WEBVTT 00:00.000 --> 00:06.400 You've studied the human mind, cognition, language, vision, evolution, psychology, from child to adult, 00:07.360 --> 00:11.120 from the level of individual to the level of our entire civilization, 00:11.680 --> 00:14.880 so I feel like I can start with a simple multiple choice question. 00:16.240 --> 00:21.840 What is the meaning of life? Is it A, to attain knowledge, as Plato said, 00:22.400 --> 00:28.000 B, to attain power, as Nietzsche said, C, to escape death, as Ernest Becker said, 00:28.000 --> 00:35.040 D, to propagate our genes, as Darwin and others have said, E, there is no meaning, 00:35.040 --> 00:41.440 as the nihilists have said, F, knowing the meaning of life is beyond our cognitive capabilities, 00:41.440 --> 00:47.360 as Stephen Pinker said, based on my interpretation 20 years ago, and G, none of the above. 00:48.160 --> 00:54.720 I'd say A comes closest, but I would amend that to attaining not only knowledge, but fulfillment 00:54.720 --> 01:06.000 more generally. That is, life, health, stimulation, access to the living cultural and social world. 01:06.000 --> 01:10.720 Now, this is our meaning of life. It's not the meaning of life, if you were to ask our genes. 01:12.160 --> 01:17.600 Their meaning is to propagate copies of themselves, but that is distinct from the 01:17.600 --> 01:26.640 meaning that the brain that they lead to sets for itself. So, to you, knowledge is a small subset 01:26.640 --> 01:33.280 or a large subset? It's a large subset, but it's not the entirety of human striving, because we 01:33.280 --> 01:39.120 also want to interact with people. We want to experience beauty. We want to experience the 01:39.120 --> 01:47.840 richness of the natural world, but understanding what makes the universe tick is way up there. 01:47.840 --> 01:54.000 For some of us more than others, certainly for me, that's one of the top five. 01:54.560 --> 02:00.080 So, is that a fundamental aspect? Are you just describing your own preference, or is this a 02:00.080 --> 02:05.920 fundamental aspect of human nature, is to seek knowledge? In your latest book, you talk about 02:05.920 --> 02:11.760 the power, the usefulness of rationality and reason and so on. Is that a fundamental 02:11.760 --> 02:16.160 nature of human beings, or is it something we should just strive for? 02:16.960 --> 02:21.840 Both. We're capable of striving for it, because it is one of the things that 02:22.640 --> 02:31.360 make us what we are, homo sapiens, wise men. We are unusual among our animals in the degree to 02:31.360 --> 02:39.760 which we acquire knowledge and use it to survive. We make tools. We strike agreements via language. 02:39.760 --> 02:47.760 We extract poisons. We predict the behavior of animals. We try to get at the workings of plants. 02:47.760 --> 02:52.640 And when I say we, I don't just mean we in the modern west, but we as a species everywhere, 02:52.640 --> 02:58.160 which is how we've managed to occupy every niche on the planet, how we've managed to drive other 02:58.160 --> 03:06.480 animals to extinction. And the refinement of reason in pursuit of human well being, of health, 03:06.480 --> 03:13.680 happiness, social richness, cultural richness, is our main challenge in the present. That is, 03:14.480 --> 03:19.280 using our intellect, using our knowledge to figure out how the world works, how we work, 03:19.280 --> 03:25.200 in order to make discoveries and strike agreements that make us all better off in the long run. 03:25.200 --> 03:31.920 Right. And you do that almost undeniably in a data driven way in your recent book, 03:31.920 --> 03:36.480 but I'd like to focus on the artificial intelligence aspect of things, and not just 03:36.480 --> 03:41.840 artificial intelligence, but natural intelligence too. So 20 years ago in the book, you've written 03:41.840 --> 03:49.600 on how the mind works, you conjecture, again, am I right to interpret things? You can correct me 03:49.600 --> 03:55.200 if I'm wrong, but you conjecture that human thought in the brain may be a result of a network, a massive 03:55.200 --> 04:00.560 network of highly interconnected neurons. So from this interconnectivity emerges thought, 04:01.280 --> 04:05.600 compared to artificial neural networks, which we use for machine learning today, 04:06.160 --> 04:12.640 is there something fundamentally more complex, mysterious, even magical about the biological 04:12.640 --> 04:19.440 neural networks versus the ones we've been starting to use over the past 60 years and 04:19.440 --> 04:24.960 become to success in the past 10? There is something a little bit mysterious about 04:25.840 --> 04:31.760 the human neural networks, which is that each one of us who is a neural network knows that we 04:31.760 --> 04:36.960 ourselves are conscious, conscious not in the sense of registering our surroundings or even 04:36.960 --> 04:42.720 registering our internal state, but in having subjective first person, present tense experience. 