#650 - Geoffrey Miller - How Dangerous Is The Threat Of AI To Humanity?

33:40China said, well, we can't be sure that this thing isn't going to start telling everyone about Tiananmen Square. So because we don't have control over it, we're not going to let it loose with the public, which is it has to be curtailing the development because it's not able to do any of the learning that it would have done. Had it been iterated over 1 .25 billion users, is all of whom are asking it how to make a cake this evening. Yeah, I think it's, it's very interesting because insofar as the Chinese government really wants AI mostly for purposes of social control and social stability and censorship and reducing crime and reducing terrorism, right?

34:24To have a much narrower range of AI applications than your typical American AI company once. Chinese government, I think, is not really interested in the kind of techno -utopian vision of the singularity and transhumanism and let's all upload our minds into the matrix, the way that you see in a lot of the Bay Area AI enthusiasts.

34:58They're Here again, what's happening, I think, is the American AI companies are out the cutting edge, right? They're far and away more advanced as far as we know than anything happening in China, much less Russia or Brazil or the UK. And they're just kind of trying to play catch up. What's happening is like we're far out in front in terms of the arms race. If I was a Chinese policy expert, I would be freaking out. I'd be wanting to play catch up. I'd be very concerned about AI having a kind of, America having a kind of AI hegemony. And it would, it would look like a threat to me that I have to respond to.

35:42So we are setting the pace in terms of the arms race. If we slow down, right, China might go, whoo, thank God. like we don't have the talent or the resources to play this arms race. We can, okay, if America's relaxing, we can relax too. We can focus on other issues like, no, how do you get Chinese people to have kids, stuff like that, right? Yeah, I matchmaking, right? That might be a key application for them. So I think here again, Americans have to look in the mirror and go to what extent are we really setting the pace with the arms raised? Are we forcing other countries to try to catch up? That's a really good point.

36:26Maybe if we slow down, we can all take a step back, take a breath, pause, think, what exactly are we doing? Should we be playing this Russian roulette? Yeah, that's a very good point. that I hadn't considered. I suppose as well that the wake of what is on the internet and what is available and what is a public knowledge about what's happening at all of these different neural net companies will be slip streamed in some regard by foreign actors. The source was, I think, a long time ago, open sourced and then it's no longer open sourced, which means that you can't fully see what's going on side in terms of workings, but I'm sure that you can determine a good amount of stuff or at least a non insignificant amount of stuff from that.

37:15One of the words that we haven't used yet that would have been used an awful lot 10 years ago was alignment problem. So how relevant is discussing the alignment problem now? And actually before you can get to that, does it look like if you were to put your money on the table, the front runner contender for creating AGI, would it be neural networks? Can a large learning model become sentient and be the AGI thing?

37:51I don't know, on this point, right? There's a big variety of opinions. And on the one hand, people like my friend Gary Marcus at New York University argue that large language models just based on deep learning and just based on neural networks cannot do many of the key cognitive tasks that humans do. So can't reach AGI. And he's got various arguments for that and some pretty good recent books on AI. On the other hand, you have people saying, well, people keep underestimating deep learning and keep underestimating what it can do. And as far as we can see, there aren't really over the human brain looks an awful lot like a large neural network.

38:42We don't exactly learn using deep learning methods as GPT does, but we're basically just a bunch of neurons with connections. So, what do you think? Is it just, can we just layer transistor upon transistor upon reinforcement and will we arrive at something that approaches sentience and or AGI? Well, most of the work I did in neural networks back in the day was based on the assumption that no, you can't just train a big random kind of incoherent, formless, blank slate neural network to do anything. It needs a bunch of structure. It needs an architecture. It might even need an evolved architecture where you have to try a bunch of different ways of wiring up large networks before you can get something that's really smart.

39:37Now I'm more humble. I don't know. I was excited about that because I studied a lot of evolution opology and animal behavior and it looked like simple nervous systems often had quite a bit of architecture to them. You look at a bumblebee or an ant nervous system and it's highly architected. It's not just a glob of neurons. There's like ganglia doing different things. There's perceptual clumps of nerve cells doing particular things. But at this point, I don't know. Like, it wouldn't surprise me that much if you, you know, GPT eight or nine proved to be able to do pretty much everything that humans can do without having a whole bunch of intrinsic structure.

