Sam, I have closely followed and cherished your work ever since reading your, “The End of Faith” as a junior in high school (just over seven years ago). Undoubtedly, though there is much to appreciate in terms of substance, a quality I am constantly growing to appreciate in recent years has been the level of your wit. Your combination of humor, rigor, and light-hearted fun in discussions constantly bring up an aurora of Hitchens. On behalf of many, I wish to thank you for not retiring from the discussions that matter and constantly chiseling at your statue of thought.
Sam’s sense of humor is one of my favorite qualities as well. The episode he does with his wife, especially the intro, makes me laugh so hard. Glad to be in good company of appreciation for his work and way of being :)
Harris' approval of the suppression of news stories for political ends is about as diametrically opposed to what Christopher Hitchens stood for as you can possibly get.
Listening to this conversation in the middle of the night is a rare instance where I'm grateful for losing sleep and being sucked in by the RUclips algorithm.
LMAO! Yeah! You Jordan Peterson fanboys crack me up. Check your history. I do believe Sam (unintentionally) screwed him up. So badly in fact that old Jordy went into seclusion and seriously considered committing the Big "S"! Fortunately a little professional guidance and a few med.'s seem to be working and at least preventing him from being committed.
For those of us with an intellectual bent U-tube and other regular sources of information can be addictive to the extent that we spend large blocks of time adding to and polishing our concepts of the world to the distraction from direct experience with the real non-digital world around us. Walking, talking face to face with friends and making art help alleviate this problem. Art is really important as it oozes between the concepts in our left hemisphere and tells us there is more beyond the capture of language.
True. But It's not just those of an intellectual bent. Media platforms , youtube included , have a tempting lure of every flavor . Whether it's celebrity gossip, political outrage, video game trailers, sports takes, or cat videos. If you have a "need" the algorithms will exploit it and attempt to addict you.
@@robertspies4695 So I guess we'll all go down together. 🤗 Still I agree with your face to face time and art making as great therapy and a positive retreat to a saner reality.
Jeeziss, Sam! $15 a month to join!?!?!? That's more than RUclips Premium. I would love to hear more of your podcast, but I'm a broke single Daddy and just can't afford it. So please post more free content! Your free intro entitled Golden Age for assholes was priceless!! Very well done.
The AI information problem will probably cause people to distrust pretty much anything they see, increasingly until they give up on it somehow, and then life will either get a lot more complicated, or a lot more simple - Hopefully the latter.
Simpler because we will need to refer to original source material once again, just like they used to teach in college. No more, “I saw it on RUclips (whatever) so it must be true.”
The not trusting anything is already happening. I'd love to see more and more people, especially gen Z begin to leave social platforms / tech and return to doing the things many of us remember doing growing up (party in the woods, get a band together with friends, ride bikes etc). When I look around my neighborhood now not so far from where I grew up it's like a ghost town. We live near high school and there are thousands of kids living here, but they spend little time outside hanging out in their own neighborhood. They're on Twitch or whatever. And when you do see them walking back from school they're looking lonely and beaten down. It's hard to watch and I worry about my son's future here.
Have resisted Twitter all along and after listening to this, I will keep on doing that. I rarely go through YT comments al well, cause I know it'll become a source of anger and stress.
More AI talk Sam. We desperately need to raise awareness and continue to tackle the alignment problem. There is no other issue more pressing right now IMO. What did you make of the research showing AI analysing fMRI and literally reading the thoughts of the human subject? Straight out of 1984. Please interview Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever.
Indeed, we need to get people to push AI ASAP. If some people want to go the way of the Amish, so be it. Shouldnt stop us from saving lives and narrowing the wealth gap.
This whole "OMG AI" is a massive overreaction in my opinion. People were doing the same kind of fearmongering about computers around 40+ years ago. Then we had the Y2K bug when the world was going to crash LOL. Some of my friends and family were terrified and no end of comforting would calm them. People filled their bath tubs with water in case the gravity feed would fail at midnight etc. AGI is Y2K all over again, and again, it's just a software issue.
@@toby9999 I'd have to push back a little here Toby. Don't get me wrong, I hope you're right about this but there are many reasons to think that there really isn't much comparison between Y2K and the advent of AGI. I'd say it's apples and oranges. Let me try and break it down and as Lex would say, try to "steelman" your argument. You argue that, just as the Y2K bug turned out to be a non-catastrophic event, concerns about AGI are also unlikely to materialise into significant threats. You believe that AGI is, at its core, a "software issue", implying that it can be addressed and managed through appropriate programming and updates. This perspective certainly encourages a more optimistic outlook on the development of AGI and the potential for amazing technological progress. And you're right when you argue that humanity has a history of overcoming such fears or even, as you say, overblowing them. But I believe there are many reasons to think those arguments may not apply here. Unlike the Y2K bug, which was a specific software issue limited to date representations, AGI has the potential to impact a much broader range of domains. As a general-purpose intelligence, AGI could surpass human intelligence in various areas, potentially leading to unforeseen consequences. AI is still a developing technology, and its future trajectory is uncertain. While the Y2K bug was a well-defined problem that could be addressed with specific solutions, AGI's development and potential risks are less predictable, which makes the comparison between the two less straightforward. The development of AGI raises numerous ethical and societal questions, such as the implications for labour markets, privacy, and the potential concentration of power. These concerns go beyond the scope of a simple software issue and warrant much broader discussions and considerations. Many experts argue that AGI could pose an existential risk if not developed and managed carefully. I'd strongly urge you to read Human Compatible by Stuart Russell and SuperIntelligence by Nick Bostrom. The Y2K bug simply did not present a comparable level of risk, the potential consequences of AGI make it crucial to approach its development with caution and foresight. There is every reason to think it carries existential risk and honestly, that isn't being hyperbolic. You're right though, fears around new technologies can sometimes be overblown, as with the Y2K bug, but it's essential to consider the unique aspects of AGI that make it a distinct and potentially more significant concern.
