You’re Being LIED to About AI, Learn THIS Before It’s Too Late!

I do want to also propose or ask the question: when we talk about our hyperchanging world, isn't it harder for older people to learn because of the way that the brain works in terms of processing speed and memory flexibility?

So, I was wondering if you're going to get a situation where, like my father had, because of his brain and the reduced memory flexibility and processing speed that happens when you're older, he is going to struggle significantly more than my niece, who can seem to learn. I mean, my niece knows five languages, and she's seven, or something crazy like that language. But I mean the brain is much more plastic, isn't it? So, the it's and that's goes back to our evolutionary psychology, which you know much evolutionary history, which you know much more than I do about, of we're meant to learn our lessons when we're young. Use that information for a lifetime. But if that information is changing quickly, well, that's—I mean, this is exactly what I'm pointing to. It is not normal for your developmental environment to fail to prepare you for your adult environment. The normal thing is, as a young person, you take on ever more of the responsibilities of the adult environment. And then at some point, you know, in a properly functioning culture, there's a right of passage. You go into the bush for 10 days. You come back with, you know, a large uh, you know, game animal. And now you're an adult, and you take that program that you've been building and you activate it. And that is normal. And you know, you're a lot happier person. You're a lot more fulfilled if your life has that kind of continuity to it.

And you know, I'm not against the idea that we have enabled ourselves to do things that can't be done if that's the limit. But we have also harmed ourselves gravely. And I would like to somehow pry apart our ability to improve our well-being from our self-inflicted wounds that come from this neverending pace of change. And I don't know if it's possible, but I think it's a worthy goal.

Something amusing. I don't know if it's exactly a counterpoint, but um, during COVID especially, and you know, through the recent technological change, uh, some people have started living closer to the more ancestral environment. Um, so uh, people whose jobs are online, some of my friends like went and built communities, like collectives, where they, you know, live, and they create farms, and they eat—and then they eat—and they have like an email job. They do their email jobs for five hours and and go out, and they're all have children, and it's a fascinating life. And there was so much rethinking in Silicon Valley about how we live. And there's a bunch of startups that are trying to create um cities where they're like, "Okay, we know that we've—we're suffering because our cities are not really walkable." And there's so many reasons why we're suffering. First, we're not getting the movement. Second, there's a social aspect of a walkable city where you're able to interact with people. You'll make uh friends by just happening to be in the same place as others. Let's actually build uh walkable cities, and if we want to, you know, uh transport faster, we'll have these self-driving cars on the perimeter of the city that are going around, and I think there are ways in which technology can afford us to uh to live uh in a way that reverses—I guess in a more local way. I like that vision, but I also am aware that there's a different vision, right? You see people in Palo Alto, for example, actually exerting, you know, very strong controls on how much their children are exposed to, uh, you know, to phones. And I live in Palo Alto. Yeah. So, so you see that.

On the other hand, what I am worried about is that the elites of Palo Alto don't realize that what they're doing is they're figuring out how to reduce the harm to their own families as they're exporting the harm to the world of these technologies that, for everybody else, are unregulated. And so the question is, can we bring everybody along? If the AI revolution is going to alter our relationship to work and everything else, can we bring everybody along so that at the end of this process, instead of saying, well, you know, it's a shame that uh, you know, three billion people were sacrificed to this transition, but progress is progress, we can really say, well, we figured it out, and everybody now is living in a style that is closer to their programming and closer to the expectations of their physical bodies. You know, if that were true, then I would—I would be—I would love to be wrong in my fears about what's coming. Um, but unfortunately, the market is not going to solve this problem without our being deliberate about forcing it to.

What's your biggest fear? Like when you say my fears about what's coming, what do you—like what's—what's the picture that comes in your mind?

Oh, it's a whole different topic actually. Um, my my fear coming stemming from technology uh and AI is that this is a runaway process, and that that runaway process is going to interface very badly with some latent human programs; that in effect, the need for workers largely disappears, and the people who are at the head of the processes that result in that elimination for the need for workers start talking about useless eaters. Maybe they come up with a new term this time. Thin the herd. Yep. Or they allow it to be thinned or something. Right.

I've heard you talk about the five key concerns you have or the five key threats you have before. Could you name those five?

