Sam Harris

Sam Harris is a neuroscientist, philosopher, New York Times best-selling author, host of Making Sense, and creator of Waking Up.

Widely respected as one of the important intellectuals of our time, his work touches on a range of topics, including rationality, religion, ethics,  free will, neuroscience, meditation, philosophy of mind, politics, terrorism, and artificial intelligence.
He has been a champion of rationality (one of the famous “Four Horsemen of the Non-Apocalypse”), highly influential in promoting rationality and scientific thinking over dogma and unchallenged beliefs while still preserving spirituality and valuing esoteric experiences like compassion, awe and devotion.

Harris is particularly concerned with existential risks from artificial general intelligence, which he has discussed in depth, arguing it will be a major threat in the near future and criticising the paucity of human interest on the subject.

Can we build AI without losing control over it? | Sam Harris

October 19, 2016 6:36 pm

Scared of superintelligent AI? You should be, says neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris -- and not just in some theoretical way. We're going to build superhuman machines, says Harris, but we haven't yet grappled with the problems associated with creating something that may treat us the way we treat ants.

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WARNING: ChatGPT Could Be The Start Of The End! Sam Harris

August 7, 2023 9:00 am

In this new episode Steven sits down with philosopher, neuroscientist, podcast host and author Sam Harris.

00:00 Intro
02:02 6 years later, where do you stand on AI?
16:36 Is this not the most pressing problem?
33:16 Why I deleted twitter
45:43 Narrow AI
58:26 The meaning of AGI
01:02:00 In the age of AI how do we create purpose?
01:10:06 Who will AI replace?
01:14:41 Should we be doing universal basic income?
01:21:40 Would you stop AI if you could?
01:27:31 How do we change our minds to be happier?
01:34:28 Why not lying & telling the truth will make you happier
01:41:28 The last guests question

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Sam Harris update on dangers of AI | Lex Fridman Podcast Clips

March 17, 2023 12:00 am

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Lex Fridman argues with Sam Harris about AI

May 22, 2021 1:00 am

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Building Mechanical Gods | Sam Harris on the Dangers of AI

January 15, 2020 9:00 pm

Sam Harris and Joe Rogan discuss the future of Artificial Intelligence, the inevitability of General AI and how we could be giving birth to the very thing that will destroy us.

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Making Sense of Artificial Intelligence

November 23, 2022 12:37 am

Filmmaker Jay Shapiro has produced a new series of audio documentaries, exploring the major topics that Sam has focused on over the course of his career.

Each episode weaves together original analysis, critical perspective, and novel thought experiments with some of the most compelling exchanges from the Making Sense archive. Whether you are new to a particular topic, or think you have your mind made up about it, we think you’ll find this series fascinating.

In this episode, we explore the landscape of Artificial Intelligence. We’ll listen in on Sam’s conversation with decision theorist and artificial-intelligence researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky, as we consider the potential dangers of AI — including the control problem and the value-alignment problem — as well as the concepts of Artificial General Intelligence, Narrow Artificial Intelligence, and Artificial Super Intelligence.

We’ll then be introduced to philosopher Nick Bostrom’s “Genies, Sovereigns, Oracles, and Tools,” as physicist Max Tegmark outlines just how careful we need to be as we travel down the AI path. Computer scientist Stuart Russell will then dig deeper into the value-alignment problem and explain its importance.

We’ll hear from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt about the geopolitical realities of AI terrorism and weaponization. We’ll then touch the topic of consciousness as Sam and psychologist Paul Bloom turn the conversation to the ethical and psychological complexities of living alongside humanlike AI. Psychologist Alison Gopnik then reframes the general concept of intelligence to help us wonder if the kinds of systems we’re building using “Deep Learning” are really marching us towards our super-intelligent overlords.

Finally, physicist David Deutsch will argue that many value-alignment fears about AI are based on a fundamental misunderstanding about how knowledge actually grows in this universe.

