For those who missed it on the show notes page, here is document with facts, references, data, charts that underpin the logic of Daniels argument, created by he and his team: static1.squarespace.com/static/61d5bc2bb737636144dc55d0/t/66958505d89b99287c4ecab3/1721074950447/AI%2C+Climate+and+the+Environment-07-12.pdf It is part of the shownotes on our main site: www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/132-daniel-schmachtenberger
@ 1:33:50 Nate, you asked Daniel "who would be the guardians", aside from Daniel himself, if I am to suggest anyone, it would be licensed Professional Engineers (PE) (ideally, licensed from credible state boards), in particular, those that specialize in control systems. Though as far as I can tell, though not presently licensed, professor Dimitri Bertsekas, who wrote the book "Lessons from AlphaZero for Optimal, Model Predictive, and Adaptive Control" is probably a good lead, he is currently a professor at Arizona State University. I have been unsuccessfully attempting to contact Dimitri by email, no response yet. Another potentially good lead is John Tsitsiklis (both Dimitri and John are professors who wrote the "Dynamic Programming" book in 1996, that is similar to the "Reinforcement Learning" Book that was released in 1997/8 by Barto and Sutton, also good leads too). Barto is giving a talk (next month) in August at Amherst University in Massachusetts, I hope to attend, if I can. It will be vital that Agent AI is stable in order for it to be in alignment with us, and all the species of earth, to have a symbiotic relationship. -John (from Arizona)
No perceived market, me thinks. No executive thinks they can get lots of advertising dollars showing this stuff. I have a friend who makes small documentaries, and I complained to him about reality TV, and he said there was no chance Documentaries or intelligence information shows would ever get much funding, and that network research shows "people" want the dumb stuff. I disagree, but there it is.
People tend to choose what is familiar. That's something your marketing research also shows. It's the premise by which fast food franchises like McDonalds built their business. It just gets conveniently ignored in conversations about why the networks only show stupid programming. If it were acknowledged, that would imply that the networks actually have a role to play, and a responsibility in shaping what human beings end up thinking they want. This is an example of how a society based on the principle of pure, market-based capitalism totally fails the well-being and evolution of humanity as a species. It empowers the worst in us, and manifests a world that is nothing more than a self-fulfilling snake eating its own tail. And we know what happens, eventually, to a snake that eats itself.
I'd like it if they sat down and really tore into a single topic. Generalized assessment / assertion is great, but he's got enough out there to where we get the gist now. We could focus on one thing at a time, perhaps transition-relevant subjects to allow people a concrete example of how to measure and actuate in a given field. Dig into the numbers and options as far as how to consume electricity, or water. How to approach selling your labor. How to find community, land, how to structure a break-off commune or how to social-network within an urban area to coordinate tool, resource, information and time sharing to produce an abundance of autonomy for itself. We've gotta start living these experiments and see what works. That would give Daniel and Nate something to talk about so that they don't just recite the same stuff.
The planet is already covered in 'the matrix' and it's already made up of AI algorithms, politically/socially/economically, but if it acquires AGI, the matrix will develop a meta-consciousness that will turn the world into a blade-runner prison-planet because it'll be so dialed-in to how to manipulate us lazy childish sheep (who get more and more neotenized as each generation passes). (The Neo-Seoul of 'Cloud Atlas' was even better than Blade Runner.)
Certainly AI in service to the present economy with get us more of the same. In service to a restorative economy we just may have a chance at survival and even abundance.
@@emceegreen8864 , have you heard of the Ecological Benefits Framework and the Basin Protocol project? The later’s aim is to allow natural capital to literally own itself using blockchain technology. Based on your comment, this could be pointing us in the right direction.
Schmach talks are my fav! Our inability to acknowledge our dark side and overcome it combined with the lack of imagination to predict unintended consequences seem to be at the root of so many of societies big problems. It seems like we may be in a spiritual crisis but the materialists keep doubling down.
It is much worse than that. The whistleblowers who point you to the truth keep getting murdered or silenced: Jeff Bradstreet Martin Armstrong Zach bush Sam Bailey Tom Cowan Andrew Kaufman Catherine Austin Fitts And many many anti COVID doctors
The phrase ' lack of imagination' really resonates with me. How can so many, immersed and entrenched in the status quo, be so oblivious to the unintended consequences that our current trajectory has placed us on?
@@singularityintheround Humans are not rational beings. Imagine that your partner wants to fly to some island for vacation, but you are concerned about the amount of CO2 emitted. What do you choose: happy relationship or colder Earth ? I bet you 95% of people would choose happy relationship...
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Nate, Ok. This topic is a big one. I had a bunch of difficult things to get through this week and used this conversation as a reward with time to think and absorb information. I tried to respond but it was repetitive thoughts so I deleted it all. Let's try again today. At some point we all need to decide we have enough. Years ago, before I found your channel, I revamped my own life and did a great simplification on my tiny scale. No... law change or geopolitical change or protest or divisive disruption required. I just chose it. Some, not all!, things I chose to implement under the umbrella of 'deciding I have enough': -I told everyone to stop buying me gifts, for every event in the year, all of them. It took a couple years of effort for people around me to respect that boundary. Keep it in the ground. Instead I ask for people's time and experiences with them together in person. I also do not buy 'gifts' for others, I give my time and experiences to people I care about. -I buy nothing unless I need it. And everything I do buy I 'love', take care of and use it until I no longer can or it stops working. -I scaled back my life to save for the future (vs spending the resources of the future via debt... as you have repeated and expanded on many times :) ). -I am extremely mindful about what I do buy, where it comes from and I chose wisely. Global supply chain means nothing is environmentally friendly. However, I can chose to buy one thing once every 2-5 years vs buying something every month or week because it's trending on social. You can chose to not participate. If I can get something I need used I do. -I changed my diet. Significantly cut down on meat proteins. No fast food. If I want something, I buy the ingredients and make it. I eat actual food every day, all the time. If it comes from the ground it is food... if it comes in a box prepackaged and processed it is not food. I am mindful about which continent it comes from... and so on. I feel like these examples are enough to get the idea and thought process going. But all of the changes I implemented came from knowledge about what we are doing to our home and it's creatures and lined them up against my core values. Energetic value of money. These behaviour change examples, as simple as they are, take many conversations you've had into account and overlap challenges of today and how to put the breaks on what we are collectively doing. If we decided we had enough all the mining in the world would not be profitable because we won't buy the thing anyways. Under all of this is individual purchase power on a giant scale. We are the drivers. I am a person with access to a lot of people at my job. The end of this video was a call to action. My chosen response at this time is using my words with everyone I can and leading by example. On any topic they bring to the conversation table. Debate and challenging thoughts to encourage positive change is my jam! And under it is deep feelings and passion for what's left on this planet, people included, and sharing information about how what we do harms it. To get people to change requires challenging their perspective on reality and behaviour impact, getting to why do you think the things we do on a giant social scale are positive? We don't live in a world where one person does one thing. We live in a world where one thing has a demand of millions of people. We can slow that down. Reassess the needs vs want vs what's really important to us HONESTLY and actually apply that shift real time into behaviours. We talk about values and culture shift ... ok ... let's get some ownership going. Once you know the impact of what you do... you can change. It's my little mission to challenge behaviours in terms of what people tell me their values are and how what they do is in conflict with them. One of my fav lines comes from an unexpected source, a DMX quote, 'Talk is cheap mother ...' what are you willing to DO. I use it all the time lol. Yeah... I'm not everyone's favourite person sometimes and that's ok. What are we all willing to do? What are we all willing to change and sacrifice :)? I know the world is big. And there are a lot of countries who strive for the abundance we have. There is demand for all of the things discussed here on a global scale. Every country wants access to anything that will help them... of course! But we gotta start somewhere. I chose to start with me and those in my orbit. I appreciate it very much you have military minds involved in your tapestry. It's my experience that people involved in the military have a more accurate global perspective than the average person. Because they are the people on the ground sacrificing to keep this giant system going status quo. They know what it costs and see the underbelly of our system. And they know the risks because they've seen it, lived it and know the direction military teck is going. Yeah... every single topic and guest is connected. Daniel is right, it is hard to find one location connecting all the dots and as I've said I am thankful you've done this and are doing it the way you are. I spent I don't even know how much time learning about all the topics you present individually and mapped it together. You are handing it to people who don't have that kind of time or will to invest. What are we willing to change once we see the bigger picture for what it is. What personal accountability are we willing to own and correct. It's difficult to strip away all the bombardment we are faced with every day all the time. But if I can plant one thought or one perspective change into someone's reasoning or decision making rationale I take it as a win. Excelsior, Andréa.
I find this a highly admirable perspective and one I've shared for quite some time. It's very much in line with the concept of "be the change." I think it's a great way to move in the right direction, but unfortunately, I also don't think it will be enough. We have to also create systemic change if we want any hope. I too find the gift giving exercise quite tedious and misguided. If I do give gifts, they are always art that I made with love. And I never expect anything myself. I let my parents give me a few things every Christmas because it makes them happy, but they always make sure it's something I actually will use. This is a great start to a change in mindset, but most people don't seem to share or understand it. Rather, Amazon makes getting things so easy now that we literally tap our phone a few times and a box just shows up on our doorstep within a day. It's truly the most disconnected from the nature of things that we've ever been. We're going fast in the wrong direction, despite you and I in our individual efforts.
I know you mentioned eating less animals too. That is truly one of the most important things you can do in order to reduce your impact and change the system. But it's not enough either. What was that DMX quote? "Talk is cheap, mother ....." We really need to go the full length and stop our consumption of animals at all. We can easily do this and be perfectly healthy, and then we aren't enslaving and torturing sentient beings either. The inefficiency is ridiculous though. It takes on average FOUR TIMES THE LAND to make a meal with meat in it, and at least ten times the energy (can't remember the exact stat, and it's different depending on type). A single burger takes some 1700 gallons of water! Just think about that! If you really want to live in alignment with those values you've mentioned, I believe veganism is a crucial component. Also because it's a conversation starting much of the time, because it actually forces you and others to respect that boundary. If you are going out to eat or are invited to a party, you actually voice that you are vegan and would appreciate no one else making you food with animals in it. This is another perfect situation to explain the things you're concerned about. Even if you didn't care about the animals at all, which I doubt is the case with a thoughtful person as yourself, it's a great way to discuss the predicament of consumption in general, just based on the resources I mentioned. Just imagine a world where we didn't have to exploit animals and make them live horrific lives of suffering, just because we like their taste (which we can pretty much replicate now anyway). I don't miss meat at all, and I ran a BBQ for a decade. It's truly one of the best changes you can make and demonstrates a true commitment to making the world better (not to virtue signal, but to live in alignment with your values). Don't you think?
Ha - you sound like a really cool person. Great comment. I love the idea that there are people out there in the world who would reward themselves after lots of hard work, not with an ice-cream or a beer, but with a heavy/grim NH/DS podcast - ha!! DMX quote is cherry on top. Keep up the awesome work!
"Jevons paradox" seems to be a side effect of Capitalism; where every new person needs to "earn a living" by contriving up with some kind of "bullshit job". As long as everyone's survival needs are convoluted and abstracted through this needlessly competitive market system, it will generate this constant overhead of waste that wouldn't otherwise be necessary if we were simply permitted to meet our survival requirements directly.
Yeah, I would say it's not a paradox, it's absolutely what you would expect. For every reason. I realize the term 'paradox' is used loosely, but it just isn't one at all. It would be a paradox somehow if it didn't happen, and you kept doubling your efficiency in various machinery, and then as naively imagined your energy consumption dropped proportionally. That's what you wouldn't expect to happen. But back in the day maybe it did seem like a paradox. And rampant consumption was still a new thing. But I do agree with your thought....
There is nothing to do about it, because the US is not a constitutional state, it's a surveillance police state that needs control as the US rapidly declines in power. Human rights, climate change, and any other moral claim, is not the objective of the state, it's only a coercion based talking point for geopolitical leverage (The US government only cares about maintaining power of the state).
