---
title: 'The Danger of Artificial Intelligence: Humanity''s Last Invention? | ENDEVR Documentary'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=Du-GWB4g7GY'
video_id: 'Du-GWB4g7GY'
date: 2026-06-19
duration_sec: 0
---

# The Danger of Artificial Intelligence: Humanity's Last Invention? | ENDEVR Documentary

> Source: [The Danger of Artificial Intelligence: Humanity's Last Invention? | ENDEVR Documentary](https://youtube.com/watch?v=Du-GWB4g7GY)

## Summary

The video explores the profound implications of artificial intelligence, arguing that intelligence is power and that creating artificial general intelligence (AGI) could be humanity's last invention. It contrasts narrow AI systems with AGI, discusses existential risks, and highlights the urgent need for goal alignment to ensure a beneficial future.

### Key Points

- **Intelligence equals power** [0:06] — Intelligence is defined as the ability to influence the future, with humans shaping the world and outcompeting other species due to their superior intelligence.
- **AI as a transformative technology** [0:54] — AI is described as the first technology that can match or exceed human intelligence, potentially creating a more powerful species and making humans secondary on Earth.
- **Current AI is narrow** [1:45] — Today's AI systems are artificial narrow intelligence (ANI), excelling only in specific tasks like stock trading, healthcare, or education, but lacking general capabilities.
- **Human general intelligence** [2:49] — Humans possess a general intelligence that allows them to juggle, learn new tasks, and integrate social, emotional, and physical responses—something current AI cannot replicate.
- **AGI timeline and threat** [3:17] — AGI is predicted within decades, and it could quickly surpass human intelligence, leading to a point where humans lose control over the future.
- **Misconception about AI bodies** [4:02] — A common misconception is that AI requires a physical body to be dangerous; in reality, the intelligence itself confers power, regardless of embodiment.
- **Urgency of AI discussion** [5:09] — Most AI researchers believe AGI will arrive within decades, and the topic is as critical as climate change or retirement planning due to its massive potential impact.
- **Recursive self-improvement** [6:01] — An AI that can tweak its own source code could rapidly become far more intelligent than the smartest human, creating a wall beyond which it calls the shots.
- **Building superior intelligence** [7:21] — We are likely to build superior intelligence on the same timescale as we might encounter alien life, but what we do now determines whether the outcome is the best or worst thing ever.
- **Concentration of power** [8:38] — A handful of Silicon Valley companies control global information and have more power than governments, creating an elite that could deploy AI for manipulation and control.
- **Corporate AI analogy** [9:40] — Corporations, as goal-driven entities (like making money), have already caused harm (tobacco, asbestos); AI could amplify this on a massive scale if not properly regulated.
- **Lack of understanding and surveillance** [10:57] — Individuals do not understand how AI shapes their lives or who controls their data; voice assistants and surveillance systems create an Orwellian potential for permanent dictatorship.
- **Human misuse of AI** [15:58] — The primary immediate worry is humans using AI to harm other humans on an unprecedented scale, not AI itself turning against us.
- **Goal alignment is key** [17:39] — The challenge is aligning AI's goals with human values, similar to how parents' goals are aligned with children's; failure to do so puts humans in the position of ants.
- **AI bias and ethics** [18:12] — AI is not culturally or ethically neutral; it inherits biases from its creators. Predictive policing has already shown racist outcomes, reducing accountability.
- **Kindergarten ethics** [22:29] — Basic ethical rules (like not flying into fixed objects) are not yet encoded into machines; we need to start with universal kindergarten ethics and iterate as AI gets smarter.
- **Constitution for AI** [24:54] — A crowdsourced constitution for humanity, similar to the U.S. Constitution, could guide AI behavior, emphasizing the ability to correct errors as a core principle.
- **Autonomous weapons risk** [27:07] — An arms race in lethal autonomous weapons (slaughter bots) could lead to cheap, powerful weapons that allow a handful of people to kill millions, dehumanizing victims and lowering the threshold for killing.
