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WarRoom Battleground EP 909: Deep Dive With SAM HAMMOND: Confronting AI and Leviathan
WarRoom Battleground EP 909: Deep Dive With SAM HAMMOND: Confronting AI and Leviathan...
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- [00:03]
A
This is the primal scream of a dying regime. Pray for our enemies because we're going medieval on these people. I got a free shot. All these networks lying about the people. The people have had a belly full of it. I know you don't like hearing that. I know you try to do everything.
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B
In the world to stop that, but.
- [00:22]
A
You'Re not going to stop it. It's going to happen. And where do people like that go to share the big lie?
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C
MAGA Media I wish in my soul.
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A
I wish that any of these people had a conscience. Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose? If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved.
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B
War Room. Here's your host, Stephen K. Band. Good evening. I'm Joe Allen with War Room Battleground. If you followed my travels over the last few months, you know that I have crisscrossed the country multiple times, even at one point ending up in Switzerland interviewing robots who, as you might imagine, turned out to be racist. I mainly tried to keep my company confined to transhumanists, Luddites, the occasional Normie, and of course, War Room Posse. In the recent weeks, I found myself in some very strange situations. One of the more unique was a Latin mass at a city I won't disclose, in which all the women, of course, had their heads covered. There were children everywhere. Beautiful iconography and the strict social order. You could see in the health of the family and certainly in the health of the individuals I met. You could see how that social order produces a certain type of human being. A human being who is devoted not only to family but to God. A human being who is infinitely capable, I believe, of responding to the future in a way that does not destroy the past. Now, after the Mass, I found myself sitting outside of a coffee shop. I was speaking to some of the young people. Some of them had their spouses with them. Most all of them will soon have children. And they. They talked about what the future would look like for their children. How would they protect their children from the predations of tech corporations in a future in which tech corporations basically rule the world. What was really interesting about that was sitting right across from us was an anarchist. He was sitting and working on a pair of boots. He's a cobbler by trade. The anarchist was diametrically opposed to the Catholic way of thinking. He clearly was not religious in any dogmatic way, very much obsessed with esoteric traditions, otherwise known as the occult. Certainly he was not into the kinds of religious, rigid social order that a Catholic or any other kind of deeply religious community would produce. And yet he agreed completely with the assessment that tech corporations are a primary threat to human life. Now, a few weeks later, Thanksgiving, I found myself in another strange kind of juxtaposition of social schemes. In the afternoon, I joined a group of families who are deeply Christian. We talked about a lot of things in regard to technology. They are as suspicious as I am in regard to religion. Let's just say that if I'm going to heaven, it'll be after them. But they were. You could see in these families that same deep devotion in the way in which it expressed itself outwardly in their marriages, in their children, in their homes, in the way they ordered their lives. Later on, I found myself in another and perhaps more exciting milieu. I was invited by one Sam Hammond to a Thanksgiving dinner comprised mainly of what we would now call tech accelerationists, although in the old days you would call them transhumanists. The turkey was delicious. The stuffing was as well. The wine, to the extent I sipped it, was not bad. And I'm not sure, but there were bottles of Brian Johnson's snake oil lining the counter. And it may be that I myself imbibed some of this bizarre immortalist elixir. Now, in the same spirit of consilience that anyone would approach a Thanksgiving dinner, we all discussed our differences civilly. And in the desire to continue that conversation, I like to welcome the War Room audience to encounter the mind of the futurist and chief economist at the foundation for American Innovation, Sam Hammond. Sam, thank you very much for joining me.
- [05:12]
C
Thanks, Joe. You're looking younger.
- [05:15]
B
It's gotta be the Brian Johnson snake oil. So, Sam, as we've discussed, your imagination is monstrous. You basically have a brain full of shoggoths, their tentacles creeping out of your eyes, creating. Creeping out of your ears. And in the bizarre words that you speak, casting the future in terms of a singularity, your book or pamphlet, AI and Leviathan is absolutely brilliant. However nightmarish this future you paint may be, if you would just give the War Room audience a sense of what you're trying to communicate with AI and Leviathan. What is this effort in futurism?
