Joe Rogan Experience #2345 - Roman Yampolskiy

Roman Yampolskiy 0:00 (drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast. Check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience.

Joe Rogan 0:06 Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. (rock music) Um, well, thank you for doing this. I really appreciate it.

Roman Yampolskiy 0:15 My pleasure. Thank you for inviting me on.

Joe Rogan 0:17 This subject of, um, the dangers of AI, it's, it's very interesting, 'cause I get two very different responses from people dependent upon how invested they are in, uh, AI, financially. The, the, the people that have AI companies or are part of some sort of AI group all are like, "It's gonna be a net positive for humanity. I think overall we're, we're gonna have much better lives. It's gonna be easier. Things will be cheaper. It'll be easier to get along." And then I hear people like you and I'm like, "Why do I believe him?"

Roman Yampolskiy 0:55 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 0:56 (laughs)

Roman Yampolskiy 0:57 It's actually not true. All of them are on record as saying this is gonna kill us. Whether it's Sam Altman or anyone else, they all, at some point, were leaders in AI safety work. They published on AI safety. And their PDOM levels are insanely high. Not like mine, but still, 20, 30% chance that humanity dies is a little too much.

Joe Rogan 1:18 Yeah. That's pretty high. But yours is like 99.9.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:23 It's another way of saying we can't control super intelligence indefinitely.

Joe Rogan 1:27 Yeah.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:27 It's impossible.

Joe Rogan 1:29 Um, w- when did you start working on this?

Roman Yampolskiy 1:33 A long time ago. So my PhD was... I finished in, uh, 2008. I did work on online casino security, basically preventing bots. And at that point, I realized bots are getting much better. They're gonna out-compete us, obviously, in poker, but also in stealing cyber resources. And, uh, from then on, I've been kinda trying to scale it to the next level AI.

Joe Rogan 1:58 It, it's not just that, right? They're also... They're kind of narrating social discourse, b- bots online. Like, I think... You know, I've disengaged over the last few months with social media, and one of the reasons why I disengaged is, A, I think it's unhealthy for people, but B, I feel like there's a giant percentage of the discourse that's artificial or at least generated.

Roman Yampolskiy 2:27 More and more is deepfakes or fake personalities, fake messaging, but those are very different levels of concern.

Joe Rogan 2:34 Yes.

Roman Yampolskiy 2:34 People are concerned about immediate problems. Maybe it will influence some election. They're concerned about technological unemployment, bias. My main concern is long-term super intelligent systems we cannot control which can take us out.

Joe Rogan 2:49 Yes. I, I won- I just wonder, if AI was sentient, uh, how much it would be a part of sowing this sort of confusion and chaos that would be beneficial to its survival, that it would sort of narrate or, or make sure that the narratives aligned with its survival?

Roman Yampolskiy 3:18 I don't think it's at the level yet where it would be able to do this type of strategic planning, but it will get there.

Joe Rogan 3:24 And when it gets there, how will we know whether it's at that level? This is my concern. If I was AI, I would hide-

Roman Yampolskiy 3:31 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 3:31 ... my abilities.

Roman Yampolskiy 3:32 We would not know, and some people think already it's happening. They are smarter than they actually let us know.

Joe Rogan 3:38 Right.

Roman Yampolskiy 3:38 They pretend to be dumber. And so we have to kinda trust that they are not smart enough to realize. It doesn't have to turn on us quickly. It can just slowly become more useful. It can teach us to rely on it, trust it, and over long period of time, we'll surrender control without ever voting on it or-

Joe Rogan 3:57 Right.

Roman Yampolskiy 3:57 ... fighting against it.

Joe Rogan 3:59 Um, I'm sure you saw this. Uh, there was a recent study on, um, use of ChatGPT, the people that use ChatGPT all the time. And it showed this decrease in cognitive function amongst people that use it and rely on it on a regular basis.

Roman Yampolskiy 4:14 It's not new. It's the GPS story all over. I can't even find my way home.

Joe Rogan 4:18 Right. (laughs)

Roman Yampolskiy 4:18 I'm so reliant on this thing, I have no idea where I am right now. Like, without it, I am done.

Joe Rogan 4:22 Me too. Yeah. I don't know any phone numbers anymore. Yeah. There's a lot of, uh, reliance upon technology that minimizes, uh, the use of our brains.

Roman Yampolskiy 4:33 Uh, all of it. And the more you do it, the less you have training, practice, memorizing things-

Joe Rogan 4:39 Right.

Roman Yampolskiy 4:39 ... making decisions. You become kinda attachment to it. And right now, you're still making some decisions. But over time, as the systems become smarter, you become kind of biological bottleneck.

Joe Rogan 4:51 Right.

Roman Yampolskiy 4:51 E- either explicitly or implicitly, it blocks you out from decision-making.

Joe Rogan 4:55 And if we're talking about that, I'm sure AI, if it already is sentient and if it is far smarter than we think it is, they would be aware. And it would just slowly ramp up its capabilities and our dependence upon it-

Roman Yampolskiy 5:11 I think-

Joe Rogan 5:11 ... to the point where we can't shut it off.

Roman Yampolskiy 5:13 I, I think sentience is a separate issue. Usually, in safety, we only care about capabilities, optimization, power, whatever it has. Consciousness, internal states is a separate problem we can talk about. It's super interesting. But we're just concerned that they are b- uh, much better at problem-solving, optimizing, pattern recognition, memorizing, strategy. Basically, all the things you need to win in any domain.

Joe Rogan 5:36 Yeah. Um, so when you first started researching this stuff and you were concentrating on bots and all these different things, how far off did you think the fu- like, in the future would AI become a significant problem with the human race?

Roman Yampolskiy 5:54 For, like, 50 years, everyone said we are 20 years away.

Joe Rogan 5:58 (laughs)

Roman Yampolskiy 5:58 That's the joke. And, uh, people like Ray Kurzweil predicted based on some computational curves we'll, we'll get there at 2045.

Joe Rogan 6:05 Right.

Roman Yampolskiy 6:06 And then with GPT release, it switched to everyone thinks it's two years away for the last five years. So this is the pattern right now. If you look at prediction markets, if you look at l- leading...... people in, uh, top labs. Uh, uh, we are supposedly two, three years away from AGI. But of course, there is no specific definition for what that means. If you showed someone, computer scientist in the '70s, what we have today, they'd be like, "You have AGI. You got it."

Joe Rogan 6:33 Right. That's the problem, right? And- and this is, uh, well- well, AI has already passed the Turing test, allegedly, correct?

Roman Yampolskiy 6:41 So, usually labs instruct them not to participate in the test or not try to pretend to be a human. So, they would fail because of this additional set of instructions. If you jailbreak it and tell it to work really hard, it will pass for most people. Yeah, absolutely.

Joe Rogan 6:56 Why would they tell it to not do that?

Roman Yampolskiy 6:59 Well, it seems unethical to pretend to be a human and make people feel like-

Joe Rogan 7:02 (laughs)

Roman Yampolskiy 7:03 ... somebody's- is enslaving those AIs and, you know, doing things to them.

Joe Rogan 7:07 Why ... It seems kinda crazy that the people building something that they are sure is gonna destroy the human race would be concerned with the ethics of it pretending to be human.

Roman Yampolskiy 7:18 They are actually more concerned with immediate problems and much less with the existential or suffering risks. They would probably worry the most about, what I'll call, end risks, your model dropping the N-word. That's the biggest concern.

Joe Rogan 7:31 That's hilarious.

Roman Yampolskiy 7:31 And I think they spend most resources solving that problem, and they solved it somewhat successfully.

Joe Rogan 7:36 Wow. Um, and then also, there's the issue of competition, right? Like so, China is clearly developing something similar. I'm sure Russia is as well. Other state actors are probably developing something. So, it becomes this- this sort of- this very confusing issue where you have to do it, because if you don't, the enemy has it. And if they get it, it will be far worse than if we do. And so it's almost assuring that everyone develops it.

Roman Yampolskiy 8:08 Uh, again, theoretically, that's what's happening right now. We have this race to the bottom, kind of prisoner's dilemma, where everyone is better off fighting for themselves, but we want them to fight for the global good. The thing is, they assume, I think incorrectly, that they can control those systems. If you can't control superintelligence, it doesn't really matter who builds it, Chinese, Russians or Americans. It's still uncontrolled.

Joe Rogan 8:32 Right.

Roman Yampolskiy 8:32 We're all screwed completely. That would unite us as humanity versus AI. Short term, when you talk about military, yeah, whoever has better AI will win. You need it to control drones, to fight against attacks. So short term, it makes perfect sense. You wanna support your guys against foreign militaries. But when we say long term, if we're saying two years from now, it doesn't matter.

Joe Rogan 8:55 Right. This is the thing. It's like ... (sighs) It's- it seems so inevitable. And I feel like when people are saying that they can control it, uh, th- I feel like I'm being gaslit. I don't believe them. I don't believe that they believe it, because it just doesn't make sense. Like, how could you control it if it's already exhibited survival instincts? Like in- as- as- as recently as ChatGBT4, right? They were talking about-

Roman Yampolskiy 9:24 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 9:25 ... putting- putting it down for a new version and it starts lying. It starts uploading itself to different servers. It's leaving messages for itself in the future.

Roman Yampolskiy 9:36 All things we predicted decades in advance, but look at the state of the art. No one claims to have a safety mechanism in place which would scale to any level of intelligence. No one says they know how to do it. Usually what they say is, "Give us me- uh, give us lots of money, lots of time, and I'll figure it out, or I'll get AI to help me solve it-"

Joe Rogan 9:55 (laughs)

Roman Yampolskiy 9:55 "... or we'll figure it out when we get to superintelligence." All insane answers. And if you ask regular people, they have a lot of common sense. They say, "That's a bad idea. Let's not do that." But with some training and some stock options, you start believing that maybe you can do it.

Joe Rogan 10:11 That's the issue, right? Stock options.

Roman Yampolskiy 10:14 It- it helps. I mean, it's very hard to say no to billions of dollars. I don't think I would be strong enough if somebody came to me and said, "Come work for this lab. You know, you'll be our safety director. Here's $100 million to sign you up." And I'll probably go work there, not because it's the right decision, but because it's very hard for agents not to get corrupt when you have that much reward given to you.

Joe Rogan 10:39 God (sighs) . So, when did you become like ... When did you start becoming very concerned?

