JOHN DICKERSON:
00:01:12
And, Karen, when you write about OpenAI, which had a different mission when it started, and you write about the forces that are moving this race to get general intelligence and the prize of AI dominance, explain and talk about those forces a little bit that are moving and pushing around these different companies? Yeah, one of the things that I talk about in my book is the fact that there's really what can only be described as sort of a quasi religious movement that has developed within the AI world. And I call this movement the AGI religion. People who believe that general intelligence is possible to fully recreate in computers. And when that happens, that will either bring us to utopia, to heaven, or to dystopia, to hell. And these forces have really led to an extraordinary amount of ideological clashing within the AI development space where people are driving forward technical progress in these AI systems, not just because of what they are seeing, of how this could impact our real world presently today, but what they project in their minds might theoretically happen in the long-term. Is there a company, or are there companies that are following a model that is, for lack of a better word, safer or more cautious in their pursuit of artificial general intelligence? I think the pursuit of artificial general intelligence is inherently something problematic, because it is trying to ultimately replace humans in society with a technology, and what we've seen throughout history is that the best way to serve society with technological progress is by designing technologies that actually support humans, not actually replace them. And so I do not think it's actually compatible for companies to pursue AGI and be safe and ethical as well. So there's a debate in its bluntest forms that's between the CEO of Anthropic, who says that jobs are going to be wiped out by AI, and then the CEO of NVIDIA, who says, wait a minute, it's not going to be so bad. It's going to be improving productivity. Do you have a view on that debate? Yeah, well, one of the things that we always see with any previous wave of automation is there are jobs that are destroyed and jobs that are created, but the problem is no one ever talks about which jobs are destroyed and which ones are created. So typically, what you see is entry level jobs are destroyed and the career ladder breaks, and then more senior positions or more junior positions are created. So the people who graduated from school and went into the workforce before that beginning rung was broken, they can actually access the more senior level positions. But everyone else is stuck with more junior roles and are not able to progress in their career. Karen Hao, the book is "Empire of AI". Thank you so much, Karen.
