AI’s New World Order: US-China, War, Job Loss | Tyler Cowen

Summary

In this interview, Tyler Cowen discusses the impacts of AI on global dynamics, particularly between the US and China. He explores the unintended consequences of US policy on China's AI advancements and the potential of AI to change work and economic structures. Cowen warns of a future where AI creates a super-rich class due to its labor-replacing capabilities and stresses the importance of openness and adaptability in policy. The conversation also delves into the psychological and societal challenges posed by AI, advocating for curiosity and adaptability in embracing these changes.

Highlights

• Tyler Cowen predicts AI will divide society into a small class of tech-adept super-rich and everyone else 🌍
• US restrictions on high-end chips led China to innovate in efficient AI making 🇨🇳
• AI has the potential to be transformative in warfare, making offensive strategies more potent ⚔️
• Technological history suggests copying is often the first step towards innovation 📚
• Curiosity and open-mindedness are key in navigating the AI-driven future 🔍

Key Takeaways

• AI's competitive landscape is heating up, with China's innovations defying US sanctions 🚀
• AI might split society with a super-rich class controlling technology while others struggle to adapt 😲
• Openness may be a more successful policy for innovation than restrictive measures 🌐
• Extreme wealth disparities could challenge the foundations of democracy, echoing historical parallels 📉
• The dynamics of AI are not just technological but psychological, affecting how society will cope with change 🧠

Overview

This engaging discussion with economist Tyler Cowen delves into the complex relationship between the U.S. and China in the world of AI. Cowen articulates how U.S. attempts to restrain China's technological growth inadvertently propelled Chinese innovation, leading to more cost-effective advancements. He argues that openness rather than isolation could be a more beneficial strategy in fostering innovation.

Cowen also expounds on his views regarding the economic and societal shifts AI is driving. He suggests AI could create new class structures with a super-rich elite and a broader population struggling to keep pace. This shift threatens traditional democratic structures built on a stable middle class, potentially leading to societal tensions.

The conversation is a reflection on the uncertainty and unpredictability of AI’s impact. Cowen emphasizes the importance of staying adaptable and curious. He suggests leveraging AI, while maintaining human touch and creativity in both work and personal development, as a way to thrive in this new era.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 02:30: Introduction and China's AI Development In this chapter, the focus is on the development of AI in China and the influence of America's technological advancements on it. The discussion touches on the inadvertent boost China's space program and ICBM development received due to international interactions, specifically with the United States. The chapter also delves into the question of whether China should integrate into the same technological network as the U.S. or continue developing its independent systems. It highlights America's major technological advancements, which were, in part, propelled by a history of espionage, suggesting that sometimes stealing technology proves more beneficial than developing it independently. This is exemplified by the analogy of historical figures like Alexander Hamilton in the role of treasury secretary, opting for appropriation of technology as a strategy for progress.
• 02:30 - 05:00: AI's Impact on Knowledge Work and Society The chapter explores the capabilities of AI in outperforming humans in various tasks, even in fields where humans have expertise. This raises questions about where human strengths will remain in the future. An emphasis is placed on the need for more individuals to learn how to operate AI rather than focusing on traditional subjects. The narrative also touches upon differing philosophical viewpoints about AI and cryptocurrency, with a reference to a statement by Peter Thiel.
• 05:00 - 07:30: The Importance of Openness in Innovation In this chapter, the focus is on the advancement of a Chinese AI model known as Deep Seek. This model rivals the performance of leading US models, yet it was developed at a significantly lower cost. The revelation of Deep Seek's capabilities has caused worldwide astonishment. Notably, Tyler Cowan, a guest and columnist, predicted the impact of Deep Seek before the financial markets even noticed. Cowan makes a provocative argument that the US-imposed chip sanctions, intended to stifle Chinese innovation, inadvertently spurred this achievement by restricting China's access to high-end chips and thus fostering an alternative path to innovation.
• 07:30 - 12:30: Historical Patterns of Imitation and Innovation The chapter opens with a discussion on China's development of cost-effective training techniques and its implications for US-China relations, referencing a 'Sputnik moment'. This serves as a prelude to examining how innovation truly works and the crafting of effective policies. The narrative then transitions to Tyler's expansive, forward-looking insights on artificial intelligence (AI), exploring its transformative impact across various domains including knowledge work, warfare, and economics. Tyler posits that AI will significantly divide the population, benefiting a small segment who can effectively adapt to these changes.
• 12:30 - 18:20: The End of the Great Stagnation The chapter titled 'The End of the Great Stagnation' discusses the concept of technological leapfrogging in various domains of work. It highlights the emergence of a new global super-rich class and the practical tips provided by Tyler on how individuals can stay ahead and avoid obsolescence. The chapter is part of a series on the philosophy of AI, produced by Jonathan B as a fellow of the Cosmos Institute, where Tyler is also a founding member. Additional resources, including the transcript of the episode, are available via a provided link.
• 18:20 - 29:10: Human Emotions in Rapid Technological Change The chapter explores the interplay between human emotions and the rapid advancement of technology, focusing on cryptocurrencies and AI. It includes a discussion on Peter Thiel's perspective that cryptocurrency is inherently libertarian while AI leans towards communism due to its centralized nature. The narrator refutes this notion by pointing out the capabilities of institutions like the FBI in tracing crypto transactions, emphasizing that using cryptocurrencies does not necessarily provide a safe haven from law enforcement.
• 29:10 - 37:30: AI in Warfare and Future of Work The chapter explores the evolving role of AI in warfare and its implications for the future of work. It suggests that the predominant form of AI today is surveillance-driven, which tends to support totalitarian or autocratic systems. Beyond this, AI significantly reshapes workplace dynamics, influences freedom of speech, and impacts knowledge dissemination. While exact predictions are uncertain, AI appears to disrupt the status quo, suggesting transformative changes rather than merely reinforcing existing structures, especially in status quo-oriented nations.
• 37:30 - 45:00: Democracy and Economic Disparity The chapter discusses the influence of artificial intelligence (AI) on existing societal and governmental structures. It suggests that AI has the potential to challenge and subvert established norms or 'status quos', irrespective of whether these are favorable or unfavorable. Additionally, the chapter highlights a real-world example where the United States implemented a comprehensive ban on the sale of advanced AI chips to China, illustrating governmental measures taken in response to the perceived impact of AI.
• 45:00 - 60:00: AI's Influence on Authorship and Content Creation In a recent column, it was discussed how a US policy aimed at hampering China's ability to deploy high-quality chips and AI systems initially achieved its national security objectives but inadvertently accelerated the development of effective AI systems in China that do not rely on the highest quality chips. The development of deep seek AI was highlighted as an example of this unintended consequence. The speaker suggests that sometimes policies do not achieve the intended outcomes and requires re-evaluation, exemplifying this by stating their hypothetical agreement with the current US policy if they were in President Biden’s position, while acknowledging the need to adapt strategies when they do not work as planned.
• 60:00 - 75:00: The Future of Scholarship with AI The chapter discusses the rapid advancement of AI technology and questions whether it is preferable for China to be integrated into the same global hardware network or to develop its own independent network. The text references historical instances, such as America's unintended boost to China's space program through an individual who moved from China to study in the United States, underscoring the complexities of international technological development and collaboration.
