vtt/episode_003_small.vtt

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 You've studied the human mind, cognition, language, vision, evolution, psychology, from child to adult,

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 from the level of individual to the level of our entire civilization,

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 so I feel like I can start with a simple multiple choice question.

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 What is the meaning of life? Is it A, to attain knowledge, as Plato said,

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 B, to attain power, as Nietzsche said, C, to escape death, as Ernest Becker said,

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 D, to propagate our genes, as Darwin and others have said, E, there is no meaning,

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 as the nihilists have said, F, knowing the meaning of life is beyond our cognitive capabilities,

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 as Stephen Pinker said, based on my interpretation 20 years ago, and G, none of the above.

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 I'd say A comes closest, but I would amend that to attaining not only knowledge, but fulfillment

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 more generally. That is, life, health, stimulation, access to the living cultural and social world.

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 Now, this is our meaning of life. It's not the meaning of life, if you were to ask our genes.

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 Their meaning is to propagate copies of themselves, but that is distinct from the

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 meaning that the brain that they lead to sets for itself. So, to you, knowledge is a small subset

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 or a large subset? It's a large subset, but it's not the entirety of human striving, because we

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 also want to interact with people. We want to experience beauty. We want to experience the

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 richness of the natural world, but understanding what makes the universe tick is way up there.

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 For some of us more than others, certainly for me, that's one of the top five.

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 So, is that a fundamental aspect? Are you just describing your own preference, or is this a

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 fundamental aspect of human nature, is to seek knowledge? In your latest book, you talk about

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 the power, the usefulness of rationality and reason and so on. Is that a fundamental

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 nature of human beings, or is it something we should just strive for?

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 Both. We're capable of striving for it, because it is one of the things that

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 make us what we are, homo sapiens, wise men. We are unusual among our animals in the degree to

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 which we acquire knowledge and use it to survive. We make tools. We strike agreements via language.

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 We extract poisons. We predict the behavior of animals. We try to get at the workings of plants.

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 And when I say we, I don't just mean we in the modern west, but we as a species everywhere,

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 which is how we've managed to occupy every niche on the planet, how we've managed to drive other

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 animals to extinction. And the refinement of reason in pursuit of human well being, of health,

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 happiness, social richness, cultural richness, is our main challenge in the present. That is,

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 using our intellect, using our knowledge to figure out how the world works, how we work,

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 in order to make discoveries and strike agreements that make us all better off in the long run.

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 Right. And you do that almost undeniably in a data driven way in your recent book,

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 but I'd like to focus on the artificial intelligence aspect of things, and not just

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 artificial intelligence, but natural intelligence too. So 20 years ago in the book, you've written

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 on how the mind works, you conjecture, again, am I right to interpret things? You can correct me

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 if I'm wrong, but you conjecture that human thought in the brain may be a result of a network, a massive

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 network of highly interconnected neurons. So from this interconnectivity emerges thought,

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 compared to artificial neural networks, which we use for machine learning today,

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 is there something fundamentally more complex, mysterious, even magical about the biological

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 neural networks versus the ones we've been starting to use over the past 60 years and

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 become to success in the past 10? There is something a little bit mysterious about

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 the human neural networks, which is that each one of us who is a neural network knows that we

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 ourselves are conscious, conscious not in the sense of registering our surroundings or even

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 registering our internal state, but in having subjective first person, present tense experience.

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 That is, when I see red, it's not just different from green, but there's a redness to it that I

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 feel. Whether an artificial system would experience that or not, I don't know and I don't think I

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 can know. That's why it's mysterious. If we had a perfectly lifelike robot that was behaviorally

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 indistinguishable from a human, would we attribute consciousness to it or ought we to attribute

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 consciousness to it? And that's something that it's very hard to know. But putting that aside,

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 putting aside that largely philosophical question, the question is, is there some difference between

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 the human neural network and the ones that we're building in artificial intelligence will mean that

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 we're on the current trajectory not going to reach the point where we've got a lifelike robot

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 indistinguishable from a human because the way their so called neural networks are organized

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 are different from the way ours are organized. I think there's overlap, but I think there are some

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 big differences that their current neural networks, current so called deep learning systems are in

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 reality not all that deep. That is, they are very good at extracting high order statistical

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 regularities. But most of the systems don't have a semantic level, a level of actual understanding

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 of who did what to whom, why, where, how things work, what causes, what else.

