Faster, Please!

Playback speed × Share post Share post at current time Share from 0:00 0:00 / The AI state of play: My interview with Ramez Naam Faster Please!—The Podcast #107 My guest this episode is Ramez Naam. Ramez has spent years thinking, writing, and investing around technological progress in energy and artificial intelligence. He is the founder and managing partner of Planetary VC, where he invests in emerging technologies across areas including clean energy, electrification, and AI.

One lesson I learned from years of covering financial markets, particularly equities, is that you can always find a reason to be bearish. There’s always some bit of fundamental or technical analysis, some looming domestic or geopolitical event that seemingly gives good reason to stay on the sidelines. And sometimes very bad things do happen. Yet long-term trends in human well-being, not to mention US stocks, argue against chronic pessimism.

I really want to believe this is true. Ronald Reagan’s 1980s idea for a missile-defense system—he called it the Strategic Defense Initiative, while Democrats derisively nicknamed it “Star Wars”—might have been inspired by his role in the 1940 spy adventure Murder in the Air, which featured a powerful ray weapon capable of knocking down enemy aircraft.

In 1976 Herman Kahn, a sunny techno-futurist, published The Next Two Hundred Years, a delightfully Up Wing book. In it he declared that humanity “is now entering the most creative and expansive period of history. These trends will soon allow mankind to become the master of the solar system.” Alas, to borrow an evocative image from Carl Sagan, humanity a half century later is still only getting its collective toes wet as it wades slowly into the Cosmic Ocean.

On this episode of Faster Please!—The Podcast, I am joined by Dalibor Rohac. Dalibor is the director of global research at GLOBSEC and a longtime senior research fellow in international relations at the University of Buckingham. Recently, he wrote the book Unshackled, which focuses on how economic power is inseparable from geopolitical strength.

A speculative bubble, Nobel laureate economist Robert Shiller wrote back in 2012, “is a social epidemic whose contagion is mediated by price movements.” And you never quite know what’s going to break the fever. What bit of disappointing news will do the trick?

What principles should inform pro-progress, Up Wing thinking when considering what to do about unique AI risk? And what next steps do those principles suggest we take?

On this episode of Faster Please!—The Podcast, I am joined by Christian Catalini. Christian is a research scientist and the founder of the MIT Cryptoeconomics Lab. Recently, Christian co-authored “Some Simple Economics of AGI” In our conversation, we will discuss this new paper. Focusing on the AI bottleneck of verification, rising safety concerns, and how to address and solve these problems while maintaining growth and the US advantage over China. In this episode: Red light or green light?

As any armchair general or History Channel devotee knows, wonder weapons donā€™t win wars. Nazi Germany is the classic, go-to case study. Its scientists developed all kinds of techno-military marvelsā€”super tanks, jet fighters, cruise missiles, and ballistic missilesā€”but the Thousand-Year Reich barely lasted a dozen.

This is hardly too much to expect: If you present yourself as a doomsaying whistleblower of great expertise and then warn that some occurrence—nuclear war, climate change, pandemic, or, say, the emergence of supersmart artificial intelligence—risks becoming a true extinction-level event, you should be prepared to say in some logical detail just how the omnicide might plausibly play out.