Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…AI systems are able to interpret, understand, interact with the human world to sufficient degree to where many of the manually controlled human in the loop systems we rely on become fully autonomous. And I think mobility is such a big part of human civilization that there will be effects on that, that they’re not just economic, but are social cultural and so on. And there’s a lot more things I could talk about for a long time. So obviously the integration utilization of AI in the creation of art, film, music, I think the digitalization and automating basic functions of government, and then integrating AI into that process, thereby decreasing corruption and costs and increasing transparency and efficiency. I think we as humans, individual humans, will continue to transition further and further into cyborgs. There’s already a AI in the loop of the human condition, and that will become increasingly so as AI becomes more powerful. The thing I’m obviously really excited about is major breakthroughs in science, and not just on the medical front but on fundamental physics, which would then lead to energy breakthroughs increasing the chance that we become, we actually become a Kardashev Type I civilization. And then enabling us in so doing to do interstellar exploration of space and colonization of space. I think there also in the near term, much like with the industrial revolution that led to rapid specialization of skills of expertise, there might be a great sort of de-specialization. So as the AI system become superhuman experts at particular fields, there might be greater and greater value to being the integrator of AIs for humans to be generalists. And so the great value of the human mind will come from the generalists, not the specialists. That’s a real possibility that that changes the way we are about the world, that we want to know a little bit of a lot of things and move about the world in that way. That could have when passing a certain threshold, a complete shift in who we are as a collective intelligence as a human species. Also as an aside, when thinking about the invention that was the greatest in human history, again for a bit of fun, we have to remember that all of them build on top of each other. as a human species. Also as an aside, when thinking about the invention that was the greatest in human history, again for a bit of fun, we have to remember that all of them build on top of each other. And so we need to look at the Delta, the step change on the, I would say impossibly to perfectly measure plot of exponential human progress. Really we can go back to the entire history of life on earth. And a previous podcast guest, Nick Lane does a great job of this in his book Life Ascending, listing these 10 major inventions throughout the evolution of life on earth like DNA, photosynthesis, complex cells, sex, movement, sight, all those kinds of things. I forget the full list that’s on there. But I think that’s so far from the human experience that my intuition about, let’s say productivity multipliers of those particular inventions completely breaks down, and a different framework is needed to understand the impact of these inventions of evolution. The origin of life on Earth, or even the Big Bang itself of course is the OG invention that set the stage for all the rest of it. And there are probably many more turtles under that which are yet to be discovered. So anyway, we live in interesting times, fellow humans. I do believe the set of positive trajectories for humanity outnumber the set of negative trajectories, but not by much. So let’s not mess this up. And now let me leave you with some words from French philosopher Jean de La Bruyère, “Out of difficulties, grow miracles.” Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.…

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