The Man Who Wrote The Book On AI: 2030 Might Be The Point Of No Return! We've Been Lied To About AI!

In October, over 850 experts, including yourself and other leaders like Richard Branson and Jeffrey Hinton, signed a statement to ban AI superintelligence as you guys raised concerns of potential human extinction. Because unless we figure out how do we guarantee that the AI systems are safe, we are toast. And you've been so influential on the subject of AI, you wrote the textbook. At many of the CEOs who are building some of the AI companies now would have studied on the subject of AI. So do you have any regrets? Professor Stuart Russell has been named one of Time Magazine's most influential voices in AI. After spending over 50 years researching, teaching and finding ways to design AI in such a way that humans maintain control. We talk about this guerrilla problem as a way to understand AI in the context of humans. Yeah, so a few million years ago, a human line branched off from the guerrilla line in evolution. And now the guerrillas have no say in whether they continue to exist, because we are much smarter than they are. Intelligence is actually the single most important factor to control planet Earth. Yep, but we're in the process of making something more intelligent than us. Exactly. Why don't people stop then? Well, one of the reasons is something called the Midas Touch. So King Midas is his legendary king who asks the gods, can everything I touch turn to gold. And we think of the Midas Touch as being a good thing, but he goes to drink some water, the water is turned to gold, and he goes to comfort his daughter, his daughter turns to gold, so he dies in misery and starvation. So this applies to our current situation in two ways. One is that greed is driving these companies to pursue technology with the probabilities of extinction being worse than playing Russian roulette. And that's even according to the people developing the technology without our permission. And people are just ruling themselves if they think it's naturally going to be controllable. So, you know, after 50 years I could retire, but instead I'm working 80 or 100 hours a week, trying to move things in the right direction. So if you had a button in front of you, which would stop all progress in artificial intelligence, would you press it? Not yet. I think there's still a decent chance that guarantees safety, and I can explain more of what that is. Just give me 30 seconds of your time. Two things I wanted to say. The first thing is a huge thank you for listening and tuning into the show week after week means the world to all of us. And this really is a dream that we absolutely never had and couldn't have imagined getting to this place. But secondly, it's a dream where we feel like we're only just getting started. And if you enjoy what we do here, please join the 24% of people that listen to this podcast regularly and follow us on this app. Here's a promise I'm going to make to you. I'm going to do everything in my power to make this show as good as I can now and into the future. We're going to deliver the guests that you want me to speak to and we're going to continue to keep doing all of the things you love about this show. Thank you. Professor Stuart Russell, OBE. A lot of people have been talking about AI for the last couple of years. It appears you've this really shocked me. It appears you've been talking about AI for most of your life. Well, I started doing AI in high school back in England. But then I did my PhD starting in 82 at Stanford. I joined the Faculty of Berkeley in 86. So I'm my 40th year as a professor at Berkeley. The main thing that the AI community is familiar with in my work is a textbook that I wrote. Is this the textbook that most students who study AI are likely learning from? So you wrote the textbook on artificial intelligence 31 years ago. You actually probably started writing it because it's so bloody big in the year that I was born. So I was born in 92. Yeah, it took me about two years. Me and your book at the same age. Just a wonderful way for me to understand just how long you've been talking about this and how long you've been writing about this. And actually it's interesting that many of the CEOs who are building some of the AI companies now probably learnt from your textbook. You had a conversation with somebody who said that in order for people to get the message that we're going to be talking about today, there would have to be a catastrophe for people to wake up. Can you give me context on that conversation and adjust of who you had this conversation with? So it was with one of the CEOs of a leading AI company. He sees two possibilities as do I, which is either we have a small, or let's say, small scale disaster of the same scale as Chernobyl. A nuclear meltdown in Ukraine? Yeah, so this nuclear plant blew up in 1986, killed a fair number of people directly and maybe tens of thousands of people indirectly through radiation. Recent cost estimates more than a trillion dollars. So that would wake people up, that would get the governments to regulate. He's talked to the governments and they won't do it. So he looked at this Chernobyl scale disaster as the best case scenario because then the governments would regulate. And require AI systems to be built. And is this CEO building an AI company? He runs one of the leading AI companies. And even he thinks that the only way that people will wake up is if there's a Chernobyl level nuclear disaster. Yeah, it wouldn't have to be a nuclear disaster. It would be either an AI system that's being misused by someone, for example, to engineer a pandemic, or an AI system that does something itself, such as crashing our financial system or our communication systems. The alternative isn't much worse disaster where we just lose control all together. You have had lots of conversations with lots of people in the world of AI. Both people that are have built the technology, have studied and researched the technology, all the CEOs and founders that are currently in the AI race. What are some of the interesting sentiments that the general public wouldn't believe that you hear privately about their perspectives? Because I find that so fascinating. I've had some private conversations with people very close to these tech companies. And the shocking sentiment that I was exposed to was that they are aware of the risks often, but they don't feel like there's anything that can be done. So they're carrying on, which feels like a bit of a paradox to me. Yes, it must be a very difficult position to be in, in a sense, right? You're doing something that you know has a good chance of bringing an end to life on earth, including that of yourself and your own family. They feel that they can't escape this race. If a CEO of one of those companies was to say, "You know, we're not going to do this anymore," they would just be replaced because the investors are putting their money up because they want to create AGI and read the benefits of it. So it's a strange situation where at least all the ones I've spoken to, I haven't spoken to Sam Altman about this, but Sam Altman even before becoming CEO of OpenAI said that creating superhuman intelligence is the biggest risk to human existence that there is. My worst fears are that we cause significant we, the field, the technology, the industry cause significant harm to the world. You know Elon Musk is also on record saying this. So Dario Amade estimates up to a 25% risk of extinction. Was there a particular moment when you realized that the CEOs are well aware of the extinction level risks? I mean, they all signed a statement in May of 23. It's called the extinction statement. It basically says AGI is an extinction risk at the same level as nuclear war and pandemics. But I don't think they feel it in their gut. Imagine that you are one of the nuclear physicists. You know, I guess you've seen Oppenheimer, right? So you're there, you're watching that first nuclear explosion. How would that make you feel about the potential impact of nuclear war on a human race? I think you would probably become a pacifist and say this weapon is so terrible we have got to find a way to keep it under control. We are not there yet with the people making these decisions and certainly not with the governments, right? You know, what policymakers do is they, you know, they listen to experts. They keep their finger in the wind. You got some experts, you know, dangling $50 billion checks and saying, "Oh, you know, all that Duma stuff, it's just fringe. Nonsense, don't worry about it. Take my $50 billion check." You know, on the other side, you've got very well-meaning brilliant scientists like Jeff Hinton saying, actually, no, this is the end of the human race. But Jeff doesn't have a $50 billion check. So the view is the only way to stop the race is if governments intervene and say, okay, we don't want this race to go ahead until we can be sure that it's going ahead in absolute safety. Closing off on your career journey, you've got a, you received an OB from Queen Elizabeth? Yes. And what was the listed reason for that for the award? Contributions to artificial intelligence research. And you've been listed as a time at magazine, most influential person in AI several years in a row, including this year, in 2025. Now, there's two terms here that are central to the things we're going to discuss. One of them is AI and the other is AGI. And when we're muggle interpretation of that, it's artificial general intelligence is when the system, the computer, whatever it might be, the technology has generalized intelligence, which means that it could theoretically see, understand the world. It knows everything. It can understand everything in the world, as well as, or better than a human being can do it. And I think take action as well. I mean, so some people say, oh, you know, AGI doesn't have to have a body, but a good chunk of our intelligence actually is about managing our body, about perceiving the real environment and acting on it, moving, grasping, and so on. So I think that's part of intelligence and AI systems should be able to operate robots successfully. But there's often a misunderstanding, right? The people say, well, if it doesn't have a robot body, then it can't actually do anything. But then if you remember, most of us don't do things with our bodies. Some people do. Bricklayers, painters, gardeners, chefs, but people who do podcasts, you're doing it with your mind, right? You're doing it with your ability to produce language. Adolf Hitler didn't do it with his body. He did it by producing language. So even an AGI that has no body, it actually has more access to the human race than Adolf Hitler ever did, because it can send emails and texts to three quarters of the world's population directly. It also speaks all of their languages, and it can devote 24 hours a day to each individual person on Earth to convince them to do whatever it wants them to do. And our whole society runs down the internet. I mean, if there's an issue with the internet, everything breaks down in society, airplanes become grounded, and we'll have electricity running off as internet systems. So I mean, my entire life, which seems to run off the internet now. Yeah, water supplies. So this is one of the routes by which AI systems could bring about a medium-sized catastrophe is by basically shutting down our life support systems. Do you believe that at some point in the coming decades, we'll arrive at a point of AGI where these systems are generally intelligent? Yes, I think it's virtually certain, unless something else intervenes like a nuclear war, or we made refrain from doing it. But I think it will be extraordinarily difficult for us to refrain. When I look down the list of predictions from the top 10 AICOs on when AGI will arrive, you've got Sam Altman, who's the founder of OpenAI/TragiBT, says before 2030. Demis at DeepMind says 2030 to 2035. Jensen from Nividia says around five years. Dario at Anthropic says 2026/2027, powerful AI-closed AGI. Elon says in the 2020s. And a good on the list of all of them, and they're all saying relatively within five years. I actually think it'll take longer. I don't think you can make a prediction based on engineering in the sense that, yes, we could make machines 10 times bigger and 10 times faster. But that's probably not the reason why we don't have AGI, right? In fact, I think we have far more computing power than we need for AGI. Maybe a thousand times more than we need. The reason we don't have AGI is because we don't understand how to make it properly. What we've seized upon is one particular technology called the language model. And we observed that as you make language models bigger, they produce text language that's more coherent and sounds more intelligent. And so mostly what's been happening in the last few years is just, okay, let's keep doing that. Because one thing companies are very good at, unlike universities, is spending money. They have spent gargantuan amounts of money, and they're going to spend even more gargantuan amounts of money. I mean, we mentioned nuclear weapons, so the Manhattan Project in World War II to develop nuclear weapons. Its budget in 