Kids Should *Not* Use Chatbots! (You Should Be Wary, Too…)

27:33We just, what's the most concise way of hitting the key points of what we're looking for? That's how you should talk to chatbots if you have to use chatbots as an adult. You do not have to interact with them like humans. Ignore the fact that it's a fancy parlor trick that they're responding to you in fluent language. There is no mind on the other side of it that deserves to be simulated as a standalone mind. And so you break that no please, no thank you, no complete sentences. just resize window, iPad, Chrome, boom. That's what you type in, right? Not, how would I, I'm trying to do this. Could you tell me how I might do this because of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

28:16So that's the best thing you can do as an adult, to break the spell of this is a conversational partner. And if you break the spell, then you're much less likely to succumb to this sort of psychosis of like, wow, that's confident, this person gets me and is really convincing me that, yeah, indeed the aliens are coming. to whisk me away to Flash Gordon's planet. So don't anthropomorphize your interactions. You're not hurting anyone's feelings. Talk to a chatbot the same way you talk to Google. What's the long-term solution, if I could raise a wave of magic wand here? Anthropomorphize chatbots in general are a bad idea, and we shouldn't have them, and I think they cause more problem than good.

28:57LM technology should be integrated into specific products as they make those products more useful to humans. I think Google is sort of demonstrating, you know, how, for example, LLMs could be integrated into something like a Google search where you type in a Google search with, you know, in a conversation. And the LLM can help power an answer window that's pulling from other web pages and summarizing things for you. That's really useful. You don't have to have a conversation with it. LLMs can show up in particular software packages where you can just say what you want. bold everything first column.

29:32And then it can interpret that and translate it to API calls that actually does what you need it to do. So we can have the LLM technology show up in products as is useful without having to create the idea of an anthropomorphized conversational partner. I think it short circuits our brains. And it's just dangerous. Our brains simulate it as a conversational partner, but it's not a predictable conversational partner. And that stochastic selection of next tokens from the probability distributions can lock into some pretty dark or unhealthy or just incorrect directions. Now, you have to remember the whole idea of an anthropomorphic chatbot was never the intention for this particular technology.

30:11Go back to 2022. What is OpenAI excited about? GPT-3, this first really scaled LLM that had a lot of power. And their whole business model was we are going to sell access to this model through what's known as an API. So you can write your own program. And then when you need a dash of artificial intelligence, you can submit prompts, your program can submit prompts to the LLM to the API and get a response back. So it's a way to take intelligence from this LLM and add it into whatever software program you were building. And they would charge per API access. And that was the model. But they needed a way of convincing people that you can build useful things on here.

30:55So someone had the idea of let's build a chatbot application to show the types of things you could program that would use GPT-3. Now, the problem is LLMs are incredibly powerful in their original form after their pre-trained, but they're not very good conversational partners. You had the right prompts to get the right responses, which doesn't matter if the thing sitting in the prompt is a computer program because you can just program your program to carefully prompt these things in the right way. This was called prompt engineering for about a minute. It was considered to be the skill of the future is how do you write exactly the right prompt.

31:29But this is where they figured out at OpenAI is, oh, we can do this tuning after the fact. We give it a lot of examples of questions you might ask a chatbot and the right types of answers like the civil way to respond. And suddenly they had a LLM that if you type questions to it like you would a conversational partner, it would answer like a conversational partner. And they combined that with an interface that was ChatGPT. It took off and it completely caught them off guard. They didn't expect that demo to become a primary product, to become one of the fastest adopted products in the history of digital technology.

32:02So that's why we accidentally ended up with chatbots as a sort of core technology of LLMs. We're only now finally seeing us moving past that phase towards more specialized applications like coding harnesses, which produce computer code or the tools that mathematicians are using. So we're finally getting back to the API pay-per-use model that we originally envisioned. But we ended up with these kind of anthropomorphized chatbots as a demo and kind of accidentally. So I think we should be willing to close the books on it. OpenAI won't do this tomorrow because they make the bulk of their revenue right now off of people paying X dollars a month for ChatGPT Pro subscriptions.

32:40But long term, I think it's dangerous. The way the solution is actually going to be implemented is going to be probably through the courts. In Germany, there was already earlier this year a key court case in which the German courts held the AI companies liable for what text is produced by their chatbots. They don't get to say, we didn't generate whatever harmful text this was. The chatbot did. German courts said, no, you're liable. Similar cases are going through the works right now. One of the members of that panel event that I was talking about earlier was one of the assistant attorney generals of Florida who actually they have now the state of Florida under his guidance has filed suit against OpenAI for that Florida State University shooting case.

