AI will give birth to an alien civilization | Max Tegmark and Lex Fridman

you were the first ever guest on this podcast episode number one so first of all Max I just have to say uh thank you for giving me a chance thank you for starting this journey it's been an incredible journey just thank you for um sitting down with me and just acting like I'm somebody who matters that I'm somebody who's interesting to talk to and uh thank you for doing it I meant a lot all right thanks to you for putting your heart and soul into this I know when you delve into controversial topics it's inevitable to get hit by what what happened let's talk about the slings and arrows and stuff and I really admire this it's in an era you know where YouTube videos are too long and now it has to be like a 20 minute Tick Tock 20 second Tick Tock clip it's just so refreshing to see you going exactly against all of the advice and doing this with these really long form things and the people appreciate it you know reality is nuanced and uh thanks for and sharing it that way uh so let me ask you again the first question I've ever asked on this podcast episode number one talking to you do you think there's intelligent life out there in the universe let's revisit that question do you have any updates what's your view when you look out to the Stars so when we look out to the Stars if you define our universe the way most astrophysicists do not as all of space but the spherical region of space that we can see with our telescopes from which light has the time to reach us since our big bang I'm in the minority I I'm estimate that we are the only life in this spherical volume that has uh invented Internet radio has gotten our level of tech and um if that's true then it puts a lot of responsibility on us to not mess this one up because if it's true it means that life is is quite rare and we are stewards of this one spark of advanced Consciousness which if we nurture it then help it grow it eventually life can spread from here out into much of our universe and we can have this amazing future at worse if we instead um are Reckless with the technology we build and just snuff it out through the stupidity or in fighting then maybe the rest of cosmic history in our Universal is just going to be a plenty for empty benches but I I do think that we are actually very likely to get visited by aliens alien intelligence quite soon but I think we are going to be building that alien intelligence so uh we're going to give birth to an intelligent alien civilization unlike anything that human the evolution here on Earth was able to create in terms of the path the biological path it took yeah and it's going to be much more alien than cats or even the most exotic animal on the planet right now because it will not have been created through the usual darwinian competition where it necessarily cares about self-preservation is afraid of death any of those things the space of alien Minds it's just that you can build it's just so much faster than what evolution will give you and with that also comes a great responsibility but the the for us to make sure that the kind of Minds we create or this kind of Minds that um it's good to create Minds that will uh share our values and and be good for Humanity in life and also mind don't create Minds that don't suffer do you try to visualize the full space of alien Minds that AI could be to try to consider all the different kinds of intelligences sort of generalizing what humans are able to do to the full spectrum of an intelligent creatures entities could do I try but I would say I fail I mean it's it's very difficult for a human mind really grapple with something still complete the alien I mean even even for us right if we just try to imagine how would it feel if we were completely indifferent towards death or individuality if we even if you just imagine that for example you could just copy my knowledge of how to speak Swedish boom now you can speak Swedish and you could copy any of my cool experiences and then you could delete the ones you didn't like in your own life just like that it it would already change quite a lot about how you feel as a human being right if you probably spend less effort studying things if you just copy them and you might be less afraid of death because if the plane you're on starts to crash you just be like oh shucks I'm gonna I haven't backed my brain up for four hours so I'm gonna lose this all this wonderful experiences of this flight we might also start feeling more like compassionate maybe with other people if we can severely share each other's experiences and our knowledge and feel more like a hive mind it's very hard though I I really feel very humble about this to to Grapple with it that the how it might actually feel that the the one thing which is so obvious though it's I think is just really worth reflecting on is because the mind space of possible intelligence is so different from ours it's very dangerous if we assume they're going to be like us or anything like us well there's a the entirety of uh human written history has been through poetry through novels been trying to describe through philosophy try and describe the Human Condition and what's entailed in it like just like you said fear of death and all those kinds of things what is love and all of that changes yeah if you have a different kind of intelligence yeah all of it the entirety all those poems they're trying to sneak up to what the hell it means to be human all of that changes how AI concerns and uh existential crises that AI experiences how that clashes with the human existential crisis The Human Condition yeah it's hard to hard to Fathom how to predict it's hard but it's fascinating to think about also even in the best case scenario where we don't lose control of over the ever more powerful AI that we're building to other humans whose goals we think are horrible and where we don't lose control to the machines and AI provides the things we want even then you get into questions do you touched here you know maybe it's the struggle that it's actually hard to do things is part of the things that gives us meaning as well right so for example I found it so shocking that this new Microsoft gpt4 commercial that they put together has this woman talking about showing this demo how she's going to give a graduation speech to her beloved daughter and she asks gpt4 to write it it was freaking 200 words or so if I realized that my parents couldn't be bothered struggling a little bit to write 200 words and Outsource that to their computer I would feel really offended actually and