40:23on the other hand, Gary Marcus might be right, that you actually need a radically different approach. I'm not sure it matters all that much, though in terms of the AI safety issues, because one way or another, the AI companies will figure out how to do AGI, if we give them the money and the talent and the resources and the social support, they will figure it out sooner or later. Why haven't we talked about the alignment problem? Why is that a term that I'm seeing less of as well? Is it just that there's so much AI progression that it's not a problem? Or is there a new issue with regards to this that neural nets have created?

41:07People are still talking about AI alignment. It's just there's so much more buzz right now about the amazing new capabilities, not just of the large language models, but also of mid -journey and dolly and the other generative AI systems for creating images and videos and the ones that can create music and amazing audio. So people are excited about that. People are extra alarmed about the AI risks and everybody interested in so -called AI alignment is still tundling along working on it. I'm still writing essays about AI alignment. It's just gotten slightly overwhelmed by all the other shiny new issues.

41:53What is AI alignment for the people who aren't inducted? The basic notion is how do you get an AI system to be, quote, aligned with human values and preferences and goals? It's kind of like the so -called principle agent problem in companies. Like, if you have a bunch of investors, right, and they are supporting a company and you create like a board of directors and the board of directors gives power to a CEO. How do you make sure the interests and decision making of the CEO are aligned with those of the board of directors and in turn with the shareholders, right? That's a kind of corporate alignment problem.

42:41A political alignment problem would be how do you elect a president that actually serves the interests of the voters instead of their own interests? In terms of AI, it would be how do you create an AI system that actually respects what the human users want it to do or kind of what they really want to do even if they can't quite articulate everything about what they wanted to do? And there's lots and lots of myths and legends going back thousands of years about the pitfalls of getting some power, like some genie that pops out of a lamp where it says, you know, what wishes would you like? And you think, my this turns everything into gold.

43:27And you give it wishes and then it interprets what you want sort of over literally, right, in a way that's absolutely disastrous. So AI alignment in principle is about making sure the AI is kind of doing what you want and even in ways that you can't necessarily articulate that fit with a whole background of human common sense and moral norms that we might not even be able to articulate to the AI system, but that we would still want it to act as if it understands. Yes, however, different individual humans have got different values and conflict of interests happen a lot. So which human values should AI's be aligned with?

44:16Yeah, so this is exactly the issue that I've been writing about in my effective altruism forum from essays for the last year or so. I've pointed out, like you can say, we want the AI to just respect the views of its end user, the consumer who actually buys it, but what if the end user is a terrorist? What if the end user is a political propagandist? What if the end user is in a hostile nation state? What if they're a bad actor, right? Do you really want the AI to do what they want it to do? And second, if you try to aggregate like the collective will of humanity, right? Where you go, well, the AGI should sort of do what people in general would want it to do if it could summarize all of our preferences.

45:05Well, then you get into interesting issues like, well, men and women have like different interests. So should the AI go with the 50 % of people who are male, the 50 % who are female or whatever? people have different political views, right? And in one essay I pointed out 80 % of humans are still involved in organized religion, right? And yet the AI industry is dominated by secular atheists who largely have contempt for religion. So if you have an AI that's trying to be aligned with people in general, and people in general have religious values that are being completely ignored and dismissed and mocked by the AI industry itself.

45:53Right? How do you actually get alignment with people? They don't really mean alignment with what people believe. They kind of sort of mean like we want the AI to be aligned with what a good liberal, secular, humanist, democratic, Bay Area, Tech Bro values. That's really the bottom line. That's what AI alignment actually boils down to in practice. Yes. Does it split the difference? I remember to not spoil the end of superintelligence, but the good guy that comes in at the end is machine extrapolated which is in a world in which we can't be sure that we're going to give a program an instruction and that program is going to take the instruction and turn us all into paper clips or kill us so it can make a cup of coffee.

