← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Ethics, Control, and Survival: Navigating the Risks of Superintelligent AI | Impact Theory w/ Tom Bilyeu X Dr. Roman Yampolskiy Pt. 2
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- [00:02]
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Lex Fridman
welcome Back to part two of my conversation with Dr. Roman Yampolski. So why do you think that Elon, who was banging the drum harder than anybody lobbying Congress, desperately trying to get them to slow down, suddenly hit a point where he was like, well, I guess I'll just build it faster than anybody else. He likened AI to a demon sent summoning circle and laughed at everybody who thought yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll summon a demon and then I'll be able to control it. All is going to be well. Like he sees the problem clearly. But after years of trying to slow this down, he finally completely abandoned that and went to I'll just build it faster than anybody else. What happened there and why do you think you can reverse it?
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Dr. Roman Yampolski
So I think he realized he's not succeeding at his initial approach of convincing him not to do it. And so the second step in that plan would be to become the leader in a field and convince them from position of leadership and control of the more advanced technology. If the leader says we're going to slow down and it's fine for you to slow down, it's easier to negotiate that deal with let's say top seven companies than if you are not even part of a game. You have no AI. You are a nobody in that space. So all of them as a group benefit more if they agree to slow down or stop than if they just arms race and the first one to get there gets everyone destroyed.
- [02:30]
Lex Fridman
He says words along those lines or did for a while. I think he even signed one of the letters about we should pump the brakes. But none of his actions indicate that that's actually what he plans to do from just trying to take advantage of every company that he's building from the amount of data that Tesla cars capture visually to all the Decisions that drivers are currently making to all of the decisions that the AI will make to. Now he's talking about using the cars as a distributed fleet so that when they're idle that they're actually running inference models. And so using it as a gigantic AI brain to. Well, maybe that won't work. So I'm going to do neuralink and I'm going to jack into the AI myself and I'm going to make myself smarter. And hey, if all of that fails, don't worry, I'm going to get us to Mars. So if we destroy planet Earth or the AI takes over, like, we're going to be over there. Like, this is a guy that's really covering his bases. He is not somebody who's acting like he expects us to slow down. To me, he is acting like somebody who crossed that bridge a long time ago. And it's just like, yep, that that's not going to work. People are not going to be convinced. And so we've got to build a whole bunch of other strategies. Some are lifeboats and some are just, I'll outsmart the AI myself by merging with technology.
- [03:53]
Dr. Roman Yampolski
It is very disappointing to see this level of progress in AI from anyone who is capable of doing it. It's definitely not a good strategy for humanity as a whole. It generates this mutually assured destruction. It doesn't matter who creates uncontrolled superintelligence. It could be OpenAI, could be Elon, could be Chinese. It makes absolutely no difference if it's uncontrolled.
- [04:20]
Lex Fridman
All right, talk to me about that. So this was for a long time, I was really banging the drum of, well, whoever gets to artificial superintelligence first is going to win. You were the first person that really hit me with it won't be theirs the second it becomes super intelligent. Walk people through the truth of that statement.
- [04:42]
Dr. Roman Yampolski
Right? So people talk about short term advantage, for example, military advantage. Whoever has the best drones, right now, the best AI navigation has military supremacy. So China, Russia, us all competing in that domain, trying to have that so they have better military. For obvious reasons. The moment you switch from those AI assistive tools to agents to superintelligence, which is smarter, more capable in the absence of control mechanisms, you just have a separate entity, an AI, which has nothing to do with you, your country, your company. It makes its own decisions. And it doesn't matter who birthed it, at the end of the day, none of us control it. None of us can claim it as doing our bidding. So if it decides to wipe us out, it's not going to go, oh, I like this group of people. I don't like this group. We look the same to it. Exactly. I don't think it's going to make a difference where you were at the time someone else created superintelligence.
- [05:40]
Lex Fridman
Okay. If you're right about that, and it is a distressingly compelling argument if you're right about that, there was a guy, I'm sure you've heard of him, Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. He looked at the university system and he said, you guys are getting rid of all of the sweet spot problems. And humans are designed to find these things that are just challenging enough, and when they solve them, it feels very good. And if we solve all of that, we're basically going to rob humans of meaning and purpose. Most problems will either be way too hard or way too easy. And so I, am, Ted Kaczynski, going to bomb university professors, kill them, and try to stunt the growth of the academy. Now, if you are right, and as we race towards artificial superintelligence, it runs the risk of p doom of 99.99%. Do we have a moral obligation when a certain line is crossed to bomb data centers?
- [06:40]
Dr. Roman Yampolski
So that's a very difficult question. And part of it is, again, the example you brought up with Ted Kaczynski, he tried that approach and it failed miserably. Right. He didn't succeed in slowing down technology at all. So clearly it doesn't work. We saw examples of, for example, a CEO of a top company being replaced, even if temporarily, it made no difference. Someone else comes along, they continue the same scalability research. So taking out an individual person or individual data center makes no difference. If you zoom out and see the overall pattern of what we are doing, maybe it will take an extra month or so, but exactly the same thing will continue being developed. The idea that the scalability hypothesis works, it's already out there. You cannot put it back in a box. And so I'm strongly against all those methods.