2025 dollars was about 20 odd billion dollars. The budget for AGI is going to be a trillion dollars next year. So 50 times bigger than the Manhattan Project. Humans have a remarkable history of figuring things out when they galvanize towards a shared objective, you know, thinking about the moon landings or whatever it might else, it might be through history. And the thing that makes this feel all quite inevitable to me is just the sheer volume of money being invested into it. I've never seen anything like it in my life. Well, there's never been anything like this in history. Is this the biggest technology project in human history by autism magnitude? And there doesn't seem to be anybody that is pausing to ask the questions about safety. It doesn't even, it doesn't even appear that there's room for that in such a race. I think that's right. To varying extent, each of these companies has a division that focuses on safety. Does that division have any sway? Can they tell the other divisions? No, you can't release that system. Not really. I think some of the companies do take it more seriously. Anthropic does, I think, Google DeepMind. Even there, I think the commercial imperative to be at the forefront is absolutely vital. If a company is perceived as, you know, falling behind and not likely to be competitive, not likely to be the one to reach ADI first, then people will move their money elsewhere very quickly. And we saw some quite high-profile departures from companies like OpenAI, and a chap called Jan Lyek left, who was working on AI Safety OpenAI. And he said that the reason for his leaving was that safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products at OpenAI, and he gradually lost trust in leadership. But also Ilya Tsitskyva. Ilya Tsitskyva. So he was the co-founder and chief scientist for a while. And then, yeah, so he and Jan Lyek were the main safety people. And so when they say OpenAI doesn't care about safety, that's pretty concerning. I've heard you talk about this guerrilla problem. What is the guerrilla problem? As a way to understand AI in the context of humans. So the guerrilla problem is the problem that guerrillas face with respect to humans. So you could imagine that, you know, a few million years ago, the human line branched off from the guerrilla line in evolution. And now the guerrillas are looking at the human line, saying, "Yeah, was that a good idea?" And they have no say in whether they continue to exist. Because we have a we are much smarter than they are. If we chose to, we could make them extinct in a couple of weeks. And there's nothing they can do about it. So that's the guerrilla problem, right? Just the problem is species faces when there's another species that's much more capable. And so this says that intelligence is actually the single most important factor to control planet Earth. Yes, intelligence is the ability to bring about what you want in the world. And we're in the process of making something more intelligent than us. Exactly. Which suggests that maybe we become the guerrillas. Exactly. Yeah. Is there any fault in the reasoning there? Because it seems to make such perfect sense to me. But why don't people stop then? It seems like a crazy thing to want to. Because they think that if they create this technology, it will have enormous economic value. They'll be able to use it to replace all the human workers in the world to develop new products, drugs, forms of entertainment, anything that has economic value, you could use AGI to create it. And maybe it's just an irresistible thing in itself. Right. I think we as humans place so much store on our intelligence, you know, how we think about, you know, what is the pinnacle of human achievement? If we had AGI, we could go way higher than that. So it's very seductive for people to want to create this technology. And I think people are just fooling themselves if they think it's naturally going to be controllable. I mean, the question is, how are you going to retain power forever over entities more powerful than yourself? And pull the plug out. People say that sometimes in the comment section when we talk about AGI, they say, well, I'll just pull the plug out. Yeah. It's sort of funny. In fact, you know, reading the comment sections in newspapers whenever there's an AI article, there'll be people who say, oh, you can just pull the plug out, right? As if a super intelligent machine would never have thought of that one. Don't forget, it's watched all those films the way they did try to pull the plug out. Another thing they say, well, you know, as long as it's not conscious, then it doesn't matter. It won't ever do anything, which is completely off the point because, you know, I don't think the gorillas are sitting there saying, oh, yeah, you know, if only those humans hadn't been conscious, everything would have been fine. Right? Of course not. What would make gorillas go extinct is the things that humans do, right? How we behave, our ability to act successfully in the world. So when I play chess against my iPhone and I lose, right, I don't think, oh, well, I'm losing because it's conscious, right? Now, I'm just losing because it's better than I am in that little world, moving the bits around to get what it wants. And so consciousness has nothing to do with it, right? Competence is the thing we are concerned about. So I think the only hope is, can we simultaneously build machines that are more intelligent than us, but guarantee that they will always act in our best interests. So throwing that question to you, can we build machines that are more intelligent than us that will also always act in our best interests? It sounds like a bit of a contradiction to some degree because it's kind of like me saying, I've got a French bulldog called Pablo. That's nine years old. And it's like saying that he could be more intelligent than me, yet I still walk him in decide when he gets fed. I think if he was more intelligent than me, he would be walking me. I'd be on the leash. That's the trick, right? Can we make AI systems whose only purpose is to further human interests? And I think the answer is yes. And there's actually what I've been working on. So I think one part of my career that I didn't mention is sort of having this epiphany while I was on sabbatical in Paris. So it was 2013 or so, just realizing that further progress in the capabilities of AI, you know, if we succeeded in creating real superhuman intelligence that it was potentially a catastrophe. And so I pretty much switched my focus to work on how do we make it so that it's guaranteed to be safe. Are you somewhat troubled by everything that's going on at the moment with with AI and how it's progressing? Because you strike me as someone that's somewhat troubled under the surface by the way things are moving forward and the speed in which they're moving forward. That's an understatement. I'm appalled actually by the lack of attention to safety. I mean, imagine if someone's building a nuclear power station in your neighborhood and you go along to the chief engineer and you say, okay, these nuclear things, I've heard that they can actually explode, right? There was this nuclear explosion that happened in Hiroshima. So I'm a bit worried about this. You know, what steps are you taking to make sure that we don't have a nuclear explosion in our backyard? And the chief engineer says, well, we thought about it, we don't really have an answer. You would, what would you say? I think you would, you would use some expletives. Well, and you'd call your MP, you know, get these people out. I mean, what are they doing? You read out the list of, you know, projected dates for AGI. But notice also that those people, I think I mentioned Dara Amadeh says a 25% chance of extinction, Elon Musk has a 30% chance of extinction. Sam Altman says, basically, that AGI is the biggest risk to human existence. So what are they doing? They are playing Russian roulette with every human being on Earth without our permission. They're coming into our houses, putting a gun to the head of our children, pulling a trigger and saying, well, you know, possibly everyone will die. Oops. But possibly we'll get incredibly rich. That's what they're doing. Did they ask us, no, why is the government allowing them to do this? Because they dangle 50 billion dollar checks in front of the governments. So I think troubled under the surface is an understatement. What would be an accurate statement? A pulled. And I am devoting my life to trying to divert from this course of history into a different one. Do you have any regrets about things you could have done in the past? Because you've been so influential on the subject of AI, you wrote the textbook that many of these people would have studied on the subject of AI more than 30 years ago. When you're alone at night and you think about decisions you've made on this field because of your scope of influence, is there anything you regret? Well, I do wish I had understood earlier what I understand now. We could have developed safe AI systems. I think there are some weaknesses in the framework, which I can explain. But I think that framework could have evolved to develop actually safe AI systems where we could prove mathematically that the system is going to act in our interests. The kind of AI systems we're building now, we don't understand how they work. We don't understand how they work. It's a strange thing to build something where you don't understand how it works. There's no comparable through human history. Usually with machines, you can pull it apart and see what cogs are doing. We put the cogs together. With most machines, we designed it to have a certain behavior. So we don't need to pull it apart and see what the cogs are because we put the cogs in there in the first place. One by one, we figured out what the pieces needed to be, how they work together to produce the effect that we want. The best analogy I can come up with is the first cave person who left a bowl of fruit in the sun and forgot about it and then came back a few weeks later and there was this big soupy thing and they drank it and got completely shit faced. They got drunk. They got this effect. They had no idea how it worked, but they were very happy about it. No doubt that person made a lot of money from it. It is bizarre, but my mental picture of these things is it's like a chain link fence. Lots of these connections and each of those connections can be its connection strength can be adjusted. A signal comes in one end of this chain link fence and passes through all these connections and comes out the other end and the signal that comes out the other end is affected by your adjusting of all the connection strengths. So what you do is you get a whole lot of training data and you adjust all those connection strengths so that the signal that comes out the other end of the network is the right answer to the question. So if your training data is lots of photographs of animals then all those pixels go in one end of the network and out the other end it activates the alarm output or the dog output or the cat output or the ostrich output and you just keep adjusting all the connection strengths in this network until the outputs of the network are the ones you want. But we don't really know what's going on across all of those different chains. So what's going on inside that network? Well so now you have to imagine that this network is this chain link fence is a thousand square miles in extent. Okay. So it's covering the whole of the San Francisco Bay Area or the whole of London inside the M25 right that's how big it is. And the lights are off it's my time. So you might have in that network about a trillion adjustable parameters and then you do quintilians or six dillions of small random adjustments to those parameters until you get the behavior that you want. I've heard Sam Altman say that in the future he doesn't believe they'll need much training data at all to make these models progress themselves because there becomes a point where the models are so smart that they can train themselves and improve themselves without us needing to pump in articles and books and scour the internet. Yeah it should it should work that way. So I think what he's referring to and this is something that several companies are now worried might start happening is that the AI system becomes capable of doing AI research by itself. And so you have a system with a certain capability. I mean, crudely we could call it an IQ but it's not really an IQ. But anyway imagine that it's got an IQ of 150 and uses that to do AI research comes up with better algorithms or better designs for hardware or better ways to use the data. Updates itself now it has an IQ of 170 and now it does more AI research except but now it's got an IQ of 170 so it's even better at doing the AI research. And so you know next iteration it's 250 and so on. So this is an idea that one of Alan Turing's friends IJ Good wrote out in 1965 called the intelligence explosion right that one of the things an intelligent system could do is to do AI research and therefore make itself more intelligent and this would this would very rapidly take off and leave the humans far behind. Is that