Name: OpenAI CEO on Artificial Intelligence Changing Society
Uploaded: 2023-10-06T20:53:56.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'OpenAI CEO on Artificial Intelligence Changing Society' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-10-06. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'OpenAI CEO on Artificial Intelligence Changing Society' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-10-06. Transcript available.

the Joe Rogan experience and wondering what the potential for the future is and
whether or not that's a good thing I think it's gonna be a great thing but I
think it's not gonna be all a great thing and that that is where I think
that's where all of the complexity comes in for people it's not this like clean
story of we're gonna do this and it's all gonna be great it's we're gonna do
this it's gonna be net great but it's gonna be like a technological
revolution it's gonna be societal revolution and those always come with
change and even if it's like net wonderful you know there's things we're
gonna lose along the way some kinds of jobs some kind of parts of our way of
life some parts of the way we live are gonna change or go away and eat no
matter
how tremendous the upside is there and I believe it will be tremendously good
you
know there's a lot of stuff we got to navigate through to make sure that's
that's a complicated thing for anyone to wrap their heads around and there's
you
know deep and super understandable emotions around that that's a very honest
answer that it's not all gonna be good but it seems inevitable at this point it's
yeah I mean it's definitely inevitable my my view of the world you know when
you're like a kid in school you learn about this technological revolution and
then that one and then that one and my view of the world now sort of looking
backwards and forwards is that this is like one long technological revolution
and
we had sure like first we had to figure out agriculture so that we had the
resources and time to figure out how to build machines then we got this
industrial revolution and that made us learn about a lot of stuff a lot of
other
scientific discovery to let us do the computer revolution and that's now
letting us as we scale up to these massive systems do the AI revolution but it
really
is just one long story of humans discovering science and technology and
co-evolving with it and I think it's the most exciting story of all time I
think
it's how we get to this world of abundance and although you know although we do
have these things to navigate and there will be these downsides if you think
about what it means for the world and for people's quality of lives if we can
get to a
world where the cost of intelligence and the abundance that comes with that the
cost dramatically falls the abundance goes ways up goes way up I think we'll do
the same thing with energy and I think those are the two sort of key inputs to
everything else we want so if we can have abundant and cheap energy and
intelligence that will transform people's lives largely for the better and I
think it's gonna in the same way that if we could go back now 500 years and
look
at someone's life we'd say well there's some great things but they didn't have
this they didn't have that can you believe they didn't have modern medicine
that's what people are gonna look back at us like but in 50 years when you
think
about the people that currently rely on jobs that AI will replace when you
think
about whether it's truck drivers or automation workers people that working in
factory assembly
lines what if anything what strategies can be put to mitigate the negative
downsides of those jobs being
eliminated by AI so I'll talk about some general thoughts but I find making
very specific predictions
difficult because the way the technology goes has been so different than even
my own intuitions or
certainly in my own intuitions could we maybe we should stop there and back up
a
little what we what were your initial thoughts if you had asked me 10 years ago
I
would have said first AI is gonna come for blue-collar labor basically it's
gonna drive
trucks and do factory work and you know it'll handle heavy machinery then maybe
after that it'll do like some kinds of cognitive labor kind of you know but not
it won't be off doing what I think of personally is the really hard stuff it
won't be off proving new mathematical theorems won't be off you know
discovering
new science won't be off writing code and then eventually maybe but maybe last
of all
maybe never because human creativity is this magic special special thing last
of all it'll
come for the creative jobs that's what I would have said now a it looks to me
like
like and for a while AI is much better doing tasks than doing jobs it can do
these little pieces super
but sometimes it goes off the rails I can't keep like very long coherence so
people are instead just able
to do their existing jobs way more productively but you really still need the
human there today and then be it's going exactly the other direction could do
the
creative work first stuff like coding second or they can do things like other
kinds of cognitive labor third and we're the furthest away from like humanoid
robots hmm so back to the initial question if we do have something that
completely eliminates factor workers completely eliminates truck drivers
delivery drivers things along those lines that creates this massive vacuum in
our society
so I think there's things that we're gonna do that are good to do but not
sufficient so I think at some point we will do something like a UBI or some
other kind of like very long-term unemployment insurance something but we'll
have some way of giving people like redistributing money in society as a
cushion for people as people figure out the new jobs but and I maybe I should
touch on that I'm not a believer at all.
