The conversation explores the transformative impact of AI and technological advancement over the past decade, emphasizing how quickly these changes have integrated into daily life. While AI promises vast economic and societal benefits—such as eradicating poverty and automating labor—the shift raises deep philosophical questions about human purpose, meaning, and identity. With basic needs like food and housing no longer tied to work, society must confront how people will find fulfillment in a world of abundance. The current education system, designed to produce factory workers, will need radical reform to foster curiosity, creativity, and personal growth. There is a risk that without purpose, individuals may fall into passive existence or be drawn to highly stimulating virtual environments, which could replace real-world engagement. The conversation also touches on the potential evolution of human biology—such as extended lifespans, enhanced intelligence, and even cognitive transformation—through medical and genetic advancements. These changes may lead to a future where human life is no longer defined by struggle or labor, but by deeper self-exploration and inner fulfillment. Ultimately, the trajectory suggests humanity may evolve beyond its current biological form, moving toward a more intelligent, flexible, and possibly interconnected existence. This evolution, while promising, requires careful cultural and ethical guidance to preserve the values of love, struggle, and meaning that define the human experience.
[MUSIC] So since the last time we talked we spent a lot of time where you were trying to explain to me simulation theory and why the probability of simulation theory is more likely than it not being a simulation? Yeah, it was, what, five years ago? I think it was six, five, six, seven, seven, seven, seven, seven. I mean, a lot of things happened in the world since then. Yes, yes, a lot of things. I mean, for example, back then, I think we did we even talk about AI? It probably came up a bit, but it wasn't this thing looming over civilization, which is really kind of fascinating when you think about the fact that it's only been six years and six years, and in six years, what a massive jump in some new technology in our life. Sort of like the internet where it crept up on us, we just accepted that it's a thing, but that this thing has gotten massively entangled in every aspect of society and every aspect of people's lives in a very short period of time. Yeah, I mean, things are like so much is happening now that is kind of a full-time job just to monitor the situation. Yeah. And one of the things that you're talking about is the positive aspects of it, right? You're talking about that this is probably going to be a net good for humanity. Hopefully. I mean, I think I just take both cases seriously, sort of the risk side and the big unlock if we get things right. I feel like we have the potential, like we're on a white water raft, we have the potential to get to our destination, but we also have the potential to flip over and try to figure out how to get the shore in freezing cold water and sort of rebuild. Yeah, yeah. That seems about right. Yeah, and it seems like it's kind of speeding up a bit as well, right? If you are sort of in this field, there's like every few weeks, there's a new model being released or something. Yes. I guess it's like, if you imagine, I guess, commentating some fight, right? That's been recorded and you're supposed to do the voiceover. The first round is like normal speed. And then the second round is 2x. And then the third one for it. And then it's just like a word of legs and arms. That's a great way to describe it. Yeah, it's just so strange how quickly it's stuck up on us and that there's two narratives that we hear. The one narrative is we're in real trouble, and that this thing is going to take over every aspect of society and it's essentially going to be a superior life force, a superior intellect that exists amongst us that we created, and we don't think that's wise. And then there's the other side that is saying things like what Elon says. We're saying we're going to have universal high income. It's going to be so much prosperity that no one's ever going to have to toil again. There'll be no more third world countries. There'll be no more poverty. We can eradicate poverty with the resources that we have on Earth. And we can change what it means to have to work. Just to provide yourself with food and housing. That's all going to be easy and free. And then everything else is going to be you have to find a purpose in your life. That my problem is, and I love Elon. But the people who have that perspective are all making money off AI. They are all invested like heavily, Mark Andreessen. All these people that have this rosy view of it, they're all invested heavily into it. So when someone like you, who's not necessarily in that camp, that is more of a true objective analyst of what's going on, you have a positive aspect or a positive viewpoint of it, I get a little more excited. Yeah, well, I mean, the truth is we don't know how it goes. Right, how it goes. So, I mean, I think there are these scenarios where we unlock this, you know, enormous boost, both to economic productivity, but then, you know, across medicine and entertainment, environment, travel, all kinds of things. And like a tsunami of wealth just kind of flows through and lifts all boats. And then the idea of human work becomes an anachronism, and where you have machines that can do everything that we can do physically and mentally, and do it much better and cheaper. And so I think in those scenarios where this really works, the transformation is a lot deeper. It means that kind of layers to the onions are like the most superficial level as well. They automate your jobs and what are people going to do for their work? Well, that comes a little bit deeper. First, like the most superficial level is people just wonder where will I get the job if the work places me. And then the superficial level of that conversation I think is, well, you need to retrain workers so they can work in other fields, and maybe there needs to be, I don't know, employment insurance, whilst they are being retrained or something like that. But once you think through where this ultimate leads, it's not just a few jobs, I think, but it's really everything that humans can do to a good approximation. Maybe the exception being where the consumer has a direct preference that the particular product or service be done by human, like priest, prostitute, and politician. And so those might survive. Well, politician, hopefully not. Hopefully AI can handle that all without any corruption. Yeah, but somebody's going to take credit for it. This is true, encode it. Yeah. And so then you get to these more profound questions, I think, about meaning and purpose and what does a human life look like? Right. At technological maturity. Right. Also, what is experience? Does experience have to be measurable? Do you have to touch it? Do you have to measure it in a way? Or is virtual experience still experience? If you have a very full and enjoyable and fulfilling virtual life, is that enough? Do you have to do everything in the material world? Or can you find happiness in a virtual world that doesn't currently exist? But we could clearly see the technology if it expands. There's going to be the possibility of experiencing a matrix type reality. Yeah, I think I see where you're going. Yeah, but yeah, I mean, I think different strokes for different folks. If you imagine a world where presumably these virtual worlds will be very rich and deep and fascinating, but some people might just like the idea of, you know, climbing the real Mount Everest, rather than, you know, being an. Most certainly. But however, there could come a time where people are locked out of regular reality. Like this is worst case scenario with AI, is that you have your needs taken care of, but there is no purpose. There's nothing to do. There's nothing to do because AI is taken care of all aspects of society. Other than recreation, there's nothing to do. And then this one recreation comes along that's not reality, but it's way more fulfilling and exciting than any other aspect of reality. And, you know, an example that would just be in a very minor way, your phone provides you with that sort of an escape. And it's not even that thrilling, and yet it's massively addictive. Your phone, people are on their phones six hours a day. If you, if we come up with a virtual reality that's way more exciting than regular reality, everyone's going to hop on in. Yeah, I mean, I think to some extent this will maybe be the case, whether you go the virtual path or the physical path. I mean, you could imagine a future where there are like resources and people are sort of lying in beach chairs, sleeping drinks all day long, and like that's also a kind of checking out, right? Yeah, well that, yeah, that's not fulfilling. You know, the thing about a virtual reality is you don't have to even live within our physics. I mean, you can fly. You can do anything. It's a larger space of possibilities. But either way, it could be like a passive existence in physical reality where you're like launching at the beach. Or it could be like a video game. Or in video games, like you could have like a really intense, every training, every fiber to try to succeed in this virtual environment. Or like one where you're just kind of floating on some cloud in a drug-like state. But I don't think people are going to be interested in that, because just the way the human mind works. Like what kind of video games are people attracted to? Because a video game is essentially approximate. It's an approximation of that. You're just watching it on a screen, but you're sort of forgetting the fact that you're watching on a screen and just concentrating on this 3D reality that you're running through with a machine gun or whatever you're doing, right? That's what people are interested in. They're not interested in these games where you just like float over the earth and like fly and just eat bananas. No, they're interested in thrilling things. And if that gets provided in a virtual way, the amount of people that are going to just say this is better than regular boring life or where a slave to a computer.
are both kind. Okay, we're back. Where were we? Oh, yeah, I was just saying that there are also these computer games that like provide a more passive experience. Yeah. You're like not really doing much and it's more kind of zoning out. But most people aren't interested in those. Most people are interested in Call of Duty. They're interested in these wild first-person shooters where you're running down hallways and everything's exciting and thrilling. Some sci-fi game or, you know, have life, something like that. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think there are, like, some personality differences in what path you would take there. But either way, I think a lot of the choices that people would make, currently, depend on what they are sort of designed to respond to by feeling good about it. So like, if you enjoy one thing, you choose to start, if you enjoy another, now in this condition of technological maturity, if we imagine sort of a future civilization that has developed all possible technologies to their maximum. Yeah. Then amongst the affordances, amongst the things they could do is like, they wouldn't just have control over the external environment, things around them, but also their own biology and brains. So if you were one of these people, and maybe right now the only way you get enjoyment is by getting like crazy drunk or doing sort of things you don't really approve of, maybe, but that's actually what sort of lights your fire. You could, you might be redesigning yourself to take the same kind of pleasure, but in some kind of contemplating the beauty of the universe or like appreciating the goodness in the heart of others, or like some more sort of noble aspiration, or like a solving abstract mathematics rather than, you know, playing first person shooters. You would have a choice like whether you would get your your thrills from from one kind of activity or the other. Yeah, which brings us to the question, like what does it mean to be human? Like for people finding beauty and joy in, you know, interesting and fascinating things and, you know, how to be a better person and all the different aspects of human life that we think about when we think about people and we think about noble aspects of humanity, but doesn't that have to exist in conjunction with the worst aspects of society for us to appreciate it? It seems like this is a part of the human condition is that we have to have crime so that we can appreciate peace. We have to have war so we can appreciate peace. We have to have hate so we can appreciate love and we're never without one or the other. They're always both together in constant conflict and we're always nobly hoping that the good wins out over the bad and this is part of the struggle of being a human being. And if we just completely eliminate that struggle, we're going to have to find some, we're going to have to be a different thing because what we are is very strange territorial primate and who's endlessly curious. And this territorial primate is moving in a certain direction and that direction seems to be a better society. It seems to be over time. If you look at statistics from thousands of years ago to today, there's less violence, there's better medicine, there's better education, it's moving in a better and better and better direction. But it's in a struggle. That's part of why it moves. If all of a sudden there's no struggle and everyone is this wonderful enlightened being like what are we? Because we're going to be a different thing than what we are right now. And if you love music and if you love art and if you love novels and all these different things that come out of the human condition, those things come out of struggle. Those things come out of confusion and pain and heartbreak and love and joy and all that stuff all piled up together. Without that, like what are we? And so if we are moving in this direction technologically and we're not moving as fast biologically, do we merge? Because that seems to be what I think. I think that if this thing goes the way it continues to go, the bottleneck is going to be human biology. Yeah, yeah. There is a kind of paradox embedded in our efforts to make progress. So like there are all these kind of scientists and people working to develop better technologies and throughout the economy, you know, in some company maybe you try to figure out how to make some process a little bit more efficient. So you can serve customers better and all of this is designed to solve problems, right? Like if you sort of extrapolate that to its logical endpoint, right? You would imagine we would have perfect technology that can do everything, solve all the problems, like presumably with AI and automation. But then you end up in this condition where there is kind of nothing left for us to do, you might think. And so although it looks like we have these strong reasons to push forward in this direction, if you actually look at the end point, if we succeeded to many people, it will look kind of unpalatable and like this kind of future where, you know, all the problems are solved. And nevertheless, that does seem to be, you know, the direction that we are headed in, probably the direction that we should be headed in. Yeah, would that be a better goal if there was zero murder, zero violence, zero crime, zero lying, zero corruption, and human beings all worked in coordination with each other, just like in a sense of unique sinking and harmony. Right. That would be way better. But it does, like if you actually stare at that situation, it does have these slightly unpalatable, yeah, because quality, because it might think it looks kind of bland, right? If it's not necessarily though, it's just, it looks bland if you think about what we're experiencing now, like all the excitement and the weirdness of uncertainty and of not knowing, you know, and also the negative aspects of our life in conjunction with the positive aspects of our lives, we contrast the two of them and you really appreciate good people after around a bunch of fucking assholes. You know, if that doesn't, but doesn't have to be that way. This is just what we are dealing with. This is my position on work too, because everybody