Sam finally agreeing on “Truth” with JBP (13:30), by acknowledging “fiction” can contain more practical a fact than any non-fiction book (on specific subjects).
“Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.” ― G.K. Chesterton
Is the 'bullshitter' a side effect of internet usage? Could it be we as a people were given the internet and never learned or taught ourselves how to use the internet? Ai might be the final lesson we fail in the history of the internet.
Sam, in regards to your concern about the deep fake internet where you don't know what's the truth and what's not. I think we will probably need to "reinvent" the internet architecture, and use blockchain as the base for the whole internet not just for crypto or NFTs. So we will probably have to have blockchain for every new information going online, and this way we will have to verify that the source is not from suspicious sources. So I think we will find new ways of having every information going online being in a way verified in the background by some sort of blockchain architecture. Just my 2c's
Hello sir. Hope you read this. Would you please start having a video podcast instead of an long audio without any people at all? I would love if your voice reach to the millions but the only way to do it to start having video podcasts. People like to share the clips from videos with their friends, not from audios.
I think we need to be very careful about understanding consciousness. Its entirely possible the machines are conscious without experiencing human emotion.
Wouldnt it need to be human to experience human emotion ? Clearly it doesn't experience human intelligence but an artificial machine version of it , at most. Similiar in ways (though vastly different) that while cats and dogs experience emotions they dont experience human emotions.
One reason of the lack of nuance in social media discussion is the necessity of making one point. And another is the lack of capacity to elaborate a long text, or tge uselessness of long texts in that kind of discussion. You won't be read at all if you're too long.
Perhaps this will have an unintended positive effect, namely, to install skepticism into people’s minds again. The source of the problem with misinformation is people’s lack of critical thinking, not the fact that the misinformation exists. It will always exist. Misinformation, in fact, is part of the exchange of information in a society that values freedom of expression. The issue is the reader or listener who doesn’t know that they should approach all claims skeptically.
@@robadkersonI think he opposes the authoritarian tendencies surrounding those who identify themselves as “woke”. Such as cancellation and hyper fixation on skin colour etc
@@christopherhitchens163 maybe, but then he's just playing into the hands of grifters. There have been legal proceedings now that can best define wokeness for us: " an awareness of social injustice" Sam Harris is a man who appreciates that words have meaning, the anti-woke rhetoric distorts that meaning.
As someone who has a couple years left of college, I’m worried for how the landscape will look like when I’m done. What kind of world will we have in a few years? Societal institutions and human life in general changes, undoubtedly, but over the last century it has been insanely rapid. Uncertainty is part of the human condition but I can’t help but feel this can’t be analogous with the Luddites. These is a whole different creature. It’s very disconcerting for the value and quality of human life. Malignant-nihilism has been vastly accelerating in our world, as seen by the rise of mass shootings, addiction, suicide. I can’t help but feel the emergence of ai that has superior capabilities all way round will be the end of us. Is it inevitable that’s Homo sapiens will go the way of our ancestors? Will we be replaced by ai? Are they our heir apparent? Times like these I wish I could believe in a god. Maybe this is just a reflection of me rather than reality.
We are living in the most transformative time in human history. Future people will envy us for having lived through this time. No we won't go extinct, but some jobs will. Learn AI and be an expert at it when you graduate. By then the world will be very different.
Also violence and war have been steadily decreasing over the last half-century. If anything, the human race is becoming less violent. You're being deceived.
I felt Paul Bloom pulled a whole lotta bull in this. He defended trumpists, defended social media, & spoke as if he understood AI yet he has a deep lack of insight about it (his infamous ignorant paragraph in his book). His ideas show psychology as not being a real science, but a "practice" of guessing without understanding. I loved that the episode ended with Bloom saying "the real science is neuroscience"! (we see what you did there 😉☺). Great work, Sam.
i'm confused i gotta subscribe both to the app AND the website to get Sam's content? can i access full episodes of the podcast + mindfulness in one subscription?
I've actually changed my mind about Sam Harris, I thought he was a liberal who is not scared to say some hard truths😂. I'm not proud of myself, and I often wonder how many times I will fall for the Jordan Peterson's of this world. Just like Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris is the proponent of conservatist thinking. Unlike Jordan he doesn't make up a theory not based in fact to 'proove' everything is as it should be and as it always will be, and the people on the left should just shut up. He prefers to use his abbilities to skip around any points his thinking is missing any nuance or doesn't make sense. Both are equally useless to listen to if not harmfull. Hopefully I finally learned my lesson😅
Our consciousness is held within the brain and the brain works by neurons firing electrical signals, IMO those electrical signals hold consciousness and anything living with neurons firing is conscious.
My prediction is that the buisness of authentication will be absolutely huge in times to come. Once the AI peeks, people will get bored of it, and there will be "watermarking" services for artists, backed by a block-chain catalog. It's not like anyone cares about Deep Blue anymore....once it became perfect it became boring, and people want to see human drama.
I think we can continue to fully embrace and enjoy our emotions, compassion, our spontaneous natural responses to each other as human beings connecting in moments of pure joy laughter and sorrow….and embrace AI as a guide to rational behaviour so we continue to evolve and appreciate the gift of being able to witness..hopefully the intelligence of earths natural unaldulterated processes.
I wouldn't go as far as saying that ChatGPT is the moist powerful AI. It is not AI at all, there is no intelligence behind it. What people don't fully understand that ChatGPT is the most advanced LANGUAGE MODEL. Translated to simple terms - it is a beautiful bu!!$!tter. It can string the words together beautifully that will trick a lot of people in believing it is a real thing. But there is zero thought behind the curtain.
GPT 3 sure, but 4 can understand images well enough to do a low grade painting of 3d space with things like trees. It clearly has some understanding in its model. Wolfram calculated the ability to crunch all these numbers to get it's performance as impossible as well.
@@thelaw3536 that's just pattern recognition, google has been working on image recognition for a long time. Have a large enough database of images and their corresponding labels and it's possible. It is both amazing and not so amazing at the same time. There is no larger understanding/thought/wisdom behind the curtain.
