# The AI Safety Expert: These Are The Only 5 Jobs That Will Remain In 2030! - Dr. Roman Yampolskiy

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

Dr. Roman Yampolskiy argues that building superintelligence before solving how to control it could put humanity at existential risk.

- Show: The Diary Of A CEO
- Hosts: [Steven Bartlett](https://realalpha.app/people/steven-bartlett/)
- Guest: [Dr. Roman Yampolskiy](https://realalpha.app/people/roman-yampolskiy/) is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and AI safety researcher.
- Published: Sep 4, 2025
- Length: 1 h 28 m

## The best minutes

- [2:43](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=163) [AI capability is advancing faster than safety research](https://realalpha.app/s/ai-capability-is-advancing-faster-than-safety-research/) (5 min)

## Also worth watching

- [21:51](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=1311) [Humanoid robots could automate physical work by 2030](https://realalpha.app/s/humanoid-robots-could-automate-physical-work-by-2030/) (4 min)
- [37:00](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=2220) [A novel virus is the extinction route he can picture](https://realalpha.app/s/a-novel-virus-is-the-extinction-route-he-can-picture/) (5 min)
- [49:01](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=2941) [OpenAI canceled its alignment team months after a four-year pledge](https://realalpha.app/s/openai-canceled-its-alignment-team-months-after-a-four-year/) (4 min)

Skip the sponsor reads and the extended simulation theory, longevity, Bitcoin and religion discussions.

## Summary

Dr. Roman Yampolskiy is a professor of computer science and engineering who says he coined the term AI safety in 2010. The description says he has published over 100 papers on AI risks and wrote Considerations on the AI Endgame: Ethics, Risks and Computational Frameworks.

Yampolskiy argues that AI capability is advancing faster than researchers’ ability to control it, and says current safety measures are patches rather than reliable solutions. He predicts AI could automate most cognitive work and later much physical labor, leaving workers and governments unprepared for unemployment and the loss of work’s meaning. He urges developers to focus on narrow AI rather than general superintelligence and says public pressure can slow the race, though he doubts regulation can guarantee control. He also argues that we may live in a simulation and discusses life extension and Bitcoin as questions in a future shaped by AI.

### Minute by minute

- [2:15](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=135) **AI capability is outpacing safety.** Yampolskiy says scaling compute and data has made AI more capable, while researchers still lack a reliable way to control advanced systems. He traces his safety work to poker bots and says safeguards are often bypassed. He sees AI capability advancing faster than safety research.
- [9:42](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=582) **AI could automate most jobs.** Yampolskiy expects AGI around 2027, citing prediction markets and leading lab executives. He says AI could automate computer-based work first, with humanoid robots potentially taking on physical labor later. He estimates unemployment could reach 99%, with some people still preferring to hire a human.
- [21:51](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=1311) **Robots could extend automation.** Yampolskiy expects humanoid robots to perform a wide range of physical tasks by 2030. He describes 2045 as the year Ray Kurzweil predicts the singularity, when AI-driven progress could outpace human understanding. Yampolskiy argues AI is a meta-invention that can create new inventions, unlike earlier tools.
- [28:45](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=1725) **Yampolskiy favors narrow AI over agents.** Yampolskiy calls superintelligence a potential solution to problems such as climate change and war, but argues it could also dominate humanity. He urges developers to build narrow tools rather than general agents. He says falling costs and advances in fields such as synthetic biology make dangerous technologies harder to contain.
- [37:00](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=2220) **Biological misuse is a risk.** Yampolskiy names an AI-enabled novel virus as an extinction route he can envision, including possible malicious use. He says developers learn what models can do through experiments after training and cannot precisely predict their outputs, leaving their creators without a complete understanding of how they work.
- [42:19](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=2539) **Yampolskiy questions OpenAI’s safety incentives.** Yampolskiy says some people who worked with Sam Altman raised concerns about his honesty and safety priorities, while noting that new AI companies can also offer financial incentives to departing staff. He suspects Altman may be motivated by control. Asked about 2100, he imagines either human extinction or a world beyond present comprehension.
- [46:43](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=2803) **Public pressure could slow the race.** Yampolskiy argues that AI developers should recognize the risks to themselves, and says laws may not help once an uncontrolled system exists. He challenges builders to explain how they would control superintelligence and points to safety teams that have been disbanded. He supports peaceful protest and says individuals can join groups seeking public influence.
- [56:00](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=3360) **Future simulations could outnumber reality.** Bartlett raises advances in AI-generated virtual worlds, and Yampolskiy says human-level AI and convincing virtual reality could enable vast numbers of simulations. He says he would run a billion simulations of the interview if they became affordable, arguing that the odds would favor being in one of them rather than the original.
- [1:07:32](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=4052) **Yampolskiy favors longer lives and Bitcoin.** Yampolskiy sees longevity as a major problem and says AI could accelerate life-extension research; he says he would choose to live indefinitely. He also calls Bitcoin unusually scarce because its supply is capped, while acknowledging that quantum computers could threaten its cryptography and that quantum-resistant strategies exist.
- [1:14:08](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=4448) **Simulation theory shapes his advice.** Asked what to do after the conversation, Yampolskiy invokes a paper about how to live in a simulation: be interesting enough that observers keep it running. He says he is not religious in a traditional sense, but sees simulation theory as sharing with religions a belief in a powerful being and a world beyond this one.
- [1:17:02](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=4622) **Critics often dismiss risks without studying them.** Yampolskiy says people find AI and simulation easy to discuss, but can treat warnings as entertainment and focus on local concerns. He says critics often dismiss AI risks without studying the field, while some developers become safety researchers as they learn more. He says he knows no one who has moved from concern to believing there is nothing to worry about.
- [1:21:21](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=4881) **Yampolskiy would stop AGI, not narrow AI.** Yampolskiy calls for human control, beneficial AI and qualified decision-makers. He would retain narrow AI but stop the push toward superintelligence, saying existing models could replace 60% of jobs and have not been widely deployed. He expects unemployment to rise over time and names loyalty as the key trait in friends, colleagues and partners.

## Transcript

The Diary Of A CEO, hosted by Steven Bartlett, with Dr. Roman Yampolskiy.

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there. Where the podcast’s audio and the video part ways, some times are a minute or so off.

[0:04](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=4) more I realized it's not something we can actually do. You have made a series of predictions about a variety of different dates. So what is your prediction for 2027? about 10% but 99% and that's without super intelligence a system smarter than all humans in all domains so it would be better than us at making new AI but it's worse than that we don't know how to make them safe and yet we still have the smartest people in the world competing to win the race to super intelligence but what do you make of people like Sam Oppen's journey with AI so a decade ago we published guardrails for how to do AI right they violated every single one And he's gambling 8 billion lives and getting richer and more powerful.

[1:12](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=72) So I guess if some people want to go to Mars, ours want to control the universe. But it doesn't matter who builds it. The moment you switch to superintelligence, we will most likely regret it terribly. And then by 2045... Now this is where it gets interesting. Dr. Roman Gimpolski. Let's talk about simulation theory. I think we are in one. And there is a lot of agreement on this. And this is what you should be doing so we don't shut it down. first just give me 30 seconds of your time two things I wanted to say the first thing is a huge thank you for listening and tuning into the show week after week it means the world to all of us and this really is a dream that we absolutely never had and couldn't have imagined getting to this place but secondly it's a dream where we feel like we're only just getting started and if you enjoy what we do here please join the 24% of people that listen to this podcast regularly and follow us on this app here's a promise I'm going to make to you I'm going to do everything in my power to make this show as good as I can now and into the future we're going to deliver the guests that you want me to speak to and we're going to continue to keep doing all of the things you love about this show

[2:28](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=148) thank you. Dr. Roman Yampolskiy, what is the mission that you're currently on? Because it's quite clear to me that you are on a bit of a mission and you've been on this mission for, I think, the best part of two decades at least. I'm hoping to make sure that superintelligence we are creating right now does not kill everyone. Give me some context on that statement, because it's quite a shocking statement. Sure. So in the last decade, we actually figured out how to make artificial intelligence better. Turns out if you add more compute, more data, it just kind of becomes smarter. And so now smartest people in the world, billions of dollars, all going to create the best possible superintelligence we can.

