← The Rest Is Politics: Leading
The Rest Is Politics: Leading
188. Will AI Give China or the US Total Power? (William MacAskill)
01:08:14
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- [00:01]
Alistair Campbell
Thanks for listening to the Rest is Politics. Sign up to the Rest is Politics plus to enjoy ad Free listening, receive a weekly newsletter, join our members chat room and gain early access to live show tickets. Just go to therestispolitics.com that's therestispolitics.com it's
- [00:15]
Will MacAskill
reasonably likely that a single country ends up with 99% of the world economic and military power.
- [00:20]
Alistair Campbell
99%?
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Will MacAskill
Yeah. Or more essentially, despite all of the hype around AI, I think people are under appreciating the risks. You could have a world where you have a military consisting of millions of autonomous weapons controlled by a single person. You know, in the US The Commander in Chief, the most intense concentration of power the world's ever seen. The US could just say, okay, we can just we're just going to go it alone. And then at that point all other countries are just locked out of most economic power. And that would be sufficient for total hegemony over the world.
- [00:49]
Alistair Campbell
Which of the two current commanders in chief of the two biggest militaries? Xi Jinping and Trump? Who is winning that race?
- [00:57]
Rory Stewart
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- [01:08]
Alistair Campbell
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- [01:15]
Rory Stewart
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- [02:47]
Alistair Campbell
Welcome to the rest is politics Leading
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Rory Stewart
with me, Alistair Campbell and with me, Rory Stewart. And today we have with us Will MacGaskill, which is taking us a little bit out of the mainstream of politics into a really interesting thinker who hopefully will make you all sit up and reconsider your lives in pretty fundamental ways. He's not quite Robert Sapolsky, our great baboon expert, in terms of going in a different direction, because Will is somebody who thinks deeply about our moral obligations to the world. So he's talked about how we should deal with poverty, how we should deal with climate change, how we should deal about energy, how we should think about AI, how we should think about democracy. And as you may be picking up in the course of this huge list of things, Will is a philosopher, but he's a philosopher of a very unusual practical bent. And he's particularly famous for his commitment to effective altruism, which is the idea that you should be spending your own personal money effectively to make the world a better place. Think hard about what it means to make the world a better place and how to do that most efficiently. But he's also quite well known as for living what he preaches. He gives away a very, very large amount of his own money, which we'll get into a little bit. And he's somebody who's known a lot of the grandest figures of our age, which we may touch on as well. So, Will, thank you very much for joining us today.
- [04:06]
Will MacAskill
Thanks so much for having me on the show. It's a real honor.
- [04:09]
Alistair Campbell
Can I start with the philosopher label? Because if we were Le Reste et la Politique, a French podcast, we'd be sort of bowing down before you'd be labeled a philosopher, because they love the idea of their philosophers as sort of great intellectual leaders. Where I still think in Britain, there's a sort of sense, well, if you're a philosopher, you're basically somebody just sits somewhere reading books and you don't really contribute much to the world. What's your definition of what a philosopher is?
- [04:34]
Will MacAskill
So, I mean, I think that's fair. And I think a lot of philosophers do just sit about reading books and, you know, a life I could well have entered had I not started thinking about effective altruism would have been working on extremely interesting problems of logic and language that I was very interested in. Would have been wonderfully satisfying life and completely pointless.
- [04:54]
Rory Stewart
I have a little interruption here.
- [04:55]
Will MacAskill
Oh, go.
- [04:55]
Rory Stewart
I was just talking to somebody from American University who does the great funding decisions, how they spend their endowment. And somebody said, what I really, really like is giving money to the maths department because all the maths department needs is a blackboard and a waste paper bin. And the other guy said, no, no, it's the philosophers. You don't even need to buy the waste paper bin.
- [05:17]
Will MacAskill
Yeah. I mean, if you think about it, the amount that the world spends on funding, thought about, where should the world be going? What is goodness? What does living a good life? You know, that's 0.0, you know, 1%. It's quite cheap. You can get some very smart people thinking about this and you don't really need to pay them very much. But as for the question of what philosophy is, I like to think of it as the study and investigation of questions that are very important but are left over by science. So there's two methods we have for finding the truth that have proven very reliable. One is the experimental method, the cornerstone of empirical science, physics, chemistry, and so on. And the other is proof. So mathematics and logic. But there's still all sorts of questions that are very important, like what is living a good life? Do we have free will? What is consciousness that can't wholly be solved by those methods. And so then we have to fall back on this method that is worse, but it can get us somewhere, which is very clear and high quality kind of essentially informal reasoning to try to get ourselves to a point where actually the questions can be answered via proofs or via the experimental method.
- [06:30]
Rory Stewart
We're not a philosophy podcast, so we're not asking for you to be super careful in academic with your language. But you were very inspired and shaped, I think, at some point in your life by the tradition of people like Peter Singer.
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Will MacAskill
Yeah.
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Rory Stewart
And I wonder whether you could explain to a general audience roughly what the really radical claim that he's making about our obligation to other people.
- [06:50]
Will MacAskill
Absolutely. So it's easiest to explain this with a thought experiment where imagine you're kind of going to work, maybe you're going to an important business meeting and you're wearing an expensive suit, your best suit, expensive shoes, and you're rushing there, you might be late. And then on the way there, you're walking past a pond and you see there's someone, actually, it looks like a child that's face down in that pond. They seem to be drowning. And you have a choice to make. You can either go in, save the child, you'll probably ruin your nice suit, that will cost you thousands of pounds, you might miss your business meeting, you'll perhaps lose a. A important deal, a promotion, or you can walk on by and intuitively like Baiko's common sense morality, if you were to work on by, you would be. And moral philosophers have a technical term for this. You would be an asshole. You would be a bad person for walking by and letting a child. Am I allowed to say that?
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Rory Stewart
Yeah.
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Will MacAskill
Yeah, I assumed. Alistair's here. It's okay.
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Alistair Campbell
Sorry. Is that because I'm an asshole or because.
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Will MacAskill
Because you're known for swearing, isn't it?
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Alistair Campbell
Oh, I see.
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Gordon Carrera
Okay.
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Will MacAskill
Okay.
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Alistair Campbell
Okay.
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Will MacAskill
That was. Please don't take it a long way. You would save the child?
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Alistair Campbell
I'm sure I 100% would.
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Rory Stewart
Yeah, well, they also quite like swimming in ponds anyway.
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Alistair Campbell
Yeah. Not in my clothes, but yeah.
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Will MacAskill
No. Obviously the loss of a few thousand pounds, or even loss of if it was 10,000, hundreds of thousands of pounds, is not comparable to the loss of a child's life. And if you can easily save that child's life at such low cost, you should do so. But then here's the kicker. What's the difference between that child that's in front of you and the child in sub Saharan Africa or in India or Gaza. Or Gaza who could be saved via a donation of a few thousand pounds to a highly effective organisation? And the argument is there is no difference. The only difference is the salience of that child versus the salience of the child elsewhere. And so you've brought us to politics,
- [08:48]
Rory Stewart
which is what Alison wants us to do. Because J.D. vance managed to get going beginning of last year with his idea of the ordo amoris, the order of love, that he took, he thought, from St. Augustine. And he seemed to have an idea that there were concentric circles of obligation. So in J.D. vance's formulation, he seemed to be saying we owe most to our immediate family and then maybe to our own little community and then to our nation. And he was using it actually at the same time as USAID was being abolished, foreign aid spending was being got rid of. The idea seemed to be that we really have our primary obligation to those nearest and dearest to us and we shouldn't really care about the rest of the world. Without getting you too political, what's your response to that idea?