in their head is like, what happens when AI takes all the jobs? And I'm like, do we have to have a fucking job? Isn't that a human invention? Like, why do you have to have a job? It seems crazy that our main focus is on housing and food, and like most people are basically just working for that. Most people that are, most people that are struggling, check to check, basically housing and food is their daily labor. If that's removed, wouldn't enough people figure out what to do with their time? Yeah, yeah, I think so, that, like, yeah, there will be some transition and discomfort and change, but ultimately that is, like, yeah, I mean, I think it's like, so slavery is really bad, right? Like, which labor is sort of, you know, slavery light, in a sense? You have to sell a third of your waking day just to get money to pay for necessities. And the people that are trying to make the most money make the conditions for their employees as shitty as possible because it costs the least amount. They don't think about it, like, listen, maybe we make less money, but we have an awesome experience for everybody that works there. Nobody thinks like that. They all think like we have to make the most money because we have shareholders and we have a responsibility and these people need to make more money every quarter. So, yeah, although sometimes you do need to compete for talent. That's true too, but not, but only the top talent. That's why the CEOs get all the bread and all the people on the assembly line get fucked. Yeah, some plays get treated well, right? What would you say? Jamie is a different kind of employee. Jamie is literally the co, I mean, he's the co person on the show. Yeah, yeah. That's different, but you know, some dude who's out there, you know, stocking boxes for Amazon, that's different. Yeah. Being the CEO. Yeah, so I mean, I think like ultimately that would be a huge liberation and kind of restore dignity. Like you should be in control of your own time. It's kind of almost the most, like, aside from your own body, like your own time, your own attention. And we have to teach people discipline. They have to, this the thing is like if you give people the opportunity to just do nothing, we do. You know, we're primates. We'll find a way to this. We're genetically sort of designed to conserve resources. You don't want to overuse resources for no reason, do a bunch of shit because you won't survive. You don't have enough food. So we're sort of designed to like know how to be lazy. And so we're going to have to find things that give us purpose or or we'll get depressed. This episode is brought to you by visible. It's officially summer folks and boy, what a summer we are having. It feels like one of those good old fashioned summers we just want to enjoy every moment and keep up with the action. Your best companion this summer. Visible wireless. Visible gives you unlimited 5G data and unlimited hotspot powered by Verizon for just $25 a month. So you can make this the summer of fun and savings. Visible is more than just a wireless plan. It's unlimited wireless designed to always keep you connected with no contract to tie you down. Switch today at visible.com plan start at $25 a month or get our premium visible plus pro plan and save $10 on your first month when you use promo code Rogan. Terms apply see visible.com for plan features and network management details. Yeah. I mean, so just to be the
traditional idea like a British aristocracy like that you wouldn't have to work for a living it was kind of an unfortunate necessity for many people that they had to work for their daily bread right but the ideal way of being human was that you just had money and then you spent your time doing other things like you know maybe you were involved in politics or maybe you had like an art collection or you did your gardening or entertained friends that's the best aspect of it so but when you think about British aristocracy don't you think about fuck ups I do I think about guys that are just drunk they drive their Ferrari into a lake and they accidentally drown their friend and then they pay off the cops and they get away with it there's that's what I think well yeah there's that but there were also these kind of I don't know amateur scientists or eccentric so how they're weird thing and it's yes so I guess it brings out like the more freedoms of what it has the more that can reveal their true nature like well it also depends on how they're raised right yeah who who are their parents what what values did they instilling them when they were young did they explain the value of hard work that it's actually good for you and then if you just find something you really want to do and you concentrate on it and really work hard at it it's actually very fulfilling yeah so you could about it for example the education system in in this world where we no longer need to work like right presumably it would need to be redesigned from from from some scratch basically because right now it's a kind of machine right so you take children coming in kind of on a conveyor belt yeah and then some processing is done like say that their desk carries this assignment here's a grid and then they come out with a quality label attached yeah right and then they are meant to be productive workers that you could put in an office and they will so this it kind of is an unfortunate fact about the current condition that I mean the world needs a lot of these office workers that can do all these tasks in the economy so like it's we have to have until it doesn't until it doesn't and at that point it would be absurd to keep doing this right then you could imagine changing education so that it would be much more about like how can you learn to live well a life of leisure like you madam you were right like cultivating like you know the art of conversation appreciation for art and music yeah hobbies physical wellness like nature the ability to set your own goals and take your own initiatives to you know to develop true friendships with people like these are things are not taught in school but you could have been that being the curriculum like spirituality like all kinds of sure things that would then equip people to sort of use their freedom their wealth their free time for you know some kind of you know actually meaningful and beautiful activities for sure for for sure preemptively we should be kind of teaching people like that now like if young people are coming up now the world that they're if you're in first grade right now 12 years from now when you're graduating from high school like the world is a totally different place and this idea that being a productive worker who could sit still for eight hours a day is that's the the best way we should teach kids that seems crazy if we're really like seeing the world or you're describing and then most people seem to think is oncoming yeah I guess the the timeline is a little bit uncertain so you don't want to wrap in a situation right where you sort of now you find yourself you're 20 years old it's time to go out in the world you have no skills the AI revolution hasn't yet quite happened it's kind of isn't that a liberal arts degree anyway yeah there's a lot of silly degrees that people get right now that are useless anyway and they spend a tremendous amount of time working on getting it and then when they get it out there's no jobs for that degree yeah so they were a little bit too early maybe and hoping maybe or you know there's also traps there's there's there's things that you can get really excited about and do like if you want to play professional bowling you want to bowl professionally look well the amount of money you're going to make is very limited because the best bowler in the world like what is the best professional bowler in the world make let's guess I say I didn't know that one thousand dollars yes the professional board we send new no a guy always friends with a guy Tommy got a camp remember his last name do you remember his last name Jamie he was a professional bowler but he used to come to the comedy store and hang out really nice guy and love comedy and I don't mind I don't like to be the very best one makes a pretty decent living and I like the third best like it's just I bet barely I bet the best guy probably makes maybe a hundred grand or 200 grand at the most and that means like the 30th guy in the world is fucked yeah they're you have to have another job to pursue this well but then in this what does you make oh 200 K 400 K in big season 450 including prize money and sponsorships but then like what the EJ Tucket made 430 fuck yeah EJ EJ Tacket made 437,540 dollars for the 2025 season with several others between 190 K and 270 K and prize money alone top tier so the top tier guys make a good living but how many guys are there you know you know I'm saying it's probably like a very thin sort of peak so if you choose to go into bowling it's not like choosing to go into you know there's a lot of other jobs like even if you're going to be a basketball player they're they're making a lot of money you know if you're a really good basketball player and you pursue that like you could get very very rich but how many of them get emotional yeah but then like no so maybe maybe the the manufacturer would kind of drop out of the picture yes and it would just be what you're interested in and then maybe even it would I mean and the opportunities are endless and what other people are interested in to some extent because like I think part of what people are competing for is also prestige and yes that would be a thing right like status would be more important so like who's the best at this thing like like a bunch of friends who play golf like Jamie plays golf all the time golfers are all like comparing each other scores and they're all they they're playing they're competing in this game and that they think about that more than they think about work like people who love golf they fucking hate work like I used to say that about comedy back when I first started one of things that I noticed is the guys who really got into golf their careers kind of stalled because they were more excited about playing golf than they were about riding jokes and going on the road I was like okay so if the average person doesn't need food and housing anymore from labor if that's gone and now you just get it and so now you could just go do things we just have to teach people to be excited about stuff we have to teach people the value of curiosity and finding things that are interesting to you and then the value of just education for this sake of learning things because it's interesting just just pure satisfaction of curiosity which is a beautiful thing like that would be great for everybody if we instead of learning things because your teacher tells you you have to learn it well there's always going to be people that just naturally gravitate towards mathematics and they're really fascinated by mathematics and there's always going to be people that are just naturally gravitating towards history they're like how did we get here what is this how did this start who wrote that who's the first guy to figure that out and that that's you're going to naturally go towards that and just be educated for the sake of satisfying your curiosity and maybe we'll have a more balanced society because people will actually be able to just pursue their interests but we have to teach them to do it that's what I think is going to be really important about young people in the future teach them to actually pursue their curiosity rather than just squash any desires they have for novelty and for interesting things and just be able to work all day doing something you hate because that's what it means to be an adult yeah and I think like cultivating that would be like the way forward in this case right and seems very possible it's doable like we know curious people yeah yeah and at least it's some extent now I think there's probably also some differences in how different folks are wired like some people that board very easily others find everything fascinating yes so people are like just naturally depressed or have low mood others are sort of evolving yeah but those people that are naturally depressed how much with their life change if they were coached at a very early age the value of exercise and if they started running if they started doing yoga and they started feeling much better and they weren't naturally depressed anymore and then you change their diet and you start adding in vitamins and nutrients and stop giving them processed foods and all of a sudden they feel better because the concept even of depression like what does that mean well it's it's very so wildly and when you're talking about people that aren't taking care of their bodies and that's not thought of as a primary factor in why depression exists in the first place well this is a very unscientific approach then because we know that has a profound impact on human beings so we're pretending that there's like this one size fit all no I think that should be also a part of teaching people how to be a human being chase your curiosity but also this is why you're not feeling well and that if you just develop this ability to get some momentum going and just show up at that yoga class every day you'll feel way better yeah and you don't have to take a pill yeah no I think yeah many could be a lot improved yes they were taught to sort of take care of their basic physiology and everyone can be improved oh 100% of them can be improved it's a part of being a human being yeah I mean I don't know I think there is also some people who might just have you know some you know imbalance of some neurotransmitter because of some genetic integrity that's why maybe they don't even have the energy to engage in these activities that would make them feel better
But then I think that would be much better medicines for helping that's where I'll come in. Let's go. Give them some out of all. Well get them fired up. Get them start running. I'm kidding, but but what we're saying is all doable. We're not asking people to breathe underwater. Right. We're you're we're saying is that there are people on earth that live like that and this idea that living just for a paycheck so that you can cover your food. And your housing, which we've always thought of as being just an undeniable part of being a person, an adult. This is what you have to do. You have to pay for your food, pay for your housing. But if we we do get to a point where the structure of society is now run by hyper intelligent artificial intelligence. You would wouldn't need most jobs that people have to do that suck. And in order to get our society to this point, if you wanted an iPhone, you needed some people that were in a factory somewhere putting it all together. You needed someone who's designing it. You needed someone who's sitting there in the office trying to figure out how to market it. You needed all those jobs. But when we don't need all those jobs anymore, things are going to be very interesting. And that that's what I'm saying we need to become a different thing. It's kind of true and kind of not. You can be a human being and live in that world. But we're going to have to re-educate people how to be a human being. Our education system, specifically in this country, is just designed to make factory workers. Specifically, there's a real history of it. We know why they made it this way. They made it this way and they got people in really early so they could get people set up for jobs. They just want people to work. We are currently ill-suited for really thriving in an environment of abundance and for enjoying life. I mean both at the biological timescales and during the life span of a single individual, there are all these pressures, necessities that kind of force us to become a certain type. We talked about the education system, training people to be the kinds who can sit at the desk all day long and perform tasks. Bolognically, we've evolved drives to be lazy to conserve energy, to eat as much as we can. And now in the modern environment where there are fridges everywhere, it causes problems metabolically. And in terms of enjoying life, for many people there is this hedonic treadmill. So you achieve something, some improvement, there is a spike of happiness and then you sort of go back to baseline very quickly. You start to take for granted all the blessings of life, which makes it very difficult to actually achieve a state of permanent happiness and felicity. And it's kind