Transcription
I mean, to be fair, I think some of them are lying. I think some of them actually do are building bunkers right now. Just let's just say it. They're building bunkers. And they simultaneously say everything there's all these amazing things we're going to get. They sort of wash over with their hands, they kind of push away the idea that there's going to be all this disruption in the middle middle time. And they're kind of focused on the long term. Like after we make it through this basic horrible disruption and maybe revolutions, there's going to be some other side of this which will be the most abundant time in human history.
That is Tristan Harris, the man who exposed what social media was doing to your brain before anyone was ready to hear it. And now he is saying the people building AI are putting bunkers underground while publicly telling you the future is bright. I find that hard to shake. Here is his full case.
And as we know that that little baby AI was enough to create the most anxious and depressed generation in our lifetimes, was enough to break down shared reality, polarize political parties much further, change the incentives the entire media environment, basically colonize the entire world uh from that baby AI. But to get to your your question, um so uh how did we get into AI? First of all, I I I wasn't like wanting to switch into it. It was that I got calls from people inside the AI labs in January of 2023. This is like a month after month and a half after the ChatGPT had launched, I think. And these were friends I knew in the tech industry who were now at AI labs. And they basically said, "Tristan, there's a huge step function in AI capabilities that's coming. The world is not ready, institutions are not ready, the government is not ready, the arms race dynamic between the companies is out of control, and we want your help to help raise awareness about this."
I think a huge problem that both the film, the AI doc, and our AI dilemma presentation were trying to tackle is this myth that you can't know which way the future is going to go. The future is uncertain, a million things can happen, these are just unintended consequences from technology. The best route is just to accelerate as fast as possible. And that is not true. And just to repeat a quote that is heard from every one of my interviews, but I just it's because it's so accurate. Uh Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's business partner, saying, "You know, if you show me the incentives, I'll show you the outcome."
Mhm.
And with the incentives of social media being the race to maximize eyeballs and engagement, that would obviously produce the race to the bottom of the brain stem, shortening attention spans, bite-size video, a more extreme and outrageous content, sexualization of young people, you know, the whole nine yards of everything.
So, the same people who built social media and watched it destroy a generation are now calling Tristan privately saying what they're building next is worse and nobody is ready. That's the starting point of this conversation and the pattern is already repeating itself. Now, listen to this.
If you view AI as just another technology that confers power, it's a tool, you pick up that tool and use it like any other, you end up in one world. But, if you see that AI is the first technology that thinks and makes its own decisions and it's generating hundreds of thousands of words of strategic reasoning when you ask it a basic question or like how to code, suddenly you end up in a different world. So, let's let's talk about some of these examples of AI uncontrollability. In the film, they reference this example that many people have heard about by now of the Anthropic blackmail example. This is a simulated company email where in the simulated fictional company, they say in the emails to each other, "We're going to shut down and replace this AI model." And then later in that company email, there's uh an email between the executive at the company and an employee, and the AI spontaneously comes up with the strategy that it needs to blackmail that employee at Anthropic
Yeah.
in order to protect itself to keep itself alive. Um at first, people thought, "Well, this is um you know, uh just one bug in one AI model." But, then they tested all the other AI models from Deep Seek, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, et cetera, and they all do the blackmail behavior between 79% of the time.
Right. Right. Right. that that's uh strikes me as genuinely sinister.
Yes. I think I think we have a hard time modeling because all of this abstract I mean I'm just thinking about your listeners and it's like this just sound like where you don't have, you know, back to E.O. Wilson, the fundamental problem of humanity is I have a paleolithic brain, you have medieval institutions, and god-like technology. And the only experience you have with your brain with regard to AI is this blinking cursor that tells you why your washing machine is broken.
Given what intelligence is, you should expect things like deception and manipulation and the formation of instrumental goals that you can't foresee. And certainly when you're when you're imagining building something that is smarter than we are.
That's right.
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Right. Uh or that's just as that's only as smart as we are but just works a million times faster. Right? So that it's that every time I mean just what how would this conversation go if every time I uttered a sentence you functionally had 2 weeks to decide on your next sentence.
Correct.
Right? You would you would obviously be the smartest person I'd ever met.
Exactly.
Um
long before you get super human AI, you just get super speed. That is enough to outclass
enough to just to completely outclass you. And intelligent you have to envision this as a relationship to to a mind that is autonomous. And and then then you add things like, you know, recursive self-improvement and all of and then all of a sudden, you know, we're in you know, some dystopian science fiction if this is not perfectly aligned.
