#2044 - Sam Altman
2023-10-06 02:36:44
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Hello. Hello, Sam. What's happening?
Not much, how are you?
Thanks for coming in here, appreciate it.
Thanks for having me.
So, what have you done? Like, ever? No, I mean, what have you done with AI? I mean, it's, um, one of the things, um, about this is, I mean, I think everyone is fascinated by it. I mean, everyone is, uh, absolutely blown away at the current capability.
And wondering what the potential for the future is and whether or not that's a good thing.
I think it's gonna be a great thing. But I think it's not gonna be all a great thing. And that is where, I think, that's where all of the complexity comes in for people. It's not this, like, clean story of, we're gonna do this and it's all gonna be great. It's, we're gonna do this, it's gonna be net great, but it's gonna be, like, a technological revolution.
It's gonna be a societal revolution. And those always come with change. And even if it's, like, net wonderful, you know, there's things we're gonna lose along the way. Some kinds of jobs, some parts of our way of life, some parts of the way we live are gonna change, go away.
And no matter how tremendous the upside is there, and I believe it will be tremendously good. You know, there's a lot of stuff we gotta navigate through to make sure. Um, that's, that's a complicated thing for anyone to wrap their heads around. And there's, you know, deep and super understandable emotions around that.
That's a very honest answer. That it's not all gonna be good.
But it seems inevitable at this point.
It's, yeah, I mean, it's definitely inevitable. My, my view of the world, you know, when you're like a kid in school, you learn about this technological revolution and then that one and then that one. And my view of the world now, sort of looking backwards and forwards, is that this is like one long technological revolution. And we had, sure, like. first we had to figure out agriculture so that we had the resources and time to figure out how to build machines.
Then we got this industrial revolution and that made us learn about a lot of stuff. A lot of other scientific discovery too. Let us do the computer revolution. And that's now letting us, as we scale up these massive systems, do the AI revolution. But it really is just one long story of humans discovering science and technology and co-evolving with it.
And I think it's the most exciting story of all time. I think it's how we get to this world of abundance. And although, you know, although we do have these things to navigate, there will be these downsides. If you think about what it means for the world and for people's quality of lives, we can get to a world where the cost of intelligence and the abundance that comes with that, the cost, dramatically falls. The abundance goes way up.
I think we'll do the same thing with energy. And I think those are the two sort of key inputs to everything else we want. So if we can have abundant and cheap energy and intelligence, that will transform people's lives largely for the better. And I think it's going to, in the same way that if we could go back now 500 years and look at someone's life, we'd say, well, there's some great things, but they didn't have this. They didn't have that.
Can you believe? they didn't have modern medicine? That's what people are going to look back at us like, but in 50 years.
When you think about the people that currently rely on jobs that AI will replace, when you think about whether it's truck drivers or automation workers, people that work in factory assembly lines,
what, if anything, what strategies can be put to mitigate the negative downsides of those jobs being eliminated by AI?
So I'll talk about some general thoughts, but I find making very specific predictions difficult because the way the technology goes has been so different than even my own intuitions, or certainly my own intuitions.
Maybe we should stop there and back up a little. What were your initial thoughts?
If you had asked me 10 years ago, I would have said, first, AI is going to come for blue-collar labor, basically. It's going to drive trucks and do factory work, and it'll handle heavy machinery. Then maybe after that, it'll do some kinds of cognitive labor, but it won't be off doing what I think of personally as the really hard stuff. It won't be off proving new mathematical theorems. It won't be off discovering new science.
It won't be off writing code. And then eventually, maybe, but maybe last of all, maybe never, because human creativity is this magic special thing, last of all, it'll come for the creative jobs. That's what I would have said. Now, A, it looks to me like, and for a while, AI is much better at doing tasks than doing jobs. It can do these little pieces super well, but sometimes it goes off the rails.
It can't keep very long coherence. So people are instead just able to do their existing jobs way more productively, but you really still need the human there today. And then B, it's going exactly the other direction. It can do the creative work first, stuff like coding. second.
They can do things like other kinds of cognitive labor. third, and we're the furthest away from humanoid robots.
So back to the initial question, if we do have something that completely eliminates factory workers, completely eliminates truck drivers, delivery drivers, things along those lines, that creates this massive vacuum in our society.
So I think there's things that we're going to do that are good to do, but not sufficient. So I think at some point, we will do something like a UBI or some other kind of very long-term unemployment insurance, something. But we'll have some way of giving people, redistributing money in society as a cushion for people, as people figure out the new jobs. And maybe I should touch on that. I'm not a believer at all that there won't be lots of new jobs.
I think human creativity, desire for status, wanting different ways to compete, invent new things, feel part of a community, feel valued, that's not going to go anywhere. People have worried about that forever. What happens is we get better tools, and we just invent new things and more amazing things to do. And there's a big universe out there. And I think I mean that like literally in that there's like space is really big, but also there's just so much stuff we can all do.
if we do get to this world of abundant intelligence where you can sort of just think of a new idea and it gets created. But again, that doesn't, to the point we started with, that doesn't provide like great solace to people who are losing their jobs today. So saying there's going to be this great, indefinite stuff in the future. People are like, what are we doing today? So, you know, well, I think we will, as a society, do things like UBI and other ways of redistribution.
But I don't think that gets at the core of what people want. I think what people want is like agency, self-determination, the ability to play a role in architecting the future along with the rest of society, the ability to express themselves and create something meaningful to them.
And also, I think a lot of people work jobs they hate. And I think there's, we as a society are always a little bit confused about whether we want to work more or work less. But somehow,
we all get to do something meaningful and we all get to play our role in driving the future forward. That's really important. And what I hope is, as those truck driving, long haul truck driving jobs go away, which, you know, people have been wrong about predicting how fast that's going to happen, but it's going to happen. We figure out not just a way to solve the economic problem by like giving people the equivalent of money every month, but that there's a way that, and we've had a lot of ideas about this, there's a way that we like share ownership and decision making over the future. I think I say a lot about AGI is that everyone realizes we're going to have to share the benefits of that, but we also have to share, like the decision making over it and access to the system itself.
Like I'd be more excited about a world where we say, rather than give everybody on earth like one eight billionth of the AGI money, which we should do that too, we say you get like one eight billionth of a one eight billionth slice of the system. You can sell it to somebody else, you can sell it to a company, you can pool it with other people, you can use it for whatever creative pursuit you want, you can use it to figure out how to start some new business. And with that, you get sort of like a voting right over how this is all going to be used. And so the better the AGI gets, the more your little one eight billionth ownership is worth to you.
We were joking around the other day on the podcast, where I was saying that what we need is an AI government. What does that mean? We should have an AI president.
Just make all the decisions?
Yeah, have something that's completely unbiased, absolutely rational, has the accumulated knowledge of the entire human history at its disposal, including all knowledge of psychology and psychological study, including UBI, because that comes with a host of pitfalls and issues that people have with it.
So I'll say something there. I think we're still very far away from a system that is capable enough and reliable enough that any of us would want that. But I'll tell you something I love about that.
Someday, let's say, that thing gets built. The fact that it can go around and talk to every person on Earth, understand their exact preferences at a very deep level, you know, how they think about this issue and that one and how they balance the tradeoffs and what they want, and then understand all of that and like collectively optimize, optimize for the collective preferences of humanity or citizens of the US. That's awesome.
As long as it's not co-opted, right? Our government currently is co-opted.
That's for sure.
We know for sure that our government is heavily influenced by special interests. If we could have an artificial intelligence government that has no influence, nothing has influence on it.
What a fascinating idea. It's possible.
And I think it might be the only way where you're going to get completely objective, the absolute, most intelligent decision for virtually every problem, every dilemma that we face currently in society.
Would you truly be comfortable handing over like final decision making and say, all right, AI, you got it.
No, no, but I'm not comfortable doing that with anybody. Right. I was uncomfortable with the Patriot Act. I'm uncomfortable with many decisions that are being made. It's just.
there's so much obvious evidence that decisions that are being made are not being made in the best interest of the overall well of the people. It's being made in the decisions of whatever gigantic corporations that have donated to whatever the military industrial complex and pharmaceutical industrial complex. And it's just the money. That's really what we know today, that money has a massive influence on our society and the choices that get made and the overall good or bad for the population.
I have no disagreement at all that the current system is super broken, not working for people, super corrupt, and, for sure, like unbelievably run by money.
And I think there is a way to do a better job than that with AI in some way. But this might just be like a factor of sitting with the systems all day and watching all of the ways they fail. We got a long way to go.
A long way to go, I'm sure. But when you think of AGI, when you think of the possible future, like where it goes to, do you ever extrapolate? Do you ever like sit and pause and say, well, if this becomes sentient and it has the ability to make better versions of itself, how long before we're literally dealing with a god?
So the way that I think about this is. it used to be that, like AGI, was this very binary moment. It was before and after. And I think I was totally wrong about that. And the right way to think about it is this continuum of intelligence, this smooth exponential curve back all the way to that sort of smooth curve of technological revolution.
