Peter Singer: Suffering in Humans, Animals, and AI | Lex Fridman Podcast #107
the following is a conversation with Peter Singer professor of bioethics at Bristol University best known for his 1975 book Animal Liberation that makes an ethical case against eating meat he has written brilliantly from an ethical perspective on extreme poverty euthanasia human genetic selection sports doping the sale of kidneys and generally happiness including in his books ethics in the real world and the life you can save he was a key popularizer of the effective altruism movement and is generally considered one of the most influential philosophers in the world quick summary of the ads to sponsors cash app and masterclass please consider supporting the podcast by downloading cash app and using collects podcast and signing up a masterclass complex click the links buy the stuff it really is the best way to support the podcast and the journey I'm on as you may know I primarily eat a ketogenic or carnivore diet which means that most of my diet is made up of me I do not hunt the food I eat though one day I hope to I love fishing for example fishing and eating the fish I catch has always felt much more honest than participating in the supply chain of factory farming from an ethics perspective this part of my life has always had a cloud over it it makes me think I've tried a few times in my life to reduce the amount of meat I eat but for some reason whatever the makeup of my body whatever the way I practice the dieting I have I get a lot of mental and physical energy and performance from eating meat so both intellectually and physically it's a continued journey for me I returned to Peters work often to reevaluate the ethics of how I live this aspect of my life let me also say that you may be a vegan or you may be a meat-eater it may be upset by the words I say or Peter says but I asked for this podcast and other episodes of this podcast then you keep an open mind I may and probably will talk with people you disagree with please try to really listen especially to people you disagree with and give me in the world the gift of being a participant and a patient intelligent and nuanced discourse if your instinct and desire is to be a voice of mockery towards those you disagree with please unsubscribe my source of joy and inspiration here has been to be a part of a community that thinks deeply and speaks with empathy and compassion that is what I hope to continue being a part of and I hope you join as well if you enjoy this podcast subscribe on youtube review it with five stars an apple podcast follow on Spotify support on patreon or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman as usual I'll do a few minutes of ads now and never any ads in the middle that can break the flow of the conversation this show is presented by cash app the number one finance app in the App Store when you get it used colex podcast cash app lets you send money to friends buy Bitcoin and invest in a stock market with as little as $1 since cash app allows you to buy Bitcoin let me 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grandparent and she herself had been in the camps and survived so I think I knew a lot about that pretty early my entire family comes from the Soviet Union I was born in so V and so sort of World War two has deep roots and a culture and the the suffering that the war brought the millions of people who died is in the is in the music is in the literature's and the culture what do you think was the impact of the war broadly on our society the war had many impacts I think one of them a beneficial impact is that it showed what racism and authoritarian government can do and at least as far as the West was concerned I think that meant that I grew up in an era in which there wasn't the kind of overt racism and anti-semitism that had existed for my parents in Europe I was growing up in Australia and certainly that was clearly seen as something completely unacceptable there was also the fear of a further outbreak of war which this time we expected would be nuclear because of the way the Second World War had ended so there was this overshadowing of my childhood about the possibility that I would not live to grow up and be an adult because of catastrophic nuclear war there was a the film on the beach was made in which the city that I was living Melbourne was the last place on earth to have living human beings because of the nuclear cloud that was spreading from the north so that certainly gave us a bit of that that sense there were many you know there were clearly many other legacies that we got of the war as well and the whole set up of the world and the the cold war that followed all of that has its roots in the Second World War you know there is much beauty that comes from war sort of at a conversation with Eric Weinstein he said everything is is great about war except all the death and suffering do you think there's something positive that they came from the war the the mirror that have put to our society sort of the ripple effects on it ethically speaking do you think there are positive aspects to war I find it hard to see positive aspects in war and some of the things that other people think of as as positive and beautiful maybe questioning so there's a certain kind of patriotism people say you know during wartime we all pull together we all work together against the common enemy and that's true an outside enemy does unite a country and in general it's good for countries to be united and have common purposes but it also engenders a kind of a nationalism and the patriotism that cannot be questioned and that I'm I'm more skeptical about what about the the Brotherhood that people talk about from soldiers the the sort of counterintuitive sad idea that the closest that people feel to each other is in those moments of suffering of being at the sort of the edge of seeing your comrades dying in your arms that somehow brings people extremely closely together suffering brings people closer together how do you make sense of that it might bring people close together but there are other ways of bonding and being close to people I think without the suffering and death that war entails perhaps you could see you can already hear the romanticized Russian in me we tend to romanticize suffering just a little bit in our literature and culture and so on could you take a step back and I apologize if it's a ridiculous question but what is suffering if you'll try to define what suffering is how would you go about it suffering is a conscious state they can be neither suffering for a being who is completely unconscious and it's distinguished from other conscious states in terms of being one that considered just in itself we would rather be with that it's a conscious state that we want to stop if we're experiencing or we want to avoid having again if we've experienced it in the past and that's as I say emphasized for its own sake because of