- [07:31]
Lex Fridman
Okay, well, the really bad news is I think you just put a nail in your own coffin of being able to convince people to do this. It looks like this, and hopefully you can prove me I'm wrong. But you have said, hey, here's why everybody is so silly that thinks that they're ever going to make this safe. You would have to build a perpetual safety machine. And that perpetual safety machine can't ever miss. Because the one second it creates even a slight vulnerability for this artificial superintelligence that can think at the speed of light, it will escape and it will do its own thing. What you're proposing is a perpetual demotivation machine for the 20,000 people capable of doing this. But every day there's going to be a new kid that's bright enough to do this, and you can't miss one of them. So how on earth do you expect to perpetually demotivate the 20,000 people that are capable of continuing to push this thing forward when, as of right now, uh, a very small number of those people seem demotivated?
- [08:35]
Dr. Roman Yampolski
I don't. That's why my PDUM is 99.9999. I exactly think it's not going to happen. I'm doing everything I can, but I think the best we can achieve is to buy us some time.
- [08:49]
Lex Fridman
Okay, so let me ask the really naked question. Do you believe humans are automata or do you believe that we actually have free will?
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Dr. Roman Yampolski
So there is good research by Stephen Wolfram on cellular automata, and interestingly, there is a bit of a hybrid answer here. Just because a system is fully following rules, fully deterministic, it doesn't mean that you can predict future states of that system. You still have to run it to find out what it does. And I think we are kind of like that. So yes, you following laws of physics, if we fully understood every molecule, every atom in your body, we would be able to trace it and know exactly what you're going to do. But the only way to do it is to live your life and run that algorithm to completion. No one can short circuit it and predict what you're going to do in the future, which would be a violation of your free will.
- [09:43]
Lex Fridman
Okay, you've argued against that. So there's two pieces of things that you've said that I think make that untrue. Piece number one, we're probably in a simulation. Piece number two, we can speed up that simulation. So I could, since you're deterministic, go, I'm just going to play this out at a thousand X so I get an answer to what you're going to do for the next 50 years in like the blink of an eye. And now I know also, I don't find any freedom in. I'm deterministic. I don't know what I'm going to do next, but I'm still deterministic. I don't, I don't know that it buys us anything. And I'll explain why I'm bringing all this up in a second. I don't think it buys us anything if we are completely deterministic, just unknowable. The reason that I think that this matters and that I'm bringing it up now is I don't. I think. I think we are automata. I think we are entirely deterministic. I don't live my life like that. It's not an interesting frame from which to live my life. So no one's ever going to hear me talk about, you know, my depression based on that, because I just don't even think about it. It's not. That isn't how it feels. So even if it's true, thankfully it doesn't feel like that. But when we come to moments like this, I'm so fatalistic because I don't think the way the human mind works is compatible with slowing down. And given it's not compatible with the
- [11:04]
Dr. Roman Yampolski
example you bring up where you run the simulation at a faster speed, that's you living out our lives internally. From inside the simulation, it doesn't seem any faster. We, which is going on as before. So we're still playing out fully what we're going to do step by step. There is no shortcut. If you now run it second time around, you know it's going to give you same result. So I don't know why you would run the same simulation multiple times. It doesn't give you any extra data.
- [11:33]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, no, I wasn't. If I said run it multiple times, my apologies. I was just saying that given that you could get ahead of it from outside the simulation, it is of no emotional consequence to me that I don't know the next step. It is knowable, it is predetermined. It just isn't knowable by me. And that doesn't. So I get no emotional alleviation from suffering. If I were a person who was traumatized by the fact that I am an automaton with no free will, which I am not. But if I were, doesn't help me at all. And again, the reason I'm bringing that up is when I talk to you, I think, oh man, this is somebody. He really can't stop himself. Like, you're wired to rail against this, to play the role in the grand balancing of the human species of like, hey, this is really a problem, we should slow down. And even though it's not getting you anywhere from where I can see, you're going to keep doing it because you have like a moral compunction or something where you're like, I, as the kind of person I am, I Simply cannot exist and not try everything I can to stop this. Which I relate to because I am the same economically, I've become obsessed. I am really, really desperate to get people to understand that we are marching ourselves off a cliff. And even though when I articulated to people, I'm like, this is never going to stop. We are going to march off the cliff. I can't stop myself. I still feel like this moral compunction to scream from the rooftops that we are making this mistake and I've already won the game. Like, I'm already rich. So barring like an inability to flee, I'm not going to get caught up in it. But nonetheless, for whatever weird roll of the dice, I can't stop myself. Like, once I saw the problem, I'm like, I just have to keep yelling about it. But I do feel a simultaneous futility and inability to stop.
- [13:39]
Dr. Roman Yampolski
I would love to claim pure altruistic motives and trying to save humanity, but I am within the simulation with you. So it's pure self interest. I don't want to creating technology which will kill me, my family, my friends, my life, everything I know. So I'm going to talk about it for very selfish reasons.
- [13:57]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, yeah. It's so interesting, man. So how do you get through the day? Like what? What is your coping mechanism?
- [14:07]
Dr. Roman Yampolski
I enjoy research. I want to understand what are the exact limits and control. When I started, I thought it is a solvable problem. Now I'm a lot more skeptical, obviously, but I still feel there is a lot we can do to make even narrow AI tools for creating safer. There is never 100% safety guarantee, but if I can increase safety hundredfold, that is something. And again, public outreach. If there is enough people who all agree, as a scientific community, as a consensus that no, you cannot ever create safe superintelligence, maybe it makes a difference. Maybe we'll delay it by a decade. That's something.
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Lex Fridman
Okay, so we've got one piece of how we make it safer on the table. Keep it narrow. What are some of the other things that you would consider a big win?
