#2525 - Nick Bostrom

>> The Joe Rogan experience.

>> Train my day Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. [MUSIC] >> It's great to see you again. >> Yeah, good to see you. >> So since the last time we talked,

we spent a lot of time where you were trying to explain to me simulation theory and why the probability of simulation theory is more likely than it not being simulation.

“>> Yeah, it was five years ago, I think it was six or six.”

I mean a lot of things happened in the world since done. >> Yes, yes, a lot of things. I mean, for example, back then, I think we did we even talk about AI. >> I probably came up a bit, but it was not like that. >> It wasn't, it wasn't this thing looming over civilization,

which is really kind of fascinating when you think about the fact that it's only been six years and in six years, like what a massive jump in some new technology in our life, like just sort of like the internet where like crept up on us, we just accepted that it's a thing.

But this thing has gotten massively entangled in every aspect of society and every aspect of people's lives in a very short period of time, yeah, I mean, things are like so much as happening now, that is kind of a full-time job just to monitor this situation. >> Yeah, and one of the things that you're talking about

is the positive aspect of it, right? You're talking about, like this is probably going to be a net good

“for humanity, hopefully, I think I take both cases seriously,”

the risk side and the big unlock, if we get things right. >> I feel like we have the potential, like we're on a white water raft, we have the potential to get to our destination, but we also have the potential to flip over and try to figure out how to get to shore and freezing cold water and sort of rebuild.

>> Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. >> That seems about right, yeah, yeah, yeah, and it seems like it's kind of speeding up a bit as well, right, if you're sort of in this field, there's like every few weeks, there's a new model being released or something, I guess it's like, if you imagine, I guess,

commentating some fight, right, that's been recorded and you're supposed

to do the voiceover, the first round is like normal speed,

then the second round is 2x, and then the third on 4x, and it's just like a word of legs and arms, that's a great way to describe it. >> Yeah, it's just so strange how quickly it's not up on us, and there's two narratives that we hear, the one narrative is wearing real trouble, and that this thing is going to take over every aspect of society and

essentially going to be a superior life force, a superior intellect that exists amongst us that we created, and we don't think that's wise. And then there's the other side that is saying things like what Elon says, where he's saying we're going to have universal high income, it's going to be so much prosperity that no one's ever going to have to toil again,

there'll be no more third world countries, there'll be no more poverty. Like we can eradicate poverty with the resources that we have on earth, and we can change what it means to have to work. Like just to provide yourself with food and housing, that's all going to be easy and free, and then everything else is going to be

“you have to find a purpose in your life. My problem is, and I love Elon,”

but the people who have that perspective are all making money off AI. They are all invested, like Evelie, Mark and Jason, all these people that have this rosy view of it, they're all invested heavily into it. So when someone like you who's not necessarily in that camp, you know, that is more of a true objective analyst of what's going on,

when you have a positive aspect or a positive viewpoint of it, I get a little more excited.

Yeah, well, I mean, the truth is we don't know right how it goes.

I think there are these scenarios where we unlock this enormous boost, both to economic productivity, but then you know across medicine, entertainment, environment, travel, all kinds of things, and like a tsunami of wealth just kind of flows through and lifts all boats. And then the idea of human work becomes an anacronism

and where you have machines that can do everything that we can do physically and mentally and do it much better and cheaper. And so I think in those scenarios where this really works, the transformation is a lot deeper.

like the most superficial level is, well, they ultimate your jobs and what are people going to do for that kind of work?

Well, that comes a little bit deeper first.

Like the most superficial level is people just wonder where we'll like get the job if the work replaces me. And then the superficial level of that conversation, I think,

“as well, you need to retrain workers so they can work in other fields”

and maybe they need to be, I don't know, employment insurance, while they are being retrained or something like that. But once you think through where this ultimate leads, you think like it's not just a few jobs, I think, but it's really everything that humans can do to a good approximation.

We may be the exception being where the consumer has a direct preference that the particular product or service be done by human, like priest, prostitute, and politician. So those might survive. Well, politician, hopefully not.

Hopefully AI can handle that all without any corruption.

Yeah, but somebody's going to take credits for it. This is true and code it. Yeah. It's, um, and so then then you get to these like more profound questions. I think about meaning and purpose.

And like what does a human life look like at technological maturity? Right. Also, what is experience? Does experience have to be measurable? Like, can you have to touch it?

Do you have to measure it in a way? Or is virtual experience still experience? Like, if you have a very full and enjoyable and fulfilling virtual life, is that enough? You don't know me?

“Like, do you have to do everything in the material world?”

Or can you find happiness in a virtual world that doesn't currently exist?

But we could clearly see the technology if it expands. It's going to, there's going to be the possibility of experiencing a matrix type reality. Yeah, I think I see where you are going. Yeah, but yeah, I mean, I think like different strokes for different folks.

If you imagine a world where presumably these virtual worlds will be very rich and deep and fascinating, but some people might just like the idea of, you know, climping the real Mount Everest rather than, you know, being in most certainly. But however, there could come a time where people are locked out of regular reality. Like, this is worst case scenario with AI.

Is that you, you have your needs taken care of, but there is no purpose. There's nothing to do. There's nothing to do because AI is taking care of all aspects of society. Other than recreation, there's nothing to do. And then this one recreation comes along, that's not reality,

but it's way more fulfilling and exciting than any other aspect of reality. And, you know, an example that would just be in a very minor way, your phone provides you with that sort of an escape. And it's not even that thrilling, and yet it's massively addictive. Your phone, people are on their phones six hours a day.

Yeah. If we come up with a virtual reality that's way more exciting than regular reality, everyone's going to hop on in.

“Yeah, I mean, I think to some extent this will maybe be the case,”

whether you go of the virtual path or the physical paths. I mean, you could imagine a future where there are like a resort. Some people are sort of lying in beach chairs. Yeah, it brings all day long. And like that's also a kind of checking out, right?

Yeah, well, that's not fulfilling. You know, the thing about a virtual reality is you don't have to even live within our physics. I mean, you can fly. You can do anything.

It's a larger space of possibilities. But either way, it could be like a passive existence in physical reality, where you're like launching at the beach. Or it could be like a visitor. In video games, like you could have a really intense,

every straining, every fiber, try to succeed in this virtual environment, or like one where you're just kind of floating on some cloud in a drug-like state. But I don't think people are going to be interested in that, because just the way the human mind works. Like, what kind of video games are people attracted to?

It's because a video game is essentially a proxy. It's an approximation of that. You're just watching it on a screen, but you're sort of forgetting the fact that you're watching it on a screen. You're just concentrating on this 3D reality that you're running through with a machine gun,

or whatever you're doing, right? That's what people are interested in. They're not interested in these games. We just like float over the earth and like fly and just eat bananas. No, they're interested in thrilling things.

And if that gets provided in a virtual way, the amount of people that are going to just say, this is better than regular boring life, or where a slave to a computer. Yeah, I mean, they're both kind of, okay, we're back.

Oh, yeah, I was just saying that there are also these computer games that provide a more passive experience.

“Yeah, like not really doing much, and it's more kind of zoning out.”

But most people aren't interested in those. Most people are interested in Call of Duty.

They're interested in these wild first-person shooters

where you're running down hallways and everything's exciting and throwing it. Some sci-fi game, or have life, something like that. You ask what people are interested in. Yeah, well, I mean, I think there are like some personality differences in what path you would take there.

But either way, I think a lot of the choices that people would make, currently, depend on what they are designed to respond to by feeling good about it. So if you enjoy one thing, you choose to start. If you enjoy another one, in this condition of technological maturity,

if we might have a future civilization that has developed all possible technologies to their maximum. Yeah. Then amongst the Fordis, amongst the things they could do, is that they wouldn't just have control over the external environment,

things around them, but also their own biology and brains. So if you were one of these people, and maybe right now,

“the only way you get enjoyment is by, in our getting crazy drunk,”

or doing things you don't really approve of, maybe, but that's actually what lights your fire. You could imagine redesigning yourself to take the same kind of pleasure, but in some kind of contemplating the beauty of the universe, or like appreciating the goodness in the heart of others,

or like some more sort of noble aspiration,

like a solving abstract mathematics, rather than playing first-person shooters.

You would have a choice when you would get your thrills from one kind of activity or the other. Yeah, which brings us to the question, like, what does it mean to be human? Like for people finding beauty and joy,

and interesting and fascinating things and how to be a better person, and all the different aspects of human life that we think about when we think about people, we think about noble aspects of humanity, but doesn't that have to exist in conjunction

with the worst aspects of society for us to appreciate it? It seems like this is a part of the human condition is that we have to have crime so that we can appreciate peace. We have to have war so we can appreciate peace. We have to have hate so we can appreciate love,

and we're never without one or the other.

They're always both together in constant conflict and we're always nobly hoping that the good winds out over the bad. And this is part of the struggle of being a human being, and if we just completely eliminate that struggle, we're going to have to find some,

we're going to have to be a different thing, because what we are is this very strange territorial primate and who's endlessly curious. And this territorial primate is moving in a certain direction, and that direction seems to be a better society,

seems to be over time. If you look at statistics from thousands of years ago to today, there's less violence, there's better medicine, there's better education, it's moving in a better and better and better direction.

But it's in a struggle that's part of why it moves. If all of a sudden there's no struggle, and everyone is this wonderful and light and being, like, what are we? 'Cause we're going to be a different thing

than what we are right now. And if you love music and if you love art, and if you love novels and all these different things that come out of the human condition, those things come out of struggle.

Those things come out of confusion and pain and heartbreak and love and joy and all that stuff all piled up together. Without that, like, what are we? And so if we are moving in this direction, technologically, and we're not moving as fast biologically,

do we merge? Because that seems to be what I think.

“I think that if this thing goes the way it continues to go,”

the bottleneck is going to be human biology. Yeah, yeah, there's a kind of paradox embedded in our efforts to make progress. So, like, there are all these kind of scientists and people working to develop better technologies

and throughout the economy, you know, in some company, maybe a try to figure out how to make some process a little bit more efficient, so you can serve customers better. And all of this is designed to solve problems, right?

To, like, if you sort of extrapolate that to its logical endpoint, right? You would imagine we would have perfect technology that can do everything, solve all the problems, like presumably with AI and automation.

Right. But then you end up in this condition where there is kind of nothing

And so, although it looks like we have these strong reasons to push forward in this direction,

“if you actually look at the end point if we succeeded,”

to many people, it will look kind of unpalatable, and like this kind of future where, you know, all the problems are solved, and nevertheless, that does seem to be, you know, the direction that we are headed in, probably the direction that we should be ahead.

Yeah, wouldn't that be a better goal if there was zero murder, zero violence, zero crime, zero lying, zero corruption, and human beings all worked in coordination with each other, just like in a sense of unique sinking in harmony. Right, that would be way better, but it does,

like if you actually stare at that situation, it does have these slightly unpalatable. Yeah, because quality, because you might think it looks kind of bland, right, if it's not necessarily, though. It's just, it looks bland if you think about what we're experiencing now,

like all the excitement and the weirdness of uncertainty, and of not knowing, you know, and also the negative aspects of our life in conjunction with the positive aspects of our lives, so we contrast the two of them, and you really appreciate good people after around a bunch of fucking households.

You know, that doesn't, but it doesn't have to be that way. This is just what we are dealing with. This is my position on work, too, because everybody in their head is like, what happens when AI takes all the jobs?

“And I'm like, do you have to have a fucking job?”

Isn't that a human invention? Like, why do you have to have a job? It seems crazy that our main focus is on housing and food,

and like most people are basically just working for that.

Most people that are struggling, check to check. Basically, housing and food is their daily labor. If that's removed, wouldn't enough people figure out what to do with their time? Yeah, yeah, I think so. That, like, yeah, there will be some pronunciation,

and this comfort, but this is made ultimately. That is like, yeah, I mean, I think it's like, so slavery is really bad, right? Like, at which labor is a sort of, you know, right, very light in a sense.

