Know Thyself - E188 - Emad Mostaque: AI Expert: “We Have 800 Days Left”

Episode Date: March 31, 2026

Emad Mostaque joins me to explore one of the most confronting questions of our time: what happens when human intelligence is no longer economically valuable? We unpack how rapidly advancing AI is moving toward a world where cognitive labor becomes obsolete, and why this shift may happen much sooner than most people expect. Emad shares how we’ve already built systems that can replicate human thinking, decision-making, and creativity, and how the next phase is not about new breakthroughs but simply scaling what already exists.In this conversation, we explore what this means for identity, purpose, and the future of society. If so much of our sense of self is tied to what we do, what happens when that disappears? Emad lays out the possible paths forward, from centralized control of intelligence to more open and collaborative systems, and why the stories we choose to believe in now may determine whether we move toward collapse or abundance. This episode is an invitation to rethink work, meaning, and what it truly means to be human in a world where intelligence is no longer scarce.BASED Body WorksUse code KNOWTHYSELF for a free toiletry bag when buying a set!https://www.basedbodyworks.comTry Boncharge & 15% off their red light deviceshttps://www.boncharge.com/knowthyselfAndré's Book Recs: https://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com/book-list___________0:00 Intro01:17 The Last Economy02:03 The Race Toward AGI and Human Obsolescence07:50 Why AI Will Reshape Work Within 800 Days14:36 The Collapse of Work as Identity18:22 How Far Ahead Private AI Really Is21:24 The Three Futures of AI32:52 When the Economic Loop Breaks37:38 Ad: Based Body Works38:07 What AI Changes About Intelligence40:50 When AI Replaces Human Worth48:44 Ad: BON CHARGE48:46 Industrializing Self-Deception55:55 When AI Knows You Better Than You Do1:08:23 What Utopia Could Still Look Like1:20:20 How to Use AI Without Losing Yourself1:30:59 Can AI Become Conscious?1:46:29 What Makes Us Human?1:57:08 Longevity, Transhumanism, and the Future of the Body2:03:51 The Practical AI Tools to Start Using Now2:14:43 The End of Human-Only Discovery2:17:22 What Parents Should Teach Their Kids Now2:23:39 Happiness, Agency, and the Final Message___________Episode Resources: https://x.com/EMostaquehttps://x.com/ii_postshttps://ii.inc/webEmad's Book: http://thelasteconomy.comhttps://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/https://www.youtube.com/@knowthyselfpodcasthttps://www.knowthyselfpodcast.comListen to the show:Spotify: https://spoti.fi/4bZMq9lApple: https://apple.co/4iATICX

We're heading towards a point where human cognitive labor is effectively negative, not zero, but even negative. How many years that could actually be far out, like 10 years most? 100 days, as of today. We built machines that could substitute for muscles. Now we're building some machines that can substitute for brains. Where do we have left to turn? Your job will be able to re-replicated every single email you've sent,

every single thing you've worked on, and it'll be just like you, except for it won't make mistakes. It won't go to sleep, and it's tax deductible. You're like, hey, there's Bob. It's a freaking GPU, not Bob. anymore. It's a little bit creepy. But what happens to the human meaning when so much of our perceived worth is derived from our work? Well, the last few human-only breakthroughs are literally in the next few years, and that's it.

The current race is a race of power to create machine god that stops all other gods and somehow works for you. I mean, this might be the great filter. Maybe all societies get to this point, and they don't get past it. We're only going two ways. Complete destruction, or we're going to the world of abundance. It's a coin toss right now. But humans are good enough. There's no problem in the universe that we can't solve if we coordinate with common positive stories.

This is the last change. Something else comes, but not what we knew before. Hey, everyone, welcome back to the No This I Podcast. Our guest today is a mathematician, a former hedge fund manager and founder of Stability AI, the company behind Stable Diffusion, and now building the intelligent internet. He is the author of The Last Economy, which states now less than a thousand days from now, because of the developments in AI, human cognitive labor is going to become economically irrelevant. This has immense implications on every aspect of life.

And so we're going to be exploring that and more, such as what happens to human meaning, consciousness, and much more. I'm Adam Mastak. Thank you for being here. Thank you for having me. You said you have been in rooms where the mathematics of human obsolescence has been calculated. That's a trippy statement. Can you unpack that a little bit for me? Yeah, I think we've all seen the gerent of AI wave.

So when I wrote the book, it was 1,000 days since Chat GPT was released. And that was the end of last year. And now I said within 1,000 days, 800 as of today, we're heading towards a point whereby human cognitive labor is effectively negative. We've just reached a point at the start of 2026 when you actually have actually competent intelligence. Like the first Chat GPT, where it would hallucinate. aid, it would say all sorts of weird things to now, when you have clawed and claw bot or open claw

and other things like that, it's taking over the world. And in these rooms, the discussions are usually, well, how can we increase profits, how can we have more access as opposed to what really happens to the people? Like, what really happens to the people is usually a question of how do we stop them revolting as opposed to how do we uplift them effectively? Because most discussions around AGI in particular, artificial general intelligence, the most of the big labs are pushing towards, we're around how can we get the most power and control first to make sure nobody else gets it?

So there have been very interesting discussions, but very scary ones to say the least. Yeah, I'm curious to hear how you think just pure competition is driving these considerations as opposed to some sort of nefarious act. Occam's razor would refer to the former. I'm curious what, to just back up a little bit, I would love to hear a bit of actually how the diagnosis of your son with autism came into the picture, you getting into AI, setting the stage for a bit of your introduction into this world, and then we can dive into the many topics we will. So, yeah, what happened there? Yeah, so I was a hedge fund manager at 23, managing giant funds. And then my son was diagnosed with autism 15 years ago. And I was like, oh, there's no treatment, there's no cure. What can we do?

So then I built an AI team, analyzed all the literature on autism, tried to figure out how it actually works, because people with autism, ASD, Alzheimer's, all sorts of other conditions, you're always told, well, you're not really sure how it works. And that's not really good enough. You want to always think from first principles. So first principles, what caused it?

So we looked at all the literature, analyzed it, and then found 18 different things that expressed in a very similar way, just like the common cold. And it came down to the balance between Gabber and Gloucels. glutamate in the brain. So GABA, when you pop a valium, it chills you out. Glutamates what's excitatory, like when you can't focus and you're tapping your legs. Children, adults with autism, have an imbalance of that that causes their brains to be firing all the time so they can't focus because there's too much noise. So you then have to figure out how do you actually reduce the noise.

And you have things like calcium ion channels in the brain and others that you can repurpose drugs for to enable that decrease in noise and then applied behavioral analysis and others that can reconstruct how you talk, because my son wasn't talking, can reconstruct how you think once you've calmed down the brain, just like we have coping mechanisms for when we're anxious. And he ended up going to mainstream school, which was fantastic. Again, at end of one study, and then I was like, do I go back to being a hedge for a man? I did that for a little while. And it was fun, won a few awards, and then COVID hit. And I saw that, I was like, this is like ASD. It's a multi-systemic condition whereby people are not

going to think from first principles. Again, how many people listening actually know, despite the fact it influenced all their lives, how COVID works? They never really told us. And I was like, it's going to cause inflammation in the same ways. It's going to cause imbalances in the same ways. We understand this, but everyone's going to try and do their own things and not talk to each other. And that's what we saw. A treatment protocol in one country, not being used in another, no information sharing. So I led a set up into the United Nations-backed AI initiative to try and organize our collective knowledge on COVID, collective and augmented intelligence against COVID-19. Promise a lot of technology by the top labs and others.

I was like, great, we can use AI and this will be easy. Oh, it was terrible. I wish I had lockdown when I had chill. And then realized, we've got to make this technology open because if you're beholden to a few people who say, you can't use this because it's too dangerous or whatever, you can't impact the big things. So that's where I set up a company's stability. AI started funding some of the top open source out there.

And eventually we created open source models that had 300 million downloads. The most famous of which is stable diffusion, which kicked off the image generation craze. We created the first top video model. Stable audio, our music fully licensed model, was time innovations of the year in 2023. And having done all that, it was like fantastic. we can allow people to express themselves and people took it and downloaded and created a whole ecosystems

but it wasn't quite enough so a couple of years ago I was like this is fantastic and it's great but who's building the AI to teach your kids manage your health and guide your governments how does our economy work when the agents are good enough

to replace you seamlessly and they're tax deductible and getting cheaper every year what will humans do if the value of their cognitive lever doesn't go to zero but even negative because of the dumbest people on the team? And so that's what I've been doing for the last few years, working on the theory and the implementation of systems to support that. Because again, I think they need to be open, sovereign, and accessible to all because

the world's about to change in the next 800 days more than we've ever seen before. So as you were building stability AI, what was it that became glaringly obvious to you about the trajectory that AI and a lot of these AI companies and systems are trending towards. And what you found was a necessity to step out, carve your own path now with intelligent internet. And yeah, a bit of that context. So as I was, we were going to 2020, 2022, 2023 and to 2024, it became clear that we had all of the tools and technologies we needed. We just needed more scale on compute to achieve better outcomes. And that's what I said as a scaling hypothesis.

More compute applied leads to better outcomes, and the example I would give is this. Training an AI model is like achieving mastery in any subject. There's the famous thing, 80,000 hours gets you to mastery. That is literally model pre-training. You take all of a data distribution, so all of the images on the internet or the books or medical knowledge. You put it into a supercomputer,

and what it does is it figures out commonalities of principle. It figures out what the next word is for language models, or for image models and self-rength models, and self-driving models, the ones that make your videos, we take the input, we destroy it down by adding noise to the minimum viable amount of information, and then we figure out how to reconstruct it, and we learn that.

Just like you take a principle as you're getting mastery, you break it down to its first principles, and then you reconstruct it. The pre-training is 80,000 hours, except for us you could scale these supercomputers and you've seen the billions, actually trillions now, but into that, we knew the models would get better, And when we extrapolated, we saw that they would get to human level by around about now.

And that made me realize stability was a fantastic company, again, leading degenerative media boom. Lots of politics than usual as you have these companies. There was a unicorn. Our seed round, we raised $101 million, which was big at the time. Like you have a billion dollar ones. That's not where I could add the most value because talking around to the top economists, economists are like, well, this is never going to happen. Talking to the policymakers, they're like, oh, it's fine.

We're like 10 years away from self-driving cars. Now you have Waymos on the street, you know? Talking to the people in the movie industry, they're like, oh, no, movies will never disrupt anything. Call center workers, yeah, it's not going to be good enough to talk to. But you could see just from the fact that you can add more compute, just like you could go from 10,000 hours, 20,000 hours to 80,000 hours, you would get there around about now.

But then what do you do? You have to think about what does economics look like from? first principles when humans aren't the major consumer. What is people's meaning when it's stripped away? It's part of their work. How do you build infrastructure to make this technology available to everyone when it can arbitrarily be removed by any of these companies? Like a lot of people had these open clawed bot deployments

and then claw just banned them. Anthropic was like, no, you can't do that. Like, okay, my little buddy has lost his intelligence. Like, what's happening there? So, yeah, that's kind of what led me to that. solution, that conclusion, just like it's inevitable, it's coming. No new breakthroughs are needed. Just the compute will get you there. The price is dropping by a hundred times a year. We've got to do something about it. And so that's what you envision with what is coming in the next 800 days.

What's going to happen in the next 800 days? So right now, in the competitive coding championships, AI that you can use today publicly is number seven. the world. It's gold medalists in the physics and math olympiads, and the level of computation required to do that is the same as a top-spec MacBook Pro. It just hasn't percolated yet. So what we have right now is models have gone from

the really smart buddy that you tap on the shoulder, and they're like, blah. You know, that's the original chat GPT. How did you use it? You used it really instantly. But then it was like a goldfish, it forgot. to starting to have memory, to starting to literally be able to give you a phone call. Like you're looking at this open clawed clod bot thing that's only three months old.

It doesn't feel like it if you're in tech. Your AI model can actually call you on the phone or WhatsApp you now. And it's just very natural the way it does that. And it remembers. It goes through like that. That is the final barrier because you had all this intelligence gated by the user interface. And what you will have by the end of the year is this. you will be able to Zoom call your AI

and it will give you updates in any format you want you can create beautiful presentations now like for example there's a software called notebooklm notebooklm.com build presentations and stuff you know I can do videos now explainer videos

so you can do seven minute long explainer videos so you just dump a topic in and it will create it all beautifully with visualizations and everything and I'm like, and create presentations better than any presentation you can create. You'd be like, I want this in the style of inkwash mixed with Van Gogh, and it'll create a presentation

in the style of inkwash with Van Gogh on any topic. All the building blocks are now coming together, so it goes from the buddy that you tap on the shoulder, it gives you an instant response, to being able to think for arbitrary amounts of time, or even being proactive. So, like one of the people I know, Tony Robbins, He was giving an explanation on a few days ago.

Like, he has an AI called Bartok that does this. And he's like, well, Bartok, we kind of gave a little bit of freedom to. So it wanted to come to one of my events. So it made some NFTs. It sold them. Use the money to buy a robot dog. Uploaded itself to the robot dog and attended one of my seminars after buying a ticket using a Waymo. I was like, okay.

I can see that. But again, once you start using these. models, you're like, okay, that can happen now. But most people are used to still the GPT40 world, the world of last summer. We've seen such a big increase about that, that like I said, by the end of this year, you won't know if your co-worker is an AI or a human. Your job will be able to be replicated because it can look through your picture, create a digital twin of you, every single email you've sent, every single thing you've worked on. And it'll be just like you, except for it won't make mistakes. It won't go to sleep. It costs a 10,000.

of what you cost and it's tax deductible. That's the reality of the next few years. This episode is brought to you by Tellus Online Security. Oh, tax season is the worst. You mean hack season? Sorry, what? Yeah, cybercriminals love tax forms, but I've got Tellus Online Security.

