when you look to the Future and you try to guess as to how all this is going to turn out with AI what do you think we're looking at over the next 5 years if you think about the AI discussion in the 2010s preop AI chat GPT and the revolution of the last 2 years but the 20110 AI discussion it maybe anchored on two visions of what AI meant and one was Nick Bostrom Oxford Prof who wrote This Book uh super intelligence 2014 and it was basically AI was going to be this super duper intelligent
thing Godlike intelligence way smarter than any human being and then there was the CCP Chinese Communist rebuttal the Kaiu Lee book from 2018 AI superpowers it defined AI as was fairly low Tech it was just surveillance facial recognition technology we would just have the sort of totalitarian stalinist monitoring it didn't require very much Innovation it just required that you apply things and basically the subtext was China is going to win because we have no ethical qualms in China about applying this this sort of basic machine learning to measuring or controlling the the the population and
those were say two extreme competing visions of what AI would mean in the 2010s and maybe were the anchors of of the AI debate and then what happened in some sense with chat GPT in late 22 early 23 was that the achievement you got you did not get superintelligent it was not just surveillance Tech you actually got to the Holy Grail of what people would have defined AI as from 1950 to 2010 for the previous 60 years before the 2010s people have always said AI the definition of AI is passing the touring test and the
touring test it basically means that the computer can fool you into thinking that it's a human being and it's a somewhat fuzzy test because obviously you can have an expert on the computer a non-expert does does it fool you all the time or some of the time how good is it but to First approximation the touring test we weren't even close to passing it in 2021 and then chat GPT basically passes the touring test at least for let's say an IQ 100 average person it's passed the touring test and that was the Holy Grail that
was the Holy Grail of AI research for the previous 60 years and and so there's I know there's probably some psychological or sociological history where you can say that this weird debate between Bost about super intelligence and Kaiu Le about surveillance Tech was like this almost like psychological suppression people had where they were not thinking they they lost track of the touring test of the Holy Grail of because it was about to happen and it was such a significant such an important thing that you didn't even want to think about so I'm tempted to give
almost a psychological repression theory of of the 2010 debates but be that as it may the Turing test gets passed and that's an extraordinary achievement and then where where does it go from here there probably are ways you can refine these it's still going to be a long time to apply it there's this AGI discussion will we get artificial general intelligence which is a hopelessly vague concept which general intelligence could be just a generally smart human being so is that just a person with an IQ of 130 or is it super intelligence is it Godlike
intelligence uh so it's an ambiguous thing but I keep thinking that maybe the AGI question is less important than passing the touring test if if we got AGI if we got let's say super intelligence that would be interesting to Mr God because you'd have competition for being God but surely the touring test is more important for us humans because it's either a complement or substitute to humans it it's going to rearrange the economic cultural political structure of our society in extremely dramatic ways and I think maybe what's already happened is much more important than anything
else that's going to be done and then it's just going to be a long ways in applying it the analogy I'm always tempted to go to and it's maybe AI it's like the internet in 1999 where on one level it's clear the internet's going to be big and get very a lot bigger and it's going to dominate the economy it's going to rearrange the society in the 21st century and then at the same time it was a complete bubble and people had no idea how the business models worked almost everything blew up it didn't take
that long in the scheme of things it took 15 20 years for it to become super dominant but it didn't happen been 18 months as people fantasized in 1999 and maybe what we have in AI is something like this it's figuring out how to actually apply it in all these different ways is going to take something like two decades but that doesn't distract from it being a really big deal do you think that the lack of acknowledgement or the public celebration or at least this mainstream discussion which I think should be everywhere that we've passed
the Turing test do you think it's connected to the fact this stuff accelerates so rapidly that even though we've essentially breached this new territory it we still know that GPT 5 is going to be better GPT 6 is going to be insane and then they're working on these right now and the and the change is happening so quickly we're almost a little reluctant to acknowledge where we're at I've probably for 15 years or so often been on the side that there isn't that much progress in science or Tech or not as much as Silicon Valley