46:47Telling the machine, do what you think we would have asked you to do, had we have had sufficient wisdom to ask you to do it. But that is roughly machine extrapolated volition. But even that modeling human preferences needs to be done based on a group of humans. And which preferences do you mean? And when preferences come into conflict, which ones win? And if it's 50, 50 between men and women and you split the difference between the two, like is that optimal? Is that actually optimal? Or is it more optimal to swing it toward one way or another? One group might be incredibly vehement about something, but it might be immoral.

47:23Okay. So given the fact that we've been trying to work out ethics and virtue and morality ourselves philosophically for thousands of years and have made some progress but not got anything that's too definitive. Please try and put that into code for me and which which morals do you mean you mean the morals of modern secular 21st century Western industrialized educated people. But why don't we use the ones from the Roman era? Or why don't we say, well, let's wait for another 3 ,000 years and see what which ones come up then? Yeah, and I think there's two additional sort of alignment problems I've been worried about.

48:00One is what I've called embodied values. So when we think of values and preferences, we typically think of things we can articulate verbally. Like if someone says, what do you want for dinner? Like we have a verbal answer we can give. But I made the point that like our brain is only 2 % of our body mass, right? Our body is full of all these other tissues and organs that have evolved their own kind of values and agendas in a way, right? And not all these embodied values, like what your immune system really wants to do is fight off pathogens that might infect you. So ideally you'd want an AI to be aligned not just with the values that our brain can articulate through our words, but that is also kind of like biometically aligned with the interests of our bodies, right, so that we are kept healthy and well and live a long time.

48:55Now, if you ask people, how do those embodied values actually work? Like, we have no idea, right? We can't even articulate those. So methods for training AI system based on human verbal feedback cannot even in principle align with all these embodied values of our bodies. A second issue is, you know, from an evolutionary viewpoint, the development of AGI would be a major evolutionary transition. It's a big thing that's comparable to the evolution of like DNA or the evolution of multicellular life or the evolution of nervous systems. It's a big deal that doesn't just affect humans. It also affects the other 70 ,000 species of vertebrates and the other 10 million species of invertebrates and all the life on the planet.

49:47Now if you ask, okay, how do you align AI not just with humans, right? But all the other kind of organic stakeholders, all the other life forms on Earth who might be affected by AI. Okay, how does the AI learn the true interests of an elephant or a dolphin or a termite hive or you know all the other life forms that matter? I've never seen anybody in the AI industry even sort of seriously talk about this. And yet they portray AI as this kind of world historical thing that will re -engineer the entire planetary ecosystem? Yeah, it could quite quickly become the most super intelligent, powerful Greta Tumbug ever created, just screaming from the top of some transistor hill.

50:41I read a thing from Bern Hobart and Tobias Hubert talking about AI safetyism being more of a risk to society than anything that AI doom is predicting. Why it seems like you've put forward a case that suggests this is something we should be concerned about, etc., etc. What is the other side of the fence to this? What is the side of the fence that says, stop shitting yourself about safetyism. Let's just crack on. I think if I was going to like put forward the best possible case against myself, right? to steel man, the anti AI doomers. I would say something like, if you pause or stop the development of AGI, there are huge potential opportunity costs.

51:33There are lots of human problems. Maybe that AI could help solve. And the usual ones that people talk about are, oh, AGI could help us solve climate change. It could help create peace and prosperity. it could reduce global conflict blah, blah, blah. I do not actually find those very compelling. I think there are often ways to solve lots of those problems without developing AI. The one potential application that does give me serious pause that I've talked and thought about a lot is longevity issues. Okay, if you had an AI that could seriously help develop longevity treatments and anti -aging treatments and help regenerative medicine research and help biotech so that we don't all have to die.

52:24I'm 58, I would like not to die. I would like to live another 100, 200 years. However long I want to live, I would love to live that long. Maybe if we pause AI, I don't get that benefit. it. Right? Now personally, I'm willing to die for my kids. I'm willing to forego longevity treatments if we reduce existential risk. Some people might have a different view. Some people might be like, well, screw you Miller, I don't want to have to die just because you're scared of AI. I understand that. I respect that viewpoint. Let's have that debate. Let's talk about it. My personal hunch is that if we invested as much directly into longevity research, as we're investing in AI, we could actually probably fix aging within like 20 or 30 years.

