The Silicon Valley Cult That Wants To Replace You With Ai: TESCREAL

0:00 This is the biggest change in in human history where we might soon be overtaken as the dominant species on the planet. I think AI will probably like most likely sort of lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, uh there will be great companies created. Right now, we're at a fork in the road. This is the most important um fork humanity has reached in its over 100,000 years on this planet. We're building effectively a new species that's smarter than us. That we no longer have control over the future. In the same way that like a child doesn't have control of the future, their parents do. Or chimps don't have control of the future, humans do. What happens to chimps is 100% determined by what humans want to do with chimps. Chimps have no say in the

0:45 matter. If we want to keep them around, great. If we want to kill them all, well, sucks to be chim. And so an ASI would be similar to a human. An ASI could keep humans around if it wanted to. It could exterminate everyone if it wanted to. You I think you would you would prefer the human race to endure, right? Uh you're hesitating. Well, I Yes. I don't know. I I would I would um This is a long hesitation. So many hesitation. There's so many questions and should the human race survive? Uh yes. Okay. But but uh I I also would um I I what once sort of digital super

1:31 intelligence basically digital god if you will. And at one point uh I said well what about you know we're going to make sure humanity is okay here. Um and and and um uh and then he called me a specist. If you're busy spreading out the wealth and resources and giving it to people who are just going to die eventually anyway, you're wasting what could be going up. So that's why, you know, to him like a Greta Tunberg is the devil that yeah, transhumanism is this, you know, the ideal was this radical transformation where your human natural body gets transformed into an immortal body. You know the

2:16 Judeo-Christian inspiration is it is it is it is it is about transcending nature. is about overcoming things and you know and the closest thing you can say to nature is that people are fallen and that that's the natural thing in a Christian sense is that um you're messed up and that's true but um you know there's some ways that uh you know with God's help you are supposed to transcend that and overcome that. uh mammals and humans become more intelligent, more creative, more loving, and moving exponentially to become more godlike, never quite reaching God, but moving in that direction. So, evolution is a spiritual process bringing us closer to

3:02 God. And technological evolution is now running a million times faster than biological evolution. And ultimately we will vastly ultimately trillions fold expand our creativity and our uh sense of humor and our ability to love and we'll become more godlike. How is this not a religious cult? You know like that that sort of yeah in the future I can't even describe to you all the good things that you're going to get. Like it it's beyond the bounds of human language sounds ridiculous. I mean, can this man actually believe that he's creating a god out of silicon chips? With all technological revolutions, I expect there to be significant impact on jobs, but exactly what that impact looks

3:47 like is very difficult to predict. In other words, I do not think that alignment is fundamentally harder than artificial intelligence was in the first place. But if we needed to get artificial intelligence correct on the first try or die, we would all definitely now be dead. That is a more difficult, more lethal form of the problem. Like if those people in 1956 had needed to correctly guess how hard AI was and like correctly theorize how to do it on the first try or everybody dies and nobody gets to do any more science and everybody would be dead and we wouldn't get to do any more science. That's the difficulty rather than an other, right? There's another person there. That's not a thing to exploit. That's a human. it really dovetailed perfectly with the

4:32 billionaire sociopathic view of the rest of humanity. And that's how they get to this weird um version of transhumanism where the super elite can leave everyone behind. So when you hear of supporters of the singularity, people like Ray Kurszswwell talking about being able to defeat aging, the body can live forever. What do you think? Well, I think I think it's, you know, I think this has been this has been a core um animating idea of the entire modern scientific project. Uh you know, the uh the search for u the water of life that the alchemists had was as great as for the thing that would trans mute everything into gold. They they were actually the alchemists were more

5:18 interested in living forever than in finding uh the the thing that substituted everything for gold. It was, you know, Francis Bacon, the new Atlantis. This is this is the whole the whole project of uh of modern science and so uh so you know it's it's hard to know how much you know how much we can you know change the world from a place where life is nasty brutish and short but um but I think uh I think the the moral thing is to is to push it as far as we possibly can that exponentially improving technologies will take us to a point of a singularity beyond which super intelligent artificial intelligence will transform from our world in nearly unimaginable ways. 18 years ago in the book Singularity is Near, he predicted that the onset of the singularity will

6:04 happen in the year 2045. AGI and its future power stem from the fact that it's very difficult to imagine. One, you mentioned halt. Is that uh the content of the letter is to suggest that maybe we should pause the development of these systems. Exactly. I mean would you do the Manhattan project in the UAE? Right. 2023 was the sort of moment for me where it went from kind of AGI is a sort of theoretical abstract thing and you'd make the models to like I see it. I feel it. I can see the cluster where it's trained on like the rough combination of algorithms the people like how it's happening. And I think you know most of the world is not you know most of the people feel it are like right here. We are literally going to have to fight the robots and the people that want to create digital gods.

6:50 And I get it. It's all a lot. But if you are pro-human, you should be anti-Humas. Um I I worry that as the models get better and better, uh the users can have sort of less and less of their own discriminating thought process around it. But but I think users are more capable than we give often give them credit for it. I think that burns the time remaining until everybody dies. I think we are not on track to learn remotely near fast enough even if it were open source is to eliminate the soul literally the soul from the music. So that's um that's really at the heart of the kind of the antihuman bias of this particular crowd

7:37 of kind of billionaire technologists. Um, an example is the point at which a system has sufficient intelligence and situational awareness and understanding of human psychology that it would have the capability, the desire to do so to fake being aligned. Like it knows what responses humans are looking for and can compute the responses looking humans are looking for and give those responses without it necessarily being the case that it is sincere about that. Like people thought we were batshit insane. And so we're actually moving exponentially to have greater levels of the very properties we ascribe to God without limit. Now we never become literally infinite, but we're moving exponentially