That there won't be lots of new jobs.
I think human creativity desire for status wanting different ways to compete
invent new things feel part of a community feel valued that's not going to go
anywhere.
People have worried about that forever.
People have worried about that forever.
What happens is we get better tools and we just invent new things and more many
things to do.
That's not going to go anywhere.
People have worried about that forever.
What happens is we get better tools and we just invent new things and more many
things.
I think human creativity desire for status.
I think human creativity desire for status wanting different ways to compete
invent new things feel part of a community feel valued.
That's not going to go anywhere.
People have worried about that forever.
What happens is we get better tools and we just invent new things and more
amazing things to do and there's a big universe out there and I think I mean
that like literally in that there's like space is really big but also there's
just so much stuff we can all do if we do get to this world of abundant
intelligence where you can sort of just think of a new idea and it gets created.
But again, that doesn't to the point we started with that that doesn't provide
like great solace to people who are losing their jobs today.
So saying there's going to be this great indefinite stuff in the future.
People are like, what are we doing today?
So, you know, well, I think we will as a society do things like UBI and other
ways of redistribution, but I don't think that gets at the core of what people
want.
I think what people want is like agency, self-determination, the ability to
play a role in architecting the future along with the rest of society, the
ability to express themselves and create something meaningful to them.
Also, I think a lot of people work jobs they hate and I think there's we as a
society are always a little bit confused about whether we want to work more or
work less, but somehow we all get to do something meaningful and we all get to
play our role in driving the future forward.
So that's really important and what I hope is as those truck driving, long haul
truck driving jobs go away, which, you know, people have been wrong about
predicting how fast that's going to happen, but it's going to happen.
We figure out not just a way to solve the economic problem by like giving
people the equivalent of money every month, but that there's a way that and we've
had a lot of ideas about this.
There's a way that we like share ownership and decision-making over the future.
A thing I say a lot about AGI is that everyone realizes we're going to have to
share the benefits of that, but we also have to share like the decision-making
over it and access to the system itself.
Like I'd be more excited about a world where we say, rather than give everybody
on earth, like one eight billionth of the AGI money, which we should do that to,
we say you get like one eight billionth of a one eight billionth slice of the
system.
You can sell it to somebody else, you can sell it to a company, you can pool it
with other people, you can use it for whatever creative pursuit you want, you
can use it to figure out how to start some new business.
And with that, you get sort of like a voting right over how this is all going
to be used.
And so the better the AGI gets, the more your little one eight billionth
ownership is worth to you.
We were joking around the other day on the podcast where I was saying that what
we need is an AI government.
So we should have an AI president and have AI right there.
Just make all the decisions?
Yeah, have something that's completely unbiased, absolutely rational, has the
accumulated knowledge of the entire human history at its disposal, including
all knowledge of psychology and psychological study, including UBI, because
that comes with a host of pitfalls and issues that people have with it.
So I'll say something there.
I think we're still very far away from a system that is capable enough and
reliable enough that any of us would want that.
But I'll tell you something I love about that.
Someday, let's say that thing gets built.
The fact that it can go around and talk to every person on Earth, understand
their exact preferences at a very deep level, you know, how they think about
this issue and that one and how they balance the tradeoffs and what they want,
and then understand all of that and, like, collectively optimize for the
collective preferences of humanity or of citizens of the U.S.
That's awesome.
As long as it's not co-opted, right?
Our government currently is co-opted.
That's for sure.
We know for sure that our government is heavily influenced by special interests.
If we could have an artificial intelligence government that has no influence,
nothing has influence on it.
What a fascinating idea.
It's possible.
And I think it might be the only way where you're going to get completely
objective, the absolute most intelligent decision for virtually every problem,
every dilemma that we face currently in society.
