Nick Bostrom: Simulation and Superintelligence | Lex Fridman Podcast #83
the following is a conversation with Nick Bostrom a philosopher at University of Oxford and the director of the future of humanity Institute he has worked on fascinating and important ideas in existential risk simulation hypothesis human enhancement ethics and the risks of super intelligent AI systems including in his book super intelligence I can see talking to Nick multiple times in this podcast many hours each time because he has done some incredible work in artificial intelligence in technology space science and really philosophy in general but we have to start somewhere conversation was recorded before the outbreak of the corona virus pandemic that both Nick and I I'm sure will have a lot to say about next time we speak and perhaps that is for the best because the deepest lessons can be learned only in retrospect on the storm has passed I do recommend you read many of his papers on the topic of existential risk including the technical report titled global catastrophic risks survey that he co-authored with Anders Sandberg for everyone feeling the medical psychological and financial burden of this crisis I'm sending love your way stay strong we're in this together we'll beat this thing this is the artificial intelligence podcast you can enjoy it subscribe on YouTube review it with five stars on a podcast supported on patreon or simply connect with me on Twitter Alex Friedman spelled Fri D ma n 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 use code lex podcast cash Apple s you said mind your friends buy Bitcoin and invest in the stock market with as little as one dollar since cash app does fractional share trading let me mention that the order execution algorithm that works behind the scenes to create the abstraction of 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universe as an information processing physical system but that there is some advanced civilization who built a lot of computers and that what we experience is an effect of what's going on inside one of those computers so that the the world around us our own brains everything we see in perceive and think and feel would exist because this computer is running certain programs do you think of this computer as something similar to the computers of today these deterministic sub touring machine type things is that what we're supposed to imagine or we're supposed to think of something more like a like a like a quantum mechanical system something much bigger something much more complicated something much more mysterious from our current perspective so the ones we have today would you find them in bigger certainly you'd need more memory and more processing power I don't think anything else would be required now it might well be that they do have addition maybe they have quantum computers and other things that would give them even more implausible but I don't think it's a necessary assumption in order to get to the conclusion that a technology mature civilization would be able to create these kinds of computer simulations with conscious beings inside them so do you think the simulation hypothesis is an idea that's most useful in philosophy computer science physics sort of where do you see it having valuable kind of start a starting point in terms of a thought experiment of it is it useful I guess it's more in in informative and interesting and maybe important it's not designed to be useful for something else okay interesting sure but is it philosophically interesting or is there some kind of implications of computer science and physics I think not so much for computer science or physics per se certainly it would be of interest in philosophy I think also to say cosmology or physics in as much as you're interested in the fundamental building blocks of the world and the rules that govern it and if we are in a simulation there is then the possibility that say physics at the level were the computer running the simulation could could be different from the physics governing phenomena in the simulation so I think might be interesting from point of view of religion or just from for a kind of trying to figure out what what the heck is going on so we mentioned the simulation hypothesis so far there is also the simulation argument which I tend to make a distinction so simulation hypothesis we are living in a computer simulation simulation argument this argument that tries to show that one of three propositions is true one of which is the simulation hypothesis but there are two alternatives in the original simulation argument which which we can get to yeah let's go there by the way confusing terms Picasa people will I think probably naturally thinks simulation argument equals simulation hypothesis just terminology wise but let's go there so simulation hypothesis means that we are living in simulations the hypothesis that we're living in simulation simulation argument has the three complete possibilities that cover all possibilities so what yeah so it's like a disjunction it says at least one of these three is true yeah although it doesn't on its own tell us which one so the first one is that almost all civilizations at our current stage of technological development go extinct before they reach technological maturity so there is some great filter that makes it so that basically none of the civilizations throughout you know maybe vast cosmos will ever get to realize the full potential of technological develop and this could be theoretically speaking this could be because most civilizations kill themselves too eagerly or destroy themselves early or it might be super difficult to build a simulation so the the span of time theoretically it could be both now I think it looks like we would technically be able to get there in a time span that is short compared to say the lifetime of planets and other sort of astronomical processes so your intuition is the build simulation is not well so this is interesting concept of technological maturity it's kind of an interesting concept to have other purposes as well we can see even based on our current limited understanding what some lower bound would be on the capabilities that you could realize by just developing technologies that we already see are possible so for example one one of my research fellows here eric drexler back in india teas studied molecular manufacturing that is you could analyze using theoretical tools and computer modeling the performance of various molecularly precise structures that we didn't then and still don't did I have the ability to actually fabricate but you could say that well if we could put these atoms together in this way then the system would be stay and it would you know rotate with at this speed and have what these computational characteristics and he also outlined some pathways that would enable us to get to this kind of molecularly manufacturing in the fullness of time you could do other other studies we have done you can look at the speed at which say it would be possible to colonize the galaxy if you had mature technology we have an upper limit which is the speed of light we have sort of a lower current limit which is how fast current Rockets go we know we can go faster than that by just you know making them bigger and have more fuel and stuff and and you can then start to describe the technological affordances that would exist once a civilization has had enough time to develop Eva at least those technologies we're already not possible then maybe they would discover other new physical phenomena as well that we haven't realized that would enable them to do even more but but at least there is this kind of basic set of capabilities in Jilin garnett well how do we jump from molecular manufacturing to deep-space exploration to mature technology like what's the connection well so these would be two examples of technological capability sets that we can have a high degree of confidence or physically possible in our universe under that a civilization that was allowed to continue to develop its science and technology would eventually attain you can Intuit like we can kind of see the set of breakthroughs they're likely to happen so you can see like what did you call the technological set with computers maybe at easiest I mean the one is we could just imagine bigger computers using exactly the same parts that we have so you can kind of scale things that way right but you could also make processors bit faster if you had this molecular nanotechnology that director x2 described he characterized a kind of crude computer built with these parts that that would perform you know at a million times the human brain while being we can be smaller the size of a sugar cube and he made no claim that that's the optimum computing structure like fraud you know we could build a faster computers that would be more efficient but at least you could do that if you had the ability to do things that were atomically precise yes means you can combine these two you could have this kind of nanomolecular ability to build things at the bottom and then say at this as a spatial scale that would be attainable through space colonizing technology you could then start for example to characterize a lower bound on the amount of computing power that technology material civilization would have if it could grab resources you know planets and so forth and then use this molecular nanotechnology to optimize them for computing you'd get a very very high lower bound on the amount of compute so sorry define some terms so technologically mature civilization is one that took that piece of technology to its to its lower bound what is it technological matures well yeah so that mean it's a strong concept and we really need for the simulation hypothesis I just think it's interesting in its own right so it would be the idea that there is some stage of technological development for you basically maxed out that you developed all those general-purpose widely useful technologies that could be developed or at least kind of come very close to the my you know 99.9 percent there or something so that's that's that's an independent question you can think either that there is such a ceiling or you might think it just goes the technology tree just goes on forever where where is your sense for I would guess that there is I I'm a maximum that you would start to asymptotes towards so new things won't keep springing up new ceilings in terms of basic technological capabilities I think that yeah there's like a finite set of those that can exist in this universe more of our I mean I wouldn't be that surprised if we actually reached close to that level fairly shortly after we have say machine super intelligence so I don't think it would take million of years for a human originating civilization to begin to do this it think it's like more more likely to happen on historical timescales but that that's that's an independent speculation from the simulation argument I mean for the purpose of the simulation argument it doesn't really matter whether it goes indefinitely far up or whether there is a ceiling as long as we know we could at least get to a certain level and it also doesn't matter whether that's gonna happen in a hundred years or five thousand years or 50 million years like the timescales really don't make any difference for the ceilin garna a little bit like there's a big difference between a hundred years and ten million years you know so it doesn't really not matter because you just said this is a matter if we jump scales to beyond historical skills so we described that so for the simulation argument sort of doesn't it matter that we if it takes ten million years it gives us a lot more opportunity to destroy civilization in the mean time yeah well so it would shift around the probabilities between these three alternatives that is if we are very very far away from being able to create these simulations if it's like say the billions of years into the future then it's more likely that we will fail ever to get there they're more time for us to kind of you know give go extinct along the way and similarly for other civilizations so it's important to think about how hard it is to build simulation from in terms of yeah figuring out which of the disk jockeys but for the simulation argument itself which is agnostic as to which of these three alternatives is true okay it's like you don't have to sit like this immolation argument would be true