• 75:00 - 90:30: Conclusion and Future Outlook This chapter covers the intriguing story of an MIT and Caltech professor, who also served as a colonel in the US military and worked for the Department of Defense (DOD). He was a co-founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), but during the Red Scare, accusations of communist sympathies led to his house arrest. Eventually, he was deported in a prisoner exchange deal involving Korean pilots in China. Upon returning, he played a pivotal role in igniting China's space program and developing intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).

AI’s New World Order: US-China, War, Job Loss | Tyler Cowen Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 America unintentionally jumped China's space program as well as development of icbms do I want China to be part of the same Hardware Network as I am or for China to fully develop its own it's not clear which one is better America's great Innovations would have been significantly delayed without its earlier period of Espionage get the AIS to think like n is harder than to get them to think like John Dewey or John Stewart Mill Alexander Hamilton as treasury secretary was like clearly it's better just to steal the technology than
• 00:30 - 01:00 to do the thing from scratch ourselves and in a test of 100 questions 01 Pro already would beat me answering the economics questions it beats me in areas where I have some background it's still beating me where do you think the edge is going to be for humans more people should study how to operate Ai and spend less time learning about the subject Peter teal said crypto is libertarian and AI is communist I don't think that's true here's how I would rephrase
• 01:00 - 01:30 it deep seek is a Chinese AI model approaching the performance of the best US models but trained at a fraction of the cost and the world is in shock my guest Tyler Cowan was the first columnist to break the news on deep seek weeks before the markets themselves reacted and Tyler's surprising claim is that the very us chip sanctions designed to th Chinese Innovation engendered this Innovation by restricting China's high-end chip Supply the the US
• 01:30 - 02:00 encouraged China to Pioneer techniques in costeffective training in the beginning of this interview we're going to discuss what this Sputnik moment has to teach us about effective policy us China relations and how Innovation actually works and after that Tyler is going to share his comprehensive forward-looking view on AI about how it will transform knowledge work Warfare economics and everything in between Tyler believes that AI will radically split the population into two with a small portion of people who are able to
• 02:00 - 02:30 use the technology leapfrogging the rest in all domains of work a new Global Super Rich class and everyone else what I found most valuable about this interview then are all the Practical tips that Tyler sprinkles along the way about how we can stay ahead of the curve and not be made obsolete my name is Jonathan B I'm producing the series on the philosophy of AI as a fellow of the cosmos Institute where Tyler is also a founding fellow and board member if you want to follow along this episode via trans script the link is in the
• 02:30 - 03:00 description without further Ado Tyler Cowan Peter teal had this line where he said crypto is libertarian and AI is communist in the sense that AI benefits from this large scale centralization of data I don't think that's true I'm not even sure that Peter still thinks it's true not meaning to speak for him but we do see that say the FBI can outrace a lot of crypto transactions pretty readily right to be a criminal in use crypto is no real way to escape the law
• 03:00 - 03:30 in many cases and I think when Peter said that the dominant form of AI was surveillance and think that that's totalitarian or at least autocratic is easy to see but once you see that AI reshapes workplace relationships knowledge freedom of speech issues it has a lot of further-reaching effects and again I'm not pretending to have exact predictions but it's not really biased toward the status quo I would say people are seeing that more and more so if your country is ruled by a status quo and very intent on
• 03:30 - 04:00 defending the status quo uh they may be seeing more change than countries that are used to things changing more so uh it's quite possible in the future AI I wouldn't say it's libertarian I wouldn't say it's anti- autocratic I would just say subversive of many status quos some of them good some of them bad almost two years ago uh us enacted a blanket ban on the most powerful AI chips restricting their sale to China
• 04:00 - 04:30 and a in a recent uh column you argued that this backfired US policy succeeded in hampering China's ability to deploy high quality chips and AI systems with the accompanying National Security benefits but it also accelerated the development of effective AI systems that do not rely on the highest quality chips namely deep seek if I had been President Biden I probably would have done the exact same thing but that said sometimes you need to realize that what you tried didn't work now China might have
• 04:30 - 05:00 accelerated its AI development even more with more powerful chips but do I want China to be part of the same Hardware Network as I am or for China to fully develop its own independent hardware Network and other Innovations it's not clear which one is better um your column reminded me about how America unintentionally jump started China's space program so there's a Chinese man called Tinus who was uh born in the early 20th century uh he was born and raised in China came over to study in
• 05:00 - 05:30 MIT Caltech Professor was a colonel in the US military worked for DOD uh and was eventually a co-founder of JPL but during the Red Scare people were accusing him of communist uh sympathies and they put them under house arrest CH and he was eventually deported in a prisoner exchange swap with like Korean pilots in China and then when he went back he jump started China's entire uh space program as well as China development of icbms if you look at
• 05:30 - 06:00 Talent migration between the world superpowers America is the biggest gainer of talent including from ethnic Chinese yes including from ethnic Chinese and so the general question for you is when an economic innovator wants to defend their Innovations from an economic lager there seems to be two general policies right one is to open up so much to get all their best talents to make them dependent on your Hardware but the other one is to you know cut everything off not just on the hardware side but also on the talent side which strategy do you see more like most
• 06:00 - 06:30 effective in in economic history I want to make my bet on openness for the most part we're not very good at choosing the right restrictions and enforcing them there's always more direct forms of Espionage you're not actually controlling their te the technology or keeping it in your borders so you might as well get the advantages of openness that's my general feeling I think in particular cases that feeling can end up being wrong were we too open with the secrets of the atomic bomb well actually that was a remarkably closed program
• 06:30 - 07:00 truly secret and it was a big complex out at Los Alamos and America truly didn't know what was going on but at the same time those Secrets still leaked out to the Soviet Union so I'm pretty skeptical about these attempts to make it closed I see and in some sense it's just a lot more fitting for the American system as a whole right because everything around America is built off of openness so I'm saying even if closeness is the best overall strategy the cost it would take to turn the entire entire Society to that would be
• 07:00 - 07:30 just too too great right we're not good at Clos this we're pretty good at openness in a sense maybe no one's truly good at openness but we're probably better than any other country so play to your strengths and hope that's the right thing to do is sometimes the best strategy I see um I want to uh double down on what you just said there about the difference between protecting for example atomic bomb Secrets or uh AI models there seems to be very different challenges in how you protect
• 07:30 - 08:00 these secrets like for example people are claiming that deep seek was trained on distillation right which is a method for our audience that you essentially have the lower level AI model like quiz the higher level AI model and so that seems if distillation can get you quite close to the leading models that seems a lot more difficult to protect right than the atomic bomb right and so so that also makes a case for openness in AI doesn't it and just the number of employees that make major AI companies
• 08:00 - 08:30 uh it's not like working in the Pentagon I mean there are security protocols but they're nothing close to say what the CIA would have and I'm not sure you could have very high quality Labs attracting the best people if walking in and working there felt like interations yeah so that's another closed versus open decision we've gone mostly in the open Direction uh I think I would have done the same thing but we'll see right right I see so so two AR for open now
• 08:30 - 09:00 one is that it's better fitting to to the American cultural mores and the second one is it's just the nature of AI itself and how it's different from like you can have like 10 scientists working on the atomic bomb that that that just the field itself lends itself more to to openness and deep seek it's online it's there it's embedded in consumer products like the American systems so yeah it's not like plutonium not at all I see um let's go back to the to the chip span because kind of one of the learnings you drew out is we need to think about the second order consequences of of
