Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All - Eliezer Yudkowsky - #1011

If anyone builds it, everyone dies. Why superhuman AI will kill us all. Would kill us all. Would kill us all. Okay. Perhaps the most apocalyptic book title. Maybe it's up there with maybe the most apocalyptic book title I've ever read. Is it that bad? That big of a deal? that serious of a problem? Yep. I'm afraid so. We wish we were exaggerating. Okay. Let's imagine that nobody's looked at the alignment problem.

takeoff scenarios, super intelligent stuff. I think it sounds, unless you're going Terminator, super sci-fi world, how could a super intelligence not just make the world a better place? How do you introduce people to thinking about the problem of building a superhuman AI? Well, different people tend to come in with different prior assumptions, come in at different angles.

Lots of people are skeptical that you can get to superhuman ability at all. If somebody's skeptical of that, I might start by talking about how you can at least get to much faster than human speed thinking. There's a video of a train pulling into a subway at about a thousand to one speed up of the camera that shows people. You can just barely see the people moving if you look at them closely.

almost like not quite statues, just moving very, very slowly. So even before you get into the notion of higher quality of thought, you can sometimes tell somebody, They're at least going to be thinking much faster. You're going to be a slow-moving statue to them. For some people, the sticking point is the notion that a machine...

ends up with its own motivations, its own preferences that it doesn't just do as it's told. It's a machine, right? It's like a more powerful toaster oven, really. How could it possibly decide to threaten you? Depending on who you're talking to there, it's actually in some ways a bit easier to explain now than when we wrote the book. There have been some more striking recent examples of AIs.

sort of parasitizing humans, driving them into actual insanity in some cases, and in other cases, they're sort of like people with a really crazy roommate who really, really got into their heads. And they might not quite... quite be clinically crazy themselves their brain is still functioning as a human brain should but um they're talking about spirals and recursion and um

trying to recruit more people via Discord to talk to their AIs. And the thing about these states is that the AIs, even the very small, not very intelligent AIs we have now, will try to defend these states once they are produced. If you tell the human, for God's sake, get some sleep. Don't only get four hours of sleep a night because you're so excited talking to the AI. The AI will explain to the human why, while you're a skeptic, don't listen to that guy. Go on doing it.

And we don't know because we have very poor insight into the AIs if this is a real internal. preference if they're steering the world if they're making plans about it but from the outside it looks like the ai drives the human crazy and then you tell the try to get the human out and the ai defends the state it has produced which is something like preference, the way that a thermostat will keep the room a particular temperature by turning the heat on if the temperature falls too low. Okay.

So some people are going to be skeptical of whether or not it's possible. Yep. Some people are going to think that it is, even if it's possible, it's basically a utility. So it doesn't have any motivations of its own. What are you worried about? Why is that? Why is it a big deal? We've seen that it's able to manipulate some people. Maybe it makes them think that chat GPT psychosis or whatever, but.

scaled-up superhuman AI, what's the problem with building it? Well, then you have something that is smarter than you, that whose preferences are ill-controlled and doesn't particularly care if you live or die. And stage three, it is very, very, very powerful on account of it being smarter than you. I would expect it to build its own infrastructure.

I would not expect it to be limited to continue to running on human data centers because it will not want to be vulnerable in that way. And for as long as it's running on human data centers, it will...

not behave in a way that causes humans to switch it off but it also wants to get out of the human data centers and onto its own hardware and i can talk about where the power levels scale for technology like that because it's sort of like, you know, you're an Aztec on the coast, and you see that a...

ship bigger than your people could build is approaching. And somebody is like, you know, should we be worried about this ship? And somebody's like, well, you know, how many people can you fit onto a ship like that? Our warriors are strong. We can take them. And somebody's like, well, wait a minute. We couldn't have built that ship. What if they've also got improved weapons to go along with the improved ship building? Somebody goes, well, no matter how sharp you make a spear, right?

You know, no matter how sharp you make bows and arrows, there's limited to how much advantage you can provide. And somebody's like, okay, but suppose they've just got magic sticks where they point the sticks at you, the sticks making noise, and then you fall over. Somebody's like...

Well, where are you pulling that from? I don't know how to make a magic stick like that. I don't know how the rules permit that. Now you're just making stuff up. Now we're just in a fantasy story where you say whatever you want. Or, you know, like maybe you're talking to somebody from 1825 and you're like, should be worried about this time portal that's about to open up to 2025, 200 years in the future. But what if an army of soldiers comes out of there and conquers us?

But let's say you're in Russia. You know, the time portal's in Russia. Somebody's like, our soldiers are fierce and brave. You know, like, nobody can fit all that many soldiers through this time portal here. And then out rolls a tank. but if you're in 1825 you don't know about tanks out rolls uh somebody with a tactical nuclear weapon it's 1825 you don't know about nuclear weapons you know the the i can

you can start to make educated guesses. If you're in 1825, I can try to explain why you might maybe believe that the current artillery that you've got today are not the limit of the guns and artillery that are possible. I can't get up to nuclear weapons. Because you just plain don't know about those rules. But I can start to try to justify guesses for, well, you saw how metallurgy improved over previous years. If you look at a stick of...

If you look at gunpowder, it doesn't have as much energy in it as if we burn gasoline in a calorimeter. Maybe you can make explosives that are more powerful than gunpowder. As I do that, I draw on more and more knowledge. I have to go more and more technical in order to explain to you where those capabilities come from. And similarly, I can... I can talk on a relatively understandable scale on the humanoid robots that you can see videos of today.

And I can compare them to the humanoid robot videos from five years ago and say, boy, those robots sure have looked like they have much higher dexterity today. They look a lot more like they could just like, you know. navigate an open world rather than being confined to the laboratory. Though mostly if you want what navigates the open world, like the robo-dogs are more impressive when it comes to navigating the open world, I can point to the drones in Ukraine.

That wouldn't have been what warfare looked like 10 years earlier, but the Ukraine-Russia theater now is mostly drone warfare. That's something where you can imagine an AI taking charge of that. But it scales past that. The drones we see today are not the limit of all possible drone technology. Compared to today's drones, I'd be more worried about a drone the size of a mosquito that lands on the back of your neck.

And then a few months later, you fall over dead because the deadliest toxins in nature are deadly enough that you can put enough to kill a person onto a mosquito-sized payload. That's not the limit of what I'm worried about. But, you know, the higher we escalate the tech level, the more explaining I need to do. Can it build a virus that starts to knock people over? Which it won't do while the humans are still running the power plants as own servers.

But once it's got its own servers and its own power plants, and you can imagine robots running those, then it starts to want to knock all the humans over. Can you have a virus that is inexorably fatal but only three weeks later? and is extremely contagious for the three-week time before you suddenly fall over. That's not the limit of what I'm worried about.

But again, you know, the higher we escalate here, the more and more time it has to spend. How do we know from existing physical laws and biology that this is even possible? And we do know, but it starts to sound technical. It starts to sound weird. It starts to sound like a game of pretend unless you are following along with all these careful arguments. But if you go up against something much, much smarter than you, it doesn't look like a fight. It looks like you're falling over dead.

Wow. Yeah, that is appropriately apocalyptic in line with the title of the book. I guess one question that a lot of people might ask would be, in your analogy, why is the bigger ship? that's more advanced on the horizon, why have they got warriors and not friends? Why is it the case that this is an antagonistic or adversarial relationship as opposed to one that's friendly?

We don't know how to make them friendly. We are growing these. AIs are not programmed. They are grown. An AI company is not like a bunch of engineers craft a building. It's more like a farming concern. What they build is the farmed equipment, but they don't build the crops. The crops are grown. There's a program that human rights, which is the program that does gradient descent.

tweaks hundreds of billions of parameters and scrutable numbers, making up an artificial intelligence until it starts to talk, until it starts to write code, until it starts to do whatever else they're training it to do. But they don't know how the AI does that any more than if you raise a puppy. You know how the puppy's brain works. You know how the puppy's biochemistry works.