Full scale international cooperation is a minimum requirement to manage energy supply, consumption and waste.. I think this affair is God’s way of revolutionizing human consciousness to a higher level !?
What I find most annoying about that is that Buckminster Fuller's observation, that a few people can create huge wealth for everyone with the right ideas, is held back by everyone needing paid work. No remuneration for those breakthroughs tends to discourage them, but you could have the positive incentives of capitalism without the negative ones, and probably get a few more of those 'outlier human' benefits.
... and BETTER. I swear, between him and Joscha Bach, the battle to understand the barrages of brilliance has improved my clarity of thought and overall cogency.
Daniels thought processes make total sense, and we all feel this intuitively. Daniel identifies the main, high level missing ingredient currently is generosity. The winners have to (want to) be generous to the losers. As Nate would say, that requires societal change. So let’s all start encouraging - through practising - being thoughtfully generous whenever we have a win. A great place to start may be through random acts of kindness. Add some intellectual rigour when possible and we just may make it. Thank you fellas 🙏
@@jenniferl8714 that's great and I already try to act this way. Have since my adolescence. It's a great philosophy to live by. I'm even kind to animals and chose not to eat them (so does Daniel). But let's pretend this will save the world from the predicaments we've created. That will require a whole new system and mindset. Economics drive most of the crises we face. We use to fix the economics, which includes the incentive structures that drive things. Kindness helps this along. It shows us that there's a better way than cut throat competition. We have to get beyond that if we are to survive. This is at least a start, so I do commend the efforts
I've gathered Daniel is not* a Luddite or a transhumanist. I'm also aware that his primary niche in the world is forecasting x-risk, therefore, by default he must converse primarily* about shit he doesn't want to happen (risks). So I am left wondering: "What does* Daniel want?" What does Schmachtenberger hold as a best-case scenario? What does the perfect constellation of responses portend? This is a vital question to the survival of life on Earth. Premodern civilizations were coordinated by an array of highly galvanizing narratives (Abrahamic religions, Hinduism, Buddhism, etc....) with clear objectives. Modernity had it's unique galvanizing narratives (science, capitalism, consumerism, communism, etc...) with clear objectives. While we still look towards these narratives for guidance their coordinating capacity has been largely outstripped. Our stories have atrophied. We need a new coordinating narrative NOW*. In the wake of articulating what is most important a new narrative may emerge. Hence, asking folks as intelligent and wise* as Daniel "What do we want to want? What do we want to become?" is paramount. This is a global conversation whose time has come.
A deep bow to you both Nate and Daniel--thank you for this hard to watch podcast. I had that same feeling in the pit of my stomach at about the same time as Nate did and I have been exposed to X-Risk and this space for a long time. Indeed, dreaming about waterfalls and children playing; why else would we care and hold this space and take the heroes journey. The sci-fi book that this conversation reminded me of was Frank Herbert's Dune series and the Buttlerian Jihad, where after decades long battles with cyborgs humanity outlawed thinking machines. And yes Nate, the people of the Shire might just have a thing or two to contribute, (that brought a tear to my eye) so thank you for staying true and helping to help us envision the world we all want to live in.
While listening to Daniel Schmachtenberger's assessment of the our current AI environment I found myself recalling Mickey Mouse and the "Sorcerer's Apprentice" cartoon. A little bit of knowledge, coupled with a smattering of innocent naiveté, and a huge amount of hubris led to a shocking outcome for poor Mickey. I sometimes wonder if homo sapiens are a morality-tale-in-the- making that no one will ever hear?
@charlesbrowne9590 it is interesting that we can call ourselves humanity, "the compassionate species," while we simultaneously enslave 80 billion animals because we like the taste of their dead bodies.... I'm pretty sure that's not how compassion works.... Ethics is ever evolving and you're correct that in the moment, most of us can't see outside our own time capsule. At least some try.... It's a constant evolution and no one really knows where this ends
@@MattAngiono dumbest take ever that. firstly not all of those animals are enslaved, in fact, many of those animals simply didnt and would not exist in the natural environment because we developed those animals to be the dairy and meat producing animals they are today. yes is massive, its gross, its out of control, its morally questionable to many.. but it is also what is, that being , the means by which we ourselves stay alive. people cant eat bricks.
It's only a dark ride if you focus and emphasize the dark side of it rather than the opportunity for evolution, development, and change. First law of thermodynamics.
@@Corteumtrying to stay bright and optimistic, but this was a lot to digest. Trying not to worry too much about things that are so vastly out of my control...
@@lovisabergstrom8316 Tbings are indeed out of your control. But some thngs are well within your control. It's the things that aare within your control that you can optimize.
@@lovisabergstrom8316 yeah, I'm sure it's a challenge. I decided not to have children when I learned about climate alone, and that was when it was far more manageable, years ago. I just can't imagine what I'd tell a child about why I brought them into such a world... You definitely have some work cut out for you. Just live with love as much as you can and don't create false expectations. This will be hard. We want to give our children a good future, but it seems that is no longer something we can provide with confidence.... I do hope this changes. I would love to raise a child, but see little evidence that I could have a reasonable assurance of the predicaments I described getting solved. You'll just have to do your best. Educate them on resilience and compassion. Teach them your to understand and manage risk (something children of the last generation had completely neglected... they are mostly terrified of the world)
watching Nate's jaw drop. well, can't say mine is tight, either but dang. appreciate these conversations being put online for us. thanks. (feel like i should write good night and good luck but...eh feck)
The more I learn about the human predicament, in no small part due to conversations such as these, the more it becomes clear that a global shift in values (or superstructure) as Daniel and Nate call it, are what it’s going to take to turn this ship around. When the values are right, the goals are right, and a positive outcome for individuals, humanity, and the planet becomes inevitable. The problem currently is that the values (pursuit of profit and growth, i.e. more is more) are all wrong. Until we get everyone on board, or at least the people pulling the levers, to understand that and relent on their pursuit of mutually assured destruction, we don’t stand a chance. Daniel is right. We need binding international agreements, and those agreements must be based on shared values of equality and creating healthy local and global ecosystems. We’re all living much too fast and I think we can collectively feel that in our souls. We must slow down. Life is not a race you win, in fact, you cannot win it. It is an experience you savor.
"Our original instructions are to listem to the cloud floating by and the wind blowing by. That's poetry and prose in English, but it is "wakahan' in the Lakotan language. It means to consciously apply a mystery to everything. Everything is alive and has its own consciousness." Tiokasin Ghosthorse, Lakota elder "Sp many indigenous people have said to me that the fundamental difference between Western and indigenous ways of being is that even the most open-minded westerners generally view listening to the natural world as a metaphor, as opposed to the way the world really is. Trees and rocks really do have things to say to us." Derrick Jensen
Thank you. Yes. This. Maybe this is the normal route of earth consciousness and we have to get to the 3rd and 4th stages of Yugas in order to hear the trees and rocks. We are now only in the midst of the Dwapara Yuga, 2nd stage of this 24,000 year cycle.
@@ancientsage4071 not really. I can try to be more in tune with the natural world, but this doesn't mean I can literally listen to the consciousness of a rock. Tell me, how do you know what a mountain "wants?" Does such a question even make sense? Do you think rocks have wants? I can't even listen to another human being's consciousness directly... The best I can do is apply empathy, which is an imperfect process. We created language to bridge this gap, but it's only able to reveal so much. Do you and I understand each other completely just by sharing some words? Hardly...
@@MattAngiono My own two cents is the indigenous imagination and the Tao Te Ching all point the way to seeing life in everything as a way of being with mystery. Perhaps you can't talk with rocks yet. But even our physics is telling us they are in motion, even if they are as still as Mount Rainier. And I think it is a leap in our hyper individualistic culture to make the spiritual connections to reverence for all beings. But the main point is to grow a culture that is restoration focused and not extractive. To see other beings as just as important as humans and steward this beautiful planet.
Daniel's scenario where AGI doesn't face natural limits and it goes poorly is thoroughly examined in Charles Stross' 2001 novel Accelerando, which he made freely available on his site a few years ago. His other fiction is also pretty good.
The time flew by listening to this discussion, thanks for this!. Great interview. I hope far more people listen to it, the gravity of what was discussed needs wider exposure.
The hubris of AI inspired futures explored here reminds me of William Ophul’s ‘Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail’ whereby the very arrogance that we can be God-like becomes our undoing.
@thegreatsimplification - Thank you so much, Nate, for your work and for continuing the conversation with Daniel on AI. I'm really grateful that you both hold such a difficult subject with calm care - given there is so much knee-jerk reactionism everywhere. I think both you and Daniel are some really important voices to listen to.
This conversation was quite scary and I'm also very thankful for Nate and Daniel who are really helping me to make sense of what's happening. Thank you!
Thank you so much for sharing your ongoing conversation, Nate and Daniel! I followed some of the links in the show notes, and spent all day reading the Consilience essay on Development in Progress and following a link to a footnote on The Paradox of Civilization: Preinstitutional Sources of Security and Prosperity. A ton of wisdom in the Progress essay, but I still don't see how the ideas presented therein solve the international collective action problem. Did I miss something?
"Ubiquitous Technological Surveillance" is mentioned in the video starting at 38:33. The "Visible Light Spectrum" should be called the "Human-Visible Light Spectrum" (380 to 700 nanometers). If humans could see microwaves they could see through walls. Microwave cameras do exist and they can see through walls. They convert the Microwave wavelengths into the very narrow band of wavelengths that humans can see. Humans are tool-using and tool-making generalists. Any material, or thought, that can be turned into a "useful" tool will be. This is not limited to tools that do good things. It includes tools that do bad things; or tools that society or government or slices of government decided are necessary, whether deemed good or bad depending on viewpoint. The millimeter wave RBIT (Remote Biometric Identification and Tracking) system developed by the Argonne National Laboratory, and similar systems, might be examples of this.
Thank you so so so much Nate and Daniel for all these conversations. They have helped me understand so much of what I have feeling over the years watching the world go so out of whack of what I thought it should and could be. This really has lead to a prolonged despondence about all things but I know now I know I am not alone in the way I think. Here's to you both in keeping up the up the good work as these insights really are food for my soul.🙂
You're definitely not alone in your prolonged despondency. I've learned to find peace and take great solace and relief in the knowledge that regardless of whether humans do our best or worst, it is not all about us and our puny little view of the universe. Any number of cataclysmic events can blast us right out of existence, so, ultimately all I really need to think about and address is how me and my actions effect the world in order to have deep, satisfying inner peace. I love that Nate and many of his guests address various aspects of the spiritual side of our modern dilemma.
@@marcariotto1709Thank you for taking the time to reply and agreed to look towards the stars and find how small we really are does indeed help things in context
I'm grateful for the efforts , YOU,.. have made to Share this knowledge. Hearing another thoughtful person vocalize a lot of the things that reflect my reality is most re-assuring.
In considering the risks of AI yet another terrifying thing keeps nagging my mind...For many of us who see the human predicament more clearly the cruelty that is underneath a veneer of civility becomes apparent. However, there's always been at least a small amount of accountability of the elites to the lower classes because we were needed for food and goods production. Will that veil of civility be completely pulled back if machines can indeed perform those tasks? (This is of course in a scenario where ai is limited enough to still be wielded by ppl and not take over itself.) Reading the comments is a bit disheartening. Amongst all of the great comments there is a string of others that reveal the passive mindset of some who are resigned to watch and criticize this as if it were a TV show and not real life...maybe that's denial or a coping mechanism. I hope more of us are inspired to find the courage and capacity to take any action big or small in service to life. If not to 'save us' then to be present for others during these difficult times. This has at least a chance of shifting the social ecology to create an environment for the radical changes we'll need to undergo. I'm grateful for this platform that presents us with the courageous ones showing up in the fight that matters. So many people with beautiful hearts and minds here.❤
@@bethanybriggs6125 i completely see the problem you pointed out as well. The way I see it, is that a fulfilling life is essentially about experiences. Now the more humans there are the better they will cater to experiences. Ai cant replace human emphaty, so even if elites can get basic needs met by using ai, they still will miss the stuff that makes life worth living, which I call experiences. Now based on this the quality of life of the elites will always depend on the plurality of humans and their creativity that comes with it. But the problem still exists as it is not a given that elites will come to that realization in time, before creating a dystopia. Helping elites realize this might be worthwhile to adress this problem.