[3:24](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=204) Unfortunately, while we know how to make those systems much more capable, we don't know how to make them safe, how to make sure they don't do something we will regret. And that's the state of the art right now. When we look at just prediction markets, how soon will we get to advanced AI? The timelines are very short, a couple of years. two three years according to prediction markets according to ceos of top labs and at the same time we don't know how to make sure that those systems are aligned with our preferences so we are creating this alien intelligence if aliens were coming to earth and you you had three years to prepare you would be panicking right now but most people don't don't even realize this is happening.

[4:19](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=259) So some of the counter arguments might be, well, these are very, very smart people. These are very big companies with lots of money. They have a obligation and a moral obligation, but also just a legal obligation to make sure they do no harm. So I'm sure it'll be fine. The only obligation they have is to make money for the investors. That's the legal obligation they have. They have no moral or ethical obligations. Also, according to them, they don't know how to do it yet. the state-of-the-art answers are we'll figure it out then we get there or AI will help us control more advanced AI. That's insane. In terms of probability, what do you think is the probability that something goes catastrophically wrong? So nobody can tell you for sure what's going to happen. But if you're not in charge, you're not controlling it, you will not get outcomes you want. The space of possibilities is almost infinite. The space of outcomes we will like is tiny. And who are you and how long have you been working on this? I'm a computer scientist by training. I have a PhD in computer science and engineering. I probably started working AI safety, mildly defined as control of bots at the time, 15 years ago. 15 years ago. So

[5:22](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=322) you've been working on AI safety before it was cool? Before the term existed. I coined term AI safety. So you're the founder of the term AI safety? The term, yes, not the field. There are other people who did brilliant work before I got there. Why were you thinking about this 15 years ago? Because most people have only been talking about the term AI safety for the last two or three years. It started very mildly just as a security project. I was looking at poker bots and I realized that the bots getting better and better. And if you just project this forward enough, they're going to get better than us, smarter, more capable. And it happened. They are playing poker way better than average players. But more generally, it will happen with all other domains, all the other cyber resources. I wanted to make sure AI is a technology which is beneficial for everyone. So I started to work on making AI safer. Was there a particular moment in your career where you thought, oh my god? First five years at least, I was working on solving this problem. I was convinced we can make this happen. We can make safe AI. And that was the goal. But the more I looked at it, the more I realized every single component of that equation is not something we

[6:38](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=398) can actually do. And the more you zoom in, it's like a fractal. You go in and you find 10 more problems and then 100 more problems. And all of them are not just difficult. They're impossible to solve. There is no seminal work in this field where like, we solve this. We don't have to worry about this. There are patches. There are little fixes we put in place and quickly people find

[7:02](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=422) **Dr. Roman Yampolskiy:** ways to work around them they jailbreak whatever safety mechanisms we have so while progress in ai capabilities is exponential or maybe even hyper exponential progress in ai safety is linear or constant the gap is increasing the gap between the how capable the systems are and how well we can

[7:26](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=446) control them predict what they're going to do explain their decision making i think this is quite an important point because you said that we're basically patching over the issues that we find so we're developing this this core intelligence and then to stop it doing things or to stop it showing some of its unpredictability or its threats the companies that are developing this ai are programming in code over the top to say okay don't swear don't say that read word don't do that bad thing exactly and you can look at other examples of that so hr manuals right we have those humans their general intelligences but you want them to behave in a company so they have a policy no sexual harassment no this no that but if you're smart enough you always find a workaround so you're just pushing behavior into a different not yet restricted subdomain we should probably define some terms here so there's narrow intelligence which can play chess whatever there's the artificial general intelligence which can operate across domains and then superintelligence, which is smarter than all humans in all domains.

[8:27](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=507) And where are we? So that's a very fuzzy boundary, right? We definitely have many excellent narrow systems, no question about it. And they are superintelligent in that narrow domain. So protein folding is a problem which was solved using narrow AI, and it's superior to all humans in that domain. In terms of AGI, again, I said, if we showed what we have today to a scientist from 20 years ago, they would be convinced we have full-blown AGI. We have systems which can learn, they can perform in hundreds of domains, and they're better than human in many of them. So you can argue we have a weak version of AGI.

[9:08](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=548) Now, we don't have superintelligence yet. We still have brilliant humans who are completely dominating AI, especially in science and engineering. But that gap is closing so fast. You can see, especially in the domain of mathematics, Three years ago, large language models couldn't do basic algebra. Multiplying three-digit numbers was a challenge. Now they're helping with mathematical proofs. They're winning mathematics, olympiads, competitions. They are working on solving millennial problems, hardest problems in mathematics. So in three years, we closed the gap from subhuman performance. to better than most mathematicians in the world.

[9:49](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=589) And we see the same process happening in science and in engineering. You have made a series of predictions, and they correspond to a variety of different dates. I have those dates in front of me here. What is your prediction for the year 2027? We're probably looking at AGI as predicted by prediction markets and tops of the labs. So we'd have artificial general intelligence by 2027. And how would that make the world different to how it is now? So if you have this concept of a drop-in employee, you have free labor, physical and cognitive, trillions of dollars of it, it makes no sense to hire humans for most jobs.

[10:34](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=634) If I can just get a $20 subscription or a free model to do what an employee does, first, anything on a computer will be automated. and next i think humanoid robots are maybe five years behind so in five years all the physical labor can also be automated so we're looking at the world where we have levels of unemployment we've never seen before not talking about 10 unemployment which is scary but 99 all you have left is jobs where for whatever reason you prefer another human would do it for you But anything else can be fully automated. It doesn't mean it will be automated in practice. A lot of times technology exists, but it's not deployed.

[11:19](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=679) Video phones were invented in the 70s. Nobody had them until iPhones came around. So we may have a lot more time with jobs and with world which looks like this. But capability to replace most humans and most occupations will come very quickly. Okay, so let's try and drill down into that and stress test it. So a podcaster like me, would you need a podcaster like me? So let's look at what you do. You prepare, you ask questions, you ask follow-up questions, and you look good on camera. Thank you so much. Let's see what we can do. Large language model today can easily read everything I wrote. and have a very solid understanding.

[12:10](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=730) I assume you haven't read every single one of my books. That thing would do it. It can train on every podcast you ever did, so it knows exactly your style, the types of questions you ask. It can also find correspondence between what worked really well, like this type of question really increased views. This type of topic was very promising, so you can optimize, I think, better than you can because you don't have a data set. of course visual simulation is trivial at this point so can you can make a video within seconds of me sat here and so we can generate videos of you interviewing anyone on any topic very efficiently and you just have to get likeness approval whatever are there many jobs that you think would remain in a world of agi if you're saying agi is potentially going to be here whether it's deployed or not by 2027 what kind and then okay so let's take out of this any physical labor jobs for a second are there any jobs that you think a human would be able to do better in a world of agi still so that's the question i often ask people in the world with agi and i think almost immediately we'll get super intelligence as a side effect so the question really is in a world of super intelligence which is defined as better than all humans in all domains what can

[13:30](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=810) Can you contribute? And so you know better than anyone what it's like to be you. You know what ice cream tastes to you. Can you get paid for that knowledge? Is someone interested in that? Maybe not, not a big market. Jobs where you want a human, maybe you're rich and you want a human accountant for whatever historic reasons. Old people like traditional ways of doing things. Warren Buffett would not switch to AI. He would use his human accountant. But it's a tiny subset of a market. Today, we have products which are man-made in US as opposed to mass produced in China. And some people pay more to have those.

[14:14](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=854) But it's a small subset. It's almost a fetish. There is no practical reason for it. And I think anything you can do on a computer could be automated using that technology. You must hear a lot of rebuttals to this when you say it, because people experience a huge amount of mental discomfort when they hear that their job, their career, the thing they got a degree in, the thing they invested $100,000 into is going to be taken away from them. So their natural reaction for some people is that cognitive dissonance that, no, you're wrong ai can't be creative it's not this it's not that it'll never be interested in my job i'll be fine because you hear these arguments all the time right it's really funny i ask people and i ask people in different occupations i'll ask my uber driver are you worried about self-driving cars and they go no no one can do what i do i know the streets of new york i can navigate like no ai i'm safe and it's true for any job professors are saying this to me oh nobody can lecture like i do like this is so special but you understand it's ridiculous we already have self-driving cars replacing drivers that is not even a question if it's possible it's like how soon before you fired yeah i mean i've just been in la yesterday and my car drives itself so i get

[15:35](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=935) in the car i put in where i want to go and then i don't touch the steering wheel or the brake pedals and it takes me from a to b even if it's an hour-long drive without any intervention at all I actually still park it, but other than that, I'm not driving the car at all. I mean, obviously in LA, we also have Waymo now, which means you order it on your phone and it shows up with no driver in it and takes you to where you want to go. So it's quite clear to see how that is potentially a matter of time. For those people, because we do have some of those people listening to this conversation right now, that their occupation is driving.

