Where AI is heading: utopia, dystopia, religion, and YOU

I recently watched a podcast about where the AI race is heading. My notes:

What's the "WHY" of the leading AI companies? “When I really grill them on why they’re doing this, they retreat into three things:

- determinism,

- the inevitable replacement of biological life with digital life, and

- the idea that this will be a good thing anyway.

At its core, it’s an emotional desire to meet and speak to the most intelligent entity they’ve ever encountered.

They also have a kind of ego-religious intuition that they’ll somehow be part of it.

It’s thrilling to them – like starting an exciting fire. They feel they’ll die either way, so they prefer to light it and see what happens.”

(Image for this post was generated by Nano Banana only on the basis of this direct quote above.)

Other key takeaways:

"If you show me the incentive, I will show you the outcome" (Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's business partner).

Some leaders privately admit they would "clearly accelerate and go for the utopia" even given a 20% chance that "everybody dies and gets wiped out by this," a choice made without the consent of 8 billion people.

AI presents a danger far exceeding previous automation cycles because it automates all cognitive labor. It is like a "flood of millions of new digital immigrants" working for less than minimum wage. The current path leads to creating mass joblessness without a transition plan, resulting in high likelihood of mass outrage and public riots.

The definition of wisdom in any tradition involves "some kind of restraint," not racing as fast and narrowly as possible.

Tristan Harris argues that this dystopian outcome is not inevitable, and humanity must exercise agency by making AI a "tier one issue" for politicians, demanding mandatory testing and common safety standards, and fostering a "massive public movement" and international coordination to choose a path of "narrow AIs" and restraint rather than racing toward an uncontrollable digital god.

You'll find the video by searching for a podcast by Steven Bartlett with the leading AI expert on ethics, Tristan Harris.

What are your thoughts on this? What do you think can be done by each of us to help ensure safe development of AI?

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