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Yeah. So I was there when we had these AI companies that were able to write one program that could play many video games. And that got me thinking about like, where does it go? And back then I could see that the progress was increasing. And that back then I hoped we had decades, but I could see it was easier for these companies to make the AIs smart than to figure out how to make the AIs good. So I was like, someone needs to be on the side of figuring out how to make the AIs good.
Nate Soares · The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett · AI Debate Ed Zitron, Andrew McAfee, Nate Soares, Roman Yampolskiy · 2026-09-17Sorry, Gary Tan is a technologist who runs Y Combinator, which Sam Altman used to run before going to OpenAI. And on an interview the other day, he said, let's not worry about these crazy future risks. We need to worry about current harms like AI swarms breaking out and taking over data centers. And I'm like, look, guys, at some point we need to look at the progression of the current harms that everyone is saying we have to worry about instead of the extinction threats and watch where the puck is going. Play where the puck is going. And I'm like, these extinction threats are coming down the line. They aren't in opposition with dealing with the problems we have today. We just need to deal with both.
Nate Soares · The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett · AI Debate Ed Zitron, Andrew McAfee, Nate Soares, Roman Yampolskiy · 2026-09-17Thousands of people. Okay. Fair enough. But we have datasets of accidents getting progressively more impactful. More devices are impacted and proportionate to capabilities of AI, the impact is higher. You can see it's going to get worse.
Roman Yampolskiy · The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett · AI Debate Ed Zitron, Andrew McAfee, Nate Soares, Roman Yampolskiy · 2026-09-17So let's go, just to pick up, question for you, Andy. Do you concede the point that the incidents are getting progressively closer to the Waymo incident that you described? Is it getting, are we getting closer there through time?
Steven Bartlett · The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett · AI Debate Ed Zitron, Andrew McAfee, Nate Soares, Roman Yampolskiy · 2026-09-17I'm a lot less, I'm less confident and I don't want to intervene and again, handcuff or retard the, slow down the progress of AI because of these so far theoretical harms that could happen. Let me be a little bit more concrete about this. I talked about Waymo a second ago. The research is pretty good because Waymos have driven, I believe it's hundreds millions of miles all around different cities. And 40,000 people a year die in automobile accidents. The research is pretty convincing to me that if we Waymo'd driving in the country, that number would fall by at least 90%. That's 30,000 lives.
Andrew McAfee · The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett · AI Debate Ed Zitron, Andrew McAfee, Nate Soares, Roman Yampolskiy · 2026-09-17I do want to hop in a little bit on some things we were saying here. One is, I think I think the reason I think AI is different from a lot of other technologies is usually humanity does stuff by trial and error, and that's usually fine. I think that's totally fine for self-driving cars because you can test your self-driving cars in test environments, and then even if they crash in the real world, you're probably still saving more lives than you're costing. This is how humanity usually does scientific progress. The alchemists poison themselves with mercury, but they leave behind notes that let someone else make the periodic table. When the scientists first working with radium died of cancer, and then you might have think that would've been enough, they were heroes for getting us the scientific info, but then the US Radium Corp told the radium girls to lick the paintbrushes and their jaws fell off, and then we were like, "Ah, whoops, okay. To this.
Nate Soares · The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett · AI Debate Ed Zitron, Andrew McAfee, Nate Soares, Roman Yampolskiy · 2026-09-17So I just want to understand, would you stop AI research and progress now?
Andrew McAfee · The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett · AI Debate Ed Zitron, Andrew McAfee, Nate Soares, Roman Yampolskiy · 2026-09-17That's a nice way to say it. The question is, what's the pace at which the level of bad can happen? And that's a huge open question. I think you two feel differently about it than I do, but I'm in the happy position of vehemently agreeing with you on this. We have been lowballing AI progress for as long as you've been looking at it and as long as I've been looking at it. It's probably a mistake to keep lowballing it.
Andrew McAfee · The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett · AI Debate Ed Zitron, Andrew McAfee, Nate Soares, Roman Yampolskiy · 2026-09-17I'm tired of debating superintelligence with these two. The three of us are not going to come to alignment on this. But the flip side of the argument is, I agree with you, this stuff is getting better very quickly. All I want to point out, there's an upside to that. We might actually speed up the pace of drug discovery, of solving diseases. We've made so little progress on terrible diseases like dementia. We have a very powerful toolkit. I'm not saying we're going solve dementia with AI or Alzheimer's with AI. I truly have no idea. But if what you say is true, and I believe about the huge increases in capabilities, our ability to solve tough problems that will benefit humanity also go up. And where I disagree with these two is the idea that some group of technocrats can make decisions about that AI is going to get us there, that AI is not going to get us there, that AI is going to kill us. Let me finish. That AI is going to kill us and that AI is going to solve Alzheimer's. So we're going to do that and not that.
