My pontificatiest AI podcast ever!
Back in May, I had the honor (nay, honour) to speak at HowTheLightGetsIn, an ideas festival held annually in Hay-on-Wye on the English/Welsh border. It was my first time in that part of the UK, and I loved it. There was an immense amount of mud due to rain on the festival ground, and many ideas presented at the talks and panels that I vociferously disagreed with (but isn’t that the point?).
At some point, interviewer Alexis Papazoglou with the Institute for Art and Ideas ambushed me while I was trudging through the mud to sit me down for a half-hour interview about AI that I’d only vaguely understood was going to take place, and that interview is now up on YouTube. I strongly recommend listening at 2x speed: you’ll save yourself fifteen minutes, I’ll sound smarter, my verbal infelicities will be less noticeable, what’s not to like?
I was totally unprepared and wearing a wrinkled t-shirt, but I dutifully sat in the beautiful chair arranged for me and shot the breeze about AI. The result is actually one of the recorded AI conversations I’m happiest with, the one that might convey the most of my worldview per minute. Topics include:
- My guesses about where AI is going
- How I respond to skeptics of AI
- The views of Roger Penrose and where I part ways from him
- The relevance (or not) of the quantum No-Cloning Theorem to the hard problem of consciousness
- Whether and how AI will take over the world
- An overview of AI safety research, including interpretability and dangerous capability evaluations
- My work on watermarking for OpenAI
Last night I watched the video with my 7-year-old son. His comment: “I understood it, and it kept my brain busy, but it wasn’t really fun.” But hey, at least my son didn’t accuse me of being so dense I don’t even understand that “an AI is just a program,” like many commenters on YouTube did! My YouTube critics, in general, were helpful in reassuring me that I wasn’t just arguing with strawmen in this interview (is there even such a thing as a strawman position in philosophy and AI?). Of course the critics would’ve been more helpful still if they’d, y’know, counterargued, rather than just calling me “really shallow,” “superficial,” an “arrogant poser,” a “robot,” a “chattering technologist,” “lying through his teeth,” and “enmeshed in so many faulty assumptions.” Watch and decide for yourself!
Meanwhile, there’s already a second video on YouTube, entitled Philosopher reacts to ‘OpenAI expert Scott Aaronson on consciousness, quantum physics, and AI safety.’ So I opened the video, terrified that I was about to be torn a new asshole. But no, this philosopher just replays the whole interview, occasionally pausing it to interject comments like “yes, really interesting, I agree, Scott makes a great point here.”
Update: You can also watch the same interviewer grill General David Petraeus, at the same event in the same overly large chairs.