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 Do you think that kind of thing can emerge as it does so artificial neural networks are much

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 smaller the number of connections and so on than the current human biological networks? But do you

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 think sort of go to consciousness or to go to this higher level semantic reasoning about things?

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 Do you think that can emerge with just a larger network with a more richly, weirdly interconnected

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 network? Separate it in consciousness because consciousness is even a matter of complexity.

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 A really weird one. Yeah, you could sensibly ask the question of whether shrimp are conscious,

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 for example. They're not terribly complex, but maybe they feel pain. So let's just put that

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 part of it aside. But I think sheer size of a neural network is not enough to give it

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 structure and knowledge. But if it's suitably engineered, then why not? That is, we're neural

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 networks. Natural selection did a kind of equivalent of engineering of our brains. So I don't think

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 there's anything mysterious in the sense that no systemated of silicon could ever do what a human

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 brain can do. I think it's possible in principle. Whether it'll ever happen depends not only on

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 how clever we are in engineering these systems, but whether even we even want to, whether that's

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 even a sensible goal. That is, you can ask the question, is there any locomotion system that is

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 as good as a human? Well, we kind of want to do better than a human ultimately in terms of

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 legged locomotion. There's no reason that humans should be our benchmark. They're tools that might

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 be better in some ways. It may be that we can't duplicate a natural system because at some point,

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 it's so much cheaper to use a natural system that we're not going to invest more brain power

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 and resources. So for example, we don't really have an exact substitute for wood. We still build

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 houses out of wood. We still build furniture out of wood. We like the look. We like the feel. It's

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 wood has certain properties that synthetics don't. There's not that there's anything magical or

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 mysterious about wood. It's just that the extra steps of duplicating everything about wood is

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 something we just haven't bothered because we have wood. Likewise, cotton. I'm wearing cotton

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 clothing now. It feels much better than polyester. It's not that cotton has something magic in it,

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 and it's not that we couldn't ever synthesize something exactly like cotton,

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 but at some point, it's just not worth it. We've got cotton. Likewise, in the case of human

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 intelligence, the goal of making an artificial system that is exactly like the human brain

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 is a goal that we probably know is going to pursue to the bitter end, I suspect, because

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 if you want tools that do things better than humans, you're not going to care whether it

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 does something like humans. So for example, diagnosing cancer or predicting the weather,

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 why set humans as your benchmark? But in general, I suspect you also believe that even if the human

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 should not be a benchmark and we don't want to imitate humans in their system, there's a lot

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 to be learned about how to create an artificial intelligence system by studying the humans.

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 Yeah, I think that's right. In the same way that to build flying machines, we want to understand

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 the laws of aerodynamics, including birds, but not mimic the birds, but they're the same laws.

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 You have a view on AI, artificial intelligence and safety, that from my perspective,

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 is refreshingly rational, or perhaps more importantly, has elements of positivity to it,

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 which I think can be inspiring and empowering as opposed to paralyzing. For many people,

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 including AI researchers, the eventual existential threat of AI is obvious, not only possible but

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 obvious. And for many others, including AI researchers, the threat is not obvious. So

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 Elon Musk is famously in the highly concerned about AI camp, saying things like AI is far

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 more dangerous than nuclear weapons, and that AI will likely destroy human civilization.

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 So in February, you said that if Elon was really serious about AI, the threat of AI,

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 he would stop building self driving cars that he's doing very successfully as part of Tesla.

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 Then he said, wow, if even Pinker doesn't understand the difference between narrow AI

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 like a car and general AI, when the latter literally has a million times more compute power

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 and an open ended utility function, humanity is in deep trouble. So first, what did you mean by

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 the statement about Elon Musk should stop building self driving cars if he's deeply concerned?

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 Well, not the last time that Elon Musk has fired off an intemperate tweet.

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 Well, we live in a world where Twitter has power.

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 Yes. Yeah, I think there are two kinds of existential threat that have been discussed

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 in connection with artificial intelligence, and I think that they're both incoherent.