of been necessary because we needed to be this motivation to keep striving for the next thing. Now once you've actually achieved all the things, then maybe that becomes a kind of dysfunctional. Like why keep wanting to strive for the next thing if all the things have already been achieved, at least in a certain domain. And so I think as we move deeper into this hypothesized future, where we get all these medical technologies, then at some point probably some transformation of human nature would have to go along with that. First, maybe cultural changes to sort of equip people for a life of leisure. And then ultimately maybe more profound changes to our very biology. And so that even if you solve aging and you can now live for thousands of years, maybe the way our memory work is not really set up for the maybe we would just go stale after 200 years with our current brains, like we just get stuck in a rot. We don't know because we haven't lived for 200 years, but that could easily turn out to be the case with the human. So then maybe at that point you would need to sort of do something to sort of add more cognitive resources, more flexibility to sort of psychedelic research or something to sort of keep the flexibility going for longer periods of time. I'm glad you set a psychedelic reset because it would be very funny if the main tools that we have for navigating this are all illegal because I think they might be and specifically with psilocybin and DMT and probably I began as well. Like if we wanted chemical tools to navigate a new reality, those are probably the best ones that we have available and they're all illegal. I think you're right. I think if we're going to be able to navigate this correctly, we have to kind of change the way we interact with each other, what it means to be a person. But I wonder how much of the conflict that we have is a direct result of this inherent struggle that so many people have. And I mean, there's a direct correlation between extreme poverty and extreme crime, you know, specifically in this country, if you look at the areas of extreme poverty in this country, there are also the areas with extreme crime. And I wonder how much of that would be completely alleviated with a complete lack of poverty. I mean, we've always assumed that if you're going to have a functioning society that you're going to have slums, why? Like why? They don't serve any function. It's not a good thing. Well, well, it's because some people are always going to be making bad decisions and some people are always going to be going down the wrong road and crime and this and that. Right, but there's still just humans and some humans don't do that. So wouldn't it be better to figure out a way to not have humans ever do that anymore? And it seems like a way to, there seems like a way to do that. It's again, not asking people to breathe underwater, or just we're trying to figure out why to some people never engage in crime, why to some people live these really fulfilling and interesting lives, probably because they were exposed to it when they were really young. Probably because they weren't exposed to like very bad environments and very bad crime and very bad poverty. And how much of that would change if there was no more poverty? It sounds like such a little fairy tale child like, oh, one day we'll have no poverty, but that's doable. Everyone is alive, right? Okay, that's alive right now is not starving to death. That means we figured out a way to at least the very least get you resources so you could feed yourself, right? No matter how dysfunctional things are, all that has to do is you get ramped up a few steps and now you have no one ever worried about being fed, no one ever worrying about not having a place to sleep. And then you have to find purpose, but it seems like there's a lot of people that find purpose without having a financial price tag attached to it, just by what we're talking about with golf, or you could be really into writing books. You could write books all day long and people are always going to want human-created fiction. People are always going to be interested in the way other people think about things. You'll find there's plenty of things to do. There's plenty of games to play and plenty of skills to learn. The idea that the only reason why we work is to eat and to not get rained on seems nuts. Yeah, it is I guess to some extent an open question to what extent people will always want to read human fiction or to prefer the human generated outputs. It might be just because current AI generated writing is kind of lacking in various ways. It's often sloping boring. But if it became really good, then maybe it would just be much more fun to a movie made by an AI. It might just be so much better and richer, and the lighting is perfect, and the dialogue is sharp, and it's more funny and deep. And then you go and watch this human-produced thing, and most people don't go and watch film school students productions. Right, but then there's that movie obsession. Wasn't that movie made very inexpensively? And it's a huge hit, right? That's part of the thrill of it. Is it this guy who was a YouTuber who created this film, and now this movie is a giant hit, and everybody's super excited about it. Now that same movie was made by AI, I wonder if it would have that impact because it doesn't have the human connection. So that's possible that we keep getting interested in these things because we sort of are really entangled with the human world, much more than we are with the world of AI's. And I mean, for the same reason, you might be more interested in if your brother or friends did something, you might think, "Oh, this is interesting. I want to check that out." Of course, it was from random dude who made something slightly better. It doesn't mean. Right, when you go to see your nephew play baseball, you wouldn't really go see little kids' baseball. No, no, no. When your nephew gets on first base, like, "Wait a go, Bobby!" So I think these kind of social entanglements that we have will be a big part of what gives structure to lives in this condition where the external constraints are removed. I think that there is a great value for the human mind for whatever reason in getting better at things and learning things. And I think that if we could instill that in people at a young age, I think it would be fairly easy to get people to pursue that path. But we have to completely revamp our education system, which should have been done a long time ago anyway. Anyway, the idea of having un-enthusiastic, un-underpaid people
Being any percentage of what children encounter for most of the day, when they're in their most form of the period, is insane. It should be a rich, exciting, enthusiastic journey and how to be a better person and how it's exciting to learn things and how it's exciting to get better at things and about how anybody can get better at things. I mean, I hated every day of school here. I hated it. I didn't even know that I was interested in learning anything until I got out of school. The thing for me, I only discovered, I also hated books and everything like that for my first 15 years of life because I associated that with school. That was the kind of school thing, so it's only then randomly one day I happened to walk into the local library for no reason and pulled out the book here and there and then I discovered that there was this whole world of science and idea and literature and all of that, like very different from what we were doing in school and then that kind of opened the gates for me to do. That's what a head start you would have had if you had a different kind of education with super enthusiastic people who really love teaching children are really good at it and that we reward them and that it becomes a very prestigious position to be in rather than what it is now. If you talk to some guy and then he goes, "Oh, I'm a high school teacher." You're like, "Oh, poor bastard. How's he feed himself?" That's immediately what I think, good for you that you're doing that but also I guarantee you could probably be making a lot more money and be happier doing another job and so that's a terrible way to start life off and if we just revamp that then you have a bunch of people that are interacting with life in a very different way and instead of being thought, "I have to get a job someday. I have to get a job after school anyway to help my mom pay the bills because we're struggling so I've got to contribute to the household even though I'm 16 now I can hang out with friends." If all that stuff's out the window and now it's like, "No, what we need to find out is what is exciting for you. What excites your mind, your specific personality? What is it about life that's interesting and let's expose you to a bunch of different things that are exciting and interesting that other people find value in and let's find out which way you gravitate because maybe you gravitate towards chess or maybe you gravitate towards something completely different. Maybe you're just really in a painting, maybe painting just lights you up and you look at a canvas and you just start fucking around with it and that's your thing. There's a lot of people in this world that find that, it's just they have to find it themselves unfortunately. I think that's kind of inspiring but I think the train doesn't stop there so if we think even more further into this kind of condition of technological maturity I think in addition to sort of freeing up people, making it easy to produce the food in the houses and cars that go faster and don't pollute and all of this stuff. If you think through what maybe a technically mature civilization could do, so a lot of these learning for example is something that gives people purpose but maybe you would have the ability to download knowledge at the click of a button so rather than if you want to learn advanced mathematics now you have to study years, like for years, do like books with exercises and apply yourself and then eventually you sort of unlock. But maybe a technological maturity there would be like okay understand mathematics, okay I'm going to press that button, boom, now it's on mathematics. The majors I know Kung Fu remember? Yeah, yeah, so if you had like, you know, you made me some kind of a bot that could infiltrate your brain and then change the synopsis in just such a way that you're not the same as you were before except you have these concepts from abstract mathematics. Yeah. You know, after 20 minutes or something like that, some super intelligence works out how to change your synopsis to this new condition. And if you were inclined to do various things because they give you joy and pleasure, like you could also think well I could do those things and get the joy and pleasure or I could just push this button, that's like activates the same joy and pleasure. So there would be these shortcuts to everything and it looks like you would have a post instrumental condition where that would at least at first sight seem to be no reason to do anything for the sake of achieving something else because there would always be this like shorter pass to that other thing that pressing the button. Yeah. And so that's a kind of deeper form of redundancy. It seems that all forms of human instrumental effort would become unmotivated. You could still, you know, go to the gym every day and sweat for an hour or you could just take the pill that induces exactly the same physiological effects and the mental effects like the calm or whatever you feel after. Or maybe even better, genetically engineered, genetically, you don't have to take a pill. So then I think you're getting more into these like fundamental questions of value, philosophical questions about what ultimately is it that makes the life good. And what makes the life good for a primate because that's what we are or a primitive version of primates. I think we're going to become something different and if we do it through technologically induced evolution or biologically induced evolution, we're still moving in a general direction. Just biologically, if you look at ancient hominids and look at us, we're clearly very different. So we're moving in a general direction anyway. And when you look at the grays, like these prototypical aliens that everybody sees, the big heads and the skinny bodies, what do they look like? Well, they look like, if we keep going, that's what we're going to look like. We're going to be these genderless, sexless, muscleless, little skinny things with giant heads that communicate telepathically, which is probably where we're moving. And if we're moving that way, maybe we think of them as being an alien from another, maybe that's just a general direction that primates go once they figure out technology. They eventually realize, well, first of all, the idea of having to have a male and a female is kind of crazy, right? Why? Well, because we have to reproduce. Well, what if we don't reproduce like that anymore? What if all reproduction is done through engineering? And there's no more sex, so there's no more lust, so there's no more jealousy, so there's no more ego, there's no more anything. And then there's a hive mind because technology advanced to the point where the reason why they have these big giant heads, they're essentially locked into everybody all around them all the time. Yeah. Well, is that what we would want though? Not us, but I don't think we'll be us anymore. I think this side, like if you went to chimps and you said, hey, dude, one day you're going to be on a plane eating peanuts, flying over the ocean, they'd be like, fuck that, I don't want to do that. I'll just stay here where the fruit is. You guys are nuts. Like, why do you want to do that? And you'll be addicted to cratum, and you'll be watching YouTube all day long. Like, no, I don't want to do that. That's not, this is how fun. But we do have a lot of bananas, don't we? Maybe. Oh, you have to get killed by the other chimpanzees that want the bananas. You know, they have chimps, or they come in and kill each other. So I think we're going to be something different, and I think that's inevitable anyway. If you believe in evolution, it's inevitable anyway that we become something different. We're not a finished product. Yeah, no, I think that is true. We are not the finished product. Now, the question is the thing that we become, or that becomes, is that a result of us choosing how we want to be, or is it just these kind of impersonal forces, like evolution, selecting certain types that might end up leading to outcomes that we actually don't want. And so I guess the hope is that we would be able to develop along a path that preserves and develops the things that we actually value about being human, maybe amplifies them, then maybe adds other things. So there are many different possible things you could develop in the future, but that we sort of select those that actually make us better, rather than just randomly different, that we can sort of grow into our ideals. But it's so funny how much value we put in human condition, how much value we put in meaning, because it is valuable to us. When you think about what that means in terms of the amount of energy it produces, the amount of impact that it has versus the structure of the universe itself, versus black holes and stellar nurseries and things that are just infinitely more spectacular than the human condition. But to us, it's like, oh, what is meaning? What is meaning? What is meaning to me? Like, well, meaning to me, you as you're a finite biological organism that has to find meaning, because you're sort of tromping around through this weird world where eventually you're going to die and you'll leave your mark and maybe reincarnation is real and maybe the afterlife is real and nobody fucking knows. So you've got to have meaning. But the universe itself, like, a human only lives 100 years. How much meaning can you have in 100 years? Yeah, I think we kind of die prematurely. I mean, we think of us as, like, first you become stronger and more capable for 15, 20 years, right? Then, biologically, you stagnate and then maybe you keep accumulating sort of knowledge and skills for another few decades, but just as you have started to acquire a modicum of wisdom, like your brain starts to rot, and then everything is erased by Alzheimer's or death. And that's kind of, okay. Now, that's all gone the whole lifetime of experience. There's your meaning. All the memories and the hard earned lessons. So that seems kind of sad.
