How To Handle AI Anxiety: A Computer Scientist and a Buddhist Teacher On Managing Uncertainty | Cal Newport & Matthew Brensilver

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/00c4f2174b28d5c6

Hello, my fellow suffering beings. Uh welcome to the Ten Percent Happier Podcast. I'm your host, Dan Harris.
I don't know about you, but I am pretty damn anxious about artificial intelligence. I have all the regular concerns, you know, will it take our jobs? Will it kill us?
But beyond that I have a a kind of generalized
Dread
'cause I have the sense that the world is about to change in profound and unpredictable ways and that
just kinda freaks me out. So I've been wanting to do this episode for a long time.
about how to manage AI anxiety, and I have recruited two ninjas. Uh my first guest is Cal Newport, who's been on the show before. Uh he is a computer science professor at Georgetown. He's written several books, including Deep Work and Digital Minimalism. He has his own podcast called Deep Questions, where he talks about AI a lot and often debunk
many of the fears around AI. So I thought he would be a really good guest. And I'm pairing him with somebody who comes at this from a very different perspective, uh Matthew Brandsilver, also a frequent flyer on this show and a highly regarded uh Dharma teacher. So
Matthew and Cal, welcome back to the show.
Thank you.
Thanks, Tim.
I'd be curious.
To hear from both of you.
on two things. One, do you use AI with any regularity? And two, how worried are you about this new technology? Cal, uh I'll I'll start with you.
I use it not that much in my current workflow. It maybe is an improved Google for me, but I study it extensively. So I watch people using it to all extremes all the time. And
The core of the way I think about it right now.
is AI is a powerful technology. It is an important technology. It certainly will bring with it some side effects.
Like a lot of other technologies that we should be worried about.
But I also think
There is a layer of dread that has been artificially added onto this technological revolution. It has a lot to do with the way that people think about
Technologies like AI and Silicon Valley.
I think it has uh seeped into the cultural consciousness in a way that we are
More anxious than we need to be. So I have the same level about anxiety, same anxiety level about AI that I might have had over other disruptive technologies.
I think some of the exceptional anxiety that we're feeling now when we dig deeper into where these concerns are coming from.
Aren't as grounded, aren't as justified. So probably people think of me as a little more relaxed.
Then maybe the average person who's following AI news. Okay, well, I always resent anybody who tries to get me to relax or be less anxious. So I'm gonna press you with a million questions. But before I do that, Matthew, where are you? Do you use AI and are you worried about it?
you kind of have to grade on the temperamental fear curve, you know. So I'm probab maybe more uh I I have to uh adjust for that baseline, you know, but um
I am maybe more uh concerned about its um
potential on on the mind. I I use it very minimally myself, but I
have a lot of respect for its s narrow applications in realms of of science and technological development and various things. And so I'm respectful of that. I'm respectful of
its potential within Dharma spheres where there's uh
Uh need for high quality
one on one dharma feedback and uh have experimented a bit in the realm of a kind of uh
um chatbot that's overtrained on on certain talks and material and has been um useful for some people. And I so I can see its applications in those realms.
Uh, but I am just temperamentally um more anxious about it and
I'm very curious to see how this conversation un unfolds.
Let's see if Cal can uh reduce our blood pressure, Matthew. Um so I th I thought for the first
for this next uh segment of the of the interview, I would get Cal to talk about some of the common fears and as he does so
Matthew, you and I can weigh in with varying degrees of skepticism and and maybe even venom if we we're feeling up to it. So Cal, uh let me go to you. Right now, as we record, there is a ton of concern and upset around what's called the hugging face incident. Um I'm gonna try to uh
State the basic
the details of this, uh, but I may screw it up, in which case you can just whoop in and uh correct me. But essentially what happened as I understand it is in July, OpenAI uh um had created a bunch of uh AI agents.
That were supposed to be in a sandbox and a and a kind of
enclosed uh work space with no access to the internet.
And somehow these agents got out of this contained training area and were able to get onto the internet and hack into uh and to execute a a a a
Quite.
sophisticated cyber attack on a company called Hugging Face. Um and then we subsequently have learned that not only did they do that, but they were they've learned how to communicate with one another uh and
We're able to keep up that communication, these AI agents, even after open AI shut down the place where they were supposed to be communicating. And so this has
raised all sorts of questions about whether the
You know, w we're we're seeing what
the sci fi writers have been worried about for a long time, an AI that we've created that gets out of our control and then does us harm.
Okay, did I get the did I state the details correctly and w why should we not be worried?
First of all, I should say how bizarre it is that the the high strung East Coast academic is trying to make the Dharma expert less anxious. Don't we have this?
Backwards. Is this bizarre world? This is where like Superman goes evil. Um You got it main mainly right. There there's
Uh two small things I want to push back on.
quit first and then broaden out to my take on that whole story.
Um
One, uh no, the system did have access to the internet, just limited access. So there was uh a sort of complicated containment where there's certain things it needed to do on the internet and they were trying to turn off other things.
Um and two, I want to use the word learn. Um language model itself can't learn uh once it's trained. It's a uh nonvaluable state. The state stays
uh static. So I think that prejudices the story a little bit.
I think there's a lot of ways we talk about this story that I think prejudices towards a sci-fi type interpretation. So I want to give you another interpretation of what's going on here. So this is a technology where you have a computer program that's written by humans, we understand how it works, we wrote the code ourselves.
That calls an LLM.
to get ideas and plans, right? So you'll have a computer program written by a person that will prompt an LLM and say
I have been given the following challenge. Give me a step by step plan. And the computer program will run that step, see what happens, go back to an LLM, write another prompt and say, Here's what happened, what should I do next? So it's a human program.
That's repeatedly prompting an LLM, roughly speaking.
And then taking action on behalf of what that LLM uh tells in its responses. The LLM itself, of course, is static, doesn't learn, doesn't change. It's just a a a static language model that it's querying.
The particular challenge they were working on in this case is
was a hacking challenge.
And it took a different route than they expected. They said hack into this server, it couldn't get access. The LLM plan was like, Well, what if we uh hack in over here and they said, Oh, we don't have internet access. It's like, well, I'm a hacking server, I've been trained to do that. So how do we get internet access? They found the bug.
