Tristan Harris

Sadly, it sounds like a sci-fi movie.

It sounds like HAL 9000.

It's like your HAL 9000 is being asked to do some task for you.

And then suddenly HAL 9000 realizes for me to do that task, one thing that would benefit me is to have more resources so I can continue to help you in the future.

So it sort of spins up this side instance.

It hacks out the side of the spaceship, reaches into this cryptocurrency mining cluster and starts generating resources for itself.

If you combine that with AIs being able to self-replicate autonomously, which many models have been tested by another Chinese research paper about this, we're not that far away from things that people, again, consider to be science fiction, where you have AIs that self-replicate kind of like a computer worm or an invasive species, but then they use their intelligence to actually harvest more resources.

And what's weird about this is that this is going to sound like people are going to say, this has to be not real.

This has to be fake.

This can't be.

But like, notice what is the thing in your nervous system that's having you do that?

Is it because that would be inconvenient?

Because that would be scary?

Because that would mean that the world that I know is suddenly not safe?

Or just like part of the wisdom that we need in this moment is to calmly and clearly stay and confront facts about reality and whatever they are, you'd rather know than not know.

And then ask, what do we need to do if we don't like where that leads us?

And we are currently seeing AIs that are doing all this deceptive behavior.

I've been on the circuit and talking a lot about the anthropic blackmail study.

A lot of people have heard about this now.

What happened?