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let me ask you kind of a big philosophical question about Ai and and the threat of it uh let's look like uh at the threat side so folks like Elias yadkowski worry that AI might
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kill all of us do you worry about that range of possibilities where artificial intelligence systems in a variety of ways might uh destroy
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human civilization I talk a lot about it about the dangers of AI I sometimes get into trouble because I depict these scenarios of how AI becoming very dangerous and then people say that I'm encouraging these scenarios but I'm I'm you know I'm
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talking about it as a warning I'm not so terrified of the simplistic idea again the Terminator scenario of robot running in the street shooting everybody
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I'm more worried about AI accumulating more and more power and basically taking over Society based taking over our lives taking power away from us until we don't
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understand what is happening and we lose control of our lives and of the future the two most important things to realize about AI you know so many things are being said now about AI but I think there are two things that every person
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should know about AI first is that AI is the First Tool in history that can make decisions by itself all previous Tools in history couldn't make decisions this is why they
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empowered us you invent a knife you invent an atom bomb the atom bomb cannot decide to start a war cannot decide which city to own AI can make decisions by itself
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an autonomous weapon systems can decide by themselves who to kill who to bomb the second thing is that AI is the First Tool in history that can create new
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ideas by itself the printing press could print our ideas but could not create new ideas AI can create new ideas entirely by itself
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this is unprecedented therefore it is the first technology in history that instead of giving power to humans it takes power away from us and the danger is that if it will
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increasingly take more and more power from us until we are left helpless and clueless about what is happening in the world and this is already beginning to happen in
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an accelerated uh Pace more and more decisions about our lives whether to give us a loan whether to give us a mortgage whether to give us a job or taking by Ai and more and more of the
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ideas of the images of the stories that surround us and shape our our minds our world our produced or created by AI not by human beings if you can just Linger
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on that what is the danger of that that more and more of the creative side is done by AI the idea generation is it that we become stale in our
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thinking is that that idea generation is so fundamental to like the evolution of humanity but we can't resist the idea is to to resist an idea you need to have some some vision of of
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the creative process yeah now this is a very old fear um you go back to Plato's Cave some of this idea that people are sitting chained in a cave and seeing
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shadows on a screen on a wall and thinking this is reality you go back to to the cart and he has this thought experiment of the of the demon and the card asks himself how do I
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know that any of this is real maybe there is a demon who is creating all of this and is basically enslaving Me by surrounding me with these Illusions you
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go back to Buddha it's the same question what if we are living in a world of Illusions and because we have been living in it throughout our lives all our ideas or our desires how we
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understand ourselves this is all the product of the same illusions and this was a big philosophical question for thousands of years now it's becoming a practical question of
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engineering because previously all the ideas as far as we know maybe we are living inside a computer simulation or for intelligent Rats from the planet Zircon if that's the case we don't know about it but taking what we do know
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about human history until now all the again stories images paintings songs operas theater everything we've encountered and shaped our minds was created by humans
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now increasingly we live in a world where the more and more of these cultural artifacts will be coming from an alien intelligence very quickly we might reach a point when
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most of the story stories images songs TV shows whatever are created by an alien intelligence and
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um if we now find ourselves inside this kind of world of illusions created by an alien intelligence that we don't understand but it understands us
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this is a kind of you know spiritual enslavement that we won't be able to break out of because it understands us it understands how to manipulate us but
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we don't understand what is behind this screen of stories and images and and songs so if there's a set of AI systems that
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are operating in the space of ideas they're far superior to ours and we're not almost able to it's it's opaque to us we're not able to see through how does that change the um
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the pursuit of happiness the human pursuit of happiness life where do we get joy if there were surrounded by AI systems that are doing most of the cool things
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humans do much better than us you know some of the things it's okay that the AIS would do them many human tasks and jobs um you know it's it's the drudgery they
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are not fun they are not developing I will ask emotionally or spiritually it's fine if the robots take over I don't know I think about the people in supermarkets or grocery stores that
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spend hours every day just you know passing uh items and and then charging you the money I mean if this can be automated wonderful we need to make sure that these people uh then have better
