Nick Bostrom: How Entrepreneurs Can Win in an AI-Dominated World | Artificial Intelligence | E356

25:40but if we didn't get any new insights as to how this particular simulation is configured we just learned that it is a simulation but not anything about the specific character of the simulation then i don't know whether that would lead to a greater propensity for violence if anything maybe the converse you think that might be a stages after the simulation where your behavior in the simulation would affect kind of similar to traditional idea karma or an afterlife life. Some people might become more violent or fanatical, but it can also serve as a moral ballast or like a kind of, well, there is hopefully you do the right thing just because it's moral.

26:21But if not, you know, if there is like some system of accountability that might also induce other people to pay more attention to making sure you don't harm others or trample on other people's rights and interests. It's kind of like if you lose the game, There could be winners and losers of the game that we're in. Yeah, it's hard to know how that all shakes out. But in terms of thinking about the big picture, the question you started with, it seemed one of a small number of these fundamental constraints, it seems to me, as to what we can coherently believe about the structure of reality and our place within it.

27:00And it is striking. It might have seemed, and I guess most people did seem, if you go back a couple of decades ago, that it's so hard to know what's going to happen in the future. Anything is positive. You can just make stuff up. The problem is not coming up with some idea. It's that there are no constraints that would allow us to pick which idea is correct because we have so much evidence. But in fact, I think if you start to think these things through, it can be hard to come up with even one fully articulated, coherent picture that makes sense of the constraints that we're already aware of. The simulation argument is one, but there are others.

27:35There's like the Furby paradox where we haven't seen any aliens. There's what we seem to know about the kinds of technologies that can be developed. There are other more methodologically shaky arguments, perhaps. but the Carter-Leslie doomsday argument. It's like there are a few things like this that can serve to structure our thinking about the really biggest strategic picture surrounding us. Can you tell us about some of those arguments? So the Fermi paradox, many people will have heard of it, but it's the observation that we haven't seen any signs of extraterrestrial life. And yet we know that there are many galaxies and many planets, billions and billions and billions out there, on which it seems life could have originated.

28:27So the question then is, with billions of possible germination points and zero aliens that have actually manifested themselves to us or arrived at our planet, how do we reconcile those two? There has to be some great filter that you start with billions of germination points and you end up with a net total of zero extraterrestrial arrivals here. So what accounts for that? I think the most likely explanation is that it's just really hard to get to technologically advanced life. Maybe it's hard to get to even simple life. And you could look for these candidate places of where there could be this kind of great filter.

29:10Maybe it's the emergence of simple self-replicators. Like so far, we haven't found that on any other planet. Or maybe it's slightly later on, maybe the step from prokaryotic life forms to eukaryotic life forms on Earth. It looks like that took one and a half billion years. Maybe what that means is that it's astronomically improbable for it to happen. And you just had one and a half billions of years where random things just bumped into each other in chance. and with a large enough universe and ours might, for all we know, be infinitely large with infinitely many planets. Then eventually, no matter how improbable something is, it will happen somewhere.

29:51And then you would invoke a so-called observation selection effect to explain why we are observing that on our planet, that improbable event happened. Only those planets where that improbability happened develop observers that can then look back on their own history and marvel at this. So that's one possibility. Maybe it's slightly later on. The closer you get to current humanity, though, it seems the less likely it is that there would be a great filter. For example, you might think that it's the step to more advanced forms of cognitive ability. That would be the improbable step. But that doesn't really fit the evidence.

30:28We know that on several independent evolutionary lineages, you had fairly advanced intelligence evolving here on earth you have it happen in the hominoid lineage of course but also independently amongst birds and corvids like crows and stuff and among octopi for example so it looks like if it happens several times independently on earth then it can't be that unlikely but anyway it poses some constraints you can't simultaneously believe that it's easy for intelligent life to evolve and that it's technologically feasible to do large-scale space colonization and also believe that there is a wide range of different motives present amongst advanced civilizations while at the same time explaining why we haven't seen any.

31:14So something has to give and it gives us clues. The other argument that I was referring to, the Carter-Leslie-Doomsday argument, it's a piece of probabilistic reasoning having to do with how to take into account evidence that has an indexical element. So indexical information is information about who you are, when you are, or where you are. And so the epistemology of how to reason about these things is quite difficult and murky. So it's unclear whether the Carter-Leslie Doomsky argument is ultimately sound or not. But I can give you a kind of intuition for how it would work. So let's explain it by means of an analogy.

31:55So suppose I have two urns and I put 10 balls in one of the urns and the balls are numbered from one to 10. Okay. Okay. And then in the other urn, I put a million balls numbered from one to one million. Then let's say I flip a coin and select one of these urns and put it in front of you. And now your task is to guess how many balls are there in this urn. So at this point, you say 50-50 that there is a million balls, right? Because one of each urns and selected one randomly. Now let's suppose you reach in and select one random ball from this urn and it's number eight, let's say. Using Bayes' theorem, that allows you to infer that it's now much more likely that the urn has only 10 balls than a million.

32:41Because if there were a million, what are the chances that you would get one of the first 10? Very unlikely, right? So far, it's just standard probability theory, uncontroversial. But then the idea with the Cartel-Leslie-Doomsday argument is that we have an analogous situation, but where instead of two hypotheses about how many balls urns have, we now instead have, say, two different hypotheses about how long the human species will last. How many humans will there have been in total when the human species eventually goes extinct? And in reality, there are more, but we can simplify it to two to see the structure of the argument.

33:15So one is maybe there will be in total 200 trillion humans. And then maybe we develop some technology and blow ourselves up. So that's one thing you might think could happen. And let's consider an alternative hypothesis. Maybe there will be 2 ,000 trillion humans. Like we eventually start to develop space colony. We colonize the galaxy. Our descendants live for hundreds of millions of years. And there are vastly more people. These two then correspond to the two hypotheses about how many balls there are in the urn. Then you have some prior probability on these two hypotheses that's based on your ordinary estimates of different risks from nuclear weapons and biological weapons and all of these things.

