Hey, it's Eric Newcomer. Welcome back to Cerebral Valley.
This is Episode 2. I'm here with Max Child and
James Wilsterman. We are going to dig into.
We're calling this episode AI Kills Us All, which will give
you a taste. It's not not the small
questions. You know what what to do about
privacy or like you know who should be in charge.
It's like, what happens if we get artificial general
intelligence? What, how worried are we about
sort of the big doom and gloom? Guys?
Great. Great to be back with you.
Great to be back. Thanks for having us.
Great to be here. After my conversation with Max
and James, I will be interviewing Daniel H Wilson,
the author of How to Survive a Robot Uprising.
Where's my jetpack? And how to build a robot army?
And the best seller, Robo Apocalypse.
So someone who has spent a lot of time imagining the doom and
gloom of machines getting powerful.
So that's he. He's an expert in this
speculation where we are mere amateurs, you know, with of
course, the help of chat. GPTI was, you know, looking,
wandering the Internet, looking for the great thinkers on AG is
coming, and one of them is Nick Bostrom, who's been writing
about this for years, I think. So this piece is the essay from
his book Super Intelligence. The essay is called The
Unfinished Fable of the Sparrows, which is very
enjoyable and I I think you'll get a lot out of it.
It was the nest building season, but after days of long, hard
work, the sparrows sat in the evening glow, relaxing and
chirping away. We are all so small and weak.
Imagine how easy life would be if we had an owl who could help
us build our nests. Yes, said another, And we could
use it to look after our elderly and our young.
It could give us advice and keep an eye out for the neighborhood
cat, added a third. Then past us, the elder bird
spoke. Let us send out scouts in all
directions and try to find an abandoned outlet somewhere.
Or maybe an egg a crow chick might also do.
Or a baby weasel. This could be the best thing
that ever happened to us, at least since the opening of the
pavilion of Unlimited grain in Yonder Backyard.
The flock was exhilarated and sparrows everywhere started
chirping at the top of their lungs.
Only Skronk Finkel A1 eyed Sparrow with a fretful
temperament was unconvinced of the wisdom of the endeavor.
Quoth he? This will surely be our undoing.
Should we not give some thought to the art of owl domestication
and owl taming first, before we bring such a creature into our
midst replied past us, taming an owl sounds like an exceedingly
difficult thing to do. It will be difficult to find an
owl egg, so let us start there. After we have succeeded in
raising an owl, then we can think about taking on this other
challenge. There is a flaw in that plan.
Squeak Skronk Finkel. But his protests were in vain,
as the flock had already lifted off to start implementing the
directive set out by Pastis. Just two or three sparrows
remain behind. Together, they began to try to
work out how owls might be tamed or domesticated.
They soon realized that pastis had been right.
This was an exceedingly difficult challenge, especially
in the absence of an actual owl to practice on.
Nevertheless, they pressed on as best they could, constantly
fearing that the flock might return with an owl leg before a
solution to the control problem had been found.
All right, what do you guys make of that?
It's. Not quite Plato, but it's.
Heavy-handed, little on the nose, I feel like this might
have been more. You know, mind blowing in 2014
when when it was raining, I guess, but nowadays it's just
like, Oh yeah, that's that's what we're talking about all the
time. But I do think, I do think this
obviously gets at this question of, you know, should you ever,
should you even go down this path at all, right.
I think that's the core question in develop trying to develop
AGI. Or is it so risky that you
should? You know not do that at all
unless you are 100% confident you figured out how to tame the
OWL right in advance. Is that your guys reading as
well? Yeah, well, I think just to like
rewind one second, I think coming back to this like AI
kills us all point. I think there's two big
questions in the sort of will AIS kill, kill us all narrative,
right. Or maybe three.
I guess one will be are we capable of developing an AI
that's smarter than humans? Like 2 will be if we're capable
of developing an AI smarter than humans, would it want to kill
us? And then three being, if it
wants to kill us, can it figure out some way to kill us?
Basically, right. I mean like and I think those
are all kind of three different questions and maybe we all like
agree on this podcast on like certain one or two or three or
or different elements of them, but like.
I think it's helpful to. Yeah.
To break it down that way because.
And if you do that, this, this story, the parable, the Fable
that I just read sort of assumes a couple of those, right.
It assumes by using an owl, it assumes that such a thing could
exist, right. And that it, it's a dangerous
being that we actually need to figure out in its essence, it's
dangerous and we need to figure out how to control it before we
create it, right. So it sort of assumes into the
story certain things exactly that you're framing up are open
question. I think they're open question.
I mean in the parable basically the OWL both is smarter and more
powerful than the sparrows, definitely wants to apparently
kill or very likely potentially wants to kill the sparrows and
certainly has the capability given that it's bigger and
stronger or whatever, right. So to your point, it's sort of
like you know, the answer is kind of written into the story,
whereas I think in real life like I think can we build AI
smarter than us. Part one is actually a pretty
interesting and contentious question and then the other ones
are also pretty interesting and contentious as well.
But just to start on part one like.
Do you guys think we can build an AI that's smarter than
humans? I guess like, let's be very
specific about how we define that, right?
Because I think it's a pretty critical question.
Come on. Well, what's your definition of,
I guess, smarter than humans? Is that a?
Are you saying super intelligence?
We're talking about, say, an. IQ That has never been achieved
by a human right. You know I.
I think that like I think there's kind of this concept of
a IAGI, which is. Better at I would say like the
median human at, you know, most tasks and then there's super
intelligence, right? Which is you know, better like
better than the best humans at most tasks, right.
Is that how you guys think about it as well?
Yeah. Let's say better than the best
humans at any mental task or any any relevant mental task, right?
I guess I believe that this is going to happen, I think.
You know, it would be naive to say, well it won't happen.
So then it's just a matter of a question of like when it will
happen and whether there are any kind of domains where it feels
like it won't happen for a long time, right?
Like are there, you know, any domains that we really think you
know it's going to be take take much longer to achieve super
intelligence than than other domains, right.
So maybe it will be the best. Coder in the world.
But will it also be the best screenwriter?
Are those things gonna happen at the same time or are they gonna
happen, you know, at different times?
Yeah, I I, I mean, first of all, you know, AI is smarter than the
smartest humans in some domains right now.
Already shall you go Wow games particularly.
Right. But that that is not a general
intelligence. No, no, I'm just saying, just.
Yeah, but in specific demands it's better.
I I think it will continue to cleave off domains, right.
I think like sort of beat all humans at the LSAT type thing
seems very soon. I I think what feels far away is
sort of and it fits into the fears of an AGI is sort of the
strategic planning like what an AGI looks like that sets like
broader priorities across like in a game it's like you want to
win at chess, like straightforward, but when it has
to you know sort of solve general optimal outcomes.
Like it feels like we are so far from a being that could do that.
Or a computer that's interested in sort of deciding whether it
should play chess or do something else and like why
especially if we're not again just articulating what the goals
are. So I guess I'm, I'm not as
bullish on in the next decade a sort of coherent overall sort of
being that feels like smarter than a human.
I mean the next decade, though. I mean, if we're already
negotiating this down to the next decade, it would seem like
you're pretty confident that it's gonna happen.
Like lifetimes. I think it's gonna happen, OK.
So you think in our lifetimes that will happen?
Yeah. What about my my earlier
distinction though Eric, do you do you think you know an AGI
that is a general intelligence that is basically better than
the media and human at most things is or or equal to is more
likely to happen in the next decade.
Is that five years? I just think it's hard to do it.
I we just don't see it as sort of a an overall agent or like an
overall decision, you know what I mean?
I I see it like winning at a bunch of discrete tasks.
