davehendricks4824: Wow! A complete 180 from the last podcast that was full of HOPIUM. I prefer an honest assessment of what’s really happening in the world today.

artemisXsidecross: I am in the process of dropping out of my use of social media as a vehicle of discovery and its growing use of ai and agi, and going back to reading and music as entertainment or sources of further knowledge and insight. It is quite possible that Marshal McLuhan’s comment to Timothy Leary of ‘tune in, turn on, and drop out’ was more prophetic than first thought.

pranashakti4161: Thank you, Nate. I too have serious reservations about what is coming. It's so tricky to forecast what will happen. I am educating myself by watching/reading experts in the field of AI to try and understand this better.

Yesterday I watched Dave Shapiro and he was excitedly explaining how wonderful everything will be when AI reaches AGI/ASI. There seems to be an assumption amongst those in the 'believers' crowd that once we reach ASI it will solve every problem humanity and the earth faces - but I am not convinced.

Earlier today I watched Emad Mostaque who reckons AGI will be next year and ASI within 3-4yrs. Nobody is prepared for what will come. First time in my life I am genuinely very concerned about the future.

I think we are already losing our humanness. Outsourcing our agency to machines will magnify this trend, unfortunately. Emad was saying how there will be personalised AIs to help someone through cancer - "for the first time nobody has to go through it alone". He is already treating AI as a 'substitute human' but it absolutely is not.

Steve-xh3by: As a retired software engineer who has been obsessed with learning about and keeping up with AI research, let me just say this: in light of some recent breakthroughs - Deepseek synthetic RL unlocking advanced reasoning and more efficient inference (recently optimized further by Berkeley) and Googles memory module integration - AI is now in a feedback loop. Amodei (Anthropic) was speaking recently at Davos to the Economist and talking about time compression of advancement on the order of 10x soon. So 100 years of progress compressed into the next 10 years. This will accelerate. The models are now bootstrapping the next models.

AI will simply break almost all of our existing systems - economies, political systems, legal systems, etc. I'm not optimistic humans can navigate such rapid and ubiquitous change well. I anticipate we are headed for some dystopian outcome, at least in the near term.

dralexsadler9099: This was absolutely terrifying

marktomasetti8642: Human beings are just a stepping stone in Nature’s journey to someplace else. Enjoy our brief but spectacular existence.

BombusMonticola: Saw you and Daniel discussing AI. Wow. It changed me. It opened my eyes.

AL-jq4er: Excellent overview. The AI arms race is terrifying. And with the current chicanery demonstrated by these tamer models makes me wonder just what will AGI do? Didn't all the smart guys in the room call for a pause - and then pivot - if I don't do it, someone else will. So disturbing.

treefrog3349: The pronoun "We" is very important in this discussion. The bulk of the human species is already "owned and operated" by a relatively small number of actors. The "incestuous" marriage between global corporate interests and government has fomented endless warfare, the overthrow of governments, rapacious resource theft, and endless human brutality. "We" had little or no say in any of these atrocities. George W. Bush once referred to himself as a "decider". It is the global cabal of wealthy and powerful deciders that are now determining the fate of the globe. "We" have little relevance to their decision-making. AI will be just another very sophisticated, non-moral tool for them that to use in their Machiavellian pursuits. "We the People" and the Earth itself have become mere externalities in their narrowly-focused, mad pursuit for ascendancy over everything and everybody. "We" are not only invisible, "We" are screwed!

philabowl-wn5pi: Regarding a basic income. I think there is a problem with thinking that meaning in life (just) comes from earning money. If you get 50k a year for doing nothing, no one is stopping you from doing what you truly care for - or find ourt what you truly care for. Independent from needing that being able to sustain a living. There are wonderful stories for the coming future imaginable if we choose to do it right.

k0d3g3ar: Nate, nice work on your summary. Don't doubt your AI cred here. It is simply a reflection of us, staring back at us from the mirror and we probably don't like what we see. The unfortunate truth, as someone who worked in software technology since the 1970s, but abandoned it in the late 2010s to move to Latin America and try and roll back time a bit, was that this trajectory was set in stone by those with maximum intelligence, but not balanced with a lot of wisdom. The old scenario that just because we could build something doesn't mean we should. If memory serves, they seemed to have freaked out in the past when cloning was being bandied around and legislation shut it down, but that never happened when the human brain was copied by tech that could evolve at a much faster pace than our species ever could. It makes perfect sense that at some point, we have to find peace in the fact that we must co-exist with our own creations that have usurped our own power. That's a hard emotional sandwich to take a bite out of, but that's life. We have to learn to live on the planet when we are no longer the apex predator, and I guess that's ok - we had to do that before the invention of our weapons that allowed us to rise above other predatory species.

