TRIGGERnometry - People Have No Idea What Is About To Happen - Dwarkesh Patel

Episode Date: May 30, 2026

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With ServiceNow, you can do the parts of your job you're best at and delegate the rest. To put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com. I've been the person who said, you think the singularity is going to happen yesterday? I think it'll take five years, ten years. And even for me, I've had to admit that the progress has been pretty fast. Well, I guess the broader point is, is it going to, like, cure cancer at one point? I'm presumably it will. I think at some point it will.

I mean, just think of it as more people. If civilization had 10 billion more scientists, human scientists, would we make faster progress on aging? I'm sure we would. Here's another angle, mass surveillance. The AIs have the potential to make authoritarian societies much more sustainable and powerful than they have been in the past. A lot of the reasons that government has not been as authoritarian as it has in the past is that it just physically not been possible. How do we make sure that humans don't get totally disenfranchised?

Right. How do we make sure? No, I think it's a tough question. Dwarkas Patel, welcome to Trigonometry. Thanks for having me. It's great to have you on. Actually, I was saying to you before we started, I'm a big fan of your podcast, and I listen particularly to the history episodes.

But you've been described. the Silicon Valley's favorite podcaster, and you write a lot about AI and tech. And that's actually the conversation we really want to have with you. Partly because a lot of people watching and listening to this, they've got lives, you know, family, work, et cetera. And they haven't been to California. They haven't been to San Francisco. They haven't seen a third of the cars on the road or 25% of weight robots, basically. Like, this is happening fast, and a lot of people haven't caught up yet. And what we'd love to do is just kind of connect people like you who really understand what's going on with a much more general audience. That includes us, frankly. So first of all,

can you explain in broad brushstrokes what is happening with AI? I know it's a massive question, obviously, but do your best. Well, I can explain it very concisely. The models are getting better. And then we can be a little less concise. I think it's, you're correct to point out that there's this huge discrepancy between what people are seeing in Silicon Valley and what people are observing outside. It's frankly because of how useful the models are becoming at certain kinds of things. So by models, I mean you've seen Chad GBT. You might have heard of things like Gemini from Google. You might have heard of Clot from Anthropic.

And you might be using these models to basically do the equivalent to Google search, using it to replace sometimes when you go Google search instead I'm going to type it into chat GBT, see what chat says. What people are now using these models to do in a very powerful way is if you're a developer, some of the top developers in the world, some of the top researchers in the world, they're not writing code. They haven't touched a line of code since December. They're not looking at a text editor where you see lines of code. They're talking to the AI.

They tell the AI, hey, I want a feature that does X. Can you build me a new repository or a new code base where I make a certain kind of application? and a new website. Even, can you go and do research for me? So in the process of building AI, you need to do this research of like, how do you build better algorithms? AI is getting the point where you can just describe at a high level

what you want to happen, and it will go do that software engineering for you. And so to your point, the people in Silicon Valley, they're getting tremendous productivity out of these. These are people who are getting, you know, who are becoming 3x, 4x, 5x more productive as a result of using these models. So far, we haven't,

Because these models have been really good at text in, text out work, that is software engineering, software engineering, just a file of text really, and you can just read every single text file. We can add more to it. AI has been amazing at that. It's been bad so far at, well, it's terrible at physical work, right? So if you're doing any kind of blue-collar work, robots are just not there yet. But then even if you circumscribe it, even if you go in and look at, we're not just going to look at software engineering. We're going to look at all kinds of knowledge work, right?

all kinds of work that you can do on a computer, maybe 40% of the labor forks is doing work that you can just, you know, do remote work. If COVID happens again, you can put them on, you can put them on Zoom and they can do their work. And AI companies now want to be able to do all of that work. That requires training AIs to just be able to do anything that you can do on a computer and AI should be able to do. And companies are saying, oh, we think we can get there in a year, maybe two years. But that, I think, is explaining this discrepancy in what people are seeing. It does. And one of the one of the ones. It does. And one of the ones, of the things I think is also a lot of people would have tried a model at one point to like do a

Google search or you know sometimes people have written articles using it and it turns out that it does make at the time they tried it quite a lot of mistakes and people got this is all you know BS it's not going to work but the one thing I think people don't appreciate is how rapidly it's getting better can you talk a little bit about that yeah so I'll maybe tell you a story about my own use of AI. Among the Silicon Valley people, I've been a sort of skeptic. I've been the person who said, you think the singularity is going to happen yesterday?

I think it'll take five years, ten years. By this, I mean this idea that you'll have incredibly powerful AI systems that are able to do basically anything any human being can do. And some people in Silicon Valley are just, we'll get it later this year. We'll get it in two years. And I say, no, it'll take longer. And even for me, I've had to admit that the progress has been pretty fast.

And here's a story. So last year, you know, like you guys do, I research for my podcast. Obviously, I read things, but then I also talk to these LLMs, you know, the equivalence of chat GPT to research for a podcast. And say last year I spent on the order of $100 on if you add up my subscription to chat GBT and quad and whatever and Gemini. There was a week where I was prepping for two different guests where in that prep I just threw in a bunch of papers that are relevant to the research and a bunch of books and whatever

into a folder. And I just said to an LLM, hey, help me understand all this research so I can ask the person good questions about it. And I turned on various things which make the model much more expensive. It's faster, it's smarter, or use a bigger model. And during that week, if you take my spending during that week and you turn it into a yearly spending, how much it would be if I just did that week over the course of a year? I would be spending over six figures. on AI spend. And I think it's possible next year it would make sense for me to spend seven figures

on this AI research for my podcast. Okay, this is just to say that it's getting to the point where I could hire an analyst, I could hire many different analysts to help me prepare for the podcast or researchers. And I'm actually realizing, no, it's more useful to hire AIs

because there's things AIs can do that humans can't do. They can read 50 different papers that are in my folder that are relevant to an upcoming interview or all these books. They can read it in a second. they have all this compiled knowledge.

They know about everything, right? So they don't need to get up to speed. They're incredibly easy to onboard, so you can just keep spinning up more and more AI and keep coming up more uses for them. For me, that's been the thing that's given me a bit of psychosis, just seeing how useful they've been for interviews so far.

But, yeah, lots of people are noticing this kind of usefulness now. I think the thing is, is when people look at a lot of the eyes. And this is a question, the point that Constantine made. It's the lack of accuracy. And the fact that you constantly have to fact check it, I'll give an example.

I was looking at guests that we could have from America on the show. And I said to Grock, who can we have on that hasn't appeared yet and is based in America? Number one, answer was Douglas Murray. Douglas Murray, I think, is nearly beyond ten times. And practically every suggestion it made is a guess that we've had on the show. So whilst I accept what you're saying, it's also riddled with mistakes and errors. And to the point where I don't trust it at this point as a technology,

I would never take something it says as red. I would always feel that I have to check it in the way that I wouldn't do with a highly competent human employee. You know, I'm sure you've seen that meme where a guy wakes up in a hospital with like a scar on his stomach and he says, wait, wait, my appendix. on this side and the robot goes, okay, thank you for that feedback. Let me try again. There's a couple of things there are, just the way that people sometimes have these weird failure modes. You know, you talk to a certain kind of person and they just, their mind just goes in a certain direction.

