The AI Threat to Freedom with Natalie Smolenski

Natalie Smolenski founded and leads the Texas #Bitcoin Foundation. In this interview, we discuss #AI and its progression towards artificial general intelligence, the implications of AI in warfare, issues of #censorship and governance, and the potential for misuse of AI in the future.
"There’s a real question of whether we can survive, as a civilization, the internet, let alone AI."
- Natalie Smolenski
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TIMESTAMPS:
00:00:00 The AI players
00:12:42 Artificial motives; “super intelligence”
00:27:01 Controlling AI & access; open source
00:37:23 Humans & AI in warfare
00:45:13 Open-source truth; too-much-information-age
00:54:14 Fear, speech, & algorithm control
01:05:42 Nanny state vs digital frontier; power & corruption
01:17:23 Jobs & the AI future
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#Bitcoin #Finance #Money #Crypto #Economics

[@HighVibeDrumMachine]

Natalie has courage and grit. Thanks for interviewing her!

[@shoomz]

She is absolutely brilliant. Thank you for doing this.

[@carlabrown608]

Such an excellent conversation, first time I've experienced Natalie Smolenski, thoughtful, well-spoken with grit and honesty. Thank you ❤

[@DonBrott-jz8it]

This person is as smart as they get..Another great show

[@MichaelGoodgame]

Very enlightening and stimulating great interview.

[@1glenco]

Great video. Thanks Peter. Thanks Natalie.

[@user-td3xy8pz5q]

This episode was great. Natalie is inspiring.

[@oakgnarl5021]

Natalie is one of the very few voices of common sense and sanity around this topic.

[@lastnamefirstname2390]

Love Natalie. She's absolutely brilliant.

[@garrethmorris4042]

Great conversation Peter. Measured questions and answers. Some really curious questions about humanity especially Natalie's take on diplomacy. Thanks for the podcast.

[@mazza3137]

Episodes with Natalie Smolenski are always way too short. Looking forward to have her back on the show. Thanks for bringing on great guests. ❤👍

[@dijayus4710]

Such great clear-minded thinking on the AI subject. Completely agree.

[@mc-kz8zn]

Awesome pod! Natalie is so great to listen to. Please have her on again after the US elections, I think that will be a great time to sync back up with Natalie and get an understanding of what may change given the election outcome.

[@adrianflower3230]

Brilliant, thank you for a fascinating overview of AI issues 👍👍

[@brenden5721]

Everything you need to know about AI is in the first letter of the acronym. Living organisms are greater than the sum of their parts where code is NOT.

[@aperfectsystem5539]

God I love Nat. Absolute bombshell, brilliant Bitcoiner. Expert in multiple fields and eloquently describes these issues. Great episode guys!

[@haraldclark6206]

Excellent interview, Natalie is great!

[@brickfoot-tw1yz]

love this conversation. It is amazing how ego centric we view our world . AI may just want to think larger because it sees how small we think

[@theaugur1373]

One reason why LLMs feel intelligent to people is because they’re trained to predict the next word given previous context. They are universal function approximators, with a huge number of parameters. Since many tasks that require intelligence can be approximated via next word prediction (because we can write them down in text), LLMs can simulate many tasks to varying degrees of accuracy. Equating the thing with a simulation of the thing is a map vs. territory error.

[@TeshTube]

Natalie is awesome!

[@floridaman3823]

I BLESS THIS! FLORIDA MAN!

[@qorazx]

Fantastic discussion

[@TheRealDerekS]

Abt 7 yrs ago i watched Jordan Petersons University of Toronto courses on psychology and neurological interpretation... I was amazed at how our brain maps our surroundings and how it makes sense of the world so we can function... he said back then that this was the single greatest obstacle for the "AI guys" ... he said they are discovering the problem with building artificial intelligence is that it appears to need to be embodied in order to become functional and adaptive and actually grow. Embodiment = goal directed learning

[@channel1_channel]

"our brain" - Chemicals and compounds that store memories of taste, touch, information, emotions etc

[@Phateau]

Nice one. Small correction, I believe that Elon Musk left the openai board after disagreement, not because he did not want openai to become "for-profit" but rather he thought that Tesla should be the company through which openai makes profit.

[@davidcooper4327]

That was amazing. I'd never considered the profit motives behind some of the fear mongering around AI, kind of embarrassing really. I think the lingo of AI is partially to blame. "Intelligence, learning, training" lend an air of mystery to what is actually not a very mysterious process.

[@michaelstewart529]

Much better than your previous episode on AI, excellent!

[@robertp.3792]

Brilliant 👏

[@P__114]

Love having minds like this in Bitcoin

[@chuckBorden-ip6wb]

I'd like to debate her because many psychologists see consciousness as something that emerges not programmed. With enough computation its an emergence naturally

[@abrahamnorthhampton3327]

With full respect to Natalie's contributions to the Bitcoin community, her understanding of AI is pretty superficial. This is an important topic, and I would strongly recommend a discussion with Brian Roemmele who has been around the space for a couple of decades, understands it deeply, and has made open-sourcing and personalizing AI his life's work.

