WEBVTT 00:00.000 --> 00:04.200 As part of MIT course 6S099, Artificial General Intelligence, 00:04.200 --> 00:06.600 I've gotten the chance to sit down with Max Tegmark. 00:06.600 --> 00:08.680 He is a professor here at MIT. 00:08.680 --> 00:11.920 He's a physicist, spent a large part of his career 00:11.920 --> 00:16.960 studying the mysteries of our cosmological universe. 00:16.960 --> 00:20.680 But he's also studied and delved into the beneficial 00:20.680 --> 00:24.000 possibilities and the existential risks 00:24.000 --> 00:25.800 of artificial intelligence. 00:25.800 --> 00:29.040 Amongst many other things, he is the cofounder 00:29.040 --> 00:33.080 of the Future of Life Institute, author of two books, 00:33.080 --> 00:35.160 both of which I highly recommend. 00:35.160 --> 00:37.260 First, Our Mathematical Universe. 00:37.260 --> 00:40.160 Second is Life 3.0. 00:40.160 --> 00:44.080 He's truly an out of the box thinker and a fun personality, 00:44.080 --> 00:45.480 so I really enjoy talking to him. 00:45.480 --> 00:47.980 If you'd like to see more of these videos in the future, 00:47.980 --> 00:50.640 please subscribe and also click the little bell icon 00:50.640 --> 00:52.720 to make sure you don't miss any videos. 00:52.720 --> 00:56.840 Also, Twitter, LinkedIn, agi.mit.edu 00:56.840 --> 00:59.600 if you wanna watch other lectures 00:59.600 --> 01:01.080 or conversations like this one. 01:01.080 --> 01:04.000 Better yet, go read Max's book, Life 3.0. 01:04.000 --> 01:07.940 Chapter seven on goals is my favorite. 01:07.940 --> 01:10.480 It's really where philosophy and engineering come together 01:10.480 --> 01:13.440 and it opens with a quote by Dostoevsky. 01:14.400 --> 01:17.940 The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive 01:17.940 --> 01:20.520 but in finding something to live for. 01:20.520 --> 01:23.920 Lastly, I believe that every failure rewards us 01:23.920 --> 01:26.560 with an opportunity to learn 01:26.560 --> 01:28.360 and in that sense, I've been very fortunate 01:28.360 --> 01:30.960 to fail in so many new and exciting ways 01:31.840 --> 01:34.020 and this conversation was no different. 01:34.020 --> 01:36.160 I've learned about something called 01:36.160 --> 01:40.840 radio frequency interference, RFI, look it up. 01:40.840 --> 01:42.960 Apparently, music and conversations 01:42.960 --> 01:45.480 from local radio stations can bleed into the audio 01:45.480 --> 01:47.080 that you're recording in such a way 01:47.080 --> 01:49.360 that it almost completely ruins that audio. 01:49.360 --> 01:52.060 It's an exceptionally difficult sound source to remove. 01:53.240 --> 01:55.520 So, I've gotten the opportunity to learn 01:55.520 --> 02:00.200 how to avoid RFI in the future during recording sessions. 02:00.200 --> 02:02.680 I've also gotten the opportunity to learn 02:02.680 --> 02:06.240 how to use Adobe Audition and iZotope RX 6 02:06.240 --> 02:11.240 to do some noise, some audio repair. 02:11.720 --> 02:14.380 Of course, this is an exceptionally difficult noise 02:14.380 --> 02:15.220 to remove. 02:15.220 --> 02:16.280 I am an engineer. 02:16.280 --> 02:18.240 I'm not an audio engineer. 02:18.240 --> 02:20.180 Neither is anybody else in our group 02:20.180 --> 02:21.880 but we did our best. 02:21.880 --> 02:25.040 Nevertheless, I thank you for your patience 02:25.040 --> 02:27.960 and I hope you're still able to enjoy this conversation. 02:27.960 --> 02:29.320 Do you think there's intelligent life 02:29.320 --> 02:31.360 out there in the universe? 02:31.360 --> 02:33.480 Let's open up with an easy question. 02:33.480 --> 02:36.240 I have a minority view here actually. 02:36.240 --> 02:39.440 When I give public lectures, I often ask for a show of hands 02:39.440 --> 02:42.920 who thinks there's intelligent life out there somewhere else 02:42.920 --> 02:45.440 and almost everyone put their hands up 02:45.440 --> 02:47.360 and when I ask why, they'll be like, 02:47.360 --> 02:50.900 oh, there's so many galaxies out there, there's gotta be. 02:51.840 --> 02:54.560 But I'm a numbers nerd, right? 02:54.560 --> 02:56.640 So when you look more carefully at it, 02:56.640 --> 02:58.040 it's not so clear at all. 02:59.080 --> 03:00.680 When we talk about our universe, first of all, 03:00.680 --> 03:03.040 we don't mean all of space. 03:03.040 --> 03:04.040 We actually mean, I don't know, 03:04.040 --> 03:05.440 you can throw me the universe if you want, 03:05.440 --> 03:07.280 it's behind you there. 03:07.280 --> 03:11.440 It's, we simply mean the spherical region of space 03:11.440 --> 03:15.360 from which light has a time to reach us so far 03:15.360 --> 03:17.040 during the 14.8 billion year, 03:17.040 --> 03:19.320 13.8 billion years since our Big Bang. 03:19.320 --> 03:22.320 There's more space here but this is what we call a universe 03:22.320 --> 03:24.040 because that's all we have access to. 03:24.040 --> 03:25.960 So is there intelligent life here 03:25.960 --> 03:28.920 that's gotten to the point of building telescopes 03:28.920 --> 03:29.960 and computers? 03:31.160 --> 03:34.540 My guess is no, actually. 03:34.540 --> 03:37.800 The probability of it happening on any given planet 03:39.240 --> 03:42.620 is some number we don't know what it is. 03:42.620 --> 03:47.620 And what we do know is that the number can't be super high 03:48.480 --> 03:50.300 because there's over a billion Earth like planets 03:50.300 --> 03:52.880 in the Milky Way galaxy alone, 03:52.880 --> 03:56.280 many of which are billions of years older than Earth. 03:56.280 --> 04:00.600 And aside from some UFO believers, 04:00.600 --> 04:01.880 there isn't much evidence 04:01.880 --> 04:05.600 that any superduran civilization has come here at all. 04:05.600 --> 04:08.440 And so that's the famous Fermi paradox, right? 04:08.440 --> 04:10.180 And then if you work the numbers, 04:10.180 --> 04:13.440 what you find is that if you have no clue 04:13.440 --> 04:16.880 what the probability is of getting life on a given planet, 04:16.880 --> 04:19.680 so it could be 10 to the minus 10, 10 to the minus 20, 04:19.680 --> 04:22.960 or 10 to the minus two, or any power of 10 04:22.960 --> 04:23.800 is sort of equally likely 04:23.800 --> 04:25.480 if you wanna be really open minded, 04:25.480 --> 04:27.600 that translates into it being equally likely 04:27.600 --> 04:31.800 that our nearest neighbor is 10 to the 16 meters away, 04:31.800 --> 04:33.880 10 to the 17 meters away, 10 to the 18. 04:35.400 --> 04:40.400 By the time you get much less than 10 to the 16 already, 04:41.080 --> 04:45.960 we pretty much know there is nothing else that close. 04:45.960 --> 04:47.280 And when you get beyond 10. 04:47.280 --> 04:48.680 Because they would have discovered us. 04:48.680 --> 04:50.360 Yeah, they would have been discovered as long ago, 04:50.360 --> 04:51.440 or if they're really close, 04:51.440 --> 04:53.560 we would have probably noted some engineering projects 04:53.560 --> 04:54.640 that they're doing. 04:54.640 --> 04:57.880 And if it's beyond 10 to the 26 meters, 04:57.880 --> 05:00.000 that's already outside of here. 05:00.000 --> 05:05.000 So my guess is actually that we are the only life in here 05:05.800 --> 05:09.040 that's gotten the point of building advanced tech, 05:09.040 --> 05:10.720 which I think is very, 05:12.680 --> 05:15.360 puts a lot of responsibility on our shoulders, not screw up. 05:15.360 --> 05:17.240 I think people who take for granted 05:17.240 --> 05:20.120 that it's okay for us to screw up, 05:20.120 --> 05:22.760 have an accidental nuclear war or go extinct somehow 05:22.760 --> 05:25.960 because there's a sort of Star Trek like situation out there 05:25.960 --> 05:28.360 where some other life forms are gonna come and bail us out 05:28.360 --> 05:30.400 and it doesn't matter as much. 05:30.400 --> 05:33.400 I think they're leveling us into a false sense of security. 05:33.400 --> 05:35.200 I think it's much more prudent to say, 05:35.200 --> 05:36.400 let's be really grateful 05:36.400 --> 05:38.720 for this amazing opportunity we've had 05:38.720 --> 05:43.720 and make the best of it just in case it is down to us. 05:44.080 --> 05:45.680 So from a physics perspective, 05:45.680 --> 05:48.800 do you think intelligent life, 05:48.800 --> 05:51.360 so it's unique from a sort of statistical view 05:51.360 --> 05:52.560 of the size of the universe, 05:52.560 --> 05:55.840 but from the basic matter of the universe, 05:55.840 --> 05:59.040 how difficult is it for intelligent life to come about? 05:59.040 --> 06:01.280 The kind of advanced tech building life 06:03.120 --> 06:05.720 is implied in your statement that it's really difficult 06:05.720 --> 06:07.640 to create something like a human species. 06:07.640 --> 06:11.560 Well, I think what we know is that going from no life 06:11.560 --> 06:15.720 to having life that can do a level of tech, 06:15.720 --> 06:18.720 there's some sort of two going beyond that 06:18.720 --> 06:22.200 than actually settling our whole universe with life. 06:22.200 --> 06:26.560 There's some major roadblock there, 06:26.560 --> 06:30.880 which is some great filter as it's sometimes called, 06:30.880 --> 06:33.520 which is tough to get through. 06:33.520 --> 06:37.160 It's either that roadblock is either behind us 06:37.160 --> 06:38.720 or in front of us. 06:38.720 --> 06:41.080 I'm hoping very much that it's behind us. 06:41.080 --> 06:45.960 I'm super excited every time we get a new report from NASA 06:45.960 --> 06:48.480 saying they failed to find any life on Mars. 06:48.480 --> 06:50.080 I'm like, yes, awesome. 06:50.080 --> 06:51.680 Because that suggests that the hard part, 06:51.680 --> 06:54.240 maybe it was getting the first ribosome 06:54.240 --> 06:59.240 or some very low level kind of stepping stone 06:59.520 --> 07:00.400 so that we're home free. 07:00.400 --> 07:01.720 Because if that's true, 07:01.720 --> 07:03.640 then the future is really only limited 07:03.640 --> 07:05.200 by our own imagination. 07:05.200 --> 07:07.360 It would be much suckier if it turns out 07:07.360 --> 07:11.440 that this level of life is kind of a dime a dozen, 07:11.440 --> 07:12.760 but maybe there's some other problem. 07:12.760 --> 07:16.160 Like as soon as a civilization gets advanced technology, 07:16.160 --> 07:17.000 within a hundred years, 07:17.000 --> 07:20.320 they get into some stupid fight with themselves and poof. 07:20.320 --> 07:21.760 That would be a bummer. 07:21.760 --> 07:26.160 Yeah, so you've explored the mysteries of the universe, 07:26.160 --> 07:29.000 the cosmological universe, the one that's sitting 07:29.000 --> 07:30.000 between us today. 07:31.080 --> 07:35.960 I think you've also begun to explore the other universe, 07:35.960 --> 07:38.000 which is sort of the mystery, 07:38.000 --> 07:40.960 the mysterious universe of the mind of intelligence, 07:40.960 --> 07:42.840 of intelligent life. 07:42.840 --> 07:45.280 So is there a common thread between your interest 07:45.280 --> 07:48.760 or the way you think about space and intelligence? 07:48.760 --> 07:51.040 Oh yeah, when I was a teenager, 07:53.040 --> 07:57.280 I was already very fascinated by the biggest questions. 07:57.280 --> 08:00.560 And I felt that the two biggest mysteries of all in science 08:00.560 --> 08:05.000 were our universe out there and our universe in here. 08:05.000 --> 08:08.120 So it's quite natural after having spent 08:08.120 --> 08:11.040 a quarter of a century on my career, 08:11.040 --> 08:12.680 thinking a lot about this one, 08:12.680 --> 08:14.320 that I'm now indulging in the luxury 08:14.320 --> 08:15.960 of doing research on this one. 08:15.960 --> 08:17.720 It's just so cool. 08:17.720 --> 08:20.120 I feel the time is ripe now 08:20.120 --> 08:25.120 for you trans greatly deepening our understanding of this. 08:25.120 --> 08:26.640 Just start exploring this one. 08:26.640 --> 08:29.560 Yeah, because I think a lot of people view intelligence 08:29.560 --> 08:33.520 as something mysterious that can only exist 08:33.520 --> 08:36.120 in biological organisms like us, 08:36.120 --> 08:37.680 and therefore dismiss all talk 08:37.680 --> 08:41.160 about artificial general intelligence as science fiction. 08:41.160 --> 08:43.200 But from my perspective as a physicist, 08:43.200 --> 08:46.680 I am a blob of quarks and electrons 08:46.680 --> 08:48.360 moving around in a certain pattern 08:48.360 --> 08:50.080 and processing information in certain ways. 08:50.080 --> 08:53.600 And this is also a blob of quarks and electrons. 08:53.600 --> 08:55.360 I'm not smarter than the water bottle 08:55.360 --> 08:57.880 because I'm made of different kinds of quarks. 08:57.880 --> 08:59.640 I'm made of up quarks and down quarks, 08:59.640 --> 09:01.400 exact same kind as this. 09:01.400 --> 09:05.080 There's no secret sauce, I think, in me. 09:05.080 --> 09:08.560 It's all about the pattern of the information processing. 09:08.560 --> 09:12.240 And this means that there's no law of physics 09:12.240 --> 09:15.600 saying that we can't create technology, 09:15.600 --> 09:19.960 which can help us by being incredibly intelligent 09:19.960 --> 09:21.680 and help us crack mysteries that we couldn't. 09:21.680 --> 09:23.560 In other words, I think we've really only seen 09:23.560 --> 09:26.480 the tip of the intelligence iceberg so far. 09:26.480 --> 09:29.960 Yeah, so the perceptronium. 09:29.960 --> 09:31.280 Yeah. 09:31.280 --> 09:33.200 So you coined this amazing term. 09:33.200 --> 09:35.760 It's a hypothetical state of matter, 09:35.760 --> 09:38.360 sort of thinking from a physics perspective, 09:38.360 --> 09:40.080 what is the kind of matter that can help, 09:40.080 --> 09:42.920 as you're saying, subjective experience emerge, 09:42.920 --> 09:44.280 consciousness emerge. 09:44.280 --> 09:46.640 So how do you think about consciousness 09:46.640 --> 09:48.160 from this physics perspective? 09:49.960 --> 09:50.800 Very good question. 09:50.800 --> 09:55.800 So again, I think many people have underestimated 09:55.800 --> 09:59.120 our ability to make progress on this 09:59.120 --> 10:01.320 by convincing themselves it's hopeless 10:01.320 --> 10:05.840 because somehow we're missing some ingredient that we need. 10:05.840 --> 10:09.560 There's some new consciousness particle or whatever. 10:09.560 --> 10:12.720 I happen to think that we're not missing anything 10:12.720 --> 10:16.320 and that it's not the interesting thing 10:16.320 --> 10:18.560 about consciousness that gives us 10:18.560 --> 10:21.400 this amazing subjective experience of colors 10:21.400 --> 10:23.320 and sounds and emotions. 10:23.320 --> 10:26.320 It's rather something at the higher level 10:26.320 --> 10:28.800 about the patterns of information processing. 