YouTube's transcript (with significant editing by me, mostly to clean and format):
Now the guys that are building the autonomous cars, they don't think they're building autonomous cars. They know perfectly well what they're doing. They're building fleets of mutually intercommunicating autonomous robots and each of them will to be able to teach the other because their nervous system will be the same and when there's ten million of them, when one of them learns something all ten million of them will learn it at the same time. They're not gonna have to be very bright before they're very very very smart.
Because us, you know, we'll learn something. You have to imitate it, God that's hard. Or I have to explain it to you and you have to understand it and then you have to act it out. We're not connected wirelessly with the same platform, but robots they are and so once those things get a little bit smart they're not going to stop at a little bit smart for very long they're gonna be unbelievably smart like overnight.
And they're imitating the hell out of us right now too because we're teaching them how to understand us every second of every day the net is learning what we're like. It's watching us, it's communicating with us, it's imitating us and it's gonna know. It already knows in some ways more about us than we know about ourselves. There's lots of reports already of people getting pregnancy ads or ads for infants, sometimes before they know they're pregnant, but often before they've told their families. The way that that happens is the net is watching what they're looking at and inferring with its artificial intelligence and so maybe you're pregnant that's just tilting you a little bit to interest in things that you might not otherwise be interested in. The net tracks that, then it tells you what you're after it does that by offering an advertisement. It's reading your unconscious mind.
Well, so that's what's happening.
Based on the transcript this does not sound like a FOOM discussion (as in rapid self-improvement) other than mentioning "group learning" by autonomous cars, which is maybe somewhat related. Also the pregnancy ad story is much more about pattern recognition with lots of data than any serious AI.
Basically JP is, in this area, a complete layman (unlike Gates, Musk, or, from the other side, Pinker) whose opinion counts for little and not talking about FOOM anyway.
Yeah, it's sort of awkward that there are two different things one might want to talk about with FOOM: the idea of recursive self improvement in the typical I.J. Good sense, and the "human threshold isn't special and can be blown past quickly" idea. AlphaZero being able to hit the superhuman level at Go after 3 days of training, and doing so only a year or two after any professional Go player was defeated by a computer, feels relevant to the second thing but not the first (and is connected to the 'fleets of cars will learn very differently' thing Peterson is pointing at).
[And the two actually are distinct; RSI is an argument for 'blowing past humans is possible' but many 'slow takeoff' views look more like "RSI pulls humans along with it" than "things look slow to a Martian," and there's ways to quickly blow past humans that don't involve RSI.]
I don't think Gates, Musk, or Pinker should count as much more than laymen when it comes to AI risk, either.
"once those things get a little bit smart they're not going to stop at a little bit smart for very long they're gonna be unbelievably smart like overnight. "
Celebrity opinions count for something in ways that expert opinions do not. They seem to reach more people, for one thing. That's partially because people just accept what celebrities say because they admire them, but it seems to me that it's also because celebrities tend to find ways of expressing the essence of ideas that are more accessible to laypeople.
Anyway, for whatever the reason, celebrities who openly express their opinions can make a difference, and I think we should celebrate when one of them gets something right and is willing to talk about it.
What interest me about this transcript (without going too much off-topic) is how Jordan Peterson uses the same words over and over in a way that it sounds somewhat pleasant or easy to understand. I wonder at what conscious level he does that and if its predetermined; it seems that it has worked out rather fine for him.