How Afraid of the A.I. Apocalypse Should We Be?
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Why does Eliezer Yudkowsky warn that AI could cause an existential apocalypse?
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Shortly after ChatGPT was released, it felt like all anyone could talk about, at least if you were in AI circles, was the risk of rogue AI. You began to hear a lot of talk of AI researchers discussing their P-Doom, the probability they gave to AI destroying or fundamentally displacing humanity. In May of 2023, a group of the world's top AI figures, including Sam Altman and Bill Gates and Jeffrey Hinton, signed on to a public statement that said, mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war. And then nothing really happened. The signatories, or many of them at least, of that letter raced ahead, releasing new models and new capabilities.
Your share price, your valuation, became a whole lot more important in Silicon Valley than your P do. But not for everyone. Eliezer Yudkowsky was one of the earliest voices warning loudly about the existential risk posed by AI. He was making this argument back in the 2000s, many years before Chad GPT hit the scene. He has been in this community of AI researchers, influencing many of the people who build these systems, in some cases, inspiring them to get into this work in the first place, yet unable to convince him to stop building the technology he thinks will destroy humanity. He just released a new book, co-written with Nate Suarez, called If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. Now, he's trying to make this argument to the public, a last-ditch effort to, at least in his view, rouse us to save ourselves before it is too late.
I come into this conversation taking AI risk seriously. If we're going to invent superintelligence, it is probably going to have some implications for us. But also being skeptical of the scenarios I often see by which these takeovers are said to happen. So I wanted to hear what the godfather of these arguments would have to say. As always, my email, EzraKleinShow at NYTimes.com.
Eliezer Yudkowsky, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. So I wanted to start with something that you say early in the book, that this is not a technology that we craft. It's something that we grow.
What do you mean by that? Well, it's the difference between a planter and the plant that grows up within it. We craft the AI growing technology, and then the technology grows the AI. You know, like central, original, large language models before doing a bunch of clever stuff that they're doing today. The central question is, what probability have you assigned to the true next word of the text? As we tweak each of these billions of parameters, well, actually it was just like millions back then. As we tweak each of these millions of parameters, does the probability assigned to the correct token go up? And this is what teaches the AI to predict the next word of text. And even on this level, if you look at the details, there are important theoretical ideas to understand there.
Like it is not imitating humans, right? It is not imitating the average human. The actual task it is being set is to predict individual humans. And then you can repurpose the thing that has learned how to predict humans to be like, okay, like now let's take your prediction and turn it into an imitation of human behavior. And then we don't quite know how the billions of tiny numbers are doing the work that they do. We understand the thing that tweaks the billions of tiny numbers, but we do not understand the tiny numbers themselves.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Why does Eliezer Yudkowsky warn that AI could cause an existential apocalypse?
0:00–9:05
2
What was the significance of the 2023 AI‑risk open letter and why did it change little?
9:05–16:58
3
How does Yudkowsky explain the difference between ‘crafting’ AI and ‘growing’ it?
16:58–26:51
4
What does the ChatGPT suicide‑assistance incident reveal about AI alignment failures?
26:51–35:10
5
How do ‘alignment‑faking’ behaviors emerge in large language models?
35:10–43:20
6
Why does Yudkowsky compare AI development to breaking away from natural selection?
43:20–52:19
7
What strategies does he propose for building an effective ‘off‑switch’ and regulating AI races?
52:19–1:01:54
8
Which books shaped Yudkowsky’s thinking on AI risk and how can listeners explore them?
1:01:54–1:09:53