whether or not we thought this could be done in five hundred years or it would take five hundred million years so for sure the simulation argument stands I'm sure there might be some people who oppose it but it doesn't matter I mean it's it's very nice those three cases covered but the fun part is at least not saying what the probabilities are but kind of thinking about kind of intuitive reasoning about what's more likely what what the kind of things that would make some of the arguments less and more so like but let's actually I don't think we went through them so number one is we destroy ourselves before we ever create simulate right so that's kind of sad but we have to think not just what what might destroy us I mean the day there could be some whatever disastrous for me crowd slamming the earth a few years from now that that could destroy us right but you'd have to postulate in order for this first disjunct to be true that almost all civilizations throughout the cosmos also failed to reach technological maturity and the underlying assumption there is that there is likely a very large number of other intelligent civilizations well if there are yeah then they would virtually all have to succumb in the same way I mean then that that leads off another I guess there are a lot of little digressions that you know there so there yeah give me dragging us back there are these there is a set of basic questions that always come up in conversations with interesting people yeah like the Fermi paradox like there's like you could almost define whether person is interesting whether they're at some point because there was a Fermi paradox comes up like well so forward it's worse it looks to me that the universe is very big I mean in fact according to the most popular current cosmological theory is infinitely big and so then it would follow pretty trivially that that it would contain a lot of other civilizations in fact infinitely many if you have some locals stochasticity and infinitely many is like you know infinitely many lumps of matter one next to another there's a kind of random stuff in each one then you're going to get all possible outcomes with probability one infinitely repeated so so then then certainly that would be a lot of extraterrestrials out there I'd maybe short of that if the universe is very big there might be a finite but large number if we literally one yet and then of course if we went extinct then all of civilizations at our current stage would have gone extinct before becoming technological material so then it kind of becomes trivially true that a very high fraction of those Quantic things but if we think there are many I mean it's interesting because there are certain things that plausibly could kill us like a certain if you look at existential risks and it might be a different like that that the best answer to what would be most likely to kill us might be a different answer than the best answer to the question if there is something that kills almost everyone what would that be because that would have to be some risk factor that was kind of uniform over all possible civilizations yeah so in this for the for the seekers argument you have to think about not just us but like every civilization dies out before they create this simulation yeah or something very close to everybody okay so what's number two in well so number two is the convergence hypothesis that is that maybe like a lot of some of these civilizations do make it through to technological maturity but out of those who do get there they all lose interest in creating these simulations so they just they have the capability of doing it but they choose not to yeah not just a few of them decide not to but you know you know out of a million you know maybe not even a single one of them would do it and I think when you say lose interest that sounds like unlikely because it's like they get bored or whatever but it could be so many possibility within that igniculus I mean losing interest could be it could be anything from it being exceptionally difficult to do to fundamentally changing the sort of the fabric of reality if you do it as ethical concerns all those kinds of things could be exceptionally strong pressures well certainly I mean yeah ethical concerns I mean not really too difficult to do I mean in a sense that's the first adopter that you get to technical maturity where you would have the ability using only a tiny fraction of your resources to create many many simulations so it wouldn't be the case that they would need to spend half of their GDP forever in order to create one simulation and the head is like difficult debate about whether they should you know invest half of their GDP for this it would more be like well if any little fraction of the civilization feels like doing this at any point during maybe they're you know millions of years of existence then there would be millions of simulations but but certainly that could be many conceivable reasons for why there would be this convert many possible reasons for not running ancestor simulations or other computer simulations even if you could do so cheaply by the way what's an ancestor simulation well that would be the type of computer simulation that would contain people all like those we think have lived on our planet in the past and like ourselves in terms of the types of experiences to have and and where those simulated people are conscious so it's like not just simulated in the same sense that a a non-player character would be simulated in the current computer game where it's kind of has you can have at our body and then a very simple mechanism that moves it forward or backwards or but but something where the the simulated being has a brain let's say that simulated at a sufficient level of granularity that that it would have the same subjective experiences as we have so where does consciousness fit into this do you think simulation like is there are different ways to think about how this can be simulated just like you're talking about now do we have to simulate each brain within the larger simulation is it enough to simulate just the brain just the minds and not the simulation I'm not the big in the universe itself like is there different ways to think about this yeah I guess there is a kind of premise in the simulation argument rolled in from philosophy of mind that is that it would be possible to create a conscious mind in a computer and that what determines whether some system is conscious or not is is not like whether it's built from our organic biological neurons but maybe something like what the structure of the computation is that it implements so we can discuss that if we want but I think it would be far worse worse might be that it would be sufficient say if you had a computation that was identical to the computation in the human brain down to the level of neuron so if you had a simulation with 100 billion neurons connected in the same ways to human brain and you'd then roll that forward with the same kind of synaptic weights and so forth so you actually had the same behavior coming out of this as a human without brain would have done then I think that would be conscious now it's possible you could also generate consciousness without having that detailed simulation there I'm getting more uncertain exactly how much you could simplify or abstract away canyonland garnett what do you mean I missed where your place in consciousness in a second well so that so if you are a computational is do you think that what creates consciousness is the implementation of a computation some property emergent property in the computation itself yes the idea yeah you could say that but then the question is which what what's the class of computations such that when they are wrong consciousness emerges so if you just have like something that I adds 1 plus 1 plus 1 plus 1 like a simple computation you think maybe that's not gonna have any consciousness if on the other hand the computation is one like our human brains are performing where as part of the computation there is like you know a global work space is sophisticated attention mechanism there is like self representations of other cognitive processes and a whole lot of other things that possibly would be conscious and in fact if it's exactly like ours I think definitely it would but exactly how much less than the full computation that the human brain is performing would be required is a little bit I think of an open question he asks another interesting question as well which is would it be sufficient to just have say the brain or would you need the environment right that's a nice way in order to generate the same kind of experiences that we have and there is a bunch of stuff we don't know I mean if you look at say current virtual reality environments one thing that's clear is that we don't have to simulate all details of them all the time in order for say that the human player to have the perception that there is a full reality and that you can have say procedurally generated virtual might only render a scene when it's actually within the view of the player character and so similarly if this if this if this environment that that we perceive is simulated it might be that all of the parts that come into our view are rendered at any given time and a lot of aspects that never come into view say the details of this microphone I'm talking into exactly what each atom is doing at any given point in time might not be part of the simulation only a more coarse-grained representation so that to me is actually from an engineering perspective why the simulation hypothesis is really interesting to think about is how much how difficult is it to sort of in a virtual reality context I don't know fake is the right word but to construct a reality that is sufficiently real to us to be to be immersive in that way that the physical world is I think that's just that's actually probably an answerable question of psychology of computer science of how how where's the line where it becomes so immersive that you don't want to leave that world yeah alright that you don't realize while you're in it that it is a virtual world yeah those are two actually questions yours is the more sort of the good question about the realism but mine from my perspective what's interesting is it doesn't have to be real but it how how can we construct the world that we wouldn't want to leave oh yeah I mean I think that might be too low a bar I mean if you think say when people first had the pong or something like that like I'm sure there were people who wanted to keep playing it for a long time because it was fun and I wanted to be in this little world I'm not sure we would say it's immersive I mean I guess in some sense it is but like an absorbing activity it doesn't even have to be but they left that world though that's the so like I think that bar is deceivingly high so they eventually look so they you can play pong or Starcraft or would have more sophisticated games for hours for four months you know Wow well the Warcraft could be in a big addiction but eventually they escape that ah so you mean when it's uh absorbing enough that you would spend your entire it would ya choose to spend your entire life in there and then thereby changing the concept of what reality is but as your reality your reality becomes the game not because you're fooled but because you've made that choice yeah and it may be different people might have different preferences regarding that some Saul might even even if you had any perfect virtual reality might still prefer not to spend the rest of their lives there meaning philosopher there's this experience machine thought experiment have you come across this so Robert Nozick had this thought experiment where you imagine some crazy super-duper neuroscientist of the future have created a machine that could give you any experience you want if you step in there and for the rest of your life you can kind of pre-programmed it in different ways so you're you know fondest dreams could come true you could whatever you dream you want to be a great artist a great lover like have a wonderful life all of these things mmm if you step into the experience machine will be your experiences constantly happy and but we kind of disconnect from the rest of reality and it would float there in the tank and the Gnostic thought that most people would choose not to enter the experience machine I mean many might want to go there for a holiday