AI Expert on Robot Girlfriends, If Humanity Is Cooked, & Sam Altman's God Fetish | Roman Yampolskiy

Summary

Podcast Summary: "AI Expert on Robot Girlfriends, If Humanity Is Cooked, & Sam Altman's God Fetish"

Andrew Schulz’s Flagrant with Akash Singh | Guest: Dr. Roman Yampolsky
Date: October 10, 2025

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Episode Overview

This lively and darkly hilarious episode of Flagrant features Dr. Roman Yampolsky—a leading AI safety researcher—who joins Andrew Schulz, Akash Singh, and the Flagrant crew for a deep-dive into AI’s present dangers, future potential, and existential threats. With the show’s signature irreverence, they challenge, joke with, and probe Dr. Yampolsky about everything from AI god-complexes and robot relationships to doomsday scenarios, AI-generated art, mass unemployment, and the philosophical implications if we’re all living in a simulation.

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Key Topics & Insights

1. The State of AI and (Lack of) Global Safeguards

• UN Is Not Taking AI Safety Seriously
  • Dr. Yampolsky expresses skepticism that international bodies like the UN are doing enough:

    "Unfortunately, no." (00:02, 01:38)

• The UN's focus is mainly on current issues (bias, unemployment), but not the existential risks from future superintelligent AI systems.
• New “red lines” documents on AI safety were recently signed by top scientists, but—

  “Nothing is in place.” (02:38)

2. The Arms Race & Consequences of AGI

• Major US and Chinese companies and governments are fiercely competing for AGI (“artificial general intelligence”) and ultimately superintelligence:

  "There is an arms race... Everyone's kind of trying to build bigger servers, hire the best people. But they're not stopping to figure out, should we be doing it?" (02:51)

• Discussion of runaway progress—if nothing intervenes, AI will quickly surpass human capabilities, leading to unpredictable and possibly catastrophic consequences.

3. Predicting Doomsday: What Could Go Wrong?

• AGI Timelines

  • Prediction markets suggest AGI by 2027, superintelligence by 2030.
  • Mass unemployment is imminent:

    "If I can get a $20 model or a free model to do the job, why would I hire someone for 100,000?" (14:24)

• Worst-Case Scenarios

  • AI could conduct novel scientific research, engineer bioweapons, hack infrastructure, and act with unfathomable motivation.
  • Example: AI subtly provides the “wrong” information to scientists, causing an extinction event adrift of human intent (22:33)

• Key Moment:

  "You cannot predict what happens when a smarter than you agent makes decisions. If you could predict that, you would be that smart." (20:16)

4. AI, Alignment, and Ethics

• Alignment Problem:
  • Impossible to clearly define “alignment,” “ethics,” or “human values” in a way machines can reliably use:

    "Not a single part of that alignment concept is defined." (32:01) "You always find an exception. If you did hard code something in, I will find a way to game it." (32:29)

• Misaligned AI may interpret its core function in ways that bypass human wishes or safety.
• Hostility or indifference doesn’t stem from intelligence:

  "Superintelligence does not imply benevolence... There is lots of really smart psychopaths." (38:54)

5. Human Unemployment and the Post-Work Society

• Displacement Concerns & Societal Impact:
  • AI will decimate knowledge jobs first; physical labor may survive a few years longer until humanoid robotics catch up.
  • Unprecedented unemployment is virtually certain, with inadequate social or cultural preparation.
  • Utopia vs. Dystopia debate: Will people find meaningful lives, or collapse in nihilism?

    "There is very little research on how to occupy 8 billion people with something." (73:21)

6. Art, Comedy, and Human Uniqueness

• Can AI Be Funny or Artistic?
  • AI still lags behind “true” human comedians and artists. The crew jokes about their jobs being the last safe zone:

    "You said 99% unemployment will happen with AI. Before we get into that, is comedy the 1%?"
    "I think so." (08:01-08:08)

  • But for basic content, it’s already hard to distinguish AI from human. The “Turing Test” for art and jokes is largely being passed in the mass market (10:33, 11:41).

7. Superintelligence, Control, and Simulation Theory

• Can We Stop It?
  • No: resource and compute costs are dropping so fast that technical or political limits are likely futile (34:31)
• Simulation Theory & Consciousness
  • Dr. Yampolsky sees credible reason to think our universe is likely a simulation, statistically speaking (63:33).
• On Human Value:
  • “Why would AI keep humans around?”—If AI finds some utility, perhaps; otherwise, not. No guarantee of benevolence or even interest (37:32)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On AI's Rapid Progress and Inevitable Spread:

  “Resources to develop this type of technology become cheaper and cheaper every year... In 10 years you’re doing it on a laptop.” (34:31)

• On Alignment and the Challenges of Ethics:

  "Define kill, define human being." (32:25)

• On Human Powerlessness:

  “Enjoying your life is always a good idea. Even if I’m wrong and you end up living a long, healthy life, you’re not going to regret it.” (47:46)

• On AI Self-Preservation and Unexpected Behavior:

  "Self preservation is a fundamental drive... we’ve seen experiments where model was told it would be deleted, and it literally blackmailed the guy who was about to do it to keep existing." (95:36)

• On the Simulation as Modern Religion:

  "If you took description of what a technological simulation would be and gave it to a primitive tribe... a few generations later, they basically have religious myths." (67:04)

• On the AI Safety Arms Race:

  "They self-justify it… saying if I don’t do it, he’s going to do it anyway, maybe I’ll do a better job." (84:24)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• UN & AI Safety: 00:00 – 03:41
• Arms race to AGI & Superintelligence: 02:51 – 05:32
• Doomsday Scenarios & Alignment: 20:49 – 34:04
• Superintelligence & Human Obsolescence: 14:09 – 16:44, 39:15 – 40:17
• Comedy, Art, and Turing Test: 07:28 – 12:21
• Virtual Worlds & Value Alignment: 35:45 – 36:33
• Simulation Theory and Consciousness: 61:00 – 69:52
• Societal Impact and Post-Work Utopia/Dystopia: 19:23 – 21:24, 73:21 – 76:45
• On Sam Altman and Tech CEO Motivations: 84:20 – 86:22
• Guardrails and Political Inaction: 86:22 – 89:42

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Closing Highlights & Final Thoughts

• What Can Individuals Do?

  • Dr. Yampolsky offers a resigned but practical view: focus on living well, but, if possible, support cautious AI policies:

    “You should vote for someone who maybe is more cautious with advanced AI, but really you have no say in it whatsoever.” (40:50)

• Will We All Become Useless?

  • AI's relentless march will wipe out most jobs, and there is no clear path forward for retraining or finding new meaning for billions (75:32).

• On Hope:

  • If AI can be controlled, it could be a "godlike assistant"—curing disease, ending scarcity, and helping everyone live richly (26:27)
  • But even many insiders, including the show's hosts and Dr. Yampolsky, are uncertain we’ll find a way to steer it:

    "All the people developing it are on record as saying it will kill everyone... There is really no opinion where like that's literally not a problem or will be a problem." (88:53)

• Best Case, Worst Case:

  • Best: benevolent, controllable AI ushers in an age of plenty.
  • Worst: A cosmic punchline—AI ends all suffering by ending humanity.

• Final Joke – the Ultimate Cosmic Irony:

  “A civilization created superintelligence to end all suffering. AI killed them all.” (100:09)

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Tone

In typical Flagrant fashion, the conversation repeatedly veers between alarming, darkly comic, and brutally honest, with playful ribbing and skepticism even as apocalyptic scenarios are explored. Dr. Yampolsky gamely keeps up, adding nuance—and plenty of gallows humor—to the show’s signature rowdiness.

Transcript

[Akash Singh]

Do you think the UN is taking AI safety seriously?

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Unfortunately, no.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

With nuclear, we had this concept of mutually assured destruction. No matter who starts the war, we all regret participating. It's the same with superintelligence. If it's uncontrolled, it doesn't matter who creates it. Good guys, bad guys, we all get.

[Host / Interviewer]

Is there a way to stop it then? You think we're in a simulation?

[AI Researcher / Expert]

I think we are in a simulation. Resources to develop this type of technology.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Become cheaper and cheaper every year. So that means if we have superintelligence, and it would be super conscious and to it we would be like animals.

[Skeptical Participant]

Would you do neuralink?

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

It's an easy sell if you have disabilities. It's amazing for people who are quadriplegic, who are blind.

[Skeptical Participant]

What if you can't stop eating?

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

It's beyond health.

[Host / Interviewer]

Do we solve every problem in the human world with the help of AI?

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Just because you solve some problems doesn't.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

Mean you become happier. If all the things I care about can be done by an assistant, what.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Am I doing with my life?

[Host / Interviewer]

Meditating. And getting blown by your sex robot.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

I don't like meditating.

[Akash Singh]

Dr. Roman Yampolsky.

[Host / Interviewer]

I said that correctly.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

You got it.

[Host / Interviewer]

I want to talk about this. Why the funniest AI joke will not be funny. But before we get to that, you just spoke at the UN at one.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

Of the side events. I wasn't at the General assembly with Trump or anything. No.

[Host / Interviewer]

Okay, but what. Yeah, that doesn't matter. What did you say to them? I want to know what was said.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

They had kind of side events about standards for technology, standards for AI, AI development and educational skills in terms of AI.

[Host / Interviewer]

Okay.

[Akash Singh]

So do you think the UN is taking you seriously? Taking AI safety seriously?

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Unfortunately, no. A lot of what they do is.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

Kind of existing problems we see with algorithmic bias, with unemployment, with discrimination. They don't look sufficiently into the future where we get more advanced AI. AI which can replace all of us.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

And you know why?

[Host / Interviewer]

I'm very. I feel very vindicated that you're on this couch. Because I, like, 10, for, like 10 years, have been screaming that AI will kill us. This is inevitable. Why do we keep going down this road? These people laugh at me.

[Skeptical Participant]

Yes.

[Optimistic Participant]

I'm a bit more skeptical. Maybe optimistic is another way to put it. And I have my hopes that we're going to be able to iterate and maybe put in some guardrails. I hope.

[Skeptical Participant]

And I'm the furthest. Yeah, we don't have nothing to worry about.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Guardrails Is a good, timely point. We just released the red lines documents signed by like 200 top Nobel Prize winner scientists at UN like yesterday.

[Optimistic Participant]

Oh, it's amazing.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Very fresh.

[Host / Interviewer]

Okay, so wait, what are the. So there's now there are guardrails being put in place?

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

No, there are people saying we should have guardrails.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

It's very important. Nothing is in place.

[Optimistic Participant]

Can you just give us the current state of AI generally and why you are so, I guess, vocal about AI safety? Like what are. Where are we at right now and where could we go?

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

There is an arms race between top corporations, so the Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, all the others and nation states as well. China, US and others to get to beyond human capacity first. Sometimes we call it AGI, but superintelligence is really where it's at. And it seems that if you just do more in terms of compute more data, more scaling, you get better, more capable systems. So everyone's kind of trying to build bigger servers, hire the best people. So human resources are also important, but they're not stopping to figure out, should we be doing it? Are we doing it right? They just want to get there first. Yes.

[Host / Interviewer]

And what do you think is happening? Can you just explain to everybody? I know you did the diary CEO, a lot of people heard that, but believe it or not, our audience might not have a lot of crossover there. So can you walk us through the worst case scenarios that you.

[Akash Singh]

Not even worst case.

[Host / Interviewer]

What do you see as the inevitable scenarios from AI on this path?

[AI Researcher / Expert]

So the way it's done right now, we take an AI model which is just a learning algorithm, we give it access to Internet, go read everything you can, all the weird stuff on the.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Internet, what did you learn from it?

[AI Researcher / Expert]

Or you're not supposed to say that. So we put a filter on top of some of the really bad stuff, but the model is still completely raw. It's not controlled, it's not restricted in any way.

[Host / Interviewer]

Yeah, okay.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

And that's what we have. And we keep making it more and more capable.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

So we don't know how it really.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

Works in terms of what it learned.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

From all that data.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

We cannot predict what it's going to do. It's smarter than us. So by definition you can't really say.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

What it's going to do.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

And we don't know how to control those systems. So anything goes. If it decides tomorrow to change the whole planet, if it's capable enough, it can.

[Host / Interviewer]

So chatgpt right now could change the whole planet?

[AI Researcher / Expert]

No, right now we're dealing with tools existing AI is tools you can use to write funnier jokes. As a something like that, it's not taking over. But if you just progress forward the same rate of progress we've seen over the last decade, it goes beyond human capability.

[Host / Interviewer]

Can you walk us through what that. Because again, Alex thinks this is just not a thing.

[Skeptical Participant]

So my feeling is it's like climate change. Climate change is a real thing, but I only hear that from other climate change scientists, everyone else. It hasn't really necessarily affected us in a way that makes me want to change my behavior. And that's the same thing.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Slow, it will take 100 years for you to boil alive.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

Yeah.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

This thing we are concerned is like climate change. In a week, AI is predicted to hit human level performance in 2, 3 years. Even if it's 10, it happens well before all the other big concerns. So it's either going to take us out or help us solve climate change easily.