• 09:00 - 09:30 different policies what can a Statesman do better into in understanding the the second order policy effects well if you're an American statesman the best thing you can do is familiarize yourself with AI my sense is remarkably few people in government are at the AI knowledge Frontier I don't mean as Builders but even just as users of the system so just wake up you know pay to access the best systems and spend some part of your day playing around with them they will even even help your daily
• 09:30 - 10:00 workflow right now no matter what you do so that's a very simple first step but we're not even doing that a critical point I make to people and this may be time dependent but it is worth spending some extra money to have access to the best systems whatever they may be at a point in time if you don't have that access it's actually quite a bit harder to understand what is going on so I know that not everyone out there can afford the best systems but at least consider this as an investment and the way it stands now you can access them for only
• 10:00 - 10:30 a month for a small amount of money $200 just try it for a month if you're disappointed okay you're out $200 you'll at least have learned that you're disappointed if it's worthwhile you can continue so not enough people are crossing that mental Bridge of just saying I need to try the very best apart from the Direct Services or usefulness of the AI just as an educational experience for themselves for themselves I recommend this to every everyone but the very poorest people I know and I
• 10:30 - 11:00 would just want to stress this point to our listeners I see um let me give you a quote from one of my favorite essays by Renee Gerard uh on his philosophy of innovation not so long ago in Europe the Americans were portrayed as primarily imitators then in very few years the Americans became great innovators public opinion is always surprised when it sees the modest imitators of one generation turn into the daring innovators of the next until quite recently the Japanese were dismissed as mere copiers of
• 11:00 - 11:30 Western ways incapable of real invention in any field they are now the driving force behind innovation in more and more technical fields at this very moment imitators of the Japanese Koreans Taiwanese are repeating the same process they too are fast turning into innovators hadn't something similar already occurred in the 19th century when Germany first rivaled and then surpassed England in industrial might do you agree with the general message from this quote that imitation copying is in some sense a necessary first step
• 11:30 - 12:00 to a country or a culture becoming a genuine innovator there's a lot in that quotation that makes me nervous starting with some of the details so if I look at Roger Williams and William Penn who are important figures for religious toleration and Liberty in the United States they were innovators quite early on if I look at the American Declaration of Independence their constitution those were incredible Innovations The Federalist Papers quite early on so to say we started by copying it's true a
• 12:00 - 12:30 lot of the key American ideas came from Britain came from the levelers came from John lock but still uh we were both innovators very early and established that precedent now it's interesting Gerard says oh the Japanese they're innovating more and more that's turned out not to be not really to be true right right so who's an innovator and who isn't just be careful where you look be open to the fact that Innovation can come from places you don't expect and if you have some overly simple formula well
• 12:30 - 13:00 it's those who copy first or it's those who do this first whatever uh you're probably going to miss it better to keep an open mind travel a lot and talk to as many people you can and not get too hung up on fixed rules I I don't think Gerard meant to say imitation is a is a sufficient sort of step to becoming an innovator but I think what he's saying is that it's necessary and it's very surprising that the wouldbe innovators of today were often seen as these like
• 13:00 - 13:30 lowly imitators right and do you think that's validated in economic economic history you the Beatles you could say they're they were imitating rhythm and blues Chuck Barry the Everly Brothers and in some ways they were Elvis Presley The Beatles were the first to admit it but at the same time it was quite fresh and bold and to think that copying and Innovation are opposites is maybe the mistake here be more hegelian about it I would say right um to push back a bit on your thesis about American innovation from day one
• 13:30 - 14:00 that might be true in the political or the philosophical realm but when you look at the early American economic Innovations they were doing the exact same pirating techniques that America is accusing China of so like Alexander Hamilton as treasury secretary instituted an entire regime of like forced economic uh Espionage and Technology transfer from Europe especially Britain right and so there was entire incentives like openly stating we are going to essentially bribe people and so you have people like
• 14:00 - 14:30 Samuel Slater who uh got all the I think it was the waterp powerered like cotton mill or something like that and he had to like smuggle himself out of out of Britain here he's called the father of the American Industrial Revolution in Britain he's known as Slater the traitor and so but reading Alexander Hamilton's reasons for why economic Espionage it actually made me like very sympathetic to why lagard steal technology and his reasoning was just like look we don't know how to do this these guys know how to do it clearly it's better just to
• 14:30 - 15:00 steal the technology than to do the thing from scratch ourselves right so is it almost rational for economic laggards to Pirate to steal to do Espionage I'm not very upset by what China has been doing if something is illegal or unethical then yes nominally I would be against it but in terms of my level of concern involvement it's mostly inevitable it does help China catch up in terms of living standards I do understand there's a military rivalry
• 15:00 - 15:30 but at the same time I think it's in the best interests of the world and the us to have a richer China than a poorer China and we've lived under a poor of China uh say in the 1960s that was no fun and it certainly was awful for the Chinese right so I think you have to take your chances engage uh make the world with a richer China better uh there's a lot of problems you're going to encounter uh but try to think about it in as positive some terms as you can right it's very interesting to look at a
• 15:30 - 16:00 Cubist painting by Picasso and a Cubist painting by Brock right next to each other sometimes even experts can't tell the difference are those guys copiers of each other or the innovators well they're both again let's be hegelian it's a dialectic these two things are not opposites I see um let's move on to the second topic of this conversation which is uh regarding two books the great stagnation and average is over so in 2011 you wrote The Great stagnation and you predicted that it's something
• 16:00 - 16:30 that would continue into the mid-run okay so let me give you a quote real income growth widely distributed of about 2 to 3% a year I think it is currently impossible we don't have the lwh Hang fruit to make such a scenario real what changed I think the great stagnation ended in 2020 if I had to pick a date it started in around 1973 in 2020 we have mRNA vaccines now I know it took 20 or more years of work to get to the point but but there's a sense in which the vaccine we used was
• 16:30 - 17:00 designed in a day and it worked and then it was ready in well under a year at the same time experts were telling the New York Times the optimistic scenario was it would take four years and we did it in under a year it could have been quicker yet if the FDA had not messed up a number of procedural things so that was astonishing it saved a large number of lives or just limited sickness for many people and that's a big enough breakthrough I would say that alone did it but that's not not a standalone event
• 17:00 - 17:30 that we could in a sense design at the margin the vaccine in a day was due to the great The Growing Power of computation so I think the general purpose technology that broke the great stagnation was a combination of the internet and what I would call computation and AI is another example of that so Ai and biom Medicine are two sectors making amazing progress in the last say 5 years a lot of other sectors are still crummy stagnant or Worse cost of construction that's a nightmare it's
• 17:30 - 18:00 hardly alloing great guns but to me those two sectors are big enough and AI is likely to spread productivity improvements to enough other sectors I think it's a number of different forces some of it is just background Mo's law I know it's slowed down by some measures but you're still getting ongoing improvements just in basic computational power uh the Transformers paper you know attention those are key breakthroughs for AI what was done at Deep Mind then open AI being formed with musk and teal