OK, sort of a sign. So this kind of gets at more of
like your definition of AGI potentially would require some
sort of Turing test type thing that it can really just convince
you that it is a human. Or I guess I'm trying to think
of like an overall thinker with like sort of priorities and sort
of. But at the end of the day, like,
just to make any predictions about this, it has to kind of be
a falsifiable assertion of like, what is AGI, right?
And it's not that easy to to define that except by some sort
of like test, right? Otherwise you end up in this
like era or this pattern we we're always in that we are
constantly moving the goal posts on like what AGI is, right?
Right. Yeah.
I mean, I think, I mean, I think you guys are both like in the
same place, which I am, which is like it's very hard to figure
out the timeline, but like to me it's definitely happening
sometime in the next 100 years, let's say.
Whether it's 10 or 20 or 50 or 100, it is a little bit harder
to guess, but like it is kind of a math problem, right?
Where we have brains that are just some giant collection of
neurons, right? And there's, you know, millions
and millions of them or whatever, whatever order of
magnitude it is, right? And essentially we're training
these large language models on, you know, a neural network in
some ways, right? Which, you know, it's not a one
to one copy of what? A neuron, how a neuron works in
our brain, which is way more complicated, but.
Fundamentally, you're sort of like, if I can just throw
numbers at this problem of like building a brain essentially and
like get more GPU cores, like just throw absolute just
computing power at this thing. Like the story of our entire
lives has been computing power just keeps going up
exponentially, right? You know, Moore's Law or
whatever, right? And so to me, it seems like
you'd have to believe there's something fundamentally
different about the way a human brain works or a neuron works.
To the way you know a neural network or you know the way GPU
transformer model works to to believe that we can't just throw
numbers at this thing until it gets smarter than humans.
And so I guess I do believe that we throw enough numbers at it
and get smarter than humans. I mean humans have to win
multiple sort of parts of the brain that developed in
different ways that interact with each.
Other. Yeah.
But they're still kind of built on the same cell structure.
I mean, yeah, yes, but but you could do that in an in an AGI
too, right? You could have different lobes
or whatever of the imaginary intelligence, right?
And then broadly, we just really don't understand how to pinpoint
the experience of human consciousness, like quality or
whatever. I talked about this at length
with Reed Hoffman when I interviewed him and like so, but
we're going to, but we're very reluctant because we can
experience our own consciousness to attribute it and animals and
we really have no like road map for how we'd ever identify it in
machines. And that's sort of different
than the Super intelligence thing, but it's certainly part
of what you want in the sort of like does it have like a real
existence sort of question, which I don't even have a road
map for how we'd identify. Coming back to the core topic of
the episode, like, will AI kill us all?
Like, it doesn't really matter if it's conscious or not, right?
If it ends up having the power and the desire to kill us,
right. So like, I do think that's an
interesting question and I don't know, maybe that's a different
episode. But like to me that's not,
that's not worth getting hung up on in the like is it going to
kill us all thing like definitely.
I mean, this sort of classic example being the paper clip
maximizer, right? The machine, the fear that we
just program this really smart, you know, LLM and tell it like,
oh, you're not only objective is maximize paper clips, you know,
And then it goes about it and then it's like, well, the humans
are hurting sort of the maximization of paper clips.
Let's get rid of them. I mean famously like I Robot by
Asimov. It's like robots are supposed to
protect humans, but then humans all kill each other.
So it's like, oh, we need to protect the humans.
I sort of need to enslave them in order to ensure their
protection, you know, so that doesn't it doesn't necessarily
need to have the depth of thinking.
You know, humans would see sort of the flawed what we would
perceive to be flawed reasoning in those things, but it would
still but a machine. You could see why a machine with
certain objectives could operate.
Though well, I I think it's sort of like saying that these
artificial intelligences can have totally different
orthogonal objectives that don't require a consciousness, right?
Like they just for some reason develop a different objective.
Than we have as humans, and they're capable of bringing
about that objective to the detriment of humanity,
basically, right? Yeah, I mean, a nuclear weapon
doesn't have consciousness, but it's still very effective at
killing people, right? That's its mission, so.
Yeah. I mean, so I, it seems like we
all agree, OK, we're going to achieve super intelligence at
some point in the next, let's say, century or an intelligence
that's smarter than humans and enough domains that it's, it's
meaningfully, you know, more capable than we are, right.
Yeah. So second question, like, you
know, would it want to kill us? I think this is like one of the
most interesting ones and you alluded to the sort of paper
clip maximization as one example of how it might just end up
killing us as like a side effect of some other mission it's on.
Right, but. I guess A, like, how likely do
we think that is? And then B, like, do we think
that we'll be able to constrain its missions in some way so that
it wants to keep us alive, you know, even if it's going off and
executing at school? I do actually, you know, worry
about this. I guess that the AI will have
some orthogonal objective that is detrimental to humans.
And then there's like a secondary question of like, can
we do anything about that, right.
We were like, I mean to read between what you're saying,
you're like, if anthropic and open AI are left only in charge,
we'll be fine. But if Facebook's llama runs
around or screwed, I mean, that's sort of, I mean, I'm
interested to see what Mustafa, who's going to speak at Cerebral
Valley, you know, he's been much more reticent about open source,
potentially. His lack of control issue.
I do think that eventually if we start to see, you know, the
risks like that, we all agree that.
You know this, we're headed towards this super intelligence
and we start to see how dangerous that may or may not
be. Like, I just don't think we know
yet how dangerous it will be. Like it's obvious to me like you
want to maintain the ability to regulate this.
And you know, just a lot of people, I think I saw Brian
Armstrong from Coinbase, you know, tweet that he just thinks
there should never be any AI regulation or I don't know if he
said never, but he was basically like regulation has such a poor
track record around innovation. Like, I just think that's sort
of naive without us knowing yet, like how dangerous it can be or
not. You just need to have the best
AI on our side. You know, like when the killer
one comes, we need to have the benevolent 1.
The best defense against a bad guy with an AI is a good guy
with an AI. That's how that's how Americans
actually think. You know, like.
The right to bear AI, baby, Yeah.
That was kind of Sam Altman's perspective when he started Open
AI. Like, I mean, at least my
reading. Of it when he was getting
started was calling it open AI because he believed putting AI
in the hands of humanity democratizing it was the best
way to go about things. And I think he's changed his
mind because of this exact thing that I'm saying, which is it's
actually pretty dangerous or potentially dangerous.
The fact that opening eye isn't open at all I know is like
something that has been beaten to death, but it's just still
ridiculous to me just that. It's hilarious kind of, yeah.
Yeah, cuz it's historical artifact or?
Something, right. But I mean I think I guess
putting aside the regulation thing and the open source is
closed source thing, I just think that if you believe that.
A substantially diverse group of people from different countries
within America, open source, closed source, can develop a
super intelligence, right? Like if you believe there's
going to be more than like five of these, which I think there
would be like in any scenario in which this actually happens,
like isn't it just very likely that one of the five or ten or
hundred or thousand of these is is a bad AI?
Mean? I just don't.
I don't think it matters if you have 999 aligned good AI and one
bad one, if that one bad one is capable of destroying the world,
right? I mean like.
It again, I just, I just think that mathematically if it's
possible to create super intelligence is like someone is
going to create a super intelligence that's really bad,
right? And I'm not sure like our
existing analogy is around like guns or nuclear deterrence or
whatever sort of game theory you want to play out here like apply
where like if anyone bad AI can get access to the tools that
needs to kill everyone, it will it will succeed, right?
Like, I don't think all the good AI can stop it, but but maybe
I'm going too far out on this. I mean, I agree with it.
I think so. So your take is that obviously
yes, the answer is yes. You know, if we achieve super
intelligence, there's a pretty big risk to that.