And so it was doing what they asked it to do. It just did it in a way
They weren't expecting.
And to me, the the real story about these type of hacks is that it's a bad idea.
to have LM outputs be the foundation for a plan. It's just too unpredictable.
It's why we don't worry about almost any other type of superhuman intelligent A uh AI that exists and all sorts of other domains. We never worry about them doing things we don't want. We never worry about them losing control.
Because they're not fundamentally based on
autonomously asking an LLM for a plan and just executing it blindly.
That's an irresponsible thing to do.
But it's not, in my opinion, eerie.
I think what you're saying is
This story, like many other stories, uh has been
has kind of fed into a larger fear narrative around AI. But if you look at the details of the story, the OpenAI was training these AI agents.
On hacking. So it's not
particularly surprising that they executed a hack. What is surprising is that
They did it in a way that
The
human
Experimenters were not expecting
And your argument is um
They probably shouldn't be running tests like this.
And and I don't think it's surprising at all. This is just a fact about LLMs that anyone who has spent time with a chat bot knows.
They produce answers that are reasonable.
Right. Like this is a reasonable response to this prompt, but they're not always predictable.
LLMs can go in weird directions if you prompt it. Like w uh there's a well known study that's out there, for example, that finds that if you mention AI in a prompt to an LLM,
You say you're an AI
And then you ask it a question or give it a scenario.
It's much more likely, for example, to give a sci fi style answer involving AI run amok because
when it sees that as part of the prompt, it reminds it of all the AI run amok sci fi stories it digested in its training. And it's like, oh, this is a reasonable way to expand it.
It's not reasonable to us as to humans.
But it's reasonable to it. So LLMs give responses that make sense, but are often defining human expectations and values. So we shouldn't use them.
as the core for plants. No one is worried about Stockfish, the world's best chess plane AI, going rogue.
Because at the
core of how this AI works and evaluates chess moves is not just asking an LLM for a plan and executing it. So I think that's what was dangerous there is
Of course that's irresponsible. It doesn't mean that there are malicious intentions that have emerged within the AI.
It means that the companies were being irresponsible by autonomously executing plans that come from something as fundamentally unpredictable as LLM output.
Matthew.
How does that all go down with you?
I'm interested, Cal, like uh
some level we're we're talking about two
questions, which is sort of like how how potent will AI become
And how alignable.
will will it be in its potency? And it sounds like you're maybe more sanguine about the alignment question that if it's done responsibly, and and that's that's a question, but if we can constrain the responsibilities around that, uh but that it is in fact more alignable than the
the more fearful types are imagining.
Yeah, I think
Aligning the
output of an LLM to what you want as humans is hard.
But most visions of AI that go beyond what the frontly labs are talking about are not just trying to get LLM outputs.
to be something that we like. And once you move to a broader vision of AI that's more than just asking an LLM for a plan and executing it,
uh alignment in the classical sense, at least in my opinion, is
Much more tractable.
You sound
as everybody can hear, reasonably sanguine here. I do want to point out that there are experts in the field who are much more or at least saying they're much more alarmed uh than you sound. Uh one of them is Helen Toner, your colleague from Georgetown, who's a uh professor and and former open AI board member.
She uh just went on um My Pal as Reclines podcast and expressed a lot of concern around this hugging face thing. And then there was a uh a safety expert from Anthropic who put out a tweet saying that his view was that w there's like a forty percent chance that
A I
ends up creating as existential problems uh for humans. Um disastrous, you know, apocalyptic problems for humans. So like when you hear
your colleague and then this guy who's on the inside at Anthropic, uh saying things like that.
What do you think?
There's a very important background.
to all these conversations that I think is really important to establish.
Which is out in Silicon Valley, there's a particular philosophical, we could call it stance that's often known as rationalism.
Um though it is heavily influenced and overlapped as well with effective altruism.
Rationalism emerged out of transhumanist movements from the nineties features transhumanist movements and evolved into rationalism in the two thousands, and core to its belief is the idea that superintelligent AI
poses a massive threat to humanity's extinction, and that the rationalists, by training their minds to be as rational as possible, are going to be our best chance at saving humanity by preventing superintelligent AI
From killing us all.
This is a very powerful belief system among this group within Silicon Valley that's really well funded. Now, here's what's important, and I want to say this all very carefully.
But there are very strong rationalist connections.
to open AI. The open AI board members that in 2023 tried to push Sam Altman out, as reported by Cade Metz in the New York Times, were all very much aligned with rationalism and felt that Sam Altman was not being sufficiently concerned about the superintelligent AI risk.
Darius Hamade has a lot of connections to this as well.
Uh, Deep Mind uh is also very deeply connected. The co-founder, Shane Leg, is a longtime rationalist, Eliezer Ukowski, who was the sort of the inventor of the rationalist movement, is who introduced Sasabi to Peter Thiel to get the initial funding.
uh for deep mind.
I don't mean to imply this is nefarious or this is bad, but it is a clear ideology that believes and believed long before LLMs came along.
That super intelligent AI was for sure coming.
And it's an existential risk.
And that we need to depend on these sort of brave, super rational engineering types to save humanity.
This gives
A particular tone to a lot of discourse coming out of Silicon Valley leaders or Silicon Valley adjacent people, a discourse that is biased towards an assumption that of course massive disruption and existential threat is always around the corner.
And I feel like this
substrate of rationalism has added an extra level of dread. It deeply influences anthropic. It deeply influences open AI. It deeply influences Elon Musk. It deeply influences
Deep mind.
And when you
peel that away, it's less scary of a picture. So you know, you'll notice, for example, when you talk to East Coast computer scientists,
who tend not to be connected to the rationalism circles on the West Coast.
uh we tend to be more sanguine. We're like, oh, this is an important technology, it's disruptive, it's dangerous, but it's not existential. We're not as afraid about it.
Russ Duhat report in the you know an op ed in the New York Times a few weeks ago that in China
they talk about AI completely differently than we do in uh the US. They actually do not have that extra narrative of existential dread or they don't see it as a weapon. They see it as a tool that's useful and a way to
Um that you know has economic growth potentials. They see economic warfare, maybe, but they don't actually see it through this framework of dread.