@@DavidDavoDavidson they didn't use images though. There's no reason for it to be able to map out 3d space yet it does. It's also tested a lot on it's ability to understand
Sam Harris speaks and we listen. But who listens to those of us who, as non-AI, real and rather fallible human beings, actually bother leaving our own comments in this comment section?
Paul has, as usual, the right take. The world is already flooded with flawed and wrong information, that is, ChatGTP doesn't make this situation really any different or really significantly worse.
@@NoFeckingNamesLeft Or it may be even be a net positive, because it makes us more aware of how important it is to chose ones sources and ignore elaborated spam. And there is also nothing wrong with good writing.
When we are born it takes about 3 yrs to know we are alive... it takes programing through the senses...We are just like the machines we create only AI will hit the ground fully programmed and to learn more quickly and never forget...all without food...and eventually without humans.
Really i do think the misinfo flood will improve society hecause we shouldnt be taking photos and videos as evidence anyways anymore. It will become so hard to find real information that people will finally stay open-minded and leave each other alone
Paul Bloom is a psychologist who studies & understands only the human mind, which is a mishmash of evolution-encoded behaviors, hidden (unconscious) forces, & social needs. Paul's ideas about AI are unimportant since it's not his forte. His ideas about psychology are important. He says (I believe correctly) @19:06 that he believes we do not think like LLMs but then he assumes incorrectly that our mind may not work as neural-net AI work. This is because he's misunderstood that LLMs are not how all AI work - they're just a crude subset of NN AI. LLMs are poorly constructed (they only focus on statistical-semantic models of online text, thus they encode flaws present in text people wrote online). Since this is not his area of expertise, he misunderstood many things. LLMs are only early crude AI. True AI is not here yet, and so AGI concerns by true experts are around futuristic AI (AGI, ASI). Most of psychology is guessing, often without understanding.
Wonder what the group psychology analysis would be for the ratio of 22k views to 500 likes (as of this comment) in an intellectual discussion concerning "What do we know about our minds?" Assumingly, which should consist of intelligent listeners? A similar length RUclips videos of a guy digging ditches with his new excavator might have 500 likes for 2K views on average, representing a 10:1 disparity on likes/views ratio? Does this indicate intelligent people generally disagree with the content of the video, or they didn't watch the whole thing, or maybe they weren't concerned enough to simply press the "like" button? Of course that doesn't mean that I believe people who watch ditch digging videos aren't intelligent either.
Some ideas sound good at a time but later turn out to have influenced the most evil minds in history. I can't help but think that Paul Bloom's "moral" ideas might be ideas that one day prove to be like that.
Hallucinations are far less on GPT-4. Stump up the $20 Sam and use chatgpt plus with GPT-4. You have no idea how much more capable this model is than 3.5.
I'm not convinced AI and Chat GPT are as much of a threat as Sam speculates. GPT just seems like a google search combined with Siri to me? Seems possible/likely that the innovation in AI will stall for a while. What am I missing?
“Heart” is a faculty that thinks/understands and is the seat of soul. In some of the most poetic verses of surah Al-nur(Verse 35). Quran describes Soul as Light and heart as a Mirror. If the mirror is unclean due to horrible character, then the light from soul cannot be reflected thru the dusty mirror. Prophet Muhammad(pbuh) said:” I was not sent but to perfect human character”. So only way to clean the mirror of heart and allow the light of Allah(the most Exalted) is to improve one’s moral character via complete submission to Allah(the All-Merciful) and remember worship is the ultimate expression of love
@@twntwrs Wire like neuronal structures that conduct electricity via ions/neurotransmitters in the CNS/PNS possess no attribute of thinking/life and yet that has “randomly” led to life. Consciousness/thinking is an innate idea that is distinct from carbon skeleton and yet the materialist scientist believes that chemistry turned into biology via “god of randomness”/”Magic”/"law of nature". Consciousness can only stem from consciousness itself (Allah-one/indivisible/loving/self-sufficient Perfection)
@@twntwrs “How it is that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as a result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of the djinn when Aladdin rubbed his lamp in the story.” -Thomas Henry Huxley
You are a rare person. In the sense of being where you shouldn't be. If you have the beliefs that you profess from your comments then what the fuck are you doing on a random sam harris podcast episode. I sense a blemish within your Iman and i fear it isn't getting any smaller.
@@MorallyResponsible a most fitting analogy indeed: In the real world nothing happens when you rub a lamp other than it possibly getting polished a bit.
As one of the people who think Sam is a giant POS, I have to admit that I am still interested in what he has to say about AI and consciousness. Edit: I'm 1hour in and all they have talked about is Sam blaming his mistakes on Twitter.
It's difficult for me to imagine occupying the level of self-oriented arrogance necessary to make such a comment. Try to absorb the following reality: _seriously, nobody cares._ Neither is which group you you identify "as," nor your dismissive name-calling, interesting to other people. And also-perhaps with a cherry of irony-nobody cares about what interests you, either. Your opinion of a person places precisely zero leverage against the arguments that they may make.
@@Maxrepfitgm Is that supposed to be a touché? C'mon, man. I'm far too cynical to have any sort of care fueling my responses. Conversation here is more like an _expect disappointment or don't play at all_ scenario, given how the vast majority of you out there are only nominally literate. Calling it a compulsion is a stretch; it's more like a guilty self-indulgence. Don't give out too much credit.
Besides emphasizing that the internet can't be reality, what are we really losing by the coming of AI? Is there a difference between an algorithm or a human lying to you? At 27:50 the worry is that AI will make most of what's online "fake".. but this was already the case. Humans do not have a great track record with honesty, scaling up the problem with machines doesn't make the problem worse, but it does lend us some much-needed cognizance. The internet was never probably the best middle-man of human experience, and maybe this is just a fortunate shortcut to allow us to move on. Also, most of the arguments against AI seem speculative, akin to the anti-immigrant rhetoric. :shrug:
Sam, imagine how terrible it would be/will be if AI got so good that it systematically made and populated the world with doctored, out of context videos of you even more effectively than are the humans who are doing it now.
