Andrej Karpathy: belief

Transcript context

…Now that I’m understanding the vision, that’s very interesting. It has a perfect analog in gym culture. I don’t think 100 years ago anybody would be ripped. Nobody would have been able to just spontaneously bench two plates or three plates or something. It’s very common now because of this idea of systematically training and lifting weights in the gym, or systematically training to be able to run a marathon, which is a capability most humans would not spontaneously have. You’re imagining similar things for learning across many different domains, much more intensely, deeply, faster. Exactly. I am betting a bit implicitly on some of the timelessness of human nature. It will be desirable to do all these things, and I think people will look up to it as they have for millennia. This will continue to be true. There’s some evidence of that historically. If you look at, for example, aristocrats, or you look at ancient Greece or something like that, whenever you had little pocket environments that were post-AGI in a certain sense, people have spent a lot of their time flourishing in a certain way, either physically or cognitively. I feel okay about the prospects of that. If this is false and I’m wrong and we end up in a WALL-E or Idiocracy future, then I don’t even care if there are Dyson spheres. This is a terrible outcome. I really do care about humanity. Everyone has to just be superhuman in a certain sense. It’s still a world in which that is not enabling us to… It’s like the culture world, right? You’re not fundamentally going to be able to transform the trajectory of technology or influence decisions by your own labor or cognition alone. Maybe you can influence decisions because the AI is asking for your approval, but it’s not because I’ve invented something or I’ve come up with a new design that I’m really influencing the future.…

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