Adam Becker: evaluation

Transcript context

…The useful idiots of AI doomsaying. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Tell me about that. Well, maybe maybe before before we get there. So after reading that article, I I immediately reached out to you because I I thought it was great. And I discovered that you'd written this book, More Everything Forever. And in a minute, actually, I'm going to read a paragraph from page 28 because I I think that sums up the book quite nicely. But I I should say at the beginning that that, you know, we we have a very technical audience, and I've interviewed many, many folks from the EA community and the rationalist community and and so on. So we try to be multidisciplinary. But I think this is actually a great opportunity for you as as a physicist to litigate some of these ideas and and kind of go from 1st principles. So anyway, tell tell me about your book. Sure. So, I mean, you you did just sum it up in a way in that the book is me litigating a bunch of these things from 1st principles. I've lived in the Bay Area now for almost 15 years, and I have been to a lot of parties out here where I've heard a lot of people say a lot of bizarre things about the future of technology, AI, you know, space colonization, that kind of thing. And I always just kinda rolled my eyes, but as time went on, I realized, wait, these ideas are actually really influential and yet there's no good evidence for them and in most cases, lot of good evidence against them. And so the book is my attempt to lay out this set of beliefs that are surprisingly influential within the tech industry and are promoted both by tech billionaires and by subcultures that are funded by tech billionaires like rationalism, effective altruism, and go after these ideas both in a in a scientific and philosophical way. Ideas like the singularity, you know, an AGI, apocalypse, space colonization, you name it. In in a way, we live in crazy times. Right? Yes. Large language models are are now getting better all the time. And, you know, you could almost be forgiven for having this kind of techno utopian view of what's to come. But I wanted just to read a tiny bit from your bit because I think this sums it up quite nicely. So you you said that the technologists, they make all of these problems into problems about technology. All the ills of the world will be solved when the singularity arrives or when super intelligent AI solves them for us or when we go into space. Global warming can be solved with nanotechnology, illness and death, all the other problems that come with having a body can be solved by transferring your mind into a computer. Social problems and political problems like the problems created by tech companies themselves are dismissed as irrelevant or unimportant when compared to the more urgent problems like avoiding the creation of an improperly aligned AI or the polite of a hypothetical unborn quadrillions of humans that could live on other side on the other side of the cosmos 1000000000 years from now. It's a philosophy made by carpenters insisting the entire world is a nail that will yield to their ministrations.…

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