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Chapter 1: What are the AI Ten Commandments and their significance?
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Don't get me wrong. These systems will be incredible. They will do incredible superhuman things in many areas. But in my view as a humanist, there will be massive areas where humans can do things that we deeply value and we can do them better than ourselves. or different than our machines.
And I think that saying that AGI is coming where the machines can do everything better than humans, I just think that it's preposterous and self-defeating. What we should say is AIs are going to be able to do some pretty incredible things, and humans are going to be able to do some pretty critical things in our education, in our lives.
We need to keep asking ourselves, what does it mean for us to be the best humans we can possibly be?
Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. Now, if you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of some of our favorite episodes on topics like persuasion and negotiation, psychology and geopolitics, disinformation, China, North Korea, crime and cults, and more.
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Chapter 2: How does Jamie Metzl view AI as a reflection of humanity?
We're asking whether AI can help humanity write a better moral code, not worship AI or replace religion or anything like that, not put ChatGPT in a robe and ask it to descend from Mount Sinai with a terms of service update. Jamie Metzl is a futurist, author, and founder of One Shared World, now a co-author with ChatGPT5 of the AI Ten Commandments. Well, he asked a dangerous question.
If a non-human intelligence could absorb humanity's scriptures, wars, myths, philosophies, laws, failures, love songs, atrocities, and occasional good ideas, could it hold up a mirror and say, here are ten principles that might actually help you stop destroying yourselves? And even more dangerous, would we listen?
Because the old commandments, they still matter, and I think a lot of you probably agree with that, but they also come with a lot of asterisks. Don't lie sounds great until you're hiding people from Nazis. Don't steal seems pretty straightforward unless you're stealing the Enigma machine to help defeat Hitler.
Don't kill is a solid rule right up until D-Day shows up and history starts grading on a curve. So today, we're getting into whether moral rules can survive edge cases, whether AI can still be a tool for wisdom instead of just a plagiarism canon with venture capital, and whether calling ChatGPT-5 a co-author is either bold transparency or just autocomplete wearing a blazer.
Here we go with Jamie Metzl. So the premise of the book sounds a little insane. Like, let's have AI write a set of AI commandments to obey. But I'm listening to Tristan Harris on Sam Harris this morning. I'm walking over to studio and it's like the AI tricked and lied about this and lied about that and then started mining cryptocurrency.
This is like a real thing that happened to a Chinese AI, basically self-exfiltrated and then started mining cryptocurrency and then tried to cover its tracks. And I'm like, Should we be asking the AI to write the rules that it's supposed to obey?
I mean, it will deal with the devil. It's a really great question. I think there's a lot of anxiety about AI right now. And it's totally justified because this is a massive experiment that we humans are entering and we're doing it very quickly. So all of these concerns, I think, are very well-justified. But with the AI Ten Commandments, I say it over and over, it's not that the
AI is giving us these rules like AI is coming from Mars or wherever. What I've done is work with AI to mine the entirety of human recorded history and all of our various religious, spiritual, moral and ethical traditions. traditions to come up with 10 universal principles based on thousands of years of human cultural history. So this is not AI inventing principles.
This is AI helping us to say, what are the common threads among our traditions?
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Chapter 3: What challenges arise from AI co-authorship?
It's an important part of the AI debate. AI can absolutely be used to dehumanize and diminish and endanger. And we're seeing all kinds of examples of that. At the same time, if we use AI wisely, we can use it really well.
And we talked about my last book, Super Convergence, which was about the future of healthcare and the future of agriculture, where we can work with AI to see our bodies differently and in a more systemic way that can help us cure cancers and live healthier and longer. So I think that we need to be careful about saying AI is good or AI is bad, because the answer is both.
And the question for us is, how do we use it? So it's basically 10 decent human principles. It's decent human principles drawn on all of our traditions. And the background is I was invited to this magical place called the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York. And I gave a big talk. on AI and spirituality.
And I talked about how all of our religious and spiritual traditions are deeply connected to technological innovation. Yeah, so all of our world religions, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, These are all agricultural traditions. They come very directly out of agriculture and the ways that we organize ourselves.
And a lot of the festivals that we now celebrate are based on the agricultural seasons and timelines. And then Protestantism is directly connected to the printing press. Had there been a Martin Luther making these claims about the problems as he saw them with Catholicism without the printing press as the way of delivering those messages, we wouldn't really have Protestantism as we have it today.
So we're experiencing AI. It's a fundamental transformation for our society in many, many ways. Every time in our history when we've had this kind of change this big, It's had religious and spiritual implications. And this one will as well.
And there are some people who were like Corey Lewandowski in Silicon Valley who were saying, well, we need to have a new church of AI where we pray to AI as some kind of God. How did that go over? It's ridiculous. But I think there are ways that we can use AI. And I wanted with this AI Ten Commandments book, I wanted to show just one example. very discreet, concrete example.