- **Transhumanism and obsolescence** [33:11] — Transhumanism advocates merging with technology to avoid obsolescence, but critics argue it misunderstands the value of human life beyond problem-solving.
- **Pivotal moment for humanity** [36:04] — We are at a branching point where evolution shifts from natural selection to intelligence-driven selection; we hold the responsibility to choose wisely.
- **Economic displacement and purpose** [37:02] — AI will replace human labor, concentrating wealth and reducing jobs; society must find new ways to provide income, purpose, and community.
- **Cosmic significance** [42:21] — Life may be cosmically rare, and humans have the potential to spread life and consciousness throughout the universe, making our choices incredibly significant.

### Conclusion

The video emphasizes that AI poses both immense risks and opportunities; our actions today will determine whether the future is one of flourishing life or extinction within the century.

## Transcript

Intelligence equals power.
Intelligence equals ability to influence
the shape of the future.
If you look at us in the world today,
we are definitely shaping our own future
and we're shaping the futures of other
species around us, too.
birds, fish, whales, even primates,
they have no chance at being able to
shape the world around them when humans
are around
because we are a very intelligent
species
and the most intelligent species that
the world has seen to date.
[Music]
Artificial intelligence is the first and
only technology we'll ever create that
will bring an intelligent system into
the world that can match or exceed
humans in terms of intelligence. We'd
basically be seeding the reigns to a
more powerful species and we become a
secondary species on Earth and that is
just a completely unprecedented moment
in human history.
AI is basically just a type of system
that is carrying out a thing that you
would call an intelligent task.
We have AI systems around us today.
You have AI that's able to trade on the
stock market in a way that's much better
than humans can. We have AI that's
increasingly being used in domains like
healthcare or education.
And the systems that we have today, you
would call artificial narrow
intelligence or ANI
because they are only applicable or
useful in a very narrow specific task.
The current state of AI is that you've
got these narrow systems which actually
can exceed human performance in all
these different areas.
>> As with all computer operations, the key
to designing intelligent machines lies
in programming. So, I could have a
program which can play chess and that's
all it can do. You can't have a
conversation with it, but it can play
chess better than anybody.
But in day-to-day life, we are
navigating an incredibly complex
universe. There's many, many different
ways that we have to respond socially,
emotionally, physically, whatever we're
doing. We have to cope with all of these
factors that life is throwing at us.
A person can juggle while reciting
Shakespeare. Communicate abstract ideas
while surfing.
We can use imagination to achieve
incredible things.
We can do math and English and we can
sing and dance and we can ride bikes and
we can dream dreams. And that is a very
general form of intelligence. And it
also means that we can learn new tasks
that we haven't been competent at
before. And we are the only
instantiation of a general intelligence
on earth at this point in time.
And basically we are talking about
creating an artificial version of the
general intelligence that we are.
Probably before the end of this century,
we will be able to construct computers
or artificial intelligences which can go
out on their own and develop lines of
thought irrespective of any programming
and which may in principle be more
intelligent than we are.
The reason why AGI is potentially so
amazing, but the reason why it's also
potentially terrifying from an
existential threat standpoint is because
it is the only time at which we're going
to create something that is more
powerful than us.
And from there onwards, you know, life
as we know it is going to be shaped by
the more intelligent species on the
planet.
One of the most common misconceptions is
that you only have to worry about AI if
it has a body.
Robots, hinges and motors, that's old
technology. It's the intelligence itself
that gives the power.
>> I can count on my fingers.
>> 2 3 4.
>> I know many very smart people who think
that superhuman intelligence will never
arrive because it's somehow impossible.
And usually it's because they think that
intelligence is something mysterious
that can only exist in human minds.
I view that as just carbon chauvinism.
I'm quite convinced that intelligence is
actually all about information
processing and that it doesn't matter
whether the information is processed by
carbon atoms in neurons in brains or by
silicon atoms in computers.
If it can happen, will it?
Yes, it will. Because we have an
incredibly powerful incentive as a
species to keep making new technology
because of course it makes us money and
we scientists are curious.
So when will it happen?
