Max Tegmark
speaker
2,248 appearances
4 recordings
2 series
first heard Aug 2018
last heard 3 Nov
Max Tegmark’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 — 2 in all, peaking in Nov 2025 with 1.
Appearances
And the problem is that even though the people who are building the technology
And the CEOs, they really get it.
The shareholders and these other market forces, they are people who don't honestly understand that the cliff is there.
They usually don't.
You have to get quite into the weeds to really appreciate how powerful this is and how fast.
And a lot of people are even still stuck again in this idea that...
in this carbon chauvinism, as I like to call it, that you can only have our level of intelligence in humans, that there's something magical about it.
Whereas the people in the tech companies...
who build this stuff, they all realize that intelligence is information processing of a certain kind.
And it really doesn't matter at all whether the information is processed by carbon atoms in neurons and brains or by silicon atoms in some technology we build.
So you brought up capitalism earlier, and there are a lot of people who love capitalism and a lot of people who really, really don't.
It struck me recently that what's happening with capitalism here is exactly analogous to the way in which superintelligence might wipe us out.
You know, I studied economics for my undergrad, Stockholm School of Economics.
Yay.
No, I tell them.
So I was very interested in how you could use market forces to just get stuff done more efficiently, but give the right incentives to the market so that it wouldn't do really bad things.
So Dylan Hadfield-Manel, who's a professor and colleague of mine at MIT, wrote this really interesting paper with some collaborators recently.
where they proved mathematically that if you just take one goal that you just optimize for, on and on and on indefinitely, that you think is gonna bring you in the right direction.
What basically always happens is, in the beginning, it will make things better for you.
But if you keep going, at some point, it's gonna start making things worse for you again.
Showing 781–800 of 2,248 · page 40 of 113
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