Good Robot #1: The Magic Intelligence in the Sky

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And on the Vergecast, we are talking about the best, the worst, the most important, the biggest heel turns, all the stuff that happened in 2025. And making maybe a few predictions about what's going to happen next year. All that and more on the Vergecast wherever you get podcasts. This series is presented by Jira by Ed Lassian. Suppose in the future, there's an artificial intelligence. We've created an AI so vastly powerful, so unfathomably intelligent, though you might call it super intelligent. Let's give this super intelligent AI a simple goal. To produce paper clips. Because the AI is super intelligent, it quickly learns how to make paper clips out of anything in the world. It can anticipate and foil any attempt to stop it. And we'll do so because it's one directive is to make more paper clips. Should we attempt to turn the AI off, it will fight back because it can't make more paper clips if it is turned off and it will be this because it is super intelligent and we are not. The final result, the entire galaxy, including you, me and everyone we know, has either been destroyed or been transformed into paper clips. This past summer, I found myself at a very niche event in the Bay Area. Cool. And what brought you to town because you don't live here, right? I came here for this festival conference thing. How much context on this one, thank you. Please dude, it's so fun to watch people try and describe. The crowd is mostly dudes, a mix of people in their 20s, 30s and 40s. It feels kind of like a college reunion meets costume party. I spot some masquerade masks and tie-dye jumpsuits. I guess it's like a sort of conference around blogging. This festival conference thing is the first official gathering IRL of a blogging community founded about 15 years ago. I am the old school fucking rat. I am the oldest of school, amazing. And rats refers to rationalists. They call themselves the rationalists. Rats strive to be rational in an irrational world. By thinking things through, often with quirky hypotheticals, they try to be rational about monetary policy, rational about evolution, rational, even about dating. We've got kind of mocked for trying to solve romance by writing long blog posts about it. But their most influential idea, their most viral meme, you might say, is one that influenced Elon Musk and created an entire industry. It's about the possibility of an AI apocalypse. Um, I was a bit of a normie myself. I was a normie once myself too. I just was drawn to the way that the community talks in these thought experiments, right? The paperclip maximizer in particular, got my attention. That was the one I had in mind, the paperclip maximizer is a clear example of the thing, people of classically being scared of. The paperclip maximizer is a thought experiment, an intentionally absurd story that tries to describe what rationalists foresee as a real problem in building AI systems. How do you kind of shape control a artificial mind that is more capable than you, uh, potentially as general or more general? They imagine a future where we've built an artificial general intelligence beyond our wildest dreams, generally intelligent, not just at some narrow task like spell checking, and super intelligent. I'm told that means it's smarter, faster, and more creative than us. And then we hand this AI a simple task. Give it the job of something like, can you make a lot of paperclip speeds? We need paperclips. Can you make there be a lot of paperclips? The task here, I'm told, is ridiculous by design. To show that if you are this future AI, you're going to follow the instructions you're given to a T. Even if you're super intelligent and you understand all the intricacies of the universe, paperclips are now your one priority. You totally understand that humans care about other stuff like art and children and love and happiness. You understand love. You just don't care about it because the thing that you care about is making as many paperclips as possible. And if you have the resources, maybe you'll turn the entire galaxy into paperclips. A lot of rationalists I spoke to told me they've thought this thing through. It was clear to me when I first heard the arguments that they weren't obviously silly. Was that thought experiment part of convincing you that this was something that we needed to worry about? Yes, definitely. And they are very, very worried. Not about a paperclip apocalypse in particular. But about how as we build more powerful AI systems, we might lose control of them. They might do something catastrophic. I think it anyway makes it hard to plan your life out or feel like you stand somewhere solid, I think. The reason I, a mere normie, find myself at this festival conference thing is that I've been plunging my head deep into the sand about AI. I've had a general sense that the vibes are kind of bad over there. Will this tech destroy our livelihoods or save our lives? Use of artificial intelligence could lead to the annihilation of humanity. You never talked about a cell phone apocalypse or an internet apocalypse. I guess maybe if you count Y2K, but even that wasn't going to wipe out humanity. But the threat of an AI apocalypse, it feels like it's everywhere. Muck Whitewood's AI is far more dangerous than NUGS. From billionaire Elon Musk to the United Nations. Today, all 193 members of the United Nations General Assembly have spoken in one voice. AI is existential. But then it feels like scientists in the know can't even agree on what exactly we should be worried about. These existential risks that they