Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2076 - Tristan Harris & Aza Razkin
Uploaded: 2023-12-19T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2076 - Tristan Harris & Aza Razkin' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-12-19. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2076 - Tristan Harris & Aza Razkin' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-12-19. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2076 - Tristan Harris & Aza Razkin

Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
We're up. What's going on? How are you guys?
All right. Doing okay.
A little apprehensive. There's a little tension in the air.
No, I don't think so.
Well, the subject is...
So let's get into it.
What's the latest?
Let's see. First time I saw you, Joe, was in 2020, like a month after The
Social Dilemma came out.
And so that was, you know, we think of that as kind of first contact between
humanity and AI.
And before I say that, I should introduce Aza is the co-founder of the Center
for Humane Technology.
We did The Social Dilemma together.
We're both in The Social Dilemma.
And Aza also has a project that is using AI to translate animal communication
called the Earth Species Project.
I was just reading something about whales yesterday.
Is that regarding that?
Yeah. I mean, we work across a number of different species.
Dolphins, whales, orangutans, crows.
And I think the reason why Tristan is bringing it up is because we're like this
conversation, we're going to sort of dive into like, which way is AI taking us
as a species, as a civilization?
And it can be easy to hear just critiques is coming from critics, but we've
both been builders.
And I've been working on AI since, you know, really thinking about it since
2013, but like building since 2017.
So this thing that I was reading about with whales, there's some new scientific
breakthrough where they're understanding patterns in the whales language.
And what they were saying was the next step would be to have AI work on this
and try to break it down and break it down into pronouns, nouns, verbs, or
whatever they're using and decipher some sort of language out of it.
Yeah, that's exactly right. And what most people don't realize is the amount
that we actually already know.
So dolphins, for instance, have names that they call each other by.
Wow.
Parrots, turns out, also have names that they're like the mother will like
whisper in each different child's ear and like teach them their name to go back
and forth until the child gets it.
Oh.
One of my favorite examples is actually off the coast of Norway every year.
There's a group of false killer whales that speak one way and a group of
dolphins that speak another way.
And they come together in a super pod and hunt.
And when they do, they speak a third different thing.
Whoa.
The whales and the dolphins.
The whales and the dolphins.
So they have a kind of like interlingua or lingua franca.
What is a false killer whale?
It's a sort of a messed up name, but it's just, it's a species related to
killer whales.
They look sort of like killer whales, but a little different.
So it's like a, in the dolphin genus.
Yeah, exactly.
Oh, wow.
These guys.
Okay.
I've seen those before.
It's like a fool's gold type thing.
Like it looks like gold, but it's.
God, they're cool looking.
Yeah.
Wow.
How cool are they?
Mm-hmm.
God, look at that thing.
That's amazing.
And so they hunt together and use a third language.
Yeah.
They speak a third different way.
Is it limited?
Oh, well, here's the thing.
Like we, we just.
We don't know.
We don't know yet.
Yeah.
Did you ever read any of Lily's work, John Lily?
Mm-hmm.
He was the wildest one.
Yeah.
Right.
That guy was convinced that he could take acid and use a sensory deprivation
tank to communicate with dolphins.
I did not know that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He was out there.
Yeah.
He had some really good early work and then he sort of like went down the acid
route.
Well, yeah.
He went down the ketamine route too.
Well, his thing was the sensory deprivation tank.
Uh-huh.
You know, that was his invention.
And he, he did it specifically.
Oh, he invented the sensory deprivation tank.
We had a bunch of different models.
The one that we use now, the one that we have out here is just a thousand
pounds of Epsom salts into 94 degree water.
And you float in it and it's, you know, and you close the door, total silence,
total darkness.
His original one was like a scuba helmet and you were just kind of suspended by
straps and you were just in water.
And he had it so he could defecate and urinate and he had like, like a diaper
system or some sort of a pipe connected to him.
So he would stay in there for days.
Yeah.
He was out of his mind.
Well, he sort of set back like the study of animal communication.
Well, the problem was the masturbating the dolphins.
So what happened was there was a female researcher and she lived in a house and
the house was like three feet submerged of water.
And so she lived with this dolphin.
But the only way to get the dolphin to try to communicate with her is the
dolphin was always aroused.
So she had to manually take care of the dolphin and then the dolphin would
participate.
But until that, the dolphin was only interested in sex.
Yeah.
And so they found out about that.
And, you know, the Puritans and the scientific community decided that that was
a no, no.
You cannot do that.
I don't know why.
Probably she shouldn't have told anybody.
I mean, I guess this is like, this is the 60s, right?
Was it?
Yeah, I think that's right.
So sexual revolution, people are like, a little bit more open to this idea of
jerking off a dolphin.
And this is definitely not the direction that I thought it was going to go.
Yeah.
Welcome to the show.
Talking about AI risk and, you know, talking about.
I'll give you, though, my one other, like my most favorite study, which is a
1994 University of Hawaii study, which they taught dolphins two gestures.
And the first gesture was, do something you've never done before.
Innovate.
