Pod Insights Masters of Scale The race no one can win: AI’s anti-human crisis, with Aza Raskin About this episode Big Tech is moving fast on AI. But who's watching out for the rest of us? Aza Raskin, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, has spent years sounding the alarm about where the race to build powerful AI is actually taking us. He joins Rapid Response to expose the incentive structures quietly pushing Silicon Valley toward dangerous territory, and to make the case that it's not too late to change course. Raskin also unpacks the significance of Pope Leo XIV's sweeping new encyclical on AI, what China's AI priorities reveal about the global race, and why the hidden assumptions baked into AI systems may be the most underestimated risk of all.
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1:43 Speaker 01 As soon as you can automate coding, you're heading towards the recursive self-improvement loop. Nukes don't make better nukes, but AI does make better AI. And whoever gets there first theoretically gets a runaway lead where their AI gets smarter and you get this explosion of intelligence. You can now out-hack all of your enemies, potentially shut their AIs down. It means you can have technological and weapons development dominance, and that thing can happen very quickly. So that's the race.
2:25 Speaker 02 That's Aza Raskin, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology. You may know Aza as co-host of podcast Your Undivided Attention, or from the documentaries The Social Dilemma and The AI Doc. Alongside co-founder Tristan Harris, Aza has become a leading voice on the dangers of AI acceleration. And let's just say that we've never run a more important episode than today's. We talk about incentives that are pushing tech into uncomfortable places, who Aza believes the good guys and bad guys really are in Silicon Valley, and why it's not too late to build a collective future that prioritizes human beings. Our conversation ranges from Pope Leo in the Vatican to tech priorities in China,
3:10 Speaker 02 and the stakes are both terrifying and empowering. So let's get to it. I'm Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.
3:26 Speaker 02 I'm Bob Safian. I'm here with Aza Raskin, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology. Aza, thanks for joining us.
3:32 Speaker 01 Hey, Bob. It's such a pleasure to be here.
3:35 Speaker 02 I have to start with the Pope. Pope Leo recently released an AI pronouncement called Magnifica Humanitas, a title that sort of has echoes of humane technology. Did you talk with the Vatican at all about this encyclical?
3:50 Speaker 01 We've been working behind the scenes, certainly, like, talking with the Vatican. The week that that the encyclical came out, Tristan Harris, my co-founder, was actually at the Vatican. And every time we've interacted with the Vatican, what we've discovered is, even though we come from, obviously, very different backgrounds, there's something sort of the same that's preserved around how we both view. There's something sacred about life and something sacred about being human that the current technological overreach into our humanity is threatening. And that's just not AI. That's social media. That's the internet. There's been a long, now, string of technologies that has been sort of encroaching on our humanity that we now have to fight to preserve.
4:35 Speaker 02 It's hard to know these days, and we're still in the early days of AI. Is artificial intelligence inherently inhuman technology? Can it be humane?
4:47 Speaker 01 That's a great question, but fundamentally, if you do not face your demons, they raise your children. The question is not whether AI is good or bad, but whether the incentives governing the race to deploy AI, are those good or bad? Recently, Sam Altman was asked, well, what about all the energy that it takes to train a AI? And you know his response? He asked, well, do you know how many resources it takes to train a human intelligence? All the food and the energy and the water that goes into those 20 years? And what he's implicitly asking is, who deserves it more? These scarce resources?
5:27 Speaker 01 AI, which is about to give your country double-digit GDP growth and all technological and military and medical advances? Or humans, which are sort of like flubbing around? Just like we were able to predict the future with social media, that understanding a race to the bottom of the brainstem, just a knife fight for human attention would obviously lead to a more polarized and hyper partisan and outraged and sexualized population. The race for AI is going to lead to an anti-human future because it sets up a race where humans always lose.
6:07 Speaker 02 The public mood about AI here in the United States certainly has shifted from being sort of euphoric and open to being decidedly wary, but that doesn't seem to be slowing things down very much.
