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| WEBVTT | |
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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, | |
| 11:16.300 --> 11:19.640 | |
| isn't actually being simulated fully, okay? | |
| 11:19.640 --> 11:22.740 | |
| But then the obvious extrapolation of that | |
| 11:22.740 --> 11:25.500 | |
| is that only I am being simulated fully. | |
| 11:25.500 --> 11:29.220 | |
| Like the rest of you are just non player characters, right? | |
| 11:29.220 --> 11:30.520 | |
| I'm the only thing that is real. | |
| 11:30.520 --> 11:32.780 | |
| The rest of you are just chat bots. | |
| 11:32.780 --> 11:34.320 | |
| Beyond this wall, I see the wall, | |
| 11:34.320 --> 11:36.020 | |
| but there is literally nothing | |
| 11:36.020 --> 11:37.360 | |
| on the other side of the wall. | |
| 11:37.360 --> 11:39.300 | |
| That is sort of the Bayesian prediction. | |
| 11:39.300 --> 11:40.180 | |
| That's what it would be like | |
| 11:40.180 --> 11:42.240 | |
| to do an efficient simulation of me. | |
| 11:42.240 --> 11:45.700 | |
| So like none of that seems quite realistic. | |
| 11:45.700 --> 11:50.700 | |
| I don't see, I hear the argument that it's just possible | |
| 11:50.900 --> 11:53.300 | |
| and easy to simulate lots of things. | |
| 11:53.300 --> 11:55.780 | |
| I don't see any evidence from what we know | |
| 11:55.780 --> 11:59.340 | |
| about our universe that we look like a simulated universe. | |
| 11:59.340 --> 12:00.180 | |
| Now, maybe you can say, | |
| 12:00.180 --> 12:01.980 | |
| well, we don't know what it would look like, | |
| 12:01.980 --> 12:04.520 | |
| but that's just abandoning your Bayesian responsibilities. | |
| 12:04.520 --> 12:07.660 | |
| Like your job is to say under this theory, | |
| 12:07.660 --> 12:09.500 | |
| here's what you would expect to see. | |
| 12:09.500 --> 12:11.660 | |
| Yeah, so certainly if you think about simulation | |
| 12:11.660 --> 12:14.340 | |
| as a thing that's like a video game | |
| 12:14.340 --> 12:17.740 | |
| where only a small subset is being rendered. | |
| 12:17.740 --> 12:22.740 | |
| But say the entire, all the laws of physics, | |
| 12:22.740 --> 12:26.540 | |
| the entire closed system of the quote unquote universe, | |
| 12:26.540 --> 12:27.780 | |
| it had a creator. | |
| 12:27.780 --> 12:29.320 | |
| Yeah, it's always possible. | |
| 12:29.320 --> 12:32.280 | |
| Right, so that's not useful to think about | |
| 12:32.280 --> 12:34.020 | |
| when you're thinking about physics. | |
| 12:34.020 --> 12:36.220 | |
| The way Nick Bostrom phrases it, | |
| 12:36.220 --> 12:39.100 | |
| if it's possible to simulate a universe, | |
| 12:39.100 --> 12:40.500 | |
| eventually we'll do it. | |
| 12:40.500 --> 12:41.340 | |
| Right. | |
| 12:42.700 --> 12:44.860 | |
| You can use that by the way for a lot of things. | |
| 12:44.860 --> 12:45.700 | |
| Well, yeah. | |
| 12:45.700 --> 12:48.540 | |
| But I guess the question is, | |
| 12:48.540 --> 12:52.340 | |
| how hard is it to create a universe? | |
| 12:52.340 --> 12:53.820 | |
| I wrote a little blog post about this | |
| 12:53.820 --> 12:55.460 | |
| and maybe I'm missing something, | |
| 12:55.460 --> 12:57.680 | |
| but there's an argument that says not only | |
| 12:57.680 --> 13:00.500 | |
| that it might be possible to simulate a universe, | |
| 13:00.500 --> 13:05.500 | |
| but probably if you imagine that you actually attribute | |
| 13:05.980 --> 13:08.860 | |
| consciousness and agency to the little things | |
| 13:08.860 --> 13:12.020 | |
| that we're simulating, to our little artificial beings, | |
| 13:12.020 --> 13:13.420 | |
| there's probably a lot more of them | |
| 13:13.420 --> 13:15.500 | |
| than there are ordinary organic beings in the universe | |
| 13:15.500 --> 13:17.420 | |
| or there will be in the future, right? | |
