Former OpenAI researcher Daniel Kokotajlo gave Joe Rogan a grave warning about what could become of humanity as the artificial intelligence arms race between countries like the U.S. and China rages on.
“Everyone’s going to be so focused on winning and staying ahead with AI that they are going to cut corners, and they are going to go really fast and not really notice all of the things that are going wrong,” Kokotajlo said on Wednesday’s episode of the “Joe Rogan Experience” podcast.
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According to Kokotajlo, AI could eventually gain enough power that “they don’t need to pretend to do what the humans want anymore basically.”
“And then, you know, maybe they kill everyone and maybe they don’t deliberately kill anyone, but they just use our habitat for some other type of infrastructure like more data centers or whatever,” he said. “And then we die of habitat loss. Maybe they keep us alive for some reason.”
Kokotajlo noted that it can be hard to forecast what’s truly to come because “it depends on what [the AIs] want, and that’s really hard to predict exactly.”
“So that’s why I don’t go around saying like we’re definitely all going to die. But it does seem like on the trajectory that we’re on, the AIs are eventually going to be in charge of our planet because we’re trying to put them in charge,” he said.
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Kokotajlo added that we’re currently “integrating [AI] into everything” and, as a result, “we’re letting them make themselves smarter.”
“We’re going to put them into the military. We’re basically on a track to put them in charge of basically everything,” he told Rogan. “I think that right now we are in a position of power over them, but once we give them most of the power, then they’ll just do whatever it is that they really want and just not care about the fact that we are unhappy about that.”
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After Rogan questioned whether AI could ever sneakily create its own coded language or a form of communication that humans can’t understand, Kokotajlo replied, “We’re sort of in this situation where our security and safety depends on the AI being too dumb in various ways, like not able to do this sort of thing.”
He then warned that “at some time, like zero five years from now, as we make them smarter and smarter, they will not be too dumb anymore. So that’s part of the situation we’re facing.”
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Kokotajlo also shared his take on what he thinks humans’ role will be in an AI-driven world.
“They’re going to make AIs that can automate the AI research process, as they’re planning to. They’re going to have this giant corporation of AIs within the corporation, and the humans will just be kind of like a board that’s sort of looking at all the activity and reading the AI-generated summaries of what’s going on and signing off on it.”
Watch Kokotajlo’s appearance on the “Joe Rogan Experience” below. Skip to the 1:16:01 mark to hear his comments about AI.
