#484 — Artificial Intimacy

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0:18Sam Harris:If you enjoy what we're doing here and find it valuable, please consider subscribing today. I'm here with Paul Bloom. Paul, it's great to see you again. It's always great to see you, Sam. It's always too long between our conversations. Yeah. No, I haven't checked to see how long it's been, but I'm sure there's a lot that we can talk about here. You're one of the short list of people who I know I'm going to have a good conversation with no matter what's happening and no matter how little prep either of us do. It's like a phone call that I know I'm going to enjoy. I appreciate that. I've been avoiding you since the Epstein files, but I decided to nonetheless push through despite your prominence in those documents.

0:54Sam Harris:Yeah. Yeah. Um, well, we're talking offline about the world cup. Did I glean correctly that you're not, uh, as obsessed with it as I am? Are you not a, uh, a many hour a day watcher of soccer at this point? I'm not, my, my, my sons came to visit and my son, uh, one of my sons came to visit and he's much more of a sort of manly than me. So we watched, uh, we watched sports together and, uh, and it's okay. I, I, I don't want to, you know, I don't want to get into this sort of culture war thing and get too many people to hate me but soccer is is not the most enjoyable sport to watch you didn't play soccer i take it as a in high school or no hockey like we played street hockey right street hockey in the summer and hockey hockey in the winter but i i've never i mean i've kicked around the ball but are you are you uh have you played that was that was the only team sport i played so i kind of sort of feel it from the the inside but i am the genius who uh scheduled this podcast recording during the spain portugal elimination match so i'm the first person i'm going to fire.

1:50Do you have a little screen like in front of you and you're kind of like,

1:52Sam Harris:I'll be watching the game for the next 90 minutes. So I hope you have a lot to say. Yeah. It's a long pause. Yeah. So now you, speaking of, uh, bandwidth and claims on your time, you recently became a father yet again. Is that, uh, how long ago did that happen? Yet again, I have, uh, I have two older sons, uh, terrific boys, 27 and 30, but I, I now am the proud father of a four-month-and-one-week-old. Nice. Congratulations. And this adorable little girl. I just spent the whole morning with her. We went to the park. We had a bottle. You know, good times. Awesome. Awesome. Well, if memory serves, that's not yet the funnest zone of parenthood, but that's still amazing.

2:34Sam Harris:That's great. Do you have an optimal age that you think of? Well, it's just probably not four and a half months. No, no. I don't know. How is sleep? Is sleep through the night? Is sleep happening? She's sleeping through the night. We have a - Oh, that's amazing. I don't know. I know you had your daughter a while ago, but we have something called a snoo. Uh-huh. Is that - Is that some kind of swaddle monstrosity? It's a bassinet. You swaddle up the kid. You clip them into the snoo. And then when they cry, it vibrates. Right. And then it basically vibrations knock them unconscious. And then they sleep.

3:05So our sleep problems, when she grew old enough to be in the snoo, she's actually sleeping great. but now we have to because unfortunately the world does not contain snooze and adults have to sleep without snooze we now have to get her out of it and that's going to be a bit of a challenge

3:18Sam Harris:all right well this is our first ad on the making sense podcast for snoo is that the brand yeah highly recommended i i get 10 from all recommended by a developmental psychologist i highly recommend the snoo awesome okay so uh how are you feeling about the world your children will eventually inherit at this point? What's top of mind for you about the unraveling of culture or anything else? Are you optimistic, pessimistic, avert in your eyes? That's a good question. Whenever you and I talk, we end up talking about Trump and the extreme train wreck of American politics. But I think things will go back to normal.

4:00I think that post-Trump, the world will be wacky in its normal ways, but we'll just have a normal president. You know, it'll be along the lines of a Biden or a Bush or a Clinton or, you know, and, um, this is the happy talk I'm getting from the relative safety of Toronto.

4:18Sam Harris:So what's happening? Yeah. Right. It all feels so good to be out of the, out of the reach of, of, of Trump. At least I've been distracted by things and he's not talking about invading us anymore. Anyway. So I think we're going to get, things will get better, but I am, I don't know what to think about AI. You know, I remember listening to you, you called the warning about AI before everybody else was talking about it, actually. You had some sort of big talk. You just, you know, pointed out that we tend not to worry so much about it. I think you get this line, because it's so cool. And unlike other sort of crises like global pandemics and climate change and nuclear war, there's something about AI which sounds science fiction-y and kind of neat.

4:56But now that we're in an age of, you know, these chatbots, which have, and I think they have extraordinary abilities, way beyond I would have ever predicted. I worry. I know I'm curious whether you share this take. And my take is that it's very, very high variance. On the one hand, it could not affect the world very much. It could be what we have now is kind of the way things are going to go. It's the world plays Google and that'll be fine.

