No Mercy / No Malice: Oppenheimer, Inc.

As read by George Hahn. https://profgmedia.substack.com/p/oppenheimer-inc Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Hogging seats on a crowded train, not saying excuse me, watching videos on your phone with no headphones in. Sometimes it feels like we don't know how to act anymore. What we have been seeing increasingly is people breaking rules. Why should I play by the rules if nobody else is going to do that for me? This week on Explain It To Me, how to mind your manners. New episodes Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:31George Hahn?

  I'm George Hahn and this is No Mercy, No Malice. AI researchers believe superintelligence is an inevitability and that there's a non-zero chance its arrival could trigger an extinction level event for humanity. We are at a fork in the road and the window for choosing which path to take is closing at an unknown rate. In fact, one of the few certainties here is that nobody knows what happens next. Oppenheimer, Inc.

• 1:12George Hahn?

  A 27-year-old resigns from a firm he spent four months at, triggers a global panic, drawing comments from a former president and calls from the leaders of Frontier Labs for a slowdown. In 1946, would we have let Robert Oppenheimer raise money from Sequoia Capital and begin selling nukes to the UAE and Procter and Gamble? I'm going on Smirconish tomorrow where I'll be asked, what the fuck is going on? The honest answer is, I don't know. What I am certain of? This is another example of a small number of players capturing

• 1:52George Hahn?

  staggering economic upside while outsourcing the downside risks, or harms, to the broader public. In 2024, a year after Dr. Jeffrey Hinton, the godfather of AI, quit Google in order to speak freely about the risks of AI, he won the Nobel Prize in Physics. In an interview for the Nobel website, Hinton described two kinds of AI risks. There's relatively short-term risks, which are very important and very urgent. They're mainly to do with people misusing AI. Examples include a job apocalypse, bullshit in my opinion,

• 2:34George Hahn?

  productivity gains accelerating wealth inequality, deep fakes destabilizing democracy, cybercriminals picking up a dangerous new tool, bias getting embedded in criminal justice, healthcare and hiring, and the proliferation of more powerful biological weapons that can be produced more easily by middle powers and non-state actors. There's also longer-term problems of these things taking over, Hinton continued. The question is, what's going to happen when we've created beings that are more intelligent than us? We've never been in that situation before. Anybody who says it's all going to be fine is crazy. Anybody who says they're

• 3:17George Hahn?

  inevitably going to take over, they're crazy too.

• 3:22George Hahn?

  Humanity is at a fork in the road. But the choice isn't whether to develop AI superintelligence, it's how to proceed in the face of a technology we cannot fully comprehend or control. One path is to regulate AI such that we mitigate the risks but reap the rewards. The other path is to continue full speed ahead, despite a widespread belief among researchers, including Hinton, that there's a non-zero chance that AI superintelligence could present an extinction level event for humanity in the near future. If the right thing seems obvious, remember

• 4:04George Hahn?

  that the right thing and the hard thing are usually the same thing.

• 4:13George Hahn?

  Increasingly, the AI narrative resembles a Terminator reboot nobody asked for. We've gone from AI will take your job to AI will spike your power bill and devour your water supply to AI will kill everyone. Inspiring stuff if you're looking to inspire a mob with pitchforks. Technology writer Jasmine Sun described AI populism as a worldview that regards AI as a thing manufactured by out-of-touch billionaires and pushed onto an unwilling public to achieve sinister aims like capitalist efficiency, layoffs, and population management, surveillance.

• 4:56George Hahn?

  This year, voters in seven states will decide on at least 16 local ballot measures related to data centers. Senator Ted Cruz called for substantially more regulation but stopped short of a moratorium, telling Politico, "If they're going to be killer robots, I'd rather they be American killer robots than Chinese killer robots." Senator Bernie Sanders has proposed a ban on superintelligence and threatened 20-year prison sentences for developers who violate it. Interestingly, Sanders and Steve Bannon

• 5:34George Hahn?

  both appeared at the Pro-Human Assembly this week. AI politics is manufacturing the strangest bedfellows. As populist anger bubbles up, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodi, who briefly held adult-in-the-room status, and other less well-known AI founders are becoming honorary members of the algorithmic oligarchy. They're joining Sam Altman, who equated the resources needed to raise children to training AI, and Elon Musk, who slashed aid to the world's most vulnerable people. That AI founders are suddenly concerned about the peril they've

• 6:18George Hahn?

  created after vesting their way to billionaire status is obnoxious and unhelpful, akin to Dr. Frankenstein begging us to rein in his monster while creating new self-replicating monsters. The robber barons left behind libraries and concert halls. The brolegarchs will leave behind server farms, a bot infestation, and conviction that we should have been more grateful for everything they did. We're watching the fourth game in the Fuck Around and Find Out World Series.

• 6:55George Hahn?