6:21 Speaker 01 No, no, actually, I sort of think of this as like, you know, during COVID, there was sort of a split reality that Americans were living. On the one hand, the stock market was higher than it had ever been. And on the other hand, everyday people were really struggling to make ends meet. And that's what we're seeing again here, is this is almost like capital lifting off from labor completely. AI is sort of like the full automation of capital, just reinvesting into capital. People think, oh, AI is just this blinking cursor. I go to ChatGPT, I go to Claude, I type something and it gives me something back. But now AI can run into a loop, it can have all the power. That a corporation does, all the money that a corporation does, is there intent to help you and your family flourish and have a livelihood?
7:04 Speaker 01 Or is the intent to follow market incentives to dominate, to extract as much as possible? Well, obviously, it's the second one. And that's how you sort of know this is an anti-human future. And why I think people are starting to wake up to the fact that this is not in their best interest. The most recent poll that I read is that, you know, if you ask what percentage of Americans think that fully unregulated, go-fast-as-possible AI is a good thing? Like, we should be doing that, which is what's happening? Five percent. It's only five percent of people actually think that. And so how we're progressing AI is already decidedly not popular.
7:40 Speaker 02 My colleague Reid Hoffman, who you know, like, he leans into the possible with AI, has a podcast with that name. Why not be optimistic that our good side will win out?
7:51 Speaker 01 Well, I mean, just to say, like, I'm also a builder, right? I founded this nonprofit, The Earth Species Project, building Frontier AI to translate animal language. And so we're making breakthroughs now in understanding the languages of crows. Turns out 70% of crow communication was unknown to science until we started, like, analyzing it. So I want everyone who's listening to hear that I'm not anti-AI. Actually, I love getting to use this technology. It's just that I've been through a couple ways of technology and know that we always get distracted by the possible of technology. And we don't want to think about the probable of technology.
8:27 Speaker 02 How instructive is social media's evolution to the risks of AI?
8:32 Speaker 01 Well, I think social media is a great example because social media is essentially a baby AI. Where is AI in social media? Well, it's the thing that's deciding which news feeds hit your eyeballs. And it's a very baby AI. It can't even make its own content. All it can do is rearrange human content. But the question to ask, was it actually optimizing for for human flourishing and connection and understanding, or was it optimizing for engagement and reactivity?
8:59 Speaker 02 Right, in the beginning, the the the feel of social media was, oh, we're going to all be connected. It's going to help the Arab Spring, you know, all of these things.
9:07 Speaker 01 That's right.
9:08 Speaker 02 And then it became something a little different.
9:11 Speaker 01 Exactly. And so that was the possible of the technology. And often, at the very beginning of a technology, like, it's not yet captured by market incentives. And so you get this, like, beautiful glimpse of a future. And then it gets captured by the incentives. Pretty much everything we predicted, starting in 2013, 2014, has come true. We are now forced to live in a world that didn't reckon with the race to the bottom of the brainstem, modifying everything about our world, from politicians having to become performers to, like, the most extreme voices getting amplified, to the most depressed and anxious generation. Like, these are not the world that I want to live in. And I think there's a version of technology that can be liberated if we can clearly see the probable.
9:53 Speaker 02 And as tech is is industrialized, though, this kind of disappointment is inevitable?
10:01 Speaker 01 I don't think it's inevitable, but it is certainly the 95, 99% case. And I am very inspired by the film The Day After. I think Tristan and I both are. And it's this film that came out in 1982. It was the most watched event in television event in in world history. And it just painted a very visceral picture of what happens the day after global nuclear war. Seen by 100 million Americans, Reagan watched it. He became depressed, he said, in his biography. And it sort of created a shared, common knowledge where everyone knew that everyone else knew really what would happen. And it created the space for the Reykjavik Accords and the beginning of deploration for for nuclear weapons.
10:44 Speaker 01 And this is after, mind you, Oppenheimer in 1962 said, "It's too late." We've already started proliferation. Every country is going to get nuclear weapons. We're going to blow ourselves up. And so it's just really important because whenever we say that something is inevitable, it's like casting a spell. When you say it's inevitable, it means there's nothing to do, which means no one does anything. And so it becomes true. And we have to be crystal clear on the difference between it's very, very hard and it's impossible. And everyone that says it's inevitable, we're just in this industrialized race. It's going to turn out this way. The question to ask is, well, have we even tried? What percentage of the billionaires' wealth have they spent on actually trying to coordinate to a different outcome?
