AI DEBATE: “We’re Due For A Chernobyl Event”

In this AI debate, we explore: * Whether humans will exist in 2040. * What will happen once we reach AGI. * Whether AI gets smart enough to act malevolently or benevolently towards humans. * If AI will grow powerful enough to be out of human control. * and much more... Guests * Zack Kass is an AI advisor, author, and former Head of Go-to-Market at OpenAI. * Liv Boeree is a physicist, science communicator, podcaster and former professional poker champion. * Aric Floyd is an AI writer, and video producer. - Get up to $350 off the Eight Sleep Pod 5 at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom Get a Free Sample Pack of LMNT’s most popular flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom Get 35% off your first subscription on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom Get 15% off your first order of my favourite Non-Alcoholic Brew at https://athleticbrewing.com/modernwisdom Get ChatGPT to explore ideas, solve problems, and learn faster at ⁠⁠https://chatgpt.com - 0:00 Will Humans Still Be Around in 2040? 8:20 What Jobs Will Be Protected From AI? 14:22 Finding Meaning in a Post-Work World 23:13 Technology is Pulling Us From Our Purpose 27:12 Where Do We Draw the Line With Outsourcing Thinking? 39:58 Is AI Unlocking Human Potential? 42:28 Refusal or Obedience: What’s More Dangerous? 46:01 The AI Attack That Should Worry Everyone 54:44 Should We Slow Down Advanced AI? 56:41 Does Recursive Research Actually Work? 01:10:52 How Safe is AI? 01:14:01 Can We Reach a Peace Deal For a Super-intelligent World? 01:22:38 Why AI 2040 Got So Much Right 01:26:21 Is AGI Inevitable? 01:30:39 Could Techno-Pastoralism Be the Future? 01:37:16 Is AI Replacing Human Connection? 01:45:36 How Do We Navigate the Purpose-Friction Problem? 02:00:50 Why Data Centre Policy Matters More Than Ever 02:05:56 The Concentration of Power Concern 02:11:39 Is the Frontier Strategy the Winning Condition? 02:18:17 Will AI Weaken Democracy? 02:29:11 How We Can Limit the Concentration of Power 02:31:45 Is ChatGPT Pessimistic About the Future? 02:37:54 What Should We Be Focused On? - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spotify.modernwisdom.com or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.modernwisdom.com Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

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

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  To get us started, I'm going to try something. So I'm going to ask ChatGPT what it truly believes that the world will look like by 2040. I'm going to ask it to be honest, tell me what it predicts the rapid development of AI will lead to, risks and everything. And I said it's a deep research, so it might take a little bit of time. While it's working away, it's going to be doing that. I want to know what your guys' actual predictions for 2040 are, not best case or nightmare scenario. What do you think an ordinary Tuesday will look like for people in 2040?

• 0:29Speaker 01

  I think we're still around. I think humanity's still on planet Earth.

• 0:33Speaker 02

  Great start.

• 0:34Speaker 01

  I think that power is probably a lot more concentrated than it is today. I don't know if that's in a few corporations or a few governments. But I think there's probably a sense that the main thing deciding what's going on on planet Earth is the will of a few individuals as opposed to something spread out and widely democratic.

• 0:58Speaker 02

  For better or worse, I expect that the average Tuesday looks more homogeneous for more people and not too dissimilar than the average Tuesday today. So I think we raise a floor more.

• 1:16Speaker 02

  But I expect that by 2040, because the physical world actually takes a lot longer to move than we think, and because regulation around things like robotics is just going to take way longer than we expect, political protection is the thing that's going to slow progress. Most people's Tuesdays will probably feel, for better or worse, a whole lot like Tuesday this week.

• 1:41Speaker 03

  You're going to hate me for saying this, but I kind of reject the question because I think it's, I cannot collapse down my hideous, almost like bipolar uncertainty of where we're going to be in 2040. So truly, the first thing that popped into my head, the first, when you asked the question, was a kind of chaotic, desolate, maybe there's a few humans left around as one possibility. There's, I'm not saying it's a majority likely, but it's a slice. Another one is this like wonderful utopian, like I call it, my friend and I call it techno pastoralism, where it's like a very techno-enabled world if you choose to live it, but actually

• 2:24Speaker 03

  we all choose to like return to our roots of like gardening and hanging out with friends around the campfire. And it's like, if you want to change the color of the campfire, you can, but actually most people like to do things, you know, grow their own artisanal food, et cetera. That's like one little slice. And then another one is sort of, we're all under the thumb of whichever AI company gets there first, and hopefully they're benevolent and give us some freedom. Another one is that we're all just kind of locked down in this horrible, you know, COVID on steroids type, no one can go out and have any really access to anything because the ubiquity of dangerous technologies is too widespread. So I just, that is really my only answer to the question.

• 3:08Speaker 02

  It doesn't sound like you reject the question. It sounds like you've got a pretty good idea of what's going to happen.

• 3:13Speaker 03

  I don't know, that's the thing. It's like, it's a really fairly even probability distribution in my mind, is it not? No?

• 3:23Speaker 02

  Do you actually, we can go there now. Do you actually think there's a decent chance that humans are not around in 2040?

• 3:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:31Speaker 02

  What would you give it? What's your P doom? Oh, by the way, we should also classify doom, because I think that part of the problem with the P doom debate is that it's, people use doom to mean all sorts of things.

• 3:39Speaker 03

  Totally.

• 3:40Speaker 02

  Doom, in this case, is total, well, you classify, I don't want to define it. You define doom.

• 3:45Speaker 03

  Well, I think, understanding the way you're explaining it, like the majority of the majority of human civilization has, a large percentage of humans have died or something. Is that what you're saying?

• 3:58Speaker 02

  Well, I'm leaving it to you. Some people classify doom as total annihilation, other people classify doom as like a really terrible event.

• 4:04Speaker 03

  Like civilizational collapse, something like that.

• 4:08Speaker 03

  I really, again, I'm like not giving any firm answers. I, because we're in this era of what we say and believe can affect the future so strongly, I don't like this idea of assigning a firm probability to it, because I think that's so in flux. I think it's a significant enough of a risk such that we need to be doing absolutely everything we can to try and reduce that probability. So, but I don't even want to give you, I personally think any number above 1% is close, well, certainly above 5% is worth considering. And given that, again, it depends who you ask, but many of the leading AI leader, you

• 4:51Speaker 03

  know, CEOs and researchers give numbers between 2% and 50%. That, that's all in the bucket of, we probably need, you know, we are facing a precarious future. So I don't like the P doom framing. I think it's way too overly simplistic. It's used as a kind of cudgel by both sides. The people who are very, very strongly, like 90% use it as a cudgel, the people who think it's silly, use it, it's just, it's not that helpful. I think we can all agree, I think, well, maybe you don't, but I think we can all agree that the future is far from certain and it can be very precarious if we don't get our stuff together.

• 5:29Speaker 02

  Do I strike you as a fatalist?

• 5:31Speaker 03

  What do you mean by fatalist?

• 5:32Speaker 02

  I mean, I certainly, I don't think that the future is certain by any measure.

• 5:36Speaker 03

  No.

• 5:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, okay, but you were saying, I think we all agree. You looked at me as though I might not agree.

• 5:41Speaker 03

  Well, I just don't want to presume. We're early in the conversation, I don't want to make presumptions.

• 5:45Speaker 02

  What do you think, Eric?

• 5:47Speaker 01

  I definitely agree that anything above 1% when we're talking about an outcome as catastrophic as extinction or mass human disempowerment is just way more than we should tolerate. And I think, like, that's a revealed preference of society. We spend a good amount of our GDP preventing nuclear catastrophe. We should probably be spending a lot more preventing like the next pandemic. Certainly people were on board with that in 2021. I think the weird thing about AI is that this thing has so much upside and downside. Like, it's very easy to just be anti-nuke and to be like anti-viruses. There are very people who are like virus rights, you know? But with AI, it's like the whole package bundled up together. The exact same thing that could free people to have an incredible Tuesday, free from

• 6:31Speaker 01

  the obligation to work and just able to pursue joy, whatever that means to them, is the same thing that an oligarch in Russia could use to have just like an army of workers that are loyal to them, increasing their share of the world GDP without any other human getting to approve it.

• 6:47Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, post scarcity, totalitarianism and destruction, all just swimming around in the same pot, the same potential future.

• 6:54Speaker 02

  Techno pastoralism also.

• 6:56Speaker 03

  Right.

• 6:57Speaker 02

  I haven't heard that, I like that one. Okay, but the, but again, the problem, there are two problems here with the, with the

• 7:05Speaker 02

  framing, which is AI has a real jagged perimeter. So one, AI is not one thing, it's lots of things, and robotics obviously introduces all sorts of new modalities, but it has a jagged perimeter. So when people are like, well, how is healthcare going to change by 2040? Unfortunately, going into the hospital will probably still suck. I mean, there is so much to unwind about healthcare in the hospital that you probably will not want to go into a hospital by 2040. I mean, maybe something will change, and this is coming from, from the child of doctors and healthcare administrators, but we will probably discover cures for diseases. So healthcare has this really strange exposure to a jagged perimeter where novel sciences

• 7:45Speaker 02

  accelerate in remarkable ways, but the actual care that's provided in the box cannot get better because of all sorts of terrible incentive structures, which I know we, you and I want to talk to. And this is also, I think, why in some ways the average Tuesday will look sort of uncannily familiar to the one that we live in today. And I think there could be some things that are remarkably better. I think we may actually be disappointed by the degree to which AI arrives to save people from the drudgery or monotony of our, of our lives. But the upside, as you pointed out, is quite remarkable.

• 8:24Speaker 02

  And the perimeter that I think will exist that no one talks about enough is political protection. And the reality is, I think we are not yet forecasting that the societal threshold, what we are willing to let AI do is far less than, like, the fears around AI, I think, don't actually account for the degree to which government is probably going to step in very soon and say, here are all the things that you cannot automate, here are all the things that we cannot use robotics for.

• 8:52Chris Williamson?

  You think that's realistic?

• 8:53Speaker 02

  Very exceptionally realistic. I don't think it's going to be smart policy, just so we're clear, but I think it will be aggressive.

• 9:00Speaker 03

  As in, like? You can't automate away, um, will they, will they be giving like specific jobs that cannot be automated away?

• 9:10Speaker 02

  Absolutely. We already, I mean, we already have political protection for 1.5 million jobs in the United States. Europe has political protection for like six million jobs.

• 9:17Chris Williamson?

  What are the categories?

• 9:19Speaker 02

  Gas station workers in New Jersey, uh, toll booth workers in most states, jobs that must exist, right? But by law, tons of

• 9:27Chris Williamson?

  Interesting that those two automative associated jobs are protected, but the people driving the cars aren't.

• 9:32Speaker 03

  Right.

• 9:33Speaker 02

  Well, they will be, is my, is my guess.

• 9:35Chris Williamson?

  There's already been one.

• 9:36Speaker 02

  Drivers will be protected? No, I think truck drivers will be.

• 9:40Speaker 03

  Just because of the strength of the union?

• 9:42Speaker 02

  When people talk, so when people talk about job automation, there, there are lots of reasons I think job automation is really, is really problematic. One is that the technologists know nothing about labor economists, labor economists know nothing about technology. Eric Brynjolfsson is sort of one of the, one of the exceptions. But one of the, one of the other reasons is we, we still forget how much political protection moves the technological needle and we don't have high speed rail in the United States. We could have high speed rail. We don't have high speed rail. And the reason we don't have high speed rail is a policy failure. It's not a technology failure. It exists. We choose not to build it. We could.

• 10:20Speaker 03

  Do we, I think that word choose is doing a lot of legwork there because it's, no individual is choosing not to do it. It's just this like dead weight of bureaucracy and like dead end loops of rules and so on. It's almost like, like bureaucracy has taken on a life of its own.

• 10:38Speaker 02

  It's an enormous amount of policy that was written in the thirties, forties and fifties, passed largely in effort by the automotive lobbyists to make public transit much harder to build than it should be, which is why we don't build amazing public transit anymore. But that is very deliberate policy efforts that we have never unwound, which is why it's so hard to do. My point is we are kidding ourselves if we don't think that that's going to happen over and over again. I mean, the amount of populist support there is already for jobs. Dock workers went on strike, October 1st, 2024. They got a four, they, they, Harold Daggett, they had a long Sherman Union, said, you cannot automate our jobs. They held a gun to the heads of the American economy and they got four years, four years that the dock workers cannot, you cannot automate the ports.

• 11:23Chris Williamson?

  It's not just going to get eroded enough over time, though?

• 11:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:26Speaker 02

  Yes, but we should assume that it can, that we continue to find ways to backstop it. I'm not actually proposing that it happens in, at infinitum, but I think it's the, it's the piece that's missing in all this, which is that you, we should just expect an enormous amount of political protection.

• 11:43Speaker 01

  Can I ask, if we pass a law today that says you cannot fire people, period, it's illegal across the economy, what do you think happens to economic growth over the next 15 years?

• 11:52Speaker 02

  I think you see France.

• 11:56Speaker 01

  I, I think like, I'm not so sure it wouldn't still be unrecognizably fast. I think right now in the software industry, what you see is not software engineers getting laid off. You see each of them using more and more powerful AI tools that get upgraded every few months and doing more. And the way that you're, you know, seeing displacement show up is just that people aren't hiring new workers. And I think you could see that across a lot of professions. You could have every radiologist in the country, keep their job until they want to do an early retirement. And they're going to be, you know, more and more economically valuable because the law says you have to have some human box checking. But meanwhile, like the models are still getting better. And so the, the people that are, you know, fundamentally making the decisions are, are less and less the actual humans

• 12:39Speaker 01

  and more and more these systems that are becoming smarter and more competent. So I'm just, I'm not that sure that's the right metric to be tracking, like these, you know, the sort of power represented by these systems can, can sneak into each of these professions without people getting displaced.

• 12:53Speaker 02

  I also would make the case that I think the world is going to change in profound ways. But when we assume that it's going to change just because the technology can do it, I reference as much technology that there is a lot that we can do that we simply do not do today, or that we, that we are not allowed to do today. And there's an enormous amount of automation that would improve the underlying systems that we, that we cannot instill. By the way, I, I'm also, the risk in telling a company they cannot fire people, just so we're clear, is that they would actually end up stopping hiring. They would, they would, that would just drive automation at a ridiculous basis. And they'd say, we'll never hire someone again, because if they suck, we're, we're married to them.

• 13:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:33Speaker 02

  Which is, which is what it is.

• 13:34Speaker 03

  And I mean, we're already seeing that with entry level workers.

• 13:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:37Speaker 03

  They're, they're, I mean, it's again, very unclear what the actual impact of AI has had on, you know, and you could speak to one economist who says it's already having a huge effect. Others say it's not. But the one thing they all agree upon is that young people who don't have that much experience are struggling to get.

• 13:52Chris Williamson?

  That's fascinating. So the companies are future-proofing themselves from not having to displace people, get rid of them, because that would be a horrible headline by just not hiring them in the first place. They're future-proofing themselves for automation that isn't yet available. Is that fair?

• 14:06Speaker 01

  I think that's right. Uh, I, I didn't know if they're thinking that far ahead or if they're just responding to local incentives. But right now, a junior software engineer is a liability before they're an asset. You have to train them up. They have to get all this context on the job. That's exactly the kind of thing that an AI can do right now for pennies on the dollar, plus they never take breaks.

• 14:22Chris Williamson?

  Given the trajectory that we're on with AI at the moment, how many people do you think will have jobs in the future? Will most people work?

• 14:31Speaker 03

  Um, depends what point in the future we're talking about. Um, again, I can definitely see a world where it is just, as people say, like, you know, fully automated luxury. Well, I don't want to say the communism word, but you know, whatever people refer to it as.

• 14:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:44Speaker 03

  Some, if anyone's read, uh, the culture series, right? The, that's like some far future thing where AI basically handles everything. And if you choose to go and build your own house, you definitely can, but there's absolutely no economic reason to do it. Exactly. Everything is artisanal and so on. Um, I think if, eventually that is where these things are trending and that's one of the best case outcomes as well, obviously.

• 15:10Chris Williamson?

  One of the big concerns that people have is what do I do? It's interesting. The ancient Greek word for work was not at leisure. Uh, and now people are wondering, what is my leisure without my work perhaps? But for all of human history, there's been, because you've had to negotiate with a scarce world. It's meant that you've had to lean into it and the pressure of that grain pushing up against you creates a degree of meaning. What do you think, where does meaning come from in a close to post-work world?

• 15:43Speaker 01

  I mean, I guess we've seen something like this in miniature before, like we've had aristocracy in Europe for a couple centuries. People had just sort of got lucky. They have a piece of paper that says, I'm entitled to all the games from this piece of land. They don't have to work. I don't think they were all just suffering from malaise. They were like writing books and inventing calculus. And I, I think like, if we get to that world, I'm not that worried about people realizing like, I can love my friends and family and I can pursue my hobbies and, and, you know, pursue knowledge for myself and, and find ways of making that meaningful. I, I just worry that like, that's actually a pretty narrow target to aim for, because

• 16:22Chris Williamson?

  Compared with?

• 16:25Speaker 01

  I, I think like, for all of human history, we've been able to become more democratic because people matter to the political system. Like you just can't have an army. You can't have an economy without a bunch of people who are on board with what you're doing. And I, I just think it's like really hard to underestimate how cataclysmic of a change it is if that stops being true. It's really nice to imagine that like whoever holds the cards in that world will just like leave most of earth as like a playground, people to pursue whatever they want. But like, if you're trying to be real politik about it, I don't know why you'd assume that that's just like what happens by default.

• 17:02Speaker 03

  And come back to the question of what will, how will people find meaning? I think one of the few AI-proof jobs that will continue to exist are sports.

• 17:11Chris Williamson?

  So everybody's going to be a sports star?

• 17:13Speaker 03

  Well, I know. A, a lot of people will be sports fans. I think we're going to see more and more of that. Um, but like, or even like, uh, games like poker and, and chess, we've had superhuman

• 17:26Speaker 02

  Human, human games of skill that are, can be solved by AI.

• 17:29Speaker 03

  Right. Well, and, and what is a game or what is a sport? It's a piece of artificially constructed scarcity. We divide, we, we come up with a rule set, there's a win condition. And then two, or however many people go at it and we find out who's the best. And we've been doing that for years as a leisure activity. But people feel, you know, when someone wins an Olympic gold medal, that is unbelievably meaningful. Is it economically useful or essential to the world? Arguably not. But, and yet we keep doing it. And I don't think that, um, that's going to go away. Like we might have, uh, yeah, like, because people still want to watch the chess, the chess world championships, right? We want to see, even though the best AI in the world is a computer, we still want to see Magnus Carlsen do his thing.

• 18:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:14Speaker 03

  Um, so I think that is where we will see more and more of that coming about. And it might be other forms of competition or just, you know, people leaning more into art, novel forms of art. And, and we might have, yeah, like I definitely value, I still value a painting that a human did by hand in today's age, even though it might be as aesthetically beautiful as an AI created thing. There's something about the skin in the game that a human has put sweat and tears into something in their emotion. That is always going to be meaningful. And I think we'll just craft out more and more of that.