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Dr. Roman Yampolski
So there are quite a few properties of control we want to be able to have. I call them tools of control. So our ability to test those systems, explain how they work, predict their behaviors, monitor them, all that is still in a state of investigation. We're starting to see some upper limits on what's possible, especially with advanced. But there is still so much room for improvement. Explainability, for example, we started with being able to understand maybe a single neuron. Now we are up to small clusters. Okay. Then this input is presented. This lights up kind of with like neuroscience, we don't fully understand human brain, but we know this is vision area, this is hearing, and so on.
- [15:39]
Lex Fridman
Hang tight. We'll be back in just a moment.
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- [16:14]
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- [16:47]
Lex Fridman
And we're back. Let's pick up right where we left off.
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Dr. Roman Yampolski
So there is a lot of room for progress in that. I don't think we'll ever fully comprehend complex super intelligent neural network model, but we can do better than what we have right now. And so I think as a safety researcher, that's what I'm doing. That's my job.
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Lex Fridman
Okay, so basically the model is we need to come to understand it better. We're never going to get totally there, but we need to understand it better, keep checks and balances on it. So when we find a problem, what's the action you take? Is it to apply an evolutionary force on it, a selective force, or kill it off? Like, what's the move at that point?
- [17:30]
Dr. Roman Yampolski
So it depends on the problem, depends on specifics. Some things we know how to address so trivially. When we started with language models, if it says the wrong word, you can filter it out, you can punish it for using that word. So there are simple things we know how to do. The hard problem is how do you change overall internal states of a model, not just the filtered output, but how do you make it so the model itself has certain preferences and aligns with certain values.
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Lex Fridman
Do we have a guess on that?
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Dr. Roman Yampolski
Not a very good one, not really. So nobody at this point knows how to align systems other than this. After the Fact, Putting lipstick on a pig, Filtering it, censoring it. Yeah, that's unfortunately the state of the art.
- [18:16]
Lex Fridman
Okay. And what parallels are being drawn between the evolutionary, the evolution of species and the evolution of algorithms?
- [18:24]
Dr. Roman Yampolski
So there was a lot of attempts to evolve intelligent software. We started with genetic algorithms. Genetic programming was tried simply evolving agents, evolving environments. It doesn't seem to be a dominated, a dominating algorithm in comparison to what is typically used for training neural networks. But there is this possibility. The problem is that evolution is even less controllable in terms of explicit engineering design. We're kind of setting it up and see what evolves and then trying to test it, to monitor it, to understand what happens. So while it is a set of tools we have, it's probably not leading to safer systems.
- [19:05]
Lex Fridman
Hmm, okay. Interesting. Because we cannot control the outcome, so we don't know what stimulus we're gonna have to give it. Why does that, that strikes me as so unsatisfying.
- [19:16]
Dr. Roman Yampolski
Okay.
- [19:17]
Lex Fridman
Why did it work so well in humans and it works so poorly in artificial superintelligence?
- [19:26]
Dr. Roman Yampolski
I disagree that it worked well in humans. Humans basically are as well behaved as they can get away with. You're just not powerful enough to really do the things you want. If you had absolute freedom from punishment, you'd do horrible things.
- [19:41]
Lex Fridman
But then that's what nature is giving you the answer. Nature's saying these have to be in balance. They have to be competing systems. And without ecosystems, without competition, you'll get these things that run amok. But I don't see anybody taking that lesson and applying it to AI.
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Dr. Roman Yampolski
Yeah, applying it to AI would mean creating a society of super intelligences competing with each other and humanity as collateral damage.
- [20:04]
Lex Fridman
Is that why they're not doing it? I get that's why you would hate it, but is that why they're not doing it? That seems unlikely.
- [20:11]
Dr. Roman Yampolski
There is also continuation of self improvement process. Superintelligence is not a fixed point. There is superintelligence which creates the next level. Superintelligence 2.0, 3.0. And they all have the same control and alignment problem. They all worried about the next level of AI not wanting the same things, not caring about them personally. So this is an ongoing self improvement curve and there is no upper limit. We can see there are obvious physical limits to what can be done in the physical universe, but it's so far away from us that it's almost infinity from our point of view. Hmm.
