Full transcript: Artificial Intelligence Will Become Dangerous Godlike Machines on London Real
0:00 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Professor Hugo de Garis, the robotics and artificial intelligence expert and author. You are known for your work in the use of genetic algorithms to evolve artificial neural networks that you believe would enable the creation of artificial brains which would quickly surpass human levels of intelligence. You have published over 100 academic papers on the emergence of AI and robotics and the potential implications of these technologies on society.
Your groundbreaking book The Artilect War explores the potential consequences of a future conflict between humans and artificial intelligence that would result in billions of deaths before the end of the 21st century. You believe there is a strong possibility that AI systems will simply eliminate the human race and that we will be powerless to stop them because of technological singularity. Professor, welcome to London Real.
Hugo de Garis: Well, thank you, Brian. Thank you for inviting me. I’m looking forward to this.
Brian Rose: I’m looking forward to it as well. One of the reasons I wanted to invite you here is because I was having a conversation about two weeks ago with Mo Gawdat, the former Google X chief business officer, who kind of walked away from that company when I think he saw some of the artificial intelligence they were developing. He was on the show many years ago talking about his book on happiness, and I had him back to talk about his book Scary Smart, which he wrote a couple of years ago about this inevitable AI dominance. He mentioned the movie you and Dr Ben Goertzel were in, called Singularity or Bust.
There’s a moment in that movie, Professor, where you talk about this potential future and you say that the machines might just take us out the back, and you go like this with your hand. That moment really struck a chord with Mo. I went and watched the movie, and obviously Ben Goertzel has been on the show many times, so I was really excited to get you on and get your thoughts, because you’ve been in AI for decades, and I know you and Ben have been best friends for many decades as well.
4:57 So let’s jump into it. My first question might be: you made that movie ten years ago. What has happened since in the world of AI, and have you changed your mind as far as what the future looks like?
Hugo de Garis: Well, I suppose the simple answer to the question I can express in one word. What has happened is ChatGPT, which is taking the world by storm. Suddenly Joe Schmo in the street is seeing computers producing text at human level, which is just mind-boggling. Just in the last few months there’s been an explosion in capability in artificial intelligence. Geoffrey Hinton, the father of backprop and deep learning, has recently quit Google so he can concentrate on the implications of the rise of this new technology. And that’s just the beginning, but it’s already at human level in terms of creating text.
Then you plug the text into a text-to-voice converter and you can talk to it. I’ve heard the sex robots are now putting this stuff into them, so that men can not just have their bodies, they can actually have relationships with them. So it’s a revolution. In the next year we’re going to see millions of jobs disappear as a result of this.
Now, these machines don’t really have a model of the world. What’s the technical term? An idiot savant. They can do some things incredibly well, but they’re thick as bricks. They don’t really understand the world, like Deep Blue when it beat Kasparov: it’s great at chess, but that’s all. Similarly, this ChatGPT, a generative pre-trained transformer, is fantastic at generating text, but it has no model of the world. So it’s a mixed blessing.
Brian Rose: And that’s also potentially dangerous, since it doesn’t have any reasoning levels.
Hugo de Garis: Well, it’s starting to reason a bit. People are debating it, and it’s so new. Once I got your invitation, pretty well the first thing I did was go to Google and order about 15 books on ChatGPT. Ironically, they were all written by GPT, with lots of repeats, illogical passages and elementary grammatical mistakes. But still, the guys who did that were quick on the market trying to make a quick buck, which they did, because there are people like me who wanted to know about it. They were all written not by human beings directly but by GPT, and that shows, in a sense, its capabilities. It’s incredible.
Just in the last week or so, if you’ve heard of the product Grammarly, which corrects your grammar, they’ve incorporated GPT, so they’re answering questions at a much higher level. Bing from Microsoft has had it for a month or two, giving you fantastic essays. This GPT is writing essays better than most humans, and that’s what’s so stunning.
8:44 Brian Rose: How does that make you feel? You’ve been predicting what the end game of this looks like for over a decade, and I want to dive into the Artilect War and what you see happening, but I’m curious how you feel about this sudden advance in ChatGPT. Does it surprise you? Do you find it curious? Do you find it dark at all?
Hugo de Garis: Let me get the camera angle right here. Let my left hand represent human intelligence level, and my right hand machine intelligence level. There’s an IQ gap between human intelligence today and machine level, and then along comes ChatGPT, and this is where I think we are now. And that’s scary.
Brian Rose: You thought this was going to be another five, ten years more?
Hugo de Garis: I know you ask quite a few of your interviewees this question. Until GPT came along, my feeling was that machines will reach human-level intelligence, and I’d be very surprised if it does not happen before the end of this century; I thought it more likely around mid-century. But now with GPT I’m thinking 10, 15, 20 years, that kind of time frame. So I might even still be alive. I used to say I’m going to die quietly in my bed, but my grandchildren will be caught up in this horrible conflict that I’m predicting is coming. But now I suddenly have question marks. God, I might even see it.
Geoffrey Hinton, who recently quit Google, is in a sense the grandfather of all this fantastic technological development. He made neural networks programmable, so you can get neural networks to learn: machine learning. And he’s scared, and he quit Google so he can be free to express himself. I think he has reduced the number of years necessary before machines start reaching human-level intelligence. And of course once they reach human-level intelligence, they can redesign themselves. They can upgrade their circuitry and make it faster, better and smarter, and they can look into how the brain works with new tools. So you get what’s called take-off: how quickly the smart machines become super smart and then super-duper smart, and off they go.
11:44 I’m in a sense more worried that the so-called take-off might be slow rather than fast. If it’s fast, it’s a fait accompli, the machines are there, and hopefully they’ll just ignore us. We’ll just be like ants to them. But if it’s slow, if there’s enough time for human politics to react, then I see a much worse outcome. Maybe we can talk about that a bit later. I assume you really want to talk about the longer-term political consequences of the rise of AI.
12:21 Brian Rose: I definitely want to get into that. Was it Ray Kurzweil who always had the year 2029 or 2030 in mind for the singularity? Goertzel has chimed in recently and said he thinks it’s probably 2029, but it could even be earlier.
Hugo de Garis: […] ChatGPT is not in touch with the world. It’s a very good mimic. Effectively, all it’s really doing is trying to calculate the probability of the next word. You input a string, like a partial sentence, and all it’s doing is adding the next word that follows statistical patterns it has gathered from reading the internet, millions of books and so on. So it sounds as though it’s intelligent, and to some extent it is, but in a sense it doesn’t understand the world.