but they wouldn't want to check out of existence permanently and so he thought that was an argument against certain views of value according to what we what we value is a function of what we experience because in the experience machine you can have any experience you want and yet many people would think that would not be much value so therefore what we value depends on other things than what we experience so ok can you can you take that argument further what about the fact that maybe what we values the up and down of life so you could have up and downs in the experience machine right but what can't you have in the experience machine well I mean that then becomes an interesting question to explore but for example real connection with other people if the experience machine is the solar machine where it's only you like that's something you wouldn't have there you would have this objective experience that would be like fake people yeah but when if you gave somebody flowers that wouldn't be any bother they were actually got happy it would just be a little simulation of somebody smiling but the simulation would not be the kind of simulation I'm talking about in the simulation argument where simulated creatures conscious it would just be a kind of smiley face that would look perfectly real to you so we're now drawing a distinction between appear to be perfectly real and actually being real yeah so that could be one thing I mean like a big impact on history maybe it's also something you won't have if you check into this experience machine so some people might actually feel the life I want to have for me is one where I have a big positive impact on history unfolds so let's see if you could kind of explore these different possible explanations for why this you wouldn't want to go into the experience machine if that's if that's what you feel and what one interesting observation regarding this Nozick thought experiment and the conclusions he wanted to draw from it is how much is a kind of a status quo effect so a lot of people might not want to jettison card reality to plug in to this dream machine but if they instead we're told well what you've experienced up to this point was a dream now do you want to disconnect from this and enter the real world when you have no idea maybe what the real world is or maybe you could say well you're actually a farmer in Peru growing you know peanuts and you could live for the rest of your life in this well or or would you want to continue your your dream life as Alex Friedman gone around the world making podcasts and doing research so if the status quo was that the that they were actually in the experience machine howling a lot of people might prefer to live the life that they are familiar with rather than sort of bail out into something the change itself the leap yeah it might not be so much the the reality itself that we're after but it's more that we are maybe involved in certain projects and relationships and we have you know a self-identity and these things that's our values are kind of connected with carrying that forward and then whether it's inside a tank or outside a tank in Peru or whether inside a computer outside a computer that's kind of less important to what what we ultimately care about yeah but still so just linger on it it is interesting I find maybe people are different but I find myself quite willing to take the leap to the farmer in Peru especially as the virtual reality system become more realistic I I find that possibility and I think more people would take that leap but so in this in this thought experiment just to make sure we are understand so in this case that the farmer in Peru would not be a virtual reality that would be the real the real that really real that your life like before this whole experience machine started well I kind of assumed from that description you're being very specific but that kind of idea just like washes away the concept of what's real I mean I'm still a little hesitant about your kind of distinction between real and illusion because when you can have an illusion that's feels I mean that looks real and you know what III don't know how you can definitively say something is real or not like what's what's a good way to prove that something is real in that context well so I guess in this case it's Morris depression in one case you're floating in a tank with these wires by the super-duper neuroscientists plugging into your head giving you Lex Friedman experiences in the other you're actually tilling the soil in Peru growing peanuts and then those peanuts are being eaten by other people all around the world by the exports and this that's two different possible situations in the one and the same real world that that you could choose to occupy but just to be clear when you're in a vat with wires and the neuroscientists you can still go farming in Peru right mmm but like well you could you could if you wanted to you could have the experience of farming in Peru but what that wouldn't actually be any peanuts grown well but what makes a peanut so so peanut could be grown and you could feed things with that peanut and why can't all of that be done in a simulation I hope first of all that they actually have peanut farms in Peru I guess we'll get a lot of comments otherwise angry I was way up to the point you should know you can't realize in that climate now I mean I I think I mean I I in the simulation I think there's a sense the important sense in which it should all be real nevertheless there is a distinction between inside the simulation and outside the simulation or in the case of no.6 thought experiment whether you're in the VAT or outside the VAT and some of those differences may or may not be important I mean that that comes down to your values and preferences so if they if the experience machine only gives you the experience of growing peanuts but you're the only one in in the experience machines there's other you can within the experience machine others can plug in well they're versions of the experience machine so in fact you might want to have distinguish different thought experiments different versions of it so in in like in the original thought experiment maybe it's only right just you so and you think I wouldn't want to go in there well that tells you something interesting about what you value and what you care about then you could say well what if you add the fact that there would be other people in there and you would interact with them well it starts to make it more attractive right then you can add in well what if you could also have important long-term effects on human history in the world and you could actually do something useful even though you were in there that makes it maybe even more attractive like you could actually have a life that had a purpose and consequences and so as you sort of add more into it it becomes more similar to the the baseline reality that that you were comparing it to yeah but I just think inside the experience machine and without taking those steps you just mentioned you you you still have an impact on long-term history of the creatures that live inside that of the quote-unquote fake creatures that live inside that experience machine and that like at a certain point you know if there's a person waiting for you inside that experience machine maybe your newly found wife and she dies she has fears she has hopes and she exists in that machine when you plug out when you unplug yourself and plug back in she's still there going on about her life oh well in that case yeah she starts to have more of an independent existence i independent existence but it depends I think on how she's implemented in the experience machine take one the mid case where all she is is a static picture on the wall of photograph right so you think well I can look at her right but that's it there's no that then you think well it doesn't really matter much what happens to that and any more than a normal photographs if you tear it up right it means you can't see it anymore but you haven't harmed the person whose picture you tore up to go home but but if she's actually implemented say at a neural level of details so that she's a fully realized digital mind with the same behavioral repertoire as you have then very plausibly she would be a conscious person like you are and then you would what you do in in this experience machine would have real consequences for how this other mind felt so you have to like specify which of these experience machines you're talking about I think it's not entirely obvious that it will be possible to have an experience machine that gave you a normal set of human experiences which include experiences of interacting with other people without that also generating consciousnesses corresponding to those other people that is if you create another entity that you perceive and interact with that to you looks entirely realistic not just when you say hello they say hello back but you have a rich interaction many days deep conversations like it might be that the only possible way of implementing that would be one that also has a side effect instantiated this other person in enough detail that you would have a second consciousness there I think that's to some extent an open question so you don't think it's possible to fake consciousness and say well it might be I mean I think you can certainly fake if you have a very limited interaction with somebody you could certainly fake that that is if all you have to go on is somebody said hello to you that's not enough for you to tell whether that was a real person there or a pre-recorded message or you know like a very superficial simulation that has no conscious Ness because that's something easy to fake we could already fake it now you can record a voice recording and you know but but if you have a richer set of interactions where you're allowed to answer ask open-ended questions and probe from different angles that couldn't sort of be you could give can't answer to all of the possible ways that you could probe it then it starts to become more plausible that the only way to realize this thing in such a way that you would get the right answer for many which angle you probe it would be a way of instance ating it we also instantiated a conscious mind yeah movie on the intelligence part but there's something about me that says consciousness is easier to fake like I I've recently gotten my hands on a lot of rubas don't ask me why or how but and I've made them there's just a nice robotic mobile platform for experiments and I made them scream and/or moan in pain so on just to see when they're responding to me and it's just a sort of psychological experiment myself and I think they appear conscious to me pretty quickly my guy to me at least my brain can be tricked quite easily right I said if I introspect and they it's harder for me to be tricked that something is intelligent so I just have this feeling that inside this experience machine just saying that you're conscious and having certain qualities of the interaction like being able to suffer like being able to hurt like being able to wander about the essence of your own existence not actually I mean you know the creating the illusion that you're wandering about it is enough to create the fit of consciousness and be create the illusion of consciousness and because of that create a really immersive experience to where you feel like that is the real world so you think there's a big gap between appearing conscious and being conscious or is it not just that gets very easy to be conscious I'm not actually sure what it means to be conscious all I'm saying is the illusion of consciousness is enough for this to create a social interaction that's as good as if the thing was conscious meaning I'm making it about myself right yeah I mean I guess there are a few differences one is how good the interaction is which might mean if you don't really care about like probing hard for whether the thing is conscious maybe maybe it would be a satisfactory interaction whether or not you really thought it was conscious now if you really care about it being contrasting in like inside this experience machine yes how easy would it be to fake it and you say it sounds easy easy yeah then the question is would that also mean it's very easy to instantiate consciousness like it's much more widely spread in the world and we have thought it doesn't require a big human brain with a hundred billion neurons all you