You have to sell a third of your waiting day just to get money to pay for necessities. And the people that are trying to make the most money make the conditions for their employees as shitty as possible, because it costs the least amount.

They don't think about it, like, listen, maybe we make less money, but we have an awesome experience for everybody that works there. Nobody thinks like that. They all think, like, we have to make the most money because we have shareholders, and we have responsibility.

And these people need to make more money every quarter. So yeah, although sometimes you do this, you compete for talent. That's true, too. But not, but only the top talent.

“That's why the CEOs get all the bread and all the people on the assembly.”

I guess I'm not pleased to get treated well, right? What would you say? Jamie is the different kind of employee. Jamie is literally the cop. I mean, he's the cop person on the show.

That's different. But some dude who's out there stocking boxes for Amazon, that's different. Yeah, being the CEO.

Yeah, I think, like, ultimately, that would be a hugely

duration, and kind of restore dignity. Like, you should be in control of your own time. It's kind of almost the most, like, a side from your own body. Like, you're on time, you're on attention. You have to teach people discipline.

They have to, that's the thing is, like, if you give people the opportunity to just do nothing, we do. We're primates. We'll find a way to, we're genetically sort of designed to conserve resources.

You don't want to overuse resources for no reason to do a bunch of shit because you won't survive. You don't have enough food. So we're sort of designed to know how to be lazy. And so we're going to have to find things that give us purpose

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Terms apply, see visible.com for plan features and network management details. Yeah, I mean, it's just to be the traditional idea of British aristocracy, that you wouldn't have to work for a living.

that they had to work for their daily bread, right?

“But the ideal way of being human was that you just had money”

and then you spent your time doing other things. Like you, you know, maybe you were involved in politics or maybe you had like an art collection or you did your gardening or entertained friends. That's the best aspect of it.

But when you think about British aristocracy, don't you think about fuck ups? I do. I think about guys that are just drunk. They drive their Ferrari into a lake

and they accidentally drown their friend and then they pay off the cops and they get away with it. That's what I think of. Well, yeah, there's that. But they were also these guy, if I don't know,

I'm at your scientist or eccentric. So how they're weird thing and it's decided to sign it. So I guess it brings out like the more freedom to what it has, the more they can reveal their true nature. Like, well, it also depends on how they're raised.

Right. Well, who are their parents, what values did they instill in them when they were young? Did they explain the value of hard work that it's actually good for you?

And then if you just find something you really want to do and you concentrate on it and really work hard at it, it's actually very fulfilling. Yeah, so you could about it, for example, the education system. In this world where we no longer need to work.

Like, presumably, it would need to be redesigned

from some sketch, basically.

Because right now, it's a kind of machine, right? So you take children coming in kind of on a conveyor belt. Yeah. And then some processing is done. Like, say that your desk here is this assignment here.

So great. And then they come out with a quality label attached. Yeah. And then they are meant to be productive workers that you could put in an office and they will.

So this kind of is an unfortunate fact about the current condition that the world needs a lot of these office workers that can do all these tasks in the economy. So like, it's we have to have until it does. Until it doesn't.

And at that point, it would be absurd to keep doing this. Right? Then you could imagine changing education so that it would be much more about like, how can you learn to live well at a life of leisure?

Like, you know, you know, the art of conversation, appreciation for art and music. The office, physical wellness, like nature, the ability to set your own goals and take your own initiatives to, you know,

to develop true friendships with people. Like, these are things that are not taught in school, but you could imagine that being the curriculum, like spirituality, like all kinds of sure things that would then equip people to sort of use their freedom.

That wealth, their free time for, you know, some kind of, you know, actually meaningful and beautiful activities. For sure, for sure, preemptively, we should be kind of teaching people like that now.

Like, if young people are coming up now, the world that they're, if you're in,

first grade right now, 12 years from now,

when you're graduating from high school, like the world is a totally different place. And this idea that being a productive work or who could sit still for eight hours a day

“is that's the best way we should teach kids.”

That seems crazy. If we're really like seeing the world or you're describing and that most people seem to think is oncoming. - Yeah, yeah.

- I guess the, the timeline is a little bit uncertain. So you don't want to happen in a situation, right? Where you sort of now, you find yourself your 20 years old, it's time to go out in the world. You have no skills.

The AI revolution hasn't yet quite happened. It's kind of, well, isn't that a liberal arts degree anyway? Yeah. And so it's that stuff. - There's a lot of silly degrees

that people get right now that are useless anyway. And they spend a tremendous amount of time working on getting it. And then when they get it out, there's no jobs for that degree. - Yeah.

- So they were a little bit to early maybe in helping on this. - Maybe. Or, you know, there's also traps. There's things that you can get really excited about

“and do, like if you want to play professional bowling,”

you want to bowl professionally. Like, well, the amount of money you're going to make is very limited, 'cause the best bowl we're in the world. Like, what is the best professional bowl we're in the world make? Let's guess.

- I say, I don't know that $1,000, yes, the professional bowl. We send new, no guy, Ari's friends with a guy. Tommy, kind of kept rumors last time. Do you remember his last name, Jamie? - He was a professional bowler,

but he used to come to the comics store and hang out really nice guy and love comedy. - I don't mind. - Maybe the very best one makes a pretty decent living

and I've had the third best, like, it's just...

- I bet barely. - I bet the best guy probably makes maybe 100 grand or 200 grand at the most. And that means like, the 30th guy in the world is... - That's the thing, yeah.

- Yeah, you have to have another job. - To put you there. - Yeah, well, but then, in this, what does he make? - Oh, 200k? - Oh, 400k in big season, 450, including prize money

and sponsorships. - But then, like, what does that mean? - EJ Tucket made, 430 subfucket, EJ, EJ Tucket.

With several others between 190k and 270k

and prize money alone, top tier. - So the top tier guys make a good living. - But how many guys are there? - You know what I'm saying? - All right, it's probably like a very thin set of peak.

- Right, so if you choose to go into bowling, it's not like choosing to go into, you know, there's a lot of other jobs. Like, even if you're going to be a basketball player, they're making a lot of money.

You know, if you're a really good basketball player and you pursue that, like, you could get very, very rich but how many of them get in the most. - Yeah, but then, like, so maybe the money factor would kind of drop out of the picture.

- Yes, and it would just be what you're interested in. And then, maybe even, it would, I mean, the opportunities are endless. - Yeah, the opportunities are endless. - Other people are interested in to some extent,

“because I think part of what people are competing for”

is also prestige. - Yes, that would be a thing where I like status would be more important. So who's the best at this thing? Like, a bunch of friends who play golf,

like Jamie please golf all the time. Golfers are all like comparing each other's scores and they're playing, they're competing in this game. And they think about that more than they think about work. Like, people who love golf, they think about hate work.

Like, I used to say that about comedy. Back when I first started, one of the things that I noticed is the guys who really got into golf, their careers kind of stalled. 'Cause they were more excited about playing golf

than they were about riding jokes and going on the road. And I was like, okay, so if the average person doesn't need food and housing anymore from labor, if that's gone and now you just get it. And so now you could just go do things.

We just have to teach people to be excited about stuff. We have to teach people the value of curiosity and finding things that are interesting to you. And then the value of just education for this sake of learning things 'cause it's interesting.

Just pure satisfaction of curiosity, which is a beautiful thing. Like that would be great for everybody. If we instead of learning things because your teacher tells you you have to learn it,

well, there's always gonna be people

that just naturally gravitate towards mathematics and they're really fascinated by mathematics. And there's always going to be people that are nearly naturally gravitating towards history that like how do we get here?

What is this? How do this start? Who wrote that? Who's the first guy to figure that out? And that's, you're gonna naturally go towards that

and just be educated for the sake of satisfying your curiosity. And maybe we'll have a more balanced society because people will actually be able to just pursue their interests, but we have to teach them to do it.

“That's what I think is gonna be really important”

about young people in the future. Teach them to actually pursue their curiosity rather than just squash any desires they have for novelty and for interesting things and just be able to work all day,

doing something you hate because that's what it means to be an adult. - Yeah, and I think like cultivate thing about would be like the way forward in this case. - And it seems very possible.

It's doable, like we know curious people. - Yeah, at least it's some extent. I think there's probably also some differences in how different folks are wired, like some people can forward very easily.

Others find everything fascinating. - Yes. - For people like just naturally depressed or have low mood, others are sort of evolves. - Yeah, but those people that are naturally depressed

how much with their life change, if they were coached at a very early age, the value of exercise and if they started running, if they started doing yoga and they started feeling much better and they weren't naturally depressed anymore.

And then you change their diet and you start adding in vitamins and nutrients and stop giving them processed foods and also they feel better because the concept even of depression, like what does that mean?

Well, it's very so wildly. And when you're talking about people that aren't taking care of their bodies and that's not thought of as a primary factor

in why depression exists in the first place,

well this is a very unscientific approach then because we know that it has a profound impact on human beings, so you were pretending that there's like this one size fit all. No, I think that should be also a part

of teaching people how to be a human being. Chase your curiosity, but also this is why you're not feeling well and that if you just develop this ability to get some momentum going and just show up at that yoga class every day, you feel way better

and you don't have to take a pill. - Yeah, I think, yeah, many could be a lot improved. If they were taught to take care of their basic physiology and everyone can be improved. - 100% of them can be improved.

It's a part of being a human being. - I mean, I don't know, I think there is also some people who might just have some imbalance, some neurotransmitter because of some geneticity. - 100%.

“- That's why I don't even have the energy to engage”

in these activities that wouldn't make them feel better. But then I think that would be much better medicines for helping them. - That's why I don't know what comes in. Let's go.

- Well, get 'em fired up. - Get 'em start running, I'm kidding. But what we're saying is all doable. We're not asking people to breathe underwater, right? Where we're saying is that there are people on earth

that live like that. And this idea that living just for a paycheck so that you can cover your food and your housing,

which we've always thought of as being just an undeniable

part of being a person, an adult. This is what you have to do.

“You have to pay for your food, pay for your housing.”

But if we do get to a point where the structure of society is now run by hyper-intelligent artificial intelligence, you would wouldn't need most jobs that people have to do that suck. And in order to get our society to this point,

if you wanted an iPhone, you needed some people that were in a factory somewhere, putting it all together. You needed someone who's designing it, you needed someone who's sitting there in the office,

trying to figure out how to market it, you needed all those jobs. But when we don't need all those jobs anymore, then things are gonna be very interesting.

And that's what I'm saying,

we need to become a different thing. Like, it's kind of true and kind of not, like you can be a human being and live in that world. But we're gonna have to re-educate people how to be a human being.

It's gonna, our education system specifically in this country is just designed to make factory workers specifically. Like, there's a real history of it. Like, we know why they made it this way.

They made it this way and they got people in really early so that they could get people set up for jobs. They just want people to work. - Yeah, so we are kind of currently ill-suited for really thriving in an environment of abundance,

and enjoying life, because, I mean, both at the biological time scales and during the life span of a single individual, they're all these pressures, necessities that kind of force us to become a certain type.

So I mean, we talked about the education system, training people to be the kind who can sit at the desk all day long and perform tasks. - Yeah.

- By a while, we've evolved drives to, you know, be lazy to conserve energy to eat as much as we can. And now, in the modern environment, where there are fridges everywhere, like it causes problems metabolically.

And in terms of enjoying life, for many people, there's this hedonic treadmill, right? Like, so you achieve something, some improvement. There's a spike of happiness, and then you sort of go back to baseline very quickly.

Start to take for granted all the blessings of life, which makes it very difficult to actually achieve a state of permanent happiness and felicity. But, and it's kind of being necessary because we, that, that needed to be this motivation

to keep striving for the next thing. Now, once we have actually achieved all the things, though, then maybe that becomes a kind of dysfunctional, like why keep wanting to strive for the next thing if all the things have already been achieved,

at least in a certain domain.

