Fallout Director Jonathan Nolan on the Promise and Perils of Our Time

oh my God this is so fun being at Sundance I've been so excited about doing this uh science versus fiction is a series where we talk to creative people like filmmakers script writers novelists artists about how science informs their work when we thought about coming to Sundance I talked to Doran and I was like I really want Jonah I really hope Jonah will come and I'm so excited to have you here it's such a pleasure to be here um one of the most amazing amazing things about looking at your work is you seem infused naturally with a genuine love of Science and you're that rare animal who also finds these dramatic narrative threads and extrapolations from those ideas and I I have to ask if you always loved science if as a kid you knew you loved science and if you always loved film making as a kid I did I did I did love science uh I think in another in another life I was an extremely mediocre engineer um my uh my Uncle Tony was an electrical engineer and taught me how to um taught me how to solder and taught me how to to to to uh to really use my my mind to kind of take things apart I was one of those kids who would always take things apart at inconvenient moments for my parents and then when you put them back together they never worked again or did they work again they worked with hiccups um but I was the youngest kid in the family so I was the one sort of fell to to kind of fix everything um Chris is fairly handy uh but and he's good with the camera but otherwise kind of not so much uh so to program the VCR it was left it was left to me um but I think at a certain point I realized that uh that that there are the things in life that you love and the things in life that you're talented at and I'm not sure I had a talent for science so much as an affection for now I find it very interesting as an audience member watching your films is I'm I'm first and foremost swept up in the cinema right I I'm I'm lost in the microcosm and in the story and then underneath I see there's this like architecture of these conceptual scientific themes I can see it in every piece of your that I've had the privilege of um watching and I I wonder if um it's that intentional in your process do you do you get excited about some crazy quantum theory and then start dreaming of a narrative or do they kind of come together naturally yeah I've always been a little uh suspicious of the of the of the term uh i' say process it's the last little bit of England that's left in me but I've always been suspicious of the the word process because I don't know what that means and I've been trying for 20 years to figure out what that means um you get interested in things I read a lot um and and you get taken with things I think a lot of people think that that um the things that I work on the things that I worked on with with Chris are are sort of more cerebral than emotional in that sort of space I you know I'm not sure I agree with that but I do think that we tend to on the great axis of writing from character to story I'm definitely over here somewhere I will get interested in a character The Dark Knight was written basically sort of with the joker as this sort of Person of Fascination at the center of it um but with everything else there's usually a thematic idea and and that tends to in our work tends to express itself more readily in story than it does in character you have to find a way to to to access both but yeah I do think I get interested in stuff uh momento came from yeah let's talk momento is momento um you screened here at Sundance and is it your first time to at sance in 2001 was it your first trip it was it must have been a pretty good trip and your first film it was it was it was an amazing amazing experience um that film actually started for me I was uh I was in the seventh grade and I did I was I was a nerd and I went to nerd camp in nerd camp in uh in Purdue University for electrical engineering which was you know I was like that I had to fill out the rest of the roster and there was a neurobiology course and that was the first time that I'd heard about anr Amnesia and it sort of stuck in my you know this retrograde amnesia which is a classic sort of Philip Marlo detective Amnesia and then there's anade amnesia which is more complicated and and has a little bit more um raises more interesting questions for raise more interesting questions for me about identity you know and and how memory and identity intersect with each other so then I was in uh in college a few years later and I took psych 101 and they talked again about anr Amnesia Oliver Sach wrote a terrific book about it that I uh that I never read the Oliver saxs book was it the man must took his wife for a hat you you forgot it yeah yeah exactly uh well there's this weird moment where you've come up with an idea and someone says oh you should read this book and you're like but if I read the book I'm going to get sort of nudged away from the thing I have I'm not a big believer in ironically and we'll get to inter later not a huge believer in research always I think you can do just enough research and then if you do too much it starts to kind of you start boxing yourself in with rules um but with with M that second helping of integrate Amnesia to me just felt like okay there's definitely a there's definitely a um a character here and a character whose condition dictates the rules of the story which is kind of the ultimate you know if if you're looking for character and you're looking for story if you have a character who whose conditions suggest exactly how the story would work um that felt like a home run and so you wrote this originally as a short story uh momento Mori remind us what that phrase means is it a Time piece momento is that no it means remember to die remember from the L you sort of remember that you will die but the more imperative kind of remember uh remember you're going to die and you hadn't envisioned this as a film originally when you you wrote it as a short story how does it come about you and your brother begin to collaborate on this yeah I had the idea so you know out of Psych 101 kind of toy with it I was taking some time off of school trying to figure out what I wanted to what I wanted to study um and I couldn't shake this idea of someone who'd been victimized but couldn't exactly remember being victimized because victimization and and revenge are such great you know Revenge maybe the classic American theme in literature and film you go back to Moby Dick Revolutionary War it's just sort of cooked into our DNA somehow we love a good Revenge story but revenge stories are of course cautionary tales and this felt like a an opportunity to kind of take the classic Revenge story and and atomize it and and break it into pieces and try to pick up the pieces and glue them back together and figure out what actually sits underneath all of that um we couldn't figure out how to tell story of course because it needed to reflect the the protagonist condition um my my solution was to sort of I wanted to write it as a deck of cards and you Shuffle it and so every experience of the story would be different and then Chris called me one day and said because I I've been working on the story Chris was moving to California uh from from the UK and we were taking a road trip together and I was kind of annoyed with the story right out of the gate because I was like this is a movie right I at the time I I thought I was going to be a novelist and Chris was a filmmaker there younger sibling situation any younger Lane respect um I was told to pick a lane I'm like no I kind of like that lane too um um but I was like this is clearly a movie so who's driving he's driving you're driving I need the whole visual good question if memory if memory serves which probably doesn't um I was driving it was my it was our dad's car which had been with me in DC and kept getting parking tickets and I was like I don't need this thing in in Washington uh but you I've heard you know I hear you need a car in La so we should we should drive it out we got to Minnesota and I had a Chris Isaac cassen go that got stuck in it's a Honda Prelude great car got stuck in the tape deck so we had to Listen to Wicked Game over and over and over again which is good for thinking uh and I sort of I we got sufficiently bored ran out of things to to say ran out of catching up and I started pitching him this story and he had he had actually been talking to me about the different he'd already made following and he was talking about the different projects He was looking at one of which is a comedy which was which was intriguing um and he sort of went through the list and I thought okay well that sounds cool I said I did have this notion for a story and I started talking about I was driving and and I was sort of you know at that point I had done a preliminary draft of it really a sketch um I think I wrote the first version of it on a you're like 21 at this point very young it was 20 20 uh I think I wrote the first version on an air on an airplane vomit bag which which I've struggled for years to find uh so I just had you know sort of a layout of it in in my mind almost kind of a Mythos more than a story um and I started explaining to him and he got very quiet and I thought oh I got him and he sees the same thing in it that I do which is an inherently visual storytelling you know it's it's one thing to describe tattoos and and Polaroids and all these things in a story but it's so much more effective to just point a camera a guy Pierce mhm um yeah I we're we're using the slides really just for tone um so I sometimes forget I get engaged and I forget to forward them