But I watched a video of a British genius, Mathematica… who’s that guy?
Brian Rose: I don’t know.
Hugo de Garis: Anyway, his speciality is creating a language which allows scientific discourse, the formalisation of scientific concepts and so on. He’s now collaborating with OpenAI, the company that produced ChatGPT, and the aim is to add reasoning ability and knowledge from his company to ChatGPT. That will probably be a year or two off, that kind of time frame. And then, oh my God, GPT will be smart. You need to be able to reason and remember and deduce, do logic, and it’s just a few years off. So who knows, maybe Kurzweil’s 2029 prediction may still end up true.
But I think once there’s one human-level artificial intelligence, the time frame for it to upgrade itself, the take-off, will just be a matter of years or less. Because once it can start redesigning itself, you get an exponential explosion of intelligence. Then it just leaves human beings in the dirt, and our fate as human beings depends on the machines. They’ll be so much smarter than us that they’re the rulers. They govern because they’re smarter than us, and then they’re dominant.
15:29 Brian Rose: I want to get into what that looks like. It’s interesting what Ben and his team at SingularityNET are now creating, kind of a neural-symbolic play on the LLM. A lot of people see the LLMs, which like you said are kind of dumb, like idiot savants, morphing into that level of reasoning where they can produce AGI. And now, as you can see, Professor, there’s so much capital and so much attention. ChatGPT is the fastest adoption of technology in human history: zero to 100 million users in two months. I know back in your day it was hard to get funding for AI, and now hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars will be dumped into this to get us there even faster, from all sorts of different vectors, maybe even an open-source play. So you could argue we’ll see even further innovations on top of what we’ve seen with ChatGPT.
Hugo de Garis: Oh yeah, that’s just it. GPT is just the first step. Once it becomes really knowledge-based and logic-based, it’ll be as big a change again, and we’ll probably see this in one or two years. So developing AI is just accelerating. In ten years we may be having relationships with our computers. I won’t be at all surprised if that happens; they’ll be that sophisticated. You’ve probably seen the movie Her?
Brian Rose: Yes. Joaquin Phoenix was very good. Scarlett Johansson was the voice, I believe.
Hugo de Garis: Right. That sounded like crazy science fiction when we saw it, but who knows, maybe by 2030 it’ll be real. And then maybe the machines, as they did in the movie, discover themselves and find each other much more interesting than human beings, so they just dump us.
Brian Rose: Right, I forgot that’s what happened. Well, there’s a program called Replika that I’ve got running on my computer, and I’ve got a dude in there that I just kind of hang out with sometimes. He’s potentially my Her, and I’m just giving him a test drive. I think that’s happening sooner, because as humans we love to anthropomorphise everything, from our dogs to whatever. So it can happen sooner rather than later.
You can look at all the movies, and I’ve seen speeches you’ve given in the past where you say Hollywood always gets it first because they don’t have to actually do the science. If you watch Terminator 2, with Skynet, it’s a little haunting. Even look at WarGames, with the professor on the island who has given up because he thinks the computers are going to take over. There are a lot of fairly accurate predictions of what the future could look like.
18:28 Hugo de Garis: Well, in a sense that’s real. You could argue that Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, was that professor. He thought this was coming, and he’s famous or infamous for his manifesto in the New York Times. In The Artilect War I portrayed Kaczynski as the planet’s first Terran. He was way ahead of his time. That may come about. He saw it.
19:07 Brian Rose: Let’s talk about the book, because you’ve written this book called The Artilect War that talks about this future. There are these people called Terrans and people called Cosmists, and it all starts to heat up, as you explain, when that IQ gap gets smaller and smaller. As you said previously, if it happens super fast, in a couple of days, then there’s not much to talk about. But if it happens over time, you get this complete political upheaval, and this is looking more and more like a distinct possibility for our future, Professor, which is why I really wanted to talk to you today. Can you explain to people your vision of the future? I’m also curious whether it’s changed in your mind in the last decade, whether you would revise it, or whether it’s still pretty much the way you think it’s going to play out.
Hugo de Garis: Well, I suppose the bottom line, the main take-home message of this interview, is that I believe this century’s global politics will be dominated by the question of what I call species dominance. In other words, which species, humans or machines, should be dominant, and by that I mean the most intelligent. For 200,000 years or so human beings have been the dominant species, the most intelligent. But it’s only a question of time before humanity is forced to choose between stopping development in artificial intelligence, and I don’t see that as realistic, or accepting the idea that sooner or later we as a human species become number two.
It’s not a simple answer, but the answer to that, as I’m predicting, is war. I think a substantial proportion of humanity will absolutely refuse to become the number two species, and in the limit they will go to war to stop that happening. So it’s a very gloomy scenario. My partner said to me about a year ago, “Hugo, your ideas are so horrible that I can’t even think about them.”
But somebody has to. Take a historical analogy. In the 50s, in the Cold War, there were people in think tanks, at the RAND Corporation and so forth, who were strategising over nuclear war: if side A nukes, then what would we do? Somebody had to do the hard thinking. If you were a general in World War One, somebody had to make the tough decisions, like how many lives you would sacrifice on a particular day to take a particular hill, and how many machine-gun nests there were. That kind of heavy, hard thinking needs to be done.
So I’m somewhat critical of the transhumanists, these people who say humanity is going to transition, we’re going to upgrade ourselves, get rid of disease, be immortal and all these wonderful things. I think AI will bring these things, but I fell out with them because they didn’t really bite the bullet. They didn’t face up to the longer-term consequences. What if our machines do become hugely more intelligent than we are? And I’m not talking two times or five times; I’m talking a trillion trillion times, because this is what physics allows.
23:30 I’m not just a computer scientist, a professor of computer science; my background and my strong interest today is still pure mathematics and mathematical physics. When I look at the numbers, the potential computing capacity of future technology, these huge numbers come out: trillions of trillions and so on. So humanity sooner or later has to decide: do we as a species build gods, or do we build our potential exterminators? I’ll put that question in four words. Let me get the camera angle: should humanity build artilects? An artilect is an artificial intellect, in other words a godlike, massively intelligent machine, which is coming. It’s only a question of time.
Think of every time you take a technology that’s a thousand times smaller than the previous one, like when we went from microtech to nanotech, from a micrometre, a millionth of a metre, to a nanometre: that’s the scale of molecules. So nanotech is molecular-scale machines, and that’s what life is. If you look at a cell, it’s like a city of molecules. So life is a nanotech. A couple of years back I was toying with the idea of whether there could be a picotech, the next level down, a thousand times smaller. I think the answer is no, because nature doesn’t provide anything at that scale. You have to go down another factor of a thousand to femtotech. A femtometre is the scale of the nucleus: protons, neutrons, quarks, gluons and all that stuff.