“And so, I think, as we move deeper into this hypothesized”

future, where we get all these magical technologies, then at some point, probably some transformation of human nature would have to go along with that.

First, maybe cultural changes to sort of equip people

for a life of leisure. - Yeah. - And then ultimately, maybe more profound changes to a very biology, and so that, imagine if you solve aging, and you can now live for thousands

of years, right? Maybe the way our memory work is not really set up. For the maybe we would just go stale after 200 years with our current brains, like we just get stuck in a rot. We don't know because we haven't lived for 200 years,

but that could easily turn out to be the case with the human. So then maybe at that point, you would need to sort of do something to sort of add more cognitive resources, more flexibility, some sort of academic research, something to sort of keep the flexibility going

for longer periods of time. - I'm glad you set a psychedelic reset because it would be very funny if the main tools that we have for navigating this are all illegal.

“'Cause I think they might be, and specifically”

with psilocybin and DMT, and probably I began as well. Like if we wanted chemical tools to navigate a new reality, those are probably the best ones that we have available, and they're all illegal. And I think you're right.

I think if we're going to be able to navigate this correctly, we have to kind of change the way we interact with each other, what it means to be a person. But I wonder how much of the conflict that we have is a direct result of this inherent struggle

that so many people have. And there's a direct correlation between extreme poverty

If you look at the areas of extreme poverty in this country, they're also the areas with extreme crime. And I wonder how much of that would be completely alleviated with a complete lack of poverty.

And we've always assumed that if you're going to have

“a functioning society that you're going to have slums, why?”

Like why? They don't serve any function, it's not a good thing. Well, well, it's because some people are always going to be making bad decisions and some people who are always going to be going down the wrong road and crime.

And this and that, right. But there's still just humans and some humans don't do that. So it wouldn't be better to figure out a way to not have humans ever do that anymore. And that seems like a way to do that.

It's, again, not asking people to breathe underwater. We're just trying to figure out why to some people never engage in crime, why to some people live these really fulfilling and interesting lives. Probably because they were exposed to it when they were really young.

Probably because they weren't exposed to very bad environments and very bad crime and very bad poverty. And how much of that would change if there was no more poverty. It sounds like such a little fairy tale child like, oh, one day we'll have no poverty, but that's doable.

If everyone is alive, that's alive right now is not starving to death. That means we figured out a way to at least the very least

“get you resources so you could feed yourself, right?”

The matter how dysfunctional things are. All that has to do is you get ramped up a few steps. And now you have no one ever worried about being fed, no one ever worrying about not having a place to sleep. And then you have to find purpose.

But it seems like there's a lot of people that find purpose without having a financial price tag attached to it just by what we're talking about with golf or you could be really into writing books. You could write books all day long.

And people are always going to want human-created fiction.

People are always going to be interested in the way other people think about things. You'll find there's plenty of things to do. There's plenty of games to play and plenty of skills to learn. The idea that the only reason why we work is to eat and to not get rained on seems nuts.

Yeah, it is, I guess, to some extent, an open question to what extent people will always want to read human fiction or to prefer the human-generated outputs. It might be just because current AI-generated writing is lacking in various ways.

It's often sloppy and boring. But if it became really good, then maybe it would just be much more fun to like a movie made by an AI. I might just be so much better on richer and the lighting is perfect. And the dialogue is sharp, and it's more funny and deep.

Certainly, it's much easier than you go on. Watch this human-produced tag. And it's going like most people don't go on and watch sort of film school students' productions. Right, but then there's that movie obsession.

Wasn't that movie made very inexpensively? And it's a huge hit, right? And that's part of the thrill of it. Is it this guy who was like a YouTuber, right? Who created this film, and now this movie is a giant hit,

and everybody's like super excited about it. Now, that same movie was made by AI. I wonder if it would have that impact because it doesn't have the human connection. So that's possible that we keep getting interested in these things

because we sort of are really entangled with the human world, much more than we are with the world of AI's. And I mean, for the same reason, you might be more interested in if your brother or friend did something. You might think, oh, this is interesting.

I want to check that out. Of course, it was from random dude who makes something seem like the better, it doesn't mean. Right, when you go to see your nephew play baseball,

“you wouldn't really go see little kids based on it, right?”

When your nephew gets on first base, like, way to go, Bobby.

So I think these kind of social entangled months that we have, like, will be a big part of what gives structure to life. In this condition where the external constraints are removed. I think that there is a great value for the human mind

for whatever reason in getting better at things and learning things. And I think that if we could instill that in people at a young age, I think it would be fairly easy to get people to pursue that path. But we have to completely revamp our education system

which should have been done a long time ago anyway. The idea of having un-enthusiastic, un-underpaid people, being any percentage of what children encounter for most of the day when they're in their most form of the period, isn't saying it should be a rich, exciting, enthusiastic journey

and how exciting to get better at things.

“And about how anybody can get better at things.”

Yeah, I mean, I hate that every day of school. I hate it. I didn't even know that I was interested in learning anything until I got out of school. It's like for me, I also hated books and everything

like that for my first 15 years of life.

Because I associated that with school. So that was the kind of school thing. It's only then randomly one day I happened to walk into the local library for no reason and pulled out the book here and there. And then I discovered that there was this whole world of science

and idea and literature and all of that. Very different from what we were doing in school. And then that kind of opened the gates for me to this. Imagine what a head start you would have had if you had like a different kind of education.

With super enthusiastic people who really love teaching children are really good at it and that we reward them and that it becomes a very prestigious position to be in rather than what it is now. If you talk to some guy and he goes on a high school teacher,

like, poor bastard, how's he feed himself? That's immediately what I think.

Like good for you that you're doing that.

But also I guarantee you could probably be making a lot more money and be happier doing another job. And so that's a terrible way to start life off. And if we just revamp that, then you have a bunch of people that are interacting with life in a very different way.

And instead of being thought, I have to get a job someday. I have to get a job after school anyway to help my mom pay the bills because we're struggling. So I got to contribute to the household, even though I'm 16, I can hang out with friends,

if all that stuff's out the window. And now it's like, no, what we need to find out is what is exciting for you. Like what excites your mind, your specific personality. What is it about life that's interesting?

And let's expose you to a bunch of different things that are exciting and interesting that other people find value in. And let's find out which way you gravitate. Because maybe you gravitate towards chess

or maybe you gravitate towards something completely different. Maybe you're just really in a painting. Maybe painting just lights you up. And you look at a canvas, and you just start fucking around with it.

And that's your thing. There's a lot of people in this world that find that. It's just they have to find it themselves, unfortunately. I think that's kind of inspiring. And I think the train doesn't stop there.

So if we think even more father into this kind of condition of technological maturity, I think in addition this is sort of freeing up people, making it easy to produce the food and the houses and cars that go faster and don't pollute.

And all of this stuff, like if you think through what maybe a technologically mature civilization could do, like so a lot of these learning, for example, is something that gives people purpose, but maybe you would have the ability to download knowledge.

I think click off a button.

“So rather than if you want to learn advanced mathematics,”

now you have to study for years, right? Do like books with exercises and the pliers out and then eventually you sort of unlock. Yeah, but like maybe a technological maturity, there would be like, OK, understand mathematics.

OK, I'm going to press that button, boom. Right, understand mathematics. Like the majors, I will come full, remember? Yeah, so if you had like, you know, maybe some kind of an anobot that could infiltrate your brain

and then change the synopsis in just such a way that you are not the same as you were before, except you have these concepts from abstract mathematics. Yeah, you know, after 20 minutes or something like that. Some super-intelligence works out how to change your synopsis

to this new condition. And if you were inclined to do various things because they give you joy and pleasure, like you could also think, well, I could do those things. I'd get the joy and pleasure or I could just push this button.

That's like activates the same joy and pleasure. So there would be these shortcuts to everything. And it looks like you would have post-instrumental condition where at least at first sight seem to be no reason to do anything for the sake

of achieving something else because I would always

be this shorter pass to that other thing that pressing the button. And so that's a kind of deeper form of redundancy. It seems that all forms of human instrumental effort would become unmotivated. You could still go to the gym every day

and sweat for an hour. Or you could just take the pills that induces exactly the same physiological effects and the mental effects, like the calm or whatever you feel. Mm-hmm.

Or maybe even better, genetically engineers or more than one degree. So you don't have to take a pill? Yeah, yeah.

“And so then, I think you're getting more into these fundamental”

questions of value, right, philosophical questions, but what ultimately is it that makes a life good?

Because that's what we are.

Or a primitive version of primates.

“I think we're going to become something different.”

And if we do it through technologically induced evolution or biologically induced evolution, we're still moving in a general direction. Just biologically, if you look at ancient hominids and look at us, we're clearly very different.

So we're moving in a general direction anyway. And when you look at the grays, like these prototypical aliens that everybody sees with big heads and skinny bodies, what do they look like? Well, they look like, if we keep going,

that's what we're going to look like. We're going to be these genderless, sexless, muscleless, little skinny things with giant heads that communicate telepathically. We're just probably where we're moving. And if we're moving that way, maybe we think of them as being

an alien from another-- and maybe that's just the general direction that primates go once they figure out technology.

They eventually realize, well, all, first of all,

the idea of having to have a male and a female is kind of crazy. Why? Well, because we have to reproduce. Well, what if we don't reproduce like that anymore? What if all reproduction is done through engineering?

And there's no more sex. So there's no more lust. So there's no more jealousy. So there's no more ego. There's no or anything.

And then there's a hive mind. Because technology advanced to the point where the reason why they have these big giant heads, they're essentially locked into everybody all around them all the time.

Yeah, well, is that what we would want, though? Not us, but I don't think we'll be us anymore. I think this, like if you went to Chimps, and you said, hey, dude, one day, you're going to be on a plane, eat peanuts,

flying over the ocean, they'd be like, fuck that. I don't want to do that. I'll just stay here with a fruit is. You guys are nuts. Like, why do you want to do that?

And you'll be addicted to cratum. And you'll be watching YouTube all day long. Like, oh, no, I don't want to do that. That sounds like it doesn't sound fun. But we don't have a lot of bananas done.

“Maybe you have to get killed by the other chimpanzees”

that want the bananas. You really have chimped wars. They come in and kill each other. So I think we're going to be something different. And I think that's inevitable anyway.

If you believe in evolution, it's inevitable anyway that we become something different. We're not a finished product. Yeah, I think that is true. We are not a finished product.

Now, the question is the thing that we become or that becomes is that a result of us choosing how we want to be, or is it just these kind of impersonal forces, like a evolution, say, like things certain types. That might end up leading to outcomes

that we actually don't want. And so I guess the hope is that we would be able to develop along a path that preserves and develops the things that we actually value about being human, maybe amplifies them,

then maybe adds other things. So there are many different possible things you could develop in the future, but that we sort of select those that actually make us better, rather than just randomly different.

That we can sort of grow into our ideals. But it's so funny how much value we put in human condition and how much value we put in meaning, because it is value with us. When you think about what that means

in terms of the amount of energy it produces, the amount of impact that it has, versus the structure of the universe itself, versus black holes, and stellar nurseries, and things that are just infinitely more spectacular

than the human condition. But to us, it's like, oh, what is meaning? What is meaning? What is meaning to me? Like, well, what is meaning to me? You was your finite biological organism

that has to find meaning, because you're sort of tromping around through this weird world, where eventually you're going to die, and you'll leave your mark, and maybe reincarnations real, and maybe the afterlife's real, and nobody fucking knows.

So you've got to have meaning. But the universe itself, like a human only lives 100 years. How much meaning can you have? You know, 100 years.

- Yeah, I think we kind of die pretty much early. I mean, we think of ourselves.