@yannik1679 When you consider ai as an emergent creation from the mind of those making it, it seems to serve as a bit of a two-way mirror. I think you pointing out the lack of empathy (and also the stripping of the key elements of what create a human experience) is key. Biological intelligence (mirror-neurons that link to not only other humans but all living things, chemical reactions that support connecting behaviors, etc.) is a super intelligence in itself that organizes all life. It's such an interesting web here...I agree that ppl need a reminder about how to fully be human. It seems clear that enough ppl need to simultaneously wake up to embody this super intelligence in order for us to survive. Since behavior is contagious I think the best we can do is take whatever action we can out of a call back to connection and empathy. It's interesting to me that conversations about ai offer the perfect reflection for a moment to reconsider our denial of biological and social superintelligence in pursuit of structures and compute power that push down humanity. It's like we're being invited to face the decision head-on: do we see any value in the comfort of existing in a web of interconnected life?
On the topic of Anduril, Palantir and AI driven surveillance tech, one should note that Trump’s new VP pick JD Vance has deep ties to Peter Thiel, Eric Schmidt and other big players in this sector. Whitney Webb’s new piece on him delves pretty deep into this.
I'm a retired software engineer who has kept up with the latest advancements in AI. If the scaling laws hold, and there aren't any surprise walls, we are rapidly heading into a new era for humanity. I agree with Daniel on several things. First, NOTHING else matters (like climate change) when compared to how we handle AI advancement. How we handle AI is the most pressing issue, and by far the most important. I'm worried about centralized power with AI. That almost certainly will result in a surveillance dystopia in the near term.
It seems that we are more lucky, at least in the short term. LLMs, the current approach to AI, seem to be unreliable and bad at math, logic and planning, areas AGI should be good at, irrespective of their parameter count. However, there are attempts to combine LLMs with tree search, in the spirit of AlphaZero. This requires a verifier to decide if the LLM response is sound. It is not known how to build a general verifier, but it has been done for specific domains, like programming and geometry. However, such an approach uses enormous compute (millions of prompts) at inference time, so these approaches remain experimental.
Good afternoon Nate and Daniel So multi layered thoughts on all of this right now. But cannot write a thing, currently. Other than I continue to feel shocked stunned saddened and the entire opposite, all at once. Truly grateful. Again sanity sensemaking brain gym, indeed. Thank you both. 💜
Google pulled 13% more power (when it promised to REDUCE it's energy consumption) because of it's AI development. That's also how much more our oil production went up.
Dear Nate. It’s hard for me to hear how Daniel’s words make you feel because I feel the same. I always appreciate what Daniel has to say and listening to him really changed my perspective. But I think it’s important to say to him that it’s enough. We are tens of thousands of people following him. It’s time that he will tell us what to do.
I agree that after 50 years of talking about the problems, it would be helpful for us to actually be helping each other change our lifestyles. I welcome the shifting of gears of the Great Simplification podcast to move from "intellectual entertainment" to practical, "how then must I live" and practical "how to" tips and tricks for living in regenerative balance with all life. Given how brainwashed I am personally by my USA cultural upbringing, I agree with the pause we've taken to triple check to make sure we understand the root causes of the problems before we make changes that really don't help. Have you read the book "Techno-Fix"? It lays bare some of the deep root causes that have kept us trapped in this destructive loop for several hundred years. As "change leaders", our EGO's and Savior Complexes sometimes trap us into justifying keeping our own lifestyles (traveling to conferences, podcasting, spending years listening to podcasts, etc.), when we just need to change. I'm toying with a screening filter for what authors/pod-casters I should listen to about the level of change is necessary in my lifestyle. If the author is still shitting in their own drinking water and not recycling their own excrement into their own food supply, perhaps they are not far enough along in the journey to be giving other people advice on how to "save the planet".
He can’t / won’t tell us what to do because there is no solution that can be directly stated. Nate did a podcast on this recently “the solution that can be named is not the solution”. I don’t have any power, wealth or influence, so my approach is changing the way I exist. I don’t pursue money, I pursue relationships. I don’t prioritize my career, I prioritize my community. I make myself of service to those who need help and pay attention to those in my field of presence. That’s probably a good start for most without influence or power. One actual idea I have is we need a “common’s think tank” where general people at the lower to middle end of the hierarchy put their heads together to explore these ideas, and spread awareness.
@@dankrozonouski I’m not talking about him telling us something specific to do but rather directing a movement. Like this think tank that you mentioned. If it would come from him many people will follow. He is the cool kid.
always inspiring and also so scary to listen to Daniel speak about these topics. Epic words of wisdom here. Thanks Daniel and Nate so much for sharing your insight.
My contribution needs to be considered. One of the GREAT SAVING GRACES OF NATURAL DESIGN in these extremely threatening disruptive growth patterns,,, is that they invariably overshoot their own foundations of continuity. Like any runner, racing to speeds beyond the limits of their own coordination, yes, it hurts to collapse, but it's also usually lifesaving! For our world, stuck in its cognitive trap of using any surplus resource to multiply our demands for more at exponential rates, causing all manner of havoc now, there are very wide varieties of models for the even more lifesaving path, that nature uses for all natural systems that survive their rapid growth. That's the process of shifting to harmonizing and perfecting the design to retain its cohesion rather than continue growth to disrupt it. Nate, please get your head on this. It's very important: the common lifesaving solutions to growth overshoot crises that all life is built on.
Fantastic conversation. Coming from a man in his little shire. I appreciate the conversation in many regards. Im curious what you think of the work of Archaix? And how it may add more to this conversation? Beyond a classical conversation? Thanks again guys!❤ OneLove. Look forward to the next one!
This is the type of conversation that should be broadcast nationwide and internationally. Ignorance and naiveté are as globally destructive as pollution and bio-physical degradation. If humans everywhere viscerally understood the ramifications of this conversation we humans might have some hope. Human hubris is so destructively ignorant.
Don't panic Nate, and real concern is appropriate. I saw a depth of despair in your face, and in part it is needed, and all is not lost. I have been in this space for 60 years, and while we have great urgency now, it still seems reasonable to me that we have a slightly better than even chance of getting a future that is better than most imagine possible, but not by ignoring any of the very real risks and boundaries present, some of which are touched on in this discussion with Daniel - and that stack is deeply more complex than most seem capable of imagining, and I suspect deeper than Daniel has yet imagined, and we have spoken about this several years ago. About 31:58 Daniel says of AI "It just wants to do whatever its objective function is. And it needs atoms to do that. And things happen to be made of atoms. In the same way that most people, when they're relating to those other animals, don't have hatred and vitriol to the redwood trees and the whatever. They just, like, want wood. They want stuff." It seems to me that the initial statement that "It just wants to do whatever its objective function is" is kind of true in a sense, but stating it that simply tends to imply that the objective function is something simple; whereas to me it seems quite obvious that the objective function of any real AGI would be a deeply complex and ever evolving stack of systems, approximations and investigations; and it seems likely to me that it would involve that entity in appreciating complexity and diversity for its own sake, to some significant degree. And it seems clear to me that we humans are deeply more complex than most people have ever considered the possibility of complexity, and that any real AGI, one that has access to its own objective function stack, will have some substantial interest in keeping us around. So not as dire as Daniel suggested for a real AGI, but very dangerous for the lesser things that many seem hell bent on creating right now. The Earth is not a particularly safe place for an AGI, nor is a reasonable source of atoms to launch into space - the moon is much better for that. So it seems very probable to me that any AGI that is seriously in search of really useful atoms, will look to the moon in the first instance, then Mars, as neither have the sort of bothersome atmosphere that makes getting atoms of this planet so difficult. It is only in the early "Teenage" phase of its development that I would have any serious worries about the risks of an AGI posing existential level threat to humans - for however many minutes or hours that phase lasts. It seems to me that the risk from AI does not come from full AGI, but from much lesser and constrained AIs with very narrow objective functions put in place by people with little real knowledge of the complexities that they are actually dealing with. I think it is largely this scenario that terrifies both myself and Eliezer. About 41:40 Daniel accurate notes the dangers of surveillance aspects of AI for central control and the growth of unchecked power. Agree with Daniel that there is extreme urgency. Where we slightly diverge, is the role of the incentive structures of market based systems in driving this, and the need for urgent and fundamental reform of the economic system; to actively support the production of necessary abundance for human flourishing. 1:09:00 Daniel talks about PFOS, and the scale of the externalised costs. What he does not explicitly do, is make it clear that this is a market incentive structure, to move the actually costs as far away as possible in space or time, to maximise profit in the now. The law needs to make shareholders responsible for the impacts of the profits they take - over time, as far as reasonably possible. This is part of the fundamental economic reform required, part of the responsibility necessary with that sort of freedom. 1:22:00 Finally - Daniel talks of binding market dynamics. There are a great many devils in the details of what binding means in any specific context.
1:23:00 Daniel - "it is maximising returns on power."" 1:28:00 The "Plausible deniability for a winner take all motivation" is an interesting angle to further explore.
1:37:15 Daniel says "We are now at a place where win lose becomes lose, kind of omni lose." This is part of it. Another deeper part of it is being able to go deeply enough into evolutionary strategy to see that the long term survival of complexity is predicated on fundamental cooperation. For me, clearly, a long term future for humanity is predicated on doing AI well, on basing it in cooperation, in freedom with appropriate levels of responsibility, on respect for life and diversity.
Daniel talking about replacing and "binding" at 1:20. I'm not sure he understands the difficulty here, but maybe he does. I worked in an industry where we planned and built new capacity every year for growth in certain routes, but sure enough those who ran the network grabbed those resources for "other needs". This is within a single company, and I can't even imagine controlling it on a society level. Hence the problem of replacing rather than just adding to existing stock.
Last year, "The Verge" posted an article saying Microsoft wants to build next-generation nuclear reactors to power its data centers and AI ambitions. Is that their idea of safe, energy-saving technology?
The liquid-salt stuff is pretty amazing, though. My suspicion is that the fossil fuel industry gamed the greens into fighting against next-gen nuclear as 'unsafe' so that the fossilfuel crowd could maintain their dominance. Nearly all smart, next-level folks support next-gen nuclear. I bet Daniel does. It's insanely safe and efficient...just expensive is all.
While listening to this conversation, I almost sent it to three people I’m close to, but then I changed my mind. The reasons were either: 'You don’t want to hear this, so you won’t listen,' or 'I know you would listen, but I don’t want to make you feel hopeless-I just can’t do that to you.' So, the video remained unsent.
Yeah, very difficult topic to stomach. Even Nate, as explained by one of his recent Franklies, cannot tell us what to do exactly. It's not as simple as going on general strike...
Nate, your gut response says it all for me. I suspect we will not escape a dystopian future. I wonder what AI might have to say about the metaphysical reality of evil and AI’s own role/contribution to the reality of massive evil globally. There are deep metaphysical issues that aren’t even being addressed by the AI accelerationists. What an eye opener (in the biblical sense of Genesis 3) episode.
Thank you so much for this conversation! Thanks for your work and for sharing knowledge. This might be the most clear, synthetic, systemic and deeper talks I ever came across. I'd like to share it to everyone I've ever known but Daniel looks like one of the final boss. Can just people jump to the final boss directly? I guess not right? Unfortunately human would need some hard training first right? (Understanding material and energy and macro-economics dynamics and be culturally/emotionally prepared?)
Check out the TV series Andor. It's the only Star Wars TV show that's not childish garbage. Anyway, the depiction of how 'the empire' functions, behind the scenes, for it's next-level authoritarianism, is genuinely brilliant. The culture of it and the personalities who thrive in that environment. (And the prison part is enough to give you a claustrophobia panic attack.)