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Can We Contain Artificial Intelligence?: A Conversation with Mustafa Suleyman (Episode #332)

August 29, 2023 9:23 pm

Sam Harris speaks with Mustafa Suleyman about his new book, “The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the 21st Century’s Greatest Dilemma.” They discuss the progress in artificial intelligence made at his company DeepMind, the acquisition of DeepMind by Google, Atari DQN, AlphaGo, AlphaZero, AlphaFold, the invention of new knowledge, the risks of our making progress in AI, “superintelligence” as a distraction from more pressing problems, the inevitable spread of general-purpose technology, the nature of intelligence, productivity growth and labor disruptions, “the containment problem,” the importance of scale, Moore’s law, Inflection AI, open-source LLMs, changing the norms of work and leisure, the redistribution of value, introducing friction into the deployment of AI, regulatory capture, a misinformation apocalypse, digital watermarks, asymmetric threats, conflict and cooperation with China, supply-chain monopolies, and other topics.

Mustafa Suleyman is the co-founder and CEO of Inflection AI. Previously he co-founded DeepMind, one of the world’s leading artificial intelligence companies. After a decade at DeepMind, Suleyman became vice president of AI product management and AI policy at Google. When he was an undergraduate at Oxford, Suleyman dropped out to help start a non-profit telephone counseling service. He lives in Palo Alto, California.

Website: https://www.the-coming-wave.com/

Twitter: @mustafasuleyman

August 28, 2023

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AI & Information Integrity: A Conversation with Nina Schick (Episode #326)

July 7, 2023 2:03 am

Sam Harris speaks with Nina Schick about generative AI and information integrity. They discuss the challenges of regulating AI, authentication vs detection, fake video, hyper-personalization of information, the promise of generative design, productivity gains, disruptions in the labor market, OpenAI, and other topics.

Nina Schick is a globally recognized author, entrepreneur, and advisor specializing in Generative AI. She has made it her mission to democratize AI and make it accessible to everyone, authoring the first book on AI-generated content in 2020. As one of the earliest GenAI experts, Nina analyzes how this nascent field of artificial intelligence will change humanity. Nina is the founder of Tamang Ventures, an advisory firm focused on Generative AI, and the creator of The Era of Generative AI, a 100K+ strong GenAI community featuring the weekly EGAI newsletter, exclusive content, and interviews with the pioneers of this space.

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July 6, 2023

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Sam Harris on AI and GPT-4

April 23, 2023 9:38 pm

Sam discusses recent developments in artificial intelligence. Full episode (#317) available now. ...

AI and the dangers of superhuman intelligence w/ Sam Harris (ChatGPT, LaMDA)

January 17, 2023 9:43 pm

Sam Harris share similar opinion about AI like Elon Musk. It is a thought-provoking topic that delves into the potential risks of continued advancements in artificial intelligence.
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@GPT-AI does not own the rights to these video clips. They have, in accordance with fair use, been repurposed with the intent of educating and inspiring others.


#chatgpt #lexfriedman #openai
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Will Artificial Intelligence Become Conscious? - with Sam Harris

May 24, 2023 8:02 pm

As AI becomes more prevalent in our society, Sam Harris reveals whether or not he believes that it will one day become conscious.

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Sam Harris: The Self is an Illusion | Big Think

September 16, 2014 6:11 pm

Sam Harris describes the properties of consciousness and how mindfulness practices of all stripes can be used to transcend one's ego.
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Sam Harris is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation. The End of Faith won the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction.

Mr. Harris' writing has been published in over ten languages. He and his work have been discussed in Newsweek, TIME, The New York Times, Scientific American, Rolling Stone, and many other journals. His writing has appeared in Newsweek, The Los Angeles Times, The Times (London), The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, Nature, The Annals of Neurology, and elsewhere.

Mr. Harris is a graduate in philosophy from Stanford University and holds a PhD in neuroscience from UCLA, where he studied the neural basis of belief with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). He is also a Co-Founder and CEO of Project Reason.
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TRANSCRIPT

Sam Harris: What one of the problems we have in discussing consciousness scientifically is that consciousness is irreducibly subjective. This is a point that many philosophers have made – Thomas Nagel, John Searle, David Chalmers. While I don’t agree with everything they’ve said about consciousness I agree with them on this point that consciousness is what it’s like to be you. If there’s an experiential internal qualitative dimension to any physical system then that is consciousness. And we can’t reduce the experiential side to talk of information processing and neurotransmitters and states of the brain in our case because – and people want to do this. Someone like Francis Crick said famously you’re nothing but a pack of neurons. And that misses the fact that half of the reality we’re talking about is the qualitative experiential side. So when you’re trying to study human consciousness, for instance, by looking at states of the brain, all you can do is correlate experiential changes with changes in brain states. But no matter how tight these correlations become that never gives you license to throw out the first person experiential side. That would be analogous to saying that if you just flipped a coin long enough you would realize it had only one side. And now it’s true you can be committed to talking about just one side. You can say that heads being up is just a case of tails being down. But that doesn’t actually reduce one side of reality to the other.