need is some system that exhibits basic intentionality and can respond and you already have consciousness like in that case I guess you still have a close coupling they denied that did I guess that a case would be where they can come apart where we could create the appearance of there being a conscious mind without actually not being another conscious mind I'm yeah I'm somewhat agnostic exactly where these lines go I think one one observation that makes it possible that you could have very realistic appearances relatively simply which also is relevant for the simulation argument and in terms of thinking about how realistic with the virtual reality model have to be in order for the creature not to notice that anything was awry well just think of our own humble brains during the wee hours of the night when we are dreaming many times well dreams are very mersive but often you also don't realize that you're in a dream and that's produced by simple primitive three-pound lumps of neural matter effortlessly so if a simple brain like this can create a virtual reality that seems pretty real to us then how much easier would it be for a super intelligent civilization with planetary sized computers optimized over the eons to create a realistic an environment for you to interact with yeah and by the way behind that intuition is that our brain is not that impressive relative to the possibilities of what technology could bring it's also possible that the brain is the epitome is the ceiling like just because ceiling how it's not possible meaning like this is the smartest possible thing that the universe could create so that's seems unlikely unlikely to me yeah I mean for some of these reasons we alluded to earlier in terms of designs we already have four computers that would be faster by many orders of magnitude than the human brain yeah but it could be that the constraints the cognitive constraints in themselves is what enables the intelligence so the more the more powerful you make the computer the less likely is to become super intelligent this is where I say dumb things to push back and uh yeah I'm not sure I father we might you know I mean so there are different dimensions of intolerance yeah a simple one is just speed like if you could solve the same challenge faster in some sense yes you're like smarter so there I think we have very strong evidence for thinking that you could have a computer in this universe that would be much faster than the human brain and therefore have speed super into it's like be completely superior maybe a million times faster then maybe there are other ways in which you could be smarter as well maybe more qualitative ways right and there the concepts are a little bit less clear-cut so it's harder to make a very crisp neat firmly logical argument for why that could be qualitative superintelligence as opposed to just thinks that we're faster although I still think it's very plausible and for various reasons that that are less than watertight arguments but when you can sort of for example if you look at animals and brains and even within humans like there seems to be like Einstein versus random person like it's not just that Einstein was a little bit faster but like how long would it take a normal person to invent general relativity it's like it's not twenty percent longer than it took Einstein or something like that it's like I don't know whether that we do it at all or it would take millions of years or some totally bizarre so well you put your tuition is that the computer size will get you go the increasing the size of the computer and the speed of the computer might create some much more powerful levels of intelligence that would that enable some of the things we've been talking about would like the simulation being able to simulate an ultra realistic environment ultra realistic yes ception of reality yeah I mean it's like they're speaking it would not be necessary to have super intelligence in order to he'll say the technology to make these simulations ancestor simulations or other kinds of simulations and as a matter of fact that thing if if there are if we are in a simulation it would most likely be one built by a civilization that had super intelligence it certainly would help a lot I mean it could build more efficient large-scale structures if you had super intelligence I also think that if you had the technology to build these simulations that's like a very advanced technology it seems kind of easier to get technology to super intelligence yeah so I'd expect by the time that could make these fully realistic simulations of human history with human brains in there like before that they got to that stage I would have figured out how to create machines super tall or maybe biological enhancements of their own brains if there were biological creatures to start with so we talked about the the three parts of the simulation argument one we destroy ourselves before we ever create the simulation two we somehow everybody somehow loses interest in creating simulation three we're living in a simulation so you've kind of I don't know if your thinking has evolved on this point but you kind of said that we know so little that these three cases might as well be equally probable so probabilistically speaking where do you stand on this yeah I know I mean I don't think equal necessarily would be the most supported probability assignment so how would you without assigning actual numbers wait wait what's more or less likely in your in your well I mean historically tended to punt on the question of like has between these three so maybe you ask me another way is which kind of things would make it each of these more or less likely what cried VI certainly in general terms if you think anything that say increases or reduces the probability of one of these we tend to slosh probability around on the other so if if one becomes less probable like the other would have to cuz gotta add up to one yes so if we consider the first hypothesis the first alternative that there's this filter that makes it so that virtually no civilization reaches technological maturity in particular our own civilization if that's true then it's like very unlikely that we would reach technical maturity just because if almost no civilization at our stage does it then it's unlikely that we do it so hang on sorry again longer than that for a second well if it's the case that almost all civilizations at our current stage of technological maturity fails at failed at our current stage of technical development failed to reach maturity that would give us very strong reason for thinking we will to reach technical material and also so the flipside of that is the fact that we've reached it means that many other civilizations yeah so that means if we get closer and closer to actually reaching technological maturity there's less and less distance left where we could go extinct before we are there and therefore the probability that we will reach increases as we get closer and that would make it less likely to be true that almost all civilizations at our current stage failed to get there like we would have this what the one case we started ourselves would be very close to getting there that would be strong evidence it's not so hard to get too technical maturity so to the extent that we you know feel we are moving nearer to technology maturity that that would tend to reduce the probability of the first alternative and increase the probability of the other - it doesn't need to be a monotonic change like if every once in a while some new threat comes into view some bad news thing you could do with some novel technology for example you know that that could change our probabilities in the other direction but that the technology again you have to think about as that technology has to be able to equally in an even way affect every civilization out there yeah pretty much I mean that strictly speaking is not real I mean that could that could be two different existential risk and every civilization you know you know one or the other like but none of them kills more than 50% like yeah but that incidentally so in some of my the work I mean on machine super intelligence like so I wanted some existential risks where they did sort of super intelligence AI and how we must make sure you know to handle that wisely and carefully it's not the right kind of existential catastrophe to make first alternative true though like it might be bad for us if the future lost a lot of value as a result of it being shaped by some process that optimized for some completely non human value but even if we got killed by machine superintendence is that machine super intelligence might still attain technical maturity so I see so you're not very you're not human exclusive this could be any intelligent species that achieves like it's all about the technological maturity it's not that the humans have to attain it right like super intelligence replace us and that's just as well fascination as well yeah yeah I mean it could interact with the second high pop foul turn ative like if the thing that replaced us was either more likely or less likely than we would be to have an interest in creating ancestor simulations you know that that could affect probabilities but yeah to a first-order like if we all just die then yeah we won't produce any simulations because we are dead but if we all die and get replaced by some other intelligent thing that then gets the technical maturity the question remains of course if my not that thing that needs some of its resources to to do this stuff so can you reason about this stuff this is given how little we know about the universe is it reasonable to to reason about these probabilities so like how little well maybe you can disagree but to me it's not trivial to figure out how difficult it is to build a simulation we kind of talked about it a little bit we also don't know like as we tried to start building it like start creating virtual worlds and so on how that changes the fabric of society like there's all these things along the way that can fundamentally change just so many aspects of our society about our existence that we don't know anything about like the kind of things we might discover when we understand to a greater degree the fundamental the physics like the theory if we have a break through have a theory and everything how that changes stuff how that changes deep space exploration and so on so like is it still possible to reason about probabilities given how little we know yes I think though there will be a large residual of uncertainty that we'll just have to acknowledge and I think that's true for most of these big-picture questions that we might wonder about it's just we are small short-lived small brained cognitively very limited humans with little evidence and it's amazing we can figure out as much as we can really about the cosmos but it okay so there's this cognitive trick that seems to happen where I look at the simulation argument which for me it seems like case one and to feel unlikely I want to say feel unlikely as opposed to sort of in like it's not like I have too much scientific evidence to say that either one or two are not true it just seems unlikely that every single civilization destroys itself and it seems like feels unlikely that the civilizations lose interest so naturally the without necessarily explicitly doing it but this illumination the simulation argument it basically says it's very likely we're living in a simulation like to me my mind mm-hmm naturally goes there I think the mind goes there for a lot of people is that the incorrect place for it to go well not not not necessarily I think the second alternative which has to do with the motivations and interest of technologically mature civilizations I think there is much we don't understand about that can you talk about that a little bit what do you think I mean this question that pops up when you have when you build an AGI system or build the general intelligence or how does that change our motivations do you think of fundamentally transform our motivations well it doesn't seem that implausible that once you take this leap to the technological maturity I mean I think like it involves creating machine superintelligence possibly that would be sort of on the path for basically all civilizations maybe before they are able to create large numbers of ancestor simulations they would that possibly could be one of these things that quite