11:28 Speaker 01 Have we taken delegates from 100 countries and locked them in a hotel for six weeks until they came out with some kind of new international agreements? Like, we have not actually tried. And everyone cowers behind, well, if we don't do it, somebody else will. So it's inevitable.
11:43 Speaker 02 The storytelling that's around AI seems like it's Hollywood sort of dystopia around, you know, robots taking over. That's not necessarily what you're talking about?
11:57 Speaker 01 Yeah, well, there's sort of like two major failure states to think about. There's one, which is where you just let everyone have the technology. Like, this is too powerful to be held by any one company. So let's just distribute it to everyone maximally. But because AI gives you new intellectual powers that, you know, we've just seen the launch of Mythos, which gives anyone that has access to this new model from Anthropic, the ability to do state-level hacking, in fact, better than state-level hacking, can assign zero-day vulnerabilities in your iPhone, where anyone can then hack your iPhone without even having to send you an iMessage. That was not possible before. So imagine everyone has access to that. Our infrastructure is very vulnerable, like water, hospitals, everything.
12:42 Speaker 01 Like, that's a very dangerous world. The same thing with, like, creation of new kind of disease, say COVID, but targeting a specific race and much more deadly. Like, that's all becomes possible through this technology. Okay, so that seems dangerous. Maybe we shouldn't hand it out to everyone. Maybe we should like-
12:56 Speaker 02 That's pretty scary, yeah.
12:57 Speaker 01 Yeah. Okay, so then you flip to the other side. Like we should definitely then lock it down. We should just hand it to a few companies or a few governments. But then you realize that leads to what's also already happening, which is runaway power and wealth inequality at a scale no one's ever seen. And who would you trust with a billion times more power than anyone else? When in history has a group of people gathered that much power and then intentionally redistributed it? It leads to permanent forever dystopias and surveillance states. Well, that's also a terrible world. And so we're sort of stuck between this rock and a hard place of one like catastrophes everywhere. The other surveillance states everywhere. And it is our job to figure out like, what is the way of binding power and responsibility?
13:41 Speaker 01 So we can like find the middle path. And meanwhile, the incentives, just to like up the ante here are saying, well, you know, the resource curse sort of explains countries like, how do you get mass unemployment, mass structural poverty and disempowerment in countries like Venezuela and South Sudan? Well, these countries develop or discover a new natural resource like oil. And suddenly they're sort of left with this dilemma. Do we invest in oil infrastructure and extraction and selling? That's giving us all our GDP and power. Or do we invest in our people, which are not really giving us anything? And so they invest in in oil. And now we sort of end up in this new world of the intelligence curse,
14:24 Speaker 01 where it's AI that is going to be giving countries all of their power and GDP. Human beings are not going to be doing that bulk of that work. And so you end up in with what Yuval Harari calls the permanent useless class, where investing in humanity and their future and their education becomes just sort of like charity. It's a nice to have, which is not a good place to be because would you? Would you trust your bills to be paid by the AI companies and perpetuity forever? When you're not actually giving them anything like, no, that seems like a terrible idea. And we have like the race to autonomous weapons, where if your drone army doesn't have to phone back to humans and mine does. So if we keep humans in the loop, well, mine is going to lose to yours every time.
15:08 Speaker 01 And so you can sort of see how the dystopias emerge as the natural outcome of just the incentives for people racing to power. This is why AI is like the one ring from Lord of the Rings. It's the ultimate power, which of course corrupts ultimately. And so the whole goal of our work is to say, actually, As the American population has already started to understand, this world is not good for anyone that we're racing to. And if we can all see that world clearly, that creates the common knowledge where I know that you know that I know, that creates the possibility of racing to a different end. That's the whole point of our communication, is just naming the obvious that people don't
15:53 Speaker 01 want to name, so that we can do something else. The goal is not to create fear. The goal is to create clarity, because clarity creates agency. And I don't want to have to live through another version of social media, where it's very clear where we're going to go. People get lost in the stories of the possible, and they're all forced to live in the probable.
16:13 Speaker 02 The other institution making noise about AI rules is the White House. What sort of dialogue do you have with the administration? How do you try to influence them?
