Joscha Bach
speaker
510 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Aug 2023
last heard 23 Jan
Joscha Bach’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I don't find it very concerning, but it's also because I think that the language models are not very dangerous yet. Yet? Yes. So as I said, I have no proof that there is the boundary between the language models and AGI.
it's possible that somebody builds a version of baby AGI, I think, and throws in algorithmic improvements that scale these systems up in ways that otherwise wouldn't have happened without these language model components. So it's not really clear for me what the end game is there and if these models can boot force their way into AGI.
And there's also a possibility that the AGI that we are building with these language models are not taking responsibility for what they are because they don't understand the greater game. And so to me, it would be interesting to try to understand how to build systems that understand what the greater games are. What are the longest games that we can play on this planet?
In the game theoretic sense. So when we are interacting with each other, in some sense, we are playing games. We are making lots and lots of interactions. This doesn't mean that these interactions have all to be transactional. Every one of us is playing some kind of game by virtue of identifying these particular kinds of goals that we have or aesthetics from which we derive the goals.
So when you say, I'm Lex Friedman, I'm doing a set of podcasts. then you feel that it's part of something larger that you want to build. Maybe you want to inspire people, maybe you want them to see more possibilities and get them together over shared ideas. Maybe your game is that you want to become super rich and famous by being the best post-caster on earth.
Maybe you have other games, maybe it switches from time to time. But there is a certain perspective where you might be thinking, what is the longest possible game that you could be playing? A short game is, for instance, cancer is playing a shorter game than your organism. Cancer is an organism playing a shorter game than the regular organism.
And because the cancer cannot procreate beyond the organism, except for some infectious cancers, like the ones that eradicate the Tasmanian devils, you typically end up with a situation where the organism dies together with the cancer. Because the cancer has destroyed the larger system due to playing a shorter game.
And so ideally, you want to, I think, build agents that play the longest possible games. And the longest possible games is to keep entropy at bay as long as possible while doing interesting stuff.
Currently, I'm pretty much identified as a conscious being. It's the minimal identification that I managed to get together because if I turn this off, I fall asleep. And when I'm asleep, I'm a vegetable. I'm no longer here as an agent. So my agency is basically predicated on being conscious. And what I care about is other conscious agents. They're the only moral agents for me.
And so if an AI were to treat me as a moral agent, that it is interested in coexisting with and cooperating with and mutually supporting each other maybe, It is, I think, necessary that the AI thinks that consciousness is a viable mode of existence and important. So I think it would be very important to build conscious AI and do this as the primary goal.
So not just say we want to build a useful tool that we can use for all sorts of things. And then you have to make sure that the impact on the labor market is something that is not too disruptive and manageable and the impact on the copyright holder is manageable and not too disruptive and so on. I don't think that's the most important game to be played.
I think that we will see extremely large disruptions of the status quo that are quite unpredictable at this point. And I just personally want to make sure that some of the stuff on the other side is interesting and conscious.
I absolutely don't know. So everybody is going to do their best, as always.
I really like playing Disco Elysium. It was one of the most beautiful computer games I played in recent years. It's a noir novel that is a philosophical perspective on Western society from the perspective of an Estonian. He first of all wrote a book about this world that is a parallel universe that is quite poetic and fascinating and is condensing his perspective on our societies.
It was very, very nice. He spent a lot of time writing it. He had, I think, sold a couple thousand books and as a result became an alcoholic. And then he had the idea or one of his friends had the idea of turning this into an RPG. And it's mind blowing. They spent the illustrator more than a year just on making the art for the scenes in between and
It's stunning. But it's a philosophical work of art. It's a reflection of society. It's fascinating to spend time in this world. And so for me, it was using a medium in a new way and telling a story that left me enriched. When I tried Diablo... I didn't feel enriched playing it. I felt that the time playing it was not unpleasant, but there's also more pleasant stuff that I can do in that time.
So ultimately, I feel that I'm being gamed. I'm not gaming. Oh, the addiction thing. Yes. I basically feel that there is a very transparent economy that's going on. The story of Diablo is branded. So it's not really interesting to me.
Go ahead, by all means, go nuts. I have no objection here. I'm just trying to describe what's happening. And it's not that I don't do things that I later say, oh, I wish I would have done something different. I also know that when we die, the greatest regret that people typically have on their deathbed is to say, oh, I wish I had spent more time on Twitter. No, I don't think that's the case.
I think I should probably have spent less time on Twitter. But I found it so useful for myself and also so addictive that I felt I need to make the best of it and turn it into an art form and thought form. And it did help me to develop something.
But I wish what other things I could have done in the meantime. It's just not the universe that we are in anymore. Most people don't read books anymore.
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