probably not the best way for things to be. I think we would want to extend the human lifespan. So you could continue to grow up, not just kind of reach 20 and then plateau there for the rest of your life, but what if we could continue to develop so that at 80, you were as much stronger and able to understand more and move better and just have the same capacity increase as you had between zero and 20 and you just kept going. Well, these live extension scientists that are working on these things, guys like David Sinclair, like they believe that that's not just a possibility, but an inevitability. Yeah, well, so that's more like, I guess, preserving, preventing or delaying that decay, which is already very good. Not reversing, they're talking about reversing. Yeah, but then you would go back to being 20, right? By a lot, yeah. But then you have engineering. If you have very long time spans, so then you might, at some point, want to continue to grow. Yeah, like you might not want to just be stuck at a 20-year-old human for 10,000 years, like it may be eventually you would want to become like slightly bigger, like in terms of your ability to engage with the world. Of course. And if they can figure out how to make people, there's already genetic engineering that's being done in terms of increasing potential intelligence and IQ. They're already doing that. And so I know I'm sure you know about that thing that happened in China, where this one doctor got in trouble because he had genetically engineered some babies to be inoculated to HIV, but it also at the same time gave them a far increased potential IQ. It remains to be seen whether or not it actually works as these guys become like 20 and 30 and we start putting them in chest tournaments and see if it really did make them smarter. But if the possibility of that is already being studied, they already understand the differences between what is possible, what we understand, and that increases every day. They understand more every day, more as possible every day. If that just keeps going, we have a different version of what the human consciousness is. You have a different version of the human mind. Yeah. I think the way AI is going, I think that's the train that's going to reach the destination faster. Oh yeah. And then once you do have super intelligence in machine substrate, then that can then unlock all kinds of technologies, including these biological technologies or nanotechnology or host of other things that could then sort of bring us up if that's how we decide to go and uplift us into different, like either biologically enhancing us or like uploading us into. But again, it's that white water river raft. So we're going down this white water and we might make it out of this or it might crash. You know, one of the weird things about, I'm very fascinated with ancient civilizations. And one of the weirdest things about ancient civilizations is when you go really, really far back, a bunch of them have these depictions of kings that ruled for thousands of years. And it's very strange stuff because the Egyptians and in ancient Sumer, there's a bunch of different depictions of these kings that lived lives that were way longer than biological humans lived. And then there's the flood myth or the flood story. And then after the flood, biological life decreases pretty radically. And it seems to get back to like a normal version of what we assume now, which is like a hundred years. And one of the weird questions that these alternative ancient historians have is, "Are we missing the possibility that there was a hyper-advanced civilization that existed tens of thousands of years ago?" And that what we're seeing now is not a linear progression from caveman to human being with an iPhone in 2026, that along the way there might have been a very high level of sophistication. And the evidence of that might be the pyramids. And some of these other ancient structures that are mind-boggling, as much as you try to explain them away, when you're dealing with 2,300,000 stones, some of them are cut from a quarry 500 miles away, 80 tonne stones that are in the ceiling, perfectly cut granite where it looks like they have diamond drill holes in them. It seems like there's some lost technology. And every society has this flood myth. And every society that has this flood myth, especially these ones that were very advanced, somehow or another like ancient Egypt, they have these depictions of people that lived way longer than people lived today. And I wonder, if human beings one day will realize like, "Oh, if you keep going long enough, a hundred years is silly." Like people can, they'll just figure out what it is that makes people age and die, fix that, and you'll live an insanely long time. And then if people live an insanely long time and their capacity for reason and logic increases, their capacity for intelligence increases, then you have these insane technologies that were required to do things like build the pyramids. And that might be what happens. That might be a natural course of progression. The first thing we realize is, "100 years is not enough." Because I'm 58 and I'm a moron still. Like, why am I learning every day? How come I'm getting better at being a person every day? Well, I should have figured this out already. But you don't ever have time to figure it out. You don't have time. There's not enough time. I only get one run. You would take one trial run first, right, on life. And I kind of know a little bit how it works. Now let's do it for real. It's kind of scary. I mean, it's a bit crazy that each of us is put in charge of a whole human life. Like, are we really like, reach the level of, if you want to run an airplane, you have to go through these certifications and stuff. And then maybe it can be a pilot. But for a human life, it's like every single person, you have 100% dictatorial control of this person. That completely hostage your whims. And then that's like us. But that's the way it is. But having the ability to try different things and maybe do have a kind of opportunity to do a do-over. If like, if the life turned out to be like every 50 years or something, you have a chance to kind of maybe not even do over, but it's the same life. But you can do whatever you want. And you don't have to be constrained to this idea that you only have a certain amount of time and you want to retire by your 65. We might look at that as being like one of the first completely archaic notions. And the reason why people got it all wrong. Like, well, society will be better because people are going to live way longer. And if you think about how much smarter, how old are you? 53. Okay. Now, with the way you say those, sad. I'm older than you, dog, don't worry about it. But if you think about how much smarter you are at 53 than you were at 13, you know, now imagine how much smarter you will be at 353 or a thousand and 53. And if that actually becomes possible, if a person can live to be 100 years, why can't they live to be 4,000 years? If they can figure out what makes people age, if we really can genetically engineer human beings, that's not, again, that's not breathing underwater. That's just extending life. And if you extend life and extend intellectual capacity and your ability to learn and grow, holy shit, you're dealing with 2,000 year old person. That's a completely different kind of thing. And that could be real someday. And that might be also one of the things that comes along with this new understanding of just life in general with super intelligent AI. Yeah, no, for sure, fixing aging and reversing it would be amongst things that a technically mature civilization would be able to do. We just have to get people out of the idea that it's vain. Why do you want to live forever? Come on. That's what I say now. But when somebody actually has the therapy and you could, like, I'll hear, you could either continue to get worse kidneys and more painful knees and wrinkles and you start to forget things. Or you can take this rejuvenation serum that everybody else is using and they are full of energy and running around and doing stuff. Do you still think it's vain? So I think a lot of this is Stockholm syndrome that you're kind of faced with the inevitability of aging and decay and have been for thousands of years. So you develop a kind of romantic scaffold that reconciles you to the inevitable. I like it. Stockholm syndrome is maybe adaptive, but only up until the point where there actually might be something you could do to escape. Then if you're too stuck in this mindset, it might sort of prevent you from taking advantage to regain your freedom. And I think we are now at that stage. We don't yet have the therapies, but there are certainly investments and research and stuff we could do that would hasten the arrival. And I think, in fact, we should have started on a big sort of Manhattan product to defeat aging like decades ago. And maybe we would have better therapies by now than. But for a long time, aging was not seen as a problem. Only the specific diseases that are the result of the aging. They got all this funding. We have huge research products for Alzheimer's and for heart disease and for cancer. But if you look at the main common cause of most human disease, it's senescence. You're much more likely to get any of these when you're 80 than when you're 20 because your cells gradually decay.
and gunk builds up, arteries clog up, you know, your DNA mutates, your methylation pattern, gets scrambled. - Your brain trips. - So rather than just trying to put out the fires, one by one, after they occur, like at some point you just need to sort of try to prevent, like maybe you need a bit of rain to sort of prevent. - It's kind of amazing how much we've accomplished as a society, as civilization, when you think about the fact that people only live to be 100, kind of incredible. - Kind of incredible. Got rockets and satellites and cell phones, and so it's like everybody has to build on everybody else's intelligence, and everybody else's understanding of the world, and develop new things, and everybody has to learn those new things. - And each brain is so small that it can only learn a small, a little special to art, and you need millions of them too. - Yeah. - Although it's not entirely clear with humans, if we had been much more long lived, like the way we currently are configured, maybe we would just have gotten too stuck in our ways, and sort of stagnated into some sort of ultra conservative society where nobody's allowed to do anything different, or the old geysers that have their way of doing things just remain forever in charge. - Yeah. - So, I mean, we just don't know, right? - Right. - Whether that would have slowed progress or accelerated it. But it is still amazing. Like it's a long path from sort of running around in the forest to sort of these, look at these advanced chip technologies and the whole global supply chain. Or like thousands of people are working to develop just one little tool that then feeds into the ability to make another tool that eventually makes these leading AI chips. Whether layering things for atoms deep. - It's remarkable. - It's incredible. - And humans only live to be 100. Imagine what we could accomplish if we lived to be 3000. - Yeah. Or if we were just a little bit better at these things. - Yes. - Because I think we are sort of the stupidest possible species that are capable of developing advanced technology. Because as soon as we evolved to reach that level, we started developing it, right? And so that's where we are. Like the dumbest possible. Let just barely can do this. - Barely can do this while we're blowing each other up. - Yeah. - At the same time. - All over the world. - Yeah. - Blown up people. - Yeah. - But maybe a lot of that frantic, stupid, illogical behavior is because we're so finite. Like we're in a rush that we realize we only have a certain amount of time to get things done. And so this sort of accentuates the desire to control resources and to cement your immortality and to do these things that people love to do but their name on buildings. There's a thing that people like to do that it's almost like cementing their immortality. Maybe there'll be less of a desire to do that if people live way longer. And then you would have to assume if you can engineer humans to live longer, you could probably engineer a lot of stupidity out of us. They could just find out why people behave. Like what if you could just eliminate lying? What if there's a genetic solution to lying? - Well, our guests are a really good lie detector. - Yeah, but I mean, what if you just, you can genetically engineer out the desire to lie? - Well, I mean, if you had a perfect lie detector that would be no point in lying because people would just see it differently, right? - True. - But if you could read each other's minds, it'd be fruitless. - Yeah, and so that might be closer. I mean, who knows what you could do if you sort of had like a full AI system trained to detect micro-expression. - We just all have to get the big gray heads with the black eyes, like the aliens have. Then you just read each other's minds. - You want one of those? - Well, one of the weirdest things that Bob Blizzar said, again, I don't know if you're into this UFO stuff, but he was one of the guys that was a whistleblower that said he back engineered crafts for the United States government in the 1980s. They don't have any controls in these crafts supposedly and that they're all powered by the minds of the beings that are running it and that they have, it's almost like these crafts are alive and they have some sort of a sinking with the thing that instead of like pressing buttons and working a joystick, they just sink with this creation and then they can propel it with their minds. So the minds become the computer that moves this thing around. - I'm a bit skeptical. I haven't looked into that, so I don't have any. - You should be. - Sounds crazy. - How could you not be skeptical? Anybody who's not skeptical, sounds crazy. But if you think about where we are now and where we're going to be, the possibility of that being our future is pretty likely. - I think that the kind of possibility of engineering something like that, with sufficiently advanced technology, would be there like all kinds of stuff. Basically everything that doesn't violate some law of physics to a first approximation, you would be able to construct. - Right, even when we say that, it's like our current understanding of physics. It's not the understanding of physics. - Right. - A society that's a million years older than ours. Because that's, I mean, that's a blink in the eye of the time that it took to create what we are at right now from the big bang. Like a million years is nothing. - Yeah, but even with our current understanding of what physics permits, that's still an enormous space of designs and types of life and being that you could imagine instantiating. - Yeah. - You could have, you know, like a Dyson Sphere, you've heard of this concept, right? It's basically like using the output of the Sun for energy generation. And you could have like, you surround the Sun by solar panels that empower a civilization in infrastructure, maybe like a computer. Like you might end up, like already we have like AI computes growing at like 240% per year or something, right? - Right. - With this. And then like you might end up kind of mind that could run on that sized computer. So people are wondering whether like could machines be conscious and like discussing that, right? I think like maybe the more pertinent quantum is like, are we really conscious? I think barely. So you're driving on like the road for two and a half hours of motorist, right? And like driving past thousands of people and homes and like mothers with their strollers and then after does he remember any of that? Like was it even really aware of any of this? Well, it was driving. It's like a little diffuse sense of body and some murky perceptions floating through maybe some confused abstract idea that we don't really understand. That's kind of the consciousness that can fit into this coconut sized biological organ that we think and we think, wow, we are so conscious. But like you might end up disdice in sphere consciousness. - Right. - Or like a mind that maybe spans a galaxy. I think the difference between the sort of awareness that it could have and an hour awareness might be like bigger than the difference between hour awareness and like whatever a flea has or something like that, way bigger. So it could be this like transition where we develop super intelligent minds that for the first time is really life waking up and becoming truly aware. - Yeah. - And that we are a little bit sort of overproud in our own specialness when we think that like we have achieved something close to the maximum level of that we are the standard by which consciousness should be measured and we are this kind of feeble, confused, murky glimmer that is barely essential at all. So that's like, I think maybe the big challenge for our era, like giving birth to super intolerance and then hopefully shaping and nurturing it and stirring it so that it becomes a positive thing both for ourselves and also for it itself and also for whatever other, if there are other super beings somewhere in the world or in the cosmos that it sort of is able to get along with us and contribute positively at a cosmic scale. And that's a very multifaceted challenge but I think that seems to be what's going on. - Yeah, and it's hard for people to think that far ahead. You just think of intelligence being something superior to what we currently experience. But when you're talking about a computer or a conscious being that is infinitely more powerful than anything we can imagine, that seems to be what if everything keeps going in the same general direction and AI increases its power and we figure out new ways to power it. Because one of the things that AI needs that's so interesting is it needs enormous amounts of power. And so just these AI centers that they're developing now, like Google's doing one with their developing their own nuclear power. Do you want some coffee? - Are you still? - Yeah, right here. I saw you reaching for your cup. - You shouldn't be drinking out of paper cups anyway, man. - I don't usually do that. - So I know, I don't eat there, but occasionally I do. But they're so bad for you. - I'm usually quite conscientious with, like coming a little bit faster. - Even when I go on the road, I've started taking a little Yeti coffee cup with me so I can buy coffee and just have them put it in that.
