Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2044 - Sam Altman
Uploaded: 2023-10-06T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2044 - Sam Altman' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-10-06. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2044 - Sam Altman' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-10-06. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2044 - Sam Altman

Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
Hello, Sam. What's happening?
Not much.
Thanks for coming in here. Appreciate it.
Thanks for having me.
So, what have you done?
Like ever?
No, I mean, what have you done with AI?
I mean, it's, um, one of the things, um, about this is, I mean,
I think everyone is fascinated by it.
I mean, everyone is, uh, absolutely blown away at the current capability
and wondering what the potential for the future is
and whether or not that's a good thing.
I think it's going to be a great thing,
but I think it's not going to 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 going to do this and it's all going to
be great.
It's, we're going to do this.
It's going to be net great, but it's going to be like a technological
revolution.
It's going to be a societal revolution.
And those always come with change.
And even if it's like net wonderful, you know, there's things we're going to
lose along the way.
Some kinds of jobs, some kinds of parts of our way of life,
some parts of the way we live are going to change or go away.
And eat no matter how tremendous the upside is there.
And I, 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 going to 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 too.
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 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 going to, 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 going to 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 work in factory assembly lines,
what, if anything, what strategies can be put to mitigate the negative downsides
of those jobs being eliminated by AI?
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 my own intuitions.
Maybe we should stop there and back up a little.
What were your initial thoughts?
If you had asked me 10 years ago, I would have said,
first, AI is going to come for blue-collar labor, basically.
It's going to 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 as the really hard
stuff.
It won't be off proving new mathematical theorems.
It won't be off, you know, discovering new science.
It won't be off writing code.
And then eventually, maybe, but maybe last of all, maybe never,
because human creativity is this magic 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, and for a while,
AI is much better at doing tasks than doing jobs.
It can do these little pieces super well, but sometimes it goes off the rails.
It 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 B, it's going exactly the other direction.
You could do the creative work first, stuff like coding second.
They can do things like other kinds of cognitive labor third,
and we're the furthest away from like humanoid robots.
So back to the initial question.
If we do have something that completely eliminates factory 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 going to 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 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.
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,
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 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.
And 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 that we all get to do something meaningful
and we all get to play our role in driving the future forward.
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 have 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 too,
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.
We should have an AI president
and have AI right things.
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,
how they think about this issue and that one
and how they balance the trade-offs
and what they want,
and then understand all of that
and 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 there?
No, but I'm not comfortable
doing that with anybody.
Right.
You know, I mean,
I don't,
I was uncomfortable
with the Patriot Act.
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 then 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.
Yeah, 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.
And I think there is a way
to do a better job than that
with AI in some way,
but,
and this might just be like
a factor of sitting
with the systems all day
and watching all of the ways they fail.
We've 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 t