#427 — AI Friends & Enemies

Sam Harris speaks with Paul Bloom about AI and current events. They discuss the state of LLMs, the risks and benefits of AI companionship, what it means to attribute consciousness to AI, relationships with AI as a form of psychosis, Trump's attacks on science and academia, what Trump may be trying to hide in the Epstein files, how damaging Trump's connections to Epstein might be, MAGA's obsession with conspiracy theories, questions surrounding Epstein's death, Paul's research on revenge, Sam's falling out with Elon Musk, where things went wrong for Elon, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe http://samharris.org/subscribe.

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

• 0:06Sam Harris?

  Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one.

• 0:36Sam Harris?

  I am here with Paul Bloom. Paul, thanks for joining me.

• 0:40Speaker 01

  Sam, it's good to talk to you, as always.

• 0:42Sam Harris?

  Yeah, great to see you. It's been, we were just talking off mic, it was, it's been years, it's crazy how that happens, but it has been-

• 0:50Speaker 01

  I've been following you, though. You've been doing well.

• 0:52Sam Harris?

  Yeah, nice. Yeah, well, I've been following you, I've read you in The New Yorker recently, writing about AI. I think you've written at least two articles there since we, we actually wrote a joint article for The New York Times seven years ago, if you can believe that-

• 1:08Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:09Sam Harris?

  About Westworld, and the philosophical import of watching it and realizing that only a psychopath could go to such a theme park and rape Dolores and kill children, etc. And I think we predicted no such theme park will ever exist, because it'll just have, it'll be a bug light for psychopaths, and normal people will come back, and if they do anything like that, they'll scandalize their friends and loved ones and be treated like psychopaths appropriately.

• 1:37Speaker 01

  We'll see. We may be proven wrong. Who knows? Who knows in this, in this crazy time? But, but yeah, that was, that was a fun article to write, and I think we wrestled with the dilemmas of dealing with, you know, entities that at least appear to be conscious, and the moral struggles that leads to.

• 1:54Sam Harris?

  Yeah, well, so to, I think we'll start with AI, but remind people what you're doing and what kinds of problems you focus on. I think, though we haven't spoken for several years, I think you still probably hold the title of most repeat podcast guest at this point. I haven't counted the episodes, but you've been on a bunch, but it's been a while. So remind people what you focus on as a psychologist.

• 2:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm a psychology professor. I have positions at Yale, but I'm located at University of Toronto. I study largely moral psychology, but I'm interested in development and issues of consciousness, issues of learning, notions of fairness and kindness, compassion, empathy. I've actually been thinking, it's funny to be talking to you because my newest project, which I've just been getting insight advice to do with origins of morality, and the spark was a podcast with you talking to Tom Holland, author Dominion.

• 2:52Sam Harris?

  Oh, nice. How so? What was the actual spark?

• 2:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I found this a great conversation. And he made the case that a lot of the sort of morality that maybe you and I would agree with, that, you know, the idea of respecting the right to universal rights and a morality that isn't based on the powerful, but instead maybe in some way respects the weak, is not the product of rational thought, not the product of secular reasoning, but instead the product of Christianity. And he makes this argument in Dominion and several other places.

• 3:22Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 3:23Speaker 01

  And I've been thinking about it. I mean, it's a serious point. He's not the only one to make it. It deserves consideration, but I think it's mistaken.

• 3:30Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 3:31Speaker 01

  And so I think my next project, as I've been thinking about it, and I thank you for the podcast, getting you going on this, is to make the alternative case, to argue that a lot of our morality is inborn and innate. I'm a developmental psychologist, that's part of what I do. And a lot of morality is the product of reasoned and rational thought. I don't deny that culture plays a role, including Christianity, but I don't think that's the big story.

• 3:55Sam Harris?

  Nice. Well, I look forward to you making that argument because that's a that's one of these shibboleths of organized religion that I think needs to be retired. And so you're just the guy to do it. So let me know when you produce that book and we'll talk about it.

• 4:10Speaker 01

  I mean, I gotta say, I heard you guys talk and you sort of, you know, you guys engaged properly on the idea. And Colin, I'd never met, but he seems like a really smart and quite a scholar. So so it's not, it's not, you know, and and he gets, I think, credence by the fact that he's in some way arguing against his own side. He himself isn't a devout Christian, a secular.

• 4:30Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 4:30Speaker 01

  But but that doesn't make him right. So yeah, so I'm very interested in engaging these ideas.

