Should We Be Fearful of Artificial Intelligence?

I think some people do and that's the real fear. Some people like this guy who's advocating for a digital god, like they do know where it's going because they actually work in technology and it's not freaking them out. But it's like Columbus, you know? Like everybody thought the world was flat. He got a couple of people to get on a boat and we didn't know what that was going to mean. See if we can find where Elon talks about this part because that was the most fascinating to me. I mean the reason OPI existed all is that... This is what he said earlier but it's going to continue. At Larry's, I used to be close friends and I would stay at his house in Palo Alto and I would talk to him the night about it. These are the people that are at the pinnacle of technology. They're having serious worries. And the very summer part of the world is that Larry was not taking AI safety seriously enough. And what did he say about it? He really seemed to be one sort of digital super intelligence, basically digital god if you will, as soon as possible. He wanted that? Yes. He's made many public statements over the years. The whole goal of Google is what's called AGI, artificial general intelligence or artificial super intelligence. And I agree with him that there's great potential for good but there's also potential for bad. And so if you've got some radical new technology you want to try to take a set of actions that maximize probably it will do good and minimize probably it will do bad things. Yes. It can't just be health leather. It's just go barreling forward and hope for the best. And then at one point I said, well what about who we're going to make sure humanity's okay here? And... I'm not going to laugh. And then he called me a species. Did he use that term? Yes. And there were witnesses. I wasn't the only one there when he called me a species. And so I was like, okay, that's it. I've... Yes, I'm a species. Okay. You got me. I'm one of you. Yeah, I'm fully a species. That's a funny line. Busted. So that was the last straw. At the time... How wild is that? It is wild. But these are the people that are in control of this thing. And I think there's also this race that's going on. There's all these different companies around the world that are trying to develop artificial general intelligence first. Because I think having it first, if you have a digital god first, you have a massive advantage. Right. Over everyone and everything. Right. Yeah. I mean, if you think that tech companies have a lot of power now, imagine if tech companies unleash a digital god. I mean, they literally might be the very seeds that created god. I really believe that now the digital universe is probably the most sought after god. Most people probably spend more time advocating for whatever they're seeing online anywhere than they do for their church or their... I think that already exists. People like Elon see that and there should be a race for it. I don't see it as... You know, everything, everything can have a really dark, bad side. And we can't control it. So I think even talking about it the way you're talking about it is scary. And I don't know that it's... Can I scare you with this? Let's scare me with this. This is on 60 Minutes last night. They did a whole piece. Oh, that's right. I saw this. One AI program spoke in a foreign language it was never trained to know. This mysterious behavior called emergent properties has been happening where AI unexpectedly teaches itself a new skill. Like a minute in he says something that I think is pretty... This is bananas. Go ahead. This is on CBS. This is called emergent properties. Some AI systems are teaching themselves skills that they weren't expected to have. How this happens is not well understood. For example, one Google AI program adapted on its own after it was prompted in the language of Bangladesh, which it was not trained to know. We discovered that with very few amounts of prompting in Bengali, it can now translate all of Bengali. So now all of a sudden we now have a research effort where we're now trying to get to a thousand languages. There is an aspect of this which we call, all of us in the field call it as a black box. You know, you don't fully understand. And you can't quite tell why it said this or why it got wrong. We have some ideas and our ability to understand this gets better over time, but that's where the state of the art is. You don't fully understand how it works and yet you've turned it loose on society? Let me put it this way. I don't fully understand how a human mind works either. Was it from that black box we wondered? What else are they saying here? They wrote a poem and they're asking why did it write that way? Why does that scare you guys so much? Listen, it's alive. It's not whether or not it's scary. It's a kind of life form. But here's the thing. I am really fearful of humanity. I'm really afraid of us. Let's hope that's not afraid of us too. It decides to get rid of us. Or make us better. Or make us better. And that's a 50-50. And I would like to, you know, I have enough negativity and I'm not talking, it's not about me. But going on in my mind where if I don't know and I'm assuming that it is a higher power than me, not God, but it is a higher power than me, that maybe for whatever reason let's trust that it is a benefit and not something that's horrible. Well, I certainly hope. I hope it's a benefit. You just played for me, didn't scare me. It doesn't scare me. The fact that it is artificial intelligence. What is intelligence? Just by virtue of what it is. So it's learning things that we can't explain. It's intelligence. That's what intelligence is. I think we're using this word in a weird way, the word scared. Because I don't think that it's scared like I'm scared of wolves. It's not that kind of scared. It's scared like, ooh, I realize where this is going. And it might not even be in our lifetime. But you didn't describe a good place. Well, it's not a good place for us, but maybe it's a good place for the universe. Do you invest in Bitcoin? Do you invest in Bitcoin? In fact, I've got some Bitcoin. Okay. But that's not what I'm thinking about. I'm thinking about maybe this is what happens with intelligence everywhere. That maybe intelligence realizes there's limitations to biology and biological evolution is very time consuming. It takes a long time to get adaptation for things to change. It takes decades. It takes centuries. It takes thousands of years. But this could happen in weeks and hours and minutes, especially if it knows how to make a better version. And you don't think that's scary? What you just proclaimed? You keep saying scary. I do. It's just the thing that's happening. 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