Humanity’s future with Artificial Intelligence

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Today on State of the World.

What do these future with artificial intelligence?

You're listening to State of the World from NPR.

We bring you the days most vital international stories up close where they're happening.

I'm Greg Dixon.

We hear a lot these days about the use of AI, how it will be used in war fighting in the

future, and in the present in Iran.

What it might mean for people's jobs and the global economy.

On today's episode, we bring you a conversation with someone who has thought a lot about our

AI future.

Here's NPR's Stevens Keep.

A new documentary features people who research and build artificial intelligence.

A filmmaker questions them in the AI doc or how I became an apocalypticist.

Several experts struggle to answer the same question.

Do you want to have kids one day?

Is that something that you're into or not really?

I confess, I think that it's like, well, let's get through this critical period.

Do you have any kids?

I do not.

Is that something you want to do?

Have children have a family?

And some other world than this world, sure.

Would you want to start a family?

I am.

That last person was Tristan Harris.

He once worked for tech firms and now runs the Center for Humane Technology, which advocates

for regulation.

We invited Harris over to hear why he thinks market incentives are taking AI in a dangerous

direction.

The only way they can justify the amount of money that's been invested into this AI

industry is if they race to replace economic labor in the economy.

That's the state admission statement of open AI is to be able to do everything that a

human laborer can do.

The open AI charter defines artificial general intelligence as highly autonomous systems

that outperform humans at most economically valuable work.

So there you are.

We're sitting in front of computer screens and NPR.

Everything you can do on that computer, answering email, scheduling something, doing financial

analysis, marketing, research, all of that, you'll be able to do with AI.

They're not racing to augment and support human workers.

They're racing to replace human workers.

And what that will lead to is unprecedented levels of concentration and wealth and power

because essentially all the money in the economy, instead of being paid to individual

laborers, you're going to pay five to ten AI companies to do all of the work.

You should clarify, you did not produce this film, you influenced the filmmakers, you're

in the film.

And there's a moment a little later where you're still talking about kids.

And you quote AI researchers or scientists saying they have kids and do not expect the

kids to make it to high school.

Yeah.

Well, so the problem is that AI carries so much risk.

Let me give you a very concrete example.

Just weeks ago, there was a new study at a university where they guy basically took all

the leading AI models and put them in various war game scenarios.

And just seeing in this war game, what would you do to sort of beat this war?

Is this like clawed versus chat GPT?

That kind of thing.

Okay.

Yeah, exactly.

And they generated 780,000 words of reasoning instantly.

And they're going back and forth in a turn by turn scenario.

And in this scenario, the AI escalated to the use of nuclear weapons 95% of the time.

But this says is that the AI, again, it's reasoning in a way that we don't understand

and we don't control what it's going to do.

Now the one possibility is AI destroys the world as you just laid out with the war game

scenario.

But you alluded to another one, which is a handful of companies and in a sense, a handful

of individuals end up with all the money and the power.

Yes.

Is that already happening?

In a way, I think it is already happening.

There's something in economics called the resource curse.

And a country gets more and more of its economic output from mining one resource.

When that happens, the country becomes sort of addicted to just that resource being mined

and doesn't want to invest in its people, just wants to invest in that resource.

With AI, there's something people worry about.

There's an essay by Rudolph Lane and Luke Drago called the intelligence curse.

So what happens when the United States, a few years from now, all of the economic output

is coming from five AI companies that are automating all the science, automating all

the physical labor, automating all the robotics and physical, et cetera.

Suddenly, why is a government, would you invest in healthcare or childcare or people?

Because the people are invaluable because the people aren't valuable anymore.

Hopefully the people still vote though, they would have some kind of power.

Well, that's an interesting question.

Do you have to listen to the people's political power if you don't get your tax revenue

from the people anymore, you get it from AI companies.

And if companies, you can't use your bargaining power, you can't withdraw your labor like

a labor union because the companies don't need you either.

So I'm not saying this to scare people, I'm saying this to clarify an incentive for governments

to say we should be investing in data centers and prioritizing electricity for data centers

not for people.

It leads to things like Sam Altman saying just a few weeks ago, when he's asked, well,

doesn't it take a lot of energy to train AI?

You know, his response was, well, doesn't it take a lot of energy to grow a human over

20 years?

This is leading to an anti-human future.

It leads to the devaluing of humans and the valuing of AI.

And this is something that's very dangerous and the thing that people should take away

is this is the last chance that our political voice will matter.

As you know very well, the Pentagon recently had a conflict with Anthropic.

That's right.

The Pentagon was using Claude, their AI platform for war fighting purposes.

Anthropic was insisting on a couple of limitations that this technology should not be used for

mass surveillance of Americans and should not be used for the automated firing of weapons

without a human being involved.

The Pentagon said, no, if it's too much, we will not accept your limitations and effectively

fired them.

What did you think about that as you watched it from the outside?

Well, there's a next part of that story, which is that after Anthropic said, we don't

want to support mass domestic surveillance of Americans and we don't want to support

autonomous weapons.

You can notice that Sam Altman jumped right in and said, we'll sell ChatGPT to the government

to do both of those things.

And what you saw subsequently to that was the largest drop in subscriptions to ChatGPT

that has happened, I believe.

And a huge surge of subscriptions into Claude and Anthropic.

I guess we should clarify ChatGPT at some point also said, we'll have restrictions.

There was some question about that and the standard was for the Pentagon any lawful purpose.

Yeah.

The point I'm trying to get at is that mass boycotts are actually very effective because

these companies really need those user numbers going up to tell investors that the health

of our company is really strong.

Let me ask about this from the flip side, though.

If you're not in favor of mass surveillance of Americans, if you're not in favor of AI-driven

war, you might cheer Anthropic for having those rules and sticking up for its principles.

But there's another way to look at it, which would be the government that I elect should

be deciding how this technology is used and not a particular company.

I mean, letting the company decide might be the equivalent of when Elon Musk was deciding

which starling satellites he wanted to activate in Ukraine.

No, definitely.

There's huge governance issues here.

And what this really is getting at is the nature of how technology is really the primary

driving force of power in this world and how do you govern technology is the central

question.

So, you feel the government should decide and we have to push the government to do it

competently.

We need to make sure that there are more experts and more citizen deliberations brought

into that process in addition to the government ultimately making the decision.

Tristan Harris, it's a pleasure talking with you.

Thank you.

Thank you so much, Steve.

Tristan Harris is an advocate for AI regulation who appears in the new documentary called

The AI Dock.

He was speaking to Steve and Steve.

And that's the state of the world from NPR.

Thanks for listening.