Max Tegmark

You've interviewed a lot of these people who lead these labs and you know just as well as I do that they're good people.

They're idealistic people.

They're doing this first and foremost because they believe that AI has a huge potential to help humanity.

But at the same time, they are trapped in this horrible race to the bottom.

Have you read Meditations on Moloch by Scott Alexander?

Yes.

Yeah, it's a beautiful essay on this poem by Ginsberg where he interprets it as being about this monster

It's this game theory monster that pits people against each other in this race to the bottom where everybody ultimately loses.

And the evil thing about this monster is even though everybody sees it and understands, they still can't get out of the race, right?

A good fraction of all the bad things that we humans do are caused by Moloch.

And I like Scott Alexander's...

naming of the monster so we humans can think of it as a thing.

If you look at why do we have overfishing, why do we have more generally the tragedy of the commons, why is it that Liv Bore, I don't know if you had her on your podcast.

Great.

She made this awesome point recently that beauty filters, that a lot of female

influencers feel pressure to use are exactly Moloch in action again.

First, nobody was using them and people saw them just the way they were.

And then some of them started using it and becoming ever more plastic fantastic.

And then the other ones that weren't using it started to realize that if they want to just keep their market share, they have to start using it too.

And then you're in the situation where they're all using it.