04:42.720 --> 04:49.840 That is, when I see red, it's not just different from green, but there's a redness to it that I 04:49.840 --> 04:54.720 feel. Whether an artificial system would experience that or not, I don't know and I don't think I 04:54.720 --> 05:00.480 can know. That's why it's mysterious. If we had a perfectly lifelike robot that was behaviorally 05:00.480 --> 05:06.800 indistinguishable from a human, would we attribute consciousness to it or ought we to attribute 05:06.800 --> 05:12.160 consciousness to it? And that's something that it's very hard to know. But putting that aside, 05:12.160 --> 05:19.040 putting aside that largely philosophical question, the question is, is there some difference between 05:19.040 --> 05:23.920 the human neural network and the ones that we're building in artificial intelligence will mean that 05:23.920 --> 05:30.400 we're on the current trajectory not going to reach the point where we've got a lifelike robot 05:30.400 --> 05:35.120 indistinguishable from a human because the way their so called neural networks are organized 05:35.120 --> 05:40.560 are different from the way ours are organized. I think there's overlap, but I think there are some 05:40.560 --> 05:48.720 big differences that their current neural networks, current so called deep learning systems are in 05:48.720 --> 05:53.840 reality not all that deep. That is, they are very good at extracting high order statistical 05:53.840 --> 06:00.640 regularities. But most of the systems don't have a semantic level, a level of actual understanding 06:00.640 --> 06:06.400 of who did what to whom, why, where, how things work, what causes, what else. 06:06.400 --> 06:10.960 Do you think that kind of thing can emerge as it does so artificial neural networks are much 06:10.960 --> 06:16.480 smaller the number of connections and so on than the current human biological networks? But do you 06:16.480 --> 06:22.640 think sort of go to consciousness or to go to this higher level semantic reasoning about things? 06:22.640 --> 06:28.960 Do you think that can emerge with just a larger network with a more richly, weirdly interconnected 06:28.960 --> 06:33.280 network? Separate it in consciousness because consciousness is even a matter of complexity. 06:33.280 --> 06:37.920 A really weird one. Yeah, you could sensibly ask the question of whether shrimp are conscious, 06:37.920 --> 06:43.200 for example. They're not terribly complex, but maybe they feel pain. So let's just put that 06:43.200 --> 06:50.000 part of it aside. But I think sheer size of a neural network is not enough to give it 06:50.960 --> 06:57.360 structure and knowledge. But if it's suitably engineered, then why not? That is, we're neural 06:57.360 --> 07:03.680 networks. Natural selection did a kind of equivalent of engineering of our brains. So I don't think 07:03.680 --> 07:10.880 there's anything mysterious in the sense that no systemated of silicon could ever do what a human 07:10.880 --> 07:16.080 brain can do. I think it's possible in principle. Whether it'll ever happen depends not only on 07:16.080 --> 07:21.040 how clever we are in engineering these systems, but whether even we even want to, whether that's 07:21.040 --> 07:27.440 even a sensible goal. That is, you can ask the question, is there any locomotion system that is 07:28.320 --> 07:32.960 as good as a human? Well, we kind of want to do better than a human ultimately in terms of 07:32.960 --> 07:39.360 legged locomotion. There's no reason that humans should be our benchmark. They're tools that might 07:39.360 --> 07:49.280 be better in some ways. It may be that we can't duplicate a natural system because at some point, 07:49.280 --> 07:53.840 it's so much cheaper to use a natural system that we're not going to invest more brain power 07:53.840 --> 08:00.000 and resources. So for example, we don't really have an exact substitute for wood. We still build 08:00.000 --> 08:04.400 houses out of wood. We still build furniture out of wood. We like the look. We like the feel. It's 08:04.400 --> 08:09.280 wood has certain properties that synthetics don't. There's not that there's anything magical or 08:09.280 --> 08:16.400 mysterious about wood. It's just that the extra steps of duplicating everything about wood is 08:16.400 --> 08:20.480 something we just haven't bothered because we have wood. Likewise, cotton. I'm wearing cotton 08:20.480 --> 08:26.880 clothing now. It feels much better than polyester. It's not that cotton has something magic in it, 08:27.600 --> 08:33.120 and it's not that we couldn't ever synthesize something exactly like cotton, 08:33.120 --> 08:37.760 but at some point, it's just not worth it. We've got cotton. Likewise, in the case of human 08:37.760 --> 08:43.520 intelligence, the goal of making an artificial system that is exactly like the human brain 08:43.520 --> 08:49.440 is a goal that we probably know is going to pursue to the bitter end, I suspect, because 08:50.080 --> 08:53.600 if you want tools that do things better than humans, you're not going to care whether it 08:53.600 --> 08:58.720 does something like humans. So for example, diagnosing cancer or predicting the weather, 08:58.720 --> 09:07.360 why set humans as your benchmark? But in general, I suspect you also believe that even if the human 09:07.360 --> 09:11.440 should not be a benchmark and we don't want to imitate humans in their system, there's a lot 09:11.440 --> 09:16.800 to be learned about how to create an artificial intelligence system by studying the humans. 