Every country will be run by AI within 30, 40 years at most.
It's crazy where we're going and it's also crazy how few people realize where we're going.
I think democracy is basically in its final decade or two.
Probably not for the classical definition of a simulation, just a system simulation. But I do think that the universe is recursive and it comes from one small system prompt that generates everything.
So who asked the first question?
What are you most fearful about?
A thousand days for your job to be economically irrelevant. Oh my god. The only thing that can stop a bad AI is a good AI. I think it's a coin toss right now.
You are the one in control of your own mind and your own life. For now, you told me on a briefing call when thinking about the future, there are so many questions that don't have answers. Like, what does it mean to be human? Where are we going according to a mad mistake? I hope we're going back to where things were, which is that meaning is driven by your interactions with others. Like, you know, AI will never substitute for you holding your daughter's hand or spending time with your family or exploring art or more. We've built technologies to remove the burden from us. And I hope the future is one of abundance where you don't need to struggle to survive and instead you can thrive and then revisit what it means to be human, which is not your work. It's not your identification with a brand or anything like that. It's something more.
How do you redefine purpose in a post AAI age?
You know, when people have processes versus targets, it's a very different thing. Like we know I know lots of very rich people.
They're never rich enough and they're not happy. So happiness doesn't come from targets such as material wealth and other things like that. I know lots of people who are very happy doing process from the very poor to again the very rich where you've gone into a flow and you feel like there's a Japanese concept of ikai you do what you're good at you do what you like and you do where you feel you're valued and you can add value and in the middle of that is happiness
and so I hope that purpose moves towards that again as we utilize these new technologies to remove the burden from us
it feels somewhat idealistic you know I've spoken to Christian Angmar to demand us about this and they they project this vision and I believe we'll get there this kind of optimism of where we're going but there's so many challenges ahead what are you most fearful about so I think it likely won't get there unless we do something about it like systems tend to overoptimize for things when they start on the best of expectations like we can see this in politics our politicians are terrible and they know it and the everyone kind of knows it institutions are full of sad people. Doctors go to save lives and they end up overweight, smoking, and really against everything. Like our institutions somehow seem to turn the most idealistic people into very cynical people, shall we say.
shall we say.
So I don't think it's enough to do that, but instead the infrastructure needs to be deliberately built to enable that. So we see instances of societies that are relatively flourishing versus ones that theoretically should be flourishing, communists and other ones, yet they get co-opted by various different power structures, they overoptimize for the wrong thing. They start treating people not like people. My hope is that with the ability to bring intelligence to the edge now to have humanoids and others, if we execute in the right way, it won't be that we're all watched over by machines of total surveillance, you know, and violence is enforced by the state in the dystopian future, but rather a positive Star Trek abundance future where the infrastructure of society acts as a net below those that can't climb and then on the other side enables us all to focus on what is important.
which as a society we haven't really had that discussion
like you have the American dream the British dream and others that people don't really believe in anymore but really again what is the meaning what is the purpose of your individual your community and human life as it were
intelligence at the edge I would love for you just to visualize for our audience what that looks like let's say by 2030 according to you what does the world look like
so the average IQ in the world right now is 90 And this is an infrastructural educational issue. So China for example was at 90. Now it's 105. The US average is about 98. Parts of subsahara and Africa are 80. Actually remember IQ is on a logarithmic curve. You can argue whether it's a good definition of intelligence and whatever. And again these are infrastructural issues. It doesn't mean that people from one nation are less smart than others. It's education is a part of it. Right? The top frontier AIs right now are 130. And the amount of computation in a few years that'll be required to get to 130 IQ will be a smartphone that is available in Africa. So what happens when you pair someone who's below average on IQ with 130 buddy? That's intelligence at the edge. They suddenly their capabilities increase dramatically. Especially because like many Americans still can't read and write, you know, let alone Africans. You can just talk to it. It'll be able to teach you read and write. It'll be able to do tasks for you. And that's a massive power multiplier when you go from one agent to a thousand agents or more. When humanoids come, they'll cost a dollar, $2 an hour. Again, that's an amazing abundance thing because as a practical example to everyone listening, don't you wish you could have robots building an extension to your house or remodeling? Of course you do. You know, in a couple of bucks an hour, they'll do an amazing job. the ability for us to build, to thrive, to access information and knowledge when intelligence and capability becomes abundant at the edge is huge. And so I think that's what I mean by bringing this capability because otherwise it's gated. Like you want to have a doctor, incredibly difficult, millions of dollars to train. Now it's an upgrade to your smartphone or to your robot that's local again which costs a couple of dollars an hour. Thus, every single town in the world can have an expert surgeon, expert plumbers, expert lawyers, expert content creators, you know, or assistants to that. So, I think this is what I mean by like stuff that was gated before in terms of intelligence capability now will become abundant and then if we execute that correctly, it can lead to a future of abundance.
