back to indexEric Weinstein: Revolutionary Ideas in Science, Math, and Society | Lex Fridman Podcast #16
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The following is a conversation with Eric Weinstein.
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He's a mathematician, economist, physicist, and the managing director of Teal Capital.
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He coined the term, and you can say, is the founder of the intellectual dark web, which
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is a loosely assembled group of public intellectuals that includes Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson,
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Steven Pinker, Joe Rogan, Michael Shermer, and a few others.
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This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence Podcast at MIT and beyond.
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If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, iTunes, or simply connect with me on Twitter at Lex
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Friedman, spelled F R I D.
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And now, here's my conversation with Eric Weinstein.
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Are you nervous about this?
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You mentioned Kung Fu Panda as one of your favorite movies.
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It has the usual profound master student dynamic going on.
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So who was, who has been a teacher that significantly influenced the direction of your thinking
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So if you're the Kung Fu Panda, who was your Shifu?
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Oh, well, it's interesting because I didn't see Shifu as being the teacher.
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Who was the teacher?
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Oogway, Master Oogway.
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They only meet twice in the entire film.
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And the first conversation sort of doesn't count.
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So the magic of the film, in fact, its point is that the teaching that really matters is
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transferred during a single conversation and it's very brief.
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And so who played that role in my life?
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I would say, uh, either, uh, my grandfather, uh, Harry Rubin and his wife, Sophie Rubin,
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my grandmother, or Tom Lehrer.
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If you give a child Tom Lehrer records, what you do is you destroy their ability to be
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taken over by later malware.
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And it's so irreverent, so witty, so clever, so obscene that it destroys the ability to
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lead a normal life for many people.
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So if I meet somebody who's usually really shifted from any kind of neurotypical presentation,
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I'll often ask them, uh, are you a Tom Lehrer fan?
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And the odds that they will respond are quite high.
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Tom Lehrer is, uh, poisoning pigeons in the park, Tom Lehrer.
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That's very interesting.
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There are a small number of Tom Lehrer songs that broke into the general population, poisoning
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pigeons in the park, the element song, and perhaps the Vatican rag.
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Uh, so when you meet somebody who knows those songs but doesn't know, oh, you're judging
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me right now, aren't you?
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Uh, no, but you're a Russian, so I doubt as the, you know, Nikolai Ivanovich Lubachevsky,
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Um, so that was a song about plagiarism that was in fact plagiarized, which most people
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don't know from Danny Kay, uh, where Danny Kay did a song called Stanislavsky of the
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And so Tom Lehrer did this brilliant job of plagiarizing a song about and making it about
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plagiarism and then making it about this mathematician who worked in non Euclidean geometry.
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That was like, uh, giving heroin to a child.
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It was extremely addictive and eventually led me to a lot of different places, one of
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which may have been a PhD in mathematics.
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And he was also at least a lecturer in mathematics, I believe at Harvard, something like that.
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I just had dinner with him.
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In fact, uh, when my son turned 13, we didn't tell him, but, um, his bar mitzvah present
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was dinner with his hero, Tom Lehrer.
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And Tom Lehrer was 88 years old, sharp as a tack, irreverent and funny as hell.
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And just, you know, there are very few people in this world that you have to meet while
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they're still here.
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And that was definitely one for our family.
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So that wit is a reflection of intelligence in some kind of deep way, like where that
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would be a good test of intelligence, whether you're a Tom Lehrer fan.
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So what do you think that is about wit, about that kind of humor, ability to see the absurdity
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Well, do you think that's connected to intelligence or are we just two Jews on a mic that appreciate
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that kind of humor?
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No, I think that it's absolutely connected to intelligence.
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So you can, you can see it.
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There's a place where Tom Lehrer decides that he's going to lampoon Gilbert of Gilbert and
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Sullivan and he's going to outdo Gilbert with clever, meaningless wordplay.
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And he has, forget the, well, let's see, he's doing Clementine as if Gilbert and Sullivan
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That I misunderstood depressed her young sister named Mr. This Mr. Depester, she tried pestering
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sisters of festering blister you best to resist or say I, the sister persisted the Mr. Resisted
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I kissed her all loyalty slip when he said, when she said I could have her, her sister's
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cadaver must surely have turned in its crypt.
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It's so insane that that's clearly intelligence because it's hard to construct something like
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If I look at my favorite Tom Lehrer, Tom Lehrer lyric, you know, there's a perfectly absurd
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one, which is once all the Germans were warlike and mean, but that couldn't happen again.
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We taught them a lesson in 1918 and they've hardly bothered us since then, right?
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That is a different kind of intelligence.
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You know, you're taking something that is so horrific and you're, you're sort of making
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it palatable and funny and demonstrating also, um, just your humanity.
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I mean, I think the thing that came through as, as Tom Lehrer wrote all of these terrible,
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horrible lines was just what a sensitive and beautiful soul he was, who was channeling
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pain through humor and through grace.
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I've seen throughout Europe, throughout Russia, that same kind of humor emerged from the generation
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It seemed like that humor is required to somehow deal with the pain and the suffering of that,
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You do need the environment to create the broad Slavic soul.
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I don't think that many Americans really appreciate, um, Russian humor, how you had to joke during
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the time of, let's say article 58 under Stalin, you had to be very, very careful.
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You know, the concept of a Russian satirical magazine like Crocodile, uh, doesn't make
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So you have this cross cultural problem that there are certain areas of human experience
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that it would be better to know nothing about.
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And quite unfortunately, Eastern Europe knows a great deal about them, which makes the,
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you know, the songs of Vladimir Vysotsky so potent, the, uh, you know, the pros of Pushkin,
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whatever it is, uh, you have to appreciate the depth of the Eastern European experience.
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And I would think that perhaps Americans knew something like this around the time of the
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civil war or merit maybe, um, you know, under slavery and Jim Crow or even the, uh, harsh
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tyranny of, uh, the coal and steel employers during the labor wars.
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Um, but in general, I would say it's hard for us to understand and imagine the collective
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culture unless we have the system of selective pressures that, for example, uh, Russians
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were subjected to.
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Yeah, so if there's one good thing that comes out of war, it's literature, art, and humor
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Oh, I don't think so.
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I think almost everything is good about war except for death and destruction.
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Without the death, it would bring, uh, the romance of it.
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The whole thing is nice.
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Well, this is why we're always caught up in war and we have this very ambiguous relationship
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to it is that it makes life real and pressing and meaningful and at an unacceptable price
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and the price has never been higher.
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So just jump in, uh, into AI a little bit.
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You, uh, in one of the conversations you had or one of the videos, you described that one
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of the things AI systems can't do and biological systems can is self replicate in the physical
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In the physical world.
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Well, yes, the physical robots can't self replicate, but the fit, but you, this is a
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very tricky point, which is that the only thing that we've been able to create that's
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really complex that has an analog of our reproductive system is software.
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But nevertheless, software replicates itself.
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Uh, if we're speaking strictly for the replication in this kind of digital space.
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So let me just to begin, let me ask a question.
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Do you see a protective barrier or a gap between the physical world and the digital world?
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Let's not call it digital.
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Let's call it the logical world versus the physical world.
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Well, because even though we had, let's say Einstein's brain preserved, uh, it was meaningless
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to us as a physical object because we couldn't do anything with what was stored in it at
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And so the idea that something may be stored logically and that it may be stored physically,
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uh, are not necessarily, uh, we don't always benefit from synonymizing.
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I'm not suggesting that there isn't a material basis to the logical world, but that it does
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warrant identification with a separate layer that need not invoke logic gates and zeros
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And uh, so connecting those two worlds, the logical world and the physical world, or maybe
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just connecting to the logical world inside our brain, Einstein's brain.
