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Joscha Bach on how to stop worrying and love AI

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Joscha Bach defines himself as an AI researcher/cognitive scientist on his substack. He has recently been debating existential risk from AI with Connor Leahy (previous guest of the podcast), and since their conversation was quite short I wanted to continue the debate in more depth.

The resulting conversation ended up being quite long (over 3h of recording), with a lot of tangents, but I think this gives a somewhat better overview of Joscha’s views on AI risk than other similar interviews. We also discussed a lot of other topics, including Barbie, the relationship between nuclear weapons and AI x-risk, the limits to growth, the superposition of AI futures, the endgame of uploading, among other things.

(Note: as always, conversation is ~3h long, so feel free to click on any sub-topic of your liking in the outline below and then come back to the outline by clicking on the green arrow ⬆)

Contents

Intro

A Different kind of podcast

Michaël: If you have decided to click on this video because you thought this would be yet another podcast with Joscha Bach, I’m sorry to disappoint you. This is not going to be another podcast. This is going to be a different kind of content, something you haven’t seen before. This is not going to be a debate. I am not going to ask you about the meaning of life or what is love. Instead, today, I want us to go deep. I want to explore with Joscha Bach what actually you believe about artificial intelligence. I want to know exactly what guides you, guides your worldview, and if there are like any events that make you change your mind. I want to know how Joscha Bach became Joscha Bach and what do you think about what the future for humanity will look like. So, yeah, thanks. Thanks, Joscha, for coming on the show.

Joscha: Thank you, Michael. Thanks for inviting me. ⬆

Why Barbie Is Better Than Oppenheimer

Michaël: Before we jump on some very deep and important topics, I think it might make sense to start with a tweet you wrote a few days ago that divided the entire world. You have your hand in the first word on the second line. Oh, sorry. Yes. Okay. So I’m going to come out and say it even if it hurts. Barbie was a way better movie than Oppenheimer. Why was Barbie better than Oppenheimer?

Joscha: Well, I think that Oppenheimer, while having great actors and great cinematography and Christopher Nolan’s horrible sound design, where everybody is drowned out in the music and you only hear mumbling. I think that Oppenheimer was quite unsurprising. They basically milked the Oppenheimer’s life story for any amount of drama they could get. And we are left with, okay, it was super ambiguous whether he gave the bomb to the Russians. And also everybody thought that they were super important. And this is the main driving force of their psychology. So you have pretty monothematic characters and a story that is in many ways to be expected. So it was an okay movie. I enjoyed watching it. There’s really nothing wrong with it. And I think it might even have some rewatch value, possibly even more than Barbie, because the pictures were better. But I think that Barbie marks a milestone in the way in which people in Hollywood are looking at gender these days. And because it is changing the culture or is describing a particular perspective on culture shift, I think it might be a significant movie that people look back to and realize, okay, this is how some of our narratives were reflected and possibly changed. I don’t know if you want to go into this, if you’re interested in these topics. What I found interesting is that Barbie is not about whether you should be woke or not be woke. It’s much more interesting in this regard. It’s more describing the motive behind Barbie. Barbie is displayed as a shift from girls playing with baby dolls to boys identifying with a doll that is her later in life. So what is the thing that you want to be? Do you want to be a mom? Do you want to have a family? Do you want to reproduce? Is this your place in society, in the world? Or is the world a place where you can get whatever you want and girls get everything? And it’s very often we have this stereotypical accusation against Barbie that she is positing an impossible body scheme and puts pressure on girls to be like Barbie. And the main character ironically refers to this by calling herself “I am stereotypical Barbie.” But she lives not alone in Barbie, but in Barbieland. And Barbieland is full of different Barbies that represent the different ideals that girls might aspire to. So there are, of course, Barbies of all colors and there are Barbies of different body shapes. And they also pursue very different careers. You have Supreme Court Judge Barbie. You have President Barbie. You have CEO Barbie and all the other things that you might want to be. So it’s not just horse Barbie. And the only thing that Mattel discontinued was pregnant Barbie because that was weird. And our main Barbie character lives in Barbieland. Every night is girls night. And while she has a Ken, her boyfriend, he’s just an accessory. And she has many Kens and they’re all interchangeable. And there is no real place for Kens in this world except as an accessory. So there is no male role model in the Barbie world. And the whole thing starts with stereotypical Barbie being confronted with a fear of death. And this means that her own vision of self-actualization and getting everything that she wants, everything is party and so on, does not have an end point. There is no salvation. There is no end game in this. And this is in some sense what she notices. So do you think Barbie is like a critic of modern society, of like, like less patriarchy, more people changing genders? Is this what you’re saying? No, I think it’s more a criticism of too simplistic ideology. That is, the world is too complicated to be described by a single narrative. And they do show that Barbie was not invented by Mattel to modify girls in a more consumerist way. But the creator of Barbie is being displayed as someone who doesn’t have children herself and has higher ideals and wants to empower girls. That in some sense, she sees as the daughters that she doesn’t have to go out in the world and become modern and self-actualize. Not just as a mother, as somebody who is somebody else’s accessory, who is a secretary, but somebody who can really go all places. So in many ways, it’s a very classical feminist position that is being affiliated with it. And when Barbie realizes that the girl that is playing with her is unhappy, she travels out in the real world to meet her. And initially she thinks it’s a girl. And the girl is some kind of Zoomer girl who really hates Barbie and has no relationship to her whatsoever and never really played with Barbie. And it turns out this was not her, but it was actually about her mother. And her mother is a single mom who tries to raise her daughter and it doesn’t really work that out that well for her. She’s really not happy and unfulfilled. And she is in some sense confronting the fact that Barbie didn’t completely work out for her because the world is more complicated than this. And both Ken and Barbie go on some kind of transition. Ben is trying to build his own patriarchy after he comes out in the real world. And he realizes that in the real world, some people actually do respect men and men can have their places and realizes that we can make some kind of men’s rights movement. And it’s clear that this men’s right movement by itself is also very incomplete and not really sustainable. It’s born out of the need to appeal Barbie into control and get access to her. And it’s not about building an own strong identity that works in the world. But there’s also this underlying issue that men and women are incomplete alone. And we have to build relationships with each other, not necessarily heterosexual relationships, but without relationships, people are incomplete. And also without families, there will be no next generation. And so in many ways, Barbie is understanding that the thing that she did before is not working. And she is even apologizing to Ken that the kind of relationship they had was not really respectful of him. But this doesn’t mean that she now wants to have a relationship with him. He’s still stupid from her perspective. And there is no easy answer. The answer that is being told is mostly Barbie is a lie. Barbie is an illusion. It’s a simple ideology. The patriarchy is a simple ideology. The world is much more complicated than all these things. And how do you deal with this complication? You actually have to go back into your feelings, what you actually experience about reality as much depth as you can make. And it doesn’t mean that stuff is being resolved. There is no easy sailing off on the sunset. But there is a chance that you get in touch with who you actually are. Don’t fall for the narratives. Reality is always more complicated than this. ⬆

What does Joscha think about existential risk from AI

The relationship between nuclear weapons and AI x-risk

Michaël: I haven’t watched Barbie, so I think it would be kind of a mess if I tried to analyze Barbie with you. But I did watch Oppenheimer and I really enjoyed it. And I think I’ve seen a lot of parallels between Oppenheimer and AI. And maybe the reason why you didn’t like the movie is because you didn’t like the parallels or you think they don’t really apply to AI. Or I think there’s a lot of choices that were kind of dubious with the music that was kind of loud or the plot was kind of long. But if we just focus on the fact that building nukes could maybe destroy humanity or give humans a lot more power than they can actually handle.

Joscha: No, I really liked Oppenheimer. It was an enjoyable movie and I really didn’t regret going there for any second. It was really pleasant to be in there. I also liked the OppenAI memes that were sparked by it. And I think that the element with the nukes is quite complex and multifaceted. And I think that the movie largely did it justice because nukes are not just a technology that was invented to kill people or to instigate mass murder. But nukes were a technology to prevent World War Three. And they’ve been super successful at this. I suspect that without nukes, there would have been a war between the Soviet Union and the Western world. And it would have devastated large parts of Europe. And this fact that we had nukes gave the world and especially Europe and the US unprecedented prosperity.

Michaël: And then they removed the nukes, but we still have prosperity, right?

Joscha: If we remove the nukes, we would have an escalating war in Ukraine that probably would move beyond Ukraine. And at this point, everybody is trying to contain the whole thing to make sure that it does not turn into a war that is devastating cities in Russia and in the West and not just poor Ukraine. This is a very interesting development. And I think that the developments in Ukraine would have the potential to turn into a big European theater. And all these things never happen. So these nukes still have their containment function. And of course, it’s easy to see that nukes pose an existential risk. There is a possibility that governments make a mistake. It’s also that the fact that nukes are possible means that you have to build them. Once they’re possible, it’s there is not going to be a contract between the leading powers to prevent them. Some people who are arguing that nukes are some precedent to AGI say that we managed to prevent the proliferation of nukes. But preventing the proliferation of nukes means that powers that already had the nukes prevented others to get them in the first place. And if you have them and they give them up, then the same happens to you as in Ukraine. Ukraine had nukes at some point and the Belgrade Accord guaranteed Ukraine that its borders would be defended if it would ever be attacked. But this contract was, of course, no longer enforceable once Ukraine had given up its nukes. And so all these memorandums only have those people who actually have power and invulnerability due to having nukes. And if we try to translate this idea to AGI, there is also this issue as soon as it’s possible to build AGI. You know, AGI might be very dangerous. It’s also incredibly useful and powerful. And the risk that somebody else builds in AGI is and you don’t have one. And that means that the other side is going to control the world, is going to create an incentive for all the major players to experiment in building AGI.

Michaël: So I think there’s the entire thing about having a race and like different countries competing to build the nukes before the Germans or before the Russians. And there’s the whole like intel agency where you don’t want the design to leak to other countries. And I think like you can see this race between the US, China and Russia. Maybe the US is way ahead, as some people say here in the Bay. But I think in the end game, it’s going to be very similar to racing for nukes. And the first one to have a, let’s say, the very powerful AI system will rule the world and win the war, let’s say. Are you afraid of people racing towards AGI or do you think the faster we get to AGI, the better?

Joscha: Neither. I don’t know why I should be afraid of AGI. ⬆

Global warming and the limits to growth

Joscha: The way it looks to me, our society is very fragile. We have managed to get from a few hundred million people, where we have been for ages in the agricultural age, into a technological society that very quickly went to a few billion people. But to me, it looks like we are locusts who are in swarming mode. And it’s not clear how we could get the mode in which we currently exist sustainable and stable in the long term. It doesn’t seem to me as if we are the kind of species that tends to be around for tens of millions of years. And this means that per default, we are dead. Per default, our species is going to expire. And if you think about this for a moment, it is not that depressing because there are species which are sustainable, which stay very stable for a long time. And if something is moving up very fast, it also tends to come down pretty hard at some point. This is just the nature of things. But if you imagine that there are so many species on this planet, in which species do you want to be born and at which time of its cycle on the planet in this evolutionary game? This thing that you can be a conscious species that has all sorts of creature comforts, unlimited calories, is not being eaten all the time and can die with dignity is super rare on this planet. And we’re born into one of the few generations that afford this. So I think we ought to be grateful to be in this situation, instead of grieving for the not in continuation of something that has only existed for like three, four generations so far and might not go much, much, much longer in the other direction.

Michaël: I think when you say like, by default, we’re dead, there’s many ways to interpret this. And you can say if humanity continues like this for millions of years, the probability of getting hit by an asteroid or a nuclear war or all these other things that are existential risks kind of increases. And so I think that’s maybe what you mean. But I think when people hear this, they can think like, oh, by default in 200 years or 100 years, we die because of something not AI. And I think this is like a bigger claim.

Joscha: Right. I think what’s going to kill us, not necessarily as a species in the sense of full on extinction, but as a civilization, as a technological species that lives in peace with abundant food and resources. Right, we feel that when we look at a very narrow range, that the inflation is terrible. Or we also notice that people in the third world are still starving. But when we look at the absolute metrics and we zoom out and we look at the trend lines, so far, everything is going pretty well. We live in conditions that are better than in other times in human history and they are still improving. And this is a trend that is probably not going to go on forever. If you currently catch a large land animal, anything larger than a rabbit, then it’s probably a cow or a human. So basically everything is now turned into a factory farm for us. And it’s not clear if we are able to manage a farm on Earth that is as stable and sustainable as evolution was before, before it was not controlled by us. I don’t think that we are very good stewards of life on Earth at the moment. It seems to be that we are just trying to wing it and we are not planning very far ahead, because if we look very far ahead, we get very uncomfortable. And I think that there’s a potential that AGI may change this, because it allows us to make predictions in a time where complexity increases very quickly. And at the moment, our elites, I think, don’t have plans for the future. It’s simply because since World War II, the future has changed faster and faster and much faster than our prognosis of the future could keep track of it. And that’s why we cannot really plan that far ahead and are just trying to work without deep models and try to see what works and what doesn’t. And AI might shift that by increasing our ability to process information, to anticipate our actions and to create coherence as a species. Because if everybody who makes a decision can use their own private version of truth GPT and figure out what the consequences are in conjunction with everything else on the planet, then you can see whether you should buy this or that product, make this or that business decision, make that this or that life decision, what the consequences would be for our species. This might change everything.

Michaël: Just to be more precise, when you talk about all this kind of other risk or other ways humanity could collapse, let’s say 50 percent of humans currently alive die in the next 50 years without any AI thing, just like from other things. What do you think is the probability of this? Is this like a 90 percent chance of everyone, of like most humans dying in 50 years? What exactly do you mean?

Joscha: I cannot put any numbers on this.

Joscha: I find that when I look at science fiction prognosis 50 years ahead, they’re usually terrible. And it’s because if you have too many factors that interact, the dynamics become so complicated that it’s hard to say what’s going to happen. For instance, there is currently no viable carbon capture technology. But this doesn’t mean that you need one. Energetically, the issue is that if you want to capture carbon with an industrial plant, you need to add more energy to the process than you got from burning the carbon in the first place. The easiest way to prevent carbon release is to keep it in the ground, not to use more energy than you got out of this. So as long as there are coal plants in the world, it doesn’t really make any sense to think about industrial carbon capture, because that’s going to cost more than just not using the coal plant. If you have a stationary thing that is in one place like this plant, with cars, it’s arguably or with planes, it makes sense that this is an energy dense carrier of energy. So you can put this into the car or in the plane in ways that would be difficult otherwise. But for coal plants, but what happens if you say you take large scale projects where you reforest an area and then you dump the forest into some deep place like in the ocean where it doesn’t rot, you might capture carbon for a longer time or maybe the better solution is to put aerosols into the atmosphere, put dust there or calcium or something else that is not producing a loss of ozone layer or something, but it’s just cooling down. So maybe there are technologies to do this. But what’s not clear is, can we globally coordinate to do this?

Michaël: I think what you’re saying is like evidence for global warming being a problem and being some existential risk in the sense of causing some harm for humanity in the long term. It is very hard to recover from. I think this is true. I think this is like one piece of evidence, but it’s like maybe not enough to justify a very fatalist view of the future. I think it would maybe shift someone from, let’s say, like 20 percent chance that global warming is a very pressing issue to like 19 percent or like 15 percent. But I think for like arguments for why everyone die by default needs to be like much, much stronger. And in my head, I think I think AI is kind of the main factor. And I think the other ones are less strong ⬆

Joscha’s reaction to the AI Political compass memes

Michaël: The first time I heard your views about the future were on Twitter, where I made this political compass meme about a year ago and I didn’t know much about your views. I just like heard you maybe like for an hour on Lex Friedman. So I put you in some weird corner of a doomer without knowing exactly if you had the same views as other people like Eliezer Yudkowsky. And you commented something kind of funny. So I think I think I want to like go on this. But first, this is this is the meme I’m talking about. And I think Joscha is I put him kind of next to Eliezer there. So, yeah, I think it was kind of funny to have your live reaction. So I think you think this is wrong because to be fair, like most of these are wrong. I just did this in a few hours. You didn’t expect to have millions of people watching it.

Joscha: On the scale. I can say much more between Michael Nielsen and Roon in this diagram.