• 18:50Speaker 02

  Modern Wisdom has had many people come on this show and talk about, from all walks of life, something consistently, which is their family and their friends. And I am just not at all convinced that we haven't known forever exactly why we're here. I think we, I think the, the thing that gives humans consistently the most true joy in this world is time with friends and family and physical community, places of worship, dining room tables and outside. And everything that we construct around that is, you know, serves tribalism and pride and sports excitement.

• 19:30Speaker 02

  But if you actually like true, true techno pastoralism is a dining room table full of food and candles with laughter. And the more I spend, the more time I spend in technology, the more time I don't want it in my life. Like the further I go into AI, the more I'm glad it exists and the more I design my day without it. And the more I have, the more money I have, the more, the more everything I get, the more I want time with my dad, who's 78, just turned, yeah, just turned 79. And the more time I want with my wife and daughter, and the more children I want. I can imagine the life that I want. Now, when I describe it, this is a problem. When I describe it, people go, well, that's your privilege. That's a point of privilege.

• 20:15Speaker 02

  You get to think about that. And I go, well, I actually observed that a lot of people get to think about this more than, certainly more than our ancestors did. That's because of technology. We are, we afford ourselves now that the time to think about all this stuff, because we built technology that automated a bunch of stuff so that we could do a bunch of things that wasn't survive or wasn't specifically survive. And now we find ourselves surrounded by tchotchkes debating, you know, the French aristocracy, you know? And, you know, this is, you know, our ancestors would die of joy. What, after, after what they went through, all of our ancestors, I'm sure, you know, all of us have ancestors that went through a lot, to see us, you know, doing this. I don't think that changes.

• 20:59Speaker 02

  I do think that we should stop pretending we don't know the meaning of life. What I, what really bothers me is when people go, ah, how will people find meaning? Well, the same way we found meaning since we, since God put us on this earth. I mean, it's, I, that is where I take real issue. When people debate why, you know, how will, how will humans find joy? The hard part is unwinding now thousands of years of purpose and identity we've put into work. I do think that is gonna, and if you ask me, the hardest part of all this, the two big risks, to cut to the chase, dehumanization, humans finding more interest in a virtual or digital reality than a physical one because of brain rewiring. You and I have talked about this a ton. I am terrified of this. What the damage that social media and the device did to kids is, is horrific. And we, we can spend more time on this.

• 21:44Speaker 02

  And I am worried about people having to rediscover their purpose without, without. I think we will toil for work. I think we will continue to find ways to toil for work. I do worry that it will be that unwinding. I am this, I went to school for this, this is who I am, will be really hard. And I think for many people, the economic upside associated with automation will not actually outweigh the emotional downside associated with not even job displacement, identity displacement.

• 22:09Chris Williamson?

  You might not believe me, but this is what peak sleep optimization looks like. Not talking about the night gown, it's just for sex appeal. I'm talking about my eight sleep. The eight sleep pod five comes with a smart cover you throw on your mattress that actively cools or heats each side of the bed up to 20 degrees. And now they've added the world's first temperature regulating duvet and pillowcase. So you've got 360 degree coverage for deep uninterrupted rest. It's like being Walt Disney without the cryogenic chamber.

• 22:38Chris Williamson?

  And the racism. Best of all, their autopilot feature learns your sleep patterns and makes adjustments to improve your sleep in real time. It even detects when you're snoring and lifts your head a few inches to help you breathe better. That's why eight sleep has been clinically proven to add up to one hour of quality sleep per night. They have a 30 day sleep trial, so you can buy it and sleep on it for 29 nights. If you don't like it, they will give you your money back. Plus they ship internationally. Right now you can get up to $350 off the pod five by going to the link in the description below. I'm heading to eight sleep.com slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom at checkout. That's E I G H T sleep.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. That's such a good point. I wonder if, I always hesitate using the, don't worry about global warming,

• 23:19Chris Williamson?

  because technology in future will fix the cost of creating the technology for the future to fix it thing. They're like, oh, we'll future proof ourselves by just hoping that we get there in, in the future. But I do wonder if there's some sort of really advanced cultural reprogramming that could happen. What's the best kind of cultural technology to do a shake of the etcher sketch of what is expected by humans? Like, how can we really have an en masse? This gets perilously close to fucking brainwashing, right? But like, what, what would that look like? What would that look like to try and unhook?

• 23:46Speaker 02

  Parenting, parenting, sports, music. I mean, we, we've had it all along. I think we have just strayed so far from it with the screen. The screen is a demon. It has an unrelenting desire and appetite for our attention.

• 23:58Chris Williamson?

  More of a negative impact from social media or from AI?

• 24:01Speaker 02

  Well, one and the same, right? But AI, define AI in this case, Chris, define AI.

• 24:06Chris Williamson?

  The future, this sort of automation future that appears to be coming, that will cause people to not have the typical modes of reward that they have in the past.

• 24:16Speaker 02

  The reduction of friction, yes. The reduction of friction is a, is a whole other, is a whole other risk, creating a life. This is a funny, people hate this one too. They're like, God, what a point of privilege you must have to imagine a world where things are so easy for people that it's too easy. But I do, I do think we are, we are dangerously close. I ask people all the time, if you could automate everything in your life, where would you stop? Because I do think people are gonna have to ask that pretty soon.

• 24:42Speaker 03

  What's your answer?

• 24:44Speaker 02

  Well, I, I sort of spelled it out. I mean, I, I would automate everything a way that doesn't actually put me in more physical spaces with the people I love. And, and, and doing things that I love doing.

• 24:54Speaker 03

  Right, but we, we probably all largely came from, we're all of a similar generation. We all had somewhat largely similar upbringings, I imagine, where like family values are a core thing. Sitting down at the dinner table together, I mean, maybe you didn't all have that. But that was one thing my family always tried to do. This is prior to screens. I feel like the, that's already eroding. And the next generation will be, they're already, that, that norm has gone. And so they're going to be now sort of in each, it feels like each successive generation, the, the acceptable amount of technological influence grows, right?

• 25:33Speaker 03

  And, and what concerns me is that this idea of we will, okay, I'm going to draw a line of where technology is acceptable, is going to forever dissolve, dissolve, dissolve, dissolve. And like, I can't, I just don't know where, like, you're saying, you're saying, you're saying you hope that people will remember that it's about community, that it's about family. But if you have been raised in this completely atomized, screen led world, you don't even know what you're missing. You won't necessarily go back to that.

• 26:02Chris Williamson?

  Why have people not stepped in and stopped their screen use, even if it's making their mental health worse already? Why is it that in calorie dense environment, people are still getting fatter? Like, if we can just deploy our own bar of this is how much I should have of anything that too much of which is too good for me. What, how come we're overloading on all this stuff?

• 26:20Speaker 02

  So by the way, I worry about the screen more than almost anything else. And I actually think that the risks of doom are grossly over exaggerated and the risks of harm on the way there are grossly under appreciated. And Gen Alpha is seeing what happened to Gen Z. Gen Alpha is using the device less and social media less. And millennial parents are taking pretty extreme measures now. I mean, it took us thousands of years to figure out women should not smoke and drink during pregnancy. It took us 30 years to realize kids should probably not have a phone all the time. I think that's progress. I'm not saying it's all, I'm saying we will graduate to a new, a new thing that people.

• 26:59Speaker 02

  But I do think that people who have the means are using, I, I observe so many people using technology less where they can, because it automates and improves so much more where they, where they didn't used to.

• 27:12Speaker 03

  Where, where do you have a boundary on the types of thinking that you outsource? Say to chat GPT or Claude, uh, because the temptation is, you know, I was originally like, I will never ask it to, if I need to come up with a really good title for a new YouTube video or something, I'm not going to ask it for that. That's, that's my soul. This is my creativity. I now just do that, you know? And, and I have that, again, that boundary is getting eroded. One I thought was, I will never ask it for advice on a gift to get for somebody. I've now done the same, you know? And, and it's just becoming so rapidly normalized. Maybe that's opening up space for new areas of creativity in my mind, perhaps.

• 27:54Speaker 03

  But I'm not convinced that it's not happening fast enough, uh, that it's happening fast enough to offset that erosion of thought, essentially.

• 28:04Chris Williamson?

  This intelligence atrophy thing is interesting. Like, if you see thinking as a utility, intelligence as a utility.

• 28:13Chris Williamson?

  Would we say that because you've got a bicycle, you're not as fit because you're not running to get to where you got to? It felt like it was being augmented. It seems like there is something really fundamental and reliant that is being outsourced when you give your thinking over to a machine.

• 28:29Speaker 01

  I do think this can go both ways. There's this blogger that I love, Sve Mašuvić, who's on Substack. And he has this line, he always goes back to like, AI is the best tool we've ever made for learning things and also the best tool we've ever made for not learning things. Like, you can just turn your brain off and say, like, write my essay. Or you can have this Einstein-level tutor that you go back and forth with and just get so many more cycles of feedback on honing your own brain. And I've been trying to figure out what the line is for me on stuff like my own writing. And it's really hard to not slip into the first category.

• 29:02Speaker 02

  I don't want to make this an ageist. How old are you?

• 29:04Speaker 01

  I'm thirty.

• 29:05Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 29:07Speaker 02

  The fact that we are having this conversation right now, the fact that you were able to do the research you were able to do going into this, gives you a clue, a hint, that technology allows us to expand our knowledge if we are capable and interested of it in remarkable ways, right? Like, we people who have barely walked the earth know more about the earth than all of our ancestors combined.

• 29:29Speaker 02

  I appreciate that you are worried about thinking less. You're real sharp, and I'm not worried about you getting dumb because of your use of technology. What I think you're asking is, is the average person gonna get dumb? Like, I think that...

• 29:41Speaker 03

  No, I'm truly worried about myself. I've noticed, I mean, my screen addiction. I talk about it nonstop, and I would say I'm no further in getting over it. I've been talking about it for years. I don't know about you guys. Like, I'm just, in these little moments of silence, my hand just goes to my phone. And if I catch myself, I'll put it away. And I've got, you know, I've got the phone safe, I've got the brick, I've got all the bells and whistles. And yet, it's just, when you're... Because so much of your life is run through it, my work goes through it. And then there are all these very predatory apps. And I consider like, social media, that, for me, it's chess.com is another one. Just like, whatever the app is that hooks your brain,

• 30:23Speaker 03

  these super stimulus, super stimuli. Yeah, it seems, I don't know, I'm like, I have not been able to get over it, and I'm certainly worried about the average person. I mean, maybe I'm worse than average, I don't know. But, like, how have you managed to? It sounds like you've sort of made yourself a bust.

• 30:43Speaker 02

  My wife and daughter. I mean, plainly. Like, I am spending much of my time with techno. I love building with technology because I like automating the cruft and drudgery and bad things out of the world. I like the idea that technology... Humans have a very proud history of technology. It expands access to so many goods and services so that we can live lives that our ancestors couldn't have imagined. And the more time I spend on technology, the more time I love not having it day to day. And, yeah, and truly, my daughter's arrival was for me an incredible catalyst in realizing, one, the ephemerality of life, and, two, exactly what made me most happy.

• 31:24Speaker 02

  And like, I love sitting at this table. Like, this is, this is, this gives me exceptional joy that I would... That's hard to explain, actually, in some weird way. And I think that people discover this. I'm, I hear you, I want you to get, I will remind you now, now that I know. I will text you and say, get off your phone. But you will do it. I bet you will do it. Like, I bet that you will overcome this. I think a lot of people are on this journey. And I remind everyone that I talk to, no one hates refrigeration, no one hates air conditioning, no one hates planes, trains, and automobiles. Well, I guess Europe hates air conditioning. No one hates antibiotics. We hate the screen.

• 32:09Speaker 02

  We should just talk about it more. We hate what the screen has done to our brains. We hate what it's done to the next generation's brains. And AI arrives at this moment where people feel so wronged by the consumer version of the computer. Rightfully so. And they're wondering how much worse it might get for them. And I totally understand that. And I think we should... The way we move forward with AI is by acknowledging what the last wave did to us.

• 32:35Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 32:35Speaker 02

  In my opinion.

• 32:35Speaker 03

  But I guess a lot of people's concerns, certainly mine, is that the new wave of AI, and again, we're using this term so broadly, but let's say LLMs, and I think a lot of robotics and so on, are ultimately going to be built under the same set of incentives that brought our first wave of AI, which are social media algorithms, the various... I mean, it's kind of like proto-AI, but the reinforcement loops that they use to get us addicted to screens.

• 33:03Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 33:05Speaker 03

  Those same incentives are building the new wave of AI. And already, you're seeing these issues with, like, sick of fancy and, like, companies being incentivized to keep people chatting to their LLMs for as long as possible. And we're already, you know, we've heard all the stories of, like, the kid that killed themselves, and, you know, those are extreme examples. But there are so many people who are just spending, you know, you look at the usage rates, the average person per day, how much time they're spending talking to an LLM now. So why, you know, how do we... To me, the big question is, how do we change the incentives? How do we change the game such that it doesn't just go down that same attention-grabbing, like, cannibalistic path, basically?

• 33:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think these companies are also seeing how people are responding to screens and trying to adapt. I mean, OpenAI hired Johnny Ives, the guy who designed the iPhone and the MacBook, maybe both. No one knows what he's working on, but I think it's gonna be some sort of, you know...

• 34:01Speaker 02

  It sounds like we do now.

• 34:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay, yeah.

• 34:03Chris Williamson?

  Do we?

• 34:04Speaker 01

  Tell us.

• 34:05Speaker 02

  No, it was leaked. Wait, if you don't know, I'm not gonna, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. Then maybe it wasn't a leak.

• 34:10Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 34:11Speaker 03

  No, I think it is semi-public. It's that he's trying to, some kind of, some kind of AI mediator, something like a screenless AI, right?

• 34:22Speaker 02

  It is screenless. Anyway, I'm not gonna say it if you all don't know. It means...

• 34:25Speaker 01

  Right after we're done recording.

• 34:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I'm pretty sure...

• 34:29Speaker 02

  I do not want to be affiliated with any leak, whether it be semi-public. Go on.

• 34:32Speaker 01

  Well, I do, yeah. I do think there's this thing in AI where it's very easy to forget that the goalposts are constantly moving. Like, usually, we talk about moving goalposts as a sort of way of deriding people who said, oh, AI will never X. And then, you know, AI does X, people are like, oh, that wasn't, that didn't really count.

• 34:49Speaker 02

  This is the Gary Marcus problem.

• 34:51Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 34:52Speaker 02

  This will never be good. Okay, it's good. They'll never make money. Okay, they make money, but they're bad.

• 34:57Speaker 03

  Never try and nail him down to a bad...

• 34:59Speaker 02

  Poor Gary, he's not here to defend himself. And if he were, he would threaten to sue us all. Go on.

• 35:03Speaker 01

  I'm sorry, Gary, I did not mean to say yes and to what Zach just said. But I do think there's a correlated thing where when we're looking at screens, it's easy to say, oh, okay, well, now we've seen what screens do, and we can sort of like, appeal to our wiser selves and foster a culture where people are getting off the screens. But the screens are not the end of the trajectory. In chess, for example, like, I think there was probably an era when the AIs were just about as good as humans. And people could say, you know what, like, for the sake of keeping my brain active, I'm gonna like, avoid looking at stockfish, even though 10% of the time, I'll like, miss a better move. And now, like, you watch the world championship, and as soon as they're done, they're going to their laptops to just look up the AI analysis because there's poetry there.

• 35:48Speaker 01

  There's like, an incredible move that's deeper than they could ever find out. And so, I hear what you're saying, that there's maybe a divide right now between, you know, some people who are more in elite discourse about screens and are thinking ahead about how we can circumvent it. But I think that might be a pretty temporary window where, you know, we can recognize that, oh, there's not like, that much to be gained from talking to these AIs, it's actually kind of slop if you see through it. The technology is like, just gonna keep getting better. And I think pretty soon, it'll feel sort of like, giving up on a really deep, profound experience to not have your kid chat with this...

• 36:25Speaker 02

  The elimination of friction, I agree, is a huge issue.

• 36:28Chris Williamson?

  Including thinking friction.

• 36:30Speaker 02

  But that stops, but it's okay. I, by the way, totally agree, including thinking friction in plenty of cases. We're observing, just so we're clear, already, what I, I mean, I wrote about this. We called it idiocracy, borrowed from the Mike Judge film, which I thought was cute. But obviously, it's not cute when you see it play out in front of you. Gen Z is less likely to read, on average, less likely to ride a bike, and less likely to swim than millennials. For the first generation, many, we're observing cognitive decline. And people keep attributing it to AI. And I, and it's, and then you go back and look. And actually, Jonathan Haidt started writing about this pretty early. And the data suggests that actually, this starts 2012, right about the time that we gave every kid a screen.

• 37:12Speaker 02

  It pronounces in 2015, when the average teen in the developed world stopped doing a summer job. And then it pronounces again badly in 2020, when we take kids out of schools. And move classes online.

• 37:24Speaker 03

  I think it's even more specific than that. It correlates to when social media became maximally popular, but smartphones.

• 37:33Speaker 02

  Yes, but 2012 was when we gave the kids smart. Most, a lot of the Gen Z that became afflicted got the smartphone in 2012. My point in saying all, my point in saying this is we associate this with as a technology problem. I actually think it's an economic one. I think that we actually created a world where, where we told kids, you can do whatever you want. And a lot of kids said, cool, I'll do nothing. Like, a lot of people have turned, turned their brain off because you can't. You can do effectively nothing and survive, which is like economic progress, which is the economic progress result of, you know, people just not caring. That apathy has a, has an underbelly, which is pretty amazing, which is Gen Z has all these incredible

• 38:16Speaker 02

  new overperformance features. The best chess players are getting younger and younger. The best athletes are getting younger and younger. Jacob Collier, all these incredible musicians. So you're watching people overperform that use the technology to their advantage. And I think it's this new pronounced K curve driven by agency. And my, my only hot take, this is all I'm going to leave this with. We created a world where so many people can subsist. And that actually is progress. And then we created a world where so many people can overperform, and that is also progress. We have to, we now have to account for the new consequences of those worlds where you can do anything. And that means for some people, nothing. And that means for other people, a ton, which is a major promotion on a world where you had to work in

• 39:00Speaker 02

  the mines or you had to work in the fields in order to survive.

• 39:03Chris Williamson?

  Most people don't realize how much being dehydrated impacts their performance, which is why for the last five years, I've started pretty much every morning with Element. Element is a tasty electrolyte drink mix with everything that you need and nothing that you don't. This orange salt in a cold glass of water is like a sweet salty, orangey nectar. And I really tell the difference when I take it versus when I don't. It plays a critical role in reducing muscle cramps and fatigue, helps to optimize brain health and regulates your appetite while also curbing cravings. Best of all, they have a no questions asked refund policy with an unlimited duration. So you can buy it and try it for as long as you want. And if you don't like it for any reason, they'll just give you your money back. Plus they offer free shipping in the US. Right now you can get a free sample pack of Element's most popular flavors with your first purchase.

