#368 – Eliezer Yudkowsky: Dangers of AI and the End of Human Civilization
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What is the focus of Eliezer Yudkowsky's research on AI?
The following is a conversation with Eliezer Yudkowsky, a legendary researcher, writer, and philosopher on the topic of artificial intelligence, especially superintelligent AGI and its threat to human civilization. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Linode for Linux systems, House of Macadamias for healthy midday snacks, and Insight Tracker for biological monitoring. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our team, we're always hiring. Go to lexfriedman.com slash hiring. And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you must skip them, please still check out the sponsors.
I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is sponsored by Linode, now called Akamai, and their incredible Linux virtual machines. It's an awesome computer infrastructure that lets you develop, deploy, and scale whatever applications you build faster and easier. I love using them. They create this incredible platform like AWS, but better in every way I know, including lower cost. It's incredible human-based in this age of AI. It's a human-based customer service, 24-7, 365.
What are the benefits of Linode, House of Macadamias, and InsideTracker?
The thing just works, the interface, to make sure it works and to monitor it is great. I mean, it's an incredible world we live in, where as far as you're concerned, you can spin up an arbitrary number of Linux machines in the cloud, instantaneously, and do all kinds of computation. It could be one, two, five, ten machines. And you can scale the individual machines to your particular needs as well, which is what I do. I use it for basic web server stuff. I use it for basic scripting stuff. I use it for machine learning. I use it for all kinds of database storage and access needs. Visit linode.com slash lex for a free credit. This show is also brought to you by House of Macadamias, a company that ships delicious, high quality, healthy macadamia nuts and macadamia nut based snacks directly to your door.
I am currently, as I record this, I'm traveling. So I don't have any macadamia nuts in my vicinity, and my heart and soul are lesser for it. In fact, home is where the macadamia nuts is. In fact, that's not where home is. I just completely forgot to bring them. It makes the guests of this podcast happy when I give it to them. It's well-proportioned snacks. It makes friends happy when I give it to them. It makes me happy when I stoop in the abyss of my loneliness. I can at least discover and rediscover moments of happiness when I put delicious macadamia nuts in my mouth. Go to houseofmacadamias.com to get 20% off your order for every order, not just the first. The listeners of this podcast will also get four-ounce bag of macadamias when you order three or more boxes of any macadamia product.
That's houseofmacadamias.com. This show is also brought to you by InsideTracker, a service I use to track my biological data. They have a bunch of plans, most of which include a blood test, and that's the source of rich, amazing data that, with the help of machine learning algorithms, can help you make decisions about your health, about your life. That's the future, friends. We're talking a lot about transformer networks, language models that encode the wisdom of the internet. Now when you encode the wisdom of the internet and you collect and encode the rich, rich, rich complex signal from your very body, when those two things are combined, the transformative effects of the optimized trajectory you could take through life, at least advice for what trajectory is likely to be optimal, is going to change a lot of things.
It's going to inspire people to be better. It's going to empower people to do all kinds of crazy stuff that pushes their body to the limit, because their body's healthy. Anyway, I'm super excited for personalized, data-driven decisions, not some kind of generic population database decisions. You get special savings for a limited time when you go to insidetracker.com slash Lex.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the focus of Eliezer Yudkowsky's research on AI?
0:00–1:22
2
What are the benefits of Linode, House of Macadamias, and InsideTracker?
1:22–31:10
3
How does GPT-4 compare to previous AI models?
31:10–42:07
4
What are the implications of AGI alignment and its dangers?
42:07–1:43:09
5
How can we escape without being noticed by aliens?
1:43:09–1:44:52
6
What are the implications of AGI's objective functions?
1:44:52–1:46:40
7
How do we define and understand consciousness?
1:46:40–1:53:45
8
What advice does Eliezer Yudkowsky give to young people?
1:53:45–3:22:18
Speakers
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