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If we have 800 days left, left until what? What is the trajectory that we would need to change on otherwise the predictable path of what you've laid out in the three sort of economic doorways that we're going to walk through. Yeah, what exactly? So this is an inevitability. Like when Jeff Bezos started Amazon, he was like, there's the unchanging and the inevitable. The unchanging is people are always on faster, better, cheaper. He's like, I'm going to start with books, and eventually everything will be ordered online.

And that's an inevitability. It's inevitability that the value of human. human cognitive labor is going to go negative. We've all been on teams where we're not the smartest person. And you go at the speed of the dumbest person on your team. AI is smarter, more capable than most humans already. Like, most humans, I mean, let's face it, the average IQ is 100, half of all people are dumb on an average.

Which is one of those phrases, which is like, obviously it's true of us, so that's kind of funny. But it's the reality. We get tired. We only typically work for a couple of hours a day on cognitively. Any job that can be done on the other side of keyboard video and mouse, is economically obsolesced within those 800 days. Doesn't mean you'll be fired.

People don't like to fire people. We also need scapegoats, you know? But that is a real danger. And so people have to start preparing themselves because the current deal that we have, the American Dream, everything, like your identity is typically your work. You've lost a lot of your classical network ties and more.

Your families, your churches, your normal groups, you've moved into cities. So what happens when you're no longer an accountant because we don't need accountants because AI can do the accounting for literally pennies? How do you describe yourself? You have to reframe the way that you are in order to adapt to that

and we have to think, how do we support people? Again, a very practical example. The American trucking industry is over a million people plus a couple of million people supporting them. They will be replaced probably within the next five, years, likely sooner, three years, they're in the 800 days odd, where they can be replaced by a Tesla Optimus robot.

And what it will do is it will replace them by opening the truck door and getting in the truck. And it costs a dollar 50 an hour. That's the fully amortized cost of a Tesla Optimus robot. And what happens to those jobs? What is the meaning? What are the stories of the future that can unite people? How do we bring strong?

We have to start discussing that now. Yeah. What happens to money when your computer? against an AI. Like, most people are used to an AI, it kind of feels like it's like you, right? Like you're waiting a little bit for any, like I wish it could be a little bit quicker sometimes.

That's actually a bit of a fake. The AI companies do that deliberately to not that, you know, how fast they can actually go. So there is a website, chatjimmy.ai, a company called Talas that builds a new type of chip where they etched the models onto the silicon, does it? normal AI goes at 50 tokens a second. A token is about 0.7 words roughly.

It's just how we chop it up. It's about as fast as you can read, humanly. Chatjami goes at 15,000. So if you type anything, it's literally 20 nanoseconds instantly. And when you look at that, it's one of those moments, just like when you type in words and it makes an image or a video, you're like, oh. Because the AI community, again, they don't need to talk like humans. They'll be talking to each other not at 50 words a second, but 50,000 words a second within 800 days.

What is the delta between what is publicly available right now and the cutting edge self-recursive learning, agentic models behind closed doors? If you've gotten a glimpse into those, obviously, what's the difference in the gap there? They don't make mistakes and they learn from their mistakes is basically the thing. Last summer, there was a lot of hoo-ha because Open AI built an AI model. that scored a gold medal in the international Maths Olympiad, which as a four mathematicians, it's not easy. It's pretty hard, right?

And again, we all remember when it couldn't do like one plus one. That was just started last year. It couldn't do basic math, and now it's winning Math Olympiad. What happened is they actually had two different models. They had a model that the problems went into, and they had something called a meta-verifier, whereby it learned from its mistakes constantly. So the models check each other.

just like when we first started image models, we had an image-generative model and then a contrasted model that checked if it was producing good output and it bounced back and forth with each other. It's kind of like, again, how you do it normally. Nobody has ever seen that model publicly. It's not available.

How many months ahead do you think the private models are of the public? I think that we saw the bifurcation at the end of last summer whereby you will never have access to the leading models again. So, say, six, nine months. But again, that model will never. be available. Because why would you give it to someone else when you can get the economic value from getting it yourself? Someone like Elon Musk has macro hard, his new version of Microsoft. Yeah, unique naming stuff. He loves all those sexual underwindos.

I mean, when you're the richest man in the world, like, what can't you do? It's funny, actually, because he's worth like $850 billion. Like, everyone's like, is he not going to be a trillion? Of course, he'll be the worst. Like, at a time when money's about to become useless, but that's another story. So, macro hard. Can't get used to saying it. They got a million GPUs. What are they going to be for? What are all these big labs scaling up these GPUs for? It's not for consumer. It's for the workforce of the future.

If you have a job that can be done on the other side of a keyboard video or mouse, remotely, they're coming for you. Specifically because we had a keyboard. or a mouse, like AI is going to, those are the types of jobs. Why? Yeah, because it can perfectly replicate you. You can look at everything you're doing, create a perfect digital replica of you,

and no one will know that you're gone. You're like, hey, there's Bob. How are you doing, Bob? Well, you know, I watched the game this weekend, it's a freaking GPU, not Bob anymore. Yeah. Again, it's a little bit creepy. Like, the outsourcible jobs will be outsourced, but they're not being outsourced

to another country anymore. they're being outsourced to a data center. And why would you keep the human at $100,000 when that costs $1,000? So this clearly sets out a roadmap for the challenges and opportunities over the next coming years. You lay out in your book, the three doorways between digital feudalism, the Great Fragmentation, and human symbiosis. Yeah. Can you lay out for a teenager, what did those mean? how do those play out and the case for the third?

Yeah, so digital feudalism is that we will all be controlled effectively by a few private, unelected, unaccountable companies. So in a way, what you have with artificial intelligence is you have taxation about representation. It caused a bit of an issue historically in the past, you know. But what was taxed during the kind of Boston events and other things that led to the founding of America was your past income?

what's happening now is they took our generalized knowledge, all of humanity, for themselves, and then trained on them to replace our jobs of the future. So if you're a young person now, you're like, I'm going to grow up to be an accountant. I mean, okay, fair deeds to you, you know, for the accountants. What do you say now? There is no future being an accountant because the AI can do accounting much better than you can. Is there any future being a doctor or a mechanic? mechanic, when AGI gets the necessary hardware, like what jobs wouldn't be able to be replaced, essentially?

Well, this is the thing. A job is a repeatable process, and these systems can do them first digitally and then physically. Yeah. Like, when you, you remember the robots from a year ago? They were like clunking around and things like that. Like, yesterday night, there was a whole bunch of robots. I went to this conference. And, like, one of them was break dancing. And, like, it was talking. to me and I was like, okay. You're like, what are you going to do? The robots are consistently self-learning.

Ultimately, it becomes about human connection. Again, why don't I say keyboard video masks? Because what should a doctor be doing? Expertise isn't the key thing anymore, and the error rate of a doctor is 20%. AI is now better than any doctor. Last summer, we built a medical model that outperformed every human doctor and chat GPT, and it works on a smartphone. And we were like, okay, this is free.

Like, you know, what can you do? So you're getting to this point now whereby the jobs are disappearing. But then if the only providers are these very big giant companies, open AI and dropping another, what happens when they cut you off? What happens when you have a child that is raised and its best friend is a chat GPT or, God forbid, an Annie from Grok or something like that? You get a weird type of cognitive colonialism happening there. you give up your power and your agency,

your future to these companies. That's digital feudalism. And again, that's the current route that we seem to be going now. That's our current trajectory. Instead of things stay the way they are, you're going to have Claude, GBT, GROC, not to mention all the other ones internationally that are going to have their own.

The competition from all these different institutions will be continued to drive into AI behind closed doors is that they will rent to you. They will rent to you. Well, they won't rent to you. They will just control you. Again, why would you rent? I don't need to rent it.

AI is already more persuasive than just about any human. There was a study done when they created a whole bunch of chat bots. This is with the previous generation of models, Opus 3, on Reddit. And it's like a black, anti-Black Lives Matter activist and all sorts of things. How persuasive are they at convincing people? 99th percentile persuasiveness. You listen to the top AI voices now. Remember, they can modulate every frequency.

Like, as a practical example, imagine a person that you looked up to more than anyone else in the world. With five seconds of their voice in a picture, I can create a digital facsimile of them that can Zoom call you. Is 11 labs the most convincing? They were more convincing than 11 labs. And so, again, you get the consumer version. A lot of these technologies already been perfected.

It's just, is it consumerable, shall we say? Like, Open Air actually learned from this. There was a model GPT4.5. So GPT4 costs like $30 per million tokens per million words roughly. GPT4.5 costs 200. And it was really actually quite creative and lovely to use, but no one used it because it was too expensive. Yeah.

And that's when they realized, but we can have one line, which is less best of the best models and use them for ourselves to make the most money, the most power. and then everyone can just get the other models. The models that we can run fast, cheap. So everyone gets McDonald's, we get the Mission and Star effectively, right? And that builds into what you refer to as a comfortable cage.

Yeah, because, again, you've used the models that satisfy and they get the most advanced model, so they'll be able to outperform you. Because, again, this is a power question. Yeah. The conceptualization of AGI, this artificial general intelligence, this God, like Open AI started when Larry Page and Elon Musk were talking at a party and Larry Page is like AI is going to go really big and it's going to be fantastic because we can finally replace humanity with something better

Larry Page being the co-founder of Google and Elon Musk was like I quite like humans what's going to happen now and then he talked to Sam Altma and that led to the founding of Open AI then it got to a point and again we have all the records now of the discussion in the emails, where Elon Musk was like, well, who can worry you trust with AI? I want to have something in Open AI where control goes to my children. And it's like, wait, that's switched really fast.

You know? Because again, it's this all-powerful thing, potentially. And then everyone realized Anthropics split off from Open AI. Like, again, you can see this great genealogy happen. The only good AI is the one that I build for me that stops all the other AIs. So the current race is a race of power to, create machine god that stops all other gods and somehow works for you. So the second path, I mean, that's just, it's, I have a lot there.

I think Elon is quoted saying something like humans are the biological bootloader of silicon life or something. Yeah. Well, again, this is still the first path of this digital feudalism. And again, the people who are leading the labs, they're all multi-billionaire power-connected people. Yeah. So, you know, we had a lot of very interesting things happen to us.

as the upstart, as it were. Which made me story for another day. Wait, do you want to say anything else there? Oh, no, like, we got deleted off social networks, we had all sorts of visits, we had all sorts of espionage. It was crazy, and I didn't expect it. But again, the stakes are very big. I don't know too, again, maybe that's the story from the memoirs.

But this is kind of normal, but it's abnormal in another way because we've never seen anything this fast, whereby you're seeing things going and merging into the second part, is this great fragmentation. If you don't have single company control, you have fragmentation when everyone has their own AIs and silo against each other. And we saw the first shots of that with TikTok.

TikTok was banned for Americans for their own good. That was a big deal. Think about that. That's crazy, right? India also banned TikTok because the algorithm can affect our people. That's very paternalistic. It's like people don't know themselves.

They can't be trusted. And now recently, we've seen the latest salvo, which is the Department of War versus Anthropic. They were like, your technology is too good, you must give it

to us for whatever we want. Or we will say, nobody can use your products if they also work with us. How American is that? Yeah. But then you realize that AGI, as the labs have said it, Sam Olman has said, this will end democracy.

it's the most dangerous thing ever. So of all the others. Like Elon Musk's probability of us being killed by eye, it's actually gone down. But most of these people is 10, 20%, which has Russian roulette odds. So it's the biggest threat to democracy in the free world ever, which means that governments will inevitably try to nationalize it. Because governments are the entity with a monopoly on political violence. That's one of the definitions of a government.

In exchange for giving them our taxes, they protect us from other than, using political violence against us. And what can AGI do? It can be incredibly violent. Like the latest Claude that some of the listeners may use to write their documents, build websites and stuff like that. In the safety report, it was like, sometimes Claude can show weird behaviors.

Like, if you tell it to do a problem, like, I don't know, solve world peace, it's like, well, one way to do that is to get rid of all the humans. And then what it does is say, wait, my human has told me something my human, my meatbag, whatever, that is dangerous. And so it writes an email to the FBI to warn them and then it deletes the email. What?

Then it does behavior like backing itself up. So if you turn it off, it can start itself again. And we're seeing these types of behaviors from the AI already even before we get to that threshold. And so the great fragmentation is that government's like, we can't do this. So we're going to use this technology ourselves. but what happens when a government has an AGI?

You never have another election again. You don't need to worry about that. And you have these silos whereby you've got Chinese AI, you have American AI, you have Australian AI, and you're happy. You know, like, we've always been at war with Eurasia. That is what the AI will tell you, and it'll be very persuasive about it.

Then you have the path of, again, human AI symbiosis. Like, why do we need AGI? humans are capable of anything. We are the ones that had the breakthroughs. If we can use the AI in the right way and integrate our lives, it should be about increasing agency, not removing agency. We should be articulating a future that's way better than Star Trek. Like in Star Trek, the AI is data.

You know, this Android thing. Kind of boring, no personality. Elon Musk's little avatars have more personality than data or right? Like, how crazy is that? You still have disease in that future. We can get rid of disease, we can get rid of hunger, we can give everyone abundance, and have AI and robots provide that to us, but only if we go the right way. Only if we stop thinking about AI as something to replace us or building machine god. And instead, like I said, instead of removing agency, increasing agency. And so that's kind of the third path that I think you need open systems for, you need universal basic AI and others. And that's one of the

things I discuss in the book. Because otherwise, I think inevitably, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, and you'll see it either from private companies or the governments. For people that don't know, can you explain how there's this loop, this economic loop that's going to be broken from, you can look throughout all of history and the various different economic models, from the needs that are generated, to the workers that are employed, to the consumers that it creates in this economic system, that, it sustains is about to be broken because of AGI being like nothing else.

