Roman Yampolskiy: These Are The Only 5 Jobs That Will Remain In 2030 & Proof We're Living In a Simulation!

26:51And there was another job. Now you can supervise this worker. So do something cool. If you're creating a meta invention, you invent 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. So we invented fire, huge game changer, but that's it, it stops with fire. We invent a wheel, same idea, huge implications, but wheel itself is not an inventor. Here we're inventing a replacement for human mind, a new inventor capable of doing new inventions.

27:36It'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 spent the last 15, 20 years of your life working on AI safety, and it's suddenly among us in a way that I don't think anyone could have predicted five years ago, So, I'm going to say among us, I really mean that the amount of funding and talent that is now focused on reaching superintelligence faster has made it feel more inevitable and more soon than any of us could have possibly imagined.

28:18We 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're still asleep 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.

29:05In 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 spend all their time worrying wouldn't have spent enough time having babies and hunting to survive. To decide radiation, people who really start thinking about how horrible the world is, usually escape pretty soon.

29:34One 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 new clear containment, it could be other things. There's other things that the governments and podcasts like me should be talking about that are more important. What's your rebuttal to that argument? So super intelligence is a meta solution. If we get super intelligence right, it will help us with climate change, it will help us with wars, it can solve all the other existential risks.

30:10If we don't get it right, it dominates. If climate change will take 100 years to boil us alive and super intelligence kills everyone at 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.

30:37And I know everyone says it. You take any class, but you take English professors' 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 by AI. Someone says, can't we just unplug it?

31:11Yeah, I get those comments on every podcast they make and I always want to like 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. We go ahead. Oh, 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.

31:42They 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 no longer have an 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.

32:25So 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 said sounds really inevitable. And with China working on it, I'm sure Putin's got some secret division. I'm sure Arana doing some bits and pieces every European country's trying to get ahead of AI. The United States is leaving the way. So it's inevitable. so we probably should just have faith and pray. Well, praying is always good, but incentives matter. If you are looking at what drives this people, so yes, money is important, so there is a lot of money in that space and so everyone is trying to be there and develop this technology.

33:09But if they truly understand the argument, they understand that you will be dead. No amount of money will be useful to you. The incentive 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 super intelligence, concentrating on narrow AI tools for solving specific problems. My company cures breast cancer. That's all. We make billions of dollars, everyone's happy, everyone 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 superintelligence.

33:50I mean, the United States might be able to conjure up enough enthusiasm for that. But if the United States doesn't build general superintelligence, then China is 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, intelligence. It doesn't matter who builds it, us or them. And if they understand this argument, they also would not build it. It's a mutually assured distraction and 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 and build a nuclear weapon.

34:39But it feels like this technology is much cheaper to get to super intelligence potentially, or at least it will become cheaper. I wonder if it's possible that some guy, some startup is gonna be able to build super intelligence in a couple of years without the need of billions of dollars of compute or electricity power. That'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 super intelligence next year, it could be a hundred billion and so on at some point a guy in a laptop could do it But you don't want to wait for years for make it affordable So that's why so much money is pouring in somebody wants to get there this year and lucky and all the winnings light cone level Award so in that regard they both very expensive projects like Manhattan level projects which was the nuclear bomb project.

35:34The difference between the two technologies is that nuclear weapons are still tools. Some dictators, some countries, 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 more slur isn't it, the technology gets cheaper at it. Then there is a future where some guy in his laptop is going to be able to create super intelligence without oversight or regulation or employees, etc.

36:16Yeah, that's why a lot of people are suggesting we need to build something like surveillance planet where you are monitoring who's doing what and you're trying to prevent people from doing it. Do 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. So you depends on how old you are. It 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.

37:01Yeah, but so we'll be through for many other technologies. We're getting much better and synthetic biology, where today someone with a bachelor's degree in biology can probably create a new virus. This 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 war's dictator with all the resources could kill a couple million people.

37:43He could destroy the world. Now we know nuclear weapons we can blow up the whole planet multiple times over. synthetic biology was so what called it, you can very easily create a combination virus which impacts billions of people. And all of those things 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? Because I need to 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 -apployment, when I say post -apployment, I mean, wants to chat you with you or something, and agents released into the world and someone hacking into it and changing it and reprogramming it to be malicious.

38:35I've 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 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 a zoom in on that then, that would be using an AI to make a virus, and then releasing it. And would that be intentional? There is a lot of psychopaths, a lot of terrorists, a lot of doomsday calls.

39:14We'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, so billions, they would do that gladly. The 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 super intelligence which can come up with completely novel ways of doing it. Again, you brought What 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.

