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- As part of MIT course 6S 099 Artificial General Intelligence, I've gotten the chance to sit
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- down with Max Tagmark.
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- He is a professor here at MIT, he's a physicist, spent a large part of his career studying the
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- mysteries of our cosmological universe, but he's also studied and delved into the beneficial
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- possibilities and the existential risks of artificial intelligence.
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- Amongst many other things, he's the cofounder of the Future of Life Institute, author of
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- two books, both of which I highly recommend.
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- First, our mathematical universe, second is Life 3.0.
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- He's truly an out of the box thinker and a fun personality, so I really enjoy talking
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- to him.
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- If you'd like to see more of these videos in the future, please subscribe and also click
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- the little bell icon to make sure you don't miss any videos.
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- Also, Twitter, LinkedIn, AGI.MIT.IDU, if you want to watch other lectures or conversations
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- like this one.
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- Better yet, go read Max's book, Life 3.0, chapter 7 on goals is my favorite.
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- It's really where philosophy and engineering come together and it opens with a quote by
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- Dostoevsky, the mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding
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- something to live for.
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- Lastly, I believe that every failure rewards us with an opportunity to learn, in that sense
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- I've been very fortunate to fail in so many new and exciting ways and this conversation
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- was no different.
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- I've learned about something called Radio Frequency Interference, RFI, look it up.
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- Apparently music and conversations from local radio stations can bleed into the audio that
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- you're recording in such a way that almost completely ruins that audio.
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- It's an exceptionally difficult sound source to remove.
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- So, I've gotten the opportunity to learn how to avoid RFI in the future during recording
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- sessions.
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- I've also gotten the opportunity to learn how to use Adobe Audition and iZotope RX6
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- to do some audio repair.
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- Of course, this is an exceptionally difficult noise to remove.
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- I am an engineer, I'm not an audio engineer, neither is anybody else in our group, but
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- we did our best.
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- Nevertheless, I thank you for your patience and I hope you're still able to enjoy this
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- conversation.
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- Do you think there's intelligent life out there in the universe?
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- Let's open up with an easy question.
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- I have a minority view here actually.
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- When I give public lectures, I often ask for show of hands who thinks there's intelligent
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- life out there somewhere else and almost everyone puts their hands up and when I ask why, they'll
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- be like, oh, there's so many galaxies out there, there's got to be.
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- But I'm a number nerd, right?
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- So when you look more carefully at it, it's not so clear at all.
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- When we talk about our universe, first of all, we don't mean all of space.
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- We actually mean, I don't know, you can throw me the universe if you want, it's behind you
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- there.
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- We simply mean the spherical region of space from which light has had time to reach us
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- so far during the 13.8 billion years since our big bang.
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- There's more space here, but this is what we call a universe because that's all we have
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- access to.
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- So is there intelligent life here that's gotten to the point of building telescopes and computers?
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- My guess is no, actually, the probability of it happening on any given planet is some
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- number we don't know what it is.
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- And what we do know is that the number can't be super high because there's over a billion
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- Earth like planets in the Milky Way galaxy alone, many of which are billions of years
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- older than Earth, and aside from some UFO believers, you know, there isn't much evidence
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- that any super advanced civilization has come here at all.
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- And so that's the famous Fermi paradox, right?
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- And then if you work the numbers, what you find is that if you have no clue what the
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- probability is of getting life on a given planet, so it could be 10 to the minus 10,
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- 10 to the minus 20, or 10 to the minus two, or any power of 10 is sort of equally likely
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- if you want to be really open minded, that translates into it being equally likely that
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- our nearest neighbor is 10 to the 16 meters away, 10 to the 17 meters away, 10 to the
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- 18.
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- Now, by the time you get much less than 10 to the 16 already, we pretty much know there
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- is nothing else that's close.
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- And when you get because it would have discovered us, they, yeah, they would have discovered
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- us longer or if they're really close, we would have probably noted some engineering projects
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- that they're doing.
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- And if it's beyond 10 to the 26 meters, that's already outside of here.
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- So my guess is actually that there are, we are the only life in here that's gotten the
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- point of building advanced tech, which I think is very, puts a lot of responsibility on our
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- shoulders, not screw up, you know, I think people who take for granted that it's okay
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- for us to screw up, have an accidental nuclear war or go extinct somehow because there's
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- a sort of Star Trek like situation out there where some other life forms are going to come
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- and bail us out and it doesn't matter so much.