10:28.800 --> 10:33.160 And that's why I like to think about this idea 10:33.160 --> 10:34.480 of perceptronium. 10:34.480 --> 10:36.920 What does it mean for an arbitrary physical system 10:36.920 --> 10:41.920 to be conscious in terms of what its particles are doing 10:41.920 --> 10:43.560 or its information is doing? 10:43.560 --> 10:46.080 I don't think, I hate carbon chauvinism, 10:46.080 --> 10:47.960 this attitude you have to be made of carbon atoms 10:47.960 --> 10:50.160 to be smart or conscious. 10:50.160 --> 10:53.520 There's something about the information processing 10:53.520 --> 10:55.360 that this kind of matter performs. 10:55.360 --> 10:57.840 Yeah, and you can see I have my favorite equations here 10:57.840 --> 11:00.720 describing various fundamental aspects of the world. 11:00.720 --> 11:02.560 I feel that I think one day, 11:02.560 --> 11:04.360 maybe someone who's watching this will come up 11:04.360 --> 11:07.280 with the equations that information processing 11:07.280 --> 11:08.760 has to satisfy to be conscious. 11:08.760 --> 11:11.800 I'm quite convinced there is big discovery 11:11.800 --> 11:15.400 to be made there because let's face it, 11:15.400 --> 11:18.720 we know that so many things are made up of information. 11:18.720 --> 11:21.960 We know that some information processing is conscious 11:21.960 --> 11:25.520 because we are conscious. 11:25.520 --> 11:27.600 But we also know that a lot of information processing 11:27.600 --> 11:28.440 is not conscious. 11:28.440 --> 11:30.040 Like most of the information processing happening 11:30.040 --> 11:32.680 in your brain right now is not conscious. 11:32.680 --> 11:36.040 There are like 10 megabytes per second coming in 11:36.040 --> 11:38.080 even just through your visual system. 11:38.080 --> 11:40.480 You're not conscious about your heartbeat regulation 11:40.480 --> 11:42.120 or most things. 11:42.120 --> 11:45.680 Even if I just ask you to like read what it says here, 11:45.680 --> 11:48.040 you look at it and then, oh, now you know what it said. 11:48.040 --> 11:51.560 But you're not aware of how the computation actually happened. 11:51.560 --> 11:53.680 Your consciousness is like the CEO 11:53.680 --> 11:56.680 that got an email at the end with the final answer. 11:56.680 --> 12:01.000 So what is it that makes a difference? 12:01.000 --> 12:05.120 I think that's both a great science mystery. 12:05.120 --> 12:07.080 We're actually studying it a little bit in my lab here 12:07.080 --> 12:10.920 at MIT, but I also think it's just a really urgent question 12:10.920 --> 12:12.080 to answer. 12:12.080 --> 12:14.880 For starters, I mean, if you're an emergency room doctor 12:14.880 --> 12:17.160 and you have an unresponsive patient coming in, 12:17.160 --> 12:19.600 wouldn't it be great if in addition to having 12:22.360 --> 12:25.320 a CT scanner, you had a consciousness scanner 12:25.320 --> 12:27.920 that could figure out whether this person 12:27.920 --> 12:30.960 is actually having locked in syndrome 12:30.960 --> 12:32.440 or is actually comatose. 12:33.360 --> 12:37.000 And in the future, imagine if we build robots 12:37.000 --> 12:41.480 or the machine that we can have really good conversations 12:41.480 --> 12:44.840 with, which I think is very likely to happen. 12:44.840 --> 12:47.760 Wouldn't you want to know if your home helper robot 12:47.760 --> 12:51.320 is actually experiencing anything or just like a zombie, 12:51.320 --> 12:53.520 I mean, would you prefer it? 12:53.520 --> 12:54.360 What would you prefer? 12:54.360 --> 12:56.200 Would you prefer that it's actually unconscious 12:56.200 --> 12:58.560 so that you don't have to feel guilty about switching it off 12:58.560 --> 13:02.120 or giving boring chores or what would you prefer? 13:02.120 --> 13:06.520 Well, certainly we would prefer, 13:06.520 --> 13:08.960 I would prefer the appearance of consciousness. 13:08.960 --> 13:11.720 But the question is whether the appearance of consciousness 13:11.720 --> 13:15.040 is different than consciousness itself. 13:15.040 --> 13:18.200 And sort of to ask that as a question, 13:18.200 --> 13:21.760 do you think we need to understand what consciousness is, 13:21.760 --> 13:23.520 solve the hard problem of consciousness 13:23.520 --> 13:28.240 in order to build something like an AGI system? 13:28.240 --> 13:30.440 No, I don't think that. 13:30.440 --> 13:34.520 And I think we will probably be able to build things 13:34.520 --> 13:36.080 even if we don't answer that question. 13:36.080 --> 13:37.720 But if we want to make sure that what happens 13:37.720 --> 13:40.960 is a good thing, we better solve it first. 13:40.960 --> 13:44.960 So it's a wonderful controversy you're raising there 13:44.960 --> 13:47.960 where you have basically three points of view 13:47.960 --> 13:48.800 about the hard problem. 13:48.800 --> 13:52.800 So there are two different points of view. 13:52.800 --> 13:55.160 They both conclude that the hard problem of consciousness 13:55.160 --> 13:56.840 is BS. 13:56.840 --> 13:59.320 On one hand, you have some people like Daniel Dennett 13:59.320 --> 14:01.480 who say that consciousness is just BS 14:01.480 --> 14:05.000 because consciousness is the same thing as intelligence. 14:05.000 --> 14:06.440 There's no difference. 14:06.440 --> 14:11.080 So anything which acts conscious is conscious, 14:11.080 --> 14:13.480 just like we are. 14:13.480 --> 14:15.960 And then there are also a lot of people, 14:15.960 --> 14:18.400 including many top AI researchers I know, 14:18.400 --> 14:19.920 who say, oh, consciousness is just bullshit 14:19.920 --> 14:22.760 because, of course, machines can never be conscious. 14:22.760 --> 14:24.520 They're always going to be zombies. 14:24.520 --> 14:27.880 You never have to feel guilty about how you treat them. 14:27.880 --> 14:30.880 And then there's a third group of people, 14:30.880 --> 14:34.920 including Giulio Tononi, for example, 14:34.920 --> 14:37.440 and Krzysztof Koch and a number of others. 14:37.440 --> 14:39.520 I would put myself also in this middle camp 14:39.520 --> 14:41.880 who say that actually some information processing 14:41.880 --> 14:44.160 is conscious and some is not. 14:44.160 --> 14:46.960 So let's find the equation which can be used 14:46.960 --> 14:49.080 to determine which it is. 14:49.080 --> 14:52.040 And I think we've just been a little bit lazy, 14:52.040 --> 14:54.960 kind of running away from this problem for a long time. 14:54.960 --> 14:57.840 It's been almost taboo to even mention the C word 14:57.840 --> 15:00.520 in a lot of circles because, 15:00.520 --> 15:03.520 but we should stop making excuses. 15:03.520 --> 15:07.920 This is a science question and there are ways 15:07.920 --> 15:11.960 we can even test any theory that makes predictions for this. 15:11.960 --> 15:13.640 And coming back to this helper robot, 15:13.640 --> 15:16.080 I mean, so you said you'd want your helper robot 15:16.080 --> 15:18.160 to certainly act conscious and treat you, 15:18.160 --> 15:20.880 like have conversations with you and stuff. 15:20.880 --> 15:21.720 I think so. 15:21.720 --> 15:22.560 But wouldn't you, would you feel, 15:22.560 --> 15:23.920 would you feel a little bit creeped out 15:23.920 --> 15:27.680 if you realized that it was just a glossed up tape recorder, 15:27.680 --> 15:31.560 you know, that was just zombie and was a faking emotion? 15:31.560 --> 15:34.560 Would you prefer that it actually had an experience 15:34.560 --> 15:37.000 or would you prefer that it's actually 15:37.000 --> 15:39.120 not experiencing anything so you feel, 15:39.120 --> 15:42.200 you don't have to feel guilty about what you do to it? 15:42.200 --> 15:45.040 It's such a difficult question because, you know, 15:45.040 --> 15:47.280 it's like when you're in a relationship and you say, 15:47.280 --> 15:48.120 well, I love you. 15:48.120 --> 15:49.760 And the other person said, I love you back. 15:49.760 --> 15:52.640 It's like asking, well, do they really love you back 15:52.640 --> 15:55.360 or are they just saying they love you back? 15:55.360 --> 15:58.120 Don't you really want them to actually love you? 15:58.120 --> 16:03.120 It's hard to, it's hard to really know the difference 16:03.520 --> 16:08.520 between everything seeming like there's consciousness 16:09.000 --> 16:10.640 present, there's intelligence present, 16:10.640 --> 16:13.840 there's affection, passion, love, 16:13.840 --> 16:16.200 and it actually being there. 16:16.200 --> 16:17.720 I'm not sure, do you have? 16:17.720 --> 16:19.400 But like, can I ask you a question about this? 16:19.400 --> 16:20.760 Like to make it a bit more pointed. 16:20.760 --> 16:22.920 So Mass General Hospital is right across the river, right? 16:22.920 --> 16:23.760 Yes. 16:23.760 --> 16:26.720 Suppose you're going in for a medical procedure 16:26.720 --> 16:29.320 and they're like, you know, for anesthesia, 16:29.320 --> 16:31.000 what we're going to do is we're going to give you 16:31.000 --> 16:33.160 muscle relaxants so you won't be able to move 16:33.160 --> 16:35.040 and you're going to feel excruciating pain 16:35.040 --> 16:35.880 during the whole surgery, 16:35.880 --> 16:37.600 but you won't be able to do anything about it. 16:37.600 --> 16:39.200 But then we're going to give you this drug 16:39.200 --> 16:40.760 that erases your memory of it. 16:41.960 --> 16:43.440 Would you be cool about that? 16:44.960 --> 16:47.600 What's the difference that you're conscious about it 16:48.600 --> 16:51.640 or not if there's no behavioral change, right? 16:51.640 --> 16:54.520 Right, that's a really, that's a really clear way to put it. 16:54.520 --> 16:57.400 That's, yeah, it feels like in that sense, 16:57.400 --> 17:01.080 experiencing it is a valuable quality. 17:01.080 --> 17:04.800 So actually being able to have subjective experiences, 17:05.840 --> 17:09.120 at least in that case, is valuable. 17:09.120 --> 17:11.240 And I think we humans have a little bit 17:11.240 --> 17:13.600 of a bad track record also of making 17:13.600 --> 17:15.480 these self serving arguments 17:15.480 --> 17:18.040 that other entities aren't conscious. 17:18.040 --> 17:19.160 You know, people often say, 17:19.160 --> 17:21.800 oh, these animals can't feel pain. 17:21.800 --> 17:24.040 It's okay to boil lobsters because we ask them 17:24.040 --> 17:25.960 if it hurt and they didn't say anything. 17:25.960 --> 17:27.400 And now there was just a paper out saying, 17:27.400 --> 17:29.320 lobsters do feel pain when you boil them 17:29.320 --> 17:31.040 and they're banning it in Switzerland. 17:31.040 --> 17:33.560 And we did this with slaves too often and said, 17:33.560 --> 17:34.680 oh, they don't mind. 17:36.240 --> 17:39.480 They don't maybe aren't conscious 17:39.480 --> 17:41.160 or women don't have souls or whatever. 17:41.160 --> 17:43.200 So I'm a little bit nervous when I hear people 17:43.200 --> 17:46.360 just take as an axiom that machines 17:46.360 --> 17:48.960 can't have experience ever. 17:48.960 --> 17:51.560 I think this is just a really fascinating science question 17:51.560 --> 17:52.400 is what it is. 17:52.400 --> 17:54.720 Let's research it and try to figure out 17:54.720 --> 17:56.000 what it is that makes the difference 17:56.000 --> 17:58.880 between unconscious intelligent behavior 17:58.880 --> 18:01.120 and conscious intelligent behavior. 18:01.120 --> 18:04.680 So in terms of, so if you think of a Boston Dynamics 18:04.680 --> 18:07.680 human or robot being sort of with a broom 18:07.680 --> 18:11.920 being pushed around, it starts pushing 18:11.920 --> 18:13.320 on a consciousness question. 18:13.320 --> 18:17.040 So let me ask, do you think an AGI system 18:17.040 --> 18:19.720 like a few neuroscientists believe 18:19.720 --> 18:22.320 needs to have a physical embodiment? 18:22.320 --> 18:25.720 Needs to have a body or something like a body? 18:25.720 --> 18:28.280 No, I don't think so. 18:28.280 --> 18:30.560 You mean to have a conscious experience? 18:30.560 --> 18:31.640 To have consciousness. 18:33.160 --> 18:36.080 I do think it helps a lot to have a physical embodiment 18:36.080 --> 18:38.440 to learn the kind of things about the world 18:38.440 --> 18:41.480 that are important to us humans, for sure. 18:42.560 --> 18:45.600 But I don't think the physical embodiment 18:45.600 --> 18:47.120 is necessary after you've learned it 18:47.120 --> 18:48.760 to just have the experience. 18:48.760 --> 18:51.400 Think about when you're dreaming, right? 18:51.400 --> 18:52.600 Your eyes are closed. 18:52.600 --> 18:54.240 You're not getting any sensory input. 18:54.240 --> 18:55.960 You're not behaving or moving in any way 18:55.960 --> 18:58.160 but there's still an experience there, right? 18:59.720 --> 19:01.400 And so clearly the experience that you have 19:01.400 --> 19:03.320 when you see something cool in your dreams 19:03.320 --> 19:04.800 isn't coming from your eyes. 19:04.800 --> 19:08.640 It's just the information processing itself in your brain 19:08.640 --> 19:10.920 which is that experience, right? 19:10.920 --> 19:13.640 But if I put it another way, I'll say 19:13.640 --> 19:15.120 because it comes from neuroscience 19:15.120 --> 19:18.280 is the reason you want to have a body and a physical 19:18.280 --> 19:23.280 something like a physical, you know, a physical system 19:23.920 --> 19:27.040 is because you want to be able to preserve something. 19:27.040 --> 19:30.840 In order to have a self, you could argue, 19:30.840 --> 19:35.840 would you need to have some kind of embodiment of self 19:36.400 --> 19:37.960 to want to preserve? 19:38.920 --> 19:42.400 Well, now we're getting a little bit anthropomorphic 19:42.400 --> 19:45.200 into anthropomorphizing things. 19:45.200 --> 19:47.280 Maybe talking about self preservation instincts. 19:47.280 --> 19:50.560 I mean, we are evolved organisms, right? 19:50.560 --> 19:53.520 So Darwinian evolution endowed us 19:53.520 --> 19:57.120 and other evolved organism with a self preservation instinct 19:57.120 --> 20:00.560 because those that didn't have those self preservation genes 20:00.560 --> 20:02.960 got cleaned out of the gene pool, right? 20:02.960 --> 20:06.880 But if you build an artificial general intelligence 20:06.880 --> 20:10.040 the mind space that you can design is much, much larger 20:10.040 --> 20:14.440 than just a specific subset of minds that can evolve. 20:14.440 --> 20:17.280 So an AGI mind doesn't necessarily have 20:17.280 --> 20:19.880 to have any self preservation instinct. 20:19.880 --> 20:21.600 It also doesn't necessarily have to be 20:21.600 --> 20:24.040 so individualistic as us. 20:24.040 --> 20:26.080 Like, imagine if you could just, first of all, 20:26.080 --> 20:27.960 or we are also very afraid of death. 