Transcription
Has your job gotten easier as AI has become less popular?
You're asking me about why they keep booing graduation speakers in America who try to talk up?
It certainly seems like the AI regulation guy might have an easier job when AI is the most spectacularly unpopular technology that I've ever covered.
Yeah, it's gotten much easier. I have to say the shift has been so fast. It's been quite stunning for me to see. I really didn't see it in my bingo card swinging so fast. Like just the other week on the same Wednesday, I think it was, I spent one hour talking about the risk of superintelligence with Steve Bannon and one hour talking about the risk of superintelligence with Bernie Sanders in the Capitol on the same day. And the sheer craziness of this, like after having lived most of my life thinking that those two guys didn't agree on anything at all. It's just further driven home by if you look at the polling, like 95% of Americans are like, "No, we don't like the status quo racing to superintelligence." And it's not just Bannon and Sanders, it's like everybody in between. Also, a lot of politicians I've spoken to recently have told me privately that they've seen this huge vibe shift among their voters where they've swung very negative on this, and they can smell a winning election issue a mile away. Right.
Yeah. This is, you asked if this has made my job easier. Very, very much so. Very much so. And I'm actually quite excited to see what's going to happen for the rest of the year now because I think this movement is only growing. The reason people boo a lot that commencement speakers talk about AI now is not just because of stuff to do with superintelligence and extinction. It's more broadly they are just against this race to replace. You know, it's pretty clear that the big companies, the business model is just race to replace humans in all ways. It starts small, like, yeah, replace the human girlfriends with AI girlfriends, replace the human therapist.
There's a different definition of small to me.
It's smaller than extinction. I mean, I think it's horrible, obviously, but replace more human relations by AI relationships, and also professionally, like therapists and so much more. And then replace human decision-making more and more. It's great if you give a doctor some AI technology that's better at diagnosing cancer, but a lot of it now is about just wholesale, "Take this programmer, fire them, have a machine do their job." As long as there's no steering of this, we get to the situation where ultimately even CEOs of companies that don't have an AI CEO will just get outcompeted by those who do. Some, in my opinion, crazy people want AI personhood so that you should be allowed to have a company with no humans in it. So there's no human to sue, no human is responsible. And in the military, you know, just have replace all the generals by AIs that can decide everything. And before we know it, if we go that road, right, we've actually, even without any machines overthrowing humanity like in some movies, we have completely voluntarily just given away the keys to Earth. And if we have no say in what happens anymore, you know, that doesn't mean for sure we're going to get ultimately killed. But we've seen it again and again in history that if you have a group of people who just have no say, it often doesn't work out so well, right? Look at what happens when some colonialists come to some place and just have totally superior military technology. Why should we humans put ourselves in such a disempowered situation? Absolutely ridiculous. So I think the race to replace is the broader phenomenon that basically unifies everybody, that everybody is so unified against.