The popular debate show, Middle Ground by Jubilee, invited me on to take the "anti-AI" side back in April 2024.
This highlight reel of the episode shows my experience of the discussion.
I'm a lifelong techno-optimist, and it's unnatural for me to represent an anti-tech position. It's just that our AI labs are admitting they're on the path to superintelligence they don't know how to control, which implies we're all about to die and the universe will be robbed of all value forever before our kids grow up. Other than that one little consideration, I'm normally pro-tech!
Timestamps
00:00:00 — Why Liron is Worried about AI
00:02:13 — The Nuclear Analogy
00:02:43 — Human Evolution and Neuralink
00:03:14 — The AI Labs’ Own Warnings
Links
Full episode on YouTube —
Transcript
Why Liron is Worried about AI
Liron Shapira 00:00:00
I’m anti-AI because I think we’re about to enter this uncontrollable extinction scenario. But until we get there, I think life is going to be amazing. I am actually more bullish on how good life is going to be than almost anybody, right before it all goes downhill.
Alex 00:00:15
That’s a good thing.
Aarushi 00:00:15
You’re explaining a society where potentially there’s cures for lots of things. You’re explaining a society where we’re able to do all kinds of energy development where we don’t necessarily have to ruin the environment.
Liron 00:00:25
Yeah. That could happen as long as the AI is value aligned. But the problem is, the smallest misalignment between what the AI wants and what humanity wants blows up into a scenario that you cannot undo. So if you don’t get the initial conditions right, there’s no undo.
The Nuclear Analogy
Aarushi 00:00:39
You know Sam Altman by any chance, OpenAI?
Alex 00:00:41
The rules have changed.
Liron 00:00:41
What do you think is the mental skill that human brains can do that AI will never do, even if you extrapolate forward 10 or 20 or 50 years? What do you think is our sustainable advantage?
Alex 00:00:51
We have emotions. We care.
Liron 00:00:53
So you think emotions are going to give us an economic role, and AI will never have emotions, and because of that, humans can get paid?
Alex 00:00:59
AI does not have emotion. It does not care about anything. It’s just there to follow the algorithm and the rules.
Liron 00:01:04
What if it simulated a human brain neuron for neuron, then wouldn’t it feel human emotion?
Human Evolution and Neuralink
Aarushi 00:01:08
What would a superhuman or a supercomputer or super AI look like to you, out of curiosity? What could it do that we couldn’t? Do you have some concrete examples of this?
Liron 00:01:18
Yeah. The best example is just what the smartest people in the year 2024 can do, that people in the year 1000 just think is complete magic, is a complete miracle. If you watch a SpaceX Starship rocket taking off, it’s a skyscraper taking off. That’s arguably more impressive than a lot of the miracles in the Bible. And yet we, as a modern human race, are able to pull that stuff off.
If you extrapolate the pattern and you say, “What does the civilization of the year 3000 do?” that’ll get your creative juices flowing. And everything we’ve said in this conversation, when we talk about the economy, jobs, is it going to create income inequality — you’ve got to think bigger than that.
You’ve got to think about events that are discontinuous, like the first nuclear bomb, the first time that a single button could kill 100 million people. Or an extinction event where 96% of life on Earth just suddenly died because of a super volcano. Events like that happen, and I think AI is one such event. There’s a reason why the world is currently full of thousands of nukes and not a single effective nuclear weapon defense system.
The AI Labs’ Own Warnings
Aarushi 00:02:13
But it’s also full of wind turbines powered by nuclear energy as well, right? Am I wrong?
Liron 00:02:19
Right.
Aarushi 00:02:19
We can also use it for that too.
Aarushi 00:02:20
Yeah. We’re using nuclear energy for a lot of good things.
Aarushi 00:02:23
We’re using it for—
Liron 00:02:23
We’re using nuclear energy, but the nuke trumps everything. If somebody uses a nuke, there’s no defense.
Aarushi 00:02:27
Look, the reason why there’s no nuclear war is because it’s mutual destruction. So we’re not going to use it, they’re not going to use it.
Liron 00:02:32
Yeah, but that’s not a robust reason. There’s been close calls all over the—
Aarushi 00:02:36
Yeah, but it’s working.
Liron 00:02:36
It’s barely working, and now you’re introducing a harder problem. You’re saying, here’s the thing that’s barely working, let’s do another version of the nuclear problem, except this time there’s profit to everybody who works on it.
Human Evolution and Neuralink
Aarushi 00:02:43
But humans will evolve too. Again, you’re looking at AI as if it’s going to evolve, as if humans are just going to stay still. You’re familiar with Neuralink. I’ll just give you that one example. There’s a potential chance that the humans of the future will have been able to converge with the AI in some way or develop a significant kind of symbiotic relationship with AI that you can’t even fathom right now.
Liron 00:03:05
There’s a chance, but that’s not where we’re headed.
Aarushi 00:03:07
Humans have been evolving.
Liron 00:03:09
That’s not where we’re headed, though, and we only have a few years.
Aarushi 00:03:11
Neuralink is already there. They already started doing the first testing phase.
Aarushi 00:03:12
How do you know? We built it.
Liron 00:03:14
Yes. But if you ask the researchers—
Aarushi 00:03:14
There’s already chips in human brains.
The AI Labs’ Own Warnings
Liron 00:03:14
The researchers themselves will tell you. Ask any researchers. They’ll all tell you that the AI that we don’t know how to control is about to come online, and all the other AIs that have more hope are way behind. That’s what’s happening right now.
Listen to what the AI labs are saying. This is the craziest thing to me. Go to OpenAI’s website, one of the leading AI labs. They will explicitly say, “Hey, we’re working on AI as fast as we can. Within 10 years, there will be an AI that’s as powerful as a human CEO. We don’t know how to make that align yet.” This is the actual state of the art from the AI labs.
They’re saying, “Hey, we’re really excited about working on this, and by the way, we don’t know how to make it friendly to humans, but it’s really exciting.”
Alex 00:03:46
Closing statements from each side. The benefits, I think, still greatly ultimately outweigh the negatives, and I hope you guys see that.
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