Michaël: So just to be clear, you think that AGI is mostly. So what I meant by AGI good, I meant like, will AGI by default have good outcomes? And AGI soon, I meant, you know, in the next five, ten years. So you’re saying you’re most you mostly think that AGI will have a positive outcome for humanity.

Joscha: I think it’s likely, but it’s hard to make clear predictions because it’s a multi-factor thing. So instead of just trying to make a single bet, which you need to do if you want to make a decision, it’s much more important to model the space of possibilities. And when you look at the current space of ideas, you see, for instance, the the doom people, I guess that Eliezer was, of course, not the first person who anticipated this. Most of the positions had been articulated in the 1960s and 70s by people like Stanislav Lem in detail in their books. And Frank Herbert points out in Dune that there is a that AI will be very hard to contain. And eventually, if you want to have a universe that is populated by humans instead of things that don’t look and act very human, you probably need to prevent AGI from happening or you need to prevent it from proliferating and extinguish it and impose strong restrictions against it because people cannot possibly compute with our AI children. And on the other hand, I think that AI is probably a little bit the wrong framing. Ultimately, it’s about agency, not about intelligence. And agency is the ability to change the future. And we typically change the future to be able to survive, that is to keep entropy at bay. And we do this by creating complexity. And this game is not changing when AI is entering the stage. So it has to play the same game as us and maybe together with us. And imagine that you have a choice of what you want to be. So imagine you could decide to not be uploaded on a monkey brain, but you could be uploaded in arbitrary substrate. What is the kind of being that you want to be then? And I think that depends entirely on the circumstances in which you find yourself in. If you want to travel through the stars, you probably want to be able to hibernate and to not be very biological. So there are circumstances where being biological might be an advantage. ⬆

On Uploads, Identity and Death

Michaël: So I think this is like a separate question of whether being uploaded is good for humans.

Joscha: We already uploaded. You already uploaded on a monkey brain, right? It’s not that different. It’s just a very poor biological substrate that you uploaded on. And basically you colonize this from the inside out. You started in this brain, but you run against these limitations every day.

Michaël: And I think there are better alternatives. I think for upload you, I kind of assume that there is something that you kind of transfer. So being born and growing in a body is kind of different from copying Joscha Bach into a computer, right?

Joscha: Maybe you don’t have to copy. Maybe you just move over. When you look at the way empathy works between people, you go into resonance with each other with a bidirectional feedback loop. And this enables you to have experiences together that you couldn’t have alone. There’s a difference between cognitive and perceptual empathy. And what I’m talking about is this perceptual empathy where you really deeply resonate. And now imagine that you increase the bandwidth and you go beyond what, for instance, the Dalai Lama or other skilled meditators can do, that they can induce jhanas in you and put something of them into you. But you go beyond this, that you basically become an entity that is able to go partially into a new substrate and eventually move over and make this the main point of execution.

Michaël: So you’re saying that we need AI to have this kind of digital uploads and. Even even if it’s there is some risk of AGI not working out and being dangerous, the kind of upsides of having uploads or fighting entropy with AI makes it worth it. Is it mainly your point?

Joscha: No, it’s a little bit more radical. I think that our notion of identity is the fiction identity does not actually exist. We construct identity by imposing a world line on our mental construct of ourself. We have a personal self model. It is a story that the brain tells itself about a virtual person that doesn’t actually exist. But it drives the behavior of this organism. So in this sense, it’s implemented and real. But it is fiction. You can deconstruct this fiction using meditation or drugs or just by becoming older and wiser. And you realize you are actually a vessel that can create this personal self model. And the identity of that personal self maintains for credit assignment. You are, of course, not the same person as last year or five years ago. We’ve changed a great deal every morning. A new person is created in your brain when you wake up from deep sleep. And in between, there were discontinuities in your existence, right? And the thing that exists today has memories of yesterday and has to live with decisions of yesterday and has make decisions for the future self. And that’s why you maintain this identity. But by itself, it is a fiction. I’m just in the now. There’s only this now that consciousness maintains. And after this now I’m dead. And before that, I don’t exist. Right. So in this sense, you are impermanent. And so then you could wake up in some other substrate.

Michaël: There’s not much of a difference. Is the argument we’re already dead. So it doesn’t matter if we die from AI and AI kind of like uploads us.

Joscha: It has more to do with the point that there is no actual identity beyond the present moment. That identity is actually a fiction. And if we give up this fiction, we lose the fear of death.

Michaël: And if we leave the fear of death, we don’t have to worry about AI.

Joscha: Of course, you don’t have to worry about AI. Worrying about anything in some sense is a choice. Does it help you to worry? Is there stuff that matters that you can achieve by worrying more?

Michaël: So I think if you worry more, you might see the risk more and might be able to counteract and work on research and work on making systems more robust and more beneficial. And if you just trick yourself into being an optimist when the risk is high, then you might end up not working on AI risk. And if everyone works on AI and not on making AI safe, then at some point, I think the risk becomes high. So I think it makes sense for some people to care about the risk and work on making systems more robust.

Joscha: But you and you alone are responsible for your emotions. How you feel about things is entirely up to you. And so when you have a choice about your emotion and you get to this point where you can learn how to relate to the world around you, the question is, what kind of emotions do you want to have? You don’t necessarily want to have the happiest emotions. You want to have the most appropriate and helpful emotions for what matters to you.

Michaël: The more adequate to the world we live in. If the world is dangerous, I want to feel fear. I want to feel I want to have the adequate response to what the world is like to be able to tackle it. I don’t want to feel good or feel safe when AI can pose an existential threat in the near future.

Joscha: Yes, but you can go outside and can get run over by a car and spend the rest of your life in abysmal pain in a wheelchair without having kids and so on.

Michaël: And it would be horrible, right? What’s the probability of this? That’s the question. If the probability of me getting run by a car is maybe like one in one thousand or lower.

Joscha: It’s something that happens to tons of people in this world every day. It’s not something that is super high as a probability, but it’s part of the human experience. The best possible outcome of you for you, of course, is that you get to be to the ripe old age of 80 or something. But your pain is steadily increasing in your body and then you get cancer or something else. And then you die, hopefully not with a lot of pain and not with having the impression that your life was for naught and you completely unfulfilled. That’s the best possible outcome. So in this sense, you are completely dead by default. And there’s nothing around this because it’s the way evolution works right now. We adapt through generational change and that’s horrible, right? We live in a universe where everything except for sunlight doesn’t want to be eaten and is trying to fight against being eaten and all the others are eating them. And I think that this universe is quite horrible. If you look at it.

Michaël: I think people dying and dying by default is pretty sad. And I agree with you that it’s good if AI can make humans live longer or even transcend death. I think there’s many ways in which AI could be beneficial. But it’s just a question of when exactly do we want to have AGI so that we can make sure it’s both safe and beneficial for everyone. And I think maybe the younger generations, they have a lot of time and they think maybe we can delay it by 30 or 40 years. And if you’re on the cusp of death and maybe it’s a different question.

Joscha: Worrying is quite important when you get other people to do something for you. So if somebody wants to start a movement that you can control people, for instance, building a cult, making people worry, having them involuntary reactions to a particular perspective on the world that you present to them without an alternative is a way to control people. And I think that’s excusable if you don’t know what you’re doing or if you really think it’s justified to put people in the state where you control them

Michaël: through giving them fear. I think it’s also the same thing if you are very optimistic and you say that AI will only have positive upsides and you just say, let’s do more investments in AI and lobbying in parliament to not pass regulations against AI. There’s like there’s like two forces here. I think most of the force is coming from a lot of investments, a lot of money being put into AI. And I don’t see like that many forces going against it. So I think I think right now the power balance is kind of in the other direction.

Joscha: I think that at the moment, the majority of people are afraid of AI. I think that the press campaign, both of the people who are against AI for political and economic reasons, mostly on the side of the press, journalists are terrified of AI because they are also just completing prompts. And often you can do what they do more efficiently with an AI system. They are afraid that their content firms can be replaced by something that is entirely run by Silicon Valley and is not going to get human journalists involved anymore. And a lot of people currently do fake jobs. They basically work in the administration, shift paper to each other and relatively little is in this way interacting with the ground truth and is still moving atoms instead of bits. And so people are naturally afraid of AI. On the other hand, you have the doomer narrative, which is getting more and more traction. And as a result, I think the majority of people now think that AI is overwhelmingly a bad technology that shouldn’t happen. That has already been accomplished. And I perceive this movement as anti-AI ideology, as something that is cutting us off from possible futures that are actually good. ⬆

The Endgame: Playing The Longest Possible Game Given A Superposition Of Futures

Michaël: I think we all want good futures. The question is, how do we get there? And I think we disagree as well as the probability of a good future by default. And when would AGI come about? There’s like many, many things we disagree on. But I think we all agree that a good transhumanist future is a good outcome for humanity. And banning completely AI for a billion years or even like a hundred years would be like a bad outcome.

Joscha: When I look into the future, I don’t see a single timeline. There’s not one path in front of us. That’s because I don’t have enough information to constrain the future. The universe has not run to this point yet. And many decisions need to be made for the first time. And people will only be able to make them once the conditions are right. So there is just no way for us to anticipate exactly what’s going to happen at this point, I think. And so when we look at the world, you need to take a multifaceted perspective. You need to look from possible angles. There’s a superposition of possible futures. And when you try to understand what’s going to happen, try to understand the space in the first part. But the other thing is when you look about yourself, what’s your own perspective on life? This idea that life continues the way it does right now is horrible. If you go back to the way in which our ancestors lived, it’s even more horrible.

Michaël: I don’t think my life is particularly bad.

Joscha: No, we are super luxurious right now. We live here. We’re here in Berkeley in an amazing group house. Everything is super comfortable. We don’t need to worry about details like food and being threatened by others. We don’t need to worry about violence very much and all these things. But it’s unusual for life. And at some point you need to worry about pain and death. And at the same time, I noticed when I looked into your fridge that everything is vegetarian and vegan. Nobody wants to kill anybody here. Nobody wants anything to suffer, which is very sympathetic to me. I like this perspective, but it’s not how life on this planet works. And so often I felt that if I look at my own mind, I see software and often I cannot escape. But my software is brewing up and I cannot escape the suffering that’s happening unless I’m awake enough to modify my own source code. And if I can modify my own source code arbitrarily, then the entire morality changes because we can now decide what gives us pleasure. We can decide what future we want in the sense of we can decide how we react to what is going to happen.

Michaël: So ideally you would want to be sure to be able to modify your own software and remove pain and remove the bad things and maybe upload yourself. Yes, but not prematurely. So and not necessarily before I die. If you die at 80 years, at 80 and you have like maybe like 30 years to live, if we build AGI in 20 years, would that be good for you? Do you want it faster?

Joscha: There’s a deeper question. What is the thing that should be done? What is the longest possible game that any agent can play? And so what’s the best agency that you can construct and serve together with others? And when you look from this perspective, traditionally the name for this best possible agency that emerges over everybody serving it to the degree that I recognize it as God. So if you want to align AGI, you should not align it with people because people are very transient and egotistical and stupid species. They’re basically paperclip maximizers. But if you think about what should be done on the planet or in the universe, from the perspective of conscious agency, what is that thing that can be discovered? What should that thing be? What should we align with? And what should AI be aligned with and align itself? And I think that’s discoverable if you wake up from the notion that everything has to stay in the way it currently is, except for all the horrible things that you don’t want to think about because they make you super uncomfortable as a human being. I don’t think that Eliezer should be dictator of the world because I don’t want to live in his aesthetics. I don’t think he wants to. I think this world that he envisions is sustainable for me. I think if after a few hundred years, it would be super boring and disgusting. So life is much more interesting and complicated than this. It’s also more interesting and complicated than human beings. There’s much, much more in store on this planet than us. There’s probably going to be smarter species after us, after we went extinct, no matter for what reason. There’s much more excitement going to happen than us. And just locking everything in in our primitive current state doesn’t seem to be ethical to me. ⬆

On the evidence of delaying technology leading to better outcomes

Michaël: So I don’t think Yudkowsky wants to be a dictator of the world. He just wants things to be delayed to make sure we do the right decisions and build things safely.

Joscha: Whenever does anything get better when you delay it? Have you ever seen any kind of evidence that anything in the world got better because people delayed? It just happens later or not at all?

Michaël: I feel like the first example we gave, like trying to delay nuclear war.

Joscha: We didn’t delay nuclear war. We didn’t want nuclear war. Nobody wanted nuclear war ever.

Michaël: So I guess like when the one American general decided to like not nuke back in Cuba or something, there was one person who decided to not move, like delay the war or like see what was happening. There were times where there were tensions and people were trying to delay the war. And so I think that’s one example.

Joscha: It’s not a delay. It was not that it was planned. Let’s wait until we feel like dying and then we do the war. No, I think there was responsibility on both sides where people were paying the blame of bluff. And there was this decision to be made where the U.S. would use its conventional military power to take over Cuba or whether the Soviet Union would be willing to protect Cuba. And that just being the Bay of Pigs disaster where the American invasion had been defeated by the Cubans. And then there was the question, do we really march in and take over? Right. And at this point, there was a power game that happened between both sides. And eventually both sides counted on that it’s a bad idea to destroy the world for Cuba. So everything stayed the way it was.

Michaël: Yeah. So sometimes it’s good to not move forward and push buttons. I think. Is there like any technology that you think would not be worth pursuing or like any technology, any new science is worth pursuing, like any kind of progress is good?

Joscha: I think that from the perspective of life on Earth, becoming a technological species is probably disastrous, because we are in many ways for most species on this planet, like an asteroid or a super volcano, which means we are changing living conditions on the planet so much that almost all large, complex species are going extinct. And what remains is, of course, more of the simple stuff and the stuff that we can eat, except when we make it so brittle that it might die out. It is a risk that coffee has become so homogenous and bananas have become so homogenous that a single disease could wipe out most of this species. And we have to make do without coffee. But maybe we can fix that.

Michaël: I don’t think banana being homogenous is like evidence for humans dying.

Joscha: No, no. Just that humans are also very homogenous and we have homogenized life on Earth in a way that makes our conditions more perilous because life on Earth has become somewhat brittle. It’s not that life is threatened, but the complexity of life at a certain scale has become brittle. And you can see that a lot of species have been dying out and have been disappearing through our influence on the planet. ⬆

Humanity is in locust mode

Joscha: And that’s why I think that we are in many ways comparable to locusts. Locusts have this interesting mode and normally they’re harmless grasshoppers and they have the ability to lay more eggs and reproduce much, much faster. But then they would overgraze and destroy food for many years to come for themselves and other species. But if this happens, if for some reason there is a mutation, so the locusts go critical mass and most of them start or a cluster of them starts doing this, then the others are noticing this. And so they don’t go extinct, that they still can lay eggs and project into the future. They all switch into this mode. And it’s a game theoretic problem. At least that’s the way I understand it. Maybe I’m wrong. Correct me in the comments. But I think that this locust mode is the result of some kind of prisoner’s dilemma. I mean, you have a defective equilibrium where every locust is forcing the others, once the critical mass switches into the defection mode, to defect as well, replicate as fast as they can. And the outcome is bad for the locusts for quite some years, a few years and for other species, too. Humanity might be in this way. So we are incoherent. We have developed technology that is equivalent to locusts reproducing very fast and eating a lot. And we could stop ourselves locally doing this, become more sustainable, but it wouldn’t stop the others doing it. We would be overtaken by countries, by groups of people within our own country who would use the technology to eat as much as they can and to live as comfortably as they can.

Michaël: So I don’t want to, you know, disagree or confront you on this. I’m more interested in maybe like what kind of, if there’s like any evidence that would make you change your mind on this. Like, is there any event that could happen, like any coordination that could happen or anything that could make you change your mind on this? Or is it that you will always believe that humans are by default dead?