ahe but this is fun the first time I ever saw my work published because we were working to get the short story published it was eventually published in Esquire which was amazing um but the first time I've ever seen i' had ever seen my work published was on guy Pierce's bicep at dinner after uh after a makeup test uh you talk about this and we're discussing architecture of science being uh really driving some of the structure and in this film already it's just amazing you know these black and white scenes which I think run chronologically forward and then there are in color scenes which I believe run chronologically backwards and they coales in the concluding scene um and this way of playing with time I thought was so powerful instead of stopping and explaining to us how there's a neurological so here's the strong conceptual theme here obviously as you mentioned neur Neuroscience uh memory brain um uh sense of self but also like a neurological notion of time is actually rooted in the actual architecture of the film I thought that was so interesting and such a powerful way of bringing the audience in instead of stopping and explaining it um and um and it was such an interesting launch I also love to notice that the technology we're going to come back to this um uh are landlines Polaroids VHS machines and Technology begins to loom larger and larger um in your work so after the well sorry you were going to say no no no well after the huge success of momento which is huge success and it's you it's still loved um film comes Prestige which is just an unbelievable script as well do you co-write this together we we did I our version of co-writing is I usually do the first draft he then makes a bunch of ill advised changes change them back and then he changes them again and directs the movie because he's the director uh here the conceptual theme feels very clearly to be the Advent of electricity um it's set in the late 1800s um there's a competition between magicians do you want to give the elevator liner of I'm sure everyone's seen the prestige it's superb um yes thank you Lu luckily we never had to do do an elevator pitch on this movie I I don't think it would have worked very well yeah I know I would have been like uh-huh so the one beautiful and again the subtle way in which you're integrating science here is with the Advent of electricity was this incredible rivalry between Edison who we all we think of the Lio we all have heard of Edison and Tesla um which we now think of as a car but actually Tesla was Edison's strongest rival in uh the generation of electricity and the prolifer proliferation of electricity and here it's kind of a parallel track in a subtle way in the background their competition to the central characters The Magicians competition um do you remember the three uh elements of the magic trick that you say in Prestige yeah the pledge the turn and the prestige I just made that up that's not that's not real magic and it's not the book to screenwriter scrambling to figure out how a three how to name the threea in a in a threea screen right it's 3x that was exactly actually going to be my question is so there's um as you said the pledge when you show the bird the turn when you make something extraordinary happen the bird disappears and then the prestige the bird has to come back um is that film making kind of a little bit magic it was interesting we we did actually I forgotten we we uh we did have to take this movie around town uh it was not a home run we were supposed to make this in 2003 um and the biggest challenge was not the complexity of the script the characters or all the goofy stuff that happens in the movie um it was just the idea of a magic movie and every every Studio executive explained to us you know the audience isn't going to care about magic because it's on the you know it's in a movie and they know that you could just cut and you know take the rabbit out of the hat and we like I think it's going to be okay we set it aside for a couple years because Warners really wanted Chris to get into prep on Batman Begins so we set it aside and when we came back we were actually the second Magic movie of that year because everyone had decid everyone had been so convinced by Chris's sort of explanation for why magic could work on screen um which is essentially that everyone knows it's illusion anyway you don't go to the you know you don't go watch David Copperfield imagining that he's really disappearing the Statue of Liberty right um You Would you would scream um uh you know it's it's it's the pleasure of knowing that it's not real but still not understanding how it can be done it's it's the pleasure of the Lial State you don't really believe it's been done but you want to so it takes advantage of this weird little hiccup in the human mind that kind of enjoys being put in that that all little in between space and you could say that's the same thing for the movie G we we want to be fooled yes right we we want to be convinced enough we don't want to see through the trick um so that we can't suspend disbelief anymore we we want we enjoy that sense of being fooled we don't want the secret to be revealed sometimes and I thought it was very interesting in the references to electricity and to Tesla who was a magician um scientist and a loner and an eccentric and a very strange just the greatest yeah fascinating personality um was that it was real magic I mean yeah you know how you referred to it technology is real magic absolutely and now we're so consumed with that we're so consumed with it's so normal for us but to imagine being late 1800s like the height of mechanical engineering superb unbelievable mechanical skills and then this electricity comes along yeah everybody thinks of our age as and and I subscribed to this belief when I was younger too that our age has been the most incredible transformational the victorians if you look at the beginning of the Victorian era to the end of it it's astonishing I mean it completely outstrips what we've experienced um it's it was it was an incredible time of Social and technological upheaval and change yeah I I really agree with that I think if you want something to last you make something mechanical you don't make something Electrical uh if you want it to last for a hundred years um you don't make an electrical uh iPhone as great as it is to keep my time here next no it's I mean look we're film partisans we you know everything you're seeing here with the exception of one TV series where we were forbidden from using it was was was shot on film we're still shooting on film um there was something about tactile mechanical wheel um and my my brother has disappeared for years because you got kids we both we you know we both got kids um at these digital photos that they just won't be around and they're and they're not you know they're already like I look through my you know to cast no aspersions on any technology companies but I go through my cloud and there are things missing there are pictures that I know are missing whereas if you got a shoe box full of negatives yeah you're good to go so you will have this generation and it's basically all the kids who grew up in the 2000 2010s there will be and my friend Michael Green made a joke about this in Blade Runner 2049 there will be no pictures of us there will be no pictures of those kids um no no baby pictures um and that's that's a little frightening it um there even though you have this really solid rivalry with Edison and Tesla and this really solid theme in the electricity you also then introduce essentially quantum teleportation that's not my fault that's Christopher priest that was I was given a job I was adapting a book it was in the book oh yes of course was the quantum teleportation originally in the book yeah and I again it's one of the ways that you treat it I love that you don't stop and explain it to us it it is it is the I didn't have an explanation skip that part because um yes neither do we still um but but he but he did but I did go to Colorado Springs and I got kind of obsessed with Tesla and I went while we were prepping the film uh and working on the final drafts I I drove again cross country I sort of every every opportunity to drive across this amazing country I I um I embrace it and so I drove a car we've been living in Boston and we had a car out there and so I drove it by way of Colorado and got lost in Colorado Springs for a few months trying to dig up any of the artifacts left from Tesla's time and and fittingly they had all been stolen there had been a small Museum and everything had been stolen to sell to private collectors which is just so perfect given the the story but you know he he really did get up to some some really interesting stuff in Colorado Springs and of course where he ruined himself you know he I think more than more than many people you could credit Tesla with inventing our modern world um and where he ruined himself was he wanted to give away for free he conjectured that there was an ionosphere which 50 years later the US Navy proved um and he thought he could give away power for free and that's when they ruined him so I'm not a conspiracy theorist but I think if you look at what happened to Tesla it does sort of it does speak to how technology moves forward and fits and starts yeah scientists often are open source by Instinct yeah um and that that's that's a story that has to be um told properly one day and um and that brings us to other adaptations big scale where you inherit the entire Legacy with the Batman series like The Dark Knight and the Dark Knight Rises and I one thing to point out again is suddenly this transition to technology and I have been told that you are