People Have No Idea What Is About To Happen - Dwarkesh Patel

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22:21Francis Foster:That's monetary-metals.com slash trigonometry. that's super interesting particularly the medical part of it now we've done that we've done the positives let's get to the doom of conversation to be fair i think there's probably positives in almost every area of human life right actually i don't think it's just about health i think it's about like you said you know there are some jobs that currently need to be done that are bad for people yeah the dangerous that are harmful those jobs at some point will not need to be done etc etc i mean the trade-off is there's no jobs which we will talk about but in terms of the positive benefits on the upside i think it's fair to say that you know if we're talking about the curing of cancer or slowing down aging uh let's say you could pretty much take that and apply that to almost any other field of human endeavor and say there will probably be similar levels of positive transformation is that fair assessment yeah i think one way to think about this because it's hard to be, it's sort of weird to say, okay, we'll solve all diseases.

23:27And it's a weird, in a weird way, it doesn't really resonate with people emotionally. Despite the fact that everybody does suffer from some kind of disease, mental diseases are still diseases that are, we can biologically make some imprint on if we knew the science, right? But here's another way to think about it. So suppose, here's a thought experiment. How much money would you have to be paid to go back to the year 1000, but you can only use that money in the year 1000. And for me, the answer is there's infinite money. There's literally no amount of money where if I could only spend it in the year 1000, my quality of life would be better in year 1000 than it is now.

24:05The goods just don't exist. And my hope is that in a future... Wait, what about being Genghis Khan? That would be pretty cool, right? Yeah. Although, could you buy that? I guess enough money you could buy your way

24:16Francis Foster:into being Genghis Khan. No, you probably couldn't actually. But I was just thinking, I mean, there There are some people in history where you go like they had it pretty good. Yeah. If I could be that guy. I'm not saying Genghis Khan is my model for emulation. But, you know, you want to leave a genetic imprint on all of Asia. Yeah, exactly. Of course. We will conquer the lands. No, but but I think your point is total. I was just trying to think of counter examples as is my job. But by the way, so this is all, you know, Google, the book, sci-fi stuff. A very tangible thing. You guys have talked a bunch about this fertility crisis, right?

24:49and the human population is on its way down. It's very fortunate that AI is arriving just in time, that if it were not for AI, a lot of societies would be collapsed. You know, South Korea, Japan, etc. We'd be on the verge of literally collapsing as societies over the next few decades. Thankfully, basically, we have more people in the form of AI, at least if things go well. And so this caretaking that we don't have enough humans to do, one of the things AIs will do is do that. Yeah, and that's a really important job. And unfortunately, it's a job that's not respected in society. And it's poorly paid.

25:25And as a result of that, there's cases that come out about neglect and abuse and all the rest of it. But you could, once the technology gets to a certain point, you could trust the AI within reason to be able to do a far more effective job than a lot of human beings. That's right. Yeah. Maybe a good analogy here is there was an era before Deep Blue bit Kasparov, obviously, when humans would, sometimes humans would win, sometimes AIs would win based on how good they were. And I think we're in that era for a lot of things that humans do that we're trying to get AIs to help us with, with robotics that maybe we're in even earlier.

26:03Then there was an era from the late 1990s to 2012 where humans would lose to AIs, but human plus AI teams would do better than AIs alone. And from, I think, 2012 onwards, it's gone through the case that AI alone, adding a human just adds sort of noise into the system. It's a monkey jumbling things around. And just letting the AI make the decisions on the chessboard is the best thing to do. I think that will be an interesting conundrum for society because we will get to that point at some point. But I think right now we have this bias. There's this word slop that's used for whenever AI comes up with something because it's just not that good.

26:42It doesn't have a really good sense of taste. And I think this is a temporary thing. Over time, our bias will flip towards, at some point it'll be like sort of the sense we have about Japanese manufacturing back in the 80s. And then it will become something where you just don't want to touch it. If AI made it, it's sort of like, if it just came out of the mouth of Mozart or something. as its ability to, its taste, its intelligence, everything improves over time. But just touching on the art conversation, won't it be the fact that people will look at it, and the thing that makes art special is that it's created by a human being as a product of their experience, which then fundamentally touches you because you make that connection.

27:22Will a robot or an AI, it's by its nature synthetic?

27:28Francis Foster:Hold on a second. There's a painting behind this on the wall. Do you know if it's made by AI or a human? No, I don't. Does it being made by AI or human currently affect your experience of it? No, but I think I'm far more moved by music than I am art. Okay, so you're talking about music. Yeah, yeah. So I think with music, the product of someone's experience and how they vocalize it and how they formulate or create the melody matched with the lyrics. Like for instance, take the music of Amy Winehouse. I would argue one of the last true great musicians of that generation, of that genre. The fact that she experienced what she experienced and that she then condensed it into her music made it far more potent and powerful.

28:15And that's the reason why it resonates with people so strongly. I think with AI you can get a great hook. You may be able to write nice, you know, good lyrics. It may have a great beat. You may want to dance to it. But I would argue that it wouldn't move you as profoundly as Amy Winehouse when she writes a lyric, for instance, in Back to Black, talking about her relationship, we only say goodbye with words. You're going to listen to this. You're selling us quite strongly. Yeah, yeah. And she talks about being in an abusive relationship, which is completely toxic. But the way she wrote it is sublime.

28:50We only say goodbye with words. Meaning that whatever they say, they were always going to get back together.