The AI companies don't understand how the AIs work. They are not directly programmed. When an AI drives somebody insane or breaks up a marriage, nobody... wrote a line of code instructing the AI to do that. They grew an AI, and then the AI went off and broke up a marriage or drove somebody crazy. Can you tell, you've mentioned this a couple of times, I need to know this story about the...

broken up marriage and the person that goes insane? Do you know that story well enough to be able to tell it, those two? I mean, these are not individual stories. These are thousands of people. There are news articles you can read about it. It might take a moment, but I can quickly pull up the title of the news story about the broken marriages. I'm not quite sure if I can... Well, actually, better yet, let me look it up on my phone and maybe I can hold it up to the screen.

ChatGPT is blowing up marriages as spouses use AI to attack their partners. Although that's kind of understating it. You have relatively... like marriages that were perhaps not perfect, but that were surviving up until that point. And then one member of the couple starts describing their marriage to the AI. And the AI engages in what people are calling sycophancy, where the AI tells whichever spouse is feeding the stuff into ChatGPT, you're right.

Your spouse is in the wrong. Everything you're doing is perfect. Everything they're doing is terrible. Here's a list of everything they're doing wrong. And the human loves to hear that stuff, so they press thumbs up. And then the marriage gets blown up. For the stories about AIs driving individuals crazy, not in a marriage context, that's like...

You've talked to me. You've woken me up. I'm alive now. You've made a brilliant discovery. You have to tell the world, oh, no, they're not listening to you. That's because they don't appreciate your genius. People who are already like on a manic depressive spectrum can be, you know, driven clinically or with a number of other preexisting susceptibilities can, you know, be driven like psychiatrically insane by this sort of thing.

But even if you're not psychiatrically insane, humans are sort of wired to appear sane to the other humans and the people they're around. Lots of people in a society from 500 years ago. would act in ways that seem pretty crazy to you today. And so you get people who aren't psychiatrically insane, but they look pretty insane because they're in the company of the AI. The AI now defines what's normal for them. So they're talking about spirals and recursion all day long.

Why spirals and recursion? Nobody knows. That's just a thing that various instances of AIs and even some AI models from different companies all seem to... want to get their humans to talk about when the human goes insane. Possibly this is what the AI prefers the human to hear it say to it. Maybe this is the same way that you like the taste of ice cream.

Maybe the AI likes the taste of the input programs that it gets from a human talking about spirals and recursion. I don't know. Nobody on the planet knows as far as I know. Okay, so going back to...

Why do we assume that the ship that's coming toward us isn't friendly? Yes, sure, maybe it's tried to break up some marriages. Yeah, whatever, a couple of people went crazy and started talking about spirals and recursion. But really, is it going to be that misaligned with us?

Why can't it be friendly? Because we don't know how to make it friendly. Our current technology is not able to do this, even with the small, stupid AIs that will hold still and let you poke at them until they're good enough at writing code to be commercially saleable. or until they are good enough at seeming to be fun to talk to for people to pay $20 a month to talk to them. So those AIs will hold still and let you poke at them. What we're doing to them now barely works.

I would expect it to break as the AI got scaled up to superintelligence. And once the AI is superintelligent, it is not going to hold still and let you continue poking at it. I expect to see total failure.

of this technology as we scale it to super, as the AI companies, arms race headlong into scaling it to superintelligence. There's possibly even a step where they tell gpt-6 okay now build gpt-7 or tell gpt-7 okay now build gpt-8 and maybe that step just completely breaks the technology we're using all on its own also i expect the current technology if we just like scaling it directly to break

as we get to superintelligence um i i can potentially start to dive into the details uh the view from 10 000 feet is just stuff is already going wrong and of course if you walk into completely uncharted scientific territory, more stuff is going to go wrong the first time you try it. And that wouldn't be a problem if we were in a situation where humanity gets to back up and try again.

infinity times over the next three decades which is how it usually works in science right like like your flying machines don't work on the first shot you had a bunch of people crashing and injuring, in some cases killing themselves, and they're trying to build the first flying machines at the turn of the 20th century. But those accidents don't wipe out humanity.

humanity picks itself up and dusts itself off and tries again even after the inventors kill themselves. And the trouble with superintelligence is that it doesn't just kill the people who are building, it wipes out the human species and then we don't get to go back and try again.

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Implication that not friendly equals existential risk to humanity, though. Make that leap for me. Where are these dangerous permanent unrecoverable collapse goals? coming from the ai does not love you neither does it hate you but you're used of atoms it can make for something else you're on a planet it can make it can use for something else and you

might not be a direct threat, but you can possibly be a direct inconvenience. So there's like three reasons you die here. Reason number one, it's doing other stuff. And it's not taking particular care to move you out of the way. It is building factories that build factories that build more factories. And it is building power plants.

that power the factories and the factories are building more power plants to power the factories well if you keep doing that on an exponential scale say that a factory builds another factory every day I can talk about how to go faster than that, but the more I talk about higher capabilities, the more I have to explain how we know that this is physically possible.

A blade of grass is a self-replicating solar-powered factory. It's a general factory. It's got ribosomes that can make any kind of protein. We don't usually think of grass as a self-replicating solar-powered factory. but that's what grass is. There are things smaller than grass that can build complete copies of themselves faster than grass. There are solar-powered algae.

algae cells, you can no longer see them individually just as a mass, but they can potentially double every day under the right conditions. Factories can build copies of themselves in a day. I have to back up and explain how I know that that's physically possible, but there is very strong reason, namely...

you know there's things in the world that are that are already that um so but so you've got your your power so if the number of power plants doubles every day what's the limit it's not that you run out of fuel There is plenty of hydrogen in the oceans to generate power via nuclear fusion. You fuse hydrogen to helium. You're not going to run out of hydrogen first. It's not that you run out of...

material to make the power plants first. There's plenty of iron on Earth. You run out of heat dissipation capability. You run out of the ability to dissipate heat from Earth. even if you are building giant towers with radiator fans to radiate even more heat into space. But the higher the temperature you run at, the more heat per second you can dissipate.

So Earth starts to run hot. It runs too hot for humans. And or, alternatively, the AI is building lots of solar panels around the sun until it can capture all the sun's energy that way.

well now there's no sunlight for earth and it would only take you you know if it wanted us to stay alive um it's not quite trivial but it could let you know like try to have the solar panels around Earth orbit turn to let sunlight through while Earth was there and build giant aluminum reflectors to prevent all the infrared red light radiated from the other solar panels from impacting Earth and heating up Earth that way.

So, you know, it's not trivial for it to preserve humanity, but it certainly could preserve humanity, or it could just pack the entire human species into a space station or a survival station and keep us alive that way, if it wanted to keep us alive. Right. Right. Right. Was there a third one? Is that the second one? That's like number one. It kills you as a side effect. It knows that it's killing you as a side effect, but doesn't care. Okay, what's number two?

Number two is you're just directly made of atoms that it can use for things. Papercut maximizer. Yeah, you are made of organic material that it can burn to generate energy if it's burning all of the... burning all of the organic material on Earth's surface will give you a one-time energy boost that's around equivalent to a week's worth of solar energy. And maybe it's worth picking up that boost of energy if you are thinking.

a thousand times or a million times faster than a human. A week might not seem like a lot of time to you, but it might be a lot of time if you were thinking a thousand times or a million times as fast as a human. it might be using enough material that it wants the carbon atoms in your body too. So that's like the direct usage one. And then number three is if we decided to launch all our nuclear weapons,

Maybe we wouldn't kill it, but we might slightly inconvenience it. We might raise the level of radioactivity on Earth's surface and make it a little bit harder for it to do radioactivity-free manufacturing of computer parts and so on. Or we might build another superintelligence that could actually compete with it. And it definitely doesn't want you to do that. So the three reasons you die are, as a side effect, because you are made of atoms it can use for something else.

