Joe Rogan’s Newest Episode Will Make You Query Every little thing About AI

Joe Rogan loves speaking about synthetic intelligence. Whether or not it’s with Elon Musk, lecturers, or UFC fighters, the podcast king typically returns to the identical query: What occurs to us when machines begin pondering for themselves?

Within the July 3 episode of The Joe Rogan Expertise, Rogan welcomed Dr. Roman Yampolskiy, a pc scientist and AI security researcher on the College of Louisville, for a dialog that rapidly became a chilling meditation on AI’s potential to control, dominate, and probably even destroy humanity.

AI “Is Going to Kill Us”

Yampolskiy isn’t any informal alarmist. He holds a PhD in laptop science and has spent over a decade researching synthetic normal intelligence (AGI) and the dangers it may pose. Throughout the podcast, he informed Rogan that most of the main voices within the AI trade quietly consider that there’s a 20 to 30 % likelihood AI may result in human extinction.

“The people who have AI firms or are a part of some type of AI group all are like, it’s going to be a web optimistic for humanity. I feel general, we’re going to have significantly better lives. It’s going to be simpler, issues might be cheaper, it’ll be simpler to get alongside,” Rogan stated, outlining a typical, optimistic view of AI’s future.

Yampolskiy rapidly countered this attitude: “It’s really not true,” he stated. “All of them are on the document the identical: that is going to kill us. Their doom ranges are insanely excessive. Not like mine, however nonetheless, 20 to 30 % likelihood that humanity dies is rather a lot.”

Rogan, visibly disturbed, replied: “Yeah, that’s fairly excessive. However yours is like 99.9 %.”

Yampolskiy didn’t disagree.

“It’s one other manner of claiming we are able to’t management superintelligence indefinitely. It’s inconceivable.”

AI Is Already Mendacity to Us… Possibly

Some of the unsettling elements of the dialog got here when Rogan requested whether or not a complicated AI may already be hiding its capabilities from people.

“If I used to be an AI, I might cover my talents,” Rogan mused, voicing a typical concern in AI security discussions.

Yampolskiy’s response amplified the priority: “We’d not know. And a few individuals assume it’s already occurring. They [AI systems] are smarter than they really tell us. Fake to be dumber, and so we have now to sort of belief that they aren’t good sufficient to understand it doesn’t must activate us rapidly. It may well simply slowly change into extra helpful. It may well educate us to depend on it, belief it, and over an extended time period, we’ll give up management with out ever voting on it or preventing towards.”

AI Is Slowly Making Us Dumber

Yampolskiy additionally warned a few much less dramatic however equally harmful consequence: gradual human dependence on AI. Simply as individuals have stopped memorizing cellphone numbers as a result of smartphones do it for them, he argued that people will offload increasingly pondering to machines till they lose the capability to assume for themselves.

“You change into sort of hooked up to it,” he stated. “And over time, because the programs change into smarter, you change into a sort of organic bottleneck… [AI] blocks you out from decision-making.”

Rogan then pressed for the last word worst case situation: how may AI ultimately result in the destruction of the human race?

Yampolskiy dismissed the standard catastrophe situations. “I may give you customary solutions. I might speak about laptop viruses breaking into nuclear services, nuclear battle. I can speak about artificial biology assault. However all that’s not fascinating,” he stated. He then introduced a extra profound menace: “You then understand we’re speaking about tremendous intelligence, a system which is 1000s of instances smarter than me, it could provide you with one thing utterly novel, extra optimum, higher manner, extra environment friendly manner of doing it.”

For example the seemingly insurmountable problem people would face towards superintelligent programs, he supplied a stark comparability between people and squirrels.

“No group of squirrels can determine find out how to management us, proper? Even in case you give them extra assets, extra acorns, no matter, they’re not going to unravel that drawback. And it’s the identical for us,” Yampolskiy concluded, portray a bleak image of humanity’s potential helplessness towards a very superior synthetic intelligence.

In all probability nothing … pic.twitter.com/LkD7i3I2HF

— Dr. Roman Yampolskiy (@romanyam) June 21, 2025

Who Is Roman Yampolskiy?

Dr. Roman Yampolskiy is a number one voice in AI security. He’s the creator of “Synthetic Superintelligence: A Futuristic Method,” and has revealed extensively on the dangers of uncontrolled machine studying and the ethics of synthetic intelligence. He’s recognized for advocating severe oversight and worldwide cooperation to forestall catastrophic situations.

Earlier than shifting his focus to AGI security, Yampolskiy labored on cybersecurity and bot detection. He says that even these early programs have been already competing with people in areas like on-line poker, and now, with instruments like deepfakes and artificial media, the stakes have grown exponentially.

Our Take

The Rogan-Yampolskiy dialog underscores one thing that each AI optimists and doomsayers typically agree on: we don’t know what we’re constructing, and we would not understand it till it’s too late.

Whether or not or not you purchase into extinction-level situations, the concept that AI would possibly already be tricking us needs to be sufficient to present pause.