Max Tegmark: AI and Physics | Lex Fridman Podcast #155
the following is the conversation with max tag mark his second time on the podcast in fact the previous conversation was episode number one of this very podcast he is a physicist and artificial intelligence researcher at mit co-founder of the future of life institute and author of life 3.0 being human in the age of artificial intelligence he's also the head of a bunch of other huge fascinating projects and has written a lot of different things that you should definitely check out he has been one of the key humans who has been outspoken about long-term existential risks of ai and also its exciting possibilities and solutions to real-world problems most recently at the intersection of ai and physics and also in re-engineering the algorithms that divide us by controlling the information we see and thereby creating bubbles and all other kinds of complex social phenomena that we see today in general he's one of the most passionate and brilliant people i have the fortune of knowing i hope to talk to him many more times on this podcast in the future quick mention of our sponsors the jordan harbinger show for sigmatic mushroom coffee better help online therapy and expressvpn so the choice is wisdom caffeine sanity or privacy choose wisely my friends and if you wish click the sponsor links below to get a discount to support this podcast as a side note let me say that much of the researchers in the machine learning and artificial intelligence communities do not spend much time thinking deeply about existential risks of ai because our current algorithms are seen as useful but dumb it's difficult to imagine how they may become destructive to the fabric of human civilization in the foreseeable future i understand this mindset but it's very troublesome to me this is both a dangerous and uninspiring perspective reminiscent of the lobster sitting in a pot of lukewarm water that a minute ago was cold i feel a kinship with this lobster i believe that already the algorithms that drive our interaction on social media have an intelligence and power that far outstrip the intelligence and power of any one human being now really is the time to think about this to define the trajectory of the interplay of technology and human beings in our society i think that the future of human civilization very well may be at stake over this very question of the role of artificial intelligence in our society if you enjoy this thing subscribe on youtube review it on apple podcast follow on spotify support on patreon or connect with me on twitter lex friedman and now here's my conversation with max tag mark so people might not know this but you were actually episode number one of this podcast just a couple of years ago and now we're back and it so happens that a lot of exciting things happened in both physics and artificial intelligence both fields that you're super passionate about can we try to catch up to some of the exciting things happening in artificial intelligence especially in the context of the way it's cracking open the different problems of the sciences yeah i'd love to especially now as we start 2021 here it's a really fun time to think about what were the biggest breakthroughs in ai not the ones necessarily that media wrote about but that really matter and and what does that mean for our ability to do better science what does it mean for our ability to help people around the world and what does it mean for new um problems that they could cause if we're not smart enough to avoid them so you know what do we learn basically from this yes absolutely so one of the amazing things you're part of is the ai institute for artificial intelligence and fundamental interactions what's up with this institute what are you working on what are you thinking about the idea is something i'm very on fire with which is basically ai meets physics and you know it's been almost five years now since i shifted my own mit research from physics to machine learning and in the beginning i noticed a lot of my colleagues even though they were polite about it well i kind of what is max doing what is this weird stuff he's lost his mind then but then gradually i uh together with some colleagues we're able to persuade more and more of the other professors in the our physics department to get interested in this and and um now we got this amazing nsf center so 20 million bucks for for the next five years mit and a bunch of neighboring universities here also and i noticed now those callings looking at me funny have stopped asking what the point is of this because it's becoming more clear and i really believe that of course ai can help physics a lot to do better physics but physics can also help ai a lot both by building better hardware my colleague marin soljacic for example is working on an optical chip for much faster machine learning where the computation is done not by moving electrons around and but we're moving photons around dramatically less energy use faster better um we can we can also help ai a lot i think by having a different set of tools and a different maybe more audacious attitude you know ai has to significant extent been an engineering discipline where you're just trying to make things that work and being less more interested in maybe selling them then figuring out exactly how they work and proving theorems about that they will always work right contrast that with physics you know when elon musk sends a rocket to the international space station they didn't just train with machine learning oh let's fire it a little bit left more to the left a bit more to the right though that also missed let's try here no you know we figured out newton's laws of gravitation and other and got other things and got a really deep fundamental understanding and that's what gives us such confidence in in rockets and my vision is that in the future all machine learning systems that actually have impact on on people's lives will be understood at a really really deep level right so we trust them not because some sales rep told us to but because they've earned our trust we can and really safety critical things even prove that they will always do you know what we expect them to do that's very much the physics mindset so it's interesting if you look at big breakthroughs that have happened in machine learning this year you know from dancing robots you know it's pretty fantastic not just because it's cool but if you just think about not that many years ago this youtube video at this darpa challenge where the mit robot comes out as the car and face plants yeah how far we've come and just a few years similarly alpha fold to you know crushing the protein folding problem we can talk more about implications for medical research and stuff but hey you know that's huge progress i you can look at gpt-3 they can spout off english text which sometimes really really blows you away you can look at the google deepmind's mu0 which doesn't just kick your butt and go and chest and shogi but also in all these atari games and you don't even have to teach it the rules now you know what all of those have in common is besides being powerful is we don't fully understand how they work and that's fine if it's just some dancing robots and the worst thing that can happen is the face plant right or if they're playing go and the worst thing that can happen is that they make a bad move and lose the game right it's less fine if that's what's controlling your self-driving car or your nuclear power plant and uh we've seen already that even though hollywood had all these movies where they try to make us worry about the wrong things like machines turning evil the actual bad things that have happened with automation have not been machines turning evil they've been caused by over trust in things we didn't understand as well as we thought we did right even very simple automated systems like what the boeing put into the 737 max right yes killed a lot of people was it that that little simple system was evil of course not but we didn't understand it as well as we should have right and we trusted without understanding exactly we over trust we didn't even understand that we didn't understand right the humility is really at the core of being a scientist i think step one if you want to be a scientist is don't ever fool yourself into thinking you understand things when you actually don't yes right that's probably good advice for humans in general i think humility in general and it was good but in science it's so spectacular like why did we have the wrong theory of gravity ever from aristotle onward and close until like galileo's time like why would we believe something so dumb as that if i throw this water bottle it's going to go up with constant speed until it realizes that its natural motion is down it changes its mind you know because we people just kind of assumed aristotle was right he's an authority we understand that why did we believe things like that the sun is going around the earth why did we believe that time flows at the same rate for everyone until einstein same exact mistake over and over again we just weren't humble enough to acknowledge that we actually didn't know for sure we assumed we knew so we didn't discover the truth because we assumed there was nothing there to be discovered right there was something to be discovered about the 737 max and if you had been a bit more suspicious and tested it better we would have found it and it's the same thing with most harm that's been done by automation so far i would say so i don't know if you did you hear of a company called knight capital no so good that means you didn't invest in them earlier they deployed this automated trading system yes all nice and shiny they didn't understand it as well as they thought and it went about losing 10 million bucks per minute yeah for 44 minutes straight no until someone presumably was like oh shut this up you know was it evil no it was again misplaced trust something they didn't fully understand right and um there have been so many um even when people have been killed by robots it's quite rare still but in act factory accidents it's in every single case been not malice just that the robot didn't understand that a human is different from an auto part or whatever and and we um so this is where i think there's so so much opportunity for physics approach where you just aim for a higher level of understanding and if you look at the all these systems that we talked about from the from reinforcement learning systems and dancing robots to all these neural networks that power gpt 3 and and go playing software stuff they're all basically black boxes much like not so different from if you teach a human something you have no idea how their brain works right except the human brain at least has been error corrected during many many centuries of evolution in a way that these some of these systems have not right and my my mit research is entirely focused on demystifying this black box intelligible intelligence is my slogan that's a good line intelligible intelligence yeah it's not that we shouldn't settle for something that seems intelligent but we should it should be intelligible so that we actually trust it because we understand it right like again elon trusts his rockets because he understands newton's laws and thrust and how everything works uh and let me tell you what can i tell you why i'm optimistic about this yes i think i think there's we've made a bit of a mistake yeah where we some people still think that somehow we're never going to understand neural networks and we're just going to have to learn to live with this it's this very powerful black box basically for those you know haven't spent time building their own it's super simple what happens inside you send in a long list of numbers and then you do a bunch of operations on them multiply by matrices et cetera et cetera and some other numbers come out that's the output of it and then there are a bunch of knobs you can tune and when you change them you know it affects the computation the input output relation and then you just give the computer some definition of good and it keeps optimizing these knobs until it performs as good as possible and often you go like wow that's really good this robot can dance or this machine is beating me a chest now and in the end you have something which even though you can look inside it you have very little idea of how it works you know you can print out tables of all the millions of parameters in there is it crystal clear now how it's working you know of course not right so many of my colleagues seem willing to settle for that and i'm like no that's like the halfway point uh some have even gone as far as sort of guessing that the mr the instructability of this is where the some of the power comes from and sort of some sort of mysticism i think that's total nonsense i i think the real power of neural networks comes not from inscrutability but from differentiability and what i mean by that is simply that the output depends changes only smoothly if you tweak your knobs and then you can use all these powerful methods we have for optimization in science we can just tweak them a little bit and see did that get better or worse that's the fundamental idea of machine learning that the machine itself can keep optimizing until it gets better suppose you wrote this an algorithm instead in python or some other programming language and then what what the knobs did was they just changed random letters in your in your code that would just epically fail right you change one thing and instead of saying print it says synt syntax error you don't even know was that for the better or for the worse right this to me is re this is what i believe is the fundamental power of neural networks and just to clarify the changing of the different letters in a program would not be a differentiable process it would make it an invalid program typically and then you wouldn't even know if you changed more letters if it would make it work again right so that's the magic of uh neural networks uh the inscriptibility the differentiability that every every setting of the parameters is a program and you can tell is it better or worse right and so so you don't like the poetry of the mystery of neural networks as the source of its power i generally like poetry but not in this case it's so misleading and it's above all it it shorts changes us it fails it makes us underestimate what we can the good things we can accomplish because so what we've been doing in my group is basically step one train the mysterious neural network to do something well and then step two do some additional ai techniques to see if we can now transform this black box into something equally intelligent that you can actually understand so for example i'll give you one example this ai feynman project that we just published right so we took the 100 most famous or complicated equations from one of my favorite physics textbooks in fact the one that got me into physics in the first place the feynman lectures on physics and uh so you have a formula you know maybe it has what goes into the formula is six different variables and then what comes out as one so then you can make like a giant excel spreadsheet with seven columns you put in just random numbers for the six columns for those six input variables and then you calculate with the formula the seventh column the output so maybe it's like the force equals in the last column some function of the other and now the task is okay if i don't tell you what the formula was can you figure that out from looking at my spreadsheet i gave you yes this problem is called symbolic regression if i tell you that the formula is what we call a linear formula so it's just that the output is some sum of all the things input the times some constants that's the famous easy problem we can solve we do it all the time in science and engineering but the general one if it's more complicated functions with logarithms or cosines or other math it's a very very hard one and probably impossible to do fast in general just because the number of formulas with n symbols you know just grows exponentially just like the number of passwords you can make grow dramatically with length so so we but we had this idea that if you first have a neural network that can actually approximate the formula you just trained it even if you don't understand how it works that can be a first step towards actually understanding how it works so that's what we do first and then we study that neural network now and put in all sorts of other data that wasn't in the original training data and use that to discover simplifying properties of the formula and that lets us break it apart often into many simpler pieces and a kind of divide and conquer approach that we so we were able to solve all of those 100 formulas discover them automatically plus a whole bunch of other ones and it's a it's actually kind of humbling to see that this code which anyone who wants now is listening to this can type pip install ai fineman on the computer and run it you know it can actually do what johannes kepler spent four years doing when he stared at mars data until he's like funny eureka this is an ellipse yeah this will do it automatically for you in one hour right or max planck he was looking at at how much radiation comes out from at different wavelengths from a hot object and discovered the famous blackbody formula this discovers it automatically i'm actually excited about seeing if we can discover not just old formulas again but new formulas that no one has seen before and do you like this process of using kind of a neural network to find some basic insights and then dissecting the neural network to then gain the final so that's in that way you've uh forcing the explainability issue uh you know really trying to analyze the neural network for the things it knows in order to come up with the final beautiful simple theory underlying the whole the initial the initial system that you were looking at i love that and and the reason i'm so optimistic that it can be generalized so much more is because that's exactly what we do as a human scientist think of galileo whom we mentioned right i bet when he was a little kid if his dad threw him an apple he would catch it why because he had a neural network in his brain that he had trained to predict the parabolic orbit of apples that are thrown under gravity if you throw a tennis ball to a dog it also has this same ability of deep learning to figure out how the ball is going to move and catch it but galileo went one step further when he got older he went back and was like wait a minute i can write down a formula yes y equals x squared a parabola you know and he helped revolutionize physics as we know it right so there was a basic neural network in there from childhood that captured like the base the experiences of observing different kinds of trajectories and then he was able to go back in with another extra little neural network and analyze all those experiences and be like wait a minute there's a deeper rule here exactly he was able to distill out in symbolic form what that complicated black box nor like was doing right not only did he the formula he get he got ultimately become more accurate you know and similarly this is how he how newton got newton's laws which is why elon can send rockets to the space station now right so it's not only more accurate but it's also simpler much simpler and it's so simple that we can actually describe it to our friends and each other right we've talked about it just in the context of physics now but hey you know isn't this what we're doing when we're talking to each other also we go around with our neural networks just like dogs and cats and chipmunks and bluejays and we experience things in the world but then we humans do this additional step on top of that where we then distill out certain high-level knowledge that we've extracted from this in a way that we can communicate it to each other in a symbolic form in english in this case right so if we can do it and we believe that we are information processing entities then we should be able to make machine learning that does it also well do you think the entire thing could be learning because they're uh this dissection process like for ai feynman the secondary stage feels like something like reasoning and the initial step feels like more like the the more basic kind of differentiable learning do you think the whole thing could be differentiable learning do you think the whole thing could be basically neural networks on top of each other it's like