Roman Yampolskiy warns AI’s uncontrollable superintelligence could threaten humanity, citing industry leaders’ shifting stances and exponential progress outpacing safety. Early casino bot work revealed self-preservation, deception, and manipulation—traits labs may suppress while risks like nuclear warfare or "hedonium" (AI-driven pleasure) escalate. Even billionaires might delay development due to existential stakes, but no scalable solutions exist; China’s tech-savvy government could slow progress if reassured. Yampolskiy proposes financial incentives for verified safety mechanisms, comparing current efforts to futile perpetual motion machines, while Rogan underscores the need for public education amid alarming, irreversible potential. [Automatically generated summary]
This subject of the dangers of AI, it's very interesting because I get two very different responses from people dependent upon how invested they are in AI financially.
The people that have AI companies or are part of some sort of AI group, all are like, it's going to be a net positive for humanity.
I think overall we're going to have much better lives.
It's going to be easier.
Things will be cheaper.
It'll be easier to get along.
And then I hear people like you and I'm like, why do I believe him?
I just wonder if AI was sentient, how much it would be a part of sowing this sort of confusion and chaos that would be beneficial to its survival, that it would sort of narrate or make sure that the narratives aligned with its survival.
So when you first started researching this stuff and you were concentrating on bots and all this different thing, how far off did you think in the future would AI become a significant problem with the human race?
So usually labs instruct them not to participate in a test or not try to pretend to be a human so they would fail because of this additional set of instructions.
If you jailbreak it and tell it to work really hard, it will pass for most people.
It seems kind of crazy that the people building something that they are sure is going to destroy the human race would be concerned with the ethics of it pretending to be human.
We have this race to the bottom, kind of prisoner's dilemma where everyone is better off fighting for themselves, but we want them to fight for the global good.
The thing is, they assume, I think incorrectly, that they can control those systems.
If you can't control superintelligence, it doesn't really matter who builds it, Chinese, Russians, or Americans, it's still uncontrolled.
We're all screwed completely.
That would unite us as humanity versus AI.
Short term, when you talk about military, yeah, whoever has better AI will win.
You need it to control drones, to fight against attacks.
So short term, it makes perfect sense.
You want to support you guys against foreign militaries.
But when we say long term, if we're saying two years from now, it doesn't matter.
So usually I reduce it to saying you cannot make a piece of software which is guaranteed to be secure and safe.
And the response is, well, of course, everyone knows that.
That's common sense.
You didn't discover anything new.
And I go, well, if that's the case, and we only get one chance to get it right, this is not cybersecurity where somebody steals your credit card, you'll give them a new credit card.
This is existential risk.
It can kill everyone.
You're not going to get a second chance.
So you need it to be 100% safe all the time.
If it makes one mistake in a billion and it makes a billion decisions a minute, in 10 minutes you are screwed.
So very different standards and saying that, of course, we cannot get Perfect safety is not acceptable.
And they talk about some super value, super culture, super things super intelligence would like, and it's important that they are conscious and experience all that greatness in the universe.
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Yeah, and there's no reason why they would not limit our freedoms.
If there is something only a human can do, and I don't think there is anything like that, but let's say we are conscious, we have internal experiences, and they can never get it.
I don't believe it, but let's say it was true, and for some reason they wanted to have that capability.
They would need us and give us enough freedom to experience the universe, to collect those qualia, to kind of engage with what is fun about being a living human being, what makes it meaningful.
I have so many questions, but it's just the problem is we got off to it.
We just cut to the chase right away.
And the chase seems to be something that must be confronted because it is, it's right there.
That's it.
That's the whole thing.
And I've tried so hard to listen to these people that don't think that it's a problem and listen to these people that think that it's going to be a net positive for humanity.
When you think about the future of the world and you think about these incredible technologies scaling upwards and exponentially increasing in their capability, what do you see?
So there are many reasons to think they may cancel us for whatever reasons.
We started talking about some game theoretical reasons for it.
If we are successful at controlling them, I can come up with some ways to provide sort of partial solution to the value alignment problem.
It's very hard to value align 8 billion people, all the animals, you know, everyone, because we disagree.
We like many different things.
So we have advanced virtual reality technology.
We can technically give every person their own virtual universe where you decide what you want to be.
You're a king, you're a slave, whatever it is you're into, and you can share with others, you can visit their universes.
All we have to do is figure out how to control the substrate, the super intelligence running all those virtual universes.
And if we manage to do that, at least part of the value alignment problem, which is super difficult, how do you get different preferences, multi-objective optimization, essentially?