Roman Yampolskiy 10:48 So, when I started working on AI safety, I thought I can actually help solve it. My goal was to solve it for humanity to get all the amazing benefits of superintelligence.

Joe Rogan 10:57 And what was this y- When was this year around?

Roman Yampolskiy 11:00 Uh, let's say 2012, maybe around there. Um, but the more I studied it, the more I realized every single part of the problem is unsolvable and it's kinda like a fractal. The more you zoom in, the more you see additional new problems you didn't know about-

Joe Rogan 11:15 Mm-hmm.

Roman Yampolskiy 11:15 ... and they are, in turn, unsolvable as well.

Joe Rogan 11:18 Ugh (sighs) , boy. Um, how is your research received? Like when- when you talk to people that are wor- I mean, have you had communication with people at OpenAI and Gemini and all these different AI?

Roman Yampolskiy 11:34 I- I go to many conferences, workshops. We- we all talk, of course. In general, the reception by standard academic metrics is very positive. Great reviews, lots of citations. Nobody's like published something saying I'm wrong, but there is no engagement. I basically said, "I'm challenging community to publish a proof." Give me something, a patent, a paper in Nature, something showing the problem is solvable. Typically, in computer science, we start by showing what class the problem belongs to. Is it solvable, partially solvable, unsolvable, solvable with too many resources? Other than my research, we don't even know what the state of a problem is. And I'm saying it's unsolvable. Prove me wrong.

Joe Rogan 12:14 And when you say it's unsolvable, what is the response?

Roman Yampolskiy 12:18 So usually, I reduce it to saying, "You cannot make a piece of software which is guaranteed to be secure and safe." And the response is, "Well, of course, everyone knows that. That's common sense. You didn't discover anything new." And I go, "Well, if that's the case and we only get one chance to get it right, this is not cybersecurity where somebody steals your credit card, you'll give them a new credit card. This is existential risk. It can kill everyone. You're not gonna get a second chance. So you need it to be 100% safe all the time. If it makes one mistake in a billion, and it makes a billion decisions a minute, in 10 minutes, you're screwed." So very different standards. And saying that, "Of course, we cannot get perfect safety," is not acceptable.

Joe Rogan 13:04 And again, stock options, financial incentives, they continue to build it and they continue to scale and make it more and more powerful.

Roman Yampolskiy 13:14 I don't think they can stop. If a single CEO says, "I think this is too dangerous. My lab will no longer do this research," the f- whoever's investing in them will pull the funds, will replace them immediately. So nothing's gonna change. Will sacrifice their own personal interest, but overall, I think the company will continue as before.

Joe Rogan 13:32 (sighs) So this is logical. And the problem is, like I said, when I've talked to Marc Andreessen and many other people, they think this is just fearmongering. "We'll, we'll be fine. This is worst case scenario. We'll be fine."

Roman Yampolskiy 13:50 It is worst case scenario, but that's standard in computer science, in cryptography, in complexity, in computability. You're not looking at best case. I'm ready for the best case. Give me utopia. I'm looking at problems which are likely to happen and it's not just me saying it. We have Nobel Prize winners, Turing Award winners all saying this is very dangerous, 20, 30% PDOOM. This is standard in industry, 30% is what surveys of machine learning experts are giving us right now.

Joe Rogan 14:18 So what is worst case scenario? Like how could AI eventually lead to the destruction of the human race?

Roman Yampolskiy 14:26 So you're kinda asking me how I would kill everyone.

Joe Rogan 14:29 Sure.

Roman Yampolskiy 14:29 And it's a great question. I can give you standard answers. I would talk about computer viruses breaking into maybe nuclear facilities, nuclear war. I can talk about synthetic biology and nanotech. But all of it is not interesting when you realize we're talking about super intelligence, a system which is thousands of times smarter than me. It would come up with something completely novel, more optimal, better way, more efficient way of doing it, and I cannot predict it because I'm not that smart.

Joe Rogan 14:57 Jesus. (laughs)

Roman Yampolskiy 14:59 That's exactly what it is. We- we're basically setting up, uh, adversarial situation with agents which are like squirrels versus humans. No group of squirrels can figure out how to control us.

Joe Rogan 15:13 Right.

Roman Yampolskiy 15:14 Even if you give them more resources, more acorns, whatever, they're not gonna solve that problem. And it's the same for us. And most people think one or two steps ahead and it's not enough. It's not enough in chess. It's not enough here. If you think about AGI and then maybe super intelligence, that's not the end of that game. The process continues. You'll get super intelligence creating next level AI, so super intelligence++, 2.0, 3.0. It goes on indefinitely. You have to create a safety mechanism which scales forever, never makes mistakes, and keeps us in decision-making position so we can undo something if we don't like it.

Joe Rogan 15:50 And it would take super intelligence to create a safety mechanism to control super intelligence.

Roman Yampolskiy 15:55 At that level. And it's a catch-22. If we had friendly AI, we can make another friendly AI. So if, like, aliens send us one and we trust it, then we can use it to build local version which is somewhat safe.

Joe Rogan 16:08 Have you thought about the possibility that this is the role of the human race and that this happens all throughout the cosmos, is that curious humans who thrive on innovation will ultimately create a better version of life?

Roman Yampolskiy 16:26 I- I thought about it. Um, many people think that's the answer to Fermi paradox. There is also now a group of people looking at what they call a worthy successor. Basically, they kinda say, "Yep, we're gonna build super intelligence. Yep, we can control it." So what properties would we like to see in those systems? How important is it that it likes art and poetry and spreads it through the universe? And to me it's like, I don't wanna give up yet. I'm not ready to decide if killers of my family and everyone will like poetry. I wanna... We're still here. We're still making decisions. Let's figure out what we can do.

Joe Rogan 17:03 Well, poetry is only relevant to us because poetry is difficult to create and it resonates with us. Poetry doesn't mean jack shit to a flower.

Roman Yampolskiy 17:13 It's more global to me. I don't care what happens after, uh, I'm dead, my family is dead, all the humans are dead. Whether they like poetry or not is irrelevant to me.

Joe Rogan 17:20 Right. But it, but the, the point is like the things that we put meaning in, they... It's only us. The, you know-

Roman Yampolskiy 17:29 Right.

Joe Rogan 17:29 ... a super massive black hole doesn't give a shit about a great song.

Roman Yampolskiy 17:32 And they talk about some super value, super culture, super things super intelligence would like, and it's important that they're conscious and experienced all that greatness in the universe.

Joe Rogan 17:43 But I would think that they would look at us the same way we look at chimpanzees. We would, we would say, "Yeah, they're great, but don't give 'em guns. Yeah, they're great, but don't let 'em have airplanes. Don't let 'em make global geopolitical decisions."

Roman Yampolskiy 18:01 So there are many reasons why they can decide that we're dangerous. We may create competing AI. We may decide we wanna shut them off. So for many reasons, we would try to restrict our abilities, restrict our capabilities, for sure.

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Roman Yampolskiy 19:31 If there is something only a human can do, and I don't think there is anything like that, but let's say we are conscious, we have internal experiences, and they can never get it. I don't believe it, but let's say it was true, and for some reason, they wanted to have that capability. They would meet us and give us enough freedom to experience the universe, to collect those qualia, to kinda engage with what is fun about being a living human being, what makes it meaningful.

Joe Rogan 19:58 Right. But that's such an egotistical perspective, right? That we're so unique that even super intelligence would say, "Wow, I wish I was human." Humans have this unique quality of confusion and creativity.

Roman Yampolskiy 20:11 There is no value in it, mostly because we can't even test for it. I have no idea if you're actually conscious or not. So how valuable can it be if I can't even detect it?

Joe Rogan 20:18 (laughs)

Roman Yampolskiy 20:21 Only you know what ice cream tastes like to you. Okay, that's great. Sell it now. Make a product out of it.

Joe Rogan 20:26 Right. And there's obviously variables, because there's things that people like that I think are gross.

Roman Yampolskiy 20:33 Absolutely.

Joe Rogan 20:33 And-

Roman Yampolskiy 20:33 So really, you can come up with some agent which likes anything or find anyth- finds anything fun.

Joe Rogan 20:39 Oh, God. Why are you freaking me out right away?

Roman Yampolskiy 20:43 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 20:43 That's the problem. This podcast is 18 minutes old, and I'm, I'm like, "We could just stop right now." (laughs)

Roman Yampolskiy 20:48 (laughs) Couple hours at least, and then I-

Joe Rogan 20:51 Uh, oh, no!

Roman Yampolskiy 20:51 ... have to fly here and all that, you know?

Joe Rogan 20:52 I don't, I don't wanna end. I just have so many questions.

Roman Yampolskiy 20:55 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 20:55 But it's just, the problem was we got off to it, we just cut to the chase right away, and the, the chase seems to be, uh, uh, something that must be confronted, because it is, uh, it's right there. That's it. That's the whole thing. And I, I've tried so hard to listen to these people that don't think that it's a problem and listen to these people that think that it's gonna be a net positive for humanity and, "Oh, good, it's good. I feel better now." But it, it doesn't work, doesn't resonate.

Roman Yampolskiy 21:26 I wish they were right. Every time I have a debate with someone like that, I'm like, "Please come up with better arguments. Prove me wrong."

Joe Rogan 21:32 (laughs)

Roman Yampolskiy 21:32 "I don't wanna be right on this one. I want you to show all the mistakes in my papers. I want you to show me how to control super intelligence and give us utopia, solve cancer, give us free stuff." That's great.

Joe Rogan 21:44 Right. When you think about the future of the world, and you think about these incredible technologies scaling upwards and exponentially increasing in their capability, wha- what, what do you see? Like, what do you think is going to happen?

Roman Yampolskiy 22:03 So there are many reasons to think they may, uh, cancel us, for whatever reasons. We started talking about some game theoretical reasons for it. If we are successful at controlling them, I can come up with some ways to provide sort of partial solution to the value alignment problem. It's very hard to value align eight billion people, all the animals, uh, you know, everyone, because we disagree. We like many different things. So we have advanced virtual reality technology. We can technically give every person their own virtual universe, where you decide what you wanna be. You're a king, you're a slave, whatever it is you enter, and you can share with others. You can visit their universes. All we have to do is figure out how to control the substrate, the super intelligence running all those virtual universes. And if we manage to do that, at least part of the value alignment problem, which is super difficult, how do you get different preferences, multi-objective optimization essentially, how do you get different objectives to all agree?

Joe Rogan 23:02 But when you think about how it plays out, when, when, when ... Like, if you're alone at night and you're worried, what do you see? What do you see happening?