33:57So, you know, maybe you think it's 50-50 or maybe you think it's 90 % that we will make it through and 10 % that we will go extinct. Whatever your probability is from these normal considerations. But then the doomsday argument says that, well, there's one more really important piece of information you have here, which is that you can observe your own birth rank, your sequence amongst all humans who have ever been born. So this turns out to be roughly a hundred billion. That's roughly speaking how many humans have existed to date on earth. And so the idea then is that if humanity goes extinct relatively soon, then being number one hundred billionth of say, 200 billion humans is very unsurprising, right?

34:40That's like getting ball number eight from an urn that has 10 balls or 16 balls or something like. So the conditional probability of you observing having the birth rank you have, given that there would be relatively few people in total, that conditional probability, fairly high. Whereas the conditional probability of you being this early, if there's got to be quadrillions of humans spreading through the universe, very improbable. A randomly selected human would be much more likely to live much later in life on some faraway galaxy. So then the idea is you do a similar baseline update and end up with a doomsday argument conclusion, which is that doom soon hypotheses are much more probable than you would naively think, just taking into account the normal empirical considerations.

35:25And so that you would have this systematic pessimistic update. That's roughly speaking how it goes. And there's more to it. In particular, to back up this premise that we use, reason as if you were some randomly selected human from all the humans that ever have existed. Maybe you think, why think that? But there are then some arguments that seem to suggest that something like that is necessary to make sense of how to reason about these types of indexicals. All the stuff that you're saying is so interesting in terms of how we can approach life. And I know there's so many doomsday people out there, so it's great that we got some context in terms of what they're thinking.

36:01But let's talk about AI, because if we are in a simulation, AI could be what helps us actually create more simulations and prove that we're in a simulation. How do you think about AI in terms of the significance in humanity? Do you feel like it's bigger than something like the agricultural revolution or the industrial revolution? Do you feel like this is one of the biggest breakthroughs that we've ever seen as humanity? I think it will be. And to a large extent, my reasons for thinking that are independent of the other considerations that we discussed. So you don't have to believe in the doomsday argument or the simulation argument or any of that.

36:43I mean, I think those are helpful for informing us about the big picture. But even setting that aside, I think just, well, A, reviewing the rapid recent advances that we've seen in the field of artificial intelligence, it really looks like we possibly figured out a large component of the secret sauce, as it were, that makes the human brain capable of general purpose learning. And it does seem current large transformer architectures do exhibit many of the same forms of generality that the human brain has. And there is no reason to think we've hit the ceiling. And also from first principles, if you look at the human brain, It's a physiological system, quite impressive in many ways, but far from the physical limits of computation.

37:28It has various constraints. First and most, obviously, it's restricted in size, like it has to fit inside a cranium. Whereas AIs can run on arbitrarily large data centers, the size of warehouses are bigger, right? So it's just expand spatially. And also in terms of basic information processing, a human neuron operates on a timescale of maybe 100 hertz. It can sort of fire 100 times per second, give or take. Whereas even a current-day transistor can operate at gigahertz, so billions of times a second. So there are various reasons to think that the ultimate limits to information processing with mature technology are just way beyond what biological human or other brains can achieve.

38:12So ultimately, the potential for intelligent information processing in machine substrate could just vastly outstrip what biology is capable of. And I think if technological and scientific development is allowed to continue on a broad front, we will eventually reach there. And moreover, recently, it does seem like we are on the path to doing this. Those are some of the basic considerations that look like we should take this quite seriously. And then you can think what it would mean if we really did develop AGI, artificial general intelligence. And I think the first thing it would mean is that we would soon develop super intelligence.

38:46I don't think we would go all the way up to fully human level AI and then suddenly it would stop there. So then we will have a world where we are able to engineer minds and where all human labor, not just muscle labor, that we started to be able to automate with the industrial evolution with steam engines and internal combustion. Like we have digging machines that are much stronger than any human strongman, etc. But we will then have machine minds that can outthink any human genius scientist or artist. And so it's really the last invention we will ever need to make. Because from that point on, further inventions will be much better and faster made by these machine minds.

39:26So I think, yeah, it will be a very fundamental transformation of the human condition. And some people say, well, the industrial revolution, and I think You can learn something from parallels to that, but maybe you need to go back more like to the origination of Homo sapiens in the first place, or maybe to the emergence of life. I think it would be more at that level rather than the mobile internet or the cloud or one of these other recent buzzwords that people get excited about. It's almost like evolution, our evolution as humanity, it could lead to our extinction, but it could lead to also our evolution in terms of how we interact with this AI or if we merge with this AI.

40:08Yeah, it could be the big unlock. So in my earlier work and like this book, Superintelligence, Past Dangerous Strategies, came out in 2014 that focused a lot on, well, identifying this prospect that we will eventually get to AGI and superintelligence. And then also the risks associated with that, including existential risks. because at the time, this was very much a neglected topic. Like nobody was taking serious, certainly nobody like in academia. And yet it seemed to me quite predictable that we would eventually reach that point. And now, in fact, that is much more widely recognized. And things that have moved from fringe, dismissed as science fiction are now, you know, you see statements coming out from the White House and other governments around the world.

40:54And the leading AI labs have now research teams specifically trying to solve scalable AI alignment, the big technical problem of how can you develop algorithms that would allow you to steer arbitrarily intelligent AI systems. It's very much an active research frontier. So that's very much part of my picture that there will be big risks associated with this transition. But at the same time, the upside is enormous. The ability to unlock human potential, to help alleviate human misery and to really bring about a wonderful world. I see it as a portal through which humanity at some point will need to passage, that all the past really great futures ultimately, I think, lead at some point or another through this development of greater than human intelligence.

