Joe Rogan Experience #1350 - Nick Bostrom

Joe Rogan 0:00 And here we go. All right, Nick. This is, uh, one of the things that scares people more than anything, is the idea that we're creating something, or someone's gonna create something, that's gonna be smarter than us, that's gonna replace us. Is that something we should really be concerned about?

Nick Bostrom 0:21 I presume you're referring to babies.

Joe Rogan 0:23 (laughs)

Narrator 0:24 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 0:24 I'm referring to artificial intelligence.

Nick Bostrom 0:26 Ah, yes.

Joe Rogan 0:27 Ugh.

Nick Bostrom 0:29 Well, it's the, the big fear and the big hope, I think.

Joe Rogan 0:32 Both?

Nick Bostrom 0:33 At the same time, yeah.

Joe Rogan 0:34 How is it the big hope?

Nick Bostrom 0:36 Well, there are a lot of things wrong with the world as it is now.

Joe Rogan 0:39 I'm trying to pull this up to your face, if you would.

Nick Bostrom 0:41 Um, all, all the problems we have, uh, most of them could be solved if we were smarter or if we had somebody on our side who are a lot smarter with better technology and so forth. Um, also, I think if we wanna imagine some really grand future where humanity or our descendants one day go out and colonize the universe, I think that's likely to happen, if it's gonna happen at all, after we have superintelligence that then develops the technology to make that possible.

Joe Rogan 1:19 The real question is whether or not we would be able to harness this intelligence, or whether it would dominate.

Nick Bostrom 1:24 Yeah, that certainly is one question. Um, not the only. You could imagine that we harness it, but then use it for bad purposes as we have a lot of other technologies through history.

Joe Rogan 1:36 Yeah.

Nick Bostrom 1:37 So I think there are really two challenges we need to meet. One, one is to make sure we can align it with human values, and then make sure that we, together, do something better with it than fighting wars or oppressing one another.

Joe Rogan 1:50 I think... Well, what I'm worried about more than anything is that human beings are gonna become obsolete, that we're going to invent something that's the next stage of evolution. I'm, I'm really concerned with that. I'm really concerned with if we look back on ancient hominids, uh, Australopithecus, just think of some primitive ancestor of man, we don't wanna go back to that. Like, that, that's a terrible way to live. I'm worried that what we're creating is the next thing.

Nick Bostrom 2:18 I think we don't necessarily want, or at least I wouldn't be totally thrilled with, with a future where humanity as it is now was, was the last and final word, the pa- like, ultimate version beyond.

Joe Rogan 2:35 Right.

Nick Bostrom 2:35 I, I think there's a lot of room for improvement.

Joe Rogan 2:37 Sure.

Nick Bostrom 2:37 But not anything that is different is an improvement.

Joe Rogan 2:40 Right.

Nick Bostrom 2:40 So, so the key would be, I think, to find some path forward where the best in us, uh, can continue to exist and develop, uh, to even greater levels. And maybe at the end of that path, it looks nothing like we do now. Maybe it's not two-legged, two-armed creatures running around with three pounds of thinking matter, right? It might be something quite different. But as long as it... what, what we value is, is present there, and ideally in a much higher degree than in the current world, then that could count as a success.

Joe Rogan 3:12 Yeah, the idea that we're in a state of evolution, that we are... just like we look at ancient hominids, that we are eventually going to become something more advanced or at least more complicated than we are now. But what I'm worried is that biological life itself has so many limitations. When we look at the evolution of technology, if you look at Moore's law or if you just look at new cellphones, like, they just released a new iPhone yesterday and they talked about all these incremental increases in the ability to take photographs and wide-angle lenses and night mode and a new chip that works even faster, these things, uh... there's not... the, the word evolution's incorrect, but the innovation of technology is so much more rapid than anything we could ever even imagine, biologically. Like, if we had a thing that we'd create, if we created, um... instead of artificial intelligence in terms of, like, some- something in a chip or a computer, if we created a life form, a biological life form, but this biological life form was improving radically every year, like, it didn't even exist, like a... the iPhone existed in 2007, that's when it was invented. If we had something that was 12 years old, but all of a sudden was infinitely faster and better and smarter and wiser than it was 12 years ago and the newest version of it, version X1, we would, we would start going, "Whoa, whoa, whoa! P- hit the brakes on this thing, man." How, how many more generations before this thing's way smarter than us? How many more generations before this thing thinks that human beings are obsolete?

Nick Bostrom 4:41 Yeah, it's coming, coming at us fast it feels like.

Joe Rogan 4:43 Yes.

Nick Bostrom 4:43 I mean, uh... and, but some, some people think, "Oh, it's, uh, slowing down now." Um...

Joe Rogan 4:48 Who thinks it's slowing down?

Nick Bostrom 4:50 Well, uh, don't they have a, like... Tyler Cowen and e- even, uh, um, Peter Thiel sometimes goes on about the, the, the pace of innovation not really being what it needs to be.

Joe Rogan 5:01 Mm.

Nick Bostrom 5:02 Um, I mean, maybe it was faster in, like, 1890s or... but, but still, compared to almost all of human history, it seems like a period of unprecedented rapid progress right now.

Joe Rogan 5:17 Unprecedented?

Nick Bostrom 5:18 I would say so. Yeah, I mean, except for maybe a couple of decades, uh, 100 years ago when there was a lot of, you know, electricity, the whole thing.

Joe Rogan 5:25 Yeah. No, I agree. Um, I just... I'm... I don't think it's a concern because, um, it's more of a curiosity to me. I mean, I am concerned, but the more I look at it and go, "Well, this is see-..." It seems inevitable that we're, we're going to run into artificial intelligence. But the questions are so open-ended. We really don't know when, we don't, really don't know what form it's gonna take, and we really don't know what it's going to do to us.

Nick Bostrom 5:54 Yeah. So I, I see it as not something that, um, should be avoided, uh...... neither something that we should just be completely gung-ho about, but more like a kind of gate through which we will have to pass at some point. All paths that are both plausible and lead to really great futures, I think at some point involve the development of greater than human intelligence, machine intelligence. And so, that our focus should be on getting our act together as much as we can in whatever period of time we have before that-

Joe Rogan 6:24 (laughs)

Nick Bostrom 6:25 ... occurs.

Joe Rogan 6:25 Prepare ourselves.

Nick Bostrom 6:27 Well, I mean, that might involve doing some, some research into various technical questions as how you build these systems so that we actually understand what they are doing, and they have some, you know, intended impact on the world. It might also, if, if we are able to get our act together a little bit at, at, on, on the kind of global political scene, um, a little bit more peace and love in the world would be good, I think.

Joe Rogan 6:48 Sure, that'd be nice.

Nick Bostrom 6:50 Um, so, uh, and, and then, like, refraining from destroying ourselves through some other mean before we even get a chance to try to, uh, needle our way through this, uh, this gate.

Joe Rogan 7:01 Well, that's certainly possible. We're, we're certainly capable of screwing it all up. Where is the current state of technology now in regards to artificial intelligence, and how far away do you think we are from AGI?

Nick Bostrom 7:15 Well, dif- different people have different views on that. I think the, uh, the truth of the matter is that it's very hard to, to have accurate views about the timelines for these things, that, that's, you know, are still involve kind of big new breakthroughs that have to happen. Um, uh, certainly, I mean, over the last eight or 10 years, there has been a lot of excitement with the deep learning revolution. Um, things that ... I mean, it used to be that people thought of AI as this kind of autistic savant, really good at logic and counting and memorizing facts, but with, with no, no intuition. And there's this deep learning evolution when you begin to do these deep neural networks, you kind of solved perception in some sense.

Joe Rogan 8:01 Mm-hmm.

Nick Bostrom 8:02 Um, you, you now have computers that can see, that, that can hear, and that have visual intuition. Um, so, so, so that, that has enabled the whole wide suite of applications, uh, which makes it commercially valuable, which then drives a lot of investment in it, which, you know, there's a ... so there's now quite a lot of momentum, um, uh, in, in machine learning and, and trying to kind of stay ahead of that.

Joe Rogan 8:26 It's interesting that when we think about artificial intelligence and it, whatever potential form that it's gonna take, if you look at films like, uh, 2001, like HAL, like, "Open the door, HAL," you know? Like-

Nick Bostrom 8:38 Uh-huh.

Joe Rogan 8:39 ... we think of something that's communicating to us like, like a person would, and maybe is a little bit colder and doesn't, doesn't share our values and has a more pragmatic view of life and death and, and things. When we think of intelligence, though, I think intelligence in our mind is almost inexorably connected to all the things that make us human, like emotions and, and, and ambition, and all these things, like the reason why we innovate. Like we ... it's not really clear, like why ... we innovate because we enjoy innovation and because we want to make the world a better place and because we want to fix some problems that we've created and we want to solve some limitations of the human body and the environment that we live in, but we sort of assume that intelligence that we create will also have some motivations.

Nick Bostrom 9:28 Well, there is a fairly large class of possible structures you could do. If you want to do anything that has any kind of cognitive or intellectual capacity at all, a large class of those would be what we might call agent.

Joe Rogan 9:41 Agents?

Nick Bostrom 9:42 So this would be, yeah, systems that interact with the world, um, in pursuit of some goal. Um, and if they are a sophisticated class of agents, they, they can plan ahead the sequence of actions. Like, more primitive agents might just have reflexes. Um, but, but the sophisticated agent might have a model of the world where it can kind of think ahead before it starts doing stuff. It can-

Joe Rogan 10:06 Hm.

Nick Bostrom 10:06 ... kind of think, "What, what would I need to do in order to reach this desired state?" And then reason backwards from that. So I think it's a fairly natural ... it's not the only possible cognitive system you could build, but it's also not this weird, bizarre special case that, you know ... it, it's a fairly natural thing to, to aim for. If you're able to specify the goal, something you want to achieve, but you don't know how to achieve it, the natural way of trying to go about that is by building the system that has this goal and is an agent and then moves around and tries different things and eventually perhaps learn to, to solve that task.

Joe Rogan 10:39 Do you anticipate different types of artificial intelligence, like artificial intelligence that mimics the, the human emotions? Like, do you th- do you think that people will construct something that's very similar to us in a way that we can interact with it in, in common terms, or do you think it will be almost like communicating with, uh, an alien?

Nick Bostrom 11:04 So there are different scenarios here.

Joe Rogan 11:06 Yeah.

Nick Bostrom 11:06 I mean, I, I'd guess, my guess is that the first thing that actually achieves superintelligence would not be very human-like. Um, there are different possible ways you could try to get to this level of technology. One, one would be by trying to reverse engineer the human brain.