33:26As he said clearly in that panel, if a human had said to the shooter the exact words that are in this chat GPT transcript, they would be in jail right now. We are pushing for criminal liability for OpenAI. You don't get a hide behind the fact that I don't know what my product was going to say. You built the product and you released it. These type of liability cases that are connected to criminal liability, this would change the whole landscape. It wouldn't be legally viable anymore to have an anthropomorphized chatbot because we can't control, as I mentioned, we can't control the lock-in that occurs, especially as conversations get meandering and you've trained on everything.

34:04you're going to end up again and again in situations where the chatbot is interacting in a way that if a human did it would have legal liability. So that's what would eventually change this. I don't think we need a world of chatbots that we talk to like humans. It's bad for us. It's bad for our brains. And we can get the benefits of LLM Power Tools without having to say please and thank you to a rack full of GPUs. All right. So that's where I'm going to leave this discussion for now. But I think the general thrust here is important. We cannot let the histrionic claims, concerns, and essays of two labs, OpenA and Anthropic, distract us from all of the actual harms that existing technologies are happening right now.

34:57Now, we can discuss the killer robot swarms that are going to shoot lasers in our eyes and kill us and debate Yudkowsky and read Bostrom X-Risk papers as much as we want, and that's good to do. But we cannot lose sight of the actual harms that are happening right now. Those matter just as much, especially when we're talking about the lives of kids. So let's stay vigilant when thinking about these tools. in addition to debating the impact of AI on humanity continue to impact the impact of AI on actual humans. All right. There we go, Jesse. It's serious. It was kind of like a dark panel. How did Anthropic get to be so big?

35:40I know that Dario left OpenAI, but then they got massive. Yeah. So there's a difference between OpenAI and Anthropic in terms of their revenue streams. OpenAI is making a lot of money off of ChatGPT subscriptions. Anthropic really went all in on the coding tools. And so like a lot of what they are making money on is enterprise. So companies paying for access to the LLM so they can use tools like CloudCode for coding and automation. So Anthropic really, they had the vision that it's these enterprise accounts that really matter for growth. You can't just be entirely consumer-facing, like individuals paying$20 a month, especially because – and I think they're right about this.

36:26If anthropomorphized chatbots stay around, there's not a big moat. So you can be – I mean you can be endless imitators that are cheap or free or specialized. And so it's not the best business, OpenAI. And that's probably why Anthropic will go through with its IPO this fall, but OpenAI has delayed theirs. I think their revenue forecast picture is bleaker and they don't want to file those S1s that would make it clear. I want to take another quick break to hear from some of the sponsors that makes this show possible. As AI adoption grows, so do your company's security risks and requirements. New frameworks, audits, and vendors keep piling on, but your team isn't getting any bigger.

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39:44Remember, if you have something you want to share, a question to ask or a reaction to me or our show, you can send it to podcast at calnewport.com. All right. I'm opening my doors for Office Hours. Jesse, who do we have lined up first? Our first question is from Chris, who wants your opinion on a recent op-ed. Okay, let's see here. So Chris pointed, he said, what is your take on this Times essay about dumb phones? I'll bring that up on the screen here. The essay he's talking about is titled, My Dumb Phone Made My Life Better. It Made Everyone Else's Worse. That's an interesting animation, Jesse.

40:23That guy is on someone else's shoulders doing something. A lot of ways to interpret that animation. Let's keep scrolling here. Okay, so I read this op-ed. I won't read it now. We can take it off the screen. But I'll tell you the gist of it. It's basically it was someone saying, I started using a dumb phone, like a flip phone, because I was addicted to my smartphone. But the problem is it's putting a big burden on all the other people in my life because there's all these logistical things that happen that require a smartphone. So I have to basically call other people or ask other people to do these things for me.

40:58And there's all sorts of examples of this in the piece. Like, for example, the parking pickup at their kid's school requires you to check in on your phone. And they don't have a smartphone, so they have to do it manually, and it delays everyone else. Or if the person needs to call an Uber, they have to call their husband and have their husband call the Uber on their smartphone. So that's the point of the piece. So what's the solution here? Well, there is a pretty clear thread in the comments and reaction to this op-ed that I think is absolutely right. And it's the way I would react to it. The issue here isn't your smartphone.

41:35It's the attention economy apps that had you looking at your smartphone compulsively in such a way that it made the rest of your life worse. Going to a dumb phone fixes that issue because it's impossible to access those types of apps on a dumb phone. But the alternative that I typically push instead is to go for a boring phone. So a boring phone is the same. It's a smartphone. You have an iPhone or whatever, but you just make that phone very boring. It's basically just used for these sort of logistical things like your QR code for the movie or checking in to pick up your kids from school or calling an Uber or doing Park Mobile when you park somewhere.