- [09:30]
Will MacAskill
So I think there's a couple of things to say the firstly is that in my view, this is a gross misunderstanding of basic Christian thought. If you read the early Christian theologians, if you read, you know, the writings in the New Testament itself, it is so radical with respect to poverty. It is harder for a rich man to go to heaven than it is to get a camel through the eye of a needle. Is meant literally. It is extremely hard. Early Christian writing is that if you have money and other people are poor, it is like you have stolen the bread from their hands.
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Alistair Campbell
Are you a Christian?
- [10:00]
Will MacAskill
I am not a Christian, though. I am like, you know, sympathetic to many aspects of that ethical thought. And, you know, there's this quote, people often say, oh, charity begins at home, which again, misunderstanding of the quote, because the full quote is, charity begins at home, but it does not end there. The point is that you cultivate love via your friends and family, and from there you realize that everyone in the world is an individual with needs, whose life can be with, you know, hopes and dreams and suffering and joy, and whose life you can potentially benefit or potentially harm. And you should take that seriously. So true understanding of Christianity and a true ethical understanding, in my view, is to think, no, you're just. You should act as you would wish to be treated yourself. And if you were poor, dying for want of a five dollar bed net in a poor country, you would want to be helped by people who are, you know, merely through virtue of being born into a rich country rather than a poor one, have an incredible ability to help you.
- [11:00]
Alistair Campbell
But isn't there a risk for all of us? And you and I know both had sort of issues of mental health and depression and all that stuff, isn't there a risk that if we all absorb the sense that a child currently being bombed in Lebanon or a child who's lost his or her parents in Gaza, or a child who's literally drowning as a child, will be somewhere in the world right now that somehow that is your responsibility too? Isn't there a risk that we all end up, one, feeling completely inadequate and secondly, feeling permanently guilty, which then drives out the sort of possibilities that we have within us to kind of get out and do things and we don't do it. None of us do enough?
- [11:43]
Will MacAskill
So I think this is a great question. I think it is a risk. Early on in my life, when I was first grappling with his ideas and I was living on a student stipend but trying to give kind of 5, 10%, I would go to the supermarket and I'd be paralysed between choices of different cereal, like, should I go for the very cheapest? But then is that less healthy and what should I do? And it's not sustainable. But the key thing is you don't have to feel that guilt. Like, I think you're morally obligated to help, and ideally to help as much as you can, you're more morally obligated to feel guilty about it. And if that is not going to be beneficial. So here's another thought experiment. Imagine you do save the drowning child one day, and then a couple of weeks later, there's a burning building. You run into the burning building. You, like, kick the door down again, there's another person to save. You know, pull them out. Or again, someone drowning, oh, my God, you're swimming. You're like, why does it all this save the person? You would think, like, wow, not only would you think, like, this is a bit of a crazy world, but you would think, man, this is some of the most meaningful things that I have done in my life. You would feel good about yourself. My brother saved someone from drowning when he was 17, and, you know, that's one of the most significant moments in his life. And I think he has every right to feel very good about himself. The world we live in is one where you can, in fact, do that. You won't be getting in the local newspapers in the same way, but you can be that person that runs into the burning building every month just by cutting a check. And actually, you can think of this as an amazing opportunity and privilege and something that you can feel proud and happy to do. And that is how I feel about it now. I used to have terrible issues with the mental health. Now I think I'm one of the happiest people I know.
- [13:26]
Alistair Campbell
So on that you're basically saying that what part of what has made you feel better about yourself is your sort of driving attitudes towards the world and what you can do within it.
- [13:35]
Will MacAskill
Exactly. So many people I know and myself at an earlier stage, you just feel lost. You feel like, God, there's just. What's even the point of my life? Okay, I get a job in the city and then I work, and what's it all for? I don't really understand. Whereas for me, you know, it's still very hard. The question of what to do is extraordinarily hard. But I do feel like, yeah, okay, I can leave this world a better place than when I came into it, at least in some small but meaningful way. And I still obviously have days of feeling very depressed or very anxious. But on those days, the thought of, like, well, okay, supposing I do nothing this year, but I manage to donate, well, that's still. That's some children who are alive that wouldn't have otherwise existed. And that at least puts a flaw on how bad I can feel.
- [14:18]
Rory Stewart
Just to explain to the audience, one of the things that Will has been very, very involved in, along with another philosopher called Toby Ord, along with effective altruism, which we can talk about a little bit more, which is how to spend the money best, is about getting individuals to commit to sign up to a giving pledge to give away a certain amount of their money. The giving pledge focuses on people giving away 10% of their income. But in Will's own personal case, he's talking about the life satisfaction he gets from it, but he actually simply gives away all the money that he makes above what he believes the minimum amount to live on, which is.
- [14:52]
Will MacAskill
Yeah, I certainly wouldn't say it's the minimum amount to live on. So at the moment, it's £20,000 per year post tax from Oxford, 2009.
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Rory Stewart
Right. Okay.
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Will MacAskill
So being precise, that's now about £32,000 per year post tax.
- [15:07]
Rory Stewart
That's what you keep money that you make post tax after that, in different ways, is going towards supporting charities.
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Will MacAskill
Various charities. That's right. So last year I donated about £100,000. So that's like several times your income. My income. That's right.
- [15:21]
Rory Stewart
Back to Alston.
- [15:21]
Alistair Campbell
Yeah. Again, to bring it back to politics. Is it easier or harder to have that mindset when politics is so. As it is currently so dominated by people who so clearly do not seem to share your attitudes to the world. I mean, I can't imagine that Donald Trump, let alone the aforementioned JD Vance and these characters sit around saying, let's use all the money we have to try and help people. On the contrary, they seem to be using government money to cause a lot of the problems for those people and in their personal lives, particularly Trump and his family, simply enriching themselves at the expense of people. Does that make your thinking about this easier or harder?
- [16:02]
Will MacAskill
It's certainly hard. So something I've been reflecting on recently was just the last 10 years. So I kind of had a revised edition of my book, Doing Good Better come out. So I reflected a bit in the last 10 years, including some of the successes of effective altruism. So via money going to global health and development, it's an estimated about 340,000 lives, mainly children, that have been saved. So, you know, okay, that Feels pretty good. At the same time, look at just developments in the world. Take the cuts to USAID alone. That's on the order of a million lives lost, maybe multiple millions.
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Alistair Campbell
What are the cuts here in the
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Will MacAskill
UK cuts here as well? Disappointing. Even from a left wing government going down to 0.3% of GDP. It's sad and it's hard as an individual to think, man, I'm so small compared to the whole size of the world. But I think that's a long way to think about things. Instead you just think in absolute terms, how much good can I do? And in the absolute terms, as we said, running into the burning building or saving the drowning child. Each individual life is absolutely huge. And so being an individual, pledging to give a certain percentage of your income. And Rory, I believe that you've now taken a trial pledge, at least donating a certain percentage.
- [17:18]
Rory Stewart
I'm also giving 10%, inspired by Will. So there we are.