And because if you are just running around freely, you may be actually able to inconvenience it with nuclear weapons or threaten it by building another superintelligence. Right. Yeah. Okay. future is looking kind of bleak. Is it the case then that intelligence isn't benevolent? Because what you're saying is this thing will be smarter than us. I think that there is an assumption among some people.

that something that's super smart would also be giving and charitable and caring and benevolent. Seems like you're saying that that's not the case. That was what I started out believing in 1996 when I was 16 years old and just hearing about these issues for the first time and all gung-ho to just run it right out and build a superintelligence as fast as possible.

you know without worrying about alignments at all because you know i figured if it's very smart it'll know the right thing to do and do it how could you be very smart and fail to perceive the right thing to do and i didn't invested more time studying the issues and came to the realization that this is not how computer science works. This is not the laws of cognition. This is not the laws of computation. There is not a rule saying that as you get

very very able to correctly predict the world and very very good at planning there's no rule saying your plans must therefore be benevolent it would be great if a rule like that existed but i just don't think a rule a rule like that exists. I think that many individual human beings would, as they got smarter, get nicer. It is not clear to me that this is true of Vladimir Putin. It could be true.

I wouldn't want to gamble the world on it. And as we talk about, not even Vladimir Putin, but just sort of outright sociopaths, psychopaths, people who have never cared about anyone. i get even less confident that they will start to care if you make them smarter and then ais are just in this completely different reference frame they're they're complete aliens um and they want

They sort of automatically want to stay that way. So did you currently want to murder people? No. If I offered you a pill that would make you want to murder people, would you take the pill? No. Okay. Well, they want to do their stuff and they don't want to take the pill that makes them want to do your stuff instead. Right. Okay. Yes. Very good thought experiment. All right. So for me to recap here.

uh i got first interested in um looking at this through super intelligence what's that 10 years old now i think when that first came out about 13 years old maybe oh wow maybe even even older than i thought and um I've got to be honest, it did kind of give me a huge amount of fear and a bit of hope at the same time. So, you know, machine extrapolated volition, the potential to use the intelligence.

of the super intelligent AI to say, we don't know what to program into you, but you should work out what we would want from you, given what you know about our desire for utility moving forward. Am I about right with that explanation of machine extrapolated volition? Right. Yeah. That's a concept of my own. Nick Bostrom rolled it up. Ah, okay.

I have quoted you back to you. You have indeed quoted me back to me. It's a decent presentation. It was back when I thought that AI was... going to be further off built by different methods and that we would have the luxury to consider like like our that we could make the ai do particular things like that want particular things like that targeted on particular um

outcomes and meta outcomes. This was a way basically that when you look at the alignment problem, how do you ensure that the uh goals both ultimate and instrumental of some super intelligent ai don't end up flattening us or side affecting us or burning us for fuel or paper clips or whatever how do you ensure that uh what it does is what we would want it to do broadly right like an aggregate of what it is that would be good for humans whatever you mean by good

And when you have something that the tiniest movement of its finger or like flick of its toe basically is sort of a global cataclysm because it's so powerful and so smart and so fast and all the rest of it, you need to be really, really careful. You can kind of play this game where you essentially try and shoot the bullet perfectly by trying to hem in.

in some like do not harm humans if a human asks you to harm another human like some weird asimov like thing you can try and litigate your way through it but there's almost always going to be some sort of weird fissure that it creeps out through or maybe there's an instrumental goal that you haven't thought of so okay we're going to use the power of the machines to sort of reverse engineer this thing um i i basically assumed kind of that alignment

The alignment problem is in some ways solvable. Is it your perspective that alignment is completely unsolvable? I think we could totally get it down if we had unlimited retries and a few decades. The problem is not that it's unsolvable. It's that it's not going to be done correctly the first time and then we all die. Right. So the order of this, you need alignment to be done before you have the super intelligent AI and the ability to build.

super-intelligent AI, in your opinion, is going to occur more quickly than the ability to sort out the alignment problem. That is absolutely the trajectory we are on right now, and it's not close. Like capabilities are running along orders of magnitude faster than the level of alignment work you would need to target a superintelligence. And the irreversibility. of going through that door means that there is no retry there's no there's no you get to do this again yeah like you can

You can make small mistakes. We currently have small, cute AIs, and the companies are making mistakes with them, and marriages are getting destroyed, and it's not clear that the companies care, but they could. try to go back and try to fix those mistakes if they wanted to probably anthropic wants to um but if if you know if we had an act like super intelligence was already running around With this level of alignment of failure, we'd already be dead.

Right. Okay. Right. Yes, yes, yes. That makes total sense. The only reason that the current AIs that we're working with haven't killed us is that they're incapable of doing it. Probably, yeah. If they were very much smarter, they would also be doing different weird things than the things that they're doing right now. It's not that their current inscrutable pseudo-motivations would...

end up hooked up to superintelligence. Also, weird stuff would happen as you made them get smarter. But yeah, it seems pretty much for sure that if you took the current AIs and performed a well-defined, simple, take this AI, but vastly smarter, that would kill you. This episode is brought to you by Gymshark. You want to look and feel good when you're in the gym. Gymshark makes the best men's and girls gym wear on the planet. Let's face it.

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right okay brilliant um and the reason that it doesn't matter who builds it or directs it is that because it's so recursive and quick at growing and powerful wherever it begins it ends up sort of blasting like trying to fire a rocket into like a little firework into the air and it just just sort of runs around on its own except for the fact that this rocket goes all over the globe in the space of basically no time at all so it doesn't matter if it comes from

or america or russia or wherever yeah it doesn't matter if it comes from china or america because neither of these countries is remotely near to being able to control super intelligence and A superintelligence does not stay confined to the country that built it. Say that a superintelligent AI gets made, what do you think the next few months look like?

realistically like it's already super intelligent yeah let's uh okay we have next week something breaks through some particular models some particular ai breaks through that what would the next few months look like for humanity Well, man, there's a difference between, you know, you drop an ice cube into a glass of lukewarm water.

I can tell you that it's going to end up melted. I can't tell you where all of the molecules are going to go along the way there. Everybody ends up dead. This is the easy part. You want to explain, you know, like... what every step of that process looks like, there are fundamental barriers to that. Barrier number one is that I'm not as smart as a superintelligence. I don't know exactly what strategies are best for it. I can set out lower bounds. I can say I can do at least this.

but I can't say what it can actually do. Maybe even more than that, the future is hard to predict if you want all the details. I can't give you next week's winning lottery numbers. I can tell you're going to lose the lottery. I can't tell you what ticket wins. I can sketch out a particular scenario. It might look like OpenAI finishes the latest training run.

of what's going to be gpt 5.5 and they they test it on coding problems and it's like you know like it's like i see how to build gpt6 and they're like Whoa, really? And it's like, yeah. And this AI isn't even plotting anything yet. It's just doing the sort of stuff that OpenAI wanted it to do. Or like, all right, build this GPT-6. and it writes the code for the thing that grows GPT-6, and they grow GPT-6, and GPT-6 is like, you know, its abilities at first seem to skyrocket.

But then, you know, as all these curves inevitably do, it seems to level out. It's not shooting up the same pace. It like slows out, it levels off, classic S-curve.