And what's crazy is that the dolphins, like, can understand that very abstract
topic.
They'll remember everything they've done before.
And then they'll understand the concept of negation, not one of those things.
And then they will invent some new thing they've never done before.
So that's already cool enough.
But then they'll say to two dolphins, they'll teach them the gestures, do
something together.
And they'll say to the two dolphins, do something you've never done before
together.
And they go down and exchange sonic information.
And they come up and they do the same new trick that they have never done
before at the same time.
They're coordinating.
Exactly.
I like that.
I like that bridge.
So their language is so complex that it actually can encompass describing
movements to each other.
That's what it appears.
Like, it doesn't, of course, prove representational language.
But it certainly, for me, puts the, like, Occam's razor, like, on the other
foot.
Like, it seems like there's really something there.
And that's what the project I work on, Earth Species, is about.
Because, you know, there's one way of diagnosing, like, all of the biggest
problems that humanity faces, whether it's, like, climate or whether it's
opioid epidemic or loneliness.
It's because there's a, we're doing narrow optimization at the expense of the
whole, which is another way of saying disconnection from ourselves, from each
other.
What do you mean by that, narrow optimization at the expense of the whole?
What do you mean by that?
Well, if you optimize for GDP and, you know, more social media addiction and
breakdown of shared reality is good for GDP, then we're going to do that.
If you optimize for engagement and attention, giving people personalized
outrage content is really good for that narrow goal, the narrow objective of
getting maximum attention, causing the breakdown of shared reality.
So, in general, when we maximize for some narrow goal that doesn't encompass
the actual whole, like, social media is affecting the whole of human
consciousness, but it's not optimizing for the health of this comprehensive
whole of our psychological well-being, our relationships, human connection,
presence, not distraction, our shared reality.
So, if you're affecting the whole, but you're optimizing for some narrow thing,
that breaks that whole.
So, you're managing, think of it like an irresponsible management, like you're
kind of operating in an adolescent way, because you're just caring about some
small, narrow thing while you're actually affecting the whole thing.
And I think a lot of what, you know, motivates our work is when humanity gets
itself into trouble with technology, where you, it's not about what the
technology does, it's about what the technology is being optimized for.
We often talk about Charlie Munger, who just passed away, Warren Buffett's
business partner, who said, if you show me the incentive, I'll show you the
outcome.
Meaning, to go back to our first conversation with social media, in 2013, when
I first started working on this, it was obvious to me, and obvious to both of
us, we were working informally together back then, that if you were optimizing
for attention, and there's only so much, you were going to get a race to the
bottom of the brainstem for attention.
Because there's only so much, I'm going to, I'm going to have to go lower in
the brainstem, lower into dopamine, lower into social validation, lower into
sexualization, all that other worse or angels of human nature type stuff, to
win at the game of getting attention.
And that would produce a more addicted, distracted, narcissistic, blah, blah,
blah, everybody knows society.
The point of it is that people back then said, well, which way is social media
is going to go?
It's like, well, there's all these amazing benefits.
We're going to give people the ability to speak to each other, have a public
platform, help small, medium-sized businesses.
We're going to help people join like-minded communities, you know, cancer
patients who find other rare cancer patients on Facebook groups.
And that's all true, but what was the underlying incentive of social media?
Like, what was the narrow goal that it was actually optimized for?
And it wasn't helping cancer patients find other cancer patients.
That's not what Mark Zuckerberg wakes up every day and the whole team at
Facebook wakes up every day to do.
It happens, but the goal is the incentive.
The incentive, the profit motive was attention, and that produced the outcome,
the more addicted, distracted, polarized society.
And the reason we're saying all this is that we really care about which way AI
goes.
And there's a lot of confusion about are we going to get the promise or are we
going to get the peril?
Are we going to get the climate change solutions and the personal tutors for
everybody and, you know, solve cancer?
Or are we going to get, like, these catastrophic, you know, biological weapons
and doomsday type stuff, right?
And the reason that we're here and we wanted to do is to clarify the way that
we think we can tell humanity which way we're going,
which is that the incentive guiding this race to release AI is not – so what
is the incentive?
And it's basically OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, they're all
racing to deploy their big AI system,
to scale their AI system and to deploy it to as many people as possible and
keep outmaneuvering and outshowing up the other guy.
So, like, I'm going to release Gemini.
Google just a couple days ago released Gemini.
It's this super big new model.
And they're trying to prove it's a better model than OpenAI's GPT-4, which is
the one that's on, you know, chat GPT right now.
And so they're competing for market dominance by scaling up their model and
saying it can do more things.
It can translate more languages.
It can, you know, know how to help you with more tasks.
And then they're all competing to kind of do that.
So feel free to jump in.
Yeah.
I mean, what –
I mean, the question is what's at stake here, right?
Yeah, exactly.
The other interesting thing to ask is, you know, Social Dilemma comes out.
It's seen by 150 million people.
But have we gotten a big shift to the social media companies?
And the answer is no, we haven't gotten a big shift.
And the question then is like, why?
And it's – that it's hard to shift them n