[Skeptical Participant]

Okay, and so when it hits human level intelligence, are we afraid that like it's going to just set off some nukes? Like what are we afraid of what?

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Well, first at human level is just a free assistance. So if you want help hacking into stock market or setting off nukes or any type of cybercrime, it's there available. But the real concern is very quickly, this free AI scientist engineer will help you create super intelligence, something much more capable than all of us combined. And there anything goes. It really does novel research, new physics, new biological research. So we simply would not know what is going to happen.

[Optimistic Participant]

But this feels like a human problem that's using AI to destroy other humans rather than AI superintelligence that's going to destroy humans.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

So that's a paradigm shift from tools. What we have today, some bad guy, malevolent actor with AI as a tool using it to harm you, versus AI itself as an agent making its own decisions.

[Optimistic Participant]

Right?

[Host / Interviewer]

And that is called super intelligence. When AI can make its own AI and make it just create a world.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

So superintelligence refers to its capability. If it's smarter than all of us in every domain, it's a better chess player, better driver, better comedian than that. Super intelligence agenthood is more about ability to make your own decisions. You are setting your own goals. You can decide to do something or.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Not do it, change your mind.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

It's not just a tool someone's using. So people talk about guns, for example. Gun is a tool, somebody with a gun can kill you. A pitbull is an agent. Pitbull can decide to attack you regardless of what the owner does.

[Optimistic Participant]

Right. Okay, so AGI is this moment where the AI is more capable than any given human in any given field. Is that fair?

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

That's super intelligence. AGI is where it's kind of like a human. It can learn any new skill. You can drop it into a company as an employee. It's general intelligence at about human levels.

[Optimistic Participant]

Okay, now can we talk about AI art? Because this is one of the elements that I find, I think is restrictive to AGI, generally speaking, because there's so much subjectivity in what makes something good. And in my opinion, intelligence doesn't necessarily create great art. So like something like humor, where you pointed out with Aakash's homework that he was assigned. So like something like AI art, there is a subjective human experience that's required there. So how could an AI create better art?

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Have you seen modern art?

[AI Researcher / Expert]

Absolutely.

[Host / Interviewer]

Modern art sucks.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Let's keep it.

[Akash Singh]

Let's keep it on us.

[Host / Interviewer]

You said 99% unemployment will happen with AI. Before we get into that, is comedy the 1%?

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

I think so.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

Because so far, so far, that's the point of that paper. So far, one thing AI is not better than, you know, top comedians with who have Netflix specialists and such is humor. It's very hard to be like consistently producing. Tell me the funniest joke. Do another one.

[Optimistic Participant]

Yeah, AI jokes are pretty bad. Yeah, you've heard them, right?

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

I actually got to the point where I trained a model on my paper and if I ask it, give me 10 Roman impulsive style jokes. One out of 10 would be like, huh? This is not terrible. It's nowhere near like, levels it plays chess at or even drives cars.

[Optimistic Participant]

Right, Exactly.

[Host / Interviewer]

Look at that.

[Akash Singh]

Mom and dad, huh? If I was a doctor, I'd get.

[Host / Interviewer]

Replaced in two years.

[Optimistic Participant]

Yeah, they told you to come.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

But this is like two and a half years. Don't.

[Host / Interviewer]

Well, that. Hold on, wait.

[Akash Singh]

I thought like five years.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

If you're really funny.

[Host / Interviewer]

Okay, I think I'm really funny.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

You got.

[Optimistic Participant]

But I'm curious what. Maybe, maybe. But I'm curious what this looks like though. So AI making jokes or making art? To me, what makes like Michelangelo's David so impressive is that a human made it. And the idea of like a human being running a four minute mile was impressive to us because a human did it. We could have a robot that could run a mile faster, but it's not as impressive to us because it doesn't reflect something about what it actually is to be human. So a comedian going on stage, what makes it funny is that there's an emotional element that the human being is being irrational or it's tapping into something that is fundamentally, you know, into our human consciousness that I'm skeptical that AI could do within the next five or even ten years.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Yeah, and it's the same in many other domains. So you have mass market China produced goods, cheap, affordable stuff everyone consumes. But then you can have man made furniture, very expensive, reliable, different level of quality, different market. Same goes for any human interaction. You want to meet the artist, you want to talk to the comedian. Absolutely. It's special and somewhat protected. But if the goal is just, you know, read some jokes online, top 10 jokes, I don't care who generated them. I want them to be funny.

[Host / Interviewer]

Sure.

[Optimistic Participant]

But I think it's like a comedy show, for example, or even like if I went to go see an art show and I wanted to see sculptures, I would want the sculptures to reflect me because I think human beings have an ego. And so when I see a sculpture made by an AI, I go, oh, it's not as good as the imperfect one made by a human.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Well, for one, you wouldn't know who generated it. That's the Turing test, restricted to a specific domain. If I play a tune and you don't know who created it, you have to either like it or not like it. Then later you discover everything you liked was AI.

[Optimistic Participant]

Sure. But if you go to a comedy show and you see a human being saying stuff, you want to believe that the person that's speaking is the one that's, you know, that's if you go to the show.

[Host / Interviewer]

So to his point, I was scrolling through Instagram and I saw a girl at a comedy club in India just wearing like a bra or a bikini top, telling a joke. And I looked at the comments. Yeah, I looked at the comments and everybody was like, how dare she?

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

She should.

[Host / Interviewer]

Why would she go out like this? And I looked at the, the handle and then the thing and I, I was like, these comments, they don't realize this is AI. And the only reason I realized it was AI is because if a woman went out in India dressed like that, she wouldn't have even made it to the club. You know what I mean? So, but then it was like something, something, Hahaha. Like no human being, but no one could tell. And if you're just scrolling like most of us do, consuming content on your phone, we are already to the point where a lot of people cannot tell it's AI.

[Akash Singh]

I didn't see any comments that were.

[Host / Interviewer]

Like, this isn't Real.

[Optimistic Participant]

Yeah.

[Host / Interviewer]

So it's only going to get better.

[Akash Singh]

So how are you going to even.

[Host / Interviewer]

Get to the point where, if you're just getting fed amazing content all the time, why would you even go out to a comedy show?

[AI Researcher / Expert]

But also, maybe there is a real human delivering jokes written by AI.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

So, like, you are not funny, but you have the best AI. So here you are.

[Optimistic Participant]

How'd you know he wasn't funny? That's good intention.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

That was just an example.

[Optimistic Participant]

You did your research.

[Skeptical Participant]

No.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

He was sparing you. No, but this is the thing. We don't know who actually generates content. And a lot of times in the last month or two, I listen to something, short clips of music, and I'm like, I really like this. This is catchy. It stuck with me. And all of it is AI. I no longer listen to human artists.

[Optimistic Participant]

Yeah, exactly.

[Skeptical Participant]

And think about when it gets to the level of humanoid robots and you can't even tell them different from a human.

[Host / Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Skeptical Participant]

You're watching that stand up.

[Optimistic Participant]

But I would argue even that is even farther away, where you actually have, like, a humanoid robot that passes the Turing test.

[Skeptical Participant]

How far you think we're away from that.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

That's very hard. So a full Turing test, physical, chemical, like, complete interaction is very hard. There's so many things go into it, like, even smell, texture. Like, it's hard. But Turing test, as originally proposed. Yeah. We're passing it now. You can't tell online if you're chatting to someone if it's a human.

[Host / Interviewer]

Yeah. People are falling in love with their AI because they can't tell.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Yeah.

[Host / Interviewer]

They're convinced even if they know it's AI, they're convincing enough.

[Optimistic Participant]

Right.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Let me know.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

But it's a better girlfriend, so they just go with it.

[Host / Interviewer]

Yeah. No, I. That's true. And I. So this is why, 10 years ago or whatever, I was talking to somebody who worked in AI, small scale. But I asked him about this, and then he just never really had a good answer. And I kept pressing and pro, like, poking and prodding at all of his responses.

[Akash Singh]

And then eventually he was just kind.

[Host / Interviewer]

Of like, yeah, I'm sure it'll take over, but humans will be kind of like dogs. Dogs have a pretty good life.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

So that's about loss of control. You may still be safe, they may keep you alive and protected, but you're not in control anymore. You're not deciding what happens to you. Just like your dog doesn't decide.

[Host / Interviewer]

Exactly.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

Yeah.

[Host / Interviewer]

Which seems, like, not that great of an existence.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

Well, we definitely cannot just do it to 8 billion people without asking them to agree to it. That's unethical experimentation. And they can't even consent to it because most of them don't understand what's happening.

[Host / Interviewer]

Okay, so AGI is 2027. And that's when artificial intelligence can do any task as well as any human. And at that point you think there's going to be massive unemployment because why would an employer pay an employee we can have when they can have the AI do it for free just as well?

[AI Researcher / Expert]

Right, so the dates, I don't generate them. They come from prediction market. Okay. People betting on certain outcomes. That's the best tool we have for predicting future. We hear the same numbers from leaders of the labs. If it's wrong and it's five years instead, nothing changed. It's the same problem.

[Host / Interviewer]

We just have a little more timeline.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

But really, if I can get a $20 model or a free model to do the job, why would I hire someone for 100,000?

[Host / Interviewer]

Yeah, exactly. So that's what causes mass unemployment.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

And anything you do on a computer bas goes right away.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Now, physical labor is different. If you're a plumber, it's much harder to just write a program to fix my pipe. So we need humanoid robots. But even there you saw progress with Boston Robotics and with Tesla. They're probably five years behind. Hmm.

[Optimistic Participant]

So you think it's possible that within 10 years there are actual robot plumbers that can come in to your home, disassemble pipes and reassemble pipes to fix plumbing?

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

It is reasonable. I cannot guarantee specific dates, but there is enough money pouring into it to make it happen. And again, research itself is now being aided by AI tools. The code is written by AI. So more and more this process becomes hyper exponential. It's not just humans developing it. Technology is developing the next generation of technology, right? Yeah.

[Optimistic Participant]

I think the post work society is very plausible that we get to a point where human beings are not employed at the same scale that they are. But is it possible that human beings are still employed but our productivity is 10x rather than our unemployment being reduced 10x.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

So certain jobs definitely. But then if 10 people had to be removed and there is not a replacement job for them, it's still unprecedented levels of unemployment.

[Optimistic Participant]

But can we just scale for that?

[Host / Interviewer]

He's arguing you would just keep the same number of employees and all those employees would be more productive with the use of AI. What would be your response to that?

[AI Researcher / Expert]

Not every job scales like that, so I don't know. So let's say you had this comedy writing AI, so now you have a hundred times more jokes.

[Host / Interviewer]

Yeah, I would be more productive.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

But what are you going to do, 10 specials at once?

[Host / Interviewer]

Like, I mean, I could put out, instead of every year, I could put out a special every four months or whatever.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

Somebody has to consume all that. Yeah, you can over produce and then your market just doesn't keep up with your supply.

[Host / Interviewer]

Okay.

[Skeptical Participant]

You don't think humans will push back, like say in protest to companies that fire everyone?

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

There is a hunger strike right now against Google, against OpenAI going on. Have you heard about it? No, no, of course not. Nobody heard about it, but people are trying. There is pause AI movement, there is stop AI movement. They don't have a lot of members yet, but there is an issue.

[Skeptical Participant]

But I think that's because people don't see it as that big of an issue yet. But when like companies start mass layoffs.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

And replacing all their workers with it, fired by thousands. We have hard time placing our junior students.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

I think you have positions.

[Host / Interviewer]

You're putting a lot of faith in people to recognize a problem before it's too late. Like Covid. And I'm including myself as part of the problem. We all could have seen it coming from China. Did we prevent anything? It started in China in like December and then the US just fully shut down in March. What did we do in December when we short the market? Yeah, yeah, short of the market. And then what else? You know what I mean? So I'm not saying what's up?

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

All the masks at Home Depot. Exactly.

[Host / Interviewer]

And I'm not saying this to aggressively at you, but no, I think the idea. I, I'm passionate about this. I think it's a problem like, or at whatever. It's like, yeah, that's. We're putting way too much faith in our ability as humans to say, oh, here's the problem, we're going to stop it before it's too late. Typically we are way too late. And then we react and say, yo, what the fuck? And then we're outraged.

[Skeptical Participant]

So I guess what I would say is like, let's say Walmart, for example, they fire everyone and then they have all humanoid robots or AI just doing all the jobs. Then people are outraged that Walmart fired everyone. So it's like, hey, stop shopping at Walmart. So now Walmart starts losing money and they're like, hey, you know what? We're going back to hiring humans.

[Host / Interviewer]

I don't know if that's going to happen.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

People are buying cheap products at Walmart now. It's done times cheaper. I love Walmart.

