AI Extinction Risk Expert: If Your Job Is Repetitive, AI Will Do It Better Than You! | Eric Weinstein

Eric Weinstein (0:00)

Different species of aliens have been reported to be having fights in the skies above Earth. And I've talked to 50 people who all have different versions of the same story. And this includes high-ranking politicians. And all of these people are reporting on this giant lump under the rug that doesn't have all of our attention.

Steven Bartlett (0:18)

So you're saying aliens are real?

Eric Weinstein (0:20)

I think it would be insane that there is no one visiting it. But everything about our life is completely bananas, fictionalized. And we're just living in what I would call managed reality. And I promise you, I'm at the frontier of mathematics and physics. And so I think you can pretty much prove 100% of the population has gone completely insane. I mean, the entire management of COVID was completely fake. We cannot get to the bottom of Jeffrey Epstein. Nobody really trusts Harvard. But right now, we're in grave danger that we haven't been in since Cuban Missile Crisis. We're in one crazy situation with Iran, together with the situation in Ukraine, which I think you might see a nuke used by Putin. And then also China is watching the US sputter and falter. But this AI thing is really the big tsunami.

Steven Bartlett (1:06)

You also are aware that AI could lead to human extinction.

Eric Weinstein (1:09)

These people have to win in a ruthless competition for their humanity to max.

Steven Bartlett (1:14)

What do you mean by that? Dario, Sam, they have to win the race to super intelligence.

Eric Weinstein (1:19)

I'm going to regret saying this, but yes, these people are forced to make decisions that no one should ever be forced to make. Their souls are going to be scarred, for sure.

Steven Bartlett (1:28)

And one of them is going to win, and ultimately, theoretically summoning the demon.

Eric Weinstein (1:31)

You have a subscription to any of these AI?

Steven Bartlett (1:33)

Yes.

Eric Weinstein (1:33)

So you're paying to have the demon summoned. Let us not sit around like our hands are clean.

Steven Bartlett (1:38)

If you could stop all of it, would you stop all of it?

Eric Weinstein (1:40)

I'm going to say something very painful. So.

Steven Bartlett (1:46)

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Eric, there's so much going on in the world at the moment. As a podcaster, you tend to feel like you say that a lot. What have you made of all this stuff? The research is coming out saying there's a 10 percent chance of extinction from AI, and obviously, we still got wars raging on, and the Ukraine-Russia situation doesn't seem to be getting any better.

When you look at all of this, is there a macro picture that people are missing?

Eric Weinstein (2:43)

Yeah.

We had 80 years of sleep, and then we had January of 2025 when Trump was inaugurated, and the sleep is over. I mean, I hate to be crude about it, but whether you date it to 75 years, to the beginning of COVID rather, and the end of World War II, there's just, we grew up in this anomalous bubble, and that bubble is over, and we thought that that was normal life. It has nothing to do with normal life. It's just the most unusual place to have found yourself.

Steven Bartlett (3:13)

As someone that was born in 1992, I do struggle when I hear predictions of the future that are somewhat dystopian because my life has been very comfortable relative to other parts of history.

Eric Weinstein (3:24)

I don't know.

I think that the great danger is feeling that we solve these problems as opposed to we were really successful in deferring these problems and issues, and we're back on the clock. It's uncomfortable for me because I was born in 1965, and that was already 20 years into The Big Sleep, The Great Nap. So, I haven't seen reality either, and there are a tiny number of people who have seen what the world can be like. Those who lived through Mao's Great Leap Forward would probably be the most recent examples. I mean, there's definitely strife and calamity and war, but mostly we don't have major wars. We have military actions, and I think when you go back and you think about what it's like to lose something like 20 percent of your population as Belarus or Poland might have in World War II, these are inconceivable things. Look, if you recall our conversation last time, and I said, get your board in the water because the tsunami of a lifetime is coming. Tell me that didn't start to come true in the period since we've seen each other.