Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1350 - Nick Bostrom
Uploaded: 2019-09-12T01:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1350 - Nick Bostrom' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-09-12. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1350 - Nick Bostrom' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-09-12. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1350 - Nick Bostrom

and here we go. All right Nick this is one of the things that scares people
more
than anything is the idea that we're creating something or someone's gonna
create something it's gonna be smarter than us it's gonna replace us. Is that
something we should really be concerned about? I presume you're referring to
babies. I'm referring to artificial intelligence. Yes well it's the the big
fear and the big hope I think. Both? At the same time yeah. How is it the big
hope?
Well there are a lot of things wrong with the world as it is now. Pull this up
to your face if you would. All the problems we have most of them could be
solved if we were smarter or if we had somebody on our side who are a lot
smarter with better technology and so forth. Also I think if we want to imagine
some really grand future where humanity or our descendants when they go out and
colonize the universe I think that's likely to happen if it's gonna happen at
all after we have super intelligence that then develops the technology to make
that
possible. The real question is whether or not we would be able to harness this
intelligence or whether it would dominate. Yeah that certainly is one
question. Not the only. You could imagine that we harness it but then use it
for bad
purposes as we have a lot of other technologies through history. So I think
there are really two challenges we need to meet. One is to make sure we can
align it
with human values and then make sure that we together do something better with
it than fighting wars or
oppressing one another. I think well what I'm worried about more than anything
is that
human beings are going to become obsolete. That we're going to invent something
that's the
next stage of evolution. I'm really concerned with that. I'm really concerned
with if we look
back on ancient hominids, Australopithecus, just think of some primitive
ancestor of man. We don't want to go back to that like that. That's a terrible
way to live. I'm worried that what we're creating is the next thing.
I think we don't necessarily want or at least I wouldn't be totally thrilled
with with a future where humanity as it is now was was the last and final word
the like ultimate version beyond. Right. I think there's a lot of room for
improvement. Sure. But not anything that is different is an improvement. Right.
So so the key would be I think to find some path forward.
where the best in us can continue to exist and develop to even greater levels
and maybe at the end of that path. It looks nothing like we do now. Maybe it's
not two legged two armed creatures running around with three pounds of thinking
matter. Right. It might be something quite different. But as long as it what
what we value is present there and ideally in a much higher degree than in the
current world and that could count as a success. Yeah. The idea that we're in a
state of evolution.
that we are just like we look at ancient hominids that we are eventually going
to become something more advanced or at least more complicated than we are now.
But what I'm worried is that biological life itself has so many limitations.
When we look at the evolution of technology. If you look at Moore's law or if
you just look at new cell phones like they just released a new iPhone yesterday
and they talk about all these incremental increases in the ability to take
photographs and wide angle lenses and night mode and a new chip that works even
faster.
these things there's not the word evolution is incorrect but the innovation of
technology is so much more rapid than anything we could ever even imagine biologically.
Like if we had a thing that we'd create if we created instead of artificial
intelligence in terms of like some something in a chip or computer. If we
created a life form a biological life form. But this biological life form was
improving radically. Every year like it didn't even exist. Like the iPhone
existed in 2000.
2007. That's when it was invented. If we had something that was 12 years old
but all of a sudden was infinitely faster and better and smarter and wiser than
it was 12 years ago. The newest version of it version X1.
we would we would we would start going whoa whoa hit the brakes on this thing
man. How how many more generations before this thing's way smarter than us. How
many more generations before this thing thinks that human beings are obsolete.
Yeah it's coming coming coming at us fast it feels like I mean but some some
people think oh it's uh slowing down now.
Um who thinks it's slowing down. Well don't they have like Tyler Cowen and even
uh um Peter Thiel sometimes goes on about the pace of innovation not really
being what it needs to be.
Um I mean maybe it was faster in like 1890s or but but still compared to almost
all of human history it seems like a period of unprecedented rapid progress
right now.
Unprecedented. I'd say so yeah I mean except for maybe a couple of decades 100
years ago when there was a lot of you know electricity the whole thing.
Yeah. No I agree. Um I just I'm I don't think it's a concern because I'm it's
more of a curiosity to me.
I mean I am concerned but the more I look at it and go well this is see it
seems inevitable that we're we're going to run into artificial intelligence.
But the questions are so open-ended we really don't know when we don't really
don't know what form it's going to take and we really don't know what it's
going to do to us.
Yeah so I see it as not something that um should be avoided uh neither
something that we should just be completely gung-ho about but more like a kind
of gate through which we will have to pass at some point.
All paths that are both plausible and lead to really great futures I think at
some point involve the development of greater than human intelligence machine
intelligence.