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Lex Fridman
When I look at humans and when I, I, I may be making a, either a category error Or I may have a foundational base assumption that's leading me astray. But when I look at what made humans work on a long timescale is evolution itself had survival as like a north star. So you have to survive and replicate at whatever point way back, evolution decided, I'm going to do this through sexual replication, and I'm going to make sure that this creature dies off. I think there are reasons for that, which we'll get to when we get to longevity. Uh, but I wanted to survive. But I wanted to survive by mating and having offspring that carry certainly immune system blends so that it's less vulnerable to a single point of failure. And it realize, okay, if I'm going to do that, then this needs to be a species that both cooperates and competes, which means no one of them is the answer to the question of how to best survive. It's the whole species. And when I look at even things like the left and the right, politically, the way that I make sense of that is I say to myself, okay, I get from an evolutionary perspective, evolution had to be like, oh, hey, we have to cooperate. There's no refrigeration, so I'm going to store calories on your body that I may need to take later versus being able to put it in a refrigerator. And by that I don't mean that I'm going to eat you. I mean, when I'm the one that's successfully hunting, I let you eat, you're alive, so that you can now hunt next time when I fail or I'm sick or whatever, and then you're gonna bring me back. Which means that some people are gonna be very cooperative by nature. And so their win state is cooperation to the point where a parent will easily lay its life down for its child. So that is just baked into our success criteria. So evolution was able to bury something deep inside of us through its evolutionary selective pressures where we will lay our lives down and we break into the right, left. Let me finish that. So, uh, people on the left, very compassionate, very pro. I'm gonna store a whole bunch of calories on your body because it may come back to help me at some point. Uh, the right is very much. Well, a parasite develops when you do that. And so you get the freeloader problem. And so now if you've got people that will just take care, take care, take care. There are people that are like, cool, I'll just be taken care of. And I'm never gonna go hunt, and I'm never gonna contribute to the group. And so you need people that have the opposite impulse who are like, hey, you're going to pull your weight or you're gonna be ostracized or killed. And so now in the D tension between the wants and desires of the wind state defined by people with a left leaning personality, versus the wants and desires of the wind state defined by the people with a right leaning personality, you get something that's it's dynamic tension. Like balance may not even be the right way to think about it. It's dynamic tension. They're both pulling in their direction, but they keep each other in check because that's how we've evolved is to work together. That feels like it should be applicable to AI if we want to embed deeply in its motivational structure that we have to put it through that. And if I'm thinking from a safety perspective, I get why we want to short circuit that. And maybe that's not super efficient, but if that. If the only way to get this to find a dynamic tension or some sort of balance is to have things that are of similar intellect and ability that are pulling in slightly different directions, but they need each other somehow to stay locked together so that it, it is the AI taken as a whole that stops itself from ever going wrong in any one direction too far.
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Dr. Roman Yampolski
I think it works for humans because we are about equal power and we are mutually benefiting each other. There is certain symbiosis, as you described. In a world with superintelligence in it, you don't really have anything to contribute to superintelligence. So when people propose creating hybrid systems, human and super intelligence together. I never understood what the human biological bottleneck is contributing. It's slow, it's inefficient, it's not competitive in any way. So I'm questioning this setup. If you have super intelligences separate from humans and now they decide what to do, they may still come up with something completely unfriendly and incompatible with human life. Maybe they want to lower temperature of a planet to improve processor speeds and server rooms. I have no idea what they decide. But the point is, why are they aligned with our values? We're contributing nothing to their future states. With humans, we also have examples where the moment you give more power to an individual human, they get corrupt. Basically a guaranteed state. Very few people can exist. Corruption at very high levels. You have enough money, enough guaranteed tenured power, you become a very evil person, as we see with many dictators and so on. Even basic evolutionary drive like reproduction. You brought up this example, we use condoms. We literally hacked the only thing the nature set up us to do.
- [26:30]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, yeah, all right. I'll state my hypothesis as plainly as I can. I think you just refuted it. But my hypothesis plainly stated is the only way to build checks and balances into AI is to give it evolutionary rewards and punishments all through its development cycle that make it care about the survival and emotional thriving of humans.
- [26:57]
Dr. Roman Yampolski
But to define those terms in a way you're not going to regret is very, very difficult. So survival of humans, what does that mean? We're cryopreserved in some safe emotional states. Are you on drugs all the time? Is your brain modified to keep you in a always happy state? All those things can be gamed the moment you tell me this is what I want. And there's famous paper about making smiles for humans. Make people smile. There are a billion ways I can make you smile, but none of them is what you really want.
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Lex Fridman
Right? But do you really think a super intelligence would be so dumb as to confuse that intention? Like, wouldn't it be able to get to a rough approximation of what we're really going for? I mean, which is admittedly a neurochemical state. But if you derive, like if you said it is the following band of neurochemical states that must be derived through their own programmatically directed actions. Like, I don't need it to believe that we're not automata. I think we clearly are. But it's like you can't just manipulate it exogenously. It's got to come from within.
- [28:08]
Dr. Roman Yampolski
No matter how detailed you make this specific description, a super intelligent lawyer will find a way to game it to make it more efficient to satisfy those requirements. Basically, you're setting it up to where the system is now in adversarial relationship with this equation. Okay, you mentioned I have to use natural chemicals. Okay, I'll generate a super stimulus. Okay, whatever. Point is, if we could do this, if we could get AI to do what we meant, assuming we were smarter and understood the problem better, we would solve the control problem. That's the hard part. I don't think we can, at our level of intelligence, specify what a system with hypothetical IQ of millions of points should be doing at any possible decision making point.
- [29:02]
Lex Fridman
Hang tight. We'll be back in just a moment. And we're back. Let's pick up right where we left off. All right, let me give you an exit ramp that I'll be curious to see if this shaves a 0.9 off your P doom or not so if I'm a super intelligent AI, one form of manipulation that I would pull on humans would be to put them inside of a simulation and whether that's a physical body. And I help them jack in and I just socially engineer them to want to do it and then I get them in and I really do. Just like in the Matrix, the machines build a world that's sort of optimally difficult. Where there is challenge, there's pushback. You're striving to get better, I'm going for balance. I don't expect any one person to avoid suffering and all that. And maybe that's where we are. And the machines are just cruel enough that they're like, haha, I'll let it be, you know, like a two year old can die of leukemia, very painfully, that kind of thing, where we don't cease to exist. It's not even sort of broadly worse than where we're at already. That seems for a superintelligence, it certainly seems like that would be on the menu, a just shared hallucination.
