Jerry Kaplan on Why AI Won’t Kill Us All

This is a made-up risk. It's mainly there because of science fiction, because of the movies and the entertainment industry, and everybody's been bombarded with this for years and years and years. And so it's nothing like, oh my God, you know, it's like worrying about uh vampires. And now the good fight with Yasha Monk. The whole world, including, I must say, me, is very worried about AI safety at the moment.

We have seen a number of really concerning instances of AI agents breaking out of a sandbox, accessing the internet, communicating with each other, coordinating their actions in ways that the people who created them were unaware of. And this has led to calls for much more legislation about AI safety. It has led to some of the leaders of the biggest AI companies saying that they might try to slow down the development of artificial intelligence. Well, my guest today is a little bit of a contrarian on this subject. He believes that AI is incredibly impactful, incredibly intelligent, it's going to transform the world, but he does not think.

that the public has really understood what happened in this infamous hugging face incident, or indeed that we should be as worried about p-doom, the likelihood that an out-of-control AI system might somehow decimate or kill or enslave humanity than many people think. We have a really interesting conversation about the nature of the intelligence that AI systems have, why it is that they may not be as dangerous as some people say, and as you'll see, we have some robust back and forth and disagreement about this. It's a really clarifying conversation if you want to make sense of this current moment in artificial intelligence. Jerry Kaplan, my guest this week, is a tech entrepreneur who has co-founded important companies in artificial intelligence and the internet. He nowadays teaches at Stanford University about the social and economic impact of artificial intelligence.

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