Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity | Lex Fridman Podcast #292
we can actually figure out where are the aliens out there in space time by being clever about the few things we can see one of which is our current date and so now that you have this living cosmology we can tell the story that the universe starts out empty and then at some point things like us appear very primitive and then some of those stop being quiet and expand and then for a few billion years they expand and then they meet each other and then for the next hundred billion years they commune with each other that is the usual models of cosmology say that in roughly 150 billion years the expansion of the universe will happen so much that all you'll have left is some galaxy clusters and they that are sort of disconnected from each other but before then they will interact there will be this community of all the grabby alien civilizations and each one of them will hear about and even meet thousands of others and we might hope to join them someday and become part of that community the following is a conversation with robin hansen an economist at george mason university and one of the most fascinating wild fearless and fun minds i've ever gotten a chance to accompany for a time in exploring questions of human nature human civilization and alien life out there in our impossibly big universe he is the co-author of a book titled the elephant in the brain hidden motives in everyday life the age of m work love and life when robots rule the earth and a fascinating recent paper i recommend on quote grabby aliens titled if loud aliens explain human earliness quiet aliens are also rare this is the lex friedman podcast support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's robin hansen you are working on a book about quote grabby aliens this is a technical term like the big bang uh yeah so what are grabby aliens grabby aliens expand fast into the universe and they change stuff that's the key concept so if they were out there we would notice that's the key idea so the question is where are the grabby aliens so fermi's question is where are the aliens and we could vary that in two terms right where are the quiet hard to see aliens and where are the big loud grabby aliens so it's actually hard to say where all the quiet ones are right there could be a lot of them out there because they're not doing much they're not making a big difference in the world but the grabby aliens by definition are the ones you would see we don't know exactly what they do with where they went but the idea is they're in some sort of competitive world where each part of them is trying to grab more stuff and do something with it and you know almost surely whatever is the most competitive thing to do with all the stuff they grab isn't to leave it alone the way it started right so we humans when we go around the earth and use stuff we change it we turn a forest into a farmland turn a harbor into a city so the idea is aliens would do something with it and so we're not exactly sure what it would look like but it would look different so somewhere in the sky we would see big spheres of different activity where things had been changed because they had been there expanding spheres right so as you expand you aggressively interact and change the environment so the word grabby versus loud you're using them sometimes synonymously sometimes not gravity to me is a little bit more aggressive what does it mean to be loud what does it mean to be grabby what's the difference and loud in what way is it visual is it sound is it some other physical phenomena like gravitational waves what are you using this kind of in a broad philosophical sense so there's a specific thing that it means to be loud in this universe of ours my co-authors and i put together a paper with a particular mathematical model and so we use the term grabby aliens to describe that more particular model and the idea is it's a more particular model of the general concept of loud so loud would just be the general idea that they would be really obvious so grabby is the technical term is it in the title of the paper it's in the body the title is actually about loud and quiet right so the idea is there's you know you want to distinguish your particular model of things from the general category of things everybody else might talk about so that's how we distinguish the paper titles if loud aliens explain human earliness quiet aliens are also rare if life on earth god that's such a good abstract if life on earth had to achieve and heart and hard steps to reach humanity's level then the chance of this event rose as time to the nth power so we'll talk about power we'll talk about linear increase so what is the technical definition of grabby how do you envision grabbiness and why are uh in contrast with humans why aren't humans grabby so like where's that line is it well definable what is grabbing what is non-grabby we have a mathematical model of the distribution of advanced civilizations i.e aliens in space and time that model has three parameters and we can set each one of those parameters from data and therefore we claim this is actually what we know about where they are in space time so the key idea is they appear at some point in space time and then after some short delay they start expanding and they expand at some speed and the speed is one of those parameters that's one of the three and the other two parameters are about how they appear in time that is they appear at random places and they appear in time according to a power law and that power law has two parameters and we can fit each of those parameters to data and so then we can say now we know we know the distribution of advanced civilizations in space and time so we are right now a new civilization and we have not yet started to expand but plausibly we would start to do that within say 10 million years of the current moment that's plenty of time and 10 million years is a really short duration in the history of the universe so we are at the moment a sort of random sample of the kind of times at which an advanced civilization might appear because we may or may not become grabby but if we do we'll do it soon and so our current date is a sample and that gives us one of the other parameters the second parameter is the constant in front of the power law and that's arrived from our current date so power law what is the n in the in the power law that's the what is the complicated thing to explain right advanced life appeared by going through a sequence of hard steps so starting with very simple life and here we are at the end of this process at pretty advanced life and so we had to go through some intermediate steps such as you know sexual selection photosynthesis multicellular animals and the idea is that each of those steps was hard evolution just took a long time searching in a big space of possibilities to find each of those steps and the challenge was to achieve all of those steps by a deadline of when the planets would no longer host a simple life and so earth has been really lucky compared to all the other billions of planets out there and that we managed to achieve all these steps in the short time of the five billion years that earth is can support simple life so not all steps but a lot of them because we don't know how many steps there are before you start the expansion so these are all the steps from the birth of life to the initiation of major expansion right so we're pretty sure that it would happen really soon so that it couldn't be the same sort of a hard step as the last ones in terms of taking a long time so when we look at the history of earth we look at the durations of the major things that have happened that suggests that there's roughly say six hard steps that happened say between 3 and 12 and that we have just achieved the last one that would take a long time which is um well we don't know but whatever it is we've just achieved the last one are we talking about humans or aliens here so let's talk about some of these steps yeah so uh earth is really special in some way we don't exactly know the level of specialness we don't really know which steps were the hardest or not because we just have a sample of one but you're saying that there's three to 12 steps that we have to go through to get to where we are that are hard steps hard to find by something that took uh a long time and is unlikely there's a lot of there's a lot of ways to fail there's a lot more ways to fail than to succeed the first step would be sort of the very simplest form of life of any sort and then um we don't know whether that first word is the first sort that we see in the historical record or not but then some other steps are say the development of photosynthesis the development of sexual reproduction there's the development of eukaryote cells which are certain kind of complicated cell that seems to have only appeared once and then there's multicellularity that is multiple cells coming together to large organisms like us and in this statistical model of trying to fit all these steps into a finite window the model actually predicts that these steps could be a varying difficulties that is they could each take different amounts of time on average but if you're lucky enough that they all appear in a very short time then the durations between them will be roughly equal and the time remaining left over in the rest of the window will also be the same length so we at the moment have roughly a billion years left on earth until simple life like us would no longer be possible life appeared roughly 400 million years after the very first time when life was possible at the very beginning so those two numbers right there give you the rough estimate of six hard steps just to build up an intuition here so we're trying to create a simple mathematical model of how life emerges and expands in the universe and there's a section in this paper how many hard steps question mark right the two most plausibly diagnostic earth duration seems to be the one remaining after now before earth becomes uninhabitable for complex life so you estimate how long earth lasts how many hard steps there's windows for doing different hard steps and you can sort of uh like cueing theory mathematically estimate of like uh the uh solution or the passing of the hard steps or the taking of the hard steps sort of like coldly mathematical look if life pre-expansionary life requires a number of steps what is the probability of taking those steps on an earth that lasts a billion years or 2 billion years or 5 billion years or 10 billion years and you say solving for e using the observed durations of 1.1 and 0.4 then gives e values of 3.9 and 12.5 range 5.7 to 26 suggesting a middle estimate of at least six that's where you said six hard steps right just to get to where we are right we started at the bottom now we're here and that took six steps on average the key point is on average these things on any one random planet would take you know trillions or trillions of trill you know of years just a really long time and so we're really lucky that they all happened really fast in a short time before our window closed and the chance of that happening in that short window goes as that time period to the power of the number of steps and so that was where the power we talked about before it came from and so that means in the history of the universe we should overall roughly expect advanced life to appear as a power law in time so that very early on there was very little chance of anything appearing and then later on as things appear other things are appearing somewhat closer to them in time because they're all going as this power law what is the power law can we for people who are not sure math inclined can you describe what a power so say the function x is linear and x squared is quadratic so it's the power of 2. if we make x to the 3 that's cubic or the power of 3. and so x to the 6th is the power of 6. and so we'd say life appears in the universe on a planet like earth in that proportion to the time that it's been you know uh ready for life to appear and that over the universe in general it'll appear at roughly a power law like that what is the exponent what is n uh is it the number of hearts yes the number of hard steps so that's so yeah it's like if you're gambling and you're doubling up every time this is the probability you just keep winning [Laughter] uh so it gets very unlikely very quickly and so we are the result of this unlikely chain of successes it's actually a lot like cancer so the dominant model of cancer in an organism like each of us is that we have all these cells and in order to become cancerous a single cell has to go through a number of mutations and these are very unlikely mutations and so any one cell is very unlikely to have any have all these mutations happen by the time your life spans over but we have enough cells in our body that the chance of any one cell producing cancer by the end of your life is actually pretty high more like 40 and so the chance of cancer appearing in the linear lifetime also goes as power law this power of the number of mutations that's required for any one cell in your body to become cancerous this is the longer you live the likely right you are to have cancer cells and its power is also roughly six that is the chance of you getting cancer is at the roughly the power of six of the time you've been since you were born it is perhaps not lost on people that you're that you're comparing the power laws of the survival or the arrival of the human species to cancerous cells the same mathematical model but of course we might have a different value assumption about the two outcomes but of course from the point of view of cancer somewhere similar uh from the point of view of cancer it's a win-win well we both get to we both get to thrive i suppose um it is interesting to take the point of view of all kinds of life forms on earth of viruses of bacteria they have a very different view and you know it's like the instagram channel um nature is metal right the ethic under which nature operates doesn't often coincide correlate with human morals it seems cold and um machine like in the selection process that it performs i am an analyst i'm a scholar an intellectual and i feel i should carefully distinguish predicting what's likely to happen and then evaluating or judging what i think would be better to happen and it's a little dangerous to mix those up too closely because then we can have wishful thinking and so i try typically to just analyze what seems likely to happen regardless of whether i like it or whether we do anything about it and then once you see a rough picture of what's likely to happen if we do nothing then we can ask well what might we prefer and ask where could the levers be to move it at least a little toward what we might prefer that's a you know useful but often doing that just analysis of what's likely to happen if we do nothing offends many people they find that you know dehumanizing or cold or metal as you say uh to just say well this is what's likely to happen and you know it's not your favorite sorry but um maybe we can do something but maybe we can't do that much this is very interesting that the the cold analysis whether it's geopolitics whether it's medicine whether it's economics sometimes misses some very specific aspect of um human condition like for example when you look at a doctor and the act of a doctor helping a single patient if you do the analysis of that doctor's time and cost of the medicine or the surgery or the transportation of the patient this is the paul farmer question you know is it worth spending 10 20 30 000 on this one patient when you look at all the people that are suffering in the world that money can be spent so much better and yet there's something about human nature that wants to help the person in front of you and that is actually the right thing to do despite the analysis and sometimes when you do the analysis you um there's something about the human mind that allows you to not take that leap that irrational leap uh to act in this way that the analysis explains it away well it's like uh for example uh the u.s government you know the d.o.t department of transportation puts a value of i think like 9 million dollars on a human life and the moment you put that number on a human life you can start thinking well okay i can start making decisions about this or that and with a sort of cold economic perspective and then you might lose you might deviate from a deeper truth of what it means to be human somehow you have to dance because uh then if you put too much weight on the anecdotal evidence on these kinds of human emotions then you're going to lose uh you can also probably more likely deviate from truth but there's something about that cold analysis like i've been listening to a lot of people coldly analyze wars warren yemen warren syria uh israel palestine war in ukraine and there's something lost when you do a cold analysis of why something happened when you talk about energy uh talking about sort of conflict competition over resources when you talk about geopolitics sort of models of geopolitics and why a certain war happened you lose something about the suffering that happens i don't know it's an interesting thing because you're both you're exceptionally good at uh models in all domains literally um but also there's a humanity to you uh so it's an interesting dance i don't know if you can comment on that dance sure it's definitely true as you say that for many people if you are accurate in your judgment of say for a medical patient right what's the chance that this treatment might help and what's the cost and compare those to each other and you might say this looks like a lot of cost for a small medical gain and at that point knowing that fact that might take the wing you know the air out of your sails you might not be willing to do the thing that maybe you feel is right anyway which is still to pay for it um and then somebody knowing that might want to keep that news from you not tell you about the low chance of success or the high cost in order to save you this tension this this awkward moment where you might fail to do what they and you think is right but i think the higher calling the the higher standard to hold you to which many people can be held to is to say i will look at things accurately i will know the truth and then i will also do the right thing with it i will be at peace with my judgment about what the right thing is in terms of the truth i don't need to be lied to in order to figure out what the right thing to do is and i think if you do think you need to be lied to in order to figure out what the right thing to do is you're at a great disadvantage because then people will be lying to you will be lying to yourself and you won't be as effective yes and achieving whatever good you are trying to achieve but getting the data getting the facts is step one now that's the final step absolutely so it's uh i would say having a good model getting the good data is step one and it's a burden because you can't just use that data to um arrive at sort of the easy convenient thing you have to really deeply think about what is the right thing you can't use the so the the dark aspect of data uh of models is you can use it to excuse away actions that are unethical you can use data to basically excuse away anything but not looking at data lets you expose yourself to pretend and think that you're doing good when you're not exactly uh but it is a burden it doesn't excuse you from still being human and deeply thinking about what is right that very kind of gray area that very subjective area um that's part of the human condition but let us return for a time to aliens so you started to define sort of the the model the parameters of uh grabbiness right or the uh as we approach crabbiness so what happens so again when there's three parameters yes there's the speed at which they expand there's the rate at which they appear in time and that rate has a constant and a power so we've talked about the history of life on earth suggest that power is around 6 but maybe 3 to 12. we can say that constant comes from our current date sort of sets the overall rate and the speed which is the last parameter comes from the fact that we look in the sky we don't see them so the model predicts very strongly that if they were expanding slowly say one percent of the speed of light our sky would be full of vast spheres that were full of activity that is at a random time when a civilization is first appearing if it looks out into its sky it would see many other grabby alien civilizations in the sky and they would be much bigger than the full moon they'd be huge spheres in the sky and they would be visibly different we don't see them can we pause for a second okay there's a bunch of hard steps that earth had to pass to arrive at this place we are currently which we're starting to launch rockets out into space we're kind of starting to expand a bit right very slowly okay but this is like the birth if you look at the entirety of the history of earth we're now at this precipice of like expansion we could we might not choose to but if we do we will do it in the next 10 million years 10 million wow time flies when you're having fun uh i was thinking a short time on the on the cosmological scale so that is it might be only a thousand but the point is if it's even if it's up to 10 million that hardly makes any difference to the model so i might as well give you 10 million this this this makes me feel i was i was so stressed about planning what i'm going to do today and now you've got plenty of time plenty of time uh i just need to be generating some offspring quickly here okay um so and there's this moment [Laughter] this 10 million year gap uh or window when we start expanding and you're saying okay so this is an interesting moment where there's a bunch of other alien civilizations that might at some history of the universe arrived at this moment were here they passed all the hard steps there's a there's a model for how likely it is that that happens and then they start expanding and you think of an expansion it's almost like a a sphere right that's when you say speed we're talking about the speed of the radius growth exactly like the surface how fast the surface okay and so you're saying that there is some speed for that expansion average speed and then we can play with that parameter and if that speed is super slow then maybe that explains why we haven't seen anything if it's super fast well it gets the slow would create the puzzle it's low predicts we would see them but we don't see them okay so the way to explain that is that they're fast so the idea is if they're moving really fast then we don't see them until they're almost here and okay this is counterintuitive all right hold on a second so i think this works best when i say a bunch of dumb things okay um and then uh you uh elucidate the full complexity and the beauty of the dumbness okay so there's these spheres out there in the universe that are made visible because they're sort of uh using a lot of energy so they're generating a lot of light they're changing things they're changing things and change would be visible long way off yes they would take apart stars rearrange them restructure galaxies they would just be kind of big huge stuff okay if they're expanding slowly we would see a lot of them because the universe is old as relative is old enough to where we would see that we're assuming we're just typical you know maybe at the 50th percentile of them so like half of them have appeared so far the other half will still appear later and um the the math of our best estimate is that they appear roughly once per million galaxies and we would meet them in roughly a billion years if uh we expanded out to meet them so we're looking at a grabby aliens model 3d sim right what's what's this that's the actual name of the video what uh by the time we get to 13.8 billion years the fun begins okay so this is this is a um right we're watching a three-dimensional sphere rotating i presume that's the universe and then right crabby aliens are expanding and filling that universe exactly with all kinds of uh and then pretty soon it's all full it's full so that's how the grabby aliens come in contact first of all with other aliens and then um with us humans the following is a simulation of the grabby aliens model of alien civilizations civilizations are born that expand outwards at constant speed a spherical region of space is shown by the time we get to 13.8 billion years this sphere will be about 3 000 times as wide as the distance from the milky way to andromeda okay this is fun it's huge okay it's huge um all right so why don't we see uh we're one little tiny tiny tiny tiny dot in that giant giant sphere right why don't we see any of the grabby aliens it depends on how fast they expand so you could see that if they expanded at the speed of light you wouldn't see them until they were here uh so like out there if somebody is destroying the universe with a vacuum decay there's this there's this you know doomsday scenario where somebody somewhere could change the vacuum of the universe and that would expand at the speed of light and basically destroy everything it hit but you'd never see that until i got here because it's expanding at the speed of light if you're spinning really slow then you see it from a long way off so the fact we don't see anything in the sky tells us they're expanding fast say over a third the speed of light and that's really really fast but that's what you have to believe if you look out and you don't see anything now you might say well how maybe i just don't want to believe this whole model why should i believe this whole model at all and our best evidence why you should believe this model is our early date we are right now almost 14 million years into the universe on a planet around a star that's roughly 5 billion years old but the average star out there will last roughly five trillion years that is a thousand times longer and remember that power law it says that the chance of advanced life appearing on a planet goes as the power of sixth of the time so if a planet lasts a thousand times longer then the chance of it appearing on that planet if everything would stay empty at least is a thousand to the sixth power or ten to the eighteen so enormous overwhelming chance that if the universe would just stay sit and empty and waiting for advanced life to appear when it would appear would be way at the end of all these planet lifetimes that is the long planets near the end of the lifetime trillions of years into the future so but we're really early compared to that and our explanation is at the moment as you saw in the video the universe is filling up in roughly a billion years it'll all be full and at that point it's too late for advanced life to show up so you had to show up now before that deadline okay can we break that apart a little bit okay or linger on some of the things you said so with the power law the things we've done on earth the model you have says that it's very unlikely like we're lucky sobs is that is that mathematically correct to say we we're crazy early that is when early means like in the history of the universe in the history okay so given this model how do we make sense of that for super can we just be the lucky ones well 10 to the 18 lucky you know how lucky do you feel uh so you know that's pretty lucky right you know 10 to 18 is a billion billion so then if you were just being honest and humble that that means what does that mean it means one of the assumptions that calculated this crazy early must be wrong that's what it means so the key assumption we suggest is that the universe would stay empty so most life would appear like a thousand times longer later than now yeah if everything would stay empty waiting for it to appear what was so what is non-empty so the gravity aliens are filling the universe right now roughly at the moment they've filled half of the universe and they've changed it and when they fill everything it's too late for stuff like us to appear but wait hold on a second did anyone help us get lucky if it's so difficult what how do like so it's like cancer right there's all these cells each of which randomly does or doesn't get cancer and eventually some cell gets cancer and you know we were one of those but hold on a second okay but we got it early early compared to the prediction with an assumption that's wrong that's so that's how we do a lot of you know theoretical analysis you have a model that makes a prediction that's wrong then that helps you reject that model okay let's try to understand exactly where the wrong is so the assumption is that the universe is empty stays empty stays empty and and waits until this advanced life appears in trillions of years that is if the universe would just stay empty if there was just you know nobody else out there yeah then when you should expect advanced life to appear if you're the only one in the universe when should you expect to appear you should expect to appear trillions of years in the future i see right right so this is a very sort of nuanced mathematical assumption i don't think we can intuit it cleanly with words uh but if you assume that you're just wait the universe stays empty and you're waiting for one life uh civilization to pop up then it's gonna it should happen very late much later than