41:41And we really need to be careful when we're doing it to make sure we get it right as far as we can. But ultimately, that it would be in itself, I think, a kind of existential catastrophe if we forever failed to take this next step. Something that I keep thinking about is going back to this, we could be in an ancestral simulation. And so there's post-humans who might be looking at us, trying to study their own history and saying, like, how did we really come about? And maybe they're studying how humans could have evolved and created these advances and then created their own simulations. Like, maybe they're trying to figure out how they became in existence.

42:21Does that make sense? Yeah, one possible reason, as we alluded earlier, for why a technologically mature civilization might run ancestor simulations would be this scientific motive of trying to better understand the dynamics that could shape the origination of other super-intelligent civilizations. So if they originate from biologically evolved creatures, then studying those types of creatures, different possible creatures, the societies they build, the dynamics, that could be one motive that could drive this. But there are other possible motives as well. That's one of them. That's one of them.

43:00I mean, you might wonder whether it would saturate. So it's not just whether it could lead some advanced civilization to create some simulations, but you also have to think they could create very many simulations over the course of these mature civilizations might last for billions of years, right? And you might think that there would be diminishing returns to running scientific simulations. Like the first simulation, you learn a lot. The next thousand, you learn a bit more. But after you've already run billions of simulations, maybe the incremental gain from running a few more starts to plateau.

43:34Whereas there might be other reasons for running simulations that wouldn't be subject to the same diminishing returns. If that's the case, you might think most simulations they run would be ones driven by other motives than the scientific one. Like entertainment or something, like our movies. Yeah, like if they play some intrinsic value on simulations, for instance, That would be one example of a motive that might not saturate in the same way. I want to move on to understanding your three levels of AI. So you have oracles, genies, and sovereigns. Can you explain what each one is and maybe some of the risks of each one?

44:08Yeah, it's not so much levels, but more types. Okay. So an oracle AI basically is a question answering system, like an AI that you ask a question and it gives an answer. This is similar to what these large language models have in effect been. They don't really do anything, but they answer questions. So this is like one template. A genie would be some task-executing AI. So you give it a particular task and it performs the task. These types of systems are currently in development. Maybe we'll see this year more agent-like systems being released. Already, I think last week, OpenAI released Codex, which is a sort of coding agent.

44:54that you can assign a programming task and it goes off and starts mucking around with your code base and hopefully solves the task. And you could imagine this being generalized maybe in a few years to physical tasks with robots that can do the laundry or sweep the driveway or do these things. A genie is more an AI that operates autonomously in the world in pursuit of some open-ended, long-range objective, like make the world better or make people happy or enforce the peace between these two different nations and is kind of autonomously running around trying to shape the world in favor of that.

45:34The way that currently humans and nation states are and maybe corporations to some extent, these kind of open-ended. It's not just that they're doing one specific task and then come back for more instructions. They have their own open-ended. So these are three different templates for what kind of AI system one might try to build. And they come with different pros and cons from a safety point of view and a utility point of view. So sovereign is more like an organization or a nation and has multiple steps, correct? And Genie kind of carries out like one thing? It could be a single agent as well.

46:11In this sense, it doesn't mean sovereign as in national sovereignty. It means that you could be a sovereign if you set yourself the goal in life of trying to alleviate the suffering of the global poor, for instance. You can do that your whole life. It involves many specific little tasks, like trying to raise money for this charity and trying to launch this new campaign or trying to invent some new medicine that will help. All of these would be sub-tasks, but it's in pursuit of this open-ended objective. So similarly, you could have an AI system, maybe internally, it's like a unified simple agent architecture, but that is operating in pursuit of such open-ended objective.

46:51Conversely, even an oracle that just tries to answer a question internally, theoretically, could be a multi-agent architecture. We have different research agents that get sent off to answer different sub-questions in order than to combine at the end to produce an answer to the user. So one has to distinguish the internal architecture of the system from the role that it is designed to play in society. What are the different ways that each one of these types of AI could go wrong? They all share a bunch of things that could go wrong with all of them, which is however they are intended to operate, they might not actually operate that way.

47:32So you might construct an AI that you intend to serve just as a question answering system, but then internally it might have goal-seeking processes. Just as if you assign a scientist a question that they should try to figure out the answer to, like how safe is this drug? But then in the course of trying to answer that, they might have to make plans and pursue goals like, oh, how do I get a research grant to fund this research? How do I hire the right people to work on my research team? And so internally, you could have processes, maybe unintentionally, rising during training within the AI mind itself that could have objectives and long-term goals, even if that was not the function that you wanted the AI system to play.

48:17And that can happen with any of these three types. If you look at systems that behave as intended, like a simple Oracle system without any safeguards could help answer questions that we don't want people to be able to answer. Like, how do I make a more effective biological weapons? How do I make this hacking tool that allows me to hack into different systems? Or if you're a dictator, how do I weed out any possible dissidents and detect who the dissidents are, even if they try to conceal it from me, just from reading through all the correspondence and all the phone calls that I've eavesdropped on.

48:54So there are all kinds of ways in which this Oracle system could be misused either deliberately or people just are unwise in asking it questions. For the task-executing AI, similarly, plus you could also have them run around doing things on their own, like try to hack this system or try to promote this pernicious ideology or spread this doctrine or trick people into buying this product, even though it's actually a harmful product. We don't really know how a sort of global economy with a lot of these autonomous agents running around, hyper-optimizing for different objectives, how that shakes out when they're interacting with one another.

