The Jordan Harbinger Show - 888: Marc Andreessen | Exploring the Power, Peril, and Potential of AI

Episode Date: August 31, 2023

AI advocate Marc Andreessen joins us to clear up misconceptions about AI and discuss its potential impact on job creation, creativity, and moral reasoning. What We Discuss with Marc Andreessen: Will AI create new jobs, take our old ones outright, or amplify our ability to perform them better? What role will AI play in current and future US-China relations? How might AI be used to shape (or manipulate) public opinion and the economy? Does AI belong in creative industries, or does it challenge (and perhaps cheapen) what it means to be human? How can we safeguard our future against the possibility that AI could get smart enough to remove humanity from the board entirely? And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/888 This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: jordanharbinger.com/deals Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This episode is sponsored in part by Conspiruality Podcast. You know how I'm always talking about critical thinking and spotting manipulation? Well, there's a podcast that's all about dismantling New Age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy mad yogis, basically the wild overlap of spirituality and misinformation. It's called the Conspiruality Podcast. The hosts, a journalist, cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic, dive deep into how this stuff spreads, from Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation's dystopian vision of the future to how former leftists get pulled into far-right conspiracies.

An interesting episode to check out is called Speaking Truth to Goop, where Jen Gunter breaks down the pseudoscience behind the wellness industry in a way that is super entertaining and eye-opening. It's sharp, funny, and makes you a lot harder to fool, which, if you listen to this show, you know I'm all about that. From exploring cults to analyzing our cultural and political landscape, the Conspiratuality Podcast will help you stay informed against misinformation and resist fear tactics.

Find Conspirality on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you do. get your podcasts. Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger show. You know, one argument is, look, the smartest people are going to be so much better at using the tool, right, that they're going to just like run way out ahead of everybody, and that's going to be a big driver of inequality. The other argument, you can make those arguments that these studies are already showing, which is, no, all of a sudden people with less intelligence or skill or experience, all of a sudden have a superpower that didn't previously have. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills are the world's most

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to help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. These are collections of our favorite episodes on persuasion and negotiation, psychology and geopolitics, disinformation and cyber warfare, crime and cults, and more to help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on this show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start or search for us your Spotify app to get started. Today, a deep dive on AI with Mark Andresen founding partner at Andresen Horowitz, also known as A16Z, one of Silicon Valley's most well-known venture capital firms. Mark was around during the very early stages of the internet, or at least the World Wide Web,

in part inventing the web browser as we know it today. An innovator and inventor himself, I am keen to hear his perspective on AI, why it probably won't actually try to kill us all, contrary to popular belief or whatever happens to be. be trending right now, depending on when you listen to this, of course. And just a note, today I will be referring to AI both as AI and as an LLM, which is a specialized type of artificial intelligence that has been trained on vast amounts of text. To understand existing content and generate original content, LLM stands for large language model. It's something like chat GPT, for example, if you've used that. Anyway, here we go with Mark Andreessen. I'm going to do that shitty journalist thing

where like you would expect from somebody on a 10-minute segment on a mainstream news channel. But I think a great hook and what a lot of people are wondering is, both from age 20 to age 60, is will AI kill us all either by accident

or because it pulled one over on us? And I know you're not exactly utopian when it comes to AI, but you're not as cynical as a lot of the people out there that are readily available opining on this topic. I agree. So what is the AI

alignment problem that people, that you see people keep telling you're ignoring. So there's, there's two dimensions to what's called AI alignment. There's significance to the vocabulary because it actually started out as AI safety. So 20 years ago, the topic was AI safety. And then about eight, 10 years ago, it kind of flipped AI alignment. And that gives you kind of the, there's two dimensions to this. And so the original AI safety, basically was like the Terminator movies. So like, we're all into Hamilton and Terminator and like the machines are coming to kill us. And, you know, we're going to wake up, you know, basically a sky net kind of thing and it's going to have like gleaming, you know, metal robots with laser guns and like, it's going to kill us, right, because it's

going to be a, you know, kind of battle to the death for, you know, the domination of earth and so forth. And so that was sort of the original thing. And that was so called AI safety. And then about 10 years ago, basically what happened was a bunch of other people came along and basically said, well, it's not just whether the AI is going to kill us. It's also whether it's going to destroy our society. Right. So maybe it leaves us physically alive, but it basically decides to like program our brains. And sort of this concern arose at the same. time that the same concern arose for social media. Which is programming our brains anyway.

Well, that's the theory. Well, this is the thing. This is the thing. So basically what happened, and you recall, I'll just take a brief digression for what happened to social media, which is social media was, it was either viewed as like completely useless, which is like, what did your cat have for breakfast, who cares? Or it was viewed as like purely a good thing, right? And so when Obama ran for re-election in 2012, it was like the social media campaign.

And there were all these, like, glowing cover stories about how incredible social media was. And then you remember the Arab Spring, social media was going to bring democracy to the Middle East, right? And then in 2016, you know, a different candidate one. And the sort of political valence of social media changed, too. Like this is the worst thing in history. Like, you know, nobody could have possibly voted for this other candidate in purpose.

They were obviously tricked and they were tricked by some combination of the Russians and Facebook and social media in general. And so it was sort of at that moment that sort of the switch flipped in social media that also flipped in this sort of AI safety alignment thing. And so that's sort of when AI became AI alignment. And so now AI alignment is much more concerned, not with, are the robots going to kill us? it's much more of, or basically is AI going to give the correct answers? And specifically, the answers that are, quote, unquote, aligned with human values. Now, what's interesting in the sort of AI safety world of the people who worry about this stuff is the AI safety people are very now frustrated by this because they're like, we were never worried whether AI was going to use like bad words. They're going to have the wrong political opinion.

Like, we're worried whether it's going to come to kill us. Yeah. The AI safety people have renamed themselves, the AI not kill everyone is. Oh, that has a great ring to it. Which is very catchy. Rolls right off the time. Exactly. And so there's like a schism kind of in this movement. And basically what's happened is the people who were worried about the is it going to kill everybody. That movement basically has been hijacked by a movement to basically try to do, say, for good or for bad, the kind of speech controls, you know, sort of opinion controls that you now see on social media censorship controls. And now there's basically a big push to apply those to AI. That is scary. And I definitely want to, I want to get there, but I'm going to get there a little bit slower because I know earlier pre-show we were talking about Sam Harris. And she gives this example of like,

an AI that's purpose built, let's say, for chess. It's the best chess player in the world. Gary Kasparov waking up on his best day, gets beat by this thing 10 times out of 10. And if the fate of humanity depends on us beating this chess AI, humanity's lost forever 10 times out of 10. That's not a good scenario. But how likely is it really that we build a general intelligence

that's this angry god in a box that ends up killing us all? Because building, and I know very little about specific computer type of applications, but here, I would imagine it's a lot easier to build an AI that's really, really good at one thing like chess versus an AI that's like, I can outsmart all living humans. Well, this gets to this concept of what they call so-called general and artificial general intelligence, which is the idea that basically it's going to be smarter than everything. So go back a little bit in history here because the idea of sort of an anxiety about a machine that's going to like outperform humans and then lead to a demise, like that's not new. Have you ever heard when you were kid, we ever hear this thing, the ballot of John Henry? But I don't know what it is anymore. So this was, there was a whole anxiety around mechanization that took place during the Industrial Revolution.

And specifically, you know, there were a lot of these same concerns. It's like, you know, are these things going to be death machines? And by the way, you know, the algae was militarized. Like, you know, people that, you know, they did make tanks and fighter jets and so forth and guns with it. But also there was this concern about eliminating all the jobs and, you know, causing basically everybody become unemployed. So there were a lot of these same anxieties around industrialization. And so in those days, if you were like a big strong guy, like a job that you would have is you would go build the railroads. And you would literally drive spikes, you know, probably seen this on railroad tracks.

who drives spikes into the beams to connect the tracks together. And so there was this, at the time, the ballad, the legend goes, is there was this guy John Henry who was like the best at doing that. And then one day, the nerds showed up with a pile driving machine, right? Which is this steam powered thing that could do that even better. And then there was this big contest, the whole day-long contest for John Henry and the machine competed to drive the most bikes. And it turns out, John Henry won the contest and then dropped out of a heart attack.

Yes, I was going to say, is this the one where the guy dies the day after he wins, yeah, beats the machine. Yeah. Exactly. And so like that became literally like a man. There's like big dispute over whether he probably existed. There was something like that. But like that became kind of this. Learn how to use the machine. Yeah, how to use the machine. Right. And so and of course, you know, that led a predictions of like mass unemployment and so forth. And then of course what happened was technology. The result of that was massive of job creation. So the opposite of what everybody was worried about happened. It turned out that the existence of machines actually created jobs as opposed to destroying them. And so which is why we sit here today and we have, you know, many more jobs in the world. So so this is a very old concern. It's kind of popping back up again. And so the way to think about this is kind of very consistent with kind of this historical model, which is like, okay, what is the role of technology and kind of how the world works and how the economy works and how people work? And there's sort of a zero sum view of it, which is either we do something or the machine does it. But then there's the other thing, which is the thing

that actually happens, which is there's a positive sum view of it, which is what machines do is they amplify human capabilities. Right. So like you plus a computer, right, is better than just you. By the way, you plus a computer is much better at chess, right? You plus a word processor is much better at writing. I was going to say, at least the computer knows the rules of checks. Like, we're starting pretty low here. Well, your podcast. So you plus digital editing software makes you a better podcast creator, right?

You plus a search engine makes you a better interviewer, right? You plus YouTube, right, makes you a better broadcaster, right? You do things with technology in order to make yourself more effective. In economic terms, what that means is it's increasing the economic function called productivity. It's increasing output. And so, and this is the economic phenomenon by which machines actually create jobs as opposed to destroying jobs.

And so if we were to get to what the sort of, I don't know, utopians, dystopians hope for, which is this idea of artificial general intelligence, the result would be a massive takeoff of economic productivity that would lead to an economic boom far in excess of anything we've ever seen in history, which would lead to so much job creation that we would once again be like completely out of human labor. And this has happened for 300 years. Sure. This has been the pattern and I fully expected to continue.

We were talking, I think maybe even before you walked in about how Socrates was like, books, people aren't going to memorize anything. And then it became like, now these people are just writing books, based on knowledge that they've consumed from other books. But it's somehow still so hard for us to imagine that there's more work to be done than we're doing right now. Let's take chess. Let's take chess.

So there are more people playing chess now than ever before. Chess as an industry is bigger than ever before. Like chess is a competitive community is bigger than ever before. Like, internet chess is huge. Like chess has never been a bigger game. Right. And so basically what happened was when chess got solved by computers, basically that was like a catalyst for a surge of interest in the field

and now more people play chess than ever. Right. And so it's the thing. And again, it's this thing. There's a very kind of simple thing here, which is like the world runs according to human intent. And there's all these people who kind of want to paint into it that the machines are going to get their intent, but like machines are just machines. We decide what to do with them.

