No Mercy / No Malice: Oppenheimer, Inc.

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George Hahn (1:21)

I'm George Hahn, and this is No Mercy, No Malice. AI researchers believe superintelligence is an inevitability, and that there's a non-zero chance its arrival could trigger an extinction level event for humanity. We're at a fork in the road, and the window for choosing which path to take is closing at an unknown rate. In fact, one of the few certainties here is that nobody knows what happens next.

Oppenheimer, Inc.

A 27-year-old resigns from a firm he spent four months at triggers a global panic, drawing comments from a former president and calls from the leaders of Frontier Labs for a slowdown. In 1946, would we have let Robert Oppenheimer raise money from Sequoia Capital and begin selling nukes to the UAE and Procter & Gamble? I'm going on Smirconish tomorrow where I'll be asked, what the fuck is going on? The honest answer is, I don't know. What I am certain of? This is another example of a small number of players capturing staggering economic upside while outsourcing downside risks or harms to the broader public.

In 2024, a year after Dr. Jeffrey Hinton, the godfather of AI, quit Google in order to speak freely about the risks of AI, he won the Nobel Prize in Physics. In an interview for the Nobel website, Hinton described two kinds of AI risks. There's relatively short-term risks, which are very important and very urgent. They're mainly to do with people misusing AI. Examples include a job apocalypse, bullshit in my opinion, productivity gains accelerating wealth inequality, deepfakes destabilizing democracy, cyber criminals picking up a dangerous new tool, bias getting embedded in criminal justice, healthcare and hiring, and the proliferation of more powerful biological weapons that can be produced more easily by middle powers and non-state actors. There's also longer term problems of these things taking over, hint and continued. The question is what's going to happen when we've created beings that are more intelligent than us. We've never been in that situation before. Anybody who says it's all going to be fine is crazy. Anybody who says they're inevitably going to take over, they're crazy too.

Humanity is at a fork in the road. But the choice isn't whether to develop AI super intelligence, it's how to proceed in the face of a technology we cannot fully comprehend or control. One path is to regulate AI such that we mitigate the risks, but reap the rewards. The other path is to continue full speed ahead, despite a widespread belief among researchers, including Hinton, that there's a non-zero chance that AI super intelligence could present an extinction level event for humanity in the near future. If the right thing seems obvious, remember that the right thing and the hard thing are usually the same thing.

Increasingly, the AI narrative resembles a Terminator reboot nobody asked for. We've gone from AI will take your job to AI will spike your power bill and devour your water supply to AI will kill everyone. Inspiring stuff, if you're looking to inspire a mob with pitchforks. Technology writer Jasmine Sun described AI populism as a world view that regards AI as a thing manufactured by out-of-touch billionaires and pushed onto an unwilling public to achieve sinister aims like capitalist efficiency, layoffs, and population management, surveillance.