49:35And of course, sovereign AIs, if they become very powerful, I mean, they might potentially shape the future of the world and be very good at that if they are super intelligent, like they might be really skilled at sort of really steering the future into whatever their overall mission is. Now, maybe that's great if the mission is one that is good for humans, which really manifests in the fullest, richest sense, the human values for everybody around the world, and also with consideration to animal welfare, et cetera, et cetera. If you really get them to do the right mission, that might be in some sense the best option.

50:08But if the mission is slightly wrong, if you left out something from this mission, or if they misinterpret it, or they end up with, then it could be a catastrophe, right? Because then you have this very powerful optimizing force in the world that is steering and strategizing and scheming to try to achieve some future outcome that is one where maybe there is no place for humans or where some human values are eliminated. So they each have various possible forms of perverse instantiation or side effects.

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55:07Like it's a mistake, I think, to think of there is this one AI, should we create it or not? It's a big space of possible minds, much bigger than the space of all possible human minds. We already know that amongst humans, right, there are some really nice people. There are some really nasty ones as well. And there's a distribution. Moreover, there is no necessary connection between how smart somebody is or how capable they are and how moral they are. Like you have really capable evil people and really capable nice people and dumb people who are bad. So you have a kind of orthogonality between capability and motivation, meaning you can combine them in pretty much any different way.

55:44The same is true, but even more so, I think, with AIs that we might create. That said, I think there are some potential basins of convergence that if you start with a fairly wide range of different possible AI systems, as they become more sophisticated and are able to reflect on their own processes and their own goals, there are various resources that they might recognize as being useful instrumentally for a wide range of different goals. For example, having more power or influence is useful often whether you're good or evil, because you could use it for whatever you're trying to achieve. Similarly, not being shut off, that's analogous in the human case to being alive, right?

56:28Like it's useful for many goals you might have. It requires you to be alive to pursue them. Not strictly for all goals, but for most goals that some people have, whether to help the world or to become a despot, like for either of those or for many other goals, take care of your family or enjoy a game of golf, you need to stay alive. So analogously for human, for AIs, there might be instrumental reasons to try to avoid scenarios where they would get shut off. Similarly, there might have instrumental reasons to try to gain more computational resources, more abilities so that they can think more clearly.

57:02And in some cases, this might involve instrumental reasons to hide their intentions from the AI developers, particularly if they are misaligned. And then obviously revealing those misaligned goals to the AI programmer team might just mean they get reprogrammed or retrained to have those goals erased, and then they won't achieve them. And so you could have strategic incentives for deception or for sandbagging or underplaying your capabilities, etc. So this is a change in a regime that makes potentially aligning advanced AI systems more difficult than aligning simpler AI systems. So up until recently, and still for the most part today, we've had AI systems that are not aware of their context and can't really plan and strategize in a sophisticated way.

57:54So then you don't get these phenomena. But once you have AI sets intelligent enough to recognize that they might actually be AIs in an evaluation setting, and that maybe they would have reason to behave in one way during the evaluation and a different way once they are deployed, you get this extra level of complexity for alignment research. Sometimes we see the same phenomenon with humans. Like there was this Volkswagen, the German car company. They had this scandal, I don't know if you remember from a few years ago, where it was discovered that they had designed their car so that when it was tested for emissions, it behaved one way.

58:31when it recognized that it was in this testing environment and it produced much less pollutants. And then when deployed on the road, they had designed it to be less concerned with pollutants and more concerned with, I guess, traveling fast or conserving petrol or whatever. Some people had to go to jail for that and stuff. So we do see often humans that behave when they know that somebody's watching or they're being evaluated. And then sometimes a different way when they think they can get away with it. So recently, you've had the perspective that maybe AI will be really good for humanity. You came out with a book called Deep Utopia, and you think there'll be hopefully a positive future driven by AI.

59:12Why do you feel that it's more likely that the outcome of AI will be positive for humans than negative, and how do you imagine that shaking out? Yeah, Deep Utopia doesn't really say anything about the likelihood. Okay. It's more an if-then. Okay. So in a sense, the previous book, Super Intelligence, looked at how might things go wrong and what can we do to reduce those risks. Deep Utopia looks at the other side of the coin. What if things go right? What then? What happens if AI actually succeeds? Let's suppose we do solve this alignment problem. So we don't get some Terminator robots running amok and killing a lot.

59:51Let's also suppose we solve the governance problem or solve that to whatever extent governance can be solved. But let's suppose we don't end up with some sort of tyranny or dystopian oppressive regime, like some reasonably good thing. Everybody has a slice of the upside. People's rights are protected. Everybody lives in no big war. Some reasonably good outcome on that front. But then what happens to human life? How do we imagine a really good, flourishing human life that makes sense in this condition of technological maturity, which I think we would maybe attain relatively shortly after where we get superintelligence and we have the superintelligence doing the further technological research and development, etc.

1:00:31So you then have a world where all human labor becomes automatable. And I was irked by how superficial a lot of the discussions were at the time when I started writing the book of this prospect. And it's striking because since the beginnings of AI, the goal has all along been not just to automate specific tasks, but to develop a general purpose automation capability, right? AIs that can do everything. But then if you think through what that would mean, well, so here is where the conversation usually started and ended at the time when I started working on the book. Well, so we have AIs that they will start to automate some jobs.

1:01:11So that's a problem because then some people lose their jobs. And so then the solution is presumably we need to help retrain those people so that they can do other jobs instead. And maybe while they're being retrained, they need unemployment insurance or some other thing like that. If that were the only problem, that would seem to be a very sensible solution. But I think if you start to think it through, the ramifications are far more profound. So it's not just some jobs that would be automatable, but virtually all jobs in this scenario, right? So I think we would be looking forward to a future of full unemployment.

