Artificial Intelligence and the Containment Problem | Mustafa Suleyman

In Episode 336 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Google DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman about the containment problem and the AI dilemma that he outlines in his book, “The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma."

Mustafa Suleyman and Demetri discuss the rapid advancement and proliferation of Artificial Intelligence and Synthetic Biology, why this revolution is going to be fundamentally different from past periods of rapid technological change, and what can be done to solve the containment problem and prevent some of the more catastrophic outcomes from occurring, while still reaping the benefits of this next wave of innovation.

The first hour of this episode is spent exploring how these AI systems work, how they learn, and how they perceive the world, as well as why they are so difficult to contain. And yet, we need to contain them if we want to avoid some of the more catastrophic outcomes like synthetically engineered pandemics, pandemics of public confusion that undermine our sense of reality, and moves toward totalitarianism or civilization-ending anarchy.

In the second hour, Kofinas and Suleyman discuss various versions of what success and failure might look like and what we can do as a society to help move us closer toward the future that we want and away from dystopian nightmares that we’ve all seen depicted in some of the most famous movies of the last half-century. 

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Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas

Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou

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Episode Recorded on 10/23/2023