WARNING By Sam Harris: ChatGPT Could Be The Start Of The End. AI "Could Destroy Us, The Internet And Democracy"

30:46Right. That challenge already is on the verge of being instrumentable in the US. I mean, it's easy to see us failing at that AI aside. Now, when you add large language models to that, and the more competent future version of it, whereas just the most compelling deep fakes are indistinguishable from real data. And everyone is siloed into their tribes where they're stigmatizing the information that comes from any other tribe. And we're just, and the internet is now so big a place that there really isn't the ordinary selection pressures where bad information gets successfully debunked so that it goes away.

31:33So as you can live in a conspiracy cult for the rest of your life if you want to, You know, you can be queuing on all day long if you want to. And now we've got deep, deep fakes, showing all that up and just spurious, you know, scientific articles, showing all that up. All of this just becomes a more compelling form of psychosis and, you know, culturally speaking. And so I'm just worried that it's going to get harder and harder for us to cooperate with one another and collaborate, and that our politics will just completely break. And that'll offer an opportunity for lots of bad actors. And I mean, and then leave inside you, there's cyber terrorism and there's synthetic biology that, you know, at the moment you get to turn AI loose on the prospect of engineering viruses and all of that.

32:31It's like, it potentiates, I mean, the asymmetry here is that it seems like it's always easier to break things than to fix them or to prevent people, to categorically prevent people from breaking them. And what we have with increasingly powerful technology is the ability for one person to create more and more damage or one small group of people.

33:01Right? person can't really do it, no matter how smart. You need a team, you need a traditionally, you need a state actors, and you need access to resources, and you have to get the physile material. And it's hard enough. But this has been fully democratized this tech. And so it's, yeah, I worry about the near -term chaos. I've never found the narrow term consequences of artificial intelligence to be that interesting until now. And so what you said, that image of the internet becoming unusable. So that was a real eureka moment for me, because I've not been thinking about that. Yeah, me too. I was just concerned about the AGI risk.

33:45And now, really in the aftermath of Trump and COVID, I've just seen the risk of losing a lot. lot that matters just based on our interacting with just these very simple tools that are misrelivably misleading us. I mean, I'm just, I'm amazed at what social media, I forget about, I'm amazed at what Twitter did to me. I mean, you know, even with all of my training and with my head screwed on reasonably straight, it's amazing to say it, but almost all of the truly bad things that have happened to me in the last decade, that just destabilized relationships and just priorities and really kind of got plowed back into me, became a kind of professional emergency.

34:48You know, stuff I had to respond to in writing or on podcasts. it was all Twitter. My engagement with Twitter was the thing that produced the chaos. And it was completely unnecessary. And it was just, it was amplifying a kind of signal for me that I felt compelled to pay attention to because I was on it. And I was trying to communicate with people on it. I was getting in certain communication back. And it was giving me a picture of the rest of humanity, which I now think was fundamentally misleading. But it was still consequential in its like I could even believe in it was at a certain point believing that it was misleading wasn't enough to inoculate me against the delusion of the kind of the opinion change that was being forced upon me and I was feeling like okay like these people are becoming unrecognizable I like I know some of these people I've had dinner with some of these people and their behavior on Twitter is is appearing so deranged to me and so in such bad faith faith, the people who I know to be non -psychopaths are starting to behave like psychopaths, at least on Twitter.

36:00And I'm becoming similarly unrecognizable to them. That it's just, again, it all felt like a psychological experiment to which I hadn't consented and which I enrolled myself somehow because it was what everyone was doing in 2009. and I spent, you know, 12 years there, getting some signal and responding to it. And it's not to say that it was all bad. I mean, I read a bunch of good articles that got linked there, and I discovered some interesting people. But the change in my life after I deleted my Twitter account was so enormous. I mean, it's embarrassing to admit it. I mean, it's just like it's like getting out of a bad relationship.

36:46And it was just it was a fundamental,

36:52just freedom from from this chaos monster that was it was always there ready to disrupt something based on its own dynamics. And when did you delete it? Yeah, like December, I think it was December. I would and I'm not someone that really takes sides on things. I like to try and remain in the middle, I think, politically. Yeah, so you must have a very different Twitter experience than I was having. No. No? No. So I don't do anything other than this podcast trailer. I don't do anything else. Right. So I just, the only thing you'll see on my Twitter is the podcast trailer. That's it. Yeah. And for all the reasons you've described, and more interestingly, I wanted to say in the last eight months, as someone that tries to be, doesn't get caught up too much in the media, oh Elon bought this, it's 100 % gone in that direction.

37:40As in my timeline now is, I say to my friends all the time, and some of my friends who, again, I think are nuanced and balanced have said to me, there's something that's been turned up in the algorithm to increase engagement that has planted me in an unpleasant echo chamber that I didn't desire to be in. And if I wasn't cock somewhat conscious, I would 100 % be in there. My timeline, it's my friend tweeted the other day, my friend Cattle tweeted, he's never seen more people die on his Twitter timeline than he has in the last six months. the prioritizing videos you're seeing a lot of death and CCTV footage that I've never seen before.

38:14And then the debate around gender, politics, right -leaning subject matter has never been more right down your throat. Because it's almost like something in the algorithm has been switched, where it's now people have been allowed to asylum. So anyway, I can describe it. And it's made me retract even more. So when Zuckerberg announced Threads, the other couple of weeks ago, it was kind of like a life raft. Right. Oh, for Titanic. And I really, really mean that. And I'm not someone to get easily caught up in narrative, as a relates to social media platforms. It's been my industry for a decade. But what I've seen on Twitter, and it's actually made me believe this hypothesis I had five years ago where I thought they would be, I thought the journey of social networking working would be, would have way more social networks, and they'd be more siloed.

39:06I thought we'd have one for our neighborhood, our football club, and now I believe that even more than ever. Yeah, that seems right. And I think it's, whether it's possible to have a truly healthy social network that people want to be in, and it's a good reason to be there, and it's, I don't know if it's possible, I like to think it is, but it's, I think there are certain things you have have to clean up at the outset that is supposed to make it possible. And I think anonymity is a bad thing. I think probably being free is a bad thing. I think you sort of get what you pay for online. And if it's, I just think there might be ways to set it up that way.