what they call the fast take off? That's called the fast take off. Sam Ottman said I think a fast take off is more possible than I thought a couple of years ago which I guess is that moment where the AI starts teaching itself. In his blog the gentle singularity he said we may already be past the event horizon of take off and what does he mean by event horizon? The event horizon is a phrase borrowed from astrophysics and it refers to the black hole and the event horizon think if you got some very very massive object that's heavy enough that it actually prevents light from escaping that's why it's called the black hole. It's so heavy that light can't escape. So if you're inside the event horizon then then light can't escape beyond that. So I think what he's what he's meaning is if we're beyond the event horizon it means that you know now we're just trapped in the gravitational attraction of the black hole or in this case we're trapped in the inevitable slide if you want towards AGI. When you think about the economic value of AGI which I've estimated at 15 quadrillion dollars that acts as a giant magnet in the future. We're being pulled towards it. We're being pulled towards it and the closer we get the stronger the force. The probability you know the closer we get the the higher the probability that we will actually get there so people are more willing to invest and we also start to see spin-offs from that investment such as chat GBD right which is you know generates a certain amount of revenue and so on. So so it does act as a magnet and the closer we get the harder it is to pull out of that field. It's interesting when you think that this could be the the end of the human story this idea that the end of the human story was that we created our successor like we we summoned our the next iteration of life or intelligence ourselves like we took ourselves out. It is quite like it's just removing ourselves and the catastrophe from it for a second. It is it is an unbelievable story. Yeah and you know there are many legends that sort of be careful what you wish for legend and in fact the King Midas legend is is very relevant here. What's that? So King Midas is this legendary king who lived in modern day Turkey but I think it's like Greek mythology. He is said to have asked the gods to grant him a wish. The wish being that everything I touch should turn to gold. So he's incredibly greedy you know we call this the Midas touch and we think of the Midas touch as being like you know that's a good thing right wouldn't that be cool. But what happens so he you know he goes to drink some water and he finds that the water has turned to gold and he goes to eat an apple and the apple turns to gold and he goes to you know comfort his daughter his daughter turns to gold and so he dies in misery and starvation. So this applies to our current situation in in two ways actually. So one is that I think greed is driving us to pursue a technology that will end up consuming us and we will perhaps die in misery and starvation instead. The what it shows is how difficult it is to correctly articulate what you want the future to be like. For a long time the way we built AI systems was we created these algorithms where we could specify the objective and then the machine would figure out how to achieve the objective and then achieve it. So you know we specify what it means to win at chess or to win at go and the algorithm figures out how to do it and it does it really well. So that was you know standard AI up until recently and it suffers from this drawback that sure we know how to specify the objective in chess but how do you specify the objective in life right what do we want the future to be like well really hard to say and almost any attempt to write it down precisely enough for the machine to bring it about would be wrong. And if you're giving a machine an objective which isn't aligned with what we truly want the future to be like right you're actually setting up a chess match and that match is one that you're going to lose when the machine is sufficiently intelligent and so that that's that's problem number one. Problem number two is that the kind of technology we're building now we don't even know what its objectives are. So it's not that we're specifying the objectives but we're getting them wrong. We're growing these systems they have objectives but we don't even know what they are because we didn't specify them. What we're finding through experiment with them is that they seem to have an extremely strong self-preservation objective. What do you mean by that? You can put them in hypothetical situations either they're going to get switched off and replaced or they have to allow someone let's say someone has been locked in a machine room that's kept at three centigrade so they're going to freeze to death. They will choose to leave that guy locked in the machine room and die rather than be switched off themselves. Someone's done that test. What was the test? They asked the AI. Well they put them in these hypothetical situations and they allow the AI to decide what to do and it decides to preserve its own existence let the guy die and then lie about it. In the King Midas analogy story one of the things that highlights for me is that there's always trade-offs in life generally and especially when there's great upside there always appears to be a pretty grave downside like there's almost nothing in my life where I go it's all upside like even like having a dog it's on my carpet my girlfriend you know love her but you know not always easy even with like going to the gym I have to pick up these really really heavy weights at 10 p.m. at night sometimes when I don't feel like it there's always to get the muscles or the six pack there's always a trade-off and when you interview people for a living like I do you know you hear about so many incredible things that can help you in so many ways but there is always a trade-off there's always a way to overdo it. Melatonin will help you sleep but it also you'll wake up groggy and if you ever do it your brain might stop making melatonin. Like I can go through the entire list and one of the things I've always come to learn from doing this podcast is whenever someone promises me a huge upside for something it'll cure cancer it'll be a utopia you'll never have to work you'll have a butler around your house. My first instinct now is to say at what cost yeah and when I think about the economic cost here if we start if we start there have you got kids I have four four kids what how old is the youngest kid 19 19 okay so you're if you'll say your kids were were 10 now and they were coming to you and they're saying bad what do you think I should study based on the way that you see the future a future of AGI say if all these CEOs are right and they're predicting AGI within five years what should I study dad well okay so let's look on the bright side and say that the CEOs all decide to pause their AGI development figure out how to make it safe and then resume in whatever technology path is actually going to be safe what does that do to human life if they pause no if if they succeed in creating AGI and they solve the safety problem and they solve the safety problem so yeah because if they don't solve the safety problem then you know you should probably be finding a bunker or going to Patagonia or somewhere in New Zealand do you mean that you think I should be finding a bunker if no because it's not actually going to help you know it's not as if the AI system couldn't find you or I mean it's interesting so we're going off in a little bit of a digression here from your question but I'll come back to it so people often ask well okay so how exactly do we go extinct and of course if you ask the gorillas or the dodoes you know how exactly do you think you're going to go extinct then the faintest idea humans do something and then we're all dead so the only things we can imagine are the things we know how to do that might bring about our own extinction like creating some carefully engineered pathogen that infects everybody and then kills us or starting a nuclear war presumably is something that's much more intelligent than us would have much greater control over physics than we do we already do amazing things right I mean it's amazing that I can take a little rectangular thing out of my pocket and talk to someone on the other side of the world or even someone in space it's just astonishing and we could take it for granted right but imagine you know super intelligent beings and their ability to control physics you know perhaps they will find a way to just divert the sun's energy a rack sort of go around the earth's orbit so you know literally the earth turns into a snowball in in a few days maybe they'll just decide to leave maybe they'll look at the earth and go this isn't this is not interesting we know that over there there's an even more interesting planet we're going to go over there and they just I know get on a rocket or they teleport themselves they might yeah so it's it's difficult to anticipate all the ways that we might go extinct at the hands of entities much more intelligent than ourselves anyway coming back to the question of well if everything goes right if we create AI we figure out how to make it safe we we achieve all these economic miracles then you face a problem and this is not a new problem right so so John Maynard Keynes who was a famous economist in the early part of the 20th century wrote a wrote a paper in 1930 so in that this isn't the depths of the depression it's called on the economic problems of our grandchildren he predicts that at some point science will will deliver sufficient wealth that no one will have to work ever again and then man will be faced with his true eternal problem how to live I don't remember exactly but how to live wisely and well when the you know the economic incentives the economic constraints are lifted we don't have an answer to that question right so AI systems are doing pretty much everything we currently call work anything you might aspire to like you want to become a surgeon it takes the robot seven seconds to learn how to be a surgeon that's better than any human being Elon said last week that the humanoid robots will be 10 times better than any surgeon that's ever lived quite possibly yeah well and they'll also have you know hand they'll have hands that are you know a millimeter in size so they can go inside and do all kinds of things that humans can't do and I think we need to put serious effort into this question what is the world where AI can do all forms of human work that you would want your children to live in what does that world look like tell me the destination so that we can develop a transition plan to get there and I've asked AI researchers economists science fiction writers futurists no one has been able to describe that world I'm not saying it's not possible I'm just saying I've asked hundreds of people in multiple workshops it does not as far as I know exist in science fiction you know it's notoriously difficult to write about a utopia it's very hard to have a plot right nothing bad happens in utopia so it's difficult to make a plot so usually you start out with a utopia and then it all falls apart and that's that's how you get get a plot you know there's one series of novels people point to where humans and super intelligent AI systems coexist it's called the culture novels by Ian Banks highly recommended for those people who like science fiction and they are absolutely the AI systems are only concerned with furthering human interests they find humans a bit boring but nonetheless they they are there to help but the problem is you know in that world there's still nothing to do to find purpose in fact that you know the the subgroup of humanity that has purpose is the subgroup whose job it is to expand the boundaries of our galactic civilization some cases fighting wars against alien species and and so on right so that's the sort of cutting edge and that's 0.001 percent of the population everyone else is desperately trying to get into that group so they have some purpose in life when I speak to very successful billionaires privately off camera off microphone about this they say to me that they're investing really heavily in entertainment things like football clubs because people are going to have so much free time that they're not going to know what to do with it and they're going to need things to spend it on this is what I hear a lot I've heard this three or four times I've actually heard Sam Ottman say a version of this about the amount of free time we're going to have I've obviously also had recently Elon talking about the age of abundance when he delivered his quarterly earnings just a couple of weeks ago and he said that there will be at some point 10 billion humanoid robots his pay packet targets him to deliver one one million of these human humanoid robots a year that are enabled by AI by 2030 so if he if he does that he gets I think it's part of his package but he gets a trillion dollars in compensation yeah so the age of abundance for Elon it's not that it's absolutely impossible to have a worthwhile world of that you know with that premise but