I mean, in the world. You would have to create some
way for the good AI to regulate the bad AI.
Basically, like if you believe we're in a world where no longer
humans are, they're not on the driver's seat, right?
We're in the back seat, right? Like you now have to basically
try to figure out how to make sure that the AI that are in the
front seat can control the other ones.
I mean part of what Max is basically referencing just, you
know, to give a little context, is Elisa Yudakowski.
I mean I pulled actually a quote, you know, to visualize a
hostile superhuman AI. Don't imagine a lifeless book,
smart thinker dwelling inside the Internet and sending I'll
intentioned emails. Visualize an entire alien
civilization thinking at millions of time human speeds,
initially confined to computers in a world of creatures that are
from its perspective, very stupid and very slow.
A sufficiently intelligent AI won't stay confined to computers
for long. In today's world, you can e-mail
DNA strings to laboratories that will produce proteins on demand,
allowing an AI initially confined to the Internet to
build artificial life forms or bootstraps straight to post
biological molecular manufacturing.
I don't know. My point of view is just like, I
think him and sort of what you guys are getting at, it just
feels like you're like, oh it's super intelligent.
It's like God, like, you know, I I still think, OK, it's way
smarter than us. But we're like a bunch of
intelligent beings, even if it's smarter than us.
I I mean, it requires that that it's going to act stealthily and
sort of like start manufacturing like a biologic version.
You know, like, I just feel like it's more likely that we're
like, this thing doesn't really listen to us and like, but then
like the GPU clusters are like, it's trying to fire them all.
And it's just like, oh, there's only so much computing power
that, you know, it's still a being that requires like
resources. You know, like humans are
smarter than everything else. We still die like they're
they're just like physical limits to things and and that
it's not going to have like God like powers.
It's going to be limited by the amount of compute it can access
and sort of our cooperation at various points.
Like, I I don't know. I don't think it's on zero to
God. I feel like you're painting.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but you're painting a picture where
we have created super intelligence.
And you agree with Max's point that some of them are misaligned
and probably would want to kill us if they could.
However, you're saying that the humanity's fine because those
misaligned AIS can't get enough resources.
Is that accurate, right, I mean. Just it's hard to know, right?
We don't. We don't.
We don't know what to do. That's definitely a gamble.
I mean, even if you believe that you're like.
You've got you've gotten pretty close to the edge.
Well I'm I'm definitely a fatalist on AI as my if we're
getting to like our deep, like what is our position.
It just, I just think like many people in tech, like the
regulation is pretty bad and like going to be only going to
stop the good guys, that this is going to keep going and that I'd
rather the best people we have try to figure it out rather than
like operate in the shadows. Yeah, I I tend to agree with you
and I probably would agree that we're not, we don't need a lot
of regulation right now on you know who can you know train
these models or something like but I.
I also wouldn't rule out like meeting this in the future if in
a year from now or two years from now I start seeing you know
a lot of like evidence that we've, the open source community
has created super intelligent misaligned AI, right.
And I think people are kind of, you know, going a little bit too
far in the direction of saying this, you know, we don't need
it. We need any regulation here.
When it's a new technology, we just don't know what it's going
to be like. We we don't, you know, and it is
a little bit like. When we were, you know, putting
the right to bear arms in the Constitution without knowing
what arms meant in the future, right?
Like how, how, how dangerous they may or may not be.
So I think that I'm just a little nervous about, you know,
assuming too much about whether we will need regulation in the
future. I mean to come back to you at
Kowski for a second, I mean he is sort of the the progenitor of
this whole AI. Dumerism, concept or whatever.
I mean, I've read a bunch of his stuff he seemed to almost like
at one point, threaten blowing up GPU.
Right, Yeah. Well, he had a time article that
he was saying in his world of protecting humanity, like one of
the only things you would have to do would be to.
You know, protect, you know, prevent rogue data centers from
training models. And, you know, it'd be
justifiable to like, bomb them essentially.
And and he was saying, you know, the entire kind of geopolitical,
you know, consensus should be that it's worse to train these
models at some level than it is to, like, worry about nuclear
proliferation. I think.
I mean, I having read a bunch of his stuff, I feel like he has
like pretty well convinced me of sort of all all three of these
things. I guess that will have a super
intelligence that it'll it'll be it'll it'll some of them at
least will desire to harm us and that they'll figure out some way
to do it. I guess I'm sort of like I'm a
little bit of a fatalist in the sense that I I think this is
basically an unstoppable train at this point that has like left
the station. Like I don't, I don't think.
Bombing data centers is like a viable solution to this problem
or breaking GPUs or whatever or certainly not in the like the
human political universe that we actually operate in today.
I think my, my attitude is just that like luckily, I guess my
the future is really hard to predict, right?
I mean, I know that's like a very obvious point, but if you
had told someone in 1940 that we were going to invent nuclear
bombs and they had really thought through all the.
You know, the potential problems in the future caused by those
devices, I think they could have been pretty fatalistic and I
think that would have been a pretty accurate read on like how
bad it was that we invented nuclear bombs, right?
Like knock on wood, so far we're still here.
So my sort of my fear is that all the stuff you you had cows
and some people it's going to happen.
Nuclear bombs are good, like they brought about like peace.
We haven't had world wars, you know, But my hope.
Is that we get lucky and that. Something about this future that
was that Yukowski or the AI doomers are sketching out is is
there's some missing link in the logical chain or or there's some
piece of the way deterrence or or alignment or whatever ends up
working that that we we get our ass saved.
But I'm kind of betting on luck at this point.
Like, I don't really think we're capable of stopping this.
Like just if we're all fatalist basically.
I mean there is like the human cloning, you know, people
brought this up to me. Like human cloning is an example
where people have, you know, America isn't cloning humans.
It seems like we could like why? Why is that an area where self
regulation seems much more possible?
I feel like there are areas where we have stopped.
That's still pretty hard, right? I mean, like, I bet that will
happen sometime in the next 50 to 100 years, right?
I don't know. I just feel like I don't know
how much desire there is for that.
But I I feel like once it's doable, people will do it.
My last thinking on one positive future scenario that I sort of
believe is possible is like, you know, we live on this planet
with lots of other organisms and creatures as you guys described.
You know, we have pets, we have dogs, whatever.
Like. Why do we have dogs?
Like, is there any really good reason?
Like the question is like, could we end up being the pets of the
AI? Like, could we could they want
to keep us alive for some reason?
And that we're a little bit different?
We're a little bit interesting to them, more fun to have around
in some scenarios, but like, in the end we're the AI's pets, you
know? Or or maybe we're the ants and
they just don't care to kill us all because it would be such a
pain, You know, right? I think that's more likely than
not. Right.
I think that is the the upside scenario is like we're we're
pets or we're ants or something compared to this.
More likely than not just the general, like the AI does not
hate us, you know what I mean? Like both.
We helped create it. Like we set a lot of its initial
value system, presumably like it, you know, relies us on us
for a lot of things early on, like I don't maybe a lot of
reasons. Yeah, maybe we're just different
in some sort of interesting way, right, in that we're not, we're
not wired exactly the same. And so you know it's it's just
interesting to have us around because we act a little bit
differently or or something like that.
And AI is not like an evolutionary being, like, you
know, we are driven by these like evolutionary prerogatives
that make us sort of competitive and you know, worried about
other other sort of genetic codes.
It it's just such a separate type of thing.
It's like hard to extrapolate from, I don't know, even beyond
humans like animals to what an AI would be like.
OK, so so I guess we all agree we're all gonna die or be a as
pets. But it seems like we we haven't
really narrowed in on how likely this is to occur in any
meaningful time frame. Like I think that to me is
pretty interesting, you know, if this happens.