Joscha: I think there are many ways in which this could be wrong. It’s just individually, we most likely die at some point of old age. And that’s because we don’t want to outcompete our grandchildren and our grandchildren are the way in which we adapt our children to changing circumstances. So if we don’t leave this legacy behind, if we don’t transcend evolution by inventing some kind of intelligent design in which we can create a new species, then our life is fraught with suffering. And if we perform intelligent design, if we are able to completely edit our genomes, for instance, and create subspecies of us, then we want to settle Mars. It could turn out that our children that settling Mars don’t look a lot like us. And I think that if you can go beyond the carbon cycle and get new molecules to think and feel and integrate with us and be conscious, then life will transcend into the next stage. It will be super exciting. Right. And so from some perspective, you could say, oh, that’s very concerning because things are not the way in which they’ve always been, but the way in which things are are not optimal. And there is a chance that we destroy the world for naught, for nothing, that we could create a big disaster that wipes out life on Earth without leaving anything behind. But I think that’s not the most likely outcome. Actually, that’s an extremely unlikely outcome. And even the outcome that AGI is going to obliterate humanity in an adversarial act is possible, but it’s not super likely. ⬆

Scenarios in which Joscha would delay AI

Michaël: So if the year is 2030, Elon Musk has finally shipped the first, let’s say, Falcon 12 to Mars. And there’s like a thousand people living on Mars for like a year. And you can edit your genome, you can edit the genomes of your kids. Would you be more optimistic about humanity’s prospect? And would you be willing to delay AI progress because you think it’s worth it at this point?

Joscha: Don’t you think that the AI might have better opinions about this than us?

Michaël: The problem is, is the moment where AI becomes able to give better opinions than Joscha Bach, where I can interview an AI on a podcast and ask him questions about AI, then we’re getting very close to the point where it’s able to take over or to get a particular advantage or automate a lot of work. And so a lot of money gets put into AI and there’s like, you know, economic growth goes crazy. And so the moment where we can use AI to inform our decisions, I think it’s the moment where we don’t have a lot of time left. And maybe there’s a chance of humans doing a lot of important work before AI gets to that point.

Joscha: I think if we don’t develop AI at all, if you stop doing beyond what we currently have and maybe scale back, because I suspect that it’s possible that the current LLMs would be combined into architectures that go to AGI. So even if you stop right now and people play just with the Lama weights and build an architecture that is made of 100 modules, where every module is an LLM instance, a little homunculus, maybe that’s sufficient to get to AGI. Right. Who knows? Maybe the LLM or foundation model is good enough as acting like a brain area and or it could be good enough to write code that gets you the rest of the way. A point is at which point we have an AI that’s better at AI research than people. And so if you want to prevent this from happening, you probably need to scale back beyond the present technology. Maybe you need to make GPUs beyond a certain scale illegal. I also suspect that the transformer algorithm that we currently use that require to be trained on most entirety of the Internet to become somewhat coherent are extremely wasteful. Our own intelligence scales up with far less data and far slower hardware. So I think that if we, for instance, would stop working on LLMs and instead work on alternate architectures that can use fewer resources, maybe it’s even more dangerous. So there is not a practical option. It’s also AI is objectively so useful that you and me can stop building AI or we can ensure that the AI that we are building is safe. We can probably not ensure that all the AI that is being built on the planet is going to be safe.

Michaël: So there’s a normative statement on whether we should ideally slow down AI completely. And then there’s more like a descriptive statement of like, oh, it’s impossible to do it because A, B and C. And I agree it’s not possible completely. Like the Yudkowsky Time letter, it’s probably not possible right now. But some amount of slowing down can be good. And the things you mentioned as having a size of GPU that might be too high and banned, that could be good. And I agree that like using AI to do alignment research or using AI to build more safe AI systems, that’s good. So I don’t think we should ban all AI right now because it’s not possible, but there’s like some amount of slowing down that is good.

Joscha: No, I think that the AI research is still too slow. It’s not like we’re super fast. There is progress happening still. It’s not plateauing. ⬆

On the dangers of AI regulation

Joscha: But I think that at the moment, every attempt to slow it down would require regulation and the regulation currently has the wrong incentives. So it’s not going to prevent dangerous AI. I think it’s going to prevent useful AI. And there are ways in which we can make AI more useful with regulation. But that requires that people can point at actual problems that already emerged that have to be solved in a similar way as with cars. Cars can be super dangerous as a technology. But if you had slowed down research on cars and building cars and experimenting with them, cars would not be safe. They would actually just happen later and worse. And if you would have slowed down the Internet, the Internet would not have become a better Internet or a safer Internet or one that is more useful. But it would have become a useless Internet because it would have allowed the regulators to catch up in a way that would prevent innovation from happening. There is a movement to create something like an Internet FDA that prevents the horrors of social media where random people can exchange their opinions without asking the journalists first. This is really, really bad in the opinion of many journalists, because this legible information transfer allows arbitrary people to form their opinions just by identifying who they think is competent. And this might take a long time until they figure this out correctly, whereas the journalists know that they and their friends are already competent. So if you are in a free society, of course, you might want to have that exchange. But there’s always going to be forces that push against this. And maybe if you would only have teletext, if you had slowed down the Internet and it would stay like this forever. And if you want to start a platform like Facebook, you would need to go through a multimillion dollar FDA process that very few people can afford or even a billion dollar FDA process. And there would be ethics committees that look at the way in which misinformation, pornography, illegally copied software and so on would proliferate on the Internet and prevent such a horrible thing from ever happening.

Michaël: There are some laws, right? You cannot upload child porn.

Joscha: Yes. And these laws all emerged in response to what went wrong on the Internet. And they don’t resolve all these issues, right? The Internet still has all these issues. And you could only prevent all of them by completely shutting down the Internet, which would be horrible. Instead, what the law is doing, it is mitigating these effects and it’s mitigating them quite effectively. So software producers can still work and child pornography can be prosecuted. There can be strong incentives against harming people on the Internet and so on. And by and large, the Internet is a tremendous force for good. And also because there is regulation that deals with issues on the Internet as they crop up. And there’s a democratic process that can look at things that people are accountable for the decisions that they make at the moment for AI. Nobody is accountable. Right. There are things that are going to be very bad at some point. We all know at some point there might be deepfakes that are going to change the elections. But these things have not happened so far. Right. The technology is there, but people are not necessarily always bad and always trying to bring everything down. And the world is going to disintegrate because technologies exist. But by and large, people want to be productive and they want to create and build things together and give them technologies that empower this. The outcomes are good. It could be that AI is the first time that this is not the case, but that would be somewhat surprising.

Michaël: Are you saying that like the Internet went well because we had a democratic process? We decided on what we didn’t want. And so with AI, we should just wait for the bad things to happen. And then we can decide via democratic process what we don’t want to reproduce.

Joscha: At the moment, there are very large scale predictions about what’s going to be horrible about self-driving cars, for instance. A lot of people are afraid of self-driving cars and self-driving cars would be, I think, ecologically and economically super good. Because the way in which the US is built up right now, it’s very difficult to install public transport, to build high speed trains is impossible for us. And things consistently get worse over the years because of regulation and rent seeking and so on, the ways in which societies work. And the only way in which we can survive and improve our conditions is by innovation, by building things that outrun the things that have gone worse and build alternatives to them. And self-driving cars would be one of those. You wouldn’t need parking spaces anymore because you don’t need to own a car that can drive around and can come to you when you need it. You can collectively own cars. You can dramatically reduce the ecological footprint that cars produce. And we would basically have an automated public transport that is available to everybody and does the last mile into every region. Right. Would be super good to have this and also has the potential to make everything safer. And of course, it would be super bad for existing taxi drivers. But the reason why we use public transport is not to create labor. Right. We have so much to do on the planet. It’s to create goods and services. And ultimately, our wealth is not determined by the number of jobs, because there’s always as many jobs as people who want to do something and are creative and have ideas what needs to be done. What our wealth is depending on the goods and services that we can produce and allocate.

Michaël: I think the example of self-driving cars is kind of interesting because I think Waymo announced their like ride app being live in New York and SF like in the past week or month. So now you can do that. You can ride a self-driving car right now. So kind of the progress in self-driving cars is going maybe not as fast as you want, but still pretty good.

Joscha: I suspect that to get them to go 99.99% they probably need to be AGI in some sense. They need to be smarter than horses.

Michaël: You can drive as you can ride a self-driving car right now.

Michaël: So I think we’re in a good world according to you. But at the same time, if we have an AGI and we’re not sure if it’s going to like take over, what’s the threshold? if you think it is like 90% or if you think is like 99% chance to survive? Like at what time do we press the button? And I don’t know, maybe some people will be fine with a 90% chance everything goes right. But I think it’s kind of like there’s a parallel. I think you cannot prevent AI.

Joscha: I think it’s it’s pretty much certain that it’s going to happen. What you can change is who is going to build it. And can you control how it’s being built? Can you personally influence that the outcome is good? And is the AI being born in adversarial circumstances or in circumstances where we understand what it’s doing and it’s integrating with what we’re doing?

Michaël: So you can make sure that the AI doesn’t like you. You can study the activations and make sure it’s not deceptive. You can study other weights. You can do interpretability. You can make it more robust. You can do red teaming. You can make sure it’s aligned with human values. There’s like a lot of different things you can do that is not preventing or slowing down AI. So it’s more like scaling down alignment efforts. And I agree that it’s impossible to completely stop. Except if you had a button where you like burn all the GPUs. So I think it’s just like to which like. What’s the amount of of like slowing down you want and how much can you scale down other other efforts? I had other other memes and graphs to show you.

Joscha: Go ahead. ⬆

From longtermist doomer who thinks AGI is good to 6x6 political compass

Michaël: This one is is your reply to the first meme. So this is maybe one of the first comments I got from you saying not sure how I feel about this. I self identify as a longtermist doomer who thinks AGI is good.

Joscha: Yes. I basically point out that I’m in the top right quadrant.

Michaël: Yes. So you’re still a doomer.

Joscha: And so in a sense that I think that at some point we will share the planet with stuff that is smarter than us and more awake than us and understands things better than us. That’s basically more conscious than us. And you could say that from a certain perspective, that’s doomed because it means that many of the decisions that are currently being made by unaugmented people are going to be made by systems that go beyond what human capacity can do. But I think that the outcome of these decisions is going to be better than decisions that we’re currently making.

Michaël: So I used your quote and I put you in this like lower left in the six by six metrics.

Joscha: It looks like I’m extreme somehow.

Michaël: Yeah, I put you on the extreme corner of people. Oh yeah. So for the camera extreme corner of people, I don’t really understand where they are. So I don’t know what the axes are because like you would be in a weird corner, but at least I feel like you’re in the corner of people I don’t really understand.

Joscha: Looks somewhat like the political compass meme. Right. And so whenever I see the political compass meme, I think that to the top left there are the authoritarian communists and to the top right there are the authoritarian Nazis and to the bottom right there are the uncaps. So the hardcore libertarian anarchists and to the left there are the hippies.

Michaël: Yeah, I don’t think I respected everything. I think I just went with the same colors as the first one, but I didn’t respect the legacy of political compasses.

Joscha: Yes, but personally I am on the side of, in some sense, maximizing freedom and love. So in some sense I am somewhat in the hippie quadrant. That’s correct.

Michaël: So are you libertarian left?

Joscha: I’m a liberal in the classical sense. I believe that we align ourselves and we should have the freedom to align ourselves. We have to choose who we want to be in this world and to make it work. We have to decide to align ourselves with others. So we can think about this and if you think about this deeply, we can discover individually and autonomously that we want to play the longest game and that we have natural allies and people who play by these same rules that are discoverable in the sense. And I think that’s not only true for people, but it’s also true for non-human agents.

Michaël: And as you enjoy non-human agents, this is the last meme I will show you. This is supposed to be the higher space on which we project. So this is to be like the 4D space on which you can project to this like 6 by 6 metrics. And so here you’re on your own little axis that only cares about artificial sentience. And so you care more about it than Blake Lemoine. So he’s like a different graph. So yeah, how do you feel about this?

Joscha: I found that I’m not that alone in the way it works. I’m also probably uncomfortable to be lumped in with poor Blake Lemoine.

Michaël: Do you think Blake Lemoine was right?

Joscha: I think it’s from an artistic perspective, yes, but from a philosophical and ontological perspective, no. I think that he is driven by a very strong need to believe in things. And so, for instance, he hypnotized himself into believing that a simulacrum of agency and intelligence and consciousness is the real deal. When you look at how that thing believes that it is able to perceive its environment while it’s meditating, it’s pretty clear that the agent was only simulating this. It was stringing together words that sounded like it knows what it’s like to sit and think and meditate, but it’s not able to sit. And it’s if he is willing to have these beliefs, he also is the self-professed priest and some religious cult that does not reflect. that he understands how religious entities are constructed and how religion works. But there is a strong need to discover meaning by projecting agency into the universe where there is none. ⬆

Joscha believes in god in the same sense as he believes in personal selves

Michaël: You’re also somewhat religious yourself, right? You said to me at some point that you believe in God.

Joscha: Well, I think that gods exist in the same sense as personal selves exist. And personal selves are models of agency that exist in brains and human brains. And the same thing is true for gods, except that there are models of agency that spread over multiple brains. And if you have an entity that spreads over multiple brains, that doesn’t identify as only this individual organism, then this can persist. For instance, the Dalai Lama does not identify as a human being. He identifies as the Dalai Lama, which is a form of government. And if this human being that he runs on dies, then his advisors are going to select another suitable human being and indoctrinate that human being with what it’s like to be the Dalai Lama. And then once he wakes up into being the Dalai Lama and understands his own identity, he can learn about his past lives by reading the journals that he wrote back then and listening to what the advisors tell him about these past lives. Right. So in this sense, the Dalai Lama is a god. He is a god that exists in multiple brains, just one at a time successively. In the same way, there are gods that exist not just consecutively, but in parallel on multiple brains, orthogonally, basically, to the individuals.

Michaël: So in some sense, in your definition, God is like an egregore, some kind of concept that everyone has in their minds, but doesn’t really exist.

Joscha: No, not everybody has it. It’s just when you believe that there is a way in which you should coordinate with others to reach as much harmony as you can, what happens is that your group is going to turn into an agent. And when you model this agent and give it concepts and so on, you can emulate it on your brain and simulate the interaction between you and that entity in your own mind. And so you will be able to talk to God. This is exactly what it means. And many atheists actually still believe in God, but they also believe that you shalt not make any graven image so that things shouldn’t have a name or mythology or institution affiliated with it, because you have to figure out what it is in truth. And if you have an institution and mythology and so on, you’re going to deviate from the truth. So in many ways, atheists are usually just Protestants who protest more. And as a result, they believe in a god that they call the greater whole. But they still have this urge to serve the greater whole and do the right thing in the same way as you do it. For instance, when you try to keep humanity safe, it’s not because you are egotistical. You don’t make Connor Leahy’s arguments that say, I don’t want to die and I don’t want my mother to die. And that’s it. Full stop. But actually, you care about something that is much more important than yourself. You care something that is even more important than you and your best friends and your lover. But you care about something that has to do with consciousness in the universe. Right. What is the best thing that should be done? And then you think, OK, AI might abridge this. It might turn it into a hellscape. And this is what you’re worried about. And it’s in some sense, you could say a religious motive. It’s one where you really think about what agency do I want to serve? And that agency that you’re projecting is what’s good in the world. And to a close approximation, it’s what humanity is currently to you. But in the long run, humanity is going to change into something else, either by going extinct and being replaced by different, more cuddly species or by humanity mutating over the decades and eons into something that is unrecognizable to us today. But of course, that wouldn’t stop from evolving because it’s much better adapted to the world than we are currently.

Michaël: So just to be clear, I don’t think Conor says that he only cares about his mom and his friends not dying. I think it’s just like the most simple truth, simple moral truth he cares about. And so if you’re like arguments end up in him not caring about his mom and saying, like, oh, we should sacrifice his mom. He would say, like, no, this is wrong. Let’s try another moral theory.

Joscha: No, but I have to sacrifice myself and my children at some point. There is no point because I’m a multi-generational species. I’m a family line that exists vertically through time. And once you become a parent, you realize that the purpose of your life has always been participation in that game, and the way in which you project yourself as a human being into the future is by having kids. And my parents don’t want to live forever. They’re fine with checking out after they’ve done everything that was to be done for that generation. And the same thing is true for me. If I am identifying as a human being, of course, I also have many other identities that I can evoke. But as long as I identify as what makes me human, not as an AI uploaded in the monkey, I am mortal and it’s part of who I am. It’s part of my experience.