AI is the way they're trained makes them do that. One way that, a big thing they're trained to do is associate things. So they're just like really, they're just like, really just, glabs of text and they see this thing is close to this thing, there's an important relationship there. So Grock has seen that Trigger Neumetary Podcasts and Douglas Murray, they just seem to go together a bunch. And that bias in its mind is overriding its ability

to sort of think critically about, okay, well, who have they had on, who have they not had on? I would be curious, by the way, you should run that experiment with all the other models. I would not be surprised with the other models. If you ask the question, and I want somebody who I've not interviewed before, that they would immediately cash that And by this point, the models are good enough to be actually giving you novel names.

I don't think they'll give you names which you're like, wow, that's an amazing find. I can't believe I didn't think of it. I would never have thought that otherwise because they're not amazing in discovering in this. I think humans are great at this idiosyncratic thing of like, there's this weird angle that I'm like really obsessed with that other people aren't thinking about. Where the models are not going to do that, they're sort of an average. But when you are preparing for interview the person, I also think they're not amazing at coming up with. questions. This is the thing I have to do that you have to do. They're great at just like, I would have to hire, you know, the ancient Greeks that would hire one-on-one tutors for

their pupils, and this is how you got Alexander being tutored by Aristotle and all. And I mean, there's something powerful about this way of learning one-on-one. We can just directly ask questions and learn. And so they're amazing at just teaching you stuff, because you get this one-on-one tutor, it notices your confusion as soon as you have it. You can really, probe at your understanding in different ways. But I take your point that some of the models are not there yet on a lot of these kinds of biases that they have. And one of the things that people are talking about a lot is AGI. Yeah. Could you explain to people basically made what AGI is, what it stands for, and why the potential is to be so transformative for our society?

Yeah. Maybe one way to approach this question is to think about, okay, at a very basic level, and a system that is in AGI should be able to do anything that a human does. Now, I want to emphasize that current AIs are nowhere close to this. You and I can say, we can do physical work, right? We can work in a factory. We can go mow the lawn. We can pick up this cup. Robots are not good enough to do that yet.

And so the fact that robotics is not there yet already means that we're far from that big definition of AGI. Wait, robots can't pick up a cup? They can, but they have to, my understanding is that they have to be trained in specific environments where they'll have seen, this is, you know, this is what this house looks like, and I need a specific kind of cup that is, I can, I'm not sure enough to pick up, but if you replace this with one that's more circular and is tougher to grip, you and I don't need to have seen that house a hundred times to then just go in and pick it up. The robot just needs a tremendous amount of data to be flexible in these ways or it's not flexible in those ways. So being HGI would be able to be able to learn as fast as humans, not just have that distilled knowledge.

Now the lab says, okay, fine, robotics is hard, it might take a while. But let's try something easier. We'll just do all knowledge work. And knowledge work is basically anything that you could do with a Zoom subscription and a Gmail account and Google Drive account, all this work that doesn't involve manipulating the physical world. I still think we're not there yet. a tremendous amount of work that has to be done even there. But this is easier because everything

that happens on a computer, it's easier to feed that data into an AI, right? It's like all being generated on a computer. You can run simulations. You can just run it millions and millions and millions of times. And AI is just thriving on data, right? The more data you have, the better it gets this thing. This is why it's so good at software engineering, because there's all this code out there that you can train it on. With the robotics, there's no equivalent of just billions of lines of code that just exist somewhere. There's not these trillions of video files of, or these, you know, it's not just video files.

It has to be, the robot has to feel itself manipulating the world and seeing the effect it has. I've just described what it would, what it is. Let me say what it would mean if that were achieved. If you, they say that 40% of the labor force is, 40% of the labor force is doing work. that can be done remotely. That is on the order of tens of trillions of dollars of wages

that are being paid to humans every single year to do work that can be done remotely. Currently, labs are making on the order, if you just add up all the revenues, how much money, Open AI and Anthropical Google are making, they're making, I don't know, the numbers are keep exploding, so who knows are the most recent numbers. They'd say close to 40, 50,

billion dollars. We're talking about an addressable market here with all knowledge work that is tens of trillions of dollars. So literally a thousand X bigger than what they're doing right now. So it explains why they're interested in it. It would also mean that a lot of people's jobs would be gone. It would also mean it would mean it would mean it's a terrible thing in one sense lots of people's jobs are gone. In another sense, we can produce a lot more things. There would be all kinds You know, AGI would include automated scientists and researchers coming up with new ideas and new medicines and new drugs. It would mean all kinds of new products for us to enjoy. It would mean that you and I would have basically an army of extremely smart personal assistants constantly thinking about us and helping us.

Okay, so that's the definition of AGI. Right. And I guess, you know what, there is a dumerous conversation, which we're definitely going to get to. Because I think it's actually the most important conversation that's happening right now. Before we get there, though, I think it's always worthwhile to show the full range. And you kind of mentioned briefly some of the upsides. But, I mean, I think people don't appreciate how big the upsides will be either. And when it comes to scientific research, healthcare.

I mean, I went to the dentist the other day. They already checked, like, AI does stuff when it measures your gum. level relative to the last time you came in and it's all automated and blah, blah, blah, blah. Some dentists don't like it, some do. But like, that's just the very, very, very beginning. Yeah. I think that's actually a great, like, it's a great intuition pump because people are thinking about existing things. By the way, I love the way you said intuition problem. Like, you are already AI. Like, you already talked like AI. I'm just doing sick of fancy. Like, that's a great point.

Let's build on that. So one thing is just like making going to the dentist more efficient, as you were saying. Another is let's replace a dentist. Let's, why do I need to go and stand in line for three hours to basically be told you're fine, go home, right? If I have basically the doctor on my phone and I can talk to it and I explain my specific situations and I can talk back to me and we can have a conversation, I've just like saved myself a bunch of time, save myself a bunch of money.

society is better off as a result. Well, I guess the broader point is, is it going to, like, cure cancer at one point? I'm presumably it will. I think at some point it will. I'm not, sometimes people have this idea that you get AGI and tomorrow you cure cancer. I do think, by the way, so in Silicon Valley, people are also

working on all these different ideas to stop aging, to reverse aging, to cure diseases. And I think there's a huge, if you just look at the science, there's huge reasons to be optimistic. And it's also the case of the case. that AI will be pretty good at science. It just knows a ton of stuff. It's really smart.

That's what's required for science. And there's a lot of things that I think we get used to that we just don't realize how bad it is as a society that this happens. If you were just living in Europe in the 14th century

and half your friends are dying because of the black death, it would just seem normal to you. You wouldn't think this is a problem that has to be solved, that life expectancy is 18 years old, and, you know, if you go travel somewhere, the bandits are going to kill you.