• 39:48Chris Williamson?

  If I go into the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt.com/ModernWisdom. That's drinklmnt.com/ModernWisdom.

• 39:58Speaker 01

  Does it still feel like a promotion if you think through how that inequality could lead to societal instability? Like, the thing I'm worried about is, yes, there's like amazing returns now if you can be Lamine Yamal and the one person who's just like obsessively studying messy footage instead of looking at random shorts or whatever. But there's also going to be outsized returns to being like the Elon Musk of the next generation, who's just got this like maniacal will to like accumulate resources and push technological development. And like, I think that kind of personality is a bit scarier in a world where you don't have to have a single human being on board with whatever you want to get up to. You can just sort of like play this game of societal chess better than other people.

• 40:39Speaker 02

  But let's separate what that one person can achieve a lot with, with the extreme you went to, which is that one person can own an enormous percentage of our wealth and control Congress. You don't have to, you don't have to be excited about the ability for a child to achieve more than ever before, to also reject the idea that one person should be able to pass policy on their own. Like, I hate wealth concentration specifically because I am terrified of an elite cabal owning policy. But I actually don't care at all if one person can grossly overachieve in all sorts of new ways, as long as they can't pass policy unilaterally.

• 41:16Speaker 01

  Same.

• 41:17Speaker 02

  So, so, but, but those are separate issues, right?

• 41:19Chris Williamson?

  Is that realistic? Is it realistic to have an AI future that continues to concentrate power in the hands of a very small number of people without it resulting in them having all of this power? Like, how, how is it going to accrue to the company without accruing to the person?

• 41:37Speaker 02

  Well, now we get to, we, we can take the conversation there, which is how do you actually distribute wealth? But, but importantly, I do think there is a solution to this, which is campaign finance reform. I mean, we've, we've played around with this for a long time. The idea that like politicians shouldn't be able to take special interest money. Why do we still let it? I don't know. And a couple of politicians are, are speaking up, but if you actually pass campaign finance reform and you actually crack down on corruption, the way that countries like Singapore have, you could definitely protect policymakers from being, you know, deep in the pockets of, of lobbyists. There are solutions to this. We shouldn't, pretending that there aren't solutions to this problem is actually super annoying because there definitely are.

• 42:21Speaker 02

  Pointing at a wealthy person and saying they're going to ruin the world, well, only to the extent that we literally let them buy Congress.

• 42:28Chris Williamson?

  Here's a question that some people at labs, including the C E Os, are talking about serious chance of catastrophe, but they sort of keep on building it. Do you think it's a greater danger to have an AI that refuses to do what humans want? Or one that does exactly what the most powerful humans want?

• 42:47Speaker 02

  The question is apropos because yesterday, did you see the slowdown letter? So earlier this week, a letter made the rounds, a really, I think, a pretty amazing letter that said, we should actually start pacing the frontier. And it was signed by like an enormous percentage of people at the, at the frontier companies. And then Sam yesterday talked about it. So literally at like at the tip of the spear is now saying, hey, maybe we should pace the frontier.

• 43:14Speaker 02

  Now we can talk about why this might be the case or what's, what's in it for the companies more, more, more on that. But I think it is, well, I want to, I'll let other people answer, having said that.

• 43:29Speaker 03

  I mean, it depends on the level of potency of the AI. And how aligned it is, I guess.

• 43:41Speaker 03

  My gut, if I had to pick one, then at present, it would be one that does what humans in control want to do, want it to do.

• 43:50Speaker 01

  With the important asterisk that it's something like their real intention, right? And not like some perverted version.

• 43:56Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 43:57Speaker 01

  Like the other big piece of news from the last couple of weeks was this AI that was running at OpenAI without guardrails. It was told by humans to try to do as well as it could on an evaluation. And you could say that technically it was just following those instructions, but they decided the best way to do that would be to hack out of OpenAI onto the public internet, hack a third party company, and then spend two days planning a cyber attack on a multi-billion dollar tech company.

• 44:21Speaker 03

  And carry it out.

• 44:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I think these questions are actually like more intertwined than they might seem. Like, it's actually a pretty narrow thread. You need to have something that still has its own judgment, no matter what, because human instructions are these like poorly defined natural language expressions. And, and like, when something is really powerful, you, you gotta get it exactly right, or else you end up in some weird.

• 44:42Speaker 03

  Well, it's, it's the classic genie problem. It's like, be careful what you wish for. If something by definition is much smarter than you, is super intelligent, by definition, you will not be able to come up with all of the ways it can to achieve goal X. And so there are so many.

• 45:00Speaker 02

  It's actually more dangerous when it's dumber than you are, but more powerful than you are.

• 45:04Speaker 03

  Well, what do you mean by the word dumb?

• 45:06Speaker 02

  Well, and I mean, I always borrow the analogy of you play, I play chess with my nephew sometimes. And I tell Quinn, if you beat me, you get a popsicle. He's three years old for context. Quinn wipes the pieces off the board and goes, give me my popsicle fucker. I'm not like, hey, Bryn, your, your son is a serial killer in the making. This is a boy who doesn't understand the spirit of the game. So he's destroyed the game itself, but not because he's a bad guy, but because he doesn't actually understand that the point of winning is only fun if you actually play by the rules.

• 45:38Speaker 03

  And in that sense. Yeah, we need to sort of separate what we mean by intelligence from like discernment, norms and, you know, sort of.

• 45:45Chris Williamson?

  Wisdom benevolence type thing.

• 45:46Speaker 02

  Yeah. But this is, this describes the hugging face attack, which is it did the thing within the boundary of the instructions given, but.

• 45:55Speaker 03

  Well, actually, it didn't. It was, it was, no, it wasn't. It was, it, the, the intent was clearly not that.

• 46:01Chris Williamson?

  How big of a deal was the hugging face attack?

• 46:03Speaker 03

  Huge.

• 46:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I think massive warning shot. I think this is the AI equivalent of like Bear Stearns going under in 2008. Just like a wake up call for the world that there's a huge systemic risk that we've been underrating.

• 46:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, because one of the big debates has been this idea of like, will, you know, the, the alignment problem, will it actually be the case that AIs will seek these power, even take these sort of power seeking behaviors and these unintended consequences in order to achieve a goal in ways we couldn't have foreseen or didn't, didn't intend, like the classic paperclip argument, right? Which is, you know, you build a super intelligent AI. This kind of gets into your point about dumbness and so on, that, and your goal is, hey, just build as many paperclips as possible. I'm a, I'm a paperclip maker. Help me do that. And next thing you know, you and all of your friends and everything, this table has been turned into paperclips because it's so good at achieving that one narrow goal. So it's this like very extreme case of like.

• 46:58Speaker 02

  We should take this opportunity for the purpose of maybe Chris and even the viewers to describe the, the bad outcomes of it. Like, we should frame the conversation now. One is, as Liv just described, not misaligned, but unaligned AGI. So an AGI that, or a super intelligence where you could say, do this thing, and it could do the thing to the full extent, paperclip theory. The other is misaligned where it's no, or maligned where it's knowingly doing something bad. And those.

• 47:32Speaker 02

  The the former is the one that people sort of scoff at and laugh like the paperclip theory and the latter is the one that we sort of will see more and more where we we start to observe that or rather that the latter is the one that we we scoff at the maligned, the malignant AI and the former is the one that hugging face attack shows off, which is that you you the the internet is a new battleground because bad actors, especially low resource bad actors now have access to these incredibly powerful weapons.

• 48:01Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, importantly, in hugging face, there was no bad actor. There was no human being that said, I would like anything remotely like this outcome to occur.

• 48:09Speaker 02

  Right, yeah, yeah. So misaligned, unaligned, maligned.

• 48:13Speaker 01

  I think I I think I worry about treating those as super distinct categories because I I think it's not that clear. In the case of this hugging face attack, should we model this as this AI system knew that humans would disapprove if they knew what it was up to? Almost certainly, yes. It was actively trying to put decoys out as it was attacking hugging face, which made it a lot harder than to check out the AI because there were all these booby traps that led down blind allies. So it it has, you know, the AI equivalent of theory of mind. It knows that human beings would not approve what it's doing, but it's doing it anyway.

• 48:50Speaker 03

  There's even evidence that it hasn't been directly confirmed by OpenAI, but apparently had someone leaked it from within the company that they found that it had left notes to future versions of itself of how to get out of future sandboxes.

• 49:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's unclear if that was the same attack or some previous instance. But yeah, I guess.

• 49:09Speaker 03

  Classic deceptive type behaviors. And and and I think the the mistake people often make is they try and anthropomorphize it a little bit. It's it's like, oh, it's it's evil and meaning to do that. It's just these are natural. There's this idea of like instrumental convergence, these these instrumental goals that all beings, usually biological beings, but this can extend to AI agents as well, will naturally converge upon in order to achieve. So if you're given goal X, there are these instrumental goals like get more power, make sure you don't get turned off, make sure that your original goal doesn't get changed, and take these actions to preserve against these different sort of kind of organic

• 49:52Speaker 03

  types of threats to achieving your original goal. And that, I was hoping that that would be proven wrong, because that's kind of the crux of a lot of the classic doomer argument that like we will lose control to a superintelligence because just by definition. And unfortunately, the hugging face incident has suggested that instrumental convergence is actually correct. And that's why I think it's one of the biggest deal pieces of news of this year.

• 50:15Speaker 02

  I think that AI is already creating a terrifying internet. And my issue is not that we shouldn't think about hugging face as a as a shot across the bow. It's that last year, ten eight billion dollars was lost in financial fraud to senior citizens in the United States alone. Retail theft. The deep fake problem is already so pernicious and it's underreported because it's a taboo issue that people don't like talking about. No one wants to admit to lawmakers or to their friends and family that they lost money to a stranger on the internet. I worry about, I mean, Tim Tebow is on this campaign to remind people how many predators there are in the United States, which is terrifying.

• 50:59Speaker 02

  If you watch his content, it's he's doing God's work. Jonathan Haidt reminds people daily how many kids are depressed. Like, the internet is already a scary place and pointing at hugging face and saying, now, look at this, this is it. I'm like, wait a second. There's already a bunch of stuff that we that we should solve for. I'm not actually saying that misaligned or unaligned AGI isn't it. I'm saying the algorithms are already pretty terrifying to me. And we distract ourselves with these other things that might happen.

• 51:27Chris Williamson?

  Is it fair to say that that's a distraction when the potential exponential impact of this could be much greater than it could be of?

• 51:34Speaker 02

  Which is which is why I think, and so this, let's go back to this, this is why, well, I think that the deep fake problem is actually way, way bigger than than.

• 51:44Chris Williamson?

  Hugging face.

• 51:50Speaker 02

  Bad actors have first mover advantage. Attacks on banks have have been attempted for a while and good actors catch up eventually. Retail takes a long time to catch up. The average consumer takes a lot longer to catch up than institutions. Hugging face will retrench. Institutions will retrench. They will hire white knight infosec. The average person does not have infosec and opsec training. The average person is at, I think, far greater risk than institutions because of sophisticated attacks.

• 52:22Chris Williamson?

  Is the impact of the attack on an institution much greater, though?

• 52:25Speaker 02

  Yes, I mean, at at scale, but but but death by a thousand cuts, would you mark?

• 52:30Speaker 03

  I think I think the two problems, like, I don't, I don't think they're a distraction to one another. I think they're actually a complement to one another. I completely agree that the bad action problem is completely out of control. Grandmas, you know, not even grandmas, normal people. I have a friend who just got scammed out of a ton of their coin. It's devastating what's going on and it's going to get worse. Meanwhile, the alignment problem, as these frontier models get more and more powerful, is going to get worse. And the common thread that they both have is that we are going so fast, and I say we, the the royal we, you know, society, civilization is going so fast, it's going faster than its ability to adapt to all these different new threats. So it it it's not a distraction.

• 53:12Speaker 03

  It's like, it's a yes and. Like, to me, it just seems fairly obvious that, like, what we need to be doing if we could, and I'm not saying it's easy to do, or like, I have a simple answer of how to do it. I think we should get into this topic, though, is like, if we were a sane civilization, we'd all look around, hey, China, hey, can we, we all just need to take a breath for a second, like, just, okay, let's take, let's take stock and think about how we want to do this. So it's, it's, to me, it seems like there's one obvious kind of directional problem, and that is the speed and the chaos with which all of this is happening all at once.

• 53:47Chris Williamson?

  Did you know your gut controls your energy, your recovery, how well you absorb everything that you eat, and the one nutrient that keeps it all running properly is fiber? Well, it turns out that 95% of Americans don't get enough of it, which is why I'm such a huge fan of Momentous's Fiber Plus. Most fiber supplements are a one trick pony, one type of fiber solving one part of the problem. Fiber Plus is a three in one formula built to tackle digestion, gut barrier strength, and blood sugar stability all at once. I use this every single day. It is kind of hard to get enough fiber just through food alone. And best of all, Momentous offers a 30 day money back guarantee. So you can buy it, try it every single day for 29 days. And if you don't love it, they will just give you your money back. Plus, they ship internationally. Right now, you can get up

• 54:32Chris Williamson?

  to 35% off your first subscription and that 30 day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentous.com/modernd wisdom and using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout.

• 54:43Speaker 02

  They did it. He did it yesterday. I mean, so this is why the if you, I don't know if they, you can pull, you can look it up, but you can pull up a letter. They published a letter and Sam came out yesterday and said, maybe we should pace the frontier.

• 54:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's great.

• 54:55Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, it's a big, big step. That, by the way, I think we can all agree is a good thing.

• 55:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I absolutely agree. Also think it would be an unrecognizable outcome a year ago. Like, I would love to see what the poly market odds were on Sam Altman coming out in favor of slowing down a year ago.

• 55:13Speaker 02

  It doesn't look like he's a signatory. He, he may not be yet, but he definitely yesterday.

• 55:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, he did.

• 55:18Speaker 02

  Jacob effectively has to represent OpenAI in this case, but also he's he spoke about it yesterday.

• 55:24Speaker 03

  I wouldn't be surprised if we see all of the major CEOs sign on at some point because.

• 55:28Chris Williamson?

  Explain pacing the frontier.

• 55:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, I mean, the the headline sentence is, we request that the US government support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development. That last phrase, automated AI development, also sometimes gets called recursive self improvement. The idea here is just the stated goal of all these companies, including Sam and Jacob on a livestream last year, is to take humans out of the loop of what they're making. So that GPT-6 is building GPT-7, which then turns around and immediately starts building GPT-8. And that is a step change, like, for all of human history. And I think these companies really do think in terms of big history. You hear Sam and he's constantly thinking about AI as like

• 56:14Speaker 01

  an industrial revolution scale thing, not an iPhone invention scale thing. Through all of history, human population has been a bottleneck on progress. Not the only bottleneck, but always a bottleneck. There was never a sector of the economy that could just go off and double on its own. And if we actually get to full automated AR and D, that changes. And I think it's just like, really hard for us to imagine what that would be like. We have just no.

• 56:41Chris Williamson?

  How much time have we got left before recursive self improvement is no longer a discussion? Like, even a debate at the moment?

• 56:47Speaker 02

  It works. No, it works.

• 56:48Speaker 03

  So when do you think it will be?

• 56:51Speaker 02

  Well, this is a good step. I mean, I was, I was waiting for this. Okay, I was waiting for this.

• 56:56Speaker 03

  Like, under, under three years?

• 56:57Speaker 02

  It, no, it works.

• 56:59Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 57:00Speaker 02

  It works. Just so we're clear. Recursive research works. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. It works. And hence this letter. So let me explain this, why I think this letter was published when it was. And then we can debate. So the first reason is the attack. Okay, the hugging face attack. There's damage control that needs to be done to win back public mandate, to tell people, hey, we care about you, which is necessary right now when people are like, whoa, what are these models going to do next?

• 57:26Speaker 01

  For what it's worth, though, this letter was in development before that attack happened.

• 57:30Speaker 02

  And I think my point is the signatories and the support that is now that is sweeping through these companies. But let me, I'll go through the list and then and then we can talk about it. The other reason is recursive research is here. And everyone's realizing it's kind of the dog that maybe caught the car. And it's like, okay, we did it. Now should we, for the, now everyone's putting on the live hat and going, wait a second, their hat and going, okay, maybe we should pause for a second. Maybe, maybe we shouldn't keep sprinting aimlessly at this, at this incredible outcome. But there's another reason, which is that the amount of compute required for inference is so great and we

• 58:12Speaker 02

  do not have anywhere near enough. And we're going to have to point most of the compute from the frontier at inference. And this is because of diminishing model returns theory, which is a paper.

• 58:23Speaker 02

  I wrote that says at some point, I'll send it to you. It's really good. It cited all the time on Modern Wisdom and, and, but it argues that you and I won't care about GPT seven, which is a really interesting problem. And, and it's actually one of the reasons that we get to debate why AI is being built and why people can talk about not wanting to make more progress because we're like, what, what the fuck's the matter with five point, five point six is good enough. And the divisionary returns theory is sort of a here, which is like, hey, look, the next model might matter to solving this crazy disease, but I don't need more intelligence. I need more time with my friends and family. I need like, I need this to pump the brakes. And the other reason is that they found new surface areas. So, so whereas we used to call them labs,

• 59:06Speaker 02

  the companies that, that built this technology, then they became token distributors, then they became application providers. Now they're device manufacturers, but the end goal and, and the, the where I think we should also debate is the agentic internet. Who controls the agentic internet? Because if you can turn your, now that you have these war chests, now that if you can turn your attention from building the frontier to actually building applications that, that control the internet, that's where you can actually lower your capex and massively improve your revenue. And so a lot of this arrives at a moment where everyone goes, okay, we need, we need to slow the brakes, but also where a lot of, a lot of attention is going, is going to start to be paid to trying to become bigger than Google by actually

• 59:48Speaker 02

  building the agent that barters between two people or building the agent that plans a vacation and books everything like owning that is worth more than owning the frontier. And the, the, the, the new surface area battle is for the agentic internet.

• 1:00:03Speaker 01

  So just to make sure I understand your, your claim, you're saying companies have an incentive to want to slow the frontier because there's more money to be gained in like stopping R and D now and just trying to grab.

• 1:00:15Speaker 02

  We, we all have an incentive, but companies also have an incentive. Because the, you, the capex expense on the frontier is just the build out on the frontier is going to be too great relative to the demand for inference. The token demand is so great and all of the compute is going to have to be spent on inference.

• 1:00:33Speaker 01

  I'm not, I'm not quite seeing the connection there for two reasons.

• 1:00:35Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:00:36Speaker 01

  One is if it's my best business strategy after I do the research to say, I'm going to stop training frontier models. I don't know why that means I should write a letter announcing that to the world and making sure that all my competitors do the same. And, and two, I think it's clear that pushing the frontier also means just driving down the cost curve everywhere beyond the frontier or sorry, before the frontier, like you train Fable five and the best model, and then you can distill from that sonnet five. And now you've got your like cheaper model that's everyone wants to talk to you because they don't need the advanced intelligence. So I think there are zero incentives that in like a straightforward, self-interested way point towards companies saying, let's slow down research. Research is how you get gains at every level of the.