Joe Rogan 11:23 Hm.

Nick Bostrom 11:24 Like, we have in existence. In, in, in the limit- limiting case, imagine if you just made an exact duplicate in, in silicon of the human brain, like every neuron had some counterpart. Um, so that, that, that seems technologically very difficult to do, but it wouldn't require a big theoretical breakthrough to do it. You could just through, if you had sufficiently good microscopy and large enough computers and enough elbow grease, you could-

Joe Rogan 11:48 Hm.

Nick Bostrom 11:48 ... kind of ... but it seems to me plausible that what will work before we are able to do it that way will be some more synthetic approach work, um, that would only be a very rough resemblance-... uh, maybe with the, the neocortex.

Joe Rogan 12:01 Yeah, that's one of the big questions, right? Whether or not we can replicate all the functions of the human brain in the way it functions and, and like mimic it exactly, or whether we could have some sort of superior method that achieves the same results that the human brain does in terms of its ability to calculate and reason and, and do multiple tasks at the same time.

Nick Bostrom 12:21 Yeah. And I also think that maybe once you have a sufficiently high level of this general form of intelligence, then you could use that maybe to emulate or mimic things that we do differently. So may- maybe we... O- Our cortex is quite limited, so we rely a lot on earlier neurological structures that we have. We have to, we have to be guided by emotion because we can't just calculate everything out.

Joe Rogan 12:46 Mm-hmm.

Nick Bostrom 12:47 Um, and, and instinct and, and m- may... and may... And if we lost all of that, we would be helpless. But maybe some system that had a sufficiently high level of this more abstract reasoning capability could maybe use that to substitute for things that weren't built in, in the same way that we do.

Joe Rogan 13:03 Have you ever talked to Sam Harris about this?

Nick Bostrom 13:05 Yeah, a little bit.

Joe Rogan 13:07 Have you ever had a podcast with him?

Nick Bostrom 13:09 I... Yeah. A- Actually, he had him on his podcast, uh, half a year ago or something like that.

Joe Rogan 13:12 I'll have to, I'll have to listen to it because he has the worst view of the, the, the future in terms of artificial intelligence. He's terrified of it. And when I talk to him, he terrifies me. And, uh, Elon Musk is right up there.

Nick Bostrom 13:26 Uh-huh.

Joe Rogan 13:26 He also has a terrifying view-

Nick Bostrom 13:28 Uh-huh.

Joe Rogan 13:28 ... of what our artificial intelligence could potentially be. What do you say to those guys?

Nick Bostrom 13:34 Well, I mean, I, I, I do think that there are these significant risks that will be associated with this transition to the machine intelligence era, um, incl- including existential risks, threats to the very survival of humanity or what we care about.

Joe Rogan 13:50 So why are we doing this? (laughs)

Nick Bostrom 13:52 Ah, well, um, there are a lot of things we are, we are doing that maybe globally it would be better if we didn't do. I mean, just-

Joe Rogan 13:58 Sure.

Nick Bostrom 13:58 ... why, why do we build thousands of nuclear weapons, right?

Joe Rogan 14:01 Right.

Nick Bostrom 14:01 Uh, uh-

Joe Rogan 14:01 Why do we overfish the oceans?

Nick Bostrom 14:02 Yeah. So, um... Now, I mean, if one actually ask why do different individuals work on AI research or why do different companies and governments fund it, I mean, there are a lot of explanation. It's like a great scientific, uh, endeavor. If, if you can make the Google search engine 1% better, that's gotta be worth like a billion dollars right off the bat. Um, it's become a kind of prestige thing now where, where nations want to have some sort of strategy 'cause it's seen as this new frontier. Um, just like when you had, um, you know, steam engines and industrialization a few hundred years ago and electricity. Like, it's gonna just open up a lot of economic opportunities. You want to be in there where it's hap- you, you wanna be this kind of, "We- we are gonna do subsistence agriculture while the w- rest of the world is moving on."

Joe Rogan 14:49 Right.

Nick Bostrom 14:50 Um, so, so there's, there's a, uh, a lot of... It's kind of overdetermined. Like, you could, you could remove some of these reasons, and there would still be enough reasons for why people would be pushing forward with this.

Joe Rogan 15:00 One of the things that scares me the most is the idea that if we do create artificial intelligence, then it will improve upon our design and create far more sophisticated versions of itself, and that it'll continue to do that until it's unrecognizable, until it reaches literally a godlike potential.

Nick Bostrom 15:17 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 15:17 That su- I mean, I forget what the real numbers were, maybe you could tell us, but someone had calculated, some reputable source had calculated the amount of improvement that sentient artificial intelligence would be able to create inside of a small window of time. Like, if it was allowed to innovate and then make better versions of itself, and those better versions of itself were allowed to innovate and make better versions of itself, you're talking about not an exponential increase of intelligence, but an explosion.

Nick Bostrom 15:45 Well, well, we don't know. So it, it's hard not to forecast the pace at which we will make advances in AI, b- because we just don't know how hard the problems are that we haven't yet solved.

Joe Rogan 15:58 Right.

Nick Bostrom 15:58 And, you know, once you get to human level or a little bit above, I mean, who, who knows? It could be that there is some level where to get further you would need, like, to put in a lot of thinking time to kind of get there. Now, what is easier to, to estimate is if, if you just look at the speed, 'cause that's just a function of the hardware that you're running it on, right? So, so there we know that there is a lot of room in principle. If, if you look at the physics of computation and you look at what would an optimally arranged physical system be that was optimized for computation, that would be like way many, many orders above what, what we can do now. Um, and that then you could have arbitrarily large systems like that. So, um, from, from that point of view, we, we know that that could be things that would be like a million times faster than the human brain and, and with a lot more memory and stuff like that.

Joe Rogan 16:48 That... And then something... If it did have a million times more power than the human brain, it could create something with a million times more comput- (clears throat) computational power than itself.

Nick Bostrom 17:00 Well-

Joe Rogan 17:00 It could make better versions. It could continue to innovate. Like, if we-

Nick Bostrom 17:04 Let me-

Joe Rogan 17:04 ... create something that we, and we say, "You are..." I mean, "It is sentient. It is artificial intelligence. Now, please go innovate. Please go follow the same directive and improve upon your design."

Nick Bostrom 17:19 Yeah. Well, but we don't know how, how long that would take then-

Joe Rogan 17:23 Right.

Nick Bostrom 17:23 ... to get to... So, I mean, we already have sort of millions of times more thinking capacity than a human has. I mean, we have millions of humans.

Joe Rogan 17:31 Right.

Nick Bostrom 17:32 Um, so if you, if you kind of break it down, you think there's like one milestone when you have maybe an AI that could do what one human can do, but then that might still be quite a lot of orders of magnitude, uh, you know, until it would be equivalent of the whole human species. Um, and maybe during that time other things happen. Maybe we upgrade, you know, our, our own abilities in some way. So there, there are some scenarios where it's so hard to get even to one human baseline that, that we kind of use this massive amount of resources just to barely create kind of, you know, a village idiot.

Joe Rogan 18:07 Yes.

Nick Bostrom 18:07 Uh, using billions of dollars of compute, right?

Joe Rogan 18:10 (laughs)

Nick Bostrom 18:10 So if, if that's the way we get there, then, I mean, it might take quite a while.... because you can't easily scale something that you've already spent billions of dollars building.

Joe Rogan 18:18 Yeah, some people think the whole thing is blown out of proportion, that we're so far away from creating artificial general intelligence that resembles human beings, that it's all just vaporware.

Nick Bostrom 18:28 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 18:28 What do you say to those people?

Nick Bostrom 18:30 Uh, well, I mean, uh, uh, well, one, one would be that I would wanna be more precise about just how far away does it have to be in order for us, uh, to be rational to ignore it.

Joe Rogan 18:41 Right.

Nick Bostrom 18:41 And it, it might be that if something is sufficiently important and high stakes, then even if it's not gonna happen in the next five, 10, 20, 30 years, it might still be wise for, you know, our pool of seven billion plus people to have some people actually thinking about this ahead of time. Um-

Joe Rogan 18:59 Yeah, for sure.

Nick Bostrom 18:59 So, so, so some of these disagreements, I guess this is my point, are, are more apparent than real. Like, there's some people say it's gonna happen soon, and some other people say, "No, it's not gonna happen for a long time." And then, (laughs) you know, one, one person means by soon five years, and another person means by a long time five years. And, uh, you know, it's more of different attitudes rather than different specific beliefs. So, so I would first want to make sure that there actually is a disagreement.

Joe Rogan 19:23 Mm-hmm.

Nick Bostrom 19:24 Um, now if there is, if somebody is very confident that it's not gonna happen in hundreds and hundreds of years, then, then I, I guess I would wanna know their reasons for, for that level of confidence. What, what's, what's the evidence they're looking at? Uh, you know, do they have some ground for, for being very sure about this? Th- certainly, the history of technology prediction is not that great. Um, you, you can find a lot of other examples where even very eminent technologist and scientists were, were quite sure it's not, not gonna happen in our lifetime. And then, like-

Joe Rogan 19:55 Yes.

Nick Bostrom 19:55 ... uh, in some cases, it had actually already just happened (laughs) in some other part of the world, or it happened, uh, you know, like a year or two later. So I, I think some, some epistemic humility with these things would be, uh, uh, wise.

Joe Rogan 20:09 I was watching a talk that you were giving, and you were talking about the, the growth of innovation in technology and GDP over the last 100 years. And you were talking about the entire history of life on Earth and what a short period of time humans have been here, and then what a sh- and during what a short period of time, what a stunning amount of innovation and how much change we've enacted on the Earth in just a, a blink of an eye. And you had the scale of GDP-

Nick Bostrom 20:37 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 20:37 ... over, you know, the, the course of the last 100 years. It's, it's crazy to l- because it's so difficult for us with our current perspective, just being a person living, going about the day-to-day life that seems so normal, to put it in perspective time-wise and see what an enormous amount of change has taken place in relatively and incredibly short amount of time.

