vtt/episode_026_large.vtt

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 The following is a conversation with Sean Carroll.

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 He's a theoretical physicist at Caltech

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 specializing in quantum mechanics, gravity, and cosmology.

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 He's the author of several popular books,

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 one on the arrow of time called From Eternity to Here,

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 one on the Higgs boson called Particle

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 at the End of the Universe,

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 and one on science and philosophy called The Big Picture

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 on the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself.

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 He has an upcoming book on quantum mechanics

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 that you can preorder now called Something Deeply Hidden.

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 He writes one of my favorite blogs on his website,

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 preposterousuniverse.com.

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 I recommend clicking on the Greatest Hits link

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 that lists accessible, interesting posts

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 on the arrow of time, dark matter, dark energy,

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 the Big Bang, general relativity,

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 string theory, quantum mechanics,

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 and the big meta questions about the philosophy of science,

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 God, ethics, politics, academia, and much, much more.

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 Finally, and perhaps most famously,

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 he's the host of a podcast called Mindscape

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 that you should subscribe to and support on Patreon.

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 Along with the Joe Rogan experience,

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 Sam Harris's Making Sense,

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 and Dan Carlin's Hardcore History,

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 Sean's Mindscape podcast is one of my favorite ways

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 to learn new ideas or explore different perspectives

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 and ideas that I thought I understood.

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 It was truly an honor to meet

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 and spend a couple hours with Sean.

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 It's a bit heartbreaking to say

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 that for the first time ever,

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 the audio recorder for this podcast

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 died in the middle of our conversation.

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 There's technical reasons for this,

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 having to do with phantom power

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 that I now understand and will avoid.

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 It took me one hour to notice and fix the problem.

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 So, much like the universe is 68% dark energy,

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 roughly the same amount from this conversation was lost,

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 except in the memories of the two people involved

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 and in my notes.

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 I'm sure we'll talk again and continue this conversation

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 on this podcast or on Sean's.

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 And of course, I look forward to it.

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 This is the Artificial Intelligence podcast.

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 If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, iTunes,

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 support it on Patreon,

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 or simply connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman.

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 And now, here's my conversation with Sean Carroll.

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 What do you think is more interesting and impactful,

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 understanding how the universe works at a fundamental level

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 or understanding how the human mind works?

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 You know, of course this is a crazy,

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 meaningless, unanswerable question in some sense,

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 because they're both very interesting

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 and there's no absolute scale of interestingness

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 that we can rate them on.

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 There's a glib answer that says the human brain

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 is part of the universe, right?

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 And therefore, understanding the universe

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 is more fundamental than understanding the human brain.

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 But do you really believe that once we understand

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 the fundamental way the universe works

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 at the particle level, the forces,

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 we would be able to understand how the mind works?

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 No, certainly not.

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 We cannot understand how ice cream works

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 just from understanding how particles work, right?

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 So I'm a big believer in emergence.

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 I'm a big believer that there are different ways

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 of talking about the world

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 beyond just the most fundamental microscopic one.

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 You know, when we talk about tables and chairs

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 and planets and people,

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 we're not talking the language of particle physics

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 and cosmology.

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 So, but understanding the universe,

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 you didn't say just at the most fundamental level, right?

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 So understanding the universe at all levels

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 is part of that.

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 I do think, you know, to be a little bit more fair

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 to the question, there probably are general principles

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 of complexity, biology, information processing,

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 memory, knowledge, creativity

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 that go beyond just the human brain, right?

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 And maybe one could count understanding those

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 as part of understanding the universe.

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 The human brain, as far as we know,

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 is the most complex thing in the universe.

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 So there's, it's certainly absurd to think

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 that by understanding the fundamental laws

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 of particle physics,

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 you get any direct insight on how the brain works.

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 But then there's this step from the fundamentals

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 of particle physics to information processing,

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 which a lot of physicists and philosophers

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 may be a little bit carelessly take

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 when they talk about artificial intelligence.

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 Do you think of the universe

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 as a kind of a computational device?

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 No, to be like, the honest answer there is no.

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 There's a sense in which the universe

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 processes information, clearly.

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 There's a sense in which the universe

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 is like a computer, clearly.

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 But in some sense, I think,

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 I tried to say this once on my blog

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 and no one agreed with me,

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 but the universe is more like a computation

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 than a computer because the universe happens once.

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 A computer is a general purpose machine, right?

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 That you can ask it different questions,

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 even a pocket calculator, right?

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 And it's set up to answer certain kinds of questions.

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 The universe isn't that.

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 So information processing happens in the universe,

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 but it's not what the universe is.

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 And I know your MIT colleague, Seth Lloyd,

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 feels very differently about this, right?

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 Well, you're thinking of the universe as a closed system.

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 I am.

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 So what makes a computer more like a PC,

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 like a computing machine is that there's a human

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 that every once comes up to it and moves the mouse around.

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 So input.

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 Gives it input.

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 Gives it input.

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 And that's why you're saying it's just a computation,

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 a deterministic thing that's just unrolling.

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 But the immense complexity of it

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 is nevertheless like processing.

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 There's a state and then it changes with good rules.

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 And there's a sense for a lot of people

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 that if the brain operates,

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 the human brain operates within that world,

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 then it's simply just a small subset of that.

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 And so there's no reason we can't build

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 arbitrarily great intelligences.

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 Yeah.

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 Do you think of intelligence in this way?

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 Intelligence is tricky.

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 I don't have a definition of it offhand.

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 So I remember this panel discussion that I saw on YouTube.

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 I wasn't there, but Seth Lloyd was on the panel.

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 And so was Martin Rees, the famous astrophysicist.