now and if you look at earth uh the way things happen on earth it happened much much much much much earlier than it was supposed to according to this model if you take the initial assumption therefore you can say well the initial assumption of the universe staying empty is very unlikely right and the other the other alternative theory is the universe is filling up and will fill up soon and so we are typical for the origin date of things that can appear before the deadline before that okay it's filling up so why don't we see anything if it's filling up because they're expanding really fast close to the speed of light exactly so we will only see it when it's here almost here okay uh what are the ways in which we might see a quickly expanding this is both exciting and terrifying it is terrifying it's like watching a truck like driving at you at 100 miles an hour and uh right so we would see spheres in the sky at least one sphere in the sky growing very rapidly and like very rapidly right yes very rapidly so we're not so there's there's you know different def because we were just talking about 10 million years this would be you might see it 10 million years in advance coming i mean you still might have a long warning or again the universe is 14 billion years old the typical origin times of these things are spread over several billion years so the chance of one originating at a you know very close to you in time is very low so it still might take millions of years from the time you see it from the time it gets here yeah a million years to be terrified there's a bad spirit coming at you but but coming at you very fast so if they're traveling close to the speed of light but they're coming from a long way away so remember the rate at which they appear is one per million galaxies right so they're they're roughly 100 galaxies away i see so the delta between the speed of light and their actual travel speed is very important right so even if they're going at say half the speed of light we'll have a long time yeah but what if they're traveling exactly at a speed of light then we see them like then we wouldn't have much warning but that's less likely well we can't exclude it and they could also be somehow traveling faster than the speed of light or i think we can exclude because if they could go faster than speed of light then they would just already be everywhere so in a universe where you can travel faster than the speed of light you can go backwards in space-time so any time you appeared anywhere in space time you could just fill up everything yeah and so anybody in the future whoever appeared they would have been here by now can you exclude the possibility that those kinds of aliens aren't already here uh well you have we should have a different discussion of that right okay so let's actually lead that let's leave that discussion aside just to linger and understand the grabby alien expansion which is beautiful and fascinating okay so there's these giant expanding spheres spheres of alien civilizations now um when those fears spheres collide mathematically it was it's very likely that we're not the first collision of grabby of alien civilizations i suppose there's one way to say it so there's like the first time the spheres touch each other we recognize each other right they meet um they they recognize each other first before they meet um they see each other coming they see each other coming and then so there's a bunch of them there's a combinatorial thing where they start seeing each other coming and then there's a third neighbor it's like what the hell and then there's a fourth one okay so what does that you think look like um what lessons from human nature that's the only data we have what can you draw the story of the history of the universe here is what i would call a living cosmology so what i'm excited about in part by this model is that it lets us tell a story of cosmology where there are actors who have agendas so most ancient peoples they had cosmologies stories they told about where the universe came from and where it's going and what's happening out there and their stories they like to have agents and actors gods or something out there doing things and lately our favorite cosmology is dead kind of boring you know we're the only activity we know about or see and everything else just looks dead and empty but this is now telling us no that's not quite right at the moment the universe is filling up and in a few billion years it'll be all full and from then on the history of the universe will be the universe full of aliens yeah so that's a it's a really good reminder a really good way to think about cosmology is we're surrounded by vast darkness and we don't know what's going on in that darkness until the light from whatever generate lights arrives here so we kind of yeah we look up at the sky okay they're stars oh they're pretty but you don't think about the giant expanding spheres of aliens right see them but now you're approaching looking at the clock if you're clever the clock tells you so i like the analogy with the ancient greeks so yes you might think that an ancient greek you know staring at the universe couldn't possibly tell how far away the sun was or how far away the moon is or how big the earth is that all you can see is just big things in the sky you can't tell but they were clever enough actually to be able to figure out the size of the earth and the distance to the moon and the sun and the size of the moon and sun that is they could figure those things out actually by being clever enough and so similarly we can actually figure out where are the aliens out there in space time by being clever about the few things we can see one of which is our current date and so now that you have this living cosmology we can tell the story that the universe starts out empty and then at some point things like us appear very primitive and then some of those just stop being quiet and expand and then for a few billion years they expand and then they meet each other and then for the next 100 billion years they commune with each other that is the usual models of cosmology say that in roughly 100 150 billion years the expansion of the universe will happen so much that all you'll have left is some galaxy clusters and they that are sort of disconnected from each other but before then for the next 100 million years 100 billion years excuse me they will interact there will be this community of all the grabby alien civilizations and each one of them will hear about and even meet thousands of others and we might hope to join them someday and become part of that community that's an interesting thing to aspire to yes interesting is an interesting word is the universe of alien civilizations defined by war as much or more than uh war defined human history i would say it's defined by competition and then the question is how much competition implies war so up until recently competition defined life on earth yes competition between species and organisms and among humans competitions among individuals and communities and that competition often took the form of war in the last 10 000 years many people now are hoping or even expecting to sort of suppress and end competition in human affairs they regulate business competition they prevent military competition and that's a future i think a lot of people will like to continue and strengthen people will like to have something close to world government or world governance or at least a world community and they will like to suppress war and many forms of business and personal competition over the coming centuries and they may like that so much that they prevent interstellar colonization which would become the end of that era that is interstellar colonization would just return severe competition to human or our descendant affairs and many civilizations may prefer that and ours may prefer that but if they choose to allow interstellar colonization they will have chosen to allow competition to return with great force that is there's really not much of a way to centrally govern a rapidly expanding sphere of civilization and so i think the one of the most you know solid things we can predict about gravians is they have accepted competition and they have internal competition and therefore they have the potential for competition when they meet each other at the borders but whether that's military competition is more of an open question so military meaning destro physically destructive right so there's a lot to say there so one idea that you kind of proposed is progress might be maximized through competition through some kind of healthy competition some definition of healthy so like constructive not destructive competition so like we would likely grabby alien civilizations would be likely defined by competition because they can expand faster because they competition allows innovation and sort of the battle of ideas the way i would take the logic is to say you know competition just happens if you can't coordinate to stop it and you probably can't coordinate to stop it in an expanding interstellar wave so competition is a fundamental force in the universe it has been so far and it would be within an expanding grabby alien civilization but we today have the chance many people think and hope of greatly controlling and limiting competition within our civilization for a while and that's an interesting choice whether to allow competition to reap to sort of regain its full force or whether to suppress and manage it well one of the open questions that has been raised in the past less than 100 years is whether our desire to lessen the destructive nature of competition or the destructive kind of competition will be outpaced by the destructive power of our weapons sort of uh if nuclear weapons and weapons of that kind become more destructive than our desire for peace then it all it takes is one at the party to ruin the party it takes one to make a delay but not that much of a delay on the cosmological scales we're talking about so you could even party on even a vast nuclear war if it happened here right now on earth it would not kill all humans yes it certainly wouldn't kill all life and so human civilization would return within a hundred thousand years so all the history of atrocities and um if you look at uh uh the black plague right which is not human cause atrocities or whatever there are a lot of military atrocities in history absolutely in the 20th century those are um those challenges to think about human nature but the cosmic scale of time and space they do not stop the human spirit essentially the humanity goes on through all the atrocities it goes on like most likely so even a nuclear war isn't enough to destroy us or to stop our potential from expanding but we could institute a regime of global governance that limited competition including military and business competition of sorts and that could prevent our expansion of course to play devil's advocate global governance is centralized power power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely one of the aspects of competition that's been very productive is not letting any one person any one country any one center of power become absolutely powerful because that's another lesson is it seems to corrupt there's something about ego in the human mind that seems to be corrupted by power so when you say global governance that terrifies me more than the possibility of war because it's uh i think that people will be less terrified than you are right now and let me try to paint the picture from their point of view this isn't my point of view but i think it's going to be a widely shared point of view yes this is two devil's advocates arguing two devils okay so for the last half century and into the continuing future we actually have had a strong elite global community that shares a lot of values and beliefs and has created a lot of convergence in global policy so if you look at electromagnetic spectrum or medical experiments or pandemic policy or nuclear power energy or regulating airplanes or just in a wide range of area in fact the world has very similar regulations and rules everywhere and it's not a coincidence because they are part of a world community where people get together at places like davos et cetera where world elites want to be respected by other world elites and they have a you know convergence of opinion and that produces something like global governance but without a global center this is sort of what human mobs or communities have done for a long time that is humans can coordinate together on shared behavior without a center by having gossip and reputation within a community of elites and that is what we have been doing and are likely to do a lot more of so for example you know one of the things that's happening say with the war in ukraine is that this world community of elites has decided that they disapprove of the russian invasion and they are coordinating to pull resources together from all around the world in order to oppose it and they are proud of that sharing that opinion and their and their feel that they are morally justified in their stance there and um that's the kind of event that actually brings world elite communities together where they they come together and they push a particular policy and position that they share and that they achieve successes and the same sort of passion animates global elites with respect to say global warming or global poverty and other sorts of things and they are in fact making progress on those sorts of things through shared global community of elites and in some sense they are slowly walking toward global governance slowly strengthening various world institutions of governance but cautiously carefully watching out for the possibility of a single power that might corrupt it i think a lot of people over the coming centuries will look at that history and like it it's uh interesting thought and thank you for playing that devil's advocate there but i think the elites too easily lose touch of course of the morals that uh the best of human nature and power corrupts sure but everything is their view is the one that determines what happens their view may still end up there even if you or i might criticize it from that point of view so from a perspective of minimizing human suffering elites can use topics of the war in ukraine and climate change and all of those things to sell an idea to the world and with disregard to the amount of suffering it causes their actual actions so like you can tell all kinds of narratives that's the way propaganda works right hitler uh really sold the idea that everything germany is doing is either it's the victim is defending itself against the cruelty of the world and it's actually trying to bring out about a better world so every power center thinks they're doing good and so this is uh this is the positive of competition of not of having multiple power centers this kind of gathering of elites makes me very very very nervous the dinners the the meetings in the closed rooms i don't know i another but remember we talked about separating our cold analysis of what's likely or possible from what we prefer and so that's this isn't exactly enough time for that we might say i would recommend we don't go this route of a world strong world governance and uh because i would say it'll preclude this possibility of becoming grabby aliens of filling the next nearest million galaxies for the next billion years with vast amounts of activity and interest and value of life out there that's the thing we would lose by deciding that we wouldn't expand that we would stay here and keep our comfortable shared governance so you wait you think that global governance is makes it more likely or less likely that we expand out into the universe less so okay this is the key this is the key point right so screw the elites so right we want to exp wait do we want to expand so again i want to separate my neutral analysis from my evaluation and say first of all i have an analysis that tells us this is a key choice that we will face and that it's a key choice other aliens have faced out there and it could be that only one in 10 or 100 civilizations chooses to expand and the rest of them stay quiet and that's how it goes out there and we face that choice too and it'll happen sometime in the next 10 million years maybe the next thousand but the key thing to notice from our point of view is that uh even though you might like our global governance you might like the fact that we've come together we know we no longer have massive wars and we no longer have destructive competition um and that we could continue that the cost of continuing that would be to prevent interstellar colonization that is once you allow interstellar colonization then you've lost control of those colonies and whatever they change into they could come back here and compete with you back here as a result of having lost control and i think if people value that global governance and the global community and regulation and all the things it can do enough they would then want to prevent interstellar colonization i want to have a conversation with those people i believe that both for uh humanity for the good of humanity for what i believe is good in humanity and for expansion exploration um innovation distributing the centers of power is very beneficial so this whole meeting of elites and i've met i've gotten i've been very fortunate to meet uh quite a large number of elites they make me nervous because it's easy to lose touch of reality i'm nervous about that in myself to make sure that you never lose touch um as you get sort of older wiser you know how you generally get like disrespectful of kids kids these days no the kids are okay but here's a stronger case for their position so i'm going to play the for the for the elites yes well for the for the for the limiting of expansion and for the regulation of of um behavior so just okay can i link on that sure so you're saying those two are connected so we the human civilization and alien civilizations come to a uh a crossroads they have to decide do we want to expand or not and connected to that do we want to give a lot of power to a central elite right do we want to uh distribute the the power centers which is naturally connected to the expansion when you expand you distribute the power if say over the next thousand years we fill up the solar system right we go out from earth and we colonize mars and we change a lot of things within a solar system still everything is within reach that is if there's a rebellious colony around neptune you can throw rocks at it and smash it and then teach them discipline okay a they said that work for the business central control over the solar system is feasible but once you let it escape the solar system it's no longer feasible but if you have a solar system that doesn't have a central control may be broken into a thousand different political units in the solar system then any one part of that that allows interstellar colonization and it happens that is interstellar colonization happens when only one party chooses to do it and is able to do it and that's what it is therefore so we can just say in a world of competition if interstellar colonization is possible it will happen and then competition will continue and that will sort of ensure the continuation of competition into the indefinite future that's and competition we don't know but competition could take violent forms okay many productive forms and the case i was going to make is that i think one of the things that most scares people about competition is not just that it creates holocausts and death on massive scales is that it's likely to change who we are and what we value yes so this is the other thing with power as we grow as human civilization grows becomes multi-planetary multi-solar system potentially how does that change us do you think i think the more you think about it the more you realize it can change us a lot so first of all this is pretty dark by the way well it's just honest right so i'm trying to do that but i think the first thing you should say if you look at history just human history over the last ten thousand years if you really understood what people were like a long time ago you'd realize they were really quite different ancient cultures created people who were really quite different most historical fiction lies to you about that it often offers you modern characters in an ancient world but if you actually study history you will see just how different they were and how differently they thought and that's they've changed a lot many times and they've changed a lot across time so i think the most obvious prediction about the future is even if that you only have the mechanisms of change we've seen in the past you should still expect a lot of change in the future but we have a lot bigger mechanisms for change in the future than we had in the past so um i have this book called the age of m work love and life when robots rule the earth and it's about what happens if brain emulations become possible so a brain emulation is where you take a actual human brain and you scan it in fine spatial and chemical detail to create a computer simulation of that brain and then those computer simulations of brains are basically citizens in a new world they work and they vote and they fall in love and they get mad and they lie to each other and this is a whole new world and my book is about analyzing how that world is different than our world basically using competition as my key lever of analysis that is if that world remains competitive that i can figure out how they change in that world what they do differently than we do and it's very different and it's different in ways that are shocking sometimes to many people in ways some people don't like i think it's an okay world but i have to admit it's quite different and that's just one technology if we add you know dozens more technologies changes into the future you know we should just expect it's possible to become very different than who we are i mean in the space of all possible minds our minds are a particular architecture a particular structure a particular set of habits and they are only you know one piece in a vast face of possibilities the space of possible minds is really huge so yeah let's linger on the space of possible minds for a moment just to sort of humble ourselves uh how peculiar our peculiarities are like the fact that we like a particular kind of sex and the fact that we eat food through one hole and poop through another hole and that seems to be a fundamental aspect of life is very important to us uh and that life is finite in a certain kind of way we have a meat vehicle so death is very important to us i wonder which aspects are fundamental or would be common throughout human history and also throughout sorry throughout history of life on earth and throughout other kinds of lives like what is really useful you mentioned competition seems to be a one fundamental i've tried to do analysis of where our distant descendants might go in terms of what are robust features we could predict about our descendants is that so again i have this analysis of sort of the next generation af so the next era after ours that if you think of human history as having three eras so far right there was the forager error the farmer and the industry are then my attempt and age of m is to analyze the next error after that and it's very different but of course there could be more and more errors after that so you know analyzing a particular scenario and thinking it through is one way to try to see how different the future could be but that doesn't give you some sort of like sense of what's typical but i have tried to analyze what's typical and so i have two predictions i think i can make pretty solidly one thing is that we know at the moment that humans discount the future rapidly so uh we discount the future in terms of caring about consequences roughly a factor of two per generation and there's a solid evolutionary analysis why sexual creatures would do that because basically your descendants only share half of your genes and your descendants your generation away so we only care of our grandchildren you know basically that a factor of four later yeah uh because you know it's later so this actually explains typical interest rates in the economy that is interest rates are greatly influenced by our discount rates and uh we basically discount the future by a factor of two per generation um but that's a side effect of the way our preferences evolved as sexually selected creatures we should expect that in the longer run creatures will evolve who don't discount the future they will care about the long run and they will therefore not neglect the wrong so for example for things like global warming or things like you know that at the moment many commenters are sad that basically ordinary people don't seem to care much market prices don't seem to care a bunch in ordinary people it doesn't really impact them much because humans don't care much about the long-term future but and futurists find it hard to motivate people and to engage people about the long-term future because they just don't care that much but that's a side effect of this particular way that our you know preferences evolved about the future and so in the future they will neglect the future less and that's an interesting thing that will that we can predict robustly eventually you know maybe a few centuries maybe longer eventually our descendants will care about the future can you speak to the intuition behind that is it is it useful to think more about the future right if evolution rewards creatures for having many descendants then uh if you have decisions that influence how many descendants you have then that would be good if you made those decisions but in order to do that you'll have to care about them you'll have to care about that future so to push back if that's if you're trying to maximize the number of descendants but the nice thing about not caring too much about the long-term future is you're more likely to take big risks or you're you're less risk-averse and it's possible that the both evolution and just life in this in in the universe is rewarded rewards the risk takers well we actually have analysis of the ideal risk preferences too so there's a literature on ideal preferences that evolution should promote and for example there's a literature on competing investment funds and what the managers of those funds should care about in terms of risk various kinds of risks and in terms of discounting and so managers of investment funds should basically have logarithmic risk i.e in collect in shared risk in correlated risk but be very risk take risk neutral with respect to uncorrelated risk so um that's a feature that's predicted to happen about individual personal choices in biology and also for investment funds so that's other things that's also something we can say about the long run what correlated and uncorrelated risk if there's something that would affect all of your descendants then if you take that risk you might have more descendants but you might have zero and that's just really bad to have zero descendants but an uncorrelated risk would be a risk that some of your descendants would suffer but others wouldn't and then you have a portfolio of descendants and so that portfolio insures you against problems with any one of them i like the idea of portfolio descendants and we'll talk about portfolios with with your idea of you briefly mentioned will return there with m e m the age of em work love and life when robots rule the earth em by the way is emulated minds so this one of the m is short for emulations i'm short for emulations and it's kind of an idea of how we might create artificial minds artificial copies of minds or human-like intelligences i have another dramatic prediction i can make about long-term preschools yes which is at the moment we reproduce as the result of a hodgepodge of preferences that aren't very well integrated but sort of in our ancestral environment induced us to reproduce so we have preferences over being you know sleepy and hungry and thirsty and wanting to have sex and wanting to you know be excitement et cetera right yeah and so in our ancestral environment the packages of preferences that we evolved to have did induce us to have more descendants that's why we're here but those packages of preferences are not a robust way to promote having more descendants they they were tied to our ancestral environment which is no longer true so that's one of the reasons we are now having a big fertility decline because in our current environment our ancestral preferences are not inducing us to have a lot of kids which is from evolution's point of view a big mistake we can predict that in the longer run there will arise creatures who just abstractly know that what they want is more descendants that's that's a very robust way to have more descendants is to have that as your direct preference first of all your thicket is so clear i love it so mathematical and thank you for for thinking so clearly with me and bearing with my interruptions and and going on the tangents when we go there so you're just clearly saying that successful long-term civilizations will prefer to have descendants more descendants not just prefer consciously and abstractly prefer that is it won't be indirect consequence of other preferences it will just be the thing they know