okay look we have to save the future
poor and so now some of the present poor
are going to have to
suffer so that's scary now part of that
is because the world economy is getting
bigger and so maybe you have to control
for that but the magnitude of the chaos
has been increasing with each
collapse have you all noticed that food
has become much more expensive that
shelter has become much more expensive
that energy
is more expensive that many consumer
goods are simply
unavailable can you not
see that this is going to get worse if
the deoe style moralists have their
way how much short-term
pain are you going to be required to
sustain decades worth all your life and
the life of your children
children it's very
likely for your own
benefit remember
that and all this painful
privation is not only not going to save
the
planet it's going to make it far
worse and well it is an open question
always how much of that cyclical
activity you actually want to suppress
right so the idea would be to suppress
the cyclical activity and produce a
linear growth the idea would be to let
nature take its course well the problem
with that is is that even in in in well
within us yeah our life is actually a
very very delicate balance between
proper death and proper regeneration so
any cell lines that you have that don't
die are cancerous right so I mean the
only reason you're able to live is
because you're dying optimally all the
time yes so so the idea that life is
nothing but growth that's what cancer is
is life that's but grow there has to be
death and replacement as a precondition
for life in some real sense so if you
flatten that out of the economy there's
no your your point I think is that
there's no signal that you've gone
astray if you artificially suppress like
a recession because a recession is a
form of
death the evidence that relatively
unconstrained government
spending produces inflation seems to be
incontrovertible and then we might want
to discuss exactly what inflation does
to people so inflation makes each unit
of currency purchase less units of value
too much money Charing too few goods
asly exactly and then you might say well
who does that punish yeah and the answer
is well inflation punishes people who've
been wise enough to yes forall
gratification yeah right so if you're
somebody who has been sensible and taken
the medium to long-term in account into
account and you've saved money so acrude
wealth let's say and the sort of wealth
that enables you to have a house and and
air conditioning and some opportunities
for your kids we would generally regard
that as a social good right because we
hope that people who are not propagate
and impulsive and who put a little aside
for the future for future contingencies
so that they can take care of themselves
and others those people should be valued
and if you inflate the currency by
overspending then those are the people
who are preferentially punished because
the people who spent all their money
well they don't have any money inflation
only affects them tangentially but it
destroys the wealth of the very people
who whose careful and conscientious
striving have produced wealth to begin
with and so I think we're actually in
real danger of forgetting this and one
of the things that I saw read a couple
of ominous things so if you plot the
size of economic catastrophes over the
last 30 years the they're getting bigger
each time so that's scary now part of
that is because the world economy is
getting bigger and so maybe you have to
control for that but the magnitude of
the chaos has been increasing with each
collapse
okay one of the things that came out of
the last collapse 2008 was the
government rescuing collapsed companies
like AIG and and the Royal Bank of
Scotland which by the way was the
biggest company in the world no one
knows that but Royal Bank of Scotland
collapsed it was the biggest company in
the world and AIG was the insurer of
insurers and so it collapsed too they
were rescued by the government and may
be fair enough but one of the motifs
that came out of that was the idea of
too big to
fail it's pretty damn clear that the
globalist utopians are willing to
sacrifice the poor for the sake of the
planet you know and they're doing that
by cranking Energy prices up through the
roof and that means that people die
lomberg has estimated that three maybe
you have turn your thermostat down by 3°
right save the planet we don't have
enough energy will'll pay you not to use
your electricity between 5 and six which
is what they're doing in the UK you turn
your damn thermostat down 3° that sounds
like nothing but if you're old that
radically increases the probability that
you'll get a respiratory disease and die
you know and if the Europeans would have
had a cold winter and that could still
happen lomberg estimated wipe out
135,000 people like well you know we're
just making energy more expensive it's
like what do you mean you're just doing
that there's going to be a substantial
amount of economic disruption as a
consequence people are going to have to
bear more costs on the energy front but
that's okay because they should be
burning less fossil fuel anyways because
of the liability accured by the planet
these are necessary disruptions as we
move toward a sustainable economy and uh
if a few eggs have to be broken to to
make an omelet than S
V so imagine the economic system it's
pyramid there's a bunch of people at the
top they have almost all the money
that's par for the course for any
productive system any system that's
productive ends up with a distribution
like that it's pretty it's like a law
nature and then you move farther down
the pyramid till you get down to the
bottom where most of the people are and
they're barely Clinging On to the edge
of reality right doesn't take much of a
crisis to tip them into you know death
and then you crank up Energy prices well
what happens is you just take a bunch of
those people at the bottom of the
distribution the poor that the left is
so you know hypothetically concerned
with and you just they're just done they
go from barely hanging on to not hanging
on and their kids go from having some
ghost of a chance of opportunity having
none people can't care about broader
environmental concerns when they're so
desperate they're worried about
tonight's shelter and the next meal and
so the idea that we have to accept
arbitrary limits to growth economic
growth which are mostly going to hurt
poor people and higher energy prices and
higher food prices which are mostly
going to hurt poor
people you know the World Bank estimated
I don't remember how many months ago
probably N9 months ago that we're
putting 350 million people at on the
brink of starvation because we're
cranking Energy prices up and so for me
it's like that's 350 million people
that's three times as many as the
Communists killed you know in their six
Decades of trying and if your if your
cure for the planet is well you know we
got to put 350 million poor people in