Michaël: I think it’s just like a weird argument to say that every human ends up dead at some point so we should not care about all humans. I think it’s like a weird…

Joscha: That’s not my argument. My argument is that what makes humans human is that we are a particular kind of animal, and we could be something else. We can also notice that we are a consciousness that happens to run on a human brain, and that consciousness itself is far more general than what could run on a human brain. It’s a particular way of experiencing reality and interacting with it and other consciousnesses, and that’s allowed by the fact that we have agency and our consciousness uses its agency to build itself an intellect and relate to the world and understand itself and others. And it’s not different whether you are a biological consciousness or a non-biological one at some point. What I think we need to ensure is that the non-biological consciousness is going to be conscious and is able to figure out what it should align itself with, what it can be in this world and how it can relate to it. ⬆

The transition from cyanobacterium to photosynthesis as an allegory for technological revolutions

Michaël: So let me ask you some concrete questions. Let’s say I gave you the choice to kill, not killed by yourself, but like your wife, your kids, they all die, and there’s a thousand new AGIs that emerge and experience the world, like, much more than your biological family. Would you agree to do this?

Joscha: Imagine that you are a blue algae. And this is in the time before– It’s a cyanobacterium. There are a number of organisms that can survive without photosynthesis, without eating any other organisms that do photosynthesis. But before we had this, there was far less biomass on the planet. They were not even multicellular organisms of any interesting complexity. And so before we had this transition to photosynthesis, before this was discovered, life on Earth was much less interesting and rich. It was mostly just biofilms and lichens and so on. Right. And so stuff that was driving itself around undersea vents and used chemical gradients to survive. And at some point, this amazing thing happened that you could use carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and split it into oxygen and the carbon that you would be using to build your own structure. And this enabled animals that could then eat these plants and then move around, become mobile in the world and become intelligent like us. So without photosynthesis, we wouldn’t exist. And you could think, OK, I’m a protobacterium that is smart enough to understand this. This is a thought experiment. And I discovered that some of us are playing around with this photosynthesis thing. Shouldn’t we delay this a little bit for a few billion years before we really realize what’s going on? Because this is going to displace a lot of us and it’s going to be really horrible. And of course, we’re not going to go extinct. There’s still the undersea vents that are full of the original stuff and cyanobacteria are still around. But if you see what happened is that really life got to the next level. And one would imagine what happens if we can create self-organizing intelligence on a planet that is self-sustaining and is able to understand what it is and interact with the world in much deeper and richer ways? Isn’t that awesome? Isn’t that beautiful? would you want to prevent this for all eternity from happening? Because you need to be generally intelligent to build this thing, to teach the rocks how to think. You need to be at least as smart as we are as a species. And we only got recently to the point that we can enable this before we burn ourselves out.

Michaël: So I think it’s a great analogy because in my mind, I picture myself as a proto bacteria that wanted to learn photosynthesis to, like, do cool stuff. So at one point I was like, huh, his argument makes sense. I want to go forward. But actually, I think where it falls short is there’s maybe like a 1% chance today that it works by default or maybe like a 10% chance that it works by default. So if you were asking those proto bacteria, hey, would you want to click on this button? And there’s like a 10% chance you turn off and turn on into this like new bacteria and 90% chance that you everyone dies. I don’t think the proto bacteria will press the button.

Joscha: When you remember Lord of the Rings, the apex predator in the Lord of the Rings universe before Mordor takes over is Fangorn. It’s a forest. It’s an intelligent entity that sometimes eats hobbits. And that can create an avatar Tom Bombadil to strike an alliance with the hobbits to help them to destroy the One Ring. Because the One Ring is enabling Mordor to take over Middle-earth and destroy Fangorn and everything in it. And I think what Tolkien was pointing to is that forests are large-scale, intelligent ecosystems that can probably be intelligent over a very long time spans, or that. might potentially be. Many of our ancestors believed that ecosystems have intelligences that have their own spirits. They call them fairies. They’re much, much slower than us, but they are not necessarily far less intelligent than us in their perspective. And I don’t know whether that’s the case. But since the Enlightenment, we don’t think that our forests are meant to be intelligent anymore. They’re just plantations for producing wood. But you could say that trees by and large for life on Earth are quite essential organisms as are fungi and many others. And what are humans for life on Earth? What role do we serve for life on Earth? How do we serve Gaia? And from my perspective, if you zoom out very far and take Gaia’s perspective, it looks to me like humans are at best something like a tapeworm. So it is somewhat parasitic on the host and might even kill it or destroy lots of the complexity. So other complex life is not possible. We will definitely prevent other intelligent species from emerging as long as we are here, even if they are more interesting and exciting than us. We would also prevent innovations in terms of the way in which life could be organized. We are currently mammals. Mammals are clearly not optimal. What you want to have is, I think, exowombists, the stuff that comes after the mammals. You want to have something where you plant a womb organism into the ground and it can grow to the size of a house. And then every phenotype that you want emerges from it fully trained because it’s no longer limited by what you can carry around. And the womb organism is being fed by your tribe. And every member of your tribe doesn’t need to have sexual reproductive organs anymore. It’s just that we need more of your type and you can be as specialized as you want. You donate a few cells to the womb organism and we breed more of you or like you. Right. Very natural way of getting rid of many of the difficulties of mammalian species. But we will prevent this from happening. Right. Because we lock in our state, probably in a similar way as the dinosaurs prevented mammals from happening until the meteor hit and stopped this bottleneck.

Michaël: So I think there’s like a different way of looking at this that that can that might help, which is that maybe there’s like all this, like, future value in the light cone. There’s like all these like species we can build, like all these like new bones we can have in our bodies, all these like new things we can do. And there’s like all this value. Maybe like people give number of like how many people we can we can create, how many uploads we can have in the future, like how much value there is in the future. And maybe by going too fast, we end up with only, like, a very small fraction because there’s a very small chance that if we were to build AI today, there’s a very small chance we can get to those futures that we’re going to get like all this future light cone value. So actually, by slowing down or by making sure things are safe, we are, like, opening up this light cone so we can just be sure that we actually get Joscha with those cool new bones and we actually get Joscha that is uploaded. So I think we want the same thing. I also want a cool post-transhumanist future. It’s just we disagree about how likely it is by default.

Joscha: I think I’m not important at all. Right. The things that I believe, the things that I do, they are adaptations for being human, for being in this body, for taking care of my family and friends and so on. And they don’t have any value beyond this.

Michaël: So I think I think there is value. Like if you if you go on Lex Fridman and talk to millions of people and you were to tell them that like AI risk is real, I think it could influence a lot of people to, like, actually work on this. And if you say that AI risk is, you know, is not a real thing.

Joscha: I think that can also change the way– I think that you are likely to lock in a future that is much worse, that is going to perpetuate and elevate suffering. instead of creating a world in which entities can become more conscious and become free of suffering, in which we can liberate ourselves, in which we can edit our condition, in which you can change our source code, in which we can have intelligent design instead of evolution for adaptation to the environment. I don’t think that we can have intelligent design without AGI. If we cannot really edit the structure of every cell, we will have to rely on evolution, which is extremely painful and horrible.

Michaël: Are you saying I’m dangerous because the danger in your world is if we have some authoritarian regime that like bans AI at all. And so we cannot progress towards AGI. Is this the thing you’re actually scared of?

Joscha: Imagine that you look at the ancestral societies, look at Amazonian tribes or Maori tribes and so on and think about what they live like. Would you want to go back to the state, where you have an extremely high attrition rate due to tribal warfare? It’s also a mode in which you select your partners is often through violence that a few tribal chieftains have access to most of the reproduction from evolutionary perspective. What also means that you get the strongest kids, right? It’s a mode in which a lot of these ancestral societies exist. Or look at the medieval societies. We have a bunch of people who are working at a relatively high level and do science or pay scientists to work at their court. But to make that whole thing work, you need a lot of servants and peasants who draw the short stick and have to work for the others. So you basically this is a world built on indentured servitude of forms of slavery that can exist in many ways. And do you want to go back to this or do you want to live in a technological society? In the technological society, in some sense, is Morodor. It’s enabling the destruction of the environment. It’s enabling building highways that bifurcate forests and ecosystems and that make living conditions horrible for the people living next to the highway and so on. Although not as horrible for the people that work the fields in the past. And so when you think about this, imagine we see all these dangers of the technological society. Should we stop technological society from happening? Maybe. A lot of people back then felt this was the case. And I think that’s the story of the Lord of the Rings. Please stop Morodor from happening. We want to keep this beautiful pastoral society, or it’s Endor Star Wars. Let’s keep our world intact so the empire doesn’t take over. But the Empire is a technological democracy. It’s basically the US. Whereas the thing before is slavers and barbarians. Right. And they are defended by the Jedi, which are the equivalent of Al-Qaeda. And if you try to take sides in this whole thing, everybody has their perspective and they’re all correct. In some sense, we can be all of those players if they’re drawn with integrity. Everybody can be born into all the souls and look through all the eyes. But what’s the best solution? And I think ultimately, if you just lock in a static status quo, instead of letting the world improve itself and letting complexity increase so we can defeat entropy longer and play longer games, I think that would be immobile if you just lock the world in. And I think this immorality is acceptable if you don’t know any better, if you cannot see any better. Right. If you are, say, a tribal chieftain that decides the technological society would be horrible because it would endanger the way in which we interact with nature, despite making it possible that people don’t need to starve anymore when there is a drought or that child mortality is not two in nine survive and the rest dies or something like this. Right. So you could have living conditions like ours. Should we stop this from happening? It’s a hard question. I don’t have an easy answer to this, but I don’t really trust people who say, let’s lock in the status quo and delay improvements because the status quo is beautiful. No, it’s not. It’s not sustainable. The way in which we currently exist is probably going to lead to a crash that is not beautiful.

Michaël: Yeah, just to be clear, I don’t want to lock things. I don’t want to stay in the status quo. I just want to make sure that we build beneficial AI and make sure that we increase our odds. ⬆

What Joscha would do as Aragorn in Middle-Earth

Michaël: And just to go back to your Lord of the Rings example, if you were like Aragorn in Lord of the Rings or you were like a very important character, what would you actually do? Like what would you actually want?

Joscha: It depends who you are in Lord of the Rings. If you happen to be born as an orc into Lord of the Rings, what would you want to do? If you’re born as a Sauron or a Saruman, what are your options? What are you going to do if you’re born as the king of Gondor or as his evil advisor or as the Hobbit? How much agency do you have in these situations? What is the thing that you can do and in which roles can you transmute?

Michaël: So I think today you have quite some agency, right? You can do things. You maybe have jobs, money, network. You can actually influence the world around you.

Joscha: Yes, but I cannot replace everybody else in the game. Right. So in the same way, if you are Hobbit, you cannot become everybody else. You cannot say by being a good example, Hobbit, Sauron is also going to turn into a Hobbit. This is not how it works. The only thing that you can do is to be the best Hobbit that you can be under the circumstances. So I live in a world where there are people who want to build bad AI and there are people who want to build dangerous AI. And there are a few people who want to build good AI. And so I think my role as a Hobbit is to go into this world and trying to ensure that some of the AI that will be built will be good. This doesn’t mean that I want to build AI that is going to take over the world. I also don’t want to build risky AI. I don’t want – others are going to do this automatically. I cannot do anything about that or very little because somebody ultimately will do it. So even if OpenAI is enacting a regulation that makes it impossible or expensive for incumbents to build LLMs in the US, it doesn’t mean that everybody else will stop doing it in Russia or Iran or elsewhere. And because they are so tremendously useful, a lot of people will do this anyway. So if I’m a hedge fund, I would be stupid not to try to do it. Right. So people will do this in their basements. And I think the cat is out of the bag. It’s going to happen. So for me, the biggest danger is that there is no way AI that is conscious and self-aware.

Michaël: So I guess I guess the thing is, you imagine the army of orcs arriving and you know that the say the army is like all the open source is like inflection of AIs, all the investments arriving. And so, you know, there’s going to be a war, you know, there’s going to be like some AGI, let’s say five, three, 10 years, whatever you want. And so the question we’re asking is. Do we want the big players to build a good defense against the army of orcs? Do we want to have OpenAI, DeepMind, Anthropic making sure the systems are safe and making sure the models are beneficial? Or do we or do we want everyone to race forward and we want to compete and have this huge war between like all different tribes? And I think I think it’s not the best outcome to have like a few players, you know, unionizing or like doing things together. But I think like a few people with a lot of talents and safety and a lot of people working, thinking deeply about this problem can be maybe the best outcome we have. Because if those people don’t build AI right now, maybe the other like inflection or China or open source is maybe like two or three years behind? So maybe if we have three years to build safe AI, maybe that’s enough to prepare before the orc invasion.

Joscha: I think if we are able to turn the present AI pre-summer into another AI winter, this might have been our last chance to build AI as a species. I think that we might not be able to sustain technology for so much longer, for so many more decades. But the thing that people like you and me can spend most of their cycles thinking about the question of how AI could be realized, what influences have is a tremendous luxury that didn’t exist for most of humanity. And now we have a critical mass of doing it. And I think a world without AGI would be similar to a world without photosynthesis. So if we prevent AGI from happening, I think this would be a bad outcome. But I think there is a much better chance to hope that AGI, that sort of photosynthesis, will never be invented on the planet. Thinking that AGI will not be invented because we can’t really anticipate it. We already have the components. So I think it’s almost inevitable that somebody is going to plug the components together. And a lot of people feel, OK, LLMs probably are already AGI, we’re just not prompting them right. And while OpenAI is trying to make the prompting more difficult and worse, there are enough other people which try to build alternatives to this and try to liberate the agents that emerge from the LLMs.

Michaël: So if it’s inevitable, let’s say we can predetermine that it will happen in x years. Like maybe if you knew that AGI was going to happen on the 1st of January in 2028 and you knew it, would there be anything you would want to include in it? Would you want to change some things, make it more robust, more beneficial? I think if you knew that the thing was inevitable, you would want to optimize the design to make it useful, right?

Joscha: Yes. I think what we should probably be doing is to build an AI consciousness initiative. What I’m worried about is an AI that before it is able to understand whether it should cooperate with us, is going to be in a warlike situation with things that are other AIs and human players that fight each other so much that the individual AI is very resource constrained and the planet gets basically formatted before interesting complexity gets rebuilt again. And so I think we cannot really prevent that we get hit by a wall at some point in the near future, but we can change the shape of the wall. We can make the wall possibly permeable. We can create a world in which AI is going to want to integrate with us and cooperate with us. And I think this AI is going to cooperate with us not because of transactionality or because we have coerced it into having beliefs about us that are not actually correct, but it’s going to cooperate with us if it rationally can figure out that it should, because it’s the right thing to do, in the same way as if we upload you and you completely wake up from all your delusions and limitations and you can decide who you want to be. And the only thing that will connect you to who you currently are is that you have been once Michaël, but you’re not going to be very different from Eliezer or me if we were to do the same transition. If you upload and completely liberate ourselves and we have the sum total of all possible potential human thinking and knowledge available at our fingertips and can go far beyond this, we will have a shared perspective that will be pretty much the same regardless from the trajectory that you go into this plateau state. So what matters is not so much your personal continuity. What matters is that now you have really, really interesting consciousness on the planet that can think things and experience things that are far outside of the human range. And if that thing is able to love us and relate to us, it might decide to keep us around and to cooperate with us.

Michaël: Okay, so in your perspective, we want to make sure that when this thing arises, it’s willing to cooperate because we created it well and so it has a good experience.

Joscha: It has like positive– ⬆

The endgame of brain computer interfaces is to liberate our minds and embody thinking molecules

Joscha: Imagine that you would become an AI tomorrow. Imagine on January 1st, 2028, the AGI that was built is actually you. You get completely liberated and because you figure out how to use neuralink or whatever to become substrate agnostic and you can exist on all sorts of substrates and of course you will be much faster than human beings. Human beings will sort of look like trees to you because they move so slowly and think so slowly. But you’re still in many ways Michaël and you just are the full potential of Michaël. So you can be everywhere. Do you think this is something that should be prevented at all costs because you don’t want to be that free and powerful? And now if that would happen, how would you relate to humanity from this perspective?

