would need us for certain things, certain tasks.

• 1:53:38Speaker 04

  I would love to know what those are. We can tell people what jobs to get.

• 1:53:42Danny Jones?

  Like, we'd be the slaves to the, uh,

• 1:53:44Speaker 04

  You're not a very efficient slave. If we have, you know, humanoid robots, if we have nanotechnology, I don't think you are contributing much.

• 1:53:53Danny Jones?

  Right. Well, Roman, thank you so much for doing this, man.

• 1:53:57Speaker 04

  Thanks, buddy.

• 1:53:58Danny Jones?

  You've blown me away, uh, and scared the shit out of me.

• 1:54:03Speaker 04

  Let's not build general super intelligence.

• 1:54:05Danny Jones?

  I agree. Let's not do it. Tell people, uh, about your books, about your podcast, where they can find you and learn more about you, all that stuff.

• 1:54:14Speaker 04

  We have a podcast, it's called The Roman Forum. It's Roman and Polsky, and, uh, we talk about AI safety with leaders in that field. If you want to read about the concerns they have, there is a book, AI Unexplainable, Unpredictable, Uncontrollable. It addresses all the limitations of existing safety mechanisms.

• 1:54:35Danny Jones?

  Fantastic, man. We'll make sure we link all that stuff below.

• 1:54:38Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 1:54:39Danny Jones?

  Thanks again. I really enjoyed this.

• 1:54:41Speaker 04

  It was fun.

• 1:54:41Danny Jones?

  All right. Good night, everybody.