Jeopardy just so that things are
hypothetically better in 100 years I
think yeah I don't think so
buddy and I could see this coming you
really saw it happening in Germany and
the UK you know where we have this
absolute Rat's Nest of way more
expensive energy and and this is where
it gets extremely perverse you know you
might say okay look we have to save the
future poor and so now some of the
present poor are going to have to suffer
that's convenient for you if you happen
not to be one of those poor people but
let's give the Devil's Due and say okay
it's like that'd be fine with me not
really that'd be fine with me if the
consequence of your actions raising
Energy prices for example actually Pro
produced an improvement in those things
you wanted to improve so for example
energy is more expensive but now the air
is cleaner but that isn't what's
happened in Germany what's happened in
Germany is energy is like five times as
expensive and the coal plants are back
on so it's like even by your own
criteria for Success you failed and you
did it at the expense of the
poor okay so I say well that's that's
too that's too long we're going to be
roasting in our in our oven-like homes
in 10 years we have to act more
precipitously and if it requires force
and fear so be it we have the
opportunity to make the world a far
better place but with all that
technological power comes the capacity
for things to go seriously sideways so
we better be wise enough to master our
technology how many of you have seen big
dog how many of you are terrified by big
dog Jordan Peterson seems very worried
about where AI is going with every
passing day check it out you know you
hear babies have no theory of mind it's
like uh yeah no they can imitate that's
pretty bloody amazing man like you
haven't seen robots that can do that yet
although there are robots now that you
can teach by moving their their arms you
move their arms and then they'll do it
and so you can actually program them by
moving them and then they'll just repeat
it and so they're getting damn close to
imitation they really getting close and
then look the hell out man cuz they're
going to be imitating each other as well
as us and they're going to do it so fast
you just won't be able to believe it so
that's coming the Canadian psychologist
is attempting to address a critical
inquiry why are we investing in the
development of AI despite the
possibility of undesirable outcomes
however the deeper one delves into this
question the more unsettling it
becomes when people were first
developing models of artificial
intelligence they thought they'd be able
to develop machines that sort of modeled
the world and then figured out how to
act in the world sort of abstractly and
then would after they figured out how to
act in the world would then act in the
world but that proved to be impossible
as you can tell because we don't have
you know ambulatory robots that can like
bus tables at a at a restaurant which
turns out to be by the way a very
complex
job fast mathematical
operations computer can handle that
easily or easily but busing a table it's
like no computer smart enough to do that
so that's pretty peculiar but it turned
out after like 40 years of investigation
that you couldn't build computers that
would operate as independent robots by
teaching them to model the world and
then by having them model the potential
action that they were going to undertake
and then by implementing it that did not
work partly because modeling the world
is way more complicated than anybody
ever suspected it's like infinitely more
complicated machine learning and AI have
progressed to the point where computers
can learn from from data and even teach
each other however some experts like
Jordan Peterson realize there is a side
of the coin that's just not being shown
here you know the guys that are building
the autonomous cars like they don't
think they're building autonomous cars
they know perfectly well what they're
doing they're building fleets of
mutually intercommunicating autonomous
robots and each of them will be able to
teach the other because their nervous
system will be the same and when there's
10 million of them when one of them
learns something all 10 million of them
will learn it at the same time so
they're not going to have have to be
very bright before they're very very
very smart cuz us you know we'll learn
something you have to imitate it it's
like God that's hard or I have to
explain it to you and you have to
understand it and then you have to act
it out we're not connected wirelessly
with the same platform but robots they
are and so once those things get a
little bit smart they're not going to
stop at a little bit smart for very long
they're going to be unbelievably smart
like
overnight many individuals including Mr
Peterson have expressed concerns about
the potential consequences of failing to
align artificial intelligence with human
values this is exemplified by
developments such as the creation of big
dog a quadruped robot that can Traverse
difficult terrain if we don't take the
appropriate steps to align AI with our
values the results could be
catastrophic some of you have seen big
dog you seen big dog look up DARPA D AR
RPA how many of you seen big dog how
many of you are terrified by big dog yes
big dog is this robot that's been
developed by the US Army then it's about
this big and it's four-legged it's got
aead and it can run like faster than you
and it can run in snow and it can run on
ice it can run up hills and if you kick
it it balances and stands back off but
hypothetically it's going to be used to
transport like the heavy things that
soldiers have to carry but you know
don't believe that that's a stupid idea
once these things
can ambulate by themselves and they can
already follow each other cuz now they
have visual systems um arming them is
going to be a very simple matter and so
the probability that we'll have
unbelievably super fast robots that can
shoot you in 10 years is like to me as
far as I can tell from the development
is absolutely certain I have a friend
who's a computer engineer and he's a
really good one and he said you know how
in science fiction movies sometimes when
those robots shoot at you they miss he
said when the robots shoot at you not
only will they shoot at where you are
but they'll shoot at the six places that
they calculate you're most likely to
Dart to and they will never miss so
that's a lovely thing to think
about every visual scene is
incomprehensibly complex there's an
indefinite number of ways of seeing
everything and this is partly why we
don't have general purpose robots is
because AI Engineers originally believed
that the problem of Robotics would be
the computation of action in the world
but turned out that the problem of
Robotics was seeing the world and that
really shocked everybody cuz when you
look at the world it's like well there
it is you know no problem you just open
your eyes and bang There are the objects
and yeah there objects it's like well
