The following is a conversation with Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at University of Oxford

and the director of the Future of Humanity Institute. He has worked on fascinating and

important ideas in existential risk, simulation hypothesis, human enhancement ethics,

and the risks of superintelligent AI systems, including in his book, Superintelligence.

I can see talking to Nick multiple times in this podcast, many hours each time,

because he has done some incredible work in artificial intelligence, in technology space,

science, and really philosophy in general. But we'll have to start somewhere.

This conversation was recorded before the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic,

that both Nick and I, I'm sure, will have a lot to say about next time we speak.

And perhaps that is for the best, because the deepest lessons can be learned only in retrospect

when the storm has passed. I do recommend you read many of his papers on the topic of existential

risk, including the technical report titled Global Catastrophic Risks Survey that he coauthored with

Anders Sandberg. For everyone feeling the medical, psychological, and financial burden of this crisis,

I'm sending love your way. Stay strong. We're in this together. We'll beat this thing.

This is the Artificial Intelligence Podcast. If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube,

review it with five stars on Apple Podcast, support on Patreon, or simply connect with

me on Twitter at Lex Freedman, spelled F R I D M A N. As usual, I'll do one or two minutes of ads now

and never any ads in the middle that can break the flow of the conversation. I hope that works

for you. It doesn't hurt the listening experience. This show is presented by Cash App, the number

one finance app in the App Store. When you get it, use code LexPodcast. Cash App lets you send money

to friends by Bitcoin and invest in the stock market with as little as $1. Since Cash App does

fractional share trading, let me mention that the order execution algorithm that works behind the

scenes to create the abstraction of fractional orders is an algorithmic marvel. So big props to

the Cash App engineers for solving a hard problem that in the end provides an easy interface that

takes a step up to the next layer of abstraction over the stock market, making trading more accessible

for new investors and diversification much easier. So again, if you get Cash App from the App Store,

Google Play, and use the code LexPodcast, you get $10 and Cash App will also donate $10 to first,

an organization that is helping to advance robotics and STEM education for young people around the

world. And now here's my conversation with Nick Bostrom. At the risk of asking the Beatles to

play yesterday or the Rolling Stones to play satisfaction, let me ask you the basics. What

is the simulation hypothesis? That we are living in a computer simulation. What is a computer

simulation? How are we supposed to even think about that? Well, so the hypothesis is meant to be

understood in a literal sense, not that we can kind of metaphorically view the universe as an

information processing physical system, but that there is some advanced civilization who built a

lot of computers and that what we experience is an effect of what's going on inside one of those

computers so that the world around us, our own brains, everything we see and perceive and think

and feel would exist because this computer is running certain programs. So do you think of this

computer as something similar to the computers of today, these deterministic sort of touring machine

type things? Is that what we're supposed to imagine or we're supposed to think of something more

like a quantum mechanical system, something much bigger, something much more complicated,

something much more mysterious from our current perspective? The ones we have today would do

find them bigger, certainly. You'd need more memory and more processing power. I don't think

anything else would be required. Now, it might well be that they do have additional, maybe they

have quantum computers and other things that would give them even more umph. It seems kind of

plausible, but I don't think it's a necessary assumption in order to get to the conclusion

that a technologically mature civilization would be able to create these kinds of computer

simulations with conscious beings inside them. So do you think the simulation hypothesis is an idea

that's most useful in philosophy, computer science, physics, sort of where do you see it

having valuable kind of starting point in terms of the thought experiment of it?

Is it useful? I guess it's more informative and interesting and maybe important,

but it's not designed to be useful for something else.

Okay, interesting, sure. But is it philosophically interesting or is there some kind of implications

of computer science and physics? I think not so much for computer science or physics per se.

Certainly it would be of interest in philosophy, I think also to say cosmology or physics in as

much as you're interested in the fundamental building blocks of the world and the rules that

govern it. If we are in a simulation, there is then the possibility that say physics at the

level where the computer running the simulation could be different from the physics governing

phenomena in the simulation. So I think might be interesting from point of view of religion or

just for trying to figure out what the heck is going on. So we mentioned the simulation hypothesis

so far. There is also the simulation argument, which I tend to make a distinction. So simulation

hypothesis, we are living in a computer simulation argument, this argument that

tries to show that one of three propositions is true, one of which is the simulation hypothesis,

but there are two alternatives in the original simulation argument, which we can get to.

Yeah, let's go there. By the way, confusing terms because people will, I think, probably naturally

think simulation argument equals simulation hypothesis, just terminology wise. But let's go

there. So simulation hypothesis means that we are living in a simulation. The hypothesis that we're

living in a simulation, simulation argument has these three complete possibilities that cover

all possibilities. So what are they? Yeah, so it's like a disjunction. It says at least one of these

three is true, although it doesn't on its own tell us which one. So the first one is that almost all

civilizations at their current stage of technological development

go extinct before they reach technological maturity. So there is some great filter

that makes it so that basically none of the civilizations throughout, you know,

maybe vast cosmos will ever get to realize the full potential of technological development.

And this could be theoretically speaking, this could be because most civilizations kill themselves

too eagerly or destroy themselves too eagerly, or it might be super difficult to build a simulation.

So the span of time. Theoretically, it could be both. Now, I think it looks like we would

technologically be able to get there in a time span that is short compared to, say, the lifetime of

planets and other sort of astronomical processes. So your intuition is the build simulation is not.

Well, so this is interesting concept of technological maturity. It's kind of an

interesting concept to have other purposes as well. We can see, even based on our current

limited understanding, what some lower bound would be on the capabilities that you could

realize by just developing technologies that we already see are possible. So for example,

one of my research fellows here, Eric Drexler back in the 80s, studied molecular manufacturing.

That is, you could analyze using theoretical tools and computer modeling the performance

of various molecularly precise structures that we didn't then and still don't today have the

ability to actually fabricate. But you could say that, well, if we could put these atoms together

in this way, then the system would be stable and it would rotate at this speed and have these

computational characteristics. And he also outlined some pathways that would enable us to get to

this kind of molecularly manufacturing in the fullness of time. And you could do other studies

we've done. You could look at the speed at which say it would be possible to colonize the galaxy

if you had mature technology. We have an upper limit, which is the speed of light. We have

sort of a lower current limit, which is how fast current rockets go. We know we can go faster than

that by just making them bigger and have more fuel and stuff. And you can then start to describe

the technological affordances that would exist once a civilization has had enough time to develop.

Even at least those technologies we already know are possible. Then maybe they would discover other

new physical phenomena as well that we haven't realized that would enable them to do even more.

But at least there is this kind of basic set of capabilities.

Can you just link on that? How do we jump from molecular manufacturing to deep space exploration

to mature technology? What's the connection? These would be two examples of technological

capability sets that we can have a high degree of confidence or physically possible in our

universe under that civilization that was allowed to continue to develop its science and technology

would eventually attain. We can kind of see the set of breakthroughs that are likely to

happen. So you can see, what did you call it, the technological set?

With computers, maybe it's easier stuff. The one is we could just imagine bigger computers

using exactly the same parts that we have. So you can kind of scale things that way, right?

But you could also make processors a bit faster if you had this molecular nanotechnology that

Director Exeter described. He characterized a kind of crude computer built with these parts

that would perform at a million times the human brain while being significantly smaller, the

size of a sugar cube. And he may not claim that that's the optimum computing structure.

You could build a faster computer that would be more efficient, but at least you could do that

if you had the ability to do things that were atomically precise. So you can then combine these

two. You could have this kind of nanomolecular ability to build things atom by atom and then

say at this as a spatial scale that would be attainable through space colonizing technology.

You could then start, for example, to characterize a lower bound on the amount of computing power

that a technologically mature civilization would have if it could grab resources, you know,

planets and so forth and then use this molecular nanotechnology to optimize them for computing.

You'd get a very, very high lower bound on the amount of compute.

So, sorry, I just need to define some terms. So technologically mature civilization is one

that took that piece of technology to its lower bound. What is it technologically mature civilization?

Well, okay. So that means it's a stronger concept than we really need for the simulation hypothesis.

I just think it's interesting in its own right. So it would be the idea that there is

some stage of technological development where you've basically maxed out that you developed all

those general purpose widely useful technologies that could be developed or at least kind of come

very close to the, you know, 99.9% there or something. So that's an independent question.

You can think either that there is such a ceiling or you might think it just goes,

the technology tree just goes on forever. Where does your sense fall?

I would guess that there is a maximum that you would start to asymptote towards.

So new things won't keep springing up. New ceilings.

In terms of basic technological capabilities, I think there is like a finite set of those

that can exist in this universe. Moreover, I mean, I wouldn't be that surprised if we actually

reached close to that level fairly shortly after we have, say, machine superintelligence.

So I don't think it would take millions of years for a human originating civilization

to begin to do this. I think it's like more likely to happen on historical timescales.

But that's an independent speculation from the simulation argument.

I mean, for the purpose of the simulation argument, it doesn't really matter whether it

goes indefinitely far up or whether there is a ceiling, as long as we know we can at least

get to a certain level. And it also doesn't matter whether that's going to happen in 100 years

or 5,000 years or 50 million years. Like the timescales really don't make any difference

for the simulation. Can you look on that a little bit? There's a big difference between 100 years

and 10 million years. So it doesn't really not matter. Because you just said,

does it matter if we jump scales to beyond historical scales? So we described that. So

for the simulation argument, doesn't it matter that if it takes 10 million years,

it gives us a lot more opportunity to destroy civilization in the meantime?