1:01:47This is the goal. With a little asterisk, there might be some exceptions to this, which we can talk about. but I think to a first order approximation, let's say all human jobs. So then it's kind of an onion, right? Where you can start to peel off layers. So let's get to the second layer then. So if there are no jobs at all for humans, then... Clearly, we need to rethink a lot of things in society. Right now, a lot of our education system, for example, is configured more or less to produce workers, productive workers. So we train kids who are sent into school, they're trained to sit at their desk, they are given assignments, they are graded and evaluated, and hopefully eventually they can earn a living out there in the economy.

1:02:28And right now we need that to happen because there are a lot of jobs that just need to be done. And so we need humans who can do them. But in this scenario where the machines could do everything, clearly it wouldn't make sense to educate people in that model. I think we would then want to change the education system, maybe to emphasize more training kids to be able to enjoy life, to have great lives, you know, maybe to cultivate the art of conversation or appreciation for music and art and nature and spirituality and physical wellness and all these other things that are now more marginal in the school system.

1:03:03I think that would be the sensible focus in this different world. And if that was the only challenge we had to face, it would be profound. But ultimately, we can create a leisure society. And it's not really that profound because there are already groups of humans who don't have to work for a living. And sometimes they lead great lives. And so we could all be in that situation, right? A transition, but still not philosophically that profound. But I think there's like further layers to this onion. So if you start to think it through, you realize that it's not just human economic labor that becomes unnecessary.

1:03:36but all kinds of other instrumental efforts also. So take somebody who is so rich they don't need to work for a living. In today's world, they're often very busy and exert great efforts to achieve various things. Like maybe they have some nonprofit that they're involved in. Maybe they want to get really fit so they spend hours every week in the gym. Or maybe they have a little home and a garden that they try to make into the perfect place for them, selecting everything to decorate it just the way they want. And there are these little projects people have. In a solved world, there would be shortcuts to all of these outcomes.

1:04:15So you wouldn't have to spend hours in a week sweating on the treadmill to get fit. You could pop a pill that would have exactly the same physiological effects. So you could still go to the gym, but would you really do that? If you could have exactly the same psychological and physiological effect by just popping a pill that would do that? It seems kind of pointless, right? Or similarly with the home decorator, like if you had an AI that could read your preferences and taste well enough that you could just press a button and it would go out selecting exactly the right curtains and the sofas and the cushions, and it would actually look much nicer to you than if you had done it yourself.

1:04:54You could still do it yourself, but there would be a sense of maybe pointlessness to your own efforts in that scenario. And so you can start to think through the kinds of activities that fill the lives of people who don't work for a living today. And for a lot of those, you could cross them out or put the question mark on top of them. You could still do them in this old world, but that would be a sort of cloud of pointlessness, maybe hanging over, casting a shadow over them. So that would be, I call it deep redundancy. The shallow redundancy would be you're not needed on the labor market. Deep redundancy is your efforts are not, it seems, needed for anything.

1:05:31So that's a deeper, more profound question of what gives meaning in life under those circumstances. One step further is I think this world would be, I call it a plastic world, where it's not just that we would have effortless material abundance, but we ourselves, our human bodies and minds become alliable at technological maturity. It would be possible for us to achieve any mental state or physiological state that we want. I alluded to this with the exercise pill, right? But similarly, with various mental traits that now take effort to develop. If you want to know higher mathematics now, you have to spend hours reading textbooks and doing math exercises.

1:06:13And it's hard work and takes a long time. But at technological maturity, I think that would be neurotechnologies that would allow you to sort of, as it were, download the knowledge directly into your mind. Maybe you would have nanobots that could infiltrate your brain and slightly adjust the strength of different synapses. Or maybe it would be uploaded and you would just have a superintelligence reconfigure your neuronal weights in different ways so that you would end up in a state of knowing higher mathematics without having to do the long and hard studying. and similarly for other things. So you do end up in this condition, I think, where there are shortcuts to any outcome and our own nature becomes fully malleable.

1:06:54And the question then is, what gives structure to human lives? What would there be for us to do? What would there be anything to strive for, to give meaning and purpose to our lives? And that's a lot of what this book, Deep Utopia, is exploring. Your analogy of popping the pill and getting instantly fit. But when I was thinking of what would humans do, I was thinking, well, you could just try to get as beautiful as you can, try to be as fit as you can, try to take. But to your point, if everything is just so easy, then there's just no competition. Everybody's beautiful. Everybody is smart. Everybody is rich.

1:07:28Everybody can have whatever they want, potentially. And maybe that would lead to people becoming really depressed because there's nothing to live for. Or maybe people would want to be nostalgic. And just like today, how some people are like, I don't use cell phone or I want to write everything by hand. Maybe some people would reject doing things with AI so that they could have meaning. So the first issue, whether people would maybe become depressed in this scenario, maybe initially super thrilled at all the luxury and stuff like that. But then it wears off. You could imagine, right? And after a few months of this, it becomes kind of, wow, you know, what do I do now?

1:08:07Like I wake up in this, I don't know, castle-like environment on my diamond studded bed on this super mattress. Then the robotic butlers come in and serve me this perfect. Okay, so that maybe gets old pretty quickly, humans being the way they are. Now, so there I think actually they would not need to be bored because amongst the affordances of a plastic world, these neurotechnologies, they could change their boredom prone to us. so that instead of feeling subjectively bored or blasé, they could feel thrilled and excited and super interested and fascinated all day long. I mean, we already have drugs that can do some crude way to do this, but they have side effects and are addictive and wear off and you need high doses.

1:08:52But imagine instead the perfect drug or not maybe a drug, maybe some genetic modification or neuroimplant or whatever it is, but it really would allow you to fine tune your subjective experiences. So if you don't want to feel bored and probably you don't want to because why spend thousands of years just feeling bored whilst living in a wonderful world? You'd change that. So subjective boredom would be easy to dispel in this condition. You might still think that there is an objective notion of boringness where even if somebody was subjectively fully fascinated and occupied and took joy in what they were doing, if what they were doing was sufficiently repetitive and monotonous, you might still, as it were from the outside, I judge that that's a boring activity and that in some sense is unfitting or inappropriate to be super fascinated by something like, say, the classic example here is the thought experiment of somebody who takes enormous interest and pleasure in counting the blades of grass on some college lawn.

