Description
This week on The Hope Axis , I’m joined by Emmett Shear to talk about AI, hope, and how we should actually think about the future. Emmett is the co-founder and former CEO of Twitch, former interim CEO of OpenAI, and now the co-founder and CEO of Softmax. We discuss why AI inspires so much fear, what it really is capable of, and where hope still shows up. Hope you enjoy. For the full transcript of our conversation, click here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/10qooWrDB9Nr_0MgKy_kkpd1XMo_2gMN0/view?usp=drive_link Important Links: X (Twitter) – https://x.com/eshear?lang=en Wikipedia – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmett_Shear Softmax – https://softmax.com/about LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/emmettshear Show Notes: (0:00:00) Introduction (0:03:00) AI and The Humanities (0:06:29) Reframing "The Essence", or "The Core" of Things (0:13:01) Why People Want to Work on AI (0:20:13) Kant As The Grandfather of AI (0:23:57) Thomas Aquinas, Informing Onto The Boundary (0:29:41) Back To Teleological Thinking (0:31:44) Art As Imprinting One's Soul On An Object (0:35:00) "Real" and "Fake" Interiority, AI's Nature Without Nurture (0:41:46) AI & Art (0:54:40) A Village of AI (1:01:58) The Risk of Human Extinction (1:08:47) AI Slop, Human Experience & Taste (1:12:22) The Beauty, The Good, and The True as Temporal Coarse-Grainings (1:18:08) Collective Aliveness of The Biosphere (1:24:05) Problems Too Big For Individuals, But Not Too Big For Humanity Books, Essays & References Mentioned: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Will Die — Eliezer Yudkowsky Superintelligence — Nick Bostrom Thomas Aquinas (informatio; origin of “information”) Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Immanuel Kant Takens’ Embedding Theorem Homotopy / homotopic stability Groupoids (one-, two-, three-, infinity-groupoid) AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) Optimizers & goal-binding Telos vs goals Taste vs skill Beauty, Truth, and the Good Learning systems & dynamic systems The biosphere / Gaia hypothesis Collective intelligence Speed as risk factor in AI systems