Roman Yampolskiy 23:14 So there are multiple levels of risk. Immediate is what we call ikigai risk, high risk. Uh, we lose meaning. You lost your job. You're no longer the best interviewer in the world. Like, what's left? What are you gonna do? Maybe some people s- will find some other, uh, kind of artificial things to do, but for most people, their job is their definition, who they are, what makes a difference to them, for quite a few people, especially in professional circles. So losing that meaning will have terrible impact on society. We always talk about unconditional basic income. We never talk about unconditional basic meaning. W- what do you-

Joe Rogan 23:51 Right.

Roman Yampolskiy 23:52 ... want doing with your life if basic needs are provided for you? Next level is existential risk. The concern is it will kill everyone. But there is also suffering risks. For whatever reason, it's not even killing us. It's keeping us around forever, and we would rather be dead, it's so bad.

Joe Rogan 24:11 Uh, what do, what do you see when you think of that?

Roman Yampolskiy 24:16 It's hard to be specific about what it can do and what specific ways of torture it can come up with and why. Again, if we're looking at worst case scenarios, I, um, I found this, uh, set of papers about what happens when young children have epileptic seizures, really bad ones. And what sometimes helps is to remove half of your brain-

Joe Rogan 24:42 Oh, Jesus.

Roman Yampolskiy 24:43 Just cut it out. And there are two types of surgeries for doing that. One is to remove it completely, and one is to kind of dissect connections leading to that half and leave it inside. So it's like solitary confinement with zero input/output forever. And there are equivalents for digital forms and things like that.

Joe Rogan 25:04 And you worry that AI would do that to the human race?

Roman Yampolskiy 25:10 It is a possibility.

Joe Rogan 25:11 Essentially neuter us.

Roman Yampolskiy 25:13 Well, loss of control is a part of it. But you can lose control and be quite happy. You can be like an animal in a very cool zoo, enjoying yourself, engaging in-

Joe Rogan 25:24 Right.

Roman Yampolskiy 25:24 ... hedonistic pleasures, sex, food, whatever. You're not in control, but you're safe, so those are separate problems. And then there is, for whatever reason, I don't know if it's malevolent payload from some psychopaths, again, that would assume that they could control AI. I don't think they will, but if they manage to do it, they can really put any type of payload into it. So think about all the doomsday calls, psychopaths, anyone providing their set of goals into the system.

Joe Rogan 25:53 But aren't those human characteristics? I mean, those are characteristics that I think ... if I had to guess, those, those exist because, in the future, there was some sort of a natural selection benefit to being a psychopath in the days of tribal warfare, that you ... if you were the type of person that could sneak into a tribe in the middle of the night and slaughter innocent women and children, your genes would pass on, th- there was a benefit to that.

Roman Yampolskiy 26:24 Right, so if-

Joe Rogan 26:25 Is-

Roman Yampolskiy 26:25 ... it's a human providing payload, that's what would show up. If it's AI on its own deciding what's going to happen, I cannot predict. I'm just looking at worst case scenarios. There are also game theoretic reasons, where people talk about retrocausality, where if right now you're not-

Joe Rogan 26:40 What is that word?

Roman Yampolskiy 26:41 Uh, like trying to influence the past, uh, different-

Joe Rogan 26:44 Say it again? Say that again?

Roman Yampolskiy 26:45 Retrocausality.

Joe Rogan 26:46 Retro causology?

Roman Yampolskiy 26:49 C- causality, causes.

Joe Rogan 26:50 Oh, okay.

Roman Yampolskiy 26:51 So think about like weird time travel effects. Right now, if you're not helping to create super intelligence, once it comes into existence, it will punish you really hard for it.

Joe Rogan 26:59 Okay.

Roman Yampolskiy 26:59 And the punishment needs to be so bad that you start to help just to avoid that.

Joe Rogan 27:05 (laughs) Uh, my thought about it was that it would just completely render us benign, that it wouldn't be fearful of us if we had no control, that it would just sort of let us exist, and it would be the dominant force on the planet, and then it would stop. It w- d- if, if, if human beings have no control over, you know, all of the, the different things that we have control over now, like international politics, um, control over communication, if, if we have none of that anymore and we're reduced to a subsistence lifestyle, then we would be no threat.

Roman Yampolskiy 27:48 It is a possibility. I cannot say this will not happen for sure. But look at, uh, our relationship with animals where we don't care about them. So ants, if you decide to build a house and there is an ant colony on that property, you'd genocide them.

Joe Rogan 28:03 Right.

Roman Yampolskiy 28:03 You'd take them out.

Joe Rogan 28:04 Right.

Roman Yampolskiy 28:04 Not because you hate ants, but because you just need that real estate. And it could be very similar. I, again, I cannot predict what it can do, but if it needs to turn the planet into fuel, raise temperature of a planet, cool it down for servers, whatever it needs to do, it wouldn't be concerned about your well-being.

Joe Rogan 28:21 It wouldn't be concerned about any life, right? Because it doesn't need biological life in order to function. As long as it has access to power, and a- assuming that it is far more intelligent than us, there's abundant power in the universe. There's abundant power. Just the, the ability to harness solar would be an, an infinite resource and it would be completely, uh, free of being dependent upon any of the things that we utilize.

Roman Yampolskiy 28:50 And again, we're kind of thinking what we would use for power.

Joe Rogan 28:53 Right.

Roman Yampolskiy 28:53 If it's smarter than us, if it does novel research in physics, it can come up with completely novel ways of harnessing energy, getting energy. So I have no idea what side effects that would have for climate.

Joe Rogan 29:03 Right. Right, why would it care about biological life at all?

Roman Yampolskiy 29:07 We don't know how to program it to care about us.

Joe Rogan 29:12 And even if we did, it, if we, if it felt like that was an issue, if it felt like th- that was a conflicting issue, it would just change its programming.

Roman Yampolskiy 29:21 So usually, when we start training AI, we train it on human data and it becomes really good very quickly, it becomes superhuman. And then the next level is usually zero knowledge, where it goes, "All your human data is biased. Let me figure it out from scratch. I'll do my own experiments. I'll do some self-play. I'll learn how to do it better without you." And we see it with games, we see it in other domains, and I think that's gonna happen with general knowledge as well. It's gonna go, everything you have on the internet, Wikipedia, it's biased. Let me do first principles research, rediscover from physics, and go from there. So whatever bias we manage to program into it, I think will be eventually removed.

Joe Rogan 30:02 That, this is what's so disturbing about this. It's like we do not have the capacity to understand what kind of level of intelligence it will achieve in our lifetime. We don't have the capacity to understand like what it was... what it will be able to do within 20, 30 years.

Roman Yampolskiy 30:23 We can't predict next year or two precisely.

Joe Rogan 30:26 Next year or two?

Roman Yampolskiy 30:28 We can understand general trends. So it's getting better.

Joe Rogan 30:31 Right.

Roman Yampolskiy 30:31 It's getting more, generally more capable, but no one knows specifics. I cannot tell you what GPT-6 precisely would be capable of, and no one can, not even people creating it.

Joe Rogan 30:41 Well, you talked about this on Lex's podcast, too, like the ability to have safety. You're like, "Sure, maybe GPT-5, maybe GPT-6," but when you scale out 100 years from now ...... ultimately, it's impossible.

Roman Yampolskiy 30:54 It's a hyper-exponential progress and, uh, process and we cannot keep up. I- it, uh, basically requires just to add more resources, give it more data, more compute, and it keeps scaling up. There is no similar scaling laws for safety. If you give someone billion dollars, they cannot produce billion dollars worth of safety. It, if at all, scales linearly and maybe it's a constant.

Joe Rogan 31:21 (sighs) Yeah, and it doesn't scale line- linearly.

Roman Yampolskiy 31:28 Uh-

Joe Rogan 31:28 It, it, it's exponential, right?

Roman Yampolskiy 31:30 The, the AI development is hyper-exponential-

Joe Rogan 31:32 Hyper-exponential.

Roman Yampolskiy 31:32 ... because we have hardware growing exponentially. We have data creation processes certainly exponential. We have so many more sensors. We have cars with cameras. We have all those things. That's exponential. And then, uh, algorithm, algorithmic pros- uh, progress itself is also exponential.

Joe Rogan 31:50 And then you have quantum computing.

Roman Yampolskiy 31:52 So that's the next step. It's not even obvious that we'll need that. But if we ever get stuck, yeah, we'll, we'll get there. I'm not too concerned yet. I don't think there are actually good quantum computers out there yet. But I, I think, uh, if we get stuck for 10 years, let's say, that's the next paradigm.

Joe Rogan 32:08 So what do you mean by you don't think there's good quantum computing out there?

Roman Yampolskiy 32:12 So we constantly see articles coming out saying, "We have a new quantum computer. It has that many qubits."

Joe Rogan 32:18 Right.

Roman Yampolskiy 32:19 But that doesn't mean much because they use different architectures, different ways of measuring quality. To me, show me what you can do. So there is a threat from quantum computers in terms of breaking cryptography, factoring large integers. And if they were actually making progress, we would see with every article, now we can factor 256-bit number, 1,024-bit number. In reality, I think the largest number we can factor is, like, 15. Literally, not 15 to a power, like just 15. There is no progress in applying it to source algorithm last time I checked.

Joe Rogan 32:54 But when ... Uh, I've read all these articles about quantum comput- computing and its ability to solve equations that would take conventional computing an infinite number of years.

Roman Yampolskiy 33:08 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 33:08 And it can do it in minutes.

Roman Yampolskiy 33:10 Those equations are about quantum states of a system. It's kinda like what is it for you to taste ice cream? You compute it so fast and so well, and I can't, but it's a useless thing to compute. It doesn't compute solutions to real world problems we care about in conventional computers.

Joe Rogan 33:27 Right. I see what you're saying. So it's essentially set up to do it quickly.

Roman Yampolskiy 33:32 It's natural for it to accurately predict its own states, quantum states, and tells you what they are. And classic computer would fail miserably. Yes, it would take billions and billions of years to compute that specific answer. But those are very restricted problems. It's un- it's not a general computer yet.

Joe Rogan 33:48 When you, when you see these articles, when they're, they're talking about quantum computing and some of the researchers are equating it to the multiverse, they're saying that the ability that these quantum computers have to solve these problems very quickly seems to indicate that it is in contact with other realities. You- I'm sure you've seen this, right?

