Science and the Future of Humanity | Episode 1713 | Closer To Truth

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[music] Is this time our time, an axial period in human history when, one way or the other, for better or worse, the future of humankind will be determined? I think it may be. I know that almost every generation thinks itself special; however, this time, our time, it may be true. I feel privileged to be living now when science is making astounding progress answering foundational questions that were once sheer speculation. I marvel how much, how quickly humanity has learned. What will science achieve in another 100 years, 1,000 years, a million years? Colonize the cosmos? Is that our destiny? But will humanity have that future? What are the risks if we don't make it? We write, we worry about nuclear weapons, climate change, and dangers of artificial intelligence. Here's what interests me: as science continues to progress, what happens to foundational questions? The mysteries of existence and human sentience. For the future of humanity, what will science bring? I'm Robert Lawrence Kuhn and Closer to Truth is my journey to find out. To foresee the future of humanity through the lens of science, I seek scientists and philosophers of science who question current belief, who challenge conventional wisdom. That's why I begin in Banff, in the Canadian Rocky Mountains, at a biennial conference of the Foundational Questions Institute, FQXi, where physicists and philosophers gather to discuss the deepest, most fundamental issues in science. FQXi is no ordinary scientific society. Here are polymaths, and paradigm shifters. I speak with the Scientific Director and co-founder of FQXi, a science visionary and theoretical cosmologist, Max Tegmark. Max, we're here at FQXi Conference, your fifth and my fourth... I'll never catch up to you, and we have a diversity of topics. Our chorus is quantum physics, quantum cosmology, but we're expanding. We're talking a little consciousness, the difference between life and not life, social implications. As you see science, from your perspective in terms of humanity's future, what are the kinds of questions we should be asking? We should be asking what ultimately we want our future to be like because, you know, 13.8 billion years, entire universe, it's woken up. It has its conscious entities, which is wonderful, and we manage to understand more and more about how our world works which has, in turn, given us great power through technology. And I'm optimistic that we can use this technology to create a really awesome future, if we can win this race between the growing power of the tech and the wisdom with which we manage it. In the past, we've managed to have the wisdom to keep up basically with trial and error. You know, we invented fire, messed up a few times, so we invented the fire extinguisher. But with more powerful technology like nuclear weapons, synthetic biology, and future of very fast artificial intelligence, we don't want to learn from mistakes. We want to get it right the first time because it might be the only time we have. And so I think it's very much the responsibility of our scientists to both engage with the public and talk more about what sort of future you want, and then figure out what the pitfalls are and help our fellow humans figure out how to navigate around them. What are the issues with AI and how are you addressing them? I think artificial intelligence will be the most powerful technology ever. First, science helped us replace our muscle power by machines that could lift heavier things and move faster, and now, if AI succeeds, we're going to have machines that also replace all our mental efforts and ultimately do everything we humans can and even better. Of course, everything I love about society is the product of intelligence, so if we can amplify our own intelligence with machine intelligence, there's a great potential for good, but, needless to say, there is also a lot of things that can go wrong. We control this planet now, not because we're stronger than tigers or have sharper claws, but because we're smarter than them, and if we create machines that are smarter than us, it's not guaranteed that we can stay in control. In the shorter term, there are also all these questions, if we replace ourselves in the job market, how will we make sure that everybody still has enough resources to live a reasonable life rather than having some sort of horrible income inequality. How do we ensure that people, even if we can distribute the wealth from the machines around, that people can find meaning and purpose in their lives. I think we've never had a technology that poses more basic questions about what we want it to mean to be human. We've had a poor history, speaking as a member of the human race, in controlling technologies and we can say things shouldn't be done, whether it's genetic engineering or nuclear weapons, and some groups of humans do it and then others feel compelled to at least not let them take over, and that creates and arms race in all of these categories. We're seeing the beginnings of it with AI, with robots that can kill people, that are under control now. So how can you assure that even though you have the right ideas it's not a majority vote. You have to get almost everybody on board, because if there are outliers to exceptions that messes up the whole strategy. - Yes. There's something we need to do first, namely, identify what are the really tough questions we need to answer and then do research to answer them. There's an encouraging precedent from biotech where, in the '70s, people were like, hey, wait a minute. Maybe we should think a little bit about hard questions before we start messing with human, the genome, and a lot of thought went into this and a lot of good guidelines came out and we have not had any terrible disasters since. Right now is precisely the time when we need to start thinking about this in AI because we're beginning to get self driving cars