- [17:21]
Will MacAskill
Fantastic. Well, thank you so much. Thank you so much.
- [17:23]
Alistair Campbell
I think between us, Fiona, I are already above 10% anyway.
- [17:26]
Will MacAskill
Okay, well, you should also sign the pledge then. You should also go on to giving what we can.
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Alistair Campbell
Yeah, but then when I mentioned to Fiona this morning that we were seeing you.
- [17:34]
Will MacAskill
Yeah.
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Alistair Campbell
And she said, is that the guy who was tied up with Sam Bankman? Fried.
- [17:38]
Will MacAskill
Yeah.
- [17:39]
Alistair Campbell
Which was.
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Will MacAskill
So was he your biggest kind of
- [17:44]
Alistair Campbell
recruit, as it were? I'd be interested in how that has played out in terms of the. The kind of profile of this.
- [17:51]
Will MacAskill
Yeah, yeah, yeah, happy to talk about it. I'll brief say that bad actors being associated with these ideas should in no way undermine your commitment to 10% or to encouraging others in the same way as Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. Murdering people in order to promote environmentalism should in no way undermine the cause of environmentalism.
- [18:14]
Alistair Campbell
I think that's a very sound political and philosophical point.
- [18:17]
Will MacAskill
But yeah, it's true that, yeah, I was associated with this person, I trusted this person. And it turned out I was extremely deceived. You know, it's hard even now talking about it, but, you know, must have been lied. Was in fact lied to my face. And it's something that I feel, yeah, enormous, I mean, enormous shame about and huge people, huge numbers of people were like harmed.
- [18:41]
Alistair Campbell
Did you get any money out of him at all?
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Will MacAskill
Well, he. I mean, one of the bizarre, sad things about all of this is so he did in fact donate quite considerably, given how young he was. But in bankruptcy proceedings, if the company or person has bought equity in a company, then that Company gets to keep the investment because there was quid pro quo. If, however, that person donated to a charity, the bankruptcy estate can go and take the money back because there was no quid pro quo. So, no, the net charitable effect was extremely negative because not only did the money have to be overturned from the charities you donated to, but also the huge overhead of legal costs, not only stress, not only reputational damage, it was a huge blow.
- [19:26]
Rory Stewart
Just while we're on this, because maybe it's not right on topic, but it's an interesting digression because it shows some of the complications of this world that you're in. I ran for a time givedirectly, which is very much part of this effective altruism movement and very much arguing that a dollar given to someone in extreme poverty in Africa would be the equivalent of giving $100 to someone in Britain. And that $1,000 given to a household on the Rwandan, Ugandan border can genuinely transform someone's lives in exactly the way that you're describing rushing into a burning building. But what I realized, getting into this world and meeting many of the people that you know and some of the donors you've worked with, is that you often got into slightly weird conversations. You know, I talked to Peter Singer or Dustin Moskovitz where I'd say, look, you know, here's this thing that I think is pretty good and here's some pretty good evidence about how much difference this is making to people's lives. And you'd get into these very abstruse arguments about whether it was exactly the same return on investment as a bed net or a vaccination, or dealing with killer robots or, you know, whatever it happened to be. And this was all summed up for me when I got in touch with Sam Bankman Fried's foundation. I was eventually put in touch with the head of his foundation. I called the guy and he listened to me. I gave my little pitch on extreme poverty in Africa and after 15 minutes he said, yeah, well, frankly, I'm quite hungry, I want to go and get some lunch, so bye. And I said, well, that's great, but can we have a follow up meeting? Because I just want to explain how we really could transform poverty in Malawi. And he said to me, frankly, I'm not that interested in poverty as a subject. And then hung up on me. That was the end of it. And I was sort of slightly thrown off balance because it showed another weird dimension to the world of effective altruism, which was there was this sort of Odd sense of lack of politeness, compassion, empathy. I mean, even if he'd somehow concluded he didn't want to give money to my particular charity, the I'm just not that interested in poverty sort of slightly threw me off as a kind of human response.
- [21:25]
Will MacAskill
Yeah, well, so I have a good guess about who that person is. And I will comment that any lewdness, not otherworldly or even global poverty specific and others have given him feedback in the past that his manner, even though he's actually like a deeply loving and caring person, his manner can often be quite different than that. The fund he was running, it was focused on catastrophic risks. It wasn't focused. There were other funds.
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Rory Stewart
And tell us about catastrophic risks and this sort of funny debate which is often characterized as whether you give money to somebody, a poor woman alive today on the Uganda border, or whether you invest in trying to stop asteroids hitting the earth or killer robots being invented, or catastrophic AI. Tell us about that debate.
- [22:06]
Will MacAskill
Yeah, I mean this has been, it's like, I often call it like the horror of effective altruism in some way, but it's just the horror of the world that we need to make incredibly hard trade offs between different groups we can help, but also between different ways of helping. There's give directly which is extraordinarily evidence based on you just basically guarantee that you're going to massively improve the lives of many people versus things that just are more speculative. And so one of the things that I think we've learned, certainly I've learned or changed my views on over the years is that a certain mode of reasoning that seems very speculative has actually now got quite a remarkably powerful track record where those of us in effective altruism were warning about funding, working on issues of pandemics and AI for many, many years before COVID before the ChatGPT moment. And I mean I wish we'd done been able to do more on pandemics. There's been remarkably little global response after Covid. And I think that actually risk of pandemics is going to go up massively as the ability to create novel viruses gets democratized over the coming years. And I think the challenges from AI are like actually underappreciated even despite all of the hype around AI, I think are under appreciating the risks from, you know, I see it as proceeding in kind of four stages. The risks from cyberweapons, bioweapons, concentration of power and then ultimately loss of control. It's obviously extremely important to prepare for new technological advances and to try to prepare for them early so that we don't have massive pandemics from new pathogens designed in someone's garage or we don't have the most intense concentration of power the world has ever seen as a result of heads of state commanding wholly automated armies. But how do you compare, how do you compare working on that versus something as evidence based as gift directly or distributing bed nets? It's an extremely hard. It's an extremely hard problem. I don't want to say oh, it's obvious and the answer is like AI. But what I do want to say is everyone should be reasoning with this, they should be reckoning with it and trying to have as informed a view as possible, at least on which of these areas is the right one to focus on.
- [24:21]
Alistair Campbell
Earlier in the interview when you talked about kind of what philosophy is and what it's about and the questions it's grappling with, as you were speaking I was thinking, well, politics should be doing that as well. And I just wondered whether you felt even what you were just saying there is politics really grappling with that stuff? Not really, kind of at the margins both now and through history. Have you ever seen a political leader or another, any level of politician and thought that person is coming at this from a philosophical standpoint or do you think that our politics is so driven by short term interest that it's almost impossible to think beyond?
- [24:56]
Will MacAskill
I mean the case that leaps most out to me is the writing of the U.S. constitution. So there you've got these amazingly brilliant thinkers in a room for three months hashing out the wording of this document. John Adams himself said the institutions we are now building may last for thousands of years and if they go wrong it will be hard to correct them back onto the right path. So it's of the utmost importance that we get this right. And they were in fact incredibly farsighted in a number of ways. That is actually a rare case of there's some new order coming into existence, namely the United States itself and effectively politicians and thinkers able to have a longer term view, try and take the challenges.
