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hello and welcome to. involving at a cost make and artificial intelligence no longer just a hollywood dream as a path ahead of us a dangerous one will our lives be real while i'm here in the universities all this questions to one of the most prominent thinkers in this field nick bostrom . it's really great to have you with us a year a philosopher a year author who writes about what's going to happen to us basically possibly. so

one of the ideas that you put forward is this idea of vulnerable world yes so correct me if i were wrong but if i get this correctly it's it's basically that humanity may come up with a technology that may do this to extension and therefore we would need computer surveillance while that might be an oversimplification but the vulnerable world hypothesis. is the hypothesis that at some level of technological development it gets to be said to destroy 6 basic things so that by default one civilization reaches the level of development. will get that a stated. and there are a couple of different ways in which this could be true one maybe the easiest way to see is. if it just because very easy at some level of development even for a small group or individual to cause must destruction so imagine if nuclear weapons for example instead of for acquiring these rare difficult to obtain real materials

like plutonium or highly enriched uranium imagine if it had been an easy way to do it like baking sand in the microwave and you could have. the energy of the atom and if that had turned out to be the way things are then maybe at that point civilization would have come to an end then. with surveillance from what i understand you can't really predict future nothing can mean you can survey people and watch what they're doing but then they will be inventing things under surveillance but you want know that it is detrimental until something has gone wrong that the fact of surveillance wouldn't really prevent well so if. things start the world at some level of technology is vulnerable in this sense one can then obviously wants to ask well what could we possibly do in that situation to prevent the world from actually getting destroyed and it does look like insurgents in our house. ubiquitous surveillance would be the only thing that

could possibly prevent that. now would even that work well i mean pads on the specifics of this narrow so you'd have to think just how easy would it be to cost destruction would you just snap your finger or say like a magic world the world blows up well then maybe surveillance wouldn't suffice but suppose it's something that takes several weeks and you have to you know do build something in your apartment and maybe require some skill you know at that point you could imagine a very fine grained. surveillance infrastructure having that kept giving the capable it didn't intercept. but also how much destruction is. created if somebody does this is it one city blows up or the whole of the earth but maybe you could afford a few sweeping through the net so you'd have to done look at the specifics now of course surveillance in itself also is a source of risk to human civilization you could imagine various kinds of total

terror and regimes becoming more effective more permanent. and peter surveillance in itself is a tell it hereon regime. what do you mean when i mean if you're surveilled 21st 7 of us that in essence. computer police state well it depends on i think what this information would be used for. if it so that some. say central authority micro-manages what everybody is allowed to do with our lives then certainly that would be a total of terror and turn on president a degree. but suppose it was a kind of passive surveillance and people just went on with our lives and ollie if somebody actually tried to create this mass destruction thing would there be a response. in that scenario maybe it would not look so totally. i really realistic

though because as soon as someone is in charge of this total surveillance and if it's passive like you're saying for very specific things like total destruction of a city or the world they would for sure take advantage of it it's possible that i'm learning i mean i'm going to just the way humans are made yeah well i think to varying degrees there are institutional checks and balances in different colors right now we have a lot of very powerful tools and in some places of the world they're used by despots and you know other parts of the world they're used by the more democratically accountable and liberal governments and the thing in between certainly it would be the case that if you created this kind of extremely fine grained surveillance infrastructure that's a group create. a very substantial danger that either immediately or after some period of time it would be captured and by some nefarious group or individual and

then used for oppressive purposes that certainly i think that that is one major reason for why. people are rightly in my view very suspicious of the surveillance technologies and whether. it could still be the case because it's not something we get to choose that the world is so configured that at some level of technology the destruction is much easier than creation or defense and it could just be that in that situation the only thing that would prevent actual destruction would be a very fine grained surveillance i'm just you know for you me for doubting this a little just because i've seen with my own eyes what a police state is a little bit so it never really works unless it's sort of attack you and the world is so diverse and we're also different and i've seen it with my own eyes that human imperfections and disorganization you know they just somehow always grow through any restrictions. or norms just like graphs repayment you know yeah well so what is