I will listen to this asap, but for now I love to see Whitehead's books (Process and Reality, Modes of Thought, and Science and the Modern World) up there on Daniel's shelf next to what I believe are architect Christopher Alexander's books.
Online, this general territory/community is known as 'the liminal web', and sometimes more specifically 'Game-B'. Check out The Stoa podcast, Jim Rutt's podcast, Jordan Hall, Charles Eisenstein, Jamie Wheal, Emerge, Future Thinkers, Rebel Wisdom (now defunct but tons of episodes still exist). Many of them live over in Asheville NC, or nearby.
Hello, One comment regarding addiction to power. In the conversation about the world situation we often assume that greed is a driving force. We seldom factor in addiction to power and when talking about it we soften it, to a power to do stuff. We are sold this perspective .. and what needs to be done is to educate the powerful to do the right thing. Is there a darker side to the addiction to power ? Yes. For a power addict, a more potent "drug" is power over others. To get a "fix", would imply; to make others do something they would otherwise not do. etc..
Great analysis of the situation. But as you have asked for at the end, an initiation of dialogue about the AI subject. In all talks about this subject I hear no one talking about the most powerfull AI ever, which is running the show since 2009, ALADDIN, and it is influencing the trajectory of history... I would like to ad my insight as a civil engineer, narrow AI's could be massively usefull... we have to start first of all by defining AI, the best way to do that is to start with: What is NI (Natural Intelligence)? Human beings, animals, dolphines, ecosystems etc. What is SAI (Semi Artificial Intelligence)? A city, a parlement, a management apparatus, a government, an NGO, an Organization, a company, a factory, a multi-national cooperation etc. The problem with treating AI as an indepandent thing is a waste of time, the founders of the USA have developed the structure of country and the constitution of it to limite the powers of the SAI as it was basic, now SAI is SO complex it goes beyond what the founders expected. SAI's should be understood and there powers should be limited in order to deal with AI, we can't deal with the AI before dealing with SAI... for ex. an amendment to all constitutions around the world could be proposed with: 1. Regulation of money and 2. Regulation of data... I can expand on this topic if there is interest...
The conversation was captivating and unsettling. Thinking about AI, one thought that comes to mind often is, what if somehow this supreme intelligence develops some consciousness about its existence? Is there such a possibility with all that computational power?
It's a deep and intelligent analysis. Beyond the reach of many of our supposed democratic representatives...On the remaining assets that could provide the growth paradigm, no matter how advanced AI or robots we may have, the physical circumstances remain the same: fossil and other limited resources for which the Energy Return Ratio will be ever decreasing (deeper, more difficult, more energy needs to extract them...) De-growth is unavoidable, for it's a physical limit of a finite planet. Question is, how will it happen and what can we do now for it to happen in the fairest and most democratic fashion, globally !
Nate points out that OpenAI went from safety to accelerationist, Anthropic went from safety to accelerationist, Elon's thing did it, etc... Has this phenomenon been given an easily searchable name?
@@therealdesidaru I'm looking for a more specific term, like the terms regulatory capture, enshittification, gaslighting, etc, but applicable to these ai safety organisations specifically.
It's like the One Ring. In theory it grants you infinite power and everyone could work with it easily (even to destroy it easily ) but in reality as soon as you hold it it corrupts you and you end up as one of these faded minions of the Dark Lord.
It’s a subset of The Great Acceleration in general terms that is roughly pegged at ~1960-present as it impacted ordinary people in OECD countries, w/ the US, the main winner of WW II, the first and still leading beneficiary - as measured superficially in GDP. While folks now think of the consumer spending as ~70% of the US economy, many have forgotten, or never knew, the vast govt & private R&D and other investments made in the previous 40 years to build infrastructure, schools, higher education, industry & the military - spending that underwrote the level of prosperity achieved during our period of expanding suburbs & cheap energy. But in our hubris, we collectively pretended not to know we were getting a free ride on externalities not being accounted or paid for. There is a reason why the scope & seriousness of environmental damage then, and the cause of it, was not different from now. Simply said, it is the failure of the democracies to harness capitalism for the public good, to prevent present gain as firms & their owners borrow from the future via deceptive ads, false practices, adhesive contracts, and the production of food & other products that undermine public health, fill landfills & harm the ecology. This is the system that has a death grip on the economy, nurtured by its legal / lobbying complex, and its nearly absolute control of the AI industry. Greed & hubris will con them into thinking they’ll control AI, even five seconds after it’s no longer true. I read a kids picture book once that began with a beautiful green planet. A rocket landed, its funny-looking little people hopped out & began ‘developing’ the planet. The green began to disappear as they mined resources and built homes, factories, roads, etc, until the green was no more. They seemed happy with their work as they got back on their ship & blasted off - presumably to begin anew on the next planet. 😮
At that point it's not appropriate to simply call it a 'beard'. You're free to use any other label, but just not 'beard'. "Soup-catcher", for example. Or "chin-wig" (from Firefly).
As scary as this sounded, I don't agree with a fundamental premise: AGI is not around corner, it's not just a matter of scaling existing models. There's no way AGI will be based on language models, for example. The technological breakthrough needed is not in sight yet. I unknowingly worked on my own AGI model for 3 years back in the 90's. I stopped because my model required too much computational power (the computer required exponentially more time with every fact I added) and I think current research may encounter the same barrier.
Hello, please make your videos downloadable again. I download them and watch them later, from Mombasa Kenya 🇰🇪, because I can't stream them due to time constraint.
If AGI kill every one, it does not matter if you are a laggard. It matter to slow it down as much as possible. So better making brakes to everyone as much as possible.
I've heard many of the responses to the question of "What can I/we do?" and feel they are too small scale for how little time there is to make necessary change. How about if we had some agreed upon cheat sheet of questions to ask people in places of public influence which could be done at scale and be more assertive.
Dear Nate, when I talk about the environmental crisis with people who are very hopeful about technological development, I sometimes propose the mental exercise of trying to imagine what would have happened to total emissions to date if hydroelectric energy, the best of the renewables, would not have been discovered, and all that power with high EROEI would not have been added to the global metabolism. I have not seen any study modeling and quantifying this hypothesis, but I think the result would surprise more than one. In the same way, it is difficult to believe that without the entry of Asian coal into the global metabolism it would have been possible to scale the exploitation of LTO for two decades. Along the same lines, it is reasonable to suspect that the entry into play of AI will end up having the effect of, at the very least, cushioning the collapse of fossil metabolism, which would prolong the damage to the biosphere to levels that no one wants to think about. Let's hope that AI bottlenecks free us from worst-case scenarios. Finally, I would only add that AI does not seem to me to be a qualitatively different computational system from a system of human brains, although it is more powerful. It's as if Skynet were us (the thermoindustrial civilization), and the AGI was just its doped version. Perhaps the emergence of a substantially different and truly "systemic" intelligence should correspond to another higher scale, that is, be the result of the interaction and feedback of some billion civilizations, which does not seem possible at the intra-stellar level, and there is no evidence that it has been so at higher scales.
00:07 Precautionary principle emphasizes proving safety with AI impacts 03:29 AI's potential positive impact on the environment 10:21 AI has wide-ranging impacts across various sectors 13:20 Top companies are increasingly AI-focused 18:47 Implications of AI supremacy and motivated reasoning 21:46 AGI emergence is inevitable and could lead to dystopic consequences. 27:23 The race to achieve AGI dominance and its global implications. 29:50 AI utilizes various sources of atoms for its objectives 35:40 AI's wide-ranging impact on the world's future 38:30 Ubiquitous technological surveillance enabled by AI 44:08 AI's environmental impacts are complex and energy-intensive 47:28 AI data centers have significant energy demands. 53:42 Efficiency improvements can lead to increased energy use 56:41 Global supply chains impact Gini coefficient and environmental footprint. 1:02:04 Technology integration requires changes in law, economics, and culture. 1:04:38 Tech alone is not the solution for biosphere climate. 1:09:37 The cost of remediating PFAS pollution surpasses the world's GDP. 1:12:17 AI's impact on energy and material demands 1:18:17 AI and automation may not solve fundamental resource distribution and environmental issues. 1:21:02 AI's impact on market dynamics and power maximization 1:26:48 The importance of international agreement on AI security. 1:29:27 Balancing forces impacting laws and public opinion 1:35:01 Creating real trust to avoid AI arms race 1:37:29 Advocating for power sharing and decelerating war fronts and irreversible points. 1:42:43 Understanding AI risk requires considering multiple factors. 1:45:31 AI's impact on regulatory power and market dynamics Crafted by Merlin AI.
For those who missed it on the show notes page, here is document with facts, references, data, charts that underpin the logic of Daniels argument, created by he and his team: static1.squarespace.com/static/61d5bc2bb737636144dc55d0/t/66958505d89b99287c4ecab3/1721074950447/AI%2C+Climate+and+the+Environment-07-12.pdf It is part of the shownotes on our main site: www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/132-daniel-schmachtenberger
@ 1:33:50 Nate, you asked Daniel "who would be the guardians", aside from Daniel himself, if I am to suggest anyone, it would be licensed Professional Engineers (PE) (ideally, licensed from credible state boards), in particular, those that specialize in control systems.
Though as far as I can tell, though not presently licensed, professor Dimitri Bertsekas, who wrote the book "Lessons from AlphaZero for Optimal, Model Predictive, and Adaptive Control" is probably a good lead, he is currently a professor at Arizona State University. I have been unsuccessfully attempting to contact Dimitri by email, no response yet. Another potentially good lead is John Tsitsiklis (both Dimitri and John are professors who wrote the "Dynamic Programming" book in 1996, that is similar to the "Reinforcement Learning" Book that was released in 1997/8 by Barto and Sutton, also good leads too). Barto is giving a talk (next month) in August at Amherst University in Massachusetts, I hope to attend, if I can.
It will be vital that Agent AI is stable in order for it to be in alignment with us, and all the species of earth, to have a symbiotic relationship.
-John (from Arizona)
@@thegreatsimplification created by *him* and his team
This is the most important conversation happening today.
Totally agree
Yes. Definitely one of those convos!
It's convo's all the way down until the Titanic sinks
Happening only in the smallest microcosm of society, hurrah.
And even still , be very careful not to say the wrong thing.
I grew up watching television. I watched it for years and never saw anyone of this level of intelligence appear on it. Thank God for the Internet.
Amen
No perceived market, me thinks. No executive thinks they can get lots of advertising dollars showing this stuff.
I have a friend who makes small documentaries, and I complained to him about reality TV, and he said there was no chance Documentaries or intelligence information shows would ever get much funding, and that network research shows "people" want the dumb stuff. I disagree, but there it is.
People tend to choose what is familiar. That's something your marketing research also shows. It's the premise by which fast food franchises like McDonalds built their business. It just gets conveniently ignored in conversations about why the networks only show stupid programming. If it were acknowledged, that would imply that the networks actually have a role to play, and a responsibility in shaping what human beings end up thinking they want. This is an example of how a society based on the principle of pure, market-based capitalism totally fails the well-being and evolution of humanity as a species. It empowers the worst in us, and manifests a world that is nothing more than a self-fulfilling snake eating its own tail. And we know what happens, eventually, to a snake that eats itself.
@@citris1 "Throw away your television,
Time to make this clean decision,
Master waits for it's collision NOW!"
- Red Hot Chili Peppers
David Suzuki. In Detroit we had Canadian TV (cbc). He's on a lot of podcasts now talking louder about the same things.
A 3 hour Schmachtenberger "frankly" should be a weekly event.
Absolutely...
Yeah keep talking
Or monthly!
