Tristan Harris

I'm not saying you should feel optimistic.

I'm saying...

What would it take for that to happen?

And you start by asking that question and say, how would everyone live if we were in service of that thing that needs to happen and to actually happen?

Does that make sense?

It is.

Max Tegmark, I think, said the problem with AI is the view gets better and better right before you go off the cliff.

Like you get more amazing cancer drugs.

You get more incredible vibe coding tools that allow people to create crazy stuff that I benefit from.

You get new material science, you get new energy, you get all this amazing stuff as you're moving closer to this dangerous cliff.

And so you can think of AI as the ultimate devil's bargain.

It's funny because Peter Thiel is giving lectures on the antichrist and how people who are trying to somehow say that AI is problematic, those people are the antichrist is what he claims.

But I think he's saying that because he knows that the real antichrist is AI.

It's the thing that makes it look like it's here to solve all of our problems.

And there are narrow forms of AI, by the way, that can solve many problems.

But the current development path of releasing the most powerful and scrutable technology in history, faster than we've deployed any other technology, that's already demonstrating HAL 9000 sci-fi behaviors, and we're releasing it under the maximum incentive to cut corners on safety.

Like, it's not that the blinking cursor of chat GPT is the existential threat.

It's that that arms race, what I just described, that is the existential threat.

And I think that everyone should be able to see that.

And then after this conversation, you know, you finish hitting play on this YouTube video, you feel overwhelmed and you go back to AI and then you ask it a question and it helps you figure out why your baby's burping.