- [25:41]
Alistair Campbell
It's quite depressing that you have to go that far back. And it's also quite depressing at a time when you feel that that is a constitution that is under profound threat at the moment.
- [25:51]
Will MacAskill
I think it is extremely worthying. I mean the example is interesting because I think you get these hinge moments. So end of the Second World War, another one with the formation of the un, the Marshall Plan and so on.
- [26:02]
Alistair Campbell
Could you argue that from a philosophical standpoint?
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Will MacAskill
Oh, absolutely. I mean, again, it feels very strange when comparing it to the world today, which feels so realpolitik and so driven by kind of national interests, just how idealistic the United States could. After the end of the Second World War, it was the only nuclear power and it could have said, oh great, well, now we're going to just take over. And obviously it did to some extent, it exported its values, but the general tenor was in terms of, oh, we're going to try and in general enrich the world in general, kind of steer the world in a positive direction. And yeah, it's just a sad fact about the last couple of decades that the political climate is moved away from the end now, even moving away from
- [26:49]
Rory Stewart
the little space, develop it a little bit more, back to a sort of cranky obsession of me and Alastair. So we're quite moved by Jon Monnet and the creation of the European Union and the sense that there was somebody with a quite long term vision who was also quite practical. You know, this is where we're going to get 5 years, 10 years, 15 years. Who pulled this thing off? And of course our dream might be a future in which Britain becomes much closer to Europe again and who knows, Norway, Ukraine, Canada, and we begin to develop a values based fourth corner to the global system to do some of what the US might have done after the Second World War. How would you think about what would be involved in trying to do that over a 10, 20, 30 year period? And is the time very unpropitious for this?
- [27:31]
Will MacAskill
Well, I think it could be. I think so. The thing that's most obvious in my mind, as you say this is the relationship between this and AI. So the views I have on what will happen with AI are, you know, they are unintuitive. They took me a long time to get to. My view is that probably within the next even five years we will have AI that can itself automate AI R&D. We'll have this leap forward in AI capabilities after that. We'll have something like a century's worth of technological progress happening in a decade or less. In fact, I think it would be a much better world if Europe, the uk, other kind of democratic countries other than the US had major and significant bargaining power in that world. However, at the moment, the US and China, and you can look at this just by where computing power is housed, where it's almost wholly the US and China at the moment. And the rising countries are United Arab Emirates, for example, and so in order to have the influence this kind of positive, like. Yeah, positive influence and values coming from the UK and Europe and so on. Yeah. These countries simply need to have bargaining chips over the development of AI, which will be the most important technology of essentially maybe ever. And that will involve having the hard power of computer chips and manufacturing capability.
- [28:59]
Alistair Campbell
You found is something called forethought. We should say to our listeners and viewers that you're not just somebody sort of saying. Because I studied philosophy, I also know about AI. Yeah, you set up something called forethought research which specifically looking at this, and you've stated publicly that you put the odds of democracy surviving AGI at less than 50%. Okay. So even without somebody like Putin threatening democracy or Trump threatening democracy, you think that the technology is what, even bigger threat than human beings to democracy.
- [29:34]
Will MacAskill
Yeah. So think about why we have democracy. So, I mean, there's two ways or several ways I think we could lose democracy. One is a non democratic country could become very, very powerful, where I think it's again, reasonably likely that a single country ends up with 99% of the world economic and military power.
- [29:52]
Alistair Campbell
99%?
- [29:52]
Will MacAskill
Yeah. Or more, essentially. Yeah. Because the only more is 100 or you can have more nines.
- [29:59]
Alistair Campbell
Trump has interesting views on.
- [30:03]
Rory Stewart
Explain a little bit. Just explain that path first. How would you end up with one country accumulating huge economic path.
- [30:11]
Will MacAskill
Yeah. And military. Military power. Yeah. And again, I'll say all of this stuff seemed crazy to me to begin with. It's been like years of working on this and thinking about this and debating arguments that have got me there. The main point is that you get essentially kind of increasing returns to scale through the development of the transition from where we are today to a society with extraordinarily powerful AI, where at the point of time that you have AI that can itself design better AI systems. So we already have AI that's extraordinarily good at coding, at least on verifiable tasks. It is as good as the best coders in the world. It's not as good as on fuzzier tasks, but that's getting solved too. The point of time when you have AI that can just do the job of a machine learning engineer, than an AI company is plausibly not that far away. Again, my best guess is it'll happen in the next more likely than not in the next five years. So then at that point you now have these AI systems that are designing better AI systems. Okay. And then those better AI systems can themselves design better AI systems. So even on the same number of chips, it's like you start off with, let's say, tens of thousands of human machine learning engineers. You quickly move to hundreds of thousands of AI machine learning engineers that then design even better machine learning engineers. So then you have a population of millions of AI scientists essentially able to design the kind of next generation better
- [31:43]
Alistair Campbell
and faster than people could.
- [31:44]
Will MacAskill
Better than faster than people could.
- [31:45]
Alistair Campbell
And therefore the people, people who are coming out of universities are thinking, that's a job I might have done. That job's now gone.
- [31:52]
Will MacAskill
Exactly.
- [31:52]
Alistair Campbell
So the social and economic implications are huge.
- [31:55]
Will MacAskill
Well, absolutely huge. And we can definitely get into that. It's fascinating and quite discombobulating. But the key thing now is that over what our modeling suggests would be quite a short period of time, some number of years, you would go from the leading country, let's say the US or China, having oh, powerful AI to then suddenly having what is equivalent of hundreds of millions of workers. Imagine the smartest person in the world now. Imagine them working 24, 7 with perfect focus to whatever task is being set to them 365 days a year, hundreds of millions of them. Every time you learn, every time one of them learns, all of them can get the same, learn the same lesson. That is extraordinarily different in terms of economic and political power. Economic power, because now just think about anything you can do, certainly to begin with from the armchair or by asking humans to do things in the physical world. Well, that's an awful lot of science. That's all strategy, cyber capabilities, design of bioweapons, potentially surveillance and monitoring, including like nuclear submarines and so on.
- [32:59]
Alistair Campbell
It could save us on the energy front.
- [33:01]
Will MacAskill
It would save us. I mean, well, there would be two factors. So you would have new sources of energy, cheaper energy, but there'd also be enormous demand for energy because now you can take an H100 chip and you can run the equivalent of this smartest human being running it 24,7 on it. So I actually think the price of energy would go up in this world.
- [33:24]
Alistair Campbell
I was trying to add a little bit of positivity to this otherwise relentless.
- [33:30]
Rory Stewart
You're doing brilliantly. But I'm just going to pull you back for our listeners, back to the basics. So let's just take an example. So the US goes through this path and in five, 10 years time is what's happening. Basically that ChatGPT 15.0, whatever it is, is suddenly no longer something which is given to European companies to run their stuff on, but instead they build their own stuff in the US and suddenly almost every company in the world is in the US because they're just much smarter, much more productive, all the manufacturing, the robotics and everything. In which case there's a huge sucking sound as the economies of the rest of the world collapses and all the economic value is sucked to Silicon Valley.