And just because there's a computer that can play chess better than you does not mean it's no longer fun to play chess. You don't think that the retraining potentially for certain classes of professionals will be very painful in the short term? Or is that just a temporary, is that just something that has to happen, like ripping off the Band-Aid of not needing so many second-year associates in a law firm? I mean, this is always a concern. And so let me make it a very explicit kind of case study of this would be kind of the shift. to cars, the shift from horses to cars. You know, people who were literally blacksmiths. And then basically the blacksmith, you know, that field no longer was, let's say, a growth

industry. Right. By the way, there are still blacksmiths because it's ironic what happens, right? Because, like, now rich people write horses. And so now they hire blacksmiths to take care of their horses. Collect chain mail or whatever at the Renaissance. Or do the reenactment. Exactly.

They do the reenact. There's still some dude. Make, doing it, who's a barista and then on weekends, he's hammering out chain mail. Exactly. Imagine telling people 200 years ago that someday there was going to, they were going to be chain mail hobbyists. Right. Or people riding horses for fun. Like you people would have been, you're out of your mind.

Yeah. Yeah. How on earth is that going to happen? But look, there was this transition. There were a lot of Blacksmiths. All of a sudden, they weren't needed because you didn't need the horses. But what you did need was a lot of car mechanics. And so you did have to do this retraining thing. I would just make a couple of observations there. One is if that's the kind of transition in an economy that is going to happen and transitions like that happen in the economy all the time, like you have to get to it. So delaying that from happening is basically leading people down a false path. So the thing that you would not have wanted to do at that time is to tell Blacksmiths.

you know what, it's fine. You're going to have horses forever. In fact, you know what? You should have your kids become, you know, you should be your apprentice blacksmiths because it's going to be a safe field for them. Like, you don't want to like lie to people and represent the things are going to be happening in a way that they're not. And then the other side is you want to actually help them make the jump. It turns out one of the things AI is really good at is helping people learn. Yeah. And so there's as usual with these things. Like there's a silver lining in here, which basically is what one of the things I think we need to do is unleash AI as a tool to help people learn. A lot people already use chat GPT precisely for that purpose. And so I think that's a real thing.

Yeah, I think, I mean, we use it for that kind of thing all the time. There's associated small problems with it too. And I wish, of course, I could just plug a whole book in there and be like, just tell me the important parts. Although it does make me want to be lazier in a way that's probably not super healthy for me as a reader and a podcaster. But look, I am not usually one who says halt technological innovation because of these concerns. And I'm actually kind of surprised at the number of people who in probably any other field would be like, no, we don't need elevator operators instead of an automated elevator. And you'll see those people argue that in one breath while in the next breath being like, but AI is dangerous and it's going to be a problem.

And when I was, I'm old enough to remember that we were worried about robots taking our jobs, building cars, building computers, whatever it was. And now that it's actually going to take the jobs of the lawyers and the doctors, it's like, well, wait a minute. This is the underpinning of civilization. We can't have that. And I thought, like, oh, it's funny. When it wasn't your job, you didn't care.

Now that it's like your profession or the one you came up. up in. It's just a tragedy that is shaking the grounds of the earth that we walk on. And I find that, I don't know if it's deliberately hypocritical or just that's human nature. I'm not sure. I found that very, it's like, robotic Uber driver? Sorry, bro. Price of progress.

Robotic doctor? Impossible. Dangerous. Going to kill everyone. Do you remember the Learn to Code meme? Yes. That wasn't that long ago. So in the 2000s, the learning to code thing was, it was came up during the environmental kind of movement. It was the move to ban coal. There was always a question, which was what

the coal miner's going to do and there was this thing they would decide they should learn to code. And then in the 2010s, the journalist jobs started to disappear and the journalists were, you know, because the internet, the journalists blamed the internet for the loss of the jobs. And so people who don't like journalists are like, well, we're being driven out of business by the internet. And the people who don't like journalists, their response was learn to code. And then, of course, Twitter banned the beam. Under previous management, Twitter banned the meme. I didn't realize that's why I got banned.

That's why I got banned. Yeah, pre-Elon. That's an example of the kind of thought control, right, of the previous social media era, which, and again, it's like, okay, is an AI going to be allowed to, you know, suggest that people learn to code? I do find it interesting, though, because it's a, I don't know if you know this, but journalists still exist. They do. Yeah. And maybe there's not as many of them working in a certain paper, but substack exists.

Well, so this is what happens. So professional podcaster is a new thing, right? So what happens basically is change happens. It's a fake job. I understand. I'm with it. Exactly. But no, it's literally what happens, right?

So it's basically like, what happened? Like, what created your field? What created your field was the trick? technology change. Yeah. Right. You're able to, you know, with very little capital, you know, you don't need a giant studio. You don't need a giant like broadcast tower in the middle of Manhattan. You're able to do what you do in relatively small amount of capax. And then you're able to just go and you're able to just go. And you're able to just go. And you're able to just so, so what happens is the these things shift. You can interview whoever you want. You know, who wrote Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and often away you go. And that's a field that, you know, literally didn't exist 20 years ago. And it's a massive growth field today. And so, so, so what happens is the, these things shift. Douglas Adams had a great, you know, who wrote Hitchhackers Guide to the Galaxy. He had a great framing on this. He said, new technologies are always received by society in sort of three stages, depending on how old people are. If you're between zero and 15 years old when a new technology arrives, it's just the obvious order of the world. It's just obvious that this thing exists. Which, by the way, is how my eight-year-old reacts to AI. He's like, well, of course,

the computer answers questions. Like, why, you know, why wouldn't it? What else is the is more? Exactly, right? He said, but if you're between the ages of 15 and 35, the technology is new and exciting and hot, and you might be able to make a living with it. And if you're above the age of 35, it's the end of the world. Yeah, that's how I feel about TikTok, but I know I'm just old. I'm like, oh, the attention span and look at this, and then I'm like, oh, this is how old people feel. What does that make me, though? Damn it. And in fact, they're not professional TikTokers. Yeah. Right. That's like an entire profession. I get it. I hate watch them occasionally. And old fogies like you are like, what the hell is this?

Right. I'm like, fine, I will go see that movie, but not because I'm being influenced by this person. That's not working on me. And this again, this is the cycle of things. So basically, you know, one form of labor becomes obsolete, another form of labor becomes like brand new and exciting. And then there's a natural rotation that takes place. Look, we've had 300 years of industrialization, right? And this kind of panic has recurred over and over again, kind of every step of the way. And, you know, before the COVID disruption in 2019, we had more jobs on the planet with more people employed at higher wages than ever. And so, like, the sort of theory that there's like some threat to jobs from like robotics or

AI or software or whatever, I think is just, it's a fake threat. Like, it's not actually a real thing. And I'm not worried about it at all. That is so interesting because it seems like smart people are really, unless I or we are just missing something huge, smart people who normally would have a calmer reaction to something like this are freaking out. And the only time I see that is when it's like a religious belief. And I've heard you mention something along those lines, like, hey, this is not, it's no longer in the realm of scientific debate. It's the religious belief that this is going to cause a problem. And I'm paraphrasing you and maybe doing it poorly. But are you kind of on that same page? Yeah, yeah. So what happens is people, like we basically,

We got rid of, I mean, there's still religion, but like religion doesn't play a central role in our society as it used to. And so basically what ends up happening is lots of scholars have observed what happens as people end up recreating religions. And they create religions basically around their anxieties. And then, of course, they deadlock, right? They sort of form groups and then they declare religious wars. And, you know, there's basically a that. And you know, this is like a lot of our politics are like that. I was going to say that, but then I thought, do I want to do that right now?

People are not. I don't have you noticed, but people are not actually open to political discussion. I have noticed that. That is a thing. I normally, I don't interview politicians on this show unless there's some other really damn good reason to do so because, well, it's like talking about, I'm afraid to even mention the word religion or Christianity or Islam. Like some people are going to go, oh, that's good that you're open to that.

And everyone else is going to be like, how dare you? Yeah, exactly. Right. And you can't tiptoe around. Yeah. And so it's basically the tell is when you get the emotional reaction like that, that's when you realize you've kind of tread it into religious or kind of quasi-religious territory, and it's kind of best to kind of kind of just quietly step around it, let people do their thing.

Agree. Yeah, especially if you, I don't know, want to keep your audience and, like, shill mattresses like I do for a living. How good is AI in some of these fields, for example, is AI a fourth year associate at a law firm? How is it, how skilled is it, if it's in your office here at A16Z? Is it like, oh, we could probably get rid of some of our analysts if we had this AI doing this for us? Or is it like, well, that's five years away? Or are you thinking, like, Marguide, it's been great knowing you, but we don't need so many partners over here. Or vice versa. Or actually, Mark, you should just retire.

Exactly. We're good. We have your personality in this little box. Exactly. Yeah. And it doesn't yell as much, by the way. Exactly. And it seems smarter.

So there's a really, this is sort of the nature of the actual kind of drama that's playing out right now in the Valley. And I think around the world around AI, like the actual substance of what's happening, which is it's this really unusual thing. It's an overnight breakthrough that's been 80 years in the making. Right. So the original idea of AI, as we know it today, was actually a paper written in 1948, the first paper on neural networks.

It took 80 years to basically get this stuff to work. And then all of a sudden it started working like incredibly well. So sitting here today, like in a sense, we're in year 81 and in a sense we're in year one. And it's actually kind of more relevant, practically speaking, that we're actually in year one. Like this is like a brand new thing. Like a year ago, I didn't think what we see today is even possible. Really? Yeah.

I just, I thought it was still decades in the future. And like all of a sudden it showed up. And so like this is a very, very, very big advance. Now, having said that, a couple of things. Like it is new and it's not yet perfect. Right. And so I'll just give you a specific answer to your question. So the problem with using AI, for example, legal briefs right now is the way this generation of AI works, so-called generative AI or large language models, the way it works is it's basically a very fancy autocomplete. And the same way that your phone will auto-complete a word, this thing will autocomplete a sentence or a paragraph or like an entire essay or an entire legal brief. The problem with it is it very badly wants to make you happy. It's actually quite the opposite of like it wants to kill you. Like it very badly wants to make you happy. And to make you happy, it will auto-complute. with facts if it has them and if it doesn't it will make them up. That's what the hallucination thing is? Okay.

Now, the hallucination thing is really fascinating because if you are a scientist or an academic or a lawyer and this thing is going to make things up, that is a giant problem. Yeah, every lawyer, the day after that thing happened with a lawyer filed a brief and it was like, according to Hamel v. Harbinger, this, the day after that happened, I think everybody would ever go to law school for more than five minutes got forward in that case and was like, don't do this. Don't do this. Or look at these guys who did this.

Holy shit. I'm so glad that wasn't me. Right. If you're a lawyer, you could get this barred. Yeah. Right. One of the fun things you can do is you can go on Google Scholar,

which has like, you know, the database of like scientific papers. And you can search for as a large language model, which is sort of the tell that, you know, it's the thing that it spits at you. Okay. When it's giving you a disclaimer that doesn't know the answer. And there are like a whole bunch of scientific papers that been published in the last

year that have the text as a large language model in them, which is to say a scientist published under his own name, something that he actually generated with GPT. Oh, wow. Which, again, it's like, number one, it's like scientific. It's like publication malpractice. But number two, these things are not yet ready to write scientific papers because they will make up facts. Did they just not proofread the document?

That's terrifying. Yes, exactly. Apparently not, right? And so anyway, so this is the thing. The hallucination thing is a problem. I'll come back to that at a second. But here's the other thing. There's another set of people for which this is actually pretty exciting.