- [05:58]
C
Yeah, so the inspiration comes from an essay by Tyler Cowen called the Libertarian Paradox, where he noted that libertarians have been fighting for small government, limited government for years. We also value markets, creative destruction, the wealth producing propensity of capitalism. But maybe these things were a package deal. We got the welfare state, we got the administrative state, the managerial state as a byproduct of capitalism. And the success of the industrial revolution. And so that sort of shook the foundation of my worldview. I was raised and grew up pretty libertarian, but coming to understand that these sort of enemies that we fight, like the Leviathan, the state got stronger as byproduct as a bundled package deal with prosperity that looking ahead, are there other package deals with AI and the AI transformation? And so the way I sort of see it is that we are sort of sitting on a knife edge. You know, the powers of AI are incredible for everything from, you know, healthcare, biomedicine, education. But they also are incredibly powerful tools for surveillance, for censorship, for social control. And there's a kind of race dynamic going on between the state and the rest of society. Will we end up in a digital panopticon a la China where, you know, the. There's a group in Shanghai that runs, you know, the surveillance systems and they have a big situation room. They brag if they can identify anybody within a sharp eyes.
- [07:22]
B
I think it goes under the name.
- [07:23]
C
Sharp eyes from a mouse quote. Or will we sort of start to fragment as the capabilities that are now today only possessed by the CIA or Mossad or by state agencies become sort of democratized and we can all rebundle our organizations around smaller communities. And I sort of want to walk a middle ground where we can have our cake. You need it too. And I think it's going to be a very narrow path. And you know, one of my roles or purposes is to try to communicate that this is a package deal. That you have these sort of naive techno optimists that think we're going to just plow forward into the brave new world and everything is going to be hunky dory. You have people who think we're just straight up doomed. I think we're somewhere in between where we're going to have to make very hard trade offs. And at the very least we should be communicating those trade offs to the public.
- [08:13]
B
You know, one thing I really appreciate about your perspective, Sam, is that you don't pull punches and you've never been shy about stating things that might be shocking to normal people. Now, I'm not a normal person, so I'm not shocked. I'm more intrigued than anything. The future is wide open. But your vision of the future is deeply informed by your education as an economist, your political education. You had described kind of a progression from a naive anarchist to one who is much more open to the possibilities of the uses of the state and maybe even the inevitability of a large Degree of centralization and the pairing that I read here in AI and Leviathan, the pairing I read here is particularly interesting because on the technological level you basically take as axiomatic the claims of Ray Kurzweil and other futurists that we are indeed heading towards a technological singularity. And you're looking at how will the state respond? And you know, spoiler alert. But you, you say that most likely it will stabilize as Chinese style, one world or one state control one sort of centralized leader using AI to control the populace. On the other side of that, you see something more akin to liberal democracy as it evolves into a high tech society where corporations basically take up that role. And in between the anarchic states. My first question regarding the first part, the technological singularity, why do you believe that in fact these technologies will keep increasing at an exponential pace? And do you really believe that by say 2045 we'll see something like Ray Kurzweil's view, where we have AIs that are millions of times smarter than human beings, most human beings locked into those systems with troads being regularly genetically updated to keep up with the machine. Is that really the generalized future you see us going towards and why?
- [10:19]
C
Yeah, I don't know if I can put the specifics right. So there's predicting the future is hard. Right? There are some things that are more easily predicted. Right. So we can predict, it's maybe setting aside the bogus climate science, it's easier in principle to predict, you know, 1 degree warming over a century than what the weather will be in a month. Right. Because the weather in a month is a random dynamic system similar with societies. So, you know, I can say with confidence that The World of 2045 will be at least as different seeming to us as the world of 1950 was to the world of, say, 1650. Just radical transformation and what that looks like in practice will, will in part be up to us. But yes, I mean, you know, one thing I think with some of the more naive techno optimists where they sort of get their overconfidence is the fact that we've lived through a period of rough relative stagnation over the last 40, 50 years as we've shifted from building actually new technologies to offshoring and globalization and these sort of substitutes to true innovation. And as we exit that era of stagnation and re encounter like when history has restarted, we have to be prepared for a very tumultuous transition. You know, I'm someone who thinks that the mind is Essentially computation. And I think that is a. A prior that maybe makes me more open to the idea that we're going to recreate mind and a digital substrate. And I think we, you know, I don't just take this as a schematic. I think it's partly. We're seeing it play out, right? We're seeing similarities between these vision models and their internals and the way our visual cortex works. We're seeing. We're learning a little bit about how, like, human language works by studying these language models. And so it's less that we're building this totally alien technology, although it is alien in some. Some respects, but we're really building a simulation or emulation of our. Of ourselves, but in a format that is potentially unbounded. Right.
