#435 — The Last Invention

Sam Harris introduces the first episode of The Last Invention https://open.spotify.com/show/3JlvdUfyVkBoe9K1hiXWyI?si=f6a8d0d11c504d51, a new podcast series on the hype and fear about the AI revolution, reported by Gregory Warner and Andy Mills. Gregory Warner was a foreign correspondent in Russia and Afghanistan, and the East Africa bureau chief for NPR. He created and hosted the podcast Rough Translation. He also publishes stories on This American Life and in The New York Times. Andy Mills is a reporter and editor, formerly of The New York Times, where he helped create their audio department and shows like The Daily and Rabbit Hole. The Last Invention is a limited run series with eight total episodes. You can find it anywhere you listen to podcasts, where episodes will be released weekly. You can sign up for their mailing list on Substack at https://longviewinvestigations.substack.com/, and you can also subscribe on their website at longviewinvestigations.com http://longviewinvestigations.com/.

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

• 0:21Sam Harris?

  Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Well, in today's episode, we are previewing a new podcast series created by Andy Mills and Matt Bull on artificial intelligence. Andy and Matt have been making podcasts and reporting for at least 15 years or so, and they've won a bunch of awards, The Peabody, Pulitzer. They've worked at outlets like Spotify and NPR and The New York Times. They also produced The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling, which I discussed on a previous episode of this podcast. And they have a new media company called Longview, and this series on AI, which is

• 1:06Sam Harris?

  titled "The Last Invention," is their first release. And so we're previewing that here. I am interviewed in it, but there are many other people in there which are well worth listening to. Nick Bostrom, Geoffrey Hinton, Joshua Benjio, Reid Hoffman, Max Tegmark, Robin Hanson, Jaron Lanier, Tim Urban, Kevin Ruess, and others. And this is really a great introduction to the topic. I mean, this is the, it's going to be a limited-run series of eight episodes. And really, more than anything that I've done on this topic, this is the series you can share with your friends and family to get them to understand

• 1:46Sam Harris?

  just what the fuss is about, whether it's the controversy on the side of being worried about this issue, or on the side of being merely worried that we're going to do something, regulatory or otherwise, to slow our progress. They represent both sides of this controversy in a way that I really don't, because I'm so in touch with one side of it. And I think those who aren't in touch with that side are fairly crazy and doctrinaire at this point. So anyway, it's a great introduction to the topic.

• 2:25Sam Harris?

  As far as the series itself, it's reported by Andy Mills and Gregory Warner. Andy, as I said, it was, worked for the New York Times and he actually helped create their audio department and their flagship podcast, The Daily, as well as Rabbit Hole. And Gregory Warner has been a foreign correspondent in Russia and Afghanistan and East Africa, where he was the bureau chief for NPR. And he created and hosted the podcast, Rough Translation. He also publishes stories on This American Life and in the New York Times. So, anyway, you're in great hands with this series. I'm happy to preview it. I would

• 3:07Sam Harris?

  love to give these guys a boost. Again, their new media company is Longview. You can find out more about them over at longviewinvestigations.com, where you can also subscribe and get their newsletter. And also, Andy and Matt wanted me to say that they are hiring for this new company. They're looking for reporters, producers, editors, both for writing and for audio and video jobs. So if you have those skills, don't be shy. Again, it's longviewinvestigations.com. Anyway, that's it. Enjoy. Thanks for listening.

• 3:56Speaker 01

  This is The Last Invention. I'm Gregory Warner, and our story begins with a conspiracy theory.

• 4:03Speaker 02

  So Greg, last spring, I got this tip via the encrypted messaging app Signal.

• 4:10Speaker 01

  This is reporter Andy Mills.

• 4:12Speaker 02

  From a former tech executive. And he was making some pretty wild claims. And I wanted to talk to him on the phone, but he thought his phone was being tapped. But the next time I was out in California, I went to meet with him.

