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+WEBVTT
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+ As part of MIT course 6S 099 Artificial General Intelligence, I've gotten the chance to sit
+
+00:05.060 --> 00:06.740
+ down with Max Tagmark.
+
+00:06.740 --> 00:13.780
+ He is a professor here at MIT, he's a physicist, spent a large part of his career studying the
+
+00:13.780 --> 00:20.660
+ mysteries of our cosmological universe, but he's also studied and delved into the beneficial
+
+00:20.660 --> 00:25.860
+ possibilities and the existential risks of artificial intelligence.
+
+00:25.860 --> 00:32.220
+ Amongst many other things, he's the cofounder of the Future of Life Institute, author of
+
+00:32.220 --> 00:35.140
+ two books, both of which I highly recommend.
+
+00:35.140 --> 00:40.220
+ First, our mathematical universe, second is Life 3.0.
+
+00:40.220 --> 00:45.060
+ He's truly an out of the box thinker and a fun personality, so I really enjoy talking
+
+00:45.060 --> 00:46.060
+ to him.
+
+00:46.060 --> 00:49.500
+ If you'd like to see more of these videos in the future, please subscribe and also click
+
+00:49.500 --> 00:52.980
+ the little bell icon to make sure you don't miss any videos.
+
+00:52.980 --> 01:00.260
+ Also, Twitter, LinkedIn, AGI.MIT.IDU, if you want to watch other lectures or conversations
+
+01:00.260 --> 01:01.260
+ like this one.
+
+01:01.260 --> 01:07.980
+ Better yet, go read Max's book, Life 3.0, chapter 7 on goals is my favorite.
+
+01:07.980 --> 01:12.300
+ It's really where philosophy and engineering come together and it opens with a quote by
+
+01:12.300 --> 01:18.460
+ Dostoevsky, the mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding
+
+01:18.460 --> 01:20.300
+ something to live for.
+
+01:20.300 --> 01:27.100
+ Lastly, I believe that every failure rewards us with an opportunity to learn, in that sense
+
+01:27.100 --> 01:33.060
+ I've been very fortunate to fail in so many new and exciting ways and this conversation
+
+01:33.060 --> 01:34.060
+ was no different.
+
+01:34.060 --> 01:41.260
+ I've learned about something called Radio Frequency Interference, RFI, look it up.
+
+01:41.260 --> 01:45.500
+ Apparently music and conversations from local radio stations can bleed into the audio that
+
+01:45.500 --> 01:49.380
+ you're recording in such a way that almost completely ruins that audio.
+
+01:49.380 --> 01:52.460
+ It's an exceptionally difficult sound source to remove.
+
+01:52.460 --> 01:59.620
+ So, I've gotten the opportunity to learn how to avoid RFI in the future during recording
+
+01:59.620 --> 02:00.620
+ sessions.
+
+02:00.620 --> 02:06.260
+ I've also gotten the opportunity to learn how to use Adobe Audition and iZotope RX6
+
+02:06.260 --> 02:11.740
+ to do some audio repair.
+
+02:11.740 --> 02:14.940
+ Of course, this is an exceptionally difficult noise to remove.
+
+02:14.940 --> 02:20.380
+ I am an engineer, I'm not an audio engineer, neither is anybody else in our group, but
+
+02:20.380 --> 02:21.780
+ we did our best.
+
+02:21.780 --> 02:26.780
+ Nevertheless, I thank you for your patience and I hope you're still able to enjoy this
+
+02:26.780 --> 02:27.780
+ conversation.
+
+02:27.780 --> 02:31.460
+ Do you think there's intelligent life out there in the universe?
+
+02:31.460 --> 02:33.420
+ Let's open up with an easy question.
+
+02:33.420 --> 02:36.260
+ I have a minority view here actually.
+
+02:36.260 --> 02:41.180
+ When I give public lectures, I often ask for show of hands who thinks there's intelligent
+
+02:41.180 --> 02:47.060
+ life out there somewhere else and almost everyone puts their hands up and when I ask why, they'll
+
+02:47.060 --> 02:52.060
+ be like, oh, there's so many galaxies out there, there's got to be.
+
+02:52.060 --> 02:54.660
+ But I'm a number nerd, right?
+
+02:54.660 --> 02:59.180
+ So when you look more carefully at it, it's not so clear at all.
+
+02:59.180 --> 03:03.140
+ When we talk about our universe, first of all, we don't mean all of space.
+
+03:03.140 --> 03:05.900
+ We actually mean, I don't know, you can throw me the universe if you want, it's behind you
+
+03:05.900 --> 03:06.900
+ there.
+
+03:06.900 --> 03:14.540
+ We simply mean the spherical region of space from which light has had time to reach us
+
+03:14.540 --> 03:19.460
+ so far during the 13.8 billion years since our big bang.
+
+03:19.460 --> 03:23.020
+ There's more space here, but this is what we call a universe because that's all we have
+
+03:23.020 --> 03:24.140
+ access to.
+
+03:24.140 --> 03:31.220
+ So is there intelligent life here that's gotten to the point of building telescopes and computers?
+
+03:31.220 --> 03:39.500
+ My guess is no, actually, the probability of it happening on any given planet is some
+
+03:39.500 --> 03:42.860
+ number we don't know what it is.
+
+03:42.860 --> 03:49.340
+ And what we do know is that the number can't be super high because there's over a billion
+
+03:49.340 --> 03:54.780
+ Earth like planets in the Milky Way galaxy alone, many of which are billions of years
+
+03:54.780 --> 04:01.740
+ older than Earth, and aside from some UFO believers, you know, there isn't much evidence
+
+04:01.740 --> 04:05.740
+ that any super advanced civilization has come here at all.
+
+04:05.740 --> 04:08.700
+ And so that's the famous Fermi paradox, right?
+
+04:08.700 --> 04:13.620
+ And then if you work the numbers, what you find is that if you have no clue what the
+
+04:13.620 --> 04:18.500
+ probability is of getting life on a given planet, so it could be 10 to the minus 10,
+
+04:18.500 --> 04:23.620
+ 10 to the minus 20, or 10 to the minus two, or any power of 10 is sort of equally likely
+
+04:23.620 --> 04:27.700
+ if you want to be really open minded, that translates into it being equally likely that
+
+04:27.700 --> 04:34.700
+ our nearest neighbor is 10 to the 16 meters away, 10 to the 17 meters away, 10 to the
+
+04:34.700 --> 04:35.700
+ 18.
+
+04:35.700 --> 04:42.860
+ Now, by the time you get much less than 10 to the 16 already, we pretty much know there
+
+04:42.860 --> 04:46.220
+ is nothing else that's close.
+
+04:46.220 --> 04:49.740
+ And when you get because it would have discovered us, they, yeah, they would have discovered
+
+04:49.740 --> 04:53.540
+ us longer or if they're really close, we would have probably noted some engineering projects
+
+04:53.540 --> 04:54.540
+ that they're doing.
+
+04:54.540 --> 05:00.140
+ And if it's beyond 10 to the 26 meters, that's already outside of here.
+
+05:00.140 --> 05:06.340
+ So my guess is actually that there are, we are the only life in here that's gotten the
+
+05:06.340 --> 05:14.020
+ point of building advanced tech, which I think is very, puts a lot of responsibility on our
+
+05:14.020 --> 05:18.140
+ shoulders, not screw up, you know, I think people who take for granted that it's okay
+
+05:18.140 --> 05:23.300
+ for us to screw up, have an accidental nuclear war or go extinct somehow because there's
+
+05:23.300 --> 05:27.460
+ a sort of Star Trek like situation out there where some other life forms are going to come
+
+05:27.460 --> 05:30.380
+ and bail us out and it doesn't matter so much.
+
+05:30.380 --> 05:33.380
+ I think they're leveling us into a false sense of security.
+
+05:33.380 --> 05:37.540
+ I think it's much more prudent to say, let's be really grateful for this amazing opportunity
+
+05:37.540 --> 05:44.180
+ we've had and make the best of it just in case it is down to us.
+
+05:44.180 --> 05:50.220
+ So from a physics perspective, do you think intelligent life, so it's unique from a sort
+
+05:50.220 --> 05:55.860
+ of statistical view of the size of the universe, but from the basic matter of the universe,
+
+05:55.860 --> 06:00.100
+ how difficult is it for intelligent life to come about with the kind of advanced tech
+
+06:00.100 --> 06:06.300
+ building life is implied in your statement that it's really difficult to create something
+
+06:06.300 --> 06:07.620
+ like a human species?
+
+06:07.620 --> 06:14.740
+ Well, I think what we know is that going from no life to having life that can do our level
+
+06:14.740 --> 06:21.140
+ of tech, there's some sort of to going beyond that than actually settling our whole universe
+
+06:21.140 --> 06:22.300
+ with life.
+
+06:22.300 --> 06:30.700
+ There's some road major roadblock there, which is some great filter as I just sometimes called
+
+06:30.700 --> 06:37.180
+ which, which tough to get through, it's either that that roadblock is either behind us or
+
+06:37.180 --> 06:38.620
+ in front of us.
+
+06:38.620 --> 06:40.980
+ I'm hoping very much that it's behind us.
+
+06:40.980 --> 06:46.900
+ I'm super excited every time we get a new report from NASA saying they failed to find
+
+06:46.900 --> 06:53.260
+ any life on Mars, because that suggests that the hard part, maybe it was getting the first
+
+06:53.260 --> 06:59.540
+ ribosome or some some very low level kind of stepping stone.
+
+06:59.540 --> 07:03.620
+ So they were home free because if that's true, then the future is really only limited by
+
+07:03.620 --> 07:04.620
+ our own imagination.
+
+07:04.620 --> 07:11.460
+ It would be much suckier if it turns out that this level of life is kind of a diamond dozen,
+
+07:11.460 --> 07:12.780
+ but maybe there's some other problem.
+
+07:12.780 --> 07:17.220
+ Like as soon as a civilization gets advanced technology within 100 years, they get into
+
+07:17.220 --> 07:21.740
+ some stupid fight with themselves and poof, you know, that would be a bummer.
+
+07:21.740 --> 07:22.740
+ Yeah.
+
+07:22.740 --> 07:28.980
+ So you've explored the mysteries of the universe, the cosmological universe, the one that's
+
+07:28.980 --> 07:36.340
+ between us today, I think you've also begun to explore the other universe, which is sort
+
+07:36.340 --> 07:42.860
+ of the mystery, the mysterious universe of the mind of intelligence, of intelligent life.
+
+07:42.860 --> 07:48.260
+ So is there a common thread between your interests or the way you think about space and intelligence?
+
+07:48.260 --> 07:49.260
+ Oh, yeah.
+
+07:49.260 --> 07:57.700
+ When I was a teenager, I was already very fascinated by the biggest questions and I felt that the
+
+07:57.700 --> 08:03.660
+ two biggest mysteries of all in science were our universe out there and our universe in
+
+08:03.660 --> 08:04.660
+ here.
+
+08:04.660 --> 08:05.660
+ Yeah.
+
+08:05.660 --> 08:11.260
+ So it's quite natural after having spent a quarter of a century on my career thinking
+
+08:11.260 --> 08:12.260
+ a lot about this one.
+
+08:12.260 --> 08:15.980
+ And now I'm indulging in the luxury of doing research on this one.
+
+08:15.980 --> 08:17.660
+ It's just so cool.
+
+08:17.660 --> 08:25.260
+ I feel the time is ripe now for you transparently deepening our understanding of this.
+
+08:25.260 --> 08:26.420
+ Just start exploring this one.
+
+08:26.420 --> 08:32.500
+ Yeah, because I think a lot of people view intelligence as something mysterious that
+
+08:32.500 --> 08:38.340
+ can only exist in biological organisms like us and therefore dismiss all talk about artificial
+
+08:38.340 --> 08:41.260
+ general intelligence is science fiction.
+
+08:41.260 --> 08:47.260
+ But from my perspective as a physicist, I am a blob of quirks and electrons moving around
+
+08:47.260 --> 08:50.180
+ in a certain pattern and processing information in certain ways.
+
+08:50.180 --> 08:53.580
+ And this is also a blob of quirks and electrons.
+
+08:53.580 --> 08:57.860
+ I'm not smarter than the water bottle because I'm made of different kind of quirks.
+
+08:57.860 --> 09:02.220
+ I'm made of up quirks and down quirks exact same kind as this.
+
+09:02.220 --> 09:07.020
+ It's a there's no secret sauce, I think in me, it's it's all about the pattern of the
+
+09:07.020 --> 09:08.820
+ information processing.
+
+09:08.820 --> 09:16.020
+ And this means that there's no law of physics saying that we can't create technology, which
+
+09:16.020 --> 09:21.740
+ can help us by being incredibly intelligent and help us crack mysteries that we couldn't.
+
+09:21.740 --> 09:25.580
+ In other words, I think we've really only seen the tip of the intelligence iceberg so
+
+09:25.580 --> 09:26.580
+ far.
+
+09:26.580 --> 09:27.580
+ Yeah.
+
+09:27.580 --> 09:34.380
+ So the perceptronium, yeah, so you coined this amazing term, it's a hypothetical state
+
+09:34.380 --> 09:39.420
+ of matter, sort of thinking from a physics perspective, what is the kind of matter that
+
+09:39.420 --> 09:44.500
+ can help as you're saying, subjective experience emerge, consciousness emerge.
+
+09:44.500 --> 09:50.140
+ So how do you think about consciousness from this physics perspective?
+
+09:50.140 --> 09:51.980
+ Very good question.
+
+09:51.980 --> 10:03.060
+ So, again, I think many people have underestimated our ability to make progress on this by convincing
+
+10:03.060 --> 10:08.500
+ themselves it's hopeless because somehow we're missing some ingredient that we need.
+
+10:08.500 --> 10:13.020
+ There's some new consciousness particle or whatever.
+
+10:13.020 --> 10:19.660
+ I happen to think that we're not missing anything and that it's not the interesting thing about
+
+10:19.660 --> 10:25.900
+ consciousness that gives us this amazing subjective experience of colors and sounds and emotions
+
+10:25.900 --> 10:32.300
+ and so on is rather something at the higher level about the patterns of information processing.
+
+10:32.300 --> 10:38.300
+ And that's why I like to think about this idea of perceptronium.
+
+10:38.300 --> 10:44.220
+ What does it mean for an arbitrary physical system to be conscious in terms of what its
+
+10:44.220 --> 10:47.100
+ particles are doing or its information is doing?
+
+10:47.100 --> 10:52.300
+ I hate carbon chauvinism, this attitude, you have to be made of carbon atoms to be smart
+
+10:52.300 --> 10:53.300
+ or conscious.