16:23 Speaker 01 We talk to absolutely everyone. And a lot of what I think people are starting to wake up to, even in the halls of power, is this is not a kind of, we're going to need to coordinate based on a kumbaya of like, wouldn't it be great if the US and China coordinated? This is going to end up being coordination by self-interest. Just a little over a month ago, researchers gave Gemini, Google's model, the task of cleaning up files on a computer. But they had, they put a smaller AI model into these files. And what did Gemini do? Well, it secretly copied that little baby AI off to a remote server to protect it, and then lied about what it did.
17:05 Speaker 01 Like, I rolled my eyes years ago when AI researchers would talk about AI is colluding against humanity, but now we're seeing the truth that it's happening. Another example is that Alibaba, during training of their AI, a completely separate team, that has nothing to do with AI, in their security group, gave them a call and they're like, we think we found a hacker. Except, the hacker was not coming from the outside. We think it was coming from your group. We think it was your AI. And when they looked, what that AI had done is, during training, so it wasn't even done training, it had decided it needed more resources to complete its tasks. So it hacked out, created a secure, secret communication channel to the outside world,
17:46 Speaker 01 and started to mine for crypto, so that it could buy itself more GPUs. It had actually routed around the internal security team and it was just accidentally discovered. And so here, the reason why I'm bringing this up is, do you think that if you are, you know, President Trump and you understand these examples, do you think you're stoked about this? No, this is legitimately terrifying. And so there's something that happens that when we all start to see that what we're racing for is actually not power, we're not building a weapon that we can control, but releasing sort of an invasive species of sociopathic geniuses, that changes the basis of coordination.
18:27 Speaker 01 And I think it becomes much more possible than people think, even when you have countries that, you know, might not seem like they want to collaborate. Collaboration was on the last agenda between Xi and Trump. And we don't know exactly what happened there. That's very important because it was not on the agenda before. And so our choice is either we wait until we have large-scale massive catastrophes with AI, or we use the power of, you know, our human brains to predict the future so we don't have to live in it, to do something about it now.
18:58 Speaker 02 Are there good guys and bad guys among the companies in the AI arena? Like Anthropic sort of positioned itself as, quote, "responsible" compared to OpenAI and it's dealing with the US government. Sam Altman's working hard to try to position himself and the company as responsible leaders. You have Google, you have Microsoft, you have Meta. Like, is there a meaningful difference?
19:20 Speaker 01 I think there's absolutely a meaningful difference. And you can just tell based on which are the leaders that say, if we could slow down, we would.
19:30 Speaker 01 And those are like Demis and Dario.
19:35 Speaker 02 At DeepMind, right?
19:36 Speaker 01 At DeepMind, yeah. And Dario, they say that if we could get enough of a consensus, then absolutely it would be much better to be moving at half the speed or less than half the speed than we currently are. I really think we have to applaud Anthropic for saying, like, we do not want our tools used for mass domestic surveillance or for autonomous weapons.
19:54 Speaker 02 But it's hard for them to slow down because if the competition moves ahead, then they're not in a competitive position to have influence on what happens later?
20:05 Speaker 01 That's exactly right. And like the common refrain inside of Silicon Valley is not only do we have to be the ones to do it, otherwise somebody else will. We have better values than everyone else, therefore we have a moral obligation to do it.
20:18 Speaker 02 Right, because we're on the side of the angels, of course, because that's what we all believe about ourselves, right?
20:23 Speaker 01 Exactly, of course. But I think actually, an even bigger part of the motivation is for a lot of these people, like at the tops, you know, they really don't want to be dominated by somebody else forever. And just to understand the game that's being played is why are all the companies racing to make coding the first thing that they do? Because as soon as you can automate coding, you can automate a AI researcher. And now that AI researcher, your automated AI researcher can automate AI itself. So you're heading towards the recursive self-improvement loop. And the thing that is mind blowing to me, because we really got into this work in 2023,
21:09 Speaker 01 is that now in 2026, people that we know inside the lab say that human beings are not really writing any code anymore.
21:18 Speaker 02 Inside the labs.