Nick Bostrom 21:01 Yeah, I mean, we, we think of this as sort of the normal way for things to be, that the, the idea that the, the alarm wakes you up in the morning, and then you commute in and sit in front of a computer all day, and you try not to eat too much. And-

Joe Rogan 21:13 (laughs)

Nick Bostrom 21:13 ... uh, and that if, if you sort of imagine that, oh, no, maybe in 50 years or 100 years or at some point in the future, it's gonna be very different, that's like some radical hypothesis. But, of course, this, quote-unquote, "normal condition" is a huge anomaly any, any which way you look at it. I mean, if you look at it on geological timescale, the human species is very young. Um, if you look at it historically, you know, for, you know, more than 90%, we were just hunter-gatherers running around and agriculturalists for... and, and the, what, what, what, uh, the last couple of hundred years when some parts of the world have escaped the Malthusian condition, where, where you basically, um, only have as much income as you need to be able to produce two children, uh, and we have the population explode. Like all of this is very, very, very recent. Um, and in, in space as well, of course, almost everything is ultra-high vacuum, and, and we live on the surface of this little special crumb.

Joe Rogan 22:13 Mm-hmm.

Nick Bostrom 22:14 Um, um, and, and yet we think this is normal and everything else is weird, but I think that's a complete inversion. And so when you do plot, if you do plot, for example, um, world GDP, which is a kind of rough measure for the total amount of productive capability that we have, right? Um, if you plot it over 10,000 years, what, what you see is just a flat line and then, uh, uh, a vertical line. And you can't really see any other structure. Like, it's, it's so extreme the degree to which, um, humanity's productive capa- so if- so if one, if one looks at this picture and we- now imagine this is now the normal, this is the way it's gonna be now indefinitely, it just can't... it's prima facie implausible. Like, it, it sort of doesn't look like, like we are in a static period right now. It, it looks like this is, we're in the middle of some kind of explosion.

Joe Rogan 23:07 E- explosion. And, and oddly enough, everyone involved in the explosion, everyone that's innovating, everyone that's creating all this new technology, they're all a part of this momentum that was created before they were even born. So it does feel normal. They're just a part of this whole spinning machine, and they jump in, they're born, they go to college. Next thing you know, they have a job, and they're contributing, they're making new technology-

Nick Bostrom 23:31 Right.

Joe Rogan 23:32 ... and then more people jump in and add on to it. And there's very little perspective in terms of like the historical significance of this incredible explosion technologically. When you look at what you're talking about, that gigantic spike, no one feels it, which is one of the weirdest things about it.

Nick Bostrom 23:50 That, I mean, you kind of expect every year there will be a better iPhone or whatever, right?

Joe Rogan 23:54 Yes. If not, we'd be upset.

Nick Bostrom 23:55 For, for almost all of human history, people lived and died, and so absolutely no technological change. And in fact, you could have many, many generations. Um, the, the very idea that there was some trajectory in the material conditions is, is a relatively new idea. I mean, people thought of history either as-... you know, some kind of dissent from a golden age, or some people had a cyclical view. But it was all in terms of political organization that would be great kingdom and then a wise ruler would rule for a while. And then like a few hundred years later, you know, their grand great-grandchildren would be too greedy and it would come into anarchy. And then, you know, a few hundred years later, it would come back together again.

Joe Rogan 24:40 Yes.

Nick Bostrom 24:40 So, so it would be all these kind of the pieces moving around, right? But no new pieces really entering. Or if they did, it was at such a slower rate that you didn't notice. Um, but over the eons, you know, the, the wheel slowly turns and, you know, somebody makes a slightly better wheel. Somebody figures out how to, uh, you know, irrigate slightly better. They, they breed better crops and, and, uh, and eventually there is enough that you could have enough of a population, um, enough brains that then create more ideas at the quick enough rate that you get this industrial revolution. Um, and, uh, and that's where we are now, I think.

Joe Rogan 25:19 Elon Musk had the most terrifying description of humanity, said that we are the biological boot loader for artificial intelligence.

Nick Bostrom 25:28 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 25:30 That-

Nick Bostrom 25:30 Well-

Joe Rogan 25:30 ... that's what we're here for.

Nick Bostrom 25:31 Well, boot loaders are important (laughs) .

Joe Rogan 25:33 (laughs) . They are important, but I think there, there's like objectively and there's personally. Like objectively, if you were outside of the human race and you were looking at all these various life forms competing, uh, on this planet for s- for resources and to, for survival, you would look at humanity and you go, "Well, you know, clearly that's not... it's not finished." So there's gonna be another version of it. It's like, when is this version gonna take place? Is it gonna take place over millions and millions of years like it has historically when it come- comes to biological organisms, or is it going to invent something that takes over from there? And then that's the new thing, some- something that's not based on tissue, something that's not based on cells and doesn't have the biological limitations that we have, nor, nor does it have all the emotional attachments, attachments to things like breeding, social dominance, hierarchies. All those things were of m- no consequence to it. It doesn't mean anything because it's not biological.

Nick Bostrom 26:30 Yeah, yeah. I mean, I, I, I, I, I, I, I don't think millions of years. I mean, number of decades or whatever. But, but it's interesting that even if we set that aside, we say machine intelligence is possible for some reason. Let's just play with that then.

Joe Rogan 26:45 Right.

Nick Bostrom 26:45 I still think there would be very rapid change, including biological change. And, um, um, I mean, we are doing great advances, making great advances in biotech as well and will increasingly be able to control what our own organisms are doing, um, through different means, um, and enhance human capacities through biotechnology. And so, so even there, a lot is, is not gonna happen overnight, but over an historically very short period of time, I th- I think you would still see quite profound change just from applying bioscience to, to change human capacities.

Joe Rogan 27:25 Yeah. One of the technologies, or one of the things that's been discussed to sort of mitigate the dangers of artificial intelligence is a potential merge. Um, some sort of symbiotic relationship with technology that you, you see, you hear discussed. Like, um, I don't know exactly how Elon's Neuralink works, but it seems like a step in that direction. There's some sort of a brain implant that in- that interacts with an external device and this, all of this increases the bandwidth for available intelligence and knowledge.

Nick Bostrom 28:01 Yeah. I'm, I'm sort of skeptical that that will work. I mean, good that somebody tries it, you know. Uh, but, um, I think it's quite technically hard to improve a normal healthy human being's, uh, say cognitive capacity or other capacities by implanting things in them, um, and get benefits that you couldn't equally well get by having the gadget outside of the body.

Joe Rogan 28:26 Mm-hmm.

Nick Bostrom 28:27 So, um, I, I don't need to have an implant to be able to use Google, right?

Joe Rogan 28:32 Right.

Nick Bostrom 28:33 I, uh... And there are a lot of advantages to, to having it external. You, you can kind of upgrade it very easily.

Joe Rogan 28:38 You can shut it off.

Nick Bostrom 28:39 You can sh- well, hopefully you could do that even with implant.

Joe Rogan 28:42 (laughs) .

Nick Bostrom 28:43 Um, and once you start to look into the details, there's sort of these kind of demos, but then if you, if you actually look at the papers often you find, well, and then there were these side effects and the person had headaches, or they had some deficit and the speech didn't... like-

Joe Rogan 28:56 Yes.

Nick Bostrom 28:56 ... infections. Like it is just... biology is messy.

Joe Rogan 28:58 Yes.

Nick Bostrom 28:59 Um, so, um, maybe it will work better than, than I expect. That, that, that could be good. But oth- otherwise, I think, um, that the, the place where it will first become possible to enhance, you know, hu- human biological capacities, uh, uh, would, would be through, um, genetic selection, um, which is technologically, uh, something very near.

Joe Rogan 29:27 Do you mean like CRISPR type?

Nick Bostrom 29:28 Well, so that would be editing, right? When you're-

Joe Rogan 29:30 Mm-hmm.

Nick Bostrom 29:30 ... actually going and change things. That, that also is moving quickly.

Joe Rogan 29:33 What do you mean by selection?

Nick Bostrom 29:34 Well, so this would just be in the context of say, in vitro fertilization. You have, um, usually some half dozen or a dozen embryos created during this fertility procedure, which is standardly used. So rather than just the doctor kind of looking at these embryos and saying, "Well, that one looks healthy. I'm gonna implant that," uh, you, you could run some genetic test and then use that as a predictor and select the one you think has the, the most, the most desirable attributes.

Joe Rogan 30:01 And so this could be a trend in terms of how human beings reproduce, that we instead of just randomly having sex, woman gets pregnant, gives birth to a child, we don't know what it's gonna be, what's, what's gonna happen, we just hope that it's a good kid. Instead of that, you start looking at the... all the various components that we can measure-

Nick Bostrom 30:24 Yeah. Uh, and so, I mean, in, to some extent, we already do this. There are a lot of, um, testing done, um, um, for various chromosomal ab- abnormalities that you can already check for. But, but our ability to, uh, to look beyond clear, stark diseases that is one gene is wrong-

Joe Rogan 30:44 Right.

Nick Bostrom 30:44 ... like the, like the, to look at more complex trait is, is, is, is increasing rapidly. Um, so obviously, there are a lot of ethical issues and-

Joe Rogan 30:51 Yeah.

Nick Bostrom 30:51 ... different things that come into that.

Joe Rogan 30:53 That's what I was gonna get to.

Nick Bostrom 30:53 But if I, if we're just talking what is technologically feasible-

Joe Rogan 30:56 Mm-hmm.

Nick Bostrom 30:56 ... I, I think that, that ... I mean, already you could do a very limited amount of that today, and maybe you'd get, you know, two or three IQ points in expectation more if you selected using current technology based on 10 embryos, let us say, so very small. But, but as genomics, uh, gets better at deciphering the genetic architecture of complex traits, like whether it's intelligence or, or personality attributes, then, then you, you would have more selection power and you could do more. A- and then there is a number of other technologies we don't yet have, but which if you did, would then kind of stack with that and, and enable much more powerful forms of, of enhancement. Um, so, so, so there, uh, yeah, I don't think there are any major technological hurdles really in, in the way, just some small amount of incremental further improvement.

Joe Rogan 31:47 That's wh- when you talk about doing something with genetics and human beings and selecting, selecting for the superior versions, and then if everybody starts doing that, the ethical concerns when you start discussing that, people get very nervous-

Nick Bostrom 32:05 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 32:05 ... 'cause they start to look at their own genetic defects and they go, "Oh my God, what if I didn't make the cut?"

Nick Bostrom 32:09 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 32:09 Like, "I wouldn't be here."

Nick Bostrom 32:10 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 32:10 And then you start thinking about all the imperfect people that have actually contributed in some pretty spectacular ways-

Nick Bostrom 32:15 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 32:16 ... to what our culture is. And like, w- what if everybody has perfect genes, would all these things even take place? Like, what are we doing really if we're bypassing nature and we're choosing to select for the traits and the attributes that we find to be the most positive and attractive? Like, what are ... like, that gets slippery.