+
+10:53.300 --> 10:58.180
+ So something about the information processing that this kind of matter performs.
+
+10:58.180 --> 11:02.700
+ Yeah, and you can see I have my favorite equations here describing various fundamental
+
+11:02.700 --> 11:04.660
+ aspects of the world.
+
+11:04.660 --> 11:09.620
+ I think one day, maybe someone who's watching this will come up with the equations that
+
+11:09.620 --> 11:12.140
+ information processing has to satisfy to be conscious.
+
+11:12.140 --> 11:19.580
+ And I'm quite convinced there is big discovery to be made there because let's face it, we
+
+11:19.580 --> 11:25.900
+ know that some information processing is conscious because we are conscious.
+
+11:25.900 --> 11:28.980
+ But we also know that a lot of information processing is not conscious.
+
+11:28.980 --> 11:32.980
+ Most of the information processing happening in your brain right now is not conscious.
+
+11:32.980 --> 11:38.380
+ There are like 10 megabytes per second coming in even just through your visual system.
+
+11:38.380 --> 11:42.940
+ You're not conscious about your heartbeat regulation or most things.
+
+11:42.940 --> 11:47.300
+ Even if I just ask you to read what it says here, you look at it and then, oh, now you
+
+11:47.300 --> 11:48.300
+ know what it said.
+
+11:48.300 --> 11:51.820
+ But you're not aware of how the computation actually happened.
+
+11:51.820 --> 11:57.020
+ Your consciousness is like the CEO that got an email at the end with the final answer.
+
+11:57.020 --> 12:01.140
+ So what is it that makes a difference?
+
+12:01.140 --> 12:06.620
+ I think that's both a great science mystery, we're actually studying it a little bit in
+
+12:06.620 --> 12:12.260
+ my lab here at MIT, but I also think it's a really urgent question to answer.
+
+12:12.260 --> 12:16.460
+ For starters, I mean, if you're an emergency room doctor and you have an unresponsive patient
+
+12:16.460 --> 12:24.180
+ coming in, wouldn't it be great if in addition to having a CT scanner, you had a conscious
+
+12:24.180 --> 12:30.780
+ scanner that could figure out whether this person is actually having locked in syndrome
+
+12:30.780 --> 12:33.580
+ or is actually comatose.
+
+12:33.580 --> 12:40.740
+ And in the future, imagine if we build robots or the machine that we can have really good
+
+12:40.740 --> 12:45.100
+ conversations with, I think it's very likely to happen, right?
+
+12:45.100 --> 12:50.020
+ Wouldn't you want to know if your home helper robot is actually experiencing anything or
+
+12:50.020 --> 12:52.980
+ just like a zombie?
+
+12:52.980 --> 12:53.980
+ Would you prefer it?
+
+12:53.980 --> 12:54.980
+ What would you prefer?
+
+12:54.980 --> 12:57.820
+ Would you prefer that it's actually unconscious so that you don't have to feel guilty about
+
+12:57.820 --> 12:59.980
+ switching it off or giving boring chores?
+
+12:59.980 --> 13:02.380
+ What would you prefer?
+
+13:02.380 --> 13:09.780
+ Well, certainly we would prefer, I would prefer the appearance of consciousness, but the question
+
+13:09.780 --> 13:15.300
+ is whether the appearance of consciousness is different than consciousness itself.
+
+13:15.300 --> 13:21.420
+ And sort of ask that as a question, do you think we need to understand what consciousness
+
+13:21.420 --> 13:28.420
+ is, solve the hard problem of consciousness in order to build something like an AGI system?
+
+13:28.420 --> 13:29.420
+ No.
+
+13:29.420 --> 13:31.140
+ I don't think that.
+
+13:31.140 --> 13:36.220
+ I think we will probably be able to build things even if we don't answer that question.
+
+13:36.220 --> 13:41.100
+ But if we want to make sure that what happens is a good thing, we better solve it first.
+
+13:41.100 --> 13:47.220
+ So it's a wonderful controversy you're raising there, where you have basically three points
+
+13:47.220 --> 13:50.220
+ of view about the hard problem.
+
+13:50.220 --> 13:55.060
+ There are two different points of view that both conclude that the hard problem of consciousness
+
+13:55.060 --> 13:56.060
+ is BS.
+
+13:56.060 --> 14:01.100
+ On one hand, you have some people like Daniel Dennett who say that consciousness is just
+
+14:01.100 --> 14:05.140
+ BS because consciousness is the same thing as intelligence.
+
+14:05.140 --> 14:06.580
+ There's no difference.
+
+14:06.580 --> 14:13.620
+ So anything which acts conscious is conscious, just like we are.
+
+14:13.620 --> 14:18.820
+ And then there are also a lot of people, including many top AI researchers I know, who say, oh,
+
+14:18.820 --> 14:22.820
+ consciousness is just bullshit because of course machines can never be conscious.
+
+14:22.820 --> 14:28.020
+ They're always going to skiddy zombies, never have to feel guilty about how you treat them.
+
+14:28.020 --> 14:35.380
+ And then there's a third group of people, including Giulio Tononi, for example, and another, and
+
+14:35.380 --> 14:40.020
+ Gustav Koch and a number of others, I would put myself on this middle camp who say that
+
+14:40.020 --> 14:44.260
+ actually some information processing is conscious and some is not.
+
+14:44.260 --> 14:49.380
+ So let's find the equation which can be used to determine which it is.
+
+14:49.380 --> 14:53.980
+ And I think we've just been a little bit lazy kind of running away from this problem for
+
+14:53.980 --> 14:55.100
+ a long time.
+
+14:55.100 --> 15:01.940
+ It's been almost taboo to even mention the C word in a lot of circles because, but we
+
+15:01.940 --> 15:03.700
+ should stop making excuses.
+
+15:03.700 --> 15:10.940
+ This is a science question and there are ways we can even test any theory that makes predictions
+
+15:10.940 --> 15:12.140
+ for this.
+
+15:12.140 --> 15:16.060
+ And coming back to this helper robot, I mean, so you said you would want your helper robot
+
+15:16.060 --> 15:21.340
+ to certainly act conscious and treat you, like have conversations with you and stuff.
+
+15:21.340 --> 15:24.860
+ But wouldn't you, would you feel a little bit creeped out if you realized that it was
+
+15:24.860 --> 15:31.700
+ just a glossed up tape recorder, you know, that was just zombie and it's a faking emotion?
+
+15:31.700 --> 15:37.220
+ Would you prefer that it actually had an experience or would you prefer that it's actually not
+
+15:37.220 --> 15:42.300
+ experiencing anything so you feel, you don't have to feel guilty about what you do to it?
+
+15:42.300 --> 15:46.580
+ It's such a difficult question because, you know, it's like when you're in a relationship
+
+15:46.580 --> 15:49.860
+ and you say, well, I love you and the other person said I love you back.
+
+15:49.860 --> 15:53.860
+ It's like asking, well, do they really love you back or are they just saying they love
+
+15:53.860 --> 15:54.860
+ you back?
+
+15:54.860 --> 15:59.620
+ Don't you really want them to actually love you?
+
+15:59.620 --> 16:08.100
+ It's hard to, it's hard to really know the difference between everything seeming like
+
+16:08.100 --> 16:14.820
+ there's consciousness present, there's intelligence present, there's affection, passion, love,
+
+16:14.820 --> 16:16.180
+ and it actually being there.
+
+16:16.180 --> 16:17.180
+ I'm not sure.
+
+16:17.180 --> 16:18.180
+ Do you have...
+
+16:18.180 --> 16:19.180
+ Can I ask you a question about this?
+
+16:19.180 --> 16:20.180
+ Yes.
+
+16:20.180 --> 16:21.180
+ To make it a bit more pointed.
+
+16:21.180 --> 16:23.140
+ So Mass General Hospital is right across the river, right?
+
+16:23.140 --> 16:29.180
+ Suppose you're going in for a medical procedure and they're like, you know, for anesthesia
+
+16:29.180 --> 16:32.180
+ what we're going to do is we're going to give you muscle relaxance so you won't be able
+
+16:32.180 --> 16:36.140
+ to move and you're going to feel excruciating pain during the whole surgery but you won't
+
+16:36.140 --> 16:37.660
+ be able to do anything about it.
+
+16:37.660 --> 16:42.020
+ But then we're going to give you this drug that erases your memory of it.
+
+16:42.020 --> 16:45.420
+ Would you be cool about that?
+
+16:45.420 --> 16:51.100
+ What's the difference that you're conscious about it or not if there's no behavioral change,
+
+16:51.100 --> 16:52.100
+ right?
+
+16:52.100 --> 16:53.100
+ Right.
+
+16:53.100 --> 16:55.220
+ And that's a really clear way to put it.
+
+16:55.220 --> 17:01.100
+ Yeah, it feels like in that sense, experiencing it is a valuable quality.
+
+17:01.100 --> 17:09.140
+ So actually being able to have subjective experiences, at least in that case, is valuable.
+
+17:09.140 --> 17:14.060
+ And I think we humans have a little bit of a bad track record also of making these self
+
+17:14.060 --> 17:17.940
+ serving arguments that other entities aren't conscious.
+
+17:17.940 --> 17:20.700
+ You know, people often say, oh, these animals can't feel pain.
+
+17:20.700 --> 17:21.700
+ Right.
+
+17:21.700 --> 17:25.580
+ It's okay to boil lobsters because we asked them if it hurt and they didn't say anything.
+
+17:25.580 --> 17:29.180
+ And now there was just a paper out saying lobsters did do feel pain when you boil them
+
+17:29.180 --> 17:31.180
+ and they're banning it in Switzerland.
+
+17:31.180 --> 17:36.300
+ And we did this with slaves too often and said, oh, they don't mind.
+
+17:36.300 --> 17:41.180
+ They don't maybe aren't conscious or women don't have souls or whatever.
+
+17:41.180 --> 17:46.540
+ So I'm a little bit nervous when I hear people just take as an axiom that machines can't
+
+17:46.540 --> 17:48.900
+ have experience ever.
+
+17:48.900 --> 17:52.500
+ I think this is just a really fascinating science question is what it is.
+
+17:52.500 --> 17:57.420
+ Let's research it and try to figure out what it is that makes the difference between unconscious
+
+17:57.420 --> 18:01.220
+ intelligent behavior and conscious intelligent behavior.
+
+18:01.220 --> 18:07.140
+ So in terms of, so if you think of a Boston Dynamics human or robot being sort of with
+
+18:07.140 --> 18:13.420
+ a broom being pushed around, it starts pushing on a consciousness question.
+
+18:13.420 --> 18:20.060
+ So let me ask, do you think an AGI system, like a few neuroscientists believe needs to
+
+18:20.060 --> 18:25.860
+ have a physical embodiment, needs to have a body or something like a body?
+
+18:25.860 --> 18:28.340
+ No, I don't think so.
+
+18:28.340 --> 18:30.620
+ You mean to have a conscious experience?
+
+18:30.620 --> 18:33.140
+ To have consciousness.
+
+18:33.140 --> 18:37.860
+ I do think it helps a lot to have a physical embodiment to learn the kind of things about
+
+18:37.860 --> 18:42.820
+ the world that are important to us humans for sure.
+
+18:42.820 --> 18:47.460
+ But I don't think the physical embodiment is necessary after you've learned it.
+
+18:47.460 --> 18:48.860
+ Just have the experience.
+
+18:48.860 --> 18:51.500
+ Think about it when you're dreaming, right?
+
+18:51.500 --> 18:55.500
+ Your eyes are closed, you're not getting any sensory input, you're not behaving or moving
+
+18:55.500 --> 18:59.780
+ in any way, but there's still an experience there, right?
+
+18:59.780 --> 19:03.220
+ And so clearly the experience that you have when you see something cool in your dreams
+
+19:03.220 --> 19:08.660
+ isn't coming from your eyes, it's just the information processing itself in your brain,
+
+19:08.660 --> 19:11.100
+ which is that experience, right?
+
+19:11.100 --> 19:16.660
+ But if I put it another way, I'll say because it comes from neuroscience is the reason you
+
+19:16.660 --> 19:24.620
+ want to have a body and a physical, something like a physical system is because you want
+
+19:24.620 --> 19:27.100
+ to be able to preserve something.
+
+19:27.100 --> 19:35.740
+ In order to have a self, you could argue, you'd need to have some kind of embodiment
+
+19:35.740 --> 19:38.180
+ of self to want to preserve.
+
+19:38.180 --> 19:45.940
+ Well, now we're getting a little bit anthropomorphic, anthropomorphizing things, maybe talking about
+
+19:45.940 --> 19:47.820
+ self preservation instincts.
+
+19:47.820 --> 19:50.700
+ We are evolved organisms, right?
+
+19:50.700 --> 19:57.020
+ So Darwinian evolution endowed us and other evolved organisms with self preservation instinct
+
+19:57.020 --> 20:03.100
+ because those that didn't have those self preservation genes got cleaned out of the gene pool.
+
+20:03.100 --> 20:09.180
+ But if you build an artificial general intelligence, the mind space that you can design is much,
+
+20:09.180 --> 20:14.500
+ much larger than just a specific subset of minds that can evolve that have.
+
+20:14.500 --> 20:19.260
+ So an AGI mind doesn't necessarily have to have any self preservation instinct.
+
+20:19.260 --> 20:24.100
+ It also doesn't necessarily have to be so individualistic as us.
+
+20:24.100 --> 20:28.140
+ Like imagine if you could just, first of all, we're also very afraid of death, you know,
+
+20:28.140 --> 20:32.180
+ as opposed to you could back yourself up every five minutes and then your airplane is about
+
+20:32.180 --> 20:33.180
+ to crash.
+
+20:33.180 --> 20:37.340
+ You're like, shucks, I'm just, I'm going to lose the last five minutes of experiences
+
+20:37.340 --> 20:41.580
+ since my last cloud backup, dang, you know, it's not as big a deal.
+
+20:41.580 --> 20:47.380
+ Or if we could just copy experiences between our minds easily, like which we could easily
+
+20:47.380 --> 20:50.620
+ do if we were silicon based, right?
+
+20:50.620 --> 20:55.860
+ Then maybe we would feel a little bit more like a hive mind, actually, that maybe it's
+
+20:55.860 --> 21:01.220
+ the, so, so there's, so I don't think we should take for granted at all that AGI will have
+
+21:01.220 --> 21:06.820
+ to have any of those sort of competitive as alpha male instincts.
+
+21:06.820 --> 21:07.820
+ Right.
+
+21:07.820 --> 21:12.820
+ On the other hand, you know, this is really interesting because I think some people go
+
+21:12.820 --> 21:17.900
+ too far and say, of course, we don't have to have any concerns either that advanced
+
+21:17.900 --> 21:22.700
+ AI will have those instincts because we can build anything we want.