[16:09](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=969) To offer them, and I think driving is the biggest occupation in the world, if I'm correct, i'm pretty sure it is the biggest occupation in the world one of the top ones yeah what would you say to those people what should they be doing with their lives what should they should they be retraining in something or what time frame so that's the paradigm shift here before we always said this job is going to be automated retrain to do this other job but if i'm telling you that all jobs will be automated then there is no plan b you cannot retrain look at computer science two years ago we told people learn to code you are an artist you cannot make money learn to code then we realized oh ai kind of knows how to code and getting better become a prompt engineer you can engineer prompts for ais it's going to be a great job get a four year degree in it but then we're like ai is way better at designing prompts for other ais than any human. So that's gone. So I can't really tell you right now, the hardest thing is design AI agents for practical applications. I guarantee you in a year or two, it's going to be gone just as well. So I don't think there is a, this occupation needs to learn to do this instead. I think it's

[17:26](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=1046) more like we as a humanity, then we all lose our jobs. What do we do? What do we do financially? who's paying for us and what do we do in terms of meaning what do i do with my extra 60 80 hours a week you've thought around this corner haven't you a little bit What is around that corner, in your view? So the economic part seems easy. If you create a lot of free labor, you have a lot of free wealth, abundance, things which are right now not very affordable become dirt cheap, and so you can provide for everyone basic needs. Some people say you can provide beyond basic needs. You can provide very good existence for everyone.

[18:09](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=1089) The hard problem is what do you do with all that free time? For a lot of people, their jobs are what gives them meaning in their life. So they would be kind of lost. We see it with people who retire or do early retirement. And for so many people who hate their jobs, they'll be very happy not working. But now you have people who are chilling all day. What happens to society? How does that impact crime rate, pregnancy rate, all sorts of issues? Nobody thinks about it. Governments don't have programs prepared to deal with 99% unemployment. What do you think that world looks like? Again, I think a very important part to understand here is the unpredictability of it.

[18:59](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=1139) We cannot predict what a smarter-than-us system will do. And the point when we get to that is often called singularity, by analogy with physical singularity. You cannot see beyond the event horizon. I can tell you what I think might happen, but that's my prediction. It is not what actually is going to happen because I just don't have cognitive ability to predict a much smarter agent impacting this world. Then you read science fiction. There is never a super intelligence in it actually doing anything because nobody can write believable science fiction at that level. they either banned ai like dune because this way you can avoid writing about it or it's like star wars you have this really dumb bots but not nothing super intelligent ever because by definition you cannot predict at that level because by definition of it being super intelligent it will make its own mind up by definition if it was something you could predict you would be operating at the same level of intelligence violating our assumption that it is smarter than you if i'm playing chess with super intelligence and i can predict every move i'm playing at that level it's kind of like my french bulldog trying to predict exactly what i'm thinking and what i'm going to do that's a good cognitive gap and it's not just

[20:15](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=1215) he can predict you're going to work you're coming back but he cannot understand why you're doing a podcast that is something completely outside of his model of the world yeah he doesn't even know that i go to work he just sees that i leave the house and doesn't know where i go buy food for him what's the most persuasive argument against your own perspective here that we will not have unemployment due to advanced technology that there won't be this french bulldog human gap in understanding and i guess like power and control so some people think that we can enhance human minds, either through combination with hardware, so something like Neuralink, or through genetic re-engineering, to where we make smarter humans.

[21:07](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=1267) Yeah. It may give us a little more intelligence. I don't think we're still competitive in biological form with silicon form. Silicon substrate is much more capable for intelligence. It's faster, it's more resilient, more energy efficient in many ways. Which is what computers are made out of versus the brain. yeah so i don't think we can keep up just with improving our biology some people think maybe and this is very speculative we can upload our minds into computers so scan your brain kind of comb of your brain and have a simulation running on a computer and you can speed it up give it more capabilities this.

[21:47](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=1307) But to me, that feels like you no longer exist. We just created software by different means, and now you have AI based on biology and AI based on some other forms of training. You can have evolutionary algorithms. You can have many paths to reach AGI. But at the end, none of them are humans. I have another date here, which is 2030. What's your prediction for 2030? What will the world look like? so we probably will have uh humanoid robots with enough flexibility dexterity to compete with humans in all domains including plumbers we can make artificial plumbers not the plumbers where that was that felt like the last bastion of uh human employment so 2030 five years from now humanoid robots so many of the companies the leading companies including tesla are developing humanoid robots at light speed and they're getting increasingly more effective and these humanoid robots will be able to move through physical space or you know make an omelet do anything humans can do but obviously have be connected to ai as well so they can think talk right they're controlled by ai they're always connected to the network so they are already

[23:11](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=1391) **Dr. Roman Yampolskiy:** dominating in many ways our world will look remarkably different when humanoid robots are functional and effective because that's really when you know i start to cry like

[23:22](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=1402) the combination of intelligence and physical ability is really really doesn't leave much does it for us um human beings not much so today if you have intelligence through internet you can hire humans to do your bidding for you you can pay them in bitcoin so you can have bodies just not directly controlling them so it's not a huge game changer to add direct control of physical bodies intelligence is where it's at the important component is definitely higher ability to optimize to solve problems to find patterns people cannot see and then by 2045 i guess the world looks even even more um which is 20 years from now so if it's still around if it's still around ray kurzweil predicts that that's the year for the singularity that's the year where progress becomes so fast so this ai doing science and engineering work makes improvements so quickly we cannot keep up anymore that's the definition of singularity point beyond which we cannot see understand predict it see and understand predict the intelligence itself or what is happening in the world the technology is being developed so right now if i have an iphone i can look forward to a new one coming out next year and i'll understand it has slightly better camera imagine now this process

[24:41](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=1481) of researching and developing this phone is automated it happens every six months every three months every month week day hour minute second you cannot keep up with 30 iterations of iPhone in one day. You don't understand what capabilities it has, what proper controls are. It just escapes you. Right now, it's hard for any researcher in AI to keep up with the state of the art. While I was doing this interview with you, a new model came out, and I no longer know what the state of the art is. Every day, as a percentage of total knowledge, I get dumber. I may still know more because I keep reading, but as a percentage of overall knowledge, we're all getting dumber and then you take it to extreme values you have zero knowledge zero understanding of the world around you some of the arguments against this eventuality are that when you look at other technologies like the industrial revolution people just found new ways to work and new careers that we could never have imagined at the time were created.

[25:55](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=1555) How do you respond to that in a world of superintelligence? It's a paradigm shift. We always had tools, new tools, which allowed some job to be done more efficiently. So instead of having 10 workers, you could have two workers and eight workers had to find a new job. And there was another job. Now you can supervise those workers or do something cool. if you're creating a meta invention you're inventing intelligence you're inventing a worker an agent then you can apply that agent to the new job there is not a job which cannot be automated that never happened before all the inventions we previously had were kind of a tool for doing something so we invented fire huge game changer but that's it it stops with fire we invent a wheel Same idea, huge implications, but will itself is not an inventor.

