Humanity’s future with Artificial Intelligence

0:00Support for this podcast and the following message come from Rivian, makers of the all-electric three-row R1S SUV and the always capable R1T pickup designed with the planet and future generations in mind. Learn more or schedule a demo drive at rivian.com. Today on State of the World, humanity's future with artificial intelligence. You're listening to State of the World from NPR. We bring you the day's most vital international stories up close where they're happening. I'm Greg Dixon. We hear a lot these days about the use of AI, how it will be used in warfighting in the future and in the present in Iran, what it might mean for people's jobs and the global economy.

0:44On today's episode, we bring you a conversation with someone who has thought a lot about our AI future. Here's NPR's Steve Inskeep. A new documentary features people who research and build artificial intelligence. A filmmaker questions them in The AI Doc, or How I Became an Apocalypse. Several experts struggle to answer the same question. Do you want to have kids one day? Is that something that you're into, or not really? I confess. I think that's like, let's get through this critical period. Do you have any kids? I do not. Is that something you want to do? Have children? Have a family? In some other world than this world, sure.

1:27Would you want to start a family? I am. That last person was Tristan Harris. He once worked for tech firms and now runs the Center for Humane Technology, which advocates for regulation. We invited Harris over to hear why he thinks market incentives are taking AI in a dangerous direction. The only way they can justify the amount of money that's been invested into this AI industry is if they race to replace economic labor in the economy. That's the stated mission statement of OpenAI, is to be able to do everything that a human laborer can do. The OpenAI Charter defines artificial general intelligence as highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work.

2:11So there you are, we're sitting in front of computer screens and NPR. Anything you can do on that computer, answering an email, scheduling something, doing financial analysis, marketing, research, all of that, you'll be able to do with AI. They're not racing to augment and support human workers. They're racing to replace human workers. And what that will lead to is unprecedented levels of concentration and wealth and power, because essentially all the money in the economy, instead of being paid to individual laborers, you're going to pay five to 10 AI companies to do all of the work. We should clarify, you did not produce this film.

2:45You influenced the filmmakers. You're in the film. And there's a moment a little later where you're still talking about kids and you quote AI researchers or scientists saying they have kids and do not expect the kids to make it to high school. Yeah. Well, so the problem is that AI carries so much risk. Let me give you a very concrete example. Just weeks ago, there was a new study at a university where the guy basically took all the leading AI models and put them in various war game scenarios. And just seeing in this war game, what would you do to sort of beat this war? Is this like Claude versus ChatGPT?

3:21That kind of thing. Yeah, exactly. And they generated 780 ,000 words of reasoning instantly. And they're going back and forth in a turn-by-turn scenario. And in this scenario, the AI escalated to the use of nuclear weapons 95 % of the time. What this says is that the AI, again, it's reasoning in a way that we don't understand, and we don't control what it's going to do. Now, the one possibility is AI destroys the world, as you just laid out with the war game scenario. But you alluded to another one, which is a handful of companies and, in a sense, a handful of individuals end up with all the money and the power.

3:58Yes. Is that already happening? In a way, I think it is already happening. There's something in economics called the resource curse. When a country gets more and more of its economic output from mining one resource, when that happens, the country becomes sort of addicted to just that resource being mined and doesn't want to invest in its people, it just wants to invest in that resource. With AI, there's something people worry about. There's an essay by Rudolph Lane and Luke Drago called the intelligence curse. So what happens when in the United States a few years from now, All of the economic output is coming from five AI companies that are automating all the science, automating all the physical labor, automating all the robotics and physical, etc.

4:37Suddenly, why as a government would you invest in healthcare or childcare or people? Because the people aren't valuable anymore. Because the people aren't valuable anymore. Hopefully the people still vote though. They would have some kind of power. Well, that's an interesting question. Do you have to listen to the people's political power if you don't get your tax revenue from the people anymore? You get it from AI companies. And if companies, you can't use your bargaining power, you can't withdraw your labor like a labor union because the companies don't need you either. So I'm not saying this to scare people.

5:04I'm saying this to clarify an incentive for governments to say we should be investing in data centers and prioritizing electricity for data centers, not for people. It leads to things like Sam Altman saying just a few weeks ago when he's asked, well, doesn't it take a lot of energy to train AI? You know what his response was? Well, doesn't it take a lot of energy to grow a human over 20 years? This is leading to an anti-human future. It leads to the devaluing of humans and the valuing of AI. And this is something that's very dangerous. And the thing that people should take away is this is the last chance that our political voice will matter.

5:36As you know very well, the Pentagon recently had a conflict with Anthropic. That's right. The Pentagon was using Claude, their AI platform, for warfighting purposes. Anthropic was insisting on a couple of limitations, that this technology should not be used for mass surveillance of Americans. and should not be used for the automated firing of weapons without a human being involved. Pentagon said, nope, that's too much. We will not accept your limitations and effectively fired them. What did you think about that as you watched it from the outside? Well, there's a next part of that story, which is that after Anthropik said, we don't want to support mass domestic surveillance of Americans and we don't want to support autonomous weapons.

6:12You can notice that Sam Altman jumped right in and said, we'll sell ChatGPT to the government to do both of those things. And what you saw subsequently to that was the largest drop in subscriptions to ChatGPT that has happened, I believe, and a huge surge of subscriptions into Claude and Anthropic. I guess we should clarify ChatGPT at some point also said we'll have restrictions. There was some question about that. And the standard was for the Pentagon any lawful purpose. Yeah. The point I'm trying to get at is that mass boycotts are actually very effective because these companies really need those user numbers going up to tell investors that the health of our company is really strong.

6:49Let me ask about this from the flip side, though. If you're not in favor of mass surveillance of Americans, if you're not in favor of AI-driven war, you might cheer Anthropic for having those rules and sticking up for its principles. But there's another way to look at it, which would be the government that I elect should be deciding how this technology is used and not a particular company. I mean, letting the company decide might be the equivalent of when Elon Musk was deciding which Starlink satellites he wanted to activate in Ukraine. No, definitely. There's huge governance issues here. And what this really is getting at is the nature of how technology is really the primary driving force of power in this world.

7:23And how do you govern technology is the central question. So you feel the government should decide and we have to push the government to do it competently. We need to make sure that there are more experts and more citizen deliberations brought into that process in addition to the government ultimately making the decision. Tristan Harris, it's a pleasure talking with you. Thank you. Thank you so much, Steve. Tristan Harris is an advocate for AI regulation who appears in the new documentary called The AI Doc. He was speaking to Steve Inskey.

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