Name: Sam Harris on AI (from Joe Rogan Experience #804)
Uploaded: 2016-06-06T20:27:35.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Sam Harris on AI (from Joe Rogan Experience #804)' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2016-06-06. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Sam Harris on AI (from Joe Rogan Experience #804)' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2016-06-06. Transcript available.

Sam Harris on AI (from Joe Rogan Experience #804)

Hello freak bitches
Do you think in our lifetimes and or in our children's lifetime it's feasible
that?
We figure out a way in some way to I'm not
Endorsing like taking people's money and giving it to other people but in some
sort of a way to eliminate poverty
Is that even possible? Is it ever gonna be possible to completely eliminate
poverty worldwide and within like a lifetime?
Well, I think we talked about this the last time when we spoke about AI, but I
mean this is the implication of
Much of what we talked about here if you imagine
Building the perfect labor-saving technology, right where you imagine just
having a
machine that can build any machine that can do any human labor
You're powered by sunlight more or less for the cost of raw materials, right?
So you're talking about the ultimate wealth generation device and now we're not
just talking about blue-collar labor
We're talking about the kind of labor
You and I do right so like the artistic labor and scientific labor and
You know good just a machine that comes up with good ideas, right?
We're talking about general artificial intelligence
This if in the right political and economic system
This would just cancel any need for people to have to work to survive
Right, it just would be there'd be enough of everything to go around and then
the question would be
Do we have the right political and economic system where we where we actually
could?
spread that wealth or would we just would we just find ourselves in some kind
of horrendous?
arms race and and a situation of of wealth inequality
unlike any we've ever seen
It's a we don't we don't have the it's not in place now
I mean if someone just handed us this device, you know if if
And it were you know all of my concerns about AI were gone. I mean there's no
question about this thing
Doing things. We didn't want it would do exactly what we want when we want it
And there's no there's just no danger of it of its interest becoming misaligned
with our own
It's just like a perfect Oracle and a perfect designer of new technology
If it was handed to us now
you know, I would expect
just
complete chaos, right? I would explain if if
Facebook built this thing tomorrow and announced it or rumor spread that they
had built it, right?
What are the implications for Russia and China well?
Insofar as they are as adversarial as they are now
It would be rational for them to just nuke California, right because it because
the happiness device
It's just a winner-take-all
Scenario I mean you win the world if you have this device you can turn the
lights off in China
You know the moment you have this device you can just even it's just the
ultimate
because literally
We're talking about and you know many people are may doubt whether such a thing
is possible, but
again, we're just talking about
the implications of
intelligence that can make refinements to itself
in
over time course that is
There's no relationship to what we experience as apes, right?
So you're talking about a system that can make changes to its own source code
And become better and better at learning and more and more knowledgeable has
instantaneous if we give it access to the internet
it has instantaneous access to all human and machine knowledge and
It does you know thousands of years of work every
every day of
Our lives right there's thousands of years of equivalent human-level
intellectual work
It's just a it's on I mean our intuitions completely falter it to capture just
how
immensely powerful such a thing would be and there's no reason to think
This isn't possible. I mean the only the most skeptical thing you can honestly
say about this is that this isn't coming soon
Right, it's like this is not but to say that this is not possible
Makes no scientific sense at this point. There's no reason to think that
a
sufficiently advanced digital computer
can't
Can't instantiate general intelligence of the sort that we have there's no
reason to think that I mean the intelligence has to be at bottom
Some form of information processing and if we get the algorithm right with
enough
hardware resources and
The limit is definitely not the hardware at this point. It's it's the the
algorithms
There's just no reason to think this could can't take off and and scale and
that we would be in the presence of something that is that is
like having and an alternate human civilization in a box that is making
Thousands of years of progress every day, right? So just imagine that if you
had in a box, you know the ten smartest people who have ever lived and
You know every time every week they make 20,000 years of progress right because
because this that is the actual you know, we're talking about
Electronic circuits being a million times faster than than biological circuits
so even if it was just and I believe I said this the last time we talked about
AI, but this is you know
This is what brings it home for me even if it's just a matter of faster, right?
It's not it's not anything especially spooky. It's just this can do human level
intellectual work, but just a million times faster and
Again, this totally under sells the prospects of super intelligence. I think
you know human level intellectual work is is
It's gonna seem pretty paltry in the end
But if you just imagine just speeding it up if you imagine if we were doing
this podcast
Imagine how smart I would seem if between every sentence I
Actually had a year to figure out what I was gonna say next, right?
and so I say this one sentence and you say you asked me a question and then in
my world
I just have a year I'm gonna go spend the next year getting getting ready for
you know for Joe and it's gonna be perfect and
This is just compounding upon itself. Like not only can I not not only
I am I working faster?
