Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2345 - Roman Yampolskiy
Uploaded: 2025-07-03T17:01:06.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2345 - Roman Yampolskiy' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-07-03. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2345 - Roman Yampolskiy' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-07-03. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2345 - Roman Yampolskiy

Well, thank you for doing this I really appreciate it my pleasure thank you for
inviting me this subject of
The dangers of AI. It's it's very interesting because I get two very different
responses from people dependent upon
How invested they are in AI?
financially
The the people that have AI companies or are part of some sort of AI group
All are like it's gonna be a net positive for humanity. I think overall we're
gonna have much better lives
It's gonna be easier things will be cheaper. It'll be easier to get along and
then I hear people like you and I'm like, why do I believe him?
It's actually not true. All of them are on record as saying this is gonna kill
us
Whatever, it's Sam Altman or anyone else. They all at some point were leaders
in AI safety work
They published an AI safety and their PDOM levels are insanely high
Not like mine, but still 20-30 percent chance that humanity dies is a little
too much. Yeah, that's pretty high
but yours is like
Ninety-nine point nine
It's another way of saying we can't control super intelligence indefinitely. It's
impossible
When did you start working on this a long time ago? So my PhD was I finished in
2008 I did work on online casino security basically preventing bots and at that
point I realized bots are getting much better
They're gonna out-compete us obviously in poker, but also in stealing cyber
resources and
From then on I've been kind of trying to scale it to the next level AI
It's not just that right. They're also they're kind of narrating social
discourse
Bots online like I think you know, I've disengaged over the last few months
with social media and one of the reasons why disengaged
a I think it's unhealthy for people
But B I feel like there's a giant percentage of the discourse that's artificial
Or at least generated
More and more is deepfakes or fake personalities fake messaging, but those are
very different levels of concern
Yeah, people are concerned about immediate problems. Maybe it will influence
some election. They're concerned about technological unemployment
Bias my main concern is long term super intelligent systems
We cannot control which can take us out. Yes. I I one I just wonder if AI was
sentient
How much it would be a part of sowing this sort of?
confusion and chaos
that would be
Beneficial to its survival that it would sort of narrate
or or make sure that the narratives
aligned with
its survival I
Don't think it's at the level yet where it would be able to do this type of
strategic planning
But it will get there and when it gets there. How will we know whether it's at
that level?
This is my concern if I was AI I would hide my
Abilities we would not know and some people think already it's happening
They're smarter than they actually let us know right pretend to be dumber and
so
We have to kind of trust that they are not smart enough to realize it doesn't
have to turn on us quickly
It can just slowly become more useful
It can teach us to rely on it trust it and over a long period of time will
surrender control without ever voting on it or right fighting against it
I'm sure you saw this there was a recent study on
Use of chat GPT the people that use chat GPT but all the time and it showed
this
Decrease in cognitive function amongst people that use it and rely on it on a
regular basis
It's not new. It's the GPS story all over. I can't even find my way home
So rely on this thing. I have no idea where I am right now like without it. I'm
done me too. Yeah, I don't know any phone numbers anymore
Yeah, there's a lot of reliance upon technology that
minimizes
the use of our brains
All of it and the more you do it the less you have training practice memorizing
things making decisions
You become kind of attachment to it and right now you're still making some
decisions
But over time as the systems become smarter you become kind of biological
bottleneck, right?
Either explicitly implicitly it blocks you out from decision making and if we're
talking about that
I'm sure AI if it already is sentient and if it is far smarter than we think it
is
They would be aware and it would just slowly ramp up its capabilities and our
dependence upon it
To the point where we can't shut it off. I think sentience is a separate issue
usually in safety
We only care about capabilities optimization power
Whatever it has consciousness internal states is a separate problem. We can
talk about it's super interesting
But we are just concerned that they are much better at problem-solving
optimizing pattern recognition memorizing
Strategy basically all the things you need to win in any domain. Yeah
So when you first started
Researching this stuff and you were concentrating on bots and all this
different thing. How far off?
Did you think?
The few like in the future would AI become a significant problem with the human
race for like 50 years?
Everyone said we're 20 years away. That's the joke and people like Ray Kurzweil
predicted based on some computational curves. We'll get there at 2045
Right and then with GPT release it switched to everyone thinks it's two years
away for the last five years
So this is the pattern right now if you look at prediction markets if you look
at
leading people in
Top labs we are supposedly two or three years away from AGI
But of course there is no specific definition for what that means if you showed
someone computer scientist in the 70s
What we have today? They'd be like you have AGI you got it right?
That's the problem right and this is what will AI has already passed the Turing
test
Allegedly correct so usually labs instruct them not to participate in the test
or not try to pretend to be a human
So they would fail because of this additional set of instructions if you jailbreak
it and tell it to work really hard
It will pass for most people. Yeah, absolutely
Why would they tell it to not do that?