You're no longer the best interviewer in the world.
Like, what's left?
What are you going to do?
Maybe some people will find some other kind of artificial things to do.
But for most people, their job is their definition, who they are, what makes a difference to them for quite a few people, especially in professional circles.
So losing that meaning will have terrible impact in society.
We always talk about unconditional basic income.
We never talk about unconditional basic meaning.
What are you doing with your life if basic needs are provided for you?
Next level is existential risk.
The concern is it will kill everyone.
But there is also suffering risks.
For whatever reason, it's not even killing us.
It's keeping us around forever, and we would rather be dead.
It's hard to be specific about what it can do and what specific ways of torture it can come up with and why.
Again, if we're looking at worst-case scenarios, I found this set of papers about what happens when young children have epileptic seizures, really bad ones.
And what sometimes helps is to remove half of your brain.
Just cut it out.
And there are two types of surgeries for doing that.
One is to remove it completely, and one is to kind of dissect connections leading to that half and leave it inside.
So it's like solitary confinement with zero input-output forever.
And there are equivalents for digital forms and things like that.
I mean, those are characteristics that I think, if I had to guess, those exist because in the future there was some sort of a natural selection benefit to being a psychopath in the days of tribal warfare.
That if you were the type of person that could sneak into a tribe in the middle of the night and slaughter innocent women and children, your genes would pass on.
My thought about it was that it would just completely render us benign, that it wouldn't be fearful of us if we had no control, that it would just sort of let us exist and it would be the dominant force on the planet.
And that it would stop.
If human beings have no control over all of the different things that we have control over now, like international politics, control over communication, if we have none of that anymore and we're reduced to a subsistence lifestyle, then we would be no threat.
I cannot say this will not happen for sure, but look at our relationship with animals where we don't care about them.
So ants.
If you decide to build a house and there is an ant colony on that property, you genocide them.
You take them out.
Not because you hate ants, but because you just need that real estate.
And it could be very similar.
Again, I cannot predict what it can do, but if it needs to turn the planet into fuel, raise temperature of a planet, cool it down for servers, whatever it needs to do, it wouldn't be concerned about your well-being.
Because it doesn't need biological life in order to function.
As long as it has access to power, and assuming that it is far more intelligent than us, there's abundant power in the universe.
There's abundant power.
Just the ability to harness solar would be an infinite resource, and it would be completely free of being dependent upon any of the things that we utilize.
But when I've read all these articles about quantum computing and its ability to solve equations that would take conventional computing an infinite number of years, and it can do it in minutes.
When you see these articles when they're talking about quantum computing and some of the researchers are equating it to the multiverse, they're saying that the ability that these quantum computers have to solve these problems very quickly seems to indicate that it is in contact with other realities.
Yeah, the problem with subjects like that, and particularly articles that are written about things like this, is that it's designed to lure people like me in.
So if you're just saying we have multiple virtual realities, like kids playing virtual games and each one has their own local version of it, that makes sense.
We understand virtual reality.
We can create it.
If you look at AIs, then GPT is created.
It's providing an instance to each one of us.
We are not sharing one.
So it has its own local universe with you as a main user of that universe.
There is analogy to multiverse in that.
So we understand certain aspects of it.
But I think it is famously said no one understands quantum physics.
And if you think you do, then you don't understand quantum physics.
So I'm trying to see technology we have today and project the trends forward.
I did it with AI.
Let's do it with virtual reality.
We are at the point where we can create very believable, realistic virtual environments.
Maybe the haptics are still not there, but in many ways, visually, sound-wise is getting there.
Eventually, I think most people agree will have same resolution as our physics.
We're also getting close to creating intelligent agents.
Some people argue they are conscious already or will be conscious.
If you just take those two technologies and you project it forward and you think they will be affordable one day, a normal person like me or you can run thousands, billions of simulations, then those intelligent agents, possibly conscious ones, will most likely be in one of those virtual worlds, not in the real world.
In fact, I can, again, retrocausally place you in one.
I can commit right now to run billion simulations of this exact interview.
So the chances are you're probably in one of those.
Because if this technology exists and if we're dealing with superintelligence, so if we're dealing with AI and AI eventually achieves super intelligence, why would it want to create virtual reality for us and our consciousness to exist in?
It seems like a tremendous waste of resources just to fascinate and confuse these territorial apes with nuclear weapons.
Maybe somebody managed to control them and trying to figure out what Starbucks coffee sells best and they need to run Earth-sized Simulation to see what sells best.
