Hey, this is Paris. I hope you enjoyed the Data Vampire series that we did back in October. It's had a fantastic response. And for that series, I spoke to a bunch of experts. And now we're releasing the full-length versions of those interviews for our supporters over on Patreon.com. And I wanted to give you a preview of what those interviews sound like. So you can consider whether to go to patreon.com slash techwon'save us, become a supporter yourself, so you can learn even more about the important topics that we dug into in that special series. So enjoy this clip from my interview with Julia Black. As we move forward to OpenAI, when that company is founded, part of, you know, I guess its founding mission is to build AGI, artificial general intelligence. Like this interest is there from the beginning. Did you get a sense of why Sam Altman is so interested in artificial general intelligence and achieving something like that?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean, I think in writing about Sam, I spoke with him and profiled him in April 2023. And in kind of getting to know him in that process, I got a sense of his view of the world. And one thing Sam and I have in common is we're both big sci-fi fans. One thing we don't have in common is actually wanting to see a world that is based on those sci-fi realities. One of the most telling things in the process of that piece was discovering this one short story that Sam loves called The Gentle Seduction, which just depicts a world basically built on superintelligence, the kind that he claims to be building. And I think in speaking with people who know him and speaking with him, I started to realize how literally he sees that. You know, he really wants to see a world in which humans and machines are kind of starting to merge, and we get to build this seemingly impossible intergalactic reality built on these capabilities, which are just so much exponentially beyond what we're capable of now. Which again is just the kind of thing you're used to seeing in these sci-fi movies, even an alien, which I saw the new Alien Romulus. I was like, oh, that's the world that Sam thinks we're building.
unknownThat's odd.
SPEAKER_01But you know, like when you actually hear them talk about their ideas, like especially about the interplanetary species and the understanding the meaning of life through technology, like, yeah, I do think that they they really exist in this kind of sci-fi realm.
SPEAKER_00Do you think they would be the kind of people who are like, no, we need to investigate and learn more about the xenomorph, we can't just get rid of it?
SPEAKER_01Probably. Yeah, I mean, of course, those are all cautionary tales. And um but I'm not always sure the messages are received by everyone in Silicon Valley. But yeah, I mean, truly on a basic level, like you've got the synthetics, which are pretty much the exact type of AI agents that people who talk about AGI and superintelligence would like to create. And then everything that that level of knowledge and computing allows us to do, which could be to, you know, make these spacecrafts that are capable of uh interplanetary travel. And it's just stuff that I don't think your average person particularly wants or cares about or thinks about, but seems to be the actual end goal for some people in Silicon Valley.
SPEAKER_00I don't know. I think we all want to live on a uh sunless mining planet, seeing our friends and family die of cancers.
SPEAKER_01That's such an insignificant part of the population, right?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. You know, when we think about how these people are approaching AI and AGI and whatever, like we have these differing narratives that I think that, you know, especially in the first year of you know, the AI hype and the Chat GPT stuff that we've been seeing around generative AI, where on the one hand, you know, there was a lot of talk about the threats that AI could pose to us, you know, thinking of this kind of long-term future thing where they could become conscious and you know become a threat to us as a result of that. But also a lot of discussion about how, wow, once we achieve these more intelligent AIs, then there's going to be all these opportunities and all these improvements to human life. And it seems like those ideas are in conflict to a certain degree. But we saw Sam Altman kind of deploy, you know, both of those narratives, at least early on in the generative AI hype. Do you have an do you have a sense of whether he's more of on the doomer side of this or more on the optimist side of things?
SPEAKER_01I mean, based on his actions, you have to believe that he's on the optimist side because but the thing is, I think it could be even to like a 51 to 49 contest. Like if he thinks that there's even a marginal better shot at a tremendously exponentially better future, he seems to have in his mind weighed it out and decided that that's worth a risk of the end of humanity. But I do think that it's important to remember that what both of these extremes, these polar options have in common is that they're fantastical. None of this is dealing in the tomorrow or the tangible or the what might really be possible or happen. It's dealing in these theoreticals, these hypotheticals that I think are very useful when you're also asking for multiples of money, compute, energy that are pretty much fantastical. I mean, he's talked about seven trillion dollars needed for data centers. So yeah, I think if if if you're gonna justify that kind of exponential need for more, then you need to justify it with exponential potential for greatness, which, yeah, I guess in a weird way, the flip side of that being the exponential potential for terrible outcomes, um, it actually kind of bolsters the argument of the all-powerful potential.
SPEAKER_00If you found that clip intriguing, go to patreon.com/slash techwon'save us, where you can become a supporter, support the work that goes into making the show, and get the full length version of that interview. Thanks so much.