And I came back and I read LessWrong, and I looked, okay, I looked, two
years have passed and absolutely nothing has changed.
(laughs) Like, you know, the capabilities have increased a lot,
from 2022, 2023, to, you know, 2025, like AI
capabilities have gone further a lot, but, you know,
all these people talking about, you know, safety, risk, governance, like
it's the same people, the same boring speeches, the same,
arguments that happen on LessWrong, like actually nothing has changed.
There's the same funders, you know, uh, Muskowitz and 00:40 John Talion doing
the same sort of work, which I don't really believe in,
uh... Yeah. And I, I am now starting
to realize, look, if I don't personally do something in this
fate of the entire species might be at stake (laughs) , and that is kind
of an almost overwhelming sort of responsibility to be dealing with.
Uh, even by 2035, you're looking at, what, an at least
40%, 50% chance that we will build
superintelligence. So, at that point you realize, look,
if you're making a life plan that does not take into account
the fact that, you know, superintelligence might be created on this
like what are you doing with your life? Like, that's just a bad move.
01:23 Less, like the world is on...
Like, there is a difference between, look, the world is on fire and I'm upset about
this, but I won't, you know, allow this to overwhelm me,
to the public. I will be the calm voice in the face of
And there is another way of processing it, which is,
look, the world is on fire, and look, I don't care about this at all
going to do my thing, because I never cared about this in the
place.
Hi everyone. My name is Guido Reichstagter, and I have the
pleasure of interviewing Samuel Shadrack today.
It's Sunday, September 21st, and
I first met Samuel online when I heard
that he had started a hunger strike
in India on the issue of AI
risk, because there are companies which are right now
racing to build superintelligent AI systems that they
have no reasonable plan for
controlling, and this project puts
all of us at risk. So,
Samuel, I'm glad to be talking with you today.
Oh, yes, nice to be here. Glad to speak with
you.
Awesome. Could you, uh, start out by telling us a little bit about
yourself, your personal history and how you came to be
aware of, uh,
uh, what- what's going on with AI?
Uh, yeah, sure. Uh, so I mean, I'm, like, currently
24 years old. Uh, I've
grown up in India my whole life. Uh, I
graduated from IIT Delhi in 2023, so that's
two years back, with like a BTech...
like a Bachelor's and a Master's in biochemical
engineering. Uh, I've always been generally
interested in tech though, generally interested in, like,
I've been, you know, the... even among, you know, the people
at, you know, such a college, I was still, you know, the outlier of, you know, just
a tech nerd who would just, you know, spend all my time reading online about
various technologies, you know, that could be, uh, space technology,
could be anti-aging, could be solar, could be climate change.
Like, just anything really. You know, I would just, on my own go up and,
read things. So, naturally at some point or the other,
also got recommended some books around AI risk.
I think the first time I got introduced to AI risk,
uh,
was this, uh, recommendation in, I think,
Bill Gates' reading list. Uh, he had a couple of
recommendations, uh, one of them was, I think, Factfulness.
There was another one which was Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom.
Uh, so when I read, you know, that particular book, that
took AI risk seriously. I realized, okay, look, okay...
That was the first time where I started realizing, okay, look, this actually makes
sense and, like, this could actually be a big deal.
Whereas until then, it was just kind of like, you know,
fiction thing in my head. Like... Uh, maybe
another point of background would be like, uh,
so during my schooling, uh, I used to use the internet a fair bit.
I was active, like, on Stack Overflow, Stack Exchange, like those sites were more
popular back then. I think now, like, AI has kind of, like, reduced the
readership of these sites, but back then they were pretty popular,
uh, among academia, among even, like, people who are new to
any, like, scientific field but want to learn more.
So, my username there was like, ghostsinthecode.
And this was based on this movie, I, Robot,
which was fairly popular. It's like a Hollywood movie.
Uh, Will Smith was an actor. And it is
basically about an AI took- takeover.
