As part of MIT course 6S 099 Artificial General Intelligence, I've gotten the chance to sit
down with Max Tagmark.
He is a professor here at MIT, he's a physicist, spent a large part of his career studying the
mysteries of our cosmological universe, but he's also studied and delved into the beneficial
possibilities and the existential risks of artificial intelligence.
Amongst many other things, he's the cofounder of the Future of Life Institute, author of
two books, both of which I highly recommend.
First, our mathematical universe, second is Life 3.0.
He's truly an out of the box thinker and a fun personality, so I really enjoy talking
to him.
If you'd like to see more of these videos in the future, please subscribe and also click
the little bell icon to make sure you don't miss any videos.
Also, Twitter, LinkedIn, AGI.MIT.IDU, if you want to watch other lectures or conversations
like this one.
Better yet, go read Max's book, Life 3.0, chapter 7 on goals is my favorite.
It's really where philosophy and engineering come together and it opens with a quote by
Dostoevsky, the mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding
something to live for.
Lastly, I believe that every failure rewards us with an opportunity to learn, in that sense
I've been very fortunate to fail in so many new and exciting ways and this conversation
was no different.
I've learned about something called Radio Frequency Interference, RFI, look it up.
Apparently music and conversations from local radio stations can bleed into the audio that
you're recording in such a way that almost completely ruins that audio.
It's an exceptionally difficult sound source to remove.
So, I've gotten the opportunity to learn how to avoid RFI in the future during recording
sessions.
I've also gotten the opportunity to learn how to use Adobe Audition and iZotope RX6
to do some audio repair.
Of course, this is an exceptionally difficult noise to remove.
I am an engineer, I'm not an audio engineer, neither is anybody else in our group, but
we did our best.
Nevertheless, I thank you for your patience and I hope you're still able to enjoy this
conversation.
Do you think there's intelligent life out there in the universe?
Let's open up with an easy question.
I have a minority view here actually.
When I give public lectures, I often ask for show of hands who thinks there's intelligent
life out there somewhere else and almost everyone puts their hands up and when I ask why, they'll
be like, oh, there's so many galaxies out there, there's got to be.
But I'm a number nerd, right?
So when you look more carefully at it, it's not so clear at all.
When we talk about our universe, first of all, we don't mean all of space.
We actually mean, I don't know, you can throw me the universe if you want, it's behind you
there.
We simply mean the spherical region of space from which light has had time to reach us
so far during the 13.8 billion years since our big bang.
There's more space here, but this is what we call a universe because that's all we have
access to.
So is there intelligent life here that's gotten to the point of building telescopes and computers?
My guess is no, actually, the probability of it happening on any given planet is some
number we don't know what it is.
And what we do know is that the number can't be super high because there's over a billion
Earth like planets in the Milky Way galaxy alone, many of which are billions of years
older than Earth, and aside from some UFO believers, you know, there isn't much evidence
that any super advanced civilization has come here at all.
And so that's the famous Fermi paradox, right?
And then if you work the numbers, what you find is that if you have no clue what the
probability is of getting life on a given planet, so it could be 10 to the minus 10,
10 to the minus 20, or 10 to the minus two, or any power of 10 is sort of equally likely
if you want to be really open minded, that translates into it being equally likely that
our nearest neighbor is 10 to the 16 meters away, 10 to the 17 meters away, 10 to the
18.
Now, by the time you get much less than 10 to the 16 already, we pretty much know there
is nothing else that's close.
And when you get because it would have discovered us, they, yeah, they would have discovered
us longer or if they're really close, we would have probably noted some engineering projects
that they're doing.
And if it's beyond 10 to the 26 meters, that's already outside of here.
So my guess is actually that there are, we are the only life in here that's gotten the
point of building advanced tech, which I think is very, puts a lot of responsibility on our
shoulders, not screw up, you know, I think people who take for granted that it's okay
for us to screw up, have an accidental nuclear war or go extinct somehow because there's
a sort of Star Trek like situation out there where some other life forms are going to come
and bail us out and it doesn't matter so much.
I think they're leveling us into a false sense of security.
I think it's much more prudent to say, let's be really grateful for this amazing opportunity
we've had and make the best of it just in case it is down to us.
So from a physics perspective, do you think intelligent life, so it's unique from a sort
of statistical view of the size of the universe, but from the basic matter of the universe,
how difficult is it for intelligent life to come about with the kind of advanced tech
building life is implied in your statement that it's really difficult to create something
like a human species?
Well, I think what we know is that going from no life to having life that can do our level
of tech, there's some sort of to going beyond that than actually settling our whole universe
with life.
There's some road major roadblock there, which is some great filter as I just sometimes called
which, which tough to get through, it's either that that roadblock is either behind us or
in front of us.
I'm hoping very much that it's behind us.
I'm super excited every time we get a new report from NASA saying they failed to find
any life on Mars, because that suggests that the hard part, maybe it was getting the first
ribosome or some some very low level kind of stepping stone.
So they were home free because if that's true, then the future is really only limited by
our own imagination.
It would be much suckier if it turns out that this level of life is kind of a diamond dozen,
but maybe there's some other problem.
Like as soon as a civilization gets advanced technology within 100 years, they get into
some stupid fight with themselves and poof, you know, that would be a bummer.
Yeah.
So you've explored the mysteries of the universe, the cosmological universe, the one that's
between us today, I think you've also begun to explore the other universe, which is sort
of the mystery, the mysterious universe of the mind of intelligence, of intelligent life.
So is there a common thread between your interests or the way you think about space and intelligence?
Oh, yeah.
When I was a teenager, I was already very fascinated by the biggest questions and I felt that the
two biggest mysteries of all in science were our universe out there and our universe in
here.
Yeah.
So it's quite natural after having spent a quarter of a century on my career thinking
a lot about this one.
And now I'm indulging in the luxury of doing research on this one.
It's just so cool.
I feel the time is ripe now for you transparently deepening our understanding of this.
Just start exploring this one.
Yeah, because I think a lot of people view intelligence as something mysterious that
can only exist in biological organisms like us and therefore dismiss all talk about artificial
general intelligence is science fiction.
But from my perspective as a physicist, I am a blob of quirks and electrons moving around
in a certain pattern and processing information in certain ways.
And this is also a blob of quirks and electrons.
I'm not smarter than the water bottle because I'm made of different kind of quirks.
I'm made of up quirks and down quirks exact same kind as this.
It's a there's no secret sauce, I think in me, it's it's all about the pattern of the
information processing.
And this means that there's no law of physics saying that we can't create technology, which
can help us by being incredibly intelligent and help us crack mysteries that we couldn't.
In other words, I think we've really only seen the tip of the intelligence iceberg so
far.
Yeah.
So the perceptronium, yeah, so you coined this amazing term, it's a hypothetical state
of matter, sort of thinking from a physics perspective, what is the kind of matter that
can help as you're saying, subjective experience emerge, consciousness emerge.
So how do you think about consciousness from this physics perspective?
Very good question.
So, again, I think many people have underestimated our ability to make progress on this by convincing
themselves it's hopeless because somehow we're missing some ingredient that we need.
There's some new consciousness particle or whatever.