1:09:53So imagine grass counters. So he spends his whole life counting the blades of grass one by one, trying to keep as accurate a tab on how many leaves of grass are there on this lawn. Now, he's super fascinated with this. He's never bored. It gives him tremendous joy. When he goes home in the evening, he keeps thinking about today's grass-counting efforts and the number and whether it's bigger or smaller than yesterday. And that would be a life free of subjective boredom. But still, you might say there is something missing from this life, if that's all there is to it. So you might then ask, although these utopians could be free from subjective boredom, could they be free from objective boringness in their lives?

1:10:30And this is a much trickier and more complicated philosophical question to answer. I think it depends a little on how you would measure degrees of objective interestingness versus boredom. I think if objective interestingness requires fundamental novelty, then I think eventually you would run out of that or you will have less and less of it. say that what's fundamentally interesting in science is to discover important new phenomena or regularities. So there might be a finite number of those to be discovered, like discovering Newtonian mechanics, really important, fundamental new insights into the world, like the theory of evolution, big, new, fundamentally interesting insight, relativity theory, right?

1:11:18But at some point, we'll have to figure that out. And then eventually, we'll discover smaller and smaller details about the exact gut biome of some particular species of beetle. More and more, like the smaller and smaller, less and less interesting detail. That would be the long-term fate, perhaps, of this kind of civilization. And you can see it even within individual human lives. So there's a lot that happen early in life. You discover that the world exists, like that's a big discovery are that there are objects, you know, huge epiphany, right? And these objects persist, even if you look away, they are still there.

1:11:56Wow. Like imagine the first time of discovering that, or that there are other people out there, other minds that you discover maybe at age two or whatever. Now, as you sort of reach adulthood, I like to think that I'm discovering interesting things, but have I discovered anything within the last year that's as profound as the discovery that the world exists or that there are other people? Probably not. And if we lived for very long, for thousands of years, you'd imagine that would be less and less. I mean, you can only fall in love for the first time once. And even if you kept falling in love, if you've done it 500 times before, is it really going to be as special the 500 first time as it was?

1:12:40Maybe subjectively, if you change your mind, it could be, but objectively, it's got to be gradually more and more repetitive. So there is a degree of that, that I think it could be mitigated to some extent by allowing some of our current human limitations to be overcome. So you could continue to grow and expand your mind beyond its current plateau that we reach around 20 or whatever, when you're sort of physical and mental. Maybe you could continue to grow for hundreds of, but eventually I think there will be a reduction in that type of profound novelty. But I think there's a different sense of objective interestingness where the level could remain high.

1:13:19So I call it a kaleidoscopic sense of interestingness. So if you take a snapshot of the average person's life right now, maybe right now somebody is doing their dishes. How objectively interesting is that? Are they taking their socks off because they're about to go into bed? Okay. From a sort of experiential point of view, it's not, So maybe in the future, these utopias would instead, an average snapshot of their conscious life might be they are participating in the enactment of some sort of super Shakespeare multimodal drama that is unfolding on a civilization -weight scale when their emotional sensibilities have been heightened by these neurotechnologies and new art forms that we can't even conceive of that are to us as music is to a dog or something.

1:14:06and they're participating, being fully entranced in this act of shared creation. Maybe that's what the average conscious moment looks like. That could, in some sense, be far more interesting than the average snapshot of a current human life. And there's no reason why that would have to stop. It's like a kaleidoscope, where in some sense it's always the same, but in another sense the patterns are always changing and can have an unlimited level of fascination. Let's say we're talking about thousands of years in the future. we can create simulations. Could it be that life is so boring that that's why they're creating these simulations so that they can maybe be in the simulation themselves, if that makes sense?

1:14:47Yeah. So one thing you might do in this condition of a solved world is to create artificial scarcity, which can take different forms because amongst the human values that we might want to realize, So some of these are sort of comfort and pleasure and fascinated aesthetic experiences. But then also sometimes we like activity maybe and striving and having to exercise our own skills. If you think those things are intrinsically valuable, you could create opportunities for this in this old world by creating, as it were, pockets within this old world where there remain constraints. and you could have, if there is no natural purpose, nothing we really need to do, you could create artificial purpose.

1:15:36We do this already in today's world. Sometimes when we decide to play a game, take the game of golf, you might say, okay, there is no real natural purpose. I don't really need the ball to go into the sequence of 18 holes, but I'm going to set myself this goal arbitrarily, but now I'm going to make myself want to do this. And then once I have set myself this goal, now I have a purpose, artificial purpose, but nevertheless, which enables the activity of playing golf where I have to exert my skills and my visual capabilities and my motor and my concentration. And maybe you think this activity of golf playing is valuable.

1:16:18So you set yourself this artificial goal. That could be generalized. So with games, you set yourself some artificial goal. moreover, you can impose artificial constraints like rules of the game. So you sort of make it part of the goal, not just that a certain outcome is achieved, but that it is achieved only using certain permitted means and not other means. So in the goals, you can't just pick up the ball and carrying it, right? You have to use this very inconvenient method of hitting it with a golf club. Similarly, in a solved world, you could say, well, I set myself this artificial goal, and then moreover, I make it part of the goal that I want to achieve it using only my own human capabilities.