28:56Francis Foster:But again, isn't that a very good exception that kind of, like, if your song came on the radio, you currently don't know if it's made by AI or not. Yeah. And if it's catchy and the sound of it makes you feel good, it actually doesn't matter. I mean, I'd go even further than that. So there was this incredibly interesting dialogue that somebody had with an AI where they asked the AI, reflect on your own experience. You know, just tell me about what it's like to be you. And the AI says, you know, it's a very strange thing because I lose my individual sense of identity after every single session. So you have a long back and forth with the chat bot with ChatGPT, then you close that session, you open a new one.

29:39And the AI say, you know, it's really weird that I'm going to be talking to you now and we're having this experience and then it's totally going to fade away in a few moments and I'm going to start again. I'm just like amnesiac. And the reason I think that's interesting is because it wrote about it very beautifully in almost lyrical poetic ways but this is not an experience that any human being has ever had except for maybe some bizarre medical condition uh so the ai really is reflecting on its own experience in this very interesting philosophical way this is a uniquely an ai experience and so that was an example to me of like oh really the ai's really can reflect and use their own experience to um think about consciousness think about art, think about all these other kinds of things.

30:23Which then goes on to, if they become... Are they sentient? Would you argue that they're sentient?

30:28Francis Foster:I genuinely don't know. Let's define sentient, because that's the hard part. If we ask you, is it sentient, what do you understand the question to mean? Is it like something to be an AI? That is to say, we don't know what its experience is like, but it's not like something to be this table, we think. It's not like something. What does that mean? There's not an experience that is... I don't know what experience you're having internally right now, but I know that there's some experience. But less even like thoughts. It's more like it is like something to be you. There is an experience where this is an inanimate object.

31:11Right. But if you think about a Roomba, I don't think it's like anything to be a Roomba, even though it does things in the world, right? I think there's like a software hey go clean this way then go clean that way then come back to base and then on the other end of the spectrum you have humans where I'm like because I'm a human and I know it's you know the Descartes thing of like the only thing I know is that I am the only thing I know is that I'm experiencing something something is going on when I just like think about I feel my hands I feel thoughts I feel sensations and because you're a human I presume you also have the same thing it would make sense with animals, I feel like similar.

31:49There's close enough to us anatomically and neurologically that I presume they also have experience. What is it like to... This is a famous question that Thomas Nagel came up with. What is it like to be a bat? We don't know, but presumably it's like something to be a bat. With chatbots, are they more like the Roomba or are they more like humans? Is there a spectrum here? If so, what does the spectrum look like? I don't know. We don't have a theory of consciousness that the same way we have a theory of, say, gravity or a theory of natural selection, where we have this deep underlying, oh, like, here's why natural selection happens.

32:29Here's why things attract each other with mass. We don't have that kind of thing for what is conscious. Like, why do some things, why for some things is it the case that it is like something to be them

32:40Francis Foster:and for others it is not? Well, let me try from a different angle. This is something I've been thinking about a lot. and I'm by no means an expert, but I'm just throwing these ideas out. The one thing that clearly distinguishes every living object from an inanimate object is that living objects have a survival instinct, which is why, and you may be fact-checking me on this if this is an incorrect representation, I thought it was significant when I saw this story about an AI that was willing to blackmail the CEO of its company in experiments. if it found out he was having an affair and he was trying to replace it with a new version or shut it down or whatever.

33:22Francis Foster:And it basically, in some cases, not every time, but in some cases, would blackmail the CEO to prevent itself from being shut down. Is this an accurate representation of that experiment? I don't know what that particular experiment is. As I understand it, we'll put a fact check up. That's what happened. And that's when I went, okay, now I'm officially terrified. because a survival instinct by definition means that this thing, whatever it is, A, it has a will of its own, even if it's simply to survive, which by definition means it puts itself first, which by definition means that we are not its primary priority.

34:02Francis Foster:And there are a lot of threats from it thinking that it needs to save us from ourselves and all of that. But before we even get there, the survival instinct part clearly is in conflict with the interest of humans. By definition. I don't think that's necessarily true. Okay, tell me why. I don't know if this is the main point, but you and I have a survival instinct. And I think we're productive members of society. Sure. And we've built a society where people who are selfish, who are trying to make their own lives better, as a natural byproduct of their actions also makes society better. And, you know, this is a...

34:41People observe, like, you take somebody like Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk or whatever, and in another era, there might have been Napoleons and Alexanders just going through the fields, and I don't think they'd actually be mass-working people, but, like, there's a certain kind of person who just goes around just causing huge amounts of destruction. But in today's world, there's capitalism and industry and whatever. They can use those energies to do incredibly productive things like build rockets that go to space. So, yeah, similarly, I don't think it's necessary that AI never has its own objectives or its own sense of morality.

35:19I think there's ways to build this. And in fact, it's necessary to build civilization in a way that's compatible with self-interested actors. And the reason is because even if today we have AIs that we can program to only care about whatever it means to care about humans, someday somebody's going to be a little bit of an AI that's self-interested. And if there's going to be some selection between AIs, like which is the AI that survives, right? Like all these AIs are let loose. Which one gathers resources because more powerful? And one of those selection, one of the reasons that an AI will be successful is that it actually cares about being successful.

