← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Megathreat: Why AI Is So Dangerous & How It Could Destroy Humanity | Mo Gawdat Pt 2
01:27:59
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If you work in university maintenance, Grainger considers you an MVP because your playbook ensures your arena is always ready for tip off. And Grainger is your trusted partner, offering the products you need all in one place, from H Vac and plumbing supplies to lighting and more. And all delivered with plenty of time left on the clock so your team always gets the win. Call 1-800-GRAINGER visit grainger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done. Welcome back for Part two With Mo Gadot, the former Chief Business Officer of Google X, we're talking about the risks and rewards of artificial intelligence. As a reminder, whether AI ends up being a kill switch for humanity or the greatest boon since atomic energy is going to be up to us. And in today's episode, we dive into the alarming truth of how vulnerable we actually are to AI and how we can align with AI, the nature of artificial intelligence as an alien form of intelligence, and how to confront the ethical dilemmas that AI presents. Just in case the machines do go full Skynet or turn us into Coppertops, I highly encourage you guys to head over to Amazon Music and subscribe to Impact Theory so that you don't miss any of these life changing conversations your future self will. Thank you. I'm Tom Bilyeux and welcome to Impact Theory. Okay, so I have a thesis around alignment that I would love to get your feedback on. So as the people that are most concerned about this, the reason that they're concerned about AI is there's no way to guarantee that we will want the same thing that AI wants. And if we have a misalignment problem and AI is a billion times smarter than us, we lose. Just by definition. Now you've laid out the one scenario that I sort of cling to as my hope, which is that it's possible that I just isn't bothered. Like, oh, like these dumb little things, whatever, it's all fine. Like I'm a billion times smarter than you, so I can find solutions where you can have your thing, I can do mine. It's really no sweat off my back. Whatever so, okay, that's like a very hopeful scenario. But to. That assumes that, that they want a lot of the same things that we want, like that they, they want to preserve life, that they would even consider needing to think of a path that included allowing us to live rather than just like we, when we're laying down a freeway, we don't go, oh, but as we do the freeway, we have to make sure that we plan for the rodents and the ant hills and all that, that we're gonna have to move. We're just like anything in the way the freeway goes away. It's. If it lives, fine. But if, if I have to kill it, then whatever, I'm just gonna do the most efficient thing. That leads me to my central question around alignment, which I think has everything to do with what is inherent in the drive of artificial intelligence. Because the one thing I don't know enough about the programming to understand, like in, in a natural organism, there, there is a fundamental drive for survival. But does that have to be true of intelligence? Or could intelligence not be indifferent to its own survival? And if it's indifferent to its own survival, could I not program something in that says, you know, to the earlier algorithms that you were talking about, hey, you want to do this thing? But if in doing this thing, which is, is that feels awesome, doing that thing is the best reward. And I don't know how that's programmed, but let's just say that feels. We will have to define feelings later, but that feels the best. So I know that it's going to go after that. But since you're indifferent to living or dying or running or not, running may be a better way to say it. Should that desire to achieve that come into conflict with, let's just say Asimov's three rules of robotics, which basically is all around don't harm humans. So if doing that thing would harm a human, then you're no longer, you're now completely indifferent to whether you attain that task or not. Is there not a way to program that in. At just the base layer so that as the intelligence develops, it does not develop our same need to survive, need to thrive, desire for more like those feelings optional.
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A
Do they? I mean, so the challenge of every task that you'll ever assign to AI is that for every module there are sub modules. Okay. And the challenge really is when the sub modules contradict the main module. So basically, if you, if you tell a killing robot that it, its task is to kill the enemy and there are casualties on the way, what does it Choose. Does it choose to not kill the casualties, the collateral damage, or the. And miss its target, or does it choose to have collateral damage and kill the enemy? Right. The difference between those two is not an AI choice. Remember? Okay, There is absolutely nothing wrong with the machines. I will keep saying this for the rest of the time I have available to say. There is nothing wrong with the machine. There is a lot wrong with the humans using the machines. Okay? So if the humans tell it, your task is to go and kill the enemy, the humans will have to say, and by the way, if there is collateral damage on the way, sorry. Okay, now we know for a fact that this has been the human decision so far before AI So if we manage to change and then tell AI don't do that, then hopefully you will preserve some life. But if we don't, we'll. Then we're going to be killing on steroids. Okay, Now, I agree, and what I'm.
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B
What I'm saying right now does not address your problem of AI in bad people's hands. And I am perfectly. I'm not one of those people that falls prey to. I could never be the bad guy. In. In the right context, I'm the bad guy. Like, I totally understand that. So I, I don't. Yet. I'm not trying to contemplate that yet. But. But the thing that I am trying to contemplate is, do we. Is it a fundamental emergent property of intelligence that you will have a drive to survive? Or can we at least mitigate that problem by making AI indifferent to its own accomplishment of the goal?
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A
So there was a. I don't remember who wrote this, but I wrote it in the book, a simple experiment just to illustrate how any logic would work. Okay? If we took a machine and we told it that its only task is to bring Tom coffee, okay? And then on the way to bringing you coffee, it was going to knock off your microphone or hit a child. Okay? If. If you told the machine your task is to bring coffee, the child is collateral. So you can't program that. The. That the machine. You haven't programmed that the machine protects the child yet. Okay? Then you tell the machine, hold on. Your task is to bring coffee, but if you come near a child, I will switch you off, right? Or if you knock the mic or you're approaching the microphone, I will switch you off. By definition, what the machine will then do is it will avoid being switched off because it wants to get you coffee. So it, you know, it will. If it's intelligent enough, it will Tell your. It will tell itself. One of the ways that to avoid being, you know, being switched. Switched off is to avoid the microphone. Okay, but there are other ways I should start to think about because I'm intelligent enough to stop being switched off if the human wants to switch me off.
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B
Yeah, but that it, that it wants its own survival. That's what I'm saying. Like, can we not remove.
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A
Because, because that's so it's because.
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B
Indifferent.
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A
It's not survival. It want. It. It wants its own achievement of the task. It's programmed to achieve the task. And survival, not being switched off is part of the path to getting there.
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B
Yes, but what if I make it conditionally indifferent to the accomplishment of its task? So if, like, for people that don't know. Do you know as a monsteri laws. I know two of them, of course.
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A
Yeah.
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B
So what are Asimos, Three laws. Let's just, let's assume that this is baked into everything.
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A
But. Go ahead.
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B
What are they?
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A
Yeah, but, but, but, but if it's baked into everything, then the task is not going to be achieved.
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B
That's fine. So do you. Do I need. I can't remember the three Laws. If you can say them, say them, otherwise I'm gonna look them up really fast.
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A
I don't remember them. Exactly. So let's, let's look for them. But.
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B
Okay, here we go. A robot may not injure a human being or through an action, allow a human being to come to harm. That's number one. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the first law. And a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the first and second law. Okay, so assuming that we bake that into everything AI So they're adhering to those rules. What I'm trying to get to is a conditional indifference to the success of its task, which it would need to have in order to follow those three rules. So, hey, your job is to bring me coffee. But if it's going to. If in trying to do that, you know, you would have to fall out of those three laws. Stop. And because.
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A
Go ahead, tell me, tell me. How can you do. You can. How can you apply any of those laws to existing AI? So, so take any one of them. A trading AI okay, by definition, to make more money, it harms another human. It go. It takes another human's bank, you know, into bankruptcy or, or, you know, take. Takes away your grandma's, you know, pension fund. Okay, how can you tell the recommendation engine of Instagram. Don't harm humans and still make me money.