The amount of compute power we can put into the system, the scientific ideas about how to make it more efficient and smarter, to give it the ability to do reasoning, to think about how to improve itself, that will all come. But my model for a long time, I think. if you look at the world of AGI thinkers, there's sort of two, particularly around the safety issues you're talking about, there's two axes that matter. There's what's called short timelines, or long timelines to the first milestone of AGI, whatever that's going to be. Is that going to happen in a few years, a few decades, maybe even longer?
Although at this point, I think most people are a few years, a few decades. And then there's takeoff speed. Once we get there, from there to that point you were talking about where it's capable of the rapid self-improvement, is that a slower, a faster process? The world that I think we're heading, that we're in, and also the world that I think is the most controllable and the safest, is the short timelines and slow takeoff quadrant.
And I think we're going to have, you know, there were a lot of very smart people for a while who were like, the thing you were just talking about happened in a day or three days. And I don't, that doesn't seem likely to me, given the shape of the technology as we understand it now. Now, even if that happens in a decade or three decades, it's still like the blink of an eye from a historical perspective.
And there are going to be some real challenges to getting that right. And the decisions we make, the sort of safety systems and the checks that the world puts in place, how we think about global regulation or rules of the road from a safety perspective for those projects, it's super important because you can imagine many things going horribly wrong. But I've been, I feel, cheerful about the progress the world is making towards taking this seriously. And, you know, it reminds me of what I've read about the conversations that the world had right around the development of nuclear weapons.
It seems to me that this is, at least in terms of public consciousness, this has emerged very rapidly, where I don't think anyone was really aware, people were aware of the concept of artificial intelligence, but they didn't think that it was going to be implemented so comprehensively, so quickly. So, chat GPT is on what, 4.5 now?
Four.
Four. And with 4.5, there'll be some sort of an exponential increase in its abilities?
It'll be somewhat better. Each step, you know, from each like half step like that, you kind of, humans have this ability to like get used to any new technology so quickly. The thing that I think was unusual about the launch of chat, GPT, 3.5 and then four was that people hadn't really been paying attention. And that's part of the reason we deploy. We think it's very important that people and institutions have time to gradually understand this, react, co-design the society that we want with it.
And if you just build AGI in secret in a lab and then drop it on the world all at once, I think it's a really bad idea. So, we had been trying to talk to the world about this for a while. People, if you don't give people something they can feel and use in their lives, they don't quite take it seriously. Everybody's busy. And so there was this big overhang from where the technology was to where public consciousness was.
Now, that's caught up. We've deployed. I think people understand it. I don't expect the jump from like four to whenever we finish 4.5, which will be a while. I don't expect that to be the crazy.
I think the crazy switch, the crazy adjustment that people have had to go through has mostly happened. I think most people have gone from thinking that AGI was science fiction and very far off to something that is going to happen. And that was like a one-time reframe. And now, you know, every year you get a new iPhone. Over the 15 years or whatever.
since the launch, they've gotten dramatically better. But iPhone to iPhone, you're like, yeah, okay, it's a little better. But now, if you go, hold up the first iPhone to the 15 or whatever, that's a big difference. GPT 3.5 to AGI, that'll be a big difference. But along the way, it'll just get incrementally better.
Do you think about the convergence of things like Neuralink? and there's a few competing technologies where they're trying to implement some sort of a connection between the human biological system and technology?
Do you want one of those things in your head?
I don't until everybody does. And, you know, I have a joke about it, but it's like the idea is like, once it gets, you have to kind of, because everybody's going to have it.
So one of the hard questions about all of the related merge stuff is exactly what you just said. Like, as a society, are we going to let some people merge with AGI, not others? And if we do, then, and you choose not to, like, what does that mean for you?
Right. And will you be protected?
How you get that moment, right? You know, if we'd like, imagine, like all, the way out to the sci-fi future, I've been a lot of sci-fi books written about how you get that moment, right? You know, who gets to do that first? What about people who don't want to? How do you make sure that people that do it first, like actually help lift everybody up together?
How do you make sure people who want to, just like, live their very human life get to do that? That stuff is really hard. And, honestly, so far off from my problems of the day that I don't get to think about that as much as I'd like to, because I do think it's super interesting.
But yeah, it seems like, if we just think logically, that's going to be a huge challenge at some point. And people are going to want wildly divergent things. But there is a societal question about how we're going to like the questions of fairness that come there. And what it means for the people who don't do it. Super, super complicated.
Anyway, on the neural interface side, I'm in the short term, like before, we figure out how to upload someone's consciousness into a computer, if that's even possible at all, which I think there's plenty of sides you could take on, why it's not. But the thing that I find myself most interested in is what we can do without drilling a hole in someone's head. How much of the inner monologue can we read out with an externally mounted device? And if we have a imperfect, low bandwidth, low accuracy, neural interface, can people still just learn how to use it really well? In a way that's like quite powerful for what they can do with new computing platform.
And my guess is we'll figure that out.
I'm sure you've seen that headpiece. There's a demonstration where there's someone asking someone a question. They have this headpiece on, they think the question, and then they literally Google the question and get the answers through their head.
That's the kind of thing we've been in. That's the kind of direction we've been exploring.
Yeah, that seems to me to be step one. That's the pong of the eventual immersive 3D video games. Like you're going to get these first steps and they're going to seem sort of crude and slow. I mean, it's essentially slower than just asking Siri.
I think if someone built a system where you could think words, doesn't have to be a question. It could just be your passive, rambling inner monologue, but certainly could be a question. And that was being fed into GPT-5 or 6.. And in your field of vision, the words in response were being displayed. That would be the pong.
That's a very valuable tool to have.
And that seems like that's inevitable.
There's hard work to get there on the neural interface side, but I believe it will happen.
Yeah, I think so too. And my concern is that the initial adopters of this will have such a massive advantage over the general population.
Well, that doesn't concern me, because that's like a, you know, that's not, you're not, that's just like better. That's a better computer. You're not like jacking your brain into something in a high risk thing. You know what you do when you don't want them, when you take off the glasses. So that feels fine.
Well, this is just the external device, then.
Oh, I think we can do the kind of like. read your thoughts with an external device at some point. Read your internal monologue.
Interesting. And do you think we'll be able to communicate with an external device as well, telepathically or semi telepathically through technology?
I do. Yeah, I do.
I think so too. My, my real concern is that once we take the step to use an actual neural interface, when, when there's an actual operation and they're using some sort of an implant and then that implant becomes more sophisticated. It's not the iPhone one. Now it's the iPhone 15.. And as these things get better and better, we're on the road to cyborgs.
We're, we're on the road to like, why would you want to be a biological person? Do you really want to live in a fucking log cabin when you can be in the matrix? I mean, it seems like we're not, we're on this path.
We're already a little bit down that path, right? Like if you take away someone's phone and they have to go function in the world today, they're at a disadvantage relative to everybody else. So that's, that's like a, maybe that's like the lightest weight version of a merge we could imagine. But I think it's worth like, if we go back to that earlier thing about the one exponential curve, I think it's worth saying we've like lifted off the X axis already down this path, the tiniest bit.
And yeah, even if you don't go all the way to like a neural interface, VR will get so good that some people just don't want to take it off that much. And that's fine for them. As long as we can solve this question of how do we like think about what a balance of power means in the world? I think there will be many people. I'm certainly one of them who's like, actually the human body and the human experience is pretty great.
That log cabin in the woods, pretty awesome. I don't want to be there all the time. I'd love to go play the great video game, but like, I'm really happy to get to go there sometimes.
Yeah. There's still human experiences that are just like great human experience. Just laughing with friends, you know, kissing someone that you've never kissed before, that you're, you're on a first date, that kind of, those kinds of things are the real moments. It just laughs, having a glass of wine with a friend and just laughing.
Not quite the same in VR. Now, when the VR goes super far, so you can't, you know, it's like you are jacked in on your brain and you can't tell what's real and what's not. And then everybody gets like super deep on the simulation hypothesis or the like Eastern religion or whatever. And I don't know what happens at that point.
Do you ever fuck around with simulation theory? Because the real problem is when you combine that with probability theory and you talk to the people that say, well, if you just look at the numbers, the probability that we're already in a simulation is much higher than the probability that we're not.
It's never been clear to me what to do about it. It's like, okay, that intellectually makes a lot of sense. I think, probably sure. That seems convincing, but this is my reality. This is my life and I'm going to live it.
And I've, you know, from like 2am in my college freshmen dorm hallway. till now, I've made no more progress on it than that.
Hmm. Well, it seems like one of those. it's, there's. no, you know, it's, if it is a possibility, if it is real, first of all, once it happens, what are you going to do? I mean, that, that is the new reality.
And in many ways, our new reality is as alien to, uh, you know, uh, hunter gatherers from 15,000 years ago, as that would be to us. now. I mean, we're, we're already, we've already entered into some very bizarre territory where, you know, I was just having a conversation with my kids. We're asking questions about something. And, uh, you know, I always say, let's guess what percentage of that is this.
And then we just Google it and then just ask Siri and we pull it up. Like, look at that. Like. that alone is so bizarre compared to how it was when I was 13 and you had to go to the library and hope that the book was accurate.