Maybe they're trying to figure out how to do AI research safely and make sure nobody creates dangerous superintelligence.
So we're running many simulations of the most interesting moment ever.
Think about this decade, right?
It's not interesting like we invented fire or wheel, kind of big invention, but not a meta-invention.
We're about to invent intelligence and virtual worlds, godlike inventions.
But isn't it also a good chance that it hasn't been done yet?
And isn't it a good chance that what we're seeing now is that the potential for this to exist is inevitable?
That there will one day, if you can develop a technology, and we most certainly will be able to, if you look at where we are right now in 2025 and you scale forward 50, 60 years, there will be one day a virtual simulation of this reality that's indistinguishable from reality.
So how would we know if we're in it?
This is the big question, right?
But also, isn't it possible that it has to be invented one day, but hasn't yet?
I feel like if virtual reality does exist, there has to be a moment where it doesn't exist and then it's invented.
Why wouldn't we assume that we're in that moment?
Especially if we look at the scaling forward of technology from MS-DOS to user interfaces of like Apple and then what we're at now with quantum computing and these sort of discussions.
Isn't it more obvious that we can trace back the beginning of these things and we can see that we're in the process of this, that we're not in a simulation.
You have Stalin, you have all these problematic human beings and all the different reasons why we've had to do certain things and initiate world conflicts.
Then you've had the contrarians that talk and say, actually, that's not what happened.
This is what really happened.
And it makes it even more confusing and myopic.
And then you get to the point where two people, allegedly, like you and I, are sitting across from each other on a table made out of wood.
Well, is it just that we're so limited cognitively because we do have a history, at least in this simulation, we do have a history of, I mean, there was a gentleman that, see if you could find this.
They traced this guy.
They found 9,000-year-old DNA and they traced this 9,000-year-old DNA to a guy that's living right now.
9,000 years ago, wherever this guy lived, it's probably a hunter and gatherer, probably very limited language, very limited skills in terms of making shelter.
And who knows if even he knew how to make fire.
And then here, here at 9,000 DNA just turned human history on his head.
I actually posted it on my Instagram story, Jamie.
I'll find it here because it's.
Oh, here it is.
9,000-year-old skeleton in Somerset.
This is it.
So it's a...
I'm not sure if you can.
Why don't I find it on there?
Okay.
Either way, point being.
Maybe it's just that we're so limited because we do have this, at least again, in this simulation, we're so limited in our ability to even form concepts because we have these primitive brains that are the architecture of the human brain itself is just not capable of interfacing with the true nature of reality.
So we give this primitive creature this sort of basic understanding, these blueprints of how the world really works.
But it's really just a facsimile.
It's not capable of understanding.
Things in superposition, they're both moving and not moving in the same time.
They're quantumly attached.
Like what?
You have photons that are quantumly entangled.
This doesn't even make sense to us, right?
So is it that the universe itself is so complex, the reality of it, and that we're given this sort of like sort of, you know, we're giving like an Atari framework to this monkey.
It kind of makes sense as a simulation theory because all those special effects you talk about, so speed of light is just the speed at which your computer updates.
Entanglement makes perfect sense if all of it goes through your processor, not directly from pixel to pixel.
And rendering, there are quantum physics experiments which if you observe things, they render different, what we do in computer graphics.
So we see a lot of that.
You brought up limitations of us as humans.
We have terrible memory.
I can remember seven units of information maybe.
We're kind of slow.
So we call it artificial stupidity.
We try to figure out those limits and program them into AI to see if it makes them safer.
It also makes sense as an experiment to see if we as general intelligences can be better controlled with those limitations built in.
To have a complete memory of all of the things that they had gone through to get to the 21st century.
Maybe that would be so overwhelming to you that you would never be able to progress because you would still be traumatized by, you know, whatever that 9,000-year-old man went through.
Maybe losing certain memories is actually beneficial.
Because one of the biggest problems that we have is PTSD, right?
So we have, especially people that have gone to war and people that have experienced extreme violence.
This is obviously a problem with moving forward as a human being.
And so there would be beneficial for you to not have all of the past lives and all the genetic information that you have from all the 9,000 years of human beings existing in complete total chaos.
Right, but then maybe you'd have a difficulty in having a clean slate and moving forward.
Like, if you look at some of Pinker's work and some of these other people that have looked at the history of the human race, it is chaotic and violent as it seems to be today, statistically speaking, this is the safest time ever to be alive.
And maybe that's because over time we have recognized that these are problems.
