Surveillance but you want know that it is detrimental and something has gone wrong that the fact of surveillance wouldnt really prevent well so if if one thinks that the world at some level of technology is vulnerable in this sense one can then obviously wants to ask well what could we possibly do in that situation to prevent the world from actually getting destroyed and it does look like insurgents in our us. Ubiquitous surveillance would be the only thing that could possibly prevent that. And now would even that work well i mean pads on the specifics of this narrow so youd have to think just how easy would it be to cause destruction would you just snap your finger or say like a magic world the world blows up well then maybe surveillance wouldnt suffice but suppose its something that takes several weeks and you have to you know do build something in your apartment and maybe require some skill you know at that point. You could imagine a very fine grained. Surveillance infrastructure having to keep giving the capable that didnt intercept. But also how much destruction is. Created if somebody does it is that once it blows up or the whole of the earth maybe you could afford a few sweeping through the net so youd have to then look at the specifics now of course surveillance in itself also is a source of risk to human civilization you could imagine various kinds of total terror and regimes becoming more effective more permanent. Peter surveillance in itself is the tell it hereon regime. What do you mean when i mean if youre surveilled 247 of us that in essence is a giant Computer Police state well it depends on i think what this information would be used for. If it so that some. Say Central Authority micromanages what everybody is allowed to do with their lives then certainly that would be a total the taron turn on president a degree. But suppose it was a kind of posture of surveillance and people just went on with our lives and ollie if somebody actually tried to create this mass destruction thing would there be a response. In that scenario maybe it would not look so totalitarian really realistic though because as soon as someone is in charge of this total surveillance and if its passive like youre saying for a very specific things like total destruction of a city or the world they would for sure take advantage of it as possible that im going away you know i mean i mean that is not the way humans are made yeah well i think to varying degrees there are institutional checks and balances in different cultures are right now we have a lot of very powerful tools and in some places of the world theyre used by despots and you know the. Of the world theyre used by the more democratically accountable and liberal governments and the thing in between certainly it would be the case that if you created this kind of extremely fine grained surveillance infrastructure that it would create. A very substantial danger that either immediately or after some period of time it would be captured and by some nefarious group or individual and then used for oppressive purposes that certainly i think that that is one major reason for why. People are rightly in my view very suspicious of the surveillance technologies and whether. It could still be the case because its not something we get to choose that the world is so configured that at some level of technology destruction is much easier than creation or defense and it could just be that in that situation the only thing that would prevent actual destruction would be very fine grained surveillance im just you know forgive me for doubting this a little just because ive seen with my own eyes what a police state is a little bit so it never we work so less its sort of attacking them and the world is so diverse and were also different and ive seen it with my own eyes that human imperfections and disorganization you know they just somehow always grow through any restrictions or norms just like graphs repayment you know yeah well so what is it precisely that youre not convinced about that that could be some level of technology at which destruction because easy or that so impossible surveillance could prevent that the world from going to the idea so leave that decimal surveillance have to have to interact somehow with you know once thats what is not convincing to me right so i think there it becomes a matter of degree which set of snorers would you be able to provide. The world from getting this starting with surveillance up so take todays world where massive destruction is possible but its also very hard to like Nuclear Weapons let us say like so that we can have. Reasonable ability even with present day Surveillance Technology to detect a nation is building a secret program. So if you then roll it back you require less of the rare or materials less big installations fewer people working on this it gets harder and harder to detect. Right with Current Technology but this is a very rapidly advancing field with. Recognition software if you could have cameras that could monitor in principle you could monitor every body and all you could imagine even if you want an extreme case but just a kind of the most straight theoretical possibility of modern if everybody wore a collar all the time with with cameras and microphones so that literally all the time when you were doing something some ai system could kind of classify what actions you were taking and and if somebody were detected to be doing this kind of forbidden action alarm could be sounded and some human alerted or some say well my problem with ira is that. It is created by in essence. Beings that are flawed by human beings so how can it be Something Better or perfect earth than human beings enable able to not me so i think because im thinking if lot beings are creating Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence is simulating human beings then its a living flawed beings and its going to miss something well i mean for a im not sure it would have to simulate human beings but be depending on which pretty particular scenario we were looking at it may or may