The following is a conversation with Sean Carroll.
He's a theoretical physicist at Caltech,
specializing in quantum mechanics, gravity, and cosmology.
He's the author of several popular books,
one on the Arrow of Time called From Eternity to Hear,
one on the Higgs Boson called Particle
at the End of the Universe,
and one on Science and Philosophy called The Big Picture,
on the origins of life, meaning, and the universe itself.
He has an upcoming book on quantum mechanics
that you can preorder now called Something Deeply Hidden.
He writes one of my favorite blogs on his website,
preposterousuniverse.com.
I recommend clicking on the greatest hits link
that lists accessible, interesting posts on the Arrow of Time,
dark matter, dark energy, the Big Bang, general relativity,
string theory, quantum mechanics,
and the big meta questions about the philosophy of science,
God, ethics, politics, academia, and much, much more.
Finally, and perhaps most famously,
he's the host of a podcast called Mindscape
that you should subscribe to and support on Patreon.
Along with the Joe Rogan experience,
Sam Harris is Making Sense,
and Dan Carlin's Hardcore History.
Sean's Mindscape podcast is one of my favorite ways
to learn new ideas or explore different perspectives
and ideas that I thought I understood.
It was truly an honor to meet and spend a couple hours
with Sean.
It's a bit heartbreaking to say that for the first time ever,
the audio recorder for this podcast died
in the middle of our conversation.
There are technical reasons for this,
having to do with phantom power
that I now understand and will avoid.
It took me one hour to notice and fix the problem.
So, much like the universe's 68% dark energy,
roughly the same amount from this conversation was lost,
except in the memories of the two people involved
and in my notes.
I'm sure we'll talk again and continue this conversation
on this podcast or on Sean's.
And of course, I look forward to it.
This is the Artificial Intelligence podcast.
If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube,
iTunes, support on Patreon,
or simply connect with me on Twitter at Lex Freedman.
And now, here's my conversation with Sean Carroll.
What do you think is more interesting and impactful?
Understanding how the universe works
at a fundamental level
or understanding how the human mind works?
You know, of course this is a crazy meaningless
unanswerable question in some sense,
because they're both very interesting
and there's no absolute scale of interestingness
that we can rate them on.
There's a glib answer that says the human brain
is part of the universe, right?
And therefore, understanding the universe
is more fundamental than understanding the human brain.
But do you really believe that once we understand
the fundamental way the universe works
at the particle level,
the forces we would be able to understand how the mind works?
No, certainly not.
We cannot understand how ice cream works
just from understanding how particles work, right?
So I'm a big believer in emergence.
I'm a big believer that there are different ways
of talking about the world
beyond just the most fundamental microscopic one.
You know, when we talk about tables and chairs
and planets and people,
we're not talking the language
of particle physics and cosmology.
So, but understanding the universe,
you didn't say just at the most fundamental level, right?
So understanding the universe at all levels is part of that.
I do think, you know, to be a little bit more fair
to the question, there probably are general principles
of complexity, biology, information processing,
memory, knowledge, creativity
that go beyond just the human brain, right?
And maybe one could count understanding those
as part of understanding the universe.
The human brain, as far as we know, is the most complex thing
in the universe.
So there's, it's certainly absurd to think
that by understanding the fundamental laws
of particle physics,
you get any direct insight on how the brain works.
But then there's this step
from the fundamentals of particle physics
to information processing,
which a lot of physicists and philosophers
may be a little bit carelessly take
when they talk about artificial intelligence.
Do you think of the universe
as a kind of a computational device?
No.
To be like the honest answer there is no.
There's a sense in which the universe processes information
clearly.
There's a sense in which the universe is like a computer,
clearly.
But in some sense, I think,
I tried to say this once on my blog
and no one agreed with me,
but the universe is more like a computation
than a computer because the universe happens once.
A computer is a general purpose machine, right?
You can ask it different questions,
even a pocket calculator, right?
And it's set up to answer certain kinds of questions.
The universe isn't that.
So information processing happens in the universe,
but it's not what the universe is.
And I know your MIT colleague, Seth Lloyd,
feels very differently about this, right?
Well, you're thinking of the universe as a closed system.
I am.
So what makes a computer more like a PC,
like a computing machine,
is that there's a human that comes up to it
and moves the mouse around,
so input gives it input.
And that's why you're saying it's just a computation,
a deterministic thing that's just unrolling.
But the immense complexity of it
is nevertheless like processing.
