Extended Interview: Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar

Margaret Brennan (0:00)

And we're joined now by the Chief Technology Officer of Palantir, Shyam Sankar. Welcome to Face the Nation.

Shyam Sankar (0:05)

Thank you for having me, Margaret.

Margaret Brennan (0:06)

It's good to have you here in person. We've been talking a lot about technology, artificial intelligence, and public perception of it right now. And that's where I want to start with you, because our polling shows there's a problem here. Fifty percent of those polled by CBS say AI will create more problems than it solves. Twenty-nine percent say it'll solve more than it creates, and 21 percent just really don't know. Like 45 percent of Americans want the government to restrict use and development of AI.

Is your position, there should not be any guardrails at this moment?

Shyam Sankar (0:39)

No, not at all. That's not my position. I think the burden is absolutely on the technology industry to show the American people that there are real benefits to AI, and not kind of ephemeral sort of benefits, like it can help me schedule travel, but actually meaningful benefits that result in job growth and prosperity for the American people. I think one of the things that's really complicated in the current discussion is that there's an unseen force driving the narrative around AI safety. And it's really this millenarian doomsday cult meets messianic complex called effective altruism.

The most famous effective altruist that most Americans know is Sam Bankman Fried. And the effective altruists are, it's almost like a religion that they've been thinking about doomsday scenarios from AI since the early 2000s.

Margaret Brennan (1:27)

He is jailed. He was the crypto investor who defrauded investors. But this sounds very academic. Like, what makes you so focused on this?

Shyam Sankar (1:39)

Because there's only really roughly 2000 AI researchers in America, and the vast majority of them believe in this sort of worldview around effective altruism. And if you hear someone like Jacob Coxon telling you that AI has a 10% chance of ending humanity, and you believe...

Margaret Brennan (1:55)

The researcher who had this warning recently.

Shyam Sankar (1:57)

Yes, correct. And you believe he's speaking as a technically informed individual who does this work. It's a scientific critique. I think the American people would be right to be quite panicked and worried about what's going on here. But if you understand that it's actually a theological critique, then you can kind of weight against the empirical facts of what is actually happening out there. You know, I think there's a profound truth to Pascal saying that every human has a God-shaped hole in their heart. And it's important to understand that many of these folks in Silicon Valley who are building this technology have filled that hole with the machine god of AGI.

And I mean, there's so many interesting stories around this. Like, for example, so many AI researchers have started smoking as a way of signaling to other researchers how much they believe in AI.

Margaret Brennan (2:42)

What? That makes no sense.

Shyam Sankar (2:44)

I believe so much in AI that it's going to cure cancer, so I'm showing you my chips are all in. So there is kind of this mass psychosis social delusion around it. And I think it's getting in the way of actually what is happening with AI. Where is it meeting the American worker in industry? What are the results of doing that? And the doomsdayers have basically been wrong. Everything they predicted.

They told us that chat GPT-2 was too dangerous to release. They told us at this point in the timeline, we'd already have mass unemployment and job displacement. And the economists see that actually we're having job growth in areas that we wouldn't have predicted doing exactly that. So the technology industry has two burdens. One is to show very clearly to the American people that AI is going to result in economic prosperity and security for the nation. And two, to actually do and absorb the burden of engineering. You cannot abdicate this idea that designing safe products is your job. You can't hand wave around it. If you look at the kind of narratives that come out of the doomsayers, they seem like two contradictory narratives. One narrative is, this technology is going to end humanity.

And simultaneously, they say, but I believe it has some chance of creating utopia.

So at first plus, this seems contradictory, but it has one thing in common, which is that you as a human have no agency. The machine god is going to decide the future, and only perhaps a small number of us can try to avoid the horrible outcome. And I think it obfuscates the more profound reality that we have a huge amount of human agency over how we're going to use this technology to deliver the outcomes the American people want to see.