09:16.800 --> 09:23.440 Yeah, I think that's right. In the same way that to build flying machines, we want to understand 09:23.440 --> 09:28.880 the laws of aerodynamics, including birds, but not mimic the birds, but they're the same laws. 09:30.480 --> 09:38.400 You have a view on AI, artificial intelligence and safety, that from my perspective, 09:38.400 --> 09:49.360 is refreshingly rational, or perhaps more importantly, has elements of positivity to it, 09:49.360 --> 09:55.440 which I think can be inspiring and empowering as opposed to paralyzing. For many people, 09:55.440 --> 10:02.320 including AI researchers, the eventual existential threat of AI is obvious, not only possible but 10:02.320 --> 10:08.640 obvious. And for many others, including AI researchers, the threat is not obvious. So 10:09.520 --> 10:16.480 Elon Musk is famously in the highly concerned about AI camp, saying things like AI is far 10:16.480 --> 10:22.240 more dangerous than nuclear weapons, and that AI will likely destroy human civilization. 10:22.960 --> 10:30.400 So in February, you said that if Elon was really serious about AI, the threat of AI, 10:30.400 --> 10:34.960 he would stop building self driving cars that he's doing very successfully as part of Tesla. 10:35.840 --> 10:40.880 Then he said, wow, if even Pinker doesn't understand the difference between narrow AI 10:40.880 --> 10:47.280 like a car and general AI, when the latter literally has a million times more compute power 10:47.280 --> 10:54.240 and an open ended utility function, humanity is in deep trouble. So first, what did you mean by 10:54.240 --> 10:59.200 the statement about Elon Musk should stop building self driving cars if he's deeply concerned? 10:59.200 --> 11:03.520 Well, not the last time that Elon Musk has fired off an intemperate tweet. 11:04.320 --> 11:07.600 Well, we live in a world where Twitter has power. 11:07.600 --> 11:16.640 Yes. Yeah, I think there are two kinds of existential threat that have been discussed 11:16.640 --> 11:19.760 in connection with artificial intelligence, and I think that they're both incoherent. 11:20.480 --> 11:28.800 One of them is a vague fear of AI takeover, that just as we subjugated animals and less 11:28.800 --> 11:33.360 technologically advanced peoples, so if we build something that's more advanced than us, 11:33.360 --> 11:39.200 it will inevitably turn us into pets or slaves or domesticated animal equivalents. 11:40.240 --> 11:46.720 I think this confuses intelligence with a will to power that it so happens that in the 11:46.720 --> 11:52.240 intelligence system we are most familiar with, namely Homo sapiens, we are products of natural 11:52.240 --> 11:56.800 selection, which is a competitive process. And so bundled together with our problem solving 11:56.800 --> 12:05.200 capacity are a number of nasty traits like dominance and exploitation and maximization of 12:05.200 --> 12:11.040 power and glory and resources and influence. There's no reason to think that sheer problem 12:11.040 --> 12:16.640 solving capability will set that as one of its goals. Its goals will be whatever we set its goals 12:16.640 --> 12:21.760 as, and as long as someone isn't building a megalomaniacal artificial intelligence, 12:22.560 --> 12:25.360 then there's no reason to think that it would naturally evolve in that direction. 12:25.360 --> 12:31.600 Now you might say, well, what if we gave it the goal of maximizing its own power source? 12:31.600 --> 12:35.280 That's a pretty stupid goal to give an autonomous system. You don't give it that goal. 12:36.000 --> 12:41.360 I mean, that's just self evidently idiotic. So if you look at the history of the world, 12:41.360 --> 12:45.680 there's been a lot of opportunities where engineers could instill in a system destructive 12:45.680 --> 12:49.520 power and they choose not to because that's the natural process of engineering. 12:49.520 --> 12:52.880 Well, except for weapons. I mean, if you're building a weapon, its goal is to destroy 12:52.880 --> 12:58.400 people. And so I think there are good reasons to not build certain kinds of weapons. I think 12:58.400 --> 13:06.240 building nuclear weapons was a massive mistake. You do. So maybe pause on that because that is 13:06.240 --> 13:12.880 one of the serious threats. Do you think that it was a mistake in a sense that it should have been 13:12.880 --> 13:19.200 stopped early on? Or do you think it's just an unfortunate event of invention that this was 13:19.200 --> 13:22.800 invented? Do you think it's possible to stop, I guess, is the question on that? Yeah, it's hard to 13:22.800 --> 13:27.440 rewind the clock because, of course, it was invented in the context of World War II and the 13:27.440 --> 13:33.120 fear that the Nazis might develop one first. Then once it was initiated for that reason, 13:33.120 --> 13:40.800 it was hard to turn off, especially since winning the war against the Japanese and the Nazis was 13:40.800 --> 13:46.160 such an overwhelming goal of every responsible person that they were just nothing that people 13:46.160 --> 13:51.440 wouldn't have done then to ensure victory. It's quite possible if World War II hadn't happened 13:51.440 --> 13:56.560 that nuclear weapons wouldn't have been invented. We can't know. But I don't think it was, by any 13:56.560 --> 14:01.760 means, a necessity any more than some of the other weapon systems that were envisioned but never 14:01.760 --> 14:09.040 implemented, like planes that would disperse poison gas over cities like crop dusters or systems to 14:09.040 --> 14:16.080 try to create earthquakes and tsunamis in enemy countries, to weaponize the weather, 14:16.080 --> 14:21.520 weaponize solar flares, all kinds of crazy schemes that we thought the better of. I think 14:21.520 --> 14:26.800 analogies between nuclear weapons and artificial intelligence are fundamentally misguided because 14:26.800 --> 14:31.520 the whole point of nuclear weapons is to destroy things. The point of artificial intelligence 14:31.520 --> 14:37.360 is not to destroy things. So the analogy is misleading. So there's two artificial 14:37.360 --> 14:42.320 intelligence you mentioned. The first one was the highly intelligent or power hungry. Yeah, 14:42.320 --> 14:47.040 an assistant that we design ourselves where we give it the goals. Goals are external to the 14:48.320 --> 14:55.840 means to attain the goals. If we don't design an artificially intelligent system to maximize 14:56.560 --> 15:02.400 dominance, then it won't maximize dominance. It's just that we're so familiar with homo sapiens 15:02.400 --> 15:08.800 where these two traits come bundled together, particularly in men, that we are apt to confuse 15:08.800 --> 15:16.720 high intelligence with a will to power. But that's just an error. The other fear is that 15:16.720 --> 15:23.040 we'll be collateral damage that will give artificial intelligence a goal like make paper clips 15:23.040 --> 15:28.320 and it will pursue that goal so brilliantly that before we can stop it, it turns us into paper 15:28.320 --> 15:34.400 clips. We'll give it the goal of curing cancer and it will turn us into guinea pigs for lethal 15:34.400 --> 15:40.000 experiments or give it the goal of world peace and its conception of world peace is no people, 15:40.000 --> 15:44.480 therefore no fighting and so it will kill us all. Now, I think these are utterly fanciful. In fact, 15:44.480 --> 15:49.600 I think they're actually self defeating. They first of all assume that we're going to be so 15:49.600 --> 15:54.880 brilliant that we can design an artificial intelligence that can cure cancer. But so stupid 15:54.880 --> 16:00.160 that we don't specify what we mean by curing cancer in enough detail that it won't kill us in the 16:00.160 --> 16:06.720 process. And it assumes that the system will be so smart that it can cure cancer. But so 16:06.720 --> 16:11.520 idiotic that it doesn't can't figure out that what we mean by curing cancer is not killing 16:11.520 --> 16:17.920 everyone. So I think that the collateral damage scenario, the value alignment problem is also 16:17.920 --> 16:23.200 based on a misconception. So one of the challenges, of course, we don't know how to build either system 16:23.200 --> 16:27.440 currently, or are we even close to knowing? Of course, those things can change overnight, 16:27.440 --> 16:33.840 but at this time, theorizing about is very challenging in either direction. So that's 16:33.840 --> 16:39.600 probably at the core of the problem is without that ability to reason about the real engineering 16:39.600 --> 16:45.200 things here at hand is your imagination runs away with things. Exactly. But let me sort of ask, 16:45.920 --> 16:52.320 what do you think was the motivation, the thought process of Elon Musk? I build autonomous vehicles, 16:52.320 --> 16:58.000 I study autonomous vehicles, I study Tesla autopilot. I think it is one of the greatest 16:58.000 --> 17:02.880 currently application, large scale application of artificial intelligence in the world. 17:02.880 --> 17:09.120 It has a potentially very positive impact on society. So how does a person who's creating this 17:09.120 --> 17:17.680 very good, quote unquote, narrow AI system also seem to be so concerned about this other 17:17.680 --> 17:21.120 general AI? What do you think is the motivation there? What do you think is the thing? 17:21.120 --> 17:30.640 Well, you probably have to ask him, but there and he is notoriously flamboyant, impulsive to the, 17:30.640 --> 17:35.120 as we have just seen, to the detriment of his own goals of the health of a company. 17:36.000 --> 17:41.600 So I don't know what's going on in his mind. You probably have to ask him. But I don't think the, 17:41.600 --> 17:48.160 and I don't think the distinction between special purpose AI and so called general AI is relevant 17:48.160 --> 17:54.400 that in the same way that special purpose AI is not going to do anything conceivable in order to 17:54.400 --> 18:00.560 attain a goal, all engineering systems have to are designed to trade off across multiple goals. 18:00.560 --> 18:05.920 When we build cars in the first place, we didn't forget to install brakes because the goal of a 18:05.920 --> 18:12.320 car is to go fast. It occurred to people, yes, you want to go fast, but not always. So you build 18:12.320 --> 18:18.960 and brakes too. Likewise, if a car is going to be autonomous, that doesn't program it to take the 18:18.960 --> 18:23.440 shortest route to the airport. It's not going to take the diagonal and mow down people and trees 18:23.440 --> 18:28.000 and fences because that's the shortest route. That's not what we mean by the shortest route when we 18:28.000 --> 18:34.720 program it. And that's just what an intelligence system is by definition. It takes into account 18:34.720 --> 18:40.640 multiple constraints. The same is true, in fact, even more true of so called general intelligence. 