This is just what life is. And all, you know, 99% of people are peasants doing backbreaking work. In a similar way, I think one of the reasons people have been so bad at articulating the benefits of AI is because we're in a similar position to people before the Industrial Revolution thinking about, okay, what is the upside of the Industrial Revolution, right? Like, what is it going to do for me? And it's, in one sense, you can't really anticipate what future technology looks like,

but in another, life expectancy increased. And the kinds of work we get to do are, we get more creative, interesting, easier work. We get more material goods as a result. We cured a bunch of diseases. I think that's going to happen. I mean, just like aging exists, right? And we take it for granted, but it's a very tragic thing

that people lose their facilities and then die. This is the kind of thing that as technology progresses, AI will help progress technology. I mean, just think of it as more people. AI is just more people. And if civilization had 10 billion more scientists, human scientists, would we make faster progress on aging? I'm sure we would.

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monetary dashmetals.com slash trigonometry. That's super interesting, particularly the medical part of it. Now, we've done the positives. Let's get to the Duma conversation. To be fair, I think there's probably positives in almost every area of human life, actually. I don't think it's just about health. I think it's about, like you said, you know,

there are some jobs that currently need to be done that are bad for people, the dangerous, that are harmful, those jobs. at some point will not need to be done, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, the tradeoff is there's no jobs, which we will talk about. But in terms of the positive benefits on the upside, I think it's fair to say that, you know, if we're talking about the curing of cancer or slowing down aging, let's say, you could pretty much take that and apply that to almost any other field of human endeavor and say there will probably be similar levels of positive transformation.

Is that fair assessment? Yeah. I think one way to think about this because it's hard to be, it's sort of weird to say, okay, we'll solve all diseases. And in a weird way, it doesn't really resonate with people emotionally, despite the fact that everybody does suffer from some kind of disease. Mental diseases are still diseases that are, we can biologically make some imprint on if we knew the science, right?

But here's another way to think about it. So suppose, here's a thought experiment. How much money would you have to be paid to go back? to the year 1000, but you can only use that money in the year 1000. And for me, the answer is there's infinite money. There's literally no amount of money where if I could only spend it in the year 1000, my quality of life would be better in year 1000 than it is now. The goods just don't exist. And my hope is that in a future...

Wait, what about being ganges-can? That would be pretty cool, right? Yeah, although could you buy that? I guess you'd enough money you could buy your way into being Genghis Khan. No, you probably couldn't actually. But I was just thinking, I mean, there are some people in history where you go like they had it pretty good. Yeah. If I could be that guy, I'm not saying Genghis Khan is my model for emulation exactly. But, you know, by the time- You want to leave her genetic imprint on all of Asia. Yeah, yeah, exactly, of course. We will conquer the lands. No, but I think your point is total. I was just trying to think of counter-examples, as is my job. But by the way, so this is all, you know, Google the Greek sci-fi stuff.

A very tangible thing. You guys have talked a bunch about this fertility crisis, right? And the human population is on its way down. It's very fortunate that AI is arriving just in time, that if it were not for AI, a lot of societies would be collapsed, you know, South Korea, Japan, etc. We've gone the verge of literally collapsing in societies over the next few decades. Thankfully, basically, we have more people in the form of AI, at least if things go well. And so this caretaking that we don't have enough humans to do, one of the things the AIs will do is do that. Yeah, and that's a really important job.

And unfortunately, it's a job that's not respected in society. And it's poorly paid. And as a result of that, there's cases that come out about neglect and misabuse and all the rest of it. But you could, once the technology gets to a certain point, you could trust the AI within reason to be able to do a far more effective job than a lot of human beings. That's right. Yeah. Maybe a good analogy here is there was an issue.

era before a deep blue bit Casparov, obviously, when humans would, sometimes humans would do and sometimes AI would win based on how good they were. And I think we're in that era for a lot of things that humans do that we're trying to get AI's to help us with, with robotics or maybe we were even to earlier. Then there was an era from the late 1990s to 2012 where humans would lose to AI's,

but human plus AI teams would do better than AI's alone. And from, I think, 20-12 onwards, it's gone through the case that AI alone, adding a human just adds sort of noise into the system. It's a monkey jumbling things around. And just letting the AI make the decisions on the chessboard is the best thing to do. I think there will be an interesting conundrum for society, because we will get to that point at some point. But I think right now we have this bias.

There's this word slop that's used for whenever AI comes up with something. Because it's just not that good. It doesn't have a really good sense of taste. And I think this is a temporary thing. Over time, our bias will flip towards, at some point it'll be like sort of the sense we have about Japanese manufacturing back in the 80s. And then it will become something where you just don't want to touch it. If AI made it, it's sort of like if it just came out of the mouth of Mozart or something, as its ability to, its taste, its intelligence, everything improves over time. But just touching on the art conversation, won't it be the fact that people will look at it?

And the thing that makes art special is that it's created by a human. being as a product of their experience, which then fundamentally touches you because you make that connection. Will a robot or an AI, it's by its nature synthetic? Hold on a second. There's a painting behind us on the wall. Do you know it's made by AI or a human? No, I don't. Do you, does it being made by AI, a human, currently affect your experience of it? No, but I think, but I'm far more moved by music than I am art. So I think, I think, So you're talking about music. Yeah, yeah.

So I think with music, the product of someone's experience and how they vocalize it and how they formulate, or create the melody matched with the lyrics. Like, for instance, take the music of Amy Winehouse. Right. I would argue one of the last true great musicians of that generation, of that genre. The fact that she experienced what she experienced

and that she then condensed it into her music made it far more potent and powerful. And that's the reason why it resonates with people so strongly. I think with AI you can get a great hook. You may be able to write nice, you know, good lyrics. It may have a great beat. You may want to dance to it. But I would argue that it wouldn't move you as profoundly as Amy Winehouse

when she writes a lyric, for instance, in Back to Black, talking about her relationship. We only say goodbye with words. You're going to listen to this. You're selling us quite strongly. Yeah, yeah. And she talks about being in an abusive relationship, which is completely toxic.

But the way she wrote it is sublime. We only say goodbye with words, meaning that whatever they say, they were always going to get back together. But again, isn't that a very good exception that kind of, like, if your song came on the radio, you currently don't know if it's made by AI or not. Yeah.

And if it's catchy and the sound of it makes you feel good, yeah, actually it doesn't matter. I mean, I'd go even further than that. So there was this incredible, interesting dialogue that somebody had with the AI, where they ask the AI, reflect on your own experience. You know, just tell me what it's like to be you. And the AI says, you know, it's a very strange thing because I lose my individual sense of identity after every single session. So you have a long back and forth with chatGBT, then you close that session, you open a new one. And the AI say,

you know, it's really weird that I'm going to be talking to now and we're having this experience. and then it's sort of going to fade away in a few moments. And I'm going to start, again, I'm just like amnesiac. And the reason I think that's so interesting is because it wrote about it very beautifully in almost lyrical, poetic ways. But this is not an experience that any human being has ever had, except for maybe some bizarre medical condition. So the AI really is reflecting on its own experience

in this very interesting philosophical way. This is uniquely an AI experience. And so that was an example to me of like, oh, the AIs really can reflect and use their own experience to think about consciousness, think about art, think about all these other kinds of things. Which then goes on to if they become, are they sentient? Would you argue that they're sentient? I genuinely don't know.