So the first one is the one I worry least about. I don't worry zero about it, but I worry least about it, which is the malevolent AI uh that the doomers are so focused on. The second one is the idea that, you know, an AI can be misaligned not because it has divergent interests but because it just misunderstands what you've asked it—these autonomous agents. You know, the famous example is you ask them to produce as many paper clips as possible, and they start liquidating the universe to make paper clips, and you know, it's a—it's a sorcerer's apprentice kind of issue. The third one I would say is actually—all of the remainder of them I would say are guaranteed—and um the third of them is the derangement of human intellect; that we are already living in a world where it's very difficult to know what the facts even mean. Right? We—the facts are so filtered, and we are so persuaded by algorithms that it's—you know, our ability to be confident even in the basic facts, even within our own discipline sometimes, is uh at an all-time low, and it's getting worse, and that problem takes a giant leap forward at the point that you have the ability to generate undetectable deepfakes. Right? That's going to alter the world very radically when the fact that you're looking at videotape of somebody robbing a bank doesn't mean that they robbed a bank or that a bank was even robbed.

Um, so anyway, I call this—we deal with this a lot, by the way. I—I think every single week—every single week I send my—I have a chat for people that just are now basically spending—I'd say 30% of their time dealing with deepfakes of me doing crypto scams, inviting people to Telegram groups and then asking them for credit card details. We had one on X. I think you probably saw it done, didn't you, of me? But that someone was running ad deepfake ads on X of me. And it wasn't just one ad. It was like there were—it was like swatting flies. There was 10 of them. And I messaged them to X, and there was 10 more. Then the day after there was 10 more. Then the day after there was 10 more. Then it started happening on Meta. So it's a video of me basically asking you to come to a Telegram group where people are being scammed, and audience members of mine are being scammed. And when I send them to Meta, they thankfully remove them. But then there's five more today, and I went on LinkedIn yesterday, and my DMs are, "Steve, by the way, there's this new scam." And I actually—at this point, I—I'd need someone full-time just sending this over to Meta. I'm the—I'm the same but on a smaller scale. Every week it's, did you really message me on Facebook asking me for my crypto wallet and blah blah blah. My—my least favorite one's when the single mother messages me saying that she just paid £500 of her money and how devastated she is, and I feel this moral obligation to give her her money back. Um, because she's fallen for some kind of scam. That was me. It was my voice. It was a video of me telling her something. Yeah. And I don't know—I don't know how you deal with that. But sorry, do continue.

Well, I mean that's actually on the list here: the massive disruption to the way things function, both because people are going to be unemployed in huge numbers and because those who are not abiding by our social contract are going to find themselves empowered more than the people who do. So in this case, not only is this poor woman, you know, now out 500 bucks for whatever the scam was, but you've also been robbed, whether or not you pay her back for the thing that she thought she purchased; your credibility is being stolen by somebody, and you have no capacity to prevent it. This has happened to me also, and it is profoundly disturbing, and it is only one of a dozen different ways that AI enables those who are absolutely willing to shrink the pie from which we all derive in order to enlarge their slice. You know, there—there are innumerable ways that this can happen, and um I think people do not see it coming. They don't understand how many different ways they are going to be robbed every bit as surely as if somebody was printing money. Um, and then the last one is that this just simply accelerates demographic uh processes that do potentially result in the unleashing of technologies that pre-existed AI. You know, this—this can easily result in an escalation uh into wars that turn nuclear. Um, so anyway, I think that list could probably be augmented at this point now that we've, you know, spent a little time in the AI era. We can begin to put a little more flesh on the bones both of what is possible in this era and what we should fear.

One of those—you—you mentioned uh truth, you know, the problem of truth. Would you say—just a thought experiment—someone today, like an average person, college-educated say person, are they more propagandized or led astray than someone in Soviet Russia?

Well, I don't know because I didn't live in Soviet Russia, but my understanding from people who did was that there was a wide awareness that the propaganda wasn't true. Doesn't mean they knew what to believe, but there was a cynicism, which is one of my fears here, is that the, you know, you're really stuck choosing between two bad options in a world where you can't tell what is true. You can either be overly credulous and be a sucker all the time, or you can become a cynic, and you can be paralyzed by the fact that you just don't believe anything. But neither of those is a recipe for—

Do you think Google search first and maybe now ChatGPT has helped people more or less to find truth?

