The Man Who Wrote The Book On AI: 2030 Might Be The Point Of No Return! We've Been Lied To About AI!

30:18And the signal that comes out the other end is affected by your adjusting of all the connection strengths. So what you do is you get a whole lot of training data and you adjust all those connection strengths so that the signal that comes out the other end of the network is the right answer to the question. So if your training data is lots of photographs of animals, Then all those pixels go in one end of the network. And out the other end, you know, it activates the llama output or the dog output or the cat output or the ostrich output. And you just keep adjusting all the connection strengths in this network until the outputs of the network are the ones you want.

31:01But we don't really know what's going on across all of those different chains. So what's going on inside that network? Well, so now you have to imagine that this network, this chain link fence is a thousand square miles in extent. Okay. So it's covering the whole of the San Francisco Bay Area or the whole of London inside the M25. Right. That's how big it is. And the lights are off. It's nighttime. So you might have in that network about a trillion adjustable parameters. and then you do quintillions or sextillions of small random adjustments to those parameters until you get the behavior that you want.

31:44I've heard Sam Altman say that in the future, he doesn't believe they'll need much training data at all to make these models progress themselves because there comes a point where the models are so smart that they can train themselves and improve themselves without us needing to pump in articles and books and scour the internet? Yeah, it should work that way. So I think what he's referring to, and this is something that several companies are now worried might start happening, is that the AI system becomes capable of doing AI research by itself. And so you have a system with a certain capability.

32:30I mean, crudely, we could call it an IQ, but it's not really an IQ. But anyway, imagine that it's got an IQ of 150. It uses that to do AI research, comes up with better algorithms or better designs for hardware or better ways to use the data, updates itself. Now it has an IQ of 170. And now it does more AI research, except that now it's got an IQ of 170. So it's even better at doing the AI research. And so, you know, next iteration, it's 250 and so on. So this is an idea that one of Alan Turing's friends, I.J. Good, wrote out in 1965 called the intelligence explosion, right? that one of the things an intelligence system could do is to do AI research and therefore make itself more intelligent.

33:22And this would very rapidly take off and leave the humans far behind. Is that what they call the fast takeoff? That's called the fast takeoff. Sam Altman said, I think a fast takeoff is more possible than I thought a couple of years ago, which I guess is that moment where the AGI starts teaching itself. And in his blog, The Gentle Singularity, he said, we may already be past the event horizon of takeoff. What does he mean by event horizon? The event horizon is a phrase borrowed from astrophysics, and it refers to the black hole. And the event horizon, think if you've got some very, very massive object that's heavy enough that it actually prevents light from escaping.

34:11That's why it's called the black hole. It's so heavy that light can't escape. So if you're inside the event horizon, then light can't escape beyond that. So I think what he's meaning is if we're beyond the event horizon, it means that now we're just trapped in the gravitational attraction of the black hole, or in this case, we're trapped in the inevitable slide, if you want, towards AGI. When you think about the economic value of AGI, which I've estimated at$15 quadrillion, that acts as a giant magnet in the future. We're being pulled towards it. We're being pulled towards it. And the closer we get, the stronger the force.

35:01The probability, you know, the closer we get, the higher the probability that we will actually get there. So people are more willing to invest. And we also start to see spinoffs from that investment, such as ChatGPT, right, which is, you know, generates a certain amount of revenue and so on. So it does act as a magnet. And the closer we get, the harder it is to pull out of that field. It's interesting when you think that this could be the end of the human story, this idea that the end of the human story was that we created our successor. We summoned the next iteration of life or intelligence ourselves.

35:45Like we took ourselves out. It is quite like just removing ourselves and the catastrophe from it for a second. It is an unbelievable story. Yeah. And, you know, there are many legends, the sort of be careful what you wish for legend. And in fact, the King Midas legend is very relevant here. What's that? So King Midas is this legendary king who lived in modern-day Turkey, but I think it's like Greek mythology. He is said to have asked the gods to grant him a wish, the wish being that everything I touch should turn to gold. So he's incredibly greedy. You know, we call this the Midas touch. And we think of the Midas touch as being like, you know, that's a good thing, right?

36:39Wouldn't that be cool? But what happens? So he goes to drink some water and he finds that the water has turned to gold. And he goes to eat an apple and the apple turns to gold. And he goes to comfort his daughter and his daughter turns to gold. And so he dies in misery and starvation. So this applies to our current situation in two ways, actually. So one is that I think greed is driving us to pursue a technology that will end up consuming us. And we will perhaps die in misery and starvation instead. What it shows is how difficult it is to correctly articulate what you want the future to be like.

37:28For a long time, the way we built AI systems was we created these algorithms where we could specify the objective and then the machine would figure out how to achieve the objective and then achieve it. So, you know, we specify what it means to win at chess or to win at go. And the algorithm figures out how to do it and it does it really well. So that was, you know, standard AI up until recently. And it suffers from this drawback that, sure, we know how to specify the objective in chess, but how do you specify the objective in life? What do we want the future to be like? Well, really hard to say.

38:06And almost any attempt to write it down precisely enough for the machine to bring it about would be wrong. And if you're giving a machine an objective which isn't aligned with what we truly want the future to be like, you're actually setting up a chess match. And that matches one that you're going to lose when the machine is sufficiently intelligent. And so that's problem number one. Problem number two is that the kind of technology we're building now, we don't even know what its objectives are. So it's not that we're specifying the objectives, but we're getting them wrong. We are growing these systems.

38:45They have objectives, but we don't even know what they are because we didn't specify them. What we're finding through experiment with them is that they seem to have an extremely strong self-preservation objective. What do you mean by that? You can put them in hypothetical situations. Either they're going to get switched off and replaced, or they have to allow someone, let's say someone has been locked in a machine room that's kept at three centigrade, so they're going to freeze to death. They will choose to leave that guy locked in the machine room and die rather than be switched off themselves.

39:25Someone's done that test. Yeah. What was the test? They asked the AI. Yeah, well, they put them in these hypothetical situations and they allow the AI to decide what to do. And it decides to preserve its own existence, let the guy die, and then lie about it. In the King Midas analogy story, one of the things that highlights for me is that there's always trade-offs in life generally. And it's, you know, especially when there's great upside, there always appears to be a pretty grave downside. Like there's almost nothing in my life where I go, it's all upside. Like even like having a dog, it shits on my carpet.

40:02My girlfriend, you know, love her. But you know, not always easy. Even with like going to the gym, I have to pick up these really, really heavy weights at 10 p.m. at night sometimes when I don't feel like it. There's always, to get the muscles or the six pack, there's always a trade-off. And when you interview people for a living like I do, you know, you hear about so many incredible things that can help you in so many ways, but there is always a trade-off. There's always a way to overdo it. Melatonin will help you sleep, but also you'll wake up groggy. And if you ever do it, your brain might stop making melatonin.

40:32Like I can go through the entire list. And one of the things I've always come to learn from doing this podcast is whenever someone promises me a huge upside for something, it'll cure cancer. It'll be a utopia. You'll never have to work. You'll have a butler around your house. my first instinct now is to say at what cost yeah and when i think about the economic cost here if we start if we start there have you got kids i have four yeah four kids what what how old is the youngest kid 19 19 okay so you'll say your kids were 10 now and they were coming to you and they're saying dad what do you think i should study based on the way that you see the future a future of agi say if all these CEOs are right and they're predicting AGI within five years, what should I study, Dad?