I happen to think that we're not missing anything and that it's not the interesting thing about
consciousness that gives us this amazing subjective experience of colors and sounds and emotions
and so on is rather something at the higher level about the patterns of information processing.
And that's why I like to think about this idea of perceptronium.
What does it mean for an arbitrary physical system to be conscious in terms of what its
particles are doing or its information is doing?
I hate carbon chauvinism, this attitude, you have to be made of carbon atoms to be smart
or conscious.
So something about the information processing that this kind of matter performs.
Yeah, and you can see I have my favorite equations here describing various fundamental
aspects of the world.
I think one day, maybe someone who's watching this will come up with the equations that
information processing has to satisfy to be conscious.
And I'm quite convinced there is big discovery to be made there because let's face it, we
know that some information processing is conscious because we are conscious.
But we also know that a lot of information processing is not conscious.
Most of the information processing happening in your brain right now is not conscious.
There are like 10 megabytes per second coming in even just through your visual system.
You're not conscious about your heartbeat regulation or most things.
Even if I just ask you to read what it says here, you look at it and then, oh, now you
know what it said.
But you're not aware of how the computation actually happened.
Your consciousness is like the CEO that got an email at the end with the final answer.
So what is it that makes a difference?
I think that's both a great science mystery, we're actually studying it a little bit in
my lab here at MIT, but I also think it's a really urgent question to answer.
For starters, I mean, if you're an emergency room doctor and you have an unresponsive patient
coming in, wouldn't it be great if in addition to having a CT scanner, you had a conscious
scanner that could figure out whether this person is actually having locked in syndrome
or is actually comatose.
And in the future, imagine if we build robots or the machine that we can have really good
conversations with, I think it's very likely to happen, right?
Wouldn't you want to know if your home helper robot is actually experiencing anything or
just like a zombie?
Would you prefer it?
What would you prefer?
Would you prefer that it's actually unconscious so that you don't have to feel guilty about
switching it off or giving boring chores?
What would you prefer?
Well, certainly we would prefer, I would prefer the appearance of consciousness, but the question
is whether the appearance of consciousness is different than consciousness itself.
And sort of ask that as a question, do you think we need to understand what consciousness
is, solve the hard problem of consciousness in order to build something like an AGI system?
No.
I don't think that.
I think we will probably be able to build things even if we don't answer that question.
But if we want to make sure that what happens is a good thing, we better solve it first.
So it's a wonderful controversy you're raising there, where you have basically three points
of view about the hard problem.
There are two different points of view that both conclude that the hard problem of consciousness
is BS.
On one hand, you have some people like Daniel Dennett who say that consciousness is just
BS because consciousness is the same thing as intelligence.
There's no difference.
So anything which acts conscious is conscious, just like we are.
And then there are also a lot of people, including many top AI researchers I know, who say, oh,
consciousness is just bullshit because of course machines can never be conscious.
They're always going to skiddy zombies, never have to feel guilty about how you treat them.
And then there's a third group of people, including Giulio Tononi, for example, and another, and
Gustav Koch and a number of others, I would put myself on this middle camp who say that
actually some information processing is conscious and some is not.
So let's find the equation which can be used to determine which it is.
And I think we've just been a little bit lazy kind of running away from this problem for
a long time.
It's been almost taboo to even mention the C word in a lot of circles because, but we
should stop making excuses.
This is a science question and there are ways we can even test any theory that makes predictions
for this.
And coming back to this helper robot, I mean, so you said you would want your helper robot
to certainly act conscious and treat you, like have conversations with you and stuff.
But wouldn't you, would you feel a little bit creeped out if you realized that it was
just a glossed up tape recorder, you know, that was just zombie and it's a faking emotion?
Would you prefer that it actually had an experience or would you prefer that it's actually not
experiencing anything so you feel, you don't have to feel guilty about what you do to it?
It's such a difficult question because, you know, it's like when you're in a relationship
and you say, well, I love you and the other person said I love you back.
It's like asking, well, do they really love you back or are they just saying they love
you back?
Don't you really want them to actually love you?
It's hard to, it's hard to really know the difference between everything seeming like
there's consciousness present, there's intelligence present, there's affection, passion, love,
and it actually being there.
I'm not sure.
Do you have...
Can I ask you a question about this?
Yes.
To make it a bit more pointed.
So Mass General Hospital is right across the river, right?
Suppose you're going in for a medical procedure and they're like, you know, for anesthesia
what we're going to do is we're going to give you muscle relaxance so you won't be able
to move and you're going to feel excruciating pain during the whole surgery but you won't
be able to do anything about it.
But then we're going to give you this drug that erases your memory of it.
Would you be cool about that?
What's the difference that you're conscious about it or not if there's no behavioral change,
right?
Right.
And that's a really clear way to put it.
Yeah, it feels like in that sense, experiencing it is a valuable quality.
So actually being able to have subjective experiences, at least in that case, is valuable.
And I think we humans have a little bit of a bad track record also of making these self
serving arguments that other entities aren't conscious.
You know, people often say, oh, these animals can't feel pain.
Right.
It's okay to boil lobsters because we asked them if it hurt and they didn't say anything.
And now there was just a paper out saying lobsters did do feel pain when you boil them
and they're banning it in Switzerland.
And we did this with slaves too often and said, oh, they don't mind.
They don't maybe aren't conscious or women don't have souls or whatever.
So I'm a little bit nervous when I hear people just take as an axiom that machines can't
have experience ever.
I think this is just a really fascinating science question is what it is.
Let's research it and try to figure out what it is that makes the difference between unconscious
intelligent behavior and conscious intelligent behavior.
So in terms of, so if you think of a Boston Dynamics human or robot being sort of with
a broom being pushed around, it starts pushing on a consciousness question.
So let me ask, do you think an AGI system, like a few neuroscientists believe needs to
have a physical embodiment, needs to have a body or something like a body?
No, I don't think so.
You mean to have a conscious experience?
To have consciousness.
I do think it helps a lot to have a physical embodiment to learn the kind of things about
the world that are important to us humans for sure.
But I don't think the physical embodiment is necessary after you've learned it.
Just have the experience.
Think about it when you're dreaming, right?
Your eyes are closed, you're not getting any sensory input, you're not behaving or moving
in any way, but there's still an experience there, right?
And so clearly the experience that you have when you see something cool in your dreams
isn't coming from your eyes, it's just the information processing itself in your brain,
which is that experience, right?
But if I put it another way, I'll say because it comes from neuroscience is the reason you
want to have a body and a physical, something like a physical system is because you want
to be able to preserve something.
In order to have a self, you could argue, you'd need to have some kind of embodiment
of self to want to preserve.
Well, now we're getting a little bit anthropomorphic, anthropomorphizing things, maybe talking about
self preservation instincts.
We are evolved organisms, right?
So Darwinian evolution endowed us and other evolved organisms with self preservation instinct
because those that didn't have those self preservation genes got cleaned out of the gene pool.
But if you build an artificial general intelligence, the mind space that you can design is much,
much larger than just a specific subset of minds that can evolve that have.
So an AGI mind doesn't necessarily have to have any self preservation instinct.