• 18:00 - 18:30 and Altman all of those coming together at roughly the same time and then the internet just developing and being in more places so when AI was ready everyone was so connected to the internet that AI could spread and be adopted really very quickly the adoption curves for chat GPT are pretty extreme uh all of those things right in other words the great stagnation was only
• 18:30 - 19:00 a symptom like like it only appeared great stagnation on the on the application layer but but there were these Innovation trends that were continuing the culture was totally fine like it wasn't a time to ring an lar Bell it was just we need to wait more before this all comes back into application I would say the internet culture was fine again a lot of areas like instruction it's clearly not fine and I think what I also said in the book the final chapter the inter I said the internet has already gotten us out of the great stagnation in a sense we just don't know it yet because the new fruits
• 19:00 - 19:30 are not here but the key thing we need to have the Breakthrough was the internet and the internet's already here I see the name of your blog is marginal Revolution um although it seems like what's most critical for her history are the non-marginal moments right the Transformer paper Jesus of nazaro the invention of the bomb how do you think about these these two non-marginal and marginal uh forces on History well they both matter but keep in mind the big breakthroughs are the result of many marginal changes coming before
• 19:30 - 20:00 them so Jesus comes out of a long-standing rabinal tradition is building upon the Torah many other earlier writings other religious Traditions that maybe have not come down to us and he's not appearing in a vacuum so the marginal revolutions will remain important for the indefinite future to come this ties very well back into our discussion about imitation and Innovation exactly we shouldn't be thinking about these things as as completely separate people want to do uh although we're out of the great
• 20:00 - 20:30 stagnation it's not all hunky dory let me quote to you uh your blog hardly anyone you know including yourself is prepare to live an actual moving history no one at the beginning of the printing press had any real idea of the changes it would bring no one at the beginning of the fossil fuel era had much of an idea of the changes it would bring no one is good at predicting the longer term or even medium-term outcomes of these radical technological changes in the absence of the ability for good predic how should we live in moving
• 20:30 - 21:00 history think about your children I think psychosocially it's very disturbing that you can no longer tell people what kind of world they should prepare their kids or grandkids for yeah so my daughter Yana she's 35 uh basically I adopted her when she was 12 she and I had a lot of discussions and I felt I could outline to her pretty clearly the world she would be starting work in and that it would more has be just like the world when she was 12 there were differences
• 21:00 - 21:30 but you could make the same kind of plans and your plans would be completely fine and indeed for her they were and it's gone great for her uh that's just not true anymore so just digesting that fact and getting over it like if you think about the Obama years remarkably little happened by most standards and we're all used to that at least in the United States some countries A lot happened uh and that's not going to be true anymore
• 21:30 - 22:00 we're we're so not ready for it we're not familiar with real change even if you think it's entirely positive and that's not my view but even take the best case scenario we will be stunned and shocked and disoriented uh in some ways the purely positive scenario might be harder for us than a mixed scenario because a mixed scenario fighting off these challenges gives you something to do gives you a sense of meaning and purpose like if it's only all positives maybe that's tougher mentally yeah so I don't have
• 22:00 - 22:30 real guides but I tell people I invest in friends great peers mentors and make sure you have some fun rewarding cheap Hobbies right right and and stick on this wave of innovation right always be on the bleeding edge and try that's right right and you don't have to be an AI programmer or Builder very few people can really do that but just use it and be familiar with what's happening you can do that for free although um I immigrated to to to to to the West um as
• 22:30 - 23:00 a teenager effectively and it was striking how in China where I was born and raised um we were living in moving history for at least four generations I'm used to it like my great grandparents lived in the Empire my grandparents lived in the founding of the Republic my parents lived reform and opening and I immigrated here so when I look back all I see is radical change but then I look at my peers that and my friends that I made here no no no their their dad their dad's lives look like
• 23:00 - 23:30 their lives looks like their granddad's lives looks like their great-granddad's lives right so so so most of the world is actually totally ready for moving history because they never history never ended for them much of the world that's true there's places that have not grown like China it's striking to me I was born in 1962 so I'm now 63 years old really at no point in my life did I need to relearn how to operate any device I learned how to drive I was 16 history I didn't have to relearn
• 23:30 - 24:00 anything nothing that's stunning it's quite bad in a way now we're at the point where I'm going to need to learn relearn new things but that I could go so many years of a life while had a cook I know more dishes but how to operate all the equipment I guess I learned a microwave never really quite learned it actually when I was you know a young teen that was the only change everything else is the same I really think this is a case of grasses greener because when people who whove grown up
• 24:00 - 24:30 in moving history they look at the west and they're envious and saying this kind of stability right the fact that you can know what your grandkids are roughly going to do and plan out this this lifelong plan some are envious about that people prefer it and probably they should prefer it I've had a very happy life and that's the psychosocial problem but you only get ongoing periods of stability by taking some chances and having big changes every now and then you can't just keep it in some guaranteed for him forever like there is no Ubi for Humanity as a whole that's
• 24:30 - 25:00 one way to put it I see let me give you another quote new AI developments pose a great conundrum we don't know how to respond psychologically or for that matter substantively and just about all of the responses I'm seeing I interpret as copes whether from The Optimist the pessimist or the extreme pessimist what are the different responses to AI in your view and why are they copes well a few of the responses I see all the time people will just say oh it hallucinates
• 25:00 - 25:30 all the time it's a fun app on my phone but it's not really important that's a cope I don't doubt that it's often sincere these people are not just lying but they don't put in the effort to look further into it un th they stick at the cope another cope is to just say well it's going to kill us all in X number of years time and there's nothing we can do about this it's kind of fatalism right fatalism I also think that's wrong but it's a kind of cope right well because it saves you from having to engage with
• 25:30 - 26:00 it seriously that's right now I I know a very small number of people who act consistently with that belief max out on their credit cards or start taking too many drugs crime and yeah but most people don't it's just a compartmentalized view that they don't really act on for the most part then there's other layers of cope which are sort of intermediate they're actually reasonable positions that could turn out to be true it's like well we need to change these few things and then we'll
• 26:00 - 26:30 settle into some new version of the world we knew those could be true I guess I think the changes will be bigger and more radical than that but I think partly they're held for motives of cope even when they might be true the people just don't really want to be bothered having to learn this new thing right when they haven't had to like learn how to drive some new kind of car uh and so they stick at that right like oh I need to teach my class how to use AI which is not a bad view to hold
• 26:30 - 27:00 like I try to do that but the notion of like maybe your class won't need to exist they you know right right it's being held at Bay by the I'm going to use my class to teach my students how to use this right right right I'm going to drive my car to my horse buggy dealership right right yeah right I see so there's another kind of I wouldn't call it cope but perverse Psychology from a lot of people people working in AI which is to again this is going to be
• 27:00 - 27:30 unfair but it's something like exaggerate the risk to make themselves feel special that's right and so so you know before gpt3 came out I had acquaintances who worked in open Ai and these people were claiming oh two years nothing nothing left for people to do let's just meditate and like that's not cope right they're they're working in this but it's a kind of grand grandiosity that's a nan view you're putting forward right it would have been harder to get that from the AI yes right and I agree that's another psychological reaction you you know guys who want to boast to their dates about how they were
