#1350 - Nick Bostrom

Joe Rogan (0:04)

All right, Nick, this is one of the things that scares people more than anything, is the idea that we're creating something, or someone's going to create something that's going to be smarter than us, that's going to replace us. Is that something we should really be concerned about?

Nick Bostrom (0:21)

I presume you're referring to babies.

Joe Rogan (0:24)

I'm referring to artificial intelligence.

Nick Bostrom (0:26)

Ah, yes. Well, it's the big fear and the big hope, I think.

Joe Rogan (0:32)

Both?

Nick Bostrom (0:33)

At the same time, yeah.

Joe Rogan (0:34)

How is it the big hope?

Nick Bostrom (0:36)

Well, there are a lot of things wrong with the world, as it is now.

Joe Rogan (0:39)

Try to pull this up to your face, if you would.

Nick Bostrom (0:44)

All the problems we have, most of them could be solved if we were smarter, or if we had somebody on our side who were a lot smarter, with better technology and so forth. Also, I think if we wanna imagine some really grand future, where humanity or our descendants one day go out and colonize the universe, I think that's likely to happen, if it's gonna happen at all, after we have superintelligence that then develops the technology to make that possible.

Joe Rogan (1:18)

The real question is whether or not we would be able to harness this intelligence, or whether it would dominate.

Nick Bostrom (1:24)

Yeah, that certainly is one question.

Not the only. You could imagine that we harness it, but then use it for bad purposes, as we have a lot of other technologies through history. So I think there are really two challenges we need to meet. One is to make sure we can align it with human values, and then make sure that we, together, do something better with it than fighting wars or oppressing one another.

Joe Rogan (1:50)

I think, well, what I'm worried about, more than anything, is that human beings are gonna be going to become obsolete, that we're going to invent something that's the next stage of evolution.

I'm really concerned with that. I'm really concerned with if we look back on ancient hominids, Australia Pythagoras, just think of some primitive ancestor of man. We don't want to go back to that. Like that's a terrible way to live.

Nick Bostrom (2:24)

I wouldn't be totally thrilled with the future where humanity as it is now was the last and final word, the ultimate version beyond that. I think there's a lot of room for improvement. But not anything that is different is an improvement.

So, the key would be, I think, to find some path forward where the best in us can continue to exist and develop to even greater levels. And maybe at the end of that path, it looks nothing like we do now. Maybe it's not too legged to armed creatures running around with three pounds of thinking matter, right? It might be something quite different. But as long as what we value is present there, and ideally in a much higher degree than in the current world, then that could count as a success.

Joe Rogan (3:12)

Yeah. The idea that we're in a state of evolution, that we are just like we look at ancient hominids, that we are eventually going to become something more advanced or at least more complicated than we are now.

But what I'm worried is that biological life itself has so many limitations. When we look at the evolution of technology, if you look at Moore's Law or if you just look at new cell phones, like they just released a new iPhone yesterday and they talked about all these incremental increases in the ability to take photographs and wide-angle lenses and night mode and a new chip that works even faster.

These things, there's not, the word evolution is incorrect, but the innovation of technology is so much more rapid than anything we could ever even imagine biologically. Like if we had a thing that we had created, if we had created, instead of artificial intelligence in terms of like something in a chip or a computer, if we created a life form, a biological life form, but this biological life form was improving radically every year, like it didn't even exist. Like the iPhone existed in 2007, that's when it was invented. If we had something that was 12 years old, but all of a sudden was infinitely faster and better and smarter and wiser than it was 12 years ago, the newest version of it, version X1, we would start going, whoa, whoa, whoa, hit the brakes on this thing, man.

How many more generations before this thing is way smarter than us? How many more generations before this thing thinks that human beings are obsolete?