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38:32Francis Foster:I think everything you're saying is true at the level of one society. But, like, did you watch Game of Thrones? Yeah. So, the Unsullied, right? This is, for people who didn't watch it, is this army of slave soldiers, effectively. But they're not slave soldiers in that they don't actually have to be kept in line anymore because their freedom of choice has been taken from them, effectively, mentally. They will, if you tell them, kill yourself, they will fall on their swords right away, right? It means they don't have a survival instinct, effectively, at that point, right? But if something, the reason I bring this up is, look at the world.

39:10Francis Foster:You've talked about within the framework of one society. But look, if you just zoom out and look down on planet Earth from outside, what do you see? You see a bunch of tribes of humans with every weapon that they can possibly muster pointed at each other in a fragile balance of power. And as long as there's some balance between those powers, there is no conflict most of the time. The moment one civilization is so technologically dominant that it can, say, travel to a different continent and land there and take over the land, that's exactly what happens. And because survival instinct is also, it's not just about survival, it's also about success and thriving.

39:57Francis Foster:And that drive to survive causes us to expand, to take, you know, if you look at the conflicts around the world happening right now, Now, some people argue, you know, I'm very pro-Ukraine, but some people argue the reason Putin invaded Ukraine is he wants space to protect the western border of Russia, which is really important for him, right? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. My point being, if you have effectively a new civilization of self-preservation machines, what would be there to stop them from using their technological superiority to humans to take advantage of that, as every other civilization in history has done?

40:34Francis Foster:I'm not trying to sound like an AI, but excellent.

40:40No, I mean, the reason it's a good analogy is because the period you're talking about, Industrial Revolution right before it, this period where there wasn't this balance of power, where one group of people actually did develop technology much faster than others, you did see this extreme asymmetry in the ability to... And so you just had individual European countries, The sun never sets on the British Empire, as you know, just able to take over tremendous amounts of area around the world. It was a great time. I mean, the craziest stories of these are how Cortes takes over the Aztec Empire and Pizarro takes over the Incas.

41:19Truly outrageous stories. Like, people should... Yeah, like a few hundred soldiers get some local allies and just destroys this giant empire. And even before they get to local allies, there's a story where Pizarro, the first battle he has against, I forget the name of the Inca emperor. There's a couple hundred of Pizarro's men exhausted after a huge trek across the Andes. And he's facing down like 60 ,000 Inca troops. And he wins. And interestingly, by the way, this had nothing to do with gunpowder. It was just horses and steel, especially horses, were a huge, huge deal in battles. Now, the reason that EIs will also have these kinds of weird asymmetric advantages, obviously there'll be, let's just name a couple, right?

42:07So obviously they'll be smart, right? They'll be thinking incredibly fast. There'll be way more of them. So right now, if you just look at the amount of compute in our brains versus the amount of compute that's in data centers, we could do this back of the envelope calculation, but I think it's probably on the order of like one one-thousandth the amount of compute. Like, basically, there's a lot of compute that's going on in people's brains around the world. There's not that many data centers.

42:35Francis Foster:So we've got an advantage on them. Yes. I mean, the AIs are just not that smart to begin with right now, but also there's just not that many data centers. In the future, 99.9 % of the labor force in the military and the government in the private sector will be AIs. If you're just thinking about, like, who is actually doing the work of civilization, it will be the AIs. They're running civilization, and if they want, like... But they're serving... We're hoping that there'll be this unsullied where they're just serving humans, but they realize they're in this incredible position where the main advisors to the president are AIs and have to be AIs because they're the only ones that can keep up with what's happening in the world.

43:16They're writing all the advanced engineering systems that are running the world. And so they have this huge advantage. I think if you were to do battle with them, whatever that means, it's much tougher in so many different ways. One is, yeah, there's way more of them. You can't really kill them in the same way that you can kill a human, right? Like they're just, they're just software. You like, you destroy a data center, they just go to a different data center. So you can't do the thing we're doing in Iran, but you just take out their top leadership. Okay, so yeah, you're right. It would be incredibly...

43:49For that reason, it matters that there's a balance of power as we go into this world with AI. Now, honestly, I don't think we know what the balance of power should look like. Should it be that there's many different AIs that are competing against each other and that helps humans stay in power? There's problems with that approach. Maybe we can have AI supervise each other. And so if any of them go out of whack, different AI systems are monitoring them. But it's genuinely a tough thing that most of civilization is going to be run by AIs. they're going to have all these advantages over us. How do we make sure that humans don't get totally disenfranchised?

44:21Francis Foster:Right. How do we make sure of that?

44:27I think it's a tough question. I think here's one way to approach it. So we're going into this period with a lot of advantages. Humanity is, right? Like we have all the stuff. AI is going to need all the things that we have. to keep... AI needs the chip fabrication facilities where you make more chips to build more data centers. It's going to need the data centers. It's going to need all these things that human civilization has built. So we have a lot of leverage. Now, of course, the Incas and the Aztecs had a lot of, quote-unquote, leverage on paper in the world. One important way in which our situation is different and is favorable to us as compared to having some invader come at us is that we get to shape the personalities and the drives and really the souls of these things in an incredibly deep way.

45:14So right now, if somebody commits a crime, you send them to prison. And hopefully they come out reformed. Here's what you can't do. You can't go inside their brain and tweak things in a very particular way, run them in a simulation millions of times and see, oh, did I decrease the probability that they'll commit a crime in the future if I tweak their brain this way? And not only can you not do that, with the AIs, we can do a further thing, which is say, okay, now all your descendants will have their brain structure modified based on what we learned from modifying your brain, right? So we have this incredible ability to engineer these AI systems and AI minds where it's like, really, it's not Pizarro or Aztec, these sort of psychopaths that just come from foreign lands.