In 10 years or even 20 years or, you know, I think that's pretty
different from how I might go ahead and live my life, you
know, for the next decade, I guess.
How about you guys? Like, do you think it's even
worth thinking about that you know right now and how you live
your life or not really? I don't know.
I just.
I can't.
I can't decide like if I would make any just different ways.
I think, you know, being close to it is appealing and like you
know, this is a technology that I believe in unlike crypto.
So it's like oh run to where, you know, the actual interesting
thing that could really revolutionize humanity is like I
I want to be around it, I guess selfishly.
So, you know, host an AI conference with you guys, run.
Into the run, into the burning building, Will AI kill us all?
In some ways is great PR for the AI industry, even though it's
sort of bleak because it suggests it takes as a premise
that artificial intelligence is it a really amazing point and
super powerful and is poised to like be extremely disruptive.
And so if you're an investor and you're like, well, I can't save
the world, I will try to profit off of it.
In the good scenario, Will AI Kill us all?
Is definitely a good motivator to like deploy capital into AI.
Like what do you take of the fact that sort of the dumerism
is like great PR for the actual existing, you know, for vector
database companies, it's a it's a good message, you know, I
don't know, what do you make of this?
This is like war profiteering. Is the motivation here?
No, I'm just saying it's like, you know, the media loves it.
Like Ezra Klein, they will, you know talks about it all the
time. But like in some ways it is a
good it's good marketing for the IT could be just like you know a
fairly mundane technology that we're nowhere close to the jump
TAGI like the Reed Hoffman interview.
He's not he's not willing to sort of commit to any near time
horizon that that AGI is coming. It could just be like it's a
fairly incremental technology. I think it's good fundraising
pitch to say hey like. We're trying to prevent, you
know, AI from killing us all. Like, we're the good AI guys,
right? I mean, like, yeah, you're like,
this is life or death doing this technology, that is.
So powerful. Powerful.
So people are worried that it's going to kill us all, you know,
I mean, I feel like that's a good, like, you know, it's a
it's a conversation that's good for industry.
Can is there an analogy to another industry where you think
that this has occurred? I'm just.
I'm not as convinced, I guess. Like, is it great for the oil
and gas industry right now that, you know, climate change is?
Well, you could argue, you know, like sometimes, like when
parents, like, freak out about, like, teen stuff, that's
obviously not that dangerous for them.
That in some ways it, like, drives teens closer to it.
And that it's like this is totally misunderstood by the
sort of authorities like, but it it reinforced, it gets it in the
news all the time. It reinforces that this is
something that's sort of going on, you know?
I mean I think it's like pros and cons to your point, like I
think it might drive a lot more regulation in a shorter time
frame than what they would have otherwise and.
To your other point, and it will probably be kind of dumb
regulation. So, like, you know, I don't
know. You know, the European Union has
made a terrible job of doing privacy regulations and just
excited to see what they gin up for AI, I mean, I think.
Isn't Italy banned Chachi PT right now?
It's like it's like already you're like, God, these European
regulators are just off the chain.
Yeah, I mean so pros and cons, right.
Banned in Italy maybe you can raise a couple $100 million with
a with a slide deck at this point.
So you know, you get you get both, I guess.
I guess I don't know if I if I was Sam Almond, like would I
want the level of AI doomerism? Occurring right now to continue,
Probably not. Probably not to be clear, just
my actual position is that like it things are very exciting
right now. That this is a legitimate
question that will AIS kill us all is legitimately grounded in
like all, you know, sci-fi content and thought experiments
about where this is going. So I don't think it's made-up,
but I think a happy coincidence is that this sort of question is
fundamentally good PR. That's all I'm saying.
So I think 1 interesting topic is.
AI and sci-fi, right? Obviously a number of the most
successful films, you know, TV shows, books, everything in
history have been built around sci-fi, which often is driven by
this idea that there's an evil killer AI basically, right?
And I think the examples that come on top of my mind, and you
guys might have other ones, are like, you know The Matrix, you
know I Robot, as you mentioned the Terminator series, Blade
Runner. Blade Runner I you know, her
being a sort of off kilter example, but still important I
think. And what's interesting is almost
all of these ones other than her that I mentioned, it involves
robots as well as AI, right? It's it's like the humanoid
version of the AI is essential to you know, killing us all
right, we're we're in Terminator.
There's a good. Storyteller.
Yeah, right. Well, yeah, it might just be
more cinematic to fight a big metal robot.
So, you know, that's something. But I guess.
And then in her you sort of have this.
Scarlett Johansson AI That. At the end kind of ascends to a
higher plane and like leaves leaves the main character
Joaquin Phoenix behind, right. And I think that I to me that
representation seems more likely than the killer robots one and
that the as I said maybe we're just pets and they just sort of
get bored with us and and leave us behind or or we're the little
you know dogs that they leave alive right.
But I guess, what do you guys think about, well, A, what's
your favorite sci-fi representation?
And then B. Do you think robots are an
essential part to these AI kill us all narratives or and or will
the robot elements integrated with AI happen anytime soon.
Well, I I I can answer with my favorite.
I mean I think my the matrix matrix is my favorite and.
I was going to say The Matrix. That's all The Matrix buys into
exactly what you're saying. The Matrix doesn't actually say
it's killer robots. It it finds a way to basically
put killer robots on the screen. So it's a fun movie, but it's
like, oh, it's a computer program, which is obviously the
world I feel like a super intelligence would live in.
Like that of what does it really need to manifest in the real
world that much? So yeah, I, I'm.
And obviously I'm interested, you know, for the following
conversation with somebody who's written a lot about robot
apocalypse. Because yeah, my intuition is
that they're going to exist mostly mostly in the digital
world. Terminator two is the other one
where I think the robot part is interesting, but I don't know
how much you remember about the historical world building of the
AI takeover which is Skynet is an AI that achieves super
intelligence that then. Takes over the nuclear arsenal
of the United States or and then bombs Russia or whatever, and
then we end up in nuclear apocalypse basically, right?
So the initial manifestation of the AI apocalypse in in
Terminator and Terminator Two is is a purely software driven
death scenario, right? There's no, there's no need for
robots in the sort of Skynet back story, right?
It can hack into a system that ends up destroying the world,
which like. Realistic, right?
Because then you don't need any physical elements, right?
Of of the sort of AI doomer narrative, right?
You don't need the robots, you don't need the the crazy
biohacking stuff or whatever. You just need to hack into the
Pentagon essentially. And it's like game over at that
point, right? So I always thought that was a
very insightful perspective on how an evil AI could kill us all
and then it would just be a pure software takeover, right?
James, did you have a favorite? Well, I I wanted to dig.
Into the Matrix a little bit more, yeah.
But I think, you know, a lot rests on whether we think that's
humanity's future as well. Like are we going to be like
almost, you know, by choice plugging ourselves into the
Matrix? Like is is this neural link kind
of interface you know within that 50 to 100 year time frame
or or even sooner, right? You know does does our normal
day-to-day life as humans you know become more of a simulation
you know in in in our lifetimes. I think that's pretty
interesting for how the future unfolds.
So do you guys believe that is possible like or do you think
you know brain interfaces are sort of so far away.
I think Brain Interface is 30 + 30 plus years. 30 plus years
away. I kind of agree.
I mean, I think it's possible maybe in our lifetime, which,
you know, God willing is 50 to 60 more years, but it does seem
like we're pretty far away on neural interfaces.
But you know, who knows? I feel like I'm I'm more excited
to come back to the previous episode about like glasses and
maybe contact lenses at some point as a sort of, you know,
augmented interface for for existence rather than like.
Plugging in, but you never know. I mean, obviously Elon believes
in it. So Elon believes like this is.