+
+21:22.700 --> 21:27.420
+ That there's, there's a very nice set of arguments going back to Steve Omohandro and
+
+21:27.420 --> 21:32.900
+ Nick Bostrom and others just pointing out that when we build machines, we normally build
+
+21:32.900 --> 21:37.700
+ them with some kind of goal, you know, win this chess game, drive this car safely or
+
+21:37.700 --> 21:38.700
+ whatever.
+
+21:38.700 --> 21:42.540
+ And as soon as you put in a goal into machine, especially if it's kind of open ended goal
+
+21:42.540 --> 21:48.460
+ and the machine is very intelligent, it'll break that down into a bunch of sub goals.
+
+21:48.460 --> 21:53.500
+ And one of those goals will almost always be self preservation because if it breaks
+
+21:53.500 --> 21:56.140
+ or dies in the process, it's not going to accomplish the goal, right?
+
+21:56.140 --> 21:59.540
+ Like, suppose you just build a little, you have a little robot and you tell it to go
+
+21:59.540 --> 22:05.460
+ down the store market here and, and get you some food, make you cook your Italian dinner,
+
+22:05.460 --> 22:09.540
+ you know, and then someone mugs it and tries to break it on the way.
+
+22:09.540 --> 22:15.380
+ That robot has an incentive to not get destroyed and defend itself for a runaway because otherwise
+
+22:15.380 --> 22:17.780
+ it's going to fail and cooking your dinner.
+
+22:17.780 --> 22:22.940
+ It's not afraid of death, but it really wants to complete the dinner cooking goal.
+
+22:22.940 --> 22:24.780
+ So it will have a self preservation instinct.
+
+22:24.780 --> 22:26.820
+ It will continue being a functional agent.
+
+22:26.820 --> 22:27.820
+ Yeah.
+
+22:27.820 --> 22:35.860
+ And, and, and similarly, if you give any kind of more ambitious goal to an AGI, it's very
+
+22:35.860 --> 22:39.940
+ likely they want to acquire more resources so it can do that better.
+
+22:39.940 --> 22:44.500
+ And it's exactly from those sort of sub goals that we might not have intended that some
+
+22:44.500 --> 22:50.740
+ of the concerns about AGI safety come, you give it some goal that seems completely harmless.
+
+22:50.740 --> 22:55.540
+ And then before you realize it, it's also trying to do these other things which you
+
+22:55.540 --> 22:59.220
+ didn't want it to do and it's maybe smarter than us.
+
+22:59.220 --> 23:08.220
+ So, so, and let me pause just because I am in a very kind of human centric way, see fear
+
+23:08.220 --> 23:11.900
+ of death as a valuable motivator.
+
+23:11.900 --> 23:17.220
+ So you don't think you think that's an artifact of evolution.
+
+23:17.220 --> 23:21.980
+ So that's the kind of mind space evolution created that we're sort of almost obsessed
+
+23:21.980 --> 23:22.980
+ about self preservation.
+
+23:22.980 --> 23:23.980
+ Yeah.
+
+23:23.980 --> 23:29.500
+ Some kind of genetic well, you don't think that's necessary to be afraid of death.
+
+23:29.500 --> 23:34.980
+ So not just a kind of sub goal of self preservation just so you can keep doing the thing, but
+
+23:34.980 --> 23:42.980
+ more fundamentally sort of have the finite thing like this ends for you at some point.
+
+23:42.980 --> 23:43.980
+ Interesting.
+
+23:43.980 --> 23:47.500
+ Do I think it's necessary for what precisely?
+
+23:47.500 --> 23:51.020
+ For intelligence, but also for consciousness.
+
+23:51.020 --> 23:58.220
+ So for those for both, do you think really like a finite death and the fear of it is
+
+23:58.220 --> 24:01.020
+ important?
+
+24:01.020 --> 24:06.980
+ So before I can answer, before we can agree on whether it's necessary for intelligence
+
+24:06.980 --> 24:10.660
+ or for consciousness, we should be clear on how we define those two words because a lot
+
+24:10.660 --> 24:13.340
+ are really smart people define them in very different ways.
+
+24:13.340 --> 24:18.500
+ I was in this on this panel with AI experts and they couldn't, they couldn't agree on
+
+24:18.500 --> 24:20.180
+ how to define intelligence even.
+
+24:20.180 --> 24:24.860
+ So I define intelligence simply as the ability to accomplish complex goals.
+
+24:24.860 --> 24:30.740
+ I like your broad definition because again, I don't want to be a carbon chauvinist.
+
+24:30.740 --> 24:36.580
+ And in that case, no, certainly it doesn't require fear of death.
+
+24:36.580 --> 24:40.100
+ I would say AlphaGo AlphaZero is quite intelligent.
+
+24:40.100 --> 24:44.260
+ I don't think AlphaZero has any fear of being turned off because it doesn't understand the
+
+24:44.260 --> 24:52.180
+ concept of even and similarly consciousness, I mean, you can certainly imagine a very simple
+
+24:52.180 --> 24:57.660
+ kind of experience if certain plants have any kind of experience, I don't think they're
+
+24:57.660 --> 25:00.940
+ very afraid of dying or there's nothing they can do about it anyway much.
+
+25:00.940 --> 25:08.420
+ So there wasn't that much value and but more seriously, I think if you ask not just about
+
+25:08.420 --> 25:15.460
+ being conscious, but maybe having what you would, we might call an exciting life for
+
+25:15.460 --> 25:23.300
+ you for your passion and really appreciate the things, maybe there, somehow, maybe there
+
+25:23.300 --> 25:29.180
+ perhaps it does help having a backdrop that, hey, it's finite, you know, let's make the
+
+25:29.180 --> 25:31.380
+ most of this, let's live to the fullest.
+
+25:31.380 --> 25:36.220
+ So if you knew you were going to just live forever, do you think you would change your
+
+25:36.220 --> 25:40.500
+ career? Yeah, I mean, in some perspective, it would
+
+25:40.500 --> 25:44.020
+ be an incredibly boring life living forever.
+
+25:44.020 --> 25:49.740
+ So in the sort of loose, subjective terms that you said of something exciting and something
+
+25:49.740 --> 25:55.180
+ in this that other humans would understand, I think, is yeah, it seems that the finiteness
+
+25:55.180 --> 25:56.660
+ of it is important.
+
+25:56.660 --> 26:02.420
+ Well, the good news I have for you then is based on what we understand about cosmology,
+
+26:02.420 --> 26:10.460
+ things in our universe is probably finite, although big crunch or big or big, what's
+
+26:10.460 --> 26:11.460
+ the extent of the infinite?
+
+26:11.460 --> 26:16.820
+ Yeah, we could have a big chill or a big crunch or a big rip or death, the big snap or death
+
+26:16.820 --> 26:17.820
+ bubbles.
+
+26:17.820 --> 26:20.140
+ All of them are more than a billion years away.
+
+26:20.140 --> 26:29.500
+ So we should we certainly have vastly more time than our ancestors thought, but still
+
+26:29.500 --> 26:35.580
+ pretty hard to squeeze in an infinite number of compute cycles, even though there are some
+
+26:35.580 --> 26:37.820
+ loopholes that just might be possible.
+
+26:37.820 --> 26:44.620
+ But I think, you know, some people like to say that you should live as if you're about
+
+26:44.620 --> 26:48.100
+ to you're going to die in five years or so, and that's sort of optimal.
+
+26:48.100 --> 26:54.740
+ Maybe it's a good as some we should build our civilization as if it's all finite to
+
+26:54.740 --> 26:55.740
+ be on the safe side.
+
+26:55.740 --> 27:02.020
+ Right, exactly. So you mentioned in defining intelligence as the ability to solve complex
+
+27:02.020 --> 27:03.020
+ goals.
+
+27:03.020 --> 27:04.940
+ So where would you draw a line?
+
+27:04.940 --> 27:10.940
+ How would you try to define human level intelligence and super human level intelligence?
+
+27:10.940 --> 27:13.380
+ Where is consciousness part of that definition?
+
+27:13.380 --> 27:16.860
+ No, consciousness does not come into this definition.
+
+27:16.860 --> 27:21.580
+ So so I think of intelligence as it's a spectrum, but there are very many different kinds of
+
+27:21.580 --> 27:22.580
+ goals you can have.
+
+27:22.580 --> 27:27.140
+ You have a goal to be a good chess player, a good goal player, a good car driver, a good
+
+27:27.140 --> 27:31.260
+ investor, good poet, etc.
+
+27:31.260 --> 27:35.740
+ So intelligence that bind by its very nature, isn't something you can measure, but it's
+
+27:35.740 --> 27:39.900
+ one number, some overall goodness, no, no, there are some people who are more better
+
+27:39.900 --> 27:42.540
+ at this, some people are better at that.
+
+27:42.540 --> 27:48.380
+ Right now we have machines that are much better than us at some very narrow tasks like multiplying
+
+27:48.380 --> 27:57.620
+ large numbers fast, memorizing large databases, playing chess, playing go, soon driving cars.
+
+27:57.620 --> 28:03.340
+ But there's still no machine that can match a human child in general intelligence.
+
+28:03.340 --> 28:08.420
+ But artificial general intelligence, AGI, the name of your course, of course, that
+
+28:08.420 --> 28:16.460
+ is by its very definition, the quest to build a machine that can do everything as well as
+
+28:16.460 --> 28:17.460
+ we can.
+
+28:17.460 --> 28:24.060
+ Up to the old Holy Grail of AI from back to its inception in the 60s.
+
+28:24.060 --> 28:27.500
+ If that ever happens, of course, I think it's going to be the biggest transition in the
+
+28:27.500 --> 28:33.860
+ history of life on Earth, but it doesn't necessarily have to wait the big impact until machines
+
+28:33.860 --> 28:35.780
+ are better than us at knitting.
+
+28:35.780 --> 28:41.940
+ The really big change doesn't come exactly at the moment they're better than us at everything.
+
+28:41.940 --> 28:45.820
+ The really big change comes, first, their big change is when they start becoming better
+
+28:45.820 --> 28:51.140
+ at us at doing most of the jobs that we do, because that takes away much of the demand
+
+28:51.140 --> 28:53.380
+ for human labor.
+
+28:53.380 --> 29:01.300
+ And then the really warping change comes when they become better than us at AI research.
+
+29:01.300 --> 29:07.900
+ Because right now, the time scale of AI research is limited by the human research and development
+
+29:07.900 --> 29:14.100
+ cycle of years, typically, along the take from one release of some software or iPhone
+
+29:14.100 --> 29:16.300
+ or whatever to the next.
+
+29:16.300 --> 29:25.820
+ But once Google can replace 40,000 engineers by 40,000 equivalent pieces of software or
+
+29:25.820 --> 29:29.660
+ whatever, then there's no reason that has to be years.
+
+29:29.660 --> 29:32.020
+ It can be, in principle, much faster.
+
+29:32.020 --> 29:38.900
+ And the time scale of future progress in AI and all of science and technology will be
+
+29:38.900 --> 29:40.980
+ driven by machines, not humans.
+
+29:40.980 --> 29:49.660
+ So it's this simple point, which gives right this incredibly fun controversy about whether
+
+29:49.660 --> 29:54.540
+ there can be intelligence explosion, so called singularity, as Werner Winge called it.
+
+29:54.540 --> 30:00.060
+ The idea, as articulated by I.J. Good, is obviously way back fifties, but you can see
+
+30:00.060 --> 30:07.220
+ Alan Turing and others thought about it even earlier.
+
+30:07.220 --> 30:12.980
+ You asked me what exactly what I define human level intelligence.
+
+30:12.980 --> 30:18.540
+ So the glib answer is just to say something which is better than us at all cognitive tasks
+
+30:18.540 --> 30:21.980
+ or better than any human at all cognitive tasks.
+
+30:21.980 --> 30:25.900
+ But the really interesting bar, I think, goes a little bit lower than that, actually.
+
+30:25.900 --> 30:33.260
+ It's when they're better than us at AI programming and general learning so that they can, if
+
+30:33.260 --> 30:37.340
+ they want to, get better than us at anything by just starting out.
+
+30:37.340 --> 30:43.100
+ So there better is a key word and better is towards this kind of spectrum of the complexity
+
+30:43.100 --> 30:45.740
+ of goals it's able to accomplish.
+
+30:45.740 --> 30:53.060
+ So another way to, and that's certainly a very clear definition of human love.
+
+30:53.060 --> 30:56.300
+ So there's, it's almost like a sea that's rising, you can do more and more and more
+
+30:56.300 --> 30:57.300
+ things.
+
+30:57.300 --> 30:59.900
+ It's actually a graphic that you show, it's really nice way to put it.
+
+30:59.900 --> 31:04.340
+ So there's some peaks and there's an ocean level elevating and you solve more and more
+
+31:04.340 --> 31:05.340
+ problems.
+
+31:05.340 --> 31:09.220
+ But, you know, just kind of to take a pause and we took a bunch of questions and a lot
+
+31:09.220 --> 31:14.380
+ of social networks and a bunch of people asked a sort of a slightly different direction
+
+31:14.380 --> 31:22.260
+ on creativity and on things that perhaps aren't a peak.
+
+31:22.260 --> 31:28.620
+ It's, you know, human beings are flawed and perhaps better means having being having contradiction
+
+31:28.620 --> 31:30.260
+ being flawed in some way.
+
+31:30.260 --> 31:34.980
+ So let me sort of, yeah, start and start easy, first of all.
+
+31:34.980 --> 31:36.620
+ So you have a lot of cool equations.
+
+31:36.620 --> 31:39.660
+ Let me ask, what's your favorite equation, first of all?
+
+31:39.660 --> 31:43.580
+ I know they're all like your children, but which one is that?
+
+31:43.580 --> 31:49.060
+ This is the Shreddinger equation, it's the master key of quantum mechanics of the micro
+
+31:49.060 --> 31:50.060
+ world.
+
+31:50.060 --> 31:55.340
+ So this equation can take everything to do with atoms and all the fuels and all the
+
+31:55.340 --> 32:04.020
+ way up to… Yeah, so, okay, so quantum mechanics is certainly a beautiful mysterious formulation
+
+32:04.020 --> 32:05.020
+ of our world.
+
+32:05.020 --> 32:10.740
+ So I'd like to sort of ask you, just as an example, it perhaps doesn't have the same
+
+32:10.740 --> 32:17.420
+ beauty as physics does, but in mathematics abstract, the Andrew Wiles who proved the
+
+32:17.420 --> 32:19.460
+ Fermat's last theory.
+
+32:19.460 --> 32:24.180
+ So he just saw this recently and it kind of caught my eye a little bit.