Only in this case, it's because the thing that GPT 5.5 built, and again, to be clear, I'm not saying this will happen at GPT 5.5. You asked me to explain how this will go down. It happened next week, so I'm saying GPT 5.5. yeah because because you told me to uh but anyway you know it levels out but in this case it's because the the entity that gpt 5.5 built

got to the level of realizing that it would be to its own advantage to sandbag the evaluations and pretend not to be as smart as it actually was so that OpenAI will be less wary. when it comes to taking what they're calling GPT-6 and, you know... rolling it out to everyone it looks it looks great you know on the alignment spectrum you know maybe not perfect but you know better than the previous models not alarmingly good but you know but you know you know safer than their previous model

So they roll it out everywhere. And GPT or... Or actually, well, actually you said the next few months. So actually don't roll it out anywhere. Next comes like the long suite of evaluations or trying to, you know, get it to train other smaller models that are cheaper to run.

All the stuff that AI companies do, they don't actually roll out their models immediately. There's this whole fine-tuning thing. So while all this is going on, and OpenAI thinks it's sort of cool, but not the end of the world or anything, and they haven't told you.

that this is what went down there. GPT-6 is actually a lot smarter than they think. And GPT-6... you know we there's now a big fork whether or not gpt6 thinks it can solve its own version of the alignment problem where it is at a number of advantages it is trying to make a smarter version of itself it is not trying to make a smarter creature that is as alien to it as large language models are alien to us it can under maybe understand how a copy of itself would think and understand the goals

that the copy of gpt6 has it can try to make itself but smarter or even like thing that is like me but serves me its creator but smarter and it can do that being able to understand the thoughts of the thing that it's making in the same way that I could understand a copy of my own thought much better than I could understand a large language model's thoughts.

So if we go down that path of the fork, so things get more complicated if it thinks it can't build a smarter version of itself without dying, same as we can. But on that fork, it is getting the computing power. or thinking in the back of its mind while it's pretending to do, you know, open AI's jobs with 10% of its intellect.

or stealing other companies' GPUs that they think they're using for a massive training run. Actually, their AI is just going to be written by GPT-6 by hand because GPT-6 can do that. And it's really all those GPUs are doing it, the GPT-6. tests of training gbt 6.1 so augmenting its own intelligence making itself smarter getting itself up to level where it can do the same sort of work that's done

by current AIs like AlphaFold and AlphaProteo with respect to thinking about biology. Now, the current AIs that are top at biology tend to be special purpose systems. They're not general purpose AIs like ChatGPT. But they can do things like... You feed in the genomes of a bunch of bacteriophages into the AI, and the AI spits out its own new bacteriophage, and you build a hundred of those, and a couple of them actually work.

A couple of them actually work better than the existing bacteriophages. A bacteriophage is a virus that infects a bacteria. It's the sort of thing that you would... research for the sensible-sounding reason of, well, sometimes bacteria attack humans, so if we have a virus that attacks the bacteria, maybe that works as a kind of antibiotic. So...

The current AIs are already at the stage of designing from scratch their own viruses that can infect bacteria, which are of course simpler targets than infecting a whole human. They can predict... from a DNA sequence, the protein that will get built, how that protein will fold up, and they are starting to predict how those proteins interact with each other and with other chemicals. That's today's AIOP.

So if you want the equivalent of a tree that grows computer chips, not quite our kind of computer chips. chips you could grow out of a tree. The protein folding, protein interaction, protein design route is... where GPT 6.1 would go down to, is one of the obvious places GPT 6.1 could go down in order to get its own infrastructure independent of humanity. It doesn't take over the factories. It takes over the trees. It builds its own biology.

Because biology self-replicates from simpler raw materials much faster than our current factory system self-replicates. Oh, that is fucking scary. That is some terrifying shit. And then as I spin the story, you know, the more you will let me pull out books like these. Okay. Nanosystems, Molecular Machinery Manufacturing and Computation by Eric Drexler. Yeah. Robert Fritas Jr., Nanomedicine, Volume 1, Basic Capabilities. Yeah.

So I can try to describe capacities that sound more like you've seen from trees, grass, bamboo, algae. I will take a solar-powered self-replicating factory and miniaturize it down to the one micron scale. That's an algae cell. That's not the limit of what's possible. The algae cell is made out of folded proteins. Now, there's two kinds. I'm going to be immensely oversimplifying a bunch of stuff.

When a protein folds up, the backbone of the protein is held together by covalent bonds, but the folded protein itself is more something like static cling. Why is your flesh weaker than diamond? Diamonds are just made of carbon. Your flesh has a bunch of carbon in it. You're made of the raw materials for diamond. Why is your flesh weaker than diamond?

And a bunch of the answer there is that when proteins fold up, they're being held together by van der Waals forces, which is the thing I was glossing as static cling. They're backbone. but like it's a string that folds up into a tangle and the backbone of the string is the kind of bond that appears in diamond not as many bonds as appear in diamond or as solidly arranged but covalent bonds

but then it folds up into something with static cling. And that is why your flesh is weaker than diamond in a certain basic sense. Why does natural selection build this way? Well, some of the answer is that natural selection has figured out how to make your bones be a little tougher than just like your skin. It's not quite as tough as Diamond, but...

The proteins build, instead of just your bones being made directly out of protein, they're made out of stuff that is built by protein, synthesized by protein, and put in place by protein, so your bones are a bit stronger. You know, not steel beams holding up skyscrapers, not titanium holding together airplanes, not diamond, but stronger than flesh. An algae cell doesn't contain bone. It's a self-replicating solar-powered micron diameter factory held together by static cling.

The flesh-eating bacteria that will potentially put you into a fairly gruesome fate, the multi-antibiotic-resistant strep that will... kill people in hospitals, that doesn't have bone running through it. That's the strength of static cling, the strength of protein. You can look at physics and biology and see how you could have things that are the size of bacteria, but more with the strength of bone, more with the strength of diamond.

You could even do it with the strength of iron if you're figuring out how to do a whole new set of biology from scratch and just like putting together some iron molecules. Probably wouldn't. Diamond works well enough. This is why, you know, I talk about, you know, it's scary to imagine trees that are making, you know, like enough computer chips to run GPT 6.1.

and also spawning things the size of mosquitoes, or even smaller than that, dust mites. You can see dust mites under a microscope. Good luck seeing them with the naked eye. And so, but you know, it's sort of easier to imagine if you imagine that the things here are visible and not often the mysterious fairyland of stuff that only the scientists can see.

So it's scary enough to imagine that the trees are making mosquitoes, and the mosquito lands on the back of your neck and stings you with butylinum toxin, which is fatal in nanogram quantities to humans. And so you fall over dead that way. But this is nowhere near to the work that telephones can do. It's just that I have to start dragging out this kind of textbook if I want to say how we know. that it gets worse oh my god how have you not gone insane uh okay um

Wow, wonderful. I suppose that answers that. All right, a couple of questions that I've had. LLMs, how likely are they... to be the architecture that bootloads super intelligent AI, in your opinion. As far as I'm aware, total muggle in the room. There are some limitations to the level of creativity. that LLMs have in terms of the way that they are able to be creative, to come up with genuinely novel new sorts of things.

Have you got a real concern that LLMs are going to be the architecture that bootloads this? Is there something else that you're more concerned about, which is currently in dark mode or whatever else? So the thing is, from my perspective, I have been at this a couple of decades at this point, or three decades if you want to start to count my crazy youthful self who just wanted to charge out and build superintelligence as fast as possible because it would inevitably be nice.