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 One of them is a vague fear of AI takeover, that just as we subjugated animals and less

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 technologically advanced peoples, so if we build something that's more advanced than us,

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 it will inevitably turn us into pets or slaves or domesticated animal equivalents.

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 I think this confuses intelligence with a will to power that it so happens that in the

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 intelligence system we are most familiar with, namely Homo sapiens, we are products of natural

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 selection, which is a competitive process. And so bundled together with our problem solving

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 capacity are a number of nasty traits like dominance and exploitation and maximization of

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 power and glory and resources and influence. There's no reason to think that sheer problem

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 solving capability will set that as one of its goals. Its goals will be whatever we set its goals

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 as, and as long as someone isn't building a megalomaniacal artificial intelligence,

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 then there's no reason to think that it would naturally evolve in that direction.

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 Now you might say, well, what if we gave it the goal of maximizing its own power source?

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 That's a pretty stupid goal to give an autonomous system. You don't give it that goal.

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 I mean, that's just self evidently idiotic. So if you look at the history of the world,

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 there's been a lot of opportunities where engineers could instill in a system destructive

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 power and they choose not to because that's the natural process of engineering.

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 Well, except for weapons. I mean, if you're building a weapon, its goal is to destroy

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 people. And so I think there are good reasons to not build certain kinds of weapons. I think

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 building nuclear weapons was a massive mistake. You do. So maybe pause on that because that is

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 one of the serious threats. Do you think that it was a mistake in a sense that it should have been

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 stopped early on? Or do you think it's just an unfortunate event of invention that this was

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 invented? Do you think it's possible to stop, I guess, is the question on that? Yeah, it's hard to

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 rewind the clock because, of course, it was invented in the context of World War II and the

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 fear that the Nazis might develop one first. Then once it was initiated for that reason,

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 it was hard to turn off, especially since winning the war against the Japanese and the Nazis was

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 such an overwhelming goal of every responsible person that they were just nothing that people

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 wouldn't have done then to ensure victory. It's quite possible if World War II hadn't happened

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 that nuclear weapons wouldn't have been invented. We can't know. But I don't think it was, by any

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 means, a necessity any more than some of the other weapon systems that were envisioned but never

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 implemented, like planes that would disperse poison gas over cities like crop dusters or systems to

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 try to create earthquakes and tsunamis in enemy countries, to weaponize the weather,

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 weaponize solar flares, all kinds of crazy schemes that we thought the better of. I think

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 analogies between nuclear weapons and artificial intelligence are fundamentally misguided because

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 the whole point of nuclear weapons is to destroy things. The point of artificial intelligence

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 is not to destroy things. So the analogy is misleading. So there's two artificial

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 intelligence you mentioned. The first one was the highly intelligent or power hungry. Yeah,

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 an assistant that we design ourselves where we give it the goals. Goals are external to the

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 means to attain the goals. If we don't design an artificially intelligent system to maximize

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 dominance, then it won't maximize dominance. It's just that we're so familiar with homo sapiens

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 where these two traits come bundled together, particularly in men, that we are apt to confuse

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 high intelligence with a will to power. But that's just an error. The other fear is that

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 we'll be collateral damage that will give artificial intelligence a goal like make paper clips

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 and it will pursue that goal so brilliantly that before we can stop it, it turns us into paper

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 clips. We'll give it the goal of curing cancer and it will turn us into guinea pigs for lethal

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 experiments or give it the goal of world peace and its conception of world peace is no people,

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 therefore no fighting and so it will kill us all. Now, I think these are utterly fanciful. In fact,

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 I think they're actually self defeating. They first of all assume that we're going to be so

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 brilliant that we can design an artificial intelligence that can cure cancer. But so stupid

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 that we don't specify what we mean by curing cancer in enough detail that it won't kill us in the

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 process. And it assumes that the system will be so smart that it can cure cancer. But so

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 idiotic that it doesn't can't figure out that what we mean by curing cancer is not killing

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 everyone. So I think that the collateral damage scenario, the value alignment problem is also

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 based on a misconception. So one of the challenges, of course, we don't know how to build either system

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 currently, or are we even close to knowing? Of course, those things can change overnight,

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 but at this time, theorizing about is very challenging in either direction. So that's

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 probably at the core of the problem is without that ability to reason about the real engineering

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 things here at hand is your imagination runs away with things. Exactly. But let me sort of ask,

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 what do you think was the motivation, the thought process of Elon Musk? I build autonomous vehicles,

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 I study autonomous vehicles, I study Tesla autopilot. I think it is one of the greatest

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 currently application, large scale application of artificial intelligence in the world.

