The Problem with Human Specialness in the Age of AI | Scott Aaronson | TEDxPaloAlto

that, but we sort of dragged the rest of us along with them, so our whole objective function changed, we can no longer judge music except by the standard of Beatles influence, any more than we can judge plays. except by Shakespeare's standard of influence. Okay, and now, if you know that there's something like what I like to call an AI paradox of abundance, right, which is as soon as you have an AI that can produce a new work of art, uh, well, you know, No matter how good it is, you can produce a thousand similar works of art just by running it more and more often, you can always rewind and try again, and that radically devalues, you know, the value of that kind of production, just like The price of gold would plummet if someone towed a 10-mile-long golden asteroid to Earth.

Actually, it wouldn't be worth it. You know what you thought was right. So you know you could say okay, okay. at least

human

s will always have this kind of advantage. Well at least we have the advantage of being fragile and only you know that there is only one of us and you can't back us up and run us over and over again with the same input. You know, when we make a decision, we really mean it, we're going to stick with it and that's the only one you're going to get out of us, which is kind of a weird place to be, you know, putting our claim to

human

ity on the line. specialty, but that might be the place we are forced to accept, but as soon as I said I have to face some kind of exotic objection, which is good, is it really true that humans can't be? rewind can't copy can't save as backups and so on.

I mean, some people might think that our own cognition is happening in some kind of digital computing layer that you know in the neurons and synapses and once the technology once the brain scanning technology is good enough, you know, will be the next iteration of neurolink or whatever, we can all just backup to the cloud, we can, you know, rewind, restore from backup, you know, and then that leads to all these weird questions like Would you accept being faxed to Mars? You know, it was just sent as reconstituted information there. The original version of your meat will be sacrificed painlessly.

Don't worry about that, right? or um, you know? uh uh uh back up your brain before you go on a dangerous journey, um, just so you know, I don't know if these things will eventually be possible, right, it's a question about ultimately the biology and physics of the human brain. only the type of digital layer is the relevant one or our identity is a little bit tied to the type of unclonable uh uh uh you know it can't be fully known you know chaotic details of the molecules uh uh uh that you know within the individual sodium ion that you know the channels and the neurons correctly, if you were to go down to the molecular level, then the famous no cloning theorem in quantum mechanics would say: well, you can't make a perfect copy, if you try, you'll have to. make measurements that you know don't tell you what you want and even destroy the original copy that you had, so, you know, I don't know if our identity is tied to these non-clonable physical degrees of freedom. but you know, even without knowing if that's true or not, you know, I mean, it seems like a difference between us and any existing AI that we're wracked by such chaos that no external agent can have at least as much As far as we know, We can have all the relevant information to predict our behavior, so we circle back to AI security, this leads to a very exotic AI security proposition, so we don't teach our AIS to indoctrinate them in a religion. that reveres the ephemeral ephemeral ephemeral analog places of creativity and intelligence in the universe, wherever they are, says to protect them from destruction, to give in to their preferences, those are the ones that matter because you know that they are the ones that in a way are the only ones. have the only chance uh now I don't know if this is a good idea uh you know in a different universe maybe I fell in love with a different idea but here I fell in love with this one and unfortunately you can't You can back me up and see a different one so it's okay, thank you.