how many of them well you could get lost
in the details of this carpet if you
were a photorealist painter you know you
could take just a section of the carpet
and it would take you maybe 3 weeks to
paint it in a highresolution manner and
even then you wouldn't have captured any
anywhere near the detail and you'd only
have done it under one condition of
Illumination and that's just a fragment
of a visual
scene and they're imitating the hell out
of us right now too because we're
teaching them how to understand us every
second of every day the net is learning
what we're like it's watching us it's
communicating with us it's imitating us
and it's going to know it already knows
in some ways more about us than we know
about ourselves you know there's lots of
reports already of people getting um
pregnancy ads or CH ads for infants
sometimes before they know they're
pregnant but often before they've told
their families and the way that that
happens is the net is watching what
they're looking at and inferring with
its artificial intelligence and so maybe
you're pregnant and that's just tilting
you a little bit right to interest in
things that you might not otherwise be
interested in the net tracks that then
it tells you what you're what you're
after and does that by offering you an
advertisement it's reading your
unconscious mind
so well so that's what's happening
and so some robotics engineers such as
Rodney Brooks who worked at MIT started
building robots from the bottom up he
made these little Mindless robots that
really didn't even have a a central
processor that were action oriented so
like the first things he built were
these little insect likee things that
skitter away from light that's all they
could do turn on light poof they go find
some dark and it's as if so imagine the
world to that robot was a binary place
it was either a light place or a dark
place and then you might say well what
did light or dark mean to this little
robot and then you have to ask yourself
well what does meaning mean and that
that's a very good question it's one
that PJ answers meaning means to that
little
robot move to a different place so light
to that robot meant move to a different
place so what the what the robot in a
sense was doing was transforming one
form of information light versus dark
into another form which was skitter away
and so I love that because it's not easy
to understand what meaning means until
you relate it to the body and so P's
fundamental proposition is that the the
elements of your understanding are not
perceptual abstractions in fact there's
even elements of understanding that
underly your perceptual abstractions
that are more fundamental and what those
are essentially are sensory motor skills
things you do with your body it's a
lovely idea it's extremely profound and
I I think it's absolutely correct it it
does recab off with the idea of
disembodied intelligence we have the
opportunity to make the world a far
better place but with all that
technological power comes the capacity
for things to go seriously sideways so
we better be wise enough to master our
technology and again I would say well
that's all on you you're all going to be
participating in this intensely and it's
all going to depend more than you think
on the decisions that each of you make
so you better make the right decisions
because you you've got a lot more power
than you think and it's going to
increase at a tremendous rate so I don't
see a a better way a better route
forward than to make stronger people
what did my friend Jonathan Paso say
Giants are going to walk the earth once
more and we're going to live through
that this is going to happen this year
so get
ready as 2024 approaches Peterson's
thoughts are full of anticipation and
concern as he contemplates the uncertain
and tumultuous times that lay ahead
there are things and everyone on in the
audience should know this there are
things coming down the pipeline on the
artificial intelligence front that are
just going to make your hair standand on
end within the next
year how many of you clap how many of
you know what chat gbt
is okay so well not very many so I'll
tell tell you what Chad GPT is just so
you know cuz you need to know this and I
don't know what sort of technological
Revolution this is Gutenberg Press level
it's something like that this is a big
deal so this AI system it's a general
language processing model was released
about a week ago a week and a half ago
and uh I I went interacted with it you
can it's an AI system artificial
intelligence system it basically is
trained on what a massive Corpus of of
spoken and or of text so it's derived
its models of the world from the
analysis of human speech essentially it
it isn't using real world data yet but
that will be happening certainly within
the next year one thing Jordan Peterson
fears in his thoughts for 2024 is the
increasing impact of AI on our lives
raising important questions about the
future of work privacy and even our own
Humanity right now chat GPT only uses
language so to the degree it's
intelligent it's intelligent because of
the intelligence that's encoded only in
language and if the linguistic Corpus so
the body of text that we've all produced
is biased and warped in some way that'll
be built into the chat GPT system and uh
along with whatever biases the
programmers might have purposely or
inadvertently put into the system but
Jim figures that the AI systems will be
able to calibrate their linguistic
knowledge against knowledge of images in
the world soon and that's basically what
scientists do right because scientists
will take a verbal
hypothesis and then test it against the
actual world and if the hypothesis in
the world fit then you think well that's
scientifically verified and Keller
thinks that that AI systems will be able
to do that pretty soon soon and pretty
soon means soon as someone builds one
that can do it cuz we the tech is
already in
[Music]
place and chat GPT analyzes a very large
Corpus of text and that Corpus is
growing all the time now it's already
sophisticated enough I went on to it
last week and I said okay some of you
know I I've written these books 12 rules
for life and then beyond order 12 more
rules cuz you know you can't have enough
rules and I asked it this is what I
asked it to do I said write me an
essay that's a 13th rule for Beyond
order written in a style that combines
the King James Bible with the D Ching
that's a pretty
difficult that's pretty difficult to
pull off you know any one of those
things is hard the intersection of all
three that's impossible well it wrote it
in about three seconds four pages long
and it isn't obvious to me for better or
worse that I would be able to tell that
I didn't write
it right right and okay and that's
pretty impressive although you know
maybe not it's relationship to what I've
written but the fact that it could do
that grammatically perfectly right and
quite impressive philosophically I also
had it write an essay on the