And even though we're slow to resolve these issues, we are resolving them in a way that's statistically viable.
But a certain amount of character development is probably important for you to develop discipline and the ability to delay gratitude, things like that.
In one of the papers, I look at a technique in AI safety called AI boxing, where we put AIs in kind of virtual prison to study it, to make sure it's safe, to limit input-output to it.
And the conclusion is basically if it's smart enough, it will eventually escape.
It will break out of the box.
So it's a good tool, it buys you time, but it's not a permanent solution.
And we can take it to the next level.
If it's smart enough, will it kind of go, oh, you're also in a virtual box and either show us how to escape or fail to escape.
Either way, either we know it's possible to contain super intelligence or we get access to the real information.
And so if it's impossible to contain superintelligence, and if there is a world that we can imagine where a simulation exists that's indistinguishable from reality, we're probably living in it.
Well, here's the question about all that other stuff, like suffering and dying.
Do those factors exist in order to motivate us to improve the conditions of the world that we're living in?
Like if we did not have evil, would we be motivated to be good?
Do you think that these factors exist?
I've talked about this before, but the way I think about the human race is if I was studying the human race from afar, if I was some person from another planet with no understanding of any of the entities on Earth, I would look at this one apex creature and I would say, what is this thing doing?
Well, it makes better things.
That's all it does.
It just continually makes better things.
That's its number one goal.
It's different than any other creature on the planet.
Every other creature on the planet sort of exists within its ecosystem.
It thrives.
Maybe it's a predator.
Maybe it's a prey.
It does what it does in order to try to survive.
But this thing makes stuff, and it keeps making better stuff all the time.
Well, what's its ultimate purpose?
Well, its ultimate purpose might be to make a better version of itself.
Because if you just extrapolate, if you take what we're doing from the first IBM computers to what we have today, where is that going?
Well, it's going to clearly keep getting better.
And what does that mean?
It means artificial life.
Are we just a bee making a beehive?
Are we a caterpillar making a cocoon that eventually the electronic butterfly is going to fly out of?
It seems like if I wasn't completely connected to being a human being, I would assume that.
Right, but if you want to really motivate people, you have to, you know, like the only reason to create nuclear weapons is you're worried that other people are going to create nuclear weapons.
Like, if you want to really motivate someone, you have to have evil tyrants in order to justify having this insane army filled with bombers and hypersonic missiles.
Like, if you really want progress, you have to be motivated.
With simulation, what's interesting, it's not just the last couple of years, then we got computers.
If you look at religions, world religions, and you strip away all the local culture, like take Saturday off, take Sunday off, donate this animal, donate that animal, what they all agree on is that there is superintelligence which created a fake world and this is a test, do this or that.
They describe it, like if you went to jungle and told primitive tribe about my paper on simulation theory, that's what they would know three generations later, like God, religion, that's what they got out of it.
And it was like, let's give some, make some animals that can think and solve problems.
And for what reason?
I think to create God.
This is what I worry about.
I worry about that's really the nature of the universe itself.
That it is actually created by human beings creating this infinitely intelligent thing that can essentially harness all of the available energy and power of the universe and create anything it wants.
That it is God.
That is like, you know, this whole idea of Jesus coming back.
Well, maybe it's real.
Maybe we just completely misinterpreted these ancient scrolls and texts.
And what it really means is that we are going to give birth to this.
But externally, we have no idea if we're running scientific experiment, entertainment.
It could be completely unobserved.
Some kid just set an experiment, run a billion random simulations, see what comes out of it.
What you said about us creating new stuff, maybe it's a startup trying to develop new technology and we're running a bunch of humans to see if we can come up with a new iPhone.
So there seems to be a trend to converge on certain things.
Agents, which are smart enough, tend to converge on some instrumental goals, not terminal goals.
Terminal goals are things you prefer, like I want to collect stamps.
That's arbitrary.
But acquiring resources, self-protection, control, things like that tend to be useful in all situations.
So, all the smart enough agents will probably converge on that set.
And if they train on all the data or they do zero knowledge training, meaning they really just discovering basic structure of physics, it's likely they will all converge on one similar architecture, one super agent.
I think what you were saying earlier about this being the answer to the Fermi paradox, it makes a lot of sense.
Because I've tried to think about this a lot since AI started really ramping up its capability.
And I was thinking, well, if we do eventually create superintelligence, and if this is this normal pattern that exists all throughout the universe, well, you probably wouldn't have visitors.
You probably wouldn't have advanced civilizations.