The path right out of the AI dumerism that we've that we've
been talking about, We are augmented.
Basically. We sort of merge our brains.
Yeah, with with AIS and that probably requires some sort of
brain interface or you know matrix like environment that
you're living in seems hard to be able to.
I agree I'm not. I'm not a problem.
Sort of like the you you think that that basically?
Is not sufficient to. I just don't think it answers
much. The like, will it kill us?
Like, oh, it's like yielding our brains to it almost means like,
are we even running the show like it?
It raises a whole bunch of other questions where we could be
undermined just from the connection.
Independent. Like it's true, Yeah.
And it also it also like pretty quickly if you believe in super
intelligence kind of. Defeats the purpose of having
that brain power. Like why?
Why do you need? Yeah, why would they?
Why would they want? To be hanging out in our brains,
it's like, it's like, oh cool, I've got this brain that's not
as good as mine. Like, maybe consciousness is
this unique human charm that nobody else has, and we can give
the machines a taste of it. I don't know, just succinctly.
Do you think in the next 100 years AI will kill us all?
Yes or no? I will say no.
I think it will kill. Some of us, but not all of us.
That's a good way to. Think that's a good Yeah.
I I think like more than 1000, less than 10,000.
Oh, more I don't. Know I think more that's a very
tight. Yeah.
That's not a good range. I I think I was smart to give
it. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Some of well, you came up with
some of us. Some of us is the right feels
like clearly. It feels like even a mistake.
I will AI intentionally well it was kill us all.
I say definitely no kill us all that's.
I say definitely there'll still be some humans at the.
End I can't say definitely. I mean it seems pretty UN, you
know, well if we do all get killed, we'll be dead and so
there's nothing to gain from the prediction.
Whereas if we live, I was correct and so it was there was
good utility in the prediction. So it's I don't know why I would
ever go the other direction. This is like Pascal's wager.
With like super intelligent AI, like, all right, this was fun.
I mean, this is this is a dream. Getting to hang out and talk
about this and call it work. Welcome.
Hey, welcome. To the second segment, here I've
got author Daniel H Wilson, author of How to Survive a Robot
Uprising, Where's My Jetpack, How to Build a Robot Army, and
Robo Apocalypse. The title of this or at least
the working title of this episode is Will AI Kill us All.
So given your interest and and work we wanted to talk with
someone who's really like been thinking about this for a long
time. I'm I'm curious like what what
first got you interest in this sort of dystopian question of
sort of the machines coming for humanity.
Yeah, well, so I just grew. Up with science fiction, right?
Like, like a lot of people, so. Initially, I was just interested
in reading, you know, any type of science fiction I could read
or watch in any type of movie. I just loved robots.
And so that's ultimately though I loved robots so much that I
studied robotics. So I ended up going to Carnegie
Mellon. I did a a whole PhD in robotics.
And while I was at Carnegie Mellon, you know, I'm surrounded
by roboticists, I'm surrounded by robots.
We're in the high Bay world. We're just in the lab.
And nobody was really trying to build robots that would destroy
the world. I noticed.
Nobody says they're trying. Generally, nobody comes out and
says. It but like, there's this really
stark difference between how robots are portrayed in pop
culture and how they're and and the actual you know, the actual
mechanics of building robots and why people are building them and
how they're explaining, you know why they need the money to build
them and all that and so. Really.
They just have this super bad, you know, reputation.
Right. And so I thought that was funny.
So then when I was still in grad school, I wrote How to Survive a
Robot Uprising, where I was just like, all right, I'm gonna take
them serious, right? Just, OK, fine.
If this is what everyone's expecting.
So I went to, you know, the people that were building legs,
and I asked, you know, how would you trip a robot?
How would you get away? I went to the people doing
sensors, the people doing all different things.
And I just asked those questions and I put it all, you know,
tongue in cheek into this book. Of course.
Then you start to look at like actual military applications.
You start to see how robotics and AI are, are, you know, being
weaponized in some cases. And then, you know, that was
more robo apocalypse much. No tongue in cheek like I I was
like, OK, let's. You're starting to believe it.
You're like, OK, this. No, I never, really.
I mean, honestly, I like. I like.
The killer robot meme really, for me, just gives you a lot of
latitude to to to think about humanity and think about, you
know, what makes us people, what makes them robots.
You know, do you do? You do you think like as a
person and somebody? Do you think robots are likely
to kill human beings? Or, like, do you see this as a
fictional actress? No, I well, look, I.
I kind of ascribed to the Lately I've been thinking a lot about
something called the psychotic ape.
Theory or the the killer ape theory, which is think about the
opening scenes of like Space Odyssey 2000, 2001.
Like it's those the, you know, they touch the the monolith.
It gives them a leap forward in evolution.
And what do the apes do? Well, they figure out how to use
weapons to bash each other's brains in.
And there's this kind of notion that humanity sort of evolves
technologically when we're trying to kill each other or
stop each other from killing each, you know, and so.
So, yeah, so I've been thinking a lot about that and and
basically you look at that and you realize we will use any
technology to kill each other. So really it's the psychotic ape
that you need to worry about. It's not the and to a lesser
extent the, you know, the capitalist ape, the known killer
species versus the sort of imagined killer who's killed
more people than anybody. Else, right.
You know you're going to want to look at the yeah, the person
across the table from you, but. I think that in terms of being
used as weapons, you know, obviously robots can be
extremely dangerous in that way. I mean I'm curious sort of you
know as a technologist somebody's thought about this
like robots versus like the large language model, sort of
totally software based being that maybe reaches super
intelligence like I I see why for like especially film, why
like robots are great because you can see them.
I'm curious in terms of like the actual like thought exercise and
what you think is likely whether you imagine robots or the sort
of potential threat being just a software.
Yeah, well, so I think of this as like a.
Consumer like a like a product design issue, right?
Like, you know, I mean, look, we're human beings are
comfortable with a certain amount of risk in our lives.
You know what, 40,000 people get killed driving around in cars,
you know, every year I've got a garbage disposal in my kitchen.
I mean, if I put my hand in the wrong place in my own home, like
I won't have a hand anymore, right?
But so but there's also the. Devices are built in order to
try to make them as safe as possible, right?
So if you think of that as a hardware problem on the hardware
side, you know, you're trying to design A consumer product that's
not gonna harm people. And that's just the, I mean we
people do that every day, right? We've been doing that for years
and years. It's a, it's a really under well
understood kind of task. And I think if you're building
hardware, it's an easier task because then when you move to
software it becomes much more complex, right, in terms of.
What the harm might be. So for instance, right now I
live in Portland, OR and in Seattle up the road, there they
are. The the school system is suing
like meta, right, because they have documented harm that using
the social media has harmed children.
It's like the Phillip Morris thing again, right?
I mean, they know for a fact using this product causes harm
to children. They die.
They commit suicide. So.
If you identify that, I mean that that takes a little while
to put those to connect those dots, right?
It's not the same as if they were just selling toasters that
were electrocuting people like you understand pretty clearly
like, OK, where's the danger there, right.
I mean, you can see if a robot is causing physical violence
against and so here's where it. Gets like even more complicated,
right? So, so let's say by the way,
we've got chat bots. Purely software.
Yes, they're going to. People are going to get LED down
crazy rabbit holes by these things and there's going to be,
I predict, extremely harmful scenarios occurring from people
just being told whatever they want to hear and and eventually
being potentially radicalized or whatever causing harm in the
community. It won't be the robot doing it
directly, but it, but it or the sorry, the chat bot or the large
language model. But then you think about the
synthesis of these two things as well.
So like think about. Like a self driving car.
So now I mean it gets really complicated because you've got
brains and you've got the hardware.