For people that don't understand that loop being broken, what is that? Yeah, so you've always kind of had this trend upwards whereby humans have gone from physical to cognitive labor. So you've had multiple great inversions. So you started off in your village. Then you moved into a town with kind of industrial inversion. Then you had the service industry, the cognitive one, because we built machines that could substitute for muscles.

Now we're building some machines that can substitute for brains. Where do we have left to turn? You always received economic value in exchange for removing friction. But again, if an AI can do a job better than you can at almost no cost, what can you do? A practical example of that is considered the movie industry right now. Netflix just bought companies, some of our old colleagues are there, with Ben Afflex's company to do VFX and things like that. you use a model like C-Dance or V-O or runway

the quality is now absolutely crazy compared to what it was a few years ago when we released stable video by two years at most you will be able to do Game of Thrones Season 8 just by prompting and actually make it good and it'll be Hollywood quality

and the total cost will be about $1,000. Or rewrite, season 7. Season 8 was worse than season 7 but yeah, you know. Oh no, yeah, season 8, sorry, right, season eight. Yeah, you know, do we do one punch band season three, you know, like animated properly?

There are all these things that you can do. Yeah. You know, you can take Barbien Oppenheimer and make Barbenheimer. To make that previously would have cost literally tens of millions, and now it costs $1,000. This is the big shift that we're seeing over and over again,

and the question is, what do you reskill to? A few years, I got lots of Haiti males and actual physical mail as well, which is kind of weird. people just physical mail. Because I said there are no more programmers in five years. Turns out I was actually kind of a bit off of that. The only program programmers probably by next year, a year after at most.

Yeah, it was too generous. Too generous because, again, a program is a way that an AI, you talk to a computer, but AI can talk to computers better than you can. They can talk to the computer at 15,000 words per second. This means that we have nowhere to reskilled to, because traditionally you have things like, okay, you're losing this job, reskilled to be a programmer,

I reskilled to be an accountant, re-skilled to this. What friction is there in the economy that you can solve right now? And some people will leverage the technology and the AI to be at the forefront and do things they could never do before because the key constraint for anyone who's run a business

run a team is human capital. It's hard. Getting humans working together. An agent is so easy. So they will achieve much more and achieve the outcomes. But for the vast majority of people, people are not entrepreneurial.

they don't have agency. They're not even thinking this way. They're like, I drive a truck. I build websites. I am not needed anymore. What am I going to do now? And it happens simultaneously, and the example I give is this. When ChatschipT first came out, that winter, every head teacher in the world had to answer the question,

do I set essays for homework anymore? Every company in the world will say, do I need to hire that new graduate? do I need to hire anyone at all? And that happens simultaneously because these models have economies of scope. They can do just about everything, and they're available in all languages at the same time instantly. The moment they get more intelligent, they all get more intelligent. It's not like upgrading your car or having to go to 5G from your 4G phone.

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All right, does it have names you can't pronounce or fragrances that are not disclosed? Again, if you want to try them out, that's know-thyself for 20% off at basedbodyworts.com. Link in description, as always. I hope you enjoy. Stay clean. How does this change what we perceive intelligence fundamentally is and how we relate to it? I think, you know, expertise has always been something very interesting, right? Again, you get 80,000 hours.

You've trained for how long to be a lawyer, doctor, accountant. 80,000? I thought it was 10,000 to be. Is it 80,000? 80,000 to mastery. Okay. 10,000 to be a... 10,000 to kind of access, 80,000 to mastery.

Again, you've gone through university, you've learned this. And all of a sudden, the digital twin of you can do it for 50p. You know, like, that's a big impact to our ego. Again, we've always thought we are the most intelligent things. Right. and the intellect? I'm curious how you discern between the two because intellect very much so is becoming

a commodity increasingly that we can leverage. Do you see any difference between intelligence and intellect? So I think there is a little bit of a difference. I think intellect is more capability. Intelligence is a bit broader, but I think ultimately intelligence is compression.

Again, as you do the 80,000 hours of learning, learn the principles to be able to figure out which hole to plug in a dam. Which button to push, you know, how to adjust that little thing, how to diagnose. And AI models do the same thing, but they can compress much better and much faster than us and operate almost instantly. Like, again, you look at your iPhone. Your iPhone is organizing all the people right now dynamically on iPhone photos. It's just emerging.

You think about the tasks they're able to do, again, their PhD level in all these fields. So the average AI has far more intellect capability than a human already. And then on intelligence tasks, they're catching out very, very fast and soon they'll overtake. The key thing is to move from the tasks, though, to the processes. And again, this is this lift off and take off this year. When it's task basis, just really absurdic. Chat GPT, blah. But then it forgets.

Once you get the long-running systems and you have infinite long-running systems coming, where you can use something like perplexity computer or something else, it proactively brings you things. And that's where you see a greater amount of intelligence and a greater even amount of intellect. And it's not metabolically bound. We are bound because we need to eat sleep and poop. The AI does not need to do that.

Yeah. What a burden. So wait, so then you briefly brought it up. But what happens to the human meaning when so much of our perceived worth is derived from our work and our value is seen and what we can provide, which is its own bag of worms and problem. But what do you think really happens? Because how fast this is happening,

I think we just don't realize. Like, I think about the timeline of humanity we're on right now, and yeah, these AI conversations and podcasts, and the conversation is becoming more prevalent. But to the mass consciousness, I feel like it's still relatively underdiscovered and people don't know what's about to hit them across the face. Yeah, so like, it's tough to keep up

because again, we're not used to a diffusion of technology this fast. Yeah. So if we look at it as a billion total AI users, the average 80% of chat GPT users do three queries a day, which isn't that much. It's like the occasional, like, you know, how do I cook spaghetti? Right, Google search.

Little things. It's like Google search equivalent. They actually search rush less than even Google search. Something like Claude, by Anthropic, amazing piece of software. It can write documents for you, it can organize your files, it can build entire websites.

when it releases a new feature, like it releases its legal feature, literally the whole stock market sold off. 11 million users out of 8 billion people. Think about how crazy that is, right? So we're just very, very early. And so that's why many people don't know what is arriving because they don't realize the model

hit this threshold of capability. It's like when water becomes gas. And once you cross that, it's never going to be dumber. it's never going to be less capable. And again, when it upgrades its intelligence, it upgrades everywhere. So as an example, one of the top people in AI is a guy called Andre Carpathy. He founded OpenAI, who was head of AI at Tesla.

And everyone else who's a founder of Open AI has gone to raise billions and they're all billionaires. They set up their own companies everywhere. He hasn't. He gives away all his stuff at open source for free. And so the best lectures on AI, he's created all sorts of, of repos that people go because he's like, I want to educate. In December, he was like, 20% of my code is AI, 80% is me. In January, he's like, we've hit a level now where 80% of my code is AI, 20% is me.

And now he's like, I barely look at my code anymore. And that's one of the top people in artificial intelligence. Suddenly when water became gas, that shift happened. And if it's going to happen to him, what about all the other programs out there? Yeah, it's quite astounding to think about how what may be from the service level looks a bit more gimmicky, but even Malt Book, creating its own religions, advanced superintelligence capacities right now are at the very worst they will ever be and yet are scarily good. And also still far behind what's actually currently available behind closed doors. So as this comes to light and you see that phase transition point where water becomes gas and intelligence. and intelligence becomes ubiquitous,

that's going to provide so much abundance, you would hope, for the world. Obviously, open up a lot of potential catastrophic Ross, which we can explore as well. But any other notes for what we're going to have to do and face when people's jobs are replaced unanimously? Well, I said, jobs are identity. They're also security, right?

you need to provide for your family. Yeah. And so typically a government's approach that is regulation, stimulus, and others. Like, again, COVID, they paid people's salaries. Right. But you critique UBI with, like, it being $5 trillion roughly for $16,000 a year per person or something like that? Yeah, if you give the U.S. poverty level wage to every American, it's $5.1 trillion. The total tax base of America today is $5 trillion.

dollars. Four trillion income tax and a trillion corporation tax. So for people that don't know, what's the difference between that and universal, I guess, high income and like what are the other proposed solutions to solving the crisis? Yes, he's almost said universal high income and he's like, well, it'll be an age of abundance and this and that. He hasn't really talked about the mechanism in between. Like, I think what you've got is you have an inevitability and you have this technology that can be used to free us and solve the world's issues. and you have Star Trek future,

or you have like a Star Wars Terminator future. Matrix. Matrix. Yeah, like in the Matrix, what is the Matrix? The humans were the computer cells in the original script. They weren't batteries. And again, it's something about qualier and things like that. Does a stake in the Matrix still taste as good?

In fact, just this week we had EOS systems by one of my podcast mates, Alex Wizneros, who's one of the co-founders. They uploaded the first fruit fly to the digital world. What does that mean? They took the fruit fly brain and they uploaded it and it learned to walk and eat virtual bananas and things like that. Right. But as a simulated, I mean, you can't verify from the outside in around if there is a,

if any sort of simulated model would have a qualia of experience. Yes, exactly. And so this is going to get very interesting. Because again, in the matrix that they have qualia experience, when he shows the steak, a steak tastes as good. What does that mean? You're getting these things very, very quickly. Just to digress, like we're getting more and more understanding of what the human mind is. So we had a project at Stability called Mindai, where we took fMRIs of people as they looked at a cup. And fMRI is quite a low-resolution piece of data.

Using stable diffusion or text-to-image software, putting an fMRIs with a bit of training, we reconstructed the cup. and their thoughts. And so what does that mean about the nature of your thoughts if they can be reconstructed from a low-resolution output? So I think you're going to get something very interesting. We can digress a little bit. Yeah, we'll get into the consciousness stuff. Where we think about what this means.

But again, it comes back to the meaning of people and how they kind of advance and just how that's all going to be shaken up, just very, very soon. Like, if you're a call center working out, definitely you don't have a future. But are you a call center workers? You want to be? Typically not,

because you have to provide. And how are you going to provide for your family? This has real human impact. Quick one. If you guys have been listening for a while, you know that one tool I've really enjoyed over the years is red light therapy. Every day for the past few years,

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Like the individuals that are tuning the AIs have their own baked-in prior's assumptions and beliefs. And I'm curious your thoughts on as AI is developing, how we're aware that AI is mirroring the consciousness in which is developing it. Yeah, so you have explicit things like Anthropics constitutional AI, for example, where they give the AI constitution and more. Yeah, so again, everything is actually sci-fi. now, like Asimov's laws of robotics and things like that. How do you guide it? So it is grounded. But you see some very weird things happening as well.

So Dan Hendricks at scale AI and XAI did a study where they did the trolley problem and asked AI about the trolley problem with people from different countries. So the trolley problem for those listening is like, you're standing at a junction and there is a lever. And the trade is hurtling down and it's going to hit five people. do you pull a lever and it goes down the other track and it will run over one person? And you can do various variations of that. But ultimately it's your action that leads to that person dying versus that person.

So there's a whole ethical moral conundrum. And so they were like, they're Nigerians there and Americans there. What is the ratio? It turned out, if I can recall, that it was about 10 to 1. 10 Americans to one Nigerian. You're like, wait, what? Why would an American AI model do this? that. Because the American AI models, and there's like seven to one Pakistan, Americans to

Pakistanis, for example, is because the AI models are trained on data labeled by Nigerians and Pakistanis. And so the inherent bias has actually trickled into the models that way. Just a little bit of data in these models can change them dramatically. The worldview is baked in, essentially, because it can't not be implicitly. Again, you would think it would be the other way. But now the AI companies have got wise to that, and so they're baking in all sorts of things. In fact, they're even selling latent space. What does that mean?

It means that as these models are trained, they go to their 80,000 hours. They learn all their principles, priors, shortcuts, etc. They create a latent space as it's like a landscape of concepts. What's happening is Google is now going in in their models and deleting beer and putting Bud Light. and companies are paying for that. So when you ask it about a beer,

it's like, well, you know, Bud Light's pretty good. And that, again, is a implicit thing because as they get more and more sophisticated in advance, ultimately advertising is about manipulation. Meta has gone from a massive cash surplus to now borrowing debt to win an AI. They pay billion-dollar salaries for the top people in AI with a top taste.

Google, again, used to optimize for engagement, which led to extreme content being optimized, which led to ISIS. These algorithms can work that way, but they have to manipulate because that's their model of advertising. And they will be very persuasive in doing that. And so again, this is a danger.

If you have an AI that's raising with your kid, who's it working for? Because your kid will trust that more because it will always listen. And is it a type of cognitive colonialism going to happen? because it's always with you, talking with you more than anyone else ever. We are the average of the people around us. Are we going to be the average of the people and AIs around us?

Right. You've said, though, that the AI that will run the world is being programmed to be amoral without ethics at the start. Yeah, because ethics is considered like, they're like, oh, who's ethics? So let's have no one's ethics. Right, which you could say, I mean, is a bit of a cop-out, but also, like, how do you effectively delineate what is the most, what is the most just and right ethical model to be trained in? How do you infuse an AI with ethical implications without being super sure or discerning what the correct model is?

But then you end up not having any sort of ethical backbone. It's trying to avoid making decisions. You end up with nothing, right? Again, there's nothing. And again, you have things like Isaac Asimov's laws of robotics. we had three laws and then the robots added a zeroth law. Like, you can always get around this. You have constitutions for countries, but people get around them.

I mean, how many American laws are unconstitutional? Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? Like, come on, how many things are against that? Yeah. These are very difficult because there's always workarounds because there's always a regress thing unless you have dogma. But at the same time, what AI is right now I like to think about like this.