- [12:14]
B
When you say the mind is computation, are you using computation as a metaphor for what happens inside the human brain or as I would say, in the human soul? Or is it something more fundamental, that the human mind and the computer truly do share the same sorts of patterns and the same sorts of processes that lead to what are what we call mind?
- [12:38]
C
Yeah, I think to say the mind is computational, to say that it's a classical computer, those are two different things. Right. So in some, in some sense, the computational aspect of our mind gives credence to this notion of an immaterial soul. Right. Because what. What is software? Software is not the bits, it's not the transistors. Software is this immaterial pattern that sits on top of those things. And the core insight of Alan Turing and their founders of computer science was that these things are independent of the substrate. You can build a computer out of pneumatic tubes. You can build a computer out of hydraulic locks and gates. Similar with the mind we live in immaterial reality constructed by our brain that's running on a particular kind of wet hardware. But there's nothing in principle that prevents us from putting that into a different form of hardware. And as we've seen over the progress of AI over the last, say, 15 years, has come not so much from deep insights into how do proteins fold. Protein folding was solved because essentially the computers caught up and that problem existed within the envelope of the kinds of supercomputers we had to model protein folding. And as computation continues to double or quadruple in its performance, and as our algorithms get more efficient, the human mind will fall within that envelope too. And then what Kurzweil foresees is by 2045, is the biggest supercomputers will have more computation than not Just a single brain, but of all the brains put together, and we don't really know what that transpires or what comes out of that. Will it be something that we wield as some single unified entity? Will we distribute that, compute in a way that gives everyone a stake, or will it be monopolized? These are the sort of questions ahead of us. And I think the biggest risks come from folks who think that this is just a normal technology and that the world of 2045 will just look like the world of today, only more so.
- [14:38]
B
Yeah, the idea that this is a normal technology, I think has been blown away by. What is it? Some over half of young people say that they've used chatbots as companions or view them as companions. They talk to them as if they were actual people. I, I think that goes well beyond anything we saw with video gaming or even social media. And we're only three years into the chat GPT era. On the other hand, I am praying for either a solar flare or at least an S curve. But setting that aside, the political approach that you have here I think is really interesting and it's something that gets lost on a lot of people, especially on the right. Without naming names, there are a lot of people that associate transhumanism with globalism, with leftism. They associate techno optimism and accelerationism with the same. If they haven't been snapped out of that hypnosis by the Trump administration yet, I think they really should. But you know, we've covered accelerationism and its newest form, effective accelerationism, and I think that whether you would take that label on, you certainly sympathize with that camp. Would you say that that's correct?
- [15:51]
C
Yeah, I would say I'm an accelerationist everywhere but, you know, superintelligence. I think it's, we, it's appropriate if you, if we are going to build this thing, to go in it with a degree of humility and trepidation.
- [16:02]
B
The real point, I mean, to get, to get at though, is that you by and large would be categorized as on the right, at least in everywhere it counts, except for technology, I would say. And maybe you would say that techno futurism is a form of right wing expression, but I think it's on a practical level really interesting how your interests align with someone like Steve Bannon in regard to something like chip exports to China. You're very much a hawk on that. Correct. You wrote a fantastic article for, I believe, the American Conservative a few weeks back. Why? If you believe acceleration and technological progress are in fact the Ways forward. Why would you want to preference America or privilege America and shut out the Chinese on this. Don't they need more advanced noodles too?
- [16:56]
C
I think there's like two big reasons. One, one is if we are on this knife edge between different, you know, forking past the way the world could go, and if AI is potentially monopolizing a technology as it is, as it stands to be, that, that, that hegemonic power of AI could be kind of fractal. It could lead to runaway growth of one Google, but also at the world stage, runaway power of a single country. Especially as not just through, you know, autonomous weaponry, surveillance, automated cyber attacks, but just the flywheel that will kick off as we begin to automate our industrial factories and so on and so forth. So I'd much rather the US be in that lead in part because then we can bake in, at least gives us some hope of baking in values like civil liberties, respect for privacy, sort of building a constitution into the AI. The other reason is this conflict. So I think the world wars were kind of inseparable from industrialization. We move from a world of agrarian craft economies to ones where we were racing to build the biggest rail networks because if we had more trains then we could move more tanks. And it was the fact that France and Germany, Russia, these countries in the lead up to World War I were in this all out race to build the biggest rail networks. And it was the fact that it was close that I think led to conflict. You get more war and more conflict when you have two great powers that are kind of neck and neck. And to the extent that we can make the US lead in AI and the core infrastructure sort of uncatchable, I think it reduces the threat of there being an all at war.