• 4:26Speaker 03

  I'm really kind of contending with like who I am in this moment. Up until a few months ago, I was an executive in Silicon Valley. And yet, here I am, sitting in a living room with you guys.

• 4:39Speaker 03

  Talking about what I think is one of the most important things that needs to be discussed in the whole world, right? Which is the the nature in which power is decided in our society.

• 4:51Speaker 02

  And he told me this story that a faction of people within Silicon Valley had a plot to take over the United States government and that the Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, under Elon Musk was really phase one of this plan, which was to fire human workers in the government and replace them with artificial intelligence. And that over time, the plan was to replace all of the government and have artificial intelligence make all the important decisions in America.

• 5:29Speaker 03

  I have seen both the nature of the threat from inside the belly of the beast, if it were, in Silicon Valley and seen the nature of what's at stake.

• 5:42Speaker 02

  Now, this guy, his name is Mike Brock, and he had formerly been an executive in Silicon Valley. He'd worked alongside some big name guys like Jack Dorsey, but he'd recently started a Substack. And he told me that after he published some of these accusations, he had become convinced that people were after him.

• 6:03Speaker 03

  I have reason to believe that I've been followed by private investigators. For that and other reasons, I traveled with private security when I went to DC and New York City last week.

• 6:13Speaker 02

  He told me that he had just come back from Washington DC, where he had met with a number of lawmakers, including Maxine Waters, and debriefed them about this threat to American democracy.

• 6:28Speaker 03

  We are in a democratic crisis. This is a coup. This is a slow motion, soft coup.

• 6:33Speaker 01

  And so this faction, who is in this faction? What is this, like the Masons or something? Or is it like a secret cult?

• 6:42Speaker 02

  Well, he named several names, people who are recognizable figures in Silicon Valley. And he claimed that this, quote unquote, conspiracy went all the way up to JD Vance, the Vice President. And he called the people who were behind this coup.

• 6:59Speaker 03

  The accelerationists.

• 7:00Speaker 02

  The accelerationists.

• 7:06Speaker 02

  It was a wild story. Yeah. But you know, some conspiracies turn out to be true. And it was also an interesting story. So I started making some phone calls. I started looking into it. And some of his claims I could not confirm. Maxine Waters, for example, did not respond to my request for an interview. Other claims started to somewhat fall apart. And of course, eventually Doge itself somewhat fell apart. Elon Musk ended up leaving the Trump administration. And for a while, it felt like, you know, it was one of those tips that just doesn't go anywhere. But in the course of all these conversations I was having with people close to artificial intelligence, I realized that there was an aspect of his story

• 7:50Speaker 02

  that wasn't just true, but in some ways, it didn't go quite far enough. Because there is indeed a faction of people in Silicon Valley who don't just want to replace government bureaucrats, but want to replace pretty much everyone who has a job with artificial intelligence. And they don't just think that the AI that they're making is going to upend American democracy. They think it is going to upend the entire world order.

• 8:22Speaker 04

  The world as you know it is over. It's not about to be over. It's over.

• 8:27Speaker 05

  I believe it's going to change the world more than anything in the history of mankind, more than electricity.

• 8:33Speaker 02

  But here's the thing, they're not doing this in secret. This group of people includes some of the biggest names in technology. Bill Gates, Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, most of the leaders in the field of artificial intelligence.

• 8:47Speaker 06

  AI is going to be better than almost all humans at almost all things.

• 8:51Speaker 04

  A kid born today will never be smarter than AI. It's the first technology that has no limits.

• 8:58Speaker 01

  So wait, so you get a tip about like a slow motion coup against the government, and then you realize, no, no, this is not just about the government. This is pretty much every human institution.

• 9:07Speaker 02

  Well, yes and no. Many of these accelerationists think that this AI that they're building is going to lead to the end of what we have come to think of as jobs, the end of what we have traditionally thought of as schools. Some would even say this could usher in the end of the nation state. But they do not see this as some sort of shadowy conspiracy. They think that this may end up literally being the best thing to ever happen to humanity. I've always believed that it's going to be the most important invention that humanity will ever make. Imagine that everybody will now in the future have access to the very best doctor

• 9:47Speaker 03

  in the world, the very best educator. The world will be richer and can work less and have more. This really will be a world of abundance.