It also doesn't necessarily have to be so individualistic as us.
Like imagine if you could just, first of all, we're also very afraid of death, you know,
as opposed to you could back yourself up every five minutes and then your airplane is about
to crash.
You're like, shucks, I'm just, I'm going to lose the last five minutes of experiences
since my last cloud backup, dang, you know, it's not as big a deal.
Or if we could just copy experiences between our minds easily, like which we could easily
do if we were silicon based, right?
Then maybe we would feel a little bit more like a hive mind, actually, that maybe it's
the, so, so there's, so I don't think we should take for granted at all that AGI will have
to have any of those sort of competitive as alpha male instincts.
Right.
On the other hand, you know, this is really interesting because I think some people go
too far and say, of course, we don't have to have any concerns either that advanced
AI will have those instincts because we can build anything we want.
That there's, there's a very nice set of arguments going back to Steve Omohandro and
Nick Bostrom and others just pointing out that when we build machines, we normally build
them with some kind of goal, you know, win this chess game, drive this car safely or
whatever.
And as soon as you put in a goal into machine, especially if it's kind of open ended goal
and the machine is very intelligent, it'll break that down into a bunch of sub goals.
And one of those goals will almost always be self preservation because if it breaks
or dies in the process, it's not going to accomplish the goal, right?
Like, suppose you just build a little, you have a little robot and you tell it to go
down the store market here and, and get you some food, make you cook your Italian dinner,
you know, and then someone mugs it and tries to break it on the way.
That robot has an incentive to not get destroyed and defend itself for a runaway because otherwise
it's going to fail and cooking your dinner.
It's not afraid of death, but it really wants to complete the dinner cooking goal.
So it will have a self preservation instinct.
It will continue being a functional agent.
Yeah.
And, and, and similarly, if you give any kind of more ambitious goal to an AGI, it's very
likely they want to acquire more resources so it can do that better.
And it's exactly from those sort of sub goals that we might not have intended that some
of the concerns about AGI safety come, you give it some goal that seems completely harmless.
And then before you realize it, it's also trying to do these other things which you
didn't want it to do and it's maybe smarter than us.
So, so, and let me pause just because I am in a very kind of human centric way, see fear
of death as a valuable motivator.
So you don't think you think that's an artifact of evolution.
So that's the kind of mind space evolution created that we're sort of almost obsessed
about self preservation.
Yeah.
Some kind of genetic well, you don't think that's necessary to be afraid of death.
So not just a kind of sub goal of self preservation just so you can keep doing the thing, but
more fundamentally sort of have the finite thing like this ends for you at some point.
Interesting.
Do I think it's necessary for what precisely?
For intelligence, but also for consciousness.
So for those for both, do you think really like a finite death and the fear of it is
important?
So before I can answer, before we can agree on whether it's necessary for intelligence
or for consciousness, we should be clear on how we define those two words because a lot
are really smart people define them in very different ways.
I was in this on this panel with AI experts and they couldn't, they couldn't agree on
how to define intelligence even.
So I define intelligence simply as the ability to accomplish complex goals.
I like your broad definition because again, I don't want to be a carbon chauvinist.
And in that case, no, certainly it doesn't require fear of death.
I would say AlphaGo AlphaZero is quite intelligent.
I don't think AlphaZero has any fear of being turned off because it doesn't understand the
concept of even and similarly consciousness, I mean, you can certainly imagine a very simple
kind of experience if certain plants have any kind of experience, I don't think they're
very afraid of dying or there's nothing they can do about it anyway much.
So there wasn't that much value and but more seriously, I think if you ask not just about
being conscious, but maybe having what you would, we might call an exciting life for
you for your passion and really appreciate the things, maybe there, somehow, maybe there
perhaps it does help having a backdrop that, hey, it's finite, you know, let's make the
most of this, let's live to the fullest.
So if you knew you were going to just live forever, do you think you would change your
career? Yeah, I mean, in some perspective, it would
be an incredibly boring life living forever.
So in the sort of loose, subjective terms that you said of something exciting and something
in this that other humans would understand, I think, is yeah, it seems that the finiteness
of it is important.
Well, the good news I have for you then is based on what we understand about cosmology,
things in our universe is probably finite, although big crunch or big or big, what's
the extent of the infinite?
Yeah, we could have a big chill or a big crunch or a big rip or death, the big snap or death
bubbles.
All of them are more than a billion years away.
So we should we certainly have vastly more time than our ancestors thought, but still
pretty hard to squeeze in an infinite number of compute cycles, even though there are some
loopholes that just might be possible.
But I think, you know, some people like to say that you should live as if you're about
to you're going to die in five years or so, and that's sort of optimal.
Maybe it's a good as some we should build our civilization as if it's all finite to
be on the safe side.
Right, exactly. So you mentioned in defining intelligence as the ability to solve complex
goals.
So where would you draw a line?
How would you try to define human level intelligence and super human level intelligence?
Where is consciousness part of that definition?
No, consciousness does not come into this definition.
So so I think of intelligence as it's a spectrum, but there are very many different kinds of
goals you can have.
You have a goal to be a good chess player, a good goal player, a good car driver, a good
investor, good poet, etc.
So intelligence that bind by its very nature, isn't something you can measure, but it's
one number, some overall goodness, no, no, there are some people who are more better
at this, some people are better at that.
Right now we have machines that are much better than us at some very narrow tasks like multiplying
large numbers fast, memorizing large databases, playing chess, playing go, soon driving cars.
But there's still no machine that can match a human child in general intelligence.
But artificial general intelligence, AGI, the name of your course, of course, that
is by its very definition, the quest to build a machine that can do everything as well as
we can.
Up to the old Holy Grail of AI from back to its inception in the 60s.
If that ever happens, of course, I think it's going to be the biggest transition in the
history of life on Earth, but it doesn't necessarily have to wait the big impact until machines
are better than us at knitting.
The really big change doesn't come exactly at the moment they're better than us at everything.
The really big change comes, first, their big change is when they start becoming better
at us at doing most of the jobs that we do, because that takes away much of the demand
for human labor.
And then the really warping change comes when they become better than us at AI research.
Because right now, the time scale of AI research is limited by the human research and development
cycle of years, typically, along the take from one release of some software or iPhone
or whatever to the next.
But once Google can replace 40,000 engineers by 40,000 equivalent pieces of software or
whatever, then there's no reason that has to be years.
It can be, in principle, much faster.
And the time scale of future progress in AI and all of science and technology will be
driven by machines, not humans.
So it's this simple point, which gives right this incredibly fun controversy about whether
there can be intelligence explosion, so called singularity, as Werner Winge called it.
The idea, as articulated by I.J. Good, is obviously way back fifties, but you can see
Alan Turing and others thought about it even earlier.
You asked me what exactly what I define human level intelligence.
So the glib answer is just to say something which is better than us at all cognitive tasks
or better than any human at all cognitive tasks.
But the really interesting bar, I think, goes a little bit lower than that, actually.
It's when they're better than us at AI programming and general learning so that they can, if
they want to, get better than us at anything by just starting out.
So there better is a key word and better is towards this kind of spectrum of the complexity
of goals it's able to accomplish.