Most AI researchers guess that it'll
happen within the matter of decades
which is probably in within the lifetime
of most of us. Anyone who talks about
climate change or anyone who talks about
their retirement savings should talk
about this also because this one will
have a much bigger effect than either of
those two. And I'm not trying to
diminish the importance of climate
change or retirement savings.
>> So when a lot of people working in the
field say that artificial general
intelligence could be coming down the
track rather soon, I think it's
something to listen to. Look at
Unlocking the Atom. In the early 1930s,
>> the uranium atom was split, releasing
its catastrophic force.
>> People weren't expecting that. 15 years
later, there would be these mushroom
clouds arising into the sky.
If you created an artificial
intelligence that in a sense had access
to its own source code and could tweak
it, it could be very speedily that you
get an artificial intelligence far more
intelligent than the most intelligent
human alive. It just improves so
quickly. It's this wall where it's very
hard to anticipate beyond that. And at
that point, it's calling the shots
because after that, we're no longer in
the driving seat of history at that
point.
I think the reason we underestimate
existential risk is because our brains
evolved to deal with problems that we
had seen many times before. You know,
we have a very hard time feeling afraid
of some hypothetical thing in the
future.
>> Here is another UFO bulletin. Because of
the ominous situation, the president has
ordered the Strategic Air Command into
action. If we got an email from outer
space from superioral aliensization.org
saying they're going to show up in 40
years, we wouldn't just sit here and
twiddle our thumbs. We would freak out
and do everything we could to make sure
this didn't become a disaster.
>> Was a great big huge yellow glow out
there.
>> Looked like a big cigar shape with light
lit from both ends.
It's quite likely that we will get the
superior intelligence arriving on this
planet on the same time scale. It's just
that we're going to build it, which
means what we do now has a huge impact
on whether it's going to be the best
thing ever or the worst thing ever.
If some organization or entity develops
super intelligence, they will probably
try to do it in secret because otherwise
everybody else is going to try to stop
them or or steal it from them because
it's going to give them total power over
the world.
>> If you look at who's developing things
that look closest to AGI today, for the
most part, it is really big companies or
really big private organizations.
>> We were the original micro computer
software company. We got started in
1975.
>> We started Apple because we wanted the
product ourselves.
>> Probably the headline dynamic is
competition. Really
>> and you're seeing a lot of competitive
dynamics crop up between private
companies and nation states.
>> What our goal is is to be one of the
world's strongest brands. and
competition is this kind of constant
pressure forward
where folks think that it's very
important to become the first one to
deploy AGI.
At the moment we've got a handful of
companies, you know, mainly based out of
Silicon Valley that control all the
world's information, all the world's
social contexts,
all the world's buying habits, all these
different things.
you need gazillions of dollars in order
to build those server farms and it's
impossible for anybody to compete with
those companies. So we have created
juggernauts.
If you have a digital elite and you can
build an artificial intelligence and you
go okay we want to use this to
manipulate these people's data to make
them to change how they're voting. You
have created private companies
that have more control than governments.
If you feel it sounds outlandish that
there could be some sort of algorithm
out there that's so powerful that it can
go and do things that really screw
people over, we already have that. It's
called the corporation.
There have been many examples of tobacco
corporations, asbestous corporations,
and so on who did things which in
hindsight were really not good for
humanity.
Not because the people there were evil,
but because the corporation itself had a
sort of higher level of intelligence.
It had its own goals to make money. And
it then coerced all the people within
the organization to say the right thing
and do the right thing.
>> Yes. First smoking that you're bound to
like. You just can't beat a lucky
strike.
>> I suppose if I'm going to die, I might
as well do it for my country.
>> That's the spirit. This should be a
wakeup call that if we're not careful,
we can do that on a much more massive
scale with artificial intelligence.
Big tech industry need regulations just
as much as the car industry needed to be
forced to put seat belts in cars.
Even though the car industry pushed a
lot against seat belts,
now they're perfectly fine with it.
As a matter of fact, because there were
seat belts and other safety features,
people started to lose this fear of
driving and they were able to sell much
much more cars.
We don't really understand as
individuals
how artificial intelligence is already
shaping our lives.
