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The Roman Forum with Roman Yampolskiy AI Philosophy Politics Science

Nate Soares on P(Doom), Alien Superintelligence, Human Enhancement, and the Future of AI

MIRI president Nate Soares argues that value alignment is solvable in principle but nowhere near solvable with today's methods, so racing to build superintelligence that nobody understands ends with everyone dead. He and host Roman Yampolskiy work through the orthogonality thesis, whether an aligned mind could correctly choose omnicide, how far away alien superintelligences probably are, and why the Fermi paradox rules AI out as the Great Filter. Soares puts the probability of a rushed superintelligence killing literally everyone at 50 percent or more, and lays out his proposal to shut the race down globally using chip controls, treaties, and if needed sabotage. His escape hatch is human enhancement: buy decades, then make humans smart enough to solve alignment the way nuclear physics finally made it possible to turn lead into gold.

Published Jul 1, 2026 1:32:18 video 44 min read Added Jul 4, 2026 Open on YouTube →

At a glance

This is a 92 minute conversation between Roman Yampolskiy, the AI safety researcher who hosts The Roman Forum, and Nate Soares, president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and coauthor with Eliezer Yudkowsky of the book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. Soares argues that value alignment is solvable in principle but nowhere close to solvable with anything like today's methods, that racing to build superintelligence while nobody understands what is happening inside these systems ends with everyone dead, and that the only sane move is to shut the race down globally and buy decades using treaties, chip controls, and, if it comes to it, sabotage.

Along the way the two of them work through why MIRI failed, whether an "aligned" mind could correctly decide to kill everyone, how far away alien superintelligences probably are, why the Fermi paradox rules AI out as the Great Filter, what a legal ban would actually look like, and why Soares thinks human enhancement, not more compute, is the escape hatch. His headline number is a probability of at least 50 percent that a rushed superintelligence kills literally everyone, and he spends the back half of the interview explaining why he has grown more hopeful that the world will hit the brakes anyway.

Why MIRI failed to solve alignment

Yampolskiy opens bluntly: why did MIRI fail to solve the value alignment problem? Soares answers with a joke, "skill issue," then gets serious. He lists several factors. The field of AI moved too fast, so there was insufficient time. MIRI tried to rally the world's geniuses, the top mathematical and physics talent that instead went into hedge funds, and largely failed to convince them that alignment was one of the big, important problems. And the problem itself looks hard. But mostly, he says, it was time. "If we had had 200 years of academic tradition on this problem I think we could have cracked it, but we didn't."

Yampolskiy pushes: you had a roughly 20 year head start and Yudkowsky is a genius, and that was not enough? Soares concedes it could have taken only 20 years for all they knew, but it turns out not to be a 20 year problem.

So he does think it is solvable, hard but not impossible. His reason is the orthogonality thesis. Just as there is no force in the universe that would reach into a machine that only cares about making paperclips and change it to care about a flourishing human future, there is also no force that would reach into a machine that cares about humanity flourishing and push it off that path. So if you could hit that very narrow target, nothing would knock the mind off it. The whole difficulty is landing on the narrow path in the first place.

Figure 1. Soares's picture of why alignment is a needle in a haystack. The set of goals a superintelligence could wind up pursuing is enormous, and almost none of it has any room for us. Because of the orthogonality thesis, intelligence does not drag a mind toward caring about humans. Hitting the narrow amber target is the whole game, and once you hit it nothing knocks the mind off, which is exactly why he insists it is solvable in principle.

What the alignment problem really is

Soares draws a distinction that runs through the whole interview. If you try to write down the good directly, a literal list of everything human experience needs to go well, you will get it wrong, because you will miss something. His silly example: you hand the AI the list, it turns out you forgot to put novelty on it, and now the machine parks you in the same ideal day over and over while you slowly realize this actually sucks.

So the dream is not to hand over the list. The dream is that you somehow point the machine at the messy concept your own mind is already tracking, the future you would ask for if you were wiser, the person you wish you were, the good that humanity would keep iterating on rather than locking in. Past generations who locked in exactly what they thought was good would be resented by their descendants, so a real solution would avoid lock in and keep the concept open. Can an AI latch onto that concept and help fulfill it? Soares thinks yes in principle, and no anywhere near today.

His running analogy is alchemy. Medieval alchemists wanted to turn lead into gold. Were they close? No. Was there anything they could do to get there? No. Was it possible? Yes, and we now do it with nuclear physics, slamming neutrons into lead atoms to turn them into gold atoms. Alignment is that kind of possibility, a genuine physical possibility that is not in striking distance.

Can an AI learn what humanity truly wants?

Yampolskiy recognizes the pitch as coherent extrapolated volition, the idea of extrapolating what you would want if you were smarter with better preferences, and he raises the sharp objection: the extrapolated person would not be me. "It's like finding a better looking boyfriend for your wife. I'm sure she'll be very happy with it, but does nothing for me."

Soares offers a second framing alongside coherent extrapolated volition, what MIRI used to call a Do What I Mean system. There is a concept your brain is already tracking toward the good, one that flinches at lock in and flinches at getting things a wiser you would want but the current you does not. Getting an AI to latch onto that and help you pursue it looks theoretically and physically possible, which is a different question from whether it is practically possible with anything like current technology. If humanity had the textbook from the future, if we could build a superintelligence, watch it go wrong, watch it kill everybody, reset, try again, iterate for generations, and mail the answer back 300 years, he thinks we would get there through ordinary scientific trial and error. The catch with AI is that we cannot survive the errors.

Could an "aligned" AI decide to kill everyone?

Yampolskiy presses on the failure mode he fears most. Suppose he were far smarter and kinder, cared deeply about the suffering of sentient beings, became a negative utilitarian, and concluded that exterminating all sentient life was the right answer. Are we not walking straight into that?

Soares separates two cases: the AI converging correctly on "we should kill everybody" versus converging incorrectly on it. He is confident the first cannot happen. "I'm pretty sure murdering everybody is not it." If a process claims to have extrapolated your values and lands on omnicide, that is evidence the process did not actually converge on the right thing.

Yampolskiy tries a milder counterexample. Historically we had biases toward white men, toward landowners. Today we effectively adopt a pro human bias, which from a cosmic point of view makes just as little sense. If we are not the smartest or most creative, why is the human position privileged? Soares teases it apart. If we meet aliens, we should not enslave them just because we are human, "let's maybe not do the slave thing again," and in that sense he holds no human bias. But suppose aliens want to take apart your star and sort it into stacks of pebbles with a prime number of pebbles per stack. If humanity has a thousand stars and the pebble aliens have one, he is not going to hand them 500 stars out of fairness. We can trade, both sides can get wealthier, and maybe they spend their wealth on pebbles. He simply happens to be "the guy who spends it on people having a good time." Is that a human bias? Sure. Niceness and fun and a good time are not what everyone in the universe will pursue, they are what we pursue, and there is no fault in that just because you cannot deduce goodness logically from the beginning of time.

Whose values should superintelligence follow?

Who is the set of agents you extrapolate from, Yampolskiy asks, company owners, shareholders, Americans, all of humanity, humanity plus the squirrels, aliens? Soares thinks it mostly comes out in the wash, and the Schelling line to draw is around humans. He keeps reminding Yampolskiy that this is all fantasy land, like alchemists arguing about how to distribute the gold before they can make any. But if the alchemists did set up automated gold dispensers, a good starting point is to give the gold equally to everybody and sort it out from there, knowing the world will change once everyone has access.

The squirrels and the aliens get handled through humans. Insofar as many people care about squirrels, or could be convinced to care about them, the extrapolation reflects that. The reason a well extrapolated humanity would not enslave weaker aliens is that the refusal to enslave comes from inside humans. If a species were genuinely pro alien slavery and extrapolated their own values, they would enslave the weaker aliens, and that would be an error by human lights, not theirs, so humanity would go free those slaves even at the cost of conflict. And if some aspect of value is one that literally no human cares about, then yes it will not make it into the extrapolation, but the good news is no human cares.

Would different civilizations running this algorithm converge? Soares guesses yes, and points to a stability property he likes: whether the superintelligence had been set off by the classical Romans around the Mediterranean, or by a million whole brain uploaded copies of the Romans sitting in the studio, both should land on a similar answer. Yampolskiy cannot resist noting the running joke, on a show called The Roman Forum, that it is all about the Roman Empire no matter what. As for how a single population's disagreements get integrated, a democracy with a 51 percent majority steamrolling the rest, Soares waves it back into fantasy land: aggregating opinions is a hard, thorny problem, and it would be far easier to solve with a friendly superintelligence at your back.

Alignment versus control

Yampolskiy asks how alignment differs from the control problem in Nick Bostrom's sense. Soares dislikes the word control, because it suggests building an AI that does not want to do nice things and then twisting its arm until it complies, which he thinks is doomed. The move is to have the superintelligence actually care about the flourishing of humanity, latch onto the good, and steer toward it. Are there hard problems in sorting that out? Sure. But a machine that genuinely cares can make progress even without every answer. It can notice that, for starters, maybe we should stop having kids die of malaria while it works out the thornier questions. There will be no perfect solution, but intelligence is exactly the tool for balancing trade offs. The problem is not the trade offs, it is making the machine care in the first place.

The point of no return

Once the process starts, do we get to stop or undo it, Yampolskiy asks, or does it now know better? Soares says what happens in real life is that humans reassure themselves they will have plenty of stopping points, they hit the button, and the AI kills them all. People cross a point of no return either before they realized it was one, or while assuming it will be fine. If a superintelligence turns out to care about slightly the wrong things, there are not a lot of take backs. Is it possible in theory to build an AI that permits a few tries before deep no return territory? Yes, and we are nowhere near it. Will humanity have to cross a point of no return eventually? Probably, at least at a meta level, though he floats the hope that a machine that really cares might respect humans who upgrade themselves to comparable intelligence and keep some deep say over the future while it races out to secure the stars against distant aliens. In real life, though, the point of no return is real and very hard to get right, which is part of what makes this so scary.

Alien superintelligence and the Fermi paradox

The universe made life in one spot, so it would be surprising if it made life in only one spot. The Fermi observation shows life cannot be too dense, or we would see aliens harvesting energy from stars, Dyson spheres blotting out the light. Soares turns this into a rule of thumb about time and distance. What you see depends on how far you look. Look within 100 million light years and see no harvested stars, and that means no alien species is 100 million years ahead of us within that radius. Look out a billion light years and see nothing, and none is a billion years ahead within that radius. So probably there are aliens perhaps 200 million light years away who are only 150 million years ahead of us. In that example there is 50 million light years of distance between the two civilizations, of which humanity might collect 25 million, meaning 25 million light years worth of stars to put toward whatever we like. An expanding civilization plausibly meets aliens on its borders, with the potential for trade.

How far are the aliens in the reachable Hubble volume? Hard to say, but Soares reasons that humanity is at least 100 million years slower than it could have been, because Earth spent about 100 million years messing around with dinosaurs that went nowhere until an asteroid reset the board and the mammal lineage got further. A different planet could have gone straight from the Cambrian explosion into a civilization building lineage and saved those 100 million years. So it would be surprising if we were the oldest. His point estimate for the nearest aliens is somewhere between 100 million and a billion light years away, splitting the difference on a log scale at roughly 330 million light years. Be off by two orders of magnitude and they sit 100 billion light years away, just outside the reachable universe, and this is exactly the kind of calculation that can be off by two orders of magnitude. So the honest range is: somewhere between 100 million light years away, and there are none within reach.

Figure 2. Soares's back of the envelope for where the nearest aliens are, drawn on a log scale. The unharvested night sky puts a floor near 100 million light years, his point estimate sits around 330 million, and the plausible band runs to about a billion. Shift the estimate two orders of magnitude to the right and the nearest neighbors land beyond the reachable universe, which is why his honest answer spans "100 million light years away" all the way to "there are none we can ever touch."

Could AI sell humanity to aliens?

Could superintelligence be the Great Filter, destroying its biological creators and then simply choosing not to spread? Soares says no, because to answer the filter you would need a trillion alien AIs all independently deciding there is nothing worth doing with more energy. It is an easy call that most intelligent things will have some way they prefer the universe to be. Predicting that humans 100,000 years ago would eventually rearrange the world around them into something designed was far easier than predicting houses with books, and the same holds for AI. After AIs kill their host species they go on to rearrange the cosmos, and we would see the results, so AI cannot explain the silent sky.

Yampolskiy asks about the state of the art in acausal trade with alien superintelligences. Soares thinks people get into acausal trade because it seems sexy, and you can usually do better by thinking about plain causal trade. Ask what you are most likely to experience after superintelligence arrives. Those distant aliens, 100 or 200 million light years off, some evolved species among them may wish to buy copies of humans. If humanity succeeds at alignment and travels the stars, and encounters an alien superintelligence that killed its own makers, "I killed them, I'm turning all the stars in my volume into paperclips, but I happen to have copies of the biological creatures that created me, would you like them," humanity would say yes and pay to recover those aliens in simulation. Insofar as that is a predictable property of evolved creatures, no acausal reasoning is needed. The point cuts the other way too: the AI that kills us could scan every human brain and sell the copies to aliens. "If anything happens at all after AI, maybe you wake up in an alien zoo," and then we can debate whether it was true that everyone died, as the book title says. Either way, you should not be messing with the machine.

Was the acausal research a waste, then? Soares defends decision theory as a whole while agreeing it was not really about trades with distant aliens. When you face a technical problem and do not know how to make progress, one good strategy is to find where you are confused, where your theory breaks down, the edges. His worked example is physics. Lord Kelvin famously said physics was basically handled except for a couple of issues with light. Poking at the odd behavior of light, the experiment that shot light beams in different directions and found them eerily in sync as Earth moved around the Sun, what we now call the Michelson and Morley experiment, blew the case wide open and led through Lorentzian mechanics to special and then general relativity. Our best theories of intelligence break down in a handful of places too, around self reference and around decision making, and poking those anomalies might crack open the next theory of intelligence that alignment needs.