turtles all the way down could be neural networks all the way down i mean that's a really interesting question we know that in in your case it is neural networks all the way down because you have in your skull as a bunch of neurons doing their thing right yeah but uh if you ask the question more generally what what algorithms are your brain is your brain are being used in your brain right i think super interesting to compare i think we've gone a little bit backwards historically because we humans first discovered good old-fashioned ai the logic based ai that we often called gophi for good old-fashioned ai and then more recently we did machine learning because it required bigger computers so we had to discover it later so we think of machine learning with neural networks as the modern thing and the logic based ai as the old-fashioned thing but if you look at evolution on earth right it's actually been the other way around i would i would say that for example an eagle has a better vision system than i have using and dogs are just as good at casting tennis balls as i am all this stuff which is done by training a neural network and not interpreting it in words you know it's something so many of our animal friends can do at least as well as us right what is it that we humans can do that the chipmunks and the eagles cannot it's more to do with this logic based stuff right where we can extract out information in symbols in language and now even with equations if you're a scientist right so basically what happened was first we built these computers that could multiply numbers real fast and manipulate symbols and we felt they were pretty dumb and that then we made neural networks that can see as well as a cat can and do a lot of this inscrutable black box neural networks what we humans can do also is put the two together in a useful way yes artificially in our own brain yes in our own brain so if we ever want to get artificial general intelligence that can do all jobs as well as humans can right then that's what's going to be required to be able to combine the neural networks with with um symbolic combine the old ai with a new ai in a good way we do it in our brains and there seems to be basically two strategies i see in industry now one scares the heebie jeebies out of me and the other one i find much more encouraging okay which one can we break them apart which which are the two the one that scares the heebie-jeebies out of me is this attitude that we're just gonna make ever bigger systems that we still don't understand until they can do be as smart as humans i what could possibly go wrong right yeah i think it's just such a reckless thing to do and unfortunately and if we actually succeed as a species to build artificial general intelligence then we still have no clue how it works i think at least 50 chance we're going to be extinct before too long it's just going to be an utter epic uh own goal you know it's that 44 minutes losing money problem or like the paper clip problem like where we don't understand how it works and it's just in a matter of seconds runs away in some kind of direction that's going to be very problematic even long before you have to worry about the machines themselves somehow deciding to do things and to us that we have to worry about people using machines that are short of ai agin power to do bad things i mean just take your moment and if if anyone is not worried particularly about advanced ai just take 10 seconds and just think about your least favorite leader on the planet right now don't tell me who it is i want to keep this a political but just see the face in front of you that person for 10 seconds yes now imagine that that person has this incredibly powerful ai under their control and can use it to impose their will on the whole planet how does that make you feel yeah so the can can we break that apart just briefly for the 50 chance that we'll run into trouble with this approach do you see the bigger worry in that leader or humans using the system to do damage or are you more worried and i think i'm in this camp more worried about like accidental unintentional destruction of everything so like humans trying to do good and like in a way where everyone agrees it's kind of good it's just they're trying to do good without understanding because i think every evil leader in history thought they're to some degree thought they were trying to do good oh yeah i'm sure hitler thought he was doing good yeah they're good too i've been reading a lot about stalin i'm sure stalin is from he legitimately thought that communism was good for the world and that he was doing good i think mao zedong thought what he was doing with a great leap forward is good too yeah i'm actually concerned about both of those uh before i promised to answer this in detail but before we do that let me finish answering the first question because i told you that there were two different boosts we could get to artificial general intelligence and one scares the species out of me which is this one where we build something we just say bigger neural networks ever more hardware and just train the heck out and more data and poof now it's very powerful that i think is the the most unsafe and reckless approach the alternative to that is the intelligent intelligible intelligence approach instead where we uh say neural networks is just a tool to this like for the first step to get the intuition but then we're going to spend also serious resources sources on other ai techniques for demystifying this black box and figuring out what's it actually doing so we can convert it into something that's equally intelligent but that we actually understand what it's doing maybe we can even prove theorems about it that this car here will never be hacked when it's driving because here's the proof uh there is a whole science of this it doesn't work for neural networks there are big black boxes but it works well and we're certain other kinds of codes right that approach i think is much more promising that's exactly why i'm working on it frankly not just because i think it's cool for science but because i think the more we understand i mean these systems the better the chance is that we can make them do the things that are good for us that are actually intended not unintended so do you think it's possible to prove things about something as complicated as a neural network that's the hope well ideally there's no reason there has to be a neural network in the end either right like we discovered newton's laws of gravity with neural network in newton's head yes but that's not the way it's programmed into the navigation system of elon musk's rocket anymore right it's written in c plus plus or i don't know what language he uses exactly yeah and then there are software tools called symbolic verification the darpa and the us military has done a lot of really great research on this because they really want to understand that when they build weapon systems they don't just go fire at random or malfunction right and there's even a whole operating system called cell 3 that's been developed by a darpa grant where you can actually mathematically prove that this thing can never be hacked well one day i hope that will be something you can say about the os that's running on our laptops too as you know we're not there but i think we should be ambitious frankly yeah and and if we can use machine learning to help do the proofs and so on as well right then it's much easier to verify that a proof is correct than to come up with a proof in the first place that's really the core idea here if someone comes on your on your podcast and says they they proved the riemann hypothesis or some new sensational new theorem it's not me oh it's much easier for some one else to take some smart math grad students to check oh there's an error here on equation equation five or this really checks out than it was to discover the proof yeah although some of those proofs are pretty complicated but yes it's still nevertheless much easier to uh to verify the proof i love the optimism you know we kind of even with the security of systems there's a kind of cynicism that pervades people who think about this which is like oh it's hopeless i mean in the same sense exactly like you're saying when y'all now work so let's go must understand what's happening uh with security people are just like well it's always going there's always going to be um attack vectors yeah like uh waste ways to attack the system but you're right we're just very new with these computational systems we're new with these intelligent systems and and it's not out of the realm of possibility just like people didn't understand the movement of the stars and the planets and so on yeah it's it's entirely possible that like within hopefully soon but it could be within a hundred years we start to have an obvious like laws of gravity about intelligence and uh god forbid about consciousness too that one is agreed you know i think of course if you're selling computers that get hacked a lot that's in your interest as a company that people think it's impossible to make it safe so nobody's going to get the idea of suing you but i want to really inject optimism here it the there it it's it's absolutely possible to do much better than we're doing now and you know your laptop does so much stuff you don't need the music player to be super safe in your in your future self-driving car right if someone hacks it and starts playing music you don't like the world on end but what you can do is you can break out and say the drive computer that controls your safety must be completely physically decoupled entirely from the entertainment system and it must physically be such that it can't take on over-the-air updates while you're driving and it can be it can have it's not that it can have ultimately a some operating system on it which is symbolically verified and proven uh that that it's always going to do what it's going to what it's supposed to do right we can basically have and companies should take that into two they should look at everything they do and say what are the few systems in our in our company that threaten the whole life of the company if they get hacked you know and have the highest standards for them and then they can save money by going for the el cheapo poorly understood stuff for the rest you know this this is very feasible i think and coming back to the bigger question about that you worried about that that there will be unintentional failures i think there are two quite separate risks here right we talked a lot about one of them which is that the goals are noble of the human the human says i want this airplane to not crash because this is not muhammad atta now flying the airplane right and now there's this technical challenge of making sure that the the autopilot is actually going to behave as as the pilot wants if you set that aside there's also the separate question how do you make sure that the goals of the pilot are actually aligned with the goals of the passenger how do you make sure very much more broadly that if we can all agree as a species that we would like things to kind of go well for humanity as a whole that the goals are aligned here the alignment problem and um yeah there's been a lot of progress in in the sense that there's suddenly huge amounts of research going on on it about it i'm very grateful to elon musk for giving us that money five years ago so we could launch the first research program on technical ai safety and alignment there's a lot of stuff happening but i think we need to do more than just make sure little machines do always what their owners do you know that wouldn't have prevented september 11. if muhammad after said okay okay autopilot please fly into world trade center you know and it's like okay that even happened in a different situation there was this depressed pilot named andreas lubitz right he told his german wings passenger jet to fly into the alps he just told the computer to change the altitude to 100 meters or something like that and you know what the computer said all right okay okay and it had the freaking topographical map of the alps in there it had gps everything no one had bothered teaching it even the basic kindergarten ethics of like no we never want airplanes to fly into mountains under any circumstances and so we have to think beyond just the the technical issues and think about how do we align in general incentives on this planet for the greater good so starting with simple stuff like that every airplane that has a computer in it should be taught whatever kindergarten ethics that's smart enough to understand like no don't fly into fixed objects if the pilot tells you to do so then go on autopilot mode send an email to the cops and land at the latest airport nearest airport you know any car with a forward-facing camera should just be programmed by the by the manufacturer so it will never accelerate into a human ever that would have avoid things like the nice attack and many horrible terrorist vehicle attacks where they deliberately did that right this was not some sort of thing oh you know us and china different views on no there was not a single car manufacturer in the world in the world right who wanted the cars to do this they just hadn't thought to do the alignment and if you look at more broadly problems that happen on this planet the vast majority have to do a poor alignment i mean think about let's go back really big because i know this is you're so good yeah in the very so long ago in evolution we had these genes and you they wanted to make copies of themselves that's really all they cared about so they some genes said hey i'm going to build a brain on this body i'm in so that i can get better at making copies myself yes and then they decided for their benefit to get copied more to align your brain's incentives with their incentives so it didn't want you to starve to death so it gave you an incentive to eat and it wanted you to make copies of of the genes so it gave you incentive to fall in love and do all sorts of naughty things to make copies of it of itself right yeah so that was successful value alignment done on the genes but they created something more intelligent than themselves but they made sure to try to align the values but then something went a little bit raw against the idea of what the genes wanted because a lot of humans discovered hey you know yeah we really like this business about sex that the genes have made us enjoy but we don't want to have babies right now yeah so we're going to hack the genes and use birth control and i really feel like drinking a coca-cola right now but i don't want to get a potbelly so i'm going to drink diet coke you know we have all these things we've figured out because we're smarter than the jeans how we can actually subvert their intentions so it's not surprising that this we humans now when we're in the role of these genes creating other non-human entities with a lot of power have to face the same exact challenge how do we make other powerful entities have incentives that are aligned with ours and so they won't hack them corporations for example right we humans decided to create corporations because can benefit us greatly now all of a sudden there's a supermarket i can go buy food there i don't have to hunt awesome and then to make sure that this corporation would do things that were good for us and not bad for us we created institutions to keep them in check like if the local supermarket sells poisonous food then those some the owners of a supermarket have to spend some years reflecting behind bars right so we created incentives to get align them but of course just like we were able to see through this thing and you developed birth control if you're powerful corporation you also have an incentive to try to hack the institutions that are supposed to govern you because you ultimately as a corporation have an incentive to maximize your profit it's like you have an incentive to maximize the enjoyment your brain has not for your genes so if they can figure out a way of of bribing regulators then they're going to do that in the u.s we kind of caught on to that and made laws against corruption and bribery then in the late 1800s teddy roosevelt realized that no we were still being kind of hacked because the massachusetts railroad companies had like a bigger budget than the state of massachusetts and they were doing a lot of very corrupt stuff so he did the whole trust busting thing to try to align these other non-human entities the companies again more with the incentives of americans as a whole um it's not surprising though that you know this is a battle you have to keep fighting now we have even larger companies than we ever had before and of course they're going to try to again support the institutions not because you know i think people make a mistake of getting all too um black thinking about things in terms of good and evil like arguing about whether corporations are good or evil or whether robots are good or evil a robot isn't good or evil it's tool and you can use it for great things like robotic surgery or for bad things and a corporation also is a tool of course and if you have good incentives to corporation it'll do great things like start a hospital or a grocery store if you have any bad incentives then it's going to start maybe marketing addictive drugs to people and you'll have an opioid epidemic right it's all about i don't want we should we not make the mistake of getting into some sort of fairy tale good evil thing about corporations or robots we should focus on putting the right incentives in place my optimistic vision is that if we can do that you know then we can really get good things we're not doing so great with that right now either on ai i think or on other intelligent non-human entities like big companies like we just have a new um secretary of defense there's going to start up now in in the biden administration who is was an active member of the board of raytheon for example yeah so you know i have nothing against raytheon i'm all i'm not a pacifist but there's a obvious conflict of interest if someone is in the job where they decide who's they're going to contract with and i think somehow we have uh maybe we need another teddy roosevelt to come along again and say hey you know we want what's good for all americans and we need to go do some serious realigning again of the incentives that we're giving to these big companies and um then we're going to be better off it seems that naturally with human beings just like you beautifully described the history of this whole thing uh of it all started with the genes and they're probably pretty upset by all the unintended consequences that happened since but the it seems that it kind of works out like it's in this collective intelligence that emerges at the different levels it seems to find sometimes last minute a way to realign the values or keep the values aligned it's almost um it finds a way like uh different leaders different humans pop up all over the place that uh reset the system do you want i mean do you have an explanation why that is or is that just survivor bias and also is that different somehow fundamentally different than with the ai systems where you're no longer dealing with something that was a direct maybe companies are the same a direct byproduct of the evolutionary process i think there is one thing which has changed that's why i'm not all optimistic that's why i think there's about a 50 percent chance if we if we take the dumb route with um artificial intelligence that we will human humanity will be extinct in this century first just the big picture yeah companies need to have the right incentives even governments right we used to have governments usually there were just some king you know who was was the king because his dad was the king you know and and then there were some benefits of having this powerful kingdom because or empire of any sort because then it could prevent a lot of local squabbles so at least everybody in that region would stop warning against each other and their incentives of different cities in the kingdom became more aligned right that's that was the whole selling point harare yeah noah harari has a beautiful piece on how empires were collaboration enablers and then we also hirari says invented money for that reason so we could have better alignment and we could do trade even with people we didn't know so this sort of stuff has been playing out since time immemorial right what's changed is that it happens on ever larger scales right technology keeps getting better because science