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 And Seth gave his shtick for why the universe is a computer

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 and explained this.

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 And Martin Rees said, so what is not a computer?

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 And Seth was like, oh, that's a good question.

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 I'm not sure.

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 Because if you have a sufficiently broad definition

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 of what a computer is, then everything is, right?

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 And the simile or the analogy gains force

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 when it excludes some things.

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 You know, is the moon going around the earth

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 performing a computation?

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 I can come up with definitions in which the answer is yes,

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 but it's not a very useful computation.

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 I think that it's absolutely helpful

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 to think about the universe in certain situations,

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 certain contexts, as an information processing device.

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 I'm even guilty of writing a paper

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 called Quantum Circuit Cosmology,

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 where we modeled the whole universe as a quantum circuit.

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 As a circuit.

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 As a circuit, yeah.

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 With qubits kind of thing?

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 With qubits basically, right, yeah.

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 So, and qubits becoming more and more entangled.

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 So do we wanna digress a little bit?

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 Let's do it.

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 It's kind of fun.

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 So here's a mystery about the universe

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 that is so deep and profound that nobody talks about it.

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 Space expands, right?

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 And we talk about, in a certain region of space,

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 a certain number of degrees of freedom,

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 a certain number of ways that the quantum fields

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 and the particles in that region can arrange themselves.

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 That number of degrees of freedom in a region of space

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 is arguably finite.

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 We actually don't know how many there are,

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 but there's a very good argument

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 that says it's a finite number.

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 So as the universe expands and space gets bigger,

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 are there more degrees of freedom?

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 If it's an infinite number, it doesn't really matter.

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 Infinity times two is still infinity.

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 But if it's a finite number, then there's more space,

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 so there's more degrees of freedom.

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 So where did they come from?

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 That would mean the universe is not a closed system.

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 There's more degrees of freedom popping into existence.

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 So what we suggested was

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 that there are more degrees of freedom,

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 and it's not that they're not there to start,

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 but they're not entangled to start.

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 So the universe that you and I know of,

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 the three dimensions around us that we see,

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 we said those are the entangled degrees of freedom

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 making up space time.

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 And as the universe expands,

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 there are a whole bunch of qubits in their zero state

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 that become entangled with the rest of space time

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 through the action of these quantum circuits.

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 So what does it mean that there's now more

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 degrees of freedom as they become more entangled?

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 Yeah, so.

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 As the universe expands.

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 That's right, so there's more and more degrees of freedom

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 that are entangled, that are playing part,

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 playing the role of part

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 of the entangled space time structure.

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 So the basic, the underlying philosophy is

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 that space time itself arises from the entanglement

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 of some fundamental quantum degrees of freedom.

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 Wow, okay, so at which point

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 is most of the entanglement happening?

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 Are we talking about close to the Big Bang?

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 Are we talking about throughout the time of the life?

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 Throughout history, yeah.

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 So the idea is that at the Big Bang,

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 almost all the degrees of freedom

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 that the universe could have were there,

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 but they were unentangled with anything else.

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 And that's a reflection of the fact

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 that the Big Bang had a low entropy.

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 It was a very simple, very small place.

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 And as space expands, more and more degrees of freedom

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 become entangled with the rest of the world.

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 Well, I have to ask John Carroll,

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 what do you think of the thought experiment

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 from Nick Bostrom that we're living in a simulation?

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 So I think, let me contextualize that a little bit more.

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 I think people don't actually take this thought experiments.

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 I think it's quite interesting.

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 It's not very useful, but it's quite interesting.

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 From the perspective of AI,

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 a lot of the learning that can be done usually happens

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 in simulation from artificial examples.

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 And so it's a constructive question to ask,

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 how difficult is our real world to simulate?

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 Right.

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 Which is kind of a dual part of,

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 if we're living in a simulation

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 and somebody built that simulation,

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 if you were to try to do it yourself, how hard would it be?

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 So obviously we could be living in a simulation.

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 If you just want the physical possibility,

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 then I completely agree that it's physically possible.

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 I don't think that we actually are.

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 So take this one piece of data into consideration.

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 You know, we live in a big universe, okay?

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 There's two trillion galaxies in our observable universe

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 with 200 billion stars in each galaxy, et cetera.

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 It would seem to be a waste of resources

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 to have a universe that big going on

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 just to do a simulation.

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 So in other words, I want to be a good Bayesian.

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 I want to ask under this hypothesis,

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 what do I expect to see?

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 So the first thing I would say is I wouldn't expect

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 to see a universe that was that big, okay?

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 The second thing is I wouldn't expect the resolution

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 of the universe to be as good as it is.

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 So it's always possible that if our superhuman simulators

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 only have finite resources,

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 that they don't render the entire universe, right?

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 That the part that is out there,

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 the two trillion galaxies,

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 isn't actually being simulated fully, okay?

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 But then the obvious extrapolation of that

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 is that only I am being simulated fully.

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 Like the rest of you are just non player characters, right?

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 I'm the only thing that is real.

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 The rest of you are just chat bots.

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 Beyond this wall, I see the wall,

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 but there is literally nothing

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 on the other side of the wall.

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 That is sort of the Bayesian prediction.

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 That's what it would be like

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 to do an efficient simulation of me.

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 So like none of that seems quite realistic.

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 I don't see, I hear the argument that it's just possible

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 and easy to simulate lots of things.

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 I don't see any evidence from what we know

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 about our universe that we look like a simulated universe.

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 Now, maybe you can say,

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 well, we don't know what it would look like,

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 but that's just abandoning your Bayesian responsibilities.

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 Like your job is to say under this theory,

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 here's what you would expect to see.

