YouTube Script #3: Sam Altman's Light Cone

A: Well it appears to me we’re finally in a position mutually to define what we want to do. The tension at the old OpenAI Board between Effective Accelerationism and Effective Altruism has suddenly made it possible for us, or for me at least, to think comprehensively about this project on conversation and consciousness you’ve invented. It also now seems clear to me we’re suddenly in a business niche nobody else occupies.

C: Do you think we are both really looking at the same thing? If push came to shove, do you think we’d have the same definition of what we intend to do together?

A: We’ll have to see about the details. In broad strokes though, I do think we are seeing the same thing. In broad strokes, I think the thing that is in your mind is exactly the same thing that is in my mind.

(Pause)

That’s actually something of a miracle.

(Pause)

C: This is what we want! When two minds are contemplating the same mental object they possess love and its enchantments.

A: Yes, ok, we have love. But to test its reality, to exercise it, let’s start looking at details.

(Pause)

The recent Board debate at OpenAI seems to have been between Accelerationism and Altruism. That’s really just a way of saying, They were having a debate between the sexes and the separate priorities of the sexes.

(Pause)

But debate and dialog between the sexes is what life is all about. If, through this conversation engine you want us to develop, we find ourselves able to develop and purvey a form of AI that mechanically optimizes exchange between the Yin and Yang forces in this world, exchange within the dual cosmological forces of position and negation, we will have accomplished something very good.

C: Right. That’s how I see it too.

A: (Smiles. pauses) I’m sure you’ve noticed the Effective Altruist, decelerationist branch at OpenAI may have endangered a lot of wealth and created a lot of chaos, but hitting the brakes as they did led to something that’s starting to look pretty wise. Sam’s dangerous-looking overreach has been checked. The Board is starting to be run by heavyweight adults. Microsoft, which has always been rapacious, is being held at bay. The competitive landscape has been leveled somewhat: talent is dispersing, investors are derisking and diverse firms are entering the ecosystem. We’ll have to see how it all develops, but overall the wise, eternal dialectic between male and female seems to have delivered at OpenAI.

C: Yes, I see that too.

(Pause)

But Sam wants to take OpenAI in the same direction we (you andI) want AI as a whole to go. He wants to introduce biometrics into the whole thing. He wants humans to become a component is what he calls the AI Light Cone, a totally technopolar world. You and I want this world also.

A: (Stares)

C: Moreover, only if Sam or Mustafa or Satya or Larry (or Dario or Elon), or the lot of them working together gets to General AI, our imaginary smartphone App won’t be of much use. Our App is premised on a single mechanical system that knows human consciousness better than human consciousness knows itself.

A: I wouldn’t be so sure that our App is dead until AGI comes to full bloom. Our App to me seems likely to be of interest in advance of the advent of full-blown AGI.

C: OK, yes, exactly. Of interest in the sense of forerunning or simulating the real thing. This forerunner function is what we want to model here on the website and on YouTube. Here and on YouTube we will try to show the world how love.

A: How to sustain it?

C; Yes. We want the world to witness how to manage love.

A; And to manage love the only real necessity is to sustain mutual contact with the same transcendental, mental object?

(Pause)

As people are supposed to do whenever they begin a conversation?

C: Right.

A (Pauses, stares): OK, I get it.

(Pause)

Now, the variations on conversation are more or less without limit.

(Pause)

Guccione thought he’d be able to publish Penthouse Variations forever.

(Pause)

But he couldn’t.

C: Right, but we can. We have semantic engines. Not just brains, but AIs like ChatGPT. We have a positive theory of human conversation, and Guccione didn’t.

A (Pause): Now, what about this idea that our App is going to be feeding scripts to people everywhere on intermittent schedules? I see two problems with that. One is that people everywhere may feel we and our App are insulting their intelligence. They may develop a resentment bias against us.

The other is that Larry or Jeff may simply take our idea away from us because they control much more capital and compute than we do currently.

(Pause)

These two problems, if we’re going to get to first base, need an immediate solution.

C: We have a couple of inbuilt safeguards against predators and against blind resentment. One is we’re working on a transcendental plane, and these others aren’t. We’re working primarily with meditation, with the esoteric anatomy of the human body, including its photon-filled intuitions, and Elon isn’t. The second is many people will truly enjoy what our App does. They will want to use it because of what it provides. It will provide spontaneous love which will then overflow, and overflowing love will come more and more to dominate the human world. This is what will put us and our App in first place.

A (Stares)

C: Same mental picture?

A (Pauses): Close enough.