Nick Bostrom 32:35 I, uh, and, and you, you think what, what would happen if, say, at some earlier age had had this ab- ability to kind of lock in their-

Joe Rogan 32:44 Yes.

Nick Bostrom 32:44 ... you know, their, their, their prejudices or, um, if the Victorians had had this.

Joe Rogan 32:50 Sure.

Nick Bostrom 32:50 Maybe we would all be, uh, whatever, pious and patriotic now or something.

Joe Rogan 32:55 Yeah. Who knows? The Nazis.

Nick Bostrom 32:56 Uh, or any other, yeah. So, um, so, so in general, with all of these powerful technologies we, we are developing, there, there is ... I- I think the ideal course would be that we would first gain a bit more wisdom, and then we would get all of these powerful tools. Um, but it looks like we're getting the powerful tools before we have really a- achieved a very high level of wisdom.

Joe Rogan 33:21 Yeah.

Nick Bostrom 33:22 And so-

Joe Rogan 33:22 But we haven't earned them. The people that are using them are sort of, uh, we're, we haven't ... Like, think about the th- the technology that all of us use. How many, how many pieces of technology do you use in a day and how much do you actually understand any of those? Most people have very little understanding of how any of the things they use work. They put no effort at all into creating those things, but yet they've inherited the responsibility of the power that those things possess.

Nick Bostrom 33:51 Yeah. I mean, that, that's the only way we, we can do it. Uh, it is just way too complex for any person.

Joe Rogan 33:55 Yeah.

Nick Bostrom 33:56 If, if you had to sort of learn how to build everything, every tool you use, like we wouldn't get very far.

Joe Rogan 34:01 Isn't that fascinating though, when you think about human beings and all the different things we do? We have very little understanding of the mechanisms behind most of what we need for day-to-day life, yet we just use them because there's so many of us, and so many people are understanding various parts of all these different things, that together, collectively, we can utilize the intelligence of all these millions of people that have innovated and-

Nick Bostrom 34:25 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 34:25 ... we with no work whatsoever just go into the Verizon store and pick up the new phone.

Nick Bostrom 34:30 Yeah. I mean, and not just technology, but worldviews and political ideas as well. It's not as if most people sit down, uh, with an empty table and try to think from the basic principles of what would be the ideal configuration of the state or something like that.

Joe Rogan 34:47 Yeah.

Nick Bostrom 34:47 You just kind of absorb it and go with the ... You float in the stream of culture.

Joe Rogan 34:51 Yeah.

Nick Bostrom 34:51 And, uh, um, and, uh, it's amazing just how little of that actually, at any point, channels through your sort of conscious attention where you make some rational or otherwise, but, like, deliberate decision. M- most, you just get carried away with. Um, so, but, but that, that again, I mean, if, if we have, if, if this is what we have to work with, then-

Joe Rogan 35:11 Yes.

Nick Bostrom 35:11 ... there's no other way-

Joe Rogan 35:12 There's no other way.

Nick Bostrom 35:13 ... possibly.

Joe Rogan 35:13 (laughs) It's, there's no other way, and there's no way ... Even, like, you and I discussing this, like, discussing the, the, the history of this incredible spike of evolution, uh, or, or innovation rather in technology, it fe- it just doesn't feel like anything. It feels normal. So even though we can intellectualize it, even though we can have this conversation and talk about what an incredible time we're in and how terrifying it is that things are moving at such an incredibly rapid rate and no one, no one's putting the brakes on it, no one's thinking about the, the potential pros and cons. We're just pushing ahead.

Nick Bostrom 35:51 Yeah. Well, not nobody now.

Joe Rogan 35:53 Not nobody. Very small-

Nick Bostrom 35:53 I mean, there are a few people. I've got my research group.

Joe Rogan 35:56 Yes.

Nick Bostrom 35:56 There's actually increase. I mean, when I, I got interested in these things in, in the '90s and it was very much a fringe, uh, activity. There were some internet mailing lists and people exchanging ideas, but, but over ... since then, I mean, there's now a small set of academic research institutes and some other that, that are kind of actually trying to do more systematic thinking about some of these big picture topics.

Joe Rogan 36:21 When did it seem like it was possible? Like, if you got involved in it in the '90s, it must have seemed like some very fringe, sort of, uh, pie-in-the-sky idea of an, general artificial intelligence.

Nick Bostrom 36:33 Oh, so we're talking specifically about AI?

Joe Rogan 36:34 Yeah.

Nick Bostrom 36:36 Um, well, actually-... the field of artificial intelligence sometimes, it's kind of dated to 1956, there was a conference. But I mean it's-

Joe Rogan 36:45 Hmm.

Nick Bostrom 36:45 ... somewhat arbitrary, but roughly that's when it got started. Um, but the pioneers, even right back at the beginning, um, thought that, uh, they were gonna be able to do all the things that the human brain does. And in fact, they were quite optimistic, li- like, they thought maybe 10 years or something like that.

Joe Rogan 37:02 Back then?

Nick Bostrom 37:03 Yeah, many of them.

Joe Rogan 37:04 Really? Even before computers?

Nick Bostrom 37:06 No. They had computers-

Joe Rogan 37:07 In the '50s?

Nick Bostrom 37:08 ... in 1956. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 37:08 Oh, did they?

Nick Bostrom 37:08 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 37:08 What kind of computers?

Nick Bostrom 37:09 Well, slow-

Joe Rogan 37:10 Yeah.

Nick Bostrom 37:11 ... slow computers.

Joe Rogan 37:12 When, when was the computer invented?

Nick Bostrom 37:15 Well, it's one of those things. Um, I think during the, um, the second World War, they had computers that were useful for doing stuff. And before that, they had kind of tabulating machines. Um, and before that, they had designs for things that, if they had been put together, would have been able to calculate a lot of numbers. Uh-

Joe Rogan 37:38 But I think about-

Nick Bostrom 37:38 ... and then before that, they had an abacus.

Joe Rogan 37:39 Right.

Nick Bostrom 37:40 I- it's kind of ... There's a number ... Like, the, the, the line from having some external tool like a notepad wh- which you, you can h- you can calculate bigger numbers, right, if you can scribble on a piece of paper, to, to, to a modern day super computer like it d- that kind of ... You can break it down into small steps and they happen gradually. But, but yeah, ro- roughly since the, uh, uh, the, the, the '40s or so.

Joe Rogan 38:03 That's when they first invented code?

Nick Bostrom 38:04 When they had like electrical ... Yeah.

Joe Rogan 38:06 Yeah.

Nick Bostrom 38:06 I think.

Joe Rogan 38:08 So even back then, they thought we're only about 10 years away.

Nick Bostrom 38:12 Well-

Joe Rogan 38:12 Some people.

Nick Bostrom 38:12 ... no. So, so in, in the, in the mid '50s, when, when people started using the word artificial intelligence, some of these A- AI researchers at the time were, were quite optimistic, um, about the timelines. Um, in fact, there was, um, some, some, some summer project that were gonna have a few students or whatever and work over the summer, and they thought, "Oh, maybe we can solve vision over the summer." Uh, and now we've kind of solved vision, but that's like, uh, 60 years later. So it can be hard to know how hard a problem is until you've actually solved it. But the really interesting thing to me is that even though ... I, I can understand why they were wrong about how difficult it is, because how, how would you know, right, if it's 10 years of work or 100 years of work. Kind of hard to estimate at the outset. But what is striking is that even the ones who thought it was 10 years away, it ... They, they didn't think about the obvious next step would be after that. Like, if you actually succeeded at mechanizing all the functions of the human mind, th- they couldn't th- think, "Oh, well, it's obviously not gonna stop there once you get human equivalents. Like, you're gonna get super intelligence." Um, but it was as if the imagination muscle had so exhausted itself thinking of this radical possibility, you could have a machine that does everything that a human does, that it, you couldn't kind of take the next step after that, or, or for that matter, the, the immense, um, ethical and social implications. Even if all you could do is to replicate a human mind, like, in machine, that, that ... If you actually thought you were building that and you were 10 years away, like, you'd be crazy not to spend like a lot of time thinking about how this is gonna impact the world. But that didn't really seem to have occurred much to them at all.

Joe Rogan 39:51 Well, sometimes it s- it seems that people just want to do it. Like, even with the creation of the atomic bomb, I mean, they, they felt like they had to do it because we had to develop it before the Germans did.

Nick Bostrom 40:04 Right. But tha- that, that, tha- that was a specific reason.

Joe Rogan 40:06 Yes.

Nick Bostrom 40:06 Like, it wasn't just, "Oh, it could be fun to do." Right?

Joe Rogan 40:08 Sure.

Nick Bostrom 40:09 Um, and so with the Manhattan Project, obviously, it was during wartime, and maybe Hitler had a program they thought, uh ... You, you could easily see why that-

Joe Rogan 40:19 Yes.

Nick Bostrom 40:19 ... you know, would motivate a lot of people. Um, but e- even before they actually started the Manhattan Project ... So, so the guy who kind of first conceived of the idea that you could make a nuclear explosion, uh, Leo Szilard, he, he was the, was a kind of eccentric physicist who, uh, conceived of the idea of a chain reaction. So, so it's been known before that that you could split the atom and a little bit of energy came out, but if you're gonna split one atom at a time, (laughs) right, you're never gonna get anything, 'cause it's too little. So the idea of a chain reaction was that if you split an atom and it releases two neutrons, then each of those can split another, uh, two atoms that then release four neutrons and, and you get an explosion, uh, an exponential blowup. And so, so he thought of this, I forget exactly when. It must have been in the, uh, 30s, early '30s probably. Um, and, uh, he was a remarkable person because he didn't just think, "Oh, this is a fun idea. I should publish it and, you know, get a lot of citations." But he thought like, "What would this mean for the world?" Like, the, "Gee, like, this, this is, uh, this, this could be bad for civilization." And so he then went to try to, uh, persuade some other of his colleagues, who were also working in nuclear physics, not, not to pursue this, not to publish unrelated ideas, and, and had-

Joe Rogan 41:35 Wow.

Nick Bostrom 41:36 ... some partial success. Um-

Joe Rogan 41:39 So there was some partial success where his colleagues agreed with him.

Nick Bostrom 41:41 Tha- some, some things were not published immediately. It's not-

Joe Rogan 41:43 Hm.

Nick Bostrom 41:43 Not all of his colleagues listened to him. So s- so-

Joe Rogan 41:45 Of course.

Nick Bostrom 41:46 ... something cannot-

Joe Rogan 41:46 That's ... Isn't that the problem, is that-

Nick Bostrom 41:48 That is the problem.