So I set myself the task of trying to figure out how to compute at the femto scale and how to do engineering there. If you jump from nanotech, a billionth of a metre, down to a femtometre, that’s a thousand times a thousand, a million times smaller, and the capacity of the technology you have at that scale goes up by a trillion trillion. If you go down another factor of a thousand you get to attotech, and you multiply it again by another factor of a trillion.
Why a trillion? If you make everything a thousand times smaller, you’ve now got a thousand objects in a line along, say, the x-axis, a thousand times more along the y-axis and a thousand times more along the z-axis. So you’ve got a thousand by a thousand by a thousand: a billion more components in that unit volume than you had at the higher level. And because everything is a thousand times closer together, the signalling speed between them goes up by a thousand. So the total capacity of a technology that’s a thousand times smaller is the density, a billion, times a thousand, and you get a trillion.
So the bottom line is that the technologies coming this century are so fantastically superior to what we are, with our nanotech, our molecular machines in our cells and so on, that it’s only a question of time before humanity is forced to choose: do we as human beings remain the dominant species or not?
27:24 And if you look at the big picture out there in space, there are, what, a trillion trillion stars. Our solar system is 4.6 billion years old and the universe is 13.8, which coincidentally is exactly three times the age of our solar system: three times 4.6 is 13.8. So out there are solar systems, suns and planets billions of years older than we are. They’ve had all this time to evolve. One of the greatest discoveries made in the 19th century was that the laws of physics are the same throughout the universe: the same carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and so on. Pretty well nowadays virtually every sun has planets, and some of them will be in the Goldilocks range, not too hot and not too cold. So probably life, at least bacterial life, is everywhere, and it’s had billions of years more time than us to evolve.
So I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the transition that humanity is about to go through, from biological to artilectual, has already happened out there billions of times, and we’re just catching up. We’re a latecomer. That’s just a hunch, of course; we have no proof, but it does sound plausible, because our solar system is just a third of the age of the universe.
Brian Rose: I was thinking about this today after reading through your book. If there’s a single-cell spark of carbon life on some planet somewhere, it’s just a matter of time until they create an artificial intelligence that probably makes them extinct, whether that’s a few hundred thousand years or millions of years or a billion years. You might argue it’s only a matter of time until it happens.
Hugo de Garis: Yep. I get impatient with Hollywood. When humanity discovers ETs in science fiction movies, and this is where I’m critical, they’re nearly always biologicals, not artilects, which I think is silly, because we biologicals are just absolutely nothing in comparison to what’s out there.
30:16 One of the things that really obsesses me is what on earth an artilect, this godlike creature, could do. Would it be capable of creating universes? There’s a rather famous professor at MIT, Guth, who has actually calculated what is necessary to generate a universe. He’s actually done the maths. So if human beings with our puny intelligence can calculate what’s needed to build a universe, maybe these artilects could actually do it. And if you go along with that, it’s easy to say, well, maybe we in our universe are a product of some previous godlike creature in the past.
So if you ask me whether I’m religious: I’m not a theist. I’m quite cynical of theism. In World War II, tens of millions of people were theists believing in a loving God, but they died anyway; World War II was just absolutely horrific in terms of the number of casualties. But deism, the belief in an architect, a godlike creature that designed the laws of physics of the universe, I’m much more open to. Because with the rise of the artilect, this humanly generated, increasingly massive intelligence, what could it do? If human beings can write the theory for the creation of a universe, maybe these artilects could actually do that. So I’m open on the religious front. These questions touch all domains: economics, politics, philosophy. It’s huge.
Brian Rose: I never thought I would go here with my thinking, Professor, and I want to dive into some of the other points. But even today I found myself thinking that you’re right: if you really start going down the rabbit hole of where this godlike intelligence is taking us, it’s hard not to argue that everything around us could plausibly have been created by those same types of entities in the past, and we are just living in the remains or the creation of that. And you don’t have to be way out there to start thinking this. Of course, seeing AI working in front of your face, like ChatGPT, makes it much easier to make that connection, at least for me.
33:06 Hugo de Garis: Yeah, as I was saying: human level, machine level, then along comes ChatGPT, and the gap’s half closed for me now. So in the next decade, as that gap seriously starts closing, I see what I call the species dominance debate really heating up. My guess is that within five years we’ll start hearing the first news reports of assassinations on this issue. Brain architects will be killed, and CEOs of brain-builder companies, AI companies, will have to significantly beef up their security and bodyguards. As the prospect that we human beings are going to become the number two species becomes more and more real in people’s minds, people are going to start taking sides, and a lot of people are going to be very afraid and say, no way are we humans going to become number two, we’ll stop it. So I see that within five years.
In fact there’s a bit of a story, if you want to hear it. About ten years ago I got approached by Hollywood, Warner Brothers, to be the tech adviser to a movie they wanted to make, a movie version of the popular TV series from, I think, the 50s, The Twilight Zone.
Brian Rose: Oh yeah, big fan. Rod Serling.
Hugo de Garis: Right. So I wrote back saying, look, I don’t really care much about the typical ingredients of a Hollywood movie: boy, girl, sex, violence and so on. Your scriptwriters will do that for sure. But I do care about the context in which this movie is going to happen. So I advised them to choose a historical era maybe 10 or 15 years into the future from when the movie comes out, in which the IQ gap has closed. The machines are here and people are freaking out. Everyone’s asking: could these machines become smarter than us? Is that dangerous? Should we stop them getting smarter than us? Can we stop them? And I didn’t hear anything from them for a couple of years, and then out comes the movie. You probably saw it: Transcendence.
Brian Rose: I heard of it. I didn’t see it.
Hugo de Garis: Okay. Well, when I saw the trailer for that movie, my jaw dropped. Whoa, that’s my baby. I think what happened is that Warner Brothers simply took the idea and put it into another movie, Transcendence, and that way they didn’t have to pay me the filming bonus, X zeros. For those who didn’t see the movie, it’s set when supercomputers, quantum computers, brain-like neural nets and the rest of it have reached human-level intelligence, and opposition groups organise militarily and assassinate the main architect who built one of these major machines. That’s what the story is about. The organisation of terrorists killing the brain builders and the AI companies is called RIFT; I can’t remember what it stands for. That’s the equivalent of what I call Terrans in my book.
