Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Full Transcript: Eliezer Yudkowsky on the Bankless podcast, published by remember on February 23, 2023 on LessWrong.

This podcast has gotten a lot of traction, so we're posting a full transcript of it, lightly edited with ads removed, for those who prefer reading over audio. Eliezer Yudkowsky: I think that we are hearing the last winds start to blow, the fabric of reality start to fray. This thing alone cannot end the world, but I think that probably some of the vast quantities of money being blindly and helplessly piled into here are going to end up actually accomplishing something.

Ryan Sean Adams: Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. This is how to get started, how to get better, how to front run the opportunity. This is Ryan Sean Adams. I'm here with David Hoffman, and we're here to help you become more bankless. Okay, guys, we wanted to do an episode on AI at Bankless, but I feel like David...

David: Got what we asked for.

Ryan: We accidentally waded into the deep end of the pool here. And I think before we get into this episode, it probably warrants a few comments. I'm going to say a few things I'd like to hear from you too. But one thing I want to tell the listener is, don't listen to this episode if you're not ready for an existential crisis. Okay? I'm kind of serious about this. I'm leaving this episode shaken. And I don't say that lightly. In fact, David, I think you and I will have some things to discuss in the debrief as far as how this impacted you. But this was an impactful one. It sort of hit me during the recording, and I didn't know fully how to react. I honestly am coming out of this episode wanting to refute some of the claims made in this episode by our guest, Eliezer Yudkowsky, who makes the claim that humanity is on the cusp of developing an AI that's going to destroy us, and that there's really not much we can do to stop it.

David: There's no way around it.

Ryan: Yeah. I have a lot of respect for this guest. Let me say that. So it's not as if I have some sort of big brain technical disagreement here. In fact, I don't even know enough to fully disagree with anything he's saying. But the conclusion is so dire and so existentially heavy that I'm worried about it impacting you, listener, if we don't give you this warning going in. I also feel like, David, as interviewers, maybe we could have done a better job. I'll say this on behalf of myself. Sometimes I peppered him with a lot of questions in one fell swoop, and he was probably only ready to synthesize one at a time. I also feel like we got caught flat-footed at times. I wasn't expecting his answers to be so frank and so dire, David. It was just a rift of hope. I appreciated very much the honesty, as we always do on Bankless, but I appreciated it almost in the way that a patient might appreciate the honesty of their doctor telling them that their illness is terminal.

It's still really heavy news, isn't it?

So that is the context going into this episode. I will say one thing. In good news, for our failings as interviewers in this episode, they might be remedied because at the end of this episode, after we finished with Hit the Record Button to Stop Recording, Eliezer said, he'd be willing to provide an additional Q&A episode with the Bankless community. So if you guys have questions, and if there's sufficient interest for Eliezer to answer, tweet us to express that interest. Hit us in Discord. Get those messages over to us and let us know if you have some follow-up questions. He said, if there's enough interest in the crypto community, I'll say he'd be willing to come on and do another episode with follow-up Q&A. Maybe even a Vitalik and Eliezer episode is in store. That's a possibility that we threw to him. We've not talked to Vitalik about t...