David Duvenaud

If you find yourself bewildered by this moment where there's so much reason for despair and so much reason to hope all at the same time, let me say I hear you.

I'm Ezra Klein from New York Times Opinion, host of The Ezra Klein Show.

And for me, the best way to beat back that bewildered feeling is to talk it out with the people who have ideas and frameworks for making sense of it.

There is going to be plenty to talk about.

You can find The Ezra Klein Show wherever you get your podcasts.

The reason that states have been treating us so well in the West, at least for the last, let's say, like two or 300 years is because they've needed us.

And in particular, because allowing freedom and like private property and basically self-determination has been the most effective recipe for growth.

Life can only get so bad when you're needed.

That's the real key thing that has been keeping governments aligned.

And that's the key thing that's going to change.

A lot of citizens would end up just being sort of like full-time activists.

And they might feel like they're forced to because if their only source of income is something like UBI, then the entire game going forward for economic advancement is do some sort of activism to convince the government to give your group more UBI.

And those same resources could be used to simulate maybe like millions of much more sympathetic, morally superior virtual beings.

And so it'll start to be seen as this like irresponsible use of resources to keep like some sort of like legacy human around.

Oh, it's my pleasure, Rob.

Yeah, so the basic thesis is that even if we can align AGIs to particular people or groups, that we still might end up optimizing or heading at a civilizational level towards outcomes that no one wants, and probably outcomes that look more like growth for growth's sake.

So the first one is economic and people basically losing their jobs and becoming unemployable.

And I think a lot of people get off the bus here and they say this is the classic lump of labor fallacy.

And they think that we think that there's only like some finite fixed set of jobs.

And if they're automated, then that's just the game over for humanity.