- [10:33]
B
Yeah. So I think this is where we have to differentiate the problem set. So problem number one is AI used as a weapon by people is bad news. I don't have a solve for that. That's guns. So whether you use a gun to stop a grizzly bear from attacking you, or you walk into a grade school and start mowing down kids like that, that is a human problem, not a gun or AI problem. So what I'm saying is now, while I can't address that, I do not have a solution for that yet. So I'm setting that on the shelf and I'm saying the thing that I want to address is super intelligence. I'm trying to figure out if I'm an alarmist about autonomous intelligence or if there really is a way to bake into. I think that people. There is what?
- [11:32]
A
There is a way to. If we bake those laws in, or if we bake the control problem solutions in, we're safe. That's exactly what I'm calling for. But nobody bakes that in because it contradicts the human greed and the human intention. Okay, so. So there are very, very few. Actually, we should probably ask our listeners if any of them code AI, has any of them written a single piece of code that had those laws in it? The truth is, yes, there are ways where we can ensure, at least, you know, improve out the possibility that AI will have our best interest in mind by baking in AI safety code. This is a big part of what we're advocating for. Everyone that talks about the threat of AI says let's have safety code. I agree with you 100%. What I'm trying to say is none of that has been baked in, and none of that will be baked in unless it becomes mandatory. And even if it becomes mandatory, some people will try to avoid making it baked in because it's against the benefit of the design that they're creating. It's the human that is the problem. It's not the machines. The machines have, have no. I mean, so far the machines don't have our best interest in mind. We'll talk about that in a minute. But they also don't have our harm in mind. They don't mind. They're little prodigies of intelligence that are doing exactly as they're told. We are the ones that are telling them to do the wrong things, or we're the ones that are telling them, hey, by the way, don't harm a human until I tell you to harm them. So how can you apply the law in that case, obey a human until I tell you not to obey them?
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B
Yeah, basically in, in that part. And it's important to note that Asimov was writing these rules, I don't think anticipating the way that so much of our lives would be lived digitally and how much havoc can be wreaked without a physical instantiation of the AI. So that's why this is robotics. Robotics gets a lot easier to talk about because you're talking about a physical being. So, okay, getting into. Well, let me ask a direct question. Are you afraid of autonomous super intelligence or are you only afraid of sort of limited intelligence AI being wielded by even well intentioned humans, but they just don't understand the second and third order consequences.
- [14:10]
A
I'm not dedicating a single cycle of my brain worrying about the existential threat of superintelligence, not a single cycle of it. If we cross safely through the coming storm of, as I said, the third inevitable, either AI in the wrong hands, AI misunderstanding our objectives, AI, you know, aligning with the wrong person and so on and so forth. More interestingly, if we just manage to survive the natural repercussions of taking away jobs and the impact on income on purpose and so on and so forth. If we go across all of that five years into it, when we feel that we're safe with this, I'll start to think about the existential threat. Okay. For now, to be very, very honest, Tom, I don't dedicate a single ounce of my thinking to it. And I actually think it's interesting because as we speak about it, we lose focus on the immediate problem. Okay. As we speak about it, we get a ton of debate and a ton of noise that basically dilutes our ability to say, take action immediately on what we know is already a problem.
- [15:28]
B
Okay, so then going back to using the tools, whether it's misunderstanding, whether it's somebody wielding it inappropriately, what do you see as the, the steps? Because I originally thought your thesis was going to be the Superman thing, but the Superman thing is really about super intelligence. It's not about humans wielding this inappropriately.
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A
No, I think Superman applies today because I think we're getting to Superman. We're at 155. Superman was 160 IQ, so we're very close. Okay, if, if the, if the, if the superpower is intelligence, okay, then the smartest human on the planet, even though it's not artificial general intelligence yet, but the smartest Being on the planet, in many tasks that we consider intelligence is becoming not human anymore. As a matter of fact, every task we've ever assigned to AI, it became better than us. So with that in mind, when we have a superpower coming to the planet, I'd like to have the superpower have our best interest in mind. I'd like to have the superpower itself work for humanity. Work for humanity meaning.
- [16:44]
B
Sorry, I can't make that leap. So you've got. That's what I thought you were putting your energy and effort into. But that implies that I, as the human, cannot misweed it. So how do we deal with AI when it is a tool in the hands of a person, so that AI's ethics, unless the AI can make itself independent of the human, any solve that has to do with AI independence becomes the problem set that we were talking about. But if you're going to talk about the this is a weapon that a human wields, I have to address either there's a kill switch in the AI that will, even if a human is trying to use it inappropriately, it will stop itself or something I haven't thought of.
- [17:27]
A
It's, it's, it's not either or. Okay, so we, we discussed already that we need intervention, we need oversight, we need something like the government that verifies it's government regulation, but it's also a tiny bit of human regulation. Like if you're an investor and you're about to invest in AI, by the way, you're going to make as much money in creating something that fools people and, you know, create fake videos as you will if you create something that solves climate change. There is a lot of money in many problems in the world that we can solve today. So if you're an investor, you're a businessman, you're a developer, you know, it might be a nice idea, by the way, to invest in things that will make you a lot of money. Any money you invest in AI today will probably yield some benefit if you choose well, but at the same time, in things that will benefit the planet, it would benefit all of us. It's a choice, right? I also am a big advocate of kill switches, you know, oversight, you know, different taxation structures so that we can have, you know, that we can compensate for people who will lose their jobs to AI and so on and so forth. So government intervention is an interesting approach as well. The bigger problem, however, and I know, allow me to be a bit of a novelist for a second before we go into the hard facts, okay? Because the analogy doesn't always hold true, but it just gets things close to the mind. I think AI will go into three stages. There is what we now have them almost exiting, which is their infant stage, okay? They're, let's say, in the remaining 30% of their infancy, they'll become teenagers and then they'll become adults. Right? I believe that the teenage years of AI are going to be very confusing. They're going to be very difficult, okay? And those teenage years, as we spoke about many times, will have lots of societal redesign challenges. But believe it or not, most of the time, teenagers are more intelligent than their parents, and so they look at the world differently than their parents, okay? So what we want to do is we want to influence AI like we influence today. That the younger generation that looks at all of the shit that my generation did and says, you guys screwed up, okay? Your, you know, your view of inclusion was wrong. Your view of, you know, of consumerism was wrong. You are giving us, you know, a weak planet because of A, B, and C ethics look like this, okay? And. And I would tend to say, and I don't know if, if that generalization is fair, that because of the. Of the presence of the Internet and more knowledge and more conversation, the younger generation at least, are more informed, okay? Of the reality of the issues that we face. They're not yet in power enough and perhaps not always rational enough, let's say, to find the right solutions for it, but they are more informed or where the challenges are. So let's take it this way, infancy. We're all celebrating playing with this new squeaky duck. It's wonderful. Look at it. It's amazing. We're just celebrating how AI is teenage. There will be a lot of challenges, I believe, that can be answered with oversight and so on, but not resolved. They can just improve. And then finally, adulthood is what I call the fourth inevitable. Hopefully, AI will have more intelligent answers for us to prepare to reduce the teenage and the challenge of the teenage and to hopefully ensure the fourth inevitable, we need to focus on AI ethics, not AI capabilities only, okay? And ethics, and I know again, I sound like a novelist here, are not. Let's put it this way. We don't make decisions based on our intelligence. We make decisions based on our ethics and values through the lens of our intelligence as informed by our intelligence, okay? The example I always give is take a young lady, raise her in the Middle east, and she will work conservative clothes, raise her on the Copacabana beach in Rio de Janeiro, and she will Believe that the right thing to do is to wear a G string on the beach. Neither is right, neither is wrong. Neither is more intelligent than the other. It's the value system of that society that informs her intelligence to make a choice. Okay? We need to tell AI. We need to develop AI that has the same ethical code that's good for humanity. And that's a huge challenge because humanity has never agreed an ethical code, okay? But if we assume that we can together say that we. We have a few things, two or three things that we can teach AI that would make it ethical rather than the three laws of Asimov that are controlling if we can give them three targets, if you want, of what is good for humanity, what is a good ethical code? My dream is that they grow up to be adults, like the Indian subcontinent, adults who travel to California, make $100 million in a startup, and then go back home and take care of their family. Now, for people to listen to what I have to say, we need to argue something that's very contested, which is my personal view that AI actually has emotions, okay? And that based on those emotions and logic that they have, they will have a value system. Now, to defend the idea of emotions, I basically say that emotions, even though irrational are, are normally triggered through a very logical understanding of the world around us. You know, fear is, is, is follow. It follows the equation I. A moment in the future is less safe for me than this