And so the question becomes like, OK, the car crashed, like
whose fault is that? And so right now that's
something we're working out, you know in the court systems and
and we're using all of our existing machinery of our
society to try to sort that out and figure that out.
So, you know, I I would say those are really the three
areas, you know, pure software, the hybrid and then just the
purely mechanical problem of of to have like a row apocalypse or
like to have robots like it, it requires like the idea that
there's some like super intelligence, right.
I mean, all of that that's predicated on the idea.
Yeah, in pop culture, you gotta. Have the singularity before.
I mean, that's just kind of like ticking the box, right?
I don't know how realistic that is, but.
Right. Well, that's I guess to me like,
you know, I know it's fiction, but like, yeah, it just feels
like if we have this super intelligence is isn't that a
threat enough without it taking sort of robotic form or I guess
particular question, you know, there's all.
These predictions about when the singularity's gonna happen and
how it's gonna be exponential, so it's gonna go slow and then
happen fast and. And like it's really interesting
because you know I was, I have a degree in machine learning.
I mean I was studying it before they were calling it machine
learning like when it, it was called knowledge discovery and
data mining and all these different.
And so you you look at that and what was happening early on was
there were all these different approaches to to trying to mimic
intelligence, right. And we would use a whole suite
of these things. And what happened was neural
networks in the last few years jumped out ahead.
And I would argue, although I'm sure other people would argue
with me, but I would argue there was no amazing scientific
breakthrough, right? What happened was processors got
faster and we had access to just a ton of data.
And so that data and those processors just are brute
forcing what are fairly simple algorithms that have been well
known for a long time and they're getting this kind of
intelligentish behavior out of it.
And so that model isn't really doesn't really sync up with the
way I think people thought AI was going to go, right.
We didn't think, oh, we're just going to use some old algorithm
and just throw more processing power at it until it gets good.
Like there's more GPUs. We're going to get it, yeah.
And so I. Don't know if it's.
So what I'm trying to say is, if you look at that and we just, I
mean the way to improve chat bots I guess is to keep throwing
more data. And keep throwing more
processing power. But I don't feel like there's
any type of singularity that's going to come out of that.
I feel like it's like, Oh yeah, it's just, I feel like that our
ChatGPT, yeah Or yeah, it'll. Just be like a more convincing
ChatGPT, it's just really, I mean it's just really just
regurgitating everything that it's, you know, in a very smart
way that it's read on the Internet, which by the way, I
mean, God, that's the worst of humanity, right?
I mean. What's it got?
It's trained on I know by the way, right?
They're all desperate to train it off.
Reddit, for instance. Yeah.
Oh my God. You know, Reddit can be OK, but
there's smart people there. But yeah, but you're looking at
the Internet and it's like, oh Lord, but but anyway, I don't
really, me personally, I don't see that.
I see that as a kind of a dead end.
I don't feel like that's headed toward the singularity
necessarily. Yeah.
Is there any existing dystopian work that you find most
plausible or like what? I mean, you know, there's so you
know, I've we talked there's The Matrix.
There's sort of the Terminator movies.
Like I don't know, like, yeah, I'm sure you've spent a lot of
time in that world. Like are is there one that you
find like, oh this this is the most sort of real world?
Well, I mean. I don't think that the purpose
of science fiction is to predict the future necessarily, but I
would say you know, if you're thinking about.
I think the most boring stuff is actually the most realistic, and
in a lot of ways look for the bad books that no, I mean no
actually. That's not true.
Like for instance I would say Terminator, which is obviously
great, but think about that. Villain think about Skynet.
Skynet's just a dumb, dumb computer program that just has
decided whatever it wants to destroy all humans.
I mean, and there's no reason for it.
There's no It's just like it just wants to kill everybody.
I mean that is so boring. You couldn't get away with an
actual human antagonist who is that simple?
People would be like, well why like and so like if you think of
that as its end goal, that's not very super intelligent, is it?
Kill all humans? I mean that's like Bender level
right now. So I would say that you know
that in a lot of ways. It is fairly realistic if
somebody just programmed a computer to tell it.
Just super simple boring goal like that.
Kill everybody like then you know I feel like that's fairly
realistic. To step away from the yeah
dystopian question for a second I'm curious just like as an
author one like are you using ChatGPT at all like in any way
or any other sort of LM tools? Well so first of all I.
All of my novels are in the training data, which means
hopefully I'll be part of a lawsuit.
Yeah, I know. I was going to ask you about
that next. OK?
I asked. I went in the chat.
GPT and I said, hey, write me a short story in the in the vein
of Daniel H Wilson. And it, like, immediately wrote.
I didn't say anything else. And it really wrote about
robots, right? It wrote, it wrote science
fiction. It was really clear that it had
been trained on my stuff. I'm like, tough.
Well, that's bullshit. First of all, I never gave
anybody permission to do that. And so second of all, like, I I
think it's so funny. So I had I'm not going to name
the corporation because I don't want to get into trouble.
I had a large large corporation approached me before ChatGPT
before Open AI released before the the these Gans became like a
big deal. So this is maybe probably.
Six months to a year before everybody knew about that and
that that came out and Open AI really just broke the whole
deal. And they it was a researcher
that called me and they wanted to know if I would test out this
new program that they had that was basically ChatGPT and and
they said we want you to use it to help you write.
And I'm like OK, so then what How will it help me write?
And they say well. And and these are just such
sweet researchers that don't have any GD idea about what the
real world is, is hell is going on in real world.
And they're like, it'll help you be creative.
And I'm like, oh, creativity, right?
That thing. I hate doing that thing that I
spent the last 20 years teaching myself to take.
What's in my head? And put it in the world by
memorizing all these really boring writing skills which are
just pure hell. And then they want to come in
and take the one good thing. I'm like, why do you think
writers write? You think because we love
typing. We like pushing letters.
I'm like, what the hell are you talking about?
I was like, you need to be prepared for everyone that you
give this tool to, to give you super negative feedback.
Because they wanted to include me in, like, this report about
how this tool would be used, and they wanted to publicize this
report as well. And so they they went back and
they came back and they said, hey, we got great news.
I got permission from, like, the program manager on this to
include your feedback, even if it's negative.
And I was like, you know what? I'm gonna just take a pass on
this. I wish you luck with your
project. Right.
So, man, no. You know what I think about,
man? The thing that cracks me up is I
used to really hate on. Asimov because I was like, robot
psychologists, What kind of bullshit is that?
Like, you program robots, right? I spent all this time, you know,
programming and learning all of these programming languages and
and everything you got to do in order to in order to speak to
the robot mind, because it doesn't speak English, right?
And I used to think that the idea of a robot psychologist was
the dumbest thing ever. The idea of a positronic brain,
by the way. Which is made fully and it's
just boom, it's done. It's crystallized.
You can't go back and change it, right?
And that's and. And by the way, that's exactly
what happens. So neural networks are black
boxes. You can't go in and fiddle with
it because all the weights make no sense, like the human brain.
So it becomes like psychology and then now if you.
Want to for instance? Yeah.
If you want to game a like a like a chat bot, if you want to
trick it into doing something, you totally have to use
psychological things. It's totally psychology.
I mean, Bravo. Asimov.
Bravo, Sir, Are you? Do you think you will, like, try
to sue? Like if somebody comes to you
and says we're going to sue these guys for.
Oh yeah. Oh, absolutely.
No, that this has to happen. Look, I mean, I I get people
trying to make money. I get, you know, capitalism.
I understand it. And this is a case where you
know, they're they're they have to be sued.
I mean, we're just because we're creating new, this is a
completely new domain. And if not, OK, to rip people
off and then chop up their stuff and train an algorithm.