+
+32:24.180 --> 32:27.980
+ This is 358 years after it was conjectured.
+
+32:27.980 --> 32:32.940
+ So this very simple formulation, everybody tried to prove it, everybody failed.
+
+32:32.940 --> 32:38.820
+ And so here's this guy comes along and eventually proves it and then fails to prove it and then
+
+32:38.820 --> 32:41.340
+ proves it again in 94.
+
+32:41.340 --> 32:45.940
+ And he said like the moment when everything connected into place, in an interview he said
+
+32:45.940 --> 32:47.980
+ it was so indescribably beautiful.
+
+32:47.980 --> 32:53.580
+ That moment when you finally realize the connecting piece of two conjectures, he said it was so
+
+32:53.580 --> 32:56.940
+ indescribably beautiful, it was so simple and so elegant.
+
+32:56.940 --> 33:01.540
+ I couldn't understand how I'd missed it and I just stared at it in disbelief for 20
+
+33:01.540 --> 33:02.540
+ minutes.
+
+33:02.540 --> 33:08.100
+ Then during the day I walked around the department and I keep coming back to my desk looking
+
+33:08.100 --> 33:09.820
+ to see if it was still there.
+
+33:09.820 --> 33:10.820
+ It was still there.
+
+33:10.820 --> 33:11.820
+ I couldn't contain myself.
+
+33:11.820 --> 33:12.820
+ I was so excited.
+
+33:12.820 --> 33:16.180
+ It was the most important moment of my working life.
+
+33:16.180 --> 33:18.940
+ Nothing I ever do again will mean as much.
+
+33:18.940 --> 33:24.860
+ So that particular moment and it kind of made me think of what would it take?
+
+33:24.860 --> 33:28.380
+ And I think we have all been there at small levels.
+
+33:28.380 --> 33:34.820
+ Maybe let me ask, have you had a moment like that in your life where you just had an idea
+
+33:34.820 --> 33:40.060
+ it's like, wow, yes.
+
+33:40.060 --> 33:44.700
+ I wouldn't mention myself in the same breath as Andrew Wiles, but I certainly had a number
+
+33:44.700 --> 33:54.820
+ of aha moments when I realized something very cool about physics just completely made
+
+33:54.820 --> 33:55.820
+ my head explode.
+
+33:55.820 --> 33:59.580
+ In fact, some of my favorite discoveries I made later, I later realized that they had
+
+33:59.580 --> 34:03.340
+ been discovered earlier by someone who's sometimes got quite famous for it.
+
+34:03.340 --> 34:07.460
+ So there's too late for me to even publish it, but that doesn't diminish in any way.
+
+34:07.460 --> 34:12.340
+ The emotional experience you have when you realize it like, wow.
+
+34:12.340 --> 34:17.460
+ So what would it take in that moment, that wow, that was yours in that moment?
+
+34:17.460 --> 34:23.420
+ So what do you think it takes for an intelligent system, an AGI system, an AI system to have
+
+34:23.420 --> 34:24.980
+ a moment like that?
+
+34:24.980 --> 34:29.420
+ It's a tricky question because there are actually two parts to it, right?
+
+34:29.420 --> 34:37.260
+ One of them is, can it accomplish that proof, can it prove that you can never write A to
+
+34:37.260 --> 34:46.420
+ the N plus B to the N equals 3 to the N for all integers, etc., etc., when N is bigger
+
+34:46.420 --> 34:49.420
+ than 2.
+
+34:49.420 --> 34:51.580
+ That's simply the question about intelligence.
+
+34:51.580 --> 34:54.420
+ Can you build machines that are that intelligent?
+
+34:54.420 --> 34:59.860
+ And I think by the time we get a machine that can independently come up with that level
+
+34:59.860 --> 35:03.460
+ of proofs, probably quite close to AGI.
+
+35:03.460 --> 35:07.860
+ But the second question is a question about consciousness.
+
+35:07.860 --> 35:13.060
+ When will we, how likely is it that such a machine would actually have any experience
+
+35:13.060 --> 35:16.500
+ at all as opposed to just being like a zombie?
+
+35:16.500 --> 35:22.940
+ And would we expect it to have some sort of emotional response to this or anything at
+
+35:22.940 --> 35:31.140
+ all akin to human emotion where when it accomplishes its machine goal, it views it as something
+
+35:31.140 --> 35:39.260
+ very positive and sublime and deeply meaningful.
+
+35:39.260 --> 35:45.260
+ I would certainly hope that if in the future we do create machines that are our peers or
+
+35:45.260 --> 35:53.700
+ even our descendants, I would certainly hope that they do have this sort of sublime appreciation
+
+35:53.700 --> 36:06.020
+ of life in a way, my absolutely worst nightmare would be that at some point in the future,
+
+36:06.020 --> 36:10.620
+ the distant future, maybe our cosmos is teeming with all this post biological life, doing
+
+36:10.620 --> 36:13.180
+ all the seemingly cool stuff.
+
+36:13.180 --> 36:20.660
+ And maybe the last humans by the time our species eventually fizzles out will be like,
+
+36:20.660 --> 36:26.140
+ well, that's okay, because we're so proud of our descendants here and look, my worst
+
+36:26.140 --> 36:30.580
+ nightmare is that we haven't solved the consciousness problem.
+
+36:30.580 --> 36:34.100
+ And we haven't realized that these are all the zombies, they're not aware of anything
+
+36:34.100 --> 36:37.900
+ anymore than a tape recorder, as in any kind of experience.
+
+36:37.900 --> 36:41.660
+ So the whole thing has just become a play for empty benches.
+
+36:41.660 --> 36:44.700
+ That would be like the ultimate zombie apocalypse to me.
+
+36:44.700 --> 36:52.900
+ So I would much rather, in that case, that we have these beings which can really appreciate
+
+36:52.900 --> 36:57.060
+ how amazing it is.
+
+36:57.060 --> 37:02.260
+ And in that picture, what would be the role of creativity, what a few people ask about
+
+37:02.260 --> 37:03.260
+ creativity?
+
+37:03.260 --> 37:04.260
+ Yeah.
+
+37:04.260 --> 37:08.700
+ And do you think, when you think about intelligence, I mean, certainly the story you told at the
+
+37:08.700 --> 37:14.100
+ beginning of your book involved, you know, creating movies and so on, sort of making
+
+37:14.100 --> 37:18.580
+ money, you know, you can make a lot of money in our modern world with music and movies.
+
+37:18.580 --> 37:23.100
+ So if you are an intelligent system, you may want to get good at that.
+
+37:23.100 --> 37:26.300
+ But that's not necessarily what I mean by creativity.
+
+37:26.300 --> 37:32.620
+ Is it important on that complex goals where the sea is rising for there to be something
+
+37:32.620 --> 37:39.940
+ creative, or am I being very human centric and thinking creativity somehow special relative
+
+37:39.940 --> 37:41.940
+ to intelligence?
+
+37:41.940 --> 37:50.940
+ My hunch is that we should think of creativity simply as an aspect of intelligence.
+
+37:50.940 --> 37:57.820
+ And we have to be very careful with human vanity.
+
+37:57.820 --> 38:01.540
+ We have this tendency to very often want to say, as soon as machines can do something,
+
+38:01.540 --> 38:05.980
+ we try to diminish it and say, oh, but that's not like real intelligence, you know, is
+
+38:05.980 --> 38:12.620
+ it not creative or this or that, the other thing, if we ask ourselves to write down a
+
+38:12.620 --> 38:18.500
+ definition of what we actually mean by being creative, what we mean by Andrew Wiles, what
+
+38:18.500 --> 38:23.660
+ he did there, for example, don't we often mean that someone takes a very unexpected
+
+38:23.660 --> 38:26.060
+ leap?
+
+38:26.060 --> 38:33.740
+ It's not like taking 573 and multiplying by 224 by just a step of straightforward cookbook
+
+38:33.740 --> 38:36.500
+ like rules, right?
+
+38:36.500 --> 38:40.660
+ You can maybe make a connection between two things that people have never thought was
+
+38:40.660 --> 38:41.660
+ connected.
+
+38:41.660 --> 38:42.660
+ It's very surprising.
+
+38:42.660 --> 38:44.300
+ Something like that.
+
+38:44.300 --> 38:50.660
+ I think this is an aspect of intelligence, and this is actually one of the most important
+
+38:50.660 --> 38:53.260
+ aspects of it.
+
+38:53.260 --> 38:57.940
+ Maybe the reason we humans tend to be better at it than traditional computers is because
+
+38:57.940 --> 39:02.020
+ it's something that comes more naturally if you're a neural network than if you're a
+
+39:02.020 --> 39:05.820
+ traditional logic gates based computer machine.
+
+39:05.820 --> 39:11.900
+ We physically have all these connections, and if you activate here, activate here, activate
+
+39:11.900 --> 39:20.980
+ here, it ping, you know, my hunch is that if we ever build a machine where you could
+
+39:20.980 --> 39:31.020
+ just give it the task, hey, hey, you say, hey, you know, I just realized I want to travel
+
+39:31.020 --> 39:32.380
+ around the world instead this month.
+
+39:32.380 --> 39:34.700
+ Can you teach my AGI course for me?
+
+39:34.700 --> 39:36.100
+ And it's like, okay, I'll do it.
+
+39:36.100 --> 39:39.860
+ And it does everything that you would have done and it improvises and stuff.
+
+39:39.860 --> 39:42.860
+ That would in my mind involve a lot of creativity.
+
+39:42.860 --> 39:45.660
+ Yeah, so it's actually a beautiful way to put it.
+
+39:45.660 --> 39:54.540
+ I think we do try to grasp at the definition of intelligence as everything we don't understand
+
+39:54.540 --> 39:57.580
+ how to build.
+
+39:57.580 --> 40:02.180
+ So we as humans try to find things that we have and machines don't have, and maybe creativity
+
+40:02.180 --> 40:05.940
+ is just one of the things, one of the words we used to describe that.
+
+40:05.940 --> 40:06.940
+ That's a really interesting way to put it.
+
+40:06.940 --> 40:09.820
+ I don't think we need to be that defensive.
+
+40:09.820 --> 40:14.700
+ I don't think anything good comes out of saying, we're somehow special, you know, it's
+
+40:14.700 --> 40:27.540
+ very wise, there are many examples in history of where trying to pretend they were somehow
+
+40:27.540 --> 40:36.220
+ superior to all other intelligent beings has led to pretty bad results, right?
+
+40:36.220 --> 40:39.700
+ Nazi Germany, they said that they were somehow superior to other people.
+
+40:39.700 --> 40:44.580
+ Today, we still do a lot of cruelty to animals by saying they were so superior somehow on
+
+40:44.580 --> 40:50.500
+ the other, they can't feel pain, slavery was justified by the same kind of really weak
+
+40:50.500 --> 40:52.420
+ arguments.
+
+40:52.420 --> 40:58.700
+ And I don't think if we actually go ahead and build artificial general intelligence,
+
+40:58.700 --> 41:01.100
+ it can do things better than us.
+
+41:01.100 --> 41:08.980
+ I don't think we should try to found our self worth on some sort of bogus claims of superiority
+
+41:08.980 --> 41:11.940
+ in terms of our intelligence.
+
+41:11.940 --> 41:21.780
+ I think we should instead find our calling and the meaning of life from the experiences
+
+41:21.780 --> 41:22.780
+ that we have.
+
+41:22.780 --> 41:23.780
+ Right.
+
+41:23.780 --> 41:30.260
+ You know, I can have very meaningful experiences even if there are other people who are smarter
+
+41:30.260 --> 41:35.860
+ than me, you know, when I go to faculty meeting here and I was talking about something and
+
+41:35.860 --> 41:39.420
+ then I certainly realized, oh, he has an old prize, he has an old prize, he has an old
+
+41:39.420 --> 41:40.420
+ prize.
+
+41:40.420 --> 41:41.420
+ Yeah.
+
+41:41.420 --> 41:47.660
+ You know, it doesn't make me enjoy life any less or enjoy talking to those people less.
+
+41:47.660 --> 41:49.780
+ Of course not.
+
+41:49.780 --> 41:57.420
+ And contrary to that, I feel very honored and privileged to get to interact with other
+
+41:57.420 --> 42:00.820
+ very intelligent beings that are better than me and a lot of stuff.
+
+42:00.820 --> 42:05.420
+ So I don't think there's any reason why we can't have the same approach with intelligent
+
+42:05.420 --> 42:06.420
+ machines.
+
+42:06.420 --> 42:08.900
+ That's a really interesting, so people don't often think about that.
+
+42:08.900 --> 42:14.380
+ They think about if there's machines that are more intelligent, you naturally think
+
+42:14.380 --> 42:19.100
+ that that's not going to be a beneficial type of intelligence.
+
+42:19.100 --> 42:24.060
+ You don't realize it could be, you know, like peers with no ball prizes that would be just
+
+42:24.060 --> 42:25.060
+ fun to talk with.
+
+42:25.060 --> 42:30.580
+ And they might be clever about certain topics and you can have fun having a few drinks with
+
+42:30.580 --> 42:31.580
+ them.
+
+42:31.580 --> 42:38.620
+ Well, also, you know, another example we can all relate to why it doesn't have to be a
+
+42:38.620 --> 42:42.580
+ terrible thing to be impressed, the presence of people who are even smarter than us all
+
+42:42.580 --> 42:47.980
+ around is when you and I were both two years old, I mean, our parents were much more intelligent
+
+42:47.980 --> 42:48.980
+ than us.
+
+42:48.980 --> 42:49.980
+ Right.
+
+42:49.980 --> 42:50.980
+ Worked out okay.
+
+42:50.980 --> 42:54.140
+ Because their goals were aligned with our goals.
+
+42:54.140 --> 43:01.380
+ And that I think is really the number one key issue we have to solve if we value align
+
+43:01.380 --> 43:07.380
+ the value alignment problem exactly because people who see too many Hollywood movies with
+
+43:07.380 --> 43:12.260
+ lousy science fiction plot lines, they worry about the wrong thing, right?
+
+43:12.260 --> 43:16.500
+ They worry about some machine suddenly turning evil.
+
+43:16.500 --> 43:21.500
+ It's not malice that we should that is the concern.
+
+43:21.500 --> 43:23.000
+ It's competence.
+
+43:23.000 --> 43:29.580
+ By definition, intelligence makes you makes you very competent if you have a more intelligent
+
+43:29.580 --> 43:35.300
+ goal playing machine computer playing as a less intelligent one and when we define intelligence
+
+43:35.300 --> 43:37.740
+ as the ability to accomplish go winning, right?
+
+43:37.740 --> 43:40.780
+ It's going to be the more intelligent one that wins.