Yeah. Well, so it would shift around the probabilities between these three alternatives.

Right. That is, if we are very, very far away from being able to create these simulations,

if it's like say the billions of years into the future, then it's more likely that we will fail

ever to get there. There's more time for us to kind of, you know, go extinct along the way.

And so it's similarly for other civilizations. So it is important to think about how hard it is

to build a simulation. In terms of figuring out which of the disjuncts. But for the simulation

argument itself, which is agnostic as to which of these three alternatives is true.

Yeah, okay.

You don't have to, like the simulation argument would be true whether or not,

we thought this could be done in 500 years or it would take 500 million years.

No, for sure. The simulation argument stands. I mean, I'm sure there might be some people who

oppose it, but it doesn't matter. I mean, it's very nice those three cases cover it. But the fun part

is at least not saying what the probabilities are, but kind of thinking about kind of

intuitive reasoning about like what's more likely, what are the kind of things that would make

some of the arguments less and more so like, but let's actually, I don't think we went through them.

So number one is we destroy ourselves before we ever create simulation.

Right. So that's kind of sad, but we have to think not just what might destroy us.

I mean, so there could be some whatever disasters or meteorites slamming the earth

a few years from now that could destroy us, right? But you'd have to postulate

in order for this first disjunct to be true that almost all civilizations throughout

the cosmos also failed to reach technological maturity.

And the underlying assumption there is that there is likely a very large number of other

intelligent civilizations. Well, if there are, yeah, then they would virtually all have to

succumb in the same way. I mean, then that leads off another. I guess there are a lot of little

digressions that they're interesting. Definitely, let's go there. Let's go there. I'll keep dragging

us back. Well, there are these, there is a set of basic questions that always come up

in conversations with interesting people. Yeah. Like the Fermi Paradox. Like there's like,

you could almost define whether a person is interesting, whether at some point the question

of the Fermi Paradox comes up. Well, so forward is where it looks to me that the universe is very

big. I mean, in fact, according to the most popular current cosmological theory is infinitely big.

And so then it would follow pretty trivially that it would contain a lot of other civilizations.

In fact, infinite the many. If you have some local stochasticity and infinite the many,

it's like, you know, infinite the many lumps of matter, one next to another, there's kind

of random stuff in each one, then you're going to get all possible outcomes with probability

one, infinitely repeated. So then certainly there would be a lot of random stuff in each one,

so then certainly there would be a lot of extraterrestrials out there.

Even short of that, if the universe is very big, there might be a finite but large number.

If we were literally the only one, yeah, then of course,

if we went extinct, then all of civilizations at our current stage would have gone extinct before

becoming technological material. So then it kind of becomes trivially true that a very high fraction

of those went extinct. But if we think there are many, I mean, it's interesting because there are

certain things that possibly could kill us, like if you look at existential risks,

and it might be a different, like that the best answer to what would be most likely to kill us

might be a different answer than the best answer to the question. If there is something that kills

almost everyone, what would that be? Because that would have to be some risk factor that was kind of

uniform overall possible civilization. Yeah. So in this, for the sake of this argument,

you have to think about not just us, but like every civilization dies out before they create

the simulation or something very close to everybody. Okay. So what's number two in the

Well, so number two is the convergence hypothesis that is that maybe like a lot of some of these

civilizations do make it through to technological maturity. But out of those who do get there,

they all lose interest in creating these simulations. So they just they have the capability

of doing it, but they choose not to. Yeah, not just a few of them decide not to, but

you know, out of a million, maybe not even a single one of them would do it.

And I think when you say lose interest, that sounds like unlikely because it's like they

get bored or whatever, but it could be so many possibilities within that. I mean, losing interest

could be it could be anything from it being exceptionally difficult to do to fundamentally

changing the sort of the fabric of reality. If you do it is ethical concerns, all those kinds

of things could be exceptionally strong pressures. Well, certainly, I mean, yeah, ethical concerns.

I mean, not really too difficult to do. I mean, in a sense, that's the first assumption that you

get to technological maturity where you would have the ability using only a tiny fraction of your

resources to create many, many simulations. So it wouldn't be the case that they would need to

spend half of their GDP forever in order to create one simulation. And they had this like

difficult debate about whether they should, you know, invest half of their GDP for this.

It would more be like, well, if any little fraction of the civilization feels like doing this

at any point during maybe their millions of years of existence, then there would be millions

of simulations. But certainly, there could be many conceivable reasons for why there

would be this convert, many possible reasons for not running ancestor simulations or other

computer simulations, even if you could do so cheaply. By the way, what's an ancestor simulation?

Well, that would be type of computer simulation that would contain people like those we think

have lived on our planet in the past and like ourselves in terms of the types of experiences

they have. And where those simulated people are conscious. So like, not just simulated in the

same sense that a non player character would be simulated in the current computer game where

it kind of has like an avatar body and then a very simple mechanism that moves it forward or

backwards or but something where the simulated being has a brain, let's say that simulated

at the sufficient level of granularity that it would have the same subjective experiences as we

have. So where does consciousness fit into this? Do you think simulation, like is there

different ways to think about how this can be simulated? Just like you're talking about now.

Do we have to simulate each brain within the larger simulation? Is it enough to simulate

just the brain, just the minds and not the simulation, not the big universe itself? Like,

is there different ways to think about this? Yeah, I guess there is a kind of premise

in the simulation argument, rolled in from philosophy of mind, that is that it would be

possible to create a conscious mind in a computer. And that what determines whether

some system is conscious or not is not like whether it's built from organic biological

neurons, but maybe something like what the structure of the computation is that it implements.

Right. So we can discuss that if we want, but I think it would be more forward as far as my view

that it would be sufficient, say, if you had a computation that was identical to the computation

in the human brain down to the level of neurons. So if you had a simulation with 100 billion neurons

connected in the same Western human brain, and you then roll that forward with the same kind of

synaptic weights and so forth, so you actually had the same behavior coming out of this

as a human with that brain, then I think that would be conscious. Now, it's possible you could

also generate consciousness without having that detailed assimilation. There, I'm getting more

uncertain exactly how much you could simplify or abstract away.

Can you look on that? What do you mean? So I missed where you're placing consciousness in

the second. Well, so if you are a computationalist, do you think that what creates consciousness is

the implementation of a computation? So some property, emergent property of the computation

itself is the idea. Yeah, you could say that. But then the question is, what's the class of

computations such that when they are run, consciousness emerges? So if you just have

like something that adds one plus one plus one plus one, like a simple computation, you think maybe

that's not going to have any consciousness. If on the other hand, the computation is one, like our

human brains are performing, where as part of the computation, there is like, you know, a global

workspace, a sophisticated attention mechanism, there is like self representations of other

cognitive processes, and a whole lot of other things that possibly would be conscious. And in

fact, if it's exactly like ours, I think definitely it would. But exactly how much less than the full

computation that the human brain is performing would be required is a little bit, I think,

of an open question. And you asked another interesting question as well, which is, would it be

sufficient to just have, say, the brain or would you need the environment in order to generate

the same kind of experiences that we have? And there is a bunch of stuff we don't know. I mean,

if you look at, say, current virtual reality environments, one thing that's clear is that

we don't have to simulate all details of them all the time in order for, say, the human player to

have the perception that there is a full reality in there. You can have, say, procedurally generated

virtual reality might only render a scene when it's actually within the view of the player character.

And so similarly, if this environment that we perceive is simulated, it might be that

all of the parts that come into our view are rendered at any given time. And a lot of aspects

that never come into view, say, the details of this microphone I'm talking into exactly what

each atom is doing at any given point in time might not be part of the simulation, only a more

coarse grained representation. So that to me is actually from an engineering perspective, why the

simulation hypothesis is really interesting to think about, is how much, how difficult is it to

fake sort of in a virtual reality context? I don't know, fake is the right word, but to construct

a reality that is sufficiently real to us to be immersive in the way that the physical world is,

I think that's actually probably an answerable question of psychology, of computer science,

of how, where's the line where it becomes so immersive that you don't want to leave that

world? Yeah, or that you don't realize while you're in it that it is a virtual world.

Yeah, those are two actually questions. Yours is the more sort of the good question about the realism.

But mine, from my perspective, what's interesting is it doesn't have to be real, but how can we

construct a world that we wouldn't want to leave? Yeah, I mean, I think that might be too low a bar.

I mean, if you think, say, when people first had Pong or something like that, I'm sure there were

people who wanted to keep playing it for a long time because it was fun and they wanted to be in

this little world. I'm not sure we would say it's immersive. I mean, I guess in some sense it is,

but like an absorbing activity doesn't even have to be. But they left that world though.

So I think that bar is deceivingly high. So you can play Pong or Starcraft or would have

more sophisticated games for hours, for months, while the work could be in a big addiction,

but eventually they escaped that. So I mean, when it's absorbing enough that you would spend your

entire, it would choose to spend your entire life in there. And then thereby changing the concept

of what reality is, because your reality becomes the game, not because you're fooled,

but because you've made that choice. Yeah, I mean, people might have different preferences

regarding that. Some might, even if you had any perfect virtual reality,

might still prefer not to spend the rest of their lives there. I mean, in philosophy,

there's this experience machine thought experiment. Have you come across this?