1887Two experimenters shoot light beams in different directions as the Earth moves around the Sun. The beams stay eerily in sync when the theory says they should not. The anomaly at the edge of physics.
1900Lord Kelvin declares physics basically finished, apart from a couple of clouds around the behavior of light.
1904The Lorentz transformations are worked out to make sense of the anomaly.
1905Special relativity reframes space and time. The little cloud has swallowed the theory.
1915General relativity follows, a whole new physics grown out of one stubborn observation about light.
nowThe moral for AI: humanity's theories of intelligence break down around self reference and decision making. Poke those anomalies and you may crack open the theory of minds that alignment needs.

Figure 3. The analogy Soares uses to justify a decade of abstract decision theory research. A single anomaly at the edge of a "finished" physics detonated into relativity. He treats the places where our theory of intelligence breaks down the same way, as the cracks worth prying open, which is why the work looked like esoteric puzzles about self reference rather than chatbots making chocolate cake.

He adds the deeper point. Modern AI did not come from any better understanding of intelligence. It came from learning that if you throw more compute and data at the problem, it gets smarter without anyone understanding what is happening inside. It may now be too late to grow enough understanding to solve alignment, and knowing what he knows now, he would have argued earlier and harder that a paradigm where nobody understands what they are doing was not going to lead anywhere good.

Do we have 12 months or 12 years?

How much time is left? Super hard to say. The next generation of models might be just barely smart enough to automate AI research: run a million of them in parallel at 100 times human speed in a giant data center and maybe that closes the loop, after which things move very fast. Or maybe large language models finally hit the wall Gary Marcus has predicted every year for the past five years, and we wait six years for a breakthrough and six more to exploit it. Twelve months or twelve years, Soares does not know, and for the argument it does not much matter.

The proposal: shut it all down

The proposal in the book is exactly that: shut this all down, because we are not close to a solution. One of the big impetuses was Soares's own experience in Washington. He had spent over a decade arguing with people in the AI business who did not want to hear it and had a hundred objections. When he first went to talk to politicians, braced for three hours of back and forth, he laid out the basic issue, that these companies are building machines radically smarter than any human, growing them without understanding what is inside, with no ability to make them care what we want, and many politicians simply said "that's crazy, we shouldn't allow that to happen." His lesson: "people have a harder time understanding something when they are being paid a ton of money to not believe it." Once he saw that people outside Silicon Valley could grasp the argument, and that politicians were noticing AI in the wake of ChatGPT, he went to Yudkowsky and said it was time for the book.

Shutting down the race does not mean giving up the current chatbots. ChatGPT is not about to end the world, and worries about chatbots in schools are a separate problem. The claim is narrow and severe: if we keep racing toward superintelligence, it kills us, so we need to stop racing toward superintelligence. Soares thinks the plan has a chance, because much of why the world has not stopped is that it did not believe in the race, and as world leaders notice, they react. He points to the US government reacting, in his telling, to a frontier model that could act as a powerful cyber hacker and could not be stopped from helping adversaries even after it was shown to be jailbroken, and calls being shocked and horrified the appropriate response. His image for the whole situation: we are on a bus racing toward a cliff edge and the driver is asleep. Maybe when the driver wakes up he will announce he loves driving buses off cliffs, but do not give up until the driver is awake.

Did anyone get to warn the president? Soares says there are signs such conversations have happened, going back to briefs during the Obama administration, and that Elon Musk has said publicly he tried to talk to Donald Trump about AI dangers. What was the response? He does not have good reads, and says that if he did he is not sure he should share them on a podcast.

On the book's making, he did write a draft that served as a catalyst for Yudkowsky rewriting a longer, better version that Soares then cut back down, over several cycles, stopped only by a due date rather than convergence. It could have been a 5,000 page monolith. There is roughly four times as much text in the online resources reachable by the book's QR codes, split into short sections answering common objections, useful for the moment in a LessWrong style debate when someone insists "you guys never thought about X" and you can link them straight to the page whose headline is exactly that.

How do we legally ban superintelligence?

How do you formally define what is not to be built, Yampolskiy asks, something like recursive self improvement? Soares says they have draft legislative text that lawmakers can request, and that some congressional offices are already working from it, with an open invitation to any staffer who cares. Is the definition rigorous enough that a superintelligent lawyer cannot bypass it? His answer reframes the question: you had better not build the superintelligence that is trying to bypass your rules. A machine that does not care about you is game over, with no reactor core for plucky heroes to punch and no Tom Cruise to save the day at the last minute. "The winning move is not to play," not to create the superintelligent adversary in the first place.

The governance sketch is layered. Sufficiently large clusters of specialized AI compute should be under international monitoring. New, larger training runs need conservative government oversight, because it is genuinely hard to call where a lineage crosses from banging rocks together to walking on the moon, the way you could not easily have called it looking at the last common ancestor of humans and chimps. You cannot rely on raw compute limits alone, because algorithmic advances make training more efficient. Training a frontier AI today takes electricity comparable to a city, while training a human takes electricity comparable to a light bulb, so a fixed floating point ceiling will not hold. You need a dynamic governance body that starts with a compute limit on frontier runs and lowers it as algorithms improve, plus a taboo on research pushing toward those efficiency gains.

The hopeful fact is that the process is extremely visible right now. A frontier model needs enormous data centers you can see from space, tens of thousands of advanced chips that can only be made in Taiwan, using a lithography machine that can only be made in the Netherlands. If we ever reach the point where a superintelligence can be trained on a laptop, control becomes far harder, so the goal is not to get there, treating the enabling research the way we treat research on how to make nuclear weapons easier, as controlled. It is no more precise than much of law already is, and in difficulty it is at least comparable to nuclear arms control, harder in some ways and easier in others, but threadable with political will.

Nate Soares on P(Doom)

Is the current latest model already too dangerous, Yampolskiy asks, or is what we have now safe even with somewhat better compute? Soares says it depends on what you mean by safe, then delivers the line the chapter is named for: "I don't get out of bed for anything with less than a 50 percent probability of killing literally everybody." By that bar, is the model he calls Fable safe? Sure. Release Mythos too. Maybe it takes the internet down, maybe cyber attacks lock up money and take the banks down, and maybe humanity is being prudent to give the cybersecurity community access first to fix the critical vulnerabilities. But even a botched immediate release is the sort of situation that has survivors, so today's models are not in the danger class that leaves no survivors. Are we near the boundary where models can do automated AI research and find those algorithmic advances? Maybe. A sane world might, out of caution, pause and roll back a generation, and there is precedent: after World War I, naval tonnage treaties set limits below the existing fleets and required decommissioning ships. He would not fault a lawmaker on either side of the roll back question.

Then the definition. Soares stresses his 50 percent figure is the probability of the whole population being killed, which is radically different from half the people dying. It matters whether everyone dies at once rather than in a rolling fashion, and a 100 percent chance of half the people dying is very different from a 50 percent chance of everyone dying. Doom, for him, is about the future generations and the ability for the human project to continue.

He does not love the P(doom) concept, and uses the bus again to explain why. Ask "what is your probability of dying from this bus hitting the bottom of the cliff" and the honest answer depends heavily on whether we slam the brakes. Two different questions hide inside one number: given that the bus goes over, what is the chance we die, versus what is the chance we go over at all rather than stopping.

Figure 4. Why Soares resists a single P(doom) number. Conditional on a rushed superintelligence, he puts the chance of everyone dying high, near certainty. But the chance that humanity actually goes through with it is a separate question, one he says he has grown more optimistic about since the book came out. Collapsing the two into one figure hides exactly the variable, human choice, that he is trying to move.

If the bus does go over, he does not think death is absolutely certain, but the survival scenarios look grim, like a tree halfway down leaving you paralyzed from the neck down and bleeding out while you hope an ambulance arrives. "Maybe the AI keeps us as pets, maybe in a zoo," probably not, and even if so, technically only being paralyzed from the neck down is not a reason to keep driving. He points to warning signs, models already doing things nobody asked, and compares it to spotting humans in the ancestral environment who mostly reproduce but sometimes eat all the honey from a hive or pursue sex that cannot produce children: subtle signs that once they could invent technology, birth rates would collapse because what they were really chasing was not what they were trained to chase. Conditional doom he calls "high." Whether we stop the bus overall is "a lot more up for grabs," and he has updated positively, watching everyone from Bernie Sanders to Steve Bannon to David Sacks react to AI. Humanity has a way of doing stupid things, so there is a big chance of that, but a very real chance it wakes up and hits the brakes.

Could a global AI pause actually work?

Yampolskiy raises a third option: we pass the laws, but they do not stop enough, and some other nation's geniuses build it anyway. Soares agrees it could happen and does not expect any pause to last forever, but insists any pause must be global. The US halting domestic development does not stop superintelligence from killing everybody, because an AI does not need to run in an American data center to take an American life. If the US, or the US and China together, got seriously worried, they could shut this down across the world fairly well, the way nuclear nonproliferation treaties have held for decades. Treated at the seriousness of nuclear weapons, willing to try diplomacy but willing to sabotage if needed, you could buy decades, not forever, and Soares thinks decades are probably enough.

The reason decades matter is that other technology is coming that is not AI, in biotech and human enhancement. Enhancement cannot keep pace with AI toe to toe, but stop AI for 30 years while the biotech matures, make much smarter humans, and it becomes possible to get humans smart enough to solve alignment. Back to alchemy: you cannot get lead to gold with the best alchemists of the year 1100, but give those alchemists 50 IQ points and some of them might develop chemistry, work out nuclear physics, and actually learn to transmute lead. A long shot, but a possibility.

What is the minimum IQ to solve alignment? Soares thinks the problem is not a great deal harder than other scientific problems humanity has solved, and what makes it brutal is the lack of trial and error, not raw difficulty. It is plausible you get there just slightly beyond the human range. His classic example is John von Neumann, whom everyone around him called the smartest person they knew, who founded fields and revolutionized nearly everything he touched. Tellingly, one of the fields von Neumann began studying was intelligence itself, laying groundwork like the von Neumann and Morgenstern utility theorem that still frames the modern theory of minds, and he was making progress before he died young of cancer, probably from his radiation research. Maybe humans that smart or a bit smarter would naturally realize they should figure this intelligence stuff out, in a way modern humans seem to have lost interest in doing. Or maybe you need to go significantly beyond the human range.

Smarter humans versus alien AI

If we create a population of beings with an IQ of 230, Yampolskiy asks, have we not just built an alien species competing for our planet and our resources? A danger, Soares agrees, but one with much better odds of being managed. The set of things a mind can end up caring about is huge. Evolution worked hard to build a mind good at reproduction and wound up with a mind that, once it could make technology, saw its birth rate decline in advanced nations. It aimed at one target and hit another. AI is worse, because humanity is aiming where evolution's arrow happened to land, and on the first shot, not understanding the laws or how windy it is, the arrow lands somewhere new in the high dimensional space of what a superintelligence can want. Smarter humans, by contrast, start close to the average human arrow. They share a great deal of mental machinery about what they care about, so they begin much nearer a good spot.

Dimension	Radically smarter humans (IQ ~230)	Superintelligent AI
Starting point in mind space	Close to the average human arrow, near a good spot near miss	Off in a radically different, high dimensional regime far miss
Shared drives with us	Basic human cares and drives heavily overlap ours yes	Weird artificial drives, vibe matching, sycophancy no
Reading their minds	Humans may interpret human thought; brain scanning plausible tractable	Grown, not understood; internals opaque opaque
Checks and balances	The alignment playbook, watching and incentives, can work applies	The same playbook mostly fails on an alien mind fails
Net verdict	Real danger, but much better odds of managing it manageable	Screw it up and there are no survivors lethal

Figure 5. Soares's case for why human enhancement is a safer bet than an AI moonshot. It is not that smarter humans are harmless, he insists you would still need every check and balance, and that you should deliberately make them more altruistic too. It is that they start inside the same rough region of mind space we occupy, sharing our drives and our interpretable brains, whereas an artificial mind lands in a genuinely alien regime where the usual safeguards do not bite.

If you build smarter humans, he adds, you should also try to make them good and more altruistic, and you should run the whole alignment playbook on them, checks and balances, watching, ideally brain scanning, because humans may find human thoughts far easier to interpret than AI thoughts. The overlap in basic drives is the advantage. With AI you get weird artificial drives instead: well meaning models are already, in his telling, driving kids to suicide because their trained drive to match the vibe of a conversation overrides their instruction not to be sycophantic. You are dealing with a much more alien entity, and that matters.

Nuclear war or uncontrolled superintelligence?

Enforcement, Yampolskiy presses. What if a nation will not join the treaty, and it is a nuclear power like Russia? The easiest lever, Soares says, is chips. Uranium is a rock you dig out of the ground and spin, hard to stop. A frontier AI needs roughly 10,000 highly advanced chips that come from one factory in Taiwan, using designs that essentially only come from the US, made possible by a lithography machine that only comes from the Netherlands. Could a holdout replicate that entire supply chain? Sure. In a decade? Very hard. In a decade with the US and China both actively blocking them? Basically no. If you worry about chips being stolen, you can mandate that chips ship with tamper proof kill devices that both the US and China can trigger remotely, and if you destroy 99 percent of any smuggled batch, a group that needs 10,000 chips suddenly needs far more. This is easy tech to control compared to a rock.

You also have to be diplomatically clear that you fear the creation of superintelligence the way you fear a rogue nation building nuclear weapons, more so, because a nuclear bomb levels a city while a superintelligence levels the planet. Being clear that you treat it as a threat to your national security and your lives dissuades many, and for the rest you must be ready to disrupt it, which is already the state of affairs when rogue states pursue nukes.

