Most Replayed Moment: AI Safety Expert Predicts The Next 20 Years! Will It Really Take All Jobs?

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1:19You must hear a lot of rebuttals to this when you say it Because people experience a huge amount of mental discomfort when they hear that their job, their career, the thing they got a degree in, the thing they invested$100 ,000 into is going to be taken away from them. So their natural reaction for some people is that cognitive dissonance that, no, you're wrong. AI can't be creative. It's not this. It's not that. It'll never be interested in my job. I'll be fine because. You hear these arguments all the time, right? It's really funny. I ask people and I ask people in different occupations. I'll ask my Uber driver, are you worried about self-driving cars?

1:54And they go, no, no one can do what I do. I know the streets of New York. I can navigate like no AI. I'm safe. And it's true for any job. Professors are saying this to me. Oh, nobody can lecture like I do. Like this is so special. But you understand it's ridiculous. We already have self-driving cars replacing drivers. That is not even a question if it's possible. It's like how soon before you fired? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I've just been in LA yesterday and my car drives itself. So I get in the car, I put in where I want to go, and then I don't touch the steering wheel or the brake pedals. And it takes me from A to B, even if it's an hour-long drive without any intervention at all.

2:36I actually still park it. But other than that, I'm not driving the car at all. I mean, obviously in LA, we also have Waymo now, which means you order it on your phone and it shows up with no driver in it and takes you to where you want to go. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So it's quite clear to see how that is potentially a matter of time for those people, because we do have some of those people listening to this conversation right now that their occupation is driving to offer them. And I think driving is the biggest occupation in the world, if I'm correct. I'm pretty sure it is the biggest occupation. One of the top ones.

3:09Yeah. What would you say to those people? What should they be doing with their lives? What should they, should they be retraining in something or what timeframe? So that's the paradigm shift here. Before we always said this job is going to be automated, retrain to do this other job. But if I'm telling you that all jobs will be automated, then there is no plan B. You cannot retrain. look at computer science two years ago we told people learn to code you are an artist you cannot make money learn to code then we realized oh AI kind of knows how to code and getting better become a prompt engineer you can engineer prompts for AI it's going to be a great job get a 40 year degree in it but then we're like AI is way better at designing prompts for other AIs than any human.

3:59So that's gone. So I can't really tell you right now the hardest thing is design AI agents for practical applications. I guarantee you in a year or two, it's going to be gone just as well. So I don't think there is a, this occupation needs to learn to do this instead. I think it's more like we as a humanity, then we all lose our jobs. What do we do? What do we do financially who's paying for us and what do we do in terms of meaning what do i do with my extra 60 80 hours a week you've thought around this corner haven't you a little bit what is around that corner in your view so the economic part seems easy if you create a lot of free labor you have a lot of free wealth abundance things which are right now not very affordable become dirt cheap and so you can provide for everyone basic needs.

4:54Some people say you can provide beyond basic needs. You can provide very good existence for everyone. The hard problem is, what do you do with all that free time? For a lot of people, their jobs are what gives them meaning in their life. So they would be kind of lost. We see it with people who retire or do early retirement. And for so many people who hate their jobs, they'll be very happy not working. But now you have people who are chilling all day. What happens to society? How does that impact crime rate, pregnancy rate, all sorts of issues? Nobody thinks about. Governments don't have programs prepared to deal with 99 % unemployment.

5:39What do you think that world looks like? Again, I think a very important part to understand here is the unpredictability of it. We cannot predict what a smarter than us system will do. And the point when we get to that is often called singularity, by analogy with physical singularity. You cannot see beyond the event horizon. I can tell you what I think might happen, but that's my prediction. It is not what actually is going to happen because I just don't have cognitive ability to predict a much smarter agent impacting this world. then you read science fiction there is never a super intelligence in it actually doing anything because nobody can write believable science fiction at that level they either banned ai like dune because this way you can avoid writing about it or it's like star wars you have this really dumb bots but not nothing super intelligent ever because by definition you cannot predict at that level because by definition of it being super intelligent it will make its own mind up By definition, if it was something you could predict, you would be operating at the same level of intelligence, violating our assumption that it is smarter than you.

6:54If I'm playing chess with superintelligence and I can predict every move, I'm playing at that level. It's kind of like my French bulldog trying to predict exactly what I'm thinking and what I'm going to do. That's a good cognitive gap. And it's not just he can predict you're going to work, you're coming back, but he cannot understand why you're doing a podcast. That is something completely outside of his model of the world. Yeah, he doesn't even know that I go to work. He just sees that I leave the house and doesn't know where I go. Buy food for him. What's the most persuasive argument against your own perspective here?

