Hey all, I’ll be traveling to SF in a few weeks and hosting a Cosmos Philosopher-Builder dinner seminar to read Girard’s Battling to the End 10/2 evening. If you are an investor, researcher, founder building in AI and also interested in philosophy we’d love to have you.
The real risk of AI isn’t extinction, it's being turned into NPCs, into mindless sheep. Silicon valley has been so caught up with X-Risk, e/acc, Effective Altruism - extremes of either optimism/pessimism - that they’ve missed this.
One of my friends uses ChatGPT for hours everyday not just as a search engine but as an operating system of his life, he asks it:
Where he should eat
What he should text girls on dating apps
He gets up everyday and has it create a schedule for him
My friend does this not because he’s stupid, he’s one of the smartest people I know, but because ChatGPT already knows so much about him that the advice is getting quite good. The restaurants and shops it recommends for example are already better than ones he can find himself.
My friend is not alone. Gen Z & Gen Alpha are increasingly using AI as a holistic operating system to which they offload their own decisions onto. And my guest Brendan McCord argues that this kind of offloading is the real danger of AI no one is talking about.
In this interview you will learn why human autonomy is important, how AI threatens it, and how to harness the power of AI without forming an unhealthy dependency.
Topics We Cover:
2:29 What’s Wrong the Pessimists: EA & X-Risk
12:35 What’s Wrong the Optimists: The AI Optimists: Accelerationism
20:28 The Hidden Risk of AI: Autocomplete For Life
31:06 The One Thing You Must Never Outsource to AI
49:07 Can AI Govern Us Better Than Humans?
51:39 Not Trusting AI Is Blasphemy
1:29:32 Why Has America Never Produced a Great Thinker?