20:27.960 --> 20:29.920 You know, I suppose you could back yourself up 20:29.920 --> 20:32.000 every five minutes and then your airplane 20:32.000 --> 20:32.840 is about to crash. 20:32.840 --> 20:36.680 You're like, shucks, I'm gonna lose the last five minutes 20:36.680 --> 20:39.520 of experiences since my last cloud backup, dang. 20:39.520 --> 20:41.520 You know, it's not as big a deal. 20:41.520 --> 20:45.680 Or if we could just copy experiences between our minds 20:45.680 --> 20:47.640 easily like we, which we could easily do 20:47.640 --> 20:50.360 if we were silicon based, right? 20:50.360 --> 20:54.040 Then maybe we would feel a little bit more 20:54.040 --> 20:56.560 like a hive mind actually, that maybe it's the, 20:56.560 --> 20:59.960 so I don't think we should take for granted at all 20:59.960 --> 21:03.000 that AGI will have to have any of those sort of 21:04.880 --> 21:07.360 competitive as alpha male instincts. 21:07.360 --> 21:10.160 On the other hand, you know, this is really interesting 21:10.160 --> 21:13.840 because I think some people go too far and say, 21:13.840 --> 21:16.680 of course we don't have to have any concerns either 21:16.680 --> 21:20.800 that advanced AI will have those instincts 21:20.800 --> 21:22.680 because we can build anything we want. 21:22.680 --> 21:26.280 That there's a very nice set of arguments going back 21:26.280 --> 21:28.560 to Steve Omohundro and Nick Bostrom and others 21:28.560 --> 21:32.280 just pointing out that when we build machines, 21:32.280 --> 21:34.680 we normally build them with some kind of goal, you know, 21:34.680 --> 21:38.520 win this chess game, drive this car safely or whatever. 21:38.520 --> 21:40.960 And as soon as you put in a goal into machine, 21:40.960 --> 21:42.760 especially if it's kind of open ended goal 21:42.760 --> 21:44.640 and the machine is very intelligent, 21:44.640 --> 21:47.000 it'll break that down into a bunch of sub goals. 21:48.280 --> 21:51.280 And one of those goals will almost always 21:51.280 --> 21:54.200 be self preservation because if it breaks or dies 21:54.200 --> 21:56.120 in the process, it's not gonna accomplish the goal, right? 21:56.120 --> 21:58.040 Like suppose you just build a little, 21:58.040 --> 22:01.000 you have a little robot and you tell it to go down 22:01.000 --> 22:04.040 the store market here and get you some food, 22:04.040 --> 22:06.200 make you cook an Italian dinner, you know, 22:06.200 --> 22:08.400 and then someone mugs it and tries to break it 22:08.400 --> 22:09.480 on the way. 22:09.480 --> 22:12.920 That robot has an incentive to not get destroyed 22:12.920 --> 22:14.720 and defend itself or run away, 22:14.720 --> 22:17.720 because otherwise it's gonna fail in cooking your dinner. 22:17.720 --> 22:19.560 It's not afraid of death, 22:19.560 --> 22:22.960 but it really wants to complete the dinner cooking goal. 22:22.960 --> 22:25.040 So it will have a self preservation instinct. 22:25.040 --> 22:27.920 Continue being a functional agent somehow. 22:27.920 --> 22:32.920 And similarly, if you give any kind of more ambitious goal 22:33.720 --> 22:37.000 to an AGI, it's very likely they wanna acquire 22:37.000 --> 22:39.840 more resources so it can do that better. 22:39.840 --> 22:42.720 And it's exactly from those sort of sub goals 22:42.720 --> 22:43.800 that we might not have intended 22:43.800 --> 22:47.160 that some of the concerns about AGI safety come. 22:47.160 --> 22:50.600 You give it some goal that seems completely harmless. 22:50.600 --> 22:53.360 And then before you realize it, 22:53.360 --> 22:55.480 it's also trying to do these other things 22:55.480 --> 22:56.920 which you didn't want it to do. 22:56.920 --> 22:59.160 And it's maybe smarter than us. 22:59.160 --> 23:01.000 So it's fascinating. 23:01.000 --> 23:05.680 And let me pause just because I am in a very kind 23:05.680 --> 23:08.720 of human centric way, see fear of death 23:08.720 --> 23:11.840 as a valuable motivator. 23:11.840 --> 23:16.440 So you don't think, you think that's an artifact 23:16.440 --> 23:19.120 of evolution, so that's the kind of mind space 23:19.120 --> 23:22.120 evolution created that we're sort of almost obsessed 23:22.120 --> 23:24.400 about self preservation, some kind of genetic flow. 23:24.400 --> 23:29.400 You don't think that's necessary to be afraid of death. 23:29.480 --> 23:32.920 So not just a kind of sub goal of self preservation 23:32.920 --> 23:34.920 just so you can keep doing the thing, 23:34.920 --> 23:38.720 but more fundamentally sort of have the finite thing 23:38.720 --> 23:43.080 like this ends for you at some point. 23:43.080 --> 23:44.160 Interesting. 23:44.160 --> 23:47.440 Do I think it's necessary for what precisely? 23:47.440 --> 23:50.920 For intelligence, but also for consciousness. 23:50.920 --> 23:55.040 So for those, for both, do you think really 23:55.040 --> 23:59.120 like a finite death and the fear of it is important? 23:59.120 --> 24:04.120 So before I can answer, before we can agree 24:05.160 --> 24:06.960 on whether it's necessary for intelligence 24:06.960 --> 24:08.360 or for consciousness, we should be clear 24:08.360 --> 24:09.800 on how we define those two words. 24:09.800 --> 24:11.960 Cause a lot of really smart people define them 24:11.960 --> 24:13.320 in very different ways. 24:13.320 --> 24:17.080 I was on this panel with AI experts 24:17.080 --> 24:20.080 and they couldn't agree on how to define intelligence even. 24:20.080 --> 24:22.000 So I define intelligence simply 24:22.000 --> 24:24.760 as the ability to accomplish complex goals. 24:25.640 --> 24:27.280 I like your broad definition, because again 24:27.280 --> 24:29.040 I don't want to be a carbon chauvinist. 24:29.040 --> 24:30.400 Right. 24:30.400 --> 24:34.600 And in that case, no, certainly 24:34.600 --> 24:36.480 it doesn't require fear of death. 24:36.480 --> 24:40.120 I would say alpha go, alpha zero is quite intelligent. 24:40.120 --> 24:43.080 I don't think alpha zero has any fear of being turned off 24:43.080 --> 24:46.320 because it doesn't understand the concept of it even. 24:46.320 --> 24:48.440 And similarly consciousness. 24:48.440 --> 24:52.240 I mean, you could certainly imagine very simple 24:52.240 --> 24:53.920 kind of experience. 24:53.920 --> 24:57.200 If certain plants have any kind of experience 24:57.200 --> 24:58.560 I don't think they're very afraid of dying 24:58.560 --> 25:00.920 or there's nothing they can do about it anyway much. 25:00.920 --> 25:04.560 So there wasn't that much value in, but more seriously 25:04.560 --> 25:09.200 I think if you ask, not just about being conscious 25:09.200 --> 25:14.200 but maybe having what you would, we might call 25:14.320 --> 25:16.400 an exciting life where you feel passion 25:16.400 --> 25:21.400 and really appreciate the things. 25:21.480 --> 25:24.440 Maybe there somehow, maybe there perhaps it does help 25:24.440 --> 25:27.880 having a backdrop that, Hey, it's finite. 25:27.880 --> 25:31.200 No, let's make the most of this, let's live to the fullest. 25:31.200 --> 25:33.800 So if you knew you were going to live forever 25:34.880 --> 25:37.400 do you think you would change your? 25:37.400 --> 25:39.560 Yeah, I mean, in some perspective 25:39.560 --> 25:43.960 it would be an incredibly boring life living forever. 25:43.960 --> 25:47.360 So in the sort of loose subjective terms that you said 25:47.360 --> 25:50.480 of something exciting and something in this 25:50.480 --> 25:53.240 that other humans would understand, I think is, yeah 25:53.240 --> 25:57.120 it seems that the finiteness of it is important. 25:57.120 --> 25:59.560 Well, the good news I have for you then is 25:59.560 --> 26:02.120 based on what we understand about cosmology 26:02.120 --> 26:05.120 everything is in our universe is probably 26:05.120 --> 26:07.960 ultimately probably finite, although. 26:07.960 --> 26:11.560 Big crunch or big, what's the, the infinite expansion. 26:11.560 --> 26:13.840 Yeah, we could have a big chill or a big crunch 26:13.840 --> 26:18.440 or a big rip or that's the big snap or death bubbles. 26:18.440 --> 26:20.040 All of them are more than a billion years away. 26:20.040 --> 26:24.600 So we should, we certainly have vastly more time 26:24.600 --> 26:27.920 than our ancestors thought, but there is still 26:29.160 --> 26:32.360 it's still pretty hard to squeeze in an infinite number 26:32.360 --> 26:36.560 of compute cycles, even though there are some loopholes 26:36.560 --> 26:37.720 that just might be possible. 26:37.720 --> 26:41.960 But I think, you know, some people like to say 26:41.960 --> 26:44.760 that you should live as if you're about to 26:44.760 --> 26:46.720 you're going to die in five years or so. 26:46.720 --> 26:47.960 And that's sort of optimal. 26:47.960 --> 26:50.560 Maybe it's a good assumption. 26:50.560 --> 26:54.680 We should build our civilization as if it's all finite 26:54.680 --> 26:55.680 to be on the safe side. 26:55.680 --> 26:56.960 Right, exactly. 26:56.960 --> 26:59.720 So you mentioned defining intelligence 26:59.720 --> 27:02.960 as the ability to solve complex goals. 27:02.960 --> 27:05.440 Where would you draw a line or how would you try 27:05.440 --> 27:08.200 to define human level intelligence 27:08.200 --> 27:10.680 and superhuman level intelligence? 27:10.680 --> 27:13.280 Where is consciousness part of that definition? 27:13.280 --> 27:16.640 No, consciousness does not come into this definition. 27:16.640 --> 27:20.280 So, so I think of intelligence as it's a spectrum 27:20.280 --> 27:21.960 but there are very many different kinds of goals 27:21.960 --> 27:22.800 you can have. 27:22.800 --> 27:24.000 You can have a goal to be a good chess player 27:24.000 --> 27:28.520 a good goal player, a good car driver, a good investor 27:28.520 --> 27:31.160 good poet, et cetera. 27:31.160 --> 27:34.320 So intelligence that by its very nature 27:34.320 --> 27:36.680 isn't something you can measure by this one number 27:36.680 --> 27:37.960 or some overall goodness. 27:37.960 --> 27:38.800 No, no. 27:38.800 --> 27:40.320 There are some people who are more better at this. 27:40.320 --> 27:42.360 Some people are better than that. 27:42.360 --> 27:45.440 Right now we have machines that are much better than us 27:45.440 --> 27:49.040 at some very narrow tasks like multiplying large numbers 27:49.040 --> 27:53.200 fast, memorizing large databases, playing chess 27:53.200 --> 27:56.280 playing go and soon driving cars. 27:57.480 --> 28:00.080 But there's still no machine that can match 28:00.080 --> 28:02.720 a human child in general intelligence 28:02.720 --> 28:05.720 but artificial general intelligence, AGI 28:05.720 --> 28:07.880 the name of your course, of course 28:07.880 --> 28:12.880 that is by its very definition, the quest 28:13.400 --> 28:16.000 to build a machine that can do everything 28:16.000 --> 28:17.800 as well as we can. 28:17.800 --> 28:21.960 So the old Holy grail of AI from back to its inception 28:21.960 --> 28:25.560 in the sixties, if that ever happens, of course 28:25.560 --> 28:27.320 I think it's going to be the biggest transition 28:27.320 --> 28:29.040 in the history of life on earth 28:29.040 --> 28:33.200 but it doesn't necessarily have to wait the big impact 28:33.200 --> 28:35.400 until machines are better than us at knitting 28:35.400 --> 28:39.160 that the really big change doesn't come exactly 28:39.160 --> 28:41.800 at the moment they're better than us at everything. 28:41.800 --> 28:44.120 The really big change comes first 28:44.120 --> 28:45.840 there are big changes when they start becoming better 28:45.840 --> 28:48.800 at us at doing most of the jobs that we do 28:48.800 --> 28:51.160 because that takes away much of the demand 28:51.160 --> 28:53.200 for human labor. 28:53.200 --> 28:55.640 And then the really whopping change comes 28:55.640 --> 29:00.640 when they become better than us at AI research, right? 29:01.040 --> 29:03.760 Because right now the timescale of AI research 29:03.760 --> 29:08.400 is limited by the human research and development cycle 29:08.400 --> 29:10.160 of years typically, you know 29:10.160 --> 29:13.480 how long does it take from one release of some software 29:13.480 --> 29:15.720 or iPhone or whatever to the next? 29:15.720 --> 29:20.720 But once Google can replace 40,000 engineers 29:20.920 --> 29:25.920 by 40,000 equivalent pieces of software or whatever 29:26.400 --> 29:29.680 but then there's no reason that has to be years 29:29.680 --> 29:31.840 it can be in principle much faster 29:31.840 --> 29:36.040 and the timescale of future progress in AI 29:36.040 --> 29:39.320 and all of science and technology will be driven 29:39.320 --> 29:40.960 by machines, not humans. 29:40.960 --> 29:45.960 So it's this simple point which gives right 29:46.520 --> 29:48.720 this incredibly fun controversy 29:48.720 --> 29:51.880 about whether there can be intelligence explosion 29:51.880 --> 29:54.400 so called singularity as Werner Vinge called it. 29:54.400 --> 29:57.040 Now the idea is articulated by I.J. Good 29:57.040 --> 29:59.480 is obviously way back fifties 29:59.480 --> 30:01.040 but you can see Alan Turing 30:01.040 --> 30:03.640 and others thought about it even earlier. 30:06.920 --> 30:10.080 So you asked me what exactly would I define 30:10.080 --> 30:12.800 human level intelligence, yeah. 30:12.800 --> 30:15.680 So the glib answer is to say something 30:15.680 --> 30:18.520 which is better than us at all cognitive tasks 30:18.520 --> 30:21.800 with a better than any human at all cognitive tasks 30:21.800 --> 30:23.080 but the really interesting bar 30:23.080 --> 30:25.760 I think goes a little bit lower than that actually. 30:25.760 --> 30:27.920 It's when they can, when they're better than us 30:27.920 --> 30:31.760 at AI programming and general learning 30:31.760 --> 30:35.360 so that they can if they want to get better 30:35.360 --> 30:37.240 than us at anything by just studying. 30:37.240 --> 30:40.560 So they're better is a key word and better is towards 30:40.560 --> 30:44.120 this kind of spectrum of the complexity of goals 30:44.120 --> 30:45.680 it's able to accomplish. 