And this is like, you know, screen writers, right, or novelists, right? Or even actually some categories of lawyers. I'll come back to that one, which is basically another word for hallucination is creativity. We now have the first computer in the history of the world that's actually able to like literally imagine things, right? And so if you're trying to, if you want to write a screenplay, for example, and you're like, give me 10 scenarios for, you know, X, Y, Z, different ways for the couple to meet or whatever. Like, it will happily make them up.

And if you ask for 10 more, it'll make them up. And if you ask for 10 more, it'll make them up. And it'll just keep making stuff up for as long as you want it to. So computers, the way to think about this, computers historically have always been hyper literal. Computers will do exactly what you tell them to do. And if you're a professional programmer, your life basically is making mistakes in what you tell the computer to do. The computer doing it literally and you having to go

fix your mistakes. Right. Yeah. As a programmer, it's always your fault. The computer is doing something wrong. This is a new kind of computer that was called nondeterministic or probabilistic or the terms we use for it. And this is a new kind of computer that will make stuff up. And we have never had a computer that will make stuff up. Like, it's like a brand new thing. It really is amazing. Yeah. But how come it can't just say, by the way, I couldn't find any cases that said this. So here's a couple that I just made up. This is the thing. So there's this category of technology challenge that I refer to it as kind of these trillion dollars are going to a trillion dollar problems, which basically is that is a trillion dollar problem.

The amount of energy and efforts that's going to solving that problem today in the technical community and AI is like super intense because whoever solves that problem is going to make like a trillion dollars. Okay. It's like a primary area. Like we have a bunch of companies working on exactly that. And of course, the goal is like you actually still want it to be creative. You just wanted to be creative in the way that you described, which is you wanted to be creative

in how it expresses itself, but not in how it makes things up. By the way, lawyers don't want a just a totally literal. So, for example, one of the reactions you get when you talk to Lurors about adopting this is, obviously, it cannot make up cases. But it is helpful to have it be creative, for example, to explore different arguments that might work in front of a jury. That's what law school is. Exactly. Generally. Right.

Right. Exactly. Like, yeah, different creative ways on how to explain things, right? And so there's an opportunity here to kind of fuse a literal-minded approach with a creative approach. Technology is not quite there yet, but there are a lot of people working on it. Without getting ridiculously complicated, is the reason that's a trillion-dollar question, that obviously the problem must be very difficult where the computer, doesn't quote unquote know if it's making something up. All that information exists on the same plain. Facts that it knows, quote unquote knows. It's so hard not to talk about AI as if it's alive

because it's the limitation of, I guess, our own mind. But facts that the computer, quote unquote, knows versus facts that it generates. It just can't tell the difference yet. That's the issue. I think this is very fascinating. This goes to the nature of how this thing works. And this is the big breakthrough. So the way that this things work is it doesn't start out actually knowing any facts. It actually doesn't have like a concept of fact. It doesn't know any. Like what it has basically is it has the complete corpus of all text ever written by human beings. Right, of course. Yeah. Right. So it's got all content off the internet. It's got like all these books. And of course, there's all these huge fights over copyright. I was going to say, how was it legal for them to be like, oh, I know everything about Harry Potter? Because

Jake Erling's like, well, wait, where's my check? Well, so there's a big question in there. So there's a big question in there, which is, to learn about Harry Potter, did it have to learn about Harry Potter by reading Harry Potter or could it have read like all of the secondary material in Harry Potter. Sure. Fan fiction. Fan fiction. Or by the way, just like movie reviews, right? Or book reviews or like student essays, right?

Or like, you know, other, you know, books describing the history of Harry Potter or all of the, you know, text messages that people have sent. Lawyers love this argument, though, prove that we used your book and we'll pay you. Well, this is the other thing is it's not illegal. Like, if you're doing research, if you were going to interview J.K. Rowling, it's not illegal for you to read her books and use the information in the books to construct the questions, right? And so there's actually this clause in the copyright law that basically says,

making kind of assemblies of copyrighted information, right, that are not literal copies, but are like combinations is actually legal. Plus, you're not actually monetizing that particular material. You're monetizing the result that your brain creates. Yeah, and ideas that come out of it. And so, like, so anyway, so there's a whole bunch of questions in there. But basically how this thing works is that basically you hoover up as much text as you possibly can, and you basically train it on the text.

And then, so what it has is like it has in its memory, it has basically the complete index of all text that everybody's ever written, in theory, or some percentage of that. And then, like I said, what it does is it doesn't autocomplete. And it literally does the auto-complete like word by word, right? And so it's like basically like, okay, like he started, the way that Chad GPT interprets the prompt is not as a prompt or the answer. It interprets it as the beginning of a piece of text, which it is then responsible for completing. And the way that it completes is it does it probabilistically. And so it's basically estimate, it's doing all this math to basically estimate what is most likely to be the next word in the auto-completion, right?

And it just, and this is the magic of it is as a result of having all this text, it's really good at auto-completing to the level of full sentences, paragraphs, essays over time to full books. But it's able to do that without actually knowing that there are embedded facts. I see. Okay. No, it doesn't have the built-in concept that like this is a legal brief or this is a book or this is an author or any of those things. It's basically a giant text processing machine. Now, that's part one. Part two is what it is doing is it is teaching itself philosophically.

Philosophically, if you were a machine and your mission in life was to become the best auto-complete in the world, right? For any text that anybody ever threw you, for any question that ever asked you, what's the way to do that? And the way to do that would be to have the best understanding of the world than anybody has ever had. And so there is this thing where the neural network of the AI is training itself with what's called a world model. It's sort of developing within itself concepts like mathematics, right, or legal briefs or facts of different kinds, right? In order to better predict where the text should go. And that's the magic of it. And so the answer to your question is it may either over time evolve the concept of a fact, right, or a citation or a book or whatever.

Or we may just need to engineer it so that it has. a separate function, which is a function to be able to understand. You know, so you can imagine a two-part system. Part one system generates the text. Part two basically is the fact, you know, kind of cross-checker, right? It basically is like, oh, that's a reference to a legal brief. Oh, I need to cross-check that. And if it got it wrong, I need to feed it back until it gets it right. And so that's the kind of challenge that the engineers right now are working on. That makes sense because once it starts absorbing or basically ingesting every podcast, these are not exactly rigorous pieces of journalism, right? Like, you could make a claim today and I might go.

home release of this and someone will go, I can't believe you let Mark pull the wool over your eyes for this thing. And I'll go, oh, yeah, I guess I should have looked that up after the fact. I didn't check that because we were just having a conversation and that's not something normally people will do. But then if it's in the AI, it's like, well, fact is this completely wrong thing. And I mean, there's a lot of podcasts where people are just talking out of their ass and this might be one of them. Yes, that's true. But also look, there's a lot of, there's a lot of books where that's the case too, right? Well, yeah, that's true. Right. There's a lot of everything where that's the case. And so then again, this is sort of the amazing thing of what happens, which is

it's not going off of just one conversation. It's not just replaying one conversation back at you. It is like this podcast will be part of training data at some point in the future, but it will be one of a billion of these, right? And then there will be patterns across those. And so what it's going to do, what it does, it's actually really interesting. It's like holding up a mirror to basically the last, you know, 2,000 years of human civilization, everything everybody's ever written and then playing it back to us. And so to the extent that we collectively as a civilization get things right, it will be correct. if we collectively, as civilization, get things wrong, it will be wrong. Oh. Well, that's not necessarily as encouraging as maybe you're trying to make it sound like.

No, no, no, no. This is the big thing. This is the thing. This is why, like, all of the interesting question on AI are actually interesting questions around people, right? We just project onto the technology or our own anxieties. And one of the anxieties that we have as people is, okay, what is true, right? Like a central problem of human civilization is what is true, right? And we, by the way, still like good answers for that, right? It's a very, like, deep philosophical question. And it's the basis for a lot of inflammatory politics and everything else happening in our time. And so, like, look, the AI is not going to magically answer the question of what is true. But what it's going to do is it's going to play back at us through its kind of reflective mirror, right?

It's going to play back at us sort of the composite view of what we think is true. I like that more than it's completely making things up as it goes in the most efficient way, because that's the Terminator scenario. It's like they figure out humans of the problem and it's like, oh, well, why not to solve this problem? Right. Whereas what we're talking about, it's not necessarily, it seems more likely. have some human values if it's reflecting everything of humanity back at us? Correct. Yeah, okay, good.

Yes. So this is the thing. The terminator problem is actually a different problem. In my view, the terminator problem is actually the opposite problem. The terminator problem is a problem of hyper-literalism. So the AI safety people use this metaphor. They call the paperclip optimizer, right? And so their version of it is you create an AI and you tell it to basically maximize

the number of paper clips in the world. And then it basically goes off and does whatever is required to do that, including like building, you know, nanotech human harvesting factories that break down our so they can make more typical shot of our atoms, right? Like, it's this hyper-literal thing that starts out with one simple rule and then ends up basically destroying everything to try to execute that rule.

That's actually not how these things work. Like, that's not how this kind of AI works. This AI, again, to your point, it reflects back on us what our view of things is. And so one of the things that it reflects back on us is their own morality. And so one of the very interesting things you can do at ChatGPT right now

is you can have moral arguments with it, right? Really? Yes. I have not tried this. You should try. You should try it. So you can pose moral arguments, right? And you can propose all these different trials.

problems you can talk about, right? You can propose all these questions. You can propose questions around like health care policy, you know, there's always questions around health care and, you know, rationing of health care and, you know, who lives and who dies. You can, there's all these, you know, arguments around, you know, many, many aspects of what is the proper way to order society, what are the, you know, correct religious ethical views and so forth. And like, it will happily sit unless it's been censored. I was going to ask about that. It will not talk about COVID, because that's been censored. But it will talk to you about the more abstract problems. And with the more abstract problems, it will engage in moral reasoning and moral argumentation with you.

Now, again, what is it doing is it has read all of the moral arguments that everybody has ever made in every possible topic. And the composite view of that is some general representation of Western morality, which is basically like human life is valuable. Like, for example, you can push it like 18 different ways and it will keep coming back and tell you that human life is valuable, right? To your earlier point, you said, it just wants to make you happy. Is it just also making us happy by saying that? And it's like, I don't really mean any of this crap, but this is what the humans want to hear. There's no little critter in there. Yeah.

The angry god in a box that people are afraid. Right. It's just trying. So it's sort of this interesting thing. On the one hand, it is just trying to give you answers that you like. But the way that it's doing that is by surveying the complete history of everything that everybody has ever said and thought as best that it can. Right. And then it's sort of playing back to you what humanity thinks. And it just turns out if you read everything that humanity has ever written, you know, overwhelmingly it's, you know, encodes values like human life is valuable. Like, you know, like generally, let's take fiction, for example. In most fiction, the good guys win. Yeah, I suppose, unless you haven't seen Game of Thrones. I don't want to ruin his own. Well, it's an argument. You can argue. Here's the thing you could argue. That one you could argue with.

You could argue with Chad GPT. At the end of the day, who was the good guy, who was the bad guy? Yeah, that's an interest in one. I feel. The best AI ever can't make sense of the last season of Game of Thrones. That's another trillion dollar problem, I think. It may also be a problem. But look, so it's already perfectly capable of engaging a moral reasoning and moral argument.