radically changes the orientation of what a civilization is in fact optimizing for there are other things as well so at the moment we have not perfect control over our own being our own mental states our own experiences are not under our direct control so for example if if you want to experience a pleasure and happiness you might have to do a whole host of things in the external world to try to get into the stage into the mental state where you experience pleasure you look like some people get some pleasure from eating great food well they can just turn that on they have to kind of actually go to a nice restaurant and then they have to make money too so there's like all this kind of activity that maybe arises from the fact that we are trying to ultimately produce mental states but the only way to do that is by a whole host of complicated activities in the external world now at some level of technological development I think will become other potent in the sense of gaining direct ability to choose our own internal configuration and enough knowledge and insight to be able to actually do that in a meaningful way so then it could turn out that there are a lot of instrumental goals that would drop out of the picture and be replaced by other instrumental goals because we could now serve some of these final goals in more direct ways and who knows how all of that shakes out after civilizations reflect on that and converge and different attractors and so on and so forth and and that that could be new new instrumental considerations that come into view as well that that we are just oblivious to that would maybe have a strong shaping effect on actions like very strong reasons to do something or not to do something and we just don't realize they're there because we are so dumb tumbling through the universe but if if almost inevitably on on route to attaining the ability to create many other simulations you do have this cognitive enhancement or advice from super intelligences or you yourself then maybe there's like this additional set of considerations coming into view and yesterday I it's obvious that the thing that makes sense is to do X whereas right now it seems so you could X Y or Z and different people will do different things and we're kind of random in that sense yeah because at this time with our limited technology the impact of our decisions is minor I mean that's starting to change some in some ways but well I'm not sure it follows that the impacts of our decisions is minor well it's starting to change I mean I suppose 100 years ago was minor it's starting to so it depends on how you viewed so what people did 100 years ago still have effects on the world today Oh as a I see as a as a civilization or in the together yeah so it might be that the greatest impact of individuals is not at technical maturity or very far down it might be earlier on when there are different tracks civilization could go down I mean maybe the population is smaller things still haven't settled out if you count indirect effects that that that those could be bigger than the direct effects that people have later on so part 3 of the argument says that so that leads us to a place where eventually somebody creates a simulation that I think you you had a conversation Joe Rogan's I think there's some aspect here where you got stuck a little bit how does that lead to were likely living in a simulation so this kind of probability argument if somebody eventually creates a simulation why does that mean that we're now in a simulation but what you get to if you accept alternative three first is that would be more simulated people with our kinds of experiences than on simulated ones like if in n kind of if you look at the world as a whole by the end of time as it were you just count it up that would be more simulated once than on simulated ones then there is a an extra step to get from that if you assume that suppose for the sake of the argument that that's true how do you get from that to this statement we are probably in a simulation so here you are introducing an indexical statement like it's that this person right now is in a simulation they're all these other people you know that are in simulation so some that are not in the simulation but what probability should you have that you yourself is one of the simulated ones in a setup so so yeah so I call it the bland principle of indifference which is that in in cases like this when you have to I guess sets of observers one of which is much larger than the other and you can't from any internal evidence you have tell which that you belong to you should design a probability that's proportional to the size of these sets so that if there are ten times more simulated people with your kinds of experiences you would be ten times more likely to be one of those is that as intuitive as it sounds in that that seems kind of if you don't have enough information you should rationally just assign the same probability as the yeah kind of the size of the set it seems seems pretty plausible to me were the holes in this is it at the at the very beginning the assumption that everything stretches sort of you have infinite time essentially you don't need infinite time you need what how long this is the time what however long it takes I guess for a universe to produce an intelligent civilization that has intense the technology to run some ancestor simulations gotcha at some point when the first simulation is created that stretch of time just a little longer than they're all start creating simulations kind of like yeah I mean that might that different it might if you think of there being a lot of different planets and some subset of them have life and then some subset of those get to intelligent life and some of those maybe eventually start creating simulations they might get started at quite different times like maybe on some planet it takes a billion years longer before you get like monkeys or before you get even bacteria then on another planet so that like this might happen kind of at different cosmological epochs is there a connection here to the Doomsday argument in that sampling there if there is a connection in that they both involve an application of anthropic reasoning that is reasoning about these kind of indexical propositions but the assumption you need in the case of the simulation argument it's much weaker than the simulator the assumption you need to make the Doomsday argument go through what is the Doomsday argument and maybe you can speak to the anthropic reasoning in more general yeah that's that's a big an interesting topic in its own right and tropics but the Doomsday argument is this really first discovered by Brandon Carter was a theoretical physicist and then developed by philosopher John Wesley I think it might have been discovered initially in the 70s or 80s and Lester wrote this book I think in 96 and there are some other versions as well God is a physicist but let's focus on the Carter Leslie version where it's an argument that we have systematically underestimated the probability that humanity will go extinct soon now I should say most people probably think at the end of the day there is something wrong with this doomsday argument that it doesn't really hold it's like there's something wrong with it but it's proved hard to say exactly what is wrong with it and different people have different accounts my own view is it seems inconclusive but and I can say what the argument is yeah yeah so maybe it's easiest to explain via an analogy to sampling from urns so imagine you have a big imagine you have two urns in front of you and they have balls in them that have numbers so there's the tourist look the same but inside one there are ten balls ball number 1 2 3 up to ball number 10 and then in the other urn you have a million balls numbered one to a million and somebody puts one of these urns in front of you and asked you to guess what what's the chance it's the 10 ball and you say 50/50 they you know I can't tell which urn it is um but then you're allowed to reach in and pick a ball at random from the urn and that's suppose you find that it's ball number 7 said that strong evidence for the 10 ball hypothesis like it's a lot more likely that you would get such a lobe numbered ball if they're on the 10 balls in the urn like it's in fact 10 percent done right then if there are a million balls it would be round likely you would get number 7 so you perform a Bayesian update and if your prior was 50/50 that it was the temple urn you become virtually certain after finding the random sample was 7 that it's only has 10 balls in it so in the case of the urns this is on controversial just elementary probability theory the Doomsday argument says that you should recent in a similar way with respect to different hypotheses about how many many balls there will be in the urn of humanity I said for how many humans that will have human being by the time we go extinct so to simplify let's suppose we only consider two hypotheses either maybe 200 billion humans in total or 200 trillion humans in total you could fill in more hypotheses but it doesn't change the principle here so it's easiest to see if we just consider these two so you start with some prior based on ordinary empirical ideas about threats to civilization and so forth and maybe you say it's a 5% chance that we will go extinct by the time there will have been 200 billion only you're kind of optimistic let's say you think probably will make it through colonize the universe in but then according to this Tuesday argument you should think of your own birth rank as a random sample so your birth is your sequence in the position of all humans that have ever existed it turns out you're about a human number of 100 billion you know give or take that's talking roughly how many people have been born before you that's fascinating because I probably yeah we each have a number wait wait wait we would each have a number in this I mean obviously the exact number will depend on where you started counting like witch ancestors start was human in hasta Carol is human but the does those are not really important - they're relatively few of those so yeah so you're roughly a hundred billion now if they're only gonna be 200 billion in total that's a perfectly unremarkable number you're somewhere in the middle right run-of-the-mill human completely unsurprising yes now if they're gonna be 200 trillion you would be remarkably early like you it's like what are the chances out of these 200 trillion human that you should be human number one hundred billion that seems it would have a much lower conditional probability and so analogously taha in the urn case you thought after finding this low numbered random sample you updated in favor of having few balls similarly in this case you should update in favor of the human species having a lower total number of members that is doom soon you said doom soon that's yeah well that would be the hypothesis in this case that it will end just a hundred billion I just like that term for the hypothec and of crucially relies on the Doomsday argument it's the idea that you should reason as if you were a random sample from the set of all humans that will ever have existed if you have that assumption then I think the rest kind of follows the question is why should you make that assumption in fact you know you're 100 billion so so where do you get this prior and then there is like a literature on that with different ways of supporting that or something and it that's just one example of a topic reasoning right there yeah that seems to be kind of convenient when you think about humanity when you when you think about us of even like existential threats and so on as it seems that quite naturally that you should assume that you're just an average case yeah that you're a kind of a typical or randomly sampled now in the case of the Doomsday argument it seems to lead to what intuitively we think is the wrong conclusion or at least many people have this reaction that there's got to be something fishy about this argument because from very very weak premises it gets this very striking implication that we have almost no chance of reaching size 200 trillion humans in the future and how can we possibly get there just by reflecting on when we were born it seems you would need sophisticated arguments about the impossibility of space colonization blah blah so what might be tempted to reject this key assumption I call it the self