Like, uh, there is
this, you know, huge tech company that builds these, you
know, armies of robots with AI, and eventually at some point the AIs plan
takeover and, you know, in very cinematic Hollywood fashion,
at the last moment, you know, the hero, you know, Will Smith comes and just
physically shoots down a bunch of robots and, you know, hacks into the center and,
you know, takes it down and stuff. Uh, I think that was the first
part, even just as like a fun curiosity, I thought about it through
like, like just some of the philosophical
them even way back then. Uh, but yeah, back then
I just thought of it as, you know, fiction, thought experiment.
I didn't think of it as, oh, literally, you know, 10 years later we're going to be
having these AIs and these are going to be actual questions and,
of the world is actually going to depend on these types of things.
Uh, so maybe that is maybe the- my first introduction.
My first serious introduction was, yeah, in college, uh,
reading Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom.Then I, you know, read
through the reviews of, uh, superintelligence.
Uh,
there were people saying, "Look, you know, half of this content is copied from, you
know, Eliezer Yudkowsky. Just go read what Eliezer Yudkowsky has
instead." And then I was like, "Hmm, interesting." And then I went and read a
lot of work of, you know, Eliezer Yudkowsky. I read The Sequences.
That gave me a lot of things to think about.
Uh,
I think Eliezer Yudkowsky is, like, a brilliant philosopher.
Like, I disagree with him on a lot of points,
brilliant, like, this surface area of, you know, novel topics he has covered
is large, and he has interesting thoughts
on a lot of them, some of which I agree with and some of
Uh,
so there's that.
So I think that was the point where I was first sure, okay, look,
some chance, you know, our species is going extinct as a result of this
technology. Back then, I, this, when I say
back then, I mean, like, you know, maybe fourth, fourth year of college.
I think back then I assigned like, you know, a 15%
probability we'll be getting, you know, superintelligence soon, like, you know, in
the next five years, 10 years. Now that number has gone up.
Now I'm like, at least 25%, maybe more.
We can talk about, you know, technicalities of these numbers
basic idea is, yeah. Uh, a couple years
ago, reading Eliezer Yudkowsky's work, that was the first time I
started taking this stuff like se- seriously and being like, "Okay, look,
there is some actual non-negligible chance that, you know, the species may
not survive the creation of this technology."
After that it's just me trying various things
around this. I started the Effective Altruism Club
in my college, IIT Delhi. It did
not go super well, to be quite blunt, but I learned useful
things from the experience of trying to start that club over a period of six
months.
What else? I completed this, uh, two-month, like,
full-time, you know, whatever, 50, 60-hour week intensive computer
science course called ML Safety Scholars by
Dan Hendrycks who's at UC- UC Berkeley, and like one of the famous
names in the AI risk space. That did give me some
technical background, and that actually scared me a little bit more
it made me understand to the extent to which, like, AIs are just
black boxes and, like, the people who are training these things have actually no
idea what's going on inside them. Like, I had a surface level of
understanding of this, but then actually, you know, you know like writing down the
equations for a transformer, okay, obviously, okay, attention is like this.
These are the key val- query value matrices.
And look, this is, you know, what a scaling law is, this is how
for the entire field of interpretability re- research looks like.
You know, this is what people when they talk about, you know,
ali- other AIs, you know, at a technical level, this
And just reading a bunch of these things from a technical level made me
understand the extent to which, like, AI researchers have no idea what they're
doing. And, like, some of these fields are so nascent and so much
of what actually works is just like black box approaches,
like try a thing without understanding why it works.
It's just, "Look, you know, the last six months it worked,
again." And that was an intuition which I really got
through that course and just studying this, the topic
of AI and, you know, AI alignment, AI safety at a more technical
level. After that what did I
do? Uh,
after that to be
quite honest I did take like a break of like at least a year from
these things. So, you know, in my fifth year, my last year of college,
did not do much about all this. I was just focused on like graduating.