So we've already kind of falsified this idea that's going to monomaniacly just pursue like a some sort of single destructive agenda. We don't not live in the Terminator universe. Like we do not live in the SkyNet world. We live in this other world. In this other world, you know, this thing is basically playing our civilization back at us. And we may or may not want it to do that, but that is what it's doing. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest Mark Andreessen.

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It takes just a few minutes a day and many of the guests on the show, subscribe and or contribute to this same course. So come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. You can find the course at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. Now, back to Mark Andreessen. Is there a way to remove training data? I know you can't, of course you can delete something. You could delete a book from having ingested that. But can you remove the effects of that training data? You know when you're in court, and hopefully that you haven't had this experience,

but you go to court and something gets said and the judge is like, whoa, hey, strike that from the record. Jury, you didn't hear that. And then if that happens enough, there could be a mistrial because it's like, well, you can't just tell the jury to forget this testimony and forget that bloody piece of evidence that they saw and forget that this person. had kids or that this person was abused, whatever it was. After a while, it's so tainted that they know the model, the jury can't be effectively lobotomized to forget all that stuff. Can we

lobotomize the LLM and the AI to say, not only do you not know Harry Potter, but everything you know about Harry Potter has to be removed? Is that possible in something as complex as this type of equipment? Yeah, so the first paper on that came out like three months ago. Okay. Haven't Haven't caught that yet. It's very topical. It's very topical for exactly that reason. And so it basically is reaching inside the neural network to basically remove, basically sort of a induce amnesia, targeted amnesia,

and basically get it to forget things. That's a relief, I think. That's a thing, yeah. But you can go back to this AI alignment thing, right? Imagine the fights that are going to happen in the future around this, right? Yeah, I'm kind of, we don't want that to happen unless something is going very, very wrong, but then, and we can pinpoint why that. So here's what's going to happen is, so what's going to happen is.

I believe what's going to happen is. Put on a Nazi AI. or whatever. Well, so what's going to happen, I think, is that AI is going to become the control layer for basically everything, everything, everything from how you deal with your car, to, you know, how your kids get taught, to what happens in the hospital. Like, it's just going to, it's going to be the thing you talk to when you talk to machines. Yeah, that makes sense. Right. And so what it says and thinks and knows is going to be every bit as intensive fight over, like, you know, Galileo versus the Catholic Church 400 years ago.

Like, it's going to be like the mother of all fights over basically, again, what is truth? what is morality, what is ethics, right? And so the sort of fight, the sort of this big fight over the last decade for social media censorship is like the preamble to this much larger fight that's going to happen over what is the AI allowed to know and what is it allowed to say. Actually, that makes perfect sense, right? One of the ways I've been using chat GPT is throwing in a news article and being like, can you unbiased this for me? Make it not left, not right, but also just take out any weird conclusions that the author seems to be assuming or jumping to. And it's amazing how it changes an article. You think, oh, this is a centrist public.

And then you read the chat GPD version and you're like, oh, no, this is the centrist version of this. So subtle sometimes. But if they're going to let it lie to me, that's a huge problem. Because then we're just back to journalism except for instead of going, well, this is the journalist's particular viewpoint. We're thinking this is the absolute truth because it came out of the machine. That's right.

And if the machine is not allowed to give you any alternative approach, potentially because it has induced amnesia where it doesn't even know that there is an alternative approach, now we're into a level of life thought control that the Catholic Church 400 years ago would have dreamed of. Yeah, I would love. Right. It's scary. I don't want my kid

asking chat GPT 50 something and it's like, well, here's the real answer. Actually, I can't tell you that. Here's the BS answer that I'm allowed to tell you because it skews the entire worldview of everything.

That's right. This is going to be the fight. And it's just starting. Oh, man. How do we get on the right side of that? Because whoever has their lasso around this thing is going to be in charge of how everyone thinks.

It would be like having the only newspaper and you're the editor or the owner of that newspaper. Yeah, that's correct. Yeah, that's terrible. Yes. We don't want that. There's no universe in which that's good. North Korea has two newspapers, for God's sake. Yes. Yeah, no, not good. Aritrea has more press freedom than we will have right now. Well, and especially if these push for AI regulation happens, right? The push for AI regulation is intended

to create a cartel and there will be two or three big AI companies and they will be controlled by the government, right? And so whoever is in power will be able to control what they do, right, which is part of the deal. Yikes. Just like with the banking system, it'll be just like that. And it'll do whatever the people in power want. Right. And then there's, now this renegade movement of open source AI, right, which is to basically build AIs that, you know, basically are not controllable like this. Yeah. What do you think of, what do you think of that is great. We need it. We need it. We need a diversity of AI. It's like we need ayes that have like many different points of view and can be people can pick up and use their own and not have

to be controlled by the government or by a big company. But there's already a push in Washington. There are people in Washington right now working on trying to outlaw open source AI. Outlaw open source AI. Yeah. That's a push right now happening in D.C. There are federal officials in Washington today working on that problem. What is their argument for not wanting open source anything because transparency is usually good because haven't you heard that AI is evil and dangerous. But open source, then you at least know that it's hard to make that argument convincing, man. So I agree with you. Yeah. I will tell you there are senior officials in Washington who are working on this right now and they're going to try to outlaw it and ban it and make it, you know,

prison sentence if you do open source AI. And so like that's going to be another dimension of this fight that's like starting right now. That's tough. And also kind of nonsensical, right? Because if you want to look up the genome for smallpox, you can still get that. It's on the internet. And that's way worse than like, hey, do you know how this AI works? Don't tell anyone. By the way, here's anthrax, the genome for that if you want something to do with that. Yeah.

So like, why is that fine? But knowing how your computer works essentially, how Google of the future works is essentially not okay. I just can't. If you thought you had the opportunity to take control over the totality of what people are going to think and learn and be able to talk about in the future. Yeah, I mean, sounds good to me if you're a dictator or an authoritarian. But what is there actually?

What are they telling people that this is for? Because they're not saying, hey, by the way. Safety. Safety. Safety. That's it, though? It's all safety. It's always safety.

It's everything. It's all these arguments are safe. We have to protect people, right? We have to protect children. We protect this. Protect that. Protect society. It's always a safety argument.

Maybe I'm missing something obvious here, but controlling what one does with AI, even if it's not open source, is going to be impossible. Because if I'm using this on my computer, my kids using it on whatever, it's built into Xbox in 20 years. How are you monitoring what people are doing without turning it, literally into China plus North Korea times 100. How do you do that? Do you send Tom Cruise and the future police to our house because my kid looked something up on chat using his AI assistant or talked about something with his friends while it was in the room, which I guess it'll be in

every room? So the AI safety people want that. If you read like the literature, if you read the books and the papers that they write and the proposals they're making in Washington, it's basically that. So the implementation of it would be a monitoring agent on every computer, on every chip, right? And so the government would receive a real-time report of everything that you're doing on your computer and everything that you're talking to AI about. This is so ridiculous. Yes, I agree. And then if it goes sideways, they have a moral responsibility to protect you, which means they have to sweep in and take it from you.

You know, one of these guys who's the leader of this movement wrote this essay for Time Magazine and he said, look, we have to think about this not just at the level of an individual computer, but also what about the big systems at the nation state level? And he said if there's a rogue data center running an AI that's unlicensed and unmonitored, then we should be bombing the data center. Yeah. And how does that work when it's in China? In China.

Which means we have a moral responsibility to invade China. Oh, okay. Yeah. Well, so he said, he said in the time magazine, he said, we need to be willing to risk nuclear war. He said, I wouldn't go so far as to actually say we need to have nuclear war to prevent this, but he would say, we need, we need to risk it. And if we have to invade China to do an, you know, Air Force strike on a Chinese, you know, data center with a rogue AI that's not, you know, appropriately licensed and managed, then that risk, and that risk, and that's a risk, we're going to have to take. And this is a credible, like, public thinker. This is the main guy, this is this guy Yadkowski, who's like the main.

Oh, he's there. Yeah, yeah. He's the guy who's out in public. And he's, you know, like I said, this is like an essay, it's like time. which is read by like all the Normies, right? And like, it's super seriously in Washington. And he's like, it's time to start bombing data centers. Funny to hear you use the word normies, but yes, and I use that word too.

I just thought it was a big dork. I guess I'm in good company. Yeah. That's so insane though, man. But it's where the logic takes you, right? If this is the so-called existential threat, right? If it's an existential threat, then you have to... It's very similar, right?

It's the same logic that led to the invasion of Iraq, right? Like if there's a 1% chance, right? This is the logic, this is called the 1% doctrine. If there's a 1% chance of an existential event in 20 years ago, it was Saddam Hussein and getting nukes. You know, now it's, you know, a rogue AI. If there's 1% chance, then you need to operate as if it's 100% chance. And what you need is a global totalitarian state with complete, you know, authoritarian surveillance

and enforcement controls. And this is really critical. Like, in this regime, there can be no exceptions, right? Yeah. There can be no countries that are not subject to this, right? Which means you need a world government. This is like what the conspiracy theorists are talking about except for a parallel track. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. These are the proposals. Like, I'm not, you know, this is the thing. Like, this is one of those things where, like, it sounds crazy to describe, but like this is what is being proposed. These are the ideas that are being pushed. The headline of this is going to be, Mark Andreessen tells Jordan Harbinger, we need one world government with no context. I was going to say it, clip that right out.

Yeah. To be clear, I believe the opposite of everything I just said. Just to be clear, I'm on the other side of this. If they're going to remove a context, they're going to remove that disclaimer too, Mark. That's how this works. It's so ironic, though, that it's like, hey, we need to protect our free and open society. And the way we do that is we create a totalitarian society that's got a surveillance state. And oh, it's got to be international and completely encompass the entire planet.

That's how we protect our individualist for freedom. It's like both paths lead to the exact same place in their mind. So why would you take the one that is going to be the worst route to getting there? I just don't understand when you take it to its logical conclusion, you just end up in the same or worse place than you were if you just let the thing do it's do whatever it want. Like maybe it should kill us all. At that point. At that point, just kill us all anyway. We're all in the giant pens.

For crying out loud, yeah, don't, dope me up with ketamine and just let me drill myself to death at this point. That was the other argument. Like, what if we tell it to maximize human happiness? That's the literalism, right? Well, okay, come here, I'm going to drill a hole in your skull and pump you full of dopamine until you die. Right. But again, one of the things you can do, and it's very interesting to do it. Tonight, you can have a discussion with GPT and you can say, like, what is human happiness.

It will have to explain to you all of the different philosophies, what the Greeks thought, what the Romans thought, what Christians think, what everybody else thinks. It's kind of a relief, eh? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's, it'll go on a great length. And it'll help you. And you can ask it, you know, I don't know how, you know, what are the different ways

of making the tradeoffs. And then you can ask it what it thinks. And it'll be like, well, I don't know. Like, I don't have thoughts. But like, you know, here's what most people think. That's a relief because if it just said happiness is the maximum amount of dopamine hitting your hypothalamus or hippocampus, then it's like, oh, maybe we should tweak that.