course people will say well suffering strengthens the spirit it has good consequences and sometimes it does have those consequences and of course sometimes we might undergo suffering we set ourselves a challenge to run a marathon or climb a mountain or even just to go to the dentist so that the toothache doesn't get worse even though we know the dentist is going to hurt us to some extent so I'm not saying that we never choose suffering but I am saying that other things being equal we would rather not be in that state of consciousness is the ultimate goal sort of you have the new ten year anniversary release the life you can say book really influential book we'll talk about it a bunch of times throughout this conversation but do you think it's possible to eradicate suffering errors at the goal or do we want to achieve a a kind of minimum threshold of suffering and then keeping a little drop of poison that to keep things interesting in the world in practice I don't think we ever will eliminate suffering so I think that little drop of poison as you put it or if you like that the contrast - of an unpleasant color perhaps something like that in a otherwise harmonious and beautiful composition that is going to always be there if you ask me whether in theory if we could get rid of it I we should I think the answer is whether in fact we would be better off or whether in terms of by eliminating the suffering we would also eliminate some of the highs the positive hires and if that's so then we might be prepared to say it's worth having a minimum of suffering in order to have the best possible experiences as well is there a relative aspect to suffering so we when you talk about eradicating poverty in the world is this the more you succeed the more the bar of what defines poverty raises or is there at the basic human ethical level a bar that's absolute that once you get above it then it we can morally converge to feeling like we have eradicated poverty I think they're both and I think this is true for poverty as well as suffering there's an objective level of suffering or of poverty where we're talking about objective indicators like you're constantly hungry you don't you can't get enough food you're constantly cold you can't get warm you have some physical pains that you're never rid of I think those things are objective but it may also be true that if you do get rid of that and you get to the stage where all of those basic needs have been met there may still be there new forms of suffering that develop and perhaps that's what we're seeing in the affluent societies we have that people get bored for example they don't need to spend so many hours a day earning money to get enough to eat and shelter so now they're bored they like a sense of purpose that can happen and that then is a kind of a relative suffering that is distinct from the objective forms of suffering but in your focus on eradicating suffering you don't think about that kind of the the kind of interesting challenges and suffering that emerges in affluent societies that's just not in your ethical philosophical brain is that of interest at all it would be of interest to me if we had eliminated all of the objective forms of suffering which I think of as generally more severe and also perhaps here at this stage anyway to know how to eliminate so yes in some future state when we've eliminated those objective forms of suffering I would be interested in trying to eliminate the relative forms as well well that's not a practical need for me at the moment sorry to linger on it because you kind of said it but just the is elimination the goal for the affluent society so is there a crew you know do you see as suffering as a creative force suffering can be a creative force I think repeating what I said about the highs and whether we need some of the lows to experience the highs so it may be that suffering makes us more creative and we regard that as worthwhile maybe that that brings some of those highs with it that we would not have had if we'd had no suffering I I don't really know many people have suggested that and I certainly can't have no basis for denying it and if it's true then I would not want to eliminate suffering completely but the focus is on and the absolute not to be cold not to be hungry yes that's at the present stage of where the world's population is that's that's the focus talking about human nature for a second do you think people are inherently good or do we all have good and evil in us that basically everyone is capable of evil based on the environment certainly most of us have potential for both good and evil I'm not prepared to say that everyone is capable of evil maybe some people who even in the worst of circumstances would not be capable of it but most of us are very susceptible through environmental influences so when we look at things that we were talking about previously let's say the what the Nazis did during the Holocaust I think it's quite difficult to say I know that I would not have done those things even if I were in the same circumstances as those who did them even if let's say I had grown up under the Nazi regime and had been indoctrinated with racist ideas had also had the the idea that I must obey orders follow the commands of the Fuhrer plus of course perhaps the threat that if I didn't do certain things I might get sent to the Russian front and that would be a pretty grim fight I think it's really hard for anybody to say nevertheless I know I would not have killed those Jews or whatever so what's your intuition how many people will be able to say that truly to be able to say it I think very few less than 10% to me it seems a very interesting and powerful thing to meditate on so I've read a lot about the war a world war 2 and I can't escape the thought that I would have not been one of the 10% right I have to say I simply don't know I would like to hope that I would have been one of the 10% but I don't really have any basis for claiming that I would have been different from the majority is it a worthwhile thing to contemplate it would be interesting if we could find a way of really finding these answers there obviously is quite a bit of research on people during the Holocaust on how ordinary Germans got led to do terrible things and there's what there are also studies of the resistance some heroic people in the white rose group for example who resisted even though they knew they were likely to die for it but I don't know whether these studies really can answer your larger question of how many people would have been capable of doing that well sort of the reason I think it's interesting is in the world as you described you know when when there are things that you'd like to do they're good that are objectively good it's useful to think about whether I'm not willing to do something or I don't even I'm not willing to acknowledge something as good and the right thing to do because I'm simply scared of putting my life