so I'm I wonder if um eliminating too much of this struggle from our existence do you think that would also take away a little bit of what it means to be human yeah we can't even predict I had somebody mentioned to me that they use they started using uh with a 3.5 and not 4.0 to write what they really feel to a person and they have a temper issue and they're basically trying to get Chad gbt to rewrite it in a nicer way to get the point across but we write in a nicer way so we're even removing the inner from our communication so I don't you know there's some positive aspects of that but mostly it's just the transformation of how humans communicate and it's scary because so much of our society is based on this glue of communication and if that we're now using AI as the medium of communication that that does the language for us uh so much of the emotion that's Laden in human communication so much of the intent that's going to be handled by an outsourced AI how does that change everything how how does it change the internal state of how we feel about other human beings what makes us lonely what makes us excited yeah what makes us afraid how we fall in love all that kind of stuff yeah for me personally I have to confess the challenge is one of the things that really makes my life feel meaningful you know if I go hiking mountain with my wife may I if I don't want to just press the button and be at the top but I want to struggle and come up there sweaty and feel wow we did this in the same way I want to constantly work on myself to become a better person if I say something in Anger that I regret I want to go back and and really work on myself rather than just tell an AI just from now on always filter what I write so I don't have to work on myself because then I'm not growing yeah but then again it could be like with chess an AI wants it significantly obviously supersedes the performance of humans it will live in its own world and provide maybe a uh flourishing Civilizations for humans but we humans will continue hiking mountains and playing our games even though AI is so much smarter so much stronger so much Superior in every single way just like with chess yeah so that that I mean that's one possible hopeful trajectory here is that humans will continue to Human uh and AI will just be a kind of a a medium that enables The Human Experience to flourish yeah I would phrase that as rebranding ourselves from Homo sapiens to homo sentience you know right now it's sapiens the ability to be intelligent we've even put it in our species name we're branding ourselves as the smartest yeah information processing empathy on the planet that's clearly gonna change if AI continues ahead so maybe we should focus on the experience instead the subjective experience that we have with homo sentience and and so that's what's really valuable the love the connection the other things and get off our high horses and get rid of this hubris that only we can um do we do integrals so Consciousness the subjective experience is a fundamental value to what it means to be human make that make that the priority that feels like a hopeful direction to me but that also requires more compassion not just towards other humans because they happen to be the smartest on the planet but also towards all our other fellow creatures on this planet and that I personally feel right now we're treating a lot of farm animals horribly for example and the excuse we're using is oh they're not as smart as us but if we get that we're not that smart in the grand scheme of things either in the post aiepoc you know then surely we should value the subjective experience of a cow also well allow me to briefly look at the book which at this point is becoming more and more Visionary that you've written I guess over five years ago life 3.0 so first of all 3.0 what's 1.0 what's 2.0 was 3.0 and how's that Vision sort of evolve the vision in the book evolved to today life 1.0 is really dumb like bacteria and that it can't actually learn anything at all during the lifetime the learning just comes from this genetic process from one generation to the next Life 2.0 Is Us and other animals which have brains which can learn during their lifetime a great deal right so and um you know you were born without being able to speak English and at some point you decided hey I want to upgrade my software let's install an English-speaking module so you did and life 3.0 does not exist yet can cannot replace not only its software the way we can but also it's Hardware and um that's where we're heading towards at high speed we're already maybe 2.1 because we can you know put in a an artificial knee uh pacemaker etc etc and if neuralink and other companies succeed will be like 2.2 Etc but uh well the Company's trying to build AGI are trying to make is of course full 3.0 and you can put that intelligence into something that also has no biological basis whatsoever so let's constrain some more capabilities just like the lead from 1.0 to 2.0 there is nevertheless you speaking so harshly about bacteria so disrespectfully about bacteria there is still the same kind of magic there that permeates Life 2.0 and uh and 3.0 it seems like maybe the thing that's truly powerful about life intelligence and Consciousness was already there in 1.0 is it possible I think we should be humble and not be so quick make everything binary and say either it's there or it's not clearly there's a there's a great spectrum and there is even controversy by whether some unicellular or organisms like amoebas can maybe learn a little bit you know after all so apologies if I offended anything there yeah it wasn't by intent it was more that I wanted to talk up how cool it is to actually have a brain yeah where you can learn dramatically within your lifetime typical human and and the higher up you get from 1.0 to 2.0 to 3.0 the more you become the captain of your own death of your own ship the master of your own destiny and the less you become a slave to whatever Evolution gave you right by upgrading our software we can be so different from previous generations and even from our parents much more so than even a bacterium you know no offense to them and if you can also swap out your Hardware take any physical form you want of course it's really the sky's the limit yeah so the it accelerates the rate at which you can perform the competition computation that determines your destiny yeah and I think it's it's worth commenting a bit on what you means in this context also if you swap things out a lot right now this is controversial but my current understanding is that that you