Sam, I am only one voice and not only that, I am coming from the other side of the world from you and probably have a naïve point of view on AI, but here goes. I think we have to realize that the train has left the station and all we can do is chase it from now on as far as AI development is concerned. In the human body of a man, if cancer cells get away from a cancerous prostate, the end is more or less guaranteed for the poor guy because they never can catch it once it is on the loose. But in the world today----let's take art for example---I am an artist and I see that AI has found a comfortable niche already in coming up with amazing pseudo-photographic work---incredibly---an AI simulated photo fetched 400,000 USD at auction. So; it's here and I say bring it on. It will separate the artists who are technically excellent in their work but could change jobs in a heartbeat from the artists who have art in them and will continue their careers by having a permanent side-job if need be. The information we all look at must now be viewed with scrutiny and double-checked and reviewed constantly. It is simply too hard to detect fakes and our technological advances in weeding out BS is in its infancy. Ditto with robots and silicon minds they will possess which are going to generate renegades and much to our regret we are going to get blowback until we conquer the problem with altering and tweaking the silicon genes, we put in them by making them foolproof and ensuring all AI assisted silicon robots and machines will be no more and no less than our family dog in their relationship with humans. Yes; we must realize that even when singularity is reached and it has blossomed into sentient silicon beings far superior to us, they must always be our companions i.e., equal to a family pet. This is doable; it may seem insurmountable; we've done it with wild animals; we can do it with silicon brains.
@@tcorourke2007 He's beholden to his own conception of it (ironically, very much in vogue now in the woke era he so despises): "Free speech for me and all the speech *I* like...only". Evidenced (not only) by all the people he openly admits to have "blocked". Hitch (oh is he ever missed) would've given him such an epic dressing down Harris would've blocked him too.
True. Our entire lives have become one big CAPTCHA test. If humans just trusted themselves a bit more they’d realize they have this period of history in the bag.
Can you please move on. We get it about Twitter! Every podcast, you spend a considerable time on harping about your Twitter experience and why you left it. WE WANT TO HEAR SOMETHING ELSE PLEASE!!
@@deborahfreedman333 Yes, I didn't assert that it was infallible. Simply that it's rate of hallucinations is subjectively much lower. I've used GPT4 extensively over the past month and my productivity has absolutely skyrocketed. Have you tried GPT4? I think we must be cautiously optimistic about this tool. It has the potential to transform our society in profound ways- both positively and negatively
I haven't had any trust in information you seem to blindly have faith in, especially the last 3 years. CNN or Sam Harris, not much difference these days.
Sam, I have closely followed and cherished your work ever since reading your, “The End of Faith” as a junior in high school (just over seven years ago). Undoubtedly, though there is much to appreciate in terms of substance, a quality I am constantly growing to appreciate in recent years has been the level of your wit.
Your combination of humor, rigor, and light-hearted fun in discussions constantly bring up an aurora of Hitchens. On behalf of many, I wish to thank you for not retiring from the discussions that matter and constantly chiseling at your statue of thought.
Sam’s sense of humor is one of my favorite qualities as well. The episode he does with his wife, especially the intro, makes me laugh so hard. Glad to be in good company of appreciation for his work and way of being :)
Harris' approval of the suppression of news stories for political ends is about as diametrically opposed to what Christopher Hitchens stood for as you can possibly get.
Listening to this conversation in the middle of the night is a rare instance where I'm grateful for losing sleep and being sucked in by the RUclips algorithm.
Thank you for the longer content on YT.
Thanks, Sam for the excellent content !
Always a treat to hear Sam's voice. Thanks for your thoughtful content. Love the opening credit music score.
Sam Harris continues to have some of the best conversations with the best people to have those conversations with.
Sam's talk with Lex Fridman was good.
@@michaeltape8282 Sam's talk with everybody was good!
Harris avoids conversations where he risks getting called out on his BS.
LMAO! Yeah! You Jordan Peterson fanboys crack me up. Check your history. I do believe Sam (unintentionally) screwed him up. So badly in fact that old Jordy went into seclusion and seriously considered committing the Big "S"! Fortunately a little professional guidance and a few med.'s seem to be working and at least preventing him from being committed.
@@twntwrs give me some examples of people who avoid it less than him, in my mind he is exceptionally good at entertaining difficult conversations
For those of us with an intellectual bent U-tube and other regular sources of information can be addictive to the extent that we spend large blocks of time adding to and polishing our concepts of the world to the distraction from direct experience with the real non-digital world around us. Walking, talking face to face with friends and making art help alleviate this problem. Art is really important as it oozes between the concepts in our left hemisphere and tells us there is more beyond the capture of language.
True. But It's not just those of an intellectual bent.
Media platforms , youtube included , have a tempting lure of every flavor . Whether it's celebrity gossip, political outrage, video game trailers, sports takes, or cat videos. If you have a "need" the algorithms will exploit it and attempt to addict you.
@@Suzume-Shimmer Amen
@@robertspies4695
So I guess we'll all go down together. 🤗
Still I agree with your face to
face time and art making as great therapy and a positive retreat to a saner reality.
Jeeziss, Sam! $15 a month to join!?!?!? That's more than RUclips Premium. I would love to hear more of your podcast, but I'm a broke single Daddy and just can't afford it. So please post more free content! Your free intro entitled Golden Age for assholes was priceless!! Very well done.
Seriously, I was subscribing when it was $4 or $5, but $15 is apple music for 6 accounts.
He gives away free subscriptions to people who can’t afford it. He usually says it at the beginning of each podcast now.
The AI information problem will probably cause people to distrust pretty much anything they see, increasingly until they give up on it somehow, and then life will either get a lot more complicated, or a lot more simple - Hopefully the latter.
It’s almost certainly going to be a disaster for the political institutions
Hmmm. That is just what a bot would say....
