AI Experts Debate: Overhyped or Underhyped? (Opposite Opinions) Mo Gawdat & Steven Kotler | EP #177

31:52I think we could argue over time for a minute. I don't think it matters. Like, here's a weird one -mo Facebook's a fricking billion times smarter than me. It already is. It knows so much. I mean, like, it's, it's, you know what I mean? It's this Facebook, which is a pretty dumbass technology. Yeah, as many of us as super intelligence. And we know it. We've been living with super intelligence for a while now. They don't tend to, you know, they tend to make things worse as much as they make things better, which is the problem. I agree. Yeah. I mean, I could not, amen. Global cooperation, human cooperation is, I think, what we all should advocate for.

32:36I mean, I was hosting Jeffrey Hinton on, you know, for my documentary, a couple of weeks ago. And, you know, one of the topics that we discuss is the difference between digital and analog intelligence and and the biggest challenge we have as humans is that our analog intelligence, our biological intelligence doesn't scale beyond one entity. Right? So, you know, when I was saying, was he wearing his Nobel Prize sort of in the way that like, you know, that's a place where it is. I was just like, I would, I would just show up for like the next year and every podcast, I did wear that shit around my back.

33:11I'm just saying. You do, you do, you do realize, you know, when they say don't meet your heroes, oh my God, I love my heroes man. He's such an amazing human being and he really is quite committed and and quite humble in his approach. You know, it is it is shocking how we spoke about his Nobel Prize, which he says, look, I'm a psychologist who, you know, lived like a computer scientist, but then won the Nobel Nobel Prize in Physics. And I'm like, you're just doing it. You're just doing it. But anyone who is just talking about the difference between, you know, the fact that if I were to share with you some of what I wrote today, it took me probably several weeks to let it simmer and then write it.

34:00And then it would take me an hour to explain it to you. When we run digital intelligences, we run them in parallel, you know, we tell them all to go player Atari or whatever, and then we just average the weights literally in seconds. We get a scaled digital intelligence. And when you said that what we're looking for is a way to scale human cooperation, that is absolutely the answer because you know what? I think, and I spoke about that with Peter when we were lost in LA, that we are, we have, we're hitting the potential of total abundance, total abundance leaning almost God -like like cure my daughter and it's done.

34:43Make me an apple and it's done. Right? You know we could hit that in 5, 10, 15, 20 years time if we don't destroy ourselves. Right? And so basically the real challenge we have as humanity is why are we freaking competing? Like this is is turn quality challenge. This is basically, let's, let all of humanity cooperate. Let's all build one particle accelerator. Let's all learn from it. Let's all distribute the benefits to everyone and stop competing. But that's not happening. And that is not the only thing. And you can't have the other, the one level down. You can't have the AI as we're all individually building for our fiftoms competing secretly in the background.

35:33Right? Like, will you give us a, like, in 1986, I want to, like, whenever you wrote Monoliths over, driving, give us our first AI that went crazy, right? A godlike AI that goes totally insane, and they have to park it in a satellite out in outer -earth orbit to keep the world safe. Like, we've seen this scenario before. We, you know what I mean? We're building it ourselves with agents. We're letting them talk to each other through age now. So, so, I want to go back to this. This question about this, yeah, this question about the near term versus the long term. And you and I have had this question about whether or not increasing intelligence correlates with increasing benevolence.

36:24In other words, I don't think there's any question that we are going to be building self -improving AI that will forget about 50 IQ points more, you know, better than the average human. I think there will be orders of magnitude more. Can I ask you first off, do you believe that Mo? 100%. Okay. So if you don't mind Peter, again, in response to how we started the conversation, this This is just using low -vacelerating returns, not using serendipities. If we figure something out tomorrow, just like we figured reinforcement learning out and it changed everything, if we figure something out tomorrow, you're literally a magnitude, a quantum mor in terms of performance and intelligence overnight.

37:15Yes. Yes. So, if in fact that is going to be the case and, you know, from all the conversations I've had and the people that I'm speaking to, that level of, again, there is no definition for AGI. It's a blurry line, just like the touring test was a blurry line that passed and no one noticed it. You know, the notion is that AGI, whether you believe Ray or Elon, it's the next few years, it's not worth arguing. But what occurs on the backside of that is a very rapid intelligence explosion. And again, that intelligence becomes a tool that's available to the kindest, most moral, most ethical human on planet and the dystopian malevolent actors out there.