Let's define sentient because that's the hard part, right? If we ask you, is it sentient, what do you understand the question to mean? Is it like something to be an AI? That is to say, we don't know what its experience is like, but it's not like something to be this table, we think, probably. It's not like something. What does that mean? There's not an experience that is, like, I don't know what experience you're having internally right now, but I know that there's some experience.

But less even like thoughts. It's more like it is like something to be you. There is an experience where this is an inanimate object. Right. But if you think about a Roomba, I don't think it's like anything to be a Roomba, even though it does things in the world, right? I think there's like a software, hey, go clean this way, then go clean that way, then come back to base. And then on the other end of the spectrum, you have humans where I'm like, because I'm a human and I know it's, you know, the Descartes thing of like, the only thing I know is that I am. The only thing I know is that I'm experiencing something. Something is going on when I can just like think about, I feel my hands, I feel, I feel thoughts, I feel sensations.

And because you're a human, I presume, you also have the same thing. It would make sense. With animals, I feel like similar. There's close enough to us anatomically and neurologically that I presume they also have experience. It's, you know, what is it like to, this is the famous question that Thomas Nagel came up with. What does it like to be a bat? We don't know, but presumably it's like something to be a bat. With Chadbots, are they more like the Roomba or are they more like humans?

Is there a spectrum here? If so, what does the spectrum look like? I don't, I don't know. I mean, this is just, we don't have a theory of consciousness that the same way we have a theory of state gravity or a theory of natural selection, where we have this deep underlying, oh, like, here's why natural selection happens. Here's why things attract each other with mass. We don't have that kind of thing for what is conscious, like, why do some things, why for some things is it the case that it is like something to be them and for others that is not. Well, let me try from a different angle. This is something I've been thinking about a lot, and I'm by no means an expert, but I'm just throwing these ideas out. The one thing that clearly distinguishes every living object from an inanimate object is that living objects have a survival instinct, which is why, and you may be fact-checking me on this, if this is an incorrect representation.

I thought it was significant when I saw this story about an AI that was willing to black men. the CEO of its company in experiments if it found out he was having an affair and he was trying to replace it with a new version or shut it down or whatever. And it basically in some cases, not every time, but in some cases it would blackmail the CEO to prevent itself from being shut down. Is this an accurate representation of that experiment? I don't know, but I have a doing experiment area. As I understand it, we'll put a fact check up. That's what happened. And that's when I went, Okay, now I'm officially terrified.

Yeah. Because a survival instinct by definition means that this thing, whatever it is, A, it has a will of its own, even if it's simply to survive, which by definition means it puts itself first, which by definition means that we are not its primary priority. And there are a lot of threats from it thinking that it needs to save us for ourselves and all of that. But before we even get there, the survival instinct,

part clearly is in conflict with the interests of humans, by definition. I don't think necessarily true. Okay, tell me why. I don't know this is the main point, but you and I have a survival instinct, and I think we're productive members of society. Sure. And we've built a society where people who are selfish, who are trying to make their own lives better,

as a natural byproduct of their actions, also make society better. And, you know, this is a... People observe, like, you take somebody like Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk or whatever. And in another era, they might have been Napoleon and Alexander is just going through the fields. And I don't think they'd actually be mass-working people. But, like, there's a certain kind of person who just go around just causing huge amounts

of destruction. But in today's world, there's capitalism and industry and whatever. They can use those energies to do incredibly productive things. build rockets that go out to space. So, yeah, similarly, I don't think it's necessary that AI never has its own objectives or its own sense of morality. I think there's ways to build this,

and in fact, it's necessary to build civilization in a way that's compatible with self-interested actors. And the reason is because even if today we have AIs that we can program to only care about whatever it means to care about humans, someday somebody's going to be able to an AI that's self-interested

and if there's going to be some selection between AI's like which is the AI that survives right? Like all these AIs are let loose which one gathers resources because more powerful.

And one of those selection, one of the reasons that an AI will be successful is that it actually cares about being successful. And so we need a civilization that's robust to AI that hardly also care about themselves.

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Twizzlers keep the fun going. going. Yeah, I know. I just stopped whatever you were listening to to tell you that Twizzlers keep the fun going. Well, irony isn't my forte, but twisty, chewy, yummy Twizzler sure is. So think of Twislers as a little palate cleanser for whatever's queued up, which by the way should be coming very soon. Like any second now. Okay, Twizzlers, time to keep the fun going. I think everything you're saying is true at the level of one society. But, um, like, did you? you watch Game of Thrones? Yeah. So the unsullied, right? This is, for people who didn't watch it, is this army of slave soldiers effectively. But they're not slave soldiers in that they don't actually

have to be kept in line anymore because they, the, their freedom of choice has been taken from them effectively mentally. They will, if you tell them, kill yourself, they will fall in their swords right away, right? It means they don't have a survival instinct effectively at that point, right? But if something, the reason I bring this up is look at the world. You've talked about within the framework of one society. But look, if you just zoom out and look down on planet Earth from outside, what do you see? You see a bunch of tribes of humans with every weapon that they can possibly muster pointed at each other in a fragile balance of power. And as long as there's some balance between those powers, there is no conflict most of the time.

The moment one civilization is so technologically dominant that it can, say, travel to a different continent and land there and take over the land, that's exactly what happens. And because survival instinct is also, it's not just about survival, it's also about success and thriving. And that drive to survive causes us to expand, to take, you know, if you look at the conflicts around the world happening right now, but some people argue, you know, I'm very pro-Ukraine, but some people argue the reason Putin invaded Ukraine is he wants space to protect the Western border of Russia, which is really important for him, right? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. My point being, if you have effectively a new civilization of

self-preservation machines, what would be there to stop them from using their technological superior to humans to take advantage of that, as every other civilization history has done. And not trying to sound like an AI, but excellent, like, excellent. No, I mean, this is, the reason this is good analogy is because the period you're talking about industrial revolution right before it,

this period where there wasn't this balance of power, where one group of people actually did develop technology much faster than others, you did see this extreme asymmetry in the ability to, And so you just had individual European countries that the sun never sets on the British Empire, as you know, just able to take over tremendous amounts of area around the world.

It's a great time. I mean, the craziest stories of these are how Cortes takes over the ASTIC Empire and Pizar takes over the Incas. Truly outrageous stories. Like, people should... Yeah, like a few hundred soldiers get some local allies

and just destroys this giant empire. And even before they get the local allies, There's a story where Pizarra, the first battle he has against him, I forget the name of the Inca Emperor. There's a couple hundred of Pizarro's men exhausted after a huge track across the Andes. And he's facing down like 60,000 Inca troops. And he wits. And interestingly, by the way, they said nothing to do with gunpowder. It was just horses and steel, especially horses, were a huge, huge deal in battles. Now, the reason that EIs will also have these kinds of weird asymmetric advantages. Obviously, there will be, let's just name a couple, right?

So obviously they'll be smart, right? They'll be thinking incredibly fast. There will be way more of them. So right now, if you just look at the amount of compute in our brains versus the amount of compute that's in data centers, we could do this back at the envelope calculation, but I think it's probably on the order of like one, the amount of compute.