I finished my thesis,
I, uh, traveled for a few months and at
the end of the travel I was actually low-key depressed.
I was like, "What am I doing with my life?" It gave me
of like, "Look, I actually need to do something useful
this sort of just traveling and having fun and stuff
to work out for me. Like, you know, in moderation it's good,
the focus of my life.
And I came back and I read LessWrong and I looked, okay, I
looked, two years have passed and absolutely nothing has
changed. (laughs) Like, you know, the capabilities have increased
a lot, like, you know, from 2022 to 2023 to, you know, 2025, like
AI capabilities have gone further a lot, but, you
know, all these people talking about, you know, safety, risk, governance,
like it's the same people, the same boring speeches, the same, you
know, arguments that happen on LessWrong. Like actually nothing has changed.
It's the same funders, you know, um, Amos Goertz and Jan Talon doing
the same sort of work which I don't really believe in.
Uh,
yeah, and I- I am now starting to realize, look, if I don't personally do
something in this space, you know, the fate of the entire species might
be at stake. And that is kind of an almost overwhelming sort of
responsibility to be dealing with, uh,
but yeah, I mean, at some level that is the truth.
Like someone needs to try out new approaches.
Someone needs to figure out ways this field can actually grow and like make an
actual impact, the field of AI risk specifically,
be one of the people to help figure that out. Yeah.
Mm-hmm Wow. And so you decide to go
on hunger strike.
Uh, yes.
What was your... How did you- how did you- how did you come to
this decision? What was your thought process around
this?
That's a good question. Uh,
so I can give you a bunch of reasons from like political theory and I can
give you a bunch of reasons which are just, okay, look, I did hit
was like, "Let's see what works." So the hit
reasons I, look, I started a YouTube channel,
videos about AI risk, I gave a bunch of, you know, talks at various
places, I-... wrote this, you
know, database for whistleblowers, which is kind of, you know,
politically sensitive, so maybe we don't have to discuss it.
But that is another thing, you know, how do you support a whistleblower at an
company? I was doing that. And at some point, yeah, this
idea came to me, like, "Look here, hunger strike actually makes sense." Uh,
so it's just, you know, try a bunch of things.
You know, so far what I was trying was not giving me very concrete, you know,
success. I couldn't look at any of the things I'd
this is a big success and it actually made a difference." So I
was like, "Okay, look, let's just try one more thing
that may have a chance of actually working." Uh, the reason from political
theory is basically, uh, making
costly public signals. Like if you signal to the public that, "Look,
willing to make significant sacrifices for this," like,
that speaks to the public more than just a few, you know, you go write a blog post
or you make a video. Uh, like words are cheap, you know, actions are
costly. Uh, they also have certain thoughts around,
you know, common knowledge, like, uh...
So when... So, like, in general and...
Okay, I'll make a disclaimer here that, you know, I don't want to try and, you
know, topple over any government when I say this, but in
the past, when people have tried to topple over
they have noticed is, uh...
A key factor here is common knowledge.
Like it's not enough for a lot of people, like if 10% of the population are
like, you know, "We are unhappy with this government
to be in charge," that is not enough to actually topple the
It's like, I know that I am unhappy, and I know the other person is
unhappy, and the other person knows that I know that they are unhappy,
that sort of common knowledge. And only when you do that among, you know,
significant fraction of the population, that's when you can actually topple the
government. And ways to establish this common
very public things. So this could be starting with, yes, uh,
let's say, a YouTube channel, you know, a charismatic speaker has, you know,
millions of likes. That establishes common knowledge because
"Oh, it's not just me liking this video.
There's also, you know, 10 million other people who
This could be in public demonstrations, public protests if, you know, if there's
like, you know, there's a city and, you know, like,
physically on the street and they all look at each other
Oh, okay, so I'm not alone in believing this.