they want there will be a president in the future that says we must have more sex we must have more descendants than do whatever it takes to do that whatever we must go to the moon and do the other things right not because they're easy but because they're hard but instead of the moon let's have lots of sex okay but there's a lot of ways to have descendants right right but so that's the whole point when the world gets more complicated and there are many possible strategies it's having that as your abstract preference that will enforce you to think through those possibilities and pick the one that's most effective so just to clarify descendants doesn't necessarily mean the narrow definition of descendants meaning humans having sex and then having babies exactly you can have artificial intelligence systems yes that uh would in whom you instill some capability of cognition and perhaps even consciousness you can also create their genetics and biology clones of yourself or um slightly modified clones thousands of them right um so so all kinds of descendants it could be exactly descendants in the space of ideas too for somehow we no longer exist in this meat vehicle it's now just like uh whatever the definition of a life form is you have descendants of those life forms yes and they will be thoughtful about that they will have thought about what counts as a descendant and that'll be important to them to have the right concept so the they there is very is very interesting who this they are but the key thing is we're making predictions that i think are somewhat robust about what our distant descendants will be like another thing i think you would automatically accept is they will almost entirely be artificial and i think that would be the obvious prediction about any aliens we would meet that is they would long since have given up you know reproducing biologically well it's all it's like uh organic or something it's all right it might be squishy and made out of hydrocarbons but it would be artificial in the sense of made in factories with designs on cad things right factories with scale economy so the factories we have made on earth today have much larger scale economies than the factories in our cells so the factories in our cells are there are marvels but they don't achieve very many scaly times they're tiny little factories but they're all factories yes factors on top of factories so everything uh the the factors and the factories that are designed is different than sort of the factories that have evolved i think the nature of the word design is very interesting uh to uncover there but let me in terms of uh aliens let me go let me analyze your twitter like it's shakespeare okay there's a tweet that says uh define hello in quotes alien civilizations as one that might in the next million years identify humans as intelligent and civilized travel to earth and say hello by making their presence and advanced abilities known to us the next 15 polls this is a twitter thread the next 15 polls ask about such hello aliens and what these polls ask is your twitter followers what they think those aliens would be like certain particular qualities so uh poll number one is what percent of hello aliens evolved from biological species with two main genders and uh you know the the popular vote is above 80 percent so most of them have two genders what do you think about that i'll ask you about some of these because it's so interesting it's such an interesting question it is a fun set of questions yes like one set of questions so the genders as we look through evolutionary history uh what's the usefulness of that as opposed to having just one or like millions so there's a question in evolution of life on earth there are very few species that have more than two genders there are some but there are they aren't very many but there's an enormous number of species that do have two genders much more than one and so there's a literature on why did multiple genders evolve and that's sort of what's the point of having males and females versus hermaphrodites um so most plants are mapredice that is they have there they they would mate male female but each plant can be either role and then most animals have chosen to split into males and females and then they're differentiating the two genders and you know there's an interesting set of questions about why that happens because you can do selection you basically have um like one gender competes for for the affection of other and there's sexual partnership that creates the offspring so there's sexual selection it's nice to have a like a to a party it's nice to have dance partners and then you get each one get to choose based on certain characteristics and that's an efficient mechanism for adapting to the environment being successfully adapted to the environment it does look like there's an advantage in if you have males then the males can take higher variance and so there can be stronger selection among the males in terms of weeding out genetic mutations because the males have higher variance in their mating success sure okay question number two what percent of hello aliens evolved from land animals as opposed to plants or ocean slash air organisms by the way i did um recently see that there's uh only 10 of species on earth are in the ocean so there's a lot more variety on land there is it's it's interesting so why is that i don't even i can't even intuit exactly why that would be maybe survival on land is harder and so you get a lot of story that i understand is it's about small niches so speciation uh can be promoted by having multiple different species so in the ocean species are larger that is there are more creatures in each species because the ocean environments don't vary as much so if you're good in one place you're good in many other places but you know on land and especially in rivers rivers contain an enormous percentage of the kinds of species on land you see because they vary so much from place to place and so a species can be good in one place and then other species can't really compete because they came from a different place where things are different so um it's a remarkable fact actually that speciation promotes evolution in the long run that is more evolution has happened on land because there have been more species on land because each species has been smaller and that's actually a warning about something or something called rot that i've thought a lot about which is one of the problems with even a world government which is large systems of software today just consistently rot and decay with time and have to be replaced and that plausibly also is a problem for other large systems including biological systems legal systems regulatory systems and it seems like large species actually don't evolve as effectively as small ones do and that's an important thing to notice about that so and that's actually in dif that's different from ordinary sort of um evolution in economies on earth in the last few centuries say um you know on earth the more technical evolution and economic growth happens in larger integrated cities and nations but in biology it's the other way around more evolution happened in the fragmented species yeah it's such a nuanced discussion because you can also push back in terms of nations and at least companies it's like large companies seems to evolve less effectively there is something that you know they have more resources more um they don't even have better resilience when you look at the scale of decades and centuries it seems like a lot of large companies die but still large economies do better like large cities grow better than small cities large integrated economies like the united states or the european union do better than small fragmented ones so yeah sure it's it's that that's a very interesting long discussion but so most the people and obviously votes on twitter um represent the absolute uh objective truth of things so most but an interesting question about oceans is that okay remember i told you about how most planets would last for trillions of years yes and then be later right so people have tried to explain why life appeared on earth by saying oh all those planets are going to be unqualified for life because of various problems that is they're around smaller stars which last longer and smaller stars have some things like more solar flares maybe more tidal locking but almost all these problems with longer-lived planets aren't problems for ocean worlds and a large fraction of planets out there are ocean worlds so if life can appear on an ocean world then uh that pretty much ensures that these these planets that last a very long time could have advanced life because most you know there's a huge fraction of ocean worlds so that's actually an open question so when you say sorry when you say life appear you're kind of saying life and intelligent life so like uh so that's that's an open question is land and as i suppose the question behind the the twitter poll which is a grabby alien civilization that comes to say hello what's the chance that they first began their early steps the difficult steps they took on on land what do you think most 80 percent uh most people on twitter think it's very likely right what do you think i think people are discounting ocean worlds too much that as i think people tend to assume that whatever we did must be the only way it's possible and i think people aren't giving enough credit for other possible paths but dolphins water world by the way people criticize that movie i love that movie kevin costner can do me no wrong okay next question what percent of hello aliens once had a nuclear war with greater than 10 nukes fired in anger so not in incompetence as an accident intentional firing of nukes and less than 20 percent was the most popular vote it just seems wrong to me so like i i wonder what so most people think uh once you get nukes we're not gonna fire them they believe in the power i think they're assuming that if you had a nuclear war then that would just end civilization for good i think that's the thinking that's the main thing right and i think that's just wrong i think you could rise again after a nuclear war it might take ten thousand years or a hundred thousand years but it could rise again so what do you think about mutually sure destruction as a force to prevent people from firing nuclear weapons that's a question that's a new to a terrifying degree has been raised now and what's going on well i mean clearly it has had an effect the question is just how strong affect for how long i mean clearly we have not gone wild with nuclear war and clearly the the devastation that you would get if you initiated nuclear war is part of the reasons people have been reluctant to start a war the question is just how reliably will that ensure the absence of a war yeah the night is still young exactly this has been 70 years or whatever it's been uh i mean but what do you think do you think we'll see nuclear war in the yeah in this century i don't know in this century but that like it it's the sort of thing that's likely to happen eventually it's a very loose statement okay i understand now this is where i pull you out of your mathematical model and ask a human question do you think this this particular thing we've been lucky that it hasn't happened so far but what is the nature of nuclear war let's think about this there is uh dictators there's democracies uh miscommunication how do wars start world war one world war ii so so the biggest datum here is that we've had an enormous decline in major war over the last century so that has to be taken into account now so the problem is is war is a process that has a very long tail that is there are rare very large wars so the average war is much worse than the median war yes because of this long tail and that makes it hard to identify trends over time so the median war has clearly gone way down in the last century that a medium rate of war but it could be that's because the tail has gotten thicker and in fact the average war is just as bad but you know most wars are going to be big force we so that's the thing we're not so sure about there's no strong data on on um wars with one because of the destructive nature of the weapons kill hundreds of millions of people there's no data on this right so but we can start intuiting but we can see the power law we can do a power law fit to the rate of wars and it's a power law with a thick tail so it's one of those things that you should expect most of the damage to be in the few biggest ones so that's also true for pandemics and some a few other things for pandemics most of the damages and the few biggest ones so the median pandemic so far is less than the average that you should expect in the future but those that fitting of data is very questionable because uh yeah well everything you said is correct the question is like what can we infer about the future of civilization threatening pandemics or nuclear war from studying the history of the 20th century so like you can't just fit it to the data the rate of wars and the destructive nature like that's not that's not how nuclear war will happen nuclear war happens with two or idiots that have access to a button small wars happen that way too no i understand that but that's it's very important small wars aside it's very important to understand the dynamics the human dynamics and the geopolitics of the way nuclear war happens in order to predict how we can minimize the chance of uh but it is a common and useful intellectual strategy to take something that could be really big or but is often very small and fit the distribution of the data small things which you have a lot of them and then ask do i believe the big things are really that different right i see so sometimes it's reasonable to say like say with tornadoes or even pandemics or something the underlying process might not be that different but that's not possible it might not be there there is the fact that mutual short destruction seems to work to some degree shows you that to some degree it's different than the small wars uh that that so it's it's a really important question to understand is are humans capable one human like how many humans on earth if i give them a button now say you pressing this button will kill everyone on earth everyone right how many humans will press that button i want to know those numbers like day to day minute to minute how many people have that much irresponsibility evil uh incompetence ignorance whatever word you want to assign there's a lot of dynamics to the psychology that leads you to press that button but how many my intuition is the number the more destructive the that press of a button the fewer humans you find and that number gets very close to zero very quickly especially people have access to such a button but that's perhaps uh a hope than a reality and unfortunately we don't have good data on this um which is like how destructive are humans willing to be so i think part of this just has to think about asking what your time scales you're looking at right right so if you say if you look at the history of war you know we've had a lot of wars pretty consistently over many centuries so if i ask if you ask will we have a nuclear war in the next 50 years i might say well probably not if i say 500 or 5 000 years like if the same sort of risks are underlying and they just continue then you have to add that up over time and think the risk is getting a lot larger the longer a time scale we're looking at but okay let's generalize nuclear war because what i was more referring to is something that kills more than um 20 of humans on earth and injures or makes um makes the other 80 percent suffer horribly uh survive but suffer that's what i was referring to so when you look at 500 years from now that might not be nuclear war there might be something else right that's that kind of has that destructive effect and i don't know i it these feels like these feel like novel questions in the history of humanity i just don't know i think since nuclear weapons this has been you know engineering pandemics for example uh robotics so nanobots um [Music] here's how i it seems like a real new possibility that we have to contend with it we don't have good models or from from my perspective so if you look on say the last thousand years or ten thousand years we could say we've seen a certain rate at which people are willing to make big destruction in terms of war yes okay and if you're willing to project that data forward that i think like if you want to ask over periods of thousands or tens of thousands of years you would have a reasonable data set so the key question is what's changed lately yes okay and so a big question of which i've given a lot of thought to what are the major changes that seem to have happened in culture and human attitudes over the last few centuries and what's our best explanation for those so that we can project them forward into the future and i have a story about that which is the story that we have been drifting back toward forager attitudes in the last few centuries as we get rich so the idea is we spent a million years being a forager and that was a very sort of standard lifestyle that we know a lot about foragers sort of live in small bands they make decisions cooperatively they share food they you know um they don't have much property et cetera and humans like that and then 10 000 years ago farming became possible but it was only possible because we were plastic enough to really change our culture farming styles and cultures are very different they have slavery they have war they have property they have inequality they have kings they they stay in one place instead of wandering they they don't have as much diversity of of experience or food they have more disease this farming life is just very different but humans were able to sort of introduce conformity and religion and all sorts of things to become just a very different kind of creature as farmers farmers are just really different than foragers in terms of their values and their lives but the pressures that made foragers into farmers were part mediated by poverty farmers are poor and if they deviated from the farming norms that every people around them supported they were quite at risk of starving to death um and then in the last few centuries we've gotten rich and as we've gotten rich the social pressures that turned foragers and farmers have become less less persuasive to us so for example a farming young woman who was told if you have a child out of wedlock you and your child may starve that was a credible threat she would see actual examples around her to make that a believable threat today if you say to a young woman you shouldn't have a child out of wedlock she will see other young women around her doing okay that way we're all rich enough to be able to afford that sort of thing and therefore she's more inclined often to go with her inclinations or sort of more natural inclinations about such things rather than to be pressured to follow the official farming norms of that you shouldn't do that sort of thing and all through our lives we have been drifting back toward forager attitudes because we've been getting rich and so aside from at work which is an exception but elsewhere i think this explains trends toward less slavery more democracy less religion less fertility more promiscuity more travel more art more leisure uh fewer work hours all these trends are basically explained by becoming more forager-like and much science fiction celebrates the star trek or the culture novels people like this image that we are moving toward this world we're basically like foragers we're peaceful we share we make decisions collectively we have a lot of free time we are into art so forger you know forger is a word and it has it's a loaded word because it's connected to the actual what life was actually like at that time as you mentioned we sometimes don't do a good job of telling accurately what life was like back then but you're saying if it's not exactly like forge as it rhymes in some fundamental way right you also said peaceful is it obvious that a forger with the nuclear weapon uh would be peaceful i don't know if that's 100 obvious so we know again we know a fair bit about what foragers lives were like the main sort of violence they had would be sexual jealousy they were relatively promiscuous and so there'd be a lot of jealousy but they did not have organized wars with each other that is they were at peace with their neighboring forager bands they didn't have property in land or even in people they didn't really have marriage um and so they were in fact peaceful and that's when you think about large-scale wars they don't start learning they didn't have coordinated large-scale wars in the ways chimpanzees do chimpanzees do have wars between one tribe of chimpanzees and others but human foragers did not farmers return to that of course the more chimpanzee-like styles well that's a hopeful message if we could return real quick to uh to the hello aliens uh twitter thread one of them is really interesting about language what percent of hello aliens would be able to talk to us in our language this is the question of communication it actually gets the nature of language it also gets to the nature of how advanced you expect them to be so i think some people see that like we have advanced over the last thousands of years and we aren't reaching any sort of limit and so they tend to assume it could go on forever and i actually tend to think that within say 10 million years we will sort of max out on technology we'll sort of learn everything that's feasible to know for the most part and then you know obstacles to understanding would more be about like sort of cultural differences like ways in which different places had just chosen to do things differently and so then the question is is it even possible to communicate across some cultural difference distances and i might think yeah i could imagine some maybe advanced aliens who just become so weird and different from each other they can't communicate with each other but we're probably pretty simple compared to them so i would think sure if they wanted to they could communicate with us so it's the simplicity of the recipient see i i tend to uh just to push back let's let's explore the possibility where that's not the case can we communicate with ants i find that um like this idea that we're not very good at communicating in general oh you're saying all right i see you're saying once you get orders of magnitude better at communicating once they had maxed out on all you know communication technology in general and they just understood in general how to communicate with lots of things and had done that for millions of years but you have to be able to this is so interesting it's somebody who cares a lot about empathy and imagining how other people feel um it's communication requires empathy meaning you have to truly understand how the other person the other organism sees the world it's like a a four-dimensional species talking a two-dimensional species it's not as trivial as to me at least as it might at first seem so let me reverse my position a little because i'll say well the whole hello aliens question really uh combines two different scenarios that uh we're slipping over so one scenario would be that the hello aliens would be like grabby aliens they would be just fully advanced they would have been expanding for millions of years they would have a very advanced civilization and then they would finally be arriving here you know after a billion years perhaps of expanding in which case they're going to be crazy advanced at some at maximal level but the holo aliens about aliens we might meet soon which might be sort of ufo aliens and ufo aliens probably are not grabby aliens how do you get here if you're not a grab alien well they would have to be able to travel oh but so they would not be expansive so for the road it doesn't count as grabby so we're talking about expanding the colony the comfortable colony so the question is if ufos some of them are aliens what kind of aliens would they be this is sort of the key question you have to ask in order to try to interpret that scenario the key fact we would know is that they are here right now but the universe around us is not full of an alien civilization so that says right off the bat that they chose not to allow massive expansion of a gravity civilization is it possible that they're they chose it but we just don't see them yet these are the stragglers the journeymen so the timing coincidence is it's almost surely if they are here now they are much older than us they are many millions of years older than us and so they could have filled the galaxy in that last millions of years if they had wanted to that is isn't it they couldn't just be right at the edge very unlikely that most likely they would have been around waiting for us for a long time they could have come here anytime in the last millions of years and they just chosen they've been waiting around for this or they just chose to come recently but the the timing coins it would be crazy unlikely that they just happened to be able to get here say in the last hundred years uh they would no doubt have been able to get here far earlier than that again we don't know so this is reference like ufo sightings on earth we don't know if this kind of increase in sightings have anything to do with action i'm just talking about like the timing like they're they're they arose at some point in space time yes right and it's very unlikely that that was just to the point that they could just barely get here recently almost surely yeah they would they might they could have gotten here much earlier and well throughout the stretch of several billion years that earth existed they could have been here often exactly so they could have therefore filled the galaxy long time ago let's push back on that that's what the question to me is isn't it possible that the expansion of a civilization is much harder than the the travel the sphere of the reachable is different than the sphere of the colonized so isn't it possible that the sphere of places where like the stragglers go the different people that journey out the explorers is much much larger and grows much faster than the civilization so in which case like they would visit us there's a lot of visitors the grad students of the civilization they're like exploring they're collecting the data but they're we're not yet going to see them and by yet i mean across millions of years the the time delay between when the first thing might arrive and then when colonists could arrive in mass and do a mass amount of work is cosmologically short you know in human history of course sure there might be a century between that but a century is just a tiny amount of time on the scales we're talking about so this is a in computer science and colony optimization it's true for ants so it's like when the first ant shows up it's likely and if there's anything of value it's likely the other ants will follow quickly yeah relatively short it's also true that traveling over very long distances probably one of the main ways to make that feasible is that you land somewhere you colonize a bit you create new resources and then allow you to go farther many short hops as opposed to long exactly those hops require that you are able to start a colonization of sorts along those hops right you have to be able to stop somewhere make it into a way station such that you can then support you moving farther so what do you think of there's been a lot of ufo sightings uh what do you think about those ufo sightings and what do you think if any of them are of extraterrestrial origin and we don't see giant civilizations out in the sky how do you make sense of that then i want to do some clearing of throats which people like to do on this topic right they want to make sure you understand they're saying this and not that right so i would say the analysis needs both a prior and a likelihood so the prior is what are the scenarios that are at all plausible in terms of what we know about the universe and then the likelihood is the particular actual sightings like how hard are those to explain through various means i will establish myself as somewhat of an expert on the prior i would say my studies and things i've studied make me an expert and i should stand up and have an opinion on that and explain be able to explain it the likelihood however is not my area of expertise that is i'm not a you know pilot i don't do atmospheric studies of things i haven't studied in detail the various kinds of atmospheric phenomena or whatever that might be used to explain the particular sightings i can just say from my amateur stance the sightings look damn puzzling they do not look easy to dismiss the attempts i've seen to easily dismiss them seem to me to fail it seems like these are pretty puzzling weird stuff that deserve an expert's attention so the in terms of considering asking what the likelihood is so analogy i would make is a murder trial okay on average if we say what's the chance any one person murdered another person as a prior probability maybe one in a thousand people get murdered maybe each person has a thousand people around them who could plausibly have done it so the prior probability of a murder is one in a million but we allow murder trials because often evidence is sufficient to overcome a one in a million prior