- [18:34]
B
Do you think the Chinese are actually in a position to catch up? Do you think that Huawei for instance, could actually meet the demand for data centers for computation in any way comparable to where the US is at right now?
- [18:47]
C
They could if we had a totally laissez faire free market here. Right. So you know, the manufacturing equipment that goes into building these chips are some of the most complex pieces of engineering ever produced by mankind. The components that go in involve thousands, tens of thousands of suppliers. There are dozens within the supply chain, dozens of mini monopolists. You know, ASML in the Netherlands builds lithography machines. They have like 100% market share. And so that enables our export controls. So we can tell those companies may not export this technology to China. China still gets some of it. Because they smuggle it, or before the controls were in place, they hoarded a bunch of it, but they're otherwise really cut off. Now I think this is important because, you know, China has other advantages. They are massively producing us on energy. You know, they're adding, you know, 400 gigawatts to their grid every year. The stat I read is that they, they added a United States roughly every seven years to their energy grid, whereas our energy grid has been flatlined. And we look at what goes into building these AI models, you know, other than having the talent and the engineers, it's really the data centers and the energy to power them. And we're already running up against hard constraints there, which is why we're making all these deals with the UAE and Saudi Arabia and so on, where there's actually abundant energy. China doesn't have that problem. If these export controls were lifted, I don't think they just catch up. I think they leapfrog us. And we see their comparative advantage is these massive infrastructure projects, just like they can do, build giant highways, they could build the, the AGI cluster if we let them.
- [20:17]
B
Something that's at the center of AI and Leviathan, which again I recommend the war room posse check out. It's very brief, it's a little heady in places, but you can get through it in an afternoon very, very easily. But one of the, you open up with the theme of, or a kind of metaphor or a symbol of the X ray goggles, the X ray specs, and comparing AI to that, it gives people the power to see beyond what they could otherwise see. And someone like me, I mean, I see the development of these technologies, especially in regard to surveillance and it's very off putting. You don't want to be seen in that way. You don't want someone to have that power over you. And so my first instinct is to reject it, lambast it, do anything I can to push it away. You on the other hand, are approaching it much more from the perspective of how can this be used and how can you use these technologies to protect yourself from surveillance or any other kind of predation. Can you go into that a little bit, break down the X ray spec metaphor?
- [21:23]
C
Yeah. Part of it is recognizing that technology is often more discovered than invented. Right. So if one day we woke up and there were X ray specs that were built, be built with sort of off the shelf technology that no one could ever control, you know, what would happen? You know, suddenly I could see through clothes, I could see through walls, I could Break into banks. I could cheat at poker at the casino. There are all these systems in our society that would just suddenly break because of this new capability. There's kind of three canonical ways society could respond. We could sort of change our culture or change our norms. We could become, you know, nudists and embrace post privacy norms.
- [22:00]
B
We could kind of like social media influencers basically do now with their souls.
- [22:04]
C
Right, exactly. We could adapt or do mitigation. So we could retrofit our homes with copper wire or anything that blocks the X ray penetration. And the third option is we have an X ray Leviathan, the all seeing states that orders all the X ray glasses to be handed over to feds. And then they use their monopoly on X ray glasses to scan our bodies to make sure we don't have them. But the core point is like the fourth option of nothing happening or some stable equilibrium is not tenable because it's fundamentally a kind of collective action problem. I want the glasses, but I don't want you to have the glasses. But you have the exact same incentive. And so very quickly we move into a new world where we all have the glasses and we have to do something about it. And AI is very similar. It's hardly even a metaphor. We even have some of these meta ray ban glasses that could you imagine, you could imagine downloading a machine learning model for. You know, there are such models for detecting people through walls using WI fi signal displacement. Yeah, you know, I'm sure that won't be on the Apple App store, but people will, people will jailbreak these things.
- [23:09]
B
We're going to go to break shortly, but in our remaining moments before, can you just tee up the idea that one of the more dramatic predictions you make is that the democratization of AI, AI diffusing across the population, whether it be America or any other country, is going to inevitably lead to regime change. Why, why is this yours? Your core argument before moving on to the distant future.