call it. It makes no sense at all, and on top of that it's an enormous distraction from the actual harms that are already being done in the name of AI. It all feels way above my pay grade, overwhelming and unknowable. I'm not an AI scientist. I couldn't tell you the first thing about how to build a good robot. It feels like I'm just along for the ride of whatever technologists decide to make good or bad. So better to just plug my ears and say, "La la la la." But I recently took a job working with Vox, a site that's been covering this technology basically since it started. On top of that, last year, Vox Media, Vox's parent company, announced their partnering with OpenAI, meaning I'm not totally sure what it means. But if I was ever going to have to grapple with AI and it's place in my life, it's here, now, at Vox. So I'll start with a simple question. How did some people come to believe that we should fear an AI apocalypse? Should AI be afraid? This is Good Robot, a series about AI from unexplainable, in collaboration with Future Perfect. I'm Joy Lungoria. Right now is the AI Gold Rush. And that means everybody who builds an app, a platform, a piece of software, a gizmo that's somebody anything, everybody is trying to put AI everywhere. And for two weeks in a series on the VertCast, we are talking through what that looks like. We're talking to developers about what they're building and how they're building it. And whether AI actually does make sense everywhere, or is just going to ruin everything in the process, that's the AI mini series on the VertCast wherever you get podcasts. This series is presented by MongoDB. For this show, comes from Odoo. Running a business is hard enough. So why make it harder? With a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other. Introducing Odoo. It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one fully integrated platform that makes your work easier. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more. And the best part? Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. But quite over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you? Try Odoo for free at odoo.com. That's odoo.com. Raise the runners. Raise the sales. Raise the sales. Captain, the unidentified ship is approaching over. Roger, wait, is that an enterprise sales solution? Reach sales professionals, not professional sailors. With LinkedIn ads, you can target the right people by industry, job title, and more. Start converting your B2B audience today. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a free $250 credit for the next one. Get started today at linkedin.com/campaign, terms and conditions applied. Here we go. When I first started reporting on the idea of an AI apocalypse, and if we should be worried about it, my first stop was the Bay Area for the Rationalist Conference, but I also stopped by the house of a colleague nearby. Hi Kelsey. How you doing? Good. How's your flight? Oh, it was actually... Box is largely a remote workplace. So it was one of those body dysmorphic experiences to meet Kelsey Piper in 3D. Better than she looks on Google Meet. I am a writer for Vox's Future Perfect, which is the Vox section that's about undercover to issues that might be a really big deal in the world. We were joined by her seven month old, as she was saying Vox's Future Perfect is about... Undercover to issues that might be a really big deal in the world. Kelsey's thought that AI technology would be a really big deal in the world, long before this AI moment we're all living. She's been thinking about AI since she was a kid when she first found the Rationalist community online. Oh, I was in high school. I was 15 board academic over performer with a very long list of extracurriculars so that would look good to colleges down the road, and in my free time, I read a lot of Harry Potter fanfiction as, you know, 15-year-olds back in 2010 did. One of the most popular Harry Potter fanfictions was called Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by Elias Aradkowski. Eliasar was influenced by a lot of the early sci-fi authors. Eliasar, as he's known to the rats, is the founding father of rationalism, King of Thought Experiments. Back in 2010, he started publishing a serialized Harry Potter fanfic over the course of years. Since inspired several audiobook versions, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality written by Elias Aradkowski, and a version acted out by The Sims. Mum, if you want to win the Sargerin with Dad, look in Chapter 2 of the first book of the Feynman Lectures on Physics. It too was a thought experiment. What if Harry Potter were parented differently? The initial promise is just that Harry Potter instead of having abusive parents has nerdy parents who teach him about science. So his aunt and uncle are nice people, yeah. Harry, I do love you, always remember that. And in this version, Harry Potter's superpowers turn out not to be courage and magic, but math and logic. What Eliasar calls the Methods of Rationality. So Harry Potter has a quest to do what, exactly. You know, fix all of the bad things in the world. And the combination of being credibly naive and also, in some sense, incredibly respectable, I think, as a teenager, that super appealing fondant, where you're like, why would I limit myself to only solving one of the problems? While there are any problems, I'm not done, we've got to fix everything. The idea that every problem should be thought about, every problem could be fixed, that was appealing to his readers, including 15-year-old Kelsey. She wanted to read more, so she found her way to Eliasar's blog. Eliasar was pretty openly