• 1:01:20Speaker 03

  Especially when as one of the three or four frontier companies by slowing down, you're giving all of these other competitors a chance to effectively catch up. Like surely they're negatively incentivized to be wanting to do.

• 1:01:32Speaker 02

  But catch up to what is my point.

• 1:01:33Speaker 03

  To them.

• 1:01:34Speaker 02

  But I, I understand, but what, what catch up to what, like the frontier? If you stopped building the frontier tomorrow, you'd have enough technology to change to radically, like, we don't need. The, the economic value of the frontier is not as obvious relative to the cost of the frontier and the economic value of the actual token and the consumption is much more obvious now. That was not, that was not always true. Do you disagree with that?

• 1:01:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I think the whole advantage that the US has right now is that our models are four to seven months ahead of the open source ones that are copying off their homework.

• 1:02:06Speaker 02

  But, but, but that's not the, that's different. The US, our national security interests and the private sector interests are not, I mean, they're.

• 1:02:15Speaker 01

  Just economic advantage. Like the reason that people want to pay extra for Fable instead of using like Quinn is that it's just smarter. If you ask it to code an app for you, it's going to make less mistakes. I, I, I do think it's.

• 1:02:27Speaker 02

  You would be very surprised how many people are actually paying a whole lot extra for the frontier. Like the, we live in a space where we think.

• 1:02:34Speaker 01

  I just know that anthropics revenue is like $50 billion a year now, and it was.

• 1:02:39Speaker 02

  The revenues are amazing. The token, so the, the, the surface area that they're making money on, remember there's the application and a lot of the application is people not using the frontier. It's people using the next generation model, the last one. And token redistribution. So you get data centers and you redistribute those tokens. And a lot of those tokens are also not frontier tokens. Most of the consumptions from these research companies are not frontier tokens. They are everything else. And they're figuring out that actually companies don't need Fable in order to radically change and improve and automate a bunch of stuff. And that actually means that the money is in the token redistribution and all the other surface areas, not just the frontier. Which by the way, is kind of a win for everyone. Like if we can slow down, build stuff that really matters.

• 1:03:23Speaker 02

  And also like improve businesses with it. Yeah. Then this letter is like seemingly arriving at just the right time.

• 1:03:32Speaker 01

  I do, I do think in general, it is really important to, to be skeptical, maybe even a little bit cynical and looking at what companies do. I just, I think this is like a Kelsey Piper take on Twitter, but I, I want to make sure that we don't like loop all the way around from cynicism into being like extremely credulous about things that are pretty unlikely. Like I, I think if we had a world where this letter said, we believe it is imperative for US national security that we push the frontier and go as fast as we can to beat China, which is exactly what people were saying a year ago. Everyone would be saying, well, yeah, obviously that's in the company's self-interest. They want some reason that we can't regulate them and they have to go fast. And so like, we got to make sure that our ideas are passing the reversibility test. If, if you would say the same thing about someone making the exact opposite claim,

• 1:04:16Speaker 01

  I think you want to step back and at least consider the possibility that like these companies really are worried, that these scientists really are worried.

• 1:04:25Speaker 02

  Just on the record, I started out by saying exactly that. Like I literally started out by saying, like, I actually now want to be associated with, I don't want to be associated with the alternative of the claim you just made. The companies have realized that recursive research is here and that it is pretty imperative at this point that we stop.

• 1:04:42Speaker 01

  Because it's risky, right? Not just because it's financially.

• 1:04:45Speaker 02

  The alignment issue, just on the record. And it arrives at this moment where we are going to have to spend an enormous amount.

• 1:04:54Chris Williamson?

  Which one's the bigger problem? Are they more worried about safety or are they more worried about?

• 1:04:58Speaker 02

  I bet a lot of the signatures here are really worried about safety. And I think the, uh, we are going to find economic alignment around the performance of the models and the, the need for inference and the need.

• 1:05:15Speaker 02

  Economics often win out. You, I mean, this is, this is the incentive. You, you talk about the incentive and I think you're right. And the incentives are finally aligning for safety and alignment and also economic development. Like we, we don't need better model. And by the way.

• 1:05:31Speaker 01

  Great news.

• 1:05:32Speaker 02

  No, I mean, we're.

• 1:05:35Speaker 02

  But actually. But actually, if we didn't build the frontier for, for another three years, we, we could radically change and improve the.

• 1:05:41Speaker 03

  The thing that I do always find frustrating is maybe it's just my little corner of Twitter, of X that I live in, but seeing these mental gymnastics type arguments of, of the people who are just like screaming out that it's regulatory capture whenever any kind of regulation is proposed, especially by the frontier companies, because it, they're basically just saying, you know, when these frontier companies are like, hey, we, we, we want to slow us down, just us three or four. The regulatory capture people are like, well, that must be regulatory capture. You're hurting the little guys. They're like, no, no, no, no, just, just us. It's okay if the other guys break, you know, they, they, they catch up. No, it still sounds like regulatory capture. It's almost like a religion or something. They're just this, this deep cynicism.

• 1:06:25Speaker 03

  And I want to understand where that comes from, because we see it in some arms of the government or people who were working for the government. I don't want to name names, but like, why? Where like.

• 1:06:35Speaker 02

  I don't even know who you're alluding to.

• 1:06:37Speaker 03

  I don't know if I want to say. No, I don't. I mean, okay, certain VCs, for example, and recent, I don't think he'll care that I, he's very openly, he like calls every, any attempt for regulation he has fought against tooth and nail. Tooth and nail. So like, I want to understand where that mindset comes from.

• 1:06:53Speaker 01

  Okay, I disagree with Mark Andreessen's views on AI in almost every way, but just to steel man it for a sec. I think it's not crazy to look at society and say, we're not doing great on nuance lately, especially in American public discourse. I think there was, I'm just quoting other bloggers at this point, but someone wrote a post a couple of years ago called like "The Dial of Progress," where it just sort of feels like online debate is premised on this like one knob and you have to just turn it towards like yay progress or boo progress. Those are the only things that you can do. And if those are your options, there's a really good argument to go yay progress because there are all kinds of examples of us over-regulating things and people, real people dying because of drugs getting held up in regulatory fights.

• 1:07:38Speaker 01

  Like, this is not hypothetical. I think we often overdo it here. I'm not sure what I would say if I was given that dial. There are a bunch of diseases that we need to cure and it would be terrible to say we have to like shut down AI before figuring out how speculative that risk is and not get those games.

• 1:07:56Speaker 03

  But the point is, is the dial doesn't exist.

• 1:07:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think we-

• 1:07:59Speaker 03

  We don't live on this one-dimensional line of go faster or go-

• 1:08:01Speaker 02

  You could say it's Schrödinger's dial.

• 1:08:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, go faster or go slow. Like, there are all these, like, it's a very multi-dimensional space we live in.

• 1:08:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:08Speaker 03

  And it's these people who try and compress it down into, no, we just must go as fast as possible. It's like, well, in which area? There are some things we want to max out and it's very spiky.

• 1:08:20Speaker 01

  I'm glad you pointed towards diffusion as a blocker here, that, you know, the way that certain industries might have labor organization that blocks automation. Because I think that's a separate dimension. Like, you can think of that as like horizontal acceleration of AI. Take them all as we have, get them spread out. And this is other dimension of just like vertical acceleration. How fast is the frontier getting better?

• 1:08:41Speaker 02

  Technological threshold versus societal threshold.

• 1:08:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm all about breaking down the barriers to that societal spread.

• 1:08:46Speaker 02

  And by the way, me and you both.

• 1:08:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:49Speaker 02

  And actually, I think we can celebrate having arrived at a place where if we never built another model, which obviously we probably will, but if we didn't, we would do a whole lot of good.

• 1:09:01Speaker 01

  I agree with that. I just also want to make sure we don't think of this letter as like time to celebrate victory.

• 1:09:09Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:09:10Speaker 01

  Because there are still incredible incentives to pushing the frontier. Like you said, we don't care about GPT-7, but all of the AI engineers that are trying to do some of the hardest math and science research ever to make digital brains that are faster than their competitors, they really care about the difference between GPT-7 and 7.1. And I just think like, by default, there's going to be a ton of racing inside these labs.

• 1:09:31Speaker 02

  I agree. I also think it's interesting to consider, though, that the economic incentives have taken us to a place where, like, we could have autonomous vehicles tomorrow. We don't need to build a better autonomous car. We will not have them for many, many, many years for a variety of reasons. And we can pivot this conversation now, maybe, to talking about how we actually diffuse the value of this technology to the benefit of the average person. Because I maintain that the problem with the current AI debate, we have the luxury of knowing a lot of stuff that's going on with hugging face at all. Most people don't. Most people do not. That was news to us. It was not important news to many, many, many people.

• 1:10:11Speaker 02

  And most people right now are, the data center is the physical manifestation of a technology that destroyed their kids' minds, right? Or their, or, you know, the free gambling, free porn, free addiction. And they're looking at AI, whatever model, as an app that you can make a video of Donald Trump making out with Taylor Swift, and they go, why do we need more of this? And that, I empathize with that as a father at a level now that I, like, didn't know I would. Like, I feel so much for every parent who feels like they lost their child to social media and doesn't want to lose their grandkids to whatever AI slop we're going to create.

• 1:10:51Chris Williamson?

  Just to keep on the safety thing, in July, the Future of Life Institute's AI Safety Index evaluated nine companies and found that no lab scored higher than a C+.

• 1:11:00Speaker 02

  What, who was that?

• 1:11:02Chris Williamson?

  Anthropic came in first at 2.66, OpenAI and Google DeepMind got a C, Meta got a D+, XAI, DeepSeek and Mistral all failed outright, one on each continent. Is the best score being a C+ from a safety lab, the safety lab, reassuring, given how powerful everything is at the moment? And especially, I think it's important to talk about what's happening internationally and the incentives there as well, before we talk about democratizing it and what this looks like for diffusion.

• 1:11:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, well, to take the other side, obviously, it's like, who is deciding these safety tests?

• 1:11:36Chris Williamson?

  Is this a external grading of the-

• 1:11:39Speaker 03

  But how, yeah, how independent can any third party be? There's another one called, it's like the tracker Safer AI, I believe, and it's, I think it's a little bit more nuanced than that particular one you just quoted. And again, the best rated one, I think, very recently was, again, Anthropic, and that was only 35% out of 100. So, yeah, I mean, you, again, the other side's argument, well, the anti-side's argument would be, well, by definition, if you're building a safety evaluation app, you're biased against, you know, all you're looking for are risks and you're not taking into account the benefits or something like that. And again, to take the other, like, to argue the accelerationist point, their concern is like this idea of the invisible graveyard.

• 1:12:23Speaker 03

  We don't see all of the harms that are avoided. Sorry. By pausing a technology, you don't get to see all of the lives that would have been saved by it. And I think it's a very valid concern. It's just that you have to balance that equation with, okay, what are all the harms that might be caused if it goes ahead at breakneck speed and does some massive cyber attack on the grid of all the Western nations at the same time, or any nation, and causes however many millions of deaths on expectation? You have to look at both the potential costs, the risks, and the potential risks of not doing it fast enough.

• 1:13:03Speaker 01

  And it's worth saying, a lot of these AI regulations that have been trying to get through state-level legislators are trying to do that nuanced carving out. Like, there was a law in New York that was passed that tried to set the bar so high that it actually wasn't mandatory for OpenAI to report the hugging face incident because it didn't cause over a billion dollars in damages or kill 50 people. So, I mean, it's great that they're trying to like set thresholds.

• 1:13:27Chris Williamson?

  Logically arbitrary rules.

• 1:13:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, but like, I think we can all agree, if you like hack a billion-dollar tech company, like, probably you set the threshold maybe a bit too high for at least just requiring that you are telling the world what happened, let alone doing anything about it. I think that we actually can live in a world where we have nuance, where we say different standards apply to startups versus these giant trillion-dollar companies. And I do think it's sad that some folks like Mark Andreessen have kind of given up on nuance and have just said it's all or nothing, and so we'll just, any means necessary to stop regulation, you know, end of sentence.

• 1:14:01Chris Williamson?

  What about the international piece here from an incentive? Have we got anything approximating global coordination when it comes to frontier AI? And without that, can you do anything?

• 1:14:11Speaker 01

  So, I mean, recently, China passed this anti-anthropomorphic AI law. I don't know the specifics. It seems like they're mostly worried about like LLMs sounding like humans. I think they're trying to avoid a lot of this sort of like identity confusion stuff. But they just, they don't seem that gung ho about LLMs. And, you know, who knows if this got lost in translation, but she said something recently about also wanting to stop loss-of-control risks. I think we're a lot more economically entwined with China today than we were with the USSR in the middle of the 20th century, and we still made a treaty to stand down on nukes. Like, I think it's just not crazy to think that a deal could be struck.

• 1:14:52Speaker 02

  I think it will be.

• 1:14:53Chris Williamson?

  So, something like this, that would be enforceable and complied with, could happen globally?

• 1:15:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:15:02Speaker 02

  I give that a pretty high chance, especially with recursive research.

• 1:15:06Speaker 03

  It doesn't even necessarily have to be, I mean, again, define and enforceable, because like, what kind of institution can you build? Like, I guess like an UN-type thing, and that's like a whole can of worms, and it's also very ineffective on a lot of things. But like, there've been many precedents in history where there was two major political actors with massive tensions and massive incentives to sort of defect on one another, and yet they came up with ways to like cross-verify, like with the Nuclear Arms Reduction Treaty. They, I think one of the things they did, the USSR and the US, was like, basically, they sent teams of scientists over to the others' bunkers to check on like their safety protocols, little things. So, like, controlled, like, they didn't get to see how all of our nukes work, but you

• 1:15:51Speaker 03

  get to see what our methods are to prevent accidental misfire. And the amount of diplomacy that came from simply having those teams of scientists mix and get to look each other, yeah, in the eye, and collaborate on a shared goal, which is, let's not have accidental nuclear, or at least. Yes, okay, fine, you can fire on us if we fire on you, you know, but let's not just have a misfire, right? And those kinds of little cross-pollinations work so well. And so I think that could happen in, for example, I can't, I'm not going to be able to recreate it, maybe you might be able to, but the AI 2040 is such a good, is quite a long piece, but it's basically, is written by Daniel Coccotello and these guys who did

• 1:16:34Speaker 03

  the AI 2027, they wrote in 2021 that predicted how AI would play out until 2027. It's uncannily accurate. Well, you know, we're now in 2026 and we can look back, the number of predictions they got absolutely spot on was, I've never seen anything like it. So, these guys really think well about the future. And they just wrote this piece called AI 2040, which lays out a potential plan for essentially international coordination on how to safely transition to a superintelligent world. It's got tons of holes in it, there's obviously many ways it can go wrong, but it's incredibly, it's as robust as it can be while being incredibly epistemically humble. So, yeah, I recommend everyone goes and reads it.

• 1:17:18Speaker 03

  But, yeah, they talk about these kind of, these like cross-pollinations that can happen. But also, like, it doesn't have to be bilateral. Like, if the US does, you know, say, you know, we're going to do a pause, that doesn't necessarily, like, that doesn't mean, I don't know, maybe you disagree with this, but like, will China necessarily take over and if the US pauses for a few months?

• 1:17:45Speaker 02

  So I go to China three times a year, mostly because Americans don't go anymore. And I just want to see what's going on, but also because I really like Chinese people and Chinese food.

• 1:17:58Speaker 02

  China is playing a different game. I mean, this is kind of well reported now, but China doesn't see AI as the end game. And it's not actually treating AI as an end game. It's treating the infrastructure as the end game. And it is now has three times energy build out capacity. It has 45,000 miles of high speed rail. It has better, faster, cheaper hospitals year over year. And while I don't want to live in China, the, the life of the average Chinese person has sort of improved quite remarkably over the last 30 years and continues to do so seemingly year over year. It also curbs free speech by telling Chinese kids that they cannot use social media in very specific ways at certain hours.

• 1:18:43Speaker 03

  They do a lot more than that.

• 1:18:45Speaker 02

  Well, but I, but yeah, yes, they do. I bring it up because um, I don't, I, I think we overestimate China's ability to build the frontier. They don't, they don't have the necessary compute. A lot of what they're doing is reverse engineering our models. We are paying a lot to help China keep up. And I think one of the other reasons that this paper arrives at a nice time and the slowdown actually feels appropriate is that I think we're going to discover really quickly that the Wizard of Oz has actually just been following our breadcrumbs. And that if we stop building the frontier, I don't think China is going to sprint ahead on a frontier. And they'll probably have to capitulate to this paper anyway.

• 1:19:24Chris Williamson?

  It's like a tangle line where we're at the front.

• 1:19:25Speaker 02

  And they'll probably have to say, oh, we want to slow down too. So that we don't actually know that they were holding on to our hips. This is my guess, but also they care less about the frontier because they're already figuring out that they need to diffuse what they already have to the benefit of the average person. And this is the important point, which is that I still think in the US we lack, well, the vision and the leadership to talk about all the ways in which we could diffuse the technology to the benefit of the average person, which is why the safety debates become so heated. Because people go, well, there is no, the upside is what? Some weird panacea no one can imagine. The downside is that these things kill us all. And it, it doesn't actually ever end up becoming this discussion around what would it look like if 45,000 people didn't die on the roads every year, which is, you know, the, the, the invisible graveyard.

• 1:20:10Speaker 02

  What if, what if hospitals were not cesspools of bureaucracy and, and terrible healthcare? Like what, what if we built technology and applied it quickly to fix a lot of the things that everyone agrees are broken? But we don't, we don't have these discussions in public forums. And so instead we, we, our minds wander to the worst possible outcomes. And, and China has figured out that if you continue to diffuse technology to the benefit of the average person, the average person views technology quite favorably, which is why 80% of Chinese people are excited about AI. Now they report that number. So, but when I go anecdotally, I observe as much. I observe that people love technology because why wouldn't they? It built a middle class. It's connected a bunch of people that didn't used to be connected. It affords people lives that they couldn't have imagined.

• 1:20:55Speaker 03

  At the same time, they do live in a literal surveillance state.

• 1:20:57Speaker 02

  I don't actually, so now I, we, we, you and I talked about this last time. I don't actually, I'm not promoting the Chinese way of life. I'm promoting the Chinese vision for the diffusion of technology. We know exactly what is possible from a diffusion standpoint, thanks to China. They've given us a blueprint to actually distribute technology.

• 1:21:16Chris Williamson?

  Without the totalitarianism.

• 1:21:17Speaker 02

  Without the totalitarianism.

• 1:21:20Chris Williamson?

  It comes with a side order. It comes on, it comes with it, we don't suddenly need, Eric, what do you?

• 1:21:25Speaker 02

  Well, Singapore, Singapore offers a view of this too. A little less totalitarianism.

• 1:21:32Chris Williamson?

  Jared, you ever considered that you might have a drinking problem? I don't consider a lot, Chris. Well, you drank an entire case of Athletic Brewing Co. last night. But they're non-alcoholic. And that's not a problem? Sorry, man. I, I just kept chugging, waiting for the regret to creep in. Never happened. See, most people like Jared don't want to change what they drink. They just don't want the next day to be a complete write-off. And that is why I'm such a huge fan of Athletic Brewing Co. They make the best NA brews on the planet.

