Masters of Scale
00:21:12 · Demis Hassabis
[00:21:12] S2: but But... Yes. Exactly. But the behaviorally... Well, but I used to argue with Daniel Dennett about this. There's there's an additional thing is we're not just behaving in ways like we'd imagine conscious beings behave, but we also share the same substrate, where we have the same squishy brains, and so then it's most parsimonious to think you're feeling what I'm feeling. But of course with an AI, that's not the case. You don't have the second... The substrate equivalents. So I think it's gonna be very hard to conclude that. I think there are dangers... Look. There's there's two reasons why I think we should be focusing on building intelligent tools today, not conscious entities. I think for one thing is a safety argument and technical safety and risk, which is the... You know, there's a direct trade off between creating something, let's say, with self volition, right, or self awareness even prior to conscious disease or the prerequisites, right, to a conscious entity that it will... And that and instruction following or sometimes called corrigibility. So this idea of a system actually following instructions, and if it's going wrong, you telling it... You know, you as the user or the human user telling it, like, stop doing that. Right? Or switch yourself off or whatever it is that you're going to, you know, change course. So if you are training your system to be able to reject commands based on its own internal workings, then you're setting up a situation where if you've got your constitution wrong or your rules wrong, and this is what Asimov was always warning about with these three laws, you know, that was a form of... A very simple form of a constitution. And his books are all warnings that that's you're never gonna get that right Yes. In every corner case, in every edge case. And I think his books show that very well. And yet we're sort of, I think, bit hubristically thinking that that... Some people thinking that, you know, sometimes called the misalignment problem is sort of under control just because today's systems, you know, the good news is they seem more malleable than we might have imagined fifteen, twenty years ago, which is great news in terms of their steerability. But that doesn't mean we've solved the misalignment problem in total as we get closer to a GI and superintelligence and so on.
00:23:14 · Demis Hassabis, Reid Hoffman
I just think it's dangerous to think one has. That's the first thing. There's a technical problem, especially if you combine it with something like an RSI. [00:23:22] S3: Yes, exactly. There's reason why we're going in this direction. [00:23:25] S2: RSI with self volition is you know, sort of doubly dangerous. So that's one thing. Second thing is a societal... More of a societal issue, which is that I don't think we are ready yet as a society. We haven't had the debate with a wider society, philosophers, theologians, artists, humanities, not just technologists, to, you know... And from many different cultures, like, do we want to cross that second Rubicon? Are we ready to have the discussion about do these systems have moral standing? Do we need to worry about what are we doing with them in this box? You know, are they slaves of some sort? You know, all these questions come up that are complex questions, and I don't think we're equipped to even begin to start dealing with those questions. So my view is we should cross the first Rubicon on its own, which is build these intelligent tools, and then actually use these intelligent tools to do more neuroscience to go back... I'd go back and do more neuroscience to actually understand what the neural correlates of consciousness really are. Finally Yes. Understand that. Yes. And then, you know, that will probably take five, ten years, and then cross the second Rubicon. Well, to have a discussion about should we cross the second Rubicon, and then if so, how? Yes. Right? Of the conscious entity type.
00:23:25 · Demis Hassabis, Reid Hoffman
[00:23:25] S2: RSI with self volition is you know, sort of doubly dangerous. So that's one thing. Second thing is a societal... More of a societal issue, which is that I don't think we are ready yet as a society. We haven't had the debate with a wider society, philosophers, theologians, artists, humanities, not just technologists, to, you know... And from many different cultures, like, do we want to cross that second Rubicon? Are we ready to have the discussion about do these systems have moral standing? Do we need to worry about what are we doing with them in this box? You know, are they slaves of some sort? You know, all these questions come up that are complex questions, and I don't think we're equipped to even begin to start dealing with those questions. So my view is we should cross the first Rubicon on its own, which is build these intelligent tools, and then actually use these intelligent tools to do more neuroscience to go back... I'd go back and do more neuroscience to actually understand what the neural correlates of consciousness really are. Finally Yes. Understand that. Yes. And then, you know, that will probably take five, ten years, and then cross the second Rubicon. Well, to have a discussion about should we cross the second Rubicon, and then if so, how? Yes. Right? Of the conscious entity type. [00:24:38] S4: And how would you... Because you engaged in hours of these discussions. How would
00:24:38 · Reid Hoffman, Reid Hoffman
[00:24:38] S4: And how would you... Because you engaged in hours of these discussions. How would [00:24:42] S3: you answer the folks who say, look, it's the only way we get the intelligent correlate to be powerful enough is it has, as it were, the ephemeral accidental. Yes. It actually has this cognitive state and so Right.
00:24:53 · Demis Hassabis
[00:24:53] S2: So we should talk about this a lot. We discussed this, you know, even ten plus years ago, I discussed it in my PhD back twenty plus years ago of... Look, I felt and I still feel intelligence and consciousness are double dissociable, which means that you can have an intelligence system that's very smart on IQ and so on, kind of like the systems we have today, which I don't... I personally don't feel are at all conscious yet, right from my own... You know, everyone probably has their own view, but I don't feel yet. And then you can have conscious entities that are not that smart. For example, my pet dog, it's lovely, but he's... And and he's pretty conscious, think. He dreams and everything, but he's not that smart. Right? Yeah. And that's provable. So so I think you can have double dissociation here. You know, many of the higher animals, dolphins, monkeys and so on, elephants, I think most of us would view that they have some, you know, they're conscious beings, but... And they exhibit all of that that sort of behaviour. And, of course, they're also made of carbons and and the same neurons and types of things we're made of. So I feel like it's pretty obvious they have some of those qualities, but they're not necessarily that smart. So it feels like you can dissociate these things. And I think to the extent that you can, I feel like we should?
00:26:01 · Reid Hoffman
[00:26:01] S3: You know, we're coming up close to the end of our session and the end of, you know, the summit, sad. But what should we think about in terms of the whole notion of AI sovereignty? Right? Because obviously one of the things that is kind of going around in a lot of countries right now is, oh, is this really important? And, you know, one of our earliest conversations was with you trying to solve this problem. So I wanted to share some thinking and obviously it's updated for whatever that was thirteen, fourteen years ago, but...