  Before we're swept up in the populist moment, we should ask, what's going right with AI? Answer? Plenty. Recently, I interviewed journalist Josh Terengel on my podcast. Researching his book, AI for Good, took Terengel to the Cleveland Clinic, where doctors deployed an AI model to better detect sepsis. It's the leading cause of death in hospitals, killing about 350,000 Americans each year. If caught early, it can be treated with antibiotics. The challenge is detection. This is a perfect problem for AI and machine learning because

• 7:36George Hahn?

  sepsis masks itself by looking like almost anything else, Terengel told me. The Cleveland Clinic AI helped reduce the hospital's sepsis mortality rate by 41%. Deployed across American healthcare, that model could save more than 140,000 lives every year. Speaking of saving lives, AI is helping to design antibiotics to kill drug-resistant bacteria and accelerating the timeline for detecting pancreatic cancer by up to three years. Pancreatic cancer kills 52,000 Americans per year. 85% of patients receive a diagnosis

• 8:19George Hahn?

  after the disease has already spread, and the five-year survival rate remains below 15%. AI is also aiding in the early detection of wildfires, improving hurricane forecasting, and helping archaeologists decipher previously unreadable ancient scrolls. Banning AI research, or slowing the pace of the frontier, whatever that means, will spill over into areas where AI is rapidly improving our lives. That's why in 2023, climate scientists opposed halting generative AI research, saying that might throttle the development of tools needed

• 9:02George Hahn?

  to advance knowledge on complex problems with hidden interactions, such as climate change. In other words, we risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

• 9:16George Hahn?

  AI founders are alarmed by the non-zero possibility of extinction, but they've still lined up bankers for an IPO. I'm looking forward to the risks section of the S1s that cast risking an extinction event as the price for progress. Cybersecurity is also on the front line of the short-term risks. According to recent data from IBM, one in four data breaches so far this year were AI-enabled, a 56% increase year on year. When I spoke with cybersecurity expert Alex Stamos on my podcast, he likened AI's democratizing

• 10:01George Hahn?

  impact on cybercrime to Premier League teams moving up a division. All of the hacking teams are getting promoted up to the next level. Small countries now have the power of big countries. From a hacking perspective, you're going to see people stand up capabilities that used to be the kind only intelligence agencies could do.

• 10:26George Hahn?

  Sophos, a cybersecurity company, puts the average current cost to recover from a ransomware attack, excluding the ransom, at $1.7 million, up 11% year on year. In the aggregate, cyber attacks cost the global economy $10.5 trillion last year. If cybercrime were a country, it would be the world's third-largest economy. Meanwhile, the cost of entry for mass harm has gone from a nation-state's budget to a laptop and a grudge.

• 11:07George Hahn?

  One of the blind spots in Silicon Valley's Milton Friedman mindset is the belief that all regulation exists in opposition to shareholder value.

• 11:19George Hahn?

  After Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" exposed unsanitary conditions in the meatpacking industry, regulatory compliance in the form of a USDA stamp-certified quality. Likewise, SEC and FDIC regulations created in the aftermath of the 1929 crash restored investor and customer confidence. The absence of regulation makes AI so fragile that valuations soar on wild speculation and collapse under clickbait. That fragility extends to the whole market, since the Mag 7 stocks register one-third

• 12:01George Hahn?

  of the S&P 500's value, and to the broader economy, as the AI buildout has driven a 32% increase in S&P earnings growth this year. Put simply, if AI sneezes, the market gets walking pneumonia, i.e. a recession. Regulation is the bulwark that keeps a tragedy from becoming a catastrophe.

• 12:31George Hahn?

  Mark Zuckerberg, the poster boy for negative externalities run amok, says every AI lab has "the responsibility and incentive to move at the pace required to train its models safely." "We should trust Zuck, as social media is going great." Donald Trump believes "a smart president is the only regulator AI needs." Unfortunately, we can't wait until 2029. Altman, Imodi, and Musk aren't clowns like Trump, but their regulatory ideas—employee-like access to external evaluators and vague promises to welcome a federal safety framework—are

• 13:16George Hahn?

  reminiscent of Sheryl Sandberg's calls for regulation: performative bullshit. It's time for an international artificial intelligence agency, IAIA, modeled after the International Atomic Energy Agency.

• 13:37George Hahn?

  We could start with a US regulator similar to the Department of Energy that records incidents, approves new models, promulgates safety rules, and has subpoena powers. The key, as Fareed Zakaria wrote in June, "is to combine private expertise with public authority." Ultimately, that regulator should share bilateral authority with a counterpart in China, where AI is already heavily regulated. As Alice Han, director at Greenmantle, told my markets co-host Ed Elson, "Sentiment around AI is largely positive in China, but leaders there worry that the absence of a global

• 14:20George Hahn?

  AI governance authority could set us up for potentially catastrophic AI-related risks."

• 14:29George Hahn?

  The AI race isn't a reason to delay regulation, it's a reason to speed it up. That's the lesson of the Cold War, when adversaries cooperated to build real safeguards that have limited weapons proliferation to nine countries, even as they facilitated nuclear power plants in 31 countries.

• 14:52George Hahn?

  Mutually assured destruction worked because everyone was terrified. A crisis is a terrible thing to waste, and we have one on our hands. People are terrified again.

• 15:06George Hahn?

  Every apocalypse needs a villain who insists he's the hero. We have ours, and they believe they can sound the alarm while ringing the NASDAQ bell. History disagrees.

• 15:24George Hahn?

  Life is so rich.