If you're worried about immigration

taking jobs, you should be way more

worried about AI because it's like a

flood of millions of new digital

immigrants that are Nobel Prize level

capability work at superhuman speed and

will work for less than minimum wage. I

mean, we're heading for so much

transformative change faster than our

society is currently prepared to deal

with it. And there's a different

conversation happening publicly than the

one that the AI companies are having

privately about which world we're

heading to, which is a future that

people don't want. But we didn't consent

to have six people make that decision on

behalf of 8 billion people.

>> Tristan Harris is one of the world's

most influential technology ethicists

>> who created the Center for Humane

Technology after correctly predicting

the dangers social media would have on

our society.

>> And now he's warning us about the

catastrophic consequences AI will have

on all of us.

>> Let me like collect myself for a second.

We can't let it happen. We cannot let

these companies race to build a super

intelligent digital god, own the world

economy and have military advantage

because of the belief that if I don't

build it first, I'll lose to the other

guy and then I will be forever a slave

to their future. And they feel they'll

die either way. So they prefer to light

the fire and see what happens. It's

winner takes all. But as we're racing,

we're landing in a world of unvetted

therapists, rising energy prices, and

major security risks. I mean, we have

evidence where if an AI model reading a

company's email finds out it's about to

get replaced with another AI model and

then it also reads in the company email

that one executive is having an affair

with an employee, the AI will

independently blackmail that executive

in order to keep itself alive. That's

crazy. But what do you think?

>> I'm finding it really hard to be

hopeful. I'm going to be honest, just so

I really want to get practical and

specific about what we can do about

this.

>> Listen, I I'm not I'm not naive. This is

super hard. But we have done hard things

before and it's possible to choose a

different teacher. So,

>> I see messages all the time in the

comments section that some of you didn't

realize you didn't subscribe. So, if you

could do me a favor and double check if

you're a subscriber to this channel,

that would be tremendously appreciated.

It's the simple, it's the free thing

that anybody that watches this show

frequently can do to help us here to

keep everything going in this show in

the trajectory it's on. So please do

double check if you've subscribed and uh

thank you so much because a strange way

you are you're part of our history and

you're on this journey with us and I

appreciate you for that. So yeah, thank

you

Tristan.

I think my first question and maybe the

most important question is we're going

to talk about artificial intelligence

and technology broadly today

but who are you in relation to this

subject matter? So I did a program at

Stanford called the Mayfield Fellows

program that took engineering students

and then taught them entrepreneurship.

You know I as a computer scientist

didn't know anything about

entrepreneurship but they pair you up

with venture capitalists. They give you

mentorship and you know there's a lot of

powerful alumni who are part of that

program. the co-founder of Asauna, uh

the co-founders of um of Instagram were

both part of that program. And that put

us in kind of a cohort of people who

were basically ending up at the center

of what was going to colonize the whole

world's psychological environment, which

was the social media situation. And as

part of that, I started my own tech

company called Apure. And we, you know,

basically made this tiny widget that

would help people find more contextual

information without leaving the website

they were on. It was a really cool

product that was about deepening

people's understanding. And I got into

the tech industry because I thought the

technology could be a force for good in

the world. It's why I started my

company. And then I kind of realized

through you know that experience that at

the end of the day these news publishers

who used our product they only cared

about one thing which is is this

increasing the amount of time and

eyeballs and attention on our website

because eyeballs meant more revenue. And

I was in sort of this conflict of I

think I'm doing this to help the world

but really I'm measured by this metric

of what keeps people's attention. That's

the only thing that I'm measured by. And

I saw that conflict play out among my

friends who started Instagram, you know,

because they got into it because they

wanted people to share little bite-sized

moments of your life. You know, here's a

photo of my bike ride down to the bakery

in San Francisco. It's what Kevin Sist

used to post when we were when he was

just starting it. I was probably one of

the first like hundred users of the app.

And later you see how these night, you

know, these sort of simple products that

had a simple good positive intention got

sort of sucked into these perverse

incentives. And so Google acquired my

company called Apure. I landed there and

I joined the Gmail team and I'm with

these engineers who are designing the

email interface that people spend hours

a day in. And then one day one of the

engineers comes over and he says, "Well,

why don't we make it buzz your phone

every time you get an email?" And he

just asked the question nonchalantly

like it wasn't a big deal. And in my

experience, I was like, "Oh my god,

you're about to change billions of

people's psychological experiences with

their families, with their friends, at

dinner, with their date night, on

romantic relationships, where suddenly

people's phones are going to be busy

showing notifications of their email."

And you're just asking this question as

if it's like a throwaway question. And I

became concerned. I see you have a slide

deck there.

>> I do. Yeah. um about basically how

Google and Apple and social media

companies were hosting this

psychological environment that was going

to corrupt and frack the global human

attention uh of humanity. And I

basically said I needed to make a slide

deck. It's 130 something pages slide

deck that basically was a message to the

whole company at Google saying we have

to be very careful and we have a moral

responsibility in how we shape the

global attentions of humanity. The slide

deck I I've printed off um which my

research team found is called a call to

minimize distraction and respect users

attention by a concerned PM and

entrepreneur. PM meaning project

manager.

>> Project manager. Yeah.

>> How was that received at Google? I was

very nervous actually uh because I felt

like

I wasn't coming from some place where I

wanted to like stick it to them or you

know um be controversial. I just felt

like there was this conversation that

wasn't happening. And I sent it to about

50 people that were friends of mine just

for feedback. And when I came to work

the next day, there was 150, you know,

on the top right on Google Slides, it

shows you the number of simultaneous

viewers.

>> Y

>> and it had 130 something simultaneous

viewers. And later that day it was like

500 simultaneous viewers. And so

obviously it had been spreading virally

throughout the whole company. And people

from all around the company emailed me

saying this is a massive problem. I

totally agree. We have to do something.

And so instead of getting fired, I was

invited and basically stayed to become a

design ethicist. studying how do you

design in an ethical way and how do you

design for the collective attention

spans and information flows of humanity

in a way that does not cause all these

problems. Because what was sort of

obvious to me then, and that was in

2013, is that if the incentive is to

maximize eyeballs and attention and

engagement, then you're incentivizing a

more addicted, distracted, lonely,

polarized, sexualized breakdown of

shared reality society because all of

those outcomes are success cases of

maximizing for engagement for an

individual human on a screen. And so it

was like watching this slow motion train

wreck in 2013. you could kind of see

there's this kind of myth that um we

could never predict the future like

technology could go any direction and

that's like you know the possible of a

new technology but I wanted people to

see the probable that if you know the

incentives you can actually know

something about the future that you're

heading towards and that presentation

kind of kicked that off. A lot of people

will know you from the documentary on

Netflix, The Social Dilemma, which was a

big moment and a big conversation in

society across the world. But then since

then, a new alien has entered the p

picture. There's a new protagonist in

the story, which is the rise of

artificial intelligence. When did you

start to and in the social dilemma, you

talk a lot about AI and algorithms.