| 13:17.420 --> 13:18.500 | |
| So there's an argument that not only | |
| 13:18.500 --> 13:20.760 | |
| is being a simulation possible, | |
| 13:20.760 --> 13:23.560 | |
| it's probable because in the space | |
| 13:23.560 --> 13:24.960 | |
| of all living consciousnesses, | |
| 13:24.960 --> 13:26.620 | |
| most of them are being simulated, right? | |
| 13:26.620 --> 13:28.860 | |
| Most of them are not at the top level. | |
| 13:28.860 --> 13:30.540 | |
| I think that argument must be wrong | |
| 13:30.540 --> 13:33.100 | |
| because it follows from that argument that, | |
| 13:33.100 --> 13:36.920 | |
| if we're simulated, but we can also simulate other things, | |
| 13:36.920 --> 13:38.840 | |
| well, but if we can simulate other things, | |
| 13:38.840 --> 13:41.840 | |
| they can simulate other things, right? | |
| 13:41.840 --> 13:44.320 | |
| If we give them enough power and resolution | |
| 13:44.320 --> 13:45.980 | |
| and ultimately we'll reach a bottom | |
| 13:45.980 --> 13:49.140 | |
| because the laws of physics in our universe have a bottom, | |
| 13:49.140 --> 13:51.000 | |
| we're made of atoms and so forth, | |
| 13:51.000 --> 13:55.100 | |
| so there will be the cheapest possible simulations. | |
| 13:55.100 --> 13:57.700 | |
| And if you believe the original argument, | |
| 13:57.700 --> 13:59.340 | |
| you should conclude that we should be | |
| 13:59.340 --> 14:00.940 | |
| in the cheapest possible simulation | |
| 14:00.940 --> 14:02.660 | |
| because that's where most people are. | |
| 14:02.660 --> 14:03.620 | |
| But we don't look like that. | |
| 14:03.620 --> 14:06.860 | |
| It doesn't look at all like we're at the edge of resolution, | |
| 14:06.860 --> 14:09.540 | |
| that we're 16 bit things. | |
| 14:09.540 --> 14:13.020 | |
| 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, | |
| 28:14.540 --> 28:18.060 | |
| to protect us against the threats as they evolve. | |
| 28:18.060 --> 28:22.340 | |
| I'm not as much as Steven Pinker optimistic about the world, | |
| 28:22.340 --> 28:23.740 | |
| but in everything I've seen, | |
| 28:23.740 --> 28:27.300 | |
| all of the brilliant people in the world that I've met | |
| 28:27.300 --> 28:29.160 | |
| are good people. | |
| 28:29.160 --> 28:30.800 | |
| So the army of the good | |
| 28:30.800 --> 28:33.400 | |
| in terms of the development of technology is large. | |
| 28:33.400 --> 28:36.860 | |
| Okay, you're way more optimistic than I am. | |
| 28:37.820 --> 28:39.060 | |
| I think that goodness and badness | |
| 28:39.060 --> 28:40.900 | |
| are equally distributed among intelligent | |
| 28:40.900 --> 28:42.700 | |
| and unintelligent people. | |
| 28:42.700 --> 28:44.660 | |
| I don't see much of a correlation there. | |
| 28:44.660 --> 28:46.060 | |
| Interesting. | |
| 28:46.060 --> 28:47.300 | |
| Neither of us have proof. | |
| 28:47.300 --> 28:48.420 | |
| Yeah, exactly. | |
| 28:48.420 --> 28:50.660 | |
| Again, opinions are free, right? | |
| 28:50.660 --> 28:52.540 | |
| Nor definitions of good and evil. | |
| 28:52.540 --> 28:57.460 | |
| We come without definitions or without data opinions. | |
| 28:57.460 --> 29:01.980 | |
| So what kind of questions can science not currently answer | |
| 29:01.980 --> 29:04.380 | |
| and may never be able to answer in your view? | |
| 29:04.380 --> 29:06.940 | |
| Well, the obvious one is what is good and bad? | |
| 29:06.940 --> 29:07.860 | |
| What is right and wrong? | |
| 29:07.860 --> 29:09.460 | |
| I think that there are questions that, | |
| 29:09.460 --> 29:11.300 | |
| science tells us what happens, | |
| 29:11.300 --> 29:13.260 | |
| what the world is and what it does. | |
| 29:13.260 --> 29:14.740 | |
| It doesn't say what the world should do | |
| 29:14.740 --> 29:15.580 | |
| or what we should do, | |
| 29:15.580 --> 29:17.800 | |
| because we're part of the world. | |
| 29:17.800 --> 29:19.200 | |
