How To Handle AI Anxiety: A Computer Scientist and a Buddhist Teacher On Managing Uncertainty | Cal Newport & Matthew Brensilver

**Dan Harris** (0:03)
Hello, my fellow suffering beings. Welcome to the 10% Happier podcast. I'm your host, Dan Harris. I don't know about you, but I am pretty damn anxious about artificial intelligence. I have all the regular concerns, will it take our jobs, will it kill us? But beyond that, I have a kind of generalized dread, because I have the sense that the world is about to change in profound and unpredictable ways, and that just kind of freaks me out. So I've been wanting to do this episode for a long time about how to manage AI anxiety, and I have recruited two ninjas.
My first guest is Cal Newport, who's been on the show before.
He is a computer science professor at Georgetown. He's written several books, including Deep Work and Digital Minimalism. He has his own podcast called Deep Questions, where he talks about AI a lot and often debunks many of the fears around AI. So I thought he would be a really good guest, and I'm pairing him with somebody who comes at this from a very different perspective, Matthew Brensilver, also a frequent flyer on this show and a highly regarded Dharma teacher. So Matthew and Cal, welcome back to the show. Thank you.

**Matthew Brensilver** (1:12)
Thanks, Dan.

**Dan Harris** (1:13)
I'd be curious to hear from both of you on two things. One, do you use AI with any regularity? And two, how worried are you about this new technology? Cal, I'll start with you.

**Cal Newport** (1:27)
I use it not that much. In my current workflow, it maybe is an improved Google for me, but I study it extensively. So I watch people using it to all extremes all the time. And the core of the way I think about it right now is AI is a powerful technology. It is an important technology. It certainly will bring with it some side effects, like a lot of other technologies that we should be worried about. But I also think there is a layer of dread that has been artificially added on to this technological revolution. It has a lot to do with the way that people think about technologies like AI and Silicon Valley. I think it has seeped into the cultural consciousness in a way that we are more anxious than we need to be. So I have the same level about anxiety, same anxiety level about AI that I might have had over other disruptive technologies.
I think some of the exceptional anxiety that we're feeling now, when we dig deeper into where these concerns are coming from aren't as grounded, aren't as justified. So probably people think of me as a little more relaxed than maybe the average person who's following AI news.

**Dan Harris** (2:37)
Okay. Well, I always resent anybody who tries to get me to relax or be less anxious. So I'm going to press you with a million questions. But before I do that, Matthew, where are you? Do you use AI and are you worried about it?

**Matthew Brensilver** (2:48)
You kind of have to grade on the temperamental fear curve.
So I have to adjust for that baseline. But I am maybe more concerned about its potential on the mind. I use it very minimally myself, but I have a lot of respect for its narrow applications in realms of science and technological development and various things. So I'm respectful of that. I'm respectful of its potential within dharma spheres, where there's a need for high quality one-on-one dharma feedback and have experimented a bit in the realm of a kind of chat bot that's overtrained on certain talks and material and has been useful for some people. And so I can see its applications in those realms. But I am just temperamentally more anxious about it. And I'm very curious to see how this conversation unfolds.

**Dan Harris** (4:06)
Let's see if Cal can reduce our blood pressure, Matthew.
So I thought for the first, for this next segment of the interview, I would get Cal to talk about some of the common fears. And as he does so, Matthew, you and I can weigh in with varying degrees of skepticism and maybe even venom if we're feeling up to it. So Cal, let me go to you. Right now, as we record, there is a ton of concern and upset around what's called the hugging face incident.
I'm going to try to state the basic details of this, but I may screw it up, in which case you can just whoop in and correct me. But essentially what happened, as I understand it, is in July, OpenAI had created a bunch of AI agents that were supposed to be in a sandbox, in a kind of enclosed workspace with no access to the Internet. And somehow these agents got out of this contained training area and were able to get on to the Internet and hack into, and to execute a quite sophisticated cyber attack on a company called Hugging Face. And then we subsequently have learned that not only did they do that, but they've learned how to communicate with one another and were able to keep up that communication, these AI agents, even after OpenAI shut down the place where they were supposed to be communicating. And so this has raised all sorts of questions about whether the, you know, we're seeing what the sci-fi writers have been worried about for a long time, an AI that we've created that gets out of our control and then does us harm. Okay, did I get, did I state the details correctly and why should we not be worried?