42:13You have just like the boring apps on it and none of the interesting ones. No social media. If you're an email addict, take the email off of your phone. And critically, so if you're going to use the boring phone method, critically, you also have to landline, which means, yeah, when I'm at home, it's plugged in in the kitchen. I don't keep it with me. Now, this requires a little bit more discipline because, yeah, sure, you could re-download those social apps. Or instead of landlining, you could keep it with you and look at stuff compulsively. You can log in with your password through a browser to try to get to social media.

42:47So, yeah, it takes some discipline. But you've got to display a little discipline to fix your life. And the discipline required when you're using a boring phone is way, way less than if you have a smartphone brimming with these amusement park attractions that have been engineered to be constantly like a carnival barker pulling at your attention. So typically, a boring phone plus landlining, so you just get used to not having it as a default, that solves the problem while still allowing you to do the logistical stuff that's important. It's unfortunately become essentially impossible to not have a smartphone for logistical reasons.

43:25We've talked about this on the show before, but the sort of last domino to fall, in my opinion, in the smartphone-less world was Warner Herzog, the famed film director who admitted more recently that he had to get a smartphone because he couldn't get in and out of parking garages. The garages he uses requires a smartphone app to get in and out. I don't think he actually understands how to use the phone. I think he just talks to it with his sort of like deep German accent. Phone. we would like the door to open now. They don't do German very well. But even he had to get one. So now the final people who are left who literally don't have a smartphone tend to be really high-end elite movie directors.

44:11I think Quentin Tarantino and Chris Nolan still do not have smartphones, but they have whole staffs to do all the stuff for them that you would do with your smartphone, and that's not accessible to everyone. So the target we should be having, those of us who are seeking more digital minimalism, is boring phones that are not our default entertainment we landline when we're at home. That gets you like 95 % of the way there. Have you heard Warner Herzog's opening narration for Conan O 'Brien's travel show? No. Oh, you got to listen to it. It's so great. I saw the show just came out, right? Yeah, there's a new season.

44:43It's on HBO. He has this deep, heavily accented German voice that does... He has movies like Cave Forgotten Dreams or Grizzly Man where he narrates. in this really profound way. So he's narrating the Conan show, but he's just using his deep voice to completely just sort of crap on O 'Brien. Is the show good? Yeah, yeah, it's good. He's like a clown. He's got dead doll eyes. He's less than a man. So it's funny. It's like in the, you know, but I can't do his accent. All right, what else? Who else do we have in line for office hours to use that metaphor? Our next question is about slow productivity.

45:24Hmm. That was my most recent book for those who are new to the show. It was called Slow Productivity. Read it. I recommend it. Part one is about the way that technology and knowledge work clashed starting in the early 2000s to make knowledge work essentially unbearable. And then slow productivity is a solution to that, to produce good knowledge work without burning out or being overwhelmed. All right, so here's the question. It's anonymous. There's no name given. I recently reread slow productivity and loved your emphasis on working at a natural pace while maintaining high quality standards rather than succumbing to pseudo activity.

46:01I was curious what key boundary or habit helps knowledge workers resist pseudo busyness when operating within corporate environments that heavily reward quick email turnaround times. All right, so pseudo-activity and pseudo-business, I think this reader is referring to my concept of pseudo-productivity. My argument has been this is the way that knowledge work ever since it became a major sector in the 20th century. The way they measure productivity is actually they just look for visible activity as a proxy for useful effort. So I call that pseudo-productivity because it's just if you're very visibly busy, it's better than if you're not.

46:41right and then the whole thesis of slow productivity is that once we got network digital tools pseudo productivity became unbearable with endless work we could endlessly check in on we could endlessly demonstrate progress by jumping in and out of chats and emails and zooms and everyone everyone is burning out all right so what do you do if you're trying to be slowly productive in a corporate environment that rewards quick email turnaround times you have to establish for yourself and then promulgate to others your alternative measures of productivity. What exactly am I working on right now? What's on my plate?

47:16What's my plan for this week to make progress on? How much progress do I want to make on these key things? When in the week am I actually going to do this work and make this progress? When you're thinking that way, now you have these concrete stakes in the ground, like I'm making progress on this key project and I'm working on these hours to get it done. Now it's much more easy to become more and more valuable than if you're just going moment to moment, what should I do next? And just falling back on the pseudo productive trap of just jumping in on email threads. So now you're going to have sort of predefined deep sessions and then you can do the email nonsense outside of it.

47:52No one notices, right? We worry that everyone will notice any changes to our behavior when it comes to communication. We worry that there's a command center somewhere where they have like the mission control and Apollo 13, and they're all tracking your response time and rates and trends over time. And that when you don't answer an email for 90 minutes because you're doing a pre-planned deep work block on a key function, that somewhere is an Ed Harris-style character saying, Houston, we have a problem. And then everything gets really worried as they're pouring over the graphs, and Ron Howard's brother jumps in and says crazy things because they're like, why has Cal not answered this email in 30 minutes?