Joe Rogan 41:48 ... some people are always going to want to be the ones that sort of innovate?

Nick Bostrom 41:52 That, that is the problem in those cases where you would actually prefer the innovation not to happen.

Joe Rogan 41:57 Yes.

Nick Bostrom 41:57 Uh, historically, of course, we now look back and think, um, there are a lot of dissenters that we are now glad could have their way because, um, a lot of cultures were, were quite, um, resistant to innovation and they wanted to do the way things had always been. Whe- whether it's like social innovation or technological innovation or ... You know, the, the Chinese were at one point ahead in, uh, seafaring, ex- exploring, and then they shut all of that down because the, the emperor at that time I guess didn't like it. And so there are many examples of kind of stasis. But as, as long as there were a lot of different places, a lot of different countries, a lot of different kind of mavericks, then somebody would always do it, and then once the others could see that it worked, you know, they could kind of copy and-... things move forward. But of course, if there is a technology you actually want not to be, uh, developed, then this multipolar situation makes it very, very hard to coordinate to refrain from doing that. Um, and yeah, this, this, this ethic is a kind of structural problem in the current human condition that is ultimately responsible for a, a lot of the existential risks that we will face in this century, th- this, this kind of failure of ability to solve global coordination problems.

Joe Rogan 43:19 Yeah, and when you think about the people that did, and Oppenheimer and the people behind the Manhattan Project, they were inventing this to deal with this existential threat, this horrific threat from Nazi Germany, this, uh, the Japanese and, uh, the World War II, you know, this, this idea that this evil empire was gonna try to take over the world. And this created the momentum and this created the motivation to develop this incredible technology that wind up making a d- a great amount of our electricity and wound up creating enough nuclear weapons to destroy the entire world many times over. And we're in this strange state now where it was motivated by this horrific moment in history, this evil empire that tries to take over the world, and we come up with this incredible technological solution, the ultimate weapon-

Nick Bostrom 44:11 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 44:11 ... that we detonate a couple of times on, on some cities. And then now we're in this weird state where, you know, we're, how many years later? Um, 80 years later? And we, we're not doing it anymore. We don't drop any bombs on people anymore, but we all have them, and we all have them pointed at each other.

Nick Bostrom 44:28 Well, not all.

Joe Rogan 44:29 Well, yes.

Nick Bostrom 44:30 Which is a good thing, I think.

Joe Rogan 44:31 Quite a few. But it's, um, incredible that the motivation for this incredible technology, this amazing technology, was actually to deal with something that was awful.

Nick Bostrom 44:43 Yeah. Yeah, I mean, wa- war, war has been a, uh, uh, a... It's like, has, has had a way of focusing minds and stuff. No, I think that nuclear energy, we would have had anyway. May- maybe it would have been developed, um, like five years or 10 years later. Um, r- reactors are not that difficult to do. Um, so I think we could have gotten to all the, the good uses of nu- nuclear technology that we have today w- without having to had, had kind of the nuclear bomb developed.

Joe Rogan 45:10 Now, you pay attention to, like, Boston Dynamics and all these, uh, all these different robotic creations that they've made?

Nick Bostrom 45:17 Well, they seem to have a penchant for doing really sinister-looking, um, bots.

Joe Rogan 45:22 (laughs) I think all robots that are... uh, you know, anything that looks autonomous is kind of sinister-looking, if it could do backflips.

Nick Bostrom 45:28 Well, I mean, you see the Japan... Yeah, I mean, th- like, the Japanese have these, like, big eyes, sort of rounded.

Joe Rogan 45:33 Yeah.

Nick Bostrom 45:33 So it's a different type.

Joe Rogan 45:34 They're trying to trick us.

Nick Bostrom 45:34 Boston Dynamics is-

Joe Rogan 45:35 Yes.

Nick Bostrom 45:35 ... I guess, they want the Pentagon to, uh, give them funding or something.

Joe Rogan 45:38 Right, DARPA. Yeah, they, they look like they're developing terminators.

Nick Bostrom 45:42 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 45:43 Yeah. But what, what I was thinking is, if we do eventually come to a time where those things are going to war for us instead of us, like, if we get involved in robot wars, our robots versus their robots-

Nick Bostrom 46:01 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 46:01 ... and this becomes the next motivation for increased technological innovation to try to deal with superior robots by the Soviet Union or by China, like these, these are more things that could be threats that could push people to some crazy level of technological innovation.

Nick Bostrom 46:18 Yeah, it, it, it could. I mean, I think there are other drivers for technological innovation as well, um, that, that seems, uh, plenty, um, strong, um-

Joe Rogan 46:29 Sure.

Nick Bostrom 46:30 ... like com- commercial drivers, let us say, um, that we wouldn't have to rely on, on war or the, the threat of war to, to kind of stay innovative. Um, and I mean, there has been this effort to try to see if it would be possible to, uh, have some kind of ban on lethal autonomous weapons.

Joe Rogan 46:50 Mm-hmm.

Nick Bostrom 46:51 Um, just as... I mean, there are, there are a few-

Joe Rogan 46:53 Drone.

Nick Bostrom 46:53 There are a few te- technologies that we have, like there is, has been a relatively successful ban on, on chemical and biological weapons, um, which have, by and large, been, you know, uh, honored and upheld. Um, there, there are kind of treaties on, on nuclear weapons, which has limited proliferation. Yes, there are now maybe, I don't know, a, a dozen. I don't know the exact number. But it, it's certainly a lot better than 50 or 100 countries.

Joe Rogan 47:20 Yes.

Nick Bostrom 47:21 Um, and some other weapons as well, uh, uh, blinding lasers, um, landmines, cluster munitions.

Joe Rogan 47:29 Mm-hmm.

Nick Bostrom 47:29 And so, so, so some people think may- maybe we could do something like this with, um, lethal autonomous weapons, killer bots that-

Joe Rogan 47:35 Yeah.

Nick Bostrom 47:35 ... you know, do we... is that really what humanity needs m- most now? Like, another arms race to develop, like, killer bots? It seems arguably the answer to that is no. Um, I've, I've, I've kind of... there's a lot of my friends who are, who are supportive. I, I kind of stood a little bit on the sidelines on that particular campaign, being a little unsure, um, exactly what it is that... Well, I mean, certainly, I think it'd be better if we refrain from having some arms race to develop these than not. But if, if you start to look in more detail, what, what precisely is the thing that you're hoping to ban? So if the idea is the autonomous bit, like, the robot should not be able to make its own firing decision, well-

Joe Rogan 48:17 Right.

Nick Bostrom 48:18 ... if the alternative to that is, um, there are some 19-year-old guys sitting in some, uh, office building and his job is whenever the screen flashes "Fire now," he has to press a red button.

Joe Rogan 48:31 Mm-hmm.

Nick Bostrom 48:31 And then exactly the same thing happens. I mean, I- I-

Joe Rogan 48:33 Yes.

Nick Bostrom 48:33 ... I'm not sure how much is gained by having that extra step. Um, all-

Joe Rogan 48:37 But it is something... It feels better for us for some reason.

Nick Bostrom 48:40 Yeah, I mean but, but like-

Joe Rogan 48:41 For some reason, someone's pushing the button.

Nick Bostrom 48:42 Right, but exactly what does that mean? Like in, in e- every particular firing decision or is it, like, some...... well, you gotta attack this group of surface ships here and, and, like, here are the general parameters, and you're not allowed to fire outside this, these coordinates. Like, it does that. I don't know. Uh, I mean, another is the question of it would be better if we had no wars, but if there is gonna be a war, maybe it is better if it's robots v. robots.

Joe Rogan 49:09 (laughs)

Nick Bostrom 49:09 Or, or if, if there's gonna be bombing, like, maybe you want the bombs to have high precision rather than low precision, like, get fewer civilian casualties.

Joe Rogan 49:18 And operating under artificial intelligence so it makes better decisions.

Nick Bostrom 49:20 W- well, well, also depends-

Joe Rogan 49:23 Yeah.

Nick Bostrom 49:23 ... like, exactly on how. So I don't know. I mean, on the other hand, you could imagine it kind of reduces the threshold for going to war if you think that you, you wouldn't fear any casualties. Maybe you would be more, you know, eager to do it.

Joe Rogan 49:33 Right.

Nick Bostrom 49:34 Or, or, or if it proliferates and you have these kind of mosquito-sized killer bots that terrorists have and, you know, it's not, not, doesn't seem like a good thing to have a society where you're having, like, a facial recognition thing and then the bot flies out and you just have a kind of dystopia. So, um, yeah.

Joe Rogan 49:53 But I think we're thinking rationally. If you're... We're thinking rationally, look, given the overall view of the human race that we want peace and everything to be well. But realistically, if you were someone who was trying to attack someone militarily, you'd want the best possible weapons that give you the best possible advantage. And that's why we had to develop the atomic bomb first. It's probably why we'll develop the, or we'll try to develop the killer autonomous robot first.

Nick Bostrom 50:24 Yeah, yeah. I mean-

Joe Rogan 50:25 Because someone else would have it.

Nick Bostrom 50:26 Right, the fear that the other is... So, so this is why it's basically a coordination problem. Like, it's hard for any one country unilaterally to make sure that the world is, is peaceful and-

Joe Rogan 50:39 Sure.

Nick Bostrom 50:40 ... and kind, right? It, it, it requires everybody to synchronize their actions. And, and then, then you can have successes like we've had with some of these treaties. Like, we've not had a big arms race in biological weapons, uh, or-

Joe Rogan 50:52 Right.

Nick Bostrom 50:52 ... in chemical weapons. I mean, there have been, there were, there were cheaters even on the biological warfare program, like the Soviet Union-

Joe Rogan 50:58 Sure.

Nick Bostrom 50:58 ... had a massive efforts there, but still probably a less use of that and less development than if there had been no such treaty. Um, so, and, or just look at the, the amount of money being wasted, uh, every, every year to maintain these large arsenals so that we can kill one another if one day we decide to do it. Like, that, there's got to be a better way.

Joe Rogan 51:19 Yeah. We would hope.

Nick Bostrom 51:20 But, but getting there is hard, yeah.

Joe Rogan 51:21 We would hope that we would get to some point where all this would be irrelevant-

Nick Bostrom 51:24 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 51:24 ... because there's no more war.

Nick Bostrom 51:26 Yeah. And so if you look at the, uh, the biggest efforts so far to, to make that happen, so after the First World War, people were really aware of this, uh, this, this sucks, like, war. I mean, look at this, like, a whole generation just ground up, machine guns, like this is-

Joe Rogan 51:43 Yeah.