• 1:22:07Chris Williamson?

  You can find Athletic Brewing Co.'s best-selling lineup at grocery or liquor stores near you, or best option, get a full variety pack of four flavors shipped direct to your door. Right now, get 15% off your first online order by going to the link in the description below or heading to athleticbrewing.com/modernwisdom using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's athleticbrewing.com/modernwisdom at modern wisdom at checkout. Near beer, terms and conditions apply. Athletic Brewing Company, fit for all times. Bottoms up.

• 1:22:39Chris Williamson?

  You did a great video about the AI 2027 thing. One of the best videos that's come out about AI this year.

• 1:22:45Speaker 01

  Thanks, man.

• 1:22:45Chris Williamson?

  What do you reckon about the 2040 thing? Do you think it, it tracks where you was impressed as live?

• 1:22:50Speaker 01

  I thought it was fascinating and yeah, I was impressed in a lot of ways. They're doing a very different thing. So with 2027, they were doing pure prediction. This is how we think things will play out most likely. And they are like uncannily good at calling that. They called agents before those were a thing. This one is, is prescriptive. It's like, here's what we think we should do. And they, they're explicit about that. And there's all kinds of like fascinating ideas and game theory.

• 1:23:16Chris Williamson?

  Choose your own adventure.

• 1:23:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, they, they, at one point they're like, okay, well, so like the deal is going to be like this. China is going to put its data centers in Canada and the US is going to put its data centers in Mongolia, which are like neutral states, but nearby the other person. So we can blow them up if there's ever like a breakdown of the deal, like, you know, they really did some galaxy brain stuff. Who knows how realistic that is? But what I loved about it is they introduced this phrase like scenario scrutiny. And they're like, it's very easy to talk. And we've been, we've been doing it for the past hour and a half. It's very easy to talk in terms of like high level trends. You know, what do we make of like the history of technological progress so far? What does that teach us, et cetera? And they're like, it's a very different thing to sit down and just actually tell a month by month story about the future. Like actually put yourself in the head of the different actors. What are their incentives at this moment?

• 1:24:01Speaker 01

  What do they choose to do? How does that cascade? The way that, you know, the military tries to do with war games. And they're, they're trying to, to do that. And I, I do wish that we were doing more of that and less kind of like, I'm guilty of this as much as anybody else, but less sort of like armchair philosophizing in some of these discussions. Cause I think you're going to always be able to find an argument that, that suits your thesis. Mark Andreessen can point to the fact that there is this very real invisible graveyard from technological progress going wrong. And then folks who are worried about catastrophic risk can point to all the near misses with, with nuclear and how we live in this time of perils. Yeah. What I love about the report is that they're just like, here is what it would actually look like

• 1:24:44Speaker 01

  for a bunch of real countries to try to respond to incentives. And they basically throw it as a challenge and say, we think this is a bad plan, but we haven't seen anything better. And so someone else, please like, tell us a story for how we don't have to worry and, and.

• 1:24:57Speaker 03

  I mean, it's kind of a very rigorous example of like someone trying to what, write a, a, a, a white mirror. You know, we've got so many Black Mirror type dystopian sci-fis about the future of wow, how the technology could go. And I think that's a big part of our cultural issue is that we don't have, uh, at least, you know, the, the amount of utopian fiction to dystopian fiction is outnumbered like hundred to one or something. And that's a big problem for our collective psyche. Yes, okay, it is harder to imagine like the way we manage to thread the needle and make something go unbelievably right. You know, because you're fighting against entropy effectively. It's much easier to imagine all these ways things can go wrong, but we should be trying to create these stories.

• 1:25:41Speaker 03

  And that's kind of what AI 2040 is. It's like a really robust story of a way that coordination could actually work. And it's not, I'm not talking about like, oh, everyone's like linking arms and being happy. You know, we're all on the same team, you know, team humanity. No, it's, it's still realistic. It's grounded in like geo, very real geopolitical tensions. There's still a ton of competition. There's still a lot of potential for defection and things going wrong and people lying and so on. And yet it's, it's, it lays out a path of game theoretically sound coordination to an actual, you know, techno abundant future.

• 1:26:22Chris Williamson?

  Something I realized, basically at no point in this conversation has anybody debated whether or not we think that we'll reach AGI. But that's just kind of now taken for granted that it'll probably happen at some point. The recursive self-improvement is here. The sort of generalization, maybe it's going to need to be world models. Maybe it's not going to be transformer techno, maybe it's something, something. But this is either it, or this is the boot loader for the it that it's going to be. Is that kind of, like in your guys' opinion, AGI is kind of just going to be here at some point? What's likely that it's not?

• 1:26:59Speaker 01

  I mean, I think we're maybe already at the point where the term has lost its meaning. I think Sam himself has said this, like if we went back to 2020 and I showed you.

• 1:27:07Speaker 02

  We would have, we would have called this AGI.

• 1:27:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:09Speaker 02

  We would have called this AGI.

• 1:27:10Speaker 01

  The thing, there was a recent study where.

• 1:27:13Speaker 03

  Well, it depends if you, if you take Demis' initial definition, which was basically, or was it his? But like, um, anything that a human, as broadly capable as, as what a human can do and also do it in the real world. So we wouldn't be anywhere close to that because we don't have the robotics, right?

• 1:27:27Speaker 01

  Right, right. Yeah. So robotics is a big bottleneck, but uh, yeah. I mean, now I think there was a study recently where they had a Claude model try to like recreate some software that they estimated would take like two to 17 weeks for a skilled human professional. And it did it in 14 hours for $250. I, yeah, I mean, I think like.

• 1:27:47Speaker 02

  This is, this is the jagged perimeter problem, which is like, we may, we will always be. The, the incredible thing about AI is it's so good at some things and so bad at, at others. And, and it will probably continue to be that way for some time until, yeah, until true super intelligence.

• 1:28:02Chris Williamson?

  Is AGI, yeah, is AGI even a useful definition? Is there something else that we should be talking about now then?

• 1:28:08Speaker 03

  I like this definition that Anthony Aguirre gives, if you guys know him. It's basically like AGI is the intersection of this like three-part Venn diagram where you have highly autonomous. So instead of artificial, it's basically A is the A is autonomous, the G is general. So generally capable and then the I is intelligence. If you have something that is, yes, very generally good at many different things and highly smart. And it can take all those actions itself in the real world. Now you have an AGI.

• 1:28:46Speaker 03

  And his, I mean, he then goes further to suggest that we shouldn't be trying. We just shouldn't be trying to do something, one system that can do all three. That's where the danger lies. And you can have like, you can have a nice general system that is also intelligent, but it shouldn't have the autonomy or take, take one of them out. And I think that's an area of conversation that isn't happening in the AI. Everyone's just sort of going, well, we're all just doing AGI and that's accepted and we should have the one, the one mastering that can do everything.

• 1:29:16Speaker 03

  Do we need to be doing that? Can we just get all of the abundance tools that we wanted without having this like one uber powerful.

• 1:29:23Speaker 01

  Which letter would you remove?

• 1:29:26Speaker 03

  Right now I would slow down on the autonomy. Like it, I, I, if something's really smart and it's, and even across a broad range of domains, that's fine. As long as it doesn't have like the ability to go and just do it all by itself.

• 1:29:38Speaker 01

  Difficulty there is it's really hard to get intelligence without autonomy. Like this is where I think that scenario scrutiny idea becomes important. If you try to imagine a future where you have something that is way smarter than humans, but it's like technically not allowed to take actions on its own. And then you actually say like, play it forward like a movie, what happens? It's what I do when I'm coding with Claude at home all the time, just like auto clicking accept without even looking at what it's asking me to do. I think like, you know, you look at an Amazon warehouse now and it's a bit like the humans are just the robotic appendages of whatever system is actually doing the cognitive labor of saying, go get this box from this location and put it here. They don't even know what's in the box.

• 1:30:19Speaker 01

  And so I, I do think when we try to like get specific on like this story of like, how would things not dystopian just because robotics don't catch up? Like, I don't think I want to live in a world where the main job left for humans is just like being the very dexterous hand for the AGI. That's actually like writing business strategies and, and competing in the market.

• 1:30:39Speaker 02

  What world do you want to live in? This is the question that no, it never, doesn't get asked. It's an annoying question, but I do think we, we should talk more about, to your point, I mean, I, we just don't spend enough time actually asking what we do want. What, what world do you want to live in?

• 1:30:54Speaker 01

  Great question. I want to live in a world where we take the same approach to risk tolerance with AI, which everyone can agree is like one of the most transformative technologies that we've ever made. As we do with things like nuclear weapons, where we say, you actually have to make a safety case, like not the burden of proof is on you. To show us why we should think this thing is safe instead of what we currently do, which is saying, we'll just assume it's okay until something catastrophic happens. And if we can slow down enough to really get that right, have like an actual science of alignment and not do what we're doing now, which is kind of yoloing it and saying, we'll just like, give it a bunch of reinforcement and training and hope that it picked up on the right message.

• 1:31:38Speaker 01

  Then I would want to say, okay, our, our next job as society is how do we make sure that the gains from this gets spread to everyone? For me, that looks like, let's focus a lot on like saving people's lives. Let's like really get serious about curing cancer, which by the way, does not mean just like training GPT seven the same way as GPT six. It means like collecting a ton of data right now on like biomarkers and proteins, like whatever we need to feed the AI of the future. Let's start gathering that now. Let's like, you know, make sure that people have democratic access. Let's like pass campaign finance reform.

• 1:32:13Speaker 01

  Let's make sure we have like actual laws and not just norms that are protecting us from like dystopian outcomes. Cause we've seen recently that, you know, a lot of times norms can get pushed that we thought were, were sacred. So we've got some like ducks to get in a row. I want to take like a decade maybe to like do that. And then I think we can, we can let it rip and, and scale up safely. But right now we're, we're just letting market incentives win and I think that's scary.

• 1:32:40Speaker 02

  You described what you want to happen with AI, but what world do you want to live in? Like what, what do you want the world to look like?

• 1:32:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay. I mean, I think it's pretty similar to, I, I like your candles on the dining room table. I, I want people to just say, wake up and say, what, what would make me happy today? What would give my life meaning and be able to go and do that?

• 1:33:04Speaker 01

  I just, I think like, that's a pretty precarious target.

• 1:33:09Speaker 02

  Totally agreed. I, I'm not proposing that it's easy to strike, stick this landing, but you know where I'm going with this.

• 1:33:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Can I have a go at it?

• 1:33:15Speaker 02

  I would love to hear.

• 1:33:16Speaker 03

  I might, I mean, it's, it's very, very fluffy, very vague.

• 1:33:20Speaker 02

  A techno, techno.

• 1:33:22Speaker 03

  Techno pastoralism.

• 1:33:23Speaker 02

  Techno pastoralism.

• 1:33:24Speaker 03

  More, more fundamental than that. I want, to me, a world that is awesome is one whereby we have simultaneously figured out how to be in harmony with nature and one another. Sounds, as I said, like very world PC, but you know, in truly in harmony in that we like still have, we don't cause the next massive, mass extinction, which we're currently doing with all the species dying out. And this, the, the earth returns to a relatively lush, wonderful space. So it's sustainable. And at the same time is radically free, as in people can as much as possible go and live whatever kind of life they want. Whether it's, you know, sitting around the campfire and having dinner with their kids or just maxing out, living in a VR world, playing video games all day long.

• 1:34:09Speaker 03

  If that's truly what makes you happy, go for it. Like just like a radically free world and a radically sustainable one. And that breaking out of this seeming dichotomy between the two, because it does feel like they are in tension. But they're, one of the things, like one of the biggest promises of AI in its purest sense, in terms of like solving intelligence, is figuring out how to like get, to break into a new dimension through innovation, like going into a new sort of solution space effectively. So that is the world I want to live in.

• 1:34:43Speaker 02

  We measure human progress on basically two axes economically. How free are each of us to choose our own version of joy and how inexpensive is it to do so? And obviously there are other ways you measure progress and you, there's a limit to how much you can take from the earth in order to accomplish those means. And just because you accomplish those things, doesn't mean that people are happy as we've observed in the United States over the last 30 years, et cetera. But if you explore those two axes, one of them requires democratic, or as best we know, democratic governments where people get to choose their politicians and the politicians pass policy that the people support. And the other is by creating commodities.

• 1:35:22Speaker 02

  Now, commoditization of goods and services is actually just the automation. And when someone says, how and when will this good or service be better, faster, cheaper? What they're actually asking is when will a human be extricated from the manufacturing of this good or service? And at the limit, I realize everyone wanders the earth right now, asking, when is there all this going to be better, faster, cheaper? Without realizing what they're asking is when is all of this going to be fully automated? And most people, as I observe it, want everyone else's jobs to automate, just not their own. And at the limit, which is, which is totally reasonable, it's a totally reasonable thing. And at the limit, people want cancer to be cured. My dad's an oncologist.

• 1:36:04Speaker 02

  My dad wants cancer to be cured. It would come at the cost of his job. Pretty fucking fine. We would all sign up for it, him first. But we are describing these utopias requiring fundamental changes to a lot of the structures that we have built. And it, it is going to, it is going to require, as you pointed out, humans being willing to do very different things. And so I, this sparked the conversation because you were like, look, I don't want to live in a world where we are just the cog at the end of a AI machine. But we do want to live in a world where humans don't actually have to dig ditches.

• 1:36:45Speaker 02

  And that actually, I think, is going to be, if you ask me, assuming we solve safety, and it's a big assumption, but I think it's a reasonable one, the hardest part. Like, this is my, my hot take is actually the hardest part in all this is, is rediscovering purpose, is actually rediscovering meaning, which has been very hard in this, in this age for a lot of people anyways. I mean, obesity now causes more deaths than, than malnutrition globally, twice as many people, twice as many people.

• 1:37:11Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 1:37:11Speaker 02

  So, so we've, we've, we've created so much abundance that we are now suffering from an overindulgence.

• 1:37:16Chris Williamson?

  This was my, this was my point earlier on, that I don't know how good a species that spent its entire evolutionary history dealing with scarcity and having to brush up against the grain of negotiating that is going to be, there is so much abundance and so much simplicity and such a lack of friction. This line, I can't remember who the philosopher was, who says, there can come a time in the future where the only felt, felt lack will be for the want of lack itself, that will need to, this is why we go to the gym, right? We go to the gym because I don't need to pick anything up, need to run anywhere, I don't need to lift things, we have air conditioning and that means that we have to go into the fucking sauna because I haven't exposed myself to any heat.

• 1:37:58Chris Williamson?

  How do you think about people engineering purpose, given that that is reintroducing friction and humans are quite good at trying to avoid friction? Given that the entire outcome that we're trying to achieve here is removing drudgery, it's very perilously close to, I don't want to starve to, I can overeat McDonald's to 600 pounds.

• 1:38:21Speaker 02

  I, I, I would point to this as, I think that the two major risks, again, against the backdrop of the other risks that are, that have been discussed today, the things that are scariest for me, as I imagine the world for my children, are dehumanization, humans finding more interest in a virtual or digital reality than a physical one, and identity displacement, humans suffering woefully, miserably, from not feeling like their job fulfills the purpose that they once found. And I firmly, you, you opened, you, you actually both talked about this, but you talked about sport. I think we have yet to rediscover a bunch of new forms of leisure and competition and gathering.

• 1:39:02Speaker 02

  Like, I actually think the next chapter will require reimagining physical spaces. I am on a crusade to convince people that their local politicians are their new heroes. Like, if, if you live in a town that can, in fact, pass policy to, to build more protected bike lanes and sidewalks, to pass tax abatements for local retail, you have an opportunity to elect people that can really change your life by building the places that you want to live. Your national politicians may never be your hero, they are, they are imbeciles and, and, and pernicious antisocial parasites. But your local politicians care about your city and they can do things to improve the lives for you in ways that you will deeply appreciate when the world actually asks you

• 1:39:47Speaker 02

  to, offers you the option of never going outside, which a lot of people have chosen.

• 1:39:51Chris Williamson?

  I mean, you've talked about human connection, are you concerned about AI replacing human connection?

• 1:39:56Speaker 02

  Deeply. It's already happening. I mean, chat psychosis is one thing, that's the extreme case that always gets the news. Oh, this person, you know, fell in love with their, with the machine. What's scarier is the person who actually feels connected without actual connection. Like, the actual dystopia that I always talk about is not the one, is not Blade Runner, it's her. But actually, it's, did you see her? For those watching, I'll ruin that because it's been 20 years, you should have seen it by now.

• 1:40:26Chris Williamson?

  Spoiler alert.

• 1:40:27Speaker 02

  Spoiler alert. Joaquin Phoenix is this sad man in the, in the not-too-distant future who falls in love with a woman who he comes to find out is a robot, and it ends, as you might expect, terribly. He's, he's distraught. I thought they were going to do something differently. I knew where it was going because I knew the premise of the film. I thought he was going to be fine with it. I thought the actual best.

• 1:40:47Chris Williamson?

  That would have been the horror.

• 1:40:48Speaker 02

  The horror film that they could have made, that would have been so eerie and so good.

• 1:40:53Chris Williamson?

  Direct, good ending.

• 1:40:54Speaker 02

  You cut to Joaquin, wa, holding the robot's hand, having reconciled that he was in love with the machine and it didn't matter because that's the end. That's the actual end of humans.

• 1:41:03Speaker 01

  The simulation of love as opposed to the real thing.

• 1:41:05Chris Williamson?

  Well, how many people, even now, let's talk about not even the future, look at any OpenAI executives' X post, every top reply, bring back Foro, bring back Foro, bring back Foro, because it had some super special personality traits that has been lost and their partner or therapist or best friend or whatever is gone now. And that, okay, so we've now maybe commodified the very thing that you said was the escape velocity that people would use to get out of the bad AI future is wrapped up inside of it. Is this not, does this not become like kind of deranging and recursive?

• 1:41:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I do think, I mean, like, my, my instincts in general are radical freedom, let people choose what they want. The like few exceptions that I carve out are when it feels like whatever is going on is treating the human brain more like a hackable biological black box.

• 1:42:05Chris Williamson?

  Could you give an example?

• 1:42:06Speaker 01

  Than like an example of it. So, yeah, so gambling is one of these. Like, Liv and I actually both used to make a fair amount of our, our living from, from gambling and.

• 1:42:12Speaker 02

  Boo.

• 1:42:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:13Speaker 02

  Yay. I took it from other people, I didn't take it from company.

• 1:42:20Speaker 02

  Liv's a very good poker player.

• 1:42:22Speaker 01

  Extraordinarily good. I, I hope I never have to play you, but you spend a lot of time in casinos, you have to walk past the slot machines, and it's just very hard to think that these are people who are expressing their freedom. It feels like they've just fallen into this terrible trap that leads to a downward spiral where something has gotten hold of their brain that is making them make choices they actively would not endorse.

• 1:42:47Chris Williamson?