And so that our focus should be on getting our act together as much as we can
in whatever period of time we have before that occurs.
Prepare ourselves.
Well I mean that might involve doing some some research into various technical
questions as how you build these systems so that we actually understand what
they are doing and they have some you know intended impact on the world.
It might also if we are able to get our act together a little bit on the kind
of global political scene um a little bit more peace and love in the world
would be good I think.
Sure it'd be nice.
Um so um and and then like refraining from destroying ourselves through some
other mean before we even get a chance to try to uh needle our way through this
uh this gate.
Well that's certainly possible.
Well that's certainly possible.
We were certainly capable of screwing it all up.
Where is the current state of technology now in regards to artificial
intelligence and how far away do you think we are from AGI?
Well different people have different views on that.
I think the uh the truth of the matter is that it's very hard to to have
accurate views about the timelines for these things that that's you know are
still involved kind of beginning breakthroughs.
Big new breakthroughs that have to happen.
Um certainly I mean over the last eight or ten years there has been a lot of
excitement with the deep learning revolution.
Um things that I mean it used to be that people thought of AI as this kind of
autistic savant really good at logic and counting and memorizing facts but with
with no no intuition.
Um and there's this deep learning revolution when you began to do these deep
neural networks that you kind of solved perception in some sense.
Um you can have computers that can see that that can hear and that have visual
intuition.
Um so so so that that has enabled the whole wide suite of applications uh which
makes it commercially valuable which then drives a lot of investment in it
which you know there's a so there's now quite a lot of momentum.
Um in in machine learning and trying to kind of stay ahead of that.
It's interesting that when we think about artificial intelligence and whatever
potential form that it's going to take.
If you look at films like uh 2001 like Hal like open the door Hal you know like
we think of something that's communicating to us like like a person would and
maybe is a little bit colder and doesn't doesn't share our values and has a
more pragmatic view of life and death and and things.
When we think of intelligence though I think intelligence in our mind is almost
inexorably connected to all the things that make us human like emotions and and
and ambition and all these things like the reason why we innovate.
Like we it's not really clear like why we innovate because we enjoy innovation
and because we want to make the world a better place and because we want to fix
some problems that we've created and we want to solve some limitations of the
human body and the environment that we live in.
But we sort of assume that intelligence that we create will also have some
motivations.
Well there is a fairly large class of possible structures you could do if you
want to do anything that has any kind of cognitive or intellectual capacity at
all.
A large class of those would be what we might call agents.
So these would be yeah systems that interact with the world in pursuit of some
goal.
Um and if there are a sophisticated class of agents they they can plan ahead
the sequence of actions like more primitive agents might just have reflexes.
Um but but the sophisticated aid and might have a model of the world where it
can kind of think ahead before it starts doing stuff.
It can kind of think what what would I need to do in order to reach this
desired state and then recent backwards from that.
So I think it's a fairly natural it's not the only possible cognitive system
you could build but it's also not this weird bizarre special case that you know
it's a fairly natural thing to aim for.
If you are able to specify the goal something you want to achieve but you don't
know how to achieve it a natural way of trying to go about that is by building
the system that has this goal and is an agent and then moves around and tries
different things.
And eventually perhaps learn to solve that task.
Do you anticipate different types of artificial intelligence like artificial
intelligence that mimics the human emotions like do you think that people will
construct something that's very similar to us in a way that we can interact
with it in common terms.
Or do you think it will be almost like communicating with an alien.
So there are different scenarios here I mean I guess my guess is that the first
thing that actually achieve super intelligence would not be very human like.
There are different possible ways you could try to get to this level of
technology what one would be by trying to reverse engineer the human brain.
You might imagine if you just made an exact duplicate in silicon of the human
brain like every neuron had some counterpart.
So that seems technologically very difficult to do but it wouldn't require a
big theoretical breakthrough to do it.
You could just through if you had sufficiently good microscopy and large enough
computers and enough elbow grease you could kind of.
But it seems to me plausible that what will work before we are able to do it
that way will be some more synthetic approach work.
That would only be a very rough resemblance maybe with the neocortex.
Yeah that's one of the big questions right whether or not we can replicate all
the functions of the human brain in the way it functions in like mimic it
exactly.
Or whether we could have some sort of superior method that achieves the same
results that the human brain does in terms of its ability to calculate and
reason and do multiple tasks at the same time.
Yeah and I also think that maybe once you have a sufficiently high level of
this general form of intelligence then you could use that maybe to emulate or
mimic things that we do differently.
So maybe we, our cortex is quite limited so we rely a lot on earlier
neurological structures that we have.
We have to 