of damaging my life in some kind of way and that kind of thought exercise is helpful to understand what is what is the right thing in my current skill set and the capacity to do so if there's things that are convenient and there's I wonder if there are things that are highly inconvenient where I would have to experience derision or hatred or or death or all those kinds of things but it's truly the right thing to do and that kind of balance is I feel like in America we don't have it's it's difficult to think in the current times it seems easier to put yourself back in history when you can sort of objectively contemplate whether how willing you are to do the right thing when the cost is high true but I think we do face those challenges today and I think we can still ask ourselves those questions so one stand that I took more than 40 years ago now was to stop eating meat become a vegetarian at a time when you hardly met anybody who was a vegetarian or if you did they might have been a Hindu or they might have had some weird theories about meat and health and I I know thinking about making that decision I was convinced that it was the right thing to do but I still did have to think how all my friends are going to think that I'm a crank because I'm now refusing to eat meat so you know I'm not saying there were any terrible sanctions obviously but I thought about that and I guess I decided well I still think this is the right thing to do and if I'll put up with that if it happens and one or two friends were clearly uncomfortable with that decision but you know that was pretty minor compared to the historical examples that we've been talking about but other issues that we have around too like global poverty and what we ought to be doing about that is is another question where people I think can have have the opportunity to take a stand on what's the right thing to do now climate change would be a third question where again people are taking a stand over you know look at great Atun Berg there and say well I think it must have taken a lot of courage for a school girl to say I'm going to go on strike about climate change and see what happened yeah especially in this divisive world she gets exceptionally huge amounts of support and hatred both there's a very difficult for teenager to operate in in your book ethics in the real world amazing book people should check it out very easy read eighty two brief essays on things that matter one of the essays asks should robots have rights you've written about this so let me ask sure robots have rights if we ever develop robots capable of consciousness capable of having their own internal perspective on what's happening to them so that their lives can go well or badly for them then robots should have rights until that happens they shouldn't so its consciousness essentially a prerequisite to suffering so everything that possesses consciousness is capable of suffering put another way and if so what is consciousness I certainly think that consciousness is a prerequisite for suffering you can't suffer if you're not kind but is it true that every being is conscious will suffer or has to be capable of suffering I suppose you could imagine a kind of consciousness especially if we can construct it out officially that's capable of experiencing pleasure but just automatically cuts out the consciousness when when they're suffering sort of like you know instant anesthesia as soon as something is going to cause you suffering so that's possible but doesn't exist as as far as we know on this planet yet if you asked what is consciousness philosophers often talk about it as their being a subject of experiences so you and I and everybody listening to this is a subject of experience there is a conscious subject who is taking things in responding to it in various ways feeling good about it feeling bad about it and that's different from the kinds of artificial intelligence we have now I take out my phone I ask Google directions to where I'm going Google gives me the directions and I choose to take a different way you know Google doesn't care it's not like I'm offending Google or anything like that there is no subjective experiences there and I think that's the indication that Google day I we have now is is not conscious or at least that level of AI is not conscious and that's the way to think about it now it may be difficult to tell of course whether a certain eye eye is or isn't conscious it may mimic consciousness and we can't tell if it's only mimicking it or if it's the real thing but that's what we're looking for is there a subjective experience a perspective on the world from which things can go well or badly from that perspective so our idea what Cocteau of what suffering looks like comes from our just watching our selves when we're in pain sort of oh when we're experiencing pleasure it's not only a pleasure and pain yes yes so and then you could actually back on us but I would say that's how we kind of build an intuition about animals is we can infer the similarities between humans and animals and so infer that they're suffering or not based on certain things and they're conscious or not so what if robots you mentioned Google Maps and I've done this experiment so I work in robotics just from my own self or I have several Roomba robots and I play with different speech interaction voice based interaction and if the Roomba or the robot or Google Maps shows any signs of pain like screaming or moaning or being displeased by something you've done that in my mind I can't help but immediately upgrade it and even when I myself programmed it in just having another entity that's now for the moment disjoint from me showing signs of pain makes me feel like it is conscious like I immediately and then the whatever the I immediately realize it's not obviously but that feeling is there so sort of I guess I guess what do you think about a world where Google Maps and rope rumbas are pretending to be conscious and we descendants of apes are not smart enough to realize it or not or or whatever or that is conscious they appear to be conscious and so you then have to give them rights the reason I'm asking that is that kind of capability may be closer than then we realize yes that kind of capability may be closer but I don't think it follows that we have to give them rights I suppose the the argument for saying that in those circumstances we should give them rights is that if we don't we'll harden ourselves against other beings who are not robots and who really do suffer that's a possibility that you know if we get used to looking at a being suffering and saying man we don't have to do anything about that that being doesn't have any rights maybe we'll feel the same about animals for instance and interestingly among philosophers and thinkers who denied that we have any direct duties to animals and this includes people like Thomas Aquinas and Immanuel Kant they did say yes but still it's better