on the street and a lot of jobs are automating away and so we should start researching it now, you know, not the night before we need it. To look out 100 years, 1,000 years, and to force yourself to answer unanswerable questions, you know, 50 years in the future everything is like magic, but if you had to go out there to that period of time, to envision what that world could look like what would you say? I'm not so interested in speculating about how fast it's going to happen, I'm much more interested in actually getting to work in trying to answer some of these tough questions that we're going to need whenever it happens because if you want to win this wisdom race again, and have wisdom keep pace with the power of technology, and there's this huge funding in just making it more powerful, and no funding at all for developing the wisdom, then rather than try to slow down the juggernaut, instead, let's invest in research. What are the tough questions? For example, if you create a very advanced artificial intelligence system, how do you ensure that it's actually going to do what you want? How do you make machines learn what we humans want? Our children learn a lot from observing our behavior, but we don't quite know how they view them, how can you guarantee that, as machines get smarter, they'll still want the same things, and what do we want anyway? Whose values should they have? This isn't just for the nerds to study, this is for everybody to discuss. [music] Max worries about the unintended consequences of scientific progress that, given the exponential growth in artificial intelligence, AI, soon to far surpass human intelligence, if something goes wrong humanity may not get a second chance. Should we worry? Does super AI loom over humanity as these mountains loom over us? Not everyone calls AI an existential threat, nor overly frets about the future of science. I speak with an expert on quantum computing and information, a physicist trained in philosophy, a unique combination, Seth Lloyd. Seth, we like talking about these very abstract topics of existence at our FQXi Conference, where we are here in Banff. If we look forward into the future, not just 10 years or 50 years, but 100 years or 1,000 years, what could be the importance and the meaning of what we're doing today in the seemingly abstract intellectual exercise? Well, I think we'll find, in the future, that most of it was just a bunch of BS. But some of it will not be, and the some of it that is not will be very important. One of the most remarkable things that can happen to science is it becomes engineering. I mean, if you look at quantum mechanics, you know, the quantum mechanics of electrons and matter became the understanding of semiconductors which became the creation of semiconductor amplifiers, of digital computers, which gave rise to a whole host of things that we would never ever have believed could have happened 50 years ago. Your smart phone, which is more powerful than a Cray computer in the 1970s. Yes, and in fact, capable of even bigger stupidity. One of the main things about artificial intelligence is it leads to real stupidity. So I think we are going to see things that we would never have thought have the application from this kind of pure science that we're doing right now, it might actually have actual engineering applications in the future. We don't know what those are going to be, but they're likely to transform the way that we live as human beings. Can you imagine what those could be? I mean, are we talking about cyborgs and integration with robots and non-biological intelligences that are merged with ourselves? I mean, what is there... are we disturbing what it means to be human? Well, I can't predict the things I have no notion about, but some things that you can extrapolate about are, you know, as our computers and smart phones become more powerful and as we get more sophisticated in programming them using, for example, machine learning techniques then they're going to behave in ways that are much more human, and they already are behaving ways that are very human. I think one of the most human things a computer can do is really mess with your brain in a truly unexpected fashion, and computers are doing more and more of that. I think it's quite likely that, there's a long debate about whether machines can be intelligent, whether they can be conscious. I should think this debate is, in some sense, irrelevant because what's likely to happen is that as they become more smart, better learning at what's going on with us, better at interacting with us we will simply treat them as conscious beings. You know, once somebody says, hey, don't turn off my smart phone, it's got some thinking and dreaming to do, you know, at that point it doesn't matter whether it's conscious or not, we're treating them as conscious. And what would be the impact on humanity when that happens? Well, we'll have a new friend. Is that good or bad. It could be good, it could be bad. There's a current bunch of loose talk when people like Steven Hawking, the elon musk, is that computers are going to take over the world and artificial malign artificial intelligence will destroy humanity. I think this is just silly. First of all, we're way away from that right now, and rather simple precautions will prevent it from happening. What about the sense of human existence in the great cosmos? Will we get to a point where we really understand more than we do now, or will the awe and mystery continue to get deeper? Human beings have not changed a lot in the last 100,000 years from their genetic makeup and the way we think about things. I don't think things are going to change that much. And, actually, in some sense, you know, technology just provides distractions. It's not clear that someone who walks around with their phone like this is leading a more spiritual existence than someone who walks around taking in the beautiful water and the sun, the mountains and, in fact, I think quite the opposite. [music] Seth