Steven Bartlett

What was it about ChatGPT that caused your mind to change or evolve?

Is it fair to say that you're one of the reasons that this software exists?

You're amongst others.

Amongst others, yes.

I'm fascinated by the cognitive dissonance that emerges when you spend much of your career working on creating these technologies or understanding them and bringing them about.

And then you realize at some point that there are potentially catastrophic consequences and how you kind of square the two thoughts.

It is difficult.

Have you thought in terms of probabilities about risk?

Is that how you think about risk is in terms of like probabilities and timelines?

Of course, but I have to say something important here.

There's been lots of predictions over the centuries about how certain technologies or new inventions would cause some kind of existential threat to all of us.

So a lot of people would rebuttal the risks here and say, this is just another example of change happening and people being uncertain.

So they predict the worst and then everybody's fine.

Why is that not a valid argument in this case, in your view?

Why is that underestimating the potential of AI?

There are two aspects to this.

Do you not think at this point, we're kind of just, the train has left the station?

Because when I think about the incentives at play here, when I think about the geopolitical, the domestic incentives, the corporate incentives, the competition at every level, countries racing each other, corporations racing each other, it feels like we're now just going to be a victim of circumstance to some degree.

How should the average person who doesn't work in the industry or isn't in academia, in AI, think about the advent and invention of this technology?

Are there kind of an analogy or metaphor that is equivocal to the profundity of this technology?