How we feel about the AI apocalypse
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This podcast was produced on the lands of the Wabakal and Gadigal people. G'day, Matt Bevan here, this is If You're Listening. Over the last few months, we've been getting a lot of questions in our inbox and promising to answer them in a Q&A episode. There's just been so much going on that we haven't got around to that, but we're going to do it today. I've got my supervising producer, Cara Jensen-McKinnon here, who spends a pretty large proportion of her time in the If You're Listening email inbox answering questions and queries. But she's brought some of the best questions here for us to answer together today. G'day, Cara.
Hello. I'm ready and strapped in.
First of all, we're recording this on the 14th of September. It was the 25th anniversary of the 9-11 attacks over the weekend. We released an episode about Guantanamo Bay. We also re-released an episode about Donald Trump's Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick, and his personal connection to the attacks. But I have to tell you, Cara, over the weekend, my feed has been wall-to-wall footage of 9-11. What's your feed been like?
Yeah, it's been pretty similar. Interesting because I've seen for the first time given the importance of this anniversary a lot of news sites that I follow like the Washington Post and the New York Times releasing eyewitness footage. I've had this kind of uncanny experience of what it might have been like had 9-11 occurred in an Instagram time. You know, I saw this really long video of just people running down the street to avoid this massive cloud of smoke that was engulfing everyone. It's rare to see that kind of eyewitness footage compared to the usual news footage that we all saw so much of at the time. And that footage is also interspersed with memes, 9-11 memes. And it's that, like, weird dichotomy which I found really unnerving and disturbing.
That's what I spent my weekend thinking about.
It's extraordinary to me the amount of amateur footage that has been circulating on various social media sites over the weekend. I remember 2001. Most people didn't carry cameras around. No. The fact that there was, like, I think about three cameras that caught on tape the first plane hitting the World Trade Centre, hitting the north tower of the World Trade Centre.
Oh, shit!
At 5am. you know, 8.46 on a random Tuesday morning. These days we get footage of basically everything. I mean, we've seen footage that just happened to be incidentally taken of the landslide in Nepal. Someone happened to have
a
camera pointing at a random mountain in Nepal as the landslide was underway because he was sort of just taking Instagram drone shots on a nearby mountaintop. But the fact that there is so much privately generated footage of the attacks that has now been circulating over the weekend really surprised me.
Yes, exactly. Back then it was like literally just like dads on holiday that carried a camcorder around to record their family doing things. But it wasn't something that everyone had in their pocket. Yeah. Like we do now.
Yeah, pretty extraordinary.
Okay, so let's get to some of the questions. Our first is from Greg who asks, will artificial intelligence grow to maybe a superintelligence and then continue growing? And where will that leave us? Why don't you have a go at that one, Cara? Yeah, so it's been an alarming and terrifying week for AI superintelligence news. So this question comes at a great time. Just to get you up to speed, last Tuesday a researcher named Jacob Coxon announced that he was resigning from Anthropic. the company that produces the Claude Chatbot.
They're one of the two big American AI sort of leading companies at the moment.
One of the big ones. And so he spent the last three years working as a pre-training researcher, both at OpenAI and Anthropic.
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