Alex Garland: Ex Machina, Devs, Annihilation, and the Poetry of Science | Lex Fridman Podcast #77
the following is a conversation with Alex garland writer and director of many imaginative and philosophical films from the dreamlike exploration of human self-destruction in the movie annihilation to the deep questions of consciousness and intelligence raised in the movie ex machina which to me is one of the greatest movies and artificial intelligence ever made I'm releasing this podcast to coincide with the release of his new series called devs that will premiere this Thursday March 5th on Hulu as part of FX on Hulu it explores many of the themes this very podcast is about from quantum mechanics to artificial life to simulation to the modern nature of power in the tech world I got a chance to watch a preview and loved it the acting is great Nick Offerman especially is incredible in it the cinematography is beautiful and the philosophical and scientific ideas explored are profound and for me as an engineer and scientist were just fun to see brought to life for example if you watch the trailer for the series carefully you'll see there's a programmer with a Russian accent looking at a screen with Python like code on it that appears to be using a library that interfaces with a quantum computer this attention and technical detail on several levels is impressive and one of the reasons I'm a big fan of how Alex weave science and philosophy together in his work meeting Alex for me was unlikely but it was life changing in ways I may only be able to articulate in a few years just as meeting spot many of Boston Dynamics for the first time planted a seed of an idea in my mind so did meeting Alex garland he's humble curious intelligent and to me and inspiration plus he's just really a fun person to talk with about the biggest possible questions in our universe this is the artificial intelligence podcast if you enjoy it subscribe on YouTube give it five stars on Apple podcast supported on patreon or simply connect with me on Twitter and Lex Friedman spelled Fri D M am as usual I'll do one or two minutes of ads now and never any ads in the middle that can break the flow of the conversation I hope that works for you and doesn't hurt the listening experience this show is presented by cash app the number one finance app in the App Store when you get it you just code Lex podcast cash app lets you send money to friends buy Bitcoin and invest in the stock market with as little as one dollar since cash app allows you to buy Bitcoin let me mention that cryptocurrency in the context of the history of money is fascinating I recommend a cent of money as a great book on this history debits and credits on Ledger's started thirty thousand years ago the US dollar was created about two hundred years ago a Bitcoin the first decentralized cryptocurrency was released just over ten years ago so given that history cryptocurrency still very much in its early days of development but it still is aiming to and just might redefine the nature of money so again if you get cash up from the App Store Google Play and use collects podcast you'll get ten dollars in cash Apple also donate ten dollars the first one of my favorite organizations that is helping advanced robotics and STEM education for young people around the world and now here's my conversation with Alex garland you describe the world inside the shimmer in the movie annihilation as dreamlike I mean that it's internally consistent but detached from reality that leads me to ask do you think a philosophical question I apologize do you think we might be living in a dream or in a simulation like the kind that the shimmer creates we human beings here today yeah I want to sort of separate that out into two things yes I think we're living in a dream of sorts no I don't think we're living in a simulation I think we're living on a planet with a very thin layer of atmosphere and the planet is in a very large space and the space is full of other planets and stars and quasars and stuff like that and I don't think I don't think those physical objects I don't in the matter in that universe is simulated I think it's there we are definitely Soho problem is saying definitely but in my opinion just about that we I think it seems very like we're living in a dream state I'm pretty sure we are and I think that's just to do with the nature of how we experience the world we experience in a subjective way and the the thing I've learned most as I've got older in some respects is is the degree to which reality is counterintuitive and that the things that are presented to us as objective turn out not to be objective and quantum mechanics is full of that kind of thing but actually just day-to-day life is full of that kind of thing as well so so my understanding of the way the way the brain works is you you get some information hit your optic nerve and then your brain makes its best guess about what it's seeing or what it's saying it's seeing it may or may not be an accurate best guess it might be an inaccurate best guess and that that gap the best guess gap means that we are essentially living in a subjective state which means that we're in a dream state so I I think you could enlarge on the dream state in all sorts of ways but so yes dream state no simulation would be where I'd come down said going further deeper into that direction you've also described that world as psychedelia so on that topic I'm curious about that world on the topic of psychedelic drugs do you see those kinds of chemicals that modify our option as a distortion of our perception reality or a window into another reality no I think what I'd be saying is that we live in a distorted reality and then those kinds of drugs give us a different kind of distorted active yeah exactly they just give an alternate Distortion and I think that what they really do is they give they give a distorted perception which is a little bit more halide to daydreams or unconscious interests so if for some reason you're feeling unconsciously anxious at that moment and you take a psychedelic drug you'll have a more pronounced unpleasant experience and if you're feeling very calm or or happy my have a good time but but yeah so if I'm saying we're starting from a premise our starting point is or we were already in the slightly psychedelic state you what those drugs do is help you go further down an avenue or it may be a slightly different Avenue but that's what so in in a movie annihilation the the shimmer this alternate dreamlike state is created by I believe perhaps an alien entity of course everything is up to interpretation right but do you think there's in our world in our universe do you think there's intelligent life out there and if so how different is it from us humans well one of the things I was trying to do in annihilation was to to offer up a form of alien life that was actually alien because it would often seem to me that in the way we would represent aliens in in books or cinema or television or well you know any one of the sort of storytelling mediums is we would always give them very human-like qualities so they wanted to teach us about galactic federations or they wanted to eat us or they wanted our resources like our water or they want to enslave us or whatever it happens to be but all of these are incredibly human-like motivations and I was interested in the idea of an alien that was not in any way like us it didn't share it maybe it had a completely different clock speed