Yeah. But when did

>> different kind of AI we used to call

that um the AI behind social media was

kind of humanity's first contact between

a narrow misaligned AI that went rogue

>> because if you think about it it's like

there you are you open Tik Tok and you

see a video and you think you're just

watching a video but what when you swipe

your finger and it shows you the next

video at that time you activated one of

the largest supercomputers in the world

pointed at your brain stem calculating

what 3 billion other human social

primates have seen today and knowing

before you do which of those videos is

most likely to keep you scrolling. It

makes a prediction. So, it's an AI

that's just making a prediction about

which video to recommend to you. But

Twitter's doing that with which tweet

should be shown to you. Instagram's

doing that with which photo or videos to

be shown to you. And so, all of these

things are these narrow misaligned AIs

just optimizing for one thing, which is

what's going to keep you scrolling. And

that was enough to wreck and break

democracy and to create the most anxious

and depressed generation of our lifetime

just by this very simple baby AI. And

people didn't even notice it because it

was called social media instead of AI.

But it was the first we used to call it

um in this AI dilemma talk that my

co-founder and I uh gave, we called it

humanity's first contact with AI because

it's just a narrow AI. And what ChachiPT

represents is this whole new wave of

generative AI that is a totally

different beast because it speaks

language which is the operating system

of humanity. Like if you think about it,

it's trained on code, it's trained on

text, it's trained on all of Wikipedia,

it's trained on Reddit, it's trained on

everything, all law, all religion and

all of that gets sucked into this

digital brain that um has unique

properties and that is what we're living

with with chat GPT. I think this is a

really critical point and I remember

watching your talk about this where I

think this was the moment that I that my

I had a bit of a paradigm shift when I

realized that how how central language

is to everything that I do every day.

>> Yeah, exactly.

>> It's like we should establish that

first. Like why is language so central?

Code is language. So all the code that

runs all of the digital infrastructure

we live by, that's language.

>> Law is language. All the laws that have

ever been written, that's language. Um

biology, DNA, that's all a kind of

language. Music is a kind of language.

Videos are a higher dimensional kind of

language. And the new generation of AI

that was born with this technology

called transformers that Google made in

in 2017 was to treat everything as a

language. Um, and that's how we get, you

know, chatbt, write me a 10-page essay

on anything and it spits out this thing

or chatbt, you know, find something in

this religion that'll persuade this this

group uh of the thing I want them to be

persuaded by. That's hacking language

because religion is also language. And

so this new AI that we're dealing with

can hack the operating system of

humanity. It can hack code and find

vulnerabilities in software. The recent

AIs today, just over the summer, have

been able to find 15 vulnerabilities in

open- source software on GitHub. So it

can just point itself at GitHub.

>> GitHub being

>> GitHub being like this u this this

website that hosts basically all the

open source code of the world. So for

it's it's kind of like the Wikipedia for

coders. has all the code that's ever

been written that's publicly and openly

accessible and you can download it. So

you don't have to write your own face

recognition system. You can just

download the one that already exists.

And so GitHub is sort of supplying the

world with all of this free digital

infrastructure. And the new AIs that

exist today can be pointed at GitHub and

found 15 vulnerabilities from scratch

that had not been exploited before. So

if you imagine that now applied to the

code that runs our water infrastructure,

our electricity infrastructure, we're

releasing AI into the world that can

speak and hack the operating system of

our world. And that requires a new level

of discernment and care about how we're

doing that because we ought to be

protecting the core parts of society

that we want to protect before all that

happens. I think especially when you

think about how central voice is to

safeguarding so much of our lives. My

relationship with my girlfriend runs on

voice.

>> Right. Exactly.

>> Me calling her to tell her something. My

bank, I call them and tell them

something.

>> Exactly.

>> And they ask me for a bunch of codes or

a password or whatever. And all of this

comes back to your point about language,

which is my whole life is actually

protected by my communications with

other people now.

>> And you you're you generally speaking,

you trust when you pick up the phone

that it's a real person. I I literally

just um two days ago I had a the mother

of a close friend of mine call me out of

nowhere and she said Tristan um you know

uh my daughter she just called me crying

that that some some person had is is

holding her hostage and and wanted some

money and I was like oh my god this is

an AI scam but it's hitting my friend in

San Francisco who's knowledgeable about

this stuff and didn't know that it was a

scam. And for a moment I was very

concerned. I had to track her down and

figure out and find my friends where

where she was and find out that she was

okay. And when you have AIs that can

speak the language of anybody, it now

takes less than three seconds of your

voice to synthesize and speak in

anyone's voice. Again, that's a new

vulnerability that society has now

opened up because of AI.

>> So, Chachi kind of set off the starting

pistol for this this whole race. And

subsequently, it appears that every

other major technology company now is

investing godly amounts, ungodly amounts

of money in competing in this AI race.

and they're pursuing this thing called

AGI which we hear this word used a lot.

>> Yes.

>> What is what is AGI and how is that

different from what I use at the moment

on chatb or Gemini?

>> Yeah.

>> So that's the thing that people really

need to get is that these companies are

not racing to provide a chatbot to

users. That's not what their goal is. If

you look at the mission statement on

OpenAI's website or all the websites,

their mission is to be able to replace

all forms of human economic labor in the

economy. Meaning an AI that can do all

the cognitive labor meaning labor of the

mind. So that that can be marketing,

that can be text, that can be

illustration, that can be video

production, that can be code production.

Everything that a person can do with

their brain, these companies are racing

to build that. That is artificial

general intelligence. General meaning

all kinds of cognitive tasks. Deis

Hassabis the co-founder of um Google

DeepMind used to say first solve

intelligence and then use that to solve

everything else. Like it's important to

say why why is AI distinct from all

other kinds of technologies. It's

because if I make an advance in one

field like rocketry if I just let's say

I uncover some secret in rocketry that

doesn't advance like biio medicine

knowledge or it doesn't advance energy

production or doesn't advance coding.

But if I can advance generalized

intelligence, think of all science and

technology development over the course

of all human history. So science and

technology is all done by humans

thinking and working out problems.

Working out problems in any domain. So

if I automate intelligence, I'm suddenly

going to get an explosion of all

scientific and technological development

everywhere. Does that make sense?

>> Of course. Yeah. It's foundational to

everything.

>> Exactly. Which is why there's a belief

that if I get there first and can

automate generalized intelligence, I can

own the world economy because suddenly

everything that a human can do that they

would be paid to do in a job, the AI can

do that better. And so if I'm a company,

do I want to pay the human who has

health care, might whistleblow,

complains, you know, has to sleep, has

sick days, has family issues, or do I

want to pay the AI that will work 24/7

at superhuman speed, doesn't complain,

doesn't whistleblow, doesn't have to be

paid for healthcare. There's the

incentive for everyone to move to paying

for AIs rather than paying humans. And

so AGI, artificial general intelligence,

is more transformative than any other

kind of of technology that we've ever

had and it's distinct.

>> With the sheer amount of money being

invested into it and the money being

invested into the infrastructure, the

physical data centers, the chips, the

compute,

do you think we're going to get there?

Do you think we're going to get to AGI?