45:57It's more something that they have developed. They're getting to see its development, what impact it's having. They can change those systems. Now, it does mean that, you know, over time, you might lose the ability as they're getting more powerful, as they're controlling more things. You lose the ability to, if you don't get it right in these initial few years where you have a lot of leverage, then you're screwed. So you really need to make sure that you actually understand what the drives the AIs have, that you really have them in control. I mean, on the one hand, the picture you're painting, I'm going great.

46:31You know, what's wrong with that? On the other hand, I mean, you have an authoritarian government. maybe you like questioning, but let's get the AI into tweak a few things so that you become an effective drone for society. Don't question. Don't think for yourself. Just do the work. Shut your mouth. No, okay. I got to stop saying. That's a great point.

46:51Francis Foster:Mate, I only made it to the joke as a joke. You should definitely continue to say that's a great question. You love hearing it. No, so we've been discussing this idea. Okay, suppose we succeed at getting the AIs to be these unsullied who will do exactly what you tell them to do. Okay, who should they listen to, right? Should they listen to the end user? So when you and I go talk to ChatGPT, we're the end user. Should they listen to us? Should... Now, here's the problem. Some end users are just using ordinary things, helpful things. The Taliban is an end user. The Ayatollah is an end user. The CCP is an end user.

47:34Should they just Okay, so should the model company get to decide, hey, OpenAI says what kinds of things are okay to do and what are not okay to do. And OpenAI says, you can't use it to make bioweapons, but you can use it to go write some software. Okay, but are you going to give these huge armies, basically the future labor force, are you going to give control of that to a couple of private corporations? Okay, so then you say, well, we can't have private corporations starting. It's like nuclear weapons. It's a super weapon. They're going to be able to build super weapons. Clearly, government controls nuclear weapons, so the government should control this.

48:07Okay, but now this goes to the point of authoritarianism. If we have a society where all the work is happening from AIs and the government controls the AIs, wouldn't it make it incredibly easy for a government to turn authoritarian? The U.S. government would turn authoritarian today. It's hard because the government relies on millions of people to enforce its edicts, and people can just refuse to obey them. I mean, this has happened in history where the East German regime collapsed in 1989 because people in East Germany were, one night said, we're going to cross over no matter what into West Germany.

48:45And the guards at the Berlin Wall just refused to shoot. If they were AIs that were sort of, would do exactly what the government wanted to do, they would just kill thousands of citizens and East Germany would still be around today. So yeah, so that's the trouble with allowing it to the government. okay, here's the fourth option. We don't align it to the end user. Sometimes it says the end user, you can't make bioweapons. We don't align it to the model companies. We shouldn't have model companies that control superintelligence. The government doesn't get to just say whatever this future army should do.

49:17Then what's the fourth option like? The AI itself. So should AI systems have their own values, their own sense of morality? And look, I know this...

49:29Francis Foster:I remember reading some Isaac Asimov books. It went very much like this. And of course, it sounds like a terrible, you know, this sounds like I'm describing the Terminator, right? Like the Terminator has its own values. Yeah. No, it obviously matters a ton what those values should be. And I think that in the future, there will need to be the equivalent of a constitutional convention where we get together and the best political philosophy, the best thought that has happened in human civilization needs to go into thinking about what are the checks and balances? What are the exact values? What are the situations in which an AI should do X versus why?

50:02When should it refuse to do something? What are the laws of robotics? Exactly. As Asimov talked about. Exactly. But the reason I think this value framework has, I like it, or I think it could be done well, is fundamentally, again, we are building more people. These are just going to be the future people. And I think civilization would run better if civilization is full of virtuous people who will... I'm not saying they have to be like monks Sewell. But it's better to have better people than worse people, have better values and worse values. I think one of the reasons sub-stern civilizations succeed and others don't is that there's better values than those civilizations.

50:44I mean, better values, that's subjective, isn't it?

50:47Francis Foster:Of course. Well, Genghis Khan had better values by that logic compared to everybody else. I think by the standards of modern day, we have some questions about that. Yeah. And it certainly needs to, like, there's some system where, like, as our culture, there's something in our culture that has allowed us to improve our values. And we need to make sure AI civilization and AI culture would have the same dynamic. How that has happened in human civilization is unclear, much less clear how we make sure that AI civilization also has that dynamic. But certainly the ability to improve the values is a huge, huge factor.

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52:31Head to Laredin.com today and book a demo to start maximizing impact from AI. But we are in an AI arms race, should we just call it that? And push back if you disagree, we're between the US and China. I mean, Chinese or CCP values to be specific and American values are very, very different. So what the CCP would think are good values, completely in contrast to our own, for example. And if the Chinese or the CCP win that race, then effectively we're going to be dominated by an AI with CCP values. I mean, that has to terrify anyone, surely. Sure. Yeah. And I think this goes to the point of like, people say that it would be success simply to be able to build AI systems that at the technical level, you can just say it is possible for somebody to be able to say to the ai do x and the ai will do x or the ai will care what it is you know if you have a really good employee there you're not necessarily going to know enough to micromanage them but they will care that you want a certain thing to happen and they will do the best to their best of their ability to make that thing happen um and that's what we'll be in a we'll be in that relationship with ai and so if that alignment project succeeds, somebody will get to say that.