38:12And we have concerns. Are we not sure that some of the malevolent actors aren't the ones who created the AIs in the first place? I'm just saying. So my question is, at what point will, I believe, and I think Moe Unite had this conversation, that at some point, AI goes from being a tool being used to potentially do harm to a tool that has the potential to say, stop this quibbling, stop this nonsense. There's plenty to go around and becomes the benevolent God -like element. Can we dive a little bit into that in the conversations we've had in your thoughts on that? Yeah, I think if you really at the level of depths that the three of us and our listeners can go to, allow me to go beyond the typical, you know, the smartest people usually start to become altruistic.

39:18Let's define intelligence itself. And I think the idea is, if you really understand our universe, our universe and everything in it exists because of entropy. We all understand that, right? Our universe wants to break down in decay. It's chaos. You leave a garden unhaged and it becomes a jungle. You break a glass, it never unbreaks. This is the very basic design of physics. Now, the role of intelligence, since it began, is to bring order to the chaos. It's to say, no, I don't want the light to scatter, I want the light to be concentrated into a laser beam. How do I do that? And it sometimes is a clear, easy solution and you use a lens or sometimes it's a very complex solution that requires an understanding of quantum physics to build a laser.

40:14Right? But we eventually get there. Now, if intelligence is defined as bringing order to the chaos, then the highest levels of intelligence bring that order with the least use of resources and waste. And you can easily understand that this is the reality. The more intelligent you become, the more you try to achieve the same order with the least waste. And so an easy analogy is to say humanity is always craved energy. We were stupid enough to burn our world in the process. And as we become more intelligent, we decide to use solar instead or a cleaner form of energy. We're still, you know, at bringing order, but we are doing it with the least waste and use of resources.

41:07If that is the case, then you can imagine that by definition when something exceeds our humans to PUDT, which I will not call intelligence, because sadly, along the curve of intelligence, intelligence, you know, if you have no intelligence at all, you have no impact on the world positive or negative, right? If you start to add intelligence, you start to have an impact on the world, hopefully positive even if just through a nice conversation with your friends, right? There is unfortunately a valley somewhere. You continue to gain intelligence. You become so smart that you become a politician or, you know, or an evil corporate leader, okay?

41:44And that's when your impact on the world turns negative. you're so smart that you're able to become the leader of your nation, but you're so stupid, you're not able to talk to your enemy, or you're not able to relate to their pain, or you're not able to understand the long -term consequences of waging a war. And so that point beyond which, more intelligence starts to say, no, no, no, no, no, I don't need any of that. I can solve the problem in a cleaner way. I can fly you all to Australia to enjoy your life, but we don't have to burn the planet in the process. I can harness energy, but we don't have to destroy the climate and so on and so forth.

42:29Okay. And so if you take that as a reasonable trend to expect, my view is that at the beginning, when we hit that valley, some evil person will use the advanced but limited intelligence of AI to wage a war using an autonomous army. But then there will be a moment in the future when AI is responsible for war gaming is responsible for commanding the humanoid soldiers, it's responsible, it's responsible, it's responsible. The AI itself will say, you know, a commander will say go kill a million people and the AI will go like, that's absolutely stupid. I'll just talk to the other AI in a microsecond and solve it, Right?

43:08And you know, again, we started this conversation by me saying anyone who predicts the future is arrogant, I cannot predict that. Okay? But at least I can be hopeful that this from my experience of everyone that's smarter than me, that there is a point at which you stop hurting others, you stop looting to succeed because you can use your intelligence to succeed without any effort or harm.

44:02to detect and prevent these diseases early at scale. That's why a group of us, including Tony Robbins, Bill Cap and Bob Hooray, founded Fountain Life, a one -stop center to help people understand what's going on inside their bodies before it's too late, and to gain access to the therapeutics to give them decades of extra health span. Learn more about what's going on inside your body from Fountain Life. Go to fountainlife .com slash Peter, and tell him Peter sent you. Okay, back to the episode. The way I think about this is for most all of human history, the objective optimization function of humans, what we're trying to optimize for, has been money and power.

44:44Unfortunately. And it's been the driver in a world of fear and scarcity, and I repeatedly say our baseline software that our brains are operating on is a fear and scarcity mindsets. And in that, with that mindset, with the neural structure, with the, with the, you know, if you would, the code that we were born with and that developed over the last 200 ,000 years, it was, I want to get out of fear and scarcity, so I want to optimize for power and wealth. And the question is what would be a new optimization function because as Stephen, I have written as you've spoken about all of this, all of these exponential technology functions lead towards this world of massive abundance where almost we live into a post -capitalist society, anything you want you can have.