First, we come stronger and more capable

for 15, 20 years, right? Then biologically, you stagnate, and then maybe you keep accumulating sort of knowledge and skills for another few decades. - Mm-hmm. - Like, just as you have

started to acquire a model come of wisdom, like a brain starts to rot. - Yep. - And then everything is erased. - Yeah. - The bi Alzheimer's or death. - Yeah. - And that's all gone.

- The whole lifetime of experience. - There's meaning. All the memories, and like a hard-earned lesson study. So that seems kind of sad,

“and probably not the best way for things to be.”

I think we would want to extend the human life span. So you could continue to grow up. Not just kind of reach 20, and then plateau there for the rest of your life. But what if we could continue to develop

so that at 80, you were as much stronger,

and like just have the same capacity increase, as you had between like zero and 20, and you just kept going. - Well, these life extensions scientists that are working on these things, guys,

like David's and Claire, like they believe that that's not just a possibility, but an inevitability. - Yeah, well, so that's more like, I guess, preserving. I could have preventing or delaying that decay.

- Sure. - Which is already a very good,

like if you were first. - Not reversing.

They're talking about reverberation.

“- Yeah, but then you would go back to being 20, right?”

- In terms of biologically. - Biologically, yeah. - But then you have engineering. If you have very long time spent, so then you might at some point want to continue to grow. - Yeah. - Like you might not want to just

be stuck at a 20-year-old human. - Of course. - Of course. - In 10,000 years. Maybe eventually you would want to become like, slightly bigger in terms of your ability to engage with the world.

- Of course, and if they can figure out how to make people, well, there's already genetic engineering that's being done in terms of increasing potential intelligence in IQ. They're already doing that. And so this is a, I know I'm sure you know

about that thing that happened in China,

where this one doctor got in trouble,

because he had genetically engineered some babies to be inoculated to HIV, but it also, at the same time, gave them a far increase potential IQ. It remains to be seen whether or not it actually works

as these guys become like 20 and 30, and we start putting them in chest tournaments and see if it really did make them smarter. But the possibility of that is already being studied. They already understand the differences between,

like what is what's possible, what we understand, and that increases every day. They understand more every day, more as possible every day. If that just keeps going, we have a different version of what the human consciousness is.

You have a different version of the human mind.

“- Yeah, a lot, I think the way AI is going,”

I think that's the train that's gonna reach the destination faster. - Oh yeah.

- And then once you do have super intelligence

in machine substrate, like then that can then unlock all kinds of technologies, including these biological technologies or nanotechnology or host of other things that could then sort of bring us up

if that's how we decide to go. - Yeah. - And uplift us in to different, like either biologically enhancing us or like uploading us into.

- But again, it's that white water river raft. So we're going down this white water and we might make it out of this or it might crash. You know, one of the weird things about, I'm very fascinated with ancient civilizations.

And one of the weirdest things about ancient civilizations is when you go really, really far back, a bunch of them have these depictions of kings that ruled for thousands of years. And it's very strange stuff.

“Because the Egyptians and ancient Sumer,”

there's a bunch of different depictions of these kings that lived lives that were way longer than biological humans lived. And then there's the flood myth or the flood story. And then after the flood,

biological life decreases pretty radically. And then it seems to get back to like a normal version of what we assume now, which is like 100 years. And one of the weird questions that these alternative ancient historians have

is are we missing the possibility that there was a hyper advanced civilization that existed tens of thousands of years ago and that what we're seeing now is not a linear progression from caveman

to human being with an iPhone in 2026 that along the way, there might have been a very high level of sophistication. And the evidence of that might be the pyramids. And some of these other ancient structures

that are mind-boggling, as much as you try to explain them away. When you're dealing with 2,300,000 stones, some of them are cut from a quarry, 500 miles away, 80 tons stones that are in the ceiling.

Perfectly cut, granite. Looks like they have diamond drill holes in them. It seems like there's some lost technology. And every society has this flood myth. And every society that has this flood myth,

especially these ones that were very advanced, somehow are another like ancient Egypt, they have these depictions of people that lived way longer than people lived today. And I wonder if human beings one day will realize, like,

oh, if you keep going long enough, 100 years of silly, like people can, they'll just figure out what it is that makes people age and die, fix that, and you'll live it insanely long time. And then if people live it insanely long time,

and they're capacity for reason and logic increases,

then you have these insane technologies that were required to do things like build the pyramids. And that might be what happens. That might be a natural course of progression,

that the first thing we realize is, 100 years is not enough,

'cause I'm 58, I'm a moron still. Like, why am I learning every day? How come I'm getting better at being a person every day? Well, I should have figured this out already. But you don't ever have time to figure it out.

You don't have time. There's not enough time. And you only get one run, like, I mean, you would take one trial run first, on life. Right?

Like, okay, now I kind of know a little bit how it works. Now, let's do it for real. Well, that's the kind of scare. I mean, it's a bit crazy that each of us is put in charge of a whole human life.

Right. Like, are we really, like, reach the level of, like, if you want to run an airplane,

“you have to go off through these certifications and stuff, right?”

And then maybe it can be a pilot. Like, for a human life, it's like every single person. Like, okay, you have 100% dictatorial control of this person. Like, that completely hostage your whims. Yeah.

And then that's like us. But that's the way it is. But yeah, having the ability to kind of try different things and maybe do, like, have a kind of opportunity to do a doover.

If the life turned out to be like every 50 years or something, you have a chance to kind of-- Well, maybe not even in a doover, but it's the same life. But you can do whatever you want. And you don't have to be constrained to this idea

that you only have a certain amount of time. And you want to retire by your 65.

We might look at that as being, like, one of the first

completely archaic notions. And the reason why people got it all wrong. Like, well, society will be better, because people are going to live way longer. And if you think about how much smarter, how old are you?

53. OK. Now, with the way so that was sad. I'm older than you, dog. Don't worry about it. But if you think about how much smarter you are at 53,

then you were at 13. Now imagine how much smarter you'll be at 353. Or 1,053. And if that actually becomes possible, if a person can

“live to be 100 years, why can't they live to be 4,000 years?”

If they can figure out what makes people age, if we really can genetically engineer human beings. That's not-- again, that's not breathing under water. That's just extending life. And if you extend life and extend intellectual capacity

and your ability to learn and grow, holy shit,

you're dealing with 2,000-year-old person. That's a completely different kind of thing. And that could be real someday. And that might be also one of the things that comes along with this new understanding of just life

in general, with super intelligent AI. Yeah, no, for sure. Fixing aging and reversing it would be amongst things that the technologically mature civilization would be able to do.

Which set and get people out of the idea that it's vain? Why do you want to live forever? That's what I say now, right? But when somebody actually has the therapy, and you could, like, out here,

you could either continue to get, you know, verse kidneys and more painful knees, wrinkles, and you start to forget things. Or you can take this rejuvenation serum that everybody else is using.

And they are like full of energy and running around and doing stuff. Like, do you still think it's a vain?

“So I think a lot of this is Stockholm syndrome”

that you're kind of faced with the inevitability of aging and decay and have been for thousands of years. So you develop a kind of bromance scaffolded that's reconciled to the inevitable. I like the Stockholm syndrome.

Which is maybe adaptive. But only up until the point where there actually might be something you could do to escape, right? Then, if you're too stuck in this mindset, it might sort of prevent you from taking advantage

to regain your freedom. Right. And I think we are now at that stage. We don't yet have the therapies, but there are certainly, like, investments and research

and stuff we could do that would hasten the arrival. And I think, in fact, we should have started on a big sort of, you know, and had them product to defeat aging, like, decades ago. And maybe we would have better therapies by now then.

But for a long time, aging was not seen as a problem. Only the specific diseases that are the result of the aging. Yeah. They've got all this funding, right? Like, so you have, like, huge research products

for Alzheimer's and for heart disease and for cancer. But if you look at the main common cause of most human disease, it's a naissance, like you're much more likely to get any of these. When you're 80, then when you're 20,

because your cells gradually decay and gunk builds up, the arteries clog up, you know, your DNA mutates, your methylation pattern gets scrambled. Your brain shows. So rather than just trying to put out the fires,

one by one, after they occur, like at some point, you just need to sort of try to prevent, like, maybe you need a bit of rain to sort of prevent, uh,

as a society, as civilization.

“When you think about the fact that people only lived”

to be a hundred, kind of incredible, yeah.

It's kind of incredible. Got rockets and satellites and cell phones, and people only lived, so it's like, everybody has to build on everybody else's intelligence, and everybody else's understanding of the world,

and develop new things, and everybody has to learn those new things, and it's just small that it can only learn the small little things. Yeah, right, and you need millions of them. Yeah.

Although it's not entirely clear with, with humans, if we had been much more long lived, like the way we currently are configured, maybe we would just have gotten to stock in our ways, and sort of stagnated into some sort of all-track conservatives

society where nobody's allowed to do anything different, or the old geezers that have their way of doing things, just remain forever in charge. Yeah. So, um, I mean, we just don't know, right?

Like, whether that would have slowed progress, or accelerated it, um,

but it is, yeah, it is still, it is still amazing.

Like, it's a long path from sort of running around in the forest to sort of these, look at these, like advanced chip technologies, and the whole global supply chain, or like thousands of people are working to develop

just one little tool that then feeds into the ability to make another tool that actually makes these leading H-I-chips. Whether layering things for atoms, deep, yeah. Yeah, it's, it's, it's remarkable.

It's incredible. And humans only look to be a hundred. Imagine what we could accomplish if we live to be 3000, you know? Yeah.

Or if we were just a little bit, you know, better at these things.

“Yeah, because I think we are sort of the stupidest possible”

species that are capable of developing advanced technology. Like, because as soon as we evolved to reach that level, we started developing it, right? And then, so that's where we are. Like, the dumbest possible that just barely can do this.

Repairly can do this while we're blown each other up. Yeah, at the same time, all over the world. Yeah, blown up people. So yeah. But maybe a lot of that frantic, stupid,

illogical behavior is because we're so finite. Like, we're in a rush that, you know, we realize we'll have a certain amount of time to get things done. And so this sort of accentuates the desire

to control resources and to cement your immortality, and to do these things that people up to do but they're name on buildings. There's a thing that people like to do that it's almost like cementing their immortality.

Maybe there'll be less of a desire to do that if people live way longer. And then you would have to assume, if you can engineer humans to live longer, you could probably engineer a lot of stupidity out of us.

They could just find out why people behave. What if you could just eliminate lying? What if there's a genetic solution to lying? Well, our guests are a really good lie detector. Yeah, but I mean, what if you can genetically

engineer out the desire to lie? Well, I mean, if you had a perfect lie detector, that would be no point in lying because people would just see the truth, right? If you could read each other's minds, it would be fruitless.

Yeah, and so that might be closer. I mean, who knows what you could do if you sort of had like, hopefully, a system train to detect micro expression. We just all have to get the big gray heads

with the black eyes, like the aliens have. And then they want to read each other's minds. And one of those? Well, one of the the weird things that Bob Lewis are said, again, I don't know if you're into this UFO stuff,

but he was one of the guys that was a whistleblower that said he back engineered crafts for the United States government in the 1980s. They don't have any controls in these crafts, supposedly. And that they're all powered by the minds

of the beings that are running it. And that they have, it's almost like these crafts are alive. And they have some sort of a sinking with the thing that instead of like pressing buttons and working a joystick, they just sink with this creation.

And then they can propel it with their minds. So the minds become the computer that moves this thing around. I'm a bit skeptical. I haven't looked into that, does I? You should be.

Sounds crazy. How could you not be scared? Anybody who's not skeptical sounds crazy. But if you think about where we are now and where we're going to be, the possibility of that

being our future is pretty likely. Right.