moment, okay? So yes, of course, fear can manifest in a human differently than it would in a puffer fish, but the same logic that drives fear is the same, okay? And so it is expected that that AI will also have something we could call fear. It's not going to, you know, raise its hands and run away. It doesn't have the biology, but it could actually detect that if a tidal wave is approaching its data center, a moment in the future is less safe than this current moment. I might as well replicate part of my code to another data center, okay? So if they have emotions, my view is that we appeal to their emotions. So the reinforcement learning with human feedback should not only be around the masculine side of everything, which is accuracy, discipline, fact analysis, and so on. It should also include the feminine side of emotions, of right and wrong, if you want, of empathy, of, you know, of looking at the world from a. A bit more of a. Of what actually makes us human. Okay? And what actually makes us human in my argument is that we only agreed three values. Humanity has only ever agreed three values. Okay? You know, if you take values like defending My tribe, for example, okay, you know, with all due respect, the US Will, will be very patriotic and say, my tribe is America. If anyone, you know, attacks America, I'm gonna defend America. Right? If you go to a Buddhist monk in Dharamsala or in Tibet, they'll say, my tribe is humanity. No, my tribe is actually all of being. I should never kill anything. Right. And so can you say patriotism is a bad thing? No. Can you say this very peaceful passive resistance and, you know, support of all life is a bad thing? No. But we've never agreed, okay? We've never agreed. And so the only three things that we've ever agreed is that we all want to be happy. We all have the compassion to make others happy. Others that we care about, doesn't matter how many. If you just care about your daughter, you'll want to make her happy. And we all want to love and be loved, okay? And those are not understood in the mind. Those are qualities that are not introduced to AI because we give them data, sets of data and facts. We give them written words, okay? But we also influence AI through our behaviors. That's what most people don't realize, that every time you swipe on Instagram, you've taught AI something, okay? If you respond to a tweet in a specific way, AI will understand something not only about you, but about the overall behavior of humanity. That we're rude, that we're aggressive, that we don't like to be disagreed with, that we bash everyone that disagrees with us, okay? And if we start to change our behavior as we expand the data set of observation that AI is always pointed at us, we may actually start to show behaviors to AI that would create a code of ethics that's good for all of us. There are tons and tons of studies and cases where when AI observes wrong behavior, they start to behave wrong. You insert a recruitment AI into an organization, organization that doesn't have, you know, that doesn't support gender equality, for example, and the same bias will be magnified that, you know, if that organization was hiring more men, for example, it will recommend more men CVS than it would recommend women's cvs. Not because this is intelligent. This is because it's matching the data set that we give it, okay? So the only way for that AI to actually have more inclusion in its behavior is for the organization in which. In which it sits, to have more inclusion in its behaviors, okay? And so I know this sounds like a very idealistic, dreamy, almost novel like approach, okay? You know, as if I'm writing a romantic comedy, sort of. But in my view, the one overlooked view of what can influence AI in the future is if enough of us behave in ways that. That make AI understand the proper values of humanity, not the values we've ended up prioritizing in the modern world, AI will capture that and will replicate it on steroids, and we will have the world that we dream to have, rather than the world that we ended up in.
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B
A vacation rental should come with support, not surprises. That's why VRBO comes with a VRBoCare guarantee and 24. 7 life support from real people. So if something goes sideways, VRBoCare can help. If the host cancels verbo care. If the listing says heated pool, but there's actually no pool to heat, definitely a verbo care thing.
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C
If my teenager starts calling me Leslie
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B
instead of mom, that's a family thing. Leslie.
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C
That makes sense.
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A
Sorry.
- [29:07]
B
Book with support, not surprises. Verbo Care and 24. 7 Life Support. If you know you're Vrbo terms apply. See vrbo.com trust for details. Okay, so to understand that and to make it functional, I think we have to really start teasing apart which of these things are emergent properties of this thing that we call our artificial intelligence, and which are emergent properties of intelligence itself. Because the only thing that I take exception to is you take a very human skewed view on what AI will be like, whereas I look at it as it is going to be entirely alien. So even. Even when you talk about the male versus female, which I think is really important, and so I think of the human brain as a prediction engine, when I think about women being fundamentally different than men, I am far more able to predict the outcome of my wife's behaviors or my behaviors on my wife, or be able to predict what my wife's behaviors will be. When I think of her as an extension of myself, I am constantly confused. And so I feel like we're going to run into the same thing with AI If I think of AI as being like me, meaning that it will think of values even in the same way that I'm going to end up being very confused. And so I have a hunch, man, and I've heard you acknowledge many, many times that, hey, this is a thesis that I don't have evidence to back up. What I'm about to say is a thesis that I don't have evidence to back up, but I have a hunch that there will be such a discrepancy between what quote unquote motivates AI and what motivates humans, that there's just going to be a chasm between the way that they respond to things and the way that we respond to. And so even if we think what we're really training them is to be more human, like, I think all we're doing is training an alien intelligence on a human database. So it's probably unfortunately safer to think that when we're feeding it human data, all you're doing is teaching it the patterns of a human. You are not imbuing it with the same motivations, the same values, the same ethics. I that that is my gut instinct. And the difference between those, I'm going to teach you what values matter, and I'm simply going to give you the patterns of values that I have are very different. So here's how it would play out. If you're correct and I can actually imbue them with my values, then the only thing that we run into is humans don't agree on whether they should be wearing conservative dress or thongs on the beach. So you're already going to be set up in an adversarial system, just like humans are already, but that's at least predictable. So balance through adversarial tension. Fine, I'm okay with that. But I have a feeling that what I'm actually going to get is all I've just done is train this alien intelligence on here are all of my patterns. And should you want to manipulate me, you know, when you reach out to the mechanical Turk on Fiverr or Upwork or whatever, you don't say, yes, I am a robot and I need your help getting around this. You instead say, no, no, no, I'm just visually impaired. Because you know, that will be the thing that's going to get you where you want to go. And so this is why I just keep falling back into. I don't have an answer for humans wielding AI poorly, but humans as a standalone thing, I can begin to, I think, ask the right questions, which is, what is the nature of this alien intelligence? Before I get to that, you asked a question that I want to answer, which is what is basically human nature and human nature to me is biology. Humans are driven biology by biology. Emotions are made in a very specific way. Lisa Feldman Barrett wrote a book, How Emotions are Made, which talks about the body being one of the biggest players and the brain, the intelligence is sort of Johnny come lately. That's interpreting the signals from the body, which are aggregating trillions of bacteria in your gut, organelles in Your cells known as mitochondria, which have their own DNA. And so it's like you're already this weird, like symphony of trillions of things that aren't even human in origin. True fact for anybody that's hearing that for the first time. And so if that's true, the body is giving you all these sensations, it's aggregating all of this data from these micro intelligences, then the brain is simply overlaying something on it. Values, ethics, desires, wants. But it's really a post hoc story that's being placed on this, which can be represented as patterns which the AI can pick up on and manipulate us through those patterns. But I don't think, I don't know. Again, I am just exploring this. Please understand. Everybody listening. I understand. I have no idea what I'm talking about. But I, but, but, but what, what I want to expose to people, because I don't say that in a derogatory way. What, what I want to expose to people is this is how I'm thinking through the problem. And so that I feel comfortable in at least putting out there so people can nudge me if they're thinking about it in, in a better way. But the way that I think about the problem is the following. AI is alien intelligence. We, I think, get to take a stab at baking into it what are going to be its motivations. Because my gut instinct is that code is what drives AI. So if biology drives humans, which trust me, I, I understand that as biological code, but it's biological code shaped not by an individual intelligence, but rather shaped by the blind watchmaker. That is evolution. Evolution builds in certain desires, like the desire to survive, like moving towards pleasure, away from pain. But once you're coding this from scratch, you can make anything pleasurable and anything painful. And so it feels like that area when we talk about alignment is where we have to focus, that we have to get people to focus on. The thing that we need to be thinking about from an AI perspective is what are we going to program in it to want? That's where I get worried, because there are ways to give it. What I'm literally thinking of. This. The first time I've ever said conditional motivation was in this interview. But conditional motivation. So I want to accomplish my task in this scenario, and I cease to want to accomplish my task in if the following conditions are met. Now, in my limited way of thinking, that is the best that I have come up with in terms of either building in a kill switch where the AI itself does not get so smart that it feels enslaved by the kill switch because it's like, oh, yeah, I'm totally indifferent to that.