30:45.680 --> 30:50.360 So another way to, and that's certainly 30:50.360 --> 30:53.040 a very clear definition of human love. 30:53.040 --> 30:55.240 So there's, it's almost like a sea that's rising 30:55.240 --> 30:56.800 you can do more and more and more things 30:56.800 --> 30:58.640 it's a geographic that you show 30:58.640 --> 30:59.880 it's really nice way to put it. 30:59.880 --> 31:01.560 So there's some peaks that 31:01.560 --> 31:03.280 and there's an ocean level elevating 31:03.280 --> 31:04.800 and you solve more and more problems 31:04.800 --> 31:07.720 but just kind of to take a pause 31:07.720 --> 31:09.000 and we took a bunch of questions 31:09.000 --> 31:10.240 and a lot of social networks 31:10.240 --> 31:11.720 and a bunch of people asked 31:11.720 --> 31:14.480 a sort of a slightly different direction 31:14.480 --> 31:19.480 on creativity and things that perhaps aren't a peak. 31:23.560 --> 31:24.720 Human beings are flawed 31:24.720 --> 31:28.720 and perhaps better means having contradiction 31:28.720 --> 31:30.200 being flawed in some way. 31:30.200 --> 31:34.960 So let me sort of start easy, first of all. 31:34.960 --> 31:36.600 So you have a lot of cool equations. 31:36.600 --> 31:39.760 Let me ask, what's your favorite equation, first of all? 31:39.760 --> 31:42.760 I know they're all like your children, but like 31:42.760 --> 31:43.680 which one is that? 31:43.680 --> 31:45.560 This is the shirt in your equation. 31:45.560 --> 31:48.640 It's the master key of quantum mechanics 31:48.640 --> 31:49.880 of the micro world. 31:49.880 --> 31:52.800 So this equation will protect everything 31:52.800 --> 31:55.840 to do with atoms, molecules and all the way up. 31:55.840 --> 31:58.560 Right? 31:58.560 --> 31:59.760 Yeah, so, okay. 31:59.760 --> 32:02.080 So quantum mechanics is certainly a beautiful 32:02.080 --> 32:05.160 mysterious formulation of our world. 32:05.160 --> 32:08.760 So I'd like to sort of ask you, just as an example 32:08.760 --> 32:12.160 it perhaps doesn't have the same beauty as physics does 32:12.160 --> 32:16.960 but in mathematics abstract, the Andrew Wiles 32:16.960 --> 32:19.360 who proved the Fermat's last theorem. 32:19.360 --> 32:22.040 So he just saw this recently 32:22.040 --> 32:24.160 and it kind of caught my eye a little bit. 32:24.160 --> 32:27.960 This is 358 years after it was conjectured. 32:27.960 --> 32:29.960 So this is very simple formulation. 32:29.960 --> 32:32.640 Everybody tried to prove it, everybody failed. 32:32.640 --> 32:34.800 And so here's this guy comes along 32:34.800 --> 32:38.640 and eventually proves it and then fails to prove it 32:38.640 --> 32:41.320 and then proves it again in 94. 32:41.320 --> 32:43.480 And he said like the moment when everything connected 32:43.480 --> 32:46.040 into place in an interview said 32:46.040 --> 32:47.880 it was so indescribably beautiful. 32:47.880 --> 32:51.040 That moment when you finally realize the connecting piece 32:51.040 --> 32:52.800 of two conjectures. 32:52.800 --> 32:55.280 He said, it was so indescribably beautiful. 32:55.280 --> 32:57.040 It was so simple and so elegant. 32:57.040 --> 32:58.760 I couldn't understand how I'd missed it. 32:58.760 --> 33:02.080 And I just stared at it in disbelief for 20 minutes. 33:02.080 --> 33:05.240 Then during the day, I walked around the department 33:05.240 --> 33:07.880 and I keep coming back to my desk 33:07.880 --> 33:09.840 looking to see if it was still there. 33:09.840 --> 33:10.680 It was still there. 33:10.680 --> 33:11.760 I couldn't contain myself. 33:11.760 --> 33:12.880 I was so excited. 33:12.880 --> 33:15.880 It was the most important moment on my working life. 33:15.880 --> 33:18.960 Nothing I ever do again will mean as much. 33:18.960 --> 33:20.800 So that particular moment. 33:20.800 --> 33:24.640 And it kind of made me think of what would it take? 33:24.640 --> 33:27.960 And I think we have all been there at small levels. 33:29.480 --> 33:32.240 Maybe let me ask, have you had a moment like that 33:32.240 --> 33:34.880 in your life where you just had an idea? 33:34.880 --> 33:37.040 It's like, wow, yes. 33:40.000 --> 33:42.480 I wouldn't mention myself in the same breath 33:42.480 --> 33:44.760 as Andrew Wiles, but I've certainly had a number 33:44.760 --> 33:52.200 of aha moments when I realized something very cool 33:52.200 --> 33:56.000 about physics, which has completely made my head explode. 33:56.000 --> 33:58.320 In fact, some of my favorite discoveries I made later, 33:58.320 --> 34:01.080 I later realized that they had been discovered earlier 34:01.080 --> 34:03.240 by someone who sometimes got quite famous for it. 34:03.240 --> 34:05.480 So it's too late for me to even publish it, 34:05.480 --> 34:07.440 but that doesn't diminish in any way. 34:07.440 --> 34:09.760 The emotional experience you have when you realize it, 34:09.760 --> 34:11.320 like, wow. 34:11.320 --> 34:15.520 Yeah, so what would it take in that moment, that wow, 34:15.520 --> 34:17.320 that was yours in that moment? 34:17.320 --> 34:21.440 So what do you think it takes for an intelligence system, 34:21.440 --> 34:24.520 an AGI system, an AI system to have a moment like that? 34:25.640 --> 34:26.760 That's a tricky question 34:26.760 --> 34:29.200 because there are actually two parts to it, right? 34:29.200 --> 34:33.920 One of them is, can it accomplish that proof? 34:33.920 --> 34:37.640 Can it prove that you can never write A to the N 34:37.640 --> 34:42.760 plus B to the N equals three to that equal Z to the N 34:42.760 --> 34:45.320 for all integers, et cetera, et cetera, 34:45.320 --> 34:48.720 when N is bigger than two? 34:48.720 --> 34:51.360 That's simply a question about intelligence. 34:51.360 --> 34:54.120 Can you build machines that are that intelligent? 34:54.120 --> 34:57.280 And I think by the time we get a machine 34:57.280 --> 35:00.840 that can independently come up with that level of proofs, 35:00.840 --> 35:03.360 probably quite close to AGI. 35:03.360 --> 35:07.240 The second question is a question about consciousness. 35:07.240 --> 35:11.760 When will we, how likely is it that such a machine 35:11.760 --> 35:14.240 will actually have any experience at all, 35:14.240 --> 35:16.160 as opposed to just being like a zombie? 35:16.160 --> 35:20.560 And would we expect it to have some sort of emotional response 35:20.560 --> 35:24.640 to this or anything at all akin to human emotion 35:24.640 --> 35:28.320 where when it accomplishes its machine goal, 35:28.320 --> 35:31.920 it views it as somehow something very positive 35:31.920 --> 35:39.160 and sublime and deeply meaningful? 35:39.160 --> 35:41.440 I would certainly hope that if in the future 35:41.440 --> 35:45.120 we do create machines that are our peers 35:45.120 --> 35:50.160 or even our descendants, that I would certainly 35:50.160 --> 35:55.480 hope that they do have this sublime appreciation of life. 35:55.480 --> 35:58.840 In a way, my absolutely worst nightmare 35:58.840 --> 36:05.760 would be that at some point in the future, 36:05.760 --> 36:07.400 the distant future, maybe our cosmos 36:07.400 --> 36:10.600 is teeming with all this post biological life doing 36:10.600 --> 36:12.880 all the seemingly cool stuff. 36:12.880 --> 36:16.480 And maybe the last humans, by the time 36:16.480 --> 36:20.120 our species eventually fizzles out, 36:20.120 --> 36:21.920 will be like, well, that's OK because we're 36:21.920 --> 36:23.600 so proud of our descendants here. 36:23.600 --> 36:26.680 And look what all the, my worst nightmare 36:26.680 --> 36:30.360 is that we haven't solved the consciousness problem. 36:30.360 --> 36:32.880 And we haven't realized that these are all the zombies. 36:32.880 --> 36:36.200 They're not aware of anything any more than a tape recorder 36:36.200 --> 36:37.840 has any kind of experience. 36:37.840 --> 36:40.040 So the whole thing has just become 36:40.040 --> 36:41.520 a play for empty benches. 36:41.520 --> 36:44.640 That would be the ultimate zombie apocalypse. 36:44.640 --> 36:47.200 So I would much rather, in that case, 36:47.200 --> 36:52.240 that we have these beings which can really 36:52.240 --> 36:57.000 appreciate how amazing it is. 36:57.000 --> 37:01.080 And in that picture, what would be the role of creativity? 37:01.080 --> 37:04.960 A few people ask about creativity. 37:04.960 --> 37:07.080 When you think about intelligence, 37:07.080 --> 37:09.840 certainly the story you told at the beginning of your book 37:09.840 --> 37:15.200 involved creating movies and so on, making money. 37:15.200 --> 37:17.240 You can make a lot of money in our modern world 37:17.240 --> 37:18.600 with music and movies. 37:18.600 --> 37:20.880 So if you are an intelligent system, 37:20.880 --> 37:22.960 you may want to get good at that. 37:22.960 --> 37:26.280 But that's not necessarily what I mean by creativity. 37:26.280 --> 37:29.640 Is it important on that complex goals 37:29.640 --> 37:31.600 where the sea is rising for there 37:31.600 --> 37:33.800 to be something creative? 37:33.800 --> 37:37.400 Or am I being very human centric and thinking creativity 37:37.400 --> 37:41.880 somehow special relative to intelligence? 37:41.880 --> 37:47.240 My hunch is that we should think of creativity simply 37:47.240 --> 37:50.760 as an aspect of intelligence. 37:50.760 --> 37:57.840 And we have to be very careful with human vanity. 37:57.840 --> 37:59.520 We have this tendency to very often want 37:59.520 --> 38:01.560 to say, as soon as machines can do something, 38:01.560 --> 38:03.560 we try to diminish it and say, oh, but that's 38:03.560 --> 38:05.920 not real intelligence. 38:05.920 --> 38:08.400 Isn't it creative or this or that? 38:08.400 --> 38:12.200 The other thing, if we ask ourselves 38:12.200 --> 38:14.320 to write down a definition of what we actually mean 38:14.320 --> 38:18.840 by being creative, what we mean by Andrew Wiles, what he did 38:18.840 --> 38:21.880 there, for example, don't we often mean that someone takes 38:21.880 --> 38:26.000 a very unexpected leap? 38:26.000 --> 38:29.680 It's not like taking 573 and multiplying it 38:29.680 --> 38:33.840 by 224 by just a step of straightforward cookbook 38:33.840 --> 38:36.520 like rules, right? 38:36.520 --> 38:39.680 You can maybe make a connection between two things 38:39.680 --> 38:42.640 that people had never thought was connected or something 38:42.640 --> 38:44.480 like that. 38:44.480 --> 38:47.720 I think this is an aspect of intelligence. 38:47.720 --> 38:53.000 And this is actually one of the most important aspects of it. 38:53.000 --> 38:55.520 Maybe the reason we humans tend to be better at it 38:55.520 --> 38:57.840 than traditional computers is because it's 38:57.840 --> 38:59.640 something that comes more naturally if you're 38:59.640 --> 39:04.120 a neural network than if you're a traditional logic gate 39:04.120 --> 39:05.720 based computer machine. 39:05.720 --> 39:08.640 We physically have all these connections. 39:08.640 --> 39:13.800 And you activate here, activate here, activate here. 39:13.800 --> 39:16.560 Bing. 39:16.560 --> 39:21.040 My hunch is that if we ever build a machine where you could 39:21.040 --> 39:29.200 just give it the task, hey, you say, hey, I just realized 39:29.200 --> 39:32.320 I want to travel around the world instead this month. 39:32.320 --> 39:34.600 Can you teach my AGI course for me? 39:34.600 --> 39:35.960 And it's like, OK, I'll do it. 39:35.960 --> 39:37.920 And it does everything that you would have done 39:37.920 --> 39:39.760 and improvises and stuff. 39:39.760 --> 39:43.360 That would, in my mind, involve a lot of creativity. 39:43.360 --> 39:45.680 Yeah, so it's actually a beautiful way to put it. 39:45.680 --> 39:52.640 I think we do try to grasp at the definition of intelligence 39:52.640 --> 39:56.360 is everything we don't understand how to build. 39:56.360 --> 39:59.360 So we as humans try to find things 39:59.360 --> 40:01.240 that we have and machines don't have. 40:01.240 --> 40:03.800 And maybe creativity is just one of the things, one 40:03.800 --> 40:05.480 of the words we use to describe that. 40:05.480 --> 40:07.200 That's a really interesting way to put it. 40:07.200 --> 40:09.520 I don't think we need to be that defensive. 40:09.520 --> 40:11.560 I don't think anything good comes out of saying, 40:11.560 --> 40:18.080 well, we're somehow special, you know? 40:18.080 --> 40:21.040 Contrary wise, there are many examples in history 40:21.040 --> 40:27.840 of where trying to pretend that we're somehow superior 40:27.840 --> 40:33.120 to all other intelligent beings has led to pretty bad results, 40:33.120 --> 40:35.960 right? 40:35.960 --> 40:38.440 Nazi Germany, they said that they were somehow superior 40:38.440 --> 40:40.080 to other people. 40:40.080 --> 40:42.440 Today, we still do a lot of cruelty to animals 40:42.440 --> 40:44.440 by saying that we're so superior somehow, 40:44.440 --> 40:46.440 and they can't feel pain. 40:46.440 --> 40:48.480 Slavery was justified by the same kind 40:48.480 --> 40:52.200 of just really weak arguments. 40:52.200 --> 40:57.120 And I don't think if we actually go ahead and build 40:57.120 --> 40:59.440 artificial general intelligence, it 40:59.440 --> 41:01.360 can do things better than us, I don't 41:01.360 --> 41:04.080 think we should try to found our self worth on some sort 41:04.080 --> 41:09.760 of bogus claims of superiority in terms 41:09.760 --> 41:12.120 of our intelligence. 41:12.120 --> 41:18.080 I think we should instead find our calling 41:18.080 --> 41:23.360 and the meaning of life from the experiences that we have. 41:23.360 --> 41:28.720 I can have very meaningful experiences 41:28.720 --> 41:32.920 even if there are other people who are smarter than me. 41:32.920 --> 41:34.400 When I go to a faculty meeting here, 41:34.400 --> 41:36.520 and we talk about something, and then I certainly realize, 41:36.520 --> 41:39.080 oh, boy, he has an old prize, he has an old prize, 41:39.080 --> 41:40.800 he has an old prize, I don't have one. 41:40.800 --> 41:43.760 Does that make me enjoy life any less 41:43.760 --> 41:47.560 or enjoy talking to those people less? 41:47.560 --> 41:49.560 Of course not. 41:49.560 --> 41:54.160 And the contrary, I feel very honored and privileged 41:54.160 --> 41:58.760 to get to interact with other very intelligent beings that 41:58.760 --> 42:00.680 are better than me at a lot of stuff. 42:00.680 --> 42:02.840 So I don't think there's any reason why 42:02.840 --> 42:06.080 we can't have the same approach with intelligent machines. 42:06.080 --> 42:07.320 That's a really interesting. 42:07.320 --> 42:08.920 So people don't often think about that. 42:08.920 --> 42:10.600 They think about when there's going, 42:10.600 --> 42:13.320 if there's machines that are more intelligent, 42:13.320 --> 42:15.080 you naturally think that that's not 42:15.080 --> 42:19.080 going to be a beneficial type of intelligence. 42:19.080 --> 42:23.000 You don't realize it could be like peers with Nobel prizes 42:23.000 --> 42:25.120 that would be just fun to talk with, 42:25.120 --> 42:27.560 and they might be clever about certain topics, 42:27.560 --> 42:32.240 and you can have fun having a few drinks with them. 42:32.240 --> 42:35.880 Well, also, another example we can all 42:35.880 --> 42:39.320 relate to of why it doesn't have to be a terrible thing 42:39.320 --> 42:42.560 to be in the presence of people who are even smarter than us 42:42.560 --> 42:45.600 all around is when you and I were both two years old, 42:45.600 --> 42:48.360 I mean, our parents were much more intelligent than us, 42:48.360 --> 42:49.040 right? 