18:40.640 --> 18:47.040 That is, if it's genuinely intelligent, it's not going to pursue some goal single mindedly, 18:47.040 --> 18:53.280 omitting every other consideration and collateral effect. That's not artificial and 18:53.280 --> 18:58.560 general intelligence. That's artificial stupidity. I agree with you, by the way, 18:58.560 --> 19:03.280 on the promise of autonomous vehicles for improving human welfare. I think it's spectacular. 19:03.280 --> 19:08.080 And I'm surprised at how little press coverage notes that in the United States alone, 19:08.080 --> 19:13.200 something like 40,000 people die every year on the highways, vastly more than are killed by 19:13.200 --> 19:19.440 terrorists. And we spend a trillion dollars on a war to combat deaths by terrorism, 19:19.440 --> 19:24.080 about half a dozen a year, whereas every year and year out, 40,000 people are 19:24.080 --> 19:27.600 massacred on the highways, which could be brought down to very close to zero. 19:28.560 --> 19:31.840 So I'm with you on the humanitarian benefit. 19:31.840 --> 19:36.240 Let me just mention that as a person who's building these cars, it is a little bit offensive to me 19:36.240 --> 19:41.680 to say that engineers would be clueless enough not to engineer safety into systems. I often 19:41.680 --> 19:46.400 stay up at night thinking about those 40,000 people that are dying. And everything I try to 19:46.400 --> 19:52.000 engineer is to save those people's lives. So every new invention that I'm super excited about, 19:52.000 --> 19:59.680 every new, all the deep learning literature and CVPR conferences and NIPS, everything I'm super 19:59.680 --> 20:08.320 excited about is all grounded in making it safe and help people. So I just don't see how that 20:08.320 --> 20:13.200 trajectory can all of a sudden slip into a situation where intelligence will be highly 20:13.200 --> 20:17.840 negative. You and I certainly agree on that. And I think that's only the beginning of the 20:17.840 --> 20:23.760 potential humanitarian benefits of artificial intelligence. There's been enormous attention 20:23.760 --> 20:27.680 to what are we going to do with the people whose jobs are made obsolete by artificial 20:27.680 --> 20:31.600 intelligence. But very little attention given to the fact that the jobs that are going to be 20:31.600 --> 20:37.600 made obsolete are horrible jobs. The fact that people aren't going to be picking crops and making 20:37.600 --> 20:43.760 beds and driving trucks and mining coal, these are soul deadening jobs. And we have a whole 20:43.760 --> 20:51.280 literature sympathizing with the people stuck in these menial, mind deadening, dangerous jobs. 20:52.080 --> 20:56.160 If we can eliminate them, this is a fantastic boon to humanity. Now, granted, 20:56.160 --> 21:02.160 we, you solve one problem and there's another one, namely, how do we get these people a decent 21:02.160 --> 21:08.320 income? But if we're smart enough to invent machines that can make beds and put away dishes and 21:09.520 --> 21:14.080 handle hospital patients, I think we're smart enough to figure out how to redistribute income 21:14.080 --> 21:20.960 to a portion, some of the vast economic savings to the human beings who will no longer be needed to 21:20.960 --> 21:28.400 make beds. Okay. Sam Harris says that it's obvious that eventually AI will be an existential risk. 21:29.280 --> 21:36.240 He's one of the people who says it's obvious. We don't know when the claim goes, but eventually 21:36.240 --> 21:41.760 it's obvious. And because we don't know when we should worry about it now. It's a very interesting 21:41.760 --> 21:49.120 argument in my eyes. So how do we think about timescale? How do we think about existential 21:49.120 --> 21:55.040 threats when we don't really, we know so little about the threat, unlike nuclear weapons, perhaps, 21:55.040 --> 22:02.400 about this particular threat, that it could happen tomorrow, right? So, but very likely it won't. 22:03.120 --> 22:08.320 Very likely it'd be 100 years away. So how do, do we ignore it? Do, how do we talk about it? 22:08.880 --> 22:13.040 Do we worry about it? What, how do we think about those? What is it? 22:13.040 --> 22:19.600 A threat that we can imagine, it's within the limits of our imagination, but not within our 22:19.600 --> 22:25.760 limits of understanding to sufficient, to accurately predict it. But what, what is, what is the it 22:25.760 --> 22:31.280 that we're referring to? Oh, AI, sorry, AI, AI being the existential threat. AI can always... 22:31.280 --> 22:34.400 How? But like enslaving us or turning us into paperclips? 22:35.120 --> 22:38.800 I think the most compelling from the Sam Harris perspective would be the paperclip situation. 