There's a state and it changes with rules.
And there's a sense for a lot of people
that if the brain operates, the human brain operates
within that world,
then it's simply just a small subset of that.
And so there's no reason we can't build
arbitrarily great intelligences.
Yeah.
Do you think of intelligence in this way?
Intelligence is tricky.
I don't have a definition of it offhand.
So I remember this panel discussion
that I saw on YouTube, I wasn't there,
but Seth Lloyd was on the panel.
And so was Martin Rees, the famous astrophysicist.
And Seth gave his shtick for why the universe is a computer
and explained this.
And Martin Rees said, so what is not a computer?
And Seth is like, oh, that's a good question.
I'm not sure.
Because if you have a sufficiently broad definition
of what a computer is, then everything is, right?
And similarly, or the analogy gains force
when it excludes some things.
Is the moon going around the earth performing a computation?
I can come up with definitions in which the answer is yes,
but it's not a very useful computation.
I think that it's absolutely helpful
to think about the universe in certain situations,
certain contexts, as an information processing device.
I'm even guilty of writing a paper
called Quantum Circuit Cosmology, where
we modeled the whole universe as a quantum circuit.
As a circuit.
As a circuit, yeah.
With qubits kind of thing.
With qubits, basically, right.
So in qubits, becoming more and more entangled.
So do we want to digress a little bit?
Because this is kind of fun.
So here's a mystery about the universe
that is so deep and profound that nobody talks about it.
Space expands, right?
And we talk about, in a certain region of space,
a certain number of degrees of freedom,
a certain number of ways that the quantum fields
and the particles in that region can arrange themselves.
That number of degrees of freedom in a region of space
is arguably finite.
We actually don't know how many there are,
but there's a very good argument that says it's a finite number.
So as the universe expands and space gets bigger,
are there more degrees of freedom?
If it's an infinite number, it doesn't really matter.
Infinity times 2 is still infinity.
But if it's a finite number, then there's more space,
so there's more degrees of freedom.
So where did they come from?
That would mean the universe is not a closed system.
There's more degrees of freedom popping into existence.
So what we suggested was that there are more degrees of freedom.
And it's not that they're not there to start,
but they're not entangled to start.
So the universe that you and I know of,
the three dimensions around us that we see,
we said those are the entangled degrees of freedom
making up space time.
As the universe expands, there are a whole bunch of qubits
in their zero state that become entangled
with the rest of space time through the action
of these quantum circuits.
So what does it mean that there's now more degrees of freedom
as they become more entangled?
Yeah.
As the universe expands.
That's right.
So there's more and more degrees of freedom
that are entangled, that are playing the role of part
of the entangled space time structure.
So the underlying philosophy is that space time itself
arises from the entanglement of some fundamental quantum
degrees of freedom.
Wow.
OK.
At which point is most of the entanglement happening?
Are we talking about close to the Big Bang?
Are we talking about throughout the time of the life of the
universe?
Yeah.
So the idea is that at the Big Bang,
almost all the degrees of freedom that the universe could
have were there, but they were unentangled with anything else.
And that's a reflection of the fact
that the Big Bang had a low entropy.
It was a very simple, very small place.
And as space expands, more and more degrees of freedom
become entangled with the rest of the world.
Well, I have to ask John Carroll,
what do you think of the thought experiment from Nick
Bostrom that we're living in a simulation?
So I think let me contextualize that a little bit more.
I think people don't actually take this thought experiment.
I think it's quite interesting.
It's not very useful, but it's quite interesting.
From the perspective of AI, a lot of the learning
that can be done usually happens in simulation,
artificial examples.
And so it's a constructive question
to ask how difficult is our real world to simulate,
which is kind of a dual part of, if we're
living in a simulation and somebody built that simulation,
if you were to try to do it yourself, how hard would it be?
So obviously, we could be living in a simulation.
If you just want the physical possibility,
then I completely agree that it's physically possible.
I don't think that we actually are.
So take this one piece of data into consideration.
We live in a big universe.
There's two trillion galaxies in our observable universe
with 200 billion stars in each galaxy, et cetera.
It would seem to be a waste of resources
to have a universe that big going on just to do a simulation.
So in other words, I want to be a good Bayesian.
I want to ask, under this hypothesis, what do I expect to see?
So the first thing I would say is I
wouldn't expect to see a universe that was that big.
The second thing is I wouldn't expect the resolution
of the universe to be as good as it is.
