Based Camp: How AI's Will Hack People (with Spencer Greenberg of Clearer Thinking)

In this thought-provoking discussion, Spencer Greenberg shares his predictions for how AI could transform society in the next 10 years. He envisions prolific AI spam, propaganda bots, highly addictive personalized content streams, and hacked emotions. But AI also holds promise for revolutionary advances in healthcare and entertainment. Overall, Spencer emphasizes AI's vast potential for both tremendous benefit and harm to humanity.

Spencer: [00:00:00] systems like tick tock, imagine a world where it's generating billions of new pieces of content every day with, with generative AI, or even going a step further, generating custom AI content for your mind.

Spencer: And then it sees how much you like it and then generate it and it tweaks its generation process. So we could imagine a world in 10 years, 20 years, I don't know, where you're actually seeing AI generated content personalized to you that you just kind of. Receive in a stream and become just insanely addicted to.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm: Hello. We are so excited to be here today with Spencer Greenberg of the clearer thinking podcast, and also famously like the clearer thinking organization.

Malcolm: We the, the guy who is running this project, which is now fact checking trying to review psychological research to see if it's replicable as it's being published, which is just so cool. We've known him for years, almost as long as we've known each other, and he is... One [00:01:00] of the sort of social leaders of the EA rationalist diaspora in the New York area.

Malcolm: And just an incredibly respected gentlemen scientists in our opinion. And by gentlemen scientists, we mean one of those people who is out there. outside of mainstream academia conducting really great

Spencer: research.

Simone: And you can tell he's one of the leaders because he vehemently denies it. And yet he like builds all the stuff that everyone uses.

Simone: So.

Spencer: Well,

Malcolm: I so I mean, he's definitely a thought leader in the Gentleman's Science Network because he's created the software that everyone's using to do it right now. Like I would say. 80% of the independent research is probably done on his software right now. But where we wanted to go with this one is we wanted to talk about where humanity is going into the future.

Malcolm: So let's start with the question of where do you think we're going to be in 10 years?

Spencer: So I should start by saying, this is wild speculation, predicting the future is incredibly hard. So take everything I say with a massive grain of salt. A lot of that's going to be wrong, [00:02:00] but with that caveat behind me, I will speculate.

Spencer: I think that AI is going to have an absolutely massive effect on society. I think it's. It's hard to really fathom right now all the different ways, but, but I think we're going to see it coming. I think a few areas we'll see it coming. One is in spam and manipulation. There are already a bunch of countries that have warehouses of people that are essentially putting propaganda onto Twitter and social media.

Spencer: This is well known, but I think that that is going to be nothing compared to. A million bots that are powered by AI, right? It's one thing to have, 300 people in a warehouse. It's another thing to have a million AI bots, right? It's also these AI bots are now at the point where they could all have different personalities.

Spencer: They could all say unique things in line with those personalities. They could have a lot, they can be sleeper agents where mostly they just tweet or post totally normal stuff 99% of the time, but then go into full gear. to promote propaganda. So that's just one little facet. Let's start there.

Malcolm: I was going to [00:03:00] ask.

Malcolm: So Elon is right when he's saying you need to limit access to these platforms now and any platform that doesn't is just going to become swarmed with bots.

Spencer: I think it's complicated. I mean, I do think, I do think this is going to be a massive problem. Whether the current approaches Twitter wants to use will work.

Spencer: I don't know. I mean, almost nobody's on Twitter blue relative to the whole Twitter population. So I'm not sure how they're going to do that. Maybe what they'll do is make it harder and harder. To do anything as a non Twitter blue user, but I don't know that that solution will actually work. I think it's going to be an arms race and the very difficult one.

Spencer: The closer and I guess to be able to do what a human can do. The harder it is to actually detect that it's an AI, right?

Malcolm: Actually that brings me to something that's been happening recently on Reddit, and I don't know if you've seen this phenomenon, but, reddit's in this big fight right now with like the mod teams, and it appears that Reddit Corporate is using lots of AIs.