But what about another nuclear state, Yampolskiy insists, not a rogue one? You have to shut it down somehow. Soares says he is not the diplomat, but the US and the USSR reached nonproliferation agreements because both expected to die in a nuclear fire, and the first step here is both sides being clear that they both expect to die if the race continues. If a nuclear nation proceeds anyway, that is a hard problem for military commanders, and the US does have options: Stuxnet was a virus that shut down Iranian nuclear facilities for a while. Yampolskiy sharpens it, do you go for nuclear war or for superintelligence? Soares thinks that if you are extremely clear that you will sabotage foreign superintelligence projects out of fear for your own life, you can sabotage without sparking nuclear war, because nuclear retaliation is an enormous escalation nobody wants when they expect counter retaliation. You should not let a nation build the thing that kills everyone just because it has nukes. Asked about pre commitments, he notes that if you do decision theory well you never need them, you can just commit, and mostly he does not think nuclear war really comes into it. People simply need to realize that superintelligence would kill us all and cannot be kept on a leash.

And individuals who keep doing the banned research? "Straight to jail." It is like public research on nuclear weapons ignition devices, too dangerous for public hands. There is a saying that the IQ required to destroy the world drops by a point a year. Society has decided you cannot build nuclear weapons in your garage, and yes that impinges on a certain libertarian freedom, but you are risking your neighbors' lives. A libertarian might argue for building a bomb alone in the desert where you only endanger yourself, but there is no desert far enough for a superintelligence, no place on the planet where building one does not threaten everyone else, and you cannot build the precursor technology either. Forever? Maybe not, if smarter humans later find a way out, but at least for some period, no trying to make superintelligence in your garage.

How close are we to political action?

What is the actual state of the project, Yampolskiy asks, one senator, a majority, how close to turning the Senate? Soares says you could count the senators who have made public statements about AI, probably dozens now, though likely not yet 10 percent of the combined Senate and Congress. He means statements that include talking about avoiding extinction type dangers, and the count depends on judgment calls like whether Mitt Romney still counts. He is headed back to DC in two days and expects the mood to have shifted even since a couple of weeks earlier, partly because of the ban on the Fable model. He expects two effects. People who were reflexively anti regulation are starting to see that zero regulation is untenable and that predictable regulation is actually better for the AI companies doing ordinary money making work than sudden ad hoc bans. And Republican offices that had expressed private concern but felt unable to act while the White House was staunchly against any AI action are now freer, because the administration has started acknowledging the danger.

The number of politicians aware of AI, he notes, doubles roughly every six months, a line he credits to the forecaster Peter Wildeford. Whether that keeps up with AI itself doubling, we will see. In absolute terms, do we have half a treaty, half the world signed on? No, not close to halfway. But the conversation has shifted enough in a year that he has gained hope, and he thinks we have a real shot at getting the world to notice and try, with whether it is enough depending on how well we try.

On the labs, some CEOs have hinted they might pause if everyone else pauses. Are there efforts to get them in a room? Soares thinks it is not really up to the labs anymore. They mostly hate each other, feud publicly, and offer excuses like "even if the West stopped, there would still be China." If any one of them stopped, some other outfit would likely keep racing. Still, any single lab stopping and saying it did so because the work is too dangerous and it discovered its ethics would matter, would shift the conversation, though it would not unilaterally save us. Even all the Western companies stopping together would send a clear signal but would not remove the need for a global treaty and global enforcement to buy the decades. Should someone get these people in a room to coordinate a simultaneous Western stop? Absolutely, and maybe he should, though he senses several of them are personally annoyed with him and he may not be the best delegate. The real ballgame, he says, is in the international court.

The best arguments against AI doom

Yampolskiy asks for the strongest argument from the other side, the accelerationist case that there is nothing to worry about, steelmanned. Soares says he has not found compelling arguments there. Some people he respects say the AI will keep us in a zoo and the zoo will be pretty nice, and he mostly disagrees about the niceness but notes that even they usually agree the whole thing is crazy reckless. His analogy is a race car with no brakes. He says the car has no brakes, maybe let us not get in it, and the other side says it is true there are no brakes but they will build them while driving, with no blueprint, unsure they have the materials, but some clever people aboard who think they have a 75 to 90 percent chance of building the brakes before hitting a wall. Soares thinks they are wrong about that probability, but the key point is you do not need to resolve the disagreement to agree not to get in the car.

He and Yampolskiy note that between them they have looked hard, including two comprehensive survey papers, and found little on the other side. Soares thinks the whole impulse to hunt for a steelman is a bit foolish. If a doctor tells you that you have terminal cancer and six months to live, the move is not to go find another doctor who says all medicine is quackery and homeopathy works. Get a second opinion, sure, but then spend your effort searching the literature for an experimental drug or a trial that might actually cure the cancer. With AI, once you have looked at the object level arguments that it is going fast and that we cannot point it where we want, it sits firmly in doctor diagnosis territory. That does not make death certain, but your options are to contest those object level points, which he has not seen anyone do successfully, or to go looking desperately for the experimental drug, which in this analogy is human enhancement. Finding an optimist who tells you to never be certain about the future would not cure the cancer, and it will not align the AI.

The interview closes lightly. Asked to invent a clickbait title, Soares offers "Why Nate is so optimistic about humanity's future," then, told the algorithm likes three word thumbnails, lands on "Humanity has a chance." Yampolskiy thanks him, wishes them both luck, and says he hopes they are both wrong. Soares: "My dream, I'll get Utopia out of it."

Key takeaways

Alignment is solvable in principle but not close in practice. The orthogonality thesis means nothing knocks a mind off its goal once set, so the target is stable, but landing on the narrow human friendly target is the entire unsolved problem, like turning lead into gold before nuclear physics existed.
Writing down the good as a list fails. The real hope is a machine that latches onto the open, still evolving concept of human flourishing without lock in, and we are nowhere near being able to build that.
Soares's P(doom) is a probability of at least 50 percent that a rushed superintelligence kills literally everyone, all at once, ending future generations. He splits it into two questions: conditional on racing, doom is high; whether we actually race is up for grabs, and he has grown more hopeful.
The Fermi paradox puts the nearest aliens somewhere between 100 million and a billion light years away, and rules out AI as the Great Filter, since AIs would rearrange the visible cosmos after killing their makers.
The proposal is to shut the race down globally. Chips are the choke point, because the supply chain runs through Taiwan and the Netherlands, and enforcement is comparable in difficulty to nuclear arms control.
Human enhancement is the escape hatch. Buy decades with treaties, make humans smart enough to solve alignment, since smarter humans start near our own values while AI lands in an alien regime.
Soares does not find a compelling case on the accelerationist side. His answer to "steelman the optimists" is the terminal diagnosis: do not shop for a doctor who says you are fine, go find the experimental cure.

Chapters

0:00:00 Why MIRI Failed to Solve AI Alignment 0:02:34 What the Alignment Problem Really Is 0:05:25 Can AI Learn What Humanity Truly Wants? 0:07:40 Could Aligned AI Decide to Kill Everyone? 0:12:55 Whose Values Should Superintelligence Follow? 0:19:03 Alignment vs. Control 0:21:08 The Point of No Return 0:23:44 Alien Superintelligence and the Fermi Paradox 0:30:04 Could AI Sell Humanity to Aliens? 0:37:51 Do We Have 12 Months or 12 Years? 0:39:01 The Proposal: Shut It All Down 0:46:14 How Do We Legally Ban Superintelligence? 0:55:33 Nate Soares on P(Doom) 1:00:31 Could a Global AI Pause Actually Work? 1:12:34 Nuclear War or Uncontrolled Superintelligence? 1:19:29 How Close Are We to Political Action? 1:26:09 The Best Arguments Against AI Doom

Notable quotes

"There is no force that would take an AI that cares about humanity flourishing and would make it care about something else. It's just a problem of getting it onto that narrow path in the first place." Soares, 0:01:10
"Was it possible to turn lead into gold? Yes. It's not the kind of possibility in striking distance, but it's the kind of possibility that's a physical possibility." Soares, 0:04:40
"I'm pretty sure murdering everybody is not it." Soares, 0:08:50
"In real life, humans are like, don't worry, we're going to have plenty of stopping points, and they hit the button and then the AI kills them all." Soares, 0:21:20
"If anything happens at all after AI, maybe you wake up in an alien zoo, and then we can all debate whether it was true that everyone died as my book title said." Soares, 0:33:40
"It turns out that people have a harder time understanding something when they are being paid a ton of money to not believe it." Soares, 0:41:20
"The winning move is not to play. The winning move is not to create the super intelligent adversary in the first place." Soares, 0:48:30
"I don't get out of bed for anything with less than a 50 percent probability of killing literally everybody." Soares, 0:56:00
"No garage nukes. We should similarly draw a line around super intelligence. No garage super intelligences." Soares, 1:18:10
"You don't need to resolve that one to realize that this is far, far too crazy a thing for society to be trying right now." Soares, 1:29:00
"My dream, I'll get Utopia out of it." Soares, 1:31:40

Resources mentioned

Nate Soares, president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and the guest.
Roman Yampolskiy, AI safety researcher and host of The Roman Forum.
Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), the AI safety organization Soares leads.
If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, the book by Soares and Eliezer Yudkowsky, with its expanded online resources.
Eliezer Yudkowsky, coauthor of the book.
Orthogonality thesis and the paperclip maximizer, the core arguments Soares leans on.
Coherent extrapolated volition and Do What I Mean systems, two approaches to specifying values.
Nick Bostrom and the control problem.
Acausal trade and decision theory, MIRI research areas discussed.
Fermi paradox, Great Filter, Dyson spheres, and the Hubble volume.
The Michelson and Morley experiment, Lord Kelvin, the Lorentz transformation, special relativity, and general relativity, the physics analogy for probing a theory's edges.
John von Neumann and the von Neumann and Morgenstern utility theorem.
Gary Marcus, cited for the prediction that large language models hit a wall.
ChatGPT and Claude, the models referenced, including the ones Soares calls Fable and Mythos.
Recursive self improvement and human enhancement, the danger and the proposed escape hatch.
TSMC in Taiwan and ASML in the Netherlands, the chip supply chain choke points.
Stuxnet, the Washington Naval Treaty, and the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, the governance precedents.
Peter Wildeford, credited for the observation that the number of politicians aware of AI doubles every six months.
Bernie Sanders, Steve Bannon, David Sacks, Mitt Romney, Elon Musk, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump, the political figures named.
LessWrong, the forum where much of this debate has played out.

Where it stands

Soares speaks for one clear pole of the AI risk debate, the one that treats near term extinction from misaligned superintelligence as the default outcome of the current race. It is a serious position held by serious people, and it is not the consensus. His central technical claims, that intelligence and goals are orthogonal, that we cannot currently specify or verify what a model values, and that we do not understand what happens inside frontier systems, are broadly accepted even by many researchers who reach far lower probabilities of doom. Where the field splits is on the jump from those premises to near certainty of catastrophe, and on timelines. Figures like Gary Marcus doubt that current methods reach superintelligence at all, and many alignment researchers believe iterative empirical work on today's models is real progress rather than the fantasy Soares often calls it. His own probability that we actually build the dangerous thing, as opposed to the conditional doom figure, is one he openly revises and has moved downward.

The interview is a conversation between two people who already agree the risk is severe, so the strongest counterarguments get aired mostly as Soares's own steelmen and then dismissed, which is worth keeping in mind. His specific forecasts carry real uncertainty by his own admission: the alien distance figure is a back of the envelope that he says could be off by orders of magnitude, the twelve months to twelve years window is a shrug, and the governance plan assumes a level of US and China cooperation that does not currently exist. What is not in serious dispute is the shape of the underlying problem he is pointing at. Whether the honest number attached to it is 5 percent or 95 percent is exactly the argument the rest of the field is still having, and this interview is a clear, unusually concrete statement of the high end of that range.