39:54Whereas 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, we know viruses. We experienced viruses, we can talk about them. But what NAI 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 AI's are actually working. Because when we assume, you know, with computers, we kind of understand how our computer works. We know that it's doing this and then this and it's running on code.

40:33but from reading your work, you described it as being a black box. So in the context of something like ChantuBT or an AI, we know, you're telling me that the people that have built that tool don't actually know what's going on inside that. That's exactly right. So even people making those systems have to run experiments and 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. They 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?

41:14Oh, 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 is capable of, some safety overhead. But we still discover new capabilities in 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. It's a science. We are creating this artifact, growing it. It's like an alien plant. And then we study to see what it's doing. And just like with plants, we don't have 100 % accurate knowledge of biology.

41:58We don't have full knowledge here. We kind of know some patterns. We know, okay, if we add more compute, it gets smarter for most of the time. But nobody can tell you precisely what the outcome is going to be given a set of inputs. I've watched so many entrepreneurs treat sales like a performance problem when it's often down to visibility because when you can't see what's happening in your pipeline, what stage each conversation is at, what's stored, what's moving, you can't improve anything and you can't close the deal. Our sponsor, PypeDrive, is the number one CRM tool for small to medium businesses.

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43:11And if you use this link, you'll get a 30 day free trial. What do you make of Open AI and Sam Altman and what they do? And obviously you're aware that one of the co -founders was it? Was it Ilya? It is. Ilya left and he started a new company called super intelligent safety. Super, because safety wasn't challenging enough, you decided to just jump right to the hard problem. As an onlooker, when you see that people are leaving OpenAI to start super intelligent safety companies, what was your read on that situation? So a lot of people who worked with them said that maybe he's not the most direct person in terms of being honest with them and they had concerns about his views and safety.

44:03That's part of it. So they wanted more control, they wanted more concentration and safety. But also it seems that anyone who leaves that company and starts a new one gets a $20 billion valuation just for having it started. You don't have a product, you don't have customers, but if you want to make many billions of dollars, just do that. So it seems like a very rational thing to do for anyone who can. So I'm not surprised that there is a lot of attrition. Meeting him in person, he's super nice, very smart, absolutely perfect public interface. You see him testify in a Senate, he says the right thing to the Senate person.

44:44you see him talk to the investors, they get the right message. But if you look at what people who know him personally are saying, it's probably not the right person to be controlling a project of that impact. Why? He puts safety second. Second to winning the race to super intelligence, being the guy who created Godic and controlling the light corner of the universe, she's worse. Did you suspect that's what he's driven by? It's by the legacy of being an impactful person that did a remarkable thing versus the consequence that that might have on society? Because it's interesting that his other startup is Worldcoin, which is basically a platform to create universal basic income.

45:36I a platform to give us income in a world where people don't have jobs anymore. So one hand you're creating an AI company, the other hand you're creating a company that is preparing for people not to have employment. It also has other properties. It keeps track of everyone's biometrics. It keeps you in charge of a world's economy, world's wealth, very tiny, a large portion of world coins. So I think it's kind of very reasonable part to integrate with world dominance. If you have a super intelligent system and you control money, you're doing well.

46:19Why would someone want world dominance? People have different levels of ambition than you are very young person with billions of dollars, fame, you start looking for more ambitious projects. Some people want to go to Mars, others want to control light cone of the universe. What did you say, light cone of the universe? Light cone. So every part of the universe light can reach from this point, meaning anything accessible you want to grab and bring them to your control. Do you think Sam Altman wants to control every part of the universe. I suspect he might. Yes. It doesn't mean he doesn't want a side effect of it being a very beneficial technology which makes all the humans happy.

47:03Happy humans are good for control. If you had to guess what the world looks like in 2 ,100. If you had to guess It's either free of human existence or it's completely not comprehensible to someone like us. It's one of those extremes. So there's either no humans? It's basically the world is destroyed or it's so different that I cannot envision those predictions. What can be done to turn this ship to a more certain positive outcome at this point? Is there still things that we can do, or is it too late? So I believe in personal self -interest. If people realize that doing this thing is really bad for them personally, they will not do it.

47:58So our job is to convince everyone with any power in the space, creating this technology, working for those companies, they are doing something very bad for them. Now just forget about it, billion people you experimenting on with no permission, no consent, you will not be happy with the outcome. If we can get everyone to understand that's a default, and it's not just me saying it, you had Jeff Hinton, a Nobel Prize winner, founder of a whole machine learning space. He says the same thing, Benji, dozens of others, top scholars, We had a statement about the interest of AI signed by thousands of scholars in computer scientists.

