AI DEBATE: “Most People Have No Idea What’s Coming” - #1138

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
To get us started, I'm going to try something. So I'm going to ask ChatGPT what it truly believes that the world will look like by 2040 I'm going to ask it to be honest, and tell me what it predicts the rapid development of AI will lead to, risks and everything. And I said it's a deep research, so it might take a little bit of time. And while it's working away, it's going to be doing that. I want to know what your guys' actual predictions for 2040 are. Not best case or nightmare scenario.
What do you think an ordinary Tuesday will look like for people in 2040?

**Zack Kass** (0:29)
I think we're still around. I think humanity is still on planet Earth.

**Chris Williamson** (0:33)
Great start.

**Zack Kass** (0:34)
I think that power is probably a lot more concentrated than it is today. I don't know if that's in a few corporations or a few governments, but I think there's probably a sense that the main thing deciding what's going on on planet Earth is the will of a few individuals as opposed to something spread out and widely democratic.

**Liv Boeree** (0:58)
For better or worse, I expect that the average Tuesday looks more homogenous for more people and not too dissimilar than the average Tuesday today. So I think we raise a floor more.
But I expect that by 2040, because the physical world actually takes a lot longer to move than we think, and because regulation around things like robotics is just going to take way longer than we expect, political protection is the thing that's going to slow progress. Most people's Tuesdays will probably feel, for better or worse, a whole lot like Tuesday this week.

**Aric Floyd** (1:41)
You're going to hate me for saying this, but I kind of reject the question because I think it's, I cannot collapse down my hideous, almost like bipolar uncertainty of where we're going to be in 2040 So truly the first thing that popped into my head, the first when you asked the question was a kind of chaotic, desolate, maybe there's a few humans left around as one possibility. I'm not saying that's a majority likely, but it's a slice. Another one is this wonderful utopian, my friend and I call it techno-pastoralism, where it's a very techno-enabled world if you choose to live it, but actually we all choose to return to our roots of gardening and hanging out with friends around the campfire.
It's like if you want to change the color of the campfire, you can, but actually most people like to do things, grow their own artisanal food, etc. That's like one little slice and then another one is we're all under the thumb of whichever AI company gets there first, and hopefully they're benevolent and give us some freedom. Another one is that we're all just locked down in this horrible COVID on steroids type. No one can go out and have really access to anything because the ubiquity of dangerous technologies is too widespread.
That is really my only answer to the question.

**Liv Boeree** (3:08)
It doesn't sound like you reject the question. It sounds like you've got a pretty good idea of what's going to happen.

**Aric Floyd** (3:13)
I don't know. That's the thing.
It's a really fairly even probability distribution in my mind. Is it not? No?

**Liv Boeree** (3:23)
Do you actually, we can go there now. Do you actually think there's a decent chance that humans are not around in 2040?

**Aric Floyd** (3:30)
Yeah.

**Liv Boeree** (3:31)
What would you give it? What's your P Doom? By the way, we should also classify Doom because I think part of the problem with the P Doom debate is that people use Doom to mean all sorts of things. Totally. Doom in this case is total. You classify, I don't want to define it. You define Doom.

**Aric Floyd** (3:45)
Well, I think understanding the way you're explaining it, like the majority of human civilization has, a large percentage of humans have died or something. Is that what you're saying?

**Liv Boeree** (3:58)
Well, I'm leaving it to you. Some people classify Doom as total annihilation, other people classify Doom as a really terrible event.

**Aric Floyd** (4:05)
Civilizational collapse, something like that.
Again, I'm not giving any firm answers. Because we're in this era of what we say and believe can affect the future so strongly, I don't like this idea of assigning a firm probability to it because I think they're so in flux. I think it's a significant enough of a risk such that we need to be doing absolutely everything we can to try and reduce that probability.