• 9:59Speaker 02

  They predict that their AI systems are going to be the thing that helps us to solve the most pressing problems that humanity faces.

• 10:07Speaker 06

  Energy breakthroughs, medical breakthroughs.

• 10:09Speaker 07

  Maybe we can cure all disease with the help of AI.

• 10:12Speaker 02

  They think it's going to be this hinge moment in human history where soon we will be living to maybe be 200 years old, or maybe we'll be visiting other planets, where we will look back in history and think, oh, my God, how did people live before this technology?

• 10:27Speaker 07

  Should be a kind of era of maximum human flourishing where we travel to the stars and colonize the galaxy.

• 10:33Speaker 06

  I think a world of abundance really is a reality. I don't think it's utopian, given what I've seen that the technology is capable of.

• 10:45Speaker 01

  So these are a lot of bold promises, and they come from the people who are selling this technology. Why do they think that the AI that they are building is going to be so transformative?

• 10:57Speaker 02

  Well, the reason that they're making such grandiose statements and these bold predictions about the near future, it comes down to what it is they think that they're making when they say they're making AI.

• 11:10Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 11:11Speaker 02

  This is something that I recently called up my old colleague Kevin Roos to talk about.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  Kevin, how is it that you describe what it is that the AI companies are making?

• 11:22Speaker 02

  Am I right to say that they're essentially building like a supermind, like a digital superbrain?

• 11:28Speaker 05

  Yes, that is correct.

• 11:30Speaker 02

  He's a very well sourced tech reporter and a columnist at the New York Times.

• 11:33Speaker 01

  Also co-host of the podcast Hard Fork.

• 11:35Speaker 02

  And he says that the first thing to know is that this is far more of an ambitious project than just building something like chatbots.

• 11:43Speaker 05

  Essentially, many of these people believe that the human brain is just a kind of biological computer, that there is nothing, you know, special or supernatural about human intelligence, that we are just a bunch of neurons firing and learning patterns in the data that we encounter, and that if you could just build a computer that sort of simulated that, you could essentially create a new kind of intelligent being.

• 12:10Speaker 02

  Right. I've heard some people say that we should think of it less like a piece of software or a piece of hardware and more like a new intelligent species.

• 12:19Speaker 05

  Yes. It wouldn't be a computer program exactly. It wouldn't be a human exactly. It would be this sort of digital supermind that could do anything a human could and more.

• 12:31Speaker 02

  The goal, the benchmark that the AI industry is working towards right now is something that they call AGI, artificial general intelligence. The general is the key part because a general intelligence isn't just really good at one or two or 20 or 100 things, but like a very smart person can learn new things, can be trained in how to do almost anything.

• 12:56Speaker 01

  I guess this is where people get worried about jobs getting replaced because suddenly you have a worker, like a lawyer or a secretary, and you can tell the AI to learn everything about that job.

• 13:07Speaker 02

  Exactly. I mean, that is what they're making, and that's why there's a lot of concerns about what this could do to the economy. I mean, a true AGI could learn how to do any human job, factory worker, CEO, doctor. And as ambitious as that sounds, it has been like the stated on paper goal of the AI industry for a very long time. But when I was talking to Kevin Roos, he was saying that even just a decade ago, The idea that we would actually see it within our lifetimes, that was something that even in Silicon Valley was seen as like a pie in the sky dream.

• 13:40Speaker 05

  People would get laughed at inside the biggest technology companies for even talking about AGI. It seemed like trying to plan for, you know, something, building a hotel chain on Mars or something. It was like that far off in people's imagination. And now, if you say you don't think AGI is going to arrive until 2040, you are seen as like a hyper conservative, basically Luddite in Silicon Valley.

