Ask Jason: AI Extinction, Grok's Rogue Meme Coin & Weed Farms as Data Centers | E2337

Jason Calacanis (0:00)

All right, everybody, welcome back. It's an all-ask Jason question. We try to do these every month or so, and man, we got a lot of questions, huh, Lon?

Lon Harris (0:08)

We got a ton of questions, and we're taking people's live questions as well.

Jason Calacanis (0:12)

Maybe we warm me up with the best of the pre-submissions, and then we'll get from there. What you have to do when we're doing live is somebody needs to be right over that drop button, ready to drop the person off the call, in case somebody does something like, I don't know who that guy Tubin was, I don't want to have a Tubin situation here.

Lon Harris (0:30)

That was his own fault, Jeffrey Tubin.

SPEAKER_3 (0:33)

CLA, innovation takes balance. CLA's CPAs, consultants, and wealth advisors can help you get from startup to where you want to end up. Get started now at claconnect.com with you, The Conservation Fund. For 40 years, The Conservation Fund has protected at-risk land and important wildlife habitats, while actively supporting local communities. Learn more at conservationfund.org. Quo, formerly OpenPhone, gives you a clean modern way to handle every customer call, text, and thread all in one place. Try it free and get 20% off your first six months at quo.com/twist.

Lon Harris (1:06)

First, we'll go to a pre-recorded, guaranteed, not too spicy question. This comes from conservative activist, Jim Faff. I believe, Jason, he is at the American Airlines Center at attending the midterm Republican convention while he's asking his question. Let's go to Jim.

SPEAKER_3 (1:22)

Oh, here we go. He's at the convention.

Jim Faff (1:24)

I'm taking a quick break from your friend, Donald Trump here. I've been doing interviews all day and I've been trying to get this out to you. Because I want to know what you think. Listen, this guy left Anthropic and he says that the safeguards are nowhere to be found, and AI is going to take over the world. I'm not even sure if I believe that I'm using it every day. But what I want to find out from you is with Apple and Nvidia, really bringing out the hardware that's going to bring local AI. By the way, we're about to implement it in my organization because we've got a lot of data work we're doing.

Do you think that that's maybe the mitigation from whatever actual risk might be there?

Do you agree that there's this kind of risk? I just don't see it because frankly, I'm using AI all the time in building things that we're doing. Honestly, it can be stupid even though it can really do a whole lot of things. What's your thoughts on that?

Jason Calacanis (2:19)

It's a great question. It's the question of the moment, in fact. You have to ask yourself from first principles, what is the attack vector that would kill, these people are saying, kill all of humanity? That's a pretty big bogey, 7 billion people, 8 billion people.

I can tell you right now, even if you intentionally wanted to kill all 7 billion people on the planet and you had the largest nuclear arsenal, Russia, United States, etc., China, and you decided to launch every nuclear bomb you had, you probably wouldn't kill everybody in the world. You'd probably still have a couple of hundred million left.

Lon Harris (2:54)

Yeah, you'd have the Mad Max stragglers in the Outback, sure.

Jason Calacanis (2:57)

Yeah, it's a pretty hard task, right? We're pretty redundant here, but let's put that aside.

The reason why people are being hyperbolic is because they want attention and they want attention because either, this is my theory, this individual who is the latest one to spout off, either they have valid concerns about say job loss like Bill Gates does or civil unrest or polarization of wealth, those kind of things are not cataclysmic. Everybody's going to die. Those are under the category of like the social fabric is destroyed in our country, in our world, societal problems. There could be societal problems. Like, I mean, we could see millions of drivers lose their jobs in under 10 years. Those people could be protesting. The Chinese government has already had to deal with this in Wuhan, where they started limiting self-driving cars. Okay, so those are the social problems. Those are real, worth discussing, planning for, et cetera. Let's put those on the side because this is not what those people are talking about. These people have hit a level of psychosis, a level of psychosis where they believe in their heart of hearts that when this recursive self-improvement, in other words, the AI agents that they deploy, 10,000 of them, will then get better and better at their job without a human in the loop. This requires them to take the human out of the loop, just like maybe Waymo or Tesla deciding to take the driver out of the car. So we take those two metaphors. One is with software, let's say, building cyber attacks, you know, hacking. And then on the other side, we have self-driving cars. When did Waymo take the safety driver out? When did Tesla start taking the safety driver out? When they perfected and they got to 99999999s of safety, 99 point, multiple 9s of safety, Waymo said, OK, we can take a driver out here. We feel in this constrained area, we're not going to kill somebody.