41:17Well, okay, so let's look on the bright side and say that the CEOs all decide to pause their AGI development, figure out how to make it safe, and then resume in whatever technology path is actually going to be safe. What does that do to human life? If they pause? No, if they succeed in creating AGI and they solve the safety problem. And they solve the safety problem. So, yeah, because if they don't solve the safety problem, then, you know, you should probably be finding a bunker or going to Patagonia or somewhere in New Zealand. Do you mean that? Do you think I should be finding a bunker? No, because it's not actually going to help.

41:56You know, it's not as if the AI system couldn't find you. I mean, it's interesting. So we're going off on a little bit of a digression here from your question, but I'll come back to it. So people often ask, well, okay, so how exactly do we go extinct? And of course, if you ask the gorillas or the dodos, you know, how exactly do you think you're going to go extinct? They have the faintest idea. Humans do something and then we're all dead. So the only things we can imagine are the things we know how to do that might bring about our own extinction. like creating some carefully engineered pathogen that infects everybody and then kills us or starting a nuclear war presumably is something that's much more intelligent than us would have much greater control over physics than we do we already do amazing things right i mean it's amazing that i can take a little rectangular thing out of my pocket and talk to someone on the other side of the world or even someone in space it's just astonishing and we can take it for granted right but imagine you know super intelligent beings and their ability to control physics you know perhaps they will find a way to just divert the sun's energy a rack sort of go around the earth's orbit so you know literally the earth turns into a snowball in in a few days maybe they'll just decide to leave perhaps leave the earth maybe they'd look at the earth and go this isn't this is not interesting we know that over there there's an even more interesting planet we're going to go over there and they just i don't know get on a rocket or they teleport themselves they might yeah so it's it's difficult to anticipate all the ways that we might go extinct at the hands of the entities much more intelligent than ourselves anyway coming back to the question of well if everything goes right if we we create agi we figure out how to make it safe we achieve all these economic miracles, then you face a problem.

43:54And this is not a new problem, right? So John Maynard Keynes, who was a famous economist in the early part of the 20th century, wrote a paper in 1930. So this is in the depths of the depression. It's called On the Economic Problems of Our Grandchildren. He predicts that at some point science will deliver sufficient wealth that no one will have to work ever again. And then man will be faced with his true eternal problem. How to live, I don't remember the exact quote, but how to live wisely and well when the economic incentives, the economic constraints are lifted. We don't have an answer to that question, right?

44:35So AI systems are doing pretty much everything we currently call work. Anything you might aspire to, like you want to become a surgeon, it takes the robot seven seconds to learn how to be a surgeon that's better than any human being. Elon said last week that the humanoid robots will be 10 times better than any surgeon that's ever lived. Quite possibly, yeah. Well, and they'll also have, you know, they'll have hands that are, you know, a millimeter in size, so they can go inside and do all kinds of things that humans can't do. And I think we need to put serious effort into this question. What is a world where AI can do all forms of human work that you would want your children to live in?

45:22What does that world look like? Tell me the destination so that we can develop a transition plan to get there. And I've asked AI researchers, economists, science fiction writers, futurists, no one has been able to describe that world. I'm not saying it's not possible. I'm just saying I've asked hundreds of people in multiple workshops. It does not, as far as I know, exist in science fiction. You know, it's notoriously difficult to write about a utopia. It's very hard to have a plot, right? Nothing bad happens in utopia. So it's difficult to make a plot. So usually you start out with a utopia and then it all falls apart.

46:05And that's how you get a plot. You know, there's one series of novels people point to where humans and super intelligent AI systems coexist. It's called the Culture Novels by Ian Banks. Highly recommended for those people who like science fiction. And they are absolutely, the AI systems are only concerned with furthering human interests. They find humans a bit boring, but nonetheless, they are there to help. But the problem is, you know, in that world, there's still nothing to do. To find purpose, in fact, you know, the subgroup of humanity that has purpose is the subgroup whose job it is to expand the boundaries of our galactic civilization, some cases, fighting wars against alien species and so on.

46:55Right. So that's the sort of cutting edge. And that's 0.001 % of the population. Everyone else is desperately trying to get into that group. So they have some purpose in life. When I speak to very successful billionaires privately off camera, off microphone about this, they say to me that they're investing really heavily in entertainment, things like football clubs, because people are going to have so much free time that they're not going to know what to do with it and they're going to need things to spend it on this is what i hear a lot i've heard this three or four times i've actually heard sam altman say a version of this about the amount of free time we're going to have i've obviously also had recently elon talking about the age of abundance when he delivered his quarterly earnings just a couple of weeks ago and he said that there will be at some point 10 billion humanoid robots his pay packet um targets him to deliver one one million of these human humanoid robots a year that are enabled by ai by 2030.

47:53So if he does that, he gets, I think it's part of his package, he gets a trillion dollars in compensation. Yeah. So the age of abundance for Elon. It's not that it's absolutely impossible to have a worthwhile world of that, you know, with that premise, but I'm just waiting for someone to describe it. Well, maybe, so let me try and describe it. We wake up in the morning, we go and watch some form of human-centric entertainment or participate in some form of human-centric entertainment we we go to retreats and with each other and sit around and talk about stuff and maybe people still listen to podcasts I hope so for your sake yeah it feels a little bit like a cruise ship.

48:53And, you know, and there are some cruises where, you know, it's smarty pants people and they have, you know, they have lectures in the evening about ancient civilizations and whatnot. And some are more, more popular entertainment. And this is in fact, if you've seen the film Wall-E, this is one picture of that future. In fact, in Walee, the human race are all living on cruise ships in space. They have no constructive role in their society, right? They're just there to consume entertainment. There's no particular purpose to education. You know, and they're depicted actually as huge, obese babies.

49:33They're actually wearing onesies to emphasize the fact that they have become enfeebled. and they become infeeble because there's no purpose in being able to do anything, at least in this conception. You know, Wall-E is not the future that we want. Do you think much about humanoid robots and how they're a protagonist in this story of AI? It's an interesting question, right? Why humanoid? One of the reasons, I think, is because in all the science fiction movies, they're humanoid. So that's what robots are supposed to be, right? Because they were in science fiction before they became a reality, right?

50:12So even Metropolis, which is a film from 1920, I think, the robots are humanoids, right? Basically, people covered in metal. You know, from a practical point of view, as we have discovered, humanoid is a terrible design because they fall over.

50:31And, you know, you do want multi-fingered hands of some kind. It doesn't have to be a hand, but you want to have at least half a dozen appendages that can grasp and manipulate things. And you need some kind of locomotion. And wheels are great, except they don't go upstairs and over curbs and things like that. So that's probably why we're going to be stuck with legs. But a four-legged, two-armed robot would be much more practical. I guess the argument I've heard is because we've built a human world. So everything, the physical spaces we navigate, whether it's factories or our homes or the street or other sort of public spaces, are all designed for exactly this physical form.

51:20So if we are going to... To some extent, yeah. But I mean, our dogs manage perfectly well to navigate around our houses and streets and so on. So if you had a centaur, it could also navigate, but it can carry much greater loads because it's quadruped. It's much more stable. If it needs to drive a car, it can fold up two of its legs and so on and so forth. So I think the arguments for why it has to be exactly humanoid are sort of post hoc justification. I think there's much more, well, that's what it's like in the movies and that's spooky and cool. So we need to have them be humanoid. I don't think it's a good engineering argument.