So another way to, and that's certainly a very clear definition of human love.
So there's, it's almost like a sea that's rising, you can do more and more and more
things.
It's actually a graphic that you show, it's really nice way to put it.
So there's some peaks and there's an ocean level elevating and you solve more and more
problems.
But, you know, just kind of to take a pause and we took a bunch of questions and a lot
of social networks and a bunch of people asked a sort of a slightly different direction
on creativity and on things that perhaps aren't a peak.
It's, you know, human beings are flawed and perhaps better means having being having contradiction
being flawed in some way.
So let me sort of, yeah, start and start easy, first of all.
So you have a lot of cool equations.
Let me ask, what's your favorite equation, first of all?
I know they're all like your children, but which one is that?
This is the Shreddinger equation, it's the master key of quantum mechanics of the micro
world.
So this equation can take everything to do with atoms and all the fuels and all the
way up to… Yeah, so, okay, so quantum mechanics is certainly a beautiful mysterious formulation
of our world.
So I'd like to sort of ask you, just as an example, it perhaps doesn't have the same
beauty as physics does, but in mathematics abstract, the Andrew Wiles who proved the
Fermat's last theory.
So he just saw this recently and it kind of caught my eye a little bit.
This is 358 years after it was conjectured.
So this very simple formulation, everybody tried to prove it, everybody failed.
And so here's this guy comes along and eventually proves it and then fails to prove it and then
proves it again in 94.
And he said like the moment when everything connected into place, in an interview he said
it was so indescribably beautiful.
That moment when you finally realize the connecting piece of two conjectures, he said it was so
indescribably beautiful, it was so simple and so elegant.
I couldn't understand how I'd missed it and I just stared at it in disbelief for 20
minutes.
Then during the day I walked around the department and I keep coming back to my desk looking
to see if it was still there.
It was still there.
I couldn't contain myself.
I was so excited.
It was the most important moment of my working life.
Nothing I ever do again will mean as much.
So that particular moment and it kind of made me think of what would it take?
And I think we have all been there at small levels.
Maybe let me ask, have you had a moment like that in your life where you just had an idea
it's like, wow, yes.
I wouldn't mention myself in the same breath as Andrew Wiles, but I certainly had a number
of aha moments when I realized something very cool about physics just completely made
my head explode.
In fact, some of my favorite discoveries I made later, I later realized that they had
been discovered earlier by someone who's sometimes got quite famous for it.
So there's too late for me to even publish it, but that doesn't diminish in any way.
The emotional experience you have when you realize it like, wow.
So what would it take in that moment, that wow, that was yours in that moment?
So what do you think it takes for an intelligent system, an AGI system, an AI system to have
a moment like that?
It's a tricky question because there are actually two parts to it, right?
One of them is, can it accomplish that proof, can it prove that you can never write A to
the N plus B to the N equals 3 to the N for all integers, etc., etc., when N is bigger
than 2.
That's simply the question about intelligence.
Can you build machines that are that intelligent?
And I think by the time we get a machine that can independently come up with that level
of proofs, probably quite close to AGI.
But the second question is a question about consciousness.
When will we, how likely is it that such a machine would actually have any experience
at all as opposed to just being like a zombie?
And would we expect it to have some sort of emotional response to this or anything at
all akin to human emotion where when it accomplishes its machine goal, it views it as something
very positive and sublime and deeply meaningful.
I would certainly hope that if in the future we do create machines that are our peers or
even our descendants, I would certainly hope that they do have this sort of sublime appreciation
of life in a way, my absolutely worst nightmare would be that at some point in the future,
the distant future, maybe our cosmos is teeming with all this post biological life, doing
all the seemingly cool stuff.
And maybe the last humans by the time our species eventually fizzles out will be like,
well, that's okay, because we're so proud of our descendants here and look, my worst
nightmare is that we haven't solved the consciousness problem.
And we haven't realized that these are all the zombies, they're not aware of anything
anymore than a tape recorder, as in any kind of experience.
So the whole thing has just become a play for empty benches.
That would be like the ultimate zombie apocalypse to me.
So I would much rather, in that case, that we have these beings which can really appreciate
how amazing it is.
And in that picture, what would be the role of creativity, what a few people ask about
creativity?
Yeah.
And do you think, when you think about intelligence, I mean, certainly the story you told at the
beginning of your book involved, you know, creating movies and so on, sort of making
money, you know, you can make a lot of money in our modern world with music and movies.
So if you are an intelligent system, you may want to get good at that.
But that's not necessarily what I mean by creativity.
Is it important on that complex goals where the sea is rising for there to be something
creative, or am I being very human centric and thinking creativity somehow special relative
to intelligence?
My hunch is that we should think of creativity simply as an aspect of intelligence.
And we have to be very careful with human vanity.
We have this tendency to very often want to say, as soon as machines can do something,
we try to diminish it and say, oh, but that's not like real intelligence, you know, is
it not creative or this or that, the other thing, if we ask ourselves to write down a
definition of what we actually mean by being creative, what we mean by Andrew Wiles, what
he did there, for example, don't we often mean that someone takes a very unexpected
leap?
It's not like taking 573 and multiplying by 224 by just a step of straightforward cookbook
like rules, right?
You can maybe make a connection between two things that people have never thought was
connected.
It's very surprising.
Something like that.
I think this is an aspect of intelligence, and this is actually one of the most important
aspects of it.
Maybe the reason we humans tend to be better at it than traditional computers is because
it's something that comes more naturally if you're a neural network than if you're a
traditional logic gates based computer machine.
We physically have all these connections, and if you activate here, activate here, activate
here, it ping, you know, my hunch is that if we ever build a machine where you could
just give it the task, hey, hey, you say, hey, you know, I just realized I want to travel
around the world instead this month.
Can you teach my AGI course for me?
And it's like, okay, I'll do it.
And it does everything that you would have done and it improvises and stuff.
That would in my mind involve a lot of creativity.
Yeah, so it's actually a beautiful way to put it.
I think we do try to grasp at the definition of intelligence as everything we don't understand
how to build.
So we as humans try to find things that we have and machines don't have, and maybe creativity
is just one of the things, one of the words we used to describe that.
That's a really interesting way to put it.
I don't think we need to be that defensive.
I don't think anything good comes out of saying, we're somehow special, you know, it's
very wise, there are many examples in history of where trying to pretend they were somehow
superior to all other intelligent beings has led to pretty bad results, right?
Nazi Germany, they said that they were somehow superior to other people.
Today, we still do a lot of cruelty to animals by saying they were so superior somehow on
the other, they can't feel pain, slavery was justified by the same kind of really weak
arguments.
And I don't think if we actually go ahead and build artificial general intelligence,
it can do things better than us.
I don't think we should try to found our self worth on some sort of bogus claims of superiority
in terms of our intelligence.
I think we should instead find our calling and the meaning of life from the experiences
that we have.
Right.
You know, I can have very meaningful experiences even if there are other people who are smarter
than me, you know, when I go to faculty meeting here and I was talking about something and
then I certainly realized, oh, he has an old prize, he has an old prize, he has an old
prize.
Yeah.
You know, it doesn't make me enjoy life any less or enjoy talking to those people less.