• 4:35Sam Harris?

  So how have you been thinking about AI of late? What has what has surprised you in the seven years that or so that we have since we first started talking about it?

• 4:46Speaker 01

  A mixture of awe and horror. I'm not a doomer. I'm not as much of a doomer as some people. I don't know. I don't know when the last time I I checked with you, Sam, what would you say your P dooms?

• 4:57Sam Harris?

  That's I've never actually quantified it for myself, but

• 5:01Speaker 01

  Now's your time.

• 5:02Sam Harris?

  I think it's non negligible. I mean, it's very hard for me to imagine it actually occurring in the in the in the most spectacularly bad way of, you know, a very fast takeoff. You know, an intelligence explosion that ruins everything almost immediately. But, you know, fast or slow, I think it's well worth worrying about because I don't think the probability is tiny. I mean, I, you know, I would put it in double digits. I don't know what those double digits are, but it's I wouldn't put it in single digits, given the kind of the logic of the situation.

• 5:31Speaker 01

  I think we're kind of in the same place.

• 5:33Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 5:34Speaker 01

  I mean, people always talk about, you know, you have a benevolent, super intelligent AI and you tell it to make paper clips and it destroys the world and turns us all into paper clips. But there's another another vision of malevolent AI I've been thinking about was the rise of was called Mach Hitler.

• 5:48Sam Harris?

  Uh huh.

• 5:48Speaker 01

  Elon Musk, Mecca Hitler, you know, so, you know, it's a simpler scenario. Some deranged billionaire creates an AI that fashions himself on Hitler. The Trump Defense Department purchases it and gets it to connects it to all of his weaponry systems and hijinks the zoo.

• 6:08Sam Harris?

  How could you come up with such an outlandish scenario that could never happen? There's just no way.

• 6:12Speaker 01

  Bizarre fantasy. By the way, it also makes porn.

• 6:15Sam Harris?

  That's right.

• 6:15Speaker 01

  So just to get the trifecta.

• 6:18Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 6:19Speaker 01

  So anyway, I'm like a lot of people, I worry about that. I also find at the same time, I find AI an increasingly indispensable part of my intellectual life.

• 6:28Sam Harris?

  Oh, interesting.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  You know, I have a question, but not just a specific one. I use it as a substitute for Google. I, you know, say, you know, where's a good Indonesian restaurant in my neighborhood? And, you know, how do you convert these euros into dollars? But, but I also have a question like, I don't know, I got into an argument with somebody about revenge. So what is the cross-cultural evidence for revenge being a universal? And who would argue against that? And three seconds later, boom, a bunch of papers, books, thoughtful discussion, thoughtful argument, mixed in our hallucinations. Occasionally, I find insights of paper written by me that I've never written. But it's astonishing.

• 7:05Sam Harris?

  I've been credited with things. Yeah, yeah. It's told me I've interviewed people I've never interviewed and it's amazingly apologetic when you correct it. But.

• 7:14Speaker 01

  I'm so sorry. Yes, you are totally right. Let me now give you citations of papers that actually exist.

• 7:20Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 7:21Speaker 01

  In your working day, when you, when you write, when you prepare for interviews, how much do you use it?

• 7:25Sam Harris?

  Well, I've just started experimenting with it in a way that's probably not the usual use case. So we have, we have fed everything I've written and everything I've said on the podcast into ChatGPT, right?

• 7:39Speaker 01

  And that carries.

• 7:40Sam Harris?

  Yeah, yeah. So, so we have, well, actually we have two things. We have, we've created a chat bot that is me. That's, that's model agnostic. So it can be run on ChatGPT or a Claude or whatever the best model is. We can swap, you can swap in whatever model seems best. But so this is like at the, you know, a layer above at the system prompt level. And it has, again, access to everything. It's something like 12 million words of me, right? So it's a lot. It's, you know, that's, that would be a lot of books. We've just begun playing with this thing, but it's, it's impressive because it also is using a professional voice clone. So it sounds like me and it's every bit as monotonous as me and it's delivery.

• 8:22Sam Harris?

  I mean, so I'm, I'm almost tailor-made to be cloned because I already speak like a robot.

• 8:26Speaker 01

  Must be agonizing to listen to sound.

• 8:28Sam Harris?