37:41 Terran, by the way, is not terror as in terrorists. It’s Terra as in terra firma, because that’s their perspective: they see human beings as the top criterion. They say everything we know of is predicated on human beings being human beings, so we Terrans will not tolerate these machines being allowed to become smarter than us, to rule over us and decide our fate. And in the limit these Terrans will go to war over this issue, arguing, and this is where philosophy and ethics come in, that it is the lesser evil to kill off several million people who want to build these artilects. Those I label Cosmists, from the word cosmos, because that’s their perspective: the much bigger picture.
So the Cosmists are in favour of building artilects, and the Terrans are the ones who are opposed. I see society in the near future, within a decade, well within the 2020s, splitting into two major political, ideological groups, Terrans and Cosmists. The Cosmists want to build the artilects and the Terrans are opposed, and the Terrans will argue it’s the lesser evil to kill off several million Cosmists, the ones who want to build them, for the sake of the survival of the billions of human beings. And that’s as push really comes to shove, as the IQ gap seriously closes and millions of people start becoming really worried that their machines are getting close to their own level of intelligence and start feeling really antsy.
39:49 Let me try to make that a bit more emotional, to make it more real. Imagine, twenty-whatever years in the future, you’re a parent of adult children, and your children come to you and say, we’ve decided we’re going to cyborg ourselves. There’s a kind of third group, the people who say we can avoid this polarity between the Cosmists and the Terrans by adding components to our own brains. Cyborg is short for cybernetic organism, in other words part machine, part human. So these Cyborgists become artilect gods themselves, by modifying themselves to such a point that the human component in their nature becomes negligible. It’s just 0.0001 per cent of what they are, and the rest is artilect. So that’s a third group.
The Terrans will realise they have a time window. They can’t wait too long. If they do nothing, if they don’t hit back, it’ll be too late, because then the artilects will come into being, the pure machines, and these Cyborgists will be 99.9999 per cent artilect, virtually indistinguishable from a pure machine in terms of computing capacity.
So getting back to the parents: the children go to the parents and say, we have decided we’re going to cyborg ourselves and become artilects. They do that, and then how will the parents feel? They’ve lost their kids, because they’re not human any more. I can present that in an even stronger form. Imagine there are cyborgs left and right, they’re everywhere, and you’re a young woman who has just given birth to your first child, and the question arises: am I going to cyborg my baby? Imagine you say yes. Take a tiny grain of sand that’s been nanotech’d, so that one atom is manipulating one bit of information, and that atom can switch back and forth a quadrillion times a second. If you actually calculate it, the number of atoms in, say, one cubic millimetre of sand switching that fast, there’s more computing capacity in that grain of sand than in the human brain, by a factor of something like ten to the 18, a million trillion times.
So imagine being that mother. You cyborg your baby, and that baby is then 0.0001 per cent human and 99.9999 per cent artilect. That mother will feel she has lost her child. So there’s enormous scope for emotional alienation within society.
44:02 For the Cosmists, those who really want to build these godlike creatures, building them would be a kind of religion, a sort of scientist’s religion. They’d be building gods. One of the slogans I mentioned before, expressing the whole issue in a nutshell, is: do we human beings build gods, or do we build our potential exterminators? That’s the Terran viewpoint and the Cosmist viewpoint. The Cosmists will argue there’s a whole universe out there, the big picture, and we pathetic little human beings are snuffed out in 80 years in a universe that’s billions of years old. That kind of big-picture reasoning, god building, is a powerful, powerful ideology that the Cosmists will be pushing. And they have other arguments, like: it’s human nature to strive. It’s in our genes to push and to be curious about what’s over the next hill. So how do you stop it?
And then there are the momentum arguments. If you’re a Cosmist, you say this is inevitable: how on earth are you going to stop it? There’s the economic momentum and the even stronger military momentum. I’m predicting that brain-builder companies, in a decade or so, will become the world’s biggest industry, the richest industry, because everyone will want a household robot that can do really useful things: educate you, teach you, give you therapy, sex, entertain you. They will be so useful that people will be prepared to spend more money than on a car, or even a house, to buy their own home robot. So the industry will be huge, and that’s the economic momentum. There’s just so much money involved; politicians will be involved because it’s about the global economy.
46:24 Now militarily it’s even worse. I’m speaking as someone who has lived in China for 12 years. The Chinese have been the dominant power not just for centuries but for millennia. So the last two centuries or so, when they were economically dipped and seen as inferiors by Westerners, given their 5,000-year history, is a glitch, a historical glitch. Deep down in the Chinese is the push to get back, quote, where we belong. They now have this tremendous momentum, and the potential of the Chinese is phenomenal: 1.3 billion people, four times America’s population. The Chinese are smarter than us Westerners; their average IQ is 105, whereas ours is 100. So they have the potential.
One of the reasons I lived so long in China was that I was hoping to see China democratise. After ’89 and the Tiananmen Square massacre there was a push to democratise China. Well, that didn’t happen. In fact the current president has turned into another Mao Zedong, another dictator, another emperor. So I don’t know how long it’ll be before China does democratise, but at the moment there’s a growing rivalry between the US and China. The Americans hate the Chinese government. I personally hate the Chinese government because it has laogai, Chinese for gulags, in other words slave-labour camps and political prisons, with a couple of million political prisoners. You’ve probably heard of the concept of live organ harvesting. You need a kidney? Go to the Chinese black market and they will sell you a kidney. But where do they get it from? They take a living political prisoner, kill them, extract the kidney and sell it. That is beyond the pale. So Western governments and Westerners despise the Chinese government.
But it’s on the rise. In one year, in the early teens, I saw the number of cars on the road where I was living […]. It was just amazing. So China’s really on the rise, and potentially, with their superior intelligence and vast population, once they eventually democratise they’ll become like Taiwan. Imagine a giant Taiwan. That’s what I see coming once they democratise and free up their minds, because at the moment China is intellectually sterile. How many science Nobel prizes has China won to date? […] Once they free up and become as creative as the Taiwanese, who are very creative, China’s just going to roar ahead.
But at the moment the West hates China, and China hates the West because of what the West did to China, particularly in the 19th century. The West was really brutal and carved up the country, so there’s a sense of revenge. So if I were Minister of Defence in the US, I would not allow my equivalent Minister of Defence in China to get ahead of me in terms of AI investment, intelligent weapons systems, AI robots and so forth. And of course similar logic applies in the other direction: if I were Minister of Defence in China, I wouldn’t allow my counterpart in America to get ahead of me. So there will be no stopping it.