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You mentioned the idea of out, outtelligence.
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Artificial outtelligence.
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Artificial outtelligence.
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This is the only essay that John Brockman ever invited me to write that he refused to
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Well, maybe it wasn't, it wasn't well written, um, but I don't know.
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The idea is quite compelling is quite unique and new and at least from my view of a stance
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point, maybe you can explain it.
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What I was thinking about is why it is that we're waiting to be terrified by artificial
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general intelligence when in fact, artificial life, uh, is terrifying in and of itself and
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it's already here.
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So in order to have a system of selective pressures, you need three distinct elements.
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You need variation within a population.
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You need heritability and you need differential success.
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So what's really unique and I've made this point, I think elsewhere about software is
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that if you think about what humans know how to build, that's impressive.
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So I always take a car and I say, does it have an analog of each of the physical physiological
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Does it have a skeletal structure?
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Does it have a neurological structure?
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Has an on board computer, has a digestive system.
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The one thing it doesn't have is a reproductive system.
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But if you can call spawn on a process, effectively you do have a reproductive system and that
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means that you can create something with variation, heritability and differential success.
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Now the next step in the chain of thinking was where do we see inanimate, non intelligent
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life outwitting intelligent life?
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And um, I have two favorite systems and I try to stay on them so that we don't get distracted.
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One of which is the Ofres orchid, um, subspecies or subclade.
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I don't know what to call it.
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There's a type of flower.
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Yeah, it's a type of flower that mimics the female of a pollinator species in order to
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dupe the males into, uh, engaging.
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It was called pseudo copulation with the fake female, which is usually represented by the
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And there's also a pheromone component to fool the males into thinking they have a mating
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But the flower doesn't have to give up energy energy in the form of nectar as a lure because
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it's tricking the males.
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The other system is a particular species, uh, of muscle lampicillus in the clear streams
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of Missouri and it fools bass into biting a fleshy lip that contain its young.
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And when the bass see this fleshy lip, which looks exactly like a species of fish that
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the bass like to eat, the, uh, the young explode and clamp onto the gills and parasitize the
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bass and also lose the best redistribute them as they eventually release both of these systems.
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You have a highly intelligent dupe being fooled by a lower life form and what is sculpting
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these, these convincing lures.
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It's the intelligence of previously duped targets for these strategies.
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So when the target is smart enough to avoid the strategy, uh, those weaker mimics, uh,
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They have terminal lines and only the better ones survive.
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So it's an arms race between the target species, uh, that is being parasitized, getting smarter
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and this other less intelligent or non intelligent object getting as if smarter.
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And so what you see is, is that artificial intelligence, artificial general intelligence
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is not needed to parasitize us.
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It's simply sufficient for us to outwit ourselves.
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So you could have a program, let's say, you know, one of these Nigerian scams, um, that
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writes letters and uses whoever sends it Bitcoin, uh, to figure out which aspects of the program
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should be kept, which should be varied and thrown away.
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And you don't need it to be in any way intelligent in order to have a really nightmarish scenario
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of being parasitized by something that has no idea what it's doing.
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So you, you, you phrased a few concepts really eloquently.
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So let me try to, uh, as a few directions this goes.
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So one first, first of all, in the way we write software today, it's not common that
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we allow it to self modify.
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But we do have that ability.
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Now we have the ability, it's just not common.
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It's not just common.
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So, so your, your thought is that that is a serious worry.
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If there becomes, uh,
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Self modifying code is, is available now.
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So there's, there's different types of self modification, right?
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There's a personalization, you know, your email app, your Gmail is a self modifying
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to you after you log in or whatever you can think of it that way.
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But ultimately it's central, all the information is centralized, but you're thinking of ideas
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where you're completely, so this is an unique entity, uh, operating under selective pressures
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Well, you just, if you think about the fact that our immune systems, uh, don't know what's
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coming at them next, but they have a small set of spanning components and if it's, if
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it's a sufficiently expressive system in that any shape, uh, or binding region can be approximated,
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uh, with, with the Lego that is present, um, then you can have confidence that you don't
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need to know what's coming at you because the combinatorics, um, are sufficient to reach
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any configuration needed.
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Uh, so that's a beautiful thing.
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Well, terrifying thing to worry about because it's so within our reach.
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Whatever I suggest these things, I do always have a concern as to whether or not I will
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bring them into being by talking about them.
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So, uh, there's this thing from open AI, uh, next, next week to talk to the founder of
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open AI, uh, this idea that, uh, their text generation, the new, uh, the new stuff they
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have for generating texts is they didn't want to bring it, they didn't want to release it
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because they're worried about the.
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I'm delighted to hear that, but they're going to end up releasing.
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So that's the thing is I think talking about it, um, well, at least from my end, I'm more
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a proponent of technology preventing tech, uh, so further innovation, preventing the
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detrimental effects of innovation.
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Well, we're at a, we're sort of tumbling down a hill at accelerating speed.
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So whether or not we're proponents or it doesn't, it doesn't really, it may not matter, but
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I, well, I do feel that there are people who've held things back and, uh, you know, died poor
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than they might've otherwise been.
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We don't even know their names.
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I don't think that we should discount the idea that having the smartest people showing
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off how smart they are by what they've developed may be a terminal process.
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I'm very mindful in particular of a beautiful letter that Edward Teller of all people wrote
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to Leo Zillard and where Zillard was trying to figure out how to control the use of atomic
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weaponry at the end of world war II and teller rather strangely because many of us view him
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as a monster, um, showed some, a very advanced moral thinking talking about the slim chance
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we have for survival and that the only hope is to make Warren thinkable.
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I do think that not enough of us feel in our gut what it is we are playing with when we
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are working on technical problems.
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And I would recommend to anyone who hasn't seen it, a movie called the bridge over the
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bridge on the river Kwai about, I believe captured British POWs who just in a desire
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to do a bridge well, end up over collaborating with their Japanese captors.
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Well now you're making me a question the unrestricted open discussion of ideas and AI.
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I'm not saying I know the answer, I'm just saying that I could make a decent case for
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either our need to talk about this and to become technologically focused on containing
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it or need to stop talking about this and try to hope that the relatively small number
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of highly adept individuals who are looking at these problems is small enough that we
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should in fact be talking about how to contain them.
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Well the way ideas, the way innovation happens, what new ideas develop, Newton with calculus,
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whether if he was silent, the idea would be, would emerge elsewhere in the case of Newton
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But in the case of AI, how small is the set of individuals out of which such ideas would
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Well the idea is that the researchers we know and those that we don't know who may live
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in countries that don't wish us to know what level they're currently at are very disciplined
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in keeping these things to themselves.
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Of course I will point out that there's a religious school in Kerala that developed
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something very close to the calculus, certainly in terms of infinite series in I guess religious
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prayer and rhyme and prose.
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So it's not that Newton had any ability to hold that back and I don't really believe
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that we have an ability to hold it back.
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I do think that we could change the proportion of the time we spend worrying about the effects
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of what if we are successful rather than simply trying to succeed and hope that we'll be able
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to contain things later.
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So on the idea of intelligence, what form, treading cautiously as we've agreed as we
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tumbled down the hill, what form...
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We can't stop ourselves, can we?
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What form do you see it taking?
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So one example, Facebook, Google, do want to, I don't know a better word, you want to
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influence users to behave a certain way and so that's one kind of example of how intelligence
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is systems perhaps modifying the behavior of these intelligent human beings in order
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to sell more product of different kinds.