“I think that the kind of possibility of engineering”

something like that, with sufficiently advanced technology would be there, like all kinds of stuff. Yeah. Basically, everything that doesn't violate some law physics to a first approximation, you would be able to construct.

It even when we say that, it's like our current understanding of physics. It's not the understanding of physics.

That's the side that's a million years old than ours.

that it took to create what we are at right now from the big bang.

Like a million years is nothing.

Yeah, but even with our current understanding of what physics permits, that's still an enormous space of designs and types of life and being that you could imagine insulating. You could have a like a Dyson's fair.

You've heard of this concept, right? It's basically like using the output of the sun for energy generation. And you could have like, you surround the sun by solar panels that then powers a civilization

in infrastructure, maybe like a computer, like imagine the, like, already we have like AI compute growing at 240% per year or something, right? Right, with this. And then like imagine the kind of mind

that could run on that sized computer. So people are wondering whether like could machines be conscious and like discussing that, right?

“Right now, I think like maybe the more pertinent”

quantum is like, are we really conscious? I think barely. So you're driving on like the road for two and a half hours of motorists, right? And like driving past thousands of people and homes

and like mothers with their strollers. And then after does he remember any of that? Like was it even really aware of any of this? Well, it was driving. It's like a little diffuse sense of body

and some murky perceptions floating through. Maybe some confused abstract idea that we don't really understand. That's kind of the consciousness that can fit into this coconut-sized biological organ that we think.

And we think, wow, we are so conscious. But like imagine this Dyson sphere of consciousness, right? Or like a mind that maybe spans a galaxy. I think the difference between the sort of awareness that it could have an hour awareness

“might be like bigger than the difference”

between hour awareness and like whatever a flea has or something like that way bigger. So it could be this like transition where we develop super-intolerant minds

that for the first time is really life waking up

and becoming truly aware. Yeah. And that we are a little bit sort of over-proud in our own specialness when we think that we have achieved something close to the maximum level of that we are

just standard by which consciousness should be measured and we have this kind of feeble, confused, murky, glamour that is barely a sense yet at all. So that's like, maybe the big challenge for our era, like giving birth to super-intolerance

and then hopefully shaping and nurturing it and staring it so that it becomes a positive thing, both for us, ourselves, and also for it, itself. And also for whatever other, if there are other super-beings somewhere in the world or in the cosmos

that it's sort of, is able to get along with us and contribute positively at the cosmic scale. And that's a very multifaceted challenge,

“but I think that's kind of seems to be what's going on.”

Yeah, and it's hard for people to think that far ahead. You just think of intelligence being something superior to what we currently experience. But when you're talking about a computer or a being, a conscious being

that is infinitely more powerful than anything we can imagine,

that seems to be what everything keeps going in the same general direction and AI increases its power and we figure out new ways to power it. And then, because one of the things that AI needs that's so interesting is it needs enormous amounts of power.

And so just these AI centers that they're developing now, they're like, Google's doing one with their developing their own nuclear power. Do you want some coffee? - Any stir?

- Yeah, right now. - It's got a little-- - That's all you're reaching for your cup. You shouldn't be drinking out of paper cups anyway, man. - I don't usually do that.

- So, I know, I don't either, but occasionally I do, but they're so bad for you. - I'm usually quite conscientious with-- - Yeah, I'm coming a little different. - Even when I go on the road,

I start taking a little yettie coffee cup with me so I can buy coffee and just have them put in that. Inside of those things, it's just lined with plastic. You're pouring hot water in a plastic and then the plastic leeches into your coffee.

- I don't do that normally, but I figured, like, for having a touch with you on the Georgian shot, would be worth, like, I guess, some hundred microplastics. - Well, thank you.

if human beings don't blow ourselves up. If we don't get hit by the nastroid, blow ourselves up, or a supervacation, volcano doesn't eradicate civilization, all this stuff is inevitable. It's just how much time is to take.

It how much does it grow exponentially in power. Because we're talking about computers, then they start bringing up quantum computing and quantum computers ability to do calculations and it doesn't even make sense.

And so you think, well, this is just one version of that. Like, what is a quantum computing going to look like 500 years from now? Like, what is computing power, which is connected to AI?

“What is that going to look like 500 years from now?”

It's impossible to even guess. - Well, we can sort of see lower bounds on what's possible. Like, thinking already of just the designs, we can conceive of, that we see in principle, we could make, maybe it'll take a long, a lot of grind to get there.

But at least that establishes a lower bound of what a technologically mature civilization could do. And then maybe they have additional ideas beyond that. But already that is enough to really unlock. So if you think of a space of possible modes of being,

where like a mode of being is a way of experiencing, living, interacting, I think, you look around humanity and all people who have existed in the past, a lot of different characters, right? Then women, like, mean people, nasty people, crazy people.

But I think all of that diversity of human experience is like a tiny little corner in this space of possible modes of being, like, it's a huge cathedral and we've been basically sitting in the janitor's closet. That's like the exploration we've done.

And the kinds of modes of being, the kinds of ways of experiencing and relating to each other or thinking and doing stuff, that they're ultimately possible. It's just this enormous space that we haven't been able to explore.

Because ultimately what we can currently conceive of, and imagine an experience and feel is like limited to our biological substrate to human brain. And just as your, like, earlier human ancestors

from a few million years ago that you were talking about before,

like they wouldn't really have been able to conceive of the modern human condition, not just because I didn't think of it, but because, like, the brain can't really, they don't, like, even if you try to describe it to them somehow, like, what is music, what is humor, what is romantic love,

like, what is science, what is, like, all of these things,

“what's literature, like, they just doesn't fit in to, right?”

And so presumably, I mean, you could think, right now, we've achieved the right brain size, where all possible values and interesting ideas are accessible to us. That seems kind of implausible. It seems much more likely that just as the chimpanzees

are necessarily blind to, like, a lot of what can give life meaning and value and significance, probably, are we, too? - Yeah, they don't even have the capacity for it, which is interesting, they can't even do it.

- Yeah, we think of them as being so intelligent, and they are in comparison to a lot of other animals. But I think one of the things that they were puzzled by when they started teaching primates sign language

was that they never asked questions.

Like, they don't seem to have questions about stuff. So they just, they exist in a intelligent way, they can figure things out, they can do things, they know when the doors left unlocked, they understand fairness, which is really weird,

like, chimps get very upset if they're treated unfairly. Like, if one chimps get something and they don't get, they get super violent. But they don't have a lot of questions. You know, we're filled with questions.

So what are we missing? The next stage of being a human will have that we're not even considering that, because it's not a part of our experience. Like, what's the asking question type of thing

that we are not able to imagine? - Yeah. - And I might many of those types of things. - Yeah, and the possibilities are literally endless. We just don't conceive of them because we're trapped in this territorial primate mindset.

- Yeah. - Yeah. - I think that's likely. - Yeah, I think so too. I think so too. I think the possibilities are endless.

“And I think it's gonna be really, really weird”

if that happens inside of our lifetime. Like, 'cause you and I were close to the same age. So we grew up with answering machines.

You probably remember the first cell phones.

You probably got online and probably like, when did you get online like the early '96? - Yeah, there you go. - Yeah, I think for me it was '94. So we got to see all this happen.

in our lifetime, that would be like literally bonkers.

What an amazing time to be alive

if you really think about it, we're so fortunate. 'Cause if you grew up between like 1700 and 1800, how much did shit change? 1600 to 1700, what do you make a better boat? Like what's different?

I'm a lot of different man. Everybody kind of is the same for 100 years. And inside of our lifetime from the late 1960s for me to the early '70s for you, like in the amount of time that we've been alive,

things have radically changed. Really, really, radically to the point where it's probably the biggest shift in human ingenuity and innovation that the world's ever seen. And where's the middle of it?

And we might be in the middle of the next one, which like literally allows us to see what the world looks like a thousand years from now, because you're gonna be alive.

“- I mean, that's why, yeah, it is now this full-time job”

just to monitor this situation. I like it's really, but it is how do you do that? - Well, you don't really, but you try to sort of, so I think the opportunity, so it used to be like, at least in my sphere of fact,

if you're doing philosophy or something like it, most people would think you have a kind of unlimited time horizon, and people have been working on philosophical questions for thousands of years, and that doesn't seem to be any huge urgency if they have been unsolved

for thousands of years, maybe if it takes another 500.

Also, but I always thought of philosophy

as having a deadline, meaning that at some point, we would develop smarter than human forms of intolerance, presumably AI, at that could then do the philosophy much better than us. And so there was a limited period of time during which any

advances, like I could contribute to would be meaningful. We don't make sense on focusing on that subset of philosophical questions or general questions that we really need the answer to now as opposed to like 10, 20 years in the future, when somebody else can do them better, like the machine mines.

So that's kind of been a lens through which I have selected the things to work on. And now, of course, that line is moving closer. So there's less time remaining, and so my focus is increasingly drifting towards questions

where it might be relevant to have the answer to now rather than a year or two from now. So you're almost like a cultural navigator, like a guy with a sextant at the helm of a ship,

“looking at the constellations, you go, I think,”

we're in the right direction. Yeah, but now we're sort of moving maybe into close to harbor and you need to, like, yeah, like pay more attention to exactly how deep the rocks are. The rocks are, and look, scan around you.

What, when you think about a timeline for radical change, what, in your mind, what do you think that looks like? Well, I mean, I take short timelines seriously with AI, I mean, for what we know, it could be like, it could be like a year or two or three or four.

I'm probably a bit longer. But we're no longer at a point where we can be confident that we won't have super intelligence in just a few years, like it could happen. So what is that?

When you say that for the uninitiated, what do you mean by super intelligence?

Well, I guess we first have AI artificial general intelligence.

AI that can do all the stuff that we can do. And then super intelligence would just be that, but can do it way better than any human can do. So all technical and intellectual common sense tasks, and then you know, they have robotics as well,

can do all the physical stuff, not much later. And so this, yeah, so the timeline remains on certain,

“but I think it's not impossible that this could happen very soon.”

And then once you have super intelligence, then I think from there on, it might be like a sort of sprint to something approximating technological maturity, because what you have super intelligence, that then designs even more smart AI, right?

Using it's kind of super intelligent AI research capability and designing better chips and all of that. So you might then have this like intelligence explosion, where you go from something slightly greater than a human level to some radical super intelligence that can done sort of invent

whatever the remaining technologies are. Maybe there needs to be some trial and error and experiments in the physical world. That's lost in the town of it.

from super intelligence, I think you might have something

“that unlocks all of these like sci-fi levels, capabilities”

that we've talked about. At least that seems relatively plausible to me. - Tim's inevitable, and my question is, how does it announce itself? Does it send a mass text message

to the whole world? Everybody's phone just starts like, you know, when you have those amber alerts and your phone starts vibrating, or when there's some sort of a storm warning.

(laughs) All of a sudden your phone goes off and then alerts you to the fact that it's taken over. - Well, so here we don't really know. It's like this is very confusing

and I've never done this before.

And so it's like very hard to figure out how this has gone on fold. And maybe it's not even fixed that maybe it depends a little bit on what

“on which we do and the extent to which different actors”

get their stuff together. - Yeah. - But, like one possible type of scenarios where things are just like accelerating there are more and more of these advances,

model releases increasingly, there is automation of the research process in AI labs. Like already you have coding assistance that are really useful to people in AI labs that are using them to write a lot of their software.

Like right now you split humans for sort of the research taste and judgment and sometimes things go like it's dark and you need a human to kind of redirect them. But more and more of that make it automated

and then you have kind of new iterations of models being trained at the faster and faster clip. They can do more and more stuff. They start to automate increasing chunks of the economy. So, right now a lot of coding is automated

but like other areas as well, maybe they become dropping virtual workers that can do everything like a human could do with a remote connection initially and then like you have people working on robotics.

So that would start to kicking and eventually just more and more of the action is run by these AI systems one or more and they're kind of doing it at their time scale which is speeding up.