it precisely that you're not convinced about that that could be some level of technology at which destruction because easy or that so impossible surveillance could prevent that the world from going to your idea so leave that decimal surveillance will still have to interact somehow with you know once that's what is not convincing to me right so i think there it becomes a matter of degree which set of sonora would you be able to provide the world from getting the story surveillance up so take today's world were massive destruction is possible but it's also very hard like nuclear weapons let us say like so that we can have. reasonable ability even with present day surveillance technology to detect if a nation is building a secret program. so if you then roll it back you require less for all materials less big installations fewer people working on this it gets harder and

harder to detect. with current technology but this is a very rapidly advancing field with say facial recognition software that you could have cameras that could monitor in principle you could monitor every body and all you could imagine even if you want an extreme case but just to kind of the most straight theoretical possibility of modern if everybody wore a collar all the time with with cameras and microphones so that literally all the time when you were doing something some ai system could kind of classify what actions you were taking and if somebody were detected to be doing this kind of forbidden action alarm could be sounded and some human alerted or something but my problem with ira is that. it is created by you know essence. beings that are thought by human beings so how can it be something that. or perfect

earth and human beings enable able to not me so think because i'm thinking if lot beings are creating artificial intelligence and artificial intelligence is simulating human beings then it's a living flawed beings and it's going to miss something well i mean for a i'm not sure it would have to simulate human beings but be depending on which pretty particular scenario we were looking at it may or may not be necessary to not miss a single thing i mean if you're looking at the kind of much worse global warming scenario it's fine if few people drive cars even in that world right as long as the majority kind of stopped doing it you wouldn't even need new surveillance technology there you would just need a carbon tax or something if you move to the other extreme where a single individual alone can destroy the whole world more than obviously there it would be essential that not a single one slipped through but then it depends on how hard would it be for a single individual with a need to do something very distinctive activity accumulate some special role materials. and maybe it would become possible to have the kind of surveillance that

could avoid that. today obviously our law enforcement capabilities are very limited but. i do think there are quite rapid advances in using to recognize him a tree like recognize faces and to classify actions and then you could imagine that's being built up over a period of 10 or 20 years into something quite formidable so you wouldn't be momentarily submitting the human race to where well. that's what i'm about i mean is i'm not i'm not good i'm just noting that there are certain scenarios if the world unfortunately turns out to be vulnerable in the way where it looks like it will lead to actually get destroyed or people will put in place to surveillance missions. that might be depending on what kind of surveillance technology you have . different ways of configuring that. maybe it would be almost completely automated or in the near term certainly it would require a lot of human involvement. to. check things that have been flagged by

al gore's means for example. maybe respond to take a break right now will continue talking to the. world. the washington consensus led by the united states says the liberal world order must be defended at almost all costs said differently the foreign policy demands the post cold war unit. would seem multi-polar world has already

arrived. and we're back with nick bostrom nick so you know a lot about a much more artificial intelligence much more than me do you think we can program artificial intelligence t.v. this benevolent platonic ain't this i don't know enlightened monarch or anything that has to do you. with control or total control is inevitably repressive and bad . well i mean i don't think we would know how to do that today i mean of course we can't even build ais that can do all the things that humans can't today but if say next year somebody figured out a way to make

a ais do all the jobs that humans can do like some big breakthrough i don't think we would know yet how also to align it with human values that is still a technical problem that people are working on since the last few years but with significant ways still to go. to getting methods for scalable ai controlled so that no matter how smart the ai becomes even even maybe becomes far smarter than we one day you could slip there isn't anybody. you have is to become smarter than most i think eventually. and by that time you would want to also have the ability to make sure that they still act in the way you intended even one they've become intellectually far superior ultimately so that that's a technical problem. that needs to be solved with technical means but then if you solve that you still don't have what we could call the political problem of the governance problem like so it would enable the humans to get the ass to do what

they want we still don't need to figure out how to ensure that this new powerful technology is used primarily for beneficial purposes as opposed to wage war oppress one another. and that that part is not the tactical problem that it's kind of a political matter like judging from the history of humanity. you're saying there is a slight possibility that i can become more intelligent than us in a way more intelligent. it's not. mean humans trying to control and make i do all those things that they want to do it's thing i ate controlling the humans and doing well with humans what they would want to have meaning but. in the ideal case the ai. being aligned with human values in as much as we would you know specify what it is that we want to achieve the ai would help us achieve it.