because the evidence is often strong enough right my guess rough guess for the ufos as aliens scenarios some of them is the prior is roughly one in a thousand much higher than the usual murder trial plenty high enough that strong physical evidence could put you over the top to think it's more likely than not but i'm not an expert on that physical evidence i'm going to leave that part to someone else i'm going to say the prior is pretty high this isn't a crazy scenario so then i can elaborate on where my prior comes from what scenario could make most sense of this data my scenario to make sense has two main parts first is panspermia siblings so panspermia is the pros hypothesis process by which life might have arrived on earth from elsewhere and a plausible time for that i mean it would have to happen very early in earth history because we see life early in his history and a plausible time could have been during this stellar nursery where the sun was born with many other stars in the same close proximity with lots of rocks flying around able to move things from one place to another pans if a you know rock with life on it from some rock with planet with life came into that stellar nursery it plausibly could have seeded many planets in that stellar nursery all at the same time they're all born at the same time in the same place pretty close to each other lots of rocks flying around okay so a panspermia scenario would then create siblings i.e there would be say a few thousand other planets out there so after the nursery forms it drifts it separates they drift apart and so out there in the galaxy there would now be a bunch of other stars all formed at the same time and we can actually spot them in terms of their spectrum and they would have um then started on the same path of life as we did with that life being seeded but they would move at different rates and most likely most of them would never you know reach an advanced level before the deadline but maybe one other did and maybe it did before us so if they did they could know all this and they could go searching for their siblings that is they could look in the sky for the other stars with the mass the spectrum that matches this the spectrum that came from this nursery they could identify their sibling stars in the galaxy the thousand of them and those would be of special interest to them because they would think well life might be on those and they could go looking for them can we just such a brilliant mathematical philosophical uh physical biological idea of um panspermia siblings because we all kind of started a similar time in this local pocket right of the universe and so that changes a lot of the math and so that would create this correlation between when advanced life might appear no longer just random independent spaces in space time there would be this cluster perhaps and that allows interaction between the elements of the cluster yes non-grabby alien civilizations like kind of primitive alien civilizations like us with others and they might be a little bit ahead that's so fascinating they would probably be a lot ahead so the puzzle is sure sure if if if they you know they happen before us they probably happen hundreds of millions of years before us but less than a billion less than a billion but still plenty of time that they could have become grabby and filled filled the galaxy and gone and beyond so there'd be plenty so the the fact is they chose not to become grabby that would have to be the interpretation if we have pants permanently in time to become grabby you said so yes they should be playing and they chose not to are we sure about this so again a hundred million years is enough 100 million so i told you before that i said within 10 million years our descendants will become grabby or not and they'll have that choice okay right and so they clearly more than 10 million years earlier than us so they chose not to but still go on vacation look around so it's not grabby if they chose not to expand that part that's going to have to be a rule they set to not allow any part of themselves to do it like if they let any little ship fly away with the ability to create a colony the game's over then they have prevented then the world the universe becomes grabby from their origin with this one colony right so in order to prevent their civilization being grabby they have to have a rule they enforce pretty strongly that no part of them can ever try to do that through a global authoritarian regime or through something that's internal to that meaning it's part of the nature of life that it doesn't want as like an advanced political officer in the brain or whatever yes there's something in human nature that prevents you from what or like like alien nature right that as you get more advanced you become lazier and lazier in terms of exploration and expansion so i would say they would have to have enforced a rule against expanding and that rule would probably make them reluctant to let people leave very far that you know any one vacation trip far away could risk an expansion from the six vacation trip so they would probably have a pretty tight lid on just allowing any travel out from their origin in order to enforce this rule but then we also know well they would have chosen to come here so clearly they made an exception from their general rule to say okay but an expedition to earth that should be allowed it could be intentional exception or incompetent exception but if incompetent then they couldn't maintain this over 100 million years this policy of not allowing any expansion so we have to see they have successfully they not just had a policy to try they succeeded over 100 million years in preventing the expansion that's a substantial competence let me think about this so you don't think there could be a barrier in 100 million years you don't think there could be a barrier to like technological barrier to becoming expansionary imagine the europeans that tried to prevent anybody from leaving europe to go to the new world and imagine how what it would have taken to make that happen over 100 million years yeah it's impossible they would had to have very strict you know guards at the borders saying no you can't go well but just just to clarify you're not suggesting that's actually possible i am suggesting it's possible i i don't know how you keep my silly human brain maybe it's a brain that values freedom but i don't know how you can keep no matter how much force no matter how much censorship or control or so on i just don't uh know how you can keep people from exploring into the mysterious into the end you're thinking of people we're talking aliens so remember there's a vast space of different possible social creatures they could have evolved from different cultures they could be in different kinds of threats i mean there are many things as you talked about that most of us would feel very reluctant to do yes this isn't one of those but okay so how if the ufo sightings represent alien visitors how the heck are they getting here under the transparent siblings so panspermia siblings is one part of the scenario which is that's where they came from and from that we can conclude they had this rule against expansion and they've successfully enforced that that also creates a plausible agenda for why they would be here that is to enforce that rule on us that is if we go out and expanding then we have defeated the purpose of this rule they set up interesting right so they would be here to convince us to not expand convincing quotes right through various mechanisms so obviously one thing we conclude is they didn't just destroy us that would have been completely possible right so the fact that they're here and we are not destroyed means that they chose not to destroy us they have some degree of empathy or you know whatever their morals are that would make them reluctant to just destroy us they would rather persuade us for their brethren and so they may have been there's a difference between arrival and observation they may have been observing for a very long time exactly and they arrive to try to not to try i don't think to ensure try to ensure that we don't become grabby which is because that's we can see they they did not they must have been forced to rule against that and they are therefore here to that's a plausible interpretation why they would risk this expedition when they clearly don't risk very many expeditions over this long period to allow this one exception because otherwise if they don't we may become grabby and they could have just destroyed us but they didn't and they're closely monitoring the technological advancing of civilization like what nuclear weapons is one thing's like all right cool that might have less to do with nuclear weapons and more with nuclear energy maybe they're monitoring fusion closely like how clever are these apes so no doubt they have a button that if we get too uppity or risky they can push the button and ensure that we don't expand but they'd rather do it some other way so now that's that explains why they're here and why they aren't out there there's another thing that we need to explain there's another key data we need to explain about ufos if we're going to have a hypothesis that explains them and this is something many people have noticed which is they they had two two extreme options they could have chosen and didn't chose they could have either just remained completely invisible clearly an advanced civilization could have been completely invisible there's no reason they need to fly around and be noticed they could just be in orbit and in dark satellites that are completely invisible to us watching whatever they want to watch that would be well within their abilities that's one thing they could have done the other thing they could do is just show up and you know land on the white house lawn as they say and shake hands like make themselves really obvious they could have done either of those and they didn't do either of those that's the next thing you need to explain about ufos azaleas why would they take this intermediate approach hanging out near the edge of visibility with somewhat impressive mechanisms but not walking up and introducing themselves nor just being completely invisible so okay a lot of questions there so one so one do you think it's obvious where the white house is or the white house law obvious where there are concentrations of humans that you could go up and into but it's human it's the most interesting thing yeah about earth yeah are you sure about this because if they're worried about an you know an expansion then it would be worried about a civilization that we could be capable of can pension obviously humans are the civilization on earth that's by far the closest to being able to expand i just don't know if aliens obviously see obviously see humans like the individual humans like the organ of the the meat vehicles as the center of focus for observing a life on a planet they're supposed to be really smart and advanced like this shouldn't be that hard for that but i think we're actually the dumb ones because we think humans are the important things but it could be our ideas it could be something about our technologies mediated with us that's correlated with it now we make it seem like it's mediated by us humans but the focus for alien civilizations might be the ai systems or the technologies themselves that might be the organism like what humans are like uh okay human is the food the the source of the organism that's under observation versus like so like the what they wanted to have close contact with was something that was closely near humans then they would be contacting those and we would just incidentally see but we would still see but don't you think they is isn't it possible taking their perspective isn't it possible that they would want to interact with some fundamental aspect that they're interested in without interfering with it and and that's actually a very no matter how fast you are it's very difficult to do but that's puzzling so i mean the you know the prototypical ufo observation is a shiny big object in the sky that has very rapid acceleration and no apparent you know surfaces for using air to to manipulate at speed um you know and the question is why that right again if if they just for example if they just wanted to talk to our computer systems they could like move some sort of like a little probe that like connects to a wire and like reads the reads and sends bits there they don't need a shiny thing flying in the sky but i don't you think they would be there they are would be looking for the right way to communicate the right language to communicate everything you just said looking at the computer systems i mean that's not a trivial thing coming up with a signal that us humans would not freak out too much about but also understand might not be that trivial freak out apart is an another interesting constraint so again i said like the two obvious strategies are just to remain completely invisible and watch which would be quite feasible or to just directly interact let's come out and be really very direct right i mean there's big things that you can see around there's big cities there's aircraft carriers there's there's lots of if you want to just find a big thing and come right up to it and like tap it on the shoulder or whatever that would be quite feasible and they're not doing that so my hypothesis is that one of the other questions there was do they have a status hierarchy and might i think most animals on earth who are social animals have status hierarchy and they would reasonably presume that we have a status hierarchy and take me to your leader well i would say their strategy is to be impressive and sort of get us to see them at the top of our status hierarchy just to just to you know that's how for example we domesticate dogs right we convince dogs we're the leader of their pack right and we domesticate many animals that way but as we we just swap into the top of their status hierarchy and we say we're your top status animals so you should do what we say you should follow our lead so the idea that would be they are going to get us to do what they want by being top status you know all through history kings and emperors etcetera have tried to impress their citizens and other people by having the bigger palace the bigger parade the bigger crown and diamonds right whatever maybe building a bigger pyramid et cetera just it's a very well established trend to just be high status by being more impressive than the rest to push back when there's an order of uh several orders of magnitude of power differential asymmetry of power i feel like that status hierarchy no longer applies it's like memetic theory it's like most emperors are several orders of magnitude more powerful than anyone okay a member of their empire uh let's increase that by even more so like if i'm interacting with ants right i no longer feel like i need to establish my power with ants i actually want to lessen i i want to lower myself to the ants i want to become the lowest possible and so that they would welcome me so i'm less concerned about them worshipping me i'm more concerned about them welcoming me into it it is important that you be non-threatening and that you be local so i think for example if the aliens had done something really big in the sky you know 100 light years away that would be there not here yes and that could seem threatening so i think their strategy to be the high status would have to be to be visible but be here and non-threatening i just don't know if it's obvious how to do that like take your own perspective if you see a planet with with relatively intelligent like complex structures being formed like uh yeah life forms you could see this under in titan or something like that the moon you know right europa you start to see not just primitive bacterial life but multicellular life and it seems to form some very complicated cellular uh colonies structures that they're they're dynamic there's a lot of stuff going on some some giant gigantic cellular automata type of construct how do you make yourself known to them in an impressive fashion without destroying it like we know how to destroy potentially right so so if you go touch stuff you're likely to hurt it right there's a good risk of hurting something by touch getting too close and touching it and interacting right yeah like landing on a white house lawn right so the claim is that their current strategy of hanging out at the periphery of our vision and just being very clearly physically impressive with very clear physically impressive abilities is at least a plausible strategy they might use to impress us and convince us sort of we're at the top of their status hierarchy and i would say if they if they came closer not only would they risk hurting us in ways that they couldn't really understand but more plausibly they would reveal things about themselves we would hate so if you look at how we treat other civilizations on earth and other people we are generally you know interested in foreigners and people from other plant lands and we were generally interested in their varying cult customs et cetera until we find out that they do something that violates our moral norms and then we hate them and these are aliens for god's sakes right there's just going to be something about them that we hate they eat babies who knows what it is but something they don't think is offensive but that they think we might find and so they they would be risking a lot by revealing a lot about themselves we would find something we hated interesting but do you uh resonate at all with memetic theory where like we only feel this way about things that are very close to us so aliens are sufficiently different to where we'll be like fascinated terrified or fascinated but not like right but if they want to be at the top of our status hierarchy to get us to follow them they can't be too distant they have to be close enough that we would see them that way but pretend to be close enough right right and not reveal much that mystery that old clintus would right cowboy let me see we're clever enough that we can figure out their agenda that is just from the fact that we're here if we see that they're here we can figure out oh they want us not to expand and look they are this huge power and they're very impressive so and a lot of us don't want to expand so that could easily tip us over the edge toward we we already wanted to not expand we already wanted to be able to regulate and have a central community and here are these very advanced smart aliens who have survived for 100 million years and they're telling us not to expand either this is brilliant i love this so much uh the the so returning to panspermia siblings just to clarify one thing in that framework how would who originated who planted it would it be a grabby alien civilization that planted the siblings or no the simple scenario is that life started on some other planet billions of years ago yes and it went through part of the stages of evolution to advance life but not all the way to advanced life and then some rock hit it grabbed a piece of it on the rock and that rock drifted for maybe in a million years until it happened upon the stellar nursery where it then seeded many stars and something about that life without being super advanced it was nevertheless resilient to the harsh conditions of space there's some graphs that i've been impressed by that show sort of the level of genetic information in various kinds of life on the history of earth and basically we are now more complex than the earlier life but the earlier life was still pretty damn complex and so if you actually you know project this log graph in history it looks like it was many billions of years ago when you get down to zero so like plausibly you could say there was just a lot of evolution that had to happen before you to get to the simplest life we've ever seen in history of life on earth was still pretty damn complicated okay and so that race that's always been this puzzle how could life get to this enormously complicated level in the short period it seems to at the beginning of earth history so where you know it's only 300 million years at most it appeared and then it was really complicated at that point so panspermia allows you to explain that complexity by saying well it spent another five billion years on another planet going through lots of earlier stages where it was working its way up to the level of complexity you see at the beginning of earth we'll try to talk about other ideas of the origin of life but let me return to ufo sightings is there other explanations that are possible outside of panspermia siblings that can explain no grabby aliens in the sky and yet alien arrival on earth well the other categories of explanations that most people will use is well first of all just mistakes like you know you're you're confusing something ordinary for something mysterious right or some sort of secret organization like our government is secretly messing with us and trying to do a you know a false flag up or whatever right you know they're trying to convince the russians or the chinese that there might be aliens and scare them into not attacking or something right because if you you know the history of world war ii say the u.s government did all these big fake operations where they were faking a lot of big things in order to mess with people so that's a possibility the government's been lying and you know faking things and paying people to lie about what they saw etc that that's a plausible set of explanations for the range of sightings seen and another explanation people offers some other hidden organization on earth there's some you know secret organization somewhere that has much more advanced capabilities than anybody's given it credit for for some reason it's been keeping secret i mean they all sound somewhat implausible but again we're looking for maybe you know one in a thousand sort of priors the question is you know could could they be in that level of plausibility can we just linger on this so you first of all you've written talked about thought about so many different topics you're an incredible mind and i just thank you for sitting down today i'm almost like at a loss of which place we explore but let me on this topic ask about conspiracy theories because you've written about institutions on authorities what um this is a bit of a therapy session but uh what do we make of conspiracy theories the phrase itself is pushing you in a direction right so so clearly in history there we've had many large coordinated keepings of secrets right say the manhattan project right and there was a lot of hundreds of thousands of people working on that over many years but they they kept it a secret right clearly many large military operations have kept things secrets over you know even decades with many thousands of people involved so clearly it's possible to keep something secret over time periods um you know but the more people you involve and the more time you're assuming and the more the less centralized an organization or the less discipline they have the harder it gets to believe but we're just trying to calibrate basically in our minds which kind of secrets can be kept by which groups over what time periods for what purposes right but let me uh i don't have enough data so i'm somebody i you know i hang out with people and i love people i love all things really and i just i think that most people even the  have the capacity to be good and they're beautiful and i enjoy them so the kind of data my brain whatever the chemistry of my brain is that sees the beautiful and things is maybe collecting a subset of data that doesn't allow me to intuit the competence that humans are able to uh to uh achieve in uh constructing a conspiracy theory so for example one one thing that people often talk about is like intelligence agencies this like broad thing they say the cia the fsb the different the british intelligence i've uh fortunate or unfortunate enough never gotten the chance that i know of to talk to any member of those intelligence agencies uh nor like uh take a peek behind the curtain or the first curtain i don't know how many levels of curtains there are and so i don't i can't intuit my interactions with government i uh was funded by dod and darpa and i've interacted uh been to the pentagon like with all due respect to my friends lovely friends in government and there are a lot of incredible people but there is a very giant bureaucracy that sometimes suffocates the ingenuity of the human spirit is one way i can put it meaning they are i just it's difficult for me to imagine extreme competence at a scale of hundreds or thousands of human beings now that doesn't mean that's my very anecdotal data of the situation and so i try to build up my intuition about centralized system of government how much conspiracy is possible how much the intelligence agencies or some other source can generate sufficiently robust propaganda that controls the populace if you look at world war ii as you mentioned there have been extremely powerful propaganda machines on nazi on the side of nazi germany on the side of the soviet union on the side of the united states and all these different uh mechanisms sometimes they control the free press through social pressures sometimes they control the press through the threat of violence you know as you do in authoritarian regimes sometimes it's like deliberately the dictator like writing the news the headlines and literally announcing it and uh something about human psychology forces you to uh to embrace the narrative and believe the narrative and at scale that becomes reality when the initial spark was just a propaganda thought in a single individual's mind so i don't i can't necessarily intuit of what's possible but i'm skeptical of the power of human institutions to construct uh conspiracy theories that cause suffering at scale especially in this modern age when information is becoming more and more accessible by the populace anyway that's i don't know if you can uh suffer at scale but of course say during wartime the people who are managing the various conspiracies like d-day or manhattan projects they thought that their conspiracy was avoiding harm rather than causing harm so if you can get a lot of people to think that supporting the comparison conspiracy is helpful then a lot more might do that and there's just a lot of things that people just don't want to see so if you can make your conspiracy the sort of thing that people wouldn't want to talk about anyway even if they knew about it you're you know most of the way there so i have learned many over the years many things that most ordinary people should be interested in but somehow don't know even though the data has been very widespread so you know i have this book the elephant in the brain and one of the chapters is there on medicine and basically most people seem ignorant of the very basic fact that when we do randomized trials where we give some people more medicine than others the people who get more medicine are not healthier just overall in general just like induce somebody to get more medicine because you just give them more budget to buy medicine say not not a specific medicine just the whole category and you would think that would be something most people should know about medicine you might even think that would be a conspiracy theory to think that would be hidden but in fact most people never learn that fact so just to clarify just a general high level statement the more medicine you take the less healthy you are randomized experiments don't find that fact do not find that more medicine makes you more healthy yeah they're just no connection oh in randomized experiments there's no relationship between more medicine so it's not a negative relationship but it's just no relationship right and uh so the the the conspiracy theory is b would say that the businesses that sell you medicine don't want you to know that fact and then you're saying that there's also part of this is that people just don't want to know they just don't want to know and so they don't learn this so you know i've lived in the washington area for several decades now reading the washington post regularly every week there was a special you know section on health and medicine it never was mentioned in that section of the paper in all the 20 years i read that so do you think there is some truth to this caricatured blue pill red pill where most people don't want to know the truth no there are many things about which people don't want to know certain kinds of truths yeah that is bad looking truths truths that discouraging truths that sort of take away the justification for things they feel passionate about do you think that's a bad aspect of human nature that's something we should try to overcome um well as we discussed my first priority is to just tell people about it to do the analysis and the cold facts of what's actually happening and then to try to be careful about how we can improve so our book the elephant in the brain co-authored with kevin simler is about how we hidden motives in everyday life and our first priority there is just to explain to you what are the things that you are not looking at that you have reluctant to look at and many people try to take that book as a self-help book where they're trying to improve themselves and and make sure they look at more things and that