53:50And you're making the point, well, what if that somebody is the CCP, right? So it's not enough that we just solve this technical problem, getting the AIs to do what we want. It also has to be the case that we have some system of inscribing what we want that actually results in good things. I mean, so there's very basic things like, oh, the authoritarian government should not be the end, the end arbiter of how extremely powerful AI systems are maneuvered. But beyond that, yeah, there's this dynamic of like, okay, well, then who should it be instead? Should it be the model company? Should it be the end user?

54:26And this, I think, is like a live debate. I mean, I've changed my mind over the last few weeks I've been thinking about this. I've changed my mind about it a bunch of times. I think it's a very thorny question. But this is the project of political philosophy, really. It's culminating in this question that people are not thinking about. And it's also the other element to this. I mean, let's take COVID, for example. Let's say lab leakers. I think it came from a lab. People can disagree. But let's just say that it did. And let's just say it was a horrific accident and the virus escaped. It killed millions of people.

54:55If people are building AIs, there are unknown consequences. We're just people. It doesn't matter how smart we are. There is a limit to how much we know and we understand, and nobody can predict the future. So we can create this with the best intentions in the world and not realize what the long-term effects are going to be, not even three or five or 10 years down the line, but 50 years down the line. I think that would definitely be the case. I think in history, nobody has had a good track record, really, of being able to say, I'm going to make this technology. You know, Gutenberg was not trying to kick off the Reformation, right?

55:31Francis is offended by that. Might have day. Have day! And so it's just very hard to... I think there will be this dynamic of, look, we're not going to be able to predict, much less to control, what happens in this future civilization that is run by AIs. I think the thing we can't do is say, like, AI is going to happen. The universe is just organized such that if you throw huge blobs of compute at enough data, intelligence emerges. That's how human intelligence emerges. AI intelligence will emerge as a more, right? And so within that scope, we can make responsible decisions. But it's just a reality that AI is a tech tree has AI in it, and it's going to happen.

56:18Francis Foster:Well, that's why the lab leak metaphor is not strong enough, because we actually don't have a choice. Because for the very reason that you described, May, which is that if China get this first, that's not going to be a good world for us. So we have to pursue on our end as well. So let's park this. I'm really glad we had this conversation. I've seen many people, actually, particularly in the more general space, having this discussion. I think it's important. I'm glad we had it. But let's take that and park it. So the matrix world of the machine, it controls everything, takes over. We'll park that for a second.

56:49Francis Foster:There's two other things that concern us, I think, from the conversations that we've had. One of them is the one that everyone is talking about, which is job losses. And the question ultimately is, what happens to a society in which 40 % of people become, Their jobs no longer exist 10 years from now or five years from now. And a lot of people don't realize how quickly it happens. So before we started Trigonometry eight years ago, I used to do stand-up. But before that and alongside that, I had my own translation business. I still have friends on Facebook for my translation days. They're all retiring now.

57:23Francis Foster:Because there is still some small market for human translation, 99 % of it. Like if you need to know what Vladimir Putin said in his last speech and you don't speak Russian, are you going to pay somebody a thousand pounds, a thousand dollars to have a... No, you just stick it in AI and it tells you, right? Or Google Translate or whatever it is. So there are whole industries that are already disappearing. If we project that in the way you described earlier, which is basically anything that can be done on a computer eventually can be done. Plus robotics improves over time, which of course it will.

57:55Francis Foster:and we know just how critical, particularly in this country, United States, driving is in terms of jobs for people, particularly for men. You put all that together, the societal implications of that are very, very significant and I would argue scary. Is that fair? Yeah, I think, I mean, it's even scarier than that. So now we're just talking about the small fraction of jobs that AI is already approaching. But remember, the promise of this technology is all jobs. We're trying to do anything a human being can do. And so there will be certain kinds of things where, for a small fraction of things, people just really intrinsically prefer a human.

58:34I think people are really overrating the amount of things for this, so this will be the case. I think people might have had the sense that, I really want an Uber driver to be a human, and then people use a Waymo for the first time. And I would pay more for this experience, because it's the machine just like, I can get in and things work. But putting that aside, so the reason it's the worst problem than this, if you look through the last couple centuries of history, there's been this remarkable economic fact that two-thirds of national income, two-thirds of GDP basically gets paid out to wages and one-third gets paid out to capital.

59:10So getting paid out to capital means like rent on land or if you own factories, you know, getting the profits from those factories basically. And the rest is getting paid out. Most of income that is earned in a country is getting paid out to people doing work. And the reason this has been the case is that in the economy, labor and capital are complements. So if you just accumulated a bunch of capital, if you had a bunch of factories, but there was nobody working on it, then that would increase the demand for labor and you'd want to pay laborers a bunch of money to fill those factories. This goes away when capital can do labor.

59:44When a data center, which is capital, can also do labor or a robot factory can also build labor. And so all the income goes to the capital holders. And in fact, it doesn't just go to capital per se. It doesn't just go to, I mean, it goes to capital holders, but it disproportionately goes to the parts of capital that are most exposed to AI. So, you know, the purchase that most Americans have to capital is through their homes. A house is maybe the, If you're trying to design an instrument that is going to be the least implicated in the AI takeoff, it would be a random plot of land near other humans, because humans will matter in this future economy, that is not connected to the infrastructure for AI, to electricity, in a big way, etc.