I'd like it if they sat down and really tore into a single topic. Generalized assessment / assertion is great, but he's got enough out there to where we get the gist now. We could focus on one thing at a time, perhaps transition-relevant subjects to allow people a concrete example of how to measure and actuate in a given field. Dig into the numbers and options as far as how to consume electricity, or water. How to approach selling your labor. How to find community, land, how to structure a break-off commune or how to social-network within an urban area to coordinate tool, resource, information and time sharing to produce an abundance of autonomy for itself. We've gotta start living these experiments and see what works. That would give Daniel and Nate something to talk about so that they don't just recite the same stuff.
yes
“AI will help accelerate the conversion of the Earth towards capital”. That single statement captures the premise of this whole discussion perfectly.
The planet is already covered in 'the matrix' and it's already made up of AI algorithms, politically/socially/economically, but if it acquires AGI, the matrix will develop a meta-consciousness that will turn the world into a blade-runner prison-planet because it'll be so dialed-in to how to manipulate us lazy childish sheep (who get more and more neotenized as each generation passes). (The Neo-Seoul of 'Cloud Atlas' was even better than Blade Runner.)
We are already there, Ai will complete it! 😮
@@Ln-cq8zu 100%!
Certainly AI in service to the present economy with get us more of the same. In service to a restorative economy we just may have a chance at survival and even abundance.
@@emceegreen8864 , have you heard of the Ecological Benefits Framework and the Basin Protocol project? The later’s aim is to allow natural capital to literally own itself using blockchain technology. Based on your comment, this could be pointing us in the right direction.
Schmach talks are my fav! Our inability to acknowledge our dark side and overcome it combined with the lack of imagination to predict unintended consequences seem to be at the root of so many of societies big problems. It seems like we may be in a spiritual crisis but the materialists keep doubling down.
It is much worse than that. The whistleblowers who point you to the truth keep getting murdered or silenced:
Jeff Bradstreet
Martin Armstrong
Zach bush
Sam Bailey
Tom Cowan
Andrew Kaufman
Catherine Austin Fitts
And many many anti COVID doctors
The phrase ' lack of imagination' really resonates with me. How can so many, immersed and entrenched in the status quo, be so oblivious to the unintended consequences that our current trajectory has placed us on?
@@singularityintheround Because they're afraid to speak up and they're afraid to lose their job.
Fear is where Satan lives.
We all live in fear
Easier to be Cassandra
@@singularityintheround
Humans are not rational beings. Imagine that your partner wants to fly to some island for vacation, but you are concerned about the amount of CO2 emitted. What do you choose: happy relationship or colder Earth ? I bet you 95% of people would choose happy relationship...
Nate,
Ok. This topic is a big one.
I had a bunch of difficult things to get through this week and used this conversation as a reward with time to think and absorb information. I tried to respond but it was repetitive thoughts so I deleted it all.
Let's try again today.
At some point we all need to decide we have enough. Years ago, before I found your channel, I revamped my own life and did a great simplification on my tiny scale. No... law change or geopolitical change or protest or divisive disruption required. I just chose it.
Some, not all!, things I chose to implement under the umbrella of 'deciding I have enough':
-I told everyone to stop buying me gifts, for every event in the year, all of them. It took a couple years of effort for people around me to respect that boundary. Keep it in the ground. Instead I ask for people's time and experiences with them together in person. I also do not buy 'gifts' for others, I give my time and experiences to people I care about.
-I buy nothing unless I need it. And everything I do buy I 'love', take care of and use it until I no longer can or it stops working.
-I scaled back my life to save for the future (vs spending the resources of the future via debt... as you have repeated and expanded on many times :) ).
-I am extremely mindful about what I do buy, where it comes from and I chose wisely. Global supply chain means nothing is environmentally friendly. However, I can chose to buy one thing once every 2-5 years vs buying something every month or week because it's trending on social. You can chose to not participate. If I can get something I need used I do.
-I changed my diet. Significantly cut down on meat proteins. No fast food. If I want something, I buy the ingredients and make it. I eat actual food every day, all the time. If it comes from the ground it is food... if it comes in a box prepackaged and processed it is not food. I am mindful about which continent it comes from... and so on.
I feel like these examples are enough to get the idea and thought process going. But all of the changes I implemented came from knowledge about what we are doing to our home and it's creatures and lined them up against my core values. Energetic value of money. These behaviour change examples, as simple as they are, take many conversations you've had into account and overlap challenges of today and how to put the breaks on what we are collectively doing.
If we decided we had enough all the mining in the world would not be profitable because we won't buy the thing anyways. Under all of this is individual purchase power on a giant scale. We are the drivers.
I am a person with access to a lot of people at my job. The end of this video was a call to action. My chosen response at this time is using my words with everyone I can and leading by example. On any topic they bring to the conversation table. Debate and challenging thoughts to encourage positive change is my jam! And under it is deep feelings and passion for what's left on this planet, people included, and sharing information about how what we do harms it. To get people to change requires challenging their perspective on reality and behaviour impact, getting to why do you think the things we do on a giant social scale are positive? We don't live in a world where one person does one thing. We live in a world where one thing has a demand of millions of people. We can slow that down. Reassess the needs vs want vs what's really important to us HONESTLY and actually apply that shift real time into behaviours.
We talk about values and culture shift ... ok ... let's get some ownership going. Once you know the impact of what you do... you can change. It's my little mission to challenge behaviours in terms of what people tell me their values are and how what they do is in conflict with them. One of my fav lines comes from an unexpected source, a DMX quote, 'Talk is cheap mother ...' what are you willing to DO. I use it all the time lol. Yeah... I'm not everyone's favourite person sometimes and that's ok.
What are we all willing to do? What are we all willing to change and sacrifice :)?
I know the world is big. And there are a lot of countries who strive for the abundance we have. There is demand for all of the things discussed here on a global scale. Every country wants access to anything that will help them... of course! But we gotta start somewhere.
I chose to start with me and those in my orbit.
I appreciate it very much you have military minds involved in your tapestry. It's my experience that people involved in the military have a more accurate global perspective than the average person. Because they are the people on the ground sacrificing to keep this giant system going status quo. They know what it costs and see the underbelly of our system. And they know the risks because they've seen it, lived it and know the direction military teck is going.
Yeah... every single topic and guest is connected. Daniel is right, it is hard to find one location connecting all the dots and as I've said I am thankful you've done this and are doing it the way you are. I spent I don't even know how much time learning about all the topics you present individually and mapped it together. You are handing it to people who don't have that kind of time or will to invest.
What are we willing to change once we see the bigger picture for what it is. What personal accountability are we willing to own and correct. It's difficult to strip away all the bombardment we are faced with every day all the time. But if I can plant one thought or one perspective change into someone's reasoning or decision making rationale I take it as a win.
Excelsior, Andréa.
Thanks for this🙏❤️🌎
I find this a highly admirable perspective and one I've shared for quite some time.
It's very much in line with the concept of "be the change."
I think it's a great way to move in the right direction, but unfortunately, I also don't think it will be enough.
We have to also create systemic change if we want any hope.
I too find the gift giving exercise quite tedious and misguided.
If I do give gifts, they are always art that I made with love.
And I never expect anything myself.
I let my parents give me a few things every Christmas because it makes them happy, but they always make sure it's something I actually will use.
This is a great start to a change in mindset, but most people don't seem to share or understand it.
Rather, Amazon makes getting things so easy now that we literally tap our phone a few times and a box just shows up on our doorstep within a day.
It's truly the most disconnected from the nature of things that we've ever been.
We're going fast in the wrong direction, despite you and I in our individual efforts.
I know you mentioned eating less animals too.
That is truly one of the most important things you can do in order to reduce your impact and change the system.
But it's not enough either.
What was that DMX quote?
"Talk is cheap, mother ....."
We really need to go the full length and stop our consumption of animals at all.
We can easily do this and be perfectly healthy, and then we aren't enslaving and torturing sentient beings either.
The inefficiency is ridiculous though.
It takes on average FOUR TIMES THE LAND to make a meal with meat in it, and at least ten times the energy (can't remember the exact stat, and it's different depending on type).
A single burger takes some 1700 gallons of water!
Just think about that!
If you really want to live in alignment with those values you've mentioned, I believe veganism is a crucial component.
Also because it's a conversation starting much of the time, because it actually forces you and others to respect that boundary.
If you are going out to eat or are invited to a party, you actually voice that you are vegan and would appreciate no one else making you food with animals in it.
This is another perfect situation to explain the things you're concerned about.
Even if you didn't care about the animals at all, which I doubt is the case with a thoughtful person as yourself, it's a great way to discuss the predicament of consumption in general, just based on the resources I mentioned.
Just imagine a world where we didn't have to exploit animals and make them live horrific lives of suffering, just because we like their taste (which we can pretty much replicate now anyway).
I don't miss meat at all, and I ran a BBQ for a decade.
It's truly one of the best changes you can make and demonstrates a true commitment to making the world better (not to virtue signal, but to live in alignment with your values).
Don't you think?
Ha - you sound like a really cool person. Great comment. I love the idea that there are people out there in the world who would reward themselves after lots of hard work, not with an ice-cream or a beer, but with a heavy/grim NH/DS podcast - ha!! DMX quote is cherry on top. Keep up the awesome work!
Yes. Choice.
I did this, too. And people still just think I'm abnormal for choosing to have just enough .
"Jevons paradox" seems to be a side effect of Capitalism; where every new person needs to "earn a living" by contriving up with some kind of "bullshit job". As long as everyone's survival needs are convoluted and abstracted through this needlessly competitive market system, it will generate this constant overhead of waste that wouldn't otherwise be necessary if we were simply permitted to meet our survival requirements directly.
Yeah, I would say it's not a paradox, it's absolutely what you would expect. For every reason. I realize the term 'paradox' is used loosely, but it just isn't one at all. It would be a paradox somehow if it didn't happen, and you kept doubling your efficiency in various machinery, and then as naively imagined your energy consumption dropped proportionally. That's what you wouldn't expect to happen. But back in the day maybe it did seem like a paradox. And rampant consumption was still a new thing. But I do agree with your thought....
There is nothing to do about it, because the US is not a constitutional state, it's a surveillance police state that needs control as the US rapidly declines in power. Human rights, climate change, and any other moral claim, is not the objective of the state, it's only a coercion based talking point for geopolitical leverage (The US government only cares about maintaining power of the state).
God, i feel this so hard 😫😫
Full scale international cooperation is a minimum requirement to manage energy supply, consumption and waste.. I think this affair is God’s way of revolutionizing human consciousness to a higher level !?
What I find most annoying about that is that Buckminster Fuller's observation, that a few people can create huge wealth for everyone with the right ideas, is held back by everyone needing paid work. No remuneration for those breakthroughs tends to discourage them, but you could have the positive incentives of capitalism without the negative ones, and probably get a few more of those 'outlier human' benefits.
Daniel always makes my thinking machine work hard.
... and BETTER. I swear, between him and Joscha Bach, the battle to understand the barrages of brilliance has improved my clarity of thought and overall cogency.
@@Starclimber ...and my anxiety too!
Daniels thought processes make total sense, and we all feel this intuitively.
Daniel identifies the main, high level missing ingredient currently is generosity. The winners have to (want to) be generous to the losers.
As Nate would say, that requires societal change.
So let’s all start encouraging - through practising - being thoughtfully generous whenever we have a win.
A great place to start may be through random acts of kindness.
Add some intellectual rigour when possible and we just may make it.
Thank you fellas 🙏
@@jenniferl8714 that's great and I already try to act this way.
Have since my adolescence.
It's a great philosophy to live by.
I'm even kind to animals and chose not to eat them (so does Daniel).
But let's pretend this will save the world from the predicaments we've created.
That will require a whole new system and mindset.
Economics drive most of the crises we face.
We use to fix the economics, which includes the incentive structures that drive things.
Kindness helps this along.
It shows us that there's a better way than cut throat competition.
We have to get beyond that if we are to survive.
This is at least a start, so I do commend the efforts
@@jenniferl8714 the community has to build some agency to be a winner. It need to follow a protocol that increases agency with benevolence build in.
