Chapter 1: What is the main topic of this episode?
From New York Times Opinion, I'm Ross Douthat, and this is Interesting Times. The age of AI is already with us. The big question is how far and fast the revolution goes. My guest today represents the very far, extremely fast perspective. He was a researcher at OpenAI who quit because he thought the company was acting recklessly.
And he's the co-author of a new forecast which predicts that within just a few short years, we might be living in a post-work pleasure dome under the rule of oligarchs managing a machine god. Or we might all be dead. I'm personally skeptical that the danger we're facing is quite this immediate and dire. I suspect that there are more limits on AI's capacities than my guest's scenario envisions.
But it's important to hear from insiders who take these possibilities seriously, because many people deeply involved in AI work believe that they're bringing this future to life and assume that they're working and we're living in the shadow of a possible apocalypse. So, Daniel Coccatello, herald of the apocalypse, welcome to Interesting Times.
Chapter 2: What are the potential impacts of AI on jobs?
Thanks for that introduction, I suppose, and thanks for having me.
So Daniel, I read your report pretty quickly, not at AI speed, not at super intelligent speed, when it first came out. And I had about two hours of thinking a lot of pretty dark thoughts about the future. And then fortunately, I have a job that requires me to care about tariffs and who the new pope is. And I have a lot of kids who demand things of me.
And so I was able to sort of compartmentalize and set it aside. But this is currently your job. right, I would say. You're thinking about this all the time. How does your psyche feel day to day if you have a reasonable expectation that the world is about to change completely in ways that dramatically disfavor the entire human species?
Chapter 3: How could AI transform society and the economy?
Well, it's very scary and sad. I think that it does still give me nightmares sometimes. You know, I've been involved with AI and thinking about this sort of thing for a decade or so, but 2020 was with GPT-3, the moment when I was like, oh, wow, like it seems like we're actually like, it might, it's probably going to happen, you know, in my lifetime.
And that was a bit of a blow to me psychologically, but I don't know, you can sort of get used to anything given enough time. And like you, the sun is shining.