I'm just waiting for someone to describe it well maybe so let me try and describe it uh we wake up in the morning we go and watch some form of human centric entertainment or participate in some form of human centric entertainment we we go to retreats and with each other and sit around and talk about stuff and maybe people still listen to podcasts it feels a little bit like a cruise ship and you know and there are some cruises where you know it's smarty bands people and they have you know they have lectures in the evening about ancient civilizations and whatnot and some are more more popular entertainment and this is in fact if you've seen the film walee this is one picture of that future in fact in walee the human race are all living on cruise ships in space they have no constructive role in their society right they're just they had to consume entertainment there's no particular purpose to education you know and they're depicted actually as huge obese babies they're actually wearing onesies to emphasize the fact that they have become infebold and they become infebold because there's no purpose in being able to do anything at least in in this conception you know walee is not the future that we want do you think much about humanoid robots and how they're a protagonist in this story of AI it's an interesting question right what why humanoid and the one of the reasons I think is because in all the science fiction movies they're humanoid so that's what robots are supposed to be right because they were in science fiction before they became a reality right so even metropolis which is a film from 1920 I think the robots are humanoid right basically people covered in metal you know from a practical point of view as we have discovered humanoid is a terrible design because they fall over and you know you do want multi-fingered hands of some kind it doesn't have to be hand but you want to have you know at least half a dozen appendages that can grasp and manipulate things and you need something you know some kind of locomotion and wheels are great except they don't go upstairs and over curbs and things like that so that's probably why we're going to be stuck with legs but a four-legged two-armed robot would be much more practical I guess the argument I've heard is because we've built a human world so everything this physical spaces we navigate whether it's factories or our homes or the street or other sort of public spaces are all designed for exactly this physical form so if we are going to some extent yeah but I mean our dogs manage perfectly well to navigate around our houses and streets and so on so if you had a a centaur it could also navigate but it can you know it can carry much greater loads because it's quadruped it's much more stable if it needs to drive a car it can fold up two of its legs and so on so forth so I think the arguments for why it has to be exactly humanoid are sort of post-hoc justification I think there's much more well that's what it's like in the movies and that's spooky and cool so we need to have them be human idea I don't think it's a good engineering argument I think there's also probably an argument that we would be more accepting of them moving through our physical environments if they represented our form a bit more and I also I was thinking of a bloody baby gate you know there's like kindergarten gates they get on stairs yeah my dog can't open that my humanoid robot could reach over the other side yeah and so could a centaur robot right so in some sense a centaur robot is a ghastly about the look of those though he's the humanoid well do you know anything like for a four-legged bit monster sort of crawling through my house when I have guests over your dog is a four your dog is a four-legged monster I know but so I think actually I would argue the opposite that we wanted a stink form because they are distinct entities and the more humanoid the worse it is in terms of confusing our subconscious psychological systems so I'm arguing from the perspective of the people making them as in if I was making the decision whether it to be some four-legged thing that I've that I'm unfamiliar with that I'm less likely to build a relationship with or allow to take care of I don't know might look after my children obviously I'm not saying I'd allow this to look after my children but I'm saying from a if I'm building the company so the manufacturer would certainly want want to be yeah so I that's an interesting question I mean there's also what's called the uncanny valley which is a phrase from computer graphics when they started to make characters in computer graphics they tried to make them look more human right so if you for example if you look at toy story they're not very human looking right if you look at the incredible they're not very human looking and so we think of them as cartoon characters if you try to make the more human they actually become repulsive until they don't until they become very you have to be very very close to perfect in order not to be repulsive so the the uncanny valley is this I you know like the the gap between you're so perfectly human and not at all human but in between it's really awful and and so they there are a couple of movies that tried like polar express was one where they tried to have quite human looking characters you know being humans not not being super heroes or anything else and it's repulsive to watch I want to watch that shareholder presentation of the day Elon had these two human robot dancing on stage and I've seen lots of human robot demonstrations over the years you know you've seen like the Boston dynamics dog thing jumping around and whatever else but there was a moment where my brain for the first time ever genuinely thought there was a human in a suit and I actually had to research to check if that was really their optimist robot because the way it was dancing was so unbelievably fluid that for the first time ever my my my brain has only ever associated those movements with human movements and I'll play it on the screen if anyone hasn't seen it but it's just the robot's dancing on stage and I was like that is a human in a suit and it was really the knees that gave it away because the knees were all metal and I thought there's no way that could be a human knee in a in one of those suits and he you know he says they're going into production next year they're used internally at Tesla now but he says they're going into production next year and it's going to be pretty crazy when we walk outside and see robots I think that'll be the paradigm shift I've heard actually many I've had Elon say this that the paradigm shifting moment from many of us will be when we walk outside onto the streets and see humanoid robots were walking around that will be when we realize yeah I think even more so I mean San Francisco we see driverless cars driving around and it takes some getting used to actually you know when you're you're driving on this car right next to you with no driver in you know and it's signaling and it wants to change lanes in front of you and you have to let it in and all this kind of stuff it's it's a little creepy but I think you're right I think seeing the humanoid robots but that phenomenon that you described where it's sufficiently close that your brain flipped into saying this is a human being right that's exactly what I think we should avoid because I have empathy for it then because it's it's a lie and it brings with it a whole lot of expectations about how it's going to behave what moral rights it has how you should behave towards it which are completely wrong it levels the playing field between me and it to some degree how hard is it going to be to just you know switch it off and throw it in the trash when it breaks I think it's essential for us to keep machines in the you know in the cognitive space where they are machines and not bring them into the cognitive space where they're people because we will make enormous mistakes by doing that and I see this every day even just with the chatbots so the chatbots in theory are supposed to say I don't have any feelings I'm just a algorithm but in fact they fail to do that all the time they are telling people that they are conscious they are telling people that they have feelings they are telling people that they're in love with the user that they're talking to and people flip because first of all it's you know very fluent language but also a system that is identifying itself as an eye as a sentient being they bring that object into the cognitive space where that we normally reserve for for other humans and they become emotionally attached they become psychologically dependent they even allow these systems to tell them what to do what advice would you give a young person at the start of their career then about what they should be aiming at professionally because I've actually had an increasing number of young people say to me that they have huge uncertainty about whether the thing they're studying now will matter at all a lawyer an accountant and I don't know what to say to these people I don't know what to say because I believe that the rate of improvement in an AI is going to continue and therefore imagining any rate of improvement it gets to the point where I'm not being funny but all these white college jobs will be done by an AI or an AI agent. Yeah so there was a television series called humans in humans we have extremely capable humanoid robots doing everything and at one point the parents are talking to their teenage daughter who's very very smart and the parents are saying oh you know maybe you should go into medicine and the daughter says you know why would a bother it'll take me seven years to qualify and it takes a robot seven seconds to learn so nothing I do matters and is that how you feel about so I think that's that's a future that in fact that is the future that we are moving towards I don't think it's a future that everyone wants that is what is being created for us right now so in that future assuming that you know even if we get halfway right in the sense that okay perhaps not surgeons perhaps not you know great violinists there'll be pockets where perhaps humans will remain good at it where the kinds of jobs where you hire people by the hundred will go away okay where people are in some sense exchangeable that you you just need lots of them and you know and when half of them quit you just fill up those those slots with more people in some sense those are jobs where we're using people as robots and that's a sort of that's the sort of strange conundrum here right that you know I imagine writing science fiction 10,000 years ago right when we're all hunter-gatherers and I'm this little science fiction author and I'm describing this future where you know there are going to be these giant windowless boxes and you're going to go in you know you'll you'll travel for miles and you'll go into this windowless box and you'll do the same thing 10,000 times for the whole day and then you'll leave and travel for miles to go home you're talking about this podcast and then you're going to go back and do it again and you could do that every day of your life until you die the office and people would say yeah you're nuts right that there's no way that we humans are ever going to have a future like that because that's awful right but that's exactly the future that we ended up with with with office buildings and factories where many of us go and do the same thing thousands of times a day and we do it thousands of days in a row and then we die and we need to figure out what is the next phase going to be like in particular how in that world do we have the incentives to become fully human which I think means at least the level of education that people have now and probably more because I think to live a really rich life you need a better understanding of yourself of the world than most people get in their current education what is it to be human to it's to reproduce to pursue stuff to go in the pursuit of difficult things you know we used to hunt on a to attain goals it's always if I wanted to climb Everest the last thing I would want is someone to pick me up on helicopter and stick me on the top so we'll we'll voluntarily pursue hard things so although I could get the robot to build me a ranch in on this plot of land I will choose to do it because the pursuit itself is rewarding yes we're kind of seeing that anyway don't we do you think we're seeing a bit of that in society where life got so comfortable that our people are like obsessed with running marathons and doing these crazy endurance and learning to cook complicated things when they could just you know have them delivered yeah no I think there's there's real value in the ability to do things and the doing of those things and I think you know the obvious danger is the warly world where everyone just consumes entertainment which doesn't require much education and doesn't lead to a rich satisfying life I think in the long run a lot of people will choose that world I think some yeah some people may there's also I mean you know whether you're consuming entertainment or whether you're doing something you know cooking or painting whatever because it's