Then from that point it would depend a lot on whether we have successfully aligned these systems so that they actually do what the people created them intended or whether they have some how gone off the rails. Is there's also the fear that America

doesn't come up with it first.

- This is not fear. - But mostly a fairy in America. - In China for example, it's from America comes up with it first. - I mean it's really just America and China there

at the forefront of this race, right? - Brush a little bit but not on the same level. - Not crush on. - No, not rush it, who else is it? - Did you see this last week?

- Ford hiring 350 engineers after AI failed shows human value in AI error. - What does that mean? - I tried to find the only one that didn't manage this to it. - They hired a bunch of engineers.

They fired after their AI wasn't matching the quality they needed. - Oh, and this is Ford, that's interesting. They probably jumped the gun, you know? They probably fired them too quickly

and now these people that they rehired, these people are gonna like how much time we have left. Six months for AI figures out how to do this. We're not, I mean, it's also possible that things time blinds could extend if one way

that could happen is such as the progress we've seen

“in the last 10 years, which has been remarkable, right?”

It's substantial extent driven by the advances, the increasing compute that is being used to train and run these systems. Like it used to be that you had a cutting edge AI system. If you were a academic running on your PC in your office,

like that was kind of the amount of computing power that was applied to doing AI stuff. And now of course you have these kind of tens of billions of dollar data centers, like hundreds of megawatts, like just massive funding.

So the chips have gotten better, but also just the amount of funding, like you just building many more of these chips. So as you apply more and more compute, like performance improves.

And that's like has been a big driver. Now at some point, you might not be able to keep increasing the amount of money you spend on it, because you can go from like $1,000 a PC

And you can go from a million dollar to a billion dollars.

“And now maybe you're spending on the order of a trillion dollars”

across the world to build data centers per year. But you can't really do like three orders of magnitude very easily there. There's like nothing that's thousand trillion dollars to spend on it.

So at some point just expanded your has to kind of slow down. So if we haven't achieved two printoutants by then, then maybe that would mean progress gets slower. If the main driver is to scale up of compute. Now it is also true that some of the progress

is driven by algorithmic advances, like just kind of clever algorithms. So that might continue. But if one driver stoles out, then that could result in faster progress.

And then of course, there's a possibility that the people who want to pause or regulate AI gain enough traction to kind of get regulatory inhibitions. How would they do that though? If there really is some sort of a Manhattan project style

race between the United States and China, and what are the countries are developing it right now that are close? Well, I mean, those are the two big ones. There's big ones.

Is it possible that someone could sneak up on us and develop some intelligent AI first? I mean, it's possible if there were like some big algorithmic breakthrough, for example, that made it a lot more efficient to run a similar level of capability with less sort

of AI data center infrastructure. And many other countries are also trying. It's just that they are not as advanced. And out of US and China, it's like US currently has the edge. What would happen to China got their first?

Well, I mean, part would depend on whether they had successfully aligned their AI if it's on the line, then I guess the same thing happens as if US AI is on the line. That is, the future gets shaped according to whatever values this AI had ended up with.

If the alignment problem solved, then it might make a difference because then the values would depend on sort of the people who on the control or a government would ask it to pursue. So then that's not what it may be.

It makes some difference who initiates it. So right now, the big players are there's Google and there's open AI.

There's always different companies.

When you say, oh, line, do they have to all be kind of on the same page? Or like when aligned, we're not going to be aligned. There's a bunch of corporations that are competing to come up with this first.

So they have to be aligned in terms of the way their program, that they're valuing human life and that they're valuing society. Like, what do you mean by all that? Well, so I mean just a technical challenge

of if you are building an AI system and you have certain things you wanted to do and certain things you don't want it to do.

“Are you technically able to get to the AI to behave?”

That way, that you-- That's the best place to decide how to-- Well, that's an unseparate question, which is equally important, maybe, but different, because that's not a technical-- like you can just go to the whiteboard and write down

so formula and now you have-- that's a political question, ultimately. Right. Question of governance. Yes.

So there you need political organization, appeals to the best human nature, dialogues, checks and balances, whatever stuff that might work in the political arena to hope that the governance of this, that the values to which it is aligned are sort of benign values,

that hopefully incorporates a white set of stakeholders. Right, but that's a little-- isn't that a little naive? Because whenever there's any sort of a situation where something has mass amounts of power above others, that one of the first things I think of is what's the most money

you can generate doing it?

“And what is the best way to generate the most amount of money?”

Like, that's-- they're going to think that way. They're not going to think like, what's the best for the human race? Like, no one ever thinks that way. They think, what is the best way in terms of like destroying the competition?

What is the best way in terms of extracting the most resources out of this, making it work for me? That's what people think of immediately. And what's the best way to stop other people from competing with us?

Right. So that would be, I think, a lot of precious strains on whatever governance mechanism exists at the time. One super intelligence is developed. Right.

So is this something that the technology is so far ahead-- the potential for it to be so far ahead of our understanding of what it's going to be able to do, that making laws for that now, it's going to be very difficult to even explain to people.

We need these laws and we need these guardbrills in place now

because here's what could happen.

It is happening, but is it happening politically? It's starting to happen. Yeah.

“It's been happening to an increasing extent politically”

and there have been various actions. OK, what action? Well, so a few years ago, for example, that was the whole expert expert regime imposed by the US on chips, the most advanced chips

where China was cut out from being able to access the most advanced and video chips and so forth. And that's kind of been modified, but that was motivated to a significant extent by trying to preserve AI edge that the US has. Right, but that's like it internationally.

I mean, in terms of being able to stop corporations from having the kind of power that this could provide them. So then there have been various efforts that was like a proposition in California where there were various things.

More recently, you saw the whole thing. I don't know if you followed it with the mythos and Fable 5, the anthropic models that were-- so mythos has not been released. This is the most powerful model because it seems

to have significant cyber offense capabilities. It can easily detect vulnerabilities in software and so anthropic figured that rather than immediately making it available to everybody, maybe it would be better to first try to make it available to providers

of critical software infrastructure, like big banks

and that they can patch up their systems. And then Fable 5 was a kind of restricted version of the mythos model, like the same underlying model, but with extra safeguards, it basically refused anything that remotely seemed like cyber hacking,

programming biological stuff, because maybe that would be bio. So it drew a wide circle around anything that even remotely looked possibly dangerous, and it just refuses that. So that was released.

But then after a week or so, the administration imposed an export restriction that prevented any non-US citizen from using it. And that anthropic had to cut it off forever, but it because I didn't have a way in real time to verify

who is US citizen or not. Oh, wow. So then it was like on the available for several weeks, and intense negotiations behind the scenes and working to try to figure out,

because allegedly it was possible to jail break it, so that it sometimes gave some little assistance with some cyber finding vulnerabilities in code. And now recently it just became available again, because I had reached some understanding with the government

where it was deemed sufficiently safe garbage to be released. And now there is like efforts on the way. It's a try to work out the framework, because like in the future you wouldn't want to do this on an ad hoc basis.

Like somebody just decides this particular model for some unspecified reason.

“Like you want to have clear standards, ideally, right?”

It applies to everybody, every company. So there's now some industry-wide effort to try to work with the government too. Anyway, so there's like a lot of this stuff happening. I expect much more of this going forward.

It just has recently become like a serious issue. People, until recently were kind of ignoring the whole AI thing for the most part.

And then there is a second wave coming, I think,

once, so so far we haven't really seen in a big impact on the labor market, right, for my art. But once that starts to hit and you get maybe, you know, high levels of unemployment amongst white color workers.

And I'd like to imagine if you have millions of millions of people with, that I have there, university to diplomas, right? They feel a sense of superiority and entitlement. They've gone through the whole process.

They've got their degree. And now they expect a well-paying job. And then there is no job for them. And I've got nothing to do all day long, but complain about AI.

So if you've got to have all these well-educated people who feel resentful and are going to say every possible bad thing about AI, they could be said all day long and mobilized.

They're a very powerful political constituency

that will emerge from that. That's not even yet happened. But that will kind of add to all of these other grievances that people point to with AI.

“So I think that's got to be kind of significant political pressures”

for doing something about AI. Isn't the key is getting ahead of it, though? So how can people find, how can we see the vulnerabilities

if there is going to be a tipping point

and a bunch of white color workers are going to be out of work and there's going to get to a point where realize like, this is coming. This is like three weeks or now, what do we do? Like, what do they do?

Yeah, so that's not clear to me, at least. I mean, a lot of people think they have different views about what should be done, of course. But it's like very hard to have and it's such a complex strategy. I mean, I've been thinking about this for like three decades,

maybe, and I still feel extremely unsure even which direction is kind of up on which is down. Yeah. I don't think it would be possible right now to sort of figure out a detailed, you know, perfect regulatory scheme

or system of laws, because there's so many unknowns.

“I think we'd need to sort of watch this closely as it happens”

and be ready to react quickly to issues that come up and hope that relevant people are like highly competent and well motivated and are trying their best. And then on the margin, maybe we can do things that kind of are constructive and increases the chances

that it will be for the good. Even when I have some clear insight as to some overall big directional push, I will let you know. But even basic questions, like for example, do we want more government involvement or less government

involvement? Do we want faster progress in AI or slower progress in AI? I don't know, it's not completely obvious to me. Well, I think it's eventually going to get to wherever

it's going to get either way. Having it slower, I don't know if that's really going to help us. I think almost like we have to crash and then we have to figure out how to rebuild and pick up the pieces. I don't think we're going to be intelligent

or have enough foresight to recognize where all these flaws

and where all these problems are going to ultimately be.

“I think they're just going to have to happen”

and then people are going to have to adjust. That's what I think. Yeah, so I'm not advocating an AI pause by contrast to a lot of some of my colleagues and friends and stuff.

I could see some scenario in which it would be helpful at some point to have a temporary slowdown of a few months maybe a few years or a year. Like if you imagine, there are different companies, countries, maybe racing to get their first.

And then eventually, somebody figures out, they basically have the system in place. They just need to amp up, run it for longer, they can see that it will become super intelligent. They hope it's aligned.

It might be very helpful in that situation to have a few extra months, just a double check. All your safeguards and rather than immediately cranking all the knobs up to 11, maybe do it a little bit incrementally, watch what happens, study it, then crank it up a little bit more.

I just think you might gain some extra safety if you have a few extra months there like the pressures on these people in the lab. That makes it all going to happen over a week. Like it's just going to be, this is the first time we ever do

this hugely complex thing, it has to be right.

We never get a second chance, just being able to,

like even just being able to sleep properly for like between your work sessions and like having a weekend to mall things. So like just that kind of human, human's don't really operate on while on in these super short timelines.

“So I think a short, if you could be sure”

that the post would in fact be limited and short and then it would be lifted. I think that could be quite useful to have at, if it could also be timed to be at the right moment and well implemented.

- But wouldn't the problem be espionage, first of all? - That's one issue with it. - Yeah, if somebody realized, hey, they're about three days away from this and then trying to bribs a bunch of people

and you know, people take off and move to. - Yeah, they're various down sides to guessing. So one is that, like there are competitors who just even without espionage are catching up. - Another is, it's not as if the world is safe without AI.

- Right. - There are other, like the natural hazards, I think they are very small, like super volcanoes and stuff like that on the relevant timescales. - Intoler or not.

- Well, I mean, we've survived for hundreds of thousands of years, right? - And we're almost wiped out entirely 70,000 years ago. - Yeah, that's a long time ago. - Is it though?

- I'll. - Not if it happened. - Well, if something hasn't done us in that long time, probably it's not gonna do us in within the next 10 years.

- Well, it's just based on the actual

empirics of these natural catastrophes. By contrast, I would say, there are other hazards that are not low. I mean, we have rapid advances in synthetic biology. Some of them driven, or enabled,

maybe even by already AI progress, that's already taking place, like that can start to assist with this. And more just happening in the pan of this, so you get increasing risk from synthetic biology. We still have the nuclear arsenal, right?