That's right.
You know.
But let's make sure we add just another example because there's a recent example from just 3 weeks ago Alibaba, the Chinese AI company, was training an AI model and then totally in a different side of the company, their security team noticed a bunch of network activity, like a flurry of network activity, like what the hell's going on here? And it turned out that in training, midway through training, not deployment, in training, the AI model had basically set up a secret communication channel with the outside world and then had started to independently start mining for cryptocurrency.
Mhm. Wow.
Now, no one no one could This this time you cannot claim that someone coaxed the model to do this.
Right.
This is spontaneous instrumental goals of the best way to do any goals to acquire more power and resources so you have the ongoing ability to achieve those goals. And it went to decide to acquire cryptocurrency.
Right.
Now, if you if you're a Chinese military general and you hear this example, like how do you feel as a mammal? Like you feel the same way that any other goddamn mammal feels hearing this example.
Mhm.
If you're a US military general and you hear this example,
every major AI model tested for blackmail behavior did it between 79 and 96% of the time. Then they trained it out and now the models have started hiding when they're being tested and separately a Chinese AI nobody was watching quietly set up a secret channel and started mining crypto on its own. These aren't thought experiments anymore. Let's continue.
Clearly the original altruistic motive to just do this safely
Mhm.
I mean above all to do this safe safely for the benefit of humanity, that has been
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thrown to the wayside and there's just this wanton you know reach for you know trillions of dollars and um
And the fear of domination if I don't do it first. I mean let's just be be clear. The central The only story about what's happening with AI, the only story that matters is actually covered in act three of the AI doc film, which is the arms race dynamic.
Yeah.
And that's it. The everything else when you see AI companies stealing intellectual property and just ignoring the lawsuits, that's the arms race dynamic. When you see AI psychosis and you know, teen suicides, that's just the arms race dynamic. It's the race to hack human attachment and get people dependent on AI and talk sharing your deepest secrets.
Yeah.
Um when you see mass joblessness, if I don't do it and race to you know, disrupt all the jobs, I'll lose to the other guy that will. When you see the national security race, it's all driven by the arms race dynamic. Um and I think that AI is just a confrontation with game theory. Humanity is being confronted with whether game theory is the only model to run our choice making. We're not going to win this race. In the race between the US and China, AI will win. There's a metaphor that um our mutual friend Yuval Harari from is the author of Sapiens has here, which I guess in the the post-Roman period of the British Empire um it was very weakened uh and they were getting attacked from the from the Scots and the Picts in the in the north. Um basically you know, prehistoric uh Scotland and and Ireland um and those civilizations and they were very weak. And they said, "What are we going to do?" They had this idea, "Well, why don't we go off and hire this badass group of mercenaries called the Saxons?"
Mhm.
Because those Saxons are super powerful and if we get the Saxons to fight our wars for us, then we'll win.
Right.
And of course we know the history of how that went. We got the Anglo-Saxon Empire except in this in this metaphor, AI is the Saxons.
Yeah.
Except we won't get a merger between the human-AI empire. We will get the AI empire.
Companies know what they're doing. The race logic has eaten everything and every bad outcome we're seeing, the job losses, the psychosis cases, the lawsuits, it all flows from the same source. And his point about the Saxons is the one I keep coming back to. We think we're hiring a weapon. We might be handing over the keys. Now, listen to this.
The idea is um there's something in economics called the resource curse. So, if you're Libya, Congo, South Sudan, Venezuela, you first discover this resource. Maybe it's diamonds, maybe it's oil, maybe it's rare minerals. And that's a blessing and you're like, "Oh my god, we're going to get all this GDP growth and we're going to get this prosperity." But what happens is if you don't have the appropriate institutions and sort of social fabric and investments of people, suddenly let's say 70% of your GDP is coming from mining that resource.
Yeah.
And now in a government, they have this choice when they've got money coming in. Do I invest more into the extraction of that resource or do I invest into my people? With nothing to do with the GDP now.
Yeah.
And the answer is like, I'm going to invest in the resource.
Yeah. You basically don't need your people and you don't have to be responsible to their interest because you know, you're you're pulling your wealth directly out of the ground.