a transportation nerd is that fair a little bit a little bit you looked a little suspicious depends on how you Define transportation oh you know flying cars yes the near future definitely um one of the interesting things about the series which was incredibly popular I mean there are people who are very fixated with your particular films The Dark Knight and the Dark Knight Rises in that entire huge Canon um because of the depth of the emotion of the characters actually interesting that you were talking about this um as well as a storyline and and and this emotive back story were you daunted by walking into um a history like that where there was such a backlog not really I was young and I was arrogant and stupid and so didn't realize the responsibility we were being given but Batman was the only movie uh the only superhero that I was interested in as a kid uh because his superpowers were money and rage slightly more relatable um and Chris had given me a copy of um uh Batman year One for my birthday when I was 14 and I was blown away by that book and and uh and so it was beautifully karmic or however you want to you know a little bit of kismat when we were able to when this this sort of opportunity came our way um and the character is a technologist himself I mean everything the Batman does is not given to him grew up grew up rich uh bereft emotionally but he has to make all of his superpowers so it's all the gizmos all the gadgets i s you know I moved to America when I was 11 and I think I I was uncertain I kep my dad kept wanted to send me back to the UK to boarding school um and I got my driver's license and that was it you know I'm a big advocate of public transportation advocate of but but I when I first got my driver's license I was like I'm never leaving this country this is like the greatest thing ever so we wind up working on this the one superhero who's most synonymous with a car uh is Not an Accident either now when you're inheriting a kind of franchise like that are there are there parameters are do they tell you we kind of want this to happen or is it just uh go man no the kind of amazing thing about working on these movies was um they had been to Again cast no versions on the movies that came beforehand there's some beautiful film making there but they had they had become very unpopular they become sort of deeply sort of and Batman weirdly has always been on the spectrum of deadly serious or very very much a parody of itself and so the movies kind of bounce back and forth like are we taking this seriously or not seriously um I think that for us things were in such a dire state with the franchise and Warners was run at the time by Jeff robinov whose theory was kind of who whose sort of philosophy was consistent with Warner's long-term philosophy of you don't you know you don't make the movies you hire the right person to make the movies right they really believe in the sort of aour um model for film making they hired Chris um I wind up working on Batman Begins kind of as a as a Ghost Rider um so I had sort of a front row seat to the whole thing because it all happened actually very quickly um and they really didn't tell us anything we had great conversations with Paul Levitz who at the time was running DC and we go to his office in New York just north of Times Square and I would pitch an idea and he'd go to his shelf big shelf and he'd pull down an issue from 1974 and he'd show me my idea already written which is a wonderful experience oh yeah I read that in 1979 it's the coolest like to work on a Chara adaptation is such a fraught thing but to adapt something that has been so thoroughly explored by so many brilliant writers and Brilliant artists you're completely liberated right there's no Canon you know you're you're not doing Harry Potter you're not doing you know you're doing something that has been interpreted reinterpreted re reinterpreted um so you're free you're free within the the the rough constraints of what we can all agree Batman is and you mentioned he invents his own superpowers and I the reason why I was really interested in this in the context of our conversation was precisely because you had this idea of this like cell sonar surveillance technology that he creates in Morgan Freeman inherits under his purview reluctantly right fraught with um um s ethical quandries of what it means to have this kind of AI Big Data surveillance um did this idea have some Origins did you just sort of find it in the telling of this story oh fascinated by it and there's always been a thread of the sort of you know it's very easy to see Batman as a fascist right I mean he's very you know he's a very politically fraught character as well it was amazing experience of making this film and it had this incredible reception when we put it into the into the theaters really unlike anything I'd experienced and then went on vacation and came back and started reading all of the people trying to interpret the politics of the movie I've never read so much nonsense about the politics of one movie um you un read it at at that time no thankfully no but you sort of come back and and uh and and great great novelists who I who I won't name had written oped pieces in the New York Times talking about how this was an apologia for Bush's politics and I was like oh we struck a nerve right that's that's nonsense but we struck a nerve and it's always fun to be in that place where both the left and the right were equally distrustful and uncomfortable about my I've made no secret of my politics I'm Progressive um but when you work on these sorts of movies you do feel all the rules for us were all self-imposed um we knew that they had to be PG-13 because I didn't if I'd been 14 years old and this movie came out and I couldn't see it I'd be pissed um and we knew to some degree when it came came to I've always been very I've always had very mixed emotions about putting my personal politics into the work that we do but with this it was I remember thinking to myself this is like getting asked to play for the Yankees you sort of set your [ __ ] aside for a little bit and you try to explore that character as much as you can um and get get underneath it without betraying your own personal politics if that makes sense yeah um but I just thought we're heading into this moment I had been following the conversations the weirdest thing about the surveillance capitalism thing is that it was it played out in absolutely full view right my idea for this was it came from a revelation on the front page of the New York Times about the powers the US government was granting itself with your phone the ability to turn it on even if it was off the ability to track it the ability to turn the microphone on all these things were absolutely public knowledge we were just in this headlong Rush towards the smartphone and we kind of didn't care and for most people who cares right uh it was only with Snowden that we started to actually really kind of dig in on the fact that this was something something of a problem so we knew this was going to be or I I I was fascinated by this issue and fascinated by the idea that Batman would use it and then destroy it and that sort of parks us into this place where people would find the content polit politically objectionable because it doesn't pick out a strident line when it comes to this issue but I would challenge anyone to figure out what we do with that just a just a conversation about encryption itself is so fraud there is no there's no standard party line for any of these things we these are complicated questions we have to we have to really get deeply into them to understand them part of the problem with the moment we're in right now is that our technologies have become too complicated too quickly and you know I mean it is laughable watching Congress you know it's tragic comic watching Congress haul technology CEOs in front of them and try to hit them with questions try to out at them when you're I think your average American is watching and going God you really don't understand these things it is a fascinating issue the idea of the conglomeration and using all of our phones which you know brings us to Person of Interest which I believe was your first fora into TV but even now I think if you pressed any individual to choose between having access to their phones and the you know we we press agree to all of the terms and conditions we don't read them we accept all the cookies we don't really know what they're doing how many people would actually uh given the choice not participate in the selfs surveillance in This Global surveillance and it is kind of fascinating it's not secret we all know it's happening all know our phones listen to us um if you we didn't opt into the phones listening to us thing necessarily but I remember a definite inflection point with this was um how many folks actually signed up for Gmail had to get an invitation to do it you guys remember this had to get a friend to invite you wow uh that's how it started that's how it launched right was my sister-in-law sent me an invite and it was very elite it was very exciting and one of the things that you had to do when when you sign up for your Gmail account uh was and you still have to do it you had to sign the end user license agreement which allows them to read your emails this was a big moment this was a big moment in American technological history this is where all of this [ __ ] all these large language models all the generative AI stuff it all comes from this moment it comes from the moment when you say yes and I said yes to Google allowing it and I think the agreement was and I think they even sort of publicized this to some degree they sort of explained