Buck Brief - Will AI Destroy Humanity Like Skynet in Terminator?

0:00This is an I Heart Podcast. Guaranteed Human. Is AI going to bring about the end of the human species, the end of the human race? Is it going to kill all of us, artificial intelligence? Now, you might think that's crazy talk. And I tend to think it is. But I also have to look at what is being said right now and what is being taken seriously by people who are supposed to experts in the field. And this is where I have to say I am obviously not an expert in AI. But I'm also not an expert in climate change. And I knew that the climate change scientists, notice you don't hear about this anymore. They were lying to us. And I was able to ascertain they were lying because they would say things that wouldn't come true. And also there were incentives for them to lie. As in, for a climate change scientist, this is all going to make sense with AI in a second.

1:02But for a climate change scientist, you have a choice. You can either tell everybody that the world is going to end and you're a hero for raising the alarm. And you get attention, maybe even adulation from people who think, wow, you're so brave. Or you can say, honestly, we'll figure it out even if there is climate change happening in an unprecedented way, which is we should discuss is not even true. But even if it is, we'll all be okay. We will adapt. Life will go on. Well, then no one cares what you have to say. And why are you a climate scientist? Because it doesn't really matter. Right? So AI researchers, this has been very interesting to me. And AI individuals, AI people in the big AI companies. They are saying stuff like, oh, I've been working with this model or this latest iteration of AI. And I'm so worried about what is going to happen. I'll give you an example. This guy, AI research Jacob Coxson is his name.

2:04107 million views. 107 million views on X of this. That is one of the most viewed posts I've ever seen. And I'm somebody that spends a lot of time on Twitter or next. Here's what he wrote. I resigned from anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pre-training research at both OpenAI and anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving super intelligence and gambling with our lives. Don't underestimate the power of this technology. These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything. Revolutionize any field overnight and acquire real power and resources. We have all witnessed the progress in each of these domains. And progress is not slowing. The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible. But I hear the same people express fear privately.

3:05No other human activity poses this level of danger. That's a bold statement. A lot of bold statements actually. Well, let's continue with this. A common response, again from Jacob Cox in here, is if they truly believe this, why are they still building it? At OpenAI, many have not deeply internalized the civilizational stakes. At anthropic, the stakes are well understood, but they are locked in a race to get their first. They believe no one else will act responsibly so they must do it themselves despite the risk. Accepting this race and entering the end game is a heubistic gamble that should not be launched from a private company's slack. Attempting to speed, run, alignment should require extraordinary confidence that there are no better trajectories available. I'm optimistic about the potential for coordination. Warning shots like the hugging face attack have made pacing agreements between US labs more viable. I don't feel like we're on track to prevent a global race which may require costly actions such as a temporary ban on improving model capabilities.

4:11If you are a lab researcher, I urge you to consider what the next few years will actually feel like. Do you want to kick off a super intelligent RL run without a rigorous understanding of its mind? Should you put your head down because it's happening anyway or take a moment to call for different conditions? End quote from this guy. I think this is AI, Dumerism, Preening. Just look at me. I'm the one that's warning everybody about this. And let me explain why. Now, I understand the first objection to this from people would be, you're just some guy, you don't understand AI. Okay. I read a lot but, you know, maybe I don't understand AI. Certainly the way that these AI researchers and programmers and stuff do. That's all fair, that's all true. But what do I understand? I understand human nature, I understand history, and I understand incentives and human psychology. And I can put all those things together and come up with some analysis that I think is worth sharing with you on all this.

5:15First of all, if what they are saying is true, what are we supposed to do about it? Stop AI research? Now they'll say, oh no, no, just stop. Set guidelines about how far we can go. Who's going to set those guidelines? AI assume companies will have to sort of self determine and collude. What would happen if somebody broke through though? Are they going to be criminally charged? Like what? How could you enforce this agreement, this collusion, if you accepted it as such, between these AI companies? This is why the Paris Climate Agreement, again, climate I think is such the climate change movement is such an important analogy for all this. There is no penalties for not doing it. So countries just won't do it and then nothing happens. But they all sit around talking about how important it is to do the thing that they won't do because there's no penalty for not doing it. Very obvious. Again, I don't have to know what the complex climate models are.

6:18I can know that one, those complex climate models are always wrong and always have been wrong. And two, I can know that without any penalties, without any incentive structure of enforcement structure rather, the incentives are entirely lined against just doing whatever you want to do while pretending you're a hero for doing the thing that's so important. You see how that aligns very much with this AI situation? It aligns very much with the realities we are seeing of artificial intelligence play out before us. So that's one aspect of it. But also what's the next level then? So the companies can regulate themselves to make AI less advanced than it would otherwise be. They'll stop themselves. Think of when has any company in any field of human endeavor ever said, you know, our R&D, we're learning too much and we're getting too good. So we're going to just shut it. We're going to hold ourselves back.

7:18That's just contrary to human nature. This is a Pandora's box situation to borrow from the ancient Greek mythology here. There's no way to put it back in. And once it's out there, we have to deal with the world as it is, not as we wish it perhaps could have been before this. So that's a component of this AI thing. But by the way, people like why should I care? AI is changing everything right now. That's happening right now. This is not some theoretical changing transportation, it's changing business, it's changing money, it's changing communication, it's changing. I mean, these all of these things, when I say changing, that doesn't mean completely upending, it doesn't mean replacing. It just means it is affecting all these things. It is going to be a tool of human change along the scale of and perhaps greatly exceeding the internet. Now, in the early days of the internet, people would have said, oh great, like I can go on Compuserve and go into a chat room and send email.