• 14:06Speaker 02

  I know that you are regularly talking to people at OpenAI and Anthropic and DeepMind and all these companies. What is their timeline at this point? When do they think they might hit this benchmark of AGI?

• 14:19Speaker 05

  I think the overwhelming majority view among the people who are closest to this technology, both on the record and off the record, is that it would be surprising to them if it took more than about three years for AI systems to become better than humans at at least almost all cognitive tasks. Some people say, physical tasks, robotics, that's going to take longer. But the majority view of the people that I talked to is that something like AGI will arrive in the next two or three years, or certainly within the next five.

• 14:57Speaker 01

  I mean, holy shit.

• 14:59Speaker 02

  Holy shit.

• 15:00Speaker 01

  That is really soon.

• 15:01Speaker 02

  This is why there has been such insane amounts of money invested in artificial intelligence in recent years. This is why the AI race has been heating up.

• 15:12Speaker 01

  Right, this is to accelerate the path to AI.

• 15:15Speaker 02

  Mm hmm. But this has also really brought more attention to this other group of people in technology, people who I personally have been following for over a decade at this point, who have dedicated themselves to try everything they can to stop these accelerationists.

• 15:33Speaker 06

  The basic description I would give to the current scenario is if anyone builds it, everyone dies.

• 15:39Speaker 02

  Many of these people like Eliezer Yudkowsky are former accelerationists who used to be thrilled about the AI revolution and who for years now have been trying to warn the world about what's coming.

• 15:51Speaker 06

  I am worried about.

• 15:52Speaker 05

  The AI that is smarter than us. I'm worried about the AI that builds the AI that is smarter than us and kills everyone.

• 15:59Speaker 02

  There's also the philosopher Nick Bostrom. He published a book back in 2014 called Superintelligence. Now, a superintelligence would be extremely powerful. We would then have a future that would be shaped by the preferences of this AI. Not long after Elon Musk started going around sounding this alarm.

• 16:16Speaker 04

  I have exposure to the most cutting edge AI, and I think people should be really concerned about it.

• 16:22Speaker 02

  He went to MIT. I mean, with artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon. Told them that creating an AI would be summoning a demon.

• 16:30Speaker 04

  AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization.

• 16:34Speaker 02

  Musk went as far as to have a personal meeting with President Barack Obama, trying to get him to regulate the AI industry and take the existential risk of AI seriously. But he, like most of these guys at the time, they just didn't really get anywhere. However, in recent years, that has started to change.

• 16:56Speaker 05

  The man dubbed the godfather of artificial intelligence has left his position at Google, and now he wants to warn the world about the dangers of the very product that he was instrumental in creating.

• 17:07Speaker 02

  Over the past few years, there have been several high-profile AI researchers, in some cases, very decorated AI researchers.

• 17:15Speaker 06

  This morning, as companies race to integrate artificial intelligence into our everyday lives, one man behind that technology has resigned from Google after more than a decade.

• 17:25Speaker 02

  Who have been quitting their high-paying jobs, going out to the press and telling them that this thing that they helped to create poses an existential risk to all of us. It really is an existential threat. Some people say this is just science fiction. And until fairly recently, I believed it was a long way off. One of the biggest voices out there doing this has been this guy Geoffrey Hinton. He's like a really big deal in the industry, and it meant a lot for him to quit his job, especially because he's a Nobel Prize winner for his work in AI. The risk I've been warning about the most, because most people think it's just science fiction, but I want to explain to people.

• 18:01Speaker 06

  It's not science fiction, it's very real. Is the risk that we'll develop an AI that's much smarter than us and it will just take over.

• 18:09Speaker 02

  And it's interesting when he's talking to journalists trying to sound this alarm. They're often saying, yes, we know that AI poses a risk if it leads to fake news. Or like, what if someone like Vladimir Putin gets a hold of AI?

• 18:21Speaker 06

  It's inevitably, if it's out there, gonna fall into the hands of people who maybe don't have the same values, the same motivations.