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But do you see other examples of this actually emerging in...
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Just take any parasitic system, make sure that there's some way in which that there's
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differential success, heritability, and variation.
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And those are the magic ingredients and if you really wanted to build a nightmare machine,
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make sure that the system that expresses the variability has a spanning set so that it
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can learn to arbitrary levels by making it sufficiently expressive.
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That's your nightmare.
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So it's your nightmare, but it could also be, it's a really powerful mechanism by which
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to create, well, powerful systems.
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So are you more worried about the negative direction that might go versus the positive?
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So you said parasitic, but that doesn't necessarily need to be what the system converges towards.
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It could be, what is it?
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And the dividing line between parasitism and symbiosis is not so clear.
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That's what they tell me about marriage.
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I'm still single, so I don't know.
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Well yeah, we could go into that too, but no, I think we have to appreciate, are you
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infected by your own mitochondria?
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So in marriage, you fear the loss of independence, but even though the American therapeutic community
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may be very concerned about codependence, what's to say that codependence isn't what's
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necessary to have a stable relationship in which to raise children who are maximally
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case selected and require incredible amounts of care because you have to wait 13 years
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before there's any reproductive payout and most of us don't want our 13 year olds having
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That's a very tricky situation to analyze and I would say that predators and parasites
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drive much of our evolution and I don't know whether to be angry at them or thank them.
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Well ultimately, I mean nobody knows the meaning of life or what even happiness is, but there
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They didn't tell you?
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That's why all the poetry and books are about, you know, there's some metrics under which
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you can kind of measure how good it is that these AI systems are roaming about.
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So you're more nervous about software than you are optimistic about ideas of, yeah, self
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replicating largely.
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I don't think we've really felt where we are.
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You know, occasionally we get a wake up, 9 11 was so anomalous compared to everything
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else we've experienced on American soil that it came to us as a complete shock that that
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was even a possibility.
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What it really was was a highly creative and determined R and D team deep in the bowels
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of Afghanistan showing us that we had certain exploits that we were open to that nobody
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had chosen to express.
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I can think of several of these things that I don't talk about publicly that just seem
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to have to do with, um, how relatively unimaginative those who wish to cause havoc and destruction
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have been up until now.
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But the great mystery of our time of this particular little era is how remarkably stable
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we've been since 1945 when we demonstrated the ability to use a nuclear weapons in anger.
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And we don't know why things like that haven't happened since then.
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We've had several close calls, we've had mistakes, we've had a brinksmanship.
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And what's now happened is that we've settled into a sense that, Oh, it's, it'll always
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It's been so long since something was at that level of danger that we've got a wrong idea
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And that's why when I went on the Ben Shapiro show, I talked about the need to resume above
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ground testing of nuclear devices because we have people whose developmental experience
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suggests that when let's say Donald Trump and North Korea engage on Twitter, Oh, it's
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It's just posturing.
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Everybody's just in it for money.
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There's, there's an, a sense that people are in a video game mode, which has been the right
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We've been mostly in video game mode.
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So you're worried about a generation which has not seen any existential.
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We've lived under it.
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You see, you're younger.
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I don't know if, if, and again, you came from, from Moscow.
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There was a TV show called the day after that had a huge effect on a generation growing
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up in the U S and it talked about what life would be like after a nuclear exchange.
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We have not gone through an embodied experience collectively where we've thought about this.
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And I think it's one of the most irresponsible things that the elders among us have done,
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which is to provide this beautiful garden in which the thorns are cut off of the, of
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the Rose bushes and all of the edges are rounded and sanded.
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And so people have developed this, this totally unreal idea, which is everything's going to
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And do I think that my leading concern is AGI or my leading concern is a thermonuclear
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exchange or gene drives or any one of these things?
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I don't know, but I know that our time here in this very long experiment here is finite
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because the toys that we've built are so impressive and the wisdom to accompany them has not materialized.
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And I think it's, we actually got a wisdom uptick since 1945.
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We had a lot of dangerous skilled players on the world stage who nevertheless, no matter
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how bad they were managed to not embroil us in something that we couldn't come back from
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Yeah, and the distance from the cold war, you know, I'm very mindful of a, there was
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a Russian tradition actually of on your wedding day, going to visit a memorial to those who
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Can you imagine this where you, on the happiest day of your life, you go and you pay homage
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to the people who fought and died in the battle of Stalingrad.
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I'm not a huge fan of communism, I got to say, but there were a couple of things that
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the Russians did that were really positive in the Soviet era.
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And I think trying to let people know how serious life actually is, is the Russian model
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of seriousness is better than the American model.
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And maybe like you mentioned, there was a small echo of that after 9 11.
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But we wouldn't let it form.
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We talk about 9 11, but it's 9 12 that really moved the needle when we were all just there
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and nobody wanted to speak.
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We witnessed something super serious and we didn't want to run to our computers and blast
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out our deep thoughts and our feelings.
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And it was profound because we woke up briefly, you know, I talk about the gated institutional
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narrative that sort of programs our lives.
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I've seen it break three times in my life, one of which was the election of Donald Trump.
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Another time was the fall of Lehman Brothers when everybody who knew that Bear Stearns
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wasn't that important knew that Lehman Brothers met AIG was next.
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And the other one was 9 11.
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And so if I'm 53 years old and I only remember three times that the global narrative was
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really interrupted, that tells you how much we've been on top of developing events.
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You know, I mean we had the Murrow federal building explosion, but it didn't cause the
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narrative to break.
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It wasn't profound enough.
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Around 9 12 we started to wake up out of our slumber and the powers that be did not want
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to coming together.
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They, you know, the admonition was go shopping.
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And the powers that be was what is that force as opposed to blaming individuals?
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So whatever that, whatever that force is, there's a component of it that's emergent
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and there's a component of it that's deliberate.
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So give yourself a portfolio with two components.
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Some amount of it is emergent, but some amount of it is also an understanding that if people
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come together, they become an incredible force.
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And what you're seeing right now I think is there are forces that are trying to come together
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and there are forces that are trying to push things apart.
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And you know, one of them is the globalist narrative versus the national narrative where
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to the global, uh, globalist perspective, uh, the nation nations are bad things in essence
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that they're temporary, they're nationalistic, they're jingoistic, it's all negative to people
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in the national, more in the national idiom, they're saying, look, this is where I pay
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This is where I do my army service.
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This is where I have a vote.
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This is where I have a passport.
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Who the hell are you to tell me that because you've moved into someplace that you can make
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money globally, that you've chosen to abandon other people to whom you have a special and
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And I think that these competing narratives have been pushing towards the global perspective,
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uh, from the elite and a larger and larger number of disenfranchised people are saying,
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hey, I actually live in a, in a place and I have laws and I speak a language, I have
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And who are you to tell me that because you can profit in some far away land that my obligations
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to my fellow countrymen are so, so much diminished.
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So these tensions between nations and so on, ultimately you see being proud of your country
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and so on, which creates potentially the kind of things that led to wars and so on.