[26:47](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=1607) Here we're inventing a replacement for human mind, a new inventor capable of doing new inventions. It's the last invention we ever have to make. At that point, it takes over. And the process of doing science, research, even ethics research, morals, all that is automated at that point. Do you sleep well at night? Really well. even though you you spent the last 15 20 years of your life working on ai safety and it's suddenly among us in a in a way that i don't think anyone could have predicted five years ago when i say among us i really mean that the amount of funding and talent that is now focused on reaching super intelligence faster has made it feel more inevitable and more soon than any of us could have possibly imagined we as humans have this built-in bias about not thinking about really bad outcomes and things we cannot prevent so all of us are dying your kids are dying your parents are dying everyone's dying but you still sleep well you still go on with your day even 95 year olds are still doing games and playing golf and whatnot because we have this ability to not think about the worst outcomes especially if we cannot actually modify the outcome so that's the same infrastructure being used for this yeah there is humanity level death-like event we're happening

[28:16](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=1696) to be close to it probably but unless i can do something about it i can just keep enjoying my life in fact maybe knowing that you have limited amount of time left gives you more reason to have a better life you cannot waste any and that's the survival trait of evolution i guess because those of my ancestors that spent all their time worrying wouldn't have spent enough time having babies and hunting to survive suicidal ideation people who really start thinking about how horrible the world is usually escape pretty soon one of the you co-authored this paper um analyzing the key arguments people make against the importance of AI safety. And one of the arguments in there is that there's other things that are of bigger importance right now. It might be world wars. It could be nuclear containment. It could be other things. There's other things that the governments and podcasters like me should be talking about that are more important. What's your rebuttal to that argument? So superintelligence is a meta solution. If we get superintelligence right, it will help us with climate change, it will help us with wars, it can solve all the other existential risks. If we don't get it right, it dominates. If climate change will take a hundred

[29:16](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=1756) years to boil us alive and superintelligence kills everyone in five, I don't have to worry about climate change. So either way, either it solves it for me or it's not an issue. Let me admit something to you. I'm a little bit messy. I have got ADHD and sometimes I forget things. I'll put something in Google Drive. I'll put something on my desktop. It's all over the shop. And I can't imagine how much that is costing me as an entrepreneur or as a creative. I never thought of this as a project management problem. I just thought of it as a me problem. So let me give you a window into my fiance, Melanie, and how she operates. She's running a business and she doesn't rely on remembering everything. She creates systems that mean she doesn't have to. And one people attend her retreats and they get automated itineraries and they get packs sent to them automatically after the retreat, all thanks to Asana. So if you're someone who constantly feels like you need to be better, more organized, maybe ask yourself a different question. Is it actually you that needs to change or is it the way that you're working? Asana has always been great at organizing work and breaking down projects into tasks. Now you can assign those tasks to AI

[29:50](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=1790) teammates. These are agents that already understand your work and keep things moving without you having to chase check or remember when something needs a real decision it comes back to you asana is the operating system for human agent teams so less falls through the cracks and less has to live in your head try it at asana.com asana.com as a founder building a business when i was in my early 20s i think i always had a deep sense of imposter syndrome because there was something that i wasn't good at and that thing was finances finance and understanding your financial position as a small business is the great enabler of all of your dreams. I was running from it until I discovered a platform called Xero. Xero is an accounting and financial management platform specifically for small businesses and it brings accounting, payments, payroll and analytics all into one place even for people that don't love doing finances. Xero wants to do the financial work for you but its core ambition is to go beyond keeping the financial record because Xero wants to help you understand what's happening in your business and increasingly and this is maybe the most important thing is help you make decisions finally we have a partner who can enable us in a simple way for

[30:26](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=1826) those people that are both left brain or right brain and enable our dreams you can learn more about xero by going to xero.com thank you to xero thank you for sponsoring this podcast but also thank you for helping me to scale my business as somebody that quite frankly has never loved finances that much. who may add additional malevolent payload, but at the end still doesn't control it. It is tempting to follow the next argument that I saw in that paper, which basically says, listen, this is inevitable. So there's no point fighting against it because there's really no hope here. So we should probably give up even trying and be faithful that it will work itself out.

[31:45](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=1905) Because everything you've said sounds really inevitable. And with China working on it, I'm sure Putin's got some secret division. I'm sure Iran are doing some bits and pieces. Every European country is trying to get ahead of AI. The United States is leading the way. So it's inevitable. So we probably should just have faith and pray. Praying is always good, but incentives matter. If you are looking at what drives these people. So yes, money is important. So there is a lot of money in that space. And so everyone's trying to be there and develop this technology. But if they truly understand the argument, they understand that you will be dead.

[32:24](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=1944) No amount of money will be useful to you. That incentive switch. They would want to not be dead. A lot of them are young people, rich people. They have their whole lives ahead of them. I think they would be better off not building advanced superintelligence, concentrating on narrow AI tools for solving specific problems. Okay, my company cures breast cancer. That's all. We make billions of dollars. Everyone's happy. Everyone benefits. It's a win. We are still in control today. It's not over until it's over. We can decide not to build general superintelligences. I mean, the United States might be able to conjure up enough enthusiasm for that. But if the United States doesn't build general superintelligences, then China are going to have the big advantage, right?

[33:12](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=1992) So right now, at those levels, whoever has more advanced AI has more advanced military. No question, we see it with existing conflicts. But the moment you switch to superintelligence and control superintelligence, it doesn't matter who builds it, us or them. And if they understand this argument, they also would not build it. It's a mutually assured destruction on both ends. Is this technology different than, say, nuclear weapons, which require a huge amount of investment and you have to like enrich the uranium and you need billions of dollars potentially to even build a nuclear weapon. But it feels like this technology is much cheaper to get to superintelligence potentially, or at least it will become cheaper.

[33:57](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=2037) I wonder if it's possible that some guy, some startup is going to be able to build superintelligence in a couple of years without the need of billions of dollars of compute or electricity power that's a great point so every year it becomes cheaper and cheaper to train sufficiently large model if today it would take a trillion dollars to build super intelligence next year it could be a hundred billion and so on at some point a guy in a laptop could do it but you don't want to wait four years to make it affordable so that's why so much money is pouring in somebody wants to get there this year and lucky and all the winnings light cone level award so in that regard they both very expensive projects like manhattan level projects which was the nuclear bomb project right the difference between the two technologies is that nuclear weapons are still tools some dictator some country someone has to decide to use them deploy them whereas super intelligence is not it's not a tool it's an agent it makes its own decisions and no one is controlling it i cannot take out this dictator and now superintelligence is safe so that's a fundamental difference to me but if you're saying that it is going to get incrementally cheaper like i think it's more's law isn't it that technology gets

[35:16](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=2116) cheaper it is then there is a future some guy on his laptop is going to be able to create superintelligence without oversight or regulation or employees, etc. Yeah, that's why a lot of people are suggesting we need to build something like a surveillance planet where you are monitoring who's doing what and you're trying to prevent people from doing it. Do I think it's feasible? No. At some point, it becomes so affordable and so trivial that it just will happen. But at this point, we're trying to get more time. We don't want it to happen in five years. We want it to happen in 50 years. I mean, that's not very hopeful.

[35:57](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=2157) Depends on how old you are. Depends on how old you are. I mean, if you're saying that you believe in the future people will be able to make superintelligence without the resources that are required today, then it is just a matter of time. Yeah, but so will be true for many other technologies. We are getting much better in synthetic biology, where today someone with a bachelor's degree in biology can probably create a new virus. This will also become cheaper, other technologies like that. So we are approaching a point where it's very difficult to make sure no technological breakthrough is the last one.

[36:35](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=2195) So essentially, in many directions, we have this pattern of making it easier in terms of resources, in terms of intelligence to destroy the world. If you look at, I don't know, 500 years ago, the worst dictator with all the resources could kill a couple million people. He couldn't destroy the world. Now we know nuclear weapons, we can blow up the whole planet multiple times over. Synthetic biology, we saw with COVID, you can very easily create a combination virus which impacts billions of people. And all of those things becoming easier to do. in the near term you talk about extinction being a real risk human extinction being a real risk of all the the pathways to human extinction that you think are most likely what what is the leading pathway because i know you talk about there being some issue pre-deployment of these ai tools like you know someone makes a mistake um when they're designing a model or other issues post-deployment when i say post-deployment i mean once a chat tpt or something an agent's released into the world and someone hacking into it and changing it and reprogramming it to be malicious.

[37:53](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=2273) Of all these potential paths to human extinction, which one do you think is the highest probability? So I can only talk about the ones I can predict myself.

[38:03](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=2283) **Dr. Roman Yampolskiy:** So I can predict even before we get to superintelligence, someone will create a very advanced biological tool, create a novel virus, and that virus gets everyone or most everyone.

