Nick Bostrom on What Happens if AI Solves All of Our Problems

**Joe Weisenthal** (0:03)
Hello, Odd Lots listeners. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

**Tracy Alloway** (0:06)
And I'm Tracy Alloway.

**Joe Weisenthal** (0:07)
We're the hosts of the Odd Lots podcast, and we've got something exciting for you.

**Tracy Alloway** (0:11)
That's right. So one of the best parts of hosting our podcast is we get to actually meet and interact with our listeners, and we know we have some listeners over in Los Angeles.

**Joe Weisenthal** (0:21)
That's right. So if you're in LA, we're going to be recording a live show, some live recordings at the Vermont Theater in Hollywood on September 17th.

**Tracy Alloway** (0:30)
We have some really exciting guests lined up, have some really great conversations planned. So go ahead and get your tickets. You can find those over at bloomberg.com/oddlots, or click the link below in the show notes and come and say hi when you're there.

**Joe Weisenthal** (0:49)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

**Tracy Alloway** (1:10)
And I'm Tracy Alloway.

**Joe Weisenthal** (1:11)
Tracy, there's so much AI news, obviously, every single day for the rest of our lives, if we're lucky, in the good scenario. There's two big events or sort of things, though, that have really struck out to me lately that, to my mind, represent either the very good version or the very bad version, depending on how you look at it. The scary version, and we're seeing more and more headlines like this.
Several weeks ago, we had the OpenAI hugging face incident, where the model escaped from its sandbox and did some hacking.

**Tracy Alloway** (1:42)
Just some light hacking.

**Joe Weisenthal** (1:43)
Light hacking erases all these fears of Skynet type scenarios, etc., where we can't control the model.
Then, in the quote good version, we had OpenAI recently coming out and saying it had made all of these breakthroughs in theoretical mathematicians, which is good in the sense that it's working, but seems to be creating an existential crisis for some of the most brilliant people on Earth who work in theoretical mathematics.

**Tracy Alloway** (2:09)
Right. We've talked about this before. When it comes to AI, the range of possibilities seems more extreme than some previous technologies. On the one hand, you have death and dystopia, where the robots basically kill us all. On the other hand, you have this idea that maybe superintelligence, AGI is going to solve literally all the world's problems to the extent that you and I won't know what to do with ourselves anymore.

**Joe Weisenthal** (2:36)
Right. The good scenario is that-

**Tracy Alloway** (2:40)
And then the whole range of outcomes in between.

**Joe Weisenthal** (2:42)
The good scenario is we've literally solved everything, in which case the question is-

**Tracy Alloway** (2:46)
In which case we're sad and miserable, and grappling for a meaning to our lives.

**Joe Weisenthal** (2:52)
Yeah. So is there a good scenario with AI actually? Or maybe somewhere in the middle-

**Tracy Alloway** (2:58)
AGI will figure it out for us.

**Joe Weisenthal** (3:00)
Maybe the middle scenario is we just have a huge financial crisis of all the debt, and that's something between human extinction and meaninglessness in our lives, and we just have something that resembles the 2008 Maybe the 2008 is actually the best of all suboptimal worlds for the AI.

**Tracy Alloway** (3:19)
Excellent. This will be our most uplifting conversation ever.

**Joe Weisenthal** (3:22)
Anyway, we've been doing more AI episodes seemingly every year since ChatGPT came out, but people smarter than us have been anticipating all of these things for a very long time. Some of these exact scenarios, particularly the existential crisis facing mathematicians, the model escaping from its sandbox and circumvent misalignment with the creators. People have been thinking about this and anticipating this for literally decades, even before any of us were talking about that.

**Tracy Alloway** (3:49)
It's funny how the Venn diagram of sci-fi writers and legitimate academic futurologists is just converging, right?

**Joe Weisenthal** (3:58)
Totally. And then there's the question of, are the models bad because they read all of the sci-fi? And that's what they were trained on. Anyway, I'm very excited to say we really do have the perfect guest, someone who has been thinking about the whole range of possible questions and outcomes with AI for a very long time. We're going to be speaking with Nick Bostrom. He's a professor, a philosopher. And his most recent book is Deep Utopia, which sort of attempts to answer the question, what happens if AI goes right? So Professor Bostrom, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots.

**Nick Bostrom** (4:28)
I'm happy to join you.