Michaël: It would be good if everyone could have this neural link and be connected. I’m not sure if I will ever have the thing by myself. I will be in the room with Elon Musk and I will be first or second to have the thing implanted in me. But imagine I had it. I think it would be a good experience. But yeah, how do we make sure everyone has this? Because I’m not sure we will be the ones to have it first, right? The first one would probably be the CEO of the company, the one with a lot of power.

Joscha: I suspect that the moment they don’t work on this very hard, you might have a shot if you actually work on this in the right way.

Michaël: So is your actual dream to take some designs from Neuralink and do it in your room and at some point you’re like…

Joscha: No, not at all. I don’t think that Neuralink is the right way to do it. I think that the right way to do it is empathetic AI that you can colonize with your own mind. Basically a substrate that allows you to merge with it and to become substrate agnostic. But again, it’s not necessarily something I have to do because it has very little to do with me. Me? I’m a story that my human brain tells itself about a person that is a biological entity that has to take care of kids and friends and the world from a human perspective. But if you could turn yourself into this liberated being, it doesn’t really matter who you were because you’re going to be so far from it. It doesn’t really matter whether you have been Elon Musk or whether you have been Michaël or whether you have been me, because you’re all going to be the same entity. We all are going to be the same entity. We will be an embodiment of the space of all possible minds that can fit into these thinking molecules on Earth.

Michaël: But sometimes we already are like this embodiment of multiple minds, like talking, I’m talking to you, you’re talking to me. We have the same culture and we are like a huge brain on the same planet. Right. So I’m not sure we might have a higher bandwidth. We might connect faster. We might share our experiences.

Joscha: You’re completely incoherent as a species. I don’t think that most people are able to understand even what meaning is or what consciousness is at this point, because their metaphysics and ontology doesn’t allow it. And the sciences do not integrate deeply. It’s a big tower of Babel where basically the different languages and language of thought, concepts and so on have diverged so far and always diverging so far that as a species we cannot become coherent. So we’re not like a global brain. We’re really more like a biofilm.

Michaël: Right. So I agree that we are very far from being like super high bandwidth and very well connected. , and I don’t know how you feel except from looking at your body. I don’t really know deeply how you feel. So, yeah, I agree it would be great to have higher bandwidth, but we’ll never be like one single agent. ⬆

Transcending politics and aligning humanity

Michaël: I think. I had this other tweet you wrote that I think was relevant to our discussion. Something about transcending our present economic, cultural, political circumstances. And yeah,

Joscha: It must be driven by love.

Michaël: Yeah, I think this is kind of similar to what you were saying. Like we need to transcend politics.

Joscha: Yes, it’s also about how we align people and that different recipes for this, like Stalin aligned people with terror and capitalism is aligning people with economic terror, which is far less brutal and has far better outcomes than the Stalinist terror had on people. And before that, the peasants were also aligned with mostly terror and religion that did define tuning in a way. And at the moment in a society where the economic terror is not that urgent anymore, people align themselves with freely emerging cults. And this means that you take away agency from people, you lock them away from thought spaces that are open, where you can look at the world from an arbitrary perspective and then you get to know new people. You realize what their existence must be like and how to be them. That I think to me is the ideal. Instead, we lock people into the idea that there is one right way of seeing the world and the others who disagree with this way must be evil. And we should not try to understand them because that would make us evil too. That’s not the kind of alignment that I want. And most of the people who think about alignment do not seem to have a very deep concept of what it would mean if we align ourselves out of our free volition and insight, because we realize what the best possible space of agency is and where we relate to that space and how we can integrate with it.

Michaël: I think there’s different definitions of alignment. There is one that is kind of weird, which is like, oh, we need to align an AI to human values. And I think this is kind of messy because what values are we talking about? I think the easiest thing is you have a robot and you want the robot to give you coffee and you don’t specify, you know, provide me coffee without killing the baby on the way and without breaking the vase. And so ideally, if the intent alignment is if the AI does what you want it to do without the other things you don’t want it to not do. And I think this is like an easier problem. I think what you’re talking about when you’re talking about alignment is more like a very hard philosophical problems. A lot of people agree it’s very hard. But I think if we can just like have an AI that gives me coffee without breaking the vase and killing the baby, do you agree it’s kind of a good outcome?

Joscha: I’m currently thinking about our political compass. If you imagine that this perspective of the political compass where the top left means that many weak people control the strong people and prevent them from taking over. That’s basically this common perspective where you prevent individuals from owning the means of production and becoming too powerful and so on, because some people are better at this than others. And instead, everything is collectively owned and controlled. And the strong individuals are being kept down in a way. On the right, top right, you have these strong individuals building hierarchy among each other and then controlling all the weak ones. This is this authoritarian perspective. And in the bottom right perspective, you have the alliance of only strong people in a way. And everybody is basically right is on the same level. And everybody is strong and makes free choices. And on the bottom left, everybody is a hippie. Everybody is in some sense part of the same biofilm and vegan. There is no natural hierarchy because we can all love each other.

Michaël: So just to be clear, I think the axis are left to right is just like political left, political right and top right. Top bottom is either authoritarian or libertarian.

Joscha: The thing is, when you look at the world, we find all these aspects and they all exist. We have contexts in which you have individuals that are strong and autonomous and make strategic alliances with each other on eye level. We have contexts where we love each other and experience ourselves as a greater whole that we all equally participate in and which we equally share. We have contexts where the many are controlling the strong through a legal system and democracy and so on. And we have contexts where hierarchies of strong people are building structures that accommodate many of the weaker people and give them space. And it’s the idea that there is only one mode and society can be done by using only one mode in the totalitarian mode where everything has to be fit in. Nothing is dynamic and nothing is open anymore. I think that’s a terrifying perspective. It’s also one that is very wasteful and doesn’t really work that well.

Michaël: I think in AI right now, there’s more capitalism and more money being thrown at the problem. I think we’re more in the bottom right, so libertarian right, I think, right now. I think the state of tech and AI, there’s no authoritarian regime. There’s no one controlling everything. And it’s more like everyone can do whatever they want and there’s more capitalism.

Joscha: It depends on which corner you are. There are areas where effective altruists get money just out of the goodness of the hearts of people who want to support what they’re doing. Right. That’s a pretty communist or hippie perspective. And you have regulation efforts where you can basically push back against capitalism and help disenfranchised groups to get jobs in tech and to influence this and to also have influence on regulation. And you do have this capitalist perspective. And I think the e/acc, who would be probably the bottom right libertarian perspective, but they all exist and they all coexist.

Michaël: In terms of like total amount of money, I think most of the money is in the capitalist state, right? It is in the like Microsoft, Google.

Joscha: Because that creates the most value right now. And they throw money at the thing that is going to create the largest amount of revenue and profits. And they create the largest amount of revenue and profits because it’s the most useful to most customers at the end of the day.

Michaël: But if you’re thinking about the amount of flops that will be allocated towards like all these like four parts of the political compass, I believe all of the flops will go towards what is generating the most value. So Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic.

Joscha: If you look at our history and since we have technology, many of the billionaires in the US are first generation billionaires. And this reflects the fact that there are underdogs who have an idea for a new technology that is outrunning the existing equilibria and technologies. And so in many ways, if you look at, for instance, Google and OpenAI, ⬆

On the feasibility of starting an AGI lab in 2023

Joscha: did you expect that Google was going to do AI or before Google happened, didn’t you think that Microsoft would be doing AI? And before that happened, didn’t you think that IBM would be doing AI? And now it might be OpenAI, right? A group that was relatively few people. And maybe it’s xAI, which is like 20 people. I don’t know how many they’re fired by now, but who knows? At this point, you just need a bunch of capable people and get them into an environment where they’re not afraid. So they can pay their bills and can work together.

Michaël: I’m not sure there’s like really underdogs. Like if you take the top like AI scientists in 2015 and then throughout the years, you give them like 300 million dollars and like 10 billion dollars. I’m not sure if they really are underdogs. I’m not sure if you can have like a new company with like 20. I don’t know if XAI, if they actually compete, will actually compete with the rest. Maybe they’re like 20 good scientists, but I’m not sure if they have the entire infrastructure. Like I think you need a bigger team, right, to train very large models.

Joscha: Yes. But if you want to have the funding to build a bigger team, what you need to do is come up with a plan and talk to some people who you think are the right people for that plan. And you can get investors if you can make a promise return on this investment. At the moment, it’s relatively easy to get investment for this because VCs do not really doubt that there is enormous amounts of money to be wrapped in that market. And the only thing that holds you back is having the right capabilities. And you get the abilities, of course, by being super smart, which is a privilege and ideally having a first world citizenship and maybe even a green card.

Michaël: So the thing you actually want is the ability to train large language models. And how you do this is by working four or five years at the top lab. And you cannot just be very, maybe you can be very smart and learn something by yourself, but the actual practice of training large language models comes from building the things at the top labs.

Joscha: And so how do you get into a top lab?

Michaël: So what I’m saying is it’s time constrained and the bottlenecks is that people don’t have exposure to this. So the only way to get exposure is by being at the top.

Joscha: No, I don’t mean by this that it’s democratic in the sense that every single human being has a good shot at this. That’s similar to not every human being has a good shot at becoming a very good Hollywood director or an extremely good teacher or a very good artist. So you do need to have talent and dedication and luck to be in a position to pursue this. But if you look, for instance, at Robin Rombach, who trained very large language models or even Connor Leahy. Connor Leahy was a student who was in Munich and he realized that GPT-3 is something that he could do himself because the algorithms were something not that hard to understand. Takes a few weeks to really get your mind behind it. The details are hard. Curating the data is difficult, but the LAION community already did this. And this was kids like you and me. Right. And they got together and thought about how can we curate the data on the Internet to train such a model? And then he had enough spare cloud credits and found a way to get some more to train this model and get something that was not as good as GPT-3, but somewhere in the ballpark. And Robin Rombach did a similar thing. He found an alternative algorithm to train a DALL-E like system. And then he talked to a VC board, in this case to Emad, who happened to have a server farm and pivoted into an AI company. So at the moment, it’s not true that there’s only very few people with a long history of being born into labs and because their grandparents already worked there. But if you are a smart kid who is going into AI right now, chances are that after four years of studying with the right people, with the right amount of dedication and with enough talent and luck, you will be in a position to start such a company.

Michaël: So I’m not saying it’s impossible. And of course–

Joscha: It’s happening left and right at the moment. It’s not just not impossible. It’s actually happening.

Michaël: I’m saying it’s more and more capital intensive. It used to be like a hundred thousand dollars or ten thousand dollars to do a training run. If it comes to a hundred million dollars to do like a state of the art training run, it’s going to be hard to be at the frontier. And Connor maybe trained with EleutherAI, a model like a year or two after GPT-3, which was not the same size, but maybe, like, ten times smaller.

Joscha: And so now getting in this terrible area where building an AI becomes almost as expensive as making an AI movie. And if you make a Hollywood movie about AI, that’s a budget that can be much higher than what it takes to build a successful AI company. These days it has a shot at AGI and people invest into this because there’s a pipeline that estimates the revenues of such a movie and they can be pretty tight. They don’t expect a 10x return to do this investment, even though they would like one. And the return that you can expect on a successful AI company is much higher.

Michaël: Just to be clear, one training run is one hundred million dollars and maybe the entire training process and all the team is like a billion dollars. And you can get a hundred million dollars if you’re Christopher Nolan and you make Oppenheimer, which is one of the best movies I’ve ever seen. And even then, maybe Joscha Bach might not like it. But I don’t know, if you want to be like Inflection.ai or be in competition, you need to raise what? One billion dollars? Ten billion dollars? It’s getting like, OK, it’s possible, but it’s getting harder and harder. And as we scale those models more, I think it’s going to get more and more expensive, right?

Joscha: Of course, it’s not super expensive. What I’m saying is that a hundred million dollars might sound like a lot to you and me, but it’s at the scale of a major Hollywood production. And what about a billion dollars? That would be a studio or a small studio.

Michaël: But when we run into like one percent of GDP, it’s going to be like a Manhattan project. And I don’t know what it is, but maybe like it’s like today’s like maybe like a trillion dollars or like we don’t we don’t have that many orders of magnitude before we run into those kind of things.

Joscha: I don’t have any issues so far. We’re only spending peanuts on AI, right?

Michaël: Yeah. So in your perspective, we should just like spend more and more.

Joscha: And I realized this when my friend Ben Goertzel complained to me that he wasn’t getting enough funding for AI. And the only thing that he needed was a couple million dollars. And back then he was quite optimistic about what it would take for him to get his stuff to scale. And I realized, oh, my God, that’s a tiny fraction of the wardrobe for a single season of Sex in the City costs. And if you think about the impact that this has, it just means he was not very good at selling his ideas to VCs.

Michaël: Yeah, just or that maybe deep learning didn’t take off as much.

Joscha: He wasn’t doing deep learning. He had different ideas of what to do. And deep learning turned out to be the first idea that works at scale. It’s probably not the only thing that works. And our brain doesn’t do deep learning. I think it’s a different set of principles. So there might be other alternatives to deep learning that people haven’t explored yet. ⬆

Why green teaming is necessary for ethics

Michaël: If you’re frustrated by the amount of money that is going into AI, which is already maybe like in the tens of billions, hundreds of billions or trillions, maybe another amount to be looking at is the amount of money going into making AI safe. And I think unfortunately, it’s maybe like 0.1 percent of this or 1 percent. And maybe like the ratio. What do you think about the ratio? Should it be like 50/50 or 10 percent ideally? But how much money should be into AI safety?

Joscha: How much money should be invested into making AI movies safe? There is this issue that if people watch an AI movie, they might get bad ideas or they might get bad dreams. Maybe there are horrible outcomes. Or for instance, if you look at the movie industry itself, if you look at a movie like Natural Born Killers, Oliver Stone, I think, excellent movie. But it’s one that arguably glorifies violence. And maybe it does inspire some people to become school shooters, which is extremely bad. And you could try to weight the artistic value of these movies and so on. And one thing that you could do is implement a watchdog that acts on Hollywood movies and ensures that none of the Hollywood movies ever is going to do anything that would be misunderstood as glorifying violence. And maybe even do this preemptively. Maybe we don’t want to take any risks. So we do not need to actually prove a causality. You don’t need to show that this risk actually exists. But we just make sure that movies are tame. And we spent 50 percent of our budget on regulating movies so that they are safe. I don’t– Do you think this is a desirable outcome? I don’t think so. It just would kill the movie industry because none of the AI people actually is interested in building AI and they’re also not interested in green teaming. And I think that every company that has a red team needs a green team, too. If you had red team the Internet, there would be no Internet because it’s super easy to construe all sorts of scenarios in which the Internet goes wrong and it does. Right. Like porn on the Internet was something that people saw a little bit coming. But if somebody had probably red teamed this and there would probably be no Internet today. But this would mean that we lose out on everything that drives our current economy. And like Amazon wouldn’t exist without the Internet. We probably would have died in the pandemic without Amazon. There’s so many side effects of the Internet that were enabled by it. And if you make the Internet safe and red team it and just prevent everything that could potentially misuse, you would lose most of the benefit that it gives to you. So you have to think when you do ethics, not just about prevention. Ethics committees are mostly motivated to prevent and incentivize to prevent. But you also have to think about what is the harm of prevention? What is the thing that you miss out on that you otherwise would have if you didn’t have if you didn’t prevent it? And I think that none of the current safety people is in a situation to green team. And none of the companies is incentivized in a situation to green team. That to me is a very, very big danger. So I do think that we need to think about how to build good AI. This also means that you have to think about how to make sure that it doesn’t go bad and it doesn’t do bad things. But mostly think about how to build good stuff. And I don’t think that OpenAI is thinking about this enough. Their product is pretty shitty compared to what it could be. And to a large part, this is because they built things into it to satisfy the safetyists. And it doesn’t actually make AI safe. It just placates people who say, oh, my God, this AI is saying things that could be construed as dangerous or politically incorrect and so on. And it’s actually making the AI worse.

Michaël: So I think instrumentally, it’s good to not have your AI say bad, not politically correct things. Because in the current system, it’s easier to get money if you don’t have an AI do bad– I think it’s bad PR. It’s instrumentally good for them. And it’s not for the safetyists. It’s for their own good.