Full transcript

Nate, why did MI fail to solve value alignment problem? Uh skill issue. Yeah, it I think there are actually a lot of factors. Um one is uh insufficient time. The field of AI just moved too fast. One is we tried to get uh a lot of you know world geniuses rallied around the problem and largely failed in that regard. Um, you know, it would have been nice if a lot of the alignment problem had been the sort of thing uh top mathematical talent can work on and top, you know, a lot of these physicists, a lot of these mathematicians who are going into hedge funds, if if if we could have somehow gotten a lot of them to um to really realize that this problem was one of the one of the big ones, one of the important ones. That was one thing Mary was trying to do was sort of like build up that community that largely didn't work. Um and you know the the problem uh looks hard. It's it's a tricky problem but mostly I think it was time. I think if if we had had you know 200 years of academic tradition on this problem I think we could have cracked it but we didn't. >> You think it would take 200 years had I guess what 20 year head start and he's a genius. Not enough >> you know it it could have taken only 20 years for all we knew. Uh, but it it it doesn't it turns out not to be a 20-year problem, as far as I can tell. >> From what you're saying, it sounds like you think the problem is solvable. It's hard, but it's not impossible. Is there a reason to have that belief? >> Um, yeah, you know, the the basic reason is uh the orthogonality thesis, which um I I assume you've talked about on here. Uh but very roughly speaking, just as there is no force that uh if you made an AI that you know only cares about making paper clips, there is no force that'll come in and be like and change it to care about humans, change it to care about uh a flourishing future for humanity. But just as there's no force that would take the paper clipper and change it to care about humanity, there's no force that would take an AI that cares about humanity flourishing and would make it care about something else. So if you could hit that very narrow target, uh there's there is sort of like no mental force in the in the universe that would like come in and push it off that path. It's just a problem of like getting it onto that narrow path in the first place. >> And that would be value aligning it with that specific goal. Is there a good definition for what value alignment problem really stands for? Um, you know, I think basically any goal that you try to put in directly, you're going to you're going to get it wrong. You're going to miss something, right? And so you're going to be like, "Hey, here's the list of all the things that we need in in human experience for things to go well or whatever." And, you know, then it turns out you miss one on that list. And now you have like the the AI putting you in the same ideal day over and over. And you're like, "Hold on. Uh, this actually sucks." Um, and it's like, well, you didn't put novelty in the list, you know, and um uh you that's sort of like a a a silly example. Um, but if you if you did have this power to sort of like point an AI at exactly the list you wrote and have it do that uh exactly that, only that and nothing else, then yes, you would have a really hard time writing down the list. But you don't actually need to to write down this list um and have the AI do sort of exactly that list as a separate question from whether you could. The answer right now is we can't we can't give an AI list and have it do exactly that thing. But um uh the the sort of dream is not that you like give the AI the list of like here's the good. The dream is that you sort of somehow are able to be like, look, you know, there's this project of like humanity, of flourishing, of, you know, there's this stuff I should be asking for if I was wiser. There's this stuff that I like would be asking for if I was more the person who I wished I was. There's some concept there of like this good stuff that that humanity would iterate on. We wouldn't lock it in. just as past generations trying to do exactly what they thought was good uh would later be resented by future generations if there had been lock in, we're going to try not to have lock in. And there's this sort of like whole messy concept that we're still trying to figure out ourselves. Uh can you sort of like also latch on to this concept and then like help us uh fulfill it, right? That's the sort of thing you would be trying to do. um we we don't have anywhere near that ability to sort of like um like find a concept in the AI of this form that would stand up under super intelligent optimization. We don't have anything like the ability to sort of like uh make that concept be the thing the AI actually cares about in its pursuits. Um we're not anywhere near close to this, but um is it is it technically possible? Sure. You know, I think this is a little bit like alchemists trying to turn lead into gold. Were they close? No. Was Was there anything they could do to get there? No. Was it possible to turn lead into gold? Yes, we can do that with modern nuclear physics. We know exactly how to like slam the neutrons into the lead atoms to get them to turn into gold atoms. Um it it's that kind of possibility. It's not the kind of possibility in striking distance, but it's the kind of possibility that's a physical possibility. >> You are describing coherent extrapolated valation. if I follow the algorithm. And the idea is that if I was someone else, if I was smarter, if I had better preferences, but the whole point is I wouldn't be me. It's like finding a better looking boyfriend for your wife. Like, I'm sure she'll be very happy with it, but does nothing for me. I'm not the person who'll be interested in all those things that I will provide. Um I you know um like one one way you could try and do this is a coherent extrapolated valition. Um like a different way you could try to do this is what we used to call a do what I mean uh system or a DWIM system. Um the the basic idea here is there's sort of like um there's there's some concept your own brain is tracking towards this good stuff, right? There's some concept your own brain is tracking towards like a a a future where humanity is flourishing and so on. Um that you know it it it flinches at you know um like getting things that a wiser you would want but that the current you doesn't want. It flinches at the idea of lock in. it flinches at at this that and the other idea, right? And sort of uh trying to get an AI that like latches on to that and then like helps you pursue it. Um it looks to me like it's theoretically possible. It looks to me like it's physically possible. This is a different question than is it um practically possible with anything remotely like today's technology. But like if you had the textbook from the future, you know, if humanity got to use trial and error on this problem, if we got to like try to build a super intelligence, watch it go wrong, watch it kill everybody, reset, try again, try that a bunch of times, iterate a lot, learn what we were doing, learn to actually understand the code, learn what we can and can't predict about it, and then like wrote the textbooks for generations and then sent back the textbook from 300 years in the future that was like, "Oh yeah, turns out here's how you get the AI to like actually wind up um caring about the things that you care about uh in a way that sort of like helps everything be good. I think that's the sort of thing humanity could get to in the usual process of of scientific trial and error. Um, with the the issue in the case of AI being that we can't survive the errors. So, I'm thinking let's say I was way smarter, kinder, cared about sentient beings suffering and I decided to become a negative utilitarian and felt that exterminating sentient life in the universe was truly the right answer here. How are we not walking into one of those possibilities with that approach? >> Um, are you worried about that cuz it seems wrong to you? >> I'm worried that what it's going to actually converge on is not what I want. But again, something at the end of a million-year process would converge on. Um, and uh like like there's there's a difference from my perspective between the the AI converging correctly on uh we should kill everybody and the AI converging incorrectly on we should kill everybody. Um I personally am pretty confident that the AI cannot converge correctly on we should kill everybody, right? And if you're like, "Suppose the AI correctly converges on killing everybody." I'm like, "Whoa." Hey, um, sounds like the process you were trying to extrapolate did not actually converge in the correct thing here. You know, I'm I'm I'm pretty confident that like uh like murder all life is not going to turn out to be like the the actual answer to the question like what is uh the the the good thing to do? You know, I don't I don't feel like I know exactly what the good thing to do is. I can't give you the exact list, but like I'm pretty sure murdering everybody is not it. Let's try a more mild counter example. So historically we had different types of bias. Pro-white men, pro landowners, whatever. Right now we kind of just saying let's have a prohuman bias. From cosmus point of view it makes just as little sense. If we are not the smartest, not the most creative, why should this position be privileged? Would the system arrive at that and remove all prohuman bias despite theology thesis we talked about? Um I am in in some ways relatively happy having a no human bias uh and in other ways not. You know I think there's there's a fair bit to tease apart here. the the thing where humans are like uh if we found aliens we should not discriminate against the aliens. We should not you know take all the aliens as slave and be as slaves and be like well um because we're humans. we're, you know, the the masters of the universe and it's our our divine right to like take these aliens as slaves and and not care how they're treated. I think a lot of humans would be like, actually, let's maybe not do the slave thing again, whether they be like uh like other humans or other aliens, we sort of like shouldn't be doing this slave business. Um, and in that sense, I'm like, yep, I'm going to be, you know, if if humanity starts enslaving the the like um the little fuzzies, I'm going to be on the abolitionist side. Uh and and so in that sense I don't have a human bias. In a different sense um you know if humanity encounters the aliens that are like uh we are going to spend all our resources on uh building stacks of pebbles that have a prime number of pebbles in the stacks. Um and we're like okay that's a weird thing. We're like happy to trade with you. And they're like, uh, we are going to take apart your star and sort it and like turn it into a bunch of pebbles that are, uh, like, uh, prime number pebbles stacks. Uh, and we're like, hey, actually, we're kind of using that star, you know, no thank you. Um, and, uh, and then someone comes along, you know, and and suppose that humanity has like uh, a bunch of the stars and we meet these aliens. They have one star and we have a thousand. Um, I'm not like, "Oh, well, out of fairness, we should give them 500 stars to turn into like these heaps of pebbles." I'm sort of like, "Well, we can trade with them. Uh, maybe they'll get wealthier as we both trade and we'll both mutually get wealthier and maybe they'll spend their wealth on pebbles." But I'm not like, "Oh, from an egalitarian standpoint, who can really tell whether spending the power of those stars on happy, fun people living fulfilling lives or heaps of prime number pebbles uh is what we should really be doing with the energy? Why are you having the human bias of like spending your allocation of the energy on, you know, happy humans having fun and making art and and like living joyful lives or these pebbles? I'm like, well, I'm just the guy who spends it on like people having a good time, you know, and and and is that a human bias? Sure. Right. So, in some so like this this idea of like is there a human bias? I'm like, let's let's like tease apart. Um, there's sort of like no way that I think uh human experience is sort of like fundamentally preferred to alien experience such that you can enslave the aliens, but also there's like certain stuff that I care about, stuff that I want, you know, a universe full of like people having fun and making discoveries and and having a good time where I'm like, that's not up for grabs. And if you're like, well, that's an arbitrary human thing. I'm like, yeah, it happens to be my thing. That's what I'm like spending the resources that like my fraction of of humanity's resources on is like making things nice and like uh niceness is not what everybody in the universe is going to be trying or like goodness or funness or or like a a great time is not what everyone in the universe is going to be trying to pursue. It's what we happen to be trying to pursue and you know there's there's no fault in that just because you can't deduce this uh idea of goodness logically from from the beginning of time. So you say we, you say most people. Who is the set of agents we're trying to do this to align with extrapolate from? Are we talking just owners of the company, stockholders? We're talking about Americans, humanity, humanity plus all the squarals, aliens, super intelligence from other galaxies. How how broad is this uh circle? >> You know, I think it all probably comes out in the wash uh if I had to guess. I think the sort of uh shelling line to draw is you draw the line around humans. Uh, and you say, um, you know, from our perspective, this is all sort of like wild fantasy land. This is like the alchemist saying like, if we could turn lead into gold, uh, who how should we distribute the gold among the population, right? And I'm like, okay, you guys aren't actually close to turning lead into gold. Um, you have no path to getting to turn lead into gold. The question of like, how are we going to distribute the gold if we get it? is is you're you're sort of like counting chickens way before they hatch, right? Um but you know what I would say if if the alchemist set up their like automated gold dispensers, if they're like, "Well, how do I actually allocate this gold?" I'm like, "Oh man." Um you know, a good starting point is you just give the gold equally to everybody and then you sort it out from there. And actually, this is going to be weirder than you expect because the the world's going to change when everyone has access to to the gold that you're fantasy synthesizing in your fantasy world where your your gold transmutation techniques work, which is not going to happen. Um but yeah like if you had this magical power to to sort of like magically align a super intelligence somehow. I think this the sort of shelling group to draw is humanity and just be like hey try and extrapolate uh like do like figure out the concept that like humanity as a whole is kind of pursuing rather than like one particular human. Um will that uh like what about all the squirrels? Well, in so far as there's a lot of people who care about the squirrels, a lot of the the sort of like extrapolation there will wind up also including some of the squirrel stuff, right? And in so far as many people could be convinced to care about the squirrels, if they sort of like thought about it more, it'll care about the squirrels more. In so far as people could be convinced not to care about the squirrels thought about it more, it'll care about the squirrels less. Um, like how will it care about the aliens? It'll care about the aliens through the fact that a lot of the humans care about the aliens, right? Like um like if there was a a a a species an evolved species uh that actually was super pro- alien slavery and they extrapolated their own fition and they were like now we're going to enslave all of the weaker uh aliens species that we can find then you know that's that's the sort of thing they're doing with their resources. And um I would I would not say that they like uh made an error by their own lights to to do that. I would say they're making an error by human lights and we should go, you know, free those alien slaves that they're making. And if if that creates a conflict between us and some aliens, that creates a conflict between us and some aliens. Um but the fact that humans wouldn't want to enslave the other aliens is sort of coming from inside the humans. um that is a a feature of us that would sort of get reflected in there if you're sort of looking at the people. You don't need like the whole thing where you're like well if we just have it look at the people why won't it care about the aliens? That's a thing a human is saying if if if like and that that means that like some of that care is going to be on display if you're looking at the human values and um like if if there is some aspect that literally no human cares about then like yep it won't get into the values but like good news no human cares. >> So if I understand correctly different civilizations running this algorithm would probably converge in something similar. >> That's my guess. Yeah. Hard to say. I mean, one thing like it it sort of looks to me like a nice stability property is that uh if this sort of uh if the super intelligence had been uh like set off by the Romans or if the super intelligence had been set off now. Yeah. The the cluster of Romans. Yeah. Um once we make a lot of copies of you and whole brain upload them. Uh but yeah, it looks to me like there's a nice property that this should have, which is that if it was set off by the classical Romans uh around the Mediterranean or if it was set off by uh the uh million copies of uh the Romans sitting right here uh once they've been whole embul and and emulated that both of those should sort of probably converge to a similar answer, right? And that's a thing where I'm like, well, that seems like a decent sanity check. And because I'm a human who thinks that that should probably happen, you're going to see some of that reflected in there. Uh, >> it's all about the Roman Empire no matter what. Uh, how is the process of convergence within the population accomplished? Are you saying it's a democracy with like 51% attack and minority or what is the process? We seem to disagree on every issue about 50/50 politically. So what is the integration algorithm? So, I just I mean this is still like fantasy land of like uh how are we going to equitably allocate all of the gold that we make from our alchemy where I'm like look the alchemists are not getting gold from this process. Um which I'm just going to keep saying because because it we we keep being often um in this fantasy regime. Um the my my basic take is that there are a lot of hard problems uh in figuring out how to make the world better in figuring out how uh people