48:37This is basically what we think right now and we need to make it a universal. No one should disagree with this and then we may actually make good decisions about what technology to build. It doesn't guarantee long -term safety for humanity, but it means we're not trying to get there as soon as possible to the worst possible outcome. And are you hopeful that that's even possible? I want to try. We have no choice but to try. And what would need to happen and who would need to act? What is it government legislation? Is it? Unfortunately, I don't think making it illegal is sufficient. There are different jurisdictions, there is, you know, loopholes.

49:18And what are you going to do if somebody does it? You're going to find them for destroying humanity? Like very steep fines for it. Like, what are you going to do? It's not enforceable. If they do create it, the now the super intelligence is in charge. So the judicial system we have is not impactful and all the punishments we have a design for punishing humans Presence capital punishment doesn't apply to AI You know the problem I have is want to have these conversations. I never feel like I walk away with I hope that something's gonna go off And what I mean by that is I never feel like I walk away with clear Some kind of clear Set of actions that can cause correct what might happen here So what should I do?

50:00What should the person said at home listening to this do you you talk to a lot of people who are building this technology? Ask them precisely to explain Some of those things they claim to be impossible how they solved it or going to solve it before they get to where they're going Do you know I don't think Sam Altman wants to talk to me? I don't know he seems to go on a lot of podcasts. Maybe he wants to go on mine I wonder why this is, I wonder why this. I'd love to speak to him, but I don't think he wants me to interview him. Have an open challenge. Maybe money is not the incentive, but whatever attracts people like that, whoever can convince you that it's possible to control and make safe super intelligence gets the prize.

50:49They come on your show and prove their case. anyone, if no one claims the price or even accepts the challenge after a few years, maybe we don't have anyone with solutions. We have companies value it again, billions and billions of dollars working on safe super intelligence. We haven't seen their output yet. Yeah, I'd like to speak to Ilier as well, because I know he's working on safe super intelligence say. Notice the pattern too. If you look at history of AI safety organizations or departments within companies, they usually start well, very ambitious, and then they fail and disappear. So open AI had super intelligence alignment team.

51:36The day they announced it, I think they said they're going to solve it in four years. Like half a year later, they canceled the team. And there is dozens of similar examples. Deeding a perfect safety for superintelligence, perpetual safety as it keeps improving, modifying, interacting with people, you're never going to get there. It's impossible. There is a big difference between difficult problems in computer science and pre -complete problems and impossible problems. And I think control, indefinite control of superintelligence is such a problem. So what's the point trying, then, if it's impossible?

52:11Well, I'm trying to prove that it is specifically that. Once we establish something as impossible, fewer people will waste their time claiming they can do it and find looking for money. So many people go and give me a billion dollars in two years and I'll solve it for you. Well, I don't think you will. But people aren't going to stop striving towards it. So if there's no attempts to make it safe and there's more people increasingly striving towards it, then it's inevitable. But it changes what we do if we know that it's impossible to make it right to make it safe then this direct path of just build it as soon as you can becomes suicide mission Hopefully fewer people will pursue that.

52:49They may go in other directions like again I'm a scientist I'm an engineer. I love AI. I love technology. I use it all the time Build useful tools. Stop building agents Build narrow super intelligence. Not a general one. I'm not saying you should make billions of dollars I love billions of dollars, but don't kill everyone yourself included.

53:16They don't think they're going to, though. Then tell us why. I hear things about intuition. I hear things about what we'll solve it later. Tell me specifically in scientific terms, publish a peer -reviewed paper explaining how you're going to control superintelligence. Yeah, strange. It's strange to even bother if there was even a 1 % chance of human extinction. It's strange to do something like if there was a 1 % chance that if I got in a car, I might not be alive. I would not get in the car. If you told me there was a 1 % chance that if I drank whatever liquid is in this cup right now, I might die.

53:51I would not drink the liquid. even if there was a billion dollars if I survived. So the 19 % chance they get a billion dollars, the 1 % is I don't know, I wouldn't drink it. I wouldn't take the chance. It's worse than that. Not just you die. Everyone dies. Yeah. Yeah. Now, would we let you drink it at any odds? That's for us to decide. You don't get to make that choice for us. To get consent from human subjects. You need them to comprehend what they are consenting to. If those systems are unexplainable, unpredictable, how can they consent? They don't know what they are consenting to. So it's impossible to get consent by definition.

54:31So this experiment can never be run ethically. By definition, they are doing unethical experimentation and human subjects. Do you think people should be protesting? There are people protesting. There is starpy eye, there is posse eye, there is black offices of open AI, they do it weekly, monthly, quite a few actions and very recruiting new people. You think more people should be protesting? Do you think that's an effective solution? If you can get it to a large enough scale to where majority of population is participating, it would be impactful. I don't know if they can scale from current numbers to that, but I support everyone trying everything peacefully and legally.