We all believe the same thing." That establishes common
knowledge. The final stage is, you know, the point at which,
you know, these mass movements can, you know, actually occupy, you know,
buildings. Uh...
Yeah, and that again establishes common
buildings are sym- like, symbols.
They're, you know,
like... yeah, they're just symbolically important.
And when everyone sees, okay, like the entire country will see, says,
look, this movement has actually gone and occupied this building
to, you know, actually stop them," then they realize,
are going to form the new government. That's just it.
So
I think, yeah, hunger strikes are one of those costly signals.
And
if a lot of people can come in, you know, even just like, share, subscribe on
hunger strike, and if hunger strike gets, you know, a million likes, that can even
establish the common knowledge required to actually bring about change.
Yeah, I was really surprised that,
um, there was the kind
of reception or the kind of impact that even this
kind of limited action made. I think the,
the, the post, uh, that Michael Trauzzi made announcing
his strike was viewed over- maybe over one and a half million
times. And the one that I made was viewed also
over a million times, and it's generated a number of
articles in, you know, press around the
world. So,
definitely was surprising to me the impact of even this kind of
limited action.
And I think, you know, if this is what
five people,
four people
going, making this kind of costly
action can do, imagine what 100 people could
do, or 1,000 people.
So I think this is really a crucial part of building
this common public
awareness. People have to see people
that are acting consistently with what it means to be in an
emergency.
And, uh, I believe we are in an emergency, and, um,
I'd be interested in hear- hearing from you.
What, what is it about this time that we're in that makes it an
emergency?
Oh, uh, that's a good question. Uh, (laughs)
I think when used the word emergency, like there's a rational aspect to it
emotional aspect to it. And, you know, I'm the type of person who tries to
the two. Uh, I still have complicated thoughts on,
well... Like, should these two be separate?
Uh, so let me just first talk about the
Uh, like rationally, you know, what do I believe?
What is the state of the world right now?
What could the state of the world be in the next few years?
Uh...
I think assuming, uh, there is no such social
movement, no one actually tries to change the course
labs are trying to take the course of history, uh,
even in the next five years, there's, you know,
going to build superintelligence.
Uh, when I say superintelligence, I mean an AI that is better than all
all tasks. And this is just the next five years.
You know, just because they don't do it in the next
won't do it afterwards. If you take, you know, another five years, so that's,
know, 2035, you can easily put another, you know, 15 to 20% ta-
like... Again these numbers are not very accurate.
There's a lot of high uncertainty on these things.
So-Even by 2035, you're looking at, what, an at
least 40%, 50% chance that we will build superintelligence.
So at that point you realize, look, if you're making a life plan
that does not take into account the fact that, you know, superintelligence might
be created on this earth, like, what are you doing with your life?
Like, that's just a bad move. Uh, if superintelligence is
created, what are the outcomes? Uh,
I think multiple outcomes are possible.
This is the thing I have more uncertainty over.
Like, I have less uncertainty on like, okay,
build soon. I have more uncertainty on, okay, if we build superintelligence,
what happens next? I think there's a good chance
just has its own thing it cares about.
It can, you know, make plans over long time horizons
the thing it wants to do, which probably has, like,
with humans or what humans want and whatever.
And it'll just take over the earth.
Uh,
it will basically ignore us, and as a side effect, like, we
might just get wiped out because,
uh, it will have things it wants to do.
You know, there are resources on the earth.
There are specific, you know, temperature and pressure conditions on the
which are required for human survival.
There are specific, you know, food resources, water resources which
for human survival. If the AI decides that even one of these resources,
it wants, it will just take those resources
uninterested in what, you know, humans want or need to live.
Uh, that is a possibility. This is the other separate possibility
in, is even if you manage to, with certain techniques, keep the
superintelligence under control, like, you know, you apply boxing techniques,
uh, for all the, you know, alignment safety nerds out there,
what AI boxing is. But it's... Yeah, literally keep the AI in a
box so that even though it's smarter than you, it just, um, harder to then break
out. Which is, to be clear, an extremely risky thing to be
trying to do. But even if you actually managed to pull this off,
I think the outcome with that sort of thing
take over the world. Uh,
you can, at this point, just, uh, topple over various governments.