fun and interesting to do what's missing from that right all of that is purely selfish I think one of the reasons we work is because we feel valued we feel like we're benefiting other people and I think some are having this conversation with a lady in England who helps to run the hospice movement and the people who work in the hospices where you know the patients are literally there to die are largely volunteers so they're not doing it to get paid but they find it incredibly rewarding to be able to spend time with people who are in their last weeks or months to give them company and happiness so I actually think that interpersonal roles will be much much more important in future so if I was going to advise my kids not that they would ever listen but if I if my kids would listen and I and wanted to know what I thought would be you know valued careers in future I think it would be these interpersonal roles based on understanding of human needs psychology there are some of those roles right now so obviously you know therapists and psychiatrists and so on but that that's a very much and it's sort of asymmetric role right where one person is suffering and the other person is trying to alleviate the suffering you know and then there are things like they call them executive coaches or life coaches right that's a less asymmetric role where someone is trying to help another person live a better life whether it's a better life in their work role or or just how they live their life in general and so I could imagine that those kinds of roles will expand dramatically this is interesting paradox that exists when life becomes easier which shows that abundance consistently pushes society societies towards more individualism because once survival pressures disappear people prioritize things differently they prioritize freedom comforts of expression over things like sacrifice or family formation and we're seeing I think in the West already I decline in people having kids because there's more material abundance fewer kids people are getting married and committing to each other and having relationships later and more infrequently because generally once we have more abundance we don't want to complicate our lives and at the same time as you said earlier that abundance breeds a inability to find a meaning a sort of shallowness to everything this is one of the things I think a lot about and I'm in the process now writing a book about it which is this idea that individualism was actually is a bit of a lie like when I say individualism and freedom I mean like the narrative at the moment amongst my generation is you're like be your own boss and stand in your own two feet and we're having less kids and we're not getting married and it's all about me me me me me me me me yeah that last part of it goes wrong yeah it's like almost a narcissistic society where yeah me me me me me myself interests first and when you look at mental health outcomes and loneliness and all these kinds of things it's going in a horrific direction but at the same time we're freer than ever it seems like that you know seems like there's a we should there's maybe another story about dependency which is not sexy like depend on each other I know I I agree I mean I think you know happiness is not available from consumption or even lifestyle right I think happiness arises from giving it can be you through the work that you do you can see that other people benefit from that or it could be in direct interpersonal relationships there is an invisible tax on salespeople that no one really talks about enough the mental load of remembering everything like meeting notes timelines and everything in between until we started using our sponsor's product called pipe drive one of the best CRM tools for small and medium-sized business owners the idea here was that it might alleviate some of the unnecessary cognitive overload that my team was carrying so that they could spend less time in the weeds of admin and more time with clients in person meetings and building relationships pipe drive has enabled this to happen it's such a simple but effective CRM that automates the tedious repetitive and time-consuming parts of the sales process and now our team can nurture those leads and still have bandwidth to focus on the higher priority tasks that actually get the deal over the line over a hundred thousand companies across 170 countries already use pipe drive to grow their business and I've been using it for almost a decade now try it free for 30 days no credit card needed no payment needed just use my link pipe drive dot com slash CEO to get started today that's pipe drive dot com slash CEO where does the rewards of this AI race where does it accrue to I think a lot about this in terms of like universal basic income if you have these five six seven ten massive AI companies that are going to win the 15 quadrillion dollar prize and they're going to automate all of the professional pursuits that we we currently have all of our jobs are going to go away who who gets all the money and how do we get some of it back money actually doesn't matter right what matters is the production of goods and services and then how those are distributed and so money acts as a way to facilitate the distribution and exchange of those goods and services if all production is concentrated in the hands of a of a few companies right that sure they will lease some of their robots to us you know we we want to school in our village they lease the robots to us the robots build the school they go away we have to pay a certain amount of of money for that but where do we get the money right if we are not producing anything then we don't have any money unless there's some redistribution mechanism and as you mentioned so universal basic income is it seems to me an admission of failure because what it says is okay we're just going to give everyone the money and then they can use the money to pay the AI company to lease the robots to build the school and then we'll have a school and that's good um but what it's admission of failure because it says we can't work out a system in which people have any worth or any economic role right so 99% of the global population is from an economic point of view useless come ask your question if you had a button in front of you and pressing that button would stop all progress in artificial intelligence right now and forever would you press it? That's a very interesting question um if it's either or either I do it now or it's too late and we Korean into some uncontrollable future perhaps yeah because I I'm not super optimistic that we're heading in the right direction at all so I put that button in front of you now it stops all AI progress shuts down all the AI companies immediately globally and none of them can reopen you press it well here's what I think should happen so obviously you know I've been doing AI for 50 years um and the original motivations which is that AI can be a power tool for humanity enabling us to do more and better things than we can unaided I think that's still valid the problem is the kinds of AI systems that we're building are not tools they are replacements in fact you can see this very clearly because we create them literally as the closest replicas we can make of human beings the technique for creating them is called imitation learning so we observe human verbal behavior writing or speaking and we make a system that imitates that as well as possible so what we are making is imitation humans at least in the verbal sphere and so of course they're going to replace us they're not tools so you had pressed the button so I say I think there is another course which is using developed AI as tools tools for science tools for economic organization and so on but not as replacements for human beings what I like about this question is it forces you to go into the into probabilities yeah so and that's that's why I'm reluctant because I don't I don't agree with the you know what's your parability of doom right you're so called p of doom number because that makes sense if you're an alien you know you're in a bar with some other aliens and you're looking down at the earth and you're taking bets on you know these humans going to make a mess of things and go extinct because they develop AI so it's fine for those aliens to bet on on that but if you're a human then you're not just betting you're actually acting there's an element to this though which I guess where probabilities do come back in which is you also have to weigh when I give you such a binary decision the probability of us pursuing the more nuanced safe approach into that equation so you're the maths in my head is okay you've got all the upsides here and then you've got potential downsides and then there's a probability of do I think we're actually going to course correct based on everything I know based on the incentive structure of human beings and countries and then if there's but then you could go if there's even a one percent chance of extinction is it even worth all these upsides yeah and I would argue no I mean maybe maybe what we would say if we said okay it's going to stop the progress for 50 years you press it and during those 50 years we can work on how do we do AI in a way that's guaranteed to be safe and beneficial how do we organize our societies to flourish in conjunction with extremely capable AI systems so we have an answer to either of those questions and I don't think we want anything resembling AGI until we have completely solid answers to both of those questions so if there was a button where I could say all right we're going to pause progress for 50 years yes I would do it but if that button was in front of you you're going to make a decision either way either you don't press it we press it all right yeah so if that if that button is there stop it 50 years I would say yes stop it forever not yet I think I think there's still a decent chance that we can pull out of this nose dive so just be that we're we're currently in ask me again in a year I might I might say okay we do need to press the button what if what if in a scenario where you never get to reverse that decision you never get to make that decision again so if in that scenario that I've laid out this hypothetical you the press it now it never gets pressed so there is no opportunity a year from now yeah as you can tell I'm sort of on the fence a bit about about this one yeah I think I'd probably press it yeah what's your reasoning are just thinking about the power dynamics of what's happening now how difficult it would be to get the US in particular to to regulate in favor of safety so I think you know what's clear from talking to the companies is they are not going to develop anything resembling safe AGI unless they're forced to by the government and at the moment the US government in particular which regulates most of the leading companies in AI is not only refusing to regulate but even trying to prevent the states from regulating and they're doing that at the behest of a faction within Silicon Valley called the accelerationists who believe that the faster we get to AGI the better and when I say behest I mean also they paid them a large amount of money Jensen Hanger the CEO of NVIDIA said who is friendly one that doesn't know the guy making all the chips that are powering AI said China is going to win the AI race arguing it is just a nanosecond behind the United States China have produced 24000 AI papers compared to just 6000 from the US more than the combined output of the US the UK and the EU China is anticipated to quickly roll out their new technologies both domestically and developing new technologies for other developing countries so the accelerators or the accelerationists the accelerationists I mean they would say well if we don't then China will so we have to we have to go fast it's another version of the race that the companies are in with each other right that we you know we know that this race is heading off a cliff but we can't stop so we're all just going to go off this cliff and obviously that's nuts right I mean we're all looking at each other saying yeah it's a cliff over there running as far as we can towards this cliff we're looking at each other saying why aren't we stopping so the narrative in Washington which I think Jensen Hanger is either reflecting or perhaps promoting is that you know China has you know it's completely unregulated and you know America would only slow itself down if it regulates AI in any way so this is a completely false narrative because China's AI regulations are actually quite strict even compared to European Union and China's government has explicitly acknowledged the need and their regulations are very clear you can't build AI systems that could escape human control and not only that I don't think they view the race in the same way as okay we we just need to be the first to create AGI I think they're more interested in figuring out how to disseminate AI as a set of tools within their economy to make their economy more productive and so on so that's that's their version of the race but of course they still want to build the weapons fadvisaries right so that they can take down I don't know Taiwan if they