Yuval Harari: "We will create gods and they will be our slaves" is the perfect summation of billionaire hubris.

As a former risk manager I had been creating procedures for pandemic preparedness for many years.
None of it was a surprise. All was entirely predictable. No one wanted to properly prepare. I may as well have been creating preparations for blancmange tsunami.

thanks - I will never be able to sleep again

Well, if we're talking about the preference to do nothing in the face of an existential threat, all I can say is that our reaction to climate change doesn't bode well for any sort of meaningful response to AI.

The role of politicians in offering the public several options to choose from is attractive, but ignores one major factor - the role of the media (both mainstream and social) in informing the public about these options, and their implications. Knowing the British tabloid press in particular, the options on offer would be distorted beyond recognition. And the echo-chambers of social media would be even worse.

What is it about being a billionaire that makes you wake up in the morning and think how can you make the world a worse place? What are they saving up to buy??! Are their souls so empty that they can’t see anything but greed ?

Tech leaders love telling us that superintelligence and loss of control are “inevitable” and that we’re already stuck on the rocket. But technical possibility isn’t social wisdom. Treating maximum machine intelligence as an unavoidable destination is a political narrative, not a law of physics. We don’t have to default to building uncontrolled autonomous actors—we can actively choose to freeze or delay general autonomy while focusing on building bounded, task-specific systems that serve human needs without taking over human choices.

The One of the biggest issues we have tbh is that montazuma was atleast a half capable, our current montazuma is an idiot...

When political will is applied to deal w a threat and the hazard is avoided, politicians are punished for the cost of the avoidance as the public cannot conceive of the costs of failure.

Scifi author Ian Banks called the Aztec situation an Outside Context Problem

Enjoy everything you love, while it lasts. That statement hit me hard during my time in the military. My superior officer randomly uttered those words, but there was nothing random about it. It was the raw truth about all we hold dear. If you have things in your life that you love, be prepared to give your life to protect it.

A country that wants it's own AI does not have to start from scratch.  There is a lot that can be copied for a start

the brain-gut thing is very insightful

"We'll do our best to convince ourselves it's not that serious, or we can't do anything about it"
-Rory outlining his position on extreme wealth inequality

0:40 actually Rory can we start with the state of the thumbnail. You look giddy with joy

This discussion is just what we need now ! Thank you so much

Stunning and terrifying discussion.

I think my smile was as big as Rory's as Yuval started. It felt like sitting down to listen to a wise story teller. Thanks Rory and Yuval

Statistics is the language humans developed to act as a ballast for the ability of other language to avoid the truth but it is an imperfect solution. People are illiterate when it comes to statistics and there are a lot of bad examples of it in popular use. The gold standard of statistics in public discourse is how it influenced the public smoking debate but that also triggered a massive industry backlash against the integrity of the usage of statistics. Oddly enough the worst examples of misuse of statistics in public discourse are things relating to human potential such as IQ or Dunning-Kruger, where people cling on to the first sign of a "scientific" reason for their own superiority like a life raft in the ocean. Other faulty metrics are often linked to personal pride/vanity such as BMI or GDP.

Excellent discussion, I look forward to the next episode.