Totally. I was very annoyed. This more, I was reading about how horrible systems like chat, GPT and Google are from an environmental impact, because it's, you know, using like some extremely tiny amount of energy for each query, and you know, how we're all destroying the world. And I was like, before that people drove to the library. Let's talk about how much carbon they burned to answer this question versus what it takes.
now. Come on.
Those, but that's just people looking for some reason why something's bad. That's not a logical perspective. Well, we should be looking at is the spectacular changes that are possible through this and all the problems, the insurmountable problems that we have with resources, with the environment, with cleaning up the ocean, climate change. There's so many problems.
We need this to solve all of everything else.
And that's why we need president AI.
If AI could make every scientific discovery, but we still had human presidents, do you think we'd be okay?
No, because those creeps would still be pocketing money and they'd have offshore accounts, and it would, it would always be a weird thing of corruption, and how to mitigate that corruption, which is also one of the fascinating things about the current state of technology, is that we're so much more aware of corruption. We're so much more, there's so much independent reporting and we're so much more cognizant of the actual problems that are in place.
This is really great. One of the things that I've observed, obviously many other people too, is corruption is such an incredible hindrance to getting anything done in a society to make it forward progress. And, you know, my worldview had been more US centric when I was younger. And as I've just studied the world more and had to work in more places in the world, like, it's amazing how much corruption there still is. But the shift to a technologically enabled world, I think, is a major force against it, because everything is, it's harder to hide stuff.
And I do think corruption in the world will keep trending down.
Because of its exposure through technology.
I mean, it comes at a cost. And I think the loss that like, I am very worried about how far the surveillance state could go here. But in a world where payments, for example, are no longer like bags of cash, but done somehow digitally. And somebody, even if he's in Bitcoin, can, like, watch those flows. I think that's like a corruption reducing thing.
I agree. But I'm very worried about central bank digital currency. And that being tied to a social credit score.
Super, super against.
Yeah, that scares the shit out of me.
Super against.
And that, the push to that is not, that's not for the overall good of society. That's for control.
Yeah, I think like, I mean, there's many things that I'm disappointed that the US government has done recently. But the war on crypto, which I think is a like, we can't give this up, like we're going to control this and all that. That's like, that's the thing that, like, makes me quite sad about the country.
It makes me quite sad about the country too. But then you also see with things like FTX, like, oh, this can get without regulation and without someone overseeing it. This can get really fucked.
Yeah, I'm not anti-regulation. Like, I think there's clearly a role for it. And I also think FTX was like a sort of comically bad situation that we shouldn't learn too much from either.
Yeah, but it's a fun one.
Like, it's totally fun. I love that story. I mean, you clearly...
I really do. I love the fact that they were all doing drugs and having sex with each other.
No, no, it had every part of the drama. I mean, it's a gripping story because everything there.
They did their taxes with like, what was the program that they used? QuickBooks.
They're dealing with billions of dollars.
I don't know why I think the word polycule is so funny. Polycule? That was what they like, when you call a relationship, like a poly, but closed, like polyamorous molecule put together.
Oh, I see.
So they were like, this is our polycule.
So there's nine of them, and they're polyamorous.
Or ten of them, or whatever. Yeah, you call that a polycule. And I thought that was the funniest, like, that became like a meme in Silicon Valley for a while. that I thought was hilarious. You clearly want enough regulation that that can't happen, but they're like...
Well, I'm not against that happening. I'm against them doing what they did with the money.
No, that's what I mean.
The polycule is kind of fun.
Go for it. No, no, I mean, you want enough thing that, like FTX, can't lose all of its depositors' money. Yes. But I think there's an important point here, which is you have all of this other regulation that people, and it didn't keep us safe. And the basic thing, which was like, you know, let's do that.
That was not all of the crypto stuff people were talking about.
Yes. I mean, the real fascinating crypto is Bitcoin. To me, I mean, that's the one that I think has the most likely possibility of becoming a universal, viable currency. And it's, you know, it's limited in the amount that there can be. It's, you know, people mine it with their own.
It's like that to me is very fascinating. And I love the fact that it's been implemented and that at least I'm like. I've had Andreas Antonopoulos on the podcast. And he's when he talks about it, he's living it. He's spending all of his money.
Everything he has paid is in Bitcoin. He pays his rent in Bitcoin. Everything he does is in Bitcoin.
I helped start a project called WorldCoin a few years ago. And so I've gotten to like learn more about the space. I'm excited about it for the same reasons. I'm excited about Bitcoin, too. But I think this idea that we have a global currency that is outside of the control of any government is a super logical and important step on the tech tree.
Yeah, agreed. I mean, why should the government control currency? I mean, the government should be dealing with all the pressing environmental, social, infrastructure issues, foreign policy issues, economic issues, the things that we need to be governed in order to have a peaceful and prosperous society that's equal and equitable.
What do you think happens to money and currency after AGI?
I've wondered about that because I feel like with money, especially when money goes digital, the bottleneck is access. If we get to a point where all information is just freely shared everywhere, there are no secrets, there are no boundaries, there are no borders. We're reading minds. We have complete access to all of the information, of everything you've ever done, everything everyone's ever said. There's no hidden secrets.
What is money then? Money is this digital thing. How can you possess it? How can you possess this digital thing if there is literally no bottleneck? There's no barriers to anyone accessing any information, because essentially it's just ones and zeros.
I think the information frame makes sense. Another way is that money is a way to trade labor or trade a limited number of hard assets like land and houses and whatever.
If you think about a world where intellectual labor is just readily available and super cheap, then that's somehow very different. I think there will always be goods that we want to be scarce and expensive, but it'll only be those goods that we want to be scarce and expensive and services that still are. Money in a world like that, I think, is just a very curious idea.
Yeah, it becomes a different thing. It's not a bag of gold in a leather pouch that you're carrying around and riding on a horse. It's not going to do you much good, probably. It's not going to do you much good. But then the question becomes, how is that money distributed and how do we avoid some horrible Marxist society where there's one totalitarian government that's just dictating?
Don't sit out. That would be bad.
My current best idea, and maybe there's something better, is if we are right, a lot of reasons we could be wrong, if we are right that the AGI systems, of which there will be a few, become the high order bits of influence, whatever in the world, I think you do need not to just redistribute the money, but the access, so that people can make their own decisions about how to use it and how to govern it. And if you've got one idea, you get to do this. If I've got one idea, I get to do that. And I have rights to basically do whatever I want with my part of it. And if I come up with better ideas than you, I get rewarded for that by whatever the society is, or vice versa.
The hardliners, the people that are against welfare and against any sort of universal basic income, UBI, what they're really concerned with is human nature. They believe that if you remove incentives, if you just give people free money, they become addicted to it. They become lazy. But isn't that a human biological and psychological bottleneck? And perhaps, with the implementation of artificial intelligence combined with some sort of neural interface, whether it's external or internal, it seems like that's a problem that can be solved.
That you can essentially, and this is where it gets really spooky, you can re-engineer the human biological system. And you can remove all of these problems that people have. that are essentially problems that date back to human reward systems when we were tribal people, hunter-gatherer people. Whether it's jealousy, lust, envy, all these variables that come into play when you're dealing with money and status and social status. If those are eliminated with technology, essentially we become a next version of what the human species is possible.
We're very, very far removed from tribal, brutal societies of cave people. We all agree that this is a way, better way to live. It's way safer. I was talking about this at my comedy club last night. We were talking about DNA, and my wife was saying that, look, everybody came from cave people, which is kind of a fucked up thought.
That everyone here is here because of cave people. Well, all that's still in our DNA.
And these reward systems can be hijacked, and they can be hijacked by just giving people money. And you don't have to work, you don't have to do anything, you don't have to have ambition, you'll just have money. And just lay around and do drugs. That's the fear that people have of giving people free money. But if we can figure out how to literally engineer the human biological vehicle and remove all those pitfalls, if we can enlighten people technologically, maybe enlighten is the wrong word, but advance the human species to the point where those are no longer dilemmas, because those are easily solvable through coding.
They're easily solvable through enhancing the human biological system, perhaps raising dopamine levels to the point where anger and fear and hate are impossible. They don't exist. And if you just had everyone on Molly, how many wars would there be? There'd be zero wars.
I mean, I think if you could get everyone on earth to all do Molly once on the same day, that'd be a tremendous thing. It would be. If you got everybody on earth to do Molly every day, that'd be a real loss.
But what if they did a low dose of Molly, where you just get to, ah, where everybody greets people with love and affection, and there's no longer a concern about competition. Instead, the concern is about the fascination of innovation and creation and creativity.
Man, we could talk the rest of the time about this one topic. It's so interesting. I think, if I could, like, push a button to, like, remove all human striving and conflict, I wouldn't do it, first of all. Like, I think that's a very important part of our story and experience. And also, I think, we can see, both from our own biological history and also from what we know about AI, that very simple goal systems, fitness functions, reward models, whatever you want to call it, lead to incredibly impressive results.