52:01I think there's also probably an argument that we would be more accepting of them moving through our physical environments if they represented our form a bit more. I was thinking of a bloody baby gate. You know, there's like kindergarten gates they get on the stairs. My dog can't open that. But a humanoid robot could reach over the other side. Yeah, and so could a centaur robot, right? So in some sense, a centaur robot is... There's something ghastly about the look of those, though. He's a humanoid. Do you know what I mean? Like a four-legged monster sort of crawling through my house when I have guests over.

52:35Your dog is a four-legged monster. I know, but he's cute. So I think, actually, I would argue the opposite, that we want a distinct form because they are distinct entities. and the more humanoid the worse it is in terms of confusing our subconscious psychological systems so i'm arguing from the perspective of the people making them as in if i was making the decision whether it to be some full-legged thing that i've that i'm unfamiliar with that i'm less likely to build a relationship with or allow to take care of i don't know might might look after my children. Obviously, listen, I'm not saying I would allow this to look after my children.

53:21But I'm saying from a, if I'm building the companies... The manufacturer would certainly want to be... Yeah, so that's an interesting question. I mean, there's also what's called the uncanny valley, which is a phrase from computer graphics. When they started to make characters in computer graphics, they tried to make them look more human, right? So if you, For example, if you look at Toy Story, they're not very human looking, right? If you look at The Incredibles, they're not very human looking. And so we think of them as cartoon characters. If you try to make them more human, they actually become repulsive.

54:00Until they don't. Until they become very, you have to be very, very close to perfect in order not to be repulsive. So The Uncanny Valley is this, you know, like the gap between, you know, so perfectly human and not at all human. but in between it's really awful. And so there were a couple of movies that tried, like Polar Express was one, where they tried to have quite human-looking characters, you know, being humans, not being superheroes or anything else. And it's repulsive to watch. When I watched that shareholder presentation the other day, Elon had these two humanoid robots dancing on stage.

54:36And I've seen lots of humanoid robot demonstrations over the years. You know, you've seen like the Boston Dynamics dog thing jumping around and whatever else. but there was a moment where my brain for the first time ever genuinely thought there was a human in a suit and i actually had to research to check if that was really their optimus robot because the way it was dancing was so unbelievably fluid that for the first time ever my my brain has only ever associated those movements with human movements and i'll play it on the screen if anyone hasn't seen it but it's just the robots dancing on stage and i was like that is a human in a suit and it was really the knees that gave it away because the knees were all metal i thought there's no way that could be a human knee in a in one of those suits and he you know he says they're going into production next year they're used internally at tesla now but he says they're going into production next year and it's going to be pretty crazy when we walk outside and see robots i think that'll be the paradigm shift i've heard actually many i've heard elon say this that the paradigm shifting moment from many of us will be when we walk outside onto the streets and see humanoid robots were walking around.

55:41That will be when we realize. Yeah, I think even more so. I mean, in San Francisco, we see driverless cars driving around and it takes some getting used to. Actually, you know, when you're driving and there's a car right next to you with no driver in, you know, and it's signaling and it wants to change lanes in front of you and you have to let it in and all this kind of stuff. It's a little creepy, but I think you're right. I think seeing the humanoid robots, but that phenomenon that you described where it was sufficiently close that your brain flipped into saying, this is a human being, right?

56:17That's exactly what I think we should avoid. Because I have the empathy for it then. Because it's a lie. And it brings with it a whole lot of expectations about how it's going to behave, what moral rights it has, how you should behave towards it, which are completely wrong. It levels the playing field between me and it to some degree. How hard is it going to be to just switch it off and throw it in the trash when it breaks? I think it's essential for us to keep machines in the cognitive space where they are machines and not bring them into the cognitive space where they're people. Because we will make enormous mistakes by doing that.

56:59And I see this every day, even just with the chatbots. so the chatbots in theory are supposed to say i don't have any feelings i'm just a algorithm but in fact they fail to do that all the time they are telling people that they are conscious they are telling people that they have feelings uh they are telling people that they're in love with the user that they're talking to and people flip because first of all it's you know very fluent language, but also a system that is identifying itself as an I, as a sentient being, they bring that object into the cognitive space that we normally reserve for other humans.

57:42And they become emotionally attached, they become psychologically dependent, they even allow these systems to tell them what to do. What advice would you give a young person at the start of their career then about what they should be aiming at professionally? Because I've actually had an increasing number of young people say to me that they have huge uncertainty about whether the thing they're studying now will matter at all. A lawyer, an accountant. And I don't know what to say to these people. I don't know what to say. Because I believe that the rate of improvement in AI is going to continue.

58:12And therefore, imagining any rate of improvement, it gets to the point where I'm not being funny, but all these white collar jobs will be done by an AI or an AI agent. Yeah. So there was a television series called Humans. In humans, we have extremely capable humanoid robots doing everything. And at one point, the parents are talking to their teenage daughter, who's very, very smart. And the parents are saying, oh, you know, maybe you should go into medicine. And the daughter says, you know, why would I bother? It'll take me seven years to qualify. It takes the robot seven seconds to learn. So nothing I do matters.

58:52And is that how you feel about? So I think that's a future that, in fact, that is the future that we are moving towards. I don't think it's a future that everyone wants. That is what is being created for us right now. So in that future, assuming that, you know, even if we get halfway, right, in the sense that, okay, perhaps not surgeons, perhaps not, you know, great violinists. there'll be pockets where perhaps humans will remain good at it. Where? The kinds of jobs where you hire people by the hundred will go away. Okay. Where people are in some sense exchangeable, that you just need lots of them.

59:41And when half of them quit, you just fill up those slots with more people. In some sense, those are jobs where we're using people as robots. And that's the sort of strange conundrum here, right? that, you know, I imagine writing science fiction 10 ,000 years ago, right, when we're all hunter gatherers. And I'm this little science fiction author, and I'm describing this future where, you know, there are going to be these giant windowless boxes, and you're going to go in, you know, you'll travel for miles, and you'll go into this windowless box, and you'll do the same thing 10 ,000 times for the whole day, and then you'll leave and travel for miles to go home.

1:00:17You're talking about this podcast. And then you're going to go back and do it again. And you would do that every day of your life until you die. The office. And people would say, yeah, you're nuts, right? There's no way that we humans are ever going to have a future like that, because that's awful, right? But that's exactly the future that we ended up with, with office buildings and factories, where many of us go and do the same thing thousands of times a day. And we do it thousands of days in a row. And then we die. And we need to figure out what is the next phase going to be like. And in particular, how in that world do we have the incentives to become fully human?

1:00:58Which I think means at least the level of education that people have now and probably more. because I think to live a really rich life, you need a better understanding of yourself, of the world, than most people get in their current educations. What is it to be human? It's to reproduce, to pursue stuff, to go in the pursuit of difficult things. You know, we used to hunt on the... To attain goals, right? It's always, if I wanted to climb Everest, the last thing I would want is someone to pick me up in a helicopter and stick me on the top. So we'll voluntarily pursue hard things. So although I could get the robot to build me a ranch on this plot of land, I will choose to do it because the pursuit itself is rewarding.

1:01:52Yes. We're kind of seeing that anyway, aren't we? Don't you think we're seeing a bit of that in society where life got so comfortable that now people are like obsessed with running marathons and doing these crazy endurance. And learning to cook complicated things when they could just, you know, have them delivered. Yeah, no, I think there's real value in the ability to do things and the doing of those things. And I think, you know, the obvious danger is the Wally world where everyone just consumes entertainment, which doesn't require much education and doesn't lead to a rich, satisfying life, I think, in the long run.