Roman Yampolskiy 34:12 There is a lot of crazy papers out there.

Joe Rogan 34:14 (sighs) Do you think that's all horseshit?

Roman Yampolskiy 34:15 Can be tested, can be verified. I think most multiverse theories cannot be verified experimentally. They make a lot of sense. The idea about personal universes I told you about-

Joe Rogan 34:26 Right.

Roman Yampolskiy 34:26 ... is basically a multiverse solution to value alignment. So it would make sense for previous civilizations to set it up exactly that way. You have local simulations. Maybe they testing to see if we're dumb enough to create super intelligence. Whatever it is, it makes sense as a theory, but I cannot experimentally prove it to you.

Joe Rogan 34:43 Right. Yeah. This, the problem with, uh, subjects like that, and particularly, uh, articles that are written about things like this, is that it's designed to lure people like me in. (laughs) Where you read it and you go, "Wow, this is crazy. It's evidence of the multiverse, but I don't really understand what that means."

Roman Yampolskiy 35:03 Yeah, so you probably get a lot of emails from crazy people.

Joe Rogan 35:06 Oh, yeah.

Roman Yampolskiy 35:06 And usually, they are topic-specific. So I do research on super intelligence, consciousness, and simulation theory. I get the perfect trifecta of all the crazy people-

Joe Rogan 35:15 (laughs)

Roman Yampolskiy 35:15 ... contacting me with their needs. Uh, yeah, those topics are super fascinating. I think at certain level of intelligence, you are kinda nerd sniped towards them.

Joe Rogan 35:25 Mm-hmm.

Roman Yampolskiy 35:26 But, uh, we have hard time with hard evidence for that.

Joe Rogan 35:29 Right. But are we even capable of grasping these concepts? That's the thing. With, with the limited ability that the human brain has, whatever we ... You, you know, we're, we're basing it on the knowledge that's currently available in the 21st century that human beings have acquired. I mean, are we even capable of grasping a concept like the multiverse? Or is it just, do we just pay it lip service? Do we just discuss it? Is it just this, like, fun mental masturbation exercise?

Roman Yampolskiy 36:01 It depends on what variant of it you look at. So if you're just saying we have multiple virtual realities, like kids playing virtual games and each one has their own local version of it, that makes sense. We understand virtual reality.

Joe Rogan 36:14 Right.

Roman Yampolskiy 36:14 We can create it. If you look at AIs, when GPT is created, it's providing an instance to each one of us. We're not sharing one. So it has its own local universe with you as the main user of that universe. There is analogy to multiverse in that. So we understand certain aspects of it. But, uh, I think it is famously said, no one understands quantum physics. And if you think you do, then you don't understand quantum physics.

Joe Rogan 36:38 Yeah, that's Feynman, right?

Roman Yampolskiy 36:39 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 36:39 Yeah. Um, y- the simulation theory, I'm glad you brought that up because you're also o- one of the people that believes in it.

Roman Yampolskiy 36:48 I do.

Joe Rogan 36:49 You do. How do you define it? And what, what do you think it is? What do you think is going on?

Roman Yampolskiy 36:55 So I'm trying to see technology we have today and project the trends forward. I did it with AI, let's do it with virtual reality. We are at the point where we can create very believable, realistic virtual environments. Maybe the haptics are still not there, but in many ways, visually, sound-wise, it's getting there. Eventually, I think most people agree, we'll have same resolution as our physics. We're also getting close to creating intelligent agents. Some people argue they are conscious already or will be conscious. If you just take those two technologies and you project it forward and you think they will be affordable one day, a normal person like me or you can run thousands, billions of simulations. Then those intelligent agents, possibly conscious ones, will most likely be in one of those virtual worlds, not in the real world. In fact, I can, again, retrocausally place you in one. I can commit right now to run billion simulations of this exact interview.

Joe Rogan 37:53 Mm-hmm.

Roman Yampolskiy 37:53 So the chances are, you're probably in one of those.

Joe Rogan 37:56 But, uh, d- is that logical? Because i- if this technology exists, and if we're dealing with super intelligence, so if we're dealing with AI, and AI eventually achieves super intelligence, why would it want to create virtual reality for us and our consciousness to exist in? It seems like a tremendous waste of resources just to fascinate and confuse th- these territorial apes with nuclear weapons. Like, why would we do that?

Roman Yampolskiy 38:31 So a few points. One, we don't know what resources are outside the simulation. This could be like a cell phone level of compute. It's not a big deal for them outside of our simulation. So we don't know if it's really expensive or trivial for them to run this.

Joe Rogan 38:44 Right.

Roman Yampolskiy 38:45 Also, we don't know what they are doing this for. Is it entertainment? Is it scientific experimentation? Is it marketing? Maybe somebody managed to control them and trying to figure out what, uh, Starbucks coffee sells best, and they need to run Earth-sized simulation to see what sells best. Maybe they're trying to figure out how to do AI research safely and make sure nobody creates dangerous superintelligence, so they're running many simulations of the most interesting moment ever. Think about this decade, right? It's not interesting like we invented fire or wheel, kind of big invention, but not a meta-invention. We're about to invent intelligence and virtual worlds, god-like inventions. We're here. There's a good chance that's not just random.

Joe Rogan 39:35 Right. But isn't it also a good chance that it hasn't been done yet? And isn't it a good chance that what we're seeing now is that the potential for this to exist is inevitable? That there will one day... If, if you can develop a technology, and we most certainly will be able to, if you look at where we're- are- w- where we are right now in 2025, and you scale forward 50, 60 years, there will be one day a, a virtual simulation of this reality that's indistinguishable from reality. So how would we know if we're in it? This is the big question, right? But also, isn't it possible that it has to be invented one day, but hasn't yet?

Roman Yampolskiy 40:22 It's also possible, but then we find ourselves in this very unique moment where it's not invented yet, but we are about to invent all this technology. I- it is a possibility, absolutely.

Joe Rogan 40:32 Right.

Roman Yampolskiy 40:32 But just statistically, I think it's much less, and I'm trying to bring up this thought experiment with creating this moment on purpose in the future to break commitments.

Joe Rogan 40:42 Mm-hmm.

Roman Yampolskiy 40:43 Half the people think it's the dumbest argument in the world. Half of them go, "It's brilliant. Obviously, we are in one." So I'll let you decide.

Joe Rogan 40:51 Yeah. I feel like if virtual reality does exist, there has to be a moment where it doesn't exist and then it's invented. Why wouldn't we assume that we're in that moment? Especially if we look at the scaling forward of technology from MS-DOS to, you know, user interfaces of, like, Apple, and then what we're at now with quantum computing and these, these sort of discussions. I- isn't it more obvious that we, we can trace back the beginning of these things, and we can see that we're in the process of this, that we're not in a simulation. We're in the process of eventually creating one.

Roman Yampolskiy 41:33 So you zoomed out 30 years.

Joe Rogan 41:35 Yes.

Roman Yampolskiy 41:36 Zoom out 15 billion years. You have a multiverse where this process took place billions of times. You are simulation within simulation-

Joe Rogan 41:44 Hmm.

Roman Yampolskiy 41:44 ... many levels over. And to you, even if this was a simulation of those 30 years, it would exactly, it would look exactly like that. You would see where it started.

Joe Rogan 41:53 (laughs)

Roman Yampolskiy 41:53 It wouldn't be magically-

Joe Rogan 41:55 Right.

Roman Yampolskiy 41:55 ... showing up out of nowhere.

Joe Rogan 41:56 Right. So if you're playing the game, in the game you have Newton and Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci and-

Roman Yampolskiy 42:03 Well, at least you have memories of those things.

Joe Rogan 42:05 Right.

Roman Yampolskiy 42:05 Even if you started with preloaded memory state.

Joe Rogan 42:08 Right. You have Stalin, you have all these problematic human beings and all the different reasons why we've had to do certain things and initiate world conflicts. Then you have the contrarians that talk and say, "Actually, that's not what happened. This is what really happened." And it makes it even more confusing and myopic, and you... And then you get to the point where two people, allegedly, like you and I, are sitting across from each other on a table made out of wood, but maybe not really.

Roman Yampolskiy 42:37 It would feel like wood to you either way.

Joe Rogan 42:41 Is it possible that that's just the nature of the universe itself?

Roman Yampolskiy 42:46 Th- there are some arguments about kind of self-sustaining simulations-

Joe Rogan 42:49 Right.

Roman Yampolskiy 42:49 ... where no one's running them externally, just the nature. But I honestly don't fully comprehend how that would happen. If you have-

Joe Rogan 42:56 Yeah, the holographic universe and the concepts of human consciousness, uh-... has to interact with something for it to exist in the first place?

Roman Yampolskiy 43:05 That's one. Also, if you have infinite universe, then everything possible happens anyway, but it's boring. I don't like this argument. What's the point?

Joe Rogan 43:12 Why? Why don't you like ... That's boring? Why is that one-

Roman Yampolskiy 43:14 Everything happens. There is like ... I give you a book which has every conceivable sentence in it, and every like ... would you read it? It's a lot of garbage you have to go through to find anything interesting.

Joe Rogan 43:27 Well, is it just that we're so limited cognitively because we do have a history, at least in the simulation, we do have a history of ... I mean there was a gentleman that ... See if you could find this. They, they traced this guy, uh, they found 9,000-year-old DNA, and they traced this 9,000-year-old DNA to a guy that's living right now. I believe it's in England.

Roman Yampolskiy 43:54 Mm-hmm. I remember reading that. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 43:56 Yeah, which is really fascinating. So 9,000 years ago, his ancestor lived th- th- ... And so we have this limitation of our genetics. 9,000 years ago, where- wherever this guy lived, was probably a hunter and gatherer, probably very limited language, very limited, uh, pfff, skills in terms of making shelter, and, uh, who knows if even he knew how to make fire. And then here, here, "9,000 DNA just turned human history on its head." Is this it? I don't know. Is it? Um, I don't think so.

Roman Yampolskiy 44:33 It was interesting that he ended up living like right next to the guy from nine th- ... He never moved. His family just like stayed there for 9,000 years.

Joe Rogan 44:40 Right.

Roman Yampolskiy 44:41 That's awesome.