not be necessary to not miss a single thing i mean if youre looking at the kind of much worse Global Warming scenario its find a few people drive cars even in that world right as long as the majority kind of stop doing it you wouldnt even need new Surveillance Technology there you would just need a carbon tax or something if you moved to the other extreme where a single individual alone can destroy the whole world more than obviously there it would be essential that not a single one slipped through but then it depends on how hard would it be for a single individual with a need to do something very distinctive activity accumulate some special role materials. And maybe it would become possible to have the kind of survival. Could avoid that. Today obviously our Law Enforcement capabilities are very limited but. I do think there are quite Rapid Advances in using to recognize him a tree like recognize faces and to classify actions and then you could imagine thats being built up over a period of 10 or 20 years into something quite formidable so you wouldnt be momentarily submitting the human race to where well. Thats what im about i mean is im not im looking at im just noting that there are certain scenarios if the world unfortunate that turns out to be vulnerable and out way where it looks like it will lead to actually get destroyed or people will put in place to surveillance much now. That might be depending on what kind of Surveillance Technology you have. Different ways of configuring that. Maybe it would be almost completely automated or in the near term certainly it would require a lot of human involvement one way to sort of check things that have been flagged by algorithmic means for example and then maybe respond to take a short break right now when were back well continue talking. About whether were living in a simulated world by computers or not stay with us. The washington consensus led by the United States says the liberal world order must be defended at almost all costs said differently the Foreign Policy blog demands the post cold war you know polar moment be preserved but alas it would seem a multiple of the world has already arrived. You are no offense but you no longer a young woman in fact you are one of the last living survivors of the nazi else asked im aware of it. All you like. You can never forget america now auschwitz was really like to be inhaled because you would never believe it want to go to as a hobby of course for 30 years and over the curb it it all seems so logical for my side to make it right when i get out on the farm saw you. Next the list and hopefully bless her. And were back with nick bostrom nick so you know a lot about a much more Artificial Intelligence much more than me do you think we can program Artificial Intelligence to be this benevolent platonic king of this i dont know in lightened monarch or anything that has to do. With control or total control is inevitably repressive and bad. Well i mean i dont think we would know how to do that today i mean of course we cant even build ais that can do all the things that humans can today but if say next year somebody figured out a way to make ais do all the jobs that humans can do like some big breakthrough i dont think we would know yet how also to align it with human values that is still a technical problem that people are working on since the last few years but with significant ways still to go. So getting methods for scalable ai controlled so that no matter how smart the ai becomes even even maybe becomes far smarter than we want to because there isnt my liberty. That you have is to become smarter than most i think eventually. And then by that time you would want to also have the ability to make sure that they still act in the way you intended even one they become intellectually far superior ultimately so that thats a technical problem. That needs to be solved with technical means but then if you solve that you still dont have what we could call the political problem of the governance problem like so it would enable the humans to get the ass to do what they want we still dont need to figure out how to ensure that this new powerful technology is used primarily for beneficial purposes as opposed to wage war oppress one another. And that that part is not the tactical problem that its kind of a Political Animal like judging from the history of humanity if youre saying theres a slight possibility that i can become more intelligent than us in a way more intelligent. Its not mean humans trying to control and make i do all these things that they want to do its thing i ate controlling the humans and doing. Well when he learns what they would want to mean. In the ideal case the ai. Being aligned with human values in as much as we would you know specify what it is that we want to achieve the ai would help us achieve it. Do you think ai could ever simulate real feelings and memories. Do you think you can ever really predict a human brain something as chaotic as a human brain because we dont really know what it is how lonely i mean i dont think that would be necessary for alignments to have a very detailed i mean we humans can do that with one another and we can still be friends with one another or how other people and so forth so that doesnt require the ability to create 100 percent accurate and relational prediction. So you have this other theory. Before they were honorable world that we my all be living inside some sort of a matrix just you know and there are layers maybe a simulation. Is a right you know actually something i published back in 2003. And its an argument that tries to show that one of 3 propositions is true so it doesnt tell us which one. Proposition won the 1st alternative. Is that all civilizations current stage of technology development. Go extinct before they reach a technological maturity so its going to be that maybe theyre out there far away other civilizations but they all failed to reach a technological maturity so because human nature doesnt change i mean Technology Goes further but humans use it to destroy the world. Yeah