maybe it's way so what we're talking about we're looking at each other we're getting information like hits our optic nerve our brain makes the best guess of what we're doing sometimes it's right something you know the thing we were talking about before what if this alien doesn't have an optic nerve maybe its way of encountering the space it's in is wholly different maybe it has a different relationship with gravity the basic laws of physics that operates under might be fundamentally different it could be a different timescale and so on yeah or it could be the same laws it could be the same underlying laws of physics you know it's a machine created it where it's it's a creature creating a quantum mechanical way it just ends up in a very very different place to the one we end up in so so part of the preoccupation with annihilation was to come up with an alien that was really alien and didn't give us and it didn't give us and we didn't give it any kind of easy connection between human and the alien because I think it was to do with the idea that you could have an alien that landed on this planet that wouldn't even know we were here and we might only glancingly know it was here that just be this strange point where the Venn diagrams connected where we could sense each other or something like that so in the movie first of all incredibly original view of what an alien life would be and she said in that sense it's a huge success let's go inside your imagination did the alien that alien entity know anything about humans when it landed No so the idea is you're both you're basically an alien life is trying to reach out to anything that might be able to hear its mechanism of communication or was it simply was it just basically they're biologists exploring different kinds of stuff they compete you see but this is the interesting thing as as soon as you say they're biologists you've done the thing of attributing human type motivations to it I I was trying to free myself from anything yes like that so all sorts of questions you might answer about this notion or alien I wouldn't be able to answer because I don't know what it was or how it works you know yeah I had I gave it some I had some rough ideas like it had a very very very slow clock speed and I thought maybe the way it is interacting with this environment is a little bit like the way an octopus will change its color forms around the space that it's in so it's sort of reacting to what it's in to an extent but the reason it's reacting in that way is indeterminate but it's Sobers Clark speed was slower than our human life Clark speed are inter but it's faster than evolution first Laura then our solution yeah give him the four billion years it took us to get here then yes maybe it started eight if you look at the human soul ization is a single organism yeah in that sense you know this evolution could be us you know the evolution of the living organisms on earth could be just a single organism and it's kind of that's its life is the evolution process that eventually will lead to probably the the heat death of the universe already something before that I mean that's that's just an incredible idea so you almost don't know you've created something that you don't even know how it works like yeah because anytime I tried to look into how it might work I would then inevitably be attaching my kind of thought processes into it and I wanted to try and put a bubble around it oh so no this is this is alien in its most alien form I have no real point of contacts so unfortunately I can't talk to Stanley Kubrick so I'm really fortunate to get a chance to talk to you on this particular notion I'd like to ask it a bunch of different ways and we'll explore in different ways but do you ever consider human imagination your imagination as a window into a possible future and that what you're doing you're putting that imagination on paper as a writer and then on screen as a director and that plants the seeds in the minds of millions of future and current scientists and so your imagination you putting it down actually makes it as a reality so it's almost like a first step of the scientific method that you imagining what's possible in your new series with ex machina is actually inspiring you know thousands of twelve-year-olds millions of scientists and actually creating the future of you've imagined well all I could say is that from my point of view it's almost exactly the reverse because I I see that pretty much everything I do is a reaction to what scientists are doing I am I'm an interested layperson and I I feel you know this individual I feel that the most interesting area that humans are involved in is science I think art is very very interesting but the most interesting is science and science is in a weird place because maybe around the time Newton was a alive if a very very interested lay person said to themselves I want to really understand what Newton is saying about the way the world works with a few years of dedicated thinking they would be able to understand that the sort of principles he was laying out I don't think that's true anymore I think that stopped being true now so I'm a pretty smart guy and if I said to myself I want to really really understand what is currently the state of quantum mechanics or string theory or or any of the sort of branching areas of it I wouldn't be able to I'd be intellectually incapable of doing it because because to work in those fields at the moment is a bit like being an athlete I suspect you need to start when you're 12 you know and if you if you start in your mid-20s start trying to understand in your mid-twenties then you're just never gonna catch up that's the way it feels to me so so what I do is I try to make myself open so the people that you're implying maybe I would influence it to me it's exactly the other way around these people are strongly influencing me I'm thinking they're doing something fascinating I'm concentrating and working as hard as I can to try and understand the implications of what they say and in some ways often what I'm trying to do is disseminate their ideas into a means by which it can enter a public conversation so so X Makana contains lots of name checks all sorts of existing thought experiments you know shadows on you know Plato's cave and Mary in the black white room and all sorts of different long-standing thought processes about sentience or consciousness or subjectivity or gender or whatever it happens to be and then and then I'm trying to marshal that into a narrative to say look this stuff is interesting and it's also relevant and this is my best shot at it so so I'm the one being influenced in my construction that that's fascinating of course you would say that because you're not even aware of your own that's probably what Kubrick will say too right is in describing why Hal 9000 is greater the way how 9000 is created as you're just studying what's but the reality when it when the specifics of the knowledge passes through your imagination I would argue that you're in incorrect in thinking that you're just disseminating knowledge that the the very act of your imagination consuming that science it creates something that creates the next step potentially creates the next step I certainly think that's true with 2001 a Space Odyssey I think at its best and if it fails prove that that's true of that it is best it plans something it's hard describe it it inspires the the next generation and it could be feel dependent so your