Would you truly be comfortable handing over, like, final decision-making and
say, "All right, AI, you got it from here?"
No, no.
But I'm not comfortable doing that with anybody.
Right.
You know?
I mean, I was uncomfortable with the Patriot Act.
Right.
I'm uncomfortable with many decisions that are being made.
It's just there's so much obvious evidence that decisions that are being made
are not being made in the best interest of the overall well of the people.
It's being made in the decisions of whatever gigantic corporations that have
donated to and whatever the military-industrial complex and pharmaceutical-industrial
complex and just the money.
That's really what we know today, that money has a massive influence on our
society and the choices that get made and the overall good or bad for the
population.
I mean, I have no disagreement at all that the current system is super broken,
not working for people, super corrupt, and for sure, like, unbelievably run by
money.
Yeah.
And I think there is a way to do a better job than that with AI in some way.
And this might just be like a factor of sitting with the systems all day and
watching all of the ways they fail.
We got a long way to go.
A long way to go, I'm sure.
But when you think of AGI, when you think of the possible future, like where it
goes to, do you ever extrapolate?
Do you ever like sit and pause and say, well, if this becomes sentient and it
has the ability to make better versions of itself, how long before we're
literally dealing with a god?
Yeah.
So the way that I think about this is, it used to be that like AGI was this
very binary moment.
It was before and after.
And I think I was totally wrong about that.
And the right way to think about it is this continuum of intelligence, this
smooth exponential curve back all the way to that sort of smooth curve curve of
technological revolution.
The amount of compute power we can put into the system, the scientific ideas
about how to make it more efficient and smarter, to give it the ability to do
reasoning, to think about how to improve itself.
That will all come, but my model for a long time, I think if you look at the
world of AGI thinkers, there's sort of two, particularly around the safety
issues you're talking about, there's two axes that matter.
There's the short, what's called short timelines or long timelines, you know,
to the first milestone of AGI, whatever that's going to be.
Is that going to happen in a few years, a few decades, maybe even longer?
Although at this point, I think most people are a few years or a few decades.
And then there's takeoff speed.
Once we get there, from there to that point you were talking about where it's
capable of the rapid self-improvement.
Is that a slower, a faster process?
The world that I think we're heading, that we're in, and also the world that I
think is the most controllable and the safest, is the short timelines and slow
takeoff quadrant.
And I think we're going to have, you know, there were a lot of very smart
people for a while who were like, the thing you were just talking about happens
in a day or three days.
And I don't, that doesn't seem likely to me, given the shape of the technology
as we understand it now.
Now, even if that happens in a decade or three decades, it's still like the
blink of an eye from a historical perspective.
And there are going to be some real challenges to getting that right.
And the decisions we make, the sort of safety systems and the checks that the
world puts in place, how we think about global regulation or rules of the road
from a safety perspective for those projects.
It's super important because you can imagine many things going horribly wrong,
but I've been, I feel cheerful about the progress the world is making towards
taking this seriously.
And, you know, it reminds me of what I've read about the conversations that the
world had right around the development of nuclear weapons.