8:22 in that direction. So we become more godlike and we become closer to God and we do so at an exponential rate and exponentials kind of explode. Never quite becoming infinite. So we never really reach that ideal. But you can definitely say that evolution is a spiritual process at movie. Um, and so that was so the original version of transhumanism was basically the the old first wave methods of eugenics with this kind of eugenics on steroids aim. You know, forget humanity, forget perfecting the human stock. Let's just create a new posthuman stock. Open AI was founded on the belief that artificial intelligence has the potential to improve nearly every aspect of our lives, but also that it creates

9:09 serious risks we have to work together to manage. We're here because people love this technology. We think it can be a printing press moment. We have to work together to make it so. We should be very careful about artificial intelligence. Um, if I were to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it's probably that Um, so we need to be very careful with artificial intelligence. I'm increasingly inclined to think that there should be some uh regulatory oversight. They just don't give a about you even in the slightest. The same way that you don't care about an ant is the same way they're not going to care about you. And these things that we're summoning into the world now are

9:54 not demons. They're not evil, but they're more like the Lovecrafty and great old ones. There are entities that are not necessarily going to be aligned with what we want. The question I think the question is when when does the CCP and when does the sort of American national security establishment realize that super intelligence is going to be absolutely decisive for national power right in this I expect that by the end of this decade and possibly somewhat sooner than that we will have quite capable systems that we look at and say wow that's really remarkable the road to AGI should be a giant power struggle I expect that to be the case. One of the things that's been powerful

10:39 in a positive way about the models is their ability to kind of act on their own. But the more autonomy we give these systems, you know, the more we can worry, are they doing exactly the things that we want them to do? There's an attractor state down there, which is extinction. Once you're extinct, you tend to stay extinct. And uh more than 99.9% of all the species that that once flew, crawled, or swam on this planet are extinct. So that that certainly is one possible future. Can you just roughly explain what you think the dangers might be? Yeah. So the the the the danger really AI is um perhaps um more dangerous than say mismanaged uh

11:25 aircraft design or production maintenance or or or bad car production. uh in the sense that it is it has the potential uh however a small one may regard that probability but it is non-trivial it has the potential of civilizational destruction you know our original mission statement at deep mind was step one solve intelligence i.e build AGI. Step two, use it to solve everything else. I still like that formulation of our mission statement better than the one, you know, we have now use AI to benefit the world. Of course, we want to do that, but that was how we thought about it back in the day. That anybody who's trying to uh spread it out when the object of the game, it's a pyramidal society. The object of the game is to gather the stuff and climb up it, right? And get to the get to the top and and transcend. And that's I mean to

12:13 cut to the chase that's the vision of the most extreme of these kind of transhumanist tech bros. What they see they see human beings like larvae like maggots living on the earth which is this piece of dung is that there are a bunch of people in between where you are and utopia is and they're blocking your access to utopia. You may very well feel justified, morally justified in engaging extreme actions to push aside those individuals. Maybe that means violence. Maybe that means genocide. There have been lots of genocides that have been justified in the minds of true believers by the this

12:59 kind of utopian vision of of the future. You could do that would only have local effects here. uh even something as wonderful as like curing cancer or eliminating world hunger uh would really be from this evaluative perspective insignificant compared to reducing the level of existential risk by say 100th of 1 percentage point. So the one thing I can tell you is they're not going to be like us. So alien means you know different these things that we're building are not going to be people. They might be really smart. They might be really good at all sorts of different things, but they're not going to be like us. They're going to be aliens. Super intelligence, which greatly exceeds our cognitive abilities, it's going to either be the the best thing ever to happen to humanity or the worst

13:45 potential of what the models can do is is is incredible. You know, we're starting to work with pharmaceutical companies. I think these models could cure cancer. But but on the other hand, you know, things that are that are very smart, this is a lot of power in our hands. It it's only only humans can be arrogant enough to think that they can control something that is a billion times smarter than them. You know, the apocalypse, the climate change, social unrest, those are just excuses to do the thing that they wanted to do all along, which was upload their brains to, you know, to the metaverse and run around like Mark Zuckerberg with nothing from the waist down. I mean, that's telling, right? They want to run around as brains in cyberspace, not as humans on the

14:30 ground with feet on the soil in the living matrix of wet, dark feminine fairies and worms. Ex Google engineer and ex Uber engineer Anthony Leandowski has created a new religion called way of the future which involves worshiping an artificially intelligent robot. And underneath it all is this rising tsunami that if we're not careful is going to wipe us all out. We have like 20 good AIs and then somebody finally builds an evil AI. The problem is that the first very powerful AI is evil. Nobody knows how to make it good and then it kills everybody before

15:16 anybody can make it good. Whereas uh we will be introducing entirely new kinds of hazards into the world uh that we have no track record of surviving. And more specifically, I think all the really big existential risks um are related to certain anticipated uh future technologies that we might well develop over the coming decades or 100 years. So if you're st you have the opportunity to stand next to one of these machines, it is an awe inspiring thing. At least for me, it feels like an altar to an alien god. It they really are impressive machines. Alaska or New Zealand, you know, as to where to where to put uh where to put his bunker for the the event, which is

16:03 what they call it. You know, the event is the uh electromagnetic pulse or uh uh you know, the nanotech disaster or climate change or nuclear war that makes their their current lifestyle all but unlivable and they have to retreat to their uh uh to their bunkers. Like if you if you can't beat it, join it. That's Yeah. you know. Um, so from a long-term existential standpoint, that's like the purpose of Neurolink is to create a high bandwidth interface. This is the most complex software object humanity has yet produced.