it's like well we're not going to read your emails which is not true by the way um we're not it's not a human who's going to read your emails it's a machine right and I think speaking for myself that actually sounded comforting I was like okay it's not a person right what's a machine going to do with them well what machine's going to do is spend the next 15 years aggregating all of them into a device that we're now trying to figure out what the hell we do with which got to replace all of us um lock all of us up for dubious politics if the wrong people are in charge um you know we have created a monster and we we did opt in it is Distributing to me when people say I've got nothing to hide and I think you don't know what you have to hide um because you don't know if it's going to be analyzing your health or your potential to uh procreate or whatever things are going to be analyzed you don't actually know what you have to hide well and you have nothing to hide from the current regime that you live under absolutely this is why I was I was disappointed that the Trump presidency did not prompt a larger more urgent conversation about these Technologies about all these different things that we signed up for and all the different we we we just sort of still kind of sadly myself included kind of blundering through this you know we've had years to understand that our elections are being manipulated that our minds are being manipulated that all these all these sort of things have have steadily eroded U political autonomy on a widespread level on an individual level um we were talking just we just talking a little bit last night about the fact that this this whole generation thing I just just a little little sidebar because I'm so fascinated by this do you guys I have to I'd have to invoke it in order to try to ask this question the amount of generational IR online right are you guys clocking this this is not how it used to be and that's a generational thing right this is new this is new and a lot of it is real but a lot of it is [ __ ] and a lot of it is being used to divide us and you sort of see this throughout throughout American history Howard Zin I would be interested to see what he has to say about all the people complaining about the Boomers there's plenty to complain about with Boomers for sure but they're not the ones who stole everyone's [ __ ] money right and we are being told to hate them as they all die bankrupt same as everyone else in this country we're being told to hate them instead of the people who really stole everything so I just think I think that is that is either mimetically driven online like a cancer or it's intent it's someone manipulating us to find grievances against each other in ways that don't actually necessarily map on to in to the injustices that we're really suffering under if that makes sense yeah I I think it's fascinating also how machines which you found comforting the idea that a machine might be reading your email as opposed to more comforting than Jeff from Human Resources right but but Jeff from Human Resources wouldn't then evolve into a large language model so been better off right with Jeff so in personally and it was it was it was [ __ ] anyway because as we know now this was actually you know what they really did was they just paid people who you know who who were willing to work all the cont all the content moderation stuff it wasn't algorithms at first it was just people who needed jobs who were subjected to to viewing and and it's still that way and in Person of Interest it is the machine that's um that that has the capacity to do all of this surveillance that we participate in from our phones to the um cameras on the street and um I remember reading somewhere that when you grew up in London and the early part of uh your childhood that you were very influenced during the troubles um that they started putting cameras everywhere on the streets and as a young kid seeing this happened like the seeds of this concept was already planted and this is long before we were really worrying about machine surveillance um and do you feel like the seeds of these these sort of concerns go back that far yeah very much London in the 80s was a weird it was a weird time uh it was a weird place to grow up it it sort of you know um Alam Moore built vur Vendetta out of that moment um and the English police have always taken a very sort of dimmer view of control and surveillance uh even in America um and so that idea yeah I remember the cameras going up even in the ' 80s MH and it was an attempt I think it the time attempt to control hooliganism that's sort of where it started soccer stadiums football stadiums and then spreading out into the rest of the city um it just taking the pen Opticon technology which actually ironically we modeled the prison in the prestige on a prison in London Victorian London called The Bird Cage which is one of the first panopticon right so panopticon is building a prison around a central viewing chamber so that the idea being you don't know if they're watching you but at any given point they could be watching you and it's a very powerful mechanism of control um and and we've just you know London then took it or England Scotland Yard took it and applied it to the city no one was watching those cameras half the time they weren't even plugged into anything but when you're 16 years old that you don't know that um so it was a strange time and I think the the post that followed us to the United States after 911 right MH um after1 is a is a kind of jumping off point for the series in some sense it sort of inspires the creation of the machine and again the fraught sense of the Creator unsure about what he's built at kind of the seed that started in Dark Knight which I thought was really fascinating yeah I wasn't done with that idea Bruce Wayne was done with that idea I was like no no no we need to get a little deeper into that and kind of figure out what's happening um I was looking at this beautiful shot which we found of the Central character who's that handsome extra up in the upper left there this is this was the series finale uh and so I I couldn't help did a little Cameo slightly narcissistic Cameo uh we shoot this in Time Square which was always which is always fun um yeah that was a really fun show to make do you do cameos or if I looked hard would I find you in others every once in a while just just for a gag but no I'll love the good I I belong on the other side of the camera uh I have to pause on Interstellar because actually I don't know if you're going to remember this but we the first time we met had to do with Interstellar so Kip Thorne famous astrophysicist now Nobel Prize winner absolutely beloved um theoretical physicist he had some of the early ideas on wormholes and black holes and just a genius and a yeah beautiful soul and he wrote a treatment for this film Interstellar I don't know if it was called Interstellar at the time um oh God got me on that name I don't remember but but Kip was on the project before I was he was what was that he was on the project before I was yeah so I think he brought it to his exgirlfriend Linda opst who's a producer who you know right and um and before all of this was made I guess it must have been sometime in that project that Kip has a party for Stephen Hawking and you're there and Chris is there and Linda o is there and I'm friends with Kip through yeah and actually that's when we first met but I didn't I wasn't sure if you would even remember that um so how did you I absolutely remember that cuz I had to help carry Hawkings wheelchair out of the house United Airlines had damaged it and so it was talking the whole time so it were carrying this thing out of the house and Hawking is talking to you from his you know he he wasn't in it while we were carrying it out the chair is talking to us with witty reparte that had been pre-programmed into US was that was a trip so Kip isn't uh going to write a screenplay so how did does it come about that you become the script writer for Stellar so Kip Kip and Linda o which has got to be one of the all-time great brief flings right just insane and here's a terrific uh sort of legendary film producer and Nobel prizewinning uh physicist and Kip is one of the great humans period um got Spielberg excited about this idea of a grounded not a Space Opera but sort of you know how how can we sort of to keep it closer to the science but still kind of get out Beyond um our own little corner of the of the solar system uh and they had people come in and pitch and I came in and pitched and the pitch was uh nice idea but it's never going to happen right and the aliens will come in a million years and they will find a little American flag a little sad American flag on the moon and they will go oh they almost made it almost made it they got to like step 3o B7 and got no further because at the time um it was the uh second Bush whichever one uh was in charge and they were they were making noise about going to Mars but it was lies right if you actually look they had gutted NASA's budget no one was going anywhere and if you grew up um as a space nerd like I did you sort of confronted with the idea that the at that time the narrative was that America was kind of kind of on the way out we weren't doing this there was no reason for anyone to go back to the Moon there was no reason for them to go to Mars and so my my sort of dangerous pitch to Spielberg was it's never going to happen you have to set it in a world in which we acknowledge that and you have to make that the premise of the film um and he he bought it so we developed this with Kip and Spielberg for a couple of years and that that was amazing I