[38:13](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=2293) I can envision it. I can understand the pathway. I can say that. So just to zoom in on that, then, that would be using an AI to make a virus and then releasing it. And would that be intentional? There is a lot of psychopaths, a lot of terrorists, a lot of doomsday cults. We've seen historically, again, they tried to kill as many people as they can. They usually fail. They kill hundreds of thousands. But if they get technology to kill millions of billions, they would do that, gladly. the point i'm trying to emphasize is that it doesn't matter what i can come up with i am not a malevolent actor you're trying to defeat here it's the super intelligence which can come up with completely novel ways of doing it again you brought up example of your dog your dog cannot understand all the ways you can take it out it can maybe think you'll bite it to death or something but that's all whereas you have infinite supply of resources.

[39:16](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=2356) So if I asked your dog exactly how you're going to take it out, it would not give you a meaningful answer. It can talk about biting. And this is what we know. We know viruses. We experienced viruses, we can talk about them. But what an AI system capable of doing novel physics research can come up with is beyond me. One of the things that I think most people don't understand is how little we understand about how these AIs are actually working. Because one would assume, you know, with computers, we kind of understand how a computer works. We know that it's doing this and then this and it's running on code.

[39:58](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=2398) but from reading your work you describe it as being a black box we actually say in the context of something like chat gpt or an ai we know you're telling me that the people that have built that don't actually know what's going on inside there that's exactly right so even people making those systems have to run experiments on their product to learn what it's capable of so they train it by giving it all of data, let's say all of internet text. They run it on a lot of computers to learn patterns in that text. And then we start experimenting with that model. Oh, do you speak French? Oh, can you do mathematics?

[40:38](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=2438) Oh, are you lying to me now? And so maybe it takes a year to train it and then six months to get some fundamentals about what it's capable of, some safety overhead. But we still discover new capabilities and old models if you ask the question in a different way it becomes smarter so it's no longer engineering how it was the first 50 years where someone was a knowledge engineer programming an expert system ai to do specific things it's a science we are creating this artifact growing it it's like a alien plant and then we study to see what it's doing and just like with plants we don't have 100 accurate knowledge of biology we don't have full knowledge here we kind of know some patterns we know okay if we add more compute it gets smarter most of the time but nobody can tell you precisely what the outcome is going to be given a set of inputs i've watched so many entrepreneurs treat sales like a performance problem when it's often down to visibility because when you can't see what's happening in your pipeline what stage each conversation is at what's stalled what's moving you can't improve anything and you can't close the deal our sponsor pipe drive is the number one crm tool for small to medium businesses not just a contact list but

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[42:46](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=2566) It is. Ilya, yeah. Ilya left and he started a new company called? Superintelligent Safety. Because AI safety wasn't challenging enough, he decided to just jump right to the hard problem. As an onlooker, when you see that people are leaving OpenAI to start superintelligent safety companies, what was your read on that situation? So a lot of people who worked with Sam said that maybe he's not the most direct person in terms of being honest with them. And they had concerns about his views on safety. That's part of it. So they wanted more control. They wanted more concentration on safety. But also, it seems that anyone who leaves that company and starts a new one gets a $20 billion valuation just for having it started.

[43:38](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=2618) You don't have a product, you don't have customers, but if you want to make many billions of dollars, just do that. So it seems like a very rational thing to do for anyone who can. So I'm not surprised that there is a lot of attrition. meeting him in person he's super nice very smart absolutely perfect public interface you see him testify in the senate he says the right thing to the senators you see him talk to the investors they get the right message but if you look at what people who know him personally are saying it's probably not the right person to be controlling a project of that impact why he puts safety second second to winning this race to super intelligence being the guy who created guarding and controlling light cone of the universe he's worse do you suspect that's what he's driven by is by the the legacy of being an impactful person that did a remarkable thing versus the consequence that that might have on society. Because it's interesting that his other startup is WorldCoin, which is basically a platform to create universal basic income, i.e. a platform to give us income in a world where people don't have jobs anymore. So on one hand, you're creating an AI company, and on the other hand, you're

[45:05](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=2705) creating a company that is preparing for people not to have employment. It also has other properties it keeps track of everyone's biometrics it keeps you in charge of the world's economy world's wealth they're retaining a large portion of world coins so i think it's kind of very reasonable part to integrate with world dominance if you have a super intelligent system and you control money you're doing well why would someone want world dominance people have different levels of ambition then you are very young person with billions of dollars fame you start looking for more ambitious projects some people want to go to mars ours want to control light cone of the universe what did you say light coin of the universe light cone so every part of the universe light can reach from this point meaning anything accessible you want to grab and bring into your control you think sam altman wants to control every part of the universe i suspect he might yes it doesn't mean he doesn't want a side effect of it being a very beneficial technology which makes all the humans happy happy humans are good for control if you had to guess what the world looks like in 2100 if you had to guess it's either free of human existence or it's completely not comprehensible to someone like us

[46:44](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=2804) it's one of those extremes so there's either no humans it's basically the world is destroyed or it's so different that I cannot envision those predictions. What can be done to turn this ship to a more certain positive outcome at this point? Is there still things that we can do or is it too late? So I believe in personal self-interest. If people realize that doing this thing is really bad for them personally, they will not do it. So our job is to convince everyone with any power in this space, creating this technology, working for those companies, they are doing something very bad for them. Forget the other 8 billion people you're experimenting on with no permission, no consent.

[47:31](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=2851) You will not be happy with the outcome. If we can get everyone to understand that's a default, and it's not just me saying it. You had Jeff Hinton on, Nobel Prize winner, founder of the whole machine learning space. He says the same thing. Banjo, dozens of others, top scholars. We had a statement about dangerous of AI signed by thousands of scholars, computer scientists. This is basically what we think right now, and we need to make it a universal. No one should disagree with this, and then we may actually make good decisions about what technology to build. It doesn't guarantee long-term safety for humanity, but it means we're not trying to get there as soon as possible to the worst possible outcome.

[48:14](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=2894) And are you hopeful that that's even possible? I want to try. We have no choice but to try. And what would need to happen and who would need to act? Is it government legislation? Unfortunately, I don't think making it illegal is sufficient. There are different jurisdictions. There is, you know, loopholes. And what are you going to do if somebody does it? Are you going to fine them for destroying humanity? Like very steep fines for it? Like what are you going to do? It's not enforceable. If they do create it, now the superintelligence is in charge. So the judicial system we have is not impactful.

[48:48](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=2928) and all the punishments we have are designed for punishing humans. Prisons, capital punishment doesn't apply to AI. You know, the problem I have is when I have these conversations, I never feel like I walk away with, I hope that something's going to go well. And what I mean by that is I never feel like I walk away with clear, some kind of clear set of actions that can course correct what might happen here. So what should I do? What should the person sat at home listening to this do you you talk to a lot of people who are building this technology ask them precisely to explain some of those things they claim to be impossible how they solved it or going to solve it before they get to where they're going do you know i don't think sam altman wants to talk to me i don't know he seems to go on a lot of podcasts maybe he does he wants to go online i wonder why that is i'd love to speak to him but i don't think he wants to i don't think he wants me to uh interview him have an open challenge maybe money is not the incentive but whatever attracts people like that whoever can convince you that it's possible to control and make safe super intelligence gets the prize they come on your show and prove their case

[50:09](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=3009) anyone if no one claims the price or even accepts the challenge after a few years maybe we don't have anyone with solutions we have companies valued again at billions and billions of dollars working on safe superintelligence we haven't seen their output yet yeah i'd like to speak to ilia as well because i know he's he's working on safe superintelligence Notice a pattern, too. If you look at history of AI safety organizations or departments within companies, they usually start well, very ambitious, and then they fail and disappear. So OpenAI had superintelligence alignment team.

[50:52](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=3052) **Dr. Roman Yampolskiy:** The day they announced it, I think they said they're going to solve it in four years. Like half a year later, they canceled the team.

[50:59](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=3059) And there is dozens of similar examples. creating a perfect safety for superintelligence, perpetual safety as it keeps improving, modifying, interacting with people, you're never going to get there. It's impossible. There is a big difference between difficult problems in computer science and pre-complete problems and impossible problems. And I think control, indefinite control of superintelligence is such a problem. So what's the point of trying, then, if it's impossible? Well, I'm trying to prove that it is specifically that. Once we establish something is impossible, fewer people will waste their time claiming they can do it and looking for money.