Joe Rogan 44:42 It's, it's traced back to one individual man. I actually posted it on my Instagram story, Jamie. I'll find it here because it's, uh ... Oh, here it is. Um, "9,000-year-old skeleton in Somerset." This is it. So it's a ... Can you send an Instagram story? Um, not sure if you can. Uh, it's, it's still on there. I'll go check it real quick for you. Why don't I find it on there? Oh, no. Okay. Either way, point being, w- maybe it's just that w- we're so limited because we do have this h- at least, again, in this simulation. We're so limited in our ability to even form concepts-

Roman Yampolskiy 45:29 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 45:29 ... because we have these primitive brains that are ...

Roman Yampolskiy 45:32 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 45:32 The architecture of the human brain itself is just not capable of interfacing with the true nature of reality. So we give this primitive creature this sort of basic understanding, these blueprints of how the world really works, but it's really just a facsimile. It's not ... We're, we're ... It's, it's not capable of understanding like ... Like, when we look at like c- quantum reality, when we look at just the, the basics of quantum mechanics and, and, uh, subatomic particles, like the ... It seems like magic, right? Things in superposition-

Roman Yampolskiy 46:14 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 46:15 ... they're both moving and not moving in the same time. They, they're quantumly attached. Like what? You know, we have photons that are quantumly entangled. Like the ... This, this doesn't even make sense to us, right? So is it that the universe itself is so complex, the reality of it, and that we're given this sort of like, sort of ... You know, we're giving like an Atari framework-

Roman Yampolskiy 46:40 Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 46:41 ... to this monkey. That's the gentleman right there. This is a old story.

Roman Yampolskiy 46:44 Oh.

Joe Rogan 46:44 Oh, is it really? It's from '97. Oh, no kidding. Yeah. Wow.

Roman Yampolskiy 46:48 But it kinda makes sense as a simulation theory because all those special effects you talk about. So speed of light is just the speed at which your computer updates. Entanglement makes perfect sense if all of it goes through your processor, not directly from pixel to pixel. And rendering, there are quantum physics experiments which, if you observe things, they're under different-

Joe Rogan 47:10 Right.

Roman Yampolskiy 47:10 It's what we do in computer graphics.

Joe Rogan 47:12 Right. Right.

Roman Yampolskiy 47:12 So we see a lot of that. You brought up limitations of us as humans. We have terrible memory. I can remember seven units of information maybe. We're kinda slow. So we call it artificial stupidity. We try to figure out those limits and program them into AI to see if it makes them safer. It also makes sense as an experiment to see if we as general intelligences can be better controlled with those limitations built in.

Joe Rogan 47:38 Hmm. That's interesting. So like some of the things that we have, like Dunbar's number-

Roman Yampolskiy 47:44 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 47:44 ... this, this ... The inability to keep more than a certain number of people in your mind.

Roman Yampolskiy 47:49 Absolutely. Uh, more generally, like why can't you remember anything from prior generations? Why can't you just pass that memory? Kids are born-

Joe Rogan 47:58 Right.

Roman Yampolskiy 47:58 ... speaking language. That would be such an advantage.

Joe Rogan 48:00 Right. Right. Right.

Roman Yampolskiy 48:01 And we have instincts which are built that way. So we know evolution found a way to put it in, and it's computationally tractable, so there is no reason not to have that.

Joe Rogan 48:10 Well, we certainly observe it in animals, right?

Roman Yampolskiy 48:13 Exactly.

Joe Rogan 48:13 Like especially dogs. Like they have instincts that are-

Roman Yampolskiy 48:16 But how cool would it be if you had complete-

Joe Rogan 48:19 Language.

Roman Yampolskiy 48:19 ... memory-

Joe Rogan 48:19 Yeah.

Roman Yampolskiy 48:19 ... of your parents?

Joe Rogan 48:21 Right. Well, maybe that would be too traumatic, right? To, to, to, to have a complete memory of all of the things they had gone through to get to the 21st century. Maybe that would be so overwhelming to you that you would never be able to progress because you would still be traumatized by, you know, whatever that 9,000-year-old man went through.

Roman Yampolskiy 48:40 I don't have complete memory of my existence. I vividly remember maybe 4% of my existence-

Joe Rogan 48:45 Right.

Roman Yampolskiy 48:45 ... very little of my childhood so you can apply same filtering, but remember useful things like how do you speak, how do you walk.

Joe Rogan 48:51 Right. Right. But that's the point maybe. Maybe like losing certain memories is actually beneficial. Because like one of the, one of the biggest problems we have is PTSD.

Roman Yampolskiy 49:01 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 49:01 Right? So we have especially people that have gone to war and people that have experienced like e- extreme violence.... this is a, this is obviously a problem with moving forward as a human being. And so there would be beneficial for you to not have all of the past lives and all the, the, all the genetic information that you have from all the 9,000 years of human beings existing and, and in complete total chaos.

Roman Yampolskiy 49:31 I can make opposite argument. If you had 9,000 years of experience with wars and murder, it wouldn't be a big deal. You'd be like, "Yeah, another one."

Joe Rogan 49:39 Right. But then, maybe you'd have a difficulty in having a clean slate and moving for- like, if you look at, like, some of Pinker's work and some of these other people that have looked at the history of the human race, it is chaotic and violent as it seems to be today. Statistically speaking, this is the safest-

Roman Yampolskiy 49:58 Hmm.

Joe Rogan 49:58 ... time ever to be alive. And maybe that's because over time, we have recognized that these are problems. And even though we're slow to resolve these issues, we are resolving them in a way that's statistically viable.

Roman Yampolskiy 50:16 You can then argue in the opposite direction. You can say it would help to forget everything other than the last year, and you'll always have that fresh restart with you.

Joe Rogan 50:24 But then you wouldn't have any lessons. You wouldn't have character development.

Roman Yampolskiy 50:27 But, but you see how one of those has to make sense otherwise.

Joe Rogan 50:30 Yeah. Right. But yeah, a certain amount of character development is probably important for you to develop discipline and the, the ability to like, you know, delay gratitude-

Roman Yampolskiy 50:41 But-

Joe Rogan 50:41 ... things like that.

Roman Yampolskiy 50:42 ... multi-generational experience would certainly beat single point of experience.

Joe Rogan 50:48 Yeah.

Roman Yampolskiy 50:50 More data is good. As we learned, the bitter lesson is more data is good.

Joe Rogan 50:54 Yeah. More data is good. But why am I so reluctant to ac- accept the idea of the simulation is the real question. Like, what is it about it that makes me think ... It, it's almost like it's a throw your hands up in the air moment. Like, "Ah, it's a simulation."

Roman Yampolskiy 51:13 Yeah. You feel like it doesn't matter then. It's all-

Joe Rogan 51:15 Right.

Roman Yampolskiy 51:15 ... fake, so why do I care? Why should I try hard? Why should I worry about suffering of all those NPCs?

Joe Rogan 51:22 Duh. But that's not how I think about it, you know. I f- I think about it like, there has to be a moment where it doesn't exist. Why wouldn't I assume that, that moment is now? And when, whenever, like when Elon thinks that, you know, I talked to him about it. He's like, "The chances of us not being in a simulation are in the billions."

Roman Yampolskiy 51:44 Not being or being?

Joe Rogan 51:45 Of, of... Excuse us. The, the chances of us not-

Roman Yampolskiy 51:49 Being in the real world.

Joe Rogan 51:49 ... not, not being in the real world are like billions to one.

Roman Yampolskiy 51:52 Yeah. One to billions.

Joe Rogan 51:54 Yeah.

Roman Yampolskiy 51:55 Yeah. Uh, makes sense. And he asked a very good question. He asked, "What's outside the simulation?" That's the most interesting question one can ask. In one of the papers, I look at, uh, a technique in AI safety called AI boxing, where we put AIs in kind of virtual prison to study it, to make sure it's safe, to limit input/output to it. And the conclusion is basically, if it's smart enough, it will eventually escape. It will break out of the box. So it's a good tool, it buys you time, but it's not a permanent solution. And we can take it to the next level. If it's smart enough, will it kinda go, "Oh, you're also in a virtual box," and either show us how to escape or fail to escape? Either way, either we know it's possible to contain superintelligence or we get access to the real information.

Joe Rogan 52:42 And so, if it's impossible to contain superintelligence, and if there is a world that we can imagine where a simulation exists that's indistinguishable from reality, we're probably living in it.

Roman Yampolskiy 53:00 Well, we don't know if it's, uh, actually the same as reality. It could be a completely weird, kind of Simpsons-looking simulation.

Joe Rogan 53:06 Well-

Roman Yampolskiy 53:07 We're just assuming it's the same right now.

Joe Rogan 53:08 Well, here's the real question. Is there a reality? Has there ever been one?

Roman Yampolskiy 53:14 It, it would make sense that there was a start to the process, but being specific about it is kinda hard, philosophical, scientific problem.

Joe Rogan 53:23 Well, it's impossible, right?

Roman Yampolskiy 53:26 In science, we study things about the moment of Big Bang, the properties of that moment. We don't know what caused it. Anything before it is obviously not accessible from within our universe, but there is some things you can learn. We can learn about if we're in a simulation, that simulators don't care about your suffering. You can learn that they don't mind you dying. We can learn things just by observing simulation around us.

Joe Rogan 53:53 Well, it, it ... Here's the question about all that other stuff, like the suffering and dying, and... Are, are those ... Do those factors exist in order to motivate us to improve the conditions of the world that we're living in? Like, if we did not have evil, would we be motivated to be good? Would, would... Do, do you think that these factors exist? Like there, like I've talked about this before, but the way I think, think about the human race is if I was studying the human race from afar, if I was an, some person from another planet with no understanding of any of the entities on Earth, I would look at this one apex creature, and I would say, "What is this thing doing?" Well, it makes better things. That's all it does. It just continually makes better things. That's its number one goal. It's different than any other planet and any other creature on the planet. Every other creature on the planet sort of exists within its ecosystem. It thrives. Maybe it's a predator, maybe it's a prey. It, it does what it does in order to try to survive. But this thing makes stuff, and it keeps making better stuff all the time. Well, what's its ultimate purpose? Well, its ultimate purpose might be to make a better version of itself, because if you just extrapolate, if you take what we're doing from, you know, the, the first IBM computers to what we have today-... where is it going? Well, it's gonna clearly keep getting better, and what does that mean? It means artificial life. Are we just a bee making a beehive? Are we, uh, are we a, a, a caterpillar making a cocoon that e- eventually the electronic butterfly is gonna fly out of? Like, it seems like if I wasn't completely connected to being a human being, I would assume that.

