The human brain does what it does with a shockingly low energy supply: just 20 watts — a fraction of a cent worth of electricity per hour. What would happen if AI technology merely matched what evolution has already managed, and could accomplish the work of top human professionals given a 20-watt power supply?

Many people sort of consider that hypothetical, but maybe nobody has followed through and considered all the implications as much as Carl Shulman. Behind the scenes, his work has greatly influenced how leaders in artificial general intelligence (AGI) picture the world they're creating.

Links to learn more, highlights, and full transcript.

Carl simply follows the logic to its natural conclusion. This is a world where 1 cent of electricity can be turned into medical advice, company management, or scientific research that would today cost $100s, resulting in a scramble to manufacture chips and apply them to the most lucrative forms of intellectual labour.

It's a world where, given their incredible hourly salaries, the supply of outstanding AI researchers quickly goes from 10,000 to 10 million or more, enormously accelerating progress in the field.

It's a world where companies operated entirely by AIs working together are much faster and more cost-effective than those that lean on humans for decision making, and the latter are progressively driven out of business.

It's a world where the technical challenges around control of robots are rapidly overcome, leading to robots into strong, fast, precise, and tireless workers able to accomplish any physical work the economy requires, and a rush to build billions of them and cash in.

As the economy grows, each person could effectively afford the practical equivalent of a team of hundreds of machine 'people' to help them with every aspect of their lives.

And with growth rates this high, it doesn't take long to run up against Earth's physical limits — in this case, the toughest to engineer your way out of is the Earth's ability to release waste heat. If this machine economy and its insatiable demand for power generates more heat than the Earth radiates into space, then it will rapidly heat up and become uninhabitable for humans and other animals.

This creates pressure to move economic activity off-planet. So you could develop effective populations of billions of scientific researchers operating on computer chips orbiting in space, sending the results of their work, such as drug designs, back to Earth for use.

These are just some of the wild implications that could follow naturally from truly embracing the hypothetical: what if we develop AGI that could accomplish everything that the most productive humans can, using the same energy supply?

In today's episode, Carl explains the above, and then host Rob Wiblin pushes back on whether that’s realistic or just a cool story, asking:

• If we're heading towards the above, how come economic growth is slow now and not really increasing?
• Why have computers and computer chips had so little effect on economic productivity so far?
• Are self-replicating biological systems a good comparison for self-replicating machine systems?
• Isn't this just too crazy and weird to be plausible?
• What bottlenecks would be encountered in supplying energy and natural resources to this growing economy?
• Might there not be severely declining returns to bigger brains and more training?
• Wouldn't humanity get scared and pull the brakes if such a transformation kicked off?
• If this is right, how come economists don't agree?

Finally, Carl addresses the moral status of machine minds themselves. Would they be conscious or otherwise have a claim to moral or rights? And how might humans and machines coexist with neither side dominating or exploiting the other?

Producer and editor: Keiran Harris
Audio engineering lead: Ben Cordell
Technical editing: Simon Monsour, Milo McGuire, and Dominic Armstrong
Transcriptions: Katy Moore

"One of the most amazing things about planet Earth is that there are complex bags of mostly water — you and me – and we can look up at the stars, and look into our brains, and try to grapple with the most complex, difficult questions that there are. And even if we can’t make great progress on them and don’t come to completely satisfying solutions, just the fact of trying to grapple with these things is kind of the universe looking at itself and trying to understand itself. So we’re kind of this bright spot of reflectiveness in the cosmos, and I think we should celebrate that fact for its own intrinsic value and interestingness." —Eric Schwitzgebel

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Eric Schwitzgebel — professor of philosophy at UC Riverside — about some of the most bizarre and unintuitive claims from his recent book, The Weirdness of the World.

Links to learn more, highlights, and full transcript.

They cover:

• Why our intuitions seem so unreliable for answering fundamental questions about reality.
• What the materialist view of consciousness is, and how it might imply some very weird things — like that the United States could be a conscious entity.
• Thought experiments that challenge our intuitions — like supersquids that think and act through detachable tentacles, and intelligent species whose brains are made up of a million bugs.
• Eric’s claim that consciousness and cosmology are universally bizarre and dubious.
• How to think about borderline states of consciousness, and whether consciousness is more like a spectrum or more like a light flicking on.
• The nontrivial possibility that we could be dreaming right now, and the ethical implications if that’s true.
• Why it’s worth it to grapple with the universe’s most complex questions, even if we can’t find completely satisfying solutions.
• And much more.