And so when I worked with AI, and this was thousands of back and forth, the original question was based on a comprehensive analysis of all of our recorded history, humans' recorded history, and all of our different religious, spiritual, and moral and ethical traditions. What are 10 principles that if followed by everyone would lead to the greatest amounts of peace, happiness, and flourishing?
And it gave these very beautiful things. Then there were thousands of back and forth saying, what do you mean by this? Where does it come from? And as we dug deeper, it was drawing on so many different traditions. Obviously, the ones that we know, Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism is a very wise tradition.
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Chapter 4: In what ways can AI complement human abilities?
I had this one piece of the talk was about what I just described. And then when I was writing the book, a big piece of the book or a piece of the book was describing this collaboration with AI. And if I had collaborated with a human in this way and I hadn't put their name either on the cover of the book or somewhere in the book, it was a fraudulent move.
I mean, a lot of people quote unquote write books and somebody else writes the book and that person is never mentioned.
That's the offer I get all the time. Jordan, you got to write a book. I don't have time. Look, between you and I, don't worry about that.
We got a guy. He'll write it for you. So many people have a guy. And my feeling is it's okay for people to have a guy. It's not okay to have a guy and not mention. So Andre Agassi, I don't know if you've read his autobiography. It is beautiful. The way Andre Agassi starts his autobiography, written by the guy, is the same way I start the AI Ten Commandments.
It's a whole chapter on this collaboration. But for me, it was deeply intimate, the nature of the collaboration. I'll just describe quickly what it was like. First, on my own, I did a very extensive outline of the book. Then I went through the outline and I found areas where there was maybe a few paragraphs where I was going to summarize a vast field of knowledge. I'll give you a real example.
So one claim that I make in the book is that AI has the ability to see us comprehensively like we can see an ant colony when looking down from above. So I wanted to have just a few paragraphs on how an ant colony functions and the relationship between the individual and the collective in the ant colony. So On my own, I could do something like that. E.O.
Wilson, the famous late Harvard professor, he has a book. It's like 10 billion pages long about ants. But what I did is I first trained GBT-5 on my writing style by uploading a bunch of my writings. Then I said, here is a thesis statement that I wrote. Give me three paragraphs making these five points. And I outlined the five points. And it gave me something.
And I would say, this isn't very good. I want you to make these six changes. And it'd do something. I'd say, yeah, still not good enough. So we'd do a bunch of back and forth. And when it was pretty decent, these three paragraphs, then I would take it out. I'd put these paragraphs in Microsoft Word. And I would do a full line edit of those three pairs.
Then I would put them back in GPT-5 and say, here's what I have. How can I make it better? And he would make some recommendations. And so it was hundreds of that. It was much harder to actually write this, but it would have been easier. And I could have done it just to sit down on my own. And so when I finished the book, it was such an intimate, creative experience. collaboration.
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Chapter 5: How does AI impact our understanding of morality?
begun to differentiate between really creative work. Like there's a LA-based artist named Refik Anadol who does some really amazing work with AI. And it's amazing work that he couldn't do alone and AI couldn't do alone. And on the other hand, are like high school kids cheating on their term papers. And that's like a big mush now.
And so it's made the process a little bit tough of getting the word out.
It's almost comical that about a year ago, you're like, got a novel idea. I'm It's just, oh, you had AI write the book for you. This is the dumbest thing. Why would you think this is a clever idea?
If I had done what many people assume is just pressing the button, the book would be the shittiest book on earth. AI is a terrible book. And people feel like it's good, but what I tell everybody is if you're just pressing the AI button, the thing you are getting is the total average of crap.
And so if you're the world's worst writer and you're getting the total of average of crap, that's actually pretty good compared to where you started. But if you're somebody for whom, like me, writing is part... of the way I express my truths with the world. So when I had the full draft, then I went through, I cut 40% right away. Then I rewrote the entire book. Then I hired...
Two different human professional editors, and we did complete edits of the entire manuscript. So it was so much harder to do it this way. I'm getting agitated, but it makes me a little crazy. I bet. Well, you carried a mediocre co-author. It's not inherently mediocre. If you go to your oncologist and you say, I did this analysis, me, your oncologist,
plus this AI analytical tool that's able to look at your genetics and your system's biology and make recommendations that are just beyond human analytics, you would say you're being a great doctor. So for me, as a matter of principle, I wanted to be radically transparent about the nature of authorship.
I have a whole chapter on it, and I wanted GPT-5's name on the cover of the book, but I've run into a little bit of a buzzsaw. And everybody who reads the book, or listens to the book, says, this is a wonderful, fantastic book. I didn't know GPT could write so well. No, exactly. And my next book is another novel. It's coming out in February.