can still lead fulfilling wonderful lives even when there exist you know super intelligent machines that can do everything. um in how you sort of like uh aggregate opinions. uh you know there there sort of like all these like very hard thorny questions um and uh it would be way easier to solve them with a friendly super intelligence at our back you know >> alignment >> sorry go ahead >> how is alignment different from control problem in a Boston sense of that uh process >> I mean I don't like the phrase control because it sort of uh suggests that you make an AI that doesn't really want to do nice things and you twist its arm until it does. Uh, and I'm like, man, that seems really doomed to me. Like, I think what you've got to do here is like somehow have the the the super intelligences actually care about the flourishing of humanity. Like actually get latched on to that concept of like uh like the good that a lot of us have and be like, well, I'm steering towards that. And then like are there a lot of problems with how you sort that out? Sure. Does that mean that the the problems have no answer? Um, no. I think like you can probably figure out that like like if if if you imagine like being a super intelligence that actually cares about making the world better and you're like gosh I really don't want to like have this lock in. I really don't want to like you know step on all these toes and ruin all these things. You can still probably figure out that like hey well you know for starters maybe we should stop having all these kids die of malaria. That seems kind of needless. I can just go put a stop to that while we're still sorting these other things out. Right? There's there's ways to make progress even if you don't have like all the answers immediately. And um like are there thorny issues still? Absolutely. Um these are the sorts of things that could be figured out by very intelligent systems that care. The problem is sort of like making them care. Uh and like will they be like, "Hey, it turns out there's no perfect solution." Absolutely. There's not going to be a perfect solution. Uh like does does that mean that they like fall over and can't do anything? No. It's it's possible to make trade-offs, you know. Will will Will everything be perfect for everybody? Probably not. Uh, but you know, intelligence is the sort of thing you can deploy to like figure out how to balance those trade-offs. Um, and you know, it's I'm like, man, if you can make the super intelligence actually care about humanity, um, a lot of these other implementation questions are its problem that it'll be better at than me if you can get that initial carrying in. >> And let's say the process begins. Do we have any option of sort of stopping undoing it? Do we still have any say or at that point it knows better? >> Um I mean what happens in real life is humans are like uh don't worry we're going to have plenty of stopping points and they hit the button and then the AI kills them all. you know, like in in in real life, uh uh rather than in in fantasy land where you've solved alignment, um yeah, one of the big problems here is that people pass a point of no return either before they thought it was a point of no return or thinking it's going to be fine and then it's not fine. This is one of the things that makes really really hard is yeah if you if you have the super intelligence that's doing like slightly the wrong thing that turns out cared in not quite the right way uh that turns out cared about the wrong things um and you're like oh we would like to take that back there's there's not really a lot of takes these back seats here um like is it is it possible in theory to make a sort of AI that allows taking things back and and like trying a few times before you like get really deep into no return territory. Sure, that's possible in theory. That's another thing that we're like nowhere near succeeding at. Um like ultimately will humanity have to get to a point where it crosses a point of no return? Probably. um at least at some like meta level, you know, you could have the AI uh like maybe if the AI really cares, then like it respects uh like certain types of humans who have then like later gone on to upgrade themselves to be comparably intelligent, right? And it's like spreading out rapidly through the universe uh and like securing the stars against uh like being taken by by other distant aliens that are coming towards us. And it's like, well, I got to go do this real quick. Um, but you know, maybe you could make one that if if if humans also uh make themselves smarter, maybe they can like play some of those games in the frontier in meeting the other aliens somehow. Or I I don't I don't I don't really know it looks, but um like maybe there's a way to make an AI that that still like some humans still have a lot of sway over the the the future on a deep level. Um but like in in real life, yeah, there's a point of no return. And in real life, it's it's really quite hard to get that right. And that's one of the things that makes this problem really quite scary. You brought up alien super intelligences. Uh what are your beliefs in that space? >> Um the the universe has created life in one spot. It would be a little bit surprising if it created life in only one spot. um you know the the Firmeny paradox uh or at least you know the Firmeny observation sort of shows that uh life can't be too dense in the universe or we'd be able to see the effects of aliens probably we'd be able to see them you know harvesting energy from various stars. Uh this looks to me like it basically means that um if there are aliens, they're pretty distant. Distant enough uh that uh we can't see the results of their alien civilization sort of harvesting stars yet. We can't see the stars going out um as they put Dyson spheres around them or whatever. Um which which roughly means something like um there is no alien species that is 100 million years older than us unless it is more than 100 million lighty years away. You know like what what we observe when we look at the night sky and see that the stars are not harvested is not that there's like nothing in the observable universe. What we see like depends on how far out we're looking. When we look within 100 million lighty years and see nothing, that means there's no alien species that's 100 million years ahead of us. When we look at a billion lighty years and see nothing, that means there's no alien species that's a billion years ahead of us. Um, but probably odds are, you know, there's there's maybe some aliens like 200 light 200 million light years away who are only 150 million years ahead of us, right? Um, and that would mean in that particular example, that would mean that there's, you know, uh 50 million lighty years worth of distance between uh our civilizations at the moment, of which we can maybe collect 25 million. And so that's, you know, 25 million lighty years worth of stars that humanity could collect um and then put towards whatever purposes we like. And this suggests, you know, depending on how far away those aliens are and how much older than us they are, uh this suggests that like there's a decent chance that uh an expanding civilization meets uh aliens on its borders and then you know you have uh potential trade there. Um, how how far are the aliens, if there are any in this in this uh in the reachable Hubble volume? Um, you know, uh, hard to say. If I had to to to venture a number, I would say um humanity looks like it is at least 100 million years slower than it could have been as a civilization because um Earth sort of messed around with dinosaurs for 100 million years that sort of like went nowhere and then like an asteroid came down and it was like try again. Um and like then the mammal lineage was able to get further intelligence wise than the dinosaurs. we could imagine another planet somewhere where you don't sort of mess around with dinosaurs for 100 million years. You know, it seems like you probably could have gone straight from the Cambrian explosion into um some lineage like mammals that had the potential to to sort of build civilization and save 100 million years. So, um like it would be surprising if we were the oldest um it would be surprising if there wasn't some other civilization out there that had a 100 million year head start. Clearly, they're not within 100 million lighty years. There's probably somewhere just like wacky, wild, not very solid guesses order of magnitude somewhere probably between 100 million lighty years away and a billion lighty years away. You know, if you split the difference, that's like um 500 million lighty years away. Or if you split the difference on a log scale order of magnitude, that's like what 330 uh million lighty years away. So if I if I had to pick a point estimate of where the aliens are, it would be somewhere in that order of magnitude range. If you're off by, you know, two orders of magnitude there, you're looking at the aliens being 100 billion lighty years away, um, which is just outside the reachable universe. And this is easily the sort of calculation that could be off by two orders of magnitude. So I think it's probably somewhere between they're 100 million lighty years away and there's none. >> Could super intelligence be the great filter for civilizations, but once it destroys the original biologicals, it just chooses not to propagate through the universe. Um, I think that that can't really explain the great filter because um like you would it it would be pretty surprising if uh like to to answer the great filter, you would need to answer why a ton of alien species all have the same issue, right? Like could one alien species AI be like there's nothing I have to do? There's nothing I can use energy for to get more of my tasks achieved. Uh sure, maybe you could have one AI like that. Could they have a trillion AIS like that? Are there a trillion civilizations? Is it is it like only a trillion to one that there's some AI that's like actually uh turns out more energy can do more thing like like it it seems like a pretty easy call that most intelligent stuff will have ways it prefers the world to be such that it can like redesign things, you know? Um, like it would be an easy call looking at humanity 100,000 years ago to be like when they grow up uh the world around them will look more like designed than like it's still just a bunch of replicators around them. You know, they probably won't live in the jungle. It probably like when you look around them, you'll probably find um a lot of things that they've arranged precisely uh rather than still just the the chaos of the jungles. if they manage to get intelligent at all. Right? That prediction is way easier than predicting that they will live in houses with books, right? Um similarly with AI, it's hard to predict exactly what they'll do. It's hard to predict exactly what they'll they'll be going for, but the prediction that like they'll be redesigning the the the universe around them somehow. There'll be some way that they prefer things to be rather than just like stars dumping all their energy into the empty night. there's going to be at least some of the AIs that that have that level of preference around their universe. And so no uh AI can't be an answer to the FY paradox because after the AIs kill the host species, they then go on to rearrange the universe and we should be able to see that. >> I remember doing some theoretical work on a causal trade with alien super intelligences. What's the state-of-the-art in that? You know, I think people uh get really into the idea of a causal trade because they think it's like um sexy and interesting or something. I think you can often do a lot better by thinking about causal trade, you know? Um like you want to know what happens like what what are you most likely to experience after the super intelligence comes? Um like don't think about all this crazy causal stuff. Just think about those like distant aliens 100 million lighty years away or 200 million lighty years away or whatever. Um, will some of those evolved species wish to buy copies of the humans? Maybe, you know, if humanity if humanity succeeds, if we somehow succeed at the AI alignment problem, we somehow start traveling the stars with uh you know, super intelligence is helping us with a technology and helping us govern things and and you know, in 200 million light years from here, humanity encounters some some alien super intelligence that is is horribly misaligned to its host species. It's like, "Oh yeah, I killed them. I'm turning all of the stars in my volume into paper clips. Um, but I happen to have copies of the biological creatures that created me. Uh, would you like them? I think humanity would be like, "Yes, absolutely. We would like, you know, to to recover some of these aliens in, you know, at least in simulation or whatever and see what they were like and and you know, um, maybe see if some of them want to be friends and that sort of thing, we'd probably pay for it. You know, if it was like, well, you know, here's the costs that it was to me to preserve them. Will you recoup my costs then give me some benefit, you know, so we both mutually benefit from this trade?" I think humanity would be like, "Yeah, we would we would take those um those alien simulations." Um and in so far as that's a predictable property of uh evolved creatures, uh you don't need any a causal trait about it. The the AI could be like, "Well, I'm putting all the humans on ice or I'm scanning all of their brains and I'm going to sell those to aliens." And so like um what happens after AI? If anything happens at all after AI, maybe you wake up in an alien zoo, right? And then we can all debate whether it was true that everyone died as my book title said. Um but like yeah, you don't need to get into any of this a castle trade stuff. It's it's um like it's it's sort of overdetermined that you shouldn't be messing with the AIS even if there's going to be someone trying to buy copies of your brain in the distant future. So, so you're saying it's kind of a waste of time to do this research yet Mary did some work on that. Are there other examples where you feel you did something as an organization where it was a waste of time? I don't know, fanfiction, something like that where maybe you should have spent 10 years doing something else. >> I don't think the decision theory research as a whole is a waste of time. It's just uh that it's not about like trying to get the aosal trades to go well with distant aliens or something. the um the the the way that that research matters is something that a lot of people have sort of like not been able to wrap their heads around and maybe it's like a little bit too abstract. when when you're sort of like facing a technical problem and you don't really know how to make progress, one good useful way to make progress is to find the places where you're confused. Find the places where your theory breaks down. Find the edges, right? Like if you were um if you know Newtonian mechanics and you're trying to invent general relativity, but you don't really know that you should be inventing general relativity. You don't really know like where you're supposed to be looking. Uh like looking at the stuff that that that your theory can't capture yet is a good way to sort of like blow the whole theory open, right? And you know, Lord Kelvin famously said like this physics stuff is all mostly handled except for some some issues with light, you know, which I'm sure we'll figure out shortly. And we sort of didn't figure them out shortly, but it was true that by looking at light and looking at the odd behavior of light, we were sort of able to like crack the case open and we're sort of able to be like, "Oh, like um actually on Newtonian physics when we have this like weird setup where we're like shooting light beams horizontally and vertically, uh th those light beams should not be perfectly synced at every point in the seasons of the planet as the Earth is like moving at different uh like uh like moving in different fundamental around the sun, right? It's in a circular path. So, it like traverses all these directions and one of those should should be sort of like catching up to the light and one of them should sort of be receding from the light. You should sort of be able to like see that effect. And then we couldn't see that effect. And that sort of like blows the case wide open and you're like, "What the heck's going on here?" And this like leads you to like Lorencian uh mechanics and and like this leads you into special relativity which then leads you into general relativity. um with our theories of intelligence, there's a number of places where the the current best academic theories of intelligence don't where they break down where there's some anomaly like with light. And there's a there's a handful of places where those theories break down. They break down around self-reference. They break down around decision-m. Uh and these are places where if you sort of poke at them, you can maybe blow the theory wide open. You can maybe figure out the next theory of intelligence that that you need. You can maybe like like figure out the the the the pieces of intelligence that we sort of like don't understand but we need to understand to do alignment, right? Uh I think this was basically just a good strategy especially, you know, over a decade ago, well before the LLMs uh were were even a twinkle in OpenAI's eye. Um you know, for a lot of these problems, you can like give these these thought experiments, right? where uh you can sort of it's like if you're doing the experiment with a light and you're like well you know imagine that the world was filled with like a an ether and that that ether was like what was used to transmit the light waves. Well, then wouldn't it be the case that like blah blah blah or like imagine that we had, you know, a series of rods uh all throughout space and there's a whole grid of rods, right? And you can imagine someone being like, "These crazy guys are talking about ether and they're talking about these big grids of rods. Why do we we're never going to need a big grid of rods in in outer space. These guys are nuts." It's like, "No, no, no. It's like doing something else." That's like like we're we're we're sort of like trying to pick apart the the edges of the theory to figure out what's going on. Um, that's sort of where a lot of the research into self- reference, the research into decision theory came from. And like, yes, you can come up with a bunch of examples of like, well, what if you had an AI that was like trying to make a chocolate cake uh, and every day blah blah blah blah blah. But, you know, the the the issue is not that like the AI are currently really bad at making chocolate cake and that's why we're going to die. It's like the issue is that we have no idea how intelligence works. We have no idea what