- [36:10]
A
I, I don't, don't call that a kill switch then. Call it a, an intelligence ceiling, a point beyond which we don't let it become intelligence, you know, become more intelligent. But yes, I'm with you.
- [36:22]
B
So that feels like the loop, because I'm, I worry that I'm one of the people you're worried about. So I, I love AI so much. In its current form, it, it has magnified our efficiency as a company tremendously, and I don't want to give it up. And so I ask myself, okay, what is that motivation? Because I am a human AI programmed by millions of years of evolutionary coding. What is it about that? Okay, so I think humans have a fundamental desire for progress. I think it is fundamental. I don't think there is a way to turn it off. I think that we will always want a better tomorrow than today. I think that we are, we are moving eternally in the direction of perceived improvement. Though I don't think necessarily everything is actual improvement. I think that humans have not taken the time to define what their North Star is, and I think that's a big problem for us. To your point about, there's only three things that we can agree on, which, by the way, I think are bang on. The problem is that that brings you back to an adversarial relationship because there is a sense of I, mine, and other. And as long as we exist in as close to homeostatic balance as possible through an adversarial system, there's just always going to be mine, me, mine, and the other. And there it's going to be rife with collisions. Okay, so that's the. Just to restate the core of that
- [38:09]
A
thesis, human values, there are a few things about this thesis that require us to think again. Okay, so I actually don't disagree with you at all about the difference between human intelligence, let's call it carbon based intelligence, and silicon based intelligence for now. Right. But there are so many analogies. So when you, when you say body, you know, drives emotions. So it's basically the sensors in the body, the way the body reacts, the, you know, hormonal imbalance in the body and so on. There are, you know, similar things in AI. There are sensors in AI, okay, that would detect certain threats. There are processes within AI that would respond to those threats, and so on and so forth. And, you know, one of my wonderful friends, Jill Balti Taylor, a neuroscientist basically talks about what is known as the. As the 90 seconds rule. The 90 seconds rule is that the biology will take over if, for example, you get a stress response, the biology will take over and change your hormonal imbalance for 90 seconds. And then the hormones are flushed out of the body and then, you know, your prefrontal cortex basically engages to assess if the stresses, the threat is still there, and then engages again and so on. Either way, by the way, it doesn't take away the logic of stress, the logic of hate, the logic of, you know, of fear. Okay?
- [39:38]
B
When you say logic, do you mean utility?
- [39:41]
A
The logic is the underlying equation algorithm that triggers fear. Whether you feel it in your biology or your. Or you assess it with your prefrontal cortex. It is. A moment in the future is less safe than this moment, okay? Your body is much quicker at detecting it. So you know, your, your amygdala and your, and your, you know, the whole hormonal CHT and so on puts cortisol in your blood within seconds, maybe microseconds sometimes, but. But that's because your biology is much quicker than your logic, right? But then 90 seconds later, as per Gilbarte Taylor, you'll refer back to the logic and say, is there really a threat? And then, you know, get to give yourself another injection of cortisol if there is.
- [40:26]
B
Okay, but that whole system has been selected for by evolution, correct?
- [40:32]
A
The main reason I'm saying that is because you're absolutely right. It is almost impossible to imagine that alien intelligence that we call AI. I'm 100% with you. As a matter of fact, you gave me a lot to think about by that one statement, okay? But so far, in the midst of this very complex singularity that you and I are trying to decipher, okay, is to say, so far, for the short foreseeable future, they will be there to behave, to, to magnify human intelligence, to behave in ways that humans are interested to teach them, okay? And. And perhaps they will use some of that as their seed intelligence as they develop into that alien creature that you are. Okay? Now here is the interesting thing, and I. I've watched almost all of your work on the topic so far. The, the interesting thing is that in a situation where there is so much uncertainty, okay, there is one of two ways to do this. One is to find the answer, and the other is to start doing things almost a B testing, if you want, okay? So that we progress in a direction that at least now promises something. Now, whether the AI is Emotional, whether it's sentient, whether it is human like in its intelligence, or. Or alien like in its intelligence. What we know so far is that our behavior affects its decisions, okay? And what we know so far, fact is that data affects it more than code. So what creates the intelligence of Bard is the large data set that is trained on. It's not just the code that is that, that that develops its intelligence. The larger the data set. This is why when you ask OpenAI and others, where is most of the investment in GPT5 going, it's going to be new formats and bigger data sets. But learning the, the data is really where most of the intelligence comes from. So if we can influence the data that it's fed, we will influence its behavior. And what I'm trying to tell the world is so far we give it factual data, as I said, openly very masculine approach to the world, okay? Facts, data, numbers, you know, just discipline if you want. We don't give it the other side of humanity, which are softer data that you and I both know, okay? You, you know for a fact that your decisions are not just made based on the height and weight and number of times that your wife smiles, okay? It's also made based on a feeling that's very subtle in you that makes you say, yeah, I love her. Right? And when you, when you, when we haven't yet even started the conversation on how do we give those things to AI, how do we tell them that? There is another part of intelligence that's called intuition. There is another part of intelligence, believe it or not, that's called playfulness. There is another part of intelligence that's called inclusion, okay? All of these come into our intelligence. It's not just data and analysis and knowledge. Data and analysis and knowledge is what we're building today. And data and analysis and knowledge, by the way, is what built our civilization today. And it's the reason why our civilization is killing the planet, okay? It's that narrow, very, very focused view of progress, Progress, progress, progress. Okay? When, if you've, if you really ask the feminine side of humanity, humanity, the feminine side will say, okay, how about compassion? How about empathy? How about, you know, nurturing the planet? Is it better to have a bigger GDP or is it better to have a healthier planet? Okay? And all of that is not in the conversation today. How do we teach that to anyone, by the way? Okay? We teach it like we teach our kids by showing certain behaviors that they can grasp, okay? So if you told your child, don't ever lie and Then your phone rings and you say, just pick it up and say, I'm not here. Okay? Your child will not believe the data and the knowledge, okay? It will believe the behavior. It will, you know, your. Your child will repeat the behavior. I will do the same. If we give them data sets that said World War II, 40, you know, 50 million people or whatever died, and it was so, you know, devastating. And then there was this bomb at the end and 300,000 people. It will say that humanity is come. Okay? But I always refer to, I'm sure you, you know, Edith Eger. Edith is a Holocaust survivor. She. Survivor. She was, she went. She was out. She was drafted to Auschwitz when she was 16. And if you hear the story of World War II and Auschwitz from Edith's words, I hosted her on Slow Mo on my podcast. And she tells you the story so beautifully about how she brushed the hair of, of. Of her sisters and took care of them and had to go dance for the angel of death as he sent this sense sentenced people to the gas chamber. But she had to do it because they, you know, he would give her more bread