So, like one of my projects recently has been to emphasize that this philosophical movement in Silicon Valley.
really has affected how a lot of people coming out of those circles talk about AI in a way that has added an extra layer of dread.
to a lot of the rest of us. And we don't realize how much of that is actually coming from the philosophy as opposed to the reality of the technology on the ground.

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Well I think another point you've made, I I believe I've heard you make this on your show
is and and I apologize if you haven't, um
Uh
Is that
Not only are are we in this weird situation where
so many of the people who are literally on the inside of these massive AI companies, the so called frontier labs, have this view that AI is a inevitable
B potentially lethal to the species and C can only be stopped by the self appointed rationalist heroes. So we have this strange situation where the men and women on the inside are are s scaring the shit out of us.
But I think another point is that sometimes
uh there are marketing reasons for folks on the inside to talk as if they've created this scary technology because it makes them seem to their investors to Wall Street to it
to everybody else, like they're in in the front in this race, in the in the lead in this race to to get to superintelligence.
Yeah, I think both of those things are going on.
I would say my stance has shifted some of this
More recently as I talk more to insiders from these companies and from Silicon Valley
Uh, I'm shifting away from hey, a lot of this is good marketing to
These are true believers.
Right. That also turns out to be uh also turns out to be good marketing, but also look at other Silicon Valley companies that aren't associated with rationalism, like NVIDIA. Jensen Wong started that, you know, well before that movement really took off.
Look at uh his quotes. I you know, I've written recently about a podcast interview he did last winter where he was like, What's with all this sci-fi stuff, guys? We have to stop this. We have to stop telling people this makes no sense.
And it's because
He's not from that background. It just is a it's our bad luck.
that the three companies that are shaping our encounter with this new type of AI
all happen to have, coincidentally, pretty strong connections to this movement. And other AI players, both here in America and overseas who don't have these connections, talk about this technology very differently.
Matthew, let me check back with you my my
Hello.
Anxious Buddhist. Um uh any of this
Mollifying you in any way.
Blood pressure is one forty over one ten. So borderline hypertension is what the monitor says here. So well, as a full disclosure, I I I'm not in the rationalist camp, but have been quite compelled by some aspects of the effective altruism movement, just uh really as a kind of
Um
uh disclosure on that front. For people who don't know what effective altruism is g and its role in all of this, can you maybe just explicate? Yeah, so so I've been not involved in the the aspects of effective altruism that are concerned about existential risk and pandemics and
you know, uh you know, misaligned technology, but I have been involved in
This basic question
that that's at the heart of effective altruism for me, which is something like to what degree
Is it morally permissible for me to privilege my own well-being over that of others?
Which w when you get down to it. And that to that is a very sympathetic question in my mind. And that's something that I I live with uh quite um consciously day to day, really. I
appreciate what you're saying, Cal, about um some of the the other
lines of thinking that are associated with with the with the movement. Dario's piece, I which I r read last night, uh, you know, Adolescent Technology, you know, um it it's a it's a very interesting like what his in what the incentive structures are for him to be
disclose you know sharing those things and I'm I'm curious what
Your thoughts are Cal on how much you construe that as a kind of grandiose or fearful temperament or marketing or something, but it's pretty harrowing and uh
And seemed fairly sober to me and is all, you know, uh embedded in very probabilistic language and and not uh and a lot of epistemic humility, I would say. Uh but
Yeah, where where where are you in in relation to that.
Cal, before you answer, for people who don't know who Dario Amade is, I believe he's either the founder or CEO or both of Anthropic, which is the parent company for the uh chatbot, Claude, which is very, very popular. I'm not aware of what Matthew's referring to in terms of his essay, so maybe you can fill in some of the
Uh
details there before you respond to to Matthew's question.
Right, and and Dario was actually a a group of seven employees of OpenAI that broke away from OpenAI because they believed that they were insufficiently concerned or dealing with the potential safety.
uh risks of AI.
Um now are are you talking about the machines of loving grace or the he has a couple essays that he's written recently.
Um, I do not think those are marketing.
Uh I don't my understanding, you know, talking to sources is uh
He really believes
These things strongly.
Um he does have a principled safety position.
That's where it's coming from.
Uh some sources are reporting that he's actually relatively isolated within the company right now. So this is not a, you know, Bill Gates in the nineties with your finger on every button in the company type of figure. So he's he's
uh that puts them in a position to do be more philosophic, right? To think throimplications and sort of write these things.
Um I also think that those are those are very rationalist influenced
storylines that he's writing about.
And that I would say a lot of the East Coast computer science community, and I I I kinda just say that as a shorthand for computer scientists that really just don't have much exposure um to those particular existential threat cultures.
a lot of the East Coast computer science community just is not at all convinced that the uh frontier lab strategy of building AGI on top of LLMs is gonna work.
That that you know, it it sounds
It sounds almost crazy to say that there's been a bit of a dead end in and in this type of technology because it feels like there's massive things happening all the time, but actually that's not really the case. Like the reality is
The original model of these companies was if we keep scaling the size of LLMs, just literally how big they are and how much data we trained them on.
they will continue to get more capable until we get something like a human type capability in an LLM, at which point we could just tap it to do anything.
That hit a wall a couple years ago. Can all the major companies learn that just making the LLMs larger
and training them more was leading to diminishing returns on capability. So
A lot of the advances that have come since then first was doing chain of thought reasoning, which allowed performance to go up some.
Almost all the other advances past then has been custom tuning these models to particular problems where we happen to have a lot of data.
And that's computer code and math. And if you really go back and think about
All of these alarming pronouncements that have made you anxious in the last six months or year. Go back and ask how many of these has to do with
building tools on top of LLMs to work with computer code or math. It's almost everything that has happened, even though
There are many other more economically fruitful areas of the economy. We just don't know how to build tools that deal with them. So it's to the East Coast computer scientists, they would say,
Amade is talking too generally and abstractly, which is a very rationalist thing. It's thought experiments. What if this happens, then this, then this.
less on the on the ground reality of the technologies and its difficulties. So
We can build very powerful scary AIs. It's not gonna be
A harness on top of Claude.
LLMs as the core of
Artificial general intelligence.
Feels like to a lot of us a dead end.
