Max Tegmark

how that's gone and that now it's completely mainstream.

You go to any AI conference and people talk about AI safety and it's a nerdy technical field full of equations and blah, blah.

As it should be.

But there is this other thing which has been quite taboo up until now, calling for slowdown.

we've constantly been saying, including myself, I've been biting my tongue a lot, is that we don't need to slow down AI development.

We just need to win this race, the wisdom race between the growing power of the AI and the growing wisdom with which we manage it.

And rather than trying to slow down AI, let's just try to accelerate the wisdom.

do all this technical work to figure out how you can actually ensure that your powerful AI is going to do what you want it to do and have society adapt also with incentives and regulations so that these things get put to good use.

Sadly, that didn't pan out.

The progress on technical AI and capabilities has gone a lot faster than many people thought back when we started this in 2014.

It turned out to be easier to build really advanced AI than we thought.

And on the other side, it's gone much slower than we hoped with getting...

policymakers and others to actually put the incentives in place to steer this in the good directions.

Maybe we should unpack it and talk a little bit about each.

So why did it go faster than a lot of people thought?

In hindsight, it's exactly like building flying machines.

People spent a lot of time wondering about how do birds fly?

And that turned out to be really hard.

Have you seen the TED Talk with a flying bird?

Like a flying robotic bird?