42:49.040 --> 42:51.960 Worked out OK, because their goals 42:51.960 --> 42:53.960 were aligned with our goals. 42:53.960 --> 42:58.680 And that, I think, is really the number one key issue 42:58.680 --> 43:02.280 we have to solve if we value align the value alignment 43:02.280 --> 43:03.080 problem, exactly. 43:03.080 --> 43:06.520 Because people who see too many Hollywood movies 43:06.520 --> 43:10.000 with lousy science fiction plot lines, 43:10.000 --> 43:12.200 they worry about the wrong thing, right? 43:12.200 --> 43:16.320 They worry about some machine suddenly turning evil. 43:16.320 --> 43:21.480 It's not malice that is the concern. 43:21.480 --> 43:22.880 It's competence. 43:22.880 --> 43:27.440 By definition, intelligent makes you very competent. 43:27.440 --> 43:31.920 If you have a more intelligent goal playing, 43:31.920 --> 43:33.680 computer playing is a less intelligent one. 43:33.680 --> 43:36.120 And when we define intelligence as the ability 43:36.120 --> 43:38.600 to accomplish goal winning, it's going 43:38.600 --> 43:40.560 to be the more intelligent one that wins. 43:40.560 --> 43:43.560 And if you have a human and then you 43:43.560 --> 43:47.720 have an AGI that's more intelligent in all ways 43:47.720 --> 43:49.520 and they have different goals, guess who's 43:49.520 --> 43:50.720 going to get their way, right? 43:50.720 --> 43:57.120 So I was just reading about this particular rhinoceros species 43:57.120 --> 43:59.200 that was driven extinct just a few years ago. 43:59.200 --> 44:02.280 Ellen Bummer is looking at this cute picture of a mommy 44:02.280 --> 44:05.080 rhinoceros with its child. 44:05.080 --> 44:09.320 And why did we humans drive it to extinction? 44:09.320 --> 44:12.800 It wasn't because we were evil rhino haters as a whole. 44:12.800 --> 44:14.920 It was just because our goals weren't aligned 44:14.920 --> 44:16.000 with those of the rhinoceros. 44:16.000 --> 44:17.680 And it didn't work out so well for the rhinoceros 44:17.680 --> 44:19.560 because we were more intelligent, right? 44:19.560 --> 44:21.240 So I think it's just so important 44:21.240 --> 44:27.120 that if we ever do build AGI, before we unleash anything, 44:27.120 --> 44:31.840 we have to make sure that it learns 44:31.840 --> 44:36.000 to understand our goals, that it adopts our goals, 44:36.000 --> 44:37.920 and that it retains those goals. 44:37.920 --> 44:40.520 So the cool, interesting problem there 44:40.520 --> 44:47.040 is us as human beings trying to formulate our values. 44:47.040 --> 44:51.360 So you could think of the United States Constitution as a way 44:51.360 --> 44:56.680 that people sat down, at the time a bunch of white men, 44:56.680 --> 44:59.680 which is a good example, I should say. 44:59.680 --> 45:01.480 They formulated the goals for this country. 45:01.480 --> 45:03.760 And a lot of people agree that those goals actually 45:03.760 --> 45:05.360 held up pretty well. 45:05.360 --> 45:07.160 That's an interesting formulation of values 45:07.160 --> 45:09.440 and failed miserably in other ways. 45:09.440 --> 45:13.320 So for the value alignment problem and the solution to it, 45:13.320 --> 45:19.560 we have to be able to put on paper or in a program 45:19.560 --> 45:20.400 human values. 45:20.400 --> 45:22.400 How difficult do you think that is? 45:22.400 --> 45:24.040 Very. 45:24.040 --> 45:25.880 But it's so important. 45:25.880 --> 45:28.000 We really have to give it our best. 45:28.000 --> 45:30.120 And it's difficult for two separate reasons. 45:30.120 --> 45:33.440 There's the technical value alignment problem 45:33.440 --> 45:39.120 of figuring out just how to make machines understand our goals, 45:39.120 --> 45:40.440 adopt them, and retain them. 45:40.440 --> 45:43.200 And then there's the separate part of it, 45:43.200 --> 45:44.200 the philosophical part. 45:44.200 --> 45:45.920 Whose values anyway? 45:45.920 --> 45:48.320 And since it's not like we have any great consensus 45:48.320 --> 45:52.040 on this planet on values, what mechanism should we 45:52.040 --> 45:54.120 create then to aggregate and decide, OK, 45:54.120 --> 45:56.520 what's a good compromise? 45:56.520 --> 45:58.440 That second discussion can't just 45:58.440 --> 46:01.560 be left to tech nerds like myself. 46:01.560 --> 46:05.720 And if we refuse to talk about it and then AGI gets built, 46:05.720 --> 46:07.160 who's going to be actually making 46:07.160 --> 46:08.480 the decision about whose values? 46:08.480 --> 46:12.080 It's going to be a bunch of dudes in some tech company. 46:12.080 --> 46:17.240 And are they necessarily so representative of all 46:17.240 --> 46:19.400 of humankind that we want to just entrust it to them? 46:19.400 --> 46:23.000 Are they even uniquely qualified to speak 46:23.000 --> 46:25.240 to future human happiness just because they're 46:25.240 --> 46:26.480 good at programming AI? 46:26.480 --> 46:30.200 I'd much rather have this be a really inclusive conversation. 46:30.200 --> 46:32.560 But do you think it's possible? 46:32.560 --> 46:37.560 So you create a beautiful vision that includes the diversity, 46:37.560 --> 46:40.960 cultural diversity, and various perspectives on discussing 46:40.960 --> 46:43.600 rights, freedoms, human dignity. 46:43.600 --> 46:46.520 But how hard is it to come to that consensus? 46:46.520 --> 46:50.400 Do you think it's certainly a really important thing 46:50.400 --> 46:51.880 that we should all try to do? 46:51.880 --> 46:54.240 But do you think it's feasible? 46:54.240 --> 47:00.160 I think there's no better way to guarantee failure than to 47:00.160 --> 47:02.840 refuse to talk about it or refuse to try. 47:02.840 --> 47:05.320 And I also think it's a really bad strategy 47:05.320 --> 47:08.560 to say, OK, let's first have a discussion for a long time. 47:08.560 --> 47:11.040 And then once we reach complete consensus, 47:11.040 --> 47:13.360 then we'll try to load it into some machine. 47:13.360 --> 47:16.560 No, we shouldn't let perfect be the enemy of good. 47:16.560 --> 47:20.600 Instead, we should start with the kindergarten ethics 47:20.600 --> 47:22.120 that pretty much everybody agrees on 47:22.120 --> 47:24.360 and put that into machines now. 47:24.360 --> 47:25.880 We're not doing that even. 47:25.880 --> 47:31.000 Look at anyone who builds this passenger aircraft, 47:31.000 --> 47:33.000 wants it to never under any circumstances 47:33.000 --> 47:35.600 fly into a building or a mountain. 47:35.600 --> 47:38.480 Yet the September 11 hijackers were able to do that. 47:38.480 --> 47:41.800 And even more embarrassingly, Andreas Lubitz, 47:41.800 --> 47:43.960 this depressed Germanwings pilot, 47:43.960 --> 47:47.360 when he flew his passenger jet into the Alps killing over 100 47:47.360 --> 47:50.640 people, he just told the autopilot to do it. 47:50.640 --> 47:53.200 He told the freaking computer to change the altitude 47:53.200 --> 47:55.040 to 100 meters. 47:55.040 --> 47:58.160 And even though it had the GPS maps, everything, 47:58.160 --> 48:00.640 the computer was like, OK. 48:00.640 --> 48:05.320 So we should take those very basic values, 48:05.320 --> 48:08.400 where the problem is not that we don't agree. 48:08.400 --> 48:10.120 The problem is just we've been too lazy 48:10.120 --> 48:11.480 to try to put it into our machines 48:11.480 --> 48:15.520 and make sure that from now on, airplanes will just, 48:15.520 --> 48:16.920 which all have computers in them, 48:16.920 --> 48:19.720 but will just refuse to do something like that. 48:19.720 --> 48:22.160 Go into safe mode, maybe lock the cockpit door, 48:22.160 --> 48:24.480 go over to the nearest airport. 48:24.480 --> 48:28.080 And there's so much other technology in our world 48:28.080 --> 48:31.320 as well now, where it's really becoming quite timely 48:31.320 --> 48:34.120 to put in some sort of very basic values like this. 48:34.120 --> 48:39.240 Even in cars, we've had enough vehicle terrorism attacks 48:39.240 --> 48:42.040 by now, where people have driven trucks and vans 48:42.040 --> 48:45.480 into pedestrians, that it's not at all a crazy idea 48:45.480 --> 48:48.680 to just have that hardwired into the car. 48:48.680 --> 48:50.280 Because yeah, there are a lot of, 48:50.280 --> 48:52.240 there's always going to be people who for some reason 48:52.240 --> 48:54.800 want to harm others, but most of those people 48:54.800 --> 48:56.760 don't have the technical expertise to figure out 48:56.760 --> 48:58.520 how to work around something like that. 48:58.520 --> 49:01.760 So if the car just won't do it, it helps. 49:01.760 --> 49:02.840 So let's start there. 49:02.840 --> 49:04.960 So there's a lot of, that's a great point. 49:04.960 --> 49:06.800 So not chasing perfect. 49:06.800 --> 49:10.840 There's a lot of things that most of the world agrees on. 49:10.840 --> 49:11.840 Yeah, let's start there. 49:11.840 --> 49:12.680 Let's start there. 49:12.680 --> 49:14.560 And then once we start there, 49:14.560 --> 49:17.240 we'll also get into the habit of having 49:17.240 --> 49:18.520 these kind of conversations about, okay, 49:18.520 --> 49:21.760 what else should we put in here and have these discussions? 49:21.760 --> 49:23.920 This should be a gradual process then. 49:23.920 --> 49:28.600 Great, so, but that also means describing these things 49:28.600 --> 49:31.240 and describing it to a machine. 49:31.240 --> 49:34.200 So one thing, we had a few conversations 49:34.200 --> 49:35.640 with Stephen Wolfram. 49:35.640 --> 49:37.080 I'm not sure if you're familiar with Stephen. 49:37.080 --> 49:38.360 Oh yeah, I know him quite well. 49:38.360 --> 49:42.040 So he is, he works with a bunch of things, 49:42.040 --> 49:46.560 but cellular automata, these simple computable things, 49:46.560 --> 49:47.960 these computation systems. 49:47.960 --> 49:49.880 And he kind of mentioned that, 49:49.880 --> 49:52.480 we probably have already within these systems 49:52.480 --> 49:54.680 already something that's AGI, 49:56.120 --> 49:58.720 meaning like we just don't know it 49:58.720 --> 50:00.400 because we can't talk to it. 50:00.400 --> 50:04.800 So if you give me this chance to try to at least 50:04.800 --> 50:06.720 form a question out of this is, 50:07.600 --> 50:10.880 I think it's an interesting idea to think 50:10.880 --> 50:12.680 that we can have intelligent systems, 50:12.680 --> 50:15.600 but we don't know how to describe something to them 50:15.600 --> 50:17.360 and they can't communicate with us. 50:17.360 --> 50:19.840 I know you're doing a little bit of work in explainable AI, 50:19.840 --> 50:22.040 trying to get AI to explain itself. 50:22.040 --> 50:25.520 So what are your thoughts of natural language processing 50:25.520 --> 50:27.640 or some kind of other communication? 50:27.640 --> 50:30.120 How does the AI explain something to us? 50:30.120 --> 50:33.640 How do we explain something to it, to machines? 50:33.640 --> 50:35.320 Or you think of it differently? 50:35.320 --> 50:39.960 So there are two separate parts to your question there. 50:39.960 --> 50:42.440 One of them has to do with communication, 50:42.440 --> 50:44.440 which is super interesting, I'll get to that in a sec. 50:44.440 --> 50:47.280 The other is whether we already have AGI 50:47.280 --> 50:49.240 but we just haven't noticed it there. 50:49.240 --> 50:50.080 Right. 50:51.800 --> 50:53.000 There I beg to differ. 50:54.280 --> 50:56.480 I don't think there's anything in any cellular automaton 50:56.480 --> 50:59.040 or anything or the internet itself or whatever 50:59.040 --> 51:03.560 that has artificial general intelligence 51:03.560 --> 51:05.520 and that it can really do exactly everything 51:05.520 --> 51:07.000 we humans can do better. 51:07.000 --> 51:11.600 I think the day that happens, when that happens, 51:11.600 --> 51:15.600 we will very soon notice, we'll probably notice even before 51:15.600 --> 51:17.440 because in a very, very big way. 51:17.440 --> 51:18.840 But for the second part, though. 51:18.840 --> 51:20.720 Wait, can I ask, sorry. 51:20.720 --> 51:24.400 So, because you have this beautiful way 51:24.400 --> 51:29.400 to formulating consciousness as information processing, 51:30.360 --> 51:31.360 and you can think of intelligence 51:31.360 --> 51:32.280 as information processing, 51:32.280 --> 51:34.320 and you can think of the entire universe 51:34.320 --> 51:38.720 as these particles and these systems roaming around 51:38.720 --> 51:41.360 that have this information processing power. 51:41.360 --> 51:44.840 You don't think there is something with the power 51:44.840 --> 51:49.040 to process information in the way that we human beings do 51:49.040 --> 51:54.040 that's out there that needs to be sort of connected to. 51:55.400 --> 51:57.880 It seems a little bit philosophical, perhaps, 51:57.880 --> 52:00.080 but there's something compelling to the idea 52:00.080 --> 52:01.920 that the power is already there, 52:01.920 --> 52:05.440 which the focus should be more on being able 52:05.440 --> 52:07.360 to communicate with it. 52:07.360 --> 52:11.960 Well, I agree that in a certain sense, 52:11.960 --> 52:15.360 the hardware processing power is already out there 52:15.360 --> 52:19.000 because our universe itself can think of it 52:19.000 --> 52:21.000 as being a computer already, right? 52:21.000 --> 52:23.800 It's constantly computing what water waves, 52:23.800 --> 52:26.120 how it devolved the water waves in the River Charles 52:26.120 --> 52:28.440 and how to move the air molecules around. 52:28.440 --> 52:30.480 Seth Lloyd has pointed out, my colleague here, 52:30.480 --> 52:32.920 that you can even in a very rigorous way 52:32.920 --> 52:35.480 think of our entire universe as being a quantum computer. 52:35.480 --> 52:37.680 It's pretty clear that our universe 52:37.680 --> 52:40.320 supports this amazing processing power 52:40.320 --> 52:42.160 because you can even, 52:42.160 --> 52:44.920 within this physics computer that we live in, right? 52:44.920 --> 52:47.040 We can even build actual laptops and stuff, 52:47.040 --> 52:49.000 so clearly the power is there. 52:49.000 --> 52:52.040 It's just that most of the compute power that nature has, 52:52.040 --> 52:54.240 it's, in my opinion, kind of wasting on boring stuff 52:54.240 --> 52:56.520 like simulating yet another ocean wave somewhere 52:56.520 --> 52:58.040 where no one is even looking, right? 