48:33It took him 45 minutes. No one cares. If you ignore emails for days, they do. Bigger picture, the other thing that really matters with reducing the burden of email is not just thinking about when you respond, but reducing the number of emails that you have to respond to in the first place. And that's another big point I get into in slow productivity. Part of that is reducing your active workload. A smaller number of things that you explicitly are actively working on at a time while other things are in a holding bin waiting to be pulled into active work once something over here finishes. that really does reduce urgent emails because urgent emails tend to be generated by projects that you're actively working on.

49:12The more projects you're actively working on, the more emails requiring urgent responses showing up in your inbox, meaning the more times you have to check it. So if you can reduce your active workload, you reduce the emails that have to be answered. In the book, I get into all sorts of details about how you do this diplomatically. Communication protocols matter as well. This is where, you know, we're in the office hour segment of this show. But office hours as a tool are something I think should be more common in corporations. So you have office hours every day. It's one hour set time, doors open, phones on, Zoom window is ready to receive unscheduled guests.

49:50And when you get communication that threatens to unfold in a sort of rapid back and forth, asynchronous conversation, which is going to require you now to like stick there and respond quickly so that you can get to an answer. you defer it to office hours. Like, yeah, this is going to take a little discussion. Grab me at my next office hours when you can. Boom, five minutes, it gets done there as opposed to unfolding throughout the day. Groups should have docket clearing meetings every other day where open issues don't just get emailed to the group. They get put in a shared dock. And in the docket clearing meeting, you go through those items.

50:21Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, one after another. Figure out what to do with each. Check in on it again at the next docket clearing meeting. So there's simple communication protocols you can put in place as well that also reduce the number of just isolated emails that arrive or slacks that arrive or T-messages arrive that require an answer right away. If you want more of those details, you should also read my book, A World Without Email, that gets way into the weeds on rethinking how communication happens to move away from urgent messages that arrive unexpectedly and still need a quick response.

50:55It's good to see we're getting through a lot of my books. Yeah. Can we get through all eight? Probably not, but you never know. All right, what do we got next? John wants to know what happens when the craftsman mindset doesn't yield results. Ah, it's another book, Jesse. The Craftsman Mindset comes from my book, So Good They Can't Ignore You Back from 2012. We're covering a lot of ground here. I feel good about it. All right, let me read this message from John. John says, for three years, I worked in web development and was fired because I was not good enough compared to the other people with the same work experience as me, which unfortunately was true.

51:35Skip to a couple weeks ago, I tried to enroll in a university as a CS major to prove to myself that hard work does pay off, like what you wrote in the Craftsman mindset. But even though I tried my best, I failed at two prerequisite courses that I needed to pass. So in this crossroads in my life, I want to ask you a question. What if even with the right mindset and good even hard work ethic, one can't do even the most elementary level task? All right. Well, John, that's a good question. You are capable. You are capable of doing all sorts of things. It's just a matter of building to the skill level that matches whatever it is that you're trying to pursue.

52:15So I do not want you down on yourself. I do not want you thinking that you somehow are less than in your capabilities than your colleagues at that web development job or in that CS program. If you want, you could get to either of those places. What matters is how do you do that? And I think this is where we're getting the actual disconnect here. Your question keeps emphasizing again and again this idea of work ethic and hard work. It actually reconceptualizes my craftsman mindset of saying you should work hard and not be lazy. But that's not quite right. That's a common trope that we have. It's a simplifying trope that like what matters is just like the willingness to do something hard and that the hardness of what you're doing itself will be rewarded with success.

53:04That like some people aren't willing to do hard work and you are and that hard work itself alchemizes in the professional advancement. But hard work by itself doesn't guarantee you anything. It has to actually be aimed at the right efforts. And there is an art to figuring out what are the right efforts to aim my energy towards to over time get the biggest return from that energy expenditure. There's an art to it that we don't necessarily teach. And I think that's what the issue is here. So you probably struggle in that web development job because you did not yet have the right skill base to do that.

53:41So you could apply as much work as you want once you're in the job, but if you don't have the skill base, people with it are going to outshine you. Same thing with the CS course. Sure, maybe you think those courses were elementary, but there was probably a background both in terms of things like mathematics and logical thinking as well as just a comfort with how do you approach fast-moving technical courses that without that, that wasn't going to go well. You could build that, but without that, that wasn't going to go well. So I want you thinking more in terms of the classic craftsman mindset from my book.

54:10which is you always ask whatever endeavor you're doing, how can I be more useful than I am right now? And the key thing there is to find answers that are a reasonable step from where you currently are. Otherwise, you just project yourself into what you want to be true. You're like, well, what I want to be is a great web developer. Let me just like take a web development job. But you have to say, you know, if I'm in a job where like web development skills would be useful, you're like, how can I be more useful than right now? Now, what's a small step you can move that's going to make you better than you are at the moment but it's achievable?