39:51It would be better. But I didn't think it'd be popular. What was that? I think with the thing that makes it popular makes it toxic. Right. Right. And even the anonymity piece, I've played this out a couple of times in my mind and the robot I'll always get is while there's people in Syria who have news to break, important news to break, and they'd be hung if they, so we need an anonymous version of the social internet. Right. Yeah. I guess there could be some exception there, but I don't know. It just doesn't, it actually doesn't interest me because I just feel such. a different sense of my being in the world as a result of not paying attention to the online, the simulator of myself.

40:43Twitter was the only one I used. I've been on Facebook this whole time. I guess I'm on Instagram too, but my team just uses those as marketing channels. It sounds like it's the way you use Twitter now. But Twitter was the one that I decided, okay, this is going to be me. I'm going to be posting here. I'm going to, you know, if I've made a mistake, I want to hear about it. You know, it's like, and I just wanted to use it as actual basis for communication. And for the longest time, it actually felt like a valid tool in that respect. You know, it reached a crisis point. I decided this is just pure toxicity.

41:22There's just no reason. Even the good stuff can't possibly make a dent in the bad stuff. So I just deleted it. And then I was returned to the real world, where I actually live. And to books and to, I mean, I'm online all the time anyway, but it's not having the time course of reactivity when you don't have social media, and you don't have a place to put this instantaneous hot take that you're tempted to put out into the world, because there's literally no place to put it. For me, if I have some reaction to something in the news, I have to decide whether it's worth talking about it in my next podcast that I might be recording four days from now, and rather often people have been just bloating about this thing for four solid days before or ever get to the microphone.

42:18And then I get to think, well, it's still worth talking about it. And almost nothing survives that test anymore, right? Like the conversations moved on. So there's actually no place for me to just type this thing that takes me 10 seconds and then rolls out there to detonate in the minds of my friends and enemies to opposite effect. And then I see the result of all that, you know, again, on a, this sort of reinforcement loop of every 15 minutes. Not having that is such a relief that I just don't even know why I would, so like when threads was announced, I wasn't, I think I'm on threads too, but it's not me.

43:05It's just, you know, just, I get another marketing channel. But yeah, I haven't, I feel such relief not exercising that muscle anymore, where it's like I, you know, I don't know how often I was checking Twitter, but it was, I was, you know, I was not checking it just to see what was happening to me or what the response to my last last thing I tweeted. I was checking it a lot because it was my newsfeed. It's like I'm following, you know, 200 smart people, they're telling me what their pain attention to. And so I'm fascinated. So yeah, we are. I want to see that next article or that next video. Just that engagement and the endless opportunity to comment and to put my foot in my mouth or put my foot in someone else's mouth or have someone put their foot.

43:49It's just not having that has been such a relief that I would be, I mean, it's not impossible, but I would be very cautious in reactivating that because it was so much noise. And again, it would, It created, there's so much, it became an opportunity cost, but it became a just this endless opportunity for misunderstanding. Misunderstanding of me and everything I've been putting out into the world and then my sense that I had to react to it and then you just plow that back into the, that becomes the basis for further misunderstanding. And it just constantly was giving me the sense that there's something I need to react to on my podcast, in an article, on Twitter, that it's just, this is a valid signal.

44:50Like this is, this is like, this is a five alarm fire. This is like, you got to stop everything. Like you're by the pool on the one vacation you're taking with your family that summer. And this thing just happened on your phone that, like, it can't wait. Right, like you actually have to pay attention because it's like the conversation is happening right now and so it was a kind of addiction to information and You know some level reputation management or or or

45:19And it was just I mean just we have to just be free of it is in his such a relief apart from like you know Health issues with certain family members is virtually the only bad things that have happened to me have been a result of my engagement with Twitter over the last 10 years. So it's just, you know, I guess if I'm a masterkist, I would be back on Twitter, but like that would be the only reason to do it. Not really AI. I asked you the question a second ago, which we... I really wanted to get a solution to it because I'm mildly terrified. I completely believe your, believe your, the logic underneath your opinion that NARAI will cause this destabilization and unusability of the internet.

46:06So just focusing on NARAI, what would you consider to be a solution to prevent us getting to that world where misinformation is rife to the point that it can destabilize society, politics and culture? Well, I think it's something I've been asking people about on my podcast because it's not actually my wheelhouse and I would just need to hear from experts about what's possible technically here. But I'm imagining that paradoxically or ironically this could usher in a new kind of gatekeeping that we're going to rely on because like the provenance of information is going to be so important. I mean the assurance that a video has not been manipulated or there's not a just a pure or confection of deep fakery.

46:58Right, so you get, so it could be that we're meandering into a new period where you're not going to trust a photo unless it's coming from, you know, getting images or, you know, the New York Times has some story about how they have verified every photo that they put in their newspaper. They have a process. And so if you see a video of Vladimir Putin seeming to say that he's declaring war on the U .S., I think most people are going to assume that's fake until proven otherwise. It's like it's just going to be too much fake stuff and it's going to be – it's going to all going to look so good that the New York Times and every other organ of media that that we have relied upon as imperfect as they've been of late, they're going to have to figure out what the tools are whereby they can say, okay, this is actually a video of Putin, right?

48:00And if the new, I mean, I'm not gonna be able to figure it out on my own, right? The New York Times doesn't have a process or CNN doesn't have a process that they go through before they say, okay, Putin really said this and so this is, we have to now react to this because this is real. Whatever that process is, and whether it's there's some kind of digital watermark that's connected to the blockchain, there's some tech implementation of it that can be fully democratized, where you by just being in the latest version of the Chrome browser can know that you can differentiate real and fake videos, say.

48:40I don't know what the implementation will be, but I just know we're gonna get to some spot where it's going to be all right we have to declare a epistemological bankruptcy we don't know what's real we have to assume anything especially a lured or agitating is fake until proven otherwise so prove otherwise and that's you know that that'll be a resetting of something I don't know what we do with that in a world where we really don't have that much time to react to certain things that are you know a video of Putin saying he's launched his big missiles is something that you know thirty minutes from now we would we would understand whether it's real or not we forget about again forget about everything we just said about AI look at all of our legacy risks look at the risk of nuclear war the the risk of stumbling into a nuclear war by accident has been hanging over our head for seventy years I mean, we've got this old tech.