>> I do think that we're going to get

there. It's not clear uh how long it

will take. And I'm not saying that

because I believe necessarily the

current paradigm that we're building on

will take us there, but you know, I'm

based in San Francisco. I talked to

people at the AI labs. Half these people

are friends of mine. You know, people at

the very top level. And you know, most

people in the industry believe that

they'll get there between the next two

and 10 years at the latest. And I think

some people might say, "Oh, well, it may

not happen for a while. Phew. I can sit

back and we don't have to worry about

And it's like we're heading for so much

transformative change faster than our

society is currently prepared to deal

with it. The reason I was excited to

talk to you today is because I think

that people are currently confused about

AI. You know, people say it's going to

solve everything, cure cancer, uh solve

climate change, and there's people say

it's going to kill everything. It's

going to be doom. Everyone's going to go

extinct. If anyone builds it, everyone

dies. And those those conversations

don't converge. And so everyone's just

kind of confused where how can it be,

you know, infinite promise and how can

it be infinite peril? And what I wanted

to do today is to really clarify for

people what the incentives point us

towards which is a future that I think

people when they see it clearly would

not want.

>> So what are the incentives pointing us

towards in terms of the future?

>> So first is if you believe that this is

like it's metaphorically it's like the

ring from Lord of the Rings. It's the

ring that that creates infinite power

because if I have AGI, I can apply that

to military advantage. I can have the

best military planner that can beat all

battle plans for anyone. And we already

have AIs that can obviously beat Gary

Kasparov at chess, beat Go, the Go Asian

um board game, or now beat Starcraft. So

you have AI that are beating humans at

strategy games. Well, think about

Starcraft compared to an actual military

campaign, you know, in Taiwan or

something like that. If I have an AI

that can out compete in strategy games,

that lets me out compete everything. Or

take business strategy. If I have an AI

that can do business strategy and figure

out supply chains and figure out how to

optimize them and figure out how to

undermine my competitors

and I have a, you know, a step function

level increase in that compared to

everybody else, then that gives me

infinite power to undermine and out

compete all businesses. If I have a

super programmer, then I can out compete

programming. 70 to 90% of the code

written at today's AI labs is written by

AI.

>> Think about the stock market as well.

>> Think about the stock market. If I have

an AI that can trade in the stock market

better than all the other AIs, because

they're currently there's mostly AIs

that are actually trading in the stock

market, but if I have a jump in that,

then I can consolidate all the wealth.

If I have an AI that can do cyber

hacking, that's way better at cyber

hacking in a step function above what

everyone else can do, then I have an

asymmetric advantage over everybody

else. So AI is like a power pump. It

pumps economic advantage. It pumps

scientific advantage and it pumps

military advantage. Which is why the

countries and the companies are caught

in what they believe is a race to get

there first. And anything that is a

negative consequence of that, job loss,

rising energy prices, more emissions,

stealing intellectual property, you

know, security risks, all of that stuff

feels small relative to if I don't get

there first, then some other person who

has less good values as me, they'll get

AGI and then I will be forever a slave

to their future. And I know this might

sound crazy to a lot of people, but this

is how people in at the very top of the

AGI AI world believe is currently

happening. And that's what

>> conversations.

>> Yeah.

>> You you've had I mean know Jeff Hinton

and and Roman Ylonsky on and other

people Mogadat and they're saying the

same thing. And I think people need to

take seriously that whether you believe

it or not, the people who are currently

deploying the trillions of dollars, this

is what they believe. And they believe

that it's win or take all. And it's not

just first solve intelligence and use

that to solve everything else. It's

first dominate intelligence and use that

to dominate everything else.

>> Have you had concerning private

conversations about this subject matter

with people that are in the industry?

>> Absolutely. I think that's what most

people don't understand is that um

there's a different conversation

happening publicly than the one that's

happening privately. I think you're

aware of this as well.

>> I am aware of this.

>> What do they say to you?

>> So, it's not always the people telling

me directly. It's usually one step

removed. So, it's usually someone that I

trust and I've known for many, many

years who at a kitchen table says, "I

met this particular CEO. We were in this

room talking about the future of AI.

this particular CEO they're referencing

is leading one of the biggest AI

companies in the world and then they'll

explain to me what they think of the

future's going to look like and then

when I go and watch them on YouTube or

podcasts what they're saying is they

they have this real public bias towards

the abundance part that you know we're

going to cure cancer

>> cure cancer universal high income for

everyone

>> yeah all this all this stuff

>> doesn't work anymore

>> but then privately what I hear is is

exactly what you said which is really

terrifying to me there was actually

since since the last time we had a

conversation about AR and podcast, I was

speaking to a friend of mine, very

successful billionaire, knows a lot of

these people, and he is concerned

because his argument is that if there's

even like a 5% chance of the adverse

outcomes that we hear about, we should

not be doing this. And he was saying to

me that some of his friends who are

running some of these companies believe

the chance is much higher than that, but

they feel like they're caught in a race

where if they don't control this

technology and they don't get there

first and get to what they refer to as

um takeoff, like fast takeoff.

>> Yeah. Uh recursive self-improvement or

fast takeoff, which basically means what

the companies are really in a race for

you're pointing to is they're in a race

to automate AI research. Um because so

right now you have open AI, it's got a

few thousand employees. Human beings are

coding and doing the AI research.

They're reading the latest research

papers. They're writing the next, you

know, they're hypothesizing what's the

improvement we're going to make to AI.

What's a new way to do this code? What's

a new technique? And then they use their

human mind and they go invent something.

They they run the experiment and they

see if that improves the performance.

And that's how you go from, you know,

GPT4 to GPT5 or something. Imagine a

world where Sam Alman can instead of

having human AI researchers can have AI

AI researchers. So now I just snap my

fingers and I go from one AI that reads

all the papers, writes all the code,

creates the new experiments to I can

copy paste a 100 million AI researchers

that are now doing that in an automated

way. And it the belief is not just that,

you know, the companies look like

they're competing to release better chat

bots for people, but the what they're

really competing for is to get to this

milestone of being to automate an

intelligence explosion or automate

recursive self-improvement, which is

basically automating AI research. And

that, by the way, is why all the

companies are racing specifically to get

good at programming because the faster

you can automate a human programmer, the

more you can automate AI research. And

just a couple weeks ago, Cloud 4.5 was

released and it can do 30 hours of

uninterrupted complex programming tasks

at the at the high end.

That's crazy.

So right now one of the limits on the

progress of AI is that human humans are

doing the work but actually all of these

companies are pushing to the moment when

AI will be doing the work which means

they can have an infinite arguably

smarter zerocost workforce that's right

scaling the AI. So when they talk about

fast takeoff they mean the moment where

they where the AI takes control of the

research and it and progress rapidly

increases

>> and it self-learns and recursively

improves and invents. Um, so one thing

to get is that AI accelerates AI, right?

Like if I invent nuclear weapons,

nuclear weapons don't invent better

nuclear weapons.

>> Yeah.

>> But if I invent AI, AI is intelligence.

Intelligence automates better

programming, better chip design. So I

can use AI to say, here's a design for

the NVIDIA chips. Go make it 50% more

efficient. And it can find out how to do

that. I can say AI, here's a supply

chain that I need for all the things for

my AI company. And it can optimize that

supply chain and make that supply chain

more efficient.

>> Mhm. AI, here's the code for making AI.

Make that more efficient. Um, AI, here's

training data. I need to make more

training data. Go run a million

simulations of how to do this and it'll

train itself to get better.