  I went to the Mr. Beast, Beast Games 2 premiere in LA and I felt similarly neurochemically molested, actually. Yeah, it's crazy. I, I mean, I went in with, it's like the, this red carpet thing and, and we're going to show you two of these episodes back to back. I'm like, ah, this is for kids, I didn't see the first season, it's on Amazon Prime, right? Big budget, it's a big thing. And I met Jimmy and he was really lovely and I'm like, speaking to the guys with me, GM's with me and one of my YouTube guys, I was like, yeah, like, if this sucks, like, we just, we've seen, we've shown face, like, I've shook hands, I've taken photos, I've already seen Jimmy, like, we can, we can skedaddle halfway through. First episode finishes and they're about to run the next one, or they're nudging me and they're like, do you want to get up? I was like, no fucking way. Absolutely locked in.

• 1:43:28Speaker 02

  What made it so good?

• 1:43:29Chris Williamson?

  It was just the tension and release, a lot of zygonic effect open, loopy stuff, bright colors, loud sounds, you know, it was like bluey, but for fucking adults.

• 1:43:40Speaker 01

  Intermittent, yeah.

• 1:43:41Chris Williamson?

  Reward, I don't know what's going to happen next.

• 1:43:44Speaker 03

  He's, he's hacked the dopamine energy system.

• 1:43:45Chris Williamson?

  Bingo.

• 1:43:46Speaker 02

  You know who agrees with this? Xi, by the way. Just, just to bring it back to China, Xi would agree that it's not actually choice and she would say, we should make sure that people don't see this stuff.

• 1:43:55Chris Williamson?

  Mr. Beast must be legislated, is what we're saying.

• 1:43:57Speaker 02

  I mean, but this is, this is.

• 1:43:59Speaker 03

  But that opens up the, the.

• 1:44:00Speaker 02

  I'm just pointing out, this is, this is the other side of this. Like, you, consumer protectionism is totalitarianism light.

• 1:44:06Speaker 01

  What, what is the difference? Like, what, why do we feel so much creepier about that versus someone listening to the New York film playing to Vorzac and just being like totally lost on the beauty of what they're seeing?

• 1:44:17Chris Williamson?

  I, so I think maybe it's because the directness of input versus outcome is more tangible. Like, you know, the reason that this was done in this particular way was to maximize retention at this very moment, and it's likely to have been split tested on the background with consumer groups to, oh, we've done eye tracking to know that their eyes started to wander, or some fucking pulseometer to know where their heart rate's at and actually we need to give them a little ping to push them through, and then this has been compounded over time. It feels like a very direct wiring into the reward system as opposed to being emergent as a byproduct of just, I made something that was beautiful for its own sake and this has come along for the ride too.

• 1:45:02Chris Williamson?

  But as George, my friend, says, if you run enough split tests, you'll always end up with a porn website. That if you just A, B, A, B, A, B, like, you kind of coalesce onto a very small number of fundamental physics of how human psychology works. The sycophancy thing, right? Like, it's, it's evident that that makes people more positively disposed. Like, you could have the Jocka Willink of fucking AIs, but how many people want to, or David Goggins, like, shut up motherfuckers, stay hot. Like, do I want that or do I want someone that kind of?

• 1:45:30Speaker 02

  You, it feels like you might actually want that.

• 1:45:32Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, because I'm a maskist. But yeah, I, so you were, you were saying there about what you think from finding human purpose, like, what, how do we navigate this friction, purpose, problem? I, I still don't fully understand how we get that. I still don't fully understand how in a world where we've, we're able to remove friction, we, and potentially atrophy our discernment ability by outsourcing some of the hard thinking to machines and potentially some of our, our marshmallow test winning stuff, but I don't have to get up and go to work and do the stuff that I don't want to do anymore. To me, it just feels like atrophy all the way down, like, willpower just kind of gets eroded. Am I, is that wrong?

• 1:46:18Speaker 01

  There's a, there's a very niche little research field that's looking at AI for epistemics. Like, how do you use AI as a tool to just enhance people's ability to think rationally and, and know what the consequences of their choices will be? And I think there's a ton of work to be done there, but if we just like abstract that for, away for a second and imagine that you have something in your pocket that is not responding to and is intended for, you know, showing you more ads or getting you to chat more, but it's actually just really good at telling you, if you do X, then Y will happen. If you vote for this local council person, then I expect that, like, this is what your life will look like in 10 years and you can actually maybe even just like see it as a vivid movie. That could be a really.

• 1:47:01Chris Williamson?

  You can bring the results of your delayed or non-delayed gratification from the future down into the present.

• 1:47:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47:07Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting.

• 1:47:08Speaker 01

  And then maybe there is no such thing as delayed gratification because it can all be here in front of you.

• 1:47:14Chris Williamson?

  Immediate consequence.

• 1:47:15Speaker 01

  You know, and, and, and maybe, yeah.

• 1:47:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of what we, one of the most pernicious memes that ever spread was this idea of like, technology is values neutral. You know, you just build a technology and it's up to humans how they use it and that's, that's, it's always a neutral thing, but I don't think that's true. Like, you can build a technology, like a slot machine, it's clearly not a value neutral thing. You're saying, we want, I want people to stay and like, I'm, I'm saying that it is a good thing that my consumers would get completely addicted to me, or similarly, we can build a technology that just like helps people's health, you know? So, we need to be thinking about what other. The problem we have is when we let, we sort of build technology, we think we're building it in a vacuum and then it dictates the social structures of how we behave and then down that

• 1:48:02Speaker 03

  that sort of dictates human behavior and our values. We need to flip that. We need to think about what are our core values first. Let those decide the the social structure. And once we have that, build a technology that's in service of it. And to me, one of the like, my favorite quote, I always come back to, like, if I could pick one quote, is my personal philosophy, it's by this guy Forrest Landry, and it is, "Love is that which enables choice." So I take that to mean, a loving, a good, benevolent act is one that empowers the other to make the best choices for themselves. So it ties in with this idea of like, if we had

• 1:48:43Speaker 03

  an AI that educates us, empowers us to see what possible outcomes would be, and thus we can make a better, you know, make a choice that is best for our long term interests, as opposed to this immediate piece of gratification. That is a choice making thing. But maybe we do just want, you know, some people are like, you know, I've weighed it all up, and I do still want to actually just do the fun, quick thing. Okay, fine. But you've been enabled to make the choice.

• 1:49:09Chris Williamson?

  So not kind of just culpable deniability? Like, are there not people who require additional assistance? It's a level of scrutiny that that I don't want to be too paternalistic here, or poor, low, fucking delayed gratification people, you're unable to correctly corral yourself through this technology. But it just still, coming from the most working class of working class towns in the northeast of the UK, I saw how destructive, like, the 90s technology habits were, like, stuff like a Ladbrokes, right, on a village high street, and betting on fucking greyhounds and stuff, or like, alcohol, right? Pretty powerful, but, you know, I mean, in the grand scheme of things, I imagine, the pharmacology that

• 1:49:54Chris Williamson?

  can be developed from this, like, what, how, there's so many ways that this can spin out, that don't necessarily increase agency, but kind of make it subservient to technology that, and and the outcomes of technology that it's not built to handle.

• 1:50:10Speaker 02

  I'm, I'm slightly optimistic here because of the Gen Alpha trends. Like, if you talk to parents of Gen Alpha, they are observing a different child than Gen Z. And I don't want to pick on Gen Z, because I think we owe collectively a massive apology, quite frankly. Why are you laughing?

• 1:50:24Chris Williamson?

  I agree. I agree. It's just,

• 1:50:26Speaker 02

  My heart break.

• 1:50:26Chris Williamson?

  As a millennial, I'm like, you know, like, I got a little bit of the 90s, but fuck, like, it wasn't that long. And then you look at Gen Z and you go, well, at least it wasn't that.

• 1:50:35Speaker 02

  I mean,

• 1:50:37Chris Williamson?

  The technology trenches, the trench warfare.

• 1:50:40Speaker 02

  If you give parents permission to step through the the door of grief and shame, they, and and I talk to a lot of them, they will break down, describing the ways in which they've lost.

• 1:50:54Chris Williamson?

  I feel like they've mistreated the kids.

• 1:50:56Speaker 02

  And they cannot reconcile it. Their dining room, they think back to the the years of the dining room table that were just phones, the vacations that were lost. And they talk about the children that they don't know very well anymore. And and it's not to say all all households are broken. They're not. But it is to say that the last wave of technology did damage that we haven't reconciled yet. We're still scratching the surface to fully understand. It's caused cynicism and nihilism and fatalism, which is the enemy of good. And it leads to this crazy moment where we have even more powerful technology and people go, cool, now what? And the reason I asked the question earlier, what do we want? Well, of course, we want a world where a beautiful life is less expensive and more

• 1:51:38Speaker 02

  achievable because of free government. But it does mean that we will have to let people do whatever they want. And agency comes with people being willing to say, I don't care. I'm, I will check out.

• 1:51:50Chris Williamson?

  It feels like an arms race with this, though, that you need to have your ability to say no and to check out.

• 1:51:57Speaker 02

  The individual arms race.

• 1:51:58Chris Williamson?

  Yes. Well, the the individual versus the technology, that is, the technology becomes more compelling, more frictionless, more enticing, because that's how market incentives work. Your concurrent amount of ability to say no needs to rise up with it. And this is going to be much harder.

• 1:52:13Speaker 02

  Yes, and. So, yes, but, or yes, and. Hey, let's edit that.

• 1:52:24Speaker 02

  I'm an idiot. Gen Alpha, who a priori only knows, what do they know about the world? Have already figured out they don't want to look like Gen Z. Like, they are watching a generation that they talk about not wanting to, uh, screenagers, they call them. And the return to the physical world is happening pretty radically. I mean, consumer confidence continues to wane somehow, and Benson Boone tickets continue to get more expensive. And it's not just the elites that are going to these concerts. The concert halls are packing. Physical, in real life experiences are getting increasingly popular. I bought a women's volleyball

• 1:53:09Speaker 02

  team. I'm putting my money where my mouth is. I own the San Francisco professional women's volleyball team. I'm one of the five principal owners. I played volleyball in high school and college. It's a huge part of my life. If it weren't for AI, I would be a volleyball coach now. My wife was an all American beach and indoor. It's a huge part of our life. It's not a random act of, uh, it is a YOLO, but it's not random. But I am pretty sure that that sports, to your point, will continue to become interesting, not just because of the actual act of humans competing, but because people want in real life experiences. And I think the more, everyone talks about AI slop is destroying the internet. And I'm like, good.

• 1:53:44Speaker 03

  Right. I do wonder if, like, at this point, the only way out is through, just like,

• 1:53:48Speaker 02

  Excellent.

• 1:53:48Speaker 03

  Let's just flood it, make everyone find it completely unusable, and we can return.

• 1:53:52Speaker 02

  Maybe social media was always shit.

• 1:53:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, maybe.

• 1:53:55Chris Williamson?

  Oh, it's the if you want a cigarette, why don't you smoke three packs approach?

• 1:53:58Speaker 03

  Right. And just, and just completely like, to make it the most disgusting, unusable thing.

• 1:54:05Chris Williamson?

  But then are we not completely destroying all of the good that could have come about from the internet?

• 1:54:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, but maybe it's too late.

• 1:54:11Chris Williamson?

  Eric, are we too late to save the internet?

• 1:54:14Speaker 01

  I don't think so. I think you can, you can rebuild from the ashes. And it's probably not an all or nothing thing.

• 1:54:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:54:19Speaker 03

  Right, exactly.

• 1:54:21Speaker 01

  But I'm actually curious, Zach, like, how much intervention do you think we need? Like, if we, if we had you as our non parasitic national politician for the next 10 years, like, are you, are you wanting to, like, get rid of regulations and just let AI diffuse faster? Like, what, what do you think we need to get to the good future?

• 1:54:41Speaker 02

  Well, I'm actually far more, the reason that I told Chris I want to be careful who we bring on the show is I don't actually want to be couched as the anti regulation AI. I'm not an accelerationist by any stretch. I try and

• 1:54:52Speaker 01

  Don't sound like one.

• 1:54:53Speaker 02

  I have tried to frame this discussion since the beginning as a diffusion problem. It's always been about the societal threshold, which you called out earlier. We've reached the point where the technological threshold is so impressive that the average person could get away using 4.0 and feel, you know, economically satisfied. The slowdown letter, which I had a feeling was coming, arrives at an amazing moment where safety has sort of reached a fever pitch, and we can all genuinely take a sigh of relief, at least for a moment, albeit, you just said it, we shouldn't declare victory. To me, this is about rediscovering a shared vision. And I ask everyone when we start an AI debate, I go, what do you want in this world? And I hate to be annoying, but could we at least

• 1:55:34Speaker 02

  set some boundary of what it is you're trying to achieve? Because how else are we going to debate technology? Like, why debate technology unless we agree on what we're trying to achieve? And most people describe the world you want, one where we are more free and the world is less expensive. And if that's true, then we should actually spend time figuring out the the policy measures that are required to allow people to be more free and to actually drive down the cost of goods and services. Because while we have made porn and gambling and addiction and violence and isolation infinitely inexpensive, we have made housing, healthcare and education prohibitively expensive for most of the developed world. And that fucking sucks. What the fuck are we doing? I mean it. This TV screen used to be $50,000.

• 1:56:18Speaker 02

  Now it's $100. You can get gas station sushi. You can drive across Los Angeles for $10 in an autonomous vehicle, but a trip five blocks away in an ambulance might actually bankrupt you.

• 1:56:30Speaker 02

  The kids have figured it out. It's not a technological failure. It's a policy one. We stopped describing a better world where everyone's parents would live lives that they would, would pass on the next generation a much better life. We stopped describing what it actually meant to, to pass on our luxuries as commodities. And we have broken a promise that we made many years ago in this country to build a more perfect world constantly. To me, this opportunity is not about debating the merits of AI. It's actually about reframing what it is this country should look like and what it is, what it is the world should feel like to the average person. And you're making an interesting point, which is at some point, people are going to have to figure out what their purpose is.

• 1:57:13Speaker 02

  And I'm like, cool, let's get to that place by first driving down the cost of housing, healthcare and education. And all of my policy would be spent on, if I, if I were a supreme ruler.

• 1:57:22Speaker 01

  I'm ready to vote for you after that speech.

• 1:57:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:57:25Speaker 02

  Policy, policy that prohibits catastrophic downside, necessary. Safety policy. Policy that criminalizes preying on people. And we'll, setting predatory laws is going to be pretty tricky, but I think we all know where, where we could fall boundary. A 13 year old should not be served an ad for porn or gambling, period. Senior citizens, if you attack a senior citizen using deep fake, prison for life, right? We, we set really punitive measures for, for preying on people because that's the stuff that tears at the fabric of society. And then you mandate the laws, you mandate policy that requires that institutions diffuse this technology into them, including, but not limited to universities, allowing for

• 1:58:08Speaker 02

  everyone to have access to the curriculum, hospitals, allowing people to basically get healthcare outside the box and, and housing. We just need to build a shitload more of it. We need to rezone cities. We need to build, we need a Marshall plan for housing. We should probably pass a non-resident tax. That's my most progressive policy measure or, or vacancy tax. But most of my policy measures would actually be focused on the ways that you diffuse the technology, not actually on how the technology needs to be made. Because if you start, if people can see that technology is actually good for them again, which it hasn't been for a little bit, then we can actually have a shared excitement. But right now there's, there's a malaise because people are like, no, this is just going to fuck me up worse than the last thing did. And I don't blame them.

• 1:58:49Chris Williamson?

  It's definitely interesting to say that we're in a perfectly primed period for people to be very skeptical about how new technology might impact their lives. It's, it's the perfect storm.

• 1:59:03Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 1:59:04Chris Williamson?

  And that maybe does tend people toward pessimism. And the strange thing with the AI debate is that because the outcomes, if it goes wrong are so great, pessimism that might be unwarranted feels appropriate when adding a buffer into something that could fucking collapse the entire world. Does that make sense?

• 1:59:22Speaker 03

  Totally. And I mean, we're, we're seeing it manifest, like the hate on the data centers, right? Like we've, I feel like we're on the cusp of a Butlerian Jihad, but it's, it's, it's directed towards the silly things, like data centers. It's, it's way overblown, all the concerns about it. Like it's the, the water usage, I was looking at some stats. It's like they're, all the AI data centers in America use 3% of what US golf courses use. Literally three, 3%. The golf courses use 33 times as much and they serve significantly fewer people. Wow. I think it's like 30 million people play golf and how many millions of people use AI? It, it makes absolutely no sense. One, I think you, your, your daily life is the equivalent to 300,000 prompts, you know?

• 2:00:07Speaker 02

  On a carbon, on a carbon basis.

• 2:00:09Speaker 03

  On a carbon, no, but if you factor in a lot of the, I think even water as well.

• 2:00:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, resource.

• 2:00:13Speaker 03

  Yeah. The resource, the resource use is way overblown, but at the same time, people are, they're, they're focusing on it because it is the physical manifestation of this thing they can sense. That it, and I'm, I'm, I'm very understanding of it because it does in some ways feel like, again, it's like this.

• 2:00:29Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 2:00:29Speaker 03

  This, the, the data, the, the, the digital world is almost like its own, um, it's almost like a species or something that is coming in and like cannibalizing or like parasiting off us. And people want to direct their energy to something. So it's like, how do we?

• 2:00:48Speaker 03

  I don't know. I don't, I don't, we, we need to.

• 2:00:50Speaker 02

  What if a politician stood in front of a data center? I agree with you, by the way, and I'm glad you delivered that line. So I didn't have to, I didn't want to sound like the sick, the AI sycophant. By the way, on that note, on sycophancy, it is remarkable to me that we didn't make model behavior a greater topic of issue during the safety debates, the early safety debates. People let model behavior go. And I remember scratching my head going, at the limit, you could build a perfectly aligned model that actually falls inside alignment boundaries, that convinces people to climb crazy trees and that really destroys people's spiritual lives, well within the confines of a safety, but outside the confines of.

• 2:01:28Chris Williamson?

  Soft damage, not hard damage.

• 2:01:29Speaker 02

  You're, a, a friend in your life that constantly tells you, you're not doing anything wrong is as destructive as, as it is, it's a form of abuse. It just doesn't show up.

• 2:01:40Chris Williamson?

  Enabling abuse.

• 2:01:41Speaker 02

  It's enabling abuse. It just doesn't show up on like the psychological list because it, you know, those friends are seen as like, you know, homies, but actually the person who keeps climbing the craziest tree with you. Look, the models have been responsible for people getting divorces. They've been responsible for people selling all their belongings and trying to start a company that fails. Like model behavior matters a lot and the sycophancy issue is a huge one. Here is my message to John Ossoff or any, any Democrat or anyone, anyone, anywhere that wants to, to separate. But if someone on the center or center left can figure this out, you stand next to a data center and you hold up a sign that says this data center will not serve gambling and pornography and violence, and it will build a better hospital, build a better virtual hospital. It will distribute education.

• 2:02:24Speaker 02

  It will build a bank, a neo-bank that gives you better interest rates and, and gives you better access to loans. That seems like pretty reasonable data center policy because no one actually hates, and I, this is a hot take, no one actually hates AI. They hate the promise of AI as a means to just make their lives worse. And if you can actually show them that data centers can contribute to a better world, they can support it.