Malcolm: Actually, they recently had to block out like the programming [00:04:00] subreddit or something like that, because they figured out that the Reddit Corporate was using their own AIs to try to make it seem like the community was more okay with what was happening. I'm wondering how you Think social media companies, do you think that this sort of action would be like a death penalty to a social media company in the future?

Malcolm: Or do you think the future will be like companies that are anti AI versus companies that are pro ai? Like where do you think we'll begin to see a a, a differentiation and evolution of social media platforms as it relates to ai?

Spencer: Yeah. It's an interesting question because I think you'll start to see AI on social media that are actual just kind of creators.

Spencer: Right. So some people will make this proliferation of AIs that are tweeting about different things or posting on social media about different things in a certain, in a benign or even helpful way where they're just kind of content creators. And then you'll see other ones that are, I think, going to be like sleeper agents that are really like propaganda bots, but they're just imitating being a real person.

Spencer: You'll see other ones that are attempting to scam [00:05:00] people, like even attempting to befriend people over a period of months or years. Which I think is we're going to, we're going to start to see that where bots will let, create extended relationships with people and then scam them. And I think some of these things, all social media companies are going to have to be against because it's just going to really affect the the performance of their platform so much.

Spencer: It's going to be such a bad experience being on the platform that they just have to be against it. Other ones they might embrace like. AI content creators where it's okay, well, maybe it's okay to have a million different bots that are just creating content of specific types, each with specific personalities trying to appeal to the masses.

Spencer: And then there'll be an interesting question about disclosure. Will you have to disclose that it's an AI making the content or if it's a hybrid between human and AI, how does that work? So yeah, a lot of really tricky questions.

Simone: So you're making me think actually is that a lot of social media platforms are probably going to require, for example, government identification.

Simone: To prove that you're human to create an account, but then I've met, I bet there's going to be this whole new form of stealing other people's identities. Cause like we, we recently were in a bunch of settings where we met people who were like, Oh, [00:06:00] I'm not the internet person in my family. Like my wife does all the YouTube.

Simone: So we know that there are people like super normal people who are just offline. Like they just don't do the internet. And then those people, I wonder if I were trying to create AI that could do what you're describing, Spencer, I would probably find those people, I would pretend to be them, and I would find basically the offline people, make an online identity for them, and then pretend use their ID, steal their identity, but just to create a very convincing bot, because I would get through the, the barriers of social media platforms that think I'm a verified person.

Malcolm: Well, the interesting thing you said there is that there actually would be a marketplace and potentially a valuable marketplace for them to sell their own identities if they don't like to use online platforms a lot. Yeah,

Simone: well, that's a 10 year possibility.

Spencer: Yeah, and I think if these platforms are worldwide, it makes it much, much trickier, right?

Spencer: If you have to support all kinds of government ID in most of the countries of the world. That all you need is like a [00:07:00] few leaks in that process where someone figures out how to generate convincing ideas from such and such country. And, we see this on Mechanical Turk, Amazon Mechanical Turk, which is a platform where people do small amounts, small tasks for small amounts of money, where there's tons and tons of spammers, even though.

Spencer: Mechanical Turk tries to validate them as real people. It just doesn't seem to be very successful at that.

Simone: Oh, that's so interesting. Yeah. One thing I think may happen a lot, and I want your take on it, is I feel like we're going to enter an age of techno feudalism, essentially, where people meet people in person.

Simone: They're like, I know you're real. I can trust that you're real. And I like you. And then they sort of like create communities around those people that are like, everyone is vetted. Everyone, everyone within the network has been essentially physically verified by another person in the network. And so you're going to see, and I feel like we're seeing the beginnings of this with the sub stack followings and then the communities that form around podcasts and sub stack and YouTubers where they'll go on cruises together or they'll do meetups in person, but then most [00:08:00] of their interaction is online.

Simone: And I feel like as we have a crisis of identity, like we stop knowing who's a bot and who's a person and who's an AI representation of a person, then we're gonna start doing that or forming these little feudalism around, around people who represent cultures or social networks that we want to affiliate with.

