Aravind Srinivas: belief

Transcript context

…There’s a lot of paths to dystopia. This computer is sitting on one of them, Brave New world. There’s a lot of ways that seem pleasant, that seem happy on the surface but in the end are actually dimming the flame of human consciousness, human intelligence, human flourishing in a counterintuitive way. So the unintended consequences of a future that seems like a utopia but turns out to be a dystopia. What gives you hope about the future? Again, I’m kind of beating the drum here, but for me it’s all about curiosity and knowledge. And I think there are different ways to keep the light of consciousness, preserving it, and we all can go about in different paths. For us, it’s about making sure that it’s even less about that sort of thinking. I just think people are naturally curious. They want to ask questions and we want to serve that mission. And a lot of confusion exists mainly because we just don’t understand things. We just don’t understand a lot of things about other people or about just how the world works. And if our understanding is better, we all are grateful. “Oh wow. I wish I got to that realization sooner. I would’ve made different decisions and my life would’ve been higher quality and better.” I mean, if it’s possible to break out of the echo chambers, so to understand other people, other perspectives. I’ve seen that in wartime when there’s really strong divisions to understanding paves the way for peace and for love between people, because there’s a lot of incentive in war to have very narrow and shallow conceptions of the world. Different truths on each side. So bridging that, that’s what real understanding looks like, real truth looks like. And it feels like AI can do that better than humans do because humans really inject their biases into stuff.…

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