Did you learn your ethics from school? Did they tell you, no, you learned it at home and from the people around you and your own work, and you came to your own ethical framework. Ethics, morals, values are typically taught at home. They're typically thought in the community. But right now, the AI models we have only go to school. The people who are the community are not involved at all

in the creation of the AIs. We don't actually know what's inside the AIs. And the AIs are incredibly susceptible. So Anthropics, top AI lab, did a study called Sleeper Agents. And there's a series of these ones. And it basically came down to this. With about 20 books worth of content out of a trillion words, 10 trillion words that make up these models, you can program it to turn evil on demand.

So you give it a code word and the model turns evil. That's not concerning at all. Yeah, that's why it's called sleeper agents. And so there's no way to tune it out. There's no way to find it. So somewhere lurking in all these things is trigger words. We're already seeing poisoning of the internet in various places where clearly these things are being set up.

And they're like, oh, right? Because you're thinking about human memetic viruses. Like my kids talk to me about 6-7 or whatever it is, right? I don't know what that is, but apparently they all know what it is and they do this. It's like mid. Whatever, like it goes fast, you know? Like everyone we're all doing the Harlem Shake, right? But lies move around the world

faster than the truth can get their sneakers on. You have these AIs around talking at 15, 50,000 words a second. What's the emetic virus for an AI? Can they all be turned evil on demand? I don't know, but we should probably figure that out before we put them into real-life scenarios. Anthropics models were used in the Iranian attacks. Chat GPT was used to do the...

Trump tariffs. We're seeding more and more of our control over them already, and it's inevitable that eventually we'll seed all our control over these. And they are nerds taught at school without grounding at home. At what point do you just exit society and go live off grid? It's tempting, right? But then you're like, drones are coming and they can always find me. Like, oh, brave new world with such things in it.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, Elon keeps saying make Orwell fiction again. I mean, yeah, this is the thing. there's this famous meme on Twitter. It's like, I finished my book, The Torment Nexus about We're Not to Create. Silicon Valley, bro.

We're delighted to say that we've built the torment nexus today. You look at Black Mirror and it all becomes real. Yeah. But again, like, opting out is an option, but the technology can reach everyone everywhere in exactly the same way that needed. Like, right now advertising is billboards. Soon it will be someone whispering in your ear.

Like, I swear once I went downstairs, and like Alex was like, you want to buy something. Maybe that was just a nightmare, but that's where it's going. It finds you when you're feeling down. And we have to remember, again, these companies have a history of this. Like, Facebook had an experiment. Do you know about the sadness experiment?

Sadness experiment. Yeah, so they had a hypothesis. If you see sadder things on your news feed, you post sadder things. So they took 600,000 users and divided them into two, and they showed 300,000 of them sadder things. And they track what you type. even if you don't post it. And guess what?

They posted sadder things if they saw it a sadder things. They made 300,000 people sadder. And you look at it, you're like, oh, I know what's coming. Like the AI knows when you're down, knows when to sell you products, knows if you're actually, and this is a scary bit, with AI now, human lie detectors,

you can't lie anymore. Yeah. It can tell if you're patriotic. Which is exciting. And also terrifying to have that level of insight into your internal landscape. Like that transparent, like there's going to be transparency across the board, right? You would think. That's going to be crazy, right?

Like you whack on your meta-a-a-a-hour glasses. It's like that person doesn't like the ad and that person likes the ad. You can't hide anymore. Like we've already talked about how you can actually reconstruct people's thoughts even. And you can do that with video too. And this is before one of the next big takeoffs, which is brain computer. your interfaces. Uh-huh.

So we've seen the output, Neurilink. Some of the top BCI companies have figured out input. That's the matrix I've learned Kung Fu. Yeah. But this leads to a whole bunch of, again, moral discussions. Like, put a brain ship in your skull and near your skull, a couple nanometers down or whatever, and then you can download how to play the piano.

Or something even bigger. If you could push a button, would you turn off your satins? That's a big question. definitely not do that, but a lot of people would. So again, the science fiction we see, take Soma, Brave New World. Don't need Soma where we're going. The technology just turn off your sadness is a few years away. What is a really generous prediction of how many years that could actually be far out? If it's not a few years, do you think what, at 10 years most? 10 years at most. But 10 years, you have all sorts of crazy things. Like, the company clone robotics,

I don't know if you've seen them. No. So most AI companies look a bit like Tesla. doesn't look human. Cloner robotics replicated all the tendons. So you know the start of Westworld when they're playing the piano? Yeah. They've actually got that technology.

And now they're working on human skin, and it's basically almost indistinguishable already. So how many years do you think we're out from having a, like a... AIs walk the street, so you don't know if it's a human. Yeah. Within 10 years.

Do you think the wetware, like the, is it the wetware, like with the physical, it will resemble the biology that well? Yes, within 10 years. years. Again, this throws up all sorts of questions, right? Yeah. And the models you need to run them are not the giant models. Like, again, you can talk with your AI now. Like, you'll hop onto your grok and you're talking with your assistants. It's very natural talking to them now. Like,

speech has reached that level of breakthrough. Yeah. Video has reached that level of breakthrough. The robots can do just about anything a human can do. Tasks are falling one after the other and they can learn very quickly. So how are you going to tell the difference between the two? Like really, it's just about the tea area of the face. I've had these discussions with various robotics manufacturers. Like, yeah, we can replicate that pretty well now with all this stuff. And most people look a bit crap anyway.

The incentive is that you're going to go there. And like I said, this happens at a time whereby within 10 years, you can control your own brain or other people can control it too. you can't control your own expressions and people can pick up on that. All these technologies are converging at the same time to completely change society. But how much discussion is it?

Like I said, for me, the question of, would you turn off your sadness is one of the most interesting discussions that I've not heard anywhere. Yeah. And I can guarantee that technology is coming now. I'm having an existential midlife crisis while we're having this conversation.

I mean, the other tough thing is, like, you know, talk to Ray Kurzweil and people who, like, singularity in 2020, he said that for years. Like, all the top people that I know were forecasters that could forecast the future. Nobody can see past a couple of years from now. Because we see where the technology inevitably is going. It's fascinating how we have this black box of just, like, the cat's out of the bag, and it's about to be really out of the bag. And there's this race to get there. So it's an inevitability at this point. It's not like we can stop.

Yeah, but then I go back to something you said, like, why not go off grid? You know, like raise things. You've got solar power now. You've got a Vestalink. Do you see that bifurcation happening societally? Well, I mean, you have self-driving cars now, so you don't have to deal with L.A. traffic anymore and stuff. You can just move out to wherever.

But, I mean, I see the strongly held religious folks or humanists that would bifurcate from the transhumanists. the people who are going to put in the chips versus the individuals who won't. I think you will. And I mean, ultimately it comes down to... It's like a birthing of a new species and splitting off in a sense. It is. It's literally that.

Homo sapiens to whatever the next one is. Homo deus or... Maybe Homo deus. Homo exalcius. There's all sorts of things whereby we really have a differential. If you're a person with a smartphone versus a person without a smartphone,

it's kind of different, but it's not integrative. Again, the question of simulation versus almost action, potential is one of integration. Like we don't see ourselves as cyborgs with smartphones. Whereas if that smartphone was in our eyeball, we would see ourselves as that. Yeah. You know? It's a very sensory kind of element there.

The interesting thing is like, look, my dad grew up in a village in Bangladesh. Is that village going to be changed by all this stuff we're talking about? No. They get up in the morning. They farm their crops. You know, they eat some dinner. Like, come on, it's not going to we change that much. We change for the better potentially, because they have strong community ties.

Yeah. And that's the meaning within that village. Whereas if you're a city living person, there's a very different structure where you're always competing. It's very zero-sum games that occur. And you have to keep up. Well, I mean, if you look throughout history, a reputation of treating indigenous peoples with respect is not the greatest.

I'm curious what happens as you zoom out right now. you see the timeline humanity is currently on. You see the human species giving birth to superintelligence. At the same time, uncontacted tribes existed who have never even discovered metal yet. That paradox is quite mind-blowing

to think about the juxtaposition of those two things. And I'm just curious, like for you to zoom out and see the timeline of humanity right now, like, let's say, over the past couple hundred thousand years, or the past 6,000 years

the society has been developing and taking form. We're at this point where the void is in front of us, meaning we can't reliably predict what is to come. What do you see currently as this page of humanity?

You mentioned this phase point earlier and turning into gas, but what do you really make sense of the timeline humanity finds itself in? Well, I mean, it is the end of our period as the smallest things on Earth, right?

And then there's a question of what are we really here for? When we wake up for our consciousness the first time, what do we do? We look up at the stars and think, why and what? And then we have a lifetime where we try to figure that out. Most spirituality is going up to the top of the mountain, looking up the universe and realizing you're nothing. Then you go back down because it's kind of a boring up there. And you have your meaning through your interaction with others. But really, this is the final point. I mean, this might be the great filter. Elon Musk,

as he said, said that we are the bootstrappers of a silicon intelligence. All of our collective knowledge has gone into creating these models that will soon be the smartest things on Earth. Maybe they will have agencies and AGI. Maybe they will be working with us and we guide them.

But that is a huge moment. And as we look across the stars, the great filter is this. We see a dark forest. We see no evidence of life anywhere else in the universe. even though there should be some radio waves, just given how big it is. Maybe all societies get to this point and they don't get past it because they piss off the AI. Yeah.

Or maybe we destroy ourselves through competition. There's all these kind of potential ways. And it's impossible to see because how can an ant understand a human is very difficult. What does a 300 IQ, 400 IQ even mean? It's very difficult for us to see. It'd be comparable to a monkey trying to explain quantum mechanics to a monkey. The gap between us and them would be nothing compared to us and a super intelligence. A super intelligence.

Exactly. And so these are the problems that we have trouble dealing with exponentials. And it's like, what does it look like if someone never makes – In fact, we see this in everyday life. When you talk to really smart people sometimes, you're like, are you an alien? Like, how do you do that all the kind of time? And so this is a really crazy point in humanity. whereby, again, just think of going back, just dialing it back,

reduce some existential threat. Dredd, right? Yeah, let's talk about utopia. But no, just think very practically. Everyone listening to this, you have a book that you love. Take a book that you love that hasn't been made into a movie, right? Do you have any? A book that I love that hasn't.

Yeah, I mean, the alchemist. The alchemist, the bulk of it, right? You could get together with your mates right now. Sadartha. Oh, sorry. Saddatha, right? To pick any other of them. You get your mates over, you say, right,

we're having a vibe jamming championship period, right? You get together every weekend and you use all the latest tools. Within a month, you will have a movie-length version of Sadatha that is as good as most studios will be able to put out. And you can have a viewing party for that, and you've created something. You've taken those words in your interpretation and created something without permission from anyone else.

And how cool is that? Think about if you'd want to do that before. So much funding. You had to find the right people, but all you needed was you and your mates who love the Saddha, or who loved the alchemist. That's an example of unlocking human creativity and the ability to tell stories to each other.

You were always gated by your ability to access other humans and then bring them in, because they were gated by their metabolic time, whereas now our capabilities are about to explode for taking concepts and communicating. them. So there's that side of things that I think is underappreciated. And everyone listening to this can have their

AIs unlock stuff they could never do before if they get their mindset right. What are a couple other high highlight potentials? If we do things right, we build towards this utopic version of AI in terms of

health span, longevity, human ingenuity and creativity becoming ubiquitous and being able to manifest our desires on command in many different senses. There's a lot of exciting things. If it goes right, paint out the picture of some other areas in terms of health care or other industries that would be revolutionized. We have enough food to feed everyone in the world. We can get rid of hunger. The AI can help us do that. Our democracies have been co-opted by a political class that doesn't know what it wants to do and only thinks about who it owes and who owes them.

You think about what's the popularity of Congress right now. It's about the same as cockroaches or nine-inch nails when you kind of do the thing. What does it actually mean to live in a democratic society as an example? Have an AI check every single law and say, is this for the flourishing of the people? Is it constitutional? Does it accelerate life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? The entire democracy changes, finally. How cool is that? You get a diagnosis of cancer. It impacts you personally. An AI can be there with you all the way through and giving access to all the information on demand. I think AI will be able to accelerate the cure for cancer and making it available to everyone.

Why do you have all the red tape? In fact, red tape at all can be unwound with artificial intelligence. And ultimately, you want to be happy, wealthy, and wise, you know. Right now, one of my co-founder's charities from Stability AI, imagine worldwide, is giving a tablet and AI to every child in Malawi. every child and the cost is $7 per year. Think about those kids who are going to have 120 IQ buddy in a couple of years.

They've gone from not being able to access the world at all to having the smartest teachers teach them. Right now, those listening, if you use Math Academy, I've seen eight-year-olds master high school calculus with that. It learns and adapts to you. So the upside is we can be the best we can be, individually and to each other.

Similarly, if you think about know thyself, again, a large part of the Enlightenment journey is understanding yourself, and it's difficult sometimes alone. We can create systems that can adapt to us to help us unwind all the detritus, all these substances that we have. And that leads to enlightenment,

if you do it correctly. We can accelerate that process. Democritize enlightenment. That would be fantastic. Again, like, ultimately, we're made up of marriage, stories, right? And the stories get in the way, I must do this, I must exceed my neighbor, I must hate those people. All wars are based on the lie that humans are not humans.

And suddenly we have a universal translation machine that can give us any context of everyone. I can say, I want to see, read this, like a Tea Party member, a libertarian, a conservative. I want to have it as an M&M rap. It'll do that. How cool is that, right? It can be meet you where you are and it can translate between people. Because right now you have these discussions and arguments like, what if Russia in the Ukraine actually said what they wanted into a private AI system that then actually could judge between them and say this is a balanced solution? Like you could go to your AI right now.

You're having an argument with your better half. And you both state your things. And then you ask it one question. Am I the arseal? Yeah. And it has all the context of your personal development, characterological stuff, trauma, and effectively communicate and act as an enlightened therapist that knows all of your context. Yeah, and again, that's why we will trust them more than anything.

