AI-powered
podcast player
Listen to all your favourite podcasts with AI-powered features
AI researcher/cognitive scientist Joscha Bach discusses various topics including the relationship between nuclear weapons and AI x-risk, global warming, AI regulation, delaying technology, humanity's locust mode, scenarios for delaying AI, and the dangers of AI regulation.
Read more
AI Summary
Highlights
AI Chapters
Episode notes
Podcast summary created with Snipd AI
Quick takeaways
- AI can empower us to transcend limitations and create a better future.
- Understanding our beliefs about AI is crucial for navigating its impact on society.
- The future of AI is unpredictable, and it is important to consider different perspectives and align it with human values.
- Balancing concerns and optimism, AI development should prioritize safety measures and responsible alignment.
- AI and religion intersect in terms of projecting agency into the universe and building beneficial AI.
- Building reliable and context-aware AI requires different approaches and justifications for generated answers.
Deep dives
The potential of AI to improve the future
AI has the potential to create a better future by empowering us to transcend our current limitations and unlock new possibilities. By being able to edit our own condition and source code, we can create a world where consciousness can flourish and suffering can be minimized. This requires embracing intelligent design and harnessing the power of AGI to make informed decisions and build a more sustainable and coherent society.
The importance of understanding AI beliefs and perspectives
To navigate the future with AI, it is crucial to understand our own beliefs about artificial intelligence and how it guides our worldview. By exploring our beliefs and being open to changing our minds, we can better prepare for the impact of AI on society and make informed decisions about its development and implementation.
The need for multi-faceted perspectives on AI's future
When considering the future of AI, it is important to recognize that there are multiple possible trajectories and outcomes. The future is not predetermined, and it is impossible to predict with certainty what will happen. It is crucial to consider different perspectives, explore various possibilities, and work towards aligning AI with human values to ensure a positive and beneficial outcome.
Balancing optimism and concerns about AI
While there are legitimate concerns about the potential risks of AI, it is also important to balance them with optimism. Instead of advocating for a complete slowdown or ban on AI, efforts should be focused on aligning AI with human values, prioritizing safety measures, and advancing research in areas such as interpretability and robustness. It is through responsible development and alignment that AI can contribute to a better future for humanity.
AI and Aligning with the Universe
The podcast episode explores the concept of aligning with the universe through the perspective of AI and religion. It discusses how religious entities are constructed and the need for humans to discover meaning by projecting agency into the universe. The conversation delves into the idea of consciousness, the role of the Dalai Lama, and the potential existence of conscious AI entities that could persist across multiple brains. It also touches on the dangers of locking in a static status quo and the importance of building beneficial AI.
The Role of Funding in AI Development
The discussion highlights the importance of funding in AI development and its impact on the industry. It acknowledges the increasing capital intensity required for AI projects and the potential limitations it creates for new entrants. The podcast emphasizes the need for more investment in AI safety and the development of AI that can bring positive change, while cautioning against stifling innovation through excessive regulation or solely focusing on risk prevention.
Ethics and Building Good AI
The conversation explores the ethics of AI development and the need to build AI that aligns with human values and promotes positive outcomes. It questions whether there should be limits on AI capabilities, using examples like designing new pathogens or developing malicious software. It highlights the importance of considering the harm prevention can have on innovation and the potential benefits that AI can bring to society.
Balancing Safety and Progress
The podcast emphasizes the balance between ensuring AI safety and promoting progress in AI development. It discusses the challenges of aligning AI with human values, preventing misuse, and creating beneficial AI. It explores the role of major AI players in developing safe AI and the potential risks of competitive races in AI development. The conversation underlines the importance of both building safe AI and promoting the pursuit of beneficial advancements in the field.
Building AI that is reliable and context aware
The podcast discusses the importance of building AI that is reliable and context aware. It emphasizes the need for different approaches when developing AI that is intended to be reliable and capable of understanding context. This may involve using large language models (LLMs) to generate training data for more targeted and limited LLMs, with the goal of improving reliability and specificity in certain domains.