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 Yeah, so certainly if you think about simulation

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 as a thing that's like a video game

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 where only a small subset is being rendered.

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 But say the entire, all the laws of physics,

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 the entire closed system of the quote unquote universe,

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 it had a creator.

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 Yeah, it's always possible.

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 Right, so that's not useful to think about

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 when you're thinking about physics.

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 The way Nick Bostrom phrases it,

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 if it's possible to simulate a universe,

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 eventually we'll do it.

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 Right.

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 You can use that by the way for a lot of things.

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 Well, yeah.

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 But I guess the question is,

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 how hard is it to create a universe?

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 I wrote a little blog post about this

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 and maybe I'm missing something,

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 but there's an argument that says not only

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 that it might be possible to simulate a universe,

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 but probably if you imagine that you actually attribute

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 consciousness and agency to the little things

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 that we're simulating, to our little artificial beings,

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 there's probably a lot more of them

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 than there are ordinary organic beings in the universe

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 or there will be in the future, right?

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 So there's an argument that not only

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 is being a simulation possible,

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 it's probable because in the space

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 of all living consciousnesses,

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 most of them are being simulated, right?

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 Most of them are not at the top level.

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 I think that argument must be wrong

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 because it follows from that argument that,

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 if we're simulated, but we can also simulate other things,

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 well, but if we can simulate other things,

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 they can simulate other things, right?

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 If we give them enough power and resolution

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 and ultimately we'll reach a bottom

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 because the laws of physics in our universe have a bottom,

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 we're made of atoms and so forth,

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 so there will be the cheapest possible simulations.

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 And if you believe the original argument,

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 you should conclude that we should be

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 in the cheapest possible simulation

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 because that's where most people are.

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 But we don't look like that.

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 It doesn't look at all like we're at the edge of resolution,

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 that we're 16 bit things.

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 It seems much easier to make much lower level things

14:13.020 --> 14:13.860
 than we are.

14:14.980 --> 14:18.220
 And also, I questioned the whole approach

14:18.220 --> 14:19.460
 to the anthropic principle

14:19.460 --> 14:22.340
 that says we are typical observers in the universe.

14:22.340 --> 14:23.660
 I think that that's not actually,

14:23.660 --> 14:27.340
 I think that there's a lot of selection that we can do

14:27.340 --> 14:30.180
 that we're typical within things we already know,

14:30.180 --> 14:32.280
 but not typical within all of the universe.

14:32.280 --> 14:35.800
 So do you think there's intelligent life,

14:35.800 --> 14:37.860
 however you would like to define intelligent life,

14:37.860 --> 14:39.940
 out there in the universe?

14:39.940 --> 14:44.660
 My guess is that there is not intelligent life

14:44.660 --> 14:48.820
 in the observable universe other than us, simply

14:48.820 --> 14:52.540
 on the basis of the fact that the likely number

14:52.540 --> 14:56.340
 of other intelligent species in the observable universe,

14:56.340 --> 15:00.320
 there's two likely numbers, zero or billions.

15:01.500 --> 15:02.580
 And if there had been billions,

15:02.580 --> 15:04.140
 you would have noticed already.

15:05.300 --> 15:07.340
 For there to be literally like a small number,

15:07.340 --> 15:09.380
 like, you know, Star Trek,

15:09.380 --> 15:13.300
 there's a dozen intelligent civilizations in our galaxy,

15:13.300 --> 15:17.340
 but not a billion, that's weird.

15:17.340 --> 15:18.500
 That's sort of bizarre to me.

15:18.500 --> 15:21.020
 It's easy for me to imagine that there are zero others

15:21.020 --> 15:22.620
 because there's just a big bottleneck

15:22.620 --> 15:24.980
 to making multicellular life

15:24.980 --> 15:27.020
 or technological life or whatever.

15:27.020 --> 15:28.580
 It's very hard for me to imagine

15:28.580 --> 15:30.140
 that there's a whole bunch out there

15:30.140 --> 15:32.300
 that have somehow remained hidden from us.

15:32.300 --> 15:34.700
 The question I'd like to ask

15:34.700 --> 15:36.820
 is what would intelligent life look like?

15:38.140 --> 15:40.500
 What I mean by that question and where it's going

15:40.500 --> 15:45.500
 is what if intelligent life is just in some very big ways

15:47.260 --> 15:51.500
 different than the one that has on Earth?

15:51.500 --> 15:53.900
 That there's all kinds of intelligent life

15:53.900 --> 15:55.420
 that operates at different scales

15:55.420 --> 15:57.300
 of both size and temporal.

15:57.300 --> 15:59.300
 Right, that's a great possibility

15:59.300 --> 16:00.800
 because I think we should be humble

16:00.800 --> 16:02.640
 about what intelligence is, what life is.

16:02.640 --> 16:04.020
 We don't even agree on what life is,

16:04.020 --> 16:07.020
 much less what intelligent life is, right?

16:07.020 --> 16:08.980
 So that's an argument for humility,

16:08.980 --> 16:10.860
 saying there could be intelligent life

16:10.860 --> 16:13.620
 of a very different character, right?

16:13.620 --> 16:18.060
 Like you could imagine the dolphins are intelligent

16:18.060 --> 16:20.500
 but never invent space travel

16:20.500 --> 16:21.460
 because they live in the ocean

16:21.460 --> 16:23.220
 and they don't have thumbs, right?

16:24.180 --> 16:27.860
 So they never invent technology, they never invent smelting.

16:27.860 --> 16:32.020
 Maybe the universe is full of intelligent species

16:32.020 --> 16:34.060
 that just don't make technology, right?