+
+43:40.780 --> 43:47.860
+ And if you have a human and then you have an AGI that's more intelligent in all ways
+
+43:47.860 --> 43:50.500
+ and they have different goals, guess who's going to get their way, right?
+
+43:50.500 --> 43:58.060
+ So I was just reading about this particular rhinoceros species that was driven extinct
+
+43:58.060 --> 43:59.060
+ just a few years ago.
+
+43:59.060 --> 44:05.740
+ Alan Bummer is looking at this cute picture of a mommy rhinoceros with its child, you
+
+44:05.740 --> 44:09.140
+ know, and why did we humans drive it to extinction?
+
+44:09.140 --> 44:12.860
+ It wasn't because we were evil rhino haters as a whole.
+
+44:12.860 --> 44:16.380
+ It was just because we our goals weren't aligned with those of the rhinoceros and it didn't
+
+44:16.380 --> 44:19.660
+ work out so well for the rhinoceros because we were more intelligent, right?
+
+44:19.660 --> 44:27.220
+ So I think it's just so important that if we ever do build AGI before we unleash anything,
+
+44:27.220 --> 44:37.380
+ we have to make sure that it learns to understand our goals, that it adopts our goals and retains
+
+44:37.380 --> 44:38.380
+ those goals.
+
+44:38.380 --> 44:45.740
+ So the cool interesting problem there is being able, us as human beings, trying to formulate
+
+44:45.740 --> 44:47.240
+ our values.
+
+44:47.240 --> 44:52.540
+ So you know, you could think of the United States Constitution as a way that people sat
+
+44:52.540 --> 44:59.780
+ down at the time a bunch of white men, which is a good example, I should say.
+
+44:59.780 --> 45:03.460
+ They formulated the goals for this country and a lot of people agree that those goals
+
+45:03.460 --> 45:05.540
+ actually held up pretty well.
+
+45:05.540 --> 45:09.600
+ It's an interesting formulation of values and failed miserably in other ways.
+
+45:09.600 --> 45:15.500
+ So for the value alignment problem and the solution to it, we have to be able to put
+
+45:15.500 --> 45:23.420
+ on paper or in a program, human values, how difficult do you think that is?
+
+45:23.420 --> 45:24.420
+ Very.
+
+45:24.420 --> 45:25.980
+ But it's so important.
+
+45:25.980 --> 45:30.340
+ We really have to give it our best and it's difficult for two separate reasons.
+
+45:30.340 --> 45:37.660
+ There's the technical value alignment problem of figuring out just how to make machines
+
+45:37.660 --> 45:40.660
+ understand our goals, adopt them and retain them.
+
+45:40.660 --> 45:46.140
+ And then there's the separate part of it, the philosophical part, whose values anyway.
+
+45:46.140 --> 45:51.700
+ And since we, it's not like we have any great consensus on this planet on values, what mechanism
+
+45:51.700 --> 45:56.780
+ should we create then to aggregate and decide, okay, what's a good compromise?
+
+45:56.780 --> 46:01.260
+ That second discussion can't just be left the tech nerds like myself, right?
+
+46:01.260 --> 46:02.260
+ That's right.
+
+46:02.260 --> 46:06.820
+ And if we refuse to talk about it and then AGI gets built, who's going to be actually
+
+46:06.820 --> 46:10.660
+ making the decision about whose values, it's going to be a bunch of dudes in some tech
+
+46:10.660 --> 46:12.380
+ company, right?
+
+46:12.380 --> 46:18.420
+ And are they necessarily so representative of all of humankind that we want to just
+
+46:18.420 --> 46:19.580
+ endorse it to them?
+
+46:19.580 --> 46:25.220
+ Are they even uniquely qualified to speak to future human happiness just because they're
+
+46:25.220 --> 46:26.460
+ good at programming AI?
+
+46:26.460 --> 46:30.380
+ I'd much rather have this be a really inclusive conversation.
+
+46:30.380 --> 46:32.700
+ But do you think it's possible?
+
+46:32.700 --> 46:38.820
+ You create a beautiful vision that includes sort of the diversity, cultural diversity
+
+46:38.820 --> 46:43.900
+ and various perspectives on discussing rights, freedoms, human dignity.
+
+46:43.900 --> 46:46.620
+ But how hard is it to come to that consensus?
+
+46:46.620 --> 46:52.140
+ Do you think it's certainly a really important thing that we should all try to do, but do
+
+46:52.140 --> 46:54.460
+ you think it's feasible?
+
+46:54.460 --> 47:01.660
+ I think there's no better way to guarantee failure than to refuse to talk about it or
+
+47:01.660 --> 47:02.980
+ refuse to try.
+
+47:02.980 --> 47:08.060
+ And I also think it's a really bad strategy to say, okay, let's first have a discussion
+
+47:08.060 --> 47:09.060
+ for a long time.
+
+47:09.060 --> 47:13.540
+ And then once we reach complete consensus, then we'll try to load it into some machine.
+
+47:13.540 --> 47:16.980
+ No, we shouldn't let perfect be the enemy of good.
+
+47:16.980 --> 47:22.140
+ Instead, we should start with the kindergarten ethics that pretty much everybody agrees on
+
+47:22.140 --> 47:24.580
+ and put that into our machines now.
+
+47:24.580 --> 47:26.100
+ We're not doing that even.
+
+47:26.100 --> 47:32.980
+ Look at anyone who builds a passenger aircraft wants it to never under any circumstances
+
+47:32.980 --> 47:35.900
+ fly into a building or mountain, right?
+
+47:35.900 --> 47:38.860
+ Yet the September 11 hijackers were able to do that.
+
+47:38.860 --> 47:44.220
+ And even more embarrassingly, Andreas Lubitz, this depressed German wings pilot, when he
+
+47:44.220 --> 47:50.220
+ flew his passenger jet into the Alps, killing over 100 people, he just told the autopilot
+
+47:50.220 --> 47:51.220
+ to do it.
+
+47:51.220 --> 47:55.140
+ He told the freaking computer to change the altitude to 100 meters.
+
+47:55.140 --> 48:01.820
+ And even though it had the GPS maps, everything, the computer was like, okay, no, so we should
+
+48:01.820 --> 48:07.300
+ take those very basic values, though, where the problem is not that we don't agree.
+
+48:07.300 --> 48:12.460
+ The problem is just we've been too lazy to try to put it into our machines and make sure
+
+48:12.460 --> 48:17.460
+ that from now on, airplanes will just, which all have computers in them, but we'll just
+
+48:17.460 --> 48:19.820
+ never just refuse to do something like that.
+
+48:19.820 --> 48:25.580
+ We go into safe mode, maybe lock the cockpit door, go to the nearest airport, and there's
+
+48:25.580 --> 48:31.340
+ so much other technology in our world as well now where it's really coming quite timely
+
+48:31.340 --> 48:34.300
+ to put in some sort of very basic values like this.
+
+48:34.300 --> 48:41.460
+ Even in cars, we've had enough vehicle terrorism attacks by now where people have driven trucks
+
+48:41.460 --> 48:47.300
+ and vans into pedestrians that it's not at all a crazy idea to just have that hardwired
+
+48:47.300 --> 48:51.420
+ into the car, because yeah, there are a lot of, there's always going to be people who
+
+48:51.420 --> 48:55.620
+ for some reason want to harm others, but most of those people don't have the technical
+
+48:55.620 --> 48:58.620
+ expertise to figure out how to work around something like that.
+
+48:58.620 --> 49:01.780
+ So if the car just won't do it, it helps.
+
+49:01.780 --> 49:02.940
+ So let's start there.
+
+49:02.940 --> 49:05.020
+ So there's a lot of, that's a great point.
+
+49:05.020 --> 49:06.900
+ So not chasing perfect.
+
+49:06.900 --> 49:10.780
+ There's a lot of things that most of the world agrees on.
+
+49:10.780 --> 49:11.940
+ Yeah, let's start there.
+
+49:11.940 --> 49:12.940
+ Let's start there.
+
+49:12.940 --> 49:18.140
+ And then once we start there, we'll also get into the habit of having these kind of conversations
+
+49:18.140 --> 49:21.940
+ about, okay, what else should we put in here and have these discussions?
+
+49:21.940 --> 49:24.100
+ This should be a gradual process then.
+
+49:24.100 --> 49:25.100
+ Great.
+
+49:25.100 --> 49:31.380
+ So, but that also means describing these things and describing it to a machine.
+
+49:31.380 --> 49:35.620
+ So one thing, we had a few conversations with Steven Wolfram.
+
+49:35.620 --> 49:37.140
+ I'm not sure if you're familiar with Steven Wolfram.
+
+49:37.140 --> 49:38.500
+ Oh yeah, I know him quite well.
+
+49:38.500 --> 49:43.380
+ So he has, you know, he works with a bunch of things, but you know, cellular automata,
+
+49:43.380 --> 49:47.660
+ these simple computable things, these computation systems.
+
+49:47.660 --> 49:52.380
+ And he kind of mentioned that, you know, we probably have already within these systems
+
+49:52.380 --> 49:59.580
+ already something that's AGI, meaning like we just don't know it because we can't talk
+
+49:59.580 --> 50:00.580
+ to it.
+
+50:00.580 --> 50:06.380
+ So if you give me this chance to try it, to try to at least form a question out of this,
+
+50:06.380 --> 50:12.780
+ because I think it's an interesting idea to think that we can have intelligent systems,
+
+50:12.780 --> 50:17.260
+ but we don't know how to describe something to them and they can't communicate with us.
+
+50:17.260 --> 50:21.220
+ I know you're doing a little bit of work in explainable AI, trying to get AI to explain
+
+50:21.220 --> 50:22.220
+ itself.
+
+50:22.220 --> 50:28.340
+ So what are your thoughts of natural language processing or some kind of other communication?
+
+50:28.340 --> 50:30.220
+ How does the AI explain something to us?
+
+50:30.220 --> 50:33.740
+ How do we explain something to it, to machines?
+
+50:33.740 --> 50:35.420
+ Or you think of it differently?
+
+50:35.420 --> 50:40.100
+ So there are two separate parts to your question there.
+
+50:40.100 --> 50:43.900
+ One of them has to do with communication, which is super interesting and I'll get to
+
+50:43.900 --> 50:44.900
+ that in a sec.
+
+50:44.900 --> 50:50.100
+ The other is whether we already have AGI, we just haven't noticed it.
+
+50:50.100 --> 50:54.340
+ There, I beg to differ.
+
+50:54.340 --> 50:58.420
+ And don't think there's anything in any cellular automaton or anything or the internet itself
+
+50:58.420 --> 51:05.400
+ or whatever that has artificial general intelligence in that it didn't really do exactly everything
+
+51:05.400 --> 51:06.980
+ we humans can do better.
+
+51:06.980 --> 51:14.100
+ I think the day that happens, when that happens, we will very soon notice and we'll probably
+
+51:14.100 --> 51:17.980
+ notice even before because in a very, very big way.
+
+51:17.980 --> 51:18.980
+ For the second part though.
+
+51:18.980 --> 51:20.700
+ Can I just, sorry.
+
+51:20.700 --> 51:30.260
+ Because you have this beautiful way to formulate in consciousness as information processing
+
+51:30.260 --> 51:33.740
+ and you can think of intelligence and information processing and you can think of the entire
+
+51:33.740 --> 51:34.740
+ universe.
+
+51:34.740 --> 51:40.220
+ These particles and these systems roaming around that have this information processing
+
+51:40.220 --> 51:47.500
+ power, you don't think there is something with the power to process information in the
+
+51:47.500 --> 51:55.460
+ way that we human beings do that's out there that needs to be sort of connected to.
+
+51:55.460 --> 51:59.980
+ It seems a little bit philosophical perhaps, but there's something compelling to the idea
+
+51:59.980 --> 52:06.100
+ that the power is already there, the focus should be more on being able to communicate
+
+52:06.100 --> 52:07.100
+ with it.
+
+52:07.100 --> 52:15.340
+ Well, I agree that in a certain sense, the hardware processing power is already out there
+
+52:15.340 --> 52:21.180
+ because our universe itself can think of it as being a computer already.
+
+52:21.180 --> 52:25.540
+ It's constantly computing what water waves, how it devolved the water waves and the river
+
+52:25.540 --> 52:29.860
+ Charles and how to move the air molecules around that Seth Lloyd has pointed out.
+
+52:29.860 --> 52:33.940
+ My colleague here that you can even in a very rigorous way think of our entire universe
+
+52:33.940 --> 52:35.660
+ is just being a quantum computer.
+
+52:35.660 --> 52:40.900
+ It's pretty clear that our universe supports this amazing processing power because you
+
+52:40.900 --> 52:46.580
+ can even within this physics computer that we live in, we can even build actual laptops
+
+52:46.580 --> 52:47.580
+ and stuff.
+
+52:47.580 --> 52:49.140
+ So clearly the power is there.
+
+52:49.140 --> 52:53.420
+ It's just that most of the compute power that nature has, it's in my opinion kind of wasting
+
+52:53.420 --> 52:57.140
+ on boring stuff like simulating yet another ocean wave somewhere where no one is even
+
+52:57.140 --> 52:58.140
+ looking.
+
+52:58.140 --> 53:03.820
+ So in a sense, what life does, what we are doing when we build computers is we're rechanneling
+
+53:03.820 --> 53:09.380
+ all this compute that nature is doing anyway into doing things that are more interesting
+
+53:09.380 --> 53:14.220
+ than just yet another ocean wave and do something cool here.
+
+53:14.220 --> 53:21.100
+ So the raw hardware power is there for sure, and even just computing what's going to happen
+
+53:21.100 --> 53:25.540
+ for the next five seconds in this water ball, you know, it takes a ridiculous amount of
+
+53:25.540 --> 53:28.060
+ compute if you do it on a human computer.
+
+53:28.060 --> 53:30.040
+ This water ball just did it.
+
+53:30.040 --> 53:36.020
+ But that does not mean that this water ball has AGI and this because AGI means it should
+
+53:36.020 --> 53:40.300
+ also be able to like I've written my book done this interview.
+
+53:40.300 --> 53:42.100
+ And I don't think it's just communication problems.
+
+53:42.100 --> 53:47.020
+ I don't think it can do it.
+
+53:47.020 --> 53:51.780
+ So Buddhists say when they watch the water and that there is some beauty, that there's
+
+53:51.780 --> 53:55.380
+ some depth and beauty in nature that they can communicate with.
+
+53:55.380 --> 54:01.180
+ Communication is also very important because I mean, look, part of my job is being a teacher
+
+54:01.180 --> 54:09.940
+ and I know some very intelligent professors even who just have a better hard time communicating.