49:41We've got these wonky radar systems that throw up errors. We have moments in history where one Soviet sub commander decided based on his just gut feeling. There's just his common sense that the data was almost certainly an error and he decided not to pass the obvious evidence of an American ICBM launch up the chain of command, knowing that the chain of command would say, okay, you have to fire, right? And he reasoned that if the US was going to attack the Soviet Union, they would launch more than, I think in this case, it looked like there were four missiles. That was the radar signature. If the US is going to launch a first strike against the Soviet Union in this way like the mid -80s, they're going to launch more than four missiles.

50:37This has to be bad data, right? But if we automate all this, will we automate it to systems that have that kind of common sense?

50:50But we've been perched on the edge of the abyss based on this possible, forget about malevolent actors who might decide to have a nuclear war on purpose. because we have the possibility of accidental nuclear war. You add this cacophony of misinformation and deep fake to all of that and it just gets scarier and scarier and this is not even AI. This is just narrow AI amplified misinformation. How do you think about it? Well, this is the thing that worries me. I worry about the next election. I think the next president, if we can run the 2024 election in a way that most of America acknowledges was valid, that will be an amazing victory.

51:40Whatever the outcome, I mean, I would not be looking forward to a Trump presidency, but I think even more fundamental than that is, can we hold a presidential election 18 months from now that is that we recognize as valid. Right? Like that I don't know I don't know what kind of resources are being spent on on that particular performance but that is hugely important and I don't think our near -term experiments with AI is going to make that easier. Why is this important? Well, it's just, I mean, if you think the maintenance of a valid democracy in the world's low and superpower is minor importance, I'd like to drink the tea or drinking.

52:35You had to mistake? I mean, I can't say I'm optimistic. It's a paradoxical state, I mean, because I definitely have, I tend to focus on what's wrong or might be wrong. I tend to, I think, have a pessimistic bias. I tend to notice what's wrong as opposed to what's right. That's my bias. But I'm actually very happy. I have a very good life. Everything is just incredibly lucky. I'm surrounded by great people. It's like it's all great. And yet I see all of these risks on the horizon. So I'm not,

53:25I just have a very high degree of well -being at this moment in my life. And yet I, like, what's on the television is scary. And so it's a very interesting juxtaposition. Yeah, you know, I'll be very relieved if we have a I just I feel like we're in a very weird spot. I mean like the I haven't seen a A full post -mortem on the COVID pandemic that has fully encapsulated what I think we what I think happened to us there but my my vague sense is that We didn't learn a whole hell of a lot. I mean basically what we learned is were really bad at responding to this kind of thing. This was a challenge that just fragmented us as a society.

54:13It could have brought us together. It didn't. And it amplified all of the divisions in our society, politically and economically and triply and all kinds of ways. The role of misinformation and disinformation on all of that was all too clear. and I think just getting worse. So I think as a dress rehearsal for some future pandemic that is inevitably gonna come and could well be worse, I think we failed this dress rehearsal. And I have to hope that at some point, our institutions will reconstitute themselves. So as to be obviously trustworthy and engender the kind of trust we actually need to have on our institutions.

55:01We need a CDC that not only that we trust, but that it's trustworthy, that we were right to trust. And so it is with an FDA and every other institution that is relevant here. We don't quite have that. And half of our society thinks we don't have that at all. And so it's, we have to rebuild trust and institution somehow. And I just think, you know, we have a lot of work to do, but to even figure out how to make an increment of progress on that score, because we're, again, the siloing of large constituents into alternate information universes is just not functional. And that's so much of what social media has done to us and alternative media.

55:56I mean, like, you know, I call it, you know, you and our podcasters, but I call it podcast to stand, right? I mean, we have this this landscape of, I mean, there's now whatever, million plus podcasts and there's you know, email newsletters and everyone has now just decided to curate their information diet it in a way that's just bespoke to them. And you can stay there forever and you're getting one slice of, and it could be a completely fictional slice of reality. And we're losing the ability to converge on a common picture of what's going on. And you, that's not optimistic. I didn't hear the optimist even though you tell me.

56:42No, I, no. But I can't refute anything you said on a logical basis. It all sounds like that is the direction of travel that we're going in, unfortunately. I have faith that there'll be surprising positives. It always tends to be surprising positives that we also didn't factor in. We just, it's easy to see, I mean, if there's any significant low hanging fruit technologically or scientifically, that could be AI enabled for us. I mean, just take a cure for cancer, a cure for Alzheimer's. I mean, just having one thing like that, right? That would be such an enormous good. And that is why we can't get off this ride.

57:35And that's why there is no break to pull. because the value of intelligence is so enormous. I mean, it is just, it's not everything. I mean, it's not that, you know, there's other things we care about and are right to care about beyond intelligence. I mean, love is not the same thing as intelligence, right? But intelligence is the thing that can safeguard everything you love. Like, I mean, even if you think the whole point in life is to just get on a beach with your friends and your family and just hang out and enjoy the sunset. Okay, you don't have to augment, you don't need superhuman intelligence to do any of that, right?

58:14You're fit to do it exactly as you are. You could have done that in the 70s and it would just be just as good a beach and it would be just as good friends. But every gain we make in intelligence is the thing that safeguards that opportunity for you and everyone. Q1 is often when businesses start implementing new systems and processes in hopes of creating efficiencies for the year ahead. And over the course of my career, I've learnt just how crucial having the right systems in places, one which has helped me across many of my investments is NetSuite. They're also a sponsor of this podcast. NetSuite is the number one cloud financial system through their streamlined platform.

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59:25That's netsweet .com slash Bartlett. How would you do it? I feel like we've not defined the term artificial general intelligence. From my understanding of it, it's when the intelligence can think and make decisions almost like a human. Yeah, I mean, loosely, this is kind of just a semantic problem, but intelligence can mean many things, but loosely speaking, it's the ability to solve problems and meet goals, make decisions in response to a changing environment, in response to data. And the general aspect of that is an ability to do that in many different situations, all the sort of situations we encounter as people.