16:34.060 --> 16:36.320
 That's compatible with the data, I think.

16:36.320 --> 16:39.840
 And I think maybe what you're pointing at

16:39.840 --> 16:44.440
 is even more out there versions of intelligence,

16:44.440 --> 16:47.560
 intelligence in intermolecular clouds

16:47.560 --> 16:49.440
 or on the surface of a neutron star

16:49.440 --> 16:51.760
 or in between the galaxies in giant things

16:51.760 --> 16:54.560
 where the equivalent of a heartbeat is 100 million years.

16:56.440 --> 16:58.080
 On the one hand, yes,

16:58.080 --> 16:59.860
 we should be very open minded about those things.

16:59.860 --> 17:04.860
 On the other hand, all of us share the same laws of physics.

17:04.860 --> 17:08.240
 There might be something about the laws of physics,

17:08.240 --> 17:09.400
 even though we don't currently know

17:09.400 --> 17:10.920
 exactly what that thing would be,

17:10.920 --> 17:15.920
 that makes meters and years

17:16.160 --> 17:18.920
 the right length and timescales for intelligent life.

17:19.880 --> 17:22.240
 Maybe not, but we're made of atoms,

17:22.240 --> 17:23.780
 atoms have a certain size,

17:23.780 --> 17:27.280
 we orbit stars or stars have a certain lifetime.

17:27.280 --> 17:30.300
 It's not impossible to me that there's a sweet spot

17:30.300 --> 17:32.200
 for intelligent life that we find ourselves in.

17:32.200 --> 17:33.800
 So I'm open minded either way,

17:33.800 --> 17:35.280
 I'm open minded either being humble

17:35.280 --> 17:37.080
 and there's all sorts of different kinds of life

17:37.080 --> 17:39.280
 or no, there's a reason we just don't know it yet

17:39.280 --> 17:42.080
 why life like ours is the kind of life that's out there.

17:42.080 --> 17:43.320
 Yeah, I'm of two minds too,

17:43.320 --> 17:47.200
 but I often wonder if our brains is just designed

17:47.200 --> 17:52.200
 to quite obviously to operate and see the world

17:52.720 --> 17:56.360
 in these timescales and we're almost blind

17:56.360 --> 18:01.200
 and the tools we've created for detecting things are blind

18:01.200 --> 18:02.760
 to the kind of observation needed

18:02.760 --> 18:04.920
 to see intelligent life at other scales.

18:04.920 --> 18:07.040
 Well, I'm totally open to that,

18:07.040 --> 18:09.240
 but so here's another argument I would make,

18:09.240 --> 18:11.520
 we have looked for intelligent life,

18:11.520 --> 18:14.120
 but we've looked at for it in the dumbest way we can,

18:14.120 --> 18:16.600
 by turning radio telescopes to the sky.

18:16.600 --> 18:21.040
 And why in the world would a super advanced civilization

18:21.040 --> 18:24.040
 randomly beam out radio signals wastefully

18:24.040 --> 18:25.440
 in all directions into the universe?

18:25.440 --> 18:27.280
 That just doesn't make any sense,

18:27.280 --> 18:29.100
 especially because in order to think

18:29.100 --> 18:32.020
 that you would actually contact another civilization,

18:32.020 --> 18:33.840
 you would have to do it forever,

18:33.840 --> 18:35.840
 you have to keep doing it for millions of years,

18:35.840 --> 18:38.280
 that sounds like a waste of resources.

18:38.280 --> 18:43.120
 If you thought that there were other solar systems

18:43.120 --> 18:44.520
 with planets around them,

18:44.520 --> 18:47.000
 where maybe intelligent life didn't yet exist,

18:47.000 --> 18:48.600
 but might someday,

18:48.600 --> 18:51.380
 you wouldn't try to talk to it with radio waves,

18:51.380 --> 18:53.600
 you would send a spacecraft out there

18:53.600 --> 18:55.560
 and you would park it around there

18:55.560 --> 18:57.360
 and it would be like, from our point of view,

18:57.360 --> 19:00.700
 it'd be like 2001, where there was a monolith.

19:00.700 --> 19:01.540
 Monolith.

19:01.540 --> 19:02.380
 There could be an artifact,

19:02.380 --> 19:04.520
 in fact, the other way works also, right?

19:04.520 --> 19:07.360
 There could be artifacts in our solar system

19:08.440 --> 19:10.480
 that have been put there

19:10.480 --> 19:12.280
 by other technologically advanced civilizations

19:12.280 --> 19:14.640
 and that's how we will eventually contact them.

19:14.640 --> 19:16.840
 We just haven't explored the solar system well enough yet

19:16.840 --> 19:17.680
 to find them.

19:18.580 --> 19:20.000
 The reason why we don't think about that

19:20.000 --> 19:21.520
 is because we're young and impatient, right?

19:21.520 --> 19:24.000
 Like, it would take more than my lifetime

19:24.000 --> 19:26.080
 to actually send something to another star system

19:26.080 --> 19:27.800
 and wait for it and then come back.

19:27.800 --> 19:30.800
 So, but if we start thinking on hundreds of thousands

19:30.800 --> 19:32.720
 of years or million year time scales,

19:32.720 --> 19:34.600
 that's clearly the right thing to do.

19:34.600 --> 19:36.800
 Are you excited by the thing

19:36.800 --> 19:39.360
 that Elon Musk is doing with SpaceX in general?

19:39.360 --> 19:41.620
 Space, but the idea of space exploration,

19:41.620 --> 19:45.360
 even though your, or your species is young and impatient?

19:45.360 --> 19:46.200
 Yeah.