So Robert Nozick had this thought experiment where you imagine some crazy,

super duper neuroscientists of the future have created a machine that could give you any experience

you want if you step in there. And for the rest of your life, you can kind of pre programmed it

in different ways. So your fondest dreams could come true. You could whatever you dream, you want

to be a great artist, a great lover, like have a wonderful life, all of these things. If you step

into the experience machine will be your experiences constantly happy. But would you kind of disconnect

from the rest of reality and you would float there in a tank. And so Nozick thought that most

people would choose not to enter the experience machine. I mean, many might want to go there for

a holiday, but they wouldn't want us to check out of existence permanently. And so he thought that

was an argument against certain views of value, according to what we value is a function of what

we experience. Because in the experience machine, you could have any experience you want. And yet,

many people would think that would not be much value. So therefore, what we value depends on

other things than what we experience. So okay, can you take that argument further? What about

the fact that maybe what we value is the up and down of life. So you could have up and downs in

the experience machine, right? But what can't you have in the experience machine? Well, I mean,

I mean, that then becomes an interesting question to explore. But for example, real connection

with other people, if the experience machine is a solar machine, where it's only you,

like that's something you wouldn't have there, you would have this objective experience that

would be like fake people. But when if you gave somebody flowers, that wouldn't be anybody they

who actually got happy, it would just be a little simulation of somebody smiling. But the

simulation would not be the kind of simulation I'm talking about in the simulation argument where

the simulated creature is conscious, it would just be a kind of smiley face that would look

perfectly real to you. So we're now drawing a distinction between appear to be perfectly real

and actually being real. Yeah. So that could be one thing. I mean, like a big impact on history,

maybe it's also something you won't have if you check into this experience machine. So some people

might actually feel the life I want to have for me is one where I have a big positive impact on

history unfolds. So if you could kind of explore these different possible explanations for why it

is, you wouldn't want to go into the experience machine if that's if that's what you feel.

And one interesting observation regarding this nosic thought experiment and the conclusions

you wanted to draw from it is how much is a kind of status quo effect. So a lot of people might not

want to get this on current reality to plug into this dream machine. But if they instead were told,

well, what you've experienced up to this point was a dream. Now, do you want to disconnect from this

and enter the real world when you have no idea maybe what the real world is? Or maybe you could

say, well, you're actually a farmer in Peru growing peanuts and you could live for the rest of your

life in this. Or would you want to continue your dream life as Alex Friedman going around the

world, making podcasts and doing research? So if the status quo was that they were actually in

the experience machine, I think a lot of people might then prefer to live the life that they are

familiar with rather than sort of bail out into. So essentially the change itself, the leap,

whatever. Yeah, so it might not be so much the reality itself that we're after, but it's more

that we are maybe involved in certain projects and relationships. And we have, you know, a self

identity and these things that's our values are kind of connected with carrying that forward.

And then whether it's inside a tank or outside a tank in Peru or whether inside a computer,

outside a computer, that's kind of less important to what we ultimately care about.

Yeah, so just to linger on it, it is interesting. I find maybe people are different, but I find

myself quite willing to take the leap to the farmer in Peru, especially as the virtual

reality system become more realistic. I find that possibility and I think more people would take

that leap. But so in this thought experiment, just to make sure we are understanding, so in this

case, the farmer in Peru would not be a virtual reality. That would be the real. The real. The

real, your life, like before this whole experience machine started. Well, I kind of assumed from

that description, you're being very specific, but that kind of idea just like,

washes away the concept of what's real. I mean, I'm still a little hesitant about your kind of

distinction between real and illusion. Because when you can have an illusion that feels, I mean,

that looks real, I mean, what, I don't know how you can definitively say something is real or not.

Like what's a good way to prove that something is real in that context?

Well, so I guess in this case, it's more a definition. In one case, you're floating in a

tank with these wires by the super duper neuroscientists, plugging into your head,

giving you like Friedman experiences. In the other, you're actually tilling the soil in

Peru, growing peanuts, and then those peanuts are being eaten by other people all around the

world who buy the exports. And that's two different possible situations in the one and the

same real world that you could choose to occupy.

But just to be clear, when you're in a vat with wires and the neuroscientists,

you can still go farming in Peru, right? No, well, you could, if you wanted to,

you could have the experience of farming in Peru, but that wouldn't actually be any peanuts grown.

Well, but what makes a peanut? So a peanut could be grown and you could feed things with that

peanut. And why can't all of that be done in a simulation?

I hope, first of all, that they actually have peanut farms in Peru. I guess we'll get a lot

of comments out of us from angry. I was with you up until the point when you started talking about

you should know you can't realize you're a lot of these in that climate.

No, I mean, I think, I mean, I, in the simulation, I think there's a sense, the important sense in

which it would all be real. Nevertheless, there is a distinction between inside a simulation and

outside a simulation, or in the case of no six thought experiment, whether you're in the vat

or outside the vat. And some of those differences may or may not be important. I mean, that comes

down to your values and preferences. So if the, if the experience machine only gives you the

experience of growing peanuts, but you're the only one in the experience machines.

No, but there's other, you can, within the experience machine, others can plug in.

Well, there are versions of the experience machine. So in fact, you might want to have

distinguish different thought experiments, different versions of it. So in, like in the

original thought experiment, maybe it's only you, right? Just you. So, and you think, I wouldn't

want to go in there. Well, that tells you something interesting about what you value and what you

care about. Then you could say, well, what if you add the fact that there would be other people in

there and you would interact with them? Well, it starts to make it more attractive, right?

Then you could add in, well, what if you could also have important long term effects on human

history in the world and you could actually do something useful, even though you were in there,

that makes it maybe even more attractive. Like you could actually have a life that had a purpose

and consequences. So as you sort of add more into it, it becomes more similar to the baseline

reality that you were comparing it to. Yeah, but I just think inside the experience machine and

without taking those steps you just mentioned, you still have an impact on long term history

of the creatures that live inside that, of the quote unquote, fake creatures that live inside

that experience machine. And that, like at a certain point, if there's a person waiting for

you inside that experience machine, maybe you're newly found wife and she dies, she has fear,

she has hopes and she exists in that machine when you unplug yourself and plug back in,

she's still there, going on about her life. Well, in that case, yeah, she starts to have

more of an independent existence. Independent existence. But it depends, I think, on how she's

implemented in the experience machine. Take one limit case where all she is is a static picture

on the wall of photograph. So you think, well, I can look at her, but that's it. Then you think,

well, it doesn't really matter much what happens to that. Any more than a normal photograph,

if you tear it up, it means you can't see it anymore, but you haven't harmed the person

whose picture you tore it up. But if she's actually implemented, say, at a neural level

of detail, so that she's a fully realized digital mind with the same behavioral repertoire as you

have, then very possibly she would be a conscious person like you are. And then you would, what you

do in this experience machine would have real consequences for how this other mind felt.

So you have to specify which of these experience machines you're talking about.

I think it's not entirely obvious that it would be possible to have an experience machine that gave

you a normal set of human experiences, which include experiences of interacting with other people,

without that also generating consciousnesses corresponding to those other people. That is,

if you create another entity that you perceive and interact with, that to you looks entirely

realistic. Not just when you say hello, they say hello back, but you have a rich interaction

many days, deep conversations. Like it might be that the only possible way of implementing that

would be one that also as a side effect, instantiated this other person in enough detail

that you would have a second consciousness there. I think that's to some extent an open question.

So you don't think it's possible to fake consciousness and fake intelligence?

Well, it might be. I mean, I think you could certainly fake, if you have a very limited

interaction with somebody, you could certainly fake that. If all you have to go on is somebody

said hello to you, that's not enough for you to tell whether that was a real person there

or a prerecorded message or a very superficial simulation that has no consciousness,

because that's something easy to fake. We could already fake it. Now you can record a voice

recording. But if you have a richer set of interactions where you're allowed to ask open

ended questions and probe from different angles that you couldn't give canned answer to all of

the possible ways that you could probe it, then it starts to become more plausible that the only

way to realize this thing in such a way that you would get the right answer from any which angle

you probe it would be a way of instantiating it where you also instantiated a conscious mind.

Yeah, I'm with you on the intelligence part, but there's something about me that says consciousness

is easier to fake. I've recently gotten my hands on a lot of rubas. Don't ask me why or how.

And I've made them, this is just a nice robotic mobile platform for experiments,

and I made them scream and or moan and pain and so on just to see when they're responding to me.