OpenAI CEO on Artificial Intelligence Changing Society

the Joe Rogan experience and wondering what the potential for the future is and
whether or not that's a good thing I think it's gonna be a great thing but I
think it's not gonna be all a great thing and that that is where I think
that's where all of the complexity comes in for people it's not this like clean
story of we're gonna do this and it's all gonna be great it's we're gonna do
this it's gonna be net great but it's gonna be like a technological
revolution it's gonna be societal revolution and those always come with
change and even if it's like net wonderful you know there's things we're
gonna lose along the way some kinds of jobs some kind of parts of our way of
life some parts of the way we live are gonna change or go away and eat no
matter
how tremendous the upside is there and I believe it will be tremendously good
you
know there's a lot of stuff we got to navigate through to make sure that's
that's a complicated thing for anyone to wrap their heads around and there's
you
know deep and super understandable emotions around that that's a very honest
answer that it's not all gonna be good but it seems inevitable at this point it's
yeah I mean it's definitely inevitable my my view of the world you know when
you're like a kid in school you learn about this technological revolution and
then that one and then that one and my view of the world now sort of looking
backwards and forwards is that this is like one long technological revolution
and
we had sure like first we had to figure out agriculture so that we had the
resources and time to figure out how to build machines then we got this
industrial revolution and that made us learn about a lot of stuff a lot of
other
scientific discovery to let us do the computer revolution and that's now
letting us as we scale up to these massive systems do the AI revolution but it
really
is just one long story of humans discovering science and technology and
co-evolving with it and I think it's the most exciting story of all time I
think
it's how we get to this world of abundance and although you know although we do
have these things to navigate and there will be these downsides if you think
about what it means for the world and for people's quality of lives if we can
get to a
world where the cost of intelligence and the abundance that comes with that the
cost dramatically falls the abundance goes ways up goes way up I think we'll do
the same thing with energy and I think those are the two sort of key inputs to
everything else we want so if we can have abundant and cheap energy and
intelligence that will transform people's lives largely for the better and I
think it's gonna in the same way that if we could go back now 500 years and
look
at someone's life we'd say well there's some great things but they didn't have
this they didn't have that can you believe they didn't have modern medicine
that's what people are gonna look back at us like but in 50 years when you
think
about the people that currently rely on jobs that AI will replace when you
think
about whether it's truck drivers or automation workers people that working in
factory assembly
lines what if anything what strategies can be put to mitigate the negative
downsides of those jobs being
eliminated by AI so I'll talk about some general thoughts but I find making
very specific predictions
difficult because the way the technology goes has been so different than even
my own intuitions or
certainly in my own intuitions could we maybe we should stop there and back up
a
little what we what were your initial thoughts if you had asked me 10 years ago
I
would have said first AI is gonna come for blue-collar labor basically it's
gonna drive
trucks and do factory work and you know it'll handle heavy machinery then maybe
after that it'll do like some kinds of cognitive labor kind of you know but not
it won't be off doing what I think of personally is the really hard stuff it
won't be off proving new mathematical theorems won't be off you know
discovering
new science won't be off writing code and then eventually maybe but maybe last
of all
maybe never because human creativity is this magic special special thing last
of all it'll
come for the creative jobs that's what I would have said now a it looks to me
like
like and for a while AI is much better doing tasks than doing jobs it can do
these little pieces super
but sometimes it goes off the rails I can't keep like very long coherence so
people are instead just able
to do their existing jobs way more productively but you really still need the
human there today and then be it's going exactly the other direction could do
the
creative work first stuff like coding second or they can do things like other
kinds of cognitive labor third and we're the furthest away from like humanoid
robots hmm so back to the initial question if we do have something that
completely eliminates factor workers completely eliminates truck drivers
delivery drivers things along those lines that creates this massive vacuum in
our society
so I think there's things that we're gonna do that are good to do but not
sufficient so I think at some point we will do something like a UBI or some
other kind of like very long-term unemployment insurance something but we'll
have some way of giving people like redistributing money in society as a
cushion for people as people figure out the new jobs but and I maybe I should
touch on that I'm not a believer at all.
That there won't be lots of new jobs.
I think human creativity desire for status wanting different ways to compete
invent new things feel part of a community feel valued that's not going to go
anywhere.
People have worried about that forever.
People have worried about that forever.
What happens is we get better tools and we just invent new things and more many
things to do.
That's not going to go anywhere.
People have worried about that forever.
What happens is we get better tools and we just invent new things and more many
things.
I think human creativity desire for status.
I think human creativity desire for status wanting different ways to compete
invent new things feel part of a community feel valued.
That's not going to go anywhere.
People have worried about that forever.
What happens is we get better tools and we just invent new things and more
amazing things to do and there's a big universe out there and I think I mean
that like literally in that there's like space is really big but also there's
just so much stuff we can all do if we do get to this world of abundant
intelligence where you can sort of just think of a new idea and it gets created.
But again, that doesn't to the point we started with that that doesn't provide
like great solace to people who are losing their jobs today.