+
+54:09.940 --> 54:14.620
+ They come up with all these brilliant ideas, but to communicate with somebody else, you
+
+54:14.620 --> 54:17.140
+ have to also be able to simulate their own mind.
+
+54:17.140 --> 54:18.140
+ Yes.
+
+54:18.140 --> 54:22.020
+ And build well enough and understand that model of their mind that you can say things
+
+54:22.020 --> 54:24.500
+ that they will understand.
+
+54:24.500 --> 54:26.700
+ And that's quite difficult.
+
+54:26.700 --> 54:31.620
+ And that's why today it's so frustrating if you have a computer that makes some cancer
+
+54:31.620 --> 54:36.260
+ diagnosis and you ask it, well, why are you saying I should have a surgery?
+
+54:36.260 --> 54:43.620
+ And if you don't want to reply, I was trained on five terabytes of data and this is my diagnosis
+
+54:43.620 --> 54:49.220
+ boop, boop, beep, beep, doesn't really instill a lot of confidence, right?
+
+54:49.220 --> 54:54.420
+ So I think we have a lot of work to do on communication there.
+
+54:54.420 --> 54:59.380
+ So what kind of, I think you're doing a little bit of work in explainable AI.
+
+54:59.380 --> 55:01.340
+ What do you think are the most promising avenues?
+
+55:01.340 --> 55:07.100
+ Is it mostly about sort of the Alexa problem of natural language processing of being able
+
+55:07.100 --> 55:13.220
+ to actually use human interpretable methods of communication?
+
+55:13.220 --> 55:17.500
+ So being able to talk to a system and talk back to you, or is there some more fundamental
+
+55:17.500 --> 55:18.500
+ problems to be solved?
+
+55:18.500 --> 55:21.180
+ I think it's all of the above.
+
+55:21.180 --> 55:27.180
+ The natural language processing is obviously important, but there are also more nerdy fundamental
+
+55:27.180 --> 55:28.180
+ problems.
+
+55:28.180 --> 55:39.180
+ Like if you take, you play chess, Russian, I have to, when did you learn Russian?
+
+55:39.180 --> 55:45.700
+ I speak Russian very poorly, but I bought a book, teach yourself Russian, I read a lot,
+
+55:45.700 --> 55:47.700
+ but it was very difficult.
+
+55:47.700 --> 55:48.700
+ Wow.
+
+55:48.700 --> 55:49.700
+ That's why I speak so poorly.
+
+55:49.700 --> 55:51.700
+ How many languages do you know?
+
+55:51.700 --> 55:52.700
+ Wow.
+
+55:52.700 --> 55:53.700
+ That's really impressive.
+
+55:53.700 --> 55:54.700
+ I don't know.
+
+55:54.700 --> 55:58.740
+ My wife has some calculations, but my point was, if you played chess, have you looked
+
+55:58.740 --> 56:00.260
+ at the AlphaZero games?
+
+56:00.260 --> 56:01.260
+ Yeah.
+
+56:01.260 --> 56:02.260
+ Oh, the actual games now.
+
+56:02.260 --> 56:03.260
+ Check it out.
+
+56:03.260 --> 56:09.900
+ Some of them are just mind blowing, really beautiful.
+
+56:09.900 --> 56:12.460
+ If you ask, how did it do that?
+
+56:12.460 --> 56:14.500
+ You got that.
+
+56:14.500 --> 56:20.540
+ Talk to Demis Osabis, others from DeepMind, all they'll ultimately be able to give you
+
+56:20.540 --> 56:26.940
+ is big tables of numbers, matrices that define the neural network, and you can stare at these
+
+56:26.940 --> 56:32.980
+ tables numbers till your face turned blue, and you're not going to understand much about
+
+56:32.980 --> 56:35.860
+ why it made that move.
+
+56:35.860 --> 56:40.540
+ Even if you have a natural language processing that can tell you in human language about,
+
+56:40.540 --> 56:44.180
+ oh, five, seven, point two, eight, still not going to really help.
+
+56:44.180 --> 56:50.660
+ I think there's a whole spectrum of fun challenges there involved in taking computation that
+
+56:50.660 --> 56:59.940
+ does intelligent things and transforming it into something equally good, equally intelligent,
+
+56:59.940 --> 57:02.060
+ but that's more understandable.
+
+57:02.060 --> 57:08.180
+ I think that's really valuable because I think as we put machines in charge of ever more
+
+57:08.180 --> 57:13.540
+ infrastructure in our world, the power grid, the trading on the stock market, weapon systems,
+
+57:13.540 --> 57:19.620
+ and so on, it's absolutely crucial that we can trust these AIs that do all we want and
+
+57:19.620 --> 57:25.860
+ trust really comes from understanding in a very fundamental way.
+
+57:25.860 --> 57:29.940
+ That's why I'm working on this, because I think the more if we're going to have some
+
+57:29.940 --> 57:34.700
+ hope of ensuring that machines have adopted our goals and that they're going to retain
+
+57:34.700 --> 57:41.260
+ them, that kind of trust, I think, needs to be based on things you can actually understand,
+
+57:41.260 --> 57:47.140
+ preferably even improve theorems on, even with a self driving car, right?
+
+57:47.140 --> 57:51.020
+ If someone just tells you it's been trained on tons of data and never crashed, it's less
+
+57:51.020 --> 57:54.460
+ reassuring than if someone actually has a proof.
+
+57:54.460 --> 57:58.820
+ Maybe it's a computer verified proof, but still it says that under no circumstances
+
+57:58.820 --> 58:02.420
+ is this car just going to swerve into oncoming traffic.
+
+58:02.420 --> 58:09.460
+ And that kind of information helps build trust and helps build the alignment of goals, at
+
+58:09.460 --> 58:12.300
+ least awareness that your goals, your values are aligned.
+
+58:12.300 --> 58:17.620
+ And I think even in the very short term, if you look at how today, this absolutely pathetic
+
+58:17.620 --> 58:25.980
+ state of cybersecurity that we have, where is it, 3 billion Yahoo accounts are packed
+
+58:25.980 --> 58:34.300
+ and almost every American's credit card and so on, you know, why is this happening?
+
+58:34.300 --> 58:39.940
+ It's ultimately happening because we have software that nobody fully understood how
+
+58:39.940 --> 58:41.460
+ it worked.
+
+58:41.460 --> 58:45.100
+ That's why the bugs hadn't been found, right?
+
+58:45.100 --> 58:50.340
+ And I think AI can be used very effectively for offense for hacking, but it can also be
+
+58:50.340 --> 59:00.580
+ used for defense, hopefully, automating verifiability and creating systems that are built in different
+
+59:00.580 --> 59:03.140
+ ways so you can actually prove things about them.
+
+59:03.140 --> 59:05.460
+ And it's important.
+
+59:05.460 --> 59:09.740
+ So speaking of software that nobody understands how it works, of course, a bunch of people
+
+59:09.740 --> 59:14.820
+ ask about your paper about your thoughts of why does deep and cheap learning work so well?
+
+59:14.820 --> 59:19.280
+ That's the paper, but what are your thoughts on deep learning, these kind of simplified
+
+59:19.280 --> 59:26.620
+ models of our own brains that have been able to do some successful perception work, pattern
+
+59:26.620 --> 59:30.940
+ recognition work, and now with AlphaZero and so on, do some clever things?
+
+59:30.940 --> 59:35.740
+ What are your thoughts about the promise limitations of this piece?
+
+59:35.740 --> 59:37.140
+ Great.
+
+59:37.140 --> 59:44.300
+ I think there are a number of very important insights, very important lessons we can always
+
+59:44.300 --> 59:47.340
+ draw from these kind of successes.
+
+59:47.340 --> 59:50.460
+ One of them is when you look at the human brain, you see it's very complicated, a tenth
+
+59:50.460 --> 59:54.140
+ of 11 neurons, and there are all these different kinds of neurons, and yada yada, and there's
+
+59:54.140 --> 59:57.980
+ been this long debate about whether the fact that we have dozens of different kinds is
+
+59:57.980 --> 1:00:01.580
+ actually necessary for intelligence.
+
+1:00:01.580 --> 1:00:06.500
+ We can now, I think, quite convincingly answer that question of no, it's enough to have just
+
+1:00:06.500 --> 1:00:07.500
+ one kind.
+
+1:00:07.500 --> 1:00:11.780
+ If you look under the hood of AlphaZero, there's only one kind of neuron, and it's ridiculously
+
+1:00:11.780 --> 1:00:15.060
+ simple, a simple mathematical thing.
+
+1:00:15.060 --> 1:00:21.380
+ So it's just like in physics, if you have a gas with waves in it, it's not the detailed
+
+1:00:21.380 --> 1:00:24.380
+ nature of the molecules that matter.
+
+1:00:24.380 --> 1:00:27.060
+ It's the collective behavior, somehow.
+
+1:00:27.060 --> 1:00:33.060
+ Similarly, it's this higher level structure of the network that matters, not that you
+
+1:00:33.060 --> 1:00:34.060
+ have 20 kinds of neurons.
+
+1:00:34.060 --> 1:00:41.740
+ I think our brain is such a complicated mess because it wasn't evolved just to be intelligent,
+
+1:00:41.740 --> 1:00:51.740
+ it was evolved to also be self assembling, and self repairing, and evolutionarily attainable.
+
+1:00:51.740 --> 1:00:53.660
+ And patches and so on.
+
+1:00:53.660 --> 1:00:58.700
+ So I think it's pretty, my hunch is that we're going to understand how to build AGI before
+
+1:00:58.700 --> 1:01:01.060
+ we fully understand how our brains work.
+
+1:01:01.060 --> 1:01:06.260
+ Just like we understood how to build flying machines long before we were able to build
+
+1:01:06.260 --> 1:01:07.260
+ a mechanical bird.
+
+1:01:07.260 --> 1:01:08.260
+ Yeah, that's right.
+
+1:01:08.260 --> 1:01:15.300
+ You've given the example of mechanical birds and airplanes, and airplanes do a pretty good
+
+1:01:15.300 --> 1:01:18.620
+ job of flying without really mimicking bird flight.
+
+1:01:18.620 --> 1:01:23.180
+ And even now, after 100 years later, did you see the TED talk with this German group of
+
+1:01:23.180 --> 1:01:24.180
+ mechanical birds?
+
+1:01:24.180 --> 1:01:25.180
+ I did not.
+
+1:01:25.180 --> 1:01:26.180
+ I've heard you mention it.
+
+1:01:26.180 --> 1:01:27.180
+ Check it out.
+
+1:01:27.180 --> 1:01:28.180
+ It's amazing.
+
+1:01:28.180 --> 1:01:30.180
+ But even after that, we still don't fly in mechanical birds because it turned out the
+
+1:01:30.180 --> 1:01:34.580
+ way we came up with simpler, and it's better for our purposes, and I think it might be the
+
+1:01:34.580 --> 1:01:35.580
+ same there.
+
+1:01:35.580 --> 1:01:38.140
+ So that's one lesson.
+
+1:01:38.140 --> 1:01:42.020
+ Another lesson is one of what our paper was about.
+
+1:01:42.020 --> 1:01:47.420
+ Well, first, as a physicist thought, it was fascinating how there's a very close mathematical
+
+1:01:47.420 --> 1:01:50.900
+ relationship, actually, between our artificial neural networks.
+
+1:01:50.900 --> 1:01:56.580
+ And a lot of things that we've studied for in physics go by nerdy names like the renormalization
+
+1:01:56.580 --> 1:02:01.100
+ group equation and Hamiltonians and yada, yada, yada.
+
+1:02:01.100 --> 1:02:11.380
+ And when you look a little more closely at this, you have, at first, I was like, well,
+
+1:02:11.380 --> 1:02:18.700
+ there's something crazy here that doesn't make sense because we know that if you even
+
+1:02:18.700 --> 1:02:23.380
+ want to build a super simple neural network to tell apart cat pictures and dog pictures,
+
+1:02:23.380 --> 1:02:27.260
+ right, that you can do that very, very well now.
+
+1:02:27.260 --> 1:02:31.540
+ But if you think about it a little bit, you convince yourself it must be impossible because
+
+1:02:31.540 --> 1:02:36.420
+ if I have one megapixel, even if each pixel is just black or white, there's two to the
+
+1:02:36.420 --> 1:02:40.900
+ power of one million possible images, which is way more than there are atoms in our universe.
+
+1:02:40.900 --> 1:02:47.220
+ So in order to, and then for each one of those, I have to assign a number, which is the probability
+
+1:02:47.220 --> 1:02:49.100
+ that it's a dog.
+
+1:02:49.100 --> 1:02:55.900
+ So an arbitrary function of images is a list of more numbers than there are atoms in our
+
+1:02:55.900 --> 1:02:56.900
+ universe.
+
+1:02:56.900 --> 1:03:02.220
+ So clearly, I can't store that under the hood of my, my GPU or my, my computer yet somehow
+
+1:03:02.220 --> 1:03:03.220
+ works.
+
+1:03:03.220 --> 1:03:04.220
+ So what does that mean?
+
+1:03:04.220 --> 1:03:12.940
+ Well, it means that out of all of the problems that you could try to solve with a neural network,
+
+1:03:12.940 --> 1:03:17.940
+ almost all of them are impossible to solve with a reasonably sized one.
+
+1:03:17.940 --> 1:03:24.820
+ But then what we showed in our paper was, was that the, the fraction, the kind of problems,
+
+1:03:24.820 --> 1:03:29.740
+ the fraction of all the problems that you could possibly pose that the, that we actually
+
+1:03:29.740 --> 1:03:34.980
+ care about given the laws of physics is also an infinitesimally tiny little part.
+
+1:03:34.980 --> 1:03:37.180
+ And amazingly, they're basically the same part.
+
+1:03:37.180 --> 1:03:38.180
+ Yeah.
+
+1:03:38.180 --> 1:03:41.180
+ It's almost like our world was created for, I mean, they kind of come together.
+
+1:03:41.180 --> 1:03:42.180
+ Yeah.
+
+1:03:42.180 --> 1:03:44.940
+ You, but you could say maybe where the world created the world that the world was created
+
+1:03:44.940 --> 1:03:50.300
+ for us, but I have a more modest interpretation, which is that instead evolution endowments
+
+1:03:50.300 --> 1:03:54.700
+ with neural networks, precisely for that reason, because this particular architecture has
+
+1:03:54.700 --> 1:04:02.380
+ opposed to the one in your laptop is very, very well adapted to solving the kind of problems
+
+1:04:02.380 --> 1:04:05.540
+ that nature kept presenting our ancestors with, right?
+
+1:04:05.540 --> 1:04:09.380
+ So it makes sense that why do we have a brain in the first place?
+
+1:04:09.380 --> 1:04:12.940
+ It's to be able to make predictions about the future and so on.