- [23:38]
C
Yeah, it's not that I'm a technological determinist, but I do see the way in which, you know, our institutions or governments or organizations are technologically contingent. Right. So you know, the growth of the administrative state, for instance, was presaged by, and partly driven by the telegraph and early rail networks that let Washington D.C. have agents of the state be in far away parts of the country and be able to still communicate and get back and forth. And so when you ever, whenever you have a big technology shock to the core sort of inputs to organizations, the ability to monitor, to broker contracts, to enforce Contracts, principal agent costs, the ability to, if I give you a job that you're going to execute on that job, when those costs come down radically, you get new kinds of institutions. Right. We saw that in micro with Uber and Lyft. Right. That was a regime change. You know, these were public taxi commissions that, you know, were, you know, quasi governmental. And for the people involved, for the taxi drivers involved, it was incredibly, you know, violent and dramatic. You know, you saw protesters in Paris throwing rocks off of bridges and so on. No, I think for the rest of us it was a massive improvement. But that was a shift that happened quite dramatically. Within a span of less than five years, the ridership completely flipped. And that was because of mobile and Internet and these new technologies leading to new kinds of organizational forms.
- [24:56]
B
Well, if there's any one thing that people need to keep in mind as this transition unfolds, it's that you're going to need some kind of economic hedge against total economic disruption. Wouldn't you agree?
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C
I think so.
- [25:10]
B
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- [27:01]
A
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A
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C
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A
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C
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- [31:49]
B
All right, War Room posse. We are back with Sam Hammond, chief economist at the foundation for American Innovation. He is the author of AI and Leviathan, a very slim track packed full of nightmarish futures, but also tips on how to survive them. Okay, Sam, if we could just return briefly to the concept of regime change, the breakdown of the current order under the pressure of AI and other downstream technologies. You don't necessarily present this as something that's ideal or even something that's desired, but you do present it as a cultural and political landscape that people will have to deal with. So if we could just return really Quickly to the mechanisms by which democratized AI will in fact erode current institutions and how you think people should find that narrow corridor as you describe it in the book.
- [32:48]
C
Yeah, part of this is a continuation of existing trends, right? So, you know, if the 1950s and 60s NASA did the Apollo project, today it's being done by SpaceX. And we're seeing very similar phenomena across, you know, many parts of our broken institutions. Right. I think we all recognize that the US government and bureaucracy is overwrought, it's decaying, it's decrepit.
- [33:08]
B
Would definitely agree with that.
- [33:10]
C
And what have we done instead? Well, we've started to, to outsource it. And I think even if we had the sort of competence of the 1950s Eisenhower administration or something like that, the fact is a lot of this talent, a lot of the know how, is embodied in these private corporations, right? So we're using Palantir as our, as our spy agency, we're using SpaceX as our flight, as our launch capability. And I see, I just see running that forward becoming more and more true. And especially when you look at the roadmaps, what these AI companies are saying they want to build, right? You know, today we have chatbots. You know, OpenAI has this actually spelled out in their research plan. Next is innovators. So AIs that don't just, you know, write, you do your homework, but can actually autonomously do new science, make new discoveries. Then after that is AI organizations, right? So these are not just a single AI or a single chatbot, but autonomous AIs working in teams as part of an AI corporation. And then once you have sort of end to end AI corporations, the world starts to look very, very different, right? We're going to have, you know, these companies, these organizations potentially making millions, billions of dollars autonomously. They might have a human at the top sitting at the chairman of the board, but otherwise any human would be a, would be a friction, would be a bottleneck.
- [34:27]
B
We're talking about something like Jeff Bezos ruling over an army of robots that do everything right? Everything. You just take out the human who is now led around by an algorithm and you replace him with Digit the robot.
- [34:38]
C
Yes. That's barely even a joke. You know, Elon Musk has been fighting for shareholder control over, over Tesla for this very reason, Right? Because he said, you know, it's less about the money, you know, this, this trillion dollar package he's gotten is more about the control. Because I'm going to use Tesla to build a humanoid robot army, you Know they're planning to ramp to 50,000, 100,000 by, by next decade. Millions of these humanoid robots coming off the factory line.
- [35:01]
B
Yeah. Building a. Basically an Optimus gigafactory right now in Texas.
- [35:06]
C
Correct. Y and so that's a lot of power under one person, but it's also a new kind of organization. We complain about the DMV or whatever, but a lot of the jobs that governments do are already extremely exposed to current AI technology, auditing, law, accounting. These things are going to fall this decade. And if there's going to be sort of a balance between the private sector and the public sector, if we can have our state capacity, the minimum viable government, we need to enforce, contract and make sure we maintain rule of law, we need to keep up. Right. If we don't, and I think this is sort of a safe default scenario that the government doesn't adapt quickly enough, then it will just be displaced in the same way we're already seeing.