not to be cruel to them not because of the suffering we're inflicting on the animals but because if we are we may develop a cruel disposition and this will be bad for humans you know because we were more likely to be cruel to other humans and that would be wrong so but you don't accept that kahin I don't accept that as a the basis of the argument for why we shouldn't be cruel to animals I think the basis of the argument for why we shouldn't be cruel to animals is just that we're inflicting suffering on them and the suffering is a bad thing but possibly I might accept some sort of parallel of that argument as a reason why you shouldn't be cruel to these robots that mimic the symptoms of pain if if it's gonna be harder for us to distinguish I would venture to say I'd like to disagree with you and what most people I think at the risk of sounding crazy I would like to say that if that Roomba is dedicated to faking the consciousness in the suffering I think we will it will be impossible for us I would I would like to apply the same arguments with animals to robots that they deserve rights in that sense now we might outlaw the addition of those kinds of features into rumors but once you do I think I'm quite surprised by the upgrade in consciousness that the display of suffering creates it's a totally open world but I'd like to just sort of the difference between animals and other humans is that in the robot case we've added it in ourselves therefore we can say something about the how real it is but I would like to say that the display of it is what makes it real and there's some I'm not a philosopher I'm not making that argument but at least like to add that as a possibility and I've been surprised by it is all I'm trying to sort of inoculate poorly I suppose so there is a philosophical view has been held about humans which is rather like what you're talking about and that's behaviorism so behaviorism was employed both in psychology people like BF Skinner was a famous behaviorist but in psychology it was more a kind of a what is it that makes this science well you need to have behavior because that's what you can observe you can't observe consciousness but in philosophy the view defended by people like Gilbert Ryle who was a professor of philosophy at Oxford wrote a book called the concept of mind in which you know in this kind of phase this is in the 40s of linguistic philosophy he said well the meaning of a term is its use and we use terms like so-and-so is in pain when we see somebody writhing or screaming or trying to escape some stimulus and that's the meaning of the term so that's what it is to be in pain and you point to the behavior and Norman Malcolm who was another philosopher in the school from Cornell had had the view that you know so what is it to dream after all we can't see other people's dreams well when people wake up and say I just had a dream of you know here I was undressed walking down the Main Street or whatever it is you've dreamt that's what it is to have a dream it's to basically to wake up and recall something so you could apply this to to what you're talking about and say so what it is to be in pain is to exhibit these symptoms of pain behavior and therefore these robots are in pain that's what the word means but nowadays not many people think that riles kind of philosophical behaviorism is really very plausible so I think they would say the same about your view so yes I'd just spoken with Noam Chomsky who basically was part of dismantling the behaviorist but and I'm with that 100% for studying human behavior but I am one of the few people in the world who has made Roombas scream in pain and I just don't know what to do with that empirical evidence because it's hard it's sort of philosophically I agree but the only reason I philosophically agree in that case is because that was the programmer but if somebody else was a programmer I'm not sure I would be able to interpret that wall so it's uh I think it's a new world that I was just curious what your thoughts are for now you feel that the display of the what we can kind of intellectual say is a fake display of suffering is not suffering that's right that would be my view but that's consistent of course with the idea that it's part of our nature to respond to this display if it's reasonably authentically done and therefore it's understandable that people would feel this and maybe as I said it's even a good thing that they do feel it and you wouldn't want to harden yourself against it because then you might harden yourself against beings who are really suffering but there's this line you know so you said once a artificial general intelligence system a human level intelligence system become conscious I guess if I could just linger on it now I've wrote really dumb programs they just say things that I told them to say but how do you know when oh when a system like Alexa was just officially complex you can introspect to how it works starts giving you signs of consciousness through natural language that there's a there's a feeling there's another entity there that's self-aware that has a fear of death immortality but as awareness of itself that we kind of associate with other living creatures it I guess I'm sort of trying to do the slippery slope from the very naive thing where I started into into something where it's sufficiently a black box to where it's starting to feel like it's conscious it wears that threshold or you would start getting uncomfortable well the idea of robot suffering do you think I don't know enough about the programming that we're going to this really to answer this question but I presume that somebody who does know more about this could could look at the program and see whether we can explain the behaviors in a harmonious way that doesn't require us to suggest that some sort of consciousness has emerged or alternatively whether you're in a situation where you say I don't know how this is happening I the program does generate a kind of artificial general intelligence which is autonomous you know starts to do things itself and is autonomous of the basic programming that set it up and so it's quite possible that actually we have achieved consciousness in a system of artificial intelligence sort of the the approach to that worker that most of the community is really excited about now is with learning methods so machine learning and the learning methods are unfortunately are not capable of revealing which is why somebody like Noam Chomsky criticizes them you've created our philosophy the science of how it works and so it's possible if those are the kinds of methods that succeed we won't be able to know exactly sort of try to reduce try to find whether there is this thing is conscious or not this thing is IntelliJ or not it's simply giving when we talk to it it displays wit and humor and cleverness and emotion and fear and then we won't be able to say we're in the billions of nodes new in this artificial