- [34:09]
Will MacAskill
Yes, and this can be a matter of choice. So already at the moment, the US is restricting the sale of chips to China. If you now have AI systems that can create a bioweapon for you, if you ask, well, it might well be the case the leading country wants to restrict it to only within their borders, perhaps only to national security use. We don't know. And so it may well be that at this point, the US could just say, okay, we're just going to go it alone. Or alternatively, they might actually just keep the technology restricted in some ways. So with military capabilities, and that would be sufficient for total hegemony of the world. Or alternatively, you might just grab currently unclaimed resources, which would be sufficient to get total dominance. So Elon Musk has already been talking about data centers in space. In the near term, I think this doesn't make economic sense, but in the long term, it is going to be where almost all computing happens, because that's where all the energy is. There are other kind of structural advantages
- [35:12]
Rory Stewart
because the sun has a billion times the amount of energy that nothing else does.
- [35:15]
Will MacAskill
Exactly. So on Earth, we could scale energy consumption a thousandfold up to then beyond that, you can go, yeah, two billion fold more. So it's a really big gain. And at the moment, this is all covered by the Outer Space Treaty, so it can't be owned by any nation. I expect the Outer Space Treaty to get thrown in the bin essentially when it becomes of real economic value. So what the United States could say is like, look, we're not even going to take anyone's territory, but we're the first ones to space. SpaceX essentially have a near monopoly on private launches already. We're going to take these resources. Thanks. And then at that point, all other countries are just locked out of most economic power.
- [35:57]
Alistair Campbell
Okay, Rory will quick breaking them back for more.
- [36:00]
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- [38:02]
Alistair Campbell
Just going back to the democratic survival point. So you've talked about the power that can go to one country be that, and we're living with a short list of two. It might be America, it might be China. You've also talked about the loss of any sense of economic value from human beings, that our brains and what we do with our hands just become kind of redundant and irrelevant. So that's where the kind of I think the social problems come. But then you've gone to this further point where these clever and clever and clever and cleverer AI models can then create armies in which there is no structure of obedience. There's no structure of obeying orders.
- [38:42]
Will MacAskill
Well, the other it's just they will always obey orders. That's the risk at least.
- [38:46]
Rory Stewart
Or they become autonomous.
- [38:48]
Will MacAskill
Yes. So this is going to be a huge challenge. It's one of the things I'm working on at the moment is AI has already been heavily used in the military. It was involved in the taking of Maduro. It was involved in Iran. Again, we're not looking that far out. And again this all seems crazy, but it's crazy because the technology is moving so quickly. Won't be that crazy. You could just have fully autonomous weapons where we have a choice there and
- [39:12]
Rory Stewart
explain what autonomous means.
- [39:13]
Will MacAskill
Yeah. So you know, we know drones, you might have seen them kind of flying around. Autonomous would mean that rather than having a human controller guiding its every movement, you could give it some very open ended goal or perhaps a whole fleet of drones. You give a very open ended goal.
- [39:27]
Alistair Campbell
Destroy London.
- [39:28]
Will MacAskill
Destroy London, yeah. Or just we're at war with China, we want to win, and then it will just figure out the strategy and implement that. Think of a wholly autonomous self driving car, one where you just say, look, I want to get to Oxford and then it'll figure out the best path and drive you there. We're not that far away from that technology being feasible. But now think how power changes in that world where at the moment, if a general says, I think I'd like power over the country to myself, and orders his soldiers to, you know, storm the Capitol building, the soldiers will say no. It is an open question how we choose to govern and design autonomous weapons where one way could be that these are just tools. A hammer does not resist you if you try and hit someone on the head with it. Similarly, AI is a tool, it should do is instruct it. But then you could have a world where you have an army, a military, consisting of millions of such autonomous weapons controlled by a single person. You know, in the US the commander in chief. And that's a very scary situation and it's one that we should be actively working to try and try and avoid.
- [40:38]
Alistair Campbell
You mentioned the US Commander in chief. Let's not say his name any more than we have to, but which of the two current commanders in chief of the two biggest militaries, Xi Jinping and Trump, who is winning that race?
- [40:50]
Will MacAskill
I mean, for AI at the moment, it's utterly clearly the United States. All of the frontier AI companies are based in the United States, where the leaders at the moment are anthropic, OpenAI, Google in particular, DeepMind. They're really the key three front runners. Most computing power is based in the United States as well. I think 60% of global computing power is in the United States. China lags behind. It kind of varies, but something like nine months behind. And if they were having to do this kind of going alone, they would be much further behind Again. Now a big part of all of this is because of the export controls where the United States a number of years ago, under Biden Said it would restrict the sale of the most powerful chips to China. So they're having to run on less powerful hardware as well as having a less. Well they have many brilliant scientists but it is a less well developed kind of talent ecosystem than in the US So they're doing kind of a fast following approach. However, it's very easy to catch up to the frontier of technology. There's various techniques you can use. So it's only a nine month gap.
- [41:59]
Alistair Campbell
Let's just say that either of those two or any other current world leader who is really trying to wrestle with this, let's say they brought you in and sat you down. Actually let's forget China for a minute. Let's say it's the democracies sat you down and said all right, well we're buying your argument here, but what should we as political leaders with an election coming up because we have to deal with those things, what should we as political leaders be doing right now to make the right calls not just for our generation but for the future? What would you tell them?
- [42:31]
Will MacAskill
Yeah, and is this political leaders in the US or Ukraine?
- [42:34]
Alistair Campbell
Usfa, uk, France, Germany, Australia, Japan, Korea, the democracies?
- [42:38]
Will MacAskill
Yeah, I think there's a couple of things. So on the software side, I think here's one kind of regulatory approach, and ideally this would be agreed at least among all the kind of democratic allied countries is to say every company producing frontier models like the most powerful AI systems needs to have what's called a model spec. That's just an English language document that says look, this is how we want our AI to behave. Such that for example, if you type in like please design me a bioweapon, it will say no. So I can't do that. That's one thing you can write in the model spec has to agree to abide by certain foundational principles.
- [43:14]
Alistair Campbell
So why wouldn't a government want to be designing new bioweapons?
- [43:17]
Will MacAskill
Well perhaps. Well there's.
- [43:18]
Alistair Campbell
And why wouldn't China just think, right, there's you democracies telling each other what you can't do. But we're just going to hoover all that you say you can't do and then we'll work out how to do it.
- [43:25]
Will MacAskill
Well in the case of bioweapons in particular, this is just a lose lose for everyone. I mean because bioweapons, it's very hard to release something that doesn't come back to you. So the biggest risk is from rogue states like North Korea where they just, you know, they've got so Little power that making crazy like reckless threats can actually be quite powerful. But look, there's going to have to be some huge bargaining over what are in those principles and what have exceptions for national security. But just briefly, I think, yeah. On the software side, having this written document and then saying any frontier model has to have be able to demonstrate that the AI will behave in line with this specification, including in very unusual scenarios. And that means you have to show that it hasn't been sabotaged, whether internally or via foreign interference. And the AI hasn't formed goals of itself. So you know that it's going to generalize.
- [44:19]
Rory Stewart
Well, we can keep going AI thing. There's 58 different questions that follow on from Will's position. But, but Alastair, I had some for you. So we've got Will laying out these very, very, very radical, very disturbing and unfortunately very plausible visions of what might happen in the next five, ten years. And yet we've got a politics across the world that barely speaks about this. We've just been with the President of Serbia. We've been covering elections the last four years all over the world. Ain't nobody really talking about this stuff. In fact, the campaigns feel like they're still stuck in the 1980s. You know, it's cost of living. What do you think? I mean, if you go back to your time in number 10 and someone like Will comes in and he says something like this really radical, that almost sounds to you like in five, ten years the world as we know it's about to end is basically what happens is that people just bury their head in the sands and say, well, he's obviously mad or an extremist and I don't want to listen to him. I mean, how do you deal with this kind of thing?