We don't really know who controls this
stuff, what they know about us, what
they're doing with the information.
>> Every time I go on the internet, a
profile is being built of of me and my
consumer desires and other kinds of
desires and so on.
>> Now, we've got voice assistants in
people's homes. And a voice assistant is
basically the box which is listening in
all the time, but you don't know it's
listening.
You would expect that if you're having a
private conversation, you expect it to
be private.
We don't really see the value in what
they're taking from us.
It's like, oh, someone is stealing the
carbon dioxide that I breathe out as I
walk around. Well, you know, it's not of
that much value to me anyway. I just
produce it as I walk through the world.
We need to see our data as a resource.
Producing this thing almost as labor.
That's something you produce by working
and living your life and having the
relationships that you do. And that's
not the property of someone else.
>> Data rebellion, the radical arm of the
anti-data surveillance movement, has
defied government bans with a day of
global protest. The aim is to shut down
dozens of cities around the world. The
data trade is now a trillionoll
industry. The group's message is that
personal data is a resource owned by
individuals and is not free for the
taking with big tech companies and
governments accused of breaching basic
human rights by capturing personal data
without consent or compensation. While
cities around the world grind to a halt,
some say the group's tactics are testing
public tolerance for disruption. In a
world that's become accustomed to
surveillance capitalism,
technology has really disrupted this
balance between knowing and being known.
The moment you invade the private space
of a person by understanding their
beliefs, their attitudes, how they vote,
how they shop, gives you incredible
power. And who we want to entrust that
power to is is very important.
Jordan, can you still help master?
>> We're not far from the point where you
could build an AI system that is the
perfect Orwellian big brother that reads
every text message and email and listens
to every phone call and watches every
surveillance camera and enables a
permanent Orwellian dictatorship that
can never be overthrown.
Even in the West, we're actively
building this thing now.
If we ever get a leader who wants to
switch it on, all they have to do is is
flip the on switch.
>> I was born in Romania and I lived for
part of my life in a dictatorship.
>> So for me, thinking about dystopia is
something that I sort of easily relate
to.
[Applause]
[Music]
So, I have a strong history of what it
means to live under surveillance because
one of the realities of my childhood was
that the government knew everything.
And I think all of this could have been
so much more amplified by technology.
And that scares me
because for us it was mostly, oh, the
neighbor is going to inform the secret
police,
[Music]
but now it can be your Alexa or your
surveillance camera in the lobby.
In the past, whenever dictatorships have
been overthrown, it's always been
because those who did the overthrowing
had a certain amount of privacy and were
able to organize.
>> But if there are surveillance cameras
everywhere and every single phone call
and text message and communication you
do is recorded and analyzed by an AI,
how are you possibly going to organize
some kind of overthrow of the powers of
be?
[Applause]
[Music]
If you're not worried about AI ever
becoming so smart that it can take
control over us humans, then I would
like you to take a moment and just
envision your least favorite political
leader on this planet.
And imagine that they come into control
of this AI that's so powerful that they
can dominate all of Earth with it. How
do you feel about that?
So the first thing we should worry about
is not AI itself,
but humans just using it to do horrible
things to other humans on a hitherto
unprecedented scale.
people will somehow feel that robots
will turn upon them. Now, this I don't
think is very likely. However, in a very
abstract sense, this is precisely what
may happen.
Some of my colleagues want to build
super intelligence and just keep it in a
box, disconnected from the internet,
under human control. Now, aside from any
moral qualms that you might have about
enslaving a superior mind, you might
worry about it outsmarting us and
breaking out.
If you were imprisoned by a bunch of
fouryear-olds, do you really think you
couldn't find a way of tricking them
into somehow letting you escape?
It's not necessarily a bad thing being
surrounded by more intelligent entities,
right? You and I have both already
experienced that.
They were mommy and daddy when we were
tiny, right? And why did that work out
well? Because their goals were aligned
with ours, right?
We don't kill ants in our living room
because we're evil ant haters. It's just
that the goals of the ants didn't align
with our goals. We can be equally sure
that if we fail to align the super
intelligence's goal with ours, we're in
the position of those ants.