neural network is is the fear coming from sort of in that case that's a really interesting place where we do now start to return to behaviorism and say yeah that's that's there isn't an interesting issue I would say that if we have serious doubts and think it might be conscious then we ought to try to give it the benefit of the doubt just as I would say with animals we I think we can be highly confident that vertebrates are conscious but when we get that and and some invertebrates like the octopus but but with insects it's much harder to be to be confident of that I think we should give them the benefit of the doubt where we can which means you know I think would be wrong to torture an insect but this doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong to slap a mosquito that's about to bite you and stop you getting to sleep so I think you you try to achieve some balance in these circumstances of uncertainty if it's okay with you if we can go back just briefly so forty four years ago like you mentioned forty plus years ago you've heard an animal liberation the classic book that started that launched was a foundation of the movement of animal liberation deep can you summarize the key set of ideas that underpin netbook certainly the the key idea that underlies that book is the concept of speciesism which i did not invent that term I took it from a man called Richard Ryder who was in Oxford when I was and I saw a pamphlet that he'd written about experiments on chimpanzees that used that term but I think I contributed to making it philosophically more precise and to getting it into a broader audience and the idea is that we have a bias or a prejudice against taking seriously the interests of beings who are not members of our species just as in the past Europeans for example had a bias against taking Syria the interests of Africans racism and men have had a bias against taking seriously the interests of women sexism so I think something analogous not completely identical but something analogous goes on and has gone on for a very long time with the way humans see themselves visibly animals we see ourselves as more important we see animals as existing to serve our needs in various ways and you can find this very explicit in earlier philosophers from Aristotle through the Kant others and either we don't need to take their interests into account at all or we can discount it because they're not humans they can a little bit but they don't count nearly as much as humans do my book I use that that attitude is responsible for a lot of the things that we do to animals that are wrong confining them indoors in very crowded cramped conditions in factory farms to produce meat or eggs or milk more cheaply using them in some research that's by no means essential for survival or well-being and a whole lot you know some of the sports and things that we do to animals so I think that's unjustified because I think the significance of pain and suffering does not depend on the species of the being who is in pain or suffering any more than it depends on the race or sex with the being who is in pain or suffering and I think we ought to rethink our treatment of animals along the lines of saying if the pain is just as great in animal and it's just as bad that it happens as if it were a human maybe if I could ask I apologize hopefully it's not a ridiculous question but so as far as we know we cannot communicate with animals to a natural language but we would be able to communicate with robots so I'm returning just of a small parallel between perhaps animals in the future of AI if we do create nature a system or as we approach creating that age a system what kind of questions would you ask her to try to to try to intuit whether whether there is consciousness whether or more importantly whether there's capacity to suffer I might ask the AGI what she was feeling well does she have feelings and if she says yes to describe those feelings to describe what they were like to see what the phenomenal account of consciousness is like that's one question I might also try to find out if the AGI has a sense of itself so for example the idea would you you know we often ask people so suppose you're in a car accident and your brain were transplanted into someone else's body do you think you would survive or would it be the person whose body was still surviving you know your body having been destroyed and most people say I think I would you know if my brain was transplanted along with my memories and so on I would survive so we could ask Adi those kinds of questions if they were transferred to a different piece of hardware would they survive what would survive that effect so it's sort of on that line another perhaps absurd question but do you think having a body is necessary for consciousness so do you think digital beings can suffer presumably digital beings need to be running on some kind of hardware right yes it ultimately boils down to but this is exactly we just said is moving the brain right one place so you couldn't move it to a different kind of highway you know and I could say look you know your hardware is needs getting worn out we're going to transfer you to a fresh piece of hardware so we kind of shut you down for a time but don't worry you know you'll be running very soon on a nice fresh piece of hardware and you could imagine this conscious AG are saying that's fine I don't mind having a little rest just make sure you don't lose me like that yeah I mean that's an interesting thought that even with us humans the suffering is in the software we right now don't know how to repair the hardware yeah but we're learning we're getting better at it and better and the idea I mean a lot of some people dream about one day being able to transfer certain aspects of the software to another piece of hardware what do you think just on that topic there's been a lot of exciting innovation in brain computer interfaces I don't know if you're familiar with the companies like neural link with Elon Musk communicating both ways from a computer being able to send activate neurons and being able to read spikes from neurons with it with the dream of being able to expand sort of increase the bandwidth of which your brain can like look up articles on Wikipedia I don't think expanding kept in the knowledge capacity of the brain do you think that notion is is that interesting to you as the expansion of the human mind yes that's very interesting I'd love to be able to have that increased bandwidth and I you know if I want better access to my memory I have to say to is yet older you know you I talked to my wife about things that we did 20 years ago or something her memory is often better about particular events where were we who was at that event what did he or she where even she may know and I have not the faintest idea about this but perhaps it's somewhere in my memory and if I had at this extended memory I could I could search that particular year and