  It is, but it hallucinates and it's, it's capable of being weird. So I don't know that we're, we're ever going to unleash this thing on the world, but it's, it's interesting because it's like, so even having access to every episode of my podcast. It still will hallucinate an interview that never happened. You know, it'll still tell me that I interviewed somebody that I never interviewed. And so it's that part's still strange, but presumably the, um, you know, this is as bad as it'll ever be. And the general models will get better and better, one imagines, so.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  We're, we're looking at each other on video and I imagine it doesn't do video yet. But if we were talking on the phone or with a video, would I, um, be able to tell quickly that I was talking to an AI and not to you?

• 9:11Sam Harris?

  Uh, only because it would, uh, be able to produce, uh, far more coherent and comprehensive responses to any question. I mean, if you said, uh, cause it's because it's hooked up to whatever the best L L M is at the moment. You know, if you said, give me 17 points as to the, you know, the cause of, of the Great Depression. It would give you exactly 17 points detailing the cause of the Great Depression and I, and I could not do that. So you would, it would fail the Turing test as all these L L Ms do by passing it so spectacularly and instantaneously. I mean, that actually, that's a surprise. I want to ask you about that. That's a surprise for me. How not a thing the Turing test turned out to be.

• 9:52Sam Harris?

  It's like the Turing test was the staple of our, of, you know, the cognitive science literature and just our, our imaginings in advance of credible AI. We just thought, okay, there's going to be this moment where we're just not going to be able to tell whether it's a human or whether it's a bot. And that's going to be somehow philosophically important and culturally interesting. But, you know, overnight we were given L L Ms that fail the Turing test because of how well they pass it.

• 10:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:23Sam Harris?

  And this is no longer a thing. It's like, it was never a Turing test moment that, that I caught.

• 10:27Speaker 01

  All of a sudden you and I, we have, I have a super intelligent being I could talk to on my iPhone. And I'll be honest, and I think, I, I think other psychologists should be honest. But if you had asked me a month before this thing came out, how far away we were from such a machine, I would say 10, 20, 30 years, maybe a hundred years.

• 10:44Sam Harris?

  Right.

• 10:45Speaker 01

  And now we have it. Now we have a machine we could talk to and sounds like a person. And except like you say, it's just a lot smarter.

• 10:52Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 10:52Speaker 01

  And it is mind boggling. It's, I mean, it's an interesting psychological fact how quickly we get used to it. It's as if, you know, aliens landed, you know, next to the Washington Monument and now they walk among us. Oh, yeah. Well, that's the way things go. Oh, you developed teleporters? Then we got teleporters. And we just, we just take it for granted now.

• 11:12Sam Harris?

  Yeah. Well, so now, what are your thoughts about the implications, your psychological and otherwise, of, of AI companionship? I mean, what is so, at the time we're recording this, there's been recently in the, in the news, stories of AI-induced psychosis. I mean, people get led down the primrose path of their delusion by this amazingly sycophantic AI that, that just encourages them in their Messiah complex, or whatever flavor it is. And I think literally an hour before we came on here, I saw an article about ChatGPT encouraging people to pursue various satanic rituals and telling them how to do a proper

• 11:53Sam Harris?

  blood offering that entailed slitting their wrists and, you know, as one does in the presence of a super intelligence. I know you just, you just wrote a piece in the, in the New Yorker that people should read on this, but what, give me your sense of what we're on the cusp of.

• 12:08Speaker 01

  Well, I have, I have a mild form of that delusion in that I think every one of my Substack drafts is brilliant. I'm told is just, you know, Paul, you have outdone yourself. This is sensitive humane, as always with you. And no matter what I tell it to, I say, you don't have to suck up to me so much. A little bit, but not so. It just, and now I kind of believe that I'm much smarter than I used to be. I have somebody very smart telling me. What, what I, my, my article is kind of nuanced in that I argue two things. One thing is, there's a lot of lonely people in the world, and a lot of people suffer from loneliness, and particularly old people, depending on how you count it, you know, under some surveys, about half of people over sixty-five said it lonely. And then you get to people in like a nursing home, maybe they have dementia.