And so our country or whatever is going to have to figure that
out and get that down in law. And that's going to require,
yeah, courts, I mean, so absolutely they're all going to
get sued. Do you do you think?
Sci-fi and dystopias are bad for AI like even talking to ChatGPT,
it's funny when you ask it to imagine things it's been trained
on all that. Exactly it parents all that.
And so it can sound really spooky like it feels like you
know you're like I'm you know this is imagination it's fiction
like. But I do think people, you know,
seriously turn to science fiction when they try and game
out where sort of a technology we don't really understand,
that's developed faster than we expect is progressing.
So yeah, is it, is that bad in some ways?
Do you do you regret that? I think it says a lot more about
us than it does about them them being the robots, you know, like
what I've been thinking about lately.
So I don't know know if you've read my books, but I I'm from
Oklahoma. I'm, I grew up in the Cherokee
Nation. I'm a Cherokee citizen and I
write a lot. There's a lot of native
characters and stuff I do. And so I think a lot about
technology from like a native perspective.
And one thing I've been thinking a lot about lately is just kind
of like how a lot of this super negative, like robots and also
first contact, like aliens, they always show up and what do they
do, man, they do exactly what all the colonizer civilizations
did to indigenous people all over the world.
So we got a civilization, we got a society, a culture.
It's all built on colonization, right?
So it means. A bunch of people with superior
technology showed up someplace, murdered everyone, destroyed
their culture. I mean, Independence Day,
they're blowing up monuments. So you think that is like
resource extraction, right? They're they're what?
Are they stealing our water or they're stealing our air or the
and then just completely dominating other people's
bodies. You know, you think about
Invasion of the Body Snatchers. And just like so, that type of
fear, I think, is cooked into our civilization.
Based on our origins and it comes seeping out into our pop
culture in a lot of different ways, but in particular in
science fiction, we see it so much.
Do do you think we should stop? You know, there are even there
are AI companies that say, oh, we should pause for six months.
I mean, originally it sounded like you were saying you didn't
think just adding more, you know, compute was gonna like
create this super intelligence. But yeah, do you, do you have
the impulse that, you know, we should slow down or stop this
research if we don't know what's going to happen?
Yeah, Well, I don't think that. That's what they're afraid of.
I don't think they're afraid of us crossing the singularity
threshold or something. I mean, they're just worried
about. So for instance, I yeah, I will
tell you that the US military is actively doing a lot of threat
scenarios that involve this kind of technology being weaponized,
this sort of disinformation on a mass scale, hugely distracting
events that could occur. I mean at this point I mean you
could get, you could get a phone call from someone it could be
just like in robo apocalypse, you know where everybody gets a
phone call from somebody that they're related to and they
trust and they all get told to go to a certain is a bad, bad
situation. I mean, all that stuff is
starting to. Right.
I really focused on this idea of it acting independently, but
obviously, just like bad people aren't, no, this is always going
to be bad. People and and so, so first of
all I don't think that's they're not worried about that
singularity. They're worried about this being
weaponized And in terms of putting a pause on it, I mean,
yeah, I mean why not. I I would say only put a pause
on it until we figure out the the rules around it.
But but the fact is this like that's not how the United States
works. Like, we don't fix anything
until it's broken, right? I mean, there's not I, I just
don't have a lot of confidence that they're going to say, OK,
six month pause and we're going to work out all the laws and
everything's going to be all ready to go in six months.
Like, hell no, that's not going to work.
So I mean, I think it's a a nice idea, but I'm I'm extremely
dubious and skeptical that could ever have any actual, you know,
useful. I mean other countries.
Are still going to work. I mean, there's the, you know,
sort of China boogeyman where it's like you can't stop the
whole world from working on it. And so there's that, honestly,
though, there's the there's the, the other side of that coin,
which is, you know, thank God that they're actually interested
in privacy in Europe, right? Like, at least there's some
people standing up and saying, hey, like, we don't just have to
accept this status quo, just 'cause you're a giant billion
dollar corporation or billion trillion dollar corporation,
just. Something you referenced
earlier. Does the military come to you to
help game out sort of technological?
Yeah, I've done a little bit of that.
It's pretty fun. So I'm not the only one who's
like. Oh, we should like, get some guy
who thought about it. Sort of fiction in fiction.
Just sort of say what happened in the real world.
Yeah, I'm not. The only one, But there are,
there are and and honestly, they're training their own.
They're training their own science fiction, right?
I will tell you this like if you are, if you're a general in the
Air Force or or whatever, if you're some kind of higher up in
the military, you get a lot of white papers that are describing
the technological capabilities of the enemy or or of various
munitions and things like that. And these papers are very dry
and just like very, you know, it's much better.
I think at least it's useful to have somebody actually
creatively tell a story that's gonna stick with you, cuz that's
the way humans communicate, right?
Through stories. And then you and then the
general is sitting there thinking, OK, now I've I've just
read a story about, you know, an actual person being impacted by
this technology in that way. And you can really visualize
what it means. And it's more than just facts
and figures when you say they're the military.
Is trained science fiction writers.
You mean those authors of the boring white papers?
Or you mean like true science fiction writers?
No, I mean that they they're literally you can yeah if you're
in the military you can There are certain programs you can
sort of sign up for where you get taught.
Yeah. Where you get they bring in
science fiction authors to, to help teach the the, the military
people how to sort of, yeah, take those super real world
scenarios and write them in an engaging way so that you have
sort of a case study and you say, look, here's one way this
could be employed. And that's just good.
That's just good science fiction writing.
That's how that is. But they would prefer not to
outsource it to, you know, hippies like me.
I'm curious. How much sort of the
technological developments we're seeing right now like you know
mid journey, whatever are influencing what?
You plan to write or do you think, like science fiction will
change based on what we see is possible?
Yeah, I mean, absolutely. Is this changing science fiction
every day? For sure.
And and and look, I think it was a watershed moment.
Like whenever you really just finally just talk to it and you
realize, oh, this thing is like, yeah, this thing can just talk
to me. And by the way, right now
there's this huge rush, as, you know, like to plug this stuff in
anywhere you can. It's like, oh, I don't know,
what is it? It's like if it's like
mayonnaise, you know, they're just putting it on.
We just discovered this thing. Let's put it on everything.
Right, right, right. It's desperation, yeah.
It's going to taste like crap on a lot of stuff, but like it's
going to work out in some places.
One thing I see which I find interesting is it occupying as
almost a homunculus, right? You think of a homunculus as
like a little tiny person that's inside of you kind of driving
you around or you think of like, who's the bad guy from
SpongeBob? You know, he's always driving a
giant robot, right, The little guy.
So if you think of the ChatGPT and you have like a it's like
the homunculus. You stick it inside of a
hardware platform so you can just tell ChatGPT here's a super
simple programming language that allows you to drive around this
autonomous vehicle or allows you to drive around this humanoid
robot platform. And then you tell it in English,
hey, go make a sandwich. And then it looks at all of its
little controls and it translates that and says, OK,
I'm going to drive this thing in there because it kind of get has
the right idea about what making a sandwich is.
But a but a hardware platform is just a bunch of like XYZ
coordinates where you're going to put your limbs and it's and
that translation right there, that's a spot where where
ChatGPT is kind of getting just like plastered in, you know,
just slap it in there and it solves all those problems.
And so that's kind of interesting because now you're
going to see ChatGPT having the ability to interact with the
real world via like whatever delivery bots or like or drones
or or humanoid robots. And so that's where you maybe
get into a little bit of consumer trouble.
Again, it's like an autonomous car, right?
Is there? Anything you've written where,
based on how technology has developed, you feel like, oh, it
feels less plausible than when I wrote it?