- [35:51]
B
And when you say we, you mean the United States.
- [35:54]
C
I think broadly speaking, most western Western democracies are pretty exposed because of our slow procedural orientation where we take our time and the technology doesn't wait. Right. And so it calls for, I think, this balancing act where we want to be pushing AI into government, but also taking that as an opportunity to set standards. Because another worry is not just the private concentration of power, but you could imagine some tim pot dictator. What is the thing that keeps them from having total power? Well, it's the fact that the military could do a coup or their generals will defy an order. But if all those become automated, if the whole machinery of government becomes AI, then it's a matter of just changing the prompt and you change your government. We need to build in some levels of privacy, civil liberties, engineering into the, into the, into the tech stack itself so that we don't have this sort of lock in effect that could, could arise. But you know, this goes to my point that a lot, I think a lot of this technology is at this point, you know, the, the, the Pandora's box has been opened. There's no way up but through. We can try to resist the technology. But really I think a better path is to try to steer the technology, to master the technology, not let it master us.
- [37:13]
B
So my own perspective, you know, I can appreciate your view as a futurist and as an economist in seeing these trends going forward and seeing them as being quasi inevitable. What do you do about it on a practical level, on an economic level, but as a humanist, as a flea Bitten monkey person I am much more concerned about. Well then what do people do? Like what do regular people do? What do my friends and family do in the face of this? We buy Bitcoin. Do we become human AI symbiotes? Do we vote for the new tech accelerationist party? Like what, what would you, in your view, what sorts of futures would a blue collar working man be dealing with or a small business owner be dealing with? Like how would they respond to this?
- [38:03]
C
Well, I mean over the next say, say five years, I think a lot of blue collar manual labor work is still relatively safe. I think there's a lot of ways that AI could be empowering the small business owners and entrepreneurs. The fact that you can now do your own marketing and graphic design and things that normally require big teams or get legal counsel essentially for free. Now in the long run if we want to ask what is my vision for the best possible outcome? And again this is not necessarily a forecast. This is now me telling you what I would want to happen is, you know, I see there are potential opportunities for AI to be a corrective to a lot of the problems of modernity. Right. And you know, I think a lot of conservatism, a lot of right wing thought is a part reaction to modernity and the trade offs that came from. Yes, we want to have these large scale systems because they're more efficient and they, you know, produce standards.
- [38:59]
B
And by modernity you mean to include managerialism, bureaucracy, egalitarianism, the post enlightenments era.
- [39:07]
C
Where we lost something with that too. We lost local communities, we lost the interfacing with your neighbor, we got pushed into big metropolises and under the thumb of a sort of impersonal bureaucracy like Kafka esque bureaucracy. And again I see that as a worthwhile trade off because we are more prosperous, we have longer living standards, we can, we try to recreate community. But it was a real tradeoff. And is there a way in which I could, you know, insofar as it does start to dissolve some of these, these state functions and, and these forces of homogenization enable a new kind of, you know, high tech communitarianism? You know, I want to go back to the, you know, one room schoolhouse that was down the road before it all consolidated into these big school, but with robots. Well you could, you know, you could have the AI tutor in the morning and the jiu jitsu class in the evening. Right.
- [40:01]
B
And you're definitely going to want to keep up with their physical prowess.
- [40:04]
C
Well, I think, I think that's Actually true. I think, you know, if the early part of the 21st century, you know, was good for the nerds, I think the latter half will be good for the, for the jocks.
- [40:15]
B
Okay, I was never much of a jock, but I do appreciate the sentiment, at least. It's a monkey person sentiment.
- [40:24]
C
But you see, where I'm sort of going with this is, and this is also what animates a lot of the more conservative pro AI folks is they see the power of AI to dissolve Hollywood, to at least in the short run, deflate the sort of managerial, professional class economy. These laptop workers that rule over us, when that becomes plentiful, then it's the electrician or the plumber that is actually in high demand now. I just think that will be a relatively short transitional window where at some point we'll also have robotics that do that as well. And so to your point, to your question, then what, Then what, You know, what are we left doing? And I look around the world at, you know, what can we garner some inspiration for, like, what's close to this sort of post scarcity world today. And I see, you know, the Gulf states, I see, you know, uae, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, they have trillion, you know, trillion dollar sovereign wealth funds. They essentially have, you know, free social services for their citizens. They import these guest workers that build their stadiums, which from their point of view are basically robots. They do these things.