+
+1:04:12.940 --> 1:04:17.580
+ So if we had a sucky system, which could never solve it, it wouldn't have a lot.
+
+1:04:17.580 --> 1:04:23.420
+ So, but it's, so this is, this is a, I think a very beautiful fact.
+
+1:04:23.420 --> 1:04:24.420
+ Yeah.
+
+1:04:24.420 --> 1:04:28.780
+ And you also realize that there's, there, that we, there've been, it's been earlier
+
+1:04:28.780 --> 1:04:34.140
+ work on, on why deeper networks are good, but we were able to show an additional cool
+
+1:04:34.140 --> 1:04:40.260
+ fact there, which is that even incredibly simple problems, like suppose I give you a
+
+1:04:40.260 --> 1:04:45.020
+ thousand numbers and ask you to multiply them together and you can write a few lines of
+
+1:04:45.020 --> 1:04:46.820
+ code, boom, done, trivial.
+
+1:04:46.820 --> 1:04:52.580
+ If you just try to do that with a neural network that has only one single hidden layer in it,
+
+1:04:52.580 --> 1:04:59.940
+ you can do it, but you're going to need two to the power of thousand neurons to multiply
+
+1:04:59.940 --> 1:05:03.260
+ a thousand numbers, which is again, more neurons than their atoms in our universe.
+
+1:05:03.260 --> 1:05:05.740
+ So that's fascinating.
+
+1:05:05.740 --> 1:05:11.580
+ But if you allow, if you allow yourself, make it a deep network of many layers, you only
+
+1:05:11.580 --> 1:05:15.340
+ need four thousand neurons, it's perfectly feasible.
+
+1:05:15.340 --> 1:05:17.500
+ So that's really interesting.
+
+1:05:17.500 --> 1:05:18.500
+ Yeah.
+
+1:05:18.500 --> 1:05:19.500
+ Yeah.
+
+1:05:19.500 --> 1:05:24.460
+ So architecture type, I mean, you mentioned Schrodinger's equation and what are your thoughts
+
+1:05:24.460 --> 1:05:32.860
+ about quantum computing and the role of this kind of computational unit in creating an
+
+1:05:32.860 --> 1:05:34.900
+ intelligent system?
+
+1:05:34.900 --> 1:05:41.100
+ In some Hollywood movies that I don't mention my name because I don't want to spoil them.
+
+1:05:41.100 --> 1:05:46.820
+ The way they get AGI is building a quantum computer because the word quantum sounds
+
+1:05:46.820 --> 1:05:47.820
+ cool and so on.
+
+1:05:47.820 --> 1:05:48.820
+ That's right.
+
+1:05:48.820 --> 1:05:54.940
+ But first of all, I think we don't need quantum computers to build AGI.
+
+1:05:54.940 --> 1:06:01.740
+ I suspect your brain is not quantum computer in any found sense.
+
+1:06:01.740 --> 1:06:03.460
+ So you don't even wrote a paper about that.
+
+1:06:03.460 --> 1:06:09.060
+ Many years ago, I calculated the so called decoherence time that how long it takes until
+
+1:06:09.060 --> 1:06:16.900
+ the quantum computerness of what your neurons are doing gets erased by just random noise
+
+1:06:16.900 --> 1:06:21.420
+ from the environment and it's about 10 to the minus 21 seconds.
+
+1:06:21.420 --> 1:06:27.420
+ So as cool as it would be to have a quantum computer in my head, I don't think that fast.
+
+1:06:27.420 --> 1:06:35.820
+ On the other hand, there are very cool things you could do with quantum computers or I think
+
+1:06:35.820 --> 1:06:40.780
+ we'll be able to do soon when we get bigger ones that might actually help machine learning
+
+1:06:40.780 --> 1:06:43.180
+ do even better than the brain.
+
+1:06:43.180 --> 1:06:58.620
+ So for example, one, this is just a moonshot, but hey, learning is very much same thing
+
+1:06:58.620 --> 1:07:00.860
+ as search.
+
+1:07:00.860 --> 1:07:05.460
+ If you're trying to train a neural network to get really learned to do something really
+
+1:07:05.460 --> 1:07:10.820
+ well, you have some loss function, you have a bunch of knobs you can turn represented
+
+1:07:10.820 --> 1:07:14.420
+ by a bunch of numbers and you're trying to tweak them so that it becomes as good as possible
+
+1:07:14.420 --> 1:07:15.420
+ at this thing.
+
+1:07:15.420 --> 1:07:22.580
+ So if you think of a landscape with some valley, where each dimension of the landscape corresponds
+
+1:07:22.580 --> 1:07:25.780
+ to some number you can change, you're trying to find the minimum.
+
+1:07:25.780 --> 1:07:29.980
+ And it's well known that if you have a very high dimensional landscape, complicated things,
+
+1:07:29.980 --> 1:07:34.140
+ it's super hard to find the minimum.
+
+1:07:34.140 --> 1:07:37.500
+ Quantum mechanics is amazingly good at this.
+
+1:07:37.500 --> 1:07:42.980
+ If I want to know what's the lowest energy state this water can possibly have incredibly
+
+1:07:42.980 --> 1:07:47.860
+ hard to compute, but nature will happily figure this out for you if you just cool it down,
+
+1:07:47.860 --> 1:07:50.860
+ make it very, very cold.
+
+1:07:50.860 --> 1:07:55.260
+ If you put a ball somewhere, it'll roll down to its minimum and this happens metaphorically
+
+1:07:55.260 --> 1:07:57.620
+ at the energy landscape too.
+
+1:07:57.620 --> 1:08:02.940
+ And quantum mechanics even uses some clever tricks which today's machine learning systems
+
+1:08:02.940 --> 1:08:03.940
+ don't.
+
+1:08:03.940 --> 1:08:07.940
+ If you're trying to find the minimum and you get stuck in the little local minimum here
+
+1:08:07.940 --> 1:08:14.180
+ in quantum mechanics, you can actually tunnel through the barrier and get unstuck again.
+
+1:08:14.180 --> 1:08:15.420
+ And that's really interesting.
+
+1:08:15.420 --> 1:08:16.420
+ Yeah.
+
+1:08:16.420 --> 1:08:22.940
+ So maybe for example, we'll one day use quantum computers that help train neural networks
+
+1:08:22.940 --> 1:08:23.940
+ better.
+
+1:08:23.940 --> 1:08:24.940
+ That's really interesting.
+
+1:08:24.940 --> 1:08:25.940
+ Okay.
+
+1:08:25.940 --> 1:08:32.020
+ So as a component of kind of the learning process, for example, let me ask sort of wrapping
+
+1:08:32.020 --> 1:08:34.060
+ up here a little bit.
+
+1:08:34.060 --> 1:08:40.540
+ Let me return to the questions of our human nature and love, as I mentioned.
+
+1:08:40.540 --> 1:08:48.020
+ So do you think you mentioned sort of a helper robot that you could think of also personal
+
+1:08:48.020 --> 1:08:49.020
+ robots.
+
+1:08:49.020 --> 1:08:55.300
+ Do you think the way we human beings fall in love and get connected to each other is
+
+1:08:55.300 --> 1:09:00.420
+ possible to achieve in an AI system and human level AI intelligence system.
+
+1:09:00.420 --> 1:09:06.100
+ Do you think we would ever see that kind of connection or, you know, in all this discussion
+
+1:09:06.100 --> 1:09:11.460
+ about solving complex goals, as this kind of human social connection, do you think that's
+
+1:09:11.460 --> 1:09:16.460
+ one of the goals on the peaks and valleys that were the raising sea levels that we'd
+
+1:09:16.460 --> 1:09:17.460
+ be able to achieve?
+
+1:09:17.460 --> 1:09:22.180
+ Or do you think that's something that's ultimately, or at least in the short term, relative to
+
+1:09:22.180 --> 1:09:23.620
+ the other goals is not achievable?
+
+1:09:23.620 --> 1:09:25.220
+ I think it's all possible.
+
+1:09:25.220 --> 1:09:31.780
+ And I mean, in recent, there's a very wide range of guesses, as you know, among AI researchers
+
+1:09:31.780 --> 1:09:35.300
+ when we're going to get AGI.
+
+1:09:35.300 --> 1:09:39.620
+ Some people, you know, like our friend Rodney Brooks said, it's going to be hundreds of
+
+1:09:39.620 --> 1:09:41.140
+ years at least.
+
+1:09:41.140 --> 1:09:44.780
+ And then there are many others that think it's going to happen relatively much sooner.
+
+1:09:44.780 --> 1:09:52.140
+ Recent polls, maybe half or so, AI researchers think we're going to get AGI within decades.
+
+1:09:52.140 --> 1:09:56.260
+ So if that happens, of course, then I think these things are all possible.
+
+1:09:56.260 --> 1:10:01.860
+ But in terms of whether it will happen, I think we shouldn't spend so much time asking,
+
+1:10:01.860 --> 1:10:04.260
+ what do we think will happen in the future?
+
+1:10:04.260 --> 1:10:08.980
+ As if we are just some sort of pathetic, passive bystanders, you know, waiting for the future
+
+1:10:08.980 --> 1:10:12.740
+ to happen to us, hey, we're the ones creating this future, right?
+
+1:10:12.740 --> 1:10:18.340
+ So we should be proactive about it and ask ourselves what sort of future we would like
+
+1:10:18.340 --> 1:10:19.340
+ to have happen.
+
+1:10:19.340 --> 1:10:20.340
+ That's right.
+
+1:10:20.340 --> 1:10:21.340
+ Trying to make it like that.
+
+1:10:21.340 --> 1:10:25.660
+ Well, what I prefer is some sort of incredibly boring zombie like future where there's all
+
+1:10:25.660 --> 1:10:30.220
+ these mechanical things happening and there's no passion, no emotion, no experience, maybe
+
+1:10:30.220 --> 1:10:31.220
+ even.
+
+1:10:31.220 --> 1:10:35.740
+ No, I would, of course, much rather prefer it if all the things that we find that we
+
+1:10:35.740 --> 1:10:44.180
+ value the most about humanity are a subjective experience, passion, inspiration, love, you
+
+1:10:44.180 --> 1:10:50.780
+ know, if we can create a future where those things do exist.
+
+1:10:50.780 --> 1:10:56.500
+ You know, I think ultimately it's not our universe giving meaning to us, it's us giving
+
+1:10:56.500 --> 1:10:58.500
+ meaning to our universe.
+
+1:10:58.500 --> 1:11:03.620
+ And if we build more advanced intelligence, let's make sure we build it in such a way
+
+1:11:03.620 --> 1:11:09.100
+ that meaning is part of it.
+
+1:11:09.100 --> 1:11:13.900
+ A lot of people that seriously study this problem and think of it from different angles have
+
+1:11:13.900 --> 1:11:20.140
+ trouble in the majority of cases, if they think through that happen, are the ones that
+
+1:11:20.140 --> 1:11:22.620
+ are not beneficial to humanity.
+
+1:11:22.620 --> 1:11:27.260
+ And so, yeah, so what are your thoughts?
+
+1:11:27.260 --> 1:11:33.820
+ What should people, you know, I really don't like people to be terrified, what's the way
+
+1:11:33.820 --> 1:11:38.660
+ for people to think about it in a way that, in a way we can solve it and we can make it
+
+1:11:38.660 --> 1:11:39.660
+ better.
+
+1:11:39.660 --> 1:11:40.660
+ Yeah.
+
+1:11:40.660 --> 1:11:44.780
+ No, I don't think panicking is going to help in any way, it's not going to increase chances
+
+1:11:44.780 --> 1:11:46.060
+ of things going well either.
+
+1:11:46.060 --> 1:11:49.340
+ Even if you are in a situation where there is a real threat, does it help if everybody
+
+1:11:49.340 --> 1:11:50.620
+ just freaks out?
+
+1:11:50.620 --> 1:11:51.620
+ Right.
+
+1:11:51.620 --> 1:11:53.620
+ No, of course not.
+
+1:11:53.620 --> 1:11:59.740
+ I think, yeah, there are, of course, ways in which things can go horribly wrong.
+
+1:11:59.740 --> 1:12:04.460
+ First of all, it's important when we think about this thing, this, about the problems
+
+1:12:04.460 --> 1:12:08.780
+ and risks, to also remember how huge the upsides can be if we get it right.
+
+1:12:08.780 --> 1:12:13.420
+ Everything we love about society and civilization is a product of intelligence.
+
+1:12:13.420 --> 1:12:17.980
+ So if we can amplify our intelligence with machine intelligence and not anymore lose
+
+1:12:17.980 --> 1:12:23.380
+ our loved ones, what we're told is an uncurable disease and things like this, of course, we
+
+1:12:23.380 --> 1:12:24.940
+ should aspire to that.
+
+1:12:24.940 --> 1:12:28.700
+ So that can be a motivator, I think, reminding yourselves that the reason we try to solve
+
+1:12:28.700 --> 1:12:34.140
+ problems is not just because we're trying to avoid gloom, but because we're trying to
+
+1:12:34.140 --> 1:12:35.900
+ do something great.
+
+1:12:35.900 --> 1:12:43.340
+ But then in terms of the risks, I think the really important question is to ask, what
+
+1:12:43.340 --> 1:12:47.740
+ can we do today that will actually help make the outcome good, right?
+
+1:12:47.740 --> 1:12:52.700
+ And dismissing the risk is not one of them, you know, I find it quite funny often when
+
+1:12:52.700 --> 1:13:01.540
+ I'm in discussion panels about these things, how the people who work for companies will
+
+1:13:01.540 --> 1:13:05.100
+ always be like, oh, nothing to worry about, nothing to worry about, nothing to worry about.
+
+1:13:05.100 --> 1:13:09.980
+ And it's always, it's only academics sometimes express concerns.
+
+1:13:09.980 --> 1:13:10.980
+ That's not surprising at all.
+
+1:13:10.980 --> 1:13:17.500
+ If you think about it, often Sinclair quipped, right, that it's hard to make a man believe
+
+1:13:17.500 --> 1:13:20.620
+ in something when his income depends on not believing in it.
+
+1:13:20.620 --> 1:13:25.580
+ And frankly, we know a lot of these people in companies that they're just as concerned
+
+1:13:25.580 --> 1:13:26.580
+ as anyone else.
+
+1:13:26.580 --> 1:13:30.300
+ But if you're the CEO of a company, that's not something you want to go on record saying
+
+1:13:30.300 --> 1:13:34.980
+ when you have silly journalists who are going to put a picture of a Terminator robot when
+
+1:13:34.980 --> 1:13:35.980
+ they quote you.
+
+1:13:35.980 --> 1:13:39.380
+ So, so the issues are real.