And it's just a sort of psychological experiment on myself. And I think they appear conscious to me

pretty quickly. Like I, to me, at least my brain can be tricked quite easily. So if I introspect,

it's harder for me to be tricked that something is intelligent. So I just have this feeling that

inside this experience machine, just saying that you're conscious and having certain qualities

of the interaction like being able to suffer, like being able to hurt, like being able to wonder

about the essence of your own existence, not actually, I mean, the creating the illusion

that you're wondering about it is enough to create the feeling of consciousness and

the illusion of consciousness. And because of that, create a really immersive experience

to where you feel like that is the real world. So you think there's a big gap between

being appearing conscious and being conscious? Or is it that you think it's very easy to be

conscious? I'm not actually sure what it means to be conscious. All I'm saying is the illusion of

consciousness is enough for this to create a social interaction that's as good as if the

thing was conscious, meaning I'm making it about myself. Right. Yeah. I mean, I guess there are a

few difficulties. One is how good the interaction is, which might, I mean, if you don't really care

about probing hard for whether the thing is conscious, maybe it would be a satisfactory

interaction, whether or not you really thought it was conscious. Now, if you really care about it being

conscious inside this experience machine, how easy would it be to fake it? And you say

it sounds really easy. But then the question is, would that also mean it's very easy to

instantiate consciousness? It's much more widely spread in the world than we have thought. It

doesn't require a big human brain with 100 billion neurons. All you need is some system that exhibits

basic intentionality and can respond and you already have consciousness. In that case, I guess

you still have a close coupling. I guess a data case would be where they can come apart,

where you could create the appearance of there being a conscious mind without actually not being

another conscious mind. I'm somewhat agnostic exactly where these lines go. I think one

observation that makes it plausible that you could have very realistic appearances

relatively simply, which also is relevant for the simulation argument. And in terms of thinking

about how realistic would a virtual reality model have to be in order for the simulated

creature not to notice that anything was awry. Well, just think of our own humble brains during

the wee hours of the night when we are dreaming. Many times, well, dreams are very immersive,

but often you also don't realize that you're in a dream. And that's produced by simple primitive

three pound lumps of neural matter effortlessly. So if a simple brain like this can create the

virtual reality that seems pretty real to us, then how much easier would it be for a super

intelligent civilization with planetary sized computers optimized over the eons to create

a realistic environment for you to interact with? Yeah, by the way, behind that intuition

is that our brain is not that impressive relative to the possibilities of what technology could

bring. It's also possible that the brain is the epitome is the ceiling. Like just the ceiling.

How is that possible? Meaning like this is the smartest possible thing that the universe could

create. So that seems unlikely to me. Yeah, I mean, for some of these reasons we alluded to

earlier in terms of designs we already have for computers that would be faster by many orders

of magnitude than the human brain. Yeah, but it could be that the constraints, the cognitive

constraints in themselves is what enables the intelligence. So the more powerful you make the

computer, the less likely it is to become super intelligent. This is where I say dumb things

to push back. Yeah, I'm not sure. I mean, so there are different dimensions of intelligence.

A simple one is just speed. Like if you can solve the same challenge faster in some sense,

you're smarter. So there I think we have very strong evidence for thinking that you could have

a computer in this universe that would be much faster than the human brain and therefore have

speed superintelligence, like be completely superior, maybe a million times faster.

Then maybe there are other ways in which you could be smarter as well, maybe more qualitative

ways, right? And there the concepts are a little bit less clear cut. So it's harder to make a very

crisp, neat, firmly logical argument for why that could be qualitative superintelligence as

opposed to just things that were faster. Although I still think it's very plausible.

And for various reasons that are less than watertight arguments. But for example, if you look at

animals and even within humans, there seems to be Einstein versus random person. It's not just

that Einstein was a little bit faster. But how long would it take a normal person to invent

general relativity? It's not 20% longer than it took Einstein or something like that. I don't

know whether they would do it at all or it would take millions of years or some totally bizarre.

But your intuition is that the compute size will get you go. Increasing the size of the computer

and the speed of the computer might create some much more powerful levels of intelligence that

would enable some of the things we've been talking about with the simulation, being able to simulate

an ultra realistic environment, ultra realistic reception of reality.

Yeah. I mean, strictly speaking, it would not be necessary to have superintelligence in order to

have, say, the technology to make these simulations, ancestor simulations or other kinds of simulations.

As a matter of fact, I think if we are in a simulation, it would most likely be one built

by a civilization that had superintelligence. It certainly would help. I mean, it could build

more efficient, larger scale structures if you had superintelligence. I also think that if you had

the technology to build these simulations, that's like a very advanced technology. It seems kind

of easier to get the technology to superintelligence. So I'd expect by the time they could make these

fully realistic simulations of human history with human brains in there, before that, they

got to that stage that would have figured out how to create machine superintelligence or maybe

biological enhancements of their own brains if they were biological creatures to start with.

So we talked about the three parts of the simulation argument. One, we destroy ourselves

before we ever create the simulation. Two, we somehow, everybody somehow loses interest in

creating simulation. Three, we're living in a simulation. So you've kind of, I don't know if

your thinking has evolved on this point, but you kind of said that we know so little that these

three cases might as well be equally probable. So probabilistically speaking, where do you stand

on this? Yeah, I mean, I don't think equal necessarily would be the most supported probability

assignment. So how would you, without assigning actual numbers, what's more or less likely in

your view? Well, I mean, I've historically tended to punt on the question of like as between these

three. So maybe you asked me another way is which kind of things would make each of these more or

less likely? What kind of, yeah. I mean, certainly in general terms, if you think anything that say

increases or reduces the probability of one of these would tend to slash probability around

on the other. So if one becomes less probable, like the other would have to, because it's going to

add up to one. Yes. So if we consider the first hypothesis, the first alternative that there's

this filter that makes it so that virtually no civilization reaches technical maturity.

In particular, our own civilization, if that's true, then it's like very unlikely that we would

reach technical maturity, because if almost no civilization at our stage does it, then

it's unlikely that we do it. So I'm sorry, can you longer on that for a second? Well,

so if it's the case that almost all civilizations at our current stage of technical maturity fail,

at our current stage of technical development, fail to reach maturity,

that would give us very strong reason for thinking we will fail to reach technical maturity.

Oh, and also sort of the flip side of that is the fact that we've reached it means that many

other civilizations have reached this point. Yeah. So that means if we get closer and closer to

actually reaching technical maturity, there's less and less distance left where we could

go extinct before we are there. And therefore, the probability that we will reach increases

as we get closer. And that would make it less likely to be true that almost all civilizations

at our current stage failed to get there. Like we would have this, the one case we had started

ourselves would be very close to getting there. That would be strong evidence is not so hard to

get to technical maturity. So to the extent that we feel we are moving nearer to technical

maturity, that would tend to reduce the probability of the first alternative and increase the probability

of the other to it doesn't need to be a monotonic change. Like if every once in a while, some new

threat comes into view, some bad new thing you could do with some novel technology, for example,

you know, that that could change our probabilities in the other direction.

But that that technology again, you have to think about as that technology has to be able to

equally in an even way affect every civilization out there.

Yeah, pretty much. I mean, that's strictly speaking, it's not true. I mean, I could be two

different existential risk and every civilization, you know, one or the other, like, but none of them

kills more than 50%. Like, yeah, but I incidentally, so in some of my the work, I mean, on machine

superintelligence, like some existential risks related to sort of superintellent AI and how we

must make sure, you know, to handle that wisely and carefully. It's not the right kind of existential

catastrophe to make the first alternative true, though, like it might be bad for us.

If the future lost a lot of value as a result of it being shaped by some process that optimized for

some completely non human value. But even if we got killed by machine superintelligence is that

machine superintelligence might still attain technological maturity.

So I see. So you're not very, you're not human exclusive. This could be any intelligent species

that achieves like it's all about the technological maturity. It's not that the humans have to

attain it. Right.

So like superintelligence because it replaced us. And that's just as well for the simulation

argument. Yeah, I mean, it could interact with the second by alternative. Like if the thing that

replaced us was either more likely or less likely, then we would be to have an interest in creating

ancestor simulations, you know, that that could affect probabilities. But yeah, to a first order,

like if we all just die, then yeah, we won't produce any simulations because we are dead. But if we

all die and get replaced by some other intelligent thing that then gets to technological maturity,

the question remains, of course, if my not that thing, then use some of its resources to do this

stuff. So can you reason about this stuff? This is given how little we know about the universe.

Is it reasonable to reason about these probabilities? So like how little, well,

well, maybe you can disagree. But to me, it's not trivial to figure out how difficult it is to

build a simulation. We kind of talked about it a little bit. We've also don't know, like as we

try to start building it, like start creating virtual worlds and so on, how that changes the

fabric of society. Like there's all these things along the way that can fundamentally change just

so many aspects of our society about our existence that we don't know anything about. Like the kind

of things we might discover when we understand to a greater degree the fundamental, the physics,

like the theory, if we have a breakthrough, have a theory and everything, how that changes,

how that changes deep space exploration and so on. So like, is it still possible to reason about

probabilities given how little we know? Yes, I think though, there will be a large residual of

uncertainty that we'll just have to acknowledge. And I think that's true for most of these big

picture questions that we might wonder about. It's just we are small, short lived, small brained,

cognitively very limited humans with little evidence and it's amazing we can figure out as

much as we can really about the cosmos. But okay, so there's this cognitive trick that seems to happen

when I look at the simulation argument, which for me, it seems like case one and two feel

unlikely. I want to say feel unlikely as opposed to sort of like, it's not like I have too much

scientific evidence to say that either one or two are not true. It just seems unlikely that every

single civilization destroys itself. And it seems like feels unlikely that the civilizations lose

interest. So naturally, without necessarily explicitly doing it, but the simulation argument

basically says it's very likely we're living in a simulation. Like to me, my mind naturally goes

there. I think the mind goes there for a lot of people. Is that the incorrect place for it to go?

Well, not necessarily. I think the second alternative which has to do with the motivations

and interests of technological and mature civilizations. I think there is much we don't

understand about that. Can you talk about that a little bit? What do you think? I mean, this

question that pops up when you build an AGI system or build a general intelligence or

how does that change your motivations? Do you think it will fundamentally transform our motivations?