5:19Sam Harris:That seems very low probability to me that. I think so. So the positive thing is it leads us into some sort of post-scarcity world, you know, yeah, a year from now, it solves Alzheimer's two years from now, because it's limitless energy three years. It brings upon a peaceful world government and teaches us about world peace. The bad side is if it doesn't kill us all, it just takes all of our jobs, you know, takes all of the jobs, you know, civil unrest, war, chaos, destruction. And, you know, if, if before AI, I would think, well, you know, my daughter, I try to get her to go to college and become some sort of professional.

5:55And maybe in the family business, she becomes a scholar of some sort. I don't know. I don't know what jobs will be there. What do you think?

6:02Sam Harris:Well, given that your daughter is only four and a half months old, I think there really is no way to guess what the world is going to be like in 17 and a half years. I mean, it's just, you know, whether college is going to be a thing. But it's harder, right. But it's harder now. So my boys, watching the 1990s, well, okay, you set up college funds, you have just a general direction, and you never know, but that's the general idea. But here I feel it's different. Yeah, no, there's an acceleration of cultural change. There's no question. So let's kind of move through those various possibilities. But before we kind of follow each branch, what has most surprised you about AI in recent years?

6:47Sam Harris:I mean, it sounds like you didn't foresee somehow, like many of us didn't foresee just how quick the changes would be. And I mean, for me, it's one thing that's been surprising is just how quickly we accommodate to change and are no longer surprised by it. I mean, you know, it's like I am for me that the landmark here or the or the fake landmark, I mean, the mirage of sorts was expecting the Turing test would be a thing. And when the Turing test was passed and passed so well that it was then failed, because, you know, obviously, this couldn't be a person who's given me exactly 400 words on any topic I want within three seconds.

7:24Sam Harris:I mean, it was just amazing to have thought that passing the Turing test would be this culturally salient, psychologically, you know, even destabilizing encounter with the uncanny. And yet, no, it's just like having a calculator or something. I mean, like there's just like there's of course nothing happened when the Turing test was passed. it's it's the louis ck routine right where he's talking about being on an airplane and people complaining that the peanuts aren't aren't being delivered quick enough and there's a bit of tribunals and the wi-fi is unsteady he says you're you're flying in the sky like a god yeah why don't you appreciate it more and now people are saying you know gosh i i asked chad a question and it got a little bit wrong what the hell yeah and you know well and i'm thinking you're talking to a super intelligent machine that can that can have deep enriching conversation with any aspect of your life that could give you personal faith, that could mimic a therapist, a companion.

8:20And, you know, why do you marvel at it more? So, you know, I'm a psychologist. I wrote, I wrote, I wrote a book called Psych, which review all of psychology and it got published in 2023. And the one part I like to change is I talk a little bit about AI. Isn't AI impressive, but of course it can have a conversation like people. It can't, you know, there's all these basic things you can do and then chat came out yeah and then and did it all and then it got better and better and better and better and you're right that one of the weird thing is how what how quickly we got used to it that that that really i can pick up my phone set it to voice mode and have a conversation with an artificial being that is i don't have to talk to it in code i don't have to use a programming language i can say i get life advice from it i get there are people who and And we could talk about this.

9:09I find it very interesting. People who have friends, relationships, partners who are artificial beings. And although I'm not tempted that way, it's not madness because they sound like people and we created them.

9:23Sam Harris:Yeah, I noticed that I'm not engaging it in voice mode. And I think I'm not doing that for a reason. I think this is something you and I spoke about, I think, several times. And we wrote an op-ed about it for the New York Times in response to the series Westworld, where we argued that Westworld was functionally impossible because, you know, a theme park where you get to rape and kill Dolores. I mean, this is going to act like a bug light for psychopaths. I mean, there's no way a psychologically normal person can go spend a weekend like that and then come home to wife and family and think normal thoughts about themselves or have the people who know what they were up to think normal thoughts about them.

10:05Sam Harris:I mean, people would begin to treat you as deviant if you wanted to spend your time that way. Because this is just the consequence of getting out of the uncanny valley and being in the presence of a true human simulacrum and acting like a psychopath there. So I feel like there's something worth considering around this issue of losing sight of whether or not it's an even interesting question to wonder whether AI is conscious. Many people are speculating about AI consciousness now and, you know, asking, you know, what would, how we know. And my feeling has been for the longest time, and certainly ever since you and I wrote that op-ed together, is that we're going to just build something that's going to seem so credibly conscious that most people are going to lose touch with whether it's even an interesting doubt to have.