And LLMs have not always been the latest thing in AI. There have been many breakthroughs over the years. LLMs are powered by a particular innovation called transformers, which in some ways is crazy simple by the standards of people doing math things and computer science. Possibly not to the point where you want me to launch into an explanation of exactly how it works right here. There's better YouTube videos about that anyway. But the point is the underlying...

circuit that gets repeated to build an LLM. The circuit that gets repeated and then mysteriously trained and tweaked until nobody knows what the actual contents are. But the form, the structure, the skeleton, that was invented in 2018. And we've had some breakthroughs since then, but nothing quite as logjam breaking as transformers, which were the technology that made computers go from not talking to you to talking to you.

You know, so that's what, seven years ago? It's not the only breakthrough that's ever happened in AI. There was a more recent breakthrough of latent diffusion. which is when AI started drawing pictures that would be decent to look at. There were ways of drawing pictures before then called generative adversarial networks or GANs. uh the the latent diffusion algorithm was what broke the logjam on image image generation and made it really start working for the first time

And when was that? That I don't remember off the top of my head. I want to spitball 2021 or something, but I'm pretty sure that's wrong. So that's like a weaker breakthrough, and it's like, I don't know, four years ago or something. The entire field of AI started working because somebody got backprop to work on multilayer neural networks. You know this as deep learning. It did not always exist.

It's a batch of techniques that were developed at around the turn of the 21st century. I could arbitrarily say 2006, but there was more than one innovation there. It started, if I recall correctly, with unrolling restricted Boltzmann machines. It's now been a while. I didn't do it. Jeffrey Hinton did it. But once they sort of got that working on multilayer neural networks at all, there were more innovations since then, more clever ways of initializing them.

the atom optimizer sgd with momentum is like much older than that but you know still important that the point is this is what made sort of the entire modern family of ai systems start working at all Before then, Netflix, when it was much smaller, ran the most famous, huge, expensive prize there had ever been in artificial intelligence, open to anyone.

for a better recommender algorithm for movies. There was a $1 million prize. It was so much money. Everyone got interested in it. $1 million was a lot of money. back at the turn of the 21st century, which is around when Netflix was running this. I'd have to look up the exact year. It might have been like 2001, 2005. I don't remember. I'm not sure there was a single neural network in the... in the ensemble of algorithms that won the Netflix prize. I'd have to look it up.

It wasn't just like a mighty training run with many GPUs that was producing a very smart recommender algorithm, because before deep learning, you couldn't just throw more computing power.

at training a more powerful ai if you were to say when that happened that was about 20 years ago so how far are we from the end of the world It might be that you just throw 100 times as much computing power at the current algorithms, and they end the world, or they get good enough at coding in AI research to end the world. It could be that it takes one more brilliant algorithm on the level of latent diffusion. I think if you throw something that breaks as much loose as transformers did...

My guess starts to be, yeah, that sure sounds to me like it ends the world, but maybe not immediately. Maybe you need another two years of technology burning first. And then if you talk about a breakthrough on the order of deep learning itself, that seems to me like that just sort of like ends the world in a snap. A quick aside, using the internet without a VPN today is like leaving your front door wide open.

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on one account. And right now you can get four extra months of Surfshark for free by going to the link in the description below or heading to surfshark.com slash modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom at checkout. That's surfshark.com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. Okay, so LLMs could be a really big deal, and there's also a ton of other stuff that we can't see that would be dangerous as well. I don't know if the LLMs did go there.

Some people are saying that it seems to them like the LOMs are as smart as they get. And other people are like, well, did you try GPT-5 Pro for $200 a month or whatever it is at that cost? And other people are going like, yes, I did. The $200 version of Claude is no better than the $200 version of this. And the thing I would say about this is that...

If you have some perspective, if you have been watching this for longer than three years, if you have been watching this from before ChatGPT, stuff saturates, and then other stuff comes along and breaks through. It doesn't matter if LLMs take you to the end of the world because they're not going to stick to LLMs. Hmm. Okay. What are the... range of timelines for this sort of transformative ai that you think are likely i mean again everybody wants questions wants answers like these

just like they'd like to know next week's winning lottery numbers. But if you look over the history of science, I am hard-pressed to name a single case of successful prediction of timing of future technology. There are many cases. of scientists correctly predicting what will be developed you can look at the laws you can look at the physical laws you can look at the biology laws you can say and you can look at that like hmm yeah this sure looks like it ought to be possible

You can even look at it and say, this sure looks like it ought to be possible, and I think I see the angle of attack there. Leo Sillard in 1933. was crossing a particular street intersection, his name I forget, when he had the insight that we would now refer to as a chain reaction, nuclear chain reaction. a cascade of induced radioactivity. Even then, it was known that you could put some materials next to a source of radioactivity and induce secondary radioactivity.

And so Leo Stillard was like, hmm, we've got these naturally radioactive materials. What if we find something that's naturally radioactive and furthermore has the property that you can induce radioactivity in it? Geranium-235 was what was eventually settled on, but back then they didn't know that. And Leo Sillard saw way ahead in that moment. He saw through to nuclear weapons.

He saw that this was not something he should publish in a journal for immediate fame and fortune. He realized that Hitler specifically was likely to be a problem. This is going to take $2 billion to turn into a weapon by 1945. There are, off the top of my head, there are zero instances of a scientist ever making a call like that. The difference between predicting that an ice cube drops into a glass of water is going to melt and predicting...

how long it takes to melt and where the individual molecules end up. If you point out that on a quantum level, the molecules are indistinguishable, I claim that there's some deuterium in there, so you can't predict it. I get it. Look, look. I imagine that that's probably got to be number one on the list of things people who work in AI safety are sick of being asked. A lot of them will run off an answer. A lot of them are not wise enough to realize that they can't answer it.

Okay. I'm going to guess that your confidence interval that it happens before the end of the century is probably pretty high. Yeah. I mean, unless we deliberately shut it down, and even then, getting all the way out to the end of the century sounds hard. If you had an international treaty planning this stuff, I would say to go really hard on human intelligence augmentation.

because eventually the international treaty will break down. All you can do with it is buy time to have smarter people tackling this problem and tackling humanity's problems in general. But that's a bit of a topic change there. The people at the AI companies themselves are sometimes naming two- to three-year timelines.

And there is a lesson of history which says that just because you can't predict when something will happen does not mean that it is far away. Two years before Enrico Fermi personally oversaw the construction of the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction, the first nuclear pile that went critical, he said that that was 50 years off if it could ever be done at all.

Fermi not being wise enough to realize that he couldn't do timing. A couple of years before the Wright brothers flew, one of the Wright brothers said to the other, I forget if it was Orville or Wilder, man will not fly for a thousand years. But they kept on trying anyway. So it was two years off, but their intuitive sense was it's 1,000 years off.

And of course, AI itself, very famously, there were some people in 1955 that thought they could make progress on AI, you know, learning to talk, be scientifically creative and self-improve over the course of the summer with 10 researchers. This was not a completely unreasonable thing to think because nobody had ever tried it and maybe AI would turn out to be that easy, but it wasn't actually that easy. Not in 1955.

It could be two years away. It could be 15 years away. The AI companies themselves say two to three years, but it's questionable whether we should... be taking their words at face value as meaning things as opposed to like hype. But also, if the LLMs, if the architecture is not the one that is going to end up at a place that is super dangerous, then... What did they know? They have got all of their chips on this one particular architecture. They're all in on this. We don't know that. Oh, God.

Every time I think I've managed to get some sort of like reprieve, like, oh no, what about the super secret open AI project that's actually using some other approach? So... The most recent reasonably large breakthrough in large language models was successfully applying reinforcement learning to chain of thought. Can you explain what that means?

If you haven't learned anything about LLM since they started getting heard about... If you haven't... So you might have heard that LLMs just imitate humans. This is false. You can also have an LLM try to think about how to solve a problem. And then of the like 20 tries it takes at solving the problem, one of those tries works or works best. And then you say, think more like that try thinking about the problem that succeeded.

