Nick Bostrom on What Happens if AI Solves All of Our Problems

Odd Lots - Bloomberg

In this episode of Odd Lots, hosts Joe Wiesenthal and Tracy Alloway discuss the profound implications of artificial intelligence with philosopher

Key takeaways

• A 'solved world' with AI could eliminate all practical problems, including poverty, disease, and scarcity, but may leave humans struggling to find purpose.
• Even traditionally meaningful activities like raising children or pursuing intellectual challenges could lose their significance if AI can perform them better.

Main topics

• Existential risks of superintelligent AI
• The concept of a 'deep utopia' where AI solves all human problems

Notable quotes

"If we solve the alignment problem, let's also imagine we solve to whatever extent it can be solved, like the governance challenge... what would a human life actually look like in this kind of, I call it a solved world?"

Conclusion

While AI holds the potential to solve humanity's greatest challenges, it also raises profound

Transcript preview

Speaker 6 (0:00) Next week on Leaders, with me, Francine Lacroix. I speak with Harvard Business School professor Linda Hill about what CEOs need to know to be successful. Speaker 4 (0:10) It really is not about them. It is about the organization. About Speaker 6 (0:13) how to lead in the age of AI. Speaker 4 (0:15) That requires a lot of confidence. Speaker 6 (0:18) And why great leaders embrace conflict. You need to amplify difference. Listen and watch Leaders, the podcast, with me, Francine Lacroix, on Bloomberg TV or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 2 (0:33) Hello, Odd Lodge listeners. I'm Joe Wiesenthal. And Speaker 4 (0:36) I'm Tracy Alloway. Speaker 2 (0:37) We're the hosts of the Odd Lodge podcast, and we've got something exciting for you. Speaker 4 (0:41) That's right. So one of the best parts of hosting our podcast is we get to actually meet and interact with our listeners. And we know we have some listeners over in Los Angeles. Speaker 2 (0:51) That's right. So if you're in LA, we're going to be recording a live show, some live recordings at the Vermont Theater in Hollywood on September 17th. We Speaker 4 (1:00) have some really exciting guests lined up. have some really great conversations planned. So go ahead and get your tickets. You can find those over at Bloomberg.com forward slash oddlots or click the link below in the show notes and come and say hi when you're there. Bloomberg Speaker 5 (1:19) Audio Studios, podcasts, Speaker 6 (1:22) radio, news. Speaker 2 (1:35) Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal. And Speaker 4 (1:40) I'm Tracy Alloway. Speaker 2 (1:41) Tracy, there's so much AI news, obviously, every single day for the rest of our lives, if we're lucky, in the good scenario. There's two big events or sort of things, though, that have really struck out to me lately that, to my mind, represent either the very good version or the very bad version, depending on how you look at it. The scary... version. And we're seeing more and more headlines like this. Several weeks ago, we had the OpenAI hugging face incident where the model, quote, escaped from its sandbox and did some hacking. And people were, you know, just some Speaker 4 (2:13) light hacking, light hacking Speaker 2 (2:14) erases all these fears of Skynet type scenarios, et cetera, where we can't control the model. And then in the sort of, quote, good version, we had OpenAI recently coming out and saying it had made all of these breakthroughs and theoretical mathematicians, which is good in the sense that it's like, It's working, but seems to be creating an existential crisis for some of the most brilliant people on Earth who work in theoretical mathematics. Speaker 4 (2:39) Right. So we've talked about this before. When it comes to AI, the range of possibilities seems more extreme than some previous technologies, right? On the one hand, you have death and dystopia where the robots basically kill us all. And on the other hand, you have this idea that maybe super intelligence, AGI, is going to solve literally all the world's problems. problems to the extent that you and I won't know what to do with ourselves anymore. Right. Speaker 2 (3:06) Like that is the that's the good scenario is that. And then the Speaker 4 (3:10) whole Speaker 2 (3:10) range Speaker 4 (3:11) of outcomes in between. The Speaker 2 (3:13) good scenario is we've literally solved everything, in which case the question is. In Speaker 4 (3:17) which Speaker 2 (3:17) case Speaker 4 (3:17) we're sad and miserable. Yeah. Speaker 2 (3:19) Or grappling Speaker 4 (3:19) for a meaning to our lives. Speaker 2 (3:22) Yeah. So is there a good scenario with AI actually? Like it doesn't know or maybe it's somewhere in the middle. Speaker 4 (3:28) AGI will figure it out for us. Speaker 2 (3:30) Maybe the middle scenario is we just have a huge financial crisis of all the debt. And that's something between human extinction and meaninglessness in our lives. And we just have something that resembles like the 2008, maybe even 2008. Is the is actually the best of all suboptimal worlds for the AI. Speaker 4 (3:49) Excellent. This will be our most uplifting conversation ever. Speaker 2 (3:52) Anyway. We've been doing more AEI episodes seemingly every year since ChatGPT came out. But people smarter than us