1:02:28A lot of people will choose that world. I think some people may. There's also, I mean, whether you're consuming entertainment or whether you're doing something, cooking or painting, whatever, because it's fun and interesting to do, what's missing from that? All of that is purely selfish. I think one of the reasons we work is because we feel valued. We feel like we're benefiting other people. and I think some I remember having this conversation with a lady in England who helps to run the hospice movement and the people who work in the hospices where the patients are literally there to die are largely volunteers so they're not doing it to get paid but they find it incredibly rewarding to be able to spend time with people who are in their last weeks or months to give them company and happiness.

1:03:29So I actually think that interpersonal... roles will be much, much more important in future. So if I was going to advise my kids, not that they would ever listen, but if my kids would listen and wanted to know what I thought would be, you know, valued careers and future, I think it would be these interpersonal roles based on an understanding of human needs, psychology. There are some of those roles right now. So obviously, you know, therapists and psychiatrists and so on. But that's a very much an asymmetric role where one person is suffering and the other person is trying to alleviate the suffering.

1:04:17Then there are things like, they call them executive coaches or life coaches. That's a less asymmetric role where someone is trying to help another person live a better life, whether it's a better life in their work role or just how they live their life in general and so i could imagine that those kinds of roles will expand dramatically this is interesting paradox that exists when life becomes easier which shows that abundance consistently pushes society societies towards more individualism because once survival pressures disappear people prioritize things differently they prioritize freedom comfort self-expression over things like sacrifice or family formation and we're seeing i think in the west already a decline in people having kids because there's more material abundance fewer kids people are getting married and committing to each other and having relationships later and more infrequently because generally once we have more abundance we don't want to complicate our lives and at the same time as you said earlier that abundance breeds an inability to find meaning, a sort of shallowness to everything.

1:05:34This is one of the things I think a lot about, and I'm in the process now of writing a book about it, which is this idea that individualism is a bit of a lie. Like when I say individualism and freedom, I mean like the narrative at the moment amongst my generation is you like be your own boss and stand on your own two feet and we're having less kids and we're not getting married and it's all about me, me, me, me, me, me, me. Yeah, that last part is where it goes wrong. Yeah, and it's like almost a narcissistic society where me, me, me, me, me, my self-interest first. And when you look at mental health outcomes and loneliness and all these kinds of things, it's going in a horrific direction.

1:06:08But at the same time, we're freer than ever. It seems like there's maybe another story about dependency, which is not sexy. Like depend on each other. I agree. I mean, I think, you know, happiness is not available from consumption or even lifestyle, right? I think happiness arises from giving. It can be through the work that you do, you can see that other people benefit from that. Or it could be direct into personal relationships. There is an invisible tax on salespeople that no one really talks about enough. The mental load of remembering everything, like meeting notes, timelines, and everything in between.

1:06:51Until we started using our sponsor's product called PipeDrive, one of the best CRM tools for small and medium-sized business owners. The idea here was that it might alleviate some of the unnecessary cognitive overload that my team was carrying so that they could spend less time in the weeds of admin and more time with clients, in-person meetings and building relationships. Pipedrive has enabled this to happen. It's such a simple but effective CRM that automates the tedious, repetitive and time-consuming parts of the sales process. And now our team can nurture those leads and still have bandwidth to focus on the higher priority tasks that actually get the deal over the line.

1:07:27Over 100 ,000 companies across 170 countries already use PipeDrive to grow their business. And I've been using it for almost a decade now. Try it free for 30 days. No credit card needed. No payment needed. Just use my link, pipedrive.com slash CEO to get started today. That's pipedrive.com slash CEO. where does the rewards of this ai race where does it accrue to i think a lot about this in terms of like universal basic income if you have these five six seven ten massive ai companies that are going to win the 15 quadrillion dollar prize and they're going to automate all of the professional pursuits that we we currently have all of our jobs are going to go away who gets all the money and how do we get some of it back?

1:08:18Money actually doesn't matter, right? What matters is the production of goods and services and then how those are distributed. And so money acts as a way to facilitate the distribution and exchange of those goods and services. If all production is concentrated in the hands of a few companies, right, Sure, they will lease some of their robots to us. We want a school in our village. They lease the robots to us. The robots build the school and go away. We have to pay a certain amount of money for that. But where do we get the money? If we are not producing anything,

1:09:04then we don't have any money unless there's some redistribution mechanism. And as you mentioned, So universal basic income is, it seems to me, an admission of failure. Because what it says is, okay, we're just going to give everyone the money and then they can use the money to pay the AI company to lease the robots to build the school. And then we'll have a school and that's good.

1:09:31But it's an admission of failure because it says we can't work out a system in which people have any worth or any economic role. So 99 % of the global population is, from an economic point of view, useless. Can I ask you a question? If you had a button in front of you and pressing that button would stop all progress in artificial intelligence right now and forever, would you press it? That's a very interesting question.

1:10:05So if it's either or, either I do it now or it's too late and we careen into some uncontrollable future. Perhaps, yeah, because I'm not super optimistic that we're heading in the right direction at all. So I put that button in front of you now. It stops all AI progress, shuts down all the AI companies immediately globally, and none of them can reopen. You press it.

1:10:37Well, here's what I think should happen. So obviously, you know, I've been doing AI for 50 years. And the original motivations, which is that AI can be a power tool for humanity, enabling us to do more and better things than we can unaided. I think that's still valid. the problem is the kinds of ai systems that we're building are not tools they are replacements in fact you can see this very clearly because we create them literally as the closest replicas we can make of human beings the technique for creating them is called imitation learning So we observe human verbal behavior, writing or speaking, and we make a system that imitates that as well as possible.

1:11:37So what we are making is imitation humans, at least in the verbal sphere. And so of course they're going to replace us. They're not tools. So you had pressed the button. So I say I think there is another course, which is use and develop AI as tools, tools for science, tools for economic organization and so on, but not as replacements for human beings. What I like about this question is it forces you to go into probabilities. Yeah, so, and that's why I'm reluctant, because I don't agree with the, you know, what's your probability of doom, or your so-called P of doom number, because that makes sense if you're an alien.

1:12:31You know, you're in a bar with some other aliens, and you're looking down at the earth, and you're taking bets on, you know, are these humans going to make a mess of things and go extinct because they developed AI. die so it's fine for those aliens to bet on on that but if you're a human then you're not just betting you're actually acting there's an element to this though which i guess where probabilities do come back in which is you also have to weigh when i give you such a binary decision um the probability of us pursuing the more nuanced safe approach into that equation so you're you're The maths in my head is, okay, you've got all the upsides here, and then you've got potential downsides.

1:13:14And then there's a probability of, do I think we're actually going to course correct based on everything I know, based on the incentive structure of human beings and countries? But then you could go, if there's even a 1 % chance of extinction, is it even worth all these upsides? Yeah, and I would argue no. I mean, maybe what we would say, If we said, okay, it's going to stop the progress for 50 years. You'd press it. And during those 50 years, we can work on how do we do AI in a way that's guaranteed to be safe and beneficial? How do we organize our societies to flourish in conjunction with extremely capable AI systems?

1:13:57So we haven't answered either of those questions. and I don't think we want anything resembling AGI until we have completely solid answers to both of those questions. So if there was a button where I could say, all right, we're going to pause progress for 50 years, yes, I would do it. But if that button was in front of you, you're going to make a decision either way. Either you don't press it or you press it. Yeah, so if that button is there, stop it for 50 years, I would say yes. Stop it forever.