- [45:18]
Alistair Campbell
Well, I actually think that if we were back in the day, and I think I'd say the same with Bill Clinton as well. I think if this had been happening around our time and you'd gone in to see Tony Blair at this time, he would have been utterly fascinated and in fact he is utterly fascinated by this. And I think Clinton would have been the same. And Thor partly would have thought how do we UK or in Clinton's case US get ahead of this? But I think would also have seen the bigger picture. And I think it is partly the narrowing of our politics and our political debate that has made it so. That's why I was going about the long termism. It's so it seems the politicians are scared of having these long term debates. I mean to be fair to Rishi Sunak, he's probably the only one I can think of who gave it a go in starting that kind of annual summit. I think he lost a lot of credibility by the high point being sitting down with Elon Musk, who just came out with his usual Muskian kind of nonsense. Of course. Elon Musk, a big admirer of yours, I saw.
- [46:12]
Will MacAskill
Well, he was in the past, is it?
- [46:14]
Alistair Campbell
Not anymore. Not anymore. Not anymore. Okay. So I would like. And I'm trying to think if there's any other current world leaders. You see, I think a politician who took this on and kind of did scare the world a bit, based on knowledge and science and, and truth. As you get back to your philosophical points, I think people would start to listen because I think we see the benefits of AI, we feel the benefits of AI, but I think there's a part of the public and the politicians that don't want to confront the scale, a bit like climate change, they don't want to confront the fact that we might be literally burning ourselves to death because it's easier to say, well, we're dealing with it, we're putting £150 million into this and we're doing more solar panels and what have you. I think the last generation of leaders probably would have said we've got to sort this.
- [47:03]
Will MacAskill
But the thing that's weird. So, I mean, yeah, I've written about long termism, the importance of taking future generations seriously, looking very far ahead. The thing that's just strange about the world now is that all these things I'm talking about, I'm thinking the next five years, as in very significant chance that we start on this takeoff of AIs, building better AIs and this huge leap forward in technological ability in the next year or two even is probably not, but maybe even then.
- [47:31]
Alistair Campbell
And is it, let's just say, because I don't know if you've listened to Roy's miniseries on AI, but I got the sense that he's become much more skeptical and much more alarmed about where it's, where it's all heading. Not skeptical about the power of it, but alarmed about the power of it. And I've always been in a quite scared, scared sort of place. Is it too late for politicians to have much impact on this, do you think?
- [47:53]
Will MacAskill
Absolutely not too late. Because the world still hasn't kind of woken up. There is already a differential in terms of higher power from the US and other countries. But other countries do have some. The Netherlands has ASML which produces 100% the entire world production of. They're called Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography machines. And I would thoroughly recommend everyone to go and look into this. There's a great veritasium video on YouTube. It's very fun. It's the most sophisticated technology in the world, essentially. So they are.
- [48:23]
Alistair Campbell
Why have the Dutch got it?
- [48:24]
Rory Stewart
It's essentially one. Yeah. I mean, it says the Dutch control 100% of one bit of it, the Taiwanese control nearly 100% of the other bit of it, and an American company controls nearly 100% of another bit of it. So the advanced computer chips, which the whole AI model is based on, has a huge link to Nvidia, to this Taiwanese company, and to this Dutch company, and yet we don't seem to be able to leverage.
- [48:47]
Alistair Campbell
And why did the Dutch get it? Because there's a small European country. Is that one company that did that?
- [48:51]
Will MacAskill
It's one company. Asml, it's called. And so, yeah, these.
- [48:54]
Alistair Campbell
Was the government involved?
- [48:55]
Will MacAskill
I don't think. Not to my knowledge, no.
- [48:57]
Alistair Campbell
So it's just the fact that somebody randomly was born to be Dutch and
- [49:00]
Will MacAskill
started a company because there was just. Lots of companies tried. We'll talk about the technology. So imagine these machines. They're so big, they have to be moved in several Boeing 747 jumbo jets. And what they are doing is etching designs of chips that are. If you look at your fingernail, see how much it grew in the course of a second. That's how fine these huge machines are etching chips. It involves these incredible processes, like firing little droplets of tin, 50,000 of them per second that get zapped three times in order to generate the ultraviolet light that is creating these etchings. So it's just extraordinarily difficult technologically. Many companies tried. They all failed, apart from this one company. Similarly, with TSMC producing these computers, which is. The Taiwanese company, produces 90% of the frontier chips, again, it's just very hard. Many companies have failed.
- [49:55]
Alistair Campbell
Is it possible, therefore, that on that one base, you remember when Nokia was kind of dominating the telephone market and Finland suddenly became this sort of, you know, greater economic power, Is it possible that that leads to the Netherlands becoming the most powerful economy in Europe?
- [50:10]
Will MacAskill
I mean, they have far more bargaining power than they know. And with the export controls, ASML and the Netherlands, they got really trounced by them, and they got browbeaten by the United States, to be honest. But they could. And it's not just them. Japan, South Korea, Germany, all play essential parts in the semiconductor supply chain as well.
- [50:35]
Alistair Campbell
I'm very much ukery in this list.
- [50:37]
Will MacAskill
I mean what the UK has is home to talent. So London is the second most important hub for AI talent outside of San Francisco. By headcount it's about a third the size of the. But that's a lot of kind of number of machine learning researchers because Google DeepMind is based in London. There's also offices for Anthropic and OpenAI. But in terms of manufacturing, in terms of, yeah, this role in kind of hard power, the US lags enormously behind. It could change that if it wanted to. But more recent news, it was going to develop more data centers in the north of England as that's fallen through as a result of permitting inability to grow energy enough and some copyright reasons too.
- [51:18]
Rory Stewart
I don't want you to go without talking a little bit about the personalities of some of the people that are dominating AI and the tech industry, because one of the things that's going to be true is if our world is increasingly in the hands of three companies, four or five, I mean, maybe we can add Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg into the picture who are worth hundreds of billions of dollars. And you're putting a huge emphasis not on a kind of broad democratic base, but these kind of solitary oligarchic figures who may, have to be frank, quite eccentric lives, eccentric views of the world, damaged childhoods, obsessions with science fiction, weird insecurities. And you've met some of them. Sam Bankman, Fried, in a sense, was one of these people. I mean, what is it one should be without trashing your friends who've been generous to your various projects? What should we be cautious of when it comes to a world run to some extent by these people?
- [52:22]
Will MacAskill
No, I'm happy to speak very frankly about all these people. I will say two things. The first I'll say is that relative to the batting average for companies dealing with ethical issues, where the Baha is in hell. Think of Exxon, think of Philip Morris. I am very happy that the three leading companies are led by Demis Hasabis, although he's part of Google, so how much influence he ultimately has over the steering is more muted. Dari Amadei and Sam Altman, these are all above. They're all above the average. They have all done things like invest
- [52:55]
Alistair Campbell
in safety, slightly developing megalomaniac tendencies.
