Dwarkesh Podcast / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
39 published records
01 / evaluation
“Then when the children show some obviously fake opportunity to defect to the allies, it's not necessarily going to be a good test of what it will do in the real circumstance because it's able to tell the difference.”
02 / belief
“Even when I try to channel some skepticism towards great works, I think that doesn't generalize to thinking it's not worth understanding human history.”
03 / belief
“I think we as a civilization are going to have a very serious conversation about what sort of servitude is appropriate or inappropriate in the context of AI development.”
04 / uncertainty
“Something happens when I stub my toe. It's unclear exactly how to name it, but there’s something about that I'm pretty focused on.”
05 / prediction
“We're going to go explore space and that's where we expect most of the things that will happen.”
06 / belief
“I think what some people mean is that our intellectual descendants should control the light cone, even if the other counterfactual doesn't involve a bunch of torture.”
07 / belief
“” Whereas I think some of our other values are much more structured around cooperation and things that also are effective and functional and powerful.”
08 / uncertainty
“If you imagine that you try to have full knowledge of what the future of the universe will be like…” I don't know.”
09 / belief
“Today I'm chatting with Joe Carlsmith. He's a philosopher and, in my opinion, a capital-G great philosopher.”
10 / belief
“There’s then a fifth version, which I think about less because it's just such an own goal if you do this.”
11 / belief
“Again, we then have to ask how janky is pleasure, how specific and contingent is the thing we care about in pleasure versus how robust is this as a functional role in minds of all kinds.”
12 / belief
“A model's verbal behavior—even if it has a planning process (which GPT-4, I think, doesn't in many cases)—doesn't necessarily reflect those criteria.”
13 / uncertainty
“" An adult in prison has that ability in a way that I don't know if these models necessarily have.”
14 / belief
“"I'm inclined to think that utopia, however weird, would also be in a certain sense recognizable; that if we really understood and experienced it, we would see in it the same thing that made us sit bolt upright long ago when we first touched love, joy, beauty; that we would feel in front of the bonfire the heat of the ember from which it was lit. There would be, I think, a kind of remembering.”
15 / evaluation
“With these models, at least so far, it doesn't seem to matter. They just get, "Hey, don't help people make bombs" or whatever, even if you ask in a different way how to make a bomb.”
16 / belief
“We're grinding through the values we care about because of increased competition.”
17 / belief
“I think we might just want to avoid having to build an AI that we're comfortable with being in that position.”
18 / belief
“What are the basic laws of physics? I think once we get that, we're done." It’s like, "Oh you'll figure out what's the right kind of hedonium.”
19 / uncertainty
“” Going to college or meeting new people or reading a new book, I'm like, “I don't know.”
20 / commitment
“You might be worried that we will be very gentle and nice and free with the AIs, and then they'll kill us.”
21 / uncertainty
“We're starting off with something that has this intricate representation of human values and it doesn't seem that hard to sort of lock it into a persona that we are comfortable with. I don't know what changes.”
22 / belief
“Pretty soon we're talking about our relationship to superhuman intelligences, if we think such a thing is possible.”
23 / belief
“Through that process, they've been bullying you, training you to be a Nazi. I think in that scenario, I might end up a Nazi.”
24 / belief
“Some people spend a lot of time on the space stuff, but I think for the immediately pressing stuff about AI, it doesn’t require that at all.”
25 / belief
“Obviously in some sense, when we talk about a good future, we need to be thinking, “What are all the stakeholders here and how does it all fit together?” When I think about it, the thing that matters about the lineage is this.”
26 / uncertainty
“I don't know if moral realism is the right word, but you mentioned the thing. There's something that makes hearts converge to the thing we are or the thing we would be upon reflection.”
27 / belief
“I think about some of the reports as much more like, “I'm more fully optimizing for trying to do something impactful.”
28 / prediction
“I expect the US government to protect me, not because of its “motives,” but just because of the system of incentives and institutions and norms that has been set up.”
29 / belief
“One possibility is that the thing we care about in consciousness or sentience is super contingent and fragile.”
30 / prediction
“I'm much more bullish on our ability to solve this problem, especially for AIs that are in what I think of as the "AI for AI safety sweet spot.”
31 / evaluation
“The most straightforward thing to focus on—I don't blame people for just talking about this one—is just the first one. It's quite robust according to our own ethics, when we think about in which context is it appropriate to try to exert various types of control, or to have more of what I call in the series "yang," which is this active controlling force, as opposed to "yin," which is this more receptive and open, letting go.”
32 / evaluation
“I agree with the sentiment of obviously approaching this situation with caution, but I do want to point out the ways in which the analyses we've been using have been maximally adversarial.”
33 / evaluation
“They're almost like random number generators. They're not especially calibrated, but once in a while they'll be like, “Oh, this one weird philosopher I care about, or this one historical event I'm obsessed with has an interesting perspective on this.”
34 / recommendation
“I don’t know practically if it works out that well. But that experience made me think that I should try to expand my horizons in an undirected way because there’s lots of different things you have to understand about the world to understand any one thing.”
35 / preference
“There’s some way in which I'm trying to embody attitudes towards them that I hope they would embody towards me. It's unclear exactly what the ground of that is, but I really like the golden rule and think a lot about it as a basis for treatment of other beings.”
36 / evaluation
“To the extent that the reason we're worried about motivations in the first place, it’s because we think a balance of power which includes at least one thing with human-descended motivations is difficult.”
37 / evaluation
“I'm curious where that's coming from because conventionally I think the thing matters because it's conscious and its conscious experience as a result of that pursuit matters.”
38 / evaluation
“I think if something is not conscious—and there's like a deep difference between conscious and unconscious—then I definitely have the intuition that there's something that matters especially a lot about consciousness.”
39 / evaluation
“For example, if someone says, "Medical care doesn't work," you have to consider how you know it does work.”