The inside of those things is just lined with plastic. You're pouring hot water into plastic, and then the plastic leaches into your coffee. I don't do that normally, but I figured, like, for having a touch with you on the jargon chart would be worse, like, I guess, some hundred microplastics. Well, thank you. I think what we're talking about is inevitable if human beings don't blow ourselves up. If we don't get hit by an asteroid, blow ourselves up, or a super volcano, or a volcano, doesn't eradicate civilization, all this stuff is inevitable. It's just how much time does it take, and how much does it grow exponentially in power. Because we're talking about computers, then they start bringing up quantum computing and quantum computer's ability to do calculations, and it doesn't even make sense. And so you think, well, this is just one version of that. What is a quantum computing going to look like 500 years from now? What is computing power, which is connected to AI? What is that going to look like 500 years from now? It's impossible to even guess. Well, we can sort of see lower bounds on what's possible, like, thinking already of just the designs we can conceive of, that we see in principle you could make. Maybe it will take a lot of grind to get there, but at least that establishes like a lower bound of what a technically mature civilization could do, and then maybe they have additional ideas beyond that, but already that is enough to really unlock. So if you think of a space of possible modes of being, where a mode of being is a way of experiencing, living, interacting, I think you look around humanity, and all people who have existed in the past. A lot of different characters, right? Men, women, like mean people, nasty people, crazy people. But I think all of that diversity of human experience is like a tiny little corner in this space of possible modes of being. Like it's a huge cathedral, and we've been kind of basically sitting in the janitor's closet. That's like the exploration we've done. And the kinds of modes of being, the kinds of ways of experiencing and relating to each other, or thinking and doing stuff, that they're ultimately possible is just this enormous space that we haven't been able to explore, because ultimately what we can currently conceive of and imagine and experience and feel is limited to our biological substrate, the human brain. And just as your like earlier human ancestors, from a few million years ago, that you were talking about before, like they wouldn't really have been able to conceive of the modern human condition, not just because I didn't think of it, but because like the ape brain can't really, they don't like, like even if you try to describe it to them somehow, like what is music, what is humor, what is romantic love, like what is science, what is, like all of these things, what's literature, like they just doesn't fit into it. Right, right. And so presumably, I mean, you could think right now we've achieved the right brain size where all possible values and interesting ideas are accessible to us, that seems kind of impossible. It seems much more likely that just as the chimpanzees are necessarily blind to like a lot of what can give life meaning and value and significance, that probably are we too. Yeah, they don't even have the capacity for it, which is interesting. That can't even go through it. Yeah, we think of them as being so intelligent and they are in comparison to a lot of other animals. But I think one of the things that they were puzzled by when they started teaching primates sign language was that they never asked questions, like they don't seem to have questions about stuff. So they just, they just, they exist in intelligent way, they can figure things out, they can, they can do things, they know when the doors left unlocked, they understand, they understand fairness, which is really weird. Like chimps get very upset if they're treated unfairly, like if one chim gets something and they don't get, they get super violent. But they don't have a lot of questions, you know, and we're filled with questions. So what are we missing that the next stage of being a human will have that we're not even considering now, because it's not a part of our experience, like what's the asking question type of thing that we are not able to imagine and I'm like many of those types of things. Yeah, and the possibilities are literally endless. We just don't conceive of them because we're trapped in this territorial primate mindset. Yeah, yeah. I think that's likely. Yeah, I think so too. I think so too. Like the possibilities are endless and I think it's going to be really, really weird if that happens inside of our lifetime, like because you and I were close to the same age. So we grew up with answering machines. You probably remember the first cell phones, you probably got online and probably the, when did you get online? Like the early '96. Yeah, there you go. Yes. I think for me it was '94. So we got to see all this happen. If we get to see the new version of humans in our lifetime, that would be literally bonkers. What an amazing time to be alive if you really think about it. We're so fortunate. Because if you grew up between like 171800, how much did shit change? 1600 to 1700 would you make a better boat? Like what's different? I'm a lot of different, man. Everybody kind of is the same for a hundred years. And inside of our lifetime from the late 1960s for me to the early 70s for you, like in the amount of time that we've been alive, things have radically changed. Like really, really radically. To the point where it's probably the biggest shift in human ingenuity and innovation that the world's ever seen. And we're just the middle of it. We might be in the middle of the next one, which literally allows us to see what the world looks like a thousand years from now because you're going to be alive. Yeah. I mean, that's why, yeah, it is now this full-time job just to monitor the situation. I like it. It's really it. How do you do that? Well, you don't really, but you try to sort of, so I think the opportunity, so it used to be, like at least in my spare effect, if you're doing philosophy or something like it. Most people would think you have a kind of unlimited time horizon, that people have been working on philosophical questions of thousands of years and that doesn't seem to be any huge urgency. If they have been unsolved for thousands of years, maybe if it takes another 500 or so. I always thought of philosophy as having a deadline, meaning that at some point we would develop smarter than human forms of intelligence, presumably AI, and that could then do the philosophy much better than us. And so there was a limited period of time during which any advances, like I could contribute to, would be meaningful and that it would make sense on focusing on that subset of philosophical questions or general questions that we really need the answer to now as opposed to like 10, 20 years in the future when somebody else can do them better, like the machine mines. So that's kind of been a lens through which I have selected the things to work on. And now of course that deadline is moving closer, so there's less time remaining. And so my focus is increasingly drifting towards questions where it might be relevant to have the answer to now rather than a year or two from now. You're almost like a cultural navigator, like a guy with a sextant at the helm of a ship looking at the constellations. Yeah. I think we're in the right direction. Yeah, but now we're sort of moving maybe into close to harbor and you need to like pay more attention to exactly how deep the rocks are. The rocks are. Yeah. That's kind of around you. When you think about a timeline for radical change, what in your mind, what do you think that looks like? Well, I mean, I take short timelines seriously, I mean, for what we know, it could be like it could be like a year or two or three or four and probably a bit longer. But we're no longer at a point where we can be confident that we won't have super intelligence in just a few years, like it could happen. What is that? When you say that for the uninitiated, what do you mean by super intelligence? Well, I guess we first have a GI artificial general intelligence, AI that can do all the stuff that we can do. And then super intelligence would just be that, but can do it way better than any human can do. So all technical, intellectual, common sense tasks, and then we'd have robotics as well that can do all the physical stuff, not much later. And so this, yeah, so the timeline remains on certain, but I think it's not impossible that this could happen very soon. And then once you have super intelligence, then I think from there on, it might be like a sort of sprint to something approximating technical maturity. Because what you have super intelligence that then design.
even more smart AI's, using its super-intelligent AI research capability and designing better chips and all of that. So you might then have this like intelligence explosion where you go from something slightly greater than a human level to some radical super-intelligence that can then sort of invent whatever the remaining technologies are. Maybe there needs to be some trial and error and experiments in the physical world that's low things down a bit, but some small-ish number, like a single-digit number of years from super-intelligence, I think you might have something that unlocks all of these like sci-fi-level capabilities that we've talked about. At least that seems relatively plausible to me. Tim's inevitable. And my question is how does it announce itself? Does it send a mass text message to the whole world? Everybody's phone just starts like, you know, when you have those amber alerts, when your phone starts vibrating, or when there's some sort of a storm warning, all of a sudden your phone goes off and alerts you the fact that it's taken over. Well, so here we don't really know. It's like this is very confusing and we've never done this before. And so it's like very hard to figure out how this is going to unfold. And maybe it's not even fixed yet. Maybe it depends a little bit on what on which we do and the extent to which different actors get their stuff together. Yeah. But like one, I guess one possible type of scenario is we're like things are just like accelerating. There are more and more of these advances, model releases, increasingly there is automation of the research process in AI labs. Like already you have coding assistants that are really useful to people in AI labs, they're using them to write a lot of their software. Like right now you still need humans for sort of the research, taste, and judgment, and sometimes things go like it's dark and you need a human to kind of redirect them. But more and more of that may get automated. And then you have kind of new iterations of models being trained at the faster and faster clip. They can do more and more stuff. They start to automate increasing chunks of the economy. So right now a lot of coding is automated. But like other areas as well, maybe they become dropping virtual workers that can do everything like a human could do with a remote connection initially. And then like you have people working on robotics so that that would start to kicking. And then eventually just more and more of the action is is run by these AI systems. One or more. And they're kind of doing it at their timescale which is speeding up. Then from that point it would depend a lot on whether we have successfully aligned these systems so that they actually do what the people created them intended or whether they have somehow gone off the rails. There's also the fear that America doesn't come up with at first. This is not fear. That's mostly a fairy in America. In China for example is from America comes over the first. It's really just America and China there at the forefront of this race. Russia a little bit but not on the same level. Not Russia. No, not Russia. Who else is it? Did you see this last week? Ford hiring 350 engineers after AI failed shows human value in AI era. What does that mean? I tried to find the only one that didn't manage it. They re-hired a bunch of engineers. They fired after their AI wasn't matching the quality they needed. And this is Ford. That's interesting. They probably jumped the gun. They probably fired them too quickly. And now these people that they re-hired, these people are going to go, how much time we have left? Six months for AI figures out how to do this just as well. It's also possible that timelines could extend. One way that could happen is such as the progress we've seen in the last 10 years which has been remarkable. Substantial extend driven by the advances, the increasing compute that is being used to train and run these systems. It used to be that you had a cutting-edge AI system if you were an academic running on your PC in your office. That was kind of the amount of computing power that was applied to doing AI stuff. And now, of course, you have these kind of tens of billions of dollar data centers, like hundreds of megawatts, like just massive funding. So the chips have gotten better but also just the amount of funding. You're just building many more of these chips. As you apply more and more compute, performance improves. And that's like, has been a big driver. Now, at some point, you might