Anthony Aguirre

And just like, trust us, even though we're in a total race with the competition, we're going to be responsible.

Well, I think it came out of a tech industry that was largely unregulated.

Again, in some ways, that was good, and in some ways, not so good.

But people think of AI systems, even though they're obviously getting incredibly powerful, as just software, right?

And they're not like a plane or a car or something that is really dangerous and can cause harm.

So I think...

That will change as AI systems cause more just obviously recognizable harm, which they will, because we're doing it unsafely.

But the question, first of all, it would be nice to prevent the harm rather than wait for it to be caused and then react to it.

It's always nice to prevent harm.

But also, being reactive means you can also be too late.

And I do worry that if we wait until the large-scale risks of AGI and superintelligence are manifest, we won't really be able to get it back under control at that time.

Well, I think right now there are more subtle things like, you know, that our political discourse and our societal discourse is totally...

bonkers.

This is not an accident.

This is not some inevitability of having 21st century something.

This has been caused by the media and social media and general online ecosystem that we've allowed to be built, which is basically AI-driven.

Again, driving people to do particular things and

hear particular things driving the news production in a particular direction, this has been profoundly unhealthy.

So I think that's our first encounter with a large-scale, quasi-catastrophic thing.

The fact that everyone feels like our world is kind of crazy right now is not because people have suddenly intrinsically gone crazy.