L L M is a langu large language model, which is essentially a
Fancy computer science way of saying a chat bot or the
technology that powers the chat bot that you know you're talking to chat GBT or Claude, um
those are essentially uh running off of LLMs. Uh uh they've they've hoovered up a lot of data, and then they're spitting out answers on everything they've um uh they've learned. And just to clarify that real quick, there's a lot of different types of AI models.
That's one of them.
And it's what powers chatbots and at the core of what OpenAI and Anthropic does. But a lot of other things AI has done recently, like Alpha Fold getting the Nobel Prize for protein folding, Alpha Go winning and playing Go, um looking at Dreamer V3, being able to learn how to play Minecraft, for example, those systems actually have nothing to do with LLMs.
And so there AI is a very broad thing and LLM is the particular strategy that Open AI and Anthropic have really put all their chips in on.
I think what you're saying is LLM's burst uh chatbots burst onto the scene in I think twenty twenty three, really, in terms of the popular consciousness. And um ever since there's been all this concern. But what's happening behind the scenes is even though there's a ton of news and some of it's disturbing
Really, we haven't seen some massive advances in the underlying
L technology that would indicate that we're on the cusp of
you use the term AGI, which is um artificial general intelligence or some sort of superintelligence, the kind of AI we see in the movies. So that that's got a lot of folks, especially on the east coast
computer science community.
feeling like Huh, maybe things have stalled a little bit, even ironically as concern has uh been jacked up.
Yeah, like there's a lot of eyebrow raising, for example, in recent months when both OpenAI and Anthropic have really been uh touting
results in
largely discrete mathematics that they helped solve using harnesses on top of LLMs. And it raised a lot of eyebrows because to people like me who actually
do ex uh you know, discrete mathematics professionally as a professor.
There couldn't possibly be a least economically advantageous angle to build AI than doing combinatorial theories within discrete mathematics. So why are they focusing there? Why not solving problems that you could immediately make money off of or would have a huge market for it? So for a lot of us, that's because
That's what they can do. It's like asking Dillinger, why do you rob banks? And he said, That's where the money is.
So the fa you know, I do think it's more limited right now than people realize coding and certain types of math.
Are kind of the sweet spots right now.
And a lot of the advances on coding and certain types of math has less to do about the LLMs than it does with just these programs that humans are writing to the they're called harnesses.
There's just a lot of old fashioned human logic and elbow grease in these harnesses where a lot of computer programmers spent a lot of time. They know a lot about computer programming. There's a lot of if then and pattern matching and just building out old fashioned programs that understand computer programming.
and prompt LLMs, these are cool tools.
And in computer programming it really is changing the way people computer program. So this is these are this is
Disruptive. This is big.
But it's also pretty limited compared to the future they were talking about in twenty twenty three, which was these LLMs will be as smart as a human. So you can ask it to do anything.
And it will be able to do it as well as a human. That seems like that's out of reach. We don't know how to do that.
Matthew, I am preparing to move on from the
Will AIs get out of control and kill us? Uh the so called alignment question.
to the will AI take all of our jobs. But before I make that segue, I just want to
touch base with you again. Is there anything more you want to add or ask?
uh on the existential
Tip. Yeah. Well I I suppose
Part of my question is uh
What
What what problems are we solving for in the technological development and who does that
serve and
I am ignorant, you know, and don't don't understand the incentive structures, but I do I just feel temperamentally a little bit skeptical about the broad application of AI
adding to like human well being. I can see it as you've emphasized, Cal, in more narrow applications, that the chatbot is not like the the pinnacle of of the form or something like that. And
it it's it's very hard to argue with the scientific value, you know, of of some of these applications already, already, every day I get
a kind of nature's top stories, and so often there is something very impressive uh uh that has been supported by the technology.
very hard to imagine that
regressing not not expanding. And so but
I as a consumer, as a civilian, as a practitioner, as somebody who
seeks a life of meaning and peace and care. It's not
Clear to me what the applications are and what the broader societal effects are. And that's where a lot of my concern really is.
And I just seeing how
you know, social media and smartphones has really
capitalized in some sense on the first noble truth, like that there is dukkha, that there is some unsatisfactoriness, and that phone or you know technological entertainment of one kind or another is capitalized on the sense of like this moment could get better.
And it's been
exploited ruthlessly to the point where our minds are colonized by
technology in a way that we don't even fully appreciate.
and smartphones capitalize on a certain kind of agitation boredom, I worry that AI will capitalize on a certain kind of
laziness and fear in in some way, and that we will continue to try to
Uh essentially turn
aspects of our life
That had in some
unseen way provided a certain amount of meaning, even though they might be mendane and repetitive, but that we are essentially
uh extricating those from our lives or outsourcing them. And and I don't know where that stops. And I and there are certain things in our life where
Wha you know, what what is the point of our life? What is the point of it? And
I I remember um Kieran
Um
Setya that you had on some some years ago made this distinction between telic and atelic activities. And telic, you know, from the Greek telos, right? It was like these are things that we do in order to exhaust, meaning we to commute home from a day of work. You get to you get home.
And that is now done. And okay, it's good that it's done. And but then there are atelic activities that where it's like spending time with family or reflecting on one's life. And you those are do not aim at a terminal state whereby you extricate that from your life. And
I I just wonder how much the sense of
Yeah.
All of our life becoming teelic activities.
And the the sense that there's less and less protection
for what is only done in the present moment and is never finished and what will be be left with. And so that that's some of my concern in the in the mix here.
If if we set aside will AI kill us, which I I think for both of us is still an opening question. There's a money money back guarantee
I'm coming to Georgetown if uh I get in trouble, you know. We'll all be dead anyway, so I'm I'm okay either way. Right. Right.
So setting aside the will we all be dead question, your question, if I your related concern, Matthew, if I'm hearing you correctly, is um if we look at the history of technology most recently with social media, that was supposed to connect us all in this blissful Kumbaya way, but it actually has driven
deep wedges and uh created a lot of like anxiety and capitalized on our vulnerabilities as summed up by the Buddha and his first noble truth that uh is often mistransated as life is suffering, but more
accurately could be translated as life is unsatisfactory if you're constantly
you know, uh chasing uh things that will not last, given how
unremitting impermanence is. Um and you look at the effect of um social media not so positive by most people's lights and say, what is AI gonna give us? Um is it you know, is it is is this just gonna drive us further into anger, anxiety, dis
connection, dislocation, et cetera, et cetera.
