Digital tools could help governance update faster

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 1:26:01

   The issue that we have here is, and you touched on it earlier on, the level of coordination that's needed to fix a problem with AI is global, and it's across multiple companies. And yeah, okay, you need probably a lot of compute, but I saw what happened, the difference between how much compute was needed to train DeepSeq and how much compute was needed. It almost feels like as the AI gets bigger, you can then retrain replicant AIs way smaller.

2. 1:26:32

   So a processor the size of this room might be able to bootload AGI in future. So, I mean, we have this with desktop synthesizers, right, for bioweapons. It was a moratorium. And it means that if you try to synthesize smallpox, you get this big red flag and some guys in boots kick your door down. I'm happy to hear you reference these examples. these are important yeah they're analogous right yeah um but the problem with the moratorium for ai is it can be done so siloed right you can just take this code you can take this approach throw this model into something start to build on top of it it would be i mean nick bostrom's old example was imagine if you could make an atomic bomb by putting sand into a microwave there's nothing physics in our current universe mean that that isn't the case right but there's nothing that

3. 1:27:21

   stop something analogous from being the case had the world have been a different way which is what you're really getting to here is what carl sagan was referring to when he talked about our technological adolescence. The conversation we're having isn't really about AI. It's about what happens when we have increasingly powerful, dangerous, and destructive technology. Because as humanity progresses, whether AI existed or not, we're going to get more and more powerful technology that would cover more and more dangerous and destructive things that you could do with it. Like we didn't have the ability to do CRISPR and bioweapons 20 years ago. Now we do have that ability and we're going to get more and more dangerous and destructive of things. And so the real question that AI is forcing us to ask is what is the wisdom needed

4. 1:28:04

   to wield the technological powers that whether AI is part of it or not, that we're going to increasingly gain. And I reference this all the time, but it's just such an accurate fundamental problem statement by E.O. Wilson that the fundamental problem of humanity is we have paleolithic brains that don't update very well to new information and think things are sci-fi and go into denial and overwhelm and blah, blah, blah. We have medieval institutions from the 18th century, and we have godlike technology that makes the 24th century technology crash down on 21st century society. That's what AI is. It's a joke from Ajayi Krotra, who's in the film, by the way. And so if we're to solve this equation, this problem statement that E.L. Wilson lays out, the way I always think about it is we need to embrace the reality of

5. 1:28:53

   our paleolithic brains. That's what wisdom is. We know that we get overwhelmed and we go into denial, so we work with that. We have systems and practices to recognize when that's about to happen and ask, what do we need to hold a difficult reality together? That's embracing our paleolithic brains. We need to upgrade our medieval institutions. We should be using 21st century technology to make faster updating, self-improving governance. Instead of creating recursively self-improving AI, we should be creating self-improving governance. Audrey Tang, the former digital minister of Taiwan has pioneered what that would look like, that democracies could be using tech to find the unlikely consensus opinions of everybody.

6. 1:29:31

   One of the things that's going to exist in the next few months is a national dialogue on AI, facilitated by technology where people can add their own ideas about how AI should be governed. And when you vote and you click, it's going to reveal the most popular consensus opinions about what should happen about these different issues. it's one thing if we live in a world where there's a cacophony and confusion about ai and it's another thing if we live in a world where you see on a clear web page that 600 000 people have voted and 96 percent of people across all these countries agree that there should be international limits you're trying to make transparent common knowledge exactly exactly we're trying to make transparent common knowledge and one of the ways to think about it is the movement has to see itself there

7. 1:30:12

   is a movement for humane technology there is a movement for a human future um it just hasn't it hasn't had a way to experience itself yet and when you see graffiti on an on a new york subway ad for an ai product people don't need people saying i don't want this or ai is not inevitable That's the human movement. When you see kids gather in Central Park for the Lamplight Club and delete social media off their phones together, that's a club that's in New York.

8. 1:30:37

   That's the human movement. There's so many things that people are already doing that is part of this. We just haven't had a name for, we're fighting back for reclaiming and protecting what's really human. Because again, our political voice is about to not matter. Once all the jobs get automated by AI, and governments and companies don't have to listen to the people because we're not the ones that are generating the revenue. You could have a union before when the factories need the human labor and then the human labor can get together and express its common voice. We want this instead of that. We want to be paid like this. We don't want these working standards. What happens when the companies and the countries don't need you anymore? This is literally the last time that our political voice will matter. And this is the time

9. 1:31:17

   to express that voice in many different ways. You can boycott unsafe AI companies or AI companies that enable mass surveillance. What did we just see with the thing that went down with the Pentagon and Anthropic last week is that subscriptions for ChatGPT went down like tons and subscriptions for Anthropic went up by a lot. If it wasn't just individuals that were doing that, but entire Fortune 500 companies that were doing that, given the amount of debt that these companies have taken on, the companies will have to respond to that market signal.

10. 1:31:47

    So mass boycotts can have a huge effect on steering which AI future we get.