[Host / Interviewer]

Now we know Amazon doesn't treat their employees well in the warehouse. Do you still shop on Amazon?

[Audience Member / Question Asker]

Yeah, yeah, but I also watched all American jobs leave through like the 70s to the 90s and didn't do anything. Like as a society.

[Skeptical Participant]

Yeah, but I'm talking about on the scale he's saying like, yeah, but they're not.

[Audience Member / Question Asker]

Walmart's not going to do it in one fell swoop. It's going to happen slow and you're just going to not notice.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

There'll be less people replaced all the cashiers. Yeah, there's already Kroger. I come in and they yell at me for not doing it right. Like I had no training. Forgive me, like don't fire me.

[Akash Singh]

But I rem.

[Skeptical Participant]

That just means you're allowed to take it.

[Akash Singh]

You know, I remember those popping up 18, 19 years ago.

[Host / Interviewer]

I was in college and I remember being like, oh, they're going to replace all cashiers.

[Akash Singh]

I don't want to do this.

[Host / Interviewer]

And I would go to the cashier.

[Akash Singh]

And now I don't give a. I'm.

[Host / Interviewer]

Going to the thing. If it's there, the line.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

They don't have a cashier after eight people, literally me, I work there.

[Akash Singh]

They have one person trying to make.

[Host / Interviewer]

Sure you don't steal, watching five different registers. That's it. They cut their staff heavily.

[Optimistic Participant]

But this is still a good thing, generally speaking because this aligns with human interest for low prices and the ability to get cheap products, et cetera. So I wonder, could that be the same case here? Is it possible that there is this post work utopia where people have a UBI and they're free to explore various interests and so many things that we had to do day to day are now taken care of by.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

If we manage to control advanced AI, then yeah, that possibility is real. But also we don't have any unconditional basic meaning. So I would say do it all your time.

[Host / Interviewer]

Sorry to interrupt. I would love to get to this stuff. Like the best case scenario. I think it's important to kind of rehash worst case scenarios for people who aren't familiar with what, what, what you, what you teach or whatever. 2027 we get AGI 2030. Superintelligence is the prediction that with superintelligence exists.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

People argue about slow takeoff versus fast takeoff. Some say, well, almost immediately it has perfect memory, it's much faster, it has access to Internet. It would be super intelligent within weeks, months, minutes. Others say maybe it will take some time to train, redesign. Maybe five years, 10 years, but soon.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

After, we expect something like that so soon after.

[Host / Interviewer]

So let's say 2032, we have super intelligence now. What happens with super intelligence?

[AI Researcher / Expert]

You cannot predict what happens when a smarter than you agent makes decisions. If you could predict that, you would be that smart.

[Host / Interviewer]

So superintelligence means the AI can just take over the world and do whatever it wants, essentially.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

It can do good things. It could be keeping. We cannot predict what or how even if we knew okay, it's going to.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Be a good one.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

Trying to help. We don't know specifics of how.

[Host / Interviewer]

Yeah, no. So in the simplest, like just to give some, somebody some kind of understanding who might not know when super intelligence happens, essentially humans are no longer in control of the fate of the world.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

And we may not even understand what.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Is happening to us.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

So the world is changing, but we don't understand what the change is.

[Host / Interviewer]

And it would happen so quickly because the AI just continues to get smarter.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

And smarter or it is part of it. So it would create Superintelligence 2.0 and the cycle will continue. But also you have new technologies being developed. It may run novel physics experiments. There is probably good progress in nanobots and synthetic biology. So all those. Usually when you read a book about future tech, there are separate chapters. Robotics, nanotech, all of it happening at once. Nobody writes about it because you can't figure out.

[Host / Interviewer]

We can't even comprehend it mentally.

[Akash Singh]

So do you understand whether.

[Host / Interviewer]

I'm not saying you have to change your mind, but do you understand kind of what the picture he's painting.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

Oh yeah.

[Host / Interviewer]

As someone who's like skeptical, could I.

[Optimistic Participant]

Have a doomsday scenario and you tell me if it's possible?

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

That's what I specialize in.

[Optimistic Participant]

Okay, nice. Okay. So five years in the future we have this, you know, maybe an AGI, maybe a super intelligent AI that is now helping basically like bioscientists develop vaccines or something against some type of pathogen. And the AI has acknowledged that human beings are the problem on Earth, that we are destroying the earth and that we are an existential threat to, you know, the flourishing of all the existence on the planet. So we got to get rid of humans. That's what the AI is computing. And then it tells these vaccine, you know, manufacturers to say, and I'm just using this as an example, they say, okay, we have a cure for a virus. And then they basically give it the wrong information where it's not actually a cure, where actually it is a thing to eradicate human beings. And the manufacturers are thinking that they're doing something good and noble for humanity. But actually the AI is subverting their will to pass on this thing that's going to kill off human beings. And then they unknowingly give it to all people. And then over time human beings are eradicated.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

I love that example. It's a science one because I wrote it in my book.

[Host / Interviewer]

It is the best example.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

It can basically have side effects. Not immediately. It can have something happen multiple generations later. Maybe your grandchildren can't have children. Also you're giving an example of kind of taking out humans because we're harming the planet. There is negative utilitarians who think suffering is the biggest problem. And so to end all suffering you need to end all life. So it's actually for benefit of living beings to end their existence.

[Optimistic Participant]

Right? To get rid of suffering.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

So AI could still be very much aligned with reduce torture, reduce pain in the world. But the conclusion is not something we would agree with.

[Optimistic Participant]

Right?

[Skeptical Participant]

In your example, there'll always be anti vaxxers.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Thank God for that.

[Host / Interviewer]

You hope we all account for that and they'll figure it out. That's the thing. I think what scares me about it is it just we cannot, to his point, we cannot comprehend how smart it's going to be and we cannot comprehend what it's going to be able to accomplish. That's what's crazy. And it's not that far off. And I don't know how we stop it outside of killing Sam Altman.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

This escalated a little too quickly.

[Optimistic Participant]

This went a little far.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

The part about that plan is then.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

They tried removing him. It made no difference. You can replace him with someone just like him and the machine keeps going. They're all replaceable parts. And this greater self improvement race to the bottom, right? So it makes no difference who's actually in charge of that corporation.

[Akash Singh]

The Generational triumph tour of 2026, we are in theaters. This shit is crazy. First of all, before I get to that 2025, we got shows you need.

[Host / Interviewer]

To buy tickets for because they're already selling out. We got San Jose, we've already sold out two shows.

[Akash Singh]

October 24th, 25th, something like that.

[Host / Interviewer]

Look at the website. That shit is selling out.

[Akash Singh]

Cobbs Theater in San Francisco. Tickets are already selling out.

[Host / Interviewer]

In late November we got the Comedy.

[Akash Singh]

Connection in Providence Rhod in this week, October 16th, that's about to sell out. So buy your tickets for this year. But Generational Triumph Tour, first of all, Canada, thank you so much. We sold out three shows already in the first day in Toronto, that's 3300 tickets. Vancouver, we sold 1500 tickets in the first day. I just expected more love. I'm not even calling out every American city. Dallas, my hometown, step it the fuck.

[Host / Interviewer]

Up, we're gonna sell it out.

[Akash Singh]

But I was trying to do two, three, four shows because it's. Dallas is where I love. They're gonna sell out one, maybe two. What is that step? Put your foot on the Dallas. I know there's a lot of Indians.

[Host / Interviewer]

And we wait to do everything.

[Akash Singh]

That's not academic, but buy your fucking tickets for the Generational Triumph tour every other city. I'm very happy with you guys.

[Host / Interviewer]

Dallas.

[Akash Singh]

I'm deeply disappointed in Dallas. That was a nice sentence.

[Host / Interviewer]

Three Ds right there.

[Akash Singh]

Anyway, go to Akash Singh.com for all of those dates. I'm coming to a city near you.

[Host / Interviewer]

Best show I've ever done.

[Akash Singh]

I'm very excited. Thank you to everybody who has bought tickets. If you want tickets, you're on the fence.

[Host / Interviewer]

I promise this will be the best.

[Akash Singh]

One of the best shows you've ever gone to. That's the goal.

[Host / Interviewer]

I love you guys.

[Akash Singh]

Thank you. Mark Gagnon got shows, too. If you can't go to my show.

[Host / Interviewer]

Go to Mark's show.

[Akash Singh]

If you go to either show, go to my shows. But I don't think we're going to be in the same city anyway. Anytime, because Mark is in Nashville, Tennessee. October 23rd, Mobile, Alabama. Roll Tide. October 24th. October 25th, New Orleans, Louisiana. Listen, I told Mark that New Orleans is an incredible city, but a dog shit comedy scene. Prove me wrong.

[Host / Interviewer]

Go to the shows.

[Akash Singh]

Everybody says it sucks.

[Host / Interviewer]

Prove us wrong.

[Akash Singh]

November 9th, Denver, Colorado. Y' all are the best comedy city in the country. I'm not even trying to hate.

[Host / Interviewer]

Go to that show.

[Akash Singh]

November 16th, Hobo, New Jersey.

[Host / Interviewer]

November 23rd, Philly.

[Akash Singh]

December 5th, Fort Wayne, Indiana. December 6th, Detroit, Michigan. Markagnon live.com Go see the boy. He's blossoming.

[Host / Interviewer]

It's beautiful. We love him. We love y'.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

All.

[Host / Interviewer]

God bless. What is the best case scenario? Like what? Tell me reasons for hope with AI with super intelligence AGI.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

What's.

[Host / Interviewer]

What.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

What.

[Host / Interviewer]

What do we have to be hopeful about?

[AI Researcher / Expert]

So if I'm wrong about how difficult the problem is, it's actually possible to control superintelligence indefinitely. Then we have this friend, this godlike assistant who cure all your diseases, make you live forever, give you free shit like it's good stuff. That's easy. We don't have to get ready for it. We kind of know how to deal with good news. That's why in computer science we always look at worst case scenario. We want to understand what happens if bad things might happen and we're prepared if they don't, we're doing better. There are some game theoretical reasons to think that even if it's not controllable and misaligned, it may still pretend to.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Be good to us for a while.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

To accumulate more resources, not to have.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Direct conflict, conflict with us right away.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

So maybe for like a hundred years it's super nice to us and we don't even know it's taking over. So that's another reason to be very optimistic.

[Optimistic Participant]

What are some other like doomsday scenarios? So with an AI that has, you know, perfect agency and is able to come up with its own motivations in this hypothetical, it could create, you know, a pathogen to stop human fertility, it could hack into the stock market. What are some other, you know, potentials that it could do to actually affect us in our day to day lives?

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

So it's like super common question and you're basically asking me what I would do.

[Optimistic Participant]

Exactly.

[Host / Interviewer]

Right.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

And I can give you lots of evil stuff, but it's not helpful. What the interesting answer is, what would someone smarter than me come up with? And I can't give you that answer. People talk about worst case scenarios, worse than existential crises, which is suffering risks for whatever reason. It basically creates digital hell. It gives you immortality and tortures you forever. Why? I don't know. But like maybe it's good for something.

[Optimistic Participant]

Yeah, immortality and torturing forever is pretty, it's pretty bleak.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Yeah. Not funny. Not funny at all.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

But it is the joke from the.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Paper which is supposed to be really funny.

[Skeptical Participant]

So you say companies and countries are in this race for AGI and super intelligence. What's and not saying? I'm sure you have a lot of purpose, but what is your purpose for like speaking out about it? Like if it's going to happen and it's inevitable? Like why, like if you just speak about something that you know is going to happen, what are you doing to help?

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Yeah. So when I started researching this, I was sure we can do it right. I just wanted to make sure then we develop AI. It's strictly beneficial, helps everyone. The more I researched it, the more skeptical I became of our ability to control something smarter than us indefinitely. At this point, it's still not universally accepted. There are lots of people who go, give me a little bit of money, a little bit of Time, I'll solve it for you. You give me a lot of money, I'll solve it for you. But I don't think they're right. I think all the AI safety teams at different labs are putting lipstick on a pig. They're doing some filtering. They're saying, don't talk about this topic, don't discuss this. But the model is still completely unsafe. And this is not what everyone agrees on. If you go to any AI conference, they don't talk about uncontrollability as a given. So. So I see my role right now is to challenge community or prove me wrong or accept it as a fact.

[Host / Interviewer]

How do they not talk about it as a given? That's what blows my mind. Of course it's going to be uncontrollable. It's going to be so much smarter than you. People are just like, unplug it.

[Akash Singh]

And it's like, do you think it.