Decent summation of your concern?
Mm-hmm.
Cal, uh what do you say to that concern?
Uh I fiercely agree.
Right. I I mean I would say one of the the big projects in my writing over the last decade is looking at exactly this issue of
You introduce a technology for some purpose and it has all these unintentional side effects. You introduce email to get rid of voicemail and it fragments our attention to the place where work becomes
unbearable. You introduce social media so you can keep up with the relationship status of your college boyfriend.
And before you know it, it has completely colonized our mind and changed our epistemology to one of engagement over logic and basically broke
the country.
So God only knows what the side effects are gonna be.
If we have the widespread adoption of AI. We've already seen a few, right? Like social media, one of the bad negative side effects of social media.
uh is that we moved in person real value sacrifice based relationships and interactions to this low friction, sort of easy digital world of interaction, what's called social snacking by the social psychologists, and we all got more lonely.
Well, social media did us a favor by becoming worse. It followed the TikTok model, and now no one actually socializes with people on social media anymore. So maybe we're gonna get a breather, but then chatbots came along.
And now people are saying, Oh, it's way lower friction.
To have a conversation with a chap off than a real person.
'Cause it really feels like it understands me.
And and I g I have a much more enjoyable conversation with it than
actually interacting with the real person.
So we got a breather from getting away from social interaction and now it's back to being worse again. Multiply those problems by a hundred. And that's what we'll have if we approach AI like we did all of the other technologies in the last 20 years, which is to basically say,
It's my job as a consumer to figure out why this is useful. I'm gonna try everything. If a company from Silicon Valley says it's a big deal, I need to use it. Um and it'll cause whatever damage it causes. We have to get rid of that mindset. We have to switch to a digital minimalist mindset of
I'm not gonna use your tool.
Until you have an
overwhelming hard to ignore case for exactly how it's going to help me. It's not my goal, open AI, to figure out how to make chat GPT useful to me. You come and convince me
That there's some part of my life this is gonna make better, and then I'll use it. We have to switch our mindset.
To starting with our values first.
And only choosing and deploying technologies when they support those values instead of inhibiting them.

I recently read um in the New York Times Brett Stevens, one of their sort of right of center columnists
Uh he wrote a very strident piece saying you should not
use AI
in your writing at all.
Uh, which I think I disagree with, but maybe some of your statements in that last utterance um might be um
pushing me into Brett's corner uh a little bit. Uh I
When the
All the noise about Chat GPT started in twenty twenty three. I vowed to myself
In my uh I was in my early fifties at the time, fifty five now.
that unlike all the past technological revolutions, I was not gonna be late on this one.
You know, I was late to the internet, late to social media. Um so I'm gonna I'm just gonna embrace it early. It just felt like the right thing to do.
um and counterintuitive uh for uh an old guy.
Um and
I have found it actually pretty useful in
in my writing not
as something that writes for me. It's a terrible writer.
Uh but as um
First of all, as like kind of an enhanced Google, uh uh like for research, although you have to
Go back and double check everything it says. And f as a decent thought partner at seven in the morning when none of my actual writing partners are at work and I can bore the shit out of ChatGBT until the cows come home and it never gets tired of me. Uh but again, I always need to run any conclusions I
Land on in my conversations with Chad B
So
I'm just laying out how I use it and have found it reasonably useful, but should I be rethinking that?
I think what you're talking about there
Would be in alignment with
Rets.
Article.
Like here's the way I think about Brett's call, which I actually agree with. Here's the way I think about it. There's two things with AI and writing that I worry about.
One is I think it is emotional or psychological fraud to try to um
Take writing that was largely produced by a computer and make it seem as if it came from you. So I have a bright line against that because when you are consuming writing that you assumed was written by another person, you're actually simulating that other person's mind within your own. Writing is like a
telepathy. It's magical. It's a way of taking an internal human state.
A cognitive state in a human brain.
Somehow capturing it in s and squiggles on paper.
And then having another person recreate your internal cognitive state within their own head. It's an incredibly intimate
human thing we do. So I do think there's
uh a level of fraud would be involved if I have AI write the email that I'm sending to you because I'm simulating your mind, but it wasn't actually your mind. So that's one bright line. The other line I have is writing is how you get smarter. Writing is one of the most cognitively demanding things we do as humans. I I I wrote a New Yorker piece about this a couple of years ago where I got into the neuroscience of writing.
Um, and it's a symphony of connections between many different parts of your brains that would never normally work together. Um, it it is incredibly demanding and it's what makes humans.
who they are. Go read Walter Ong's uh you know, go read Walter Ong, right? And he gets into huge detail about
Almost anything we think about today as rationality or logic or human rights or anything we value intellectually could not exist until we had writing and writing allowed us to sort of grapple and make sense of these. So it's important that you write.
All that being said.
I don't see any problem using uh a chatbot as a better Google. It is a good Google, especially if it's pointing you to sources that you then read. I think it's great for it. I
I think it's fine to have I've tried this conversations with Chat GPT. I don't think there's anything morally wrong with it. It worries me.
Because it's really addictive.
Because it's very positive and it makes you seem really smart. And I've gotten very wary about it, but I don't think there's anything wrong about that. So actually I
I have no issue with what you're saying, but I do have issues with um having it write on your behalf or just writing less. I think both of those things are important. Matthew, are there use cases for
Cat bots.
uh that you think are healthy for and adaptive for the average viewer or listener for the of this show?
Yeah, well I I loved what what Cal said, that dimension about telepathy, which you know, in in Dharma circles, Buddhist language, we
describe as something like transmission that that actually the nature of of
The thread between uh
A teacher and student in the Buddhist world is essentially sharing one's mind and actually conveying.