- [52:58]
Rory Stewart
Oh no.
- [52:58]
Will MacAskill
But they are also megalomania. Both of these things can be true. So in terms of the things you should be worried about. Yeah, I mean, entrepreneurs and very successful entrepreneurs are already extremely weird by populations because of the, you know, it's not an enjoyable job to run a billion dollar company. So you need to be megalomaniacal to some extent. You need to be power hungry, power seeking, really want success in some form. Also a very distinctive thing among such people is incredible competitiveness. It's striking how often such leaders are like intense game players as well. So intense competitiveness isn't necessarily what we want in something where cooperation would be much better. But then the final thing is just imagine the situation you're now in where over and over in your life you have made some crazy bet, some belief that you had that others didn't have and they were all wrong. And you got pleas right and now you're the billionaire. Okay, now you've got some new crazy belief and other people are telling you you're all wrong. You're going to really kind of back yourself again. And so I think everyone should be very worried about how much power can go. We've talked about how much power can go into government hands. That's the thing I'm most worried about. But I think we should be very worried about how much power could go into company hands as well. I am expecting companies to be worth tens of trillions of dollars again within just a few years and with relatively small workforces, with workforces that ultimately go down to one, because it's a single person commanding the CEO commanding a wholly automated workforce again, we'll see this increasingly, even just over the next few years, we'll have single person companies where all the staff are artificial intelligences again, that could lead us, you know, think of the East India Company had its own army. You know, it was having power on the level of states. I think it's reasonably likely that we'll get the same with companies too.
- [54:56]
Alistair Campbell
I'm trying to think of something to kind of, you know, cheer us up a bit.
- [54:59]
Will MacAskill
I mean, yeah, the last thing I'll say is Rohi has just been grinning this whole time. Since we've, in a bemused way since we've gotten onto artificial intelligence again, I want to say like I'm not like a science fiction person. I'm not like an AI hype person. I don't work for the company, I work for nonprofit. I would rather, I would like nothing more than to be wrong about all of this stuff. I have come to these conclusions kicking and screaming by the changes that we're seeing and the forecasts that I think follow some fairly basic.
- [55:29]
Alistair Campbell
I guess my Final question is this. I've mentioned a couple of times, you know what thought has been given to the social and economic consequences you've just described there. A vision of a CEO who doesn't need human beings, who can have massive economic power, even military power as an individual. What are the human being, what are we all going to do and how are we all going to live?
- [55:51]
Will MacAskill
Yeah. So I mean, I guess here's something that's a little bit of optimism in this or something. So the world will be getting enormously richer over this time period. And I actually differ.
- [56:03]
Alistair Campbell
Won't be shared.
- [56:03]
Will MacAskill
Well, well, so there'll be this one off the distribution before its ordinarily intense concentration because robots are lagging behind. I'm laughing because I know what I'm about to say. So okay, at the moment robots are lagging quite far behind kind of AI for cognitive skills. And this is because when it comes to kind of evolution and how much time evolution has to optimize our brains, well, science is just very new. It's not at all what we've evolved for. But doing fine motor coordination, me picking up this glass and putting it down, that is extraordinarily complex. What I just did. It doesn't feel like it because it's so second nature to us. It's just, it's all built into our brains from evolution. And moreover the robots don't exist so we can't actually build equivalent of a human hand in terms of just how fine our kind of touch perception is. And so over the period that we're moving from AI that we have now to AI that far exceeds kind of human cognitive capabilities, there will be complementarity between that AI and human workers. If only. I think this is for many reasons, but if only because we are able to act in the world and we have these fine motor skills and the robots haven't yet been built. And so this means there'll be this period which is just a one off gain where wages for humans will go much, much higher because we are able to go and build the robots that will then replace us.
- [57:23]
Alistair Campbell
That will then replace us. I see.
- [57:24]
Will MacAskill
And so we'll have, you know, so you can use your phone, it has a camera, it has audio. It can be like here you're attached to your head, the AI can be telling you what to do. It's like you've got this coach, this manager doing exactly the physical movements so that you can build these robots.
- [57:44]
Alistair Campbell
Is there not at least a party? If I was one of these big AI gurus, who's about to rule the world. I'm sitting listening to this. I might think, God, this guy sounds like he knows what he's on about, and he sounds like it could be a bit of a problem for us as well. Let's get him in and offer him a ginormous salary, about a thousandth of what I'm on as the CEO, and get him in and use his brain on that. Is there nothing that would take you above the 32,000 pound a year?
- [58:09]
Will MacAskill
Yeah, completely. Honestly, this is something that I, you know, that's the way than get, like, a lot of intrusive thoughts about. It's like, I know all these people I was close to and, like, good friends with, and we're all engaged in this kind of ethical project together, and now some of them are worth hundreds of millions of dollars, even kind of billions and so on. And from an ethical perspective, I think it's good that I have made all this noise about saying, like, well, this is my income and I'm not going to live beyond that because it means that I kind of can't get tempted by. It would be extremely embarrassing for me if I said, well, actually I'm going to give up on all that and take the big salary. Obviously, I could do that in order to donate, but I think the bottleneck that we have is much more about ideas, much more about ability to speak freely than it is about money. And so, yes, it's this very striking thing, seeing so many people I know become extraordinarily wealthy. But it's an unexpected benefit of the pledge that I took. That sort of temptation is off the
- [59:20]
Alistair Campbell
table, I suspect, dare not speak for the many millions of them, but I. I think most of the rest is politics. Family will probably admire you more than them.
- [59:31]
Will MacAskill
Well, we'll see.
- [59:32]
Rory Stewart
Thank you, Will, so much.
- [59:33]
Will MacAskill
Great. Thank you so much for having me. This was a great conversation.
- [59:35]
Rory Stewart
Thank you. Thank you
- [59:39]
Alistair Campbell
very. Occasionally I wake up in the middle of the night and think, why am I the one who's put in all these bloody guests, these presidents and prime ministers, and Rory just occasionally wheels in with somebody who spends his time with baboons. And then he says to me, I want to talk to a philosopher. Right. As the team who were in Serbia, I was saying, you know, why we do this guy, this philosopher guy. I thought that was absolutely brilliant.
- [60:07]
Rory Stewart
Oh, thank you.
- [60:08]
Alistair Campbell
Absolutely riveting. Why do I think it was so riveting? Because I am think. I think I am of that mindset that doesn't. I kind of follow it and I listen to what you said on the series and I read books and I've read, you know, some of the big biographers and if I see a big profile of Sam Altman, I'll read it and what have you. But I don't really dive into this in a way that I do with some of the other things that we talk about. And I think that is partly fear. And I think what he's basically saying is, yeah, you're right to be scared. And we've got to confront that, we've got to understand it. And I think the point you raised about where politics is at the moment, I mean, I watched the Tory party local election broadcast the other night and you said, our apologies are stuck in the 80s. I mean, it was just, it was like, you know, we'll give you a stronger economy. We'll, we'll your schools, your, we'll deal with this, we'll deal with that. It felt really back in a different age. And he's basically saying this is the age and you're saying we've got to talk about it more. So I found it. Yeah, I think our people will love that.