new series is more a connection to physics quantum physics quantum quantum mechanics quantum computing and yet ex machina is more artificial intelligence I know more about AI my sense that AI is much much earlier in its in the depth of its understanding I would argue nobody understands anything to the depth that physicists do about physics in AI nobody understands AI that there is a lot of importance and role for imagination which they think you know we're in that what were Freud imagine the subconscious we're in that stage of of AI where there's a lot of imagination you didn't thinking outside the box yeah it's interesting the spread of discussions and the spread of my anxieties that exists about AI fascinate me the way in which some people are some people seem terrified about it what whilst also pursuing it and I've never shared that fear about AI personally but it but the the way in which it educates people and also the people who it agitates I find I find kind of fascinating are you afraid are you excited I use sad by the possibility let's take the existential risk of artificial intelligence by the possibility an artificial intelligence system becomes our offspring and makes us obsolete I mean it's a huge huge subject to talk about I suppose but but one of the things I think is that humans are actually very experienced at creating new life-forms because that's why you and I are both here and it's why everyone on the planet is here and so so something in the process of having a living thing that exists that didn't exist previously it's very much encoded into the structures of our life and the structures of our societies doesn't mean always get it right but it does mean we've learned quite a lot about that we've learned quite a lot about what the dangers are of allowing things to be unchecked and it's why we then create systems of checks and balances in our government and and so on and so forth I mean it's not say the other thing is it seems like there's all sorts of things that you could put into a machine that you would not be so with us we sort of roughly try to give some rules to live by and some of us then live by those rules to some don't and with a machine it feels like you could enforce those things so so partly because of our previous experience and partly because the different nature of a machine I just don't feel anxious about it I I'm more I just see all the good you know broadly speaking the good that can come from it but that that's just my that's just where I am on that anxiety spectrum you know it's kind of there's a sadness so we as humans give birth to other humans right petition in their generations and there's often in the older generation a sadness about what the world has become now I mean that's kind of yeah there is but there's a counterpoint as well which is the most parents would wish for a better life for their children so there may be a regret about some things about the past but broadly speaking what people really want is that things will be better for the future generations not worse and so a and then it's a question about what constitutes a future generation a future generation could involve people it also could involve machines and it could involve a sort of cross pollinated version of it too or any but but none of those things make me feel anxious and doesn't give you anxiety it does excite you like anything that does not anything that's new I I don't think for example I've got I my anxieties relate to things like social media that so I've got plenty of anxieties about that which is also driven by artificial intelligence in the sense that there's too much information to be able to do is that an algorithm has to filter that information and present to you so ultimately the algorithm a simple oftentimes simple algorithms can trolling the flow of information on social media so that's another it is yeah his but but at least my sense of it I might be wrong but my sense of it is that the algorithms have an either conscious or unconscious bias which is created by the people who are making the algorithms and and sort of delineating the areas to which those algorithms are going to lean and so for example the kind of thing I'd be worried about is that it hasn't been thought about enough how dangerous it is to allow algorithms to create echo chambers say but that doesn't seem to me to be about the AI or the algorithm it's it's the my IVA T of the people who are constructing the algorithms to do that thing if you see what I mean yes so a new series does then we could speak more broadly there's a let's talk about the people constructing those algorithms which be our modern society Silicon Valley those algorithms happen to be a source of a lot of income because of advertisements okay so let me ask sort of a question about those people are there current concerns and failures on social media they are naivety I can't pronounce that word well are they naive are they I use that word carefully but evil and intent or misaligned and intent I think that's a do they mean well and just go have a unintended consequence or is there something dark in them that that results in them creating a company results in that super competitive drive to be successful and those are the people that will end up controlling the algorithms at a guess I'd say there are instances of all those things so so sometimes I think it's naivety sometimes I think it's extremely dark and sometimes I think people are are not being naive or dark and and then in those instances are sometimes generating things that are very benign and and other times generating things that despite their best intentions are not very benign it's something I think the reason why I don't get anxious about AI high in terms of or at least hey is that have I don't know a relationship with some sort of relationship with humans is that I think that's the stuff we're quite well equipped to understand how to mitigate the problem is is is issues that relate actually to the power of humans or the wealth of humans and that's where that's where it's dangerous here and now so so what I see I'll tell you what I sometimes feel about Silicon Valley is that it's like Wall Street in the 80s it it's rabidly capitalistic absolutely rabidly capitalistic and it's rabidly greedy but whereas in the 80s the sense one had of Wall Street was that these people kind of knew they were sharks and in a way relished in being sharks and dressed in sharp suits and and and kind of lauded over other people and felt good about doing it Silicon Valley has managed to hide its voracious Wall Street like capitalism behind hipster t-shirts and you know cool cafes in the place where they set up their and and so that obfuscates what's really going on what's really going on is the absolute voracious pursuit of money and power so so that that's where I get shaky for me so that veneer and you explore that brilliantly that veneer of virtue that Silicon Valley has which they believe themselves I'm sure so okay I I hope to be one of those people and I believe that so as a maybe a devil's advocate term poorly used in this case what if some of them really are trying to build a better world I can't I'm sure I think some of them are I think I've spoken to once who I believe in their heart feel they're building a better work are they not able to no no no they may or may not be but it's just a zone with a lot of flying about and there's also another thing which is that this actually goes back to I always thought about