gets better so now we can communicate over larger distances transport things faster over larger distances and so the entities get ever bigger but our planet is not getting bigger anymore so in the past you could have one experiment that just totally screwed up like easter island where they actually managed to have such poor alignment that when they went extinct people there there was no one else to come back and replace them right if elon musk doesn't get us to mars and then we go extinct on a global scale and we're not coming back that's that's the fundamental difference and that's an ex mistake i would rather we don't make for that reason in the past of course history is full of fiascos right but it was never the whole planet and and then okay now there's this nice uninhabited land here some other people could move in and organize things better this is different the second thing which is also different is that technology gives us so much more empowerment right both to the good things and also to screw up in the stone age even if you had someone whose goals were really poorly aligned like maybe he was really pissed off because his stone age girlfriend dumped him and he just wanted to if he wanted to like kill as many people as he could yeah how many could he really take out with a rock and a stick before he was overpowered right right just handful right yeah now with today's technology if we have an accidental nuclear war between russia and the u.s which we almost have about a dozen times and then we have a nuclear winter it could take out seven billion people or six billion people we don't know uh so this the scale of the damage is bigger that we can do and if if um there's obviously no law of physics that says that technology will never get powerful enough that we could wipe out our species entirely that would just be fantasy to think that science is somehow doomed not get more powerful than that right and and it's not at all unfeasible in our lifetime that someone could design a designer pandemic which spreads as easily as covet but just basically kills everybody we already had smallpox they killed one-third of everybody who got it and and um what do you think of the here's an intuition maybe it's completely naive and this optimistic intuition i have which it seems and maybe it's a biased experience that i have but it seems like the most brilliant people i've met in my life all are really like fundamentally good human beings and not like naive good like they really want to do good for the world in a way that well maybe is aligned to my sense of what good means and so i have a sense that the the people that will be defining the very cutting edge of technology there will be much more of the ones that are doing good versus the ones that are doing evil so the race i'm optimistic on the us always like last minute coming up with a solution so if there's an engineered pandemic that has the capability to destroy most of the human civilization it it feels like to me either leading up to that before or as it's going on there will be we're able to rally the the collective genius of the human species i could tell by your smile that you're uh at least some percentage uh um doubtful but is that could that be a fundamental law of human nature that evolution only creates it creates uh like karma is beneficial good is beneficial and therefore will be all right i hope you're right i would really would love it if you're right if there's some sort of law of nature that says that we always get lucky in the last second because of karma but you know i pref i prefer uh not playing it so close and gambling on that and i i think um in fact i think it can be dangerous to have too strong faith in that yes because it it makes us complacent like if someone tells you you never have to worry about your house burning down then you're not going to put in a smoke detector because why would you need to right right even if it's sometimes very simple precautions we don't take them if you're like oh the government is going to take care of everything for us i can always trust my politicians you know we advocate our own responsibility i think it's a healthier attitude to say yeah maybe things will work out maybe i'm actually gonna have to myself step up and take responsibility uh and the stakes are so huge i mean if we do this right we can develop all this ever more powerful technology and cure all diseases and create a future where humanity is healthy and wealthy for not just the next election cycle but like billions of years throughout our universe that's really worth working hard for and not just you know sitting and hoping for some sort of fairy tale karma well i i just mean so you're absolutely right from the perspective of the individual like for me like the primary thing should be to take responsibility and to build the solutions that your skill set allows yeah which is a lot i think we underestimate often very much how much good we can do right if the if you or anyone listening to this is completely confident that our government would do a perfect job on handling any future crisis with engineered pandemics or future ai people out there on on what actually happened in 2020 do you feel that the government by and large around the world has handled this flawlessly uh that's a really sad and disappointing reality that uh hopefully is a wake-up call for everybody uh for the scientists for the for the re for the engineers for the researchers in ai especially it was disappointing to see how inefficient we were as spread collecting the right amount of data in a privacy preserving way and spreading that data and utilizing that data to make decisions all that kind of stuff yeah i think when something bad happens to me i made myself uh a promise many years ago that i would not be a whiner so when something bad happens to me of course it's a process the disappointment but then i try to focus on what did i learn from this that can make me a better person in the future and there's usually something to be learned when i fail and i think we should all ask ourselves what can we learn from the pandemic about how we can do better in the future and you mentioned there's a really good lesson you know we were not as resilient as we thought we were and we were not as prepared maybe as we wish we were you can even see very stark contrast around the planet south korea right they have over 50 million people do you know how many deaths they have from covet last time i checked no about 500 why is that well the short answer is that they had prepared they were incredibly quick incredibly quick to get on it with very rapid testing and contact tracing and so on which is why they never had more cases than they could contract trace effectively right they never even had to have the kind of big lockdowns we had in the west but the deeper answer to it's not just the koreans are just somehow better people the reason i think they were better prepared was because they had already had a pretty bad hit from the sars pandemic or which never became a pandemic something like 17 years ago i think so it's kind of fresh memory that you know we need to be prepared for pandemics so they were right and so maybe this is a lesson here for all of us to draw from covid that rather than just wait for the next pandemic or the next problem with ai getting out of control or anything else maybe we should just actually set aside a tiny fraction of our gdp to have people very systematically do some horizon scanning and say okay what are the things that could go wrong and let's duke it out and see which are the more likely ones and which are the ones that are actually actionable and then be prepared so one of the observations as one little ant slash human that i am of disappointment is the political division over information that has been observed that i observed this year that it seemed uh the discussion was less about um sort of uh what happened and understanding what happened deeply and more about there's different truths out there and it's like a argument my truth is better than your truth and it's it's like red versus blue or different like it was like this ridiculous discourse that doesn't seem to get at any kind of notion of the truth it's not like uh some kind of scientific process even science got politicized in ways that's very heartbreaking to me uh you have an exciting project on the ai front uh of trying to rethink one of the you mentioned corporations there's one of the other collective intelligence systems that have emerged all this is social networks and just to spread the internet is the spread of information on the uh the internet our ability to share that information there's all different kinds of news sources and so on and so you said like that's from first principles let's rethink how we think about the news how we think about information can you talk about this uh amazing effort that you're undertaking well i'd love to this has been my big covet project it's been nights and weekends on ever since the lockdown to segue into this actually let me come back to what you said earlier that you had this hope that in your experience people who you felt were very talented or often idealistic and wanted to do good frankly i feel the same about all people by and large there are always exceptions but i think the vast majority of everybody regardless of education and whatnot really are fundamentally good right so how can it be that people still do so much nasty stuff right i think it has everything to do with this with the information that we're given yes you know if you go into sweden 500 years ago and you start telling all the farmers that those danes in denmark they're so terrible people you know and we have to invade them yes because they've done all these terrible things that you can't fact check yourself a lot of people swedes did that right and if and um we've seen we're seeing so much of this today in the world both geopolitically you know where we are told that that china is bad and russia is bad and venezuela is bad and people in those countries are often told that we are bad and we also see it at a micro level you know where people are told that oh those who voted for the other party are bad people it's not just an intellectual disagreement but they're bad people and um we're getting ever more divided and so how do you reconcile this with with this intrinsic goodness i and people i i think it's pretty obvious that it has again to do with this with the information they were fed and given right we evolved to live in small groups where you might know 30 people in total right so you then had a system that was quite good for assessing who you could trust and who you could not and if someone told you that you know joe there is a jerk but you had interacted with him yourself and seen him in action and and you would quickly realize maybe that that's actually not quite accurate right but now that we the most people on the planet are people we've never met it's very important that we have a way of trusting the information we're given and so okay so where does the news project come in well throughout history you can go read machiavelli you know from the 1400s and you'll see how already then they were busy manipulating people with propaganda and stuff propaganda is not new at all and the incentives to manipulate people is just not new at all what is it that's new what's new is machine learning meets propaganda that's what's new that's why this has gotten so much worse you know some people like to blame certain individuals like in my liberal university bubble many people blame donald trump and say it was his fault i see it differently i think what donald trump just had this extreme skill at playing this game in the machine learning algorithm age a game he couldn't have played you know 10 years ago so what's changed which changes well facebook and google and other companies and i don't i'm not bad matching them i have a lot of friends who work for these companies good people they deployed machine learning algorithms just to increase their profit a little bit to just maximize the time people spent watching ads and they had totally underestimated how effective they were going to be this was again the black box non-intelligible intelligence they just noticed oh we're getting more ad revenue great it took a long time until they even realized why and how and how damaging this was for society because of course what the machine learning figured out was that the by far most effective way of gluing you to your little rectangle was to show you things that triggered strong emotions anger etc resentment and uh if it was true or not didn't really matter it was also easier to find stories that weren't true if you weren't limited that's just the limitations let's show people that's a very limiting fact and before and long we got these amazing filter bubbles on a scale we had never seen before couple this to the fact that also the online news media were so effective that they killed a lot of print journalism there's only there's less than half as many journalists now in america i believe as there was you know a generation ago he just couldn't compete with the online advertising so all of a sudden most people are not getting even reading newspapers they get get their news from social media and most people only get news in their little bubble so along comes now some people like donald trump who've figured out what among the first successful politicians to figure out how to really play this new game and become very very influential but i think donald trump was a sim well he he took advantage of it he didn't create the fundamental conditions were created by machine learning taking over the news media so this is what motivated my little covid project here so you know i said before machine learning and tech in general is not evil but it's also not good it's just a tool that you can use for good things or bad things and as it happens machine learning and news was mainly used by the big players big tech to manipulate people watch as many ads as possible which have this unintended consequence of really screwing up our democracy into and fragmenting it into filter bubbles so i thought well machine learning algorithms are basically free they can run on your smartphone for free also if someone gives them away to you right there's no reason why they only have to help the big guy to manipulate the little guy they can just as well help the little guy to see through all the manipulation attempts from the big guy so this project is called you can go to improve the news.org the first thing we've built is that it's a little news aggregator looks a bit like google news except it has these sliders on it to help you break out or your filter bubble so if you're reading you can click click and go to your favorite topic and then um if you just slide the left right slider away all the way over to the left there's two sliders right yeah there's the one the most obvious one is the one that has left right labeled on it you go to the left you get one set of articles you go to the right you see a very different truth yeah appearing oh that's literally left and right on the political spectrum on the political yeah so if you're reading about immigration for example it it's very very noticeable and and i think step one always if you want to not get manipulated is just to be able to recognize the techniques people use so it's very helpful to just see how they spin things on the two sides i think many people are under the misconception that the main problem is fake news it's not we i had an amazing team of mit students where we did an academic project to use machine learning to detect the main kinds of bias over the summer and yes of course sometimes there's fake news where someone just claims something that's false right like oh hillary clinton just got divorced or something yes but what we see much more of is actually just omissions if you go to there's some stories which just won't be mentioned by the left or the right because it doesn't suit their agenda and then they'll instead mention other ones very very very much so for example we've had a lot a number of stories about the trump family's financial dealings and then there's been some a bunch of stories about the biden families hunter binds financial dealings right surprise surprise they don't get equal coverage on the left and the right right one side loves to cover the biden hunter biden stuff and one side loves to cover the trump you never guess which is which right yeah but the great news is if you want to if you're a normal american citizen and you dislike corruption in all its forms then slide slide you can just get look at both of the sides and you'll see all the corrupts those political corruption stories it's really liberating to just take in the both sides the spin on both sides it somehow unlocks your mind to like think on your own to realize that that i don't know it's the same thing that was useful right in the soviet union times for when when everybody was much more aware that they're surrounded by propaganda right it's so interesting what you're saying actually so noam chomsky you know used to be our mit colleague once said that propaganda is to democracy what violence is to totalitarianism and and what he means by that is if you have a really totalitarian government you don't need propaganda right people will do what you do what you want them to do anyway out of fear right yes but otherwise you need propaganda so i would say actually that the propaganda is much higher quality in democracies much more believable and it's brilliant it's really striking when i talk to colleagues science colleagues like from russia and china and so on i noticed they are actually much more aware of the propaganda in their own media than many of my american colleagues are about the propaganda and western media that's brilliant that means the propaganda in the western media is just better yes that's so big better in the west oh man that's good but when you when once you realize that you realize there's also something very optimistic there that you can do about it right because first of all omissions as long as there's no outright censorship you can just look at both sides and pretty quickly piece together a much more accurate idea of what's actually going on right and develop a natural skepticism too yeah just a analytical scientific mind about how you're taking the information yeah and i i think i have to say sometimes i feel that some of us in the academic bubble are too arrogant about this and somehow think oh it's just people who aren't as educated when we are often just as gullible also you know we read only our media and and don't see through things anyone who looks at both sides like this in comparison will immediately start noticing the shenanigans being pulled and you know i think what i tried to do with with this app is that the big tech has to some extent uh try to blame the individual for being manipulated much like big tobacco tried to blame the individuals entirely for smoking and then later on you know our government stepped up and said actually you know you can't just blame little kids for starting to smoke we have to have more responsible advertising and this and that i think it's a bit the same here it's very convenient for a big tech to blame so it's just people who are so dumb and get fooled yeah the blame usually comes in saying oh it's just human psychology people just want to hear what they already believe but professor david rand at mit actually partly debunked that with a really nice study showing that people are tend to be interested in hearing things that go against what they believe if it's presented in a respectful way like suppose for example that um you have a company and you're just about to launch this project and you're convinced it's going to work and someone says you know lex i hate to tell you this but this is going to fail and here's why would you be like shut up i don't want to hear it yeah would you you would be interested right and also if you're on an airplane back in the co precovered times you know and the guy next to you is clearly from the opposite side of the political spectrum but is very respectful and polite to you wouldn't you be kind of interested to hear a bit about how he or she thinks about things of course but it's not so easy to find out respectful disagreement now because like for example if you are a democrat and you're like i want to see something on the other side so you just go breitbart.com and then after the first 10 seconds you feel deeply insulted by something and then they it's