Episode 24: The Myth of AI Doom, with Cal Newport

[upbeat music] Welcome back to Dreaming Against the Machine. I'm your host, Adam Becker. This week's guest is Cal Newport. Cal is a professor of computer science at Georgetown University, and he's also the author of quite a few books, more books than I thought he was the author of, as I find out during this conversation. Uh, he's probably best known for his book Deep Work, and I thought we were gonna get to talk about that during this conversation, but that is not what happened. We got caught up talking about AI doomers and AGI cultists who are pervasive throughout Silicon Valley's AI industry. And the reason we ended up talking about that is, uh, also the same reason that I know Cal. Cal read my book, More Everything Forever, and then wrote an op-ed for The New York Times that came out earlier this month about the influence that ideas like rationalism and effective altruism and all these other ideologies of technological salvation that I wrote about in my book, the influence that these things have on the AI industry in Silicon Valley. And, you know, he's a computer scientist, so he has a interesting and unique perspective on it. Then a few days after [laughs] that came out in the Times, this guy Coxon left Anthropic and said he thinks that there's a good chance that what they're building there is going to destroy all of humanity, and he quoted major rationalists in his justification for this. And then other people at Anthropic said, "Oh, yeah, yeah, we agree with him," and the whole thing got kind of weird. So Cal and I, uh, decided to have a conversation about this. And yeah, okay, we didn't get to talk about Deep Work, but that just means we're gonna have to bring him back. So here's Cal Newport. [upbeat music] Cal, welcome to Dreaming Against the Machine.

Well, thanks for having me, Adam. I got a lot to talk about.

Yeah. [laughs] Well, let's, let's introduce you for our listeners. Uh, you are a professor of computer science at Georgetown, yeah?

Yep, that's right. I'm a computer scientist trained originally in distributed system theory-

Mm-hmm

... but have morphed over the years into also a digital ethicist, technology critic, someone who grapples with technology and its impact. So-

Yeah

... I've got a foot in both the worlds of building the technology and then worrying about the technology that we build.

No, that sounds like a good recipe for an anxiety disorder, so you know, uh, good on you.

I'm anxious all the time. Yep.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you've also written, what, two, three books? Uh, uh-

Eight.

Oh, sh-

My ninth is coming out in March. Yeah, [laughs] I've been at it for a while.

Whoops. Sorry. [laughs] Damn. Uh... [laughs]

I started young, Adam. That's how that works out, yeah.

Um, I was, I was gonna ask, you must write your books pretty fast.

I wrote my first one as an undergrad, so it's a sl- it's all a matter-

Whoa

... of, of, uh, aggregation over time. That's the secret for everything.

Wow. Yeah, no, I think that if I had tried to write my first book when I was an undergrad, I would have died.

Well, let me assure you, my first book was exceedingly dumber than your first book. So this is-

[laughs]

You know, my first books I wrote were student