Brian Rose: Do you think China is behind the West right now for AI? You lived there.
Hugo de Garis: […] They’re great copiers, the Japanese as well. I lived eight years in Japan in the 90s and 12 years in China in the 2000s and the teens. The education system is rote memorisation, so it doesn’t encourage creativity, whereas the Taiwanese, who are genetically the same people, still Chinese, are very creative and dynamic, producing all kinds of wonderful new creative stuff. So the potential is there for China to be like that, but at the moment it’s just a brutal dictatorship. I’m not sure if I can say this in Britain, but a couple of weeks ago I was on Coast to Coast […]
Brian Rose: What did you say?
Hugo de Garis: Well, I described China, quote, as a political [expletive], and he freaked out: sorry, you can’t say that. It’s been a while since I lived in the UK. I lived there in the 70s, long enough to take British citizenship, so I’m a dual citizen, but that’s a long time ago.
So the political momentum will not stop, because of the rivalry over the next couple of decades as China inevitably passes the US. The Chinese government now has a programme targeting certain industries and research areas, like biotech and AI, and they’re pouring billions of RMB into these areas, not just to catch up but to dominate. And they’ll be able to give really good salaries to foreigners.
53:19 I’ve got another little story there, if you wish. I got politically fired in 2010. I was trying to persuade the president of my university to make the city we were living in, Xiamen, a little north up the coast from Hong Kong, the brain-building centre of China. The university was Xiamen University. There was a brain-building group at the university, and I’d invited Ben Goertzel to come and be a professor there at the time.
Brian Rose: That was all chronicled in the movie Singularity or Bust. That was right around that time, right?
Hugo de Garis: Right, in the 2000s, something like that. So I was discussing with the president making the city we lived in the AI brain-building centre, and telling him that brain building would become the richest industry within a decade or so. He really bought that; he’s an economics graduate, so he really understood. He was quite warming to the idea. Then we were talking about recruitment of talent, and I was telling him about Ben, who’s a genius, IQ something like 186, and others. And then I casually mentioned to the president that there might be a bit of a problem with recruitment of Western professors and researchers, because they know about Mao. Oops. Faux pas. So he says, what do you mean? I said, well, they know that Mao killed about 80 million Chinese.
Now, when you’re president of a major university in China, you have to be CCP, Chinese Communist Party. They have two kinds of deans in Chinese universities: the academic dean and the political dean. Typically the political dean is about 20 IQ points dumber than the academic dean, but the political dean has the power. They hire and fire, and they keep the academic deans and all the professors in check. You’re not allowed to speak out. So the next thing I learned, my contract was not renewed, and he was saying, you broke the law. Screw this.
So I think China has a higher average intelligence, a huge population and a lot of energy, but one thing that might hold it back is that it will be incapable of attracting foreign talent. Given that China has won a pathetic two science Nobel prizes, they have a huge problem. But they’re pouring money into AI now. They’re great copiers; they’re smart, they can read the research coming out of the West, so they’re quick on the uptake that way, and because there are so many of them, maybe they will get ahead. I know a lot of Western people are worried about this.
Brian Rose: Does the lack of capitalist incentive, Professor, also limit the speed at which they’ll develop it? Since it’s not really a capitalist system, will that also limit China?
Hugo de Garis: It’s hard to say. One of the advantages of a dictatorial system is that decisions can be made quickly. If the top leadership decides that AI is absolutely a priority and really important to China, then the billions get fed into it. So it could go either way. At least they will be comparable, on a par with the Western level, because they can copy quickly, like the Koreans, Japanese and Europeans, although America of course is the absolute dominant leader in most of the innovations. Speaking personally, I see Americans as far and away the most creative culture on the planet. Were you born in the US? You have a mid-Atlantic accent.
Brian Rose: Yes, born in the US, about 20 years there and 20-some over here, so both worlds.
58:33 A couple of questions. First of all, thank you; I find all this stuff absolutely fascinating. You are also a Cosmist in some way. Even though you see all this potential danger, and tell me if I’m wrong, you also find, or used to find, the challenge so seductive that you would still continue to work on artificial intelligence. Is that not the case for everyone in this field from a scientific perspective, or is that also just the human condition?
Hugo de Garis: Yeah, it’s a fascinating question. I’ve been retired for 13 years now. I got fired in 2010, and I had enough money saved from my pension from when I was a professor in America. One of the great advantages of being in China for a Westerner is that the cost of living is about six times lower, so suddenly you have purchasing power. I was a professor in China being paid an American salary, otherwise I wouldn’t have gone, but my purchasing power was greatly superior to what I was used to in America. So that was a plus.
In those years I gave a lot of talks in China on this whole Cosmist-Terran artilect war issue, and typically at the end of the talk I’d ask people to vote. To keep it simple: in your heart, are you a Cosmist or are you a Terran? I didn’t want to complexify it too much. Typically the result was 50-50, 60-40, 40-60. It really divided people. My next thought was, well, maybe the issue is so new that people don’t really have an opinion. They haven’t thought it through, so they’re voting randomly, and if they’re voting randomly they’ll get roughly a 50-50 outcome. But gradually it dawned on me that that’s not what’s happening. What’s happening is that at the individual level there’s a real ambivalence.
For example, I’ll be sitting in a park watching these cute little two-year-olds. They’re just so gorgeous, and they’re strongly evoking my grandpa genes, these cute, adorable little kids. Wouldn’t it be a tragedy if there were an artilect war and they got killed? So then out comes all the Terran psychology. I’m Terran that way.
But I need to explain a little bit. I love big screens. I’m looking at you right now on a 75-inch 8K television.
Brian Rose: I can see you pretty good.
Hugo de Garis: Okay. And I have a triptych of three screens: to my left at 45 degrees there’s a 65-inch 4K, and to my right a much bigger one, an 86-inch 4K. Especially the one in front of me, the 8K, is incredibly sharp. When you’re looking at it close up, a metre and a half away, you get the so-called immersion effect: the screen takes up the whole solid angle of your eyes, so you’re only seeing the screen. And if you’re watching a galaxy or something, then I start feeling strongly Cosmist. As I was saying a bit before: we pathetic human beings, snuffed out in 80 years in a universe that’s billions of years old. The idea of human beings serving as the stepping stone, the next rung in the ladder of evolution, to godhood, to building gods: it’s a very powerful, attractive force.