Nick Bostrom 51:44 ... gotta make sure this never happens again. So they tried to do the League of Nation, but then didn't really invest it with very much power. Um, and then the second war, Second World War happened. And so then again, just after that, it's fresh in people's memory saying, "Well, never again. This is it." Uh, the United Nations and in Europe, the European Union, it's kind of both designed as ways to try to prevent this. But again, with kind of maybe, in the case of the United Nations, quite limited powers to actually enforce the agreements. And there's a veto, which makes it hard if it's two of the major powers that are at loggerheads. Um, so it might be that if, if there were, were a third big conflagration, that then people would say, "Well, you know, this time, you know, we've got to really, uh, we've got to really put something, kind of institutional solution in place that, that has enough enforcement power, that, that we don't try this yet again."

Joe Rogan 52:37 So we don't have a second robot war. So once we get through-

Nick Bostrom 52:40 Well, yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 52:40 ... the first robot war.

Nick Bostrom 52:41 Yeah. I mean, but, but they've kind of memory's fade, right? So...

Joe Rogan 52:43 Yes, that's the problem, right?

Nick Bostrom 52:44 Um, so even the Cold War, I mean, I grew up ... I, I'm, I'm Swedish. I, I remember we were kind of in between, right? And, and we were taught in schools about nuclear fallouts and stuff, like, there was like a very palpable sense that at any given point in time, there could be some miscalculation or crisis or some- something. Um, and, and li- like, all the way up to se- senior statesmen at the time, this, this, this were like a very real and very serious. And, and I feel the sa- that memory of just how bad it is to live in that kind of, um, hair trigger nuclear arms race, Cold War situation has kind of faded, and now we think-

Joe Rogan 53:22 Yeah.

Nick Bostrom 53:22 ... "Wow, maybe, you know, the world didn't blow up, so, so maybe it wasn't so bad after all." Well, I think that would be the wrong lesson to learn.

Joe Rogan 53:30 When I was a-

Nick Bostrom 53:30 It's a bit like you're, you're playing Russian roulette-

Joe Rogan 53:33 Yeah.

Nick Bostrom 53:33 ... and you survive one and you say, "Wow, it isn't so dangerous at all to play Russian roulette. I think I'm gonna have another go."

Joe Rogan 53:38 (laughs)

Nick Bostrom 53:38 Like, the, you gotta realize, like, well, maybe that was a 10% chance or a 30% chance that the world would blow up during the Cold War and we were lucky, but it doesn't mean we want to have another one.

Joe Rogan 53:48 Uh, when I was in high school, it was a real threat. When I was in high school, everyone was terrified that we were gonna go to war with Russia.

Nick Bostrom 53:54 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 53:54 It was, it was a big thing. And, and you talk to people from my generation about that, and everybody remembers it. Remember that feeling that you had in high school, that like, we... There any, at any day something could go wrong and we could be at war with another country that's a nuclear superpower.

Nick Bostrom 54:11 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 54:12 But that's all gone now. Like, that, that feeling, that fear. People are so confident that that's not going to happen, that that's not even in people's consciousness.

Nick Bostrom 54:19 Yeah. And, uh, then a number of maneuvers are made and then you-

Joe Rogan 54:27 Yes.

Nick Bostrom 54:27 ... find yourself in a kind of situation where there's like honor at stake and reputation and you feel you can't back down, and then another thing happens and, and you get into this place where if you even say something kind about the other side, you seem to be like, you know, you're a softie or a pinky or like-

Joe Rogan 54:43 (laughs) Yeah.

Nick Bostrom 54:43 And then it, and on, on both sides. On the other side as well.

Joe Rogan 54:46 Yeah.

Nick Bostrom 54:46 Obviously they're gonna have the same internal dynamic, and each side says bad things about the other, it makes the other side hate them even more. And, and these things are then hard to reverse. Like once-

Joe Rogan 54:54 Yeah.

Nick Bostrom 54:54 ... you find this dynamic happening, it's, it's kind of almost, well, it's not too late, you can try it, but, but it can be very hard to back out of that. And so if, if you can prevent yourself from going down that path to begin with, that-... preferable.

Joe Rogan 55:07 When you see Boston Dynamics and you see those robots, is there something comparable that's being developed, either in the Soviet Union or in China, or somewhere else in the world where there's, uh, similar type robots?

Nick Bostrom 55:19 Well, I think a lot of the Boston Dynamic things seems more showy than actually useful.

Joe Rogan 55:25 Really?

Nick Bostrom 55:25 Like these kind of, um, animal-like things that hop around and, and, m- with 150 decibel or something like... If I were a special ops trying to sneak in, like I wouldn't want this kind of big alarm. Like (laughs) -

Joe Rogan 55:39 Right.

Nick Bostrom 55:40 ... but, but I think lo- lot of action would be more in terms of, um, flying drones, uh, maybe submarine stuff, um, missiles, um, that kind of stuff.

Joe Rogan 55:51 But are you... When, when you see these robots and you, you, you know, see like the, the ones that look like dogs or like insects, um, couldn't you imagine those things being armed with, with guns?

Nick Bostrom 56:06 I, I mean I could.

Joe Rogan 56:07 And then when they are, then they don't... It doesn't really look showy anymore. It seems pretty effective. Like you can't even kick those things over.

Nick Bostrom 56:12 (laughs) Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, I think if it has a gun, I mean, it doesn't really matter whether it looks like a dog or if it's just a small flying platform.

Joe Rogan 56:21 Right. Sure.

Nick Bostrom 56:22 Um, I mean, in general, I think that the more with, with, with AI and robotics, like the more, the cooler something looks, usually technically the less impressive it is. Um, as you see this cute ro-

Joe Rogan 56:33 The cooler it looks?

Nick Bostrom 56:33 Yeah. I would say, is it the, the, the extreme case of this is these robots that, uh, look exactly like a human, like maybe like shaped like a beautiful woman or something like that, right? Like there, there are complete hype and have guns.

Joe Rogan 56:45 Like Ex Machina.

Nick Bostrom 56:46 Was it... In the movies, obviously they do it because-

Joe Rogan 56:49 Right.

Nick Bostrom 56:49 ... they don't want to film in movies. But, but every once in a while you have some press release. Um, I forget what the name is of this, uh, female looking robot that got citizenship in Saudi Arabia a few years ago.

Joe Rogan 57:01 (laughs)

Nick Bostrom 57:01 It's like a pure publicity stunt, but, but the media-

Joe Rogan 57:03 Right.

Nick Bostrom 57:03 ... just laps it up. Wow, they've created this like, it's, it's exactly like a human. Like, what a big breakthrough. And, and it's like nothing. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 57:11 Do you anticipate... Like when you see Ex Machina, do you think that that's something that could be realistically, like, that could be implemented in 100 years or so? Like we really could have some form of artificial human that's indistinguishable?

Nick Bostrom 57:29 Well, I think the action is not gonna lie in the, um, the, the, the, the, the robotic part so much as in the brain part. Like I think it's the AI part, and robotics only in so far as it becomes enabled by having, say, much better learning algorithms study. So right now if you have a robot for the most part in any one of these big factories, it's like a blind dumb thing that executes a pre-programmed set of motions over and over again.

Joe Rogan 57:58 Mm-hmm.

Nick Bostrom 57:58 And if you want to change up the production, you need to get in some engineers to reprogram it.

Joe Rogan 58:02 Right.

Nick Bostrom 58:02 But, um, with a human, you could kind of show them how to do something once or twice and then they can do it. So it will be interesting to see over the next few years whether we can see some kind of progress in robotics that enable this kind of imitation learning to work well enough that you could actually start doing it in, in a kind of... There are demonstrations already, but, but robustly enough that, that it would be useful and you could replace a lot of these kind of industrial robotics, um, experts by, by having this. Um, so, um, yeah. So I think, I mean, in terms of making things look like human, I th- I think that's more for, for Hollywood and, and for press releases than, than, than the actual driver of, of progress.

Joe Rogan 58:48 Yeah, and more so the actual driver of progress, but someone is going to probably try to replicate a human being once the technology becomes viable. And one of the more dist- You... Did you see the movie, Ex Machina?

Nick Bostrom 58:58 I've probably... I mean, I don't s- Yeah, I just... It's a little bit of a blur. Is, is, um... I've seen some of these and not others, and I'm just wondering whether-

Joe Rogan 59:07 Ex Machina was the one where the-

Nick Bostrom 59:07 ... I'm confusing it with some-

Joe Rogan 59:08 ... the guy lives in the very remote location and he's-

Nick Bostrom 59:10 Yeah, yeah, like a beautiful place in Norway.

Joe Rogan 59:12 Yeah.

Nick Bostrom 59:12 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 59:12 Yes.

Nick Bostrom 59:13 I see that. Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 59:14 Yeah, and he-

Nick Bostrom 59:14 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 59:14 ... created this beautiful girl robot-

Nick Bostrom 59:17 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 59:17 ... that seduces this-

Nick Bostrom 59:18 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 59:18 ... man and-

Nick Bostrom 59:19 It's-

Joe Rogan 59:19 ... at the end of it she leaves him locked up in this thing and just takes off and gets on a helicopter and flies away. And-

Nick Bostrom 59:25 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 59:26 ... the thing that's disturbing is that they... She knew how to manipulate his emotions to achieve a desired result-

Nick Bostrom 59:32 Right.

Joe Rogan 59:32 ... which is him helping her escape.

Nick Bostrom 59:34 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 59:35 And, but then once she did she had no real emotions. So he's screaming-

Nick Bostrom 59:38 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 59:38 ... and, you know, she had no compassion and no empathy. She just hopped on the helicopter and left him there to starve to death inside that locked box. And that is what scares people. This idea that we're gonna create something that's intelligent, it has intelligence but, like us, but it doesn't have all the things that we have like caring-

Nick Bostrom 59:55 Right.

Joe Rogan 59:56 ... love, friendship, compassion, the need for other human beings. If you develop an autonomous robot that's really autonomous, it has no need for other people, that's where we get weirded out. Like it, it doesn't need us.

Nick Bostrom 1:00:09 Right. Yeah. I mean, I, I think the same would hold even if it were not a robot but just a program in- inside a computer.

Joe Rogan 1:00:15 Sure.

Nick Bostrom 1:00:15 Um, but, but yeah. Yeah. And the, and the idea that you could have something that is strategic and deceptive and so forth.

Joe Rogan 1:00:21 Yeah.

