Dario Amodei: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Exactly. In this world with super powerful AI that’s increasingly automated, what’s the source of meaning for us humans? Work is a source of deep meaning for many of us. Where do we find the meaning? This is something that I’ve written about a little bit in the essay, although I actually give it a bit short shrift, not for any principled reason, but this essay, if you believe it was originally going to be two or three pages, I was going to talk about it at all hands. And the reason I realized it was an important underexplored topic is that I just kept writing things and I was just like, “Oh man, I can’t do this justice.” And so the thing ballooned to 40 or 50 pages and then when I got to the work and meaning section, I’m like, “Oh man, this isn’t going to be 100 pages. ” I’m going to have to write a whole other essay about that. But meaning is actually interesting because you think about the life that someone lives or something, or let’s say you were to put me in, I don’t know, like a simulated environment or something where I have a job and I’m trying to accomplish things and I don’t know, I do that for 60 years and then you’re like, “Oh, oops, this was actually all a game,” right? Does that really kind of rob you of the meaning of the whole thing? I still made important choices, including moral choices. I still sacrificed. I still had to gain all these skills or just a similar exercise. Think back to one of the historical figures who discovered electromagnetism or relativity or something. If you told them, “Well, actually 20,000 years ago, some alien on this planet discovered this before you did,” does that rob the meaning of the discovery? It doesn’t really seem like it to me, right? It seems like the process is what matters and how it shows who you are as a person along the way and how you relate to other people and the decisions that you make along the way. Those are consequential. I could imagine if we handle things badly in an AI world, we could set things up where people don’t have any long-term source of meaning or any, but that’s more a set of choices we make that’s more a set of the architecture of society with these powerful models. If we design it badly and for shallow things, then that might happen. I would also say that most people’s lives today, while admirably, they work very hard to find meaning in those lives. Like look, we who are privileged and who are developed these technologies, we should have empathy for people not just here, but in the rest of the world who spend a lot of their time scraping by to survive, assuming we can distribute the benefits of this technology to everywhere, their lives are going to get a hell of a lot better and meaning will be important to them as it is important to them now. ive, assuming we can distribute the benefits of this technology to everywhere, their lives are going to get a hell of a lot better and meaning will be important to them as it is important to them now. But we should not forget the importance of that and that the idea of meaning as the only important thing is in some ways an artifact of a small subset of people who have been economically fortunate. But I think all of that said, I think a world is possible with powerful AI that not only has as much meaning for everyone, but that has more meaning for everyone that can allow everyone to see worlds and experiences that it was either possible for no one to see or a possible for very few people to experience. So I am optimistic about meaning. I worry about economics and the concentration of power. That’s actually what I worry about more. I worry about how do we make sure that that fair world reaches everyone. When things have gone wrong for humans, they’ve often gone wrong because humans mistreat other humans. That is maybe in some ways even more than the autonomous risk of AI or the question of meaning. That is the thing I worry about most, the concentration of power, the abuse of power, structures like autocracies and dictatorships where a small number of people exploits a large number of people. I’m very worried about that.…

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