often goes badly because it's harder to actually do that than you think yeah and so but we at least want you to know that that this truth is available if you want to learn about it it's the nietzsche if you gaze long to the abyss the abyss gazes into you let's talk about this elephant in the brain uh amazing book the elephant in the room is quote an important issue that people are reluctant to acknowledge or address a social taboo the elephant in the brain is an important but unacknowledged feature of how our mind works and introspective taboo you describe selfishness and self-deception as uh the core or some of the core elephants some of the elephants elephant offspring in the brain selfishness and self-deception all right can you explain can you explain why these are um the taboos in our brain that we uh don't want to acknowledge your conscious mind the one that's listening to me that i'm talking to at the moment allegedly you like to think of yourself as the president or king of your mind ruling over all that you see issuing commands that immediately obeyed yes you are instead better understood as the press secretary of your brain you don't make decisions you justify them to an audience that's what your conscious mind is for you watch what you're doing and you try to come up with stories that explain what you're doing so that you can avoid accusations of violating norms so humans compared to most other animals have norms and this allows us to manage larger groups with our morals and norms about what we should or shouldn't be doing this is so important to us that we needed to be constantly watching what we were doing in order to make sure we had a good story to avoid norm violation so many norms are about motives so if i hit you on purpose that's a big violation of hit you accidentally that's okay i need to be able to explain why it was an accident and not on purpose so where's that need come from for your own self-preservation right so humans have norms and we have the norm that if we see anybody violating a norm we need to tell other people and then coordinate to to just make them stop and punish them for for violating so such benefits are strong enough and severe enough that we each want to avoid being successfully accused of violating norms so for example hitting someone on purpose is a big clear norm violation if we do it consistently we may be thrown out of the group and that would mean we would die that's right okay so we need to be able to convince people we are not going around hitting people on purpose if somebody happens to be at the other end of our fist and their face connects that was an accident and we need to be able to explain that and similarly for many other norms humans have uh we are serious about these norms and we don't want people to violate them we find them violating we're going to accuse them but many norms have a motive component and so we are trying to explain ourselves and make sure we have a good motive story about everything we do which is why we're constantly trying to explain what we're doing and that's what your conscious mind is doing it is trying to make sure you've got a good motive story for everything you're doing and that's why you don't know why you really do things what you know is what the good story is about why you've been doing things and that's the self-deception and you're saying that there's a machine the actual dictator is selfish and then you're just the press secretary who's desperately doesn't want to get fired and it's justifying all of all the decisions of the dictator and that's the self-deception right now most people actually are willing to believe that this is true in the abstract so our book has been classified as psychology and it was reviewed by psychologists and the basic way that psychology referees and reviewers responded to say this is well known most people accept that there's a fair bit of self-deception but they don't want to accept it about themselves directly they don't want to accept it about the particular topics that we talk about so people accept the idea in the abstract that they might be self-deceived or that they might not be honest about various things but that hasn't penetrated into the literatures where people are explaining particular things like why we go to school why we go to the doctor why we vote etc so our book is mainly about ten areas of life and explaining about in each area what our actual motives there are and you know people who study those things have not admitted that hidden motives are explaining those particular areas they haven't taken the leap from theoretical psychology to actual public policy exactly and economics and all that kind of stuff let me just linger on this uh and uh bring up my old friends zingman freud and carl young so how vast is this landscape of the unconscious mind the power and the scope of the dictator is uh is it only dark there is it uh some light is there some love the vast majority of what's happening in your head you are unaware of so in a literal sense the unconscious the aspects of your mind that you're not conscious of is the overwhelming majority but but that's just true in a literal engineering sense your mind is doing lots of low-level things and you just can't be consciously aware of all that low-level stuff but there's plenty of room there for lots of things you're not aware of but can we try to shine a light at the things we're unaware of specifically now again staying with the philosophical psychology side for a moment you know can you shine the light in the jungian shadow can you what what's going on there what is this machine like like what what level of thoughts are happening there is it uh something that could we can even interpret if we somehow could visualize it is it something that's human interpretable or is it just a kind of chaos of like monitoring different systems in the body making sure you're happy making sure you're um fed all those kind of basic forces that form abstractions on top of each other and they're not introspective at all we humans are social creatures plausibly being social is the main reason we have these unusually large brains therefore most of our brain is devoted to being social and so the things we're very obsessed with and constantly paying attention to are how do i look to others what would others think of me if they knew these various things they might learn about me so that's close to being fundamental to what it means to be human is caring what others think right to to be trying to present a story that would be okay for what other things but we're very constantly thinking what do other people think so let me ask you this question then about you robin hansen who many places sometimes for fun sometimes as a basic statement of principle likes to disagree with with what the majority of people think so how do you explain um how are you self-deceiving yourself in this task and how are you being self how's your like why is the dictator manipulating you inside your head to be so critical like there's norms why do you want to stand out in this way why do you want to challenge the norms in this way almost by definition i can't tell you what i'm deceiving myself about but the more practical strategy that's quite feasible is to ask about what are typical things that most people decease themselves about and then to own up to those particular things sure what's what what's a good one so for example i can very much acknowledge that i would like to be well thought of yes that i would be seeking uh attention and glory and uh praise yes from my intellectual work and that that would be a major agenda driving my intellectual attempts so you know if there were topics that other people would find less interesting i might be less interested in those for that reason for example i might want to find topics whether people are interested and i might want to go for the glory of finding a big insight rather than a small one and maybe one that was especially surprising that's also of course consistent with some more ideal concept of what an intellectual should be but most intellectuals are relatively risk-averse they are in some local intellectual tradition and they are adding to that and they are staying conforming to the sort of usual assumptions and usual accepted beliefs and practices of a particular area so that they can be accepted in that area and you know treat it as part of the community um but you might think for the purpose of the larger intellectual project of understanding the world better people should be less eager to just add a little bit to some tradition and they should be looking for what's neglected between the major traditions and major questions they should be looking for assumptions maybe we're making that are wrong they should be looking at ways things that are very surprising like things that would be you would have thought a priori unlikely that once you are convinced of it you find that to be very important and and a big update right so um you could say that um one motivation i might have is less motivated to be sort of comfortably accepted into some particular intellectual community and more willing to just go for these more fundamental long shots that should be very important if you could find them which would if so if you can find them would get you appreciated uh respect across a larger number of people across the longer time span of history right so like maybe the the small local community will say you suck right you must conform but the larger community will see the brilliance of you breaking out of the cage of the small conformity into a larger cage it's always a bigger there's always a bigger page and then you'll be remembered by more yeah um also that explains your choice of colorful shirt that looks great in a black background so you definitely stand out right are now of course you know you could say well you could get all this attention by making false claims of dramatic improvement sure and then wouldn't that be much easier than actually working through all the details why not to make true claims let me ask the press secretary why not why so of course you spoke several times about how much you value truth and the pursuit of truth that's a very nice narrative right hitler and stalin also talked about the value of truth do you worry when you introspect as broadly as all humans might that it becomes a drug this uh being a martyr point being the person who points out that the emperor wears no clothes even when the emperor is obviously dressed just to be the person who points out that the emperor is wearing no clothes do you think about that so i think the standards you hold yourself to are dependent on the audience you have in mind so if you think of your audience as relatively easily fooled or relatively gullible then you won't bother to generate more complicated deep you know arguments and structures and evidence to persuade somebody who has higher standards because why bother you you can get away with something much easier and of course if you are say a salesperson uh you know you make money on sales then you don't need to convince the top few percent of the most sharp customers you can just go for the bottom 60 of the most gullible customers and make plenty of sales right so i think um intellectuals have to vary one of the main ways intellectuals varies in who is their audience in their mind who are they trying to impress is it the people down the hall is it the people who are reading their twitter feed is it their parents is it their high school teacher right or is it einstein and freud and socrates right so i think those of us who are especially arrogant especially think that we're really big shot or have a chance at being a really big shot we were naturally going to pick the big shot audience that we can we're going to be in trying to impress socrates in einstein is that why you hang out with tyler conan and try sure i mean try to and you might think you know from the point of view of just making money or having sex or other sorts of things this is misdirected energy right right trying to impress the very most highest quality minds that's such a small sample and they can't do that much for you anyway yeah so i might well have had more you know ordinary success in life be more popular invited to more priorities make more money if i had targeted a lower set tier intellectuals with the standards they have but for some reason i decided early on that einstein was my audience or people like him and i was going to impress them yeah i mean you you pick your set of motivations uh you know convincing and pressing tyler cohen is not gonna help you get laid trust me i tried all right uh what are some notable um sort of effects of the elephant in the brain in everyday life so you mentioned when we try to apply that to economics to public policy so when we think about medicine education all those kinds of things so what are some things that well the key thing is medicine is much less useful health-wise than you think so you know if you're focused on your health you would care a lot less about it and if you were focused on other people's health you would also care a lot less about it but if medicine is as we suggest more about showing that you care and let other people showing that they care about you then a lot of priority on medicine can make sense so that was our very earliest discussion in the podcast you were talking about what do you know should you give people a lot of medicine when it's not very effective and then the answer then is well if that's the way that you show that you care about them and you really want them to know you care then maybe that's what you need to do if you can't find a cheaper more effective substitute so if we actually just pause on that for a little bit how do we start to untangle the full set of self-deception happening in the space of medicine so we have a method that we use in our book that is what i recommend for people to use and all these sorts of topics the straightforward method is first don't look at yourself look at other people look at broad patterns of behavior in other people and then ask what are the various theories we could have to explain these patterns of behavior and then just do the simple matching which theory better matches the behavior they have and the last step is to assume that's true of youtube don't assume you're an exception it may if you happen to be an exception that won't go so well but nevertheless on average you aren't very well positioned to judge if you're an exception so look at what other people do explain what other people do and assume that's youtube but also in the case of medicine there's several parties to consider so there's the individual person that's receiving the medicine there's the doctors that are prescribing the medicine there's drug companies that are selling drugs there are governments that have regulations that are lobbyists so you can build up a network of categories of humans in this and they each play their role so how do you introspect the sort of analyze the system at a system scale versus at the individual scale so it turns out that in general it's usually much easier to explain producer behavior than consumer behavior that is the drug companies or the doctors have relatively clear incentives to give the customers whatever they want yeah and similarly say governments and democratic countries have the incentive to give the voters what they want so that focuses your attention on the patient and the voter in this equation and saying what do they want they would be driving the rest of the system whatever they want the other parties are willing to give them in order to get paid so now we're looking for puzzles in patient and voter behavior what are they choosing and why do they choose that and how much exactly and then we can explain that potentially again returning to the producer by the producer being incentivized to manipulate the decision-making processes of the voter and the consumer now in almost every industry producers are in general happy to lie and exaggerate in order to get more customers yeah this is true of auto repair as much as human body repair and medicine so the differences between these industries can't be explained by the willingness of the producers to give customers what they want or to do various things that we have to again go to the customers why are customers treating body repair different than auto repair yeah and that potentially requires a lot a lot of thinking a lot of data collection and potentially looking at historical data too because things don't just happen overnight that over time there's principle it does but actually it's a lot actually easier than you might think i think the biggest limitation is just the willingness to consider alternative hypotheses so many of the patterns that you need to rely on are actually pretty obvious simple patterns you just have to notice them and ask yourself how can i explain those often you don't need to look at the most subtle most you know difficult statistical evidence that might be out there the simplest patterns are often enough all right so there there's a fundamental statement about self-deception in the book there's the application of that like we just did in medicine can you steal man the argument that uh many of the foundational ideas in the book are wrong meaning uh there's two that you just made which is it can be a lot simpler than it looks can you steal man in the case that it's case by case it's going it's always super complicated like it's a complex system it's very difficult to have a simple model about it's very difficult to disrespect and the other one is that the human brain isn't not just about self-deception um that that there's a lot of there's a lot of motivation to play and we are able to really introspect our own mind and like what what's on the surface of the conscious is actually quite a good representation of what's going on in the brain and you're not deceiving yourself you're able to actually arrive to deeply think about where your mind stands and what you think about the world and it's less about impressing people and more about being a free-thinking individual so when a child tries to explain why they don't have their homework assignment yes they are sometimes inclined to say the dog ate my homework they almost never say the dragon ate my homework the reason is the dragon is a completely implausible explanation almost always when we make excuses for things we choose things that are at least in some degree plausible it could perhaps have happened that's an obstacle for any explanation of a hidden motive or a hidden feature of human behavior if people are pretending one thing while really doing another they're usually going to pick as a pretense something that's somewhat plausible that's going to be an obstacle to proving that hypothesis if you are focused on sort of the local data that a person would typically have if they were challenged so if you're just looking at one kid and his lack of homework yeah maybe you can't tell whether his dog ate his homework or not if you happen to know he doesn't have a dog you might have more confidence right you will need to have a wider range of evidence than a typical person would when they're encountering that actual excuse in order to see past the excuse that will just be a general feature of this so in order if i say you know there's a usual story about where we go to the doctor and then there's this other explanation you know it'll be true that you'll have to look at wider data in order to see that because you know people don't usually offer excuses unless in the local context of their excuse they can get away with it that is it's hard to tell right so in the case of medicine i have to point you to sort of larger sets of data but in many areas of academia including health economics the researchers there also want to support the usual points of view and so they will have selection effects in their publications and their analysis whereby they if they're getting a result too much contrary to the usual point of view everybody wants to have they will file draw that paper or redo the analysis until they get an answer that's more to people's liking so that means in the health economics literature there are plenty of people who will claim that in fact we have evidence that medicine is effective and when i respond i will have to point you to our most reliable evidence and ask you to consider the possibility that the literature is biased in that when the when the evidence isn't as reliable when they have more degrees of freedom in order to get the answer they want they do tend to get the answer they want but when we get to the kind of evidence that's much harder to mess with that's where the that's where we will see the truth be more revealed so with respect to medicine we have millions of papers published in medicine over the years most of which give the impression that medicine is useful there's a small literature on randomized experiments of the aggregate effects of medicine where there's you know maybe a few half dozen or so papers where it would be the hardest to hide it because it's such a straightforward experiment done in a straightforward way that um you know it's hard to manipulate and that's where i will point you to to show you that there's relatively little correlation between health and medicine but even then people could try to save the phenomenon and say well it's not hidden motives it's just ignorance they could say for example you know medicine's complicated most people don't know the literature therefore they can be excused for for ignorance they are just ignorantly assuming that medicine is effective it's not that they have some other motive that they're trying to achieve and then i will have to do you know as with a conspiracy theory analysis and i'm saying well like how long has this misperception be going on how consistently has it happened around the world and across time and i would have to say look uh you know if we're talking about say a recent new product like segway scooters or something i could say not so many people have seen them or use them maybe they could be confused about their value if we're talking about a product that's been around for thousands of years used in roughly the same way all across the world and we see the same pattern over and over again this sort of ignorance mistake just doesn't work so well it also is a question of how much of the self-deception is prevalent versus foundational because there's a kind of implied thing where it's foundational to human nature versus just a common pitfall this is this is a question i have so like maybe maybe human progress is made by people who don't fall into the self-deception it's it's like it's a baser aspect of human nature but then you escape it easily if you if you're motivated the motivational hypotheses about these self-deceptions are in terms of how it makes you look to the people around you again the press secretary yes so the story would be most people want to look good to the people around them therefore most people present themselves in ways that help them look good to the people around them that's sufficient to say there would be a lot of it it doesn't need to be 100 right there's enough variety in people and in circumstances that sometimes taking a contrary in strategy can be in the interest of some minority of the people so i might for example say that that's a strategy i've taken i've decided that uh being contrarian on these things could be winning for me in that there's a room for a small number of people like me who have these sort of messages who can then get more attention even if there's not room for most people to do that and uh that can be explaining sort of the variety right so similarly you might say look just look at the most obvious things most people would like to look good right in the sense of physically just you look good right now you're wearing a nice suit you have a haircut you shaved right so and we accept my own hair but okay well that's all more impressive that's the counter uh that's the counter argument for your claim right so clearly if we look at most people in their physical appearance clearly most people are trying to look somewhat nice right they shower they they shave they comb their hair but we certainly see some people around who are not trying to look so nice right is that a big challenge the hypothesis that people want to look nice not that much right we can see in the those particular people's context more particular reasons why they've chosen to be an exception to the more general rule so the general rule does reveal something foundational generally right that's that's the way things work let me let me ask you you wrote a blog post about the accuracy of authorities since we're talking about this especially in medicine uh just looking around us especially during this time of the pandemic there's been a growing distrust of authorities of institutions even an institution of science itself what are the pros and cons of authorities would you say so what's nice about authorities what's nice about institutions and what are their pitfalls one standard function of authority is as something you can defer to respectively without needing to seem too submissive or ignorant or um you know gullible that is uh you know when you're asking what should i be act on or what belief should i act on you might be worried if i chose something too contrarian too weird too speculative that that would look make me look bad so i would just choose something very conservative so maybe an authority lets you choose something a little less conservative because the authority is your authorization the authority will let you do it and you can say and somebody says why did you do that thing and they say the authority authorized it the authority tells me i should do this why aren't you doing it right so the authority's often pushing for the conservative well no the authority can do more i mean so for example we just think about i don't know in a pandemic even right you could just think i'll just stay home and close all the doors or i'll just ignore it right you could just think of just some very simple strategy that might be defensible if there were no authorities right but authorities might be able to know more than that they might be able to like look at some evidence draw a more context-dependent conclusion declare it as the authority's opinion and then other people might follow that and that could be better than doing nothing so what you mentioned who the world's most beloved organization uh so you know this is me speaking in general who and cdc has been kind of i depending on degrees and right uh details just not behaving as i would have imagined in the best possible evolution of human civilization authorities should act they seem to have failed in some fundamental way in terms of leadership in a difficult time for our society can you say what are the pros and cons of this particular authority so again if there were no authorities whatsoever no accepted authorities right then people would sort of have to sort of randomly pick different local authorities who would conflict with each other and then they'd be fighting each other about that or just not believe anybody and just do some initial default action that you would always do without responding to context so the potential gain of an authority is that they could no more than just basic ignorance and if people followed them they could both be more informed than ignorance and all doing the same thing so they're each protected from being accused or complained about that's that that's the idea of an authority that would be the good id where's the con okay so what's the negative how does that go wrong the con is that if you think of yourself as the authority and asking what's my best strategy as an authority it's unfortunately not to be maximally informative so you might think the ideal authority would not just tell you more than ignorance it would tell you as much as possible okay it would give you as much detail as you could possibly listen to and manage to assimilate and it would update that as frequently as possible or as frequently as you were able to listen and assimilate and that would be the maximally informative authority the problem is there's a conflict between being an authority or being seen as an authority and being maximally informative that was the point of my blog post that you're pointing out to here that is if you look at it from their point of view they won't long remain the perceived authority if they are too cauti in cautious about how they use that authority and one of the ways to being cautious would be to be too informative okay that's still in the pro column for me because you're talking about the tensions that are very uh data-driven and very honest and i would hope that authorities struggle with that how much information to provide to people to maximize to maximize outcomes now i'm generally somebody that believes more information is better because i trust in the intelligence of people but i'd like to mention a bigger con on authorities which is the human question this comes back to global government and so on is that you know there's humans that sit in chairs during meetings in those authorities they have different titles it's humans form hierarchies and sometimes those titles get to your head a little bit and you start to want to think how do i preserve my control over this authority as opposed to