45:44your robotics, your nanotech can manufacture, your AI can design. And so what do we optimize for in the future? I think that's one of the biggest questions, both as a human and as a centaur human and AI together. What's our objective? So how do you think about that, gentlemen? One thing I don't know if this is an answer, but two things off of what most said. One, if we go with your definition of intelligence, right, it's essentially an attribute to decreasing function, that we know that's what brains do, right? The governing theory in modern, neural science is Karl Fristens free energy principle, which says the brains are predictive engines that always want to decrease uncertainty and increase efficiency.

46:42So we already like brains do that. AI is going to do that naturally if we say that's your definition of intelligence. The point I'm making off of all of that is and it may be the answer to Peter's question, which is why I've interjected it is we see wisdom wisdom is wisdom evolves in multiple species with brains. We see co -evolution around wisdom. The older you get, the wider you get, and it doesn't matter if you're a dolphin or a whale or a rattlesnake or a human, wisdom is, is, is, is, is, we co -evolve, species, life seems to co -evolve towards wisdom. where at least a large chunk of life seems to co -evolve towards Wisdom, which is to say, if everything's running off the free energy principle, this governs everything with brains, and that includes our machine brains, and Wisdom is where this points, that's a slightly hopeful idea, and that may be the optimizing function you're looking for, Peter.

47:44But I could be totally wrong. I think at the end of the day, wisdom is a function of having had experience that lets you know this path will lead to success, this path will lead to failure from my own personal point of view. And I do believe that AIs are going to develop the greatest wisdom. Why? Because they're able to create a forward looking simulations of a billion scenarios, with those simulations have high degrees of accuracy and it will say out of these billion scenarios this was the best way to go and that will be wisdom beyond just the you know the brief experiences that you know the Weiss -Olde council of 80 and 90 -year -old men might have had so I think AI is going to by definition give us great wisdom if we're willing to listen.

48:41I love that view to be honest because Because believe it or not, artificial wisdom is very different than artificial intelligence. Intelligence is a force with no polarity. Intelligence can be applied to good and it would deliver good and it can be applied to evil and it would kill all of us. But wisdom generally is applied to good, to finding the ultimate solution or answer to a problem. Now, go ahead Peter. Yeah, I want to go back to this idea of a that humanity Won't survive without a digital super intelligence In the long run You know my my concern is that we're gonna have such turbulence.

49:29There's been a number of papers You know that recently there was a you know sort of an AI 2027 paper they came out that sort of had a bifurcating future one in which we did extraordinarily well. The other in which the AI has destroyed us. You know, this is Hollywood all over again and 99 % of all Hollywood is dystopian future films. One of the things I have to say because I've been on a rampage for this, we humans need a positive vision of the future to aim for. We don't have that. We don't have the start. We We have started giving us that. Yeah, we have started. But nothing recently. I think the challenge really truly is,

50:23we've prioritized our entertainment over the years above true reflection. And even if you take anything from video games to science fiction movies, to whatever. They've all painted that dystopian scenario, which I have to say is very unlikely when you really think about it, because if AI gets to the point where they are capable of destroying us that easily, we are so freaking irrelevant that they probably wouldn't even bother. I mean, think about it. I think it was a trade or Hugo do the garrist one, one, I don't remember who said the more likely scenario is that they kill us because they're not aware of our presence or, you know, like when you hit an end hill while you're walking, right?

51:20But if you really want to optimize the human, you know, sort of the gain function that we need to aim for. If I'd look forward, I'd look to start track. And if I'd look backward, I'd look to the caveman and woman years. And it's actually quite interesting, because when you mention about, when you mention how governed we are by greed and fear and our egos and all of that negativity, it is actually because we want to survive and believe it or not, you know, survival could be, oh, I'm not really sure if 20 million is enough, I need to gain 20 more, just in case something happens. Or if it's a survival of the ego, it's like if I have 200 million or 2 billion or 20 billion or whatever, and the other has 21 billion, and like what the fuck is wrong with me, okay?