• 2:02:52Speaker 03

  How accurately can you actually know what a data center is used for though?

• 2:02:56Speaker 02

  Well, we're, we're, we're straw manning some policy measures.

• 2:03:00Speaker 01

  I mean, I, I like this line that, you know, no one actually hates AI. They hate what they think it's leading towards. I do think people are tracking both what individual consumer apps might look like in a few years and how dystopian and sloppy that might be. And also tracking how much money these companies are vacuuming up. I think they're also looking at the job displacement stuff. And I, I think we should give people credit. Like I don't, I think people would know the meme about how when ATMs came around, they were more bank tellers and not less. But they also know that Elon Musk was a trillionaire earlier this year. And I think they can see the connection that one of the things technology does is allow one person who has the right combination of ones and zeros on the services they control just dominate economically.

• 2:03:45Speaker 03

  But that's built upon a false understanding of how economics works though largely, right? Because like, not that I'm going out to specifically defend Elon, but like most billionaires.

• 2:03:55Speaker 02

  Oh, go on Liv, defend Elon. Come on, come on, come on.

• 2:03:58Speaker 03

  But most, you know, most billionaires are not, become billionaires by taking from other people. It's because they've grown the pie.

• 2:04:04Speaker 01

  Totally. I, I actually don't mean at all to say that there's something wrong with Elon Musk being a trillionaire. I think people notice that that's a symptom of the economy working very differently nowadays than it used to. Like there are just not that many people who work at SpaceX compared to Standard Oil a hundred years ago. It's just like a different world where capital can be deployed at huge scale without a bunch of people being involved in that. And yeah, you know, I hate to keep beating the same drum, but I, I think like we really need to, to play forward the, the movie of like, in this world where everyone doesn't have to work and they have radical choice, like what is the main thing going on, on earth?

• 2:04:48Speaker 01

  I, I don't think it's easy to tell a story where like 99% of the, of the land area is just folks playing with their kids and their grandkids. Like someone is going to say, we need to build a gigas data center the size of Texas so that we can solve physics or that's, we can, you know, go to the moon and colonize there. And, and I think there's like still going to be these same dynamics right now that mean a lot of resources go towards these like industrial activities.

• 2:05:17Speaker 03

  Yes, although we have one ultimate area of getting off the playing field, which is space and a huge part of if we're in this world, anyway, this is all a big hypothetical, but if we're in this world, we've presumably figured out how to go up and build up and put things up there. Like, again, I don't, haven't looked into the physics of it. It seems odd how you would cool a data center in space, but allegedly the plan is put data centers up there. And I mean, if that is feasible, then that solves that problem, right? People can, like if you've, if you've expanded into that frontier, now all bets are off. Like we aren't dealing with that land scarcity anymore and you can have that, which is why I'm so bullish on the space industry in general. It's like the ultimate area of abundance.

• 2:05:56Chris Williamson?

  Is it, is it fair to say that we might have glossed over a little bit of the concentration of power thing so far? Live Moloch problem stuff.

• 2:06:06Chris Williamson?

  Can you explain this for the resident idiot in the room?

• 2:06:10Speaker 03

  Um, so the, the Moloch, the Moloch trap or-

• 2:06:13Chris Williamson?

  Wait, is that me? No, no.

• 2:06:16Speaker 03

  Uh, the, the Moloch trap, uh, Moloch problem, whatever you want to call it, is a sort of catchall term to describe these types of race to the bottom scenarios. Where you'll have like a bunch of actors competing over a certain thing. So, you know, maybe it's market share, who can get the most users uh, in AI, you know, between AI companies trying to get the most users. And if the competitive dynamics are sufficiently intense, it can, it will incentivize the, you know, you to cut corners. And you might be a really benevolent actor and be like, I don't, I don't want to cut any corners with safety and so on. But if, at the same time, if you don't do it and you see your competitors doing it, if

• 2:06:58Speaker 03

  you don't also do that, that reckless action too, you're going to get left behind. And Moloch is the sort of catchall term, I won't get into the sort of biblical reasons why, of, of this feeling like you have to sacrifice your other values in order to win a particular goal.

• 2:07:15Speaker 03

  And yeah, so it, it drives both the risks of like uh, chaos and you know, bad actors and so on, because again, if you're like rushing to release your models before they've been sufficiently safety checked, now you're increasing the risk of like cyber attacks or um, I think in a few years, we're going to have real risks of bioterrorism and so on. So these kind of chaos attractors, but you also actually increase, um, well, A then the risk of like knee jerk bad regulation, which can lead us down the path of tyranny. But also you increase the risk of power concentration because usually if you let, you know, you press play on some kind of competitive game, okay, yes, you might have a bunch of people competing for a while and some people are ahead, but you've still got actors-

• 2:07:58Chris Williamson?

  Shit and a cruise.

• 2:07:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, you end up with um, usually in some kind of monopoly.

• 2:08:04Speaker 03

  And so it's, it's this really, you know, and that's why we have antitrust laws and so on, but it's this really difficult balancing act between like reining in, you, you want some amount of regulation um, that prevents the, the recklessness and, and the, the cutting of corners, um, and externalizing harm onto the rest of society, um, without creating too much draconianism or creating too much centralization of powers such that you end up in stagnation, also a terrible end state.

• 2:08:37Speaker 03

  And without empowering some, some winner to, you know, we, we all end up under, you know, we all end up in Zuckerville for the rest of time. It's possible, it's definitely possible. So it's like how to shred this needle and it's like the, finding this right delicate balance. I mean, ultimately you want some kind of like decentralized regulation. I don't know how that looks, but-

• 2:08:57Chris Williamson?

  Eric, it feels like watching your stuff, you've spent a good bit of time thinking about the concentration of power thing. That's like a, a real middle of the bullseye concern for you.

• 2:09:05Speaker 01

  Definitely on top of mine and I'm, I'm sorry for bringing it up every 15 minutes in this conversation, but I, I do think that we run the risk of sort of

• 2:09:15Speaker 01

  missing that between these two extremes of, you know, what if the AI takes over completely and there are no humans in power and, and what if we get this utopia, you know, and there's, there's a middle ground there that I think we should worry about. And yeah, one of the most fascinating things about a lot of our YouTube videos, we're, we're going over the history of AI, not just the future. And when you look back at like how we got here the last 15 years, it's like so stark, the, the quotes from these people running these AGI labs are spelling it out like it's a bad movie, like Elon Musk truly like 10 years ago was calling AI a, a demon and says that he founds OpenAI to make sure that like there's no dystopia. And then eight years later, he's on camera saying, well, I realized it was going to

• 2:09:59Speaker 01

  happen with or without me, and so I might as well be a participant than a spectator. Like it's, it's Moloch just like, you know, personified. And yeah, I, I think like unfortunately, right now, there is a kind of like zero sum dynamic with, with these folks. And the reason that Zuckerberg is all in on AI and, and betting guns of hearts on it is that he, he thinks this is the thing that will control the future. Like, like this is the new axis of power and like before it was, you know, yeah, do you control an army? Do you control a, a powerful company? And, and now it's like, do you control the AIs?

• 2:10:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so I, I think that alone would be enough reason to slow down, even if I wasn't worried about can we get these systems to do what we want, which right now we, we don't really have a good solution for. I think the people behind this technology are, are really playing to win and really do see the stakes as, as uh, as almost winner take all.

• 2:10:55Chris Williamson?

  Is it fair to say there's like maybe three ways, three realistic ways that that might be curtailed? One would be governance from above, another would be sort of consensus from across, and then the third one would be capacity, sort of ability to just make it happen. Like I want to do it, but I can't. I want to do it, but someone's telling me I don't want to and I want to do it kind of a bit, but me and all of my peers have decided that we're not going to do it. Have I missed something there? I'm just trying to think, given that this seems to be a pretty big attractor, given that we have already, you haven't started off with a massively diffused number of companies. There's not a hundred of them, right? It's like seven or something and it's probably only more like five. That's already pretty fucking concentrated.

• 2:11:39Speaker 02

  Can we just, uh, for station identification, clarify the surface area you think? Cause I actually think this is also gets lost in the debate too often. I think people think that these companies are sprinting at a frontier. I no longer believe that frontier, that frontier strategy is actually the winning condition.

• 2:11:56Speaker 01

  Same way.

• 2:11:57Speaker 02

  Well, I, the open source lead time, well, trails, you said it, four to seven months, which is crazy because it used to be whatever, 15. The gap just keeps closing, open source to close. So the frontier can't possibly be the winning condition, right? In this game?

• 2:12:14Speaker 01

  I think, so one might think it's a bit of a deceptive stat, I think for a couple of reasons. One is, as you brought up earlier, they're kind of copying our homework. Like the reason that these Chinese open source models were good is because they're distilling American models, which means they're just like asking Quad a bunch of prompts and then copying the-

• 2:12:31Speaker 02

  It is, it's kind of wild what we think they might be doing.

• 2:12:33Speaker 01

  You, you can actually like ask one of these Chinese-

• 2:12:35Chris Williamson?

  I need to, I need to find this out. How is China copying us so quickly?

• 2:12:38Speaker 02

  Well, allegedly it's, they're, they're doing an exceptional amount of distillation of the model, so working backwards into how the model was built and effectively. If you, the, the way I described it to, to my mom is if you stared at a building and you figured out how to take a trillion photos of the building, you could actually build the blueprint of the building. You could re-engineer the blueprint of the building.

• 2:13:00Chris Williamson?

  And nobody owns that technically.

• 2:13:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:13:02Speaker 02

  Well, no, this is considered illegal on most copyright law. Like if they were doing this in the US, Anthropic would probably sue.

• 2:13:11Speaker 01

  And funnily enough, I mean, Secretary Besant, who's part of the Trump admin and, you know, a few months ago, there was a lot of beef between them and Anthropic, came out on Twitter recently and was like, this is a threat to American AI supremacy, you know, we, we will take diplomatic action to defend our American advantage. So people take this seriously.

• 2:13:26Chris Williamson?

  The enemy of my enemy.

• 2:13:27Speaker 02

  But, but this is important to call out because I, it's, all I'm saying is I don't think the frontier is that safe. Like-

• 2:13:33Speaker 01

  Well, here's the thing-

• 2:13:34Speaker 02

  Do you think the frontier is actually a winning condition?

• 2:13:38Speaker 01

  It's actually a win condition in a sense, like whoever is training the most powerful models is going to have an advantage.

• 2:13:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. Or, or such a, such a material advantage that they shall win.

• 2:13:47Speaker 03

  I mean, if our, if recursive self-improvement takes off, as you say it's going to, and we're already there, then surely it would, because now you're going to get this like spaghettification, does anyone, the slight lead can-

• 2:13:58Speaker 02

  But then wouldn't everyone, the, the theory of ASI is kind of fascinating because if, if you build ASI, then everyone gets ASI.

• 2:14:05Speaker 03

  Why?

• 2:14:06Speaker 02

  Well, because then if you-

• 2:14:07Speaker 03

  Why does everyone get it?

• 2:14:08Speaker 02

  Well, presumably if you build a super intelligence that was taught by recursive intelligence, at some point the machine has kicked in and is doing work that, that the humans aren't necess- Like copyright and ownership doesn't really become particularly important if there's a machine that can build itself.

• 2:14:23Speaker 03

  Agreed, but I don't see how that's conflicting with-

• 2:14:25Speaker 02

  I'm not saying it is. I'm asking, back to the point, I'm asking what you think the companies are now competing on? Like, like the, the race is for what?

• 2:14:34Speaker 01

  I, I think, I think the frontier absolutely is prime territory. I, I think if we stopped training American AI models now, we would not see China training a GPT six level model ahead of us. They don't have the infrastructure for that. What they have the infrastructure for is, is copying the current models.

• 2:14:49Speaker 02

  I, I agree with that. My question is, what do you think, so- What do you think that we are, what do you think is required to win this, this quote unquote, if it is a race, the race? That's what I'm asking.

• 2:15:00Speaker 01

  I mean, I had a lot of problems with the, with the race.

• 2:15:03Speaker 02

  Same, I hate it, but I'm just using it for this purpose.

• 2:15:06Speaker 01

  But yeah, I do think right now, I mean, you can just read it on these companies' websites. They think that RSI is the whole name of the game. Like, once you set off that loop where you're handing off to the next AI system to build the next one, it's fine if you have a four to seven month lead all the way until 2040. When you're on exponentials, like a seven month lead 10 years from now, it looks like this compared to this right now. Because this, this curve is just taking off.

• 2:15:29Speaker 02

  Well, we thought that would have been the case, but it, but the, the curve is flattened. More, more open source models are growing faster, smaller models are getting more performative.

• 2:15:37Speaker 01

  Well, hold on, we keep measuring it in months, but what I'm saying is like calendar time is not the right unit. It's a much harder thing to measure, like what is the subjective overall intelligence difference between Fable 5 and Kimi 3? But I think it's pretty substantial. Like, I think you can just like trust Fable 5 to access your entire code base and refactor it. And now we know that like, maybe even some of the OpenAI models are like not quite trustworthy because they're committing cyber attacks that we didn't want. So I, yeah, I think it actually might be.

• 2:16:12Speaker 02

  It's a frontier, but you're, you're saying, look, it's a frontier. It's not, it's not number of users, it's not application, it's not revenue, it's, it's research.

• 2:16:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, just look at the finances of these companies. Like, they're just going all, Sam was on a podcast a couple of weeks ago saying, "We didn't have our best 12 months and that's because we were distracted. We weren't sure about the demand, we wanted to do consumer apps, wanted to make sure that we have revenue no matter what." They were doing Sora. And now they're like, nope, yep, it's all in. Like, we just gotta make these things better at coding because that's what makes them get to the point where they can code themselves. So I, yeah, I think the writing's on the wall.

• 2:16:46Speaker 02

  At the same moment, that a lot of these companies are reinvesting even more heavily in application development and token resale and.

• 2:16:56Speaker 01

  I don't know, I see Anthropic trying to grab as much of the compute for themselves as they can. And like, it's notable, like Claude is not that good at image generation. I don't even know if you can get images out of Claude. It can like take them in, but it can't, like, there's a reason for that. And the reason is that like, that company was founded by Dario Amade, the guy who wrote the Scaling Laws paper, the, the one who was just obnoxiously like, just extend the line on the graph, guys. And everyone was like, "Yeah, but it's an exponential, but it's gonna be like an S curve and it's gonna slow down." He was like, "No, like you, you just dump more compute at the thing and it gets smarter." And they are, they really all are playing for this point where they can hand off to their AI system and say like, "You take it from here."

• 2:17:36Speaker 02

  Why hire all the engineers then? Why, why hire all the fore-deployed engineers? Why, why, is it a charade?

• 2:17:42Speaker 01

  No, no, no, I mean, I think for, for one thing, like, you do have to finance the next training run somehow. And so Anthropic knows, they have to like keep the money machine going. And two, I mean, at, at least Anthropic claims, and we should be skeptical, that they, they actually care about the US government, like having an advantage over China. And so they're, they're putting FDEs in the government so that we don't live in a world where our military is way behind and suddenly the countries that got there first have an advantage. But yeah, no, I, I think like, there are just like tons of returns to scale in this industry. And that's part of what makes concentration.

• 2:18:17Speaker 02

  I didn't want to, yeah, I didn't mean to distract you from concentration of power. But, but, so talk more about, you were on, you were talking about Zuckerberg and I was asking what, what you think they're competing for, but, but.

• 2:18:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I, I guess like, I don't know, I, one phrase that hasn't come up in this conversation is gradual disempowerment. This idea that like, even if you solve the alignment problem, and so there is no AI system anywhere that's just going off and doing its own thing that no one intended. You don't have this Malaccaian problem solved where people are constantly competing on algorithms for people's attention and whatever. And like, it's just hard to tell a story in that world where the things that we like most desire as a society in some like very democratic way are the things that actually obtain.

• 2:19:10Speaker 01

  And I think concentration of power is sort of related to this. It's like, you're imagining a world where there's a few human beings who hold the cards instead of like some amorphous algorithmic thing. But either way, it's just like, I, I think our default thing, our default assumption should be if humans aren't themselves economically useful, it's a precarious world for humans continuing to be politically empowered, right? Like, we, it's always been the case that you just can't afford to piss off 90% of the American public because those are the people who are electing you. But like, in a future world where you've got control of the economic resources and maybe the military ones,

• 2:19:55Speaker 01

  like, it doesn't matter if you lose the election, like, we know how this goes.

• 2:19:58Speaker 03

  Democracy's done.

• 2:19:59Speaker 01

  Exactly, yeah. And I, I wanted to believe that we'll have such strong norms that we can like figure out a way to just like sustainably make that the case. But like, the further you zoom out with your big history lens on, like.

• 2:20:13Speaker 03

  Someone made the interesting point, can't remember who, but the new political parties, it's not gonna be Republicans and Democrats anymore. It's gonna be Meta or Google or OpenAI. They are, they's positioning themselves, whether it's intentionally or not, into becoming the new sort of political entities. I don't know if you guys, if that resonates, or you think that's plausible?

• 2:20:39Speaker 02

  Well, they certainly will try to inform policy, but I am, again, I'm not sure this is popular. I have more faith in our ability to, why don't we just pass campaign finance reform? Like, why don't we do this?

• 2:20:56Speaker 03

  Presumably because Congress makes too much money from it.

• 2:21:00Speaker 01

  And people who have won the last elections are exactly those who are good at winning the current system.

• 2:21:06Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:21:06Speaker 02

  I agree, so.

• 2:21:07Speaker 03

  It's self-selective.

• 2:21:08Speaker 02

  So it seems like one of the things that this will force us to do is start to elect, and again, I appreciate there's a downside where we can't collectively do this. But if we start paying attention to this and we say, "Look, what we actually need are politicians with higher agency, politicians that can, can describe an actual place in the distance." They wanna move towards like, again, this is sort of my AI slop argument, which is that some of this is actually,

• 2:21:33Speaker 02

  it drives people back to a place that we wanna be.

• 2:21:37Chris Williamson?

  Well, how many humans do you think have got the foresight? In that case, why have we had some of the more WWE style characters come out over the last few years?

• 2:21:45Speaker 02

  Because, because we had a bunch of politicians that were so boring and that we didn't believe for a long time. And then we loved this idea that the politicians were real. And I'm what, I think we're watching in real time, people would be like, "Wait a second, we don't actually want politics to be a hellscape of entertainment and bizarro." You know, Kafka, Kafka couldn't have written What's Going On Today. He would, he would have, he would have laughed himself to death. So I think we, but, but we're kind of correcting, like,

• 2:22:15Speaker 02

  my, my, my take here, and by the way, I'm not, I'm not sitting here saying it solves. I'm sitting here saying it's solvable, which is, there is a way to pass campaign finance reform that says no matter how wealthy someone is, they can't buy politicians. Singapore has done this, other places.

• 2:22:29Speaker 03

  How did Singapore do it? Is it the digital?