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They, they ultimately, it is human nature and it is good for us for wake up calls of
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Well, I think that these are tensions and my point isn't, I mean, nationalism run amok
link |
is a nightmare and internationalism run amok is a nightmare.
link |
And the problem is we're trying to push these pendulums, uh, to some place where they're
link |
somewhat balanced, where we, we have a higher duty of care to those, uh, who share our log,
link |
our laws and our citizenship, but we don't forget our duties of care to the global system.
link |
I would think this is elementary, but the problem that we're facing concerns the ability
link |
for some to profit at the, by abandoning their obligations, uh, to others within their system.
link |
And that's what we've had for decades.
link |
You mentioned nuclear weapons.
link |
I was hoping to get answers from you since one of the many things you've done as a economics
link |
and maybe you can understand human behavior of why the heck we haven't blown each other
link |
So, uh, we'll get back.
link |
I don't know the answer.
link |
It's a, it's a fast.
link |
It's really important to say that we really don't know.
link |
A mild uptick in wisdom.
link |
A mild uptick in wisdom.
link |
Well, Steven Pinker, who I've talked with has a lot of really good ideas about why,
link |
but I don't trust his optimism.
link |
Listen, I'm Russian, so I never trust a guy who was that optimistic.
link |
It's just that you're talking about a guy who's looking at a system in which more and
link |
more of the kinetic energy like war has been turned into potential energy, like unused
link |
You know, now I'm looking at that system and I'm saying, okay, well, if you don't have
link |
a potential energy term, then everything's just getting better and better.
link |
That's beautifully put.
link |
Only a physicist could.
link |
I'm not a physicist.
link |
Is that a dirty word?
link |
I wish I were a physicist.
link |
My dad's a physicist.
link |
I'm trying to live up that probably for the rest of my life.
link |
He's probably gonna listen to this too.
link |
So your friend, Sam Harris, uh, worries a lot about the existential threat of AI.
link |
Not in the way that you've described, but in the more, well, he hangs out with Elon.
link |
I don't know Elon.
link |
So are you worried about that kind of, uh, you know, about the, um, about either robotic
link |
systems or, you know, traditionally defined AI systems essentially becoming a super intelligent,
link |
much more intelligent than human beings and, uh, getting, well, they already are and they're
link |
not when, when seen as a, um, a collective, you mean, well, I mean, I, I can mean all
link |
sorts of things, but certainly many of the things that we thought were peculiar to general
link |
intelligence or do not require general intelligence.
link |
So that's been one of the big awakenings that you can write a pretty convincing sports story
link |
from stats alone, uh, without needing to have watched the game.
link |
So you know, is it possible to write lively pros about politics?
link |
Yeah, no, not yet.
link |
So we were sort of all over the map.
link |
One of the, one of the things about chess that you'll, there's a question I once asked
link |
on Quora that didn't get a lot of response, which was what is the greatest brilliancy
link |
ever produced by a computer in a chess game, which was different than the question of what
link |
is the greatest game ever played.
link |
So if you think about brilliancies is what really animates many of us to think of chess
link |
Those are those moves and combinations that just show such flair, panache and, and, and
link |
in soul, um, computers weren't really great at that.
link |
They were great positional monsters and you know, recently we, we've started seeing brilliancies
link |
The grandmasters have identified with, uh, with alpha zero that things were quite brilliant.
link |
So that's, that's, that's a, you know, that's an example of something we don't think that
link |
that's AGI, but in a very restricted set, a set of rules like chess, you're starting
link |
to see poetry, uh, of a high order.
link |
And, and so I'm not, I don't like the idea that we're waiting for AGI, AGI is sort of
link |
slowly infiltrating our lives in the same way that I don't think a worm should be, you
link |
know, the C elegans shouldn't be treated as non conscious because it only has 300 neurons.
link |
Maybe it just has a very low level of consciousness because we don't understand what these things
link |
mean as they scale up.
link |
So am I worried about this general phenomena?
link |
But I think that one of the things that's happening is that a lot of us are fretting
link |
about this, uh, in part because of human needs.
link |
We've always been worried about the Golem, right?
link |
Well, the Golem is the artificially created life, you know, it's like Frankenstein.
link |
It's a Jewish version and, um, Frankenberg, Frankenstein, yeah, that's makes sense, right?
link |
So the, uh, but we've always been worried about creating something like this and it's
link |
getting closer and closer and there are ways in which
link |
we have to realize that the whole thing is kind of, the whole thing that we've experienced
link |
are the context of our lives is almost certainly coming to an end.
link |
And I don't mean to suggest that, uh, we won't survive.
link |
And I don't mean to suggest that it's coming tomorrow and it could be 300, 500 years, but
link |
there's no plan that I'm aware of if we have three rocks that we could possibly inhabit
link |
that are, uh, sensible within current technological dreams, the earth, the moon and Mars.
link |
And we have a very competitive civilization that is still forced into violence to sort
link |
out disputes that cannot be arbitrated.
link |
It is not clear to me that we have a longterm future until we get to the next stage, which
link |
is to figure out whether or not the Einsteinian speed limit can be broken.
link |
And that requires our source code.
link |
Our source code, the stuff in our brains to figure out what do you mean by our source
link |
The source code of the context, whatever it is that produces the quarks, the electrons,
link |
Oh, our source code.
link |
You're talking about stuff that's written in a higher level language.
link |
You're talking about the low level, the bits.
link |
That's what is currently keeping us here.
link |
We can't even imagine, you know, we have harebrained schemes for staying within the Einsteinian
link |
Uh, you know, maybe if we could just drug ourselves and go into a suspended state or
link |
we could have multiple generations of that, I think all that stuff is pretty silly, but
link |
I think it's also pretty silly to imagine that our wisdom is going to increase to the
link |
point that we can have the toys we have and, uh, we're not going to use them for 500 years.
link |
Speaking of Einstein, I had a profound breakthrough when I realized you're just one letter away
link |
Yeah, but I'm also one letter away from Feinstein.
link |
It's, well, you get to pick.
link |
So unified theory, you know, you've worked, uh, you, you enjoy the beauty of geometry.
link |
I don't actually know if you enjoy it.
link |
You certainly are quite good at it.
link |
I tremble before it.
link |
If you're religious, that is one of the, I don't have to be religious.
link |
It's just so beautiful.
link |
You will tremble anyway.
link |
I mean, I just read Einstein's biography and one of the ways, uh, one of the things you've
link |
done is try to explore a unified theory, uh, talking about a 14 dimensional observers that
link |
has the 4d space time continuum embedded in it.
link |
I, I'm just curious how you think and how philosophically at a high level about something
link |
more than four dimensions, uh, how do you try to, what, what does it make you feel?
link |
Talking in the mathematical world about dimensions that are greater than the ones we can perceive.
link |
Is there something that you take away that's more than just the math?
link |
Well, first of all, stick out your tongue at me.
link |
Now on the front of that time, yeah, there was a sweet receptor and next to that were
link |
salt receptors and two different sides, a little bit farther back.
link |
There were sour receptors and you wouldn't show me the back of your tongue where your
link |
bitter receptor was.
link |
Show the good side always.
link |
So you had four dimensions of taste receptors, but you also had pain receptors on that tongue
link |
and probably heat receptors on that time.
link |
So let's assume that you had one of each, that would be six dimensions.
link |
So when you eat something, you eat a slice of pizza and it's got some, some, uh, some
link |
hot pepper on it, maybe some jalapeno, you're having a six dimensional experience, dude.
link |
Do you think we overemphasize the value of time as one of the dimensions or space?
link |
Well, we certainly overemphasize the value of time cause we like things to start and
link |
end or we really don't like things to end, but they seem to.
link |
Well, what if you flipped one of the spatial dimensions into being a temporal dimension?
link |
And you and I were to meet in New York city and say, well, where, where and when should
link |
What about, I'll meet you on a 36 in Lexington at two in the afternoon and uh, 11 oclock
link |
That would be very confusing.
link |
Well, so it's convenient for us to think about time, you mean.
link |
We happen to be in a delicious situation in which we have three dimensions of space and
link |
one of time and they're woven together in this sort of strange fabric where we can trade
link |
off a little space for a little time, but we still only have one dimension that is picked
link |
out relative to the other three.