54:45And then you do that again, and then you do it again, and then you do it again. It's the aggregation of small deliberate steps that leads to productive journeys. So I think you need to – your work ethic is admirable, and that's going to get you anywhere you need to go. We just have to aim it now. You've got to aim it at small, achievable, evidence-based steps that moves you closer to being increasingly valuable in whatever it is you do. You're just trying to make leaps that are too big. I want to go through a trial of fire to prove myself. But it's the specific skills that matter, and that requires more of a gradualist approach.

55:22But if you're relentless, step, done. Reasonable step, done. Reasonable step, done. If you're relentless, progress accrues. Progress aggregates. So don't leap too far forward, but keep moving forward. I don't want you to think that you're lesser than anyone else. Your hard work ethic is probably better than most of those other people that you encountered. You just have to aim it in the most reasonable incremental steps possible. And probably to do that, make sure you're not watching too much of that sort of hustle culture YouTube stuff where it's just, you know, be willing to put in the 20 hours a day and that's how you do it.

55:57This is a marathon, not a sprint. We got to be reasonable there. I should push that book more. That's a good book, Jesse. So good they can't ignore you. Plus, you can push some of your schooling books because people are prepping for like the SITs and ACT and stuff like that. Oh, I know. I know. I feel like, okay, we got to get those all in. Also, you need to read how to win a college, how to become a straight student, and how to become a high school superstar. I'll tell you, you know, my oldest son's in eighth grade and he rues the fact that I wrote all those books because they're relevant to where he is in life and he doesn't want to hear it.

56:31He doesn't want to hear it from his dad. All right. Do we have one more? Our final question is about an AI op-ed making the rounds. Oh, he's got to get some AI in, right? What else? We need something for people to yell at me about. So let's see here. Ben wrote and said, Ezra Klein's recent AI op-ed needs a Cal Newport response. Okay, let's put this op-ed up here on the screen. The title is, There's Something We Have to Do Right Now About AI. There's Ezra, his home library. And then we get a long op-ed. The reason why this is so long, I read it, of course. The reason why it's so long is it's actually a monologue episode of his podcast.

57:15He has a client show that they then cleaned up the transcript and released it. So it's longer than the average op-ed because it's based on a long conversation. I read it. Ezra covers a lot of points in it. I pulled out a quote here from the beginning that I think captures the primary point of the op-ed. So let me read that quote first, and then we can talk about it. So Ezra said, but taking their warning seriously, he's talking about the particular AI leaders of the frontier labs that have been talking about AI has an X percent chance of killing us all. But taking their warning seriously doesn't just mean doing what they say and stopping where they say to stop.

57:53The language that's taken hold in both Silicon Valley and Washington is a phrase these companies chose. Pace the frontier. But pacing the frontier isn't enough. Walking quickly off a cliff is only marginally better than sprinting off one. Human beings need to control the frontier, and controlling the frontier means stopping the labs from doing something they're on the cusp of doing. Recursive self-improvement. the process by which AIs begin atomously building and improving new generations of more powerful AIs at ever more rapid speeds. All right. I do have thoughts. Instead of drinking water before I say do these AI episodes, I should just do like a shot of whiskey.

58:35I think that's where we are now. All right. We're going to talk about recursive self-improvement. Me and my friend Dr. Daniels need to have a quick conference first. It's kind of where we are these days. First, I want to say I like what Ezra's doing here. He's doing something that I've also been trying to do in my recent essays. I have a new piece coming out. It may be out already when this episode airs or not. It's also doing this thing that I like that Ezra's doing. And what it is that Ezra's doing that is good here is moving the discussion of AI control to the substrate of specificity. it's something that me and a lot of observers were very frustrated about the way the frontier labs mainly Dario Amadei and Sam Altman the way they're talking about concerns about ai is they're being incredibly general they use the phrase ai generic it's a very generic term but they use it as a stand-in for the specific systems and research projects that they're working on i went through Dario's Pacing the Frontier letter, there's three terms he uses throughout.

59:38AI, AI system, and AI model to describe their systems. The advantage to them of being so generic is that it implies this narrative in which AI is a singular technology. There's like, there's AI. And that AI advances along this sort of unavoidable, inevitable, linear path. And your only choices are speed up movement on that path, slow down movement on that path, or just stop working on AI. That is the mental model they want us to have of this technology. And like, well, we can't stop because then the Chinese will do it. But we shouldn't speed up because the robots with the, you know, eye lasers will kill us all.

1:00:23So maybe what we should do is slow down. And what Ezra is doing in this article, which I've been trying to do as well, is to say, no, no, no, no. AI is a very broad category that has many, many different types of systems and many, many different types of experiments and things you might do on those systems. And we're going to get specific about what systems and experiments and research is bad. And we're going to demand to know why are you doing those? Why is this company say it's unnecessary? Why, you know, maybe this is what we want to stop. So there's a substrate of specificity that's been missing from this discussion because too many people are cowed by the technical complexity of this technology.