1:00:18and to have one's capacity in one area, as I get better at deciding whether or not this is a cup, I don't magically get worse at deciding whether you just said a word. I can do multiple things in multiple channels that's not something we had in our artificial systems for the longest time because everything was bespoke to the task. we'd build a chess engine and it couldn't even play tic -tac -toe. All it could do is play chess. And we just would get better and better in these piecemeal narrow ways. And then things began to change a few years ago where you'd get with like deep mind, would have its algorithms that were the same algorithm with slightly different tuning could play go, right?

1:01:09Or it could you know, it could solve a protein folding problem as opposed to just playing chess, right? And it became the best in the world at chess and it became the best in the world at go.

1:01:21And amazingly, I mean, to take, you know, what Alpha Zero did, it, you know, before Alpha Zero, all the chess algorithms were, they just had all of our chess knowledge plowed into them. They had studied every human game of chess and it was just, it was a bespoke chess engine. Alpha zero just played itself, I think for like four hours, right? It just had the rules of chess and then it played itself and it became better not merely than every of every person who's ever played the game. It became better than all the chess engines that had all of our chess knowledge plowed into them. So it's a fundamentally new moment in how you build an intelligent system.

1:02:12And it promises this possibility. Again, this inevitability, the moment you admit that we will eventually get there. The moment you admit that it can be done in silico, go. And the moment that you admit that we will just keep going unless a catastrophe happens and those two things are so easy to admit that I don't at this point I don't see any place to stand where you're not forced to admit them right. I don't see any neuroscientific or cognitive scientific argument for substrate dependence for intelligence given what we've already built. And again, we're going to keep going until something stops us.

1:02:57We'll hit some immovable object that prevents us from releasing the next iPhone, but otherwise we're going to keep going. And then, yeah, so then it, then whatever general will mean in that first case, there'll be a case where we've built a system that is so good at everything we care about that is functionally general. Now maybe it's missing something, maybe it's not, you know, maybe it's missing something that we don't even have a name for. You know, we're missing all kinds of, there are possible intelligences that we haven't even thought about because we just haven't thought about them. There are things that, there are ways to section the universe undoubtedly that we can't even conceive of because we are just, we have the minds we have.

1:03:44Elon was asked a question on this by journalist, the journalist said to him, in a world where you believe that to be true, that artificial general intelligence is around the corner. When your kids come to you and say, Daddy, what should I do with my life? To find purpose and meaning? What advice do you now give them if you hold that intuition to be true? That is around the corner. What do you say to your children when they say, what should I do with my life to create purpose and meaning? Did you say that Elon answered this question? Yeah, what did he say? It's one of the most chilling moments in an interview.

1:04:16I think I've seen in recent times because he's status. He goes silent for about 15 seconds, which is very an Elon. He's status. He's status. He's status a bit more. Like, he can't, and then he says he thinks he's suspended. He's living in suspended disbelief because if he really thought about it too much, what's the point? He says what's the point of me building all these cars. He was in his Tesla factory. What's the point of me building all these cars and what's the point? I do think that's sometimes So I think I have to live in his words where suspended disbelief Right, well, I would encourage him to ask what's the point of spending so much time on Twitter because that he could clearly benefit from rethinking that but that aside I Mean my answer to that is and I think other people have echoed this of late I mean sort of surprising to me.

1:05:09I mean my answer is that But this begins to privilege a return to the humanities as a kind of a core, like the center of mass intellectually for us. Because when you look at what we're really good at, and it's among the last things that can be plausibly automated. And if we automate it, we may cease to care about it. So it's like learning to write good code is something that is going to be, it's being automated now. I'm not a programmer, but I have it on good authority that already these large language models are improving code and something like half the time they're writing better code than people.

1:06:02that's all going to become like chess, right? It's just it's going to be better than people ultimately. So being a software engineer is something that, you know, and being a radiologist and being like those things, it's easy to see how AI just cancels those professions or at least makes one person, you know, so effective at using AI tools that one person can do the work of 100 people so that you've got 99 people who don't have to be doing that job.

1:06:33But creating art and writing novels and being a philosopher and talking about what it means to live a good life and how to do it, that's something that if we have to look at those, we have to look at where we're going to care that we're actually in relationship to and in dialogue with another person who we know to be conscious. We're like, where we don't care about that, we're not going to care. We're going to want just the best version of it. Like, I don't care if the cure for cancer comes from an A -I, an incentive in A -I, I do not give a shit. I just want the cure for cancer. right? There's no added value that when I find out, okay, the person who gave me this cure really felt good about it and he's, you know, he had tears in his eyes when he figured out the cure.

1:07:35Every engineering problem is like that. We want safer planes, we want, you know, we just want things to work. We're not sentimental about the artistry that went into all of that. And when the difference, when the gulf between the best and the mediocre gets big and consequential, we're just going to want the best. We're just going to want the best. We're all the way down the line. But what is the best novel, right? What is the best podcast conversation? What is the... And can you subtract out the conscious person from that and still think it's the best? And so like someone once sent me a What reported to be I didn't even listen to it so I don't even sure what it was but look like it was an AI generated conversation between Alan Watts and Terrence McKenna right both guys who I love I mean, I didn't know either of them but fans of both Listen to hundreds of hours of both talk as far as I know they never met each other.

1:08:39They would have been a fascinating conversation I realized when I looked at this YouTube video, I realized I simply don't care how good this is because I only care if it was actually Alan Wads in Terence McKenna talking. I got a simulacrum of Alan Wads in Terence McKenna. In this context, I don't care about it. So another use case, I stumbled upon. I was playing with with chat GPT and I asked it you know the causes of World War II you know give me 500 words on the cause of World War II and it gives you this perfect little you know bullet pointed essay on the cause of World War II that's exactly what I want from that's that's fine that's like I don't care that it what there was no person behind that typing but when I when When I think, well, do I want to read Churchill's history of World War II?

1:09:36It's on my shelf to read. I want these aspirational sets of books. Haven't read it yet. I actually want to read it because Churchill wrote it. That's why, and if you could give me an AI version of Churchill saying this is in the style of Churchill, it's very, even Churchill scholars say this sounds like Churchill. I actually don't care about it. Like that's not the use, I'll take the generic use of, you know, give me the cost of World War II. The fake Churchill is profoundly on interest into me. The real, real Churchill, even though he's dead, is interesting to me. So the rebuttal I give here, and this is what my mind is doing, is saying this, the distinction you're presenting, the difference I see is that in the case of the conversation between two people, you respect that has been generated by AI, someone has signaled to you that it is fake.