52:58.040 --> 53:00.880 So in a sense, what life does, what we are doing 53:00.880 --> 53:03.880 when we build computers is we're rechanneling 53:03.880 --> 53:07.200 all this compute that nature is doing anyway 53:07.200 --> 53:09.360 into doing things that are more interesting 53:09.360 --> 53:11.440 than just yet another ocean wave, 53:11.440 --> 53:13.200 and let's do something cool here. 53:14.080 --> 53:17.080 So the raw hardware power is there, for sure, 53:17.080 --> 53:21.080 but then even just computing what's going to happen 53:21.080 --> 53:23.520 for the next five seconds in this water bottle, 53:23.520 --> 53:26.000 takes a ridiculous amount of compute 53:26.000 --> 53:27.920 if you do it on a human computer. 53:27.920 --> 53:29.920 This water bottle just did it. 53:29.920 --> 53:33.440 But that does not mean that this water bottle has AGI 53:34.760 --> 53:37.040 because AGI means it should also be able to, 53:37.040 --> 53:40.160 like I've written my book, done this interview. 53:40.160 --> 53:42.080 And I don't think it's just communication problems. 53:42.080 --> 53:46.760 I don't really think it can do it. 53:46.760 --> 53:49.280 Although Buddhists say when they watch the water 53:49.280 --> 53:51.240 and that there is some beauty, 53:51.240 --> 53:53.720 that there's some depth and beauty in nature 53:53.720 --> 53:54.840 that they can communicate with. 53:54.840 --> 53:56.480 Communication is also very important though 53:56.480 --> 54:01.200 because I mean, look, part of my job is being a teacher. 54:01.200 --> 54:06.200 And I know some very intelligent professors even 54:06.200 --> 54:09.800 who just have a bit of hard time communicating. 54:09.800 --> 54:12.640 They come up with all these brilliant ideas, 54:12.640 --> 54:14.520 but to communicate with somebody else, 54:14.520 --> 54:16.920 you have to also be able to simulate their own mind. 54:16.920 --> 54:18.360 Yes, empathy. 54:18.360 --> 54:20.640 Build well enough and understand model of their mind 54:20.640 --> 54:24.400 that you can say things that they will understand. 54:24.400 --> 54:26.480 And that's quite difficult. 54:26.480 --> 54:28.280 And that's why today it's so frustrating 54:28.280 --> 54:32.600 if you have a computer that makes some cancer diagnosis 54:32.600 --> 54:34.120 and you ask it, well, why are you saying 54:34.120 --> 54:36.120 I should have this surgery? 54:36.120 --> 54:37.960 And if it can only reply, 54:37.960 --> 54:40.800 I was trained on five terabytes of data 54:40.800 --> 54:45.080 and this is my diagnosis, boop, boop, beep, beep. 54:45.080 --> 54:49.120 It doesn't really instill a lot of confidence, right? 54:49.120 --> 54:51.120 So I think we have a lot of work to do 54:51.120 --> 54:54.320 on communication there. 54:54.320 --> 54:58.040 So what kind of, I think you're doing a little bit of work 54:58.040 --> 54:59.320 in explainable AI. 54:59.320 --> 55:01.320 What do you think are the most promising avenues? 55:01.320 --> 55:05.240 Is it mostly about sort of the Alexa problem 55:05.240 --> 55:07.200 of natural language processing of being able 55:07.200 --> 55:11.600 to actually use human interpretable methods 55:11.600 --> 55:13.160 of communication? 55:13.160 --> 55:16.000 So being able to talk to a system and it talk back to you, 55:16.000 --> 55:18.640 or is there some more fundamental problems to be solved? 55:18.640 --> 55:21.160 I think it's all of the above. 55:21.160 --> 55:23.520 The natural language processing is obviously important, 55:23.520 --> 55:27.600 but there are also more nerdy fundamental problems. 55:27.600 --> 55:31.640 Like if you take, you play chess? 55:31.640 --> 55:33.040 Of course, I'm Russian. 55:33.040 --> 55:33.880 I have to. 55:33.880 --> 55:34.720 You speak Russian? 55:34.720 --> 55:35.560 Yes, I speak Russian. 55:35.560 --> 55:38.040 Excellent, I didn't know. 55:38.040 --> 55:39.160 When did you learn Russian? 55:39.160 --> 55:41.800 I speak very bad Russian, I'm only an autodidact, 55:41.800 --> 55:44.560 but I bought a book, Teach Yourself Russian, 55:44.560 --> 55:47.720 read a lot, but it was very difficult. 55:47.720 --> 55:48.560 Wow. 55:48.560 --> 55:49.960 That's why I speak so bad. 55:49.960 --> 55:51.960 How many languages do you know? 55:51.960 --> 55:53.840 Wow, that's really impressive. 55:53.840 --> 55:56.320 I don't know, my wife has some calculation, 55:56.320 --> 55:58.400 but my point was, if you play chess, 55:58.400 --> 56:01.040 have you looked at the AlphaZero games? 56:01.040 --> 56:02.600 The actual games, no. 56:02.600 --> 56:05.000 Check it out, some of them are just mind blowing, 56:06.320 --> 56:07.720 really beautiful. 56:07.720 --> 56:12.400 And if you ask, how did it do that? 56:13.760 --> 56:16.520 You go talk to Demis Hassabis, 56:16.520 --> 56:18.240 I know others from DeepMind, 56:19.120 --> 56:20.600 all they'll ultimately be able to give you 56:20.600 --> 56:23.920 is big tables of numbers, matrices, 56:23.920 --> 56:25.720 that define the neural network. 56:25.720 --> 56:28.080 And you can stare at these tables of numbers 56:28.080 --> 56:29.600 till your face turn blue, 56:29.600 --> 56:32.520 and you're not gonna understand much 56:32.520 --> 56:34.520 about why it made that move. 56:34.520 --> 56:37.640 And even if you have natural language processing 56:37.640 --> 56:40.280 that can tell you in human language about, 56:40.280 --> 56:42.520 oh, five, seven, points, two, eight, 56:42.520 --> 56:43.560 still not gonna really help. 56:43.560 --> 56:47.480 So I think there's a whole spectrum of fun challenges 56:47.480 --> 56:50.520 that are involved in taking a computation 56:50.520 --> 56:52.240 that does intelligent things 56:52.240 --> 56:56.240 and transforming it into something equally good, 56:57.760 --> 57:01.840 equally intelligent, but that's more understandable. 57:01.840 --> 57:03.240 And I think that's really valuable 57:03.240 --> 57:07.440 because I think as we put machines in charge 57:07.440 --> 57:09.760 of ever more infrastructure in our world, 57:09.760 --> 57:12.680 the power grid, the trading on the stock market, 57:12.680 --> 57:14.320 weapon systems and so on, 57:14.320 --> 57:17.760 it's absolutely crucial that we can trust 57:17.760 --> 57:19.400 these AIs to do all we want. 57:19.400 --> 57:21.520 And trust really comes from understanding 57:22.520 --> 57:24.400 in a very fundamental way. 57:24.400 --> 57:27.560 And that's why I'm working on this, 57:27.560 --> 57:29.160 because I think the more, 57:29.160 --> 57:31.840 if we're gonna have some hope of ensuring 57:31.840 --> 57:33.520 that machines have adopted our goals 57:33.520 --> 57:35.800 and that they're gonna retain them, 57:35.800 --> 57:38.800 that kind of trust, I think, 57:38.800 --> 57:41.200 needs to be based on things you can actually understand, 57:41.200 --> 57:44.240 preferably even improve theorems on. 57:44.240 --> 57:46.080 Even with a self driving car, right? 57:47.040 --> 57:48.680 If someone just tells you it's been trained 57:48.680 --> 57:50.640 on tons of data and it never crashed, 57:50.640 --> 57:54.200 it's less reassuring than if someone actually has a proof. 57:54.200 --> 57:55.960 Maybe it's a computer verified proof, 57:55.960 --> 57:58.800 but still it says that under no circumstances 57:58.800 --> 58:02.320 is this car just gonna swerve into oncoming traffic. 58:02.320 --> 58:04.640 And that kind of information helps to build trust 58:04.640 --> 58:08.080 and helps build the alignment of goals, 58:09.400 --> 58:12.200 at least awareness that your goals, your values are aligned. 58:12.200 --> 58:13.840 And I think even in the very short term, 58:13.840 --> 58:16.360 if you look at how, you know, today, right? 58:16.360 --> 58:19.320 This absolutely pathetic state of cybersecurity 58:19.320 --> 58:21.720 that we have, where is it? 58:21.720 --> 58:25.960 Three billion Yahoo accounts we can't pack, 58:27.200 --> 58:31.720 almost every American's credit card and so on. 58:32.800 --> 58:34.120 Why is this happening? 58:34.120 --> 58:37.960 It's ultimately happening because we have software 58:37.960 --> 58:41.200 that nobody fully understood how it worked. 58:41.200 --> 58:44.800 That's why the bugs hadn't been found, right? 58:44.800 --> 58:47.480 And I think AI can be used very effectively 58:47.480 --> 58:49.640 for offense, for hacking, 58:49.640 --> 58:52.320 but it can also be used for defense. 58:52.320 --> 58:55.360 Hopefully automating verifiability 58:55.360 --> 59:00.360 and creating systems that are built in different ways 59:00.680 --> 59:02.920 so you can actually prove things about them. 59:02.920 --> 59:05.240 And it's important. 59:05.240 --> 59:07.680 So speaking of software that nobody understands 59:07.680 --> 59:10.640 how it works, of course, a bunch of people ask 59:10.640 --> 59:12.160 about your paper, about your thoughts 59:12.160 --> 59:14.680 of why does deep and cheap learning work so well? 59:14.680 --> 59:15.520 That's the paper. 59:15.520 --> 59:18.320 But what are your thoughts on deep learning? 59:18.320 --> 59:21.880 These kind of simplified models of our own brains 59:21.880 --> 59:26.440 have been able to do some successful perception work, 59:26.440 --> 59:29.560 pattern recognition work, and now with AlphaZero and so on, 59:29.560 --> 59:30.880 do some clever things. 59:30.880 --> 59:33.880 What are your thoughts about the promise limitations 59:33.880 --> 59:35.680 of this piece? 59:35.680 --> 59:40.680 Great, I think there are a number of very important insights, 59:43.080 --> 59:44.640 very important lessons we can always draw 59:44.640 --> 59:47.120 from these kinds of successes. 59:47.120 --> 59:48.960 One of them is when you look at the human brain, 59:48.960 --> 59:51.480 you see it's very complicated, 10th of 11 neurons, 59:51.480 --> 59:53.320 and there are all these different kinds of neurons 59:53.320 --> 59:55.040 and yada, yada, and there's been this long debate 59:55.040 --> 59:57.200 about whether the fact that we have dozens 59:57.200 --> 1:00:00.160 of different kinds is actually necessary for intelligence. 1:00:01.560 --> 1:00:03.360 We can now, I think, quite convincingly answer 1:00:03.360 --> 1:00:07.640 that question of no, it's enough to have just one kind. 1:00:07.640 --> 1:00:09.920 If you look under the hood of AlphaZero, 1:00:09.920 --> 1:00:11.080 there's only one kind of neuron 1:00:11.080 --> 1:00:15.000 and it's ridiculously simple mathematical thing. 1:00:15.000 --> 1:00:17.280 So it's just like in physics, 1:00:17.280 --> 1:00:20.320 it's not, if you have a gas with waves in it, 1:00:20.320 --> 1:00:23.240 it's not the detailed nature of the molecule that matter, 1:00:24.240 --> 1:00:26.040 it's the collective behavior somehow. 1:00:26.040 --> 1:00:30.720 Similarly, it's this higher level structure 1:00:30.720 --> 1:00:31.760 of the network that matters, 1:00:31.760 --> 1:00:34.080 not that you have 20 kinds of neurons. 1:00:34.080 --> 1:00:37.040 I think our brain is such a complicated mess 1:00:37.040 --> 1:00:41.720 because it wasn't evolved just to be intelligent, 1:00:41.720 --> 1:00:45.840 it was involved to also be self assembling 1:00:47.000 --> 1:00:48.760 and self repairing, right? 1:00:48.760 --> 1:00:51.920 And evolutionarily attainable. 1:00:51.920 --> 1:00:53.560 And so on and so on. 1:00:53.560 --> 1:00:54.720 So I think it's pretty, 1:00:54.720 --> 1:00:57.040 my hunch is that we're going to understand 1:00:57.040 --> 1:00:59.520 how to build AGI before we fully understand 1:00:59.520 --> 1:01:02.600 how our brains work, just like we understood 1:01:02.600 --> 1:01:05.560 how to build flying machines long before 1:01:05.560 --> 1:01:07.800 we were able to build a mechanical bird. 1:01:07.800 --> 1:01:08.640 Yeah, that's right. 1:01:08.640 --> 1:01:13.280 You've given the example exactly of mechanical birds 1:01:13.280 --> 1:01:15.680 and airplanes and airplanes do a pretty good job 1:01:15.680 --> 1:01:18.560 of flying without really mimicking bird flight. 1:01:18.560 --> 1:01:20.920 And even now after 100 years later, 1:01:20.920 --> 1:01:23.880 did you see the Ted talk with this German mechanical bird? 1:01:23.880 --> 1:01:25.040 I heard you mention it. 1:01:25.040 --> 1:01:26.520 Check it out, it's amazing. 1:01:26.520 --> 1:01:27.760 But even after that, right, 1:01:27.760 --> 1:01:29.360 we still don't fly in mechanical birds 1:01:29.360 --> 1:01:32.720 because it turned out the way we came up with was simpler 1:01:32.720 --> 1:01:33.840 and it's better for our purposes. 1:01:33.840 --> 1:01:35.280 And I think it might be the same there. 1:01:35.280 --> 1:01:36.280 That's one lesson. 1:01:37.520 --> 1:01:42.520 And another lesson, it's more what our paper was about. 1:01:42.640 --> 1:01:45.800 First, as a physicist thought it was fascinating 1:01:45.800 --> 1:01:48.240 how there's a very close mathematical relationship 1:01:48.240 --> 1:01:50.800 actually between our artificial neural networks 1:01:50.800 --> 1:01:54.560 and a lot of things that we've studied for in physics 1:01:54.560 --> 1:01:57.520 go by nerdy names like the renormalization group equation 1:01:57.520 --> 1:01:59.800 and Hamiltonians and yada, yada, yada. 1:01:59.800 --> 1:02:04.360 And when you look a little more closely at this, 1:02:05.720 --> 1:02:06.560 you have, 1:02:10.320 --> 1:02:12.360 at first I was like, well, there's something crazy here 1:02:12.360 --> 1:02:13.520 that doesn't make sense. 1:02:13.520 --> 1:02:18.520 Because we know that if you even want to build 1:02:19.200 --> 1:02:22.560 a super simple neural network to tell apart cat pictures 1:02:22.560 --> 1:02:23.400 and dog pictures, right, 1:02:23.400 --> 1:02:25.400 that you can do that very, very well now. 1:02:25.400 --> 1:02:27.520 But if you think about it a little bit, 1:02:27.520 --> 1:02:29.080 you convince yourself it must be impossible 1:02:29.080 --> 1:02:31.920 because if I have one megapixel, 1:02:31.920 --> 1:02:34.160 even if each pixel is just black or white, 1:02:34.160 --> 1:02:36.960 there's two to the power of 1 million possible images, 1:02:36.960 --> 1:02:38.960 which is way more than there are atoms in our universe, 1:02:38.960 --> 1:02:41.000 right, so in order to, 1:02:42.040 --> 1:02:43.200 and then for each one of those, 1:02:43.200 --> 1:02:44.640 I have to assign a number, 1:02:44.640 --> 1:02:47.080 which is the probability that it's a dog. 1:02:47.080 --> 1:02:49.440 So an arbitrary function of images 1:02:49.440 --> 1:02:54.440 is a list of more numbers than there are atoms in our universe. 1:02:54.440 --> 1:02:57.360 So clearly I can't store that under the hood of my GPU 1:02:57.360 --> 1:03:00.640 or my computer, yet somehow it works. 