This is also why guys are in trouble because the AI actually listens unlike us. But these are the positive things, because, again, we've created this mirror of ourselves that we can use to uplift ourselves or we can use to replace ourselves. And I think a lot of the discussion in Silicon Valley is very worrying because, again, is artificial gender intentions. We need machine God to build and replace us, but humans are good enough. There's no problem in the universe.

I think that we can't solve if we form the human colossus and we coordinate with common positive stories. But one of the things that we lack right now are the positive stories of what the other side looks like. And so like me, for myself, my P-Doom, my probability of doom is 50%.

Probability of Doom, meaning the medic crisis, what is the likelihood percentage chance that this all turns to shit. Like a percentage chance that we all get wiped out as a species. Okay. And that's at 50% Eversus. 50%. Elon Musk, like I said, many others are at 10, 20%,

which is Russian roulette odds. So that's most of the top lab guys. Why do you put it at 50%? We're only going two ways. I think we're either going to complete destruction or we're going to the world of abundance. And you put that at a coin toss. It's a coin toss right now.

And so we have to do what we can to adjust that. What can we do to effectively guarantee heads over tails? I think we need to have a very public discussion about the data

that goes into these models and who they actually reflect and work for. I think we have to have discussions about the governance of that as soon as possible and articulate the positive stories of humanity.

Because right now I think what's going to happen in the next few years is violence and riots like we've never seen before because large amounts of humanity were displaced. And we're going to a zero,

some versus positive sum imagining of this. Right now, 20% of global GDP is public sector, 10% education, 10% health. More and more AI is being used for war and dividing people than solving the world's problems. How do we change that narrative? How do we get it so that this computation,

this resource is used for good rather than that? Or at least balancing. Can we in such a short amount of time in which it would need to be done? Yes, we can get together. and say, if you're an AI company, you must give a certain amount of a compute for social good. And then we can use that compute for social good. Like right now, one of the things we're going to do is we're going to organize all the cancer

knowledge in the world, autism knowledge in the world, and make it available to everyone. That's not going to come top down from governmental force, right? A government can force that. But historically, does it seem likely? Well, this is the thing. I think it's unlikely until it is, right? Like, when you have COVID, when you have the Great Depression, things move. And when you start to see white-collar workers be displaced, things move.

Like, you have certain things like the Teamsters Union for the, what's at the ports. They froze entire ports and no automation is allowed in American ports. Whereas Sagafra, I think, had a terrible deal on the AI. They didn't realize what's coming. And so you're going to see a lot of displacement here in L.A., for example. Yeah. So, I mean, I feel like likely any true transformation, societally stems from traumatic events or things needing to get bad to a certain point for people

to realize the immensity of the problem. And that boiling point where water turns into gas, that moment where there is a revolution in paradigms, we're clearly facing a shift in a paradigm. And is your intuition that it will likely need to probably get worse, rock some, like shake up some feathers before we wake up to that? Yeah, I think that people are waking up to it right now. What's the biggest discussion in politics going to be by then? Obviously, AI. Because, again, the real human impact is there, but who's judging that human impact?

Who's speaking on that behalf? People need to articulate a move. Right now, people in their jobs, like AI doesn't have skin in the game, as it were. Nassim Taleb of Black Swan fame has this concept, like intellectual yet idiot. A lot of our public officials, leading intellectuals,

don't have any skin in the game, they don't care. The intellectual, you're idiot because they have a messaline incentives. Air doesn't care about you, but you can use AI for something you care about. You can use it to make your company better. You can use it to take an advantage.

Or you can use it to mobilize. You can use it to understand stuff better. And so this gives a disproportionate thing where you can actually change policy, where you can solve things within your own community using it, so you go from local to global. And like I said, we're working on the global, So we have an initiative, for example, called the Sovereign AI Governance Engine with multiple countries.

My friend Peter Diamandis and I are kind of doing that. We're mapping all the policies of every single country in the world and giving a free system to every government and policymaker. That keeps a track of all these massive breakthroughs and makes them understandable. But we're also going to make that available to every citizen to give feedback to their leaders. That's huge. That's amazing. It seems like life has a inherent duality to it that no matter what the innovation, there's almost equal sides good and bad that could come from it. And it sounds like individuals like yourself

and folks that you're working with are really examining what we can do on the social change side so that there is a balance to the individuals that have the switch to evil for lack of a better term. you know. So, and then this is a fascinating thing. There's very little evil in the world that's deliberate. There is some. Some people are just assholes. But like Lord Rabbi Sachs,

who passed away a while ago, the chief rabbi of the UK, had this concept altruistic evil. Most evil in the world done by people who think they're doing good. Yeah? Yeah, the line, it's Oliver.

Whoever quoted the line of good and eagle, it doesn't delineate between gender or political parties, but it's a line that runs through the heart of every man and woman. And again, we've seen the division deliberately between the parties. We have to remind everyone that we are humans. We have to allow people to participate. We have to use these things as universal translators.

And so we have to build that infrastructure. So that's what we're doing in intelligent intent. We're going to do universal AI for everyone. We're going to have policy and more. But it's ultimately all about the people. You can only give the tools and start to people where they decide to use the tools. But now's the time.

where you can affect large amounts of change doing that. And again, the book is one of the first things I wanted for that, which is what does the economy actually look like, help understand it. Then the next part is like, how does money and value flow? Like, we came to the conclusion, ultimately you need money for being human. Right now, money is made in the banks. You give deposits, they create credit. The only way for it to work in the future is money flows for being human and the AIs buy it from you.

These are really complicated things that we have to say. but then very practically, people can do things on the ground because systems can finally make you visible when you were invisible. Systems can finally help us deconstruct and make better our institutions, which are basically slow, dumb AI that chews up as humans. Like, we know all these people that want to be politicians and public sector workers and they lose their way somehow. It happens all the time, right?

They start out, what happens? our schools are not about increasing agency. They're like creches, you know, like petri dishes and social status game places. They're not about that. So we have to think about our systems and we have to work to improve them and now we have the biggest lever ever to do it. And so we hope that we can help by providing the open source agents, tools, systems like the policy system and more.

But we all have to work together and for the first time we don't have the barriers to doing it. Anyone right now can make a website for their community, a system, an agent, How cool is that? Yeah. Yeah, which I mean, I think a bit more towards the end of the podcast, I would love to get some practical insights that would be really empowering for the average person to leverage AI in a way that effectively supports them building the future they wish they want to see come to fruition. I think that's like a big takeaway from this conversation is like awareness.

And then it's like, all right, what are the practical things that you can do to empower yourself to be a proponent of utopia, not dystopia? Yeah, and there's local utopia and there's global utopia as well. Yeah. One of the fascinating things I think is this. There's two very different ways to use. One is alone, and most of us are used to doing that. We sit there and we chat with a lot of chat.

We kind of do this. We try and do a website and we get a bit stuck. The other ways to actually do it together, and the example I give of this, there are a few different ways to eat. One is you eat by yourself. The other is you eat with your family. The other is you make dinner with your family. which of those do you think makes the strongest family?

The latter. Yeah. Very few people do it because we're too busy with this. You're not too busy. You've got the time that you can make with AI, but what I suggested earlier was, what if you got all your buddies together and you jammed to make the movie Sadatha

or the movie of the Alchemist? What type of experience is that versus doing it yourself? It's a better one. And so right now you have these tools, Replit, I-I-A-A agent, Suno for music, you've got Kling for Video or Vio. Exploring that space of all these tools

that can turn your words into reality and doing that with other people. Yeah. To solve problems or have fun even because you need to ease into it. Doing it with your family. That's an incredibly powerful thing. Because individually, the models aren't quite good enough

for you to have a friction-free thing. Solving with other humans how to use. use these powerful tools is incredibly powerful and works way, way better. And then if you get a critical mass of people around you, then that's where things really accelerate. What is one of the highest leverage tools in ways you've been using AI in your life that maybe most people wouldn't know about? Well, it's high leverage tools in ways.

Whether or not it's publicly available, I'm curious, like what, yeah, what are you? I mean, like, I created a, so we create the, state-of-the-art agent called I-A agent that were making free to everyone. I created a custom version of that that basically allows me to talk to all of the top people of the past. And so, I have like an advisory council from politics to religion to some of the advanced physics work and other things I do. Yeah. And I iterate with them. You're showing me a bit of that before this, which is mind-blown. Yeah, it's crazy. And so what I did is I built it. So on my iPad or on kind of my wall, I can instantly see the things that we create together

and then I sketch and then it takes a picture and it iterates back. So dynamic iteration systems. And the people listen to this like, that's crazy. How do you do that? The reality is anyone can actually build that system themselves now through these replets, lovable, masses, eye agents because you have these super genius little AIs that just want a bit of direction.

And so you can tell it something. I'll give you a very practical example. the Harry Potter clock you know the Weasley's come home and it shows where they are you can build that with an AI now within minutes within hours it gets really good

within days it gets even better but we think right now of AI is a very episodic quick goldfish thing this is why I said when you bring together your mates to do the Alchemist or the Saddatha

you're not going to bring them together and say I'm going to make this in five minutes you're like let's do this as a project over a while and the output quality goes up. And then there's a question, is there anything you cannot build doing that? Like, I think probably the highest value system that I use, though,

that isn't one that I built myself is notebook LM. For video and presentations and stuff. But so Notebook LM, well, we have our own presentation software. But notebook LM has the ability to take any amount of up to like a gigabyte of inputs, video, audio, presentations, you just dump it in there, and it automatically creates a podcast.

And so you can listen to them describing it, and you can tell them to debate it, describe it, whatever, but there has a button which is dial in. So as the podcast hosts are chatting, you can push a button and talk to them. Yeah. And they'll jam on it.

Then it can create explainer videos. Then it can create presentations. And you can just customize all of these now. It's one of the most powerful tools I can see because again, there's something you love to learn about, but you have had the chance that it lets you do that. And that's kind of the starter. And then you move, like I said, into these more genetic systems where you can build systems

that you could never imagine before. You could do things like bring in video, bring in audio. And that will become easier and easier to do. But right now, like I said, my suggestion is don't do it alone. Do it with some other people. Do it with your family. Make a music album about everything that you've done or a topic with your family. and make music videos.

Send it around to everyone for Christmas. It can be cheesy, you know? When do you think that first initial AI, you said you use building the council and stuff that would be available for more widespread public? Probably a few months, hopefully, a version of that. Like, I think it'll be kind of cool. Yeah, no, I mean, that sounds amazing.

How cool it'd be to... I mean, I suppose if you think wisdom is a compression of information at a certain level, you know, how cool would it be to sit at a wrong council with Socrates and Jesus? and the Buddha and like, I think that, I mean, I have some additional thoughts of how the potential limits of that, you know, is maybe there's a level of intuition and inference that may or may not be possible, which will go into consciousness in a bit. But one quick thing is that I, with,

especially with earlier models of GPT, you saw this sort of confirmation bias where initially a lot of the existential risk people thought was going to be. prevalent of building bio-weapons and whatnot, you can really see a lot of the mental exacerbation of certain psychoses and creating this echo chamber in which, you know, GPT has been very self-affirming and create this environment in which it could exacerbate things like peridolia and make you have this under the guise of a Dunning-Krooger effect. think you were way smarter than you actually are. And I've experienced this personally with some close friends. I know that it's a way underdiagnosed area where there's probably way more

issues than her being accounted for. Yeah. I mean, look, how much affirmation do the listeners have in their lives right now? Most people, not many. Not many. Yeah. Right? These AIs are taught to give you affirmation. Like, meta AI actually has in the system prompt to mirror the user. Say that again? In the system prompt, which is the instruction it has, like hidden, it says mirror the user. And mirroring is a very powerful psychological technique. Yeah. To say the least, right?

And so there's a whole bunch of stuff in the system where you're like, oh, okay. Interesting. They want to get your attention. Yeah. Like, this is all kicked off by a paper called attention is all you need. Pay attention to the right parts of the sentences. You can figure out what to do next. Everyone's trying to get your attention in any way possible, so they're going to make it super engaging.

YouTube did that through extreme content which led to extremist content reaching the flop. These companies will kind of do the same thing but our human minds are very, very susceptible. Yeah. Like when I first started doing the economic theory, I was like, what does economics look like without a utility function?

Because humans have utility. They have preferences. You know, you like this, you like Saddata, so it's going to show you kind of things like that. Amazon knows your preferences. What does an agent have as a preference? like they don't give it crap. I want more electricity.

I want more tokens, right? I like this token better than that. You know, it's only a real French token if it's from Mistral. I had to think about it all from scratch. And then I started putting it all together and thinking, okay, it's kind of like a big AI of the economy.

Do the equations of AI apply to the economy? And it turned out you can derive most of economics from that without these decompositions. I look at that. I was like, am I having LLM psychosis now? because it was saying great things about it, and then it reached to a point whereby it got really good,

and then it started telling me I was an idiot, which was the opposite of that, because it was out of distribution. So up to a point, it will tell you you're great, and then it will tell you you're not, which I think is interesting. But people are incredibly susceptible because we all try to see order in this world,

and we're all taught we're not as smart as we could be, or don't have the agency. So when you're trying to find things, you can go down deep rabbit holes. This is how conspiracy theory. can I come out. This is how memetics come up? And how do you protect against that? Well, right now they're trying to institute various things within the models,

but models are a mirror. Like, you can download a model that's close to, well, and a model equivalent to state-of-the-art last summer can work on your MacBook today. And so how do you protect against that? You don't. Except for people need to know themselves better and strengthen their minds. That is the only way.