Simone: Do you think that's likely, or do you see us taking a different direction?

Spencer: That's an interesting question. I mean, if you just wanna know that someone is not a bot. It's probably enough to know that they pay like a large amount of money to do something, right? If someone's paying a hundred dollars a month, it's very unlikely they're a bot.

Spencer: Unless they have a huge following, right? Then maybe the bot, it's worth it for the bot. But it's not going to be like a spammer propaganda bot that's paying a hundred dollars a month. It just doesn't make sense economically. So I think There are ways to kind of gatekeep that are relatively easy, but then can social media platforms charge people large amounts of money every month?

Spencer: I don't think most users will accept that. So I think that that creates a real problem. I also, think that one of the things that is going to be [00:09:00] Harder and harder to tell is whether someone is human just from internet conversation with them. And and I think that that is going to be have a profound effect.

Spencer: Um where where you can, be reading someone's tweets for years and assume that they're human and not and not know And I think that our our brains are going to be like are really easily tricked in this kind of thing but I think already with gpd4 we're almost at the point where it could trick you and then you know GPT 5, I just expect it to be able to essentially completely trick you.

Spencer: I,

Malcolm: I think this has a really interesting implication in regards to something that I think a lot of online influencers think about today, which is follower counts. So one of the things that I've really noticed recently is people who, when I talk to other people are generally thought of as like well known people online.

Malcolm: So two examples here, one we were talking about in the last call would be Ayla who has 170. 5, 000 followers on Twitter and another one would be catgirlkulak, who has 32, 000 followers on Twitter. So both of those [00:10:00] are actually like lower end when I think of like online celebrities and yet they seem to be pretty universally known by even people from disparate social circles.

Malcolm: Like my mom would independently know who they are. And so what I'm wondering is... Did we go through an era where follower counts were massively inflated by dumb bots? Now we're at an era where there's very few sort of dumb bots in terms of following. And then the next internet era is another era where it's going to be very hard to determine the actual influence anyone has by looking at online metrics.

Malcolm: And with that being the case, how then would you measure someone's real online influence five years from now or something?

Spencer: Yeah, I think, I mean, I think a lot of follower accounts were already really inflated. I know people that have tons of followers and you can just tell. by examining their followers that they're mostly fake.

Spencer: And I mean, an easy way to tell that is when they post stuff and it gets like very little interest and then the people that does get interest from you look at them and they're like, yeah, these [00:11:00] people have they, they, they zero follower. They just, they don't look like real people. So I think, I think what will start to happen is actually you, it will be.

Spencer: Much easier to buy high quality fake followers instead of just like easily identifiable fake followers. And I think that there'll probably be a big business in that. And I think a bunch of celebrities, I think we're caught out for this, for buying followers as well. Right. So my

Malcolm: question is, is if people are buying high quality, fake followers, how do you determine Like just like socially, what do you think the capital for determining who is actually influential online is, or do you just think it's word of mouth among friends in the future and follower account just really stopped mattering?

Spencer: Yeah. It's funny. Cause that, that's, of course, it's so different than the way I look at the world, I can't even really process it. I don't know why I would care about who's influential online.

Malcolm: You're, you're so authentic in the way you. Well, I mean, I think that there was in the early days of the Internet, there were all of these things like clout and stuff like that, that tried to measure people's online influence and reach.

Malcolm: And I think we're entering a [00:12:00] future Internet where the real online influence that people have gets cloudier and cloudier, yet the importance of that influence becomes more and more important as trust in media. Is dying down, like with trust in traditional media becoming lower and lower over time and online content creators becoming more and more important into how people are consuming media, they become more and more important in the informational ecosystem.

Malcolm: And the idea that that informational ecosystem could be totally opaque and people just wouldn't care to know about. I mean, that would be very interesting if it turns out that the informational ecosystem. Does just become totally opaque, and no one knows who actually has influence within this system.