like, I wrote this to see if it would get people into my blog less wrong, where I write about other issues. So the question is, please tell us a little about your brain. Yes, your IQ on his blog, called Less Wrong. He applies the methods of rationality, method logic, to all kinds of topics. So the question is, how to start training young children as rationalists. Like child rearing. Training children to be self-aware, trying to get them more interested in being fair to both sides of an argument. Religion. My parents, their modern Orthodox Jews, always avoiding their real weak points of their beliefs. They had stuff about atheism, a lot of stuff about psychology, biases, experiments that showed that, depending on how you ask the question, you get very different answers from people. Because the idea is that you're supposed to, by reading the blog and participating, learn how to be less wrong. I do it by stories and parables that illustrate it. Like the default state is that we're all very confused about many things, and you're trying to do a little bit better. So it's kind of like trying to sort of, I don't know, like, work out the bugs in the human brain system to optimize prediction. Yeah, and a ton of the people involved are computer programmers, and I think that's very much how they saw it. Like the human brain has all these bugs. You go in and you learn about all of these, you learn to correct for them, and then once you've corrected for them, you'll be a better thinker, and better at doing whatever it is you set out to do. The biggest human brain bug, Elias, or wanted to address was how people thought about AI, how he himself used to think about AI. His very first blog post, as far as I can tell, was in 1996, when he was just 17. And in a very 17 kind of way, he writes about his frustrations. I have had it, I've had it with crack houses, dictatorships, and world hunger. I've had it with a planetary death rate of 150,000 sentient beings per day. None of this is necessary. We repeat the mantra, "I can't solve all the problems of the world. We can. We can end this." And the way to end this, he thought back then, was to build a super intelligent AI. A good robot that could save the world. But at around 20 years old, while researching how to build it, he became convinced building super intelligent robots would almost certainly go badly. It would be really hard to stop them once they were on a bad path. I mean, ultimately, if you push these things far enough without knowing what you're doing, sooner or later, you're going to open up the black box that contains the black swan surprise from hell. And at first, he was sending these warnings into the void of the vast internet. So the question is, do I feel lonely often? That's, I often feel isolated to some degree, but writing less wrong has, I think, helped a good deal. The way I tend to think about Eliezer Yutkowski as a writer is that he has a certain angle on the world, which can be like a real breath of fresh air, like, "Oh, there's someone else who cares about this." You know, you can feel very seen for the first time. And if you know how you feel, oh yeah, yeah. You have a good heart, and you are certainly trying to do the right thing. But it's very difficult sometimes to figure out what that is. That pursuit of being less wrong, of doing the right thing in the right way, brought many kindred spirits together on the blog. Actually, several of my housemates posted on less wrong back in the day. This is how I met a bunch of the people I live with. They were people whose blogs I read back when I was a high school student. Wow. That's kind of wild. Yeah. Many less wrong bloggers and readers like Kelsey were inspired to move to the Bay area. To join a pretty unusual community, IRL, and the weekend I visited hundreds of rationalists from around the world gathered in the Bay to reason things out together for a festival conference thing called Less Online. Many rationalists I met there found the community the way Kelsey did. A friend of mine at Mathcam introduced me to Harry Potter and the methods of rationality. The poster was written in all caps saying, "Oh my God, I've just read it to most amazing book in my life. You have to read it right now, linking to fanfiction.net." Others found Eliezer on his blog. I mean, this event exists in very large part because of our series of blog posts. That series of blog posts has become known by the community as the sequences. It includes the paperclip maximizer thought experiment. Eliezer Yudkowski helped come up with the idea, intending to warn people of the danger of an AI apocalypse. And at least here, it seems to have worked. Like, I definitely think AI is the largest kind of existential risk that humanity faces right now. Yeah. I, the normie, wanted to try to take this threat beyond quirky hypotheticals to something more concrete. And can you walk me through, like, how could that happen? Like, how could an AI? It's really hard to say how it will happen if it does. Yes, although it is easier to say ways that it might happen and to kind of provide various examples to, like, just generate intuitions for why this might be. But anytime I pressed a rationalist on it, they gave me yet another series of thought experiments. Kind of the way it might happen is analogous to how a 21st century army might defeat an 11th century army. Which, I guess, might be the only way to try and describe a threat from a technology that's really still in its infancy. For rationalists first introduced into this world. Like 15-year-old Kelsey, these thought experiments were convincing. AI, to her, was a really big deal. It was just