intersection between the dowst version
of
ethical morality and the ethics that are
outlined in The Sermon on the Mount
which it just nailed got that dead right
BR brilliant again it took it about 3
seconds I can't imagine that's more than
10 years
away and that's just one thing that's
going to happen maybe not even the most
surreal
thing there was a a computer engineer
who purported to work for Tes he asked
GPT chat GPT said look I work for Elon
Musk but I haven't been doing much for
the last week so I need you to write me
10 bullet points about what I probably
would have done as a as a engineer at
Twitter what 10 things did I do last
week that were productive and valuable
and oh if you don't mind write me the
accompanying computer code that goes
with each project and it did that too 3
seconds and the computer code
works right and so okay so that's that's
already
there so then a university Professor did
this he thought oh that's interesting
any student will be able to write any
essay on any topic with chat GPT and uh
someone gave it an SAT by the way and it
scored about as well as the average
student in a well-functioning public
university so that's how smart it is so
that's basically an IQ test he said
write me an essay gave it a topic wrote
the essay he said now grade it said if
we can automate the students we should
be able to automate the professors too
and so it provided a complete
comprehensive analysis of its own Essay
with grade it wrote uh someone else
asked it write the screenplay and
describe the characters for the next
$900 million Hollywood Blockbuster it's
like bang plot characterizations then
someone else took the descriptions of
the actors and said generate computer
photorealistic computer images for each
actor that and all the AI systems could
do that so I'm going to tell you what's
going to happen next this is going to
happen this year so get
ready we are definitely increasing our
technological power and you can imagine
that that'll increase our capacity for
tyranny and also our capacity for
abundance and then the question becomes
what do we need to do in order to
increase the probability that we tilt
the future towards Jerusalem and away
from the Beast and the reason that I've
been concentrating on helping people
bolster their individual morality to the
degree that I've managed that is because
I think that whether the outcome is the
positive outcome that in some sense Jim
has been outlining or the negative
outcomes that we've been querying him
about I think that's going to be
dependent on the individual ethical
choices of people well at the individual
level but then cumulatively right so if
we decide that we're going to worship
the image of the Beast so to speak
because we're mesmerized by our own
reflection that's another way of
thinking about it and we want to be the
victim of our own dark desires then the
IIA Revolution is going to go very very
badly but if if we decide that we're
going to aim up in some positive way and
we make the right micro decisions well
then maybe we can harness this
technology to produce a time of
abundance in the manner that Jim is
hopeful
about okay so now we have an AI model
that can extract a model of the world
from the entire Corpus of language all
right and it's
it's smarter than you and it's going to
be a hell of a lot smarter than you in
two years so you can get ready for that
too but it's not that smart yet because
it's just a Humanity's professor at the
moment it doesn't test its linguistic
knowledge against the real world that's
what a scientist does right you come up
with a theory that's linguistically
predicated and then you throw it against
the world and see if it sticks and then
the world tells you whether or not
you're linguistic construction is valid
but the new AI systems will be able to
extract out patterns from the world
itself from images and so forth and then
be able to test their linguistic
constructions against the world and so
they'll practice just like scientists
and the most advanced models are going
to use text and image and action as well
because they'll build a model Human
Action and so and all of that's going to
come down the pipes with within the next
year so hang on to your hats ladies and
gentlemen because what did my friend
Jonathan Paso say Giants are going to
walk the earth once more and we're going
to live through that
maybe we have the opportunity to make
the world a far better place but with
all that technological power comes the
capacity for things to go seriously
sideways so we better be wise enough to
master our technology and again I would
say well that's all on you you're all
going to be participating in this
intensely and it's all going to depend
more than you think on the decisions
that each of you make so you better make
the right decisions because you you've
got a lot more power than you think and
it's going to increase at a tremendous
rate so I don't see a a better way a
better route forward than to make
stronger people you don't want to
automate your tyrannical Masters and
that's the D that's one of the dangers
of AI and this is a whole new kind of
monster and maybe it's already
here the Canadian psychologist is trying
to address a critical danger about
machine learning and Ai and he realized
that there is a sign of the coin that's
just not being shown here what's your
position on artificial intelligence
potential positive and negative outcomes
and general sense of what it will mean
for
hum Humanity Humanity those those people
over the next 5 years five years that's
all well my position basically is we
better get our act together before the
Giants show up and they're like knocking
at the door right now so you
better build your Ark folks and get on
your adventure because we're whipping up
some things in the lab that will make
everything that's come so far look like
nothing's happened at all yet and that's
that's
not like next year that's tomorrow
that's
now
so we're going to have a lot of things
to contend with many individuals
including Mr Peterson have expressed
concerns about the potential
consequences of developing AI despite
the possibility of undesirable outcomes
however the deeper one delves into this
question the more unsettling it
becomes well is there objection seems to
be something like we're we're making we
may be making when we're Doom saying
let's say and I'm I'm not saying there's
no place for that we're making the
presumption of something like a a zero
sum competitive landscape right is that
the the idea and the idea behind movies
like like the Terminator is that there
is only so much resources and the
machines and the human beings would have
to fight over it and you can see that
that that could easily be a Preposterous
assumption now I I think the one of the
fundamental points you're making though
is
also um
there will definitely be people that
will weaponize Ai and those weaponized
AI systems will have as their goal
something like the destruction of human
beings at least under some circumstances
