Carl Shulman - Intelligence Explosion, Primate Evolution, Robot Doublings, & Alignment

<p>In terms of the depth and range of topics, this episode is the best I’ve done.</p><p>No part of my worldview is the same after talking with Carl Shulman. He's the most interesting intellectual you've never heard of.</p><p>We ended up talking for 8 hours, so I'm splitting this episode into 2 parts.</p><p>This part is about Carl’s model of an intelligence explosion, which integrates everything from:</p><p>* how fast algorithmic progress & hardware improvements in AI are happening,</p><p>* what primate evolution suggests about the scaling hypothesis,</p><p>* how soon before AIs could do large parts of AI research themselves, and whether there would be faster and faster doublings of AI researchers,</p><p>* how quickly robots produced from existing factories could take over the economy.</p><p>We also discuss the odds of a takeover based on whether the AI is aligned before the intelligence explosion happens, and Carl explains why he’s more optimistic than Eliezer.</p><p>The next part, which I’ll release next week, is about all the specific mechanisms of an AI takeover, plus a whole bunch of other galaxy brain stuff.</p><p>Maybe 3 people in the world have thought as rigorously as Carl about so many interesting topics. This was a huge pleasure.</p><p>Watch on <a target="_blank" href="https://youtu.be/_kRg-ZP1vQc">YouTube</a>. Listen on <a target="_blank" href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-lunar-society/id1516093381">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a target="_blank" href="https://open.spotify.com/show/4JH4tybY1zX6e5hjCwU6gF">Spotify</a>, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript <a target="_blank" href="https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/carl-shulman">here</a>. Follow <a target="_blank" href="https://twitter.com/dwarkesh_sp">me on Twitter</a> for updates on future episodes.</p><p>Timestamps</p><p>(00:00:00) - Intro</p><p>(00:01:32) - Intelligence Explosion</p><p>(00:18:03) - Can AIs do AI research?</p><p>(00:39:00) - Primate evolution</p><p>(01:03:30) - Forecasting AI progress</p><p>(01:34:20) - After human-