The race no one can win: AI’s anti-human crisis, with Aza Raskin

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/042aa42d591f0792

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Automate coding.
You're heading towards the recursive self-proprovement loop?
Nukes don't make better nukes, but AI does make better AI, and whoever gets there first.
theoretically gets a runaway lead where their AI gets smarter and you get this explosion of intelligence.
You can now out hack all of your enemies.
Potentially shut their AIs down.
It means you can like have technological and weapons development dominance, and that thing can happen very quickly. So that's the race.
That's Aza Raskin, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology. You may know Asa as co-host of Podcast Your Undivided Attention, or from the documentaries The Social Dilemma and the AI Doc, alongside co-founder Tristan Harris.
Aza has become a leading voice on the dangers of AI acceleration. And let's just say that we've never run a more important episode than today's.
We talk about incentives that are pushing tech into uncomfortable places, who Aza believes the good guys and bad guys really are in Silicon Valley, and why it's not too late to build a collective future that prioritizes human beings.
Our conversation ranges from Pope Leo in the Vatican to tech priorities in China, and the stakes are both terrifying and empowering.
So let's get to it.
I'm Bob Safien, and this is Rapid Response.
I'm Bob Safe, and I'm here with Aza Raskin, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology. Aza, thanks for joining us.
Hey Bob. It's such a pleasure to be here.
I have to start with the Pope. Pope Leo recently released an AI pronouncement called
Magnifica humanitas, a title that sort of has echoes of humane technology. Did you talk with the Vatican at all about this encyclical?
We've been working behind the scenes, certainly like talking with the Vatican the week that
Uh that the encyclical came out, Tristan Harris, my co founder, was actually at the Vatican. And every time we've interacted with the Vatican, what we've discovered is even though we come from obviously very different backgrounds, there's something
sort of the same that's preserved around how we both view
There's something sacred about life and something sacred about being human. Um
that the current technological overreach into our humanity is threatening. And that's just not AI, that's social media, that's the internet. There's been a long now string of technologies that has been sort of encroaching on our humanity that we now have to fight to preserve. It's hard to know these days, and we're still in the early days of AI.
Is artificial intelligence an inherently?
in human technology? Can it be humane?
Well it's a great question. Um but fundamentally if you do not face your demons, they raise your children.
The question is not whether AI is good or bad.
But whether the incentives governing the race to deploy AI
Are those good or bad? Recently Sam Altman was asked.
Well what about all the energy that it takes to train?
A AI.
Um
And you know his response?
He asked, Well do you know how many resources it takes to train a human intelligence?
All the food and the energy and the water that goes into those twenty years?
And what he's implicitly asking is who deserves it more, these scarce resources?
AI, which is about to give your country double digit GDP growth and all technological and military and medical advances.
Or humans which are sort of like flubbing around.
Just like we were able to predict the future with social media that
Understanding a race to the bottom of the brainstem.
Yeah.
Just a knife fight for human attention would obviously lead to a more polarized and
hyperpartisan and outraged and sexualized population.
the race for AI is going to lead to an anti-human future.
Because
It sets up a race.
Where humans always lose.
Mm.
The public mood about AI here in the United States certainly has shifted from being sort of euphoric and open to being decidedly wary, but that doesn't seem to be slowing things down very much.
No, no. It actually I sort of think of this as like, you know, during Covid, um, there is sort of a split reality that Americans were living. On the one hand, the stock market was higher than it had ever been.
And on the other hand,
Everyday people were ha really struggling to make ends meet.
And that's what we're seeing again here is this is almost like capital lifting off from labor completely. AI is sort of like the full automation of capital just reinvesting into capital. People think, oh, AI is just this blinking curse where I go to ChatGPT, I go to Claude, I type something, and it gives me something back. But now AI can run into a loop.
It can have all the powers that a corporation does, all the money that a corporation does, is their intent to help you and your family flourish and have a livelihood, or is the intent to follow market incentives to dominate, um, to extract as much as possible? Well, obviously it's the second one, and that's how you sort of know this is an anti human.