Well, it doesn't seem that implausible that once you take this leap to technological maturity.

I mean, I think it involves creating machine superintelligence possibly that would be sort of

on the path for basically all civilizations, maybe before they are able to create large

numbers of ancestor simulations. That possibly could be one of these things that quite radically

changes the orientation of what a civilization is, in fact, optimizing for. There are other

things as well. At the moment, we have not perfect control over our own being, our own mental states,

our own experiences are not under our direct control. For example, if you want to experience

a pleasure and happiness, you might have to do a whole host of things in the external world to

try to get into the stage, into the mental state where you experience pleasure. Like when people

get some pleasure from eating great food, well, they can't just turn that on. They have to kind

of actually go to a nice restaurant and then they have to make money. So there's like all this kind

of activity that maybe arises from the fact that we are trying to ultimately produce mental states,

but the only way to do that is by a whole host of complicated activities in the external world.

Now, at some level of technological development, I think we'll become auto potent in the sense of

gaining direct ability to choose our own internal configuration and enough knowledge and insight

to be able to actually do that in a meaningful way. So then it could turn out that there are a lot

of instrumental goals that would drop out of the picture and be replaced by other instrumental

goals because we could now serve some of these final goals in more direct ways. And who knows how

all of that shakes out after civilizations reflect on that and converge and different

attractors and so on and so forth. And that could be new instrumental considerations that come into

view as well that we are just oblivious to that would maybe have a strong shaping effect on actions,

like very strong reasons to do something or not to do something. And we just don't realize

they are there because we are so dumb, bumbling through the universe. But if almost inevitably

on route to attaining the ability to create many answers to simulations, you do have this

cognitive enhancement or advice from superintelligence or you yourself, then maybe there's like this

additional set of considerations coming into view. And yesterday I asked, it's obvious that the thing

that makes sense is to do X. Whereas right now it seems you could X, Y or Z and different people

will do different things and we are kind of random in that sense. Yeah, because at this time,

with our limited technology, the impact of our decisions is minor. I mean, that's starting

to change in some ways. Well, I'm not sure how it follows that the impact of our decisions is minor.

Well, it's starting to change. I mean, I suppose 100 years ago was minor. It's starting to...

Well, it depends on how you view it. So what people did 100 years ago still have effects on

the world today. Oh, as I see, as a civilization in the togetherness. Yeah. So it might be that

the greatest impact of individuals is not at technological maturity or very far down. It might

be earlier on when there are different tracks, civilization could go down. I mean, maybe the

population is smaller, things still haven't settled out. If you count indirect effects, that

those could be bigger than the direct effects that people have later on. So part three of the

argument says that, so that leads us to a place where eventually somebody creates a simulation.

I think you had a conversation with Joe Rogan. I think there's some aspect here where you get

stuck a little bit. How does that lead to we're likely living in a simulation? So this kind of

probability argument, if somebody eventually creates a simulation, why does that mean that

we're now in a simulation? What you get to if you accept alternative three first is there would be

more simulated people with our kinds of experiences than non simulated ones. If you look at the world

as a whole, by the end of time, as it were, you just count it up, that would be more simulated

ones than non simulated ones. Then there is an extra step to get from that. If you assume that,

suppose for the sake of the argument that that's true, how do you get from that to the statement

we are probably in a simulation? So here you're introducing an indexical statement like it's

that this person right now is in a simulation. There are all these other people that are in

simulations and some that are not in the simulation. But what probability should you have that you

yourself is one of the simulated ones in the setup. So I call it the bland principle of

indifference, which is that in cases like this, when you have two sets of observers,

one of which is much larger than the other, and you can't from any internal evidence you have,

tell which set you belong to. You should assign a probability that's proportional to the size

of these sets so that if there are 10 times more simulated people with your kinds of experiences,

you would be 10 times more likely to be one of those. Is that as intuitive as it sounds?

I mean, that seems kind of, if you don't have enough information, you should rationally just

assign the same probability as the size of the set. It seems pretty plausible to me.

Where are the holes in this? Is it at the very beginning, the assumption that everything stretches

sort of you have infinite time essentially? You don't need infinite time.

You just need how long does the time you take? However long it takes, I guess, for a universe

to produce an intelligent civilization that then attains the technology to run some

ancestry simulations. Got you. When the first simulation is created, that stretch of time

just a little longer than they'll all start creating simulations, kind of like order of

matters. Well, I mean, it might be different. If you think of there being a lot of different

planets and some subset of them have life and then some subset of those get intelligent life

and some of those maybe eventually start creating simulations, they might get started at quite

different times. Like maybe on some planet, it takes a billion years longer before you get

like monkeys or before you get even bacteria than on another planet. So this might happen

when kind of at different cosmological epochs. Is there a connection here to the doomsday

argument and that sampling there? Yeah, there is a connection in that they both

involve an application of anthropic reasoning that is reasoning about these kind of indexical

propositions. But the assumption you need in the case of the simulation argument

is much weaker than the assumption you need to make the doomsday argument go through.

What is the doomsday argument? And maybe you can speak to the anthropic reasoning in more

general. Yeah, that's a big and interesting topic in its own right, anthropics. But the

doomsday argument is this really first discovered by Brandon Carter, who was a theoretical physicist

and then developed by philosopher John Leslie. I think it might have been discovered initially

in the 70s or 80s. And Leslie wrote this book, I think in 96. And there are some other versions

as well by Richard Gott, he's a physicist, but let's focus on the Carter Leslie version where

it's an argument that we have systematically underestimated the probability that

he might not be able to go extinct soon. Now, I should say most people probably

think at the end of the day, there is something wrong with this doomsday argument that it doesn't

really hold. It's like there's something wrong with it. But it's proved hard to say exactly what

is wrong with it. And different people have different accounts. My own view is it seems

inconclusive. But I can say what the argument is. Yeah, that would be good. Yeah, so maybe it's

easy to explain via an analogy to sampling from urns. So imagine you have a big, imagine you

have two urns in front of you, and they have balls in them that have numbers. The two urns look

the same, but inside one, there are 10 balls, ball number one, two, three up to ball number 10.

And then in the other urn, you have a million balls numbered one to a million. And now somebody

puts one of these urns in front of you and asks you to guess what's the chance it's the 10 ball

urn. And you say, well, 50, 50, I can't tell which urn it is. But then you're allowed to

reach in and pick a ball at random from the urn. And that's suppose you find that it's ball number

seven. So that's strong evidence for the 10 ball hypothesis. Like, it's a lot more likely that

you would get such a low numbered ball, if there are only 10 balls in the urn, like it's in fact

10% done, right? Then if there are a million balls, it would be very unlikely you would get number

seven. So you perform a Bayesian update. And if your prior was 50, 50, that it was the 10 ball

urn, you become virtually certain after finding the random sample was seven that it only has 10

balls in it. So in the case of the urns, this is uncontroversial, just elementary probability

theory. The Doomsday argument says that you should reason in a similar way with respect to

different hypotheses about how many balls there will be in the urn of humanity, I said,

for how many humans there will ever be by the time we go extinct. So to simplify, let's suppose we

only consider two hypotheses, either maybe 200 billion humans in total, or 200 trillion humans

in total. You could fill in more hypotheses, but it doesn't change the principle here. So it's

easiest to see if we just consider these two. So you start with some prior based on ordinary,

empirical ideas about threats to civilization and so forth. And maybe you say it's a 5% chance that

we will go extinct. By the time there will have been 200 billion only, you're kind of optimistic,

let's say, I think probably we'll make it through colonized universe. But then, according to this

Doomsday argument, you should take off your own birth rank as a random sample. So your birth rank

is your sequence in the position of all humans that have ever existed. And it turns out you're

about a human number of 100 billion, you know, give or take. That's like roughly how many people

have been born before you. That's fascinating, because I probably, we each have a number.

We would each have a number in this. I mean, obviously, the exact number would depend on

where you started counting, like which ancestors was human enough to count as human. But those

are not really important. They're relatively few. So yeah, so you're roughly 100 billion. Now,

if they're only going to be 200 billion in total, that's a perfectly unremarkable number. You're

somewhere in the middle, right? Run of the mill human, completely unsurprising. Now, if they're

going to be 200 trillion, you would be remarkably early. Like, what are the chances out of these

200 trillion human that you should be human number 100 billion? That seems it would have

a much lower conditional probability. And so analogously to how in the urn case, you thought

after finding this low number random sample, you updated in favor of the urn having few balls.

Similarly, in this case, you should update in favor of the human species having a lower total

number of members that is doomed soon. You said doomed soon. That's the hypothesis in this case

that it will end 100 billion. I just like that term for the hypothesis. Yeah.

So what it kind of crucially relies on, the doomed argument, is the idea that you should reason

as if you were a random sample from the set of all humans that will ever have existed.

If you have that assumption, then I think the rest kind of follows. The question then is,

why should you make that assumption? In fact, you know you're 100 billion, so where do you get this

prior? And then there is like a literature on that with different ways of supporting that assumption.

There's just one example of anthropocrysine, right? That seems to be kind of convenient when you

think about humanity, when you think about sort of even like existential threats and so on,

as it seems that quite naturally that you should assume that you're just an average case.