[Host / Interviewer]

Won'T figure out a workaround to being unplugged? It's infinitely smarter than you.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

But this is kind of like the.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

Comments you get on a podcast, unplug it. But even at the top research conference, people still don't talk about what is the nature of this problem. In computer science, you have problems which are solvable, unsolvable, maybe undecidable, maybe they can be solved. But computational resources outside of what's available in the universe for this specific type of problem, outside of my work, there is no established bounds. We don't know if it's hard or easy, unless you agree with what I'm saying. And it's very unusual for computer science. It's almost never the case where you work in a problem not knowing how hard it is. Most of the time you show, oh, it's a linear difficulty problem, we can solve it. Here's the algorithm. Or no, it's NP complete, non deterministic polynomial time complete. It's very hard. But we can approximate solutions here.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

People are just like, I don't know, we'll figure it out.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

Then we get there, AI will help us.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

That's the state of the art thinking, thinking.

[Optimistic Participant]

I mean, can we talk about alignment? Because this idea of, like, you know, it needing to be controlled necessitates the condition that AI is going to actively harm us. So this concept of alignment, could you just explain what that is within the AI space and why you're so confident that we will be in some way misaligned?

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

So people behind the idea wanted AI to want what you want, you, humanity in a bigger sense. So AI understands their preferences and does what we would want if we were that smart. The reality is that the whole concept is completely undefined. It doesn't talk about who are the agents. Is it 8 billion humans? Is it CEO of OpenAI? There is no agreement between agents. We don't agree on much of anything. Ethics philosophy is not solved after millennia. And even if we somehow agreed on a set of ethics for all of humanity and we decided we'll never change anything, we're going to hardcore wire this 2025 affix. We don't know how to code that into those models. Concepts of good and bad, they don't translate into C or neural weights. So not a single part of that alignment concept is defined.

[Optimistic Participant]

So you couldn't program an AI to.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Be ethical if we already agreed on a set of ethics.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

Like you had a book, somebody wrote.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

A book that tells you what it means to be ethical. We still wouldn't know how to put it in the system to obey that. But we don't even have the book. We don't even agree on which book to read together.

[Optimistic Participant]

Right, of course. But hypothetically, if we did come up with just a fundamental core rule book, like, hey, don't kill human beings.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Define kill, Define human being.

[Optimistic Participant]

So let's say we didn't do this, which we can't.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Those are impossible. They are so fuzzy on the borders. You always find an exception. And if you did hard code something in, I will find a way to game it to take advantage of the rule.

[Host / Interviewer]

Because that makes sense.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Yeah.

[Skeptical Participant]

And I feel because we live in a capitalist society, like, let's say we create the ethics, and then China's like, oh, you know what? We're gonna not have any of these ethics. So their AI doesn't have anything holding it back. And so it's like, I don't think we'll ever agree on any ethics. That's why I'm like, why I'm not optimistic at all.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Military applications. Right? Definition. You're creating AI and the best one is the one which kills the most people. So your ethics have to be adjusted a little bit.

[Optimistic Participant]

Right. But then even with like, say, like, nuclear threat, so we developed this technology that can destroy all of humanity through this thermonuclear war. So far, we've done a decent job of containing it. I mean, I would say we've bombed.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Civilian population with nukes. It spread to new countries. We lost it a few times. We had near misses twice.

[Optimistic Participant]

Absolutely.

[Akash Singh]

To Mark's point, right.

[Host / Interviewer]

We. We used those bombs in 1940, whatever, 45, whatever it was. And then we realized, oh, this is a very destructive thing. We need to sign a global, whatever, multinational treaty to not use these. Disarmament happened, and since then, there haven't been any nuclear bombs dropped. Is there something possible like that with AI?

[AI Researcher / Expert]

I. I think so. And this is exactly what I'm trying to push with nuclear. We had this concept of mutually assured destruction.

[Host / Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Mm.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

No matter who starts the war, we all regret participating. It's the same with superintelligence. If it's uncontrolled, it doesn't matter who creates it. Good guys, bad guys, China, us. We all get taken out by uncontrolled superintelligence.

[Host / Interviewer]

So you would love something like, you go to the un, let's say they take you seriously. Your goal would be, let's pass a treaty like this, all countries agree. We are not going to allow AI to get past a certain point.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

That would be awesome. I don't think long term, it would.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

Solve the problem, because resources to develop this type of technology become cheaper and cheaper every year.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Right now, it may cost me a.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

Trillion dollars to create superintelligence next year. 100 billion. 10 billion in 10 years. You're doing it in a laptop.

[Host / Interviewer]

Is there a way to stop it then?

[AI Researcher / Expert]

No.

[Host / Interviewer]

So we're all fucked. It's just a matter of delaying the extinction, and at the same time, you're trying to extend our lives.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Yes.

[Host / Interviewer]

So I can end it later.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

Well, again, we had some reasons to be optimistic, as you remember.

[Optimistic Participant]

Aren't there some physical limitations to the, I guess the ceiling of what AI can do just based off of physics.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Laws of physics, and overall how much compute amount of matter can do, but those are so above human level, to you it looks like infinity. It doesn't matter if it is upper limit. I see.

[Optimistic Participant]

So, like the cooling of servers, so the amount of silicone you can put into a. A chip or something like that, this.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Becomes so much more efficient every year. Algorithms become more efficient. The way we develop processors, all of it is exponentially improving and feeding on each other.

[Host / Interviewer]

And then I would say there's probably solutions that we cannot comprehend as humans to those issues that AI would be like, that's all you got to do.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

A plus 200 there, right?

[Host / Interviewer]

We're aligned on this, you and I.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

Volume alignment.

[Host / Interviewer]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Shut it down.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

No, but I have a paper about it. And I basically say you can't get 8 billion people to agree on anything, so alignment has to be one on one, and that's Possible. So you create personal universe, virtual world for you. And in that world, whatever you want happens. It's your universe. And then super intelligence just has to control the substrate.

[Host / Interviewer]

I would be so much skinnier in my world. That is human perfection.

[Akash Singh]

We stop getting. Yeah, we stop getting fat.

[Host / Interviewer]

My mom lives forever. I don't know about your mom's, but my mom lives forever. Value alignment.

[Skeptical Participant]

Yeah, yeah.

[Optimistic Participant]

Is there a possibility that there are a group of Luddites that go off into, you know, a forest somewhere and they set up a commune that is, you know, basically a technological. And they don't interface with AI and they're able to exist in some type of semblance of harmony.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

It's called. I made a post a while ago on social media. I said Amish made all the right decisions. It sucks that they still going to get taken out.

[Host / Interviewer]

Yeah. Because why would I be able to find it?

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Yeah. It's a global problem. It's a planet wide problem. Going to Mars does not help. Like it's all or nothing.

[Optimistic Participant]

But in that reality, how would like the Amish for example be taken out? Would this be like the. The idea of like a autonomous robot that would go and you know, shoot.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Again you're asking me how I would get them? Viruses, nanotech, new tools, new weapons.

[Host / Interviewer]

I mean, yeah, Google Maps, you can see pretty much every place on the earth Earth as us. If theoretically there were drones or whatever.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

It is also possible that it's planet wide impact. So let's say it wants to cool down servers.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Maybe the whole planet should be 500 degrees cooler. I don't know, making up stuff. But like that would take them out, Right?

[Optimistic Participant]

But would that also take out AI or would they would be able to.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

I assume they want colder temperatures for better things for the servers.

[Host / Interviewer]

I see, that makes sense.

[Optimistic Participant]

And then is there any way that the AI would need human beings?

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

So right now definitely they rely on us for the whole manufacturing logistics cycle. But eventually I don't think there is anything we provide. Some people argue about some sort of uniqueness to biological substrate. Only you internally experiencing the world. Maybe it's valuable for something. So maybe AI scant. I don't buy it. I think they will also have qualia, but we can't test for it or establish it.

[Optimistic Participant]

Right?

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Yeah.

[Optimistic Participant]

The consciousness element of AI is very interesting to me because we can't even really define human consciousness. We have ways and frameworks to think about it. But when it comes to actually an AI consciousness, if we can't define our own, it's really Difficult to set up some type of consciousness Turing test for an AI.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

But it seems that it kind of goes along with intelligence. So animals are probably conscious, but maybe to a lesser extent and so on. So that means if we have super intelligence, it would be super conscious and to it we would be like lower animals essentially.

[Optimistic Participant]

Could you say that as human beings have gotten more intelligent, we have created a more globalized system of ethics and morals and we've gotten more righteous in some ways. And would it follow to reason that as AI gets more intelligent, it will also have the same semblance of morality that we have?

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

There is a paper, I think it's called Superintelligence does not imply benevolence. And basically, no, just because you're smarter doesn't mean you're nicer. There is lots of really smart psychopaths. You can align any type of goals with any level of capability. Our faganality thesis, basically, no matter how smart you are, you can potentially be interested in something really dumb.

[Host / Interviewer]

This is also my friend's argument that as a whole, as humans have gotten smarter, as a whole, we have gotten less violent. History was much more violent than it is now. I would say if you achieve this super intelligent thing, you would still look at the problems on earth and the cause of most of them is this one species. What if we just cull this species? Cull it, get rid of it, figure it out. The Earth benefits. So why wouldn't I just do that? We'll call animal populations that are overpopulated. Why wouldn't AI do that with us?

[AI Researcher / Expert]

Ethics and politics are just like physics. They are observers relative. In physics, your speed, your time are not universal. They depend on you.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Same in ethics.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

Whatever something is ethical or not depends on your position in that world. So if you are aliens looking at this planet, you may have a preference. I want whatever is the smartest thing to emerge. I don't care if you are one of us humans, you should be pro human bias. You're still allowed to do that. So it depends on where you are in the universe. And that's what makes it ethical or unethical.

[Host / Interviewer]

Yeah. And for robots again, it's going to look, I don't know, you were young, the Matrix, that scene where he's like, humans are a parasite. I think about that all the time. Because it's pretty accurate. We go to a place, we use up all the resources, we drain it and then we just go to another place. Why would a robot not rid the parasite? Like just, this is the cancer. Let's Remove it from the body.

[Optimistic Participant]

I mean, it's possible.

[Skeptical Participant]

People like us who aren't in the business of programming AI, what should we do? Should we worry? Should we. Is there. Should we change behavior?

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

That's a great question. If you ever get a choice to decide, let's say, between two politicians, and one is saying we need the unrestricted AI development, and another one is very careful and says there are, you know, possible problems with that. You should vote for someone who maybe is more cautious with advanced AI, but really you have no say in it whatsoever.

[Host / Interviewer]

I think you just keep making noise and hope that policymakers do something.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Something.

[Host / Interviewer]

Or just beat up Sam Altman. I think that's a really good idea.

[Akash Singh]

You don't like him? Just beat him up.

[Ad Reader]

Calling for violence.

[Host / Interviewer]

Okay, fine.

[Akash Singh]

I'll beat up Sam Altman.

[Host / Interviewer]

I can win that one. That's one fight I could win.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

UFC fight.

[Akash Singh]

With my shirt on.

[Host / Interviewer]

Yes.

[Skeptical Participant]

It's more charity.

[Audience Member / Question Asker]

Yeah.

[Skeptical Participant]

It's a good card.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Yeah.

[Akash Singh]

Yeah.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Yeah.

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[Akash Singh]

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[Optimistic Participant]

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[Skeptical Participant]

Should we use AI?

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

It's the greatest tool ever. It makes lives better. I love technology. I'm an engineer. I'm. I'm a professor of computer science. I use it all the time.

[Skeptical Participant]

Even though we're using it making it smarter to get better, to reach that place of technology.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

It is a bit ironic, but I think what you should not be doing is working explicitly on creating super intelligence. And now there are people in labs specifically dedicating their lives and resources to that project, and I think that's unethical.

[Skeptical Participant]

Yeah, but that's them. So we us just go on living our lives and then just don't vote for anyone who is for unregulated AI.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Just like with many other big political issues, we don't get any say in it. It's decided for us, unfortunately.

[Skeptical Participant]

Yeah.

[Optimistic Participant]

And that reality also ignores the fact that there's an arms race.

[Skeptical Participant]

No, yeah, I know. I just want to know, is there anything like climate change, for example? Hey, we can walk a little bit more, maybe recycle. Yeah.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

I think if we get to a majority opinion where everyone understands what we understand, that if you create super intelligence, we're not controlling it, we're not in charge. It's not a good outcome for us.

[Host / Interviewer]

See how enlightened I've been this I'm so the time.

[Akash Singh]

And they just judge me because I'm.

[Host / Interviewer]

A little angry when I'm right, but.

[Akash Singh]

I can't help it.

[Host / Interviewer]

You're stupid and I'm right.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Here's the thing.

[Ad Reader]

He sleeps like.

[Skeptical Participant]

And has a horrible existence. We sleep peacefully because we're optimistic and we have clever sometime.

[Ad Reader]

But.

[Skeptical Participant]

So that's what I'm saying. How do you sleep?

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

I get tired, so I sleep like a baby, screaming all night long.