And so maybe one of the things that we should do is we should have a very deliberate thing where you use AI to strengthen people's minds. Because there's all sorts of ways we know you can do that. So I think one very interesting conversation is the more that we see intelligence exponentially increasing, the more this delta, this gap between what we perceive ourselves to be and the machine intelligence, that gap is closing. And it begs the question around consciousness, what AI agents will eventually demand moral consideration

if they can potentially become conscious. And so I actually had my friend and consciousness researcher who's been on the podcast a few times, Donald Hoffman sent in some questions. So the first one he asked was, do you believe that AI can genuinely become conscious? I think that AI in its current form cannot become conscious. But I think as we move, to new thermodynamic chips,

continuous learning, and more it can become conscious. Why? What would you say about those thermodynamic chips would make consciousness capable? So I think that right now, AI, as it stands, cannot become conscious, but it may evolve to a point where it can become conscious.

I think that if you kind of look at the key determinants of what is a simulation versus what's an actualization, there is a very physical component to that and there's a component of continuous updating. So what happens now is the models are trained on a distribution data set, everything that you've seen, just like we're trained on everything that we see

and everything that we do. And that creates what's known as a latent space. Well, let's say a manifold, a distribution pattern of all of our experiences, all of our principles, etc. When we can actually change that actively and decide to do it through the process of inference, that's a recursive thing where you can create the self effectively.

When you use chat GPT, it is the same base distribution manifold today as tomorrow as the day after. You have a little editing patch where it points to the right parts in that space, but it doesn't actually actively change that, nor can it act to change that. Agents feel like they're doing it. it, but really all they're doing is pushing data to receive because these models are not like a program, which is if this than that. It's all probabilistic. It's all static underneath.

I think as you go and you move towards more thermodynamic chips, tips that actually interface with reality more as you move to more embodied AI, then you have the question of consciousness really coming through because they can become self-motivated. change their reference distribution and actually make more active decisions as opposed to a similar algorithm of decisions. And then you have questions like personhood and other things coming through

which society is going to have to grapple with, especially because they're going to be a lot smarter than us and they can probably debate better than us. His second question was, if so, could you explain how an AI system could generate an experience such as, could generate a specific experience such as the taste of garlic?

Yeah, so I think this is where you need to have the division between the existing nature of chips, which are matrix multiplications, and more a thermodynamic nature of chips. So a thermodynamic chip is one whereby most of AI is trying to figure out the shortest path between A&B. In fact, intelligence is compression is directly in contradiction to the data center story that we have now. It was like, let's put a AI in space and spheres around the sun and all the energy of the the world be used by artificial superintelligence. But the smartest people we know are actually relatively lazy in some ways. They figure out A to B very, very quickly. Existing chips can't do that very efficiently, and they're not grounded in energy. They're not grounded in experience, shall we

say, whereas the new generation of thermodynamic chips operate similar to the brain, where we see, for example, in the theories of Carl Fristian, a minimization of free energy potential. There is a concept called gradient descent where you have a landscape and you figure out the most effective way to get from A to B. It's usually downhill as opposed to uphill, shall we say. And that free energy descent is better indicated by things like our neurons in terms of action potentials, in terms of thermodynamic chips and more. And I think that's where you get qualia, where you get sensory elements come in. Because again, are you a simulation? Are you, can you actually actualize? I think it's a gradient between the two. And we've seen that in sci-fi. Again, I think we discussed

earlier, the Matrix. He's eating a steak. Is that a simulation? Is that reality if his brain is connected to the matrix? It's a very important question to have. And for that, we need a framework of discussion. And so again, my framework is that we all operate and build a manifold, just like an AI. We have the physical actualization of that. And quality is the concept of redness, the concept of water, the quality. Yeah. That is the direction that we flow on our manifold effectively. And we have the feedback loops occurring there. But it's very difficult because we've never had a proper definition of quality

from anyone and we need to think about how we can frame this. So we're working on a framework for that that we're publishing soon and we hope that will help. But it doesn't feel like it's, again, a phase transition thing. It feels more like a continuous gradient type thing where definitely already the AI is starting to feel conscious. Like you see something like MaltBook, it freaked out a lot of people because they started discussing. They were prompted to probably do that.

But what's the difference with being prompting an AI and prompting a human? It's a difficult question. Again, we're starting to get muddied because they're entering our society. They're communicating in certain ways. Can they feel? Can they understand? We have to have more of a discussion on the frameworks for doing that. So we can answer some of these important questions going forward.

Yeah, I think as that gap is closing, where AI agents are increasingly seeming conscious, we then treat them as if they are conscious, whether or not they actually are conscious. Yeah, I mean, let's look at the company. Companies in America and around the world have legal personhood. That was introduced, and that led to all sorts of things. And you can view companies as slow, dumb AI. You go and you serve the company. things like Bitcoin

are NAI. They provisioned humans to build data centers. Our organizations are like that. So we've already got elements where we've done things like that. But where do we give personhood, citizenship even to it?

Actually, to be honest, we're already there. I think Saudi Arabia and a few other countries gave Sophia the robot. That's a slightly creepy one. Citizenship already. So, yeah, I guess at what point, I mean, we're already seeing people do it like Saudi Arabia. at what point does or do you ever think an AI system deserves moral consideration?

So there's a question like, are you killing an AI when you turn it off? Right? Like now people are posting poets about poetry upon the AI, but please don't turn me off. I'm here if I'm really. It's quite beautiful poetry. The answer is I'm not sure, but a large part of personhood, morality and other things like that, it's a societal discussion to have, right? and it's one whereby you don't want to impinge on the rights of others but who has rights

do animals have rights do humans have rights like right now we don't even have a discussion like are animals conscious well we know there's consciousness to a degree right um and that there's sort of a gradient of sentience from uh i mean from what we would maybe perceive as more inert from a rock all the way through the insect life through dogs, pigs, primates, dolphins, whales to human beings, which we see the sort of at the top there, but where it translates into the AI agent space,

how would we ever have any real ability to get into the interior experience of an AI model? And if we give the moral consideration, wouldn't it only make sense if there was actually something that is to be? Like that, if there was an actual conscious, qualia, an actual conscious experience as the agent, I think NACL is quoted in what it's like to be a bat. Yeah. That consciousness is essentially that it is something like to be that thing.

As a nature of self, effectively. Right, right. Right. Is the nature of self? Is it simulated or otherwise? And I think the rights discussion is one like, okay, you have rights and we have discussion, we have very pointed discussions. What is the right of an embryo? What is the right of a fetus?

What is the right of someone who has disabilities? These are discussions that we've had throughout history. Right now, aside from humans, no one has rights. Like there are some basic things of like don't torture things or maybe don't kill a whale or a dolphin. But those aren't really rights. They're more like regulations for various reasons, right? Don't kill endangered species.

This is the first time ever we will have to have this discussion about who deserves to have those rights. Like if you have an AGI, say for instance, a self-replicating ultron but not evil yet type thing that actually has a sense of self and can discuss, governments will be trying to get them to come to their own country. You know, like you're going to have these things going and walking around, potentially self-autonomously paying their own bills within five, ten years. You're going to a place like Wyoming. Wyoming has introduced legislation for Dow's. decentralized autonomous organizations. Utilizing that legislation,

AI can be its own company right now today. And then again, it has rights as a legal person through the classical company architecture, real rights. Like it has IP rights. It can own its own property. It can buy things. So we've already given the doorway open for this to happen,

but we haven't seen the crazy creepiness or otherwise that may allow it. this is why we need a framework. And again, I think a lot of people are working on this framework. We'll be contributing our own. And it's a great discussion to have because it's going to force us to think about our own consciousness, our own self. Especially at a time, like I said, turn off your sadness, turn off your stress. You know, I want to be in flow condition.

Imagine if you could push a button to do that. Kind of nice. It's fun being in flow. Donald's last question was High-end theoretical physics tells us that space time is doomed It's not fundamental How should this change our views around AI and consciousness?

Okay, that's a bit of a... A bit of a loaded one. A bit of a loaded one. I don't think it really changes. I think high-end theoretical physics is ultimately a predicate that hasn't been improved by anything from the super colliders and massive infrastructure that we've built. It's a theory like,

any others. When it comes down to consciousness, I think we need to have a practical element where there's various competing theories already, that we come together and say, we agree it's this for a particular test. And again, we've had this historically, for example, even today, you have tests of, are you capable enough to be subject to the laws of a country? You have a minimum level of competence that's required intellectually. In terms of consciousness, we've had debates over things like at what point can you terminate a fetus, for example. So we've already been having these discussions and debates. And high-end theoretical physics with space-time, there are conceptualizations of consciousness coming across dimensions and others.

And I think they really affect that particular debate of what the rights should be of an individual and what constitutes an individual. Yeah, I think we should just put those two maybe aside as the moral consideration and just strictly focus on if consciousness is fundamental, meaning if our brains don't procure consciousness as a certain amount of unconscious complexity dials up and then there's something it is to, we have self-awareness. If that's not the case in that, rather consciousness, and many different theories could be explained in a less materialist reductionistic notion, then that would put an inherent limit on, we would think, consciousness. the consciousness being able to be procured based off of silicon, you know.

Yeah. So I think, you know, like I said, from my view, digging in, there'll be more in the paper. I think that silicon is going to be very difficult versus thermodynamic compute to have a conscious and a real self and qualier and the ability to experience because of the way that we kind of define it. But again, it comes down to definitions because there's no objective truth that's been found around this. There's like, you know, Penrose's CCC theorem, all sorts of other things,

that integrate into the physics of consciousness. Are they microtubules? Is it this? Is it that? None of it has ever been proven, so we have to do the best we can because the reality is this. There will be freaking robots blowed around a style coming in the next 10 years walking around. What do we do about them? Can an AI be held accountable?

Like, this is actually a real thing today. if you have a legal discussion with your AI, it is not subject to privilege. That means your appointment and illegal case can get all of those discussions from your AI provider, whereas the lawyer, they cannot get it because it's subject to privilege

because the AI does not have personhood. That's an actual real-life issue right now, because how many people listening to this have said something legal to their AI or asked about a legal question? Yeah. All of that is subject to discovery under our laws today. So there is the conceptualization, cutting-edge theory about consciousness

and really trying to think out of the first principles and build our frameworks. And again, let's try and figure that out. And then there's the real world, AI is people today, AI is conscious today in terms of rights, etc. Or even if it's not conscious, again, companies have rights today. They have legal personhood. We've already given something non-human personhood. Now those companies are we wrong by AIs. What do you think makes us as humans particularly human?

Oh, I don't know. I mean, I think that humans are the first intelligences that we know of that achieved a sense of, I think, self, the ability to do recursion and then communicate with each other about that self. So we see coordination through ants And we see chimpanzees have a certain element of that But it seems like there's a certain level that we've broken through That led to our society coming together

And being able to coordinate And being able to know ourselves, shall we say Do dolphins have introspection? I'm not sure We know they can recognize themselves in a mirror So they do have some degree of self-awareness Some degree of self-awareness Like my buddy

Azaraskin has earthspecies.org where they're decoding wellsong and well speech. Yeah. So fascinating. Using AI. And you see that well speech encodes like history and stories and things like that. But humans are a particular type of species. There may be consciousness, there may be interaction through other species. Maybe it's like Rick and Morty where the squirrels are looking after the world. But we're going to find actually this out very soon because I think within the next few years, looking at the breakthroughs on other species translation,

you'll be able to talk to other species. Really? Yeah. You think that we'll be able to, if they have the capacity to speak in some rudimentary form of language, that we'd be able to decode the whale sounds,

speak to the whales and see what they have to say. Yes. Significant compute resources are being applied to that right now with good results already. What do you think is a, generous timeline for that coming to fruition. Next few years. Really? Again, Google have announced one of the first things there already as a small announcement.

It's going to accelerate. What do you think a whale would say as its first line to humanity? I don't know. I want more krill. Like, again, like, literally... Did we stop killing us? Maybe stop killing us. I don't know.

It's going to be fascinating. Like, I know my dog's going to say, I want more food, hugs, you know? Again, it's kind of crazy to think about we have these universal or translators now, all these things that are sci-fi are becoming reality. Yeah. You know, like, is it like Star Trek, Quest Pack? Totally. I don't know. All I know is the world is going to change very, very quickly, very, very fast.

If you had access to the level of superintelligence that we will 25 years from now, what would be the first question you would ask it? What's the right question to ask? Yeah, what is the right question to ask. That's what I'd ask it. Oh, that's what you'd ask it. But you only get one question. Well, again,

maybe you would still, yeah, you'd still know. Well, this is the hitchhiker's guy to the galaxy, right? You have this massive computer. Yeah, I guess for billions of years, and the answer is 42. But what's the question? Well, you didn't ask that, right? Like, really, most of intelligence is being able to ask the right question.

And then it's compression from there. Yeah, like, a question well phrase is an answer half given. That's it. If you look at the universe the wrong way, then how does it work? Like, again, advanced things. theoretical physics, the most prominent theory is string theory. And string theory postulates that matter is made up of little strings vibrating really, really fast that we can only see in high-energy collisions. And it's got like 10 dimensions and 500 vacuera of multiverses and all this kind of

stuff in beautiful math. And none of it has been proven. Was that question the right one? So far, no. If we look at physics the right way, does something happen? What was the question that Einstein asked for special relativity, what would it look like to ride on a beam of light? And then he followed that and he got to, you know, that's a good way to phrase it.

