Robin Hanson: …By ‘singularity’, you mean a sudden, very rapid increase in growth rates that very quickly leads to a very different world, right? Yes, plausibly, people like to simulate pivotal events in history more than other events.

And in fact, that’s typically what we do in any simulation. So if you imagine you simulate an airplane wing or something, right? It’s flopping around. We have a grid and we make the grid more fine whatever things are changing more, not just in space, but also in time. So it’s just a general fact about simulations that you prefer to simulate pivotal events in more detail.

And therefore, yes, you would simulate this if it was about to be a pivotal event, but I’m just not very persuaded that that’s how AI is going to play out is a sudden thing. And then in the next two years, everything changes. I—

Steve Hsu: I think I’ll share a story that is relevant to this topic, which comes from impeccable sources.

So several founders of OpenAI were present at this discussion. and it’s about the creation of OpenAI, which goes way back because it was first created as a kind of not-for-profit thing. Elon Musk became concerned. Elon actually has a fair amount of probability weight on us living in a simulation.

Right? It’s easy if you’re the richest man in the world to think that…“this is a simulation, and I’m one of the ‘player characters’, and you guys are mostly ‘NPCs’”. Right? But there are a few other player characters, and what is the point of the game? So, he sort of became convinced that, and this is at a time when DeepMind was making a lot of progress, AlphaGo is at this time, and he became convinced that maybe it was Larry Page, but even more likely Demis Hassabis, was another player character. And the point of the game was to get to AGI.

Okay, and that is actually why he put in the money to create an OpenAI, because he was afraid that Demis was going to get too far ahead.

And this is actually, I think, a completely true story. It’s widely believed by people who are close to the events.

Robin Hanson: I mean, I think it’s psychologically pretty healthy for people to have grand ambitions in the world and see themselves as important and see themselves as doing pivotal things. It motivates you, it gives you energy, you focus your attention.

So I’m happy to see people seeing themselves as part of big, important things, but still from a distance, I can’t—you know, I have to ask, “yeah, but is it true?” Yeah. And, you know, and I’ve seen, you know, all through my lifetime, lots of technology people who are really excited to believe that they are part of pivotal things.

And that’s very energizing. You know, in some sense, you can’t really do a startup unless you kind of irrationally believe too much in it, right? So… And Musk is doing wonderful things. I want him to believe wonderful things about what he’s doing. He’s one, you know, one of the greatest people in the world today in terms of an accomplishment he’s thinking about…

So I will give him all the delusions he wants about his pivotal role and the things he’s doing in it, because a lot of them do great things, but still I got to stand back and say, “yeah, but what’s the chance?”