22:38.800 --> 22:44.000 Yeah. I mean, I just think it's totally fanciful. I mean, that is, don't build a system. Don't give a, 22:44.000 --> 22:50.400 don't... First of all, the code of engineering is you don't implement a system with massive 22:50.400 --> 22:55.040 control before testing it. Now, perhaps the culture of engineering will radically change, 22:55.040 --> 23:00.320 then I would worry, but I don't see any signs that engineers will suddenly do idiotic things, 23:00.320 --> 23:05.440 like put a, an electrical power plant in control of a system that they haven't tested 23:05.440 --> 23:14.720 first. Or all of these scenarios not only imagine a almost a magically powered intelligence, 23:15.360 --> 23:20.000 you know, including things like cure cancer, which is probably an incoherent goal because 23:20.000 --> 23:25.440 there's so many different kinds of cancer or bring about world peace. I mean, how do you even specify 23:25.440 --> 23:31.360 that as a goal? But the scenarios also imagine some degree of control of every molecule in the 23:31.360 --> 23:38.480 universe, which not only is itself unlikely, but we would not start to connect these systems to 23:39.200 --> 23:45.840 infrastructure without, without testing as we would any kind of engineering system. Now, 23:45.840 --> 23:53.920 maybe some engineers will be irresponsible and we need legal and regulatory and legal 23:53.920 --> 23:59.440 responsibility implemented so that engineers don't do things that are stupid by their own standards. 23:59.440 --> 24:08.560 But the, I've never seen enough of a plausible scenario of existential threat to devote large 24:08.560 --> 24:14.720 amounts of brain power to, to forestall it. So you believe in the sort of the power en masse of 24:14.720 --> 24:19.520 the engineering of reason as you argue in your latest book of reason and science to sort of 24:20.400 --> 24:26.160 be the very thing that guides the development of new technology so it's safe and also keeps us 24:26.160 --> 24:32.480 safe. Yeah, the same, you know, granted the same culture of safety that currently is part of the 24:32.480 --> 24:38.960 engineering mindset for airplanes, for example. So yeah, I don't think that, that that should 24:38.960 --> 24:44.800 be thrown out the window and that untested, all powerful systems should be suddenly implemented. 24:44.800 --> 24:47.360 But there's no reason to think they are. And in fact, if you look at the 24:48.160 --> 24:51.760 progress of artificial intelligence, it's been, you know, it's been impressive, especially in 24:51.760 --> 24:56.960 the last 10 years or so. But the idea that suddenly there'll be a step function that all of a sudden 24:56.960 --> 25:02.160 before we know it, it will be all powerful, that there'll be some kind of recursive self 25:02.160 --> 25:11.200 improvement, some kind of fume is also fanciful. Certainly by the technology that we that we're 25:11.200 --> 25:16.720 now impresses us, such as deep learning, where you train something on hundreds of thousands or 25:16.720 --> 25:22.720 millions of examples, they're not hundreds of thousands of problems of which curing cancer is 25:24.320 --> 25:30.560 typical example. And so the kind of techniques that have allowed AI to increase in the last 25:30.560 --> 25:37.600 five years are not the kind that are going to lead to this fantasy of exponential sudden 25:37.600 --> 25:43.680 self improvement. So I think it's kind of a magical thinking. It's not based on our understanding 25:43.680 --> 25:49.200 of how AI actually works. Now, give me a chance here. So you said fanciful, magical thinking. 25:50.240 --> 25:55.280 In his TED Talk, Sam Harris says that thinking about AI killing all human civilization is somehow 25:55.280 --> 26:00.400 fun intellectually. Now, I have to say as a scientist engineer, I don't find it fun. 26:01.200 --> 26:08.560 But when I'm having beer with my non AI friends, there is indeed something fun and appealing about 26:08.560 --> 26:14.720 it. Like talking about an episode of Black Mirror, considering if a large meteor is headed towards 26:14.720 --> 26:20.640 Earth, we were just told a large meteor is headed towards Earth, something like this. And can you 26:20.640 --> 26:25.840 relate to this sense of fun? And do you understand the psychology of it? Yes, great. Good question. 26:26.880 --> 26:33.440 I personally don't find it fun. I find it kind of actually a waste of time, because there are 26:33.440 --> 26:39.840 genuine threats that we ought to be thinking about, like pandemics, like cybersecurity 26:39.840 --> 26:47.040 vulnerabilities, like the possibility of nuclear war and certainly climate change. This is enough 26:47.040 --> 26:55.280 to fill many conversations without. And I think Sam did put his finger on something, namely that 26:55.280 --> 27:03.120 there is a community, sometimes called the rationality community, that delights in using its 27:03.120 --> 27:10.160 brain power to come up with scenarios that would not occur to mere mortals, to less cerebral people. 27:10.160 --> 27:15.360 So there is a kind of intellectual thrill in finding new things to worry about that no one 27:15.360 --> 27:21.200 has worried about yet. I actually think, though, that it's not only is it a kind of fun that doesn't 27:21.200 --> 27:27.280 give me particular pleasure. But I think there can be a pernicious side to it, namely that you 27:27.280 --> 27:35.280 overcome people with such dread, such fatalism, that there's so many ways to die to annihilate 27:35.280 --> 27:40.160 our civilization that we may as well enjoy life while we can. There's nothing we can do about it. 27:40.160 --> 27:46.560 If climate change doesn't do us in, then runaway robots will. So let's enjoy ourselves now. We 27:46.560 --> 27:55.200 got to prioritize. We have to look at threats that are close to certainty, such as climate change, 27:55.200 --> 28:00.320 and distinguish those from ones that are merely imaginable, but with infinitesimal probabilities. 