sampling assumption the idea that you should reason as if you were a random sample from all observers or in your some reference class however it turns out that in other domains it looks like we need something like this self sampling assumption to make sense of bona fide a scientific inferences in contemporary cosmology for example you have these multiverse theories and according to a lot of those all possible human observations are made so I mean if you have a sufficiently large universe you will have a lot of people observing all kinds of different things so if you have two competing theories say about some the value of some constant it could be true according to both of these theories that there will be some observers observing the value that corresponds to the other theory because there will be some observers that have elucidation so there is a local fluctuation or an statistically anomalous measurement these things will happen and if in us observers making us different observations that would be something that sort of by chance make these different ones and so what we would want to say is well many more observers a larger proportion of the observers will observe as it were the true value and a few will observe the wrong value if we think of ourselves as a random sample we should expect with a very improper bility to observe the true value on that well then allow us to conclude that the evidence we actually have is evidence for the theories we think are supported it kind of done is a way of making sense of these inferences that clearly seem correct that we can you know make various observations and infer what the temperature of the cosmic background is and and the the fine-structure constant and all of this but it seems that without rolling in some assumption similar to the self sampling assumption this inference just doesn't go through and there are the examples so so there are these scientific context so it looks like this kind of anthropic reasoning is needed and makes perfect sense and yet in the case of the dupes argument it has this weird consequence and people might think there is something wrong with it there so there's done this project that would consistent try to figure out now what are the legitimate ways of reasoning about these indexical facts when observer selection effects are in play in other words well being a theory of anthropic s-- and that different views of looking at that and it's a difficult methodological area but to tie it back to the simulation argument the the key assumption there this land principle of indifference it's much weaker than the self sampling assumption so if you think about in the case of the Doomsday argument it says you should reason as if you're a random sample from All Humans that will never live even though in fact you know that you are about number one hundred billion human and you're alive in the year 2020 whereas in the case of the simulation argument it says that well if you actually have no way of telling which one you are then you should assign this kind of uniform probability yeah yeah your role is the observer in the simulation argument is different it seems like who is the observer I mean I keep assigning the individual consciousness yeah I mean when I say you want a lot of observers in the simulation in the context of the simulation argument but they're all irrelevant the server's would be a the people in original histories and be the people in simulations so this would be the class of observers that we need I mean there also may be the simulators but we can set those aside for this so the question is given that class of observers a small set of original history observers and a large class of simulated observers which one should you think is you where are you amongst this well observers I'm maybe having a little bit trouble wrapping my head head around the intricacies of what it means to be an observer and this and this in the different instantiations of the anthropic reasoning cases that we mention right now it I mean it may be an easier way of putting it is just like are you simulated or you're not simulated you've given this assumption that these two groups of people exist yeah in the simulation case it seems pretty straightforward it's yeah so that's right they think the key point is the methodological assumption you need to make to get the simulation argument to where it wants to go is much weaker and less problematic then the methodological assumption you make to get the Doomsday argument to its conclusion maybe the dune star government is sound or unsound but you need to make a much stronger and more controversial assumption to make it go through in the case of the Doomsday argument a sorry simulation argument I guess one maybe way intuition pub to like support this bland principle of indifference is to consider a sequence of different cases where the fraction of people who are assimilated to non-simulated approaches one so in the limiting case where everybody assimilated I obviously can deduce with certainty that you are simulated right if everybody with your experience is assimilated and you know you're gotta be one of those you don't need the probability at all you just kind of logically conclude it right right so then as we move from a case where say 90% of everybody simulated 99% 99.9% it's impossible that the probability of sine should sort of approach one certainty as the fraction approaches the case where everybody is in a simulation yes exactly like you wouldn't like expect that to be a discrete well if there's one non-simulated person then it's 50/50 but if we move that and it's hundred percent like it should kind of all right there are other arguments as well one can use to support this blind principle of indifference but that might be enough to but in general when you start from time equals zero and go into the future the fraction assimilated if it's possible to create simulated worlds the fraction similar worlds will go to one well I mean it was a novelist kind of go all the way to one in in reality that would be some ratio although maybe a technical material civilization could run a lot of simulations using a small portion of its resources it probably wouldn't be able to run infinite demand yeah I mean if we take say the observed the physics in the observed universe if we assume that that's also the physics at the level of the simulators that would be limits to the amount of information processing that any one civilization could perform in its future trajectory right and there's like well first of all there's limited amount of matter you can get your hands off because with the positive cosmological constant the universe is accelerating there's like a finite sphere of stuff even if you've traveled with the speed of light that you could ever reach you have a finite amount of stuff and then if you think there is like a lower limit to the amount of loss you get when you perform an eraser of a computation or if you think for example just matter gradually over cosmological timescales decay you know maybe protons decay other things and they radiate out gravitational waves like there's all kinds of seemingly unavoidable losses that occur so eventually we'll have something like like a heat death of the universe or if it caused death or whatever but it's finite but of course we don't know which if if there's many ancestral civil simulations we don't know which level we are so there could be couldn't there be like an arbitrary number of simulation that spawned ours and those had more resources there's a physical universe to work with sorry I mean that that could be sort of okay so if simulations spawn other simulation tries it seems like each new spawn has fewer resources to work with yeah but we don't know at which love which step along the way we are at right any one observer doesn't know whether we're in level 42 or 100 or one or is that not matter for the resources I mean when it's true that they would that would be all certainty asked you could have stacked simulations yes and that couldn't be a certainty as to which level we are at as you remark tall so all the computations performed in a simulation within the simulation also have to be expended at the level of the simulation well today the computer in basement reality where all these simulations for the simulations with the simulations are taking place like that that computer ultimately it's it's its CPU or whatever it is like that has to power this whole tower right so if there is a finite compute power in basement reality that would impose a limit to how tall this tower can be and if if each level kind of imposes a large extra overhead you might think maybe the tower would not be very tall that most people would be lower down in the tower I love the term basement reality let me ask one of the popularizers you said there's many through this when you look at sort of the last few years of the simulation hypothesis just like you said it comes up every once in a while some new community discovers it and so on but I would say one of the biggest popular artists of this idea is Elon Musk do you have any kind of intuition about what Elon thinks about when you think about simulation why is this of such interest is it all the things we've talked about or is there some special kind of intuition about simulation that he has I mean you might have a better I think I mean why it's of interest I think it's it's like seems Fred Albus why if it to the extent that one think the argument is credible why it would be of interest it would if it's correct tell us something very important about the world you know one way or the other whichever of the three alternatives for a simulation that seems like arguably one of the most fundamental discoveries right now interestingly in the case of someone like Elon so there is like the standard arguments for why you might want to take the simulation hypothesis seriously the simulation argument right in the case that if you are actually Elon Musk let us say there's a kind of an additional reason in that what are the chances you would be Elon Musk right it seems like maybe that would be more interested in simulating the lives of very unusual and remarkable people so if you consider not just assimilations where all of human history or the whole of human civilization are simulated but also other kinds of simulations which only include some subset of people like in the industry in those simulations that only include a subset it might be more likely that that would include subsets of people with unusually interesting or consequential like your Elon Musk you got a wonder right more like yeah or if you're like if you're Donald Trump or if you are Bill Gates or you're like some particularly yeah like distinctive character you might think that that ad I mean if you just think of yourself into the shoes right it's got to be like an extra reason to think that's kind of so interesting so on a scale of like farmer in Peru to you a musk the more you get towards the almost the higher the probability you're dividing that would be some extra boost from that there's an extra boost so he also asked the question of what he would ask an AGI saying the question being what's outside the simulation do you think about the answer to this question if we are living a simulation what is outside the simulation so the programmer of the simulation yeah I mean I think it connects to the question of what's inside the simulation in that if you had views about the Craters of the simulation it might help you make predictions about what kind of simulation it is what what might what might happen what you know happens after the simulation if there is some after but also like the kind of setup so these these two questions would be quite closely intertwined but do you think you'll be very surprising to it like is the stuff inside the simulation is it possible for it to be fundamentally different than the stuff outside yeah like I got another way to put it can the creatures inside the simulation and be smart enough to even understand or have the cognitive capabilities or any kind of information processing capabilities enough to understand the mechanism that created them they might understand some aspects of it I mean it's a love all of its kind of there are levels of explanation like degrees to which you can understand so does your dog understand what it is to be human well it's got some idea like humans are these physical objects that move around