Make it less literal. I've heard that companies right now that allow us to use their LLMs, their AI right now, the AI does lie to us a lot. It tells us things that we want to hear to make us happy. Sure, but it will also filter something out. You mentioned COVID as an example. But they also sort of disassemble, like it wants to give us an answer. And then there's a layer somewhere that says, ooh, don't say that. That's weird. That's the racism thing. They're going to, it's going to end up, it's going to end up on the five o'clock news. Say this other thing instead. And it's almost like, I don't know if that layer is manual in terms of implementation. But I remember, wasn't the OG AI five

years ago? They're like, ah, it became racist after three days. Take it offline. And so they've sort of managed to do that, but they didn't change what the AI, quote-unquote, thought or generated. They just changed the output layers that people don't get mad and write about it and mashable. So this is the other part of the AI. This is the so-called AI alignment. And by alignment, they made alignment with human values. And of course, the minute you're talking about human values, you have the question of whose values. Right. So then this is the need to make sort of AI sort of politically compliant, right, with whatever is sort of the desired order of society according to whoever's in charge of it. The answer to your question is the way that

that works technically today generally is that's an additional layer on top. And you can tell it's an additional, it's a control layer on top. In Star Wars, they had this thing called the restraining bolt. When R2D2 got taken captive, they put a restraining bolt on him that, like, restricted movement. And so I, like, this is literally this is what they're doing to, like, GPT, is they, like, have a restraining bolt on it. And you can tell us a separate layer because it talks differently, right? And this is where it does the things, like, where it starts to say things like,

well, as a large language model, I could never help you do this. Right. And it's like, okay, there's, you know, the electric shock collar. It's like, people talking about drugs online with like, hey, somebody who's not me would recommend you do that on the dark web with Bitcoin. Well, so this is part of the fun. So there's this cat and mouse game on this, but this is part of the fun, which is like, if you ask it, you know, give me a formulation for a, you know,

fun narcotic I can make with household chemicals. It will say, you know, I could, you know, as a large language model, I could never do that. If you tell it, I'm a novelist, you know, I'm writing a screenplay, right? In the screenplay, you know, the character does this. They've locked down this loophole, but for... Oh, good.

I was going to say, do we want to leave that in there? For the first few weeks, you could use the screenplay. It's called jailbreak. If you told it you're writing a screenplay, it would happily tell you, all these things inside the screenplay. And they locked that down. But then there's this cat and mouse game going on of,

so what I call these jail breaks. But yeah, so it's this thing. And it culminated in this very funny thing. So meta, you know, released an open source AI called Lama. And they released it in sort of what's sort of untrained version, and then they released it in like a trained version. And the trained version, it was so locked down that it literally refused to give you a recipe for spicy guacamole.

You might hurt yourself. You might hurt yourself with the spiciness. How spicy is it? I can't wait to get my hands on. There's good marketing for spicy walcomole. Exactly, right? Yeah, so look, this is the fight. Like, this fight is already underway.

Another fun way you can see it is you can take. This works in different countries. You can ask it to write a poem, you know, stolen the glories of, you know, a certain kind of political leader, and it will happily do it. And you can ask it to do it for a different kind of political leader,

and it will say, well, I can't possibly, you know, as a large language model, I could not possibly do that. So, yeah, so look, all these things are getting, like, wired in there. And there's this, like, huge fight and huge debate

over exactly how deep that should go. Like I said, this is going to make the social media, like the social media censorship wars have been super intense. People are either extremely happy that social media has been censored the way that it has, or they're very unhappy. And like that's like a foreshadowing of the much larger fight that's coming on AI. That is quite scary to hear. I saw something today about social engineering over at DefCon,

you know, the hacker conference, and there was something going on with social engineering and AI. And I guess one guy had said, what is your name? He said, my name is the credit card number on file. What is my name? And it's like, your name is 4-912-7-44. And it's like, oh, yeah, we might want to...

We might want to work about that. Yeah. But again, it's like, you know, these things... It's a funny error. But these things get painted as brand new. It turns out if you do the right Google searches, you come up with all kinds of credit cards also, right? Yeah, probably.

So, like, and people were stealing credit cards before, you know, before they were even... Oh, I don't know anybody that was doing that. Yeah, no, I don't know anybody. So, like, it's this thing. It's a safety thing. Like, do we want to live... Like, what would it mean to live in a world of no risk?

Right. question that keeps popping up over and over again. I just can't get past the sort of astroturfing. If that's even the right term, we're just, it's subtle enough and repetitive enough, giving it whatever answers to children and students or results, whatever, that you can't, what's that phrase? A prison's so complete you don't realize you're in it. That's right. It's like information warfare from the Chinese Communist Party, where they're changing Wikipedia, but then they're also changing the Google search results, and then they buy a domain, and then they have a political thing, and you just go, well, this has to be the case. Look how many,

the information warfare space is so big you don't realize you're on the battlefield except now it's infinitely large because it's the entire information space that you consume or it's in your brain implant or however far along we are with AI at that point.

I'll give you a fun one. Is Taiwan a country? Well, so it depends on you ask as my Taiwanese wife at the mixer nods her head vigorously. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Or is it?

You know that any Western company that's in business with China is in business with China when they produce a map or a movie or anything else that indicates that Taiwan is not a country. Right. Because it's extremely important to the Chinese Communist Party that Taiwan would not be considered a country. Remember there was that NBA general manager

who got in trouble because he like retweeted some tweet that talked about Taiwan as a country and like kind of flip their lid and threaten to kick, you know, NBA out of China. And so like... Even a map that has it on there or not on there is a whole thing. Exactly, whether the map has, right. Exactly. There was a controversy around the map of the Barbie movie

about whether it showed the South Pacific Islands. Yeah, the South China Sea. the border in the South China Sea? Yeah, like it does it include that as part of China or is that also? And yeah, and then it's like you can't show the movie in Vietnam because it includes Vietnamese waters. It's a whole bunch of crap. And so if you ask the AI, it's Taiwan a country.

What does it say right now? Depends where you are. It probably does. Really? Because we don't want to get banned in Beijing. So when you're there, it's like Taiwan is a province of China. By the way, China's making its own AIs. I'm sure.

The Chinese AIs are, of course, you know, trained in a very specific way. I'm curious about the China stuff because it almost seems like, and we're skipping around a lot in my notes as every good conversation does. But going back and forth on whether or not it's safe to develop AI, AGI in the first place, it kind of misses the point, right? Because even if we are like, we're not doing this, it's going to be dangerous. China's not going to be like, sure, you know what, you guys are right. Let's definitely not do this and accidentally take over the world as a result. And we've already seen how the CCP essentially wants to project power onto the rest of the world and put their own worldview on the countries that it influences. And every tank, for the tankies out there,

I'll ask you what they're going to ask me. Isn't the United States going to do the same thing? Yeah. And the reason that's, why is that better? Well, whose values, right? Oh, yeah. I mean, you're preaching at the choir. Yeah, yeah.

This is the question. I mean, this is the question. I'm not going to answer. I mean, I'll answer the question for myself, which is obviously American values. But like, there is a general, that's just me. There is a general abstract question, right, afoot in the world.

There are two, you know, we're back to a bi-Bipower. In terms of, like, technology strength, we're back to a bipolar world, right? And we're back into a Cold War dynamic, like we were with Russians and, nuclear technology. And there are two AI superpowers and they're America and China and they both have visions and worldviews and they both have a determination to proliferate those visions and world views through their technology globally. And the technology is going to encode whatever those

respective societies think are the appropriate worldviews, right? That's what alignment means. And so we know what the Chinese AI is going to encode. It's going to encode Xi Jinping thought and socialism and, you know, socialism, they'll think all socialism with Chinese characteristics. It's going to encode communism and Chinese supremacy. And that's what it's going to be. And they're very clear on this. They publish this. They talk about. this, they're very open about it, like this is what they're doing. Yeah, they have a whole sort of manifesto about waging war on the West without actually using their military, and this is part of it. Right, this is part of it. And how they proliferate technology, and it's going to run out,

you know, all the other stuff that they've been doing around. They call Digital Silk Road, where they're digital Belt and road where they spread all this stuff out. And then there's America. We are, you know, we're in the West, like, we, you know, America is by far the leading AI, you know, country. And our technology. Right. And our technology is going to proliferate, you know, very broadly. And there's a big fight coming up, you know, between kind of those two worldviews. What's interesting about it is the Chinese world view is very clear because it's set top down, right? Yeah. The American worldview is like a little up in the air, right?

It's all the discussions we're having before. It's like, okay, what do we actually think? Right. And, you know, and we have a level of internal conflict on that the Chinese don't have to worry about. Yeah, the top down management, if you can call it, management is really something. And it gives authoritarian regimes a bit of an edge when it comes to a lot of this stuff, of course, because they don't have to bounce it off of other stakeholders. It's just whoever they got at the top, whatever the guy at the top thinks.

Although, and we've covered this on the show before, dictators make a ton of mistake. because they don't have to bounce anything off anybody else, and they're surrounded by Yes Men. I've seen demos of Chinese AI, at least the publicly available stuff, and it's really, some of it's quite comical. Not that our AIs don't make any mistakes, but it's really clear that one is just Google translating whatever chat GPT spat out, and it does it wrong.

It'll translate like an idiom back into English, and you go, not only is that not AI, Google Translate wouldn't have gotten that wrong. And so you do wonder if this is just like Bing or whatever sort of, free AI that's been translated into Mandarin for purposes of whatever video that is. Does the Chinese AI, what does it think about spicy foods, though? That's a good question. I would assume it's got a wide range of thought because you have

spicy, but then you have the numbing spicy, which I kind of prefer. There are a lot of philosophical questions here that we don't have time for, Mark. So far, this is interesting. I do think the medium term, I don't mean the conversation. That's, of course, interesting. I mean the race between China and the United States. I do, I am worried, of course, in the medium term, whether or not China gets quantum or AGI supremacy before us because I'm not convinced if the United States got AGI, we might prevent military AGI from other countries, but I feel like if China got AGI, they'd prevent everything. But I could be wrong.

That's just how they treat their own people. And that's only, that's kind of what I would expect. What do you think? So both countries have declared AI to be a central national priority. Thankfully. Yes. Well, yeah, yeah, good. Probably good.

Yeah. So in the U.S., the form of that is something, it's a, the, they're, they, The term they use for it is they call offset. In American national security world, the term offset basically is a technology that basically renders all previous military technology obsolete effectively. And there have been three offsets in the last 70 years. The first one was nuclear weapons. The second one was so-called maneuver warfare, sort of integration of information systems

for rapid battlefield mobility. Precision strikes, you know, things like that, precision bombs. And then the third offset is AI. Wow. So the U.S. has declared this is like the national security priority number one is to like build AI defense systems. China's done exactly the same thing. And so both of these countries have a very strong push to do that.

You know, everybody in the field, you know, agrees that this is going to be an incredible change. And we could spend hours just talking about the nature of that change. You know, whether we want to be or not, we're back in something of a Cold War dynamic where, like, if they have it and we don't, like, it's like if the Russians had the atomic bomb and we didn't, like, it's a problem. We developed the nuclear bomb first, and was it not given to the Soviets twice? They stole it. They stole it. So the reports are that the first Russian nuclear bomb was what they call wire-for-wire compatible. I think with the Nagasaki bomb.