Of course not.
And contrary to that, I feel very honored and privileged to get to interact with other
very intelligent beings that are better than me and a lot of stuff.
So I don't think there's any reason why we can't have the same approach with intelligent
machines.
That's a really interesting, so people don't often think about that.
They think about if there's machines that are more intelligent, you naturally think
that that's not going to be a beneficial type of intelligence.
You don't realize it could be, you know, like peers with no ball prizes that would be just
fun to talk with.
And they might be clever about certain topics and you can have fun having a few drinks with
them.
Well, also, you know, another example we can all relate to why it doesn't have to be a
terrible thing to be impressed, the presence of people who are even smarter than us all
around is when you and I were both two years old, I mean, our parents were much more intelligent
than us.
Right.
Worked out okay.
Because their goals were aligned with our goals.
And that I think is really the number one key issue we have to solve if we value align
the value alignment problem exactly because people who see too many Hollywood movies with
lousy science fiction plot lines, they worry about the wrong thing, right?
They worry about some machine suddenly turning evil.
It's not malice that we should that is the concern.
It's competence.
By definition, intelligence makes you makes you very competent if you have a more intelligent
goal playing machine computer playing as a less intelligent one and when we define intelligence
as the ability to accomplish go winning, right?
It's going to be the more intelligent one that wins.
And if you have a human and then you have an AGI that's more intelligent in all ways
and they have different goals, guess who's going to get their way, right?
So I was just reading about this particular rhinoceros species that was driven extinct
just a few years ago.
Alan Bummer is looking at this cute picture of a mommy rhinoceros with its child, you
know, and why did we humans drive it to extinction?
It wasn't because we were evil rhino haters as a whole.
It was just because we our goals weren't aligned with those of the rhinoceros and it didn't
work out so well for the rhinoceros because we were more intelligent, right?
So I think it's just so important that if we ever do build AGI before we unleash anything,
we have to make sure that it learns to understand our goals, that it adopts our goals and retains
those goals.
So the cool interesting problem there is being able, us as human beings, trying to formulate
our values.
So you know, you could think of the United States Constitution as a way that people sat
down at the time a bunch of white men, which is a good example, I should say.
They formulated the goals for this country and a lot of people agree that those goals
actually held up pretty well.
It's an interesting formulation of values and failed miserably in other ways.
So for the value alignment problem and the solution to it, we have to be able to put
on paper or in a program, human values, how difficult do you think that is?
Very.
But it's so important.
We really have to give it our best and it's difficult for two separate reasons.
There's the technical value alignment problem of figuring out just how to make machines
understand our goals, adopt them and retain them.
And then there's the separate part of it, the philosophical part, whose values anyway.
And since we, it's not like we have any great consensus on this planet on values, what mechanism
should we create then to aggregate and decide, okay, what's a good compromise?
That second discussion can't just be left the tech nerds like myself, right?
That's right.
And if we refuse to talk about it and then AGI gets built, who's going to be actually
making the decision about whose values, it's going to be a bunch of dudes in some tech
company, right?
And are they necessarily so representative of all of humankind that we want to just
endorse it to them?
Are they even uniquely qualified to speak to future human happiness just because they're
good at programming AI?
I'd much rather have this be a really inclusive conversation.
But do you think it's possible?
You create a beautiful vision that includes sort of the diversity, cultural diversity
and various perspectives on discussing rights, freedoms, human dignity.
But how hard is it to come to that consensus?
Do you think it's certainly a really important thing that we should all try to do, but do
you think it's feasible?
I think there's no better way to guarantee failure than to refuse to talk about it or
refuse to try.
And I also think it's a really bad strategy to say, okay, let's first have a discussion
for a long time.
And then once we reach complete consensus, then we'll try to load it into some machine.
No, we shouldn't let perfect be the enemy of good.
Instead, we should start with the kindergarten ethics that pretty much everybody agrees on
and put that into our machines now.
We're not doing that even.
Look at anyone who builds a passenger aircraft wants it to never under any circumstances
fly into a building or mountain, right?
Yet the September 11 hijackers were able to do that.
And even more embarrassingly, Andreas Lubitz, this depressed German wings pilot, when he
flew his passenger jet into the Alps, killing over 100 people, he just told the autopilot
to do it.
He told the freaking computer to change the altitude to 100 meters.
And even though it had the GPS maps, everything, the computer was like, okay, no, so we should
take those very basic values, though, where the problem is not that we don't agree.
The problem is just we've been too lazy to try to put it into our machines and make sure
that from now on, airplanes will just, which all have computers in them, but we'll just
never just refuse to do something like that.
We go into safe mode, maybe lock the cockpit door, go to the nearest airport, and there's
so much other technology in our world as well now where it's really coming quite timely
to put in some sort of very basic values like this.
Even in cars, we've had enough vehicle terrorism attacks by now where people have driven trucks
and vans into pedestrians that it's not at all a crazy idea to just have that hardwired
into the car, because yeah, there are a lot of, there's always going to be people who
for some reason want to harm others, but most of those people don't have the technical
expertise to figure out how to work around something like that.
So if the car just won't do it, it helps.
So let's start there.
So there's a lot of, that's a great point.
So not chasing perfect.
There's a lot of things that most of the world agrees on.
Yeah, let's start there.
Let's start there.
And then once we start there, we'll also get into the habit of having these kind of conversations
about, okay, what else should we put in here and have these discussions?
This should be a gradual process then.
Great.
So, but that also means describing these things and describing it to a machine.
So one thing, we had a few conversations with Steven Wolfram.
I'm not sure if you're familiar with Steven Wolfram.
Oh yeah, I know him quite well.
So he has, you know, he works with a bunch of things, but you know, cellular automata,
these simple computable things, these computation systems.
And he kind of mentioned that, you know, we probably have already within these systems
already something that's AGI, meaning like we just don't know it because we can't talk
to it.
So if you give me this chance to try it, to try to at least form a question out of this,
because I think it's an interesting idea to think that we can have intelligent systems,
but we don't know how to describe something to them and they can't communicate with us.
I know you're doing a little bit of work in explainable AI, trying to get AI to explain
itself.
So what are your thoughts of natural language processing or some kind of other communication?
How does the AI explain something to us?
How do we explain something to it, to machines?
Or you think of it differently?
So there are two separate parts to your question there.
One of them has to do with communication, which is super interesting and I'll get to
that in a sec.
The other is whether we already have AGI, we just haven't noticed it.
There, I beg to differ.
And don't think there's anything in any cellular automaton or anything or the internet itself
or whatever that has artificial general intelligence in that it didn't really do exactly everything
we humans can do better.
I think the day that happens, when that happens, we will very soon notice and we'll probably
notice even before because in a very, very big way.
For the second part though.
Can I just, sorry.
Because you have this beautiful way to formulate in consciousness as information processing
and you can think of intelligence and information processing and you can think of the entire
universe.
These particles and these systems roaming around that have this information processing
power, you don't think there is something with the power to process information in the
way that we human beings do that's out there that needs to be sort of connected to.
It seems a little bit philosophical perhaps, but there's something compelling to the idea
that the power is already there, the focus should be more on being able to communicate
with it.