• 18:30Speaker 02

  And he's telling them, no, no, no, no, this isn't just about it falling into the wrong hands. This is a threat from the technology itself.

• 18:37Speaker 06

  What I'm talking about is the existential threat of this kind of digital intelligence taking over from biological intelligence. And for that threat, all of us are in the same boat. The Chinese, the Americans, the Russians, we're all in the same boat. We do not want digital intelligence to take over from biological intelligence.

• 18:56Speaker 01

  Okay, so what exactly is he worried about when he says it's an existential threat?

• 19:01Speaker 02

  Well, the simplest way to understand it is that Hinton and people like him, they think that one of the first jobs that's gonna get taken after the industry hits their benchmark of AGI will be the job of AI researcher. And then the AGI will 24/7 be working on building another AI that's even more intelligent and more powerful.

• 19:28Speaker 01

  So you're saying AI would invent a better AI? And then that AI would invent an even better AI?

• 19:34Speaker 02

  That is one way of saying it. Yes, exactly. The AGI now becomes the AI inventor. And each AI is more intelligent than the AI before it, all the way up until you get from AGI, artificial general intelligence, to ASI, artificial superintelligence.

• 19:53Speaker 06

  The way I define it is this is a system that is single-handedly more intelligent, more competent at all tasks than all of humanity put together.

• 20:02Speaker 02

  I've now spoken to a number of different people who are trying to stop the AI industry from taking this step. People like Connor Leahy, he's both an activist and a computer scientist.

• 20:13Speaker 06

  So it can do anything the entire humanity working together could do. So for example, you and me are generally intelligent humans, but we couldn't build semiconductors by ourselves. But humanity put together. Together can build a whole semiconductor supply chain. A superintelligence could do that by itself.

• 20:32Speaker 01

  So it's kind of like this, if AGI is as smart as Einstein, or way smarter than Einstein, I guess.

• 20:38Speaker 02

  An Einstein that doesn't sleep, that doesn't take bathroom breaks, right?

• 20:41Speaker 01

  And lives forever and has a memory for everything.

• 20:44Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 20:44Speaker 01

  ASI, that is smarter than a civilization.

• 20:48Speaker 02

  A civilization of Einsteins. That's how the theory goes, right? Like, you have the ability now to do in hours or minutes, things that take a whole country, or maybe even the whole world, a century to do. And some people believe that if we were to create and release a technology like that, there'd be no coming back. Humans would no longer be the most intelligent species on Earth, and we wouldn't be able to control this thing.

• 21:18Speaker 06

  By default, these systems will be more powerful than us, more capable of gaining resources, power, control, et cetera. And unless they have a very good reason for keeping humans around, I expect that by default, they will simply not do so. And the future will belong to the machines, not to us.

• 21:34Speaker 02

  And they think that we have one shot, essentially.

• 21:38Speaker 01

  One shot, like, one shot meaning we don't, we can't update the app once we release it.

• 21:42Speaker 02

  Once this cat is out of the bag, once this genie is out of the bottle, whatever metaphor.

• 21:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, once this program is out of the lab, as it were.

• 21:47Speaker 02

  Exactly. Unless it is 100% aligned with what humans value, unless it is somehow placed under our control, they believe it will eventually lead to our demise.

• 22:00Speaker 01

  I guess, I'm scared to ask this, but like, how? Would this look like a global disaster? Or are we talking about it getting control of CRISPR and releasing a global pandemic?

• 22:10Speaker 02

  Yes, there are those fears, for sure. I want to get more into all the different scenarios that they foresee in a future episode, but I think the simplest one to grasp is just this idea that a superior intelligence is rarely, if ever, controlled by an inferior intelligence.

• 22:28Speaker 02

  And we don't need to imagine a future where these ASI systems hate us, or they like break bad or something. The way that they'll often describe it is that these ASI systems, as they get further and further out from human level intelligence, after they evolve beyond us, that they might just not think that we're very interesting.