28:01.360 --> 28:07.120 And we have to take into account people's worry budget. You can't worry about everything. And 28:07.120 --> 28:13.920 if you sow dread and fear and terror and and fatalism, it can lead to a kind of numbness. Well, 28:13.920 --> 28:18.240 they're just these problems are overwhelming and the engineers are just going to kill us all. 28:19.040 --> 28:25.760 So let's either destroy the entire infrastructure of science, technology, 28:26.640 --> 28:32.080 or let's just enjoy life while we can. So there's a certain line of worry, which I'm 28:32.080 --> 28:36.160 worried about a lot of things engineering. There's a certain line of worry when you cross, 28:36.160 --> 28:42.800 you allow it to cross, that it becomes paralyzing fear as opposed to productive fear. And that's 28:42.800 --> 28:49.760 kind of what you're highlighting. Exactly right. And we've seen some, we know that human effort is 28:49.760 --> 28:58.080 not well calibrated against risk in that because a basic tenet of cognitive psychology is that 28:59.440 --> 29:05.120 perception of risk and hence perception of fear is driven by imaginability, not by data. 29:05.920 --> 29:11.200 And so we misallocate vast amounts of resources to avoiding terrorism, 29:11.200 --> 29:16.240 which kills on average about six Americans a year with a one exception of 9 11. We invade 29:16.240 --> 29:23.920 countries, we invent an entire new departments of government with massive, massive expenditure 29:23.920 --> 29:30.800 of resources and lives to defend ourselves against a trivial risk. Whereas guaranteed risks, 29:30.800 --> 29:36.720 you mentioned as one of them, you mentioned traffic fatalities and even risks that are 29:36.720 --> 29:46.240 not here, but are plausible enough to worry about like pandemics, like nuclear war, 29:47.120 --> 29:51.760 receive far too little attention. In presidential debates, there's no discussion of 29:51.760 --> 29:56.720 how to minimize the risk of nuclear war, lots of discussion of terrorism, for example. 29:57.840 --> 30:05.520 And so we, I think it's essential to calibrate our budget of fear, worry, concerned planning 30:05.520 --> 30:12.640 to the actual probability of harm. Yep. So let me ask this in this question. 30:13.520 --> 30:18.960 So speaking of imaginability, you said it's important to think about reason. And one of my 30:18.960 --> 30:26.560 favorite people who likes to dip into the outskirts of reason through fascinating exploration of his 30:26.560 --> 30:34.880 imagination is Joe Rogan. Oh, yes. So who has, through reason, used to believe a lot of conspiracies 30:34.880 --> 30:40.000 and through reason has stripped away a lot of his beliefs in that way. So it's fascinating actually 30:40.000 --> 30:47.920 to watch him through rationality, kind of throw away the ideas of Bigfoot and 911. I'm not sure 30:47.920 --> 30:52.320 exactly. Kim Trails. I don't know what he believes in. Yes, okay. But he no longer believed in, 30:52.320 --> 30:57.920 that's right. No, he's become a real force for good. So you were on the Joe Rogan podcast in 30:57.920 --> 31:02.880 February and had a fascinating conversation, but as far as I remember, didn't talk much about 31:02.880 --> 31:09.280 artificial intelligence. I will be on his podcast in a couple of weeks. Joe is very much concerned 31:09.280 --> 31:14.640 about existential threat of AI. I'm not sure if you're, this is why I was hoping that you'll get 31:14.640 --> 31:20.480 into that topic. And in this way, he represents quite a lot of people who look at the topic of AI 31:20.480 --> 31:27.840 from 10,000 foot level. So as an exercise of communication, you said it's important to be 31:27.840 --> 31:33.280 rational and reason about these things. Let me ask, if you were to coach me as an AI researcher 31:33.280 --> 31:38.320 about how to speak to Joe and the general public about AI, what would you advise? 31:38.320 --> 31:42.400 Well, the short answer would be to read the sections that I wrote in Enlightenment. 31:44.080 --> 31:48.880 But longer reason would be, I think to emphasize, and I think you're very well positioned as an 31:48.880 --> 31:54.800 engineer to remind people about the culture of engineering, that it really is safety oriented, 31:54.800 --> 32:02.160 that another discussion in Enlightenment now, I plot rates of accidental death from various 32:02.160 --> 32:09.280 causes, plane crashes, car crashes, occupational accidents, even death by lightning strikes, 32:09.280 --> 32:16.560 and they all plummet. Because the culture of engineering is how do you squeeze out the lethal 32:16.560 --> 32:23.360 risks, death by fire, death by drowning, death by asphyxiation, all of them drastically declined 32:23.360 --> 32:28.160 because of advances in engineering, that I got to say, I did not appreciate until I saw those 32:28.160 --> 32:34.000 graphs. And it is because exactly people like you who stay up at night thinking, oh my God, 32:36.000 --> 32:42.560 what I'm inventing likely to hurt people and to deploy ingenuity to prevent that from happening. 32:42.560 --> 32:47.360 Now, I'm not an engineer, although I spent 22 years at MIT, so I know something about the culture 32:47.360 --> 32:51.360 of engineering. My understanding is that this is the way you think if you're an engineer. 