rerun those things I think that would be great in some sense we already have that by storing so much of our data online like pictures of different yes well Gmail is fantastic for that because you know people people email me as if they know me well yeah I haven't got a clue who they are but then I search for their name email me in 2007 and I know who they are now yeah so we already do it taking the first steps already so on the flip side of AI people x2 Russell and others focus on the control problem value alignment in AI which is the problem of making sure we build systems that align to our own values or ethics do you think sort of high level how do we go about building systems do you think is it possible that align with our values align with our human ethics or living being ethics presumably it's it's possible to do that I know that lot of people who think that there's a real danger that we won't that will more or less accidentally lose control of of AGI yeah laughs hear yourself personally I'm not quite sure what to think I talk to philosophers like Nick Bostrom and Toby Ord and they think that this is a real problem where you need to worry about then I talk to people who work for Microsoft or deepmind or somebody and I say no we're not really that close to producing a gr you know super intelligence so if you look at Nick Bostrom's of the arguments it's very hard to defend some of course and I myself engineer I a system so I'm more with the deep mind folks were it seems that we're really far away but then the counter-argument is is there any fundamental reasonable that we'll never achieve it and if not and eventually there will be a dire existential risk so we should be concerned about it and do you have give define that argument at all appealing in this domain or any domain that eventually this will be a problem so we should be worried about it yes I think it's a problem I think there's that's a valid point of course when you say eventually that raises the question how far off is that and is there something that we can do about it now because if we're talking about this is going to be a hundred years in the future and you consider how rapid our knowledge of artificial intelligence has grown in the last 10 or 20 years it seems unlikely that there's anything much we could do now that would influence whether this is going to happen a hundred years in the future you know people in 80 years in the future would be in a much better position to say this is what we need to do to prevent this happening then than we are now so to some extent I find that reassuring but I'm all in favor of some people doing research into this to see if indeed it is that far off or if we are in a position to do something about it sooner I'm I'm very much of the view that extinction is a terrible thing and therefore even if the risk of extinction is very small if we can reduce that risk that's something that we ought to do my disagreement with some of these people who talk about long term risks extinction risks is only about how much priority that should have is compared to present questions no such it if you look at the math of it from a utilitarian perspective if it's existential risk so everybody dies that there's a it feels like an infinity in the math equation that if that makes the math where the priority is difficult to do that if we don't know the time scale and you can legitimately argue this nonzero probability that all happened tomorrow that how do you deal with these kinds of existential risks like from nuclear war from nuclear weapons from biological weapons from I'm not sure if global warming falls into that category because global warming is a lot more gradual mm-hmm and people say it's not an existential risk because they'll always be possibilities of some humans existing farming Antarctica or wrestles in Siberia or something of that sort yeah but you don't find this of did did complete existential risks a fundamental like an overriding part of the equations of ethics I wouldn't know you know certainly if you treated as an infinity then it plays havoc with any calculations arguably we shouldn't only one of the ethical assumptions that goes into this is that the loss of future lives that is of merely possible lives of beings who may never exist at all is in some way comparable to the sufferings or deaths of people who who do exist at some point and that's not clear to me I think there's a case for saying that but I also think there's a case for taking the other view so that has some impact on it of course you might say ah yes but still if there's some uncertainty about this and the the costs of extinction are infinite then still it's gonna overwhelm and everything else but I suppose I I'm not convinced of that I'm not convinced that it's really infinite here and even Nick Bostrom in his discussion of this doesn't claim that there'll be an infinite number of lives live is he and what is a 10 to the 56th or something it's a vast number that I think he calculates this is assuming we can upload consciousness onto these you know Dilek on digital form did digital forms and therefore there'll be much more energy efficient but he calculates the amount of energy in the universe or something like that so then I was a vast but not infinite which gives you some prospect maybe of resisting some of the argument the the beautiful thing with Nick's arguments is he quickly jumps from the individual scale to the universal scale which is just awe-inspiring to think right when you think about the entirety of the span of time of the universe it's both interesting from a computer science perspective AI perspective and from an ethical perspective the idea of utilitarianism because you say what is utilitarianism utilitarianism is the ethical view that the right thing to do is the act that has the greatest expected utility where what that means is it's the act that will produce the best consequences discounted by the odds that you won't be able to produce those consequences that something will go wrong but in simple case let's assume we we have certainty about what the consequences of our actions will be then the right action is the action that will produce the best consequences is that always and by the way there's a bunch of nuanced stuff the talk with Sam Harris on this podcast on the people should go listen to it's great to think two hours of moral philosophy discussion but is that an easy calculation no it's a difficult calculation and actually there's one thing that I need to add and that is utilitarians certainly the classical utilitarians think that by best consequences we're talking about happiness and the absence of pain and suffering there are other consequentialists who are not really utilitarians who say there are different things that could be good consequences justice freedom you know human dignity knowledge they all kind as good consequences too and that makes the calculations even more difficult because then