Transcription
Welcome to the program, Max Tegmark. It is an honor to have you on. I've been a fan of yours for a very long time.
It's an honor for me to be here.
Uh so, so Max, I'm seeing the statement that you have put out and let's just can we go through it? Here it is. We call for a prohibition on the development of super intelligence not lifted before there is broad scientific consensus that that it would be done safely and controllably and a strong public buyin. That's the whole statement.
Right.
That's it.
And what do you hope because I've seen who you have signing. I mean here's the first five signitories already. uh Steve Waznjak, Sir Richard Branson, Steve Bannon, Glenn Beck, Susan Rice, Prince Harry, uh Yaval Harrari, which is mindboggling to me. You have all of these leaders from all walks of life. You have faith leaders, um and it runs the spectrum. What is it that we all have in common here?
Yeah. And you also have um the most cited scientists in the world. Joshua Benjo and Stephen and and um Jeff Hinton, you know, they're like Einstein and Oppenheimer of of today who've developed much of this technology and pioneering work saying their own work. They're they're what these people all have in common. It was hilarious to see people express confusion and say, "This is such a bewilderingly diverse group of people. Why aren't they even agreeing on anything?" It's because they're all human. And this is a question about do we want a future where machines work for humans or a future which is all about the machines?
So, can you stop super intelligence? I mean, we've had a conversation on this. You know, Sam Alman believes he's creating God.
Um, and uh, and that's a terrifying and there's a lot of people in Silicon Valley that want to meet God um, of their creation. How do you stop this? China is rushing towards it. We're rushing towards it. How do you stop it?
Well, let's start by talking just a little bit more about what Sam Alen and people and these folks want and then then I promise I'll tell you how we can stop it.
Okay.
It was very doable. You know, I was just looking this morning at some of the early writings of Sam Oldman before his uh media team started telling him to tone down the rhetoric a little bit. This is a direct quote from a blog he wrote called the merge where he says we will be the first species ever to design our own descendants. My guess is that we can either be the biological bootloader for digital intelligence and then fade into an evolutionary tree branch. How does that sound to you as an optimistic future for our children? Or we can figure out what a successful merge looks like. So he's arguing in this piece that you know we should merge with machines and you know the average person listening to us right now on this program you know who asked them if they want to merge with machines or if they want their kids to merge with machines. I was just playing with my 2-year-old son Leo this morning. I find that the biggest assault on American democracies in 1776 that someone is going to like force my son to merge with machines without him or his parents or anyone really having a say on this. It's it's it's completely nuts that a bunch of dudes in in San Francisco who've had too much Red Bull to drink should get to make these sort of decisions for the rest of us.
For all of humanity.
Um.
Yeah indeed the the the race though is on. So how do you stop it?
Well first of all the uh lobbyists from these companies keep trying to convince us that it's unstoppable. That's the number one scop trick in the book. Right? If if a big powerful country invades another country, the first thing they're going to try to persuade those who are invaded is oh we're unstoppable. don't bother fighting us. It's it's pointless, right? So, we have to be a bit suspicious when the same people saying it's unstoppable are actually many of you working for the companies. Second, let's just look at the logic. You know, uh the argument is you can never stop a new technology that can give a lot of money and power. And that's just historically false. You know, I could make so much money on human cloning if I could if I could clone you, Glenn, and a bunch of other talented people, make and mess with your DNA and tweak you and and sell your services. You know, we didn't do that as a society. There was a big discussion about this in the 70s and the consensus around the world was we could lose control over our species if you start messing with with ourselves in that way and we it became so stigmatized it just didn't happen.
There there is a guy wasn't there a guy who did it wasn't there somebody in China or?
Yes actually so this is such a great thing that you bring up people often say well if we don't do it China's going to do it well there was a dude in China who did it. And guess what the Chinese government did with him? They sent him to jail because they thought human cloning was a a really bad idea. And you know the Chinese government, the Chinese Communist Party, they really like control. So the idea that they're going to let some some oddball in China do something that could lose control over the human species doesn't land well there. Right. And it's so this is where the optimism comes to your first question. How can we stop this? You know there there is a race of course for dominance between the US and China. But there actually two races going on here. There is a dominance race, economic dominance, military dominance, technological cultural dominance. And the way to win that race is with by building tools that are controllable. Whereas there's there's a second race to see who can be the first to build super intelligence that we lose control over and that wipes out humanity. Maybe that's a suicide race. the the way the US or China will compete for for dominance is is involved by doing something that's going to take away the power from both countries. I think of this is just really analogous to something that happened already. The cold war with the Soviet Union there there were also two races. There was a race for dominance economic and military, right? And we Americans won that one. And then there was a suicide race to see who can put the most nuclear craters in the other country. And both the Americans the Soviet and the Soviets ultimately decided to not nuke each other just not engage with that suicide race. Why was it cuz Reagan and Gorbachev got on a stage and looked each other in the eye and hugged each other and promised to not nuke each other? No. There wasn't that kind of trust. But it also wasn't necessary cuz we knew the Soviets knew that it was suicide to try to nuke us. We knew that they knew and vice versa. And that's all it took to avoid the suicide race.