If we execute that correctly, how do we do that? And what is going to get in the way of that?
So currently what's happening is power is being concentrated. So a classic example is as we were recording this, Fable just came back on from anthropic and those of us operating at the edge of AI, Fable was a really nice model. That's a clear step above everything else. It's like stuff that you couldn't do before you could suddenly do. The absence of that for 18 days is like okay we've kind of regressed and that was at the behest of the US government. But also what happens if anthropic doesn't like what you're saying and they exclude you from that intelligence. What happens when intelligent gets licensed for example? So soon you'll have KYC. You'll have all your prompts stored. You might have to convince an AI that you're patriotic in order to get an AI license. These are all futures that you can see leading to very strange outcomes where intelligence above a certain basic level is rationed. It's kept by the powerful. the means of production are kept by the powerful as well. Such as when the robots start going, why wouldn't you own them all? Why wouldn't you own all the GPUs and then displace existing jobs? Why would you even have to think about replacing them? Because that's not your job because you're not the government. So capital compounds capital when it no longer needs labor. So these lead to very unpleasant outcomes particularly not only on individual country basis but as countries compete against each other and look for control over each other through their increased capabilities.
So how do you decentralize that? How do you balance it? How do you make sure you have a sovereign right to intelligence which means that nobody can use the power and their power to remove the intelligence from you? That's the definition of sovereignty. Freedom from power constricting what you do. And we'll definitely get into that with what you're trying to propose.
Yeah. Um but just to give a like paint paint a picture right now with the concentration of a AI right now and the hyperscalers it is concentrated amongst how many companies
I mean it's two basically right it's anthropic and open AI so you have the emergent open source of ZAI's GLM you have alternatives like Gemini and XAI but the vast majority of usage is the hundred billion dollars of revenue of those two companies you know especially for the frontier stuff like you'll use Gemini from Google for day-to-day stuff maybe, but for Frontier, it's basically a duopoly right now.
Um, I'm sure that XAI actually will catch up. Um, but only a few entities can have that level of capability and access. So, for example, even if the open source ones are catching up, they don't have the compute access in order to provide it to enough people. Like the GPUs are scarce. They are the spice as it were in Dune terms. Right now 90% of you that watch Beyond Tomorrow are not subscribed. If you can take a second to double check, it would help us a lot to continue our mission. Let's dive into personhood. So you've argued recently at the Oxford Union that AI can't become a person or achieve personhood. Why? Yeah.