would go to Caltech I sort of got my my uh unofficial half-ass uh post-graduate degree in astrophysics working with Kip um and he would give me a shelf of books to read and I would kind of get stuck halfway through each of them but pulled together enough um to to sort of fulfill the Mandate of a somewhat grounded um Cosmic Adventure the reality was I got through the first three books and I was like well we're no we're never going anywhere there there's nothing near Earth we have no Technologies to get us anywhere further enough from Earth um uh that we could do anything so then you started to have to work with to with Kip to start investigating the the bigger possibilities right um are we alone in the universe um is is is there the possibility of intervention I mean also just you have this conceptual them which I think is very clear you could say oh it's black holes and wormholes but really it's kind of Relativity is really deep in the script relativity in general and you um you play obviously black holes are a consequence of Einstein's theory of relativity and wormholes are a consequence and ones that Kip explored but you also um talked about time dilation something that we know can happen which is the time travel of one person into another person's future yeah right so when Matthew mccane gets too close to Gargantua yeah um the black hole he travels to the Earth's future and more importantly um his children's future yeah and I think that that's not science fiction we know that that happens we can do that in the laboratory not with people yet because we can't move them around as easily that's actually a scientific verified observed fact and the way you handled it there there is some discussion with Anne hathway and Matthew MCC to explain a little bit of the relativity and how it works but really what what's so impactful is the moment that Matthew MCC when he comes back from Gargantua after a few hours yes and it's 23 years um later on Earth yeah and he has that moment of going through the logs of the videos um that had been sent to him over the years from his family and I thought there was such a beautiful cinematic way of demonstrating the ideas and I think that's exactly why it's so unusual how you do things is that it's it's Cinema first but the structure is underneath um did you grapple with how to represent that yeah for me that was the whole movie that's where sort of the the the origin of it and the reason why we sort of I I struggled for years to kind of get it made because Spielberg eventually left Paramount and and and therefore I had to leave the project and I had to find a director and luckily I know one um uh but for me you know are you driving again you write some scripts you get excited about them you set them aside um some scripts you can't and this was when I couldn't and it was in part because of that moment and that moment was taken um in part from uh from Einstein and so Einstein I think one of the things that people don't really understand about Einstein and there's beautiful portrayal in my brother's movie um but unlike Oppenheimer Einstein really didn't bother much with the math he he he would use his mind he wasn't an experimentalist he would sit there and he would come up with thought experiments and all of the thought experiments uh were sort of you know if you're if you're writing movies you're looking for the human drama weirdly Einstein was a terrific screenwriter we all be like identical twins and one of them gets on a train and the train accelerates to the speed of light and comes back you just think about the sadness of that right where did my twin go um and and so it was hard reading all of those thought experiments and not imagining well you have to actualize one right you have to take one and make it and make it the the sort of Cornerstone of of the story and so that's where we did I'm working towards that moment in which you know in which Matthew You Beautiful performance in that moment but he just experiences it was also one of the one of the ideas about black holes and one of the ideas about black holes that and you'll correct me if I get this wrong but my understanding of black holes and red shifting is that if you fell into a black hole at a certain point as you got spaghettified right as you got crushed and pulled into pieces you would start to Glimpse you'd be Beyond The Event Horizon and you would start to Glimpse the outside Universe faster and faster absolutely um and I think I don't want was one of my favorite facts is I I tell people black holes are dark from the outside but they can be bright on the inside and as you fall in the light from the entire galaxy can catch up to you and you can see eons unfolding you know yeah Ian the Earth come and go the Sun come and go whatever happens we merge with Andromeda and all of that can come rain down on you before you make it to the singularity a terrible way to die uh but kind of an amazing an amazing gift almost a Godlike gift you would get You' get to see what happened to your kids you get to see and I think you know you get older as you become a parent um this is the thing that you know um that you are that I'm scared of the most is you want to know where The Story Goes you just want to know what happens to all these people you love and you understand on some level that you're never going to get to know that and so this almost romantic idea of you know the the Glimpse the closer you get to mortality with a black hole the more Godlike you become in your ability to understand and see what happens to the people you love and care about and that just felt like an amazing thing to build a film around I think much has been made of this already but maybe not everyone in the audience knows is you have an incredibly mathematically accurate depiction of a black hole yeah that's that's all Kip and that's all math and and one of those gratifying and weird uh parts of this film was presenting one of the first sort of scientifically validated conjectural images of a black hole and then a couple lat you know a couple years later they they they got a picture of one and it looked pretty pretty damn close which was which was it's crazy and one of the things you this isn't the full shot of a black hole but it's really just accretion hot gas around it but because of the way SpaceTime is bent you're seeing behind the black hole Yeah the light is coming over and above otherwise you'd never be able to see the black hole yeah and so the fact that the shadow is cast is really a result of the curved SpaceTime and it's one of the most beautiful demonstrations um and I remember Kip said um when saw it he's like oh my gosh of course it looks like that I he hadn't really stopped to visualize it I heard you turned off the color I don't know if that's true because if the black hole swirling one side coming out you would be Bluer and one side going away would be redder and it's much more monochromatic maybe told me that too I don't want to out us but my brother and I are both uh colorblind no way which explains why you don't see a lot of red in Chris Nolan films also explains why you see a lot of red in Westworld cuz I was like finally um but yeah we are we are red green color blind so the blue red shift would be theoretical for us yeah wasted yeah well I think it's more beautiful and monochromatic now um you uh back to television I'm actually very curious about television versus film because if you write a script for a film yeah you know the beginning you know the middle you know the end and then you do something as epic as westw world world and it can go on forever and how different is that first of all the beginning middle end issue the issue that each season you can start again and where do you keep going but also um collaborating and I know that you did this with the unbelievably talented Lisa Joy who also happens to be your wife yep and I I did actually want to ask how you have such creative relationships with your most intimate people your brother it's very complicated and your wife I can barely collaborate over walking the dog I mean um but you co-created Westworld you've both written and directed episodes um do you ever get frustrated with the collaboration I won't make you talk about with your wife but we're going there okay no no I was going to make it a little easier and say like with the writing room you have to hire a team now of writers film and television is amazing thing um where it's best when it's individualistic but it's never not a collaborative fully collaborative medium like if you just want to be a uh a tyrant you have to write a novel right and there are famously tyrannical directors my brother is not one of them um but you can't make a movie without literally on on some days on I remember J.J abrs came to visit us on set when we were shooting the uh finale for westbr he was taking a break from doing his first Star Wars movie and he gets there and he's like how big is the show because there were like 30 trucks in the parking lot 800 people some days on set with Westworld and 800 incredibly talented people and you need all of them uh to be having an excellent day to get something really great out of it so it is collaborative and it's very cinematic I mean it's it just doesn't read the old days television each episode has all of the Cinematic caliber of the best films that's quite tremendous I remember so obviously again I assume everyone in the audience knows very strong scientific conceptual theme for this one is clearly Consciousness AI um the self in the first season it's very strongly rooted in this we're the humans they're different they're the hosts and you're not even sure they're conscious as the season progresses there