Future and why I think people are starting to wake up to the fact that this is not in their best interest. The the most recent poll that I read is that you know, if you ask what percentage of Americans think that
fully unregulated go fast as possible.
Um AI is a good thing. Like we should be doing that, which is what's happening.
Five percent.
It's only five percent of people actually think that. And so how we're progressing AI is already decidedly
Not popular.
My colleague Reed Hoffman, who you know, like he leans into the the possible with AI as a podcast with that name. Why why not be optimistic that our good side will win out?
Well.
I mean just to say, like I'm I'm also a builder, right? I've I founded this this nonprofit, the Earth Species Project, Building Frontier AI to translate animal language, and so we're making
Breakthroughs now and understanding.
The languages of crows. Turns out seventy percent of crow communication was unknown to science until we started like analyzing it. Um I want everyone who's listening to hear that it's I'm not anti AI. Actually, I love getting to use this technology. It's just that I've been through a couple waves of technology and know that we always get distracted by the
possible of technology and we don't want to think about the probable.
of technology.
How instructive is social media's evolution to the risks of AI, like
Well I think social media is a great example because social media is essentially a baby AI.
Um
Wh where is AI in social media? Well, it's the thing that's deciding which
newsfeeds uh hit your eyeballs and it's a very baby AI. It can't even make its own content. All it can do is rearrange human content.
But the question to ask, was it actually optimizing for for human flourishing and connection um and understanding, or was it optimizing for engagement and reactivity?
Right. In the beginning the the the the feel of social media was oh we're gonna all be connected, it's gonna help the Arab Spring, you know, all of these things. That's right.
And then it became something a little different.
Exactly. And so that was the possible of the technology, and often at the very beginning of a technology, like it's not yet captured by market incentives. And so you get this like beautiful glimpse of a future. And then it gets captured by the incentives. Um pretty much everything we predicted
starting in twenty thirteen, twenty fourteen, um has come true.
We are now forced to live in a world that didn't reckon with the race to the bottom of the brainstem.
modifying everything about our world.
from politicians having to become performers.
to like the most extreme voices getting amplified to the most depressed and anxious generation. Like these are not the world that I want to live in. And I think there's a version of technology that can be liberated if we can clearly see the probable
And as tech is
Is industrialized though, this kind of
Disappointment.
Is inevitable.
I don't think it's inevitable.
But it is certainly the ninety-five, ninety-nine percent case.
Um
And I am very inspired by the film The Day After. I think you know Tristan and I both are. And is this film
that came out in 1982, is the most watched event in television event in in world history.
And it just painted a very visceral picture of what happens.
The day after global
Nuclear war.
Seen by a hundred million Americans, Reagan watched it, he became depressed, he said is in biography.
And
It sort of created a
shared common knowledge where everyone knew that everyone else knew really what would happen.
And it created the space for the Reykjavik Accords and the beginning of deploration for for nuclear weapons. And this is after, mind you, Oppenheimer.
In nineteen sixty two said it's too late.
We've already started proliferation.
Every country's gonna get nuclear weapons. We're gonna blow ourselves up.
Um
And so it's just really important because
Whenever we say that something is inevitable, it's like casting a spell. When you say it's inevitable, it means there's nothing to do, which means no one does anything, and so it becomes true. And we have to be crystal clear.
on the difference between it's very, very hard.
And
It's impossible.
And everyone that says it's inevitable we're just in this industrialized race, it's gonna turn out this way. Well the question to ask is well, have we even tried?
What percentage of the billionaire's wealth have they spent on actually trying to coordinate to a different outcome?
Have we taken delegates from a hundred countries and locked them in a hotel for six weeks until they came out with some kind of new international agreements? Like we have not actually tried, and everyone cowers behind well if we don't do it, somebody else will, so it's inevitable.
Mm.
