I Warned You AI Would Hack Us — My 2023 Interview Aged Terrifyingly Well

In April 2023, weeks after GPT-4 launched, when many were saying it was just a "stochastic parrot", I went on AdQuick's Madvertising podcast hosted by Adam Singer and warned that GPT was "about to be the strongest hacker the world has ever known".

Watch that conversation, which also covered the Web3 bubble and AI doom more broadly, and judge for yourself how my claims are holding up.

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6gNwZWY-T8

Timestamps

00:00:00 — Adam Introduces Liron

00:02:03 — Liron's P(Doom) Poll

00:03:24 — Web3 Postmortem

00:05:05 — Axie Infinity and Hollow Abstractions

00:07:54 — Brand Marketers' Metaverse FOMO

00:13:33 — Near-Term AI: Elevator to Heaven

00:16:46 — AI at Relationship Hero

00:18:25 — From Chatbots to Bricking the Universe

00:20:17 — The Passive Income Doom Scenario

00:22:58 — 50 Orders of Magnitude Smarter

00:26:10 — Accelerationism and Transhumanism

00:28:51 — Why There's No Off Button

00:31:00 — Can't We Hard-Code Safeguards?

00:33:13 — CRISPR, Nukes, and Fusion

00:35:40 — AI Doom vs. Climate Change

00:39:10 — Nanotechnology Endgame

00:41:45 — AI Attackers vs. AI Defenders

00:43:28 — The Ethics of AI Persuasion

00:46:41 — The Blue Sky Scenario

00:49:04 — Will AI Kill Craft?

00:51:13 — Stuck Culture and Hollywood Sequels

00:54:50 — The Pause Letter: Don't Train GPT-5

00:59:00 — Worldcoin and Proof of Humanity

01:00:44 — "You Probably Won't Die of Old Age"

01:01:52 — Wrap-Up

Original episode: https://madvertising.buzzsprout.com/2118560/episodes/12603815-liron-shapira-web-3-mania-cybersecurity-how-ai-could-brick-the-universe-madvertising-6

Links

ADAM SINGER & MADVERTISING

Adam Singer on X: https://x.com/AdamSinger

Madvertising by AdQuick (the original show): https://madvertising.buzzsprout.com/

LIRON'S PROJECTS MENTIONED

Bloated MVP (Liron's blog on hollow abstractions): https://www.bloatedmvp.com/

REFERENCED IN THE EPISODE

"Pause Giant AI Experiments" open letter (FLI, March 2023): https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experiments/

Eliezer Yudkowsky — "Pausing AI Developments Isn't Enough. We Need to Shut it All Down" (TIME, March 2023): https://time.com/6266923/ai-eliezer-yudkowsky-open-letter-not-enough/

Rob Miles AI Safety on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/robertmilesai

Engines of Creation by Eric Drexler: https://www.amazon.com/Engines-Creation-Nanotechnology-Library-Science/dp/0385199732

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