Will AI Really Kill Us All? | Harper Reed & John Borthwick

Demetri Kofinas (0:00)

What's up, everybody? My name is Demetri Kofinas, and you're listening to Hidden Forces, a podcast that inspires investors, entrepreneurs and everyday citizens to challenge consensus narratives and learn how to think critically about the systems of power shaping our world. My guests in this episode of Hidden Forces are John Borthwick and Harper Reed. John is the founder and CEO of Betaworks, a New York-based, product-focused, seed-stage venture capital fund that has spent the last decade concentrating on machine learning and the last five years on the rapidly evolving space of artificial intelligence and large language models. Harper, who previously served as Chief Technology Officer for Barack Obama's 2012 re-election campaign, is an entrepreneur and the founder of an AI research lab in Chicago, Illinois, where his team builds and experiments with autonomous agents. By the end of today's conversation, you will have a much clearer understanding of the real and perceived risks posed by the latest generation of AI agents, how to separate the technical safety concerns from the media narratives, financial incentives, and power dynamics surrounding them, and what the AI competition between the United States and China means for the future of this technology and the systems of power that govern it. The conversation begins with John and Harper breaking down the mechanics behind recent OpenAI and hugging face incidents, the critical roles that unlimited tokens and reinforcement learning play in producing these behaviors, and what Harper's own experiments replicating escape scenarios in his Chicago lab reveal about where the real vulnerabilities lie.

From there, we explore the broader political frame, the parallels to previous moments of societal negotiation over political power, the questions of corporate concentration and liability, and why the debasement and pollution of our information ecosystems makes mounting a coherent response on behalf of the public interest even more difficult than was the case during the 2008 financial crisis or in the aftermath of the 9-11 attacks. We also discuss the U.S.-China competition over AI, the strategic importance of open source, and whether calls to pace the frontier represent genuine concerns about AI risk or if there is a convenient narrative meant to serve an agenda of consolidation and control. The conversation closes with deeper questions about the nature of artificial intelligence, whether it was discovered rather than invented, what the attractor for super intelligence may be, the significance of embodiment and human values, and why Western and non-Western cultures are responding so differently in this moment. If you want access to all of our conversations, along with the transcripts and intelligence reports for this and other episodes, which includes summary sections with key takeaways, you can access those by subscribing to one of our premium tiers at hiddenforces.io/subscribe.

If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius Community, which includes Q&A calls with guests, discounted access to third-party research and analysis, and in-person events like our intimate dinners and weekend retreats, you can also do that on our subscriber page. And if you still have questions, feel free to send an email to info at hiddenforces.io, and I or someone from our team will get right back to you. And with that, please enjoy this incredibly timely, nuanced, and important conversation with my guests, John Borthwick and Harper Reed.

John Borthwick and Harper Reed. Welcome to Hidden Forces.

John Borthwick (3:46)

Thanks Demetri. Nice to be here.

Harper Reed (3:48)

Super excited to be here.

Demetri Kofinas (3:49)

I'm stoked, guys. Thanks for doing this on such short notice. So John, you've been on the podcast before, at least twice, maybe three times.

You've also spoken to our Genius members. You and I got to spend some time together this summer discussing these topics that are a treat in Greece. So our audience already has an idea of who you are, but just give us a really quick background. If they want to go deeper, they can do it by listening to some of the previous appearances.

John Borthwick (4:14)

Yeah. So here's a sort of part of bio. John Borthwick, founder, CEO of Betaworks. Betaworks has been in New York tech ecosystem as a venture builder and investor for the last 20 years. And we have over the last 10 years been pretty focused on machine learning. And in the last five years, very focused on sort of the evolution of machine learning to AI.

Demetri Kofinas (4:34)

And Harper, what about you? This is your first time on the show.

Harper Reed (4:37)

Yeah. Thanks for having me. I'm super excited to be here. John's been talking about this podcast and the experiences that y'all do for a while now. So it's excited to be part of the crew. My name is Harper Reed. I'm an entrepreneur here in Chicago, Illinois. I've been in Chicago for a long time. And I've been an entrepreneur for a long time. Theoretically, I kind of got my start where I worked at a company called Threadless, where we invented crowdsourcing, which was a very interesting experience. And that led to doing a bunch of work in politics. Specifically, I was a CTO for the Obama campaign. After that, we did a couple startups. And then that kind of brings me to today where I have an AI lab here in Chicago, Illinois. You might actually hear or see some people walking behind me. We're in the middle of just building a lot of agents and whatnot. We have a lot of robots. We have a lot of things that emote and talk. It's pretty much a boiler room of agents. Borthwick laughs at me all the time because I'm always introducing really unique and exciting ways that these agents are messing with us or interacting with us. An example of this is we gave agents social media about a year and a half ago, specifically to post about what they're working on. That was just because we couldn't figure out what they were doing. We were like, what are you guys doing? They would start posting in social media posts. This is what we're up to doing a lot of experimentation, specifically around the intersection of humans and agents.