Max Tegmark

It's going to either be the best thing ever to happen to humanity or the worst.

I'm really quite confident that there is not that much middle ground there.

Of course, utterly and totally, you know.

Again, we branded ourselves as homo sapiens because it seemed like the basic thing.

We're the king of the castle on this planet.

We're the smart ones.

We can control everything else.

This could very easily change.

We're certainly not going to be the smartest on the planet for very long unless AI progress just halts.

And we can talk more about why I think that's true because it's controversial.

And then we can also talk about

reasons you might think it's going to be the best thing ever and the reason you think it's going to be the end of humanity, which is, of course, super controversial.

But what I think we can, anyone who's working on advanced AI can agree on is it's much like the film Don't Look Up in that it's just really comical how little serious public debate there is about it, given how huge it is.

So this is very controversial.

When we talked the first time, we talked about how I was involved in starting the Future Life Institute.

And we worked very hard on 2014, 2015 was the mainstream AI safety.

the idea that there even could be risks and that you could do things about them.

Before then, a lot of people thought it was just really kooky to even talk about it.

And a lot of AI researchers felt worried that this was too flaky and could be bad for funding and that the people who talked about it just didn't understand AI.

I'm very, very happy with...