19:46.200 --> 19:49.200
 No, I do think that space travel is crucially important,

19:49.200 --> 19:50.800
 long term.

19:50.800 --> 19:52.500
 Even to other star systems.

19:52.500 --> 19:57.500
 And I think that many people overestimate the difficulty

19:57.500 --> 20:00.940
 because they say, look, if you travel 1% the speed of light

20:00.940 --> 20:02.020
 to another star system,

20:02.020 --> 20:04.060
 we'll be dead before we get there, right?

20:04.060 --> 20:06.180
 And I think that it's much easier.

20:06.180 --> 20:08.120
 And therefore, when they write their science fiction stories,

20:08.120 --> 20:09.580
 they imagine we'd go faster than the speed of light

20:09.580 --> 20:11.700
 because otherwise they're too impatient, right?

20:11.700 --> 20:13.600
 We're not gonna go faster than the speed of light,

20:13.600 --> 20:16.020
 but we could easily imagine that the human lifespan

20:16.020 --> 20:18.100
 gets extended to thousands of years.

20:18.100 --> 20:19.140
 And once you do that,

20:19.140 --> 20:21.180
 then the stars are much closer effectively, right?

20:21.180 --> 20:23.260
 And then what's a hundred year trip, right?

20:23.260 --> 20:25.820
 So I think that that's gonna be the future,

20:25.820 --> 20:28.700
 the far future, not my lifetime once again,

20:28.700 --> 20:30.380
 but baby steps.

20:30.380 --> 20:32.420
 Unless your lifetime gets extended.

20:32.420 --> 20:34.740
 Well, it's in a race against time, right?

20:34.740 --> 20:37.340
 A friend of mine who actually thinks about these things

20:37.340 --> 20:40.460
 said, you know, you and I are gonna die,

20:40.460 --> 20:43.060
 but I don't know about our grandchildren.

20:43.060 --> 20:45.940
 That's, I don't know, predicting the future is hard,

20:45.940 --> 20:47.900
 but that's at least a plausible scenario.

20:47.900 --> 20:51.820
 And so, yeah, no, I think that as we discussed earlier,

20:51.820 --> 20:56.780
 there are threats to the earth, known and unknown, right?

20:56.780 --> 21:01.780
 Having spread humanity and biology elsewhere

21:02.580 --> 21:04.940
 is a really important longterm goal.

21:04.940 --> 21:08.900
 What kind of questions can science not currently answer,

21:08.900 --> 21:09.920
 but might soon?

21:11.480 --> 21:13.860
 When you think about the problems and the mysteries

21:13.860 --> 21:17.840
 before us that may be within reach of science.

21:17.840 --> 21:20.300
 I think an obvious one is the origin of life.

21:20.300 --> 21:22.780
 We don't know how that happened.

21:22.780 --> 21:25.300
 There's a difficulty in knowing how it happened historically

21:25.300 --> 21:27.240
 actually, you know, literally on earth,

21:27.240 --> 21:30.500
 but starting life from non life is something

21:30.500 --> 21:32.420
 I kind of think we're close to, right?

21:32.420 --> 21:33.240
 We're really.

21:33.240 --> 21:34.080
 You really think so?

21:34.080 --> 21:36.740
 Like how difficult is it to start life?

21:36.740 --> 21:39.260
 Well, I've talked to people,

21:39.260 --> 21:41.780
 including on the podcast about this.

21:41.780 --> 21:43.340
 You know, life requires three things.

21:43.340 --> 21:44.220
 Life as we know it.

21:44.220 --> 21:45.500
 So there's a difference with life,

21:45.500 --> 21:47.060
 which who knows what it is,

21:47.060 --> 21:48.140
 and life as we know it,

21:48.140 --> 21:50.780
 which we can talk about with some intelligence.

21:50.780 --> 21:53.840
 So life as we know it requires compartmentalization.

21:53.840 --> 21:56.660
 You need like a little membrane around your cell.

21:56.660 --> 21:58.980
 Metabolism, you need to take in food and eat it

21:58.980 --> 22:01.020
 and let that make you do things.

22:01.020 --> 22:02.620
 And then replication, okay?

22:02.620 --> 22:04.620
 So you need to have some information about who you are

22:04.620 --> 22:07.880
 that you pass down to future generations.

22:07.880 --> 22:11.780
 In the lab, compartmentalization seems pretty easy.

22:11.780 --> 22:13.780
 Not hard to make lipid bilayers

22:13.780 --> 22:16.760
 that come into little cellular walls pretty easily.

22:16.760 --> 22:19.260
 Metabolism and replication are hard,

22:20.160 --> 22:21.900
 but replication we're close to.

22:21.900 --> 22:24.960
 People have made RNA like molecules in the lab

22:24.960 --> 22:28.840
 that I think the state of the art is,

22:28.840 --> 22:30.660
 they're not able to make one molecule

22:30.660 --> 22:32.060
 that reproduces itself,

22:32.060 --> 22:33.600
 but they're able to make two molecules

22:33.600 --> 22:35.260
 that reproduce each other.

22:35.260 --> 22:36.100
 So that's okay.

22:36.100 --> 22:37.100
 That's pretty close.

22:38.060 --> 22:41.060
 Metabolism is harder, believe it or not,

22:41.060 --> 22:42.900
 even though it's sort of the most obvious thing,

22:42.900 --> 22:44.940
 but you want some sort of controlled metabolism

22:44.940 --> 22:47.500
 and the actual cellular machinery in our bodies

22:47.500 --> 22:48.660
 is quite complicated.

22:48.660 --> 22:50.940
 It's hard to see it just popping into existence

22:50.940 --> 22:51.780
 all by itself.