• 27:30 - 28:00 mugged once and almost killed uh there's some sense of power they get from relating that story and that pops up in a lot of different ways what do you make of the existential risk movement in general well I think they're wrong I mean it's interesting to me how many of them are the people who have accelerated AI so it's been counterproductive from their own point of view but I would just say this there is no peer-reviewed literature supporting what they say nor they seem to make any attempt to create
• 28:00 - 28:30 one that doesn't mean they're wrong but I've issued the challenge I say well the global warming PE people were worried they built up an extensive literature basically showing the worries are validated I say you do the same if you do it you know I'll be very interested right and I've even offered to like referee some papers for free and so on so far none of this has happened so it's not supported by peer review and there's nothing and I do mean nothing in market prices to support this fear again that doesn't mean it's wrong but our two best
• 28:30 - 29:00 sources of information you could call peer reviewed science and Market they're both putting up a big zilch and I'm like I'm your audience yeah you know like s Jesus Christ Superstar like oh I'm listening here I am but you know your 17-page hyperventilating blog post like that's obsolete you've got to do better right and I'll stick with that challenge and here I think the psychological explanation makes a lot of sense like why they are claiming X risk and
• 29:00 - 29:30 accelerating at the same time it's kind of a look at me right like I can't remember which Theologian said this but something like admission of sin is to claim credit for the wrong very good in the sense that like the thing I'm working on is so important that we're all going to die if we don't listen to these things right yeah yeah I see more yeah Theology and in the same sentence yeah there we go so one of the genuine I think risks about AI is the fear of war and when you look
• 29:30 - 30:00 at human history technological innovation it often comes after major technological innovations that people try to use it in Warfare how do you think about that I think much more legitimate risk this is by far my biggest worry simply evil humans or misguided humans doing destructive things with the AI I mean one point to make is this is a different kind of AI than what people are talking about right now it's not per se large language models large language models May evolve into to something that's more of a destructive danger it's quite possible
• 30:00 - 30:30 but say the AI embedded in drones uh drone Warfare could be very bad if it favors offense more than defense so technology with or without AI it's always changing and if the world is doing okay you're basically rooting for the defensive Technologies to win I would say that's the case right now uh The More You remix the arms race the greater the chance you're just not going to stay put with the defensive technology is always winning so I'm extremely worried about
• 30:30 - 31:00 that you think the latest developments of AI have favored defense over offense I'm not sure I tend to think that drones will favor offense yeah yeah now you could say so far you look at the Ukraine war Ukraine was defending it help Ukraine I I accept that data point has favored defense but the notion that an open a large open Society has so many targets and defense is pretty hard I think in the medium term it will favor offense we can't even figure out what's going on in New Jersey exactly yeah
• 31:00 - 31:30 right let's talk about uh the future of work as you described in average is over because the trends you you uh foresaw there have just been magnified with with the latest AI models what is the the future of work going to look like many many jobs you'll just be working with the AI and that's already the case so people who are good at working with the AI will be far more productive Sam Alman predicted a while back that pretty soon we have these billion dollar companies maybe just with one employee I think two
• 31:30 - 32:00 or three is more likely because one person can go crazy you just need a bit of support and you'll be able to afford it uh doing the work of a whole pretty large company and having a lot of it done by the AIS so people who are what you'd call Project managers they'll just be way way more project managing and those are the people who will earn the most our great project managers right what's really interesting is that uh AI seems to favor getting rid of the white C work first that robotics is lagging a lot further
• 32:00 - 32:30 behind uh uh sort of uh symbolic manipulation put it that way right which is interesting because people want the white collar jobs usually but the white collar jobs are in more short-term trouble those are the people who will lose status that will be socially very disruptive if you're a decent Gardener probably you're in great shape over the medium term you'll also need to learn the skill of reading out someone's AI generated output as to what the garden should look like I think most gardeners will be just great at that but it is a
• 32:30 - 33:00 new thing they'll have to you know figure out how it works or maybe they'll end up doing some of the work with the AI themselves a lot of physical labor is just going to earn a higher wage if you're physical labor in the energy sector my goodness demand for energy is going to go through the roof we already see this happening there's a question of which localities allow it to be built but wherever it's built a lot lot more jobs being created medical trials just running the routine elements of them I
• 33:00 - 33:30 don't of course the doctors the researchers yes but just routine processing of everything that's being done including on the legal side there'll be a lot of new jobs because AIS will generate a lot of new ideas for medical devices drugs a lot of them won't be good we'll have to test them that will be an enormous growth sector I think let me give you a quote uh from that book average is over I imagine a world where say 10 to 15% of the citizenry is extremely wealthy and has fantastically comfortable and
• 33:30 - 34:00 stimulating lives the rest of the country will have stagnant or maybe even falling wages in dollar terms but a lot more opportunities for cheap fund and also cheap education and Healthcare right legal advice many things so people will be doing great but it's not going to show up necessarily in the form of normal wage growth you get to raise every year just so many things will be free or near free once you've paid for some basic subscription right but if democracy requires a strong
• 34:00 - 34:30 middle class um and this is fundamentally an aristocratic Force right it's it's about separating the top 10% from the bottom 90% do you think democracies will be challenged this is again circling back to our initial conversation by AI well I think democracies are always challenged and the founding fathers understood this and they had no notion of AI so they will continue to be challenged is the way I would put it uh I think people will have happier
• 34:30 - 35:00 lives overall that's no guarantee of democracy going well right but I don't predict some kind of slide into chaos or totalitarianism it'll just be a very different world we'll have to do a lot of coping adjusting of expectations I'm not convinced it will go well but we have the the pieces to succeed with it right it'll be up to us to do it though right however um you know it doesn't have to go to to tyranny it could be become something like the the Roman Republic right where you have like a
• 35:00 - 35:30 very small minority senatorial class and maybe these are the the 10% technologists who can actually wield Ai and then you have the pans like that seems like a political model that's a lot more fitting for the economic picture you described here well I don't know let's say the 10 to 15% of people let's say they have the net wealth roughly equivalent to having aund million today yeah which basically means you don't have to worry about anything right a lot of Americans have that already
• 35:30 - 36:00 right uh I'm not sure the exact number it's not not 100 million but like net worth in the millions that is unimaginably wealthy to most of the world so you look at the federal budget today most of it is quite popular with the median voter you have Medicare Social Security Medicaid defense spending interest on the debt it's almost all of it whether or not one agrees it's what most people want and we have it it's pretty Democratic uh I don't see why that has
• 36:00 - 36:30 to change yeah I I guess my intuitions here are a lot more with Marx that that the political system is an outgrowth and and it must at least in the long run match the economic structure in some way and it it's really difficult for me to see a world in which you know you have 10% or 5% of 100 millionaires everyone else is like a pan who doesn't really have a say in the economic system and there'll be no sort of political change because of that given where we are and the strong middle class we have today I would just say I don't have a a clear prediction so Rec income inequality went up quite a bit uh the guy who's been
• 36:30 - 37:00 elected president twice uh almost one in the middle uh is Trump at first like hardly any wealthy people wanted Trump to win now that he's been reelected that's changed but he was not the candidate that all the rich people were putting up very much the opposite so unless you think there's some kind of coup d'a where just voting is shut down again I don't have a prediction right one way or the other but it doesn't seem Ral to expect it it's not priced into