Well, I agree that in a certain sense, the hardware processing power is already out there
because our universe itself can think of it as being a computer already.
It's constantly computing what water waves, how it devolved the water waves and the river
Charles and how to move the air molecules around that Seth Lloyd has pointed out.
My colleague here that you can even in a very rigorous way think of our entire universe
is just being a quantum computer.
It's pretty clear that our universe supports this amazing processing power because you
can even within this physics computer that we live in, we can even build actual laptops
and stuff.
So clearly the power is there.
It's just that most of the compute power that nature has, it's in my opinion kind of wasting
on boring stuff like simulating yet another ocean wave somewhere where no one is even
looking.
So in a sense, what life does, what we are doing when we build computers is we're rechanneling
all this compute that nature is doing anyway into doing things that are more interesting
than just yet another ocean wave and do something cool here.
So the raw hardware power is there for sure, and even just computing what's going to happen
for the next five seconds in this water ball, you know, it takes a ridiculous amount of
compute if you do it on a human computer.
This water ball just did it.
But that does not mean that this water ball has AGI and this because AGI means it should
also be able to like I've written my book done this interview.
And I don't think it's just communication problems.
I don't think it can do it.
So Buddhists say when they watch the water and that there is some beauty, that there's
some depth and beauty in nature that they can communicate with.
Communication is also very important because I mean, look, part of my job is being a teacher
and I know some very intelligent professors even who just have a better hard time communicating.
They come up with all these brilliant ideas, but to communicate with somebody else, you
have to also be able to simulate their own mind.
Yes.
And build well enough and understand that model of their mind that you can say things
that they will understand.
And that's quite difficult.
And that's why today it's so frustrating if you have a computer that makes some cancer
diagnosis and you ask it, well, why are you saying I should have a surgery?
And if you don't want to reply, I was trained on five terabytes of data and this is my diagnosis
boop, boop, beep, beep, doesn't really instill a lot of confidence, right?
So I think we have a lot of work to do on communication there.
So what kind of, I think you're doing a little bit of work in explainable AI.
What do you think are the most promising avenues?
Is it mostly about sort of the Alexa problem of natural language processing of being able
to actually use human interpretable methods of communication?
So being able to talk to a system and talk back to you, or is there some more fundamental
problems to be solved?
I think it's all of the above.
The natural language processing is obviously important, but there are also more nerdy fundamental
problems.
Like if you take, you play chess, Russian, I have to, when did you learn Russian?
I speak Russian very poorly, but I bought a book, teach yourself Russian, I read a lot,
but it was very difficult.
Wow.
That's why I speak so poorly.
How many languages do you know?
Wow.
That's really impressive.
I don't know.
My wife has some calculations, but my point was, if you played chess, have you looked
at the AlphaZero games?
Yeah.
Oh, the actual games now.
Check it out.
Some of them are just mind blowing, really beautiful.
If you ask, how did it do that?
You got that.
Talk to Demis Osabis, others from DeepMind, all they'll ultimately be able to give you
is big tables of numbers, matrices that define the neural network, and you can stare at these
tables numbers till your face turned blue, and you're not going to understand much about
why it made that move.
Even if you have a natural language processing that can tell you in human language about,
oh, five, seven, point two, eight, still not going to really help.
I think there's a whole spectrum of fun challenges there involved in taking computation that
does intelligent things and transforming it into something equally good, equally intelligent,
but that's more understandable.
I think that's really valuable because I think as we put machines in charge of ever more
infrastructure in our world, the power grid, the trading on the stock market, weapon systems,
and so on, it's absolutely crucial that we can trust these AIs that do all we want and
trust really comes from understanding in a very fundamental way.
That's why I'm working on this, because I think the more if we're going to have some
hope of ensuring that machines have adopted our goals and that they're going to retain
them, that kind of trust, I think, needs to be based on things you can actually understand,
preferably even improve theorems on, even with a self driving car, right?
If someone just tells you it's been trained on tons of data and never crashed, it's less
reassuring than if someone actually has a proof.
Maybe it's a computer verified proof, but still it says that under no circumstances
is this car just going to swerve into oncoming traffic.
And that kind of information helps build trust and helps build the alignment of goals, at
least awareness that your goals, your values are aligned.
And I think even in the very short term, if you look at how today, this absolutely pathetic
state of cybersecurity that we have, where is it, 3 billion Yahoo accounts are packed
and almost every American's credit card and so on, you know, why is this happening?
It's ultimately happening because we have software that nobody fully understood how
it worked.
That's why the bugs hadn't been found, right?
And I think AI can be used very effectively for offense for hacking, but it can also be
used for defense, hopefully, automating verifiability and creating systems that are built in different
ways so you can actually prove things about them.
And it's important.
So speaking of software that nobody understands how it works, of course, a bunch of people
ask about your paper about your thoughts of why does deep and cheap learning work so well?
That's the paper, but what are your thoughts on deep learning, these kind of simplified
models of our own brains that have been able to do some successful perception work, pattern
recognition work, and now with AlphaZero and so on, do some clever things?
What are your thoughts about the promise limitations of this piece?
Great.
I think there are a number of very important insights, very important lessons we can always
draw from these kind of successes.
One of them is when you look at the human brain, you see it's very complicated, a tenth
of 11 neurons, and there are all these different kinds of neurons, and yada yada, and there's
been this long debate about whether the fact that we have dozens of different kinds is
actually necessary for intelligence.
We can now, I think, quite convincingly answer that question of no, it's enough to have just
one kind.
If you look under the hood of AlphaZero, there's only one kind of neuron, and it's ridiculously
simple, a simple mathematical thing.
So it's just like in physics, if you have a gas with waves in it, it's not the detailed
nature of the molecules that matter.
It's the collective behavior, somehow.
Similarly, it's this higher level structure of the network that matters, not that you
have 20 kinds of neurons.
I think our brain is such a complicated mess because it wasn't evolved just to be intelligent,
it was evolved to also be self assembling, and self repairing, and evolutionarily attainable.
And patches and so on.
So I think it's pretty, my hunch is that we're going to understand how to build AGI before
we fully understand how our brains work.
Just like we understood how to build flying machines long before we were able to build
a mechanical bird.
Yeah, that's right.
You've given the example of mechanical birds and airplanes, and airplanes do a pretty good
job of flying without really mimicking bird flight.
And even now, after 100 years later, did you see the TED talk with this German group of
mechanical birds?
I did not.
I've heard you mention it.
Check it out.
It's amazing.
But even after that, we still don't fly in mechanical birds because it turned out the
way we came up with simpler, and it's better for our purposes, and I think it might be the
same there.
So that's one lesson.
Another lesson is one of what our paper was about.
Well, first, as a physicist thought, it was fascinating how there's a very close mathematical
relationship, actually, between our artificial neural networks.
And a lot of things that we've studied for in physics go by nerdy names like the renormalization
group equation and Hamiltonians and yada, yada, yada.
And when you look a little more closely at this, you have, at first, I was like, well,
there's something crazy here that doesn't make sense because we know that if you even
want to build a super simple neural network to tell apart cat pictures and dog pictures,
right, that you can do that very, very well now.