- [61:08]
Rory Stewart
I also thought your last question was a really good one because I do think that apart from being, you know, a highly intelligent, articulate guy who, as you said when we're chatting afterwards, is not umming and ahhing a lot and is able to explain very complicated things very simply, which I think is a really, really good definition of intelligence, he's also still independent and as you pointed out, that's very, very rare. God knows what I would feel if one of these companies approached me. And you know, I know one person who took a job was one of them at $200 million a year. But it's wonderful, as he says that he can be so self deprecating about and say, you know, he gets intrusive thoughts, he's very tempted. But it just would be really embarrassing because he set himself up as the guy that doesn't do that, just how powerful that is. And I just wish there was more of that. I mean, I think in a funny way, without being too romantic, I think in the past there were many, many more people who felt a strong sense of embarrassment or shame, which stop them doing things which are becoming increasingly normal in politics. The Trump administration is just the most extreme example. But thank goodness, because most of the people, you're quite right, they get bought. Most of the great AI minds end up with shares in these companies, consultancy groups in these companies. And then what can you really do to call them out?
- [62:28]
Alistair Campbell
It's interesting. The other thing I found really interesting was that he clearly thinks that politicians and governments still can get on top of this. I'm not convinced by that because I think a lot of these people are now so powerful economically and technologically every other way that they really are the sovereign individuals. They really are going to end up with more power. I mean I maybe would have asked him, these people he's talking about, Altman, Musk and the rest of them, are they more or less powerful, say than a president or prime minister of a middle sized Latin American, European, Asian country?
- [63:02]
Rory Stewart
I think much more powerful. I think the only thing that he might say is that we should never underestimate the power of something like the US Federal government. I mean if they wanted, they could lock these people up, put them in jail. Still US government has the army, they don't. Now as a practical point, you're right. These people are so wealthy, so influential and the Trump government so corrupt. This is the perfect storm. It's the worst possible moment to look for sensible long term regulation when you've got Trump in as president. So we've got this explosion of AI, the most dangerous moment in technology in the world, and a president that doesn't care about this stuff at all. And add to that this competition point, which is every one of these leaders says that they're worried about AI safety, but they're not going to do anything about it so long as their competitor has got their foot on the acceleration. Then they make the same argument with China. There's no point else for regular, you make this point, we're not regulating ourselves in the U.S. what happens if China. So it's a kind of prison dilemmas problem. It's a race to the bottom. It's a sense of everybody saying, yeah, of course if it was just up to me, I'd behave much better. But if everyone else is doing it, what's the point of my.
- [64:06]
Alistair Campbell
And I think it does go back to this sort of choice of the future. Whether he's saying it's 50%, whether democracy will less than 50%, whether democracy will survive. That's why I think nine, admittedly it's going very fast, but when he said China's nine months behind, that doesn't feel very long to me. If you're a dictatorship, you can catch up a lot quicker. And especially as they are so bright, they do have, I don't know how many he was talking about, you know, San Francisco, London, but how many great Brains have they got? Currently working on this in China.
- [64:37]
Rory Stewart
Oh, unbelievable. And Tsinghua University is graduating more top level computer scientists than any American college at the moment. And the sheer weight of talent in China you wouldn't want to bet against. Couple of final things for me, I feel that even actually it's one of the reasons I'm feeling quite cheerful about what we're doing at the moment, because I do realize how lucky we are to be able to try to talk relatively openly about things without having to worry too much about what a party donor says or our employer says. I do worry that politicians are so constrained in terms of just being honest and open about what they're thinking about the market. Second thing that's lovely about Will is that lovely moment where he answered you early on when he talked about mental health, about how initially this was unbelievably painful for him. You know, he was stuck in a sort of spectrum, like anxieties about if I bought a cheaper breakfast cereal, I could give more to the extreme poor in Africa and the same. And now has become, as far as I can see, actually sort of surprisingly good humored, witty, relaxed and. And cheerful about the sort of complexities and absurdities of the world. That was quite cheering up.
- [65:48]
Alistair Campbell
I've not quite got there yet. Don't worry.
- [65:51]
Rory Stewart
Many years to go, Alison. Many years to go.
- [65:53]
Alistair Campbell
Anyway, thank you for that. We'll see whether our. I think our regulars will really, really like that. I admitted that Sapolsky was a. Was a surprise hit. But just occasionally, Roy, I'd like you to pull in a president or a prime minister. Okay. Just occasionally.
- [66:07]
Rory Stewart
Well, yeah, yeah. And sometimes when I feel I'm pulling people in, you like to jump in and take the credit for them and say, why aren't you doing it?
- [66:13]
Alistair Campbell
No, excuse me. If you're talking about Kemi B. It took me one text message to get a.
- [66:17]
Will MacAskill
Yes, I was already there.
- [66:19]
Rory Stewart
Do you want to share the text messages from days before? I'm just unlike you. As soon as I'm going somewhere, I'm not immediately showing off to everybody else
- [66:28]
Alistair Campbell
about how well I'm going to show off. An asshole will have a show off. I see.
- [66:31]
Rory Stewart
Or insulting everyone else for doing nothing when they're working hard. That's not a way to motivate a team.
- [66:37]
Alistair Campbell
I think I'm quite good at motivating teams.
- [66:39]
Rory Stewart
Not this team at this rate.
- [66:42]
Will MacAskill
Well, it's probably.
- [66:43]
Alistair Campbell
We're probably wandering into philosophy now.
- [66:45]
Rory Stewart
Yeah, absolutely not. Sure everyone needs to hear this spat about us and Kemi Vadenok. All right. Anyway, Alistair, thank you very much.
- [66:52]
Alistair Campbell
I think our listeners will be very excited if Kemi Vadenok's going tbh.
- [66:55]
Rory Stewart
Okay, thank you very much, Alice. Bye bye.
- [67:04]
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- [67:31]
Gordon Carrera
why did we really go to war with Iraq?
- [67:34]
David McCloskey
And did Saddam Hussein really have weapons of mass destruction?
- [67:39]
Gordon Carrera
I'm Gordon Carrera, national security journalist.
- [67:41]
David McCloskey
And I'm David McCloskey, author and former CIA analyst. We are the hosts of the Rest Is Classified. And in our latest series, we are telling the true story of one of history's biggest intelligence failures. Iraq WMD.
- [67:54]
Gordon Carrera
In 2003, the US and UK told the world that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. But they were wrong.
- [68:03]
David McCloskey
This wasn't a simple lie. It was something far more complicated, far more interesting, and far more dangerous.
- [68:10]
Gordon Carrera
Spies who believed their sources, politicians who wanted the public to believe in the threat, and a dictator who couldn't prove he'd already destroyed the weapons.
- [68:20]
David McCloskey
In this series, we go deep inside the CIA and MI6, go into the rooms where decisions were made, and look at the sources who fabricated the intelligence that took us to war.
- [68:32]
Gordon Carrera
The Iraq war reshaped the Middle east and permanently weakened public trust in governments and intelligence agencies, and its consequences are still playing out today.
- [68:42]
David McCloskey
Plus, in a Declassified Club exclusive, we are joined by three people who were at the heart of the decision to go to war. Former head of MI6 Richard Dearlove, Tony Blair's former communications director, Alistair Campbell, and former ACT acting head of the CIA, Michael Morell.
- [68:57]
Gordon Carrera
So get the full story by listening to the Rest Is Classified and subscribing to the Declassified Club. Wherever you get your podcasts.