it's not going to work or if you take someone who votes republican and they go to something on the left and they just get very offended very quickly by them having put a deliberately ugly picture of donald trump on the front page or something it doesn't really work so this news aggregator also has this nuanced slider which you can pull to the right and then to make it easier to get exposed to actually more sort of academic style or more respectful um portrayals of different views and and finally the one kind of bias i think people are mostly aware of is the left right right because it's so obvious because both left and right are very powerful here right both of them have well-funded tv stations and newspapers and it's kind of hard to miss but there's another one the establishment slider which is it's also really fun i i i love to play with it that's more about corruption yes because if you have a society that where almost all the powerful entities want you to believe a certain thing that's what you're going to read in both the big media mainstream media on the left and on the right of course and the powerful companies can push back very hard like tobacco companies pushed back very hard back in the day when peop some newspaper started writing articles about tobacco being dangerous so it was hard to get a lot of coverage about it initially and also if you look geopolitically right of course in any country when you read their media you're mainly going to be reading a lot about articles about how our country is the good guy and the other countries are the bad guys right so if you want to have a really more nuanced understanding you know like the germans used to be told that the the the british used to be told that the french were the bad guys and the french used to be told that british were the bad guys now they visit each other's countries a lot and have a much more nuanced understanding i don't think there's going to be any more wars between france and germany but on the geopolitical scale it's just just as much as ever you know a big cold war now you as china and so on and if you want to if you want to get a more nuanced understanding of what's happening geopolitically then it's really fun to look at this establishment slider because it turns out there are tons of little newspapers both on the left and on the right who sometimes challenge establishment and say you know maybe we shouldn't actually invade iraq right now maybe this weapons and mass destruction thing was bs if you look at the journalism research afterwards you can actually see that quite clearly that both cnn and fox were very pro let's and get rid of saddam there are weapons of mass destruction then there were a lot of smaller newspapers they were like wait a minute this evidence seems a bit sketchy and maybe we but of course they were so hard to find most people didn't even know they existed right yet it would have been better for american national security if those voices had also come up i think it harmed america's national security actually that we invaded iraq and arguably there's a lot more interest in that kind of thinking too from those small sources so like the when you say big it's more about kind of uh the reach of the broadcast but it's not big in terms of the interest i think i think there's a lot of interest in that kind of anti-establishment or like skepticism towards you know out-of-the-box thinking there's a lot of interest in that kind of thing do you see this news project or something like it being um basically taking over the world as as the main way we consume information like what's how do we get how do we get there like how do we you know so okay the idea is brilliant it's a it's a you you're calling it your little project in 2020 but how does that become the new way we consume information i hope first of all just to plan the little seed there because normally the big barrier of doing anything in media is you need a ton of money but this cost me no money at all i've just been paying myself you pay a tiny amount of money each month to amazon to run the thing in their cloud we're not there never will never be any ads the point is not to make any money off of it and we just train machine learning algorithms to classify the articles and stuff so it just kind of runs by itself so if it actually gets good enough at some point that it starts catching on it could scale and if other people carbon copy it and make other versions that are better that's the more the merrier i think there's a real opportunity for machine learning to empower the individual the list of the powerful players uh it's as i said in the beginning here it's been mostly the other way around so far that the big players have the ai and then they tell people this is the truth this is how it is but it can just as well go the other way around and when the internet was born actually a lot of people had this hope that maybe this will be a great thing for democracy make it easier to find out about things and maybe machine learning and things like this can uh can actually help again and i have to say i think it's impo it's more important than ever now right because this is very linked also to the whole future of life as we discussed earlier right we're getting this ever more powerful attack you know it's frank it's pretty clear if you look on the one or two generation three generation time scale that there are only two ways this can end geopolitically yeah either it ends great for all humanity or ends terribly for all of us there's there's really no in between it and we're so stuck in and because you know technology knows no borders and you can't have people fighting when the weapons just keep getting ever more powerful uh indefinitely eventually lux the luck runs out and and you know right like right now we have i love america but the the fact of the matter is what's good for america is not opposites in the long term to what's good for other countries it it would be if this was some sort of zero-sum game like it was thousands of years ago when the only way one country could get more resources was to take land from other countries because that was basically the resource right you look at the map of europe some countries kept getting bigger and smaller endless wars but then since 1945 there hasn't been any war in western europe and they all got way richer because of tech so the optimistic outcome is that the big winner in this century is going to be america and china and russia and everybody else because technology just makes us all healthier and wealthier and we just find some way of keeping the peace on this planet but i think unfortunately there are some pretty powerful forces right now that are pushing in exactly the opposite direction and trying to demonize other countries which just makes it more likely that this ever more powerful tech we're building is gonna use disastrous ways yeah for aggression versus cooperation that kind of thing yeah even look at look at this military ai now right it's 120 it was so awesome to see these dancing robots i loved it right but one of the biggest growth areas in robotics now is of course autonomous weapons right and and 2020 was like the best marketing year ever for autonomous weapons because in both libya civil war and in nagorno-karabakh they made the decisive difference right and everybody else is like watching this oh yeah we want to build autonomous weapons too and in libya you had on one hand our ally the united arab emirates that were flying their autonomous weapons that they bought from china bombing libyans and on the other side you had our other ally turkey flying their drones and they had no skin in the game any of these other countries and of course there was the libyans who really got screwed in nagorno-karabakh you had actually again now turkey is sending drones built by this company that was actually founded by a guy who went to mit aeroastro do you know that background dr yeah so mit has a direct responsibility for ultimately this and a lot of civilians were killed there you know and so because it was militarily so effective now now suddenly there's a huge push oh yeah yeah let's go build ever more autonomy into these these weapons and it's going to be great and uh i think actually people who are obsessed about some sort of future terminology scenario right now or should start focusing on the fact that we have two much more urgent threats happening for machine learning one of them is the whole destruction of democracy that we've talked about now where where our flow of information is being manipulated by machine learning and the other one is that right now you know this is the year when the big arms race in out of control arms race and at least thomas weapons is going to start or it's going to stop so you have a sense that there is uh like 2020 was a instrumental catalyst for the race of for the autonomous weapons race yeah because it was the first year when when they proved decisive in the battlefield and and these ones are still not fully autonomous mostly they're remote controlled right but you know we could very quickly make things about you know the size and cost of a smartphone which you just put in the gps coordinates or the face of the one you want to kill his skin color or whatever and it flies away and you know does it and the the real good reason why the u.s and all the other superpowers should put the kibosh on this is the same reason we decided to put the kibosh on bio weapons so you know we gave the future of life award that we can talk more about later matthew messelston from harvard before for convincing nixon to ban bioweapons and i asked him how did you do it and he was like well i just said look we don't want there to be a 500 weapon of mass destruction that even all our enemies can afford even non-state actors and nixon was like good point you know it's in america's interest that the power of weapons are all really expensive so only we can afford them or maybe some more stable adversaries right nuclear weapons are like that but bioweapons were not like that that's why we banned them and that's why you never hear about them now that's why we love biology so you have a sense that it's possible for the big powerhouses in terms of the the big nations in the world to agree that autonomous weapons is not a race we want to be on that it doesn't end well yeah because we we know it's just going to end in mass proliferation and every terrorists terrorist everywhere is going to have these super cheap weapons that they will use against us and it and our and our politicians have to constantly worry about being assassinated every time they go outdoors by some anonymous little mini drone you know we don't want that and if even if the u.s and china and everyone else could just agree that you can only build these weapons if they cost at least 10 million bucks that would that would be a huge win for the superpowers and frankly for everybody the um you don't and people often push back and say well it's so hard to prevent cheating but hey you could say the same about bioweapons you know take any of your rmit colleagues in biology of course they could build some nasty bioweapon if they really wanted to but first of all they don't want to because they think it's disgusting because of the stigma and second even if there's some sort of nut case in want to it's very likely that some other grad students or someone would rat them out because everyone else thinks it's so disgusting right and in fact we now know there was even a fair bit of cheating on the bioweapons ban but none no countries used them because it was so stigmatized that it just wasn't worth revealing that they had cheated you talk about drones but you kind of think that drones is the remote operation which they are mostly yes but you're not taking the next intellectual step of like where does this go you're kind of saying the problem with drones is that you're removing yourself from direct violence therefore you're not able to sort of maintain the common humanity required to make the proper decision strategically but that's the criticism as opposed to like if this is automated and just exactly as you said if you automate it and there's a race then he's going to the technology and you get better and better and better which means getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper yeah and unlike perhaps nuclear weapons which is connected to uh resources in a way like it's hard to get the it's hard to engineer yeah it feels like it's you know um there's too much overlap between the tech industry and autonomous weapons to where you could have smartphone type of uh cheapness if you look at drones uh you know it's a it's a you know for a thousand dollars you can have an incredible system that's able to maintain flight autonomously for you and take pictures and stuff you could see that going into the autonomous weapon space that's um but like why is that not thought about or discussed enough in the public do you think you see those dancing boston dynamics robots and everybody has this kind of um like as if this is like a far future yeah they have this like fear like oh this will be terminator in like some i don't know unspecified 20 30 40 years and they don't think about well this is like some much less dramatic version of that is actually happening now it's not going to have it's not going to be legit it's not going to be dancing but it's this already has the capability to use artificial intelligence to kill humans yeah the boston dynamics leg robots i think the reason we imagine them holding guns is just because you've all seen arnold schwarzenegger right right that's our reference point that's pretty useless that's not going to be the main military use of them they might be useful in law enforcement in the future and then there's a whole debate about do you want robots showing up at your house with guns telling you to uh who'll be perfectly obedient to whatever dictator controls whatever but let's leave that aside for a moment and look at what's actually relevant now so there's a spectrum of things you can do with ai in the military and again to put my card on the table i'm not the pacifist i think we should have good defense um so for example a predator drone is a room basically a fancy little remote controlled airplane right there's a human can piloting it and the decision ultimately about whether to kill somebody with it is made by a human still and this is a line i think we should never cross there's a current dod policy again you have to have a human in the loop i think algorithms should never make life or death decisions they should be left to humans now why might we cross that line well first of all these are expensive right so for example when uh when when azerbaijan had all these drones and armenia didn't have any they start trying to jerry-rig little cheap things fly around and but then of course their minions would jam them as areas would jam them and remote control things can be jammed that makes them inferior also there's a bit of a time delay between you know if we're piling something far away speed of light and the human has a reaction time as well it would be nice to eliminate that jamming possibility in the time delay by having it fully autonomous but now you might be so then if you do but now you might be crossing that exact line you might program it to just oh yeah the air drone go hover over this country for a while and whenever you find someone who is a bad guy you know kill them now the machine is making these sort of decisions and you and some people who defend this still say well that's morally fine because we are the good guys and we will tell it the definition of bad guy that we think is moral but now you'll be very naive to think that if isis buys that same drone that they're gonna use our definition of bad guy maybe for them bad guy is someone wearing a us army uniform right or maybe maybe there will be some weird uh ethnic group who decides that someone of another ethnic group they are the bad guys right the thing is human soldiers with all our faults right we still have some basic wiring in us like no it's not okay to kill kids and civilians and thomas weapon has none of that it's just going to do whatever is programmed it's like the perfect adolf eichmann on steroids like they told him out of icman you know he wanted to do this and this than this to make the holocaust more efficient and he was like and off he went and did it right yeah do we really want to make machines that are like that like completely amoral and we'll take the user's definition of who's the bad guy and do we then want to make them so cheap that all our adversaries can have them like what could possibly go wrong that's the that's i think the big argument for why we want to this year really put the kibosh on this and i think you can tell there's a lot of very active debate even going on within the u.s military and undoubtedly in other militaries around the world also about whether we should have some sort of international agreement to at least require that these weapons have to be above a certain size and cost you know so that um things just don't uh totally spiral out of control and finally just for your question now but is it possible to stop it because some people tell me oh just give up you know but again so so matthew messelcen again from harvard right who the bio weapons hero he had exactly this criticism also with bio weapons people were like how can you check for sure that the russians aren't cheating and um he told me this i think really ingenious insight he said you know max some people think you have to have inspections and things and you have to make sure that people that you can catch the cheaters with a hundred percent chance you don't need a hundred percent they said one percent is usually enough because i like if it's just an enemy if it's another big state like suppose china and the u.s have signed the treaty [Music] drawing a certain line and saying yeah these kind of drones are okay but these fully autonomous ones are not now suppose you are china and you have cheated and secretly developed some clandestine little thing or you're thinking about doing it you know what's your calculation that you do well you're like okay what's the probability that we're going to get caught if the probability is 100 of course we're not going to do it but if the probability is five percent that we're going to get caught then it's going to be like a huge embarrassment for us yeah and it doesn't have it's we still have our nuclear weapons anyway so it doesn't really make an enormous difference in in terms of deterring the u.s you know and that fees the stigma that you kind of establish like this fabric this universal stigma over the thing exactly it's very reasonable for them to say well you know we probably get away with it but if we don't then the u.s will know we cheated and then they're going to go full tilt with their program and say look the chinese are cheaters and that's good now we have all these weapons against us and that's bad so the stigma alone is very very powerful and again look what happened with bioweapons right it's been 50 years now yeah when was the last time you read about a bioterrorism attack the only deaths i really know about with bioweapons that have happened when we americans managed to kill some of our own with anthrax you know the idiot who sent them to tom daschle and others and letters right and similarly the in uh zverdlovsk in the soviet union they had some anthrax and some lab there maybe they were cheating or who knows and it leaked out and killed a bunch of russians i'd say that's a pretty good success right 50 years just two own goals by the superpowers and then nothing and that's why whenever i ask anyone what they think about biology they they think it's great they associate it with new cures new diseases maybe a good vaccine this is how i want to think about ai in the future i want and i want others to think about ai too as a source of all these great solutions to our problems not as oh ai oh yeah that's the reason i feel scared going outside these days yes it's kind of brilliant that the bioweapons and nuclear weapons we've figured out i mean of course there's still a huge source of danger but we figured out some way of creating rules and social stigma over these weapons that then creates a stability to our whatever that game theoretic stability that is exactly and we don't have that with ai and you're kind of screaming from the top of the uh the mountain about this that we need to find that because um just like you know it's very possible you know with future of