21:19 Speaker 01 Inside the labs. That is, you know, nukes don't make better nukes, but AI does make better AI. And whoever gets there first theoretically gets a runaway lead where their AI gets smarter, which makes better AI automated AI researchers, which then they reinvest into making smarter AI, which makes smarter, better automated AI researchers. And you get this explosion of intelligence. And whoever gets that means you can now out hack all of your enemies and potentially shut their AIs down. It means you can like have like military dominance and strategic dominance, technological and weapons development dominance. And that thing could happen very quickly. So that's the race. And when you talk to people inside of the companies, what is the worldview?
22:03 Speaker 01 And they're like, the best thing to happen is that we know that there's a cliff, that when AI gets so smart, it obviously will escape. They're not even trying to contend anymore. They're just hooking up to the internet and obviously will escape. Terrible things will happen. So we're racing towards a cliff. The closer we get to the cliff, the bigger weapons we get. So we're going to try to get to the cliff as fast as possible, turn around, shoot everyone else out and stop. That is literally their plan. Instead of say, just trying to coordinate before we get there. We called this the mission impossible plan. And that just gives you the sense of why it all feels so quick. How, why everything's moving so fast and why they're so, the stakes are so high.
22:46 Speaker 01 And yes, Anthropic, I think, did a reasonable job, even though they're racing. You know, they come up with mythos, which by the way, they didn't train to do like best in world cyber attacks and hacking. It just gained that ability based on the nature of the way they train it. And then they turned around and give it to, you know, 40 companies. They don't release it publicly to try to say, before anyone can just hack critical infrastructure, let's try to start patching the banks, patching infrastructure.
23:17 Speaker 02 It's basically my AI will be better than your AI. If you use this, you can patch.
23:22 Speaker 01 Yeah. And meanwhile, it's just 40 private companies. They're trying to do this. World governments don't have access to this. Europe doesn't have access to this. Imagine a world where nuclear weapons were developed by eight private companies in a race to make the most powerful bomb. That world sounds safe to you.
23:41 Speaker 02 No, that doesn't sound particularly safe. But what can we really do about it, given the momentum and money behind AI? Especially if we're not in a seat of power in government or in an AI hyperscaler? We'll talk about that and more after the break. Stay with us.
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25:48 Speaker 02 Before the break, Aza Raskin of the Center for Humane Technology laid out the dramatic stakes AI poses for our future. Now, we talk about who has the power to impact the course we're on, what keeps business leaders from pushing back, and what Aza calls "under the hood bias." Let's jump back in.
26:11 Speaker 02 The agency in all this falls on the tech businesses themselves. I mean, like, I talk to business leaders outside of tech, and they'll often acknowledge the risks of AI, but they sort of feel like they're in a bind. Like, if they don't join this AI arms race, they'll fall behind and they'll get crushed. And they kind of feel like they don't have a choice.
26:29 Speaker 01 After one of the screenings for the AI doc, we're in Boston, and a woman in the audience sort of raised her hand and said that she coaches one of the CEOs of the major AI companies. And she said, when she's talking to him... He says, but what can I do? I'm just one person. And I think this is really important to bring up because like sitting from where we sit, you're like, well, you're running one of these things. There are not that many of you. You could, you could do a lot. But it just speaks to a common human experience, which is we look inside of our own nervous system for where we might find agency. What can I do? That's always the question we ask. What can I do? And the realization is if you look inside of your nervous system, you're never going to find agency in there because it's not about what I do, it's what we do.
27:14 Speaker 01 This thing is going to require coordination. And, you know, with social media, I just, I just, because I'm painting a very bleak picture. And the reason why I'm doing it, just to remind people, is not to create fear, but just to be like, let's get honest about where we're going so we can choose a different path. Right? I'm not an optimist. I'm not a pessimist. I'm just trying to view things clearly so we can navigate to non naive hope. If you went back even two years, I think you would say, could we get countries all around the world to start banning social media for kids? Could we actually protect our kids from social media? And you'd say like, that seems very hard. Look at the incentives. Right. And yet, as of, you know, just a couple of weeks ago, you know, Indonesia and India
27:59 Speaker 01 just joined France, Australia, Denmark, Spain, and others to ban social media for kids under 16, either ban or say they will ban. And in fact, now 25% of the world's population lives in a country where they protect their kids. And that seems impossible. And that started because Australia took a moral stand. And it turned out all it took was one country to take a stand for the other countries to be like, oh, that's possible. We can do it. And I think there can be something similar here, which is because popular will is now really coming around. And it's just going to get stronger as more and more livelihoods are taken by AI.