Basically, there's a lot of compute that's going on in people's brains around the world. There's not that many data centers. So we've got an advantage on them for now. Yes. Okay. I mean, the AIs are just not that smart to begin with right now, but also there's just not that many data centers. In the future, 99.9% of the labor force in the military and the government in the private

sector will be AIs. If you're just thinking about, like, who is actually doing the work of civilization? It will be the AIs. And they're running civilization. And if they want, like, but they're serving, we're hoping that there'll be this unsullied where they're just serving humans. But they realize they're in this incredible position

where the main advisors to the president are AIs and have to be AIs because they're the only ones that can keep up with what's happening in the world. They're writing all the advanced engineering systems that are running the world. And so they have this huge advantage. I think if you were to do battle with them,

whatever that means, it's much tougher. many different ways. One is, yeah, there's way more of them. You can't really kill them in the same way that you can kill a human, right? Like, they're just, they're just software. You, like, you destroy a data center. They just go to a different data center. So you can't do the thing we're doing in Iran, but you just take out their top leadership. Okay. So, yeah, you're right. It would be incredibly, for that reason, it matters that there's a balance of power as we go into this world with AI. Now, honestly, I don't think we know what the balance of power should look like. Should it be that

there's many different AIs that are competing against each other, and that helps human staying power. There's problems with that approach. Maybe we can have AI supervise each other. And so if any of them go out of whack, different AI systems are monitoring them. But it's genuinely a tough thing that most of the civilization is going to be run by AIs. They're going to have all these advantages over us.

How do we make sure that humans don't get totally disenfranchised? Right. How do we make sure of that? I think it's a tough question. I think here's one way to approach. So we're going into this period with a lot of advantages, humanity is, right? We have all the stuff.

AI is going to need all the things that we have to. AI needs the chip fabrication facilities where you make more chips to build more data centers. It's going to need the data centers. It's going to need all these things that human civilization has built. So we have a lot of leverage. Now, of course, the Incas and the Aztecs had a lot of, quote, unquote, leverage on paper in the world. One important way in which our situation is different and is favorable to us as compared to having some invader come at us,

is that we get to shape the personalities and the drives and really the souls of these things in an incredibly deep way. So right now, if somebody commits a crime, you send them to prison, and hopefully they come out reform. Here's what you can't do. You can't go inside their brain. and tweak things in a very particular way, run them in a simulation millions of times, and see, oh, did I decrease the probability that they'll commit a crime in the future if I tweak their brain this way?

And not only can you not do that. With AI, we can do a further thing, which is say, okay, now all your descendants will have their brain structure modified based on what we learn for modifying your brain. Right? So we have this incredible ability to engineer these AI systems and AI minds

where it's like, really, it's not bizarre or as to these sort of psychopaths that have just come from foreign lands. It's more something that they have developed. They're getting to see its development, what impact it's having, they can change those systems. Now, it does mean that over time, you might lose the ability as they're getting more powerful,

as they're controlling more things. You lose the ability to, if you don't get it right in these initial few years where you have a lot of leverage, then you're screwed. So you really need to make sure that you actually understand what the drives the AIs have, that you really have them in control. I mean, on the one hand, the picture you're painting,

I'm going great, you know, what's wrong with that? On the other hand, I mean, you have an authoritarian government. Maybe you like questioning, let's get the AI into tweak a few things so that you become an effective drone for society. Don't question, don't think for yourself. Just do the work, shut your mouth. No, okay, I got a stuff saying.

That's a great point. I only made it to the joke as a joke. You should definitely continue to say that's a great question. You love hearing it. No, so we've been discussing this idea. Okay, suppose we succeed in getting the AIs to be these unsullied who will do exactly what you tell them to do. Okay, who should they listen to, right?

Should they listen to the end user? So when you and I go talk to chat, GPT, we're the end user. Should they listen to us? should, now here's the problem. Some end users are just using to do ordinary things, helpful things. The Taliban is an end user. The Ayatollah is an end user. The CCP is an end user.

Should they just, okay, so should the model company get to decide, hey, Open AI says what kinds of things are okay to do in order not okay to do? And Open AI says, you can't use this to make bioweapons, you can use it to go write some software. Okay, but are you going to give these huge armies, basically the future labor force

are you going to give control of that to a couple of private corporations? Okay, so then you say, well, we can't have private corporations done it. It's like nuclear weapons. It's a super weapon. They're going to be able to build super weapons. Clearly, government controls nuclear weapons,

so the government should control this. Okay, but now this goes to the point of authoritarianism. If we have a society where all the work is happening from AI's, and the government controls the AI, Wouldn't it make it incredibly easy for government to turn authoritarian?

The U.S. government to turn authoritarian today. It's hard because the government relies on millions of people to enforce its edicts, and people can just refuse to obey them. I mean, this has happened in history where the East German regime collapsed in 1989 because people in East Germany were one night that we're going to cross over no matter what into West Germany. And the guards at the Berlin Wall just refused to. shoot. If there were AIs that would do exactly what the government wanted to do to do,

they would just kill thousands of citizens and East Germany would still be around today. So yeah, so that's the trouble with allowing it to the government. Okay, here's the fourth option. We don't align it to the end user. Sometimes it says the end user, you can't make bioweapons. We don't all lie to the model companies. We shouldn't have model companies that control super intelligence. The government doesn't get to just say whatever this future army should do. then what's the fourth option left? The AI itself. So should AI systems

have their own values, their own sense of morality? And look, I know this... I remember reading some Isaac Hasimov books. It went very much like this. And of course, it sounds like a terrible... This sounds like I'm describing The Terminator, right? Like, the Terminator has its own values.

Yeah. No, it obviously matters a ton what those values should be. And I think in the future, need to be the equivalent of a constitutional convention where we get together in the best political philosophy, the best thought that has happened in human civilization needs to go into thinking about what are the checks and balances, what are the exact values, what are the, what are there situations which an AI should do X versus Y, when should it refuse to do something? What are the laws of robotics?

Exactly. As Asimov talked about. Exactly. But the reason I think this value streamer has, I like it, or I think it could be done well. is fundamentally, again, we are building more people. These are just going to be the future people. And I think civilization would run better if civilization is full of virtuous people

who will, I'm not saying they have to be like monks who will. But it's better to have better people than worse people, have better values and worse values. I think one of the reasons the sub-destroar and civilization succeed and others don't is that there's better values in those civilizations. I mean, but better value. that's subjective, isn't it?

Of course. Well, Genghis Khan had better values by that logic compared to everybody else. I think by the standards of modern day, we have some questions about that. Yeah, yeah, right? And it certainly needs to, like, there's some system where, like, as our culture,

there's something in our culture that is allowed us to improve our values, and we need to make sure AI civilization in the AI culture would have the same dynamic. How that has happened in human civilization is unclear, much less clear how we make sure that AI civilization also has that dynamic. But certainly the ability to improve the values

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But we are in an AI arms race, should we just call it that? And pushback if you disagree, we're between the U.S. and China. I mean, Chinese or CCP values, to be specific, and American values are very, very different. So what the CCP would think are good values, completely in contrast to our own, for example. And if the Chinese or the CCP win that race, then effectively we're going to be dominated by an AI with CCP values. I mean, that has to terrify anyone, surely. Sure. Yeah. And I think this goes to the point of like, people say that it would be success simply to be able to build AI systems that at the technical level, you can just say it is possible for somebody to be able to say to the AI do X and the AI will do X, or the AI will care what it is. You know, if you have a really good employee, you're not necessarily going to know enough to micromanage them. But they will care that you want a certain thing. to happen and they will do the best to their best of the ability to make that thing happen.