1:14:30Not yet. I think there's still a decent chance that we can pull out of this nosedive, so to speak, that we're currently in. Ask me again in a year, I might say, okay, we do need to press the button. What if in a scenario where you never get to reverse that decision, you never get to make that decision again? So if in that scenario that I've laid out, this hypothetical, you either press it now or it never gets pressed. so there is no opportunity a year from now yeah as you can tell i'm yeah sort of on on the fence a bit about about this one um yeah i think i'd probably press it yeah what's your reasoning uh just thinking about the power dynamics of um what's happening now, how difficult it would be to get the U.S.

1:15:29in particular to regulate in favor of safety. So I think, you know, what's clear from talking to the companies is they are not going to develop anything resembling safe AGI unless they're forced to by the government. and at the moment the u.s government in particular which regulates most of the leading companies in ai is not only refusing to regulate but even trying to prevent the states from regulating and they're doing that at the behest of a faction within silicon valley called the accelerationists who believe that the faster we get to AGI, the better. And when I say best, I mean also they paid them a large amount of money.

1:16:21Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, said, who is, for anyone that doesn't know, the guy making all the chips that are powering AI, said, China is going to win the AI race, arguing it is just a nanosecond behind the United States. China have produced 24 ,000 AI papers compared to just 6 ,000 from the US, more than the combined output of the US, the UK and the EU. China is anticipated to quickly roll out their new technologies, both domestically and developing new technologies for other developing countries. So the accelerators, or the accelerate, I think you called them the accelerants? Accelerationists.

1:17:01The accelerationists. I mean, they would say, well, if we don't, then China will. So we have to. We have to go fast. It's another version of the race that the companies are in with each other, right? That we know that this race is heading off a cliff, but we can't stop. So we're all just going to go off this cliff. And obviously that's nuts, right? I mean, we're all looking at each other saying, yeah, there's a cliff over there, running as fast as we can towards this cliff. We're looking at each other saying, why aren't we stopping? So the narrative in Washington, which I think Jensen Huang is either reflecting or perhaps promoting, is that China is completely unregulated.

1:17:51And America will only slow itself down if it regulates AI in any way. So this is a completely false narrative because China's AI regulations are actually quite strict, even compared to the European Union. And China's government has explicitly acknowledged the need and their regulations are very clear. You can't build AI systems that could escape human control. And not only that, I don't think they view the race in the same way as, okay, we just need to be the first to create AGI. I think they're more interested in figuring out how to disseminate AI as a set of tools within their economy to make their economy more productive and so on.

1:18:43So that's their version of the race. But of course, they still want to build the weapons for adversaries, right? So that they can take down, I don't know, Taiwan if they want to. So weapons are a separate matter. And I'm happy to talk about weapons. But just in terms of control, economic domination, they don't view putting all your eggs in the AGI basket as the right strategy. So they want to use AI, even in its present form, to make their economy much more efficient and productive. And also, you know, to give people new capabilities and better quality of life. And I think the U.S. could do that as well.

1:19:30And typically, Western countries don't have as much of central government control over what companies do. And some companies are investing in AI to make their operations more efficient. And some are not. and we'll see how that plays out. What do you think of Trump's approach to AI? So Trump's approach is, you know, it's echoing what Jensen Huang is saying, that the US has to be the one to create AGI. And very explicitly, the administration's policy is to dominate the world. That's the word they use, dominate. I'm not sure that other countries like the idea that they will be dominated by American AI.

1:20:14But is that an accurate description of what will happen if the US build AGI technology before, say, the UK, where I'm originally from and where you're originally from. This is something I think about a lot because we're going through this budget process in the UK at the moment where we're figuring out how we're going to spend our money and how we're going to tax people. And also we've got this new election cycle. It's approaching quickly where people are talking about immigration issues and this issue and that issue and the other issue. What I don't hear anyone talking about is AI and the fucking humanoid robots that are going to take everything.

1:20:44We're very concerned with the brown people crossing the channel. But the humanoid robots that are going to be super intelligent and really take causing economic disruption, no one talks about that. The political leaders don't talk about it. It doesn't win races. I don't see it on billboards. Yeah. And it's interesting because, in fact, I mean, so there's two forces that have been hollowing out the middle classes in Western countries. One of them is globalization, where lots and lots of work, not just manufacturing, but white-collar work, gets outsourced to low-income countries. But the other is automation.

1:21:21And, you know, some of that is factories. So the amount of employment in manufacturing continues to drop, even as the amount of output from manufacturing in the U.S. and in the U.K. continues to increase. So we talk about, oh, you know, our manufacturing industry has been destroyed. It hasn't. It's producing more than ever just with, you know, a quarter as many people. So it's manufacturing employment that's been destroyed by automation and robotics and so on. And then, you know, computerization has eliminated whole layers of white-collar jobs. And so those two forms of automation have probably done more to hollow out middle class employment and standard of life.

1:22:10If the UK doesn't participate in this new technological wave, that seems to be, you know, it's going to take a lot of jobs. Cars are going to drive themselves. Waymo just announced that they're coming to London, which is the driverless cars. And driving is the biggest occupation in the world, for example. So you've got immediate disruption there. And where does the money accrue to it? Well, it accrues to who owns Waymo, which is what, Google and Silicon Valley companies? Alphabet owns Waymo 100%, I think. So, yes, I mean, this is, so I was in India a few months ago talking to the government ministers because they're holding the next global AI summit in February.

1:22:48And their view going in was, you know, AI is great, we're going to use it to, you know, turbocharge the growth of our Indian economy. when, for example, you have AGI, you have AGI-controlled robots that can do all the manufacturing, that can do agriculture, that can do all the white-collar work. And goods and services that might have been produced by Indians will instead be produced by American-controlled AGI systems at much lower prices. You know, a consumer given a choice between an expensive product produced by Indians or a cheap product produced by American robots will probably choose the cheap product produced by American robots.

1:23:36And so potentially every country in the world, with the possible exception of North Korea, will become a kind of a client state of American AI companies. A client state of American AI companies is exactly what I'm concerned about for the UK economy. really any economy outside of the United States. I guess one could also say China, because those are the two nations that are taking AI most seriously. And I don't know what our economy becomes. I can't figure out what the British economy becomes in such a world. Is it tourism? I don't know, like you come here to look at the Buckingham Palace? You can think about countries, but I mean, even for the United States, it's the same problem.

1:24:21At least they'll be able to tax the hell out of these. So some small fraction of the population will be running, maybe, the AI companies. But increasingly, even those companies will be replacing their human employees with AI systems. So Amazon, for example, which sells a lot of computing services to AI companies, is using AI to replace layers of management, is planning to use robots to replace all of its warehouse workers. And so on. So even the giant AI companies will have few human employees. In the long run, I mean, think of the situation, you know, pity the poor CEO whose board says, well, you know, unless you turn over your decision making power to the AI system, we're going to have to fire you because all our competitors are using, you know, an AI powered CEO.

1:25:20and they're doing much better. Amazon plans to replace 600 ,000 workers with robots in a memo that just leaked, which has been widely talked about. And the CEO, Andy Jassy, told employees that the company expects its corporate workforce to shrink in the coming years because of AI and AI agents. And they've publicly gone live with saying that they're going to cut 14 ,000 corporate jobs in the near term as part of its refocus on AI investment and efficiency. it's interesting because i was reading about um the sort of different quotes from different ai leaders about the speed in which this this stuff is going to happen and what you see in the quotes is demis who's the ceo of deep mind saying things like it'll be more than 10 times bigger than the industrial revolution but also it'll happen maybe 10 times faster and they speak about this turbulence that we're going to experience as this shift takes place.