• 22:50Speaker 01

  I mean, in some ways hatred would be flattering. Like if they saw us as the enemy and we were in some battle between humanity and the AI, which we've seen from so many movies. But what you're describing is just like indifference.

• 23:03Speaker 02

  Right. I mean, one of the ways that people will describe it is that like, if you're going to build a new house, of all the concerns you might have in the construction of that house, you're not going to be concerned about the ants that live on that land that you've purchased. And they think that one day the ASIs may come to see us the way that we currently see ants.

• 23:25Speaker 06

  You know, it's not like we hate ants. Some people really love ants, but humanity as a whole has interests. And if ants get in the way of our interests, then we'll fairly happily kind of destroy them.

• 23:38Speaker 02

  This is something I was talking to William McCaskill about. He is a philosopher and also the co-founder of this movement called the Effective Altruists.

• 23:45Speaker 06

  And the thought here is if you think of AIs we're developing as like this new species, that species, as its capabilities keep increasing. So the argument goes, we'll just be more competitive than the human species. And so we should expect it to end up with all the power. That doesn't immediately lead to human extinction, but at least it means that our survival might be as contingent on the goodwill of those AIs as the survival of ants are on the goodwill of human beings.

• 24:19Speaker 01

  If the future is closer than we think, and if one day soon, there is a at least reasonable probability that super intelligent machines will treat us like we treat bugs, then what do the folks worried about this say that we should do?

• 24:35Speaker 02

  Well, there's essentially two different approaches to the perceived threat. Some people who are worried about this, they simply say that we need to stop the AI industry from going any further, and we need to stop them right now.

• 24:50Speaker 06

  We should not build ASI. Just don't do it. We're not ready for it, and it shouldn't be done. Further than that, it's not just I am not trying to convince people to not do it out of the goodness of their heart. I think it should be illegal. It should be logically illegal for people and private corporations to attempt even to build systems that could kill everybody.

• 25:09Speaker 01

  What would that mean to make it illegal? Like, how do you enforce that?

• 25:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, some accelerationists joke like, what are you going to outlaw algebra?

• 25:16Speaker 01

  Right, you don't need uranium in a secret center. You can just build it with code.

• 25:22Speaker 02

  Right, but you do need data centers. And you could, you know, put in laws and restrictions that stop these AI companies from building any more data centers and a number of other laws. There are some people, though, who go even further and say that nuclear armed states like the US should be willing to threaten to attack these data centers if these AI companies like OpenAI are on the verge of releasing an AGI to the world.

• 25:51Speaker 01

  Wait, so even bombing data centers that are in Virginia or in Massachusetts? I mean, like-

• 25:57Speaker 02

  They see it as that great of a threat. They believe that on the current path we're on, there is only one outcome, and that outcome is the end of humanity.

• 26:08Speaker 01

  If we build it, then we die.

• 26:10Speaker 02

  Exactly, and this is why many people have come to calling this faction the AI doomers.

• 26:16Speaker 05

  The accelerationists like to call doomer. That was a kind of pejorative coined by them, and very successfully, I must say.

• 26:23Speaker 06

  I just avow the doomer label because I don't see myself that way.

• 26:26Speaker 02

  Some of them have embraced the name doomer, others of them dislike the name doomer. They often will call themselves the realists, but in my reporting, everyone calls themselves the realists. So I didn't think that would work.

• 26:37Speaker 06

  Like I consider it to be realistic, to be calibrated.

• 26:40Speaker 02

  And one of the reasons that they balk at the name is that they feel like it makes them come off as a bunch of anti-technology Luddites. When in fact, many of them work in technology, many of them love technology. People like Connor Leahy, I mean, they even like AI as it is right now. I mean, he uses chat GPT. He just tells me that from everything that he sees, where it's headed, where it's going, we have no choice but to stop them.