I think it's not ChatGPT exactly, but all of the various AI engines starting with Google have briefly enhanced our capacity to know what's true because, in fact, they allow us to see through the algorithmic manipulation because the AI is not well policed. You can get it to recognize patterns that people will swear are not true. Um, and so anyway, a lot of us have found it useful in just simply unhooking the gaslighting. Um, so that's been very positive. But I also remember the early days of search, and search used to be a matter of there are some pages out there. I don't know where they are. Here's a mechanized something that's looked through this stuff and just point me at the direction of things that contain these words. Right, before the algorithmic manipulation started steering us into believing pure nonsense because somebody who controlled these things decided it was useful for us to believe those things. So my guess is, at the moment, AI is enhancing our ability to see more clearly, but that really depends on some kind of agreement to protect that capacity that I'm not aware of us having—

Are you implying there that AI will protect us from AI—i.e., the woman that got scammed in my audience, the platforms would have a tool built in which would be able to identify shortly that that is not me and the ad has been launched by someone in another country potentially, and then also when she starts being asked for her credit card details in such a way on Telegram 10 minutes later the system will be able to understand there that this is probably a scam at that touch—touch point too, and it will also be the defense, not just the offense.

First thing—question is Meta incentivized to solve this problem?

Yes. Yes. And so Meta is probably actively working on AIs, and again it's going to be a cat-and-mouse game like every abuse that happens out there. So I—I think that the market will naturally respond to things like that in the same way that, you know, we installed antiviruses—as you know, annoying as they are. I think we'll install uh AIs on our computers that will allow us to at least help us kind of sort the fake from from the truth.

Well, but let's—let's take the example you say. Is Meta incentivized to solve this problem? Superficially, it seems that it should be, but how many times in recent history have we watched a corporation cannibalize its own business over what, at best, is the bizarre desires of its shareholders, right? Why was X throwing off people with large accounts or Facebook or Google? It would seem that you would expect, based on the market choosing search engines or social media sites, you would expect these companies to be absolutely mercenary and say, you know, if Alex Jones has a big audience, who are we to say? That's what I would have expected. Instead, you had these companies policing the morality of thought, even though it reduced the size of the population using the platforms. I have a hard time explaining why that happened, but I have every reason to expect the same thing will happen with AI.

What are you excited about with AI? What's your optimistic take? Because at the start of this conversation, you said that there's infinite ways that it could improve our lives and there's 10 times more ways that it could hurt our lives. But let's investigate some of those ways that it could drastically improve our lives.

There's a couple of different ways. One, we have, as we mentioned before, a dearth of competent teachers and professors. And that is a problem that will take three generations at least to solve if what we're going to do is start tomorrow and start educating people in the right way that would make them competent to stand at the front of a room and educate. But if we can augment that process, if we can leverage a tool like AI so that, you know, a small number of competent teachers can maybe reach a larger number of pupils, that's plausible, I think. Second thing is we have a tremendous number of problems that are obstacles to us living well on this planet that AI might be able to manage that human intellect alone cannot. Right? Just in the same way that, you know, compute power can calculate things at a rate that human beings can't keep up, and there are certain things you want calculated very well. There are also some reasoning problems. You could imagine that instead of having um static laws that govern behavior poorly because they get gamed, that you could have a dynamic interaction. You could specify a—an objective of something like a law, and then you could monitor whether or not a particular intervention successfully moved you in the direction that you were hoping to go or did something paradoxical, which happens all the time, and you could have—you could basically have governance that is targeted to navigation and prototyping rather than to specifying a blueprint for how we are to live. So we wouldn't need politicians. Um, at the moment we're stuck with, you know, constitutional protections that are as good as has been constructed and still inadequate to modern realities.

Dan, what are you excited about with AI from an individual level, but also from a societal level?

Yeah. Well, the big ones are healthcare and education. I mean, it's ridiculous that you uh are sitting there in pain, having had an MRI, and there just hasn't been someone to look at that MRI yet and and tell you what to do. Um, and that could easily be solved. There's all sorts of healthcare issues where—and also not only that—throughout the entire world there are places that just don't have general practitioners and they don't have, you know, medical advisers, and and you know, the breakthroughs in global healthcare will be phenomenal, and the breakthroughs in global education could be transformational um on the planet. I—I'm excited at an individual level that I think the industrial age created a bunch of jobs that are very dehumanizing, and we've just kind of gotten used to them and put up with them. The idea that work should be repetitive and you know, you just repeat the same loop over and over and over and over again, and over a 10-year period of time you might get, you know, graduated up one gear and all that kind of stuff. I don't think that's very human. Um, the idea that you could be simultaneously writing a book, launching a business, running a team, launching a festival, having an event. Um, that—that—that you could actually be doing this kind of like mini-kingdom work where you've got this little, you know, uh ecosystem around you of fun things that you're involved in that is actually made possible for a vast majority of people if they embrace these kind of tools. Um, you can live an incredibly fulfilling and amazing and impactful existence, or I know that I do as a result of having these tools in my life. Like I'm—I'm doing things that I could have only dreamed about uh as a kid.