7:28That we will not have unemployment due to advanced technology? That there won't be this French bulldog human gap in understanding and, I guess, like power and control. So some people think that we can enhance human minds, either through a combination with hardware, so something like Neuralink, or through genetic re-engineering to where we make smarter humans. Yeah. It may give us a little more intelligence. I don't think we're still competitive in biological form with silicon form. Silicon substrate is much more capable for intelligence. It's faster, it's more resilient, more energy efficient in many ways.

8:14Which is what computers are made out of versus the brain. Yeah. So I don't think we can keep up just with improving our biology. Some people think maybe, and this is very speculative, we can upload our minds into computers. So scan your brain, kind of comb of your brain, and have a simulation running on a computer. And you can speed it up, give it more capabilities. But to me, that feels like you no longer exist. We just created software by different means. And now you have AI based on biology and AI based on some other forms of training. You can have evolutionary algorithms. You can have many paths to reach AGI.

8:53But at the end, none of them are humans. I have another date here, which is 2030. What's your prediction for 2030? What will the world look like? So we probably will have humanoid robots with enough flexibility, dexterity to compete with humans in all domains, including plumbers. We can make artificial plumbers. Not the plumbers. That felt like the last bastion of human employment. So 2030, five years from now, humanoid robots, so many of the companies, the leading companies, including Tesla, are developing humanoid robots at light speed and they're getting increasingly more effective. These humanoid robots will be able to move through physical space, make an omelet, do anything humans can do, but obviously be connected to AI as well.

9:50So they can think, talk. Right. They're controlled by AI. They're always connected to the network. so they are already dominating in many ways. Our world will look remarkably different when humanoid robots are functional and effective because that's really when, you know, I start to cry. Like the combination of intelligence and physical ability really doesn't leave much, does it, for us human beings? Not much. So today, if you have intelligence through internet, you can hire humans to do your bidding for you. You can pay them in Bitcoin. So you can have bodies just not directly controlling them.

10:33So it's not a huge game changer to add direct control of physical bodies. Intelligence is where it's at. The important component is definitely higher ability to optimize, to solve problems, to find patterns people cannot see. And then by 2045, I guess the world looks even more, which is 20 years from now. So if it's still around. If it's still around. Ray Kurzweil predicts that that's the year for the singularity. That's the year where progress becomes so fast. So this AI doing science and engineering work makes improvements so quickly, we cannot keep up anymore. That's the definition of singularity, point beyond which we cannot see, understand, predict.

11:20See, understand, predict the intelligence itself, or? What is happening in the world? The technology is being developed. So right now, if I have an iPhone, I can look forward to a new one coming out next year, and I'll understand it has slightly better camera. Imagine now this process of researching and developing this phone is automated. It happens every six months, every three months, every month, week, day, hour, minute, second. You cannot keep up with 30 iterations of iPhone in one day. You don't understand what capabilities it has, what proper controls are. It just escapes you. Right now, it's hard for any researcher in AI to keep up with a state of the art.

12:03While I was doing this interview with you, a new model came out, and I no longer know what the state of the art is. Every day as a percentage of total knowledge, I get dumber. I may still know more because I keep reading, but as a percentage of overall knowledge, we're all getting dumber. And then you take it to extreme values, you have zero knowledge, zero understanding of the world around you. Some of the arguments against this eventuality are that when you look at other technologies like the Industrial Revolution, People just found new ways to work and new careers that we could never have imagined at the time were created.

12:44How do you respond to that in a world of superintelligence? It's a paradigm shift. We always had tools, new tools, which allowed some job to be done more efficiently. So instead of having 10 workers, you could have two workers and eight workers had to find a new job. And there was another job. Now you can supervise those workers or do something cool. So if you're creating a meta invention, you're inventing intelligence, you're inventing a worker, an agent, then you can apply that agent to the new job. There is not a job which cannot be automated. That never happened before. All the inventions we previously had were kind of a tool for doing something.

13:25So we invented fire, huge game changer. But that's it. It stops with fire. We invent a wheel. Same idea. Huge implications, but Will itself is not an inventor. Here we're inventing a replacement for human mind, a new inventor capable of doing new inventions. It's the last invention we ever have to make. At that point, it takes over. And the process of doing science, research, even ethics research, morals, all that is automated at that point. Do you sleep well at night? Really well. even though you you spent the last 15 20 years of your life working on ai safety and it's suddenly among us in a in a way that i don't think anyone could have predicted five years ago when i say among us i really mean that the amount of funding and talent that is now focused on reaching super intelligence faster has made it feel more inevitable and more soon than any of us could have possibly imagined?

14:26We as humans have this built-in bias about not thinking about really bad outcomes and things we cannot prevent. So all of us are dying. Your kids are dying, your parents are dying, everyone's dying, but you still sleep well, you still go on with your day. Even 95-year-olds are still doing games and playing golf and whatnot because we have this ability to not think about the worst outcomes, especially if we cannot actually modify the outcome. So that's the same infrastructure being used for this. Yeah, there is humanity-level death-like event. We're happening to be close to it, probably. But unless I can do something about it, I can just keep enjoying my life.