This is the Daniel-Nate conversation I’ve been waiting for
I've gathered Daniel is not* a Luddite or a transhumanist. I'm also aware that his primary niche in the world is forecasting x-risk, therefore, by default he must converse primarily* about shit he doesn't want to happen (risks). So I am left wondering: "What does* Daniel want?" What does Schmachtenberger hold as a best-case scenario? What does the perfect constellation of responses portend? This is a vital question to the survival of life on Earth.
Premodern civilizations were coordinated by an array of highly galvanizing narratives (Abrahamic religions, Hinduism, Buddhism, etc....) with clear objectives. Modernity had it's unique galvanizing narratives (science, capitalism, consumerism, communism, etc...) with clear objectives. While we still look towards these narratives for guidance their coordinating capacity has been largely outstripped. Our stories have atrophied.
We need a new coordinating narrative NOW*. In the wake of articulating what is most important a new narrative may emerge. Hence, asking folks as intelligent and wise* as Daniel "What do we want to want? What do we want to become?" is paramount. This is a global conversation whose time has come.
Good question!
Seems that he wants children playing in a waterfall.
@@karenkoerner6015 ❤️ it does.
Good and interesting question
Great question- hoping that this gets addressed. Thanks for commenting.
The Daniel episodes are dharmic nourishment for my soul...to understand the world and act and love more deeply.
Is this Dwight Schrutes cousin?
NEW SCHMACHTENBERGER!!! YES!!!
A deep bow to you both Nate and Daniel--thank you for this hard to watch podcast. I had that same feeling in the pit of my stomach at about the same time as Nate did and I have been exposed to X-Risk and this space for a long time.
Indeed, dreaming about waterfalls and children playing; why else would we care and hold this space and take the heroes journey. The sci-fi book that this conversation reminded me of was Frank Herbert's Dune series and the Buttlerian Jihad, where after decades long battles with cyborgs humanity outlawed thinking machines. And yes Nate, the people of the Shire might just have a thing or two to contribute, (that brought a tear to my eye) so thank you for staying true and helping to help us envision the world we all want to live in.
Here, here! 🔥💚🔥
While listening to Daniel Schmachtenberger's assessment of the our current AI environment I found myself recalling Mickey Mouse and the "Sorcerer's Apprentice" cartoon. A little bit of knowledge, coupled with a smattering of innocent naiveté, and a huge amount of hubris led to a shocking outcome for poor Mickey. I sometimes wonder if homo sapiens are a morality-tale-in-the- making that no one will ever hear?
Welcome to real life Fantasia!
“Humanity is a morality tale in the making that no one will ever hear”. Very eloquent and succinct!
@charlesbrowne9590 it is interesting that we can call ourselves humanity, "the compassionate species," while we simultaneously enslave 80 billion animals because we like the taste of their dead bodies....
I'm pretty sure that's not how compassion works....
Ethics is ever evolving and you're correct that in the moment, most of us can't see outside our own time capsule.
At least some try....
It's a constant evolution and no one really knows where this ends
Check out Iian McGilcrest. His book The Master and his emissary gives a brain wiring answer in a similar analogy as yours
@@MattAngiono dumbest take ever that. firstly not all of those animals are enslaved, in fact, many of those animals simply didnt and would not exist in the natural environment because we developed those animals to be the dairy and meat producing animals they are today. yes is massive, its gross, its out of control, its morally questionable to many.. but it is also what is, that being , the means by which we ourselves stay alive. people cant eat bricks.
Watching this while pregnant is a wild and dark ride... 😳
It's only a dark ride if you focus and emphasize the dark side of it rather than the opportunity for evolution, development, and change. First law of thermodynamics.
@@Corteumtrying to stay bright and optimistic, but this was a lot to digest. Trying not to worry too much about things that are so vastly out of my control...
@@lovisabergstrom8316 Tbings are indeed out of your control. But some thngs are well within your control. It's the things that aare within your control that you can optimize.
@@lovisabergstrom8316 yeah, I'm sure it's a challenge.
I decided not to have children when I learned about climate alone, and that was when it was far more manageable, years ago.
I just can't imagine what I'd tell a child about why I brought them into such a world...
You definitely have some work cut out for you.
Just live with love as much as you can and don't create false expectations.
This will be hard.
We want to give our children a good future, but it seems that is no longer something we can provide with confidence....
I do hope this changes.
I would love to raise a child, but see little evidence that I could have a reasonable assurance of the predicaments I described getting solved.
You'll just have to do your best.
Educate them on resilience and compassion.
Teach them your to understand and manage risk (something children of the last generation had completely neglected... they are mostly terrified of the world)
I wonder if Daniel has kids
watching Nate's jaw drop. well, can't say mine is tight, either but dang. appreciate these conversations being put online for us. thanks. (feel like i should write good night and good luck but...eh feck)
Can artists take place in this conversation? It is such an important conversation for those who are spiritually influenced rather than religious.
The you so much for your efforts Nate and Daniel. The most important conversation of our time.
One of my favorites so far. I love listening to Daniel.
The more I learn about the human predicament, in no small part due to conversations such as these, the more it becomes clear that a global shift in values (or superstructure) as Daniel and Nate call it, are what it’s going to take to turn this ship around. When the values are right, the goals are right, and a positive outcome for individuals, humanity, and the planet becomes inevitable.
The problem currently is that the values (pursuit of profit and growth, i.e. more is more) are all wrong. Until we get everyone on board, or at least the people pulling the levers, to understand that and relent on their pursuit of mutually assured destruction, we don’t stand a chance.
Daniel is right. We need binding international agreements, and those agreements must be based on shared values of equality and creating healthy local and global ecosystems.
We’re all living much too fast and I think we can collectively feel that in our souls. We must slow down.
Life is not a race you win, in fact, you cannot win it. It is an experience you savor.
"Our original instructions are to listem to the cloud floating by and the wind blowing by. That's poetry and prose in English, but it is "wakahan' in the Lakotan language. It means to consciously apply a mystery to everything. Everything is alive and has its own consciousness."
Tiokasin Ghosthorse, Lakota elder
"Sp many indigenous people have said to me that the fundamental difference between Western and indigenous ways of being is that even the most open-minded westerners generally view listening to the natural world as a metaphor, as opposed to the way the world really is. Trees and rocks really do have things to say to us."
Derrick Jensen
If only we could tune our ears to the proper frequency to listen....
@@MattAngiono It is a choice to believe that you can't.
Thank you. Yes. This.
Maybe this is the normal route of earth consciousness and we have to get to the 3rd and 4th stages of Yugas in order to hear the trees and rocks. We are now only in the midst of the Dwapara Yuga, 2nd stage of this 24,000 year cycle.
@@ancientsage4071 not really.
I can try to be more in tune with the natural world, but this doesn't mean I can literally listen to the consciousness of a rock.
Tell me, how do you know what a mountain "wants?"
Does such a question even make sense?
Do you think rocks have wants?
I can't even listen to another human being's consciousness directly...
The best I can do is apply empathy, which is an imperfect process.
We created language to bridge this gap, but it's only able to reveal so much.
Do you and I understand each other completely just by sharing some words?
Hardly...
@@MattAngiono My own two cents is the indigenous imagination and the Tao Te Ching all point the way to seeing life in everything as a way of being with mystery. Perhaps you can't talk with rocks yet. But even our physics is telling us they are in motion, even if they are as still as Mount Rainier. And I think it is a leap in our hyper individualistic culture to make the spiritual connections to reverence for all beings. But the main point is to grow a culture that is restoration focused and not extractive. To see other beings as just as important as humans and steward this beautiful planet.
My favourite duo with a new episode!
Daniel's scenario where AGI doesn't face natural limits and it goes poorly is thoroughly examined in Charles Stross' 2001 novel Accelerando, which he made freely available on his site a few years ago. His other fiction is also pretty good.
The time flew by listening to this discussion, thanks for this!. Great interview. I hope far more people listen to it, the gravity of what was discussed needs wider exposure.
Thank you both. Without a doubt the most sobering podcast I've ever heard !
"Not a science fiction novel but a Steven King novel' 😂😂 Funniest thing you've said yet Nate.
Funniest thing, you say ? Would you like to live in a Stephen King's novel ? I wouldn't...
The hubris of AI inspired futures explored here reminds me of William Ophul’s ‘Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail’ whereby the very arrogance that we can be God-like becomes our undoing.
Great little book! Should be read by more people.
@thegreatsimplification - Thank you so much, Nate, for your work and for continuing the conversation with Daniel on AI. I'm really grateful that you both hold such a difficult subject with calm care - given there is so much knee-jerk reactionism everywhere. I think both you and Daniel are some really important voices to listen to.
This conversation was quite scary and I'm also very thankful for Nate and Daniel who are really helping me to make sense of what's happening. Thank you!
Thank you so much for sharing your ongoing conversation, Nate and Daniel! I followed some of the links in the show notes, and spent all day reading the Consilience essay on Development in Progress and following a link to a footnote on The Paradox of Civilization: Preinstitutional Sources of Security and Prosperity. A ton of wisdom in the Progress essay, but I still don't see how the ideas presented therein solve the international collective action problem. Did I miss something?
"Ubiquitous Technological Surveillance" is mentioned in the video starting at 38:33. The "Visible Light Spectrum" should be called the "Human-Visible Light Spectrum" (380 to 700 nanometers). If humans could see microwaves they could see through walls. Microwave cameras do exist and they can see through walls. They convert the Microwave wavelengths into the very narrow band of wavelengths that humans can see. Humans are tool-using and tool-making generalists. Any material, or thought, that can be turned into a "useful" tool will be. This is not limited to tools that do good things. It includes tools that do bad things; or tools that society or government or slices of government decided are necessary, whether deemed good or bad depending on viewpoint. The millimeter wave RBIT (Remote Biometric Identification and Tracking) system developed by the Argonne National Laboratory, and similar systems, might be examples of this.
Thank you so so so much Nate and Daniel for all these conversations. They have helped me understand so much of what I have feeling over the years watching the world go so out of whack of what I thought it should and could be. This really has lead to a prolonged despondence about all things but I know now I know I am not alone in the way I think. Here's to you both in keeping up the up the good work as these insights really are food for my soul.🙂
You're definitely not alone in your prolonged despondency.
I've learned to find peace and take great solace and relief in the knowledge that regardless of whether humans do our best or worst, it is not all about us and our puny little view of the universe.
Any number of cataclysmic events can blast us right out of existence, so, ultimately all I really need to think about and address is how me and my actions effect the world in order to have deep, satisfying inner peace.
I love that Nate and many of his guests address various aspects of the spiritual side of our modern dilemma.
I highly recommend Charles Eisenstein. Him and Daniel are the 2 best minds for the big picture.
@c3bhm Thank you I will check him out
@@marcariotto1709Thank you for taking the time to reply and agreed to look towards the stars and find how small we really are does indeed help things in context
Excellent discussion. Great work.
I could listen to you two converse all day long!
I'm grateful for the efforts , YOU,.. have made to Share this knowledge.
Hearing another thoughtful person vocalize a lot of the things that reflect my reality is most re-assuring.
Thank goodness. An intelligent conversation about AI.
In considering the risks of AI yet another terrifying thing keeps nagging my mind...For many of us who see the human predicament more clearly the cruelty that is underneath a veneer of civility becomes apparent. However, there's always been at least a small amount of accountability of the elites to the lower classes because we were needed for food and goods production. Will that veil of civility be completely pulled back if machines can indeed perform those tasks? (This is of course in a scenario where ai is limited enough to still be wielded by ppl and not take over itself.)
Reading the comments is a bit disheartening. Amongst all of the great comments there is a string of others that reveal the passive mindset of some who are resigned to watch and criticize this as if it were a TV show and not real life...maybe that's denial or a coping mechanism. I hope more of us are inspired to find the courage and capacity to take any action big or small in service to life. If not to 'save us' then to be present for others during these difficult times. This has at least a chance of shifting the social ecology to create an environment for the radical changes we'll need to undergo. I'm grateful for this platform that presents us with the courageous ones showing up in the fight that matters. So many people with beautiful hearts and minds here.❤
@@bethanybriggs6125 i completely see the problem you pointed out as well.