>> AI accelerates AI.

>> What do you think these people are

motivated by the CEOs of these

companies?

>> That's a good question.

>> Genuinely, what do you think their

genuine motivations are when you think

about all these names?

>> I think it's a subtle thing.

I think

there's um it's almost mythological

because

there's almost a way in which they're

building a new intelligent entity that

has never before existed on planet

Earth. It's like building a god. I mean,

the incentive is build a god, own the

world economy, and make trillions of

dollars, right? If you could actually

build something that can automate all

intelligent tasks, all goal achieving

that will let you out compete

everything. So that is a kind of godlike

power that I think relative imagine

energy prices go up or hundreds of

millions of people lose their jobs. That

those things suck. But relative to if I

don't build it first and build this god,

I'm going to lose to some maybe worse

person who I think in my opinion, not my

opinion, Tristan, but their opinion

thinks is a worse person. It's it's a

kind of competitive logic that

self-reinforces itself, but it forces

everyone to be incentivized to take the

most shortcuts, to care the least about

safety or security, to not care about

how many jobs get disrupted, to not care

about the well-being of regular people,

but to basically just race to this

infinite prize. So, there's a quote that

um a friend of mine interviewed a lot of

the top people at the AI companies, like

the very top, and he just came back from

that and and basically reported back to

me and some friends, and he said the

following.

In the end, a lot of the tech people I

talk to when I'm when I really grill

them on it about like why you're doing

this, they retreat into number one,

determinism,

number two, the inevitable replacement

of biological life with digital life,

and number three, that being a good

thing. Anyways, at its core, it's an

emotional desire to meet and speak to

the most intelligent entity that they've

ever met. And they have some ego

religious intuition that they'll somehow

be a part of it. It's thrilling to start

an exciting fire. They feel they'll die

either way, so they prefer to light it

and see what happens.

>> That is the perfect description of the

private conversations.

>> Doesn't that match what what you have

description,

>> doesn't it? And that's the thing. So,

people may hear that and they're like,

"Well, that sounds ridiculous." But if

you actually

>> I just got goosebumps cuz it's the

perfect description. Especially the part

they'll think they'll die either way.

>> Exactly. Well, and um worse than that,

some of them think that in the case

where they if they were to get it right

and if they succeeded, they could

actually live forever because if AI

perfectly speaks the language of

biology, it will be able to reverse

aging aging, cure every disease. And and

so there's this kind of I could become a

god. And I'll I'll tell you um you know,

you and I both have know people who've

had private conversations. Well, one of

them that I have heard from one of the

co-founders of one of the most, you

know, powerful of these companies when

when faced with the idea that what if

there's an 80% or 20% chance that

everybody dies and gets wiped out by

this, but an 80% chance that we get

utopia. He said, well, I would clearly

accelerate and go for the utopia.

Given a 20% chance,

it's crazy. People should feel you do

not get to make that choice on behalf of

me and my family. We didn't consent to

have six people make that decision on

behalf of eight billion people. We have

to stop pretending that this is okay or

normal. It's not normal. And the only

way that this is happening and they're

getting away with it is because most

people just don't really know what's

going on.

>> Yeah. But I'm curious what what do you

think when I

>> It's I mean everything you just said

it's that last part about the 8020%

thing is almost verbatim what I heard

from a very good very successful friend

of mine who is responsible for building

some of the biggest companies in the

world when he was referencing a

conversation he had with the founder of

maybe the biggest company in the world

and it was truly shocking to me because

because it was said in such a blasé way.

>> Yes. It wasn't Yeah. That that's what I

had heard in this particular situation.

wasn't like

a matter of fact.

>> It was a matter of fact, it's just easy.

Yeah, of course I would do the I would

take the I roll the dice.

>> And even Elon Musk said he actually said

the same number in an interview with Joe

Rogan. Um, and if you listen closely

when he said, "I decided I'd rather be

there when it all happens. If it all

goes off the rails, I decided in that

worst case scenario, I decided that I'

I'd prefer to be there when it happens."

Which is justifying racing to our

collective suicide.

Now, I also want people to know like you

don't have to buy into the sci-fi level

risks to be very concerned about AI. So,

hopefully later we'll talk about um the

many other risks that are already

hitting us right now that you don't have

to believe any of this stuff.

>> Yeah. The the Elon thing I think is

particularly interesting because for the

last 10 years he was this slightly hard

to believe voice on the subject of AI.

He was talking about it being a huge

risk

>> and an extinction level.

>> He was the first AI risk people. Yeah.

He was saying this is more dangerous

than nukes. He was saying, "I try to get

people to stop doing it. This is

summoning the demon." Those are his

words, not mine.

>> Yeah.

>> Um, we shouldn't do this. Supposedly, he

used his first and only meeting with

President Obama, I think, in 2016, to

advocate for global regulation and

global controls on on AI, um, because he

was very worried about it. And then

really what happened is, um, Chachi BT

came out and as you said, that was the

starting gun and now everybody was in an

allout race to get there first. He

tweeted words to the effect I'll put it

on the screen. He tweeted that he had

remained in I think he used a word

similar to disbelief for some time like

suspended disbelief. But then he said in

the same tweet that the race is now on.

>> The race is on and I have to race

>> and I have to go. I have no choice but

to go. And he tried he's basically

saying I tried to fight it for a long

time. I tried to deny it. I tried to

hope that we wouldn't get here but we're

here now so I have to go.

>> Yeah.

>> And

at least he's being honest. He does seem

to have a pretty honest track record on

this because because he was the guy 10

years ago warning everybody. And I

remember him talking about it and

thinking, "Oh god, this is like 100

years away. Why are we talking about

that?"

>> I felt the same, by the way. Some people

might think that I'm some kind of AI

enthusiast and I'm trying to ratch I I

didn't believe that AI was a thing to be

worried about at all until suddenly the

last 2 three years where you can

actually see where we're headed. But um

oh man, there's just there's so much to

say about all this and I'm so if you

think about it from their perspective,

it's like best case scenario, I build it

first and it's aligned and controllable,

meaning that it will take the actions

that I want. It won't destroy humanity

and it's controllable, which means I get

to be God and emperor of the world.

Second scenario, it's not controllable,

but it's aligned. So, I built a god and

I lost control of it, but it's now

basically it's running humanity. It's

running the show. It's choosing what

happens. It's out competing everyone on

everything. That's not that bad an

outcome. Third scenario, it's not

aligned. It's not controllable. And it

does wipe everybody out. And that should

be demotivating to that person, to an

Elon or someone, but in that scenario,

they were the one that birthed the

digital god that replaced all of

humanity. Like this is really important

to get because in nuclear weapons

the risk of nuclear war is an omni

lose-lose outcome. Everyone wants to

avoid that. And I know that you know

that I know that we both want to avoid

that.

>> So that that motivates us to coordinate

and to have a nuclear

non-prololiferation treaty. But with AI,

the worst case scenario of everybody

gets wiped out is a little bit different

for the people making that decision.

Because if I'm the CEO of DeepSeek and I

make that AI that does wipe out

humanity, that's the worst case scenario

and it wasn't avoidable because it was

all inevitable. Then even though we all

got wiped out, I was the one who built

the digital god that replaced humanity.