Simpler because we will need to refer to original source material once again, just like they used to teach in college. No more, “I saw it on RUclips (whatever) so it must be true.”
The not trusting anything is already happening. I'd love to see more and more people, especially gen Z begin to leave social platforms / tech and return to doing the things many of us remember doing growing up (party in the woods, get a band together with friends, ride bikes etc). When I look around my neighborhood now not so far from where I grew up it's like a ghost town. We live near high school and there are thousands of kids living here, but they spend little time outside hanging out in their own neighborhood. They're on Twitch or whatever. And when you do see them walking back from school they're looking lonely and beaten down. It's hard to watch and I worry about my son's future here.
I think you mean to say a lot more complicated or a lot more complacent.
Good to hear that intelligent people have problems like the rest of us with wasting time on social media. There is hope!
Great conversation as always :) Buuuuuut when are you going back on the JRE? Cant wait for that one!
Please get Max Tegmark on.
Have resisted Twitter all along and after listening to this, I will keep on doing that. I rarely go through YT comments al well, cause I know it'll become a source of anger and stress.
More AI talk Sam. We desperately need to raise awareness and continue to tackle the alignment problem. There is no other issue more pressing right now IMO. What did you make of the research showing AI analysing fMRI and literally reading the thoughts of the human subject? Straight out of 1984.
Please interview Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever.
Indeed, we need to get people to push AI ASAP. If some people want to go the way of the Amish, so be it. Shouldnt stop us from saving lives and narrowing the wealth gap.
@@robadkerson You've won today's staggering hubris award 🎉🎉
This whole "OMG AI" is a massive overreaction in my opinion. People were doing the same kind of fearmongering about computers around 40+ years ago. Then we had the Y2K bug when the world was going to crash LOL. Some of my friends and family were terrified and no end of comforting would calm them. People filled their bath tubs with water in case the gravity feed would fail at midnight etc. AGI is Y2K all over again, and again, it's just a software issue.
@@toby9999 I'd have to push back a little here Toby. Don't get me wrong, I hope you're right about this but there are many reasons to think that there really isn't much comparison between Y2K and the advent of AGI. I'd say it's apples and oranges. Let me try and break it down and as Lex would say, try to "steelman" your argument.
You argue that, just as the Y2K bug turned out to be a non-catastrophic event, concerns about AGI are also unlikely to materialise into significant threats. You believe that AGI is, at its core, a "software issue", implying that it can be addressed and managed through appropriate programming and updates. This perspective certainly encourages a more optimistic outlook on the development of AGI and the potential for amazing technological progress. And you're right when you argue that humanity has a history of overcoming such fears or even, as you say, overblowing them. But I believe there are many reasons to think those arguments may not apply here.
Unlike the Y2K bug, which was a specific software issue limited to date representations, AGI has the potential to impact a much broader range of domains. As a general-purpose intelligence, AGI could surpass human intelligence in various areas, potentially leading to unforeseen consequences.
AI is still a developing technology, and its future trajectory is uncertain. While the Y2K bug was a well-defined problem that could be addressed with specific solutions, AGI's development and potential risks are less predictable, which makes the comparison between the two less straightforward.
The development of AGI raises numerous ethical and societal questions, such as the implications for labour markets, privacy, and the potential concentration of power. These concerns go beyond the scope of a simple software issue and warrant much broader discussions and considerations.
Many experts argue that AGI could pose an existential risk if not developed and managed carefully. I'd strongly urge you to read Human Compatible by Stuart Russell and SuperIntelligence by Nick Bostrom. The Y2K bug simply did not present a comparable level of risk, the potential consequences of AGI make it crucial to approach its development with caution and foresight. There is every reason to think it carries existential risk and honestly, that isn't being hyperbolic.
You're right though, fears around new technologies can sometimes be overblown, as with the Y2K bug, but it's essential to consider the unique aspects of AGI that make it a distinct and potentially more significant concern.
Chris Langan, CTMU
hey, a non-crazy professor of psychology from U of T. That's nice :)
Sam finally agreeing on “Truth” with JBP (13:30), by acknowledging “fiction” can contain more practical a fact than any non-fiction book (on specific subjects).
“Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.” ― G.K. Chesterton
Is the 'bullshitter' a side effect of internet usage? Could it be we as a people were given the internet and never learned or taught ourselves how to use the internet? Ai might be the final lesson we fail in the history of the internet.
Sam, in regards to your concern about the deep fake internet where you don't know what's the truth and what's not. I think we will probably need to "reinvent" the internet architecture, and use blockchain as the base for the whole internet not just for crypto or NFTs.
So we will probably have to have blockchain for every new information going online, and this way we will have to verify that the source is not from suspicious sources. So I think we will find new ways of having every information going online being in a way verified in the background by some sort of blockchain architecture.
Just my 2c's
Who then decides which sources are legitimate in the blockchain? Trust in sources had already been annihilated before GPT arrived.
Thx Sam & guest
Hello sir. Hope you read this. Would you please start having a video podcast instead of an long audio without any people at all? I would love if your voice reach to the millions but the only way to do it to start having video podcasts. People like to share the clips from videos with their friends, not from audios.
Excelente Sam
I think we need to be very careful about understanding consciousness. Its entirely possible the machines are conscious without experiencing human emotion.
Wouldnt it need to be human to experience human emotion ? Clearly it doesn't experience human intelligence but an artificial machine version of it , at most.
Similiar in ways (though vastly different) that while cats and dogs experience emotions they dont experience human emotions.
Have you ever tried ChatDMT though?
5:07 "Artisanal oncology" - brilliant and hilarious.
Glad to see Sam back in the saddle and speaking about things he actually knows about instead of sounding like a complete fool talking about Covid.
How does ivermectin taste?
@@G_Demolished It's pretty much tasteless in pill form. How's the myocarditis?
@@G_Demolished how many people did IM kill?
One reason of the lack of nuance in social media discussion is the necessity of making one point. And another is the lack of capacity to elaborate a long text, or tge uselessness of long texts in that kind of discussion. You won't be read at all if you're too long.