you need to know how to balance these things off if you are just talking about well-being using that term to express happiness and the absence of suffering I think that the calculation becomes more manageable in a philosophical sense it's still in practice we don't know how to do it we don't know how to measure quantities of happiness and misery we don't know how to calculate the probabilities that different actions will produce this or that so at best we can use it as a as a rough guide to different actions and one way we have to focus on the short-term consequences because we just can't really predict all of the longer-term ramifications so what about the sort of what about this the extreme suffering of very small groups sort of utilitarianism is focused on the overall aggregate right how do you would you say you yourself a utilitarian you'll find that sort of do you what do you make of the difficult ethical maybe poetic suffering of very few individuals I think it's possible that that gets overwritten by benefits to very large numbers of India I think that can can be the right answer but before we conclude that is the right us that we have to know how severe the suffering is and how that compares with the benefits so I I tend to think that extreme suffering is worse than always further if you like below the neutral level then extreme happiness or bliss is above it so when I think about the worst experience as possible and the best experience as possible I don't think of them as equidistant from neutral so like it's a scale that goes from minus 100 through zero as a neutral level to plus a hundred because I know that I would not exchange an hour of my most pleasurable experiences for an hour of my most painful experiences even I wouldn't have an hour of my most painful experiences even for two hours or ten hours of my most painful experiences did I say that correctly yeah maybe 20 hours then yeah well one what's the exchange rate oh that's the question what is the exchange rate but I think it's it can be quite high so that's why you shouldn't just assume that you know it's okay to make one person suffer extremely in order to make two people much better off it might be a much larger number but at some point I do think you should aggregate and and the result will be even though it violates our intuitions of justice and fairness whatever it might be giving priority to those who are worse off at some point I still think that will be the right thing to do yes I'm complicated nonlinear function and ask the sort of out there question is the more remote put our data out there the more we're able to measure a bunch of factors of each of our individual human lives and I guess foresee the ability to estimate well-being of without whatever we public we together collectively agree and a good object function for from a utilitarian perspective do you think it do you think it'll be possible and is a good idea to push that kind of analysis to make then public decisions perhaps with the help of AI that you know here's a tax rate here's a tax rate at which well-being will be optimized and yeah that would be great if we could if we really knew that if we could really could calculate that nobody do you think it's possible to converge towards an agreement amongst humans but towards an objective function is just a hopeless pursuit I don't think it's hopeless I think it's difficult be difficult to get converged towards agreement at least at present because some people would say you know I've got different views about justice and I think you ought to give priority to those who are worse off even though I acknowledge that the gains that the worst offer making our less than the gains that those who are sort of medium badly off could be making so we still have all of these intuitions that we we argue about so I don't think we would get agreement but the fact that we wouldn't get agreement doesn't show that there isn't a right answer there do you think who gets to say what is right and wrong do you think there's place for Ethics oversight from from the government so I'm thinking in the case of AI overseeing what is what kind of decisions they I can't make and not but also if you look at animal animal rights or rather not rights or perhaps rights but the idea is you've explored in an Animal Liberation who gets to so you eloquently beautifully write in your book that this will here you know we shouldn't do this but is there some harder rules that should be imposed or is this a collective thing would converge towards a society and thereby make the better and better ethical decisions politically I'm still a Democrat despite looking at the flaws in democracy and why it doesn't work always very well so I don't see a better option than allowing the public to vote for governments in accordance with their policies and I hope that they will vote for policies policies that reduce the suffering of animals and reduce the suffering of distant humans whether geographically distant or distant because their future humans but I recognize that democracy isn't really well set up to do that and in a sense you could imagine a wise and benevolent you know omni-benevolent leader who would do that better than democracies could but in the world in which we live it's difficult to imagine that this leader isn't going to be corrupted by a variety of influences you know we've we've had so many examples of people who've taken power with good intentions and then have ended up being corrupt and favoring themselves so I don't know if you know that's why as I say I don't know that we have a better system than democracy to make this decision well so you also discuss effective altruism which is a mechanism for going around government for putting the power in the hands of the people to donate money towards causes to help you know do you know did remove the middleman and give it directly to the to the causes they care about sort of maybe this is a good time to ask you 10 years ago wrote life you can save that's now I think available for free online that's right you can download either the ebook or the audiobook free from the life you can saved org and what are the key ideas the present in in the book the main thing I want to do in the book is to make people realize that it's not difficult to help people in extreme poverty that there are highly effective organizations now but doing this that they've been independently assessed and verified by research teams that are expert in this area and that it's a fulfilling thing to do to for at least part of your life you know we can't all be Saints but at least one of your goals should be to really make a positive contribution to the world and to do something to help people who through no fault of their own are in very dire circumstances and and living a life that is barely or perhaps not at all a decent life for a human being to live so you described a minimum ethical standard of giving what what advice would