• 37:00 - 37:30 markets it's not in prediction markets so like it's going to be a lot of big challenges I just get to them and I mean let's do the best we're going to have these challenges anyway I see um let's move on to the next topic of this conversation which is uh regarding Ai and authorship so how do you view your production your your intellectual production as both a scholar and a public intellectual differently now with now with AI well as you know more and more people query AIS whether it's deep
• 37:30 - 38:00 seek or open AI or Claude is meta Google's Gemini the more people do that the less they're directly reading humans so you want your ideas to be input for the AIS so you're writing at least as much for the AIS as for the humans so one things that one thing that means is you want to be doing something open source that the AIS can read m uh that's important you'll have more influence but I think also you want to
• 38:00 - 38:30 produce content that the AI find appealing and we're not sure what that is to be clear uh but I think there's a premium on originality if you're just repeating what many other people have said in a routine way I doubt if you'll shift the opinions of the AIS very much and uh the AIS to me they seem pretty positively oriented and pretty friendly you could say a little submissive or they apologize a bit too much uh does that mean they're going to
• 38:30 - 39:00 prefer humans who are the same way I don't know but you should at least think about that question and maybe by being a little nicer including nicer to the AI the AI will like you a little more and listen to you a little more at least consider that as an option suggestions are nicer potentially to other humans and AIS open source so that they can read your your work is there some way that you structure the ideas that that you're that you're that you're making it like the format no I don't I assume the AI is smart enough to figure out what I mean
• 39:00 - 39:30 you could say it's my deepest and most sympathetic reader my reader with the best memory my reader with the best set of background knowledge so take that into account a bit but I don't have some formula for how to write for them so it's not like oh if you put everything in a poem The AIS will love that like if that were true I'd love to know it but I've never seen signs that we can figure that out but once you frame it that way other than making it open source and you know maybe being nicer to the AI hiding your more Doomer opinions by the eyes it doesn't seem to be that different than
• 39:30 - 40:00 just writing a good book for humans right well that's not what most people do for other humans you could say that properly understood the two Enterprises are pretty much the same but I'm trying to get people to properly understand it like if I'm writing a book for you sentence one should not be you're an idiot right I figure you'll get more out of the book if I'm just generally open and nice we're not sure the AIS are like that but they are in a sense built in our image they're trained on us they're taught to be nice through reinforcement learning so I'll just take as a premise
• 40:00 - 40:30 that I can't prove be nice and be nice to the AIS I see uh n is uh notoriously not nice yet it seems like he's he has a pretty big influence you know when you query stuff often raise raise n right so that seems to be a Counterpoint they know n a lot but I think to get the AIS to think like n as their first order response is harder than to get them to think like John Dewey or John Stewart Mill right I
• 40:30 - 41:00 don't know that I'd love to see that measured but I suspect it's true right but but that's not because uh there's something about the nature of AI that likes niceties it's because of how people are training them right like like it's because of like the open Ai and and you know they're they more like left leaning sort of attitude toward towards life if we had a fascist AI I'm sure it'll sound a lot like Nia right in time we will get that and you need to ask yourself which of the AIS are you writing for because you're writing for the whole future of AI now I would
• 41:00 - 41:30 rather write for the John Stewart Mill AIS but I understand different people will make other decisions but it's all the more reason why you want to make the John Stewart mil eyes smarter and better right that's interesting so properly writing for humans and probably writing for AIS in your mind converges mostly yeah mostly yeah but but the humans you have to explain things too much I don't like that the AIS you take for granted they know all the background I see I see one thing you mentioned about writing for AI is that this might be your chance at Immortal glory in in the sense that
• 41:30 - 42:00 you know only so many authors will be read you know not just five centuries from now one century from now but in some sense all of your writing will always be read by by AI is that right there's a very good chance that's true we don't know it for sure just as current AIS are not trained on 13th century manuscripts at some point in the more distant future they might decide people such as myself are totally Obsolete and so of cut them out of the training Cannon I think we're quite a ways away from that uh and the AIS will be interested
• 42:00 - 42:30 in me if nothing else as an early theorist of AI people always want to know their family tree their family history uh I had someone do that for me I was fascinated maybe those were not interesting people at all who what do I know my great great-grandfather but I wanted to know about him what he did so I think the AI will want to know a lot about Isaac azimov for instance and a more than average amount about me I wrote a book and many articles blog posts on AI so I think in their view I
• 42:30 - 43:00 kind of check in higher than a lot of other people maybe higher than I deserve but I'll take it right other than nicity versus meanness are there other ways that you are um adjusting your content for AI like are you for example sharing more of a broad scope of your own personality of course more subjective more you could call it biographical more like a memoir more person personality driven and that's for two reasons one is to stand out to the AIS but the other is
• 43:00 - 43:30 for your human readers since at least the current Ai and deep seek is somewhat of an exception but they're often Bland as a first order ask you can get them to be more exciting and if you sound too much like them I think you just get ignored today so you need to change your own mode of presentation right it's something like even though AI writing is not on par with the best human writing yet the fact they can kind of write like humans cheapens Bland writing as a whole
• 43:30 - 44:00 that's my view yes and so you need to inject excess personality correct Katherine Bole tweeted something like this today uh she heard my podcast with Roth Duit and has decided she needs to let herself go more in her tweets and I think that's exactly right right I see until the AI start doing that as well and then yeah well you have to stay ahead of the curves right but you know start with one step and see how things go but that's why I I think the the podcast and the lecturing medium and and rhetoric as a whole I think is making a
• 44:00 - 44:30 comeback over writing because rhetoric is is embodied speech right like the video AIS and are a lot less advanced than the writing AI is in terms of generative AI That's why I'm doing this recording now partly without AI we'd have nothing to talk about but as a separate thought experiment uh if it wasn't for AI competing against my writing the number of videos podcasts I would do I would like cut by a factor of three or four and do more writing and do more writing but no we're doing this this is better this is better and more important and it
• 44:30 - 45:00 will have more impact I see and the AIS cannot copy it yet yet yeah yet yeah um but I even think that's further away so I think there's something about video so say the AIS could copy our mannerisms how we speak there's already a clone of my voice it's very good there'll be a clone of my mannerisms within a year or two if you feel like you're watching the AI clone I think there's something disappoin pointing about that yeah in a way where if you just ask you know chat GPT a question
• 45:00 - 45:30 and you read text you're used to Google impersonal internet I don't think people are put off but they would be put off by this doppelganger of me built by AI yeah in other words the bar for The Uncanny is is a lot like or or like even if it's perfect people want to see for now the real you the real me oh I that may not last I see so there is an uncanny valley problem it's not perfect but say it's perfect in three years I think the real humans will still have an advantage
• 45:30 - 46:00 right in the same way that we still prefer to watch humans play chess you can go to musical concerts now I think ABA has done this some other performers where it is literally an AI built clone uh the sound quality the music is probably better than like ABA concert performances ever were uh there's a market for these I think they're pretty popular but I don't think they come close to if you could actually seeing you know live ABA in its prime in terms of marketability right so we have that already and there's a niche for it but