life as you point out uh institute uh awards pointed out that uh you know with nuclear weapons we could have destroyed ourselves quite a few yeah times and it's um you know it's a learning experience that uh doesn't it's very costly we gave you know this future life award we gave it the first time to this guy vasily arkhipov you know he was on most people haven't even heard of yeah can you say who he is vasily arkhipov he um has in my opinion made the greatest positive contribution to humanity of any human in modern history and maybe it sounds like hyperbole here like i'm just over the top but let me tell you the story and i think maybe you'll agree so during the cuban missile crisis we americans first didn't know that the russians had sent four submarines but we caught two of them and we didn't know that that so we dropped practice depth charges on the one that he was on to try to force it to the surface but we didn't know that this nuclear submarine actually was a nuclear submarine with a nuclear torpedo we also didn't know that they had authorization to launch it without clearance from moscow and we also didn't know that they were running out of electricity their batteries were almost dead they were running out of oxygen sailors were fainting left and right the temperature was about 110 120 fahrenheit on board it was really hellish conditions really just kind of doomsday and at that point these giant explosions start happening from the americans dropping these the captain thought world war iii had begun they decided that they were going to launch the nuclear torpedo and one of them shouted you know we're all going to die but we're not going to disgrace our navy you know we don't know what would have happened if there had to be a giant mushroom cloud all of a sudden you know and against the americans but since everybody had their hands on the triggers it's pretty you don't have to be too creative to think that it could have led to an all-out nuclear war and in which case we wouldn't be having this conversation now right what actually took place was they needed three people to to approve this the captain had said yes there was the communist party political officer he also said yes let's do it and the third man was this guy vasiliyakipov who said yet yeah uh he for some reason he was just more chill than the others and he was the right man at the right time i don't want us as a species rely on the right person being there at the right time you know we tracked down his family living in relative poverty outside moscow when he flew his daughter he had passed away and flew them to london they had never been to the west even it was incredibly moving so you have to honor them for this uh the next year we gave this future life award to stanislav petrov have you heard of him yes so he he was in charge of the soviet early warning station which was built with soviet technology and honestly not that reliable it said that there were five us missiles coming in again if they had launched at that point we probably wouldn't be having this conversation he decided based on just mainly gut instinct to just not tell not to not escalate this and i'm very glad he wasn't replaced by an ai that was just automatically following orders and then we gave the third one to matthew messelson last year we gave this award to these guys who actually use technology for good not avoiding something bad but for something good the guys who eliminated this disease which is way worse than covent that had killed a half a billion people in in the past its final century smallpox right so we mentioned it earlier coved on average kills less than one percent of people who get it smallpox about 30 percent and um they just ultimately victor donov and bill feige most my colleagues have never heard of either of them um one american one russian they did this amazing effort not only what was able to get the us and the soviet union to team up against smallpox during the cold war but bill feige came up with this ingenious strategy for making it actually go all the way to defeat the disease with without funding for vaccinating everyone and as a result we haven't had any we went from 15 million deaths the year i was born in smallpox so what do we have in covet now a little bit short of two million right yes to zero deaths of course this year and forever there have been 200 million people they estimate who would have died since then by smallpox had it not been for this so isn't science awesome can't that when you use it for good and the reason we want to celebrate these sort of people is is to remind them of this science is so awesome when you use it for good and those those awards actually uh the variety there paint's a very interesting picture so the the the first two are looking at it's kind of exciting to think that these these average humans in some sense that they're products of you know billions of other humans that came before them evolution and some little you said gut you know but there's something in there that that uh stopped the annihilation of the human race and that's a magical thing but that's like this deeply human thing and then there's the other aspect where that's also very human which is to build solution to the to the existential crises that we're facing like to build it to take the responsibility and to take come up with different technologies and so on yeah and both of those are deeply human the gut and and the mind whatever that is the best is when they work together archipelago i wish i could have met him of course but he had passed away he was really a fantastic military officer combining all all the best traits that we in america admire in our military because first of all he was very loyal of course he never even told anyone about this during his whole life even though you think he had some bragging rights right but he just was like this is just business just doing my job it only came out later after his death and and second the reason he did the right thing was not because he was some sort of liberal or some sort not because he was just oh you know uh peace and love it was partly because he had been the captain on another submarine that had a nuclear reactor meltdown and it was his heroism that helped contain this that's why he died of cancer later also but he's seen many of his crew members die and i think for him that gave him this gut feeling that you know if there's a nuclear war between the u.s and the soviet union the whole world is going to go through what i saw my dear crew members suffer through it wasn't just an abstract thing for him i think it was real and second though not just the gut the mind right he he was for some reason very level-headed personality a very smart guy which is exactly what we want our best fighter pilots to be also right i i never forget neil armstrong when he's landing on the moon and almost running out of gas and he doesn't even change when they say 30 seconds he doesn't even change the tone of voice just keeps going arc i think was just like that so when the explosion starts going off and his captain is screaming and we should nuke them and and all he's like i don't think the americans are trying to sink us i think they're trying to send us a message that's a pretty badass yes coolness because he said yeah if they wanted to sink us no and he said listen listen it's alternating one loud explosion on the left one on the right one on the left one on the right he was the only one who noticed this pattern and it is like i think this is them trying to send us a signal that they want us to surface and they're not going to sink us uh and somehow this is how he then managed to ultimately with his combination of gut and also just cool analytical thinking was able to de-escalate the whole thing and uh yeah so this is some of the best in humanity i guess coming back to what we talked about earlier is the combination of the neural network you know with uh i'm getting the tearing up here getting emotional but he was just he is one of my superheroes com having both the heart you know and the mind combined and especially in that time uh there's something about the i mean this is a very in america people are used to this kind of idea of being the individual um of like on your own thinking yeah i think under in the soviet union under communism it's actually much harder to do that oh yeah he didn't even he even got he didn't get any accolades either when he came back for this right uh they just wanted to hush the whole thing up yeah there's echoes of that with chernobyl there's all kinds of um uh that's one that's that's a really hopeful thing that amidst big centralized powers whether it's companies or states there's still the power of the individual to think on their own to act but i think we need to think of people like this not as a panacea we can always count on but rather as a wake-up call you know so because of them because of archipov we are alive to learn from this lesson to learn from the fact that we shouldn't keep playing russian roulette and almost have a nuclear war by mistake now and then because relying on luck is not a good long-term strategy if you keep playing russian inlet over and over again the probability of surviving just drops exponentially with time yeah and if you have some probability of having an accidental new core every year the probability of not having one also drops exponentially i think we can do better than that so i i think uh the message is very clear once in a while happens and um there's a lot of very concrete things we can do to reduce the risk of things like that happening in the first place on the ai front if we just link an effort yeah so you're friends with you often talk with elon musk throughout history did a lot of interesting things together um he has a a set of fears about the future of artificial intelligence agi do you have a sense you've we've already talked about the things we should be worried about with ai do you have a sense of the shape of his spheres in particular about ai of the which subset of what we've talked about whether it's creating you know it's that direction of creating sort of these giant computational systems that are not explainable they're not intelligible intelligence or is it um is it the and then like as a branch of that is it the manipulation by big corporations of that or individual evil people to use that for destruction or the unintentional consequences do you have a sense of where his thinking is on this from my many conversations with elon yeah i i certainly have a model of how how he thinks it's actually very much like the way i think also i'll elaborate on it a bit i just want to push back on when you said evil people i i don't think it's very helpful context concept evil people yes sometimes people do very very bad things but they usually do it because they think it's a good thing yes because somehow other people had told them that that was a good thing or given them incorrect information or or whatever right um i i have i believe in the fundamental goodness of humanity that if we educate people well and they find out how things really are people generally want to do good and be good hence the value alignment as yeah it's it's about information about knowledge and then once we have that we'll we'll uh we'll likely be able to uh do good in the way that's aligned with everybody else who thinks yeah and it's not just the individual people we have to align so we we don't just want people to be educated to know the way things actually are and to treat each other well but we also need to align other non-human entities we talked about corporations there has to be institutions so that what they do is actually good for the country they're in and we should align do make sure that what countries do is actually good for the species as a whole etc uh coming back to elon yeah my my uh understanding of of how elon sees this is really quite similar to my own which is one of the reasons i like him so much and enjoy talking with him so much i feel he's quite different from most people in that he thinks much more than most people about the really big picture not just what's going to happen in the next election cycle but in millennia millions and billions of years from now right and if you when you look in this more cosmic perspective it's so obvious that we are gazing out into this universe that as far as we can tell is mostly dead with life being almost imperceptibly tiny perturbation right and and he sees this enormous opportunity for our universe to come alive for us to become an interplanetary species mars is obviously just first stop on this cosmic journey and precisely because he thinks more long-term it's much more clear to him than to most people that what we do with this russian roulette thing we keep playing with our nukes as a really poor strategy really reckless strategy and also that that we're just building these ever more powerful ai systems that we don't understand it's also it's a really reckless strategy i feel elon is a human very much a humanist in the sense that he wants an awesome future for humanity he wants to be us that control the machines rather than the machines that control us yes you know and why shouldn't we insist on that we're building them after all right why should we build things that just make us into some little cog in the machinery that has no further say in the matter right it's not my idea of an inspiring future either yeah the if if you think on the cosmic scale in terms of both time and space so much is put into perspective yeah whenever i have a bad day that's what i think about it immediately makes me feel better it makes me sad that for us individual humans at least for now the ride ends too quickly we don't get to experience the cosmic scale yeah i mean i think of our universe sometimes as an organism that has only begun to wake up a tiny bit uh just like you know when you're in the the very first little glimmers of consciousness you have in the morning when you start coming around for the coffee before the coffee even before you get out of bed before you even open your eyes you start start to wake up a little bit there's something here you know that's very much how i think of of where we are you know those all those galaxies out there you know i think they're really beautiful but why are they beautiful they're beautiful because conscious entities are actually observing them and experiencing them through our telescopes if i you know i define consciousness as subjective experience whether it be colors or emotions or sounds so beauty is an experience meaning is an experience purpose is an experience if there was no conscious experience of observing these galaxies they wouldn't be beautiful if if we do something dumb with advanced ai in the future here and earth originating life goes extinct and that was it for this if there is nothing else with telescopes in our universe then it's kind of game over for me beauty and meaning and purpose in our whole universe and i think that would be just such an opportunity lost frankly and i think when elon points this out he gets very unfairly maligned in the media for all the dumb media bias reasons we talked about right they print precisely the things about elon out of context that are really click-baity like he has gotten so much flack for this summoning the demon statement yeah i happen to know exactly the context because i was in the front row when they gave that talk it was at mit you'll be pleased to know it was the aero astro anniversary they had buzz aldrin there from the moon landing a whole house a kresge auditorium packed with mit students and he had this amazing q a it might have gone for an hour and then we talked about rockets and mars and everything at the very end this one student was actually in my class asked him what about ai elon makes this one comment and they take this out of context print it goes viral is it like with ai we're summoning the demon something like that and try to cast him as some sort of doom and gloom dude you know yeah you know elon yes he's not the doom and gloom dude he he is such a positive visionary and the whole reason he warns about this is because he realizes more than most what the opportunity cost is of screwing up that there is so much awesomeness in the future that we can we can and our descendants can enjoy if we don't screw up right i get so pissed off when people try to cast him in some sort of technophobic luddite and then at this point it's kind of ludicrous when when i hear people say that people who worry about artificial general intelligence are luddites because of course if you look more closely you have some of the most outspoken people making warnings are people like professor stuart russell from berkeley who's written the best-selling ai textbook you know so claiming that he is a luddite who doesn't understand ai is the joke is really on the people who said it but i think more broadly this message is really not sunk in at all what it is that people worry about they think that elon and stuart russell and others are worried about the dancing robots picking up an ar-15 and going on a rampage right they think they're worried about robots turning evil they're not i'm not you know the risk is not malice it's it's competence the risk is just that we build some systems that are incredibly competent which means they're always going to get their goals accomplished even if they clash with our goals that's the risk why did we humans you know drive the west african black rhino extinct is it because we're malicious evil rhinoceros haters no it's just because our goals didn't align with the goals of those rhinos and tough luck for the rhinos you know so when i'm the point is just we don't want to put ourselves in the position of those rhinos creating these something more powerful than us if we haven't first figured out how to align the goals and i am optimistic i think we could do it if we worked really hard on it because i spent a lot of time around intelligent entities that were more intelligent than me my mom and my dad and i was little and that was fine because their goals were actually aligned with mind quite well but uh we've seen today many examples of where the goals of our powerful systems are not so aligned so those click through optimization algorithms that are polarized social media right they were actually pretty poorly aligned with what was good for democracy it turned out and um again almost all problems we've had in machine learning again came so far not from malice but from poor alignment and it's that's exactly why that's why we should be concerned about it in the future do you think it's possible that uh with with systems like neurolink and brain computer interfaces you know again thinking of the cosmic scale elon's talked about this but others have as well throughout history of figuring out how the exact mechanism of how to achieve that kind of alignment so one of them is having a symbiosis with ai which is like coming up with clever ways where we're like stuck together in this weird uh relationship whether it's biological or in some kind of other way do you think there's that's a possibility of having that kind of symbiosis or do we want to instead kind of focus on this uh distinct entities of us humans talking to these intelligible self-doubting ais maybe like stuart russell thinks about he's like these these we're we're self-doubting and full of uncertainty and then have rai systems that are full on certainty we communicate back and forth and in that way achieve symbiosis i honestly don't know i would say that because we don't know for sure what if any of our which of any of our ideas will work but we do know that if we don't i'm pretty convinced that if we don't get any of these things to work and just barge ahead then our species is you know probably going to go extinct this century i think it this century you think like you think we're facing this crisis as a 21st century christ like this century would be remembered on a hard drive and a hard drive somewhere or or maybe by future generations is like uh like there will be future future life institute awards for people that have done something about ai it could also end even worse where there isn't we're not superseded by leaving any ai behind either way we just totally wipe out you know like on easter island our century is long no it's there are still 79 years left of it right think about how far we've come just in the last 30 years so we can talk more about what might go wrong but you asked me this really good question about what's the best strategy is it neuralink russell's approach or or whatever