You know, if the biological imperative is survive and reproduce, look how far that has somehow gotten us as a society. All of this, all this stuff we have, all this technology, this building, whatever else. Like,
that got here through an extremely simple goal in a very complex environment, leading to all of the richness and complexity of people fulfilling this biological imperative to some degree and wanting to impress each other. So, I think, like, evolutionary fitness is a simple and unbelievably powerful idea. Now, could you carefully edit out every individual manifestation of that?
Maybe, but I don't want to, like, live in a society of drones where everybody is just sort of, like, on molly all the time either. Like, that doesn't seem like the right answer. Like, I want us to continue to strive. I want us to continue to push back the frontier and go out and explore. And I actually think something's already gotten a little off track in society about all of that.
And we're, I don't know, I think, like, I'm, I don't, I thought I'd be older by the time. I felt like the old guy complaining about the youth. But I think we've lost something, and I think that we need more striving, maybe more risk-taking, more, like, explorer spirit.
What do you mean by you? think we've lost something?
I mean, here's, like, a version of it very much from my own lens. I was a startup investor for a long time, and it often was the case that the very best startup founders were in their early or mid-20s, late-20s, maybe even, and now they skew much older. And what I want to know is, in the world today, where are the super great 25-year-old founders? And there are a few. It's not fair to say there are none, but there are less than there were before.
And I think that's bad for society at all levels. I mean, like, tech company founders, is one example, but, like, people who go off and create something new, who push on a disagreeable or controversial idea, we need that to drive forward. We need that sort of spirit. We need people to be able to, you know, put out ideas and be wrong and not be ostracized from society for it or not have it be, like, you know, something that they get canceled for, or whatever. We need people to be able to take a risk in their career because they believe in some important scientific quest that may not work out or may sound, like, really controversial or bad or whatever.
You know, certainly when we started OpenAI and we were saying, we think this AGI thing is real and could be, you know, could be done, unlikely, but so important if it happens. And all of the older scientists in our field were saying, those people are irresponsible. You shouldn't talk about AGI. That's like, you know, they're, like, selling a scam or they're, like, you know, they're kind of being reckless and it's going to lead to an AGI winter. We said we believed.
We said at the time we knew it was unlikely, but it was an important quest and we were going to go after it and kind of, like, fuck the haters. That's important to a society.
What do you think is the origin? Like, why do you think there are less young people that are doing those kind of things now as opposed to a decade or two ago?
I am so interested in that topic.
I'm tempted to blame the education system, but I assure that I think that, like, interacts with society in all of these strange ways.
It's funny. There was this, like, thing all over my Twitter feed recently, trying to talk about, like, what, you know, what, like, what caused the drop in testosterone in American men over the last few decades. And no one was like, this is a symptom, not a cause. And everyone was like, oh, it's the microplastics, it's the birth control pills, it's the whatever, it's the whatever, it's the whatever. And I think this is, like, not at all the most important piece of this topic, but it was just interesting to me sociologically that there was only talk about it being about what caused it, not about it being an effect of some sort of change in society.
But isn't what caused it – well, there's biological reasons why. Like, when we talk about the phthalates and microplastic pesticides, environmental factors, those are real.
Totally. And I don't – like, again, I'm so far out of my depth and expertise here. This was – it was just interesting to me that the only talk was about, like, biological factors and not that somehow society can have some sort of effect.
Well, society most certainly has an effect.
Do you know what the answer to this is?
I don't. I mean, I've had a podcast with Dr. Shanna Swan, who wrote the book Countdown, and that is all about the introduction of petrochemical products and the correlating drop in testosterone, rise in miscarriages, the fact that these are ubiquitous endocrine disruptors. That when they do blood tests on people, they find some insane number. It's like 90-plus percent of people have phthalates in their system.
I appreciate the metal cups.
Yeah, we try to mitigate it as much as possible, but, I mean, you're getting it. If you're microwaving food, you're fucking getting it. You're just getting it. If you eat processed food, you're getting it. You're getting a certain amount of microplastics in your diet, and estimates have been that it's as high as a credit card of microplastics for a week in your body.
You consume a credit card of that a week. The real concern is with mammals, because the introductions, when they've done studies with mammals, when they've introduced phthalates into their body, there's a correlating... One thing that happens is these animals, their taints shrink. Like the taint of... Yeah, the mammal, when you look at males, it's 50% to 100% larger than the females.
With the introduction of phthalates on the males, the taints start shrinking, the penises shrink, testicles shrink, sperm count shrinks. So we know there's a direct biological connection between these chemicals and how they interact with bodies. So that's a real one. And it's also the amount of petrochemical products that we have, the amount of plastics that we use, it is such an integral part of our culture and our society, our civilization. It's everywhere.
And I've wondered, if you think about how these territorial apes evolve into this new advanced species, wouldn't one of the very best ways be to get rid of one of the things that causes the most problems, which is testosterone? We need testosterone. We need aggressive men and protectors. But why do we need them? We need them because there's other aggressive men that are evil, right?
So we need protectors from ourselves. We need the good, strong people to protect us from the bad, strong people. But if we're in the process of integrating with technology, if technology is an inescapable part of our life, if it is everywhere, you're using it, you have the internet of everything that's in your microwave, in your television, your computers, everything you use. As time goes on, that will be more and more a part of your life. And as these plastics are introduced into the human biological system, you're seeing a feminization of the males of the species.
You're seeing a downfall in birth rate. You're seeing all these correlating factors that would sort of lead us to become this more peaceful, less violent, less aggressive, less ego-driven thing.
Which the world is definitely becoming over time. And I'm all for less violence, obviously. But I don't...
Look, obviously, testosterone has many great things to say for it, and some bad tendencies, too. But I don't think a world, if we leave that out of the equation and just say, like a world that has a spirit that, you know, we're gonna defend ourselves, we're going to explain... We're going to find a way to like, protect ourselves, and our tribe and our society into this future, which you can get with lots of other ways. I think that's an important impulse. More than that, though, what I meant is about...
If we go back to the issue of like, where are the young founders? Why don't we have more of those? And I don't think it's just the tech startup industry. I think you could say that about like, young scientists, or many other categories. Those are maybe just the ones that I know the best.
In a world with any amount of technology, I still think we've got to... It is our destiny, in some sense, to stay on this curve. And we still need to go figure out what's next, and after the next hill, and after the next hill. And it would be... My perception is that there is some long-term societal change happening here.
And I think it makes us less happy, too.
Right. It may make us less happy. But what I'm saying is, if the human species does integrate with technology, wouldn't a great way to facilitate that to be to kind of feminize the primal apes, and to sort of downplay the role...
You mean like, should the AGI...
Well, maybe... I don't know if it's AGI. I mean, maybe it's just an inevitable consequence of technology. Because especially the type of technology that we use, which does have so much plastic in it, and then, on top of that, the technology that's involved in food systems, preservatives, all these different things that we use to make sure that people don't starve to death. We've made incredible strides in that.
There are very few people in this country that starve to death. It's not a primary issue. But violence is a primary issue. But our concerns about violence, and our concerns about testosterone, and strong men, and powerful people, is only because...
We need to protect against others.
We need to protect against other same things.
Is that true? Is that really the only reason?
Sure. I mean, how many incredibly violent women are out there running gangs?
No, no, that part for sure. Clearly not very many. What I meant more is, is that the only reason that society values strong masculinity?
Yeah, I think so. I think it's a biological imperative, right? And I think that biological imperative is because we used to have to defend against incoming tribes, and predators, and animals. And we needed someone who was stronger than most to defend the rest. And that's the concept of the military.
That's why Navy SEAL training is so difficult. We want the strongest of the strong to be at the tip of the spear. But that's only because there's people like that out there that are bad. If artificial general intelligence and the implementation of some sort of a device that changes the biological structure of human beings to the point where that is no longer a concern... Like, if you are me, and I am you, and I know this because of technology, violence is impossible.
Yeah, look, by the time, if this goes all the way down the sci-fi path, and we're all like merged into this one single, like planetary, universal, whatever consciousness, then yes, you don't.
You don't need testosterone.
Need testosterone, but you still...
Especially if we can reproduce through other methods. Like, this. is the alien hypothesis, right? Like, why do they look so spindly and without any gender? And, you know, and they have these big heads and tiny mouths.
They don't need physical strength.
They don't need physical strength. They have some sort of a telepathic way of communicating. They probably don't need sounds with their mouths. And they don't need this urge that we have to conquer and to spread our DNA. Like, that's so much of what people do is these reward systems that were established when we were territorial apes.
There's a question to me about how much you can ever get rid of that. if you make an AGI, and it decides, actually, we don't need to expand. We don't need more territory. We're just like happy. We, at this point, you, me, it, the whole thing all together, all merged in.
We're happy here on Earth. We don't need to get any bigger. We don't need to reproduce. We don't need to grow. We're just going to sit here and run.
A, that sounds like a boring life.
I don't agree with that. I don't agree that that would be the logical conclusion. I think the logical conclusion would be they would look for problems and frontiers that are insurmountable to our current existence, like intergalactic communication and transportation.
What happens when it meets another AGI, the other galaxy over?