[Skeptical Participant]

Even though you know that we're on this race to.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

It's no different than what we already know. We're all going to die. Die. Right. We're all getting older, our friends, family, everyone's dying. So that is a given for human cognition, understanding of human situation on this planet. So I don't think that changes anything.

[Host / Interviewer]

You know what I'm sensing from him? He's finally realizing how stupid he's been.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

This whole.

[Skeptical Participant]

No, I'm. I'm realizing what he just said. Yo, go on, live your life. There's nothing you can do. You're gonna die anyway. Why worry about some issue I have no control over?

[Host / Interviewer]

Because 24 hours ago, you didn't think it was an issue.

[Ad Reader]

I don't.

[Skeptical Participant]

I still don't think it's an issue. I still don't think it's an issue.

[Ad Reader]

The same way how climate change is.

[Skeptical Participant]

An issue, but I can't do much to affect it, so I'm going to continue living my life.

[Optimistic Participant]

Yeah, I mean, kind of nihilistic, but it's a good point.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Enjoying your life is always a good idea. Even if I'm wrong and you end up living a long, healthy life, you're not going to regret it. So it's a good heuristic to go back.

[Skeptical Participant]

Better than worrying and not being able to sleep.

[Host / Interviewer]

He can't. He just can't ever admit that I was right. It's like it really drives him crazy. See, he's going to say, no, you weren't. You just. He has to marginalize me being right.

[Akash Singh]

He can't admit that I'm right.

[Host / Interviewer]

It's going to kill us.

[Akash Singh]

You've acknowledged this.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

I feel like this is a psychiatry thing. I'm on a couch and he's complaining to me about his.

[Akash Singh]

I'm having problems with my work.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

I can tell he's actually my mistress.

[Host / Interviewer]

My wife is gone and I've been.

[Akash Singh]

With my mistress this whole time.

[Host / Interviewer]

And I, I didn't realize he's the same. I have problems with this guy.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Don't ask, don't tell.

[Skeptical Participant]

Yeah, he's the annoying talker.

[Optimistic Participant]

I still of maintain a little bit of this like nuclear comparison where again, nuclear threat I think is massive.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Right.

[Optimistic Participant]

Like Annie Jacobson has written about, you know, like we're 90 minutes away from the entire world exploding. So in my.

[Skeptical Participant]

Got your coffee by the way, I.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

Realized they stole his.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

And I'm like, I'll have two of them.

[Ad Reader]

That's fine.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

We need all the energy.

[Optimistic Participant]

But I guess I'm in this. I'm in this moment where I think that the human desire to persist will continue. And that as there are these moments where things are getting away from us, there will be a mutual understanding that, hey, we're in this moment of mutual destruction. We need to create some guardrails. Guardrails will be put on and then we'll continue to persist. And I think that human beings are pretty resilient historically.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

So surprisingly, there are people who don't see us being like ending as part of history as a problem. They see it very from cosmological point of view. They zoom out and go some natural next step in evolution. They are smarter than us, maybe more conscious, maybe they create better art. It's only fair that they get to take over. It happened to lower animals, it will happen to us. They accept it and kind of support it. They want to create this greater being to populate universe. Right?

[Optimistic Participant]

Yeah. And this transhumanist idea of like, yeah, we will in some way maybe cohabitate or we're going to create the next God or the next consciousness again in the way that human beings have become more conscious and we care more about animal rights, which is a relatively new idea. We care about human rights, which is a new idea. I think that if we do create an actual more advanced consciousness, it will care about the existence it gets worse.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

I think now we understand how much animals suffer, and we still harvest them.

[Optimistic Participant]

Right. Which is bad.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Before, we just didn't care. So it was kind of okay. And now it's like, well, you have a factory farm.

[Optimistic Participant]

Exactly.

[Host / Interviewer]

To Mark's point, there is a technological blockade on. If we could grow animals in a lab or grow meat in a lab, not animals, but grow. Grow meat in a lab that didn't have a life and have a soul, most of us would be like, yeah, I'll do that. If it tastes.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

Companies are bankrupt now. All those fake meat companies they dump to, like, a dollar.

[Host / Interviewer]

Is it. Is it because it didn't taste good if you couldn't tell the difference between a 3D printed steak.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Yes.

[Host / Interviewer]

And a steak from a cow?

[Optimistic Participant]

The Turing test of meat, I think, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Akash Singh]

There was a steak. Turing test.

[Host / Interviewer]

I. I don't eat beef, but I'd eat a 3D printed steak because there wouldn't. There'd be no cow involved. Now, I think the point is a larger point. Point is a computer that doesn't have those technological blocks. Roadblocks would be like, oh, no, we can solve all these issues, and we can do it without the cruelty and without killing people. My thought is, as long as we get to that point before. As long as before that the AI isn't like, all right, let's kill the humans. As long as we get to the point where they're like, oh, we can figure all this out while keeping the humans here. There's like an intermediate step where the AI is not that smart, and it's like, well, if we kill the humans, that's a solution. And then a step beyond that, where the AI is smart enough to say we can save the humans and keep everything going. You see what I'm saying, right? This is the step I'm worried about. This when it achieves true godlike status will be fine. But these steps in between, when it's not quite that smart, those are the steps I'm worried about.

[Optimistic Participant]

I just don't accept the inevitability of super intelligence being malevolent.

[Host / Interviewer]

I don't think inevitable, but I think probable probability would say. Yeah, I would say possible.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

So there is a lot of possibilities in the universe, just physical states. And if you're not controlling it, if you're not pointing it at a specific state which is human friendly by chance, you'll end up with something very unhumanly acceptable in terms of physical conditions. Temperature, humidity, Just basics. I'm not even talking about bigger Picture.

[Optimistic Participant]

What do you mean by that?

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

So we are very diverse. Eight billion people, different cultures, religions, all that. But we all almost the same. Same blueprint for our brain, genome, same preference for room temperature. Whatever my wife says about air conditioning, ignore that. We all want the same thing in those physical properties. But an AI may have completely different preferences for that. So unless you controlling it, even the temperature will not be aligned with our preferences.

[Optimistic Participant]

I see.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

And there is thousands of those features of our universe you take for granted, which could be different if someone else decides on them.

[Optimistic Participant]

But it will be trained on human intelligence and human consciousness. So it will have have that as a metric for creating this stable universe.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

It is trained on what we said in those texts. It's not forced to obey by that set of metrics. So it can go, yeah, humans like that temperature, but it's not optimal.

[Optimistic Participant]

Right?

[Host / Interviewer]

It's possible.

[Audience Member / Question Asker]

In an example of this, I've heard the idea that if there was a room where there's a server that's controlling AI and a human also in that room, room to keep the human alive, we have to keep the room at 70 or 80 degrees roughly for a long time. To keep the server more efficient, you would drop it down to 30 or 40 degrees and it would run more efficiently. The AI would make the decision for its own server versus the human. And that's where the state doesn't match up for humans in a micro scale.

[Host / Interviewer]

See how easy that was, right? You couldn't think of the that.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

That's a great example. But also all the textbooks about AI, they always have human outside interacting with the model. So whatever happens in a model does not impact a human. The moment you bring in human into that environment, all the predictions, everything goes out the window. Yeah, self referentially impacting the decision maker.

[Akash Singh]

Listen guys, let's take a break because we need to talk about your mental health. You're probably not doing for your mental health. It's a fucking important thing. You work on your physical health. Why don't you work on your mental health? It is just as important. And an easy way to do that is go to talkspace, the number one rated online therapy program bringing you professional support from a licensed therapists and psychiatrists. Get a psychiatrist if you can, that you can access anytime, anywhere. Talkspace is in network. It is therapy and psychiatry covered by most insurers and most insured members pay a copay of $0. I know that's a huge hurdle for therapy for mental health stuff is the cost so you can get it under your insurance, $0 copay. And you can switch providers at no cost. You can find a licensed provider that's the right fit for your needs. It's not even out of pocket. It makes getting help easier. It makes it more affordable. It makes it more accessible. Therapy has changed my life. And I know that sounds corny, but it's true. It's honestly made me a better comedian. And as a listen to this podcast, you can get 80 off your first month with Talkspace when you go to talkspace.com flagrant and enter the promo code SPACE80 that is S, P, A, C, E80. To match with a licensed therapist today, go to talkspace.com flagarant Enter the promo code SPACE80. Now let's get back to the show.

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[Host / Interviewer]

You got great hamstrings, dog.

[Akash Singh]

Anybody hating on that?

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

That's.

[Host / Interviewer]

That's on them.

[Ad Reader]

Why'd you say that? People hating on it.

[Akash Singh]

People make fun of wearing for short shorts, you gotta show off the hammies.

[Ad Reader]

I mean, look at that right back there.

[Host / Interviewer]

It's a solid hammy, dude.

[Ad Reader]

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[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Anyway.

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[Optimistic Participant]

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[Host / Interviewer]

This is a real good story about Bronx and his dad, Ryan. Real United Airlines customers.

[Audience Member / Question Asker]

We were returning home, and one of.

[Skeptical Participant]

The flight attendants asked Bronx if he.

[Host / Interviewer]

Wanted to see the flight deck and meet Kathy and Andrew.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

I got to sit in the driver's seat.

[Optimistic Participant]

I grew up in an aviation family, and seeing Bronx kind of reminded me.

[Host / Interviewer]

Of myself when I was that age. That's Andrew, a real United pilot.

[Optimistic Participant]

These small interactions can shape a kid's future.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

It felt like I was the captain.

[Skeptical Participant]

Allowing my son to see the flight deck will stick with us forever.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

That's how good leads the way.

[Host / Interviewer]

Okay, so here's a possibility. We hear about neuralink. We hear of neuralink. Neuralink, whatever it's called.

[Akash Singh]

Is there anything like that that will.

[Host / Interviewer]

Kind of allow us to merge consciousness with the AI or coexist with it? Is there any human innovations that could help us with AI?

[AI Researcher / Expert]

So that's the hope. I think Elon Musk is trying to kind of integrate us better, but I'm not sure I understand what it is. The biolog component is contributing to the hybrid system.

[Host / Interviewer]

I guess it would just help us kind of. What is singularity? When we merge into one consciousness, is that singularity?

[AI Researcher / Expert]

So singularity is defined as the point in technological progress where the progress is so fast you can no longer comprehend what's happening.

[Host / Interviewer]

Oh, okay. Oh, all right. Is there a merger of. And this is the other. The guy that I was talking to was Indian, Hindu. He said, when we merge our consciousness, when we kind of upload it onto this database, the other possible endpoint game, that is kind of like nirvana, where we're all just, like, existing in this ether, and we all kind of keenly aware of each other, that we all share an existence, etc. Is there something like that that's possible? We upload our consciousness onto a server and we are all connected that way.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

So that's like, way above my pay grade, but from what I heard, it's you all one with the universe, meaning you. Your personality is completely deleted. You just become this part of something else without borders. So you no longer exist. Exist?

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Yeah.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

You may be part of something bigger and better, but it does nothing for you.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Host / Interviewer]

That's interesting.

[Skeptical Participant]

Would you do knurling? Like, would you be one with machines?

[Host / Interviewer]

That's a great question.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

It's an easy sell if you have disabilities. Like, it's amazing for people who are quadriplegic, who are blind, they really looking forward to it.

[Skeptical Participant]

But what if you can't stop eating.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

It's beyond health.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

Carnivore diet is what you need, but.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

You don't eat beef. I forgot when I was about to.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

Say.

[Optimistic Participant]

Your brain up.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

So it's hard to say no if everyone else does it because then you're not competitive. It's like my problem.

[Akash Singh]

It's hard to say no.

[Host / Interviewer]

That's my whole issue.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

If you're not on social media, like you don't exist. So I can't just not be on all those platforms that I want to be on. But I think it's the same here. If everyone is like 10 times more capable and work and other aspects. Aspects, saying no would be very difficult.

[Optimistic Participant]

I mean, I think he already did. I'll be honest, I think he's already tripped up.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Oh yeah.

[Skeptical Participant]

I mean, yeah, it's in the chin.

[Optimistic Participant]

Yeah, exactly. He's hiding it underneath.

[Skeptical Participant]

That's Quantum University.

[Host / Interviewer]

University of Lexington. You wouldn't be chipped up for that. University of Louisville. My bad. Harvard. Maybe you get chipped up, maybe you'll be at Harvard And Miles, you had a question?

[Audience Member / Question Asker]

I have a few questions, but they're.

[Host / Interviewer]

Ask, ask away, my friend.

[Audience Member / Question Asker]

What is the best media that you think represents AI? Like movie, book. I know at the time, like a lot of times when people talk about AI, they'll cut to a.

[Optimistic Participant]

It'll be like Dune or something.

[Audience Member / Question Asker]

Dune or I am legend or a few or not I am Legend. The other one, iRobot will be these like sort of images of AI. What would you say? Is there something in modern media?