You know, this is a threat to, you know, the US government, the Chinese government,
the Indian, Russian governments.
If a small group of people have an actual superintelligence that's in their
control, and they can do novel things with this,
just build parallel industries. They can build, you know...
(laughs)
Uh, I mean, Yudkowsky famously talks about
that is also possible. We can even just look at, you know,
life, like, we are already not that far from, away from
being a- able to, you know, genetically engineer life forms so you can
populate the earth with, you know, engineered life forms.
Uh,
you can invent new energy sources with a
sufficiently intelligent mind. Uh, like, we are already doing these
things. Like, forget superintelligence.
Like, humans might be able to do these things in
Like, this is not science fiction in my head.
Like, if humans make, you know, solar energy really cheap or they crack,
fusion energy or something, like, these things seem totally possible to me,
and the superintelligence is just going to accelerate these things.
So if a small group of people can just build things like this, they can
build, you know, their own power grid, they can be extremely,
extremely persuasive. Like, just imagine someone like Hitler
way more persuasive, and you have, like, direct access to millions of people.
You can disperse very people at scale, you can get really good at cyberattacks.
You know, AI is already, as of 2025, pretty good at
cyberattacks. You know, Mark Zuckerberg has openly on the record
you know,
like, AI is already a threat to the
Uh, so just a fi- you know, five years more of progress on that,
just basically hack into any system, any government database and so
on. Like, there's so many different capability just
open up all at the same time. Yeah, it seems quite plausible to me a small
of people will just take over the world and establish their own, you know, like,
their permanent dictatorship of sorts and just do what they want.
That seems possible to me. There's also a possibility that
there's just some unknown unknown sort of thing happens which, you know, I can't
predict. Like, these things are just really hard to predict.
There are just so many intersecting things going on.
There's AI capabilities going on, there's, you know, specific
questions like, okay, if I had cyberattacking capability, if
I had a fully autonomous military, if I had XYZ technology,
like, how much power can I project on the world?
Like, some of these questions are just honestly open questions.
Like, me sitting in my bedroom is not...
I'm not necessarily going to be able to, you know, forecast all of these questions
correctly. So we might just end up with some unknown
unknown, uh, possibility which,
again, m- doesn't necessarily need to be good.
You know, it could be good, could be bad.
So
it's just, yeah, it's just going to dramatically change the
And just from a rational point of view, I think that constitutes an emergency when
you look at these sort of extremely dramatic
outcomes. Now, coming to an emotional point of view,
uh,
yeah, I don't know. I think I'm still working my way through
So there's one set of philosophies which are kind of popular in
Silicon Valley, and I have kind of a love-hate
ideas which are popular in Silicon Valley, which is, yeah, basically a
lot of, like,
stoicism and, like, you know, if
there is a crisis and you are the leader and you are calm, you know,
good decisions. Like, there's a lot of emphasis on this sort of
even if the world is on fire, you need to be calm,
the good decisions here. Like, this is the thing that's popular in
Silicon Valley. There's- they- there's a general emphasis on, like,
this is what great people do, and
to part... for part of me, that makes sense.
Like... but, uh, there is
also another part of me that is like, okay, if you take that ideology to
its logical extreme, you really do end up with a person who
not care about these things in the first place.
Like, the world is on-Like, there's a difference between, "Look,
is on fire and I'm upset about this, but I won't, you know, allow this
to overwhelm me," or, "I won't show this to the public.
I will be the calm voice in the face of the storm." And there is another
way of processing it, which is, "Look, the world is on fire.