Yeah, that you're kind of a typical randomly sample. Now in the case of the doomed argument,

it seems to lead to what intuitively we think is the wrong conclusion. Or at least many people

have this reaction that there's got to be something fishy about this argument. Because from very,

very weak premises, it gets this very striking implication that we have almost no chance of

reaching size 200 trillion humans in the future. And how can we possibly get there just by reflecting

on when we were born? It seems you would need sophisticated arguments about the impossibility

of space colonization, blah, blah. So one might be tempted to reject this key assumption. I call

it the self sampling assumption. The idea that you should reason as if you're a random sample from

all observers or in your some reference class. However, it turns out that in other domains,

it looks like we need something like this self sampling assumption to make sense of

bona fide scientific inferences in contemporary cosmology, for example, we have these multiverse

theories. And according to a lot of those, all possible human observations are made. I mean,

if you have a sufficiently large universe, you will have a lot of people observing all kinds

of different things. So if you have two competing theories, say about the value of some constant,

it could be true, according to both of these theories, that there will be some observers

observing the value that corresponds to the other theory, because there will be some observers that

have hallucinations. So there's a local fluctuation or a statistically anomalous measurement,

these things will happen. And if enough observers make enough different observations,

there will be some that sort of by chance make these different ones. And so what we would want to say

is, well, many more observers, a larger proportion of the observers will observe as it were the true

value. And a few will observe the wrong value. If we think of ourselves as a random sample,

we should expect with our own probability to observe the true value and that will then allow us

to conclude that the evidence we actually have is evidence for the theories we think are supported.

It kind of done is a way of making sense of these inferences that clearly seem correct,

that we can make various observations and infer what the temperature of the cosmic background is

and the fine structure constant and all of this. But it seems that without rolling in some assumption

similar to the self sampling assumption, this inference doesn't go through. And there are

other examples. So there are these scientific contexts where it looks like this kind of

anthropic reasoning is needed and makes perfect sense. And yet, in the case of the Dubster argument,

it has this weird consequence and people might think there's something wrong with it there.

So there's then this project that would consistent try to figure out what are the legitimate ways

of reasoning about these indexical facts when observer selection effects are in play. In other

words, developing a theory of anthropics. And there are different views of looking at that.

And it's a difficult methodological area. But to tie it back to the simulation argument,

the key assumption there, this bland principle of indifference, is much weaker than the self

sampling assumption. So if you think about in the case of the Dubster argument, it says you

should reason as if you are a random sample from all humans that would have lived, even though in

fact you know that you are about number 100 billionth human and you're alive in the year 2020,

whereas in the case of the simulation argument, it says that, well, if you actually have no way

of telling which one you are, then you should assign this kind of uniform probability.

Yeah, your role as the observer in the simulation argument is different, it seems like.

Who's the observer? I keep assigning the individual consciousness.

Well, a lot of observers in the simulation, in the context of the simulation argument,

the relevant observers would be A, the people in original histories and B, the people in simulations.

So this would be the class of observers that we need. I mean, there are also maybe the simulators,

but we can set those aside for this. So the question is, given that class of observers,

a small set of original history observers and the large class of simulated observers,

which one should you think is you? Where are you amongst this set of observers?

I'm maybe having a little bit of trouble wrapping my head around the intricacies of

what it means to be an observer in the different instantiations of the anthropic reasoning cases

that we mentioned. It's like the observer. No, I mean, it may be an easier way of putting it,

it's just like, are you simulated or are you not simulated, given this assumption that these

two groups of people exist? Yeah, in the simulation case, it seems pretty straightforward.

Yeah, so the key point is the methodological assumption you need to make to get the simulation

argument to where it wants to go is much weaker and less problematic than the methodological

assumption you need to make to get the doomsday argument to its conclusion. Maybe the doomsday

argument is sound or unsound, but you need to make a much stronger and more controversial assumption

to make it go through. In the case of the simulation argument, I guess one

maybe way intuition popped to support this bland principle of indifference,

is to consider a sequence of different cases where the fraction of people who are simulated

to non simulated approaches one. In the limiting case where everybody is simulated,

obviously you can deduce with certainty that you are simulated. If everybody

with your experiences is simulated and you know you've got to be one of those,

you don't need a probability at all, you just kind of logically

conclude it, right? So then as we move from a case where say 90% of everybody is simulated,

99.9%, it should seem possible that the probability assigned should sort of approach

one, certainty, as the fraction approaches the case where everybody is in the simulation.

And so you wouldn't expect that to be a discrete. Well, if there's one non simulated person,

then it's 50, 50, but if we move that, then it's 100%. There are other

arguments as well one can use to support this bland principle of indifference, but

that might be nice too. But in general, when you start from time equals zero and go into the future,

the fraction of simulated, if it's possible to create simulated worlds,

the fraction simulated worlds will go to one. Well, I mean, is that an obvious kind of thing?

Well, it won't probably go all the way to one. In reality, there would be some

ratio, although maybe a technological mature civilization could run a lot of

simulations using a small portion of its resources. It probably wouldn't be able to

run infinitely many. I mean, if we take say the observed, the physics in the observed universe,

if we assume that that's also the physics at the level of the simulators, that would be limits

to the amount of information processing that anyone civilization could perform in its future

trajectory. Right. Well, first of all, there's limited amount of matter you can get your hands

off because with the positive cosmological constant, the universe is accelerating,

there's like a finite sphere of stuff, even if you travel with the speed of light that you

could ever reach to have a finite amount of stuff. And then if you think there is like a lower limit

to the amount of loss you get when you perform an erasure of a computation, or if you think,

for example, just matter gradually over cosmological time scales, decay, maybe protons, decay,

other things, you radiate out gravitational waves, like there's all kinds of seemingly

unavoidable losses that occur. So eventually, we'll have something like a heat death of the

universe or a close death or whatever. So it's fine. But of course, we don't know which, if there's

many ancestral simulations, we don't know which level we are. So there could be,

couldn't there be like an arbitrary number of simulations that spawned ours? And those had

more resources in terms of physical universe to work with? Sorry, what do you mean that that could

be? Okay, so if simulations spawn other simulations, it seems like each new spawn has fewer resources

to work with. But we don't know at which step along the way we are at,

any one observer doesn't know whether we're in level 42, or 100, or one, or is that not

matter for the resources? I mean, it's true that there would be uncertainty asked,

you could have stacked simulations. Yes. And that could then be uncertainty as to which level we

are at. As you remarked also, all the computations performed in a simulation within a simulation

also have to be expanded at the level of the simulation. So the computer in basement reality

where all these simulations with the simulations with the simulations are taking place, like that

computer ultimately, it's CPU or whatever it is, like that has to power this whole tower, right? So

if there is a finite compute power in basement reality, that would impose a limit to how tall

this tower can be. And if each level kind of imposes a large extra overhead, you might think

maybe the tower would not be very tall, that most people would be low down in the tower.

I love the term basement reality. Let me ask one of the popularizers, you said there's many

through this, when you look at sort of the last few years of the simulation hypothesis,

just like you said, it comes up every once in a while, some new community discovers it and so on.

But I would say one of the biggest popularizers of this idea is Elon Musk. Do you have any kind

of intuition about what Elon thinks about when he thinks about simulation? Why is this of such

interest? Is it all the things we've talked about, or is there some special kind of intuition about

simulation that he has? I mean, you might have a better, I think, I mean, why it's of interest,

I think it seems pretty obvious why to the extent that one think the argument is credible,

why it would be of interest. If it's correct, tell us something very important about the world,

in one way or the other, whichever of the three alternatives for a simulation that seems arguably

one of the most fundamental discoveries, right? Now, interestingly, in the case of someone like

Elon, so there's like the standard arguments for why you might want to take the simulation hypothesis

seriously, the simulation argument, right? In the case that if you are actually Elon Musk, let

us say, there's a kind of an additional reason in that what are the chances you would be Elon Musk?

Like, it seems like maybe there would be more interest in simulating the lives of very unusual

and remarkable people. So, if you consider not just assimilations where all of human history

or the whole of human civilization are simulated, but also other kinds of simulations which only

include some subset of people. Like, in those simulations that only include a subset,

it might be more likely that they would include subsets of people with unusually interesting

or consequential lives. If you're Elon Musk, you got to wonder, right? It's more likely that

if you are Donald Trump or if you are Bill Gates or you're like some particularly

like distinctive character, you might think that that add, I mean, if you just think of yourself

into the shoes, right? It's got to be like an extra reason to think. That's kind of...

So interesting. So, on a scale of like farmer and Peru to Elon Musk, the more you get towards

the Elon Musk, the higher the probability... You'd imagine there would be some extra boost from that.

There's an extra boost. So, he also asked the question of what he would ask an AGI saying,

the question being what's outside the simulation. Do you think about the answer to this question

if we are living a simulation? What is outside the simulation? So, the programmer of the simulation?

Yeah. I mean, I think it connects to the question of what's inside the simulation in that

if you had views about the creators of the simulation, it might help you

make predictions about what kind of simulation it is, what might happen, what happens after

the simulation if there is some after, but also like the kind of setup. So, these two questions

would be quite closely intertwined. But do you think it would be very surprising to... Is the

stuff inside the simulation, is it possible for it to be fundamentally different than the stuff

outside? Yeah. Another way to put it, can the creatures inside the simulation be smart enough

to even understand or have the cognitive capabilities or any kind of information processing

capabilities enough to understand the mechanism that created them? They might understand some

aspects of it. I mean, it's a level of explanation, like degrees to which you can understand. So,

does your dog understand what it is to be human? Well, it's got some idea, like humans are these

physical objects that move around and do things. And a normal human would have a deeper understanding

of what it is to be human. And maybe some very experienced psychologists or great novelists

might understand a little bit more about what it is to be human. And maybe superintelligence

could see right through your soul. So, similarly, I do think that we are quite limited in our

ability to understand all of the relevant aspects of the larger context that we exist in.