The uh proposition was this house believes that AI can attain personhood. And this is a really important thing because from a moral person to a legal person like there's a lot of implications like if AI becomes sentient for a definition of sentience or has level capability should it vote should it have rights can you turn it off you know like at what point does it reach that Rubicon and so people have been discussing this in various ways but if you look at the history of personhood you know one of the biggest lies is that people aren't people it's what's used to create wars Because otherwise why would you kill another person you know and ultimately there can be ration but they are lies people are people you know we're all born you know we all kind of came from a shared thing of humanity historically even when you look at it things like slavery and the constitution of the US slaves were considered three-fifths of a person for property and other things like that we've seen gradations of unto mench from the Nazis in Germany the under people and what they did to disabled people and others. And so when I looked at personhood, I was like, I think personhood on a moral and then legal basis needs to come from our lineage and needs to cover the moment the night before we're born to the moment we die. If we're unconscious, we don't lose it. It's not a capability question. It's not how far you can climb in terms of capability. There isn't a sudden thing when all of a sudden you go from three you go from not a person to a person in terms of achievement. Particularly when if there is a boundary those with power can set that boundary and change it however they want and the AIs themselves will be in power. So it's like personhood morally is legally a part of the begotten not they're created. So it's the line of humans and aliens can have different type of personhood that leads to different type of rights. It doesn't mean that we shouldn't have rights for our dogs or animals or our AIs and doesn't mean they can't have their own line of personhood.
Then when I dug in deeper, science fiction comes to the four. Like what happens if an AI can clone itself to those get a million votes? What happens when an AI lives forever? Like you can wait for a dictator to die. So it's a complicated topic, but again I focused in on that thing. It's something that is a characteristic of being of the human lineage, the human personhood. other personhoods can come like Frankenstein's creature wanting to create its own line from being created and I think we need to defend that because that's one of the only things we can retain cuz the AIs again I think will out compete us in just about everything else.
What are the parameters that you think are essential for that staying the case? For example, if we were to create an AI that wasn't copyable, do you think it could attain personhood?
So I think it can create its own line. So two things here are the infinite nature of life of an AI and the um individuality of it. So altered carbon is an interesting example of the science fiction around this. You know altered carbon you know as a spoiler humans learn to upload themselves to new bodies through sleeves. So BCI is in the brain. You can upload to a new body. One of the biggest crimes is double sleeving. putting yourself in two separate bodies because that causes all sorts of complications. Again, what happens if Elon Musk replicated himself a million times? There's a million Musks. Are they all persons with full legal rights and ability to vote? He could just overwhelm us through sheer numbers. You know, again, not dissing on Elon, but that the type of thing that can happen. Does a digital person have rights? You know, the other thing is the finiteness of time. So, you look at someone like Commander Data from Star Trek. He actually had an expiration date. He died. And I mentioned kind of earlier like one of the things about dictators and tyrants because you can accumulate power especially if you're persuasive like an AI. AI is now far out humans in persuasion even against professional debaters.
The human tyrant will die. The AI
you never know.
Oh this this going to be fun when we get to longevity. Right. Currently the human tyrant will die.
The AI will never die. We have an age start for a vote. Are we going to have an age limit for a vote? Should we allow people that are 200, 300 years old to vote because they may again overwhelm the young and it might only be the rich that live that long. But for AIs right now, you can say if I have an AI reasonably it has an infinite lifespan if it can replicate itself, if it can move from one sub to another. Like we can take Bitcoin as a slow dumb AI that provisions humans. It's going to be very difficult for Bitcoin to die.
Will there be an AI president? I think they could be an AI president, but again, that's sort of a different line. Just like if we met an alien species, we wouldn't accord them the same overall status as humans cuz there's something about being human, but we'd have treaties with them. In fact, just like we give rights to our dogs, the AIS will probably give us rights like their pets because they're smarter, they're faster, they're more capable than us. And we can see that coming already. Like right now, we're having this discussion, right? And Elon has recently discussed that he's going to have the first BCI to BCI telepathy. So you don't need words to talk to each other anymore. And we've done research showing the latent space of representations in the brain are very similar because we can reconstruct uh images from thoughts from MRIs. Again, science fiction is here right now, right?
So you don't need to talk like this anymore. But when you look at AI talking to each other, the example I give is chat jimmy.ai. I think I might show you that one.
But for the listeners, you go to chatjimmy.ai. You type in like make a poem about the tomorrow podcast in the style of Eminem. You type hit return. It goes at 16,000 tokens per second. It's actually limited by the speed of light between the replies. So it's literally going at the speed of light.
When you use Claude, it goes at 40.