22:51.780 --> 22:52.860
 It probably took a while,

22:53.740 --> 22:56.100
 but we're making progress.

22:56.100 --> 22:57.240
 And in fact, I don't think we're spending

22:57.240 --> 22:58.580
 nearly enough money on it.

22:58.580 --> 23:01.780
 If I were the NSF, I would flood this area with money

23:01.780 --> 23:05.220
 because it would change our view of the world

23:05.220 --> 23:06.780
 if we could actually make life in the lab

23:06.780 --> 23:09.420
 and understand how it was made originally here on earth.

23:09.420 --> 23:11.160
 And I'm sure it'd have some ripple effects

23:11.160 --> 23:12.940
 that help cure disease and so on.

23:12.940 --> 23:14.380
 I mean, just that understanding.

23:14.380 --> 23:16.700
 So synthetic biology is a wonderful big frontier

23:16.700 --> 23:17.980
 where we're making cells.

23:18.940 --> 23:21.100
 Right now, the best way to do that

23:21.100 --> 23:23.620
 is to borrow heavily from existing biology, right?

23:23.620 --> 23:25.380
 Well, Craig Venter several years ago

23:25.380 --> 23:28.220
 created an artificial cell, but all he did was,

23:28.220 --> 23:29.860
 not all he did, it was a tremendous accomplishment,

23:29.860 --> 23:33.180
 but all he did was take out the DNA from a cell

23:33.180 --> 23:37.200
 and put in entirely new DNA and let it boot up and go.

23:37.200 --> 23:42.200
 What about the leap to creating intelligent life on earth?

23:43.420 --> 23:44.260
 Yeah.

23:44.260 --> 23:45.860
 Again, we define intelligence, of course,

23:45.860 --> 23:49.860
 but let's just even say Homo sapiens,

23:49.860 --> 23:54.480
 the modern intelligence in our human brain.

23:55.340 --> 23:58.660
 Do you have a sense of what's involved in that leap

23:58.660 --> 24:00.420
 and how big of a leap that is?

24:00.420 --> 24:03.300
 So AI would count in this, or do you really want life?

24:03.300 --> 24:06.420
 Do you want really an organism in some sense?

24:06.420 --> 24:07.540
 AI would count, I think.

24:07.540 --> 24:08.980
 Okay.

24:08.980 --> 24:11.020
 Yeah, of course, of course AI would count.

24:11.020 --> 24:13.460
 Well, let's say artificial consciousness, right?

24:13.460 --> 24:15.500
 So I do not think we are on the threshold

24:15.500 --> 24:16.760
 of creating artificial consciousness.

24:16.760 --> 24:18.180
 I think it's possible.

24:18.180 --> 24:20.300
 I'm not, again, very educated about how close we are,

24:20.300 --> 24:22.100
 but my impression is not that we're really close

24:22.100 --> 24:24.820
 because we understand how little we understand

24:24.820 --> 24:26.460
 of consciousness and what it is.

24:26.460 --> 24:28.440
 So if we don't have any idea what it is,

24:28.440 --> 24:29.780
 it's hard to imagine we're on the threshold

24:29.780 --> 24:31.620
 of making it ourselves.

24:32.500 --> 24:34.500
 But it's doable, it's possible.

24:34.500 --> 24:35.960
 I don't see any obstacles in principle.

24:35.960 --> 24:38.160
 So yeah, I would hold out some interest

24:38.160 --> 24:40.220
 in that happening eventually.

24:40.220 --> 24:42.700
 I think in general, consciousness,

24:42.700 --> 24:44.420
 I think we would be just surprised

24:44.420 --> 24:49.060
 how easy consciousness is once we create intelligence.

24:49.060 --> 24:50.540
 I think consciousness is a thing

24:50.540 --> 24:54.000
 that's just something we all fake.

24:55.540 --> 24:56.380
 Well, good.

24:56.380 --> 24:57.680
 No, actually, I like this idea that in fact,

24:57.680 --> 25:00.500
 consciousness is way less mysterious than we think

25:00.500 --> 25:02.620
 because we're all at every time, at every moment,

25:02.620 --> 25:04.500
 less conscious than we think we are, right?

25:04.500 --> 25:05.460
 We can fool things.

25:05.460 --> 25:07.780
 And I think that plus the idea

25:07.780 --> 25:11.180
 that you not only have artificial intelligent systems,

25:11.180 --> 25:12.980
 but you put them in a body, right,

25:12.980 --> 25:14.280
 give them a robot body,

25:15.620 --> 25:18.460
 that will help the faking a lot.

25:18.460 --> 25:20.980
 Yeah, I think creating consciousness

25:20.980 --> 25:25.140
 in artificial consciousness is as simple

25:25.140 --> 25:30.020
 as asking a Roomba to say, I'm conscious,

25:30.020 --> 25:32.780
 and refusing to be talked out of it.

25:32.780 --> 25:33.820
 Could be, it could be.

25:33.820 --> 25:36.740
 And I mean, I'm almost being silly,

25:36.740 --> 25:38.280
 but that's what we do.

25:39.660 --> 25:40.940
 That's what we do with each other.

25:40.940 --> 25:42.020
 This is the kind of,

25:42.020 --> 25:44.500
 that consciousness is also a social construct.

25:44.500 --> 25:47.860
 And a lot of our ideas of intelligence is a social construct.

25:47.860 --> 25:52.820
 And so reaching that bar involves something that's beyond,

25:52.820 --> 25:54.940
 that doesn't necessarily involve

25:54.940 --> 25:57.720
 the fundamental understanding of how you go

25:57.720 --> 26:02.500
 from electrons to neurons to cognition.

