"Will A.I. Take Over?" with Stephen Marche
Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps
Josh Szeps
4.5 • 905 Ratings
🗓️ 31 May 2023
⏱️ 70 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The world’s leading A.I. researchers have released an open letter warning of the “existential threat” the technology poses to human civilisation. Stephen Marche begs to differ. He’ll go down in history as the man who created the world’s first mainstream novel written by A.I. To do so, he spent months interacting with Chat GPT. Join Josh as he and Stephen argue about the fate of artificial intelligence… and of humankind.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Goody, humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas, and is there any idea more dangerous than giving consciousness, breathing life and will into inanimate machines? |
| 0:14.4 | The rise of artificial intelligence is something that is preoccupying the world's most brilliant minds and seems to be cleaving us into one of at least two camps, one of which says we are basically opening a portal and giving birth to a new life that is going to be much more sophisticated than we are, at least in terms of its computational capacity, |
| 0:38.3 | and we just don't know what that is going to mean. We don't know how to control something |
| 0:42.9 | that is so much smarter than us that it is doing a lifetime worth of human thinking in one second. |
| 0:52.8 | It has the predictive power and ability to see beyond horizons |
| 0:56.7 | that we can't even possibly fathom |
| 0:58.7 | about the links between challenges that we face, |
| 1:02.7 | opportunities that might present themselves. |
| 1:05.5 | And all of this can sound terribly sci-fi |
| 1:07.9 | until you actually interact with GPT4 or some of these other chatbots. |
| 1:15.2 | And they behave in ways that seem like there's something going on inside them. |
| 1:24.1 | That doesn't mean that they're having an experience yet. |
| 1:29.0 | But we don't even understand what it means for us to have an experience |
| 1:33.9 | or why we have experiences or why it's like anything to be you |
| 1:37.4 | in a way that it is not like something to be your calculator or your phone. |
| 1:43.2 | And we are creating systems now that are so complicated and so frankly intelligent |
| 1:50.3 | and nimble that a lot of scientists are worried that there's some small chance, |
| 1:57.7 | it doesn't have to be a very high chance for it to nonetheless be worth taking seriously, some small chance that the alignment problem could become real, meaning that the alignment between our interests and the interests of a parallel intelligence that we have mustered out of silicon won't necessarily always be exactly the same. |
| 2:19.4 | And like two sailboats |
| 2:21.5 | who are just slightly pointing in different directions, |
| 2:24.9 | you come back to them a year later and they're miles apart. |
| 2:28.0 | And the sailboat that's going to win is the one |
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