Losing your job may be the best-case scenario.
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Ross Douthat: How fast is the artificial intelligence revolution really happening? What would machine superintelligence really mean for ordinary human beings? When will Skynet be fully operational?
Are human beings destined to merge with some kind of machine god — or be destroyed by our own creation? What do A.I. researchers really expect, desire and fear?
My guest today is an A.I. researcher who’s written a dramatic forecast suggesting that we may get answers to all of those questions a lot sooner than you might think. His forecast suggests that by 2027, which is just around the corner, some kind of machine god may be with us, ushering in a weird, post-scarcity utopia — or threatening to kill us all.
Daniel Kokotajlo, herald of the apocalypse, welcome to “Interesting Times.”
Daniel Kokotajlo: Thanks for that introduction, I suppose, and thanks for having me.
Douthat: Daniel, I read your report pretty quickly — not at A.I. speed or superintelligence speed — when it first came out. And I had about two hours of thinking a lot of pretty dark thoughts about the future. Then, fortunately, I have a job that requires me to care about tariffs and who the new pope is, and I have a lot of kids who demand things of me, so I was able to compartmentalize and set it aside. But this is currently your job, right?