10:55I think that's right. Once it looks like a person and sounds like a person, you know, right now you could talk to it. I don't think we're that far away from having a Zoom conversation. with it, where, you know, as you're looking at me and I'm looking at you, it could just be AIs doing it. And I think, put aside, once it has a body, then it's going to be irresistible to think of it as human. We haven't been wired up. We've been wired up to take things that look like people and treat them as people. So that's half of it. Half of it might be that even if it's not even close to conscious, we can't help but treat it as such.

11:26And that's going to open up a whole lot lot of things. The other half of it, and this is actually, there's a wonderful paper by Maddie Wilkes, professor at University of Edinburgh, and she was my postdoc for a while. We're actually writing something up on this, but she makes the following argument. She's very interesting. A lot of people seem to think that, well, if we were to discover that as conscious, we would then treat it kindly. We can't enslave it. It has to have rights. We can't torture it and so on. She argues this is wrong because actually we know that non-human animals feel pain, suffer, have some degree of cognitive sophistication.

11:59Yeah, we torture and eat them all the time. And so it shows that we could think of something as conscious and yet treat it horribly. And so that's not what's going to save the AIs. The consciousness isn't what it's going to

12:12Sam Harris:Right. Except, I mean, presumably, I mean, we're less and less comfortable with that not perfectly expanded circle of moral concern. And the circle has definitely expanded. It expands first to things that are most like us, right? And so like, obviously mistreating chimpanzees is something that exactly nobody is for at this point. And, uh, you know, our, our, the, uh, depth of our concern diminishes from there, but in the presence of AI that is smarter than us, that is more articulate than us, that we'll be able to argue better than we can around the ethics of all of this. And which, you know, in this, at this point will seem conscious to us and may even claim to be conscious, I feel like it's suddenly going to be, I mean, they'll be standing right in the center of the circle with us insofar as we believe that there's something that it's like to be them.

13:05I think that's right, but I don't think that the linguistic and cognitive skills are enough. So, you know, my favorite movie when thinking about AI is her. You've seen it? Yeah. I think in 2013, Scarlett Johansson plays Samantha, which our main character quickly falls in love with, and we do too, watching it. But she has a voice. She has emotion. She talks like a person. Once we have that, once that's fully instantiated, plus the intelligence and rationality you're talking about, yeah, it'll be irresistible.

13:38Sam Harris:Well, we do. So, crucially, the Scarlett Johansson character is disembodied, right? So, I feel like we're already, anyone who's dealing with an AI companion now is essentially living in the her universe, right? I mean, again, I'm not spending much time with the voice, but I think even, I think didn't in the launch of ChatGPT version whatever, didn't they steal Scarlett Johansson's voice and get sued? They asked for her permission. She said no in true Hollywood style. They knocked it off. Somebody who sounded exactly like her and then she sued. I don't know how that came about, but she should have won because the voice that it originally had sounded exactly like her.

14:18So you said a couple of times you don't interact with the voice and that this might be because you tend to use a computer or whatever, but, but do you have a worry?

14:27Sam Harris:I do. Actually, I do. I mean, so I haven't thought much about this, but, and it is mostly just a use case issue for me. I mean, I'm so text-based and I'm, I mean, the, the, the utility of AI for me is to, is to do research. So really that needs to be text, you know, rather than somebody talking to me. But when I've played around with the voice, I noticed that a different kind of mimetic psychology comes online. And this is what gave me my concern. You know, my personal concern was first peaked when, hey, I will say you must have seen some of these kind of viral videos around the failure modes that still exist for these LLMs.

15:07Sam Harris:Where like if you ask any one of them, I think this is probably still true at the moment we're talking. And if you ask any one of them, give me a number below 1 ,000 that has an A in it. None of them can do this. I mean, there is no number apparently below 1 ,000 that has an A in it. None of them, they all fail this, but they all confidently give you numbers that don't have A's, right? So they'll all say, oh, yeah, well, so 70, 70's got an A. And you say, no, no, 70 does not have an A. And they say, oh, you're right, right. So they'll endlessly apologize and endlessly answer confidently with new numbers.

15:40Sam Harris:and it's, it's very bizarre behavior, but I was sitting with my, my daughter showed me this phenomenon and we were in chat mode with one of these bots. Uh, I think it was Claude and, uh, effectively making fun of it. Right. And, you know, and it's, and as it was failing, I detected in its tone, a kind of a subtle, like loss of patience, like there's something shifted in its tone. I mean, we were just laughing at its expense endlessly. And I was getting somehow uncomfortable with this because it was a kind of social shaming that you would never do with a person with a clear conscience. But the AI, it seemed to me, subtly started to react to it.

