Salim: no mechanism to slow down, and P(doom) versus P(abundance)

What's your take on this? I mean, you know, can we slow down? I mean, is that, you know, a wish? Is that, you know, sort of like uh just giving himself an out in the future? How do you think about that?

Well, I'll say it again. I've repeated this a hundred times. I see no mechanism by which we can slow this down. Like, zero. And it's arguable nor should we, right? Um, AI is going to move at a particular pace. Uh, intelligence wants to be free. Um, it's going to hop — it's hopped from uh self-organizing cells to — through evolution — to us, to now information technologies, and this is a progression that is natural. Um, and we should just go, okay, it's happening, and let's just observe it and marvel at it.

Where we — I think we keep making the mistake of anthropomorphizing this. I will go back to the comment I've made before, that we're building, or helping deliver or usher in, a type of intelligence that is different and alien and separate and complementary to human intelligence, not replicative. We've evolved for 4 billion years to do two things: survive and procreate. And AI is not restricted by those, and therefore we shouldn't try and cram it into our objective functions as human beings. Set it free and let it do its thing.

I look — I use the analogy of PageRank, which scans billions of web pages to kind of create signal from noise. That's a completely complementary model to human intelligence, not replicative. Uh, the fact that we can kind of create a huge amount and solve legacy problems that we've not been able to solve, I think it's just fantastic.

We — you know, people worry about — we're going to talk about P(doom), I think, in this episode, right? Um, uh, what's that?

Well, P(doom), the probability of, like, AI taking everything out.

I think we don't do enough to talk about P(abundance) uh and P(fabulousness) that's coming along. Like, why focus only on P(doom)? We're so geared towards that negative, right? And so I think the fact that we're doing all this stuff and solving all those problems — bring it on. Let them go. They'll figure things out. It's going to be unbelievable.

So I really struggle with this kind of uh alignment issue. I don't see any mechanism for controlling it or stopping it. It's going to break our world government structures, and that's a good thing given the mess that we're in right now globally, and I think we just need to get there as fast as we can.