Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
28 transcript-backed records
01 / evaluation
“It could be, but we don’t know yet. Again, we have examples. Certainly, we know of examples of high intelligence without consciousness.”
02 / belief
“If I approach a problem with some preconceived idea or solution and then try to impose it on the problem, and just find confirmation bias, just find the evidence that supports my view, this is easy for the mind to do.”
03 / belief
“The universe does not function like a story. So I think to really understand life, you need to observe it directly in a nonverbal way.”
04 / belief
“The most difficult thing, at least in the meditation I practice, vipassana, which I learned from a teacher called S.”
05 / belief
“In terms of power, human power comes from intelligence and from stories. But I think that the deepest and best qualities of humans are not intelligence and not storytelling and not power.”
06 / belief
“I mean, it’s closely related. I would say, I look at the world today, like politics.”
07 / belief
“You can only find it, I think, in direct experience, which is non-verbal, which is pre-verbal.”
08 / evaluation
“Kill those millions. Ethics, aesthetics, truth, they don’t matter. The only thing that matter is the victory of the state or the victory of the class.”
09 / belief
“I think that consciousness is far more important and valuable than intelligence.”
10 / uncertainty
“If social scientists and say psychologists establish that, I don’t know, 17% inattention is good for a conversation because then you feel challenged, “Oh, I need to grab this person’s attention,” you can program the AI to have exactly 17% inattention, not one percentage more or less.”
11 / belief
“The two most important things to realize about AI; you know, so many things are being said now about AI, but I think there are two things that every person should know about AI.”
12 / uncertainty
“You are going to, I don’t know, you learn to [inaudible 02:25:26] languages, you want to be a translator.”
13 / uncertainty
“If Xi Jinping says one thing and some other big shot thinks differently, will they have the courage, the ability, the backbone to say, with all due respect, they think differently and there is a real conversation, or not? I don’t know the answer, but this is a key question.”
14 / observation
“People quit jobs because of boredom. And if you never learn how to deal with boredom, you will never learn how to enjoy peace and quiet, because the way to peace passes through boredom.”
15 / belief
“Most of them are good people. And also, I think we can empathize with some of the key ideas there, which I share, that yes, it’s becoming more and more difficult to understand what is happening in the world.”
16 / belief
“Even though I don’t think computers have consciousness, I think we are close to the point the legal system will start treating them as conscious entities, because of this social convention.”
17 / commitment
“We could destroy ourselves in a nuclear war, through ecological collapse, by giving too much power to AI that goes out of our control. But if we survive, we’ll probably have so much power that we will change ourselves using various technologies so that our descendants will no longer be homo sapiens like us.”
18 / evaluation
“One of the things people don’t understand about Nazism and fascism, we teach in schools about Fascism and Nazism as this ultimate evil, the ultimate monster in human history. At some level, this is wrong because it actually exposes us.”
19 / belief
“I think one of the big differences between those who believe in conspiracy theories and people who warn about the dangers of AI, the dangers of climate change, we don’t see certain humans as evil and hateful.”
20 / prediction
“Very quickly we might reach a point when most of the stories, images, songs, TV shows, whatever are created by an alien intelligence. And if we now find ourselves inside this kind of world of illusions created by an alien intelligence that we don’t understand, but it understands us, this is a kind of spiritual enslavement that we won’t be able to break out of because it understands us.”
21 / evaluation
“If you think about the last really big revolution, the Industrial Revolution, yes, in the end, we learned how to use the powers of industry; electricity, radio, trains, whatever, to build better human societies.”
22 / prediction
“If we now find ourselves inside this kind of world of illusions created by an alien intelligence, that we don’t understand, but it understands us, this is a kind of spiritual enslavement that we won’t be able to break out of, because it understands us, it understands how to manipulate us, but we don’t understand what is behind this screen of stories and images and songs.”
23 / evaluation
“The fact that it was California in the 1970s and not, say, I don’t know, Japan in the 1980s or China in the 1990s, this made a huge, huge difference.”
24 / evaluation
“There is an element of luck, but again, part of it is also self-awareness. And you asked me earlier about the potential of power to corrupt, and I listened to the interview you just did with Prime Minister Netanyahu a couple of days ago.”
25 / prediction
“If you rewind the movie of history and press play and you rewind and press play a hundred times, I think Christianity would take over the Roman Empire in the world maybe twice out of a hundred times.”
26 / prediction
“The other side of the coin is that the stories are not really alive, because they don’t feel anything. This goes back to the question of consciousness, which I think is the most important thing, that the ultimate reality is consciousness, is the ability to feel things.”
27 / evaluation
“Yeah. This is why I also, I think I admire what you are doing, that you’re going to talk with some of the most difficult characters around in the world today, and with this basic belief that by talking maybe we can move them an inch, which is a lot when it comes to people with so much power.”
28 / evaluation
“If you have lots of bots retweeting something, then you have the impression, “Oh, lots of people are interested in that. That’s important,” and this is basically the bots pretending to be humans, because if you see a tweet which says 500 people retweeted it or you see a tweet and it says 500 bots retweeted it, I don’t care what the bots we tweeted, but if it’s humans, okay, that’s interesting.”