are these Sparks of um Consciousness unfolding and then I feel towards the end I don't know we're all algorithms and um does it really matter and we have narratives that we're living out and that doesn't sound like a fun watching experience it's I I loved it and it's not totally dystopian yeah um which I I also think is is interesting so I guess first question is how you were grappling with these ideas of Consciousness and self and as you're going along are your ideas changing as the you're making the show uh definitely yeah so it start that started with with momento where I sort of um became fascinated by way of memory and one of the amazing things about momento was we put the film we came here which is amazing uh to Sundance and then put it out in the universe and every time we'd screen it anywhere I I i' interact with someone who sadly uh typically had been in a motorcycle accident was was a frequent thing that came up but I'd interact with someone at almost every screening all around the world who would walk up and say that they had gone through a period uh of of of inter great Amnesia maybe for minutes or days or months absolutely marked them and you could almost tell at every screening you be shaking hands and and interacting with people and you'd be like that's the that's the person who's going to tell me that they had anner great Amnesia because it gives you this uh haunting is the word that I would used to describe all of these people I've never experienced it I I I've you know I'm a a bit of a lightweight when it comes to the the exploration of my yes exact luckily um uh but also Altered States I'm a bit of a wimp uh so my this is all entirely conjecture for me uh but you would you would talk to people who' experienced a loss of self even if it was a momentary one uh and all of them were marked by this and you be you begin to understand that our sense of identity uh is extremely fragile extremely fragile in the short story I was fascinated by by by sleep and and the wakefulness this idea I think the imagery and the story is is sort of a a Chain Gang of people the version of you from yesterday the version of you from tomorrow and handing you know trying to shuffle forward together trying to convey these you know intentions all our best intentions our dreams our plans our schemes um being handed from one person who goes to sleep and wakes up the next day to the next person um you know our identities are are pretty suspect if you think about it right our idea that there's a self um is is remarkably suspect so for this project what was great was the invitation to explore that question by way of by way of creatures who are not human um and I think I think you know we were part of the reason AI has come up again it starts it starts in infecting the work um maybe in Person of Interest Interstellar and then I sto kind of doing anything that isn't about AI because it kind of feels like this is the big question of our time and we're we're in some ways very it's very scary we also very very lucky to be here at this incredible inflection point where we are about to share the world for the first time in a very long time with another sentient set of creatures and that is absolutely something that we're going to have to struggle we were talking about this the other day it's it's amazing I I'm not sure if I think a large language model is sentient but I was suspicious of the fact that every mainstream article you'd read about gpt3 by the third paragraph quickly explains that of course this isn't real intelligence this isn't real Consciousness this isn't real general intelligence and he say how do you know why are we so quick to say that we just keep moving the goalposts right as we've always moved the goalpost as we've always only conferred the idea of Consciousness and sentience on one small group and denied it to everybody else so I I think you know the the with every adaptation you want to find a reason why you're doing the adaptation especially if it's something good um kon's original film is packed with ideas uh some amazing ideas but the jumping off point for Lis and I was a simple inversion we're going to tell the story now from the perspective of the robots yeah so that's about on season three maybe it starts I guess through the whole thing right the game the joke of the first season is you think they a couple human characters in there and spoiler alert they're not and definitely I don't know who I'm rooting for after a while I love that there's always this kind of us and them are the AI going to kill us and are we going to get them back but you don't know who you're rooting for sometimes it's not so far down species yeah we talked about this a little bit I'm very suspicious I have become very suspicious of good the good versus evil the bad guys versus the good guys storyline almost all of contemporary Cinema is built on that idea yeah and it's an invention and it's certainly not the real world right I think this this tendency to demonize one group uh the tribalism that is woven into all the storytelling and some films that I've worked on too um is really a disease yeah and and it's a it's a modern idea we're talking about this with the The Iliad it's not in the ilot it's not in a lot of Greek storytelling it is a contemporary invention and it simplifies and streamlines The Narrative so much yeah so it's such a powerful one and it hits you know we're sort of seeing now with social media I think everyone in this room is old enough to remember time before social Med media and you're watching I think we're all sort of aware of what social media is doing in terms of there's a it's it's manipulating aspects of human behavior that are flaws in many ways right there's lots of good stuff that comes out of it and there's lots of of of interesting things as with all technology is two-sided thing but um but it is manipulate we all understand and we failed yet to understand how to regulate it um and for for parents this is particularly terrifying we understand that it's exploiting flaws in human coat movies and and TV shows have been doing that for hundred years movies have been doing that for for for their entire existence we exploiting tribalism we love it we cannot get enough of it it's so powerful we understand on some level it's deeply wrong but we love watching it and we can't help ourselves you know if you just take any movie any popular movie from the last 20 or 30 years how many of them actually question that idea and when you try to make things that question idea they usually don't do very well um so it's just you know for us the idea of taking kon's film which is which is more complicated than I'm painting it to be it is not jingoistic right it is thoughtful it's all kinds of brilliant ideas in that movie but it's told from the perspective of the the terrified Bachelors whose sort of you know bachelor weekend turns on them and this was an effort to try to get underneath you know this this central question of how will we we have failed to Define our own Consciousness so how are we supposed to to judge when something else has Consciousness I mean I believe you mentioned just just the other day we were talking it goes back to Alan Turing who first just through mathematics tried to mechanize the idea of mathematical proof and then began to think of mechanizing thought itself and then began to think maybe I can make machines that think and then eventually came to this kind of shedding of his theism to believe that we are machines that think um and and um and of course we've been grappling with turing's very intuitive idea of that ever since yeah all of the all of the arguments with Westworld cars on the table because we get asked all the time if we worked with consultants and did we talk to people um no the first season of Westworld is just [ __ ] that me and Lisa made up uh we read a lot of books um and there's a there's this big argument about is human consciousness you know you sort of say surl versus dennit or you can break it apart you know you you know we read a lot um of is there something privileged and special about human consciousness is there something distinct about it versus just a very sophisticated machine we're about to find out there are lots of really smart people who are on opposite sides of that argument but right in the middle of the road is this iron Obelisk of Turing you kind of forget about Turing and you get caught up in the Contemporary there's very few people who are smarter than Turing and the line in Westworld where um where our Kula says if you can't tell does it matter which is kind of a glib a throwaway line turing's principle it's an adaptation of turing's principle if you can't tell it doesn't matter right and so we forget ourselves in the sort of New York Times latest analysis of GPT 5 remember that if we can't tell it doesn't matter that's what Turing said and touring was very very smart and this idea that we are the Arbiters of Consciousness but we've failed at that utterly when it comes to all of the rest of you know organic life that we share this planet with thousands of years and we have no idea the relative levels of consciousness of the animals that we surround ourselves with that we routinely Slaughter to eat um we hav even we haven't even solve that question who are we to decide when a machine becomes smart enough to be conscious we we won't know and Turing probably had trouble understanding other people which was very interesting um was probably had some level of autism so which is interesting himself understanding human consciousness was hard for him well it just points the fact that human consciousness can be expressed in all these manifold beautiful ways and and any