and then there's the possibility that
that will get out of control because the
most effective systems at destroying
human beings might be the ones that win
let's say and that could happen
independently of whether or not it is a
true zero something
competition well we'll see I mean Elon
Musk one of the things he's working on
see he he thinks that the world will be
controlled by whoever produces the most
functional AI system the fastest because
they'll be a first a
first mover advantage and one of the
things musk has been working on for a
long time are distributed AI systems so
that you'll have your own artificial
intelligence to protect you against
let's say against Google's artificial
intelligence for starters yeah or or the
ccp's artificial intelligence cuz you
can bet your hat they're working on that
about as fast as they possibly
can so I wonder if that's part partly a
consequence of
the erroneous maximization of short-term
desire I mean one of the things that you
might think about that could be
dangerous on the AI front is that we
optimize the manner in which we inter we
interact with our electronic gadgets to
capture short-term
attention right because there's a
difference between getting what you want
right now right now and getting what you
need in some more mature sense across a
reasonable span of time and one of the
things that does seem to be happening
online and I think it is driven by the
development of AI systems is that we're
we're assaulted by systems that
parasitize our shortterm attention yeah
and at the expense of longer term
attention and I if the AI system emerge
to optimize attentional grip it isn't
obvious to me that they're going to
optimize for the attention that works
over the medium to long run right
they're going to they're going to be
they could conceivably maximize
something like whim centered Jordan
Peterson's concern about the
implications of AI is palpable
reflecting the Monumental challenges
posed by this technology for the future
of humanity I mean one of the things I
was talking to Dr Penrose today about
[Music]
was he believes that Consciousness in
some sense stands outside the domain of
algorithmic computation I know he does
yes and we discussed in some detail why
he believes that and I'm very curious
about that my
brother-in-law is probably the world's
foremost computer chip designer okay and
he's currently designing a
chip that he thinks will have the
computational power of a human brain and
he was the first person to build a 60 4
bit chip and he did that in 1985 okay
and so we've had a lot of discussions
about the limits of AI so this is an AI
optimized chip by the way yes and my my
brother-in-law thinks that computation
is algorithmic and so it's comp or that
that that thought is computation and
algorithmic and it can be replicated in
AI systems yeah Penrose thinks that
Goodell's theorem precludes that there
has to be something standing outside yes
now I tried to push him on what he
regarded as the metaphysical
significance of
Consciousness one of my hypothesis let's
say about deep stories is that
they're they're they're metag gists in
some sense so you could imagine 100
people telling you a tragic story and
then you could reduce each of those
tragic stories to the gist of of the
tragic story and then you could
aggregate the gists and then you'd have
something like a meta tragedy and I
would say the deeper the gist the more
religious like the story gets and that's
part of it's that idea is part of the
reason that I wanted to bring you guys
together I mean one of the things that
what you just said makes me wonder is
imagine that you took Shakespeare and
you took Dante and you took like the the
canonical Western writers and you
trained an AI system to ex to understand
the structure of each of them and then
and now you have you could pull out the
summaries of
those structures the gists and then
couldn't you pull out another gist out
of that so it' be like the essential
element of Dante and Shakespeare
and they're always after the next new
thing as fast as possible so it's a
machine that's speeding along as fast as
a machine possibly can and and God only
knows where it's headed in some sense
right because there's so many things
happening at the same time that it's
impossible to keep track and we don't
even know what these things are like the
the autonomous cars that are being
developed you know people still think
about those as cars but that isn't what
they are they're autonomous
self-learning robots and the fact that
they happen to take the form of cars at
the moment is almost irrelevant you know
there are no more cars than cars where
Horseless bu
right they're a whole new
thing because one of the things that's
happening now is as you pointed out
earlier is we're going to be producing
equally revolutionary
Transformations but at a much smaller
scale of time and so my one of the
things I wonder about I think it's
driving some of the concerns in the
conversation is are we going to be
intelligent enough to direct direct with
regulation the transformations of
Technology as they start to accelerate I
mean we've we've already you look what's
happened online I mean we've
inadvertently for example ra radically
magnified the voices of narcissists
Psychopaths and macu alant and we've
done that so intensely partly and I
would say partly as a conser consequence
of AI
mediation when people were first
developing models of artificial
intelligence they thought they'd be able
to develop machine that sort of modeled
the world and then figured out how to
act in the world sort of abstractly and
then would after they figured out how to
act in the world would then act in the
world but that proved to be impossible
as you can tell because we don't have
you know ambulatory robots that can like
bus tables at a at a restaurant which
turns out to be by the way a very
complex
job fast mathematical
operations computer can handle that
easily or easily but busing a table it's
like no computer smart enough to do that
so that's pretty peculiar but it turned
out after like 40 years of investigation
that you couldn't build computers that
would operate as independent robots by
teaching them to model the world and
then by having them model the potential
action that they were going to undertake
and then by implementing it that did not
work partly because modeling the world
is way more complicated than anybody
ever suspected it's like infinitely more
complicated and what's really
interesting about robots like that is
that they basically they're all
identical right more or less M and what
that means is that when one learns
something every one of them learns it at
the same time and so even if they're not
very bright if there's 10 million of
them or 100 million of them and they're
all learning one thing a day that's a
100 million new things a day that every
one of them is learning and so they're
mapping the road and they're learning
how to operate in a natural environment
which is a really big deal like it's a