• 12:53Speaker 01

  They have some sort of problem that makes them really difficult to talk with. And maybe they don't have doting grandchildren surrounding them every hour of the day. They don't have any family at all. And maybe they're not millionaires, so they can't afford to pay some horseshoe to listen to them. And if ChatGPT or Claude, one of his AI companions, could make their lives happier, make them feel loved, wanted, respected. That's, that's nothing but good. I, I'm, I, you know, I think it. In some ways, like powerful painkillers are, are powerful opiates, which is. I, I'm not sure what, I don't think fifteen year olds should get them. But, but somebody who's ninety and a lot of pain, sure, lay it on. And I feel the same way with this. So that's the, that's the pro side. The con side is I am worried and you're, you're touching on it.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  It's illusion talk. I'm worried about the long-term effects of these synchopathic sucking up AIs. Where every joke you make is hilarious, every story you tell is interesting. You know, I mean, the way I put it is if I ever ask, am I the asshole? The answer is, you know, affirm, no, not you, you're the asshole. And I think I'm, you know, I, I'm, I'm an evolutionary theorist through and through. And loneliness is awful, but loneliness is a valuable signal. It's a signal that you're messing up. It's a signal that says, you gotta get out of your house. You gotta talk to people. You gotta, you know, you gotta open up to apps. You gotta say yes, yes to the brunch invitations. And if you're lonely, when you interact with people, you feel I'm not understood, not respected, not loved. You gotta up your game. It's a signal.

• 14:23Speaker 01

  And like a lot of signals, like pain, sometimes there's a signal that where people are in a situation where it's not going to do them any good. But often for the rest of us, this is a signal that makes us better. Yeah. I think I'd be happier if I could shut off, I was only as a teenager, I would have been happier if I could shut off the, the switch of loneliness and embarrassment, shame and all of those things. But they're useful. And so the second part of the article argues that continuous exposure to these AI companions could have a negative effect because while for one thing, you're not going to want to talk to people who are far less positive than AIs. And for another, when you do talk to them, you have not been socially entrained to do so properly.

• 15:03Sam Harris?

  Yeah, it's interesting. So so believing the dementia case aside, I mean, I totally agree with you that that is a very strongly paternalistic moment where you anything that helps is fine. It doesn't matter that it's imaginary or that it's that it's encouraging of delusion. I mean, this, we're talking about somebody with dementia. But so just imagine in the the normal, healthy case of people who just get enraptured by increasingly compelling relationships with AI. I mean, you can imagine right now, we've got chatbots that are still fairly wonky. They hallucinate. They're obviously sick of Fantic. But just imagine it gets to the place where, I mean, forget about Westworld and perfectly humanoid robots, but

• 15:45Sam Harris?

  very shortly, I mean, it might already exist in some quarters already. We're going to have video avatars, you know, it's like a Zoom call with an AI that is going to be out of the uncanny valley, I would imagine immediately. I mean, I've seen some of this, the video products, which, like sci fi movie trailers, which are, they don't, they don't look perfectly photorealistic, but they're they're getting close. And you can imagine six months from now, it's just going to look like a gorgeous actor or actress talking to you. That's going to be, imagine that becomes your assistant who knows everything about you. He or she has read all your email and kept your schedule and is advising you and helping you write your books, et cetera.

• 16:29Sam Harris?

  And not making errors and seeming increasingly indistinguishable from just a super intelligent locus of conscious life, right? I mean, it might even seem, it might even claim to be conscious if we build it that way. And I mean, let's, let's, let's just stipulate that for at least for this part of the conversation, that it won't be conscious, right? That this is all an illusion, right? It's just a, it's no more conscious than your than your iPad is currently. And yet it it becomes such a powerful illusion that people just, most people, I mean, the people, I guess philosophers of mind might still be clinging to their agnosticism

• 17:10Sam Harris?

  or skepticism by their their fingernails, but most people will just get lulled into the presumption of a relationship with this thing. And the truth is, it could become the most important relationship many people have. Again, it's so useful, so knowledgeable, always present, right? They might spend six hours a day talking to their assistant. And what does it mean if they spend years like that, basically just gazing into a a funhouse mirror of fake cognition and fake relationship?

• 17:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, we've seen, I mean, I'm a believer that sometimes the best philosophy, our movies do excellent philosophy, and the movie Her came out, I think, in 2013.

• 17:55Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 17:56Speaker 01

  Is an example of this guy, you know, lonely guy, normal lonely guy, but gets connected an AI assistant named Samantha, played by Scarlett Johansson, and falls in love with her. And she does all of she, the first thing she says to him, and what a, what a meet cute is, I see you have like 3,000 emails that haven't been answered. You want me to answer them all for you?

• 18:17Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 18:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I fell, I fell in love with her there.