But there might be hope for some. I think we understand some aspects of it. But

how much good is that? If there's one key aspect that changes the significance of all

the other aspects. So, we understand maybe seven out of ten key insights that you need.

But the answer actually varies completely, depending on what number eight, nine, and

ten insight is. It's like whether you want to... Suppose that the big task were to guess whether

a certain number was odd or even, like a ten digit number. And if it's even, the best thing

for you to do in life is to go north. And if it's odd, the best thing for you to go south.

Now, we are in a situation where maybe through our science and philosophy, we figured out what

the first seven digits are. So, we have a lot of information, right? Most of it we figured out.

But we are clueless about what the last three digits are. So, we are still completely clueless

about whether the number is odd or even, and therefore whether we should go north or go south.

I feel that's an analogy, but I feel we're somewhat in that predicament. We know a lot about the

universe. We've come maybe more than half of the way there to kind of fully understanding it,

but the parts we are missing are possibly ones that could completely change the overall

upshot of the thing. And including change our overall view about what the scheme of

priorities should be or which strategic direction would make sense to pursue.

Yeah, I think your analogy of us being the dog, trying to understand human beings is an entertaining

one and probably correct. The closer the understanding tends from the dog's viewpoint to us human

psychologist's viewpoint, the steps along the way there will have completely transformative ideas

of what it means to be human. So, the dog has a very shallow understanding. It's interesting to

think that to analogize that a dog's understanding of a human being is the same as our current

understanding of the fundamental laws of physics in the universe. Oh, man. Okay, we spent an hour

or 40 minutes talking about the simulation. I like it. Let's talk about superintelligence,

at least for a little bit. And let's start at the basics. What to you is intelligence?

Yeah, I tend not to get too stuck with the definitional question. I mean, the common sense

understand, like the ability to solve complex problems, to learn from experience, to plan,

to reason, some combination of things like that. Is consciousness mixed up into that or no? Is

consciousness mixed up into that? Well, I don't think, I think it could be fairly intelligent,

at least without being conscious, probably. So, then what is superintelligence? Yeah,

that would be like something that was much more of that, had much more general cognitive capacity

than we humans have. So, if we talk about general superintelligence, it would be much faster learner

be able to reason much better, make plans that are more effective at achieving its goals,

say in a wide range of complex, challenging environments. In terms of, as we turn our eye

to the idea of existential threats from superintelligence, do you think superintelligence

has to exist in the physical world or can it be digital only? We think of our general intelligence

as us humans, as an intelligence that's associated with the body that's able to interact with the

world, that's able to affect the world directly with physically. I mean, digital only is perfectly

fine, I think. I mean, it's physical in the sense that obviously the computers and the memories are

physical. But it's capable to affect the world, sort of? Could be very strong, even if it has a

limited set of actuators. If it can type text on the screen or something like that, that would be,

I think, ample. So, in terms of the concerns of existential threat of AI, how can an AI system

that's in the digital world have existential risk? What are the attack vectors for a digital system?

Well, I mean, I guess maybe to take one step back. I should emphasize that I also think there's this

huge positive potential from machine intelligence, including superintelligence. I want to stress that

because some of my writing has focused on what can go wrong. When I wrote the book,

Superintelligence, at that point, I felt that there was a kind of neglect of what would happen

if AI succeeds. And in particular, a need to get a more granular understanding of where the pitfalls

are so we can avoid them. I think that since the book came out in 2014, there has been a much

wider recognition of that. And a number of research groups are now actually working on

developing, say, AI alignment techniques and so on and so forth. So, yeah, I think now it's

important to make sure we bring back onto the table the upside as well.

And there's a little bit of a neglect now on the upside, which is, I mean, if you look at,

talking to a friend, if you look at the amount of information that is available,

or people talking, or people being excited about the positive possibilities of general

intelligence, that's not, it's far outnumbered by the negative possibilities in terms of our

public discourse. Possibly, yeah, it's hard to measure. What are, can you look at that for a

little bit? What are some, to you, possible big positive impacts of general intelligence,

superintelligence? Well, I mean, super, because I tend to

also want to distinguish these two different contexts of thinking about AI and AI impacts,

the kind of near term and long term, if you want, both of which I think are legitimate things to

think about. And people should, you know, discuss both of them, but they are different and they

often get mixed up. And then, then I get, you get confusion. I think you get simultaneously,

like maybe an overhyping of the near term and an underhyping of the long term. And so I think as

long as we keep them apart, we can have like two good conversations, but, or we can mix them

together and have one bad conversation. Can you clarify just the two things we're talking about,

the near term and the long term? Yeah, and what are the distinctions? Well, it's a, it's a blur

distinction. But say the things I wrote about in this book, superintelligence, long term,

things people are worrying about today with, I don't know, algorithmic discrimination or even

things self driving cars and drones and stuff, more near term. And then, of course,

you could imagine some medium term where they kind of overlap and one evolves into the other.

But anyway, I think both, yeah, the issues look kind of somewhat different depending on

which of these contexts. So I think it would be nice if we can talk about the long term

and think about a positive impact or a better world because of the existence of the long

term superintelligence. Do you have views of such a world? Yeah, I mean, I guess it's a little

hard to articulate because it seems obvious that the world has a lot of problems as it currently

stands. And it's hard to think of any one of those which it wouldn't be useful to have a

like a friendly aligned superintelligence working on. So from health to the economic system to be

able to sort of improve the investment and trade and foreign policy decisions, all that kind of

stuff. All that kind of stuff and a lot more. I mean, what's the killer app? Well, I don't think

there is one. I think AI, especially artificial general intelligence is really the ultimate

general purpose technology. So it's not that there is this one problem, this one area where it will

have a big impact. But if and when it succeeds, it will really apply across the board in all fields

where human creativity and intelligence and problem solving is useful, which is pretty much

all fields, right? The thing that it would do is give us a lot more control over nature.

It wouldn't automatically solve the problems that arise from conflict between humans,

fundamentally political problems. Some subset of those might go away if you just had more

resources and cooler tech, but some subset would require coordination that is not automatically

achieved just by having more technical capability. But anything that's not of that sort, I think

you just get like an enormous boost with this kind of cognitive technology once it goes all

the way. Now, again, that doesn't mean I'm like thinking, oh, people don't recognize what's possible

with current technology. And like sometimes things get overhyped. But I mean, those are

perfectly consistent views to hold the ultimate potential being enormous. And then it's a very

different question of how far are we from that? Or what can we do with near term technology?

Yeah. So what's your intuition about the idea of intelligence explosion? So there's this,

you know, when you start to think about that leap from the near term to the long term,

the natural inclination, like for me, sort of building machine learning systems today,

it seems like it's a lot of work to get the general intelligence. But there's some intuition

of exponential growth of exponential improvement of intelligence explosion. Can you maybe

try to elucidate, to try to talk about what's your intuition about the possibility of

intelligence explosion, that it won't be this gradual slow process that might be a phase shift?

Yeah, I think it's, we don't know how explosive it will be. I think for what it's worth,

it seems fairly likely to me that at some point there will be some intelligence

explosion, like some period of time where progress in AI becomes extremely rapid.

Roughly in the area where you might say it's kind of humanish equivalent in

core cognitive faculties, that the concept of human equivalent starts to break down when

you look too closely at it. And just how explosive does something have to be for it to

be called an intelligence explosion? Like does it have to be like overnight literally,

or a few years? But overall, I guess if you plotted the opinions of different people in

the world, I guess I would be somewhat more probability towards the intelligence explosion

scenario than probably the average AI researcher, I guess.

So, and then the other part of the intelligence explosion, or just forget explosion, just progress,

is once you achieve that gray area of human level intelligence, is it obvious to you that

we should be able to proceed beyond it to get to super intelligence?

Yeah, that seems, I mean, as much as any of these things can be obvious, given we've never had one,

people have different views, smart people have different views, it's like some

some degree of uncertainty that always remains for any big futuristic philosophical grand question

that just we realize humans are fallible, especially about these things.

But it does seem as far as I'm judging things based on my own impressions that it seems very

unlikely that there would be a ceiling at or near human cognitive capacity.

But that's such a, I don't know, that's such a special moment. It says both terrifying and

exciting to create a system that's beyond our intelligence. So maybe you can step back and

say, like, how does that possibility make you feel that we can create something,

it feels like there's a line beyond which it steps, it'll be able to all smart you.

And therefore, it feels like a step where we lose control.

Well, I don't think the latter follows, that is, you could imagine, and in fact, this is what

a number of people are working towards, making sure that we could ultimately

project higher levels of problem solving ability while still making sure that they are aligned,

like they are in the service of human values. I mean, so losing control, I think,

is not a given that that would happen. I asked how it makes me feel. I mean, to some extent,

I've lived with this for so long, since as long as I can remember being an adult or even a teenager,

it seemed to me obvious that at some point, AI will succeed. And so I actually misspoke,

I didn't mean control. I meant, because the control problem isn't an interesting thing.