And so the suicide you're talking about with ASI is if China gets it, China would know we'll lose control of they're control freaks and we'll lose control of our own country. We won't be in control. ASI will be running everything.
Right.
Exactly. Exactly. Exactly.
So, how do you how do you deal then with people like Sam Alman? I mean, I would imagine I mean, because they're going to be people who have, you know, labs and and compute time um to be able to pursue this. Can you can you catch those people before they go down that road? That even possible?
It certainly is possible. You know, it's of course in the interest of these companies to make us think it's impossible, right? So, we shouldn't try. But it's very possible because we look, we do this with every other industry. Let's look at biotech for example, the the industry that is now not doing human cloning, right?
But they're they're doing fine, making a ton of money on other medicines, right? And u once upon a time there were no regulations on biotech. They could sell any medicine they wanted in the supermarket. And sometimes this caused tragedies. Sometimes it caused tragedies in China because it was unregulated there. Sometimes it caused tragedies here. In the US there was this drug called Thalidomide. You probably remember, right? It caused over a 100,000 American babies to be born without arms or legs. And that triggered so much anger that we got the political will to regulate biotech. We created safety standards, the FDA. And now there's actually a ban on selling unapproved medicines in the US. We can argue about how one could make that system less efficient, more efficient, right? eliminate corruption and stuff like that, but I don't know any theories scientists or people in biotech who wanted to abolish the FDA and then legalize Thalidomide, right? And we've done the same thing with every other industry. Even if you if you go to San Francisco to visit one of these tech companies and you go for lunch across the street, that restaurant before they could sell their first sandwich had to have a health inspector check their kitchen and and show that they met some basic safety standards. Right? So saying that AI companies should be the only companies in America that don't have to meet any safety standards is really just asking for corporate welfare for AI companies.
Okay? kind.
Okay, hang on just a second. I take a one minute break. I want you to read this statement. They're asking for signatures. I have signed on to it. Um, there are plenty of people who I disagree on almost everything um that have signed on to it. There's plenty of people that are my friends that have signed on to it. Really, really brilliant people, faith leaders, etc., etc. Um we we I think the reason why it's so diverse is because th this is it. This is the end of humanity. If we lose control of uh our technology, it will become a master and not a tool. And I want you to go to futureoflife.org. futureoflife.org. Look for the super intelligence statement. It was just released a couple of hours ago. Superintelligencestatement.org. Uh you can go there and find it uh or at futureoflife.org and sign it. And I want to ask I want to ask Max what what what your signature means? Um and what what what is this going to be used for? So what is your goal with this statement, Max?
Yeah, just for your reader for our listeners here, futurelife-ph.org is where you can go and add your support for this if you'd like. The goal of this statement is to u make it publicly known that if you're concerned about this, you're not crazy. You're not alone. You you have an incredible amount of support from um thought leaders across the political spectrum here. Up until now, a lot of people who who have this horrible feeling that this is nuts, right, are afraid of speaking up because they tell me people a lot of people have told me this because they don't want to sound like lit, scaremongers, you know, now is the time to to to speak up and say what you think because we this is this is this, it, Glenn. You're you're so right. You know, the really the reason we're seeing such a remarkably broad group of people agreeing on this is because that's also what would happen if we actually got invaded by aliens from space. Just like you said in the beginning, right? If some weird spaceships start showing up and and shooting at us, everybody's going to team up on team.
Right. Right.
And that's what's happen that's what happens now. That's fundamentally also why we can stop this because almost nobody wants this. We also just released a poll showing that less than 5% of Americans actually want a race to a race to super intelligence. That's less than one in 20 Americans, right? And yet we're having this stuff shut down our throats.
Um Max, I can't thank you enough for this um and uh and all that you're doing. that we need to have more conversations about uh artificial intelligence, artificial super intelligence, general intelligence. The world is going to change and millions of jobs are either going to change or be lost and it depends on how we apply AI. Um it's not something to fear if you realize it is a tool and you are the master. But too many people are just going to use this. their brain is going to go soft and they will let it take control of their lives and answer their you know make their decisions etc. And then if it becomes general intelligence or super intelligence you're a slave to it. Uh and it it has to stop. It has to stop. Uh so if you would like to uh sign this I have signed it and I I urge you to sign this. Um it's a very simple statement. Uh we call for a prohibition on the development of super intelligence not lifted before there's a broad scientific consensus that it will be done safely and controllably and a strong public buyin. That's all you're signing. And you can go to superintelligence.org. I I I found it at futureoflife.org and you can you'll find it there as well. You scroll down the page but superintelligence.org org. I urge you to sign it and to pass it on to somebody else. This is a conversation we must have. MIT physics professor and uh and author of Life 3.0, Max Tegmark.