53:19But people, what's happening instead as is people are like, we know it's really hard to get people to directly support longevity treatment, people are in a kind of pro -death trance. They think it's weird and creepy to head towards immortality. So we know we can't sell that as a research program, right? So instead we're going to sell them on AI, and then AI will like magically deliver the anti -aging cures. I've often seen this argument, right? People won't directly support longevity research, but AI can solve longevity, so that's why we need AI. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. It's, um, I don't know, I'm really trying to stay up and mind into this, but coming from a boss, Remite background, you know, I've always for nearly a decade now, been so wary and touchy, feeling about anything that even looks remotely smart that comes out of, you know, Siri, Siri was something that I remember there was a, oh my God, like, you know, is Siri going to be conscious of what sort of problems are going to be caused, et cetera, et cetera.

54:32But there definitely, there feels a part of me that's like, well, look, if you're going to work incredibly hard to fix longevity problems so that you keep people alive, you keep some people alive that are alive right now. And the outcome of that is that everybody is dead within two centuries. That seems like a bad deal. It seems like a relatively pointless deal. So we're talking about terrible outcomes that could occur the tip of the spear or the top of the mountain, so to speak, looking at some of the stuff that's going to occur in the interim between now and then. You know, because this is how many transistors is it going to take?

55:10Will the large learning models get us there? Is it GPT -8? Is it GPT -never? But some of the things that we probably can be certain about are what the tools and the technologies are enabling at the moment stuff like deception, deep fakes, information, sanitization and misinformation, elections, politics, persuasion, friend bots, loneliness, what are you most concerned about that is very high likelihood? Maybe it's already here. What are the things that people should be looking out for with the rise of AI over the coming years? I think the 2024 election cycle in America is going to be absolutely wild and shocking and is going to involve a lot of narrow AI applications in political propaganda and ads and deepfakes and speech writing and sort of the mass customization of political propaganda.

56:08Because one thing AI's can do is track individual preferences and values and priorities through social media interaction and get a pretty good model of what every potential voter really cares about. And then potentially customize political messaging directly to each voter in a way that pushes their own hot buttons very effectively. right? So like if you're a Democrat and you care a lot about racism but you don't really care about abortion then you'll start to see customized ads that are like very anti -racist but they don't talk about abortion. That will be new. We haven't seen that before. Before political ads were kind of like lowest common denominator TV spots or magazine ads that sort of tried to hit like like the typical undecided voter.

57:04But now, I think in 2024, my humble prediction is we're going to see a lot more narrow AI used for purposes of political manipulation. And I think people will be shocked at how effective and persuasive it is. And I have no idea what the outcome of the election will be, but I think the outcome for a lot of voters will be to go, oh my God, we don't have a sort of political immune system that can fight this very well. Does that mean that AI at the moment has got theory of mind?

57:45So theory of mind is like your ability to understand the beliefs and preferences of others. I think large language models do have pragmatically speaking theory of mind and that they have absorbed all the lessons that are available from the internet about how to understand people's beliefs and desires. So I think if you ask like a GPT, can you please write really good ad copy to advertise particular good or service, it's pretty good at that. I know people in advertising who are like, oh my god, GPT is better at ads than we are. And so we have to use it because our rivals are using it. And I think that also applies to political ads and speech writing.

58:35Yes, functionally, it is able to achieve the same thing as somebody that has theory of mind. And this comes back to a conversation that everyone is having, which is one, And you know, if something is conscious or not, you know, the touring test turned out to kind of be a bit of a insufficient barometer for working out whether or not something is sufficiently intelligent because there's no way that you can speak to a well -trained chat GPT model and not think that there is something inside of there. But you don't know if there is any there, right? Is this just a P zombie? be. Is it just making all of the movements and the sounds and the shakes and you roll this forward into a sufficiently fleshy, sufficiently pink, sufficiently right proportioned robot that can move around your house?

59:21And you go, that's a human. That's a human. I know it's a human. It looks like a human. It walks and talks like a human. So at the moment, yeah, that the function and the outcome that these things are able to achieve is so close to somebody that is able to do that. So 2024 election, lots of persuasion, lots of speech writing what about social media and the news landscape and the information landscape and people both producing and consuming content. You know we're coming with still in this world of content creators at the moment. How do you think that that's going to be influenced?