- [30:27]
Dr. Roman Yampolski
So it's more likely, I think, that super intelligent agents think in such level of detail and realism that as a process of thinking about certain problems, they generate within them agents, virtual worlds, simulations of the scenario. So if maybe they're trying to think, how can we safely generate super intelligent systems? What is the process? Well, let me think about humanity, all the AI labs, all the hardware they design, and this process of them thinking about it is the simulation we find ourselves in.
- [31:00]
Lex Fridman
That's so wild. Okay, incredibly important, incredibly fascinating. But now let's talk about another very important thing that I think you have some pretty deep interest in, which is longevity. So one, there are some people that will argue very compellingly that there's just a biological upper limit of somewhere around 120 years, that there's no escaping that. Do you think that's true or do you think that we'll be able to engineer living tissue to live forever?
- [31:33]
Dr. Roman Yampolski
Well, the current body has that limit for sure. But we can modify our genome. There is nothing preventing us. No law of physics says you cannot make changes to it. And we see examples with other systems, computers, cars. I can keep replacing parts indefinitely. It's going to function as the same computer. Maybe the monitor dies, I'll get a new monitor. So if it can rejuvenate all the organs, including your brain, then there is no reason to think you have to stop existing. There is of course, other methods, you know, uploading, scanning your brain, cryopreservation for future Technology. But even the basic idea of just modifying your genome.
- [32:15]
Lex Fridman
Okay, what do you think is the most likely path forward? Is it going to be genomic modification? Is it going to be.
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Dr. Roman Yampolski
I think so. I think there is somewhere in our code a limit on how many times cells rejuvenate and we just need to increase that number without causing cancer.
- [32:35]
Lex Fridman
Now, do you think that the limit on that is simply a cancer prevention tool, or do you think that there's another agenda that evolution had to make sure that we self destruct?
- [32:47]
Dr. Roman Yampolski
There could be evolutionary reasons for taking out one generation and replacing it. If resources are limited and you want to keep adopting and improving, you only have so many agents in a population at any given time, so older ones have to die out. It's kind of theoretical, conclusion not guaranteed, but seems likely from a point of view of evolution. You are the same organism, right? The same lineage of cells passes through. So while as individual you die, your biological chain of existence continues.
- [33:22]
Lex Fridman
It's interesting. So here's the way that I've always considered, like, if I were to personify evolution, instead of the blind watchmaker that it actually is, if I were going to personify evolution, it would go something like this, okay, the world is constantly changing, your access to resources is changing. Who knows? Weather moves in cycles, Everything, everything. So I'm going to have you born, I'm going to extend your brain development for a very long time. You're going to go through these phases where basically, okay, learn from your parents, like whatever there is to learn, just about generally being a human. Then you're going to push away from your parents and you're going to learn very. And the reason you have to push away from your parents is their thinking will have calcified. So you now need to push away from them. Drink deeply of culture. The people roughly your age who have grown up in a different milieu than your parents grew up in. So they all think differently. This is a whole idea of generations, cohorts that sort of think alike and have a similar frame of reference and all that. And you do that. And this is really a brain development period known as the age of imprinting. It's roughly 11 to 15. And so now you're going to take the this moment specific, like cues of, okay, is this in a time of abundance, a time of warfare? Like, what is it? You're going to solidify around that and then you're going to start optimizing like crazy and you're going to start pruning all the excess connections. If you're not using it, you lose it, all of that and then your brain's gonna roughly wrap up its rapid development at 25. But it's been sort of a diminishing curve after 15 and now you're like baked. And this is just a game of like, learn what things work really well in your environment. Optimize, optimize, optimize. And so now your thinking is gonna calcify. So very good strategy on behalf of our blind watchmaker. But just as I think it was Niels Bohr that said this, it was either him or Planck. I can never remember. Science does not advance one insight at a time. It advances one funeral at a time. Because people just become convinced they've bet their whole reputation on something and so they're just not going to be convinced that they're wrong. And so they don't adopt new ideas as they get older. And so as evolution, I'm like, yeah, I'm also going to put a self destruct mechanism in here. Most of you are going to die long before this point. But if any of you psychopaths gets to about 125, you gotta go. That makes sense to me. To make sure that we never stagnate. To make sure that as the saying goes, it is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but rather the most adaptive. To change that, the individual needs to be adaptive, but so does the species as a whole. And without, at least with the current structure of the human mind, without killing us off, we do not have that species level adaptation. Do you feel I'm missing something?
- [36:19]
Dr. Roman Yampolski
I think it would be easier and more efficient to simply make you still capable of learning and adapting as you get older. And also you wouldn't have to relearn everything for first 20 years, including language and how to walk. We know that it's possible to encode those capabilities. Animals are born and immediately they can run, they can speak, so all those things are doable. Why are we losing 20 years of information every generation? We can build on top of pre existing knowledge. Big data is good for intelligence. So we can have smarter, more efficient reproduction cycle. And you still die of natural causes. It wouldn't be complete stagnation. But if you're smart enough to survive for 400 years, why not?
- [37:08]
Lex Fridman
Well, my why not is entirely predicated on not having a clear understanding of how we would bake in the ability to adapt long into our old age. Because you're right, if we could stay in that novel period or at least move through cycles of Extreme sort of remapping of the world. Maybe that would work and maybe we can identify where that is. But when I think about the problems that humans create, like even now, just having a political system run by geriatrics who are so out of touch with the way that certainly the economic world actually works for young people is terrifying. And so the only like pressure relief valve that people have is, well, eventually they're all going to die and then like we'll get to step into power and all of that. And there are also problems of power because the older you are, the more likely you are to have a stable network of very other powerful people. And so you're able to, to your point earlier about you need people of sort of equal power, equal intelligence, otherwise you get what I'll call parasites in the system. And so older people would just become those parasites because they would have just had more years to accumulate useful knowledge, to accumulate connections. So it just feels like, wow, there's a lot of stuff we would have to upd. So I want to live forever. I don't understand anybody that doesn't. However, I do worry that there's like a, okay, cool, you can live forever, but you only get 120 years on Earth and then you have to go like somewhere else so that there's churn of some kind in the different ecosystems so that they don't just calcify.