52:20And that unfortunately, it's what plays our current modern world. Now the reality is, if you really think about humanity, humanity, the purpose of humanity, since the caveman and women years was to live, okay? And for some strange reason, we've optimized so much to achieve that objective and forgot that this was the objective. So, again, as friends of the camera, we speak about those things quite a bit. The question of what you go through seasons in your life, and there is a season where you want to maximize and a season where you want to build and a season where you want to look attractive in your middle age or whatever crazy stuff that we have.

53:10But eventually there is a season where you go like, okay, so I'm now I've now lived and experienced so much What have I missed have I actually lived any of that and believe it or not as as as scary as it looks To have no job to go to in the morning If society provided then you'll go back to a much safer caveman woman scenario where you know there are no threats, there are no famines. You just really live, enjoy life, connect, ponder, reflect, explore, which I know is very difficult for a lot of people. I do it for the first three hours of every day. It's pure joy to sit really with your curiosity if you want.

53:59And then if you push all the way forward into Star Trek, that's sort of what the enterprise is doing at universal scale. It was basically, let's go and explore now that we don't really have to struggle with all of the wars and famine and shit that we've created on Earth. Now we can actually open up and create connections, not just with humans but with every living being. I mean, lovely science fiction, But at its core, I think it's exactly what we're about. You know, a full life where you completely connect and enjoy and feel love and enjoy the pleasures of being alive and the curiosity to learn and explore and connect and it's all at our fingertips.

54:46If we just erase the systemic bias of capitalism that has gotten us here. I mean, thank you capitalism for creating all that we've created so far, but can we please change it now from a billion dollars to like what I do, one billion happy as a capitalist objective? But it's not measured in dollars. All right. Mo, a question that Stephen, I have been pondering in foreign new book is what is it going to take for humanity, for all of us to both survive and thrive in this coming age of AI. So the survive part is an important element because as we see jobs being lost as we see probability dangers, we don't know how to deal with types of terrorist activities.

55:41And thriving takes on a new meaning. I think it does take on the meaning that we just spoke about. For most of all of us, you say, tell me about yourself. Instantly you go to what your job is. Instantly you go to, I'm a VP here on the CEO there. I do this. I invented this. I don't know that. It's an ego statement of who you are. So the notion of surviving thriving as we have intelligent systems that again exceed and then massively exceed our capabilities. Your thoughts there. Stephen, do you want to start? I think here's the thing I think that question was already answered in a funny way. So Mo and I, we met a couple years ago and one of the things Mo said on stage at that time was I'm done writing books.

56:42I remember it's coming. I'm done writing books. It's not going to happen anymore. What did Mo tell us he did yesterday? to be wrote with his A .O. right? Why did you write? Because it puts you into flow because it creates passion and purpose and intelligence and creates it. So like we have the answer to this question. We already know because we're biological systems and we know what the ingredients of thriving are, passion, purpose, and passion. We have a list. And Mo gave it like his own, you know what I mean, we have this super intelligent AI's and we're still going to do like, I don't know a coder who has stopped coding because the AI's have come along.

57:31They have it. Like they're still coding. Why? Because coding produces flow, flow produces meaning, creativity, like this, like we're wiring this way. So unless our fundamental hard wire and changes, we already have those answers as well. It's like the global cooperation. I don't think these are puzzles. I think they're engineering problems at this point. I think Sergei's perspective, like Sergei would say, no, no, we got the spark. Now it's engineering. And I agree. So I could be wrong. That was my two sets. But what do you think? Peter, what do you think? Also, I want to give you... I think you're brilliant.

58:11Mo, please, please. Your spot on for a very interesting reason, Steven, as well, because when you really think about it, a writer was a writer, whether he used a feather or a pen or a typewriter or a computer or now AI. And if you look at my work, I've published four and a half books so far, like I've published four and my fifths is on Substack, but going to be published if you want. But I wrote around 13 and the other eight I will never publish I wrote them because you know if you ask me why why do you You write like why do I have my wife? It's you know there is Joy in that you understand so so having said that I Peter's question was what would it take and and I wrote recently a piece that I called the the the mad map spectrum and the idea really is it will unfortunately take a realization for humanity to change direction and that realization will either be a conviction of new truly assured destruction or a conviction of new truly assured prosperity.

59:24And between them there is no grayscale unfortunately. So if the US at any point in time is convinced that this mad arms race to win intelligence supremacy is one that is going to lead to some harm to everyone in the world, they will stop. And if they will stop competing, they will continue to develop, but they'll start cooperating. And if they are convinced that it will lead to an assured prosperity that nobody is going to stab them in the back, that everyone is going to be enjoying a life that is very different for all of us, but full of prosperity for all of us, then they will stop. They will continue to develop the technology, but they will stop competing.