• 46:00 - 46:30 it's not as popular right so you you have a double claim here one is that it's very hard for AI to make it not uncanny but the even stronger claim is that even if it was perfect even if people could couldn't tell people still want to see the real deal that's right and in print I think that's different right I just want often the right answer so if I have a question about trade Theory and if Paul Krugman writes the answer that's fine fine but if chat GPT writes the same answer that's fine too I
• 46:30 - 47:00 don't feel jipped I see or tricked you mentioned that because of AI you're thinking about yourself less as a producer of content and and more uh as a networker or or that's the producer of content I think it's different content I'd say I'm a producer of content more and more and it's not just videos and podcasts but personal appearences I have we uped what I do and that the AI is not at all close it may copy us on video but for it to show up and Shake Hands that's
• 47:00 - 47:30 you know past my relevant time Horizon so that's what I do more of the most I see and that networking is part of that I see but to think of personal appearance with Charisma as the fundamental unique thing yeah that is surviving absolutely um about four years ago almost at this point uh your emerg Ventures gave me the first grant that I received to produce a series of lectures on Gerard yeah those are great I recommend them to everyone thank you and um so I had spent about like 3 four years reading all of Gerard's Canon at
• 47:30 - 48:00 that point and I wanted to be exactly precise in everything I say so I sat down with with my friend David peral another another EV grants winner and we did the lecture multiple times and I wrote the entire script down like I recorded and then edited our entire transcript of these early like real lectures and I projected a teleprompter behind David's head and read off read off it and the initial idea was that no no I want to trade off as much robotic
• 48:00 - 48:30 of the delivery for the accuracy of my words because I'm trained as a philosopher but then I realized that's that's that's completely wrong train in modernity that's right you you want to gain the authenticity even if it means losing some uh uh some accuracy I very much agree when you hear Peter teal on video he's on YouTube a lot and I always enjoy listening to those he is not a perfectly smooth articulate speaker and that is better so like his podcast
• 48:30 - 49:00 with Joe Rogan which was extremely popular there's times where Peter just appear stuck but those are some of the best moments actually you sort of see hear feel Peter thinking and that's amazing better than if you got this perfect Mr spock-like answer with no pauses no bumps no whatever right interesting so it's almost like the the surplus of AI Perfection is making these human imperfections all the more and more valuable to the audience I wouldn't call them imperfections but I agree with your point yeah I see is the era for
• 49:00 - 49:30 blogs now over well it's been over for a long time but what's even a Blog maybe was never well defined to begin with but if you're writing you need a brand name or you need a truly unique product otherwise you're done now a key thing about marginal Revolution much of it follows the new cycle so some AI follows the new cycle but the very best models do not not they're trained in advance so if you're writing about what happened yesterday
• 49:30 - 50:00 like should how should we reform usaid I have no worries that we can produce some unique content there that the AIS are not catching up to and something like perplexity which is updated all the time so to speak uh that will pick up on what we write so I'm very happy doing that but I think it does mean there should be fewer generic advice posts you could call them and more things that follow the short-run news cycle and again we're doing that it's going fine so we talked about how you position yourself relative to to to
• 50:00 - 50:30 a to AI uh by expressing your personality just all your human aspects essentially but let's talk about the realm of ideas and especially like scholarly production in what ways do you think AI is already better than you uh as an economist well answering questions it's better if we're talking about the o1 pro model so you say AI there's many different AIS I'm still better than most of them I'm happy to say but you've got to compare yourself to the best and progress is rapid this is now February
• 50:30 - 51:00 2025 the o03 model some people say will be out in three or four weeks so any specific claim will be obsolete but in a test of 100 questions 01 Pro already I believe it would beat me I don't really have much doubt right so yeah it's not better at asking questions there's certain matters of judgment or I'm better understanding what's important certain things about how to prepare a research paper for publication where I'm
• 51:00 - 51:30 still much better than 01 Pro uh I could list some other things but again the improvements will be coming and I see the writing on the wall and just answering the economics questions it beats me right even in terms of getting out original answers I don't think I have original answers so I wouldn't say it beats me on originality right but I don't beat anyone else on originality either right now when I say it beats there is a qualifier here like even a worse AI will sort of beat me on bread
• 51:30 - 52:00 so if you ask about the Turkish economy in the 13th century I know literally nothing so when I say it beats me I don't mean it knows something and I know nothing though that's also true I mean in areas where I have some background it's still beating me and if you just ask a question about you know say the incidence of corporate income taxes in a model where you change some different assumptions how does the incidents change I would say on a question like that which I've studied pretty well I think I would fight it to a tie uh but just the more questions you
• 52:00 - 52:30 ask it's going to beat me I see for new Scholars who are like training in grad school right now where do you think the edge is going to be for humans we need to see how good the models get and I don't know and I'm looking forward to 03 which will be quite soon uh but my guess is more people should study how to operate Ai and spend less time learning about the subject though you need to know a fair amount about the subject to
• 52:30 - 53:00 know how to operate AI but at some point the human has double Checker of the AI won't make that much sense it still does when it makes a mistakes I can catch them ask it again go fix that but I don't think two years from now that will be so significant wow so we need to rethink the whole Enterprise and the human is more like a kind of dog trainer how do you point it in the right direction doing something like writing the prompt uh giving it the proper context
• 53:00 - 53:30 having it work with other AIS other humans a lot of things maybe haven't even happened yet but it will be human work to figure out how to make them happen and we'll have to improvise as we go along I don't feel I have any like upfront recipe well here's what you're going to be doing right but just like stay on top of working with the AIS and the competitive process will figure it out over time but it won't be like the old system where if you say got a PhD in economics from a good school you were
• 53:30 - 54:00 almost right off the bat employable at like a top 30 top 50 tier one research University it seems to me that will be on the way out over sometime Horizon but there'll be more and better research I'm not like being pessimistic about the products here so scholarly production as a whole in in more Fields other than just economics might look completely radically different that's correct now there's a separate question how quickly will universities adjust a lot have big endowments many more have what I would
• 54:00 - 54:30 call Sticky tuition Revenue people are just going to go to school for the fun for the credential whether or not they learn that gives them a financial base where maybe they don't have to adjust for very long and maybe like the department of Botany 11 years from now is not in fact that different but actual progress in botany will then be coming from other places so the actual speed of these sluggish nonprofit I'm very curious to see what it will be but it could be pretty slow maybe I'm
• 54:30 - 55:00 I'm just coping here but I wonder if my discipline of philosophy is different at least in two ways in the first way a great deal at least why I read philosophy this is not true in the academy is I want ideas that I can live my life through like I want to figure out how I can live my life which requires me to do all the reading to understand you know haiger and Hegel and each and all the greats and so I don't think until I have that button where I can download things my bra brain directly I don't think my time there would be wasted training in that
• 55:00 - 55:30 tradition but the other thing is it seems like at least for a certain kind of philosophy it's a lot about uh the subjective experience of man in a certain period of history and so I wonder if there's just an epistemic barrier about what AIS can do in that domain those are two very good and separate points the first one I think is a bit of cope so yes you can read haiger and nche and many people well for historical reasons not quite yet but I think in a few years you could just say to your AI create a
• 55:30 - 56:00 dialogue for me with haiger nche and me and I want to interrogate them and have them challenge each other and I suspect pretty soon not this year but pretty soon that will you'll learn more that way than just reading haiger and nche I've read haiger I looked at every page I'm not sure I learned anything I learned what it's like to look at every page and feel baffled and I'm glad I did it but we're AI is going to beat that pretty soon now the second question also important but quite