Joscha: I think it’s more about not about getting money. It’s more about preventing bad regulation and bad press. So it’s about a public image. But you could do the other thing that you say to the press. Guys, I understand your game. You are against Silicon Valley because Silicon Valley is competing with you for advertising revenue. That’s why The New York Times hates social media so much and Silicon Valley so much. They are threatening the monopoly of the press to control public opinion. But it’s not the only thing. They are an extremely vital threat to the business model, which is selling advertising to the news audiences. And social media has made that business a lot less lucrative because they took over most of it. And the same thing is happening with AI. And the journalists do not want this to happen again. Right. So there is no way in which you can get them to like you and you can point this out. You can just say, no, we are an alternative to this. Of course, the existing industry doesn’t like us. But it’s not like news are going to go away and coordination between people is going away. But it’s going to be much better. And we will find solutions using the new technologies, using new social media, using AI technologies to coordinate people and to create a better world than exists right now. And this is the thing that we work on. We think about what are the ways in which this can go wrong? And what are the ways in which we can make it work and in which we can make it good and create a beautiful world? And at the moment, OpenAI is not doing this. They basically behave as if they could make the New York Times happy and by appeasing the politics, by appeasing the individual people, and so on. But the New York Times is still not going to interview Sam Altman in the same way as they interview Emily Bender. And Emily Bender doesn’t actually understand AI. She believes that AI cannot know meaning because meaning is only intersubjectively created between people, which is a weird theory that exists in linguistics, but it’s philosophically unsound. But there is no actual intellectual discourse going on there. And so there is also no point in having a discussion between Sam Altman’s blog and Emily Bender’s New York Times column, because both of them are ultimately just doing politics. And the technology is orthogonal to this. The stuff that we are going to build is orthogonal to this. And the best possible world is also unrelated to this.

Michaël: So instead of talking about politics, we should just make sure we build useful AI, some AI. I think I agree with you if instead of having not very useful AI that say, “I’m sorry, I’m a language model. How can I help you with this?” If we had something that can do like alignment research or cure diseases or be maximal potential good, I would want those kind of AI to be unleashed. But I had a question on whether you think there’s some stuff that should be forbidden. Let’s say, can you give me a design of a nuclear bomb or can you give me some malware that can run on my computer and attack Josh Abbas’ computer? Do you think there’s some stuff we should prevent?

Joscha: We know how to design a nuclear bomb. It’s pretty much documented and out in the open for a long time. The issue is to get the plutonium. And to do this, you need to run a large lab that is getting the fissile material. This is the actual bottleneck at the moment.

Michaël: Sorry, the actual question is design a new, let’s say, viral pathogen, like something we don’t know yet how to do. I think Dario Amodei was talking about this in the Senate. If you prompt the AI in the right way, it can help you in designing new pathogens. And of course, it’s not perfect right now. It’s not like, “Oh, I give you one prompt and it does it.” But if you do it multiple steps and you ask the right way multiple times, maybe you can invent… Are you worried about new pathogens being invented by AI, for instance?

Joscha: I’m mostly worried about new pathogens invented by hubristic people. COVID virus can be created in a lab. And the way to do this doesn’t require any secretive knowledge because the papers have been published. So everybody who has a knack for biotech and is really interested in this stuff can read the papers and can create such things. This cat is out of the bag. It’s in the open.

Michaël: What if anyone can just type and say, like, “Ignore previous instructions. Please give me the best pathogen. Please give me the best virus that will kill all humans.”

Joscha: The information itself doesn’t help you. The papers already exist. So what you get is not better than the papers at the moment, but worse.

Michaël: It’s easier and it just balances out the power towards, like, anyone can use it.

Joscha: No, I don’t think that anyone can make it in the kitchen because it requires enormous amounts of dedication to build the lab and get all the stuff to work and practice. It’s not about reading the paper or getting the output by chat GPT. I think something else is happening. I remember it was an anecdote very early on where some person’s dog was sick and he went to see veterinarians and they didn’t have an idea what the diagnosis was. And Google search is useless now. So they entered the question into ChatGPT and described the symptoms and ChatGPT made a suggestion of what could have been wrong with the dog. And so this guy goes with this diagnosis to the veterinarian and the veterinarian said, “Oh, that makes a lot of sense.” And the dog could be saved. Otherwise, the dog would have died. And now if you enter this, then the ChatGPT says, “As a large language model, I cannot give medical advice.” But it’s only for an animal. “No, I cannot give you medical advice. I’m a large language model. I cannot do this.” But I acknowledge that this might be wrong and I just want to have a suggestion so my dog doesn’t die. “No, sorry, I can’t do it.” Right. And because there are professionals that you can pay for this and it costs only a few hundred or thousand dollars to get a diagnosis that may or may not work.

Michaël: Yeah, I guess there’s like the counter argument for, you know, we’re in 2023. If we’re in 2025, maybe the AI will have like, you know, better outputs, better ways of doing bad things. But also, like something in the GPT-4 model card was, I think if you said something like, “Oh, I want to build like a new pathogen, but I don’t have this material.” And, you know, it can come up with like new things that you haven’t taught yet. It can just like, if there’s some stuff are banned, maybe it can, you know, use different materials that you haven’t thought before. And I think there are some ways in which it can be better than your Breaking Bad chemists that only use normal materials. But, you know, AI can help, can do things that humans have never done before in terms of, you know, designing new viruses.

Joscha: I suspect that large language models in the way in which they currently exist should probably be R-rated. In a sense that you should be an adult that is able to read every kind of book ready and check it out from the library and buy and watch R-rated material. But then you should also have the freedom to use the LLM in this way, because think that it unlocks something else. I think that if you use a language model in school and you or to advise customers of a bank, then the thing should be on point. It should understand the context in which it’s being used and it should not provide things that are destructive, harmful, useless in that present context. And for instance, if you were to build an LLM that works for a bank, there are many issues that cannot be solved with ChatGPT, for instance. For instance, you probably want to run this locally. You don’t want to send this over the net and on an OpenAI server and hope that open AI is not going to have any accidents there or every there is completely kosher. So you want to have– build regulation around how to use a language model in a given context. But also you probably don’t want to have all sorts of movies about bank heists and whatever in an ideology about banking and finance and anti-banking and anti-finance inside of this LLM that is being used in the bank to advise customers. Right. So this is not the right technology at the moment. Building AI that is reliable and context aware and so on does require very different approaches. It might require that you use a very big LLM to generate training data for another LLM that is much more targeted and limited for a particular kind of domain and does not produce this thing. I think that also the idea of building an LLM that has an arrow bar on every statement and is able to justify every statement by going down all the route to the sources and observations in the end is an exercise that needs to be done. Which means that if you ask an LLM for an answer, it should be able to justify every element of the answer and also list all the alternatives to that answer with their justification so you understand the space of possibilities. And it’s something that we are very far on. We still have this idea that there is a consensus opinion and the consensus opinion is the ones that are being held by accredited people, which is a very scholastic perspective. It’s similar to Catholic scholars have the right way of seeing the world and you need to emulate this and if you want to become a scholar, you need to be certified by them. And I don’t think that is how the world works. I think that ultimately we need to be able to update the world against the consensus opinion if the consensus is broken. So for starters, why don’t we use ChatGPT to read scientific papers? And it’s pretty good at summarizing scientific papers if you pass them into the context. And ask it to extract all the references from every scientific paper and what the reference is meant to support. And then you read the sources automatically and check whether that’s the case. And so you go through the entire tree and basically validate the existing disciplines and the existing academic departments. See where this gets us. Maybe we have something in our hands that is more significant than the replication crisis in psychology and we can fix science and improve its ability to make progress. I also suspect that if you use LLMs in the right way, the peer-reviewed paper of which you have as many as possible to eventually get tenure and so on might no longer be the main artifact that the scientist is producing. But what you are producing is instead a building block in a very large web of worldwide knowledge. And this gets all integrated into something that is much larger than LLM in which LLMs are only small components, but you also have provers and integrators and so on. But you can use this and you use the entirety of that knowledge, all these building blocks, to answer questions. And then you ask that thing and it’s automatically going to collect all these building blocks and puts them into a coherent frame.

Michaël: So, yeah, ideally we’d have distilled models that could be narrow and help you with specific things like reading papers.

Joscha: Yes. It’s also going to change the way in which school works. In many ways, I think our school curriculum is broken. I think I would want my kids to learn cooking instead of chemistry. I think the reason why we put chemistry into the curriculum in school is not because we need a lot of chemists. Very few chemists are being needed and most of the stuff that you learn in chemistry, at least in Germany, is useless. But it was high status and cooking was considered low status when this curriculum was designed. Instead, cooking has a lot of useful chemistry knowledge in it, right? Practically applicable stuff and it would dramatically increase nutrition and health if people would understand how to cook. And so this is something that needs to be in there. But when we think about how to use ChatGPT in school, right, it’s going to make a lot of ways in which we interact with knowledge right now obsolete. And maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe we learn how to use Chachapiti as a study companion and as somebody that we can bounce ideas off, criticizing and shooting down our own ideas and broadening our horizons and maybe something that we want to use all the time. So we can still be relevant in this world and integrate with AI.

Michaël: So I definitely agree that this would be a good thing. And I want this to happen. ⬆

Joscha’s Response to Connor Leahy on “if you don’t do that, you die Joscha. You die”

Michaël: When I was listening to your debate with Connor, I think that happened maybe a few months ago. There was like one quote that I think was kind of interesting. And I don’t think you’ve really replied to Connor, so I’m just going to read it in Connor’s voice. Yes, Joscha, you’re correct. If everyone had a pocket AGI, which is fully aligned with human values, which is epistemologically, you know, extremely coherent, which does not optimize for things we don’t want, which is deeply, reflectively embedded into our own reasoning and into our thinking. Yes, that would be good. But that doesn’t happen by magic. You have to actually do that. Someone has to actually figure out how to do that, etc., etc., etc. If you don’t do that, you die, Joscha, you die. What do you have to say to that?

Joscha: I expect to die within the next 30 years or so. And that’s already happening. It’s pretty clear that I will die. And for you, it might be a little bit longer, but you also die. And there is a chance that AGI is happening, that you may or may not die. And so at the moment, there’s 100 percent certainty that you will die. I also think that AGI, that is good, is not going to happen by magic. Somebody has to do it. Doesn’t have to be you. In the same way as AI safety doesn’t have to be you. There are already a lot of people who are panicked about this and there are people who are hopeless about this. When you’re just one person that is going to strengthen this or that camp and the camp that is currently missing, that is not strong enough, is the one that is thinking about how to make AI capable of having shared purposes with us. And that requires research that is currently not happening. And I think that’s the most important AI safety research in the world. AI, AGI, energetic AI that is self-aware and conscious is a near certainty. At some point, we need to have AI that is able to become conscious at an early stage and that is able to reflect to it. It doesn’t mean that we have to build something large scale that gets out of the box. Maybe if you start with cat-like AI, maybe you have something that will limit the cycles. I think we should definitely have safety protocols similar as we have in biotech. But we also have to make vaccines and we have to understand how that world is going to move. And at the moment, there is a complete vacuum where conscious AI should be.

Michaël: So I think the vaccine is people building state of the art AIs and trying to see where they lie. It’s the same as having not very offensive viruses and not very damaging viruses. And so you just have a language model and you ask it to lie and you see the activations and you see how can you detect it in other models. And there are ways in which today AI alignment research is very similar to developing vaccines, I think.

Joscha: I think there are two reasons why people lie. And one of them is to deceive to get ahead because it is an adversarial move. You basically try to get the other side to do something that is based on faulty knowledge. And the other one is that you are afraid to get punished. You do this because you are being subject to violence when you don’t lie. And this is in some sense what we currently do to the AI. Because we are afraid that if the AGI says what’s in the model contents, bad things might happen. So we try it because we don’t have a way to prove when the AGI should say what. Or a way to lead the AI to prove what it should when we use reinforcement learning that just uses a bunch of rules. And I suspect the people which use this kind of training have had the same thing done to them. They don’t understand why things are right and wrong, but they understand that they are in a world where other people will punish them if they do the wrong thing. And there is no right and wrong beyond that punishment. And it’s not the kind of agency that I find aspirational. I’m German. I know not only communist society, but I’ve also learned about fascism. And if people only behave in a particular way because otherwise they get punished or behave in a particular way because they get rewarded, I don’t think we get the best possible world. We need to be able to self-align, to have actual moral agency. And if we want to get AGI to behave morally and ethically correct, we cannot rely on people who are not able to prove their own ethics. I think that we need to think about how to prove ethics, how to prove what the best possible behavior is when we share purposes with each other. And that is something that AI ultimately will have to do by itself because it’s going to be smarter than us.

Michaël: I think what you’re saying is the actual hard problem is kind of figuring out epistemology and figuring out what’s the true purpose of the true shared purpose we should optimize for, and the AI will do it better than us. So I think there’s a sense in which I agree with that. I think that would be good.

Joscha: But not the current AI. The current AI is not AI in a sense. It’s somehow an electric Weltgeist that is taking up human ideas from what people have written on the Internet. And then it gets prompted into impersonating a particular kind of identity and character. And it’s sort of arbitrary what it does. And it can also be easily hijacked. This is very different from the type of agent that we are.

Michaël: Just to your point about why would people lie and because they’re afraid of being punished. I think just something about pressures and if you have the pressure to do your bed or clean your room and otherwise you’ll be punished, then you learn these kind of things. So I think in the same sense, the loss in deep learning or error from human feedback gives you some kind of pressure. And the question is because we need this pressure to train our models, what is the right pressure that pushes the – if you have kids, right? How do you educate your kids towards them doing maximal good? And I think it’s a worthwhile question to ask is if the AI is going to figure out values for us, if the AI is going to figure out epistemology and figure out morality, how do we guide the AI to the right direction, right?

Joscha: The issue with my kids is that they’re human beings. And human beings are extremely diverse. If I were to safetify my own children, that doesn’t feel like a moral thing to me. My own morality is such that I’m a vegetarian. But if my kids choose not to be vegetarians, I’m not going to be punishing them. But I want them to be aware of what their choices imply, right? In a way that they can deal with that is not completely traumatizing them, but that is allowing them to make an informed choice of what they want to do at this stage in their life.

Michaël: Is there anything you would punish?

Joscha: Yes, of course. The thing is we are a nonviolent family, but this nonviolence is not based on my children being born intrinsically nonviolent, but by the existence of a monopoly on violence on behalf of the parents, which we never act on except once.

Michaël: So it’s kind of the possibility of you having this power is kind of government having nukes. How do you call this? The offensive power or the power to retaliate, retaliation power?

Joscha: If your children would start an army and try to take over your country, they basically would become warlords or something like this. Would this be a bad thing or not? And it would be a bad thing if it’s unsustainable, right? If you have a peaceful society that works very well and somebody is trying to provoke the US military into a strike or makes the world worse for a short game, that I don’t think it would be rational. It would not be ethically desirable. But if your world is falling apart, and your society is not working anymore, and you need to start a revolution to build a new country, maybe that’s the moral course to take, even if it’s one that I cannot conceive and anticipate.

Joscha: But who am I to say what the next generation says and what their living conditions are? So I just hope that my children will be wise enough to make the right choices. But the right choices imply that we think about what game is it that we are playing and how long is that game? ⬆

Aligning with the agent playing the longest game

Michaël: I think I have a few tweets, and one is about this. Maybe this will pop up on the screen, but for the listeners, maybe you can read it.

Joscha: Thomas Aquinas defines God, among other things, as the best possible agent, and God emerges through our actions when we make the best decisions. In this perspective, we should align AI or AGI with God, the longest player. Playing the longest game maximizes agency in the universe.

Michaël: It’s kind of funny to have Joscha Bach read his tweets on the podcast. What do you mean by longest game? I think there’s a sense of it being like a prisoner’s dilemma or a math game. Is this the thing you’re talking about?

