Tim Scarfe: belief

Transcript context

…I could just sit here and read to you from my book, but but there's an audiobook, which you you can buy wherever audiobooks are sold. Please do. I I don't think they're being I mean, you know, it's easy to be cynical and say, oh, you know, follow the money. And and as you outlay in your book, there are lots of wealthy billionaires putting lots of money into this and Yep. Easy to be cynical. Yep. But I I think I mean, there's this anthropic fiasco recently, you know, what it doesn't make sense. Make it make sense. Why why they're making all of this money. Why why would they why would they sabotage themselves? So, you know, I I don't think they're being grifters. But what what is going on? Are they true believers? Like, what what's happening? I think that a lot of these people are true believers. Yeah. Like, you know, I mean, in the book, certainly don't go easy on say, Elias or Yodkowski. But 1 thing I will say about Yodkowski is he's certainly a true believer. You know, he he believes the stuff that he's saying. The same goes for, you know, like people like Nick Bostrom or Toby Ord. Right? And I think that that's also true of a lot of the people working at places like Anthropic. They really believe that AI alignment is, you know, the problem of our time. I just think that they've made a mistake. I think that that's not true and that there are other problems that are significantly more pressing and that, you know, as I say in my book, many of the biggest problems of our time are not problems amenable to solutions with technology. They are social problems that require social solutions, which is not to say that technology doesn't play a role. It's just that you can't solve them purely with technology. I You know, climate change being the the big 1, the climate crisis is a problem that absolutely does require certain technologies to exist. Most of the technologies that we need exist already and the problem is 1 of actually deploying them and persuading people to switch and actually like finding ways to get this stuff out there. That's a social and political problem that requires a social and political solution. So yeah. And then but then you have someone like Sam Altman who I don't know what's going on in Sam Altman's head. I don't know if he's a true believer in whatever, but he has gone out and said things and he's not the only 1 who said things like this that, you know, AI is going to solve the climate crisis. And like, I I think that in the unlikely event that we built like a really intelligent conscious machine intelligence based on existing technologies in the near future, well, if we did that and asked it to solve climate crisis, the minute we turn it on, it would say, well, you shouldn't have built me. Look at my carbon footprint.…

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