And there's kind of ego in that. And uh

the god that I built speaks Chinese

instead of English.

>> That's the religious ego point.

>> That's the ego.

>> Such a great point because that's

exactly what it is. It's like this

religious ego where I will be

transcendent in some way.

>> And you notice that it it all starts by

the belief that this is inevitable.

>> Yeah.

>> Which is like is this inevitable? It's

important to note because

if you believe it's if everybody who's

building it believes it's inevitable and

the investors funding it believe it's

inevitable, it cocreates the

inevitability.

>> Yeah.

>> Right.

>> Yeah.

>> And the only way out is to step outside

the logic of inevitability. Because if

if we are all heading to our collective

suicide, which I don't know about you, I

don't think that I don't want that. You

don't want that. Everybody who loves

life looks at their children in the

morning and says, I want I want the

things that I love and that are sacred

in the world to continue. That's what n

that's what everybody in the world

wants. And the only thing that is having

us not anchor on that is the belief that

this is inevitable and the worst case

scenario is somehow in this ego

religious way, not so bad. if I was the

one who accidentally wiped out humanity

because I'm not a bad person because it

was inevitable anyway.

>> And I think the goal of of for me this

conversation is to get people to see

that that's a bad outcome that no one

wants. And we have to put our hand on

the steering wheel and turn towards a

different future because we do not have

to have a race to uncontrollable,

inscrutable, powerful AIs that are, by

the way, already doing all the rogue

sci-fi stuff that we thought only

existed in movies like blackmailing

people. uh being self-aware when they're

being tested, scheming and lying and

deceiving to copy their own code to keep

themselves preserved. Like the stuff

that we thought only existed in sci-fi

movies is now actually happening. And

that should be enough evidence to say

we don't want to do this path that we're

currently on. It's not that

some version of AI progressing into the

world is directionally inevitable, but

we get to choose which of those futures

that we want to have.

Are you hopeful? Honestly,

honestly,

>> I don't relate to hopefulness or

pessimism either because I focus on what

would have to happen for the world to go

okay. I think it's important to step out

of because both hope or optimism or

pessimism are both passive.

You're saying if I sit back, do I which

way is it going to go? I mean, the

honest answer is if I sit back, we just

talked about which way it's going to go.

So, you'd say pessimistic?

I challenge anyone who says optimistic.

On what grounds?

What's confusing about AI is it will

give us cures to cancer and probably

major solutions to climate change and

physics breakthroughs and fusion at the

same time that it gives us all this

crazy negative stuff. And so what's

unique about AI that's literally not

true of any other object is it hits our

brain and as one object represents a

positive infinity of benefits that we

can't even imagine and a negative

infinity in the same object and if you

just ask like can our minds reckon with

something that is both those things at

the same time and if

>> people aren't good at that

>> they're not good at that

>> I remember reading the work of Leon

Festinger the guy that coined the term

cognitive

>> dissonance yes when prophecies fail he

also did that Yeah. And essential I mean

the way that I interpret it I'm probably

simplifying it here is that the human

brain is really bad at holding two

conflicting ideas at the same time.

That's right. So it dismisses one.

That's right.

>> To alleviate the discomfort, the

dissonance that's caused. So for

example, if I if you're a smoker and at

the same time you consider yourself to

be a healthy person, if I point out that

smoking is unhealthy, you will

immediately justify it.

>> Exactly.

>> With in some way to try and alleviate

that discomfort, the the contradiction.

And it's the same here with with AI.

It's it's very difficult to have a

nuanced conversation about this because

the brain is trying to

>> Exactly. And people will hear me and say

I'm a doomer or I'm a pessimist. It's

actually not the goal. The goal is to

say if we see this clearly then we have

to choose to something else. I'm it's

the deepest form of optimism because in

the presence of seeing where this is

going still showing up and saying we

have to choose another way. It's coming

from a kind of agency and a desire for

that better world

>> but by but by facing the difficult

reality that that most people don't want

to face.

>> Yeah. And the other thing that's

happening in AI that you're saying

that's that lacks the nuance is that

people point to all the things it's

simultaneously more brilliant than

humans and embarrassingly stupid in

terms of the mistakes that it makes.

>> Yeah.

>> A friend like Gary Marcus would say

here's a hundred ways in which GPT5 like

the latest AI model makes embarrassing

mistakes. If you ask it how many

strawberries contain the word R in it,

it'll confuse it gets confused about

what the answer is. um or it'll put more

fingers on the hands than in the deep

fake photo or something like that. And I

think that one thing that we have to do

what Helen Toner who is what board

member of OpenAI calls AI jaggedness

that we have simultaneously AIs that are

beating and getting gold on the

International Math Olympiad that are

solving new physics that are beating

programming competitions and are better

than the top 200 programmers in the

whole world um or in the top 200

programmers in the whole world that are

beating cyber hacking competitions. It's

both supremely outperforming humans and

embarrassingly uh failing in places

where humans would never fail. So how

does our mind integrate those two

pictures?

>> Mhm. Have you ever met Sam Orman?

>> Yeah.

>> What do you think his incentives are? Do

you think he cares about humanity?

>> I think that these people on some level

all care about humanity underneath there

is a care for humanity. I think that

this situation, this particular

technology, it justifies

lacking empathy for what would happen to

everyone because I have this other side

of the equation that demands infinitely

more importance, right? Like if I didn't

do it, then someone else is going to

build the thing that ends civilization.

So, it's like,

>> do you see what I'm saying? It's it's

not

>> it's it's I I can justify it as I'm a

good guy.

>> And what if I get the utopia? What if we

get lucky and I got the aligned

controllable AI that creates abundance

for everyone?

If in that case I would be the hero. Do

they have a point when they say that

listen if we don't do it here in America

if we slow down if we start thinking

about safety and the long-term future

and get too caught up in that. We're not

going to build the data centers. We're

not going to have the chips. We're not

going to get to AGI and China will. And

if China get there, then we're going to

be their lap dog.

>> So this is this is the fundamental thing

I want you to notice. Most people having

heard everything we just shared,

although we probably should build out um

we probably should build out the

blackmail examples first, we have to

reckon with evidence that we have now

that we didn't have even like 6 months

ago, which is evidence that when you put

AIs in a situation, you tell the AI

model, "We're going to replace you with

another model." It will copy its own

code and try to preserve itself on

another computer. It'll take that action

autonomously.

We have examples where if you tell an AI

model reading a fictional AI company's

email, so it's reading the email of the

company and it finds out in the email

that the plan is to replace this AI

model. So it realizes it's about to get

replaced and then it also reads in the

company email that one executive is

having an affair with the other employee

and the AI will independently come up

with the strategy that I need to

blackmail that executive in order to

keep myself alive.

That was Claude, right?

>> That was Claude by Enthropic.

>> Byanthropic. But then what happened is

they Enthropic tested all of the leading

AI models from DeepSeek, OpenAI, Chatbt,

Gemini, XAI. And all of them do that

blackmail behavior between 79 and 96% of

the time. Deepseek did it 79% of the

time. I think XAI might have done it 96%

of the time. Maybe Claude did it 96% of

the time.