What happens when it meets an AGI that's a million years more advanced?
Or that.
Like, what does that look like? Yeah. That's what I've often wondered. if we are, I call ourselves the biological caterpillars that create the electronic butterfly, that we're making a cocoon right now and we don't even know what we're doing. And I think it's also tied into consumerism.
Because what does consumerism do? Consumerism facilitates the creation of newer and better things, because you always want the newest, latest, greatest. So you have more advanced technology and automobiles and computers and cell phones, and all of these different things, including medical science.
That's all, for sure. True. The thing I was like reflecting on, as you were saying, that is, I don't think I, I'm not as optimistic that we can or even should overcome our biological base, to the degree that I think you think we can. And, you know, to even go back one further level, like. I think, I think society is happiest where there's like roles for strong femininity and strong masculinity in the same people and in different people.
And, and I don't like,
and I don't think a lot of these, like deep seated things, are gonna be able to get pushed aside very easily and still have a system that works. Like, sure, we can't really think about what if there were consciousness in a machine someday or whatever, what that would be like. And maybe, maybe I'm just like thinking too small mindedly. But I think there is something about us that has worked in a super deep way. And it took evolution, a lot of search space to get here.
But I wouldn't discount it too easily.
But don't you think that cave people would probably have those same logical conclusions about life and sedentary lifestyle and sitting in front of a computer and not interacting with each other except through text?
Well, I mean, isn't that like, what you're saying is correct.
How different do you think our motivations are today? And kind of what really brings us genuine joy and how we're wired at some deep level differently than cave people? Clearly, lots of other things have changed. We've got better, much better tools. But how different do you think it really is?
I think that's the problem is that genetically, at the base level, there's not much difference. And that these reward systems are all there. We interact with all of them. Whether it's ego, lust, passion, fury, anger, jealousy, all these different things.
And you think some people will upload and edit those out?
Yes. Yeah, I think that our concern with losing this aspect of what it means to be a person, this like the idea that we should always have conflict and struggle, because conflict and struggle is how we facilitate progress, which is true. Right. And combating evil is how the good gets greater and stronger if the good wins. But my concern is that that is all predicated on the idea that the biological system that we have right now is correct and optimal.
And I think one of the things that we're dealing with, with the heightened states of depression and anxiety and the lack of meaning and existential angst that people experience, a lot of that, is because the biological reality of being a human animal, doesn't really integrate that well with this world that we've created.
That's for sure.
And I wonder if the solution to that is not find ways to find meaning with the biological vessel that you've been given, but rather engineer those aspects that are problematic out of the system to create a truly enlightened being. What are the odds that in three years there will be no war in the world? That's zero. Like nobody thinks. No, there's never been a time in human history where we haven't had war.
If you had to say what is our number one problem as a species? Well, I would say our number one problem is war. Our number one problem is this idea that it's okay to send massive groups of people who don't know each other to go murder, massive groups of people that are somehow opposed because of the government and because of lines in the sand and territory.
That's clearly an insane thing.
It's an insane thing. How do you get rid of that? Well, one of the ways you get rid of that is to completely engineer out all the human reward systems that pertain to the acquisition of resources.
So what's left at that point?
Well, we're a new thing. I think we've become a new thing.
And what does that thing do want?
I think that new thing would probably want to interact with other new things that are even more advanced than it.
I do believe that scientific curiosity can drive quite, that can be a great frontier for a long time.
Yeah, I think it can be a great frontier for a long time as well. I just wonder if what we're seeing with the drop in testosterone, because of microplastics, which sort of just snuck up on us, we didn't even know that it was an issue until people started studying it.
How certain is that at this point that that's what's happening?
I don't know. I'm going to go study after this. It's a very good question. Dr. Shannaswan believes that it's the primary driving factor of the sort of drop in testosterone and all miscarriage issues and low birth weights.
All those things seem to have a direct, there seems to be a direct factor environmentally. I'm sure. there's other factors too. The drop in testosterone, I mean, it's been shown that you can increase males' testosterone through resistance training and through making, there's certain things you can do. Like.
one of the big ones they found through a study in Japan is cold water immersion before exercise.
Yeah.
It radically increases testosterone. So cold water immersion and then exercise post that.
I wonder why. Yeah.
I don't know. See if you can find that.
But it's a fascinating field of study, but I think it has something to do with resilience and resistance and the fact that your body has to combat this external factor that's very extreme, that causes the body to go into this state of preservation and the implementation of cold shock proteins and the reduction of inflammation, which also enhances the body's endocrine system. But then, on top of that, this imperative that you have to become more resilient to survive this external factor that you've introduced into your life every single day.
So there's ways, obviously, that you can make a human being more robust. You know, we know that we can do that through strength training and that all that stuff actually does raise testosterone. Your diet can raise testosterone, and a poor diet will lower it and will hinder your endocrine system, will hinder your ability to produce growth hormone, melatonin, all these different factors. That seems to be something that we can fix in terms, or at least mitigate with decisions and choices and effort. But the fact that these petrochemical products, like there's a graph that Dr.
Shanna Swan has in her book that shows during the 1950s when they start using petrochemical products in everything, microwave, plastic, saran wrap, all this different stuff. There's a direct correlation between the implementation and the dip, and it all seems to line up like that seems to be a primary factor.
Does that have an equivalent impact on, like estrogen related hormones?
That's a good question. Some of them actually, I know. some of these chemicals that they're talking about actually increase estrogen in men. I don't know, but I do know that it increases miscarriages. So I just think it's overall disruptive to the human body.
Disruption of the endocrine system in a short period of time seems like just bad and difficult to wrap our heads around.
And then pollutants and environmental toxins on top of the pesticides and herbicides and all these other things and microplastics. There's a lot of factors that are leading our systems to not work well.
But I just really wonder if this like, are we just clinging on to this monkey body? Are we deciding?
I like my monkey body.
I do too. Listen, I love it. But I'm also. I try to be very objective. And when I objectively look at it in terms of like, if you take where we are now and all of our problems, and you look towards the future and like, what would be one way that you could mitigate a lot of these?
And well, it would be the implementation of some sort of a telepathic technology where, you know, you couldn't just text someone or tweet at someone something mean, because you would literally feel what they feel. when you put that energy out there. And you would, you would be repulsed. Yeah. And then violence would be if you were committing violence on someone and you literally felt the reaction of that violence in your own being.
That's fascinating.
You would also have no motivation for violence. If we had no aggressive tendencies, no primal chimpanzee tendencies.
You know, it's true that violence in the world has obviously gone down a lot over the decades, but emotional violence is up a lot. And the Internet has been horrible for that. Yeah. Like, I don't walk. I'm not going to walk over there and punch you because you look like a big, strong guy.
You're gonna punch me back. And also, there's a societal convention not to do that. But if I didn't know you, I might like send a mean tweet about you, and I feel nothing on that.
Yeah.
And clearly that has become like a mega epidemic in society that we did not evolve the biological constraints on somehow. And I'm actually very worried about how much that's already destabilized us and made us all miserable.
It's certainly accentuated it. It's exacerbated all of our problems. I mean, if you read Jonathan Haidt's book, The Coddle of the American Mind. Great book. Yeah, it's a great book.
And it's very damaging to women, particularly young girls. Young girls growing up, there's a direct correlation between the invention of social media, the introduction to the iPhone, self-harm, suicide, online bullying. You know, like people have always talked shit about people and no one's around. I think, the fact that they're doing it now openly to harm people.
Horrible. Obviously, I think it's super damaging to men too. Maybe they just like talk about it less. But I don't think any of us are like set up for this.
No, no one's set up for it. And, you know, I think famous people know that more than anyone.
We all get used to it.
Yeah, you just get numb to it. And or, if you're wise, you don't engage. You know, I don't engage. I don't even have any apps on my new phone. Yeah.
I've decided, I got a new phone and I decided, okay, nothing.
That's really smart.
No Twitter. So I have a separate phone that if I have to post something, I pick up. But all I get on my new phone is text messages.
And is that more just to like? keep your mind pure and unpolluted?
Do you know how many fucking times I've got up to go to the bathroom first thing in the morning and spent an hour just sitting on the toilet, scrolling through Instagram like for nothing? Does zero for me. And there's this thought that I'm going to get something out of it.
I was thinking actually just yesterday about how, you know, we all have talked for so long about these algorithmic feeds are going to manipulate us in these big ways, and that will happen. But in the small ways already, where, like scrolling, Instagram is not even that fulfilling, like you, finish that hour and you're like, I know that was a waste of my time.
But it was like over the threshold where you couldn't quite. It's hard to put the phone down.
Right. You're just hoping that the next one's going to be interesting. And every now and then the problem is, every like 30th or 40th reel that I click on is wild.
I wonder, by the way, if that's more powerful than if everyone was wild, if everyone was great. Sure. You know, it's like the sloth.
You have to mine for gold. Yeah. You don't just go out and pick it like daisies.
If the algorithm is like, intentionally feeding you some shit along the way.