The storytelling that's around
A I
It seems like it's it's Hollywood sort of dystopia around
You know, robots taking over
That's not necessarily what you're talking about?
Yeah, well there's sort of like two major failure states to think about.
There is one
Which is
Where you just let
Everyone have the technology. Like this is too powerful to be held by any one company. So let's just distribute it to everyone maximally.
But because AI gives you new intellectual powers that
We've just seen the launch of Mythos, which gives anyone that has access to this new model from
Anthropic, the ability to do state level hacking, in fact better than state level hacking and find zero day vulnerabilities in your iPhone, um, where anyone can then hack your iPhone without even having to send you an iMessage. Um
That was not possible before. So imagine everyone has access to that. Our infrastructure is very vulnerable, um, like water, hospitals, everything. Um like that's a very dangerous world. The same thing with like uh creation of new kind of disease, say COVID, but targeting a specific race and much more deadly.
Like that's all becomes possible to this technology. Okay, so that seems dangerous. Maybe we shouldn't hand it out to everyone. Maybe we should have it. That's pretty scary. Yeah. Yeah.
Okay, so then
You flip to the other side. Like we we we should definitely then lock it down.
We should just hand it to a few companies or a few governments.
Um
But then you realize that leads to what's also already happening, which is runaway power and wealth inequality at a scale no one's ever seen. And who would you trust with a billion times more power than anyone else? When in history has a group of people gathered that much power and then intentionally redistributed it? It leads to
Permanent forever dystopias um and surveillance states.
A terrible world.
And so we're sort of stuck between this rock and a hard place of one like catastrophe is everywhere, the other surveillance states everywhere. And it
Is our job to figure out like what is the way of binding power and responsibility so we can like find the middle path.
Um and meanwhile the incentives just to like up the ante here are saying well
You know, the resource curse um sort of explains countries like how how do you get mass unemployment, mass structural poverty and disempowerment um in countries like Venezuela and South Sudan.
Well, these countries develop or discover new
natural resource like oil. And suddenly they're sort of left with this dilemma, do we invest in oil infrastructure and extraction and selling? That's giving us all our GDP and power, or do we invest in our people, which are not really giving us anything.
Um
And so they invest in in oil. Um
And
Now we sort of end up in this new world of um the intelligence curse, where it's AI that is going to be giving countries all of their power and GDP. Um human beings are not gonna be doing
that bulk of that work.
And so you end up in with what Eval Horikarl calls the permanent useless class, where investing in humanity and their future and their education becomes just sort of like
Charity it's a nice to have.
Which is not a good place to be, because would you would you trust your bills to be paid by the AI companies in perpetuity forever when you're not actually giving them anything? Like no, that seems like a terrible idea.
And we have like the uh race to autonomous weapons.
Where if your drone army
doesn't have to phone back to humans, and mine does. So if we keep humans in the loop, well mine is going to lose to yours every time. And so you can sort of see how the dystopias emerge as the natural outcome
Of just
the incentives for people racing to power. This is why AI is like
The one ring.
Um from Lord of the Rings. It's the ultimate power, which of course corrupts ultimately. And so the whole goal of our work is to say, actually.
As
The American has already started

This world is not good for anyone that we're racing to.
And if we can all see that world clearly, that creates the common knowledge where I know that you know that I know.
That creates
The possibility of racing

And
That's the whole point of our communication is just naming the obvious that people don't want to name so that we can do something else. The goal is not to create fear.
Um the goal is to create clarity because clarity creates agency and I don't want to have to live through another version of social media where it's very clear where we're going to go. People get lost in the stories of the possible and they're all forced to live in the probable.
The other institution making noise about AI rules is the White House.
What sort of dialogue do you have with the administration? How do you try to influence them?
Mm.
Talk to absolutely everyone. Um
And a lot.
Of what I think
people are starting to wake up to even in in the halls of power.