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- I think they're leveling us into a false sense of security.
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- I think it's much more prudent to say, let's be really grateful for this amazing opportunity
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- we've had and make the best of it just in case it is down to us.
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- So from a physics perspective, do you think intelligent life, so it's unique from a sort
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- of statistical view of the size of the universe, but from the basic matter of the universe,
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- how difficult is it for intelligent life to come about with the kind of advanced tech
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- building life is implied in your statement that it's really difficult to create something
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- like a human species?
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- Well, I think what we know is that going from no life to having life that can do our level
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- of tech, there's some sort of to going beyond that than actually settling our whole universe
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- with life.
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- There's some road major roadblock there, which is some great filter as I just sometimes called
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- which, which tough to get through, it's either that that roadblock is either behind us or
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- in front of us.
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- I'm hoping very much that it's behind us.
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- I'm super excited every time we get a new report from NASA saying they failed to find
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- any life on Mars, because that suggests that the hard part, maybe it was getting the first
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- ribosome or some some very low level kind of stepping stone.
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- So they were home free because if that's true, then the future is really only limited by
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- our own imagination.
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- It would be much suckier if it turns out that this level of life is kind of a diamond dozen,
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- but maybe there's some other problem.
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- Like as soon as a civilization gets advanced technology within 100 years, they get into
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- some stupid fight with themselves and poof, you know, that would be a bummer.
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- Yeah.
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- So you've explored the mysteries of the universe, the cosmological universe, the one that's
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- between us today, I think you've also begun to explore the other universe, which is sort
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- of the mystery, the mysterious universe of the mind of intelligence, of intelligent life.
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- So is there a common thread between your interests or the way you think about space and intelligence?
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- Oh, yeah.
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- When I was a teenager, I was already very fascinated by the biggest questions and I felt that the
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- two biggest mysteries of all in science were our universe out there and our universe in
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- here.
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- Yeah.
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- So it's quite natural after having spent a quarter of a century on my career thinking
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- a lot about this one.
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- And now I'm indulging in the luxury of doing research on this one.
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- It's just so cool.
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- I feel the time is ripe now for you transparently deepening our understanding of this.
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- Just start exploring this one.
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- Yeah, because I think a lot of people view intelligence as something mysterious that
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- can only exist in biological organisms like us and therefore dismiss all talk about artificial
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- general intelligence is science fiction.
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- But from my perspective as a physicist, I am a blob of quirks and electrons moving around
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- in a certain pattern and processing information in certain ways.
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- And this is also a blob of quirks and electrons.
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- I'm not smarter than the water bottle because I'm made of different kind of quirks.
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- I'm made of up quirks and down quirks exact same kind as this.
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- It's a there's no secret sauce, I think in me, it's it's all about the pattern of the
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- information processing.
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- And this means that there's no law of physics saying that we can't create technology, which
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- can help us by being incredibly intelligent and help us crack mysteries that we couldn't.
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- In other words, I think we've really only seen the tip of the intelligence iceberg so
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- far.
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- Yeah.
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- So the perceptronium, yeah, so you coined this amazing term, it's a hypothetical state
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- of matter, sort of thinking from a physics perspective, what is the kind of matter that
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- can help as you're saying, subjective experience emerge, consciousness emerge.
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- So how do you think about consciousness from this physics perspective?
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- Very good question.
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- So, again, I think many people have underestimated our ability to make progress on this by convincing
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- themselves it's hopeless because somehow we're missing some ingredient that we need.
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- There's some new consciousness particle or whatever.
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- I happen to think that we're not missing anything and that it's not the interesting thing about
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- consciousness that gives us this amazing subjective experience of colors and sounds and emotions
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- and so on is rather something at the higher level about the patterns of information processing.
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- And that's why I like to think about this idea of perceptronium.
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- What does it mean for an arbitrary physical system to be conscious in terms of what its
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- particles are doing or its information is doing?
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- I hate carbon chauvinism, this attitude, you have to be made of carbon atoms to be smart
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- or conscious.
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- So something about the information processing that this kind of matter performs.
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- Yeah, and you can see I have my favorite equations here describing various fundamental
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- aspects of the world.
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- I think one day, maybe someone who's watching this will come up with the equations that
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- information processing has to satisfy to be conscious.
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- And I'm quite convinced there is big discovery to be made there because let's face it, we
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- know that some information processing is conscious because we are conscious.
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- But we also know that a lot of information processing is not conscious.