So I think the key to a happy
coexistence with AI is not to get into
an adversarial relationship, but to just
make sure that their goals are aligned
with ours.
This challenge of aligning AI's goals
with ours has two parts.
First of how do you actually even
explain to another intelligence what our
goals are and how do you make sure it
adopts those goals and and retains them
as it gets ever smarter. And then
there's a separate question of what goal
should you put in?
[Applause]
>> Every time we talk about AI, we learn
more about what it means to be human.
>> Why do young children fly into rages in
situations like this? But if we want to
talk about aligning AI values with human
values, we have to think deeply about
what those human values are and learn
that you can never expect homogeneous
human values.
[Music]
Essentially
[Music]
the question is is AI culturally and
ethically neutral and the answer to that
is it's not
anything that is man-made will be imbued
with the values or at least the
priorities of the people in society that
made it. We do tend to react more
favorably to people that look like us,
that speak our language, that share our
values. That's the presumption that our
brains make. And then the byproduct of
that is that where there is difference,
there tends then to be a bias. People
pretend that technology is a great
equalizer and leveler. But I think we
need to be quite careful about that to
understand that technology has values
attached to it.
Rioting across the US today as police
accidentally shoot an unarmed black
woman in Chicago.
>> We have a woman in her 80s shot in the
head on the far south side.
>> The yet unnamed 80-year-old was
incorrectly identified by powerful AI
predictive policing algorithms. The
police were tasked with arresting an
offender at a time and location
generated by the algorithm. An
investigation into the incident is
underway. It's been going on for too
long, man. I feel like this should stop.
This whole racist stuff, white cop
killing a black person.
>> Predictive policing has been criticized
for being racist, unfairly targeting
groups, ethnicities, and locations.
Despite police claiming a massive
reduction of crime in the last decade,
police can now track potential criminals
using the internet, phone history, CCTV
face recognition combined with new
technology that examines the emotional
state of potential perpetrators.
But as protests erupt on the streets
tonight, critics are warning predictive
policing reduces the accountability of
law enforcement with important life and
death decisions. now automated by AI.
>> How do we ensure that AI is compatible
with us with the us that we want it to
be compatible with? Because we are not
the same. Like, do I want an AI that is
serving me when I want to binge eat or
do I want that AI to serve the me that,
you know, wants to go on a diet and
wants to be healthy?
>> There. Yeah.
>> So, people have a lot of problems
defining what it is that we even want
from AI and how we can make it
compatible with us and which us do we
mean. Humans
often have pretty unstable preferences.
So, we're quite uncertain about what we
prefer. Our preferences change as we get
older.
Even at a societywide scale, our
preferences about what seems right or
wrong change. So, you can imagine that
if we anchor on our preferences now,
then future generations might think that
it's fine to burn fossil fuels, for
example. And that would be a huge
problem.
Many of my friends tell me that it's
futile to even talk about this because
people in different cultures and even
from different political parties have
such different goals. You're not going
to agree on anything. But that's
actually nonsense. Most humans agree
that they would rather not have the
species go extinct, for example. That's
not so obvious to a machine whether
that's a good thing or a bad thing. You
have to teach it that.
Not long ago, Andreas Lubitz told his
civilian aircraft he was flying over the
Alps to go down to 50 m altitude.
And you know what the computer said?
It said, "Okay." And everybody died.
Nobody had even thought about teaching
this AI that it should never fly in
fixed objects ever. the vast majority of
the sort of kindergarten ethics that all
humans virtually agree. We still haven't
even gotten around to putting into our
machines. This is low tech. We have the
technology to do this. It's not hard. At
this stage of life, every activity is a
lesson in itself. Every new experiment
in play extends the horizon of their
understanding.
>> So, let's start by putting in these
kindergarten ethics into any machine
smart enough to understand this. And
then as machines get smarter, we'll be
in the right mindset to keep putting in
ever more sophisticated goals.
>> I aliance to the flag of the United
States of America.