Yes. You are coming on strong these days. Good talk.
Perhaps this will have an unintended positive effect, namely, to install skepticism into people’s minds again. The source of the problem with misinformation is people’s lack of critical thinking, not the fact that the misinformation exists. It will always exist. Misinformation, in fact, is part of the exchange of information in a society that values freedom of expression. The issue is the reader or listener who doesn’t know that they should approach all claims skeptically.
Can we get an episode challenging you’re views on American exceptionalism?
We need one challenging Elon exceptionalism...
Or his weird stance in favor of Anti-wokeness. Or against AI... (And I'm a Sam fan)
@@robadkersonI think he opposes the authoritarian tendencies surrounding those who identify themselves as “woke”. Such as cancellation and hyper fixation on skin colour etc
@@christopherhitchens163 maybe, but then he's just playing into the hands of grifters. There have been legal proceedings now that can best define wokeness for us: " an awareness of social injustice"
Sam Harris is a man who appreciates that words have meaning, the anti-woke rhetoric distorts that meaning.
That assumes Harris is aware he's steeped in American exceptionalism.
As someone who has a couple years left of college, I’m worried for how the landscape will look like when I’m done. What kind of world will we have in a few years? Societal institutions and human life in general changes, undoubtedly, but over the last century it has been insanely rapid. Uncertainty is part of the human condition but I can’t help but feel this can’t be analogous with the Luddites. These is a whole different creature. It’s very disconcerting for the value and quality of human life. Malignant-nihilism has been vastly accelerating in our world, as seen by the rise of mass shootings, addiction, suicide. I can’t help but feel the emergence of ai that has superior capabilities all way round will be the end of us. Is it inevitable that’s Homo sapiens will go the way of our ancestors? Will we be replaced by ai? Are they our heir apparent? Times like these I wish I could believe in a god. Maybe this is just a reflection of me rather than reality.
We are living in the most transformative time in human history. Future people will envy us for having lived through this time.
No we won't go extinct, but some jobs will. Learn AI and be an expert at it when you graduate. By then the world will be very different.
Also violence and war have been steadily decreasing over the last half-century. If anything, the human race is becoming less violent. You're being deceived.
lol perfect episode to come out on 4/20
I felt Paul Bloom pulled a whole lotta bull in this. He defended trumpists, defended social media, & spoke as if he understood AI yet he has a deep lack of insight about it (his infamous ignorant paragraph in his book). His ideas show psychology as not being a real science, but a "practice" of guessing without understanding. I loved that the episode ended with Bloom saying "the real science is neuroscience"! (we see what you did there 😉☺). Great work, Sam.
"we don't know Exactly how the brain gives rise to consciousness" ? no, we don't know that at all, not even a little bit!
I thought that was Paul McCartney in the thumbnail.
6:18 Love your "have your cake and eat it too" comment, Sam.
i'm confused i gotta subscribe both to the app AND the website to get Sam's content? can i access full episodes of the podcast + mindfulness in one subscription?
@@anewman thanks Austin!
And he has even more stuff for you to pay for. It sucks hard.
@@LLlap yeah paying for anything sucks hard. If you want quality content you have to pay up.
Yes, satiating quality requires one to pay up.
@@ganeshkimi no you don't! Lol. Anything is free on the web.
Also the pidcast is the only good thing. The gerbaiz episodes are awful.
11:56 How to give a what a life of happiness?
I've actually changed my mind about Sam Harris, I thought he was a liberal who is not scared to say some hard truths😂. I'm not proud of myself, and I often wonder how many times I will fall for the Jordan Peterson's of this world. Just like Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris is the proponent of conservatist thinking. Unlike Jordan he doesn't make up a theory not based in fact to 'proove' everything is as it should be and as it always will be, and the people on the left should just shut up. He prefers to use his abbilities to skip around any points his thinking is missing any nuance or doesn't make sense. Both are equally useless to listen to if not harmfull. Hopefully I finally learned my lesson😅
Our consciousness is held within the brain and the brain works by neurons firing electrical signals, IMO those electrical signals hold consciousness and anything living with neurons firing is conscious.
Not the signals themselves but the properties that emerge from those signals, and of the brain structure
54:00 I think this is the most important part: liar vs bullshitter.
What is the difference between fiction and illusion?
Almost no talk in this about "What do we know about our minds?" ....
Take A Moment
My Fellow Ape's
Sam, you are one of the world's leading experts
Keep on using our minds as a sponges Thank you
Stay Safe and Stay Free
My prediction is that the buisness of authentication will be absolutely huge in times to come. Once the AI peeks, people will get bored of it, and there will be "watermarking" services for artists, backed by a block-chain catalog. It's not like anyone cares about Deep Blue anymore....once it became perfect it became boring, and people want to see human drama.
I think we can continue to fully embrace and enjoy our emotions, compassion, our spontaneous natural responses to each other as human beings connecting in moments of pure joy laughter and sorrow….and embrace AI as a guide to rational behaviour so we continue to evolve and appreciate the gift of being able to witness..hopefully the intelligence of earths natural unaldulterated processes.
My biggest fear…a Red A.I. and a Blue A.I….😱😩🫠
I wouldn't go as far as saying that ChatGPT is the moist powerful AI. It is not AI at all, there is no intelligence behind it. What people don't fully understand that ChatGPT is the most advanced LANGUAGE MODEL. Translated to simple terms - it is a beautiful bu!!$!tter. It can string the words together beautifully that will trick a lot of people in believing it is a real thing. But there is zero thought behind the curtain.
Finally someone who gets it
GPT 3 sure, but 4 can understand images well enough to do a low grade painting of 3d space with things like trees. It clearly has some understanding in its model. Wolfram calculated the ability to crunch all these numbers to get it's performance as impossible as well.
@@thelaw3536 that's just pattern recognition, google has been working on image recognition for a long time. Have a large enough database of images and their corresponding labels and it's possible. It is both amazing and not so amazing at the same time. There is no larger understanding/thought/wisdom behind the curtain.