Nick Bostrom 1:00:21 So that, that... I mean, but then other elements of the movie, of course, and in general, w- a reason why it's bad to get your kind of map of the future from, from Hollywood is if it... So if, if you think, so is this one guy, presumably some genius living out in the nowhere and kind of inventing this whole system. Like in reality-

Joe Rogan 1:00:40 Yeah.

Nick Bostrom 1:00:40 ... um, it's like anything else. There are a lot, like hundreds of people programming away on their computers, writing on whiteboards, and sharing ideas with other people across the world. Uh, it doesn't look like a human. Um, s- s- and, and that would often be some economic reason for doing it in the first place. Like not just, "Oh, we have this Promethean attitude that we want to-"

Joe Rogan 1:01:05 Yeah.

Nick Bostrom 1:01:05 "... kind of bring..." And I like... So-Um, so all of those things don't make for such good plot lines, so they just get removed. But then-

Joe Rogan 1:01:14 Mm-hmm.

Nick Bostrom 1:01:14 ... I wonder if people actually think th- of the future in terms of some kind of super villain and some hero and it's gonna come down to these two people and they're gonna wrestle and-

Joe Rogan 1:01:25 Yeah.

Nick Bostrom 1:01:25 ... you know? Um, and it's gonna be very personalized and concrete and localized, whereas a lot of things that determine what happens in the world are very spread out and bureaucracies churning away and...

Joe Rogan 1:01:37 Sure.

Nick Bostrom 1:01:37 Um...

Joe Rogan 1:01:38 Yeah, that was a big problem that a lot of people had with the movie, was the idea that this one man could innovate at such a high level and be so far beyond everyone else is ridiculous. That he's just doing it by himself on-

Nick Bostrom 1:01:50 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:01:50 ... this weird compound somewhere.

Nick Bostrom 1:01:52 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:01:52 Come on.

Nick Bostrom 1:01:53 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:01:53 That's, that... But that makes a great movie, right?

Nick Bostrom 1:01:56 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:01:56 Fly in in the helicopter, drop you off in a remote location.

Nick Bostrom 1:01:59 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:01:59 This guy shows you something he's created that is gonna change the whole world.

Nick Bostrom 1:02:03 And it looked beautiful. I mean, I-

Joe Rogan 1:02:04 Yeah.

Nick Bostrom 1:02:04 ... can imagine doing some writer's-

Joe Rogan 1:02:06 Yeah.

Nick Bostrom 1:02:06 ... retreat there or something.

Joe Rogan 1:02:08 Well, when the iconic image of aliens from another world is this, these little gray things with, uh, no sexual organs and large heads and black eyes, this is the iconic thing that we, uh, uh, imagine when we think about things from another planet. I've often wondered if what we think of w- in terms of, like, artificial life from another plan- or life from another planet is that, it's like an artificial creation. Like, in our ideas that we understand that the biological limitations of the body when it comes to traveling through space, the dealing with radiation, the death, need for food, things along those lines, that what we would do is create some artificial thing to travel for us, like we've-

Nick Bostrom 1:02:55 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:02:55 ... already done on Mars.

Nick Bostrom 1:02:56 Sure.

Joe Rogan 1:02:56 Right? We have-

Nick Bostrom 1:02:57 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:02:57 ... the rover that roams around Mars. The next step would be an artificial autonomous intelligent creature that has no biological limitations like we do in terms of, like, its ability to absorb radiation from space. And we create one of those little guys, just like that, with an enormous head, no sex organs, doesn't need sex organs, you know, and we have this thing pilot these ships that can defy our own physical limitations in terms of what would happen to us if we had to deal with, you know, one million G-force because it's moving at some preposterous rate through space. Like, we, when we think of these things coming from another planet, if we think of life on another planet, if they can innovate in a similar fashion the way we do, we would imagine they would create an artificial creature to do all their dirty work. Like, why would they wanna, like, risk their body?

Nick Bostrom 1:03:52 Right. Yeah, I mean, except I think creature might conjure up stuff that... I mean, I, I...

Joe Rogan 1:03:57 Okay, things.

Nick Bostrom 1:03:57 If you have the spaceship, I mean, you don't-

Joe Rogan 1:03:58 Right.

Nick Bostrom 1:03:58 ... have to have, like, build a little thing that sits and turns the steering wheel, right?

Joe Rogan 1:04:02 Right. Right.

Nick Bostrom 1:04:02 I mean, this could be all automated.

Joe Rogan 1:04:04 Sure.

Nick Bostrom 1:04:04 And you'd imagine a technology, um, that is space-faring in a serious way would have nanotechnology, so they would have basically the ability to arbitrarily configure, uh, matter in whatever structure they wanted. They would have, like, nanoscale-

Joe Rogan 1:04:20 Right.

Nick Bostrom 1:04:20 ... probes and things that could shape-shift. And it, it, it's, it would not be that there would be this person sitting in a seat behind the steering wheel. Like-

Joe Rogan 1:04:27 Sure.

Nick Bostrom 1:04:28 ... it, it would just, if they wanted to, they could be invisible toss (?) I think, like, nano-scale things hiding in a rock somewhere.

Joe Rogan 1:04:35 Yes.

Nick Bostrom 1:04:36 Um, then just connecting with an information link up to some planetary-sized computer somewhere-

Joe Rogan 1:04:41 Sure.

Nick Bostrom 1:04:41 ... far away, uh, which would be doing the... So, yeah, I think that's the way that space is most likely to get colonized. It's not, not gonna be like with meat sacks kind of driving spaceships around and having Star Trek adventures. It's gonna be some spherical frontier, um, emanating from whatever the home planet was, moving at some significant fraction of the speed of light and converting everything in its path into infrastructure, um, of whatever type is maximally valuable for that civilization, maybe computers and, uh, launchers to launch more of these space probes so that the whole wavefront can continue to propagate.

Joe Rogan 1:05:24 But we are, I mean, one of the things you brought up earlier is that if human beings are going to continue and we, we're gonna propagate through the universe, we're going to try to go to other places, we're going, we're going to try to populate other planets, and are we gonna do that with just robots? Are we gonna try to do that biologically? We're probably gonna try to do it biologically. And one of the things you were saying earlier is one of the things that artificial intelligence could possibly do is accelerate our ability to travel to other lands or other planets.

Nick Bostrom 1:05:53 Yeah. I mean, we're gonna try. I mean, in fact, some people are, right, trying to-

Joe Rogan 1:05:57 Yeah.

Nick Bostrom 1:05:57 ... biological... I just think that's gonna not, um, lead to anything important, uh, until those efforts becomes obsoleted by some radical new technology wave, probably, uh, triggered by machine superintelligence that then rapidly leads to something approximating technological maturity. Once, once innovation happens at digital timescales rather than human timescales, then all these things that you could imagine we're doing, if we had 40,000 years to work on it, we would have space colonies and cures for aging and-

Joe Rogan 1:06:31 Yeah.

Nick Bostrom 1:06:31 ... all of these things, right? But, um, if, if that thinking time happens in a digital space, then that long future gets telescoped and I think you fairly quickly reach a condition where you have close to optimal technology. Um, and then you can colonize the space cost-effectively. You just need to send out one little probe that then can land on some resource and set up a production facility to make more probes and then it spreads exponentially everywhere. And then if you want to, you could then, like... After that initial infrastructuring has happened, you could transport biological human beings-

Joe Rogan 1:07:10 Yeah.

Nick Bostrom 1:07:10 ... to other planets if you wanted to.

Joe Rogan 1:07:11 If you wanted to.

Nick Bostrom 1:07:11 But it's not really where the action is gonna be. Like-

Joe Rogan 1:07:13 But what if we were concerned...... there's some sort of a threat to the Earth, like some sort of asteroid impact, something-

Nick Bostrom 1:07:23 I mean, yeah-

Joe Rogan 1:07:24 ... where we're concerned with that.

Nick Bostrom 1:07:24 ... at that stage of technology, averting some asteroid would be, uh, I think trivial.

Joe Rogan 1:07:29 Really?

Nick Bostrom 1:07:29 It would be like a gift of free energy, right? "Oh, here comes an energy package. Great."

Joe Rogan 1:07:33 (laughs) That's a funny way to look at it. Um, do you think we're gonna eventually colonize Mars?

Nick Bostrom 1:07:40 Um, well, I think the, the, the, the answer is, is, is, I, I think if and only if we, um, manage to get through these key technological transitions, and then I think we will colonize not just Mars, but, um, everything else that, that is accessible in the universe.

Joe Rogan 1:07:59 When you talk about these things, people always wanna know when. When do you think it's gonna happen? What's the timeline?

Nick Bostrom 1:08:03 Yeah, so my, my guess would be after technological maturity, like after super intelligence. Now, with Mars, it's possible that there would be like a little kind of prototype colonization thing, 'cause there are like people like really excited about that. So if-

Joe Rogan 1:08:17 Yeah.

Nick Bostrom 1:08:17 So you could imagine some little de- demo project happening sooner, but if we're talking about something say that would survive long-term even if the Earth disappeared, like some kind of self-sustaining-

Joe Rogan 1:08:29 Yeah.

Nick Bostrom 1:08:29 ... civilization, I think that's gonna be very difficult to do, uh, until we have super intelligence, and then it's gonna be trivial.

Joe Rogan 1:08:37 So, you think super intelligence could potentially be what... I mean, tha- one of the applications would be to terraform Mars to-

Nick Bostrom 1:08:45 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:08:46 ... change change the atmosphere, to, to make it sustainable for biological life?

Nick Bostrom 1:08:49 Yeah, for biological life.

Joe Rogan 1:08:49 So we have-

Nick Bostrom 1:08:50 If we wanted to-

Joe Rogan 1:08:51 ... like a second spot-

Nick Bostrom 1:08:52 Yeah, for example.

Joe Rogan 1:08:52 ... like a vacation house.

Nick Bostrom 1:08:54 Yes. Now, I also think that at this, this, this is a very radical context, technological maturity-

Joe Rogan 1:09:00 Yeah.

Nick Bostrom 1:09:00 ... because we already... Maybe there are additional technologies we can't even think of yet, but even just what we already know about physics, et cetera, we can sort of see possible technologies that we don't yet... or that we're not yet able to build, but we can see that they would be consistent with physics, that they would be stable structures.

Joe Rogan 1:09:16 Yeah.

Nick Bostrom 1:09:16 And, uh, and already that, um, creates a vast space of things you could do. And so, for example, I think it would be possible at technological maturity to upload human minds into, to, to computers, for example.