that that could be the case and a very robust saw that even if you have thousands of human like civilizations out there they would all succumb before they reach technological maturity so thats one way things could be another the 2nd alternative is amongst all civilizations that do reach technological maturity they all his interest in creating these kinds of what i call ancestor simulations these would be detailed computer simulations. At the find in author level of granularity that the people in the simulations would be conscious and have experiences like ours maybe some civilizations do get there but theyre just a completely uninterested in using their resources to create these kinds of simulations. And the 3rd alternative the only one remaining i argue is that we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation right now built by someone who wants to build us a ship and anything thats the most probable one. Of the simulation argument doesnt say anything about which of these is true or most likely it just demonstrates this constraint that if you reject all 3 of them you have a kind of probabilistic incoherence and wind of the full argument involves some Probability Theory and stuff but i think the basic idea can be conveyed relatively intuitively its supposed to 1st turn out to be is false so that some nontrivial fraction get through some material to suppose the 2nd alternative is also falls so that some of those who have gone through to maturity do use some of the resources to create simulations. Ok right then you can show that. They because each one of those could run a lot of simulation study of some of them go through there will be many many more simulated People Like Us than there would be People Like Us living in our regional history even right whole 6000000000 of us yeah but not just that but you could show that at technological maturity even by using just a tiny fraction of say one planets worth of Computer Resources even just for one minute you could draw on you know tens of thousands of simulations of all of Human History so that if the 1st 2 and we could talk more about the evidence gallantly how that simulation is possible even if we dont understand our brain well might they obviously we cant do that you say i mean i really i said are evolution argument makes no assumption about the timescale behaved 20000 years or 20000000 years it still holds. And so because each simulating civilization would be able to run using a tiny fraction of its resources. Hundreds of thousands millions of runs through all of Human History almost all. Beings with our kinds of experiences were dumbass simulated ones rather than non simulated ones and conditional in that they argue we should think we are probably one of the simulated ones so in other words what that means is if you reject the 1st 2 alternatives it doesnt seems you are forced to accept the 3rd one which done shows you can reject all 3 in other words that at least one of them is true so thats the structure of the simulation argument ok so you answered my 1st question about how can we how can anything simulate human brain because youre saying theres no time span so again that. 2 questions if were living in a simulation why would the future eyes. Even make one just for fun i mean so. Many possible reasons you could imagine i mean you could imagine scientific exploration like wanting to know counterfactual history what would have happened if things had gone different they could kind of be both theoretically interesting and maybe useful for trying to understand other extraterrestrial civilizations you might encounter you could imagine. Entertainment reasons that we humans do our best with novels that frame you into this world that we put on theater plays and make movies Computer Games in many cases making the most realistic yes we can of course we cant make them perfectly realistic now but if you had that the bullet did maybe we would make them perfectly realistic. So that that would be another example made maybe even some kind of historical tourism you could imagine if you can actually time travel maybe you could build an exact simulation of the past and interact with that and it would be as if you had to travel to the past and you could experience what to do belike and other reasons as well that we we dont necessarily know very much about what would motivate or drive some kind of technologically mature opposed to man civilization and why they would want to do. Different things with the resources and then i guess the core question eightys even if were living in a simulation rate does it really matter to us im me and you and everyone around us i mean buddhists say the whole world is illusion so what this does is cancel out the things that we leave there are good or bad like love and feelings and problems no nonsense unknown day i think to a 1st approximation if you became convinced youre living in a simulation you probably should have gone as if you were not living in a simulation like for most everyday things like if you want to get into your car you still have to take out the car key and open the door etc. So i think thats true i think there might be some respects in which new possibilities would exist if you are in a simulation that wouldnt really exist if youre not in a simulation. For example we think the universe cant just suddenly pop out of existence right. Conservation of energy and momentum and so forth whereas of course if youre in a simulation if somebody pulls the plug of the simulation the whole thing ceases to exist saw. The possibility of there being more and more its well that the world suddenly ending with that that seems to say its likely or not there were some times go but at least it seems like a possibility. Other things as well. You could imagine things like. After after life like is clearly possible in a simulation you could just rerun the same person in another simulation and so forth or various interventions by the simulators in some ways actually. As that of possibility is kind of structurally similar to what theologians have been thinking ab