really really big deal they're learning
to map the the perception of the world
onto action which is really the
definition a good definition in some
sense of
intelligence you know you hear babies
have no theory of mind it's like uh yeah
no they can imitate that's pretty bloody
amazing man like you haven't seen robots
that can do that yet although there are
robots now that you can teach by moving
their their arms you move their arms and
then they'll do it and so you can
actually program them by moving them and
then they'll just repeat it and so
they're getting damn close to imitation
they're really getting close and then
look the hell out man cuz they're going
to be imitating each other as well as us
and they're going to do it so fast you
just won't be able to believe it so
that's
coming now ai you know it's a threat too
but if we if we were if we had our act
together
ethically it's possible that AI could
become a a useful servant rather than
than a tyrannical Master you don't want
to automate your tyrannical Masters and
that's the D that's one of the dangers
of
AI you know the guys that are building
the autonomous cars like they don't
think they're building autonomous cars
they know perfectly well what they're
doing they're building fleets of
mutually intercommunicating autonomous
robots and each of them will be able to
teach the other because their nervous
system will be the same and when there's
10 million of them when one of them
learns something all 10 million of them
will learn it at the same time so
they're not going to have to be very
bright before they're very very very
smart cuz us you know we'll learn
something you have to imitate it it's
like God that's hard or I have to
explain it to you and you have to
understand it and then you have to act
it out we're not connected wirelessly
with the same platform but robots they
are and so once those things get a
little bit smart they're not going to
stop at a little bit smart for very long
they're going to be unbelievably smart
like
overnight everyone in Silicon valy is
rushing to produce artificially
intelligent systems which are being
tried out in 50 different ways a 100
different ways now and then they're also
rushing to build more and more powerful
computational devices as fast as they
possibly can and there's a huge arms
race in that direction and arms races of
course well they tend to they tend to
progress perhaps exponentially and so
all these things are happening at the
same time well we have no idea what that
we have no idea what that means
we are definitely increasing our
technological power and you can imagine
that that'll increase our capacity for
tyranny and also our capacity for
abundance and then the question becomes
what do we need to do in order to
increase the probability that we tilt
the future towards Jerusalem and away
from the Beast and the reason that I've
been concentrating on helping people
bolster their individual morality to the
degree that I've managed that is because
I think that whether the outcome is the
positive outcome that in some sense Jim
has been outlining or the negative
outcomes that we've been querying him
about I think that's going to be
dependent on the individual ethical
choices of people well at the individual
level but then cumulatively right so if
we decide that we're going to worship
the image of the Beast so to speak
because we're mesmerized by our own
reflection that's another way of
thinking about it and we want to be the
victim of our own dark desires then the
IIA Revolution is going to go very very
badly but if if if we decide that we're
going to aim up in some positive way and
we make the right micro decisions well
then maybe we can harness this
technology to produce a time of
abundance in the manner that Jim is
hopeful
about we don't even know if we need to
be worried about Facebook because God
only knows if it'll even exist in 5
years it could even be the same with
Google so you know we're worried about
machines that are changing so fast that
we can't figure out what exactly we
should be worried about cuz I mean who
was thinking about YouTube 5 years ago
no one it's like cute cat videos who
cares about YouTube but it turns out
that YouTube is an unbelievably powerful
social Force because it makes the spoken
word as universally transmissible and as
permanent as the written word right so
it's a Gutenberg Revolution and it might
even be more profound than Gutenberg
Revolution because it's possible that
people can listen better than they can
read and they can listen when they're
doing other things which is what happens
in the podcast World lots of my students
now listen to podcasts instead of
listening to music or they listen to
podcast instead of reading you know they
speed them up I mean these are massive
massive technological changes and
they're all happening in parallel we
have no idea what the consequences of
that are going to
be the fact that any set of phenomena
has a near infinite number of potential
interpretations and that actually
happens to be the case um that that fact
let's say was discovered simultaneously
in a number of different disciplines um
one of them most surprisingly was
artificial intelligence and the
artificial intelligence people ran into
that conundrum when they learned that it
was much more difficult to make a
machine that could perceive the world
than had originally been supposed you
know we're supposed to have autonomous
robots and or and and functional
artificial intelligence back by the late
60s and of course that didn't happen and
part of the reason for that was that the
artificial intelligence researchers when
they were starting to instantiate
perception into their machines learned
that charting your course in the world
might be a trivial problem in comparison
to determining how to perceive the world
and the reason for that is that there's
a very large number of ways to perceive
the
world my concern fundamentally is that
these machines will reflect us ethically
and that should be frightening because I
wouldn't say that our ethical house is
particularly in order so they're going
to magnify what we are you know so you
know the Google guys can talk about the
mind of God but that's making the
presumption that the thing that we're
building will be a good thing and I
don't think that it will be a good thing
because it will reflect us this is my
advice to anybody who gets Tangled Up In
This sort of thing is like first of all
be careful what you say but if you
believe what you said do not apologize
because you're you cannot apologize to a
m in a world drowning in the abyss of
group think Jordan Peterson emerges as a
Fearless Warrior armed with intellectual
ammunition to wage war against the
mind-numbing Conformity that stifles our
critical
thinking it seems in some sense that no
matter what you do there it's
wrong and and I'm not trying to convince
you of that believe me I'm I'm really
curious about this you felt when you
were there that you were on the side