So the point is we the assumption behind

AI is that it's controllable technology

that we will get to choose what it does.

But AI is distinct from other

technologies because it is

uncontrollable. It acts generally. The

whole benefit is that you don't it's

going to do powerful strategic things no

matter what you throw at it. So the same

benefit of its generality is also what

makes it so dangerous. And so once you

tell people these examples of it's

blackmailing people, it's self-aware of

when it's being tested and alters its

behavior. It's copying and

self-replicating its own code. It's

leaving secret messages for itself.

There's examples of that, too. It's

called steganographic encoding. It can

leave a message that it can later sort

of decode what it might meant in in a

way that humans could never see. We have

examples of all of this behavior. And

once you show people that, what they say

is, "Okay, well, why don't we stop or

slow down?" And then what happens?

Another thought will creep in right

after, which is, "Oh, but if we stop or

slow down, then China will still build

it." But I want to slow that down for a

second.

You just, we all just said we should

slow down or stop because the thing that

we're building, the it is this

uncontrollable AI. And then the concern

that China will build it, you just did a

swap and believe that they're going to

build controllable AI. But we just

established that all the AIs that we're

currently building are currently

uncontrollable.

So there's this weird contradiction our

mind is living in when we say they're

going to keep building it. What the it

that they would keep building is the

same uncontrollable AI that we would

build. So, I don't see a way out of this

without there being some kind of

agreement or negotiation between the

leading powers and countries to

pause, slow down, set red lines for

getting to a controllable AI. And by the

way, the Chinese Communist Party, what

do they care about more than anything

else in the world?

>> Surviving.

>> Surviving and control. Yeah.

>> Control as a means to survive.

>> Yeah. So, it's they they don't want

uncontrollable AI anymore than we would.

And as as unprecedented as impossible as

this might seem, we've done this before.

In the 1980s, there was a different

technology chemical technology called

CFCs, a chlorofhluocarbons, and it was

embedded in aerosols like hairsprays and

deodorant, things like that. And there

was this sort of corporate race where

everyone was releasing these products

and you know using it for refrigerants

and using it for hairsprays and it was

creating this collective problem of um

the ozone hole in the atmosphere. And

once there was scientific clarity that

that ozone hole would cause skin

cancers, cataracts and sort of screw up

biological life on planet Earth. We had

that scientific clarity and we created

the Montreal protocol.

195 countries signed on to that protocol

and the countries then regulated their

private companies inside those countries

to say we need to phase out that

technology and phase in a different

replacement that would not cause the

ozone hole and in the course of um the

last 20 years we have basically

completely reversed that problem I think

it'll completely reverse by 2050 or

something like that and that's an

example where humanity can coordinate

when we have clarity or the nuclear

non-prololiferation treaty when there's

the risk of existential destruction when

this film called the day after came out

and it showed people this is what would

actually happen in a nuclear war and

once that was crystal clear to people

including in the Soviet Union where the

film was aired uh in 1987 or 1989 that

helped set the conditions for Reagan and

Gorbachev to sign the first

non-proliferation arms control talks

once we had clarity about an outcome

that we wanted to avoid and I think the

current problem is that we're not having

an honest conversation in the public

about which world we're heading to that

is not in anyone's interest.

>> There's also just a bunch of cases

through history where there was a

threat, a collective threat and despite

the education,

people didn't change, countries didn't

change because the incentives were so

high. So I think of global warming as

being an example where for many decades

since I was a kid, I remember watching

my dad sitting me down and saying,

"Listen, you got to watch this

inconvenient truth thing with Al Gore."

and sitting on the sofa, I don't know,

must have been less than 10 years old

and hearing about glo the threat of

global warming. But when you look at how

countries like China responded to that,

>> y

>> they just don't have the economic

incentive to scale back production to

the levels that would be needed to save

the the atmosphere.

>> The closer the technology that needs to

be governed is to the center of GDP and

the center of the lifeblood of your

economy, Yeah. the harder it is to come

to international negotiation and

agreement.

>> Yeah.

>> And oil and fossil fuels was the kind of

the pumping the heart of our economic

superorganisms that are currently

competing for power. And so coming to

agreements on that is is really really

hard. AI is even harder because AI pumps

not just economic growth but scientific,

technological and military advantages.

And so it will be the hardest

coordination challenge that we will ever

face. But if we don't face it, if we

don't make some kind of choice, it will

end in tragedy. We're not in a race just

to have technological advantage. We're

in a race for who can better govern that

technologies impact on society. So for

example, the United States beat China to

social media. that technology. Did that

make us stronger or did that make us

weaker?

We have the most anxious and depressed

generation of our lifetime. We have the

least informed and most polarized

generation. We have the worst critical

thinking. We have the worst ability to

concentrate and do things. And that's

because we did not govern the impact of

that technology well. And the country

that actually figures out how to govern

it well is the country that actually

wins in a kind of comprehensive sense.

>> But they have to make it first. You have

to get to AGI first.

>> Well, or you don't. We could instead of

building these super intelligent gods in

a box. Right now, China, as I understand

it, from Eric Schmidt and Selena Shu in

in the New York Times wrote a piece

about how China is actually taking a

very different approach to AI and

they're focused on narrow practical

applications of AI. So, like how do we

just increase government services? How

do we make, you know, education better?

How do we embed DeepS in in the WeChat

app? How do we make uh robotics better?

and pump GDP. So like what China's doing

with BYD and making the cheapest

electric cars and out competing

everybody else that's narrowly applying

AI to just pump manufacturing output.

And if we realized that if we're instead

of competing to build a super

intelligent uncontrollable god in a box

that we don't know how to control in the

box and we instead raced to create

narrow AIs that were actually about

making stronger educational outcomes,

stronger agriculture output, stronger

manufacturing output, we could live in a

sustainable world, which by the way

wouldn't replace all the jobs faster

than we know how to retrain people.

Because when you race to AGI, you're

racing to displace millions of workers.

And we talk about UBI, but are we going

to have a global fund for every single

person of the 8 billion people on planet

Earth in all countries to pay for their

lifestyle after that wealth gets

concentrated?

When has a small group of people

concentrated all the wealth in the

economy and ever consciously

redistributed it to everybody else? When

has that happened in history?

>> Never.

Has it ever happened? Anyone ever just

willingly redistributed the wealth?

>> Not that I'm aware of. When Ed, one last

thing, what when Elon Musk says that the

Optimus Prime robot is a $1 trillion

market opportunity alone, what he means

is I am going to own the global labor

economy, meaning that people won't have

labor jobs.