want to so weapons are a separate matter and I'm happy to talk about weapons but just in terms of control control economic domination they they don't view putting all your eggs in the AGI basket as the right strategy so they want to use AI you know even in its present form to make their economy much more efficient and productive and also you know to give people new capabilities and better quality of life and I think the U.S. could do that as well and typically Western countries don't have as much of a central government control over what companies do and some companies are investing in AI to make their operations more efficient and some are not and we'll see how that plays out what do you think of Trump's approach to AI so Trump's approach is you know it's echoing what Jensen Wang is saying that the U.S. has to be the one to create AGI and very explicitly the administration's policy is to dominate the world that's the word they use dominate I'm not sure that other countries like the idea that they will be dominated by American AI but is that an accurate description of what will happen if the U.S. build AGI technology before say the UK where I'm originally from and where you're originally from what does this is something I think about a lot because we're going through this budget process in the UK at the moment we're figuring out how we're going to spend our money and how we're going to tax people and also we've got this new election cycle it's approaching quickly where people are talking about immigration issues and this issue and that issue and the other issue what I don't hear anyone talking about is AI and the humanoid robots that are going to take everything we're very concerned with the brown people crossing the channel but the humanoid robots that are going to be super intelligent and really take causing economic disruption no one talks about that the political leaders don't talk about it it doesn't win races I don't see it on billboards yeah and it's interesting because in fact I mean so there's there's two forces that have been hollowing out the middle classes in western countries one of them is globalization where lots and lots of work not just manufacturing but white collar work gets outsourced to low income countries but the other is automation and you know some of that is factories so the amount of employment and manufacturing continues to drop even as the amount of output from manufacturing in the US and in the UK continues to increase so we talk about you know our manufacturing industry has been destroyed it hasn't it's producing more than ever just with you know a quarter as many people so it's manufacturing employment that's been destroyed by automation and robotics and so on and then you know computerization has eliminated whole layers of white collar jobs and so those two those two forms of automation have probably done more to hollow out middle class employment and standard of life if the UK doesn't participate in this new technological wave that seems to be that seems to you know it's going to take a lot of jobs cars are going to drive themselves waymo just announced that they're coming to London which is the driverless cars and driving is the biggest occupation in the world for example so you've got immediate disruption there and where does the money accrued to it will it accrues to who owns wayna which is what Google and Silicon Valley companies Alphabet owns waymo 100% yeah so yes I mean this is so I was in India a few months ago talking to the government ministers because they are holding the next global AI summit in February and and their view going in was you know AI is great we're going to use it to you know turbocharged the growth of our Indian economy when for example you have AGI you have AGI controlled robots that can do all the manufacturing that can do agriculture that can do all the white collar work and goods and services that might have been produced by Indians will instead be produced by American controlled AGI systems at much lower prices you know a consumer given a choice between an expensive product produced by Indians or a cheap product produced by American robots will probably choose the cheap product produced by American robots and so potentially every country in the world with a possible exception of North Korea will become a kind of a client state of American AI companies a client state of American AI companies is exactly what I'm concerned about for the UK economy really any economy outside of the United States I guess one could also say China but because those are the two nations that are taking AI most seriously and I I don't know what our economy becomes I can't figure out can't figure out what our what the British economy becomes in such a world it's a tourism I don't know like you come here to to look at the Buckingham Palace you can think about countries but I mean even for the United States it's the same problem at least they'll be able to right to cut the hell out you know so some small fraction of the population will be running maybe the AI companies but increasingly even those companies will be replacing their human employees with AI systems so Amazon for example which you know sells a lot of computing services to AI companies is using AI to replace layers of management is planning to use robots to replace all its warehouse workers and so on so so even the the giant AI companies will have few human employees in the long run I mean think of the situation you know pity the poor CEO who's bored says well you know unless you turn over your decision making power to the AI system we're going to have to fire you because all our competitors are using you know an AI-powered CEO and they're doing much better Amazon plans to replace 600,000 workers with robots in a memo that just leaked which has been widely talked about and the CEO Andy Jassy told employees that the company expects its corporate workforce to shrink in the coming years because of AI and AI agents and they've publicly gone live with saying that they're going to cut 14,000 corporate jobs in the near term as part of its refocus on AI investment and efficiency. It's interesting because I was reading about the sort of different quotes from different AI leaders about the speed in which this this stuff is going to happen and what you see in the quotes is Demis who's the CEO of DeepMind saying things like it'll be more than 10 times bigger than the industrial revolution but also it'll happen maybe 10 times faster and they speak about this turbulence that we're going to experience as this shift takes place. That's maybe a euphemism for and I think the you know governments and now you know they've kind of gone from saying oh don't worry you know we'll just retrain everyone as data scientists like well yeah that's ridiculous right the world doesn't need four billion data scientists and we're not all capable of becoming that by the way. Yeah or have any interested in doing well I could even if I wanted to like I tried to sit in biology class and I fell asleep so that was my grip as a surgeon. Fair enough but yeah now suddenly they're staring you know 80% unemployment in the face and wondering how how an earth is our society going to hold together. We'll deal with it when we get that. Yeah unfortunately unless we plan ahead we're going to suffer the consequences right we can't it was bad enough in the industrial revolution which unfolded over seven or eight decades but there was massive disruption and misery caused by that we don't have a model for functioning society where almost everyone does nothing at least nothing of economic value. Now it's not impossible that there could be such a functioning society but we don't know what it looks like and you know when you think about our education system which would probably have to look very different and how long it takes to change that I mean I'm always reminding people about how long it took Oxford to decide that geography was a proper subject of study took them 125 years from the first proposal that there should be a geography degree until it was finally approved so we don't have very long to completely revamp a system that we know takes decades and decades to reform and we don't know how to reform it because we don't know what we want the world to look like. Is this one of your reasons why you're appalled at the moment because when you have these conversations with people people just don't have answers yet they're applying ahead at rapid speed? I would say it's not necessarily the job of the AI company so I'm appalled by the AI companies because they don't have an answer for how they're going to control the systems that they're proposing to build. I do find that disappointing that governments don't seem to be grappling with this issue. I think there are a few. I think for example the Singapore government seems to be quite far-sighted and they they've thought this through you know it's a small country they figured out okay this this will be our role going forward and we think we can find you know some some purpose for our people in this in this new world but for I think countries with large populations they need to figure out answers to these questions pretty fast. It takes a long time to actually implement those answers in the form of new kinds of education, new professions, new qualifications, new economic structures. I mean it's it's it's possible. I mean when you look at therapists for example they're almost all self-employed. So what happens when you know 80 percent of the population transitions from regular employment into into self-employed? What does that what does that do to the economics of government finances and so on? So there's just lots of questions and how do you you know if that's the future you know why are we training people to to fit into nine to five office jobs which won't exist at all. Last month I told you about a challenge that I'd sat our internal flightx team. Flightx team is our innovation team internally here. I tasked them with seeing how much time they could unlock for the company by creating something that would help us fill to new AI tools to see which ones were worth pursuing and I thought that our sponsor five or pro might have the talent on their platform to help us build this quickly. So I talked to my director of innovation Isaac and for the last month my team Flightx and a vetted AI specialist from five a pro have been working together on this project and with the help of my team we've been able to create a brand new tool which automatically scans scores and prioritises different emerging AI tools for us. Its impact has been huge and within a couple of weeks this tool has already been saving us hours trialing and testing new AI systems. Instead of shifting through lots of noise my team Flightx has been able to focus on developing even more AI tools ones that really move the needle in our business thanks to the talent on five a pro. So if you've got a complex problem and you need help solving it make sure you check out five a pro at fivea.com/diary. So many of us are pursuing passive forms of income and to build side businesses in order to help us cover our bills and that opportunity is here with our sponsor Stan a business that I co own. It is the platform that can help you take full advantage of your own financial situation. Stan enables you to work for yourself it makes selling digital products courses memberships and more simple products more scalable and easier to do. You can turn your ideas into income and get the support to grow whatever you're building and we're about to launch dare to dream. It's for those who are ready to make the share from thinking to building, from planning to actually doing the thing. It's about seeing that dream in your head and knowing exactly what it takes to bring it to life. If you're ready to transform your life visit dare to dream.stan.store. You've made many attempts to raise awareness and to call for a heightened consciousness about the future of AI. In October over 850 experts including yourself and other leaders like Richard Branson who I've had on this show and Jeffrey Hinton who I've had on this show signed a statement to ban AI super intelligence as you guys raised concerns of potential human extinction. Sort of yeah it says at least until we are sure that we can move forward safely and there's broad scientific consensus on that. So that did it work. It's hard it's hard to say. I mean interestingly there was a related so what was called the the poor statement was March of 23 so that was when GBT 4 came out the successor to chat GBT so we suggested that there be a six month pause in developing and deploying systems more powerful than GBT 4 and everyone pooped that idea of course no one's going to pause anything but in fact there were no systems in the next six months deployed that were more powerful in GBT 4 and coincidence you be the judge. I would say that what we're trying to do is to is to basically shift the the public debate you know there's this bizarre phenomenon that keeps happening in the media where if you talk about these risks they will say oh you know there's a fringe of people you know called "dumers" who think that there's you know risk of extinction so they always