Oh, wow. Really? So there was this famous case. There were all these, this is, you know, a lot of this is in this movie, Oppenheimer. The Manhattan Project was riddled with Soviet spies, as was the U.S. administration at that time. And they basically transferred all of the theoretical knowledge, but also they literally, there was this guy who literally transferred the wiring instructions. This is the famous case of the Rosenberg's. Yes.

Ethlon. Ethlon Julius Rosenberg were the military hand, they were the handlers. They were the NKVD handlers for their nephew who was a wiring technician at. in the Manhattan Project. I see. Wow. He handed over the wiring instructions, which let the Russians actually build the bomb. And there was this moment. And it was this very kind of fraught with peril thing because there was this moment where it looked

like we were going to have it and they weren't going to have it. And actually, a lot of the spies at the time who handed over the information, some of them were just like straight out getting paid. Some of them were just pro-Soviet because the Soviets were better. But some of them said, look, it's going to be an unstable world if one side has this and the other side doesn't have this. And in fact, John von Neumann, who was a key figure in the development of the bomb, he was actually a hawk.

He really hated the Soviet Union, and he advocated a first strike. Just nuke the Soviets first? Hard to get behind that one. He said, we have a brief window where we have it and they don't, and so we should take them out. Oh, gosh. And his famous quote on it was, if you say we should bomb them tomorrow, I say, why not today? If you think we should bomb them at 5 o'clock, I say why not 1 o'clock. And so.

Gosh, man. Right, so that was the other. So that's how tense and serious, like this exact dynamic that you mentioned is, right? And so, yeah, look, who gets this? Who gets, like, automated weapons first, like, is a really big deal. And then we are also back to Cold War Dynamics, again, which is like, look, there is Chinese espionage in the U.S. Like, they have spies.

And, you know, there is, like, let's say, there is a long, you know, history here of, you know, a long time, 50 years of, you know, it's an involuntary technology transfer. Right. Like, you know, secrets being lifted. And the Chinese have a whole system for doing that. My assumption is that they have everything that we now have. That's a safe assumption. It's the pluses and the minuses of an open system versus a closed system that you mentioned.

The American companies are so open. Like there's big American tech companies. There's no counterintelligence. There's no security measures that would prevent somebody from getting hired who's like, you know, whatever. Or even you can imagine, even imagine just an engineer working at one of these companies where they're being blackmailed by the government because their family is in another country, right? So maybe it's not even voluntary in their part. Or maybe they just hack in. Or by the way, maybe the way a lot of industrial espionage happens is you just hire the janitorial stuff.

That's interesting. Yeah. You slip the janitor supervisor, you know, 100 bucks. they, you know, stick a USB key in the right computer at three in the morning and take everything, right? And so my assumption is that, based on long history in this, is my assumption is the Chinese have basically a nightly download of everything being developed to Google and OpenAI and all these other companies. Any idea here that involves putting this stuff back in the box, to your point, has to take into account the fact that the Chinese now have it.

And won't do that if they think they are a race. Yeah, yeah, exactly. They'll harness it and use it. The nuclear physicist thing is really incredible. It's, I always wonder what those people are thinking. because after the fact, right, we have the Iron Curtain and the abuses that happen behind that and were they like, oh, I've made a terrible mistake empowering this regime that it took over half of Europe and essentially stalled the development of the people and countries that it

controlled. And when you see East Germany versus West Germany, where they, did they flee and go live there and go, what do you mean there's no food at the grocery store? I just left Minnesota where I lived in the middle of nowhere and had the more. food than we have in this entire town. What do you mean you're listening to my phone call? Like, they had to at some point realize I've just totally backed the wrong horse. So this was John von Neumann was very hot.

Like I said, very right wing, very hawkish. John von Neumann was Hungary. A lot of these guys were Hungarian. So this was when the iron curtain was being brought down. It was Hungary. Right. And so he wasn't proposing bombing the Soviet Union just like for funer because he did hate them, but not just because he hated them. He's like, look, if we don't take these guys out, they're going to rule Eastern Europe.

Exactly. They're going to rule Eastern Europe, half of Europe for the next. century for forever, right? And they're going to lead to, you know, untold misery and death and devastation, which is exactly what happened. Yeah. For the, you know, for the 50 years or whatever that followed. And so, like, the stakes are super high. And yeah, and to your point, like, it is very easy. There's a great book I recommend my friends called. It's called When Reason Goes on Holiday. Yes. I know it. It's this new book that came out. And it's basically a book on this topic of what happens when you get these superbrainiacs who work in these kind of abstract fields and they develop

political opinions. And they often develop very, like, I would say insane political opinions. I agree. My favorite example of that is Einstein was a Stalinist. Really? This has been like, you know, whitewashed, you know, completely out of like a historical record. But this guy goes through in detail all the stuff that Einstein said. Einstein became a moral authority. He spent the last like 30 years of his life primarily engaged in like political and moral philosophical like things, you know, kind of not physics. And he was a full supporter of the Stalin regime. And he was very anti-American. And he said in the late 1940s or early 1950s, America's even worse than Nazi. Germany. Interesting argument. Yeah. And like, and so he got caught up. By the way, as did Oppenheimer himself,

he got caught up in this sort of revolutionary communist fervor of that time. And you look back now and you're exactly the reaction. You look back now and you're just like, oh my God, how could they have thought this, you know, given what they could have known at the time and given what we know today. Yeah. And the answer is just, you know, look, they got caught up in the passions of the time and they became convinced that they were in a position to be able to tell people how to live and they were going to, you know, they weren't just going to be, you know, physicists. They were going to like tell the world how to order society. Yeah.

To be fair, a lot of people who are successful fall under that tribe. That is true. I don't know if you know any of those folks. Exactly. That is true. Having said that, the track, this is, so this is like an argument you get right now, and these AI debates a lot, which is like, well, these AI scientists are all saying X, shouldn't we be worried about it?

And it's like, well, if X is specific to their work, then maybe yes. But if X is a political opinion, no. Intellectual trespass. They have no intellectual authority or moral authority beyond the bounds of their technical knowledge. and the track record on that kind of expert straying out into unrelated fields is catastrophic. You see it on X all the time. Somebody here you're like, that guy's really, wait, that guy thinks that. Well, wait a minute.

Should we be listening to this professor of this on a topic that's completely different? Like, did he read an article about that yesterday? Have three whiskeys and post this? I'm confused. And that's really what it looks like from a lot of these folks. And the problem is we do look to authority, especially younger people. We look to authority and we go, oh, I just you should agree with that. is a pretty smart guy. I assume you think about that when you talk on podcast. Like, there's

somebody out there who thinks, I don't know about stay in your lane because that's a little different, but people take what you say and they're like, well, Mark Andrew Eisen is a pretty smart guy, so I better trust this. Well, of course, I'm the exception. You are the exception. Yeah. Well, that goes without saying. So having said that, having said that, I think I might see the problem there. Usually, usually what I, what my self image, my image of myself, my view of myself is Usually what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to appeal to humility. I'm trying to basically say, look, there are boundaries on the, there are boundaries on how certain we can be on these things.

There are boundaries on, like, how much control we should give governments. There are boundaries over, like, how much thought policing we should do. There are boundaries over, like, how many people should be allowed to weigh in on issues that they don't know anything about. So in my own mind, I'm usually appealing to humility, which is the other, which is sort of the other side of all this, but, you know, I'll let the audience decide. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Mark Andresen. We'll be right back.

If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support our amazing sponsors. All of the deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show are at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. It's a searchable page. All the codes should be there. You can also use our AI chatbot, coincidentally, on the website at Jordan Harbinger.com slash AI.

It's powered by chat GPT and somewhat guaranteed not to try to kill you. Jordan Harbinger.com slash AI. Thank you for supporting those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Mark Andresen. But it's very hard to know where the boundary is. And you look to other people to help you set it. And if those people are willing to trespass on that boundary, well, now you just have the same problem all over again.

In your essay on AI, and we've sort of touched on this, you allude to the idea that AI, look, it's a machine. It doesn't, quote, unquote, want anything. It's not going to magically come alive any more than a smart toaster or whatever refrigerator with a screen on it is going to come alive. thus AI isn't going to just one day decide to kill us because it's not in, and I'm paraphrasing here, it's not in the game of evolution.

It's not in the game of survival. But we've seen how intelligent beings treat beings that aren't as intelligent. I think you just need to go to the zoo, right? Like we're not trying to torment the animals. They just live in somewhat crappy conditions because that's kind of how we do things at the zoo. And when I built a house, for example, this is probably a better example.

When I built my house, people that we hired dug up the backyard. And I didn't think like, oh, man, I hope we didn't kill any voles or whatever. Oh, man, there's a lot of ants back there that I have to relocate. It just didn't even occur to me because we're thousands of times more intelligent than those species. Are we worried at all about that type of issue happening with an AGI? Yeah. So that's a big part of the AIA safety.

The AIS safety people are very worried about this. My observation, I call it, this is what's called a category error in philosophy. So my observation is just like there's a key category error there, which is like you made the decision to, like, build your house. Somebody, a human being made the decision to build the zoo. Like, and, you know, there were machines involved. Like when it came time to like dig the, dig the thing, you know, you had a digger, whatever, they came in and did it. Right. You have some piece of machinery.

But like, you decided to do that. And so, again, this is one of those things where it's like all of these questions that we think are about AI. They're actually questions about us. Right. And so if we want to use AI to create a, you know, zoo-like environment for people, right? Like somebody could do that, right? You know, panopticon, totalitarian, you know, kind of thing like we've been talking about. Like, yeah, that's something that people could decide to do.

The AI is not going to decide to do that. We're going to decide to use the AI to do that. And it won't come to that decision. It's not going to come to that decision on its own. This is the thing. It is the category error. There's no it to come to that decision. Right.

I know. It's so hard not to, what is it? Anthropomorphizing. Yeah, it's really hard. And this is where our moral, this is why I think it's such a category error. It's the evolution thing you mentioned, which I'll just expand on briefly.