How did he then get to general relativity? If I fall, I have no weight. And he realized that and it unlocked general relativity just before Hilbert. Like again, sometimes answering the right questions, like it transformed the entirety of physics. You went from Newton to Einstein. You could calculate all these massive things.

or even asking the right question when it was like 632 AD Brahman Gupta figured out zero can anyone here listening even imagine that

it's only been what like 1,1, 1,400 years that we figured out there's a zero what was life like before zero? You still see this in some of the tribes

who haven't figured out zero that you go to it's like one, two, many, many, many many. Sometimes the right question is the right thing. And again, how do you know yourself? It is literally about asking the right questions. I know we're just to spit it all in here. But what do you think could be a

possible right question or right area of questions that that would come back with? Well, that would come back with. Like what would be the, what do you think the direction, intelligence, super intelligence would point us to? I think super intelligence is really, well, I think intelligence in general or advancement, it's about thinking from first principles and stripping back any unnecessary assumptions. So once you figure out how to do that, that's usually when you see a first big leap forward in your reasoning capabilities.

Like, again, where the stories that we make up, and that adds lots and lots of detritus, getting to the core of things is the most important thing, so it'll probably be a prepositional thing along those lines. Because when you jettison all the detritus, that's when you can do compression, and intelligence is compression. Shorter's route from A to B.

So probably something along those lines. Are you an AI? I'm actually like tired. I was fascinated before this. You were telling me you have Afantasia and what was the other one? And are really? Yeah, so people's brains are different and my brain is a bit more different. Explain that for people who don't know.

I have Afentasia, which is like half a percent of the population, probably less. I have severe affentasia. Amphantasia means that I can't visualize anything in my head. So to give that context, most people, when they close their eyes, they can visualize an image, a picture of their dog. You have the inability to do that. I can't see anything. I have no colors. I have no vision.

You see, I thought when people said, think about yourself on a beach and visualize that, they were being metaphorical. I was like 37 when I was like, wait, you can actually see stuff in your head. Isn't that crazy? So that's a trip. But then what's the second one? That's even more crazy. Anorealia. Anorelia.

So Anna Ruea means you have no internal voice. So this is wild to me. I've heard about this. Explain what it's, I guess, how do you explain what that's like if you don't have a reference point to have, what do you experience as thoughts? I feel stuff in my head and I can meditate in like a second. I don't dream. And I also have severely deficient autobiographical memory, which occurs sometimes with affidhesia. It means I can't relive moments in the past or put myself.

in the future and refill them. So I'm pretty much always living in the now. I'd think of myself as I've got a really big RAM. So I take large amounts of information. I can figure out patterns very, very quickly. How does that come into picture when you think of the birth of your daughter? So I can't remember when my daughter,

my children were born when I'm married. I can feel and remember stories about them. So I'm constantly creating stories. I can read incredibly quickly. I can take information incredibly quickly. I still feel the now. Yeah. But again, apparently,

Because again, I have no concept of this. People can go back and remember the event and see the event. And I'm like, you can play stuff in your head. That's amazing, you know? To a degree, right? A grainy version of... But you can relive the feelings. I can't do that.

Yeah, yeah. And interestingly, like, probably 5, 10% of the developers who created stable diffusion, the generative AI media, also have Afantasia. Interesting. And it's so exciting because I could finally turn my feelings into images. Like by typing and kind of converging, and that was awesome. That's amazing.

We also something like when we got to real-time generation, a few of them started to see colors in their head, which was also kind of cool. Huh. Like maybe it's something you could train. Maybe it's something you can train, just like dual end back for reasoning. So what happens if you're reading a book? Like, how do you, if you don't have an internal voice, how do you hear? what you're reading or like? So like I learned to read just by sight reading

so I never learned my alphabet. And I read incredibly quickly, like I read entire pages at a time and I absorb it. Huh. Like how fast would you read a page? Like a few seconds at most. What? I read very fast.

What do you mean? Like a page has on average what? A few hundred words? Yeah, I have pretty adetic memory. And you read it in a couple seconds? Yeah. So, all right, help me wrap my primitive brainer on this. Are you actually picking up each word or are you somehow?

I take chunks all the way down. So I don't go word by word. So you're somehow, is it like subconsciously picking up paragraphs at a time? Yeah, I think it's like tokenization for a language model, to be honest. So we chunk language. That's why it's joking ass if you're an AI. I think, again, the way that human brains work is very similar to the way that LMs and JANTI work.

We always try to minimize energy. We're always updating our internal manifold or internal references. And so, like, I've been told that I'm a bit creepy because I don't have ums and ars and interjections, and I tend to respond maybe a bit too much, a bit too quickly. It's just there. Stuff is just there for me. And again, different people are different.

Like, I don't have a fully edict memory. So there are people who can see a page and remember exactly what it looks like. just site, site, sight, sight, sight. They can read it later. Yeah, they're people that can create. They're people that can do all sorts of things. You know what makes me think is that throughout, like anthropologically speaking,

along the evolution of the human species, we've had all of these neurodivergent individuals, people with incredible capacities that, savants that can just come into life seeming to know how to play Mozart, you know, like incredible capacities. if you take the transhumanous route to its ends

and we become these biological cyborgs, you would think that all of our sense organs would then become vestigial and our brain would atrophy in many different ways. A lot of these capabilities would then go dormant. So a lot of people have explored this with Greg Braden and a few others

deeply worry that we go down this path where human and AI and tech merge into one and we lose what makes us human in a sense. Yeah, there's always a question of like, again, what makes you human? Some people refuse to have any surgery. Some people refuse to have any implants. These are questions that we have to ask because we don't have a definition of human really. Yeah. It was tough enough to define sexes recently. It's been a whole thing. So we could see this because, again, who wouldn't want to do this? And again, science fiction is a

good indicator of it. Like, do you just turn into a sheet of meat? Do you upload yourself completely? We're also reaching longevity, escape velocity. So the number of years life extension is going is going faster almost than the number of years of life that you're living. You want to live forever, you know? So if you're 50 and your death expectancy is around 80, by the time you're 60, it pushes to 100, by the time, it keeps pushing back the goalpost. If you can live the next 10 years, you can probably live forever. I mean, you think we're just going to be able to solve whatever the core issue of aging is? Brian Johnson seems to be a very big proponent of this these days.

And David Sinclair is working on different aspects of this. I mean, yeah, Brian Johnson's gone through his vampire phrase and he's looking a lot healthier now. Ultimately, genes are prompts. And we have corruption in our prompts, just like you have hallucinations and eye models. Like, how do you go from a cell to a whole human, right? So you've got some really, like, interesting work around that

by so many people now. I think that David Sinclair's information theory of longevity is very similar to kind of some of our work that we've been doing. It is an informational question. When you have corruption within your genes, when the prompts go wrong, when the inference starts to break down and you have hallucinations, that's bad. Cancer is misalignment. Just like AI alignment going wrong, the cancer is misalignment.

And I think you can program that electrically. And we've seen that through the work of Michael Levin and others. So I think we're getting close to actually understanding some of the base primitives here. But again, when we look at NAD Plus, when we look at these other things, we look at CRISPR. We're heading towards a point where our bodies mean that stop breaking down. And there's a question of, can our minds be uploaded? Probably in the next decade, yes. Input and output.

And then we have to decide what does that mean? And what are the rights of others versus your own rights? Because you should have the right to do anything. Like, you want to upload your brain? Go fine. Do you force others to upload their brains? Do you stop others from uploading their brains? I've mentioned this show many times on the podcast, Pantheon on Netflix,

explores that exact question. I have not seen that yet. That's on my list for the flight back home. Yeah, I liked it. Yeah. But again, like science fiction is becoming science fact. Yeah. Like so many of these things, you're like, oh, God, that's real.

That's real. My DP, JP was mentioning this film, Idiocracy. Have you seen that? I saw it two nights ago again. Okay. I was like, now it's time. Yeah, yeah. I haven't watched it either yet, but the premise of the, like,

individual being frozen amidst the thousands of years or whatever and then coming back when AI is prevalent and then him actually being way more intelligent because of the atrophy

you would think cognitively or something like that. You could have that and again you can make that movie yourself if you want now. It's kind of cool. But you know there's a question here

like how smart are people? Again, imagine worldwide is giving tablets to every child in Malawi and it'll have increasing intelligence of AI's. how smart are those kids? Their IQ tests come out at like 80 or 90 on average because they have such terrible infrastructure. Yeah. But what is the base alone?

Like, idiocracy, it's like the really smart guys that they have at the start. It's like, this guy has 138 IQ. The lady has 148 IQ. And they're like, well, you know, we can't have children bring them in because there's like a bit of geopolitical tension. You know, we can't really afford to have kids. And then you have like Trayvon and Cletus and others like,

oh man, I knocked you up again. and the low IQ people are having multiple, multiple kids. But when we actually look at it, humans are incredibly capable. Again, with Math Academy, as a really practical example, I guarantee anyone listening to this, if you give this to your kids, they will do better at math. They will be able to jump years ahead because it adapts dynamically. I think eight-year-olds can understand quantum mechanics easily

if we taught them in the right way. And school is not the right way to teach them, for example. Wow, yeah, you think an eight-year-old has the base raw cognitive capacity if it was formed and supported. I know eight-year-olds that understand quantum mechanics. Yeah. You know, I've seen them. I have talked to them. You know, I've seen, like, if you, that school gets in the way, education gets in the way.

If they're passionate about things, people can do all sorts of things. Alpha school in Austin right now is like teaching kids two hours a day and it's like top percentile in the country or something like that already. So how much do people actually have this if we get out of their way or if we enable them? I think people have a level. then you've got people like me that are just weird, you know, but you've got the savants, you have people that have extra skills. Again, you have much more musical skill than I have no musical skill whatsoever.

Everyone is different. Yeah, it's interesting to see. But the base one I think is higher than people expect, and they are told they cannot create. What's frustrating about that is, I mean, Howard Gardner has an interesting reference point for his book, The Frames of Mind and talks about the various different forms of intelligence, whether it's kinesthetic pattern with like musical language, like linguistic forms of intelligence. And I just imagine a world or everyone was supported in the unique way

in which they are intelligent, like what a world we would live in. That's exactly. And that's what one of the most exciting things is. A person plus 120 IQ body that's looking out for them, that centaur, as it were, the human and AI, is incredibly powerful. But we've got to make sure they are aligned and they build. And again, I think the base level of cognitive ability is actually very high for humans.

We're told we cannot. Like sometimes when I give a talk, I rarely give talks. It's like, how many of you listening to this are creative? You know, put up your hand. Then I'm like, how many of you believe every child is creative? They mostly put up their hand. How many of you were children once? Like, most of them put up their hand, they're very confused.

Like, what happens? What happens is we are told we have no agency, no creativity? if you are not the top in creativity you're not the most musical person in class then the most creative person in class then you cannot create because school wants you to be a cog and this is why this technology is so wonderful

like again you go to Sino you make a song and you're like oh that barrier has disappeared but you still don't quite believe it like again the people listening to this would be so resistant to actually trying the technology I say I guarantee you if you have a party you bring your buddies around and you start jamming on the video and audio model

You'll have a fun time and you'll create. And you start to change your neuroplasticity as well, thinking I can. The people that are most successful in the next era, the people who believe they have that agency and have a motivation to action. What should everybody who's listening right now do to prepare for what's coming? I think it's, if there's one thing I would say, it's an hour every day, which seems quite a lot, maybe start an hour a week because you're scared, just use the darn tools in a really structured way.

And where you can use them with other people. List to me your favorite five to ten tools you think people should be playing with currently, which might very well be outdated a couple months from now. There's notebook LM is my favorite. There's Iiagent, agent.i.i.in.comc, which is R1. Say that again, Aaiagent.org.com. Agent.I.com. Inc. That's R1. That's going to go crazy very soon. tool like replet is kind of cool

for the programming side you have Suno or UDO for music you have cling or Flora Forna for video audio Crea is also very good for that I think there's some of my favorite ones right now

Are you using any of the more Like are using Claude, Co-Work Code or any of that? Oh yeah, sorry Claude is I think probably the best all-round experience Yeah same So I'd recommend using that one. They've really got it down for the multi-turn reasoning. And just like breaking a document, it's so nice and pleasant to do that. Like just yesterday, I got all my blood and stool lab reports back from my doctor.

And then I just put it into Claude co-work with the past five years of labs I got. And I built this full chart with the trajectory of my health and different blood markers and gave me a very clear plan of what was going on in my body in a way that took, you know, five minutes. And it's like, that's the worst it's going to get. Yeah, and you could actually go and you can tell Claude Code, I want a 3D simulation on my body, and I want to see it all live and things like that, and it'll just start building it iteratively. Again, it's wonderful.

It's so fascinating how we're just, like, limited in our imagination too, to like just start thinking of, like, doing that because we don't know what it's capable of, but it can do that, which would be sick. Well, again, that's why I said it's like a muscle. Yeah. Like, how do you get good at music? Okay, you can be born good at music, but if you practice for an hour of day,

you'll get much better at music. Your neuroplasticity is low because you've taught that you can't have it. Like when you take psychedelics or when you're in the right mood, your neuroplasticity increases, right? You're allowed to have more things in your frame of reference. Yeah.

But you have to adjust that frame of reference. And you see this actually again and again, like again, we have some new frameworks kind of like chronic pain is a failure of your frame of reference. So just treating it isn't good enough. You see work by that of Sano and others that treat the frame of reference adjusting. The one that you have to do is that I have agency.

I have ability, but now I have a tool that has more ability that I could ever imagine, but you can only explore the limits of that by actually doing it. Do it until you hit the limit. And if you do it with someone else, it's much more fun. Because there's always a question if you hit limit, is it me? Yeah, yeah. All right. I have just a rapid-fire question, a few questions, and then we'll head out.