So it's always possible that if our superhuman simulators only
have finite resources that they don't render
the entire universe, that the part that is out there,
the two trillion galaxies, isn't actually
being simulated fully.
But then the obvious extrapolation of that
is that only I am being simulated fully.
The rest of you are just nonplayer characters.
I'm the only thing that is real.
The rest of you are just chatbots.
Beyond this wall, I see the wall,
but there is literally nothing on the other side of the wall.
That is sort of the Bayesian prediction.
That's what it would be like to do
an efficient simulation of me.
So none of that seems quite realistic.
I don't see, I hear the argument that it's just possible
and easy to simulate lots of things.
I don't see any evidence from what we know about our universe
that we look like a simulated universe.
Now, maybe you can say, well, we don't know what it would
look like, but that's just abandoning
your Bayesian responsibilities.
Like your job is to say, under this theory,
here's what you would expect to see.
Yeah, so certainly if you think about a simulation
as a thing that's like a video game where only a small subset
is being readied, but say all the laws of physics,
the entire closed system of the quote unquote universe,
it had a creator.
Yeah, it's always possible.
So that's not useful to think about
when you're thinking about physics.
The way Nick Bostrom phrases it, if it's possible
to simulate a universe, eventually we'll do it.
Right.
You can use that, by the way, for a lot of things.
But I guess the question is, how hard is it
to create a universe?
I wrote a little blog post about this,
and maybe I'm missing something.
But there's an argument that says not only
that it might be possible to simulate a universe,
but probably, if you imagine that you actually
attribute consciousness and agency
to the little things that we're simulating,
to our little artificial beings, there's probably
a lot more of them than there are ordinary organic beings
in the universe, or there will be in the future.
So there's an argument that not only is being a simulation
possible, it's probable, because in the space
of all living consciousnesses, most of them
are being simulated.
Most of them are not at the top level.
I think that argument must be wrong,
because it follows from that argument that if we're simulated,
but we can also simulate other things.
Well, but if we can simulate other things,
they can simulate other things.
If we give them enough power and resolution,
and ultimately, we'll reach a bottom,
because the laws of physics in our universe
have a bottom, we're made of atoms and so forth.
So there will be the cheapest possible simulations.
And if you believe the original argument,
you should conclude that we should be in the cheapest
possible simulation, because that's where most people are.
But we don't look like that.
It doesn't look at all like we're at the edge of resolution,
that we're 16 bit things.
It seems much easier to make much lower level things
than we are.
So, and also, I question the whole approach
to the anthropic principle that says
we are typical observers in the universe.
I think that that's not actually,
I think that there's a lot of selection that we can do
that were typical within things we already know,
but not typical within all the universe.
So do you think there is intelligent life,
however you would like to define intelligent life
out there in the universe?
My guess is that there is not intelligent life
in the observable universe other than us.
Simply on the basis of the fact that the likely number
of other intelligent species in the observable universe,
there's two likely numbers, zero or billions.
And if there had been billions,
you would have noticed already.
For there to be literally like a small number,
like Star Trek, there's a dozen intelligent civilizations
in our galaxy, but not a billion.
That's weird, that's sort of bizarre to me.
It's easy for me to imagine that there are zero others
because there's just a big bottleneck
to making multicellular life
or technological life or whatever.
It's very hard for me to imagine
that there's a whole bunch out there
that have somehow remained hidden from us.
The question I'd like to ask is,
what would intelligent life look like?
What I mean by that question and where it's going is,
what if intelligent life is just fundamentally,
in some very big ways, different than the one
that has on Earth.
That there's all kinds of intelligent life
that operates at different scales of both size and temporal.
That's a great possibility
because I think we should be humble
about what intelligence is, what life is.
We don't even agree on what life is,
much less what intelligent life is, right?
So that's an argument for humility,
saying there could be intelligent life
of a very different character, right?
You could imagine that dolphins are intelligent
but never invent space travel
because they live in the ocean
and they don't have thumbs, right?
So they never invent technology, they never invent smelting.
Maybe the universe is full of intelligent species
that just don't make technology, right?
That's compatible with the data, I think.
And I think maybe what you're pointing at
is even more out there versions of intelligence,
you know, intelligence in intermolecular clouds
or on the surface of a neutron star
or in between the galaxies in giant things
where the equivalent of a heartbeat is 100 million years.
On the one hand, yes,
we should be very open minded about those things.
On the other hand, we all of us share the same laws of physics.