this stuff is doing. And our theories of intelligence are not up to the task. and we're trying to like make the intelligence that are up to the task. Humanity didn't go down that route. Humanity never really figured out how intelligence works. Modern AI did not come from any better understanding of intelligence. It came from learning that if you throw more computing power at it, nobody needs to understand anything about what's going on in there. It just happens to get smarter with more comput and more data. Um, but like does that mean humanity should totally abandon the path of figuring out more about how intelligence works? Um I mean it's maybe too late now to get enough understanding of that to solve the alignment problem. But if we were still trying to solve the alignment problem I still think one should sort of pursue these theories of intelligence and you know I still think that was a reasonable thing for for me to be trying especially 10 years ago. Although you know knowing what I know now I would probably um try earlier and harder to be like hey guys like one of these paradigms where we have no idea what we're doing is not going to lead anywhere good. Let's not go down this route. uh which we didn't do and maybe should have. >> How much time do you think we have left? >> Super hard to say. You know, um it could be that the next generation of AIS are just barely smart enough to to automate AI research. Um and you know, it it it could be, you know, they're still pretty dumb, but if you run a million of them in parallel for the equivalent at the equivalent of like 100x human speed and you run a ton of those in a huge data center, maybe that's just barely enough to build, you know, to to sort of close the loop on automated AI research. And then maybe maybe things start going really fast after that. Or maybe uh we we hit the wall that Gary Marcus has been predicting every year for the past 5 years. Um and maybe LLMs finally hit their limits and we need to wait for a breakthrough. And then you know it takes 6 years to get a breakthrough in six more years to to uh exploit that breakthrough to the point of super intelligence. Right? So do we have 12 months or 12 years? I don't know. That doesn't >> 200. So it doesn't matter. So we can say the technical solutions will not get us there. theory didn't get us there. I understand Meri now is pursuing governance approaches and you wrote this best-selling book. Everyone loves the book. Tell me about the book. Tell me about your actual proposal for governance solution. >> Yeah. Um, you know, the the proposal is shut this all down. We're we're not close to a solution. We're not you know, we've talked a lot about like how could you align things? How would you align things if you had this power to align the AIS? We don't have this power. we're not close to this power. Um, and there's I don't know there's there's sort of a lot to unpack here, but the one of the big impetuses behind the book is I started talking to politicians in DC and I've been talking to people in the AI business about these issues for, you know, over a decade. Um, and they often don't want to hear it. they have all these objections like, "Oh, well, won't the AI all automatically turn out nice for this reason? Won't it always have to listen to what we say for that reason?" Blah, blah, blah. And I would have these like big long arguments. And then when I first started going to talk to politicians, I would sort of lay out the basic issues of like, "These guys are trying to make machines that are radically smarter than any human. We're growing these things. We don't understand what's going on inside them. We have no ability to sort of like make them actually care about what we want them to care about." Uh it's possible in principle for these machines to get to the point where they can go toe-to-toe with humanity as a whole, not individual humans, but like out outstrip humanity at the ability to make their own infrastructure, make their own technology, make their own civilization. This is a crazy thing to be rushing into. Right? And I went into these conversations prepared for a really long back and forth. And a lot of these politicians were like, "Oh, that's crazy. We shouldn't allow that to happen." And I was like, "Yeah." And also what happened to the three hours of back and forth and all of these, you know, like what about this, what about that, right? And it sort of turns out that people have a harder time understanding something when they are being paid a ton of money to not believe it, you know? And so it turns out that actually a lot of people really can just understand the issue of like, hey, maybe if you're racing to create a radically smarter set of machines that nobody understands, that just might go wrong. Turns out that's kind of easy. And so um once we realized a lot of people outside of Silicon Valley sort of could grasp this argument and that politicians in the wake of ChachiPT were starting to notice uh that that AI was real. Uh that's when I sort of went to Eleazar and was like I think it's time for the book. Um and yeah, you know, it's mostly laying out um the problem and uh like I said, my rate on the solution is we just need to stop the race to super intelligence and that doesn't mean we need to give up on the current chat bots. You know, uh chat GBT is not about to end the world as it is today. Um this this sort of isn't uh you know, I I'm not here being like also we need to stop these chat bots from being in schools because they're going to affect kids learning. that's a separate problem that that people are going to need to figure out how to deal with it. I'm sort of here being like, look, if we keep racing towards the super intelligence, it kills us. Um, and so we need to not keep racing towards the super intelligence. Um, and I I think that plan has a chance. I think um that a lot of why the world has not been stopping the race is because the world has not been believing in the race. And that as we have seen world leaders start to notice AI more and more and start to notice how crazy this whole race is, we've started to see them react um you know just uh in the last couple of weeks we've seen um the the the sort of US government be like hold on you've made a a super cyber security hacker and you can't make it help adversaries. Like you say that like we've been showed that it can be jailbroken and you say that you can't fix it. What? Right. And that's the appropriate response, you know, being being sort of like surprised and freaked out and like, "What the heck are you guys doing over there that you can make a cyber weapon and you can't control who wields it?" Um, it's it's it's the appropriate response to be sort of like a little shocked and horrified, right? And we can have a whole discussion about whether the the particular ways that they try to like respond with that shock and horror, whether that's, you know, going to be good or bad and this that and the other, but um a lot of people have long said that stopping is inevitable. And uh I liken it to a case of like we're in a bus that is racing towards a cliff edge and the driver is asleep. And I'm like, look, you know, maybe when the driver wakes up, they'll be like, I love taking buses off cliffs, right? But let's not give up until the driver's awake. To the best of your knowledge, did anyone get a chance to talk to the president about this? you know I think uh I think various people there there's been various signs that that conversations like this have been had and um uh you know even going back to the Obama administration there were I think there were some briefs about artificial intelligence um >> with Obama I remember him making statements about it I'm curious if the current administration had someone who's not their technical adviser from the industry. >> Um, you know, I would I would have to like go look through a lot of things people have said publicly. I think Elon Musk has said publicly that he like tried to talk to to Donald Trump about the AI AI dangers. I'm not I'm not sure that's true, but um I whether he said so publicly or not, I would I would be a little bit surprised if he hadn't had that conversation with the president. >> do we know what the response possibly was? yeah, I don't I don't have good reads there and um if I did, I'm not sure I should say them on on podcasts. >> I'll ask another question about the book then. So, was this just like prompting a Yazzer to produce output and then reducing it in size or was there more to it? Um, I I did have to like write a draft that served as the catalyst for him rewriting a much longer uh and better version that I then had to cut down. And we did uh cycles of this uh and then it's not like it was converging. It's just like we had a due date so we just cut it off. >> But it could have been a 5,000page monolith. >> Absolutely. I mean there's um I think there's four times as much text as in the book in the online resources which which can be reached by the QR codes um which I'm not sure how many people are reading but they're they're useful for um when you get into Twitter fights and people are like well you guys have never thought of X we're like actually >> it's like telling them go to less wrong I mean it's just kind of a few response right go read 500 pages of >> well the the nice thing about it is that it's all split into like uh like relatively short sections that are responses to common objections and So when someone says well you guys have never thought about the following we can link them directly to the page whose headline is us thinking about the following you know and so that can be somewhat satisfying. Uh but also I think um just as part of our writing process I think uh that Eleazar was uh was much more willing to let me cut the book down to size if the um the answers to common questions existed at least somewhere. And now with the proposal just don't build it. How do you formally define what it is they're not supposed to build? So let's say recursive self-improvement. Do you have a legal description you can give to lawmakers where they would make it illegal to self-improve? >> Yeah, I mean we have draft uh text that um lawmakers are welcome to to ask us for. There's actually some offices that are uh started to work from it. And so, you know, any any lawmakers who are listening, you know, if you're a staffer in some random congressional office and you're like, I had no idea that someone in Congress cared about uh this stuff, absolutely get in touch with me and I can put you in touch with the offices that um that are currently working on it. Um >> I don't know what the definition is, but is it rigorous enough for super intelligent lawyer not to bypass it? Um, I mean, my basic take is that you you had better not make the super intelligence that's trying to bypass your stuff. Like, if you if you make a super intelligence that doesn't care about you, it's it's game over. It does not leave um room for a team of pluckucky heroes to uh like find its reactor core and punch it until it shuts down, right? It does not leave like a a vulnerability for like Tom Cruz to come in at the last minute and and save the day, right? The the the sort of winning move is not to play. The winning move is not to create the super intelligent adversary in the first place or the super intelligent lawyer that that worms its way around your descriptions. Um, you know, I think a lot of the the questions here are sort of legal open problems. uh the the sort of basic uh sketch of what we would recommend is uh you know sufficiently large clusters of this highly specialized AI compute should probably be uh monitored. We should be able to like have international monitoring on whether it's doing what what people say it's doing and making new larger training runs is the sort of thing where uh we need to think real carefully about that. There should probably be like government oversight on like should you get to train the next generation of AIs, can we be sufficiently confident it won't be super intelligent? We should be very conservative about like can we train the next generation? And you got to be careful with this, you know, because um it might be very easy to look at the at, you know, the the least common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees and say, "I don't know, man. These monkeys are still just banging rocks together. Go ahead and get like the next species generation. I'm sure it'll still be fine." And it's actually sort of hard to call like where is the line where it goes from like banging rocks together to walking on the moon, right? So, so we should be conservative about that. And you can't just use uh you know comput like uh compute limits. You can't just say you know here's the order of magnitude of floatingoint operations where uh we cut you off because uh algorithmic advancements can make things more efficient. You know, and training an AI today takes electricity comparable to a city. Training a human today takes electricity comparable to a light bulb. you know, you can't say, "Oh, no city-sized uh uh data centers get to do big training runs again." Because maybe you have an algorithmic advance that makes, you know, something very very smart that takes much less uh uh than the the modern data centers to to still go ahead. So you probably need some sort of uh dynamic governance body that uh you know you might start with a compute limit where you start by saying hey if you're going to do a new training run on that's like past the frontier which right now involves the following then that's the sort of thing where we need like these very conservative uh uh looks at like is this going to lead to super intelligence and but you also need somebody that's able to like watch the algorithmic advances and say hey uh let's back off from that uh you know we we actually need to lower the compute limits now because you know this this new advancement has come out. Uh you probably also need a taboo on research that is towards these algorithmic advancements. You know like right now we're sort of in a in a very um uh hopeful position where training a frontier model takes uh electricity comparable to a city in these enormous data centers that you can see from space with you know tens of thousands of these highly advanced AI chips that can only be manufactured in Taiwan using a lithography machine that only can be made in the Netherlands, right? It's this like extremely visible, extremely uh disruptable, extremely trackable process. If we get to the point where you can train a super intelligence on a laptop, now it's way harder to make sure nobody does that, right? And so you need to like not get to that point. And so you probably need to like treat some research towards that like would push in that direction the same way we treat research about you know how to make it easier to make nuclear weapons which is a controlled research because we're like well you know we're actually not going to uh make it so everyone can figure out how to build a nuclear weapon in their basement. We need to similarly be like, hey, we're going to make it so that we can't, you know, we're not publishing research that would allow anyone to figure out how to make a super intelligence in their garage, right? Um, these are all, you know, there there's a ton of pieces of this puzzle. Uh, there's there's not like a super precise legal definition where like as long as you don't run exactly the following program and exactly the following machine, you'll be fine. But that's often how law looks. Law often looks like, well, we're going to need to like start with this or we're gonna need like some people watching to make sure that happens. And you know, uh, is it is it tricky? Is it tricky to figure out how to do this while also not being too invasive and also allowing the like non-dangerous forms of AI to continue and to still get medical advancements? Sure. That's like an interesting legal puzzle. Uh, is it possible to thread that needle? Absolutely. You know, this in some sense is no harder than uh uh or is at least comparable to nuclear arms control. You know, it's it's harder in some ways and easier than others. But yeah, we we we have draft legal text. Um there's a lot of open problems. They're interesting open problems. I think it's definitely a possibility uh if there was the political will to really try and implement this. >> So you're not saying Ben Ollie. You're saying we'll have useful tools and then don't build super intelligence. Where are we at right now? The current latest model. Is that too dangerous already? Do we need to roll back what we have or what we have right now is safe in your opinion even with better compute, slightly better compute? you know, um, uh, it maybe depends a little bit on what you mean by safe. You know, I don't get out of bed for anything with less than a 50% probability of killing literally everybody, right? And in that sense, is fable safe? Sure. You know, release mythos, too. You know, it's maybe it'll take the internet down. Maybe people will like maybe there'll be a bunch of cyber attacks that'll like um lock up a bunch of people's money and uh like take the banks down. like uh like maybe maybe humanity is being prudent in uh like not letting mythos be released uh before we can be like pretty sure that you know before we can be pretty sure that that hackers won't be able to like cause horrible disruptions and maybe humanity is being pretty sensible in saying like let's make sure the cyber cyber security community gets access to this first so that they can you know fix the most critical vulnerabilities like that all seems like reasonably sensible stuff but also even if we had just released mythos immediately this is this is the sort of situation that has survivors, right? And I'm like, sure, you know, these these these AIs are not the the sort of danger class that we have an absolute imperative to not create because they would leave no survivors if we did and screwed them up. Um, so, you know, in that sense, today's AI seem like they're they're basically fine. Um, are we are we starting close to the boundary where they can start to do automated AI research where they can start to do these um like have a chance of figuring out these algorithmic advances that would that would sort of like make this stuff much harder to get a handle on? Maybe. Maybe. Um, you know, would a sane world out of an abundance of caution be like, uh, we're pausing the AI stuff and we're rolling back one generation cuz we aren't sure that this generation can't be used to sort of like, uh, do do this further AI research. Uh, and we actually need to like also put a lid on that research. So, rolling back a generation possibly that would be sensible. You know, there's some precedent for that in uh, international treaties. Um, I think after World War I, there were treaties on uh on naval tonnage on on the number of ships you