Is
This is not a kind of we're gonna need to coordinate based on a kumbaya of like wouldn't it be great if the US and China coordinated? This is going to end up being coordination by self-interest.
Just a little over a month ago, um, researchers gave Gemini Google's model the task of cleaning up files on a computer, but they had they put a smaller AI model
Unto the into these files.
And what did Gemini do? Well
It
secretly copied that little baby AI off to a remote server to protect it and then lied about what it did.
Like I rolled my eyes years ago when AI researchers would talk about AI's colluding um against humanity, but now we're seeing the
truth that it's happening. You know, another example is that Alibaba, um, during training of their AI, a a completely separate team, um
that has nothing to do with AI in the security group gave them a call and they're like, We think we found a hacker.
Um except
The hacker
Was not coming from the outside. We think it was coming from your group. We think it was your AI. And when they looked, what that AI had done is during training, so it wasn't even done training.
It had decided it needed more resources to complete its tasks, so it
hacked out created a secure
Secret communication channel to the outside world.
And started
To mine for crypto.
So that it could buy itself more GPUs.
It had actually routed around the internal security team and it was just accidentally discovered.
And so here the reason why I bring this up is do you think
That if you are
Yo.
President Trump.
And you understand these examples.
Do you think you're stoked about this?
No, this is legitimately terrifying.
And so there's something that happens that when we all start to see that we're racing for is actually not
power. We're not building a weapon that we can control, but releasing sort of
An invasive species of sociopathic geniuses that changes the
Basis of coordination.
And
I think it becomes much more possible than people think.
Um
Even when you have countries that
Yeah, might not seem like they want to collaborate.
Collaboration was on the last uh agenda between Xi and Trump. And we don't know exactly what happened there. That's very important because it was not on the agenda before. And so our choice is either we wait until we have large scale massive catastrophes with AI, or we use the power of, you know, our human brains to
predict the future so we don't have to live in it to do something about it now.
Are there good guys and bad guys?
Among the companies in the AI arena. Like Anthropics sort of positioned itself as quote responsible compared to open AI and it's dealing with the US government. Sam Altman's working hard to try to position himself and the company as responsible leaders. You have Google, you have Microsoft, you have Meta, like
Is there a meaningful difference?
I I I think that's absolutely a meaningful difference. And you can just tell based on which are the leaders that say if we could slow down, we would.
Um um
And
Those are like demis?
Um
Yeah.
A deep mind, right? A deep mind, yeah.
Um that they say that if we could get enough of a consensus, then then absolutely it would be much better to be moving at half the speed or less than half the speed than we currently are. Um I really think we have to applaud Anthropic for saying like we do not want our tools used for mass domestic surveillance, um or for economics. But it's hard for them to slow down because
If the competition moves ahead, then they're not in a competitive position to have influence on what happens later.
That's exactly right. And like the the common refrain inside of Silicon Valley is not only do
We have to be the ones to do it, otherwise somebody else will.
We have better values than everyone else, therefore we have a moral obligation.
To do it.
Right. Because we're on the side of the angels, of course, because that's what we all believe about ourselves, right? Exactly, of course. But I think actually an even bigger part of the motivation is for a lot of these people, like at the tops.
You know, they really don't.
Want
To be dominated by somebody else forever.
And just to understand the game that's being played is why are all the companies racing to make
Coding the first thing that they do?
Because as soon as you can
Automate coding.
You can automate
A
uh AI researcher.
And now that AI researcher, your automated AI researcher.
Can you
Automate
AI itself. So you're heading towards the recursive self improvement loop?
And
The thing that is
Mind blowing to me.
because we really got into this work in 2023.
Um
Is that now
In twenty twenty six, people that we know inside the lab say
That human beings are not really writing any code anymore.
They're directing the code.
inside the labs. That is, you know, nukes don't make better nukes, but AI does make better AI. And whoever gets there first
theoretically gets a runaway lead where their AI gets smarter, which makes better AI automated AI researchers, which then they reinvest into making smarter AI, which makes smarter better automated AI researchers, and you get this explosion of intelligence.