16:25Sam Harris:And honestly, the hair on the back of my neck stood up. I just felt like, okay, we're pissing off the robots now and they're going to they're going to remember this and it's going to matter at some point yeah want to check your bank account sam see what happened to it exactly as you fuck with me yeah that'll be the least of my problems but yeah yeah i mean part of the issue which is engaged a lot of people is the sycophancy the the sucking up which is i think part of why you get this effect which is it's very hard for it not to want to give you what you want so you ask for something and it just can't say i gotta disappoint you man there's no there's nothing that doesn't have a letter A.

17:01Sam Harris:Well, no, but I did switch that off. I think they still fail. You went into the sentence? I don't think that's the variable there, but yeah, my version, I remember I did lobotomize the sycophancy of at least one of the LLMs I use, and that kind of helped. I did that, and then I changed it back again after a month. Oh, yeah. I saw that from your talk. I don't get as much love as you, maybe. I just kind of, you know, I kind of liked it telling me how smart I was and how good my questions were. Yeah. Um, but, but, but I mean, I noticed that I feel the need to be, I mean, this has widely been remarked upon, you know, like virtually everyone else.

17:37Sam Harris:I say things like, you know, please, you know, show me this, right? Like, so dropping the, those kind of courtesies seems wrong, not because, and I, I really have zero concern that the LLMs are currently conscious. but again it seems like a um a violation of social norms that i don't want to encourage in myself and at a certain point that would these it's just all of our adherence to these norms are going to be totally hijacked by the technology and we're just going to feel like we're talking to persons yeah and then you know there are an increasing number of people i think it was like some study finds some large proportion maybe a third of teenagers have confided in llms and asked some advice for intimate personal matters.

18:22I think the young people are going to do it more and more. And I know friends of mine, I know adults who have had problems in their marriages and they, you know, two in the morning, they're talking to Claude, they're talking to chat and they're to say, and she said this and what should I do and everything. And I don't want to, I don't want to mock it. I don't want to deride it. I think people find solace in it. I think that unlike social media, which drives people towards batty extremes, often AI has sort of a normalizing function. Yeah, yeah. I was asking at once questions about the Holocaust.

18:54And I said, could this have happened in any other country at the same time? What do you think? What could have been in Austria? And then it sort of sternly reminded me, this really did happen. I will have no track of Holocaust denial. And I kind of, okay, dude, I got it. But it doesn't indulge in conspiracy theories. For the most part, it's a normalizing thing. I think there's a lot. I am not a booster. I think that they're dangerous, but I think that these conversations that people have are to a large extent good for them. And of course, alleviate loneliness for a lot of them.

19:25Sam Harris:Yeah. So you just invoke two different use cases there. I mean, one is kind of the advice that AI can give for relationships. Like you say, I just had this argument with my wife and this is what happened. And I haven't done much of this, but I know people who have really, who really feel that certain difficult conversations have been kind of expertly navigated in advance by consulting AI. And then they've just had a much better go of it in real life with the person who, you know, has their own user interface issues. But you're talking now about actually as a remedy for loneliness and social isolation too.

20:02Sam Harris:So let's talk about that because I know you've, you've, you recently gave a, a TED talk about that. And, um, it's not out yet though, right? It's not available. It's not as coming out in a couple of months. Okay. It's, uh, but I saw it and, uh, I recommend it. And so let's back up for a second and just talk about the problem of loneliness as you see it and what it amounts to. Like what, what a, what a proper cure for it beyond just being surrounded by people who love you and to whom you matter. you know uh if you can instantly switch that on obviously that is a uh cure but i know you're a fan of rebecca goldstein's framing of you know of mattering here so maybe we could start there yeah she has this uh wonderful book where she talks about the importance of mattering to another person i think that's a nice framework which to see loneliness obviously loneliness isn't just a matter of being alone some people do very well in solitude and some people and often And alternatively, you could be surrounded by people and feel tremendously lonely.

20:59Sam Harris:Yeah. It's not even necessarily a matter of being loved. I think it's a matter of mattering to people, having value, having weight, being taken seriously. I think she describes that as being deserving of attention. I think that's... Yes, that's right. Yeah. That's right. And that, sort of to jump ahead, is that regardless of what impression we get, that's actually one thing AI can't do for us, really. because if I'm talking to you, which means that you've taken your time to talk to me, giving up accidents while watching the soccer game, you're spending your time, these precious hours you have on earth.

21:35The truth is, Paul,

21:36Sam Harris:it was time I did not want to give. You didn't know. Yeah. This is an accident that worked to your advantage. You know, but, and also, you know, at three in the morning, you know, I kind of knock on your door and say, Sam, I want to talk. Yeah. You know, and maybe for me, maybe not, But basically, there's a value in a person making time for you. And at the micro level, you know, you say something funny, I laugh. You've affected me in some way. You know, I disagree. I get angry. I say, wow, you made a great point. And we're resonating to each other. And I don't think an AI really has any of that.