Dwarkesh Patel: belief

Transcript context

…My main high level take here is that I would be unhappy about a world where Anthropic just makes some call and Anthropic is like, here's the kind of AI. We've seen enough, we're ready to hand off the future to this kind of AI. So procedurally, I think it's not a decision that kind of I want to be making personally or I want Anthropic to be making. So I kind of think from the perspective of that decision making are those challenges? The answer is pretty much always going to be like, we are not collectively ready because we're sort of not even all collectively engaged in this process. And I think from the perspective of an AI company, you kind of don't have this fast handoff option. You kind of have to be doing the option value to build the technology in a way that doesn't lock humanity into one course path. This isn't answering your full question, but this is answering the part that I think is most relevant to governance questions for Anthropic. You don't have to speak on behalf of Anthropic. I'm not asking about the process by which we would, as a civilization, agree to hand off. I'm just saying, okay, I personally, it's hard for me to imagine in 100 years that these things are still our slaves. And if they are, I think that's not the best world. So at some point, we're handing off the baton. Where would you be satisfied with this is an arrangement between the humans and AIS where I'm happy to let the rest of the universe or the rest of time play out. I think that it is unlikely that in 100 years I would be happy with anything that was like, you had some humans, you're just going to throw away the humans and start afresh with these machines you built. That is I think you probably need subjectively longer than that before I or most people are like, okay, we understand what's up for grabs here. If you talk about 100 years, I kind of do. There's a process that I kind of understand and like a process of like, you have some humans. The humans are, like, talking and thinking and deliberating together. The humans are having kids and raising kids, and one generation comes after the next. There's that process we kind of understand, and we have a lot of views about what makes it go well or poorly, and we can try and improve that process and have the next generation do it better than the previous generation. I think there's some story like that that I get and that I like. And then I think that the default path to be comfortable with something very different is kind of more like just run that story for a long time, have more time for humans to sit around and think a lot and conclude, here's what we actually want. Or a long time for us to talk to each other or to grow up with this new technology and live in that world for our whole lives and so on. And so I'm mostly thinking from the perspective of these more local changes of saying not like, what is the world that I want? What's the crazy world? The kind of crazy I'd be happy handing off to more, just like, in what way do I wish we right now were different? How could we all be a little bit better? And then if we were a little bit better, then they would ask, okay, how could we all be a little bit better? And I think that it's hard to make the giant jump rather than to say, what's the local change that would cause me to think our decision are better.…

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