With a
incredible precision and authenticity like what it's like to it's some level a Dharma talk is narrating one's mind and to have the output of of an LLM
that is only adds static to it, even if it sounds good. And so I'm
really concerned, skeptical about and have have never tried to use the technology to augment, you know, Dharma talks that I give or anything like that. That makes me very wary. And it's not to say that there wouldn't be something very compelling that would come up in the
the output, you know, that I can imagine, like, okay, give me a poignant story about change or something like that. And then
you know, Claude's gonna do it, right? Or something like that. And
But I'm
I'm wary. And so uh I I can imagine
given the limitations of teachers to meet with students one on one, I can imagine some individually tailored instructions. Maybe it's one of the kind of frontier models, whatever
Or maybe it's something that is overtrained on Dharma, you know, on one teacher or a series of teachers in some way. I don't know the technical kind of applications that are possible, but I could imagine that being
uh giving very good feedback. In fact, I have a friend who in an online retreat was consulting, you know, asking very precise Buddhist questions that were essentially
Enable
him to
uh deep in the d Dhamma Vachaya investigation, investigation. And so there was something about the output that was harvesting from you know the all of the world's wisdom and specifically Buddhist, you know, Theravadan Buddhism that
enabled him to actually
hone the the meditation techniques in some interesting ways. And but that was dependent on him being
intrinsically motivated to to to practice and using it in a way that was
I would say uh balanced and, you know, circumscribed rather than getting
You know.
sidetracked with philosophical inquiries or these kinds of things. It was really in service of phenomenological investigation. And when it's like that, I I really can see its its value.
So
You think it would be kosher and maybe even helpful to talk to a chat bot about your meditation practice or find points of the Dharma?
It's gonna be better than all of us.
At some level.
You know.
And I that is that is my sense that it's it's I don't know it well enough, but it will
At some point the output will be excel that of
you know, our most luminary best teachers. That's my that's my guess. But what's interesting to me, and I'm not gonna name any names here, but a very prominent Dharma teacher recently released
A chat bot based on their I'm gonna use their as the pronoun not
Just
Not to give away the gender of of the person uh on their work.
And there was an uproar.
And so I read I actually
Personally.
Don't
And this may make me unpopular with my own viewers and listeners, but I don't actually see a big problem
with releasing a chatbot of your work, especially if it's, you know
Done with humility and and in a sense of experimentation. But what it
With
outsize reaction speaks to me.
to the massive
anxiety that people feel
and wariness that people feel around this technology.
When when is the Dan Bot coming, Dan?
The thing is, in order to create a bot around somebody, you actually have to know something. And I am not a Buddhist scholar or a highly trained Buddhist teacher. I'm not a computer scientist like Cal. I am an interviewer and I I can speak
Confidently on a few things, but um not not in the way you can. So I don't see a bot coming anytime soon.
I
appreciate the the the strength of the reaction from people is does not surprise me at all. You know, and you can look at polling and some threat to this basic notion of Dharma as warm hand to warm hand, you know as the Zen tradition says. That that
And that to disrupt that at some fundamental level is very destabilizing. And and you could probably see that in s in classrooms and you know, education, that that that there are
there will be risks to the disruption of of the the warm hand to warm hand.
That's why I believe chatbots can be really helpful in the ways you've described and
They're not a replacement for
either one to one relationships with a Dharma teacher or a parisocial relationship.
through my app or some other app, um, or you know, going on retreats, et cetera, et cetera. I think I see it as an augmentation, not a replacement. Back to AI anxiety though, because I have a few
questions I want to get to before I let you guys go. Um
I referenced the f the other common
Well, I think there are many other common fears around AI, but I think the m most prominent other fear other th uh beside will
artificial intelligence eliminate us is will it eliminate our jobs. Um
Cal
How worried should we be about that?
Uh in the near future, I wouldn't be very worried because it has struggled to do this.
Even though year after year we've been told it's about to. Even after we went through
A whole season this fall and this winter of what became known as AI washing, where tech companies that were right sizing after over hiring during the pandemic kept trying to blame layoff on AI, only for it to be pointed out that
Uh, these layoffs had nothing to do with AI. It was just a way of making them sound more smart. Um, so right now we don't see this as as being a particular fear. Something I'm reporting on uh at the moment, which I think is really important, is that even in the world of computer programming, which is the best case scenario for AI, this is where we have the most advanced AI tools.
We have the most impressive adoption. It's the use case with the best data, and it's the use case that the AI engineers understand best. So these coding harnesses that can produce code automatically have swept through computer programming, right? It's it's ubiquitous now.
And now what's the reporting showing after four or five months of this?
A lot of these senior engineers are quietly having to go back to write a lot more code by hand.
because it just it's not trustworthy enough. And it's too hard to review the code being produced by a machine. When you write code yourself, this is how you understand how a system works. And when you understand how a system works, you know how to prevent it from actually crashing.
And this doesn't mean that these tools aren't useful in computer programming, but it means that even in this best case scenario for AI to come in and take over jobs, and we were told it was doing this and it had been doing this, we're struggling to actually have it do it because what we do as humans in a lot of these jobs is complicated and it's multifaceted. Um, it's easy to augment.
work with technology to make it easier. It's really hard to automate work. So I think there is a big
moment, maybe like a six month moment.
Where this was the conversational topic de jure. It's going to take all the jobs. It's going to crash the economy. And the Frontier Labs moved off that topic. I think it was right around the time they started talking to East Coast bankers about IPOs, and they said this is not the right talking point to be talking about. And now we moved on to other things like alignment and superintelligence and AI getting out of control.
Um, so no, I don't think right now there's a widespread fear that we have an imminent threat of a widespread job automation that's like about to happen like that.
Matthew, how's your blood pressure in response to that?
I sit still for a living, Dan. You know this. I I'm like so far out of my zone, you know, and you
Uh
But I naively feel like
I have have seen enough capability to be
it's not hard to imagine wide swaths of job being changed fundamentally given given the just the capabilities that I've seen in my limited exposure and
Uh
That is that that's
Sobering.
You know, and and when I think about certain tasks, it's just hard to imagine companies wanting to um pay a human for it.
Is he right about that, Cal?
Yes, but that's normal, right? I mean, this is a normal technological story that you you invent a new workplace productivity technology and it automates certain types of work and replaces some types of work and other types adapt, but we didn't have the same
levels of existential dread about it. I think the internet, for example, was massively disruptive. The personal computer was massively disruptive.
But we didn't think about it in terms of the economy is going to crash, or that like Sam Altman has proposed on multiple occasions, we're gonna have to have a sovereign wealth fund based on stock grants from the AI companies from which we can actually give people income so they can survive after most of the economy is automated. We never thought so.
extremely about past uh past innovations, even though they did change things.
