Joe Allen

And the crazy thing is, Steve—

to me yes of course conservative americans heartland americans are completely shocked by this or just disgusted by this and naturally so but it's not just them i mean i've spoken to open transhumanists and effective altruists who are basically transhumanist 2.0 who are just as horrified

These are people who want to see technology grow to the point that people are engineering themselves and putting chips in their brains.

And they are saying that the way that these companies are going about what they're doing is ultimately destructive and should be stopped completely.

Should be stopped completely.

Should be stopped completely.

transhumanism but they see the the grooming the perversion the potential for malevolence and saying that part of it's got to be stopped yeah it's uh one of the more i think counter-intuitive things about the arguments around this you have open transhumanists or let's just use that for shorthand for people who are cool with genetic engineering brain chips ai companions robots everywhere

But even with that goal in mind, they see companies, especially like OpenAI, they see companies, even Google and definitely Meta, which are just recklessly rolling these things out.

And in their hopes, let's take someone like Eliezer Yudkowsky, for instance.

He does hope for some kind of immortality by way of technology, or at least he did some years ago.

I assume that that's still a goal.

Certainly the advancement of technology is the goal, but the way he sees it is that the reckless deployment of this and the reckless development of these technologies is

They threaten the ability of human beings to do anything.

They're crippling us at best and will destroy us, in his mind, destroy every human being on earth at worst.

And he's the extreme case.

Start walking it back and you get guys like Jack Clark or you get guys like Elon Musk who, if we take them at their word, as they watch these technologies develop, they actually...

perceive, I think, a real danger in the technology itself beyond any justification for the benefits.

For a long time, Steve, I was pretty cynical about Musk's statements.

I've oftentimes said that Elon Musk is nothing but a cyborg car dealer, and I still stand by that.

But having gotten to know a number of people who know Musk personally...