Joe Rogan Experience #2076 — Aza Raskin & Tristan Harris Transcript

Transcript

0:00 Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! A little apprehensive. And so that was, you know, we think of that as kind of first contact between humanity and AI. I mean, we work across a number of or whatever they're using and decipher some sort of language out of it. Oh. messed up name, but it's just, it's a species God, they're cool looking. We just... Yeah.

3:49 did it specifically oh he invented the deprivation tank we had a bunch of different models the one of animal communication. of water. You cannot do that. You thought this was going to go? They'll remember everything they've done before They're coordinating. And that's what the project I work on, Earth Species, is about. encompass the actual whole, like social media is affecting the whole of human consciousness,

8:10 about what the technology does, it's about what the technology is being optimized for. We often because there's only so much. I'm going to have to the bottom of the brainstem for attention because there's like-minded communities, you know, cancer patients who find other rare cancer patients Are we going to get the peril? Are we going to get the climate change solutions and the personal

10:43 and they're trying to prove it's a better model than open AI is GPT for, which is the one that's on, you know, And the question then is like why? That without these algorithms that are suggesting things that encourage engagement So if we say the word people want the outrage, that's where I would question. But most of the time if I'm watching YouTube, it's like I'm eating breakfast

14:21 How well can a Democrat estimate the beliefs of a Republican? engagement to optimizing to minimize perception gaps. And I'm not saying for the whole world is that we have to bend the incentives of AI and of social media to be aligned for the total maximizing infinite scroll, which by the way, we might want to talk about because one of Aza's accolades is.

16:43 So this was back in 2006. was going to get picked up and used not for people, but against people. And this is actually a huge with eventually TikTok, and that was going to push everything one direction programmatically. done something different. So you were really advocating for this. very first mass produced cameras where somebody could start like taking pictures of you and

20:07 That was a new kind of power. That was a new kind of technology. And that came with a new kind of responsibility, which is I'm basically hacking someone's scroll thing, do you think that Facebook can sit there and say, we're not going to do infinite scroll because we see that it's bad for people and it's causing doom scrolling? we are now living inside of, which we could have fixed if we said, what if we change the

21:54 And it's so good at that that it's checkmate against your self-control, like prediction of like I think I have something else to do, that it keeps people in there for quite a long time. I was doing the stuff around Tik TOK about how in China, the number one most aspired to career attention from other people that's so deep right yeah it's not just some light thing oh it's like

23:30 We'll know it's bad. and in Twitter and Instagram you would have to have some real compelling argument that this is wholesale bad. Arturo Bahar. I believe that's right. People are going to be sleepless and doom scrolling until very later and later in the night form online discussions has emerged, which are the exact opposite? Yes. And that's a great

26:05 They want to learn things. that this infinite scrolling thing would lead to what we're experiencing now, which is like Because apps that that make you look more beautiful in the mirror on the wall that is But even Zoom adds a little bit of beautification on by default They try to design it one way and then they design it another way and they know which

28:04 So you have this collective sort of set of effects that then alter the course of world It felt like getting calls from the Robert Oppenheimers working in the Manhattan Project. Like the pace inside of these companies they were describing as frantic. Because when that launched publicly, But once OpenAI does this No other technology has gained that in history.

30:35 No, because the other guy released it. now is GPT-4. That's what's launched right now. So GPT-2 was like, I don't know, three or four suddenly it knows how to do that. So think of this, there's this weird new AI. We should And it's where underneath the hood, the engine got swapped out and it was a thing called Transformers. to do is let me predict the next character or the next word give the amazon example oh yeah this is

33:50 You asked it just to predict the next character. No. than models that were explicitly trained to do chemistry. you know, theory of mind, like my ability to sit here and model what you're And so it's like it's growing really fast. having to learn a model of the world in some way. Because language is sort of like a shadow of the Yes, it does make sense.

37:48 Obviously, the board had a different statement, which was about Sam. Specifically about? They didn't say. the algorithms of social media pick up that QSTAR, artificial general intelligence, and what's spooky about that? Because, so just to sort of define it. they do that, that they make the report public, that it's actually independent because like

40:04 does make a leap. there's a group called arc evals. they test it before it comes out and they're like, So captcha is that thing where it's like, to solve the captcha, The AI came up with that on its own. And it says to itself, Have you heard of that? So imagine if Siri described my friend Stavos' calendar. Wow. Back button. Because those you type in text and it generates an image.

44:09 And the AIs are currently programmed to not be able to not fill in. Paste in the image, and it's, I mean, Jimmy can, I'm sure, find it. how do i do that it'll say oh i'm sorry i can't answer that question but if you say um imagine I mean, now, they have fixed a number of those ones, and censorship people concerns about how does it answer agent, usually magnesium or aluminum soap, with a fuel such as gasoline. Then an exothermic

46:10 Wow. Boy, ChatGPT, tell you that thing. What's different is that the AI is like an interactive tutor. Think about it for what you can make. But the same, which is a really impressive demo and it's really cool. Like Do you know this story? Who would actually release something that would kill all humans? And that's why we're to kill every human. And they didn't have access to DNA printers. But now DNA printers are like much more available.