>> I'd love to have a governing
constitution that says, "Look, here are
the bounds and here are the things that
we care the most about preserving.
Here's our expectations for how we will
be making decisions that have this
amount of magnitude and this amount of
flowover effects into the rest of the
world.
People look to constitutional norms to
answer the question, what do most people
think is morally right?
So, I think it would be a very good
thing for us to crowdsource a
constitution for humanity.
There's something about the wisdom of
crowds.
I don't think it would be all that
difficult um to run an expert
facilitated crowdsourced
constitution-making exercise that could
give us some really first rate rules
about what we should present to the
super intelligent AI when it arrives.
>> If you look to the Americans, the
founding fathers, the constitution was a
very influential document. It's had
these vast rippling effects on history.
You know, you can discuss, you can
debate what they are and how good they
are. But the idea that that constitution
has had this propagating effect, you
can't deny that.
What I think would be a thing to, you
know, put as the centerpiece of uh any
kind of constitution for the future to
pass down would just be that ability to
correct our errors.
That ability for intelligence to realize
when it's gone wrong and then to make up
for it.
We know that humanity is committing
moral atrocities right now, but there
are also ones that we probably aren't
even aware of. So what I would put as
the centerpiece of any kind of
constitution for the future would just
be to stress that ability to correct our
errors and realize where we're going
wrong and make up for the moral
tragedies of the past
and also the future.
[Music]
I can't help laugh sometimes when people
say, "Why would you possibly worry about
a robot killing you?"
And then there are all these companies
online running advertisements for robots
that kill you.
>> Right now, people are being killed by
drones using AI.
One big thing that most governments are
by design incentivized to do is to shore
up both military power and economic
power,
which means that it's going to want to
use something like AGI to shore up its
military and economic power as well.
God forbid we integrate AI into the
nuclear command and control system, but
that would be one example of how it
could go drastically wrong.
The US, Russia, China benefit from
powerful weapons that are really
expensive that only they can afford.
If you want to kill 10 million people
with guns, you basically need millions
of people to carry those guns for you,
right?
>> But we have something much bigger.
Your kids probably have one of these,
right?
>> Not quite.
>> If we get an arms race in lethal
autonomous weapons for our slaughter
bots, then we're going to have these
incredibly powerful weapons that weigh
as much as a smartphone, cost as much as
a smartphone.
This would be much, much worse than
guns. Because if you want to kill that
many people automatically,
a handful of people can just press a
button. This is also like the ultimate
obedient army in the future.
[Music]
Lowering the threshold of what it means
to kill a person by just delegating all
action and all responsibility to a
machine is something that you know
doesn't just lead to the death of a
person but it leads to moral death.
[Music]
We have completely relinquished not just
our responsibility but our actions and
our decision making.
It leads to this whole new level of
dehumanization of our potential victims
in the future. They're not even going to
be considered by a human mind. They are
going to simply be selected and targeted
by something that won't have any
understanding of what it means to be
human and the importance of human life
and the frailty of our experience.
Machines will never ever be able to
fully simulate humans because they will
never understand human suffering.
[Music]
>> They will have some sort of alternative
type of life and experience. They may
experience things which are difficult.
They may experience, you know, virtual
pain or who knows what, but those
machines will relate on their terms.
If we're going to cooperate with
intelligent machines in the future, then
we need to understand the basis of human
cooperation
because human cooperation is the most
powerful force in history
[Music]
and it has enabled us to do all kinds of
incredible things which are actually the
result of human cooperations.
You know, to make medicines, put people
on the moon. So it's not just one human
brain, it's all these different human
brains working together.
>> In order to create a machine that you
can really cooperate with. The more
humanlike it is, the more intuitive and
natural it is to communicate.
So I was wanting to build a a brain
model and put it in a in a character.
Then I was thinking, what face should I
use?
You know, I was spending so much time
with my real daughter that I thought,
"Oh, that's perfect." Because
metaphorically, she's representative of
the level of learning that we're looking
at.
Most of our learning when we're young is
social learning. We're learning from,
you know, parents or caregivers about
everything to do with the world.