59:59You know I think what we've got at the moment is, well you know, Noam Chomsky wrote this book 30 years ago about manufacturing consent, about the way that in so -called democratic societies, the way that power actually works is through subtle semi -voluntary propaganda, right? People are willing to go to school to absorb the indoctrination that we get in public schools, and we expose ourselves voluntarily to certain kinds of newspapers and magazines and TV news shows, and then they sort of guide us into what we should think and value. And the engineering of all of that has been done before by humans, by people who do who are Hollywood screenwriters and political speech writers and ad people, marketing people, public relations people, right?

1:00:56There are millions of humans involved in that venture of trying to manipulate public opinion in various directions. But now they're going to have these AI systems that hugely increase their reach, their ability to customize messages, to particular individuals, their ability to kind of capitalize on big data gathered through social media. that can do extremely fast iterative testing of messaging, right? Not just split tests or just focus groups like in traditional marketing, but that do the kind of things that Facebook does in terms of testing all the time, which of millions of ads are most effective.

1:01:42So we're going to have kind of this AI -powered like hegemony warfare, like World View, Warfare, where people are advocating their political, ideological, religious belief systems and they're fighting against enemies, right? And there's going to be a massive kind of ongoing culture war, which in a way is the only war that matters anymore. But it's going to be heavily, heavily shaped increasingly by AI tools. What about friend bots and people who just abscond the real world for some virtual best mate or a girlfriend or whatever in their apartment? Do you think that this is something that's likely?

1:02:30Yeah, absolutely. This is something I wrote about in my most recent essay on anti - likely anti -AI backlash. One thing that will provoke, I think, a backlash is people using AI as fake boyfriends, girlfriends and friends, and getting a kind of pseudo intimacy and sort of validation from AI systems. And you might think, oh, surely people can't be that gullible that they would prefer interacting with just a smart chatbot. But if you think, like we're talking about a chatbot that could potentially remember every single personal detail about you, there are members all previous conversations with you that can try out different ways of interacting with you to see what you like and what you don't like that is much more attentive than any real life boyfriend or girlfriend that has infinite patience for listening to all your shit and all your dumb stories and all your neurotic woes, right?

1:03:41In a way that no living lover would ever put up with. And it would be like the perfect, you know, combination psychotherapist and friend and girlfriend and mentor and confidant and all of that. And we're pretty close to being being able to do that. So I do worry that But real life social interaction will look like a pretty poor substitute for those kinds of AI pals. Why would that cause a backlash? I think it will be a backlash because people who don't get caught up in having an AI boyfriend or girlfriend will look at people who are caught up in it like Gen Z is staying alone in their apartments and never going out on dates and not getting married and not reproducing and they might go, oh my god, this is the most socially toxic technology ever invented.

1:04:36Like the birth rate is dropping, nobody's dating, nobody's having real relationships. This is not sustainable and therefore we are going to do a moral backlash or religious backlash or political backlash that says this is not the way we want civilization to go. I saw an headline which you'll have seen 50 % of AI researchers believe that there is a 10 % or greater risk that humans go extinct due to our inability to control AI and the center for AI safety had a ton of researchers agree with the statement mitigating the risks of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal scale risks such as pandemics, nuclear war, the open letters been signed by more than 350 executives, researchers and engineers working in AI, plus Elon Musk as well, was a part of this movement.

1:05:32How effective are AI experts at predicting this AI development and the risks moving forward? And if 50 % of the people say that there is a 10 % chance that the technology that they're working on is going to end us, what happens next? Is there going to be picket lines of disgruntled, terrified AI researchers outside of OpenAI's lab? What's happening? Yeah, I mean, there is a movement actually to do literal protests and demonstrations and picket lines. I'm involved in a Slack group that, you know, some members of that are actually organizing like pickets in front of OpenAI or in front of DeepMind and London.