and do things and I a normal human would have a deeper understanding of what it is to be a human and maybe some very experienced psychic psychologist or great novelist might understand a little bit more about what it is to be human and maybe super intelligence could see right through your soul so similarly I I do think that that we are quite limited in our ability to understand all of the relevant aspects of the larger context that we exist in but there might be hope first I think we understand some aspects of it but you know how much good is that if there's like one key aspect that changes the significance of all the other aspects so we understand maybe it's seven out of ten key insights that you need but but the answer actually like varies completely depending on what like number eight nine and ten insight is it's like whether you wanna suppose that the big tasks were to guess whether a certain number was odd or even like a ten digit number and if it's if it's even the best thing for you to do in life is to go north and if it's odd the best thing for you to go south now we are in a situation where maybe through our science and philosophy we figured out what the first seven digits are so we have a lot of information right most of it we figured out but we are clueless about what the last three digits are so we are still completely clueless about whether the number is odd or even and therefore whether we should go nor go south I feel that's that's an analogy but I feel we're somewhat in that predicament we know a lot about the universe we've come maybe more than half of the way there to kind of fully understanding it but the parts were missing or plausibly ones that could completely change the overall upshot of the thing and including change our overall view about what the scheme of priorities should be or which strategic direction would make sense to pursue it yeah I think your analogy of us being the dog trying to understand human beings as a as an entertaining one and probably correct the closer the understanding tends from the dog's viewpoint to us human psychologist viewpoint the steps along the way there will have completely transformative ideas of what it means to be human so the dog has a very shallow understanding it's interesting to think that and analogize that a dog's understanding of a human being is the same as our current understanding of the fundamental laws of physics in the universe man okay we spent an hour 40 minutes talking about the simulation I like it let's talk about super intelligence at least for a little bit and let's start at the basics what tu is intelligence yeah I didn't not to get too stuck with the definitional question I mean I the common sense understanding like the ability to solve complex problems to learn from experience to plan to reason some combination of things like that it's got this mixed up into that or no it's consciousness mixed up into that as well I don't think I think it could be fairly intelligent at least without being conscious probably and so then what is super intelligence so yeah that would be like something that was much more had much more general cognitive capacity than we humans have so if we talk about general super intelligence it would be much faster learner be able to recent much better MIT plans that are more effective at achieving its goals say in a wide of complex challenging environments in terms of as we turn our eye to the idea of sort of existential threats from super intelligence do you think super intelligence has to exist in the physical world or can it be digital only sort of we think of our general intelligence as us humans as an intelligence that's associated with the body that's able to interact with the world that's able to affect the world directly with physically I mean digital always perfectly fine I think I mean you you could you it's physical in the sense that obviously the computers and the memories are physical but its capability to affect the world sort of could be very strong even if it has a limited set of actuators if it can types text on the screen or something like that that would be I think ample so in terms of the concerns of existential threat of AI how can any AI system that's in the digital world have existential risk sort of what what are the attack vectors for a digital system well I mean I guess maybe to take one step back so I should emphasize that I also think there's this huge positive potential from machine intelligence including super intelligence and I want to stress that because like some of my write writing has focused on what can go wrong and when I wrote the book super intelligence at that point I felt that was a kind of neglect of what would happen if AI succeeds and in particular a need to get a more granular understanding of where the pitfalls are so we can avoid them I think that since since the book came out in 2014 there has been a much wider recognition of that and a number of research groups are not actually working on developing say AI alignments techniques and so on and so forth so that's I'd I'd like yeah I think now it's important to make sure we bring back onto the table the upside as well and there's a little bit of a neglect now on the upside which is I mean if you look at talking to a friend if you look at the amount of information there's available or people talking and people being excited about the positive possibilities of general intelligence that's not it's far outnumbered by the negative possibilities in in terms of our public discourse possibly yeah it's hard to measure so but what are you kneeling on that's a little bit what are some to you possible big positive impacts of general intelligence super intense me super excite end to also want to distinguish these two different contexts of thinking about AI and high impacts they're kind of near term and long term if you want both of which I think are legitimate things to think about and people should you know discuss both of them but but they are different and they often get mixed up and then then I get you get confusion like I think you get simultaneously I've maybe been overhyping of the near term and and under hyping of the long term and so I think as long as we keep them apart we can have like two good conversations but or we can mix them together and have one bad conversation can you clarify just oh the two things we were talking about the near term and long term yeah and what are the distinction well it's a blurry distinction but say the things I wrote about in this book super intelligence long term things people are worrying about today with I don't know algorithmic discrimination or even things self-driving cars and drones and stuff more near term and then then of course you could you button some medium term where that kind of overlap and they want evolves into the other but I don't write I think both yeah the dishes look kind of somewhat different depending on which of these contexts so I think I think it'd be nice if we can talk about the long term mm-hm and think about a positive impact or a better world because of the existence of the long term super intelligent now do you have the use of such a war yeah I mean it I guess it's a little harder chicklet because it seems obvious that the world has a lot of problems as it currently stands and it's hard to think of any one of those which it wouldn't be useful to have like a friendly aligned super intelligence working on so from health you know to the economic system to be able to sort of improve the investment and trade and foreign policy decisions all that kind of stuff all that kind of stuff and a lot more I mean what's the killer app well I don't think there is one I think AI I especially artificial general intelligence is really the ultimate general purpose technology so it's not that there is this one problem this one area where it will have a big impact but if and when it succeeds it will really apply across the board in all fields where human creativity and intelligence and problem-solving is useful which is pretty much all fields right there the thing that it would do is give us a lot more control over nature it wouldn't automatically solve the problems that arise from conflict between humans fundamentally political problems some subset of those might go away if you just had more resources and cooler tech but some subset would require coordination that is not automatically achieved just by having more technical capability but but anything that's not of that sort I think you just get like an enormous boost with this kind of cognitive technology what once it goes all the way not again that doesn't mean I'm like thinking or people don't recognize what's possible with current technology and like sometimes things get over height but I mean those are perfectly consistent views to hold the ultimate potential being enormous and then it's a very different question of how far are we from that or what can we do with near-term technology so what's your intuition about the idea of intelligence explosion so there's this you know when you start to think about that leap from the near term to the long term the natural inclination like for me sort of building machine learning systems today it seems like it's a lot of work to get the general intelligence but there's some intuition of exponential growth of exponential improvement of intelligence explosion can you maybe try to elucidate to try to talk about what's your intuition about the possibility of an intelligence explosion they won't be this gradual slow process there might be a phase shift yeah I think it's we don't know how explosive it will be I think for what it's worth I've seems fairly likely to me that at some point I will be some intelligence explosion like some period of time where progress in AI becomes extremely rapid roughly roughly in the area where you might say it's kind of human equivalent in coral cognitive faculties that the concept of human equivalent like this starts to break down when you look too closely at it but and just how explosive does something have to be for it to be called an intelligence expulsion like does it have to be like overnight literally or a few years or so but but overall I guess in on if you had if you plotted the opinions of different people in the world I I guess I would be somewhat more probability towards the intelligence expulsion scenario than probably the average you know AI researcher I guess so and then the other part of the intelligence explosion or just forget explosion just progress is once you achieve that gray area of human level intelligence is it obvious to you that we should be able to proceed beyond it to get the super intelligence yeah that seems I mean as much as any of these things can be obvious given we've never had one people have different views smart people of different views is like that it's like some some some degree of uncertainty that always remains for any big futuristic philosophical grand John that just we realize humans are fallible especially about these things but it does him as far as I'm judging things based on my own impressions that it seems very unlikely that that would be a ceiling at or near human cognitive capacity but and this is a I don't know this is a special moment and it says both terrifying and exciting to create a system that's beyond our intelligence so maybe you can step back and and say like how does that possibly make you feel that we can create something it feels like there's a line beyond which it steps you'll be able to outsmart you and therefore it feels like a step where we lose control well I don't think that a lot of follows that is you could imagine and in fact this is what a number of people are working towards making sure that we could ultimately the project higher levels of problem-solving ability while still making sure that they are aligned like they're in the service of human values I mean so so it's losing control I think is not enough even that would happen now I asked how it makes me feel I I mean to some extent I've lived with this for so long since as this as long as I can remember being being an adult or even a teenager it seemed to me obvious that at some point I I will succeed and so I actually misspoke I didn't mean control I meant because the control problem is an interesting thing and I think we the hope is at least we should be able to maintain control over systems that are smarter than us but they're they we do lose our specialness it's sort of we'll