55:10And for the person listening at home, what should they be doing? What, what, because they don't want to feel powerless, And I just want to feel powerless. So it depends on what scale we are asking about time scale. I was saying like this year, you keep goes to college, what major to pick? Should they go to college at all? Yeah. Should you switch jobs? Should you go into certain industries? Those questions we can answer. We can talk about immediate future. What should you do in five years with this being created for an average person, not much, just like they can't influence World War III nuclear Holocaust, anything like that.

55:45But it's not something anyone's going to ask them about. Today, if you want to be a part of this movement, yeah, join Poisei, join Stappi -I, there's organizations currently trying to build up momentum to bring democratic powers to influence those individuals. So, in the near time, not a huge amount, I was wondering if there are any interesting strategies in the near time. Like, should I be thinking differently about my family about, you know, you've got kids, right? You've got three kids. I don't know about you. How are you thinking about parenting in this world that you see around the corner?

56:25How are you thinking about what to say to them, the advice to give them what they should be learning? So good is general advice outside of this domain that you should leave your everyday as if it's your last. It's a good advice no matter what. If you have three years left or 30 years left, you lived your best life. So try to not do things you hate for too long. Do interesting things, do impactful things. If you can do all that while helping people do that. Simulation theory is an interesting sort of adjacent subject here, because as computers begin to accelerate and get more intelligent and we're able to, you know, do things with AI that we can never have imagined in terms of like, Imagine the worlds that we could create with virtual reality.

57:11I think it was Google that recently released What was it called? Like the AI worlds You take a picture and it generates a whole world. Yeah, you can move through the world I'll put it on the screen for people to see but Google have released this technology Which allows you I think with a simple prompt actually to make a three -dimensional world that you can then navigate through And in that world it has memory So in the world, if you paint on a wall and turn away, you look back the wall. Persistent. Yeah, it's persistent. And when I saw that, I could go, Jesus, bloody hell, this is like the foothills of being able to create a simulation that's indistinguishable from everything I see here.

57:50Right. That's why I think we are in one. That's exactly the reason. AI is getting to the level of creating human agents, human level agents, and virtual reality is getting to the level of being indistinguishable from ours. So you think this is a simulation? I'm pretty sure we are. In a simulation, yeah. For someone that isn't familiar with the simulation arguments, what are the first principles here that convince you that we are currently living in a simulation? So you need certain technologies to make it happen. If you believe we can create human level AI, and you believe we can create virtual reality as good as this in terms of resolution, haptics, whatever properties it has, then I commit right now the moment this is affordable I'm going to run billions of simulations of this exact moment making sure you are statistically in one.

58:42See that last part again you're going to run I'm going to commit right now when it's very affordable like 10 bucks a month to run it I'm going to run a billion simulations of this interview. Why? Because statistically that means you are in one right now. The chances of you being in the real one is one in a billion. Okay, so to make sure I'm clear on this. It's a retroactive placement. Yeah, so the minute it's affordable, then you can run billions of them, and they would feel and appear to be exactly like this interview right now. Right. So assuming the AI has internal state experience as quality, some people argue that they don't, some say they already have it, that's a separate philosophical But if we can simulate this, I will.

59:31Some people might misunderstand. You're not saying that you will. You're saying that someone will. So I can also do it. I don't mind. Of course, others will do it before I get there. If I'm getting it for $10, somebody got it for $4 ,000, that's not the point. If you have technology, we're definitely running a lot of simulations for research, for entertainment, games. all sorts of reasons. And the number of those greatly exceeds the number of real worlds we in. Look at all the video games kids are playing. Every kid plays, stand different games, you know, billion kids in the world. So there is a ton of billions simulations in one real world.

1:00:14Even more so than we think about advanced AI, super intelligent systems. Their thinking is not like ours. They think in a lot more detail, there are experiments. So running a detailed simulation of some problem at the level of creating artificial humans and simulating the whole planet would be something they'll do routinely. So there is a good chance this is not me doing it for $10. It's a future simulation thinking about something in this world.

1:00:46So it could be the case that a species of humans or a species of intelligence in some form got to this point where they could affordably run simulations that are indistinguishable from this and they decided to do it and this is it right now. And it would make sense that they would run simulations as experiments or for games or for entertainment. And also, when we think about time in the world that I'm in in this simulation that I could be in right now, time feels long relatively, you know, I have 24 hours in a day, but on there, in their world, it could be... I'm as relative. Relative, yeah, it could be a second.