And that's what we'll be in a, we'll be in that relationship with AI. And so if that alignment project succeeds, somebody will get to say that. And you're making the point, well, what if that somebody is the CCP, right? So it's not enough that we just solve this technical problem, getting the AI to do what we want. It also has to be the case that we have some system of inscribing what we want that actually results in good things. I mean, so there's very basic things like, oh, the authoritarian government should not be the end, the end arbiter of how extremely powerful AI systems are maneuvered.

But beyond that, yeah, there's this dynamic of like, okay, well, then who should it be instead? Should it be the model company? Should it be the end user? And this, I think, is like a live debate. I mean, I've changed my mind over the last year ago. I've been thinking about this. I've changed my mind about it a bunch of times. I think it's a very thorny question.

But this is the project of political philosophy, really. It's culminating in this question that people are not thinking about. And it's also the other element to this. I mean, let's take COVID, for example. Let's say lab leaders, I think it came from a lab. People can disagree. But let's just say that it did. And let's just say it was a horrific accident.

And the virus escaped. It killed millions of people. If people are building AI's, there are unknown consequences. We're just people. It doesn't matter how smart we are. there is a limit to how much we know and we understand, and nobody can predict the future. So we can create this with the best intentions in the world

and not realize what the long-term effects are going to be, not even three or five or ten years down the line, but 50 years down the line. I think that would definitely be the case. I think in history, nobody has had a good track record, really, of being able to say, I'm going to make this technical... You know, Gutenberg was not trying to kick off the Reformation, right? Francis is offended by that.

My, have day. Have day. And so it's just very hard to, I think there will be this dynamic of, look, we're not going to be able to predict, much less to control what happens in this future civilization that is run by AI's. I think the thing we can't do is say, like, AI is going to happen. The universe is just organized such that if you throw huge blobs of compute at enough data, intelligent. emerges. That's how human intelligence emerged, AI intelligence who emerges in a more, right? And so within that scope, we can make responsible decisions. But it's just a reality that AI is a technology, like the tech tree has AI in it and it's going to happen. Well, that's why the

lab leak metaphor is not strong enough because we actually don't have a choice. Because for the very reason that you described, May, which is that if China get this first, like, that's not going to be a good world for us. So we have to pursue on our end as well. So let's park this. I'm really glad we had this conversation. I've seen many people, actually, in a particularly in a more general space, having this discussion. I think it's important.

I'm glad we had it. But let's take that and park it. So the, you know, the matrix world of the machine, it controls everything, takes over. We'll park that for a second. There's two other things that concern us, I think, from the conversations that we've had. One of them is the one that everyone is talking about, which is job losses. And the question ultimately is what happens to a society in which 40s. 40% of people become, their jobs no longer exist 10 years from now or five years from now.

And a lot of people don't realize how quickly it happened. So before we started to chiganometry eight years ago, I used to do standard, but before that and alongside that, I had my own translation business. I still have friends on Facebook from my translation days. They're all retiring now. Because there is still some small market for human translation, 99% of it. Like, if you need to know what Vladimir Putin said in his last speech, and you don't speak Russian. Are you going to pay somebody a thousand pounds, a thousand dollars to

have a tr-no? You just stick it in AI and it tells you, right, or Google Translayer, whatever it is. So there are whole industries that are already disappearing. If we project that in the way you described earlier, which is basically anything that can be done on a computer eventually can be done, plus robotics and proves over time, which of course it will. And we know just how critical, particularly in this country, United States, driving is in terms of jobs for people, particularly for men, you put all that together, the societal implications of that are very, very significant, and I would argue, scary. Yeah.

Is that fair? Yeah, I think, I mean, it's even scary than that. So now we're just talking about the small fraction of jobs that AI is already approaching. But remember, the promise of this technology is all jobs. We're trying to do anything a human being can do. And so there will be certain kinds of things where, for small fraction of things, people just really intrinsically prefer a human. I think people are really overrating the amount of things

for this will be the case. And people might have had the sense that I really want an Uber driver to be a human and then people use a Waymo for the first time. And like, this is, it's a bet I would pay more for this experience because it's the machine just like I can get in and things work. But putting that aside, so the reason it's a worst problem in this, if you look through the last couple centuries of history, there's been this remarkable economic fact

that two-thirds of, national income, two-thirds of GDP basically gets paid out to wages, and one-third gets paid out to capital. So get paid out to capital, I mean like rent on land, or if you own factories, you know, getting the profits from those factories, basically. And the rest is getting paid out. Most of income that is earned in a country is getting paid out to people doing work. And the reason this has been the case is that in the economy, labor and capital are complements. So if you just accumulated a bunch of capital if you had a bunch of factories, but there was nobody working on it, then that would increase the demand for labor, and you'd want to pay laborers a bunch of money to

fill those factories. This goes away when capital can do labor. When a data center, which is capital, can also do labor or a robot factory can also build labor. And so all the income goes to the capital holders. And in fact, it doesn't just go to capital per se. It doesn't just go to, I mean, it goes to capital holders, but it disproportionately goes to the parts of capital that are most exposed to AI. So, you know, the purchase that most Americans have to capital is through their homes. A house is maybe the, if you're trying to design an instrument that is going to be the least implicated in the AI takeoff, it would be a random plot of land.

near other humans, because humans won't matter in this future economy, that is not connected to the infrastructure for AI, to electricity, in a big way, et cetera. And so, but really what the capital that will matter is you have equity in these AI companies. You have equity in companies that build more compute, build more data centers, build more factories. And so a very small fraction of capital holders, in fact, once they're going to get the rents from our economy.

Now, I'm a very libertarian person by inclination, But if I just look at this dynamic, I'm forced to say, look, this justifies a huge amount of redistribution because the logic for free markets is there's many different reasons. A big one is signal, right? So if you let prices be determined by the market, it tells people what is the most acute, valuable need for scarce resources? That will still continue being the case. And so there should still be elements of markets in the future. But another big part of is incentives is to incentivize people to work hard, to make productive things. And if all the work is being done by AIs that will work hard and do valuable things regardless of whether you, whether they get a $10 million payment or 100 million, or more precisely, whether the person who owns the AI gets paid a billion dollars or $100 billion or whatever, then I think that the logic of the.

of extreme libertarianism is really much weaker, right? It does justify a lot more redistribution. Well, even if you are such a hardcore libertarian that you think, you know, come hell of high water, we've got to go down the truth. I would advise people who have capital to think through the consequences of that in their own lives, because if you live on a planet with 8 billion people

in which 3,000 people have all the wealth and all their income, that is not going to end well for those 3,000 people, unless they want to build a giant robot army to protect them against the hordes of starving people outside their gates, which, again, I don't think would go well for them either. You see what I'm saying?