Yeah. Well, there's just a lot of shit out there, unfortunately. But it's all. it's just in terms of, you know, I was talking to Sean O'Malley, who's this UFC fighter, who's, you know, obviously has a very strong mind, really interesting guy. But one of the things that Sean said is like, I get this like low level anxiety.
Yeah.
From scrolling through things. And I don't know why. Like, what is that? And I think it's part of the logical mind realizes this is a massive waste of your resources.
I also deleted a bunch of that stuff off my phone because I just didn't have the self-control. I mean, I had the self-control to delete it, but like not to stop once I was scrolling through. Right. Yeah. And so I, I think we're just like, yeah, we're getting attention hacked in some ways.
There's some good to it, too, but we don't yet have the stuff in place, the tools, the societal norms, whatever, to modulate it well.
Right. And we're not designed for it. Certainly. This is a completely new technology that, again, hijacks our human reward systems and hijacks all of the checks and balances that are in place for communication, which, historically, has been one on one. Historically, communication has been one person to another.
And when people write letters to each other, it's generally things like if someone writes a love letter or, you know, they miss you, they're writing this thing where they're kind of exposing a thing that maybe they have a difficulty in expressing in front of you. And it was, you know, generally, unless the person was a psycho, they're not hateful letters, whereas the ability to just communicate, fuck that guy, I hope he gets hit by a bus is so simple and easy and you don't experience.
Twitter seems to be particularly horrible for this, as the mechanics work. Yeah. It really rewards in ways that I don't think anybody fully understands that, like taps into something about human psychology. Yeah. Where, but that's kind of like, that's how you get engagement.
That's how you get like followers. That's how you get what, like, you know, the dopamine hits or whatever.
And, like the people who I know that spend all day on Twitter, more of them are unhappy about it than happy.
Oh, yeah. They're the most unhappy. I mean, there's quite a few people that I follow, that I only follow because they're crazy. And then I'll go and check in on them and see what the fuck they're tweeting about. And some of them are on there eight, 10 hours a day.
I'll see tweets all day long. And I know that person cannot be happy.
They're unhappy and they cannot stop.
Can't stop. And it seems like it's their life.
And they get meaning out of it in terms of reinforcement.
They get short term meaning. Yeah. I think, maybe each day you go to bed feeling like you accomplished something and got your dopamine. And the end of each decade, you probably were like, where'd that decade go?
I was talking to a friend of mine who was having a real problem with it. He's saying he would be literally walking down the street and he'd have to check his phone to see who's replying. And he wasn't even looking where he's walking. He was just like caught up in the anxiety of these exchanges.
And it's not because of the nice things people say.
No, no, no, no. It's all. And with him, he was recognizing that he was dunking on people and then seeing people respond to the dunking. Yeah. I stopped doing that a long time ago.
I stopped interacting with people on Twitter in a negative way. I just won't do it. Even if I disagree with someone, I'll say something as peacefully as possible.
I have like more of an Internet troll streak than I would like to admit. And so I try to just like not give myself too much of a temptation, but I slip up sometimes.
Yeah. It's so tempting. Totally. It's so tempting, and it's fun. It's fun to say something shitty.
I mean, again, whatever this biological system we were talking about earlier, that gets a positive reward.
Well, there's a react, you know, there's reactions. You say something outrageous and someone's going to react. And that reaction is like energy. And there's all these other human beings engaging with your idea. But ultimately, it's just not productive for most people.
And psychologically,
it's just fraught with peril. There's just so much going on. I don't know anybody who engages all day long. that's happy.
Certainly not. I think I've watched it. like destroy is too strong of a word, but like knock off track the careers or life or happiness or human relationships of people that are like good, smart, conscientious people. Yeah. Just like, couldn't fight this demon.
Yeah. Like hacked there.
And COVID really accentuated that, because people were alone and isolated. And that made it even worse because then they felt they felt even better saying shitty things to people.
I'm unhappy. Yeah. Even worse things about you.
And then there was a psychological aspect of it, like the angst that came from being socially isolated and terrified about this invisible disease. It's going to kill us all. And, you know, and so you have, is like, and then you're interacting with people on tour. And then you're caught up in that anxiety and you're doing it all day. And I know quite a few people, especially comedians, that really lost their minds and lost the respect of their peers by doing that.
I have a lot of sympathy for people who lost their minds during COVID, because what a natural thing for us all to go through in isolation was just brutal. But a lot of people did. And I don't think the Internet, and particularly not the kind of like social dynamics, of things like Twitter. I don't think that like brought out anyone's best.
No. Well, I mean, some people, I think if they're not, they're not inclined to be shitty to people. I think some people did seek comfort and they did interact with people in positive ways. I see there's plenty of positive. I think the thing is that the negative interactions are so much more impactful.
Look, I think there are a lot of people who use these systems for wonderful things. I didn't mean to imply that's not the case, but that's not what drives people's emotions after getting off the platform at the end of the day.
Right, right. And it's also probably not. If you looked at a pie chart of the amount of interactions on Twitter, I would say a lot of them are shitting on people and being angry about.
How many of the people that you know that use Twitter, those eight or 10 hours a day, are just saying wonderful things about other people all day versus the virulent?
Very few.
Yeah.
Very few. I don't know any of them. I know. But then again, I wonder, with the implementation of some new technology that makes communication a very different thing, that will occurring. Like what we're doing now with communication, is less immersive than communicating one on one.
You and I are talking. We're looking into each other's eyes. We're getting social cues. We're smiling at each other. We're laughing.
It's a very natural way to talk. I wonder if, through the implementation of technology, if it becomes even more immersive than a one on one conversation, even more interactive. And you will understand even more about the way a person feels, about what you say, about that person's memory, that person's life, that person's history, their education, how it comes out of their mind, how their mind interacts with your mind. And you see them. You really see them.
I wonder if what we're experiencing now is just like the first time people invented guns. They just started shooting at things.
Yeah. If you can feel what I feel when you say something mean to me or nice to me, that's clearly going to change what you decide to say.
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Unless you're a psycho.
Unless you're a psycho.
And then what causes someone to be a psycho? And can that be engineered out? Imagine what we're talking about when we're dealing with the human mind. We're dealing with various diseases, bipolar, schizophrenia. Imagine a world where we can find the root cause of those things and, through coding and some sort of an implementation of technology that elevates dopamine and serotonin and does some things to people, that eliminates all of those problems and allows people to communicate in a very pure way.
It sounds great.
It sounds great, but you're not going to have any rock and roll. Stand-up comedy will die.
You'll have no violent movies. There's a lot of things that are going to go out the window. But maybe that is also part of the process of our evolution to the next stage of existence.
Maybe. I feel genuinely confused on this.
Well, I think you should be.
We're going to find out. Yeah.
I mean, to be sure. That's the same.
But I don't even have...
Hubris beyond belief. Right. I mean, you just... You, from the... When did OpenAI...
When did you first start this project?
Like the very beginning. End of 2015,, early 2016..
And when you initially started this project, what kind of timeline did you have in mind? And has it stayed on that timeline, or is it just wildly out of control?
I remember talking with John Shulman, one of our co-founders, early on. And he was like, yeah, I think it's going to be about a 15-year project. And I was like, yeah, that sounds about right to me. And I've always sort of thought since then... Now, I no longer think of AGI as quite the end point.
But to get to the point where we accomplish the thing we set out to accomplish...
That would take us to 2030, 2031.. That has felt to me like all the way through kind of a reasonable estimate with huge error bars. And I kind of think we're on the trajectory I sort of would have assumed.
And what did you think the impact on society would be? Like? did you... When you first started doing this and you said, okay, if we are successful... And we do create some massively advanced AGI.
What is the implementation? And what is the impact on society? Did you sit there and have like a graph where you had the pros on one side, the cons on the other? Did you just sort of abstractly consider...
Well, we definitely talked a lot about the cons.
Many of us were super worried about, and still are, about, safety and alignment. And if we build these systems, we can all see the great future. That's easy to imagine. But if something goes horribly wrong, it's like really horribly wrong. And so there was a lot of discussion about...
And really a big part of the founding spirit of this is like, how are we going to solve the safety problem? What does that even mean? And one of the things that we believe is that the greatest minds in the world cannot sit there and solve that in a vacuum. You've got to like have contact reality. You've got to see where the technology goes.
Practice plays out in a stranger way than theory. And that's certainly proven true for us. But we had a long list of... Well, I don't know if we had a long list of cons. We had a very intense list of cons, because, you know, there's, like all of the last decades of sci-fi telling you about how this goes wrong.
And why you're supposed to shoot me right now. Yeah. And...
I'm sure you've seen the John Connor chat GPT.
I haven't. What is it?
It's, like, you know, John Connor from the Terminator, the kid looking at you when you open up chat GPT.
Yeah.
So that stuff we were like very clear in our minds on. Now, I think we understand there's a lot of work to do, but we understand more about how to make AI safe. in the... AI, safety gets overloaded. Like, you know, does it mean don't say something people find offensive?
or does it mean not, don't destroy all of humanity or some continuum? And I think the word is like gotten overloaded. But in terms of the like, not destroy all of humanity version of it, we have a lot of work to do. But I think we have finally more ideas about what can work. And given the way the systems are going, we have a lot more opportunities available to us to solve it than I thought we would have.