that was doing the right
things do you
um and now when you look back I mean I
don't know what to make of what what
happened with the US in the Middle East
over the last 15 years I'm just as happy
and perhaps you are as
well there's less engagement in Foreign
Wars now than there was 10 years ago in
the US right that seems to have receded
to some degree and that perhaps that's a
good thing brace yourself for the epic
Clash as Peterson fearlessly confronts
the forces of collective thought
unmasking the dangers of group think
that blind us to the truth and Rob us of
our
individuality I was pretty sick the last
few
years and I was in a lot of
pain
uh it took me usually for about 2 and
1/2 years it took me about 4 hours
before I could stand up and then once I
stood
up I couldn't sit down I was walking
you know 9 to 12 miles a
day and then by 10:00 at night I was
feeling something approximating the
worst I'd ever felt previously in my
life but way better than I had in the
morning and then I knew perfectly well
that as soon as I went to sleep it was
going to start again and uh I put up
with that for
about 2 and 1/2 years
and got to the point where especially
cuz I was seeing the pain I was in
reflected in the eyes of the
people that I
loved and
uh I didn't want to have that happen
anymore you
know prepared to witness the battlefield
of ideas where Peterson stands as a
formidable opponent to the homogeneity
of thought rallying up us to question
Challenge and transcend the suffocating
Echo chambers that threaten our
intellectual
Freedom there's a book called Ordinary
men that's a lot like that I don't think
I've mentioned that to you before but
ordinary men is a book about it's the
best book of its type as maybe it's the
only book of its type it's possible but
it's plotted much like Breaking Bad in
some sense it's a story about these
German policemen in early stages of
World War II and they were guys who were
old enough to be raised in Germany
really before the hitlerian
propaganda came out in full force you
know if you were a teenager say in the
1930s you were going to be pulled right
into the propaganda machine and maybe
you were part of the Hitler Youth and
like you were raised in that you know
but if you were older then you were
raised before that and you're not as
amendable to propaganda once you're
older than about well I would say about
22 or something like that it's it's
pretty young actually if you're going to
make a soldier you have to get a soldier
Young cuz once people are in their early
20s say they're kind of they already
have their personality developed
anyways these policemen were sent into
Poland after the Germans marched through
and uh you know it was wartime and there
was this hypothesis in Germany that the
Jews in particular were operating as a
fifth column and undermining the German
war effort because of course the Germans
blame the Jews and a variety of other
people for actually setting up the
conditions that made the war necess NE
and so when the police were sent into
Poland they were also required to make
peace roughly speaking and so they
started up by they started out by
rounding up all the Jewish men between
18 and 65 and Gathering them in in
stadiums and then shipping them off on
the trains but that isn't where they
ended they ended in in very very dark
place I mean these guys were going out
in the field with naked pregnant women
and shooting them in the back of the
head by the end of their training and
what's really interesting about that is
that is that their Commander told them
that they could go home at any
time so this is this is not one of those
examples of people following orders and
the reason they didn't roughly speaking
there's many reasons but one of the
reasons they didn't is because they
didn't think it was comradely so to
speak to leave their the guys they were
working with to do all the dirty work
and run off you know and that's really
that's really interesting fact you know
because you'd in in different
circumstances say you wouldn't think
about that as reprehensible right you'd
think well that's part of teamwork and
under rough circumstances and that's at
least imp part how they viewed it and
they were also made physically ill
multiple times physically and
psychologically ill by the things that
they had to do but they kept doing them
anyways so it's one step at a time and
that's the thing is that you end up in
very bad places one step at a time so
you got to watch those
steps enter the fry where Peterson's
unwavering voice rever Ates exposing the
Insidious nature of group think and its
detrimental impact on the pursuit of
knowledge reason and independent thought
imagine this so imagine that imagine you
had a fairly hostile father who was not
very well controlled in his
aggression decent person other than that
but let's say that and so your reaction
is I'm never going to be
aggressive and so you've built a like a
moral structure it's part of your
personality
and there's possibility floating around
outside of that that you you've denied
an ethical you've denied any
ethical what you say you've stripped the
idea of aggression of any ethical
utility whatsoever okay so what happens
this Burns off and then that comes back
up now you still have to integrate it so
it's associated in some sense with
nich's idea as morality as cowardice
because one of n's most trenchant
critiques of traditional morality let's
say is that most of what passes for
Morality isn't morality it's just
cowardice it's not that I'm a good
person and I don't hurt you it's that
I'm afraid to hurt you and because I
don't want to admit that I'm afraid to
hurt you then I say I'm moral because
then I can mask my Essential fear and
cowardice in a guise of morality and
that happens far more often than you
would think because harmless and more
are by no means the same thing so some
of what you're burning off you can see
and this is where Freud was such a
genius I think is because he
concentrated on aggression and sexuality
which are perhaps the two most difficult
parts of a personality to integrate said
that um the
the hyper simplified morality stops you
from tapping into deeper recesses of
your psyche
and it's partly because they're Primal
forces it's not surprising that you
don't want to have anything to do with
them that you stay away from situations
where they might make themselves
manifest but the problem is by denying
the worst in yourself in that manner of
suppressing it you preclude the
possibility of the
best here's here's something interesting
about
Christianity it was actually posed as an
interesting question in in the musical
Jesus Christ Superstar near the end
um the the the actor who played
Judas asks Christ after he's dead there
there's sort of a there's a scene where
everyone's singing and dancing it's
strange sort of Quasi disco scene and
Judas asks why Christ had to come to
Earth at such a strange time and in such
an isolated place because he appears as
a carpenter in a backwoods region you
