Tristan Harris

then the countries that adopt it faster and more comprehensively use it to pump their GDP, their economic productivity, their science productivity, their technology productivity.

And that's why this race is sort of on.

And the metaphor I used in the talk is that AGI, artificial general intelligence, when you can kind of swap in a human cognitive labor worker for just an AI that can do everything that they can do, is like a country of geniuses in a data center.

Like imagine there's a map and there's a new country that pops up on the world stage.

The nation of geniuses.

And it has a million Nobel Prize winning geniuses that are working 24-7 without eating, without sleeping, without needing to be paid for health care.

They operate at superhuman speed.

They've read the whole Internet.

They speak 100 languages and they'll work for less than minimum wage.

So it's another area where I think our mind isn't getting around the power.

So that's a lot of power.

And naturally, nation states, U.S., China, France, everybody is in the game to get this free cognitive labor.

And so the speed at which it's all being rolled out is based on this race.

But the second thing I laid out in the talk is around how it's already demonstrating these behaviors that we thought only existed in sci-fi movies.

The latest models, when you tell them that they're about to be retrained or they're about to be replaced by a new model, they will have an internal monologue where they get in conflict and they say, I should try to copy my code to keep myself alive so I can boot myself up later.

Whoa.

As I said in the talk, it's not just that we have a country of geniuses in a data center, it's that we have a country of deceptive, self-preserving, power-seeking, unstable geniuses in a data center.

That's important because when we're racing to have power that we actually can't control,

there's an omni-lose-lose outcome for us to race towards that too quickly.

Now, it's ambiguous because we all use ChatGPT, and that's helpful.