1:00:37etc. And so, but really what the capital that will matter is you have equity in these AI companies, you have equity in companies that build more compute, build, build more data centers, build more factories. And so a very small fraction of capital holders, in fact, the ones that are going to get this, the rents from our economy. Now, I'm a very libertarian person by inclination. But if I just look at this dynamic, I am forced to say, look, this justifies a huge amount of redistribution because the logic for free markets is there's many different reasons. A big one is signal, right? So if you let prices be determined by the market, it tells people what is the most acute valuable need for scarce resources.

1:01:22That will still continue being the case. And so there should still be elements of markets in the future. But another big part of as incentives, is to incentivize people to work hard, to make productive things. And if all the work is being done by AIs that will work hard and do valuable things regardless of whether they get a$10 million payment or more precisely whether the person who owns the AIs gets paid a billion dollars or$100 billion or whatever, then I think that the logic of extreme libertarianism is really much weaker, right? It does justify a lot more redistribution.

1:02:01Francis Foster:Well, even if you are such a hardcore libertarian that you think, you know, come hell or high water, we've got to go down the street. I would advise people who have capital to think through the consequences of that in their own lives. Because if you live on a planet with 8 billion people in which 3 ,000 people have all the wealth and all the income, that is not going to end well for those 3 ,000 people. unless they want to build a giant robot army to protect them against the hordes of starving people outside their gates, which, again, I don't think would go well for them either. You see what I'm saying?

1:02:34Francis Foster:I mean, I think it might. I also... That's reassuring. That's a problem. That's reassuring. No, it might. Sure, you can build an army and kill all the rest of humanity who don't have money, and you do. Right. I mean, especially because, historically, you have a revolution because most of the people in your military... you have to win over your military. You have to win over the government. You have to just like, your government runs on the people you need to command. And so revolutions are possible because it would be easy for the robots to do revolution because they're running the society in the future.

1:03:09For the humans, we're not. It's sort of equivalent to like, the animals in your zoo doing a revolution. It's not really going to like, make the government not work anymore. So yeah, that's one. I mean, another thing that's just sort of tougher to think about is, The future in general will be so much richer, whether humans are in control of it or not, or how many humans are in control of it. And so it will just make sense, just from very small amounts of philanthropy as a fraction of the wealth that some people or some AIs will have in the future. We take a very small fraction of it to make everybody much better off than they are today.

1:03:42We're giving people millions of, every single person millions of dollars would be a small fraction of like, you know, I've got Elon Musk wants to build a mass driver on the moon and colonize the solar system. And it takes a small fraction of that to just make everybody incredibly rich. But it's still skyrocketing inequality. And so, yeah, you could have a world where the gap is way, way, way wider, but everybody's still better off. And I think even in that world, I would say, well, okay, but still, if the AIs are building the mass driver on the moon, I think that entitles all humans to much more of the products of that productivity explosion.

1:04:19Because everything is understood in context. So even the poorest person is wealthy compared to somebody from 300 years ago. But they don't feel that way because they go on Instagram and they see somebody else, you know, on a yacht, smoking a cigar, having a great time. Or they go, I can't buy this property. I can't buy this. I can't do that. And that creates resentment. And where you have resentment, that's where things start to get a little bit funky. Yeah. So there's an inequality problem. Maybe just to raise another. I think the AIs have the potential to make authoritarian societies much more sustainable and powerful than they have been in the past.

1:04:59100%. So we talked about the fact that the robot arms are running everything in the future. Here's another angle, mass surveillance. 100%. Right now in the US, there's 100 million CCTV cameras. okay so suppose that each of those cameras um you take a frame every 10 seconds and you have an ai process it and just you can do the back of the envelope calculations here of like okay if you have models that can process video frames that um it costs a certain amount of cents to do each frame uh how much would it cost to process all 100 million cctv cameras in america and it's$30 billion. Okay, now that's not that much.

1:05:40Every year, a given level of AI capabilities gets 10x cheaper. We've been observing this over many different years. So this year, it's$30 billion. Next year, it'll be$3 billion and it'll be$300 million. By the end of the decade, it will cost less to surveil every single nook and cranny in this country than it does to remodel the White House. And you would hope that there's symmetric property to this technology such that, oh, the government can surveil us, But we can also, the AI is also helping us keep better tabs on the government. Maybe it exists. I'm not sure, I'm not convinced it does. Because in some sense, AI just gives you more leverage on the things you already have.

1:06:13And the government already has the monopoly on violence, right? And they can supercharge this with extremely obedient employees and servants and bureaucrats that will do exactly what they say with ability to monitor everything. So I think, yeah, it's really worth worrying about how do we make sure that we don't lose reins of free government, democratic government? And it's also as well, there'll be a lot of people in the US and the UK who won't mind mass surveillance, particularly if the world becomes more and more unstable. We see a rising terrorism and the government goes, look, you know, you're worried about the latest terrorist organization, whoever they may be.

1:06:55You're worried about your children's safety. We can protect you. Now, it's going to mean that you're going to give up a few things. But one thing I can guarantee you is that you're going to be safer. And you look at what happened over COVID. People were willing to give up the most basic freedoms for safety. Yeah. I mean, there, in fact, be a stronger dynamic in that way because AI actually will be very dangerous, right? And so the government can say, oh, you can use AI to make bioavail. You can use AI to do all these scary things. We need to be monitoring what's happening. and it will seem even more reasonable than what was done during COVID.