And look, I don't care about this at all
I never cared about this in the first place." And like, I think there's a
dividing line between those. So, you know,
emotionally, am I looking at it like I'm in an
level? Yes. But at some level, I'm also kind of leading a
relatively normal life. Like, okay, I have devoted my career, you know, full
time to working on this, but apart from my career, what am I doing?
You know, I have a relatively normal soc- a normal social life.
You know, I have friends, you know, I have fun activities I do with them,
I travel places. Like,
if you look at, you know, other aspects of my life,
and be like, "Oh, Samuel is, you know, in an emergency or a crisis right now."
so
yeah, all in all, I don't know. I think that just gives you a lot of
on, you know, to what extent am I looking at this as an
Yeah.
Yeah. For, for me there's a couple of aspects to it.
One is definitely that there is
an immense risk
in front of us. And
it threatens the lives of everyone I care about, and really everyone
on this planet. And like you said, I look at
the trajectory. If there isn't a movement or if there
effective, um, political
project
to prevent this risk, um,
we're, we're gonna suffer those consequences,
are. And because there's not
currently any signs that we are on track
to effectively manage it, um, like
to me that's an emergency. It's kind of like, you
know, we're in a car headed downhill, gaining
speed and there's no brakes on the car.
It's like, that's an emergency.
So
yeah, it is, it is hard sometimes to separate the
rational aspect.
Um...
I think for me it, it boils down to rationally understanding
we're in danger, and
emotionally, the most important thing that I feel is
not turning away or trying to,
um, deny that fact, and
then emotionally face it, face what it means, and then
act rationally, appropriately to try and stop
it. So,
yeah.
H- how are you? We should have, we should have got this, uh, done in the,
beginning, but you've been on hunger strike now,
fasting. How did you... Do you prefer to call it a fast or a
hunger strike? And you've been, but you've been on it for eight days
now, so I'm curious how your experience has
personally.
Yeah. Uh, I think I was initially a bit hesitant to call it a
because, yeah, there were a lot of, you know, random Twitter trolls who
"Look, you're not actually putting your life in
Is that a hunger strike or not?" But at this point I'm like, "Look, I don't
care about that." I do still consider this a hunger strike.
Like, I am actually making a costly sacrifice
actually worse as a result. And
like, if I was just doing what's good for me,
I'm doing this because I believe there's a bigger, you know, cause that needs to
be,
uh, advanced here. Uh,
so yeah, I would call it a hunger strike.
Uh, how am I doing? Ah, that's a good
question. I think it's pretty much manageable,
of, you know, today, which is day number eight of the hunger strike.
I've publicly committed that I'll be doing this for at least 18
days.
Oh wow.
Yes. Yeah. Uh...
I mean, it is not great, but it is manageable.
Like, I am definitely extremely, like, physically weak, like just
less energy in my body. Like when I walk around,
look, don't bump yourself into things, don't get yourself injured, you know,
fall over. Uh, I have, I
randomly have nausea at points. I have randomly, you know,
points. Uh,
like by itself, you know, none of these things is a big deal.
All of this is very much manageable.
It's just
or, you know, I drink salt water, it tastes, you know, absolutely horrible.
Uh, all these things by itself, they're small, but when they
accumulate, you know, day after day after day just dealing with
shit, it does kind of take a toll on you
mentally. Also, I'm just kind of bored.
I- I'm not doing anything productive and my mind is not clear
enough to do any, like very focused work.
So
I end up spending a lot of time doing absolutely nothing, and then
that feels not great. So
yeah, it's just like a m- like a
subpar quality of life. When you extend that, you know, over many,
it does start taking a bit of a toll on you.
But all in all, I think it's pretty much manageable.
You know, I am fine doing this for, doing this for, you know, another week,
another two weeks if it comes to it. Yeah.
So to be clear, you're just taking, um, basically
salts for electrolytes, but otherwise nothing, no
other... no calories, no vitamins, nothing like that?