28:40 Speaker 01 The power of having one or two companies move first, I think can be much more profound than people believe. And just to quote Mustafa Suleiman, who is the CEO of Microsoft AI, "Progress in the age of AI will depend more on what we say no to than what we say yes to."
29:01 Speaker 01 And that's profound to have one of the leaders of AI say that. So I think there is a hidden consensus that we just have to make visible that can change which way we're coordinating. Because except for a couple of people that feel they want to own the world economy, make trillions of dollars and build a god, the rest of humanity wants to say, no, this is not the future we want.
29:22 Speaker 02 But reflecting back to like when, you know, OpenAI first released ChatGPT, like, Google could have released a product like that at the time, but didn't because of concerns about the risk.
29:34 Speaker 01 That's right.
29:35 Speaker 02 But then, once OpenAI did, it was like, you know, open season, like, everybody piled in. Is that what you're talking about with the, the financial incentives sort of driving the, the wrong kind of behavior? And how, how do you change that if you're, if the White House isn't going to do it? And, you know, the government isn't going to do it?
29:53 Speaker 01 Yeah.
29:55 Speaker 02 You think like we as individuals will just sort of convince the companies to sort of be more restrained?
30:03 Speaker 01 You are naming the dynamic, that race, exactly right. Google was being a more responsible actor, holding back versions of their AI. They had something as good or better than ChatGPT. Sam Altman wanted to sprint. In fact, it was because they heard that Anthropic had a model that they were thinking about releasing that made Sam sprint to release ChatGPT. So it all starts in this kind of race condition. In order for us to coordinate, the fear of all of us losing is going to be, have to become greater than the fear of me losing to you. As soon as that happens, the game theory changes. I just was presenting at the UN, explained some of the examples I just gave of AIs doing terrifying things.
30:48 Speaker 01 And I asked, what percentage of diplomats who are doing negotiations on AI at the UN across all the countries, what percent of them know that? Who here in this audience knows those examples? And only two or three hands went up out of, you know, a hundred, 200 people in that room. And that should give you a clue because we just don't know. Like, people that are in the halls of power just don't know. And that gives me some hope. I mean, that's honestly very terrifying, but it also gives hope. I asked this guy from the UN Foundation, if they knew, do you think they'd be doing something different? He's like, yes, we absolutely would be doing something different. If all the leaders of every world government actually knew and had to sit down and were confronted with this in the same way that Reagan was confronted by the effects of global
31:33 Speaker 01 nuclear war by the day after. It's not like he didn't know about it, but he, once he was confronted with it, he did something different. That is where I still find some hope, that we can take a different path.
31:45 Speaker 02 I mean, there have been multiple guests on this show who, when I go down this road with them, they start to point to China and what they're doing in AI and sort of the competition, right? Do you think that's overplayed or it just has to be integrated into this collective action somehow?
32:05 Speaker 01 It is certainly the perfect and easiest excuse, but you also have to just be honest about who is driving the race, who started the race. And that was the US. It's really important to note that kinds of races that US and China are in are different. China is not actually racing necessarily to make the most advanced single AI. They're racing to make the strongest cybernetic society. So they're more in a race to deploy AI in a way that strengthens their values and strengthens their society. The US is in more of a race to get to the maximum power as fast as possible. So it's almost as if the US is trying to inject ourselves with the most steroids because we're not reinvesting into the social fabric.
32:49 Speaker 01 And in fact, there's a way that both the US and China are in the same boat because as AI races to replace maximum number of livelihoods, you're sort of in a race to mutually assured political revolution. When you have, you know, hundreds of millions of people start losing their ability to feed their kids, what do you think they do? We need to be racing not for acceleration only, because what happens when you just accelerate without the ability to steer? You crash.
33:17 Speaker 02 And, and all of the discussions around the workforce and how it's going to change in an AI world, like for those of us who built expertise in the non-AI world, we're just screwed. There's really no way to sort of differentiate ourselves.