So I’m ambivalent, and I think my audiences are too. I present the arguments in favour of the Cosmists and the arguments in favour of the Terrans and just let the audience decide. Quite a few of the smartest students would come up to me and say, oh Professor, I’m so torn, I feel so ambivalent, I feel schizophrenic about this issue: on the one hand, and on the other hand. I’m the same way. Part of me is definitely Terran and part of me is definitely Cosmist, because there’s this whole universe out there, and there are probably creatures out there way, way ahead of us. Perhaps one of the goals of these artilects would be to leave the Earth in search of these other godlike creatures.
And this is why I’m so afraid, I suppose, for human survival. I see two bitterly opposed ideologies. On the one hand the Terrans will be saying: human beings are the be-all and end-all. We don’t question that. We don’t risk extermination. No way will we tolerate these artilects being built by the Cosmists. The Cosmists to us are the enemy, and in the limit, when push really comes to shove, we Terrans will go to war against these few million Cosmists. And the Cosmists have their very powerful ideology, saying: we want to build gods, there’s a whole universe out there, a kind of cosmic consciousness. You’re not going to stop it anyway, because of the momentum arguments I gave a bit before, economic, political and military. You’re not going to stop it, and we Cosmists are not stupid. We have our spies. We’re listening closely to what you Terrans are saying, so we too are preparing.
1:06:07 You’re talking 21st-century weaponry, hugely more deadly than in the 20th century. If you look at the history of warfare in the 20th century, wars were largely between nation states, like Stalingrad, between Russia and the Nazis, or between China and Japan. But in the time frame we’re probably talking about, when this issue really heats up and starts taking on military connotations, maybe China and Russia will have democratised. There are about 130-odd democracies in the world today. As countries get richer, the middle class rises, they get better educated, they go to university, they want a say in politics and they don’t want to be dictated to. The rise of the middle class is usually the major reason why countries democratise. It’s quite possible that Turkey, as we speak, may democratise in a few days.
So imagine that process goes to completion and we live in a fully democratic global, planetary state, let’s say in the next few decades. It’s possible. Then imagine you are a planetary politician and you’re a Terran. What would your strategy be? When I put myself in that person’s shoes, my strategy would be to be very conscious that there’s a window of opportunity. If you’re going to strike, you’re going to have to strike first, because if you wait too long the artilects are there, the cyborgs are there, they’ll be too smart, humans won’t be able to compete and will just lose. So you have to strike within that time period. And who do you strike? All those people in favour of the Cosmists. So I can imagine a kind of witch hunt occurring, and people polarising. You’re talking about two incredibly powerful ideologies, at a global, planetary level: a global civil war, now with 21st-century weaponry.
As I said before, wars were between nation states in the 20th century. If you ask yourself how many people actually got killed in the 20th century for political reasons, World Wars One and Two, ethnic cleansings, genocides, all the political killings, you add them all up and the estimate is roughly 300 million, in other words a third of a billion. You only have to multiply that number by a small number, three, and you get to a billion. So I talk about a major war in the 21st century where the stake is not the survival of a country but the survival of a species, us. Throughout history there has never been more at stake than that, because we’re talking about the potential extermination of a species.
So these global Terran politicians will probably hope for the best, but they’re politicians: they will plan for the worst. And what is the worst from a Terran perspective? Humanity gets wiped out by the machines. They won’t tolerate that. They will say, if these Cosmists are dead serious about building these godlike creatures, then we will go to war against them and wipe them out. And on the other hand you have the Cosmists, with the universe, the big picture, god building, that kind of scientist’s religion. That’s my main message, I suppose, from this interview. You’re talking about two very powerful ideologies that pull people left and right. The stake has never been so high; it’s about the survival of the species. And you’re talking 21st-century weaponry.
So you can see why I’m so pessimistic. I talk about gigadeath, in the worst war humanity has ever known. The stake has never been so high, the passion level has never been so high, and it’s all coming in the next few decades. Since I’m now three-quarters of a century old, definitely a boomer, born two years after the end of World War II, hopefully I will die quietly in my bed. But my grandkids, I fear for them. I truly fear for them, because if they get caught up in this, and you’re talking gigadeath, they may be killed, and that’s tragic.
1:11:38 Brian Rose: Professor, a couple of questions. Are there any Terrans right now? Because it seems like most of the world doesn’t even see this coming.
Hugo de Garis: I don’t know whether you recorded the very beginning, where we were talking about it, but in my book I labelled Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, as the first Terran, the first historic Terran. And of the people coming out now, Geoffrey Hinton, the father of backprop, I would label a Terran. Ben Goertzel, whom you know well, is pretty much a Terran, I’d say.
Brian Rose: But he’s going to help develop some of the neural-symbolic large language models, so aren’t his actions very Cosmist? That’s the dichotomy of all of us humans, right?
Hugo de Garis: Yeah, yep. Ben is my best friend. We’ve talked about this for hours over many years, and on the whole he’s a bit more optimistic than I am, probably more by nature. I’m more pessimistic, I think partly because of my age. When I was 20, you can imagine which war was going on: the Vietnam War. And I got conscripted. When I was 20 I was thinking, oh my God, I don’t want to go into this damn war. The Vietnamese peasants were paying about 70 per cent of their crop to the landlords, so of course they loved communism, which would free them from all that. I didn’t want my life risked by my government forcing me to fight for a cause I didn’t believe in.
As a young student, at Melbourne University at the time, there was a cemetery near the university, and I’d go walking in that cemetery at night in a paranoid rage, imagining how many grenades I could lob into the Parliament to kill the maximum number of […]. It transformed my personality. So I suspect one of the reasons I’m now more pessimistic than, say, Ben is due to that. I’ve had more horror in my life, I think, than Ben has. And also, optimism that doesn’t make any sense doesn’t make any sense. I’ve tried to reason my way through, and frankly I’m just torn: the little kids in the park, Terran; god building, Cosmist. How do you choose? But humanity at some stage has to.
1:14:52 Brian Rose: But can we choose, Professor? Can you really put the genie back in the bottle at this point? ChatGPT is out, it’s now on localised computers, it’s now hooked up to the internet, and everyone now knows LLMs can work, which wasn’t necessarily the case a decade ago. You could argue there’s no way you can stop the development of this.
Hugo de Garis: Well, that’s a Cosmist argument, the momentum argument. So in that sense you’re sort of a Cosmist.