likes to claim and even on the AI level I think it's a massive technical achievement it's still an open question is it actually going to lead to much higher living standards for everybody the internet was a massive achievement how much it it raise people's living standards much much trickier question but in this world where not much has happened one of the paradoxes of an era of relative Tech stagnation is that when something does happen we don't even know how to process it I think Bitcoin was a big invention we can debate whether it was good
or bad but it was a pretty big deal and it was systematically underestimated for at least the first 10 11 years you could trade it it went up smoothly for 10 11 years it didn't get repriced all at once because we're in a world where nothing big ever happens and so we have no way of processing it when something pretty big happens the internet was pretty big in '99 Bitcoin was moderately big and I'd say passing the Turing test is really big it's on the same scale as the internet and because our lived experiences that
so little has felt like it's been changing for the last few decades we're we're probably underestimating it it's interesting that you say that so little we feel like so little has changed in our age we've seen all the change right we saw the end of the Cold War we saw answering machines we saw VHS tapes then we saw the internet and then where we're at right now which is like this bizarre moment in time where people carry the internet around with them in their pocket every day and these super sophisticated computers that are ubiquitous everybody
has one there's incredible technology that's being ramped up every year they're getting better all the time and now there's AI there's AI on your phone you could access chat GPT and a bunch of different programs on your phone and I think that's an insane change I I think that's one of the most especially with the use of social media it's one of the most bizarre changes I think our cultures ever the most bizarre it can be can be a big change culturally or politically but the kinds of questions I I'd ask is how do you
measure it economically how much does it change GDP how much does it change productivity the story I would generally tell for the last 50 years since the 1970s early '70s is that we've been not absolute stagnation we been an era of relative stagnation where there has been very limited progress in the world of atoms the world of physical things and there has been a lot of progress in the world of bits information computers internet mobile internet now ai what are you referring to when you're saying the the world of physical things if if we had
defined technology if we were sitting here in 1967 the year we were born and we had a discussion about technology what technology would have meant would it would have meant computers it would have also meant Rockets it would have meant supersonic airplanes it would have meant new medicines it would have meant the green revolution in agriculture maybe underwater cities because technology simply gets defined as that which is changing that which is progressing and so there's progress on all these fronts to today last 20 years when you talk about technology technology has been reduced to meaning
computers and that tells you that the structure of progress has been weird there's been this narrow cone a very intense progress around the world of bits around the world of computers and then all the other are areas have been relatively stagnant we're not moving any faster the Concord got decommissioned in 2003 or whenever and then with all the low Tech airport security measures it takes even longer to fly to get through all all of them from from from one city to the next the highways have gone backwards because there more traffic jams we haven't figured
out ways around those we're literally moving slower than we were 40 or 50 years ago and then of course there's also a sense in which the screens and the devices have this effect distracting us when you're you know riding a 100-year-old Subway New York City and you're looking at your iPhone you can look at wow this is this cool new Gadget but you're also being distracted from the fact that your lived environment hasn't changed in a 100 years there's a question how important is this world of bits versus the world of atoms I would say
as human beings we're physically embodied in a material world and so I I I would always say this world of atams is pretty important and when that's pretty stagnant there's a lot of stuff that that doesn't make sense I I was an undergraduate at Stanford late 80s and at the time in retrospect every engineering area would have been a bad thing to go into mechanical engineering chemical engineering all these engineering Fields where you're tinkering and trying to do new things because these things turned out to be stuck they were regulated couldn't come up with new
things to do nuclear engineering Aero asro engineering people already knew those were really bad ones to go into they were outlawed you weren't going to make any progress in new nuclear reactor designs or stuff like that electrical engineering which was the one that's adjacent to making semiconductors that one was still okay and then the only field that was actually going to progress a lot was computer science and again it's been very powerful but that was not the felt sense in the 1980s in the 1980s computer science when people use the word science I'm in favor