1:00:13And unfortunately, if you look back at in history, we're not able to guess those possibilities like a good applied mathematician on a game board. We have to hit them like face on like everyone in the world knew that a pandemic was coming. Everyone, right? Everyone who at least studied biology, okay? But it had to hit us in the face so that everyone stops, okay? Everyone knows that you know trade wars are going to hurt everyone. But we have to put them out there and then fight through them and then eventually get to something. And it's sad. I mean, perhaps what we are doing, and I've dedicated probably the last six, seven years of my life to is, is to say, we really don't have to hit our face against it.

1:01:09It's a simple game theory, right? Understand that a, you know, a prisoner's dilemma where we are competing endlessly is going to end badly. Can we please stop? We already know it's tips for chat, right? Like you want the other strategy. You want the, it doesn't matter how many AI's we put on that. It's the same thing with flow and compassion and creativity. Like these problems have been solved. We know these answers. This isn't like, it's not like we have to unify gravity and, you know, relativity. That's a hard problem. These are not. So Mo, I wish we were that rational and I wish we were that compelled for our optimization function being all of humanity.

1:01:57It's not. And so I go back to what we're going to get, we're going to get a drastic event within the next two to three years. A drastic event that on one side will hit us very badly economically. or on the other side will hit our fears very much, or on sadly, on the worst side, may kill quite a few million people. And you could have a range of a hacker that's simply, instead of, you know, attacking a physical place, switching off the internet or the power grid somewhere, where the power grid is needed for life. Or you could, on the other extreme, get, you know, a hack into a bank, or an evil war that goes out of control or machines that turn onto their makers.

1:02:51Or there will be some very big news headline. As always, there will be it. It will last for 12 to 13 days before we start to talk about some kind of a pop star. But then behind closed doors, I think decision makers will wake up. Every day I get the strangest compliment. Someone will stop me and say, Peter, you have such nice skin. Honestly, I never thought I'd hear that from anyone. And honestly, I can't take the full credit. All I do is use something called One Skin OS 1 twice a day every day. The company is built by four brilliant PhD women who identified a peptide that effectively reverses the age of your skin.

1:03:31I love it. And again, I use this twice a day every day. You can go to oneskin .co and write Peter at checkout for a discount on the same product I use That's one skin .co and use the code Peter at checkout. All right back to the episode Going beyond that because that is the that's the use of AI by Malevolent actors You know the interesting thing about us versus China is China's irrational actor They're not saying that Well, and US is a rational actor. In other words, we're not going to do something that will destroy, you know, Thank you so much for saying that that's actually not usually how the US media positions it.

1:04:14I also want to say that I think deep seek and the way deep seek was released. I think that was a very clear sign that China sees the same issues we see and they want to cooperate. I think it was rolled out enough. I think it was a very clear message that it doesn't seem like many people in America heard, but I was like, come on people. Like this is really clear and we're all seeing it. So like I look at deep sea and I look at what happened in China and I'm like, no, we all see this. We all see that if we don't start figuring out, like cooperate and build this stuff together, we're screwed. So I thought it, I thought that was really cool.

1:04:53I'm glad you see it too. A lot of people disagree with me on that one. The point I wanted to make was when you have a large population and you have a check -in balance system which you get with governance versus a religious war going on in individuals who are looking to create maximal destruction and don't have a check and balance system at all. That's where we're gonna see, I think, the dystopian future, or those activities playing out in two to three years. I guess I wanna get beyond that and go back to the conversation of, is a digital superintelligence, a benevolent God, or is it a terminator scenario that is, because I don't believe that we're gonna see the more intelligent AI systems become, I don't see them as SkyNet, right?

1:05:57I don't see that as needing to destroy humanity. People, unfortunately Hollywood is built this scenario where AI is going to destroy humanity because it wants access to our energy. And oh my God, we have so much abundance in the world. I think what I'm looking forward to over the next 12 to 24 months over the next 22 years is going to be the incredible breakthroughs we'll see from AI in physics and in chemistry and in biology which will unleash the next layer of abundance. So there are scenarios however where they could turn against us if we become really annoying. So imagine a world where job losses will position AI as the enemy.

