Free Speech, Antisemitism, and Elon Musk (Robert Wright & Paul Bloom)
Robert Wright's Nonzero
Nonzero
4.7 • 618 Ratings
🗓️ 13 December 2023
⏱️ 47 minutes
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Summary
1:06 The biggest surprise of Paul’s intellectual life 8:41 What the three college presidents should have said about free speech 21:07 Ramaswamy’s hot mic moment: mistake or power move? 23:13 Elon’s scorched-earth moment: power move or mental break? 31:17 Paul gets fact-checked—and likes it 36:30 In aligning AI, should we aim higher than human values? 40:57 Bob DESTROYS Paul’s AI article
Robert Wright (Bloggingheads.tv, The Evolution of God, Nonzero, Why Buddhism Is True) and Paul Bloom (https://smallpotatoes.paulbloom.net, University of Toronto, The Sweet Spot, Against Empathy). Recorded December 11, 2023.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/NonzeroPods
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to Robert Wright's Non-Zero Podcast. |
| 0:33.7 | Hello, Paul. |
| 0:35.5 | Hello, Bob. How are you? |
| 0:37.5 | I'm doing well. Thank you for asking, sir. Let me introduce this. I'm Robert Wright, |
| 0:42.1 | proprietor of the non-zero newsletter. This is a non-zero podcast. You're Paul Bloom, |
| 0:48.2 | proprietor of the falsely modest newsletter, Small Potatoes, and also a professor of psychology at the University |
| 0:56.8 | of Toronto. I am all that. Correct. So far, author of many books. Many. Too many to count or name. |
| 1:07.0 | By the way, have you actually met Jeffrey Hinton, one of your colleagues at the University of Toronto? |
| 1:12.6 | I met him. |
| 1:13.1 | He will not remember this, but I met him when I was a graduate student at MIT. |
| 1:17.3 | He came and gave him. |
| 1:18.6 | Really? |
| 1:19.1 | Yeah. |
| 1:19.3 | Now, he has been called by the New York Times the godfather of artificial intelligence. |
| 1:24.5 | Some might dispute that, but he's definitely, you know, here's a little |
| 1:27.9 | known fact, not to pull rank on you, but I interviewed him in 1983 for a piece I was writing about |
| 1:35.5 | AI. I wound up not quoting him in the piece, regrettably, but I do remember talking to him. |
| 1:40.1 | And he was at that point advocating this besieged insurrectionist minority approach to AI. |
| 1:48.5 | He was not at all mainstream. And he turned out to be right. And that's the, his approach, |
| 1:53.9 | broadly speaking, is behind the large language models that have gotten so much attention. |
| 1:58.8 | Tell me about your own encounter with him. I don't remember. I I'm sure he remembers less, but he was at the time, sort of the enemy. |
| 2:06.3 | The notion of AI that people at MIT took seriously was much more of a symbolic one. |
... |
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