Episode 4 - Calum Chace on Machine Consciousness

You cannot read the news and not read about AI.

The New York Times, I think about 25 to 30% of all the articles that appear in the New York Times are about AI, and they're usually alarmist and sort of doom.

They're really not.

They might raise an

alarm and then they squish it.

For years, journalists have loved to sneer about doom scenarios.

They might mention it, and they're very happy to run pictures of the Terminator because that's a good copy.

But they fundamentally don't believe it.

And what's happened in the last two weeks is that they've all thought about Hugging Face and OpenAI, that incident.

And they've all thought, oh, actually, maybe this isn't quite so daft as we've been saying.

There's a huge... antipathy towards big tech in the journalist community for the very obvious reason that big tech stole their business.

Google and Facebook now own half the advertising industry, and that half of the advertising industry is what used to pay for journalists to go out and get drunk at lunchtime and have a whoopee time.

Now there's no money in journalism, so they all have to work five times as hard, they have much less fun, and they're much less well-paid relative to everybody else.

So they are absolutely indignant about big AI, totally understandably.

So they sneered about the ideas of superintelligence.

It's a myth put up by spotty, nerdy engineers in Silicon Valley.

That's been their general approach.

That's changing.

And when that changes for long enough, and it's not just an article that raises a possibility and then squishes it, but it's an article which is the lead item in the news.

And it says, this is a real possibility.

Extinction risk is a real possibility.

The possibility of a future where there's no jobs for humans, that's a real possibility.

We need to be thinking about these things.

Then I think public opinion could be mobilized.

You cannot read the news and not read about AI.

The New York Times, I think about 25 to 30% of all the articles that appear in the New York Times are about AI, and they're usually alarmist and sort of doom.

They're really not.

They might raise an

alarm and then they squish it.

For years, journalists have loved to sneer about doom scenarios.

They might mention it, and they're very happy to run pictures of the Terminator because that's a good copy.

But they fundamentally don't believe it.

And what's happened in the last two weeks is that they've all thought about Hugging Face and OpenAI, that incident.

And they've all thought, oh, actually, maybe this isn't quite so daft as we've been saying.

There's a huge... antipathy towards big tech in the journalist community for the very obvious reason that big tech stole their business.

Google and Facebook now own half the advertising industry, and that half of the advertising industry is what used to pay for journalists to go out and get drunk at lunchtime and have a whoopee time.

Now there's no money in journalism, so they all have to work five times as hard, they have much less fun, and they're much less well-paid relative to everybody else.

So they are absolutely indignant about big AI, totally understandably.

So they sneered about the ideas of superintelligence.

It's a myth put up by spotty, nerdy engineers in Silicon Valley.

That's been their general approach.

That's changing.

And when that changes for long enough, and it's not just an article that raises a possibility and then squishes it, but it's an article which is the lead item in the news.

And it says, this is a real possibility.

Extinction risk is a real possibility.

The possibility of a future where there's no jobs for humans, that's a real possibility.

We need to be thinking about these things.

Then I think public opinion could be mobilized.