The Case for AI Doomerism (ft. Kevin Roose)

Zaid Admani (0:00)

Welcome back to The Rundown, interview edition. Today, we are talking to Kevin Roose, a longtime tech journalist and former New York Times columnist. Kevin has spent years covering the tech industry, and he's now launching a new show about AI with Casey Newton called Machine Gods. In today's conversation, we talked all things AI. We got into the AI safety debate that seems to be everywhere right now. There was some great back and forths there about that, and I really appreciate Kevin's perspective, which is way different than mine. We also talked about Meta's new Muse app and whether Meta could end up winning the consumer AI market and some hot takes at the end. This was a really fun one for me. I'm a tech nerd at heart, so I loved it. And I think you guys are gonna enjoy it as well. So let's get into it.

All right, guys, today we are joined by Kevin Roose, a former New York Times tech columnist and now the co-founder of a new AI show, Machine Gods. Kevin, welcome to The Rundown.

Kevin Roose (0:53)

Thanks so much for having me.

Zaid Admani (0:55)

And you're joining at a great time. I mean, AI is all the noise right now. There's so much happening. I feel like I can't keep up with all the AI news. I feel like I have to be unemployed at this point just to keep up with all the news, all the AI related news happening.

You've been covering tech for what? A decade plus now, right?

Kevin Roose (1:12)

Yeah.

Zaid Admani (1:12)

Is this the most fun that you're having right now? Or are you the most stressed out? Cause you know, as someone who's a tech nerd myself, I feel like tech kind of had a little dip after like the mobile phone rise. And it was all just like more boring stuff like CloudIn and SaaS software and maybe some social media stuff. But then AI comes along and now it's like super exciting. So I just want to get your take of someone who's covering this for like a decade plus now.

Kevin Roose (1:36)

Yeah. Well, I would say it is both exciting and scary.

Like it contains both of those things in it. Like I am a nerd. I grew up in the nineties playing with computers. My first job was making websites with my brother. Like I was super interested in-

Zaid Admani (1:52)

Shout out GeoCities, right?

Kevin Roose (1:54)

Shout out GeoCities, Angel Fire. And we got all the classics.

And I was obsessed with AI and science fiction and movies. And I think talking with these AI systems, using them, I use them constantly for coding projects, for just like personal hobby things. I use them for help with my work. And yeah, every time something new comes out, I'm like, I want to try this. I can't wait. I'm doing like this coding project right now with my kid. It's just, there's so much exciting stuff happening, and it still boggles my mind that we can just like talk to computers now and that they can talk back, which was not possible until just a couple years ago. So the sort of thing that really set me off, and I've got this new book now, The AGI Chronicles, and the thing that really set me off on wanting to write that book was like, how do we get here? Like how did this technology go from not working at all to now being superhuman at a lot of things in the span of a decade? But yeah, to answer your question, like the fear and the excitement are intertwined, because then I start thinking about, well, what if this keeps going? What if things keep going as quickly and progressing as fast as they are now?

It does not seem obvious to me that these things are gonna sort of plateau at a round human level, like they could just keep going. And so that's the fear, is that like pretty soon we could end up in a world of like superior intelligences that we don't understand and that we can't control.

Zaid Admani (3:19)

Yeah, I wanna talk more about that safety stuff, because that safety conversation really broke containment last week or a couple of weeks ago when Anthropics CEO Dario Almoday posted that article. And then there was that Anthropics researcher talking about 10% chance of human extinction. And so like my normal non-tech friend started asking me about AI, AI safety and all that stuff. So it really kind of broke containment. The stock market, it kind of made a dent for a little bit, and then the markets kind of moved on. So the markets aren't taking this very seriously, or maybe the odds of a 10% human extinction is already priced in.