120. The AI Episode: Immortality and Endless Wealth or Human Extinction?

Explicit content warning

03/17/22 • 53 min

There's a pretty fundamental shift in our near future and the median AI scientist says it is coming by about the year 2040: the rise of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Right now, the types of AI that power TikTok and Facebook and Spotify and Netflix and any number of other major tech companies in the world currently are examples of Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI) which may be superhuman, like the ANI's that can beat the best humans in the world at games like chess and Go, but they are only superhuman at one thing. An AGI is an algorithm that is good at learning how to do multiple things, and can attain human-level intelligence across the board. The next step after AGI is ASI, which is Artificial Super Intelligence, which goes beyond the known biological range of intelligence and can improve upon itself at an exponential rate. That's the scary stuff.

We talk with Isabel's friend Shantanu, who works at a company called OpenAI, about the hypothetical scenarios that are possible and likely within our lifetimes. He notes that a lot of the biggest worries out there are projections of our own personal fears about the world and the direction society is going in because at the end of the day, it is hard to make predictions about what we don't know. But there are a lot of AI safety organizations out there putting extensive thought into these questions, because whoever comes up with the first ASI could determine the entire fate of humanity: we could hypothetically use the AI for "good" and bring an end to most human suffering in the world by using nanotechnology to reverse aging and stop most disease, and possibly create a world in which humans never have to work again and we all live off a universal basic income. But we could also use it for "evil," which is of course a moral imposition by humans that likely wouldn't apply to an algorithm without feeling or intention, but we could program an algorithm to optimize for one thing (the classic parable is making paperclips) and it gets so good at it that it turns everything in the world to paperclips.

Links:

The Wait but Why articles about hypothetical scenarios involving recursively self-improving AI:
https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html
https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-2.html

Some examples of what OpenAI's code models can do:
https://openai.com/blog/openai-codex/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGUCcjHTmGY
Some examples of what gpt-3 can do:
https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3
Openai's blog:
https://openai.com/blog/
https://openai.com/blog/webgpt/
https://openai.com/blog/dall-e/
https://openai.com/blog/instruction-following/
Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

Links:

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119. The Proposal Episode: The Life and Death of Relationships

You know the game 2 truths and a lie? Well we are switching it up and making it 2 breakups and a marriage proposal: in the last 2 weeks, we have had 1 proposal and 2 breakups between the 2 co-hosts. So we take a minute to talk about what we have learned from those experiences and why it's weird when when you go through a breakup and a proposal at the same time. We also cover: why we should put more serious, emotional conversations into writing, why it is useful to have people in your life who will tell you your flaws, and what our previous relationships have taught us.

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

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121. The Faith Episode: How We Build Meaning in Everything From Neighborhood Architecture to High School Musical Nights

Wes Willison lives on a block with 100 houses on it. That is a very long block by most urban planning standards and he starts off telling us a bit about what that kind of built environment affords you: safety, because you have a lot more eyes on all the people going up and down the street but also, because his block is nestled in an otherwise high-crime part of Port Richmond, which is a neighborhood in Philadelphia, he and his neighbors get to avoid the attention of big developers who might want to come in and "flip" the neighborhood.

Wes originally went to seminary but is now pivoting to become a realtor, a role in which he hopes to apply a lot of the belief systems he has spent his whole life honing and shaping. We started this episode intending to have a conversation about the importance of place and ownership of land and the inequities ingrained in that, but what we ended up talking about was everything.

For example, Wes tells us the incredible story of how in San Francisco's Chinatown, the Chinese immigrants would pay white builders to add "Chinese-looking" facades to otherwise normal houses to fend off the government and developers looking to buy out or claim land in Chinatown through eminent domain and how the immigrant community organized themselves to leave the city en masse if the government did not choose to respect their land rights, which worked surprisingly well.