like, whoa, all this is, like, really cool and exciting and interesting. And I tried to convince my friends that it was cool and exciting and interesting. I asked 30-year-old Kelsey to break it down for me without thought experiments. So I think L.A.'s are sort of had two big claims in the zooming out a lot. Claim number one, we will build an AI that's smarter than humans, and it will change the world. AI is a really big deal. Building something that is smarter than humans is possible, is probably achievable, is potentially achievable soon in our lifetimes. And then Claim number two, getting this right is extraordinarily difficult. Things are likely to go wrong. What is my advice to less-strong readers who want to save human race? Well, if you're familiar with all the issues of AI and all the issues of rationality and you're willing to work for a not-overwhelmingly high salary. L.A.'s are helped inspire a new career path and a new field was born. Trying to make sure we developed superintelligence safely. One way to make sure it went safely was to try and actually build it. And as investment in that field began to grow, the community of believers in a someday super-intelligent AI experienced a schism. And I think a lot of the people who were persuaded by L.A.'s are first claim that AI is a really big deal. We're not necessarily super-sweeted by a second claim that you have to be very, very careful or you're going to do something catastrophically bad. But the beginning of a so-called catastrophe looks like after the break. If you're tired of database limitations and architectures that break when you scale, then it's time to think outside rows and columns. MongoDB is the database built for developers, by developers. It's acid compliant, enterprise-ready and fluent in AI. That's why so many of the Fortune 500 trust MongoDB with their most critical workloads. Ready to think outside rows and columns? Start building faster at MongoDB.com/build. Start for the show comes from Odo. Running a business is hard enough. So why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odo. It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one fully integrated platform that makes your work easier. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce and more. And the best part? Odo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. So why over thousands of businesses have made the switch? So why not you? Try Odo for free at Odo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com. President Trump was busy last weekend. Kennedy Center honors. It's like sometimes you could say, like people, either have it to your own. Great sound in this building. Crash the staff holiday party at the White House. Many of you have been with me for the beginning, including the first term, and we love you all. And I just want to wish you a Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, Happy Honig, and all the wonderful kids. But all Trump wants for Christmas. It's for Indiana Republicans to pass a new Congressional mat. Routh Social. If they stupidly say no, vote them out of office. They are not worthy. And I will be there to help. Thank you, Indiana. Some things he can gerrymander his way to victory in the 2026 midterm elections. But some Indiana Republicans aren't buying it. Trump and his Mac and Movement have taken over the GOP, but in Indiana and beyond, there are some signs of cracks in the coalition. That's coming up onto the explain from Vox. When the paperclip maximizer meme first started circulating, in the 2000s, our best example of a paperclip AI was Clippy. The animated little guy, onward, with the eyeballs, Microsoft's AI office assistant. Back in the day, I remember it couldn't even tell you if you should use there or there in a sentence. People weren't so much afraid of Clippy as they were annoyed with him. There are a remarkable number of think pieces from those years slamming Clippy. The consensus was, no one asked for this. This is dumb. So when Eliezer Yudkowski warned about the dangers of a super intelligent AI that could someday destroy humanity, it was hard for a lot of people to take him seriously. The state of thought in 2010 was something like, yeah, AI may as well be a century away. He's your perfect writer, Kelsey Piper again. So if you are Eliezer Yudkowski, you have a bit of a dilemma, right? You want to make two arguments. One is super intelligent AI is possible. Building a robot that's smarter, faster, and more creative than humans at most things is possible, Clippy be damned, and he needed to make that first argument before he could make his next one. The second argument you want to make is, we need to not do it until we have solved the challenge of how to do it right. For a long time, both arguments, super AI is possible, but let's not for now. We're dead in the water. Because AI tech was just not that impressive. But by 2014, Eliezer noticed that people outside his corner of the blogosphere had started to pay attention. AI is probably the single biggest item in the near term that's likely to affect humanity. Tesla achieved executive and billionaire Elon Musk, who started this year sitting prominently in President Trump's White House, had tweeted, quote, "We need to be super careful with AI, potentially more dangerous than nukes." It's about minimizing the risk of existential harm. It seems like Elon Musk is a reader of Eliezer's blog. He famously met his ex, the musician Grimes, when they joked on then Twitter about a very obscure thought experiment from the blog. I will spare you the details. The point is, Elon Musk read the paperclip Maximizer Thought Experiment, and he seemed