• 27:06Speaker 06

  If it turns out tomorrow, there's new evidence that actually all these problems I'm worried about are less of a problem than I think they are. I'd be the most happy person in the world. Like this would be ideal.

• 27:17Speaker 01

  All right. So one approach is we stop AI in its tracks. It's illegal to proceed down this road we're on. But that seems challenging to do, given how much is it already invested in AI? And frankly, how much potential value there is in the progress of this technology? So what's the alternative?

• 27:36Speaker 02

  Well, there's another group of people who are pretty much equally worried about the potentially catastrophic effects of making an AGI and it leading to an ASI. But they agree with you that we probably can't stop it. And some of them would go as far as to say, we probably shouldn't stop it because there really is a lot of potential benefits in AGI. So what they're advocating for is that our entire society, essentially our entire civilization, needs to get together and try in every way possible to get prepared for what's coming.

• 28:12Speaker 05

  How do we find the win-win outcome here?

• 28:15Speaker 02

  One of the advocates for this approach that I talked to is Liv Bury. She is a professional poker player and also a game theorist.

• 28:22Speaker 05

  Our job now, right now, whether you know, you're up someone building it or someone who is observing people build it or just a person living on this planet, because this affects you too, is to collectively figure out how we unlock this narrow path. Because it is a narrow path we need to navigate. We should be really focusing a lot right now.

• 28:41Speaker 02

  On trying to understand as completely as possible, what are all the obstacles we need to face along the way? And what can we be doing now to ensure that that transition goes well? This faction, which includes figures like William McCaskill, what they want to see is the thinking institutions of the world, you know, the universities, research labs, the media, join together to try and solve all of the issues that we're going to face over the next few years as AGI approaches.

• 29:12Speaker 01

  So you mean not just leave this up to the tech companies?

• 29:14Speaker 02

  Exactly. They want to see, you know, politicians brainstorming ways to help their constituents in the event that the bottom falls out of the job market, right?

• 29:26Speaker 01

  Right, or prepare communities to have no jobs, I guess.

• 29:29Speaker 02

  Some of them go that far, right? Like, universal basic income. And they also want to see governments around the world, especially in the US, start to regulate this industry. What are the concrete steps we could take in the next year to get ready?

• 29:43Speaker 05

  So we'd like regulations that say, when a big company produces a new, very powerful thing, they run tests on it and they tell us what the tests were.

• 29:52Speaker 02

  Geoffrey Hinton, after he quit Google, he converted to this approach. And he was talking to me about the kinds of regulations that he wants to see.

• 30:01Speaker 05

  And we'd like things like whistleblower protection. So if someone in one of these big companies discovers the company is about to release something awful, which hasn't been tested properly, they get whistleblower protections. Those are to deal, though, with more short-term threats.

• 30:16Speaker 02

  OK, but what about the long-term threats? What about this idea that AI poses this existential threat? What is it that we could do to prevent that?

• 30:25Speaker 05

  OK, so I can tell you what we should do about AI itself taking over. There's one good piece of news about this, which is that no government wants that. So governments will be able to collaborate on how to deal with that.

• 30:38Speaker 02

  So you're saying that China doesn't want AI to take over their power and authority? The US doesn't want some technology to take over their power and authority? And so you see a world where the two of them can work together to make sure that we keep it under control?

• 30:53Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 30:54Speaker 04

  In fact, China doesn't want an AGI to take over the US government because they know it will pretty soon spread to China. So we could have a system where there were research institutes in different countries that were focused on how are we going to make it so that it doesn't want to take over from people? It will be able to if it wants to, so we have to make it not want to. And the techniques you need for making it not want to take over are different from the techniques you need for making it more intelligent. So even though the countries won't share how to make it more intelligent, they will want to share research on how do you make it not want to take over.

• 31:31Speaker 02

  And over time, I've come to calling the people who are a part of this approach, the scouts.

• 31:36Speaker 01

  Like the Boy Scouts, be prepared.

