David Deutsch is a phenomenal thinker on AI, Physics and Philosophy. But his views on AI risk puzzled me. So I sat down with him to discuss in more detail why he believes AGIs will pose no greater risk than humans.

David Deutsch is author of The Fabric of Reality and The Beginning of Infinity. Both are phenomenal works and thoroughly engrossing. I can't recommend reading them enough.

Timestamps:

00:00 - Will AIs Be Smarter Than Humans?

03:53 - Could Faster AIs Outcompete Us?

06:24 - Will Augmented Humans Keep Up With AI?

15:19 - Can Creativity Be Sped Up?

25:51 - Will AGIs Be People?

27:46 - Do Qualia Determine Morality?

30:54 - Would AGI and Human Values Converge?

40:10 - How Do We Test Moral Theories?

51:30 - Would AGI Care About Morality?

56:06 - Would Simulation Enable Moral Convergence?

1:04:13 - Do Moral Arguments Always Change Our Actions?

1:08:50 - Do AGIs and Teenagers Present The Same Problem?

1:14:13 - Would AGIs Start Off With Our Values?

1:19:22 - Do The Starting Values Matter?

1:21:41 - THE ORTHOGONALITY THESIS AND HITLER

1:31:34 - Maybe AGIs Will Suck At Morality?

1:40:39 - We're Going To Make Mistakes.

AI is jagged - superhuman at some things, terrible at others.

This is why talk of "AGI" is so misleading. Focusing only on failures misses 90% of the picture, and could leave you unprepared for AI progress.

JaggednessThe original jaggedness diagram: https://substack.com/@tomaspueyo/note/c-182052822The AI VillageHomepage: https://theaidigest.org/villageLatest on X: https://x.com/aidigest_Merch store created by the village: https://ai-village-store.printful.me/In-person event organised (mostly) by the village: https://theaidigest.org/village/blog/season-2-recap-ai-organizes-eventTokenizationExplore tokenization yourself: https://tiktokenizer.vercel.app/AlphaFoldThe original paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03819-2DanishChatGPT speaking fluent Danish while insisting it can’t speak Danish: https://www.reddit.com/r/GPT3/comments/zb4msc/speaking_to_chatgpt_in_perfect_danish_while_it/The ApprenticeNadia being fired: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wf-o4nev2Bw

I thought the Turing Test was between a person and a computer. But Turing’s paper seems to imply it’s between a man and a woman, and then a computer and a woman. So what really is the Turing Test? And is it a good measure of intelligence anyway?

Sources

Alan Turing: Computing Machinery and Intelligence, 1950

https://phil415.pbworks.com/f/TuringComputing.pdf

Gualtiero Piccinini: Turing’s Rules for the Imitation Game, 2000

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/251383110_Turing's_Rules_for_the_Imitation_Game

Judith Genova: Turing’s Sexual Guessing Game, 1994

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02691729408578758

EDSAC: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:EDSAC_(25).jpg

Jimmy Kimmel Clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=earRJKrE8Bw

EDSAC iPhone13 Comparison

EDSAC, from Wiki:

1. “Cycle time was 1.5 ms for all ordinary instructions”

2. It looks like addition was one of the “ordinary instructions.”

3. “Numbers were either 17 bits (one word) or 35 bits (two words) long.”

4. My understanding is that 35 bits would take two operations to add, so I’ve stuck to adding two 17 bit numbers, which can be done in one floating point operation.

5. “The first calculation done by EDSAC was a program run on 6 May 1949”

6. From then to Christmas day 2025 is 27992 days = 2418508800 seconds

7. So the number of 17 bit numbers the EDSAC could add in the time period is

8. 2418508800 s / 1.5 ms = 1612339200000

iPhone 13, from Wiki:

1. The GPU runs at 1.37 TFLOPS (tera FLOPS), so 1.37 * 1012 FLOPS.

2. Let’s assume adding two 17 bit numbers takes 1 FLOP.

3. Then adding 1612339200000 17 bit numbers can be done in

4. (1612339200000 additions) / (1.37 * 1012 additions/s) = *1.176889 s.*