+
+1:13:39.380 --> 1:13:45.660
+ And the way I think about what the issue is, is basically, you know, the real choice we
+
+1:13:45.660 --> 1:13:51.980
+ have is, first of all, are we going to dismiss this, the risks and say, well, you know, let's
+
+1:13:51.980 --> 1:13:57.140
+ just go ahead and build machines that can do everything we can do better and cheaper,
+
+1:13:57.140 --> 1:14:00.940
+ you know, let's just make ourselves obsolete as fast as possible or what could possibly
+
+1:14:00.940 --> 1:14:01.940
+ go wrong.
+
+1:14:01.940 --> 1:14:02.940
+ Right.
+
+1:14:02.940 --> 1:14:03.940
+ That's one attitude.
+
+1:14:03.940 --> 1:14:09.380
+ The opposite attitude that I think is to say, it's incredible potential, you know, let's
+
+1:14:09.380 --> 1:14:14.900
+ think about what kind of future we're really, really excited about.
+
+1:14:14.900 --> 1:14:18.700
+ What are the shared goals that we can really aspire towards?
+
+1:14:18.700 --> 1:14:22.100
+ And then let's think really hard about how we can actually get there.
+
+1:14:22.100 --> 1:14:23.100
+ So start with it.
+
+1:14:23.100 --> 1:14:24.460
+ Don't start thinking about the risks.
+
+1:14:24.460 --> 1:14:26.940
+ Start thinking about the goals.
+
+1:14:26.940 --> 1:14:30.540
+ And then when you do that, then you can think about the obstacles you want to avoid, right?
+
+1:14:30.540 --> 1:14:34.420
+ I often get students coming in right here into my office for career advice.
+
+1:14:34.420 --> 1:14:38.060
+ Always ask them this very question, where do you want to be in the future?
+
+1:14:38.060 --> 1:14:42.580
+ If all she can say is, oh, maybe I'll have cancer, maybe I'll run over by a truck.
+
+1:14:42.580 --> 1:14:44.420
+ Focus on the obstacles instead of the goal.
+
+1:14:44.420 --> 1:14:49.340
+ She's just going to end up a hypochondriac paranoid, whereas if she comes in and fire
+
+1:14:49.340 --> 1:14:54.060
+ in her eyes and is like, I want to be there, and then we can talk about the obstacles and
+
+1:14:54.060 --> 1:14:56.100
+ see how we can circumvent them.
+
+1:14:56.100 --> 1:14:59.100
+ That's I think a much, much healthier attitude.
+
+1:14:59.100 --> 1:15:01.540
+ And that's really what we're in.
+
+1:15:01.540 --> 1:15:09.420
+ And I feel it's very challenging to come up with a vision for the future, which we're
+
+1:15:09.420 --> 1:15:10.660
+ unequivocally excited about.
+
+1:15:10.660 --> 1:15:14.300
+ I'm not just talking now in the vague terms like, yeah, let's cure cancer.
+
+1:15:14.300 --> 1:15:18.500
+ I'm talking about what kind of society do we want to create?
+
+1:15:18.500 --> 1:15:25.380
+ What do we want it to mean to be human in the age of AI, in the age of AGI?
+
+1:15:25.380 --> 1:15:31.460
+ So if we can have this conversation, broad, inclusive conversation, and gradually start
+
+1:15:31.460 --> 1:15:38.100
+ converging towards some future with some direction at least that we want to steer towards, right?
+
+1:15:38.100 --> 1:15:42.340
+ Then we'll be much more motivated to constructively take on the obstacles.
+
+1:15:42.340 --> 1:15:54.260
+ And I think if I wrap this up in a more succinct way, I think we can all agree already now that
+
+1:15:54.260 --> 1:16:05.540
+ we should aspire to build AGI that doesn't overpower us, but that empowers us.
+
+1:16:05.540 --> 1:16:10.820
+ And think of the many various ways that can do that, whether that's from my side of the
+
+1:16:10.820 --> 1:16:12.860
+ world of autonomous vehicles.
+
+1:16:12.860 --> 1:16:17.020
+ I'm personally actually from the camp that believes this human level intelligence is
+
+1:16:17.020 --> 1:16:22.780
+ required to achieve something like vehicles that would actually be something we would
+
+1:16:22.780 --> 1:16:25.380
+ enjoy using and being part of.
+
+1:16:25.380 --> 1:16:26.380
+ So that's the one example.
+
+1:16:26.380 --> 1:16:31.140
+ And certainly there's a lot of other types of robots and medicine and so on.
+
+1:16:31.140 --> 1:16:35.300
+ So focusing on those and then coming up with the obstacles, coming up with the ways that
+
+1:16:35.300 --> 1:16:38.420
+ that can go wrong and solving those one at a time.
+
+1:16:38.420 --> 1:16:42.980
+ And just because you can build an autonomous vehicle, even if you could build one that
+
+1:16:42.980 --> 1:16:47.500
+ would drive this final AGI, maybe there are some things in life that we would actually
+
+1:16:47.500 --> 1:16:48.500
+ want to do ourselves.
+
+1:16:48.500 --> 1:16:49.500
+ That's right.
+
+1:16:49.500 --> 1:16:50.500
+ Right?
+
+1:16:50.500 --> 1:16:54.660
+ Like, for example, if you think of our society as a whole, there are some things that we
+
+1:16:54.660 --> 1:16:57.540
+ find very meaningful to do.
+
+1:16:57.540 --> 1:17:02.100
+ And that doesn't mean we have to stop doing them just because machines can do them better.
+
+1:17:02.100 --> 1:17:06.660
+ I'm not going to stop playing tennis just the day someone builds a tennis robot and
+
+1:17:06.660 --> 1:17:07.660
+ beat me.
+
+1:17:07.660 --> 1:17:09.900
+ People are still playing chess and even go.
+
+1:17:09.900 --> 1:17:10.900
+ Yeah.
+
+1:17:10.900 --> 1:17:19.100
+ And in this very near term, even some people are advocating basic income, replace jobs.
+
+1:17:19.100 --> 1:17:22.780
+ But if the government is going to be willing to just hand out cash to people for doing
+
+1:17:22.780 --> 1:17:27.660
+ nothing, then one should also seriously consider whether the government should also just hire
+
+1:17:27.660 --> 1:17:33.380
+ a lot more teachers and nurses and the kind of jobs which people often find great fulfillment
+
+1:17:33.380 --> 1:17:34.380
+ in doing, right?
+
+1:17:34.380 --> 1:17:38.900
+ We get very tired of hearing politicians saying, oh, we can't afford hiring more teachers,
+
+1:17:38.900 --> 1:17:41.700
+ but we're going to maybe have basic income.
+
+1:17:41.700 --> 1:17:46.340
+ If we can have more serious research and thought into what gives meaning to our lives, the
+
+1:17:46.340 --> 1:17:50.700
+ jobs give so much more than income, right?
+
+1:17:50.700 --> 1:18:00.020
+ And then think about, in the future, what are the roles that we want to have people
+
+1:18:00.020 --> 1:18:03.180
+ continually feeling empowered by machines?
+
+1:18:03.180 --> 1:18:08.900
+ And I think sort of, I come from the Russia, from the Soviet Union, and I think for a lot
+
+1:18:08.900 --> 1:18:14.100
+ of people in the 20th century, going to the moon, going to space was an inspiring thing.
+
+1:18:14.100 --> 1:18:21.300
+ I feel like the universe of the mind, so AI, understanding, creating intelligence is that
+
+1:18:21.300 --> 1:18:23.380
+ for the 21st century.
+
+1:18:23.380 --> 1:18:26.740
+ So it's really surprising, and I've heard you mention this, it's really surprising to
+
+1:18:26.740 --> 1:18:31.940
+ me both on the research funding side that it's not funded as greatly as it could be.
+
+1:18:31.940 --> 1:18:36.500
+ But most importantly, on the politician side, that it's not part of the public discourse
+
+1:18:36.500 --> 1:18:44.300
+ except in killer bots, terminator kind of view, that people are not yet, I think, perhaps
+
+1:18:44.300 --> 1:18:48.260
+ excited by the possible positive future that we can build together.
+
+1:18:48.260 --> 1:18:54.660
+ So we should be, because politicians usually just focus on the next election cycle, right?
+
+1:18:54.660 --> 1:18:59.340
+ The single most important thing I feel we humans have learned in the entire history of science
+
+1:18:59.340 --> 1:19:07.460
+ is they were the masters of underestimation, underestimated the size of our cosmos, again
+
+1:19:07.460 --> 1:19:11.380
+ and again, realizing that everything we thought existed was just a small part of something
+
+1:19:11.380 --> 1:19:12.380
+ grander, right?
+
+1:19:12.380 --> 1:19:18.580
+ Planet, solar system, the galaxy, clusters of galaxies, the universe.
+
+1:19:18.580 --> 1:19:25.700
+ And we now know that we have the future has just so much more potential than our ancestors
+
+1:19:25.700 --> 1:19:27.820
+ could ever have dreamt of.
+
+1:19:27.820 --> 1:19:39.820
+ This cosmos, imagine if all of Earth was completely devoid of life except for Cambridge, Massachusetts.
+
+1:19:39.820 --> 1:19:44.220
+ Wouldn't it be kind of lame if all we ever aspired to was to stay in Cambridge, Massachusetts
+
+1:19:44.220 --> 1:19:49.660
+ forever and then go extinct in one week, even though Earth was going to continue on for
+
+1:19:49.660 --> 1:19:50.660
+ longer?
+
+1:19:50.660 --> 1:19:57.300
+ That sort of attitude I think we have now on the cosmic scale, we can, life can flourish
+
+1:19:57.300 --> 1:20:00.820
+ on Earth, not for four years, but for billions of years.
+
+1:20:00.820 --> 1:20:06.340
+ I can even tell you about how to move it out of harm's way when the sun gets too hot.
+
+1:20:06.340 --> 1:20:11.900
+ And then we have so much more resources out here, which today, maybe there are a lot of
+
+1:20:11.900 --> 1:20:19.380
+ other planets with bacteria or cow like life on them, but most of this, all this opportunity
+
+1:20:19.380 --> 1:20:25.380
+ seems as far as we can tell to be largely dead, like the Sahara Desert, and yet we have the
+
+1:20:25.380 --> 1:20:30.380
+ opportunity to help life flourish around this for billions of years.
+
+1:20:30.380 --> 1:20:37.420
+ So like, let's quit squabbling about whether some little border should be drawn one mile
+
+1:20:37.420 --> 1:20:43.380
+ to the left or right and look up into the skies and realize, hey, we can do such incredible
+
+1:20:43.380 --> 1:20:44.380
+ things.
+
+1:20:44.380 --> 1:20:45.380
+ Yeah.
+
+1:20:45.380 --> 1:20:49.980
+ And that's I think why it's really exciting that you and others are connected with some
+
+1:20:49.980 --> 1:20:54.740
+ of the work Elon Musk is doing because he's literally going out into that space, really
+
+1:20:54.740 --> 1:20:56.260
+ exploring our universe.
+
+1:20:56.260 --> 1:20:57.260
+ And it's wonderful.
+
+1:20:57.260 --> 1:21:02.340
+ That is exactly why Elon Musk is so misunderstood, right?
+
+1:21:02.340 --> 1:21:05.300
+ Misconstrued with some kind of pessimistic doomsayer.
+
+1:21:05.300 --> 1:21:10.860
+ The reason he cares so much about AI safety is because he more than almost anyone else
+
+1:21:10.860 --> 1:21:13.340
+ appreciates these amazing opportunities.
+
+1:21:13.340 --> 1:21:16.340
+ It will squander if we wipe out here on Earth.
+
+1:21:16.340 --> 1:21:22.740
+ We're not just going to wipe out the next generation, but all generations and this incredible
+
+1:21:22.740 --> 1:21:25.580
+ opportunity that's out there and that would be really be a waste.
+
+1:21:25.580 --> 1:21:32.740
+ And AI, for people who think that there would be better to do without technology, let me
+
+1:21:32.740 --> 1:21:37.740
+ just mention that if we don't improve our technology, the question isn't whether humanity
+
+1:21:37.740 --> 1:21:38.740
+ is going to go extinct.
+
+1:21:38.740 --> 1:21:43.620
+ The question is just whether we're going to get taken out by the next big asteroid or
+
+1:21:43.620 --> 1:21:49.540
+ the next super volcano or something else dumb that we could easily prevent with more tech,
+
+1:21:49.540 --> 1:21:50.540
+ right?
+
+1:21:50.540 --> 1:21:56.220
+ If we want life to flourish throughout the cosmos, AI is the key to it.
+
+1:21:56.220 --> 1:22:04.780
+ As I mentioned in a lot of detail in my book, even many of the most inspired sci fi writers
+
+1:22:04.780 --> 1:22:11.580
+ I feel have totally underestimated the opportunities for space travel, especially to other galaxies,
+
+1:22:11.580 --> 1:22:17.100
+ because they weren't thinking about the possibility of AGI, which just makes it so much easier.
+
+1:22:17.100 --> 1:22:18.100
+ Right.
+
+1:22:18.100 --> 1:22:25.900
+ Yeah, so that goes to a view of AGI that enables our progress, that enables a better life.
+
+1:22:25.900 --> 1:22:30.060
+ So that's a beautiful way to put it and something to strive for.
+
+1:22:30.060 --> 1:22:31.580
+ So Max, thank you so much.
+
+1:22:31.580 --> 1:22:32.580
+ Thank you for your time today.
+
+1:22:32.580 --> 1:22:33.580
+ It's been awesome.
+
+1:22:33.580 --> 1:22:34.580
+ Thank you so much.
+
+1:22:34.580 --> 1:22:35.580
+ Thanks.
+
+1:22:35.580 --> 1:22:36.580
+ Merci beaucoup.
+
+1:22:36.580 --> 1:22:49.100
+ Thank you so much for your time today and thank you so much for your time and for your
+
+1:22:49.100 --> 1:22:50.100
+ time.
+
+1:22:50.100 --> 1:22:51.100
+ Thank you.
+
+1:22:51.100 --> 1:22:52.100
+ Thank you.
+
+1:22:52.100 --> 1:22:53.100
+ Bye.
+
+1:22:53.100 --> 1:22:54.100
+ Bye.
+
+1:22:54.100 --> 1:22:55.100
+ Bye.
+
+1:22:55.100 --> 1:22:56.100
+ Bye.
+
+1:22:56.100 --> 1:22:57.100
+ Bye.
+
+1:22:57.100 --> 1:22:58.100
+ Bye.
+
+1:22:58.100 --> 1:22:59.100
+ Bye.
+
+1:22:59.100 --> 1:23:00.100
+ Bye.
+