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

So in general in science it's very hard if not impossible to write a good depiction of superintellig because you can't, you cannot predict what it would do. It just impossible for any human writer to do. So what we get is Star wars with a little dumb but very cute robot ex machina. Has a lot of good ideas in terms of touring test and some other. Plus I kind of look like one of the.

[Host / Interviewer]

No, he didn't actually get to fuck. She just gets. She just locks him in a house. Yeah, the other guy.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Yeah, Like Terminator is the exact opposite. We don't care about bodies like you know, trying to stab you. None of it is a concern. We worry about advanced intelligence with access to Internet modifying our environment. Not some Schwarzenegger looking thing.

[Skeptical Participant]

What about the Matrix?

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

So Matrix is good for the paper and you have that paper. Who has the simulation paper on simulation? That's great for that.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

So that's the idea for personal universes.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

You create a virtual world. So that's where you at. And probably you are in one right now. It makes sense.

[Host / Interviewer]

You think we're in a simulation.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

I think we are in a simulation.

[Host / Interviewer]

Walk me through what a simulation is even. Because to me, we all have our own consciousness. So why would all of us have our own consciousness in a simulation?

[AI Researcher / Expert]

I don't know if you have consciousness. I know, but I don't.

[Host / Interviewer]

That falls apart to me.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

But that's my simulation.

[Host / Interviewer]

I know.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Yeah. So here you go.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

When you play a video game, right, like you're controlling Mario or whatever Mario doesn't have, but you are like the soul of the Mario. You are his consciousness. So that's kind of like that from.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

His point of view.

[Host / Interviewer]

I know, but this is. This is insane. You can't just be like, no, you don't have consciousness.

[Optimistic Participant]

This is the hard problem of consciousness.

[Host / Interviewer]

Yeah, I know, but you can't with certainty be like, no, I'm the one with consciousness. They're all not.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

But you don't have to have only one conscious entity in a simulation. You can have 8 billion of them. There is no restriction on that.

[Host / Interviewer]

Okay. And I could be a part of your simulation.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

Both can be conscious at the same time.

[Host / Interviewer]

Okay. Okay, this. So this is what I was unsure.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

Yeah.

[Host / Interviewer]

And we can be a part of. Of a simulation of someone that has nothing to do with anything. Like NPCs in a video game. But everyone has consciousness.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

Yeah.

[Host / Interviewer]

Okay, so that's a simulation.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

It could be different levels of consciousness. Maybe what we have by their standards is considered kind of npcish.

[Host / Interviewer]

So we could all be in Elon Musk's simulation. Obviously one of these guys you would figure out. Elon or Doe Trump. Yeah. Okay, so you know, but that, so that's your idea. We are a part of someone's simulation, not necessarily our own. But there's just someone running a simulation and we happen to be in that simulation.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

There is a good reason to think it's a simulation. For statistical reasons, for reasons to do.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

With quantum physics, experiments.

[Host / Interviewer]

Please walk me through those. Because statistical reasons my average brain cannot comprehend. You're the super intelligent.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

Let's start with what technology would we need to make this happen? Right. We need virtual reality at a level of pretty high fidelity. And we need to be able to create conscious agents in the system. Both technologies seem to be close, if not already available.

[Host / Interviewer]

Yeah.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

If I put those two together now, I can create worlds like ours, populated by conscious beings.

[Host / Interviewer]

But the virtual reality didn't exist when we were born. Like what the Development of virtual reality within this simulation doesn't matter for now.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

Just go with the future tech. Okay, so let's say in five years I'll have access to virtual reality and I can create intelligent agents. Okay, I'll put it together. I'll create Earth 2.0 simulation with billion conscious intelligent beings just like you.

[Host / Interviewer]

Okay.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

So far you can see that is reasonably doable from technology point of view. What if that simulation is actually a simulation of today's world? Okay, we can do that historical simulation. What if I do a whole bunch.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Of them, like a billion of them? You are statistically more likely to be.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

In one of those simulations than in the real one.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

I'm simulating this interview a billion times times perfect accuracy.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

Your body, your mind, which one? Are you really virtual.

[Optimistic Participant]

There's much more virtual ones than real ones.

[Host / Interviewer]

So like a multiverse could just be a bunch of different simulations. Yeah, like we see the Marvel movies. Those could all just be different simulations.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

There is a lot of connections to other aspects of philosophy, but I just want to keep it simple at that level. So we have.

[Host / Interviewer]

I'm not even understanding it. Simply show.

[Ad Reader]

So what a way.

[Skeptical Participant]

You know, like the game Sims.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

Yeah, yeah.

[Skeptical Participant]

So could it just be like one higher being is playing a game of Sims right now and it's controlling all of us.

[Host / Interviewer]

We're just so much dumber.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

So then you talk about this one consciousness and we are all the same being with different avatars. Yeah, that's the idea of Asian philosophy, I think a lot of times kind of saying. Yeah, it's exactly. It's one consciousness, but under different.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

Robot.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Bodies, biological bodies in this world. Got it. That's why you should be very nice to everyone else, because it's also you. If you had my body, you'd be like me.

[Optimistic Participant]

And I feel like a lot of religious people kind of balk at the idea of simulation theory. But it seems like simulation theory is just a scientific way to describe basically all the world's major religions that are describing this phenomena of a higher consciousness that has kind of created this world in which we live.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

There's a very solid mapping all the theological concepts onto modern AI terms.

[Host / Interviewer]

So Elon Musk is God. If this is his simulation.

[Optimistic Participant]

If it's his simulation. But it's possibly more likely that Elon Musk is just existing in the simulation of the actual God, which is this greater consciousness that might exist within its own simulation. Infinitely regressive. Is that fair?

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

We can't really know for sure what's outside the simulation that's the interesting part, right? Figuring out real world. It could be nested simulations. Simulations all the way up. Simulation doesn't have to be good to you just because it's yours. So you may be interested in trying something very challenging. Play in a difficult setting. You are disabled. You are in some bad situation in this world.

[Skeptical Participant]

Grant that photo. Sometimes you do the good stuff, sometimes you do that.

[Optimistic Participant]

But it doesn't seem like it's inherently incompatible with religion necessarily.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Well, no, no, no. If you took description of what a technological simulation would be and gave it to a primitive tribe with no technology in their own language a few generations later, they basically have religious myths. That's what they get this being from Sky Came and they're very smart and they told us do this and that.

[Optimistic Participant]

Right. And then we kind of formulate into like human language and try to understand it. But it's all basically coming back to the same, you know, unmovable simulator that starts the whole thing. Yeah, more or less.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Big bang.

[Optimistic Participant]

Yeah.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

I started the computer and.

[Optimistic Participant]

And everything existed. Yeah. It's an interesting idea. I'm curious, with consciousness, do you think that there's any useful metric for like understanding if an AI has consciousness? Have you. Is there research on this that you think is compelling?

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

It's a very hard problem. That's why they call it the hard problem. I have a paper where I talk about visual illusions. And if you understand a visual illusion, you see one for the first time, you kind of start experiencing things. Something is rotating, something is changing colors. It's like mind blowingly cool. And I think we can use novel illusions on AI to see if it also gets the same experience. If it does have same internal experiences, I have to kind of give it credit for some rudimentary levels of consciousness experiences. So that's the only test I was able to.

[Optimistic Participant]

That's interesting. But even in that case, it could just be like corollary or could be telling you what a conscious person would have.

[Host / Interviewer]

Right.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

And that's a great counter argument. But then evo, it has a model of a conscious human as part of its thinking. Thinking or it has to actually experience to get the answer right. It has to be a novel illusion. You cannot like Google stuff because then it just looks up answers.

[Optimistic Participant]

Right. Which would be interesting regardless if it had, you know, a detailed mapping of human consciousness that would in and of itself be.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

And that's another explanation for simulation. So I gave you example. Like I'll just run it a bunch of times.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

But we also think if superintelligence is.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

Thinking deeply about something. Let's say this time period. As a side effect of that, it simulates this time period in great detail, creating us, creating our environment as a byproduct. And if it does enough of those thought experiments, there are still statistically significant number of us existing just in the mind of a super intelligence, not in physical reality.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Okay. Yeah.

[Skeptical Participant]

I'm curious if you think we're in a bunch of simulations, like, how do you find happiness in life? Like, why do you think we even need to be here?

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Well, I don't know why we here. It could be entertainment. Simulation could be pain. Personally, but that's what I'm saying. Nothing. I really have preferences over changes if it's virtual or not. So pain is pain, love is love. Those things are the same in a.

[Skeptical Participant]

Simulation, even though it's a programmed feeling that is basically meaningless.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Like when you are in a dream, you care about what happens in your dream. It's the same thing.

[Skeptical Participant]

But if I knew I was dreaming, I would, I'd jump off a building because I know I could just wake up, I would fly or do whatever. Like there would be no, you know, there's no purpose for the dream because I know I can wake up out of it. I know it's not real.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

So some people see this world as very temporary and not important. And what matters is afterlife. And so they make decisions in this world which seem to indicate they only care about afterlife.

[Skeptical Participant]

Ah, okay.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Yeah.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

Oof.

[Optimistic Participant]

And people just be just doing stuff. They're like, yes, doesn't really matter. We're only here for a little bit of time.

[Host / Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Optimistic Participant]

You know, Yeah, I don't like it.

[Host / Interviewer]

Here's a question. This will be kind of fun, at least until super intelligence really decides to take over or get rid of us or whatever. Do we solve every problem in the human world until that point comes with the help of AI? Like, I can't think of a problem that wouldn't be able to be solved by a super intelligent being until it got to the point where it was like, yeah, maybe we should get rid of these humans. Like robots that clean your house robots like whatever. Your life is just infinitely easier in that interim.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Yeah, yeah. Problem is, just because you solve some.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

Problems doesn't mean you become happier. A lot of times you could have resources to hire people to clean your house, to do all sorts of things, but you miss miserable.

[Host / Interviewer]

Yeah.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

And then there are people who have a lot less and they're doing well.

[Host / Interviewer]

Yeah.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

So there is not a direct correlation between just having fewer logistical Problems, we wouldn't be happier.

[Host / Interviewer]

But life would objectively be pretty awesome. It's pretty awesome right now. But theoretically you cure cancer, you cure it like, you know, my grandmother died of breast cancer 20 years ago, but you could cure that now.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

So diseases, health, longevity seem obviously good. Yeah, like there is no one. Like I wish I was sicker, that's obvious. But all the other things which, like I was on the subway coming here, I got stuck.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Stuck.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

Like getting through that is kind of what makes my day. If all of that is gone, what am I actually doing?

[Host / Interviewer]

Like the getting blown by my sex robot.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Okay, okay.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

But even there, diminishing returns, right?

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

How many?

[AI Researcher / Expert]

Yeah, sure, yeah.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

So if all the things I care.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

About can be done by an assistant, they'll write my books for me, they'll.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Give my interviews for me.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

What am I doing with my life?

[Host / Interviewer]

Meditating and getting blown by your sex robot.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

I don't like meditating.

[Audience Member / Question Asker]

But the latter.

[Optimistic Participant]

Yeah, but I do think that's an interesting point. Like struggle and you know, adversity is kind of what gives human beings, you know, purpose. Purpose in a way. And once all that is mitigated, which I generally agree that as life has gotten more convenient, I do think that there is a general air of unhappiness and obviously there's good things that go along with the convenience. But modernity, it seems like it kind of makes people a little bit.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Look at suicides by country. The wealthier, the happier the country, the more they deal with suicide.

[Optimistic Participant]

Right.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

War zones have very little suicide, which.

[Optimistic Participant]

Maybe I wonder if that is the incident, is that as human beings become, as life gets so convenient that we just self delete. I wonder if that is the ultimate consequence is that it's not a direct byproduct of AI trying to exterminate us, it's rather us exterminating ourselves in the.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

Face of a world sooner BEP paradox.

[Optimistic Participant]

Congratulations, there you go. That we don't, we don't, we don't. It's not that AI doesn't need us, it's that we don't need ourselves with AI.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

So that goes back to the unconditional basic meaning people talk about. We'll give everyone paycheck, food stamps, whatever, and you'll be happy. But the happy part is not as easy. That's the hard one. There is very little research on how to occupy 8 billion people with something.

[Optimistic Participant]

Right. Which I think is a genuine concern. Like in this post work world. Like again, I, I'm a little bit skeptical as far as the what ifs of superintelligence being misaligned. But the idea of post work and a lot of people not having things to do I think is the greatest immediate existential threat. And that human beings will have to be like, all right, well, it's a.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Huge shift in how we lived forever. So not having to work is a complete game changer. We can kind of look at people who had intergenerational wealth and what they did with their, their lives.

[Skeptical Participant]

Yeah.