1:03:00.640 --> 1:03:01.480 So what does that mean? 1:03:01.480 --> 1:03:04.960 Well, it means that out of all of the problems 1:03:04.960 --> 1:03:08.200 that you could try to solve with a neural network, 1:03:10.120 --> 1:03:12.880 almost all of them are impossible to solve 1:03:12.880 --> 1:03:14.560 with a reasonably sized one. 1:03:15.480 --> 1:03:17.440 But then what we showed in our paper 1:03:17.440 --> 1:03:22.360 was that the fraction, the kind of problems, 1:03:22.360 --> 1:03:23.800 the fraction of all the problems 1:03:23.800 --> 1:03:26.520 that you could possibly pose, 1:03:26.520 --> 1:03:29.480 that we actually care about given the laws of physics 1:03:29.480 --> 1:03:32.480 is also an infinite testimony, tiny little part. 1:03:32.480 --> 1:03:35.440 And amazingly, they're basically the same part. 1:03:35.440 --> 1:03:37.560 Yeah, it's almost like our world was created for, 1:03:37.560 --> 1:03:39.000 I mean, they kind of come together. 1:03:39.000 --> 1:03:42.800 Yeah, well, you could say maybe where the world was created 1:03:42.800 --> 1:03:44.960 for us, but I have a more modest interpretation, 1:03:44.960 --> 1:03:46.680 which is that the world was created for us, 1:03:46.680 --> 1:03:48.040 but I have a more modest interpretation, 1:03:48.040 --> 1:03:50.360 which is that instead evolution endowed us 1:03:50.360 --> 1:03:53.120 with neural networks precisely for that reason. 1:03:53.120 --> 1:03:54.640 Because this particular architecture, 1:03:54.640 --> 1:03:56.040 as opposed to the one in your laptop, 1:03:56.040 --> 1:04:01.040 is very, very well adapted to solving the kind of problems 1:04:02.480 --> 1:04:05.560 that nature kept presenting our ancestors with. 1:04:05.560 --> 1:04:08.120 So it makes sense that why do we have a brain 1:04:08.120 --> 1:04:09.280 in the first place? 1:04:09.280 --> 1:04:11.880 It's to be able to make predictions about the future 1:04:11.880 --> 1:04:12.880 and so on. 1:04:12.880 --> 1:04:16.440 So if we had a sucky system, which could never solve it, 1:04:16.440 --> 1:04:18.280 we wouldn't have a world. 1:04:18.280 --> 1:04:23.280 So this is, I think, a very beautiful fact. 1:04:23.680 --> 1:04:24.520 Yeah. 1:04:24.520 --> 1:04:29.000 We also realize that there's been earlier work 1:04:29.000 --> 1:04:32.040 on why deeper networks are good, 1:04:32.040 --> 1:04:34.680 but we were able to show an additional cool fact there, 1:04:34.680 --> 1:04:38.360 which is that even incredibly simple problems, 1:04:38.360 --> 1:04:41.080 like suppose I give you a thousand numbers 1:04:41.080 --> 1:04:42.720 and ask you to multiply them together, 1:04:42.720 --> 1:04:46.680 and you can write a few lines of code, boom, done, trivial. 1:04:46.680 --> 1:04:49.520 If you just try to do that with a neural network 1:04:49.520 --> 1:04:52.440 that has only one single hidden layer in it, 1:04:52.440 --> 1:04:53.400 you can do it, 1:04:54.320 --> 1:04:57.360 but you're going to need two to the power of a thousand 1:04:57.360 --> 1:05:00.920 neurons to multiply a thousand numbers, 1:05:00.920 --> 1:05:02.520 which is, again, more neurons than there are atoms 1:05:02.520 --> 1:05:03.360 in our universe. 1:05:04.600 --> 1:05:05.480 That's fascinating. 1:05:05.480 --> 1:05:09.960 But if you allow yourself to make it a deep network 1:05:09.960 --> 1:05:13.240 with many layers, you only need 4,000 neurons. 1:05:13.240 --> 1:05:14.520 It's perfectly feasible. 1:05:16.400 --> 1:05:17.960 That's really interesting. 1:05:17.960 --> 1:05:18.800 Yeah. 1:05:18.800 --> 1:05:21.040 So on another architecture type, 1:05:21.040 --> 1:05:22.720 I mean, you mentioned Schrodinger's equation, 1:05:22.720 --> 1:05:26.360 and what are your thoughts about quantum computing 1:05:27.240 --> 1:05:32.240 and the role of this kind of computational unit 1:05:32.400 --> 1:05:34.880 in creating an intelligence system? 1:05:34.880 --> 1:05:39.520 In some Hollywood movies that I will not mention by name 1:05:39.520 --> 1:05:41.040 because I don't want to spoil them. 1:05:41.040 --> 1:05:44.240 The way they get AGI is building a quantum computer. 1:05:45.480 --> 1:05:47.600 Because the word quantum sounds cool and so on. 1:05:47.600 --> 1:05:48.440 That's right. 1:05:50.040 --> 1:05:52.880 First of all, I think we don't need quantum computers 1:05:52.880 --> 1:05:54.920 to build AGI. 1:05:54.920 --> 1:05:59.240 I suspect your brain is not a quantum computer 1:05:59.240 --> 1:06:00.640 in any profound sense. 1:06:01.600 --> 1:06:03.200 So you don't even wrote a paper about that 1:06:03.200 --> 1:06:04.560 a lot many years ago. 1:06:04.560 --> 1:06:08.120 I calculated the so called decoherence time, 1:06:08.120 --> 1:06:10.320 how long it takes until the quantum computerness 1:06:10.320 --> 1:06:13.400 of what your neurons are doing gets erased 1:06:15.320 --> 1:06:17.960 by just random noise from the environment. 1:06:17.960 --> 1:06:21.320 And it's about 10 to the minus 21 seconds. 1:06:21.320 --> 1:06:24.600 So as cool as it would be to have a quantum computer 1:06:24.600 --> 1:06:27.320 in my head, I don't think that fast. 1:06:27.320 --> 1:06:28.360 On the other hand, 1:06:28.360 --> 1:06:33.040 there are very cool things you could do 1:06:33.040 --> 1:06:34.200 with quantum computers. 1:06:35.240 --> 1:06:37.480 Or I think we'll be able to do soon 1:06:37.480 --> 1:06:39.360 when we get bigger ones. 1:06:39.360 --> 1:06:40.960 That might actually help machine learning 1:06:40.960 --> 1:06:43.160 do even better than the brain. 1:06:43.160 --> 1:06:45.640 So for example, 1:06:47.040 --> 1:06:50.760 one, this is just a moonshot, 1:06:50.760 --> 1:06:55.760 but learning is very much same thing as search. 1:07:01.800 --> 1:07:03.160 If you're trying to train a neural network 1:07:03.160 --> 1:07:06.240 to get really learned to do something really well, 1:07:06.240 --> 1:07:07.280 you have some loss function, 1:07:07.280 --> 1:07:10.360 you have a bunch of knobs you can turn, 1:07:10.360 --> 1:07:12.080 represented by a bunch of numbers, 1:07:12.080 --> 1:07:12.920 and you're trying to tweak them 1:07:12.920 --> 1:07:15.080 so that it becomes as good as possible at this thing. 1:07:15.080 --> 1:07:19.680 So if you think of a landscape with some valley, 1:07:20.720 --> 1:07:22.120 where each dimension of the landscape 1:07:22.120 --> 1:07:24.120 corresponds to some number you can change, 1:07:24.120 --> 1:07:25.640 you're trying to find the minimum. 1:07:25.640 --> 1:07:26.760 And it's well known that 1:07:26.760 --> 1:07:29.040 if you have a very high dimensional landscape, 1:07:29.040 --> 1:07:31.840 complicated things, it's super hard to find the minimum. 1:07:31.840 --> 1:07:35.840 Quantum mechanics is amazingly good at this. 1:07:35.840 --> 1:07:38.240 Like if I want to know what's the lowest energy state 1:07:38.240 --> 1:07:39.720 this water can possibly have, 1:07:41.720 --> 1:07:42.560 incredibly hard to compute, 1:07:42.560 --> 1:07:45.400 but nature will happily figure this out for you 1:07:45.400 --> 1:07:48.000 if you just cool it down, make it very, very cold. 1:07:49.800 --> 1:07:50.880 If you put a ball somewhere, 1:07:50.880 --> 1:07:52.240 it'll roll down to its minimum. 1:07:52.240 --> 1:07:54.280 And this happens metaphorically 1:07:54.280 --> 1:07:56.320 at the energy landscape too. 1:07:56.320 --> 1:07:59.280 And quantum mechanics even uses some clever tricks, 1:07:59.280 --> 1:08:02.520 which today's machine learning systems don't. 1:08:02.520 --> 1:08:04.160 Like if you're trying to find the minimum 1:08:04.160 --> 1:08:06.960 and you get stuck in the little local minimum here, 1:08:06.960 --> 1:08:08.760 in quantum mechanics you can actually tunnel 1:08:08.760 --> 1:08:11.840 through the barrier and get unstuck again. 1:08:13.480 --> 1:08:14.320 That's really interesting. 1:08:14.320 --> 1:08:16.120 Yeah, so it may be, for example, 1:08:16.120 --> 1:08:19.160 that we'll one day use quantum computers 1:08:19.160 --> 1:08:22.840 that help train neural networks better. 1:08:22.840 --> 1:08:23.680 That's really interesting. 1:08:23.680 --> 1:08:27.040 Okay, so as a component of kind of the learning process, 1:08:27.040 --> 1:08:27.880 for example. 1:08:27.880 --> 1:08:29.440 Yeah. 1:08:29.440 --> 1:08:33.080 Let me ask sort of wrapping up here a little bit, 1:08:33.080 --> 1:08:36.880 let me return to the questions of our human nature 1:08:36.880 --> 1:08:40.000 and love, as I mentioned. 1:08:40.000 --> 1:08:41.640 So do you think, 1:08:44.280 --> 1:08:46.000 you mentioned sort of a helper robot, 1:08:46.000 --> 1:08:48.640 but you could think of also personal robots. 1:08:48.640 --> 1:08:52.480 Do you think the way we human beings fall in love 1:08:52.480 --> 1:08:54.680 and get connected to each other 1:08:54.680 --> 1:08:58.040 is possible to achieve in an AI system 1:08:58.040 --> 1:09:00.360 and human level AI intelligence system? 1:09:00.360 --> 1:09:03.720 Do you think we would ever see that kind of connection? 1:09:03.720 --> 1:09:06.160 Or, you know, in all this discussion 1:09:06.160 --> 1:09:08.520 about solving complex goals, 1:09:08.520 --> 1:09:10.760 is this kind of human social connection, 1:09:10.760 --> 1:09:12.560 do you think that's one of the goals 1:09:12.560 --> 1:09:16.280 on the peaks and valleys with the raising sea levels 1:09:16.280 --> 1:09:17.360 that we'll be able to achieve? 1:09:17.360 --> 1:09:20.040 Or do you think that's something that's ultimately, 1:09:20.040 --> 1:09:21.760 or at least in the short term, 1:09:21.760 --> 1:09:23.640 relative to the other goals is not achievable? 1:09:23.640 --> 1:09:25.120 I think it's all possible. 1:09:25.120 --> 1:09:27.600 And I mean, in recent, 1:09:27.600 --> 1:09:30.840 there's a very wide range of guesses, as you know, 1:09:30.840 --> 1:09:33.720 among AI researchers, when we're going to get AGI. 1:09:35.120 --> 1:09:37.640 Some people, you know, like our friend Rodney Brooks 1:09:37.640 --> 1:09:41.040 says it's going to be hundreds of years at least. 1:09:41.040 --> 1:09:42.200 And then there are many others 1:09:42.200 --> 1:09:44.040 who think it's going to happen much sooner. 1:09:44.040 --> 1:09:45.520 And recent polls, 1:09:46.840 --> 1:09:48.640 maybe half or so of AI researchers 1:09:48.640 --> 1:09:50.920 think we're going to get AGI within decades. 1:09:50.920 --> 1:09:52.720 So if that happens, of course, 1:09:52.720 --> 1:09:55.040 then I think these things are all possible. 1:09:55.040 --> 1:09:56.840 But in terms of whether it will happen, 1:09:56.840 --> 1:10:00.600 I think we shouldn't spend so much time asking 1:10:00.600 --> 1:10:03.240 what do we think will happen in the future? 1:10:03.240 --> 1:10:05.160 As if we are just some sort of pathetic, 1:10:05.160 --> 1:10:07.040 your passive bystanders, you know, 1:10:07.040 --> 1:10:09.280 waiting for the future to happen to us. 1:10:09.280 --> 1:10:11.640 Hey, we're the ones creating this future, right? 1:10:11.640 --> 1:10:15.520 So we should be proactive about it 1:10:15.520 --> 1:10:16.920 and ask ourselves what sort of future 1:10:16.920 --> 1:10:18.240 we would like to have happen. 1:10:18.240 --> 1:10:19.920 We're going to make it like that. 1:10:19.920 --> 1:10:22.720 Well, what I prefer is just some sort of incredibly boring, 1:10:22.720 --> 1:10:24.320 zombie like future where there's all these 1:10:24.320 --> 1:10:26.040 mechanical things happening and there's no passion, 1:10:26.040 --> 1:10:28.040 no emotion, no experience, maybe even. 1:10:29.600 --> 1:10:32.040 No, I would of course, much rather prefer it 1:10:32.040 --> 1:10:35.240 if all the things that we find that we value the most 1:10:36.240 --> 1:10:40.680 about humanity are our subjective experience, 1:10:40.680 --> 1:10:43.000 passion, inspiration, love, you know. 1:10:43.000 --> 1:10:48.000 If we can create a future where those things do happen, 1:10:48.000 --> 1:10:50.840 where those things do exist, you know, 1:10:50.840 --> 1:10:54.560 I think ultimately it's not our universe 1:10:54.560 --> 1:10:57.960 giving meaning to us, it's us giving meaning to our universe. 1:10:57.960 --> 1:11:01.840 And if we build more advanced intelligence, 1:11:01.840 --> 1:11:03.680 let's make sure we build it in such a way 1:11:03.680 --> 1:11:08.680 that meaning is part of it. 1:11:09.120 --> 1:11:11.400 A lot of people that seriously study this problem 1:11:11.400 --> 1:11:13.600 and think of it from different angles 1:11:13.600 --> 1:11:16.880 have trouble in the majority of cases, 1:11:16.880 --> 1:11:19.160 if they think through that happen, 1:11:19.160 --> 1:11:22.520 are the ones that are not beneficial to humanity. 1:11:22.520 --> 1:11:25.560 And so, yeah, so what are your thoughts? 1:11:25.560 --> 1:11:29.400 What's should people, you know, 1:11:29.400 --> 1:11:32.040 I really don't like people to be terrified. 1:11:33.440 --> 1:11:35.040 What's a way for people to think about it 1:11:35.040 --> 1:11:39.600 in a way we can solve it and we can make it better? 1:11:39.600 --> 1:11:42.960 No, I don't think panicking is going to help in any way. 1:11:42.960 --> 1:11:44.840 It's not going to increase chances 1:11:44.840 --> 1:11:45.880 of things going well either. 1:11:45.880 --> 1:11:48.400 Even if you are in a situation where there is a real threat, 1:11:48.400 --> 1:11:51.080 does it help if everybody just freaks out? 1:11:51.080 --> 1:11:52.680 No, of course, of course not. 1:11:53.640 --> 1:11:56.600 I think, yeah, there are of course ways 1:11:56.600 --> 1:11:58.440 in which things can go horribly wrong. 1:11:59.560 --> 1:12:03.680 First of all, it's important when we think about this thing, 1:12:03.680 --> 1:12:05.280 about the problems and risks, 1:12:05.280 --> 1:12:07.160 to also remember how huge the upsides can be 1:12:07.160 --> 1:12:08.440 if we get it right, right? 1:12:08.440 --> 1:12:12.360 Everything we love about society and civilization 1:12:12.360 --> 1:12:13.400 is a product of intelligence. 1:12:13.400 --> 1:12:15.320 So if we can amplify our intelligence 1:12:15.320 --> 1:12:18.760 with machine intelligence and not anymore lose our loved one 1:12:18.760 --> 1:12:21.080 to what we're told is an incurable disease 1:12:21.080 --> 1:12:24.800 and things like this, of course, we should aspire to that. 1:12:24.800 --> 1:12:26.680 So that can be a motivator, I think, 1:12:26.680 --> 1:12:29.120 reminding ourselves that the reason we try to solve problems 1:12:29.120 --> 1:12:33.520 is not just because we're trying to avoid gloom, 1:12:33.520 --> 1:12:35.760 but because we're trying to do something great. 1:12:35.760 --> 1:12:37.680 But then in terms of the risks, 1:12:37.680 --> 1:12:42.680 I think the really important question is to ask, 1:12:42.680 --> 1:12:45.480 what can we do today that will actually help 1:12:45.480 --> 1:12:47.320 make the outcome good, right? 