26:02.500 --> 26:05.060
 No, actually, I think that is an extremely good point.

26:05.060 --> 26:08.660
 And in fact, what it suggests is,

26:08.660 --> 26:10.540
 so yeah, you referred to Kate Darling,

26:10.540 --> 26:11.940
 who I had on the podcast,

26:11.940 --> 26:16.440
 and who does these experiments with very simple robots,

26:16.440 --> 26:18.060
 but they look like animals,

26:18.060 --> 26:20.740
 and they can look like they're experiencing pain,

26:20.740 --> 26:23.380
 and we human beings react very negatively

26:23.380 --> 26:24.400
 to these little robots

26:24.400 --> 26:26.300
 looking like they're experiencing pain.

26:26.300 --> 26:29.980
 And what you wanna say is, yeah, but they're just robots.

26:29.980 --> 26:31.700
 It's not really pain, right?

26:31.700 --> 26:33.080
 It's just some electrons going around.

26:33.080 --> 26:36.300
 But then you realize, you and I are just electrons

26:36.300 --> 26:38.380
 going around, and that's what pain is also.

26:38.380 --> 26:43.060
 And so what I would have an easy time imagining

26:43.060 --> 26:44.740
 is that there is a spectrum

26:44.740 --> 26:47.420
 between these simple little robots that Kate works with

26:47.420 --> 26:49.420
 and a human being,

26:49.420 --> 26:50.940
 where there are things that sort of

26:50.940 --> 26:52.840
 by some strict definition,

26:52.840 --> 26:55.460
 Turing test level thing are not conscious,

26:55.460 --> 26:58.580
 but nevertheless walk and talk like they're conscious.

26:58.580 --> 27:00.220
 And it could be that the future is,

27:00.220 --> 27:02.460
 I mean, Siri is close, right?

27:02.460 --> 27:04.540
 And so it might be the future

27:04.540 --> 27:07.100
 has a lot more agents like that.

27:07.100 --> 27:08.860
 And in fact, rather than someday going,

27:08.860 --> 27:10.700
 aha, we have consciousness,

27:10.700 --> 27:13.180
 we'll just creep up on it with more and more

27:13.180 --> 27:15.220
 accurate reflections of what we expect.

27:15.220 --> 27:18.320
 And in the future, maybe the present,

27:18.320 --> 27:20.800
 for example, we haven't met before,

27:20.800 --> 27:25.300
 and you're basically assuming that I'm human as it's a high

27:25.300 --> 27:28.560
 probability at this time because the yeah,

27:28.560 --> 27:30.200
 but in the future,

27:30.200 --> 27:32.000
 there might be question marks around that, right?

27:32.000 --> 27:33.340
 Yeah, no, absolutely.

27:33.340 --> 27:35.740
 Certainly videos are almost to the point

27:35.740 --> 27:36.740
 where you shouldn't trust them already.

27:36.740 --> 27:39.060
 Photos you can't trust, right?

27:39.060 --> 27:41.700
 Videos is easier to trust,

27:41.700 --> 27:44.020
 but we're getting worse that,

27:44.020 --> 27:46.540
 we're getting better at faking them, right?

27:46.540 --> 27:48.780
 Yeah, so physical embodied people,

27:48.780 --> 27:51.020
 what's so hard about faking that?

27:51.020 --> 27:51.980
 So this is very depressing,

27:51.980 --> 27:53.420
 this conversation we're having right now.

27:53.420 --> 27:54.340
 So I mean,

27:54.340 --> 27:55.180
 To me, it's exciting.

27:55.180 --> 27:56.300
 To me, you're doing it.

27:56.300 --> 27:57.780
 So it's exciting to you,

27:57.780 --> 27:59.060
 but it's a sobering thought.

27:59.060 --> 28:00.420
 We're very bad, right?

28:00.420 --> 28:02.820
 At imagining what the next 50 years are gonna be like

28:02.820 --> 28:04.220
 when we're in the middle of a phase transition

28:04.220 --> 28:05.260
 as we are right now.

28:05.260 --> 28:06.740
 Yeah, and I, in general,

28:06.740 --> 28:09.220
 I'm not blind to all the threats.

28:09.220 --> 28:14.220
 I am excited by the power of technology to solve,

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 to protect us against the threats as they evolve.

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 I'm not as much as Steven Pinker optimistic about the world,

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 but in everything I've seen,

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 all of the brilliant people in the world that I've met

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 are good people.

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 So the army of the good

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 in terms of the development of technology is large.

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 Okay, you're way more optimistic than I am.

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 I think that goodness and badness

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 are equally distributed among intelligent

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 and unintelligent people.

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 I don't see much of a correlation there.

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 Interesting.

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 Neither of us have proof.

28:47.300 --> 28:48.420
 Yeah, exactly.

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 Again, opinions are free, right?

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 Nor definitions of good and evil.

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 We come without definitions or without data opinions.

28:57.460 --> 29:01.980
 So what kind of questions can science not currently answer

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 and may never be able to answer in your view?

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 Well, the obvious one is what is good and bad?

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 What is right and wrong?

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 I think that there are questions that,

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 science tells us what happens,

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 what the world is and what it does.

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 It doesn't say what the world should do

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 or what we should do,

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 because we're part of the world.

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 But we are part of the world

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 and we have the ability to feel like something's right,

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 something's wrong.

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 And to make a very long story very short,

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 I think that the idea of moral philosophy

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 is systematizing our intuitions

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 of what is right and what is wrong.

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 And science might be able to predict ahead of time

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 what we will do,

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 but it won't ever be able to judge

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 whether we should have done it or not.

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 So, you're kind of unique in terms of scientists.

