#494 — A Coin Toss for the Future

SPEAKER_1 (0:02)

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Sam Harris (0:24)

I am here with Ryan Greenblatt. Ryan, thanks for joining me.

SPEAKER_1 (0:27)

It's good to be here.

Sam Harris (0:29)

So you're the chief scientist at Redwood Research, which is one of these AI safety research firms that analyze the recent hugging face, fiasco incident, terrifying phenomenon. We'll get into it. But how did you come to this work?

What was your path to focusing on AI safety?

Ryan Greenblatt (0:49)

Yeah. So in college during my junior year, I was in my apartment alone because it was COVID, all classes were remote, and I was in a contemplative mood thinking about what I should do with my life, listening to various podcasts. And in one of those podcasts, someone made an argument that was like, basically I would summarize the argument as like, it doesn't make that much sense to be selfish because what's really the distinction at a material level between your future self and other future people. And I was like, that argument makes sense to me. I should really consider how I want to lead my life and what I should do.

And I ended up getting pretty sold on being much more focused on altruism. And then after that, I spent a bunch of time thinking about what I should do with my life. Eventually, I ended up deciding that working on technical AI safety was like a important thing to do, was like a very critical issue that we would face, got sold in those arguments, applied to various places, and then started working at Redwood, where I've been working on AI security and AI safety research for about five years.

Sam Harris (1:47)

And is your background in computer science?

Ryan Greenblatt (1:49)

Yeah. Computer science, also some math.

Sam Harris (1:53)

So it sounds like you might have come up through the effective altruist community. I mean, do you consider yourself a part of the EA community?

Ryan Greenblatt (2:00)

I would say that I'm definitely within the EA community. I'm not sure I would self-identify as an EA, but I think to some extent, just because I'm a bit reluctant to self-identify with any label that's going to associate you in some. I feel like I don't know if when I think about myself, I don't think like I'm an EA. I'm sort of like, yeah, I have a bunch of properties that other people in that community have. I'm in touch with that community. But I wouldn't necessarily say like I'm an EA per se.

I do think that I would definitely say that I'm interested in effectively pursuing the impartial good.

Sam Harris (2:36)

Right. Well, as you know, and as I've talked about in the podcast of late, effective altruism has come in for some abuse, much of it unfair, some of it might be fair.

I think there's a reason why I, like you, have not hung up an EA shingle in my life. Perhaps we can talk about that. But it sounds like, well, you tell me, where on the spectrum of concern are you? I would put the most worried people over there with Eliezer Yudkowski and his recent co-author Nate Sories. Maybe Max Tegmark is over there, Nick Bostrom is not quite over there, but still on that side of the spectrum. And all the way on the other side, opposing them, you have the people who say that there really is no real concern here, that it's all a hoax, that any thought that artificial intelligence might get out of our control and destroy us, that is a weird form of marketing being employed by the frontier labs. It's an effort to get regulation imposed and achieve something like regulatory capture. Or it's an EA PsiOp, and there are people like, I would say, Mark Andreessen or David Sacks or even the president himself, who's recently called it a hoax, in so many words, who are just not fundamentally not worried about any significant downside risk here, and just see dollar signs just stretching out to the horizon. Where do you locate yourself on that spectrum?

Ryan Greenblatt (4:09)

So I would say I'm very concerned, but I may be more optimistic that we'll make it through without sort of averting the course of AI development. So I would say that I'm sort of like, suppose that we proceed on what the current default path looks like in front of us. Maybe there's about a 50 or 60 percent chance that misaligned AIs would end up taking over the world. And then if that did happen, there would be a significant chance that many or all humans would die.