1:10:29If you remove that because say Churchill thought, idea, why would I write a book when I could just click a button and this thing will write it in my voice, in my tone of voice, with the entire back catalog of things I've written before and it will produce my account and it will save me time. So I'll just click a button and my publisher and maybe you'll do it for me. And then I'll sell that to Sam on the basis that it is my thoughts, which I imagine I can imagine a very near future. If we just do it by percentage, how many books are going to be increasingly written by artificial intelligence? To the point that when you look at a shelf, I imagine at some point in the future, if intelligence does increase by any measure, that most of it would be words strung together by artificial intelligence and it will be selling potentially better than the words written by humans.

1:11:21So again, when we go back to the conversation with your children, there might not be a career there either, because art or intelligence is faster, can produce more, can test and iterate on whether it sells better, clicks, gets more clicks. It can write the headline, create the picture, write the content, and then I can just take the chat because I put my name to it. So I go, even in that regard, what remains? Well, so in the limit, what I think we're imagining is a world where, and so none of the terrifyingly bad things have happened, so it's just all working. We're just producing a ton of great stuff that is better than the human stuff and people are losing their jobs.

1:12:04We've got a labor disruption, but we're not talking about any other kind of political catastrophe or cyber apocalypse. helps, much less AGI destroying everything. Then I think we just need a different economic assumption and ethical intuition around the value of work. Our default norm now in a capitalist society is you have to figure out something to do with most of your time that other people are willing to pay you for. right? You have to figure out how to add value to other people's lives such that you reliably get paid. Otherwise, you might die. We've got a social safety net, but it's pretty meager.

1:12:55We're not, they're cracks you can fall through, you can wind up homeless, and we're not going to figure out what to do about that. We're all too well. You know, and you're so you're claim upon your existence among us is you finding something to do with your time that other people will pay you for right and now we've got artificial intelligence removing some of those opportunities creating others but in the limit and I do think it is different I think analogies to other moments in technological history are fundamentally flawed. I think this is a technology which in the limit will replace jobs and not create better new jobs in their wake.

1:13:44This just cancels the need for human labor ultimately. And it's strangely, it replaces some of the highest status most cognitively intensive of jobs first, right? You know, it replaces Elon Musk before it replaces your electrician, your plumber, or your masseuse way before. Right? So, we have to internalize the reality of that. If, again, this is in success. This is not, this is all good things happening, right? And we have to have a new ethic. We have to have a new economics based on that ethic, which is, you know, UBI is one solution to this. You shouldn't have to work to survive, right? You can possibly basic income.

1:14:31Yeah, there's so much abundance now being created. We have to figure out how to spread this wealth around. We've got a cure for cancer over here. We've got perfect photovoltaic -driven economies over here, where we've solved the climate change issue. We're just pulling wealth out of the ether, essentially. We've got nanotechnology that is just birthing whole new industries yet, but it's all being driven by AI. We don't, there's no room in the, whenever you put a person in the, in the decision chain, you're just adding noise. This is the best thing, this should be the best thing that's ever happened to us.

1:15:16This is just like God handing us the perfect labor -saving device, right? The machine that can build every other machine that can do anything you could possibly want, we should figure out how to spread the wealth around in that case, right? This is just powered by sunlight, no more wars over resource extraction, it can build anything, we can all be on the beach just hanging out with our friends and family, right? Like, like, did you believe we should do universal basic income where everybody's given like a monthly check? So we have to break this connection. Again, this is, this is what we'll have to happen in the presence of this kind of labor force dislocation enabled by all of this going perfectly well, right?

1:16:02Like this again, just this pure success, just AI is just producing good things. And the only bad thing is putting all these people out of work, you know, it's coming for your job eventually. I've heard this and I've, my issue with it and my rebuttal when I talk to my friends about this idea of universal basic income when we, you know, we hand out enough casual resources to people so that they're stable, which I'm not necessarily against, but just want to play with it a little bit, is humans seem to have an innate, innate desire for purpose in meaning. And we seem to be designed and built psychologically for labor and for discomfort.

1:16:36But it doesn't have to be labor that's tied to money. We will get our status in other ways and we'll get our meaning in other ways. Again, these are all just stories we tell ourselves. I mean, you know, you're talking to a person who knows it's possible to be happy Actually doing nothing right like like just sitting in a room for a month, right and just staring at the wall Like that's possible, right? So and yet that's most people's worst nightmare You know, it's the solitary confinement in a prison is considered a torture, right? And I know people who spent 20 years in in a cave, right? So it's like that there's a There are capacities here that we're talking about but But just more commonly, I think we will, we want to be entertained, we want to have fun, we want to be with the people we love, we want to be useful in relationship.

1:17:34And insofar as that gets uncoupled from the necessity of working to survive, right? It doesn't all just go away. We just need new norms and new ethics and new conversations around what we do on vacation. It's like, what you're imagining is that if you put everyone on vacation, on the best vacation, you can make the vacation as good as possible, a majority of people will eventually be miserable because they're not back at work. Right? And yet, most of these people are working so that they have enough money so they could finally take that vacation right we will figure out a new way to be happy on the beach right i'm like if you can't if you get bored with frisbee we will figure something else out that is fun you know you you can read you know i'll be able to read the church all history of world war two on the beach and not be rushed by any other imperative because i'm you know i i i i'm happily retired right because my a i is creating the thing that is solving all my economic problems right We should be so lucky as to have that be our problem.

1:18:45How to be happy in conditions of no economic imperative, no basis for political strife on the basis of scarce resources, and no question about the question of survival is off the table. with respect to what does with one's time and attention. You can be as lazy as you want and you'll still survive. You can be as unlucky as you want and you'll still survive. I mean, the awful situation we're in now is that differences in luck mean everything. Right, you know, someone is born without any of the advantages that we have, we don't have a system, we don't have an economic system that reliably gives them every advantage and opportunity that it could have.