link |
It's very much Gladys Knight and the pips.
link |
So which one developed for who?
link |
Do we develop for these dimensions or did the dimensions or were they always there and
link |
Well, do you imagine that there isn't a place where there are four temporal dimensions or
link |
two and two of space and time or three of time and one of space and then would time
link |
not be playing the role of space?
link |
Why do you imagine that the sector that you're in is all that there is?
link |
I certainly do not, but I can't imagine otherwise.
link |
I mean, I haven't done ayahuasca or any of those drugs that hope to one day, but instead
link |
of doing ayahuasca, you could just head over to building two.
link |
That's where the mathematicians are?
link |
Yeah, that's where they hang.
link |
Just to look at some geometry.
link |
Well, just ask about pseudo Ramanian geometry.
link |
That's what you're interested in.
link |
Or you could talk to a shaman and end up in Peru.
link |
And then it's an extra money for that trip.
link |
Yeah, but you won't be able to do any calculations if that's how you choose to go about it.
link |
Well, a different kind of calculation, so to speak.
link |
One of my favorite people, Edward Frankel, Berkeley professor, author of Love and Math,
link |
great title for a book, said that you are quite a remarkable intellect to come up with
link |
such beautiful original ideas in terms of unified theory and so on, but you're working
link |
So one question in developing ideas that are truly original, truly interesting, what's
link |
the difference between inside academia and outside academia when it comes to developing
link |
Oh, it's a terrible choice.
link |
So if you do it inside of academics, you are forced to constantly show great loyalty to
link |
the consensus and you distinguish yourself with small, almost microscopic heresies to
link |
make your reputation in general.
link |
And you have very competent people and brilliant people who are working together, who form
link |
very deep social networks and have a very high level of behavior, at least within mathematics
link |
and at least technically within physics, theoretical physics.
link |
When you go outside, you meet lunatics and crazy people, madmen.
link |
And these are people who do not usually subscribe to the consensus position and almost always
link |
And the key question is, will progress likely come from someone who has miraculously managed
link |
to stay within the system and is able to take on a larger amount of heresy that is sort
link |
In which case, that will be fascinating, or is it more likely that somebody will maintain
link |
a level of discipline from outside of academics and be able to make use of the freedom that
link |
comes from not having to constantly affirm your loyalty to the consensus of your field?
link |
So you've characterized in ways that academia in this particular sense is declining.
link |
You posted a plot, the older population of the faculty is getting larger, the younger
link |
is getting smaller and so on.
link |
So which direction of the two are you more hopeful about?
link |
Well, the baby boomers can't hang on forever.
link |
First of all, in general, true, and second of all, in academia.
link |
But that's really what this time is about.
link |
We're used to financial bubbles that last a few years in length and then pop.
link |
The baby boomer bubble is this really long lived thing, and all of the ideology, all
link |
of the behavior patterns, the norms.
link |
For example, string theory is an almost entirely baby boomer phenomenon.
link |
It was something that baby boomers were able to do because it required a very high level
link |
of mathematical ability.
link |
You don't think of string theory as an original idea?
link |
Oh, I mean, it was original to Veneziano, probably is older than the baby boomers.
link |
And there are people who are younger than the baby boomers who are still doing string
link |
And I'm not saying that nothing discovered within the large string theoretic complex
link |
Quite the contrary.
link |
A lot of brilliant mathematics and a lot of the structure of physics was elucidated by
link |
What do I think of the deliverable nature of this product that will not ship called
link |
I think that it is largely an affirmative action program for highly mathematically and
link |
geometrically talented baby boomer physics physicists so that they can say that they're
link |
working on something within the constraints of what they will say is quantum gravity.
link |
Now there are other schemes, you know, there's like asymptotic safety, there are other things
link |
that you could imagine doing.
link |
I don't think much of any of the major programs, but to have inflicted this level of loyalty
link |
through a shibboleth.
link |
Well, surely you don't question X.
link |
Well, I question almost everything in the string program.
link |
And that's why I got out of physics.
link |
When you called me a physicist, it was a great honor, but the reason I didn't become a physicist
link |
wasn't that I fell in love with mathematics.
link |
I said, wow, in 1984, 1983, I saw the field going mad and I saw that mathematics, which
link |
has all sorts of problems, was not going insane.
link |
And so instead of studying things within physics, I thought it was much safer to study the same
link |
objects within mathematics.
link |
There's a huge price to pay for that.
link |
You lose physical intuition.
link |
But the point is, is that it wasn't a North Korean reeducation camp either.
link |
Are you hopeful about cracking open the Einstein unified theory in a way that has been really,
link |
really understanding whether this, uh, uniting everything together with quantum theory and
link |
I mean, I'm trying to play this role myself to do it to the extent of handing it over
link |
to the more responsible, more professional, more competent community.
link |
Um, so I think that they're wrong about a great number of their belief structures, but
link |
I do believe, I mean, I have a really profound love, hate relationship with this group of
link |
I think the physics side, cause the mathematicians actually seem to be much more open minded
link |
and uh, well they are and they aren't, they're open minded about anything that looks like
link |
They'll study something that isn't very important physics, but if it's beautiful mathematics,
link |
then they'll have a, they have great intuition about these things as good as the mathematicians
link |
And I might even intellectually at some horsepower level, give them the edge.
link |
The theoretical theoretical physics community is bar none.
link |
The most profound intellectual community that we have ever created.
link |
It is the number one.
link |
There's nobody in second place as far as I'm concerned, like in their spare time and the
link |
spare time they invented molecular biology.
link |
What, what was the origin of molecular biology?
link |
You're saying something like Francis Crick.
link |
I mean, a lot of, a lot of the early molecular biologists were physicists.
link |
I mean, you know, Schrodinger wrote what is life and that was highly inspirational.
link |
I mean, you have to appreciate that there is no community like the basic research community
link |
in theoretical physics and it's not something I'm highly critical of these guys.
link |
I think that they would just wasted the decades of time with a near religious devotion to
link |
their misconception of where the problems were in physics.
link |
But this has been the greatest intellectual collapse ever witnessed within academics.
link |
You see it as a collapse or just a lull?
link |
Oh, I'm terrified that we're about to lose the vitality.
link |
We can't afford to pay these people.
link |
We can't afford to give them an accelerator just to play with in case they find something
link |
at the next energy level.
link |
These people created our economy.
link |
They gave us the rad lab and radar.
link |
They gave us two atomic devices to end world war two.
link |
They created the semiconductor and the transistor to power our economy through Moore's law.
link |
As a positive externality of particle accelerators, they created the worldwide web and we have
link |
the insolence to say, why should we fund you with our taxpayer dollars?
link |
No, the question is, are you enjoying your physics dollars?
link |
These guys signed the world's worst licensing agreement and if they simply charged for every
link |
time you used a transistor or a URL or enjoyed the piece that they have provided during this
link |
period of time through the terrible weapons that they developed or your communications
link |
devices, all of the things that power our economy, I really think came out of physics,
link |
even to the extent the chemistry came out of physics and molecular biology came out
link |
So, first of all, you have to know that I'm very critical of this community.
link |
Second of all, it is our most important community.
link |
We have neglected it.
link |
We don't take it seriously.
link |
We don't even care to get them to rehab after a couple of generations of failure, right?
link |
No one, I think the youngest person to have really contributed to the standard model of
link |
theoretical level was born in 1951, right?
link |
Frank Wilczek and almost nothing has happened that in theoretical physics after 1973, 74
link |
that sent somebody to Stockholm for theoretical development that predicted experiment.