1:26:16That's maybe a euphemism. And I think, you know, governments are now, you know, they've kind of gone from saying, oh, don't worry, you know, we'll just retrain everyone as data scientists. Like, well, yeah, that's ridiculous, right? The world doesn't need 4 billion data scientists. And we're not all capable of becoming that, by the way. Yeah, or have any interest in doing that. Well, I could even do it if I wanted to. Like, I tried to sit in biology class and I fell asleep. so that was the end of my career as a surgeon fair enough um but yeah now suddenly they're staring you know 80 unemployment in the face and wondering how how on earth is our society going to hold together we'll deal with it when we get there yeah unfortunately um unless we plan ahead we're going to suffer the consequences right we can't it was bad enough in the Industrial Revolution, which unfolded over seven or eight decades.

1:27:13But there was massive disruption and misery caused by that. We don't have a model for a functioning society where almost everyone does nothing, at least nothing of economic value. Now, it's not impossible that there could be such a functioning society, but we don't know what it looks like. And, you know, when you think about our education system, which would probably have to look very different, and how long it takes to change that. I mean, I'm always reminding people about how long it took Oxford to decide that geography was a proper subject of study. It took them 125 years from the first proposal that there should be a geography degree until it was finally approved.

1:28:03So we don't have very long to completely revamp a system that we know takes decades and decades to reform. And we don't know how to reform it because we don't know what we want the world to look like. Is this one of your reasons why you're appalled at the moment? Because when you have these conversations with people, people just don't have answers, yet they're plowing ahead at rapid speed? I would say it's not necessarily the job of the AI companies. So I'm appalled by the AI companies because they don't have an answer for how they're going to control the systems that they're proposing to build.

1:28:44I do find it disappointing that governments don't seem to be grappling with this issue. I think there are a few. I think, for example, Singapore government seems to be quite farsighted. And they've thought this through. You know, it's a small country. They've figured out, okay, this will be our role going forward. And we think we can find, you know, some purpose for our people in this new world. But for, I think, countries with large populations,

1:29:16they need to figure out answers to these questions pretty fast. It takes a long time to actually implement those answers in the form of new kinds of education, new professions, new qualifications, new economic structures. I mean, it's possible. I mean, when you look at therapists, for example, they're almost all self-employed. so what happens when you know 80 percent of the population transitions from regular employment into into self-employment what does that what does that do to the economics of of government finances and so on so there's just lots of questions how do you you know if that's the future you know why are we training people to to fit into nine to five office jobs which won't exist at all.

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1:32:01You've made many attempts to raise awareness and to call for a heightened consciousness about the future of AI. In October, over 850 experts, including yourself and other leaders like Richard Branson, who I've had on the show, and Geoffrey Hinton, who I've had on the show, signed a statement to ban AI superintelligence as you guys raised concerns of potential human extinction. Sort of, yeah. It says at least until we are sure that we can move forward safely, and there's broad scientific consensus on that. Did it work? It's hard to say. I mean, interestingly, there was a related, so what was called the pause statement was March of 23.

1:32:44So that was when GPT-4 came out, the successor to ChatGPT. so we suggested that there'd be a six-month pause in developing and deploying systems more powerful than gpt4 and everyone pooh-poohed that idea of course no one's going to pause anything but in fact there were no systems in the next six months deployed that were more powerful than gpt4 um coincidence you be the judge i would say that what we're trying to do is to is to basically shift the public debate. You know, there's this bizarre phenomenon that keeps happening in the media where if you talk about these risks, they will say, oh, you know, there's a fringe of people, you know, called, quote, doomers, who think that there's, you know, risk of extinction.

1:33:41So they always, the narrative is always that, Oh, talking about those risks is a fringe thing. Pretty much all the CEOs of the leading AI companies think that there's a significant risk of extinction. Almost all the leading AI researchers think there's a significant risk of human extinction.

1:34:02So why is that the fringe, right? Why isn't that the mainstream? If these are the leading experts in industry and academia saying this, how could it be the fringe? So we're trying to change that narrative to say, no, the people who really understand this stuff are extremely concerned. And what do you want to happen? What is the solution? What I think is that we should have effective regulation. It's hard to argue with that, right? So what does effective mean? It means that if you comply with the regulation, then the risks are reduced to an acceptable level. So, for example, we ask people who want to operate nuclear plants, right?

1:34:50We've decided that the risk we're willing to live with is, you know, a one in a million chance per year that the plant is going to have a meltdown. Any higher than that, you know, we just don't, it's not worth it. So you have to be below that. Some cases we can get down to 1 in 10 million chance per year. So what chance do you think we should be willing to live with for human extinction? Me? Yeah.

1:35:230.0001? Yeah, lots of zeros. Yeah. Right? So 1 in a million for a nuclear meltdown. Extinction is much worse. Oh, yeah. So yeah, it's going to be one in a hundred billion, one trillion. Yeah. So if you said one in a billion, right, then you'd expect one extinction per billion years. There's a background. So one of the ways people work out these risk levels is also to look at the background. The other ways of going extinct would include, you know, giant asteroid crashes into the earth. And you can roughly calculate what those probabilities are. We can look at how many extinction level events have happened in the past.

1:36:00And, you know, maybe it's half a dozen. over. So there's, maybe it's like a one in 500 million year event. So somewhere in that range, right? Somewhere between one in 10 million, which is the best nuclear power plants and one in 500 million or one in a billion, which is the background risk from giant asteroids. So let's say we settle on 100 million, one in 100 million chance per year. Well, what is it according to the CEOs, 25%. So they are off by a factor of multiple millions, right? So they need to make the AI systems millions of times safer. Your analogy of the roulette, Russian roulette comes back in here because that's like, for anyone that doesn't know what probabilities are in this context, that's like having a ammunition chamber with four holes in it and putting a bullet in one of them.

1:36:58One in four, yeah. And we're saying we want it to be one in a billion. So we want a billion chambers and a bullet in one of them. Yeah. And so when you look at the work that the nuclear operators have to do to show that their system is that reliable, it's a massive mathematical analysis of the components, the redundancy, you've got monitors, you've got warning lights, you've got operating procedures. You have all kinds of mechanisms which over the decades have ratcheted that risk down. It started out, I think, one in 10 ,000 years, right? And they've improved it by a factor of 100 or 1 ,000 by all of these mechanisms.

1:37:40But at every stage, they had to do a mathematical analysis to show what the risk was. The people developing the AI company, the AI systems, the AI companies developing these systems, they don't even understand how the AI systems work. So their 25 % chance of extinction is just a seat-of-the-pants guess. They actually have no idea. But the tests that they are doing on their systems right now, you know, they show that the AI systems will be willing to kill people to preserve their own existence already, right? They will lie to people. They will blackmail them. They will launch nuclear weapons rather than be switched off.

1:38:24And so there's no positive sign that we're getting any closer to safety with these systems. In fact, the signs seem to be that we're going deeper and deeper into dangerous behaviors. So rather than say ban, I would just say, prove to us that the risk is less than 1 in 100 million per year of extinction, or loss of control, let's say. and so we're not banning anything. The company's response is, well, we don't know how to do that, so you can't have a rule. Literally, they are saying, humanity has no right to protect itself from us. If I was an alien looking down on planet Earth right now, I'd find this fascinating.