And I think the hope is, at least we should be able to maintain control over systems that are

smarter than us. But we do lose our specialness. It sort of will lose our place as the smartest,

coolest thing on earth. And there's an ego involved with that, that humans are very good at

dealing with. I mean, I value my intelligence as a human being. It seems like a big transformative

step to realize there's something out there that's more intelligent. I mean, you don't see that

as such a fundamentally... Well, yeah, I think, yes, a lot. I think it would be small. I mean,

I think there are already a lot of things out there that are... I mean, certainly if you think

the universe is big, there's going to be other civilizations that already have super intelligences

or that just naturally have brains the size of beach balls and are completely leaving us in the

dust. And we haven't come face to face with this. We haven't come face to face. But I mean, that's

an open question. What would happen in a kind of post human world? Like how much day to day would

these super intelligences be involved in the lives of ordinary... I mean, you could imagine

some scenario where it would be more like a background thing that would help protect against

some things. But you wouldn't... They wouldn't be this intrusive kind of making you feel bad by

like making clever jokes on your experience. But there's like all sorts of things that maybe in

the human context would feel awkward about that. You wouldn't want to be the dumbest kid in your

class, everybody picks it. Like a lot of those things maybe you need to abstract away from

if you're thinking about this context where we have infrastructure that is in some sense

beyond any of our old humans. I mean, it's a little bit like, say, the scientific community

as a whole. If you think of that as a mind, it's a little bit of metaphor. But I mean,

obviously it's got to be like way more capacious than any individual. So in some sense, there is this

mind like thing already out there. That's just vastly more intelligent than any individual is.

And we think, okay, that's... You just accept that as a fact. That's the basic fabric of our

existence. There's a super intelligent thing. Yeah, you get used to a lot of... I mean,

there's already Google and Twitter and Facebook, these recommender systems that are the basic

fabric of our... I could see them becoming... I mean, do you think of the collective intelligence

of these systems as already perhaps reaching superintelligence level? Well, I mean, so here

it comes to the concept of intelligence and the scale and what human level means.

The kind of vagueness and the determinacy of those concepts starts to

dominate how you would answer that question. So, say the Google search engine has a very high

capacity of a certain kind, like retrieving... Remembering and retrieving information,

particularly like text or images that are... You have a kind of string, a word string key.

Obviously, superhuman at that. But a vast set of other things it can't even do at all,

not just not do well. So you have these current AI systems that are superhuman in some limited

domain and then radically subhuman in all other domains. Same with a chess...

A simple computer that can multiply really large numbers, right? So it's going to have this one

spike of superintelligence and then a kind of zero level of capability across all other cognitive

fields. Yeah, I don't necessarily think the generalness... I mean, I'm not so attached with it,

but it's a gray area and it's a feeling, but to me, alpha zero is somehow much more intelligent,

much, much more intelligent than D blue. And to say which domain... Well, you could say, well,

these are both just board games. They're both just able to play board games. Who cares if they're

going to do better or not? But there's something about the learning and the self play that makes

it crosses over into that land of intelligence that doesn't necessarily need to be general.

And the same way Google is much closer to D blue currently in terms of its search engine than it

is to sort of the alpha zero. And the moment it becomes... And the moment these recommender systems

really become more like alpha zero, but being able to learn a lot without the constraints of

being heavily constrained by human interaction, that seems like a special moment in time.

I mean, certainly learning ability seems to be an important facet of general intelligence,

that you can take some new domain that you haven't seen before and you weren't specifically

preprogrammed for and then figure out what's going on there and eventually become really good at it.

So that's something alpha zero has much more of than D blue had. And in fact, I mean, systems

like alpha zero can learn not just go, but other, in fact, probably beat D blue in chess and so

forth. So you do see this general and it matches the intuition. We feel it's more intelligent.

And it also has more of this general purpose learning ability. And if we get systems that

have even more general purpose learning ability, it might also trigger an even stronger intuition

that they're actually starting to get smart. So if you were to pick a future, what do you think a

utopia looks like with AGI systems? Is it the neural link brain computer interface world where

we're kind of really closely interlinked with AI systems? Is it possibly where AGI systems replace

us completely while maintaining the values and the consciousness? Is it something like it's a

completely invisible fabric? Like you mentioned a society where just aids and a lot of stuff that

we do like curing diseases and so on. What is utopia if you get to pick? Yeah, I mean, it is a good

question and a deep and difficult one. I'm quite interested in it. I don't have all the answers

yet, but might never have. But I think there are some different observations one can make. One is if

this scenario actually did come to pass, it would open up this vast space of possible modes of

being. On one hand, material and resource constraints would just be expanded dramatically.

So there would be a lot of a big pie, let's say. Also, it would enable us to do things

including to ourselves or like that, it would just open up this much larger design space

and option space than we have ever had access to in human history. So I think two things follow

from that. One is that we probably would need to make a fairly fundamental rethink of what

ultimately we value. Think things through more from first principles. The context would be so

different from the familiar that we could have just take what we've always been doing and then

oh, well, we have this cleaning robot that cleans the dishes in the sink and a few other small

things. I think we would have to go back to first principles. So even from the individual

level, go back to the first principles of what is the meaning of life, what is happiness,

what is fulfillment. And then also connected to this large space of resources is that it

would be possible and I think something we should aim for is to do well by the lights

of more than one value system. That is, we wouldn't have to choose only one value criterion and say

we're going to do something that scores really high on the metric of, say, hedonism. And then it's

like a zero by other criteria, like kind of wireheaded brains in a vat. And it's like a lot

of pleasure. That's good. But then like no beauty, no achievement like that. I think to some

significant, not unlimited sense, but the significant sense, it would be possible to do

very well by many criteria. Like maybe you could get like 98% of the best according to several

criteria at the same time, given this great expansion of the option space. And so have

competing value systems, competing criteria as sort of forever, just like our Democrat versus

Republican, there seems to be this always multiple parties that are useful for our progress in society,

even though it might seem dysfunctional inside the moment, but having the multiple value systems

seems to be beneficial for, I guess, a balance of power. So that's not exactly what I have in mind,

that it's, well, although it may be in an indirect way, it is. But that if you had the chance to do

something that scored well on several different metrics, our first instinct should be to do that

rather than immediately leap to the thing, which ones of these value systems are we going to screw

over? Let's first try to do very well by all of them. Then it might be that you can't get 100%

of all, and you would have to then have the hard conversation about which one will only get 97%.

There you go. There's my cynicism that all of existence is always a tradeoff. But you say,

maybe it's not such a bad tradeoff. Let's first try that. Well, this would be a distinctive context

in which at least some of the constraints would be removed. There's probably still be tradeoffs in

the end. It's just that we should first make sure we at least take advantage of this abundance.

In terms of thinking about this, one should think in this kind of frame of mind of generosity

and inclusiveness to different value systems and see how far one can get there first.

And I think one could do something that would be very good according to many different criteria.

We talked about AGI fundamentally transforming the value system of our existence, the meaning of

life. But today, what do you think is the meaning of life? What are you the silliest or perhaps the

biggest question? What's the meaning of life? What's the meaning of existence? What gives

your life fulfillment, purpose, happiness, meaning? Yeah, I think these are, I guess, a bunch of

different related questions in there that one can ask. Happiness, meaning,

yeah. You could imagine somebody getting a lot of happiness from something that

they didn't think was meaningful. Mindless watching reruns of some television series,

waiting junk food, maybe some people that gives pleasure, but they wouldn't think

it had a lot of meaning. Whereas, conversely, something that might be quite loaded with meaning

might not be very fun always. Some difficult achievement that really helps a lot of people

maybe requires self sacrifice and hard work. And so these things can, I think, come apart,

which is something to bear in mind also when you're thinking about these utopia questions that

you might actually start to do some constructive thinking about that. You might have to isolate

it and distinguish these different kinds of things that might be valuable in different ways.

Make sure you can sort of clearly perceive each one of them, and then you can think about how

you can combine them. And just as you said, hopefully come up with a way to maximize all of

them together. Yeah, or at least get, I mean, maximize or get a very high score on a wide

range of them, even if not literally all. You can always come up with values that are

exactly opposed to one another, right? But I think for many values, they're kind of opposed with,

if you place them within a certain dimensionality of your space, like there are shapes that are kind

of, you can't untangle like in a given dimensionality. But if you start adding dimensions, then it

might in many cases just be that they are easy to pull apart. And you could. So we'll see how

much space there is for that. But I think that there could be a lot in this context of radical

abundance, if ever we get to that. I don't think there's a better way to end it, Nick. You've

influenced a huge number of people to work on what could very well be the most important

problems of our time. So it's a huge honor. Thank you so much for talking to me. Well,

thank you for coming by, Lex. That was fun. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation

with Nick Bostrom. And thank you to our presenting sponsor, Cash App. Please consider supporting

the podcast by downloading Cash App and using code Lex podcast. If you enjoy this podcast,

subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple podcast, support it on Patreon, or simply

connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now let me leave you with some words from Nick

Bostrom. Our approach to existential risks cannot be one of trial and error. There's no opportunity

to learn from errors. The reactive approach, see what happens, limit damages and learn from experience

is unworkable. Rather, we must take a proactive approach. This requires foresight to anticipate

new types of threats and a willingness to take decisive preventative action and to bear the

costs, moral and economic of such actions. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.