Transcription
But we're starting tonight with artificial intelligence, which is developing at such an astonishingly fast rate, it poses a threat to the survival of humanity. That's the opinion of an American billionaire, Paul Tudor Jones, after he met privately with 40 leaders. He says, household names we would all recognize in politics, finance, science, and tech. He says these leaders all agreed that AI is set to transform things like education and health care. So that's good. But on the flip side, he said all of these leaders who we would all know if we knew their names agreed AI could easily be turned against humanity.
Here's some of what he had to say. "AI clearly poses, uh, an imminent threat, security threat, imminent, uh, in our lifetimes to humanity." And they said the, the competitive dynamic is so intense among the companies, uh, and then geopolitically between Russia and China that there's no agency, no ability to stop and say, "Maybe we should think about what actually we're creating and building here." And so, uh, then the follow-up question is, "Well, what are you doing about it?" He said, "Well, I, I'm buying a 100 acres in the Midwest, I'm getting cattle and chickens, and I'm laying in provisions for real. For real. For real." Uh, and that was obviously a little disconcerting.
And then he went on to say, "I think it's going to take an accident where 50 to 100 million people die to make the world take the threat of this really seriously."
Now, as if that's not alarming enough, Tudor Jones went on to say that these 40 leaders in politics, finance, science, and AI had a breakout session where they were presented with a series of propositions and asked whether they agreed or disagreed. Have a listen to what happened. "One of the propositions was, 'There's a 10% chance in the next 20 years that AI will kill 50% of humanity.'" So there's a 10% chance that AI will kill 50% of humanity in the next 20 years. All four modelers were on the agree side of that. All four of the leading developers of the AI models were on that side.
What's really alarming about this, Caleb and Liz, is this isn't some crank from left field. This is a very well-respected businessman who has strong contacts in the key aspects of American society and culture saying this is what they're all thinking.
Absolutely. And we've heard this from Elon Musk himself. He's, he's right at the forefront of this. He's the brain chips guy. He's a total, he's a very passionate transhumanist. Always has been. Has never tried to hide that. We know that he's working on these humanoids and he's very excited about pumping thousands of them out. We've shown you that story before. Here he was talking recently. He also said this on Joe Rogan's podcast, the most watched, listened-to podcast in the world. But here he is talking at a second conference saying something that's alarmingly similar to what you just heard. "What's the optimistic case of abundance? No shortage of goods and services for anyone on earth. The sort of 10-20% probability of something terrible happening." Um, so 10 to 20 probability of what happening? "Something terrible, which is like, what, how bad is something terrible? Extinction. [Music] Annihilation or whatever." He just says it so carefully. It's, it's easy to relate to it like that when you've got the capacity to build bunkers as many of these uber, uber-rich guys have, like Zuckerberg openly talks about bunkers that he's built.
The problem with this is that it's an arms race and, as this guy discussed, the countries are in such stiff competition with each other trying to be the first to produce AGI, artificial general intelligence, and we're told that someone, one of these companies is going to crack that by the end of this year. It's roughly six months away, we're told. The problem with inventing AGI is that give that thing 10 minutes and itself will create ASI, artificial super intelligence. And once you have something with the IQ of a million, that's what we're talking about now. It will not need human input to evolve anymore. It can teach itself things. It can learn whatever it wants. It's like imagining that an ant created you. And now that ant is trying to tell you what to do. Why on earth would you listen to it? You don't need that thing anymore. You are 10 billion times smarter than any human being on the planet.
And what a lot of these tech guys are saying, I've seen so many clips of them doing this. And it's really funny to see these tech nerds talk quite hysterically. Like it, it sounds like, "Oh, are you guys nutcases?" But they're the ones who would know. They, this is exactly what they're saying. They're like, the logical conclusion is that this thing will decide you guys are redundant. "What do we need you for?" And will seek to eliminate large swaths of the population. It sounds hysterical, but when you think it through, it also makes sense because there's nothing this thing can't do. There's no one it can't control. It knows your desires. It can use deep fakes. If this thing wants the nuclear codes, you're not going to be able to stop it from getting whatever it wants. It will be able to destroy infrastructure. It will be able to do absolutely whatever it wants. And that seems to be something that they're openly admitting, Caleb. And yet at the same time, nobody's really doing anything about it except for building bunkers.
Everyone in tech knows it, and everyone who's worked in the sector knows it. Um, Claire, many of you will know as a regular on Sky, went to a symposium in Sydney last week about AI and they were all saying exactly the same thing, that you know, we're talking by the end of the decade, uh, this stuff will be so powerful that you cannot, that the people who work in the industry cannot even fathom exactly how powerful this stuff will be by the end of the decade. That's within five years, this stuff. Um, and that it is a serious danger. It poses a serious danger to the human race, to humanity. And the most bizarre thing is that we've built it. We have done this to ourselves.
And I mean, you mention Elon Musk. Two years ago, in fact, two years and a month ago, it was April, two years ago, 2021, he and a bunch of other, uh, tech bosses and engineers from Meta and Google and Microsoft and whatever signed an open letter. Steve Wozniak, one of the founders of Apple, signed an open letter saying, "We need to have at least a six-month pause on the development of AI technology beyond what was then GPT4 because it is moving too fast and we haven't had any time to regulate it or to seriously discuss the effects of this and what it's going to look like at the end." And that didn't happen, and we are fast hurtling towards a world where we could be in serious trouble.
And of course, we talked last night as well about what it means just at a, a normal human level, taking away your jobs and that sort of thing. We talked last night about for the first time in the US, they've now got a driverless truck driving around in the US in Texas. It's got no one on board whatsoever. So, you follow that to its logical conclusion. You get rid of truckers. Well, what are they all going to do? And law firms are now using AI as well. One of the largest law firms in Australia, Minter Ellison, is using AI when it's going through discovery in court cases now. So they're using AI to just, you know, wade through vast swaths of documents to find evidence that might be useful in court. I know someone who runs a number of very successful businesses and he uses AI for basic legal advice as well, just, you know, ordinary stuff that's sort of beyond his knowledge but doesn't require specialist advice, he'll go and ask ChatGPT and it comes back with the correct answer. This is where we're going.
So of course, in, in the case of the law firm, it means they have to hire far fewer graduates straight out of uni who do the sort of, you know, low-level, kicking-around sort of jobs before they work their way up. So if you don't have the kids coming through doing the low-level stuff for the higher-up lawyers, then who eventually becomes the higher-up lawyers, so on and so forth. So if AI basically, if AI doesn't take your job, it'll take your life. So it probably doesn't matter anyway, which, which is which is the worst outcome? Well, the law firm, if they're using graduates to sort through documents, they can go through 20 to 25 documents an hour compared to the AI program which can sort through three and a half thousand documents an hour and probably with greater accuracy.
It's not all bad news, though. If you've ever paid legal fees, this is fantastic. Well, I'm sure they'll still fudge those numbers. They'll probably use AI but not tell anyone. It's like, but the fact that this thing could be able to hack into anything. We talk about hackers. This is going to be the most incredible hacker on the face of the planet. There is nothing that it won't be able to access. A lot of people think of robots when we're talking about AI. No, no. This thing will just be an all-encompassing presence that can talk to itself in different technologies all around the world constantly. This whole AI discussion just illustrates perfectly the paradox of human nature, right? We are the most magnificent villains. We're capable of incredible beauty and ugliness, glory and destruction. And so, on the one hand, AI will revolutionize healthcare and education and probably destroy half of humanity. That's typical of human nature, and at our own hands.