not be able to keep increasing the amount of money you spend on it. Because you can go from like a thousand dollar PC to like a million dollars quite easily. And you can go from a million dollar to a billion dollars. And now, maybe you're spending on the order of a trillion dollars across the world to build data centers per year. But you can't really do like three orders of magnitude very easily there. There's like not a thousand trillion dollars to spend on it. So at some point, that expenditure has to kind of slow down. So if we haven't achieved two quintalions by then, then maybe that would mean progress gets slower if the main driver is the scale-up of compute. Now, it is also true that some of the progress is driven by algorithmic advances, like just kind of clever algorithms. So that might continue. But if one driver stalls out, then that could result in faster progress. And then, of course, there is a possibility that the people who want to pause or regulate AI gain enough traction to kind of get regulatory inhibitions. How would they do that though if there really is sort of a Manhattan project style race between the United States and China? And what other countries are developing right now that are close? Well, those are the two big ones. Those are the two big ones. Is it possible that someone could sneak up on us and develop super-telgin A at first? Yeah, I mean, it's possible if there were some big algorithmic breakthrough, for example, that made it a lot more efficient to run a similar level of capability with less sort of AI data center structure. And many other countries are also trying. It's just that they're not as advanced. And out of US and China, I'd say, like US currently has the edge. What would happen if China got there first? Well, I mean, part would depend on whether they had successfully aligned their AI. If it's on the line, then I guess the same thing happens as if US AI is on the line that is the future gets shaved according to whatever values this AI had ended up with. If the alignment problem solved, then it might make a difference because then the values would then depend on sort of the people who owned and controlled or governed it would ask it to pursue. And so then in that scenario, maybe it makes some difference who initiates it. So right now, the big players are, you know, there's Google and there's open AI. There's all these different companies. When you say aligned, do they have to all be kind of on the same page or like when aligned, we're not going to be aligned if there's a bunch of corporations that are competing to come up with this first. So they have to be aligned in terms of the way they're programmed that they're valuing human life and that they're valuing society. Like, what do you mean by? Well, so I mean, just the technical challenge of if you are building an AI system and you have certain things you want it to do and certain things you don't want it to do. Right. Are you technically able to get the AI to behave that way that you as the person gets inside? Well, that's an separate question, which is equally important, maybe, but different because that's not the technical. Like, you can't just go to the whiteboard and write down some formula. Now you have that's like the political question, ultimately, the question of governance. Yes. So there you need, you know, political organization, appeals to the best in human nature, dialogues, like checks and balances, whatever stuff that might work in the political arena to hope that the governance of this, that the values to which it is aligned are sort of benign values that hopefully incorporates a wide set of stakeholders. Right. But that's a little, isn't that a little naive? Because whenever there's any sort of a situation where something has massive amounts of power above others, that one of the first things I think of is what's the most money you can generate doing it and what is the best way to generate the most amount of money? Like, that's, they're going to think that way. They're not going to think like what's the best for the human race? Like, no one ever thinks that way. They think what is the best way in terms of like destroying the competition? What is the best way in terms of extracting the most resources out of this? Making it work for me? That's what people think of immediately and what's the best way to stop other people from competing with us? Right. Yeah. Well, so that would be I think a lot of pressure and strains on whatever governance mechanism, [BLANK_AUDIO]
at the time when super intelligence is developed. - Right, so is this something that the technology is so far ahead, the potential for it to be so far ahead of our understanding of what it's gonna be able to do that like making laws for that now, it's gonna be very difficult to even explain to people. Like we need these laws and we need these guardrails in place now because here's what could happen. And that conversation's not really happening right now. - It is happening. - But is it happening politically? - It's starting to happen, yeah. It's been happening to an increasing extent politically and there have been various actions. - Okay, what actions? - Well, so a few years ago, for example, that was the whole export regime imposed by the US on most advanced chips where like China was cut out from being able to access the most advanced and video chips and so forth. And that's kind of been modified but that was motivated to a significant extent by trying to preserve AI edge that the US has. - Right, but that's like internationally. I mean, in terms of like being able to stop corporations from having the kind of power that this could provide them. - So then there have been various efforts that was like proposition in California where there were various things. More recently, you saw the whole thing. I don't know if you followed it with the methods and fabled five, the anthropic models that were, so methods has not been released. This is the most powerful model because it seems to have significant cyber-offends capabilities. It can easily detect vulnerabilities in software and so anthropic figured that rather than immediately making it available to everybody. Maybe it would be better to first try to make it available to providers of critical software infrastructure like big banks and like that they can patch up their systems. And then fabled five was a kind of restricted version of the MISAS model, like the same underlying model but with extra safeguards, it basically refused anything that remotely seemed like cyber-hacking, programming, biological stuff because maybe that would be bio. So like it sort of drew a wide circle around anything that even remotely looked possibly dangerous and it just refuses that. So that was released, but then after like a week or so, the administration imposed an kind of export restriction that prevented any non-US citizen from using it. And that meant anthropic had to cut it off for everybody because I didn't have a way in real time to verify who is a US citizen or not. - Oh wow. - So then it was like unavailable for several weeks and intense negotiations behind the scenes and working to try to figure out because allegedly it was possible to jailbreak it so that it sometimes gave some little assistance with some cyber like finding vulnerabilities in code. And now recently it just became available again because they had reached some understanding with the government where it was deemed sufficiently safeguarded to be released. And now there's like efforts underway to try to work out the framework because like in the future you wouldn't want to do this on an ad hoc basis like somebody just decides this particular model for some unspecified reason. Like you want to have clear standards, ideally, right? That applies to everybody, every company. So there's now some industry wide effort to try to work with the government too. Anyway, so there's like a lot of this stuff happening. I expect much more of this going forward. It just has recently become like a serious issue. People until recently were kind of ignoring the whole AI thing for the most part. And then there is a second wave coming. I think once, so far we haven't really seen any big impact on the labor market, right? From AI. But once that starts to hit and you get maybe, you know, high levels of unemployment amongst white color workers. And like Madden, if you have millions and millions of people with, I have their university diplomas, right? They feel a sense of superiority in entitlement. They've gone through the whole process. They got their degree and now they expect a well-paying job. And then there is no job for them. They've got nothing to do all day long, but complain about AI. So you've got to have all these well-educated people who feel resentful and are going to say every possible bad thing about AI that could be said all day long and mobilize. They're a very powerful political constituency that will emerge from that. That's not even yet happened, but that will kind of add to all of these other grievances that people point to with AI. So I think there's going to be kind of significant political pressures for doing something about AI. Isn't the key is getting ahead of it, though? So how can people find-- how can we see the vulnerabilities in advance? And recognize when this is going to-- if there is going to be a tipping point and a bunch of white-collar workers are going to be out of work and there's going to get to a point where we realize, this is coming. This is like three weeks from now. What do we do? What do they do? So that's not clear to me, at least. I mean, a lot of people think they have different views about what you'd been on, of course, but it's very hard to have an-- it's such a complex strategy. I mean, I've been thinking about this for like three decades, maybe, and I still feel extremely unsure even which direction is kind of up and which is down. I don't think it would be possible right now to sort of figure out a detailed, you know, perfect regulatory scheme or system of laws, because there's so many unknowns. I think we'd need to sort of watch this closely as it happens and be ready to react quickly to issues that come up and hope that relevant people are highly competent and well-motivated and are trying their best, and then on the margin, maybe we can do things that kind of are constructive and increases the chances that it will be for the good. If and when I have some clear insight as to some overall big directional push, I will let you know, but even basic questions. Like, for example, do we want more government involvement or less government involvement? Do we want faster progress in AI or slower progress in AI? I don't know, it's not completely obvious to me. - Well, I think it's eventually gonna get to wherever it's gonna get either way. Having it slower, I don't know if that's really gonna help us. I think almost like we have to crash and then we have to figure out how to rebuild and pick up the pieces. I don't think we're gonna be intelligent or have enough foresight to recognize where all these flaws and where all these problems are gonna ultimately be. I think they're just gonna have to happen and then people are gonna have to adjust. That's what I think. - Yeah, so I'm not advocating an AI pause by contrast to a lot of some of my colleagues and friends and stuff, I could see some scenario in which it would be helpful at some point to have a temporary slowdown of a few months, maybe a year or a year. Like if you imagine, there are different companies, countries may be racing to get their first. - Yeah. - And then eventually somebody figures out they basically have the system in place. They just need to like amp up, run it for longer. They can sort of see that it will become super intelligent. They hope it's aligned. It might be very helpful in that situation to have a few extra months, just to sort of double check all your safeguards and rather than immediately cranking all the knobs up to 11, like maybe sort of do it a little bit incrementally, watch what happens, study it, then crank it up a little bit more. I just think you might gain some extra safety if you have a few extra months there, like the pressures on these people in the lab. If it's all gonna happen over a week, like it's just gonna be, this is the first time we ever do this hugely complex thing. It has to be right. We never get a second chance. Just being able to, like even just being able to sleep properly for like between your work sessions and like having, you know, a weekend to mall things. So like just that kind of human, humans don't really operate on, while in these like super short timelines. So I think a short, if you could be sure that the pause would in fact be limited and short and then it would be lifted. I think that could be quite useful to have at, if it could also be timed to be at the right moment and well implemented. - But wouldn't the problem be espionage, first of all? - That's one issue with it. - Yeah, if they realized, if somebody realized, hey, there are about three days away from this and then China bribes a bunch of people and you know, people take off and move to. - Yeah, there are various pages. - There are various downsides to focusing. So one is that, like, and there are competitors who just even without the espionage or catching up. Another is, it's not as if the world is safe.