thinking through like what is the mission of the authority what is the mission of wh o any other such organization and how do i maximize the implementation of that mission you start to think well i kind of like sitting in this big chair at the head of the table i'd like to sit there for another few years or better yet i want to be remembered as the person who in a time of crisis was at the head of this authority and did a lot of good things so you stop trying to do good under what good means given the mission of the authority and you start to try to carve a narrative to manipulate the narrative first in the meeting room everybody around you just a small little story you tell yourself the new interns the the managers throughout the whole hierarchy of the company okay once you everybody in the company or an organization believes this narrative now you start to control this the release of information not because you're trying to maximize outcomes but because you're trying to maximize the effectiveness of the narrative that you are truly a great um representative of this authority in human history and i just feel like those human forces whenever you have an authority it starts getting to people's heads one of the most this me as a scientist one of the most disappointing things to see during the pandemic is the use of authority from colleagues of mine to roll their eyes to dismiss other human beings just because they got a phd just because they're an assistant associate for faculty just because they are deputy head of ex-organization nih whatever the heck the organization is just because they got an award of some kind and at a conference they won a best paper award seven years ago and then somebody shook their hand and gave him a medal maybe it was a president and there and it's been 20 30 years that people have been patting them on the back saying how special they are especially when they are controlling money and getting sucked up to from other scientists who really want the money in a self-deception kind of way they don't actually really care about your performance and all of that gets to your head and no longer are you the authority that's trying to do good and lessen the suffering in the world you become an authority that just wants to maximize uh self-preserve yourself in in a uh sitting on a throne of power so this is core to sort of what it is to be an economist i'm a professor of economics there you go for the authority again no so it's about saying just joking yes we often have a situation where we see a world of behavior and then we see ways in which particular behaviors are not sort of maximally socially useful yes and we have a variety of reactions to that so one kind of reaction is to sort of morally blame each individual for not doing the maxillary socially useful thing under perhaps the idea that people could be identified and shamed for that and may be induced into doing the better thing if only enough people were calling them out on it right but another way to think about it is to think that people sit in institutions with certain you know stable institutional structures and that institutions create particular incentives for individuals and that individuals are typically doing whatever is in their local interest in the context of that institution and then you know perhaps to less blame individuals for winning their local institutional game and more blaming the world for having the wrong institutions so economists are often like wondering what other institutions we could have instead of the ones we have and which of them might promote better behavior and this is a common thing we do all across human behavior is to think of what are the institutions we're in and what are the alternative variations we could imagine and then to say which institutions would be most productive i would agree with you that our information institutions that is the information institutions by which we collect information and aggregate it and share with people are especially broken in the sense of far from the ideal of what would be the most cost-effective way to collect and share information but then the challenge is to try to produce better institutions and you know as an academic i'm aware that academia is particularly broken in the sense that we give people incentives to you know do research that's not very interesting or important because basically they're being impressive and we actually care more about whether academics are impressive than whether they're interesting or useful and i know i can go happy to go into detail with lots of different known institutions and their known institutional failings ways in which those institutions produce you know incentives that are mistaken and that was the point of the post we started with talking about the authorities if if i need to be seen as an authority that's at odds with my being informative and i'm i might choose to be the authority instead of being informative because that's my institutional incentives and if i may i'd like to given that beautiful picture of incentives and individuals that you just painted let me just apologize for a couple of things one i often put too much blame on leaders of institutions versus the incentives that govern those institutions and as a result of that i've been i believe too critical of anthony fauci too emotional about my criticism of anthony apology and i'd like to apologize for that because i think there's a deep there's deeper truths to think about there's deeper incentives to think about that said i do sort of i'm a romantic creature by nature i romanticize winston churchill and i when i think about nazi germany i think about hitler more than i do about the individual people of nazi germany you think about leaders you think about individuals not necessarily the parameters the incentives that govern the system that uh because it's harder it's harder to think through deeply about the models from which those individuals arise but if that's the right thing to do so uh but also i don't apologize uh for being emotional sometimes and being i'm happy to blame the individual leaders in the sense that you know i might say well you should be trying to reform these institutions if you're just there to like get promoted and look good at being at the top but maybe i can blame you for your motives and your priorities in there but i can understand why the people at the top would be the people who are selected for having the priority of primarily trying to get to the top i get that can i maybe ask you about particular universities they've received like science has received an increase in distrust overall as an institution which breaks my heart because i think science is beautiful as a not maybe not as a institution but as as one of the things one of the journeys that humans have taken on uh the other one is university i think university is actually a place for me at least in the way i see it is a place of freedom of exploring ideas scientific engineering ideas engineering ideas more than a corporate more than a company more than a lot of domains in life they're it's not just in its ideal but it's in its implementation a place where you can be a kid for your whole life and play with ideas and i think with all the criticism that universities still not currently receive i think they i don't think that criticism is representative of universities they focus on very anecdotal evidence of particular departments particular people but i still feel like there's a lot of place for freedom of thought at least you know mit at least in the fields i care about you know in a particular kind of science uh particular kind of technical fields you know mathematics computer science physics engineering so robotics artificial intelligence this is a place where you get to be a kid yet there is bureaucracy that's that's rising up there's like more rules there's more meetings and there's more administration having like powerpoint presentations which to me you should like uh be more of a renegade explorer of ideas and meetings destroy they suffocate that radical thought that happens when you're an undergraduate student and you can do all kinds of wild things when you're a graduate student anyway all that to say you've thought about this aspect too is there something uh positive insightful you could say about how we can make for better universities in the decades to come this particular institution how can we improve them i hear that centuries ago many scientists and intellectuals were aristocrats they had time and could if they chose choose to be intellectuals that's a feature of the combination that they had some source of resources that allowed them leisure and that the kind of competition they were faced in among aristocrats allowed that sort of a self-indulgence or self-pursuit at least at some point in their lives so the analogous observation is that university professors often have sort of the freedom and space to do a wide range of things and i am certainly enjoying that as a tenured professor you're really sorry to interrupt a really good representative of that just the exploration you're doing the depth of thought the like most people are afraid to do the kind of broad thinking that you're doing which is good the fact that that can happen is the combination of these two things analogously one is that we have fierce competition to become a tenured professor but then once you become tenured we give you the freedom to do what you like and that's a happenstance that didn't have to be that way and in many other walks of life even though people have a lot of you know resources etc they don't have that kind of freedom set up so i think we're kind of i'm kind of lucky that tenure exists and that i'm enjoying it um but i can't be too enthusiastic about this unless i can approve of sort of the source of the resources that's paying for all this right so for the aristocrat if you thought they they stole it in war or something you wouldn't be so pleased whereas if you thought they had earned it or their ancestors had earned this money that they were spending as an aristocrat then you could be more okay with that right so for universities i have to ask you know where are the main sources of resources that are going to the universities and are they getting their money's worth or are they getting a real good value for that payment right so first of all they're students and the question is are students getting good value for their education and you know on each person is getting value in the sense that they are identified and shown to be a more capable person which is then worth more salary as an employee later but there is a case for saying there's a big waste to the system because we aren't actually changing the students or educating them we're more sorting them or labeling them and that's a very expensive process to produce that outcome and part of the expense is the you know freedom of from tenure i get so i feel like i can't be too proud of that because it's basically a tax on all these young students to pay this enormous amount of money in order to be labeled as better whereas i feel like we should be able to find cheaper ways of doing that the other main customer is researcher patrons like the unit the government or other foundations and then the question is are they getting their money worth out of the money they're paying for research to happen and my analysis is they don't actually care about the research progress they are mainly buying an affiliation with credentialed impressiveness on the part of the researchers they mainly pay money to researchers who are impressive and have high you know impressive affiliations and they don't really much care what research project happens as a result is that a cynical so that there's a deep truth to that cynical perspective is there a less clinical perspective that they do care about the long-term investment into the progress of science and humanity they might personally care but they're stuck in an equilibrium sure wherein they basically most foundations like governments or research or you know like the ford foundation they are the individuals there are rated based on the prestige they bring to that organization yeah and even if they might personally want to produce more intellectual progress they are in a competitive game where they don't have tenure and they need to produce this prestige and so once they give grant money to prestigious people that is the thing that shows that they have achieved prestige for the organization and that's what they need to do in order to retain their position and you do hope that there's a correlation between prestige and actual competence of course there is a correlation the question is just could we do this better some other way yes i think it's almost i think it's pretty clear we could what is harder to do is move the world to a new equilibrium where we do that instead uh what are the components of of the better ways to do it is it uh money so how the sources of money and how the money is allocated to give the individual researchers freedom years ago i started studying this topic exactly because this was my issue and this was many decades ago now and i spent a long time and my best guess still is prediction markets betting markets so if you as a research paper patron want to know the answer to a particular question like what's the mass of the electron neutrino then what you can do is just subsidize a betting market in that question and that will induce more research into answering that question because the people who then answer that question can then make money in that betting market with the new information they gain so that's a robust way to induce more information on a topic if you want to induce an accomplishment you can create prizes and there's of course a long history of prizes to induce accomplishments and we moved away from prizes even though we once had used them a far more often than we did today and there's a history to that uh and for the customers who want to be affiliated with impressive academics which is what most of the customers want students journalists and patrons i think there's a better way of doing that which i just wrote about in a my second most recent blog post can you explain sure what we do today is we take sort of acceptance by other academics recently as our best indication of their deserved prestige that is recent publications recent you know job affiliation institutional affiliations recent you know invitations to speak recent grants we are today taking other impressive academics recent choices to affiliate with them as our best guesstimate of their prestige i would say we could do better by creating betting markets in what the distant future will judge to have been their deserved prestige looking back on them i think most intellectuals for example think that if we look back two centuries say to intellectuals from two centuries ago and tried to look in detail at their research and how it influenced future research and which path it was on we could much but more accurately judge their actual deserved prestige that is who was actually on the right track who actually helped which will be different than what people at the time judged using the immediate indications of the time of which position they had or which publications they had or things like that so in this way if you think from the perspective of multiple centuries you would higher prioritize true novelty you would disregard the temporal proximity like how recent the thing is and you would think like what is the brave the bold the big novel idea that this and you would actually you would be able to rate that because you could see the path with which ideas took which things had dead ends which led to what other followings you could looking back centuries later have a much better estimate of who actually had what long-term effects on intellectual progress so my proposal is we actually pay people in several centuries to do this historical analysis and we have betting mark we have prediction markets today where we buy and sell assets which will later off pay off in terms of those final evaluations so now we'll be inducing people today to make their best estimate of those things by actually you know looking at the details of people and setting the prices according so my proposal would be we rate people today on those prices today so instead of looking at their list of publications or affiliations you look at the actual price of assets that represent people's best guess of what the future will say about them that's brilliant so this concept of idea futures can you elaborate what this would entail i've been elaborating two versions of it here so one is if there's a particular question say the mass of the electron neutrino and what you as a patron want to do is get an answer to that question then what you would do is subsidize the betting market in that question under the assumption that eventually we'll just know the answer and we can pay off the bets that way right and that is a plausible assumption for many kinds of concrete intellectual questions like what's the mass of the electron neutrino in this hypothetical world these are constructing the maybe a real world do you mean literally financial yes literal little very literal very cash very direct and literal yes so or well crypto is whatever yes true so the idea would be research labs would be for-profit they would have as their expense paying researchers to study things and then their profit would come from using the insights the researchers gains to trade in these financial markets just like hedge funds today make money by paying researchers to study firms and then making their profits by trading on those that that insight in the ordinary financial and the market would if it's efficient would be able to become better and better predicting the powerful ideas that the individual is able to generate the variance around the mass of the electron neutrino would decrease with time as we learned that value of that parameter better and any other parameters that we want to decimate you don't think those markets would also respond to recency of prestige and all those kinds of things they would respond but the question is if they might respond incorrectly but if you think they're doing it incorrectly you have a profit you can go fix it so we'd be inviting everybody to ask whether they can find any biases or errors in the current ways in which people are estimating these things from whatever clues they have right there's a big incentive for the correction mechanism in in academia currently there's not you it's the safe choice to to go with the procedure and there's no even if you privately think that the prestige is over overrated even if in the case think strongly that's overrated still you don't have an incentive to defy that publicly you're going to lose a lot unless you're a contrarian that writes brilliant blogs and and then you could you could talk about or have pockets right i mean initially this was my initial concept of having these betting markets on these key parameters what i then realized over time was that that's more what people pretend to care about what they really mostly care about is just who's how good yeah and that's what most of the system is built on is trying to rate people and rank them and so i designed this other alternative based on historical evaluation centuries later just about who's how how good because that's what i think most of the customers really care about customers i like the word customers here humans right well every major area of life which you know has specialists who get paid to do that thing must have some customers from elsewhere who are paying for it well who are the customers for the mass of the neutrino but yes i i i understand a sense people who are willing to pay right for a thing that's an important thing to understand about anything who are the customers so what i think and what's the product like medicine education academia military etc that's part of the hidden motives analysis often people have a thing they say about what the product is and who the customer is and maybe you need to dig a little deeper to find out what's really going on or a lot deeper you are you've written that you seek out quote view quakes you're able as a uh as an intelligent black box word generating machine you're able to generate a lot of sexy words i like it i love it view quakes which are insights which dramatically change my world view your world view uh you write i loved science fiction as a child studied physics and artificial intelligence for a long time each and now study economics and political science all fields full of such insights so let me ask what are some view quakes or a beautiful surprising idea to you from each of those fields physics ai economics political science i know it's a tough question something that springs to mind about physics for example that just is beautiful i mean right from the beginning say special relativity was a big surprise uh you know most of us have a simple concept of time and it seems perfectly adequate for everything we've ever seen and to have it explained to you that you need to sort of have a mixture concept of time and space where you put it into the space-time construct how it looks different from different perspectives that was quite a shock and that was you know such a shock that it makes you think what else do i know that you know isn't the way it seems certainly quantum mechanics is certainly another enormous shock in terms of from your point you know you have this idea that there's a space and then there's you know point particles at points and maybe fields in between and um quantum mechanics is just a whole different representation it looks nothing like what you would have thought as sort of the basic representation of of the physical world and that was quite a surprise what would you say is the catalyst for the for the view quake in in in theoretical physics in the 20th century what where does that come from so the interesting thing about einstein it seems like a lot of that came from like almost thought experiments it wasn't almost experimentally driven um and with actually i don't know the full story of quantum mechanics how much of it is experiment like where if you look at the full trace of idea generation there uh of all the weird stuff that falls out of quantum mechanics how much of that was the experimentalist how much was it the theoreticians but usually in theoretical physics the theories lead the way so maybe can you uh can you elucidate like what what is the catalyst for these the remarkable thing about physics and about many other areas of academic intellectual life is that it just seems way over determined that is if it hadn't been for einstein or if it hadn't been for heisenberg certainly within a half a century somebody else would have come up with essentially the same things is this something you believe yeah something yes so i think when you look at sort of just the history of physics in the history of other areas you know some areas like that there's just this enormous convergence that the the different kind of evidence that was being collected was so redundant in the sense that so many different things revealed the same things that eventually you just kind of have to accept it because it just gets obvious so if you look at the details of course you know einstein did it for somebody else and it's well worth celebrating einstein for that and you know we by celebrating the particular people who did something first or came across something first we are encouraging all the rest to move a little faster to try to to push us all a little faster which is great but i still think we would have gotten roughly to the same place within half centuries so sometimes people are special because of how much longer it would have taken so some people say general relativity would have taken longer without einstein than other things i mean heisenberg quantum mechanics i mean there were several different formulations of quantum mechanics all around the same few years means no one of them made that much of a difference we would have had pretty much the same thing regardless of which of them did it exactly when nevertheless i'm happy to celebrate them all but this is a choice i make in my research that is when there's an area where there's lots of people working together you know who are sort of scoping each other and getting getting a result just before somebody else does you ask well how much of a difference would i make there at most i could make something happen a few months before somebody else and so i'm less worried about them missing things so when i'm trying to help the world like doing research i'm looking for neglected things i'm looking for things that nobody's doing it if i didn't do it nobody would do it nobody would do it or at least in the next time 20 years kind of thing exactly same with general relativity just you know who would do it it might take another 10 20 30 50 years so that's the place where you can have the biggest impact is finding the things that nobody would do unless you did them and then that's when you get the big view quake the insight so what about artificial intelligence would it be uh the ems the emulated minds what idea what whether that struck you in the shower one day or well or are they you just clearly the biggest view quake in artificial intelligence is the realization of just how complicated our human minds are so most people who come to artificial intelligence from other fields or from relative ignorance a very common phenomenon which you must be familiar with is that they come up with some concept and then they think that must be it once we implement this new concept we will have it we will have full human level or higher artificial intelligence right and they are just not appreciating just how big the problem is how long the road is just how much is involved because that's actually hard to appreciate when we just think it seems really simple and studying artificial intelligence going through many particular problems looking at each problem all the different things you need to be able to do to solve a problem like that makes you realize all the things your minds are doing that you are not aware of that's that vast subconscious that you're not aware that's the biggest viewcase from artificial intelligence by far for most people who study artificial intelligence is to see just how hard it is i think uh that's a good point but i think it's a it's a very early view quake it's when the uh uh sure done in kruger crashes hard it's the first realization that humans are actually quite incredible the human mind the human body is quite a lot of different parts to it but then see i it's already been so long for me that i've experienced that view quake that for me i now experience the view quakes of holy  this little thing is actually quite powerful like neural networks i'm amazed because you've become more cynical after that first view quake of like this is so hard like evolution did some incredible work to create a human mind but then you realize just because you have you've talked about a bunch of simple models that simple things can actually be extremely powerful that maybe uh emulating of the human mind is extremely difficult but you can go a long way with a large neural network you can go a long way with a dumb solution it's that stuart russell thing with the reinforcement learning right holy crap you can do you can go a long way with us but we still have a very long road to go but nonetheless i can't i refuse to sort of know the the road on the road is full of surprises so long sure is an interesting like you said with the six hard steps that humans had to take to arrive at where we are from the origin of life on earth so it's long maybe in the statistical improbability of the steps that have to be taken but in terms of how quickly those steps could be taken i don't know if my intuition says it's if it's hundreds of years away or if it's uh a couple of years away i i prefer to measure pretty confidence at least a decade and well we can file the confidence at least three decades i can steal man either direction i prefer to measure that journey in elon musk's that's the new uh well we don't get any less very often so that's that's a long time scale for now i don't know maybe you can clone or maybe multiply or even know what elon musk what that is what is that what is that's a good question exactly well that's an excellent question how does that and then how does that fit into the model the three parameters that are required for becoming a grabby alien civilization that's the question of how much any individual makes in the long path of civilization over time yes and you know it's a favorite topic of historians and people to try to like focus on individuals and how much of a difference they make and certainly some individuals make a substantial difference in the modest term right uh like you know certainly without hitler being hitler in the role he took european history would have taken a different path for for a while there um but if we're looking over like many centuries longer term things most individuals do fade in their individual influence so i mean einstein you and einstein [Applause] no matter how sexy your hair is you will also be forgotten in the long arc of history uh so you said at least 10 years so let's talk a little bit about this ai point um of where how we achieve how hard is the problem of solving