Chapters:

• Cold open (00:00:00)
• Luisa’s intro (00:01:10)
• Bizarre and dubious philosophical theories (00:03:13)
• The materialist view of consciousness (00:13:55)
• What would it mean for the US to be conscious? (00:19:46)
• Supersquids and antheads thought experiments (00:22:37)
• Alternatives to the materialist perspective (00:35:19)
• Are our intuitions useless for thinking about these things? (00:42:55)
• Key ingredients for consciousness (00:46:46)
• Reasons to think the US isn’t conscious (01:01:15)
• Overlapping consciousnesses [01:09:32]
• Borderline cases of consciousness (01:13:22)
• Are we dreaming right now? (01:40:29)
• Will we ever have answers to these dubious and bizarre questions? (01:56:16)

Producer and editor: Keiran Harris
Audio engineering lead: Ben Cordell
Technical editing: Simon Monsour, Milo McGuire, and Dominic Armstrong
Additional content editing: Katy Moore and Luisa Rodriguez
Transcriptions: Katy Moore

"You can’t charge what something is worth during a pandemic. So we estimated that the value of one course of COVID vaccine in January 2021 was over $5,000. They were selling for between $6 and $40. So nothing like their social value. Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t think that they should have charged $5,000 or $6,000. That’s not ethical. It’s also not economically efficient, because they didn’t cost $5,000 at the marginal cost. So you actually want low price, getting out to lots of people.

"But it shows you that the market is not going to reward people who do the investment in preparation for a pandemic — because when a pandemic hits, they’re not going to get the reward in line with the social value. They may even have to charge less than they would in a non-pandemic time. So prepping for a pandemic is not an efficient market strategy if I’m a firm, but it’s a very efficient strategy for society, and so we’ve got to bridge that gap." —Rachel Glennerster

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Rachel Glennerster — associate professor of economics at the University of Chicago and a pioneer in the field of development economics — about how her team’s new Market Shaping Accelerator aims to leverage market forces to drive innovations that can solve pressing world problems.

Links to learn more, highlights, and full transcript.

They cover:

• How market failures and misaligned incentives stifle critical innovations for social goods like pandemic preparedness, climate change interventions, and vaccine development.
• How “pull mechanisms” like advance market commitments (AMCs) can help overcome these challenges — including concrete examples like how one AMC led to speeding up the development of three vaccines which saved around 700,000 lives in low-income countries.
• The challenges in designing effective pull mechanisms, from design to implementation.
• Why it’s important to tie innovation incentives to real-world impact and uptake, not just the invention of a new technology.
• The massive benefits of accelerating vaccine development, in some cases, even if it’s only by a few days or weeks.
• The case for a $6 billion advance market commitment to spur work on a universal COVID-19 vaccine.
• The shortlist of ideas from the Market Shaping Accelerator’s recent Innovation Challenge that use pull mechanisms to address market failures around improving indoor air quality, repurposing generic drugs for alternative uses, and developing eco-friendly air conditioners for a warming planet.
• “Best Buys” and “Bad Buys” for improving education systems in low- and middle-income countries, based on evidence from over 400 studies.
• Lessons from Rachel’s career at the forefront of global development, and how insights from economics can drive transformative change.
• And much more.

Chapters:

• The Market Shaping Accelerator (00:03:33)
• Pull mechanisms for innovation (00:13:10)
• Accelerating the pneumococcal and COVID vaccines (00:19:05)
• Advance market commitments (00:41:46)
• Is this uncertainty hard for funders to plan around? (00:49:17)
• The story of the malaria vaccine that wasn’t (00:57:15)
• Challenges with designing and implementing AMCs and other pull mechanisms (01:01:40)
• Universal COVID vaccine (01:18:14)
• Climate-resilient crops (01:34:09)
• The Market Shaping Accelerator’s Innovation Challenge (01:45:40)
• Indoor air quality to reduce respiratory infections (01:49:09)
• Repurposing generic drugs (01:55:50)
• Clean air conditioning units (02:02:41)
• Broad-spectrum antivirals for pandemic prevention (02:09:11)
• Improving education in low- and middle-income countries (02:15:53)
• What’s still weird for Rachel about living in the US? (02:45:06)

Producer and editor: Keiran Harris
Audio Engineering Lead: Ben Cordell
Technical editing: Simon Monsour, Milo McGuire, and Dominic Armstrong
Additional content editing: Katy Moore and Luisa Rodriguez
Transcriptions: Katy Moore