1:19:41That's like it's so we just,

1:19:45we don't have the, you know, we apparently, we've convinced ourselves, we either don't have the resources or we've convinced ourselves, we don't have the resources, we don't have the incentive such that we access the resources. So it's to actually come to the help of people we could help. The idea that people starve to death is just unimaginable and yet it still happens. That's not a scarcity problem, it's a political problem wherever it happens. And yet all of this is tied to a system where everyone has convinced themselves that it's normal to really have one's survival be in question if one doesn't work.

1:20:26And by choice or by accident, like if you get, if you have an, you know, I think I think it's still true that in the, at least in the US, this is almost certainly not true in the UK, but in the US, the most common reason for a personal bankruptcy is, you know, overwhelming medical expense that just comes upon you for whatever reason. You know, your wife gets cancer, you guys go bankrupt solving the cancer problem or failing to solve the cancer problem, and now everything else unravels. And we have a society which thinks, yeah, well, unlike you, if you're a wind up homeless, just don't sleep in front of my store because I need my, you're gonna hurt my business.

1:21:12Successful AI that cancels lots of jobs would be, it would only be canceling those jobs by virtue of producing so many good things. So much value for everybody that we would we would have to figure out how to spread that wealth around otherwise We yeah otherwise we would have a you know if An amazing Amazingly dystopian bottleneck for a few short years and then we would just have a revolution Then we then the guys in there in their in a gated communities making trillions of dollars based on them having you know gotten close enough to the GPUs that they, you know, some of it rubbed off on them.

1:21:59Yeah, they'd be dragged out of their houses and off their Gulf streams, and you know, we would have a fundamental reset, we have a hard reset of the political system. If I had to give you an ESO situation, and I'm asking you're intuition the question now, that if your objective was to, which I'm sure it is, is to encourage the betterment of humanity and to increase our odds of happiness and well -being 100 years from now. And there was a button placed in front of you, and it would either end the development of artificial intelligence as we've seen it over the last decade. So we'd never proceed with developing intelligent machines or not.

1:22:39So you could press a button and stop it right now. What would you do? And stop it permanently such that we never then do that thing. We just never figure out how to build intelligent machines. Pause it indefinitely. Well, I would definitely pause it. In a point where we would get our heads around the alignment problem. Permanently. If the button was a permanent pause that you couldn't undo. Well, the question is how deep does that go? So like we have everything we have now, but we just never get better than that. Yeah, we never make progress from here. Right. And your objective is to make humanity happy and prosperous.

1:23:23It's hard because when you begin imagining all of the good stuff that we could get with aligned superhuman AI, well then it's just, you know, cornucopia, pond cornucopia. It's just everything is potentially within reach. Yeah, I mean, I take the existential risk scenario seriously enough that I would pause it, you know, I would say I mean I think we will get we will eventually get to if if if curing cancer is a is a biomedical engineering problem that admits of a solution and I think there's every reason to believe it ultimately would be we will eventually get there based on our own, you know, muddling along with our current level of tech, currently information tech.

1:24:15I'm reasonably confident of that.

1:24:22Because our intelligence shows every sign of being general is just not as fast as we would want it to be. It's not the thing that AI is going to give us is going to give us speed that is, I mean, there's speed and then there's the the accent, there's memory, right? It's like, and like, we can't integrate. We don't have the ability. We have no person or team of people can integrate all of the data we already have, right? So the real promise here is that these systems will be able to find patterns that we wouldn't even know how to look for and then do something on the basis of those patterns. I think an intelligent search within the data space by apes like ourselves will eventually do most of the great things we want done.

1:25:20and there isn't, the problems we need to solve, so as to safeguard the career of our species and to make civilization durable and sane and to remove this sort of damacly that is our heads at every moment, that any moment we could just decide to have a nuclear war that ruins everything or create an engineered pandemic that ruins everything. We don't need superhuman intelligence to solve all those problems. We need an appropriate emotional response to the untenability of the status quo, and we We need a political dialogue that eventually transcends our tribalism. You and, I'd say, a few others, maybe two or three others, helped change my mind about one of the most profound things I think anyone could believe, which was when I was 18, I believed in Christianity.

1:26:28And then there was a couple of moments that shook my belief. Nothing on a personal level, just a couple of ideas that managed to sort of infect my operating system that led my curiosity towards your work. And I changed my mind profoundly. It's such a profound change that I had. How do we change our minds? And I really want to focus that question on the individual's mind. I want to change my mind. I want better beliefs, better ideas in my head that allow me to get out of my own way because I am not a cheat, I'm miserable. I'm not living the life that I would say I know I can live but some people don't even know they can live a little better life.

1:27:17I'm not happy. That's the signal. And I want to rectify this in some way. Yeah, well, there are a few bright lines for me. I mean, we'll start like take, um, or ethical lives and our relationships to other people, right? So, um, There's the problem of individual well -being that's still real, even if you're in a moral solitude, if you're on a desert island by yourself, you really don't have ethical questions that are emerging because you're not in relationship to anybody else, but you still have the problem of how to be happy. But so much of our unhappiness is in collaboration with others, right?

1:27:57We're unhappy in our relationships. We're unhappy professionally. And it's worth looking at how we're behaving with other people. For me, the highest leverage change I ever made, and it's against, it's very easy to spell out, and it's very clear. And ultimately, it's pretty easy, is just to decide that you're not going to lie about anything, really. I mean, there might be some situations in extremists where you'll feel forced to lie, but those, you know, in my view, are analogous to acts of violence that you may be forced to use in self -defense, right? So like, a line is sort of the first stage on the continuum of violence for me, right?

1:28:48So like, I'm not going to lie to someone unless I recognize that this is not a rational actor who I can possibly collaborate with. This someone I have to be, I have to avoid or defeat or otherwise, you know, contain their propensity to do me harm. So yes, if the Nazis come to the door and ask if you've got Anne Frank in the attic, yes, you can lie or you can shoot them or you can, these are not normal circumstances. But that aside, every other moment in life where people are tempted to die is one that I think you can categorically rule out as being unethical and beyond unethical, it's just not, it's creating a life you don't, when you examine it, you don't want to live, right?

1:29:44I mean, the moment you know that you're not gonna lie to people and they know that about you, the, the, it's like all the dials get, the social dials get sort of recalibrated on both sides. And then you find yourself in the presence of people who don't ask you for your opinion unless they really want it. Right. And then, and then when you're honest, I mean, then it's a night and day difference when you're giving people feedback, critical feedback, and they know you're honest, right? They know their bullshit detector is not going off because they just know you're even one that's not convenient, you're being honest, or even one that's not comfortable, you're in honest.