• 31:38Speaker 02

  Like the Boy Scouts, yes, exactly. And it turned out that after I ran this name by William McCaskill. So what if I called your camp the Scouts?

• 31:47Speaker 04

  So a little fun fact about myself is I was a Boy Scout for 15 years.

• 31:54Speaker 02

  He actually was a Boy Scout, and so I thought, OK, the Scouts.

• 31:57Speaker 04

  Maybe that's why I've got this approach.

• 31:59Speaker 02

  But the key thing about the Scouts approach, if it's going to work, is they believe that we cannot wait, that we have to start getting prepared, and we have to start right now. This is something that I was talking about with Sam Harris.

• 32:14Sam Harris?

  The reasons to be excited and to want to go, go, go are all too obvious, except for the fact that we're running all of these other risks and we haven't figured out how to mitigate them.

• 32:24Speaker 02

  Sam is a philosopher, he's an author, he hosts the podcast Making Sense, and he's probably the most impassioned scout that I know personally.

• 32:32Sam Harris?

  There's every reason to think that we have something like a tightrope walk to perform successfully now, like in this generation, right? Not 100 years from now. And we're edging out onto the tightrope in a style of movement that is not careful. If you knew you had to walk a tightrope and you got one chance to do it, and you've never done this before, like, what is the attitude of that first step and that second step? Right? We're like racing out there in the most chaotic way.

• 33:07Speaker 02

  Slating our arms.

• 33:08Sam Harris?

  Yeah, and just like, we're off balance already. We're looking over our shoulder, fighting with the last asshole we met online, and we're leaping out there.

• 33:19Speaker 02

  Right, and you've been on this for a long time. In 2016, I remember you did this big TED Talk.

• 33:24Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 33:25Speaker 02

  I've watched it at the time, it had millions of views, and you were essentially saying the same thing. You were trying to get people to realize that we have a tightrope to walk, and we have to walk it right now.

• 33:35Sam Harris?

  Well, I wanted to to help sound the alarm about the inevitability of this collision, whatever the timeframe. We know we're very bad predictors as to how quickly certain breakthroughs can happen. So Stuart Russell's point, which I also cite in that talk, which I think is a quite brilliant change in a frame. He says, okay, let's just admit it is, you know, probably 50 years out, right? Let's just change the concepts here. Imagine we received a communication from elsewhere in the galaxy, from an alien civilization that was obviously much more advanced than we are, because they're talking to us now.

• 34:17Sam Harris?

  And the communication reads thus: "People of Earth, we will arrive on your lowly planet in 50 years. Get ready." Just think of how galvanizing that moment would be. That is what we're building, that collision and that new relationship.

• 35:03Speaker 06

  Coming up on The Last Invention.

• 35:12Speaker 02

  Why is all the worry about the technology going badly wrong? And why are people not worried enough about it not happening?

• 35:20Speaker 06

  The accelerationists respond to these concerns.

• 35:23Speaker 02

  Existential risk for humanity is a portfolio. We have nuclear war, we have pandemic, we have asteroids, we have climate change. We have a whole stack of things that could actually in fact have this existential risk. So you're saying that it's going to decrease our overall existential risk, even as it itself may pose to some degree, an existential risk? Yes.

• 35:45Speaker 06

  Researchers tell us what they saw that changed their minds.

• 35:49Speaker 04

  I was a person selling AI as a great thing for decades. I convinced my own government to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in AI. All my self-worth was on the plan that it would be positive for society. And I was wrong. I was wrong.

• 36:12Speaker 06

  And we go back to where the technology fueling this debate began.

• 36:16Speaker 05

  Basically, this is the holy grail of the last 75 years of computer science.

• 36:22Speaker 02

  It is the genesis, the ur philosopher's stone of the field of computer science.

• 36:33Speaker 06

  The Last Invention is produced by Longview. To hear episode two right now, search for The Last Invention wherever you get your podcasts. And subscribe to hear the rest of the series. Thank you for listening and our thanks to Sam. We'll see you soon.