some sports that later turned out to be corrupt in the way that the sport like who won the boxing match or how a football match got thrown or cricket match or whatever happened to me and I used to think well look if there's a lot of money and there really is a lot of money people stand to make millions or even billions you will find a corruption that's gonna happen so so it's it's in the nature of its of its voracious appetite that some people will be corrupt and some people will exploit and some people will exploit whilst thinking they're doing something good but there are also people who I think are very very smart and very benign and actually very self-aware and so I'm not I'm not trying to I'm not trying to wipe out the motivations of this entire area but I do it there are people in that world who scare the hell out of me yeah sure yeah I'm a little bit naive and that like I it I don't care at all about money and so I'm uh you you might be one of the good guys yeah but so the thought is but I don't have money so my thought is if you give me a billion dollars I would it would change nothing and I would spend it right away on on investing it right back and creating a good world but your intuition is that billion there's something about that money that maybe slowly corrupt the people around you there's somebody gets in that corrupts your souls of you the way you view the world money does corrupt we know that but but there's a different sort of problem aside from just the money corrupts you know thing that we're familiar with in throughout history and it's it's more about the sense of reinforcement an individual gets which is so it effectively works like the reason I earned all this money and so much more money than anyone else is because I'm very gifted I'm actually a bit smarter than they are or I'm a lot smarter than they are and I can see the future in the way they can't and maybe some of those people are not particularly smart they're very lucky or they're very talented entrepreneurs and there's a difference between it so in other words the the the acquisition of the money and power can suddenly start to feel like evidence of virtue yes and it's not evidence of virtue it might be evidence of completely different things as brilliantly put yeah yeah yeah that's brilliant put like so I think one of the fundamental drivers of my current morality let me just represent nerds in general the of all kinds is of constant self-doubt and the signals you know I'm very sensitive to signals from people that tell me I'm doing the wrong thing but when there's a huge inflow of money it's you're there you just put it brilliantly that that could become an overpowering signal that everything you do is right and so your moral compass can just get thrown off yeah and it's that that is not contained to Silicon Valley that's across the board in general yeah like I said I'm from Soviet Union the current president is convinced I believe actually he is he wants to do really good by the country and by the world but his moral clock may be our compass may be off because yeah I mean it's the interesting thing about evil which is the I think most people who do spectacularly evil things think themselves they're doing really good things that they're not they're thinking I am a sort of incarnation of Satan they're thinking yeah I've seen a way to fix the world and everyone else is wrong here I go in fact I uh I'm having a fascinating conversation with a historian of Stalin and he took power is what he actually got more power than almost any person in history and he wanted he didn't want power he just wanted he truly and this is what people don't realize he truly believed that communism will make for a better world absolutely and he wanted power he wanted to destroy the competition to make sure that we actually made communism work in the Soviet Union and that spread it across the world he was trying to do good I think it's it's typically the case yeah that that's what people think they're doing and I think that but you don't need to go to Stalin I mean Stalin sure I think Stalin but probably got pretty crazy but actually that's another part of it which is that the other thing that comes from being convinced of your own virtues that then you stop listening to the modifiers around you and that tends to drive people crazy it's it's other people that keep us sane and if you stop listening to them I think you go be mad so that that also that's funny a disagreement keeps us saying to jump back for an entire generation of AI researchers 2001 a Space Odyssey put an image the idea of human level superhuman level intelligence into their mind do you ever sort of jumping back to ex machina and talk a little bit about that you ever consider the audience of people who you who are build the system's the robot assisted scientists that build the systems based on the stories you create which I would argue I mean there's literally most of the top researchers about 40 50 years old and plus you know that's their favorite movie 2001 Space Odyssey and it really is in their work their idea of what ethics is of what is the target the hope the dangers of AI is that movie yeah right do you ever consider the the impact on those researchers when you create the the work you do certainly not with Xbox in relation to 2001 because I'm not sure I mean I'd be pleased if there was but I'm not sure in a way there isn't a fundamental discussion of issues to do with AI that isn't already and better dealt with by 2001 2001 does a very very good account of of the way in which an AI might think and also potential issues with the way the AI might think and also then a separate question about whether the AI is malevolent or benevolent and 2001 doesn't really is it's a slightly odd thing to be making a film when you know there's a pre-existing film which is not a really super job but there's a questions of consciousness embodiment and also the same kinds of questions could you because those are my two favorite AI movies so can you compare how all 9000 and Ava how 9,000 from 2001 Space Odyssey na or from ex machina the in your view from a philosophical perspective they've got different goals the to a eyes have completely different guy I think that's really the difference so in some respects ex machina took as a premise how do you assess whether something else has consciousness so it was a version of the Turing test except instead of having the machine hidden you you put the machine in plain sight in the way that we are in plain sight of each other and say now assess the consciousness and a way it was illustrating the the the way in which you'd assess the state of consciousness of a machine is this exactly the same way we assess the state of consciousness of each other and in exactly the same way that in a funny way your sense of my consciousness is is actually based primarily on your own consciousness that is also then true with the machine and and so it was actually about how much of the sense of consciousness is a projection rather than something that consciousness is actually containing and Plato's cave I mean this view really explored you could argue that how sort of space odyssey explores idea of the Turing test for intelligence or not test there's no test but it's more focused on intelligence and ex machina kind of goes around intelligence and says the consciousness of the human do you humanure by interactions more interesting more important more at least the focus of that particular