convinced AI was a threat. It's very important that we have the advent of AI in a good way, and that's the reason that we created an open AI. Elon Musk co-created open AI. You might have heard he left and then tried to buy it back, but if you haven't heard of open AI, you've probably come across its most popular product, chat GPT. I was surprised to learn that Eliezer Yudkowski was in fact the original inspiration for the chat GPT company, according to its co-founder, Sam Altman. Sam Altman has in fact said this on Twitter that he said that he credits Eliezer for the fact that he started open AI. Co-founder Sam Altman specifically tweeted that Yudkowski might win a Nobel Peace Prize for his writings on AI, that he's done more to accelerate progress on building an artificial general intelligence than anyone else. Now, in saying this, he was kind of being a little cruel, right? Because Eliezer thinks that open AI is on track to cause enormous catastrophe. Co-founders Sam Altman and Elon Musk bought Eliezer's first claim. That superintelligence is possible, and it's possible in our lifetimes, but they miss the part about how you're not supposed to build it yet. For this sort of most important technological milestone in human history, I view that as right around the corner. I think that's Sam Altman talking about superintelligence. Like, it's coming soon enough, and it's a big enough deal that I think we need to think right now about how we want this deployed, how everyone gets the benefit from it, how we're going to govern it, how we're going to make it safe and sort of good for humanity. It's still not clear to me what superintelligence actually is. I won't be the first one to observe that it has some religious vibes to it. The name makes it sound like it's an all-knowing entity. The CEO of OpenAI's competitor, Anthropic, said he wanted to build, quote, "machines of loving grace." Sam Altman was asked on Joe Rogan's podcast about whether he's attempting to build God. I guess it comes down to maybe a definitional disagreement about what you mean by it becomes a God. I think whatever we create will still be subject to the laws of physics in this universe. Sam Altman has called this superintelligence, quote, "the magic intelligence in the sky," which, I don't know, sounds a lot like how some people talk about God to me. How exactly this supposed superintelligence will be smarter, faster, and more intelligent than us on what scale is unclear? But for all the hype around chat GPT, I only recently learned what the heck it is. It's what they call a large language model. At its most fundamental level, a language model, is an AI system that is trained to predict what comes next in a sentence. I'm oversimplifying here, but the very basic idea of a language model is to generate language based on probabilities. So if I have a word, or a set of words, what's the most likely next word? So if a sentence starts with, on Monday, I went to the grocery. The next word is probably store. The way the model guesses that store is probably next is based on how you train the language model. Training involves feeding the model a large body of text, so it can detect patterns in that text, and then go generate language based on those patterns. Early versions of spellcheck, like Clippy, were language models trained on the dictionary. It's useful, but only for a very specific task, like to tell you if you put the E in the word weird in the wrong place, or the ages in the word rhythm. Clippy couldn't tell you if you should use there, there, or there in a sentence because it wasn't trained on enough text to be able to guess the right word in context. The dictionary can't tell you that. But open AI's products were very different from Clippy. A revolution was happening in AI tech that made language models look less like a simple spellcheck and more like the human brain, detecting patterns and storing them in a network of neurons. Technologists train those neural networks to a process they called deep learning. They train the AI on a lot of data, close to the entire internet. Thanks to Vox Media's partnership with OpenAI, we know they're likely training the language model on this podcast, the words I'm saying right now. No one had ever trained an AI on the entire internet before, at least in part because of how expensive it is. It takes a ton of energy and compute power, but OpenAI, founded by a billionaire, raised the funds to make an attempt at the biggest, baddest, largest language model the world had ever seen. They started going, "Okay, what if the secret to trying to build super intelligent, god AI or whatever, is just to spend more money and have more neurons and to have more connections, beat it more data? What if that's all there is? What if you can build something that is more intelligent than any human who's ever lived just by doing that?" One of their earlier attempts before ChatGPT was GPT2 in 2019. You could similarly give it a specific task, like, "Design a luxury men's perfume ad for the London Underground. Make it witty and concise." "The London Underground is a great place to advertise. It's a great place to get your message across. It's a great place to get your product noticed." Look out, mad men. GPT2 was not exactly coming for copyrighter jobs, but for people like Kelsey, who were watching the technology closely, "I was like, wow, this is like miles beyond what AI chatbots were capable of last week. This is huge." GPT2, the language prediction machine, was showing some real promise. She wasn't alone in that feeling. It was like Microsoft poured millions more dollars into the next few models, which were bigger