Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
34 transcript-backed records
01 / prediction
“kind of advanced world, I think there is a decent reason to think that if we did get that rate of scientific and technological advancement, we could basically hit the limits of science and technology.”
02 / commitment
“One more thing that I'll just throw in there–– I think a lot of people who disagree with my take would say, “Look, I do believe eventually we will develop space colonization abilities.”
03 / belief
“I think some of the stuff that might be hardest to automate would just be stuff that in some sense doesn't have anything to do with software or capabilities.”
04 / belief
“I think that's something that's happened. So I think we should be expecting ourselves to do a bit better than people did in the past and future people will probably do better than we do.”
05 / uncertainty
“Maybe that would be fine or good. I don't know. My wife really loves these like old churches–– if I had more of her attitude, I would be more horrified by this idea.”
06 / belief
“I think you can summarize the highlights of the report as just saying that most of the effort that has ever in the history of humanity has gone into making AI because the field of AI is not very old and the economy and the amount of effort invested have gone up dramatically.”
07 / belief
“I think even then, the amount of money we'd be working with would be really small by the standards of any kind of government budget.”
08 / belief
“I think what I try to do is I try to know enough about the topic that I can manage them effectively, and that's a pretty general corporate best practice.”
09 / belief
“Whereas I believe that if you're a utilitarian, it's really unclear whether utilitarianism actually tells you to do things like avoiding lying.”
10 / belief
“” Whereas you can sit there in your lab with your scientists and find new theories that change the world. So some of this stuff, I think, is very counterintuitive, but I can imagine worlds where you get really wacky stuff before you get self-driving cars out on the road just because of the way the regulations work.”
11 / belief
“I think a lot of moral progress has just come from humans getting to know other humans who they previously were stereotyping and judging negatively and afraid of. So I think there's some way in which humans learning about the world and learning about themselves leads them to have kind of conclusions that are more reflective and more intelligent for their own goals.”
12 / belief
“I actually think the situation looks very challenging, very scary by default, and I think we're tending to overestimate how bad and how dire things are.”
13 / belief
“I mean, I think I've also heard from people who think I'm like underselling the whole thing–– crazy people who just think that I should be planning on transformative AI much sooner than what I kind of implied in the series.”
14 / belief
“I mean, I think in some sense, the effects are permanent in the sense that if you cause someone to live a healthier, better life, that's a significant thing that happened.”
15 / observation
“Since then, we've basically seen these very computationally intensive (but fundamentally simple) AI systems achieve a lot of progress on lots of different unrelated tasks. It's not crazy to imagine that the current way people are developing AI systems, cutting-edge AI systems, could take us all the way to the kind of extremely powerful AI systems that automate roughly everything humans do to advance science and technology.”
16 / belief
“I think in theory, what we want is to make grants that have more upside than downside or have expected net positive effects.”
17 / belief
“I think that if you were to design an AI system and you were kind of giving it encouragement every time it was getting more money into your bank account, you might get something that's very, very good at getting money into your bank account to the point where you'd going to disrupt the whole world to do that.”
18 / commitment
“At some point, if I get enough subscribers, I will explain who all these stuffed animals are, but my wife and I basically use a stuffed animal personality classification system where we will compare someone to various stuffed animals to explain what their strengths and weaknesses are.”
19 / belief
“I think we want to treat each hire as something that we only do because we had a really good reason to.”
20 / belief
“I think there is a good case that they came up with a lot of stuff that really shaped the whole world since then because of the fact that the UK became so influential and really laid the groundwork for a lot of stuff about the rights of the governed, free speech, individual rights, and human rights.”
21 / belief
“If we put the views out into the world, A, I think all the people seeking money from us would just have a better idea of where we're coming from and why is it that we're interested in funding what we're interested in funding.”
22 / belief
“I do believe that most things you could say about the far future are very unreliable and not worth taking action on, but I think there are a few things one might say about what a transition to very powerful AI systems could look like.”
23 / belief
“I argue in the Most Important Century series that it looks reasonably likely, in my opinion, more than 50-50, that this century will see AI systems that can do all of the key tasks that humans do to advance science and technology.”
24 / belief
“I think John Locke was doing his stuff because he felt it was a good thing to do at any period in time, but the thing is that if we are at this crucial period of time, it becomes an even better thing to do and it becomes magnified to the point where it could be more important than other things.”
25 / uncertainty
“What do we do?” I’d be like, “I don't know. We did what we could do. We can’t go back in time and try to prepare for this better.”
26 / commitment
“I don't think it's amazing, but I think I wrote a recent blog post entitled The Track Record of Future.”
27 / evaluation
“I think there has been moral progress, but I don't think that means moral progress is something inevitable or something that happens every time you are intelligent.”
28 / recommendation
“I encourage people to go to my series because I have a bunch of charts illustrating this and it could be a little bit hard to do concisely now. But having learned about just how strange the time we live in is when you look at it in context, I think the biggest thing I take away from this is how we should really look for the next big thing.”
29 / uncertainty
“It's very hard to put a probability on it. But I think if you imagine that we're going to get this explosion in scientific and technological advancement, you have to take pretty seriously the idea that we could end up hitting a wall and there could not be a lot of room for more dynamism.”
30 / preference
“I've developed this professional specialization in looking for ideas that are underappreciated, underrated, and tremendously important because a lot of the time that's where I think you can find what you might call an “outsized return on investment.”
31 / evaluation
“” I think that’s the worst possible rule because the people who are living at the important time will then do the wrong thing.”
32 / preference
“I think that's the most generalizable skill I've had, but I have switched around because I do think that I've kind of at various points in my career just said, “Hey, here's something that's getting very little attention and it's very important, and it's worth the sacrifice of the specialized knowledge I built up in one area to switch into this other area that I think I ought to be working on.”
33 / prediction
“The more I’d be interested in focusing on other causes of very broad things we do, such as trying to grow the set of people who think about issues like this, rather than trying to specifically study how to get AI systems like today's to behave as intended. So I think that's a general shift, but I would say that I tend to feel a bit more optimistic on longer time frames because I do think that the world just isn't ready for this and isn't thinking seriously about this.”
34 / preference
“The moral parliament idea is an idea that was laid out by Nick Bostrom in an Overcoming Bias post a decade ago that I like.”