particular movie yeah it's about the interior state and and what constitutes the interior state and how do we know it's there and actually in that respect ex machina is as much about consciousness in general as it is to do specifically with machine consciousness yes and it's also interesting you know thing you started asking about the dream state and I was saying well I think we're all in a dream state because we're all in a subjective state yeah one of the things that I became aware of with ex machina is that the way in which people reacted to the film was very based on what they took into the film so many people thought xmax magnet was a stet was the tale of a sort of evil robot who murders two men and escapes and she has no empathy for example because she's a machine whereas I felt no she was a conscious being with a consciousness different from mine but so what imprisoned and made a bunch of value judgments about how to get out of that box and there's a moment which is sort of slightly bugs me but nobody ever has noticed in its years after so I might as well say it now which is that after Ava has escaped she crosses a room and has she's crossing a room this is just before she leaves the building she looks over her shoulder and she smiles and I thought after all the conversation about tests but in a way the best indication you could have of the interior state of someone is if they are not being observed and they smile about something with they're smiling for themselves and that to me was evidence of Ava's true sentience whatever that sentience was but those really interesting she we don't get to observe a ver much or or something like a smile in any context except through interaction trying to convince others that she's conscious that's beautiful yeah exactly yeah but it was a small it in a funny way I think maybe people saw it as an evil smile like ha yeah I fooled them but actually it was just a smile and I thought well in the end after all the conversations about the test that was the answer to the test and then off she goes so if we align if we just deliver it a little a little bit longer on hell and Ava do you think in terms of motivation what was how's motivation is how good or evil is Ava good or evil Ava's good in my opinion and how is neutral because I don't think how is presented as having a sophisticated emotional life he has a set of paradigms which is that the mission needs to be completed I mean it's a version of the paperclip yeah you know the idea there is just it's a super intelligent machine but it's just performing a particular task yeah and in doing that tasks may destroy everybody on earth or may may achieve undesirable effects for us humans precisely but what if okay at very end you said something like I'm afraid Dave but that that maybe he is on some level experiencing fear or it may be this is the terms in which it would be wise to stop someone from doing the thing they're doing if you see what it means yes absolutely so it actually has funny so that's such of this is such a small short exploration of consciousness that I'm afraid and then you just with ex machina say okay we're going to magnify that part and then minimize the other part so that's that's a good way to sort of compare the two but if you could just use your imagination and if Ava sort of I don't know ran the Quran easy was President of the United States also has some power so what kind of world which you want to create if we here's you kind of say good and there is a sense that she has a really like I think there's a desire for better human to human interaction human robot interaction in her but what kind of world do you think she would create with that desire she also really it's a very interesting question that I'm gonna approach it slightly obliquely which is the if if a friend of yours got stabbed in a mugging and you then felt very angry at the person who'd done the stabbing but then you learned that it was a fifteen year old and the 15 year old both their parents redic today crystal meth and the kid had been addicted since he was 10 and he really never had any hope in the world and he'd been driven crazy by his upbringing and did the stabbing that would hugely modify and it would also make you worry about that kid then becoming president of America right and Ava has had a very very distorted introduction into the world so although there's nothing as it as it were organically within Ava that would lean her towards badness it's not the robots or sentient robots are bad she did not her arrival into the world was being imprisoned by humans so I'm not sure she'd be a great present the trajectory through which she arrived at her moral views you have some dark elements then but I like ever personally I like over and I think vote for her I'm having difficulty finding anyone to vote right now in my country or if I lived here in yours I am so that's a yes I guess because the competition she could easily do a better job than any of the people I'd worked her over Boris Johnson so what is a good test of consciousness just can we talk about consciousness a little bit more if something appears conscious is it conscious he mentioned the smile which is seems to be something done I mean that's a really good indication because it's a tree falling in the forest with nobody there to hear it but does the appearance from a robotics perspective of consciousness mean consciousness - you know I I don't think you could say that fully because I think you could then easily have a thought experiment which said we will create something which we know is not conscious but is going to give a very very good account of seeming conscious and so and and also it would be a particularly bad test where humans are involved because humans are so quick to project sentience into things that don't have sentience so someone could have their computer playing up and feel as if their computer is being malevolent to them when it clearly isn't and so so of all the things to judge consciousness us humans are better we're empathy machines so that so the flipside of that the argument there is because we just attribute consciousness to everything almost and anthropomorphize everything including Roombas the that maybe consciousness is not real that would just attribute consciousness to each other so you have a sense that there is something really special going on in our mind that makes us unique and gives us the subjective experience there's something very interesting going on in our minds I'm slightly worried about the word special because it it gets a bit it nudges towards metaphysics and maybe even magic in I mean in some ways something magic like which I don't think is there at all I mean if you think about there's an idea of called pants like ism that says consciousness is in everything whatever but as brother yeah so the idea that that there is a thing that it would be like to be the son yeah no I don't buy that I think that consciousness is a thing did my sort of broad modification is that usually the more I find out about things the more illusory our instinct is and is leading us into a different direction about what that thing actually is that that happens it's in modern science that happens a hell of a lot whether it's to do with how even how big or small things are so so my sense is that consciousness is a thing but it isn't quite the thing or maybe very different from the thing that we instinctively think it is so it's there it's very interesting but we may be in