| But we are part of the world | |
| 29:19.200 --> 29:21.460 | |
| and we have the ability to feel like something's right, | |
| 29:21.460 --> 29:22.740 | |
| something's wrong. | |
| 29:22.740 --> 29:25.660 | |
| And to make a very long story very short, | |
| 29:25.660 --> 29:28.000 | |
| I think that the idea of moral philosophy | |
| 29:28.000 --> 29:30.100 | |
| is systematizing our intuitions | |
| 29:30.100 --> 29:31.700 | |
| of what is right and what is wrong. | |
| 29:31.700 --> 29:34.580 | |
| And science might be able to predict ahead of time | |
| 29:34.580 --> 29:36.180 | |
| what we will do, | |
| 29:36.180 --> 29:38.000 | |
| but it won't ever be able to judge | |
| 29:38.000 --> 29:39.600 | |
| whether we should have done it or not. | |
| 29:39.600 --> 29:43.620 | |
| 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, | |
| 29:45.520 --> 29:47.660 | |
| but even just reaching out, | |
| 29:47.660 --> 29:49.080 | |
| I think you referred to as sort of | |
| 29:49.080 --> 29:51.300 | |
| doing interdisciplinary science. | |
| 29:51.300 --> 29:54.100 | |
| So you reach out and talk to people | |
| 29:54.100 --> 29:55.980 | |
| that are outside of your discipline, | |
| 29:55.980 --> 30:00.140 | |
| which I always hope that's what science was for. | |
| 30:00.140 --> 30:02.300 | |
| In fact, I was a little disillusioned | |
| 30:02.300 --> 30:06.420 | |
| when I realized that academia is very siloed. | |
| 30:06.420 --> 30:07.260 | |
| Yeah. | |
| 30:07.260 --> 30:09.560 | |
| And so the question is, | |
| 30:10.700 --> 30:13.020 | |
| how, at your own level, | |
| 30:13.020 --> 30:15.380 | |
| how do you prepare for these conversations? | |
| 30:15.380 --> 30:16.900 | |
| How do you think about these conversations? | |
| 30:16.900 --> 30:18.300 | |
| How do you open your mind enough | |
| 30:18.300 --> 30:20.220 | |
| to have these conversations? | |
| 30:20.220 --> 30:21.940 | |
| And it may be a little bit broader, | |
| 30:21.940 --> 30:24.380 | |
| how can you advise other scientists | |
| 30:24.380 --> 30:26.260 | |
| to have these kinds of conversations? | |
| 30:26.260 --> 30:28.180 | |
| Not at the podcast, | |
| 30:28.180 --> 30:29.860 | |
| the fact that you're doing a podcast is awesome, | |
| 30:29.860 --> 30:31.380 | |
| other people get to hear them, | |
| 30:31.380 --> 30:34.700 | |
| but it's also good to have it without mics in general. | |
| 30:34.700 --> 30:37.460 | |
| 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, | |
| 30:40.980 --> 30:43.240 | |
| and he was asked on a podcast, | |
| 30:43.240 --> 30:45.700 | |
| how do we psych ourselves up to do a workout? | |
| 30:45.700 --> 30:48.340 | |
| How do we make that discipline to go and work out? | |
| 30:48.340 --> 30:50.300 | |
| And he's like, why are you asking me? | |
| 30:50.300 --> 30:52.340 | |
| I can't stop working out. | |
| 30:52.340 --> 30:54.380 | |
| I don't need to psych myself up. | |
| 30:54.380 --> 30:57.340 | |
| So, and likewise, he asked me, | |
| 30:57.340 --> 30:59.740 | |
| how do you get to have interdisciplinary conversations | |
| 30:59.740 --> 31:00.700 | |
| on all sorts of different things, | |
| 31:00.700 --> 31:01.660 | |
| all sorts of different people? | |
| 31:01.660 --> 31:04.860 | |
| I'm like, that's what makes me go, right? | |
| 31:04.860 --> 31:07.380 | |
| Like that's, I couldn't stop doing that. | |
| 31:07.380 --> 31:09.660 | |
| I did that long before any of them were recorded. | |
| 31:09.660 --> 31:12.380 | |
| In fact, a lot of the motivation for starting recording it | |
| 31:12.380 --> 31:14.420 | |
| 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, | |
| 31:17.700 --> 31:18.900 | |
| not enough time to read them. | |
| 31:18.900 --> 31:20.700 | |
| And now if I have the motivation, | |
| 31:20.700 --> 31:23.220 | |
| 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. | |
