Sam Harris

We knew exactly when the problem would manifest and people were focused on it, were worried about it.

We told ourself a story that there was, you know, real risk here, but it was still, you know, it was always hypothetical and

When the moment passed and basically nothing happened, we realized, okay, it's possible for all of these seemingly level-headed, you know, people in tech to suddenly get spun up around a fear that proves to be purely imaginary, right?

And so I think a lot of people, certainly a lot of people who only have positive things to say about, you know, this is the best time to be alive and this is, you know, we're all going to escape old age and cancer and death.

They seem to think that there is some deep analogy to a moment like Y2K.

It's like all of these fears that we're expressing are just, it's all hypothetical.

Yeah, I wonder, clearly part of the solution here is to make it sufficiently obvious that it becomes unignorable.

I'm just wondering what the barriers are to that.

I mean, because again- I think it's happening.

No, but it's like-

Think of the principal people who are, I mean, in the film, there were a bunch of people, some of whom I had never seen before, who, if you had them at this table, wouldn't concede most of what we've said over the previous 90 minutes, right?

They would just... What do you think they would do?

I mean, well, there's just this assumption that these risks, even, you know, rogue behavior where it goes mining, you know, cryptocurrency.

But I think they would say, okay, but we detected it and now we're going to solve that problem.

Like we can play whack-a-mole successfully and ultimately we can use AI to play whack-a-mole against AI.

I think in the film, somebody was asked how many people are working on AGI and he said something like 20,000.

20,000.

How many people are working on AI safety and it's like 200 or something.

That's right.

I mean, I think the low hanging fruit for me here rhetorically is to, I mean, I can't take my eyes off the alignment problem because I do think it's just, it's the largest and it's the most interesting and scary, but.