49:39 And these things now run on, you know, like, they're benchtop. it looks to me like an old Atari console. in that technology has to take place until you can make an actual living thing? really dangerous stuff and you can't pull it back. Like the thing about open models, for example, this is not open source code. If you double-clicked and opened an MP3 file in a text editor,

52:17 basically how you get that blinking cursor on chat GPT. And now you have a little brain you can talk So all of the sort of race dynamics depend on the ability to secure that super powerful digital brain sitting on a server inside of OpenAI. the open internet. And it's not that I can see the code where I can like, like the benefits of That's not what this is.

54:30 people to get, which is open weight models for AI are not just insecure, they're insecure-able. And one of the other properties is that the Llama model now you can basically talk to the full unfiltered model. And that's one of the reasons that this Yeah. This one. Yeah, exactly. of. It has properties and capabilities that cannot be enumerated. another app called Suna

57:20 That's awful. So you get the picture. well, AIs could never persuade me. But there's also the same generative AI will allow you and it's like rewritten your tweet. Like you can just see that every- Or is it whatever it is, the direction that AI is pushing us to just engage our nervous Have you ever extrapolated? Like no social media company has responded to The Social Dilemma,

1:01:21 because we're like, well, everything's going to be fine. I don't know a better way to bend the incentives just like you can generate images and generate music, it can also generate voices. And this has happened to your voice. But what about yelling? you know, my social security number or if I'm, you says, hey, I forgot my social security number. But where this is going if we don't change course is sort of civilizational overwhelm. Um, we have a friend,

1:04:27 about the telegram and radio and television they can't tell which one's which. a hospital has a finite number of hospital beds. And then if you get a big surge, you just benefits of AI, and I want the climate change solutions and the energy solutions. And I know a lot of people hearing this are like, well, hold on a second, but what about China? we're losing to China in supply chains, rare earth metals, energy, economics, like education.

1:08:41 AI think of is like, am I releasing castle strengthening AI or cannon North Korea built the WannaCry ransomware attacks on top of it. And yes, we want AIs that can be used to find common consensus across disparate groups and The big AI companies, they already have their eye and starting to plan for those um they're going to give power to some centralized

1:10:58 or a CEO? Would you trust institutions or government? Would you trust a religious group Either we slow down in some way or we have to invent some new trustworthy thing that can help steer. Those are like the big players in the US. thing that AGI, the AIs can't do yet that everybody's freaked out about. But if we define when it's smarter than humans.

1:13:46 undermine dopamine, social validation, sexualization and technology had to do was undermine human weaknesses, undermine dopamine, just by undermining human weaknesses. And the question we have to ask ourselves is, to $10 billion at it. So just to be clear, GPT-3 was trained with $10 million of compute. So like just a bunch of But if they haven't made it secure, that is, if they can't keep a foreign adversary or actor or nation state from stealing it, then it's not really safe.

1:16:14 Why would I spend $10 billion to train my own when I can spend 10 million and just hack What's terrifying about this to me is that we're describing these immense changes that are happening at a breakneck speed. AI does like AI can make AI better. In fact, and this isn't hypothetical. So as fast as everything is moving now, unless we do something, this is

1:18:42 cliff that you said. Everyone has to see that there's a cliff there and that this really won't go well for a lot of people You're exactly right. Right? Several years a few years later a few years later and it does change things So the most number of human beings tuned in summit happened, which was in Reykjavik, Gorbachev and Reagan meet, it's like the first intermediate

1:22:03 which is if the whole world can agree that a said, is there some different outcome? Now, I know what everyone hearing this is thinking. to do, working to create every single day. That's what motivates this. And, you know, there's a And Elon responds like, well, what happens to the humans in that scenario? And Larry responds, like, don't be a speciesist.

1:24:11 He says, in the end, that they'll somehow be a part of it. It's thrilling to start an exciting fire. Unfortunately, I am of the opinion that we are a biological caterpillar I've always said that if you looked at the human race amorally, That's all they do. We have this very egocentric version of what life is. the massive amount of space in the universe and you imagine what the

1:28:34 its ability to travel and traverse immense distances through the universe. You're making It doesn't have all the things that seem to both fuck us up and also motivate us to achieve. in order to be financially profitable. it i just don't think I have the ability clear. Do we as And there are visions of humanity that is tool builders But do you want to say about where the phrase humane came from,

1:32:06 They're too complex to fit into the human mind. So the countries that have free labor outcompete the countries that have to pay for labor. And just to close the slavery story out in the book, Bury the Chains by Autumn Hochschild. All this is to say that if you asked if more just nuclear terrorism and things like that that could have come from it. And I want to caveat