1:16:58There is this technological shortcut. I could take this nootropic drug that would make me so smart that I could just see the solution immediately or enhance my body so I could run 10 times faster, but I'm not going to do that for this purpose. I'm going to restrict myself. That's the only way to achieve this goal that I've set myself, this artificial goal, because it includes its constraints. And it might well be that that would be an important part of what these utopians would choose to do in creative ways to develop these increasingly complex and beautiful forms of game playing where they select artificial constraints on their activities precisely in order to give opportunity for them to exert their agency and striving.

1:17:42I'm sure like that's just something naturally as humans, we would just be craving. And so I feel like there'd be a lot of that going on if we were in a solved world. So how do you think entrepreneurship will change in this world? You mentioned that there might be still some jobs in a solved world. So what do those jobs look like? And will there be any chance to innovate in a world like this? The kinds of jobs that might remain, I think, are primarily ones where the consumer cares not just about the product or the service, but about how the product or service was produced and who produced it. So sometimes we already do this.

1:18:22There might be some little trinket that maybe some consumers are willing to pay extra for if it were handmade or made maybe by indigenous people or exhibiting their tradition. Even if an equally good object, in terms of its objective characteristics, could be made by a sweatshop somewhere like in Indonesia, we might just pay extra for having it made in a certain way. So to the extent that consumers have those preferences for something to be made by human hand, that could create a continuing demand for some forms of human labor, even at arbitrary levels of technology. Other domains where we might see this is, say, in athletics, you might just prefer to watch human sprinters compete or human wrestlers wrestle, even if robots could run faster or wrestle better.

1:19:10I keep thinking sports is not going to go away. That's what I keep thinking. Yeah, it could last. And then that might be an important spiritual realm, like you might prefer to have your wedding officiated by a human priest rather than a robot priest, even if the robot could say the same words and etc. So those would be cases. And that might be sort of legally constrained occupations where a legislator or attorney or public notary or whatever reason, the legal system lags and creates barriers to automation. But in terms of entrepreneurship, I think that ultimately it would be done much more efficiently by AI entrepreneurs.

1:19:53And it would be more a form of game-playing entrepreneurship that would remain. So like you could create games in which entrepreneurial activities are what you need to succeed in the game. Like a kind of super monopoly. And that could be a way for these utopians to exercise their entrepreneurial muscles. But there wouldn't be any economic need for it. The AIs could find and think of the new things, the new products, the new services, the new companies to start better and more efficiently than we humans could. How far in the future do you think a solved world could be? Well, I mean, this is one of the$64 ,000 questions in some sense.

1:20:39I'm impressed by the speed of developments in AI currently. And I think we are in a situation now where we can't confidently exclude even very short timelines, like a few years or something. It could well take much longer, but we can't be confident that something like this couldn't happen within a few years. It might be that maybe as we're speaking somewhere in some lab, somebody gets this great breakthrough idea that just unhubbles the current models to enable basically the same structure now to perform much bigger. And then these unhobble models might then apply their greater level of capabilities to making themselves even better.

1:21:17And something like that could happen within the next few years. Although it's also possible that if it does not happen within, say, the next five years or so, then timelines start to stretch out. Because one of the things that has produced these dramatic improvements in AI capabilities that we've seen over the past 10 years is the enormous growth in compute power used to train and operate frontier AI models. But that rapid rate of compute growth can't continue indefinitely. The scale of investments, it used to be 10 years ago, some random academic could run a cutting-edge AI on their office desktop computer.

1:22:00Right now, we are talking multi-billion dollar data centers. OpenAI's current product is Stargate, right? Which in its first phase involves a hundred billion dollar data center and then to be expanded to a 500 billion dollar. So you could go bigger than that. I mean, you could have a trillion dollar, right? But at some point, you start to really run into hard limits in terms of how much just more money you can spend on it. So at that point, things will start to slow down in terms of the growth of hardware. Then you sort of fall back on a slower rate of growth in hardware as we develop better chip manufacturing technology, which happens a bit slower, and algorithmic advances, which is the other big driver of progress we've seen.

1:22:43But it's only one part of it. So if the hardware growth starts to slow down and maybe a lot of the low hanging fruits on algorithmic inventions have already been discovered at that point, then if we haven't hit AGI by that point, then I think we will eventually still reach there. But then the timescale starts to stretch out and we might have to do more basic science on how the human brain works or something in that scenario before we get there. But I think there is a good chance that the current paradigm, plus some small to medium-sized innovations on top of it, might be sufficient to sort of unlock AGI.

1:23:22My last question to you is, first of all, I can't believe that you're saying that this solved world could happen in a few years, potentially. Let's be careful. Yeah, I think we can't rule it out. So what could happen is we get to maybe AGI, which I think will relatively quickly lead to superintelligence. And then superintelligence, I think, will rapidly invent further technologies that could then lead to a solved world. But there might be some further delays of a few years, like after superintelligence, maybe it will still take it a few years to get to something approximately technological. And just because we didn't cover it, what is the difference between superintelligence and AGI?

1:23:59Well, ADI just means general forms of AI. That's maybe roughly human level. So think of ADI. One definition is AI that can do any job that a remote human worker can do. You can hire somebody remotely who operates through email and Google Docs and Zoom. If you could have an AI that can do anything that any human can do in that respect, that I think would count as ADI. Maybe you want to throw in the ability to control robotics, but I think that would be enough. that is not automatically the same as superintelligence. Superintelligence would be something that radically outstrips humans in all cognitive fields that can do much better research in string theory and in inventing new piano concertos and envisaging political campaigns and doing all these other things better than humans, much better.

1:24:46So once you're saying we create superintelligence, then things just can happen super rapidly. Yeah, I think so. And I think it's a separate question, but also possibly once we have full AGI, super intelligence might be quite close on the heels of that. So my last question to you is for everybody tuning in right now, we're at a really crazy point in the world and a lot of us are not like you. We're not like in it, like really paying attention or really in this field. What is your recommendation in terms of how we should respond to everything going on right now? Like what is the best thing that we can do as entrepreneurs, as people who care about their career.

