Making Sense with Sam Harris - Subscriber Content

#385 - AI Utopia

27 snips

Sep 30, 2024

In this engaging discussion with Nick Bostrom, a leading Oxford professor and director of the Future of Humanity Institute, the complexities of AI unfold. They delve into the dual potential of AI—its power to both uplift humanity and present existential risks. Bostrom highlights the challenges of alignment and governance, exploring how our decisions pave the way for future outcomes. The conversation shifts to the ethical dilemmas of technology's influence on happiness and personal connection, raising profound questions about meaning, labor, and human values in a rapidly evolving world.

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INSIGHT

Knotty Problems & Path Dependence

Some problems become easier with technology; others require coordination.
Advanced technology can exacerbate existing issues if not managed carefully.

INSIGHT

The Solved World Paradox

A "solved world" is technologically mature and politically stable.
Humans may recoil from a perfectly solved world due to its unfamiliarity.

ANECDOTE

Keynes' Prediction

Keynes predicted increased productivity and a four-hour workweek.
While his productivity prediction was accurate, he underestimated working hours.

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Sam Harris speaks with Nick Bostrom about ongoing progress in artificial intelligence. They discuss the twin concerns about the failure of alignment and the failure to make progress, why smart people don’t perceive the risk of superintelligent AI, the governance risk, path dependence and "knotty problems," the idea of a solved world, Keynes’s predictions about human productivity, the uncanny valley of utopia, the replacement of human labor and other activities, meaning and purpose, digital isolation and plugging into something like the Matrix, pure hedonism, the asymmetry between pleasure and pain, increasingly subtle distinctions in experience, artificial purpose, altering human values at the level of the brain, ethical changes in the absence of extreme suffering, our cosmic endowment, longtermism, problems with consequentialism, the ethical conundrum of dealing with small probabilities of large outcomes, and other topics.

Nick Bostrom is a professor at Oxford University, where he is the founding director of the Future of Humanity Institute. He is the author of more than 200 publications, including Anthropic Bias (2002), Global Catastrophic Risks (2008), Human Enhancement (2009), and Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014), a New York Times bestseller which sparked the global conversation about the future of AI. His work has framed much of the current thinking around humanity’s future (such as the concept of existential risk, the simulation argument, the vulnerable world hypothesis, astronomical waste, and the unilateralist’s curse). He has been on Foreign Policy’s Top 100 Global Thinkers list twice, and was the youngest person to rank among the top 15 in Prospect’s World Thinkers list. He has an academic background in theoretical physics, AI, computational neuroscience, and philosophy. His most recent book is Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World.

Website: https://nickbostrom.com/

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