[51:37](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=3097) So many people go and give me a billion dollars in two years and I'll solve it for you. Well, I don't think you will. But people aren't going to stop striving towards it. So if there's no attempts to make it safe and there's more people increasingly striving towards it, then it's inevitable. But it changes what we do. if we know that it's impossible to make it right, to make it safe, then this direct path of just build it as soon as you can becomes suicide mission. Hopefully fewer people will pursue that. They may go in other directions. Again, I'm a scientist. I'm an engineer. I love AI. I love technology. I use it all the time. Build useful tools. Stop building agents. Build narrow superintelligence, not a general one. I'm not saying you shouldn't make billions of dollars.

[52:22](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=3142) I love billions of dollars. But don't kill everyone, yourself included. They don't think they're going to, though. Then tell us why. I hear things about intuition. I hear things about we'll solve it later. Tell me specifically, in scientific terms, publish a peer-reviewed paper explaining how you're going to control superintelligence. Yeah, it's strange. It's strange to even bother if there was even a one percent chance of human extinction it's strange to do something like if there was a one percent someone told me there was a one percent chance that if i got in a car i might not i might not be alive i would not get in the car if you told me there was a one percent chance that if i drank whatever liquid is in this cup right now i might die i would not drink the liquid even if there was a billion dollars if i survived so the 99 chance i get a billion dollars the 1% is I die I wouldn't drink it I wouldn't take the chance it's worse than that not just you die everyone dies yeah yeah now would we let you drink it at any odds that's for us to decide you don't get to make that choice for us to get consent from human subjects you need them to comprehend what they are consenting to if those systems are unexplainable unpredictable how can

[53:41](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=3221) they consent. They don't know what they are consenting to. So it's impossible to get consent by definition. So this experiment can never be run ethically. By definition, they are doing unethical experimentation on human subjects. Do you think people should be protesting? There are people protesting. There is Stop AI, there is Pause AI, they block offices of OpenAI, they do it weekly, monthly, quite a few actions, and they're recruiting new people. Do you think more people should be protesting? Do you think that's an effective solution? if you can get it to a large enough scale to where majority of population is participating it would be impactful i don't know if they can scale from current numbers to that but i support everyone trying everything peacefully and legally and for the for the person listening at home what should they what should they be doing what what because they they don't want to feel powerless none of us want to feel powerless so it depends on what scale we're Asking about timescale, I was saying, like, this year your kid goes to college, what major to pick?

[54:50](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=3290) Should they go to college at all? Yeah. Should you switch jobs? Should you go into certain industries? Those questions we can answer. We can talk about immediate future. What should you do in five years with this being created? For an average person, not much. Just like they can't influence World War III, nuclear, Holocaust, anything like that. It's not something anyone's going to ask them about. today if you want to be a part of this movement yeah join pause ai join stop ai those are organizations currently trying to build up momentum to bring democratic powers to influence those individuals so in the near term not a huge amount If there are any interesting strategies in the near term, should I be thinking differently about my family, about...

[55:40](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=3340) I mean, you've got kids, right? You've got three kids? That I know about, yeah. Three kids. How are you thinking about parenting in this world that you see around the corner? How are you thinking about what to say to them, the advice to give them what they should be learning? So there is general advice outside of this domain that you should live your every day as if it's your last. It's a good advice no matter what. If you have three years left or 30 years left, you lived your best life so try to not do things you hate for too long do interesting things do impactful things if you can do all that while helping people do that simulation theory is a interesting uh sort of adjacent subject here because as computers begin to accelerate and get more intelligent and we're able to you know do things with ai that we can never have imagined in terms of like imagine the worlds that we could create with virtual reality i think it was google that recently released what was it called um like the ai worlds you take a picture and it generates the whole world yeah you can move through the world i'll put it on the screen for people to see but google have released this technology which allows you i think with a

[56:43](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=3403) simple prompt actually to make a three-dimensional world that you can then navigate through and in that world that has memory so in the world if you paint on a wall and turn away you look back the wall persistent yeah it's persistent and when i saw that i go god jesus bloody hell this is this is like the foothills of being able to create a simulation that's indistinguishable from everything i see here right that's why i think we are in one that's exactly the reason ai is getting to the level of creating human agents human level agents and virtual reality is getting to the level of being indistinguishable from ours.

[57:10](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=3430) So you think this is a simulation? I'm pretty sure we are in a simulation, yeah. For someone that isn't familiar with the simulation arguments, what are the first principles here that convince you that we are currently living in a simulation? So you need certain technologies to make it happen. If you believe we can create human-level AI, and you believe we can create virtual reality as good as this in terms of resolution, haptics, whatever properties it has, then I commit right now, the moment this is affordable, I'm going to run billions of simulations of this exact moment, making sure you are statistically in one.

[57:38](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=3458) Say that last part again. You're going to run... I'm going to commit right now, when it's very affordable, it's like $10 a month to run it, I'm going to run a billion simulations of this interview. Why? because statistically that means you are in one right now the chances of you being in the real one is one in a billion okay so to make sure i'm clear on this it's a retroactive placement yeah so the minute it's affordable then you can run billions of them and they would feel and appear to be exactly like this interview right now so assuming the ai has internal state's experience is qualia. Some people argue that they don't. Some say they already have it.

[58:09](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=3489) That's a separate philosophical question. But if we can simulate this, I will. Some people might misunderstand. You're not saying that you will. You're saying that someone will. I can also do it. I don't mind. Of course, others will do it before I get there. If I'm getting it for $10, somebody got it for $4,000. That's not the point. If you have technology, we're definitely running a lot of simulations for research, for entertainment, games, all sorts of reasons. And the number of those greatly exceeds the number of real worlds we're in. Look at all the video games kids are playing. Every kid plays 10 different games.

[58:39](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=3519) A billion kids in the world, so there is 10 billion... simulations in one real world. Even more so, when we think about advanced AI, superintelligent systems, their thinking is not like ours. They think in a lot more detail, they run experiments. So running... It takes a little bit of time to realize this as a founder, but once you do, it's something you can't unsee. That having the right systems in place with your business is critical. One that's helped me across all of my investments is NetSuite, the number one cloud financial system and sponsor of today's conversation. Through their streamlined platform, you'll find all of your accounting, finance, management, inventory, and HR in one place. And their technology has been a massive unlock for all of my companies, especially for my team at Flight Story. As over the last year, we've moved out of startup mode into scale-up mode. And that's the stage where we found it mission critical to use NetSuite. We no longer have to juggle multiple systems and having everything together has reduced the number of manual tasks and of course the number of errors. Over 42,000 businesses have chosen to future-proof their business with NetSuite. So if you'd like to learn how it can help

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[1:01:41](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=3701) people are going like i'm giving it non-trivial probability a few people are as high as i am but a lot of people give it some credence what percentage are you at in terms of believing that we are currently living in a simulation very close to certainty and what does that mean for the nature of your life if you're close to 100 certain that we are currently living in a simulation does that change anything in your life so all the things you care about are still the same pain still hurts love still love right like those things are not different so it doesn't matter they're still important that's what matters the little one percent different is that i care about what's outside the simulation i want to learn about it i write papers about it so that's the only impact and what do you think is outside of the simulation i don't know but we can look at this world and derive some properties of the simulators so clearly brilliant engineer brilliant scientist brilliant artist not so good with morals and ethics room for improvement in our view of what morals and ethics should be well we know that is suffering in a world so unless you think it's ethical to torture children then i'm questioning your approach

[1:02:56](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=3776) But in terms of incentives, to create a positive incentive, you probably also need to create negative incentives. Suffering seems to be one of the negative incentives built into our design to stop me doing things I shouldn't do. So, like, put my hand in a fire, it's going to hurt. But it's all about levels, levels of suffering, right? So unpleasant stimuli, negative feedback doesn't have to be at, like, negative infinity hell levels. You don't want to burn a life and feel it. You want to be like, oh, this is uncomfortable, I'm going to stop. It's interesting because we assume that they don't have great morals and ethics, but we too would, we take animals and cook them and eat them for dinner and we also conduct experiments on mice and rats.

[1:03:38](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=3818) But to get university approval to conduct an experiment, you submit a proposal and there is a panel of Ephesus who would say, you can't experiment on humans, you can't burn babies, you can't eat animals alive. All those things would be banned. In most parts of the world. Where they have ethical boards. Some places don't bother with it, so they have easier approval process. It's funny when you talk about the simulation theory, there's an element of the conversation that makes life feel less meaningful in a weird way. Like, I know it doesn't matter, but whenever I have this conversation with people, not on the podcast about are we living in a simulation, you almost see a little bit of meaning come out of their life for a second, and then they forget and then they carry on.