1:01:29My whole life could be a millisecond in there. Right, you can change speed of simulations, you're running for sure. So your belief is that this is probably a simulation? Most likely. And there is a lot of agreement on that, if you look again, returning to religions, every religion basically describes what a super intelligent being, an engineer, a program, recreating a fake world for testing purposes or for whatever. But if you took the simulation hypothesis paper. You go to jungle, you talk to primitive people, a local tribe, and in their language you tell them about it. Go back to generations later.

1:02:08They have religion. That's basically what the story is. Religion, yeah, it describes a simulation. They're very visually. Somebody created it. So by default, that was the first theory we had. Now with science, more and more people are going, like I'm giving it non -trivial probability. If you people ask how I am, but a lot of people give it some credence. What percentage you are in terms of believing that we are currently living in a simulation? Very close to certainty. And what does that mean for the nature of your life? If you're close to 100 % certain that we are currently living in a simulation, does that change anything in your life?

1:02:45So all the things you care about are still the same. Pain still hurts, love still love, like those things that are different, so it doesn't matter, they're still important, that's what matters. The little 1 % difference is that I care about what's outside the simulation, I want to learn about it, I write papers about it, so that's the only impact. And what do you think is outside of the simulation? I don't know, but we can look at this world and derive some properties of the simulators. So clearly, brilliant engineer, brilliant scientist, brilliant artist, not so good with moral significance, room for improvement.

1:03:25In our view of what morals and ethics should be? Well, we know that it's suffering in a world, so unless you think it's ethical to torture children, then I'm questioning your approach. But in terms of incentives to create a positive incentive, you probably also need to create negative incentives. Suffering seems to be one of the negatives incentives built into our design to stop me doing things I shouldn't do. So like put my hand in a fire, it's going to hurt. But it's all about levels, levels of suffering, right? So unpleasant stimuli, negative feedback doesn't have to be at like negative infinity hell levels.

1:04:01You don't want to burn a life and feel it. You want to be like, oh, this isn't comfortable. I'm going to stop. It's interesting because we assume that they don't have great more rules and ethics, but we too would we take animals and cook them and eat them for a dinner and we also take conduct experiments on mice and rats. But to get university approval to conduct an experiment you submit a proposal and there is a panel of ethicists who would say you can't experiment in humans, you can't burn babies, you can't eat animals alive, all those things would be banned. In most parts of the world. Where they have ethical boards.

1:04:37Yeah, because some places don't bother with it so they have easier approval process. It's funny when you talk about the simulation theory, there's an element of the conversation that makes life feel less meaningful in a way.

1:04:52I know it doesn't matter, but whenever I have this conversation with people, not on the podcast about, are we living in a simulation, you almost see a little bit of meaning come out of their life for a second, and then they forget and then they carry on. But the thought that this is a simulation, almost posits that it's not important. Well, I think humans want to believe that this is the highest level and we're at the most important and it's all about us. We're quite egotistical by design. And just an interesting observation I've always had when I have these conversations with people that it seems to strip something out of their life.

1:05:29Do you feel religious people feel that way? They know that it's another world and the one that matters is not this one. Do you feel they don't value their lives the same? I guess in some religions. Think they think that this world is being created for them and that they are going to go to this heaven or hell and that still puts them at the very center of it. But if it's a simulation, we could just be some computer game that four -year -old alien is messing around with while he's got some time to burn. But maybe there is a test and there is a better simulation you go to and a worse one, maybe there are different difficulty levels.

1:06:09Maybe you want to play it on a harder setting next time. I've just invested millions into this and become a co -owner of the company. It's a company called Keytone IQ and the story is quite interesting. I started talking about ketosis on this podcast and the fact that I am very low carb, very, very low sugar and my body produces ketones which have made me incredibly focused, have improved my endurance, have improved my mood, and have made me more capable at doing what I do here. And because I was talking about it on the podcast, a couple of weeks later, these showed up on my desk in my HQ in London, these little shots.

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1:08:25That's justworks .com. And do you think much about longevity? A lot, yeah. It's probably the second most important problem, because if AI doesn't get us, that will. Would you mean? You're going to die of old age. Which is fine? That's not good. You want to die? I mean, you don't have to just the disease. We're going to cure it. Nothing stops you from living forever. As long as universe exists, unless we escape the simulation. But we wouldn't want a world where everybody could live forever, right? That would be... Sure, but why? Who do you want today? Well, I don't know. I mean, I say this because it's all I've ever known that people die, but wouldn't the world become pretty ever crowded?