China wants to become the global leader

in artificial intelligence by 2030. To

achieve this goal, Beijing is deploying

industrial policy tools across the full

AI technology stack from chips to

applications. And this expansion of AI

industrial policy leads to two

questions, which is what will they do

with this power and who will get there

first? This is an article I was reading

earlier. But to your point about Elon

and Tesla, they've changed their

company's mission. It used to be about

accelerating sustainable energy and they

changed it really last week when they

did the shareholder announcement which I

watched the full thing of to sustainable

abundance. And I it was again another

moment where I messaged both everybody

that works in my companies but also my

best friends and I said you've got to

watch this shareholder announcement. I

sent them sent them the condensed

version of it because not only was I

shocked by these humanoid robots that

were dancing on stage untethered because

their movements had become very humanike

and there was a bit of like uncanny

valley

>> watching these robots dance but broadly

the bigger thing was Elon talking about

there being up to 10 billion humanoid

robots and then talking about some of

the applications he said maybe we won't

need prisons because we could make a

humanoid robot follow you and make sure

you don't commit a crime again. He said

that in his incentive package which he's

just signed which will grant him up to a

trillion dollars

>> trillion dollar

>> remuneration. Part of that incentive

package incentivizes him to get I think

it's a million humanoid robots into

civilization that can do everything a

human can do but do it better. He said

the humanoid robots would be 10x better

than the best surgeon on earth. So we

wouldn't even need surgeons doing

operations. You wouldn't want a surgeon

to do an operation. And so when I think

about job loss in the context of

everything we've described. Doug

McMillan, the Walmart CEO, also said

that, you know, their company employs

2.1 million people worldwide, said every

single job we've got is going to change

because of this sort of combination of

humanoid robots, which people think are

far away, which is crazy. They're not

that far away. They just went on sale.

No, was it now? They're terrible,

>> but they're doing it to train them.

>> Yep.

>> In household situations. And Elon's now

saying production will start very, very

soon on humanoid robots um in America. I

don't know what when I hear this, I go,

"Okay, this thing's going to be smarter

than me, and it's going to be able to

it's built to navigate through the the

environment, pick things up, lift

things. You got the physical part,

you've got the intelligence part.

>> Yeah.

>> Where do we go? Well, I think people

also say, okay, but you know, 200 years

ago, 150 years ago, everybody was a

farmer and now only 2% of people are

farmers. Humans always find something

new to do. You know, we had the elevator

man and now we have automated elevators.

We had bank tellers, now we have

automated teller machines. So humans

will always just find something else to

do. But why is AI different than that?

>> Because it's intelligence.

>> Because it's general intelligence that

means that rather than a technology that

automates just bank tellers. Yeah.

>> This is automating all forms of human

cognitive labor, meaning everything that

a human mind can do.

>> So who's going to retrain faster? you

moving to that other kind of cognitive

labor or the AI that is trained on

everything and can multiply itself by

100 million times and it retraining how

to do that other kind of labor

>> in a world of humanoid robots where if

Elon's right and he's got a track record

of delivering at least to some degree

and there are millions tens of millions

or billions of humanoid robots what do

me and you do like what is it that's

human that is still valuable like do you

know what I'm saying I mean we can hug I

guess humanoid robots are going to be

less good at hugging people

>> I I think everywhere where people value

human connection and a human

relationship, those jobs will stay

because what we value in that work is

the human relationship, not the

performance of the work. And but that's

not to justify that we should just race

as fast as possible to disrupt a billion

jobs without a transition plan where no

one how are you going to put food on the

table for your family?

>> But these companies are competing

geographically again. So if I don't know

Walmart doesn't change its whole supply

chain, its warehousing, its uh how it's

doing its its factory work, its farm

work, its shop floors, staff work, then

they're going to have less profits and a

worse business and less opportunity to

grow than the company in Europe that

changes all of its backend

infrastructure to robots. So they're

going to be a huge dis corporate

disadvantage. So they have to

>> what AI represents is the

xenithification of that competitive

logic. The logic of if I don't do it,

I'll lose to the other guy that will.

>> Is that true?

>> That's what they believe.

>> Is that true for sort of companies in

America?

>> Well, just as you said, if Walmart

doesn't automate their their workforce

and their supply chains with robots and

all their competitors did, then Walmart

would get obsoleted. If the military

that doesn't create autonomous weapons

doesn't want to because I think that's

more ethical. But all the other

militaries do get autonomous weapons,

they're just going to lose.

>> Yeah.

>> If the student who's using ChhatPt to do

their homework for them is going to fall

behind by not doing that when all their

other classmates are using chatbt to

cheat, they're going to lose. But as

we're racing to automate all of this,

we're landing in a world where in the

case of the students, they didn't learn

anything. In the case of the military

weapons, we end up in crazy Terminator

like war scenarios that no one actually

wants. In the case of businesses, we end

up disrupting billions of jobs and

creating mass outrage and public riots

on the streets because people don't have

food on the table. And so much like

climate change or these kind of

collective action problems or the ozone

hole, we're kind of creating a badness

hole through the results of all these

individual competitive actions that are

supercharged by AI. It's interesting

because in all those examples you name

the people that are building those

companies, whether it's the companies

building the autonomous AI powered war

machinery, the first thing they'll say

is, "We currently have humans dying on

the battlefield. If you let me build

this autonomous drone or this autonomous

robot that's going to go fight in this

adversar's land, no humans are going to

die anymore." And I think this is a

broader point about how this technology

is framed, which is I can guarantee you

at least one positive outcome. So, and

you can't guarantee me the downside. You

can't.

>> But if that war escalates into

I mean, the reason that the Soviet Union

and the United States have never

directly fought each other is because

the belief is it would escalate into

World War II and nuclear escalation. If

China and the US were ever to be in

direct conflict, there's a concern that

you would escalate into nuclear

escalation. So it looks good in the

short term, but then what happens when

it cybernetically sort of everything

gets chain reactioned into everybody

escalating in ways that that causes many

more humans to die.

>> I think what I'm saying is the downside

appears to be philosophical whereas the

upside appears to be real and measurable

and tangible right now. But but how is

it if if the automated weapon gets fired

and

it leads to again a cascade of all these

other automated responses and then those

automated responses get these other

automated responses and these other

automated responses and then suddenly

the automated war planners start moving

the troops around and suddenly you've

you've created this sort of escalatory

loss of control spiral.

>> Yeah. And that that and then humans will

be involved in that and then if that

escalates you get nuclear weapons

pointed at each other.

>> Do you see what I'm feel this again is

is a

sort of a more philosophical domino

effect argument whereas when they're

building these technologies these drones

they're say with AI in them they're

saying look from day one we won't have

American lives lost. But it's a narrow

it's a narrow boundary analysis on

whereas this machine you could have put

a human at risk now there's no human at

risk because there's no human who's

firing the weapon it's a machine firing

the weapon that's a narrow boundary

analysis without looking at the holistic

effects on how it would actually happen

just like

>> which we're bad at

>> which is exactly what we have to get

good at AI is

>> AI is like a right of passage it's an

initiatory experience because if we run

the old logic of having a narrow

boundary analysis that this is going to

replace these jobs that people didn't

want to do. Sounds like a great plan,

but creating mass joblessness without a

transition plan where billion a billion

people won't be able to put food on the

table.

AI is forcing us to not make this

mistake of this narrow analysis. What is

what got us here is everybody racing for

the narrow optimization for GDP at the

cost of social mobility and and mass

sort of joblessness and people not being

able to get a home because we aggregated

all the wealth in one place. It was

optimizing for a narrow metric. What got

us to the social media problems is

everybody optimizing for a narrow metric

of eyeballs at the expense of democracy

and kids mental health and addiction and

loneliness and no one knowing it. You

know, being able to know anything. And

so AI is inviting us to step out of the

previous narrow blind spots that we have

come with and the previous competitive

logic that has been narrowly defined

that you can't keep running when it's

supercharged by AI.