We didn't think about it as fundamentally going to destabilize the entire economy. And you know, as it stands now.
It's hard to use these tools.
to completely automate even major parts of jobs. I think that the two most useful use cases we have right now are uh computer programming, right? I think it is true. This is very disruptive.
For the most part, computer programmers have letting agents produce the actual code. They'll heavily spec what they want and look at what it writes, but that's a big change.
in certain types of mathematics, these mathematics solvers that are built on LLMs along with other tools that are all orchestrated together.
Are changing the way that people in uh my field do mathematics.
That we're using these tools more often. Um it
It doesn't solve mathematics. It can only work with stuff that humans have already proved.
But it is disruptive there. And I think that's the normal story. And I think that's what we're gonna get with AI.
all these with these technological revolutions, it goes slower than you think at first and then has bigger impacts than you assumed
in the long term. So I think twenty years from now we'll look around and say,
Wow, there's AI one way or the other heavily integrated into almost everything I do in my job in a way that wasn't the case before, just like today versus nineteen eighty, you're like, man, there's computers and networks involved in almost everything I do is my job in a way that would have been inconceivable forty years ago. So I think that's right.
But I also think that's more normal.
then the rhetoric we've been hearing is allowing us to accept.

So for much of this interview, um
Matthew and I have been peppering you, Cal, with
Skeptical questions about
Um how much we should be worried about AI. For this section, I wanna focus on you, Matthew. And then Cal you can
Uh way in with
Anything you'd like uh to add?
If people listening
Retain their anxiety.
Let's talk from a Buddhist perspective about
tools for navigating an uncertain future.
What would you suggest?
It is striking that the the the Buddha
Places
uncertainty at the center of all things that anietzha anietzha usually rendered as
impermanence, but uh sometimes also as uncertainty.
And uncertainty, you know, mobilizes a sense of urgency in us because there can be more than one outcome, some of which we prefer more than others. And
Generally speaking, for an animal, uh, the default response to uncertainty is something like stress.
And
stress at some level occurs when we
feel something, are surprised by what we're feeling and we do not know how to
mobilized to meet that threat and because feeling is really sensed as threat. This is why
Buddhist teachers are often pointing us back to our body and the somatic, uh
uh cues um because at some level if feeling is the kind of alarm thinking is the rapid response that we try to marshal in order to manage that sense of
Um the world trembling.
And the world is always trembling. And the basic manner in which we of
try to manage un anisha uncertainty.
Is to think.
And to worry.
And to generate
fearful scenarios and attend to those fearful scenarios, or we're trying to game out all of these contingencies in our life and try to cling our way into more
security, you know, and so this is um
This is a very deep habit of our mind. And even while we're meditating, we can actually
recognize that a lot of the movements of our mind are an attempt to know
what the trajectory of our life means for the next moment.
What this felt sense of this moment means for the my future. And there's a sense of being.
Yeah.
squashed between the past and the future, where the present is essentially only leveraged in order to ensure
our security and
Information is sometimes described as or defined as like the reduction of uncertainty.
That's what information is in some sense. And so if
We uh enter a room that's where the lights are out, it's completely dark and we're sighted. We turn on the lights, there's information, there's less uncertainty, right?
When we're sitting there on our meditation cushions or we're lying there in bed late at night trying to go to sleep, we
Essentially are
hungry, desperate for information.
uh to in order to reduce uncertainty and sense of threat
And
The uh uh
place to which we go. We kind of go to the the our low budget Google, namely think
You know, and it is about generating and attending to various scenarios and contingencies.
And no doubt some of this is adaptive, you know, the notion of just like live in the present moment. It's like
Silly. It's silly. Of course, there's a ton of planning and prognostication. In fact, like
Wisdom at some level is the ability to predict.
true happiness to predict
What will satiate our heart's
and the hearts of others.
This path is actually involves the future, but our like deeply fraught anxious relationship with uncertainty.
uh is a shadow that that um
is cast over over our present moment in deep ways.
Okay, so there's a kind of like problem definition, right? And then what what what is the the the Buddhist counsel around this? On the one hand
We're
asked to generate deep forms of stability.
that it's not merely opening to an each, but we are
actually cultivating stability and we are opening in this radical way to the ungovernable, unpossessable nature of life.
And so it's these
Two deep tasks that sometimes clank into one another. Tell me to stop, Dan. Should I just keep going?
Yeah, I'm loving this. Um I think what you're saying is the the on the remedy side, it's stabilizing the mind and then with a stable mind
Opening up.

reality that we don't know shit.
On the stabilizing front, it may be counterintuitive, but I would say
The Buddhist tradition begins with something like love.
and ethical responsibility, that this is part of how we stabilize our life is that we ensconce ourselves in a network of care and responsibility and debt and gratitude.
and love and we come to find in our dharma life that that increasingly because we have been careful not to trespass on the hearts of others because
We know that there is no such thing as a close hearted happiness. We live into a network of care and mutual respect, and we feel suspended, supported by that.
We develop um
Stability.
through the practice of equanimity, right? The the kind of sense of so much of our anxiety is the sense that I will be run over by phenomena. That there are possibilities for my future that will obliterate my heart sense of well being
And the practice of equanimity of actually
staying stable amidst
uh intense feeling.
Is
a essentially an anti anxiety
practice, you know, that that that the more confidence we have in our heart to be with the various uh valences and intensities of the future
The less
We need to actually attend to fearful scenarios, the sense that oh yeah, it's gonna this really may hurt. And
That will not harm my heart.
that is a kind of security that we start to sense very
Clearly.
And and we develop the stability of of ease and tran you know tranquility and it our whole life looks different from the perspective uh
Of tranquility.
our whole life, including risk of all kinds. It just looks different. It's not that the problems are resolved, but everything looks different when we come into that deep balance.
And then
Lastly, maybe on the stabilizing front would be something like if uncertainty is this sense of being
This impoverished of information. We need more information. Part of what we are doing in our dharma practice is
Distinguishing signal from noise. And meditation at some level is about learning what is actually.
trustworthy information.
What we
Actually
can take to the bank and is good
predictive data for understanding our future happiness. And a lot of times
The state of delusion is one where it's a cacophony of voices, we do not know what to listen to, the noise of greed and hatred, which
Are not
useful in sources of information predict for predicting our well-being is just not.