1:09:08No, you stop reproducing if you live forever. You have kids because you want a replacement for you. If you live forever, you're like, I'll have kids in a million years. That's cool. I'll go explore a universe first. Plus, if you look at actual population dynamics outside of like one continent, we all shrinking when I'm growing. Yeah, this is crazy. It's crazy that the more rich people get the less kids they have, which aligns with what you're saying. And I do actually think I'm going to be completely honest here. I think if I knew that I was going to live to a thousand years old, there's no way I'd be having kids at 30.

1:09:42All right. Is that biological clocks are based on terminal points? Whereas if your biological clock is infinite, you'd be like one day. And you think that's close? Being able to extend our lives? It's one breakthrough away. I think somewhere in our genome we have this rejuvenation loop and it's sad to basically give us at most 120. I think we're going to reset it to something bigger. A .I. is probably going to accelerate that. That's one very important application area. Yes, absolutely. So maybe Brian Johnson's right when he says don't die now. He keeps saying to me he's like don't die now. Don't die ever.

1:10:21But he's saying like don't die before we get to the technology. Right. Longevity escape velocity, you want to live long enough to live forever. If at some point we every year of your existence at two years to your existence through medical breakthroughs, then you live forever. You just have to make it to that point of longevity escape velocity. And he thinks that longevity escape velocity, especially in the world of AI, is pretty it's decades away, minimum, which means... As soon as we fully understand human genome, I think, will make amazing breakthroughs very quickly. Because we know some people have genes for living way longer.

1:10:58They have generations of people who are centarians. So if we can understand that and copy that or copy it from some animals which will live forever, we'll get there. Would you want to live forever? Of course. Reverse the question. Let's say we'll live forever and you ask me, do you want to die in 40 years? Why would I say yes? I don't know. Maybe you just used to be default. Yeah, I am used to the devote. And nobody wants to die, like no matter how old you are, nobody goes, yeah, I want to Davis here. Everyone's like, I want to keep leaving. I wonder if life and everything would be less special if I lived for 10 ,000 years.

1:11:33I wonder if going to Hawaii for the first time or I don't know, a relationship or these things would be way less special to me if they were less scarce. And if they're, I just, you know, quite It's individually less special, but there is so much more you can do. Right now, you can only make plans to do something for a decade or two. You cannot have an ambitious plan of working in this project for 500 years. Imagine possibilities open to you within a time in a infinite universe. Gosh. Well, you can't. Because it's all serious. It's a big amount of time. Also, I don't know about you, but I don't remember like 99 % of my life in detail.

1:12:14I remember big highlights. So even if I enjoyed Hawaii 10 years ago, I'll enjoy it again. Are you thinking about that really practically as in terms of, you know, in the same way that Brian Johnson is, Brian Johnson is convinced that we're like maybe two decades away from being able to extend life? Are you thinking about that practically? And are you doing anything about it? Diet nutrition, I try to think about investment strategies which pay out in a million years, yeah. Really? Yeah, of course. Would you mean of course? Of course. Well, I want you if you think this is what's going to happen, you should try that.

1:12:46So if we get AI right, now what happens to economy? We talked about world coin, we talked about free labor, what's money? Is it now Bitcoin? Do you invest in that? Is there something else which becomes the only resource we cannot fake? So those things are very important research topics. So you're investing in Bitcoin, aren't you? Yeah. Yeah. Because it's the only scarcity source. Nothing else has scarcity. Everything else if price goes up will make more. I can make as much gold as you want given a price point. You cannot make more Bitcoin. Some people say Bitcoin is just this thing on a computer that we all agreed was value.

1:13:27We are a thing on a computer. Remember? So, okay. So, I mean, not investment advice, but investment advice. It's hilarious how that's one of those things where they tell you it's not, but you know it is immediately. Your call is important to us. That means your call is of zero importance. And investment is like that. Yeah, when they say no investment advice, it's definitely investment advice. But it's my investment advice. Okay, so you'll bullish on Bitcoin because it's, It can't be messed with. It is the only thing which we know how much there is in the universe. So gold could be an asteroid made out of pure gold heading towards us, devaluing it.

1:14:10Well, also killing all of us. But Bitcoin, I know exactly the numbers. And even the 21 million is an upper limit. How many are lost? Passwords forgotten. I don't know what Satoshi is doing with his million. and it's getting scarce every day, while more and more people are trying to accumulate it. Some people worry that it could be hacked with a supercomputer. A quantum computer can break that algorithm. There is strategies for switching to quantum -resistant cryptography for that. And quantum computers are still kinda weak. Do you think there's any changes to my life that I should make following this conversation?

1:14:51Is there anything that I should do differently? the minute I will cut out this door. I assume you already invest in Bitcoin heavily. Yes, I'm an investor in Bitcoin. Business financial advice. No, you seem to be winning. Maybe it's your simulation. You reach handsome. You have famous people hanging out with you. That's pretty good. Keep it up.