have been anticipating all of these things for a very long time. Some of these exact scenarios, particularly the existential crisis facing mathematicians, the model escaping from its sandbox and circumvent misalignment with the creators. People have been thinking about this and anticipating this for literally decades. even before and even before any of us were talking about that. Speaker 4 (4:19) It's funny how like the Venn diagram of sci-fi writers and like legitimate academic futurologists is just converging, right? Speaker 2 (4:28) Totally. And then there's the question of are the models bad because they read all of the sci-fi and that's what they were trained on. Anyway. I'm very excited to say we really do have the perfect guest, someone who has been thinking about the whole range of possible questions and outcomes with AI for a very long time. We're going to be speaking with Nick Bostrom. He's a professor, a philosopher, and his most recent book is Deep Utopias, which sort of attempts to answer the question, what happens if AI goes right? So, Professor Bostrom, thank you so much for coming on OddLots. Speaker 1 (4:57) I'm happy to join you. Speaker 2 (4:59) What do you make of the existential crisis of mathematicians, their sort of realization that maybe there will just be no more puzzles left to solve because the AI is just very good at them and can find them all cheaply and answer all of our questions? Speaker 1 (5:14) Yeah, hopefully we'll all be in that position at some point. I guess we could compare it to what happened with chess, where computers have also... exceeded humans. And yet a lot of people are still involved in training themselves in chess and competing in chess and taking pleasure in that. So maybe mathematics will ultimately become more like a hobby pursuit. Wait, Speaker 4 (5:41) Joe, you still play chess, right? Yeah, Speaker 1 (5:42) I'm glad you brought up chess because I Speaker 2 (5:45) still love chess. Why? Speaker 5 (5:46) It's fun. It's fun. You know, Speaker 2 (5:49) it's still a puzzle. It's still mental exercise for me. It's still something to do to pass the time while I'm waiting for the subway playing a three minute game online. I know that I knew even before Stockfish and so forth, I knew I would never be a grandmaster. Still fun. All Speaker 4 (6:03) right. So, Nick, you have basically two books that deal with these tail risk scenarios now. So one is this idea of. deep utopia and AI is going to solve all our problems. And then you also have superintelligence, which seemed to paint a different scenario where AI poses a physical and possibly existential danger to humanity. Which one do you think we're closer to right now? We Speaker 1 (6:31) are somewhere in the middle, maybe. So the first one was superintelligence. It came out in 2014 and I had been working on it for... Six years before that. And at that time, the whole notion of having human level or even super intelligent machines was generally just ignored or people dismissed it as science fiction. And it seemed to me clear that this would one day happen if science and technology were allowed to continue on a wide front. We would eventually figure out how to make smart algorithms and build big computers. And that once we succeeded with that, we would then be faced with a bunch of challenges, including this alignment problem of how you can sort of design a mind more brilliant than any human and still steer it so that it will actually have an impact on the world that is beneficial. So that, I guess, like... with many other developments, helped eventually build a kind of global conversation. And so now all the frontier labs have research teams trying to develop scalable methods for AI control. And the conversation really has kind of swung and there's like this rise of people really worried about what will happen. And I thought it might be time to have a look at the other side of the coin. Like what happens if things actually go well? If we solve this alignment problem, let's also imagine we solve to whatever extent it can be solved, like the governance challenge, like we don't use this technology to oppress each other or wage war. And we get like the best possible outcome. Like what would a human life actually look like in this kind of, I call it a solved world, where all practical problems either have already been solved or to the extent that they remain are better worked on by these super intelligent machines and robots. And where there is no longer any need for human economic labor. And in fact, if you think more deeply about it, you realize it's not just earning wages that becomes unnecessary for humans to do. But a lot of other instrumentally motivated efforts as well would seem to lose their point. And so that's the kind of topic of this Deep Utopia book. Speaker 2 (8:44) Actually, talk about some of that other things that could be solved. Because when I was like a third of the way through your book. I was like, you know what? It's fine if all of our economic problems are solved. I'll just derive satisfaction from raising my kids and then maybe helping to raise their kids, et cetera. But as you point out, even that in the truly solved world, maybe even something like raising children might not be an available avenue to us to find at least our conventional notions of satisfaction. Speaker 1 (9:17) Yeah, so