And to give you a more precise example, we have very strong third person “objective measures” of things like anxiety and fear at this moment. You bring someone into the lab, they say they’re feeling fear. You can scan their brains with FMRI and see that their amygdala response is heightened. You can measure the sweat on their palms and see that there’s an increased galvanic skin response. You can check their blood cortisol and see that its spiking. So these now are considered objective third person measures of fear. But if half the people came into the lab tomorrow and said they were feeling fear and showed none of these signs and they said they were completely calm when their cortisol spiked and when their palms started to sweat, these objective measures would no longer be reliable measures of fear. So the cash value of a change in physiology is still a change in the first person conscious side of things. And we’re inevitably going to rely on people’s subjective reports to understand whether our correlations are accurate. So the hope that we are going to talk about consciousness shorn of any kind of qualitative internal experiential language, I think, is a false one. So we have to understand both sides of it subjective – classically subjective and objective.

I’m not arguing that consciousness is a reality beyond science or beyond the brain or that it floats free of the brain at death. I’m not making any spooky claims about its metaphysics. What I am saying, however, is that the self is an illusion. The sense of being an ego, an I, a thinker of thoughts in addition to the thoughts. An experiencer in addition to the experience. The sense that we all have of riding around inside our heads as a kind of a passenger in the vehicle of the body. That’s where most people start when they think about any of these questions. Most people don’t feel identical to their bodies. They feel like they have bodies. They feel like they’re inside the body. And most people feel like they’re inside their heads. Now that sense of being a subject, a locus of consciousness inside the head is an illusion.

Transcript continued on: https://bigthink.com/videos/sam-harris-on-self-transendence
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Sam Harris 2018 - IS vs OUGHT, Robots of The Future Might Deceive Us with Eliezer Yudkowsky

April 17, 2018 5:47 pm

Sam Harris 2018 - IS vs OUGHT, Robots of The Future Might Deceive Us with Eliezer Yudkowsky

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The Trouble with AI: A Conversation with Stuart Russell and Gary Marcus (Episode #312)

March 7, 2023 10:48 pm

Sam Harris speaks with Stuart Russell and Gary Marcus about recent developments in artificial intelligence and the long-term risks of producing artificial general intelligence (AGI). They discuss the limitations of Deep Learning, the surprising power of narrow AI, ChatGPT, a possible misinformation apocalypse, the problem of instantiating human values, the business model of the Internet, the meta-verse, digital provenance, using AI to control AI, the control problem, emergent goals, locking down core values, programming uncertainty about human values into AGI, the prospects of slowing or stopping AI progress, and other topics.

Stuart Russell is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley, holder of the Smith-Zadeh Chair in Engineering, and Director of the Center for Human-Compatible AI. He is an Honorary Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, an Andrew Carnegie Fellow, and a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His book, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, co-authored with Peter Norvig, is the standard text in AI, used in 1500 universities in 135 countries. Russell is also the author of Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control. His research covers a wide range of topics in artificial intelligence, with a current emphasis on the long-term future of artificial intelligence and its relation to humanity. He has developed a new global seismic monitoring system for the nuclear-test-ban treaty and is currently working to ban lethal autonomous weapons.
Website: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~russell/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stuartjonathanrussell/

Gary Marcus is a scientist, best-selling author, and entrepreneur. He is well-known for his challenges to contemporary AI, anticipating many of the current limitations decades in advance, and for his research in human language development and cognitive neuroscience. He was Founder and CEO of Geometric Intelligence, a machine-learning company acquired by Uber in 2016. His most recent book, Rebooting AI, co-authored with Ernest Davis, is one of Forbes’s 7 Must Read Books in AI. His podcast Humans versus Machines, will come later this spring.
Website: garymarcus.com
Twitter: @GaryMarcus

March 7, 2023

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