Uh, no. Yeah, I'm just drinking water and I'm
having, you know, table salt, you know, sodium
chloride, uh, mag- uh, potassium chloride, which is again,
another salt. I'm having, you know, magnesium capsules and that's about
it.
Yeah.
I'm not having any calories, no sugar, no
vitamins, so on.
Mm.
Yeah.
Mm. Yeah, I- I wonder if that's a big difference in our
experiences 'cause I am taking, um, a multivitamin
and other vitamin supplements, but no c- no calories, and also
electrolytes. And like, subjectively,
of course, I feel tired and I have the same nausea
and, um, you know, some stomach pain.
But, um, mentally, I feel like very
there, like very, um, you know,
aware and in full possession of my faculties and everything,
so. Or maybe I'm just (laughs) maybe I'm just
(laughs) being there doesn't mean all that much (laughs) as it may- as it
may to you.
But, um,
yeah, that's amazing. I didn't...
I- I- I missed that part where you had- had committed to- to going for 18
days, so that's... Yeah, that's impressive.
Um, I'm curious, how is your... How are your family and friends,
uh, responding? Do they know about this or what do they think?
Have you talked to them about it?
Uh, yeah, the response are mixed. I've definitely got just
support, solidarity from some of my friends who
thing you're doing and I wish you all the best," and so
on. There's certain people who don't really
they don't really buy the case for AI risk to the extent that I do.
But despite that, they're like, "Look, you know, you believe in this, you want to
do this, you know, good for you. All the best.
I hope you, you know, I hope you stay safe.
I hope your health stays fine, you know, don't get hospitalized and all that
stuff." Uh, I have gotten a couple of
responses I'm not happy about where I did realize, okay, look,
these people, you know, out of a misguided sense of, you know,
me might actually try to, you know, stop me from continuing on
this. And to them, I have made very clear, like, "Look, this is
important to me, you know, don't get in my way.
Like, I know you have, you know, sort of certain, you know, care
me, but if you actually truly cared about me,
this is to me. So, you know, don't- don't get in my way."
Yes, that
I
have gotten again, you know, even more the responses, they're like,
they're not super happy with me doing this, but
also end of the day, look, the choice is not in their hands, the choice is in my
hands and this is what I'm doing. So yeah, the responses have been pretty mixed all
around. I think I'm generally happy with the
And, uh, I guess just as a final question,
I'm wondering how do you see yourself, uh,
going forward in the future? What's, um,
you know, what's on your mind about
what part you can play in this whole
situation that we're in?
Uh, that's a good question. Yeah, I mean
if you ask me concretely, do I have like, a role I want to play and just
consistently play that for five years?
Like, I don't have conviction on what that role is.
I'm still in a phase of, you know, hit and trial, try a bunch of things and see
what works, uh-
What's the goal that you're working towards?
I mean, the high level goal is definitely, you know, get a pause
on further research development of AI
worldwide across all countries. This will require
necessarily a treaty between the government of the United States and the
government of China. This is going to require a certain
number of en- enforcement mechanisms.
This is going to require a lot of people actually convinced that their lives are in
danger. Like, you cannot pull off these sort of large
actually convinced a lot of people.
Like, that is the high level goal. Uh, I could also
go into like, what are the more smaller things
that I'm working on, if you'd like to kn- know about those.
Well, what's your... Yeah, what's your- what's your kind of, um, big
picture of the path? How do- how- how generally
do you think we... What do we need to do to get from here to
there?
Uh, good question. So I think in general, if you
want to get a person to do something, there are two ways to do it.
You know, A, you can convince them let- in their heart that, "Look, this is
actually no- important." Like, you actually change their values
And B, as you apply incentives on them, you apply pressure.
Now, pressure could be actual physical
It could be, you know, monetary incentives.
You tell them, "Look, if you do this, you'll be respected," et cetera.
I think this... Solving this problem is going to require a mix
of both. Like, you can't use just force
persuasion. There are going to be people doing a bi- bit of
both. Uh,
but-
You mentioned earlier about, um, a mass movement.