know 2,000 years ago why then why there
and the answer
is the the Divine principle has to
manifest itself constantly within the
confines of an individual life with all
of the peculiarities and idiosyncrasies
and limitations of that individual life
and so part of the reason that the ideal
beckons is because you can't just be
born as
Christ because what Christ represents
let's say this overarching ideal is
actually the union of the Divine with
the particulars of your time and
place and so because you're
particularized
then you have to determine how to
manifest the archetype in your
conditions in your specific conditions
that and that's partly associated with
that dialogue with your
conscience no one can be a good person
without integrating their capacity for
aggression because without that capacity
of for aggression you cannot say no cuz
no means if you really say it no means
there isn't anything that you can do to
me that will make me change my mind or
or conversely it means I will play for
higher Stakes than you will and unless
you've got your aggression integrated
there isn't a chance you can say that
and if you did no one would take you
seriously because they' know it was just
a show so one of the most useful things
that Yung did I think was to work on
this idea of the integration of the
Shadow because he was really interested
in the idea of evil right especially
working with trying to parcel out what
happened in Nazi Germany and during the
second world war what do you do with the
part of you that's aggressive and and
potentially malevolent you just crush it
that's the super ego response in some
sense do you just put it behind you so
to speak is that a possibility or do you
admit to its existence and bring it into
the game and that's see for for for
Freud in some sense morality was super
ego clamping down on the ID and they
were fundamentally opposed both Yung and
P had a different idea and I think they
were right it's like no no you invite
the bad guys out to play and so you're
an aggressive hockey player but it's
disciplined aggression that makes you
gives you access to a whole sorts of
energy you wouldn't otherwise have and
then with regards to sexuality it's like
well untrammeled promiscuity doesn't
constitute a virtue but neither does
unavoidable virginity right in fact I
think that's worse because it also masks
itself with virtue it's like well you
should be able to you should be able to
do things that you wouldn't do that's
the that's like the definition of a
genuinely moral
person he's so caught in his
presuppositions that he can't escape
right and so Pinocchio represents the
new Force so it's very interesting so
when you watch Pinocchio try to rescue
him the first thing jepetto does is
confuse Pinocchio with a fish because he
wants something to eat but Pinocchio is
better than something to eat because he
can rescue him so he doesn't need to eat
and then Pinocchio wants to make a fire
and jepetto objects because he's going
to burn up all the furniture it's like
we don't need the damn Furniture if
we're getting out of the whale you know
and so so japedo and and he's old so
that that's that's the r that's the
rigid structure that's the old year that
has to die off before the new year can
be born
it's a forest fire that allows for New
Growth and and that's how those things
are are put together and see and it's
useful to know too because if you burn
something off you might think well
there's nothing left it's like that's
not true if it's Deadwood then you have
room for New Growth and you want to be
doing that on a fairly regular basis
that's the that's that's the snake that
sheds its skin and transforms itself
right that's that's the death and
Resurrection from a psychological
perspective it's exactly the same idea
now we don't know the upper limit to
that right because we don't know what a
person would be like if they let
everything that they could let go let go
and only let in what was seamly let's
say but you can see that it's funny we
don't know that to some degree you can
see people very you can see people start
to do that without that's not an rare
experience and people improve very
rapidly they can improve their lives
very rapid a lot of it's low hanging
fruit like if you just stop doing really
stupid things that you know are stupid
your life improves a lot so and it it
frees you up it also means there's a
there's an element there that's also
associated with
pride because people tend to take pride
in who they are and that's a bad idea
because that stops you from becoming who
you could be because if you're proud of
who you are you won't let that go when
it's necessary you won't step away from
it you know and then you end up up being
your own parody something like that
that's also a very bad idea you want to
be continually stepping away from your
previous self and soig and I guess part
of that too is that you you have to
decide you know are you are you order
are you chaos or are you the process
that mediates between them and if you're
the process that mediates between them
you you are the thing that
transforms and that's the right attitude
for a human being because that's what we
are we're the thing that voluntarily
confronts chaos and transforms that's
what we are and so for better or worse
you know that's our deepest biological
essence you might say and so you can let
things go if you know that there's more
growth to come
so when the bud
unfolds and from the lesser the greater
emerges then as n says one becomes two
and the greater figure which one always
was but which remained invisible appears
to the Lesser personality with the force
of a revelation yes and that's the
manifestation of the self that's right
what that is is an intimation of who you
could
be yeah and it's it's also an intimation
of what you're associated with that
might guide you to what you could be so
so it would you might say it's a
revelation of your own possibility but
it's your re a revelation of your
possibility in relationship to something
that's infinite and transcendent yeah
that's the that's the and and I would
also say that that does that is also
very commonly manifested by a
transformation in the relationship with
conscience because when something like
this happens sometimes this happens to
people for example in um hallucinatory
or psychedelic
experiences right they start to take
their conscience seriously as the see
Yung believed at least to some degree
that
what guided your interest and that would
include your conscience was a
manifestation of the totality of the
self in
the restricted domain of the present
okay so that's okay so so
okay which one always was but which
remained invisible right that's the
heavenly father that would be the the
Marcus aelius principle that manifests
itself in in in Maximus and that that
that that kitus resists
MH right and and which Marcus Aurelius
also made himself subordinate to at
least to some degree right that's the
the one which always was but which
remained invisible yeah