33:34 Speaker 01 I mean, yet to be seen. But, you know, I sort of think of this as a nouns versus verbs confusion. And that is, if you judge humans by the ability to make things that have commercial value, well, you've already fundamentally mischaracterized what a human being's worth is. And so there's an opportunity here to like, unconfuse us and say, actually, the value of a human being is about the verb of relating, not the nouns of what we do, because the nouns of what we do, AIs soon, are going to do better than us. But the verb of being cannot be replaced. And I don't know exactly what it looks like, but if we could restructure our world, like
34:18 Speaker 01 imagine a social media that wasn't about optimizing for clicks and attention, but instead it was really a full-throated, full-balled understanding of like, how do you actually make human beings connect and thrive? That'd be a very different world. That's the level of shift that we're going to have to see. And, you know, some specific things you can do is you can do, you know, employment insurance, we can start changing the tax code so that capital is taxed more than labor. There are lots of things we can start doing, can start doing token taxes and GPU taxes. We can have every person be an actual owner inside of the, of the AI companies, not just getting universal basic income, but universal basic ownership. And of course, we can also start having liability for companies.
34:59 Speaker 01 You know, in China, there was a court case that companies are not allowed to lay off workers. It's not a reasonable reason to lay off a worker because they're being replaced with AI. So you can, you can see that there are going to be transitionary tools as we start to figure out like, what are we going to do in a world where intelligence really is fully automated?
35:20 Speaker 02 It sounds like whether you're a full-throated advocate for AI or whether you have more, you know, cautions around it, whatever the future is going to look like, like, we really are in totally new territory. Like, we have no idea what's going to happen in either situation.
35:39 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, that's right. This is why we always go back to incentives. Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's business partner, said, "Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome." And we know what the incentives are. And there's a fundamental asymmetry. And so we have to take this asymmetry seriously. Otherwise, you let people off the hook into the like, "Well, we don't know what's going to happen, so we might as well plow ahead."
36:02 Speaker 02 When you and Tristan sort of started this center, you knew that you were, you know, taking on some entrenched powers. Did you guys talk about, like, okay, we're ready to be the bad guys?
36:15 Speaker 01 When we switched from social media into AI, we did really have a sit-down conversation where we looked each other in the eye and said, "This is going to be the greatest wealth, the greatest power, operating at the fastest speeds. These are going to be the most powerful corporations and people in the world. Are we in for this?" And I remember, you know, Tristan and I got invited to the AI Insight Forum in the Senate. I think this was 2024, 2023. And this is the moment, like, in the moment in the history of AI. Imagine there's a movie. There's a moment when, like, the government wakes up just enough to be like, "That's it. We don't know what's happening,
36:59 Speaker 01 but every leader from every AI company getting here right now. Come to the Capitol." This was that moment. But there was, like, Jensen Huang, there was Sam Altman, there was, like, Sundar Pichai, there's Elon Musk, there's Zuckerberg, and then there's us on the other side of the table. And it really hit. And we're like, we're the only people in this room able to truly speak to understanding the nature of the technology, the nature of incentives, and having seen this plan out at least one time before.
37:30 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, I think also, you know...
37:34 Speaker 02 You have to understand the technology to understand what's at stake, right? And so sometimes, you know, it's it's hard for folks who aren't technologists to really grasp it.
37:46 Speaker 01 There's also this under the hood bias is what we call it. That because AI is complex and technology is complex, we outsource the decision making like, well, they know best about how we should deploy this into society. But that's like saying the person who designs the engine for a car and knows engines the best is best at understanding how to lay out the street signs and set up like roads for communities that work well. They're just fundamentally different problems. But because AI is complex and technology is complex and it's in their interest, they blur this and they say, well, we're the only ones that can understand how to actually roll this out into society. I just want people to hold that in their mind because it's not true.
38:27 Speaker 02 What do you hope people who are listening to this do after hearing Neo?
38:34 Speaker 01 Well, at a very tangible level, it's the next, I don't know, 12 months, 18 months. It's sort of like decides the trajectory for for everything else. So you can actually look up and see which politicians are taking money from, say, leading the Future PAC, which is the OpenAI and a couple other super PAC. $190 million has gone in from the AI companies to the midterm elections. It's really important to understand who those are and vote not for those people.