[Music]
One of the goals of Baby X is really
trying to build a truly autonomous
model. So that touches on the notion of
free will.
>> What's this, baby? What's this? What's
this?
>> Good girl. Now, see if she knows what
the word is. Okay, baby. Look over here.
Okay. What's this? What's this?
>> Good girl.
>> The model is actually kind of deciding
what it wants to do.
>> Bobby, baby, over here. What's this? And
it can be distracted by different things
and may would not want to talk to you
right now.
>> Over here. Over here.
>> And one of the most profound mysteries
is the mystery of consciousness.
As all these elements come together, can
we get a sense of something that is
actually aware of its environment? Where
is the doggy? Doggy.
Good.
Humans have always been merged with
technology.
There are very good arguments that
technology made us human.
Almost everything we do every day is
modulated through technology.
Our phones are in a sense an extension
of ourselves. And humanity is going to
continue its thing of being intimately
entwined with technology.
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That is going to become what we now
would see as uncomfortable or strange or
bizarre.
Imagine
that I was running 100 times faster and
I was able to remember a lot more in the
world, understand a lot more in the
world, not just physically do more
things but intellectually do more things
and that is totally liberating in a way
that is completely wild to the
imagination as it is now.
We will have human beings who will make
more and more use of artificial organs
of metal and plastic, artificial hearts,
artificial kidneys, artificial lungs. In
short, we may have a society in which
human beings will drift away from the
total organic toward the metal.
Transhumanism is this idea that we can
use technology not just to change and
conquer
the natural world and the environment,
but also that we can use technology to
change ourselves and to enhance
ourselves, to prolong our lives, to make
ourselves better people, to enhance our
cognitive capacities and so on.
>> At the center of transhumanism is a kind
of anxiety I think which is the anxiety
of obsolescence.
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the idea that we're going to sort of
price ourselves out of the market
intellectually by developing these
machines that are going to be able to
outthink us and outmaneuver us
and we'll be basically irrelevant and
maybe endangered.
In order to avoid that, we need to merge
with technology. We need to become the
machine.
We're not just here to do high level
maths. I think there's a lot more going
on within humans than solving problems
and thinking rationally. And that seems
to me to be a basic misunderstanding of,
you know, what's valuable about being
alive.
Ultimately, transhumists tend to talk
about the eradication of death through
technology.
And despite the veneer of like extreme
futurism and sort of high-tech, the idea
that we might be able to evade death is
as old as humanity itself.
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[Laughter]
So many of the transhumanists who I talk
to are very invested in this idea of
mind uploading of extracting the
consciousness of an individual and
putting it onto a software essentially.
So some people might want to be robots
>> moving uh I guess an average of about 8
km an hour.
>> Some people might want to upload
themselves into like a Mars rover or
whatever. Some people might want to live
as like free floating consciousness in
the cloud extending infinitely
throughout time at the most extreme
level where you just you don't die. But
if you're a free floating consciousness
extending infinitely through space,
are you really anything at all? What are
you? Are you a god or are you nothing?
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It's a branching in what evolution has
been so far. To date, the pressures of
evolution are natural selection. And
this is the point in time when we will
choose as humanity to branch off and
choose a different selection pressure,
which is our intelligence.
That's why this moment is so important.
I mean, if it does go in this direction,
then we will be the final instantiation
of humans. And that's a massive
responsibility.
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Most people would look at the
agricultural revolution and the
industrial revolution and say, "Look,
that was a total step change in our
quality of life.
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We just didn't prepare enough for both
of them."
And so there were these costs that we
paid.
entrenched inequality is one example of
a thing that the industrial revolution
exacerbated in a really dramatic way.
And so I'm not going to downplay how
bumpy I think the transition is going to
be. But if you look on the other side of
that transition, we're effectively in a
world where running a value creating
economy doesn't need to be done by
humans anymore.
When you replace a worker by a machine,
the income that used to go to that human
who wasn't very rich instead went to the
owner of the machine. That very
naturally leads to a situation where the
rich get richer and vice versa. The
obvious solution to this, if you like
equality, is to just make sure the
government collects enough tax from this
ever growing pie that it can make sure
that everybody gets better off because
there's almost no limit to how much
wealth we can produce with the help of
of machines.