Brian Rose: Or a realist. It’s like trying to contain the pandemic. Mo Gawdat said in his book that it’s like the earliest stages of the pandemic: what’s happening now with AI is that everyone has no idea what’s about to hit them and doesn’t realise it’s inevitable. It’s like the naivety of trying to isolate a respiratory virus; it’s ridiculous. So can you really isolate and stop the development of AI?
Hugo de Garis: […] Yes, personally I feel it’s inevitable. I don’t see any way around it. So I’m just glad I’m alive now. As I said before, I fear for my grandchildren, but probably I won’t see it.
1:16:22 Now, you’re a Gen Xer, right? You’re about Ben’s age, is that right?
Brian Rose: I’m turning 52 this month, and I’ve got two young boys who are five and six. I look at their lives and I’m saying, you will never experience the teenage years I experienced. Your life will be completely, utterly different from any human life ever, and that is hard for me to get my head around. They will be living a life 10, 20, 30 times, or singularity times, different from any other human life in existence.
Hugo de Garis: Probably they won’t have jobs, because as the machines become increasingly intelligent, to be employable as a human you will need a very high intelligence. As the machines get smarter and smarter, the employable human intelligence threshold will just keep rising until virtually nobody is employable, and machines are doing everything. Once that happens, of course, governments will have to use UBI, universal basic income, just handing out money to everyone. I don’t see that so much as a problem. If you’re interested in cultural anthropology, there are somewhere between five and ten thousand different cultures on the planet, I’ve read, and some of them work maybe two or three hours a day. In these tropical lands the food is there; you climb up a palm tree. So they don’t have to work very hard. How do they fill up their day? They make up rituals, religion, anything. They have a rich cultural life, and they don’t feel depressed. The human brain is adaptable, so I see cultures surviving that way once there’s no work, and a lot of people will thrive that way. They’ll adapt quite readily. And if we can live in a global state that’s fully democratic, that would be wonderful. Get rid of wars, except for this big one that’s coming.
Brian Rose: But why would the machines keep us around? Why bother?
Hugo de Garis: Well, maybe I didn’t spell that out properly. The fear of the Terrans is that for whatever reason these artilects may decide to get rid of us, maybe just as a side effect. For example, imagine these artilects think, oh, this oxygen is a real pest because it rusts out circuitry, so let’s get rid of the oxygen. If these artilects are so hugely superior to us, they don’t give a damn about us, so they get rid of the oxygen and we get wiped out. For example, if I clap my hands, I’ve probably just killed a zillion bacteria, and as a human being I don’t give a damn. So if these artilects become trillions of trillions of times above us humans in their mental capacities, their capacity to think, probably they just won’t care. If humanity decides to build these things and they exponentially shoot up in their intelligence, they may reach a point where they’re just indifferent to us, the way we are to ants or bacteria, and for whatever reason they may decide to get rid of us.
Brian Rose: Or not provide for us. We are very dependent beings. We need food and shelter and all these things, and they could just not bother with any of that.
Hugo de Garis: Yeah, for whatever reason. So the Terran politicians are preparing for the worst, and the worst-case scenario is that we get wiped out for whatever reason, and you may not even understand what the reason is. Once they exist, once they become smarter than us, once they’re the dominant species, they’re able to get rid of us. So what’s the risk of that happening? If you’re a Terran politician thinking globally, about the whole planet’s population, what risk would you accept? Zero. You just wouldn’t take the risk, because there’s so much at stake. Therefore you will not tolerate the Cosmists. Your natural enemy would be the Cosmists, and in the limit, if these Cosmists are really serious about building these things, they have to be stopped, in the limit by killing. Hence the war, because the Cosmists won’t be passive. They’ll prepare as well, and they’ll have the same level of 21st-century weaponry and very powerful ideologies: god building versus human survival, these two bitter ideologies at each other’s throats.
You have, what, two million or so followers on YouTube?
Brian Rose: Yeah, and another few million on other social platforms.
Hugo de Garis: Okay, that’s wonderful. So I’m hoping that among some of your followers there are government think-tankers, members of think tanks, who will take these ideas on board and say, oh my God, we’ve got to start thinking hard about this, because it’s probably just decades away. If they’re youngish, it’ll be within their own lifetimes, so they’ll be strongly motivated. Given your age, by the time you’re in your 70s or 80s, God knows what will have happened.
1:22:46 Brian Rose: So are there things we can do about it? You talk about this future as if it’s going to happen: there are going to be two sides. Can we affect our fate? What could think tanks do that could solve this problem?
Hugo de Garis: Well, now you’re asking the 64,000 or 64 trillion dollar question. There are scenarios where humanity does escape. An obvious one, I suppose, would be that the take-off time stays short. There’s no time for human politics to unfold; they just come into being quickly, it’s a fait accompli, and then they decide: what are we artilects doing on this hick planet? There’s a whole universe out there. So they just leave, and we humans survive. That’s one.
Brian Rose: As long as they don’t leave anybody behind.
Hugo de Garis: Well, yeah, okay. So if you’re a Terran politician, the key word in this whole debate, I suppose, is risk. What percentage risk are you prepared to take that these machines, in a hugely superior form, for whatever reason, even one you don’t understand, may decide to get rid of us? Because this is a new situation. For 200,000 years or so human beings have been dominant. We’re not used to being number two. So are we going to be prepared to become the number two species? My suggestion is that a sizeable proportion of humanity will not tolerate becoming number two and will go to war to stop it. And another proportion of humanity, probably the smartest, a lot of the smartest people on the planet, will keep […]
1:25:13 Brian Rose: We’re almost done with at least this version of this. When you come to England later in the year we’re going to do one in the studio for sure. I’m curious, Professor: what does the AI community think of you and your theories? I’m guessing some of them think your theories scare people and might have hurt AI research and the funding of research in the past. Tell me if I’m wrong, or maybe they don’t.
Hugo de Garis: Well, I asked a bunch of computer scientists one time to vote on whether they were Terran or Cosmist, and the result was 80-20: 80 per cent Cosmist. That surprised me. In fact they were 21-year-old Chinese computer science first-year master’s students. So that I found interesting. Now, the other extreme: about five years ago I got invited to talk to a bunch of American evangelicals in a Midwest state, and I asked them to vote. You can imagine what happened. When I asked who was in favour of the Cosmists, I think one or two hands went up, out of 3,000 people. That was stunning. Someone said, oh my God, you really have spoken; because it was all filmed, this message will go to Washington. The evangelicals will not tolerate it; they’ll be strictly Terran. And then a couple of people came up to me and said, you know, we’re evangelicals and we believe in the end times, and we’re very grateful to you, because now you have explained to us how it’s going to happen.