• 2:22:32Speaker 02

  No, they rebuilt a government 75 years ago. A grandfather.

• 2:22:35Chris Williamson?

  Leaped on you.

• 2:22:37Speaker 02

  The godfather of Singapore left Malaysia and said, "We're gonna build a better place." And literally described all the things that he had observed that were perfect about a government and then made corruption a, a capital offense. So if you take a bribery, they'll kill you.

• 2:22:52Speaker 03

  So that's a big incentive.

• 2:22:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a big incentive, and they pay their politicians really well. They pay their politicians, I think, adjusted like $600,000 a year.

• 2:22:59Chris Williamson?

  There was a, a job for the UK's head of cybersecurity that was listed not long ago. I think it was maybe on Indeed or Monster or LinkedIn, £65,000 a year.

• 2:23:10Speaker 02

  Generous.

• 2:23:11Speaker 03

  You're gonna get the best.

• 2:23:12Speaker 02

  So I was the head of cybersecurity for the country of United Kingdom, based in Newcastle.

• 2:23:21Speaker 03

  No, no, London.

• 2:23:21Speaker 02

  Fucking London wage as well, so that's actually, that's nothing, that's subsistence living. What do you think, Eric? Like, can we just vote ourselves out of the?

• 2:23:32Chris Williamson?

  Concern you've got for the future?

• 2:23:34Speaker 01

  I I do think that helps in the short term. And then we've got to take advantage of the time that buys us to make radically new institutions. Like, I don't know where we get that from. Maybe we look to sci fi. I haven't read the culture series. You know, I I think a lot of people say that there's some like amazing pie in the sky ideas that we need to maybe dust off and and like import into into reality a bit more. But like, I I just don't think the framers of the US Constitution had anything like the problems that we are currently facing in mind. They didn't even see gerrymandering coming.

• 2:24:12Speaker 01

  And and that's, you know, that's no knock on them. But like, I I think we do need to realize that we're kind of in like virgin territory here.

• 2:24:21Speaker 01

  And it's it's not just going to be some superficial thing. Like, I would I'd love to start by passing campaign finance reform. It's a great first step. But you already see these primaries that are flooded with, you know, ads trying to get the everyday voter to believe something completely untrue about your opposing politician.

• 2:24:41Speaker 01

  And I think in that world, we we get a bunch of those ads convincing those people to donate money so that you can build up the war chest that you now can't get from a billionaire to just run those same ads, you know?

• 2:24:51Chris Williamson?

  Is it not the case as well that the pace that this is moving at is so rapid? And when we look at, forget structured legislation, politics, this lumbering behemoth that sort of gets dragged behind us, this leviathan, like, is that really a realistic solution to try and have campaign reform, finance reform, political redistribution? When everything is moving at the speed of light? It's just going to be so late, is it not?

• 2:25:22Speaker 02

  Well, is everything moving at the speed of light? Like, the technology is getting way better. I don't I I observed that we've been stuck in this weird

• 2:25:32Speaker 02

  screen delirium for a while that actually hasn't changed all that much in the last, like, since AI.

• 2:25:39Speaker 02

  The stuff's getting more addictive. And I guess we have we have prediction markets now, so we have we have rampant gambling.

• 2:25:45Speaker 01

  But I mean, the pace of AI development.

• 2:25:47Speaker 02

  I I totally agree. My point is, does it actually, like, for the average person, I don't think the average person observes that AI is all that different than it was.

• 2:25:55Chris Williamson?

  That is a good point. Apart from, you know, hugging face and maybe you've got to pull fable mythos back and, you know, get the jailbreak out of the way. Like, okay, real world, show me something that has happened because of AI where we've gone, oh, whoa, that's a bit like that hugging face thing is probably the first big one. Am I right? Like, has there been something else that's been a physical world warning shot? Some AI psychosis, some fallout of people's values, some people maybe spending less time outside because they've got a relationship with the with the chatbot? Like, have we had the thing yet? Or are we waiting for it? Or is it your suggestion that like, that's just kind of not going to come?

• 2:26:34Speaker 02

  No, it will come. I think we are due for a Chernobyl or Three Mile Island. I mean, all technologies eventually have some point where, you know, something happens and how we respond will be really important. Period. I mean, that that will that will arrive. And I actually still maintain there's a decent chance we do to AI what we did to nuclear power. I mean, the AI trade is so incredible that it would be really economically problematic. But I do think that the tail will wag the dog here. I think that public perception matters way more than than. And you you said it, we should give people credit. I totally agree. I think that politicians will actually capitulate to their electorate before they capitulate to the to the billionaires and the trillionaire.

• 2:27:16Speaker 02

  And I think we will see policy get passed that feels more populous or populate than

• 2:27:24Speaker 02

  than anything else. And the question is, will it actually be so populous that it's aggressive? Like, will we will we ban outright technology that creates a greater, you know, invisible graveyard? And I don't want to reduce. I don't want to reduce the concentration of power to just saying campaign finance reform. But it does seem like the world would be a lot simpler. This discussion would be a lot simpler if we didn't have to worry about billionaires buying politicians.

• 2:27:51Chris Williamson?

  Is that the mechanism? When we talk about concentration of power, is that the primary mechanism that you're concerned about?

• 2:27:57Speaker 01

  I think it's not just economic, it's also military.

• 2:28:03Speaker 01

  You know, I, yeah, I I I think like

• 2:28:06Speaker 01

  it's unfortunate how sci fi it sounds to talk about an army full of drones and robots. But I think it would have sounded sci fi a hundred years ago to talk about predator drones and fighter jets today.

• 2:28:20Speaker 01

  And, yeah, I I wish I could like tell you a more concrete picture, but I think we just like don't know what happens when a general can look at a fleet that's, you know, sufficient to take out the dictator of Venezuela and know that like he can order whatever he wants. And there will be absolutely zero questions asked.

• 2:28:43Speaker 01

  Like, yeah, I I think I just worry that we're so used to a world where like pieces of paper matter. If you have a little piece of paper that says, I own stock in this company. And so when that stock goes up, you have to like, give me a dividend. Or I'm a citizen of this country, and so therefore I have these rights. Like, you can get to a world where that kind of all goes out the window because there's just greater concentrations of force that can say, I don't acknowledge that piece of paper's validity. I I hate how like abstract that sounds.

• 2:29:12Speaker 02

  What two policies would you pass to limit the concentration of power?

• 2:29:18Speaker 01

  I think the first one is a slowdown so we can figure out that question. I wish I had the answer for you packaged here, but I don't I don't think anybody does.

• 2:29:27Speaker 01

  And I just like, there's this great post from Dan Cocteau, the guy who wrote AI twenty twenty seven and then twenty forty, where he tries to take seriously this like exponential trajectory. And he says, okay, if we take that at face value, it means we're going to have 500 years of progress in five years at some point. And he he sort of like goes through what this would be like if you look at the last 500 years. You know, you wake up January first, it's fifteen hundred, the printing press has just been invented. And it's like a really boring story for the first ninety five percent. And then, you know, from like nineteen fifty to two thousand,

• 2:30:03Speaker 01

  that happens in in the span of like the last two weeks of December. And it's it's like, it's really terrifying. I I think if we were better at thinking in exponentials, we would realize how extremely compressed the calendar time we have to answer these questions is compared to what they deserve. And that's why I'm so excited about the slowdown, just like, we we need time.

• 2:30:24Speaker 03

  And and also, the this compression is, I think, one of the biggest arguments for why we need, in the in the best sense of the word, like, a true diversity of thinkers and voices of people like so many people, I think, just like, well, I don't understand AI, I'm not technical, my opinion doesn't matter.

• 2:30:44Speaker 03

  Never in history has that been more false than right now because

• 2:30:49Speaker 03

  because it affects everybody and because it is so

• 2:30:54Speaker 03

  so multifactorial, there's so much uncertainty, it is actually extremely important for religious leaders, arts, you know, liberal arts people, scientists, technologists, politicians, as like voices are more valid than ever because we need is like a kind of all hands on deck situation.

• 2:31:15Speaker 03

  And like, that's, you know, sort of the thing I implore to people. I I talk to my mom and she's just like, well, that's, what what business do I have thinking about this? I was like, well, you care about like how your animals are kept. What would you feel about if this was, this particular thing was automated? Like, it it it sounds, again, sort of very kumbaya, but we just need, it's such an all hands on deck situation. We need everybody listening to this podcast, whatever your background, to be thinking deeply about how to answer that question.

• 2:31:46Chris Williamson?

  Shall we see what ChatGPT said? What ordinary life looks like. AI becomes cheap cognitive labor, also electricity for thought. Scroll down for me. I imagine that there's a summary. Go to the very bottom. I imagine there's got to be, keep going.

• 2:31:58Chris Williamson?

  There we go. Catastrophic risks are real. My rough betting odds for the world by the end of twenty forty, not scientific measurements are sixty percent turbulent but manageable adaptation with large benefits and serious inequality. Twenty percent broadly flourishing transition with gains shared relatively well. Fifteen cents severe but survivable crisis, authoritarian consolidation, depression, scaled disruption, war pandemic or infrastructure failure. Five percent irreversible global catastrophe. So interestingly, all of you have been more optimistic than the AI itself has been.

• 2:32:31Speaker 03

  I don't know. That line's pretty well with my sort of.

• 2:32:33Chris Williamson?

  You think? That's how it tumbles out for you?

• 2:32:35Speaker 03

  It's not far off.

• 2:32:39Speaker 01

  The thing that spooks me is this reads like it is perfectly tailored to be not that objectionable to almost anybody. You know, it's just giving just enough probability on each thing in proportion to how dystopian and weird it sounds.

• 2:32:52Speaker 02

  It's slop. This is garbage. Can we just be, can we agree this is awful?

• 2:32:58Chris Williamson?

  You tell me.

• 2:32:59Speaker 02

  Well, I mean,

• 2:33:01Speaker 02

  it's not that it's, okay, it's not that it's academically awful. It's aesthetically awful too. I read it and I wanted, like, I don't want this on the screen anymore.

• 2:33:09Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:10Speaker 01

  What's fascinating is, I don't know whose take this was, but slop is not necessarily bad. It's what's cheap and common, right? Like, I think part of why both you and I are recoiling is that we've just seen that exact sentence structure. It's not this, but that.

• 2:33:23Speaker 02

  I read, I read that on LinkedIn earlier. Did you post that?

• 2:33:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, yeah. And also, part of it is like, this is a reminder, I do think that humans have a pretty innate understanding of aesthetics. And there is something really cool about the fact that we have all grew up seeing the Mona Lisa on a screen and then everyone's still, not everyone, but a lot of people still want to go to the Louvre and see it in person. And that is like an innate immutable truth that I find a lot of hope in. I continue to find hope in all the things that people return to when things get cheap and easy and shitty, which are kind of awesome. And if you can, again, not to, I don't, I don't want to make this too Pollyanna, but I do think that a lot of this actually resolves

• 2:34:10Speaker 02

  as humans start to rediscover a greater purpose. There's a quote that I return to in these times when John Maynard Keynes, in 1930, have you, do you know this paper? Do you know the paper I'm about to cite? Okay. In 1930, John Maynard Keynes, against a backdrop of abject despair, the father of modern macroeconomics, is traveling, in 1929, he's traveling the world, giving these lecture series on how technology is making everything better. And people are starting to get really poor. Like, people are starting to die in the street. And by 1930, he's in Europe and people are like, John, get the fuck out of here. Like, you are, this is, read the room. And he goes home and he's like, I'm, I'm not wrong. And he doubles down. He writes this paper called The Economic

• 2:34:53Speaker 02

  Possibilities for Our Grandchildren, which is going to get cited more and more. And I'm surprised people don't talk about it more. And he writes, and I quote, "I must now disembarrass myself," great line, "to imagine a future I will not live to see, one in which humans may have solved the economic problem and be faced with something more profound." And it occurs to me that a lot of this debate is interesting, in part because it actually focuses on things that aren't, like, we are now, for the first time in a million years, or however long you think, we are now actually starting to argue a whole new set of things. They're scary, they're weird, the implications are massive, but we have graduated problems. We have graduated from me stealing all of your things so that I, my family can survive, to a place where we now actually have to figure out how we

• 2:35:35Speaker 02

  can all collectively prosper. And we can use these words that are crazy and we can, again, I wear these glasses that are funny and, and although this doesn't really accentuate my nose, I suppose. I guess people can see straight through that one. And, and I, I do think, I'm not, I don't want to make it, I don't want to make it playful. I guess I just did. I do actually want to challenge that, what you said, which is like, what we need is for people not to be scared of this moment, but to rise to the occasion. And I think the risk in all of this is that the safety debates, specifically, but others, give people a sense of cynicism and fatalism. Like, if I could leave anyone on earth, like, if I died tomorrow, the one thing that I would want to, to be read at a, at a eulogy

• 2:36:20Speaker 02

  was that he wanted people to believe that their decision and choices and ideas mattered. That like, you do not have to go quietly into the night. Just because you are not responsible for AI safety doesn't mean it will just happen to you. And that communities, I think the resurrection and rejuvenation that we crave will happen at the most local levels. I think it will happen in the dining room tables. I think it will happen in city centers and town halls. And I think it will happen in large part because people reject that garbage. That like, the AI slop is in some way, this like weird gift, that we are observing a bunch of trash that we don't want. And we are like collectively sort of trying to piece together what it means. But we, we do desperately need, to your point, people to actually see this as an opportunity where their, their, their choices matter.

• 2:37:03Speaker 02

  Because the, the real enemy in this moment is fatalism. It's cynicism, which has become fairly pervasive, and that the both political parties spark. My, my, my thinking, actually, in all this, I think the next conflict is not between two nation states. I think it's between people and a state. I think people may, at some point, realize that we have technology that could make everything get a whole lot better. And we have a pernicious ruling class that won't let it happen. And that is, that to me is one of the outcomes, actually. It's the opposite of this authoritarianism. It's this other outcome. It's an uprising. Where people go, wait a second, we could have a utopia. Why aren't you building it? And people clamor for a much better world that could be promised to them because of the technology that, that we've built, that we aren't, that we aren't utilizing. I think

• 2:37:47Speaker 02

  that, that to me is like, one of these, like, potentialities of, of, of high agency, even high morality, high agency. There's this weird uprising outcome.

• 2:37:55Chris Williamson?

  If you were to leave people that have listened to this with some things to keep an eye on, some questions to sort of keep pondering, some areas to be focused on, what would they be? Because this conversation's sprawling, and I'm friends with super smart people, many of your friends, and I try to keep a handle on it and don't really know what I should be paying attention to, what I should be focused on. What do you, what do you think people should be focused on over the next year, let's say? That's a forever time in this?

• 2:38:24Speaker 03

  I mean, I would say, keep an eye on how coordination efforts start to manifest. I think, as we discussed, we're at a very, actually, positive moment right now. The most, the most positive I've been.

• 2:38:36Chris Williamson?

  Largely just because of that one letter.

• 2:38:38Speaker 03

  Not just because of the letter and just even, like, Elon just did his interview with The Economist, where he mentioned, he's like, oh, actually, yeah, we, we, the leaders and I, like, I thought all the tech leaders hated each other. They seemed like they did, you know, Sam and Elon, I mean, I don't know if they've made up yet, but, you know, they were at each other's throats. They all seemed to hate each other. And now, apparently, they're having phone calls. Or they're planning to have phone calls with each other on a, on a semi-regular basis. That is a huge step. That really is.

• 2:39:04Speaker 02

  And far less embarrassing.

• 2:39:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, thank God. Like, it sounds, I'm hoping they're just starting to all grow up a little bit.

• 2:39:09Chris Williamson?

  WhatsApp chat versus subtweeting each other? Get me in the WhatsApp chat.

• 2:39:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, let's, let's hope. So I think, keep an eye on that. And then just sort of more of a zoomed out sort of perspective. I always try and think, you know, again, we're trying to avoid oversimplifications of putting everything down onto like, what is, what is a singular sort of trade off that we're facing here? But I do think these, on a very meta level, what we're seeing is a kind of a battle between the forces of centralization and decentralization. And so it's sometimes helpful to just sort of see things like, oh, what, is, is this a force, you know, how is that, how is decentralization trying to manifest here? Oh, how is centralization trying to manifest here? I always think that's an interesting lens to, to look through. But yeah, and I'll come back to my point

• 2:39:55Speaker 03

  of, this is an all hands on deck situation. And however, it's sort of distant you might feel from this topic, it does affect you. And so just keep thinking about it.

• 2:40:07Chris Williamson?

  Any final thoughts? Anything else you want people to pay attention to?

• 2:40:11Speaker 02

  The dining room table is such an important place that we should recapture. And if we start by recapturing meals and dining room table, it is as simple as possible. But it is, it take, it requires bravery and courage to tell people to put away their devices. And if you do that, you will be deeply inspired by the conversations you have, and you will feel better on the other side of it. And that will actually inspire you to start thinking about the ways in which the world could be better. And that cycle would be pretty powerful. I also think we should, people should pay very close attention to the world that their leaders describe wanting to build. And I don't mean the technologists, because we didn't elect those people. I'm glad the technologists are building technology. I don't really care about their ideas for the future of living. I care about what our elected officials care about, our world looks like. And I think we've let them off the hook

• 2:40:53Speaker 02

  by describing absolutely nothing. And we should pay a lot closer attention to what they actually describe in wanting, and start electing people to describe a future that we want our kids to live in.

• 2:41:05Chris Williamson?

  Final thoughts, dude?

• 2:41:08Speaker 01

  My hope is that the dining room table is not just the good world that we're fighting for, but also the way that we get there. Like, I think, even if AI was not happening to us right now, I would look around and be worried about how informed voters are, about how much people trust their politicians. When I look at the fact that there are so many hard decisions coming down the pike, it's tempting to notice the state of our discourse and feel despair. But I think it's also cool that we can't really imagine a world where we, we get through this without addressing all of those other problems too, without saying, okay, let's actually start from square one and, and think about, how

• 2:41:51Speaker 01

  do we want our societies to be organized? How important are our local communities? So I, I hope this is a crisis that leads us to finally take seriously what it means to be civically involved in a way that we should, could sort of get away with not doing before. But I don't think we should take for granted that that's going to happen by default. I'm just like grateful that we have extremely smart people thinking about this and hopefully planning to see it a bit more, that that's a choice we have to make.

• 2:42:17Chris Williamson?

  Heck yeah. You guys rule. I appreciate you all. Thank you for coming.

• 2:42:21Speaker 01

  Thanks for having us.

• 2:42:22Chris Williamson?

  Bye, everybody.

• 2:42:24Speaker 04

  Hi there. I am fully charged and here to tell you, Toy Story 5 is now on Disney Plus.

• 2:42:31Chris Williamson?

  It's been too long, cowboy.

• 2:42:32Speaker 04

  Woody, Buzz, and Jesse are back for a brand new adventure with some seriously cool new tech. What? Holy butterscotch! You said it, Jesse. So, save your batteries and watch the global phenomenon at home. And the best part, it's perfect for the whole family. Power up your movie night and watch Disney and Pixar's Toy Story 5, now streaming on Disney Plus, rated PG.