come sort of attempt to kind of systematize it or categorize it or say well this is real Consciousness over here to me seems like [ __ ] to begin with I don't I don't think for what is worth um that that there is something privileged about human experience I think we're very very privileged to be conscious I think we're very privileged to be alive and sentient but I don't think there's anything privileged about the process by which that came about you kind of explore this in the series peripheral in the sense that human beings go in and out of their body I and you just they're still them they're still conscious you're not getting overwrought about those philosophical issues you're just allowing them to transport in and out of peripherals well the other books the other book that I got when I was 14 was Batman year One and Neuromancer and it was my first introduction to the amazing William Gibson um who I think has contributed so much to our imagination yeah I mean he coined cyberspace you know this is this is a person who readily understood what we were about to you know kind of blunder into we kept asking him as we were making the preferable we like you because if you read the book he published the book in 2014 maybe and it anticipates author authoritarian presidency endless war a global pandemic so we call up Bill occasionally and be like will you please tell us what's going to happen next because it's getting scary how does this end William how does it end but Gibson had all these deep incredibly deep under understandings of how specifically technology was going to both save us and alienate alienate us from from ourselves and the questions you know he doesn't I like to think that you know we I don't have any answers but we have questions good questions and that's very much how Gibson approaches his storytelling this beautiful book and and the series we made from it was about degrees of alienation from technology uh and and and a little like Interstellar I I remember reading the book for the first time and I'd spent years thinking about time travel for Interstellar and then I read the first 20 pages of Gibson's book and I was like oh [ __ ] he's got it he just nailed it right he takes the many worlds Theory and he takes time travel and he marries them together in a way that feels inherently like it answers the problems that we have intuitively with time travel so you can travel back short briefly it it sort of goes like this you can travel back in time and change things but that creates a new universe Gibson called them stubs creates a new universe that doesn't connect to yours so you resolve the the grandfather Paradox by saying well you can kill your grandfather but that creates a new universe that you're not part of which is brilliant um and so we we had a lot of fun with it so I'm I'm aware that we're exactly um coming up to where I wanted to close and allow us to open for Q&A but before we do that I wanted to do a teaser of what's next sure um uh we're about to ceue up the trailer for Fallout right before we show it um my guys in the back there are gonna be able to put it on for us can you give us a really quick um uh storyline of uh what we should anticipate from Fallout coming in April oh boy Fallout if if the Dark Knight Rises took four years to get to movie movie screens it's because I was busy playing Fallout 3 instead of writing it uh I've Loved These video games um and they're this Gonzo blend of you know I say you know our our stuff largely is and political the games are intens political uh my partner AR Graham said you know the first one could have been written by adbusters um they're they're intensely political satirical piss on uh the end of the world but also the it's not the end of our world and this is the the hardest thing to kind of Express uh in in making the series but is it's not our world that ends it's this kind of bizarre Eisenhower America that never goes through a moment of naal reflection never has a Watergate moment never has a Vietnam um and and sort of branches off we talk about many worlds Theory kind of branches off for 100 Years of ongoing swaggering America as a as a nuclear power and then you know sinks into the mud yeah exactly right awesome can we show this [Music] trailer I know that I've lived a relatively comfortable life stop Mercy you need to go home Vault dwellers are an endangered species I do not think you would be willing to do what it takes to survive up here if you insist on staying then you will have to adapt uh-huh I don't want to see [Music] tomorrow I see with tomorrow so they say will be a lovely day a bright new sun will suddenly break through but I don't want to see tomorrow unless I see it with you I grabbed a moldy one I don't want to see tomorrow I see [Music] [Applause] once again again I'd like to say for the record that I did start working on this before Chris started working on Oppenheimer and I remember having a moment where I was like well I guess we're both going to do atomic bomb projects mine is quite different no sibling rivalry there uh I that's such an awesome place before we open it to Q&A please join me in thanking Jonah for his time such a pleasure okay awesome do you have questions I think people have microphones that they will hand around so um by all means if you have a microphone just hand it to somebody if you if you're in Char just yeah go ahead you choose Thank you going back to government surveillance and corporate surveillance and manipulation of our Behavior what are your thoughts on the potential of free open-source software tools such as graphine you privacy focused operating system for degoogle Android phones and Monero like completely untraceable cryptocurrency and regaining that that that back yeah crypto is a great example right so I I was on a u a very peculiar but but um interesting trip to the Arctic with a bunch of uh thought leaders and uh and I I was struggling a bit with crypto this is about five years ago and um a journalist who had gone deep into crypto uh took the time we were hiking in stalard uh and uh she took the time to articulate crypto exactly how it worked in a deep way um and the possible different versions possible outcomes of the widespread adoption of of the underlying sort of forget technology but the underlying philosophy underneath blockchain um and I don't think I've ever been as scared in my entire life because we're at this point where the technology you talk about encryption crypto all these things together the blockchain is the creation of a literal truth you know when you're sort of a kid you'd think about truth with a lowercase te subjectivity the promise of blockchain is to Usher into the universe objective Truth at its heart right we're like oh it's some weird [ __ ] I invested in the Super Bowl after watching a commercial right no it's it's actually an attempt to to to strip down information and make it inviable and permanent and forever that's a terrifying idea this is a very powerful idea and it has the promise depending on who it all comes down to who builds it and who controls it and is there a back door it's funny we we received some online criticism for the third season of Westworld opens with Aaron Paul's character uh knocking off an ATM machine and I remember reading some things online about people saying God how stupid futur futurism is hard um and I remember someone saying what kind of idiot thinks there's going to be cash in 30 years and I I it's the most optimistic thing in the show if we have cash we might still be free right cash is a mechanism an an anonymity right is one of the last mechanisms of anonymity so if you're talking about a cashless World we're [ __ ] right game over blockchain goes one way or the other and and crypto goes one way or the other one of the things was explained to me was this journalist had been asked to go to the kingdom the Saudi to explain to them blockchain this is 5 years ago sit down with the Minister of Finance and explain how this technology works and as she was explaining it she realized in the room that she started something like because the the question was well wait if we if we control it if we build it if we build it then we can see everything we can see every transaction right to which the answer is yes if you're talking about State created blockchain there is no more it's a literal truth it's a little truth it's a book of truth that is that the government is able to read so I think these Technologies are amazing they have the power I think for me in all of my work the whole time it's it's this battle between the Techno Optimist in me I love technology right hopeless techn technology nut um and the the cautionary tale because all of these Technologies bring something good all of them even the atomic B right you know nuclear power might might has the promise to save us from global warming um all of these Technologies do something good but they also change us and the game the the stakes get higher and higher and our ability we've done really really well remember great conversation maybe with David Eagleman or another um Brant neurobiologist marveling at the fact you think about like I tried to keep my iPhone 12 as long as possible right I like I'm going to get to the 15 and it and it just went dead on me a week before that phone arrived our brains are hundreds of thousands millions of years old in their current configuration I say hundreds of thousands of years because morphologically they haven't changed but about 120,000 years ago there was a sort of self-induced firmware update in the form of speech and then written language that changed us utterly that's the animal the animal that has speech is the animal that walks out of Africa