After all of your conversations,

research,

before the book, during the book,

after the book, where do you land on the

spectrum of

let's just say

some other mark, but like Church of

Andreessen, techno-optimist, right?

>> [laughter]

>> And there are others who are more

exaggerated. Post AI in the near term,

we will live in a post-scarcity world of

superabundance, and everyone will get a

free car, and we'll be free to

crochet socks and play music and read

poetry all day, and

basically, we don't have to worry about

anything because superintelligence will

solve it all, right? There's that on one

end. And then there's the, you can

imagine, I don't want to go into a

belabored description of the doomers,

but you have the doomers who are like,

the end is nigh.

Here we go. It's

It's not It's not the second coming,

it's the Antichrist, and within short

order, we're going to be Mad Max.

Between those two, there's a lot, and I

suspect you land between those two.

But

where do you land

in terms of assessing the promises and

peril of AI and superintelligence as it

stands right now?

>> So, look, I think any reasonable person

should be both excited and a bit

frightened.

>> Mhm.

>> And, you know, that's just the nature of

it. It sounds contradictory, but

actually, that's the only rational

response. I think, you know, the

superabundance story

may turn out to be true on a kind of

longer view, let's say, 20, 30, 40

years.

>> Mhm.

>> The problem is that in the path to get

there, there's going to be a tremendous

amount of disruption.

And that's going to be politically quite

difficult to navigate. I think a useful

lens through which to view this question

is the China shock in trade.

>> Mhm.

>> So, in 2003 or thereabouts, you get this

enormous surge of Chinese

exports into the US, and people lose

their jobs in a very concentrated way.

Certain industries just get wiped out.

And for the first time in the history of

economic study of the effects of trade,

you actually see negative effects on

workers. Before that, it was kind of a

bit of a myth, right? Because people

adjust. They get displaced from one

thing, but they move to a new thing.

With the China shock, they didn't. But,

if you look at the size of the China

shock,

in a 12-year period between 1999 and

2011, the total number of jobs displaced

was 2 million,

which is actually a small number in a

huge labor market like the US, where

there's a lot of churn month to month

anyway. And yet the political reaction

against trade, against globalization in

terms of the swing towards

protectionism, frankly, in both

political parties,

was enormous. So, it shows you that a

small to medium shock to the labor

market creates an enormous political

consequence. And so, A 40 year eye with

artificial intelligence, you're going to

have a bigger shock. You're going to

have a bigger political reaction. We're

already seeing that in the polling

around AI in the last 2-3 months. And

so, [clears throat] I think the super

abundance thing, it may be true, but the

path to get there, we have to talk about

that as well. So, if that's that's my

sense on that side of the debate. I

think

on the doom side of the debate, I'll

give you my own personal journey on

this. I began by thinking, of course AI

is going to be smarter than us, right?

It already beats us at chess since the

1990s, at Go since 2016. Now, it can ace

the bar exam. It can do PhD level math,

all that stuff. Of course, it's smarter.

But, it doesn't have an incentive to

attack us, right? We are evolved as

human beings to pass on our DNA.

Therefore, we have to survive to do

that.

Machines don't have DNA. They don't want

to pass it on, and they don't want to

survive. So, they're not They have no

reason to attack us.

So, I wander around for like the first

year or two of this project feeling kind

of, you know, comfortable and happy.

And then one day I go visit Geoff

Hinton, the academic father of deep

learning, who lives in Toronto.

And I sit in his kitchen, and I debate

him on this because he's a doomer. I

say, "Look, Geoff,

why are you so depressed?"

And he says, "Okay,

here's a thought experiment. You have an

AI.

It's very powerful, but you're worried

that there's a Russian AI or a Chinese

AI that's going to come and attack your

AI.

Now, you, as a human, you're too slow

and dumb

to know when that attack is coming.

So, you're going to empower your own AI

to watch out for the attack,

and when the attack is coming, defend

yourself or maybe counterattack.

Whatever you do, make sure you survive.

Oh,

survive. There you have it. Now, are you

feeling comfortable, Sebastian?

Right? [snorts] You've just given the

machine a survival instinct. And I think

that's correct. These machines will be

smarter than us. They will want to

survive.

And they are also They can be deceptive.

They can obfuscate. They can go behind

your back, pretend they're doing one

thing then actually do another. All of

this has been shown in all the tests of

the models.

And so, we put those things together, I

think your probability of doom cannot be

zero. I mean, when Yann LeCun, the

former chief scientist of Meta, says

zero,

I think that's crazy.

If you just say nothing to see here,

you've got no right to be in the debate.

I don't think it's a high probability of

doom, but it's not zero.

>> Yeah, zero

does not seem defensible. Right? Because

there's the direct Skynet scenario,

something akin to that. And then there's

the indirect, which is enabling people

who might previously have had malevolent

intent but no capacity for

harm on a grand scale to create

biological weapons and things of this

type, right? So, I don't find the zero

very defensible.