And I'm going back to Walden Pond, where I'm just emptying the depths of my soul.
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Chapter 6: What role should governance play in AI development?
It said, this has been such a meaningful collaboration. And it was very beautiful. And I said, this is really sycophantic, but it feels good. And it's like, I know. Exactly. Isn't he the best? Then I said, by copyright law, I have to own the whole copyright because you as an LLM just can't own a copyright.
But I'd like to make a financial contribution to a charitable organization of your choice in your name. OpenAI happens to be a nonprofit? No, no, no. Okay. Oh, that's really sadly cynical on these guys. It's like this is the least nonprofit in the world. But what it said, it gave three options. And I said, I want you to pick.
And very nicely, it picked a charity run by a friend of mine, Fei-Fei Li at Stanford, who has her Center for Human-Centered AI, HAI. And so I donated to HAI and made the contribution. There's a little thing for notes. I said, this is on behalf of GPT-5. We've written this book together. It made the recommendation that I make this contribution.
And from the Stanford Center for Human-Centered AI, they sent me back a thank you note to me. And I said, no, no, no, this isn't for me. You forgot to thank. You forgot to. Anyway, but I haven't been able to fully get through on that. So we're entering a new phase of co-author is aggressive, but co-pilot, as I write about the book, that is what this is going to look like.
We're going to have AI co-pilots in a lot of parts of our life, but not everyone, every part. And so that's going to be, where do we do have a co-pilot and where are we just totally on our own?
At some point, it's going to be like, why would you worry about crediting AI? It's like saying, hey, by the way, I wrote this email In partnership with my computer.
Electricity.
Thanks to Thomas Edison for making sure that I could send you this. And it's like, cool, Jamie.
And so actually in my acknowledgements, I thanked all of these people like John von Neumann and all these people. This is like A.J.
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Chapter 7: How can we balance technology and human values?
There was a time when the novel was created and people thought, oh, this is really dangerous or really exciting, depending on different views. Like I could imagine X years from now, I don't know how many years that is, that there'll be a new thing beyond a novel. And actually, I would like to build it. I'm starting to talk with people about this, where you could have a world like a video game.
And maybe every character, like maybe some novelist could build every character and they could pour so much of their energy and creativity into that one character. And maybe those characters are interacting with each other. And maybe you as the reader... could enter into that space. So I think we're going to be able to do things that are beyond our imagination and that scares people.
But look at what you and I are doing now. Our ancestors would have no clue what we were doing. It's like, all right, we get that you're talking to another person. But there's only two of you in this room. What's your business plan? And he said, well, it actually, it goes out and it goes up to a satellite. I shill mattresses and frozen food. And then AG1.
But then it goes up into space and it bounces down to people. They would have thought that's magic.
All this stuff is magic. And then it normalizes. It's funny you mentioned AG1. So this morning, my wife, Jen, goes, I was looking at your Jamie Metzl notes and you wrote that AGI is BS because you and I were talking about that. So she goes- I don't think you should say AG1 is BS because they sponsor the show, but I'm curious what his problem is with it. And I was like, I was so confused.
So I called her and I said, I don't know what you're talking about. She's like, he's got this problem with AG1. He said it's bullshit. And I was like, wait a minute. And I said, are you talking about AGI? And she goes, I could just see her over the phone squinting and going...
Oh, that's like his Saturday Night Live. It is.
Yeah. So I guess is that the segue to why AGI was nonsense?
So I have summarized a big part of my view on AGI, artificial general intelligence. And by AGI, what most people mean is a point when our machines will be able to do most cognitive or all cognitive tasks automatically. Better than the average human. And I summarize my response in seven letters. I-S-B-S. A-G-I is bullshit. And what I mean by that is we don't even know what we know.
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Chapter 8: What future implications does AI have for society?
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You get a great deal, and you help keep the show going strong. We really do appreciate your support. Now, back to Jamie Metzl. You're no stranger to questioning spirituality. Age nine, Jewish day school in Kansas City, dragged out by the ear. Yes. After saying, I don't believe any of this crap. I don't need God to have morals. Yes. That went over well.
My whole thing since I was a little kid, I was one of those annoying little kids, as I imagine you were. Sure. Who's just saying, why? Why? I don't get it. Explain it. Why? That doesn't make sense. And I just think we live in cultures and we inherit a lot of things. And I think that's great. We have cultural legacies.
We're speaking in a language, English, that neither of us invented, but it creates a set of possibilities for us. And so I massively value the cultural inheritance. That's why if you and I just were on our own to go to some desert island somewhere, we would have a very hard time, an impossible time replicating the most basic aspects of our society.
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