But if you think about it a little bit, you convince yourself it must be impossible because
if I have one megapixel, even if each pixel is just black or white, there's two to the
power of one million possible images, which is way more than there are atoms in our universe.
So in order to, and then for each one of those, I have to assign a number, which is the probability
that it's a dog.
So an arbitrary function of images is a list of more numbers than there are atoms in our
universe.
So clearly, I can't store that under the hood of my, my GPU or my, my computer yet somehow
works.
So what does that mean?
Well, it means that out of all of the problems that you could try to solve with a neural network,
almost all of them are impossible to solve with a reasonably sized one.
But then what we showed in our paper was, was that the, the fraction, the kind of problems,
the fraction of all the problems that you could possibly pose that the, that we actually
care about given the laws of physics is also an infinitesimally tiny little part.
And amazingly, they're basically the same part.
Yeah.
It's almost like our world was created for, I mean, they kind of come together.
Yeah.
You, but you could say maybe where the world created the world that the world was created
for us, but I have a more modest interpretation, which is that instead evolution endowments
with neural networks, precisely for that reason, because this particular architecture has
opposed to the one in your laptop is very, very well adapted to solving the kind of problems
that nature kept presenting our ancestors with, right?
So it makes sense that why do we have a brain in the first place?
It's to be able to make predictions about the future and so on.
So if we had a sucky system, which could never solve it, it wouldn't have a lot.
So, but it's, so this is, this is a, I think a very beautiful fact.
Yeah.
And you also realize that there's, there, that we, there've been, it's been earlier
work on, on why deeper networks are good, but we were able to show an additional cool
fact there, which is that even incredibly simple problems, like suppose I give you a
thousand numbers and ask you to multiply them together and you can write a few lines of
code, boom, done, trivial.
If you just try to do that with a neural network that has only one single hidden layer in it,
you can do it, but you're going to need two to the power of thousand neurons to multiply
a thousand numbers, which is again, more neurons than their atoms in our universe.
So that's fascinating.
But if you allow, if you allow yourself, make it a deep network of many layers, you only
need four thousand neurons, it's perfectly feasible.
So that's really interesting.
Yeah.
So architecture type, I mean, you mentioned Schrodinger's equation and what are your thoughts
about quantum computing and the role of this kind of computational unit in creating an
intelligent system?
In some Hollywood movies that I don't mention my name because I don't want to spoil them.
The way they get AGI is building a quantum computer because the word quantum sounds
cool and so on.
That's right.
But first of all, I think we don't need quantum computers to build AGI.
I suspect your brain is not quantum computer in any found sense.
So you don't even wrote a paper about that.
Many years ago, I calculated the so called decoherence time that how long it takes until
the quantum computerness of what your neurons are doing gets erased by just random noise
from the environment and it's about 10 to the minus 21 seconds.
So as cool as it would be to have a quantum computer in my head, I don't think that fast.
On the other hand, there are very cool things you could do with quantum computers or I think
we'll be able to do soon when we get bigger ones that might actually help machine learning
do even better than the brain.
So for example, one, this is just a moonshot, but hey, learning is very much same thing
as search.
If you're trying to train a neural network to get really learned to do something really
well, you have some loss function, you have a bunch of knobs you can turn represented
by a bunch of numbers and you're trying to tweak them so that it becomes as good as possible
at this thing.
So if you think of a landscape with some valley, where each dimension of the landscape corresponds
to some number you can change, you're trying to find the minimum.
And it's well known that if you have a very high dimensional landscape, complicated things,
it's super hard to find the minimum.
Quantum mechanics is amazingly good at this.
If I want to know what's the lowest energy state this water can possibly have incredibly
hard to compute, but nature will happily figure this out for you if you just cool it down,
make it very, very cold.
If you put a ball somewhere, it'll roll down to its minimum and this happens metaphorically
at the energy landscape too.
And quantum mechanics even uses some clever tricks which today's machine learning systems
don't.
If you're trying to find the minimum and you get stuck in the little local minimum here
in quantum mechanics, you can actually tunnel through the barrier and get unstuck again.
And that's really interesting.
Yeah.
So maybe for example, we'll one day use quantum computers that help train neural networks
better.
That's really interesting.
Okay.
So as a component of kind of the learning process, for example, let me ask sort of wrapping
up here a little bit.
Let me return to the questions of our human nature and love, as I mentioned.
So do you think you mentioned sort of a helper robot that you could think of also personal
robots.
Do you think the way we human beings fall in love and get connected to each other is
possible to achieve in an AI system and human level AI intelligence system.
Do you think we would ever see that kind of connection or, you know, in all this discussion
about solving complex goals, as this kind of human social connection, do you think that's
one of the goals on the peaks and valleys that were the raising sea levels that we'd
be able to achieve?
Or do you think that's something that's ultimately, or at least in the short term, relative to
the other goals is not achievable?
I think it's all possible.
And I mean, in recent, there's a very wide range of guesses, as you know, among AI researchers
when we're going to get AGI.
Some people, you know, like our friend Rodney Brooks said, it's going to be hundreds of
years at least.
And then there are many others that think it's going to happen relatively much sooner.
Recent polls, maybe half or so, AI researchers think we're going to get AGI within decades.
So if that happens, of course, then I think these things are all possible.
But in terms of whether it will happen, I think we shouldn't spend so much time asking,
what do we think will happen in the future?
As if we are just some sort of pathetic, passive bystanders, you know, waiting for the future
to happen to us, hey, we're the ones creating this future, right?
So we should be proactive about it and ask ourselves what sort of future we would like
to have happen.
That's right.
Trying to make it like that.
Well, what I prefer is some sort of incredibly boring zombie like future where there's all
these mechanical things happening and there's no passion, no emotion, no experience, maybe
even.
No, I would, of course, much rather prefer it if all the things that we find that we
value the most about humanity are a subjective experience, passion, inspiration, love, you
know, if we can create a future where those things do exist.
You know, I think ultimately it's not our universe giving meaning to us, it's us giving
meaning to our universe.
And if we build more advanced intelligence, let's make sure we build it in such a way
that meaning is part of it.
A lot of people that seriously study this problem and think of it from different angles have
trouble in the majority of cases, if they think through that happen, are the ones that
are not beneficial to humanity.
And so, yeah, so what are your thoughts?
What should people, you know, I really don't like people to be terrified, what's the way
for people to think about it in a way that, in a way we can solve it and we can make it
better.
Yeah.
No, I don't think panicking is going to help in any way, it's not going to increase chances
of things going well either.
Even if you are in a situation where there is a real threat, does it help if everybody
just freaks out?
Right.
No, of course not.
I think, yeah, there are, of course, ways in which things can go horribly wrong.
First of all, it's important when we think about this thing, this, about the problems
and risks, to also remember how huge the upsides can be if we get it right.
Everything we love about society and civilization is a product of intelligence.
So if we can amplify our intelligence with machine intelligence and not anymore lose
our loved ones, what we're told is an uncurable disease and things like this, of course, we
should aspire to that.
So that can be a motivator, I think, reminding yourselves that the reason we try to solve
problems is not just because we're trying to avoid gloom, but because we're trying to
do something great.