1:15:16Robin Hansen has a paper about how to live in a simulation, what you should be doing in it. And you go all this to do exactly that. You want to be interesting. You want to hang out with famous people so they don't shut it down. So you are part of a part someone's actually watching in paper view or something like that. Oh, I don't know if you want to be watched on paper fee because then you can be the same. Then they'll shut you down if no one's watching. Why would they play it? I'm saying, don't you want to fly under the radar? Don't you want to be the guy who's living the normal life that the monster does?

1:15:46There's an NPCs. Nobody wants to be an NPC. Are you religious? Not in any traditional sense, but I believe in simulation hypothesis which has a super intelligent being. So you don't believe in the like, you know, the religious books. So different religions. This religion will tell you, don't work Saturday. This one, don't work Sunday. Don't eat pigs, don't eat cows. They just have local traditions on top of that theory. That's all it is. They all the same religion. They all worship super intelligent being. They all think this world is not the main one. And they argue about which animal not to eat.

1:16:24Skip the local flavors, concentrate on what all the religions have in common. And that's the interesting part. They all think there is something greater than humans, very capable, all knowing, all powerful, than I run a computer game. For those characters in a game, I am that. I can change the whole world, I can shut it down, I know everything in a world. Funny I was thinking earlier on when we started talking about the simulation theory that there's there might be something in a in us That is been left from the creator almost like a clue like it like an intuition Because that's what we we tend to have through history humans have this intuition.

1:17:02Yeah that All the things you said are true that there's this somebody above and that we have generations of people who were religious who believed God told them and was there and given books and that has been passed on for many generations. This is probably one of the earliest generations not to have universal religious belief. One of those people are telling the truth. One of those people that say God came to them and said something about you now. Imagine if that was part of the story. I'm looking at the news today. Something happened an hour ago and I'm getting different conflicting results.

1:17:35I can't even get with cameras, with drones, with like guy on Twitter there. I still don't know what happened. And you think three thousand years ago we have occupied record of translations and of course not. You know these conversations you have around AI safety. Do you think they make people feel good? I don't know if they feel good or bad but people find it interesting. It's one of those topics so I can have a conversation about different cures for cancer with an average person but everyone has opinions about AI. Everyone has opinions about simulation. It's interesting that you don't have to be highly educated or a genius to understand those concepts.

1:18:16Because I tend to think that it makes me feel not positive. And I understand that, but I've always been of the opinion that

1:18:29you shouldn't live in a world of delusion where you're just seeking to be positive, have sort of positive things said and avoid uncomfortable conversations. Actually, progress often in my life comes from like having uncomfortable conversations, becoming aware about something and then at least being informed about how I can do something about it. And so I think that's why that's why I asked the question because I think most people should, if they're normal human beings, listen to these conversations and go, gosh, that's scary. And this is concerning. And then I keep coming back to this point, which is like, what do I do with that energy?

1:19:12Yeah, but I'm trying to point out this is not different than so many conversations. We can talk about all the reservation in this region, genocide in this region, you're dying, cancer is spreading, autism is up. You can always find something to be lady depressed about, and nothing you can do about it. And we are very good at concentrating on what we can change, what we are good at, and basically not trying to embrace the whole world as a local environment. So historically you grew up with a tribe, you had a dozen people around you, if something happened to one of them, it was very rare, it was an accident.

1:19:50Now, if I go on the internet, somebody gets killed everywhere all the time, somehow thousands of people that report it to me every day, I don't even have time to notice. It's just too much. So I have to put filters in place. And I think this topic is what people are very good at filtering as like this was this entertaining talk I went to, kind of like a show. And the moment I exit it ends. So usually I would go give a keynote at a conference and I tell them basically you're going to die, you have two years left, any questions. and people will be like, will I lose my job? How do I lubricate my sex robot?

1:20:32Like all sorts of nonsense, clearly not understanding what I'm trying to say there. And there's a good question, interesting questions, but not fully embracing the result. They still in their bubble of local versus global. And the people that disagree with you the most as it relates to AI safety, what is it that they say? What are their counter arguments typically? So many don't engage at all. They have no background knowledge in a subject. They never had a single book, single paper, not just by me, by anyone. They may be even working in a field, so they are doing some machine learning work for some company, maximizing ad clicks.