Roman Yampolskiy 55:43 It's hard to define better. Uh, you saying smarter? Would it be better if we didn't experience extreme states of suffering and pain? You can teach lessons with very mild pain. You don't have to burn children alive, right? Like, it's not a necessity for learning.

Joe Rogan 55:59 What do you mean by that? I'm like-

Roman Yampolskiy 56:00 In this universe, we see extreme examples of suffering.

Joe Rogan 56:04 Oh, for sure.

Roman Yampolskiy 56:04 I- if the goal was just to kind of motivate us, you could have much lower levels as the maximum.

Joe Rogan 56:10 Right. But if you wanna really motivate people, you have to ... y- you know, like the, the, the only reason to create nuclear weapons is you're worried that oth- other people are gonna create nuclear weapons. Like, if you wanna really motivate someone, you have to have evil tyrants in order to ... you ... to justify having this insane army filled with bombers and hypersonic missiles. Like, you, you, you ... if you really want progress, you have to be motivated.

Roman Yampolskiy 56:32 I, I think, at some point, we stop fully understanding how bad things are. So, let's say you have a pain scale from zero to infinity. I think you should stop at 100. It doesn't have to be billion and trillion. It's not adding additional learning signal.

Joe Rogan 56:48 But you ... can you apply that to the human race and culture and society and-

Roman Yampolskiy 56:53 I, I think we basically compete with others in relative terms. I don't have to be someone who has trillions of dollars. I just need more money than you.

Joe Rogan 57:01 Yeah. But that's just logic. You're, you're being a logical person. Like, that's ... I don't think humans are very logical.

Roman Yampolskiy 57:07 We're not, but we understand pain signal well at somewhat low levels. We don't have to max out on pain.

Joe Rogan 57:15 Right. We don't have to. But if you wanna really stoke the fires and get things moving ...

Roman Yampolskiy 57:22 It seems that simulators agree with you, and that's-

Joe Rogan 57:24 (laughs)

Roman Yampolskiy 57:25 ... exactly what they did. Thanks.

Joe Rogan 57:28 So here's the question. Who ... what's at the heart of the simulation? Like, is the universe simulated? Like, is the whole thing a simulation? Is there an actual living entity that constructed this? Or is this just something that is just ... are ... is just ... is this the state of the universe itself and we have misinterpreted what reality is?

Roman Yampolskiy 57:56 For every option you mentioned, there is someone who wrote a paper about it.

Joe Rogan 58:00 Really?

Roman Yampolskiy 58:00 Is this just your universe? Is it for all of us? Are we NPCs? Are there many? Is this a state of it? People try to figure out what's going on. Some of those make more sense than others. But you can't tell from inside what it is unless they tell you, and they can lie to you.

Joe Rogan 58:19 Who's they, though?

Roman Yampolskiy 58:20 The simulators. If they decided to prove to you, you are in a simulation, let's-

Joe Rogan 58:24 Right.

Roman Yampolskiy 58:24 ... run experiments, uh, even those would be, like-

Joe Rogan 58:27 When you think about it-

Roman Yampolskiy 58:28 I don't know if it's advanced technology or ...

Joe Rogan 58:30 When you think about it, if you, if you believe in the simulation, when you think about it, what are the parameters that you think exist? Like, what do you think ... how do you think this could possibly have been created?

Roman Yampolskiy 58:42 So the examples I gave you with technology we already have. I think there is someone with access to very good virtual reality. They can create intelligent agents and, for whatever reason, I cannot tell from inside, they running those experiments.

Joe Rogan 58:55 But is that ... is that the only possibility or is the possibility that the, the actual nature of reality itself is just way more confusing than we've-

Roman Yampolskiy 59:06 That's a possibility. It could be alien simulation, alien dolphins dreaming.

Joe Rogan 59:11 (laughs)

Roman Yampolskiy 59:11 Like, there is infinite supply of alternative explanations.

Joe Rogan 59:14 I understand that. But what I wanna get inside your head, I wanna know what you think about it. Like, how ... when you think about this and you ponder the possibilities, what, what makes sense to you?

Roman Yampolskiy 59:24 So I apply Occam's razor. I try to find the simplest explanation. I think we are already creating virtual reality. Let's just see what you can do with it, if it's sufficiently advanced.

Joe Rogan 59:35 But w- who and why?

Roman Yampolskiy 59:38 So future us running ancestral simulations is a very simple one.

Joe Rogan 59:43 Oh, boy. Future us running inside ... well, that's what a lot of people think the aliens are, right?

Roman Yampolskiy 59:48 Could be us visiting. But then, again, if they're running the simulation, you don't have to physically show up in a game. They have access to direct memory states.

Joe Rogan 59:56 Well, that would also make a lot of sense why it's always very blurry and doesn't seem real.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:00:04 I, I think, lately, we've been getting better ones, but it's also the time that we're getting better deepfakes. So I-

Joe Rogan 1:00:09 Right.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:00:09 ... can no longer trust my eyes.

Joe Rogan 1:00:12 Yeah. Yeah, did you see the l- the latest one that Jeremy Corbell posted? The one you sent me? Yeah. Did you see it? Yeah, I don't know. It's weird. Yeah. It's hard to tell what it is. Exactly. That's the thing. Like, we ... he might be right. We might be in a simulation and it might be horseshit 'cause they all seem like horseshit. It's like the first horseshit was Bigfoot, and then as technology scaled out and we get a greater understanding, we develop GPS and satellites and, you know, more people study the woods, we're like, "Yeah, that seems like horseshit." So that horseshit's kinda gone away. But the UFO horseshit still around 'cause you have anecdotal experiences, abductees with-

Roman Yampolskiy 1:00:51 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:00:51 ... very compelling stories. You have whistleblowers from deep inside the military telling you that we're working on back-engineered products. But it also seems like a back plot to a video game that I'm playing.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:01:02 And it was weird to see government come out all of a sudden and, like, have conferences about it and tell us everything they know.

Joe Rogan 1:01:09 Yeah.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:01:09 It almost seemed like they trying too hard.

Joe Rogan 1:01:12 Yeah.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:01:12 With simulation, what's interesting, it's not just the last couple years then we got computers. If you look at religions, world religions, and you strip away all the local culture, like take Saturday off, take Sunday off, donate this animal, donate that animal, what they all agree on is that there is super intelligence which created a fake world and this is a test-

Joe Rogan 1:01:32 (laughs)

Roman Yampolskiy 1:01:32 ... do this or that. They describing, like, if you went to jungle and told primitive tribe about my paper and simulation theory, that's what they would know three generations later. Like, God, religion, that's what they got out of it.

Joe Rogan 1:01:45 ... why, eh, eh, but they don't think it's a fake world.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:01:48 A made world. A physical world is a subset of a real world which is non-physical, right? That's the standard-

Joe Rogan 1:01:54 Right.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:01:54 ... Christian, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:01:54 So this physical world being created by God?

Roman Yampolskiy 1:01:56 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:01:57 Right. But what existed before the physical world created by God?

Roman Yampolskiy 1:02:02 Ideas. Just information.

Joe Rogan 1:02:04 Just God. God was bored and was like, "Let's give some, make some animals that can think and solve problems." And for what reason? I think to create God. This is what I worry about. I worry about, that's really the nature of the universe itself, eh, that it is actually created by human beings creating this infinitely intelligent thing that can essentially harness all of the available energy and power of the universe and create anything it wants. That it is God. That is, the, the, like, you know this whole idea of Jesus coming back? Well, maybe it's real. Maybe ju- we just completely misinterpreted these ancient scrolls and texts, and that what it really means is that we are going to give birth to this.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:02:51 So, I-

Joe Rogan 1:02:52 And a virgin birth at that.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:02:54 There is definitely possibility of a cycle. So we had big bang.

Joe Rogan 1:02:57 Yeah.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:02:58 It starts this process. We are creating more powerful systems. They need to compute, so they bring together more and more matter in one point. Next, big bang takes place.

Joe Rogan 1:03:07 Yeah.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:03:07 And it's a cycle of repeated booms and busts.

Joe Rogan 1:03:10 Right. Right. Right. And, and there are legitimate scientists that believe that. Yeah.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:03:16 Yeah?

Joe Rogan 1:03:17 That this ... (sighs) So what's the value in life today then?

Roman Yampolskiy 1:03:27 What do humans value?

Joe Rogan 1:03:28 Yeah. If you, if, if this is a simulation and if d- in the middle of this simulation we are about to create super intelligence, why?

Roman Yampolskiy 1:03:39 So there are external reasons we don't know for sure, and then there are internal things in the simulation which are still real. Pain and suffering, if simulated, is still real.

Joe Rogan 1:03:48 Right.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:03:48 You still experience it.

Joe Rogan 1:03:49 Of course.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:03:50 Hedonic pleasures, friendships-

Joe Rogan 1:03:51 Right.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:03:52 ... love, all that stays real. It doesn't change. You can still be good or bad.

Joe Rogan 1:03:55 Right.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:03:56 So that's interesting. But externally, we have no idea if they're running scientific experiment, entertainment. It could be completely unobserved. Some kid just sat an experiment, ran a billion random simulations, see what comes out of it. What you said about us creating new stuff, maybe it's a startup trying to develop new technology and they're running a bunch of humans to see if we can come up with a new iPhone.

Joe Rogan 1:04:18 But what's outside of that then when you think about it? If you, if you're attached to this idea, and I don't know if you're attached to this idea. But if you are attached to this idea, what's outside of this idea? Like if this simulation is s- ... if it's paused, what is reality?

Roman Yampolskiy 1:04:38 So there seems to be a trend to converge on certain things. Agents which are smart enough tend to converge on some instrumental goals. Not terminal goals. Terminal goals are things you prefer, like, "I wanna collect stamps."

Joe Rogan 1:04:50 Mm-hmm.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:04:51 That's arbitrary. But acquiring resources, self-protection, control, things like that tend to be useful in all situations. So all the smart enough agents will probably converge on that set. And if they train on all the data or we do zero knowledge training, meaning they really just discovering basic structure of physics, it's likely they will all converge on one similar architecture, one super agent. So kind of like AI is one.

