There's no really anyone better to talk about this than
Christian Hammond. He is the director of the Center for
Advancing Safety of Machine Intelligence. Thanks so
much for taking the time to be with me. First question,
you hear this letter and certainly that word extinct
catches our attention. A letter signed by people who
work for open A I Google Microsoft. When you hear
word Extinction, is that over dramatic or is that the
right type of language we should be using to talk about
this situation Well, it's uh it's shockingly over
dramatic. Ok. Uh But um we're in a situation right now
where in fact, if you look at the story that you just
presented, that's a real present harm. And uh there's
not a lot in the way of thought and regulation a
an entire suite of harms which we know flow from biased
systems, uh systems that are sort of uh addictive in
nature systems that cause depression that we understand
really well and no one's moving Um And so I think that
the thinking was um well, let's make, let's up the
stakes and we'll make it, you know, let's worry about
the extinct, the extinction moment. Um The problem is
that, um, uh it's a distraction. Um, that is that w
need to, we actually need to take steps to make, say A
A I safe, that's it. We need to make it safe. Um, uh,
but uh we need to make it safe in the day to day. Much
more than we have to worry about making it safe in
terms of us as a species. Because I have to admit very
few people can actually tell you the causal chain that
goes from, it gets really smart till we die. Uh, it,
it's, it's really not there. It's all, um, uh, in the,
using a term associated with chat GP T it's, uh,
something of a hallucination. Yeah. Well, it certainly
caught, caught our attention as we put that statement
back up on the screen there. I think it's interesting
that you have tech executives saying that they wan
regulation. What type of regulation would you like to
see But what's actually realist to be put in place
Well, I, I'm, is tech, tech executives are looking for
regulation but they won't actually do the things that
they need to do right now that they should be regulat
to do. Uh, so, um, uh, Sam Altman, when he stood in
front of, sat in front of Congress said, oh, we have to
regulate. Um, and in fact, we should license compani
so that we know that they have the right level of
expertise. Now, he didn't follo up by saying, by the
way, for example, um we're now going to tell you about
all of the data that we use to build our systems. Um
And we're gonna tell you about what metrics we used for
getting rid of toxic content because that was a very
aggressive step. And so they will neither tell us how
it was trained nor they will, will they tell us about
how, hm, how they decide what we're not supposed to see
And we need both of those. Um Likewise, we're not
seeing um at this point, a real concerted effort to uh
test against uh uh to test, test against bias. We hav
the obvious uh the obvious tests, but we don't have, uh
we don't have a real effort to take a look at. For
example, if T GP T generates a job description, is
this job description that is more prone to be picked by
uh a,a man or a woman, uh a white person versus uh uh
African American We just, uh we're not doing that kind
of testing and we need to do that kind of testing. And
so, um oh, go ahead. I was gonna say to your point
because we've seen as we've talked about on the
criminal side of it, it's already being used for bad
things. Scammers can use it frankly. The government
doesn't have a great track record when it comes to
putting in regulations for big tech, being aggressive
with that sector. Do you think the government can, can
pick up speed and maybe push back against some of those
things that the tech companies don't want to do
Especially if it's something that they believe
eventually could lead to, you know, scary words like
extinction. I hope so. Uh The thing I worry though, uh
about is that we, we get ourselves stuck in the worl
of worrying about, you know, sky net. Um I feel like
the place where we are right now is, um I mean, you
imagine you go to a bar with a buddy and that person
gets really, really drunk. Um You, you wanna take their
keys away. You don't want to sit and have a long
discussion about the, you know, the dangers of
alcoholism and dangers to their body and how it's gonna
ruin their family and have everyone in the bar come
around and agree with you that there's a,a long term
danger. You want to take away their keys. And right now
we're in a situation like that where we're being
distracted by the long term and we're not actually
taking action on the short and it's time to actually
push really hard to say. No, we actually want to have
um uh we want to have uh regulations around um u
systems that can cause depression systems that can
cause uh uh online addictions systems that actuall
uh will convince us to do things. We don't want to do
systems that are biased. We need regulations against
those and we need them today. Um I'm, I'm less worried
about accidentally creating sky net, right Christian
Hammond. Thank you so much for taking the time to join
us. It is certainly a story that is going to be
continuing on as A I continues to have more of an
impact on our everyday lives. We appreciate it.