Halting the Race to Superintelligence, with Kevin Lotto

Kevin Lotto is a volunteer with the Torchbearer Community, a regular AI safety speaker with the AI Safety Awareness Project in Wisconsin, and co-founder of the Control AI Wisconsin Action Group. He is also a daily power user of the same AI tools he advocates regulating, which puts him squarely in the tension this show is built around.

We start with what people get wrong about AI company economics, and why the profitability debate may be a sideshow to a bigger race. From there we get into why modern LLMs are grown more than engineered, the Bitter Lesson, and the difference between AGI and ASI. We take on the “just build an off switch” argument, the Moloch trap that pushes businesses to adopt AI faster than they’d like, and the multitasking trap of running too many agents at once. We also cover how business leaders can roll out AI with guardrails, how listeners can engage their lawmakers, the argument that China makes slowing down impossible, and the case for narrow AI as an alternative to the race toward general intelligence.

We close on whether there’s cause for optimism, and on a question the show keeps coming back to: AI isn’t going away, so how do we steer it, and is the real problem less the technology itself than the speed of the race around it?

🔗 Episode Links:
- Kevin Lotto on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinlotto/
- Torchbearer Community: https://www.torchbearer.community/
- ControlAI: https://controlai.com
- The Bitter Lesson (Richard Sutton): http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html
- Meditations on Moloch (Scott Alexander): https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
- Max Tegmark: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Tegmark
- Instadocs: AI Gone Wild (Netflix): https://www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/instadocs-ai-gone-wild-release-date-news