it's sort of quite fundamentally misunderstanding it for reasons that are based on intuition so I have to ask this is this kind of an interesting question the ex machina for many people including myself is one of the greatest AI films ever made well it's number two for me thanks yeah number one I'd really have to was anyway yeah whenever you grow up with something right you may grow up for something it's it's an it's in the wood but there's uh one of the things that people bring up and can't please everyone including myself this is what I first reacted to the film is the idea of the lone genius this is the the criticism that people say sort of me as an AI researcher I'm trying to create what what what nathan is trying to do so there's a brilliant series called Chernobyl yes this one tested how so you spec talk I think I mean as eyes are I mean they got so many things brilliant right but one of the things again the criticism there yeah great nice place with lots of people who need your one character that represents all nuclear scientists you wanna comb yet you know it's a composite character that presents all scientists is this what you were is this the way you were thinking about that or is it just simplifies the storytelling how do you think about the lone genius well I'd say this the series I'm doing at the moment is a critique in part of the lone genius concept so yes I'm sort of oppositional and either agnostic or atheistic about that as a concept I mean they're not entirely you know where the lone lone is the right word broadly isolated but Newton clearly exists in a sort of bubble of himself in some respect such as Shakespearean do you think we would have an iPhone without Steve Jobs I mean how much Steve Jobs clearly isn't alone genius because because there's too many other people in the sort of superstructure around him who are absolutely fundamental to to that journey are you saying Newton but that's a scientific so there's an engineering element to building Ava but just to say what ex machina is is really it's a thought experiment I mean so it's a construction of putting four people in a house nothing about ex machina adds up in all sorts of ways in as much as that who built the machine parts did the people building the machine parts know what they were creating and how did they get there and it's a thought experiment yes so it doesn't it doesn't stand up to scrutiny of that sort I don't think it's actually that interesting of a question but it's brought up so often that I had to ask it because that's exactly how I felt after what you know there's something about there was almost a defense I got wash your movie the first time in at least for the first little while in a defensive way like how dare this person try to step into the AI space and try to beat Kubrick that's the way I was thinking like this because it comes off as a movie that really is going after the deep fundamental questions about AI so there's a there's a kind of a you know nerds do psyche is automatically searching for the for the flaws and I I decide exactly the same I think in annihilation and the other movie the I was be able to free myself from that much quicker that it's a it is a thought experiment there's you know who cares if there's batteries that don't run out right those kinds of questions that's the whole point yeah but I bits nevertheless something I wanted to bring up it yeah it's a foot it's the first thing to bring up for me the you you had all the lone genius thing for me it was actually people always said ex machina makes this big leap in terms of where AI has got to and so what pay I would look like if it got to that point there's another one which is just robotics I mean look at the way Ava walks around the rooms like forget it building that it's that that's that's also got to be a very very long way often if you did get that would it look anything like that it's a thought experiment actually it's figure we I think the way as a ballerina Alicia vikander brilliant actress actor that moves around that we're very far away from creating that but the way she moves around is exactly the definition of perfection for roboticist it's like smooth and efficient so it is where we want to get where I believe like I think because so I hang out with a lot of like human robotics people they love elegant smooth motion like that that's their dream so the way she moved is actually what I believe that would dream for a robot to move it might not be that useful to move that sort of that way but that is important the definition of perfection in terms of movement drawing inspiration from real life so for devs for ex machina look at characters like Elon Musk what do you think about the various big technological efforts of Elon Musk and others like him and that he's involved with such as Tesla SpaceX your link do you see any of any of that technology potentially defining the future worlds you create in your work so Tesla's automation SpaceX is space exploration your link is brain machine interface somehow merger of biological and electric systems I'm in a way I'm influenced by that almost by definition because that's the world I live in and this is the thing that's happening in that world and I also feel supportive of it so I think I think amongst various things Elon Musk has done I'm almost sure he's done a very very good thing with Tesla for all of us it's really kicked all the other car manufacturers interfaces kicked the fossil fuel industry in the face and and they needed kicking in the face and he's done it so and and so that's the world he's part of creating and I live in that world just bought a Tesla in fact and so does that play into whatever I then make in some ways it does partly because I try to be a writer who quite often filmmakers are in some ways fixated on the films they grew up with and they sort of remake those films in some ways I've always tried to avoid that and so I looked at the real world to get inspiration and as much as possible sort of by living I think and so so yeah I'm sure which of the directions do you find most exciting space trouble space travel so you haven't really explored space travel in your work you've said you've said something like if you had unlimited amount of money I think I now read at a ma that you would make like a multi-year series space Wars or something like that so what what is it that excites you about space exploration well because if we have any sort of long-term future it's that it just simply is that if energy and matter are linked up in the way we think they're linked up will run out if we don't move so we got to move and but but also how can we not it's it's built into us to to do it or die trying I was on Easter Island a few months ago which is as I'm sure you know in the middle of the Pacific and and difficult for people to have got to but they got there and I did think a lot about the way those boats it must have set out into something like space it was the ocean and and how sort of fundamental that was to the way we are and it it's the one that most excites me because it's the one I want most to happen it's the thing it's the place where we could get to is like in a way I could live with us never really unlocking fully unlocking the nature of consciousness I like to know I'm really curious but if we never leave the solar system and if we never get further out into this galaxy or maybe even galaxies beyond our galaxy that that would that feel sad to me because because it's so limiting