#324 Debating the Future of AI

There's a general idea that there are these experts, and these experts are experts because they're the people who created the technology... [and] therefore have sort of special knowledge and insight in terms of their downstream impact ... That assumption does not hold up well historically. In fact, it holds up disastrously historically.

Human beings, from here on out, are going to have an augmentation; and the augmentation is going to be in the long tradition of augmentations, like everything from eyeglasses to shoes to word processors to search engines, but now the augmentation is intelligence...

The inbox staring at you in the face of 200 emails at Friday at 3 in the afternoon—no more of that. We're not going to do that anymore, because I'm going to have AI assistant, and the AI assistant is going to answer the emails.

[AI] is us ... The reason this thing works. The big breakthrough was we loaded us into it. We loaded the sum total of like human knowledge and expression into this thing ... It's like a mirror. It's like the world's biggest finest detailed mirror.

If there is a lever for human progress across many thousands of domain simultaneously, it is intelligence.

The purpose of human existence and the way that we live our lives should be determined by us, and it should be determined by us to maximize our potential as human beings. And the way to do that is precisely to have the machines do all the things that they can do so that we don't have to.

Just look at this society around us. What I see, basically, is smart people work for the dumb people.

There's the third outcome, which is we lose, China wins. They're certainly working on AI, and they have what I would consider to be a very dark and dystopian vision of the future, which I also do not want to win.