1:06:53So a lot of people would actually who are not maybe fully aware that the layer beyond the apparent layer is how capitalism and labor arbitrage is the reason and why you lost your job. It's not that day I can do it. But I think the truth of the matter is that you may be in a situation where you are, where you're going to see man versus machine. And then the machine will go like, seriously, don't annoy me, don't annoy me, don't annoy me and then, right? We could see that. But my perception is that in a very interesting way, I wrote a short book that I would never publish that I called Bomsquad, which of course, for someone with a Middle Eastern origin, you don't write those titles.

1:07:43But it was basically about diffusing, you know, problem solving, using weights of urgency and importance and so on. So the idea is, you know, if you really look at our current future, I think the short term is both more explosive and more urgent than the long -term existential risk, especially because I would say this very openly, I spoke about it with Jeffrey as well the other week. We don't know the answer to how to, even if we decide, all of humanity decides that we want to address the existential risk, we don't know how. We don't actually have a technical answer to do it. So, we might as well focus for now on the immediate short -term, clear and present danger and work on the ethics of humanity so that AI is deployed from the get -go in science and physics and discovering medicines and understanding human life and longevity and so on and so forth.

1:08:57If we from the get go set them in those directions, then we're more likely to see an AI that continues as they grow older to work with those objectives. Stephen, let me go back to our quandary of surviving and thriving and surviving side of the equation. How do you prepare Mo for this? What's coming? How do you think about our kids, our society, our leaders? Are we just bumbling in the dark? Or is there, I mean, which is the way I feel it? It's like, you know, we're just, we're bouncing around. We have huge political moves being made, right? We just saw in the last couple of weeks, the entire AI royalty end up in Saudi Arabia and then in the Emirates and you know playing off against China.

1:10:04And it feels like, I don't know if it's a random walk, but I feel like we're making it up as we go along and there's very little wisdom guiding this. How do you think about that? But how do we prepare for this next few years? Is there any way to prepare? Well, I was actually, Peter and I were in a room recently with the Chief Science Officer for one of the big AI companies who I'm going to leave his name off. But he's young and he was talking about AI dangers and he sort of got frustrated with the question from the audience and his response was, you have to trust us. We know what we're doing. I get everybody sort of like froze.

1:10:47Like everybody froze, because we were like, oh God. Right? So my point is that not only it may be to be right, like it's a random walk, but even when somebody says something, like we're trying to train our AI to be moral and blah, blah, blah. When you hear somebody say that and you look at them and this guy was in his early 30s, that was my reaction. I was like, dude, like what? You want me to trust you? This is like Mark Zuckerberg telling me social media is good for me or Marbro telling me the cigarettes are good for me Right, it's I'm like it's sort of like speeder picked that way so um, I don't know if I have anything like Cheerful here because not only do I think it's a random walk, but I think when people try to steer We're suspicious of their ability.

1:11:34I'm suspicious of their ability to steer right? But that's the story I just told you is this guy is brilliant, probably way fricking smarter than me and he's trying to steer and I'm suspicious. So like I think it's on both sides of this coin. I don't know if I have any good news here. Let me frame in the following way. I think we are holding two different futures in super position to go back to quantum physics and if you would shore and just cat. And one future we're going to collapse the wave function to a brilliant vibrant future for humanity. In the other future we have dystopian outcomes. And the question becomes how do we guide humanity towards this positive vision of the future?

1:12:24What do we do today? How do we help people? Steven, I've been talking about this as its mindset, are we going to help people create the mindset and the frames that allow them to survive and thrive? Or is there something else that needs to be done? Yeah. So I'll actually first in one minute, second, what Steven said. You know, one of the top irritating comments I heard from Eric Schmidt. I worked for Eric for a while, so I respect him tremendously. But he said, we will need every gigawatt of power, renewable or non -renewable if we were to win this race. right? And I think that's the kind of blind, blindness that you get when you're running too fast, right?

1:13:26When you're so afraid that the other guy will win, right? It's those times when you start to make decisions that are not really responsible because you are blinded by something that you position as more important. The way I look at it, Peter, is I know it sounds really not positive but there is positivity in it. I call it a late state diagnosis. So what humanity is struggling with today is look, we've been building a system, systemically prioritizing greed, prioritizing gains, prioritizing power, and so on, as you rightly said, for so long, right, that those objectives systemically have built the world that we are in today.

1:14:21And the world we are in today is not healthy.