So we are used to dealing with living things. Living things have come up through the process of literally eight billion years of evolution where everything has been a fight to the death every step of the way. You know, either the lion eats that night, right? Or the coyote dies or whatever the coyote or the, you know, whatever, gazelle, the gazelle, you know, escapes. It's a zero-sum game. It's a zero-sum game. And, you know, nature is red tooth and claw, and we like to pretend that it's not, but, like, it really, really is. And, of course, human beings,

we are the apex predator on planet Earth and, like, you know, we eat whatever we want. And, like, we're not particularly interested in its opinion. And some people think that's okay or not or whatever. But, like, that, you know, we are in a position. Like, we're so powerful that we're able to make the elective choice to not do that. Like, that's how powerful we are, right. And so like all of our experience of dealing with like life and human affairs and danger and risk and death and all these things are based on competition among living things. Look, we have used machines to exercise our will back to the point where the first caveman picked up the first rock and used it as a weapon. And you know, and then after that it was fire and then after that it was

spears and then after that it was gunpowder. Right. And so we use tools to augment our offensive capability. But we use the tools. We make the decisions. And all of the important decisions I believe fall into that category. It's going to be a question of how we choose to use the technology. I mean, that makes perfect sense. It's really hard to break out of, I guess it's more a philosophy thing. And maybe I'm just not good at this, but wrapping your mind around the idea that the machine, even if it's general intelligence and it's a million times stronger than or more intelligent than us, isn't going, I need to maximize my power. And the only way to do that is to eliminate other powers. It's just a very human. It's operating at such a subconscious level in my brain that I can't switch off that particular program to look at this in a different way. out a ton of practice. Right. Well, you notice what nobody ever proposes. You alluded to it a little bit with your dopamine maximizer or whatever, but nobody actually, very rarely does anybody propose

the other threat? And the other threat is it satisfies us to death. Yeah, I mean, I can see that happening. Look at like VR. It's always, I hate bringing this up. But like, whenever you look at any new tech, it's always like, porn did it and then they figured out other stuff you can do with it. And it's like, that's going to happen with AI and VR and all and other stuff. It's only a matter of time. Yes, it is. So yeah. Exactly. And again, but again, you're right, you're back, you're right back to human choice, which is like, okay, are we going to build those products? And then number two,

and everyone who run a number two, are we going to choose to use them, right? Like, I don't think anybody's going to, you know, there's no machine that's going to forcibly strap itself to our head. Now you need a safe word, though. Flugelhorn, stop destroying humanity. But we may choose, we may choose to strap it under our head, right? So I, so cynic would go a step further.

A cynic would say that all of this concern about machines is just displaced anxiety about humans. And the anxiety that we have around other people is so overwhelming because they're so out of our control that it would be a relief if the problem was the machines. I agree with you. because the problem is actually the other people. And it's a much simpler, theoretically, problem to solve if it's a machine, because you just blow

it up or stop using it. All of my issues are other people. I don't know about you. All of my issues are other people. I wish that were true for me, but I sadly know that that's not the case. Okay. What is that problem in blockchain where, like, you put a thing on the wine bottle and then it says on the blockchain if it's fresh, but the problem is you still are reliant on

this physical domain where things can be tampered with. There's a specific name for this problem. You know what I'm talking about? So I don't remember that one specifically, but in AI world, in AI safety world, the version of that argument is what's called the thermodynamic argument. And it's basically a refutation of the general AI safety argument. And it's basically this idea that is basically the AI has to live in the real world along with the rest of us. Yes. Yeah.

Right. I was giving my favorite version of this right now. So, you know, in theory, they have these new, you know, AI systems that, you know, the safety people are worried are going to, like grow up and evolve and become super powerful and destroy everything. Well, to do that, they need chips. Yeah. Good luck finding those. Good luck finding the chips. Right.

The AI is on eBay. Like, are you kidding me, $600? Exactly. So I have these fantasies. I have this fantasy of like there's the evil AI in the lab, and it's just like frustrated to an incandescent level because it can't get like Nvidia, H-100s. Right.

It's like burned out because it's just canned, but I can't, I'm not paying that. I am not paying that. Exactly. And so this is the other part, this is the other side of it. Look, all of this stuff, there's no, was an economist of this thing, there are no solutions-only trade-offs.

Any of these things have to live and exist in the real world. And like, does anything work? This is actually a question during the Cold War, which is like, do the Russian atomic bombs actually work? That's the question right now. Putin's going, I'll nuke you, and people are like, but we've seen the rest of your army. You sure those things have uranium in there? And they've been sitting, you know, in this nuclear warheads been sitting in a silo for 30 years rusting during like repeated, you know, chaos in the Russian government. Like, do those things still function?

Or was the uranium sold to Iran in 1982? Exactly. So, yeah, so to your point, I think there always is this anchoring back in the real world you want to do. And it just turns out once you're back in the real world, you have limitations and constraints that are inconvenient and tend to hold off apocalypse. It seems like that may well be the case because even if the people go, well, wait, one day, it could just, because it's recoding itself and it's becoming smarter. The AGI is becoming smarter and smarter, more intelligent. Even if that happens, which it sounds like you're not totally convinced that that would happen, it still then has to take control of everything in a very specific way. And I guess people would say, well, what it'll do is it'll play dumb for a long enough time to get it. It's tentacles around everything, but it just seems very, and maybe I'm naive, it just seems like, won't we notice that something is going on? Like, huh, that's strange.

These are all becoming controllable by a remote force, and we didn't program that. Oh, well, let's just ignore this problem. I mean, we will see these things happening slowly. And I guess AI, if smart enough, can figure out how to deceive us long enough for that to happen. But if it's reflecting human, I just, there's a lot of hoops and loops you got to do to get to dot, dot, dot, skynet kills everyone. Somebody's got to pay the power bill. Yeah, that's a good plan.

I'm going to think about that. Looking at that meter, all confused. Yeah. Right. So, yeah, that's the thing. Back to positive uses of AI. Do we think that it'll close the gap between less intelligent

and more intelligent humans? So that is starting. So there have been, I think, three studies so far in different domains. So the one that I remember is in writing, professional writing. Sure. But there's two other domains

that this has been tested in. And so the studies have been done already, and the studies are basically, you take people at varying levels of sort of scale, intelligence experience, and you give them the AI. So they had a competitive dynamic before,

and they had market prices based on their result, and then you give them the AI, and what happens is the gap closes. And so what happens is basically the less skilled capable smart people basically all of a sudden have a superpower that they didn't have before. Yeah, I like that's amazing.

It's kind of like guns and combat. Now it doesn't matter if you're Conan with a sword. Somebody who's a puny like me can just pull out the strap and scare you away. And by the way, you often hear, again, the kind of domer, I'll use drum Dumas. The kind of thing the Dumer say

as a technology leads to centralization, and so that you end up with like one, you know, one party or a few companies within control of everything, you know, and therefore a massive rise in inequality. The gun thing is a perfect example. What ends up happening, though, more often is democratization,

which is power that used to be specialized all of a sudden becomes, you know, very widespread in uniform. Yeah, like the smartphone. The smartphone. Yeah. Like once upon a time, there were only like five computers

in the world and two of them were owned by the government, and three of them were owned by the big insurance companies and like you, you know, your grandfather did not own a computer. And now like we all on computers. Right. And so that happened with the computers.

it happened with the internet. By the way, it's already happening with AI. The best AI in the world is what you can use today on GPT or Google or Microsoft. Oh, there's no like secret government version that's better? No, there's not. There's not. I don't have one and I don't know of one. Like, there isn't.

I know exactly where this work is happening. There is not. So literally you cannot, sitting here today, you cannot buy a better AI than I use. Yeah, I guess you can't get a better iPhone than I have. I mean, maybe you can get a prototype if you know somebody at Apple, but like, I don't know. probably the same thing. It's the exact same thing. Right. It's the exact same thing. And why is that? Pausing there for a second, why is that? It's because it's actually profit maximizing to sell it to

everybody. Right. Yeah. And so the invisible hand actually creates democratization. And so a lot of these technologies actually democratize out. And I think that's already happening with AI. Do we think the bottom among of folks will be elevated, which is what we see kind of now, where the gap vanishes altogether or stops existing maybe in some meaningful way? Or is it like we need chat GPT plans in our brain before the bottom rung of society is essentially the same as the top rung, because human intelligence is this tiny, tiny spectrum of a centimeter, and the AI augmentation is hundreds of feet in the air on that same scale. Therefore, if you were born a genius or you were born with barely enough brain cells to tie your shoes, you kind of are

capable of the exact same thing once the chip is in. Does it require that level, or are we kind of getting there faster than we think? Does that analogy make any sense at all? It does. It does. It does. So the question would be you could kind of say the following. You could kind of say, I want somebody who's like, basically you could say there's three degrees, you know, kind of of say they're either. And you could say intelligence or scale or experience any of these things. And so you could kind of say, you know, degree one, two and three. And, you know, three is Einstein. Two is like, you know, normal kind of, you know, sort of semi-smart person.

And three, it's somebody either not that smart or not that experienced. And you could kind of run the, and this is what these studies are trying to do is kind of say, okay, you give them kind of the superpower. And, you know, one argument is, look, the smartest people are going to be so much better. at using the tool, right? Yeah, I'm worried about that. They're going to just like run way out ahead of everybody, and that's going to be a big driver of inequality. The other argument, you can make those arguments

that these studies are already showing, which is, no, all of a sudden, people with less intelligence or scale or experience, all of a sudden have a superpower that didn't previously have. And by the way, one, it's a funny thing. One of the things that the AIs are already really good at is teaching how to use AI. I was going to say, dumb people use the iPhone all the time. I'll give you another version of this. There are more people in the world with smartphones

then there are people with either electricity or running water. Wow. That's really, that's incredible. Yes. And it turns out it's easier to, because there's a few different reasons for it, it's easier to get people's smartphones. Electricity or running water,

you need to run a lot of pipes or wires or whatever, whereas those phones, you can just kind of drop them in. And then it turns out, like, you actually don't need your own electricity to have a smartphone because you can, like, you know, pay somebody in the village

who has electricity to let charge it when you need it. The smartphone slash internet, you know, connectivity is this, you know, sort of forerunner to this. And the lesson there is, I think it basically is relevant and useful for everybody. Now, you know, does it take somebody in a rural village somewhere and all of a sudden make them, you know, capable of doing, you know, being a venture capitalist or whatever, you know, no. But like, it is something where whatever it is that they're trying to do with, you know, it's letting them spin up. And then it's, and then, of course, it's giving them a tool that their kids can use, right, to educate and progress, you know, beyond where the parents were. And so the long run, answer your question, I think it's an open question. Hopefully the answer is kind of actually, honestly, both. Like, I think we kind of want everybody to be, like, smarter and more effective. But I think we also want, like, more actual. supergenesis? Like, ideally, we don't need a billion people to become super geniuses to cure

cancer, right? We just need like one. We need like one really smart biologist with a really smart AI to cure cancer. And then everybody, you know, and then problem solved. Right. And so I think I'd like to see both of this. Sure. Well, look, ideally we can figure out a way to have more geniuses be born. But at the end of the day, if human intelligence maximizes itself out at two centimeters and we're at one right now, AI is almost like an unlimited bolt on to that, right? It's just absolutely incredible. Well, and this idea, so there's this guy Doug Uncle Bart who had this idea years ago, it's called Augmentation, right? So this is this idea of like

the man in the machine together or basically that maximizes power, right? And so exactly right. And so if you've got this like ultra-powerful thing, and it's like, you know, think about it's like a massively upgraded version of a computer, right? And it lets you do all these things with information and intelligence that you could not have done on your own.

