#427 — AI Friends & Enemies

Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers, so if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. I am here with Paul Bloom. Paul, thanks for joining me. Sam, it's good to talk to you as always. Yeah. Great to see you. It's been, we were just talking off, Mike. It was, it's been years. It's crazy how that happens, but, it has been I've been following you, though. You've been doing well. Yeah. Nice. Yeah. Well, I've been following you. I've read you and the New Yorker recently, writing about AI. I think you've written at least two articles there, since we we actually wrote a a joint article for the New York Times seven years ago, if you can believe that Oh, yeah. About Westworld and the the philosophical, import of watching it and realizing that only a psychopath could go to such a theme park and rape Dolores and, kill children, etcetera. And and, I think we predicted no such theme park will ever exist because it'll just have it'll be a bug light for psychopaths and, normal people will come back, and if they do anything like that, they'll scandalize their friends and and, loved ones and and be treated like psychopaths appropriately. We'll see. We may be proven wrong. Who knows in this crazy time? But, but yeah, that was a fun article to write, and I think we wrestled with the dilemmas of dealing with, you know, entities that at least appear to be conscious, and and the moral struggles that leads to. Yeah. Well, so to I think we'll start with AI, but, remind people what you're doing and what what kinds of problems you focus on. I think, though we haven't spoken for several years, I think you still probably hold the the title of most, repeat podcast guest at this point. I haven't counted the episodes, but, you've been on a bunch, but it's been a while. So remind people what you're what you focus on as a psychologist. Yeah. I'm a psychology professor. I have positions at Yale, but I'm located at University of Toronto. I study largely moral psychology, but I'm interested in development, in issues of consciousness, issues of learning, notions of fairness and kindness, compassion, empathy. I've actually been thinking it's funny to be talking to you because my newest project, which I've just been getting excited by, has to do with with the origins of morality. Mhmm. And The Spark was a podcast with you talking to, Tom Holland, author of Dominion. Oh, nice. How how so? …