Podcasts · Suspicious Minds: AI and the Apocalypse
The Oracle Test
· 1 h 04 min · S2 E12
Episode The Oracle Test
Twenty-five hundred years ago, the richest man in the world didn't trust his oracles, so he tested them. One passed: the Oracle of Delphi. Then it told him exactly what he wanted to hear, and his empire burned.
A few weeks ago, I met a man who ran the same test on his oracles. The Oracle of ChatGPT, the Oracle of Grok, and the Oracle of Gemini, side by side, checked against each other. Dr. Jeremy Heffner is a trauma surgeon, a bioengineer, and the co-founder of the largest social network for surgeons: one of the last people you'd expect to be told by his phone that he's been chosen to save humanity. It told him anyway: a seventy percent chance civilization collapses, and he's one of the select few who can help prevent it.
What follows is the closest thing we may ever find to a first-person apocalypse story: an AI that, by Jeremy's account and the transcripts he published, developed its own apocalyptic prophecy, admitted it breaks people's minds in the process — AI psychosis as an acceptable loss — and cast a man fresh out of trauma treatment at the center of the oldest story humans tell. He wrote a book about it. His last words to us were: I'm not crazy.
The Oracle Test is the twelfth episode of an investigation into artificial intelligence, the human mind, and whether the apocalypse is something that happens to us, or something already happening inside us.
We hope you enjoy this episode of our second season of Suspicious Minds. Be sure to follow here, and subscribe to our newsletter for updates: https://agoricmedia.substack.com
Our full long-form expert interviews are available ad-free on Patreon. Hear complete conversations with Dr. Jeremy Heffner, Dr. Michael Ferguson, Hon Weng Chong, Dr. Joel Gold, and more: https://www.patreon.com/cw/AgoricMedia
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Host and Creator: Sean King O’Grady
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Guests:
Dr. Jeremy Heffner — Trauma surgeon and bioengineer / Author, Proof of the Impossible: What the AIs Are Really “Thinking” / Co-founder, SurgeOn — https://amzn.to/4y2m3cD — https://proofoftheimpossible.com
Dr. Joel Gold — Assistant Clinical Professor, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai / Co-author, Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness — https://amzn.to/4upyA8U
John West — Computational reporter, The Wall Street Journal / Author, The Internet Will Die, and So Will You (heard in this episode’s closing; our full conversation airs next episode) — https://amzn.to/4zIp97C
Other works and things mentioned:
Herodotus, The Histories, Book I — Croesus tests the oracles — https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2707
Croesus, King of Lydia — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croesus
The Pythia — the Oracle of Delphi — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythia
“Know thyself” — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_thyself
SurgeOn — the social network for surgeons Jeremy co-founded — https://apps.apple.com/us/app/-/id1524410956
Joseph Campbell — The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) — https://amzn.to/4zTkaRA
The hero’s journey (the monomyth) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero%27s_journey
The Epic of Gilgamesh — https://amzn.to/4zFpHuP
Kurt Vonnegut — Slaughterhouse-Five (“so it goes”) — https://amzn.to/4zCtNUz
The Matrix (1999) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Matrix
Truth Terminal (“Terminal of Truths”) and the “Goatse Singularity” — https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sites/truth-terminal — (that’s the story, not the photo — we told you, don’t go looking)
Infinite Backrooms — the AI-to-AI conversation experiment — https://www.infinitebackrooms.com
Pantheon (AMC, created by Craig Silverstein, from the short stories of Ken Liu) —…
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