we need to. I guess make some distinctions here. So when you say satisfaction, that could mean a subjective state of mind, like you're feeling happy and pleased and relaxed and joyful and so forth. I think that would be easy to achieve in this condition of technological maturity. It could also mean that satisfaction in the sense of our preferences having been met. all the things we want from life. And there it's a little bit more tricky because one of the things that people might want is purpose, like having worthwhile things to work on and struggle with. And there, there is more of a question mark, which we can sort of dive into. But if we take it sort of at, so first, like, imagine we automate the economy, okay? So you wouldn't need to sort of commute into the office every day just to sort of get your paycheck. Speaker 3 (10:10) It Speaker 1 (10:11) would require a big adjustment in society and in culture, because right now, like the whole education system is geared towards producing workers, like children are coming in, right? And then they are processed, learn to sit at their desk, receive assignments. They are sort of quality graded and then spit out at the other end. And then you have somebody who can go into the economy and perform some economically useful tasks. So that would no longer make sense in this scenario where machines can do. all of these jobs. And you might want to have an education system that instead focused on developing skills for enjoying life, like cultivating the art of conversation, appreciation for nature and beauty, sports, hobbies, the ability to form deep friendships, spirituality, all of that kind of stuff. But then, as you alluded to, you think through what it really would mean to have such... immense affordances. And because here it's not just that we would have super-intelligent machines, but the super-intelligence could also bring along a host of other technological advances, right? You have science and technology running now at machine speed rather than human speed. So you get a kind of compression of the future, all these science fiction-like technologies and inventions that maybe we would make if we had... 20,000 years to work on it. We would maybe have space colonies and perfect virtual realities, cures for aging. Like all of that might happen quite soon after super intelligence. And so then if you ask somebody now who doesn't have to work for a living, you know, oftentimes they have very busy lives, but maybe what do they do? Well, for somebody, maybe they like to, they like fitness. So like maybe they spend an hour a day running or at the gym, right? But at technological maturity, you could just pop a pill that would achieve the same. physiological effects and like the state of mental clarity and relaxation that some people get right and and so then you can start to work through the different things that like maybe for somebody else they're like oh like like decorating the home could be a fun project that people might do right if they don't have to work so like they go through the catalogs they they go to the store they pick out the perfect curtain they do all of these things that could be but then like With superintelligence, you could have this kind of system that really is good at knowing or inferring your preferences and could do a much better job at you at picking out all the perfect items and purchasing them and like installing them with robots. And so that the end result would be much better if you just press the button and say, hey, I decorate my home than if you went through the whole trouble of doing it yourself. So you could still do it yourself, but. Is there really a point to it? Like that would seem to be this kind of purposelessness. And you can sort of walk through the different things that one might fill one's life with if one is like on an extended holiday or on retirement or you're like sufficiently wealthy, you have just decided to quit working. And a lot of those also, it seems, could be automated. So you would have this, it's like more like a post-instrumental condition rather than just a post-work condition. Speaker 4 (13:08) Some of this sounds nice. And I myself. enjoy a little bit of interior decorating and going to the shops and buying stuff. In the utopian vision of the future, how are economic gains from AI actually distributed? Because again, like all of this sounds very nice, but it also costs money. And if we're not working because the robots have replaced us, I'm not sure where that money comes from. Speaker 1 (13:33) Yeah. So that's a more practical problem, shall we say, which is like deliberately set aside in this book, The Deep Utopia, because I wanted in that book actually to get to the question, the more philosophical questions of what ultimately gives value. But it is, of course, an important question. I think a lot depends on how it pans out. But I mean, we do have a taxation system. So you could imagine like in the simplest scenario where things just continue as they are with better technology, maybe some companies make windfall profits. from serving the latest models or building the infrastructure, the data centers, etc. Companies achieving efficiency gains from not needing to hire all of these humans. And then some of those capital gains or dividend income gets taxed and that could be redistributed. The good thing