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 It has a potentially very positive impact on society. So how does a person who's creating this

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 very good, quote unquote, narrow AI system also seem to be so concerned about this other

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 general AI? What do you think is the motivation there? What do you think is the thing?

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 Well, you probably have to ask him, but there and he is notoriously flamboyant, impulsive to the,

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 as we have just seen, to the detriment of his own goals of the health of a company.

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 So I don't know what's going on in his mind. You probably have to ask him. But I don't think the,

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 and I don't think the distinction between special purpose AI and so called general AI is relevant

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 that in the same way that special purpose AI is not going to do anything conceivable in order to

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 attain a goal, all engineering systems have to are designed to trade off across multiple goals.

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 When we build cars in the first place, we didn't forget to install brakes because the goal of a

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 car is to go fast. It occurred to people, yes, you want to go fast, but not always. So you build

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 and brakes too. Likewise, if a car is going to be autonomous, that doesn't program it to take the

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 shortest route to the airport. It's not going to take the diagonal and mow down people and trees

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 and fences because that's the shortest route. That's not what we mean by the shortest route when we

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 program it. And that's just what an intelligence system is by definition. It takes into account

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 multiple constraints. The same is true, in fact, even more true of so called general intelligence.

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 That is, if it's genuinely intelligent, it's not going to pursue some goal single mindedly,

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 omitting every other consideration and collateral effect. That's not artificial and

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 general intelligence. That's artificial stupidity. I agree with you, by the way,

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 on the promise of autonomous vehicles for improving human welfare. I think it's spectacular.

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 And I'm surprised at how little press coverage notes that in the United States alone,

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 something like 40,000 people die every year on the highways, vastly more than are killed by

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 terrorists. And we spend a trillion dollars on a war to combat deaths by terrorism,

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 about half a dozen a year, whereas every year and year out, 40,000 people are

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 massacred on the highways, which could be brought down to very close to zero.

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 So I'm with you on the humanitarian benefit.

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 Let me just mention that as a person who's building these cars, it is a little bit offensive to me

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 to say that engineers would be clueless enough not to engineer safety into systems. I often

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 stay up at night thinking about those 40,000 people that are dying. And everything I try to

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 engineer is to save those people's lives. So every new invention that I'm super excited about,

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 every new, all the deep learning literature and CVPR conferences and NIPS, everything I'm super

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 excited about is all grounded in making it safe and help people. So I just don't see how that

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 trajectory can all of a sudden slip into a situation where intelligence will be highly

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 negative. You and I certainly agree on that. And I think that's only the beginning of the

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 potential humanitarian benefits of artificial intelligence. There's been enormous attention

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 to what are we going to do with the people whose jobs are made obsolete by artificial

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 intelligence. But very little attention given to the fact that the jobs that are going to be

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 made obsolete are horrible jobs. The fact that people aren't going to be picking crops and making

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 beds and driving trucks and mining coal, these are soul deadening jobs. And we have a whole

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 literature sympathizing with the people stuck in these menial, mind deadening, dangerous jobs.

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 If we can eliminate them, this is a fantastic boon to humanity. Now, granted,

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 we, you solve one problem and there's another one, namely, how do we get these people a decent

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 income? But if we're smart enough to invent machines that can make beds and put away dishes and

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 handle hospital patients, I think we're smart enough to figure out how to redistribute income

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 to a portion, some of the vast economic savings to the human beings who will no longer be needed to

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 make beds. Okay. Sam Harris says that it's obvious that eventually AI will be an existential risk.

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 He's one of the people who says it's obvious. We don't know when the claim goes, but eventually

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 it's obvious. And because we don't know when we should worry about it now. It's a very interesting

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 argument in my eyes. So how do we think about timescale? How do we think about existential

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 threats when we don't really, we know so little about the threat, unlike nuclear weapons, perhaps,

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 about this particular threat, that it could happen tomorrow, right? So, but very likely it won't.