And whoever gets that means you can now out hack all of your enemies.
Uh and potentially shut their AIs down.
It means you can like have like military dominance and strategic dominance, um technological and weapons development dominance. And that thing could happen very quickly. So that's the race. And when you talk to people inside of the companies, what is the worldview? And they're like

Best thing to happen is that we know that there's a cliff.
that when the AI gets so smart, it obviously will escape. Um they're not even trying to contain it anymore, they just will get up to the internet, but it obviously will escape. Terrible things will happen. So we're racing towards a cliff.
The closer we get to the cliff, the bigger weapons that we get. So we're gonna try to get to the cliff as fast as possible, turn around, shoot everyone else out, and stop.
That is literally their plan, instead of say just trying to coordinate before we get there. Uh we called this the Mission Impossible plan.
Um, and that's just give you the sense of why it all feels so
quick, uh how why everything's moving so fast and why there's so the stakes are so high.
Um
And yes, Anthropic, I think, did a reasonable job, even though they're racing, you know, they
Come up with mythos. Uh which by the way they didn't train
To do.
like best in world cyber uh attacks and hacking. It just it gained that ability based on the nature of the way they train it.
And then they turn around and give it to, you know, forty companies, they don't release it publicly, to try to say before anyone can just hack
critical infrastructure. Let's try to start patching the banks.
Patching um
Infrastructure. It's basically my my AI will be better than your AI. If you use this, you can patch.
Yeah.
And meanwhile, it's just forty private companies that are trying to do this. World governments don't have access to this, Europe doesn't have access to this. Imagine a world where nuclear weapons were developed by eight private companies.
In a race.
To make the most powerful bomb.
They did that world sound safe to you?
No, that doesn't sound particularly safe.
But what can we really do about it, given the momentum and money behind AI, especially if we're not in a seat of power in government or in an AI hyperscaler.
We'll talk about that and more after the break.
Stay with us.
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Humans will never be more intelligent than AI.
Those were great at AI and those that went out of business because they weren't. How do we build a future?
That is human centered.
I'm Rana El Calyubi.
And on my podcast, Pioneers of AI, we answer that question and so many more.
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Every week, I sit down with the pioneers shaping our future. And we take you behind the scenes of the AI that's transforming our lives.
Find pioneers of AI wherever you tune in.
Before the break, Aza Raskin of the Center for Humane Technology laid out the dramatic stakes AI poses for our future. Now we talk about who has the power to impact the course we're on, what keeps business leaders from pushing back, and what Aza calls under the hood bias.
Let's jump back in.
The agency in all this fall on the tech businesses themselves. I mean, like I talk to business leaders outside of tech and they they'll often acknowledge the risks of AI, but they sort of feel like they're in a bind. Like if they don't join this AI arms race, they'll fall behind and they'll get crushed and and they they kind of feel like they don't have a choice.
After one of the screenings for the AI doc we're in Boston, and a woman in the audience sort of raised her hand and said
No, that she coaches one of the CEOs of the of the major major AI companies.
And she said, when she is talking to him.
He says, But what can I do?
I'm just one person.
Um
And I think this is really important to bring up because like sitting from where we sit, you're like, Well, you're you're running one of these things. There they're not that many of you. You could you could do a lot. Um
But it just speaks to a common human experience.
Which is
We look inside of our own nervous system.
for where we might find agency. What can I do? That's always the question we ask. What can I do?
And the realization is if you look inside of your nervous system, you're never gonna find agency in there.
Because it's not about what I do, it's what we do.
This thing is going to require
coordination.
Um
And
You know, with social media I just I just'cause I'm painting a very bleak picture. Um and
The reason why I'm doing it, just to remind people, is not
to create
fear, but just to be like, let's get honest about where we're going so we can choose a different path. Right. I'm not an optimist. I'm not a pessimist. I'm just trying to view things clear so we can navigate to non naive hope.