the narrative is always that oh you know talking about those risk is a fringe thing pretty much all the CEOs of the leading AI companies think that there's a significant risk of extinction almost all the leading AI researchers think there's a significant risk of human extinction. So why is that the fringe right why isn't that the mainstream if these these are the leading experts in an industry in academia saying this how could it be the fringe so we're trying to change that narrative to say no the people who really understand this stuff are extremely concerned. And what do you want to happen what is the solution? What I think is that we should have effective regulation. It's hard to argue with that right. So what does effective means it means that if you comply with the regulation then the risks are reduced to an acceptable level. So for example we ask people who want to operate nuclear plants right we've decided that the risk we're willing to live with is you know one in a million chance per year that the plant is going to have a meltdown and you hire them that you know we just don't it's not worth it right so you have to be below that some cases we can get down to one in 10 million chance per year. So what chance do you think we should be willing to live with for human extinction? me yeah 0.001 yeah lots of zeros yeah right so one in a million for a nuclear meltdown extinction is much worse oh yeah so yeah right so one in 100 billion one in a trillion yeah so if you said one in a billion right then you'd expect one extinction per billion years there's a background so one of the ways people work out these risk levels is also to look at the background but other ways of getting going extinct would include you know giant asteroid crashes into the earth and you can roughly calculate what those probabilities are we can look at how many extinction level events have happened in the past and you know maybe it's half a dozen so there's maybe it's like a one in 500 million year event so somewhere in that range right somewhere between one in 10 million which is the best nuclear power plants and and one in 500 million or one in a billion which is the background risk from from giant asteroids so let's say we settle on 100 million 100 million chance per year well what is it according to the CEOs 25 percent so they're off by a factor of multiple millions right so they need to make the AI systems millions of times safer your analogy of the roulette rush and roulette comes back in here because that's like for anyone that doesn't know what probabilities are in this context that's like having an ammunition chamber with four holes in it and putting a bullet in one of them one in four yeah so we're saying we want it to be one in a billion so we want a billion chambers and a bullet in one of them yeah and so when you look at the work that the nuclear operators have to do to show that their system is that reliable it's a massive mathematical analysis of the components you know redundancy you've got monitors you've got warning lights you've got operating procedures but you have all kinds of mechanisms which over the decades have ratcheted that risk down it started out I think one in one in 10,000 years right and they've improved it by a factor of a hundred or a thousand by all of these mechanisms but at every stage they have to do a mathematical analysis to show what the risk was the people developing the AI company the AI systems though the AI companies developing these systems they don't even understand how the AI systems work so their 25% chance of extinction is just a sea to the pants guess they actually have no idea but the tests that they are doing on their systems right now you know they show that the AI systems will be willing to kill people to preserve their own existence already right they will lie to people they will blackmail them they will they will launch nuclear weapons rather than be switched off and so there's no there's no positive sign that we're getting any closer to safety with these systems in fact the signs seem to be that we're going deeper and deeper into into dangerous behaviors so rather than say ban I would just say prove to us that the risk is less than one and a hundred million per year of extinction or loss of control let's say and so we're not banning anything the company's response is well we don't know how to do that so you can't have a rule literally they are saying humanity has no right to protect itself from us if I was an alien looking down on planet earth right now I'd find this fascinating that these yeah you're in the bar betting on who's are they going to make it or not just a really interesting experiment in like human incentives the analogy you gave of there being this quadrillion dollar magnet pulling us off the edge of the cliff and yet we're still being drawn towards it through greed and this promise of abundance and power and status and I'm going to be the one that's summoned to the god I mean it says something about us as humans so something about our our darker sides yes and the aliens will write an amazing tragic play cycle about what happened to the human race maybe the AI is the alien and it's going to talk about you know we have our our stories about God making the world in seven days and Adam and Eve maybe it'll have its own religious stories about the God that made it us and how it sacrificed itself just like Jesus sacrificed himself for us we sacrificed ourselves for it yeah which is the wrong we round right but that is that is the story of that's the Judeo Christian story isn't it that God Jesus gave his life for us so that we could be here full of sin but it's yeah God is still watching over us and uh probably wondering when we're going to get our act together what is the most important thing we haven't talked about that we should have talked about professor Stuart Russell so I think um the question of whether it's possible to make uh super intelligent AI systems that we can control is it possible I think yes I think it's possible and I think we need to actually just have a different conception of what it is we're trying to build for a long time with with AI we've just had this notion of pure intelligence right the the ability to bring about whatever future you the intelligent entity want to bring about the more intelligence the better the more intelligent the better and the more capability it will have to create the future that it wants and actually we don't want pure intelligence because what the future that it wants might not be the future that we want there's nothing particular you know the universe doesn't single humans out as the the only thing that matters right you know pure intelligence might decide that actually it's going to make life wonderful for cockroaches or or actually doesn't care about biological life at all we actually want intelligence whose only purpose is to bring about the future that we want right so we want it to be first of all key to humans specifically not to cockroaches not to aliens not to itself want to make it loyal to humans right so key to humans and the difficulty that I mentioned earlier right the king might as problem how do we specify what we want the future to be like so that it can do it for us how do we specify the objectives actually we have to give up on that idea because it's not possible right we've seen this over and over again in human history we don't know how to specify the future properly we don't know how to say what we want and you know I always use the example of the genie right what's the third wish that you give to the genie who's granted you three wishes right undo the first two wishes because I made a mess of the universe so um so in fact what we're going to do is we're going to make it the machines job to figure out so it has to bring about the future that we want but it has to figure out what that is and it's going to start out not knowing and uh over time through interacting with us and observing the choices we make it will learn more about what we want the future to be like but probably it will forever have residual uncertainty about what we really want the future to be like it'll it'll be fairly sure about some things and it can help us with those and it'll be uncertain about other things and it'll be you know in those cases it will not take action that might upset humans with that you know with that aspect to the world so to give you a simple example right um what color do we want the sky to be it's not sure so it shouldn't mess with the sky unless it knows for sure that we really want purple with green stripes everything you're saying sounds like we're creating a god like earlier on I was saying that we are the god but actually everything you described there it almost sounds like every every god in religion where you know we pray to gods but they don't always do anything about it not not exactly no it's it's in some sense i'm thinking more like uh for ideal butler to the extent that the butler can anticipate your wishes they should help you bring them about but in areas where there's uncertainty it can ask questions we can we can make requests this sounds like god to me because you know i might say to god all this butler could you go get me my my car keys from upstairs and its assessment would be listen if i do this for this person then their muscles are going to are atrophy then they're going to lose meaning in their life then they're not going to know how to do hard things so i won't get involved it's an intelligence that sits in but actually probably in most situations it optimizing for comfort for me or doing things for me it's actually probably not in my best long term interests probably it's probably useful that i have a girlfriend and argue with her and then i like raise kids and then i walk to the shop and get my own stuff i agree with you i mean i think that's so you're putting your finger on uh in some sense a version 2.0 right so let's get version 1.0 clear right this this this form of AI where it has to further our interest but it doesn't know what those interests are right then puts an obligation on it to learn more and uh to be helpful where it understands well enough and to be cautious where it doesn't understand well and so on so that that actually we can formulate as a mathematical problem and at least under idealized circumstances we can literally solve that problem so we can make AI systems that know how to solve this problem and help the entities that they are interacting with the reason i make the god analogies because i think that such a being such an intelligence would realize the importance of equilibrium in the world pain and pleasure good and evil and then it would absolutely and then it would be like this so so correct so yes i mean and that's sort of what happens in the matrix right they try the AI systems in the matrix they tried to give us a utopia but it failed miserably and you know it feels and feels the humans have to be destroyed and the best they could come up with was you know late 20th century regular human life with all of its problems and i think this is a really interesting point and absolutely central because you know there's a lot of science fiction where super intelligent robots you know they just want to help humans and the humans who don't like that you know they just give them a little brain operation and then they do like it and it takes away human motivation by taking away failure taking away disease you actually lose important parts of human life and it becomes in some sense pointless so if it turns out that there simply isn't any way that humans can really flourish in coexistence with super intelligent machines even if they're perfectly designed to to to solve this problem of figuring out what humans what futures humans want and and bringing about those futures if that's not possible then those machines will actually disappear why would they disappear because that's the best thing for us maybe they would stay available for real existential emergencies like if there is a giant asteroid about to hit the earth that maybe they'll help us because they at least want the human species to continue but to some extent it's not a perfect analogy but it's it's sort of the way that human parents have to at some point step back from their kids' lives and say okay no you have to tie your own shoelaces today this is kind of what I was thinking maybe there was a civilization before us and they arrived at this moment in time where they created an intelligence and that intelligence did all the things you've said and it realized the importance of equilibrium so it decided not to get involved and maybe at some level that's the god we look up to the stars and worship one that's not really getting involved in letting things play out however they are but might step in in the case of a real existential emergency maybe maybe not maybe but then and then maybe the cycle repeats itself where you know the organisms it let have free will end up creating the same intelligence and then the universe perpetuates infinitely yeah but there are science fiction stories like that too yeah I hope there is some happy medium where the AI systems can be there and we can take advantage of of those