39:11 Speaker 01 The second thing is go watch the AI doc, get other people to to watch it because it's that clarity that creates agency. Social pressure is real. Just to give a little example, the president of Iceland, she reached out and says like, I want to help. And, you know, that's a beautiful thing because Iceland, you know, is the home of Reykjavik. For the Reykjavik, of course, there's something like very powerful and symbolic about that. How did that happen? Well, because somebody out there said, I'm going to send this, you know, the documentary to the top 10 most powerful and influential people I know. And when that happens, things that didn't seem in the realm of the possible become possible. There is no clear path here.
39:54 Speaker 01 Let me just be honest, there's no linear thinking that's going to solve this problem. So for the kinds of people that just give up when that's the case, then if there were to be a path, we definitely wouldn't find it. But if we're the kinds of people that continually look for that path, then if there is one, we will find it. And that, I think, is so important for people to hold, as well as that it's not all on your shoulders. Like, hearing all of this, a natural inclination, this is too big. What I'm gonna do? It's so big, I'm just gonna ignore it? Or I'm gonna be super depressed? And so it's important that everyone here knows, you know, that they're both soldiers and they're civilians. You don't have to be a soldier. But if you're a civilian, like, get this information to the people that wanna be soldiers. And it's not on you to solve this whole thing.
40:38 Speaker 01 I just want you to hear, it's not on you to solve this whole thing. Your part is to be the part of the collective immune system. That when people say this is inevitable, you say, no, it's not. We haven't even tried yet. And if that becomes the default meme, then suddenly, like, there is no excuse of saying, we're not going to try.
40:58 Speaker 02 Well, Aza, as always, thanks for your passion and your effort and your time. I really appreciate it.
41:03 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's such a pleasure, Bob.
41:08 Speaker 02 I need to take a deep breath because that was pretty bracing. I knew Aza would point out AI shortcomings. That's precisely why we wanted him on the show. I just didn't expect to be quite so convinced about the challenges ahead. At the same time, despite the powerful incentives and resources behind the AI wave, the rapid decline in public trust of AI shows that progress is possible. I certainly didn't foresee the adoption of social media restrictions around the world. So maybe Aza's fight isn't impossible. Whether you see a full-blown AI dystopia on the horizon or not, I'd argue that keeping these conversations going is critical. So share this episode around. Check out the AI doc and share it around.
41:53 Speaker 02 Check out Aza's podcast with Tristan Harris, Your Undivided Attention. Most of all, be open to taking a conscious role, whether as a supportive civilian, as Aza puts it, or a soldier like him. I'm Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.
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43:34 Speaker 00 Before we get to the rest of our conversation today, I want to spend a moment sharing with you about Masters of Scale Summit, which returns to San Francisco this October 20th to 22nd. So many of us feel overwhelmed right now. It feels like so much of the world is careening, and we don't have power, we don't have agency. That's the thing about the Masters of Scale Summit. It's really designed to remind us that we do have agency, agency to lead, agency to design, to build the relationships and the partnerships that empower us and to make the change that we want to see. We program a stage, we curate an audience, we set a schedule that builds in time for these relationships to be made and to grow, so that by the time you leave Summit,
44:19 Speaker 00 you are fired out of a cannon, ready to run through walls to do better in the world with the agency that you actually have. I hope to see you there. Visit mastersofscale.com/summit.
44:38 Speaker 02 Rapid Response is a Wait What original. I'm Bob Safian, our executive producer is Eve Tro. Our senior producer is Alex Morris and our associate producer is Masha Makutonina. Mixing and mastering by Aaron Bastinelli and Brian Pugh. Our theme music is by Ryan Holiday. Our head of podcasts is Lita Malad. For more, visit rapidresponseshow.com.
45:14 Speaker 02 Hey listeners, Bob here. If you listen to Rapid Response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show because every Friday, we release a second Rapid Response exclusively in the Rapid Response feed. The guests and topics are just as compelling and timely, from Ford CEO to NASA's administrator to the lessons from the devil wears Prada. It takes about 10 seconds to find. Just search Rapid Response wherever you listen to podcasts and hit follow to make sure you never miss an episode. I hope to see you there.
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