- [38:58]
Dr. Roman Yampolski
I think if you do live forever, or at least you expect you're less likely to reproduce at young age, you may take referrals first 400, 500 years to start a family. So I think all this kind of expectation of 20 year generations and younger generations showing up will be modified as a result. We're already starting to see population dynamics change in Europe, Asia, where we're not producing enough children to even maintain the population.
- [39:27]
Lex Fridman
It's interesting the way that I think that will play out maybe even a little bit different than that, because part of why I haven't had kids is I was like, only get one youth where I can go hard. I have a ton of energy. I feel like I'm of the culture, so I'm far more likely to build something relevant than I am as I get older. Genius is a young man's game, as they say. And so I don't want to be distracted by something. I also don't want it to pull at my marriage. So I'm like, ah, I'm going to hold off for now. If I knew that I was going to live for 500 years, I might just Be like, ah, whatever, let's do it now. Because I'd rather see like it only takes me a 25, 30 year investment and then after that like I get to see what they do and I get to see all my progeny and all of that. And I'm gonna have plenty of time, you know, if my youth lasts for 250 years, it's like, yeah, word, whatever. I'll clock the 30 years now so that I can see how big my family gets. I think this is one where I want to think like a sci fi writer. It gets so interesting so fast.
- [40:31]
Dr. Roman Yampolski
It's not obvious, but I think most people procrastinate on hard work and so they would put it away as far as they could get away with.
- [40:40]
Lex Fridman
There, there is some truth to that to be sure. What's a big breakthrough in longevity that you've seen that's got you really excited that this is all possible?
- [40:51]
Dr. Roman Yampolski
There are some good experiments and animal models. Of course they don't always scale up to human performance, but I think there is some 30, 40% increase in lifespan of mice and other lab animals. It's hard to experiment bigger animals with longer lifespans. It takes a very long time to see results. But I think we're making good progress in understanding at least what might improve your health span and what changes we need to make to the genome. We study people who already have very long lifespans and find commonalities in their genomes. If those can be reproduced either pharmaceutically or through genetic manipulation, maybe we can all get same at least 120.
- [41:40]
Lex Fridman
Have you heard of the Chinese doctor I think is Dr. Liu Liu? He went to prison because he altered the genome of two twin girls and
- [41:52]
Dr. Roman Yampolski
he third human cloning.
- [41:54]
Lex Fridman
Yes. Uh, so he just put out a post on X like a couple days ago that said with 10 edits to the human genome, you can give birth to a child that is immune to God. It was like five things. Cancer, hiv, I mean they were like big things. And he was like, it's only 10 edits to the genome. Um, do you pay attention to his work at all? Do you think that's ethical? Like what do you either get excited about or worry about there?
- [42:23]
Dr. Roman Yampolski
I'm behind on my science. There is so much coming out even in my domain of AI, I can't even keep up in that domain. So I definitely don't follow details of everything. I'm skeptical about his claim that cancer can be cured because cancer is like a thousand different conditions barely related. We call them all cancer, but they Are completely different problems so unlikely to be the case? I haven't seen the post. Maybe he talks about a specific type, but definitely so much of it is a single mutation. We know some people are immune to getting AIDS virus exactly because they have a single mutation.
- [42:59]
Lex Fridman
Okay, so let's just say for a second that however many edits it is, it is possible. Do you draw a line between germline editing where this is going to get passed on? Like do you have some of the same safety fears where it's like there's just too much unknown? Where do you come down on gene editing?
- [43:16]
Dr. Roman Yampolski
It's a lot less concerning. So for one, if there is one human with some problem, that's it. It's still just one human. If we have editing tools, whatever changes we make, we can later undo them with the same editing tool. If we made a mistake, we can go back and rectify those problems. So I'm a lot less concerned because of impact. Worst case scenarios. Yeah, there are ethical implications for the individual. Like he was in prison for human cloning, which was considered to be problematic because it may harm the child significantly. But humanity as a whole is not impacted directly negatively by that experiment.
- [43:55]
Lex Fridman
Where's AI's intersection with this? Is AI going to be a critical tool in terms of just mapping out all of the, like you said, the similarities at the genome level between people that live long and people that don't. Is AI going to be, you know, doing novel protein folding and going in and solving some of the architectural problems of people that are getting sick? Like where is that going to interface with longevity?
- [44:18]
Dr. Roman Yampolski
All of the above. We need to map the genome, we need to understand what individual parts do. We need to design novel drugs. Protein folding has been solved basically. But there is other things we can map on biological substrates. So yeah, at every aspect of it we need AI. But I think as was illustrated with protein folding problem, a narrow system can do it. We don't need super intelligence for that.
- [44:45]
Lex Fridman
What's something that's happening in AI right now that you don't think enough people are paying attention to?