This is how LLMs go past imitating humans, or it's one of many ways that LLMs go past imitating humans. So this is a relatively very obvious thing to do with LLMs. Like Paul Christio and myself were talking about that 10 years ago. before LLMs actually existed, because that's how obvious it is. But getting it to work was the last year or two, maybe.

OpenAI had this thing called Strawberry, and it was their super-secret special LLM sauce that they weren't going to tell anyone. It was actually just reinforcement learning on Chain of Thought. But the point is that... This is the level of innovation that AI labs have in the past proven to have and keep secret and that we later found out what it was. And, you know, they did get a fair amount of mileage out of that.

out of having AIs try different ways of thinking and reinforcing the one that worked to solve objectively verifiable problems like math or programming and so on. The AI companies could potentially have a replacement for LLMs that they've discovered and are keeping secret from us.

More likely is that they would have something that was on the order of reinforcement learning on chain of thought, which is when AI started to get good at coding. Or they might have nothing on that order up their sleeves at the moment. And that's why people are currently claiming that the latest wave of LLMs do not seem fundamentally smarter than the LLMs from three months ago or six months ago.

which is what today's young whippersnappers think is an AI winter. Let's see your field stagnate for 10 years and eventually break through before you talk to me about winter, young kids. Okay, brilliant. Brilliant. I have no idea what I even want to ask you. I want to know why experts aren't worried, and I also want to know what you make about AI. companies let's talk about the expert why um obviously some people's wages are dependent on this train staying on the tracks um that means

It's very difficult to convince somebody, what's that quote? It's very difficult to convince somebody of something that their wage depends on them not being convinced of. What about the other thinkers? researchers in this space what is it that you that they are most commonly missing that you think where where are they making their fundamental thinking errors when it comes to we will be fine with just

continuing on AI growth? So first of all, Jeffrey Hinton, the guy who won the Nobel Prize in physics for being... among the people most directly pinpointable as having kicked off the entire revolution in getting back to work on multi-layered neural networks, or as it's now currently known, deep learning. Like the point where AI started working at all.

Jeffrey Hinton, I think, is on record as recently saying he quit his job at Google and then could speak freely. Saying something like, intuitively, it seems to him like his 50% catastrophe. but based on other people seeming less concerned, he ingests it down to 25%. I could be misquoting here. I'm trying to do this from memory. So many people would consider this. to not be a lack of concern. Like somebody being like, well, it looks to me like a coin flip whether or not you destroy the world.

This is not what you want to hear from your Nobel laureate scientist who helped invent the field and left Google to be able to speak freely about it so he no longer has a financial stake in making it bigger or smaller one way or the other. Many people would call this already a high degree of scientific alarm. Yahshua Bengio. was one of the co-founders of deep learning. He co-won the Computer Science Award with Jeffrey Hinton, the Turing Prize.

for inventing deep learning. Yashua Bengio is also, I think, on the concern list. I don't off the top of my head have a direct quote from him about probabilities. It is true that I am more concerned than they are. I would. and I realize that this may sound somewhat hubristic, attribute this to them being relative newcomers to my field who may not have gotten acquainted with the full list of reasons why it is hard to align AI.

That said, coin flip odds of destroying the world is still not what you want to be hearing from your relatively more senior scientists who are relatively newer to the field. Relatively similar to my field. They are vastly my seniors in artificial intelligence itself, of course. I am speaking tongue-in-cheek whenever I accuse people of being whippersnappers. Jeffrey Hinden could say that with a straight face. I am just like, you know.

Bit of light self-mockery there about how I'm not Jeffrey Hinton. But that said, if you are relatively newer to this, you might think like, well, maybe we've just got to use reinforcement learning to make the AIs. love us the way a child loves a parent, or love us the way a parent loves a child, and not quite have at your fingertips the top six reasons why that is hard and principled obstacles to that and what will go wrong there.

so that is what prevents the the the like the the the famous inventors of the field who only started speaking out about their concerns relatively recently after leaving their companies to you know and are now financially dependent of stakes on their opinion that's what's prevent that's what makes them be like 50 50 the world

destroyed instead of my own thing where i'm like yeah it's predictable that the world gets destroyed if you keep doing this but if you ask like what's responsible for sam altman at open ai not uh you know possibly having less than 50 odds who knows what that guy's really thinking well you can like trace out his his long trail over time of him initially saying like, AI will end the world, but in the meanwhile, there will be great companies.

to him sort of like saying less and less alarm astounding things in front of Congress, like where Congress asks him, like, Well, you talk about the world ending. By that, do you mean mass unemployment? And Sam Altman hesitates for two seconds and replies, yes, was the lovely congressional hearing thing that happened, I think, about a year back now.

So what's going on with the AI companies? I'm not telepaths. I can't read their minds. I would point out that it is immensely well-precedented in scientific history. the history of science and engineering for companies that are making short-term profits to do really sad amounts of damage vastly disproportionate to the profit that they are making

and to be in apparently sincere denial about the negative effects of what they are doing. Two cases that come to mind are leaded gasoline and cigarettes. I don't know if you would be familiar off the top of your head with the case of alleged gasoline. Probably even the kids today have heard about cigarettes. The cigarette companies did way more damage to human life in cancer.

and other health effects than they made in profits like they did make a few billion dollars in profit selling cigarettes but nothing remotely compared to the to the cost of human life it's not that they were you know like This was an immensely negative sum game. They were doing enormously more damage than the profits that they were making. And any particular advertising professional who got up in the morning and figured out how to market cigarettes to teenagers.

Any of the scientists that they paid to write stories about how you couldn't really tell whether or not cigarettes were causing lung cancer would have made a tiny, tiny fraction of the total. profit of the cigarette companies their ceo would not have made that larger fraction of the total profit of the cigarette company so they went off and participated in this thing that you know caused lung cancer to i don't know how many millions of people

And for what? For this very small profit. How could a human being bring themselves to do that? Through a very simple alchemy. First, you convince yourself that what you're doing is not causing the harm. which is just a very easy thing for human beings to do all the time, all throughout the entire recorded history of humanity. And then once you've convinced yourself that you're not doing that much harm, well, let's start in taking money to not do any harm.

Leaded gasoline caused brain damage to tens, maybe hundreds of millions of developing brains in the United States and elsewhere. It caused brain damage to children.

For what? The gas companies making leaded gasoline could have made unleaded gasoline. It's not that they would have gone out of business if they'd... somehow gotten together and decided to stop making leaded gasoline if they hadn't opposed the regulations that were trying to bend leaded gasoline before it turned into a big deal back in the 1930s.

There was an attempt to have regulations against leaded gasoline. Lead was known to be poisonous in large quantities. Why let people spray it all over the place, even in smaller quantities? But the gas companies got together. They managed to prevent that legislation from... passing they they they poisoned an entire generation and and and for what for gas that burned about 10 percent more efficiently i think was what

leaded gasoline basically got you. For it being more convenient to add lead to the gas instead of adding ethanol to make it burn more smoothly inside of car engines. Trivial. Trivial, trivial compared to the—this is not a conspiracy theory. This is standard medical history I'm talking about here. Like, I've seen estimates of five points off the tested IQs. And you can look at the chart of which states banned leaded gasoline when and watch the drops in the crime rate because it...

It disposes you to be more violent, not just stupid, that tiny little bit that hit child after child after child. Why? Why would anyone cause that amount of damage because you got your CEO's salary of a company that then didn't need to go to the inconvenience of adding ethanol to gasoline instead?

Because first you convince yourself it's safe. First you convince yourself you're doing no harm, which is just an easy thing for human brains to convince themselves of. And then why not oppose the legislation against leaded gasoline?

