#385 — AI Utopia

Sam Harris speaks with Nick Bostrom about ongoing progress in
artificial intelligence. They discuss the twin concerns about the
failure of alignment and the failure to make progress, why smart
people don’t perceive the risk of superintelligent AI, the
governance risk, path dependence and "knotty problems," the idea
of a solved world, Keynes’s predictions about human productivity,
the uncanny valley of utopia, the replacement of human labor and
other activities, meaning and purpose, digital isolation and
plugging into something like the Matrix, pure hedonism, the
asymmetry between pleasure and pain, increasingly subtle
distinctions in experience, artificial purpose, altering human
values at the level of the brain, ethical changes in the absence
of extreme suffering, our cosmic endowment, longtermism, problems
with consequentialism, the ethical conundrum of dealing with
small probabilities of large outcomes, and other topics.


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