- [41:26]
B
Yeah, you know, in the original etymological root of the word, you know, robot comes from, what is it? Robota and Czech, which means servant or slave.
- [41:35]
C
Right.
- [41:35]
B
So I guess they are, they're Czech robots.
- [41:37]
C
So I think there's a world where we, we end up in a kind of, you know, rentier state. And I think this is one of the things we have to, to balance. You know, the reason Saudi Arabia has a big sovereign wealth fund is because if they don't, they suffer a resource curse. And they, you know, so we need to. I think the Trump administration has been quite thoughtful and has a lot of foresight in the fact that Trump wants a US Sovereign wealth fund. But that leaves open the question of what do we do on a daily basis? And we look back in history, what did people in the 1600s do on a daily basis? Well, yes, they sowed the land or whatever, but they also went to church, they raised their families, they participate in community life, they went to rituals and had services. And I think there's a world where we can get back to something that is potentially more human than what we have today. Because, because AI has This potential for this radical re. Localization of human society.
- [42:35]
B
So taking this line of thought, by the way, before we go, I will say one more prayer for a solar flare, and if failing that, just give us an S curve, but a long, flat S curve. I'm intrigued by the roots of your thought in what was once called transhumanism is now called science and technology. We were both reading Ray Kurzweil's the Age of Spiritual Machines around the same time, 2001 or so, and it made a deep impression on me. The totalizing vision of technology, the idea of superhuman AI, all human beings attached to it through nanobots or whatever, the indistinguish, indistinguishable nature of physical and virtual reality, all that. But when I read it, it just sounded like a nightmare world. You know, I'd read Ted Kaczynski a couple of years before and oftentimes joke that, you know, on one shoulder is Ray Kurzweil and on the other is Ted Kaczynski, sort of like a devil and a fallen angel on each shoulder for you. My sense is that Kurzweil had a different impact. Am I correct about that?
- [43:44]
C
I think the primary impact it had was just looking back at, you know, how much he got right through relatively simple methods. Right. So, you know, people will nitpick that his timing is off here and there, but Age of Spiritual Machines came out in 1999, and he predicted that, you know, we'd have human level AI AGI by 2029, which, if you look at the betting markets and the other forecasting sites, is roughly where things are converging. You know, you may have had a slightly different path, how to get there.
- [44:14]
B
Right. He talked about whole brain emulation.
- [44:16]
C
Yeah. That we'd scan the brain in a way. We did that indirectly. Right. These large language models are trained on human generated data. And in the limit, they are learning the thing that generated that data, not the data itself. And the thing that generated that data is a mind. Which is why these, you know, you know, these companies are actually even talking, starting to talk about, you know, the welfare of the AI. So what I. What I got from Kurzweil was just, first of all, that history hasn't ended, that we should not limit our imagination. And if you talk to most people, they're relatively linear thinkers, whereas Kurt Kurzweil always trust, you know, there's these exponential trends and we got to take them very seriously. And then secondly, that you can do a lot and go a long way with these very simple forecasting methods of, you know, what will be the biggest supercomputer, what will be the most, you know, what is the computational power of our brain? And when will those two lines intersect?
- [45:09]
B
Yeah, you go into a bit. You give a hat tip to the early Extropians, Max Moore and others in that genre. You know, Max Moore is the reason we're saying transhumanism when he pivoted to that as a, A term. And you also give a hat tip to the effective accelerationists. Get the sense that you also see it as being part of the same trend. I, I want to pivot, if we can, to your vision of the future, your timeline. I mean, if there's one thing that Ray Kurzweil can be given credit for, it's that he had the, the guts to say, this is what I believe is going to happen. And he laid out a very specific path. You do the same. And if you would just give the audience a sense, you broke it down into three basic periods. The immediate future about six, seven years from now, beginning in 2036 and then ending, of course, in the 2000 40s. As we approach the singularity, what are the different elements that people should expect to see as we move forward towards this imagined. I would say singularity.
- [46:16]
C
Sure. So let's start with where we are today. Today we are at a place where we have Google, OpenAI, Anthropic X, are serving a neck and neck race to release the best general purpose language model. The big breakthrough last year were reasoning models, thinking models, models that can actually do tasks. And now the application of reinforcement learning, which is a AI training technique that basically gives these models goals and goal directed behavior. Now there's an organization called Meter Metr that tracks the level of autonomy in these systems. By autonomy, I mean, what's the longest task that they can do before they sort of become discombobulated and fall off track and start to drift? That is now doubling every seven months or so.