and bigger. Be the scent that turns heads. And a couple years later, OpenAI released ChatGPT. "Visual, a captivating image of the perfume bottle surrounded by vibrant city lights, symbolizing the urban lifestyle, embrace the city, embrace your scent." Because people weren't paying any attention to AI, and so for them, it was like a huge change in what they understood AI to do. ChatGPT was the first time that normies like me even thought about AI in any real way. "All I wanted to do was fix my email. I did not expect to have a minor existential crisis about how much the world is about to change." And this is only proving that one day AI will take over human intelligence. "I spent about two hours just typing back and forth with this AI chatbot, and it got pretty weird." The AI confessed to loving Kevin and tried to convince him to leave his wife. People at OpenAI or competitors were saying, "Yeah, the plan is to build super intelligence. We think we're going to do it by 2027." People were like, "Okay, start up hype. For some reason, everybody who wants to start up feels the need to say that they're going to build God and throw human race." And then after ChatGPT was genuinely impressive, people started taking them a bit more seriously. And a lot of those people were nervous. People weren't so nervous about ChatGPT, but what ChatGPT represented? The way they got the language model to sound so much smarter, so quickly, wasn't through intricate code, they just made the model bigger. Which suggested to some people that the path to building God or whatever was through brute force, spending more and more money to build a bigger and bigger machine. So big, we didn't really understand why it did what it did. We can't point to a line of code to say, "This is why the robot got so much better at writing a perfume ad. And if we someday do build something that's smarter than us, whatever that means, we won't be able to understand why it's smarter than us." The trouble with this, it seems to me, is that AI will come for copyrighter jobs. It could come for all our jobs. But rationalists I spoke to say that's nothing compared to the bigger trouble ahead, a potential apocalypse. But I do also kind of think there is an important priority for me to have the best possible time in the next five to ten years. And just do the very best I can to squeeze the joy out of life while it is here. Do you have an example of that? One I can talk about on a podcast. Many rationalists I spoke to live in polyamorous communities because they believe monogamy is irrational. Some aren't sure if it's rational to have children, given the high probability of things going very, very wrong because of AI. What's my p-dume, p-dume it's a shorthand I heard at the conference, meaning probability of doom. It's a phrase that gets thrown around at this conference, people will literally go up to go, "So what's your p-dume?" And it's a shorthand for what is the probability that humanity doesn't make it in the long term. And this is a mathybunch, so they get specific. I guess the answer I usually give is something like over 50% I mean, I think it's like somewhere around 80, 90 years. Eliezer Yucowski's p-dume is very high. I've read it's over 95% these days, but then I've seen him tweet that p-dume is beside the point. I spotted Eliezer Yucowski pretty much the moment I stepped into the conference. He was hard to miss. It was the one wearing a gold sparkly top hat all weekend. I was the one who was clearly lost, carrying a big furry microphone for three days, trying to get people to talk to me. It wasn't until day three of the conference that I mustered the determination to approach Eliezer for an interview. Determination was necessary because he was always surrounded by a cluster of people, cluster of mostly dudes listening to him speak. I asked him if it would be ok if I pulled out my microphone. Over the last few years Eliezer and the rationalists have gotten some bad press. Some rationalists express their frustration at journalists who focus on the polyamory that happened in the community. Some critics of rationalism to put it crudely call them a sex cult. And then there's the unsavory things people associated with the community have said. One philosopher who helped popularize the paperclip maximizer, Nick Bostrom. Once wrote that he thought black people were less intelligent than white people. He has since apologized. But critics highlight this comment and the mostly white demographics of the rationalist community to question their beliefs. I never really know why anyone agrees to talk to me, but can you introduce yourself? I'm Eliezer Yudkowski. This event is probably more my fault than the fault of anyone else around. And can you describe your outfit right now? I'm currently wearing a sparkly multi-colored shirt and a sparkly golden hat. You can probably hear it in my voice. I was nervous to talk to him. He's known for being a bit argumentative, very annoyed with journalists and with the world, more generally, for not being smart enough to understand him, for not heating his warnings. I don't know. How would you summarize what you want the world to know in terms of AI? The world is completely botching the job of entering into the issue of machine super intelligence. There's not a simple fix to it. If anyone, anywhere builds it up, you know, and anything under anything remotely like the current regime, everyone will die. This is bad. We should not do it. Do you feel like gratified at all to see that like your ideas entered the mainstream conversation? Do you feel like they have? The circumstances under which they have entered the mainstream