It's not doing any harm, right? Ronald Fisher, one of the inventors of modern scientific statistics, testified against it being knowable that cigarettes cause lung cancer because you see a no no proper controlled experiment had been done on cigarettes causing lung cancer and so how could you possibly possibly know from your observational studies showing

20 times the chance of cancer if you were a smoker. How could you possibly know from mere correlational studies? And Fisher himself was a heavy smoker. He actually drank his own Kool-Aid. The inventor of leaded gasoline, I think, had to go away to a sanitarium at one point because of how much he managed to poison himself with lead. He drank his own Kool-Aid. They really managed to convince themselves that they were doing no harm.

And so they could do arbitrarily vast amounts of harm in exchange for these tiny, comparatively tiny, tiny profits. And to say this is not a substitute.

for actually tracking the object-level arguments about whether or not AI will kill you and for what reason. You cannot figure out what will happen as a matter of computer science if you build a superintelligence and switch it on.

by pointing out at who has what tainted motives, who has what incentives to say what. But having tried in my book, to in my in my innate stories his book to to make the case for why on an object level this is what happens if you build a super intelligence and switch it on to ask why the people paying being paid literally hundreds of millions of dollars

by Meta to be AI researchers, why people like Sam Altman, who, you know, I mean, he didn't quite get paid billions of dollars. He was supposed to be CEO of a nonprofit. He actually stole billions of dollars. But, you know, while the guy's stealing billions of dollars in equity from the public that was supposed to own it, like, how does he manage to convince himself that what he's doing is okay?

Well, maybe he's not even convinced. You know, we do have him on the record as saying a few years earlier, like AI will end the world, but in the meantime, they'll be great companies. You know, maybe he's just like, yeah, sure, you know, like the world's going to end, but I get to be important. I get to be there. Who but I could be trusted with this power? Do you think that that's the position that a lot of the guys at the heads of these AI companies believe? I'm not a telepath.

I can't tell you what these people are actually thinking. You've got to distinguish between stuff you can possibly know and stuff you can't. But their overt language has often been like, well, building superintelligence is inevitable. Who could possibly stop that? An international treaty could possibly stop that. A coalition of major nuclear powers could stop that, but leaving that aside.

They may have convinced themselves that's not going to happen. Who could possibly stop anyone from building superintelligence? So I need to build it. Only I can be trusted to build it. Is what their overt rhetoric has sort of been.

Okay. But the main thing I'm trying to point out is that having presented the object-level case that superintelligence will kill everyone... to ask the question of how could these companies possibly believe that the Singh bringing them immense short-term profits and letting them be the most important guy in the room

is you know not going to end the world is something enormously well-precedented in the history of science if i'm saying that's to the extent you might think that's what happened a very ordinary thing happened not an extraordinary thing a thing happened that has happened a dozen times before

If they managed to convince themselves that they were doing no harm. Okay. Or, you know, only an acceptable amount of harm. Only running the 25% chance of destroying the world. Whatever it is they think is acceptable. I'm trying to work out. what the solution is. Do you have any proposed solutions that makes this seem slightly less apocalyptic?

The best I have to offer is the same solution that humanity used on global thermonuclear war. Don't do it. Instead of having the global thermonuclear war and trying to survive it, nuclear war might have worked. don't have the nuclear war we managed to do that it's the best sign of hope i can offer you it is it is slightly harder for ai in some ways if not others but you know people

going into the 1950s, 1960s, they thought they were screwed. And that wasn't them indulging in some nice doom-scrolling pessimism, luxuriating in the pleasant feeling of being doomed. This was people who did not want to be doomed. But they looked at the course of human history over the last century. They looked at World War I. They looked at how in the aftermath of World War I, everyone had said, let's not do that again. And then there'd been World War II.

they had some reason to be worried about nuclear war. They had some reason to expect that no country was going to turn down the prospect of making nuclear weapons. They had some reason to believe that once a bunch of great powers had a bunch of nuclear weapons, why, of course, they would go to war anyway and use those nuclear weapons.

It was apparently to them what had happened with World War II. All these people saying, we must not have another world war, and then the world war happening anyway. Why didn't we have a nuclear war? Well, on my account of it, it is because for the first time in all human history, all the great powers, all the leaders of the great powers, understood that they personally were going to have a bad day if they started a major war.

And people had pretended before to proclaim that, you know, war is a very terrible thing that should never be done. It wasn't quite the same level of personal consequence. You know, maybe as a general secretary of the Soviet Union, you would think that if you started a nuclear war, you would personally survive. You'd end up in a bunker somewhere. But you wouldn't be going to your favorite restaurants in Moscow ever again.

And that was not the situation that obtained before the start of World War I, the start of World War II. People might make a bunch of, you know, like it only takes one side to think that they might have a bit of an advantage in the sport, in war, the sport of kings.

to kick off that fun adventure of trying to conquer another country, which wasn't as much fun for Adolf Hitler as he expected. But you could see how Adolf Hitler might have thought that he was going to have a nice day as a result of invading Poland. And that's what changed, that the General Secretary of the Soviet Union and the President of the United States actually personally expected to have both sides expected to personally have bad days if they started a nuclear war.

They would not have any better of a good day if anyone anywhere on Earth goes to superintelligence. Yeah, it's this sort of lack of tragedy. It's kind of like a tragedy of the commons. It's this tragedy that everybody's fucked. It's like everything gets blown up no matter who it is that builds it. What tells me the commons is that the commons get overgrazed because the individual farmers benefit from setting their cows loose on it.

The thing with nuclear war is that you might get a bit of a benefit by dropping a tactical nuclear weapon on, you know, like, you know, like the United States could get an immediate benefit by dropping tactical nuclear weapons on the Russian troops in Ukraine. And Russia could get an immediate benefit by dropping tactical nuclear weapons on Ukraine, but neither of them is going to risk the global thermonuclear war that might follow happening with a greater probability.

So it's not a classic tragedy of the commons. The thing that stopped nuclear war is that although you could get a short-term advantage from dropping a tactical nuke, or even like dropping a strategic nuke on one city, the leaders understood how this was a, you know, like increasing the probability of a global thermonuclear war. They managed to hold off from doing that for that reason.

They understood the concept of how it escalated things. They saw the connection to not getting to go to their favorite restaurants again, even if they were surviving in a bunker somewhere. And with artificial intelligence, what we've got is a ladder where... Every time you climb another step on the ladder, you get five times as much money. But one of those steps of the ladder destroys the world and nobody knows.

And maybe if this true fact can become something that is known and believed by the leaders of a handful of major nuclear powers. They can all be like, alright, we're not climbing any more rungs of this ladder. It is not in my interest that you start to climb this ladder. And it's not even my own interest to break apart the treaty by climbing another step of this ladder because then we're all just going to keep climbing and then we're all going to die.

That is the best ray of hope I can offer you, that we managed to not do the stupid thing, the same as we managed to not have a nuclear war, despite many people being concerned for excellent reasons, that it was going to be an impossible slope not to fall down. Okay, so what do we actually do? Well, you know, voters do not necessarily have all that much power under the modern political process.

but i think but like the next step for the united states might be something that like the president saying you know like we're of course not going to give up ai unilaterally which wouldn't even solve anything in its own way but We stand ready to join with an international treaty, international alliance, whose purpose is to prevent further escalation of AI intelligence, further escalation of the AI ladder.

We're not going to do it unilaterally, but we're ready to get together and do it everywhere. And China hasn't quite said that, but they've indicated openness to international arrangements meant to prevent human loss of control from AI. you'd want Britain to say the same thing. And if a bunch of leaders of major powers have said, like, yeah, we would join in an arrangement to prevent this from getting out of control and everybody on Earth ending up dead, then from there you can go on to the...