There might be something about the laws of physics
even though we don't currently know exactly
what that thing would be that makes meters
and years the right length and time scales
for intelligent life, maybe not.
But we're made of atoms, atoms have a certain size,
we orbit stars, our stars have a certain lifetime.
It's not impossible to me that there's a sweet spot
for intelligent life that we find ourselves in.
So I'm open minded either way, I'm open minded either being humble
and there's all sorts of different kinds of life
or no, there's a reason we just don't know it yet
why life like ours is the kind of life that's out there.
Yeah, I'm of two minds too, but I often wonder
if our brains is just designed to, quite obviously,
to operate and see the world on these time scales.
And we're almost blind and the tools we've created
for detecting things are blind to the kind of observation
needed to see intelligent life at other scales.
Well, I'm totally open to that,
but so here's another argument I would make.
We have looked for intelligent life,
but we've looked at for it in the dumbest way we can
by turning radio telescopes to the sky.
And why in the world would a super advanced civilization
randomly beam out radio signals wastefully
in all directions into the universe?
It just doesn't make any sense, especially because
in order to think that you would actually contact
another civilization, you would have to do it forever.
You have to keep doing it for millions of years.
That sounds like a waste of resources.
If you thought that there were other solar systems
with planets around them where maybe intelligent life
didn't yet exist, but might someday,
you wouldn't try to talk to it with radio waves.
You would send a spacecraft out there
and you would park it around there.
And it would be like, from our point of view,
it would be like 2001 where there was a monolith.
There could be an artifact.
In fact, the other way works also, right?
There could be artifacts in our solar system
that have been put there by other technologically advanced
civilizations, and that's how we will eventually contact them.
We just haven't explored the solar system well enough yet
to find them.
The reason why we don't think about that is because
we're young and impatient, right?
It's like it would take more than my lifetime
to actually send something to another star system
and wait for it and then come back.
But if we start thinking on hundreds of thousands of years
or a million year time scales,
that's clearly the right thing to do.
Are you excited by the thing that Elon Musk is doing with SpaceX
in general, but the idea of space exploration,
even though you're species is young and impatient?
No, I do think that space travel is crucially important, long term.
Even to other star systems.
And I think that many people overestimate the difficulty
because they say, look, if you travel 1% the speed of light
to another star system, we'll be dead before we get there, right?
And I think that it's much easier.
And therefore, when they write their science fiction stories,
they imagine we'd go faster than the speed of light
because otherwise they're too impatient, right?
We're not going to go faster than the speed of light,
but we could easily imagine that the human lifespan
gets extended to thousands of years.
And once you do that, then the stars are much closer.
Effectively, right?
What's 100 year trip, right?
So I think that that's going to be the future, the far future,
not my lifetime once again, but baby steps.
Unless your lifetime gets extended.
Well, it's in a race against time, right?
A friend of mine who actually thinks about these things said,
you know, you and I are going to die,
but I don't know about our grandchildren.
I don't know, predicting the future is hard,
but that's the least plausible scenario.
And so, yeah, no, I think that as we discussed earlier,
there are threats to the earth, known and unknown, right?
Having spread humanity and biology elsewhere
is a really important longterm goal.
What kind of questions can science not currently answer,
but might soon?
When you think about the problems and the mysteries before us,
that may be within reach of science.
I think an obvious one is the origin of life.
We don't know how that happened.
There's a difficulty in knowing how it happened historically,
actually, you know, literally on earth,
but starting life from nonlife
is something I kind of think we're close to, right?
You really think so?
Like, how difficult is it to start life?
I do.
Well, I've talked to people, including on the podcast, about this.
You know, life requires three things.
Life as we know it.
There's a difference between life, who knows what it is,
and life as we know it,
which we can talk about with some intelligence.
Life as we know it requires compartmentalization.
You need a little membrane around your cell.
Metabolism, you need to take in food and eat it
and let that make you do things.
And then replication.
You need to have some information about who you are,
that you pass down to future generations.
In the lab, compartmentalization seems pretty easy,
not hard to make lipid bilayers
that come into little cellular walls pretty easily.
Metabolism and replication are hard,
but replication we're close to.
People have made RNA like molecules in the lab that...
I think the state of the art is
they're not able to make one molecule that reproduces itself,
but they're able to make two molecules that reproduce each other.
So that's okay. That's pretty close.
Metabolism is harder, believe it or not,
even though it's sort of the most obvious thing,
but you want some sort of controlled metabolism
and the actual cellular machinery in our bodies is quite complicated.