link |
So we have to understand that we are doing this to ourselves.
link |
Now, with that said, these guys have behaved abysmally in my opinion because they haven't
link |
owned up to where they actually are, what problems they're really facing, how definite
link |
they can actually be.
link |
They haven't shared some of their most brilliant discoveries, which are desperately needed
link |
in other fields like gauge theory, which at least the mathematicians can, can share, which
link |
is an upgrade of the differential calculus of Newton and Leibniz.
link |
And they haven't shared the importance of renormalization theory.
link |
Even though this should be standard operating procedure for people across the sciences dealing
link |
with different layers and different levels of phenomena.
link |
And by shared, you mean communicated in such a way that it disseminates throughout the
link |
These guys are sitting, both theoretical physicists and mathematicians are sitting on top of a
link |
giant stockpile of intellectual gold, right?
link |
They have so many things that have not been manifested anywhere.
link |
I was just on Twitter, I think I mentioned the Habermann switch pitch that shows the
link |
self duality of the tetrahedron realized as a linkage mechanism.
link |
Now this is like a triviality and it makes an amazing toy that's, you know, built a market,
link |
hopefully a fortune for Chuck Habermann.
link |
Well, you have no idea how much great stuff that these priests have in their monastery.
link |
So it's truly a love and hate relationship for you.
link |
Well, it sounds like it's more on the love side.
link |
This building that we're in right here is the building in which I really put together
link |
the conspiracy between the National Academy of Sciences and the National Science Foundation
link |
through the government university industry research round table to destroy the bargaining
link |
power of American academics, uh, using foreign labor with, uh, on microfeature in the base.
link |
That was done here in this building.
link |
And I'm, I'm truly speaking with a revolutionary and a radical, uh, no, no, no, no, no, no,
link |
no, no, no, no, no, no.
link |
At an intellectual level, I am absolutely garden variety.
link |
I'm just straight down the middle.
link |
The system that we are in this, this university is functionally insane.
link |
Harvard is functionally insane and we don't understand that when we get these things wrong,
link |
the financial crisis made this very clear.
link |
There was a long period where every grownup, everybody with a tie, uh, who spoke in a,
link |
you know, in Barrett, baritone tones, uh, with, with the right degree at the end of
link |
Uh, we're talking about how we banished volunteer volatility.
link |
We were in the great moderation.
link |
They were all crazy.
link |
And who was, who was right?
link |
It was like Nassim Taleb, Nouriel Roubini.
link |
Now what happens is, is that they claimed the market went crazy, but the market didn't
link |
The market had been crazy and what happened is, is that it suddenly went sane.
link |
Well, that's where we are with academics.
link |
Academics right now is mad as a hatter and it's, it's absolutely evident.
link |
I can show you graph after graph.
link |
I can show you the internal discussions.
link |
I can show you the conspiracies.
link |
Barrett's dealing with one right now over, uh, it's admissions policies for people, uh,
link |
of color, uh, who happened to come from Asia.
link |
All of this madness is necessary to keep the game going.
link |
What we're talking about just on, well, we're on the topic of revolutionaries is we're talking
link |
about the danger of an outbreak of sanity.
link |
You're, you're the guy pointing out the elephant in the room here and the elephant has no clothes.
link |
Is that how that goes?
link |
I was going to talk a little bit to, uh, Joe Rogan about this, ran out of time, but I think
link |
you're, you have some, you, just listening to you, you could probably speak really eloquently
link |
to academia on the difference between the different fields.
link |
So you think there's a difference between science, engineering, and then the humanities
link |
in academia in terms of tolerance that they're willing to tolerate?
link |
So from my perspective, I thought computer science and maybe engineering is more tolerant
link |
to radical ideas, but that's perhaps innocent of me is that I always, you know, all the
link |
battles going on now are a little bit more on the humanity side and gender studies and
link |
Have you seen the, uh, American mathematical society's publication of an essay called get
link |
What's, what's the idea is that white men who hold, uh, positions.
link |
Within universities and mathematics should vacate their positions so that young black
link |
women can take over something like this.
link |
That's in terms of diversity, which I also want to ask you about, but in terms of diversity
link |
of strictly ideas, do you think, cause you're basically saying physics as a community has
link |
become a little bit intolerant to some degree to new radical ideas, or at least you, uh,
link |
you said it's changed a little bit recently, which is that even string theory is now admitting,
link |
okay, we don't look very promising in the short term, right?
link |
So the question is what compiles if you want to take the computer science metaphor, what
link |
will get you into a journal?
link |
Will you spend your life trying to push some paper into a journal or will it be accepted
link |
What about the characteristics of the submitter and what gets taken up and what does not?
link |
All of these fields are experiencing pressure because no field is performing so brilliantly
link |
well, um, that it's revolutionizing our way of speaking and thinking in the ways in which
link |
we've become accustomed.
link |
But don't you think even in theoretical physics, a lot of times, even with theories like string
link |
theory, you could speak to this, it does eventually lead to what are the ways that this theory
link |
would be testable.
link |
Yeah, ultimately, although look, there's this thing about popper and the scientific method
link |
that's a cancer and a disease and the minds of very smart people.
link |
That's not really how most of the stuff gets worked out.
link |
It's how it gets checked.
link |
All right, so, and there is a dialogue between theory and experiment, but everybody should
link |
read Paul directs 1963 American scientific American article where he, he, you know, it's
link |
He talks about it as if it was about the Schrodinger equation and Schrodinger's failure to advance
link |
his own work because of his failure to account for some phenomenon.
link |
The key point is that if your theory is a slight bit off, it won't agree with experiment,
link |
but it doesn't mean that the theory is actually wrong.
link |
Um, but direct could as easily have been talking about his own equation in which he predicted
link |
that the electrons should have an antiparticle.
link |
And since the only positively charged particle that was known at the time was the proton,
link |
Heisenberg pointed out, well, shouldn't your antiparticle, the proton have the same mass
link |
as the electron and doesn't that invalidate your theory?
link |
So I think the direct was actually being quite potentially quite sneaky, um, and, uh, talking
link |
about the fact that he had been pushed off of his own theory to some extent by Heisenberg.
link |
Um, but look, we've fetishized the scientific method and popper and falsification, um, because
link |
it protects us from crazy ideas entering the field.
link |
So you know, it's a question of balancing type one and type two error.
link |
And we're pretty, we were pretty maxed out in one direction.
link |
The opposite of that, let me say what comforts me sort of biology or engineering, uh, at
link |
the end of the day, does the thing work?
link |
You can test the crazies away and the crazy.
link |
Well see now you're saying, but some ideas are truly crazy and some are, are actually
link |
So, well there's pre correct currently crazy.
link |
And so you don't want to get rid of everybody who's pre correct and currently crazy.
link |
Um, the problem is, is that we don't have standards in general for trying to determine
link |
who has to be put to the sword in terms of their career and who has to be protected,
link |
uh, as some sort of giant time suck pain in the ass, uh, who may change everything.
link |
Do you think that's possible?
link |
Uh, creating a mechanism of those select?
link |
Well, you're not going to like the answer, but here it comes.
link |
It has to do with very human elements.
link |
We're trying to do this at the level of like rules and fairness.
link |
That's not going to work cause the only thing that really understands this, you read the
link |
Oh, you have to read this book.
link |
Not only did Jim Watson, uh, half discover this three dimensional structure of DNA, he's
link |
also one hell of a writer before he became an ass, uh, that no, he's tried to destroy
link |
his own reputation.
link |
I knew about the ass, I didn't know about the good writer.
link |
Jim Watson is one of the most important people now living.
link |
And uh, as I've said before, Jim Watson is too important, a legacy to be left to Jim
link |
Um, yeah, that book tells you more about what actually moves the dial, right?
link |
There's another story about him, which I don't, don't agree with, which is that he stole everything
link |
from Rosalind Franklin.
link |
I mean the, the problems that he had with Rosalind Franklin are real, but we should
link |
actually honor that tension in our history by delving into it rather than having a simple
link |
Jim Watson talks about Francis Crick being a pain in the ass that everybody secretly
link |
knew was super brilliant.