1:21:14And to them, those systems are very narrow. And then they hear that obviously, I was going to take over the world like it has no hands. How would it do that? It's nonsense. This guy is crazy. He has a beard. Why would I listen to him? Right? That's Then they start treating a little bit. They Go, okay, so maybe I can be dangerous. Yeah, I see that but we always solve problems in the past We're gonna solve them again. I mean at some point we fixed a computer virus or something. So it's the same and Basically the more exposure they have the less likely they are to keep that position I know many people who went from super careless developer to safety researcher.

1:22:00I don't know anyone who went from I worry about the safety tool like there is nothing to worry about.

1:22:11What are you closing statements? Let's make sure there is not a closing statement we need to give for humanity. Let's make sure we stay in charge and control. Let's make sure we only build things which are beneficial to us. Let's make sure people who are making those decisions are remotely qualified to do it. They are good, not just at science, engineering and business, but also have moral and ethical standards. And if you're doing something which impacts other people, you should ask their permission before you do that. If there was one button in front of you and it would shut down every AI company in the world right now, permanently, with the inability for anybody to start a new one, would you press the button?

1:22:58Are we losing that way or just super intelligent EGI part? Losing all of AI. That's a hard question because AI isn't extremely important. It controls stock market power plants. it controls hospitals, it would be devastating. Accident. Millions of people would lose their lives. Okay, we can keep narrow AI. Oh yeah. That's what we want. We want narrow AI to do all this for us, but not God we don't control doing things to us. So you would stop it, you would stop AGI and super intelligence. We have AGI. What we have today is great for almost everything we can make secretaries out of it. 99 % of economic potential of current technology has not been deployed.

1:23:42We make AI so quickly it doesn't have time to propagate through the industry, through technology, something like half of all jobs I consider it B as jobs. They don't need to be done, bullshin jobs. So those can be not even automated, they can be just gone, but I'm saying we can replace 60 % of jobs today with existing models. We're not done that. So if the goal is to grow economy to develop, we can do it for decades without having to create super intelligence as soon as possible. Do you think globally, especially in the Western world, unemployment is only going to go up from here? Do you think relatively this is the low of unemployment?

1:24:20I mean, it fluctuates a lot with our factors. There are wars, there is economic cycles, but overall the more jobs you automate and the higher is the intellectual necessity to started job with fewer people qualify. So if we plotted it on a graph over the next 20 years, you're assuming unemployment's gradually going to go up over that. I think so. Fewer and fewer people would be able to contribute already. We kind of understand it because we created minimum wage. We understood some people don't contribute an economic value to get paid anything really. So we had to force employers to pay them more than they worth.

1:24:59And we haven't updated it. It's about 725 federally in US. If you keep up with economy, it should be like $25 an hour now, which means all these people making less are not contributing enough economic output to justify what they're getting paid. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the And the question left for you is, what are the most important characteristics for a friend, colleague or mate? There's a very different types of people, but all of them loyalty is number one. And what does loyalty mean to you? Not betraying you, not screwing you, not cheating on you.

1:25:54despite the temptation. Despite the world being as it is, situation, environment. Dr. Roman, thank you so much. Thank you so much for doing what you do, because you're starting a conversation and pushing forward a conversation and doing research that is incredibly important. And you're doing it in the face of a lot of skeptics. I'd say there's a lot of people that have a lot of incentives to discredit what you're saying and what you do, because they have their own incentives and they have billions of dollars on the line, and they have their jobs on the line potentially as well. So it's really important that there are people out there that are willing to, I guess, stick their head above the parapet and come on shows like this and go on big platforms and talk about the unexplainable, unpredictable, uncontrollable future that we're heading towards.

1:26:42So thank you for doing that. This book, which I think everybody should check out, if they want a continuation of this conversation, I think it was published in 2024, for, gives a holistic view on many of the things we've talked about today, preventing AI failures and much, much more. And I'm gonna link it below for anybody that wants to read it. If people wanna learn more from you, if they wanna go further into your work, what's the best thing for them to do? Where do they go? They can follow me, follow me on Facebook, follow me on X, just don't follow me home. They're important to me. Okay, so I'll put you on Twitter, your X account as well below, so people can follow you there.

1:27:14And yeah, thank you so much for doing what you do. It's remarkably eye -opening, and it's given me so much food for thought, and it's actually convinced me more that we are living in a simulation. But it's also made me think quite differently of religion, I have to say, because you're right, all the religions, when you get away from this, sort of, the local traditions, they do all point at the same thing. And actually, if they are all pointing at the same thing, then maybe the fundamental truth that exists across them should be something I pay more attention to, things like loving their neighbor, things like the fact that we are all one, that there's a divine creator.

1:27:43And maybe also, they all seem to have consequence beyond this life. So maybe I should be thinking more about how I behave in this life and where I might end up thereafter. Roman thank you. Amen.

1:28:40you

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