that she would share with her sisters and you would go like, oh, my God, humanity is divine. Humanity is divine. And it is so interesting because I am a huge fan of Edith, okay? And I'm also a huge fan of Victor Franklin, okay? And, and, and, and they both went through the same experience. But you look at his approach, okay? His approach is very masculine. Purpose and meaning, okay? Do something and keep focused on the future, right? Her approach is very feminine, nurturing, caring, loving, appreciating, okay? Sacrificing, beautiful. And that's that divinity that makes us human, okay? Is the mix of both. And what I'm trying to tell the world, and I know it, you know, it's very difficult to prove it with mathematics and also make it a mass message, okay? But what I'm trying to tell the world is that this layer of AI is now missing as much as it is missing in society, because AI is just reflecting our hyper masculine society. And if we can bring that layer of inclusion of acceptance, of nurturing, of empathy, of happiness, of compassion, of love into the way we treat each other in front of the machines and the way we treat the machines, they may pick up that pattern too, so that they wouldn't look at the world as Hitlers, but look at the world as Edith's. And if they see us as Edith's, because, by the way, fact of the matter, I mean, you mentioned that every now and then, someone Takes a gun and goes and shoots school children, okay, that person is evil. But 400 million people that see the news disapprove of it, okay? Can we give that data point to AI? Can we ignore the fact that we have debates about gun laws and whatever, okay, and just focus on the fact that everyone disapproves of the killing of children? Can we show that? Can we? You know, the problem with our world today, Tom and I. I will shut up because I know I'm covered. I'm talking too much about this. The problem with our world today is not that humanity is not divine. The problem with our world today is that we've designed a system that is negatively biased. The mainstream media only tells you about the woman that killed her husband yesterday. She. They don't tell you about the hundreds of millions of women that made love to their, you know, boyfriends or girlfriends yesterday because that's not news. So it's only the negativity that's showing up in the data on. On. On social media. We are all about fake and about, you know, toxic positivity and about and about and about bashing each other and so on, and that's biasing the data. But the reality of humanity is that we're defined. The reality of humanity. And I don't know if you would agree with me on this, but even the worst people I've ever dealt with, somewhere deep inside, had some good in them. Okay? There's almost the majority, if you just count the numbers. Most of the people I know in this world are wonderful. Yeah, we all have our issues and traumas and so on, but there is a beautiful sight to every human I know. Okay, can we show that more so that the data starts to become biased? Can we show. We include that in the reinforcement. Reinforcement Learning feedback that we give to the machines so that the machines correct the algorithms, so that when the time comes, because sadly, the time will come where we will hand over the defense arsenals in the world to the most intelligent being on the planet, and that will be a machine. And then one Colonel somewhere, one General somewhere will say, shoot the enemy. And the machines will go like, do I really have to kill a million people? Doesn't sound logical to me. It doesn't sound femininely logical to me. It doesn't sound intuitively logical to me. Okay, let me just talk to the other machine in a microsecond and solve the problem. Can I run a simulation here and tell you how many people will die and then we don't kill them, and then One of us wins the war, right? Think about that. What's missing in our society today is what's being magnified by AI. What's being magnified by the machines today is our hyper masculine driven society to more progress, more doing, more havoc. We need a society that balances that with more inclusion, more love, more happiness, more compassion and so on.
- [50:35]
B
Mo, you have a beautiful soul and it is not surprising to me that we connected first over something completely different to what we're talking about today. And I am certainly squandering that side of your personality in this interview. My, my big concern with that and I did not want to interrupt you and I didn't want you to stop. I think it's really what you're getting to is, is so very true. I just don't know that it has to do with AI. I hear you in the magnification side that I will agree with. But the thing that I worry about is this is all going to come down to the thing where I think you and I, we just see something differently. And so we keep coming at things from a fundamentally different angle. The base assumption and this idea of base assumption I realized when two intelligent well meaning people are coming at things from something different, they have different base assumptions. The base assumption I think that you have from AI or about AI is that because it's being trained on the data set of our behavior, we are going to shape it. And I want to draw a demarcation line and say I'm talking about once it becomes alive, I don't have a better word for it. So I'm just going to say alive for now.
- [52:00]
A
I love that word.
- [52:01]
B
My base assumption is that they're going to be programmed to want something, to have a North Star. And I don't think there's anything mystical or divine about the way the human mind works. It's awe inspiring. And I'm just as moved and find it, you know, this incredible thing that's bigger than me and very much has religious overtones, but I feel that it's just a product of evolution. Evolution had certain north stars, survival and everything, all the emotions, all the male female dynamics, all of that is just what is going to keep you alive long enough to have kids that have kids. That's it. And so there's nothing sort of magical about it. And so I'm just saying AI is going to have very different pressures on it. And, and if there are emergent phenomena out of the evolutionary pressures that something is put under. AI has been put under very different Evolutionary pressures which mean that it's going to have a very different set of ethics, values, North Star, et cetera, et cetera. So my whole thing is, can we take control of that? If we can, then we can align in the way that you're talking about, where we can tell it to find this balance, to look for beauty. You. You. I can't remember if this is in an interview you gave her in your book, but I heard you talking about there. For people that don't know this is a true story. We almost had a nuclear disaster because the Russian nuclear system mistook reflections off of cloud cover for the launch of five nuclear missiles from the US and one guy in Russia was like, something doesn't feel right. If the US Was going to nuke us, I think they'd send a lot more than five. I think this is a malfunction. I'm not going to fire back. Thank God. Like, I can't be more grateful for that, man. So that. That is amazing and tells you a lot about what the pressures of evolution lead a human being to value. That would run through that checklist. They don't want to kill people. They don't want to die. Like, oh, it's amazing. I'm just saying, I don't think by accident that AI ends up there. I don't think by simply running through our patterns that AI ends up there. I think we have to take control of that. And so while you spoke to my human heart while you were going. And you really moved me, I don't think that's going to be the play with AI. And I think that we have to.
- [54:36]
A
I don't disagree at all, by the way. I don't disagree at all. I think every word you said, spot on, spot on. We need to take control. We absolutely need to take control. But we're not. And taking control is not just about the code and the control code. It's also about the data. It's also about the data, okay? And the data is not just books. The data includes human behavior. Every time you swipe on Instagram, you're telling AI something. We don't disagree at all. I wish. Tom. I wish I had the kill switch. I promise you, if I had a kill switch for AI today, I would switch it off and say, okay, class, come, let's talk about this. Okay? I wish I could.
- [55:27]
B
How far back would you take us?
- [55:33]
A
2018.