1:30:40One that's incredibly valuable because basically you're giving them the information that you would want if you were in their shoes, right? Because we have this sort of delusion that takes over us. Whenever we're tempted to tell a white lie, we imagine, okay, this person doesn't want, it'd be much better for me to just tell them the kind fiction than and tell them the uncomfortable truth, right? But we don't do the, so we don't even calculate that for the golden rule there most of the time. And we, if you just took a moment, you'd realize, wait a minute, does someone who is actually doing a bad job want me to tell them that they're doing a good job and then just send them out into the world to bounce around other people who are going to be recognizing, as I just did, that the thing they're doing isn't so great, right?

1:31:35You're just not doing them a favor. This is part of the nature of belief changes, isn't it? That when someone, we believe that someone is on our side, or we believe from like a political standpoint, that they represent the 99 % of the views that we represent. We're much more likely to change our beliefs, so I expect to tell you a show about this, the neuroscientist, and I wrote about this in a chapter in my upcoming book about how you change people's minds. And they showed in the elections that if like a flat earth, there's something to a flat earther about the nature of the earth. I believe it.

1:32:03But if NASA says something to a flat earther, they will just dismiss on site because the source of that information is not one that they believe or trust or like believe is well intentioned. I mean, this is a bug, not a feature. I mean, it's understandable, but this is something we have to grow beyond because the truth is the truth, right? So you can't, I mean, it goes in both directions. The person on your team who you love and respect is capable of, in their very next sentence, of speaking a falsehood, and you need to be able to detect that. And conversely, the person you least respect is capable of saying something that's quite incisive and worth taking on board.

1:32:46And so we have to have this sort of meta -cognitive layer where we're noticing how we're getting played by our social alliances and recognize that the truth and rather often important truths are evaluated by different principles. I mean, it's not a matter of the messenger. You shouldn't shoot the messenger and you shouldn't worship him. You mentioned lying as being a... well, removing lying and being more honest as being a significant step change in your own happiness. Is that accurate? In my happiness. In your happiness. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So, it meant immensely so because it's practically and specifically how.

1:33:36So you, and when you look at how people ruin their reputations and their relationships and their businesses, their careers, the gateway to all of the misbehavior that accomplishes that is line. It's a me look at somebody that lands arms strong, right? I mean, just, or tiger woods, right? These are guys that the absolute apogee of sport, everyone loves them, everyone's just amazed at what they've accomplished. And yet, you know, the dysfunction in their lives just gets vomited up for all to see at a certain point. And it was just enabled at every stage along the way by line. So if either of them had early in their career before they became famous, before they became rich, before they became tempted to do anything that was going to derail their lives later on, if they had decided they weren't going to lie, right?

1:34:40They would have found everything else they did to screw up their success impossible. So when I decided, and this was in the book, this was a course I took at Stanford, it was a seminar with this brilliant professor, Ron Howard, who many people, I think some people in Silicon Valley have taken this course as well. I mean, this course was just like a machine, you know, undergraduates and graduate students would come in on one side, and then 12 weeks later would come out convinced that basically line was no longer on the menu. It's just, it was, the whole seminar was an analysis of the question, is it ever right to lie?

1:35:27And really we focused on white lies, and truly tempting lies, as opposed to the obvious lies that screw people's lives in relationships. It's just so corrosive, and it's corrosive of relationships in ways that you, unless you're a student of this kind of thing, you don't necessarily notice. I mean, one example, I believe, is in that book, is that I remember my wife was with a friend and the two of them were out and the friend had something she had to do with another friend later that night, but she didn't really feel like doing it. And she got a call from that friend in the presence of my wife.

1:36:11And she just lied to the friends to get out of the plan. She said, oh, you know, I'm so sorry, but my daughter's got this thing. And it was just an utterly facile use of dishonesty to get where she could have just been honest, right? But it was just too awkward to be honest. So she just got out of it with a lie. But now it's in the presence of my wife and my wife is now the immediate question is How many times have I been on the other side of that conversation right? How many times has she lied to me in In an equally compelling way about something so trivial right and so it just eroded trust in that relationship in a way that the The liar would never have known about would never have detected it because it's just she just went right back to having a good time with, you know, they would just have to launch and they continued, you know, having their lunch and they're still having a good time and it's all smiles.

1:37:06But my wife has just logged something about kind of the ethical limitations of this person. And the person doesn't know it, right? And so once you sort of pull on this thread, you basically your entire life becomes at least for the transition period until this just becomes a habit that you no longer have to consider.

1:37:34Suddenly, the world becomes kind of mirror thrown up to your mind and you meet yourself in all these situations where you were avoiding yourself before. So like someone will say, do you wanna have plans or do you wanna collaborate with me on this project? And if previously you always had a recourse to some kind of white lie that just got you out of the awkward truth, which is the answers no, and there are actually reasons why not.

1:38:12You never have to confront the awkwardness of that. You're this kind of person who has these kinds of commitments and this kind of, you know, the most awkward one would be someone to clear is a romantic interest in you and And the answer is no. And then the, it's no for a totally superficial reason, right? Like this person is, they're not attractive enough for you, right? Or they're overweight or what it means is just say, like you have your reason why not, and this is something you feel you cannot say, right? Now, I'm not saying that you should always go out of your way, like with Tourette's, who just helplessly blurt out the truth.

1:39:00There's a scope for kindness and compassion and tact. But if someone is going to really drill down on the reasons why not, if the person says, no, I want to know exactly why you don't want to go out with me, there's something to discover on on on either side of that true disclosure, right? Like either you are cast back on yourself and you have to realize, okay, I'm such a superficial person that it doesn't matter who anyone is If they're 10 pounds overweight, I'm not interested, right? That's that's the mirror held up to your mind. It's like okay All right, so you're that kind of person do you do you want to still be that kind of person?

1:39:42and you really want to just decide that everyone, no matter what their virtues, right? And no matter what chaos is going on in their life, and actually this person might actually lose those 10 pounds next month and you would have a very different situation, but are you really not available? Are you really filtering by weight in this way? And are you really comfortable with that? And are you comfortable saying that? Like if somebody forces you to actually be honest. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're going to leave it for.