Given the direction that we initially thought the technology was going to go. So that's good. On the positive side, the thing that I was most excited about then and remain most excited about now, is what if this system can dramatically increase the rate of scientific knowledge in society? That is a... I think that kind of like all real sustainable economic growth, the future getting better, progress in some sense, comes from increased scientific and technological capacity.
So we can solve all the problems. And if the AI can help us do that, that's always been the thing I've been most excited about.
Well, it certainly seems like that is the greatest potential, greatest positive potential of AI. It is to solve a lot of the problems that human beings have had forever, a lot of the societal problems that seem to be... I mean, that's why I was talking about an AI president. I'm kind of not joking. Because I feel like if something was hyper intelligent and aware of all the variables, with no human bias and no incentives, no other than here's your program, the greater good for the community of the United States and the greater good for that community as it interacts with the rest of the world.
The elimination of these dictators, whether they're elected or non elected, who impose their will on the population because they have a vested interest in protecting special interest groups and industry.
The thing that I find scary when you say that is, it feels like it's humanity not in control. And I reflexively don't like that. But if it's instead like it is the collective will of humanity being expressed without the mistranslation and corrupt influences along the way, then I can see it.
Is that possible? It seems like it would be. It seems like if it was programmed in that regard to do the greater good for humanity and take into account the values of humanity, the needs of humanity.
There's something about the phrase, do the greater good for humanity. that sets me off.
I know, it's terrifying. It's very Orwellian. All of it is. But also, so is artificial general intelligence.
For sure. For sure.
Open the door, pal.
I wish I had worked on something that was less morally fraught.
But do you? Because it's really exciting.
I mean, I cannot imagine a cooler thing to work on. I feel unbelievably, I feel like the luckiest person on earth. That's awesome. It is not an easy mode. Let's say that.
This is not life on easy mode.
No, no, no, no. I mean, you are at the forefront of one of the most spectacular changes in human history. And I would say as, no, I would say more spectacular than the implementation of the Internet. I think the implementation of the Internet was the first baby steps of this. And that artificial general intelligence is, it is the Internet on steroids.
It's the Internet in, you know, hyperspace.
What I would say is it's the next step and there will be more steps after, but it's our most exciting step yet.
Yeah. My wonder is what are those next steps after?
Isn't that so exciting to think about?
It's very exciting. I think we're the last people. I really do. I think we're the last of the biological people with all the biological problems. I think there's a very….
And do you feel excited about that?
I just think that's just what it is.
You're just fine with it.
It is what it is, you know. I mean, that, I don't think you can control it at this point, other than some massive natural disaster that resets us back to the Stone Age, which is also something we should be very concerned with, because it seems like that happens a lot. We're not aware of it, because the timeline of a human body is so small. You know, the timeline of the human existence as a person is 100 years, if you're lucky. But yet the timeline of the Earth is billions of years.
And if you look at how many times life on Earth has been reset by comets slamming into the Earth and just completely eliminating all technological advancement, it seems like it's happened multiple times in recorded history.
I always think we don't think about that quite enough.
We talked about the simulation hypothesis earlier. It's had this big resurgence in the tech industry recently. One of the new takes on it, as we get closer to AGI, is that, you know, if ancestors were simulating us, the time they'd want to simulate again and again is right up to the lead up to the creation of AGI. So it seems very crazy we're living through this time. It's not a coincidence at all.
You know, this is the time that is after we had enough cell phones out in the world, like recording tons of video, to train the video model of the world. that's all being like jacked into us now via brain implants or whatever. And before. everything goes really crazy with AGI. And it's also this interesting time to simulate, like, can we get through?
Does the asteroid come right before you get there for dramatic tension? Like, do we figure out how to make this safe? Do we figure out how to societally agree on it? So that's led to, like, a lot more people believing in it than before, I think.
Yeah, for sure. And again, I think this is just where it's going. I mean, I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. It's just a thing. But it's certainly better to live now.
I would not want to live in the 1800s and be in a covered wagon trying to make my way across the country.
Yeah, we've got the most exciting time in history yet.
It's the best. It's the best. But it also has the most problems. The most social problems. The most awareness of social, environmental, infrastructure.
The issues that we have.
But we get to go solve them. Yeah. And I, intuitively, I think I feel something somewhat different than you, which is, I think humans, in something close to this form, are going to be around for a lot longer than, I don't think we're the last humans.
How long do you think we have?
Like,
longer than a time frame I can reason about. Really? Now, there may be, like, I could totally imagine a world where some people decide to merge and go off exploring the universe with AI, and there's a big universe out there. But, like, can I really imagine a world where, short of a natural disaster, there are not humans pretty similar to humans from today on Earth doing human-like things? And the sort of spirit of humanity merged into these other things that are out there doing their thing in the universe.
It's very hard for me to actually see that happening. And maybe that means I'm, like, going to turn out to be a dinosaur and Luddite and horribly wrong in this prediction. But I would say I feel it more over time as we make progress with AI, not less.
Yeah, I don't feel that at all. I feel like we're done.
In, like, a few years.
No. A few decades. Maybe a generation or two. It'll probably be a gradual change, like wearing of clothes. You know, I don't think everybody wore clothes and they invented clothes.
I think it probably took a while. When someone figured out shoes, I think that probably took a while. When they figured out structures, doors, houses, cities, agriculture, all those things were slowly implemented over time, and then now become everywhere. And I think this is far more transformative.
And is part of that because you don't think there will be an option for some people not to merge?
Right. Just like there's not an option for some people to not have telephones anymore. Like, I used to have friends, like, I don't even have email. Those people don't exist anymore. They all have email.
Everyone has a phone, at least a flip phone. I know some people that they just can't handle social media and all that jazz. They went to a flip phone.
I don't know if this is true or not. I've heard you can't, like, walk into an AT&T store anymore and still buy a flip phone. I heard that just changed. You can?
Oh, really?
Someone told me this, but I don't know if it's true.
Verizon still has them. I was just there. They still have flip phones. I was like, I like it. I like this fucking little thing that you just call people.
And I always, like, romanticize about going to that. But my step was to go to a phone that has nothing on it but text messages. And that's been a few days.
Feeling good so far?
Yeah, it's good. You know? I still have my other phone that I use for social media, but when I pick that motherfucker up, I start scrolling through YouTube and watching videos and scrolling through TikTok or Instagram. And I don't have TikTok, but I've, I've, I tried threads for a little while, but I was like, fucking ghost town. Went right back to X.
I live on a ranch during the weekends, and there's Wi-Fi in the house, but there's no cell phone coverage anywhere else.
And it's every week. I forget how nice it is and what a change it is, to go for a walk with no cell phone coverage.
It's good for your mind.
It's unbelievable for your mind. And I think we have, like, so quickly, lost something.
Mm-hmm.
Like, out of service just doesn't happen. That doesn't even happen on airplanes anymore.
Right. You know?
Like, but that, like, hours where your phone just cannot buzz.
Yeah.
No text message either.
Nothing.
I think that's a really healthy thing.
I dropped my phone once when I was in Lanai, and I think it was the last time I dropped the phone. The phone was like, we're done. And it just started calling people randomly. Like, it would just call people, and I'd hang it up, and it would call another person. I'd hang it up, and I was showing my wife.
I was like, look at this. This is crazy. It's just calling people. And so the phone was broken. And so I had to order a phone, and we were on vacation for, like, eight days.
And it took three days for Apple to get me a phone.
I bet you had a great three days.
It was amazing. It was amazing. Because when I was hanging out with my family, I was totally present. There was no options. And I wasn't thinking about checking my phone, because it didn't exist.
I didn't have one. And there was an alleviation of, again, what Sean was talking about, that low level of anxiety. This sort of like, ugh, ugh, that you have when you always want to check your phone.
Yeah, I think that thing, it's so bad. We have not figured out yet. Like, the technology has moved so fast. Biology moves very slowly. We have not figured out how we're going to function in this society.
And get those occasional times when, you know, your phone is broken for three days. Or you go for a walk with no service. But it's like, I very much feel like my phone controls me. Not the other way around. And I hate it.
But I haven't figured out what to do about it.
Well, that's what I'm worried about with future technology. Is that this, which was so unanticipated. If you'd imagine a world when you, can you imagine going up to someone in 1984 and pointing to a phone. And saying, one day that will be in your pocket. It's going to ruin your life.
Like, what? Like, yeah, one day people are going to be jerking off to that thing. You're like, what? One day people are going to be watching people get murdered on Instagram. I haven't seen so many murders on Instagram over the last few months.
Really, I've never seen one.
It's been a bad timeline. Me and my friend Tom Segura. Every morning we text each other the worst things that we find on Instagram. For fun. He's a comedian.
Okay. We're both comedians.
That's fun to you?
Yeah.
Alright. It's just ridiculous.
I mean, just crazy. Car accidents. People get gored by bulls. Like, we try to top each other. So, every day he's sending me the most.