1:00:59And I like to see even non-technical writers like Ezra breaking through that. And so he's pointing here to a very specific type of research experiment that Anthropic and OpenAI are really racing towards, recursive self-improvement. So let's talk about recursive self-improvement. What is this? Well, here's the first thing you need to know. It's not a computer science idea. It's not a technical idea that their engineers came up with and now they're concerned about it. Actually, its origins go back to a paper that a statistician named I.L. Good wrote in the 1960s for an AI conference. But then it got picked up and popularized in the 90s and 2000s by futurist circles.

1:01:44So the extropians, which really became big on an email list, listserv in the 1990s, the extropians were all about these optimistic visions for technological utopias. And they had two major tools they used to justify why those utopias might happen. Nanotechnology and superintelligent AI delivered through recursive self-improvement. Nanotechnology was new. They were very inspired by a book that was written by a researcher named Eric Drexler. and they could just basically say, look, I can't explain to you how nanobots are gonna repair our bodies and prevent us from dying, but we just have this vague idea from Drexler's book that nanobots can create other nanobots and they'll become more sophisticated and everything is possible basically.

1:02:28And on the AI front, they're like, look, I don't know how to build an AI system that's gonna be super intelligent or what we would need, but we don't have to figure it out. What's gonna happen is recursive self-improvement. A system will create a better system, that system will create a better system and that will speed up and then boom, There'll be something called takeoff and we have the digital god. So it was a way, both the nanotechnology discussions and the recursive self-improvement superintelligence discussions, these were both ways for futurists to posit a utopian future without having to be technical, without having to get into the details of like how these systems would work or how they're going to overcome obstacles.

1:03:07So that's where RSA got popular. Now, when you had the rationalist movement break off from the extropians led by Eliezer Yudkowsky, who was a big participant on the extropian listservs, he wasn't technical, right? He only has an eighth grade education. He's not an engineer. Yudkowsky really leaned on RSI as a way of saying, for sure, we're going to get super intelligent AI. So now let's start doing a lot of thought experiments about what that means. Another person on that extropian mailing list was Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford, who really influenced William McCaskill and Toby Orbe and the other effective altruists, this utilitarian philosophy movement that was starting at Oxford.

1:03:45He really influenced them that superintelligence caused by RSI is the thing to really worry about. And so RSI served a useful role for these futurists because they weren't technical. And it gave you a way of being confident that super intelligent AI was coming with this sort of pleasing thought experiment that prevented you from having to argue about what specific technological breakthroughs would be needed to actually create these futures. So RSI was a rhetorical tool used by largely non-technical futurists. So why is OpenAI and Anthropic talking about it? And they are, right? I mean, Jacob Pachowski, the chief scientist at OpenAI, recently wrote this letter where he said RSI is absolutely necessary to advance AI.

1:04:36And then Dario Amade cited that letter in his Pacing the Frontier letter of his own as evidence that RSI was already happening and something that is inevitable. So why are these two labs embracing this non-technical idea that came out of futurist circles? It's not something that AI researchers were thinking or talking about. It's because both of those labs were started to advance futurist principles. OpenAI was started as a lab. It was heavily influenced by rationalist and effective altruist to make sure that the inevitable superintelligence that was going to come from RSI would be benevolent, not evil.

1:05:11Anthropic was founded out of OpenAI because Dario Amadei, his sister, and several other OpenAI employees worried that Sam Altman wasn't effective enough at trying to bring forward this rationalist, effective, altruist, futurist view of superintelligent AI god is coming and we have to make sure it's benevolent. So they came out of the futurist circles that popularized RSI. So then to make the prophecies of this futurism true, those two labs, unique among all of the people building hyperscaled LLMs, feel like RSI is important because it's part of the prophecy. We've been saying for 20 years, this is how we're going to get to God.

1:05:51So now they're running around saying we're getting there, we're working on it, we have to get there, it's really important. It's very critical to know that this is unique to the two labs that are connected to futurism. Recently, Mark Zuckerberg, in a sort of remarkable tweet that he put out, called out OpenAI and Anthropic about this. He says, hey, if you're worried, I'm paraphrasing here, but he basically said, if you're worried about safety, how about you put more of your attention on, and he said compute, not attention. But he's like, how about you dedicate all this compute towards building products that are useful to customers instead of chasing after recursive self-improvement?