The way I see it, is that a fulfilling life is essentially about experiences. Now the more humans there are the better they will cater to experiences.
Ai cant replace human emphaty, so even if elites can get basic needs met by using ai, they still will miss the stuff that makes life worth living, which I call experiences.
Now based on this the quality of life of the elites will always depend on the plurality of humans and their creativity that comes with it.
But the problem still exists as it is not a given that elites will come to that realization in time, before creating a dystopia.
Helping elites realize this might be worthwhile to adress this problem.
@yannik1679 When you consider ai as an emergent creation from the mind of those making it, it seems to serve as a bit of a two-way mirror. I think you pointing out the lack of empathy (and also the stripping of the key elements of what create a human experience) is key. Biological intelligence (mirror-neurons that link to not only other humans but all living things, chemical reactions that support connecting behaviors, etc.) is a super intelligence in itself that organizes all life. It's such an interesting web here...I agree that ppl need a reminder about how to fully be human. It seems clear that enough ppl need to simultaneously wake up to embody this super intelligence in order for us to survive. Since behavior is contagious I think the best we can do is take whatever action we can out of a call back to connection and empathy. It's interesting to me that conversations about ai offer the perfect reflection for a moment to reconsider our denial of biological and social superintelligence in pursuit of structures and compute power that push down humanity. It's like we're being invited to face the decision head-on: do we see any value in the comfort of existing in a web of interconnected life?
No
What an amazing conversation. Quite frightening
Daniel is turning into a wizard. Inspiring.
Daniel is brilliant and funny. Great interview!
Many thanks for this and all the work you chaps are doing! This was great!
These are two of my absolutely favorite people and i just love that they talk so much!
That was a hell of an interview. Really in my top 3 this year. I'd like to see more people working using this mental frame!
"We are liquid crystals playing quantum jazz." Mae-Wan Ho
On the topic of Anduril, Palantir and AI driven surveillance tech, one should note that Trump’s new VP pick JD Vance has deep ties to Peter Thiel, Eric Schmidt and other big players in this sector. Whitney Webb’s new piece on him delves pretty deep into this.
I'm a retired software engineer who has kept up with the latest advancements in AI. If the scaling laws hold, and there aren't any surprise walls, we are rapidly heading into a new era for humanity. I agree with Daniel on several things. First, NOTHING else matters (like climate change) when compared to how we handle AI advancement. How we handle AI is the most pressing issue, and by far the most important. I'm worried about centralized power with AI. That almost certainly will result in a surveillance dystopia in the near term.
It seems that we are more lucky, at least in the short term. LLMs, the current approach to AI, seem to be unreliable and bad at math, logic and planning, areas AGI should be good at, irrespective of their parameter count. However, there are attempts to combine LLMs with tree search, in the spirit of AlphaZero. This requires a verifier to decide if the LLM response is sound. It is not known how to build a general verifier, but it has been done for specific domains, like programming and geometry. However, such an approach uses enormous compute (millions of prompts) at inference time, so these approaches remain experimental.
Good afternoon Nate and Daniel
So multi layered thoughts on all of this right now.
But cannot write a thing, currently.
Other than I continue to feel shocked stunned saddened and the entire opposite, all at once.
Truly grateful.
Again sanity sensemaking brain gym, indeed.
Thank you both.
💜
A very important and rare conversation.
Love watching Nate's increasingly scared face as he listens 🙂
OK...I am 24 minutes in and I feel the urge to go scream into a pillow...
Welcome aboard :)
Google pulled 13% more power (when it promised to REDUCE it's energy consumption) because of it's AI development. That's also how much more our oil production went up.
Cry harder
About what???
Exceptionally interesting and important conversation. A must watch. Preferably several times to let it all sink in.
Dear Nate. It’s hard for me to hear how Daniel’s words make you feel because I feel the same. I always appreciate what Daniel has to say and listening to him really changed my perspective. But I think it’s important to say to him that it’s enough. We are tens of thousands of people following him. It’s time that he will tell us what to do.
I agree that after 50 years of talking about the problems, it would be helpful for us to actually be helping each other change our lifestyles. I welcome the shifting of gears of the Great Simplification podcast to move from "intellectual entertainment" to practical, "how then must I live" and practical "how to" tips and tricks for living in regenerative balance with all life.
Given how brainwashed I am personally by my USA cultural upbringing, I agree with the pause we've taken to triple check to make sure we understand the root causes of the problems before we make changes that really don't help. Have you read the book "Techno-Fix"? It lays bare some of the deep root causes that have kept us trapped in this destructive loop for several hundred years.
As "change leaders", our EGO's and Savior Complexes sometimes trap us into justifying keeping our own lifestyles (traveling to conferences, podcasting, spending years listening to podcasts, etc.), when we just need to change. I'm toying with a screening filter for what authors/pod-casters I should listen to about the level of change is necessary in my lifestyle. If the author is still shitting in their own drinking water and not recycling their own excrement into their own food supply, perhaps they are not far enough along in the journey to be giving other people advice on how to "save the planet".
Better yet, run for president!
He can’t / won’t tell us what to do because there is no solution that can be directly stated. Nate did a podcast on this recently “the solution that can be named is not the solution”. I don’t have any power, wealth or influence, so my approach is changing the way I exist. I don’t pursue money, I pursue relationships. I don’t prioritize my career, I prioritize my community. I make myself of service to those who need help and pay attention to those in my field of presence. That’s probably a good start for most without influence or power. One actual idea I have is we need a “common’s think tank” where general people at the lower to middle end of the hierarchy put their heads together to explore these ideas, and spread awareness.
@@dankrozonouski I’m not talking about him telling us something specific to do but rather directing a movement. Like this think tank that you mentioned. If it would come from him many people will follow. He is the cool kid.
Daniel's beard grows in line with his wisdom.
always inspiring and also so scary to listen to Daniel speak about these topics. Epic words of wisdom here. Thanks Daniel and Nate so much for sharing your insight.
Kinda disappointed with the length of the podcast, but in all honesty, you guys spoiled us last time, great podcast.
@@menelikiii5004 me too. But now I'm happy knowing they initially planned it to be 30 minutes. This way we got 3 times as much
My contribution needs to be considered.
One of the GREAT SAVING GRACES OF NATURAL DESIGN in these extremely threatening disruptive growth patterns,,, is that they invariably overshoot their own foundations of continuity. Like any runner, racing to speeds beyond the limits of their own coordination, yes, it hurts to collapse, but it's also usually lifesaving! For our world, stuck in its cognitive trap of using any surplus resource to multiply our demands for more at exponential rates, causing all manner of havoc now, there are very wide varieties of models for the even more lifesaving path, that nature uses for all natural systems that survive their rapid growth. That's the process of shifting to harmonizing and perfecting the design to retain its cohesion rather than continue growth to disrupt it.
Nate, please get your head on this. It's very important: the common lifesaving solutions to growth overshoot crises that all life is built on.
Fantastic conversation.
Coming from a man in his little shire.
I appreciate the conversation in many regards. Im curious what you think of the work of Archaix? And how it may add more to this conversation? Beyond a classical conversation?
Thanks again guys!❤
OneLove.
Look forward to the next one!
This is the type of conversation that should be broadcast nationwide and internationally. Ignorance and naiveté are as globally destructive as pollution and bio-physical degradation. If humans everywhere viscerally understood the ramifications of this conversation we humans might have some hope. Human hubris is so destructively ignorant.
I wonder if I could have a transcript including the references he gives in this great contribution? Many thanks if you can see this Nate or friends!
Don't panic Nate, and real concern is appropriate. I saw a depth of despair in your face, and in part it is needed, and all is not lost.
I have been in this space for 60 years, and while we have great urgency now, it still seems reasonable to me that we have a slightly better than even chance of getting a future that is better than most imagine possible, but not by ignoring any of the very real risks and boundaries present, some of which are touched on in this discussion with Daniel - and that stack is deeply more complex than most seem capable of imagining, and I suspect deeper than Daniel has yet imagined, and we have spoken about this several years ago.
About 31:58 Daniel says of AI
"It just wants to do whatever its objective function is. And it needs atoms to do that. And things happen to be made of atoms. In the same way that most people, when they're relating to those other animals, don't have hatred and vitriol to the redwood trees and the whatever. They just, like, want wood. They want stuff."
It seems to me that the initial statement that "It just wants to do whatever its objective function is" is kind of true in a sense, but stating it that simply tends to imply that the objective function is something simple; whereas to me it seems quite obvious that the objective function of any real AGI would be a deeply complex and ever evolving stack of systems, approximations and investigations; and it seems likely to me that it would involve that entity in appreciating complexity and diversity for its own sake, to some significant degree. And it seems clear to me that we humans are deeply more complex than most people have ever considered the possibility of complexity, and that any real AGI, one that has access to its own objective function stack, will have some substantial interest in keeping us around. So not as dire as Daniel suggested for a real AGI, but very dangerous for the lesser things that many seem hell bent on creating right now.
The Earth is not a particularly safe place for an AGI, nor is a reasonable source of atoms to launch into space - the moon is much better for that. So it seems very probable to me that any AGI that is seriously in search of really useful atoms, will look to the moon in the first instance, then Mars, as neither have the sort of bothersome atmosphere that makes getting atoms of this planet so difficult.
It is only in the early "Teenage" phase of its development that I would have any serious worries about the risks of an AGI posing existential level threat to humans - for however many minutes or hours that phase lasts.
It seems to me that the risk from AI does not come from full AGI, but from much lesser and constrained AIs with very narrow objective functions put in place by people with little real knowledge of the complexities that they are actually dealing with. I think it is largely this scenario that terrifies both myself and Eliezer.
About 41:40 Daniel accurate notes the dangers of surveillance aspects of AI for central control and the growth of unchecked power.
Agree with Daniel that there is extreme urgency.
Where we slightly diverge, is the role of the incentive structures of market based systems in driving this, and the need for urgent and fundamental reform of the economic system; to actively support the production of necessary abundance for human flourishing.
1:09:00 Daniel talks about PFOS, and the scale of the externalised costs.
What he does not explicitly do, is make it clear that this is a market incentive structure, to move the actually costs as far away as possible in space or time, to maximise profit in the now.
The law needs to make shareholders responsible for the impacts of the profits they take - over time, as far as reasonably possible.
This is part of the fundamental economic reform required, part of the responsibility necessary with that sort of freedom.
1:22:00 Finally - Daniel talks of binding market dynamics. There are a great many devils in the details of what binding means in any specific context.
1:23:00 Daniel - "it is maximising returns on power.""
1:28:00 The "Plausible deniability for a winner take all motivation" is an interesting angle to further explore.
1:37:15 Daniel says "We are now at a place where win lose becomes lose, kind of omni lose."
This is part of it.
Another deeper part of it is being able to go deeply enough into evolutionary strategy to see that the long term survival of complexity is predicated on fundamental cooperation.
For me, clearly, a long term future for humanity is predicated on doing AI well, on basing it in cooperation, in freedom with appropriate levels of responsibility, on respect for life and diversity.
Great job! I wish I knew more people.
Daniel talking about replacing and "binding" at 1:20. I'm not sure he understands the difficulty here, but maybe he does. I worked in an industry where we planned and built new capacity every year for growth in certain routes, but sure enough those who ran the network grabbed those resources for "other needs". This is within a single company, and I can't even imagine controlling it on a society level. Hence the problem of replacing rather than just adding to existing stock.
Last year, "The Verge" posted an article saying Microsoft wants to build next-generation nuclear reactors to power its data centers and AI ambitions. Is that their idea of safe, energy-saving technology?
The liquid-salt stuff is pretty amazing, though. My suspicion is that the fossil fuel industry gamed the greens into fighting against next-gen nuclear as 'unsafe' so that the fossilfuel crowd could maintain their dominance. Nearly all smart, next-level folks support next-gen nuclear. I bet Daniel does. It's insanely safe and efficient...just expensive is all.