conversation are catastrophic. And if I was a sort of person who was like, you know, like deeply attached to the validation of seeing other people agree with me, I would have picked a much less disagreeable topic. It was here to try to like not have things good. I was here to not have things go terribly. They're currently going terribly. I did not get the thing I wanted. Eleasers been on a bit of a press tour, giving interviews and TED Talks, saying open AI is on track to cause catastrophe. So it's a funny thing because I have one position of deep sympathy with Eleaser. If you become convinced that this is a huge problem, it makes perfect sense to go on a writing tour, trying to explain this to people. And also, I think it's kind of predictable that a lot of people heard this and went, oh, AI is going to be really powerful. I don't think you're right about the thing where that's a problem. I want the powerful, important thing. And some people seized on it and were like, because this is powerful and important, we should like invest now. And I feel kind of sad about this. I can understand why Eleaser was hesitant to talk to me. His message to the world has been totally lost in translation. In his mind, it's backfired. Even at his own conference, there were attendees who worked for places like open AI. The company's building, the supposed death machine he was afraid of. He thought that our best chance of building a super intelligent AI that did what we wanted and didn't like, you know, seize power from humans was to build one that was very well understood. One that's sort of from the ground up, we knew why it made all the decisions that it made. Larger language models are just the exact opposite of that. I will say, even after talking to Eleaser and Kelsey and a bunch of rationalists, it's still hard to imagine how something like chat GPT or Google's AI, which once told someone to add glue to stick cheese on pizza, is going to become the invention of all inventions and possibly catastrophic. And I can understand how building something big that you don't understand is a scary idea. The best AI metaphor I came across for my brain was not about paperclips. It was by a non-rationalist writer, a guy named Brian Christian, describes that training AI is something that could go wrong in the way parenting a kid can go wrong. Like, there's a little kid playing with a broom, she cleans up a dirty floor, and her dad looking at what she's done on her own says, "Great job, you swept that really well." This little girl, without skipping a beat, might dump the dirt back on the floor and sweep it up again, waiting for that same praise. That's not what her dad meant for her to do. It's hard to get the goals right in teaching a kid to be good. It's even harder to teach good goals to a non-human robot. It strikes me as like almost like a parenting problem. I ran this parenting metaphor by Kelsey with her seven-month-old on her lap. I think there's some serious similarities, and I do with my kids struggle with trying to steer something that you don't have perfect control over, and that you wouldn't even want to have perfect control over, but where it could go extremely badly to like just let the dice fall where they may. If we just let the dice fall where they may, rationalists say we could have an apocalypse on our hands, and they say it won't be one we saw coming. It won't be a Hollywood style terminator situation, and probably won't have paper clips either. They don't pretend to know exactly how apocalypse could befall us. Just that it'll probably be something we haven't even imagined yet. But I have trouble getting caught in what could happen. When it feels like having bad things already started to happen, thanks to AI, AI is not hypothetical anymore. It's arrived in our lives. I'm not kept up at night about a hypothetical apocalypse. I find myself asking now questions. Questions like, "What is open AI doing with my voice right now?" Is there anything to do about problems with AI short of the annihilation of humanity? It sounds very exciting, you know, like if I were a big science fiction geek, I would be so into that. Not all technologists seized on Eleazar Yutkowski's claims. What is even talking about? This is like word salad, like this doesn't even make sense. One group of technologists didn't actually seize on any of his claims. There's one thing to have that conversation as a thought experiment. That's another thing when that kind of thought experimentation sucks up all of the money and the resources. The more I dig into the AI world, the more I see disagreement between technologists. I do worry about the ways in which AI can kill us, but I think about the ways in which AI can kill us slowly. They've been called the AI ethicists, and they say, "We've been paying attention to all of the wrong things." That's next time. Good Robot was hosted by Julia Longoria, and produced by me, Gabrielle Burbe. Sound Design, Mixing, and Original Score by David Herman. Editing by Diane Hodson and Catherine Wells. Special thanks to future perfect founder, Dylan Matthews, Tovox's executive editor, Albert Ventura, and Tom Chivers, whose book, The Rationalist's Guide to the Galaxy, was an early inspiration for this episode. If you want to dig deeper into what you've heard, head to vox.com/goodrobot to read more future perfect stories, trying to make sense of artificial intelligence — thanks for listening. Support for this show comes from Odo. Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder, with it doesn't differ in apps that don't talk to each other. Introducing Odo. 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