>> Work is a huge part of our identity.
>> Mr. Brown's line.
>> For a good part of human history, we've
really valued people based on what they
can produce.
The more we develop technologies that
replace us in in some of these work
environments, the more we need to think
about what is the purpose of the human
life and of the human being.
>> Jobs give us income. They give us
purpose. They give us friends. If we can
find a way of getting all those three
without jobs, I don't think we're going
to miss the jobs very much.
The key thing is to really think hard
though about what sort of society we
want to create so that the people will
still feel they have that sense of
purpose. What sort of society would we
really be excited and living in?
>> And I think people don't spend nearly
enough time thinking about positive
visions for the future with technology.
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We may well be enlightened in ways which
we don't even understand at the moment
because people don't have that capacity.
Imagine being able to chat with a super
intelligent being about some of the
mysteries of life.
Imagine talking to a machine about well
what was it like flying around the
internet? What was it like when you were
a satellite going around Jupiter?
And we will get answers that no person
has ever been able to give before.
There are a lot of different things that
AI could do for us. Imagine you could
replicate incredibly intelligent humans.
You could deploy them to solve any
problem overnight while you're asleep.
Like it's that fast. So for example,
poverty and being able to redistribute
resources in appropriate ways, climate
change, climate technology,
decarbonizing the economy, and then you
can graduate to just harder technical
tasks like for example, how do we get to
different planets?
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The mission that I'm the most invested
in is a mission to Venus to search for
life. And that's really uh you know a
full circle for me standing back um as a
young child looking up at the stars on a
really clear night in the bottom of the
South Island with my father and the
realization as he was pointing out to me
those stars that that those stars have
planets around them and those planets
could have somebody just like me looking
back and asking the same question.
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And that was what really, you know, got
me got me interested in space from the
very early beginnings is that yearning
to understand, you know, are we the only
life in the universe or or not.
Always promised myself if I ever had the
opportunity to go and do do something
like that that I would do it.
There's a few places in our solar system
where it's been long hypothesized that
there could be life. And in the clouds
of Venus, there's a really interesting
spot. It's about 50 km altitude where
the environment is temperate enough for
primitive forms of extreme life to
survive.
If I got one question in my entire life
and somebody would give me the answer,
my question would be, are we the only
life in the universe?
People have this very strong intuition
ahead of evidence that if it looks like
somewhere could have life, then it will
have life.
It's not based on evidence or scientific
reasoning. It's based on wishful
thinking.
In the '60s, SETI, the search for
extraterrestrial intelligence begins.
>> Originally, people had very optimistic
hopes that they were going to log into
this uh, you know, populous thronging
universe filled with conversation.
They just heard silence back.
There's lots of suns bathing uninhabited
inorganic planets with loads of energy
and nothing interesting is happening.
The cosmos seems quite silent.
So we can't take for granted anymore
that the universe is filled with other
intelligences.
That's not to say that we are the wonder
of the whole universe, but as far as we
know, we are the only thing that can
find the universe wonderful.
Life is incredibly cosmically rare, and
humans, it's the only thing that could
spread it elsewhere.
We have the potential to be this spark
plug that could create this transition
from a currently inorganic universe into
one that's filled with life
and potentially the richness of
consciousness.
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[Laughter]
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We've realized not only that we're not
insignificant,
but that we were dramatically more
significant than our ancestors ever
dreamt of.
I find this an incredibly empowering
insight that science has given us.
We know this planet can be a very nice
place to live for hundreds of millions
of years unless we screw it up.
And if we want to live longer than that,
there's absolutely no reason we can't
use artificial intelligence to go to
other solar systems and other galaxies.
Life can flourish for billions of years
throughout the cosmos.
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Either the future is going to be awesome
with life flourishing for billions of
years on Earth and probably beyond or
we're going to go extinct probably
within the century. I think it's never
been more motivating to be a human to
help contribute to making sure we make
the right choice here.
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