[1:04:26](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=3866) But the thought that this is a simulation almost posits that it's not important or that I think humans want to believe that this is the highest level and we're at the most important and we're the, it's all about us. We're quite egotistical by design. And just an interesting observation I've always had when I have these conversations with people that it seems to strip something out of their life. Do you feel religious people feel that way? They know there is another world and the one that matters is not this one. Do you feel they don't value their lives the same, I guess, in some religions? I think they think that this world is being created for them and that they are going to go to this heaven or hell.

[1:05:08](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=3908) And that still puts them at the very center of it. But if it's a simulation, we could just be some computer game that a four-year-old alien is messing around with while he's got some time to burn. But maybe there is a test and there is a better simulation. you go to a worse one maybe there are different difficulty levels maybe you want to play it on a harder setting next time i've just invested millions into this and become a co-owner of the company. It's a company called Ketone IQ and the story is quite interesting. I started talking about ketosis on this podcast and the fact that I'm very low carb, very very low sugar and my body produces ketones which have made me incredibly focused, have improved my endurance, have improved my mood and have made me more capable at doing what I do here. And because I was talking about it on the podcast, a couple of weeks later these showed up on my desk in my HQ in London, these little shots. And oh my God, the impact this had on my ability to articulate myself, on my focus, on my workouts, on my mood, on stopping me crashing throughout the day was so profound that I reached out to the founders of the company. And now I'm a co-owner of this business. I highly, highly recommend you look into this. I highly recommend you look at

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[1:06:55](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=4015) At that stage, you're thinking about the product. how to attract new customers, how to grow your team, really how to survive. And HR slips down the list because it doesn't feel urgent, but sooner or later it is. And when things get messy, tools like our sponsor today, JustWorks, go from being a nice-to-have to being a necessity. Something goes sideways and you find yourself having conversations you did not see coming. This is when you learn that HR really is the infrastructure of your company and without it, things wobble. And JustWorks stops you learning this the hard way. It takes care of the stuff that would otherwise drain your energy and your time, automating payroll, health insurance benefits, and it gives your team human support at any hour.

[1:07:32](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=4052) It grows with your small business from startup through to growth, even when you start hiring team members abroad. So if you want HR support that's there through the exciting times and the challenging times, head to justworks.com now. That's justworks.com. And do you think much about longevity? A lot, yeah. That's probably the second most important problem because if AI doesn't get us, that will. What do you mean? You're going to die of old age. Which is fine. That's not good. You want to die? I mean... You don't have to. It's just a disease. We can cure it. Nothing stops you from living forever.

[1:08:10](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=4090) As long as the universe exists. Unless we escape the simulation. But we wouldn't want a world where everybody could live forever, right? That would be... Sure we do. Why? Who do you want to die? I don't know. I mean, I say this because it's all I've ever known, that people die. but wouldn't the world become pretty overcrowded if no you stop reproducing if you live forever you have kids because you want a replacement for you if you live forever you're like i'll have kids in a million years that's cool i'll go explore universe first plus if you look at actual population dynamics outside of like one continent we're all shrinking we're not growing yeah this is crazy it's crazy that the more rich people get the less kids they they have which aligns with what you're saying and i do actually think i think if i'm going to be completely honest here I think if I knew that I was going to live to a thousand years old, there's no way I'd be having kids at 30. Right, exactly. Biological clocks are based on terminal points, whereas if your biological clock is infinite, you'd be like, one day. And you think that's close, being able to extend our lives? It's one breakthrough away. I think somewhere in our genome, we have this

[1:09:18](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=4158) rejuvenation loop, and it's set to basically give us at most 120. I think we can reset it to something bigger. AI is probably going to accelerate that. That's one very important application area. Yes, absolutely. So maybe Brian Johnson's right when he says don't die now he keeps saying to me he's like don't die now don't die ever because he's saying like don't die before we get to the technology right longevity escape velocity you want to long live long enough to live forever if at some point we every year of your existence at two years to your existence through medical breakthroughs then you live forever you just have to make it to that point of longevity escape velocity and he thinks that longevity escape velocity especially in the world of AI is decades away, minimum, which means...

[1:10:09](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=4209) As soon as we fully understand human genome, I think we'll make amazing breakthroughs very quickly. Because we know some people have genes for living way longer. They have generations of people who are centurions. So if we can understand that and copy that or copy it from some animals which will live forever, we'll get there. Would you want to live forever? Of course. Reverse the question. let's say we lived forever and you ask me do you want to die in 40 years why would i say yes i don't know maybe you're just used to the default yeah i am used to the default and nobody wants to die like no matter how old you are nobody goes yeah i want to die this year everyone's like i want to keep living i wonder if life and everything would be less special if i lived for 10 000 years i wonder if going to hawaii for the first time or i don't know a relationship all of these things would be way less special to me if they were less scarce and if i just you know it could be individually less special but there is so much more you can do right now you can only make plans to do something for a decade or two you cannot have an ambitious plan of working on this project for 500 years imagine possibilities open to you with infinite time in the infinite universe

[1:11:24](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=4284) gosh well you can't feels exhausting it's a big amount of time also i don't know about you but i don't remember like 99 of my life in detail i remember big highlights so even if i enjoyed hawaii 10 years ago i'll enjoy it again are you thinking about that really practically as as in terms of you know in the same way that brian johnson is brian johnson is convinced that we're like maybe two decades away from being able to extend life are you thinking about that practically and are you doing anything about it diet nutrition i try to think about investment strategies which pay out in a million years yeah really yeah of course what do you mean of course of course why wouldn't you if you think this is what's going to happen you you should try that so if we get ai right now what happens to economy we talked about world coin we talked about free labor what's money is it now bitcoin do you invest in that is there something else which becomes the only resource we cannot fake so those things are very important research topics So you're investing in Bitcoin, aren't you?

[1:12:45](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=4365) Yeah. Because it's a... It's the only scarce resource. Nothing else has scarcity. Everything else, if price goes up, will make more. I can make as much gold as you want, given a proper price point. You cannot make more Bitcoin. Some people say Bitcoin is just this thing on a computer that we all agreed was valuable. We are a thing on a computer. Remember? remember okay so i mean not investment advice but investment advice it's hilarious how that's one of those things where they tell you it's not but you know it is immediately there is a your call is important to us that means your call is of zero importance and investment is like that yeah yeah when they say no investment advice it's definitely investment advice um but it's not investment advice okay so you're bullish on bitcoin because it's it can't be messed with it is the only thing which we know how much there is in the universe so gold there could be an asteroid made out of pure gold heading towards us devaluing it well also killing all of us but bitcoin i know exactly the numbers and Even the 21 million is an upper limit.

[1:13:56](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=4436) How many are lost? Passwords forgotten. I don't know what Satoshi is doing with his million. It's getting scarcer every day, while more and more people are trying to accumulate it. Some people worry that it could be hacked with a supercomputer. A quantum computer can break that algorithm. There is strategies for switching to quantum-resistant cryptography for that. And quantum computers are still kind of weak. Do you think there's any changes to my life that I should make following this conversation? Is there anything that I should do differently the minute I walk out of this door? I assume you already invest in Bitcoin heavily?

[1:14:17](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=4457) Yes, I'm an investor in Bitcoin. This is financial advice. No, just you seem to be winning. Maybe it's your simulation. You're rich, handsome. You have famous people hang out with you. That's pretty good. Keep it up. Robin Hanson has a paper about how to live in a simulation, what you should be doing in it. And your goal is to do exactly that. You want to be interesting, you want to hang out with famous people so they don't shut it down. So you are part of a part someone's actually watching on pay-per-view or something like that. Oh, I don't know if you want to be watched on pay-per-view because then you're going to be the same.

[1:14:56](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=4496) Then they shut you down. If no one's watching, why would they play it? I'm saying, don't you want to fly under the radar? Don't you want to be the guy just living a normal life that they're the masters those are npcs nobody wants to be an npc are you religious not in any traditional sense but i believe in simulation hypothesis which has a super intelligent being so but you don't believe in the like you know the religious books so different religions this religion will tell you don't work saturday this one don't work sunday don't eat pigs don't eat cows they just have local traditions on top of that theory that's all it is they're all the same religion. They all worship super-intelligent beings. They all think this world is not the main one.