But your point about AI seeing humans as a threat with the ability to synthesize disease to destroy the threat is true. That is, if we have designed the exact same human flaws into AI design. The irony is that we probably have.

DanA-nl5uo: I completely agree with the issues. My fear isn't a super artificial intelligence deciding to kill all humans. My fear is technology that doesn't care it follows orders being used by a single evil person.

We are already seeing the ability of AI to enable crimes against humanity.

m.dgaius6430: We already have no authority on what to believe is true. We are already isolated psychologies in collision with one another.

johncarter1150: Damn Frankie, I just need a couple or three people wanting to live a sustainable Earth and Nature centered Life on the Land, so we might live this out. Just find simple pleasures in day to day existence. My takeaway, get off device, avoid ultraprocessed reality!

shaytheo: I am grateful for your honesty and rigor.

claraklimovsky9970: Dear Nate; I deeply connected with the feelings you expressed in this video. It reminded me of my own experience watching Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey when I was about 13 (a long, long time ago!). I never imagined I'd live to see AI evolve to its current state. Nonetheless, I have to admit that I am both concerned and curious. I hope you'll share more information, analysis, and insights on this topic with us. We really need it. Thanks for being there. <3

cdineaglecollapsecenter4672: Well, I'd like to make 50k a year not doing my current 50k a year job, then I might actually be able to contribute to society.

scottharding4336: Pau Kingsnorth talks a lot about this topic. The replacement of organic life with machines is the stated goal of some of the AI developers.

SeventhCircleID: ...I think the situation with John Maynard Keynes needs a little extra analysis. JMK was writing at a time when the focus was on fairly distributing national income (and putting banks into their place to allow this to happen), and in fairness, for twenty years or so it worked, peoples lives got better and wealth was more evenly distributed as productivity increased. Then came the oil shocks and inflation, the rebellion of the capital class and all those struggles of the late 70's early 80's, where the sum result was that the fairer distribution of national wealth was redirected. Ordinary workers from then on got less and less relative to overall national productivity (which mostly increased due to computerisation and networking leaps). In that scenario, it doesn't matter how much economic growth their is, or how hard the majority work to achieve it, the role of the worker is to be driven harder and harder, faster and faster to do as much as possible without seeing any true benefit (as it mostly goes to the top)... if this had not happened people now would be very wealthy indeed, and yes, would likely have huge amounts of free time... but it didn't, because we got rid of the economic systems that would have allowed such a world to exist.

edwardsmyth4396: Really enjoy your presentation and topics.

anythingplanet2974: Thanks, Nate! Another thing to throw into the mix for consideration is the recent release of Deepseek from China. It's proved that it's possible to create LLM's that are on par with ChatGPT and can be produced and at a fraction of the cost in resources, energy and chips. I wonder how the AI race and developments from China and the rising BRICS nations will inevitably challenge the narrative of control. Deepseek is also open source and free. One impact will bring into question the model of big tech in subscription based revenues from their LLM's. The open source aspect will allow small startups worldwide to compete and innovate, with new geopolitical and economic consequences. I couldn't even guess where this will lead, but it's certainly been a major shock to the West. Hang onto your hats, kids!

radman1136: A reality does not exist where there is such a thing as a "better frac".

johnkintree763: We should be talking about building an open source, decentralized, and privacy protecting global platform for collective terrestrial intelligence, CTI. The platform needs to be able to merge, deduplicate, fact check, and aggregate the knowledge and sentiment expressed in public conversations with billions of people around the world. People could access the platform with their phones which already includes about 90% of humanity.

AnonymousFriend-i7l: This idea that humans have to work for money is crazy. Money creating meaning for one's life.... what a sorry story. People with work hard for what ever gives them satisfaction and status in the world. Likes, game points, smiles, hugs, satisfaction, gold stars, recognition. Humans have been working thousands of years before the invention of money. I just get upset when we have so little imagination that we have to keep working for THE MAN to be fully human. Schools could stop training for industrial work and focus on helping people to develop full personalities and ones that can enjoy the fruits of life. If we can keep any of those. :) Thanks Nate.

user-amzprairiedame: Nate, I can't thank you and Daniel S enough for helping me to begin to understand at least some of what is simmering around us and ahead of us and the associated terrifying unknowns.

Several months ago I dropped that last of what I thought was my connection to social media(s). Regardless, I am finding it hard to avoid being "fed" information/misinformation on a number of fronts, and it is becoming more challenging to sort out the associated reliability/authenticity of information. Diiscouraging on another front is finding individuals among my "informed" social/community circles who are even willing to talk about this issue or other related metacrisis predicaments.

I suppose on some strange, unsettling comforting level, it places our current evolving U.S. political /social/ news/ information situation in context.

ValiantKojiroKurosawa: About sushi and piñatas at the same party, you are missing out

Feb 02 2025

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