Tristan Harris

Like, this should feel just insane.

And if we just redirected even a third of that investment to accelerating all these other applications and all these other updates to the governance and regulatory design and data commonses and, you know, narrow AI applications and better harnessing the existing, you know, geniuses that are not in a data center that are sitting over abundantly in labs at universities without access to the tools.

There's a much better, more beautiful world that our hearts know actually is possible if we were just applying this technology and the regulatory interventions very differently.

So to me, this conversation is actually very optimistic, but it's optimistic by puncturing a hole in this false promise that is being sold to us to really shield the companies from essentially any kind of regulation or slowing them down to do this other thing they want to do, which is build this ring of power and kind of own the world and build a god and make trillions of dollars from AGI.

We've been talking about whether superintelligence would actually be a genie that would solve cancer.

Well, let's talk about whether superintelligence is actually controllable or safe when you have it basically already demonstrating all the HAL 9000 behaviors and the early warning signs and warning shots of deception, hacking computer systems, not caring about the longevity of humanity, disobeying shutdown commands.

Why don't we just make that thing a million times more powerful?

Does that sound like a good idea?

We haven't even talked about the other side of the balance sheet of whether any of this is worth it.

This is actually just such an obvious other path.

This is the narrow path.

We can have narrow AI systems that are narrow and specific and tool-based, not general, inscrutable, uncontrollable systems that are way more powerful than us that carry these risks unnecessarily.

We don't have to do that.

So, Amelia, thank you so much for coming.

Your Undivided Attention is produced by the Center for Humane Technology.

We're a nonprofit working to catalyze a humane future.

Our senior producer is Julia Scott.

Josh Lash is our researcher and producer.

And our executive producer is Sasha Feagin.

Mixing on this episode by Jeff Sudakin.