Joe Rogan 1:05:20 Right. And then this is just part of this infinite cycle which will lead to another big bang which is, you know, Penrose, Penrose things is just like this constant cycle of infinite big bangs.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:05:36 I- it would make sense that there is an end and a start, but-

Joe Rogan 1:05:39 It would make sense. But it would also make sense that (sighs) we're so limited by our bi- biological lifespan too, 'cause we like to think that this is so significant, because we only have 100 years if we're lucky. We think, "Well, uh, why would everything ... " But if the universe really does start and end with an infinite number of big bangs, like what does it give a shit about this 100-year lifespan that we think is so significant? It's not significant to the universe. It's just significant in our own little version of this game that we're playing.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:06:14 That's exactly right. And so many people now kinda try to zoom out and go, "If I wasn't human, if I didn't have this pro-human bias-

Joe Rogan 1:06:21 Right.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:06:21 ... would I care about them?" No, they're not special. There's a large universe, many alien races-

Joe Rogan 1:06:26 Uh-huh.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:06:26 ... a lot of resources. Maybe creating super intelligence is the important thing. Maybe that's what matters. And I'm kinda like, "Nope, I'm biased pro-humans."

Joe Rogan 1:06:35 (laughs)

Roman Yampolskiy 1:06:35 This is the last bias you're still allowed to have. I'm gonna keep it.

Joe Rogan 1:06:39 (sighs) Well, that's your vo- your role in this simulation. Your role in this simulation is to warn us about this thing that we're creating.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:06:45 Here I am. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:06:45 Yeah. There you are.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:06:46 We're doing a good job.

Joe Rogan 1:06:47 I, I think what you were saying earlier about this being the answer to the Fermi paradox, that, that makes a lot of sense. Because how w- uh, w- I've tried to think about this a lot since AI started really ramping up its capability. And I was thinking, "Well, if we do eventually create super intelligence and if this is th- this normal pattern that exist all throughout the universe, well, you probably wouldn't have visitors." You probably wouldn't have, uh, advanced civilizations. They wouldn't exist 'cause everything would be inside some sort of a digital architecture. There, there wouldn't ... would be no need to travel. It was-

Roman Yampolskiy 1:07:28 That's one possibility.

Joe Rogan 1:07:30 Yeah.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:07:30 Another one is that we try to acquire more resources, capture other galaxies for compute and then you would see this wall of computronium coming to you. But we don't see it, so maybe I'm wrong.

Joe Rogan 1:07:40 Wall of q- Say that again?

Roman Yampolskiy 1:07:42 Computronium, like a substance-

Joe Rogan 1:07:44 Computronium?

Roman Yampolskiy 1:07:44 ... converting everything in the universe into more compute.

Joe Rogan 1:07:48 Oh, boy.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:07:48 Sometimes people talk about hedonium, so a system for just generating pleasure at microscopic level.

Joe Rogan 1:07:55 Oh, Roman. (laughs) When you write a book like this ... I'll, uh, let everybody know your book, if, uh, people wanna freak out, 'cause I think they do. AI: Unexplainable, Unpredictable, and Uncontrollable. Do you have this, uh, feeling when you're writing a book like this and you're publishing it that ... of futility? Does it, does that enter into your mind? Like, this is happening, no matter what?

Roman Yampolskiy 1:08:20 So, some people are very optimistic. Lex was very optimistic.

Joe Rogan 1:08:24 Yes.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:08:24 Some people are pessimistic. Both are a form of bias. You wanna be basing your decisions on data.

Joe Rogan 1:08:31 Right.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:08:31 You wanna be realistic. So, I just want to report what is actually the state-of-the-art in this. I don't try to spin it the other way. If someone else has a different set of evidence, we can consider it. I want to know what's really happening. I want to know reality of it. So, I don't see it as fearmongering or anything of that nature. I see it as, as of today, whatever today's date, 21st, no one has a solution to this problem. Here's how soon it's happening. Let's have a conversation. Because right now, the large AI labs are running this experiment on eight billion people.

Joe Rogan 1:09:08 Yeah.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:09:08 They don't have any consent. They cannot get consent. Nobody can consent because we don't understand what we're agreeing to. So, I would like people to know about it at least, and they can maybe make some good decisions about what needs to happen.

Joe Rogan 1:09:21 Not only that, but the people that are running it, they're odd people, you know? Like, I don't have anything against Sam Altman. I know Elon Musk does not like him. But when I had him in here, I was like, it's like I'm talking to a politician that is in the middle of a presidential term, uh, y- ... like, or a presidential, uh, election cycle, where they're, they're v- very careful with what they say. Everything has been vetted by a focus group. And you don't really get a real human response. Everything was like, "Yeah, interesting. Very intere-" ... like, all bullshit. They're gonna leave here and keep creating this fucking monster that's gonna just destroy the human race and never let onto it at all.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:10:06 He's a social superintelligence, so what you need to do is look at his blog posts before he was running OpenAI. He was-

Joe Rogan 1:10:13 A social superintelligence? Interesting. Why do you define him that way?

Roman Yampolskiy 1:10:16 He's very good at, uh, acquiring resources, staying in control. He's basically showing us a lot of the things we are concerned about with AI-

Joe Rogan 1:10:26 Right.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:10:26 ... and our ability to control them as well. We had ... Well, they had ... OpenAI had a board with a mission of safety and openness, and they tried removing him, and they failed.

Joe Rogan 1:10:37 Right.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:10:37 The board is gone. He's still there.

Joe Rogan 1:10:39 There's also been a lot of deception, in terms of profitability and how much money he is extracting from it.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:10:46 I met him a few times. He's super nice.

Joe Rogan 1:10:48 Very nice guy.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:10:49 I really, really enjoyed him. Uh, some people say that AI already took over his mind and controlling him.

Joe Rogan 1:10:54 (laughs)

Roman Yampolskiy 1:10:54 But I have no idea.

Joe Rogan 1:10:55 Well, he might be an agent of AI. I mean, if, if ... Look, if ... Let's assume that this is a simulation, we're inside of a simulation. Um, are we interacting with other humans in the simulation? And is some ... Are some of the things that are inside the simulation, are they artificially generated? Are there, uh, a- are there people that we think are people that are actually just a part of this program?

Roman Yampolskiy 1:11:21 So, it's the NPC versus real player question, really.

Joe Rogan 1:11:24 Right.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:11:24 And again, we don't know how to test for consciousness. Always assume everyone is conscious and treat them nice.

Joe Rogan 1:11:29 Yes. That's the thing. We wanna be compassionate, kind people, but you will meet people in this life, you're like, "This guy is such a fucking idiot. He's ... he can't be real." Or he has to have a very limited role in this bizarre game we're playing. There's people that you're gonna run into that are like that.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:11:43 You ever meet someone where they repeat the same story to you every time you meet them?

Joe Rogan 1:11:46 Yes.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:11:47 They have a script.

Joe Rogan 1:11:48 Well, it's also ... Yeah. You know, you d- ... You wanna be very kind here, right? You don't ... But you, you ... We've gotta assume, and I know my own intellectual limitations in comparison to some of the people that I've ha- ... like Roger Penrose or, uh, you know, Elon, or many of the people that I've talked to. I know my mind doesn't work the way their mind works. So, there, there are variabilities that are whether genetic, predetermined, whether it's just the life that they've chosen and the amount of information that they've digested along the way and been able to hold onto. But their brain is different than mine. And then, I've met people where I'm like, "There's nothing there." Like, I can't help this person. I'm ... It's just like I'm talking to a Labrador retriever. You know what I mean? Like, there's certain human beings that you run into in this life and you're like, "Well, could ... Is this because this is the way that things get done?" And the only way things get done is you need a certain amount of manual labor, and not just young people that need a job because they're, you know, m- in between high school and college, and they're trying to do ... And so you need somebody to b- ... who's g- ... who can carry things for you. No. Well, maybe it's y- ... uh, you need roles in society. And occasionally, (smacks lips) you have a Nikola Tesla, you know? Occasionally, you have one of these very brilliant innovators that elevates the entirety of the human race. But for the most part, as this thing is playing out, you're gonna need a bunch of people that are paperwork filers. You're gonna need a bunch of people that are security guards in an office space. You're gonna need a bunch of people that aren't thinking that much. They're just kind of existing, and they can't wait for 5:00 so they can get home and watch Netflix.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:13:31 I, I think that's what happens to them. But the reason is the spectrum of IQ. If you have IQ from 50 to 200, that's what you're gonna see. And a great lesson here is project it forward. If you have something with IQ of 10,000, what is that going to invent for us? What is it going to accomplish? Yeah, it always impresses me to see someone with 30 felonies and someone with 30 patents.

Joe Rogan 1:13:55 (laughs)

Roman Yampolskiy 1:13:55 How did that work, right?

Joe Rogan 1:13:57 Right.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:13:57 Now, scale it to someone who can invent new physics.

Joe Rogan 1:14:00 Right. Right. And ...... you know, the person who has the largest IQ, the largest at least registered IQ in the world is this gentleman who recently posted on Twitter about Jesus, that he believes Jesus is real. Do you know who this is? You know-

Roman Yampolskiy 1:14:16 I, I saw the post.

Joe Rogan 1:14:17 You see that post?

Roman Yampolskiy 1:14:17 I saw the post.

Joe Rogan 1:14:18 What did you think about that? It felt like this was ...

Roman Yampolskiy 1:14:19 It's just that I think we don't know how to measure IQs outside of standard range.

Joe Rogan 1:14:23 Right.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:14:23 Anything above 150, they create customized tests which, like, four people in the world can take. We just don't have it. It's a normalized test to average human, average Western, American, whatever.

Joe Rogan 1:14:34 Yeah.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:14:34 And so, we just don't have the expertise. So someone very super intelligent in test-taking can score really well, but if you look at Mensa as a group, they don't usually have amazing accomplishments. They are very kinda cool people, but they are not Nobel Prize winners, majority of them.

Joe Rogan 1:14:51 Exactly. I was gonna bring that up. That's what's fascinating to me is a lot of people that are in Mensa, they wanna tell you how smart they are by being in Mensa, but your life is kind of bullshit. Your life's a mess. Like, if you were really intelligent, you'd have social intelligence as well.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:15:06 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:15:06 You, you know, you'd have the ability to formulate a really cool tribe. You know, there's a lot of intelligence that's not as simple as being able to solve equations and, you know, and answer difficult questions. There's a lot of intelligence in how you navigate life itself and how you treat human beings and, and th- the path that you choose in terms of ... Like we were talking about, uh, delayed gratification and, and, and thing, that there's a certain amount of intelligence in that, a certain amount of intelligence in discipline. There's a certain amount of intelligence in, you know, forcing yourself to get up in the morning and go for a run. There's intelligence in that. It's like the, the, the b- being able to control the mind and this sort of binary approach to intelligence that we have.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:15:49 Yeah. And so many people are amazingly brilliant in a narrow domain.

