Nathan Labenz: evaluation

Transcript context

…ole point of doing this is at least this was milo 's milo 's creative child. And I didn't have much of A say any in him making it either way. I had to say in how I was represented and that's about it. But the reason I I gladly and enthusiastically participated in it is because I do think these are really important questions, like pretty fundamental essential civilization level questions. and i don't think the only people who should be talking about it are a thousand dudes in san francisco or even the people who are you know AI insiders and who if like if you understood eighty to ninety percent of this podcast this film i think you will like it and enjoy it. But it's not for that kind of person. It's for people who are interested in the stuff. They know AI is sort of crazy. They don't really know what's going on. we do a little bit of the alignment one oh one sort of stuff but mostly it's centered on this consciousness question. And it's for people who are smart. But it is it is meant to engage a much larger audience to understand the core questions that are being asked right now. And I think that's an important thing to do because this is a civilization level problem. And I think all of our civilizations should be participating and trying to find the solution. I don't as much as I I do deeply respect than people I've named in this podcast, Jack Lindsay and Kyle Fish and Rob Long at Ilios and you know, people doing this good work. i don't think this should be a decision that four people or a dozen people or even a hundred people make. This needs to be a conversation that we have collectively as a species, and I'm all for attempts to open up this conversation to a wider audience and get people involved in realizing the actual stakes of what's going on right now. Cool. Well, people should stay tuned to check out the documentary when it comes out on May 4th. Maybe watch it and send it to family and friends who need a gentler introduction. Yeah, maybe my last question for you. I, you know, I think we talked with this more last time than this time, but this notion of mutualism as a positive vision for the future, I think is another major strength of just everything that you bring to the table. Because I, I do think we're dramatically under theorized in terms of, you know, what is our long term positive relationship with AI going to look like? Are you aware of any fiction that you would recommend to people that you would say has the vibe that you want? And if not, you know, maybe we should try to run a story contest or something to elicit this from people. But I, I have increasingly felt that hyperstitioning through fiction might be one of the best things people can do. But I wonder if you you've got any examples that you think are already out there that are good? No, I got to be honest with you. i hope my whole you know research agenda isn't already usurped by some sci fi book that somebody wrote forty years ago. But I am, I am not a huge consumer of fiction and I know stories exist now. I could have got on this podcast and told you what Claude told me to say. If I got some question about what fiction I would recommend people, but I'm not I'm not going to do that. I'm going to, I'm going to people can absolutely copy paste the transcript of this podcast into Claude and find if there's there's cool fiction that that that resonates with these themes. if anyone has any recommendations you know cameron at reciprocal research dot org please email me. I would love to. Understand sort of how this has been tackled. I do not have any great wrecks off the top of my head. You know, I hope I'm not too naive and this story has already been told and I'm just not aware of it. This is, you know, not to continually plug the dock. But this is one thing that I think Milo picks up in a really good way in the film is that questions of consciousness and basically what it would mean for us to wake up dead matter what it would mean for us to wake up the machine. This is a story that humanity has been telling ourselves through fiction arguably since ancient Greece, biblical sort of era with with the golem and and through Frankenstein and through Ex Machina and her and Wally and all that. Like these are score staples. you know hal two thousand one right? These are core staples of our cultural consciousness. Not to belabor the term and people intuitively, I think get this question and get the stakes of it and the scale of it in a way that I think in some ways the alignment problem can be framed in a very simple way. You build something smarter than you. How do you control that thing? By definition? It's not that hard to understand that maybe Terminator is like the parallel sort of cultural reference, But I think it's not that surprising that that the human mind is incredibly interested in where matter becomes mind. And we are a tool building species. What happens when we start building tools that start resembling species more than tools? A hammer. no one 's confused if the hammers conscious claude. we're now all confused if claude 's conscious and i think that this just just like psychologically very intuitively resonant to people. And I think basically situating the contribution of this film in that landscape is true and powerful. The only thing that's changed is this has moved from the realm of science fiction to the realm of science. That's the historical moment we find ourselves when I find that both incredibly exciting and incredibly scary. And hopefully that vibe comes through when people watch this film. So I don't have, I don't have fiction to recommend. I'm sure Claude does. And the key thing I can recommend is, yeah, people watch this, this doc that I wish were fiction but is not.…

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