“It’s gonna get better and better and better and then Kaboom we all lose that’s what’s gonna happen” — Max Tegmark
Intro the kind of thing people assume is if you develop an AGI that open AI if they’re the ones that do it for example they’re going to win but you’re saying no they’re everybody loses yeah it’s gonna get better and better and better and then Kaboom we all lose that’s what’s gonna happen when lose and win are defined in a metric of basically quality of life for human civilization and for Sam Altman both to be blunt my personal guess you know and people can quibble with this is that we’re just gonna they won’t be any humans that’s it that’s what I mean by lose you know if you if we can see in history History once you have some species or some group of people who aren’t needed anymore it doesn’t usually work out so well for them right yeah there were a lot of horses for that were used for traffic in Boston and then the car got invented and most of them got you know well we don’t need to go there and uh if you look at them humans you know right now we why did the labor movement succeed and after the Industrial Revolution because it was needed even though we had a lot of mallocs and there was child labor and so on you know the company still needed to have workers and that’s why strikes had power and so on if we get to the point where most Human Rights humans aren’t needed anymore I think it’s like it’s quite naive to think that they’re going to still be treated well you know we say that yeah yeah um everybody’s equal and the government will always will always protect them but if you look in practice groups that are very disenfranchised and don’t have any actual power it usually gets screwed and uh now in in the beginning so Industrial Revolution we automated away muscle work but that got went worked out pretty well eventually because we educated ourselves and started working with our brains instead and got usually more interesting better paid jobs but now we’re beginning to replace brain work so we replaced a lot of boring Boring Jobs stuff like we got the pocket calculator so you don’t have people adding multiplying numbers anymore at work fine there were better jobs they could get but now gpt4 you know and the stable diffusion and techniques like this they’re really beginning to blow away some real some jobs that people really loved having it was a heartbreaking article just post just yesterday on social media I saw about this guy who who was doing 3D modeling for gaming and if and all of a sudden now they got this new software he just give says prompts and he feels his whole job that he loved it’s lost its meaning you know and uh I asked the gpt4 to rewrite Twinkle Twinkle Little Star in the style of Shakespeare I couldn’t have done such a good job it was really impressive you’ve seen a lot of the Arts coming out here right so I’m all for automating away the dangerous jobs and the boring jobs but I think um you hear a lot some arguments which are too glib sometimes people say well that’s all that’s going to happen we’re getting rid of the boring boring uh tedious dangerous jobs it’s just not true there are a lot of really interesting jobs that are being taken away now journalism is getting going to get crushed uh coding is going to get crushed I predict uh the job market for programmers salaries are going to start dropping you know if you said you can code five times faster you know then you need five times fewer programmers maybe there will be more output also but you’ll still end up using fewer program needing fewer programmers than today and I love coding you know I I think it’s super cool um so we we need to stop and ask Humanity for Humanity ourselves why again are we doing this as humans like I feel that AI should be built by Humanity for Humanity and let’s not forget that it shouldn’t be by malloc for molok or what it really is now is kind of by Humanity for molok which doesn’t make any sense it’s for us that we’re doing it and and um it would make a lot more sense if we build develop figure out gradually Automating jobs safely how to make all this Tech and then we think about what are the kind of jobs that people really don’t want to have you know and automate them all away and then we ask what are the jobs that people really find meaning in like maybe taking care of children in the daycare center maybe doing art etc etc and and even if it were possible to automate that away but we don’t need to do that right we built these machines well it’s possible that we ReDiscover redefine or ReDiscover what are the jobs that give us meetings yeah for me the thing it is really sad like I half the time I’m excited half the time I’m uh crying as I’m as I’m generating code because I kind of love programming it’s uh it’s the Act of Creation you you have an idea you design it and then you bring it to life and it does something especially if there’s some intelligence that it does something it doesn’t even have to have intelligence printing hello world on screen you you you made a little machine and it it comes to life yeah and uh there’s a bunch of tricks you learn along the way because you’ve been doing it for for many many years and then for to see AI be able to generate all the tricks you thought were special yeah um I don’t know it’s very uh it um it’s it’s scary it’s almost painful like a loss uh loss of Innocence maybe like yeah maybe when I was younger uh I remember before I learned that sugar is bad for you you should be on a diet I remember I enjoyed candy deeply in a way I just can’t anymore that I know is bad for me I enjoyed it unapologetically fully just intensely and I just have I lost that now I feel like a little bit of that is lost for me with program or being lost with programming similar as it is for uh the the 3D modeler no longer being able to really enjoy the art of modeling uh 3D things for gaming I don’t know I don’t know what to make sense of that maybe I would ReDiscover that the true magic of what it means to be human is connecting with other humans to have conversations like this I don’t know to uh to have sex to have to eat food to really intensify the value from conscious experiences versus like creating other stuff you’re pitching the rebranding again from homosapiens to homo sentences but the meaningful experiences and just to inject some optimism in this here so we don’t sound like a bunch of gloomers you know we can We can have our cake totally have our cake and eat it you hear a lot of totally claims that we can’t afford having more teachers yeah have to cut the number of nurses you know that’s just nonsense obviously with anything even quite far short of AGI we can dramatically improve grow the GDP and produce this wealth of goods and services it’s very easy to create a world where everybody is better off than today including the richest people can be better off as well right it’s not a zero-sum game you know technology again you can have two countries like Sweden and Denmark had all these ridiculous Wars Century after century and uh sometimes that Sweden got a little better off because it got a little bit bigger and then Denmark got a little bit better off because we can go a little A total win for everyone bit smaller and and but then we then technology came along and we both got just dramatically wealthier without taking away from anyone else it was just a total win for everyone and the AI can do that on steroids if you can build safe AGI if you can build super intelligence yeah basically all the limitations that cause harm today can be complete be completely eliminated right it’s a wonderful you talk possibility in this this is not sci-fi this is something which is clearly possible according to laws of physics and I we can talk about ways of making it safe also um but unfortunately that’ll only happen if we steer in that direction that’s absolutely not the default outcome that’s why income inequality keeps going up that’s why the life expectancy in the US has been going down now I think it’s four years in a row I was just read a heartbreaking study from CDC about how something like one-third of all teenage girls in the US have been thinking about suicide you know like those are steps and they’re totally the wrong direction and and it’s important to keep our eyes on the prize here that we can we have the power now for the first time in the history of our species to harness artificial intelligence to help us really flourish and help bring out the best in our Humanity rather than the worst of it to help us have really fulfilling experiences that feel truly meaningful and you and I shouldn’t sit here and dictate the future Generations what they will be let them figure it out but let’s give them a chance to live and and not foreclose all these possibilities for them by just messing things up right