Sam Harris

Have you done any research or is there any research on the first point you made, though, that kind of a course and instrumental use of AI has bleed through into human relations and so kids are actually less socially appropriate if they're embarking orders at their bots all day?

Well, what would you imagine in the case of humanoid robots?

This is something that, honestly, I haven't spent that much time visualizing, but whenever I have spoken about it, I think we can stipulate that we will eventually get out of the uncanny valley and have robots that look, if not perfectly human, in some sense, better than human.

They'll be perfect humanoids in some sense.

When we want our AI shaped like that, we'll make it shaped like that.

I've spoken to Paul Bloom about this some years ago in response to the series Westworld.

We looked at that and we thought one piece of philosophy that was accomplished by that series is that it revealed that a place like Westworld probably couldn't exist because

you'd really have to be a psychopath to go on vacation and rape, you know, perfect facsimiles of, you know, human women and girls and then come home and, you know, tell your friends what a good time you had, you know, raping and killing robots that were indistinguishable from humans.

And so, you know, maybe you could set up a theme park that would act like a bug light for psychopaths in that way, but just normal people would not want to have a perfectly, seemingly veridical experience of being a moral monster.

And you would imagine some real contamination, both of how they felt about themselves and how other people saw them if we did that.

So just imagine we get to the place where we have now we're talking to humanoid robots and making demands upon them.

I would imagine that our social graces will come creeping back in.

I mean, honestly, even just in typing instructions into an LLM, I find myself being inappropriately polite, right?

I mean, I'll use the word please, and I think that probably costs Sam Altman some number of dollars every time I do it.

How's that going to change us?

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I am here with Matt Mahan.