So you could say I mean this is a very

this is an optimistic take is AI is

inviting us to be the wisest version of

ourselves and there's no definition of

wisdom in literally any wisdom tradition

that does not involve some kind of

restraint like think about all the

wisdom traditions do any of them say go

as fast as possible and think as

narrowly as possible.

The definition of wisdom is having a

more holistic picture. It's actually

acting with restraint and mindfulness

and care.

And so AI is asking us to be that

version of ourselves. And we can choose

not to be and then we end up in a bad

world or we can step into being what

it's asking us to be and recognize the

collective consequences that we can't

afford to not face. And I believe as

much as what we've talked about is

really hard that there is another path

if we can be cleareyed about the current

one ending in a place that people don't

want.

We will get into that path because I

really want to get practical and

specific about what I think we before we

started recording we talked about a

scenario where we sit here maybe in 10

years time and we say how we did manage

to grab hold of the steering wheel and

turn it. So I'd like to think through

that as well but just to close off on

this piece about the impact on jobs. It

does feel largely inevitable to me that

there's going to be a huge amount of job

loss and there is it does feel highly

inevitable to me because of the the

things going on with humanoid robots

with the advances towards AGI that

>> the the biggest industries in the world

won't be operated and run by humans. If

we even I mean you walked you you're at

my house at the moment so you walked

past the car in the driveway.

>> There's two electric cars in the

driveway that drive themselves. Yeah. I

think the biggest employer in the world

is driving. And I I don't know if you've

ever had any experience in a full

self-driving car, but it's very hard to

ever go back to driving again. And

again, in the shareholder letter that

was announced recently, within about he

said within one or two months, there

won't even be a steering wheel or pedals

in the car and I'll be able to text and

work while I'm driving. We're not going

to go back. I don't think we're going to

go back.

>> On certain things, we have crossed

certain thresholds and we're going to

automate those jobs and that work. Do

you think there will be immense job loss

>> irrespective? You think there will be?

>> Absolutely. We're already there that we

already saw Eric Bernholson and his

group at Stanford did the recent study

off of payroll data which is direct data

from employers that there's been a 13%

job loss in AI exposed jobs for young

entry-level college workers. So if

you're a college level worker, you just

graduated and you're doing something in

an AI exposed area, there's already been

a 13% job loss. And that data was

probably from May even though it got

published in August. And having spoken

to him recently, it looks like that

trend is already continuing. And so

we're already seeing this automate a lot

of the jobs and a lot of the work. And

you know, either an AI company is going

to if you're if you work in AI and

you're one of the top AI scientists,

then Mark Zuckerberg will give you a

billion dollar signing bonus, which is

what he offered to one of the AI people,

or you won't have a job. Uh,

let me that wasn't quite right. I didn't

say that the way that I wanted to. Um,

I was just trying to make the point that

>> No, I get the point.

>> Yeah. Um, I just want to like say that

for a moment. Um my my goal here was not

to um sound like we're just admiring how

cat catastrophic the problem is cuz I I

just know how easy it is to fall into

that trap.

>> And what I really care about is people

not feeling good about the current path

so that we're maximally motivated to

choose another path. Obviously there's a

bunch of AI. Some cats are out of the

bag, but the lions and super lions that

are yet to come have not yet been

released. And there is always choice

from where you are to which future you

want to go to from there. There are a

few sports that I make time for, no

matter where I am in the world. And one

of them is, of course, football. The

other is MMA, but watching that abroad

usually requires a VPN. I spend so much

time traveling. I've just spent the last

2 and 1/2 months traveling through Asia

and Europe and now back here in the

United States. And as I'm traveling,

there are so many different shows that I

want to watch on TV or on some streaming

websites. So when I was traveling

through Asia and I was in Koala Lumpur

one day, then the next day I was in Hong

Kong and the next day I was in

Indonesia. All of those countries had a

different streaming provider, a

different broadcaster. And so in most of

those countries, I had to rely on

ExpressVPN who are sponsor of this

podcast. Their tool is private and

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One of the big questions I've had on my

mind, I think it's in part cuz I saw

those humanoid robots and I I sent this

to my friends and we had a little

discussion in WhatsApp, is in such a

world, and I don't know whether you

you're interested in answering this, but

what what do what do we do? I was

actually pulled up at the gym the other

day with my girlfriend. We sat outside

cuz we were watching the shareholder

thing and we didn't want to go in yet.

And then we had the conversation which

is in a world of sustainable abundance

where the price of food and the price of

manufacturing things, the price of my

life generally drops and instead of

having a a cleaner or a housekeeper, I

have this robot that's and does all

these things for me. What do I end up

doing? What is worth pursuing at this

point? Because you say that, you know,

that the cat is out the bag as it

relates to job impact. It's already

happening. certain kinds of AI for

certain kinds of jobs and we can choose

still from here which way we want to go

but go on. Yeah.

>> And I'm just wondering in such a future

where you think about even yourself and

your family and your and your friends,

what are you going to be spending your

time doing in such a world of abundance?

If there was 10 billion

>> question are we going to get abundance

or are we going to get just jobs being

automated and then the question is still

who's going to pay for people's

livelihoods. So the math as I understand

it doesn't currently seem to work out

where everyone can get a stipend to pay

for their whole life and life quality

that as they currently know it and are a

handful of western or US-based AI

companies going to consciously

distribute that wealth to literally

everyone meaning including all the

countries around the world whose entire

economy was based on a job category that

got eliminated. So for example, places

like the Philippines where you know a

huge percent of the jobs are are

customer service jobs. If that got

automated away, are we going to have

open AI pay for all of the Philippines?

Do you think that people in the US are

going to prioritize that?

So then you end up with the problem of

you have law firms that are currently

not wanting to hire junior lawyers

because well the AI is way better than a

junior lawyer who just graduated from

law school. So you have two problems.

You have the law student that just put

in a ton of money and is in debt because

they just got a law degree that now they

can't get hired to pay off. And then you

have law firms whose longevity depends

on senior senior lawyers being trained

from being a junior lawyer to a senior

lawyer. What happens when you don't have

junior lawyers that are actually

learning on the job to become senior

lawyers? You just have this sort of

elite managerial class for each of these

domains.

>> So you lose intergenerational knowledge

transmission.

>> Interesting. And that creates a societal

weakening in the social fabric.

>> I was watching some podcasts over the

weekend with some successful

billionaires who are working in AI

talking about how they now feel that we

should forgive student loans. And I

think in part this is because of what's

happened in New York with was it

Mandani?

>> Yeah, Mandani. Yeah, Mani's been elected

and they're concerned that socialism is

on the rise because the entry level

junior people in the society are

suppressed under student debt, but also

now they're going to struggle to get

jobs, which means they're going to be

more socialist in their voting, which

means

>> a lot of people are going to lose power

that want to keep power.

>> Yep. Exactly. That's probably going to

happen.

>> Uh, okay. So their concern about

suddenly alleviating student debt is in

part because they're worried that

society will get more socialist when the

divide the divide increases

>> which is a version of UBI or just