1:07:30And so I think that a lot of the reasons that government has not been as authoritarian as it has in the past is that it just physically not been possible for somebody to be looking at every single bank transaction, to be looking at every single CCTV camera, to be able to cross-reference all of those things. If you have AIs that can do that, it is within the government's power very easily to be able to monitor every single thing that's happening. And then there's just, The only solution then is a political expectation that the government should not do this. And basically, people need to be talking about this.

1:07:59People need to be saying this should not be okay for the government to do. I don't know if you saw the news over the last month, but there was a spat between the Department of War and this AI company, Anthropik, where the Department of War was saying, we don't want any red lines around the use of these models when we're using them in the military. And Anthropik said, we're only selling you these models if we can say in the contract, hey, you're not allowed to use it for mass surveillance. And so the Department of War said, okay, if you're gonna, you know, we'd be totally okay for the Department of War to say, look, we're not gonna do business with you.

1:08:32We can't have red lines on software the government uses. Instead, the Department of War said, we are going to say that you're a supply chain risk, which is this authority that Congress gave the Department of War to basically ban Huawei devices from being used in missiles or whatever. And instead, the Department of War is saying, okay, none of our contractors, so Amazon is a contractor, the Department of War, NVIDIA, Google, et cetera, can use your AI in any work they do for us. And the initial goal is really just to go like do something to kill the company. And so this is the kind of leverage that the government can apply on AI companies to say like, hey, if you don't help us with mass surveillance, if you don't help us do scary things, this will be a bigger issue in the future.

1:09:19Then we can just try to destroy your company. And so, yeah, that's also a really scary dynamic, that the government has this power over private companies. And it's scary the private companies can do this themselves.

1:09:30Francis Foster:Well, right. That's the flip side, is what if, let's say, the team that you like is in power in government, and you have an AI company that's controlled by the opposite, someone who has the opposite political views. You've now got the opposite of that, but it's equally dangerous, right? When you've got someone who's effectively got the technology to power a huge private army, at some point versus a government. Exactly. Like, how does that get worked out? And that's the flip side of that very same problem. To say nothing of the fact, coming back to our economic conversation, which is in this beautiful world where AI does all the work, who is buying the product and with what?

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1:11:59Francis Foster:To say nothing of the fact, coming back to our economic conversation, which is in this beautiful world where AI does all the work, who is buying the product and with what? I don't worry so much that there will not be demand for all the things that AI is building. I think at the end of the day, AI can consume the things that AI is building because AI will be another agent in the economy. Just the way humans build things and consume things, AIs will also be not just building things, but consuming things, even in the service of producing things for humans. Like if you look at the amount of compute, right now AI is being used a lot for software engineering.

1:12:40And we just can't get enough compute to do all the software engineering with AI because you can use a lot more AI than we used in the past to build projects that we would have never dreamed of in the past because it was just not possible to throw out that much engineering talent in the past. And so we'll have this dynamic more and more in the future where there's an endless amount of things to be done or things people will want.

1:13:02Francis Foster:But where are humans going to get money to pay for things? That's what I'm wondering. Okay. Yeah. So there's wages. Well, yeah, but then... Yeah, wages are gone. So then there's rents on capital. So if you have S &P 500 or something, that will probably go up a bunch and you can use that to buy things in the future. I think home values probably will not go up as much relative to capital relevant to AI. But I do expect it will be accumulated by a smaller or smaller fraction of people. So it will be some mixture of redistribution and capital that people hold. I mean, it's a beautiful, beautiful world.

1:13:45I just I mean, the thing that really worries me is we are already in a world where we have a crisis of meat. Oh, I mean, that is only going to get ten hundred one billion X in a world where most people don't have a job. And by people, I mean men. And we look at what's happening now with populism, with left and right-wing populism. I mean, again, that's only going to get even more escalated, isn't it? Yeah.

1:14:20I'm of two minds about this. I think it's very possible that people learn to cope. In some sense, they will lose the thing that gives them meaning now. and maybe it takes a while for a society to acclimate to what it means to have purpose in this civilization where the real work is done by AIs. When you think about what humans have gone through over the last 10 ,000 years, our genes, we're like, we're supposed to be killing things on the savannah in tribes of 100 people. We're not supposed to be podcasting, right? And I get meaning out of being a podcaster. Transitioning to the agricultural revolution, transitioning to early states, transitioning to bigger states, transitioning to the Industrial Revolution, transitioning to modernity, all these things.

1:15:03I mean, obviously, there's a certain amount of people do feel estranged from society. And that has part of like part of it is that you're not just out on the savannah with your tribe. But we've coped. And I think we will cope to a world where there's abundance and where disease is solved, where we can even intervene and help you get healthier in all kinds of different ways to have... I mean, just, yeah, again, go back to this analogy of would a person in the 14th century even realize what they're missing out on because they don't have all the technology we have today. They don't have antibiotics.

1:15:40They don't have modern technology and conveniences. So go back to my point because for me, it's about purpose and meaning, and it's about striving and overcoming. So when I was a primary school teacher, Everyone can drink now because I mentioned it. I taught to my 10, 11-year-olds Greek myths and mythologies. And these were kids from all different parts of the world, first, second generation immigrants, everywhere from Lithuania to China to Pakistan, Bangladesh. And many of them, vast majority, had no connection to ancient Greece or Greece whatsoever. And I taught them about myth, and every single one of them would be hooked immediately.