1:14:31It's not part one of the, of alive, you know, I, I basically the book is three parts past, present, and future in the past, part of the book, you know, more than half of what I write is not about AI. It's about capitalism. It's about, you know, the propaganda machine. It is about, it's about, it's about, it's about, it's about all of those things that will be magnified by AI. And who's the point? If your, you know, if this planet is sick, if you want, and it's in a late stage diagnosis, a physician will sit you down, look you in the eye and say, by the way, this does not look good. Okay. But that statement, believe it or not, is not a statement of hate, it's a statement of ultimate care.

1:15:23Why? Because a late stage diagnosis is not a death sentence. Okay? It's, you know, many, many patients who have been, you know, diagnosed with a late stage disease have not only survived, but they thrived, right? And they thrived because they changed their lifestyle. They changed something, you know, this was even teaches all of us. The idea is that you can live differently. And when you live differently, you'll achieve peak performance, you'll achieve maximum health, you'll achieve, you'll achieve, you'll achieve, right? And I think that's what we as humanity need to start realizing. That the systems that have gotten us here, okay, from a process point of view, have nothing wrong with them, but from an objective and morality point of view, have everything wrong with them, okay?

1:16:12What good is it to be a zillionaire in a world where there is nothing you can do with your money? What good is it to be the first inventor of an AI that basically renders you irrelevant? And I think that's a stop that needs to basically pause and say, do we want this anymore? Sadly, it requires cooperation across human brains that Stephen rightly said at the beginning is not something we do very well. The other thing is I put forward the notion there is no on -off switch and there's no velocity in Europe. We are running open loop with yes and more and more and more as the again the objective function.

1:17:09And there's no consideration for whether you know a GPT -5 or GPT -6 or a GROC -4 or GROC -5 or whatever your favorite models are in the final result going to to enable something that is massively dangerous for humanity. So if that's the case, I still go back to what safety valves do we have? Because I don't see any action being taken by the leaders of the free world. Let me ask you a little more question if you could move to a planet that didn't have AI or where AI was developing. Absolutely. At 10 % the speed, it's right, would you leave? I'd be gone. 100 % I'd go, I'd be set back to 2016 today.

1:18:15I don't know anybody. I'm sure your answer, your answer to that is what? I would reset back to 2016 today. 2016, you know, I think AI today has all the upside and very little downside. I think it's AI in the next two to five years that I'm so concerned about. Right. I mean, AI today is an incredible. And I said we're going to go to move to planet where there's no AI. I just said move to a planet where it's going much slower. So maybe we can start to think about it. I think everybody feels that's a fantasy. Well, I mean, so we're going to space hotels coming to a universe near you.

1:19:03Peter, I actually think that you're accurate in your description of where AI is today, but it's that 5 % five degrees deviation back in 2016 that led us to where we are today. You remember things at the time where Wigix agreed that we're not going to put it on the open internet. It was Google, Google developed this first and decided not to put it out there. And then open AI says, you're right. Here it is. And no one has it. Put it on the open internet. Teach it to create and write more code. And let's, you know, start the party of the school children of agents talking to agents talking to AI's.

1:19:42Right. Now, so, so, so I, I would definitely reset that. I would, I will however say, looks. There are things we can do right now if we want to prepare. And you know, I'll start with government. I don't think I think we're asking government for too much when we tell them to try and regulate AI. It's it's almost like going to government and say regulate the making of hammers so that they can drive nails but nobody can use them to hit someone on the head. Right. It's it's a very complex thing to ask because they don't understand hammers and believe it or not even the guy that's making the hammer cannot do that.

1:20:15Right. So my ask of governments is regulate the use of AI. If someone uses a video that is a deep fake video and does not declare that it's a deep fake video, you know, developed by AI, criminalize that, make it legally reliable to use AI, manipulate information to, you know, manipulate populations and so on and so forth. So this is the role of the government immediately, is regulate the use of this massive, massively in your technology. For the rest of us, honestly, investors, business people, and so on, I ask for a very simple question. If you do not want your daughter or son at the receiving end of a specific AI, don't invest in it, don't promote it, don't use it.

1:21:01Okay? So simple as that. If you believe this can be harmful to someone that you love, do not give it the light of day. And then for us as individuals, I'll go back to the late stage diagnosis, believe it or not, the way I live now. And you guys probably know this about me not in front of cameras. I hug my loved ones and I enjoy every minute of every day. And I prepare, I learn the tool, I am one of the better users of AI in the world, I'm in line with the technology. but at the same time I'm completely back to the purpose. Realizing that I will do the absolute best that I can to spread the message, I will do the absolute best that I can to say that ethics is the answer that if we show AI and ethical behavior, they may learn it from us just like they learned all of the other stuff from us.