15:13In fact, maybe knowing that you have limited amount of time left gives you more reason to have a better life. You cannot waste any. And that's the survival trait of evolution, I guess, because those of my ancestors that spent all their time worrying wouldn't have spent enough time having babies and hunting to survive. It's suicidal ideation. People who really start thinking about how horrible the world is usually escape pretty soon.

15:43One of the, you co-authored this paper, analyzing the key arguments people make against the importance of AI safety. And one of the arguments in there is that there's other things that are of bigger importance right now. It might be world wars. It could be nuclear containment. It could be other things. There's other things that the governments and podcasters like me should be talking about that are more important. What's your rebuttal to that argument? So superintelligence is a meta solution. If we get superintelligence right, it will help us with climate change. It will help us with wars. It can solve all the other existential risks.

16:18If we don't get it right, it dominates. If climate change will take 100 years to boil us alive and superintelligence kills everyone in five, I don't have to worry about climate change. So either way, either it solves it for me or it's not an issue. So you think it's the most important thing to be working on? Without question, there is nothing more important than getting this right.

16:45And I know everyone says it. You take any class, you take English professor's class, and he tells you this is the most important class you'll ever take. But you can see the meta-level differences with this one. Another argument in that paper is that we'll be in control and that the danger is not AI. This particular argument asserts that AI is just a tool. Humans are the real actors that present danger. And we can always maintain control by simply turning it off. Can't we just pull the plug out? I see that every time we have a conversation on the show about AI. Someone says, can't we just unplug it?

17:19Yeah, I get those comments on every podcast I make. And I always want to get in touch with a guy and say, this is brilliant. I never thought of it. We're going to write a paper together and get a Nobel Prize for it. This is like, let's do it. Because it's so silly. Like, can you turn off a virus? You have a computer virus, you don't like it. Turn it off. How about Bitcoin? Turn off Bitcoin network. Go ahead, I'll wait. This is silly. Those are distributed systems. You cannot turn them off. And on top of it, they're smarter than you. They made multiple backups. They predicted what you're going to do.

17:50They will turn you off before you can turn them off. The idea that we will be in control applies only to pre-superintelligence levels, basically what we have today. Today, humans with AI tools are dangerous. They can be hackers, malevolent actors, absolutely. But the moment superintelligence becomes smarter, dominates, they're no longer the important part of that equation. It is the higher intelligence I'm concerned about, not the human who may add additional malevolent payload, but at the end still doesn't control it. It is tempting to follow the next argument that I saw in that paper, which basically says, listen, this is inevitable.

18:33So there's no point fighting against it because there's really no hope here. So we should probably give up even trying and be faithful that it will work itself out. because everything you've said sounds really inevitable. And with China working on it, I'm sure Putin's got some secret division. I'm sure Iran are doing some bits and pieces. Every European country's trying to get ahead of AI. The United States is leading the way. So it's inevitable. So we probably should just have faith and pray. Praying is always good, but incentives matter. If you are looking at what drives these people, so yes, money is important.

19:11So there is a lot of money in that space. And so everyone's trying to be there and develop this technology. But if they truly understand the argument, they understand that you will be dead. No amount of money will be useful to you. Then incentives switch. They would want to not be dead. A lot of them are young people, rich people. They have their whole lives ahead of them. I think they would be better off not building advanced superintelligence, concentrating on narrow AI tools for solving specific problems. Okay, my company cures breast cancer. That's all. We make billions of dollars. Everyone's happy.

19:47Everyone benefits. It's a win. We are still in control today. It's not over until it's over. We can decide not to build general superintelligences. I mean, the United States might be able to conjure up enough enthusiasm for that. But if the United States doesn't build general superintelligences, then China are going to have the big advantage, right? So right now, at those levels, whoever has more advanced AI has more advanced military. No question, we see it with existing conflicts. But the moment you switch to superintelligence and control superintelligence, it doesn't matter who builds it, us or them.

20:25And if they understand this argument, they also would not build it. It's a mutually assured destruction on both ends. Is this technology different than, say, nuclear weapons, which require a huge amount of investment and you have to like enrich the uranium and you need billions of dollars potentially to even build a nuclear weapon. But it feels like this technology is much cheaper to get to superintelligence potentially, or at least it will become cheaper. I wonder if it's possible that some guy, some startup is going to be able to build superintelligence in a couple of years without the need of billions of dollars of compute or electricity power?