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 Very likely it'd be 100 years away. So how do, do we ignore it? Do, how do we talk about it?

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 Do we worry about it? What, how do we think about those? What is it?

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 A threat that we can imagine, it's within the limits of our imagination, but not within our

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 limits of understanding to sufficient, to accurately predict it. But what, what is, what is the it

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 that we're referring to? Oh, AI, sorry, AI, AI being the existential threat. AI can always...

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 How? But like enslaving us or turning us into paperclips?

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 I think the most compelling from the Sam Harris perspective would be the paperclip situation.

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 Yeah. I mean, I just think it's totally fanciful. I mean, that is, don't build a system. Don't give a,

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 don't... First of all, the code of engineering is you don't implement a system with massive

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 control before testing it. Now, perhaps the culture of engineering will radically change,

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 then I would worry, but I don't see any signs that engineers will suddenly do idiotic things,

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 like put a, an electrical power plant in control of a system that they haven't tested

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 first. Or all of these scenarios not only imagine a almost a magically powered intelligence,

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 you know, including things like cure cancer, which is probably an incoherent goal because

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 there's so many different kinds of cancer or bring about world peace. I mean, how do you even specify

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 that as a goal? But the scenarios also imagine some degree of control of every molecule in the

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 universe, which not only is itself unlikely, but we would not start to connect these systems to

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 infrastructure without, without testing as we would any kind of engineering system. Now,

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 maybe some engineers will be irresponsible and we need legal and regulatory and legal

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 responsibility implemented so that engineers don't do things that are stupid by their own standards.

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 But the, I've never seen enough of a plausible scenario of existential threat to devote large

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 amounts of brain power to, to forestall it. So you believe in the sort of the power en masse of

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 the engineering of reason as you argue in your latest book of reason and science to sort of

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 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

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 engineering mindset for airplanes, for example. So yeah, I don't think that, that that should

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 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

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 the last 10 years or so. But the idea that suddenly there'll be a step function that all of a sudden

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 before we know it, it will be all powerful, that there'll be some kind of recursive self

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 improvement, some kind of fume is also fanciful. Certainly by the technology that we that we're

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 now impresses us, such as deep learning, where you train something on hundreds of thousands or

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 millions of examples, they're not hundreds of thousands of problems of which curing cancer is

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 typical example. And so the kind of techniques that have allowed AI to increase in the last

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 five years are not the kind that are going to lead to this fantasy of exponential sudden

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 self improvement. So I think it's kind of a magical thinking. It's not based on our understanding

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 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

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 fun intellectually. Now, I have to say as a scientist engineer, I don't find it fun.

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 But when I'm having beer with my non AI friends, there is indeed something fun and appealing about

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 it. Like talking about an episode of Black Mirror, considering if a large meteor is headed towards

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 Earth, we were just told a large meteor is headed towards Earth, something like this. And can you

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 relate to this sense of fun? And do you understand the psychology of it? Yes, great. Good question.

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 I personally don't find it fun. I find it kind of actually a waste of time, because there are

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 genuine threats that we ought to be thinking about, like pandemics, like cybersecurity

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 vulnerabilities, like the possibility of nuclear war and certainly climate change. This is enough

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 to fill many conversations without. And I think Sam did put his finger on something, namely that

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 there is a community, sometimes called the rationality community, that delights in using its

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 brain power to come up with scenarios that would not occur to mere mortals, to less cerebral people.

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 So there is a kind of intellectual thrill in finding new things to worry about that no one

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 has worried about yet. I actually think, though, that it's not only is it a kind of fun that doesn't

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 give me particular pleasure. But I think there can be a pernicious side to it, namely that you

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 overcome people with such dread, such fatalism, that there's so many ways to die to annihilate

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 our civilization that we may as well enjoy life while we can. There's nothing we can do about it.

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 If climate change doesn't do us in, then runaway robots will. So let's enjoy ourselves now. We

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 got to prioritize. We have to look at threats that are close to certainty, such as climate change,

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 and distinguish those from ones that are merely imaginable, but with infinitesimal probabilities.

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 And we have to take into account people's worry budget. You can't worry about everything. And

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 if you sow dread and fear and terror and and fatalism, it can lead to a kind of numbness. Well,

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 they're just these problems are overwhelming and the engineers are just going to kill us all.