1:21:53But at the end of the day, well, if it messes up, you were going to hit that dystopia. Not forever. There is a point in time where AI takes over and says, okay, kids, enough stupidity, I'm in charge now. Nobody killed nobody. How far out is that? 12 years. 12 years. Okay, so people don't come back and hit me after 12 if I'm still there. I'm going to wrap this episode on this subject line. It's where we've come to before, which is in the near term, it's the use of AI by malevolent individuals that are our greatest fear. It's not China versus US. It's US and China against those malevolent players out there that wish to use this for for greed and for vengeance, whatever it might be.

1:22:57And I think that this is an unstoppable progression. I don't think again, there's any on -off switch here. We're seeing a billion dollars a day being invested into AI, which is extraordinary. And I think that's gonna continue to increase. We're seeing data centers being popped up every way, every place possible. So, you know, I'm the world's, I think myself as the world's biggest optimist and I am optimistic about the impact of AI on human longevity, on new understanding the physics of the universe, on new mathematics, on new material sciences, on things that will create incredible abundance that Stephen and I I have written about and are writing about in our next book.

1:23:48And I am looking forward to this benevolent super intelligence stabilizing the world. And that's what I'm hoping for. Hi, Agri. Steven, where do you come out on this? I think that you guys want to invent a code God to save you from yourselves is maybe the craziest thing I've heard since the guy from the AI company I won't mention don't be to trust him. I like you. But I love you, balls.

1:24:32That's actually usually the answer that you get. That's the only way to save us from AI is to use an AI.

1:24:46You know what the beautiful thing is, we're going to find out. Yeah, I like. I also, one thing I want to leave everybody with is back to what we were saying about cooperation and the upleveling of human intelligence and human consciousness and things like that. The human brain has widely considered the most advanced machine in the history of the universe. And we're just now, without a AI, figuring out how to uplevel that, I'll link it with other brains, like the level of cooperative possibility. Let me, let me back into it one second. We, Enlightenment, which is a definable biological state that produces universal kind of compassion, oneness with everything, we're engineering.

1:25:34It's a state that's starting to become available almost on demand. So when I say like there's new levels of cooperation coming that are emergent at the same time as the AI stuff, we can't see that. We have no, they're emergent, just like, just like other things. So I think that rather than the 11 AI God, I think we're going to surprise ourselves. And I'm not the optimistic in the room, by the way, like Peter's the optimistic in the room. I've not the optimistic, but I think I'm more optimistic that Peter had this one. I'd love for that thought to be actually implemented. I think that's something that we really need to think about deeply.

1:26:14If the short term is to do, that is a great human matter. I don't know. Who could we talk to? Peter, it's back to you. Thank you. I appreciate that you were saying, Mo, please. Cool. I was basically saying, I think this definitely, definitely is the answer if you ask me. If you, you know, if we just shift our mindset into cooperation, we had directly into a world of total abundance. Yeah. You know, I was with, in the conversation with Eric Schmidt, he mentioned earlier, and his point of view was until there is some type of a disaster and until there is something perhaps like a Chernobyl or a three mile island that isn't you know a 10 out of 10 it's a two or three out of 10 but it scares the daylights out of us.

1:27:05We don't really align as humans we don't really align and we blindly go forward as we have been. And I believe that it's the human nature that that plagues us from being able to save ourselves many times until that child in us burns our fingers on the stove. Even after your parent has told you over and over again you're going to burn your fingers on the stove to stop playing with fire. Agreed 100%. But let's be hopeful. Let's assign that task to Steven to design an an ex -price for human cooperation. Let's assign another task to Peter to make it happen. And yeah, let's assign a task for me to Hagiuboaks when you do.

1:27:56I love you, Mo. Thank you guys very much. How can we go all the hard work? Hagingue is hard work, Steven. You understand that. You move too much. Yeah. All right, guys. That's lovely. Thank you, bro. With the different lending up lending me your brains this morning was fun. Digging with you. The fun conversation. I hope I'm curious as people listen to this podcast, where do you come out on this? How do you feel about it? I'd love to see that your comments below. So, and do you have a solution that we should all be thinking about and promote it? You know, I'll ask my AI as well. It's not necessarily going to give me the best answer, but maybe our group mind, our meta -intelligence here might bring us that.

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