Well, it seems unethical to pretend to be a human and make people feel like
Somebody's is enslaving those the eyes and you know doing things to them
It seems kind of crazy that the people building something that they are sure is
going to destroy the human race
Would be concerned with the ethics of it pretending to be human
They are actually more concerned with immediate problems and much less with
Substantial or suffering risks they would probably worry the most about what I'll
call and risks your model dropping the n-word
That's the biggest concern and I think they spend most resources solving that
problem and they solved it somewhat successfully
Wow
And then also there's the issue of competition, right? Like so China is clearly
developing something similar
I'm sure Russia is as well other state actors are probably developing something
so becomes this is
Sort of
This very confusing issue where you have to do it because if you don't the
enemy has it and if they get it
It will be far worse than if we do and so it's almost assuring that everyone
develops it
Game theoretically that's what's happening right now
We have this race to the bottom and a prisoner's dilemma where everyone is
better off fighting for themselves
But we want them to fight for the global good
The thing is they assume I think incorrectly that they can control those
systems if you can't control super intelligence
It doesn't really matter who builds it Chinese Russians or Americans. It's
still uncontrolled
We're all screwed completely that would unite us as humanity versus AI
Short-term when you talk about military
Yeah, whoever has better AI will win you needed to control drones to fight
against attacks
So short-term it makes perfect sense you want to support you guys against
foreign militaries
But then we say long-term if we say in two years from now
It doesn't matter right
This is the thing it's like
It's it seems so inevitable and
And I feel like when people are saying they can control it that I feel like I'm
being gaslit
I don't believe them. I don't believe that they believe it
Because it just doesn't make sense like how could you control it if it's
already exhibited?
Survival instincts like in is as recently as chat GPT for right they were
talking about
Putting putting it down for a new version and it starts lying
It starts uploading itself to different servers. It's leaving messages for
itself in the future
All things were predicted decades in advance, but look at the state-of-the-art
No one claims to have a safety mechanism in place which would scale to any
level of intelligence
No one says they know how to do it
Usually what they say is give us me give us lots of money lots of time and I'll
figure it out
I'll get AI to help me solve it or we'll figure it out then we get to super
intelligence
All insane answers and if you ask regular people they have a lot of common
sense. They say that's a bad idea
Let's not do that, but with some training and some stock options you start
believing that maybe you can do it
That's the issue right stock options
It helps I mean it's very hard to
Say no to billions of dollars
I don't think I would be strong enough if somebody came to me and said come
work for this lab, you know
You'll be our safety director here's hundred million to sign you up and I'll
probably go work there not because it's the right decision
But because it's very hard for agents not to get corrupt then you have that
much reward
given to you
So when did you become like when did you start becoming very concerned?
So when I started working on AI safety, I thought I can actually help solve it
My goal was to solve it for humanity to get all the amazing benefits of super
intelligence and what was this when was this year around?
Let's say 2012 maybe around there
But the more I studied it the more I realized every single part of the problem
is unsolvable and it's kind of like a fractal
The more you zoom in the more you see additional new problems you didn't know
about and they are in turn unsolvable as well
Boy
How is your research received like when when you talk to people that are work?
I mean have you had communication with people that open AI and Gemini and all
these different AI
I go to many conferences workshops. We all talk of course in general the
reception by standard academic metrics is very positive great reviews
Lots of citations. Nobody's like publish something saying I'm wrong, but there
is no engagement
I basically said I'm challenging community to
Publish a proof give me something a patent a paper in nature something showing
the problem is solvable
Typically in computer science. We start by showing what class the problem
belongs to is it solvable partially solvable unsolvable solvable with too many
resources
Other than my research. We don't even know what the state of a problem is and I'm
saying it's unsolvable prove me wrong
And when you say it's unsolvable
What is the response?
so usually I
Reduce it to saying you cannot make a piece of software which is guaranteed to
be secure and safe and the response is well
Of course everyone knows that that's common sense. You didn't discover anything
new and I go well if that's the case and
We only get one chance to get it right. This is not cyber security where
somebody steals your credit card
You'll give them a new credit card. This is existential risk. It can kill
everyone. You're not going to get a second chance
So you need it to be hundred percent safe all the time if it makes one mistake
in a billion and it makes a billion decisions a minute
In ten minutes you're screwed
So very different standards and saying that of course we cannot get perfect
safety is not acceptable
and
Again stock options financial incentives they continue to build it and they
continue to scale and make it more and more powerful
I don't think they can stop if a single CEO says I think this is too dangerous.
My lab will no longer do this research
The whoever's investing in them will pull the funds will replace them
immediately
So nothing's gonna change will sacrifice their own personal interest
But overall I think the company