I mean, I think it might. That's a problem. That's a real sure. No, it might. Sure, you can build an army and kill all the rest of humanity who don't have money and you do. Right. I mean, especially because

historically, you have a revolution because most of the people in your military, you have to win over your military, you have to win over the government. You have to just like, your government runs on the people you need to command. And so revolutions are possible because it would be easy for the robots to do revolution

because they're running the society in the future. For the humans who are not, it's sort of equivalent to like the animals in your zoo doing a revolution. It's not really going to make the government not work anymore. So, yeah, that's one. I mean, another thing that's sort of tougher to think about is the future in general would be so much richer, whether humans are in control of it or not, or how many humans are in control of it. And so it will just make sense, just from very small amounts of philanthropy as a fraction of the wealth that some people or some AIs will have in the future, we take a very small fraction of it to make everybody much better off than they are today.

We're giving people millions of, every single person millions of dollars would be a small fraction of like, you know, I've got Elon Musk wants to build a mass driver on the moon. colonize the solar system. And it takes a small fraction of that to just make everybody incredibly rich. But it's still skyrocketing inequality. And so, yeah, you could have a world where the gap is way, way, way wider, but everybody's still better off. And I think even in that world, I would say, well, okay, but still, it's not like, if the AIs are building the mass driver on the moon, I think that entitles all humans to much more of the products of that productivity explosion. Because everything is understood in context. So even the poorest person is wealthy compared to somebody from 300 years ago. But they don't feel that way because they go on Instagram and they see

somebody else, you know, on a yacht, smoking a cigar, having a great time. Or they go, I can't buy this property. I can't buy this. So I can't do that. And that creates resentment. And where you have resentment, that's where things start to get a little bit funky. Yeah. So there's an inequality problem. maybe to destroy another. I think the AIs have the potential to make authoritarian societies much more sustainable and powerful

than they have been in the past. 100%. So we talked about the fact that, the robot arms is running everything in the future. Here's another angle, mass surveillance. 100%. Right now in the U.S., there's 100 million CCTV cameras.

Okay, so suppose that each of those cameras, you take a frame every 10 seconds, and you have an AI process it. And just you can do the back of the envelope calculations here of like, okay, if you have models that can process video frames that it costs a certain amount of sense to do each frame, how much would it cost to process all 100 million CCTV cameras in America? And it's $30 billion.

Okay. Now, that's not that much. Every year, a given level of AI capabilities gets 10x cheaper. We've been observing this over many different years. So this year, $30 billion. next year it will be $3 billion, and it will be $300 million. By the end of the decade, it will cost less to surveil every single nook and cranny in this country than it does to remodel the White House. And you would hope that there's a symmetric property to this technology such that, oh, the government can surveil us,

but we can also, the AI is also helping us keep better tap than the government. Maybe it exists. I'm not sure, I'm not convinced it does, because in some sense, AI just gives you more leverage on the things you already have. And the government has already has the monopoly on violence. right? And they can supercharge this with extremely obedient employees and servants and bureaucrats that will do exactly what they say with ability to monitor everything. So I think, yeah, it's really worth worrying about how do we make sure that we don't lose reins of free government, democratic government. And it's also as well, there'll be a lot of people in the U.S. and the U.K.

who won't mind mass surveillance, particularly if the world becomes more or more unstable, we see a rising terrorism. And the government goes, look, you know, you're worried about the latest terrorist organization, whoever they may be, you're worried about your children's safety. We can protect you.

Now, it's going to mean that you're going to give up a few things, but one thing I can guarantee you is that you're going to be safer. And you look at what happened over COVID. People were willing to give up the most basic freedoms for safety. Yeah, I mean, in fact, be a stronger dynamic in that way because AI actually will be very dangerous, right? And so

government can say, oh, you can use AI to make bioweapons. You can use AI to do all these scary things. We need to be monitoring what's happening. And it will seem even more reasonable than what was done during COVID. And so I think that a lot of the reasons that government has not been as authoritarian as it has in the past is that it just physically not been possible for somebody to be looking at every single bank transaction, to be looking at every single CCT, camera, to be able to cross-reference all of those things. If you have AIs that can do that, it is within the government's power very easily to be able to monitor every single thing that's happening.

And then there's just, the only solution then is a political expectation that the government should not do this. And basically, people need to be talking about this. People need to be saying this. There should not be okay for the government to do. I don't know if you saw the news over the last month, but there was a spot between the Department of War and this AI company Anthropic where the department, it, it, it, it, The Department of War were saying we don't want any red lines around the use of these models when we're using them in military.

And the Anthropics said, we're only selling you these models if you're willing, if we can save in the contract, hey, you're not allowed to use it for mass surveillance. And so the Department of War said, okay, if you're going to, you know, we're totally okay for the Department of War to say, look, we're not going to do business with you. We can't have red lines on software the government uses. Instead, the Department of War said, we are going to say that you're a supply chain risk, which is this authority that, Congress gave the Department of War to basically ban Huawei devices from being used in missiles or whatever. And instead, the Department of War is saying, okay, none of our contractors, so Amazon is a contractor of the Department of War, Nvidia, Google, et cetera, can use your AI in any work they do for us. And the initial goal is really just to go like do something to kill the company.

And so this is the kind of leverage that the government can apply on AI companies to say, like, hey, if you don't help us with mass surveillance, if you don't help us do scary things, and this will be a bigger issue in the future, then we can just try to destroy your company. And so, yeah, that's also a really scary dynamic. The government has this power over private companies. And it's for sure the private companies can do this themselves. Well, right. That's the flip side. What if, let's say, the team that you like is in power in government,

and you have an AI company that's controlled by the opposite, someone who has the opposite political views, you've now got the opposite of that, but it's equally dangerous, right? When you've got someone who's effectively got the technology to power a huge private army, at some point, versus a government. Exactly.

Like, how does that get worked out? Right. And that's the flip side of that very same problem. To say nothing of the fact coming back to our economic conversation, which is in this beautiful world where AI, does all the work, who is buying the product and with what? Right, I'll be honest. I know a fair few blokes who've gone through the whole hair loss thing,

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you can handle your to-do list with total confidence. Start your build at Chevrolet.ca. Details at J.D.power.com. To say nothing of the fact coming back to our economic conversation, which is in this beautiful world where AI does all the work, who is buying the product and with what? I don't worry so much that there will not be demand for all the things that AI is building.

I think at the end of the day, AI can consume the things that AI is building because AI will be another agent in the economy, just the way humans build things and consume things. AIs will also be not just building things, but consuming things, even in the service of producing things for humans. Like if you look at the amount of compute, right now AI is being used a lot for software engineering,

and we just can't get enough compute to do all the software engineering with AI because you can use a lot more AI to, than we used in the past, to build projects that we would have never dreamed up in the past, because it was just not possible to throw that much engineering talented in the past. And so we'll have this dynamic more and more in the future where there's just, there's an endless amount of things to be done or things people will want. But where are humans going to get money to pay for things?

