The Anti-Tech Bro on Who Gets to Decide AI’s Future | Vilas Dhar| Keris & Silicon EP06

Vilas Dhar (0:00)

I pulled him aside and I said, remind me when you got a Ph.D. in Macroeconomic Policy or Labor Theory.

Shahril Hamdan (0:06)

You must have pissed him off.

Vilas Dhar (0:07)

A few weeks later, he announced a council of experts that would from now on advise the projections that the company would make. You became an engineer to build a startup and raise money to sell your company, to go and buy your Aston Martin and party in the clubs in San Francisco. In the last 30 years, we decided to forget 5,000 years of religious wisdom and say, Godlike power is within reach, let's just go build it. And come what may, people aren't mad about data centers. So what are people really mad about? We are essentially trading our shared community welfare, so somebody else can get rich.

There is no future but the one we write for ourselves.

Shahril Hamdan (0:51)

There are different types of discussions around AI, and we'll try and cover most of them. One type is about what AI will or won't do, curing diseases or generating bio weapons, unleashing a new age of abundance or displacing jobs and making us question what life is for.

Solving climate challenges or hacking into bank accounts. In a sense, the anxiety around AI, where they exist, is anxiety about its consequences. But there's also a second kind of discussion. And that's the one that says the anxiety isn't so much about consequences, but about participation, about the terms of engagement, about having a say in one's own future. This episode belongs mostly to the second type. We spoke a lot about procedure and first principles. These kinds of conversations shouldn't replace the optimistic case for technology, but they need to sit alongside it.

My guest today is Vilas Dhar, president of the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, one of the largest funders of AI for Public Purpose, or AI for Good, in the world. He started out working on AI 25 years ago, counts some of the people running the Frontier Labs today as friends. And yet, he's also been described as the anti-tech bro. We talk about safety, AI safety, and who's to blame when things go wrong, why tech titans became our philosophers, why the data center became a totem for the anxiety or the angst around AI, and what agency countries like Malaysia really have. And we ended somewhere more hopeful on what AI is already doing for people that the headlines ignore, and whether this moment gives us more freedom to find fulfillment beyond the path society sets for us. Again, this is a conversation less about what AI will do for us or won't do for us, and more about who gets to decide. Here's Vilas Dhar.

Vilas Dhar, welcome to Keris & Silicon.

Vilas Dhar (2:48)

Thank you, my friend. I'm so happy to be here.

Shahril Hamdan (2:51)

Vilas, you started out as an AI researcher in the field, building it when it was still, in your words, primordial.

Now you describe in some circles as the anti-tech bro. How did that come about?

Vilas Dhar (3:06)

Primordial is such a good word, isn't it? And particularly for what's happening with AI now, it evokes Jurassic Park, the dinosaurs in the field. And I think often about that scene, if you remember that movie where they come over the hill and they see the dinosaurs for the first time, it's this moment of awe and wonder. It wasn't like that when we were working on AI 25 years ago. We knew there was something there, a community of researchers and scientists that were never obsessed with AI in the way that we talk about it now. It was never make a trillion dollars building computer systems. It was so much more foundational. It was understand the very nature of intelligence. What is it that makes us human? How could we model it inside of computer systems? How could we use the computers as a tool to better understand ourselves? And it was a heady time. We had no idea what we were doing. We look back on it now and it almost seems laughable. Generations have passed in a few years.

But I go back to why we did that work, what it was about AI that captured the imagination. And it was this sense that by building things that tried to emulate us, we could better understand ourselves.

I think that's a really interesting place to start thinking about modern AI. You said I've been described as the anti-tech bro, and I almost feel like that's being described like the anti-villain. I'll take it. But what does it mean? It doesn't mean that I reject technology. Of course not. I've spent my entire life obsessed with the incredible things we can do with these tools.