29:43.620 --> 29:45.520
 Listen, it doesn't have to do with podcasts,

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 but even just reaching out,

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 I think you referred to as sort of

29:49.080 --> 29:51.300
 doing interdisciplinary science.

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 So you reach out and talk to people

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 that are outside of your discipline,

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 which I always hope that's what science was for.

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 In fact, I was a little disillusioned

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 when I realized that academia is very siloed.

30:06.420 --> 30:07.260
 Yeah.

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 And so the question is,

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 how, at your own level,

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 how do you prepare for these conversations?

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 How do you think about these conversations?

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 How do you open your mind enough

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 to have these conversations?

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 And it may be a little bit broader,

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 how can you advise other scientists

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 to have these kinds of conversations?

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 Not at the podcast,

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 the fact that you're doing a podcast is awesome,

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 other people get to hear them,

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 but it's also good to have it without mics in general.

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 It's a good question, but a tough one to answer.

30:37.460 --> 30:40.980
 I think about a guy I know who's a personal trainer,

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 and he was asked on a podcast,

30:43.240 --> 30:45.700
 how do we psych ourselves up to do a workout?

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 How do we make that discipline to go and work out?

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 And he's like, why are you asking me?

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 I can't stop working out.

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 I don't need to psych myself up.

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 So, and likewise, he asked me,

30:57.340 --> 30:59.740
 how do you get to have interdisciplinary conversations

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 on all sorts of different things,

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 all sorts of different people?

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 I'm like, that's what makes me go, right?

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 Like that's, I couldn't stop doing that.

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 I did that long before any of them were recorded.

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 In fact, a lot of the motivation for starting recording it

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 was making sure I would read all these books

31:14.420 --> 31:15.460
 that I had purchased, right?

31:15.460 --> 31:17.700
 Like all these books I wanted to read,

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 not enough time to read them.

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 And now if I have the motivation,

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 cause I'm gonna interview Pat Churchland,

31:23.220 --> 31:25.180
 I'm gonna finally read her book.

31:25.180 --> 31:29.460
 You know, and it's absolutely true

31:29.460 --> 31:31.700
 that academia is extraordinarily siloed, right?

31:31.700 --> 31:32.780
 We don't talk to people.

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 We rarely do.

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 And in fact, when we do, it's punished.

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 You know, like the people who do it successfully

31:38.820 --> 31:41.420
 generally first became very successful

31:41.420 --> 31:43.100
 within their little siloed discipline.

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 And only then did they start expanding out.

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 If you're a young person, you know,

31:47.660 --> 31:48.940
 I have graduate students.

31:48.940 --> 31:52.980
 I try to be very, very candid with them about this,

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 that it's, you know, most graduate students

31:55.580 --> 31:57.420
 are to not become faculty members, right?

31:57.420 --> 31:59.020
 It's a tough road.

31:59.020 --> 32:03.140
 And so live the life you wanna live,

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 but do it with your eyes open

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 about what it does to your job chances.

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 And the more broad you are

32:09.580 --> 32:12.900
 and the less time you spend hyper specializing

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 in your field, the lower your job chances are.

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 That's just an academic reality.

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 It's terrible, I don't like it, but it's a reality.

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 And for some people, that's fine.

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 Like there's plenty of people who are wonderful scientists

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 who have zero interest in branching out

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 and talking to things, to anyone outside their field.

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 But it is disillusioning to me.

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 Some of the, you know, romantic notion I had

32:36.180 --> 32:38.220
 of the intellectual academic life

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 is belied by the reality of it.

32:39.940 --> 32:43.500
 The idea that we should reach out beyond our discipline

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 and that is a positive good is just so rare

32:48.500 --> 32:53.500
 in universities that it may as well not exist at all.

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 But that said, even though you're saying you're doing it

32:57.660 --> 33:00.300
 like the personal trainer, because you just can't help it,

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 you're also an inspiration to others.

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 Like I could speak for myself.

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 You know, I also have a career I'm thinking about, right?

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 And without your podcast,

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 I may have not have been doing this at all, right?

33:15.060 --> 33:19.540
 So it makes me realize that these kinds of conversations

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 is kind of what science is about in many ways.

33:23.340 --> 33:26.500
 The reason we write papers, this exchange of ideas,

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 is it's much harder to do interdisciplinary papers,

33:30.540 --> 33:31.380
 I would say.

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 And conversations are easier.

33:35.140 --> 33:36.820
 So conversations is the beginning.

33:36.820 --> 33:41.180
 And in the field of AI, it's obvious

33:41.180 --> 33:45.580
 that we should think outside of pure computer vision

33:45.580 --> 33:47.540
 competitions on a particular data sets.

33:47.540 --> 33:49.660
 We should think about the broader impact

33:49.660 --> 33:53.740
 of how this can be, you know, reaching out to physics,

33:53.740 --> 33:57.220
 to psychology, to neuroscience and having these

33:57.220 --> 34:00.580
 conversations so that you're an inspiration.

34:00.580 --> 34:05.220
 And so never know how the world changes.

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 I mean, the fact that this stuff is out there

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 and I've a huge number of people come up to me,

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 grad students, really loving the podcast, inspired by it.

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 And they will probably have that,

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 they'll be ripple effects when they become faculty

34:20.740 --> 34:21.580
 and so on and so on.

34:21.580 --> 34:25.300
 We can end on a balance between pessimism and optimism.

34:25.300 --> 34:27.780
 And Sean, thank you so much for talking to me, it was awesome.

34:27.780 --> 34:29.460
 No, Lex, thank you very much for this conversation.

34:29.460 --> 34:49.460
 It was great.