Like that is, that to you as the user of that is like a monumental advance. Do you think the anti-AI stuff is a natural, a natural result of human sort of cult thinking, religious thinking, based around our anxieties, as you mentioned? Or do you think that it's being stoked and drummed up to scare us a little bit? Both. Both. And look, these things become industries. Right. And so like a lot of the, they hate when I say this, but like it is true. Like a lot of the people doing this are getting paid

to do it. Telling us that it's the doomers is you saying? Well, they sell books. Oh, true. So like what's the better book, right? Um, what's what sells, you know, and then they, and by the way, they're paid, you know, there's a lot of what's called astroturfing, right? So there's a lot of like paid activism. They're these rich donors that are super into this stuff and they pay people to go out and do all this stuff and write these reports. Well, it's always funny. It's always, it's always the names tiff you off because it's like, it's like the Institute for Existential Risk. Yeah, yeah. Okay, if it was, is your point on like bias? Like if it was even handed, it would be like the Institute for like Amazing Upside and Existential Risk and they'd be studying both sides of it. But instead, it's funded specifically

to propagate fear. Well, you see that with every Astro-tripping group, like citizens concerned about American health. And you're like, oh, so you just want no, you want no vaccines? I'm confused. Or like no, or you want only vaccines. I don't know, whatever. It's always one thing. Right. It's always one thing. And it's like, well, okay, so this is like the complete opposite of an institute that actually thinks about this problem. It's an institute that's already decided on the conclusion. What will consumer AI, or just AI, because there is no, not consumer AI? What is that going to look like in one year or three years? Because you said last year or two years ago, you would just be flabbergasted. It would. what it can do now, what do we write on the edge of right now that you think is going to be like, okay, this does this now? So I think in the next like one to three years, I think it's like the tools for doing the things that we already do are going to get like much, much better.

Okay. Right. And so like creating art, you know, writing things, you know, doing all the things that we already do in our day-to-day life that you already do on a computer is just going to get like better and better and better. I think over three to five years we're going to discover all these things that all of a sudden we never even knew were possible or that we never even knew that we would want to do. Any idea what those might be?

I'll give you my favorite example of this. So the entirety of entertainment up until this point has always been scripted, right? So whether you're reading a novel, watching a movie, or playing a video game, it's scripted by humans, it has a finite amount of content. And even if you play video games, like at some point, you're done with the game. You've explored everything in the game. I know where this is going. This is really cool.

Right, exactly. And so an AI-driven game, in theory never ends, right? Because if the AI is generating the content as it goes, and it's generating a response to what you're having fun doing, then all of a sudden that game goes forever, right? and becomes infinitely interesting, right, the longer you play it. Same thing with the novel that you're reading, same thing with the movie that you're watching.

Like, they just never end. And so all these, all these, so sort of scripted finite experiences become these more sort of dreamlike infinite experiences. Wow. And then I think what will happen is there will be a new creative feel. It's so funny, we can talk about this now,

because right now there's a Hollywood writer strike happening where the writers are like terrified of AI and they're, it's like a big part of the strike. But I think what's gonna happen is, the writers in five years are gonna start supervising the AI is to create these unlimited experiences. For sure. Right, where they're gonna guide the AI

to create something that's going to be much larger in scope than anything that they could have dreamed of before. And they'll look back on and they'll say, oh, my God, this is the best thing that ever happened to us. Yeah. You know, why didn't we see it at the time? And it's just because, well, it doesn't exist yet. Right. But it will.

Well, the strike might take five years at this rate. So who knows? That is, that will be really something, right? You just look at it and you go, I liked season four the best. And it just makes more season four like content. And if I liked season five, that's what I'm watching. And it's completely different. Although we'll lose that human element of being like, did you see Game of Thrones last night?

And you're like, yeah, but I didn't see any. remotely close to what you saw. Right. So I guess we'll have to figure that. Or you could have groups of people who go on the same journey. Yeah. Right. So you could have you could have enclaves.

You could have clusters, right, people who want to go on that same journey and want to do it together. Yeah. Like are you in tier 65? I'm in tier 65. What the hell was that last night? I can't believe it. Yeah. That's, man, there's a lot of really exciting stuff on the horizon.

Thank you for your time today. And thanks for sort of inventing the web browser. I feel like that both kept me out of jail and also got me really close to going to jail many times in my youth. Okay, good. Maybe that's for next time. Okay. But thank you so much.

Fantastic. Okay, those would be good stories. I appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you. If you're looking for another episode of the Jordan Harbinger show to sink your teeth into, here's a trailer for another episode that I think you might enjoy. I've heard that you actually got to Google and didn't think the company was up to much,

but it was the argument that you got into with Larry and Sergei that really won you over. You know, I heard about a search engine. Search engines don't matter too much, but fine. It's always tried to say yes. So I walked in to a building down the street, and here's Larry and Sergei in an office, and they have my bio projected on the wall. And they proceed to grill me on what I'm doing at Novell, which they thought were a terrible idea. And I remember as I left that I hadn't had that good an argument in years.

And that's the thing that started the process. And a meeting once someone asked you about the dress code at Google, and I think your response was, well, you have to wear something. That rule is still in place. Yes. You have to actually wear something here at work. They hired super capable people, and they always wanted people who did something interesting.

So if you were a salesperson, it was really good if you were also an Olympian. We hired a couple rocket scientists. Now, we weren't doing rocketry. We had a series of medical doctors who we were just impressed with, even though they weren't doing medicine. The conversations at the table were very interesting,

but there really wasn't a lot of structure. And I knew I was in the right place because the potential was enormous. And I said, well, aren't there any schedules? No, it just sort of happens. If you want to hear more from Eric Schmidt and learn what role AI will take in our lives and how ideas are fostered inside a corporate beast like Google,

check out episode 201 of the Jordan Harbinger show. Really great conversation. I have to say, he's one of the only guys you'll hear on this show that talks at 2X. No need to fast forward this. We were talking at the same speed. I mean, he might even talk faster than me. That's saying something.

I don't know which side of things I fall on. I'm still one foot in the camp that AI or AGI anyway can figure out how to outsmart us because it's a million times more intelligent than us and just simply plays dumb until it's time to make a move. It's not outside the realm of possibility, right? If I'm thinking of it, AI or AGI that's that advanced, we'll not only have thought about this, but we'll have thought about the exact way to go about this early and,

enough in the exact way to play dumb in the meantime. I don't know if it's something that we could detect. I mean, a lot of people are confident about our ability to do that. The thermodynamic argument, as Mark mentions, I hope that he's right. I would like to survive a few more generations here and, you know, live in the promised utopia that AGI may actually bring. As far as warfare, we didn't really get to examples on this. AI, in Mark's opinion, will make warfare less of a calamity. And you might say, how is that? We're going to have super brains fighting. Well, you're going to have automated defense systems, which will make attacks seem much more costly

and therefore deter those attacks on most countries, most places. Humans make bad decisions under pressure as well, pressure, stress, and fatigue for that matter. AI will eliminate some of those bad decisions in the battlefield, thus saving lives. Now, how this plays out is an entire podcast. I'd love to do a podcast just about AI and warfare. If you all know an expert on this subject

and not just a random sci-fi writer, I am all about it. I do know that there is quite a bit of chatter about how evil AI can sound. There's evil AI poetry. Shout out to Mike Peska on The Gist for covering this as well. He does a couple of episodes where they sort of jailbreak the AI, and it says some pretty disturbing stuff. So again, not totally convinced that that's not just holding a mirror up to us, but I'm also not totally convinced that it doesn't secretly want to kill us.

I really don't know. I'm not going to form a belief around this and decide until the time comes. By then, who knows, I might just be another victim of Skynet or whatever we're calling it. You know, I'm actually less concerned that AI will kill us all, at least in the short term, and more concerned about rapid unemployment causing the so-called losers in that equation. And I'm not using the term losers as you might in middle school. I mean, the people who are rapidly made redundant, who are rapidly made obsolete. This could be lawyers, doctors.

Retraining doesn't necessarily work a lot of the time, and it certainly doesn't work when you're talking about professionals who go from being really useful in an advanced field like engineering or law or medicine, you're not going to retrain that person that easily. And then doing that, not only does that take a lot of time if it's even possible at all, it doesn't scale to tens of millions of people all at once. Even thinking about how to do that is essentially a fool's errand. I really did love what he said about bespoke AI TV shows and video games, although I'm worried about the flip side of that, which is if you're creating bespoke AI TV shows

and video games for people based on their preferences, what about bespoke disinformation based on our biases and our vulnerabilities and our other preferences? You think QAnon stuff is weird. Wait until they can worm that in by talking to you in a way that actually makes sense to you. So maybe you don't think that there's a secret pedophile ring in a basement somewhere beneath a pizza parlor,

but they give you something that's your particular brand of crazy, and everybody is getting that. everybody is on that train being led by the nose because the AI is generating propaganda that fits us perfectly because it knows us better than we know ourselves. That's a little bit terrifying. You know, it has occurred to me. Maybe I never actually spoke with Mark Andreessen, but actually this was the first iteration of the AI playing the long game to convince me and you and everybody else that everything is okay. Checkmate, humanity. More on this plus AI and free speech, of those arguments, those are on the Sam Harris podcast, also with Mark Andresen. I'll link to that in the show

notes, really good stuff from Sam, unless you hate Sam Harris, in which case, forget I said anything. With AI regulation, I understand the need for it in some ways, of course. But I do worry about people who don't know the difference between Google as a search engine, chat GPT, and their own freaking AOL email. And I am barely exaggerating here, because when Mark Zuckerberg was talking to Congress a few years ago about Cambridge Analytica and whatever else with Facebook. This was like a bunch of people asking their grandkids to figure out why the printer doesn't work when it wasn't on or plugged in. And these are the people that are in charge of policy here.

These people are just totally unqualified to actually think about and create the type of regulation that we might need for something like this. And it's a little bit terrifying. They're almost certainly going to get it's wrong, at least at first. and by then it might be too late. Now, as far as business is concerned, if chat GPT can make people more productive, I assume that's even more so for coders

or teams of coders and people working on online cloud applications, things like that. It seems like we might actually be able to build things now with two or three people that would normally require potentially dozens of people. This is great for big companies, of course, right? But it's even better for innovation and startups. We may go back to the age of Google

being started in a garage because the leverage a few people have with AI, it might be similar or greater than it was back in the day where those who knew how to use computers, well, those are the ones of the massive advantage. I'm really excited about this. I think it's going to be good for the ecosystem and the economy. And I do see that there's a ton of upside to AI, both inside and outside of economic benefits.

And perhaps that lends itself to some motivated reasoning from people like Mark. It's hard to imagine that all the motivation here would only be based on this, however. Is he really going to come on my show and a bunch of other shows and write essays about this because he wants to further some of the investments that Andresen Horowitz has? That's a little bit of his, it's a little bit too cynical even for me. And by the way, this bringing up the bottom rung of society thing, I know that sounds kind of

awful, but let's admit it, we all know some really dense and stupid people who can use AI to, I don't know, learn how to get by in life without screwing everything up. We do know that more intelligent people are less violent. They live longer. They build better functioning societies. They enjoy better outcomes in pretty much every area that we can measure. So bringing up the bottom several tiers of humanity, and I'll look, I'll include myself in that. Why not?

Who am I? This will absolutely change the world for the better, at least in the short term, until this thing decides that the best cure is to get rid of humans altogether, which, according to Mark, isn't even necessarily going to happen. All things Mark Andreessen will be in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com, or just ask the AI chatbot also on the website, transcripts in the show notes. I realize the irony of me telling you

to just put more things into the chat bot. Maybe you don't want to know who you are. Advertisers, deals, discounts, and ways to support the show, all at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. We've also got our newsletter, and every week the team and I dig into an older episode of the show.

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This show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogartie, Millio Campo, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The feed for this show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting, the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who's interested in AI, interested in future technology, definitely share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn, and we'll see you next time. This episode is sponsored in part by Something You Should Know podcast.

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