Uh-
What do you think the... What do you see the role of a-
process of moving society from where it is now
to where it needs to be to actually implement that kind
of a global treaty? Or even starting with the
United States, right?
Mm-hmm.
Because the United States right now is nowhere in the ballpark of politically
of
seriously considering that even as an option.
Yeah, that is fair. Okay, so the...
I think historically, the way that, you know, effective altruist movement has
approached this is a very softball kind of approach, which
is, again, I'm not saying like, it is bad
to try this. I'm just saying, you know, maybe they're failing.
What they tried is essentially, "Look, we will get people in all the
elite circles of government, you know, we will..."Uh, establish think
tanks. We'll establish policy. Policy institutions.
We'll get just people in government and, you know, just convince people in the US
government this is important and just make a- action work that way.
So they just went through the persuasion approach.
And I'm not optimistic on this working out.
I think the geopolitical power you get from developing AI is too
large for, uh, people at the high levels of
US government to be just listening toward this effective and trust people have to
say. Uh, so just 100% persuasion is not g-
really going to work in my view, uh, which comes to, you know,
establishing a mass movement and actually applying pressure on the US
Like, you can't do just persuasion.
You need to actually pressure that, look, you know, if you don't actually do the
things that we want you to do, like if we, the public, say we want this and the
government is, like, not willing to do it, you need to actually apply
pressure and be like, "Look, we are willing to vote new leaders
We're willing to, you know, bi- boycott your products if required.
You know, we are willing to protest on the street
Uh, we are going to disrupt your way of doing
think a mass movement is a good idea.
Establishing a mass movement, again, requires persuasion,
different audience. And instead of convincing, you know,
government, you're now going to be convincing,
public. Now, even in the public, who do you mean exactly?
So one is there are people who are very technically skilled.
This is, again, you know, the software developers essentially,
Silicon Valley. So I think convince Silicon Valley
I think convince, you know, literally every person in the United
is another approach. Uh, I think multiple approaches need to be
out and we need to see what works. Even on the, you know,
broader geopolitical scale, like, okay, look, you convinced US,
like, "You know, what about China?
What about Israel?" You know, uh, there will be people who will need to
attempt similar things even in China and I don't
know, for political reasons, maybe I'm not super comfortable commenting
that, but at some point, through some m- mix of either
persuasion or- or force, you do need to also get the Chinese
board with the idea that, you know, superintelligence is an extremely
technology and you need to respond, you know,
that it poses.
All right. Well, thanks for sharing your time.
Yeah.
So there anything else, uh, you want to say or think is, um,
good- important for our- our audience to
hear?
Uh, no, not much in particular. Yeah,
just in general, look, if you like the work I'm doing, you know,
like, share, subscribe to spread this to a wider
I'd especially be interested in being connected to people, you know,
space, in the legal space, even just other people who are really full
time committed to this. Uh, there are
ways you can actually, you know, contribute
to this cause that are, uh, that A, won't require a lot of your time
and even will require a lot of your time if you don't have a lot of time or energy
to spare. You know, even just, you know, sharing, uh, my channel to
others helps, even just sharing your own views in
Like, don't be like, "You know, Samuel said this,"
actually believe and you put that on social media. Even
If you do have a lot of time and energy to spare, uh, there
are more important things you can do.
You can start a channel of your own, you know,
Uh,
you can obviously donate money. Uh, there are things you can do.
So in general, feel free to reach out to me
you can contribute to the space. You can also obviously reach out to,
Guido here. There are a number of people in the space who
if you just openly come and ask, "Look, you know, I want to contribute.
What can I do?" There are lots of people who will tell you,
you could be doing.
Sure. Thanks so much for coming on and, uh, and
speaking, because this is, you know, this is
probably the most important
issue facing humanity in the near
term.
And thanks for doing your part.
Oh, yeah. You're welcome.