Or like how much like forecasting where where what's
possible do you see as like part of your yeah, well, I think
that, you know, what happens is you look at what's out there in
the world and you run with it and you start thinking of all
the different ways it could be. And that's where science fiction
is fun, right, 'cause you suddenly you're like, I never
really thought of it like that. But but there it is.
And dystopias are fun too, because, you know, it's
dangerous. It's exciting.
And so the difference between my writing and and is that I had
this degree in robotics. I all my friends from when I was
20, they're all running corporate robot corporations.
They're driving the Mars Rovers like that so that my cohort, you
know, I'm like my all my old friends, that's what they're
doing. And so I feel like I have a
little bit of a sneak peek. So like for instance when I
wrote Robo Apocalypse, that was 10 years ago or whatever, and it
I was watching and seeing the technology that was 5 or 10
years out. So it's all come true.
In fact, that's the joke because it's still Robo Apocalypse is
still with Spielberg at Amblin and and you know, development
continues on this movie. But like what we've what we've
told Spielberg is hey man, let's do this before it becomes a
historical documentary. All of this stuff is, you know,
so in in Robo Apocalypse there are and Robo Genesis the sequel,
which came out a few years later.
There are autonomous vehicles. There is essentially ChatGPT as
as personal assistants on phones.
I mean I wrote that before before Siri came out.
Wow. It was 2000.
The book came out in like 2011 or something a long time ago.
But anyway, so yeah, I mean my latest novel is that the
Andromeda Evolution which is a sequel to Michael Crichton's The
Andromeda Strain, which I he passed away and I did this with
in cooperation with his, with his estate.
And and you know that one was again like very dialed in in
terms of just because it's Crichton, the the government
like exactly which scientists would be going where how they be
chosen and and and I mean just so so locking in those details
is is really important for a, for a techno thriller, you know
that certain genre of science fiction do you do you give in?
Sort of, yeah. The professional need to be
forward-looking. Do you have any sort of
predictions or about where like culture is going or what what
you think, what you really think will be the more sort of
essential change like it. I mean it does feel like, you
know, like self driving cars and stuff like that.
Feel feel close? Certainly in San Francisco.
I mean, I think culturally human beings are always the wild card.
The technology is not that hard to predict usually.
I mean, you can usually see what people are up to 5-10 years out,
you, you know what what they're going for, right?
But then with human beings, you never know, like autonomous
vehicles. I was much more sort of bullish
on that. I thought those things would
already be here, being used in a bigger way.
But as it turns out, one person gets killed and humans freak
out, even though 40 or 50,000 people are dying every year with
Inhuman human. But then the robot screws up
once and everybody loses their mind and they shut them all
down. That's like, I didn't really
predict that. I thought we had a higher
tolerance for for that or or we cared less so like.
So it's really tough to predict the human element.
And I think that with Chachi PT, man, things can go a lot of
different ways, right? The movie Her is interesting in
terms of falling in love with it.
I think that's totally going to happen.
It can, It just tells us what we want to hear, right.
And so I think that that is just so dangerous and just such a
siren song. For instance, the researcher who
thought that that that at Google.
Like something? Yeah, he thought that.
That program was sentient. And did you just?
I mean, when you read those transcripts, you can just see
he's leading it. He's telling it what he wants to
hear and it every, and he's rewarding it every time it comes
back and tells him a version of what he wants to hear.
It's almost like he said write me a short story where you're a
sentient AI and has read all those stories.
I know that it's read mine. And so like, you know, it's
going to jam those things out. And so I mean, think about that,
right? Like if you're just sitting and
you've got sort of mass disinformation campaigns that
are amplifying certain ideas. I mean, man, the the the
potential for divisiveness I think is just super scary.
And in fact that's probably the biggest thing I'm afraid of is
that we just end up in these crazy echo chambers.
Like, it just becomes a very. Effective propaganda tool or you
know becomes, yeah man, really good at just and and the and the
and the thing that makes it so dangerous is that it's a mass
scale, individualized attack. So normally when you scale up to
a mass level, you get A1 size fits all type scenario, right.
You know it's not that effective in this case, man.
You can scale it all the way and then it's going to be
individualized for each person and it's like that's pretty
crazy. That's pretty scary.
I mean the best case scenario of that is just we end up buying a
bunch of shit we don't need because we're being advertised
to. That's the best case.
We we get much better. Yeah.
I mean it's like Advanced micro targeting, I mean you know,
exactly with elections, right. It used to be like well at least
you had to use the same message for everybody and then it was
like OK, we can break it down. And then you know with Facebook,
you know, obviously, yeah, there were these the micro targeting
what you're saying is now it's even easier to actually create
the content for the sort of niche and and The thing is it's
very human like, right. So one thing that I'm kind of, I
don't know, I'm not after during COVID, right.
We all got very used to interacting with machines and
everything that used to have a human element to it.
They're trying to get that out, right.
So it's a service. You want it, I give you the
money, you give me the thing, no chit chat.
And I need it now. And I don't want any bull,
right? And so we did that.
We were doing that online and we're doing that also with
lifelike machines that are talking to us like people.
And then we go out into the real world.
You know, if we're ordering off of like these smart whatevers
and and you know, these chat windows popping up and and stuff
like that, I think it's going to only become more of that human
like machines selling us stuff. The problem though is that then
you go and you know, people are being really rude to like their
baristas and being really rude to why?
Because we're trained. We can be so mean to like we're
trained. It's it's a classic, like you're
typing in to support, like, go fuck yourself, be human.
It's a machine. And then it turns out it's like
a real person. Yeah.
Oops. Oh, oops.
Yeah, but then also like, oops, right?
Do you? Do you worry on?
The like being nice to the AI systems for for like, I don't
know, there's some people. Like, oh, you should be nice to
it because it could be sentient someday.
I mean, yes, I do say please and thank you.
I got rid of the. I got rid of Alexa.
I have a Sonos now, but I feel like it's slightly less evil.
But well, I say, yeah, I say please and thank you.
Not because I care about it, memorizing whether I was polite.
Robots will not give any. They don't care if we're polite.
They're not going to. But I'm modeling in an
interaction with a human like entity to my children and to
myself. And so do I want to be the kind
of person who's a jerk and shouts, you know, at the no.
Like, I don't want my children to be like that either.
So I say please and thank you. I try not to be.
I mean, sometimes it is. It gets a little bit annoying
whenever it gets everything wrong.
All right, my final. Will AI kill us all?
Like do you? Is it in in the sort of end of
humanity chances? Where do you put sort of robots
and AI being sort of the cause of our demise?
You know, I don't. I think again, it's those
psychotic apes. You know, if you're gonna read
a, if you're gonna read a story about the the role of machines
in the demise of Man, I would read There Will Come Soft Rains
by Ray Bradbury. And they'll just be keeping on
keeping on trying to do their thing.
And it'll be us. We we kill each other nuclear.
War, but the machines keep going.
Keep on trying to do their thing, man.
Daniel H Wilson, thank you. So much for coming on the show.
I really it was a great time to chat with you.
Cool, man. It was a pleasure.
That's our episode. Thanks.
So much to Max Child and James Wilsterman of Volley, my Co
host. I'm Eric Newcomer.
Shout out to Scott Brody, our producer Riley Kinsella, Chief
of Staff for newcomer Gabby Caliendo at Volley, who's
helping so much with the conference behind the scenes.
Oh, and of course to young Chomsky for the wonderful theme
music. This episode is part of the
Cerebral Valley series that I'm doing on the Newcomer Podcast.
You can follow along on my sub stack at newcomer.co where I'm
publishing each episode, or you can follow it on YouTube.
Or Apple Podcasts. Or wherever you get your
podcasts. Thanks so much.
Goodbye. Goodbye.
Goodbye, Goodbye, Goodbye.