Balaji Srinivasan on Polytheistic AI, Human-AI Symbiosis, and Prospects for AI Control

**Nathan Labenz** (0:00)
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**Balaji Srinivasan** (0:45)
They don't care about AI safety. What they care about is AI control.
Do I think we eventually get to a configuration like that? Maybe. Where you have an AI brain is at the center of civilization, and it's coordinating all the people around it. And every civilization that makes it is capable of crowdfunding and operating its own AI. You know, our background culture influences things in ways we don't even think about. So much of the paperclip thinking is like, a vengeful god will turn you into pillars of salt. The polytheistic model of many gods as opposed to one god is, we're all going to have our own AI gods and there'll be war of the gods.
Man-machine symbiosis is not some new thing.
It's actually the old thing that broke us away from other primate lineages that weren't using tools.
Then the question is, what's the next step? Which is, AI is amplified intelligence. It is that the AI-human fusion means there's another 20 Elon Musk's, or whatever the number is.
That's good.

**Nathan Labenz** (1:42)
Hello and welcome to The Cognitive Revolution, where we interview visionary researchers, entrepreneurs, and builders working on the frontier of artificial intelligence. Each week, we'll explore their revolutionary ideas and together we'll build a picture of how AI technology will transform work, life, and society in the coming years. I'm Nathan Labenz, joined by my co-host, Eric Thornburg. Hello and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today, my guest is Balaji Srinivasan. In tech circles, Balaji needs no introduction, but for folks from other backgrounds, Balaji is a serial startup entrepreneur who's founded and ultimately sold highly dissimilar technology companies, including Teleport, which helped people move around the world to realize opportunities, Council, which provided genetic testing for couples planning to have children, and earn.com, a paid email on the blockchain startup, which ultimately sold to Coinbase, where Balaji became CTO. Along the way, he's also taught statistics at Stanford and been a general partner at Andresen Horowitz as well. Today, as an independent thinker, investor, and author of The Network State, Balaji is extremely prolific in both text and audio formats. And as you'll hear, whether for the first time or the 50th, he is an incredibly creative thinker who relentlessly develops and iterates on new paradigms for understanding a fast changing, often chaotic world. He's also a very associative and interdisciplinary thinker who constantly adds dimensions to any analysis.
Such horsepower can be hard for a podcast host to rein in, but I personally find it extremely stimulating. So in this conversation, I tried to strike a balance between letting Balaji go off as only he can do, contributing what I hope are worthy versions of core AI safety arguments and supporting results from recent research, and occasionally steering us back toward what I see as the most critical questions for the AI big picture.
If there's one area where Balaji and I disagree most consequentially, it's on the question of how independent AI systems are likely to become over the next five to ten years. Balaji thinks that AI systems need to be at least symbiotic with humans, because physical computers can't replicate themselves without human support. While I think there's at least a significant chance that we get AIs that are so independent of humans that their behaviors and interactions become the primary drivers of world history.
In Balaji's own words, he does expect massive economic and social disruption from AI, but doesn't think that quote unquote can't turn the killer AI off scenarios are likely, at least for a long while, due to factors like the existence of adversarial inputs that can paralyze AIs, particularly those with open model weights, the observation that even decentralized programs like the Bitcoin network can't run independently without continuous human support, and the premise that to control the physical world, AIs will need to direct either large numbers of humans who are notoriously difficult to control or highly agile robots which don't yet exist.