1:06:30So Zuckerberg is kind of calling them out and saying, that's futurist stuff. This is not about – it's not some inevitable thing you have to do to build useful AI products. It's because your prophecies told you this is what has to happen to get the god. So they're starting to be called out by the other AI companies. All right. So RSI, as Ezra points out, is a very specific thing you could pursue and it's dangerous. Now, is it going to lead to a takeoff and these all-powerful beings? I would say most sober engineers I know that aren't connected to that world would say, no, that's nonsense. We don't actually know how to build systems that can do fundamental research on AI.

1:07:10And even if you did, we have no reason to believe that there's this sort of steady sequence of improvements that will continue on until you get to some sort of positive superintelligent capability that we don't even know if it is computationally possible. But you don't need that for recursive self-improvement to be dangerous because what do you get as you more and more try to get your AI systems to update themselves, to change the code of agents, or to design and run their own training runs on LLMs that power those agents? What do you get? More unpredictability, more obfuscation. You lose more and more human understanding of the systems themselves.

1:07:50So you take all of the issues we're having now with these sort of Mad Max style agent experiments that OpenA and Anthropica are running and you make them 10 times worse. If you say we're already finding the systems we built to be unpredictable, then now have parts of these systems basically be designed behind closed doors and we're just going to observe them. Why in the world would you do that unless you were, again, trying to make your prophecy of summoning digital ball a reality? So this is what's important about Ezra's call. It's like that's a specific thing. This is what Dario and Sam don't want you to do.

1:08:25They want you just to – inevitable trajectory. All you can do is slow down or speed up. They don't want you to come in and say, no, no, no, no. Why are you doing that experiment? Stop doing that. In fact, we're going to make it illegal for you to do that. And now you've got to justify yourself. They don't want to be asked to justify themselves because if you push them hard enough on some of these questions, they're going to come back to Rocco's basilisk. Like if we don't do everything we can to summon the god ourselves, when the god gets here, they're going to be wrathful towards us. You get to weird, futurist, apocalyptic, estochological territory if you really push these guys farther on the specific things they're doing that none of the other hyperscaling AI labs are.

1:09:01So they don't want you to open the covers and look at the specific things you're doing. But of course that's the way we have to intervene on AI because that's what we do in any other type of potentially dangerous manufacturing operation. If there's a bio lab that's had multiple incidents where dangerous pathogens are released, we don't stand back and say, guys, we got to slow down and pace biotechnology. We shut down that lab. We say, what are your safety procedures? Why were you handling – you clearly are – this is irrational or dangerous or you don't have the right standards or you're running experiments that we don't think is safe.

1:09:38And we're going to – you can't do that anymore. Or if your lab can't do this safely, your lab is shut down. So the substrate of specificity is where discussions of AI intervention need to land. So Ezra is talking about this the right way. I've been trying to talk about this the right way. I think Gary Marcus has done a really good job talking about this way. We don't have to engage with concerns about AI on the terms of the eccentrics that are talking about these concerns. They can give us all the speeches they want about whether it's 10 or 10.4 % that the robot killer swarms are going to use lasers in our eyes or instead they're going to use brain-piercing lasers to come in through our nose.

1:10:16We can say, great. Good for you, kid. But now we have some questions for you. What's going on at that lab of yours? Why are you doing it? Why aren't these other people doing it? Why are only the two labs connected to futurism, the two labs that are talking the most about human extinction? And why are all the other people who are working on high-level hyperscale AI think that you're a little bit off? We got some questions for you. And so I like this column by Ezra, and I like this general approach to AI. All right. I try to avoid Jesse having an AI rant in every episode, but in this case, like one slipped in under the cover.

1:10:55All right, so let's end this show by just checking in. First and foremost, the big news is we're very happy to have Jesse back in the studio. As Jesse saw, I installed the sort of like over-the-top fancy light. When I say I installed, I texted an electrician and he came and installed it. I still can't figure it out, but I'm working on it. You have to program it with a phone. I don't know how to do it. Remind the audience what you want the light to do. So, okay. And this is much more important than human extinction. It's like a light. So you have a big bar light LEDs with four spotlights, two on either end.

1:11:37And I have one spotlight, in theory, will be aimed at each wall. I can't figure out how to do that yet. But they'll have one spotlight aimed at each wall. When I just do the switch, it's normal mode. It's just a nice warm, you know, warm white light like you would have and it kind of lights up the room and the walls. But you can program it and I want to have a deep work mode. And the deep work mode is going to lower the main light and then have sort of sharper spotlights just on the walls where I'm hanging things that have like various meaning or points of inspiration to me around the room. And maybe the light on the walls will even not even be white but maybe blue or something like that.

1:12:12So I can, especially at night, turn that room into a concentration chamber. And then we're just in there editing or something, just light the whole thing up. So that's the vision. But ironically, I can't figure out the technology. Speaking of vision, did you get any comments about vision documents from any audience members?