1:06:14And now, of course, the point of these letters, and I think I've signed all the letters that are going around myself, we know the letters themselves will not stop the AI industry from doing what it's doing. However, the whole point of the letters is to draw public attention to the issue, right, to get press coverage, to get the general public thinking about these things, hopefully tuning into podcasts like this and reading the books they need to read and becoming politically motivated to take this seriously as an issue. And I think in that regard, the letters have been surprisingly effective, like the amount of press coverage given to AI risk in the last couple of months is hugely greater than anything in the previous 10 years.

1:07:05and the government response, like, you know, Biden inviting AI industry executives to the White House, and Prime Minister Britton taking this very seriously and tweeting about it and having like AI safety summits in London, there's a lot of public support for slowing down and the AI industry being held accountable and people asking hard questions about, like, what exactly is the end game here? like mass unemployment and then extinction. Is that really the direction we want to go in? And I think the AI experts themselves, I hope have a new humility about their ability to predict things because they'll know they've been blindsided by GPP.

1:07:59They didn't expect these kind of capabilities this quickly. So when certain AI researchers like, let's say, Lawn, Yon, Lekun, who makes fun of AI Doomer's a lot on Twitter, hopefully people like him will stay open -minded enough that they might actually kind of re -examine their biases. And maybe they'll have a kind of Jeff Hinton moment, right, like leading AI researcher Jeff Hinton going at age 75. Oh no. Oh no, I think my life's work might have been really actually kind of evil and imposing risks on people and I'm going to resign from Google and blow the whistle and make a big fuss about this.

1:08:41Yeah, there was a tweet as well from Tim Urban that you responded to. Tim said whether you're optimistic or pessimistic about the future, the fact is that we're facing an existential risk at worst and a vastly different future world at best. The world that we're used to very well may not be around for much longer, so let's really enjoy the world that we have it Visit the places that you've always wanted to visit dive into that hobby you've always wanted to try spend quality time with your loved ones save for each sunny Saturday Great mail each moment of fun if we end up looking back on these days with great nostalgia We want to at least know we made the most of the time that we had and you responded and said existential risk isn't Anywhere near the worst thing that we could have there's something called S risk as well above and beyond X risk What's S risk?

1:09:29S risk is suffering risk so With extinction right everybody's dead and then they don't experience anything anymore and that's like pretty bad compared to Experiencing things and being happy but as anybody who's ever suffered chronic pain or torture will will attest like there are things worse than death. There are levels of suffering that could potentially be imposed by new technologies that would make us wish we'd gone extinct. I personally haven't taken S risk that seriously. I don't know that much about it. There's other people who are more expert on it than me. I've only read like a few science fiction novels that depict like really, really bad S risks that could be imposed.

1:10:19There's a novel called Surface Detail by E &M Banks, where long story short, in the far future some religious fundamentalists decide, having an hell don't really exist, but we should make them exist, so we're going to upload everybody's brain before they die into a simulated reality. And if we think they've been bad and naughty, we're going to make them live in a simulated virtual hell for like subjective millennia and like thousands of years of suffering and torture and mayhem and death. And like that would be worse than being dead forever. So that's a S -risk. Some people worry a lot about it.

1:11:00I haven't really focused on it very much, but I think when people like Tim Urban say, Yeah, it'll either be great or will all be dead. So just smell the daffodils and enjoy your steak and visit beautiful Austin, Texas or whatever they think we should be doing. I think no, that like I want my daughters to grow up being very confident that A, they won't suffer an extinction risk and and be they won't suffer, you know, an S risk. Yeah, the take it a little bit more seriously. One final person who waited in was Mark Andresan. I'm going to guess that you read his big essay, Why AI Will Save the World recently.

1:12:00What I think he's just so witlessly stupid about the extinction risks regarding it. It truly baffles me like how you can have a brain that big and be so honestly, I think what happens with a lot of these sort of well -respected rich elders like Likun or Andreessen is they've had a great career, they've done well in business, they've made a bunch of money, they are technically savvy, I have no doubts, they have high IQs, but I think they radically overestimate their ability to understand issues that they just haven't read very much about. And I think if you haven't read Nick Boss from Super Intelligence, you haven't read Toby Awards, the precipice, you haven't read some of the other key ideas if you haven't read Eliezeria Kowskys work, then like you're just going to be reinventing a bunch of very amateurish objections to that kind of work that like we're already addressed 10 or 20 years ago by the actual experts who have been thinking about this.