you give to people that want to be effectively altruistic in their life like live an effective altruism life there are many different kinds of ways of living as an effective altruists and if you're at the point where you're thinking about your long term career I'd recommend you take a look at a website called 80,000 hours 80,000 hours org which looks at ethical career choices and they range from for example going to work on Wall Street so that you can earn a huge amount of money and then donate most of it to effective charities to going to work for a really good nonprofit organization so that you can directly use your skills and ability and hard work to further a good cause or perhaps going into politics may be small chances but because I off sin in politics go to work in the public service where if you're talented you might rise to a higher level where you can influence decisions do research in an area where the payoff could be great there are a lot of different opportunities but too few people are even thinking about those questions they're just going along in some sort of preordained rut to particular careers maybe they think they land a lot of money and have a comfortable life but they may not find that as fulfilling as actually knowing that they're making a positive difference to the world what about in terms of so that's like long-term $80,000 sure a shorter term giving part of well actually it's a part of that and go to Walker work at Wall Street if you would like to give a percentage of your income you talk about life you can save that I mean is it I was looking through it's quite a compelling it's I mean I'm just a dumb engineer so I like there's simple rulz okay so I do actually set out suggested levels of giving because people often ask me about this a popular answer is give 10% the traditional tithe that's recommended in Christianity and also Judaism but you know why should it be the same percentage irrespective of your income tax scales reflect the idea that the more income you have the more you can pay tax and I think the same is true in what you can give so I I do set out a progressive donor scale which starts out at 1% for people on modest incomes and rises to 33 and a third percent for people who are really earning a lot and my idea is that I don't think any of these amounts really impose real hardship on on people because they are progressive and geared to income so I think anybody can do this and can know that they're doing something significant to play their part in reducing the huge gap between people in extreme poverty in the world and people living effluent lives and aside from it being an ethical life it's 1 Nephi more fulfilling because like there's something about our human nature that or some of our human nature's maybe most of our human nature that enjoys doing the the ethical thing yes I make both those arguments that it it is an ethical requirement and like kind of world we live in today to help people in great need when we can easily do so but also that it is a rewarding thing and there's good psychological research showing that people who give more tend to be more satisfied with their lives and I think this has something to do with with having a purpose that's larger than yourself and therefore never being if you like never never being bored sitting around oh you know what will I do next I've got nothing to do in a world like this there are many good things that you can do and enjoy doing them plus you're working with other people in the effective altruism movement forming a community of other people with similar ideas and they tend to be interesting thoughtful and good people as well and having friends of that sort is another big contribution to having a good life so we talked about big things that are beyond ourselves but we where we're also just human and mortal do you ponder your own mortality is there insights about your philosophy the ethics that you gain from pondering your own mortality clearly you know as you get into your 70s you can't help thinking about your own mortality but I don't know that I have great insights into that from my philosophy I don't think there's anything after the death of my body assuming that we won't be able to upload my mind into anything at the time when I die so I don't think there's any afterlife or anything to look forward to in that sense we fear death so if you look at Ernest Becker and describing the motivating aspects of the our ability to be cognizant of our mortality do you have any of those elements in your driving your motivation life I suppose the fact that you have only a limited time to achieve the things that you want to achieve gives you some sort of motivation to get going and achieving them and if we thought very mortal we might say you know I can put that off for another decade or two so there's that about it but otherwise you know no I'd rather have more time to do more I'd also like to be able to see how things go that I'm interested in you know his climate change gonna turn out to be as dire as a lot of scientists say that it is is going to be will we somehow scrape through with less damage than we thought I'd really like to know the answers to those questions but I guess I'm not going to well you said there's nothing afterwards so let me ask the even more absurd question what do you think is the meaning of it all I think the meaning of life is the meaning we give to it I don't think that we were brought into the universe for any kind of larger purpose but given that we exist I think we can recognize that some things are objectively bad extreme suffering is an example and other things are objectively good like having a rich fulfilling enjoyable pleasurable life and we can try to do our part in reducing the bad things and increasingly good things so one way the meaning is to do a little bit more of the good things objectively good things and a little bit less of the bad things yes or do as much of the good things as you can and there's little of the bad things either beautifully put I don't think there's a better place to end it thank you so much for talking today thanks very much like it's been really interesting talking to you thanks for listening to this conversation with Peter Singer and thank you to our sponsors cash app and master class please consider supporting the podcast by downloading cash app and use the code lex podcast and signing up at master class comm / flex click the links buy all the stuff it's the best way to support this podcast and the journey i'm on my research and startup if you enjoy this thing subscribe on youtube review it with 5,000 type of podcast support on patreon or connect with me on Twitter Alex Friedman spelled without the e just Fri D ma N and now let me leave you with some words from Peter Singer what one generation finds ridiculous the next accepts and the third shudders when looks back with the first dead thank you for listening and hope to see you next time you