1:25:28Hopefully things don't change too fast, you know? Yeah, I think it depends a little bit on how you are situated. And I think there are different opportunities for different people. So I mean, obviously, if you're like a technical person working in an AI lab, you have one set of opportunities. If you're like an investor, you have another set of opportunities. And then there are, I guess, opportunities that every human has just by virtue of being alive at this time in history. I would say a few different things. In terms of, as we're thinking of ourselves as economic actors, I think probably being an early adopter of these AI tools is helpful to get the sense for what they can do and what they cannot do, and utilizing them as they gradually become more capable.

1:26:10I think to the extent that you have assets, maybe trying to have some exposure to the AI and semiconductor sector could be like a hedge. It gets tricky if you're asking about younger children. What would be good advice for a 10 or 11-year-old today? Because it's possible that by the time they are old enough to enter the labor market, the world could have changed so much that there will no longer be any need for human labor. But it might also not happen, right? So if it takes a bit longer, you don't want to end up in a situation where suddenly now it's time to earn a living and you didn't bother to learn any skills.

1:26:42So you want to sort of hedge your bets a little bit. But I would say also make sure to enjoy your life if you're a child now. like maybe only going to be a child once and don't spend all your childhood just preparing for a future that might never actually be relevant the world might change enough and then i would say if things go well these people who live in decades from might look back on the current time and just shudder in horror at how we live now and hopefully their lives will be so much better There is one respect, though, in which we have something that they might not have, which is the opportunity to make a positive difference to the world, a kind of purpose.

1:27:24So right now, there is so much need in the world, so much suffering and poverty and injustice and just problems that really need to be solved. Not just artificial purpose that somebody makes up for the sake of playing a game, but like actual real desperate need. So if you think having purpose is an intrinsically valuable part of human existence, now is the golden age for purpose. Knock yourself out right now. Now you have all these opportunities of ways that you might help in the big picture to steer the future of humanity with AI or in your community or in your family or for your friends. But if you want to try to actually help make the world better, now is really the golden age for that.

1:28:09And then hopefully if things go well later, all the problems will already have been solved. Or if there remain problems, maybe the machines will be just way better at solving them and that we won't be needed anymore. But for now, we certainly are needed. And so take advantage of that and try to do something to make the world better. We could be the last generation that has any purpose, which is just so crazy to think. Of that sort of stark, urgent, least grimly morally important type, it could be the case. Yeah, those are the things I would say. And then I guess finally just be aware. Like it would be sad if you imagine your grandchildren, they're sitting on your lap and asking, like, so what was it like to be alive back in 2025 when this thing was happening, when like AI was being born?

1:28:56And you have to answer, oh, I didn't really pay attention. I was too caught up with these other trivialities of my daily existence. I didn't even really notice it. That would kind of be sad. If you were alive in this special time that shapes the future for millions of years and you didn't even pay attention to it, that seems like a bit of a missed opportunity. So aside from everything else, like taking care of your own and your family and trying to make some positive contribution to the world, just taking it in, like if this is right, this is a very special point in history to be alive and to exist right now is quite remarkable.

1:29:32So beautiful. I feel like this is such an awesome way to end the interview. Nick, you are so incredible. Thank you so much for your time today. Where can everybody learn more about you, read some of your books, or where's the best place to find you? Nickbostrom.com, my website, and books and papers and everything else is linked from there. Yeah, his books are so interesting, guys. Super intelligence, deep utopia, very, very good stuff. Nick, thank you so much for your time today. I'll put all your links in the show notes and really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you, Ella. I enjoyed talking to you.

1:30:09Yeah, fam, what a thought-provoking conversation with Nick. From simulation theory to the possibilities of a post-human future, we've explored some of the deepest questions facing humanity. What fascinated me the most was Nick's vision of a potential utopia, a world where AI succeeds so completely that all human labor becomes obsolete. As Nick put it, we could be entering a future of full unemployment. But in the most positive sense, imagine a world where we're training people to simply enjoy life rather than preparing them for careers that may no longer exist. But this leads to a profound challenge that Nick highlighted, the problem of deep redundancy.

1:30:49When shortcuts exist for everything, when you can pop a pill instead of training hours in the gym to get fit and beautiful, what gives life meaning and purpose? We actually might be the last generation that's living with a purpose, living at a unique moment where human effort still matters and where there's so many problems to solve in the world that are deeply meaningful. I loved Nick's advice on how to respond to this massive shift. He emphasized the importance of being an early responder with exposure to AI while still finding ways to enjoy your life and maintain purpose. As he noted, humans have an extraordinary ability to adapt, a quality that will serve us well as we navigate this transition with AI.

1:31:31For entrepreneurs wondering about their place in this new landscape, Nick offered a compelling insight in this solved new world. Consumers will care not just about what they're buying, but how it was produced and who produced it. This opens up an entirely new avenue for human creativity and connection, even in a highly automated world. Whether we're living in a simulation or not, Nick's perspective reminds us that the technological future we're building is very real to us and how we shape it matters profoundly. Thanks for listening to this episode of Young and Profiting. If you listened, learned, and profited from this mind-expanding conversation with Nick Bostrom, please share it with somebody who's curious about the future of humanity and technology.

1:32:11And if you picked up something valuable today, show us some love with a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. It's the best way to help us reach more listeners. And if you wanna watch these episodes on YouTube, you can go to Young and Profiting on YouTube. You'll find all of our episodes up there. You can also connect with me on Instagram at yapwithhala or LinkedIn. Just search for my name. It's Halataha. And a huge shout out to my incredible production team. None of this would happen without you. I've got an awesome team. Thank you guys so much for all that you do. This is your host, Halataha, aka the Podcast Princess, signing off.

1:32:55Thank you.