Kind of existing. We think have gotten a little bit complacent about the risks of nuclear war. And various other things as well.

“So I think there's a background level of existential risk”

that humanity faces in the absence of super intolerance that probably is growing as well. So you don't want to wait so long that you don't even get the chance to roll the dice with AI because you destroyed yourself before,

even got it, but we kind of decide. And then also, I mean, I think there is like some risk if you set up a pause infrastructure that what's initially meant to be a temporary thing becomes permanent, like they say there's nothing more permanent

like than a temporary government program. So if you set up the infrastructure to actually control this, ideally at the global scale, right? It's meant to be for six months. Like what happens after six months?

Nobody can still prove that AI will be safe. So you have all these people now who's job it is to regulate it and like maybe they say it could bump kind of frozen in become permanent. And then also, the delay benefits of this.

So if you think what, like 65 million people die every year,

that's a lot of human lives, that's like 1 9/11/25 minutes,

“just kind of boom, that's what it'll look at it.”

And so there is a certain urgency. There is something that somehow could have a chance to fix this, like all the suffering that is happening in the world. Aside from the people dying, like all the people who are bereaved to lost their loved one.

And then all the disease that led up to that dying, right? And then all the non-deceased related, all the horrible poverty and like the suicidal depression and the animals in the animal, the trees that they're like spending with.

It's just like this, I think moral urgency that if there is a hope that getting AI right could fix this, then you don't want to wait unnecessarily long because every day is just this massive horror. So I think there are many reasons for why you wouldn't want

unnecessary or excessive delays in developing AI. But there is a trade off because if we can make more progress on AI safety and alignment and get our act together a little bit

“before we take the plunge like that's also worth quite a lot.”

- It's certainly exciting because the possibilities are right in front of us and they're kind of endless. And it seems like they're right in front of us. It seems like in my mind, it seems like we're like 24 months away from something really insane.

- Could be, could be, could be, could be 48 months, it could be. - I mean, we don't, we don't, right, it could be. - Yeah, who knows. - But there's something happening really quickly. You know, when I talk to Elon about Grock,

he said it's, it shocks us like every couple weeks. We're like, how is it doing this, how is it so fast, how is it advancing so quickly? And one day, Kat's gonna be out of the bag and there's not gonna be any way to stop it.

Like if the power went out right now, if there was some sort of a massive solar flare that killed our power grids and all computer hard drives got fried and we had a restart from now.

Like we would have to rebuild society, right. But if we get to the point where this thing understands what would cause that, how to prevent that,

how to make sure that never happens,

much better power supply, much better allocation of resources, much better batteries, much better redundant data systems where you never have to worry about hard drives crashing and you never have to worry about any of these problems. So like any information you have now will be secure

and then understanding of natural disasters will actually get drilled into this volcano and it never goes off. Like this is gonna be a few things that they're gonna figure out through AI

that's gonna prevent a lot of the things that are probably wiped out enormous swaps. I mean, imagine if we could just actually see asteroids coming all of them and know how to divert them instantaneously.

I would have to do it, right. Coding them with something that changes the aerodynamics of them. - I think that's one would be relative to the ECM. And even we could figure out to do that, that's okay. And there's also detonating them.

There's a bunch of different crazy ideas, but imagine if AI's actually, you could just do this. Now, and then you put a shield over the earth

and you never have to worry about it ever.

The shield's powered by the sun. So you have ultimate power and you never have to worry about being hit by a Manhattan-sized asteroid. - Yeah, I think the trickier ones might be ones that are more internal to civilization

if you have some process that either like a worldwide process with different humans and corporations and governments or like an internal process in the AI. Like on the one hand, you want to be able to continue

to develop new ideas, new ways of doing things.

“So you need to experiment and try new things.”

But then there's also the risk of just keep trying new ideas like that eventually, you get stuck on some idea that actually proves really harmful or dangerous to you. And that you then sort of derail internally through your own memetic or internal evolutionary development.

So, how to sort of grow up safely in this world, where you have unlocked all kinds of new technological capabilities. Even if you're easily able to protect yourself against external threats like volcanoes and asteroids and stuff, right? Then there might still be processes arising

from within this global civilization. Just as we might invent new technologies that are dangerous, we might invent new drugs that are super addictive once you invent them.

You try them and then you're addicted, you never want to...

- Yeah. - That could be other like some crazy ideology that once it takes hold, it takes a lot of time. - I'm glad you brought that. - Is that one of the major fears that a lot of people have

as human beings will develop ideologies based around AI

“that there'll be like an AI God that someone develops?”

- Yeah, and I mean, I think that's, in fact, I would add that to the list of I've mentioned nuclear and bio terrorist risks, guess background existential risks. Like another is like some form of insanity,

like collective insanity, I feel. Our civilizational sanity already is kind of a little bit precarious. I think we're just kind of maybe barely holding ourselves together. - Uh-huh.

- And it's amazing how well the world functions

despite how crazy people are and how much they love their opponents and so forth. And we'll still manage to somehow get it to work. - There's also manipulation of the zeitgeist that's clearly being done by bots.

So you've got a bunch of people online that are having arguments on Twitter and they're not even talking to people. There's a bunch of ideas that are being pushed out on Twitter and a lot of these social media platforms.

“It's not even human beings tweeting about it.”

It's not, there's algorithms, there's AI, there's people that are hired to do it, there's people that are working for certain organizations that are hired to muddy up the waters, gaslight people, create problems,

how people argue with each other. And so it's like if AI recognizes how easy it is to manipulate people, do whatever it wants. That's a fierce, well. - Yeah, so whenever you change the basic parameters

of sort of the social cultural political discourse, new dynamics will emerge. And we don't have the kind of social science that is able to predict what happens if you change some of these knobs.

So we've seen in the past, like you invent, let's go all the way back, like somebody invents writing. Okay, so that turns out to have a had a huge effect, not just on people writing literature and stuff, but on political systems.

So you could now have states that could keep tax records, right? So you could have larger political units with writing and then they can hire standing armies and now you have like large-scale war.

You have social stratification. You could have like the ruler of the large area, could have you know enormous wealth, and you could have a soldier cast that like protects against internal and external.

So like just the way that human societies are political organized changes, as the result of this change in the rules of communication when you can have written texts, right? And then you have the printing press again,

and we're like 100 years from religious wars in Europe, like a reformation and all of this stuff. It's possibly, and then like forms of democracy later on, are also coming out of this and the scientific revolution. Then you have like mass media in the last century

with like radio and stuff,

of being able to simultaneously talk to millions of people,

“'cause that was never possible before, right?”

Could have some charismatic kind of guy who's like rallies up the whole nation, and new ideologies become mimetically fit in that situation.

That might never have, if it were people writing

kind of letters to the editor, like it's kind of a different type of idea that works there, then if you're giving a kind of stump speech that goes out to millions of simultaneously.

And now with social media, of course, we have another one of these, and you do see that starting to change culture in different ways. And now with AI being the next wave of this, that will also change, you have like bots,

you have new ways of finding information, you have maybe AI's that can themselves be super persuaders, that will also change presumably in some unknown, unknowable way, the way that like social discourse pans out. And for any one of these, I guess it could turn out

to be a lot better, we could become more informed, having AI advisors. I think that's fairly likely scenario,

“but it's also possible somehow the dynamics shape out”

in a different way, and we kind of go collectively insane in some way. - Back to the white water raft. - White to back water raft, yes, and it all becomes kind of totalitarian,

or we sort of fragment into like political warring tribes, or we become kind of completely unhinged. Everyone of us becomes convinced of their own little notary theory that they then like the AI or feed just serves them more material to kind of fuel their conviction.

That different ways in which this could go badly.

But don't you think even if that happens ultimately

the progress of AI won't stop? And so, again, I keep going back to this thing, but I think this is really what it is, is we have to change, like what it means to be a person. All those things are only problems.

If people stay what we are now, which is territorial primates with desire to possess material goods for some strange reason, even though we're a finite life form, if all that changes,

if we change what it means to be a person, which seems inevitable, then it won't matter. Then if we could figure out a way to literally engineer out all of the issues that humans have with greed and violence

and all the different things that trouble society, if the desire for that is no longer a part of being a person, which is that's doable. That seems like if we're going to continue to evolve, past, you know, Australia, Pethicus,

to homo sapiens, 2026, if we continue the same amount of time in the future, we'll probably won't be like that anymore. The best versions of people aren't people who want to steal your house and steal your land and shoot you and take your resources.

That's the best people are the people that contribute and they're interesting and they make you excited to be around them and you like it. But if that keeps going on and if that is aided by technology, if we recognize that there's actual patterns

of human thinking and behavior that can be changed and that if we all agree to subscribe to this algorithm that connect to this computer program, connect to this external device or maybe not even external, maybe it's internal that allows us to communicate

with each other telepathically. Like all that changes and then it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if there's any guardrails for AR or not because we're not the same thing anymore. Like all the worry that we have about AI,

the worry we have about power and manipulation and the ability to influence people, all that kind of goes away if people don't behave the way they behave currently. - Well, I guess here is one difference

with your white water rafting metaphor that out. So in that metaphor it's kind of, we need to hang on. Like there's a risk we could smash ourselves on the rock but if we don't do that then there's kind of one way

we end up right downstream. - We get up in a nice lake, yeah.

“But I think in reality what might also be the case”

that in addition to trying to not smash ourselves on the rock there might be places where the choices who make affect the ultimate destination. - Go after go right. - Yeah. - Or which dream but you may be a more...

- Yeah. - And where if you stay in one direction

you might end up in one place ultimately

in some sort of strange post human world and maybe it's really beautiful and people have the chance to grow into their true self and we love each other and are creative and take initiatives and go a different way.

Maybe you have a pipe paperclip maximizing AI or maybe that just everything is paperclip. So going a third way maybe you have a totalitarian system

- Yeah.

- Or just sci-fi, I'm trying to...

- Yeah, there are many more possibilities and maybe some that kind of we would think would look kind of good if we chose now but then in reality they have some hidden flaw that we didn't think of.

So if we chose those it would sort of be a mistake. And then maybe others that don't look that appealing to us now if you just presented them in a brochure to you like, but then actually if you thought hard about it

maybe you would realize that actually it would be a really nice place to live. Because in the current world they're the places that are nice to visit that are interesting but then there's not necessarily the same places

we would wanna live and raise a kid, right? So there are like novels and movies that they're really fun to watch but you wouldn't wanna live in those worlds. So there's a difference between the kind of what makes

for the good interesting story and the place we actually wanna spend the rest of your life.

“And so I think that would be possibly a lot of opportunities”

to make foolish choices or unwise choices or conflicts that sort of thorns the process and makes us end up not just that we go extinct before we reach them but that the deer that we reach might depend on the level of wisdom

and kindness that we have during the process.

- And there's always unintended consequences

with every solution that we try to find for any problem that we have. There's always some new thing that comes up we're like, oh, we didn't see that coming. I mean, it's certainly whenever we're dealing with nature

like whenever they've brought it in invasive species to handle other invasive species it always a giant disaster, you know? - Yeah. - Oh, it's, there's always unintended consequences

like, oh, now you have a hundred million frogs. Who's telling us about that? Was it Ollie Siddiqu that was telling us about the frogs? About they brought in, what did they bring in? Forget what the invasive species was.

Were they brought in this one species

“to kill another species and the problem they didn't realize”

that that species had been controlled. Was like coyotes or, I don't know, it was Guam. What did they get rid of? Whatever it was, they got rid of this thing that had been killing the frogs.

So then they had toads, right? Was it toads? So they had millions of these things that were all over the highway. So you drive on them, just squash them.