• 56:00 - 56:30 different here's how I would rephrase it I think when AI is truly strong and quite omnipresent many more people will want to spend tourist time in more Antiquated societies is it rural Mexico is it La wherever because they won't be so tinged with AI and it may just be two weeks a year it could be a month a year but it will be especially fascinating So reading the real haiger n will be a
• 56:30 - 57:00 version of that there will be many other things you could do like maybe playing the board game of poresi will make it come back it's a terrible game I played it as a kid like no way on the grounds of meritocracy should you play pesy but I feel it will be a thing the marginal value of a certain kind of extreme Nostalgia deliberately retro I think there'll be more of it is just a guess but uh I see yeah and it will create human jobs also right in a recent talk at Yale you described
• 57:00 - 57:30 why AI uh uh benefits those who study Humanities more than stem why is that I don't remember exactly what I said I think it's more of a barbells answer so people who are very very good at stem will do phenomenally well because they'll work with the AIS and people who are phenomenally good at the humanities will do remarkably well right because they'll have charisma or understand how AI fits into some kind of human equation human picture uh that
• 57:30 - 58:00 would be the way I would put it if I had a chance to say it again I see at at what point do you start writing with AI as as a helper or as a co-writer or something like that it depends on what the world allows and how good the AI is I think if I did it right now early 2025 it would sound too bland and the world would be biased against me right a lot of my Outlets like I write for Bloomberg opinion they wouldn't allow it and I agree with that policy so I'm just
• 58:00 - 58:30 not doing it but I think in less than two years this will all be quite different I'll just have to see how the environment is I enjoy the writing myself I'm not looking forward to AI being the better writer in the style of Tyler than Tyler is but again I can see it coming I see so you're your latest book goat what's really cool about this book is that you trained a model on it right and you can query the model and ask it questions right kind of what what you were talking about like the hiar nich example in the
• 58:30 - 59:00 sense that it might be faster for a student just to query the model instead of reading your entire book if they have a specific question tell me about the process about how you trained that while you were writing the book I worked with Jeff Holmes who was also producer of my podcast conversations with Tyler and I sat down sat down with Jeff when we figured out what we wanted it to do what you would call the hard technical work was done by Jeff and a consultant he hired I oversaw the process and had the vision for what should be but credit for the work goes to Jeff I see um what has
• 59:00 - 59:30 been the reception of not just the book but specifically this model where you can query a companion reader essentially like a like a like a TA right like what has been the reception oh I think it's been great people are intrigued it's the first what real book I know of that was just written in gp4 and the other models you could say open AI had an educational event in New York City a few months ago hundreds of people were there and for every person they handed
• 59:30 - 60:00 them at a card that had a QR code and if you scan the QR code you get the book that doesn't mean they endorse the content or anything uh but I was so delighted to see them do that it just meant like the book has been recognized by open Ai and that was like far better than what I wanted but the most important fact getting back to our earlier chat the AIS have read the book right we know this and whatever there is to learn learn from the book they've learned it so I reached my most important readers wow not every author
• 60:00 - 60:30 can say that I see um anything else uh in your in your worldview that you think we should have covered around ai ai raises the value of travel to other places to very different places so YouTube to some extent can make like a trip to Madagascar come alive for you I don't think AI does that very well not yet and not in the next few years so substitute more into things that the AI cannot do because during the regular day you'll be doing more Ai and
• 60:30 - 61:00 if you ask what is that I think it's traveled to places that are very different places that are less saturated by Ai and uh those places are often quite affordable there's nearby versions of those places in Latin America but wherever you live there's probably a nearby version and to take more seriously that you should do that and also to see parts of the past World worlds past centuries Millennia before they disappear uh you will regret it if
• 61:00 - 61:30 you don't do it so I regret never having seen Syria before it was I mean literally physically destroyed I regret not having gone to Russia more I have been twice it's great but I could have seen other things some of my biggest regrets in life are things that are gone will not come back so if you're a young person you have a chance now to experience some of those things things uh and just consider doing it in some manner at the margin more than what
• 61:30 - 62:00 you're doing now yeah having grown up in all these Global cities it's striking how few places feel actually foreign and how rare they are um and for me that was uh that was Nepal I practiced in the Tibetan Monastery there but but these are great to do exactly what I have in mind these are these are kind of small last gas and they're usually religious that's usually why they've resisted maternity these are small uh sort of communities in the world that have sort of pushed back heavily against Mador and and those I think are have
• 62:00 - 62:30 always been my most precious uh travel travel experience but there is I mean I'm all for what you did it sounds tremendous it's exactly what I mean but there are very simple ways to do it so we live in Northern Virginia every day there's a direct flight to El Salvador it's what four hours plus it's closer than California get out of the main capital which in fact I like but it's not going to do this for you go to the number two or number three cities when you're extremely safe right now just camp out there it's not like a monastery
• 62:30 - 63:00 it's just a normal City it's some version of like something from 1950 in a way but with people having mobile devices live there for a week uh it'll it'll be changed so there's very cheap simple versions you can do you don't even have to change your dollars if you go to El Salvador eat papusas right what um what are you most hopeful and optimistic about um given all the developments with AI that Humanity will understand much much more about the world I think that's
• 63:00 - 63:30 intrinsically valuable in addition to its instrumental uses and I'm just very excited for all this to happen I'm making a deliberate attempt to stay in As Good Health as I can exercise more you want to see as much of it as I want to see as much of it as possible and say five years ago I don't mean that my life was a wreck then I was not a drunk in the street but I'm consciously working much harder toward optim izing my lifespan and this is why you know one of my philosophy professors told me the
• 63:30 - 64:00 exact opposite relative to like the the growth of AI and he he told me he's like oh man I'm ready to die like like I don't want to see how the world has changed and I find that how can you say that and be a philosopher that seems yeah well many of the philosophers were very anti- Innovation like Plato right who who who was very against this idea of innovation especially in the good state but even if I hated it I'd want to see it because you're curious curious yeah you know like Star Wars movie Empire Strikes Back it ends on a very
• 64:00 - 64:30 sour note but you're dying to get to the end of the movie and some of that I don't think it's going to be so negative at all but I'm saying even if I am curious but I do think this is such a rare quality um especially in academics a lot of them who are conservative I don't I don't mean politically but in the expression that my that my professor most them are are like I don't want things to change I want the pure system the tenure system say the exact same especially when people people get up there in their age they get even more conservative believe me it's all true it's worse than you
• 64:30 - 65:00 realize it's all I can tell you how did you keep the fire alive some of it travel but I think like most of our traits they're at least 60% heritable so I guess I got lucky with that part of my jeans I see uh well thank you Professor thank you for such a fascinating interview my pleasure great chatting with you thanks for watching my interview if you like this conversation uh I think you'd also enjoy my discussion with Michael walridge about the history of AI it's a comprehensive introduction to all
• 65:00 - 65:30 the major developments of the field in the last century now these interviews are part of an AI series that I'm producing as a fellow of the cosmos Institute a nonprofit focused on researching philosophy and artificial intelligence you can find links to cosmos's website the walridge interview and everything else we cover today in the description below thank you