Digital Social Hour
Anthony Aguirre: AI Isn’t Serving Humans Anymore.. It’s Controlling Us | DSH #1697
21 Dec 2025
Chapter 1: What is the main concern about AI's power over humanity?
if we keep going down the road of building more and more powerful general autonomous intelligences that humanity is basically going to stay in charge of the earth that probability seems to be quite low almost everything we consume as information about the world is being chosen for us by an algorithm that we don't control and don't even understand how it operates and is optimizing something that is not in our best interest necessarily we are currently
sort of seeing a large scale AI that is controlling us rather than being controlled by us as humanity.
Chapter 2: How does superintelligence accumulate control?
Superintelligence is not going to be something that grants you power. Superintelligence is going to be something that absorbs power.
All right, guys, we got Anthony here, Future of Life Institution.
Chapter 3: What was the proposal for a six-month pause in AI development?
He just spoke on stage and we're at the AI4 conference. And for people that don't know what Future of Life Institution is about, could you explain that?
Yeah, we're a nonprofit that's been around for about 10 years thinking about AI and other transformative technologies and how we can make them go well. Have them be like a large scale benefit to humanity, not a disaster.
Chapter 4: Why are governments struggling to keep up with AI advancements?
Yeah. And your claim to fame, like you went really viral for that letter, right?
Yeah, we did the pause letter back shortly after GPT-4 came out. Still think we should have paused.
Chapter 5: What lessons can we learn from social media's impact on AI?
We didn't. But we will keep pushing for just doing things that make some sense.
You wanted a six-month pause? We did. And what was the reason behind six months?
Chapter 6: Why is self-regulation insufficient in the AI industry?
Six months was sort of an amount of time, you know, it was minimum six months, first of all. But it's sort of minimal amount of time to really get the conversation going and the discussion between the companies and the governments and everyone else to like take a pause and think, well, where are we going with this? Like, what's the plan? So we didn't do that.
Chapter 7: What is the critical difference between AGI and superintelligence?
We're going forward with no plan. And that's a shame. But I think it's not too late. We, I think, still could take a breath. And rather than sort of racing headlong into more and more powerful models and this race for super intelligence, we could still pause. But I think the, you know, the way we would put it now is not so much pause as like, let's change direction.
Yeah. What is the current relationship with the United States government and the big AI companies?
Well, it's pretty close. I mean, the amount of money that's being poured by the AI companies into directly lobbying for their desires is immense. And of course, they are also representing themselves as sort of a national asset that the US is in this geopolitical competition with China.
And that, you know, if you're against building the AGI or superintelligence or just giving them pretty much anything they want, that that is giving into this geopolitical competition and so on. So I think this is really very disingenuous, but that is an argument that is being made. So I think the U.S.
Chapter 8: How can we change course to prevent AI from becoming uncontrollable?
government is... rightly paying attention to it. And in the AI action plan that they put out, they are acknowledging that there are large scale risks from AI and that it's going to take a lot of careful management. Unfortunately, they seem largely to want to leave that to the companies to do.
And I think in a competitive landscape like this, where there's this all out battle to sort of quickly put out products and show that yours is better than the next one and gobs of money lying around, self-governance is just not something that's going to work.
Yeah, it's an interesting dilemma because I come from the crypto space and at first there was no regulation, then there was too much. Now they're kind of backtracking on that. So it reminds me a little of AI, right?
Yeah, I think the... I mean, with all spaces, I think we have to find the right balance of what is good to have hands off and where are the natural market dynamics really not going to give us what we want. And I think there are parts of the internet that it was wonderful to have basically no regulation of.
And then there are parts like we really dropped the ball on social media, I think, that we created something that had like zero regulation and... these incredibly strong drivers toward optimizing attention and, you know, advertisement based, you know, everything and a feed algorithm that feeds on like sucking up attention and creating addiction.
Yeah.
This was a bad idea. Like we should not have left that totally alone. That's what is in a bad place. So I think there are parts of AI that I think probably we do want light or zero regulation of, you know, if you're making an image recognition system, like you should just make it.
If you're building a smarter-than-human superintelligence, you should have the government looking over your shoulder as if you were making a nuclear weapon.
Yeah. So that's an interesting take. So social media was left unchecked in your eyes, right?
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