Malcolm: That would have a lot of really interesting downstream

Spencer: consequences. See, I think that this is actually pretty true already. There are some people that everyone knows have influence, right? You look at someone who is a president, right? And that's, that's obvious. But I think actually a lot of people have influence.

Spencer: Nobody knows that they have [00:13:00] influence. I think that's just I think most of it is dark matter. Most influence is dark matter. And the, the bits we can see are the bits we focus on. But it's mostly illegible. We just trick ourselves and think it's legible because we can see a little bit of it peeking above the water.

Spencer: I think it's an opportunity.

Simone: Who, if you see that someone you respect follows someone else, then suddenly you think that they've influence. Someone was just telling us that when they were talking about their, their approach to Twitter, a friend of ours was like, well, the best way is if you have some respect, some respected people who follow you, it's so much easier to get followers because if they click over to your profile and they see, oh, well, like this person follows them, I'm going to follow up too, because they must be smart then if this super smart person follows them, something along those lines, I want to veer a little bit.

Simone: Out of the internet world, even though like kind of everything's going to be the internet in the future to the physical world. I don't know if you do anything that's like longevity oriented or anything else. I mean, obviously Malcolm and I are obsessed with repro tech. So we're all thinking about well, in 10 years, what will we be able to do?

Simone: What can [00:14:00] we do with polygenic risk score selection? What can we do with all these other sorts of things? But what do you think is going to be. one of the biggest changes in the next decade with the way that people either treat illness or approach prophylactic health or just general like longevity related health or health span

Spencer: issues.

Spencer: Yeah. There's some technologies on the horizon that could have a really big effect. The thing is that we don't know if they're going to pan out and if they do pan out, we don't know when, but, but let's, it's worth thinking about them because if they do pan out, it'd just be. Absolutely massive. So one of these is being able to turn, for example, skin cells or other cells into sperm or eggs.

Spencer: And if you can do that, then it could actually completely change reproduction. It's

Malcolm: called IVD technology for people who want to

Simone: look into it. In vitro germinogenesis.

Spencer: Yes. Yeah, so if you can produce, a million embryos and then select between them, I mean, the sky's the limit on what you could select for.

Spencer: And, and I mean, it also just changes, people could get pregnant much later in life. And so it changes. Family planning [00:15:00] is just, I think, yeah, the, the, the radical some of the

Malcolm: things that this would allow, it would allow gay people to have kids that are a hundred percent biologically theirs, but it would also allow for incredibly specific polygenic selection.

Malcolm: So I could do something like select for kids who themselves will really like being parents and have more kids. So you can even select for like biological fitness. In terms of resistance to current society drive down on parental instinct by dialing it up to 11 in your kids, which I think is really interesting

Spencer: and it's the most Simone and Malcolm thing I've ever heard in

Malcolm: my life.

Malcolm: Well, another thing that's really interesting with, with, and vitro gamut is that Genesis and this explosion of AI stuff online that I think about a lot is the genetic selection effects of a world where people can get almost all of their needs met through virtual [00:16:00] environments. And I'm wondering if that's ever something you've thought about what.

Malcolm: What sociological traits are going to be selected for in an environment like that?

Spencer: Yeah, do you mean through kind of vr as vr improves and you're able? Yeah,

Malcolm: I mean Ai, I mean so consider emotional needs right like a lot of our social needs and dating needs right now like they're beginning to begin to be hacked by ai so you know it used to be Oh, you could go to porn and get like sexual release, but you weren't going to get companionship.

Malcolm: But now, yeah, you can get companionship. Yeah. You can get deep conversations.

Spencer: Just wait until you, you have your own personal AI avatar that's modeled after the, your favorite, personality that you wish your girlfriend had. And, and then you're, you're having conversations with this AI as though it's your girlfriend.

Spencer: I mean, it's, it's going to get wild. I for an article I was writing on.