do you think ai could ever simulate real feelings and memories. do you think it can ever really predict a human brain something as chaotic as a human brain because we don't really know what it is how blowing mean i don't think that would be necessary for alignments to have a very detailed i mean we humans can't do that with one another and we can still be friends with one another or help other people and so forth so that doesn't require the ability to create 100 percent accurate relational prediction. so you have this other theory. before the vulnerable world that. we my old be living inside some sort of a matrix. and there are layers maybe a simulation. is a right. actually something i published back in 2003.

and it's an argument that tries to show that one of 3 propositions is true so it doesn't tell us which one. proposition won the 1st alternative. is that all civilizations current states of technology development. go extinct before they reach a technological maturity so it's going to be that maybe they're out there far away other civilizations but they all failed to reach a technological maturity you know because human nature doesn't change i mean technology goes further but humans use it to destroy the world. yeah that that could be the case and a very robust saw that even if you have thousands of human like civilizations out there they would all succumb before they reach technological maturity so that's one way things could be another the 2nd alternative is amongst all civilizations that do reach technological maturity they all his interest in creating these kinds of

what i call ancestor simulations these would be detailed computer simulations. at the fine in level of granularity that the people in the simulations would be conscious and have experiences like ours maybe some civilizations do get there but they're just a completely uninterested in using their resources to create these kinds of simulations. and the 3rd alternative the only one remaining i argue is that we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation right now built by someone who wants to build us a ship and anything that's the most probable one. of the simulation argument doesn't say anything about which of these is true or most likely it just demonstrates this constraint that if you reject all 3 of them you have a kind of probabilistic incoherence and end of the full argument involves some probability theory and stuff but i think the basic idea can be conveyed relatively

intuitively it's supposed to 1st turn to is false so that some non-trivial fraction get through to maturity suppose the 2nd alternative is also falls so that some of those who have gone through to maturity do use some of their resources to create simulations ok right then you can show that. they because each one of those could run a lot of simulation study some of them go through there will be many many more simulated people like us than there would be people like us living in our regional history even right whole 6000000000 of us. but not just that but you could show that at technological maturity even by using just a tiny fraction of say one planet's worth of compute resources even just for one minute you could draw on you know tens of thousands of simulations of all of human history so that if the 1st 2 and we could talk more about the evidence apparently how that simulation is possible even if we don't understand our brain well might

they obviously we can't do that you say i mean i really honestly diary of a nation argument makes no assumption about the timescale behaved 20000 years or 20000000 years it still holds. and so because each simulating civilization would be able to run using a tiny fraction of its resources. hundreds of thousands millions of runs through all of human history almost all. beings with our kinds of experiences were dumbass simulated ones rather than non simulated ones and conditional in that they are good we should think we are probably one of the simulated ones so in other words what that means is if you reject the 1st 2 alternatives it seems you are forced to accept the 3rd one which done shows you can reject all 3 in other words that at least one of them is true so that's the structure of the simulation argument ok so you answered my 1st question about how can we how can anything simulate human brain

because you're saying there is no time span so again that. 2 questions if we're living in a simulation why would the future us. even make one just for fun i mean so. many possible reasons you could imagine i mean you could imagine scientific exploration like wanting to know counterfactual history what would have happened if things had gone differently that could kind of be both theoretically interesting and maybe useful for trying to understand other extraterrestrial civilizations you might encounter you could imagine. entertainment reasons that we humans do our best with novels that bring you into this world that we put on theater plays and make movies computer games in many cases making the most realistic yes we can of course we can't make them perfectly realistic now but if you had that ability maybe we would make them perfectly realistic. so that that would be another example maybe maybe even some kind of historical tourism you could imagine if you can actually

time travel maybe you could build an exact simulation of the past and interact with that and it would be as if you had to travel to the past and you could experience what it would be like and other reasons as well that we we don't necessarily know very much about what would motivate or drive some kind of technologically mature pulls to man civilization and why they would want to do. different things with the resources and then i guess the core question eighty's even if we're living in a simulation rate does it really matter to us me and you and everyone around us i mean buddhists say the whole world is illusion so what. does this cancel out the things we live there are good or bad like love and feelings and problems no nonsense unknown day i think to a 1st approximation if you became convinced you're living in a simulation you probably should have gone as if you were not living in