It's hard to see it just popping into existence all by itself.
It probably took a while.
But we're making progress.
In fact, I don't think we're spending nearly enough money on it.
If I were the NSF, I would flood this area with money
because it would change our view of the world
if we could actually make life in the lab
and understand how it was made originally here on Earth.
I'm sure it would have some ripple effects
that help cure diseases and so on.
That's right.
Synthetic biology is a wonderful big frontier where we're making cells.
Right now, the best way to do that
is to borrow heavily from existing biology.
Craig Ventner several years ago created an artificial cell,
but all he did was...
not all he did, it was a tremendous accomplishment,
but all he did was take out the DNA from a cell
and put in entirely new DNA and let it boot up and go.
What about the leap to creating intelligent life on Earth?
However, again, we define intelligence, of course,
but let's just even say homo sapiens,
the modern intelligence in our human brain.
Do you have a sense of what's involved in that leap
and how big of a leap that is?
So AI would count in this?
Or do you really want life?
AI would count in some sense.
AI would count, I think.
Of course, AI would count.
Well, let's say artificial consciousness.
I do not think we are on the threshold
of creating artificial consciousness.
I think it's possible.
I'm not, again, very educated about how close we are,
but my impression is not that we're really close
because we understand how little we understand
of consciousness and what it is.
So if we don't have any idea what it is,
it's hard to imagine we're on the threshold
of making it ourselves.
But it's doable, it's possible.
I don't see any obstacles in principle,
so yeah, I would hold out some interest
in that happening eventually.
I think in general, consciousness,
I think it would be just surprised
how easy consciousness is
once we create intelligence.
I think consciousness is a thing
that's just something we all fake.
Well, good.
No, actually, I like this idea that, in fact,
consciousness is way less mysterious than we think
because we're all at every time,
at every moment, less conscious than we think we are.
We can fool things.
And I think that plus the idea that you
not only have artificial intelligence systems,
but you put them in a body,
give them a robot body,
that will help the faking a lot.
Yeah, I think creating consciousness
in artificial consciousness
is as simple
as asking a Roomba
to say, I'm conscious
and refusing to be talked out of it.
It could be.
I mean, I'm almost being silly,
but that's what we do.
That's what we do with each other.
The consciousness is also a social construct,
and a lot of our ideas of intelligence
is a social construct,
and so reaching that bar involves
something that's beyond,
that doesn't necessarily involve
the fundamental understanding
of how you go from
electrons to neurons
to cognition.
No, actually, I think that is an extremely good point,
and in fact,
what it suggests is,
so yeah, you referred to Kate Darling,
who I had on the podcast,
and who does these experiments with
very simple robots,
but they look like animals,
and they can look like they're experiencing pain,
and we human beings react
very negatively to these little robots
looking like they're experiencing pain,
and what you want to say is,
yeah, but they're just robots.
It's not really pain.
It's just some electrons going around,
but then you realize you and I
are just electrons going around,
and that's what pain is also.
What I would have an easy time imagining
is that there is a spectrum
between these simple little robots
that Kate works with
and a human being,
where there are things that,
like a human touring test level thing
are not conscious,
but nevertheless walk and talk
like they're conscious,
and it could be that the future is,
I mean, Siri is close, right?
And so it might be the future
has a lot more agents like that,
and in fact, rather than someday going,
aha, we have consciousness,
we'll just creep up on it
with more and more accurate reflections
of what we expect.
And in the future, maybe the present,
and you're basically assuming
that I'm human.
I get a high probability.
At this time, because the,
but in the future,
there might be question marks around that, right?
Yeah, no, absolutely.
Certainly videos are almost to the point
where you shouldn't trust them already.
Photos you can't trust, right?
Videos is easier to trust,
but we're getting worse.
We're getting better at faking them, right?
Yeah, so physical, embodied people,
what's so hard about faking that?
This is very depressing,
this conversation we're having right now.
To me, it's exciting.
You're doing it, so it's exciting to you,
but it's a sobering thought.
We're very bad at imagining
what the next 50 years are going to be like
when we're in the middle of a phase transition
as we are right now.
Yeah, and in general,
I'm not blind to all the threats.
I am excited by the power of technology
to solve,
as they evolve.
I'm not as much as Steven Pinker
optimistic about the world,
but in everything I've seen,
all the brilliant people in the world
that I've met are good people.
So the army of the good
in terms of the development of technology is large.
Okay, you're way more
optimistic than I am.