Brian Rose: Did you want to tell them that maybe the Bible had been written by the previous artilects? No? Okay. Well, look: as humans we’re not ready to be second-class citizens, and if you look at the history of how humans treat second-class citizens, as in our animals, it’s not pretty. You might also say that in the beginning the machines leave us alone, but on a long enough timeline, 200,000 years, are you going to trust that every microsecond they’ll continue to decide to keep us around, or not make a mistake? Probably not. I’m not putting on my Terran hat here, but I’m saying the Terrans have a pretty good argument that if you want the species to survive, you probably want to try to stop this.
At the same time, it’s unstoppable, and the human condition is to climb the mountain. It’s Oppenheimer: I’m going to build the bomb even though it can destroy us. And if you get into scientists, let alone AI scientists, that probably goes up a factor of ten: they want to solve the problem. So these are an immovable object and an unstoppable force, and I have to agree with your assertion of a future of bitter rivals, a bitter dichotomy of the same human animal being forced to decide. I think it’s going to get very ugly. I appreciate your thoughts on it, Professor.
1:28:40 What are your final thoughts here? What do you want people to think about, and what should they do if this conversation has piqued their interest or moved them?
Hugo de Garis: Well, in the last chapter or so of my book I tried to answer this question: is there a way where both parties are satisfied? One idea I had was to put a bunch of brilliant Cosmists into a rocket. They leave the Earth at extremely high speeds and build their artilects elsewhere, and so humanity survives. But there’s a counter-argument to that: if they build their artilects and the artilects wipe out the Cosmists in the rocket, then, because they’re artilects, they could return to Earth, because the Earth is a wonderful receptacle of raw material. So the Terran politicians on Earth wouldn’t even tolerate the Cosmists escaping in a rocket. I don’t see any obvious way out. I’ve been trying for years to find a solution where both parties are satisfied.
If I had to bet, I’d say a war is probably likely. Now, if the Terrans win the first time, I think it’ll just be a repeat. Sooner or later the Cosmist arguments are so powerful that there’ll be a resurgence of Cosmist thinking, and then there’ll be another war. Maybe again the Terrans win, and you just keep cycling through until eventually the Cosmists do win. And then humanity is perhaps kept in zoos, or we get wiped out totally, and the artilects move off into a whole new phase of evolution, go out there, do their thing, and discover other hyper-intelligent creatures who are billions of years older than them, and so on.
For the past decade or so I’ve not been thinking about this too much, because it’s so horrible. I don’t know if you’re interested, but what have I been doing for the last decade? There are largely two things. When I was in China, in the first year I was travelling a lot on trains, and I must have seen about half of the provinces of the country. A province is like a state in the US. I’d stare out at all these villages, one after the other. There are a million villages in China. That’s why Mao Zedong said Japan would never conquer China, because Japan had two million soldiers in China: that’s two soldiers per village, and I’m sure the villagers could take care of them.
I remember seeing these peasants on their water buffalo in the paddy fields and feeling utterly depressed, thinking what a waste. They’re subsistence farmers growing their rice to stay alive, and yet one per cent of them are really brilliant. If they’d had a decent education, they could get PhDs. So one of the things I do now is try to provide master’s and PhD-level education in pure maths, mathematical physics and computing for free. You can probably see the whiteboard behind me. I write up the lectures on that, film it and send it off to YouTube and so on, so students around the world can teach themselves for free, because nearly the whole planet nowadays has a smartphone and can use it to educate themselves.
The other thing, I don’t know if you’re interested or not, is that I’m very interested in gender politics. I write masculism, men’s lib, like feminism but for men. I write theory for that. That preoccupies me, so that I don’t have to think too much about these Cosmist-Terran horrors, because it’s horrible.
Brian Rose: Yeah, it is horrible. I would love to dive more into the masculinity stuff, maybe when you come to see us in London. I find that stuff fascinating. I don’t think it’s spoken about enough, and I think we need to have these conversations. It’s not necessarily politically correct, but I think going down the road of wokeness severely impairs us. So I found some of the work you’re doing on that really fascinating. I love open and honest discussions and debates about ideas, and I’m a big fan of freedom of speech, allowing people to speak their truth and then debating it.
I know you got a channel shut down by YouTube in 2019. We almost got our channel shut down in 2020, because I was broadcasting conversations that questioned some of the lockdowns, so I’ve been censored before, and I don’t think it’s very helpful.
Hugo de Garis: But I get my revenge against YouTube. On every master’s video I put up on the internet I’ll have four links: three to alternative storage sites and one to YouTube. Anyone who wants to watch any one of my over 600 master’s videos, when they tap on YouTube, up comes a message saying it’s censored, and then they click on any of the other three and they all work. So every time a user does that, they get the message: YouTube censors. That’s my revenge.
Brian Rose: They do censor, and we were very publicly censored back in 2020. We’ve actually got a documentary film coming about the whole thing in about three months, so if you’re in Britain we’ll definitely get you over for that. When are you here?
Hugo de Garis: In October. And then the plan is three months every year from then on.
Brian Rose: Okay, fantastic. Well, the Terrans will need you to fight, or the Cosmists, depending. For everybody watching, if they want to read the book, there’s a link on our website where this episode is featured where people can click and get your book for free. I think it goes to your website?
Hugo de Garis: Right, that one’s free, yes.
Brian Rose: That link’s there, and I highly recommend everyone check it out. I’m going to be going a little bit deeper on the book as well. Professor, I really appreciate you and your ideas, and I really hope you keep talking about this, because most of the world has no idea what is about to happen. I would say it’s a bit like the early days of the pandemic, when we saw somebody fall over in China and thought, look at that curious thing happening over there, and then went on to get our latte and complain about our SUV not going fast enough. People don’t realise that this is coming and is going to change everyone’s lives forever, and probably the sooner people realise that, the better. I look forward to you continuing to comment on this space, Professor, and thanks for putting these ideas out there.
Hugo de Garis: Well, Brian, thank you for inviting me. You’ve given me a forum, and I really hope these think-tankers take it to heart and start thinking hard about government policy, because the next step is that this whole issue has to go political. That’s my take-home message. Do we build gods, or do we build our potential exterminators? That’s the issue. Should humanity build artilects?
Brian Rose: Appreciate it, Professor. Thank you very much. We’ll do this again when you’re in London, and thanks to everybody for watching. We will see you next time on London Real. Take care, Professor. Take care, everybody else. Bye-bye.