[1:15:47](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=4547) And they argue about which animal not to eat. Skip the local flavors. Concentrate on what do all the religions have in common? And that's the interesting part. They all think there is something greater than humans. Very capable. All-knowing. All-powerful. Then I run a computer game. Four of those characters in the game, I am that. I can change the whole world. i can shut it down i know everything in the world it's funny i was thinking earlier on when we started talking about the simulation theory that there's there might be something innate in us that is been left from the creator almost like a clue like a like an intuition because that's what we tend to have through history humans have this intuition yeah that all the things you said are true that there's this somebody above and we have generations of people who were religious who believed god told them and was there and give them books and that has been passed on for many generations this is probably one of the earliest generations not to have universal religious belief what if those people are telling the truth what if there's people those people that say god came to them and said something imagine that imagine if that was part of this i'm looking at the news

[1:16:57](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=4617) today something happened an hour ago and i'm getting different conflicting results i can't even get with cameras with drones with like guy on twitter there i still don't know what happened And you think 3,000 years ago we have accurate record of translations? No, of course not. You know, these conversations you have around AI safety, do you think they make people feel good? I don't know if they feel good or bad, but people find it interesting. It's one of those topics where I can have a conversation about different cures for cancer with an average person, but everyone has opinions about AI. Everyone has opinions about simulation.

[1:17:31](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=4651) It's interesting that you don't have to be highly educated or a genius to understand those concepts. because I tend to think that it makes me feel not positive and I understand that but I've always been of the opinion that you shouldn't live in a world of delusion where you're just seeking to be positive have sort of positive things said and avoid uncomfortable conversations actually progress often in my life comes from like having uncomfortable conversations becoming aware about something and then at least being informed about how i can do something about it and so i think that's why that's why i asked the question because i assume most people will should if that you know if they're normal human beings listen to these conversations and go gosh that's scary and this is concerning and and then i keep coming back to this point which is What do I do with that energy?

[1:18:34](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=4714) Yeah, but I'm trying to point out this is not different than so many conversations. We can talk about, oh, there is starvation in this region, genocide in this region, you're dying, cancer is spreading, autism is up. You can always find something to be very depressed about and nothing you can do about it. And we're very good at concentrating on what we can change, what we are good at, and basically not trying to embrace the whole world as a local environment. So historically, you grew up with a tribe, you had a dozen people around you. If something happened to one of them, it was very rare. It was an accident.

[1:19:13](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=4753) Now, if I go on the internet, somebody gets killed everywhere all the time. Somehow, thousands of people are reported to me every day. I don't even have time to notice. It's just too much. So I have to put filters in place. And I think this topic is what people are very good at filtering as like, this was this entertaining talk I went to, kind of like a show. And the moment I exit, it ends. So usually I would go give a keynote at a conference and I tell them, basically, you're all going to die. You have two years left. Any questions? And people be like, will I lose my job? How do I lubricate my sex robot?

[1:19:54](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=4794) Like all sorts of nonsense, clearly not understanding what I'm trying to say there. And those are good questions, interesting questions, but not fully embracing the result. They're still in their bubble of local versus global. And the people that disagree with you the most as it relates to AI safety, what is it that they say? What are their counter arguments typically? So many don't engage at all. like they have no background knowledge in a subject they never write a single book single paper not just by me by anyone they may be even working in a field so they are doing some machine learning work for some company maximizing ad clicks and to them those systems are very narrow and then they hear that obviously i is going to take over the world like it has no hands how would it do that it's nonsense this guy is crazy he has a beard why would i listen to him right? Then they start reading a little bit. They go, oh, okay, so maybe AI can be dangerous. Yeah, I see that. But we always solve problems in the past. We're going to solve them again. I mean, at some point we fixed a computer virus or something. So it's the same. And basically, the more exposure they have, the less likely they are to keep that position. I know many people who

[1:21:15](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=4875) went from super careless developer to safety researcher. I don't know anyone who went from I worry about AI safety to like there is nothing to worry about. What are your closing statements? Let's make sure that It's not a closing statement we need to give for humanity. Let's make sure we stay in charge, in control. Let's make sure we only build things which are beneficial to us. Let's make sure people who are making those decisions are remotely qualified to do it. They are good, not just at science, engineering and business, but also have moral and ethical standards. And if you're doing something which impacts other people, you should ask their permission before you do that.

[1:22:08](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=4928) If there was one button in front of you and it would shut down every AI company in the world right now permanently with the inability for anybody to start a new one, would you press the button? Are we losing narrow AI or just super intelligent AGI part? Losing all of AI. That's a hard question because AI is extremely important. It controls stock market, power plants, it controls hospitals. it would be a devastating accident. Millions of people would lose their lives. Okay, we can keep narrow AI. Oh, yeah. That's what we want. We want narrow AI to do all this for us, but not God we don't control doing things to us.

[1:22:51](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=4971) So you would stop it? You would stop AGI and superintelligence? We have AGI. What we have today is great for almost everything. We can make secretaries out of it. 99% of economic potential of current technology has not been deployed. We make AI so quickly, it doesn't have time to propagate through the industry, through technology. Something like half of all jobs are considered BS jobs. They don't need to be done, bullshit jobs. So those can be not even automated, they can be just gone. But I'm saying we can replace 60% of jobs today with existing models. We've not done that. So if the goal is to grow economy, to develop, we can do it for decades without having to create super intelligence as soon as possible.

[1:23:43](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=5023) Do you think globally, especially in the Western world, unemployment is only going to go up from here? Do you think relatively this is the low of unemployment? I mean, it fluctuates a lot with other factors. There are wars, there's economic cycles, but overall, the more jobs you automate and the higher is the intellectual necessity to start a job, the fewer people qualify. So if we plotted it on a graph over the next 20 years, you're assuming unemployment is gradually going to go up over that time? I think so. fewer and fewer people would be able to contribute already we kind of understand it because we created minimum wage we understood some people don't contribute enough economic value to get paid anything really so we had to force employers to pay them more than they worth and we haven't updated it it's what 725 federally in u.s if you keep up with economy it should be like 25 dollars an hour now which means all these people making less are not contributing enough economic output to justify what they're getting paid we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're leaving it for and the question left for you is what are what are the most important characteristics

[1:24:43](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=5083) characteristics for a friend colleague or mate those are very different types of people but for all of them loyalty is number one and what does loyalty mean to you not betraying you not screwing you not cheating on you despite the temptation despite the world being as it is situation environment dr roman thank you so much thank you so much for doing what you do because you're you're starting a conversation and pushing forward a conversation and doing research that is incredibly important and you're doing it in the face of a lot of um a lot of skeptics i'd say there's a lot of people that have a lot of...

[1:25:30](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=5130) Incentives to discredit what you're saying and what you do because they have their own incentives and they have billions of dollars on the line and they have their jobs on the line potentially as well. So it's really important that there are people out there that are willing to, I guess, stick their head above the parapet and come on shows like this and go on big platforms and talk about the unexplainable, unpredictable, uncontrollable future that we're heading towards. So thank you for doing that. This book, which I think everybody should check out if they want a continuation of this conversation, I think it was published in 2024, gives a holistic view on many of the things we've talked about today, preventing AI failures and much, much more.

[1:26:11](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=5171) And I'm going to link it below for anybody that wants to read it. If people want to learn more from you, if they want to go further into your work, what's the best thing for them to do? Where do they go? They can follow me, follow me on Facebook, follow me on X, just don't follow me home. Very important. Okay, so I'll put your Twitter, your x account um as well below so people can follow you there and yeah thank you so much for doing what you do it's remarkably eye-opening and it's given me so much food for thought and it's actually convinced me more that we are living in a simulation but it's also made me think quite differently of religion i have to say because um you're right all the religions when you get away from the sort of the local traditions they do all point at the same thing and actually if they are all pointing at the same thing then maybe the fundamental truths that exist across them should be something i pay more attention to things like loving thy neighbor things like the fact that we are all one that there's a divine creator and maybe also they all seem to have consequence beyond this life so maybe i should be thinking more about how i behave in this life and and where i might end up thereafter rovin thank you amen

[1:27:21](https://realalpha.app/v/UclrVWafRAI/?t=5241) Thank you.