32:51.360 --> 32:58.160 And it's essential that that culture not be suddenly switched off when it comes to artificial 32:58.160 --> 33:02.080 intelligence. So I mean, that could be a problem, but is there any reason to think it would be 33:02.080 --> 33:07.360 switched off? I don't think so. And one, there's not enough engineers speaking up for this way, 33:07.360 --> 33:13.680 for the excitement, for the positive view of human nature, what you're trying to create is 33:13.680 --> 33:18.240 the positivity, like everything we try to invent is trying to do good for the world. 33:18.240 --> 33:23.600 But let me ask you about the psychology of negativity. It seems just objectively, 33:23.600 --> 33:27.680 not considering the topic, it seems that being negative about the future, it makes you sound 33:27.680 --> 33:32.720 smarter than being positive about the future, in regard to this topic. Am I correct in this 33:32.720 --> 33:39.120 observation? And if so, why do you think that is? Yeah, I think there is that phenomenon, 33:39.120 --> 33:43.920 that as Tom Lehrer, the satirist said, always predict the worst and you'll be hailed as a 33:43.920 --> 33:51.840 prophet. It may be part of our overall negativity bias. We are as a species more attuned to the 33:51.840 --> 33:59.200 negative than the positive. We dread losses more than we enjoy gains. And that might open up a 33:59.200 --> 34:06.560 space for prophets to remind us of harms and risks and losses that we may have overlooked. 34:06.560 --> 34:15.040 So I think there is that asymmetry. So you've written some of my favorite books 34:16.080 --> 34:21.680 all over the place. So starting from Enlightenment now, to the better ranges of our nature, 34:21.680 --> 34:28.560 blank slate, how the mind works, the one about language, language instinct. Bill Gates, 34:28.560 --> 34:37.840 big fan too, said of your most recent book that it's my new favorite book of all time. So for 34:37.840 --> 34:44.000 you as an author, what was the book early on in your life that had a profound impact on the way 34:44.000 --> 34:50.560 you saw the world? Certainly this book Enlightenment now is influenced by David Deutch's The Beginning 34:50.560 --> 34:57.520 of Infinity. We have a rather deep reflection on knowledge and the power of knowledge to improve 34:57.520 --> 35:02.960 the human condition. They end with bits of wisdom such as that problems are inevitable, 35:02.960 --> 35:07.760 but problems are solvable given the right knowledge and that solutions create new problems 35:07.760 --> 35:12.480 that have to be solved in their turn. That's I think a kind of wisdom about the human condition 35:12.480 --> 35:16.960 that influenced the writing of this book. There's some books that are excellent but obscure, 35:16.960 --> 35:22.080 some of which I have on my page on my website. I read a book called The History of Force, 35:22.080 --> 35:27.920 self published by a political scientist named James Payne on the historical decline of violence and 35:27.920 --> 35:35.120 that was one of the inspirations for the better angels of our nature. What about early on if 35:35.120 --> 35:40.640 you look back when you were maybe a teenager? I loved a book called One, Two, Three, Infinity. 35:40.640 --> 35:45.920 When I was a young adult, I read that book by George Gamov, the physicist, which had very 35:45.920 --> 35:55.120 accessible and humorous explanations of relativity, of number theory, of dimensionality, high 35:56.080 --> 36:02.240 multiple dimensional spaces in a way that I think is still delightful 70 years after it was published. 36:03.120 --> 36:09.280 I like the Time Life Science series. These are books that arrive every month that my mother 36:09.280 --> 36:15.600 subscribed to. Each one on a different topic. One would be on electricity, one would be on 36:15.600 --> 36:21.440 forests, one would be on evolution, and then one was on the mind. I was just intrigued that there 36:21.440 --> 36:27.040 could be a science of mind. That book, I would cite as an influence as well. Then later on. 36:27.040 --> 36:30.960 That's when you fell in love with the idea of studying the mind. Was that the thing that grabbed 36:30.960 --> 36:38.560 you? It was one of the things, I would say. I read as a college student the book Reflections on 36:38.560 --> 36:44.800 Language by Noam Chomsky. He spent most of his career here at MIT. Richard Dawkins, 36:44.800 --> 36:48.800 two books, The Blind Watchmaker and the Selfish Gene were enormously influential, 36:49.520 --> 36:56.640 partly mainly for the content, but also for the writing style, the ability to explain 36:56.640 --> 37:03.760 abstract concepts in lively prose. Stephen Jay Gould's first collection ever since Darwin, also 37:05.040 --> 37:11.120 excellent example of lively writing. George Miller, the psychologist that most psychologists 37:11.120 --> 37:17.440 are familiar with, came up with the idea that human memory has a capacity of seven plus or minus 37:17.440 --> 37:21.920 two chunks. That's probably his biggest claim to fame. He wrote a couple of books on language 37:21.920 --> 37:27.520 and communication that I'd read as an undergraduate. Again, beautifully written and intellectually deep. 37:28.400 --> 37:31.840 Wonderful. Stephen, thank you so much for taking the time today. 37:31.840 --> 37:42.960 My pleasure. Thanks a lot, Lex.