- [47:01]
B
Kind of in a Moore's Law fashion.
- [47:03]
C
Yeah, faster. In Moore's Law, Moore's Law was every two years. This is every seven months. So the best model today, at least that's publicly released, is Gemini 3 from Google. It can perform tasks, engineering tasks that take humans roughly two and a half hours with a high degree of reliability. In seven months, that'll be five hours. Then seven months from then, it'll be 10 hours and then 20 hours. And then suddenly, very quickly, we have systems that are doing things autonomously that would normally take humans or teams of Humans, weeks or months, those are going to be incredibly powerful. They're going to be incredibly useful economically because this is when you move from AI being a tool to being a direct substitute for all kinds of, at least at first, white collar work.
- [47:47]
B
The greater replacement, yes, your words.
- [47:55]
C
But it's also very dual use. So the autonomy of these systems can be used to automate your Excel job, but it could also be used to execute cyber espionage campaigns. As Anthropic just revealed, they disrupted a Chinese effort using their models and their servers running autonomously to spy on US corporations and government agencies. So I think that's, that's really the next, say two or three year period. I think we could see, you know, a major run up in these cyber attacks and you know, potentially in ways in which the Internet becomes somewhat unusable or at least we need to build new Internet Rails, both because it'll be hard to know what's real and what's not, the proliferation of deepfakes, but also, you know, the cyber, the level of cyber threats, the vulnerabilities in our cyber infrastructure are very severe and if we don't fix them fast enough, we may have to just build alternatives and you.
- [48:48]
B
See the appropriate response, or at least the most effective response as people basically moving into gated communities both in reality, physical reality and virtually.
- [48:59]
C
Right, yeah, you see this in my privatization. Yeah, you see this with, you know, online communities, right? So if you go on Facebook and look at, you know, the comments and on you know, some fake image of like an African child who built a Jesus statue out of shrimp shells, you know, you see all the, all the people commenting me like, oh man, you know, praise, praise the Lord. And it's like, well, you know, we're not going to make it. Those people are not going to make it. But you know, how do you solve bots? Well, you could either have some identification system where we all scan our iris like worldcoin wants to do, or you end up moving into these more gated communities where you are very selective about who gets in. And I think that that's already happening in the digital realm. I think it will increasingly happen in.
- [49:41]
B
The real world too, and ultimately leading to the singularity. If I may, should I read the last passage of the book? Is this too much of a spoiler? You describe this privatization, you describe city powered with a massive singularitarian data center powered by fusion and they are about to go God mode and you say the, the city is a home to a fusion powered supercluster with billions of times more computational power than every human brain combined. It just completed its first big training run and the new model is ready to be tested. The engineers have read the sequences and know the danger, but their pride, curiosity and Benthamite expected value calculations all scream turn it on. Besides, who's going to stop them? Nightmarish future indeed. Sam Hammond I cannot deny it will happen or not, but I'm still praying for that solar flare, AI and Leviathan. Where can people find the book and where can people follow you?
- [50:42]
C
So this is a limited run, but it's drawn from essay series. If you just google it, you can find it written there for free.
- [50:49]
B
All right, Sam Hammond, I really appreciate you coming by. Thank you very much for hanging out with us flea bitten monkey people for now. Until it's all robots. Before the robots though, the IRS needs more money. Your money. If you owe the IRS back taxes, they can garnish your wages, levy your bank accounts and even seize your retirement or take your home. Don't let the IRS target you. Call the professionals at Tax Network usa. Their tax lawyers and enrolled agents are experts. Experts in powerful programs that may even help you eliminate your tax debt. Whether you owe a few thousand or a few million, they can help you. With one phone call, you can start the process of stopping the threatening demand letters. Call 1-800-958-1000. That's 1-800-958-10000 or visit tnusa.com bannon and of course you still need to diversify your assets in the face of the Singularity. Diversify. Let Birch Gold Group help you convert an existing IRA or 401k into a tax sheltered IRA in physical gold. Just text Bannon to 989898 to claim your eligibility for this offer. Again, text Bannon to the number989,898 today because Birch Gold's free silver with qualifying purchase promotion ends on December 22nd. Thank you, good night.
- [52:18]
A
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