1:40:19The question that's been left for you, peckable handwriting. Where do you want to be when you die? Describe the place, time, people, smell, and feeling?

1:40:38Well, it's actually, connects with an idea I've had. I think what we need, we haven't talked about psychedelics here, but there's been this renaissance in research in psychedelics. It's hard to know. I'm worried that we could recapitulate some of the errors of the 60s and roll this all out in a way that's less than wise. But the wise version would be, I think we need to recapitulate something like the mysteries of elucists where we have rice of passage that are enabled by, in many people's case, psychedelics and the practice of meditation. I just think these are just fundamental tools of insight that are, I mean, for most people, it's hard to see how they would get them any other way.

1:41:32Right, I just think, you know, there's a lot longer conversation about which molecule and how and all that but Another component of this is I mean a hospice situation where the the experience of dying is as wisely Embraced and facilitated as as possible and I think psychedelics could Certainly play a role for many people there So I imagine something like we need a we need places that are truly beautiful that where you know people have gone to die and their families can visit them there and It is just a you know a final right of passage that is that is embraced with you know all the wisdom We can muster there and And yeah, so for in my case, I would want to be in, you know, currently I'd be happy to be home, but you know, wherever home is at that point, I would want a view of the sky.

1:42:38You know, I think it could be an ocean beneath the sky. That would be ideal. Right. I just, I mean, there's basically nothing that makes me happier than just looking at a blue with just watching like cumulus clouds move across a blue sky. I mean, it's just like I can extract so much mental pleasure just looking at that. Right, it's just, I mean it's, so yeah, if I'm gonna spend my last hours of life looking at anything, if my eyes are gonna be open, you know, looking at the sky and having... The stars will sky the daytime sky. The sky, the daytime, yeah. Yeah, I mean, if I were, if I, light pollution is enough of a thing in my world that I go for, I feel like I go for years without seeing a good night sky.

1:43:28So I've kind of given up hope there, but I do love that. But yeah, just a, you know, a view of the sky and with the people I love at that point, who are, who are still alive at that point. Yeah, I mean, I'm not, I'm not worried about death. in that sense. I really think it's... The death part is not a problem. I can't say I'm looking for... I can imagine there could be sort of medical chaos and uncertainty and all of the weirdness that happens around the dying process, right, depending on... And there are all kinds of ways to die that I wouldn't choose but having a nice place to do that with the view of the sky would be the only solution I think I would require.

1:44:20The question asks the smell. Give me the smell, a smell, a notion breeze. I have put an ocean there, so yeah, notion breeze would be perfect. Sam, thank you so much. Thank you so much. Not just this conversation, as I said to you before you sat down, you were pivotal in really helping me to unpack some problems on our younger, some conflicts I should describe them with my view on religious belief and the nature of the world. But I think more importantly, you didn't rob me of my religious beliefs and leave me with nothing. You left me with something else, which was something that was really important to me, which was the idea that that can still be great meaning.

1:45:00And there can be what you describe as spirituality in the absence or in the place of that religious belief. Religious belief gives people a lot of things. And it's funny because when I was religious and I wanted the journey to becoming agnostic, let's say, I was in conflict with people. As in, I would want to have a debate with everybody. Yeah. And I spent those two years watching everything that you and Richard Dawkins and Hitchens had all done. And then I came out of the side and it was peaceful. Yeah. And it's you believe what you want. I'll believe what I want. As long as we're not causing any conflicts with each other and you're not doing any harm, it's okay.

1:45:35And then I discovered what I would call my own spirituality, which is my meaning, the meaning that I see in the world around me and And the self and things like psychedelics And it's a it's a better place to be and I removed my fear of death Which I had as a religious person So thank you. Yeah, thank you for that and all your subsequent work But you know incredible books you've written so many of them that are absolutely incredible You've got an unbelievable podcast which I was gorging on before you came here as well in an app which, I mean, if you could speak just a few sentences about the meaning of the app and what you do, I know it's much more than meditation now, but I think people listening to this might be compelled to check it out and download it.

1:46:15Yeah, well, so I had that book which you're holding waking up, which is where I talk about my experience in meditation and just how I've fitted into a scientific secular worldview. And just turns out that an app is a much better delivery system for that kind of information. I mean, it's just hearing audio. You don't even need video. I think audio is the perfect medium for it. So when that technology came about or when I discovered it, I just felt incredibly lucky to be able to build it. And so it's kind of outgrown me now. There are many, many teachers on it and many other topics beyond meditation that are touched.

1:46:56But it's a, it really subverts all of the problems that, you know, some of which we touched upon here with the smartphone. I mean, like the smartphone has become this tool of fragmentation for us. It fragments our attention. It continually interrupts our experience. It's depending on how you use it. But most of what we do with that you're checking Slack, you're checking your email, you're checking your social media, you're just, it's punctuating your life with all this, at this point, seemingly necessary interruptions. But this app, or really any app will like it, that's delivering this kind of content, subverts all that because it's just a platform where you're getting audio that is guiding you in a very specific use of attention and a sort of reordering of your priorities and getting you to recognize things about your experience that you wouldn't otherwise see.

1:48:00And yeah, an app is just a sheer good look. It turns out it's just the perfect delivery system for that information. So yeah, I just felt very lucky to have stumbled upon it because again, you know, ten years ago there were no apps and you know there's just all I could do is write a book. Sam, thank you. Yeah, thank you. Thank you so much for your generosity. Yeah, I'm pleased to meet you. Thanks and congratulations with everything. It's really, it's so, I was catching up on your podcast in anticipation of this and it's amazing that the reach you've got now. So it's wonderful. No, it's still trying to catch up with it, but it's the credit to all of the team.

1:48:37And I really want to say from the bottom of my heart, thank you. Because the work you do is really, really important. It's been important in my life, as I've said, but it's just really important. And I feel like we're living in a world where, like, nuance and all the things you've talked about, and openness to debate and honest dialogue, us, we're getting further and further away from this. So if there's anyone left in this world, that's still willing to engage on that level. I feel like they must be protected at all costs. And I see you as one of those people, so thank you. Nice, nice. Well, to be continued.

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