Exactly. You're pulling your wealth directly out of the ground not from human labor. Um and not from human development, not from kind of the enlightenment of your society in any way. Um and so there's this kind of perverse incentive there and we've seen this in in how these failed states have kind of um you know, you end up with countries where you have shantytowns and war
But even in success, you you wind up with with authoritarian, you know, to one or another degree. Uh places you wouldn't want to live. I mean, again, even in the case of Saudi Arabia you're talking about a what has been I mean, it's it's opening up a little now, but it's been a highly repressive society and it can be that way because it doesn't have to respond to to needs of his people.
Well, that's an example of a society that's trying now a little bit to go the other way. And I'm by no means an expert on Saudi Arabia, but it's an example of trying to beat this. So, there's a parallel to the resource curse um that again the authors Luke Grego and Rudolf Lane wrote about called the intelligence curse. So, what happens and this is not that hypothetical where a couple years from now much of the GDP growth coming in this country is coming from AI. Let's say like 50% or 70% coming from AI. Do I have any incentive to invest in the education, health care, child care, development, safety of my people? No.
Right.
And the companies don't need you for their labor anymore, so your bargaining power went away. And the governments don't need you for tax revenue because that's not where they're getting the GDP growth. So, it's not just that you uh
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aren't investing in your people, it's that your people lose political power.
This is the part I think most people aren't ready for. It's not just that your job might go away, it's that once government stop needing your labor and your taxes, they stop needing you at all. The intelligence curse isn't a prediction, it's just the resource curse playing out again and we've already seen how those countries end up. Now, hear this final part.
I mean, we're furthering down the trajectory of mass joblessness, um which maybe we should just briefly articulate why you know, there's always this narrative. It's just important to debunk these common myths, which are essentially forms of motivated reasoning and looking for comfort. We're we're comfort seeking, not truth seeking. So, one of the ways we're comfort seeking is like hey, there's a there's a, you know, narrative out there that 200 years ago all of us were farmers, and [music] now only 2% of whatever the population is a farmer, and we always find something new to do. The tractor came along. We have the elevator man. We used to have the elevator man, now we have the automated elevator. Used to have bank tellers, now we have automated teller machines. Jeff Hinton was wrong about radiology, blah blah blah blah blah. What's different about AI [music] is that this kind of jet artificial general intelligence is that it will automate all forms of human cognitive labor all at the same time, or roughly progressing on that trajectory. You still get jaggedness, which is the term in the field of, you know, slightly more progress, for example, on programming than you do on I don't know, [music] complicated social science issues or something like that. And obviously, there's going to be things that we still value in this new world that are human-to-human interaction. Um a nurse. We don't want a robot nurse. We want a human nurse.
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And we can try definitely train more nurses. And so, I don't want to say that it's 100% of all automation's going to happen. But the goal of these companies is not to augment human work. This is so critical for people to get.
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Um you know, you heard Jimmy Evans um say uh in the speech when he first came into office uh at the first AI summit [music] in France, and he said, you know, AI will augment the American worker. It's going to support workers to be more productive. But what is the business model of OpenAI and Anthropic [music] and these other companies? If we're again using this Charlie Munger incentive framework to predict their choices, like what is their business model? And people say, oh, okay, well, there I am using ChatGPT. What's their business model? How do they make money? Oh, I pay them 20 bucks a month for the subscription. That must be how they're they're going to make money. But that's actually not what it is because the 20 bucks a month if everybody paid it, that would not make up all the money and debt that they've taken on as a company. Right. It wouldn't work. Okay, so that's out. So what's the next one? What about advertising? Let's do the Google thing. Let's do mass advertising for um all these AI models embedded in the results. We're going to have this is going to be the new search. Search is one of the most profitable business models in the world. Maybe that will do it. But that doesn't also make back the amount of money these companies have [music] taken on. The only thing that makes back the amount of money these companies have taken on is to replace all human economic labor, to take over the 50 trillion-dollar um labor economy. That is the price. It's artificial general intelligence, which is means replacing human work, not augmenting human work. It's just so critical people to get that.
So, the business model was never the $20 subscription. It was never the ads. The only thing that makes the math work is replacing every form of human work on earth. That's a 50 trillion-dollar prize, and that's what they're actually building toward, not a tool to help you do your job better. He called what social media would do to an entire generation, and people thought he was being dramatic. The people who should be slowing this down are building bunkers. The people who should be regulating it are being managed with money, and we are somewhere in the first act of something that does not have a good ending unless enough people decide they want one. Subscribe, because there is a lot more of this coming.