Ilya Sutskever: belief

Transcript context

…Like what does it look like? Are there still humans walking around on Earth? Or have you guys thought concretely about what you actually want this world to look like? Let me describe to you what I think is not quite right about the question. It implies we get to decide how we want the world to look like. I don't think that picture is correct. Change is the only constant. And so of course, even after AGI is built, it doesn't mean that the world will be static. The world will continue to change, the world will continue to evolve. And it will go through all kinds of transformations. I don't think anyone has any idea of how the world will look like in 3000. But I do hope that there will be a lot of descendants of human beings who will live happy, fulfilled lives where they're free to do as they see fit. Or they are the ones who are solving their own problems. One world which I would find very unexciting is one where we build this powerful tool, and then the government said — Okay, so the AGI said that society should be run in such a way and now we should run society in such a way. I'd much rather have a world where people are still free to make their own mistakes and suffer their consequences and gradually evolve morally and progress forward on their own, with the AGI providing more like a base safety net. How much time do you spend thinking about these kinds of things versus just doing the research?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.