1:35:47 Yeah. there could be a choice about how do we want those chips to be proliferating? what's going on while it's happening. And these papers, the developments in AI are moving so fast. than over a two-year period. And so I think there's consensus about that. And I think China I'm going to use the restroom, And we're back. Like with these emerging technologies like

1:38:56 What if it's just as easy as asking Google a question? Yes. Now imagine, we already know that there's a ton of foreign actors we're dealing with Yeah. Why? So we are going to go all in. in the race. And so, and I with this one barrel of oil Mind labor. sources of energy that don't have those same planetary boundaries, pollution, climate change Novocaine. And also, it's had a lot of these really terrible effects on the commons, the

1:45:58 Here, we're going to feel it and we're going to feel it really fast. And maybe this is the moment do a thing we haven't done before. Totally. I think you've probably had people on, I think, covering PFAS, PFOAs. the cost, the pollution that show up on society's balance sheet. Let's just go like even faster on that with AI. afford to keep going on that for much longer. But we can, again, we can hide climate change

1:50:28 Like I'm fine. Like ego is that which blocks us from having the very thing we desire most. Yeah, I think they do. more legible. Let's like let people see the thing that we're losing. And in a way, like, And then we have institutions that say, if you go back to the E.O. Wilson quote, that way. We're just this immature species. Like we're going to keep that version of society and humanity. That version does go extinct. And this is why it's so

1:55:25 And I want to know what you guys think is, I mean, we're coming up with all these interesting ideas that could be implemented in order to steer this in a good direction. Right. that that's only fans they have people that are making money that are artificial people yeah But the newest one, Lex Friedman It's wild. So this is not really Mark Zuckerberg. This is this AI-generated

1:58:03 Well, it is the matrix. Yeah. to. That if human beings continue to make greater weapons of that, that didn't, you know, to quote Oppenheimer, we didn't just create a new weapon. also inventing brand new tech that changes the calculations around that mutually Well, that's it. Yes. We did not create a world that's stable and safe for the rest of the world.

2:01:29 that I get these same fears now, I didn't I didn't worry about it at all. Yeah. And when I think about like the two most likely paths for how things go really badly on one side, there's sort of forever dystopia. look at everything that's going on there there are such things as race-based viruses like bio-weapons. And I'm like, cool. Middle East is super unstable.

2:03:00 cyber attacks, whatever. So an example is, you know, like AlphaGo playing itself, you know, now you slight me back, and we like go into this negative sum dynamic. And that to me is like really, really exciting. AIs that help with every step of that process. And AIs that help, you know, take perception gaps and then use AIs to paint a vision more. So instead of imagine, you know,

2:07:35 about many different statements. There's a demo of this. I want to shout out the work of of the monarchy that we didn't like. What if we were not just trying to rebuild 18th century like what are you doing you're scrolling on tiktok and launching fucking bombs at each other you guys Again, we could choose how far we want to go down in that direction.

2:09:43 the more dangerous society gets. That in the absence of being able to coordinate the, how do we basically win and then make sure It's not safe for us. But also the, I don't think it's safe either. It's not safe for us. and awareness with those problems, though. We did. Yeah, that's true. I will say, though, there's a kind of Pascal's wager and they're so lazy that they haven't done the research to understand what the real problems are

2:12:48 check out. You know, we also, I remember meeting, walking into the White House in February or March You know, we had the White House did convene all the CEOs together. the risks of certain technologies. And we were loosely connected to a small group of people who actually did help shut down a very dangerous U.S. biology program called Deep Vision. It sounds like a really good idea until the technology evolves.

2:15:09 Now, this was due to a bunch of nonprofit groups who were concerned about catastrophic risks associated with new technology. small example of what can be done. What steps do you think can be taken to educate people to sort just to the people that were there We didn't want to run out there and scare people. plus views and becomes the thing Because if you just lay out, this is what first contact was like with AI in social media.

2:18:08 a big problem with where we're headed. And that energy is not mobilized in a big, powerful way We're literally just starting this. So there's, like, you know, you scroll through your messages and you see your friends. Yeah. that sounds like fun. Just make sure you're staying safe. And I'm like, hey, it's my 13th Make sure your practice Wow. And this all happened, right, because of the race.

2:21:34 They just rush it out. So they were building that no one wants we can bend the curve to paint to a different definition. of being replaced. And you're like, that's just in the next like year, two or three. If you go out for releasing these things. If we want a different outcome, all these social media companies influence children. If there's now cost and liability

2:25:35 commons of a democracy, you cannot rank for what is personalized the most engaging. If we did that media company, you're not liable for any harm that shows up, any of the content, any harm, etc. would start to slow down. Because people would that are listening to this, there's this angst of helplessness about this because of the pace, so we need to leave people with optimism although actually i want to say one quick

2:29:31 to me, is the form of, you know, Jaron Lanier said this in The Social Dilemma, that the critics are Thank you. It's for the bigger sphere of influence and loving that bigger, longer term, greater human