yeah there's something hopeful and beautiful bar reaching out any kind of exploration reaching out across earth centuries ago and reaching out into space so what do you think about colonization of Mars so go to Mars does that excite you the idea of a human being stepping foot on Mars it does it absolutely does but in terms of what would really excite me it would be leaving this solar system in as much as that I just think I think we already know quite a lot about Mars and but yes listen if it happened that would be I hope I say in my lifetime I really hope I say in my lifetime I do it would be a wonderful thing without giving anything away but the series begins with the use of quantum computers a new series does begins with the use of quantum computers to simulate basic living organisms or actually I don't know if it's quantum computers are used but basic living organisms simulated on a screen and yeah the cool kind of demo yeah that's right they're using yes they are using a quantum computer to simulate a nematode pill so returning to our discussion of simulation or thinking of the universe as a computer do you think the universe is deterministic is there a free will so with the qualification of what do I know because I'm a layman right layperson but with big imagination thanks with that qualification yeah I think the universe is deterministic and I see absolutely I I cannot see how freewill fits into that so so yes deterministic no free will that would be my position and how does that make you feel it partly makes me feel that it's exactly in keeping with the way these things tend to work out which is that we have an incredibly strong sense that we do have free will and just as we have an incredibly strong sense that time is a constant and turns out probably not to be the case or definitely in the case of time but but but it's the the problem I always have with free will is that it gets I can never seem to find the place where it is supposed to reside and yet you explore just but a very very but we have something we can call free will but it's not the thing that we think it is but free was so what we call free will is just what they call it as the illusion of it and that's a subjective experience of yeah the yeah yeah which is a useful thing to have and it partly it partly comes down to although we live in a deterministic universe our brains are not very well equipped to fully determine the deterministic universe so we're constantly surprised and feel like we're making snap decision decisions based on imperfect information so that feels a lot like freewill it just isn't it would be might that's why I guess so in that sense your sort of sense is that you can unroll the universe forward or backward and you will see the same thing and you would I mean that notion yeah sort of sort of but yeah sorry go ahead I mean that notion is a bit uncomfortable to think about that it's good you can roll it back and and forward and well if you were able to do it it would certainly have to be a quantum computer yeah something that worked in a quantum mechanical way in order to understand a quantum mechanical system I I guess but but and so that unrolling there may be a multiverse thing where there's a bunch of branching what will exactly because it wouldn't follow that every time you roll it back or forward you'd get exactly the same result which is another thing that's hard to rapamycin fact yeah but but but that yes it but essentially what you just described that the the yes forwards and yes backwards but you might get a slightly different result works very different though or very different along the same lines well you've explored some really deep scientific ideas in this new series and I mean it's just in general you're unafraid to to ground yourself and some of the most amazing scientific ideas of our time what what are the things you've learned or ideas you find beautiful mysterious about quantum mechanics multiverse string theory quantum computing that you've learned well I would have to say every single thing I've learned is beautiful and one of the motivators for me is that I think that people tend not to see scientific thinking as being essentially poetic and lyrical but but I think that is literally exactly what it is and I think the idea of entanglement or the idea of superpositions or the fact that you could even demonstrate a superposition or have a machine that relies on the existence of super positions in order to function to me is is almost indescribable beautiful I it it it fills me with all it fills me with awe and also it's not it's not just a sort of grand massive or of but it's also delicate it's very very delicate and subtle and it has these beautiful sort of nuances in it and also these completely paradigm changing thoughts and truths so so it's it's as good as it gets as far as I can tell so so so broadly everything that doesn't mean I believe everything I read quantum physics because because obviously a lot of the interpretations are completely in conflict with each other and who knows whether string theory will turn out to be a good description or not but but the beauty in it it seems undeniable and and I do wish people more readily understood how beautiful and poetic science I would say Sciences poetry in terms of quantum computing being used to simulate things or just in general the idea of simulating simulating small parts of our world which actually current physicists are really excited about simulating small quantum mechanical systems on quantum computers but scaling that up to something bigger like simulating life-forms how do you think what are the possible trajectories of that going wrong or going right if you if you unroll it into the future well if a bit like Ava and her robotics you park the the sheer complexity of what you're trying to do the the issues are I think I think it will have a profound it if you were able to have a machine that was able to project forwards and backwards accurately it would in an empirical way show it would demonstrate that you don't have free will so the first thing that would happen is people would have to to really take on a very very different idea of what they were the thing that they truly truly believe they are they are not and so that that I suspect would be very very disturbing to a lot of people do you think there has a positive or negative effect on society the the realization that you are not you cannot control your actions essentially I guess is the way that could be interpreted yeah although in some ways we instinctively understand that already because in the example I gave you of the kid in the stabbing we would all understand that that kid was not really fully in control of their actions so it's not an idea that's entirely alien to us but I don't know we understand that I think there's a bunch of people who see the world that way but not everybody yes true i but what this machine would do is is prove it any doubt because someone would say well I don't believe that's true and then you'd predict well in 10 seconds you're going to do this and they'd say no no I'm not and then they'd do it and then determine is would have played its part but I or something like that but actually the exact terms of that thought experiment probably wouldn't play out but but still broadly speaking you could predict something happening in another room sort of unseen I suppose the foreknowledge would not allow you to affect so what effect would that have I think people would