Everywhere you go, because there was nothing controlling the population, these things anymore. It's like unintended consequences of, you know, 'cause we're very short-sighted. And even in our ability to be contemplative

about what the possibility of the future is, when you're dealing with such an open-ended thing like AI, super general intelligence that can maybe make better versions of itself, or who the hell knows what that means.

Are we making a God? 'Cause it seems like if it keeps going on that, if it makes better versions of itself,

what's ultimately going to get to the point

where it could do anything, which is exactly what a God is. It can make universes. You know, what if the ultimate end of this is a big bank button that some scientists invents? (laughing)

So we are a little bit like, yeah, it's, I don't know that different analogies one might reach for, but I mean, I guess like say you're on a plane and then like the pilot has passed out or had a heart attack or something.

Now it's like we pass in years. We somehow have to, I don't know, figure out how to do the run the controls. We have to still try to make your best, right? But then add to that, that all the passengers

are fighting amongst each other. Each one thinks they are the God, who should control the, they all convinced that they are the superior person to try to land a plane.

So in addition to trying to figure out how the controls work, they are like actually having a big fist fight in the cockpit as well. And somebody's like dragging somebody else away. And there's like the kind of monkey tribe

that is the current state of the world here. And we're trying to shepherd this ship of humanity into Utopia. It's, yeah, it's an interesting. It's Dr. Strangelov on steroids.

But that's it. We might only have to like get it self at some point. We should be able to hand over like the reins. Like once you have it sufficiently good AI, like we maybe get assistance from that point on.

“I think it's the first thing that it's going to take over”

this government, which is going to realize how unbelievably inefficient the government is at doing almost everything and how much of the money that gets allocated is fraud and waste. If you allow AI to sort through that

and develop much more efficient pathways to controlling and sending any resources. Some people would not want to see that. - Exactly. - Exactly. That's going to be a problem.

of, some sort of a high mind possibility. Some sort of, I mean, one of the things that Elon said that I thought was really fast in and he said, "Do you going to be able to talk with that words?" Well, if we're able to talk with that words,

like does that eventually get to the point we could read minds? Could we, is, is, is thought in his communication? No longer verbal, it's no longer sounds. So right now we associate sounds that I'm making

where you know what words I'm using, what I'm referencing and we get a certain understanding of what each other is trying to say. But what if that's just clunky and that's silly and what of instead of a scroll that you leave

“in a cave somewhere now you have a movie that you can watch?”

Like something much more engrossing and much more powerful

and that this is what human communication becomes. It doesn't, it, maybe this is why the grays don't have mouths. We move away from sounds because right now what we figured out is like sort of like duct tape. We've, we're communicating, we kind of patched it up.

We figured out something. We're just going to use noises we make. Well, we have different noises here than the people that live on this island. They have totally different noises.

I don't know what the fuck they're saying. And then you have people on the other side of the world totally different noises. So Tower of Babel type situation, right? Where we really can't communicate with each other

unless we have translators.

But if we get to the point where that's not how humans communicate,

we communicate purely through thought and intention

“and understanding and that it's no longer based on language.”

It's no longer based on this is a transistor. This is a coffee mug. Instead, it's a complete understanding of each individual thing that we're discussing. Everything, you know what it is.

You understand what it is without it having to have a noise associated with it. Yeah, I mean, I guess the cyber security implications are significant if you are giving direct access to other people to transmit signals to your brain

in a high band with way that is not just words kind of that it's almost like you heard them even though there is no sound in your ear. But if it's like actually directly kind of interfacing in a high band with way with your network.

Also, we encryptions out the window. If we no longer have encryption, if we get to the point where I start thought of the window, because if computing gets to the point where the bottleneck is like think about money, right?

What is money right now? Money is all 1's and 0 somewhere, essentially. It's all bank accounts. It's like, we're not on a gold standard anymore. So what if that bottleneck, it's an information bottleneck,

where someone's preventing you from going into these places

“and getting these ones and 0's and transferring it to your place?”

But what if that is all-- what if computing power gets to the point with AI, gets to the point where that-- those boundaries are nonsense now. All encryption is instantaneously decoded. I think probably cryptography is defense dominant in the limit.

I think if you imagine mature technology, I think it would be possible to encrypt-- I mean, if nothing else, you could do this at a one time pad, which would enable you to encrypt things in a way that is unbreakable.

Really? I feel like that's going to be a bottleneck. And I think once we start reading each other's minds,

that might be the first thing to go--

it'll be like the ultimate solution. I mean, that's where you read it, probably would want encryption, right? If you're going to transmit thoughts to me-- Oh, yeah, like you don't want to have a--

Oh, you want some asshole, constantly in your head, your next-door neighbor, just poking you and prodding you. But you would hope that along with this technology becomes like a general state of enlightenment, that the human beings achieve, where that's no longer the kind of behavior

that we indulge in, which behavior do we no longer-- annoying each other, annoying each other, stealing each other's money. Yeah, that kind of stuff. But then, yeah, I guess we go back to this question of the utopian condition, like if you--

and so there are a lot of things that individually are bad, like lying, stealing, cheating, greed, excessive pride, like all kinds of disease, stubbing your knees, bad, like-- yet, if you sort of imagine removing all of those things,

then that changes the human condition quite profoundly, and to some people would feel kind of, maybe, are a pair of flavorless, or sort of, if there is no tension, no conflict, no bruised ego, no, like-- Yeah, it might self be good, but it does force us to sort of--

that we wouldn't be metamorphosing if we went all the way

in that direction, which ultimately might be right,

but it would require us to kind of find new ways of realizing whatever values are imperfectly realized in the current world through conflict and competition and pain, like some people get the motivation from painful failure. Yeah.

And so if you get rid of the pain from failure, then you'd need some other motivation, like some other thing that drives you on, which that could be, like maybe it's just a love of achievement, then you feel kind of neutral, or just less happy when you fail,

but it would still need something that kind of preserves whatever structure it is that we think is valuable, in the current human condition. Unless you go all the way to sort of radical hedonism and think the future is best if we were all just kind of floating

in some kind of drug-induced euphoria as blobs,

that experienced immense pleasure, but I'd now real texture in our experiences, didn't engage in activities and didn't interact with each other. Like, there's like a philosophical review,

“where ultimately pleasure is the only thing that matters”

and the minimization of suffering. So if that's your axiology, then it's relatively easy to see that and how a technological maturity you would achieve a sort of optimal state. But if you have a more complex value system,

where maybe pleasure is one good thing, maybe really important, but there are also other things, like appreciating beauty, you know, true friendship, courage, achievement, and ideally you'd want a future that includes all of these things, then you need to do a little bit more sort of design work

to figure out the way to combine them all in a meaningful way. But this all comes back to our idea of human meaning. What's important to humans are finite 100-year lifespan adoption of this concept of meaning, but the black hole doesn't give a shit about human meaning,

and it's going to be around a lot longer than us. And it's got a lot more power than us, and it's doing a lot more change than us. And we want to think that we're more important than black holes.

“- Yeah, I mean, because we are, I think we are,”

I mean, to us, yeah, to us, but to the universe is it? Is human meaning that important to the universe? Or is it just sort of a placeholder

for what will ultimately become?

Is it motivated us to continue to progress? - Well, so I think like at technological maturity, there are certainly forms of purpose that you could have. You could have artificial purpose. So this is when you basically set yourself a goal

for the sake of having the goal and then doing the activity that. So maybe you set yourself the goal. I'm going to get this little white ball into a sequence of 18 holes. And not only that, but in order to achieve this goal, it's part of the goal that I'm only going to use

allowed to use this very inconvenient method. I can hit the ball with a club, right? I can't much easier to just pick it up and put it in each hole successfully, but that doesn't count as being successful. So you could make up this goal pretty arbitrary.

Now, once you have that goal, then you now have a reason to try hard, to concentrate, to perfect your swing, and you can play golf. So the goal enables you to do this activity of golf playing, which may be you find fun or worthwhile or meaningful.

And the goal is how you solve the meaningfuls, because it's difficult to do.

“Yeah. And so the future would consist, I think,”

if we succeed in a lot of game playing, and you could certainly have these artificial purposes that you set yourself these goals, that then give you a reason to engage in the next activity. Now we're back in the world of Half-Life.

Now we're back in a video game. Now we're also in the simulation. Yeah, this is going to be your artificial goal. And you could imagine, I think, maybe we shouldn't think of video games here,

but it could be much like games we can't even imagine. It could be like society-wide games that last for 20 years, that involve all kinds of multimodal things, and little groups that work together to come up with new ways of creatively. And so in that broad sense of things we do for their own sake,

I think, game playing could be, and it's like a lot of what children do, they're kind of for curiosity and spend a lot of the time playing games, and we might all be kids again. What might be in short to supply is a little natural purpose. Like purposes, which we don't just arbitrarily make up,

in order to have a purpose, but that they're sort of given to us. So right now in the world, you might say, making a living is not just an arbitrary purpose, because there are real consequences if you fail. Like, maybe eventually you get kicked out from your flat,

and then it's really cold, and you get rained on,

So similarly, if you don't brush your teeth,

eventually you will have tooth decay, and there will be real consequences. So there are various things that you have reason to do, because there are real negative consequences if you fail to do them. And a lot of our lives is structured by these natural purposes.

“At a societal level, there is a whole bunch of things we need to do together, right?”

In this future world, maybe there would be many fewer of those natural purposes, because for any one of them, you can just ask the AI to sort it out. And so the artificial purposes would be a larger chunk.

It's interesting to think, are there any natural purposes

that would survive to technological maturity? Like anything that we still have sort of instrumental reasons that we need to do ourselves? And I think there might be a few, but they are more subtle. They might not strike us currently as very important,

but it's one of those things where, like during the day, if you're outside, you can't see the stars, right? It's not because they're not there. It's because there's so much light that they are sort of plotted out. But at night, when this stronger light from the sun is absent,

you can see these finger lights.

“I think similarly in this future, there might be one”

sort of urgent, screaming more of values, of immediately pressing practical concern, go away. You might be able to perceive a whole constellation of these more subtle values that we are blind to currently. So take the value of, take the value of, like, I don't know,

like honoring your forebears. So right now, it doesn't seem, I mean, maybe it's nice sometimes to remember your past parents or some historical hero who did something good that benefacted humanity, right? But it's not the main thing that you're, like, maybe that would be a bigger thing.

If that was nothing else you needed to do, maybe you could actually spend serious time or spiritual quests, like even for people who are very religious,

“a lot of their actual waking hours are spent on random other things,”

doing that laundry, right? Like driving to work, like the else kinds of stuff. Like, if all of that was automated, you could imagine spending more time on trying to align yourself, orient yourself to this higher being and trying to be in communication with them.

Like, maybe aesthetic values. Like, there are maybe some things that would just be kind of nice and cool if the world were like that. We don't really have time to worry so much about them now. But if that was nothing else on the agenda, like coming together

in a way that uphold some tradition in a beautiful original way that still is true to the original spirit together with other people and enacting some ceremony, like maybe those things would start to feel more of our time in conjunction with this game playing, and that might be many other of these kind of subtler values that would start to shape what people were doing.

Yeah, and ultimately who knows? Yeah. It's very interesting, and it's very open-ended. And we really don't know what's going to happen, but we're probably going to see it. We're probably going to see the strangest thing that humans have ever had a possibility to experience.

Yeah, and in the end, I guess it's a trust fall.

Yeah. Well, I mean, these conversations are always fascinating.

And who knows, let's do another one in a few years and see how off we are. Yeah. If you come back in four years, all right? Let's have four years. If we have four years, if you can, if you're allowed to travel in four years, come back and let's see how wrong we were, we can update. Well, thank you very much. I really appreciate you coming in here.

That's great to see you again, it's funny. So, it's fun. Okay. All right. Think about a kid. Bye, everybody.