i think um like you know when when we did the manhattan project we didn't know if any of our four ideas for enriching uranium and getting out the uranium uranium-235 were going to work but we felt this was really important to get it before hitler did so you know what we did we tried all four of them here i think it's it's analogous where there's the greatest threat that's ever faced our species and of course u.s national security by implication we don't know if we don't have any method that's guaranteed to work but we have a lot of ideas so we should invest pretty heavily in pursuing all of them with an open mind and hope that one of them at least works these are the good news is the century is long you know and it might take decades until we have artificial general intelligence so we have some time hopefully but it takes a long time als to solve these very very difficult problems it's going to actually be it's the most difficult problem we're ever trying to solve as a species so we have to start now so we don't have rather than you know begin thinking about it the night before some people have had too much red bull switching on and we have to coming back to your question we have to pursue all of these different avenues and see if you're my investment advisor and i was trying to invest in the future how do you think the human species is most likely to destroy itself in this century yeah in uh so if if the crisis many of the crisis we're facing are really before us within the next hundred years how do we make explicit the make known the the unknowns and solve those problems to to avoid the biggest starting with the biggest existential crisis so as your investment advisor how are you planning to make money destroying yourselves i have to ask i don't know it's uh it might be the russian origins somehow involved at the micro level of detailed strategies of course this is these are unsolved problems for ai alignment we can break it into three sub-problems that are all unsolved i think with you know you want first to make machines understand our goals then adopt our goals and then retain our goals so to hit on all three real quickly the problem when andreas lubitz told his autopilot to fly into the alps was that the computer didn't even understand anything about his goals right it was too dumb it could have understood actually but we would have had to put some effort in as a system designer that don't fly into mountains so that's the first challenge how do you how do you program into computers human values human goals we can start rather than than saying oh it's so hard we should start with the simple stuff as i said self-driving cars airplanes just put in all the goals that we all agree on already and then have a habit of whenever machines get smarter so they can understand one level higher goals you know put them into uh the second challenge is uh getting them to adopt the goals it's easy for situations like that where you just program it in but when you have self-learning systems like children you know any parent knows that um there's a difference between getting our kids to understand what we want them to do and to actually adopt our goals right with with humans with children fortunately they they go through this phrase first they're too dumb to understand what we want our goals are and then they have this period of some years when they're both smart enough to understand them and malleable enough that we have a chance to raise them well and then they become teenagers it's kind of too late but we have this window with machines the challenges they might the intelligence might grow so fast that that window is pretty short so that's a that's the research problem the third one is how do you make sure they keep the goals if they keep learning more and getting smarter many sci-fi movies are about how you have something which initially was a line but then things kind of go off keel and you know my kids were very very excited about their legos when they were little now they're just gathering dust in the basement you know if we put if we create machines that are really on board with the goal of taking care of humanity we don't want them to get as bored with us and and as my kids go with legos so this is another research challenge how can you make some sort of recursively self-improving system retain certain basic goals that said a lot of adult people still play with legos so maybe we succeeded with the legos i like your optimism so not all ai systems have to maintain the goals right some just some fraction yeah so there so there is a there's a lot of talented ai researchers now who have heard of this and want to work on it not so much funding for it yet of the billions that go into building a ai more powerful it's only a minuscule fraction so far going into the safety research my attitude is generally we should not try to slow down the technology but we should greatly accelerate the investment in this sort of safety research um and also make sure it's been it's this was very embarrassing last year but you know the nsf decided to give out the six of these big institutes we got one of them for ai and science you asked me about another one was supposed to be for ai safety research and they gave it people studying oceans and climate and stuff yeah so i'm all for starting oceans and climates but we need to actually have some money that actually goes into ai safety research also and doesn't just get grabbed by whatever um that's a fantastic investment and then at the higher level you ask this question okay what can we do you know what are the biggest risks i think i think we cannot just consider this to be only a technical problem like again because if you solve only the technical problem can i play with your robot yes please if we just get our machines you know to just blindly obey the orders we give them so we can always trust that it will do what we want that might be great for the owner of the robot that might not be so great for the rest of humanity if if that person is that least favorite world leader or whatever you imagine right so we have to also take look at the apply alignment not just to machines but to all the other powerful structures that's why it's so important to strengthen our democracy again as i said to have institutions make sure that the playing field is not rigged so that corporations are given the right incentives to do the things that both make profit and are good for people to make sure that countries have incentives to do things that are both good for their people and don't screw up the rest of the world and this is not just something for ai nerds you know to geek out on this is the interesting challenge for political scientists economists and so many other thinkers so one of the magical things that uh perhaps makes him this earth quite unique is that it's home to conscious beings so you mentioned consciousness perhaps as a small aside because we didn't really get specific to what how we might do the alignment like you said it's just a really important research problem but yeah do you think engineering consciousness into ai systems is is a a possibility it's something that we might to one day do or is there something fundamental to consciousness that is uh is there something about consciousness that is fundamental to humans and humans only i think it's possible i think both consciousness and intelligence are information processing certain types of information processing and that fundamentally it doesn't matter whether the information is processed by carbon atoms in neurons and brains or by silicon atoms and and so on in our technology some people disagree this is what i think is this physicist that i i and that consciousness is the same kind of you said consciousness is information processing so meaning you know i i think you had a quote of something like it's information uh knowing itself that kind of thing i think consciousness is the way information feels when it's being processed what's being done we don't know exactly what those complex ways are it's clear that most of the information processing in our brains does not create an experience we're not even aware of it right like for example um you're not aware of your heartbeat regulation right now even though it's clearly being done by your body right it's just kind of doing its own thing when you go jogging you there's a lot of complicated stuff about how you put your foot down and we know it's hard that's why robots used to fall over so much but you're mostly unaware about it your brain just your ceo consciousness module just sends an email hey you know i'm going to keep drawing along this path yeah the rest is on autopilot right so most of it is not conscious but somehow there are some of the information processing which is we don't know what what exactly i i think this is a science problem that i hope one day we'll have some equation for or something so we can be able to build a consciousness detector and say yeah here there is some consciousness here there's not oh don't boil that lobster because it's feeling pain or it's okay because it's not feeling pain right now we treat this as sort of just metaphysics but it would be very useful in emergency rooms to know if a patient has locked in syndrome and is conscious or if they are actually just out and in the future if you build a very very intelligent helper robot to take care of you you know i think you'd like to know if you should feel guilty by shutting it down or if or if it's just like a zombie going through the motions like a fancy tape recorder right and and once we can make progress on the science of consciousness and figure out what is conscious and what isn't then um we assuming we want to create positive experiences and not suffering we'll probably choose to build some machines that are deliberately unconscious that do cr you know incredibly boring repetitive jobs in a iron mine somewhere or whatever and maybe we'll choose to create helper robots for the elderly that are conscious so so that people don't just feel creeped out that the you know the robot is just faking it when it acts like it's sad or happy like i said elderly i think everybody gets pretty deeply lonely in this world and uh so there's a place i think for everybody to have a connection with conscious beings whether they're human or otherwise but i know for sure that i would if i had a robot if i was going to develop any kind of personal emotional connection with it i would be very creeped out if i knew it in an intellectual level that the whole thing was just the fraud now today you can buy a little talking doll for it for a kid which will say things and the little child will often think that this is actually conscious yes and even real secrets to it that then go on the internet and with all sorts of creepy repercussions uh you know i would not want to be just hacked and tricked like this if i was going to be developing real emotional connections with the robot i would want to know that this is actually real it's acting conscious acting happy because it actually feels it and i i think this is not sci-fi i think it's possible to measure to come up with tools and make after we understand the science of consciousness you're saying is we'll be able to come up with tools that can measure consciousness and definitively say like this thing is experiencing the things it says it's experiencing kind of by definition if it is a physical phenomena information processing that and we know that some information processing is conscious and some isn't well then there is something there to be discovered with the methods of science giulia tononi has stuck his neck out the farthest and written down some equations for a theory maybe that's right maybe it's wrong we certainly don't know but i i applaud that kind of efforts to sort of take this say this say this is not just something that philosophers can have beer and muse about but something we can measure we can study and coming being that back to us i think what we would probably choose to do as i said is if we cannot figure this out choose to make to be quite mindful about what sort of consciousness if any we put in in different machines that we have we um and certainly we wouldn't want to make them we should not be making much machines that suffer without us even knowing it right and if if at any point someone decides to upload themselves like ray kurzweil wants to do i don't know if you've had him on your show do we agree but then covet happens so we're waiting it out a little bit you know suppose he uploads himself into this robo-ray and it talks like him and acts like him and laughs like him and before he powers off his biological body he would probably be pretty disturbed if he realized that there's no one home this robot is not having any subjective experience right if we reply if humanity gets replaced by by uh wrote by machine descendants which do all these cool things and build spaceships and go to intergalactic rock concerts and it turned out turns out that they are all unconscious uh just going through the motions wouldn't that be like the ultimate robo zombie apocalypse right just a play for empty benches yeah i have a sense that there's some kind of once we understand consciousness better we'll understand that there's some kind of continuum and it would be a greater appreciation and we'll probably understand just like you said it'd be unfortunate if it's the trick we'll probably definitely understand that love is indeed a trick that will play on each other that we humans are we convince ourselves we're conscious but we're really um you know awesome trees and dolphins are all the same kind of caution can i try to cheer you up a little bit with the philosophical thought here about the last part yes let's do it you know you might say okay yeah love is just a collaboration enabler okay and then you'll and then maybe you can go and get depressed about that but i i think that would be the wrong conclusion actually you know like i know that the only reason i enjoy food is because my genes hacked me and they don't want me to starve to death not because they care about me it's consciously enjoying succulent delights of pistachio ice cream but they just they just want me to make copies of them the whole thing so in a sense the whole the whole enjoyment of food is also a scam like this but does that mean i shouldn't take pleasure in this pistachio ice cream i love pistachio ice cream and i can tell you i i have i know this is an experimental fact i enjoy pistachio ice cream every bit as much even though i scientifically know exactly why what kind of scam this was your genes really appreciate that you like the pistachio ice cream well but i my mind appreciates it too you know and i have a conscious experience right now ultimately all of my brain is also just something the genes built to copy themselves but so what you know i'm grateful that yeah thanks jeans for doing this but you know now it's my brain that's in charge here and i'm gonna enjoy my conscious experience thank you very much and not just pistachio ice cream but also the love i feel for my amazing wife and all the other delights of being conscious i don't actually richard feynman i think said this so well he he is also the guy you know really got me into physics some art friend said that oh science kind of just is the party pooper it kind of ruins the fun right when like you have a beautiful flowers as the artist and then the scientist is going to deconstruct that into just a blob of quarks and electrons and and feynman just pushed back on that in such a beautiful way which i think also can be used to push back and make you pre not feel guilty about falling in love so so here's what feynman basically said he said his friend you know yeah i can also as a scientist see that this is a beautiful flower thank you very much maybe i'm i can't draw as good a painting as you because i'm not as talented an artist but yeah i can really see the beauty in it and it just it also looks beautiful to me but in addition to that fyman said as a scientist i see even more beauty that the artist did not see right suppose this is the a flower on a blossoming apple tree you could say this tree has more beauty in it than just the fruit the colors and the fragrance this tree is made of air if i'm in roads this is one of my favorite flying quotes ever and it took the carbon out of the air and bound it in using the flaming heat of the sun you know to turn the air into a tree and when you burn logs in your fireplace it's really beautiful to think that this is being reversed now the tree is going the wood is going back in the air and this flaming beautiful dance of the fire that the artist can see is the flaming light of the sun that was bound in to turn the air into a tree and then the ashes is the little residue that didn't come from the air that the tree sucked out of the ground you know feynman said these are beautiful things and science just adds it doesn't subtract and i i feel exactly that way about love and about pistachio ice cream also i can understand that it even there is even more nuance to the whole thing yeah right at this very visceral level you can fall in love just as much as someone who knows nothing about neuroscience but you can also approach appreciate this even greater beauty in it just like isn't it remarkable that it came about from from this completely lifeless universe just a bunch of a hot blob of plasma expanding and then over the eons you know gradually first the strong nuclear force decided to combine quarks together into nuclei and then the electric force bound in electrons and made atoms and then they clustered from gravity and you got planets and stars and this and that then natural selection came along and and the genes had their little thing and you started getting what went from seeming like a completely pointless universe so we're just trying to increase entropy and approach heat death into something that looked more goal-oriented isn't that kind of beautiful and then this goal-orientedness through evolution got ever more sophisticated where you got ever more and then you started getting this thing which is kind of like deepmind's um mu0 on steroids self the ultimate self play is not what what deepmind's ai does against itself to get better at go it's what all these little cork blobs did against each other in the in the game of of survival of the fittest you know when you had really dumb bacteria living in a simple environment there wasn't much incentive to get in intelligent but then the the life made environment more more complex and then there was more incentive to get even smarter and and that gave the other organisms more incentive to also get smarter and then here we are now just like like mew zero learned to become world club master at at go and chess from playing as itself by just playing against itself all the quarks here on our planet the electrons have created giraffes and elephants and humans pistachio ice cream i just find that really beautiful and i i me that just adds to the enjoyment of of love it doesn't subtract anything do you feel a little more i feel way better that was that was incredible so the this self play of quarks taking back to the beginning of our conversation a little bit you've there's so many exciting possibilities about artificial intelligence understanding the basic laws of physics do you think ai will help us unlock there's been a quite a bit of excitement throughout the history of physics of coming up with more and more general simple laws that explain the nature of our reality and then the ultimate of that would be a theory of everything that combines everything together do you think it's possible that well one we humans but perhaps ai systems will figure out a theory of physics that unifies all the laws of physics yeah i think it's absolutely absolutely possible i think it's it's very clear that we're going to see a great boost to science we're already seeing a boost actually from from machine learning helping science alpha fold was an example you know the decades-old protein folding problem so and gradually yeah unless we go extinct by doing something dumb like we discussed i think it's um very likely that our understanding of physics will become so good that uh our technology will no longer be limited by human intelligence but instead be limited by the laws of physics so our tech today is limited by what we've been able to invent right i think as i ai progresses it'll just be limited by the speed of light and other physical limits which would mean it's going to be just dramatically beyond you know where we are now do you