I think that goodness and badness
are equally distributed among intelligent
and unintelligent people.
I don't see much of a correlation there.
Interesting.
Neither of us have proof.
Yeah, exactly. Again, opinions are free, right?
Nor definitions of good and evil.
Without definitions
or without data
opinions.
So what kind of questions can science not
currently answer
and may never be able to answer in your view?
Well, the obvious one is what is good and bad.
What is right and wrong?
I think that there are questions that science tells us
what happens, what the world is,
doesn't say what the world should do
or what we should do because we're part of the world.
But we are part of the world
and we have the ability to feel like
something's right, something's wrong.
And to make a very long story
very short, I think that the idea
of moral philosophy is
systematizing our intuitions of what is right
and what is wrong.
And science might be able to predict ahead of time
what we will do,
but it won't ever be able to judge
whether we should have done it or not.
You know, you're kind of unique in terms of scientists.
It doesn't
have to do with podcasts, but
even just reaching out, I think you refer to
as sort of doing interdisciplinary science.
So you reach out
and talk to people
that are outside of your discipline,
which I always
hope that's what science was for.
In fact, I was a little disillusioned
when I realized that academia
is very siloed.
Yeah.
The question is
how,
at your own level, how do you prepare for these conversations?
How do you think about these conversations?
How do you open your mind enough
to have these conversations?
And it may be a little bit broader.
How can you advise other scientists
to have these kinds of conversations?
Not at the podcast.
The fact that you're doing a podcast is awesome.
Other people get to hear them.
But it's also good to have it without mics in general.
It's a good question, but a tough one
to answer. I think about
a guy I know is a personal trainer
and he was asked on a podcast
how do we psych ourselves up
to do a workout? How do we make
that discipline to go and work out?
And he's like, why are you asking me?
I can't stop working out.
I don't need to psych myself up.
Likewise, you asked me
how do you get to have
interdisciplinary conversations and all sorts of different things
with all sorts of different people?
That's what makes me go.
I couldn't stop
doing that. I did that long before
any of them were recorded. In fact,
a lot of the motivation for starting recording it
was making sure I would read all these books
that I had purchased. All these books
I wanted to read. Not enough time to read them.
And now, if I have the motivation
because I'm going to interview Pat
Churchland, I'm going to finally read her
book.
And
it's absolutely true that academia is
extraordinarily siloed. We don't talk to people.
We rarely do.
And in fact, when we do, it's punished.
The people who do it successfully
generally first became
very successful within their little siloed discipline.
And only then
did they start expanding out.
If you're a young person, I have graduate students
and I try to be very, very
candid with them about this.
That it's
most graduate students do not become faculty members.
It's a tough road.
And so
you live the life you want to live
but do it with your eyes open
about what it does to your job chances.
And the more
broad you are and the less
time you spend hyper
specializing in your field, the lower
your job chances are. That's just an academic
reality. It's terrible. I don't like it.
But it's a reality.
And for some people
that's fine. Like there's plenty of people
who are wonderful scientists who have zero
interest in branching out and talking to
things to anyone outside their field.
But
it is disillusioning to me
some of the romantic notion
I had of the intellectual academic life
is belied by the reality
of it. The idea that we should
reach out beyond our discipline
and that is a positive good
is just so
rare in
universities that it may as well
not exist at all. But
that said, even though you're saying
you're doing it like the personal trainer
because you just can't help it, you're also
an inspiration to others.
Like I could speak for myself.
You know,
I also have a career I'm thinking about
right. And without
your podcast, I may have
not have been doing this at all.
Right. So it
makes me realize that these kinds
of conversations is kind of what science is about.
In many
ways. The reason we write papers
this exchange of ideas
is much harder to do
into the disciplinary papers, I would say.
Yeah. Right.
And conversations are easier.
So conversations is the beginning
and in the field of AI
that it's
obvious that we should think outside
of pure
computer vision competitions and in particular
data sets. We should think about the broader
impact of how this can be
you know, reaching
out to physics, to psychology
to neuroscience
and having these conversations.
So you're an inspiration
and so. Well, thank you very much.
Never know how the world
changes. I mean
the fact that this stuff is out there
and I've
a huge number of people come up to me
grad students really loving the
podcast inspired by it and
they will probably have that
there'll be ripple effects when they become faculty
and so on. So we can end
on a balance between pessimism
and optimism and Sean, thank you so much
for talking. It was awesome. No, Lex, thank you very
much for this conversation. It was great.