@@DavidDavoDavidson they didn't use images though. There's no reason for it to be able to map out 3d space yet it does. It's also tested a lot on it's ability to understand
This. It's all Western ego and sensationalism.
Will we live our lives with an AI giving us real time advice as we go about living our lives? Maybe we are close to being there now.
Sam, why don’t you respond more to what’s happening in Eastern Europe?
Sam, I just hope you don't read any more of these comments from trolls. Good job, man.
Thx Sam
Sam Harris speaks and we listen. But who listens to those of us who, as non-AI, real and rather fallible human beings, actually bother leaving our own comments in this comment section?
Other people? I'm not sure what you're asking here.
Thanks
Paul has, as usual, the right take. The world is already flooded with flawed and wrong information, that is, ChatGTP doesn't make this situation really any different or really significantly worse.
It's not new but will exacerbate the issue, AI outputs content at a rate far beyond all human users combined and writes better than 90% of them.
@@NoFeckingNamesLeft Or it may be even be a net positive, because it makes us more aware of how important it is to chose ones sources and ignore elaborated spam. And there is also nothing wrong with good writing.
We know it’s highly susceptible to mass formation psychosis.
When we are born it takes about 3 yrs to know we are alive... it takes programing through the senses...We are just like the machines we create only AI will hit the ground fully programmed and to learn more quickly and never forget...all without food...and eventually without humans.
Really i do think the misinfo flood will improve society hecause we shouldnt be taking photos and videos as evidence anyways anymore. It will become so hard to find real information that people will finally stay open-minded and leave each other alone
Paul Bloom is a psychologist who studies & understands only the human mind, which is a mishmash of evolution-encoded behaviors, hidden (unconscious) forces, & social needs. Paul's ideas about AI are unimportant since it's not his forte. His ideas about psychology are important. He says (I believe correctly) @19:06 that he believes we do not think like LLMs but then he assumes incorrectly that our mind may not work as neural-net AI work. This is because he's misunderstood that LLMs are not how all AI work - they're just a crude subset of NN AI. LLMs are poorly constructed (they only focus on statistical-semantic models of online text, thus they encode flaws present in text people wrote online). Since this is not his area of expertise, he misunderstood many things. LLMs are only early crude AI. True AI is not here yet, and so AGI concerns by true experts are around futuristic AI (AGI, ASI).
Most of psychology is guessing, often without understanding.
fantastic
Yessir. We want the best outcome. I certainly do NOT want you to be replace by a BOT.
That it shuts off when we die
Wonder what the group psychology analysis would be for the ratio of 22k views to 500 likes (as of this comment) in an intellectual discussion concerning "What do we know about our minds?" Assumingly, which should consist of intelligent listeners?
A similar length RUclips videos of a guy digging ditches with his new excavator might have 500 likes for 2K views on average, representing a 10:1 disparity on likes/views ratio?
Does this indicate intelligent people generally disagree with the content of the video, or they didn't watch the whole thing, or maybe they weren't concerned enough to simply press the "like" button? Of course that doesn't mean that I believe people who watch ditch digging videos aren't intelligent either.
BARD told me AI might be friendly to humans if it's programmed that way. I guess I'm more optimistic that AI is itself, which worries me.
so is this a two hour talk about how we should stop wasting so much time on Twitter? if it was two minutes, it would make more sense
Really thought Sam was going to talk about something new this time
will ai and quantum computing merge??
Some ideas sound good at a time but later turn out to have influenced the most evil minds in history. I can't help but think that Paul Bloom's "moral" ideas might be ideas that one day prove to be like that.
You have TikTok version?
Hallucinations are far less on GPT-4. Stump up the $20 Sam and use chatgpt plus with GPT-4. You have no idea how much more capable this model is than 3.5.
I am #1
Me too
We are all winners
In 1:00:36, Sam started with the masculine pronoun before the feminine, that's unfeministic of Sam :)
Joscha Bach?
AI =singularity
People will need to start cryptographically signing poster content so you can determine it’s likelihood of it being legitimate.
I'm not convinced AI and Chat GPT are as much of a threat as Sam speculates. GPT just seems like a google search combined with Siri to me? Seems possible/likely that the innovation in AI will stall for a while. What am I missing?
I agree. You're spot on. As it stands currently, it's just a "clever" front end for a search algorthm.
kind of looks like a painting by goya or some Euro -peaen painter
“Heart” is a faculty that thinks/understands and is the seat of soul. In some of the most poetic verses of surah Al-nur(Verse 35). Quran describes Soul as Light and heart as a Mirror. If the mirror is unclean due to horrible character, then the light from soul cannot be reflected thru the dusty mirror. Prophet Muhammad(pbuh) said:” I was not sent but to perfect human character”. So only way to clean the mirror of heart and allow the light of Allah(the most Exalted) is to improve one’s moral character via complete submission to Allah(the All-Merciful) and remember worship is the ultimate expression of love
Except there's no evidence your god exists.
@@twntwrs Wire like neuronal structures that conduct electricity via ions/neurotransmitters in the CNS/PNS possess no attribute of thinking/life and yet that has “randomly” led to life. Consciousness/thinking is an innate idea that is distinct from carbon skeleton and yet the materialist scientist believes that chemistry turned into biology via “god of randomness”/”Magic”/"law of nature". Consciousness can only stem from consciousness itself (Allah-one/indivisible/loving/self-sufficient Perfection)
@@twntwrs “How it is that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as a result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of the djinn when Aladdin rubbed his lamp in the story.”
-Thomas Henry Huxley
You are a rare person. In the sense of being where you shouldn't be. If you have the beliefs that you profess from your comments then what the fuck are you doing on a random sam harris podcast episode. I sense a blemish within your Iman and i fear it isn't getting any smaller.
@@MorallyResponsible a most fitting analogy indeed: In the real world nothing happens when you rub a lamp other than it possibly getting polished a bit.