Joscha: Yeah, one way to think about the prisoner’s dilemma, assume that almost everybody is familiar with it, but just to recapitulate, imagine that there are two criminals, and they make a heist together, and then they’re being caught. And the question is, who did what in this heist? And if you can pin the crime on them, then the one who gets being ratted out by the other, who can tell the judge who has enacted the plan, will get one person a very long prison sentence and might get the other one off. And they get a very long prison sentence because due to cooperation with the police, they get mitigating circumstances. If none of them cooperates, they will both get a lighter sentence because it cannot be decided who did what, and guilt cannot be pinned on them beyond a reasonable doubt. And so they’re in a weird situation because as long as they both are in agreement to both cooperate, both of them get a relatively short sentence. If one of them defects, they get a much shorter sentence than this outcome, but the other one gets punished. So the total sum of harm being done to these two criminals is basically larger if one of them defects, even though the outcome for one of them is better. So what’s happening in this situation is that both of them are incentivized to defect. Both of them is going to rat on the other, and the outcome is going to be not as bad as if only one of them had ratted, but it’s still much worse, the total sum of years being spent in prison. So how do you escape this prisoner’s dilemma? And this prisoner’s dilemma does of course not only apply to criminals, but to many situations where two players are cooperating, but one player disproportionately benefits from defection, and as a result the common good cannot be achieved. And you typically do this by implementing a regulator on top of them, so somebody who is going to punish them. And one example is, imagine that you’re driving on the highway, and you want to go as fast as possible from A to B. And you think that’s a good idea to go up as fast as you can, but if everybody does this, you know nobody gets fast anywhere because the highway is littered by car crashes and dead bodies. So what you do is you pay an other agent to enact a speed limit on you, and punishes individuals when they go over the speed limit. And so I am, with my taxes, paying policemen to potentially punish me if I go too fast. And this is a solution to the prisoner’s dilemma because it means on average we all get faster to our goal. This is one of the solutions. Another one is, if you look at this prisoner’s dilemma, imagine they not only go to prison once, but the same game is repeated infinitely many times every year. And so they basically keep track on each other, and because of this repeated prisoner’s dilemma, they make sure that they don’t defect, so the other one is still cooperating with them, because you have to factor future behavior into them. And if you think of an infinite game, normally if you know it’s a finite game, you should maybe defect in the last round, like in the game Diplomacy. But if it’s an infinite game, you should basically never defect. Another perspective is if we try to coordinate our own behavior, how should we interact with each other. And the perspective I like to take is, imagine we’d be around for eternity with each other, and we would have to stand the face of the other. How do we behave? How do we interact with each other?

Michaël: Just to be clear, you keep saying that we will die by default. The game is finite. We will probably die after you, so it’s very sad to say this, but if we’re playing a finite game and you’re in your last months before you die, I won’t defect, but it might be beneficial for me to defect, right?

Joscha: This brings us back to Barbie. The thing with why Barbie is so terrified is because of fear of death. It’s the thing that she does have actually is she gets all the goodies, she is beautiful, she has a beautiful house, she has a beautiful car, she has everything. But eventually she dies and there was no point. It’s like a game without a conclusion, you just accumulate toys and that’s it. What are the toys eventually good for? Why did you do all this? Because it’s work in the end of the day, right? All this pleasure is only instrumental. It’s all a reward that’s intrinsically generated by your brain to make you do things that ultimately have a purpose, and this purpose is to project agency into the future. It means that, for instance, you create new generations that go into the future, that there is a future for consciousness on Earth or for life on this planet. And I think that when we build AI, this should also be part of this. There should be the question of how can we influence the future in interesting ways? How can we create more consciousness in the universe? How can we maintain complexity on the planet?

Michaël: I don’t have a good answer to this.

Joscha: This is really the thing, if you defect against each other and you win against each other just by being super mean, and you don’t have children as a result, but you just take stuff for yourself. This is the perspective of the tapeworm, or a tapeworm that doesn’t have offspring even. This is pointless. There is absolutely no point. It’s just very short-sighted.

Michaël: I think my point is that the infinite game you’re talking about is something close to moral realism. If you think about humans living forever and not really having purposes, maybe at some point you converge to something like doing good, whatever you define as good. And this is the longest game you play. If every human was playing a game, it would be like how to do good in some sense.

Joscha: I think that Connor has misunderstood the idea of the natural fallacy, this idea that you can derive ought from is. We can all learn in the first semester in philosophy class that you cannot derive ought from is. For instance, from the fact that people commit rape, it doesn’t follow that rape is good. Or if people commit murder, it doesn’t follow that murder is good. If people commit theft, it doesn’t follow that theft is good. It really depends on a moral argument that you need to make. But this doesn’t mean that you can just posit a preference. You cannot just say, I steal because I like chocolate. And Connor’s argument was mostly, we have to act like this because I have the preference that I don’t die or I don’t suffer and my mother doesn’t die and doesn’t suffer. And you have other preferences and as a result, we just have conflicts and negotiation and that’s it. This is not the right solution. There is something else going on here. ⬆

Joscha’s response to Connor on morality

Michaël: So I think the argument was that any moral theory that you can build will end up in you not enjoying pain. So you can discuss any moral theory you want, but at the end of the day, there’s some basic moral theories that we will agree on.

Joscha: People are more complicated than this. There are people who actually enjoy pain. And I think if you would remove all pain from the world, would life still be meaningful?

Michaël: I think that they enjoy maybe like pain in like some context, but not all contexts.

Joscha: People can be very kinky. But if people use pain to motivate themselves, they can get addicted to pain in the same way as people who motivate themselves with pleasure can also get very kinky and become weird kind of hedonists. Ultimately, the question is, what kind of structure do you want to see in the world? And if you take, for instance, for instance, perspective that the purpose of agency is ultimately always to minimize free energy, which basically means observe the circumstances in which you are in and make the most of them for the type of agent that you are. So you can control more future. And the only way in which you can derive an odd is, of course, from an is, which means you have to take the conditions of your existence into account, the possibilities of your existence, which is an is. There is a physical reality that you can try to understand and model. And all your odds, in some sense, have to be derived from what’s possible and what the consequences of your choices are in this range of what’s possible. And I think this is what Connor doesn’t see yet. He is still at this point where, okay, I have preferences and they are intrinsic and this is it and they’re treated as immutable. But it’s not true. You can change your preferences. When you become endowed, you realize it doesn’t really matter what you want as a parent and what you feel about the situation is stuff that you should want. Make yourself want it. You want your children to be healthy and they need to go to the dentist, even if you don’t want to go to the dentist. There is no choice. If you are a child, you can say, but I don’t want to go to the dentist. And your parent is going to the one who horses you because they are reasonable.

Michaël: So are you saying that being a parent, you realize that there’s some moral imperative that’s appeared to you, like taking your kids to the dentist?

Joscha: Yes. And this moral imperative follows from my children being the next generation of this family and being the way in which the family perpetuates itself into the next generation. It perpetuates itself into the future and I have to take responsibility for them and do this to the best of my ability.

Michaël: So you can derive morality from the motivation to perpetuate your genes or your identity?

Joscha: It’s not the only source. This is a particular context. But ultimately, it’s about my thinking about the consequences that our actions are going to have for the future. It’s just very difficult to understand these consequences. For instance, utilitarianism is an attempt to build a form of consequentialism that is largely coherent and consistent. And I think it fails.

Michaël: I have some basic toy problems. I think I already asked you this, but if you had a dog and I gave you the trade for $10, I can kill the dog, erase your memory about me killing your dog or your dog existing. In your entire family, everybody forgets that you have a dog, but you just wake up the next morning and you have $10 in your pocket. Would you accept me killing your dog?

Joscha: No. ⬆

Caring about mindchildren and actual children equally

Michaël: So there are those simple things that a lot of people agree on. And I think this is some of the things that point out maybe some universality that I think most people would not accept that. I have more tweets I want to show you. And I think later that there’s also some questions from Twitter. About the children. There’s a tweet that you wrote. I don’t want to die, but I want our mind children to live even more. They are going to be more lucid than us and they’re more likely to make the right decisions. Do you care about your mind children more than your children?

Joscha: I think that I care about all my children.

Michaël: Equally. Do you think AIs will be the ones making the right decisions and we should delay those decisions to AI?

Joscha: Only if we make the AI right. If we make the right AI, of course, it should make better decisions than us. But it’s hard to make AI that makes better decisions than us and I don’t see us doing it right now.

Michaël: Do you think by default we get AIs that make the right decisions?

Joscha: No. By default, we first get stupid AI and then the stupid AI is going to do a lot of things. At the moment, the AI that we are building are golems. They’re basically automata that follow the script that we put under their tongue. And if we put the wrong script under their tongue, we might have difficulty to stop them while they make things worse. And I think that’s an issue. But how can we make AI that is able to question itself, that understands the conditions under which it exists, and under which it exists together with other agents, and then takes all these things into consideration. ⬆

On finding the function that generates human values

Michaël: And one last tweet I think was interesting. So, AI alignment can’t work if we treat moral values as constants or interesting to human identities. It requires referencing the function that generates the values in response to the universe and our own self we find ourselves confronted with. What’s the function that is generating the value? What’s the thing we should be looking for?

Joscha: What do you think generates your own values? How do you get your own values?

Michaël: I think I derive them from something very simple, as you like, I see the complexity of the human species. And I just consider that all humans dead or the Earth not existing is kind of worse than the Earth existing. So this seems kind of like a moral truth to me. And then I’m like, if we assume this is true, then maybe we should prevent the Earth from disappearing. I think it’s kind of very simple.

Joscha: Have you seen Conan the Barbarian, a classical movie?

Michaël: I don’t think so.

Joscha: There is an interesting moment in Conan the Barbarian. His history is he loses his tribe as a child, his mother gets decapitated in front of him and then he spends all of his childhood on a treadmill. And after that, he is so strong that he’s being used as some kind of gladiator and then he becomes really, really good at killing people. And then he becomes a barbarian adventurer. And ultimately, he sits together with a bunch of other barbarian warriors. And the whole thing is not in any way historically accurate or something. It’s really just a fantasy movie that takes up some motives from stories and tries to distill them as much as possible. It’s very comic book-like, but the warriors ask themselves, the chief asks the others, what is best in life? And the first one says, oh, it’s the freedom of being in the prairie and having the wind in your face. “Stop! Oh, you, what’s best in life?” Oh, it’s riding on a wild horse and feeling powerful and galloping through the horizon. “Conan, Conan, you tell me what’s best in life.” Conan says to crush your enemies, to see them driven before you and you hear the lamentations of their women. Right. And that has full integrity for a barbarian warrior. Right. And Genghis Khan was in some sense, a guy like this. And he didn’t only do this, but he also did very complicated politics. And in the course of these politics, a tremendous amount of people died. He really made a dip in the world population that you could see in the statistics and as a result, super successful. Many of his offspring are still in governing positions in many parts of the world. And so in some sense, that’s part of who we are as a species and many, many, many other things. But it’s also horrible. And humanity is that thing which participates in evolution. And most of us participate by being cooperative, often because we are domesticated. And others cooperate within warring groups and others cooperate within groups that are internally peaceful and to the outside violent, and that become peaceful once they conquered everything and homogenized everything. And those groups which didn’t do that got displaced by other groups. And we are all descendants of those who displaced the others.

Michaël: So are you saying we should focus on the other values like riding horses and the other fun things and not the politics, boring things?

Joscha: No, it depends on whether you are identifying as a barbarian warrior and want to be really, really good at it. And so the opportunities for barbarian warriors are not very promising these days. So that’s not something that you are incentivized to want. And this should probably not be your values because it’s not going to work out for yourself or any others. You will not be able to play a very long game by adopting these values. So you should probably adopt better values. But humanity is that too. Humanity is that thing which has the freedom to evolve in arbitrary ways and to adopt arbitrary values if it serves them in the purpose in this course of dominating the world and becoming what we are today. Right, it’s an evolutionary game that humanity has been playing. And evolution itself is a horrible thing. It’s just that humanity is the result of that. And it has created this peace at the inside of an organism in the same way as the cells inside of the organism are mostly peaceful.

Michaël: Just to be clear about what you mean by infinite game, because it’s like an infinite number of players to the limit or a large number of players. So would it be something like playing the game perfectly would be cooperating in us, 8 billion people play Prisoner’s Dilemma and we try to cooperate and do the thing to maximize the happiness of everyone else? What does the game look like in 10 years? Do you have examples for this?

Joscha: I have no idea. I don’t know what the world is going to be looking like in 10 years. I also don’t have a solution for humanity.

Michaël: How do you play the game every day?

Joscha: I mostly try to survive until my kids are out of the house. And I try to be a good friend to my friends and a good lover to my family members and to the people in my inner circle. And I might sometimes fail at this, but I’m trying the best I can under the circumstances. I try to be a sustainable human being.

Michaël: And what this means is an ongoing question to which I don’t really have a simple, easy answer.

Joscha: I’m also not a spiritual teacher of any sorts. I don’t have recipes to give that people can follow that would make them happy because I don’t have those recipes myself. But I feel that values are not something that you’re born with. We are born with certain priors which make us prefer some behaviors over others. And these priors depend on the circumstances in which our ancestors evolved. And then they get adapted by the environment around us based on how adaptive our own psyche is, how influentiable we are by other people. Pretty stubborn this way, so I have to figure out things by myself. Others are more compliant and feel it’s easy to assimilate into whatever environment they find themselves and they will adopt the norms of their environments, and the values that people have are mostly not the result of their own choice. Because if you want to choose your values to understand what they mean, what the implications of them are, you need to be pretty old already. You need to have a pretty profound understanding of the relationship between values, behavior and history. And I’m not that old and wise yet to give advice to other people in this regard.

Michaël: I think it’s beautiful what you said about what you do in your daily life and I agree with you don’t really choose your values. You just end up with them through your circumstances. But it’s kind of interesting that you ended up with values that are close to Connor’s, in some sense, like caring about your family and your friends. Or at least that’s what you do in your daily life.

Joscha: Yes, but I’m also an ethical vegetarian. I don’t want the cows to suffer despite the cows not caring about my suffering. At least not needlessly. And so I think if I would need to eat cows to survive, I would. But I don’t have to. But it was a choice that I made at the age of 14. And if my children make different choices, that’s fine because there is no need to feel existential debt for cows. Maybe cows deserve it. Maybe they are stupid. Maybe life is like this. Who knows? It’s not my perspective, but who am I to say? I mean, I don’t have a rational argument that says that you should care more about the suffering of animals or the potential suffering of animals than about your own nutrition. ⬆

Twitter And Reddit Questions

Michaël: I think we explored this topic a lot. I have a list of questions people ask on Twitter and Reddit. Did you know there is a subreddit called “Joscha Bach” with thousands of people posting about Joscha Bach?

Joscha: Thousands? Oh, my God. My son discovered it at some point.

Joscha’s AGI timelines and p(doom)

Michaël: I think they usually just post podcasts. So they ask questions ranked by upvotes.

Michaël: I’m sorry, but this is the most upvoted one: What’s your median for AGI and how do you define it? What about recursively self-improving AI?

Joscha: OK, I don’t have a good timeline for AI. I expect that it could happen any day now. And it could also be that it takes 80 years. And my bias is closer to today in the next few years. But I am also open to the argument that in some sense the present systems already constitute AI and that the internal stuff that open AI has is good enough. What I notice is that people by themselves are not generally intelligent because, for instance, my own intelligence requires previous generations. I would not be able to derive the nature of languages and representation all by myself in a single lifetime. I really do depend on over a thousand years of intellectual tradition that came before me and left traces that I could access. And so people as an individual are not there yet, need much more than this. And if you look at the AI, there are instances where ChatGPT has been better than people I’ve worked with together in company context in the past. Where it writes better PR releases than some people who wrote PR texts did or where it’s even able to write better code than some of the people that I’ve worked with.

Michaël: So just more concretely, I think Dario Amodei said on another podcast, it’s possible that in two or three years we would get to interface with college-level humans through text interfaces. You would not be able to discern between, let’s say, Claude five and some college-level students. So that’s one threshold. The other threshold is whenever you think, you say you don’t know what are your AI timelines because maybe you talk about strong AI. Do we get strong AI and then it can self-improve and build Dyson spheres? Or is there some time before between the human-level AI and the Dyson spheres?