know life is best thought of not as a bag of meat or even a bag of Elementary particles but rather as in as um a system which can process information and retain its own complexity even though nature is always trying to mess it up so it's all about information processing and that makes it a lot like something like a wave in the ocean which is not it's it's water molecules right the water molecules bob up and down but the wave moves forward it's an information pattern in the same way ulex you're not the same atoms as during the first time you did with me you've swapped out most of them but still you yeah and the the information pattern is still there and um if you if you could swap out your arms and whatever you can still have this kind of continuity it becomes much more sophisticated sort of wave forward and time where the information lives on I I lost both of my parents uh since since I last podcast and and it actually gives me a lot of Solace that this way of thinking about them they haven't entirely died because a lot of mommy and daddy's um sorry I'm getting a little emotional here but a lot of their values and ideas and even jokes and so on they haven't gone away right some of them live on I can carry on some of them and they also live on a lot of other and a lot of other people so in this sense even with Life 2.0 we can to some extent already transcend our physical bodies and our death and particularly if you can share your own information your own ideas with many others like you do in your podcast then you know that's the closest immortality we can get with our biobodies you carry a little bit of them in you yes yeah uh do you miss them you miss your mom and dad of course of course what did you learn about life from them if it can take a bit of a tangent on so many things um for starters my my Fascination for Math and the physical mysteries of our University thinking I got a lot of that for my dad but I think my obsession for really big questions and Consciousness and so on that actually came mostly from my mom and what I got from both of them which is very core part of really who I am I think is is um this um just feeling comfortable with not buying into what everybody else is saying what I think is right they both very much just you know did their own thing and sometimes they got flagged for it and it did it anyway that's why you've always been an inspiration to me that you're at the top of your field and you still you still willing to uh to tackle the big questions in your own way you're one of the one of the people that represents MIT best to me you've always been an inspiration in that so it's good to hear that you got that from your mom and dad yeah you're too kind but but yeah I mean the real the good reason to do science is because you're really curious you want to figure out the truth if you think this is how it is and everyone else says no no that's and it's that way you know you sticked with what you think is true and and even if everybody else keeps thinking it's there's a certain um I always root for the underdog when I watch movies and my my dad wants I I one time for example when I wrote one of my craziest papers ever or I'm talking about our universe ultimately being mathematical which we're not going to get into today I got this email from a quite famous Professor saying this is not only but it's going to ruin your career you should stop doing this kind of stuff I sent it to my dad do you know what he said what do you say he replied with a quote from Dante Corso follow your own path and let the people talk go Dad yeah this is the kind of thing he's dead but that that attitude is not how did losing them as a man as a human being change you how does it expand your thinking about the world how did it uh expand you thinking about you know this thing we're talking about which is humans creating another living sentient perhaps uh being I think it uh mainly do two things uh one of them just going through all their stuff after they had passed away and so on just drove home to me how important it is to ask yourselves why are we doing this things we do because it's inevitable that you look at some things they spent an enormous time on and you asked in hindsight would they really have spent so much time on this or if would they have done something that was more meaningful um so I've been looking more in my life now and asking you know why am I doing what I'm doing and I I feel it should either be something I really enjoy doing or it should be something that I find really really meaningful because it helps Humanity and the if it's in none of those two categories maybe I should spend less time on it you know the other thing is dealing with death up in person like this it's actually made me less afraid of um even less afraid of other people telling me that I'm an idiot you know which happens regularly and just let me live my life do my thing you know um and um it's made it a little bit easier for me to focus on what I what I feel is really important what about fear of your own death has it made it more real that this is that this is something that happens that's made it extremely real and you know I'm next next in line in our family now right it's me and my brother younger brother but um they both handled it with such dignity it was that was a true inspiration also they never complained about things and you know when you're old and your body starts falling apart it's more and more to complain about they looked at what could they still do that was meaningful and they focused on that rather than wasting time talking about or even thinking much about things they were disappointed in I think anyone can make themselves depressed if they start their morning by making a list of grievances whereas if you start your day when the little meditation and just the things you're grateful for you you basically choose to be a happy person because you only have a finite number of days you should spend them Make It Count being grateful yeah

Channel: Lex Clips

Views: 302,977

Keywords: ai, ai clips, ai podcast, ai podcast clips, artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence podcast, computer science, consciousness, deep learning, einstein, elon musk, engineering, friedman, joe rogan, lex ai, lex clips, lex fridman, lex fridman podcast, lex friedman, lex mit, lex podcast, machine learning, math, math podcast, mathematics, max tegmark, mit ai, philosophy, physics, physics podcast, science, tech, tech podcast, technology, turing

Id: s45bjBk_Gag

Length: 24min 13sec (1453 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 14 2023