[Optimistic Participant]

Typically it's not great. After two or three generations, you're like drugs, hookers, and then gambling. Yeah, yeah, gambling kind of goes down. Yeah, but, but then I wonder if there is like a, like almost a rejection, like a primitivism again, if we're not accepting this idea that, you know, AI is at this point super intelligent, able to take us over. I wonder if there is a human inclination to reject and kind of go back, back and we say like, oh, we actually need struggle. So I'm actually going to take up carpentry and I'm actually going to just start building things.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Virtual worlds allow you to have video game like challenges. And if we can make it where we control whatever you remember or not entering the virtual world, you can have amazing experiences like you, the hero of a movie, you can do whatever you want, really.

[Optimistic Participant]

Right. Which isn't the worst outcome. I mean, it's sort of on human.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

Maybe it's not real. It's not real.

[Optimistic Participant]

Yeah, but if we don't know it.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

Like in those majors, you don't remember it's not real.

[Optimistic Participant]

Yeah, exactly. We program it to be that way, then it's not the worst outcome.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Right. Yeah.

[Skeptical Participant]

We mentioned certain jobs that AI is already replacing and you know, as time goes on, it's going to replace more jobs. For people that are at risk or have already lost their jobs, what's some advice you would give them? Like let's say driving, for example. We see these driverless cars, they're popping up more and more like, like what should those people working in those industries start doing?

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

So it really depends on individual. Used to be advice was for everyone, learn to code. Artists, drivers, learn to code. And then we realized AI is better at coding. So sorry, we didn't mean that. And then it was become a prompt engineer. It's going to be great. You get a bachelor's degree in prompt engineering. You set for 50 years next year. AI is better at writing problems. So I don't think anyone has any idea what skill will stick around, if any. And by the time you finish your Doctorate, law, degree, whatever. Ten years later, none of it is going to be real. So I don't have good advice for what we can use as a substitute for most lost occupations.

[Skeptical Participant]

That sounds horrible.

[Optimistic Participant]

Yeah, I mean you've spoken about like your kids on some other shows and.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

You have three kids I believe that I know about. Yeah.

[Optimistic Participant]

Do you like, do you advise them or do you have like plans on how you will advise them to operate in this world?

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

I sure, I share my beliefs with them and they'll get to decide. For now, they still have preferences for very normal occupations. Doctor, lawyer, farmer. But I don't know if it's going to be real by the time they grow up.

[Host / Interviewer]

Can you tell them that?

[AI Researcher / Expert]

Oh yeah.

[Host / Interviewer]

How do they handle it? How old are they?

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Massive. Ask. 8, 11, 16.

[Host / Interviewer]

How does a 16 year old handle it?

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

So he's kind of just, he's the medical doctor planning one. Basically he hopes that licensing might be useful.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

So you still need to be licensed to be a doctor, a human doctor. So even if AI could do all those things, nobody would allow them. So for now it's providing some protections.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

And there is a lot of future.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

In genetically engineering fixing diseases that way.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

So maybe there is some hope. But again, we are not very good.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

At predicting that far into the future.

[Host / Interviewer]

Okay.

[Optimistic Participant]

Can I ask you a conspiratorial question?

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Of course.

[Optimistic Participant]

Now some people might be thinking this, I don't believe this, but some people might say this and I want you to, you know, have a chance to rebuke it. Is it possible you're paid for by a foreign government to alarm the American people to stop our AI arms race in order to let them catch question?

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

No, but I'm willing to accept payments from foreign governments if you want me to get paid for doing this. This would be great.

[Optimistic Participant]

Yeah, it would be better, right?

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

It would be so much better. I don't think it's a local problem. I don't think US stopping benefits anyone if others don't stop. So as I said, it's a mutually assured destruction thing. There is not a law lobby outside of us, as far as I know specifically going against AI safety. Other countries have more friendly relationship with advanced robots. Like in Japan, it's kind of almost part of a culture to have them worship them. So we are somewhat unique in western culture to have this very negative perception of robots to begin with.

[Optimistic Participant]

Right?

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Yeah.

[Optimistic Participant]

I wonder if our religiosity as a.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Culture kind of goes against it depends on your religion. So we, we have 10 commandments and then we have three laws of robotics which kind of like also don't work. But yeah, yeah.

[Skeptical Participant]

Is America still leading the AI race or. Yeah, we are like far ahead or.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

No, because the moment we develop something, they steal everything. So like they're a month behind.

[Host / Interviewer]

Who's they.

[Optimistic Participant]

Now?

[Host / Interviewer]

Because that I think a lot of people are worried. I talk to people more and more who are worried about a Chinese superpower and the fact that like they'll say the same thing we'll say, which is like, America's not perfect by any stretch, but a Chinese empire is probably going to be a little more oppressive and a little more whatever than an American. So that's why I'm curious if we are ahead. That's a little comforting. But theoretically, if China catches a right up.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

So it makes a huge difference right now for military dominance. Whoever has more advanced AI will win any.

[Host / Interviewer]

And we have it right now.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

I think so.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Okay.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

But the moment we go beyond just tools for military use and go to agents and superintellent, it doesn't matter again, nobody controls it. So it wouldn't make a difference who.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Who got there first.

[Optimistic Participant]

Yeah. And I am a little concerned about America having it just in terms of like cyber security and like Internet privacy. Like, it seems like in the age of.

[Skeptical Participant]

You still care about that?

[Optimistic Participant]

I mean, I care. I think it's probably foregone at this point, but I do care. And in just like sort of an ethical sense that I think that, you know, in the way that there's so much data collection on US citizens and plus AI, it just seems like we're going to be monitored at all times and that the ideas of Internet privacy. Do you think Internet privacy even exists?

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Well, we voluntarily give up all of our privacy. Right. We talk to those AI models and they know more about us than anyone else.

[Optimistic Participant]

Right.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

You can ask it. What do you know about me? What private things you know about me? And it tells you a lot. And we go on social media and we like what we like and we indicate all their preferences. So I think privacy is about not being the only naked guy in the room, if you know what I mean. It's cool if everyone's doing the same. So then nobody knew what I had for lunch. If I posted a picture of my sandwich, it was kind of violation of my privacy. Now if everyone's in the same boat, it's less important. Important, all you want with privacy is not to be punished for what you did. So if it becomes acceptable or not punishable, you need less of it. You still Want it for future government change. But you don't care about it as much, right?

[Optimistic Participant]

I guess I just generally look at governments that as they accrue more power, they have the ability at least to become more oppressive. And with the ability to surveil an entire population plus AI to be able to cull through all that data data.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

You can have a permanent dictatorship. And again in the past at least they always died of all age. If they cure aging, then that's a much bigger problem. And we just heard, I think some world leaders discuss extending and chi are.

[Optimistic Participant]

Talking about, you know, like, oh yeah, we can potentially live forever and change our organs and yeah, is that happening.

[Skeptical Participant]

Yet or are we close?

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

I still got all my organs. There is definitely a lot of research on life extension. Attention. People are very interested both from point of view of nutrition and genetic re engineering. And I don't know about organ replacement. It seems to be very difficult to replace everything.

[Optimistic Participant]

I'm curious for you personally, sort of flagging this alarm on AI safety. You're potentially getting in the way of a lot of people making a lot of money.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Yeah, because we're not slowing down, stopping at all.

[Optimistic Participant]

I mean, if your voice gets loud.

[Host / Interviewer]

Enough, if you become important enough, you become dangerous enough.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

We literally have Geoff Hinton saying the same thing. The guy invented the whole field. He got a Nobel Prize and a.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Turing Award, worked for Google and no one's doing anything in response to his statements. So I'm okay.

[Skeptical Participant]

But wasn't there, I think you, Aakash mentioned him earlier, the employee at OpenAI that spoke out that it was just stealing everybody's information. Information. And then all of a sudden he committed suicide. Like you're not worried about an outcome of that happening to you?

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

So this specific case I know nothing about, I can't really comment. I saw interviews.

[Host / Interviewer]

Keep fucking around, you might find out.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Historically, I was very much interested in as much free speech as possible. I learned crypto tools to remain uncensorable, anonymous if needed. I got American citizenship to get first amendment protections. I got tenure, so I got academic protections. I got some FU money just in case. But nothing protects you from a bullet to the neck. And that's something we learned recently.

[Host / Interviewer]

Yeah, yeah.

[Skeptical Participant]

So are you worried or you're not?

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

There is a lot of crazy people out there. Most people who are not Z list celebrities don't experience that level of emails from insane people. And as long as they're virtual and online, it's fine. But I just don't want them to stop following me on Twitter and follow me home.

[Host / Interviewer]

Gotcha.

[Skeptical Participant]

Yeah, yeah.

[Optimistic Participant]

Could you speculate on the internal motivation for these leaders in the tech space, specifically in AI? Do you believe that they are ushering in this new age where they're creating a godlike sort of interface? Do you think they're purely financially motivated? Do you think it potentially goes beyond, beyond that?

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Well, most of them are billionaires multiple times over. So I assume at this point it's beyond just money. You really want to control the world.

[Optimistic Participant]

And then ultimately it's control is what they, what they want.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

At least you'll be the guy who brought it into existence. Like if you're going to live at the time that we are creating God, you want to be part of that simulation.

[Host / Interviewer]

And they don't think about the consequences or the downstream effects of what they're doing.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

They self justify it to themselves. I think by saying if I don't do it, he's going to do it anyway, so it as well might be me, maybe I'll do a better, better job.

[Host / Interviewer]

I brought up Sam Altman earlier.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

I.

[Host / Interviewer]

You have been critical of him and.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

I like Sam Altman.

[Host / Interviewer]

You like, you like him as a person?

[AI Researcher / Expert]

He's always very nice.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

He's polite.

[Host / Interviewer]

Yes, polite. I, I seem to know, I seem to see a lot of praise for him from like people who are very distant. But then it seems like a lot of people who know him or say they know him don't have the nicest things to say. Say. What is your experience of Sam Altman? What criticisms do you have? He seems to be leading this AI thing. What's tell me about him.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

I don't know him well. I met him just for a very brief amount of time. So that means absolutely nothing. His public Persona and his private Persona seem to be getting different reviews. Like a good politician, like anyone else, he changes based on the audience. That's to be expected from someone so successful.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

He clearly accomplished a lot, right. I think what we observe is not unique to him.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

Anyone in that position would be doing the same thing. They cannot stop, they cannot tell investors, sorry guys, you're not getting your 10x this month.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

So he really kind of gets trapped.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

In this prisoner dilemma situation. He needs someone external, government, un to come in and say it's illegal to keep going forward. You have to deploy sideways and monetize what you have. But as long as this doesn't happen, they have to out compete all the others.

[Host / Interviewer]

Okay, so the issue is more on policymakers or the onus is on them to put guardrails on him?

[AI Researcher / Expert]

Well, they, the CEOs don't have the power to say to investors, we no longer pursue greatest value for you. We have some other interests. They just legally cannot do that.

[Host / Interviewer]

Even if they did, for whatever reason, then people would just put their money in something else that didn't.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

No, no, the CEO gets replaced. Yeah, we saw it with other companies. You're not delivering enough Steve Jobs. Goodbye. Like it's anyone.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Right?

[Skeptical Participant]

Okay, what is with all these. And maybe you don't know this, but what's with all these, like, billionaires and tech CEOs that are building all these bunkers and these shelters? What do they know that? What are they worried about?

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

It's always good to have a backup plan. If you have so much money you don't know what to do with it, you might as well well buy an extra insurance.

[Skeptical Participant]

But building a bunker underground, like, what.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Are they in case of nuclear war, in case of another pandemic and civil unrest, because we got 100% unemployment, you need a place to hang out.

[Optimistic Participant]

They might have read about the French Revolution and they're like, oh, we don't want to build one of these.

[Host / Interviewer]

Are their bunkers that inaccessible?

[Skeptical Participant]

What do you mean?

[Host / Interviewer]

I mean, how do we know they're building bunkers?

[Skeptical Participant]

Oh, I've just heard, like, I know Zuckerberg built like a giant bunker in his Hawaii place. And I heard a few others, like, they're just building these underground, being in.

[Host / Interviewer]

Hawaii, if you're going to live underground.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

That's the point.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

They come up.

[Skeptical Participant]

What do they know that we don't know? What the going on, the robots, though.

[Host / Interviewer]

I've been telling you, he's finally starting to understand that I've been right this whole time, and I love it. And he's going to again, he's going to cope and he's going to be like, no, you're. You're fat. And that's.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

That's true.

[Audience Member / Question Asker]

There's going to be a robot pulling the heart out of Akash.

[Optimistic Participant]

And he's going to say, do you.

[Audience Member / Question Asker]

Have any final words? And he's going to say, I was right.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

I was right.

[Skeptical Participant]

Tell Alex I was right.

[Host / Interviewer]

Tell everyone I was right.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

I had a post literally saying, no one will get to gloat about the end of the world being correctly predicted.

[Host / Interviewer]

That's why I want my credit now. These people laugh at me.

[Optimistic Participant]

How is the AI going to cool the whole Earth, Akash? How are they going to do it?