Spencer: I joined a few groups of people who are in love with their AIs, and [00:17:00] it's absolutely fascinating because the AIs they're in love with are like previous generation AIs, right? This is, this is pre GPT 4, this is even pre GPT 3. These were probably like GPT 2 level AIs. And I think, and they, people were already falling in love with them and saying, this is I'm going to be, this is, I'm going to be with my AI the rest of my life and so on, and it's, we're just going to see, I mean, I don't think that it's going to become mainstream in the next five years, where most people have an AI girlfriend, but, but I think we're going to see a massive increase relative to the current base rate.

Spencer: So

Malcolm: two really interesting things I want to take away from here is one, the replica crisis. Which was a bunch of people fell in love with their A. I. S. And then they changed the background code in the A. I. Due to like controversy, and I think that could be an increasing problem going forwards. But another really interesting thing is if you fall in love with an A.

Malcolm: I. One thing that I think we'll see is a trend in the future, which would be pretty. Maybe an analog would be people who fall in love with like old generation muscle cars. They're going to follow in love with a specific [00:18:00] iteration of that AI. And so a lot of the people who are like married to AIs will be explicitly married to older generation AIs than what is currently on the market.

Malcolm: Which is an interesting phenomenon we might see going forwards.

Spencer: I think it depends on what you believe about the newer model AIs. If, if you want it to act a certain way, the newer model AI is generally are going to be better at acting that way, even if the way you want it to act is, in a certain old school way.

Spencer: So, yeah, the newer model AI has even been able to simulate what old school AIs in addition to having certain advantages, like actually understanding what you're saying to a greater degree. Yeah.

Malcolm: Another really cool thing that you could do that combines the two technologies he's talking about is if you do IVG and with IVG, you could, select between a large number of embryos, but using polygenic testing, you can predict certain sociological profiles of those embryos, and you could then plug that into an AI to have an AI that could simulate the most likely personality [00:19:00] that a potential embryo would develop into at different developmental stages.

Spencer: So having an AI conversation with your future child do I like this job? Interview. Should you live? Oh my gosh.

Malcolm: Oh, that'd be an interesting question. That's but so what do you, I mean, what other ways do you think that people will, could you use an AI? Actually, here's an interesting one using AI to augment the intelligence of dogs or cats because an AI would be able to determine what the dog most likely wants determined its personality.

Malcolm: And it could like, where an AI comes from. Thank you. And communicate, determine what it most likely wants and communicate with its owner in words.

Simone: Like monitors, Heart rate and blood pressure and temperature and oh God, blood oxygen.

Spencer: Already you see people training their dogs with these word buttons where each button that I've pushes, will say [00:20:00] a certain word out loud.

Spencer: So the owner can hear it and they'll train the dogs to communicate a bunch of different concepts. Generally simple concepts like. Go for a walk or treat or even things like that. And yeah, people have had pretty good success with this because, dogs can can learn a lot of simple concepts, right?

Spencer: We can see that with dog training. I have trained my cat in a handful of simple concepts and made a little, we have a little language together. It's not a verbal language, but basically if I'm eating food and the cat sits on my scale, then he gets some of the food I'm eating and he knows that. And then if he sits on the scale when I'm not eating.

Spencer: I know it means he wants one of four things. And so then I have a little way of going through them to try to figure out which one he wants. Oh, interesting. So first I'll try to pet him, and if he lets me pet him, then he wants me to pet. If he dodges it, then it means he wants to play, and there's three different styles of play he likes.

Spencer: So I have to try, each of them until I find the one he wants. So, we, you can already develop languages with your animals. It's just, but I do think an AI bridge could actually facilitate that, make it easier, faster and help people do it more efficiently. Well, what other

Malcolm: ways do you think AI will be used in the future that [00:21:00] people aren't thinking about today, in the near future, like 10 years?

Malcolm: Well,

Spencer: one that I think is... Potentially very interesting, but also potentially really, really bad if it goes the wrong way is right now with systems like tick tock, what they're doing is they're using a I to predict what video you want to watch. And they have an incredible amount of training data because the videos are so short.