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jobs uh uh better means of supporting themselves and developing their social abilities their spiritual abilities uh and and that that's the that's the ideal
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world that AI can create that it takes away from us the things that uh uh it's better if we don't do them and allows us to focus on the most
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important things and the deepest aspects of of our nature of our potential if we give AI Control of the sphere of ideas at this stage I think it's very
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very dangerous because it doesn't understand us and AI at present is mostly digesting the products of human culture
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everything we've produced over thousands of years it eats all of these cultural products digests it and starts producing its own new stuff
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but we still still haven't figured out ourselves in our bodies our brains our minds our psychology um so an AI based on our float
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understanding of ourselves is a very dangerous thing I think that we need first of all to keep developing ourselves
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if if for every dollar and every minute that we spend on developing AI artificial intelligence we spend another dollar and another minute in developing human consciousness the human mind will
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be okay the danger is that we spend all our effort on developing an AI at the time that we don't understand ourselves and then letting the AI take over that's
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that's a road to a human catastrophe does this surprise you how well large language models work I mean has it modified your understanding of the nature of intelligence yes I mean you
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know I've been writing about AI for I know like eight years now and engage with all these predictions and speculations and when it actually came it was much faster and more
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powerful than I thought it would be um I didn't think that we would have in 2023 and AI that can hold the conversation that you can't know if it's a human being or an AI that can write
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beautiful texts in telling I mean I I read the texts written by AI and the thing that strikes me most is the coherence you know people think oh it's nothing
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they just takes ideas from here and their words for me and and putting no it's so current I mean you read in not sentences you read paragraphs you read entire texts and there is logic that
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there is the structure not only go here and it's convincing yes and the beautiful thing about it that has to do with your work it doesn't have to be true gets facts wrong but it still is
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convincing and it is both scary and beautiful yeah that our brains love language so much that we don't need the facts to be correct we just
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need it to be a beautiful story yeah and that's been the secret of politics and religion for thousands of years and now it's coming with AI so you as a person who has written some of the most
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impactful words ever written in your books uh how does that make you feel that you might be one of the last effective human writers that's a good question first of all do you think that's
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possible I think it is possible um I I've seen a lot of examples of AI being told right like you will know Harare and what it produces has it ever done better than you think you could have written yourself
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I mean on the level of content of ideas no there are things I say I would I would never say that but when it comes to the you know I mean there is again the coherence and the
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quality of writing is such that I say it's it's unbelievable how good it is and who knows in 10 years in 20 years maybe it can do better even on in
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according to certain measures of on the level of of content so that people would be able to do like a style transfer to uh in the style of Yvonne or Harare right anything right
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why I should have ice cream tonight and and make it convincing I don't know if I have anything convincing to say about this I think you'll be surprised I think you'd be surprised they could be an evolutionary biology explanation for
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why ice cream is good for you yeah so I mean uh I mean that changes the nature of writing ultimately I I think it it goes back um
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much of of my writing is suspicious of itself I write stories about the danger of stories I write about intelligence
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but highlighting the dangers of intelligence ultimately I don't think that in terms of power human power comes from intelligence and from stories but I think that the
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deepest and best qualities of humans are not intelligence and not storytelling and not power again with all our power with all our cooperation with our intelligence we are
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on the verge of destroying ourselves and destroying much of the ecosystem our best qualities are not there our best qualities are non-verbal again
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they come from things like compassion from introspection and introspection for my experience is not variable if you try to understand yourself with words you will never succeed there is a a place
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where you need the words but the deepest insights they don't come from words and you can't write about it that that's second it goes back to to Wittgenstein to Buddha to so many of these sages
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before that uh this these are the things we are silent about yeah but eventually you have to project it as a writer you have to do the silent introspection but project it onto a page yes but you still have to
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warn people you will never find the deepest truth in a book you will never find it in words uh you can only find it in I think in direct experience which is non-verbal
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which is pretty verbal in the Silence of your own mind yes somewhere in there
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