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- Robot Plumbers, Robot Armies, and Our Imminent A.I. Future | Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Robot Plumbers, Robot Armies, and Our Imminent A.I. Future | Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Is artificial intelligence about to take your job? According to Daniel Kokotajlo, the executive director of the A.I. Futures Project, that should be the least of your worries. Kokotajlo was once a researcher for OpenAI, but left after losing confidence in the company’s commitment to A.I. safety. This week, he joins Ross Douthat to talk about “AI 2027,” a series of predictions and warnings about the risks A.I. poses to humanity in the coming years, from radically transforming the economy to developing armies of robots.
Read the full transcript at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/15/opinion/artifical-intelligence-2027.html
03:20 What effect could AI have on jobs?
06:22 But wait, how does this make society richer?
10:13 Robot plumbers and electricians
15:26 The geopolitical stakes
20:02 AI’s honesty problem
24:01 The fork in the road
28:47 The best case scenario
30:36 The power structure in an AI-dominated world
33:34 What AI leaders think about this power structure
39:16 AI's hallucinations and limitations
44:47 Theories of AI consciousness
48:11 Is AI consciousness inevitable?
52:23 Humanity in an AI-dominated world
This episode of “Interesting Times” was produced by Sophia Alvarez Boyd, Katherine Sullivan, Andrea Betanzos and Elisa Gutierrez. It was edited by Jordana Hochman. Mixing and engineering by Sonia Herrero, Isaac Jones and Efim Shapiro. Cinematography by Marina King, Nick Midwig and Derek Knowles. Video editing by Arpita Aneja and Steph Khoury. Original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Aman Sahota and Pat McCusker. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Video directed by Jonah M. Kessel. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
Watch more on @InterestingTimesNYT
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Video Transcript
How fast is the AI
revolution really happening?
When will Skynet be
fully operational?
What would machine
superintelligence
mean for ordinary
mortals like us?
My guest today is an AI
researcher who’s written
a dramatic forecast
suggesting that by 2027,
some kind of machine
god may be with us,
ushering in a weird
post-scarcity utopia
or threatening to kill us all.
So, Daniel Kokotajlo,
herald of the apocalypse.
Welcome to Interesting Times.
Thanks for that
introduction, I suppose.
And thanks for having me.
You’re very welcome.
So Daniel, I read your
report pretty quickly-
not at AI speed, not at
super intelligence speed-
when it first came out. And I had about two hours
of thinking, a lot of
pretty dark thoughts
about the future.
And then fortunately,
I have a job
that requires me to
care about tariffs
and who
the new Pope is,
and I have a lot of kids
who demand things of me,
so I was able to
compartmentalize and set it
aside.
But this is
currently your job, right?
I would say you’re thinking
about this all the time.
How does your psyche
feel day to day
if you have a reasonable
expectation that the world is
about to change
completely in ways
that dramatically disfavor
the entire human species?
Well, it’s very scary and sad.
I think that it does still
give me nightmares sometimes.
I’ve been involved with AI
and thinking about this thing
for a decade or so, but
2020 was with GPT-3,
the moment when I
was like, oh, Wow.
Like, it seems like
we’re actually like,
it might it’s probably going
to happen, in my lifetime,
maybe decade or so.
And that was a bit of a
blow to me psychologically,
but I don’t know.
You can get used to
anything given enough time.
And like you, the sun
is shining and I
have my wife and my
kids and my friends,
and keep plugging along
and doing what seems best.
On the bright side, I might
be wrong about all this stuff.
OK, so let’s get
into the forecast itself.
Let’s get into the story and
talk about the initial stage
of the future you see coming,
which is a world where very
quickly artificial
intelligence starts to be able