intelligence uh by engineering artificial intelligence that achieves human level human-like qualities that we associate with intelligence how hard is this what are the different trajectories that take us there one way to think about it is in terms of the scope of the technology space you're talking about so let's take the biggest possible scope all of human technology right the entire human economy so the entire economy is composed of many industries each of which have many products with many different technologies supporting each one at that scale i think we can accept that um most innovations are a small fraction of the total that is usually has relatively gradual overall progress and that individual innovations that are have a substantial effect the total are rare and their total effect is still a small percentage of the of the total economy right there's very few individual innovations that made a substantial difference to the whole economy right what are we talking steam engine you know shipping containers you know a few things uh shipping shipping containers deserves to be up there with steam engines honestly uh can you say exactly why shipping containers uh containers revolutionized shipping and shipping is very important but placing that as shipping containers so you're saying you wouldn't have some of the magic of the supply chain and all that without shipping containers that made a big difference absolutely interesting that's something to look into i don't i we shouldn't we shouldn't take that tangent although i'm tempted to but anyway so there's a few just a few innovations right so at the scale of the whole economy right now as you move down to a much smaller scale um you will see individual innovations having a bigger effect right so if you look at i don't know lawn mowers or something i don't know about the innovations lawn mower but there are probably like steps where you just had a new kind of lawnmower and that made a big difference to mowing lawns because you're you're focusing on a smaller part of the whole technology space right so um and you know sometimes like military technology there's a lot of military technology there's a lot of small ones but every once in a while a particular military weapon like makes a big difference but still even so mostly overall they're making modest differences to a something that's increasing relatively stable like us military is the strongest in the world consistently for a while no one weapon in the last 70 years has like made a big difference in terms of the overall prominence of the us military right because that's just saying even though every once in a while even the recent soviet hyper missiles or whatever they are they aren't changing the overall balance dramatically right so when we get to ai now the now i can frame the question how big is ai basically if so one way of thinking about ais is just all mental tasks and then you ask what fraction of tasks are mental tasks and then i go a lot and then if i think of ai is like half of everything then i think well it's got to be composed of lots of parts where anyone innovation is only a small impact right now if you think no no ai is like agi and then you think agi is a small thing right there's only a small number of key innovations that will enable it now you're thinking there could be a bigger chunk that you might find that would have a bigger impact so the way i would ask you to frame these things in terms the chunkiness of different areas of technology in part in terms of how big they are if you take 10 chunky areas and you add them together the total is less chunky yeah but don't you are you able until you solve the fundamental core parts of the problem to estimate the chunkiness of that problem well if you have a history of prior chunkiness that could be your best estimate for future chunkiness so for example i mean even at the level of the world economy right we've had this what 10 000 years of civilization well that's only a short time you might say oh that that doesn't predict future chunkiness uh but you know looks relatively steady and consistent we can say even in computer science we've had you know seven years of computer science we have enough data to look at chunkiness in computer science like when were there algorithms or approaches that made a big chunky difference and you know versus and how large a fraction of that was that and i'd say mostly in computer science most innovation has been relatively small chunks the bigger chunks have been rare well this is the interesting thing this is about ai and just algorithms in general is you know pagerank so google's right so sometimes it's a simple algorithm that by itself is not that useful but the scale context and in a context that's scalable like right depending on yeah depending on the context is all of a sudden the power is revealed and there's something i guess that's the nature of chunkiness is um that you could things that can reach a lot of people simply can be quite challenging so one standard story about algorithms is to say algorithms have a fixed cost plus a marginal cost and so in history when you had computers are very small you tried all the algorithms had low fixed costs and you look for the best of those but over time as computers got bigger you could afford to do larger fixed costs and try those and some of those had more effective algorithms in terms of their marginal cost and that in fact you know that it roughly explains the long-term history where in fact the rate of algorithmic improvement is about the same as the rate of hardware improvement which is a remarkable coincidence but it would be explained by saying well there's all these better algorithms you can't try until you have a big enough computer to pay the fixed cost of doing some trials to find out if that algorithm actually saves you on the marginal cost and so that's an explanation for this relatively continuous history where so we have a good story about why hardware is so continuous right and you might think why would software be so continuous with the hardware but if there's a distribution of algorithms in terms of their fixed costs and it's safe spread out a wide log normal distribution then we could be sort of marching through that log normal distribution trying out algorithms with larger fixed costs and finding the ones that have lower marginal cost so would you say agi human level ai even em m emulated minds is uh chunky like a few breakthroughs can take so and m is by its nature chunky in the sense that if you have an emulated brain and you're 25 effective at emulating it that's crap that's nothing okay okay you pretty much need to emulate a full human brain is that obvious is that obviously pretty obvious i'm talking about like you know so the key thing is you're emulating various brain cells and so you have to emulate the input output pattern of those cells so if you get that pattern somewhat close but not close enough then the whole system just doesn't have the overall behavior you're looking for right but it could have functionally some of the power of the overall so there'll be some threshold the question is when you get close enough then it goes over the threshold it's like taking a computer chip and deleting every one percent of the of the gates right no that's that's very chunky but uh right hope is that the emulating the human brain i mean the human brain itself is not right so it has a certain level of redundancy and a certain level of robustness and so there's some threshold when you get close to that level of redundancy and robustness then it starts to work but until you you know until you get to that level it's just going to be crap right yeah it's going to be just a big thing that isn't working well so we can be pretty sure that emulations is is a big chunk in an economic sense right at some point you'll be able to make one that's actually effective in enable substituting for humans and then that will be this huge economic product that people will try to buy like crazy now you bring a lot of value to people's lives so they'll be able to they'll be willing to pay for it but it could be that you know the first emulation costs a billion dollars each right and then we have them but we can't really use them too expensive then the cost slowly comes down and now we have less of a chunky adaptation adoption right that as the cross comes down then we use more and more of them in more and more context and that's a more continuous curve so it's only if the first emulations are relatively cheap that you get of more sudden disruption to society uh and that could happen if sort of the algorithm is the last thing you figure out how to do or something what about robots that capture some magic um in terms of social connection the robots like we have a robot dog on the carpet right there uh robots that are able to capture some magic of human connection as they interact with humans but are not emulating the brain what about what about those how far away so we're thinking about chunkiness or distance now so if you ask how chunky is the task of making a you know emulatable robot or something you know which chunkiness and time are correlated right but that it's about how far away it is or how suddenly it would happen uh chunkiness is how suddenly and you know difficulty is just how far away it is but it could be a continuous difficulty it would just be far away but will slowly steadily get there or there could be these thresholds where we reach a threshold and suddenly we can do a lot better yeah that's a good i mean question for both i tend to believe that all of it not just the m but agi too is chunky and um human level intelligence so my my best body in robots is also junk because the history of computer science and chunkiness so far seems to be my rough best guess for the chunkiness of agi that is it is chunky it's modestly chunky not that chunky right because our ability chunky peanut butter too many things in the economy has been moving relatively steadily overall in terms of our use of computers in society they have been relatively steadily improving for 70 years no but i would say that's hard well yeah okay okay i would have to really think about that because uh neural networks are quite surprising sure but every once in a while we have a new thing that's surprising but if you stand back you know we see something like that every 10 10 years or so some new innovation is gradual that has a big effect so moderately chunky huh yeah the history of the level of disruption we've seen in the past would be a rough estimate of the level of disruption in the future unless the future is we're going to hit a chunky territory much chunkier than we've seen in the past well i do think there's um it's like um like kunyan like revolution type it it seems like the data especially on ai's is is difficult to um uh to reason with because it's so recent it's such a recent field right it's been around for 50 years i mean 50 60 70 80 years being recent okay that's the that's it's enough time to see a lot of trends a lot a few trends a few trends i think the internet computing there's really a lot of interesting stuff that's happened over the past 30 years that i think the possibility of revolutions is likelier than it was in the i think for the last 70 years there have always been a lot of things that look like they had a potential for evolution so we can't reason well about this i mean we can reason well by looking at the past trends i would say the past trend is roughly your best guess for the future features but if i look back at the things that might have looked like revolutions in the 70s and 80s and 90s uh they are less like the revolutions of that appear to be happening now or the capacity of revolution that appear to be there now first of all there's a lot of more money to be made so there's a lot more incentive for markets to do a lot of kind of innovation it seems like in the ai space but then again there's a history of winters and summers and so on so maybe we're just like riding a nice wave right now one of the biggest issues is the difference between impressive demos and commercial value yes so we often through the history of ai we saw very impressive demos that never really translated much into commercial values somebody who works on and cares about autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicles tell me about it uh so and there again we return to the number of elon musk's per earth per year yeah generated uh that's the um coincidentally same initials as the m uh yeah uh very suspicious very suspicious we're gonna have to look into that all right two more fields that i would like to force and twist your arm to all right to look for view quakes and for beautiful ideas economics what is what what is a beautiful idea to you about economics you you mentioned a lot of them sure uh so as you said before there's going to be the first view cake most people encounter that makes the biggest difference on average in the world because that's the only thing most people ever see is the first one and so you know with ai the first one is just how big the problem is and but once you get past that you'll find others certainly for economics the first one is just the power of markets um you know you might have thought it's just really hard to figure out how to to optimize in a big complicated space and markets just do a good first pass for an awful lot of stuff and they are really quite robust and powerful and uh that's just quite the view craig where you just say you know just let up if you if you want to get in the ballpark just let a market handle it and step back and that's true for a wide range of things it's not true for everything but it's a it's a very good first approximation most people's intuitions for how they should limit markets are actually messing them up they're that good in sense right most people when you go i don't know if we want to trust that well you should be trusting that what about wha what are markets like just a couple of words uh so so the idea is if if people want something then let other companies form to try to supply that thing let those people pay for their cost of whatever they're making and try to offer that product to those people that many people many such firms enter that industry and let the customers decide which ones they want and if the firm goes out of business let it go bankrupt and let other people invest in whichever ventures they want to try to try to attract customers to their version of the product and that just works for a wide range of products and services and through all of this there's a free exchange of information too there's a hope that there's no manipulation of information and so on that they're um you're making these even when those things happen still just the simple market solution is usually better than the things you'll try to do to fix it then the alternative um that that's that's a view quick it's surprising it's you know it's not what you would imagine they thought that's one of the great i guess inventions of human civilization right that trust the markets now another view cake that i learned in my research that's not all of economics but something more specialized is the rationality of disagreement that is basically people who are trying to believe what's true in a complicated situation would not actually disagree and of course humans disagree all the time so it was quite the striking fact for me to learn in grad school that actually rational agents would not knowingly disagree and so that makes disagreement more puzzling and and it makes you less willing to disagree humans are to some degree rational and are able to their priorities are different than just figuring out the truth which might not be the same as being irrational that's another tangent that could take an hour in the space of human affairs political science what is a beautiful foundational interesting idea to you a view quake in the space of political science the main thing that goes wrong in politics is people not agreeing on what the best thing to do is that's the wrong thing so that's what goes wrong that is when you say what's fundamentally behind most political failures it's that people are ignorant of what the consequences of policy is and that's surprising because it's actually feasible to solve that problem which we aren't solving so it's a bug not a feature that there's a there's a inability to arrive at a consensus so most political systems if everybody looked to some authority say on a question and that authority told them the answer then most political systems are capable of just doing that thing but that is uh and so it's the failure to have trust for the authorities yeah that is sort of the underlying failure behind most political failure we failed we have bad we invade iraq say when we don't have an authority to tell us that's a really stupid thing to do it's it's and it is possible to create more informative trust for the authorities that that's a remarkable fact about the world of institutions that we could do that but we aren't yeah that's that's surprising we could and we aren't right and another big view crick about politics is from the elf in the brain that most people when they're interacting with politics they say they want to like make the world better and make their city better their country better that's not their priority what is it so they they want to show loyalty to their allies they want to show their trouble they're on their side yes their various tribes are in that that's that's their primary primary priority and they do accomplish that yeah and the tribes are usually color-coded conveniently enough um what would you say you know it's the churchill question uh democracy is the the crappiest form of government but it's the best one we got um what's the best form of government for this our seven billion human civilization and the maybe as we get farther and farther you mentioned a lot of stuff that's fascinating about human history as we become more forager-like and looking out beyond what's the best form of government in the next 50 hundred years as we become a multiple terrorist species so the the key failing is that we have existing political institutions and related institutions like in media institutions and other authority institutions and these institutions sit in a vast space of possible institutions yes and the key failing we're just not exploring that space so i have made my proposals in that space and i think i can identify many promising solutions and many other people have made many other promising proposals in that space but the key thing is we're just not pursuing those proposals we're not trying them out on small scales we're not doing tests we're not exploring the space of these options that is the key thing we're failing to do and if we did that i am confident we would find much better institutions than when we're using now but we would have to actually try so a lot of those topics um i do hope we get a chance to talk again you're a fascinating human being so i'm skipping a lot of tangents on purpose that i would love to take you're such a brilliant person on so many different topics let me take a a stroll into the uh into the deep human psyche of uh robin hansen himself so first may not be that deep [Laughter] i might just be all on the surface what you see is what you get there might not be much hiding behind it some of the fun is is on the surface and uh i actually think this is true of many of the most successful most interesting people you see in the world that is they have put so much effort into the surface that they've constructed yeah and that's where they put all their energy like so somebody might be a a you know a statesman or an actor or something else and people want to interview them and they want to say like what are you behind the scenes what do you do in your free time you know what those people don't have free time they don't have another life behind the scenes they put all their energy into this into that surface the one we admire the one we're fascinated by and they kind of have to make up the stuff behind the scenes to supply it for you but it's not really there well there's several ways of phrasing this so one of his authenticity which is um the if you become the thing you are on the surface if the depths mirror the surface then that's what authenticity is you're not hiding something you're not concealing something to push back on the idea of actors they actually have often a manufactured surface that they put on and they try on different masks and the depths are very different from the surface and that's actually what makes them very not interesting to interview if you are an actor who actually lives the role that you play so like i don't know a clint eastwood type character who clearly represents the the cowboy like at least uh rhymes or echoes the person you play on the surface that's authentic some people are typecast and they have basically one persona they play in all of their movies and tv shows and so those people it probably is the actual person persona that they are yeah or has become that over time you know clint eastwood would be one i think of tom hanks as another i think they just always play the same person and you and i are just uh both uh surface players you're you're the fun brilliant uh thinker and i am the suit wearing uh idiot full of silly questions all right that said uh let's put on your wise sage hat and ask you what advice would you give to young people today in high school and college about life about how to live a successful life in career or just in general that they can be proud of most young people when they actually ask you that question what they usually mean is how can i be successful by usual standards yeah i'm not very good at giving advice about that because that's not how i tried to live my life so i would more flip it around and say you live in a rich society you will have a long life you have many resources available to you whatever career you take you'll have plenty of time to make progress on something else yes it might be better if you find a way to to combine your career and your interests in a way that gives you more time and energy but there are often big compromises there as well so if you have a passion about some topic or something that you think just was worth pursuing you can just do it you don't need other people's approval and you can just start doing whatever it is you think is worth doing it might take you decades but decades are enough to make enormous progress on most all interesting things and don't worry about the commitment of it i mean that's a lot of what people worry about is well there's so many options and if i choose a thing and i stick with it you know i sacrificed all the other paths i could have taken but i mean so i switched my career at the age of 34 with two kids age zero and two went back to grad school and social science after being a software research software engineer so it's quite possible to change your mind later in life um how can you have an age of zero less than one okay so oh oh you index was there yeah i got it okay right you know like people also ask what to read and i say textbooks and until you've read lots of textbooks or maybe review articles i'm not so sure you should be reading you know blog posts and twitter feeds and even podcasts i would say at the beginning read the read you know this is our best sum humanity's best summary of how to learn things is crammed into textbooks especially the the ones on like introduction to everything introduction to everything just read all the algorithms read as many textbooks as you can stomach and then maybe if you want to know more about a subject find review articles right you don't need to read the latest stuff from most topics yeah and actually textbooks often have the the prettiest pictures there you go and then depending on the field if it's technical then doing the homework problems at the end yeah it's actually extremely extremely useful extremely powerful way to understand something if you allow it you know i actually think of like high school and college which you you kind of remind me of people don't often think of it that way but you'll almost not again get an opportunity to spend the time with the fundamental stuff and everybody's forcing you like everybody wants you to do it and like you'll never get that chance again to sit there even though it's outside of your interest biology like in high school i took ap biology ap chemistry um i'm thinking of subjects i never again really visited seriously and it was so nice to be forced into uh anatomy and physiology to be forced into that world to stay with it to look at the pretty pictures do certain moments to actually for a moment enjoy the beauty of these of like how cell works and all those kinds of things and you're somehow that stays like the ripples of that fascination that stays with you even if you never do those this if even if you never utilize those uh learnings in your actual world a common problem at least many young people i meet is that they're like feeling idealistic and altruistic but in a rush yes so you know the usual human tradition that goes back you know hundreds of thousands of years is that people's productivity rises with time and maybe peaks around the age of 40 or 50. the age of 40 50 is when you will be having the highest income you'll have the most contacts you will sort of be wise about how the world works [Laughter] expect to have your biggest impact then before then you are you can have impacts but you're also mainly building up your resources and abilities um that's that's the usual human trajectory expect that to be true of you too don't be in such a rush to like accomplish enormous things at the age of 18 or whatever i mean you might as well practice trying to do things but that's mostly about learning how to do things by practicing there's a lot of things you can't do unless you just keep trying them and when all else fails try to maximize the number of offspring however way you can that's certainly something i've neglected i would tell my younger version of myself hey try to have more descendants yes absolutely it matters more than i gave i realized at the both in terms of making copies of yourself in in mutated form and just the joy of raising them sure i mean the the meaning even you know so in the literature on the value people get out of life there's a key distinction between happiness and meaning so happiness is how do you feel right now about right now and meaning is how do you feel about your whole life and you know many things that produce happiness don't produce meaning as reliably and if you have to choose between them you'd rather have meaning and meaning is more goes along with sacrificing happiness sometimes and children are an example of that do you get a lot more meaning out of children even if they're a lot more work why do you think kids children are so magical like raising kids because i i'm i would love to have kids and um whenever i work with robots there's some of the same magic when there's an entity that comes to life and in that case i'm not trying to draw too many parallels but there is some um echo to it which is when you program a robot there's some aspect of your intellect that is now instilled in this other moving being that's kind of magical well why do you why why do you think that's magical and you said happiness and meaning as opposed to a shorting full why is it meaningful it's over determined like i can give you several different reasons all of which is sufficient and so the question is we don't know which ones are the correct reasons technical over it's over determined look it up right so you know i meet a lot of people interested in the future interested in thinking about the future they're thinking about how can i influence the future but you know overwhelmingly in history so far the main way people have influenced the future is by having children overwhelmingly and that's just not an incidental fact you you are built for that that is you know you're you're the sequence of thousands of generations each of which successfully had a descendant and that affected who you are you just have to expect and it's true that who you are is built to be you know expect to have a child to to you know want to have a child to have that be a natural and meaningful interaction for you and it's just true it's just one of those things you just should have expected and it's not a surprise well uh to push back and sort of in terms of influencing the future as we get more and more technology more and more of us are able to influence the future in all kinds of other ways right being a teacher educating even so though still most of our influence in the future is probably happened being being kids even though we've accumulated more ways other ways to do it you mean at scale i guess the depth of influence like really how much of much effort how much of yourself you really put another human being do you mean both the raising of a kid or you mean raw genetic information well both but raw genetics is probably more than half of it more than half more than half even in this modern world yup genetics let me ask some dark difficult questions if i might let's take a stroll into that uh place that may may not exist according to you what's the darkest place you've ever gone to in your mind in your life a dark time a challenging time in your life that you had to overcome um you know probably just feeling