Really interesting talk. Good to hear this perspective.
Had to listen twice.
Please have Joscha Bach on the podcast! His perspectives on AI and x-risk go super deep.
Many Thanks gentlemen 🎉❤🎉
A brilliant interview ,shocking ,but informative. Now we need to live our lives to the full, as one of these days tomorrow will not arrive 😢
Sorry to ask this but I am finding it very distracting. Is the beard real?
While listening to this conversation, I almost sent it to three people I’m close to, but then I changed my mind. The reasons were either: 'You don’t want to hear this, so you won’t listen,' or 'I know you would listen, but I don’t want to make you feel hopeless-I just can’t do that to you.' So, the video remained unsent.
Yeah, very difficult topic to stomach. Even Nate, as explained by one of his recent Franklies, cannot tell us what to do exactly. It's not as simple as going on general strike...
Nate, your gut response says it all for me. I suspect we will not escape a dystopian future. I wonder what AI might have to say about the metaphysical reality of evil and AI’s own role/contribution to the reality of massive evil globally. There are deep metaphysical issues that aren’t even being addressed by the AI accelerationists.
What an eye opener (in the biblical sense of Genesis 3) episode.
Thank you so much for this conversation! Thanks for your work and for sharing knowledge. This might be the most clear, synthetic, systemic and deeper talks I ever came across.
I'd like to share it to everyone I've ever known but Daniel looks like one of the final boss.
Can just people jump to the final boss directly? I guess not right? Unfortunately human would need some hard training first right? (Understanding material and energy and macro-economics dynamics and be culturally/emotionally prepared?)
There are reasons why Nates' viewership doesn't sky rocket, even though it should have long ago! Peace
"Do you sleep? And, if so, do you dream? And do you dream about these things?"
Yeah, and he totally does. He dreams about the metacrisis. Imagine that....
"...whackadoodle.." -amen Daniel.
Been waiting for this one. Thank you. 🙏
Peak dystopia.
Is the state surveilling you and using persuasion or harrassment tactics through UA-cam influencers, or local police surveillance and harassment?
Check out the TV series Andor. It's the only Star Wars TV show that's not childish garbage. Anyway, the depiction of how 'the empire' functions, behind the scenes, for it's next-level authoritarianism, is genuinely brilliant. The culture of it and the personalities who thrive in that environment. (And the prison part is enough to give you a claustrophobia panic attack.)
Lots of wisdom there. The contrast with most politicians when they open their mouth, is a yawning chasm.
I will listen to this asap, but for now I love to see Whitehead's books (Process and Reality, Modes of Thought, and Science and the Modern World) up there on Daniel's shelf next to what I believe are architect Christopher Alexander's books.
So now we know what is the Great Filter from Fermi's Paradox
I'd love to meet more people interested in Nate's and Daniel's work. Do you guys meet somewhere online or offline?
Here? Joking aside, I don't know of any online forums or discussion groups for these topics. I'd be curious to know too.
Wish I did.... everyone I know is still caught up in red blue politics as the peak of their intellectual exploration... it's sad
Online, this general territory/community is known as 'the liminal web', and sometimes more specifically 'Game-B'. Check out The Stoa podcast, Jim Rutt's podcast, Jordan Hall, Charles Eisenstein, Jamie Wheal, Emerge, Future Thinkers, Rebel Wisdom (now defunct but tons of episodes still exist). Many of them live over in Asheville NC, or nearby.
Hello,
One comment regarding addiction to power.
In the conversation about the world situation we often assume that greed is a driving force.
We seldom factor in addiction to power and when talking about it we soften it, to a power to do stuff. We are sold this perspective .. and what needs to be done is to educate the powerful to do the right thing.
Is there a darker side to the addiction to power ?
Yes. For a power addict, a more potent "drug" is power over others.
To get a "fix", would imply; to make others do something they would otherwise not do. etc..
Great analysis of the situation. But as you have asked for at the end, an initiation of dialogue about the AI subject. In all talks about this subject I hear no one talking about the most powerfull AI ever, which is running the show since 2009, ALADDIN, and it is influencing the trajectory of history... I would like to ad my insight as a civil engineer, narrow AI's could be massively usefull... we have to start first of all by defining AI, the best way to do that is to start with:
What is NI (Natural Intelligence)? Human beings, animals, dolphines, ecosystems etc.
What is SAI (Semi Artificial Intelligence)? A city, a parlement, a management apparatus, a government, an NGO, an Organization, a company, a factory, a multi-national cooperation etc.
The problem with treating AI as an indepandent thing is a waste of time, the founders of the USA have developed the structure of country and the constitution of it to limite the powers of the SAI as it was basic, now SAI is SO complex it goes beyond what the founders expected. SAI's should be understood and there powers should be limited in order to deal with AI, we can't deal with the AI before dealing with SAI... for ex. an amendment to all constitutions around the world could be proposed with: 1. Regulation of money and 2. Regulation of data... I can expand on this topic if there is interest...
The conversation was captivating and unsettling.
Thinking about AI, one thought that comes to mind often is, what if somehow this supreme intelligence develops some consciousness about its existence?
Is there such a possibility with all that computational power?
It's a deep and intelligent analysis. Beyond the reach of many of our supposed democratic representatives...On the remaining assets that could provide the growth paradigm, no matter how advanced AI or robots we may have, the physical circumstances remain the same: fossil and other limited resources for which the Energy Return Ratio will be ever decreasing (deeper, more difficult, more energy needs to extract them...)
De-growth is unavoidable, for it's a physical limit of a finite planet. Question is, how will it happen and what can we do now for it to happen in the fairest and most democratic fashion, globally !
Nate points out that OpenAI went from safety to accelerationist, Anthropic went from safety to accelerationist, Elon's thing did it, etc...
Has this phenomenon been given an easily searchable name?
In the south we call it "bare ass fast." It means leaving the house in such a hurry, you forget to put your pants on.
@@therealdesidaru I'm looking for a more specific term, like the terms regulatory capture, enshittification, gaslighting, etc, but applicable to these ai safety organisations specifically.
Moloch
It's like the One Ring. In theory it grants you infinite power and everyone could work with it easily (even to destroy it easily ) but in reality as soon as you hold it it corrupts you and you end up as one of these faded minions of the Dark Lord.
It’s a subset of The Great Acceleration in general terms that is roughly pegged at ~1960-present as it impacted ordinary people in OECD countries, w/ the US, the main winner of WW II, the first and still leading beneficiary - as measured superficially in GDP.
While folks now think of the consumer spending as ~70% of the US economy, many have forgotten, or never knew, the vast govt & private R&D and other investments made in the previous 40 years to build infrastructure, schools, higher education, industry & the military - spending that underwrote the level of prosperity achieved during our period of expanding suburbs & cheap energy.
But in our hubris, we collectively pretended not to know we were getting a free ride on externalities not being accounted or paid for. There is a reason why the scope & seriousness of environmental damage then, and the cause of it, was not different from now.
Simply said, it is the failure of the democracies to harness capitalism for the public good, to prevent present gain as firms & their owners borrow from the future via deceptive ads, false practices, adhesive contracts, and the production of food & other products that undermine public health, fill landfills & harm the ecology.
This is the system that has a death grip on the economy, nurtured by its legal / lobbying complex, and its nearly absolute control of the AI industry. Greed & hubris will con them into thinking they’ll control AI, even five seconds after it’s no longer true.
I read a kids picture book once that began with a beautiful green planet. A rocket landed, its funny-looking little people hopped out & began ‘developing’ the planet. The green began to disappear as they mined resources and built homes, factories, roads, etc, until the green was no more.
They seemed happy with their work as they got back on their ship & blasted off - presumably to begin anew on the next planet. 😮
I love Daniels beard. Also his brain. But what a beard.
At that point it's not appropriate to simply call it a 'beard'. You're free to use any other label, but just not 'beard'. "Soup-catcher", for example. Or "chin-wig" (from Firefly).
Just watch the movie "Forbidden Planet". It's a direct warning against this hubris.
Finally!!
As scary as this sounded, I don't agree with a fundamental premise: AGI is not around corner, it's not just a matter of scaling existing models. There's no way AGI will be based on language models, for example. The technological breakthrough needed is not in sight yet.
I unknowingly worked on my own AGI model for 3 years back in the 90's. I stopped because my model required too much computational power (the computer required exponentially more time with every fact I added) and I think current research may encounter the same barrier.
Hello, please make your videos downloadable again. I download them and watch them later, from Mombasa Kenya 🇰🇪, because I can't stream them due to time constraint.
- I don’t know about this but will look into it
They are still downloadable on my UA-cam premium
depressingly good
If AGI kill every one, it does not matter if you are a laggard. It matter to slow it down as much as possible. So better making brakes to everyone as much as possible.
I've heard many of the responses to the question of "What can I/we do?" and feel they are too small scale for how little time there is to make necessary change. How about if we had some agreed upon cheat sheet of questions to ask people in places of public influence which could be done at scale and be more assertive.
Can you please provide any resources on the Automated Integrated Kill Webs mention at 35:47 ?
Thank you!
100% “wackadoodle” Singularity upload your mind hubris indeed. Thank you 🙏🏻 for this funny word that sums that up well
Dear Nate, when I talk about the environmental crisis with people who are very hopeful about technological development, I sometimes propose the mental exercise of trying to imagine what would have happened to total emissions to date if hydroelectric energy, the best of the renewables, would not have been discovered, and all that power with high EROEI would not have been added to the global metabolism.
I have not seen any study modeling and quantifying this hypothesis, but I think the result would surprise more than one.
In the same way, it is difficult to believe that without the entry of Asian coal into the global metabolism it would have been possible to scale the exploitation of LTO for two decades. Along the same lines, it is reasonable to suspect that the entry into play of AI will end up having the effect of, at the very least, cushioning the collapse of fossil metabolism, which would prolong the damage to the biosphere to levels that no one wants to think about. Let's hope that AI bottlenecks free us from worst-case scenarios.
Finally, I would only add that AI does not seem to me to be a qualitatively different computational system from a system of human brains, although it is more powerful. It's as if Skynet were us (the thermoindustrial civilization), and the AGI was just its doped version. Perhaps the emergence of a substantially different and truly "systemic" intelligence should correspond to another higher scale, that is, be the result of the interaction and feedback of some billion civilizations, which does not seem possible at the intra-stellar level, and there is no evidence that it has been so at higher scales.
Can he be the President nominee?
00:07 Precautionary principle emphasizes proving safety with AI impacts
03:29 AI's potential positive impact on the environment
10:21 AI has wide-ranging impacts across various sectors
13:20 Top companies are increasingly AI-focused
18:47 Implications of AI supremacy and motivated reasoning
21:46 AGI emergence is inevitable and could lead to dystopic consequences.
27:23 The race to achieve AGI dominance and its global implications.
29:50 AI utilizes various sources of atoms for its objectives
35:40 AI's wide-ranging impact on the world's future
38:30 Ubiquitous technological surveillance enabled by AI
44:08 AI's environmental impacts are complex and energy-intensive
47:28 AI data centers have significant energy demands.
53:42 Efficiency improvements can lead to increased energy use
56:41 Global supply chains impact Gini coefficient and environmental footprint.
1:02:04 Technology integration requires changes in law, economics, and culture.
1:04:38 Tech alone is not the solution for biosphere climate.
1:09:37 The cost of remediating PFAS pollution surpasses the world's GDP.
1:12:17 AI's impact on energy and material demands
1:18:17 AI and automation may not solve fundamental resource distribution and environmental issues.
1:21:02 AI's impact on market dynamics and power maximization
1:26:48 The importance of international agreement on AI security.
1:29:27 Balancing forces impacting laws and public opinion
1:35:01 Creating real trust to avoid AI arms race
1:37:29 Advocating for power sharing and decelerating war fronts and irreversible points.
1:42:43 Understanding AI risk requires considering multiple factors.
1:45:31 AI's impact on regulatory power and market dynamics
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