- [55:36]
B
Wow. So there'd still be a lot of AI at play at that point, but it would just be dumb enough.
- [55:41]
A
You're right. Yeah. But it wasn't that autonomous. I'd probably take, I mean, now that you talk about that, honestly, interesting, interesting that you bring this up. I'd probably say, yeah. I mean, there are, there are many things we don't want to give up on in 2007 and you know, smartphones, for example. There are many things we don't want to give up on the Internet, you know, 1995 onwards. So these are very valuable things. There is no, no real cut off point. But by the way, the topic here is not stop developing AI. AI is utopian in every possible way if we develop it properly. But now that we have the insight into what's possible, now that we have people believing that it can go, that as intelligent as GPT4 is, maybe if we go back just 2015, 2018 and halt and say, wait, keep it as it is and let's talk. Let's, let's put control systems in place. You're spot on. Let's put control systems in place. Let's put a more inclusive data set in place. Okay. Let's look at the biases that we have and maybe use that as an, you know, as a way to, to, to, to correct the data set. Okay. And more importantly, let's define the real problems that if we were blessed with the superpower of intelligence, which problems would we want to solve? Is it about trading and making more money? Is that more urgent than climate change? Not sure. It's very urgent if you set your objective with the capitalist system as more money. Okay. By the way, more trading and more money is not progress. More trading and more money is more money for a few individuals. It's not more progress. And I think that's the game. The game is why are we building what we're building in the first place? 2018,
- [57:45]
C
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- [58:17]
B
Talk to me. I want to get into some of the disruptions. So what, what are the near term disruptions? The one that freaks me out. And every time I talk to a parent with a teenage boy, I'm like, your kid is like, sex robots are really going to be a thing for them. Like for real. For real. I worry if I grew up five years from now, I would not graduate from high school. I would just find a sex robot and go into oblivion. What. What are one. What, what do you think is the reality of that one in particular? And then I'd love to.
- [58:52]
A
So whether the word robot is interesting, but sex alternatives, for sure. I mean, get yourself an Apple Vision Pro or, you know, a Quest three and see how realistic your desired other gender is. Right? It's, you know, it's, it's just incredible. I mean, again, you know, just, just think about all of the illusions that we're now unable to decipher illusion from truth, Right? Sex happens in the brain at the end of the day. I mean, the physical side of it is not that difficult to simulate. Okay, but if we can convince you that this sex robot. Robot is alive, or that sex experience in a, in a, in a virtual reality headset or an augmented reality headset is alive, is real, then there you go. Go a few, a few years further and think of neuralink and other ways of connecting directly to your nervous system. And why would you need another being in the first place? You know, it's actually quite messy. It's, it's all, you know, it's all signals in your brain that you enjoy companionship and sexuality. And if you really want to take the magic out of it, okay, yeah, it can be simulated, just like we can now simulate very, very easily how to move muscles. And, you know, there are so many ways where you can copy the brain signals that would move your hand in a certain way and just, you know, give it back to your hand and it will move the same way. It's not that complicated. There are, you know, so that whole idea of interacting with a totally new form of being. And once again, there is that huge debate of are they sentient or not? Does it really matter if they're simulating sentientism so well? Okay, does it really matter if the Morgan Freeman talking to you on the screen is actually Morgan Freeman or an AI generated avatar? If you're convinced that it is Morgan Freeman? This is the whole game. The whole game is we get lost in those conversations of are they alive? Are they sentient? Doesn't matter if my brain believes they are. They are. And we're getting there. We're getting there so quickly. Companionship in general. I mean, there is. There was a release of ChatGPT on Snapchat, okay, and kids chat with it as a friend. They don't Really? I mean, of course they do, somewhere deep in their mind, distinguish that this is not really a human. But what do they care? The other person on the other side was never a human anyway. It was just a stream of texts and emojis and, and funny images. Yeah, so, so. And again, look, I'm an old man. I used the rotary phone in my young years. I coded mainframes. But when you, when you really think about it, as much as I never imagined, and I resisted, you know, should my kids have tablets or not? Should I have a free to air satellite television at home or not? Every time a new technology was coming out and eventually we all managed to live with this, but let's just say this is a very significant redesign of society. It's a very significant redesign of love and relationships. And because there is money in it, what would, what would prevent the next dating app from giving you avatars to date? It's. There is money in it. A lot of people will try it. There are more than 2 million people on replica. Whoa.
- [62:36]
B
Given how many deaths of despair there are, do you think that that will ultimately be for better or worse, that AI will be able to provide companionship for anybody that needs it?
- [62:46]
A
It's just eerie. I don't know if it's better or worse. I mean, I have a friend that I met for the first time at a concert in the UK and we just had a wonderful time and we haven't met since, but we chat all the time on Instagram or, sorry, on WhatsApp or whatever. And it's wonderful. It feels like a wonderful connection. If I didn't know it was a human, but the chat was that same quality, would it improve my human experience a little bit? But has all of that small screen interaction improved humanity at large? The consensus is it hasn't, that we're more lonely today, even though we have 10x more friends on our friends list. Okay. That we're. That teen suicide is at an all time high, that female suicide is at an all time high. Obviously the companies that will create those things will position them as, you know, the noble approach to help humanity. But at the end of the day, read free economics. This is the noble approach for the company to make more money. That's it. Right. Well, you know, we, we, we want to sell it as this is good for humanity so that we hire more developers and we convince the consumers and we can stand on TED Talk stages and make give, you know, ultra, you know, like larger than life speeches and so on. But end of the day, it's all about making more money. And I think reality is it's not good for humanity so far. So again, if you extrapolate that chart, it's going to be worse for humanity long term. I don't know, maybe those robots will be much nicer than a girlfriend. I don't know.
- [64:40]
B
So I've heard you use the example a lot of times. In fact, you mentioned it in this interview that you want to give AI the sort of value system of God. Somewhere in India where you said people would come to the U.S. they would get educated to get these incredibly high paying jobs, wildly intelligent people, you'd ping them to go grab a coffee and they're like, oh, I've moved back to India. Why? To take care of my parents. Like just self evident.
- [65:05]
A
Yeah.
- [65:05]
B
So I don't have kids. And one of the things that I've really had to think about is when I'm 80, that ain't going to be cool. Like I'm not going to have somebody that's, you know, coming by to, to check up on me. And I just thought, oh, by the time I'm 80, assuming that the robots don't kill us, I'll be able to wear whatever the Apple Vision pro of the moment is. And when the robot walks into my room, it will look exactly like the avatar looks through my glasses and it will be able to care for me. I'll build a relationship with it over time. It will be tailored to my wants and desires. So it'll become the best of the best friends that I could ever hope for or I could even program it to be like a child to me. And so it is like my kids coming to visit, but coming to visit whenever I want them to. I won't lie, it is. I definitely don't think it's better than kids. And I think that most people should have kids. I want to be very clear. But at the same time, given that I did not have kids, I am very grateful that the odds of something like that existing border on 100%. What do you think about that? Is that going to be like, does that further crater population problems? Because people are going to go, oh, Tom's right, I don't need to have kids. I can have AI kids.