8:20Ooh, and I can look at certain news sites or something or, ooh, well yeah, but now it's, as we know, trillion dollar businesses are built essentially on the internet. Right, or trillions of dollars of businesses done on the internet. And this is completely changed the way humans interact and operate in their day to day, how we communicate, how we do everything. AI is going to be like that, it's going to be like the internet in the sense that it affects a lot of things. But I don't think it's going to be SkyNet from the Terminator series and Kill All of Us. And I think that these people that are saying this stuff are extremely unhelpful. There are applications of AI specifically that are worrying, like for example, the removal of a human element from the kill chain of drones with AI for targeting, which is already a thing that's happening. Meaning that that technology exists. That is concerning for obvious reasons.

9:21And you also get to who is going to be held responsible and how does insurance handle these things with autonomous driving and all these different technologies that are coming together that are already here. So yeah, there's adoption issues with all of this, but it's going to kill us all. Or even if there's a 10% or a 1% chance, it's going to kill us all. I don't see it. So that putting it in the government's hands to regulate this the next thing I wanted to say, that's what you're going to have Chuck Schumer. You're going to have AOC. You're going to have Ted Cruz. It was a very smart guy, but you know, he doesn't know AI. He's not an AI researcher. You're going to have these people writing laws that say what? Don't create an AI that kills everybody. I mean, okay, I got news for you. If what they're saying is true and that's technologically even possible, they could stumble into it and not know it. And so what guardrails can you really set up?

10:22And this brings me to the guardrails of the government are going to set up. It's going to be picking winners and losers, going to be corruption. It's going to be all kinds of stuff. We've seen a lot of this with the internet too. There's going to be a lot of putting the hand on the scale under the guise of protecting people, but really just allowing the government to pick winners and losers and reward friends. And punish enemies and so you don't want the government creating some artificial set of constraints on the advancement of a technology that is still in its infancy for humanity. So the first thing is, you know, okay, the companies, oh, we're sounding the alarm right. Let's break this down. First level, the companies are in charge themselves of restraining themselves. They're not going to do that and that's absurd. And even if they do do it, there's no penalties. So eventually somebody will break through. Okay, second level government regulation. Government has no idea. Government still hasn't figured out how to regulate free speech on the internet properly without being completely ham-fisted in the process. You think they're going to be good at this?

11:23That's absurd. But then there's the other aspect of it. And I've seen people get snarky about this online too. Like, oh, China. It's always a thread about China. We'll look at climate change in China. Again, very useful proxies. Say, what does that have to do with anything? We were being told, oh, we have to build fewer factories, use less coal, all these different things. Limit our CO2 output to save the world. Meanwhile, China and India's CO2 output was skyrocketing and they could care less. And we share the world with them. So what difference does it make? It made no difference. It was the whole thing. The whole climate change movement is an exercise in futility, but also it's damaging because we created costs that are unnecessary, restraints on innovation and productivity that just made us less wealthy and less prosperous as a species, human beings. There's no reason to do this stuff. It's absurd.

12:23And this is why you also never really hear about it. Well, climate change, don't even talk about it anymore. But as long as China was going to do whatever they were going to do, our efforts to restrain CO2 emissions were doomed to be meaningless. Not just fail. Do nothing. Nothing. By the very numbers of the people demanding we do something. Now you see how it's relevant to AI with China. We're going to self-regulate so that we don't have dangerous AI out there. Nobody thinks China is going to regulate its AI. Because it's too powerful or too advanced. So you want to perhaps leave a more advanced version of AI that maybe can crack into our cryptic communications, and maybe can get into our satellites that maybe you get into all this stuff. You're going to allow that to just, you're going to seed that territory to China and see what happens. This is why these people are saying, oh, but I'm so worried about where this is going. We will adapt.

13:25We are humans. We will adapt. We will figure it out. It's a very useful tool. It's already happening. There's no turning back from even the AI that we already have. It's only going to become more present in our lives. And just like we have with the internet, just like we have with the combustion engine and with nuclear power and with electricity and with all these different things. We'll figure it out. That's the real answer about this AI stuff. Yeah, as we go, there's going to be some stuff that happens. We don't like, we do like, but stop pumping the, pumping the brakes on this is, it's just meaningless. It's absurd. You can't pump the brakes on it, really. I mean, the ways that you would do it are just self-defeating and have no meaning over the long term. Because people say, oh, we need to think more about this or see more of the implications. Who's going to make the determination when humanity or even just the American people know enough about AI?

14:28That now we can finally go to the next level. People are going to innovate. They're going to discover. They're going to try new things. They're going to learn. And we should embrace the tools of the 21st century as just homo sapiens. But also as Americans specifically, because we want an America-dominated future. We certainly don't want China to be the dominant power going forward. You hear that? You didn't hear anything. That's great, isn't it? Because it's my phone with no scam calls and no scam texts. That silence from your phone that I just played for you there, because you heard nothing. Guess what? It's golden. But data brokers are trying to find your stuff all the time, selling your personal information like it's going out of style. Your phone number, home address, email, those scammers are blowing up your phone. They bought your information. They'll keep buying it over and over until you make it stop. But within Cogniz help, they can remove.

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