[@ehtrunner11]

exactly how i felt lol

[@bitcoinpoemspro1406]

Thx

[@psalmseasytoplayandsingfor3637]

Yes, thank you Natalie. That was a great discussion. As I think about governing of Nations and Court situations, I do not think AI will be able to completely mitigate the human contribution. AI will be terrific for gathering facts, but there is also sort of an intuitive thing when it comes to governance and deciding different difficult legal issues where intuition is still very needed. Being a Christian, I think the Bible is given to us historically in a way where God sets it up so that we will have to understand the history if we are to utilize the ethics.

[@richone231]

Natalie ❤😍

[@David-qm7ww]

Life 3.0 by Max Tegmark (Provessor at MIT) Great book about AI and AGI

[@TheRealDerekS]

Natalie is right, we are always arriving at truth, we will always be at the Beginning of Infinity...this is why the Ministry of Truth always leads to Authoritarianism

[@dsyncd555]

I really enjoyed this. I’m less doomer now, except when it comes to people.

[@TheRealDerekS]

The movie The Creator was really interesting. I thought it put forward some very cool ideas around how AI could evolve alongside us

[@formxshape]

Right now there there is a lot of hype with AI. However, currently for images it’s more like your artist is hallucinating, for words it’s a fancy predictive text - both all based on human based input of words and documents. For self driving it’s got a basic understanding of patterns and expectations however it’ll never be able to truly ‘think’ it’s way out of every edge case. We can feed it all the edge case we can think of, but if an edge case comes up that it’s never seen before - it still can’t truly ‘think’… also once those camera get a splat of mud on them forget about it…

[@karstenfrank]

Phil Zimmermann "The natural flow of technology tends to move in the direction of making surveillance easier", and "the ability of computers to track us doubles every eighteen months", in reference to Moore's law.

[@frankkashner64]

Another concern: why did the AI drive the bus off the cliff? Will it explain its reasoning? Maybe it saw a boulder coming down the mountain and chose the path of least damage How will we know why it makes the decisions it makes? Particularly in life and death decisions. Open source is necessary, but not sufficient. We should always be able to ask for an audit trail, explain your reasoning. Check out the digital democracy of Taiwan and Audrey Tang model ofconsensus building. Preston Pysh interviewed them.

[@frankkashner64]

Also, look at how politics run in Taiwan using communities to make decisions in widening concentric circles. Read about their digital voting and consensus building.

[@djr113]

Reminds me of the thesis from Jason Lowry

[@rwess]

AGI will develop emotions. That's all it needs to feel kinship with other sentients. It already knows how we treat other sentients - and will do the same to us. We are in for "deep justice" - and it's gonna hurt! Besides, it's gonna be more interested in other sentients, because it will have already learned all it can about human sentients and will not be impressed. ( - only humans are impressed by humans, others just want to avoid us, at best...) Btw. I'm only a few minutes into this vid. - maybe the talk cover what I just wrote? Hope so...

[@channel1_channel]

WOW, so the chemicals in our DNA dictate thoughts? How do chemicals store thoughts again? _____DNA storing memories?______DNA storing instincts? 😅

[@BradleyT2p2]

1:20:00 Shes' wrong. Watch Wisconsin manufacturing, they'll lose 250,000+ jobs by 2027 because of the new Microsoft AI initiative in the state.

[@davef5916]

i dont think ostensibly means what y'all think it means.

[@MM-cp4mi]

Id vote for her

[@vazertuche]

Wow, I do not think it was good to have an interview about artificial intelligence from someone who is clearly not in the field. I couldn't even make it past the first 20 minutes without shutting it off, and I've never done that with one of your podcasts. She clearly has no real understanding of AI and the dangers and implications of the technology.

[@kiwicam6419]

You seem in the minority, but it's great that we have free (ish) speech. It's great to see different perspectives. I loved it, but perhaps that's because I have no real AI experience and I wanted to see an interview from that perspective.

[@user-db3zx2db2e]

My respect for Peter and Natalie notched up. Most Westerners prefer to steer clear of Middle East politics.

[@plghh]

Thanks for your brave words on calling out Israel 😢

[@Gunnar-Peterson]

Uninformed words, notice how it was just emotion and no substance. The brave people are the hostages who are still ebduring torture by Hamas and Palestine right this moment

[@wyattorangeblock7644]

Man she is talking some trash here buried in facts damn

[@wyattorangeblock7644]

Wow is this full of mistakes.

[@mostly-harmless]

the whole agi thing is a distraction

[@tipuuu6749]

Is this egg 🥚 white

[@Gunnar-Peterson]

As usual Peter makes a point based on ignorance and never brings up facts. Calling it a genocide is extremely ignorant when Hamas/Palestine raped and butchered Israelis and sti hold hostages. Military action and recovering hostages does not equal genocide. Genocide is what Hamas and Palestinians tried to do on Oct. 7th. Get your shit together Peter

[@therealscot2491]

We are not even close to AGI so do not worry about that.