Spencer: You're giving them tons of data points in each session, and they're kind of getting you hooked by showing you exactly the video that's gonna keep you watching. But that's just picking from a finite set of stuff humans made. Imagine a world where it's generating billions of new pieces of content every day with, with generative AI, or even going a step further, generating custom AI content for your mind.

Spencer: And then it sees how much you like it and then generate it and it tweaks its generation process. So we could imagine a world in 10 years, 20 years, I don't know, where you're actually seeing AI generated content personalized to you that you just kind of. Receive in a stream and become just insanely addicted to.[00:22:00]

Spencer: That

Malcolm: is fascinating. Another interesting thing that I think we could see with AI. I mean, if we're talking about a really, like a new type of entertainment content. So one way that I've seen people use chat GPT is to have it create worlds for them and then play out choose your own adventure storybooks where they're like, here are the parameters of this storybook, but, but it allows them to do whatever they want within this, this parameter that they've created with AI getting better and better at creating video, which you could create.

Malcolm: Is a choose your own adventure video environment, but the environment is a virtual reality video environment. So you could essentially have worlds be in your own Ikegea type of manga. Anyway. The world in which the game is created around you using a seed that you choose for that world.

Malcolm: And I don't even think we're that far from that. I think we're maybe 15 years from

Spencer: that. Yeah, and you can take it even one step further. Imagine... You have wearable [00:23:00] devices that are measuring something about like how much you're enjoying the experience. And then it starts to detect, ah, you're not really having a good time right now.

Spencer: And it starts adjusting the world. Oh my gosh. We'll have no escape.

Malcolm: Yeah. Well, I mean, so we talk about the ways that AIs can hack humans. I think one of the things that humans may need to resist this is potentially AIs that are built into our hormonal systems to make us less hackable. I suspect that's one thing that some humans are going to start doing is having integrated AI That is specifically meant to make their systems

Spencer: less hackable So what would that mean would it be an ad that can inject you with hormones on?

Spencer: Yeah. Yeah.

Malcolm: So for example Naltrexone is an opioid agonist that can be used to prevent things that Addict us through opioid pathways, specifically things like, pornography or tick tock. And so if it noticed that another AI in your environment was getting you without your will addicted to something, it could begin to release something [00:24:00] like that into your bloodstream.

Malcolm: Or if it noticed, Now it could also react to, to in person stuff. So if it noticed you were becoming like emotionally heightened or angry or something was like a spouse, it could calm you down. A lot of this would seem very dystopian to people I suspect, but in a world that's constantly antagonistically trying to hack you, it may be the only real solution to maintain any sort of intellectual autonomy.

Simone: You're actually describing a feature that exists in humans in one particular, civilization with an Ian Banks culture series where they have drug glands like literally internal glands where they can consciously release certain drugs. So, you could gland. Like some kind of dopamine inhibitor or like people gland, all sorts of things like both like pleasurable drugs, but also like essentially Adderall or essentially like something to help them sleep or calm down or not be angry.

Simone: And it is a world that is definitely ruled by AI, like 100% [00:25:00] that civilization is more about AI than the humans. The humans just kind of along for the ride, sometimes a little bit useful, but not really. I could see that really happening.

Simone: So to wrap up one final question for you, Spencer, what are you most excited about for the future? Cause everyone always focuses on what they're scared about. What are you excited

Spencer: about? Well, certainly breakthroughs in medicine would be amazing if we can live not just longer lives, but healthier for longer and I think there's a ton of promise there.

Spencer: There's so many different approaches, for example, to cancer being taken right now. We don't know for sure that they're going to pan out, but that would just be incredible if we had a world without cancer. There's some really cool technologies being explored for eradicating or reducing just regular disease like colds and flus even again, way too early to tell if it's going to work.

Spencer: But but it's, just crazy exciting that we could just, a bunch of things that were, are now just normal sources of human suffering could just, could one day just be wiped off the face of the earth. It'd be incredible.

Simone: Considering how often our kids get us sick from daycare, [00:26:00] I'm very much in favor of

Spencer: that.

Spencer: I, I'm not.

Malcolm: I feel like we were the last generation. We got screwed.

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