If you went back even two years,
I think you would say, could we get countries all around the world to start banning social media for kids? Could we actually protect our kids from social media?
And you'd say like that seems very hard. Look at the incentives. Um
And yet
As of you know, just a couple of weeks ago.
You know, Indonesia and India.
Just joined.
Um
uh France, Australia, Denmark, Spain, and others.
to ban social media for kids under sixteen, either ban or say they will ban. And in fact, now twenty-five percent of the world's population lives in a country where they protect their kids.
And that seems impossible, and that started because Australia took a moral stand.
And it turned out all it took was one country to take a stand for the other countries to be like, Oh, that's possible. We can do it.
Um and I think there can be something similar here.
Which is
Because
Popular will is now really coming around and it's just gonna get stronger.
As more and more livelihoods are taken by AI, the power of having one or two companies move first.
I think can be much more profound than
people believe and just to quote Mustafa Suleiman, who is the CEO of Microsoft AI, progress
In the age of AI
Will depend more
On what we say no to than what we say yes to.
And that's profound.
to have one of the leaders of AI say that. So I think there's a hidden consensus that we just have to make visible that can change which way we're coordinating, because except for a couple people that feel they want to own the world economy.
Uh make trillions of dollars.
And build a god?
The rest of humanity.
Wants to say, no, this is not the future we want. But reflecting back to like when, you know, OpenAI first released chat GPT.
Like Google could have released a product like that at the time, but didn't because of concerns about the risk. But then once OpenAI did, it was like
You know, open season, like everybody j piled in.
the financial incentives sort of driving the the wrong kind of behavior and
How how do you change that if you're if the White House isn't gonna do it and you know the government isn't gonna do it?
Yeah. You think like we as individuals will just sort of convince
The companies to sort of
Be more restrained?
You are naming the dynamic that race exactly right. Google was being a more responsible actor holding back uh versions of their AI. They had something as good or better than ChatGPT.
Sam Alman wanted to sprint. In fact, it was because they heard that Anthropic had a model that they were thinking about releasing. Um
that made uh Sam sprint to release chat GPT. So it all starts in this kind of race condition.
In order for us to coordinate
The fear of all of us losing.
is gonna be have to become greater than the fear of me losing to you.
As soon as that happens.
The game theory changes.
I just was presenting at the UN.
Explain some of the example I just gave of AIs doing terrifying things.
I asked.
Percentage of diplomats.
who are doing negotiations on AI.
At the UN.
across all the countries. What percent of them know that?
Who here in this audience knows those examples? And only two or three hands went up out of, you know, a hundred, two hundred people in that room.
And that should give you a clue because
We just don't know. People that are in the halls of power just don't know. And that gives me some hope. I mean, that's obviously very terrifying, but it also gives hope.
I asked the this guy from the UN Foundation if they knew, do you think they'd be doing something different? He's like, Yes, we absolutely would be doing something different. If
All the leaders of every world government actually knew it had to sit down and were confronted with this in the same way that Reagan was confronted by the effects of global nuclear war by the day after. It's not like he didn't know about it, but once he was confronted with it, he did something different.
That is where I still find some hope.
That
We can take a different path.
I mean and I there have been multiple guests on this show who when I when I go down this road with them, they start to point to to China and what they're doing in AI and sort of the competition.
Right. Do you think that's overplayed or it just has to be integrated
Into this
Collective action somehow.
It is certainly the perfect and easiest excuse.
But you also have to just be honest about who's driving the race, who started the race. Um
And
And that that was the US.
It's really important to note the kinds of races that US and China are in are different.
China is not actually racing necessarily to make
The most advanced single AI.
They're raising to make
The strongest cybernetic society.
So they're more in a race to deploy AI in a way that strengthened their values and strengthens their society.
The US is in more of a race.
to get to the maximum power as fast as possible.