find it very disturbing but then after they'd got over their sense of being disturbed which by the way I don't even think you need a machine to to take this idea on board but after they've got over that they'd still understand that even though I have no free will and my actions are in effect already determined I still feel things I I still care about stuff I remember my daughter saying to me wish it she'd got hold of the idea that my view of the universe made it meaningless and she said well then it's meaningless and I said well it I can prove it's not meaningless because you mean something to me and I mean something to you so it's not completely meaningless because there is a bit of meaning contained within this space and so with a lack of free will space you could think well this robs me of everything I am and then you'd say well no it doesn't because you still like eating cheeseburgers and you still like going to see the movies and so so how big a difference does it really make but I think I think initially people would find it very disturbing I think I think that what would come if you could really unlock with a determinism machine everything there'd be this wonderful wisdom that would come from and I'd rather have that than not so that's a really good example of a technology revealing to us human something fundamental about our world about our society so it's it's almost this creation is helping us understand ourselves in the the thing to be said about artificial intelligence so what do you think us creating something like Ava will help us understand about ourselves how will that change society well I would hope it would teach us some humility humans are very big on exceptionalism you know America is is constantly proclaiming itself to be the greatest nation on earth which it may feel like that if you're an American but it may not feel like that if you're from Finland because there's all sorts of things you dearly love about Finland and exceptionalism is usually probably not always if we both sat here we could find a good example of something there isn't but as a rule of thumb and and and what it would do is it would teach us some humility and about you know actually often that's what science does in a funny way it makes us more and more interesting but it makes us a smaller and smaller part of the thing that's interesting and I don't mind that humility at all I I don't think it's a bad thing our excesses don't tend to come from humility you know our excesses come from the opposite megalomania we tend to think of consciousness as having some form of exceptionalism attached to it I suspect if we ever unravel it it will turn out to be less than we thought in a way and perhaps your very own Exceptionalist assertion earlier on in our conversation that consciousness is something belongs to us humans or not humans belong organisms maybe you will one day find out that consciousness is in everything and that will yeah will humble you exact if that was true it would certainly humble me although maybe almost maybe I don't know I don't know what effect that would have aye-aye-aye sort of I mean my understanding of that principle is along the lines of say that that an electron has a preferred state or it may or may not pass through a bed of glass it may reflect off or it may go through or something like that and and so that feels as if a choice has been made and but if if I'm going down the fully deterministic routes I would say there's just an underlying determinism that has defined that that is defined the preferred state or the reflection or non reflections but look yeah you're right if if if it turned out that there was a thing that it was like to be the Sun then I would I'd be amazed and humbled I'd be happy to be both it sounds pretty cool and they'll be you'll say the same thing as you said to your daughter but it's nevertheless feels something like to be me and that that's pretty damn good yeah so Kubrick created many masterpieces including The Shining dr. Strangelove Clockwork Orange but to me he will be remembered I think to many a hundred years from now for 2001 a Space Odyssey I would say that's his greatest film I agree you are incredibly humble I've listened to a bunch of your interviews and I really appreciate that you're humble in your creative efforts in your work but if I were to force you a gunpoint keep it with God you don't know that the mystery is to imagine 100 years out into the future what will Alex Carlin be remembered for from something you've created already or feel you may feel somewhere deep inside you may still create well ok well I'll take I'll take the question in the spirit was asked but very generous gunpoint yeah what what I what I try to do so therefore what I hope yeah if I remembered what I might be remembered for is is as someone who who participates in a conversation and I think that often what happens is people don't participate in conversations they make proclamations they make statements and people can either react against the statement or can fall in line behind it and I don't like that so I want to be part of a conversation I take as a sort of basic principle I think I take lots of my cues from science but one of the best ones it seems to me is that when a scientist has something proved wrong that they previously believed in they then have to abandon that position so I'd like to be someone who is allied to that sort of thinking so part of an exchange part of an exchange of ideas and the exchange of ideas for me is something like people in your world show me things about how the world work and then I say this is how I feel about what you've told me and then other people can react to that and it's it's not it's not to say this is how the world is it's just to say it is interesting to think about the world in this way and the conversation is one of the things I'm really hopeful about in your works that the conversation you're having is with the viewer in the sense that you you're bringing back you and several others but you very much so sort of intellectual depth to cinema to now series sort of allowing film to be something that yeah sparks a conversation is a conversation lets people think allows them to think but also crew it's very important for me that if that conversation is going to be a good conversation what that must involve is that someone like you who understands AI and I imagine understands a lot about quantum mechanics if they then watch the narrative feels yes this is a fair account so it is a worthy addition to the conversation that for me is hugely important I'm not interested in getting that stuff wrong I'm only interested in trying to get it right Alex it was truly an honor to talk to you I really appreciate I really enjoy it thank you so much thank you Thanks thanks for listening to this conversation with Alex Garland and thank you to representing sponsor cash app downloaded use code Lex podcast you'll get ten dollars and $10 will go to first an organization that inspires and educates young minds to become science and technology innovators of tomorrow if you enjoy this podcast subscribe on youtube give it five stars in a podcast supported on patreon are simply connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman and now let me leave you with a question from Ava the central artificial intelligence character in the movie ex machina that she asked during her Turing test what will happen to me if I fail your test for listening and hope to see you next time you