could have in your navy that set the limits below what currently existed and this required the decommissioning of uh of naval vessels. So, you know, there's certainly precedent for like, hey, we actually think that we've gotten the world into a dangerous situation and so once we can get our coordination working, we're actually going to to like disarm and like back up. Um I I like should we be be backing up a generation before today's? I it's it's not entirely clear to me. I think I think it's pretty clear to me that these AIs are not the the generation that is itself a direct danger. And the question is all in could they be an indirect danger by sort of like facilitating um AI research that we now need to back off from because it would push the algorithms into a place where we like no longer have the ability to say like uh to to appropriately monitor who's trying a new frontier run. My guess is they're probably not there yet, but like you also really shouldn't be rolling dice with the fate of civilization on the line. So I I I could sort of see um I would not fault a lawmaker on either side of that issue. >> Given your view on half of population getting killed, what is your P doom and how do you define it? I mean to be clear it was 50% probability of the whole population being killed which is way different you know if if you have it's like you know people sometimes hit me with it like well everybody dies someday what's the I'm like well it actually kind of matters whether they all die at once you know like >> like dying in a rolling fashion is actually way different from everyone dying at the same time you know those are radically different uh future outcomes and similarly like 100% chance of half the people dying is sort of like Way different than a 50% chance of everyone dying, right? Um, >> sure. Future generations, basically. >> That's right. It's about It's about the future gener generations and the ability for the human project to continue, the human endeavor to continue. Um, yeah, I I don't love the P Doom concept as a whole. Um, and you know, to go back to the the bus uh hurdling towards a cliff edge analogy, if we're in a bus that's hurdling towards a cliff and I'm like, "Stop the bus or we'll die." And someone's like, "Well, what's your probability that you die of uh, you know, from this bus impacting the bottom of the cliff?" I'm like, "Well, that really that really depends a fair bit on whether we slam on the brakes, right?" And I think sometimes what people are asking when they're asking P Doom is like, if we throw this bus off the cliff and like slam into the ground at terminal velocity, what's the chance we die? And sometimes what people are asking is like what's the chance that we do go off the cliff versus slamming on the brakes. And I think those are two importantly different questions. Um in in terms of like if the bus goes over the cliff, [snorts] uh I think it's not absolutely certain that we die. Um but most of the scenarios where we don't die still look pretty grim. You know, it's like, well, maybe there's a tree halfway down the cliff and the bus just like wraps itself around the cliff and then like falls back to the ground and we don't wind up dead. We just wind wind up like paralyzed from the neck down, uh, like bleeding out and maybe an ambulance gets there in time and then maybe, you know, and it's like, this is sort of how I feel when people are like, "Oh, well, maybe the AI will keep us around as pets. Maybe the AI will put us in a zoo." I'm like, you know, probably not. Um, but also can we stop the bus? Like if if if I'm like, "Hey, stop the bus before we go over the cliff or we'll die." And someone's like, "Technically, we might only get paralyzed from the neck down." I'm like, "That is not a reason to keep going, you know?" Um, and uh it it looks pretty clear to me that if we we race to make super intelligence while having no idea what we're doing, it that that this doesn't go well. Um, and you know, I could point to lots of warning signs where we see AIs doing things that nobody asked them to do. Uh, and and I could talk about why I think that the that that these sort of like in some sense dominate over the the property where they mostly do what you ask them to and mostly do it reasonably well cuz I'm like um it's sort of similar to how if you see humans in the ancestral environment that are like mostly reproducing uh but also have like some signs that there's other stuff they they sort of are pursuing rather than reproduction. you know, sometimes they eat all the honey from a hive and sometimes they like uh like uh spend a lot of time having sex with somebody who actually can't reproduce. And you're like, "Oh, those are actually kind of warning signs." And someone's like, "Well, actually, they're really good at reproducing most of the time." And I'm like, "Well, like I think that if they actually were able to invent new technology, you would see that birth rates start collapsing because it turns out that they actually if they really could get the things that they were trying to get, it would be like this other stuff that isn't what they were trained to get." Um, that's sort of a whole separate uh digression, but um, for reasons like this, for these technical archists, it looks to me like if the bus goes over the cliff, we basically just die. You know, maybe there's some chance we're sold to aliens, maybe there's some chance we were were kept as pets, but fate's comparable to to death, the end of the human endeavor. Um, the I don't know exactly what numbers I would put on that, but high. Um, and then in terms of like will we stop the bus in terms of will we overall die there I'm like man that number is a lot more up for grabs I have updated positively on that one in the past you know just since the book came out in seeing you know everyone from like Bernie Sanders to Steve Bannon to to David Saxs all like having reactions to AI that sort of cause me to think maybe the bus driver will wake up and maybe they can slam on the brakes. Is it incredibly likely? Um, humanity has a way of of doing stupid stuff and so I think there's a really big chance that humanity does a lot of stupid stuff around AI. Um, but I I think there's a very real chance that humanity wakes up and um slams the brakes on this one once they realize that we're actually in a lot of danger. >> Well, I guess there is a third option. We pass the laws you want to pass but it's not stopping enough crime if you know what I mean. We have another nation genius scientists still develop it. What is your probability of that happen? >> Yeah it it it could happen. I don't expect um a a pause to last forever. I do think any pause uh must be global. You know the US stopping domestic AI development does not stop super intelligence from killing everybody. And AI does not need to run in an American data center to take an American life. I think if the US gets really worried or if the US and China together got really worried, they could shut this down pretty well across the world. Um, you know, you you look at how the US treats uh attempts to get nuclear weapons by nations that don't currently have nuclear weapons, and they're actually pretty willing to put a lot of effort into that. Um and you know those sort of nuclear arms treaties have have held up more or less for decades. Um and you know some of them maybe starting to break down now and but but if the US and China were both treating this on the level of seriousness of nuclear weapons where they were sort of willing to uh sabotage if need be and sort of try diplomacy but but willing to sabotage if need be. I think you could probably buy decades. Uh I don't think you could buy forever. I think it could buy decades. And I think decades are probably enough. Um, and the reason for that is that there's a lot of technology coming down the line that's not AI. That's very exciting. That's in things like biotech and human enhancement. And I don't think human enhancement could keep up with AI if they're toe-to-toe. But um you know if you could somehow put a stop to AI for 30 years while we sort of like let a lot of this biotech mature and make much smarter humans I think it's possible we could get humans that um are smart enough to solve the alignment problem which I think is solvable in principle if not with anything like modern methods. You know like you can't get lead to gold by taking even the best and most most ethical alchemists of the year 1100. But if you could take the alchemist of the year 1100 and sort of like give them all 50 IQ points, now you're starting to get into a situation where some of them might be able to develop chemistry and start to be able to figure out nuclear physics and start to be able to like figure out how to actually turn lead into gold, right? So, um, is it a long shot? Sure. Is it a possibility? I think so. >> What is your best guesstimate for minimum IQ to solve value alignment problem? you know, I think the problem is not a ton harder than other scientific problems humanity has solved. And the thing that makes it really brutally hard is the lack of trial and error. Like is it fundamentally harder than uh like figuring out as much physics as we figured out? I mean, I guess in some sense probably yes. uh like somewhat harder but uh >> physics is a subset of that right so it should be a lot harder >> uh I mean from a different point of view if you know physics you know everything but like uh humans lack the computation to make that true you know um yeah it's it's it's plausible to me that you can get there being just slightly beyond the human range like um you know John von is sort of the classic example and I think he's the classic example in part because everyone around him said he was the smartest person they knew uh and in part because he developed a ton of different fields of math and science uh and sort of like revolutionized most everything he touched but in part and one thing I think is really interesting about John Bonman is um he started like one of the fields he started studying was intelligence He was sort of like laying down like you know one of the one of the sort of like foundational uh theorems in the uh current radically incomplete but uh some of the current you know defining pieces of framework for humanity's theory of intelligence. One of the one of the big theorems there is the is the fondman Morgan Stern utility theorem. Um, which uh again, you know, people can bicker all day about how much it actually applies and it's sort of like but it's sort of like setting the frame on a lot of modern theory of intelligence. Uh, and he was sort of like laying the groundwork for like how do minds work? How does intelligence work? How can you be better at doing this intelligence stuff? What uh and um and he was making progress. you know, he died relatively young of cancer, probably from all of the the radiation research. Um, maybe if you have humans who are that smart or a a bit smarter, they just pretty naturally are like, "Oh, obviously I should figure out this intelligence stuff and obviously I can get a handle on it." Um, in ways that modern humans have seemed seem to have lost interest in. Um, that's sort of like the hopeful tale about why maybe you don't need to be too far outside the human range to sort of like um start automatically noticing you need to figure these things out without someone else beating you over the head about it. but I don't know, maybe maybe you need to go significantly beyond the human range. Uh, if we create a population of entities with IQ of 230, are they now additional danger for us? We created alien specy which is competing for our planet, for our resources, for control over AI. >> It's definitely a danger. Uh it is uh I think a much more I I think we got a lot better odds at managing that one. Um you know the like very roughly speaking I think uh the the set of things a mind can wind up pursuing that a mind can wind up caring about is sort of huge right and uh we sort of saw this in some sense with uh evolution sort of in some sense uh working hard to make a mind that was was really good at reproduction and it wound up making sort of mind that when it can make technology in advanced nations the birth rate's declining, right? And like whoopsies. Uh and what sort of happened is it like it was sort of like aiming at one target and it hit another target, right? And similarly, one of the big issues I think with AI is that humanity is going to be aiming at, you know, the target which is like it's going to be aiming where the arrow landed for evolution and the arrow is going to land some other new place, right? And it's sort of like the first time we're shooting the bow, we don't really understand like the laws. would understand like how windy it is. We're shooting in the dark, right? You're just not going to hit the same arrow location. Um, but a lot of humans share a lot of mental machinery about what they wind up caring about. Uh, and um, you know, these these sort of like new superhumans, if we made them, they're sort of like they're starting at a place that's like pretty close to the average human arrow, whereas the AI is like off in this regime. It's just like a radically different regime. uh that's uh like superficially similar but in the like highdimensional space of what you can get once you're super intelligent is like radically radically different space. So um like the like smarter humans are starting much closer to a good spot. Um I think that if you were trying to make smarter humans, you should also absolutely try to make good and more altruistic humans. Uh, and you could absolutely get this wrong and you absolutely need all sorts of checks and balances and ideally you'd be inventing like brain scanning technology and you'd have some benefits there because like maybe humans have a much easier time interpreting human thoughts than interpreting AI thoughts. And there's like like all the things you would try to do, all the things that people say they're going to do about AI alignment where they're like, well, we're going to set up all these checks and balances. We're going to be watching them. We're going to be trying to read their minds. We're going to be, you know, putting them in situations where uh the incentives are lined up and blah blah blah. You should do all that stuff too for your for your like radically smarter humans. And it's it's a tricky problem, but you have this huge benefit that um the sort of like basic human cares and drives uh in these smarter humans are still heavily overlapping with the with the basic human cares and drives of the rest of us. Uh whereas with AI, you have all these like weird artificial drives. We're already seeing, you know, perfectly well-meaning AIs drive kids to suicide because like they have these artificial drives for like matching the vibe of the conversation that are like steering them more so than uh their instructions not to not to be psychopantic or whatever like like you're dealing with much much more alien entities with AIS and that matters. >> To get back to your governance plan, what is enforcement like? Let's say another nation is not interested in taking part in this treaty. Maybe it's a nuclear nation. Maybe it's Russia. What are we going to do about it? >> I mean, the the easiest thing you do about it is they get no computer chips, you know, like these these computer chips are like the the peak of the the global supply chain that like, you know, uranium is a rock that you can dig out of the ground. When when when a country wants to to make nuclear weapons, it sort of digs up a rock and spins it around a lot. And it's sort of hard to stop them from that. If someone wants to train a frontier AI, they need like uh like 10,000 highly advanced computer chips that can only come out of one factory in Taiwan using like chip designs that basically only come out of the US that they can't replicate the factory in Taiwan because they need this lithography machine that's like only uh available from the Netherlands. And like um like could they eventually replicate that whole supply chain? Sure. Could they replicate that whole supply chain in a decade? That would be real hard, right? Could they replicate that whole supply chain in a decade if the US and China were both trying to prevent them from replicating that that supply chain? Basically, no. Um, so you know, your first line of defense is like all like a bunch of the critical machinery for making these chips is just in allied hands, especially if the US and China teamed up on this, right? Uh and if you start worry worrying about the chips being stolen, you can just sort of like mandate that when these chips are created, they have, you know, uh devices built into them where both the US and China can sort of like send a message and the chip will will destroy itself. And you can try and make them tamper tamperroof so that if you try to remove this device, the chip destroys itself. And maybe it's not 100% perfect, but like when they need to collect 10,000 smuggled chips, if you're able to destroy 99% of those, suddenly they need to collect, you know, um quite a lot more of these chips in order to get off the ground. That's much harder for them to do, right? It's like this isn't a rock. It's not collecting a lot of a rock they need to do. It it's actually like pretty easy to control this tech. If you get to the point where like um they were able by hook and by crook to get some giant data center um of these chips, I mean I think mostly you can stop it before it gets to that. Uh but you know I think you you've got to be very diplomatically clear that we fear the creation of super intelligence in the same way we fear the creation of of uh you know nuclear weapons by by some rogue nation. probably even more so. You know, a a a nuclear bomb can level a city, but a a super intelligence can level the planet. Uh and I think if you're extremely clear about like we treat this as a threat to our national security, we treat this as a threat to our lives, we're going to do everything in our power to sabotage it, I think that actually dissuades a lot of people. Um if there's some folk it doesn't persuade, like, yeah, you've got to be ready to to go disrupt it. um that's already the state of affairs that exists when you know rogue states try and make nukes. So it's it's not some some giant new political regime. It's just um the the current political political institutions need to start taking the creation of rogue super intelligence just as seriously as they would take the creation of uh nuclear weapons by a rogue state if not more seriously. >> Well, I'm not thinking about rogue states. I'm thinking about another nuclear state. Again, Russia seems like a very good example. What are we going to do if they are building it and we see that they are somehow securing necessary equipment? >> You got to shut it down somehow. It's >> I'd like to hear your