Making Sense of Artificial Intelligence | Episode 1 of The Essential Sam Harris

Making Sense with Sam Harris

Waking Up with Sam Harris

Samharris, Currentevents, Politics, Ethics, Religion, Neuroscience, Science, Society & Culture, Philosophy

4.6 • 29.1K Ratings

🗓️ 22 November 2022

⏱️ 68 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Filmmaker Jay Shapiro has produced a new series of audio documentaries, exploring the major topics that Sam has focused on over the course of his career.

Each episode weaves together original analysis, critical perspective, and novel thought experiments with some of the most compelling exchanges from the Making Sense archive. Whether you are new to a particular topic, or think you have your mind made up about it, we think you’ll find this series fascinating.

In this episode, we explore the landscape of Artificial Intelligence. We’ll listen in on Sam’s conversation with decision theorist and artificial-intelligence researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky, as we consider the potential dangers of AI – including the control problem and the value-alignment problem – as well as the concepts of Artificial General Intelligence, Narrow Artificial Intelligence, and Artificial Super Intelligence.

We’ll then be introduced to philosopher Nick Bostrom’s “Genies, Sovereigns, Oracles, and Tools,” as physicist Max Tegmark outlines just how careful we need to be as we travel down the AI path. Computer scientist Stuart Russell will then dig deeper into the value-alignment problem and explain its importance.

We’ll hear from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt about the geopolitical realities of AI terrorism and weaponization. We’ll then touch the topic of consciousness as Sam and psychologist Paul Bloom turn the conversation to the ethical and psychological complexities of living alongside humanlike AI. Psychologist Alison Gopnik then reframes the general concept of intelligence to help us wonder if the kinds of systems we’re building using “Deep Learning” are really marching us towards our super-intelligent overlords.

Finally, physicist David Deutsch will argue that many value-alignment fears about AI are based on a fundamental misunderstanding about how knowledge actually grows in this universe.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're
0:12.1	hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing
0:16.2	the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense
0:20.7	Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharis.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed
0:26.1	to add to your favorite pod catcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads
0:31.2	on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers.
0:35.8	So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one.
0:47.2	I am here with Jay Shapiro. Jay, thanks for joining me. Thank you for having me.
0:51.3	So we have a fun project to talk about here, and let's see if I can remember the genesis of this.
0:58.9	I think I woke up in the middle of the night one night realizing that more or less my entire
1:04.8	catalog of podcasts was, if not the entire thing, maybe conservatively speaking, 50% of all the
1:13.5	podcasts were evergreen, we should say that their content was basically as good today as the day I
1:20.9	recorded them, but because of the nature of the medium, it would never be perceived as such,
1:26.1	and people really don't tend to go back into the catalog and listen to a three-year-old podcast.
1:32.5	And yet there's something insufficient about just recirculating them in my podcast feeder or elsewhere.
1:40.8	And so I and Jaren, my partner in crime here, were trying to think about how to give
1:48.2	all of this content new life, and then we thought of you just independently turning your creative
1:57.3	intelligence loose on the catalog, and now I will properly introduce you as someone who
2:04.6	should be doing that. Perhaps you can introduce yourself, just tell us what you have done
2:10.1	low these many years and the kinds of things you've focused on.
2:13.2	Yeah, well, I'm a filmmaker first and foremost, but I think my story and my genesis of being
2:21.3	maybe the right person to tap here is probably indicative or representative of a decent portion of
	...

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