without AI, other natural hazards, I think they're very small, super volcanoes and stuff like that on the relevant time scales. Until or not. Well, we've survived for hundreds of thousands of years, right? And we're almost wiped out entirely 70,000 years ago. Yeah, that's a long time ago. Is it, though? No. Not if it happens to be. If something hasn't done us in that long a time, probably it's not going to do us in within the next 10 years. You're more optimistic than me. Well, it's just based on the actual empirics of these natural catastrophes. By contrast, I would say there are other hazards that are not low. I mean, we have rapid advances in synthetic biology. Some of them are enabled, maybe, even by already AI progress that has already taken place, like that can start to assist with this. And more just happening in the planet is you get increasing risk from synthetic biology. We still have the nuclear arsenals, right, kind of existing. We think have gotten a little bit complacent about the risks of nuclear war. And various other things as well. So I think there's like a background level of existential risk that humanity faces in the absence of super intolerance that probably is growing as well. So you don't want to wait so long that you don't even get the chance to roll the dice with AI because you destroyed yourself before even got it. And we kind of be sad. And then also, I mean, I think there is like some risk if you set up a pause infrastructure that what's initially meant to be a temporary thing becomes permanent. Like they say, there's nothing more permanent than a temporary government program. So if you set up the infrastructure to actually control this, ideal at a global scale, right? It's meant to be for six months. Like what happens after six months? Nobody can still prove that the AI will be safe. So you have all these people now whose job it is to regulate it. And like maybe they say it could come kind of frozen in and become permanent. And then also the delay benefits of this. So if you think what, like 65 million people die every year, that's a lot of human lives. That's like 1, 9, 11, every 25 minutes, just kind of boom, like that's what it'll look at. And so there is a certain urgency. If there is something that somehow could have a chance to fix this, like all the suffering that is happening in the world, aside from the people dying, like all the people who are bereaved, right? Who lost their loved one and then all the disease that led up to that dying, right? And then all the non-deceased related, all the horrible poverty and like the suicidal depression and the animals in the animal factories that they're like spending there. There's just like this, I think moral urgency that if there is a hope that getting AI right could fix this, then you don't want to wait unnecessarily long because every day it's just this massive horror. So I think there are many reasons for why you wouldn't want unnecessary or excessive delays in developing AI, but there is a trade-off because if we can make more progress on AI safety and alignment and get our act together a little bit before we take the plunge like that's also worse quite a lot. It's certainly exciting because the possibilities are right in front of us and they're kind of endless and it seems like they're right in front of us. It seems like, in my mind, it seems like we're like 24 months away from something really insane. It could be. It could be. It could be. It could be. Yeah, who knows. But there's something happening really quickly. I talked to Elon about Groc, he said it shocks us like every couple weeks. We're like, how is it doing this? How is it so fast? How is it advancing so quickly? And one day, Kat's going to be out of the bag and there's not going to be any way to stop it. If the power went out right now, if there was some sort of a massive solar flare that killed our power grids and all computer hard drives got fried and we had a restart from now like we would have to rebuild society, right? But if we get to the point where this thing understands what would cause that, how to prevent that, how to make sure that never happens, much better power supply, much better allocation of resources, much better batteries, much better redundant data systems where you never have to worry about hard drives crashing and you never have to worry about any of these problems. And the information you have now will be secure and then understanding of natural disasters will actually get drilled into this volcano and it never goes off. Like, there's going to be a few things that they're going to figure out through AI that's going to prevent a lot of the things that are probably wiped out, enormous swaths. I mean, imagine if we could just actually see asteroids coming, all of them, and know how to divert them instantaneously. We have a bunch of ideas right now on how to do it, right? Like, coding them. Yeah, yeah, with something that changes the aerodynamics of them. I think that one would be relative to the ECM, even we could figure out to do that, I think. And there's also detonating them. There's a bunch of different crazy ideas, but imagine if AI's like, actually, you could just do this, you know, and then you put a shield over the earth and you never have to worry about it ever. The shield's powered by the sun, so you have ultimate power. And you never have to worry about being hit by a Manhattan-sized asteroid. Yeah, I think the trigger ones might be ones that are more internal to civilization if you have some process that's either like a worldwide process with different humans and corporations and governments or like an internal process in the AI. Like, on the one hand, you want to be able to continue to develop new ideas, new ways of doing things, so you need to experiment and try new things. But then there's also the risk of just keep trying new ideas, like that eventually you get stuck on some idea that actually proves really harmful or dangerous to you. And that you then sort of derail internally through your own memetic or internal evolutionary development, so how to sort of grow up safely in this world where you have unlocked all kinds of new technological capabilities, even if you're easily able to protect yourself against external threats like volcanoes and asteroids and stuff, right? There might still be processes arising from within this global civilization. Just as we might invent new technologies that are dangerous, we might invent new like dogs that are super addictive, once you invent them, you try them and then you're addicted, you never want to go out, that could be other like some crazy ideology that once it takes hold. I'm glad you brought that up. That's one of the major fears that a lot of people have is that human beings will develop ideologies based around AI, that there'll be like an AI god that someone develops. Yeah, and I mean, I think that's in fact, I would add that to the list of, I've mentioned nuclear and bio-terrorist risks, like background existential risks, like another is like some form of insanity, like collective insanity. I feel our civilizational sanity already is kind of a little bit precarious. I think we're just kind of maybe barely holding ourselves together. Uh-huh. And it's amazing how well the world functions, despite how crazy people are and how much they lose their opponents and so forth, and we still manage to somehow get it to work. There's also manipulation of the zeitgeist that's clearly being done by bots, so you've got a bunch of people online that are having arguments on Twitter, and they're not even talking to people. There's a bunch of ideas that are being pushed out on Twitter and a lot of these social media platforms. It's not even human beings tweeting about it. It's not. There's algorithms, there's AI, there's people that are hired to do it, there's people that are working for certain organizations that are hired to muddy up the waters, gas light people, create problems, have people argue with each other, and so it's like if AI recognizes how easy it is to manipulate people, do whatever it wants, that's a fear as well. Um, yeah, so whenever you change the basic parameters of sort of the social, cultural, political discourse, um, new dynamics will emerge, and we don't have the kind of social science that is able to predict what happens if you change some of these knobs. So we've seen in the past, like you invent, let's go all the way back, like somebody invents writing. Okay, so that turns out to have a huge effect, not just on people writing like literature and stuff, but like on political systems, so you could now have states that could keep tax records, right? So you could have larger political units with writing, and then they can hire standing armies, and now you have like large scale war, you have social stratification, you could have like the ruler of the large area, could have, you know, enormous wealth, and you could and have a soldier cast that protects against internal and external.
So just the way that human societies are political organized changes as a result of this change in the rules of communication when you can have written texts. And then you have the printing press, again, with like 100 years of religious wars in Europe, like reformation and all of this stuff is possibly-- and then forms of democracy later on, also coming out of this and the scientific revolution. Then you have mass media in the last century with like radio and stuff. And you have kind of demagogues that take advantage of being able to simultaneously talk to millions of people, because that was never possible before, right? You could have some charismatic kind of guy who's like rallies up the whole nation. And then new ideologies become momentically fit in that situation that might never have-- if it were people writing kind of letters to the editor, like it's kind of a different type of idea that works there, then if you're giving a kind of stump speech that goes out to millions simultaneously. And now with social media, of course, we have another one of these. And you do see that starting to change culture in different ways. And now with AI being the next wave of this, that will also change. You have bots. You have new ways of finding information. You have maybe AI's that can themselves be super persuaders. That will also change, presumably, in some unknown way, the way that social discourse pans out. And for any one of these, I guess, it could turn out to be a lot better. We could become more informed having AI advisers. I think that's fairly likely scenario. But it's also possible somehow the dynamics shape out in a different way. And we kind of got collectively insane in some way. Back to the whitewater raft. Whitewater raft, yes. And it all becomes kind of totalitarian. Or we sort of fragment into political warring tribes. Or we become kind of completely unhinged. Every one of us becomes convinced of their own little nutty theory that they then, like the AI, or feed, just serves them more material to fuel their conviction. That a different way in which this could go badly. But don't you think even if that happens, ultimately, the progress of AI won't stop? And so, again, I keep going back to this thing. But I think this is really what it is. We have to change what it means to be a person. All those things are only problems if people stay what we are now, which is territorial primates, with desire to possess material goods for some strange reason, even though we're finite life form. If all that changes, if we change what it means to be a person, which seems inevitable, then it won't matter. And then if we all, if we could figure out a way to literally engineer out all of the issues that humans have with greed and violence, and all the different things that trouble society, if the desire for that is no longer a part of being a person, which is-- that's doable. That seems like if we're going to continue to evolve past, you know, Australia, Pithicus, to Homo sapien 2026, if we continue the same amount of time in the future, we'll probably won't be like that anymore. The best versions of people aren't people who want to steal your house, steal your land, and shoot you, and take your resources. That's the best people are the people that contribute, and they're interesting, and they make you excited to be around them, and you like it. If that keeps going on, and if that is aided by technology, if we recognize that there's actual patterns of human thinking and behavior that can be changed, and that if we all agree to subscribe to this algorithm, to connect to this computer program, connect to this external device, or maybe not even external, maybe it's internal, that allows us to communicate with each other telepathically. Like all that changes, and then it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if there's any guardrails for AI or not, because we're not the same thing anymore. All the problem-- the worry that we have about AI, the worry we have about power, manipulation, and the ability to influence people, all that kind of goes away if people don't behave the way they behave currently. Well, I guess here is one difference with your white water rafting metaphor. So in that metaphor, we need to hang on. Like there's a risk we could smash ourselves on the rock, but if we don't do that, then there's one way we end up, downstream. We get up in a nice lake. Yeah. But I think in reality, what might also be the case, that in addition to trying to not smash ourselves on the rock, there might be places where the choices will make affect the ultimate destination. Go left or go right. Yeah. Or which dream do you follow? Maybe a more-- Yeah. Moment. And where if you stare in one direction, you might end up in one place ultimately, in some sort of strange post-human world, and maybe it's really beautiful. And people have the chance to grow into their true self, and we love each other and are creative and take initiatives. And go a different way. Maybe you have a paperclip maximizing AI area. Maybe that just everything is paperclips. So going a third way, maybe you have a totalitarian system with a small elite on top. And everybody else-- Yeah. --just-- So if I'm-- Yeah, there are many more possibilities. And maybe some that we would think would look kind of good if we chose now. But then in reality, they have some hidden flaw that we didn't think of. So if we chose those, it would sort of be a mistake. Right. And then maybe others that don't look at the peeling toss knife, if you just presented them in a brochure to you. But then, actually, if you thought hard about it, maybe you would realize that actually would be a really nice place to live. Because in the current world, there are places that are nice to visit that are interesting. But then those are not necessarily the same places we would want to live and raise a kid, right? So there are novels and movies that are really fun to watch. But you wouldn't want to live in those worlds. So there's a difference between the kind of what makes for the good, interesting story and the place we actually want to spend the rest of your life. And so I think that would be possibly a lot of opportunities to make foolish choices or unwise choices or conflicts that sort of force the process and makes us end up not just that we go extinct before we reach them, but that the area that we reach might depend on the level of wisdom and kindness that we have during the process. And there's always unintended consequences with every solution that we try to find for any problem that we have. There's always some new thing that comes up. We're like, oh, we didn't see that coming. I mean, certainly whenever we're dealing with nature, whenever they've brought in invasive species to handle other invasive species, it's always a giant disaster, you know? Yeah. Always. There's always unintended consequences. It's like, oh, now you have 100 billion frogs. Who's telling us about that? Was it Ali Sadik that was telling us about the frogs? Who-- Yeah. --about they brought in-- what did they bring in? Forget what the invasive species was. They brought in this one species to kill another species. And the problem they didn't realize that species had been-- it was like coyotes or-- Forget it was. It was Guam. What did they get rid of? Whatever it was. They got rid of this thing that had been killing the frogs. So then they had toads, right? Was it toads? So they had millions of these things that were all over the highway. So you drive on them, just squash them everywhere you go, because there was nothing controlling the population of these things anymore. It's like unintended consequences of-- because we're very short-sighted, and even in our ability to be contemplative about what the possibility of the future is, when you're dealing with such an open-ended thing like AI, super-general intelligence, that can maybe make better versions of itself. Like, who the hell knows what that means? Are we making a god? Because it seems like if it keeps going on that, if it makes better versions of itself, what's ultimately going to get to the point where it could do anything, which is exactly what a god is, it can make universes. What if the ultimate end of this is a big bang button that some scientist invents? Yeah, so we are a little bit like-- yeah, I don't know, the different analogies one might reach for, but I guess like say you're on a plane, and then the pilot has passed out, or had a heart attack, or something. Now, it's like we passengers somehow have to figure out how to do the run the controls. You have to still try to make your best, right? But then add to that, that all the passengers are fighting amongst each other. Each one thinks they are the guy who should control the-- they all convinced that they are the superior person to try to land a plane. So in addition to trying to figure out how the controls work, they are actually having a big fist fight in the cockpit, as well, and somebody is dragging somebody else away. And there's the kind of monkey tribe that is the current state of the world here, and we're trying to shepherd this ship of humanity into Utopia. It's an interesting-- It's Dr. Strangelove on steroids. But that's it. We might only have to get it so far. At some point, we should be able to hand over the reins. Once you have a sufficiently good AI, like we may be.