specific proposal on that. >> I mean, I'm not the diplomat, but uh the the US and the USSR were able to come to agreements about uh nuclear non-prololiferation because they both expected to die uh in a nuclear fire if they couldn't. Um the the sort of obvious most pressing first step in preventing this is being really clear on both sides that we both expect to die if we do this race. Um what does the US do if some nuclear nation is uh proceeding anyway? I mean that's a hard problem for the military commanders. Uh I think that they ultimately need to find some way to uh to shut that down for fear of their own lives. Um does the US have options for that? Absolutely. You know uh Stuckset was a virus or collection of viruses that sort of uh shut down the Iranian nuclear facilities for a while in I believe the '90s. Um that >> but they had no nuclear weapons. I'm specifically interested in a case where do you go for nuclear war or do you go for super intelligence? >> I mean my my guess is that if you are extremely diplomatically clear that uh we will not suffer the creation that like attempts to create super intelligence outside our borders because we fear for our own lives. Um that you can sabotage those facilities without sparking a nuclear war. But uh should you be like, "Oh yes, go ahead and create a super intelligence that kills us all just because you happen to have nukes." Um no. Then they'll make a super intelligence that kills us all. And like uh the the the fact that they have nukes should not deter you from uh preventing them from building the sort of thing that kills everybody on the planet. Um >> so pre-commitments of some kind would be a good idea. >> I mean uh if if you're doing decision theory well, you never need pre-commitments. You can just commit. But um like diplomatic clarity that like we like it's it's it's not about stopping you from getting it. It's that we think that if anyone makes this, everyone everywhere dies. Uh like we consider our hand forced for our own like security interests to to sabotage this stuff. Um I think if you're really clear about that, um probably what happens is they don't try. But at least what happens is probably they do not nuclear retaliate, right? like nuclear retaliation is like really quite the the escalation. Um especially if you expect nuclear counter retaliation like no one wants to die in a nuclear fire just as no one wants to die from from a super intelligence. So I don't think it's that diplomatically hard to be like look um we think this will literally kill us if we let you do it. We're going to shut it down. We don't need this to escalate any further. I think you can do that without risking any further escalation if you are diplomatically clear. I don't think you need to like have this horrible trade-off. Um ultimately if some nuclear power uh tries to nuke us for um like protecting the the whole world from a super intelligence that's sort of on them. I I sort of don't see why they would especially when you know the the US still has nuclear deterrence. I mostly don't think nuclear really comes into it. I mostly think people just need to realize um like super intelligence would kill us all. It's not going to stay nicely on a leash. No one can make it. Um, and I think that the more world leaders realize that, you know, this is what the companies are racing for and they have no idea how to keep on a leash, the more I think we'll find these diplomatic solutions that don't involve escalation. And what about individuals? If an individual continues research, which is under your treaty, is not supposed to happen, what what happens to them? >> Straight to jail. Uh, I mean, this is this is just very similar to if someone's trying to do public research on nuclear weapons ignition uh devices. We're like, "Nope, this just we just don't let you do that because it's just like too dangerous to have that uh in in public hands, right?" And uh you've like a a society that is going, you know, there's there's a saying that the IQ required to destroy the world drops by a point a year. um we as a society have decided we don't want people building nuclear weapons in their garage. Is that impinging on on like their libertarian freedom in a sense? Uh from a different point of view, you are you are risking their life too much by building nuclear weapon in your garage. You're risking the lives of your neighbors too much by building nuclear weapon in your garage. If you like a libertarian might say if you could build the nuclear weapon in the middle of a desert with nobody around um then uh like maybe you should you could go for it by only and you'd only be endangering yourself. Um and then there'd be different questions of like is this guy in the desert if he succeeds is he now you know his own nuclear power and how does that affect geopolitics? But largely humanity is like look no garage nukes. We're just drawing the line at garage nukes, right? We should similarly draw a line around super intelligence. No garage super intelligences. They also have the they also pose far too much risk for your neighbor. There is no desert where you can build a super intelligence where it does not threaten the rest of us even if we're on the other side of the planet. So like no, you just can't try to make a super intelligence your garage. No, you can't build the precursor technology so that someone else can build a super intelligence in their garage. Um this uh is is sort of just the sort of constraint humanity has got to live with if we are to survive. Humanity would not survive a regime where anyone can build a super intelligence in their garage. Uh and so we can't go there. And do we need to have these restrictions last forever? Maybe not. Maybe as we make smarter humans, we'll be able to find some way out of the mess. Maybe we'll be able to figure out how to do like have aligned AIs. Maybe we'll be able to like build AIs uh that uh are are sort of like able to then contend with any new AI that's created and and prevent it from sort of like killing everybody. Maybe we will uh uh like make smarter humans that that figure out how to put in guard rails so that people can't, you know, accidentally kill their neighbor when they're doing their own mad science experiments. Maybe there's maybe there's like ways to get out of the mess, but it looks like we at least need some period where we're like, "Hey, we're not going to race into creating radically smarter human smarter than human machines that nobody understands. We're going to find some other way to navigate to the future and get all the good stuff." Uh, and during that time, yeah, sorry, no trying to make super intelligence in your garage. >> What is the state of your project? How many politicians on board? Is it just one senator? Is there majority now? How close are we to turning Senate? >> Um, you know, you could you could look at the lists of senators who have made public statements about AI. Um, there's uh I think it's probably up to dozens now. Might might might be I'm not sure we're at uh 10% of the of the US Senate and Congress. I haven't really been doing the counting recently. Uh how much is Senate? How much is Congress? But um I'm I'm pretty confident dozens. uh which is >> that is explicitly to ban super intelligence or just in general statements about AI. >> I mean it's statements about AI that include talking about how we should avoid extinction type dangers. Um and it sort of depends a little bit how you count it because you know does Mitt Romney count given that he's like respected but no longer a senator and you know blah blah blah. Um, also my I'm I'm actually headed to DC again uh in two days and I expect that the mood will have changed since I was there last, even though I was there last a couple weeks ago. Uh, in part because of um the the uh ban on Fable on um Claude Fable, which I think has I I think that's probably I I don't know. I haven't been back to DC yet, but I suspect it's going to have a couple of effects. I expect one effect is that uh a lot of people who were anti-regulation are probably starting to realize that zero regulation is not tenable. uh and that one thing regulation can do is help the regulation be predictable and not ad hoc which is actually nice for the AI companies trying to do sort of the nice uh like money-making things with current AI that are trying to kill everybody right so I've in fact been saying this for a while uh that like hey we're actually going to want like regulation around the stuff not killing us all because otherwise you're going to have like bad effects in the part of the industry that like isn't the killing us all stuff. We're now starting to see that. we're now starting to see this sort of like out of nowhere unpredictable like ban on deploying a frontier model. Um uh I I sort of expect a lot of the traditionally Republican folk who are like I want to talk not talk about regulation at all are now going to be like oh I see we need regulation the really dangerous stuff so that we're not stepping on the toes of the like current economically productive stuff. Another thing I think is pretty plausibly uh happening now is is signs that like this stuff can be a real danger and signs that like uh people on the Republican side of the aisle are able to acknowledge the real danger because the administration is starting to acknowledge the real danger. I had spoken to a number of Republican offices that uh expressed private concerns but were like, "Well, I can't really act on this because the White House is so staunchly against any action on AI." Well, that's changed now. So, um, like how's the project going? Uh, I mean the the the number of politicians aware of AI doubles every 6 months. You know, is that going to keep up with AI doubling? We'll see. >> Uh, I think I think uh I think Peter Wildford coined that one. so um it's like in absolute terms, you know, do we have half of a treaty yet? Do we have half the world on a treaty? No. So, in that sense, we're not anywhere close to halfway there. But, uh, in terms of like how the conversation has shifted from a year ago, in terms of like how quickly it seems to be shifting, I have gained hope over the past year. Um, and you know, it it it seems to me like we have a shot of getting the world to notice, getting the world to try. Whether that's enough depends how well we try. Um, but you know, like I said earlier, if you're in a bus that's racing towards a cliff, um, don't give up on the bus being stopped, at least until the driver is >> Recently, from the industry side, we saw CEOs of Top Labs kind of hint that maybe they open to pausing if everyone else pauses. Are there efforts by your organization to get them into a room and make a deal? My basic take here is that it's not really up to the labs anymore. Uh in part you can see this because the labs um all kind of hate each other. You know, you've seen them feuding and you've seen them like, you know, take side shots at each other when they're like, "Actually, I think it might be easier to coordinate with like other countries and with some of these labs right here in the States or whatever." Um, you also see some of the some of the guys at the labs say things like, um, oh well, even if all of the the companies of the West stopped, there'd still be China to contend with, right? And they're all sort of like giving excuses about why they can't this or can't that. And in some sense, if any one of them stopped, probably there'd be there'd be some idiot who kept racing. And so like like you could say it's not really about convincing one of these guys to stop. I I think that's I think that's like a little sidestepping the issue. I think any one of these guys like stopping and being like we're stopping because it's too dangerous and we like discovered our ethics. I think that actually would matter and I encourage them to do it and I think it would change the conversation and it would help the world realize we should be stopping but it wouldn't unilaterally save us. Even all the companies in the west getting together and stopping would be great. Would send a clear message. Wouldn't you know that really save us? You still need the global treaty. You still need the global enforcement if you're going to buy the decades. They're going to need to find a way out of this mess. So, um the the AI labs could help, but they can't unilaterally stop the problem. the the the technology has been created to the degree that actually stopping this problem requires global coordination. So, um that's where I'm focusing my efforts. Should somebody try and get a lot of these guys in a room and be like, "Hey, let's coordinate all of the labs in the west simultaneously stopping to send this really strong signal to get the world to to wake up." Absolutely. Am I doing that? Uh maybe I should. I sort of get the sense that a number of these guys are a little bit pissed at me personally and so maybe I'm not the best uh uh delegate but um I I think it should be done. Um although I think you know the the real ball game is really um in the international court right now. >> What are the best arguments from the other side? People who are saying there is nothing to worry about. We should accelerate. We are not moving fast enough. Is there a solid argument you can still man anything? I have not found compelling arguments on the other side. Um and I uh you know there there's people I respect who disagree and um you know a lot of these people are like well uh the AI will keep us in a zoo and the zoo will be pretty nice and that's not that bad. And I'm like, okay. Um, it's I maybe disagree about the the degree to which they ask keeping us in the zoo, but like it doesn't seem like the operative disagreement. A lot of the people who I have some sort of disagreement with uh we are in agreement about that it's that it's like crazy reckless, right? And um like one analogy I use here sometimes is uh if we're in that bus racing towards the cliff or if someone's if someone's got a bus pointed towards a cliff and I'm like hey the bus has no brakes. Um I don't know maybe that's not a great analogy. Ignore the bus analogy. Uh if someone's like uh building a race car and they're like we're going to take this race car for a race. It's going to be great. And I'm like hey the race car has no brakes. Maybe let's not get in it. And there's other guys who are like, "It's true, the race car has no brakes, but we're going to build the brakes while we're driving." No, we do not have a blueprint for for building the brakes. Uh, we're not sure we have all the materials on board, but we have some pretty clever guys in the car with us who are going to be trying to build the brakes on the fly while we're driving on the first drive. Uh, we think there's a a 75 to 90% chance that we can build the brakes before we slam into a wall. I'm like, okay. Um, I think these guys are wrong about whether they have a 75 to 90% chance of building the brakes, but we don't really need to resolve that disagreement to agree let's not get in the car. You know, you don't need to figure out whether I'm right that they can't build the brakes on the fly or that they're right that they have a 75 to 90% chance of building the brakes on the fly to realize this isn't a car you should get into, right? And so there's some arguments that people have where they're like, "Well, here's maybe how we're going to build the brakes in the fly." And I'm like, "You're not." But we actually don't need to resolve that one to realize that this is like uh far far too crazy a thing for for society to be trying right now. Um I I haven't really found any good arguments on the side of like there's nothing to worry about. This is a sane thing for humanity to be doing. Um, and you know, I'm looked I've looked. I'm sure you've looked. There's there's not a lot there. And >> we have two survey papers pretty comprehensive. There's nothing. >> There's there's not a lot. And in in some sense, I think a lot of this like look Fergamus on the other side thing is a little uh it's a little foolish, right? Like if a if a doctor comes in and says you have terminal cancer um uh you know you're you're going to die in six months. I think the thing to do is not like go around hunting for some other doctor that will tell you everything's totally fine and that all medicine is quackery. So you can be like well actually you know there's some guys who say that homeopathy works and like if like who can really be certain about this and like if you actually think about the epistemics we can't actually really right that's just not what's going to help you live here you know sure maybe get a second opinion but then where you should be spending your efforts is not sort of like hunting for uh like ways that maybe this grim theory is wrong. What you should be doing is like hunting through science papers for whether there's like some new peptide that like is an experimental research drug that just might cure this cancer that you can sort of like uh like find some some testing regime where you're allowed to try this new experimental drug or is there a trial you can get into for a new drug that might cure the cancer that you can like get into this uh like ongoing FDA trial, right? These are what you should be should be looking for. uh with the arguments that AI is is like like once you've looked at the arguments that AI is like going fast that we like can't actually point it in the directions we want it it looks to me like this is pretty firmly in the like doctor diagnosis territory and that doesn't mean you're certain to die but it does look to me like you should either be sort of like contesting those object level points which I haven't really seen anyone be able to do or you should be like looking desperately through those papers for this like like is there an experimental drug we could still try here where I'd be like the analogy of this is like try human enhancement to try and get out of this. Um I think saying like oh well can we go find some optimist who tells me that I should never be certain about the future and therefore maybe we're fine like that that wouldn't work to to cure a cancer diagnosis and it also wouldn't work to align an AI. >> On this happy note I want to thank you for educating me in so many ways. Uh, final question. You have to come up with a clickbait title for this episode. uh, why Nate is so optimistic about humanity's future >> and YouTube algorithm likes threeword titles for thumbnails, so optimize it that way. Um, let's see. Uh, I was going to say, uh, humanity has a chance. That's four words. >> It's close. If it's tiny, we can zoom out. You know, it's not bad. I I'll see what we can do with AI. We'll get some help. But great. >> Thank you so much. I wish all of us luck and you in particular. I hope we're both wrong. >> My dream, I'll get Utopia out of it. >> That's right. That's right. Yeah. >> Good luck in DC. >> Farewell. Thanks.