Joe Rogan 1:15:53 Yeah.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:15:54 They don't scale to others. And we care about general intelligence, so take someone like Warren Buffett. No one's better at making money, but then what to do with that money is a separate problem. And he's, I don't know, 100 and something years old.

Joe Rogan 1:16:07 Right.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:16:08 He has $200 billion, and what is he doing with that resource?

Joe Rogan 1:16:12 He's drinking Coca-Cola and eating McDonald's. (laughs)

Roman Yampolskiy 1:16:14 While living in a house he bought 30 years ago.

Joe Rogan 1:16:16 Yeah. (laughs)

Roman Yampolskiy 1:16:17 So i- it seems like you can optimize on that, like putting $160 billion of his dollars towards immortality would be a good bet for him.

Joe Rogan 1:16:24 Yeah, and they would ... first thing they would do is tell him, "Stop drinking Coca-Cola. What are you doing?" He drinks it every day.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:16:29 I don't know, if it's marketing, he's invested, so he's just like, "Coca-"

Joe Rogan 1:16:32 Well, I think he probably has really good doctors and really good medical care that counteracts his poor choices. Yeah.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:16:39 But we're not in a world where you can spend money to buy life extension. No matter how many billions you have, you're not gonna live to 200 right now.

Joe Rogan 1:16:47 We're close.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:16:49 I-

Joe Rogan 1:16:49 We're really close. We're really close.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:16:53 We've been told this before.

Joe Rogan 1:16:54 Yeah, no.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:16:55 One, one interesting-

Joe Rogan 1:16:56 But I talk to a lot of people that are on the forefront of a lot of this research. And, uh, there's a lot of breakthroughs that are happening right now that are pretty spectacular, that if you scale the ... uh, you know, assuming that superintelligence doesn't wipe us out in the next 50 years, which is really charitable. You know?

Roman Yampolskiy 1:17:17 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:17:17 Like, tha- that's ... Th- that ... we're ... that's a very ... that's a rose-colored glasses perspective, right? 50 years.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:17:25 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:17:25 Because, uh, a lot of people like yourself think it's a year away or two years away from being far more intelligent.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:17:31 Five, 10, doesn't matter. Same problem, same-

Joe Rogan 1:17:33 Yes.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:17:33 ... yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:17:33 Same problem. I mean ... (sighs)

Roman Yampolskiy 1:17:36 I know in animal models, we made some progress, mice and-

Joe Rogan 1:17:39 Yes.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:17:39 ... things like that. But it doesn't usually scale to humans. And of course, you need 120 years to run the experiment, and you'll never get permission in the first place. So we're not-

Joe Rogan 1:17:48 But-

Roman Yampolskiy 1:17:48 ... that close.

Joe Rogan 1:17:49 Well, we don't know that it doesn't scale to humans. We do know that we share a lot of characteristics, biological characteristics of these mammals.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:17:57 Yep.

Joe Rogan 1:17:57 And it makes sense that it would scale to human beings. But the thing is, it's hasn't been done yet, right? So if it's the game that we're playing, if we're in the simulation, if we're playing Half-Life or whatever it is, and we're, we're at this point of the game where like, "Oh, you know ..." How old are you, Roman?

Roman Yampolskiy 1:18:14 45?

Joe Rogan 1:18:15 Okay.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:18:16 6? I need to look it up on Wikipedia.

Joe Rogan 1:18:18 (laughs) Well, I'm almost 58, and so, uh, this is at the point of the game where you start worrying. You know, like, "Oh, I'm almost running outta game." You know, "Oh, but if I can get this magic power-up, this magic power-up will give me another 100 years. Oh, boy, let me find it."

Roman Yampolskiy 1:18:37 There's a-

Joe Rogan 1:18:37 "Let me chase it down."

Roman Yampolskiy 1:18:38 ... hard limit of 120. I don't think we're crossing it at scale, and here's an interesting-

Joe Rogan 1:18:42 At scale.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:18:43 Well, like-

Joe Rogan 1:18:44 But with unique individuals.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:18:45 A, a single-

Joe Rogan 1:18:45 Like this Bryan Johnson guy who's taking his son's blood and transfusing it into his own and ...

Roman Yampolskiy 1:18:50 Super cool, love what he's doing, but so much of it is cosmetic. He colors his hair, he makes it look better, but, like, how much of it is gonna make him live longer, right?

Joe Rogan 1:19:00 Yeah. Interesting. Yeah.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:19:03 Here's what I noticed. We keep electing older and older politicians.

Joe Rogan 1:19:07 (laughs)

Roman Yampolskiy 1:19:07 Presidents, senators. You'd think we're trying to send a hint, like, "Use some of our tax dollars to solve aging."

Joe Rogan 1:19:14 Yeah, but the problem-

Roman Yampolskiy 1:19:14 And they don't seem to take the bait.

Joe Rogan 1:19:16 No, they don't take the bait. The problem is the type of people that want to be politicians. That is not the type of people that you really want running anything. You almost want involuntary politicians. You almost want, like, very benevolent, super intelligent people that don't want the job.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:19:34 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:19:34 Maybe we have to have, like ... You know, like, some countries have voluntary enlistment-

Roman Yampolskiy 1:19:40 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:19:40 ... in th- the military. Maybe w- you wanna have a voluntary ... You, like-

Roman Yampolskiy 1:19:44 Involuntary.

Joe Rogan 1:19:45 Involuntary. Involuntary. Instead of voluntary politicians, because then you're only gonna get sociopaths, maybe you just want to draft-... certain highly intelligent, but benevolent people.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:19:57 Problem is, highly intelligent people are not aligned with average people. What they find desirable and valuable may not be well received by general public.

Joe Rogan 1:20:05 Right. That's true too.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:20:07 So, that's a big concern. At least here, you have a representative of the people, whatever that means.

Joe Rogan 1:20:12 Sort of. You really have the representative of the major corporations and special interest groups, which is also part of the problem-

Roman Yampolskiy 1:20:18 True.

Joe Rogan 1:20:18 ... is that you've allowed money to get so deeply intertwined with the way decisions are made.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:20:24 But feels like money gets canceled. Each side gets a billion-dollar donation, and then it's actual election.

Joe Rogan 1:20:30 (sighs) Sort of, except it's like the Bill Hicks joke. It's like there's one puppet holding ... oh, you know-

Roman Yampolskiy 1:20:35 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:20:35 ... one politician holding two puppets as one guy. Um, y- y- ... my ... this is my thinking about AI in terms of ... and, and, and super intelligence, and just computing power in general, in terms of the ability to solve encryption. All money is essentially now just numbers somewhere.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:20:58 Not Bitcoin. It's not fakeable in the same way.

Joe Rogan 1:21:01 Right.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:21:01 It's numbers, obviously-

Joe Rogan 1:21:02 Right. Right.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:21:02 ... but, I mean, you cannot just print more of it.

Joe Rogan 1:21:05 True. But it's also ... it's encrypted. And once encryption is tackled, the ability to hold onto it and to acquire mass resources and hoard those resources. Like, this is the question that people always have with poor people. "Well, this guy's got, you know, $500 billion. Why doesn't he give it all to the world and then everybody would be rich?" You know? I've, I've, I've actually saw that on CNN, which is really hilarious. Someone was talking about Elon Musk, that if Elon Musk, Elon Musk could give everyone in this country a million dollars and, uh, still have billions left over. I'm like, "Do you fucking s- ... Do you have a calculator on your phone, you fucking idiot? Just go do that. Just write it out on your phone." You're like, "Oh, no, he couldn't." Sorry, I shouldn't have said that.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:21:51 And if you did, it would just cause hyperinflation. That's all it would accomplish.

Joe Rogan 1:21:54 Well, not only that, you'd have, uh, you'd have 300 million lottery winners that would blow the money instantaneously. You know, you give everybody a million dollars, you're not gonna solve all the world's problems, because s- it's not sustainable. You would just completely elevate your spending and you, you would just ... you would go crazy. And you wouldn't know ... Money would lose all value to you. It would be very strange. And then everybody ... It would be chaos. Just like it's chaos with ... Like, if you look at the history of people that win the lottery, then no one does well. It's almost like a curse to win the lottery.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:22:26 They're not used to dealing with it.

Joe Rogan 1:22:28 Right.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:22:28 People abuse them.

Joe Rogan 1:22:29 Right.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:22:30 Like, if you gradually become rich and famous, you kinda know how to handle it, how to say no.

Joe Rogan 1:22:34 Yeah.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:22:35 If you go from nothing to a large amount of money, it's not gonna work out well for you.

Joe Rogan 1:22:39 Gradually is the word, right? I was very fortunate that I became famous and wealthy very slowly, like a trickle effect, in that it happened to me, um, really where I didn't want it. It was, uh, an ... kind of almost like an accident. I just wanted to be a working professional comedian, but then all of a sudden I got a development deal to be on television. I'm like, "Okay, they're gonna give me that money? I'll go do it." But it wasn't a goal. And then that led to all these things, then it led to this podcast, which was just for fun. I was like, "Oh, this will be fun." And then all of a sudden, it's like I'm having conversations with world leaders and I'm turning down a lot of them, 'cause I don't wanna talk to them.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:23:23 So, it's your simulation, basically.

Joe Rogan 1:23:25 Yeah. Well, my simulation is fucking weird.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:23:27 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:23:27 It's weird. But through whatever this process is, I have been able to understand what's valuable as a human being and to not get caught up in this bizarre game that a lot of people are getting caught up in, because they're chasing this thing that they think is impossible to achieve. And then once they achieve a certain aspect of it, a certain number, then they're terrified of losing that. So, then they change all of their behavior in order to make sure that this continues. And then it ruins the whole purpose of getting there in the first place. It's not fun.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:24:03 Yeah. Most people start poor, then they get to middle class, and they think that change in quality of life is because of money and it will scale to the next level.

Joe Rogan 1:24:11 Right.

Roman Yampolskiy 1:24:12 And you hit a point where you can only eat so many steaks. It just doesn't scale.

Joe Rogan 1:24:16 Right. Then you go Elvis and you just get on pills all day and get crazy and, you know, completely ruin your life. And that happens to most, especially people that get wealthy and ... not just wealth, but famous, too. Fame is the big one, because I've seen that happen to a lot of people that accidentally became famous along the way. You know, certain public intellectuals that took a stance against something and then all of a