1:13:12So this is one of those topics where it's very important not to just defer to people because they're rich or famous as smart. like you really want to dive deep on have they thought through these issues, have they engaged in meaningful conversations with other experts in the area, and if they haven't, they probably do not know what they're talking about. What would you do if you could step in? What would your prescription or policy be if you had an omnipotent, omniscient God's eye view?

1:13:50I think I would love for the general public just to tune into the issue to apply their natural survival instincts and their parental instincts to go, wow, this looks like a threat to me, my family, my kids, my grandkids. This is a legit threat. I should take it just as seriously as I would take a local crime wave, or just as seriously as people took nuclear war back in the Cold War. And this is a matter of potentially life and death, you know, for me and my family. I want them to personalize it. I don't want them to just think this is some abstract science fiction scenario that is in the distant future.

1:14:35This is the stuff that could affect my 26 year old daughter or my 15 month old daughter, or my actual kids and cousins and nieces and nephews and whatever. And once you take it seriously, then you're motivated to learn more. And to start moralizing the issue and to go, are the people who are charging headlong into this, right? Through some combination of like greed and hubris and prestige and whatever. Are they on our side? Are they prohuman? Are they fighting for my family or are they just caught up in some kind of sort of delusional project that is at heart reckless and evil? And then what? And then if they decide this is reckless and evil, let's let's effing morally stigmatize it.

1:15:30Let's say if you work in the AI industry and you are not spending most of your time worried about AI safety, then you're a bad person. And I don't want to associate with you. I don't want to date you. I don't want to be your friend. I don't want to invest with you. I don't want to supply you with hardware software or anything else. I don't want you to be a blooperate in our city, state, or country. And I want to shut it down. Now I'm not advocating for a violent, so -called, like, butlerian jihad, or people rise up and they're like, smash all the machines and kill all the AI. Like no, I don't want that.

1:16:10that, mostly because it would be counterproductive in terms of PR, like violence doesn't work in the social media era. It just deligitivizes your cause. But I think short of violence, it's important to be aware that like we can use all the techniques of persuasion and activism in this domain that people used in every other social movement that we're familiar with, civil rights movement, the gay rights movement, you know, the libertarian movement, crypto, like anything that's been at all successful in terms of the public rising up and saying, we want to change the values. We can use all that in fighting reckless AI development.

1:17:01I suppose the challenge you're going to have is everyone is being distracted into a beautiful field with daisies growing in it and free cake recipes and essays written for them for school and university. So yeah, I worry that the novelty and the immediate convenience that's been afforded by these new advances is causing it to seem both so benign and enjoyable and distracting and entertaining that galvanizing people to see this is going and presumably this is the one of the primary challenges that you're facing. I think what I would say to people is like you can kind of have your cake and eat it to in terms of like this whole range of incredible software and narrow AI that's that's absolutely wonderful like if you look at the progress in computer graphics and Hollywood movies it's amazing like a love of Endure's movies and a lot of that would be considered very advanced generative AI right by the standards of the 1970s.

1:18:19The fact that many modern movies are largely kind of AI graphic generated, that's pretty cool. The fact that Google Maps can actually get you from A to B pretty reliably and taking into account traffic, that is narrow AI. That's a huge benefit to many people. And there are probably hundreds of cases where you can have quite safe narrow AI applications that deliver huge quality life benefits to people, but you don't have to go down the road towards AGI, right, or towards other kinds of highly risky narrow AI. And even in longevity research, like you could have narrow AI that does biomedical research and synthesizes scientific literatures about which molecules might be helpful, and that maybe even can help you run larger scale longevity studies, right?

1:19:20And maybe we can get longevity through that without having to go down the road of extremely dangerous AGI. Jeffrey Miller, ladies and gentlemen, if people want to keep up to date with the work that you're doing, whether it be evolutionary psychology or AI risk, where should they go? Then go to my website primalpoly .com and they can also see my essays on the effective altruism forum, which is EA forum, where I publish quite a bit these days. Jeffrey, I appreciate you. I'm looking forward to seeing what we get to talk about next time as well. My pleasure, Chris.