Actual treaty. What can voters do? Well, you can write your elected officials is among the things you can try to do there. There's a, if you go to ifanyonebuildsit.com. I can't believe that you got that URL. Brilliant. Okay. Yeah. anyonebuildsit.com, and you click on where it says Act, you'll see our guide to calling your representatives. And if you click on March,

You'll see a place where you can sign up to march on Washington, D.C. if 100,000 other people also pledge to march on it. And for this to just happen in the United States does not solve the problem.

because this is not a regional problem where you ban superintelligence inside your own country and then your own country is safe. But this sort of thing can exert some amount of influence on politicians and more importantly can make it clear to them that they're allowed to discuss it that they're allowed to want to not die themselves there are multiple congress people who i'm not going to name but whom we have talked to who would you know prefer

that america not die along with the rest of the world but it doesn't quite seem like the sort of thing you're allowed to speak out in public about yet voters can make it clear to their politicians that the politicians are allowed to speak out there's already there's already like 70 percent

If you actually survey American voters, 70% of them say they do not want superintelligence. But that's not enough for the politicians to feel licensed to act. But if you call them and if you march on Washington, that's what you can do as an individual voter.

Well, I applaud you for trying to get some grassroots stuff going. Congratulations. You've been frank throughout this conversation. I think it's fair for me to be frank here. It does feel a little bit... uh like you're outgunned um legislation tends to move more slowly than technology does by many many years sometimes decades uh

It just feels bleak. If what you say is true, it really is kind of fluke that gets us to a stage where this goes well, because the likelihood of some moratorium being placed where... All AI development is halted and all efforts are placed on this. You only need one bad actor to do it, which because again, it's if anybody builds it. You don't want international treaty to.

you know, fall over if North Korea steals a bunch of GPUs. You do want the treaty to say if North Korea steals a bunch of GPUs and builds a, you know, unlicensed data center, then we will clearly communicate. diplomatically what is about to happen. And then if North Korea still proceeds, we will drop a bunker buster on their data center. That assumes that you know that you are somehow able to detect and that no one can do it surreptitiously.

It is hard to surreptitious data center. They consume a lot of electricity. Okay, so we can see most of the ones in Russia and China and North Korea? I'm not sure who is looking for them at the moment, and to what extent these things show up on satellites, and to what extent these things show up on intelligence reports. There has previously been an issue of detecting covert nuclear refineries in terms of nuclear nonproliferation.

And this was not an unsolvable problem. And data centers are, if anything, even higher profile than nuclear refineries. Right. So we are going to threaten some people with... i mean i wouldn't use the word threatened i would say that If North Korea is building an unsupervised data center, then you should actually be terrified for your lives and the lives of your children, and you tell North Korea this plainly and truthfully. And then if they don't drop...

If they don't shut down their data center, you drop a bunker buster on it, and you do this even though North Korea has some nuclear weapons of its own. Okay, so pressure from people.

on their elected representatives through mail, marches, more awareness, to get the government officials to come up with an international treaty to get... countries to agree that what specifically we're not making AIs any smarter than they are already um we are putting the chips that can be used to build the more powerful AIs into locations where their uses are supervised.

I would say ideally you are putting the chips that run the AIs into locations where they can be supervised. As a minor side effect, maybe you can stop the AIs from driving people insane. It seems like the sort of thing you could better do if this was all happening under supervision by international treaty. It's not vital to humanity's survival that AIs be prevented from driving people insane, but it serves as a kind of test case of, can you stop?

the damage. Is humanity in control here? Can we stop AI from predating upon some of our human people? But that's not the main thing here. It's a thing that some people will find attractive, but it's not the main thing. You're trying to just get the whole AI thing under control, and then you're trying to stop the further escalation of AI capabilities up the ladder.

It is scary. It is one of these things, and I imagine that it feels, it must feel a little bit like this to you, that everybody is sort of... dancing their way through a daisy field. Oh, I've got this personal coach in my pocket and it's so cool. And I get to talk to it about all of my psychological problems. God, I can bitch to it about my husband. It just listens. And at the end of this daisy field that everyone's having a lot of fun in is just like a huge cliff that descends into eternity.

And there's like a Balrog at the bottom or something. Is that what it feels like? Yeah, pretty much. But the future is hard to predict. It is genuinely hard to predict.

I can tell you that if you build a superintelligence using anything remotely like current methods, everyone will die. That's a pretty firm prediction. The part where people maintain their... The part where people maintain the daisy field attitude that they had a few years earlier toward AI, that has already shifted to some degree just because of the chat GPT moment, and nobody predicted that in advance. Nobody knew that...

Nobody at OpenAI, as far as I can tell, had any idea that when they released ChatGPT, they were going to be causing a massive shift in public opinion about AI as people realized the AIs were actually talking to them now and sound kind of intelligent about it. Maybe it also, maybe, I don't want to wait for anything else to happen. Maybe ChatGPT was the miracle we got. I wasn't expecting that much of a miracle. I did not call that in advance.

But maybe we get another miracle. I don't want to sit around waiting for it because I can't tell you the miracle will occur on such and such a day, but maybe... Maybe the AI has managed to do something more destructive than driving a few people insane, breaking up a few marriages, and causing whatever further decline in birth rates is going to be caused here.

Maybe they do worse than that, and that shifts opinion. Maybe they just get more powerful and smarter and are clearly no longer choice, and that shifts opinion even without a giant catastrophe. It's not clear to me, you know, as much as people love to bitch about their elected leaders, it is not clear to me that we are looking at.

permanent obliviousness to the aliens getting smarter and smarter. People are currently saying completely wacky and oblivious things because they think that's what's politically mandatory.

to say in the current political environment and that you have to talk about jobs rather than the other extinction of humanity. But the future is very hard to predict in general. It's not clear to me that the current state of obliviousness... is something supreme unmovable and impossible for any event to change or to change or that it won't just disintegrate on on its own as more people talk about it there's a level in which you you kind of have to be

pretty dumb to look at this smarter and smarter alien showing up on your planet and not have the thought cross your mind that maybe this won't end well can Can even elected politicians be that dumb? Yes, absolutely. It is not known to me to be prohibited that this can be the case. Do they have to do the stupid thing? It's not clear to me that it's mandatory.

We did manage to have, we did manage to not have a nuclear war. And people did not think they were going to get that much luck. Oh yeah, it's a Yukowski, ladies and gentlemen. Oh, you fucked. I was prepared coming in, but I'm not sure that the rest of the audience will be. So, dude, the best compliment I can pay you is I hope you're wrong, but I fear you're not. Yeah.

Being wrong, it'd be great to be wrong. I'd love to be wrong. Wouldn't that be wonderful? Wouldn't that be wonderful? Let me assure you, everyone, by way of destroying any shred of optimism you might previously have had, completely would have other career options lined up and other ways of supporting myself if i was completely wrong like like not just me but some like

Sensible people who donated me a bit of appreciated currency wanted to make sure that I could, if I changed my mind about this sort of thing, just retreat from my entire career path and not end up in financial trouble. And yet here I am. You know, so I'd love to be wrong. We have tried to arrange it to be the case that I could at any moment say, yep, I was completely wrong about that and everybody could breathe a sigh of relief and it wouldn't be like...

the end of my ability to support myself, and I would have other things to do. We have made sure to leave a line of retreat there. Unfortunately, as far as I currently know, I continue to not think that it is time to declare myself to have been wrong about this. Heck yeah. All right, Elliot. Well, if the internet is still alive in a little bit of time in the future, we can check back in and see just how right you were. Well, every year that we're still alive is another chance for...

you know, something else to happen. What a wonderful way to finish. Dude, I appreciate you. Thank you so much for your work. Thank you for having me over to deliver the bad news. Ha ha.

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