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- Most of the information processing happening in your brain right now is not conscious.
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- There are like 10 megabytes per second coming in even just through your visual system.
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- You're not conscious about your heartbeat regulation or most things.
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- Even if I just ask you to read what it says here, you look at it and then, oh, now you
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- know what it said.
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- But you're not aware of how the computation actually happened.
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- Your consciousness is like the CEO that got an email at the end with the final answer.
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- So what is it that makes a difference?
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- I think that's both a great science mystery, we're actually studying it a little bit in
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- my lab here at MIT, but I also think it's a really urgent question to answer.
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- For starters, I mean, if you're an emergency room doctor and you have an unresponsive patient
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- coming in, wouldn't it be great if in addition to having a CT scanner, you had a conscious
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- scanner that could figure out whether this person is actually having locked in syndrome
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- or is actually comatose.
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- And in the future, imagine if we build robots or the machine that we can have really good
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- conversations with, I think it's very likely to happen, right?
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- Wouldn't you want to know if your home helper robot is actually experiencing anything or
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- just like a zombie?
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- Would you prefer it?
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- What would you prefer?
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- Would you prefer that it's actually unconscious so that you don't have to feel guilty about
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- switching it off or giving boring chores?
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- What would you prefer?
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- Well, certainly we would prefer, I would prefer the appearance of consciousness, but the question
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- is whether the appearance of consciousness is different than consciousness itself.
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- And sort of ask that as a question, do you think we need to understand what consciousness
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- is, solve the hard problem of consciousness in order to build something like an AGI system?
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- No.
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- I don't think that.
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- I think we will probably be able to build things even if we don't answer that question.
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- But if we want to make sure that what happens is a good thing, we better solve it first.
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- So it's a wonderful controversy you're raising there, where you have basically three points
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- of view about the hard problem.
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- There are two different points of view that both conclude that the hard problem of consciousness
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- is BS.
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- On one hand, you have some people like Daniel Dennett who say that consciousness is just
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- BS because consciousness is the same thing as intelligence.
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- There's no difference.
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- So anything which acts conscious is conscious, just like we are.
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- And then there are also a lot of people, including many top AI researchers I know, who say, oh,
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- consciousness is just bullshit because of course machines can never be conscious.
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- They're always going to skiddy zombies, never have to feel guilty about how you treat them.
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- And then there's a third group of people, including Giulio Tononi, for example, and another, and
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- Gustav Koch and a number of others, I would put myself on this middle camp who say that
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- actually some information processing is conscious and some is not.
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- So let's find the equation which can be used to determine which it is.
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- And I think we've just been a little bit lazy kind of running away from this problem for
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- a long time.
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- It's been almost taboo to even mention the C word in a lot of circles because, but we
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- should stop making excuses.
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- This is a science question and there are ways we can even test any theory that makes predictions
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- for this.
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- And coming back to this helper robot, I mean, so you said you would want your helper robot
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- to certainly act conscious and treat you, like have conversations with you and stuff.
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- But wouldn't you, would you feel a little bit creeped out if you realized that it was
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- just a glossed up tape recorder, you know, that was just zombie and it's a faking emotion?
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- Would you prefer that it actually had an experience or would you prefer that it's actually not
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- experiencing anything so you feel, you don't have to feel guilty about what you do to it?
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- It's such a difficult question because, you know, it's like when you're in a relationship
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- and you say, well, I love you and the other person said I love you back.
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- It's like asking, well, do they really love you back or are they just saying they love
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- you back?
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- Don't you really want them to actually love you?
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- It's hard to, it's hard to really know the difference between everything seeming like
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- there's consciousness present, there's intelligence present, there's affection, passion, love,
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- and it actually being there.
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- I'm not sure.
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- Do you have...
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- Can I ask you a question about this?
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- Yes.
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- To make it a bit more pointed.
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- So Mass General Hospital is right across the river, right?
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- Suppose you're going in for a medical procedure and they're like, you know, for anesthesia
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- what we're going to do is we're going to give you muscle relaxance so you won't be able
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- to move and you're going to feel excruciating pain during the whole surgery but you won't
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- be able to do anything about it.
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- But then we're going to give you this drug that erases your memory of it.
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- Would you be cool about that?
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- What's the difference that you're conscious about it or not if there's no behavioral change,
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- right?
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- Right.
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- And that's a really clear way to put it.
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- Yeah, it feels like in that sense, experiencing it is a valuable quality.
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- 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?
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-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.
-