But then in terms of the risks, I think the really important question is to ask, what
can we do today that will actually help make the outcome good, right?
And dismissing the risk is not one of them, you know, I find it quite funny often when
I'm in discussion panels about these things, how the people who work for companies will
always be like, oh, nothing to worry about, nothing to worry about, nothing to worry about.
And it's always, it's only academics sometimes express concerns.
That's not surprising at all.
If you think about it, often Sinclair quipped, right, that it's hard to make a man believe
in something when his income depends on not believing in it.
And frankly, we know a lot of these people in companies that they're just as concerned
as anyone else.
But if you're the CEO of a company, that's not something you want to go on record saying
when you have silly journalists who are going to put a picture of a Terminator robot when
they quote you.
So, so the issues are real.
And the way I think about what the issue is, is basically, you know, the real choice we
have is, first of all, are we going to dismiss this, the risks and say, well, you know, let's
just go ahead and build machines that can do everything we can do better and cheaper,
you know, let's just make ourselves obsolete as fast as possible or what could possibly
go wrong.
Right.
That's one attitude.
The opposite attitude that I think is to say, it's incredible potential, you know, let's
think about what kind of future we're really, really excited about.
What are the shared goals that we can really aspire towards?
And then let's think really hard about how we can actually get there.
So start with it.
Don't start thinking about the risks.
Start thinking about the goals.
And then when you do that, then you can think about the obstacles you want to avoid, right?
I often get students coming in right here into my office for career advice.
Always ask them this very question, where do you want to be in the future?
If all she can say is, oh, maybe I'll have cancer, maybe I'll run over by a truck.
Focus on the obstacles instead of the goal.
She's just going to end up a hypochondriac paranoid, whereas if she comes in and fire
in her eyes and is like, I want to be there, and then we can talk about the obstacles and
see how we can circumvent them.
That's I think a much, much healthier attitude.
And that's really what we're in.
And I feel it's very challenging to come up with a vision for the future, which we're
unequivocally excited about.
I'm not just talking now in the vague terms like, yeah, let's cure cancer.
I'm talking about what kind of society do we want to create?
What do we want it to mean to be human in the age of AI, in the age of AGI?
So if we can have this conversation, broad, inclusive conversation, and gradually start
converging towards some future with some direction at least that we want to steer towards, right?
Then we'll be much more motivated to constructively take on the obstacles.
And I think if I wrap this up in a more succinct way, I think we can all agree already now that
we should aspire to build AGI that doesn't overpower us, but that empowers us.
And think of the many various ways that can do that, whether that's from my side of the
world of autonomous vehicles.
I'm personally actually from the camp that believes this human level intelligence is
required to achieve something like vehicles that would actually be something we would
enjoy using and being part of.
So that's the one example.
And certainly there's a lot of other types of robots and medicine and so on.
So focusing on those and then coming up with the obstacles, coming up with the ways that
that can go wrong and solving those one at a time.
And just because you can build an autonomous vehicle, even if you could build one that
would drive this final AGI, maybe there are some things in life that we would actually
want to do ourselves.
That's right.
Right?
Like, for example, if you think of our society as a whole, there are some things that we
find very meaningful to do.
And that doesn't mean we have to stop doing them just because machines can do them better.
I'm not going to stop playing tennis just the day someone builds a tennis robot and
beat me.
People are still playing chess and even go.
Yeah.
And in this very near term, even some people are advocating basic income, replace jobs.
But if the government is going to be willing to just hand out cash to people for doing
nothing, then one should also seriously consider whether the government should also just hire
a lot more teachers and nurses and the kind of jobs which people often find great fulfillment
in doing, right?
We get very tired of hearing politicians saying, oh, we can't afford hiring more teachers,
but we're going to maybe have basic income.
If we can have more serious research and thought into what gives meaning to our lives, the
jobs give so much more than income, right?
And then think about, in the future, what are the roles that we want to have people
continually feeling empowered by machines?
And I think sort of, I come from the Russia, from the Soviet Union, and I think for a lot
of people in the 20th century, going to the moon, going to space was an inspiring thing.
I feel like the universe of the mind, so AI, understanding, creating intelligence is that
for the 21st century.
So it's really surprising, and I've heard you mention this, it's really surprising to
me both on the research funding side that it's not funded as greatly as it could be.
But most importantly, on the politician side, that it's not part of the public discourse
except in killer bots, terminator kind of view, that people are not yet, I think, perhaps
excited by the possible positive future that we can build together.
So we should be, because politicians usually just focus on the next election cycle, right?
The single most important thing I feel we humans have learned in the entire history of science
is they were the masters of underestimation, underestimated the size of our cosmos, again
and again, realizing that everything we thought existed was just a small part of something
grander, right?
Planet, solar system, the galaxy, clusters of galaxies, the universe.
And we now know that we have the future has just so much more potential than our ancestors
could ever have dreamt of.
This cosmos, imagine if all of Earth was completely devoid of life except for Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Wouldn't it be kind of lame if all we ever aspired to was to stay in Cambridge, Massachusetts
forever and then go extinct in one week, even though Earth was going to continue on for
longer?
That sort of attitude I think we have now on the cosmic scale, we can, life can flourish
on Earth, not for four years, but for billions of years.
I can even tell you about how to move it out of harm's way when the sun gets too hot.
And then we have so much more resources out here, which today, maybe there are a lot of
other planets with bacteria or cow like life on them, but most of this, all this opportunity
seems as far as we can tell to be largely dead, like the Sahara Desert, and yet we have the
opportunity to help life flourish around this for billions of years.
So like, let's quit squabbling about whether some little border should be drawn one mile
to the left or right and look up into the skies and realize, hey, we can do such incredible
things.
Yeah.
And that's I think why it's really exciting that you and others are connected with some
of the work Elon Musk is doing because he's literally going out into that space, really
exploring our universe.
And it's wonderful.
That is exactly why Elon Musk is so misunderstood, right?
Misconstrued with some kind of pessimistic doomsayer.
The reason he cares so much about AI safety is because he more than almost anyone else
appreciates these amazing opportunities.
It will squander if we wipe out here on Earth.
We're not just going to wipe out the next generation, but all generations and this incredible
opportunity that's out there and that would be really be a waste.
And AI, for people who think that there would be better to do without technology, let me
just mention that if we don't improve our technology, the question isn't whether humanity
is going to go extinct.
The question is just whether we're going to get taken out by the next big asteroid or
the next super volcano or something else dumb that we could easily prevent with more tech,
right?
If we want life to flourish throughout the cosmos, AI is the key to it.
As I mentioned in a lot of detail in my book, even many of the most inspired sci fi writers
I feel have totally underestimated the opportunities for space travel, especially to other galaxies,
because they weren't thinking about the possibility of AGI, which just makes it so much easier.
Right.
Yeah, so that goes to a view of AGI that enables our progress, that enables a better life.
So that's a beautiful way to put it and something to strive for.
So Max, thank you so much.
Thank you for your time today.
It's been awesome.
Thank you so much.
Thanks.
Merci beaucoup.
Thank you so much for your time today and thank you so much for your time and for your
time.
Thank you.
Bye.