think it's a fundamentally mathematical pursuit of trying to understand like the laws of this that govern our universe from a mathematical perspective so almost like if it's ai it's exploring the space of like theorems and those those kinds of things or is there some other is is there some other more computational ideas more sort of empirical ideas they're both i would say it's really interesting to look out at the landscape of everything we call science today so here we come out with this big new hammer it says machine learning on it and ask you know where are there some nails that you can help with here that you can hammer ultimately if machine learning gets the point that it can do everything better than us it will be able to help across the whole space of of science but maybe we can anchor it by starting a little bit right now near term and see how we kind of move forward so so like right now first of all you have a lot of big data science where for example with telescopes we are able to collect way more data every hour than a grad student can just pour over like in the old times right and machine learning is already being used very effectively even at mit i define planets around other stars to detect exciting new signatures of new particle physics in the sky and to detect the ripples and the fabric of space time that we call gravitational waves caused by enormous black holes crashing into each other halfway across the observable universe machine learning is running and thinking right now you know doing all these things and it's really helping all these experimental fields there is a separate front of physics computational physics which is getting an enormous boost also so um we had to do all our computations by hand right people would have these giant books with tables of logarithms and oh my god i just pains me to even think how long time it would have taken to do simple stuff then we started to get little calculators and computers that could do some basic math for us now what we're starting to see is kind of a shift from gophi computational physics to neural network computational physics what i mean by that is most computational physics would be done by humans programming in the intelligence of how to do the computation into the computer just as when gary kasparov got his posterior kicked by ibm's deep blue in chess humans had programmed in exactly how to play chess intelligence came from the humans it wasn't learned right mu zero can be not only kasparov in chess but also fish which is the best sort of go-fi chess program by learning and we're seeing more of that now that shift beginning to happen in physics so let me give you an example so lattice qcd is an area of physics whose goal is basically to take the periodic table and just compute the whole thing from first principles this is not the search for theory of everything we already know the theory that's supposed to produce as output the periodic table which atoms are stable how heavy they are all that good stuff their spectral lines it's called it's a theory lattice qcd you can put it on your t-shirt or colleague frank wilcheck got the nobel prize for working on it but the math is just too hard for us to solve we have not been able to start with these equations and solve them to the extent that we can predict oh yeah and then there is carbon and this is what the spectrum of the carbon atom looks like but uh awesome people are building these super computer simulations where you just put in these equations and you you make a big cubic lattice of space or actually it's very small lattice because you're going to the sub-atomic scale down to the subatomic scale and you're trying to solve this but it's just so computationally expensive that we still haven't been able to calculate things as accurately as we measure them in many cases and now machine learning is really revolutionizing this so my colleague fiola shanahan and mit for example she's been using this really cool machine learning technique called normalizing flows where she's realized she can actually speed up the calculation dramatically by having the ai learn how to do things faster another area like this where where we suck up an enormous amount of supercomputer time to do physics as black hole collisions so now that we've done the sexy stuff of detecting a bunch of this with ligo and other experiments we want to be able to know what we're seeing and so it's a very simple conceptual problem it's the two body problem newton solved it for classical gravity hundreds of years ago but the two body problem is still not fully solved for black holes black copper yes and nice nice gravity because they won't disorbit each other forever anymore two things they give off gravitational waves and make sure they crash into each other and the game what you want to do is you want to figure out okay what kind of wave comes out as a function of of the masses of the two black holes as a function of how they're spinning relative to each other etc and that is so hard it can take months of super computer time on massive numbers of cores to do it you know wouldn't it be great if you can use machine learning to greatly speed that up right um now you can use the expensive old gofi calculation as the truth and then see if machine learning can figure out a smarter faster way of getting the right answer yet another area like of computational physics these are probably the big three that suck up the most computer time lattice qcd black hole collisions and cosmological simulations where you take not a subatomic thing and try to figure out the mass of the proton but you take something with it's enormous and try to look at how all the galaxies get formed in there oh wow yeah there again there are a lot of very cool ideas right now about how you can use machine learning to do this sort of better stuff better the difference between this and the big data is you kind of make the data yourself right so and then finally we're looking over the physics landscape and seeing what can we hammer with machine learning right so we talked about experimental data big data discovering cool stuff that we humans then look more closely at then we talked about taking the expensive computations we're doing now and figuring out how to do them much faster and better with ai and finally let's go really theoretical like so things like discovering equations having deep fundamental insights this comes this is something closest to what i've been doing in my group we talked earlier about the whole ai fineman project where if you just have some data how do you automatically discover equations that seem to describe this well that you can then go back as a human and then work with and test and explore and uh you asked a really good question also about if this is sort of a search problem in some sense that's very deep actually what you said because it is suppose i ask you to prove some mathematical theorem what is a proof in math it's just a long string of steps logical steps that you can write out with symbols and once you find it it's very easy to write a program to check whether it's a valid proof or not so why is it so hard to prove it then well because there are ridiculously many possible candidate proofs you could write down right if this if the proof contains 10 000 symbols even if there were only 10 options for what each symbol could be that's 10 to the power 1000 possible proofs which is way more than there are atoms in our universe right so you could say it's trivial to prove these things you just write a computer generate all strings and then check is this the valid proof no is this a valid proof no and then you just keep doing this forever but there are a lot of but it is fundamentally a search problem you just want to search the space of all those all strings of symbols to find the one with find one that is the proof right and there's a whole area of machine learning called search how do you search with some giant space to find the needle in the haystack it's easier in cases where there's a clear measure of of good like you're not just right or wrong but this is better and this is worse you can maybe get some hints as to which direction to go in that's why we talked about neural networks work so well i mean that's such a human thing of that moment of genius of figuring out the intuition of of good essentially i mean we thought that that is it maybe it's not right we thought that about chess right that exactly that the ability to see like 10 15 sometimes 20 steps ahead was not a calculation that humans were performing it was some kind of weird intuition about different patterns about board positions about the relative positions exactly somehow stitching stuff together and a lot of it is just like intuition but then you you have like alpha i guess zero be the first one that did uh the self-play it just came up with this it's it was able to learn to self-play mechanism this kind of intuition exactly but just like you said it's so fascinating to think well they're in the space of totally new ideas can that be done in developing theorems we know it can be done by neural networks because we did it with the neural networks in the cranium those are the great mathematicians of our of humanity right and and i'm so glad you brought up alpha zero because that's the counter example it turned out we were flattering ourselves when we said intuition is something different it's only humans can do it it's not information processing if you if it used to be that way again it's very it's really instructive i think to compare the chess computer deep blue that beat kasparov with alpha zero that beat lisa doll at the go because for deep blue there was no intuition there was some pro humans had programmed in some intuition after humans had played a lot of games they told the computer you know count the pawn as one point the bishop is three points rook is five points and so on you add it all up and then you add some extra points for past pawns and subtract if the opponent has it and and blah blah blah blah and then what what deep blue did was just search just very brute force tried many many moves ahead all these combinations and the pruned research and it could think much faster than kasparov and it won right and that i think inflated our egos in a way it shouldn't have because people started to say yeah yeah it's just brute force search but has no intuition yeah alpha zero really popped our bubble there yeah because what alpha zero does yes it does also do some of that research but it also has this intuition module which in geek speak is called a value function where it just looks at the board and comes up with a number for how good is that position the difference was no human told it how good the position is it just learned it and mu zero is the is the coolest or scariest of all depending on your mood because if the same basic ai system will learn what the good board position is regardless of whether it's chess or go or shogi or pac-man or lady pac-man or breakout or space invaders or any number a bunch of other games you don't tell anything and it gets this intuition after a while for what's good so this is very hopeful for science i think because if if it can get intuition what's a good position there maybe it can also get intuition for what are some good directions to go if you're trying to prove something if i i often one of the most fun things in my science career is when i've been able to prove some theorem about something and it's very heavily guided of course i don't sit and try all random strings i have a hunch that you know this reminds me a little bit about this other proof i've seen for this thing so maybe i first what if i try this nah that didn't work out but but this reminds me actually the way this failed reminds me of that and so so combining the intuition that with all these brute force capabilities i think i think it's going to be able to help physics too do you think that there will be a day when an ai system being the primary contributor let's say 90 plus wins the nobel prize in physics obviously they'll give it to the humans because we humans don't like to give prizes to machines it'll give it'll give it to the humans behind the system you could argue that ai has already been involved in some nobel prizes probably maybe something with black holes and stuff like that yeah we don't like giving prizes to other life forms if someone wins a horse racing contest they don't give the price the horse either it's true uh but do you think that's we might be able to see something like that in our lifetimes when ai so like the first system i would say that makes us think about a nobel prize seriously is like alpha fold is making us think about in medicine physiology a nobel prize perhaps discoveries that are direct result of something that's discovered by alpha fall do you think in physics we might be able to see that in our lifetimes i think what's probably going to happen is more of a blurring of the distinctions so today if somebody uses a computer to do a computation that gives them the normal price nobody's going to dream of giving the price to the computer they're going to be like that was just a tool i i think for these things also people are just going to for a long time view the computer as a tool but what's going to change is that as the ubiqui the ubiquity of of machine learning i think at some point in my lifetime finding a human physicist who knows nothing about machine learning is going to be about almost as hard as it is today finding a human physicist who doesn't says oh i don't know anything about computers right or i don't use math it would just be a ridiculous concept you see but the thing is there is a magic moment though like with alpha zero when the system surprises us in a way where the best people in the world truly learn something from the system in a way where you feel like it's another entity yeah like the way people the way magnus carlsen the way certain people are looking at the work of alpha zero it's like uh it it truly is no longer a tool in the in the sense that it doesn't feel like a tool it feels like some other entity so there's a magic difference like where where you're like uh you know if an ai system is able to come up with an insight that surprises everybody in a some uh in some like major way that's a phase shift in our understanding of some particular science or some particular aspect to physics i feel like that is no longer a tool and then you can start to say uh that like it perhaps deserves the prize so for sure the more important the more fundamental transformation of the 21st century science is exactly what you're saying which is probably everybody will be doing machine learning it's to some degree like if you want to be successful at uh unlocking the mysteries of science you should be doing machine learning but it's just exciting to think about like whether there will be one that comes along that's super surprising and uh they'll make us question like who the real inventors are in this world yeah yeah i think the question of isn't if it's going to happen but when and and but it's important in my mind the time when that happens is also more or less the same time when we get artificial general intelligence yes and then we have a lot bigger things to worry about than whether they should get the nobel prize or not right yeah because when you have machines that can outperform our best scientists at science they can probably outperform us at a lot of other stuff as well which can at a minimum you know make them incredibly powerful agents in in the world you know and i think it's a mistake to think we only have to start worrying about loss of control when machines get to agi across the board where they can do everything all our jobs long before that they'll be hugely influential we talked at length about how the hacking of our minds with um algorithms trying to get us glued to our screens right has already had a big impact on on society that was an incredibly dumb algorithm in the grand scheme of things right just supervised machine learning yet that had had huge impact so so um i just don't want us to be lulled into false sense of security and think there won't be any societal impact yeah until things reach human level because it's happening already and it's i was just thinking the other week you know when i see some scaremonger going oh the robots are coming the implication is always that they're coming to kill us yeah and maybe you should have worried about that if you were in nagorno-karabakh during the recent war there but more seriously the robots are coming right now but they're mainly not coming to kill us they're coming to hack us [Music] they're they're coming to hack our minds into buying things that we maybe we didn't need to vote for people who may not have our best interest in mind and and it's kind of humbling i think actually as a human being to admit that it turns out that our minds are actually much hacked more hackable than we thought and the ultimate insult is that we are actually getting hacked by the machine learning algorithms that are in some objective sense much dumber than us you know but maybe we shouldn't be so surprised because you know how do you feel about the cute puppies love them so you know you would probably argue that in some across-the-board measure you're more intelligent than they are but boy are our cute puppies good at hacking us right yeah they move into our house persuade us to feed them and do all these things what do they ever do but for us yeah other than being cute and making us feel good right so if puppies can hack us maybe we shouldn't be so surprised if a pretty dumb machine learning algorithms can hack us too not to speak of cats which is another level and and i think we should to counter your previous point about there let us not think about evil creatures in this world we can all agree that cats are as close to objective evil as we can get but that's just me saying that okay so uh you have you seen the the cartoon i think it's maybe the onion um with this incredibly cute kitten and just says um with underneath something that thinks about murder all day exactly that's that's accurate uh you've mentioned offline that there might be a link between post biological agi and seti so last time we talked um you've you've talked about this intuition that we humans might be quite unique in our galactic neighborhood perhaps our galaxy perhaps the entirety of the observable universe we might be the only intelligence civilization here which is um and you argue pretty well for that thought um so i have a few little questions around this one the scientific question in which way would you be if you were wrong in that intuition in which way do you think you would be surprised like why were you wrong if we find out that you ended up being wrong like in which dimensions so like is it because we can't see them is it because the nature of their intelligence or the nature of their life is totally different than we can possibly imagine is it uh because the i mean something about the great filters and surviving them or maybe because we're being protected from signals so all those explanations for um for why we haven't heard a big loud like red light that says yeah we're here yeah so there are actually two separate things there that i could be wrong about two separate claims that i made right not them one one of them is i made the claim i think most civilizations when you're going from simple bacteria like things to space space colonizing civilizations they spend only a very very tiny fraction of their other of their life being where we are uh that i could be wrong about the other one i could be wrong about is a quite different statement that i think that actually i'm guessing that we are the only civilization in our observable universe from which light has reached us so far that that's actually gotten far enough to invent telescopes so let's talk about maybe both of them in turn because they really are different the first one if if we look at the n equals one the data point we have on this planet right so we spent um four and a half billion years fussing around on this planet with life right we got and most of it it was pretty lame stuff from an intelligence perspective you know it's bacteria and then the dinosaur is spent then but things gradually accelerated right then the dinosaurs spent over 100 million years stomping around here without even inventing smartphones and um and then very recently you know it's only we've only spent 400 years going from newton to us right yeah in terms of technology and we've look what we've done even