of science I'm not in favor of Science and quotes and when it's always a tell that it's not real science and so when we call it climate science or political science or social science you're just making it up and you have an inferiority complex to real science which something like physics or chemistry and computer science was in the same category as social science or political science it was a fake field for people who found electrical engineering or math way too hard you don't feel that climate science is a real science there's several different things one
could say it's it's possible climate change is happening it's possible we don't have great accounts of why that's going on so I'm not questioning any of those things but how scientific it is I don't think it's a place where we have really vigorous debates maybe the climate is increasing because of carbon dioxide emissions temperatures are going up maybe it's methane maybe it's people are eating too much steak it's the cows flatulating or and you have to measure how how much is methane a greenhouse gas versus carbon dioxide I don't think they're rigorously doing that stuff
scientifically and I think the fact that it's called climate science tells you that it's more dogmatic than anything that's truly science should be does Dogma doesn't mean it's wrong but why is the fact that it's called climate science mean that it's more dogmatic because if you said nuclear science you wouldn't question it right it's yeah but no one calls it nuclear science they call it nuclear engineering because I'm just the the only thing is I just making I'm just making naring science that is legitimately science at this point people say computer science is worked but
right in the 1980s all I'm saying is it was in the same categories let's say social science political science it was a tell that the people doing it deep down knew they weren't doing real science there's certainly ideology that's connected to climate science and then there's certainly corporations that are invested in this Prospect of green energy and the concept of green energy and they're profiting off of it and pushing these different things whether it be electric car mandates or whatever it is like California I think 2035 they have a mandate that all new vehicles have
to be electric which is hilarious when you're connected to a grid that can't support the electric cars it currently has after they said that within a month or two Gavin new asked people to not charge their Teslas because it was summer and the grid was yeah look it's it it was all linked into all these ideological projects in all these ways and there's an environmental project and maybe it shouldn't be scientific there's the hardcore environmentalist argument is we only have one planet and we don't have time to do science if you have to do rigorous
science and you can prove that we're overheated it'll be too late and so if you're a hardcore environmentalist you don't want to have as high a standard of science yeah my my intuition is certainly when you go away from that you end up with things that are too dogmatic too ideological maybe it doesn't even work even if the planet's getting warmer maybe methane is it more dangerous greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide we're not even capable of measuring that we're also ignoring certain things like regenerative Farms that sequester carbon and then you have people like Bill
Gates saying that planting trees to to deal with carbon is ridiculous it's a ridiculous way to do it like how is that ridiculous is they literally turn carbon dioxide into oxygen it is their food that's what the food of plants is that's that's what powers the the whole plant life and the way we have the symbiotic relationship with them like and the more carbon dioxide is the greener it is which is why it's Greener Today on Earth than it has been in a hundred years sure these are all facts that are inconvenient to people that
have a very specific narrow window of how to approach this sure although there probably are ways to steal man the other side too where maybe the original 1970s I think the manifesto that's always very interesting from the other side was this uh book by the club of Rome 1972 the limits of growth we need to head towards a society in which there's very limited growth because if you have unlimited growth you're going to run out of resources if you don't run out of resources you'll hit a pollution constraint in the 1970s it was you're going
to have overpopulation you're going to run out of oil we had the oil shocks and then by the 9s it's morphed into more of the pollution problem with carbon dioxide climate change other environmental things there's been some improvement in oil carbon fuels with fracking things like this in Texas it's not at the scale that's been enough to give an American standard of living to the whole planet and we consume 100 million barrels of oil a day globally maybe fracking can add 10% 10 million to that if everybody on this planet has an American standard of
living it's something like 3 300 400 million barrels of oil and I don't think that's there I I always wonder whether that was the real environmental argument is we can't have an American standard of living for the whole planet we somehow can't justify this degree of inequality and therefore we have to figure out ways to dial back and tax the carbon restrict it and maybe there's some sort of a malthusian calculus that's more about resources than about pollution