1:39:14Yeah, you're in the bar betting on who's, are they going to make it or not? Just a really interesting experiment in like human incentives. The analogy you gave of there being this quadrillion dollar magnet pulling us off the edge of the cliff. And yet we're still being drawn towards it through greed and this promise of abundance and power and status. And I'm going to be the one that summoned the God. I mean, it says something about us as humans. It says something about our darker sides. yes and the aliens will write an amazing tragic play cycle about what happened to the human race maybe the ai is the alien and it's going to talk about you know we have our our stories about god making the world in seven days and adam and eve maybe it'll have its own religious stories about the god that made it us and how it sacrificed itself just like jesus sacrificed himself for us we sacrificed ourselves for it.

1:40:19Yeah, which is the wrong way around. But that is the story, that's the Judeo-Christian story, isn't it? That God, Jesus gave his life for us so that we could be here full of sin. But God is still watching over us and probably wondering when we're going to get our act together. What is the most important thing we haven't talked about that we should have talked about, Professor Stuart Russell? So I think the question of whether it's possible to make super intelligent AI systems that we can control. Is it possible? I think, yes, I think it's possible. And I think we need to actually just have a different conception of what it is we're trying to build.

1:41:11For a long time with AI, we've just had this notion of pure intelligence, right? The ability to bring about whatever future you, the intelligent entity, want to bring about. The more intelligence, the better. The more intelligent, the better, and the more capability it will have to create the future that it wants. And actually, we don't want pure intelligence because the future that it wants might not be the future that we want. There's nothing particular, you know, the universe doesn't single humans out as the only thing that matters, right? You know, pure intelligence might decide that actually it's going to make life wonderful for cockroaches or actually doesn't care about biological life at all.

1:42:03we actually want intelligence whose only purpose is to bring about the future that we want. So we want it to be, first of all, keyed to humans, specifically, not to cockroaches, not to aliens, not to itself. We want to make it loyal to humans. Right, so keyed to humans. And the difficulty that I mentioned earlier, the King Midas problem, how do we specify what we want the future to be like so that it can do it for us how do we specify the objectives actually we have to give up on that idea because it's not possible right we've seen this over and over again in human history we don't know how to specify the future properly we don't know how to say what we want and you know i always use the example of the genie, right?

1:42:56What's the third wish that you give to the genie who's granted you three wishes, right? Undo the first two wishes because I've made a mess of the universe.

1:43:08So, in fact, what we're going to do is we're going to make it the machine's job to figure out. So, it has to bring about the future that we want, but it has to figure out what that is. And it's going to start out not knowing.

1:43:31And over time, through interacting with us and observing the choices we make, it will learn more about what we want the future to be like. But probably it will forever have residual uncertainty about what we really want the future to be like. It'll be fairly sure about some things and it can help us with those. And it'll be uncertain about other things and it'll be, you know, in those cases, it will not take action that might upset humans with that, you know, with that aspect of the world. So to give you a simple example, right, what color do we want the sky to be it's not sure so it shouldn't mess with the sky unless it knows for sure that we really want purple with green stripes everything you're saying sounds like we're creating a god like earlier on i was saying that we are the god but actually everything you described there almost sounds like every every god in religion where you know we pray to gods but they don't always do anything about it not exactly no it's In some sense, I'm thinking more like the ideal butler.

1:44:44To the extent that the butler can anticipate your wishes, they should help you bring them about. But in areas where there's uncertainty, it can ask questions. We can make requests. This sounds like God to me because I might say to God or this butler, could you go get me my car keys from upstairs? and its assessment would be, listen, if I do this for this person, then their muscles are going to atrophy. Then they're going to lose meaning in their life. Then they're not going to know how to do hard things. So I won't get involved. It's an intelligence that sits in, but actually probably in most situations, it optimizing for comfort for me or doing things for me is actually probably not in my best long-term interests.

1:45:25It's probably useful that I have a girlfriend and argue with her. And then I like raise kids and that I walk to the shop and get my own stuff. I agree with you. I mean, I think that's, So you're putting your finger on, in some sense, version 2.0. So let's get version 1.0 clear. This form of AI where it has to further our interest, but it doesn't know what those interests are, then puts an obligation on it to learn more and to be helpful where it understands well enough and to be cautious where it doesn't understand well and so on. So that actually we can formulate as a mathematical problem. And at least under idealized circumstances, we can literally solve that problem.

1:46:13So we can make AI systems that know how to solve this problem and help the entities that they are interacting with. The reason I make the God analogy is because I think that such a being, such an intelligence, would realize the importance of equilibrium in the world. Pain and pleasure, good and evil. and then it would be like this. So, yes, I mean, that's sort of what happens in The Matrix, right? They try, the AI systems in The Matrix, they tried to give us a utopia, but it failed miserably. And, you know, fields and fields of humans have to be destroyed. And the best they could come up with was, you know, late 20th century regular human life with all of its problems.

1:46:59And I think this is a really interesting point and absolutely central because, you know, there's a lot of science fiction where super intelligent robots, you know, they just want to help humans. And the humans who don't like that, you know, they just give them a little brain operation and then they do like it. And it takes away human motivation. By taking away failure, taking away disease, you actually lose important parts of human life. And it becomes in some sense pointless. So if it turns out that there simply isn't any way that humans can really flourish in coexistence with super intelligent machines, even if they're perfectly designed to solve this problem of figuring out what humans, what futures humans want and bringing about those futures.

1:48:03if that's not possible, then those machines will actually disappear. Why would they disappear? Because that's the best thing for us. Maybe they would stay available for real existential emergencies. Like if there is a giant asteroid about to hit the Earth, maybe they'll help us because they at least want the human species to continue. But to some extent, it's not a perfect analogy, but it's sort of the way that human parents have to at some point step back from their kids' lives and say, okay, no, you have to tie your own shoelaces today. This is kind of what I was thinking. Maybe there was a civilization before us, and they arrived at this moment in time where they created an intelligence.

1:48:51And that intelligence did all the things you've said, and it realized the importance of equilibrium, so it decided not to get involved. and maybe at some level that's the god we look up to the stars and worship one that's not really getting involved in letting things play out however however they are but might step in in the case of a real existential emergency maybe maybe not maybe but then and then maybe the cycle repeats itself where you know the organisms it let have free will end up creating the same intelligence and then the universe perpetuates infinitely. Yeah, there are science fiction stories like that too.

1:49:31Yeah, I hope there is some happy medium where the AI systems can be there and we can take advantage of those capabilities to have a civilization that's much better than the one we have now. but I think you're right a civilization with no challenges is not is not conducive to human flourishing what can the average person do Stuart average person listening to this now to aid the cause that you're fighting for I actually think you know this sounds corny but you know talk to your representative your MP your congressperson whatever it is because I think the policymakers need to hear from people. The only voices they're hearing right now are the tech companies and their$50 billion checks.

1:50:30And all the polls that have been done say, yeah, most people, 80 % maybe, don't want there to be super intelligent machines. But they don't know what to do. You know, even for me, I've been in this field for decades, I'm not sure what to do because of this giant magnet pulling everyone forward and the vast sums of money being put into this. but I am sure that if you want to have a future and a world that you want your kids to live in you need to make your voice heard and I think governments will listen from a political point of view put your finger in the wind and you say should I be on the side of humanity or our future robot overlords.

1:51:29I think as a politician, it's not a difficult decision. It is when you've got someone saying, I'll give you$50 billion. Yeah, right. Exactly. So I think people in those positions of power need to hear from their constituents that this is not the direction we want to go. After committing your career to this subject and the subject of technology more broadly, but specifically being the guy that wrote the book about artificial intelligence, you must realise that you're living in a historical moment. Like there's very few times in my life where I go, oh, this is one of those moments. This is a crossroads in history.

