So it's inevitable that the same thing, once it surpasses us in intelligence, it will dominate us in some way.

Yeah.

And I think that kind of intuition is very, very widespread.

Something like intelligence is a source of power.

So if a system is much, much more intelligent than us, it's going to be much more powerful than us.

And then, of course, you can see how these sorts of worries start becoming more pressing for people if you think that this is not just some possibility that might happen in 50 years, but maybe in three years or five years, we're going to have systems that are super intelligent in this sense.

So again, the thing to say is, it's not that I think what is being described here is just obviously absurd or has no basis at all in kind of rational considerations.

Why? Why can't we just make sure that the AI doesn't? harm us and why would it want to harm us anyway? Yeah, what are your thoughts around that?

Like what they believed about race or gender or like religion, for example.

Yeah, or the cosmos or about science or even about basic issues concerning social relations, maybe about their nation, about imperialism, all of these sorts of things.

We now think most of what they believe just isn't true.

We've learned a lot more since then.

And I think if you just therefore engage in some induction, it's very likely that much of what we believe today is also going to be false.

Moreover, there's a lot of reason to believe that there are just principled reasons for thinking it's very difficult to figure out what the truth is.

So for most of the things that we're forming beliefs about, it's not like we've got firsthand experience of the things that we're forming beliefs about.

Like right-wing misinformation.

But, you know, this is not somebody whose mind was open early on, who had a potentially positive view as a politician and then sees a story like that and goes, "Oh, now suddenly I realize this is an evil person," right? This is somebody who probably had pretty distorted political condition to begin with, was pretty consumed by rage and hatred against some part of the political spectrum to begin with, and that's why they in earnest or perhaps in a trolling way then share that kind of news story.

Exactly.

This is not a cross-section of the population engaging with that kind of content.

And actually, in many of these cases, as you say, it's not even clear that they really believe it, and it can even be to their sort of perceived political advantage when fact-checking organizations come out and discredit that information because they're so hostile to these institutions anyway that it doesn't make much of a difference.

I mean, that's not to say that this kind of content never has any harmful consequences.

Like, it's probably not a great thing that people with highly conspiratorial worldviews or really strong hostility towards establishment institutions are consuming lots of incredibly weird low-quality content.

It's not a great thing.

Any particular person, uh, probably has a bias, and so w- we should mis- mistrust everything basically." How do we protect ourselves against that kind of cynicism, and what more specifically do you mean by this everyone is biased bias?

Dan, w- what's the word on the ground in Israel right now?

Well, as you noted, it's a waiting game.

The Israelis aren't waiting, nor the Iranians.

The exchange of fire, Israeli airstrikes and Iranian missiles continues.

Arguably, however, the Iranian attacks do appear to be tapering off.

According to an interview, uh, in an interview he gave yesterday, the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attributed this to Israel's shift, a shift by the Israeli military to targeting launch systems for the r-... that the launchers are actually more important than how many missiles the Iranians have in hand, because if you can't launch them, they're virtually useless.

And he said yesterday that half, around half had been destroyed.

Dan, what do we know about the timetable for President Trump to decide whether or not to strike Iran?