Our ego
This is static. That is noise. That's distortion in the system. It will make us
Um
choose pathways that are
less likely to lead to our happiness. So a lot of meditation is
about stabilizing our mind, learning what is trustworthy within us, learning where the distortion and noise is, and living our life on those accords.

And then
the the last piece and then I'll be quiet. Um
would be this more radical
practice of opening to to uncertainty and to the ungovernable
Mm-hmm.
Endless.
relentless nature of
Um
this human realm. The sense of
opening to the unpossessability of our life, that our life
depends on a million other factors that we do not call our life.
that we are supported by that, that we are in this network of fragility.
And that it will not last forever. And so this
Is
a reflection on
uh mortality ultimately, and that that is why the the tradition commends a kind of deep uh
uh exploration of what that does to one's heart that that to live alongside finitude, but even before that m you know final you know contemplation of death
is is the sense that I I do not own my life. I do not own my life, that it has arisen, it's dependent on many causes and conditions, and that I can
exert influence but
The
the the efficacy of that influence creates the illusion of control. And so this kind of deep wisdom of of letting
go and surrender and the sense of no longer
um exerting willfulness over that which is ungovernable. There comes great great relief with that, and much of the Dharma is only revealed when we relinquish the willfulness and see what lies on the other side of our power.
What goodness is already there. This is
A kind of radical
dimension of the Buddhist practice, but uh an important one uh as we also cultivate all of this stability.
Let me see if I can reflect that back to you and also just add on some of my own
Two cents.
I think what you're saying is in the face of of
Uncertainty in AI as a
Huge vector for uncertainty. Um
Uh
the Buddhist recommendation
or at least the recommendation from you as a Buddhist is um
Stabilize and open. So stabilize the mind. One way to do that is to just
Live your life as a kind, connected person.
We know.
From
just basic understanding of evolution and also from modern psychological research that
Um
living in a generous connected way is a great way to regulate the nervous system.
F another way to stabilize the mind is through meditation, which can help us be less distracted and um
uh help us be less fooled by our unwise thoughts and more open to our wise thoughts and impulses.
Um
And once we've stabilized the mind in this way, we can do this radical thing of
Opening up to the fact that we don't know.
Um and we don't have full control.
Now this can be and this is where the two cents come in, mine. This can be misinterpreted as a kind of resignation. That's not what it is. It's

It's acceptance not as resignation or passivity, but as not being
at war with reality.
so that you can with your stable open
Mine that is now connected to
the non negotiable truth of of things.
Do whatever is within your capacity to do.
And so for me, to the extent that I can muster optimism or hope at any point in my life, it really is connected to huh, if I follow the tools I've learned through Buddhism and modern psychology.
I will be maximally
Uhable.
of doing whatever I can in whatever
situation arises.
Nice. Nice.
Sounds good, Dan.
Cal

Asked to sit through a large dose of the Dharma. Um, I know many technical folks who are very interested in Buddhism because it is so technical.
Um
Was
All of the foregoing
Boring or compelling for you?
Lower.
Uh and what came to mind is
A potential synthesis.
The way I'm thinking about AI and the way Matthew is, I want to run this by Matthew.
Um, and so I'm reflecting it back to see if I'm if I'm seeing this in the right way as well. So so one of the things that came to my mind is that
A trick that AI rhetoric is pulling right now that really is pretty malicious is that it puts people into a a cognitive state if there's an acute emergency.
But it doesn't actually give them
a response they can do. Right. So there's an acute emergency. The alarm bells are going, but there is no let's get our possessions out of the house before the fire gets here. We have to get to the doctor and deal with this matter. We don't know what to do about it.
And I'm assuming for a lot of people who would aspire to what Matthew was talking about, the the sort of equanimity, the meditative Buddhist approach, it's very difficult to access when you feel like you're in a state of acute emergency. So maybe one way to synthesize this, I want your opinion on Matthew, is that
I'm trying to reduce the sense of that we're in an acute emergency.
We're not all about to die. Your job isn't about to disappear.
That does not get rid of the uncertainty surrounding AI. That does not let us off the hook, but it does put us back into an area that we have been continually for basically all of the 20th century. Before this, there was a pandemic. Before this, there was a financial crisis. Before this, there was terrorism post nine eleven. Before that, we were dealing
nuclear threat, right? It puts us back to a a level of uncertainty that we've been at before, and now maybe the average person has a hope of actually making progress with exactly the type of approaches
um that Matthew was talking about. So it's this idea, Matthew, that I'm like the amuse Bush that hopefully
allows the average person into the entree that is a sort of Buddhist approach to uncertainty.
Am I am I finding a way here to synthesize our approaches?
I I like it. I like it. Yeah, it's it's like maybe we say we've been
overtrained on fear and anxiety or something like that. And that's actually
Mm-hmm.
There's there's there's some evolutionary, whatever, conservation of some mechanisms of fear, but uh we actually are not going to exercise our wisdom from a place of
Uh
you know, catastrophic thinking, hyper arousal, and uh and so the the sobriety is is a way actually of accessing uh our our collective wisdom. Sounds good?
Gentlemen, that's a perfect place to leave it.
I am so grateful to both of you. This has been
enormously helpful for me personally and I hope for everybody watching and listening. I also want to thank DJ Kashmir, uh, who produced this episode uh with uh an enormous amount of skill.
Just in closing for Cal Newport.
You should check out his books.
Um
Um they include
Deep work and digital minimalism, but there are many more, and he's been on the show several times. I'll put links in the show notes. He also has his own show as referenced at the top called Deep Questions, where he does a lot of debunking of the latest uh fear based AI stories, and I'm a regular listener and and can heartily recommend it. Matthew um is
as I referenced before, constantly teaching in the Dharma world. Matthew, if we want to learn from you directly, take your courses or whatever, is there a website we should go to?
Just my name, MatthewBransilver.org.
I'll put a link in the show notes. Gentlemen, I'm I'm as I said before incredibly grateful. Thank you both.
Thank you.
Thanks so much.
Thank you so much to everybody who works so hard to make this show.
Ten Percent Happier is produced by Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vasili.
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