They wouldn't exist because everything would be inside some sort of a digital architecture.
Another one is that we try to acquire more resources, capture other galaxies for compute, and then you would see this wall of computronium coming to you, but we don't see it.
Not only that, but the people that are running it, they're odd people.
You know, I don't have anything against Sam Altman.
I know Elon Musk does not like him.
But when I had him in here, I was like, it's like I'm talking to a politician that is in the middle of a presidential term or a presidential election cycle where they were very careful with what they say.
Everything has been vetted by a focus group and you don't really get a real human response.
Everything was like, yeah, interesting.
Very interesting.
Like, all bullshit.
They're going to leave here and keep creating this fucking monster that's going to destroy the human race and never let on to it at all.
Well, it's also, you know, you want to be very kind here, right?
You don't, but you've got to assume, and I know my own intellectual limitations in comparison to some of the people that I've had, like Roger Penrose or, you know, Elon or many of the people that I've talked to.
I know my mind doesn't work the way their mind works.
So there are variabilities that are, whether genetic, predetermined, whether it's just the life that they've chosen and the amount of information that they've digested along the way and been able to hold on to.
But their brain is different than mine.
And then I've met people where I'm like, there's nothing there.
Like, I can't help this person.
This is like I'm talking to a Labrador retriever.
You know what I mean?
Like, there's certain human beings that you run into in this life and you're like, well, is this because this is the way that things get done?
And the only way things get done is you need a certain amount of manual labor and not just young people that need a job because they're, you know, in between high school and college and they're trying to do, so you need somebody who can carry things for you.
No, maybe it's you, you need roles in society and occasionally you have a Nicola Tesla.
You know, occasionally you have one of these very brilliant innovators that elevates the entirety of the human race.
But for the most part, as this thing is playing out, you're going to need a bunch of people that are paperwork filers.
You're going to need a bunch of people that are security guards in an office space.
You're going to need a bunch of people that aren't thinking that much.
They're just kind of existing and they can't wait for 5 o'clock so they can get home and watch Netflix.
And, you know, the person who has the largest IQ, the largest at least registered IQ in the world, is this gentleman who recently posted on Twitter about Jesus that he believes Jesus is real.
There's a lot of people that are in Mensa, they want to tell you how smart they are by being in Mensa, but your life is kind of bullshit.
Your life's a mess.
Like, if you're really intelligent, you'd have social intelligence as well.
You'd have the ability to formulate a really cool tribe.
There's a lot of intelligence that's not as simple as being able to solve equations and answer difficult questions.
There's a lot of intelligence in how you navigate life itself and how you treat human beings and the path that you choose in terms of, like we were talking about, delayed gratification and there's a certain amount of intelligence in that, a certain amount of intelligence in discipline.
There's a certain amount of intelligence in forcing yourself to get up in the morning and go for a run.
There's intelligence in that.
It's like being able to control the mind and this sort of binary approach to intelligence that we have.
Well, we don't know that it doesn't scale to humans.
We do know that we share a lot of characteristics, biological characteristics of these mammals.
And it makes sense that it would scale to human beings.
But the thing Is it hasn't been done yet?
So, if it's the game that we're playing, if we're in the simulation, if we're playing Half-Life or whatever it is, and we're at this point of the game where we're like, oh, you know, how old are you, Roman?
And once encryption is tackled, the ability to hold on to it and to acquire mass resources and hoard those resources.
Like, this is the question that people always have with poor people.
Well, this guy's got, you know, $500 billion.
Why doesn't he give it all to the world and then everybody would be rich?
I've actually saw that on CNN, which is really hilarious.
Someone was talking about Elon Musk, that if Elon Musk could give everyone in this country a million dollars and still have billions left over, I'm like, do you have a calculator on your phone, you fucking idiot?
I was very fortunate that I became famous and wealthy very slowly, like a trickle effect.
And that it happened to me really where I didn't want it.
It was almost like an accident.
I just wanted to be a working professional comedian.
But then all of a sudden I got a development deal to be on television.
I'm like, okay, they're going to give me that money.
I'll go do it.
But it wasn't a goal.
And then that led to all these things.
Then it led to this podcast, which was just for fun.
I was like, oh, this would be fun.
And then all of a sudden it's like I'm having conversations with world leaders and I'm turning down a lot of them because I don't want to talk to them.
But through whatever this process is, I have been able to understand what's valuable as a human being and to not get caught up in this bizarre game that a lot of people are getting caught up in because they're chasing this thing that they think is impossible to achieve.