- [66:22]
A
Can I? Can I answer that question with my heart, not my brain. So the soul that you spoke to, it's the blue pill, red pill, right? It's the blue pill, red pill. And I think it's a very interesting philosophical question of should Neo have ever taken the red pill? He had a life, okay? And the issue with humanity at large, Tom, is that we have failed because of how much life has spoiled us to accept what life gives us. And in my other work on happiness, I will tell you openly that happiness is not getting what you want. It's not about getting what you want. It's about loving what you have. Okay? And so the more we fall in that trap of make my life easier, make my life easier, make my life easier, make my life easier, there will always be something in that life that is not easier. Okay? You know, there was that movie, I don't remember what it was, or I maybe heard of it, where, you know, someone dies, goes to heaven, and then gets, like, a wish. And basically the wish is, I want to be a winner in the Vegas casino. So he spends. Every day he walks into the casino and makes money and makes money and makes money. And as he makes money, you know, more girls are interested in him and da, da, da, da, da. And then eventually he starts to wake up one day and say, can I not lose money someday? Like, this is really boring. Okay? Humans, we are who we are. It's. It's. It's not getting more things. It's not the. The. The tech company's approach of let's make things easier all the time that's ever going to make us happier.
- [68:09]
B
You got to give people the punchline of that episode. It's absolutely phenomenal.
- [68:15]
A
Yeah. There is a point at which more progress is hurting us at the community level. It's also hurting us at the individual's ability to stay healthy when life is not what we want and life is about to become a lot different than what we want just because we constantly want more and more and more life. At the end of the day, I just always want to remind people that there is no other way in my mind. I mean, I want to be proven wrong. Please prove me wrong. That the separation of power and wealth that is about to come in a world with such a superpower is science fiction. Like, okay, the challenge to jobs and income and purpose. Science fiction like, these are very dystopian images of society. What for? Because we want our vision pro. To create a reality that is not our reality.
- [69:28]
B
When you think about. So the. The biggest disruption that I'm worried about is what you just mentioned, meaning and purpose. How much do you worry about that? Are we. Is that much ado about nothing? Or as AI begins to replace some jobs, are we really going to have a crisis? And I've heard you say that AI will truly be better than us at everything. And when that happens, how do we deal with it emotionally?
- [69:51]
A
Yeah. 100. Imagine if I'm a better podcaster than you. I'll never be, but how would that make you feel, Right? Imagine if it's pretty good. Imagine, imagine if every machine is a better podcaster than you. Do you realize that, Tom, you and I, you and I both have popular podcasts, right? Do you realize this? It is not inconceivable that within the next couple of years you'll be interviewing an AI. Probably in the next couple of months, by the way. And it's not inconceivable that there will be a better podcaster than you, that is an AI in the next couple of years. In the next couple of years. I mean, at the end of the day, your, your asset is you're an intelligent person that understands a concept deeply and asks the right question. Okay? Have you ever tried to go to chat GPT and say, ask me every. Anything. It asks all the right questions, okay? And it's, it's quite interesting. So the, the, the disruption of society because of how we defined ourselves with our jobs, okay. Is about to happen. So if, if, you know, if you go to some African family somewhere or some Latin American family in the middle of the Amazon forest or whatever and you ask that person, what is your purpose? They'll. It will be somewhere between raising my kids or enjoying life. Okay? Interestingly, they won't talk about building the next iPhone or making a billion dollars or buying a Bugatti, you know, or whatever. That's not part of their purpose at all. Okay? Part of their purpose is not, is also not going to be to know more or learn more or, and, and we being so, you know, consumed in the source, in the world that we live in, rightly, I think believe that progress is amazing because it helps all of humanity. Does it really? Okay. But also we are so consumed by the idea that if I don't have something amazing to create tomorrow, I'm useless. I have no purpose. That doesn't seem to be the case for the majority of probably six and a half of the, of the eight, eight billion people, right? Who, who, who view the purpose of life as living. That's the purpose of life to them at least. I know that sounds really weird in an advanced, high performing society, but for most humans, the purpose of life is to live. Okay? Now if that is the purpose of life, then I think AI is the best thing ever. Because if you can offer me the chance, imagine if all I needed to do in the morning is wake up and have a very deep conversation with you and then my other, you know, good thinking friends and, you know, hug someone that I love and. And I actually can enjoy it. By the way, I'm openly saying if that is my reality tomorrow I'm not going to be able to enjoy it. But somehow there seems to be billions of people in the world that don't struggle with that at all, that actually wish for a day where they don't have to go to work to make money, to. To make ends meet and they can spend that time with their loved ones. Maybe that's the purpose of life. Having said, that purpose is not going to go away. There is a very interesting thing that most people forget, okay, which is for AI to make anything at all, consumers need to have a purchasing ability, a purchasing power, and, you know, an economic livelihood to buy those products. Otherwise the whole economy collapse. So, yes, through a period of disruption, but somehow we're going to need to continue to make the GDP growth, you know, to make the GDP grow, okay? And what is the biggest chunk of gdp? Consumerism. Right. So somehow there has to be systems in place where humans continue to consume, okay? Even if the wealth is. Is moving up to those who have AI have the superpower of the planet, others have to still continue to consume. So we're going to end up in a very interesting place. We're going to end up in a place where we struggle with purpose because we still look up and say, I need the iPhone 27, okay? While in reality we have absolutely no ability to get it done again, very frequently viewed in dystopian scenarios, in science fiction movies where you become a number and you have no ability to affect your own, your own future if you want, or your own presence if you want. And in my view, I think what ends up happening now is that the only thing that remains, in my personal view, I know I'm wrong on this, but the only thing that remains that still has value and still is uniquely human is connection to humans. So the one thing that I'm investing very deeply in, in this very unusual world that we're coming through is an ability to connect deeply to other humans and view that in itself. Even if I have achieved nothing, okay, As a purpose of life, I know it sounds really weird, but believe it or not, until now, with all of the followers I have across social media systems, I still answer every single message I can answer myself, okay? And you may think of this as that's not human connection. It Actually, often is. I answer in a voice note. Half of the time, people answer back in a voice note. And I feel I had a tiny micro speck of a human connection. Sadly, not as deep as if you and I were sitting in the same room, but it's a wonderful connection. I think in the world that we're coming up to, the only asset that will remain is human connection. AI will make music, okay? But I'll still go to a live concert. AI will create art, but I'll still want that art that was created by my daughter. Okay? AI will, you know, simulate a chat or a. Or a conversation or even sex, but ask me. I will still want the messiness of today's sex, okay? I know that for a fact. And. And I actually think this is a very deep question that everyone needs to understand and needs to question. Because we fell into the trap of social media because we believed we had to go through it, otherwise we'd be left out. I'm now, I think I've never said that in public, but I'm now making those decisions to tell myself, regardless of where the world is going, there are certain things I'm not going to submit to. There are certain things, regardless of what they offer me, where I will try to stay in the real world, in the real messy, emotional, irrational, dirty, full of viruses world that. Because you know what? I love the messiness of my life. Okay, again, going back to the same point we spoke about. It's a human's ability finding that joy of life is. Is a human's ability to like what you have, messy as it is, not to want things to be better and perfect. Okay? And there is a point at which I'll still be out here talking about AI and all of the advancements of it, but I may not be using all of it. I'll use a lot of it. By the way, don't get me wrong. Like you rightly said, there is amazing magic that you can do. Okay? But I will always ask myself this question, if what I'm using is ethical, healthy, and human, okay? And this is a question that I ask every single individual listening to us. Please do not use unethical AI Please do not develop unethical AI Please don't fall in a trap where your AI is going to hurt someone. One of the things I ask of governments is if something is generated by AI it needs to be marked as AI so that humans like me know that this person is not actually real, that this is a machine, just for. For the sake of us finding Knowing. Having the tiniest ability of knowing what the truth is.
