Guillaume Verdon: prediction

Transcript context

…So if it turns out that the beauty that is consciousness in the universe is bigger than just humans, the AI can carry that same flame forward. Does it scare you, are you concerned that AI will replace humans? So during my career, I had a moment where I realized that maybe we need to offload to machines to truly understand the universe around us, right, instead of just having humans with pen and paper solve it all. And to me that sort of process of letting go of a bit of agency gave us way more leverage to understand the world around us. A quantum computer is much better than a human to understand matter at the Nanoscale. Similarly, I think that humanity has a choice, do we accept the opportunity to have intellectual and operational leverage that AI will unlock and thus ensure that we’re taken along this path of growth in the scope and scale of civilization? We may dilute ourselves, right? There might be a lot of workers that are AI, but overall out of our own self-interest, by combining and augmenting ourselves with AI, we’re going to achieve much higher growth and much more prosperity, right. To me, I think that the most likely future is one where humans augment themselves with AI. I think we’re already on this path to augmentation, we have phones we use for communication, we have on ourselves at all times. We have wearables, soon that have shared perception with us, right, like the Humane AI Pin or I mean, technically your Tesla car has shared perception. And so if you have shared experience, shared context, you communicate with one another and you have some sort of IO, really it’s an extension of yourself.And to me, I think that humanity augmenting itself with AI and having AI that is not anchored to anything biological, both will coexist. And the way to align the parties, we already have a sort of mechanism to align super intelligences that are made of humans and technology, right? Companies are sort of large mixture of expert models, where we have neural routing of tasks within a company and we have ways of economic exchange to align these behemoths. And to me, I think capitalism is the way, and I do think that whatever configuration of matter or information leads to maximal growth, will be where we converge, just from like physical principles. And so we can either align ourselves to that reality and join the acceleration up in scope and scale of civilization or we can get left behind and try to decelerate and move back in the forest, let go of technology and return to our primitive state. And those are the two paths forward, at least to me. But there’s a philosophical question whether there’s a limit to the human capacity to align. So let me bring it up as a form of argument, this guy named Dan Hendrycks and he wrote that he agrees with you that AI development could be viewed as an evolutionary process, but to him, to Dan, this is not a good thing, as he argues that natural selection favors AIs over humans and this could lead to human extinction. What do you think, if it is an evolutionary process and AI systems may have no need for humans?…

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