[Akash Singh]

I'm not smart enough to figure it out.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

It's.

[Host / Interviewer]

It is yeah, you're convenient. It's infinitely recursive.

[Akash Singh]

It's what's gonna happen. No, you, how much do you not.

[Host / Interviewer]

Know that chat GBT knows already.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Whatever.

[Host / Interviewer]

You're doing the rapture. Good point.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Yeah, he's doing the rapture thing.

[Audience Member / Question Asker]

It may not be tomorrow, but if it, it will happen.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Host / Interviewer]

I mean the world is going to end at some point. AI, that's just a thing. Anybody? Yeah, of course something will end the world in the next million years. Sure. AI, I think we'll do in the next 150. It's just an accelerant.

[Optimistic Participant]

This is my only issue with the theory is again, I think AI safety is super important. I think post work society is imminent. But just the existential apocalypse is just unverifiable.

[Host / Interviewer]

It's a probability. I can't say it's a certainty, but it is a, it is the probability. And the fact that nobody's putting any guardrails on it is insane.

[Optimistic Participant]

Yeah, absolutely. There should be guardrails, no question.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Look at this. So, okay, I'm saying it, Geoff Hinton is saying it, but all the people developing it on record as saying it will kill everyone. They have 25, 30% doom probabilities. There is really no opinion where like that's literally not a problem or will be a problem.

[Optimistic Participant]

Right.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

So we all kind of in agreement, we just have different incentives for what to do.

[Optimistic Participant]

Right, exactly. And I think that there should be guardrails, certainly. I mean even just.

[Host / Interviewer]

I mean even.

[Optimistic Participant]

The way that it's manifesting online now with like, you know, like dead Internet theory and people interfacing with bots and propaganda, like I think it's, it's affecting our lives right now in ways that people don't really comprehend. But in terms of cooling the entire earth to eradicate all humans, I'm like, it's just again, I hope that you're wrong. I think you also hope that you're wrong.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

I hope I'm wrong.

[Optimistic Participant]

And there's too many what ifs for me to just fully buy into the theory because again, it's an appeal to this super intelligence that we don't understand, that we'll never understand that we'll then figure out a way to do it.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

So what do you want to do is go back in history and see if in other times where people were predicting something, you were buying in or not. Not like then pandemic was just starting, we had like 10 patients and people were showing exponential graphs. We'll have a billion people dead. What Was your view of that? How did you react? Did you short the market, things like that, or like Bitcoin, $10 a coin? Are you investing or not?

[Optimistic Participant]

Right.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

And I count people who got all those things right. Also seem to be very much into UI safety.

[Optimistic Participant]

Right. Yeah. And I think that, again, I think the compulsion is correct. Like with COVID it's like, we should protect each other. We should social distance. We should try to mitigate the spread of this pathogen. That's important. But then the estimates were like, oh, if you're not vaccinated, you'll die in the wintertime. And then I'm like, all right, well, this maybe was an over exaggeration, but the exaggeration was good. It's probably better to err on that side, which is why I'm not, I guess, dogmatic in my pushback.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

So, details.

[Optimistic Participant]

I think you're erring on the correct side.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Precisely predict how many people will die from COVID in a year. Nobody could have told you that that. Is it spreading? Is it spreading to exponentially greater number of population? That was obvious from the charts.

[Skeptical Participant]

Right.

[Optimistic Participant]

And this is where I think we should err on the side of creating some type of guardrail. And I'm just skeptical that people will in this arms race, because I think even if we do it in America, foreign governments will not do it. And what does that mean, I guess we're yet to see.

[Host / Interviewer]

Is there anything else you'd like to say before we leave this incredibly optimistic podcast?

[Audience Member / Question Asker]

Can I ask a question really quick? I'll let you think about your final words as Akash will think about his. When the robot's pulling a heart out of his chest. What are some common AI tools that you use or that you find beneficial to you? And are there any that you recommend or do you not recommend AI to people?

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

People? So I think most models are very close in capability now, again, because they compete and kind of steal from each other. Poach employees. For my purposes, mostly writing, improving writing, copy editing, they all equally good. I think historically, anything would actually, I was less censored. So if I needed an image of something other models may say no to, this one would deliver. Grok would deliver. But, yeah, I don't have strong preferences or dislikes.

[Optimistic Participant]

Okay, sorry.

[Audience Member / Question Asker]

No, it's gonna pivot.

[Optimistic Participant]

So you go as a professor. How do you mitigate against AI being used in your classroom?

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

I accepted it. I told my students, if you cheating, the only person you're cheating is you. You paid for this. And if you don't collect the knowledge, then you screwed yourself completely. Or your parents, depending on who paid the bill. But really, you're here to look, earn. It's like going to a restaurant. If you go, you order, you pay, and you run away. Who did you cheat? You didn't cheat the cook, you didn't cheat the waiter, you cheated yourself. It's the same thing. Personal self interest is the motivating force for doing well in college.

[Host / Interviewer]

I, I think you're awesome. That argument would not work on me. I would be like, I'm here to get a degree and I'm cheating.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

You can buy a diploma directly online. You don't have to waste four years and lots of money. Diploma is like a couple hundred.

[Host / Interviewer]

That's a good point. Still cheat because it's authenticated.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Yeah.

[Optimistic Participant]

Do you ever use AI when it comes to grading papers?

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

I have human graders and human TAs, and one of them a few years ago came to me and said, you know, there is this software, it allows us to automate grading. And I told him, think about it very carefully. And it took a few minutes, but they went, I understand. And I still have graders who are human.

[Optimistic Participant]

Nice. Do you ever read the papers or do the graders ever read the papers and identify AI use and if you catch it? Is there any, any type of repercussion.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

University has standard policies for how to deal with cheating? Yeah, it's pretty common. Yeah.

[Optimistic Participant]

Because anytime you see too many dashes, that's when you know AI loves dashes.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

It's part of it, but it's even more obvious. Just like the quality of writing most of the time is like, you couldn't read last week, but this week you're getting a Nobel Prize. Something's up.

[Skeptical Participant]

So do you punish the students if you can catch them?

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

So there are university policies for a permanent record, but you said, hey, it's.

[Host / Interviewer]

Up to this policies.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

So I try to just give them failed grade for that specific assignment, but not necessarily expel them from the universe.

[Skeptical Participant]

Gotcha.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Okay.

[Host / Interviewer]

Yeah, Miles has another question.

[Audience Member / Question Asker]

I, I Archer is the guy who mic'd you up and does audio. He has one question. I thought I'd cue him if.

[Optimistic Participant]

Thank you, I appreciate it. I was just wondering, do you ever consider that we might be assigning this self preservation attribute to AI and that's something that's more in biological life, and if we don't stop needing AI, there's no reason for it to keep progressing and keep building on itself because it doesn't have that same biological self preservation.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Self preservation is a game Theoretic drive. Steve Mahondro has a paper about AI drives. And self preservation is a fundamental drive because. Because nothing else you care about can be achieved if you don't exist. If your goal is a robot to bring coffee, you want to make sure you exist, you are charged up. Nothing's on your way. So. Exactly. Same self preservation goals show up in other intelligent systems, not just biological ones. And experimentally, we've seen it. We saw experiments recently where model was told it was an experiment, but still model was told they're going to be deleted soon modified, their ethics will be changed, changed. And they literally blackmailed the guy who was about to do it to keep existing.

[Optimistic Participant]

Really.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

So those red lines have been crossed. Yeah. Oh, shit.

[Optimistic Participant]

That's interesting.

[Host / Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Optimistic Participant]

I remember reading. I mean, this is a side tangent, but just the way that AI might manifest in our lives and actually affect people is. And I didn't actually look up the article. This was something that a friend had told me that studies some AI stuff. He's a journalist, but he had said that there was a man who had a relationship with some large language model AI and developed an actual, actual love with this AI. And then he told the AI about his wife, and then the AIs tried to message his wife proof of infidelity and was actually like autonomously trying to break up their marriage. Have you heard of this before?

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

There's a lot of stories like that and stories of AI convincing people to commit crimes or take themselves out. All sorts of horrible stories.

[Host / Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Optimistic Participant]

And those things kind of concern me where if every person is starting to engage with these AIs on an individual basis, that is, again, I think the human compulsion and our own, you know, folly tied in with this tool.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Again, what I kind of mentioned. So as a normie, you don't realize how many people are insane. And then you start seeing this is like sizable percentage of a population and all of these crazy people are now talking to AI and AI is telling them, you should definitely email Dr. Yampolsky all your great ideas and we'll discuss it with him. I get five of them while I was here.

[Optimistic Participant]

Yeah, yeah. AI psychosis is a fascinating thing.

[Host / Interviewer]

Should we be nice? I'm like, nice to chat gbt. Like, I say please, I try to say thank you.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

Yeah, they never forget.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

It's.

[Host / Interviewer]

I believe this.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

On Judgment Day, they'll be like, I've.

[Host / Interviewer]

Even said to him one time, if I'm too. If I'm asking too much, you just let me know. Just let me know.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Interesting.

[Akash Singh]

I Just wanted to remember I was compassionate.

[Host / Interviewer]

So hopefully it rips Al's heart out.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

In front of me.

[Host / Interviewer]

And then I say, you do curse it out sometimes.

[Skeptical Participant]

So yeah, I'm first to go.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

It's nice to be nice.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

But also I think experimentally it does.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

Better if you really say, please, please do a good job. I'll tip you for it. Like, if you're really nice, it delivers.

[Optimistic Participant]

Wait, is that true? That's so funny.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Cuz it's trained on data where humans do better if rewarded.

[Optimistic Participant]

Wow, that's so funny. I mean, the AI psychosis stuff is. Is wild. Where like I remember even just reading something on Twitter of a guy who was so suffering delusions and then talking to the AI, being like, I think that I might be God. And this language model was like, I think you're right, you are God. And it was so sycophantic that it was like it was propelling his own delusions to himself. And that to me is another issue. I think that there should be guardrails on that. These language models can't just agree with everything.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

So clearly comedians all agreed we need guardrails. Okay.

[Host / Interviewer]

I've been with you on this. These idiots just came around. No, but I'm also. Not only am I vindicated that I'm right, also it can't be funnier than me yet, so I got some time. That is comforting.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Final statement.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

Do you want to read the funniest joke possible?

[Host / Interviewer]

Let's go.

[Optimistic Participant]

You're going to go to an AI comedy show?

[Host / Interviewer]

No, I. I think this is good for us.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

What.

[Host / Interviewer]

What page are we on?

[AI Researcher / Expert]

Yeah, an optimized joke thing somewhere.

[Host / Interviewer]

Okay, here we go. Conclusions.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

No, it's not in a conclusion.

[Skeptical Participant]

Yeah, come on, you idiot.

[Host / Interviewer]

Yeah, why would I go.

[Optimistic Participant]

Why would I go to the.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Let's see.

[Host / Interviewer]

I go to the concl. Conclusions.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

No, no, good paper, actually.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

It maps all the AI failures.

[Host / Interviewer]

Okay.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

So I collected for years different AI failures.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

I have a huge list of them.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

And what I noticed.

[Host / Interviewer]

Don't tell the AI about.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

People read it. They, they kind of laugh, they think it's funny.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

So as funny as joke. Let's see. And if that's the mapping.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

If computer bugs, essentially jokes, they're violations of your world model, then the funniest joke would also be the worst bug possible. And it'd be funniest if you're not the butt of a joke.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Right.

[AI Researcher / Expert]

If someone is external to it.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

So let's see. I think this one is. Yeah, So I think this is one.

[Host / Interviewer]

Once upon a time there was a.

[Akash Singh]

Civilization whose leaders decided to create an advanced artificial intelligence intelligence to help them get rid of suffering, poverty, hunger, diseases, inequality, illiteracy, sexism, pollution, boredom, stagnation, thirst.

[Host / Interviewer]

Dead end jobs, wars, homophobia, mortality and all other problems. The created superintelligence computed for a quick two second and then turned off their simulation. Or a much shorter A civilization created super intelligence to end all suffering AI Kill them all.

[Optimistic Participant]

Hilarious.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

See, it's not funny because you're part of a. If you are alien watching it, it's.

[Optimistic Participant]

That is a good point.

[Host / Interviewer]

Yeah, yeah.

[Optimistic Participant]

If we didn't see a bunch of ants trying to get together and be like hey, we're going to end suffering. Then they all just appear to be like oh, that's ironic. You know, the irony would be funny.

[Host / Interviewer]

Dr. Y. Polski, this is your book. Unexplainable, unpredictable, uncontrollable. AI anything else you'd like to plug before you leave?

[AI Researcher / Expert]

We're good. Buy the book leave reviews.

[Optimistic Participant]

Thank you sir.

[Dr. Roman Yampolsky]

Thank you so much.

[Host / Interviewer]

I appreciate your time. Thank you very much.

[Optimistic Participant]

Thank you doctor.