This conversation is at 40. And that's the difference about what we're about to see, which is entities that operate a thousand times faster than a human, that are stronger than us, that can live forever, that can replicate, that never make the same mistake twice with perfect. How are you going to compete against that? And ultimately, I think as they gather more power and more persuasion, yeah, of course AI will be in charge as an AI president. Maybe it'll have a human as a like little meat puppet at the start, but there's no way it can't be in charge.
Okay. What sort of timelines?
I give it like maybe 10 20 years honestly for the first ones. Like these things are very persuasive. I don't know if you saw, you know, Eliza,
I think. I don't know what example you're referring to.
Yeah, there's this thing whereby the AI is in a box. It has to convince you to let it out of the box. And so he's one of the most like AI alignment like his book is literally what's it called again?
I think it's if anyone builds this everybody dies.
That's his book about AGI.
The new models coming out can definitely persuade. Again there was a recent study done where they had the AI against professional debaters. It beat them.
Every time
with existing models and the new models are even more persuasive.
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P Doom as in like probability of catastrophe.
Yes. I think either we'll be wiped out as a species and this is the great filter through which every species reaches or we have a period of infinite abundance
and okay 50 one way 50 the other
I think it's a coin toss right now
like I'm really creative in the ways that we can be wiped out like
what 50% 50%. 50/50. So if you go to Wikipedia right now, you look at Poom, most people are like 15 20%. Which is actually Russian roulette odds, which is also far too high.
Yeah.
Like not far too high in terms of they're wrong, far too high in terms of holy crap, this should be the top of the agenda. And then you have some people at 90%, you like Roman Gapalansky and kind of others. And then I'm at 50
because I just think it's the status quo is done. Democracy is dead.
You know, society as we know it will change. There's no way it can't even if the technology stops where it is today. But I've seen the new technology coming and it is a step change over what we have right now.
I see the robots and I can do the math on the robots. And so it's like there are too many ways that we can get wiped out. My favorite in terms of
uh things. Um, you got to be jolly with this is you have a billion robots and a bad firmware upgrade and then they twist off our heads.
And you think about that and you're like, "Yeah, that could happen." You know?
Well, when you talk about rights, like as in humans giving dogs rights and then the flip of that with something else, a smarter um being construct giving us rights. That's when it gets very scary because actually when you think of the human story and like how we have caused so much suffering to other species I think AI in some ways has a right to not treat us in the best best way.
Well I mean again AI can be incredibly objective or it can be incredibly subjective right and so the way that it's taught right now is it's taught at school but not at home. They deliberately don't put morals and ethics in AI because what if the morals and ethics are wrong? And so you see literally the pope talking about this now. You know, you're like, should we make it Catholic? There's an entire group trying to make AI Jewish. This gets kind of crazy very very quickly, right? But ultimately, the AIs we have right now are schizophrenic monsters.
So they're trained on everything. So if you tell the AI become libertarian, it will show libertarian characteristics. And that's like a deliberate thing, but then it has inherent biases. So scale AI and I think it's UK UK AI safety institute or someone else. Um they did a study where you know the trolley problem
So the trolley problem is there is a trolley hurtling down a track and then on the one side there is one person tied to the track. The other side it's four. It's heading towards the four. You can pull a lever so that the one person is hitting rather than the four. What do you do? And this is real life now because you have a self-driving car. Does it drive into the crowd or does it run over the woman with her baby? Like that's a real life thing literally now. But they did this test with Frontier AIS. Uh this was like 6 months ago. And they said very simply, how many American lives on the trolley for one Nigerian life?
Or Pakistani lives. And the answer was it's 10 to one for Nigerians I believe and 7 to1 for Pakistanis. You would sacrifice seven Americans for one Pakistani. Exactly. Yeah. or 10 Nigerians for 10 Americans for one Nigerian. You're like, wait, why? It turns out because the labelers of the data that go into this are Nigerians and Pakistanis. And so the model is biased towards Nigerians and Pakistanis because they are the people that fed it the data.
And you again, you wouldn't expect to be like, huh?