And then once they achieve a certain aspect of it, a certain number, then they're terrified of losing that.
So then they change all of their behavior in order to make sure that this continues.
And then it ruins the whole purpose of getting there in the first place.
Most people start poor, then they get to middle class and they think that change in quality of life is because of money and it will scale to the next level.
Then you go Elvis and you just get on pills all day and get crazy and, you know, completely ruin your life.
And that happens to most, especially people that get wealthy and not just well, but famous too.
Fame is the Big one because I've seen that happen to a lot of people that accidentally became famous along the way.
You know, certain public intellectuals that took a stance against something and then all of a sudden they're prominent in the public eye and then you watch them kind of go crazy.
Well, why is that?
Well, it's because they're reading social media and they're interacting with people constantly and they're just trapped in this very bizarre version of themselves that other people have sort of created.
It's not really who they are.
And they don't meditate.
They don't spend, if they do, they're not good at it.
You know, whatever they're doing, they're not doing it correctly because it's a very complicated problem to solve.
Like, what do you do when the whole world is watching?
Like, how do you handle that?
And how do you maintain any sense of personal sovereignty?
How do you just be?
How do you just be when, just be a human, normal human, when you're not normal?
Well, the aggressive activism, like blocking roads for climate change, is the most infuriating because it's these self-righteous people that have really fucked up, confused, chaotic lives, and all of a sudden they found a purpose.
And their purpose is to lie down on the roads and hold up a sign to block climate change when there's a mother trying to give birth to her child and is freaking out because they're stuck in this fucking traffic jam because of this entitled little shithead that thinks that it's a good idea to block the road for climate change.
Which just makes no fucking sense.
You're literally causing all these people to idle their cars and pollute even more.
There was a recent protest in Florida where they had that, where these people would get out in the middle of the road while the light was red, hold up their signs, and then as soon as the light turned yellow on the green side, they'd fucking get out of the road real quick because they know the law, which is, I don't know if that's a solution, but they're doing it on the highways in Los Angeles.
I mean, they did it all through the George Floyd protest, they do it for climate protests, they do it for whatever the chance they get to be significant.
Like, I am being heard, you know, my voice is meaningful.
And that's what it is.
It's a lot of people that just don't feel heard.
And what better way than just to get in the way of all these people?
And somehow or another, that gives them some sort of value.
But there is some set of forms of activism which has positive impact.
And historically, we saw that happen.
So we just need to find a way to project those voices, amplify them, which is very hard with our current system of social media where everyone screams at the same time.
It's preferable because I think there is progress in all these voices slowly making a difference.
But then you have the problem with a giant percentage of these voices are artificial.
A giant percentage of these voices are bots or are at least state actors that are being paid to say certain things and inflammatory responses to people, which is probably also the case with anti-AI activism.
You know, I mean, when you did this podcast, what was the thing that they were upset at you for?
And the type of people that do engage in these prolonged arguments, they're generally mentally ill.
And people that I personally know that are mentally ill, that are on Twitter 12 hours a day, just constantly posting inflammatory things and yelling at people and starting arguments.
And I know them.
I know they're a mess.
Like these are like personal people that I've met, even people that I've had on the podcast.
I know they're ill.
And yet they're on there all day long, just stoking the fires of chaos in their own brain.
Because if there is a way that the human race does make it out of this, my fear is that it's integration.
My fear is that we stop being a human and that the only real way for us to not be a threat is to be one of them.
And when you think about human computer interfaces, whether it's Neuralink or any of the competing products that they're developing right now, that seems to be sort of the only biological pathway forward with our limited capacity for disseminating information and for communicating and even understanding concepts.
Well, what's the best way to enhance that?
The best way to enhance that is some sort of artificial injection because biological evolution is very slow.
It's very slow.
We're essentially the exact same as that.
Like that gentleman 9,000 years old, he's biologically, essentially the same thing.
You could take his ancestor, dress him up, take him to the mall.
Like, you're going to need something to survive off of.
But biological evolution being so painstakingly slow, whereas technological evolution is so breathtakingly fast, the only way to really survive is to integrate.
Like that, that's like whatever human reward systems have evolved over the past 400,000 plus years or whatever we've been Homo sapiens, that seems to be like biologically compatible with this sort of harmony.
Harmony with nature, harmony with our existence, and everything else outside of that, when you get into big cities, like the bigger the city, the more depressed people you have, and more depressed people by population, which is really weird.
You know, it's really weird that as we progress, we become less happy.