And what would you say to entrepreneurs? I know you—you work with thousands of entrepreneurs. What are you telling them in terms of their current businesses or business opportunities that you're foreseeing?

So I think that small teams have infinite leverage now, and that when you have a team of say five to 10 people who share an incredible passion for a meaningful problem in the world and they want to see that meaningful problem solved, and they come together in the spirit of entrepreneurship to solve that problem—that little 5 to 10 person team armed with the technology that we now have available, you can have a big impact. You can make a lot of money. You can have a lot of fun. You can solve meaningful problems in the world. You can scale solutions. You can probably do more in a three-year window than most people did in a 30-year career. Uh, and then that little band of 5 to 10 people could either go together onto a new meaningful problem or they could disband and you know, work on other meaningful problems with different teams.

In such a world where you have this sort of infinite leverage, but everyone else has access to the same infinite leverage, what becomes the USP? Going back to this idea of the moat, like what is the thing of value when we've all got access to $20 infinite leverage?

Well, first of all, the first thing you need to do, you need to understand is that this moment of time is the least competitive uh moment. Like if you understand how to use these tools, you can start making money tomorrow. Like we, you know, I see countless examples of people making thousands of dollars with these hustles that I—that I talked about or building businesses that generates millions of dollars in the first couple of months of existence. So, I would say start moving now. Start building things. So, it's an unprecedented time of—of—of wealth creation. Clearly, at some point, as the market gets more efficient, as people more and more people understand how to use these tools, um, there's less potential for uh, you know, creating these massive businesses quickly, and we've seen this—like the dawn of the internet or dawn of the web, you know, it was a lot easier to create Facebook than it is now—then we had mobile, and for three, four, five years it was very easy to create massive businesses, and then it became harder. Being just at the edge of what's possible is going to be very, very important over the next couple of years. And that's—that gets me really excited because the entrepreneurs who are paying attention are going to—are going to be having the most amount of fun, but they're also going to be able to make a lot of money.

How many applications have been built on Replit to date?

So, you know, I can talk about the millions of things that have been built since the—since we started the company, but just since uh September when we launched Replit, there's been about 3 million applications built purely in natural language with no—with no coding at all, purely natural language. Uh, of those, I think uh 300, 400,000 of them were deployed in a real—in the site was deployed, and it is having—people are using it—some kind of business, some kind of internal tool. I built one last night, by the way—an internal tool—or I built an application to track um how my kids earn pocket money. Amazing. So I just told it that I wanted to track the tasks that are happening around the house and put an assign a value to them, and I want to be able to at the end of the week push a button and get a summary of how much to pay each child um for their pocket money. We are so screwed. And within 15 minutes, it had created this application, and it was amazing. Like you could toggle between like here's the place where you have the kids, and here's the weekly reports, and here's the um how much per task, and you can tick off the tasks or remove tasks or add tasks. So then I now have this application for which took 15 minutes of just talking about what I wanted, and now I have an application to run the pocket money uh situation in the house, and this—by the way, it's something—having run an IT agency years ago—that's something that we would have charged 5 to 10,000 to create—or 5 to 10,000 US—to create, and how much time—probably talking something that would have been a three, four-week project—and we're at the start of the S-curve now that you're describing, and it's already—Yeah. If you—if it's a $20—Replit's roughly $20 a month, 25 for the—for the base case, you did one day of usage. Let's say it's a dollar. Yeah. It cost you—and it cost you minutes and a dollar now, and we're at the start of the S-curve, and and you talk to it like you're chatting to a developer. So, one of the things that slows down the development process is you have to send the information to a developer, and they need to understand it, and then they need to create something and then come back to you. This just happens in front of your eyes uh while you're watching it, and it's actually showing you what's being built, and it's—it's really wild. If you love the Driver CEO brand and you watch this channel, please do me a huge favor. Become part of the 15% of the viewers on this channel that have hit the subscribe button. It helps us tremendously, and the bigger the channel gets, the bigger the guests.