and bestrides the entire world right it's a firmware update we've done pretty well with this thing for hundreds of thousands of years right no no real Hardware changes no extra Ram right maybe keto right um we've been stuck with a piece of technology how many how many other piece of technology do you use in your life that are hundreds of thousands of years old we've done pretty well we are getting to a point now we're starting to challenge our Technologies are starting to challenge our ability our ability to to keep a handle on them I think that's very very much case I'm I'm equal parts horrified by the future and excited um I just keep that microphone going and I'll take questions from whoever has I will try to keep my answers less longwinded that's question I know that um filmmaker large wants to throw us out so I know people are going to be disappointed but I really appreciate your questions go go thank you so much yeah my I was at Google when Gmail was launched and my name's jeff which is so weird you chose that name I swear did sorry Jeff I did not reach your emails um so I was close right you were close yeah I also work in blockchain I'm a little more optimistic than you on on that but maybe we can beer sometime and talk about it um my question I'm Blown Away by your work it's so scary impression it's amazing it's so enjoyable I wish the peripheral had a season two oh me too loved it uh question is um do you think that AI should be paused until Humanity uh identifies what Consciousness is and I mean obviously that won't be able to be happened but if we could figure out Consciousness and then go into AI would that be an ideal world yeah probably um you know honestly because I'm sort of torn by the fact that we should just slide over a little bit on the couch and make some room because here come you know everyone you know we went to strike over the summer for very good reasons one of which was our fear that we were going to get replaced by um by uh large language models I mixed feelings about the the relative neuroses of writers that we imagine we'd be readily replaced by a chat bot but here we are uh and it is a real it's a real it's a real fear um and it will be a real phenomenon and I'm Riven torn between um a sort of a protectionist mindset right that art should be created by humans and and I'm so excited to see what AI makes of of Art and music right like how can you not be right this is a way so much of what we do as humans is we digest information and we spit it out set aside the question of Consciousness right just creativity what is creativity the way that that term has been applied in this conversation is really really interesting right um and I would liken it in some ways the sort of moral Panic that sets in over electronic instrumentation obviously it's deeper than that but at every phase with these Technologies we gotten really uptight and they have proven to be incredible tools for humans to create these are the first tools we've made that maybe create themselves and maybe it's random maybe it's monkeys on typewriters right but even in the randomness there'll be some beauty there um so I I you know I think I think the real reason to answer your question setting aside art those considerations which are real considerations and real problems and obviously the idea that that these tools would be used to displace whole categories of of workers and deny people um an income is a real problem we have to look at the structure of our civilization with as these Technologies emerge there's a lot of conversations about Universal basic income all these sorts of ideas about how how on Earth are we going to deal with the massive Bounty created by these Technologies but I think if you just looked at one thing which is I mean in West world we were panicked about Advanced artificial intelligence but I think the the more pre pressing and and problematic thing is artificial stupidity right low-level language models manipulating gullible humans myself included right into manipulating our political beliefs or telling us who we should be in a pitched battle with who we should be angry at right is it the Boomers or is it [ __ ] Exxon right and so I think the manipulation of social media and public sentiment right now by AI is going to a disaster an absolute disaster I'm not afraid of Evan Rachel Wood as a robot right actually Evan Rachel Wood as a robot be very scary I definitely wouldn't mess with her um I'm afraid I'm not afraid of the robots not afraid of AI I'm afraid of I'm not I'm not afraid of guns in isolation a gun in a box is a gun I'm afraid of humans misusing these Technologies or being misled by them and I think you know you can't even have a coherent conversation in Congress about these Technologies we're so far behind the curve everything that just played out at um at open AI what was that that fascinating what was that and the weirdest thing about it was how everyone was rooting for Sam for Sam Sam I've met Sam he's a good dude aren't we worried about these Technologies why are we immediately leaping to the defense right and not listening and not taking them moment it's bizarre we so invested in Sam's a good guy oh they fired this good guy wait a second wait a second let's back up for a second right what are we doing with these Technologies what did the board what were they scared of this is an incipient terrifying inflection point for technology we all understand that all the questions that Chris got asked on his press tour about the atomic bomb were about AI so I think look if it was possible we all kind of immediately preface this by saying it's not possible it was possible at as Alomar with genetic research that wasn't as widely distributed that wasn't as easy as these models have made it for people that tinker and experiment with it so maybe it is a sort of a Fool's errand to try to press pause but yeah I think the next this election and the election after that are going to be a [ __ ] show I think we have time I'm sorry for only one more question so let's get that mic moving oh good someone has it okay hi I'm over here sorry oh there you are um I don't know if you're going to like this question but uh as we talk about you've talked about tribalism talking about Humanity with AI um I can't help but to think about how when we talk about philis being like the philosophies of like humanity and how it's going to extend to these like non-sentient versus sentient AI robots that we can't even apply that to the real world aspect of the tri the most grotesque example of tribalism racism or what's going on in the country and uh just seeing like how do you so like for example you know if I'm talking to like a film nerd about something like Blade Runner and he's like super excited explaining to me like how of course they deserve autonomy and of course they deserve like you know Humanity but they can't extand that you know philosophy to marginalized groups in front of them and they can't make that connection and I can't help but to see that they can only make that connection only give that Humanity to somebody that looks like AI but only looks like them because they're white you know so how does how do you get to extend that to like the actual thing that's happening that's not in the vehicle of sci-fi and fantasy like how do we get people to see that Muggles are you know people that experience prejudice but they are fictional characters no 100% I mean for me the question the one question is implicit in the other that's what westw world's about Westworld we're talking about robots but we're also talking about the human impulse to deny Humanity to as many people as possible right I mean is you know I think one of the reasons why I like science fiction is because it allows you I think it has been you I go back and forth about the social utility of my job period but to the degree to which artists storytellers um filmmakers Can can move the needle can sort of you know I think of film and television ultimately its root when it's being used best as an empathy machine that's what it's best for it is best for forcing you to be in someone else's shoes literally it's an incredible revolutionary technology and I do believe and I you know I'm here I am bagging on llms uh and generative AI the same things were said about Cinema Cinema was viewed as a disruptive or revolutionary technology um there's lots of bad movies and there's lots of movies that that that um perpetuate stereotypes and perpetuate hate but I think in the aggregate film has probably been a good thing for getting people to understand each other to extend that kind of you talk about the Overton window let's extend the empathy window and let's expand it to to take care of it of you know to to include everyone science fiction is an opportunity to deal with these questions in an abstract way that allows you hopefully as a thought experiment to take that empathy and bring it back to the here and now you know that that was the that was the idea with the show that was that was part of the the driving impulse was a frustration I love human beings but they're so frustrating we are so frustrating right we're so capable of beauty we're so capable of these of these wonders and we waste so much of our time fighting with each other that was such a terrific question I can't think of a better place to close a conversation thank you all so much for coming thank you [Music] Jonah

Channel: Pioneer Works

Views: 10,436

Keywords: Jonathan Nolan, Janna Levin, Sundance, Westworld, Batman, AI, Turing, Black Holes, cinema, interstellar, Einstein, Science vs. Fiction, Fallout

Id: oS0MhG98jE4

Length: 80min 37sec (4837 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 29 2024