Ultimately, I can change my my ability to work faster. I mean like we're
talking about software that can change itself
You're talking about something that that becomes you know self-improving so
there's a compounding function there, but
it's the point is it's unimaginable in terms of how
How much change this could affect and if you imagine the best-case scenario
where this is under our control right where there's no alignment
Problem where it's just it doesn't this thing doesn't do anything that
surprises us
This thing will always take direction from us it will never it will never
develop interests of its own right
Which is again the fear but let's let's just say this is totally obedient
It's just an oracle and a genie route, you know in in one and
You know we say you know cure Alzheimer's and it cures Alzheimer's
You know you solve the the protein folding problem and and it just as it's just
off and running and to develop a perfect nanotechnology and it does that
This is all again going back to David Deutsch
There's no reason to think this isn't possible because anything that's
compatible with the laws of physics can be done
Given the requisite knowledge, right? So you just you get enough intelligence
As long as you're not violating the laws of physics, you can do something in
that space
So but the problem is this is a winner-take-all scenario, so Facebook does it
tomorrow and
China and Russia find out about it
They can't afford to wait around to see whether the US decides to do something
not entirely selfish with this right because
That they're with their worst fears could be realized if Donald Trump is
president
What's Donald Trump going to do with a perfect AI when he has already told the
world that he you know hates Islam, right?
it's a it's a
We would have to have a political and economic system that allowed us to absorb
this ultimate wealth saving it will wealth producing technology and
And and again, so this may all sound like pure sci-fi craziness to people
I don't think there is any reason to believe that it is but walk way back from
that edge of craziness and just look at
Dumb AI, you know narrow AI just self-driving cars and automation and
Intelligent algorithms that can do human level work
That is already poised to change our world
Massively and create massive wealth inequality which we have we have to figure
out how to spread
This wealth, you know, what do you do when you can automate?
50% of
Human labor were you paying attention to the artificial intelligence go match?
Yeah, yeah
I don't actually play go so I wasn't paying that kind of attention to it, but I'm
aware of what happened there and you know the rules of go
Not not so that I know actually I don't I don't I don't play it I know I don't
I don't know I don't I know vaguely how you how you
How it looks when a game is played, but I don't it's supposed to be very
complicated though. Oh, yeah more complicated and more possibilities
Then just yeah, and that's why I took 20 years longer for
Look a computer to be the best player in the world
It's it is
Did you see how the computer did it to?
well, I didn't I I know I mean this is so the company that did it is
Deep mind which is was acquired by Google and they're at the cutting edge of AI
research and
yeah, well, it's
the cartoons are
Unfortunately, not so far from what is possible, but
the
Yeah, I mean there's
Again, this is no this is not general intelligence like we're talking about
These are not machines that it can even play tic-tac-toe right now. There's
some there. There have been some
moves away from this or like deep mind has trained
An algorithm to play all of the Atari games like from 1980 or whenever
And it is very quickly became superhuman on most of them
I think I don't think it's superhuman on all of them yet, but it could play in
space invaders and all these and break out all these games that are
Highly unlike one another and it's the same algorithm
Becoming expert and superhuman in all of them and that's that's a new paradigm
and it's using a technique called deep learning
for that and that's and that's been you know very exciting and I will be
incredibly useful, you know
I mean this is I mean the other the flip side of all this I know that
everything I tend to say on this sounds scary, but
This is all like I mean the the next scariest thing is not to do any of this
stuff
It's like we we want intelligence we want automation. We want to figure out how
to solve problems that we can't yet solve
So like intelligence is the best thing we've got so we want more of it
But we have to have a system where I mean it's scary that we have a system
where if you gave the best possible version of it
To one research lab or to one government
It's not obvious that that wouldn't destroy
Humanity right that would that wouldn't lead to massive dislocations where you'd
have you know some trillionaire who's trumpeting his new device and and
Just you know 50% unemployment in the u.s. You know in a month, right?
I mean like you like it's not obvious how we would absorb this level of
progress
And we we definitely have to to figure out how to do it and of course we can't
assume the best-case scenario, right?
That's the best-case scenario. I think there's a few people that put it the way
you put it that
Terrify the shit out of people right and everyone else seems to have this rosy
vision of increased longevity and automated
Everything and everything fixed and easy to get to work and medical procedures
would be easier
They're gonna know how to do it, but everybody looks at it like we are always
going to be here
But are we obsolete? I mean is this idea of a living thing?
That's creative and wrapped up in emotions and lust and desires and jealousy
and all the pettiness that we see celebrated all the time
We still see it. It's not getting any better, right? If if are we obsolete?
I mean what if this thing comes along and says listen, there's a way to do you
can abandon all that stupid shit?
You can abandon all that makes you all the stuff that makes you fun to be
around
Yeah, it also fucks with you can live three times as long without that stuff.
Oh, I I think it
It would in the best case would usher in a a