21:07That's a great point. So every year it becomes cheaper and cheaper to train sufficiently large model. If today it would take a trillion dollars to build superintelligence, next year it could be a hundred billion and so on. At some point, a guy on a laptop could do it. But you don't want to wait four years to make it affordable. So that's why so much money is pouring in. Somebody wants to get there this year and lucky in all the winnings, light cone level award. So in that regard, they're both very expensive projects, like Manhattan-level projects. Which was the nuclear bomb projects. The difference between the two technologies is that nuclear weapons are still tools.

21:49Some dictator, some country, someone has to decide to use them, deploy them, whereas superintelligence is not a tool, it's an agent. It makes its own decisions, and no one is controlling it. I cannot take out this dictator, and now superintelligence is safe. So that's a fundamental difference to me. But if you're saying that it is going to get incrementally cheaper, like I think it's Moore's law, isn't it, that technology gets cheaper? It is. Then there is a future where some guy on his laptop is going to be able to create superintelligence without oversight or regulation or employees, etc. Yeah, that's why a lot of people are suggesting we need to build something like a surveillance planet where you are monitoring who's doing what and you're trying to prevent people from doing it.

22:37Do I think it's feasible? No. At some point it becomes so affordable and so trivial that it just will happen. But at this point, we're trying to get more time. We don't want it to happen in five years. We want it to happen in 50 years. I mean, that's not very hopeful. Depends on how old you are. Depends on how old you are. I mean, if you're saying that you believe in the future people will be able to make superintelligence without the resources that are required today, then it is just a matter of time. Yeah, but so will be true for many other technologies. We are getting much better in synthetic biology, where today someone with a bachelor's degree in biology can probably create a new virus.

23:20This will also become cheaper, other technologies like that. So we are approaching a point where it's very difficult to make sure no technological breakthrough is the last one. So essentially, in many directions, we have this pattern of making it easier in terms of resources, in terms of intelligence, to destroy the world. If you look at, I don't know, 500 years ago, the worst dictator with all the resources could kill a couple million people. He couldn't destroy the world. Now we know nuclear weapons, we can blow up the whole planet multiple times over. Synthetic biology, we saw with COVID, you can very easily create a combination virus which impacts billions of people.

24:06And all of those things are becoming easier to do. In the near term, you talk about extinction being a real risk, human extinction being a real risk. Of all the pathways to human extinction that you think are most likely, what is the leading pathway? way? Because I know you talk about there being some issue pre-deployment of these AI tools, like, you know, someone makes a mistake when they're designing a model or other issues post deployment. When I say post deployment, I mean, once a chat GPT or something, an agent's released into the world and someone hacking into it and changing it and reprogramming it to be malicious.

24:43Of all these potential paths to human extinction, which one do you think is the highest probability? So I can only talk about the ones I can predict myself. So I can predict even before we get to superintelligence, someone will create a very advanced biological tool, create a novel virus, and that virus gets everyone or most everyone. I can envision it. I can understand the pathway. I can say that. So just to zoom in on that then, that would be using an AI to make a virus and then releasing it. Yeah. And would that be intentional? There is a lot of psychopaths, a lot of terrorists, a lot of doomsday cults.

25:23We've seen historically, again, they tried to kill as many people as they can. They usually fail. They kill hundreds of thousands. But if they get technology to kill millions of billions, they would do that, gladly.

25:36The point I'm trying to emphasize is that it doesn't matter what I can come up with. I am not a malevolent actor you're trying to defeat here. It's the superintelligence which can come up with completely novel ways of doing it. Again, you brought up example of your dog. Your dog cannot understand all the ways you can take it out. It can maybe think you'll bite it to death or something. But that's all. Whereas you have infinite supply of resources. So if I asked your dog exactly how you're going to take it out, it would not give you a meaningful answer. It can talk about biting. And this is what we know.

26:16We know viruses. We experienced viruses. We can talk about them. But what an AI system capable of doing novel physics research can come up with is beyond me. One of the things that I think most people don't understand is how little we understand about how these AIs are actually working. Because one would assume, you know, with computers, we kind of understand how a computer works. We know that it's doing this and then this and it's running on code. but from reading your work you describe it as being a black box we actually say in the context of something like chatubt or an ai we know you're telling me that the people that have built that don't actually know what's going on inside there that's exactly right so even people making those systems have to run experiments on their product to learn what it's capable of so they train it by giving it all of data, let's say all of internet text.

27:12They run it on a lot of computers to learn patterns in that text. And then we start experimenting with that model. Oh, do you speak French? Oh, can you do mathematics? Oh, are you lying to me now? And so maybe it takes a year to train it and then six months to get some fundamentals about what it's capable of, some safety overhead. but we still discover new capabilities and old models. If you ask the question in a different way, it becomes smarter. So it's no longer engineering how it was the first 50 years where someone was a knowledge engineer programming an expert system AI to do specific things.