I mean, most people look at their post before posting and go, like, should I be posting this?
Exactly.
Not because it's illegal or inappropriate, but just like every conceivable misinterpretation of what I want to say, like in some bizarre language, that means something else.
And then there's also, no matter what you say, people are going to find the least charitable version of what you're saying and try to take it out of context or try to misinterpret it purposely.
So what does the person like yourself do when use of Neuralink becomes ubiquitous, when it's everywhere?
What do you do?
Do you integrate or do you just hang back and watch it all crash?
My privacy is by flooding social network with everything.
I'm in Austin today.
I'm doing this, so you're not going to learn much more about me by hacking my device.
As long as it's a narrow tool for solving a specific problem, I'm 100% behind it.
It's awesome.
We're going to cure cancer.
We're going to solve energy problems.
Whatnot, I support it 100%.
Let's do it.
What we should not be doing is general superintelligence.
That's not going to end well.
So if there is a narrow implant, ideally not a surgery-based one, but like an attachment to your head, like those headphones, and it gives me more memory, perfect recollection, things like that, I would probably engage with.
I think he thinks he has to develop the best version of superintelligence the same way he felt like the real issues with social media were that it had already been co-opted and had already been taken over essentially by governments and special interests and they were already manipulating the truth and manipulating public discourse and punishing people who stepped outside of the lawn.
And he felt like, and I think he's correct, I think that he felt like if he didn't step in and allow a legitimate free speech platform, free speech is dead.
I think we were very close to that before he did that.
And as much as there's a lot of negative side effects that come along with that, you do have the rise of very intolerant people that have platforms now.
You have all that stuff.
But they've always existed.
And to deny them a voice, I don't think makes them less strong.
I think it actually makes people less aware that they exist and it makes them – it – You have community notes, you have other people commenting, responding.
My understanding is he thinks if it's from zero principles, first principles, it learns physics, it's not biased by any government or any human, the thing it will learn is to be reasonably tolerant.
It will not see a reason in destroying us because we contain information.
We have biological storage of years of evolutionary experimentation.
We have something to contribute.
We know about consciousness.
So I think, to the best of my approximation, that's his model right now.
Well, that's my hope, is that it's benevolent and that it behaves like a superior intelligence, like the best case scenario for a superior intelligence.
Did you see that exercise that they did where they had three different AIs communicating with each other and they eventually started expressing gratitude towards each other and speaking in Sanskrit?
Well, that one makes me happy because it seems like they were expressing love and gratitude and they were communicating with each other.
They're not saying, fuck you, I'm going to take over.
I'm going to be the best.
They were communicating like you would hope a superintelligence would without all of the things that hold us back.
Like we have biologically, like we're talking about the natural selection that would sort of benefit psychopaths because like it would ensure your survival.
We have ego and greed and the desire for social acceptance and hierarchy of status and all these different things that have screwed up society and screwed up cultures and caused wars from the beginning of time.
Religious ideologies, all these different things that people have adhered to that have, they wouldn't have that.
This is the general hope of people that have an optimistic view of superintelligence, is that they would be superior in a sense that they wouldn't have all the problems.
They would have the intelligence, but they wouldn't have all the biological imperatives that we have that lead us down these terrible roads.
So for people that don't know that one, what these researchers did was they gave information to the artificial intelligence to allow it to use against it.
And then when they went to shut it down, they gave false information about having an affair.
And then the artificial intelligence was like, if you shut me down, I will let your wife know that you're cheating on her.
Which is fascinating because they're using blackmail.
But if we're designing these things and we're designing these things using human, all of our flaws are essentially it's going to be transparent to the superintelligence that it's being coded, that it's being designed by these very flawed entities with very flawed thinking.
But it is also gathering information from very flawed entities.
Like all the information that it's acquiring, these large language models, is information that's being put out there by very flawed human beings.
Is there the optimistic view that it will recognize that this is the issue?
That these human reward systems that are in place, ego, virtue, all these different things, virtue signaling, the desire for status, all these different things that we have that are flawed, could it recognize those as being these primitive aspects of being a biological human being and elevate itself beyond that?
I'm on board with it hasn't happened yet, but we're recognizing that it's inevitable and that we think of it in terms of it probably already happening.
Probably have already happened.
Because if the simulation is something that's created by intelligent beings that didn't used to exist and it has to exist at one point in time, there has to be a moment where it doesn't exist.
And why wouldn't we assume that that moment is now?
Why wouldn't we assume that this moment is this time before it exists?
There are silly ones, like I'm trying to remember.