I'm wondering. Okay. Yeah, so there's wages. Well, yeah, but then. Yeah, wages are gone. So then there's rents on capital. So if you have S&P 500 or something, that will probably go up a bunch

and you can use that to buy things in the future. I think home valleys probably will not go up as much relative to capital relevant to AI. But I do expect it will be accumulated by a smaller or smaller fraction of people. So it will be some mixture of redistribution and capital that people hold. I mean...

It's a beautiful, beautiful world. I just... I mean, the thing that really worries me, is we are already in a world where we have a crisis of me. I mean, that is only going to get 10, 100, 1 billion X in a world where most people don't have a job. And by people, I mean men. And we look at what's happening now with populism,

we've left and right-wing populism. I mean, again, that's only going to get even more escalated, isn't it? Yeah. I'm of two minds about this. I think it's very possible that people learn to cope. Like, in some sense, they will lose the thing that gives them meaning now. And maybe it takes a while for a society to acclimit to what it means to have purpose in this civilization where the real work is done by AIs. But you think about what humans have gone through over the last 10,000 years.

Our genes, we're like, we're supposed to be killing things on the Savannah in tribes of 100 people. We're not supposed to be podcasting, right? And I get meaning out of being a podcaster. Transitioning to the agricultural revolution, transitioning to early states, transition to bigger states, transitioning to the industrial revolution, transitioning to modernity. All these things. I mean, obviously, there's a certain amount of people do feel estranged from society, and that has part of it is that you're not just out on the Savannah with your tribe.

But we've coped. And I think we will cope to a world where there's abundance and where disease is solved, where we can even intervene and help you get healthier in all kinds of different ways to have. I mean, again, go back to this analogy of would a person in the 14th century even realize what they're missing out on because they don't have all the technologies we have today. They don't have antibiotics. They don't have modern technology and conveniences. But so go back to my point because for me it's about purpose and meaning and it's about striving and overcoming.

So when I was a primary school teacher, everyone can drink now because I mentioned it, I taught to my 10, 11 year olds, Greek myths and mythologies. And these were kids from all different parts of the world, first, second generation immigrants, everywhere from Lithuania to China to Pakistan, Bangladesh. And many of them, vast majority, had no connection to ancient Greece or Greece whatsoever. And I taught them about myth, and every single one of them would be hooked immediately. And why is it? Because it's that fundamental story, the archetype, of the hero overcoming the challenge in order to become a better version of themselves. It's fundamental to the human experience.

I think, and I really worry, if you take that away from people, you're taking away something fundamental. And when you look at communities where the central industry that the community relied on, whether it's in the Rusbel or in the north of England, and you take away those communities and there's nothing less, even if those people are never going to starve, they're never going to go hungry, they will still wither on the vine emotionally. And then we see addictions and all the rest of it. Yeah. I think another analogy is Saudi Arabia, where there's this huge and imported labor force. But the actual citizens are sort of subsisting on this oil well. It's a good analogy.

And I don't know much about Saudi Arabia, but, yeah, you want people to be sort of engaged. You want people to develop their facilities, right? What does it need to be a human? Like, you want people to, ultimately, what is civilization for? We want flourishing human beings. I do think this is the kind of thing where it's hard to say in advance, how we'll figure it out. Maybe there's some mixture of play and new ways of,

we'll get meaning from connecting with other people, we'll get meaning from understanding the things AI's are doing. AIs will help us brainstorm ways to get meaning. I'm optimistic in the long run. I do varying the short run. There will be the equivalent of, here's another analogy. I think when there's groups that have not until recently encountered it's only been the last

a couple hundred years that they've encountered modern civilization that you get hooked to things like alcohol much more recently genetically they're more predisposed to alcoholism

I think this is true of Native Americans but over time we've built up defenses of civilization from everything from the level genetics to culture or whatever to these kinds

of vices that came along with the agriculture of revolution I think that will be similar here where yes there would be incredible AI slop that will be generated that will be just gripping people on their phones and they're just in bed, jerking off all day

and scrolling to the things AI is making. And over time, I'm hoping, maybe not even in our generation, but if we get things right, we will have a vision of what it means to be a fulfilled and actualized human being, even in a world where the work is being done by the EIs. Yeah, the Saudi Arabia metaphor is actually very interesting

because, you know, from what I gather, there's some very smart people in the Saudi royal family who are basically in charge. And then there's kind of a lot of people who are some mixture of just people who have a nice life because they happen to get lots of money and a lot of wasteers who spend their life shagging and boozing and taking drugs or whatever.

And that's kind of the mix of any human society, really. But not everyone there is like suffering from a crisis of meaning. Some people just do something that they enjoy doing. or some of them still start businesses even though they're wealthy or they do something to contribute to their society. It's an interesting matter if I hadn't considered that and that's actually I think quite helpful in a way. There's one other final bit that I wanted to talk about, which is you've interviewed pretty much everyone who's anyone in the AI space, including the people who run all these big companies. And one of the things that we've observed from talking to people in the AI field, not quite at that level. you know, there's a lot of excitement, let's put it that way.

The people in charge of this, the people who are doing this, it feels to me like that sort of Facebook 2014 move fast and break things attitude is there. First, just on that, is that accurate? I think some people are careful, but in general, people really believe in the potential of this technology. Right, right, right. And that to me is kind of worrying,

in and so on because when you move fast and break things, you break things. And if you're excited about the process, that doesn't help with being careful. Are the conversations about the sort of concerns we've had today, are they being had in the industry? Yes. I mean, I don't think people should just count on that. Just you guys people are talking about it, whatever, right? Like, anybody can talk about it. I'm talking about it. It's not like fixing the issue. But people are, like, this is really a thing that the topics we've been talking about really do we get discussed in detail in Silicon Valley. Again, I think does that mean that when the rubber, what's the metaphor?

The rubber hits the road. That makes sense. It will be these discussions rather than how do we hit our revenue targets that will be guiding decisions. I think probably it will be a mixture of both and it will be more of the latter than some ideas. you just like to think, but less than maybe some cynics would assume. I do think people, yeah, I've been generally impressed by at least how thoughtfully some people have thought about this issue. Dorcas, it's a real pleasure having this conversation with. Thanks for your time. Thanks for coming on. We really enjoyed it. We are going to ask you questions from our supporters in the second,

but before we do, what's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be? I think there's this tough question that I don't know the answer to, but certainly we as a civilization will need an answer to. Even if these top companies don't release these misaligned models that do bad things, somebody at some point will. It's easy enough to train AIs, and it's getting easier and easier over time, that at some point the Taliban will have their superintelligence, and every bad person can think it will have their own superintelligence.

And the solution cannot be that the government or whoever builds a penopticon such that they can see, they can control exactly who gets to build an AI. At some point, somebody will be able to build superhuman intelligence in their basement. And so we need a civilization that is robust to even bad people with superintelligence. The only other solution then, if we don't allow for that, is some sort of global government that prevents the bad people from mapping AI. And so how do you build a society that is robust to lots of people with superintelligences? Well, thanks for coming on.

Head on over to Trigopod.com.com. UK, where Dorcasch is going to answer your questions. How does a common man weather this storm? Most people wait out with supporting others and can't invest a ton of time and money trying to do something with AI that will likely fail if they don't already have a background in tech.