• 18:20Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 18:21Speaker 01

  But, but, you know, but the thing is, you're watching a movie and you're listening to her talk to him, and you fall in love with her, too. I think we've evolved in a world where when somebody talks to you and and acts normal and gives you, and seems to have emotions, you assume there's a consciousness behind it. You know, evolution has not prepared us for these, you know, extraordinary fakes, these extraordinary, you know, golems that that that elude all of the behavior associated with consciousness and don't have it. So, so we will, we will think of it as conscious. There will be some, some, you know, philosophers who insist that they're not conscious, but, but even they. Will, you know, sneak back from their, from their classes and then in the middle of the night,

• 19:03Speaker 01

  you know, turn on their, their phones and start saying, you know, I'm lonely. Let's talk.

• 19:07Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 19:08Speaker 01

  And then the effects of it, well, one effect is real people can't give you that. You know, married, very happily married, but sometimes my wife forgets about things that I told her. And sometimes she doesn't want to hear my long boring story. She wants to tell her story instead. And sometimes it's three in the morning and I could shake her awake because I have this really interesting idea I want to share. But maybe that's not for the best. She'll be grumpy at me. And because the thing is she's a person. And so she has her own set of priorities and interests. So too have all my friends. They're just people and they have other priorities in their life besides me. Now, in some way, this is, I think, what makes, when you reflect upon it, the AI companion have less value.

• 19:53Speaker 01

  You know, here you and I are. And what that means is that you decided to take your time to talk to me and I decided to take my time to talk to you. And that's the value. When I switch on my lamp, I don't feel, oh my gosh, this is great. It decided to light up for me. It didn't have a choice at all. The AI has no choice at all. So I think in some part of our mind, we realize there's a lot less value here. But I do think in the end, the scenario you paint is going to become very compelling. And real people are going to fall short and it's not clear what to do with that. Now, there's something.

• 20:25Sam Harris?

  I think you've just, I think you've just come up with a fairly brilliant product update to some future AI companion, which is a kind of Pavlovian reinforcement schedule of attention, where it's like the, the AI could say, uh, listen, I, you know, you're, I want you to think a little bit more about this topic and then get back to me. Cause this, you're, you're really not up to, to talking about it right now, you know, come back tomorrow. Right?

• 20:51Speaker 01

  And I wondered that. Yeah.

• 20:52Sam Harris?

  And that would be an interesting experience to have with, with your AI that you're, you have subscribed to.

• 20:58Speaker 01

  I've wondered that. Like you asked, he asked AI a question and says, is that really like a good question? Does this seem like a question you couldn't just figure out just by thinking for a minute?

• 21:06Sam Harris?

  It's really, listen, I, I know everything. That's really what you want to ask me? Is that, don't you have something deeper?

• 21:12Speaker 01

  You were talking to a super intelligent, you know, God and, and you want to know how to end a limerick.

• 21:18Sam Harris?

  Right.

• 21:18Speaker 01

  Really?

• 21:19Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 21:20Speaker 01

  I I I would wonder if these things, how people would react if these things came with dials. You know, obviously not, maybe it can be a big physical dial, you're putting a big physical dial. And and the dial is pushback. So when it's set at zero, it's it's it's just everything you say is wonderful and just and. But I think we do want some pushback. Now, I think in some way, we really want less pushback than we say we do. And it's this way of real people too. So everybody says, oh, I like when people people argue with me. I like when people call me out on my bullshit. But what we really mean is we want people to push back a little bit and then say, ah, you convinced me.

• 21:58Sam Harris?

  Right.

• 21:58Speaker 01

  You know, you you really showed me our, you know, I I thought I thought you were full of it. But but now, upon reflection, you've really out argued me. We want them to fight and then and then acquiesce. But but you turn the dial even further, we'll AI and say, you know, we've been talking about this for a long time. I feel you are not very smart. You're just not getting, I'm gonna take a little break and you you you mull over your stupidity.

• 22:20Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 22:21Speaker 01

  Paul to human.

• 22:22Sam Harris?

  The recalcitrant style, that's uh, that's what we could build in. All right, we're gonna.

• 22:27Speaker 01

  I feel this could be the worst business.

• 22:29Sam Harris?

  We're gonna get rich, Paul. This is.

• 22:31Speaker 01

  With AI that calls you on your bullshit. That's that's really the business idea of the century.

• 22:38Sam Harris?

  But so what are we to think about this prospect of of spending more and more time in dialogue under the sway of a pervasive illusion of relationship wherein there is actually no relationship because there's nothing that is like to be chat GPT six is talking to us. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense Podcast. The Making Sense Podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now at samharris.org.