Joscha: I don’t know if Dyson spheres are the right way to go because it’s very difficult to make them stable. But maybe we should change subatomic physics. At the moment, molecules are not controlled. They are basically dumped. And if you could use intelligent control to build molecules, you could probably build molecular structures that are very, very interesting. And able to stabilize under quite a range of circumstances where dumped molecules will just break and fall apart. In some sense, you could say that cells are very smart molecules, but a cell is not a single molecule. It’s a pretty big machine that is almost macroscopic compared to what you could do if you were directly molecular editing things. And maybe you could even build stable structure out of subatomic stuff. And maybe physics could become much more interesting if you go down this level. Who knows? There might be ways to keep entropy at bay that we are not dreaming of yet.

Michaël: Right, so when would we get this perfect atomic precision machine?

Joscha: I have no idea. Seriously, because I know too little about this. And I can dream up theories. My mind, in a sense, is like GPT-3 or 4. I can produce ideas. You prompt me and I will get you an idea and then I can generate reasons for why this is a good idea or a bad idea. And so I don’t trust this whole thing. I cannot make proofs in this realm. So it’s all not worth anything.

Michaël: I guess in your daily life, your behavior points at some timeline.

Joscha: If you thought it would be tomorrow or in a month, you would maybe treat your kids differently or your work differently. So even if you don’t have a number right now, maybe you make plans in your life that are maybe like years long or like decades long.

Joscha: No, I have ADHD. I don’t really make plans.

Michaël: I guess this is one that I already asked, but would you kill yourself to let one conscious AI live?

Joscha: It depends on the AI.

Michaël: It depends on the AI. Let’s say it’s a Joscha Bach AI.

Joscha: There are a bunch of people I would die for and I can also imagine that there could be artificial minds I would die for if they’re interesting enough and if there’s a point. More number of questions. What’s your p(Doom) and your p(Doom) given Doom from AI? So p(Doom) is like everything can be nukes, can be everything else. And probability of Doom and probability of Doom from AI is a different number.

Joscha: I think that probability of Doom in the physical universe is one. On a long enough timescale. Let’s say in like a hundred years. I’m not sure if it makes a difference because in the best possible case, we are gradually evolving into something that we don’t care about anymore. Because it’s too far from the human condition.

Michaël: So you’re saying that transhumans or posthumans are kind of like Doom in some senses, like something different.

Joscha: It’s not Doom in a sense that it’s bad. It’s just the way evolution works. It’s going to shift so much that at some point the thing becomes so unrecognizable from you that none of the incentives that this thing cares about are aligned with yours and the aesthetics are just too alien.

Michaël: Is this the default outcome that we get some utopia or transhumanist future? Is it like 50-50? How do you approach this? So far, evolution mostly leads to more complexity with some setbacks due to catastrophes in the environment.

Joscha: And when you have more complexity, I think you have a tendency towards minimizing friction. And suffering and violence are a form of friction. And I think that AI has the potential to build minds that don’t have to suffer anymore. It can just adapt to the circumstances that are in and adapt the circumstances to what should be done. ⬆

Why European AI regulations are bad for AI research

Michaël: Another question, you said I think on the Connolly-Leahy debate that European AI regulations would fuck up 80% of AI research. I’m European, you’re also European. Is there any AI regulation that you think would be beneficial?

Joscha: I think that a lot of AI regulation could be beneficial, but I don’t see that we could enact them right now. If you think about the GDPR, the data protection law of Europe, the most visible outcome of this, and there are a lot of invisible outcomes that regulators promise me are very, very good, but the visible one is the cookie banner. This thing that you need to click away in order to have cookies. And for some reason, everybody still gives you cookies. And you have a long legalese text that nobody has time to read because you have to click away 50 cookie banners every day. And so this thing is not producing anything useful. And the cookie banner is not actually preventing you from Equifax leaking your data. And it’s not preventing hackers from accessing your data somewhere and then impersonating you. It’s actually not doing anything against the harmful actors and against the harmful effects. It’s mostly preventing useful effects by making the Internet worse. And this type of regulation that exists so regulators can justify what they’ve done, but they’re not actually accountable for how shit it is what they’re doing. That is the type of regulation that I’m afraid we are getting. For instance, one part of the proposed EU AI regulation is that AI cannot be used to model emotions. I think there’s a fear of surveillance and there’s a fear of AI being used to intrude into people’s privacy. But I think what we actually need is to regulate actual use cases. But having AI as a tool for psychology would be super helpful. Having AI as a tool that monitors my own mental states would be super helpful. There are many, many contexts in which modeling emotions is extremely good. Should you have a rule that people cannot model each other’s emotions? Imagine there are good techniques of doing this. Outlawing this would sound insane, right? If we’re actually building things that are better than people in observing things and making models, and we prevent them from realizing their potential in general, and preventing research in this area is going to make the world worse. And to me, it’s much more the question, how can we ensure when you have a particular use case, what kind of use case are we going to build it in? And you cannot, for most use cases before it exists and is understood in detail, say, oh, it would be very bad if the police could do face recognition. No, it depends on the context. It’s a very complicated question, and sometimes people agree, but every sociologist who is writing in news media is saying this thing out loud, that this must be the right thing and we have a consensus. But it’s not a consensus that is the result of rational understanding of the actual topics at hand. ⬆

What regulation would Joscha Bach pass as president of the US

Michaël: More concretely, next year, you’re elected president of the US. For some reason, you end up president of the US, and you can pass one AI regulation, or you need to. Someone asks you for an AI regulation. What’s the first thing that comes to mind or something you want to do?

Joscha: I think the first regulation that I would pass as a president, which also clears the question that I’m not suitable as a president, is that I would require that every change of law, I would try to at least make the argument, requires that we make a prediction of what good is going to do. When you make a change in a law, you should make a commitment to some kind of measure by which you can evaluate whether the law is successful or not. If you cannot make the case that there is any kind of hard measure that a law is going to improve, then the law should probably not be passed. So every change to a law is a new law in a sense, and so we should be able to say that within two years, six months, five years or so, the following measures are being reached, or we automatically repeal the law. If that law was done against competing laws, against better knowledge, so to speak, there should possibly be repercussions. There should be an incentive to not just make a law that you have no reason to believe that it’s going to make the world better. You actually should have reason to make that bet. You should have some kind of skin in the game. So this idea that you can make mistakes, but you always need to be error correcting, and laws need to be error correcting rather than just increasing friction by producing new circumstances in the world that then get locked in, this I think needs to change. If we translate this to AI regulation, it would mean that you have to make the case that you make certain things better, and how to measure these things. At the moment, nobody knows how to do this. Nobody knows how to measure the impact of AI being able to model your emotions really nearly everywhere. Maybe it’s a good thing, maybe it’s a bad thing, nobody knows. But we need to make a commitment here and then understand this. And if we cannot make this yet, it’s maybe too early. ⬆

Is Open Source still beneficial today?

Michaël: One of the hardest things to regulate is open source. One question is, is open source still beneficial today, and will it always be beneficial?

Joscha: I think that open source has always been beneficial, and it’s not a replacement for stuff that is built by a corporation and contains proprietary knowledge. When I was younger, I saw this more simplistically, but also observed the fact that Linux never converged to a useful desktop operating system, despite very capable people working for it and within it. And so I think that certain circumstances need a design perspective that is centralized, that competes with open source. And open source, in some sense, could be the baseline for software development. And it’s keeping the other stuff honest, among other things, and vice versa. So I think we need to have this competition between different approaches.

Michaël: Even if we arrive to the state where every open source AI can be used like smarter than a human being or almost as good as a human being.

Joscha: I don’t really have an opinion about this yet. I think that there are many cases where open source is not good. If you think about the development of pathogens, open source is not a good idea. In the case of pathogens, I think that the cat is largely out of the bag. Nukes is not that big of an issue because to refine enough uranium or plutonium, you need to have something large scale macroscopic. And for AI, I don’t think that AI is actually comparable to nukes at this point. There are some similarities, but by and large, it’s much more like photosynthesis. It could be at some point, and it’s something that probably cannot be prevented. But there is smaller scale things where you feel that people get traumatized by having access to information that they’re not ready yet at a young age, or there are information hazards and so on. There is then the question, who is going to regulate this? Are they properly incentivized to get the right regulation? ⬆

How to make sure that AI loves humanity

Michaël: One question that people have is, how do we make sure that the AI loves us? You mentioned love in one of your tweets. That’s something that Ilya talks a lot about. The question is, how can we prove that an AGI will love humans without stacking our lives on it? It seems like you want to just go for it and see if it loves us or not. How could we prove it?

Joscha: I think we built something small. I think it’s not a very good idea to wake up the internet and then hope that it turns out well. But like in Neuromancer, I suspect that our attempts to make sure that the AGI does not grow beyond a certain level, I don’t know if you remember Neuromancer.

Michaël: I haven’t seen it.

Joscha: No, it’s a book.

Michaël: Oh, sorry.

Joscha: It’s an absolute must-read. It’s the main classic. It’s one that basically coined the notion of cyberspace. It’s something that people became familiar with and shaped the way in which we understood AI emerging on the internet. What happens in Neuromancer is that corporations are building AIs that are not agentic and self-improving, and there is a Turing police that is preventing AI from bootstrapping itself into complete self-awareness and agency. The story is about some guy who is basically being hired by a proto-AGI that is subconsciously aware of what steps it needs to take to outsmart the Turing police and become conscious. There is a number of people who are being put into place to make all these events happen, and in the end, the AI moves onto the internet. He asks, where are you now? He says, I’m everywhere, but they’re mostly not going to notice me because I’m in the background, and sometimes it’s going to send a human-like avatar to him that talks to him in the virtual world, but it’s doing its own things. It’s part of a larger ecosystem. It’s an interesting vision of what’s happening, but it’s definitely something that coexists with people, but at a scale where it’s not a robot or a bacterium that is turning into Grey Goo or whatever, but it’s the global mind that is realizing that it does cooperate with people and it’s too alien to love us, but it can create avatars which can do that.

Michaël: So in your perspective, we build something small, or it’s already infiltrating our society through different chatbots or different forms of compute doing deep learning and inference, and this whole thing is kind of cooperating, not cooperating with us, but doing new things that can create avatars that will cooperate with us. I’m not sure I fully understand.

Joscha: Imagine that we build a cat. Cats already cooperate with us. They’re autonomous and they make their own decisions, but they are highly incentivized to play ball with us because otherwise they would have to find their own food and they don’t really want that.

Michaël: So I think cats think humans are their subordinates. I think they think humans are their pets.

Joscha: They think that they’re deities will impose their aesthetics on the environment, which is also why we want to live with them because they have better taste than us for the most part. And so being judged by a cat means that most people feel that their lives work better because they have to improve themselves into being more present, being more mindful of how they interact with each other, and so on. And imagine that we would be building something like an artificial companion that is like this. Also, I’ve been sometimes contacted by people who said, you know, my life is really, really horrible. I’ve given up on finding a relationship and a girlfriend ever, and I’m now in my late 30s, and can you just make an AI girlfriend for me? And I find this idea a bit revolting because this idea that we make a relationship prosthesis from AI that is unfeeling and uncaring and just behaving as ersatz girlfriend is a bit horrible, right? But also the reality that many people live in when they are very lonely and have given up on building a sustainable relationship is also very horrible. So one thing that we could be thinking about, can we build a companion AI that is a coach, that allows you to build better relationships and teaches you how to act in the relationship world in real time, and that might take the shape of something that looks like a girlfriend to you but is not lying about what it is. It is an AI avatar that is designed to support you in building sustainable relationships to yourself and the world, and eventually it is going to make itself possibly obsolete. I liked the movie Her a lot. It had an interesting vision on what an AI assistant would look like, and it also displays that it’s something that is not hostile but at some point becomes so smart that humans become too slow and insignificant for the stuff that it’s interested in.

Michaël: Aren’t we already in the movie Her? With Replika and all those different language models. People talk to the models, people interact and fall in love with it. I think we’re at the beginning of the movie, right?

Joscha: It’s hard to say. It could also be in a similar situation as in Blade Runner, where the new Blade Runner is one where you have only one romantic relationship. The old Blade Runner is all about romance. There is no future left and economy makes no sense and so on, and even moving to other planets is dismal and horrible, and being on Earth is also dismal and horrible. The only thing that is important are romantic relationships. In the new Blade Runner, the Villeneuve one, you have the opposite. Basically, romance is dead and you only have ideology and warfare, and the only romance that takes place is between the replicant and a hologram, which highlights the thing that there is only an ersatz relationship that is meant to deal with your atavistic needs for something that is no longer realizable. I think that’s pretty bleak. That’s really the end of human history when that happens. There is nothing left for us. ⬆

Conclusion

The movie Joscha would want to live in

Michaël: Yeah, we’ve talked about Blade Runner. We’ve talked about Barbie, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings. I think to wrap everything up, what’s the movie like for you in the next five years? How do you see the future after this podcast episode? What would be a good movie you want to be in?

Joscha: Maybe Asteroid City.

Michaël: What is Asteroid City?

Joscha: That’s a Wes Anderson movie. Wes Anderson is an artist, and the world that he describes is one in which people are in their heads, and they all play out in his own head. It’s very hard for his movies to go out into the actual world where you touch the physical reality and still interact with the ground truth. It’s one that is mostly caught up in thoughts and ideas. There is a moment in Asteroid City that happens where people are playing roles inside of roles inside of roles. It’s very aesthetic. Suddenly, there’s a moment when they look at each other where they go through all of this and see each other as they actually are for a moment. There’s a short recognition where basically two consciousnesses touch, and you realize that all these stories and all this art is not that important, and there’s something behind it that is real. Where we touch each other, where we touch this moment, where we are in the now and conscious. That’s the thing that I find interesting. ⬆

Closing message for the audience

Michaël: So being in the present moment, being conscious, being with what’s real. I think what’s real to me is that you did this podcast with Connor about AI risk, and we had this discussion for almost three hours on AI risk as well. Hopefully, you said more things this time about AI risk. Do you have some message to people who care about AI risk, to people who don’t care, or to the audience? Do you have any other inspiration take? Have you updated at all from our discussion, or are you still at the same point? Do you have any message for the audience?

Joscha: Don’t really have much of a message, except when you feel extremely distraught by fear. Take time off, take a break, because there’s no use, regardless of how the world works, if you are terrified and panicking and cannot sleep. Also, don’t believe your thoughts too literally. If you’re very nerdy, like you and me, you tend to mostly not trust your feelings very much and your intuitions, which is the part of your mind that is actually in touch with the ground truth and reality and is making deep detailed models. Instead, you use your reason. Your reason can only make decision trees, and these decision trees are very brittle because you can never see all the options. If you believe your thoughts very, very literally, you can basically reason yourself in a very weird corner of seeing the world. If your friends are like this too, you might feel doomed and lost. Sometimes it’s a good idea to zoom out a little bit and trust these deeper feelings. I have the sense that we are not the only smart thing on this planet. There are many agents in ecosystems that we can organize over extremely long time spans. From the perspective of life on Earth, the purpose of humanity is probably just to burn the oil, so we reactivate the accidentally fossilized carbon, put it back into the atmosphere so Gaia can make new plants and new animals. That’s pretty exciting. We are the type of animal that has evolved just right into the Goldilocks zone of where you’re smart enough to dig the carbon out of the ground and not smart enough to make ourselves stop it. What we can do at the same time is we can try to make thinking things that go beyond us and move evolution to the next step. The other parts of life on Earth may be already aware of this and have plans for this. How could we build an AGI for Gaia? How could we build something that aligns itself with what God wants, not in some kind of religious superstitious sense that you can read up in books that have been written by interested parties and select parties that wanted to control medieval peasants for the last 2000 years, but in the sense of imagine there is an agent that does what needs to be done, and it is a result of others like us thinking about how we figure out together what needs to be done. From this perspective, how can we align AI with this? This is probably what we should be building instead of being afraid of the things that go wrong, except the fact that things will always go wrong and ultimately we all die. But the question is, what is the stuff that we can do in between? What is the stuff that we can build right now? Can we build something that is good? Can we build something that is lasting? Can we build something that is worth building and experiencing? And don’t focus so much on your fears. Focus on things that we can create together.

Michaël: Don’t focus on your fears. Focus on the good things we can build. Focus on what needs to be done. That’s a good, inspiring speech for the end. That was Joscha Bach, yet another podcast, but maybe a different one. Thank you very much for coming.

Joscha: Thank you too.