Every day when I wake up and I check. Tom, fuck, what are you doing?
Can you explain what's fun about that?
Well, he's a comic. And I'm a comic. And comics like chaos. We like ridiculous, outrageous shit that is just so far beyond the norm of what you experience in a regular day. Got it.
And also, the understanding of the wide spectrum of human behavior. If you're a nice person and you surround yourself with nice people, you very rarely see someone get shot. You very rarely see people get stabbed for no reason randomly on the street. But on Instagram, you see that every day.
And there's something about that which just reminds you. Oh, we're crazy. Like, the human species. Like, there's a certain percentage of us that are just off the rails. And just out there.
Just causing chaos and jumping dirt bikes and landing on your neck. All that stuff is out there.
Even to hear that makes me, like, physically, like, I know that happens, of course.
And I know, like, not looking at it doesn't make it not happen. Right. But it makes me so uncomfortable and unhappy to watch.
Oh, yeah, it makes me uncomfortable, too. But, yeah, we do it to each other every day.
And it's not good. It's definitely not good. But it's also, I'm not going to stop. It's fun. But why is it fun?
It's fun because it's my friend Tom. And we're both kind of the same in that way. Which, just look at that. Look at this. Look at that.
Look at this. And it's just a thing we started doing a few months ago. Just can't stop.
And Instagram has, like, learned that you do that. So, it just keeps showing you more and more.
Instagram knows. My search page is a mess. When I go to the Discover page.
Awful stuff happens.
Oh, it's just crazy. But the thing is, it shows up in your feed, too. That's what I don't understand about the algorithm. It knows you're fucked up. So, it shows up in your feed of things.
Like, even if they're not people I follow. But Instagram shows them to me anyway.
I heard an interesting thing a few days ago by Instagram. And the feed, which is, if you use it at off hours. When they have more processing capability available. Because less people are using it. You get better recommendations.
So, your feed will be better in, like, the middle of the night.
What is better, though? Doesn't your feed...
More addictive to you or whatever. Right.
So, for me, better would be more murders. More animal attacks.
Sounds horrible.
It's horrible. But it's just, it seems to know that's what I like. It seems to know that that's what I interact with. So, it's just sending me that most of the time.
Yeah.
That probably has all kinds of crazy psychological effects.
I'm sure. Yeah, I'm sure that's also one of the reasons why I want to get rid of it. And move away from it.
Yeah, so maybe it went too far.
I don't even know if it's too far. But what it is is it's showing me the darker regions of society, of civilization, of human behavior.
But you think we're about to edit all that out?
I wonder if that is a solution. I really do. Because I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility. If we really, truly can engineer the... Like, one of the talks about Neuralink that's really promising is people with spinal cord issues, injuries, people that can't move their body.
And being able to hotwire that. Where, essentially, it controls all these parts of your body that you couldn't control anymore. And so that would be an amazing thing for people that are injured. Amazing thing for people that are, you know, they're paralyzed. They have all sorts of neurological conditions.
That is probably one of the first, and that's what Elon's talked about as well. One of the first implementations. The restoration of sight.
Cognitive function enhanced from people that have brain issues.
That's tremendously exciting. Yeah. And like many other technologies. I don't think we can stop neural interfaces. Nor because of the great good that's going to happen along the way.
But I also don't think we know where it goes.
It's Pandora's box, for sure. And I think, when we open it, it's just we're not going to go back. Just like we're not going to go back to no computers without some sort of natural disaster.
By the way, and I mean this as a great compliment. You are one of the most neutral people I have ever heard. talk about the merge coming. You're just like, yeah, I think it's going to happen. You know, it's going to be good in these ways, bad in these ways.
But you seem like unbelievably neutral about it. Which is always something I admire.
I try to be as neutral about everything as possible. Except for corruption, which I think is just like one of the most massive problems with the way our culture is governed. I think corruption and the influence of money is just a giant, terrible issue. But in terms of like social issues and in terms of the way human beings believe and think about things, I try to be as neutral as possible. Because I think the only way to really truly understand the way other people think about things is try to look at it through their mind.
And if you have this inherent bias and this, you have this like very rigid view of what's good and bad and right and wrong. I don't think that serves you very well for understanding why people differ. So I try to be as neutral and as objective as possible when I look at anything. This is a skill that I've learned. This is not something I had in 2009, when I started this podcast.
This podcast, I started just fucking around with friends and I had no idea what it was. I mean, there's no way I could have ever known. But also I had no idea what it was going to do to me as far as the evolution of me as a human being. I am so much nicer. I'm so much more aware of things.
I'm so much more conscious of the way other people think and feel. I'm just a totally different person than I was in 2009,, which is hard to recognize. It's hard to believe.
That's really cool.
But that is just an inevitable consequence of this unexpected education that I've received.
Did the empathy kind of like come on linearly?
Yes.
And that was not a….
No, it just came on recognizing that the negative interactions on social media that I was doing, they didn't help me. They didn't help the person. And then having compassion for this person that's fucked up or done something stupid, it's not good to just dunk on people. There's no benefit there other than to give you some sort of social credit and get a bunch of likes. It didn't make me feel good.
That's not good. And also a lot of psychedelics. A ton of psychedelic experiences from 2009 on, with everyone, a greater understanding of the impact. Like I had one recently. And when I had the one recently, like the overwhelming message that I was getting through this was that everything I say and do ripples off into all the people that I interact with.
And that if I'm not doing something with at least the goal of overall good or overall understanding, that I'm doing bad. And that that bad is a real thing. As much as you try to ignore it because you don't interface with it instantly, you're still creating unnecessary negativity. And that I should avoid that as much as possible. It was like an overwhelming message that this psychedelic experience was giving me.
And I took it because I was just particularly anxious that day about the state of the world, particularly anxious about Ukraine and Russia and China and the political system that we have in this country. And this incredibly polarizing way that the left and the right engage with each other. And God, just it just seems so just tormented. And so I was just some days. I just get, I think, too much about it.
I just I'm like, I need something. Yeah. Crack me out of this. So I, I took the psychedelics.
Are you surprised psychedelic therapy has not made from what you thought would happen in the early 2010s? Are you surprised it has not made more progress, sort of on a path to legalization of medical treatment?
No, no, I'm not. Because there's a lot of people that don't want it to be in place. And those people have tremendous power over our medical system and over our regulatory system. And those people have also not experienced these psychedelics. There's very few people that have experienced profound psychedelic experiences that don't think there's an overall good for those things.
So you're. the problem is you're having these laws and these rules implemented by people who are completely ignorant about the positive effects of these things. And if you know the history of psychedelic prohibition in this country, it all took place during 1970. And it was really to stop the civil rights movement. And it was really to stop the anti-war movement.
And they they tried to find a way to make all these things that these people were doing. that was causing them to thinking these very different ways is tune in, turn on, drop out. They just wanted to put a fucking halt to that. What better way than to lock everyone who participates in that in cages? Find the people who are producing it.
Lock them in cages. Put them in jail for the rest of their life. Make sure it's illegal. Arrest people. Put the bus on television.
Make sure that people are aware. And then there's also you connect it to drugs that are inherently dangerous for society and detrimental. The fentanyl crisis, you know, the crack cocaine crisis that we experienced in the 90s. Like all of those things, they're under the blanket of drugs. Psychedelic drugs are also talked about like drugs, even though they have these profound spiritual and psychological changes that they, you know, invite.
I remember when I was in elementary school and I was in like drug education. They talked about, you know, marijuana is really bad because it's a gateway to these other things. And there's this bad one, that bad one, heroin, whatever. And the very end of the line, the worst possible thing is LSD.
Did you take LSD and go, oh, they're lying?
Psychedelic therapy was definitely one of the most important things in my life. And I assumed, given how powerful it was for me, like I, you know, I struggled with, like all kinds of anxiety and other negative things. And to like watch all of that go away.
Like that?
Like I traveled to another country for like a week, did, a few things, came back, a totally different person. And I was like, I've been lied to my whole life. Yeah. I'm so grateful that this happened to me now. Talked to a bunch of other people, all similar experiences.
I assumed, this was a while ago. I assumed it was, and I was, like, you know, very interested in what was happening in the US. I was like, particularly like looking at where MDMA and psilocybin were on the path. This is going to get through like this is, and this is going to like change the mental health of a lot of people in a really positive way. And I am surprised we have not made faster progress there, but I'm still optimistic we will.
Well, we have made so much progress from the time of the 1990s. In the 1990s, you never heard about psychedelic retreats. You never heard about people taking these vacations. You never heard about people getting together in groups and doing these things and coming back with these profound experiences that they relayed to other people. And literally seeing people change, seeing who they are change.
Seeing people become less selfish, less toxic, less mean. You know, and more empathetic and more understanding. Yeah. I mean, I can only talk about it from a personal experience. It's been a radical change in my life, as well as, again, having all these conversations with different people.
I feel so fortunate to be able to do this, that I've had so many different conversations with so many different people that think so differently. And so many exceptional people that have accomplished so many incredible things. And you get to sort of understand the way their mind works and the way they see the world, the way they interface with things.
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