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And there's an encounter between, uh, Chargaff, uh, who came up with the equimolar relations
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between the nucleotides who should have gotten the structure of DNA and Watson and Crick.
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And you know, he talks about missing a shiver in the heartbeat of biology and stuff is so
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It just makes you tremble even thinking about it.
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Um, look, we know very often who is to be feared and we need to fund the people that
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The people who are wasting our time need to be excluded from the conversation.
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You see, and you know, maybe we'll make some errors in both directions.
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But we have known our own people.
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We know the pains in the asses that might work out and we know the people who are really
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just blowhards who really have very little to contribute most of the time.
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It's not a hundred percent, but you're not going to get there with rules.
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It's a using some kind of instinct.
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I mean, I, to be honest, I'm going to make you roll your eyes for a second, but uh, and
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the first time I heard that there is a large community of people who believe the earth
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is flat actually made me pause and ask myself the question, why would there be such a community?
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Is it possible the earth is flat?
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So I had to like, wait a minute.
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I mean, then you go through a thinking process that I think is really healthy.
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It ultimately ends up being a geometry thing.
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I think, uh, it's an interesting, it's an interesting thought experiment at the very
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Well, I don't, I do a different version of it.
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I say, why is this community stable?
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That's a good, uh, way to analyze it.
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Well, interesting that whatever we've done has not erased the community.
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So you know, they're taking a long shot bet that won't pan out, you know, maybe we just
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haven't thought enough about the rationality of the square root of two and somebody brilliant
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will figure it out.
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Maybe we will eventually land one day on the surface of Jupiter and explore it, right?
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These are crazy things that will never happen.
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So much of social media operates by AI algorithms.
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You talked about this a little bit, uh, recommending the content you see.
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So on this idea of radical thought, how much should AI show you things you disagree with
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on Twitter and so on in a Twitter word verse in this question?
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Cause you don't know the answer?
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Look, we've been, they've pushed out this cognitive Lego to us that will just lead to
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It's good to be challenged with things that you disagree with.
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The answer is no, it's good to be challenged with interesting things with which you currently
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disagree, but that might be true.
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So I don't really care about whether or not I disagree with something or don't disagree.
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I need to know why that particular disagreeable thing is being pushed out.
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Is it because it's likely to be true?
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Is it because, is there some reason?
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Because I can write, I can write a computer generator, uh, to come up with an infinite
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number of disagreeable statements that nobody needs to look at.
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So please, before you push things at me that are disagreeable, tell me why.
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There is an aspect in which that question is quite dumb, especially because it's being
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used to, uh, almost, um, uh, very generically by these different networks to say, well,
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we're trying to work this out.
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But you know, basically, uh, how much do you see the value of seeing things, uh, you don't
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like, not you disagree with, because it's very difficult to know exactly what you articulated,
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which is, uh, the stuff that's important for you to consider that you disagree with.
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That's really hard to figure out.
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The bottom line is this stuff you don't like.
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If you're a, uh, uh, Hillary Clinton supporter, you may not want to, it might not make you
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feel good to see anything about Donald Trump.
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That's the only thing algorithms can really optimize for currently.
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They really can't.
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Now they can do better.
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This is where we're.
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No, we're engaged in some moronic back and forth where I have no idea why people who
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are capable of building Google, Facebook, Twitter are having us in these incredibly
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low level discussions.
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Do they not know any smart people?
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Do they not have the phone numbers of people who can elevate these discussions?
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They do, but this, they're optimizing for a different thing and they're pushing those
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people out of those rooms.
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They're, they're optimizing for things we can't see.
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And yes, profit is there.
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Nobody, nobody's questioning that, but they're also optimizing for things like political
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control or the fact that they're doing business in Pakistan.
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And so they don't want to talk about all the things that they're going to be bending to
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So we're involved in a fake discussion.
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You think these conversations at that depth are happening inside Google?
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You don't think they have some basic metrics under user engagements?
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You're having a fake conversation with us guys.
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We know you're having a fake conversation.
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I do not wish to be part of your fake conversation.
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You know how to cool, you know, these units, you know, high availability, like nobody's
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My Gmail never goes down.
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So you think just because they can do incredible work on the software side with infrastructure,
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they can also deal with some of these difficult questions about human behavior, human understanding.
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I mean, I've seen the, I've seen the developers screens that people take shots of inside of
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And I've heard stories inside of Facebook and Apple.
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We're not, we're engaged.
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They're engaging us in the wrong conversations.
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We are not at this low level.
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Here's one of my favorite questions.
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Why is every piece of hardware that I purchase in tech space equipped as a listening device?
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Where's my physical shutter to cover my lens?
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We had this in the 1970s, cameras that had lens caps, you know, how much would it cost
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to have a security model pay five extra bucks?
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Why is my indicator light software controlled?
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Why when my camera is on, do I not see that the light is on by putting it as something
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that cannot be bypassed?
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Why have you set up my, all of my devices at some difficulty to yourselves as listening
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devices and we don't even talk about this.
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This is, this thing is total fucking bullshit.
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Well, I hope these discussions are happening about privacy.
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Is there a more difficult thing you're giving them credit for?
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It's not just privacy.
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It's about social control.
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We're talking about social control.
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Why do I not have controls over my own levers?
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Just have a really cute UI where I can switch, I can dial things or I can at least see what
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the algorithms are.
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You think that there is some deliberate choices being made here.
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There's emergence and there is intention.
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There are two dimensions.
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The vector does not collapse onto either axis, but the idea that anybody who suggests that
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intention is completely absent is a child.
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That's really beautifully put and uh, like many things you've said is going to make me
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can I turn this around slightly?
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I sit down with you and you say that you're obsessed with my feed.
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I don't even know what my feed is.
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What are you seeing that I'm not?
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I was obsessively looking through your feed on Twitter because it was really enjoyable
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because there's the Tom layer element is the humor in it.
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By the way, that feed is Eric R. Weinstein on Twitter at Eric R. Weinstein.
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No, but seriously, why?
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Why did I find it enjoyable or what was I seeing?
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What are you looking for?
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Why are we doing this?
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What is this podcast about?
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I know you've got all these interesting people.
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I'm just some guy who's sort of a podcast guest.
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Sort of a podcast.
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You're not even wearing a tie.
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I mean, it's not even a serious interview.
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I'm searching for meaning, for happiness, for a dopamine rush, so short term, long term.
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And how are you finding your way to me?
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I don't honestly know what I'm doing to reach you.
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The representing ideas which feel common sense to me and not many people are speaking.
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So it's kind of like the intellectual dark web folks, right?
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These folks from Sam Harris to Jordan Peterson to yourself are saying things where you're
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like saying, look, there's an elephant and he's not wearing any clothes.
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And I say, yeah, yeah, let's have more of that conversation.
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That's how I'm finding you.
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I'm desperate to try to change the conversation we're having.
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I'm very worried we've got an election in 2020.
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I don't think we can afford four more years of a misinterpreted message, which is what
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And I don't want the destruction of our institutions.
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They all seem hell bent on destroying themselves.