| 31:32.780 --> 31:34.260 | |
| We rarely do. | |
| 31:34.260 --> 31:36.460 | |
| And in fact, when we do, it's punished. | |
| 31:36.460 --> 31:38.820 | |
| 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. | |
| 31:43.100 --> 31:46.380 | |
| And only then did they start expanding out. | |
| 31:46.380 --> 31:47.660 | |
| 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, | |
| 31:52.980 --> 31:55.580 | |
| 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, | |
| 32:03.140 --> 32:04.620 | |
| but do it with your eyes open | |
| 32:04.620 --> 32:06.900 | |
| about what it does to your job chances. | |
| 32:06.900 --> 32:09.580 | |
| And the more broad you are | |
| 32:09.580 --> 32:12.900 | |
| and the less time you spend hyper specializing | |
| 32:12.900 --> 32:15.780 | |
| in your field, the lower your job chances are. | |
| 32:15.780 --> 32:17.060 | |
| That's just an academic reality. | |
| 32:17.060 --> 32:20.060 | |
| It's terrible, I don't like it, but it's a reality. | |
| 32:20.060 --> 32:22.540 | |
| And for some people, that's fine. | |
| 32:22.540 --> 32:24.660 | |
| Like there's plenty of people who are wonderful scientists | |
| 32:24.660 --> 32:27.140 | |
| who have zero interest in branching out | |
| 32:27.140 --> 32:30.740 | |
| and talking to things, to anyone outside their field. | |
| 32:30.740 --> 32:33.740 | |
| But it is disillusioning to me. | |
| 32:33.740 --> 32:36.180 | |
| Some of the, you know, romantic notion I had | |
| 32:36.180 --> 32:38.220 | |
| of the intellectual academic life | |
| 32:38.220 --> 32:39.940 | |
| is belied by the reality of it. | |
| 32:39.940 --> 32:43.500 | |
| The idea that we should reach out beyond our discipline | |
| 32:43.500 --> 32:48.500 | |
| 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. | |
| 32:53.900 --> 32:57.660 | |
| 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, | |
| 33:00.300 --> 33:02.940 | |
| you're also an inspiration to others. | |
| 33:02.940 --> 33:04.980 | |
| Like I could speak for myself. | |
| 33:05.780 --> 33:09.540 | |
| You know, I also have a career I'm thinking about, right? | |
| 33:09.540 --> 33:12.060 | |
| And without your podcast, | |
| 33:12.060 --> 33:15.060 | |
| 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 | |
| 33:19.540 --> 33:23.340 | |
| 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, | |
| 33:27.460 --> 33:30.540 | |
| 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. | |
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| So conversations is the beginning. | |
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| And in the field of AI, it's obvious | |
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| that we should think outside of pure computer vision | |
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| competitions on a particular data sets. | |
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| We should think about the broader impact | |
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| of how this can be, you know, reaching out to physics, | |
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| to psychology, to neuroscience and having these | |
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| conversations so that you're an inspiration. | |
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| 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 | |
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| and so on and so on. | |
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| We can end on a balance between pessimism and optimism. | |
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| And Sean, thank you so much for talking to me, it was awesome. | |
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| No, Lex, thank you very much for this conversation. | |
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| It was great. | |