a simulation like for most everyday things like if you want to get into your car you still have to take out the car key and open the door etc. so i think that's true i think there might be some respects in which new possibilities would exist if you are in a simulation that wouldn't really exist if you're not in a simulation. for example and we think the universe can't just suddenly pop out of existence right. conservation of energy and momentum and so forth whereas of course if you're in a simulation if somebody pulls the plug of the simulation the whole thing ceases to exist saw. the possibility of there being more and more it's well that the world suddenly ending with that that seems to not say it's likely or not there were some times go but at least it seems like a possibility of him other things as well. you could imagine things like. after after life like is clearly possible in

a simulation you could just rerun the same person in another simulation and so forth or various interventions by the simulators in some ways actually. as out of possibilities kind of structurally similar to what theologians have been thinking about in terms of supernatural relationship to a creator and so far it's kind of a kind of analogues of that arise within this simulation theory stuff. although i don't think there is any logical necessary connection one way or the other it's still kind of intriguing that you get these kind of parallel set of possibilities in some respects not exactly the same. but in some ways kind of similar. and now i understand they hold. theory because i wasn't really putting together because i was really thinking now ok so it was making sense it doesn't make sense now. and it's still all related somehow to to artificial intelligence because what

would be simulating us rate it will be some sort of israeli yet so a lot of scenarios today are. are linked to this dooms day when artificial intelligence takes over or the contrary a lot of people are saying that artificial intelligence is actually the solution to a lot of our problems like hunger and malady and global warming where you at on some worry but we are going i think both are possible outcomes. of the fields and asked me whether i'm an optimist or pessimist and i started to refer to myself as a frightened optimist and. i do think that the transition. is not something we should avoid i see it more as a kind of gate through which we need to passage and all the possible paths to really grand future for humanity go through escape at some point in waltz

the. development of greater than human machine intelligence certainly like a purgatory before you're not not to purgatory but a true necessary transition which however will be associated with significant risk including existential risk starts that we actually permanently destroy ourselves or what we care about in making this transition i think it is unless we destroy ourselves some other way before i think this transition will happen and our focus should be on getting our act together as much as possible. in whatever time frame we have remaining with the board some ok whatever it is try to do the research to figure out scalable methods for i control to the extent we can try to get. global order in what the recent polls say but can foster more collaboration. and in particular with an ai community and so forth developed in a common set of norms and the idea that it should be for the common good of all.

and then making sure we don't destroy ourselves before we even get a chance with ai. would be good as well. and trying to grow up to come wiser in whatever there is sort of intervening number of years we. thank you so much for this wonderful and say it's been a pleasure talking to you pleasure talking to you. everything collapses against the dollar. so how long will that last probably not a long time because. as we've seen during brain woods or through the plaza a horde of the 1980 s.

there's going to have to be a global coordinated sit down to rearrange the global 4 x. market rearrange the global currency grid and the dollar is not the thing they're going to have to match against because that runaway balli when the dollar is what's causing this deflation and. depression part. of the course. was and is new york at the song internet you should be the chief. feel and i. would not only do it is nice but i will. keep us no.

bob are not on the coronavirus pandemic and what you need to know to stay safe on this edition of politics. politicking i'm working from my home as many people are in america today united states reaction to the corona virus that make ranges from complacency to outright panic. while the white house tries to reassure a nation still split along partisan lines what the united states government has done and what has it done right what needs more attention the answer to that i'm joined by dr bob are not he's an award winning journalist former chief medical correspondent for n.b.c. and c.b.s.

news bestselling author of more than a dozen books he joins us from stoll vermont ok wants what do you think dr bob is that how do you think the government to this point is handled this well you know it's a tough question because they kept so political i do think that the last 5 briefing from the white house have been terrific they give a pretty transparent when they talked about why didn't you close down the united kingdom the next day they did dr couch i worked with since he 1st got his job in 1983 you know he's the finest infectious disease specialist worldwide united trusted with my life and of course we're all trusting you know with our lives now the c.d.c. is simply the best disease surveillance organization anywhere in the world so look at it very responsive today the president said in the news conference that you know the chinese they've given us more notice it.