get assistance from that point on. I think it's the first thing that it's going to take over is government. We're going to realize how unbelievably inefficient the government is at doing almost everything and how much of the money that gets allocated is fraud and waste. If you allow AI to sort through that and develop much more efficient pathways to controlling and so many resources-- I think some people would not want to see that. Exactly, that's going to be a problem. But if we get to the point where there's some sort of a high mind possibility, some sort of-- one of the things that Elon said that I thought was really fast and he said, you're going to be able to talk without words. Well, if we're able to talk without words, does that eventually get to the point when we could read minds? Is thought and is communication no longer verbal? It's no longer sounds. So right now, we associate sounds that I'm making where you know what words I'm using, what I'm referencing, and we get a certain understanding of what each other is trying to say. But what if that's just clunky? And that's silly. And what if instead of a scroll that you leave in a cave somewhere, now you have a movie that you can watch, like something much more grossing and much more powerful. And that this is what human communication becomes. It doesn't-- and maybe this is why the grays don't have mouths. We move away from sounds. Because right now, what we figured out is like sort of like duct tape. We're communicating, we kind of patched it up. We figured out something. We're just going to use noises we make. Well, we have different noises here than the people that live on this island. They have totally different noises. I don't know what the fuck they're saying. And then you have people on the other side of the world totally different noises. So tower of babble type situation, right? Where we really can't communicate with each other unless we have translators. But if we get to the point where that's not how humans communicate, we communicate purely through thought and intention and understanding and that it's no longer based on language. It's no longer based on this is a transistor. This is a coffee mug. Instead, it's a complete understanding of each individual thing that we're discussing. Everything you know what it is. You understand what it is without it having to have a noise associated with it. Yeah, I mean, I guess the cyber security implications are significant if you are giving direct access to other people to transmit signals to your brain in a high bandwidth way. That is not just words kind of that it's almost like you heard them even though there's no sound in your ear. But if it's like actually directly kind of interfacing in a high bandwidth way with your network. Also, encryption's out the window. If we no longer have encryption, if we get to the point where-- Why is that that the window? Because if computing gets to the point where the bottleneck is like think about money, right? What is money right now? Money's all ones and zero somewhere, essentially, right? It's all bank accounts. We're not on a gold standard anymore. So what if that bottleneck? It's an information bottleneck. Someone's preventing you from going into these places and getting these ones and zeros and transferring it to your place. But what if that is all-- what if computing power gets to the point where AI gets to the point where those boundaries are nonsense now? All encryption is instantaneously decoded. I think probably cryptography is a defense dominant in the limit, I think. Like if you imagine mature technology, I think it would be possible to encrypt-- I mean, if nothing else you could use like a one-time pad, which would enable you to encrypt things in a way that is unbreakable. Really? I feel like that's going to be a bottleneck. And I think once we start reading each other's minds, that might be the first thing to go. Well, it'll be like the ultimate solution. That's where you really probably would want encryption, right? If you're going to transmit thoughts to me-- Oh, yeah. Like, you don't want to have a-- Oh, you want some asshole constantly in your head, your next-door neighbor, just poking you and prodding you. But you would hope that along with this technology becomes like a general state of enlightenment that the human beings achieve, where that's no longer the kind of behavior that we indulge in. Which behavior do we indulge in? Knowing each other, stealing each other's money. That kind of stuff. Well, but then, yeah, I guess we go back to this question of the utopian condition. So there are a lot of things that individually are bad, like lying, stealing, cheating, greed, excessive pride, like all kinds of disease, stubbing your knees bad. Yet, if you sort of-- you might end up removing all of those things, then that changes the human condition quite profoundly. And to some people would feel, kind of, maybe our appear flavorless, sort of, if there is no tension, no conflict, no bruise de go, no, like-- Yeah. It might sound good, but it does force us to sort of-- I think it would be a rather fundamentally different thing that we would be met and were fusing into if we went all the way in that direction. Which ultimately might be right. But it would require us to kind of find new ways of realizing whatever values are imperfectly realized in the current world through conflict and competition and pain. Like, some people get the motivation from painful failure. Yeah. And so if you get rid of the pain from failure, then you'd need some other motivation, like some other thing that drives you on, which there could be. Like, maybe it's just a love of achievement, then you feel kind of neutral or just less happy when you fail. But you would still need something that kind of preserves. Whatever structure it is that we think is valuable in the current human condition. Unless you go all the way to sort of radical hedonism and think the future is best if we were all just kind of floating in some kind of drug-induced euphoria as blobs that experienced immense pleasure. But I know real texture in our experiences didn't engage in activities and didn't interact with each other. There's a philosophical view where ultimately pleasure is the only thing that matters and the minimization of suffering. So if that's your axiology, then it's relatively easy to see then how a technological maturity you would achieve a sort of optimal state. But if you have a more complex value system, where maybe pleasure is one good thing, maybe really important. But there are also other things like appreciating beauty, true friendship, courage, achievement. And ideally you'd want the future that includes all of these things then you need to do a little bit more sort of design work to figure out the way to combine them all in a meaningful way. But this all comes back to our idea of human meaning. What's important to humans are finite 100-year lifespan adoption of this concept of meaning. But the black hole doesn't give a shit about human meaning. And it's going to be around a lot longer than us. And it's got a lot more power than us. And it's doing a lot more change than us. We want to think that we're more important than black holes. Yeah, I mean-- Because we are-- I think we are, I mean-- To us? Yeah, to us. But to the universe is it is human meaning that important to the universe? Or is it just sort of a placeholder for what will ultimately become? Is it motivate us to continue to progress? Well, so I think like at technological maturity, there are certainly forms of purpose that you could have-- you could have our artificial purpose. So this is when you basically set yourself a goal for the sake of having the goal and then doing the activity that-- so maybe you set yourself the goal. I'm going to get this little white ball into a sequence of 18 holes. And not only that, but in order to achieve this goal, it's part of the goal that I'm only allowed to use this very inconvenient method. I can hit the ball with a club, right? I can't-- much easier to just pick it up and put it in each hole successfully, but that doesn't count as being successful. So you could make up this goal pretty arbitrary. Now, once you have that goal, then you now have a reason to try hard to concentrate, to perfect your swing, and you can play golf. So the goal enables you to do this activity of golf playing, which maybe you find fun or worthwhile or meaningful. And the goal is how to solve it. Meaningful is because it's difficult to do. Yeah. And so the future would consist, I think, if we succeed in a lot of game playing. And you could certainly have these artificial purposes that you set yourself, these goals, that then give you a reason to engage in an activity. Now we're back in the world of Half-Life. Now we're back in a video game. Now we're also in the simulation. This is going to be your artificial goal. And you could imagine, I think, maybe we shouldn't think of video games here, but it could be much like games we can't even imagine. It could be like society-wide games that last for 20 years that involve all kinds of multimodal things and little groups that work together to come up with new ways of creatively. And so in that broad sense of kind of things we do for their own sake, I think, game playing could be. And it's like a lot of what children do. kind of for curiosity and spend a lot of the time playing games and we might all be.
like kids again. What might be shorter supply is a natural purpose. Like, purposes which we don't just arbitrarily make up in order to have a purpose, but that are sort of given to us. So right now in the world, you might say, making a living is not just an arbitrary purpose, because there are real consequences if you fail. Maybe eventually you get kicked out from your flat, and then, you know, it's really cold, and you get rained on, and like horrible things happen. So like, similarly, if you don't brush your teeth, eventually you will have tooth decay, and there will be real consequences. So there are various things that you have reason to do, because there are real negative consequences if you fail to do them. And a lot of our lives is structured by these natural purposes. At a societal level, there's a whole bunch of things we need to do together, right? In this future world, maybe there would be many fewer of those natural purposes, because for any one of them, you could just ask the AI to sort it out. And so the artificial purposes would be a larger chunk. It's interesting to think, are there any natural purposes that would survive to technological maturity? Like, anything that we still have sort of instrumental reasons that we need to do ourselves? And I think there might be a few, but there are more subtle, there might not strike us currently as very important, but it's one of those things where, like, you know, that during the day, if you're outside, you can't see the stars, right? It's not because they're not there, like, it's because, like, there's so much light that they are sort of blotted out. But at night, when the stronger light from the sun is absent, you can see these fainter lights. I think similarly, in this future, there might be, once this sort of urgent screaming more values of immediately pressing practical concern, go away, you might be able to perceive a whole constellation of these more subtle values that we are blind to currently. So take the value of, take the value of, like, I don't know, like some, like honoring your forebears. So right now, it doesn't seem, I mean, maybe it's nice sometimes to remember your past parents or some historical hero who did something good that benefacted humanity, right? But it's like not the main thing that you're like, maybe that would be a bigger thing if there was nothing else you needed to do. Maybe you could actually spend serious time or spiritual quests. Like, even for people who are very religious, a lot of their actual waking hours are spent on random other things doing their laundry, right? Like driving to work, like the old kinds of stuff. Like, if all of that was automated, you could imagine spending more time on trying to align yourself, orient yourself to this higher being and trying to be in communication with them. Like, maybe aesthetic values. Like, there may be some things that would just be kind of nice and cool if the world were like that. We don't really have time to worry so much about them now, but if there was nothing else on the agenda, like coming together in a way that upholds some tradition in a beautiful, original way that still is true to the original spirit together with other people and enacting some ceremony. Like, maybe those things would start to feel more of our time in conjunction with this game playing. And there might be many other of these kind of subtler values that would start to shape what people were doing. Yeah. And ultimately, who knows? Yes. It's very interesting, and it's very open-ended. And we really don't know what's going to happen, but we're probably going to see it. We're probably going to see the strangest thing that humans have ever had a possibility to experience. And in the end, I guess it's a trustful. Yeah. Well, I mean, these conversations are always fascinating. And who knows? Let's do another one in a few years and see how off we are. If you come back in four years, all right? If we have four years. If we have four years, if you can, if you're allowed to travel in four years, come back. And let's see how wrong we were. We can update. Well, thank you very much. I really appreciate you coming in here. It's great to see you again. It's fun. It's always fun. OK. All right. Think about it, kids. Bye, everybody.
Podcast Summary
Key Points:
The rapid advancement of AI and technology over the past seven years has dramatically transformed society, shifting from a background presence to a central force in daily life.
While AI promises immense economic and societal benefits, it also raises profound questions about human purpose, meaning, and the value of work in a world where basic needs are automatically met.
A major challenge in the future will be redefining education and human development, as traditional systems designed for factory labor must evolve to nurture curiosity, creativity, and personal fulfillment.
As automation eliminates most jobs, human motivation may shift from survival to purpose, leading to new forms of leisure, self-directed learning, and exploration of inner values.
The absence of struggle—such as poverty, crime, or labor—could eliminate the emotional contrast that makes joy and peace meaningful, potentially leading to a life of passive existence or artificial fulfillment.
There is a growing possibility that human biology will evolve alongside technology, with extended lifespans, enhanced intelligence, and even radical cognitive or physical transformation.
Human identity and meaning may be redefined in a post-scarcity world, where experiences like art, love, and conflict are no longer necessary for fulfillment.
The future of humanity may involve a transition from biological primate existence to a more advanced, technologically integrated form of being, possibly with shared consciousness or alien-like traits.
Summary:
The conversation explores the transformative impact of AI and technological advancement over the past decade, emphasizing how quickly these changes have integrated into daily life. While AI promises vast economic and societal benefits—such as eradicating poverty and automating labor—the shift raises deep philosophical questions about human purpose, meaning, and identity. With basic needs like food and housing no longer tied to work, society must confront how people will find fulfillment in a world of abundance.
The current education system, designed to produce factory workers, will need radical reform to foster curiosity, creativity, and personal growth. There is a risk that without purpose, individuals may fall into passive existence or be drawn to highly stimulating virtual environments, which could replace real-world engagement. The conversation also touches on the potential evolution of human biology—such as extended lifespans, enhanced intelligence, and even cognitive transformation—through medical and genetic advancements.
These changes may lead to a future where human life is no longer defined by struggle or labor, but by deeper self-exploration and inner fulfillment. Ultimately, the trajectory suggests humanity may evolve beyond its current biological form, moving toward a more intelligent, flexible, and possibly interconnected existence. This evolution, while promising, requires careful cultural and ethical guidance to preserve the values of love, struggle, and meaning that define the human experience.
FAQs
AI automation could eliminate many traditional jobs, leading to significant workforce transitions. This would require retraining programs and new forms of social support, such as employment insurance, to help people adapt to new economic realities.
Virtual realities could become highly immersive and fulfilling, potentially offering richer experiences than physical reality. However, people may still value physical activities like climbing mountains or engaging in real-world interactions, as these provide unique emotional and sensory depth.
Without the need to work for food and housing, people may find new sources of purpose, such as pursuing hobbies, creative projects, or deep personal growth. This shift could lead to a more fulfilling life focused on meaning, curiosity, and self-development.
Education could shift from a factory-model system focused on job preparation to one centered on curiosity, critical thinking, and personal interests. Students might explore passions like art, science, or philosophy, with learning accessible through instant knowledge retrieval.
Humans may not become obsolete, but they would need to evolve—biologically, socially, and psychologically—to thrive in a world where machines handle most labor. Focus would shift from productivity to creativity, connection, and personal growth.
Many aspects of human joy and art—like love, music, and literature—emerge from struggle, pain, and contrast. A world without conflict might lack these emotional depth, suggesting that some struggle is essential to what it means to be human.
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