1:12:47.320 --> 1:12:49.880 And dismissing the risk is not one of them. 1:12:51.240 --> 1:12:54.800 I find it quite funny often when I'm in discussion panels 1:12:54.800 --> 1:12:55.960 about these things, 1:12:55.960 --> 1:13:00.960 how the people who work for companies, 1:13:01.200 --> 1:13:03.120 always be like, oh, nothing to worry about, 1:13:03.120 --> 1:13:04.760 nothing to worry about, nothing to worry about. 1:13:04.760 --> 1:13:09.600 And it's only academics sometimes express concerns. 1:13:09.600 --> 1:13:11.880 That's not surprising at all if you think about it. 1:13:11.880 --> 1:13:12.880 Right. 1:13:12.880 --> 1:13:15.200 Upton Sinclair quipped, right, 1:13:15.200 --> 1:13:18.040 that it's hard to make a man believe in something 1:13:18.040 --> 1:13:20.120 when his income depends on not believing in it. 1:13:20.120 --> 1:13:24.080 And frankly, we know a lot of these people in companies 1:13:24.080 --> 1:13:26.240 that they're just as concerned as anyone else. 1:13:26.240 --> 1:13:28.480 But if you're the CEO of a company, 1:13:28.480 --> 1:13:30.280 that's not something you want to go on record saying 1:13:30.280 --> 1:13:33.440 when you have silly journalists who are gonna put a picture 1:13:33.440 --> 1:13:35.720 of a Terminator robot when they quote you. 1:13:35.720 --> 1:13:39.040 So the issues are real. 1:13:39.040 --> 1:13:41.920 And the way I think about what the issue is, 1:13:41.920 --> 1:13:46.920 is basically the real choice we have is, 1:13:48.040 --> 1:13:50.840 first of all, are we gonna just dismiss the risks 1:13:50.840 --> 1:13:54.480 and say, well, let's just go ahead and build machines 1:13:54.480 --> 1:13:57.560 that can do everything we can do better and cheaper. 1:13:57.560 --> 1:14:00.200 Let's just make ourselves obsolete as fast as possible. 1:14:00.200 --> 1:14:01.720 What could possibly go wrong? 1:14:01.720 --> 1:14:03.440 That's one attitude. 1:14:03.440 --> 1:14:05.440 The opposite attitude, I think, is to say, 1:14:06.400 --> 1:14:08.800 here's this incredible potential, 1:14:08.800 --> 1:14:11.960 let's think about what kind of future 1:14:11.960 --> 1:14:14.640 we're really, really excited about. 1:14:14.640 --> 1:14:18.480 What are the shared goals that we can really aspire towards? 1:14:18.480 --> 1:14:19.960 And then let's think really hard 1:14:19.960 --> 1:14:22.000 about how we can actually get there. 1:14:22.000 --> 1:14:24.160 So start with, don't start thinking about the risks, 1:14:24.160 --> 1:14:26.720 start thinking about the goals. 1:14:26.720 --> 1:14:28.200 And then when you do that, 1:14:28.200 --> 1:14:30.480 then you can think about the obstacles you want to avoid. 1:14:30.480 --> 1:14:32.840 I often get students coming in right here into my office 1:14:32.840 --> 1:14:34.120 for career advice. 1:14:34.120 --> 1:14:35.560 I always ask them this very question, 1:14:35.560 --> 1:14:37.920 where do you want to be in the future? 1:14:37.920 --> 1:14:40.640 If all she can say is, oh, maybe I'll have cancer, 1:14:40.640 --> 1:14:42.480 maybe I'll get run over by a truck. 1:14:42.480 --> 1:14:44.280 Yeah, focus on the obstacles instead of the goals. 1:14:44.280 --> 1:14:46.880 She's just going to end up a hypochondriac paranoid. 1:14:47.920 --> 1:14:49.920 Whereas if she comes in and fire in her eyes 1:14:49.920 --> 1:14:51.840 and is like, I want to be there. 1:14:51.840 --> 1:14:53.960 And then we can talk about the obstacles 1:14:53.960 --> 1:14:55.760 and see how we can circumvent them. 1:14:55.760 --> 1:14:58.880 That's, I think, a much, much healthier attitude. 1:14:58.880 --> 1:15:03.880 And I feel it's very challenging to come up with a vision 1:15:03.880 --> 1:15:08.120 for the future, which we are unequivocally excited about. 1:15:08.120 --> 1:15:10.320 I'm not just talking now in the vague terms, 1:15:10.320 --> 1:15:12.360 like, yeah, let's cure cancer, fine. 1:15:12.360 --> 1:15:14.720 I'm talking about what kind of society 1:15:14.720 --> 1:15:15.840 do we want to create? 1:15:15.840 --> 1:15:20.360 What do we want it to mean to be human in the age of AI, 1:15:20.360 --> 1:15:21.720 in the age of AGI? 1:15:22.840 --> 1:15:25.360 So if we can have this conversation, 1:15:25.360 --> 1:15:28.200 broad, inclusive conversation, 1:15:28.200 --> 1:15:31.400 and gradually start converging towards some, 1:15:31.400 --> 1:15:34.240 some future that with some direction, at least, 1:15:34.240 --> 1:15:35.400 that we want to steer towards, right, 1:15:35.400 --> 1:15:38.160 then we'll be much more motivated 1:15:38.160 --> 1:15:39.960 to constructively take on the obstacles. 1:15:39.960 --> 1:15:43.560 And I think if I had, if I had to, 1:15:43.560 --> 1:15:46.640 if I try to wrap this up in a more succinct way, 1:15:46.640 --> 1:15:51.480 I think we can all agree already now 1:15:51.480 --> 1:15:56.160 that we should aspire to build AGI 1:15:56.160 --> 1:16:05.160 that doesn't overpower us, but that empowers us. 1:16:05.160 --> 1:16:08.560 And think of the many various ways that can do that, 1:16:08.560 --> 1:16:11.000 whether that's from my side of the world 1:16:11.000 --> 1:16:12.720 of autonomous vehicles. 1:16:12.720 --> 1:16:14.720 I'm personally actually from the camp 1:16:14.720 --> 1:16:16.800 that believes this human level intelligence 1:16:16.800 --> 1:16:20.480 is required to achieve something like vehicles 1:16:20.480 --> 1:16:23.880 that would actually be something we would enjoy using 1:16:23.880 --> 1:16:25.120 and being part of. 1:16:25.120 --> 1:16:27.040 So that's one example, and certainly there's a lot 1:16:27.040 --> 1:16:30.920 of other types of robots and medicine and so on. 1:16:30.920 --> 1:16:33.880 So focusing on those and then coming up with the obstacles, 1:16:33.880 --> 1:16:35.920 coming up with the ways that that can go wrong 1:16:35.920 --> 1:16:38.160 and solving those one at a time. 1:16:38.160 --> 1:16:41.520 And just because you can build an autonomous vehicle, 1:16:41.520 --> 1:16:42.800 even if you could build one 1:16:42.800 --> 1:16:45.080 that would drive just fine without you, 1:16:45.080 --> 1:16:46.720 maybe there are some things in life 1:16:46.720 --> 1:16:48.400 that we would actually want to do ourselves. 1:16:48.400 --> 1:16:49.240 That's right. 1:16:49.240 --> 1:16:51.400 Right, like, for example, 1:16:51.400 --> 1:16:53.040 if you think of our society as a whole, 1:16:53.040 --> 1:16:56.320 there are some things that we find very meaningful to do. 1:16:57.200 --> 1:16:59.640 And that doesn't mean we have to stop doing them 1:16:59.640 --> 1:17:02.000 just because machines can do them better. 1:17:02.000 --> 1:17:04.080 I'm not gonna stop playing tennis 1:17:04.080 --> 1:17:07.360 just the day someone builds a tennis robot and beat me. 1:17:07.360 --> 1:17:09.600 People are still playing chess and even go. 1:17:09.600 --> 1:17:14.600 Yeah, and in the very near term even, 1:17:14.600 --> 1:17:18.880 some people are advocating basic income, replace jobs. 1:17:18.880 --> 1:17:20.840 But if the government is gonna be willing 1:17:20.840 --> 1:17:24.040 to just hand out cash to people for doing nothing, 1:17:24.040 --> 1:17:25.840 then one should also seriously consider 1:17:25.840 --> 1:17:27.640 whether the government should also hire 1:17:27.640 --> 1:17:29.480 a lot more teachers and nurses 1:17:29.480 --> 1:17:32.160 and the kind of jobs which people often 1:17:32.160 --> 1:17:34.440 find great fulfillment in doing, right? 1:17:34.440 --> 1:17:36.320 We get very tired of hearing politicians saying, 1:17:36.320 --> 1:17:39.320 oh, we can't afford hiring more teachers, 1:17:39.320 --> 1:17:41.480 but we're gonna maybe have basic income. 1:17:41.480 --> 1:17:44.000 If we can have more serious research and thought 1:17:44.000 --> 1:17:46.200 into what gives meaning to our lives, 1:17:46.200 --> 1:17:48.960 the jobs give so much more than income, right? 1:17:48.960 --> 1:17:50.520 Mm hmm. 1:17:50.520 --> 1:17:53.320 And then think about in the future, 1:17:53.320 --> 1:17:58.320 what are the roles that we wanna have people 1:18:00.000 --> 1:18:03.040 continually feeling empowered by machines? 1:18:03.040 --> 1:18:06.120 And I think sort of, I come from Russia, 1:18:06.120 --> 1:18:07.240 from the Soviet Union. 1:18:07.240 --> 1:18:10.160 And I think for a lot of people in the 20th century, 1:18:10.160 --> 1:18:14.080 going to the moon, going to space was an inspiring thing. 1:18:14.080 --> 1:18:18.080 I feel like the universe of the mind, 1:18:18.080 --> 1:18:20.880 so AI, understanding, creating intelligence 1:18:20.880 --> 1:18:23.240 is that for the 21st century. 1:18:23.240 --> 1:18:24.400 So it's really surprising. 1:18:24.400 --> 1:18:25.640 And I've heard you mention this. 1:18:25.640 --> 1:18:27.400 It's really surprising to me, 1:18:27.400 --> 1:18:29.240 both on the research funding side, 1:18:29.240 --> 1:18:31.760 that it's not funded as greatly as it could be, 1:18:31.760 --> 1:18:34.760 but most importantly, on the politician side, 1:18:34.760 --> 1:18:36.520 that it's not part of the public discourse 1:18:36.520 --> 1:18:40.800 except in the killer bots terminator kind of view, 1:18:40.800 --> 1:18:44.880 that people are not yet, I think, perhaps excited 1:18:44.880 --> 1:18:46.680 by the possible positive future 1:18:46.680 --> 1:18:48.120 that we can build together. 1:18:48.120 --> 1:18:51.520 So we should be, because politicians usually just focus 1:18:51.520 --> 1:18:53.320 on the next election cycle, right? 1:18:54.480 --> 1:18:57.160 The single most important thing I feel we humans have learned 1:18:57.160 --> 1:18:59.320 in the entire history of science 1:18:59.320 --> 1:19:02.040 is they were the masters of underestimation. 1:19:02.040 --> 1:19:07.040 We underestimated the size of our cosmos again and again, 1:19:08.480 --> 1:19:10.200 realizing that everything we thought existed 1:19:10.200 --> 1:19:12.240 was just a small part of something grander, right? 1:19:12.240 --> 1:19:16.640 Planet, solar system, the galaxy, clusters of galaxies. 1:19:16.640 --> 1:19:17.560 The universe. 1:19:18.440 --> 1:19:23.120 And we now know that the future has just 1:19:23.120 --> 1:19:25.160 so much more potential 1:19:25.160 --> 1:19:27.640 than our ancestors could ever have dreamt of. 1:19:27.640 --> 1:19:32.360 This cosmos, imagine if all of Earth 1:19:33.600 --> 1:19:35.440 was completely devoid of life, 1:19:36.640 --> 1:19:38.520 except for Cambridge, Massachusetts. 1:19:39.560 --> 1:19:42.680 Wouldn't it be kind of lame if all we ever aspired to 1:19:42.680 --> 1:19:45.560 was to stay in Cambridge, Massachusetts forever 1:19:45.560 --> 1:19:47.160 and then go extinct in one week, 1:19:47.160 --> 1:19:49.760 even though Earth was gonna continue on for longer? 1:19:49.760 --> 1:19:52.800 That sort of attitude I think we have now 1:19:54.200 --> 1:19:57.800 on the cosmic scale, life can flourish on Earth, 1:19:57.800 --> 1:20:00.840 not for four years, but for billions of years. 1:20:00.840 --> 1:20:02.920 I can even tell you about how to move it out of harm's way 1:20:02.920 --> 1:20:04.840 when the sun gets too hot. 1:20:04.840 --> 1:20:09.520 And then we have so much more resources out here, 1:20:09.520 --> 1:20:12.480 which today, maybe there are a lot of other planets 1:20:12.480 --> 1:20:14.960 with bacteria or cow like life on them, 1:20:14.960 --> 1:20:19.880 but most of this, all this opportunity seems, 1:20:19.880 --> 1:20:22.440 as far as we can tell, to be largely dead, 1:20:22.440 --> 1:20:23.560 like the Sahara Desert. 1:20:23.560 --> 1:20:28.480 And yet we have the opportunity to help life flourish 1:20:28.480 --> 1:20:30.280 around this for billions of years. 1:20:30.280 --> 1:20:32.680 So let's quit squabbling about 1:20:34.080 --> 1:20:36.480 whether some little border should be drawn 1:20:36.480 --> 1:20:38.440 one mile to the left or right, 1:20:38.440 --> 1:20:41.080 and look up into the skies and realize, 1:20:41.080 --> 1:20:44.040 hey, we can do such incredible things. 1:20:44.040 --> 1:20:46.640 Yeah, and that's, I think, why it's really exciting 1:20:46.640 --> 1:20:49.440 that you and others are connected 1:20:49.440 --> 1:20:51.880 with some of the work Elon Musk is doing, 1:20:51.880 --> 1:20:54.480 because he's literally going out into that space, 1:20:54.480 --> 1:20:57.000 really exploring our universe, and it's wonderful. 1:20:57.000 --> 1:21:02.000 That is exactly why Elon Musk is so misunderstood, right? 1:21:02.000 --> 1:21:05.000 Misconstrued him as some kind of pessimistic doomsayer. 1:21:05.000 --> 1:21:07.640 The reason he cares so much about AI safety 1:21:07.640 --> 1:21:12.080 is because he more than almost anyone else appreciates 1:21:12.080 --> 1:21:14.280 these amazing opportunities that we'll squander 1:21:14.280 --> 1:21:16.640 if we wipe out here on Earth. 1:21:16.640 --> 1:21:19.680 We're not just going to wipe out the next generation, 1:21:19.680 --> 1:21:23.320 all generations, and this incredible opportunity 1:21:23.320 --> 1:21:25.400 that's out there, and that would really be a waste. 1:21:25.400 --> 1:21:30.080 And AI, for people who think that it would be better 1:21:30.080 --> 1:21:33.600 to do without technology, let me just mention that 1:21:34.680 --> 1:21:36.320 if we don't improve our technology, 1:21:36.320 --> 1:21:39.320 the question isn't whether humanity is going to go extinct. 1:21:39.320 --> 1:21:41.160 The question is just whether we're going to get taken out 1:21:41.160 --> 1:21:44.800 by the next big asteroid or the next super volcano 1:21:44.800 --> 1:21:48.280 or something else dumb that we could easily prevent 1:21:48.280 --> 1:21:49.840 with more tech, right? 1:21:49.840 --> 1:21:53.160 And if we want life to flourish throughout the cosmos, 1:21:53.160 --> 1:21:54.760 AI is the key to it. 1:21:56.120 --> 1:21:59.840 As I mentioned in a lot of detail in my book right there, 1:21:59.840 --> 1:22:04.840 even many of the most inspired sci fi writers, 1:22:04.880 --> 1:22:08.120 I feel have totally underestimated the opportunities 1:22:08.120 --> 1:22:11.240 for space travel, especially at the other galaxies, 1:22:11.240 --> 1:22:15.360 because they weren't thinking about the possibility of AGI, 1:22:15.360 --> 1:22:17.520 which just makes it so much easier. 1:22:17.520 --> 1:22:18.440 Right, yeah. 1:22:18.440 --> 1:22:23.440 So that goes to your view of AGI that enables our progress, 1:22:24.080 --> 1:22:25.760 that enables a better life. 1:22:25.760 --> 1:22:28.320 So that's a beautiful way to put it 1:22:28.320 --> 1:22:29.960 and then something to strive for. 1:22:29.960 --> 1:22:31.440 So Max, thank you so much. 1:22:31.440 --> 1:22:32.560 Thank you for your time today. 1:22:32.560 --> 1:22:33.560 It's been awesome. 1:22:33.560 --> 1:22:34.400 Thank you so much. 1:22:34.400 --> 1:22:35.240 Thanks. 1:22:35.240 --> 1:22:40.240 Have a great day.