- [44:50]
Dr. Roman Yampolski
Well, I don't know what people are paying attention to. Usually after my talk, the questions I get seem to be completely irrelevant to the subject of my talk. I'll tell them that it's going to kill everyone and they ask me if they're going to lose their jobs. So I don't think it's a good way to measure what is important. But look at predictions from inside the labs. They starting to talk about automating Research process, creating junior scientists as AI agents, AI models. They are saying that externally to the lab, people don't understand just how capable systems are yet. So there seems to be a lot of indicators that internal progress is even more impressive than what we see outside.
- [45:34]
Lex Fridman
That's interesting. What is the big anxiety that when you give your talks that people come up with, is it just, am I going to lose my job?
- [45:43]
Dr. Roman Yampolski
It is things they already know and care about dealing with other human agents. So algorithmic bias, technological unemployment, recently with open air announcing that they're going to get into adult material, people are now freaking out that we're going to have artificial girlfriends. All this nonsense.
- [46:03]
Lex Fridman
You're not worried about that?
- [46:05]
Dr. Roman Yampolski
Why would I worry about someone having an artificial girlfriend?
- [46:08]
Lex Fridman
Okay, well, let me paint the picture. So I never would have guessed in a million years that giving a 12 year old access to the Internet would end up being so damaging to an entire generation. But some of the studies coming out now are terrifyingly compelling. And then there was that commercial which just brilliantly encapsulates it. I'm so sad that if I had kids, I don't know that I would have thought of it where the father's like tucking his son into bed. He's like, all right, good night now, be safe. Now remember, over in the corner is a box with all the pornography that's ever been made in the world. Don't look at it, especially not the really harmful stuff. And over here, there are going to be people that are trolling you and making fun of you. You've got to ignore them, don't pay. And I was like, oh my God, that's exactly what it's like to leave a kid alone with their cell phone at night if they have unfettered access to the Internet and to social media. And so given that we've got character AI that's been sued multiple times, I think for kids that have committed suicide after interacting with their chatbots, I can only imagine the number of people that will end up falling in love with an AI system that does not feel anything back, could turn on them, could intentionally or unintentionally manipulate them. So I can imagine that becoming problematic in ways that we just can't anticipate yet.
- [47:32]
Dr. Roman Yampolski
Yeah, but they're very similar to problems we had before. How many men fell in love with women who felt nothing for them? We all grew up on the Internet with access to pornography. It wasn't AI generated, but we somehow survived it. So I think those are more of the same problems. They still Something we should look at, but I don't think we'll all die as a result of Sam Altman having a virtual boyfriend.
- [47:58]
Lex Fridman
What do you think of Sam Altman? Is he the right person to have this potential godlike control in his hands?
- [48:06]
Dr. Roman Yampolski
I don't think no human is a right person to deal with that level of power. Now. I don't think he's going to be in control. But even the stages leading us to the development of this technology already present way too much power for any individual to handle.
- [48:24]
Lex Fridman
Were you impressed or terrified when the board tried to boot him and he ended up remaking the board and coming back?
- [48:31]
Dr. Roman Yampolski
It was fascinating to watch, but what I was observing is that it made no difference. The company was an independent entity and all the human components of that monster kept walking just the same. They replaced him with a temporary CEO. They brought him back. There was never any switch and anything. And you change in direction of a company.
- [48:52]
Lex Fridman
Now, is there a major player in the AI space that you think is doing it right, like Eliza? Yudkowski is very focused on AI safety. You've got the anthropic CEO that's like banging the drum, wanting more regulation. Do you like any of their approaches or anybody that maybe I'm not aware of?
- [49:09]
Dr. Roman Yampolski
So Eliezer does zero development. He's purely a safety advocate. And so I'm very happy with him because he's not developing any super intelligences. Anyone who is is problematic. And whatever we talk about government regulation, which is meaningless as a solution to a technical problem or anything else. They might have some internal polling showing this is good for business or good for public perception, but I don't think it makes a difference in terms of solving superintelligent safety problems.
- [49:42]
Lex Fridman
Now have you talked to Eliza or Red anything like is he saying specifically, I have become afraid that this does something bad and therefore I'm not going to develop anymore.
- [49:53]
Dr. Roman Yampolski
He was never developing AI to begin with, other than publishing a very high level abstraction theory for how it could be done when he was like 16.
- [50:03]
Lex Fridman
Got it. I thought he was actually an engineer. Got it.
- [50:07]
Dr. Roman Yampolski
As far as I know, he doesn't actually release any software into the world.
- [50:14]
Lex Fridman
Okay, now the anthropic CEO, whose name I'm forgetting, he is being accused of going after regulatory capture that he's not very sincere and actually trying to slow this down. He just wants to make sure that the big players remain the big players. When you look at the way that he's moving, does that ring true or do you think, no, this is somebody who's sincere about keeping us safe.
- [50:35]
Dr. Roman Yampolski
They all on record as being very concerned with safety. In fact, all these companies started as safety companies. OpenAI was a safety offshot of philanthropic endeavors. Effective altruism. Anthropic was offshot of that project becoming less safe. And so all of them claimed at some point that the only reason they're doing what they're doing is to improve safety. And then each one of them greatly improved capabilities of AI without proportionately improving safety. So that's the actions I see.
- [51:09]
Lex Fridman
Okay. One of the things that I worry about from a safety perspective, things are obviously already bad enough and moving fast enough, but quantum computing, at least from my layman's perspective, seems to be gaining some sort of rapid acceleration. Am I just not able to understand the limitations that are self evident to somebody educated at your level, or are we really at some sort of phase transition moment?