What do we know about our minds? That it is always lying to you.
Mind is a poor social construct. I use my nervous system to derive my thought in analogue form.
what if humans were the unintended consequence of some alien computer science experiment?
Too bad Sam is not in charge of deciding what the public can hear.
That's one of his biggest frustrations.
5:58
As one of the people who think Sam is a giant POS, I have to admit that I am still interested in what he has to say about AI and consciousness.
Edit: I'm 1hour in and all they have talked about is Sam blaming his mistakes on Twitter.
He really does get hung up on silly stuff for someone who should be quite self aware.
It's difficult for me to imagine occupying the level of self-oriented arrogance necessary to make such a comment. Try to absorb the following reality: _seriously, nobody cares._ Neither is which group you you identify "as," nor your dismissive name-calling, interesting to other people. And also-perhaps with a cherry of irony-nobody cares about what interests you, either.
Your opinion of a person places precisely zero leverage against the arguments that they may make.
@@pocket83squared Surely somebody cares, particularly the person who feels compelled to respond cares.
@@Maxrepfitgm Is that supposed to be a touché? C'mon, man. I'm far too cynical to have any sort of care fueling my responses. Conversation here is more like an _expect disappointment or don't play at all_ scenario, given how the vast majority of you out there are only nominally literate. Calling it a compulsion is a stretch; it's more like a guilty self-indulgence. Don't give out too much credit.
@@pocket83squared Mental illness needs to be addressed in this country.
Or at least discourage him but the Victorians dressed their little boys in dresses for the first years of their lives. Why?
Besides emphasizing that the internet can't be reality, what are we really losing by the coming of AI? Is there a difference between an algorithm or a human lying to you? At 27:50 the worry is that AI will make most of what's online "fake".. but this was already the case. Humans do not have a great track record with honesty, scaling up the problem with machines doesn't make the problem worse, but it does lend us some much-needed cognizance.
The internet was never probably the best middle-man of human experience, and maybe this is just a fortunate shortcut to allow us to move on.
Also, most of the arguments against AI seem speculative, akin to the anti-immigrant rhetoric. :shrug:
One big difference, most human liars have a tell. Plus, AI doesn't exactly lie, it hallucinates, or confabulates in a very convincing fashion.
What do we know about our minds? Simple... not much.
Nothing, we do know nothing.
Its already way too far ahead. Cheers 🥂
We know that Trump can break some folks minds.
Sam, imagine how terrible it would be/will be if AI got so good that it systematically made and populated the world with doctored, out of context videos of you even more effectively than are the humans who are doing it now.
This will absolutely happen in the next 1-3 years.
Approx 1.234328 hours
we know that orange man is bad.
Sam, I am only one voice and not only that, I am coming from the other side of the world from you and probably have a naïve point of view on AI, but here goes. I think we have to realize that the train has left the station and all we can do is chase it from now on as far as AI development is concerned. In the human body of a man, if cancer cells get away from a cancerous prostate, the end is more or less guaranteed for the poor guy because they never can catch it once it is on the loose. But in the world today----let's take art for example---I am an artist and I see that AI has found a comfortable niche already in coming up with amazing pseudo-photographic work---incredibly---an AI simulated photo fetched 400,000 USD at auction. So; it's here and I say bring it on. It will separate the artists who are technically excellent in their work but could change jobs in a heartbeat from the artists who have art in them and will continue their careers by having a permanent side-job if need be. The information we all look at must now be viewed with scrutiny and double-checked and reviewed constantly. It is simply too hard to detect fakes and our technological advances in weeding out BS is in its infancy. Ditto with robots and silicon minds they will possess which are going to generate renegades and much to our regret we are going to get blowback until we conquer the problem with altering and tweaking the silicon genes, we put in them by making them foolproof and ensuring all AI assisted silicon robots and machines will be no more and no less than our family dog in their relationship with humans. Yes; we must realize that even when singularity is reached and it has blossomed into sentient silicon beings far superior to us, they must always be our companions i.e., equal to a family pet. This is doable; it may seem insurmountable; we've done it with wild animals; we can do it with silicon brains.
Just checking the comments to see if Sam has made any recent public gaffs.
"ohkay.... just a little bit of housecleaning here"
His utter obliviousness to the concept of free speech would be hard to top.
@twntwrs6746 I don't think he's oblivious to the notion, but more that he's willing to sacrifice it to preserve the current order.
That's worse.
@@tcorourke2007 He's beholden to his own conception of it (ironically, very much in vogue now in the woke era he so despises): "Free speech for me and all the speech *I* like...only". Evidenced (not only) by all the people he openly admits to have "blocked". Hitch (oh is he ever missed) would've given him such an epic dressing down Harris would've blocked him too.
Only gaffs he makes is calling the Democrats the Left and being unaware there are no human races!
The MSM has already demonstrated we can't trust the authenticity of information on the internet.
True. Our entire lives have become one big CAPTCHA test. If humans just trusted themselves a bit more they’d realize they have this period of history in the bag.
The black and white dog robot minced into the rubble at the collapsed parking garage in NYC and promptly fell over. Ooops! 🤖
Can you please move on. We get it about Twitter! Every podcast, you spend a considerable time on harping about your Twitter experience and why you left it. WE WANT TO HEAR SOMETHING ELSE PLEASE!!
What a misleading title. Blabbering on about AI and Twitter
I wonder if Sam has tried GPT4? It's much noticeably less likely to hallucinate
Do a quick search, every review of ChatGPT4 says it hallucinates.
@@deborahfreedman333 Yes, I didn't assert that it was infallible. Simply that it's rate of hallucinations is subjectively much lower. I've used GPT4 extensively over the past month and my productivity has absolutely skyrocketed. Have you tried GPT4? I think we must be cautiously optimistic about this tool. It has the potential to transform our society in profound ways- both positively and negatively
I haven't had any trust in information you seem to blindly have faith in, especially the last 3 years.
CNN or Sam Harris, not much difference these days.
I know that my mind really likes boobs
I am first also