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 So let's either destroy the entire infrastructure of science, technology,

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 or let's just enjoy life while we can. So there's a certain line of worry, which I'm

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 worried about a lot of things engineering. There's a certain line of worry when you cross,

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 you allow it to cross, that it becomes paralyzing fear as opposed to productive fear. And that's

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 kind of what you're highlighting. Exactly right. And we've seen some, we know that human effort is

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 not well calibrated against risk in that because a basic tenet of cognitive psychology is that

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 perception of risk and hence perception of fear is driven by imaginability, not by data.

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 And so we misallocate vast amounts of resources to avoiding terrorism,

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 which kills on average about six Americans a year with a one exception of 9 11. We invade

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 countries, we invent an entire new departments of government with massive, massive expenditure

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 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

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 not here, but are plausible enough to worry about like pandemics, like nuclear war,

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 receive far too little attention. In presidential debates, there's no discussion of

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 how to minimize the risk of nuclear war, lots of discussion of terrorism, for example.

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 And so we, I think it's essential to calibrate our budget of fear, worry, concerned planning

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 to the actual probability of harm. Yep. So let me ask this in this question.

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 So speaking of imaginability, you said it's important to think about reason. And one of my

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 favorite people who likes to dip into the outskirts of reason through fascinating exploration of his

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 imagination is Joe Rogan. Oh, yes. So who has, through reason, used to believe a lot of conspiracies

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 and through reason has stripped away a lot of his beliefs in that way. So it's fascinating actually

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 to watch him through rationality, kind of throw away the ideas of Bigfoot and 911. I'm not sure

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 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

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 about existential threat of AI. I'm not sure if you're, this is why I was hoping that you'll get

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 into that topic. And in this way, he represents quite a lot of people who look at the topic of AI

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 from 10,000 foot level. So as an exercise of communication, you said it's important to be

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 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.

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 But longer reason would be, I think to emphasize, and I think you're very well positioned as an

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 engineer to remind people about the culture of engineering, that it really is safety oriented,

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 that another discussion in Enlightenment now, I plot rates of accidental death from various

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 causes, plane crashes, car crashes, occupational accidents, even death by lightning strikes,

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 and they all plummet. Because the culture of engineering is how do you squeeze out the lethal

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 risks, death by fire, death by drowning, death by asphyxiation, all of them drastically declined

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 because of advances in engineering, that I got to say, I did not appreciate until I saw those

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 graphs. And it is because exactly people like you who stay up at night thinking, oh my God,

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 what I'm inventing likely to hurt people and to deploy ingenuity to prevent that from happening.

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 Now, I'm not an engineer, although I spent 22 years at MIT, so I know something about the culture

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 of engineering. My understanding is that this is the way you think if you're an engineer.

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 And it's essential that that culture not be suddenly switched off when it comes to artificial

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 intelligence. So I mean, that could be a problem, but is there any reason to think it would be

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 switched off? I don't think so. And one, there's not enough engineers speaking up for this way,

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 for the excitement, for the positive view of human nature, what you're trying to create is

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 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,

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 not considering the topic, it seems that being negative about the future, it makes you sound

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 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,

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 that as Tom Lehrer, the satirist said, always predict the worst and you'll be hailed as a

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 prophet. It may be part of our overall negativity bias. We are as a species more attuned to the

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 negative than the positive. We dread losses more than we enjoy gains. And that might open up a

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 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,

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 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

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 the human condition. They end with bits of wisdom such as that problems are inevitable,

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 but problems are solvable given the right knowledge and that solutions create new problems

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 that have to be solved in their turn. That's I think a kind of wisdom about the human condition

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 that influenced the writing of this book. There's some books that are excellent but obscure,

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 some of which I have on my page on my website. I read a book called The History of Force,

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 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

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 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

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 you? It was one of the things, I would say. I read as a college student the book Reflections on

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 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,

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 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

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 excellent example of lively writing. George Miller, the psychologist that most psychologists

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 are familiar with, came up with the idea that human memory has a capacity of seven plus or minus

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 two chunks. That's probably his biggest claim to fame. He wrote a couple of books on language

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 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.