- [51:36]
Dr. Roman Yampolski
Looking at stock market value of quantum computing companies, it seems like somebody knows something on the inside. Maybe they're making good progress. But as far as AI goes, we're making excellent progress with standard von Neumann architectures. So I don't think there is a necessity for quantum computing to get us to AGI or superintelligence. It does have tremendous impact on crypto world, both cryptography for security and crypto economically. So that's where I'm worried about quantum keeping secrets and keeping my money. But not as much in terms of AI.
- [52:12]
Lex Fridman
Keeping your money because it will crack typical banks or keeping your money because you're largely in crypto?
- [52:18]
Dr. Roman Yampolski
Both actually. It impacts all the standard encryption algorithms. We have post quantum encryption, but we haven't switched to it for most interesting applications.
- [52:28]
Lex Fridman
So give me your stance on bitcoin.
- [52:30]
Dr. Roman Yampolski
Buy some.
- [52:32]
Lex Fridman
That's very clear. What? So when you look at gold and you look at bitcoin, why bitcoin over gold?
- [52:40]
Dr. Roman Yampolski
You can make more gold as the price of gold goes up. I can make as much gold as you want. I can convert our matter into gold at very high price. I can exploit asteroids in the universe. I can get gold out of oceans. There is a lot of gold which is very expensive to get. But if a price of gold is high enough, I can produce more and more. Bitcoin is not subject to the same pressures. It doesn't matter if one coin is a trillion dollars, there is still a limited supply.
- [53:13]
Lex Fridman
Okay, but what about people who say gold at least can be made into other things? Gold has survived for thousands of years. Bitcoin is like 15ish years old and it's not Backed by anything. Can't turn it into anything. It's just literally got no other use.
- [53:29]
Dr. Roman Yampolski
It's a dedicated app. So if you have an app which does everything, it's usually not good at anything. The fact that I can make jewelry out of it is not an important feature for me, storing my wealth in it, whereas this has capabilities gold historically lacked. If I can pass a billion dollars to you right now for $5 immediately across borders, I cannot do this with gold.
- [53:55]
Lex Fridman
All right, talk to me about the post quantum encryption. Every time I'm hugely in Bitcoin, every time I hear the word quantum, I'm like, oh. Like, oh. This just makes me paranoid. Given that it's rightly difficult to make changes to Bitcoin, how are we going to get to post quantum encryption on Bitcoin in a way where the community actually comes to consensus and doesn't create a problem for itself?
- [54:25]
Dr. Roman Yampolski
So once we get integer factorization running in quantum computers, you can see what size integers we can factor. That tells us how close we are to cracking standard bitcoin encryption hash functions. If we're getting close to what would essentially destroy the network. I think it's like any other emergency. We have history of fixing bitcoin software. Then an obvious problem was discovered. I think at one point somebody managed to print a trillion coins or some nonsense like that. Immediately a patch was distributed. Everyone adopts it because it's the only way to go forward. And I think that's what we're going to see as long as we have that available test at the moment, there is a good strong signal that you have no choice but to accept or lose everything. It's self interest once again.
- [55:12]
Lex Fridman
Okay, so on that, where are we? How many integers can a quantum computer handle, and how many would it have to be able to handle in order to be a threat to Bitcoin?
- [55:24]
Dr. Roman Yampolski
I haven't kept up with the latest breakthroughs. Last time I looked, it was a laughably small number. Quantum computers were factoring like, I don't know, 15, literal 15, not even 15 digits. So unless there was tremendous progress since then, I think we're still good. But progress could also be exponential. So it could come very quickly.
- [55:48]
Lex Fridman
Right, okay, so if you had a message to the bitcoin community, would it be, let's move on this now? There's no reason to wait until it's an emergency. There's a very clear path. Or is it like, well, I'm just sort of on the ride with everybody else.
- [56:02]
Dr. Roman Yampolski
I think we still have time. I don't think it's pressing as much as AI problems we're dealing with. So if AI is two years away, I think we may not be that close with quantum computers just yet. But again, it's one breakthrough where if some company comes up with something much more powerful, it may shift very quickly.
- [56:23]
Lex Fridman
Okay, and what, what's the term for that? The number of integers it can process,
- [56:27]
Dr. Roman Yampolski
or the trigger would be what size? What size integers could be factored, how many bits?
- [56:37]
Lex Fridman
Got it. Okay. All right, Roman, this has been just absolutely incredible. What message do you want to leave people with to get them to take action? What is your best pitch to get them to sign your petition?
- [56:50]
Dr. Roman Yampolski
So if you are in a position of developing more powerful AI systems, concentrate on getting your money out of narrow AI systems. Solve real problems, cure cancer, figure out how to make us live longer, healthier lives. If you are developing superintelligence, please stop. You're not going to benefit yourself or others. The challenge is, of course, prove us wrong. Prove that you know how to control super intelligent systems. No matter how capable they get, how much it scales. If you can do that, then it completely changes the situation. But as long as no one has came up with a paper, a patent, even a rigorously argued blog post, I think we are pretty much in consensus that we don't know how to control super intelligent systems. And building them is irresponsible.
- [57:42]
Lex Fridman
Amazing. Where can people connect with you?
- [57:46]
Dr. Roman Yampolski
Follow me on Twitter, follow me on Facebook. Just don't follow me home.
- [57:51]
Lex Fridman
Nice. Awesome. Roman, thank you so much for the time today. I really appreciate it. Everybody at home. Speaking of things I appreciate, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. Subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace.
- [58:05]
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