Joe Rogan 1:09:31 Yeah.

Nick Bostrom 1:09:32 And so that-

Joe Rogan 1:09:32 You think that's gonna happen, like Ray Kurzweil style?

Nick Bostrom 1:09:34 Well, I think, again, it would be technologically possible at technological maturity to do it.

Joe Rogan 1:09:39 Mm-hmm.

Nick Bostrom 1:09:40 Um, now, whether it's actually gonna happen then depends, A, do we reach technological maturity, and B, do we... are we interested in using our technology for that purpose at that time? But, uh, both of those seem kind of reasonably possible.

Joe Rogan 1:09:59 Yeah, reasonably possible in-

Nick Bostrom 1:10:01 Possible, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:10:01 ... when, especially in comparison to what we've already achieved. If, if I had a time machine, and it could jump you 1,000 years from now into the future, would you do it? Would you jump in?

Nick Bostrom 1:10:15 Uh, I mean, I think just-

Joe Rogan 1:10:16 Do you like how it is right now?

Nick Bostrom 1:10:17 ... just going on like a, a long jet flight is kind of already stretching my-

Joe Rogan 1:10:23 What if it was instantaneous? What if it was an instantaneous trip-

Nick Bostrom 1:10:24 What? Could, could I come back?

Joe Rogan 1:10:25 ... to 1,000 years? No.

Nick Bostrom 1:10:26 Well, uh, I probably wouldn't.

Joe Rogan 1:10:33 Would you not now?

Nick Bostrom 1:10:33 I, I don't know. I mean, I'm, I'm kind of a, a, uh, uh, bit cautious with these things.

Joe Rogan 1:10:39 (laughs)

Nick Bostrom 1:10:39 But at least, at the very least, I've gotta think about it for a long time before-

Joe Rogan 1:10:42 It would be so hard.

Nick Bostrom 1:10:42 I mean, also I have, I mean, attachments. I mean, there are people I care about here.

Joe Rogan 1:10:46 Sure, sure.

Nick Bostrom 1:10:46 And projects, and maybe even opportunities to try to make some difference. If, if we actually are in this weird time right now, different from all of earlier human history where nothing really much was happening, and we're not yet where it's all out of our hands and the super intelligence is running the show-

Joe Rogan 1:11:02 Right.

Nick Bostrom 1:11:02 If, if, if that actually is... if, if, if that's true, then that means we, right now, live in this very weird period where our actions might have cosmological consequences. If we effect the precise time and way in which the transition to machine super intelligence happens, we would be hugely influential. And, you know, if, if you have some ambition to try to, uh, uh, do some good in the world, then that kind of can be a very exciting, um, prospect as well. Like, there might be no other better time to exist if, if your goal is to do good in the world.

Joe Rogan 1:11:37 Yeah, we might be in the golden years.

Nick Bostrom 1:11:40 For... In, in terms of ability to have... to take actions that have large consequences.

Joe Rogan 1:11:45 Also, there's a very unique transitionary period between the times of old and the times of new. Like, we're really in the heat of the change in terms of like we... you know, the internet is only 20 plus years old. Phones are only, you know, cell phones at least, people carrying them all the time, it's only 15 plus years old. This is very, very new.

Nick Bostrom 1:12:08 Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:12:09 So it's an exciting-

Nick Bostrom 1:12:10 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:12:10 ... crazy time where all these changes are taking place really rapidly. Like, if you were from the future, this might be the place where you would travel to to experience what it was like to see this immense change take place almost instantaneously. Like, if you could go back in time to a specific time in history and experience what life was like, to me, I, I think I'd probably pick Ancient Egypt-

Nick Bostrom 1:12:34 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:12:34 ... like during the, the days of the pharaohs. I would love to see-

Nick Bostrom 1:12:37 Do you get to choose who, who we are there or-

Joe Rogan 1:12:39 No, no. You just watch.

Nick Bostrom 1:12:41 You just sit and watch from the balcony?

Joe Rogan 1:12:41 Just to see what it looks like, you know, what it's like to experience life back then. But if I was from the future where things were-

Nick Bostrom 1:12:49 What, what, what... Just out of curiosity, what, what do you think it would look like? Like, what, what, what do you imagine yourself seeing in this?

Joe Rogan 1:12:54 I would imagine... I w- I mean, I've really thought long and hard about the construction method- the construction methods of Ancient Egypt. I would love to see what it looked like when they were building the pyramids. Like, wo- how long did it take? What were they doing? Like, how did they do it? We still don't know. It's all-

Nick Bostrom 1:13:15 Hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:13:15 ... really theoretical. There's all these ideas-

Nick Bostrom 1:13:17 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:13:17 ... of how they constructed it with incredible precision and-... you know, precision in terms of the way it's astronomically aligned to certain areas of our solar system and different constellations. It's amazing.

Nick Bostrom 1:13:30 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:13:31 I would love to have seen how they did that and what was the planning like, and how they implemented, and how many people did it take.

Nick Bostrom 1:13:38 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:13:39 And how long did it take. Because we really don't know. It's all speculation. The, during the burning of the Library of Alexandria, we lost so much information and we've got, you know, hieroglyphs.

Nick Bostrom 1:13:48 Uh-huh.

Joe Rogan 1:13:49 And the physical structures that are still daunting. We have no idea. We look at those ... Like we, they look at the Great Pyramid of Giza, um, the, um, the, the, the huge one with two million plus stones in it. Like, who made that? How? How'd you guys do it? Like, w- w- what, where did you ... Did you draw it out first? Like, how did you get all the rocks there? (laughs) Like, I mean, I think that would be probably the spot that I would want to go to. I would wanna be there in the middle of the construction of the pyramids, just to watch.

Nick Bostrom 1:14:19 Uh-huh.

Joe Rogan 1:14:19 Just to see how-

Nick Bostrom 1:14:19 So that certainly would be, like, big, like, I guess, tourist destinations from, for travelers.

Joe Rogan 1:14:24 For time travelers. Sure. Yeah.

Nick Bostrom 1:14:25 And I guess, I mean, in terms of if one is thinking, I'm just thinking what was going on back then, we think the pyramids and the, the, the slave trains and the ... but, of course, for most Egyptians most of the time, they would be picking weeds from their field, or-

Joe Rogan 1:14:38 Sure.

Nick Bostrom 1:14:38 ... putting their baby to sleep, or-

Joe Rogan 1:14:40 Just like us.

Nick Bostrom 1:14:40 ... stuff like that, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:14:41 Yeah.

Nick Bostrom 1:14:41 So the, the, the kind of the typical moment of human existence.

Joe Rogan 1:14:45 They don't even think it's slaves anymore, I don't think. I think they think it's skilled labor based on-

Nick Bostrom 1:14:49 That's kind of-

Joe Rogan 1:14:49 ... their diet. Based on the diet, the utensils that they found in these camps, these workers' camps.

Nick Bostrom 1:14:54 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:14:54 They think that these were highly skilled craftspeople.

Nick Bostrom 1:14:58 Mm.

Joe Rogan 1:14:58 That they, it wasn't necessarily slaves.

Nick Bostrom 1:15:01 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:15:01 They used to think it was slaves, but now because of the bones or the food they were eating really well, and they think that, well ... And also, the, the level of sophistication involved, this is not something you just get kind of slaves to do. You, this seems to be that there was a population of structural engineers, that there was a, a population of skilled construction people, and that they tried to, you know, utilize all of these great minds that they had back then-

Nick Bostrom 1:15:30 Mm.

Joe Rogan 1:15:30 ... to put this thing together. But it's still a mystery. I think that's the spot that I would go to because I think it would be amazing to see so many different innovative times. I mean, it would amaze ... It'd be amazing to, to be, uh, alive during the time of Genghis Khan or, you know, to be alive during some of the, some of the wars of thousand, 2,000 years ago, just to see what it was like on the ... But the pyramids would be the big one. But I think if I was in the future, some weird dystopian future where artificial intelligence runs everything and, and human beings are, you know, linked to some sort of neurological implant that connects us all together and we long for the days of biological independence and we would like to see, what, what was it like when they first-

Nick Bostrom 1:16:17 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:16:17 ... started inventing phones? What was it like when the internet was first opened up for people? What was it like when people saw ... When, when, when someone had someone like you on a podcast and was talking about potential artificial intelligence and where it could lead us and what it could do?

Nick Bostrom 1:16:33 It's the most interesting time.

Joe Rogan 1:16:34 It is the most interesting time.

Nick Bostrom 1:16:36 It is now.

Joe Rogan 1:16:36 Yeah. That's what's cool about it to me is that we seem to be in this, this really Goldilocks period of great change, where we're still human but we're worried about privacy, we, we're concerned our phones are listening to us, we're concerned about surveillance states and, you know, p- people put little stickers over their laptop camera. W- we see it coming-

Nick Bostrom 1:16:56 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:16:57 ... but it hasn't quite hit us yet. We're just seeing the problems that are associated with this increased level of technology in our lives.

Nick Bostrom 1:17:09 Which is, yeah, that, that is a strange thing if you add up all these pieces. It does-

Joe Rogan 1:17:14 Yeah.

Nick Bostrom 1:17:15 ... put us in this very weirdly special position.

Joe Rogan 1:17:18 Yeah.

Nick Bostrom 1:17:19 And you wonder, hmm, it's a little bit too much of a coincidence. I mean, it might be the case, but yeah, it, it does put some strain on it.

Joe Rogan 1:17:28 When you say a little too much of a coincidence, how so?

Nick Bostrom 1:17:30 Well, so, um, I mean, I guess the intuitive way of thinking about it, like what way, like what, what are the chances that-

Joe Rogan 1:17:36 Right.

Nick Bostrom 1:17:36 ... just by chance you would happen to be, uh, living in the most interesting time in history-

Joe Rogan 1:17:42 Yeah.

Nick Bostrom 1:17:42 ... being like a celebrity, like whatever, like what, well, like that's pretty low prior probability. Like most people-

Joe Rogan 1:17:49 Like you mean like for me?

Nick Bostrom 1:17:49 Well, for you. Or I mean, for, for ... But for all of us, really.

Joe Rogan 1:17:54 For all of us.

Nick Bostrom 1:17:54 Um, um, and so, that, that, that could just be. I mean, uh, uh, if there's a lottery, somebody's got to have the ticket, right?

Joe Rogan 1:18:02 Yeah. But, um-

Nick Bostrom 1:18:04 Or.

Joe Rogan 1:18:05 Or, yeah, or, or, or we are wrong about this whole picture and, uh, there is some very different structure