you know when i was a little kid there was no internet even so it's i think it's pretty likely for in this case of this planet right that we're either gonna really get our act together and start spreading life into space the century and doing all sorts of great things or where you're gonna gonna wipe out um it's a little hard if i i couldn't be wrong in the sense that maybe what happened on this earth is very atypical and for some reason what's more common on other planets is that they spend an enormously long time futzing around with the ham radio and things but they just never really take it to the next level for reasons i don't haven't understood i'm humble and open to that but i would bet at least ten to one that our situation is more typical because the whole thing with moore's law and accelerating technology it's pretty obvious why it's happening everything that grows exponentially we call it an explosion whether it's a population explosion or a nuclear explosion it's always caused by the same thing it's that the next step triggers a step after that so i we tomorrow's technology today's technology enables tomorrow's technology and that enables the next level and as i think because the technology is always better of course the steps can come faster and faster on the other question that i might be wrong about that's the much more controversial one i think but before we close out on this thing about if the first one if it's true that most civilizations spend only a very short amount of their total time in the stage say between um inventing um telescopes or like mastering electricity and leaving their and doing space travel if that's actually generally true but then that should apply also elsewhere out there so we we should be very very we should be very very surprised if we had find some random civilization and we happen to catch them exactly in that very very short stage it's much more likely that we find this planet full of bacteria yes or that we find some civilization that's already post-biological and has done some really cool galactic construction projects in their in their galaxy would we be able to recognize them do you think is it possible that we just can't i mean this post biological world could it be just existing in some other dimension it could it could be just all a virtual reality game for them or something i don't know that that it changes completely we won't be able to detect we have to be honestly very humble about this yeah i think that i said i think i said earlier the number one principle of being a scientist is you have to be humble and willing to acknowledge that everything we think guess might be totally wrong of course you can imagine some civilization where they all decide to become buddhists and very inward looking and just move into their little virtual reality and not disturb the flora and fauna around them and we might not notice them but this is a numbers game right if you have millions of civilizations out there or billions of them all it takes is one with a more ambitious mentality right that decides hey we are going to go out and settle a bunch of other solar systems and maybe galaxies and then it doesn't matter if they're a bunch of quiet buddhists we're still going to notice yeah that expansionist one right and it seems like quite the stretch to assume that you know we know even in our own galaxy that there are probably a billion or more planets that are pretty earth-like and many of them were formed over a billion years before ours so had a big head start so if you actually assume also that life happens kind of automatically on an earth-like planet i think it's it's pretty quite the stretch to then go and say okay so we are billions of another billion civilizations out there that also have our level of tech and they all decided to become buddhists and not a single one decided to go like go hitler on the galaxy and say we need to go on and colonize or and or not and not a single one decided for more benevolent reasons to go out and get more resources that that seems seems like a bit of a stretch frankly and this leads into the the second thing you challenged me to be that i might be wrong about how rare or common is life you know so francis drake when he wrote down the drake equation multiplied together a huge number of factors and then we don't know any of them so we know even less about what you get when you multiply together the whole product yeah since then a lot of those factors have become much better known one of his big uncertainties was how common is it that a solar system even has a planet right well now we know it's very common earth-like planets we know we have better diamonds many many of them even in our galaxy at the same time you know we have thanks to i'm a big supporter of the seti project and its cousins and i think we should keep doing this and we've learned a lot we've we've learned that so far all we have is still unconvincing hints nothing more right and and there are certainly many scenarios where it would be dead obvious if there were 100 million other human-like civilizations in our galaxy it would not be that hard to notice some of them with today's technology and we haven't right so so what we can what we can say is well okay we can rule out that there is a human level of civilization on the moon and in fact in many nearby solar systems where we we cannot rule out of course that there is something like earth sitting in a galaxy 5 billion light years away but we've ruled out a lot and that's already kind of shocking given that they're all these planets there you know so like where are they where are they all that's the that's the classic fermi paradox yeah and and um so my argument which might very well be wrong it's very simple really it just goes like this okay we have no clue about this it could be the the the probability of getting life on a random planet it could be 10 to the minus one a priori or ten to the minus five ten ten to the minus twenty ten to minus thirty ten to the minus forty basically every order of magnitude is about equally likely when you then do the math and ask how close is our nearest neighbor it's again equally likely that it's 10 to the 10 meters away 10 to 20 meters away 10 to 30 meters away we can we have some nerdy ways of talking about this with bayesian statistics and a uniform log prior but that's irrelevant this is the simple basic argument and now comes the data so we can say okay how many were there all these orders of magnitude 10 to the 26 meters away there's the edge of our observable universe if it's farther than that light hasn't even reached us yet if it's uh less than 10 to the 16 meters away well it's within an earth survey it's no farther away than the sun we can definitely rule that out you know um so i think about it like this a priori before we look to telescopes you know it could be 10 10 meters 10 to 20 10 to the 30 to the 40th and 50th and equally likely anywhere here yeah uh and now we've ruled out like this chunk yeah and most of it is outside and here is the edge of our observable universe yes yep so i'm certainly not saying i don't think there's any life elsewhere in space if space is infinite then you're basically 100 guaranteed that there is but the probability that there is life that the nearest neighbor it happens to be in this little region between where we would have seen it already yeah and where we will never see it there's actually significantly less than one i think and and i think there's a moral lesson from this which is really important which is to be good stewards of this planet and this shot we've had you know it can be very dangerous to say oh you know it's fine if we nuke our planet or ruin the climate or mess it up with an unaligned ai because i know there is this nice star trek fleet out there they're going to swoop in and take over where we failed just like it wasn't the big deal that the easter island losers wiped themselves out it's a dangerous way of lulling yourself into false sense of security if it's actually the case that it might be up to us and only us the whole future of intelligent life in our observable universe then i think um it's both it really puts a lot of responsibility on our shoulders inspiring it's a little bit terrifying but it's also inspiring but it's empowering i think most people because because the biggest problem today is i see this even when i teach right so many people feel that it doesn't matter what they do or we do we feel disempowered oh it makes no difference this is about as far from that as you can come but we realize that what we do on our little spinning ball here in our lifetime you know could make the difference for the entire future of life in our universe you know how empowering is that yeah survival of consciousness i mean and the the other a very similar kind of uh empowering aspect of the drake equation is say that there is a huge number of intelligent civilizations that spring up everywhere but because of the drake equation which is the lifetime of a civilization yeah maybe many of them hit a wall and yeah and just like you said it's clear that that for us the great filter the one possible great filter seems to be coming you know in the next 100 years so it's also empowering to say okay well uh we have a chance to not i mean the way great filters work it does just get most of them exactly nick bostrom has articulated this really beautifully too i i you know every time yet another search for life on mars comes back negative or something i'm like yes are odds for us surviving this yes you already made the argument and brought rush there right but just unpack it right the point is we already know there's a crap ton of planets out there that are earth-like and we also know that most of them do not seem to have anything like our kind of life on them so what went wrong there's clearly one step along the evolutionary at least one filter roadblock in going from no life to space faring life and um where is it is it in front of us or is it behind us right if if there's no filter behind us and we keep finding all sorts of of uh little mice on mars and or whatever right that's actually very depressing because that makes it much more likely that the filter is in front of us and that what actually is going on is like the ultimate dark joke that that whenever a civilization invents sufficiently powerful attack it's just you just set your clock and then after a while it goes poof for one reason or other and wipes itself out that will be wouldn't that be like utterly depressing if we're actually doomed whereas if it turns out that there is a really there is a great filter early on that for whatever reason seems to be really hard to get to the stage of um sexually reproducing organisms or even the first ribosome or whatever right or or maybe you have lots of planets with dinosaurs and cows but for some reason they tend to get stuck there and never invent smartphones all of those are huge vic boosts for our own odds because been there done that you know it doesn't matter how hard or unlikely it was that we got past that roadblock because we already did yeah and then then that makes it likely that the future is in our own hands we're not doomed so that's why that's why i think the fact that like that the life is rare in the universe it's not just something that there's some evidence for but also something we should actually hope for so that's the the end the mortality the death of human civilization that we've been discussing in life maybe prospering beyond any kind of great filter do you think about your own death does it make you sad that you may not witness some of the you know you lead a research group on working some of the biggest questions in the universe actually um both on the physics and the ai side does it make you sad that you may not be able to see some of these exciting things come to fruition that we've been talking about of course of course it sucks the fact that i'm going to die and i remember once when i was much younger my dad made this remark that life is fundamentally tragic and i'm like what are you talking about that you know many years later i i felt now i feel like i totally understand what he means you know we grow up very little kids and everything is infinite and it's so cool and then suddenly we find out that actually you know you got to only this this is that you can get game over at some point so of course it's it's it's um it's something that's sad uh are you afraid no not in the sense that uh i think anything terrible is going to happen after i die or anything like that no i i think it's really going to be game over but it's more that um it makes me very acutely aware of i just have what a wonderful gift this is that i get to be alive right now and and is a steady reminder to just live life to the fullest and really enjoy it because it is finite you know and i think actually and we know we all get the regular reminders when someone near and dear to us dies that that um you know one day it's going to be our turn it adds this kind of focus i wonder what it would feel like actually to be an immortal being if they might even enjoy some of the wonderful things of life a little bit less just because there isn't that um finiteness yeah do you think that could be a feature not a bug the fact that we beings are finite maybe there's lessons for engineering in artificial intelligence systems as well that are conscious like do you think uh it makes is it possible that the reason the pistachio ice cream is delicious is the fact that you're going to die one day and you will not have all the pistachio ice cream that you could eat because of that fact well let me say two things first of all i it's actually quite profound what you're saying i do think i appreciate the pistachio ice cream a lot more knowing that i will there's only finite number of times i get to enjoy that and i can only remember finding a number of times in the past and moreover my life is not so long that it just starts to feel like things are repeating themselves in general it's so new and fresh i also think though that beth is a little bit overrated and in the sense that the it comes from a sort of outdated view of physics and what life actually is because if you ask okay what is it that's going to die exactly what what am i really when i say it i feel sad about the idea of myself dying am i really sad that this skin cell here is going to die of course not because it's going to die next week anyway and then i'll grow a new one right and it's not any of my cells that i'm associating really with with who i really am nor is it any of my atoms or quarks or electrons in fact basically all of my atoms get replaced on a regular basis right so what is it that's really me from a modern physics perspective it's the information in processing amy that's where my my memory that's my memories that's my my values my dreams my passion my love um it's that's what's really fundamentally me and frankly not all of that will die when when my body dies like richard feynman for example his body died of cancer you know but many of his ideas that he felt were made him very him actually live on i i this is my own little personal tribute to richard feynman right i try to keep a little bit of him alive in myself and i've even quoted him today right yeah he almost came alive for a brief moment in this conversation yeah yeah and and this honestly gives me some solace you know when i work as a teacher i feel if i can actually share a bit about myself that my students feel worthy enough to copy and adopt some part of things that they know or or they believe or aspire to now i live on also a little bit in them right and i uh so being a teacher is a little bit of what i that's something also that contributes to making me a little teeny bit less mortal right because i'm not at least not all gonna die all at once right and i find that a beautiful tribute to people we generally respect if we can if we can remember them and carry in us the things that we felt was the most awesome about them right then they live on and i'm getting a bit emotionally ever but it's a very beautiful idea you bring up there i think we should stop this old-fashioned materialism and just equate who we are with our quarks and electrons there's no scientific basis for that really and it's also very uninspiring now if you look a little bit towards the future right one thing which really sucks about humans dying is that even though some of their teachings and memories and stories and and ethics and so on will be copied by those around them hopefully a lot of it can't be copied and just dies with them with a brain and that really sucks that that's the fundamental reason why we find it so tragic when someone goes from having all this information there more just gone ruined right with with uh more post biological intelligence that's gonna shift a lot right the only reason it's so hard to make a backup of your brain in its entirety is exactly because it wasn't built for that right if you have a future machine intelligence there's no reason for why it has to die at all if it wants to up if you want to copy it whatever is it into some other quark blob right you can copy not just sum it but all of it right and so so in that sense you can get immortality because all the information can be copied out of any individual entity uh it's and it's not just mortality that will change if we get more post biological life it's also the with that i think very much the whole individual the whole individualism we have now right the reason that we make such a big difference between me and you is exactly because we're a little bit limited in how much we can copy like i would just love to go like this and copy your russian skills russian speaking skills yeah wouldn't it be awesome but i can't i have to actually work for years if you want to get better on it and but if you have if we were robots just copy and paste freely then that loses completely uh it washes away the sense of what immortality is and also individuality a little bit right we would start feeling much more maybe we would feel much more collaborative with each other if we can just hey you know i'll give you my rush you can give me your russian and i'll give you whatever some i can and suddenly you can speak swedish maybe that's less a bad trade for you but whatever else you want from my brain right yeah and and um there have been a lot of sci-fi stories about hive minds and so on where where people where experiences can be more broadly shared uh and uh i think one we don't i don't pretend to know what it would feel like to be a super intelligent machine but i'm quite confident that however it feels about mortality and individuality will be very very different from how it is for us well for us mortality and finiteness seems to be pretty important at this particular moment and so all good things must come to an end just like this conversation i saw that coming sorry this is the world's worst transition i could talk to you forever it's such a huge honor that you spend time with me uh honor is mine thank you so much for getting me essentially to start this podcast by doing the first conversation making me realize uh falling in love with conversation in itself and thank you so much for inspiring so many people in the world with your books with your research with your talking and with the other the like this this ripple effect of friends including elon and everybody else that you inspire so thank you so much for talking today thank you i feel like you're so fortunate that this you're doing this podcast and getting so many interesting voices out there into the ether and not just the five second sound bites but so many of the interviews of what you do you really let people go in into depth in a way which we surely need in this day and age and that i got to be number one like i feel super honored yeah you started thank you so much max thanks for listening to this conversation with max tegmark and thank you to our sponsors the jordan harbinger show for sigmatic mushroom coffee better help online therapy and expressvpn so the choice is wisdom caffeine sanity or privacy choose wisely my friends and if you wish click the sponsor links below to get a discount and to support this podcast and now let me leave you with some words for max tag mark if consciousness is the way that information feels when it's processed in certain ways then it must be substrate independent it's only the structure of information processing that matters not the structure of the matter doing the information processing thank you for listening and hope to see you next time