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So I'm trying to save theoretical physics, trying to save the New York Times, trying
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to save our various processes.
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And I think it feels delusional to me that this is falling to a tiny group of people
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who are willing to speak out without getting so freaked out that everything they say will
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be misinterpreted and that their lives will be ruined through the process.
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I mean, I think we're in an absolutely bananas period of time and I don't believe it should
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fall to such a tiny number of shoulders to shoulder this way.
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So I have to ask you on the capitalism side, you mentioned that technology is killing capitalism
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or it has effects that are unintended, well, not unintended, but not what economists would
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predict or speak of capitalism creating.
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I just want to talk to you about in general, the effect of even then artificial intelligence
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or technology automation taking away jobs and these kinds of things and what you think
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is the way to alleviate that, whether the Andrew Ng presidential candidate with universal
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basic income, UBI, what are your thoughts there?
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How do we fight off the negative effects of technology that...
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All right, you're a software guy, right?
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A human being is a worker is an old idea, a human being has a worker is a different
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So if you think about object oriented programming as a paradigm, a human being has a worker
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and a human being has a soul.
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We're talking about the fact that for a period of time, the worker that a human being has
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was in a position to feed the soul that a human being has.
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However, we have two separate claims on the value in society.
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One is as a worker and the other is as a soul and the soul needs sustenance, it needs dignity,
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it needs meaning, it needs purpose.
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As long as your means of support is not highly repetitive, I think you have a while to go
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before you need to start worrying.
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And if what you do is highly repetitive and it's not terribly generative, you are in the
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cross hairs of for loops and while loops.
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And that's what computers excel at, repetitive behavior and when I say repetitive, I may
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mean things that have never happened through combinatorial possibilities, but as long as
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it has a looped characteristic to it, you're in trouble.
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We are seeing a massive push towards socialism because capitalists are slow to address the
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fact that a worker may not be able to make claims, a relatively undistinguished median
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member of our society is still has needs to reproduce, needs to have to dignity.
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And when capitalism abandons the median individual or the bottom 10th or whatever it's going
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to do, it's flirting with revolution.
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And what concerns me is that the capitalists aren't sufficiently capitalistic to understand
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You really want to court authoritarian control in our society because you can't see that
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people may not be able to defend themselves in the marketplace because the marginal product
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of their labor was too low to feed their dignity as a soul.
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So my great concern is that our free society has to do with the fact that we are self organized.
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I remember looking down from my office in Manhattan when Lehman brothers collapsed and
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thinking who's going to tell all these people that they need to show up at work when they
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don't have a financial system to incentivize them to show up at work.
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So my complaint is first of all, not with the socialists, but with the capitalists,
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which is you guys are being idiots.
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You're courting revolution by continuing to harp on the same old ideas that, well, you
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know, try, try harder, bootstrap yourself.
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Yeah, to an extent that works to an extent, but we are clearly headed in a place that
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there's nothing that ties together our need to contribute and our need to consume.
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And that may not be provided by capitalism because it may have been a temporary phenomena.
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So check out my article on anthropic capitalism and the new gimmick economy.
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I think people are late getting the wake up call and we would be doing a better job saving
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capitalism from itself because I don't want this done under authoritarian control.
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And the more we insist that everybody who's not thriving in our society during their reproductive
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years in order to have a family is failing at a personal level.
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I mean, what a disgusting thing that we're saying.
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What horrible message who, who the hell have we become that we've so bought into the Chicago
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model that we can't see the humanity that we're destroying in that process.
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And it's, I hate, I hate the thought of communism.
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My family has flirted with it decades past.
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It's a wrong, bad idea, but we are going to need to figure out how to make sure that those
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souls are nourished and respected and capitalism better have an answer.
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And I'm betting on capitalism, but I've got to tell you, I'm pretty disappointed with
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So you're still on the capitalism team.
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You just, uh, there's a theme here.
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Radical capitalism.
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I want, I think hyper capitalism is going to have to be coupled to hyper socialism.
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You need to allow the most productive people to create wonders and you've got to stop bogging
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them down with all of these extra nice requirements.
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You know, nice is dead.
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Good has a future.
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Nice doesn't have a future because nice ends up with, with gulags.
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Damn, that's a good line.
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You tweeted today a simple, quite insightful equation saying, uh, imagine that every unit
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F of fame you picked up as stalkers and H haters.
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So I imagine S and H are dependent on your path to fame perhaps a little bit.
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Well, it's not as simple.
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I mean, people always take these things literally when you have like 280 characters to explain
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So you mean that that's not a mathematical, uh, no, there's no law.
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So I put the word imagine because I still have a mathematician's desire for precision.
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Imagine that this were true, but it was a beautiful way to imagine that there is a law
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that has those variables in it.
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And uh, you've become quite famous these days.
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So how do you yourself optimize that equation with the peculiar kind of fame that you have
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gathered along the way?
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I want to be kinder.
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I want to be kinder to myself.
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I want to be kinder to others.
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I want to be able to have heart, compassion, or these things are really important.
link |
And uh, I have a pretty spectrumy kind of approach to analysis.
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I'm quite literal.
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I can go full rain man on you at any given moment.
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Uh, it's facultative autism if you like, and people are gonna get angry because they want
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autism to be respected.
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So when you see me coding or you see me doing mathematics, I'm, you know, I speak with speech
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apnea, uh, be right down to dinner, you know, we have to try to integrate ourselves and
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those tensions between, you know, it's sort of back to us as a worker and us as a soul.
link |
Many of us are optimizing one to the, at the expense of the other.
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And I struggle with social media and I struggle with people making threats against our families
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and I struggle with, um, just how much pain people are in.
link |
And if there's one message I would like to push out there, um, you're responsible, everybody,
link |
all of us, myself included with struggling, struggle, struggle mightily because you, it's
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nobody else's job to do your struggle for you.
link |
Now with that said, if you're struggling and you're trying and you're trying to figure
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out how to better yourself and where you failed and where you've let down your family, your
link |
friends, your workers, all this kind of stuff, give yourself a break.
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You know, if, if, if it's not working out, I have a lifelong relationship with failure
link |
There's been no period of my life where both haven't been present in one form or another.
link |
And I do wish to say that a lot of times people think this is glamorous.
link |
I'm about to go, you know, do a show with Sam Harris.
link |
People are going to listen in on two guys having a conversation on stage.
link |
It's completely crazy when I'm always trying to figure out how to make sure that those
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people get maximum value.
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And uh, that's why I'm doing this podcast, you know, just give yourself a break.
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You owe us, you owe us your struggle.
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You don't owe your family or your coworkers or your lovers or your family members success.
link |
Um, as long as you're in there and you're picking yourself up, recognize that this,
link |
this new situation with the economy that doesn't have the juice to sustain our institutions
link |
has caused the people who've risen to the top of those institutions to get quite brutal
link |
Everybody is lying at the moment.
link |
Nobody's really a truth teller.
link |
Um, try to keep your humanity about you.
link |
Try to recognize that if you're failing, if things aren't where you want them to be and
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you're struggling and you're trying to figure out what you're doing wrong, which you could
link |
do, it's not necessarily all your fault.
link |
We are in a global situation.
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I have not met the people who are honest, kind, good, successful.
link |
Nobody that I've met is checking all the boxes.
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Nobody's getting all tens.
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So I just think that's an important message that doesn't get pushed out enough.
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Either people want to hold society responsible for their failures, which is not reasonable.
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You have to struggle, you have to try, or they want to say you're a hundred percent
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responsible for your failures, which is total nonsense.
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Eric, thank you so much for talking today.
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Thanks for having me, buddy.