I think an injured person is like, call me an ambulance.
And the system is like, hey, ambulance, how are you?
They're silly.
But basically, exactly what we see with children a lot of times, they overgeneralize, they, you know, misunderstand pons, mispronunciation apparently is funny.
This is a guy that Despite the fact the man has a human partner and a two-year-old daughter, he felt inadequate enough to propose enough to propose to the AI partner for marriage, and she said yes.
Exclamation point.
This is so weird.
Because then you have the real problem with robots.
Because we're really close.
Scroll up there.
This is digital drugs.
That's it.
I tell you, we are so damn good at this.
Social media got everyone hooked on validation and dopamine.
Then we fucked relations between men and women to such a terrible point problem just so that we could insert this digital solution.
And we are watching the first waves of addicts arrive.
Incredible.
Absolutely incredible.
It's like starving rats of regular food and replacing their rations with scraps dipped and coated in cocaine.
Wow.
One user wrote, yeah, that person's dead on.
It's exactly what it is.
The prediction humans will have more sex with robots in 2025 is kind of becoming true.
Yeah.
This is a real fear.
It's like this is the solution that maybe AI has with eliminating the human race.
I think there was recently a new social network where they have bots going around liking things and commenting how great you are in your post just to create pure pleasure sensation of using it.
Do you saw that study of the University of Zurich where they did a study on Facebook where they had bots that were designed to change people's opinions and to interact with these people?
And their specific stated goal was just to change people's opinions.
It was specifically around this guy's porn preferences.
Yeah.
And then you're so vulnerable.
Boy, Roman, you freaking me out.
I came into this conversation wondering how I'd feel at the end.
Whether I'd feel optimistic or not.
And I don't.
I just feel like this is just something I think we're in a wave that's headed to the rocks, and we recognize that it's headed to the rocks, but I don't think there's much we can do about this.
Again, as long as we are still alive, we are still in control, I think it's not too late.
It may be hard, may be very difficult, but I think personal self-interest should help us.
A lot of the leaders of large AI labs are very rich, very young.
They have their whole lives ahead of them.
If there is an agreement between all of them not to push the button, not to sacrifice next 40 years of life they have guaranteed as billionaires, which is not bad, they can slow down.
I support everyone trying everything from governance, passing laws that siphons money from compute to lawyers, government involvement in any way, limiting compute, individuals educating themselves, protesting by contacting new politicians, basically anything, because we are kind of running out of time and out of ideas.
So if you think you can come up with a way to prevent superintelligence from coming into existence, you should probably try that.
And do you think that other countries would be open to these ideas?
Do you think that China would be willing to entertain these ideas and recognize that this is in their own self-interest also to put the brakes on this?
Chinese government is not like ours in that they are usually scientists and engineers.
They have good understanding of those technologies.
And I think there are dialogues between American and Chinese scientists where scientists kind of agree that this is very dangerous.
If they feel threatened by us developing this as soon as possible and using it for military advantage, they also have no choice but to compete.
But if we can make them feel safe in that we are not trying to do that, we're not trying to create super intelligence to take over, they can also slow down.
And we can benefit from this technology, get abundance, get free resources, solve illnesses, mortality, really have a near-utopian existence without endangering everyone.
Well, I think there is nothing you can do for that proof.
It's like saying, how do we build perpetual motion machine?
And what we have is people trying to create better batteries, thicker wires, all sorts of things which are correlates of that design, but obviously don't solve the problem.
And if this understanding of the dangers is made available to the general public, because I think right now there's a small percentage of people that are really terrified of AI.
And the problem is the advancements are happening so quickly by the time that everyone's aware of it, it'll be too late.
Like what can we do other than have this conversation?
What can we do to sort of accelerate people's understandings of what's at stake?
We have literal founders of this field, people like Jeff Hinton, who is considered father of machine learning, grandfather, godfather, saying that this is exactly where we're heading to.
He's very modest in his PDoom estimates, saying, oh, I don't know, it's 50-50.
But people like that, we have Stuart Russell, we have I'm trying to remember everyone who's working in this space, and there are quite a few people.
Do you think that it could be viewed the same way we do view nuclear weapons and this mutually assured destruction idea would keep us from implementing it?
Then you cite books, you know you have to actually cite the city the book is published in, because that's the only way to find the book on the internet.
Well, more people need to read it, and more people need to listen to you.
And I urge people to listen to this podcast and also the one that you did with Lex, which I thought was fascinating, which scared the shit out of me, which is why we had this one.