1:12:34Yeah. When did we talk about that? I talked about that, man, it feels like forever ago, but it was like, yeah, three episodes ago or something. um no one did anyone send you one no not yet i think i like i casually put out the call if you want to share your vision document for the fall you should we could talk about on the show but i don't think i made that clear enough so i'll make the call clear now if you're following some sort of semester quarterly seasonal planning system like we talked about a few weeks ago send me an anonymized or cleaned up a redacted version of your of your vision document strategic plan because we could share some of them.

1:13:10I think people really, people like to see these actual examples. All right, here's the other big news that I just sprung on, Jesse. We're going to update the studio, what it looks like. I like my black curtain, but it turns out that having a black background is a problem for like almost anything you do in a studio. Anytime like I'm on TV, it just looks weird. It's like the host is in this block and it's always light. And then I'm kind of coming out of the darkness. I'm like Nostarofu or something like that. I'm from like a vampire movie. It just always looks weird to have a dark background. If there's anyone else involved in a discussion, any interview, any appearance on another podcast, any times I'm doing zoom in here, whether it's to be recorded or privately.

1:13:54So we need to move past our curtain stage and we're going to do some sort of backdrop. So we're willing to hear your suggestions for people who want to know, look, I'll open this curtain. This is what's back here. So that's just a wall. So we could put anything on that wall. I'm thinking some sort of wood paneling, maybe a couple shelves with some books, books, books and a lamp. Yeah. We could fill them with books I wrote. I don't know. Something like that. So we're probably going to do something like that. We're going to change up the lighting set up, change up. So, like, Jesse, go to your shot for a second for people who are watching.

1:14:36So it feels like you don't know what's around Jesse, but he's actually zoom out. He's actually surrounded by lots of gear and stuff like this. So we're actually going to have I want a real producer shot for Jesse where you actually can see that he's at all the control panels or this or that. And I don't know. We're figuring it all out. If you have thoughts about the studio background, let us know. Again, we only have, we'll have like three, four feet behind us to play with. So it's going to be a little bit tight in here, but you should give the audience a heads up on why we're not using headphones too.

1:15:09Oh yeah. Um, our new video team that's, you know, working on the intros and stuff like that said, don't wear headphones. No one wears headphones. Uh, I, you know, I, I was explaining to Jesse, I wear headphones. I learned that from Joe Rogan, right? Joe Rogan always wears headphones and I just when I set up the studio I just remember hearing him talk about it why does he always wear headphones is because he says in natural conversation people talk over each other but that sounds bad on tape because it just jumbles and you can't hear anything so if you if him and his guests wear headphones here's his theory you're hearing the mix in your ears you won't talk over people because when you talk over people the mix is completely incomprehensible and so it helps people better take turns but I monologue so that doesn't really matter or do remote interviews.

1:15:58So that really doesn't matter as much. But I was told, wait a second, no one has headphones on outside of Joe Rogan. You know what? I think he's right, Jesse. Think about it. Have you seen any video podcast outside of Rogan where people have headphones on? I just was used to it. I wonder what Mad Dog does. Well, he's on radio too, though. McAfee doesn't wear headphones, right? Yeah. Sometimes they'll have in earwigs. You have to be able to hear the collars and you have to hear, like radio people have headphones they can hear from their producer and their callers. But I've done like all the podcast, except Rogan's.

1:16:35And yeah, really people don't wear headphones unless they're doing an interview or something. I don't know what I'm going to do with an interview. I guess I'll wear headphones for that or they use, people use like iPod headphones or something. But I like our headphones. Anyways, so less headphones. We can hang the headphones on the wall and behind us. we're going to fill the wall behind us with headphones. Just dozens and dozens of headphones.

1:17:05With realistic looking severed heads. You got to take swings. If you don't take swings, you're not, you know, attention is a, it's a, you're some game. You got to do what you got to do to get attention. So yeah, lots going on. If you've been watching the podcast recently, you'll see we've been evolving the intros and the animations. there's also a naming shift going on which I haven't made official yet in the audio feed but we are shifting from deep questions to the Cal Newport show so there's a lot going on you know I'm on sabbatical so in theory I have a little bit more time this hasn't turned out to be true because I'm involved in like a lot of AI stuff at Georgetown right now but a lot is going on we're kind of getting the 2.0 of the show is coming together so any feedback you have send that over to podcast at calnewport.com if there's a complaint just make sure that you're flagging Jesse.

1:17:51He can handle that. All right. That's enough for today. We'll be back next week for another episode. And until then, as always, stay deep. Hey, if you've made it this far, you must be ready to join my fight for depth in a distracted world. Now, the best way to do this is to join over 125 ,000 people who receive my email newsletter each Monday. You can sign up at calnewport.com slash ideas. And when you do, I will send you a free guide to my seven best ideas about cultivating a deep life. Sign up today, calnewport.com slash ideas.