So saying there's going to be this great indefinite stuff in the future.
People are like, what are we doing today?
So, you know, well, I think we will as a society do things like UBI and other
ways of redistribution, but I don't think that gets at the core of what people
want.
I think what people want is like agency, self-determination, the ability to
play a role in architecting the future along with the rest of society, the
ability to express themselves and create something meaningful to them.
Also, I think a lot of people work jobs they hate and I think there's we as a
society are always a little bit confused about whether we want to work more or
work less, but somehow we all get to do something meaningful and we all get to
play our role in driving the future forward.
So that's really important and what I hope is as those truck driving, long haul
truck driving jobs go away, which, you know, people have been wrong about
predicting how fast that's going to happen, but it's going to happen.
We figure out not just a way to solve the economic problem by like giving
people the equivalent of money every month, but that there's a way that and we've
had a lot of ideas about this.
There's a way that we like share ownership and decision-making over the future.
A thing I say a lot about AGI is that everyone realizes we're going to have to
share the benefits of that, but we also have to share like the decision-making
over it and access to the system itself.
Like I'd be more excited about a world where we say, rather than give everybody
on earth, like one eight billionth of the AGI money, which we should do that to,
we say you get like one eight billionth of a one eight billionth slice of the
system.
You can sell it to somebody else, you can sell it to a company, you can pool it
with other people, you can use it for whatever creative pursuit you want, you
can use it to figure out how to start some new business.
And with that, you get sort of like a voting right over how this is all going
to be used.
And so the better the AGI gets, the more your little one eight billionth
ownership is worth to you.
We were joking around the other day on the podcast where I was saying that what
we need is an AI government.
So we should have an AI president and have AI right there.
Just make all the decisions?
Yeah, have something that's completely unbiased, absolutely rational, has the
accumulated knowledge of the entire human history at its disposal, including
all knowledge of psychology and psychological study, including UBI, because
that comes with a host of pitfalls and issues that people have with it.
So I'll say something there.
I think we're still very far away from a system that is capable enough and
reliable enough that any of us would want that.
But I'll tell you something I love about that.
Someday, let's say that thing gets built.
The fact that it can go around and talk to every person on Earth, understand
their exact preferences at a very deep level, you know, how they think about
this issue and that one and how they balance the tradeoffs and what they want,
and then understand all of that and, like, collectively optimize for the
collective preferences of humanity or of citizens of the U.S.
That's awesome.
As long as it's not co-opted, right?
Our government currently is co-opted.
That's for sure.
We know for sure that our government is heavily influenced by special interests.
If we could have an artificial intelligence government that has no influence,
nothing has influence on it.
What a fascinating idea.
It's possible.
And I think it might be the only way where you're going to get completely
objective, the absolute most intelligent decision for virtually every problem,
every dilemma that we face currently in society.
Would you truly be comfortable handing over, like, final decision-making and
say, "All right, AI, you got it from here?"
No, no.
But I'm not comfortable doing that with anybody.
Right.
You know?
I mean, I was uncomfortable with the Patriot Act.
Right.
I'm uncomfortable with many decisions that are being made.
It's just there's so much obvious evidence that decisions that are being made
are not being made in the best interest of the overall well of the people.
It's being made in the decisions of whatever gigantic corporations that have
donated to and whatever the military-industrial complex and pharmaceutical-industrial
complex and just the money.
That's really what we know today, that money has a massive influence on our
society and the choices that get made and the overall good or bad for the
population.
I mean, I have no disagreement at all that the current system is super broken,
not working for people, super corrupt, and for sure, like, unbelievably run by
money.
Yeah.
And I think there is a way to do a better job than that with AI in some way.
And this might just be like a factor of sitting with the systems all day and
watching all of the ways they fail.
We got a long way to go.
A long way to go, I'm sure.
But when you think of AGI, when you think of the possible future, like where it
goes to, do you ever extrapolate?
Do you ever like sit and pause and say, well, if this becomes sentient and it
has the ability to make better versions of itsel