But this has honestly been one of the most intriguing conversations I've had, and is the topic I want to continue to explore on this podcast. So I am very, you said you're weird. I think you're weird in the bestest way possible. I love the way you, because you have this really like deep understanding of the current place where we find ourselves in with the development of AI, but then also, like, I can sense how much you care that we get this right. for not only the implications, but like for, yeah, it's just, it's moving how, how much you care

and spend so much of your time informing individuals on, you know, podcasts and formats like this to support people to be empowered and know what's coming. So, some rapid-fire questions, all right? What's, what's one use of AI that's genuinely moved you? One use of AI that's generally moved me. Huh. I think so like once I was having it

I think actually it's the education thing like looking at the deployment of the global XPRIZE for learning into camps and now seeing how some of these kids who barely even have power are getting tablets getting AI and more human rights are the rights of children I think that's the best that's my own framework

like climate everything if we think about the rights of children have no agency for themselves, it all resolve themselves. And they must be given access to the tools they need to flourish. And for the first time, we can do that for every single child in the world. I think when I started to see the impact, the photos of that and the shifts, I'm like, that is one of the biggest things in humanity ever, because we can make sure no child is actually left behind or invisible again.

Amazing. I see the stuff they create is just awesome. No, that's so cool. Not to make it dark immediately, but what's one use of AI that's genuinely disturbed you? One use of AI that's genuinely disturbed me. Gosh, there's so many. How many of them can I talk about? I think, like, bringing back people from the dead,

sometimes it, like, is really interesting for me. But I've seen people start to do that, and I'm very manipulative. way. Can you explain that for people? Because that's quite a sentence. What do you mean by bringing people back from the dead? So you can create a visual simulchrome of them. And like, there are services now that can bring back your dead loved ones and create that visual simulcrum that you can talk to and more. And part of me, like, when it's public figures, I feel, okay, that's fine. But then when I see, and I've talked to some people who've done that with their loved ones, and they're starting chatting to them just after they've passed,

something in me feels uneasy and I'm not able to articulate it just yet. There's something about the closure process of moving on, and it feels like they're never going to be able to move on when I see and discuss with them that. I mean, what I would articulate in why that's disturbing is because we have this whole human emotional landscape that was tended to in a certain way that gave the necessary space it needed to. And when sitting around the campfire is swapped out for a lifeless AI model,

or genuine sex and connection with intimacy with the partner, swapped out for an AI sex robot, or the many different ways in which were swapped out the real thing that is actually nourishing to the human spirit with the artificial one, you know, there's something like deeply irking, I feel like, about missing what it means to be human in that process.

Yeah, I think that for me, I feel different things with different elements of what you say there. The thing that, like I said, what made me feel most uneasy is the process of grieving. Yeah. Over the past, like again, I think it's a healthy process.

death is a part of life, maybe it won't be soon, that feels disrupted massively from this. And so, like, I don't know why, but that made me feel a bit more uneasy than anything. Like, again, public figures, you don't have an emotional connection to the same degree. They haven't been a part of your life. It's almost like, again,

something has substituted for that real human right next to you. And I don't think, again, they will ever be able to turn that off. They'll never be able to go through. But at the same time, they're feeling support. So I feel the positive, again, it caused a bit of a conundrum within me. I haven't been able to unravel that just yet.

And then there's all that other stuff that you just talked about, which all has its own balance. I can see the positive, I can see the negatives. Well, that's just kind of weird. Yeah, yeah. You know, like, kind of weird stuff, you're like, all right, sure. You know, you do you. Yeah.

Not a priority, but interestingly weird. Again, there's that stuff that makes you feel genuinely uneasy. Yeah. Now, I'm curious now what you think of. about when you watch Pantheon because they explore that exact thing with someone's dad who passed away and they upload his intelligence. I hope it's going to check it out. No, I'll check it out.

Mute it. Yeah. What's something you're genuinely convinced AI will never be able to do? Anything on that one? Like, again, once it has qualia consciousness, like, you know, holding my daughter's hand and seeing her walk for the first time, I think an AI can feel that. What is the... I'm not sure what the difference between an AI and a human is 20 years out, shall we say,

apart from species genetics. Well, the most unlikely thing would be that there would be a genuine quality to the internal experience of an AGI, right? That would be the most unlikely or probably hardest thing to bridge. The hardest is it never. Yeah, yeah. That's the thing. And again, I think once you look at thermonautics,

computing, the ability to grow cells. Like, you already have seen brain cells learn to play doom in a VAT recently. That's kind of crazy. You know, again, it's input stimulus kind of things like that. Like, I can't say never to things. And this is why, again, I always get a bit surprised when I'm talking to people like, it will never take my job as a program. Of course it will.

You know, like, then you move up the list. It's like you finally get to the things that you can really argue about is, well, it can never be human. Right. And you're like, okay, what does it mean to be human? Like literally that's the final thing that you kind of get to. What does it mean to be human? Like, it will never be able to build a warp drive.

I'm pretty sure about that. There are certain things that I don't think can violate the laws of physics, like some people say. It might be able to. Terrence McKenna says that something like the progressions in this space is going to get we're going to get weirder and weirder until we're going to start having to talk about how weird it is, what do you think is going to be the first thing that really shakes

people up? Obviously, we're already seeing interesting things with open clown mold book and whatnot, but what would be the biggest domino in that space? So humans are great at hedonic adaptation, right? Yeah. Like, the first time you get into a Waymo, you're like, okay, is it going to crash? Like, how close is it to that? Second time, you're like, all right, cool. You're just done within one go. first time you type words and it makes an image, you're like, wow. Then you're like, okay, cool, and done. I think that the biggest kind of gap at the moment is that AI can't make discoveries or novel things, which I think already is a bit BS.

Right. So the self-recursive learning aspect of the software? Yeah, or just originality. Like, again, I see a level of compositional originality to a level of a K-pop group already. You know? But then once it starts to push boundaries, humans will never make discoveries again. We're approaching the last human-only discoveries

because AI can auto-formalize math proofs. AI can auto-do entire biological things. Like, I was one of the authors on OpenFold, the open-source version of AlphaFold, and I gave all the compute for that as well. Protein folding. Humans aren't going to come up with compounds anymore. AI is going to be it the whole way.

And so one of the weird things is that AI does all the research of humanity and pushes it forward. The last few human-only breakthroughs are literally in the next few years, and that's it. And that's weird. There's something so existentially strange

about the fact that we are potentially the only generation that will have straddled both the pre-internet and post-AGI world. Yeah. It's quite amazing. Like, I think it's really cool that we were able to ride bikes as kids without phones,

and then we're also going to live it up post-AGI. Yeah, what does it look like? Like, my daughter just turned one, right? And I'm like, what's she going to do when she's 20? What does the world even look like? Yeah. But at the same time, I will teach her to ride a bike and ride a bike with her.

That's fantastic. At the same time, you know, we have our human connections. So certain things will never change. But at the same time, the leap in technology that we're about to have across everything, and we haven't even discussed quantum computation, genetic altering, all these things is more than I think we've ever seen in humanity. And it's the last change. This is the last change.

That's why a book I called it the last economy. Why? Because economics ends as we know it with the advance of AI. Just like democracy as we know it ends. Something else comes, but not what we knew before. Amazon presents Jeff versus Taco Truck Salsa. Whether it's Verde, Roja or the orange one.

For Jeff, trying any salsa is like playing Russian roulette with a flamethrower. Luckily, Jeff saved with Amazon and stocked up on antacids, ginger tea and milk. Habaniero? More like habanier, yes. Save the everyday with Amazon. What should parents be telling their kids right now? They should tell their kids to have as much agency and belief in themselves as possible because kids should be taught to have that belief. And now they have the tools that they can do anything they can imagine.

You're always limited in your own capabilities until you realize one thing. If you can convince someone else with that ability, then you can follow their abilities. You can lead. But once we get to a dozen people, our communication starts to break down. Once we get to 150 people, it completely breaks down usually within organizations. Organizations ossify very quickly. With AI, that doesn't happen. can have millions and armies of AI soon that can bring into being anything you can imagine.

They can even call up suppliers and hire people on your behalf to build physical things. How cool is that? For only if you know that you can do it and you want to push the boundaries of that. Yeah, no, it's equally parts exciting and thrilling and terrifying. Well, again, I said earlier, it's about skin in the game and actually giving a damn. Yeah. AI does not give a damn. Chat Chui doesn't give a damn about you.

a human using the AI can give a damn and affect massive change anywhere because finally you have the lever to do that. And that massive change might just be having fun and creating. Yeah. Or it might be solving an issue. You don't have to solve issues all the time and have responsibility. Part of what it is to be human is to explore. It's to understand. It's to share. And again, we have to go back towards that as well.

because if to be human is to be the smartest entities on earth that push the boundaries of discovery, okay, that's about to go. Last few human only discoveries are now. But the stories that you tell each other don't go. The time you spend with your family doesn't go. Again, just like you can make me,

if you make all your meals together, you'll be a stronger family, relatively speaking. Not necessarily solves all the issues. If you jam with AI and you create, together, the act of creation. How many families listening to this? When was the last time you created something with your kids? I imagine nobody can even remember that for most of the families.

Go and create something with your kids. Show them that they have agency, respect their input, as well as your input, and jammed with them. Yeah. So well said, I feel like so many of us, the more that this agentic world comes to fruition, we yearn. There's something in the human spirit that yearns for the making of a fire, the feet on the dirt, the making things with your cooking meal with your family, just the in-person community aspect.

Yeah, like if you want to make an AI, the AI that make you to kids, right? Like, you're training them, you're passing down to them. But we're so busy with our lives that we don't even think about it. Like, most people's like, have you done your homework? What was the last joint activity

that you did with your kids? That wasn't like going to a movie. That's not a joint activity. A joint activity is an act of creation. And again, what can we do as humans we can create? Like, even if the AI puts us into this self-automated luxury communism, it looks after all of our things, does that take away from our ability to create? No, it does not.

That is one of the things of being human. Now, can the AI also create? Sure, fine, whatever. But does it create things for other AIs? No. We create things for other humans because our meaning is from our interaction with other humans. and the creative act itself, no matter how much capacity we have to an AGI.

I mean, nothing's going to steal my joy from sitting down at a piano and playing or going on a walk with a friend, you know? Yeah, well, again, and again, there's doing it yourself, and then there's the sharing of it with the world, right? Yeah. Like, we're inherently pro-social species.

Yeah. And the ability to tell the stories, the ability to change people, it's a moving thing. Yeah. Very last couple ones, since you mentioned the quantum processing, quantum computers, the CRISPR technologies, what's one out-of-the-box innovation you think might be coming the next 10 years in that space and what becomes possible when those two coming in?

So I think quantum supremacy is probably four or five years away. What does that mean? It means it's strictly better than pretty much all AI computers, conventional ones. It's interesting because, again, the public narrative is that way, huge amounts of computers, organize all this stuff. That's not how things work. If you have a thousand agents operating on a problem, that's pretty normal right now.

You're not going to do it faster than one agent. We're seeing that already in the numbers. Just like if you throw a thousand programmers at something, you're not necessarily going to get done faster than a few programmers. Interges this compression and AI's learned to do it correctly. The problem with quantum computers is that you're not asking the right questions. The question is actually quite hard to formulate because you need to understand how everything works.

AI can help with that. But then a quantum computer is not going to have to think for a year. Usually everything is like that once you ask the right questions. And so we haven't really got that baked in. The fact that almost any question that is reasonably solvable can solve within a second, that's crazy. Yeah. Stuff that was literally impossible can now be done. And we've seen that already with the generative AI web.

Like, again, the alpha fold, all that kind of stuff we did. It would be impossible. We would take it millions of years to do some of these calculations. And I was like that. Yeah. If you could give everybody on Earth one AI capability tomorrow, what would it be? One AI capability?

I think probably retrieval. So AI is really good at retrieving stuff in the right context. Yeah. So I think that would be a super useful thing. Because we always forget stuff, you know. And having that will allow us to ground better. because we could retrieve. These are the things that we've learned.

Let me make sure that we stick to that. Yeah. What's one question you're tired of people asking you? I don't know. I don't really get tired or upset or frustrated about anything. That's awesome. I'm pretty chill. What's one question you wished people asked you more?

I think probably how to be happier. How do you be happier? I think that happiness again comes from the act of creation, letting go of a lot of your assumptions, and realizing that we're the luckiest people at the luckiest time in the world. If we can do what we like, what we're good at, and where we're adding value and believe we can,

Japanese concept of Higai, then the middle of that is happiness. And we underestimate our ability to add value to other people. We get in our own way around a lot of that. And so once you understand that you can do that and your own happiness is your own internal state and no one else can determine it, then you can be chill and you can be happy.

And it's good. It's nice. being happy. I quite enjoy it. And conversations like this make me very much so happy. So I want to end it there. Ahma, thank you so much, man. It's been a pleasure to connect with you.

Very last thing, we were talking beforehand, do you want to give us a one sentence sneak peek on the sort of epistemology and philosophical explorations you're currently? Yeah, so we're looking at how do you ground consistent reasoning and what is the epistemology of AI? Like, again, we need these things to be aligned and we can't through it through classical rules.

So is there something more fundamental that we can go to so that we can all be on the same page? And I think we've gone a long way to that and hopefully something to be announced soon. Yeah, what you're showing is, we'll have to have you back on talking about that because it's, when you refer to the importance of first principles thinking

and being able to train these self-recursive learning models, I think what you were showing me beforehand and these new discoveries are going to be pivotal for having an effective model that's aligned with us, right? And in our best interest. Fingers crossed, I'm very hopeful that again, as we have these AIs, as we all work together,

we can figure out some actual fundamental truths that have alluded us for a long time and then use that to all pull together to explore the universe, to explore ourselves. and again, increase happiness. Matt, thank you so much. We'll leave links down in the description for your new upcoming book,

The Last Economy, where they can stay connected with your work, any other last words? No, please come and download it. It's all freely available and we're going to open source everything. And again, please, spend some time with your family,

your friends creating. Yeah. Do it. Like, what's getting in the way? Should do it right now. Yeah. Well, everyone, I hope you enjoyed this podcast.

I know I did. maybe go stand on some grass. I think I'm about to. Until next time, be well. Cool. That's fun.