Andrew McAfee · The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett · AI Debate Ed Zitron, Andrew McAfee, Nate Soares, Roman Yampolskiy · 2026-09-17This has been clarified. But one thing that's becoming clear to me, and I think a point of disagreement between us is we agree that these agentic systems have a huge amount of agency, right? And if you're saying you predicted this, I believe you and good on you, right? Because as you say, a lot of people said it never happened, never happened. I think we continue to under— your community continues to underestimate human agency, human ability to deal with the problems that, that we bring into the world with our technologies. I think this is the most recent case. I think it's a really interesting case. That's why I was pressing you on the incentive that these labs have to change the way they're approaching their work, to have fewer of these kinds of incidents happen. I predict they're going to come up with some effective responses. Your response to that will be, yeah, but we can't tell. That's because the AI went so deep underground that we can't even watch it make its progress.
Andrew McAfee · The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett · AI Debate Ed Zitron, Andrew McAfee, Nate Soares, Roman Yampolskiy · 2026-09-17But you're also saying that we will not make progress in staving off the outcomes that you're worried about.
Andrew McAfee · The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett · AI Debate Ed Zitron, Andrew McAfee, Nate Soares, Roman Yampolskiy · 2026-09-17I'm referencing the paper that you were mentioning by Daniel and some of his colleagues, and the key milestone predictions month by month are in March 2027, they forecast superhuman coders. In August 2027, they haven't— you can make a superhuman AI researcher who could do the feedback loop that accelerates as millions of automated coders work on model design, training algorithms, and alignment, effectively replacing human ML researchers. By November 2027, they have super intelligent AI researcher. AI progress speeds up to 250 times compared to human-only research. The models start discovering novel AI architectures that humans cannot interrupt. And then by December 2027, they have in their prediction artificial super intelligence, ASI. The system completely outpaces human cognitive abilities across all domains.
Steven Bartlett · The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett · AI Debate Ed Zitron, Andrew McAfee, Nate Soares, Roman Yampolskiy · 2026-09-17I think we've spent an alarming amount of time not talking about the actual harms of AI as it is today. I think these are necessary conversations to have. I think we should talk about the fact that Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Oracle are helping power these hacks, that Sam Altman and Dario Amadei have overseen companies that have done what is tantamount to felony hacking, that we are not having discussions about how to stop this today, but what we might stop tomorrow. And I think in general, we also need to worry about the financials, which have not come come up at all. But if there is an industry slowdown, how do you deal with the $1.3 trillion of compute commitments? All of these are very real things that will have very real consequences very, very soon. But, and I understand why, and it's necessary to discuss what we do around AI, the actual regulatory thing we need to do today is cut off the compute, slow down these labs fully. And I don't, I don't care about China here. What are they gonna do, distill a model like they have the time, they are capped on our progress. So what the biggest thing to do is to slow down.
Ed Zitron · The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett · AI Debate Ed Zitron, Andrew McAfee, Nate Soares, Roman Yampolskiy · 2026-09-17So for all those people that say, hey, we're going to have 3 rate hikes, 4 rate hikes, and indeed until September next year, we have 3 further rate hikes priced in. Nobody has a clue. The Fed doesn't have a clue. The data are going to speak. The market is going to speak. Right. And the test is going to be, is there enough progress being made on inflation in the context of everything else that happens? And, and Kevin Walsh actually pointed to the areas Um, I know I might actually confuse that with somebody else who talked to Bloomberg earlier, but, but he— I think he alluded to, to areas where he wants to see progress on inflation. Clearly, on something like oil, it's difficult because it's driven by, um, by, by the war in Iran, but we should have a better handle on it. And the data are going to dictate the next rate hike. So this notion of how people hawkish or dovish I think are going to play less than what the data are going to do in practice.
Axel Merk · Thoughtful Money with Adam Taggart · SPECIAL REPORT: Fed Hikes Rates! | Axel Merk · 2026-09-17And to just add to that, right, once more, some people said, oh my God, Kevin boxed himself in, right? Because there was an over 90% chance of a rate hike. Well, Kevin said not enough progress is made. The next data in inflation showed there isn't more progress made. Market says, aha, there's going to be a rate hike. And it's the market boxing itself in based on the data.
Axel Merk · Thoughtful Money with Adam Taggart · SPECIAL REPORT: Fed Hikes Rates! | Axel Merk · 2026-09-17