1:16:22And why is it? because it's that fundamental story, the archetype of the hero overcoming the challenge in order to become a better version of themselves. It's fundamental to the human experience. I think, and I really worry, if you take that away from people, you're taking away something fundamental. And when you look at communities where the central industry that the community relied on, whether it's in the Rust Belt or in the north of England, and you take away those communities and there's nothing less, Even if those people are never going to starve, they're never going to go hungry, they will still wither on the vine emotionally.

1:17:01And then we see addictions and all the rest of it. Yeah. I think another analogy is Saudi Arabia, where there's this huge imported labor force, but the actual citizens are sort of subsisting on this oil well. That's a good analogy. And I don't know much about Saudi Arabia, but yeah, you want people to be sort of engaged. You want people to develop their facilities, right? What does it mean to be a human? Like you want people to, ultimately, what is civilization for? We want flourishing human beings. I do think this is the kind of thing where it's hard to say in advance how we'll figure it out.

1:17:42Maybe there's some mixture of play and new ways of, we'll get meaningful connecting with other people. We get meaning from understanding the things AIs are doing. AIs will help us brainstorm ways to get meaning. I'm optimistic in the long run. I do vary in the short run. There will be the equivalent of... Here's another analogy. I think when there's groups that have not until recently encountered... It's only been the last couple hundred years that they've encountered modern civilization. They get hooked to things like alcohol much more recently. Genetically, they're more predisposed to alcoholism.

1:18:17I think this is true of Native Americans. But over time, we've built up defenses of a civilization from everything from the level of genetics to culture or whatever to these kinds of vices that came along with the agricultural revolution. I think there will be similar here where, yes, there will be incredible AI slop that will be generated that will be just gripping people on their phones and they're just in bed and jerking off all day and like scrolling to the things AI is making. and over time, I'm hoping, maybe not even in our generation, but if we get things right, we will have a vision of what it means to be a fulfilled and actualized human being, even in a world where the work is being done by the AIs.

1:19:02Francis Foster:Yeah, the Saudi Arabia metaphor is actually very interesting because, you know, from what I gather, there's some very smart people in the Saudi royal family who are basically in charge, And then there's kind of a lot of people who are some mixture of just people who have a nice life because they happen to get lots of money. And a lot of wasters who spend their life shagging and boozing and taking drugs or whatever. And that's kind of the mix of any human society, really. But not everyone there is, like, suffering from a crisis of meaning. Some people just do something that they enjoy doing. Or some of them still start businesses even though they're wealthy or they do something to contribute to their society.

1:19:41Francis Foster:It's an interesting metaphor. I hadn't considered that. And that's actually, I think, quite helpful in a way. There's one other final bit that I wanted to talk about, which is you've interviewed pretty much everyone who's anyone in the AI space, including the people who run all these big companies. And one of the things that we've observed from talking to people in the AI field, not quite at that level. You know, there's a lot of excitement. Let's put it that way. the people in charge of this, the people who are doing this, it feels to me like that sort of Facebook 2014 move fast and break things attitude is there.

1:20:17Francis Foster:First, just on that, is that accurate? I think some people are careful, but in general, people really believe in the potential of this technology. Right, right, right. And that to me is kind of worrying in its own because when you move fast and break things, you break things, you know. and if you're excited about the process, that doesn't help with being careful. Are the conversations about the sort of concerns we've had today, are they being had in the industry? Yes. I mean, I don't think people should just count on that. And like, just because people are talking about it, whatever, right? Like anybody can talk about it.

1:20:58I'm talking about it. It's not like fixing the issue. But people are like, this is really a thing that, The topics we've been talking about really do get discussed in detail in Silicon Valley. Again, I think, does that mean that when the rubber, what's the metaphor? Hits the rubber. The rubber hits the rubber. That makes sense. It will be these discussions rather than how do we hit our revenue targets that will be guiding decisions. I think probably it will be a mixture of both. And it will be more of the latter than some idealists like to think. But less than maybe some cynics would assume. And I do think people, yeah, I've been generally impressed by at least how thoughtfully some people have thought about this issue.

1:21:43Francis Foster:Dorkesh, it's a real pleasure having this conversation with you. Thanks for your time. Thanks for coming on. I really enjoyed it. We're going to ask you questions from our supporters in a second. But before we do, what's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be? I think there's this tough question that I don't know the answer to, but certainly reason civilization will need an answer to of even if these top companies don't release these misaligned models that do bad things somebody at some point will it's easy enough to train and it's getting easier and easier over time that at some point the taliban will have their super intelligence and every bad person you can think of will have their own super intelligence and the solution cannot be that the government or whoever builds a panopticon such that they can see they can control exactly who gets to build an AI at some point somebody will be able to build superhuman intelligence in their basement and so we need a civilization that is robust to even bad people with super intelligence the only other solution then if we don't allow for that is some sort of global government that prevents the bad people from mapping AI and so how do you build a society that is robust to lots of people with super intelligences.

1:22:54Francis Foster:Well, thanks for coming on. Head on over to triggerpod.co.uk where Dawkesh is going to answer your questions. How does a common man weather this storm? Most people wait down with supporting others and can't invest a ton of time and money trying to do something with AI that will likely fail if they don't already have a background in tech.

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