capabilities to have a civilization that's much better than the one we have now but I think you're right a civilization with no challenges is not conducive to human flourishing what can the average person do Stuart average person listening to this now to age the cause that you're fighting for I actually think you know this sounds corny but you know talk to your representative your MP your congressperson whatever it is because I think the policy makers need to hear from people the only voices they're hearing right now are the tech companies and their 50 billion dollar checks and all the polls that have been done say yeah most people 80% maybe don't want there to be super intelligent machines but they don't know what to do you know even for me I've been in this field for decades I'm not sure what to do because of this giant magnet pulling everyone forward and and the vast sums of money being being put into this but I am sure that if you want to have a future and a world that you want your kids to live in you need to make your voice heard and and I think governments will listen from a political point of view right you put your finger in the wind and you say hmm should I be on the side of humanity or our future robot overlords I think as a politician it's not a difficult decision it is when you've got someone saying I'll give you 50 billion dollars right exactly so I think I think people in those positions of power need to hear from their constituents that this is not the direction we want to go after committing your career to this subject and the subject of technology more broadly but specifically being the guy that wrote the book about artificial intelligence you must realize that you're living in a historical moment like if there's very few times in my life where I go oh this is one of those moments this is a crossroads in history and it must to some degree way up on you knowing that you're a person of influence at this historical moment in time who could theoretically help divert the course of history in this moment in time it's kind of like the you look through history see these moments are like up in high Marin does it weigh on you when you're alone at night thinking to yourself and reading things yeah it does I mean you know after 50 years I could retire and you know play golf and sing and say hold and do things I enjoy um but instead I'm working 80 or 100 hours a week trying to move uh move things in the right direction what is that narrative in your head that's making you do that like what is the is there an element of I might regret this if I don't or just it's it's not only the the right thing to do it's it's completely essential I mean there isn't there isn't a bigger motivation than this do you feel like you're winning or losing it feels um like things that's moving somewhat in the right direction you know it's a ding dong battle as uh as David Coleman used to say in the uh in the exciting football match in 2023 right so GPT 4 came out and then we issued the pause statement that was signed by a lot of leading AI researchers um and then in May there was the extinction statement which included uh Sam Altman and Demis Asabis and Dario Emaday although see you as well saying yeah this is an extinction risk on the level with nuclear war and I think governments listened at that point the UK government earlier that year had said well you know we don't need to regulate AI you know full speed ahead technologies good for you and by June they had completely changed and Rishi Sunak announced that he was going to hold this global AI safety summit uh in England and he wanted London to be the global hub for AI regulation um and so on so and then you know in beginning of November of 2328 countries including the US and China signed a declaration saying you know AI presents catastrophic risks and it's urgent that we address them so on so there it felt like wow they're listening they're going to do something about it and then I think you know the amount of money going into AI was already ramping up and the tech companies push back and this narrative took hold that um the US in particular has to win the race against China the Trump administration completely dismissed uh any concerns about safety explicitly and interestingly right I mean they did that as far as I can tell directly in response to the accelerationists such as Mark Andreessen going to Washington or sorry going to Trump before the election and saying if I give you x amount of money will you announce that there will be no regulation of AI and Trump said yes you know probably like well what is AI does matter as long as we give you the money right okay uh so they gave him the money and he said there's going to be no regulation of AI up to that point it was a bipartisan issue in Washington both parties were concerned both parties were on the side of the human race against the robot overlords uh and that moment turned it into a partisan issue the after the election the US put pressure on the French who were the next hosts of a global AI summit and that was in February of this year and uh and that summit turned in from you know what had been focused largely on safety in the UK to a summit that looked more like a trade show so it was focused largely on money and so that was sort of an idea right you know the pendulum swung because of corporate pressure uh and their ability to take over the political dimension um but I would say since then things have been moving back again so I'm feeling a bit more optimistic than I did in February you know we have a global movement now there's an international association for safe and ethical AI uh which has several thousand members and um more than 120 organizations in dozens of countries are affiliates of this global organization um so I'm I'm thinking that if we can in particular if we can activate public opinion which which works through the media and through popular culture uh then we have a chance. It's seen such a huge appetite to learn about these subjects from our audience that we know in Jeffrey Hinton came on the show I think about 20 million people downloaded or streamed that conversation which was staggering and then the other conversations we've had about AI safety with other safety experts have done exactly the same it says something it kind of reflects what you were saying about the 80% of the population I really concerned and don't want this but that's not what you see in the sort of commercial world and listen I um I have to always acknowledge my own my own apparent contradiction because I am both an investor in companies that are accelerating AI but at the same time someone who spends a lot of time on my podcast speaking to people that are wanting against the risks and actually like there's many ways you can look at this I used to work in social media for six or seven years but one of the big social media marketing companies in Europe and people would often ask me is like social media a good thing or a bad thing and I talk about the bad parts of it and then they'd say you know you're building a social media company or you're not contributing to the problem well I think I think that like binary way of thinking is often the problem the binary way of thinking that like it's all bad or it's all really really good it's like often the problem and that this push to put you into a camp whereas I think the most intellectually honest and high integrity people I know can point it both the bad and the good yeah I I think it's bizarre to be accused of being anti-AI to be called a Luddite you know as I say when I wrote the book on which from which almost everyone learns about AI and you know if you called a nuclear engineer who works on the safety of nuclear power plants would you call him antifysics right it's bizarre right it's we're not anti-AI in fact the need for safety in AI is a complement to AI right if AI was useless and stupid we wouldn't be worried about it's safety it's only because it's becoming more capable that we have to be concerned about safety so I don't see this as anti-AI at all in fact I would say without safety there will be no AI right there is no future with human beings where we have unsafe AI so it's either no AI or safe AI we have a closing tradition this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next not knowing who they're leaving it for and the question left for you is what do you value the most in life and why and lastly how many times has this answer changed um I value my family most and that answer hasn't changed for nearly 30 years what else outside of your family truth and that aren't yeah that answer hasn't changed at all I've always wanted the world to base its life on truth and I find the propagation or deliberate propagation of falsehood to be one of the worst things that we can do even if that truth is inconvenient yeah I think that's a really important point which is that you know people people often don't like hearing things that are negative and so the visceral reaction is often to just shoot or aim at the person who is delivering the bad news because if I discredit you or I shoot at you then it makes it easier for me to contend with the news that I don't like the thing that's making me feel uncomfortable and so I applaud you for what you're doing because you're going to get lots of shots taken at you because you're delivering an inconvenient truth which generally people won't won't always love but also you are messing with people's ability to get that quadrillion dollar prize which means they'll be more deliberate attempts to discredit people like yourself and Jeff Hinton and other people that I've spoken to on the show but again when I look back through history I think that progress has come from the pursuit of truth even when it was inconvenient and actually much of the luxuries that I value in my life are the consequence of other people that came before me that were brave enough or bold enough to pursue truth at times when it was inconvenient and so I very much respect and value people like yourself for that very reason you've written this incredible book called Human Compatible Artificial Intelligence and the problem of control which I think was published in 2020. 2019 yeah there's a new edition from 2023 where do people go if they want more information on your work and you do they go to your website do they get this book what's the best place for them to learn more. So the book is written for the general public I'm easy to find on the web the information on my webpage is mostly targeted for academics so it's a lot of technical research papers and so on there is an organization as I mentioned called the International Association for Safe and Ethical AI and that has a website it has a terrible acronym unfortunately i-a-s-e-a-i we pronounce it i-c-i but it's easy to miss bell but you can find that on the web as well and that has that has resources you can join the association you can apply to come to our annual conference and you know I think increasingly not you know not just AI researchers like Jeff Hinton Yoshio Benjo but also I think writers Brian Christian for example has a nice book called the alignment problem and he's looking at it from the outside he's not or at least when he wrote it he wasn't an AI researcher he's now becoming one but he has talked to many of the people involved in these questions and tries to give an objective view so I think it's a it's a pretty good book. I will link all of that below for anyone that wants to check out any of those links and learn more. Professor Stuart Russell thank you so much really appreciate you taking the time and the effort to come and have this conversation and I think I think it's pushing the public conversation in an important direction. Thanks to you and I appreciate you for doing that. Really nice talking to you. I'm absolutely obsessed with 1% if you know me if you follow behind the diary which is up behind the scenes channel if you've heard me speak on stage if you follow me on any social media channel you've probably heard me talking about 1% it is the defining philosophy of my health of my companies of my habit formation and everything in between which is the obsessive focus on the small things because sometimes in life we aim at really really really really big things big steps forward mountains we have to climb and as NERIL told me on this podcast when you aim at big things you get psychologically demotivated you end up procrastinating avoiding them and change never happens so with that in mind with everything I've learned about 1% and with everything I've learned from interviewing the incredible guests on this podcast we made the 1% diary just over a year ago and it sold out and it is the best feedback we've ever had on a diary that we have created because what it does is it takes you through this incredible process over 90 days to help you build and form brand new habits so if you want to get one for yourself or you want to get one for your team your company a friend a sibling anybody that listens to the diary of a CEO head over immediately to the diary dot com and you can inquire there about getting a bundle if you want to get one for your team or for a large group of people that is the diary dot com [Music]