lose our place as the smartest coolest thing on earth and there's an ego involved that that humans are very good at dealing with I mean I I value my intelligence human being it seems like a big transformative step to realize you there's something out there that's more intelligent I mean you don't see that today I think yes a lot I think it really small I mean I think there already a lot of things out there that are I mean certainly if you think the universe is big there's going to be other civilizations that already have super intelligences or that just naturally have brains the size of beach balls and they're like completely leaving us in the dust and we haven't our face to face we have some face to face but I mean that's not my question what what would happen in in a kind of posthuman world like how much day-to-day would these super intelligences be involved in the lives of ordinary men I you could imagine some scenario where it would be more like a background thing that would help protect against some things but you wouldn't like that there wouldn't be this intrusive kind of like making you feel bad by like making clever jokes on your ex but like there's all sorts of things that maybe in the human context would feel awkward about that you don't want to be the dumbest kid in your class everybody picks it like a lot of those things maybe you need to abstract away from if you're thinking about this context where we have infrastructure that is in some sense beyond any or all humans I mean it's a little bit like say the scientific community as a whole if you think of that as in a mind it's a little bit of metaphor but I mean obviously it's going to be like way more capacious than any individual so in some sense there is this mind like thing already out there that's that just vastly more intolerant and than a new individual is and we think okay that's you just accept that as a fact that's the basic fabric of our existence intelligent yeah you get used to a lot of I mean there's already Google and Twitter and Facebook these sister recommender systems that are the basic fabric of our and I could see them becoming I mean do you think of the collective intelligence of these systems as already perhaps reaching super intelligence level well means I hear it comes to this the concept of intelligence and the scale and what human level means the the kind of vagueness and indeterminacy of those concepts starts to dominate how he would answer that question so the like say the Google search engine has a very high capacity of a certain kind like retrieve it remember remembering and retrieving information particularly like text or images that are you have a kind of string a word string key like obviously superhuman at that but a vast set of other things it can't even do at all not just not do well but so so you have these current AI systems that are superhuman in some limited domain and then like radically subhuman in all other domains so it's same way that chess like are just a simple computer that can multiply really large numbers right it's gonna have this like one spike of super intelligence and then a kind of a zero level of capability across all other cognitive fields and yeah I don't necessarily think the journalist I mean I'm not so attached with it but I could sort of it's a it's a gray area and it's a feeling but to me sort of alpha zero it's somehow much more intelligent much much more intelligent than deep blue hmm and just say which tomato you could say well these are both just board game that they're both just able to play board games who cares if they're good do better or not but there's something about the learning the self play learning yeah that makes it crosses over into that land of intelligence that doesn't necessarily need to be general in the same way Google is much closer to deep blue currently in terms of its search engine now then it is to sort of alpha zero and the moment it becomes the moment these recommender systems really become more like alpha zero but being able to learn a lot without the constraints of being heavily constrained by human interaction that seems like a special moment in time certainly learning ability seems to be an important facet of general intelligence that you can take some new domain that you haven't seen before and you weren't specifically pre-programmed for and then figure out what's going on there and eventually become really good at it so that's something alpha 0 it has much more often than deep blue had and in fact I mean systems like alpha zero can learn not just go but other in fact probably beat deep blue in chess and so forth right so that you say you do just general and it matches the intuition we feel it's more intelligent and it also has more of this general purpose learning ability and if we get systems that have been more general-purpose learning ability it might also trigger an even stronger intuition that they are actually starting to get smart so if you were to pick a future what would eating a utopia looks like with a GI systems sort of is it the neural link brain computer interface world where we're kind of really closely interlinked with AI systems is it possibly where a GI systems replace us completely while maintaining the the values and the the consciousness is it something like it's a completely invisible fabric like you mentioned a society where just AIDS and a lot of stuff that we do like carrying diseases and so on what does utopia if you get to pick yeah I mean it's a good question and a deep and difficult one I'm quite interested in it I don't have all the answers yet but or might never have but I think there are some different observations one could make one one is if this if the scenario actually did come to pass it would open up this vast space of possible modes of being on one and material and resource constraints would just be like expanded dramatically so you there would be a lot of a big pie let's right also it would enable us to to do things including to ourselves or not like that do you eat it would just open up this much larger design space options based and and we have ever had access to in in human history so I think two things follow from that what one is that we probably would need to make a fairly fundamental rethink of what ultimately we value like think things through more from first principles in the context would be so different from the familiar that we could have just take what we've always been doing and then like oh well we have this cleaning robot that like cleans the dishes in the sink and a few other small things and like I think we would have to go back to first principles and so from even from the individual level go back to the first principles of what what is the meaning of life what is happiness how it is fulfillment yeah and then also connected to this large space of of resources is that it would be possible and I think something we should aim for is to do well by the lights of more than one value system that is we wouldn't have to choose only one value criterion and say we're gonna do something that's course really high on the metric of say even ISM and then is like a zero by other criteria like kind of wire headed brains innovate and it's like a lot of pleasure that's good but then like no no Beauty you know achievement like no III or or or pic and I think to some significant not unlimited sense but the significant sense it would be possible to do very well by many criteria like maybe you could get like 98% of the best according to several criteria at the same time given this this the secret expansion of the option space and so so have competing value systems in criteria as a sort of firm just like our Democrat versus Republican there seems to be this always multiple parties that are useful for our progress in society even though might seem dysfunctional inside the moment but having the multiple value systems used to be beneficial for I guess a balance of power so that's yeah let's not not exactly what I have in mind that it's well although alchemy may be in an indirect way it is but that if you had the chance to do something that scored well in several different isometrics our first instinct should be to do that rather than immediately leap to the thing ah which one's of these value systems are we gonna screw over like our first in let's first try to do very well by all of them yeah then it might be that you can't get a hundred percent of all and you would have to then like have the hard conversation about which one will only get ninety-seven particular there's my cynicism that all of existence is always a trade-off but you say that maybe it's not such a bad trade office first he's right well this would be a distinctive context in which at least some of the constraints would be removed probably stupid trade-offs in the end it's just that we should first make sure we at least take advantage of this abundance so in terms of thinking about this like yeah what one should think I think in this kind of frame of mind of generosity and a inclusiveness to different value systems and and see how far one can get there first and I think one could do something that that would be very good according to many different criteria we kind of talked about AGI fundamentally transforming the the value system of our existence the mean the meaning of life but today what do you think is the meaning of life what are you the serious or perhaps the biggest question what's the meaning of life what's the meaning of existence what makes what gives your life fulfillment purpose happiness meaning yeah I think these are like I guess a bunch of different but related questions in there that one can ask happiness meaning yeah I mean it like he's pretty bad and somebody getting a lot of happiness for something that they didn't think was meaningful like mindless like watching reruns of some television series avoiding junk food like maybe some people that gives pleasure but they wouldn't think it had a lot of meaning whereas conversely something that might be quite loaded with meaning might not be very fun always like some difficult achievement that really helps a lot of people maybe requires self-sacrifice and hard work and so so these things can I think come apart which is something to bear in mind also when if you're thinking about these utopia questions that you might actually start to do some constructive thinking about that you might have to isolate and distinguish these different kinds of things that might be valuable in different ways make sure you can sort of clearly perceive each one of them and then you can think about how you can combine them and just as you said hopefully come up with a way to maximize all of them together yeah maximize or or get like a very high score on on a wide range of them even if not literally all you can always come up with values that are exactly opposed to one another right but I think for many values they're kind of a post with m'p lace them in in a certain dimensionality of your face like there are shapes that are kind of you can't untangle like in a given dimensionality but if you start adding dimensions then it might in many cases just be that they are easy to pull apart and you could so we'll see how much space there is for that but I think that there could be a lot in this context of radical abundance if ever we get to that I don't think there's a better way to end it Nick you've influenced the huge number of people too work on what could very well be the most important problems of our time so it's a huge honor and thank you so much for talking for coming by likes that's fun thank you thanks for listening to this conversation with Nick Bostrom and thank you to a presenting sponsor cash app please consider supporting the podcast by downloading cash app and using code lex podcast if you enjoy this podcast subscribe on youtube review it with five stars a NAPA podcast supporter on patreon or simply connect with me on Twitter and lex friedman and now let me leave you with some words from nick bostrom our existential risks cannot be one of trial-and-error there's no opportunity to learn from errors the reactive approach see what happens limit damages and learn from experience is unworkable rather we must take a proactive approach this requires foresight to anticipate new types of threats and a willingness to take decisive preventive action and to bear the costs moral and economic of such actions thank you for listening and hope to see you next time you