(See timestamps below) Thomas Hickey is a Dutch student in both philosophy and artificial intelligence at Utrecht University. We talk about his bachelor thesis on A.G.I. or Artificial General Intelligence, on bottlenecks for recursive self-improvement. But also go into existential risk and what we can do about it. CONTACT INFO: Alex van der Meer email: [email protected] but remove capital letters, (for spam) SEE MORE OF ME: - Twitter: https://twitter.com/AlexvanderMeer5 - YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@safetransition9743 EPISODE LINKS: Eliezer Yudkowsky, on why it is lethal not to have retries https://intelligence.org/2022/06/10/agi-ruin/ OpenAI on their approach to alignment blog post https://openai.com/blog/our-approach-to-alignment-research/ TIMESTAMPS: On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) - Introduction (03:16) - Recursive self-improvement, how long until superintelligence (10:50) - What can be learned in the digital realm (14:21) - How fast can it learn in the real world (18:34) - Can AGI become better than us? (22:54) - Complex enough environment to create superintelligence? (29:10) - Can AGI Thomas take over the world? (37:40) - Is superintelligence irrelevant for safety? (41:38) - Existential risk from AI? (48:09) - How to decrease the chance of a bad outcome? (49:08) - Regulations (53:19) - ChatGPT and the best current models (59:57) - Solution to the treacherous turn?   (1:05:01) - AGI becomes religious? (1:11:03) - Starting point of the intelligence explosion? (1:16:49) - OpenAI Alignment approach blog post (1:18:29) - Is Open source bad for safety? (1:24:49) - How to contact me