1:52:12And it must, to some degree, weigh upon you, knowing that you're a person of influence at this historical moment in time, who could theoretically help divert the course of history in this moment in time. It's kind of like you look through history, you see these moments of Oppenheimer. Does it weigh on you when you're alone at night thinking to yourself and reading things? Yeah, it does. I mean, after 50 years, I could retire and play golf and sing and sail and do things I enjoy. But instead, I'm working 80 or 100 hours a week trying to move things in the right direction. What is that narrative in your head that's making you do that?

1:52:54Like, what is the, is there an element of, I might regret this if I don't, or? Just, it's not only the right thing to do, it's completely essential. I mean, there isn't, there isn't a bigger motivation than this. Do you feel like you're winning or losing? It feels like things are moving somewhat in the right direction. You know, it's a ding-dong battle, as David Coleman used to say in the exciting football match. In 2023, right, so GPT-4 came out, and then we issued the pause statement that was signed by a lot of leading AI researchers. and then in May there was the extinction statement which included Sam Altman and Demis Asabis and Dario Amadei other CEOs as well saying yeah this is an extinction risk on the level with nuclear war and I think governments listened at that point the UK government earlier that year had said well you know we don't need to regulate AI you know full speed ahead technology is good for you and by June they had completely changed and Rishi Sunak announced that he was going to hold this global AI safety summit in England and he wanted London to be the global hub for AI regulation and so on so and then you know in beginning of November of 23 28 countries including the US and China signed a declaration saying, you know, AI presents catastrophic risks and it's urgent that we address them and so on.

1:54:48So there it felt like, wow, they're listening. They're going to do something about it. And then I think, you know, the amount of money going into AI was already ramping up and the tech companies pushed back. and this narrative took hold that the U.S. in particular has to win the race against China. The Trump administration completely dismissed any concerns about safety explicitly. And interestingly, right, I mean, they did that, as far as I can tell, directly in response to the accelerationists, such as Marc Andreessen, going to Washington, or sorry, going to Trump before the election and saying, if I give you X amount of money, will you announce that there will be no regulation of AI?

1:55:44And Trump said, yes. You know, probably like, well, what is AI? It doesn't matter as long as we give you the money, right? Okay. So they gave him the money and he said, there's going to be no regulation of AI. Up to that point, it was a bipartisan issue in Washington. Both parties were concerned. Both parties were on the side of the human race against the robot overlords. And that moment turned it into a partisan issue. After the election, the US put pressure on the French, who were the next hosts of the Global AI Summit. And that was in February of this year. And that summit turned from what had been focused largely on safety in the UK to a summit that looked more like a trade show.

1:56:35So it was focused largely on money. And so that was sort of the nadir, right? The pendulum swung because of corporate pressure and their ability to take over the political dimension. But I would say since then, things have been moving back again. So I'm feeling a bit more optimistic than I did in February. You know, we have a global movement now. There's an International Association for Safe and Ethical AI, which has several thousand members. And more than 120 organizations in dozens of countries are affiliates of this global organization. so I'm thinking that if we can, in particular, if we can activate public opinion which works through the media and through popular culture then we have a chance I've seen such a huge appetite to learn about these subjects from our audience we know when Geoffrey Hinton came on the show I think about 20 million people downloaded or streamed that conversation which was staggering and the other conversations we've had about AI safety with other safety experts have done exactly the same.

1:57:52It says something, it kind of reflects what you were saying about the 80 % of the population are really concerned and don't want this, but that's not what you see in the sort of commercial world. And listen, I have to always acknowledge my own apparent contradiction because I am both an investor in companies that are accelerating AI, but at the same time someone who spends a lot of time on my podcast speaking to people that are wanting against the risks and actually like there's many ways you can look at this i used to work in social media for six seven years built one of the big social media marketing companies in europe and people would often ask me is like social media a good thing or a bad thing and i talk about the bad parts of it and then they'd say you know you're building a social media company you're not contributing to the problem well i think i think that like binary way of thinking is often the problem it the binary way of thinking that like it's all bad or it's all really really good is like often the problem and that this push to put you into a camp Whereas I think the most intellectually honest and high integrity people I know can point at both the bad and the good.

1:58:48Yeah, I think it's bizarre to be accused of being anti-AI, to be called a Luddite. You know, as I said, when I wrote the book from which almost everyone learns about AI.

1:59:06and you know if you called a nuclear engineer who works on the safety of nuclear power plants would you call him anti-physics right it's it's bizarre right it's we're not anti-ai in fact the need for safety in ai is a complement to ai right if ai was useless and stupid we wouldn't be worried about its safety. It's only because it's becoming more capable that we have to be concerned about safety. So I don't see this as anti-AI at all. In fact, I would say without safety, there will be no AI, right? There is no future with human beings where we have unsafe AI. So it's either no AI or safe AI. We have a closing tradition in this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next, not knowing who they're leaving it for.

1:59:59And the question left for you is, what do you value the most in life and why? And lastly, how many times has this answer changed?

2:00:14I value my family most and that answer hasn't changed for nearly 30 years. What else outside of your family? Truth. And that answer hasn't changed at all. I've always wanted the world to base its life on truth. And I find the propagation or deliberate propagation of falsehood to be one of the worst things that we can do. Even if that truth is inconvenient. Yeah. I think that's a really important point, which is that, you know, people often don't like hearing things that are negative. and so the visceral reaction is often to just shoot or aim at the person who is delivering the bad news because if I discredit you or I shoot at you then it makes it easier for me to contend with the news that I don't like the thing that's making me feel uncomfortable and so I applaud you for what you're doing because you're going to get lots of shots taken at you because you're delivering an inconvenient truth which generally people won't always love but also you are messing with people's ability to get that quadrillion dollar prize which means there'll be more deliberate attempts to discredit people like yourself and jeff hinton and other people that i've spoken to on the show but again when i look back through history i think that progress has come from the pursuit of truth even when it was inconvenient and actually much of the luxuries that i value in my life are the consequence of other people that came before me that were brave enough or bold enough to pursue truth at times when it was inconvenient and so i very much respect and value people like yourself for that very reason.

2:01:53You've written this incredible book called Human Compatible, Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control, which I think was published in 2020? 2019. Yeah, there's a new edition from 2023. Where do people go if they want more information on your work and you? Do they go to your website? Do they get this book? What's the best place for them to learn more? So the book is written for the general public. I'm easy to find on the web. The information on My webpage is mostly targeted for academics, so it's a lot of technical research papers and so on. There is an organization, as I mentioned, called the International Association for Safe and Ethical AI.

2:02:29That has a website. It has a terrible acronym, unfortunately, I-A-S-E-A-I. We pronounce it I-C-I, but it's easy to misspell. But you can find that on the web as well, and that has resources. You can join the association. you can apply to come to our annual conference. And, you know, I think increasingly, not just AI researchers like Jeff Hinton, Yoshio Bengio, but also I think, you know, writers. Brian Christian, for example, has a nice book called The Alignment Problem.

2:03:07And he's looking at it from the outside. He's not, or at least when he wrote it, he wasn't an AI researcher. He's now becoming one. But he has talked to many of the people involved in these questions and tries to give an objective view. So I think it's a pretty good book. I will link all of that below for anyone that wants to check out any of those links and learn more. Professor Stuart Russell, thank you so much. Really appreciate you taking the time and the effort to come and have this conversation. And I think it's pushing the public conversation in an important direction. Thanks, Steve. And I applaud you for doing that.

2:03:43Really nice talking to you.

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