Tegmark says his objection is to how fast AI is being built, not to the technology itself. He argues that binding safety standards for AI companies would make humanity play "careful chess" and still reach the upside.
…AI that's at least much more powerful than we have now, that is a very useful tool and helps that civilization flourish rather than destroy it. I think what I'm unhappy about that we're doing now is not that we're developing technology, but just that we're rushing it recklessly. Do you play chess?
Yeah, not well. My nine-year-old can beat me, but
okay, but suppose you're playing against a really strong player and you're up a queen, and then you have three hours left on the chess clock. The one way you can still lose this one game is if you start rushing your moves. You somehow act like you have only one minute left on the clock and then you blunder this piece, you blunder that piece, and suddenly you're lost. I feel that this is exactly what humanity is doing right now. We've learned after being on the planet for hundreds of thousands of years that we have a one game. We don't have to worry about getting eaten by tigers or starving to death or having a life expectancy of 29 years because through studying science and technology, we've become so much more empowered that we can be the captains of our own ship. I see the whole human history as growing empowerment…
I do, yeah. There's too much doom. Talk about CAM, you know, Kolmogorov, Arnold Networks, talk about verified coding. Yeah, give me five minutes on that, please.
Yeah,
I'll talk about the talk I gave just the other week with those mathematicians, Terence Tao and others and Jacob Simmerman and others at UCLA. So I was talking about how where we are now is we have AI that we cannot trust enough. Swarms break out, open AI and Anthropic and Glack and all sorts of bad…