Demis Hassabis: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Ridiculous question, what’s your P-Doom? Probability of the human civilization destroys itself? Well, look, I don’t have a P-Doom number. The reason I don’t is because I think it would imply a level of precision that is not there. So I don’t know how people are getting their P-Doom numbers. I think it’s a little bit of ridiculous notion because what I would say is it’s definitely non-zero and it’s probably non-negligible. So that in itself is pretty sobering. And my view is it’s just hugely uncertain what these technologies are going to be able to do, how fast are they going to take off, how controllable are they going to be. Some things may turn out to be, and hopefully way easier than we thought, but it may be there’s some really hard problems that are harder than we guessed today, and I think we don’t know that for sure. And so under those conditions of a lot of uncertainty, but huge stakes both ways. On the one hand, we could solve all diseases, energy problems, the scarcity problem, and then travel to the stars and conscious of the stars and maximum human flourishing. On the other hand, is these P-Doom scenarios. So given the uncertainty around it and the importance of it, it’s clear to me the only rational, sensible approach is to proceed with cautious optimism. So we want the benefits of course, and all of the amazing things that AI can bring. And actually, I would be really worried for humanity given the other challenges that we have, climate, aging, resources, all of that if I didn’t know something like AI was coming down the line. How would we solve all those other problems? I think it’s hard. So I think it could be amazingly transformative for good. But on the other hand, there are these risks that we know are there. But on the other hand, there are these risks that we know are there, but we can’t quite quantify. So the best thing to do is to use the scientific method to do more research to try and more precisely define those risks and of course address them. And I think that’s what we’re doing. I think there probably needs to be 10 times more effort of that than there is now as we are getting closer and closer to the AGI line. What would be the source of worry for you more? Would it be human-caused or AI, AGI caused? Are humans abusing that technology versus AGI itself through mechanism that you’ve spoken about, which is fascinating, deception or this kind of stuff getting better and better and better secretly and then escapes?…

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