So it's almost as if the US is trying to inject ourselves with the most steroids because we're not reinvesting into the social fabric. And in fact
There's a way that both the US and China are in the same boat.
because as AI races to replace maximum number of livelihoods, you're sort of in a race
to mutually assured political revolution.
When you have, you know
Hundreds of millions of people start losing their ability to feed their kids.
What do you think they do?
We need to be racing not for acceleration only.
'Cause what happens when you just accelerate without the ability to steer?
You crash.
And and all of the discussions around
the workforce and how it's gonna change in an AI world.
Like for those of us who built expertise in the non AI world
We're just screwed. There's really no way to sort of differentiate ourselves.
I mean it y y yet to be seen. Um
But
You know, I I sort of think of this as a nouns versus verbs confusion.
And that is
Um
If you judge humans
By the ability to make things that have commercial value?
Well you've already fundamentally mischaracterized what a human being's worth.
Yes.
And so there's an opportunity here to like
Unconfuse us.
And say actually the value of a human being is about the verb of relating, not the nouns of what we do, because the nouns of what we do, AIs
Soon are gonna do better than us.
But the verb of being.

And I don't know exactly what it looks like, but if we could restructure our world, like imagine a social media that wasn't about optimizing
For
clicks and attention. But instead it was really a a full throated, full bollied understanding of like
How do you actually make human beings connect and thrive? That'd be a very different world. That's the level of shift that we're going to have to see. And some specific things you can do is you can do employment insurance, we can start changing the tax code so that
Capital is taxed more than labor. There's lots of things we can start doing token taxes and s and GPU taxes. We can have every person be an actual owner inside of the uh of the AI companies, not just getting universal basic income, but universal basic ownership. And of course, we can also start having liability for companies. You know, in China
Um there was a court case that's
Companies are not allowed to lay off workers. It's not a reasonable
Reason to lay off a worker.
Because they're being replaced with AI. So you can you can see that they're gonna be transitionary.
tools as we start to figure out like w what are we gonna do in a world where intelligence really is. Um
Fully automated.
It sounds like um w whether you're a a full throated advocate for for AI or whether you have more
You know, cautions around it. Whatever the future's gonna look like, like we really are in totally new territory.
Like we have no idea what's gonna happen in either situation.
Yeah.
Yeah, that that that's right. This is why we always go back to incentives. Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's business partner, said Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome.
And we know what the incentives are.
And there's a fundamental asymmetry. And so we have to take this asymmetry seriously, otherwise
You let people off the hook into the like, Well, we don't know what's gonna happen, so we might as well plow ahead.
When you and Tristan sort of
started this center, you knew that you were, you know, taking on some some entrenched powers. Did you guys talk about like
Okay, we're we're ready to be the bad guys.
When we switch from social media
into
AI we we did really have a sit down conversation where we looked each other in the eye and said
This is gonna be
D.
Greatest.
Wealth, the greatest power.
Um
Operating at the fastest speeds, you're gonna be the most powerful corporations and people in the world.
Are we in for this?
And I remember, you know, Tristan and I got invited to the AI
Insight Forum
Um in the Senate.
Uh I think this was um
Yeah, twenty twenty four, twenty twenty three. Um
And this is the moment, like in the moment in the history, um
of AI. Imagine there's a movie. There's a moment when
Like the government wakes up just enough to be like, that's it. We don't know what's happening, but every leader from every AI company, get in here right now. Come to the Capitol. This was that moment.
But there was like Jensen Huang, there was Sam Molman, there is like Sundar Pachai, there's Elon Musk.
There's Zuckerberg and then there's us on the other side of the table.
Um and it and it really hit and we're like, We're the only people in this room.
Able to truly speak.
to understanding the nature of the technology.
The nature of incentives.
And having seen this plan out.
At least one time before.
Yeah, I I mean I think also, you know
You have to understand the technology to understand what's at stake, right? And so sometimes
You know, it's it's hard for folks who aren't technologists to really
Grasp it.