strongly rejected and so i've been i'm apparently somewhat emotionally scarred by just being very rejection averse which must have happened because some rejections were just very scarring at a scale in in what kinds of communities and they did the individual scale i mean lots of different scales yeah all the different many different scales still that rejection stings um hold on a second but you are a contrarian thinker you challenge the knowledge why if you if you were scarred by rejection why welcome it in so many ways at a much larger scale constantly with your ideas could be that i'm just stupid and or that i've just categorized them differently than i should or something um you know the most rejection that i've faced hasn't been because of my intellectual ideas uh so oh so once the intellectual ideas haven't been the thing to risk the rejection the one that the things that put challenge your mind taking you to a dark place are the more psychological rejections so well you just asked me well you know what took me to a dark place you didn't specify it as sort of an intellectual dark place i guess yeah i just meant like what what so intellectual is disjoint or at least at a at a more surface level than something emotional yeah i would i would just think you know there are times in your life when you know you're just in a dark place and that can have many different causes and most you know most intellectuals are still just people and most of the things that will affect them or the kinds of things that affect people they aren't that different necessarily and that's going to be true for like i presume most basketball players are still just people if you ask them what was the worst part of their life it's going to be this kind of thing that was the worst part of life for most people so rejection early in life uh yeah i think i mean that's possible not in grade school probably but you know yeah sort of you know being a young nerdy guy and feeling you know not in much demand or interest or you know later on lots of different kinds of rejection but yeah but i think that's you know most of us like to pretend we don't that much need other people we don't care what they think uh you know it's a common sort of stance if somebody rejects yourself i didn't care about them anyway i you know didn't but i think to be honest people really do care yeah we do seek that connection that love what do you think is the role of love in the human condition um opacity in part that is um love is one of those things where we know at some level it's important to us but it's not very clearly shown to us exactly how or why or in what ways uh there are some kinds of things we want where we can just clearly see that we want and widely we want it right we know when we're thirsty and we know why we were thirsty and we know what to do about being thirsty and we know when it's over that we're no longer thirsty love isn't like that it's like what what do we seek from this we're drawn to it but we do not understand why right we're drawn exactly because it's not just affection because if it was just affection we don't seem to be drawn to pure affection we don't seem to be drawn to uh somebody who's like a servant we don't seem to be necessarily drawn to somebody that satisfies all your needs or something like that so it's clearly something we want or need but we're not exactly very clear about it and that isn't kind of important to it so i've also noticed there are some kinds of things you can't imagine very well so if you imagine a situation there's some aspects of the situation you can clear that you can imagine it being bright or dim you can imagine it being windy or imagine being hot or cold but there's some aspects about your emotional stance in a situation that's actually just hard to imagine or even remember it's hard to like you can often remember an emotion only when you're in a similar sort of emotion situation and otherwise you just can't bring the emotion to your mind as a and you can't even imagine it right so there's certain kinds of imag emotions you can have and when you're in that emotion you can know that you have it and you can have a name and it's associated but later on i tell you you know remember joy and it does that doesn't come to mind you're not able to replay it right and that's the sort of reason why we ha we're one of the reasons that pushes us to re-consume it and reproduce it is that we can't reimagine it well there's a it's interesting because there's a daniel kahneman type of thing of like reliving memories because i'm able to summon some aspect of that emotion again by thinking of that situation that from which that emotion came right so like a certain song you can listen to it and you can feel the same way you felt the first time you remember that song associated with you need to remember that situation in some sort of complete package yes you can't just take one part off of it and then if you get the whole package again if you remember the whole feeling yes or some fundamental aspect of that whole experience that arouse from which the feeling wrote and actually the feeling is probably different in some way it could be more pleasant or less pleasant than the feeling you felt originally and that morphs over time every time you replay that memory it is interesting you're not able to replay the because you feeling remember the feeling you remember the facts of the events so there's a sense in which over time we expand our vocabulary as a community of language and that allows us to sort of have more feelings and know that we are feeling them because you can have a feeling but not have a word for it and then you don't know how to categorize it or even what it is and whether it's the same as something else but once you have a word for it you can sort of pull it together more easily and so i think over time we are having a richer palette of feelings because we have more words for them what has been a painful loss in your life maybe somebody or something that's no longer in your life but played an important part of your life youth that's a concept no it has to be i mean but i was once younger i had one health and i had vitality i was seeing summer i mean you know i've lost that over time do you see that as a different person maybe you've lost that person certainly i yes absolutely i'm a different person than i was when i was younger and i've i'm not who i don't even remember exactly what he was so i don't remember as many things from the past as many people do so and some stuff i've just lost a lot of my history by not remembering it but does that and i'm not that person anymore that person's gone is that painful is it a painful loss though yeah or is it a why why is it painful because you're wiser you're i mean there's so many things that are beneficial to getting older right but are you just just i just was this person and i felt assured that i could continue to be that person and you're no longer that and he's he's gone and i'm not him anymore and he's he died without fanfare or a funeral and that the person you are today talking to me that person will be changed too yes and so that 20 years he won't be there anymore and the future person you have uh will look back with each version of you for m's this will be less of a problem for m's they would be able to save an archived copy of themselves at each different age and they could turn it on periodically and go back and talk to it to replay you think some of that will be so with emulated minds with m's there's a clue there's a digital cloning that happens and do you think that makes your you less special if if you're cloneable like does does that make you uh the experience of life the experience of a moment the scarcity of that moment the scarcity of that experience isn't that a fundamental part of what makes that experience so delicious so rich of feeling i think if you think of a song that lots of people listen to that are copies all over the world we're gonna call that a more special song yeah yeah so there's a perspective on copying and cloning where you're just scaling happiness versus uh degrading each copy of a song is less special if there are many copies but the song itself is more special if there are many copies and on mass right you're you're actually spreading the happiness even if it diminishes over a large number of people at scale and that increases the overall happiness in the world and then you're able to do that with multiple songs is a person who has an identical twin more or less special well the problem with identical twins is you know you it's like just two with m's right but but two is different than one so but i think an identical twin's life is richer for having this other identical twin somebody who understands them better than anybody else can from the point of view of an identical twin i think they have a richer life for being part of this couple which each of which is very similar now if you said will the world you know if we lose one of the identical twins will the world miss it as much because you've got the other one and they're pretty similar maybe from the rest of the world's point of view they are they suffer less of a loss when they lose one of the identical twins but from the point of view of the identical twin themselves their life is enriched by having a twin see but the identical twin copying happens at the place of birth uh that's different than copying after you've done some of the environment like the nurture yeah at the teenage or the in the 20s that'll be an interesting thing for ems to find out all the different ways that can have different relationships to different people who have different degrees of similarity to them in time yeah yeah man but it seems like a rich space to explore and i don't feel sorry for them this sounds like interesting world to living and there could be some ethical conundrums there there will be many new choices to make that they don't make now so and then we discussed it and i discussed that in the book age if i'm like say say you have a lover and you make a copy of yourself but the lover doesn't make a copy well now which one of you or are both still related to the lover socially entitled would you show up yes so you'll have to make choices then when you split yourself which which of you inherit which unique things yeah and of course there will be an equivalent increase in lawyers well i guess you can clone the lawyers to help manage some of these negotiations of how to split property the nature of owning i mean property is connected to individuals right you only really need lawyers for this with an inefficient awkward law that is not very transparent and able to do things so you know for example an operating system of a computer is a law for that computer when the operating system is simple and clean you don't need to hire a lawyer to make a key choice with the operator you don't need a human in the loop you just make a choice yeah right so ideally we want a legal system that makes the common choices easy and not require much overhead and that's the digitization of things uh further and further further enables that [Music] so the loss of a younger self what about the loss of your life overall do you ponder your death your mortality are you afraid of it i am a cryonics customer that's what this little tag around my deck says it says that if you find me in a medical situation uh you should call these people to enable the cryonics transfer so i am taking a long shot chance at living a much longer life can you explain what cryonics is so when medical science gives up on me in this world instead of burning me or letting worms eat me they will freeze me or at least freeze my head and there's damage that happens in the process of freezing the head but once it's frozen it won't change for a very long time chemically it'll just be completely exactly the same so future technology might be able to revive me and in fact i would be mainly counting on the brain emulation scenario which doesn't require reviving my entire biological body it means i would be in a computer simulation and so that's i think i've got at least a five percent shot at that and that's immortality are you so most likely it won't happen and therefore i'm sad that it won't happen do you think immortality is something that you would like to have well i mean just like infinity i mean you can't know until forever which means never right so all you can really you know the better choices at each moment you want to keep going so i would like at every moment to have the option to keep going the the interesting thing about the human experience is that the way you phrase it is exactly right at every moment i would like to keep going but the thing that happens uh you know leave them wanting more of whatever that uh right that phrase is the thing that happens is over time uh it's possible for certain experiences to become bland and you become tired of them and that actually makes life um really unpleasant sorry it makes that experience really unpleasant and perhaps you can generalize that that to life itself if you have a long enough horizon and so it might happen but we might as well wait and find out but then you're ending it and suffering you know so in the world of brain emulations i have more options you can return yourself that is i i can make copies of myself archive copies at various ages and at a later age i could decide that i'd rather replace myself with a new copy from a younger age so does a brain emulation still operate in the physical space so can we do what do you think about like the metaverse and operating in virtual reality so we can conjure up not just emulate not just your own um brain and body but the entirety of the environment well most brain emulations will in fact spose most of their time in virtual reality but they wouldn't think of it as virtual reality or just think of it as their usual reality i mean the thing to notice i think in our world most of us spend time most time indoors and indoors we are surrounded by walls covered with paint and floors covered with tile or rugs most of our environment is artificial it's constructed to be convenient for us it's not the natural world that was there before a virtual reality is basically just like that it is the environment that's comfortable and convenient for you and but if if when it's the right that environment for you it's real for you just like the room you're in right now most likely is very real for you you're not focused on the fact that the paint is hiding the actual studs behind the wall and the actual wires and pipes and everything else the fact that we're hiding that from you doesn't make it fake or unreal what are the chances that we're actually in the very kind of system that you're describing where the the environment and the brain is being emulated and you're just replaying an experience when you or first did a podcast with lex after and now you know the person that originally launched this already did hundreds of podcasts with lex this is just the first time and you like this time because there's so much uncertainty there's nerves you could have gone any direction um at the moment we don't have the technical ability to create that an emulation so we'd have to be postulating that in the future we have that ability and then they choose to evaluate this moment now no but to simulate it don't you think we're we could be in the simulation of that exact experience right now we wouldn't be able to know so one scenario would be this never really happened this only happens as a reconstruction later on yeah that's different than scenario this did happen the first time and now it's happening again as a reconstruction second scenario is harder to put together because it requires this coincidence where between the two times we produce the ability to do it um no but don't you think replay of memories uh um poor replay of memories is so that might be a possible thing in the future saying it's harder than conjure up things from scratch it's certainly possible so the main way i would think about it is in terms of the demand for simulation versus other kinds of things so i've given this a lot of thought because you know i first wrote about this long ago when bostrom first wrote his papers about simulation argument and i wrote about how to live in a simulation um and so the key issue is you know the fraction of creatures in the universe that are really experiencing what you appear to be really experiencing relative to the fraction that are experiencing it in a simulation way i.e simulated so then the key parameter is at any one moment in time creatures at that time many of them most of them are presumably really experiencing what they're experiencing but some fraction of them are experiencing some past time where that past time is being remembered via their simulation so um to figure out this ratio what we need to think about is basically two functions one is how fast in time does the number of creatures grow and then how fast in time does the interest in the past decline because at any one time people will be simulating different periods in the past with different emphasis the way you think so much that's exactly right yeah so if if the first function grows slower then the second one declines then in fact your chances of being simulated are low yes so the key question is how fast does interest in the past decline relative to the rate at which the population grows with time does this correlate to you earlier suggested that the interest in the future increases over time are those correlated interests in the future versus interest in the past like why do why are we interested in the past but the simple way to do is as you know like google engrams has a way to type in a word and see how interested in client declines arises over time right yeah you can just type in a year and get the answer for that if you type in a particular year like 1900 or 1950 you can see with google engram how interest in that year increased up until that date and decreased after it yep and you can see that interest in a date declines faster than does the population grow with time that is brilliant and so that's so interesting to have the answer wow and that was your argument against not against this particular aspect of the simulation how much past simulation there will be a replay of past memories first of all if we assume that like simulation of the past is a small fraction of all the creatures at that moment yes right and then it's about how fast now some people have argued plausibly that maybe most interest in the past falls with this fast function but some unusual category of interest in the fast won't fall that fat quickly and then that eventually would dominate so that's a other hypothesis some category so that that very outlier specific kind of yeah okay yeah yeah yeah like really popular kinds of memories like second probably second in a trillion years there's some small research institute that tries to randomly select from all possible people in history yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah how big is this research institute and how big is the future in a trillion years right and that's that would be hard to say but if we just look at the ordinary process by which people simulate recent errors so if you look at well i think it's also true for movies and plays and video games overwhelming they're interested in the recent past there's very few video games where you play someone in the roman empire right even fewer where you play someone in the ancient egyptian empire yeah just indifferent it's just declined very quickly but every once in a while that's brought back um but yeah you're right i mean just if you look at the mass of entertainment movies and games it's it's focusing on the present recent past and maybe some i mean where does science fiction fit into this because um it's sort of uh uh what is science fiction i mean it's a mix of the past and the present and some kind of manipulation of that right to uh make it more efficient for us to ask deep philosophical questions about humanity the closest genre to science fiction is clearly fantasy fantasy and science fiction many bookstores and even netflix or whatever categories they're just lumped together so clearly they have a similar function so that the function of fantasy is more transparent than the function of science fiction so use that as your guide what's fantasy for it's just to take away the constraints of the ordinary world and imagine stories with much fewer constraints right that's what fantasy is you're much less constrained what's the purpose to remove constraints is it to escape from the harshness of the constraints of the real world or is it to just remove constraints in order to explore some some get a deeper understanding of our world what is it i mean why do people read i'm not a i'm not a a cheap fantasy reading kind of person so i need to uh one story that sounds plausible to me is that there are sort of these deep story structures that we love and we want to realize and then many details of the world get in their way fantasy takes all those obstacles out of the way and lets you tell the essential hero story or the essential love story whatever essential story you want to tell um the the reality and constraints are not in the way and so science fiction can be thought of as like fantasy except you're not willing to admit that it's not can't be true so the future gives the excuse of saying well it could happen and you accept some more reality constraints for the for the illusion at least that it maybe it could really happen maybe it could happen and that it stimulates the image the imagination is something really interesting about human beings and it seems also to be an important part of creating really special things is to be able to first imagine them uh with you and nick bostrom where do you land on the simulation and all the mathematical ways of thinking it and just the thought experiment of it are we living in a simulation that was the just discussion we just had that is you should grant the possibility of being a simulation you shouldn't be 100 confident that you're not you should certainly grant a small probability the question is how large is that probability oh you're saying we would be i i misunderstood because i thought our discussion was about replaying things that already happened right but the whole question is right now is that what's what i am am i actually a replay from some distant future but it doesn't necessarily need to be a replay it could be a totally new you could be you don't have to be right but clearly i'm in a certain era with a certain kind of world around me right so either this is a complete fantasy or it's a past of somebody else in the future but no it could be a complete fantasy though it could be right but then you might and then you have to talk about what's the frank fraction of complete fantasies right i would say it's easier to generate a fantasy than to replay a memory right sure just look at the entire we just look at the entire history of everything we should say sure but most things are real most things aren't fantasies right therefore the chance that my thing is real right so so the simulation argument works stronger about sort of the past we say ah but there's more future people than there are today so you being in the past of the future makes you special relative to them which makes you more likely to be in a simulation right if we're just taking the full count and saying in all creatures ever what percentage are in simulations probably no more than 10 see so what's the good argument for that that most things are real yeah because foster says the other way right in a competitive world in a world where people like have to work and have to get things done then they have a limited budget for leisure and so you know leisure things are less common than work things like real things right that that's just but if you look at the stretch of history in the universe doesn't the ratio of leisure increase i is that where we isn't that the fourth right but now we're looking at the fraction of leisure which takes the form of something where the person doing the leisure doesn't realize it now there could be some fraction that's much smaller right yeah okay clues forward or somebody is clueless in the process of supporting this this leisure right it might not be the person leisuring somebody they're a supporting character or something but still that's got to be a pretty small fraction of leisure what you mentioned that children are one of the things that are a source of meaning broadly speaking then let me ask the big question what's the meaning of this whole thing the robin meaning of life what is the meaning of life we talked about alien civilizations but this is the one we got we are the aliens we are the human seem to be conscious be able to introspect what's why why why are we here this is the thing i told you before about how we can predict that future creatures will be different from us we our preferences are this amalgam of various sorts of random sort of patched together preferences about thirst and sex and sleep and attention and all these sorts of things so we don't understand that very well it's not very transparent and it's a mess right that is the source of our motivation that is how we were made and how we are induced to do things but we can't summarize it very well and we don't even understand it very well that's who we are and often we find ourselves in a situation where we don't feel very motivated we don't know why in other situations we find ourselves very motivated and we don't know why either and so that's the nature of being a human of the sort that we are because even though we can think abstractly and reason abstractly this package of motivations is just opaque and a mess and that's what it means to be a human today and the motivation we can't very well tell the meaning of our life it is this mess that our descendants will be different they will actually know exactly what they want and it will be to have more descendants for that will be the meaning for them well it's funny that you have the certainty you have more certainty you have more transparency about our descendants than you do about your own self right so um it's really interesting to think because you mentioned this about love that something that's fundamental about love is this opaqueness that we're not able to really introspect what the heck it is um or all the feelings the complex feelings involved true about many of our motivations and that's what it means to be human of the 20 20th and the 21st century variety um why is that not a feature that we want will choose to persist in civilization then this opaqueness you know put another way mystery maintaining a sense of mystery about ourselves and about those around us uh maybe that's a really nice thing to have maybe but so i mean this is the fundamental issue and analyzing the future what will set the future one theory about what will set the future is what do we want the future to be so under that theory we should sit and talk about what we went to future we have some conferences have some conventions you know discussion things vote on it maybe and then hand out off to the implementation people to make the future the way we've decided it should be that's not the actual process that's changed the world over history up to this point it has not been the result of us deciding what we want and making it happen in our individual lives we can do that and we might decide what career we want or where we want to live who we want to live with in our individual lives we often do slowly make our lives better according to our plan and our things but that's not the whole world the whole world so far has mostly been a competitive world where things happen if anybody anywhere chooses to adopt them and they have an advantage and then it spreads and other people are forced to adopt it by competitive pressures so that's the kind of analysis i can use to predict the future and i do use that to predict the future it doesn't tell us it'll be a future we like it just tells us what it'll be and it'll be one where we're trying to maximize the number of our descendants and we know that abstractly indirectly and it's not opaque with some probability that's non-zero that will lead us to become grabby in expanding aggressively out into the cosmos until we meet other aliens the timing isn't clear we might become glabby and then this happens these are grubbiness and this are both the results of competition but it's less clear which happens first does this future excite you or scare you how do you feel about this well i think again i told you compared to sort of a dead cosmology at least it it's energizing and having a living story with real actors and characters and agendas right yeah and that's one one hell of a fun universe to live in robin you're one of the most fascinating fun people to talk to brilliant humble systematic in your analysis hold on to my wallet here what's he looking for i already stole your wallet long ago i really really appreciate you spend your valuable time with me i hope we get a chance to talk many more times in the future thank you so much for sitting down thank you thanks for listening to this conversation with robin hansen to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from ray bradbury we are an impossibility in an impossible universe thank you for listening and hope to see you next time you