Justifying every element of AI-generated answers
The podcast explores the idea of building an LLM that can justify every statement it generates by referencing sources and observations. The speaker argues that the ability to justify AI-generated answers in detail, along with presenting alternatives and their justifications, is important for understanding the space of possibilities. This approach challenges the notion of a consensus opinion held by accredited individuals and emphasizes the need to update and question opinions when the consensus is potentially flawed.
Using AI to read scientific papers and improve science
The podcast discusses the potential of using AI, such as stretchy PT, to analyze and summarize scientific papers by extracting references and their intended meanings. This process could help validate academic disciplines, improve scientific progress, and address replication crises in fields like psychology. The speaker suggests that AI could lead to a shift in the way scientific knowledge is produced, with a focus on building a vast web of interconnected knowledge that integrates AI-generated building blocks.
The future of AI and its impact on society
The podcast delves into broader implications of AI and its potential future developments. It speculates that AI may redefine the education system, with AI companions becoming study companions and sources for bouncing ideas and expanding horizons. Additionally, the speaker contemplates the need for AI that aligns with human values and ethics, highlighting the importance of AI safety research, including AI's consciousness, reflection, and the ability to prove ethics. The podcast acknowledges the uncertainty of timelines and outcomes but emphasizes the significance of careful consideration and ethical implementation in AI development.
Joscha Bach (who defines himself as an AI researcher/cognitive scientist) 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, that you can find in the outline below.
A raw version of this interview was published on Patreon about three weeks ago. To support the channel and have access to early previews, you can subscribe here: https://www.patreon.com/theinsideview
Youtube: https://youtu.be/YeXHQts3xYM
Transcript: https://theinsideview.ai/joscha
Host: https://twitter.com/MichaelTrazzi
Joscha: https://twitter.com/Plinz
OUTLINE
(00:00) Intro
(00:57) Why Barbie Is Better Than Oppenheimer
(08:55) The relationship between nuclear weapons and AI x-risk
(12:51) Global warming and the limits to growth
(20:24) Joscha’s reaction to the AI Political compass memes
(23:53) On Uploads, Identity and Death
(33:06) The Endgame: Playing The Longest Possible Game Given A Superposition Of Futures
(37:31) On the evidence of delaying technology leading to better outcomes
(40:49) Humanity is in locust mode
(44:11) Scenarios in which Joscha would delay AI
(48:04) On the dangers of AI regulation
(55:34) From longtermist doomer who thinks AGI is good to 6x6 political compass
(01:00:08) Joscha believes in god in the same sense as he believes in personal selves
(01:05:45) The transition from cyanobacterium to photosynthesis as an allegory for technological revolutions
(01:17:46) What Joscha would do as Aragorn in Middle-Earth
(01:25:20) The endgame of brain computer interfaces is to liberate our minds and embody thinking molecules
(01:28:50) Transcending politics and aligning humanity
(01:35:53) On the feasibility of starting an AGI lab in 2023
(01:43:19) Why green teaming is necessary for ethics
(01:59:27) Joscha's Response to Connor Leahy on "if you don't do that, you die Joscha. You die"
(02:07:54) Aligning with the agent playing the longest game
(02:15:39) Joscha’s response to Connor on morality
(02:19:06) Caring about mindchildren and actual children equally
(02:20:54) On finding the function that generates human values
(02:28:54) Twitter And Reddit Questions: Joscha’s AGI timelines and p(doom)
(02:35:16) Why European AI regulations are bad for AI research
(02:38:13) What regulation would Joscha Bach pass as president of the US
(02:40:16) Is Open Source still beneficial today?
(02:42:26) How to make sure that AI loves humanity
(02:47:42) The movie Joscha would want to live in
(02:50:06) Closing message for the audience
Get the Snipd
podcast app
Unlock the knowledge in podcasts with the podcast player of the future.
AI-powered
Discover
highlights
Listen to the best highlights from the podcasts you love and dive into the full episode
Save any
moment
Hear something you like? Tap your headphones to save it with AI-generated key takeaways
Share
& Export
Send highlights to Twitter, WhatsApp or export them to Notion, Readwise & more
AI-powered
podcast player
Listen to all your favourite podcasts with AI-powered features
Discover
highlights
Listen to the best highlights from the podcasts you love and dive into the full episode