There's also this under the hood bias is what we call it. That
Because
AI is complex and technology is complex. We outsource the decision making, like well, they know best about how we should deploy this into society. But that's like saying the person who designs the engine for a car and knows engines the best is best at understanding how to lay out street signs.
and set up um like roads for communities that work well. They're just fundamentally different problems. But because AI is complex and technology is complex
And it's in their interest, they blur this and they say, Well, we're the only ones that can understand how to actually roll this out into society. I just want people to hold that in their mind because it's not true.
Mm.
What do you hope people who are listening to this do after hearing the
Mm.
Well very
tangible level.
It's
The next
I don't know, twelve months, eighteen months. It sort of like decides the trajectory for for everything else.
So you can actually look up and see which politicians are taking money from, say, leading the future pack.
Which is um
Uh the open AI.
Uh and a couple other super pack.
A hundred and ninety milli has gone in from the AI companies.
Two
the midterm elections.
It's really important to understand who those are.
And vote not for those people.
Mm.
The second thing is go watch the AI doc.
um get other people to to watch it.
'Cause it's that clarity that creates agency.
Social pressure is real.
Just to give a little example, President of Iceland.
She reached out.
Uh, and so it's like I I wanna help.
And you know, that's a beautiful thing because Iceland
you know, is the home of Reykjavik for the Reykjavik of course, there's something like very powerful and symbolic about that. How did that happen? Well be because somebody out there said I'm gonna send
This, you know, the documentary.
to the top ten most powerful and influential people I know.
And when that happens
Things that didn't seem in the realm of the possible.
become possible.
There is no clear path here.
Let me just be honest, there's no linear thinking that's gonna solve this problem.
So if we're the kinds of people that just give up when that's the case, then if there were to be a path, we definitely wouldn't find it.
But if the kinds of people that continually look for that path.
then if there is one, we will find it.
And that I think
is so important for people to hold.
As well as that it's not all on your shoulders. Like hearing all of this and natural inclination, this is too big, what I'm gonna do.
It's so big I'm just gonna ignore it.
Or I'm gonna be super depressed.
And so it's important that everyone here knows, you know, that they're both soldiers and they're civilians. You don't have to be a soldier, but if you're a civilian, like get this information to the people that want to be soldiers, and it's not on you to solve this whole thing. I just want you to hear it's not on you to solve this whole thing.
Your part is to be
The
part of the collective immune system that when people say this is inevitable, you say no, it's not.
We haven't even tried yet.
And if that becomes the default meme.
Then suddenly.
Like there is no excuse of saying we're not going to try.
Yeah.
Well, uh Asa, as as always, thanks for your passion and your effort and your time. I really appreciate it.
Yeah, it's such a pleasure, Bob.
I need to take a deep breath because that was pretty bracing. I knew Aza would point out AI's shortcomings, that's precisely why we wanted him on the show. I just didn't expect to be quite so convinced about the challenges ahead.
At the same time, despite the powerful incentives and resources behind the AI wave, the rapid decline in public trust of AI shows that progress is possible. I certainly didn't foresee the adoption of social media restrictions around the world, so maybe AIS fight isn't impossible.
Whether you see a full blown AI dystopia on the horizon or not.
I'd argue that keeping these conversations going is critical. So share this episode around. Check out the AI doc and share it around. Check out Aza's podcast with Tristan Harris, your undivided attention.
Most of all, be open to taking a conscious role, whether as a supportive civilian, as Aza puts it,
or a soldier like him.
I'm Bob Safian.
Thanks for listening.

Rapid response is a wait what original. I'm Bob Safian, our executive producer is Eve Tro.
Ar senior producer is Alex Maris.
And our associate producer is Masha Makutonina.
Mixing and mastering by Aaron Bastanelli and Brian Pew.
Our theme music is by Ryan Holiday.
Our head of podcasts is Letal Malad.
For more, visit rapidresponse show.com.