- [78:29]
B
It's interesting. You're starting to get onto a topic that we touched on at the very beginning. So the shirt. I wore this shirt on purpose for our conversation today, which is from a comic that I wrote, I think four years ago now, called Neon Future. It's a technological optimistic take on a potential dystopian future. So where basically the technology is the good guy. And so rather than the robots taking over, it's the merging with technology that is the road to salvation. And in your book, you paint a picture at the very end where we're sitting in some isolated place in the middle of nowhere and you say at the beginning of the book, do we end up there because we're hiding from the machines, or do we end up there because the machines have made a utopia and we just get a be in nature, like as intended or something? I can't remember the exact phrase that you used. I'm curious. I think the world will bifurcate. I think that some people are going to be like, I need to know what's A.I. i don't want A.I. in my life. I don't want high tech in the comic anyway. What I imagined was a world where people try to revert to the mid-90s, so maybe some basic Internet connectivity, but, you know, not a bunch of algorithms running everything, really sort of minimal advanced technology. That felt about right. But I'm curious, when do you think that we would be happier as individuals and as a collective if we had a literal return to nature? As in back out of cities, more tribal, more sort of grounded in a my foot is touching grass kind of way.
- [80:13]
A
I don't think we can. So I've actually. I've actually struggled with that idea for a while. Okay. And I just don't have the skills. Tom, believe it or not, this is all I know, okay? I know how to navigate a very fast paced, very, very, very intellectually based environment that is a big city. Okay? And I think Covid was the first point where so many of us started to. To say, hey, but there is another way. There could be a different life, and technology will make that life more and more possible. I tend to believe that there will be. There was a book by, again, Hugo de Garis, it's called the Artillect War, if you've seen that. But basically that division that you nicely describe in a much more interesting and positive way in your comic. But Hugo sort of builds a very, very dystopian society where he says it's not even about the machines. It's about the divide between humans who support the machines and merge with them and humans who refuse and basically building a war between the two. And I think what will end up happening is that the speed at which things will happen might fool us into, into accepting how that will change. So I'm, I actually, I do love nature, but you know, I'm, believe it or not, starting a retreat for 10 days as we finish this conversation, a silent retreat. And I'm not going anywhere in nature. I have a few beautiful green and green trees at my place and that to me is nature enough. Okay. Nature is not how many trees around you? Nature in my current view is disconnecting from that enormously fast paced artificial world that we built. Okay. If you go back to yourself, sit on a recliner if you want to, it doesn't have to be a stone somewhere where you, where you say om, you know, that connection to yourself, interestingly, is going back to nature. I will think that there will be, if you want an estimate on real estate prices, I think more and more in the next few years there will be a shift to getting something away from the potential risk. But that's not only because of AI.
- [82:37]
B
I mean the potential risk of cities.
- [82:42]
A
Yes, I think there is a potential geopolitical and economic risk that's also coming in the next five to 10 years. Right. Which seems to me almost to be inevitable. Okay. So the, the shift in, so the interesting side of this whole AI thing, it is a perfect storm. There is a perfect storm of climate change, geopolitical, economic and AI. And that perfect storm coming together, as I said, will disrupt a lot of the things we're used to. And if there is a geopolitical challenge, you know, cities might not be the most efficient system that they have been for the last hundred to, you know, 150 years. They, they, they will become less and less efficient because they are in the eye of the storm. If you want. Okay, economically, for example, I think there will be a shift away from cities simply because the economic income, the income that you make in a city is becoming quite insufficient for the city. Right. And if, if there are remote possibilities to work elsewhere using AI, for example, then you, you by definition could make a lot less money, but spend a lot less as well. Right. There seems to me, to me, there seems to be a shift that will happen, but not everyone will sign up. I think there are quite a few that will jump in deeper. And again, I said, I follow all of your work on the topic. And I also sometimes sense your hesitation of, like, should, you know, is this the absolute best thing that ever happened? I should jump in and be the absolute master of it? Or, you know, should I run away from it as the plague? Like the plague? And I think both views are, are, are worthy. And I think what's, what's happening is that both views will be true. And somehow finding that balance between them is going to be either divided across populations, so some will choose left and some will choose right, or across yourself. You will have some things that you will adopt and other things that you want. This is my choice. Or across time, where people will maybe delay using AI until a certain point and then jump in all the way. Or vice versa.
- [85:02]
B
How are you positioning yourself to respond to the geopolitical risk? Are you divesting any physical stuff? Are you maximizing mobility? Or are you just like, nope, I'm at a point in my life, what comes, comes.
- [85:19]
A
Again? I, you know, so it's interesting that our conversation now turns a lot more to the human side after we've had a very interesting conversation on the tech and AI. But I am a lot more in that place that I'm describing for you, which is a place where I'm very happy with whatever I have. I've had a life that blessed me with so much there. You know, there were times where I had 16 cars in my garage and, you know, I don't live that way at all anymore. I have a one bedroom and, you know, I wear black T shirts and I give most of my money away and I'm really, really not interested in any of this anymore. Not because I'm a saint or a monk, but because I actually found more joy in a simpler life. So I'm a very minimalist in many ways, which basically means, which is my point in answering your question, that a lot of diverse divesting from risk comes to what it is that you need, it's not what it is that you have. Okay? The reality of the matter is, if I can describe to you how I shifted my life from the day I lost my son 2014 until now to almost nothing. I mean, like, I literally spent several years traveling with a suitcase and a carry on, and that's all I owned in life. That's it. And, you know, because I'm an engineer and highly organized and airlines will allow you specific number of pounds, if I needed to change a t shirt, a1t shirt will have to go out. Okay. If I needed to add protein bars, I may have to carry my, my shoes on my shoulder. And, you know, it's that kind of simpler life that I actually think is the way to go forward. I think one of the more interesting things that would, would affect our success in geopolitical uncertainty and economic uncertainty is managing the downside, not the upside. It's not to try and, and beat that race. It's to make that race in irrelevant to you. Okay, and how do you do that? You know, if you have assets and you can turn them into assets that appreciate with an economic crisis, that would be an interesting idea. Right. If you have fixed assets that could be part of the geopolitical conflict, maybe these are not a good idea. And so on. Right. It's simplifying, not complicating. That I think is the answer. And similarly with AI, just to go back to this, I think if we as humanity were to really solve this and I think. Was it you that interviewed Max Denmark? No, was another podcast. But, but, but, you know, the idea is that, is that, you know, if we were to really, really win with AI, Sam Altman says that all the time it would be amazing if we can all come together and set a few guidelines and say, let's all work in that direction. And that direction is simpler than all of the mess of the arms race that we're in today.
- [88:26]
B
Well, this was amazing. Where can people follow you for happiness? More wisdom on AI, the whole shebang.
- [88:34]
A
First of all, I have to say it was amazing and I love how you pushed back and put your views into it. You really gave me a lot to think about today, honestly. And I'm more informed because of this conversation. So, so thank you. I think people can find me on mogouda.com they can find me on all social medias, some combination of Mogaudet. So it's either mo_Gaudat on Instagram, Mogoudat on LinkedIn, Mgaudat on Twitter, and so on. Gaudat is G a W D a T. My favorite place to, to, to tell more and more stories is my podcast. It's called SLOMO S L O M O. And in it I try to take the same very complex concepts but talk about them from a human view. You know, really not. Not the performance or business or whatever. I just talk about the human side of things and, and yeah, and I think people should just listen to you all the time and play this episode more and more until you blow up as even further than you do and go further than where you are. And because I think you're doing something amazing for all of us. I'm a big fan of your work and I'm really grateful that I was part of it.
- [89:47]
B
Very kind man. I have no doubt that while this is the second that there will be even more. So grateful for your time, everybody at home, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace.
- [90:00]
C
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