#499 — The Birth of AGI

SPEAKER_1 (0:02)

You're listening to Making Sense with Sam Harris. This is the free version of the podcast, so you'll only hear the first part of today's conversation. If you want the full episode and every episode, you can subscribe at samharris.org. There are no ads on this show, it runs entirely on subscriber support. If you enjoy what we're doing here and find it valuable, please consider subscribing today.

Sam Harris (0:25)

I am here with Kevin Roose. Kevin, thanks for joining me.

Kevin Roose (0:28)

Thank you so much for having me, Sam.

Sam Harris (0:29)

Well, you have written what I think is probably the first proper history of the birth of AGI. The book is The AGI Chronicles, The Inside Story of the Race to Create Artificial Superintelligence. Very fun read, very behind the scenes, and maybe before we jump into the book and its various players, can you just summarize how you came to focus on this topic, because you were not always on the tech beat. So how did you get into AGI, and when did you first convince yourself that this was worth paying attention to above seemingly everything else at this moment?

Kevin Roose (1:06)

So I've had several fields in my career as a journalist. I was first a religion reporter, whereas where I first came across your work, Sam, I was spending a semester undercover at Liberty University with a bunch of evangelical college students who were, by the way, obsessed with you. They were watching your YouTube videos up late at night in the dorms, because you were challenging their faith. Anyway, that was my first career.

Sam Harris (1:30)

When was that? What year was that?

Kevin Roose (1:32)

That would have been 2007 So this was at the apex of the new atheist YouTube scene, and it was very interesting. I remember sitting around watching you and Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens on YouTube with these evangelical college students, and I was not evangelical, but I was there to investigate and report this book.

That was very interesting. So then I had a short career as a finance reporter, and then for about the past decade, I've been covering tech.

When I started covering tech, no one was really talking about this idea of AGI, artificial general intelligence, and the idea that you could create a human level AI system. This was something that not even the AI experts at the time thought was possible. But there was this little community, this little crew of technologists, who were sort of considered fringe weirdos within their community, who believed in AGI, who believed that it was possible to build something like a digital brain and endow it with the powers of the human brain, and they're now some of the most famous powerful people in the world. So the question I was trying to answer with this book was like, how did we get here? In the span of a decade, we've gone from AI not really working and not doing much of consequence to now we have these systems that are out there solving Millennium Prize problems and conducting automated cyber attacks. And so I really thought this era deserved a proper history. I think this is something akin to the Manhattan Project, and we have lots of books about the Manhattan Project, but we didn't really have anything that was an attempt to document what's been going on in AI for the last decade.

Sam Harris (3:16)

Yeah, we should come back to the analogy to the Manhattan Project, because it's fitting in some ways, and in other ways, I think, understates how strange this moment is. How real is the risk to you? I mean, obviously, there's a continuum of concern on this topic from people who are quite cynical about it, who think that any expression of risk, certainly existential risk, is nothing more than marketing or an attempt to produce regulatory capture. You've got these kind of arch accelerationists, some of whom are very close to the government and were even in it until the five minutes ago. People like David Sachs, Mark Andreessen, who's been on the podcast, is somebody who seems to have very few concerns about risk of any sort. Then there are the people on the further end of the continuum, many of whom have also been on the podcast, people like Eliezer Yudkowski. Nick Bostrom is probably not as shrill as Eliezer at this point, but he's the person who wrote the book Super Intelligence, has so many people worried about this. Then the many of the people who are going to talk about are actually doing the work, started as being quite radicalized with respect to the risk, and now they are racing in this tangle of perverse incentives to hear them justify it, but nonetheless racing to build AGI as quickly as possible.