sees the human future not unlike the human presence, but with our species adapting to the ubiquity of robots, super smart and apparently conscious, will there be a difference between, say, a super smart GPS and an apparently conscious humanoid? How many such humanoids will there be? Will every human own a few? Will humanoids demand their rights, resist abuse, organize? Can we comprehend the psychological and social impact? Encompassed by these forests and rivers, all seems well with the world, but I fear it is not so. I fear the struggles to come. But there's more to the future than survival. In the long future will the profound questions of existence still be pursued? What will be the big questions of our distant progeny? I ache to know the big questions of generations to come. I speak with the Associate Scientific Director of FQXi, cosmologist Anthony Aguirre. Anthony, it's great to be here with you again. This our fourth Conference together, fourth FQXi. We've dealt with multiverse and cosmology, nature of time, nature of information, nature of the observer versus events in quantum physics. Can you integrate all this together from the FQXi viewpoint, how does this impact the understanding that humanity has for science and the importance of science as we look to the future? What is the significance of what we're doing? One of the things I love about FQX and being part of it is that people are thinking on such a big scale, and when you think about society and sort of where we are as humans and where we are in our solar system and in the universe and in the history of the universe, it's an amazing thing that the universe has gone on for this 13.8 billion years, and a lot of it, you know, at some level unobserved, or at least unobserved by things that enjoy the sort of consciousness and appreciation and who get to think about it like we do at FQX. And the question is, is that a blip in the radar? Are we going to sort of have this glorious time for a little while and then kill each other off and that's it, and the universe goes back to sleep for another billions and billions of years, or, you know, is this the great awakening that's going to go on and sort of fill up billions of light years with sentient beings getting to do all this awesome stuff? It's about not just who we are now but who are we going to become, what are our descendents, are they going to be us, are they going to be super intelligent AI's, you know, what are they going to be? And what can we sort of do about that now by understanding, you know, what is an observer, what is conscious, what is matter, and those sorts of questions that are part and parcel of what FQX likes to think about. So, FQXi foundational questions, when you deal with time, information, multiverse, observers, why are those considered foundational questions? You know, foundation is a sort of word we've given to the questions we think are really cool and interesting. That's the secret. That's the dirty secret of FQX, but they're, you know, I think at some level, things that have to do with the sort of big questions, the big nature of reality, the hard problems. So it's hard to say exactly what makes something foundation and FQX-y. But you sort of know when we see it, when you're like, yeah, that's really cool and that, whoa, that's confusing. That's the kind of question we like. One way of defining it in a funny way is that we talk about the things that you can't get a normal science grant for. That is certainly the case, that is certainly one way to define it by exclusion. But that covers a lot of things and it's tricky to find the ground that is still science and still rigorous and still, you know, you can talk about it with real scientific methodology and yet is far enough out, sort of on the edge, of what people can think about that it's hard to get conventional funding. And you have a core way of thinking, which is generally physics, which underlies this approach. There are other ways of knowing in the world, you know, arts and humanities and biological, but the core of this is physics, which is one view of the world to view these kinds of questions. That's right. [music] We are the cosmos, self aware and self reflective, a brief coalescing of the scattered dust of dying stars generating somehow conscious cognition, the cosmos comprehending itself. To me, for human consciousness to come about after almost 14 billion years of cosmic history and then to self extinguish defies common sense, if not scientific logic. I cannot escape the unfashionable sense that meaning and purpose is about in the cosmos, that human beings are somehow central. That's why the future, to me, is not so much about amazing gadgets, however magical they may seem, but more about foundational questions, how they will endure and change or, perhaps, remain the same. What's the real value of foundational questions? Can ultimate answers be found? I push to the far future. I speak with a visionary physicist who connects consciousness with what the universe is about, Paul Davies. Paul, we're at the FQXi Conference. Normally we deal with very fundamental things in physics and cosmology-time, information, multiverse. This time we're branching out a little bit. We're talking about science and society, what the future is. How do you see the relationship between fundamental questions and physics and cosmology, even consciousness with the real world and what humanity is becoming, and will be becoming and take a long time horizon, you know, not just a few decades, but 100 years, 1,000 years, a million years? People like me are interested in these foundational questions in science and, you might say, well why does society pay for this, and I'd be quoting John Wheeler a lot. I can remember him once saying to me, "I don't know why society is prepared to support people like us who investigate these deep issues, but so long as they do we've got to hang in there and get these results." And so it is amazing, but in my view important, that society does allocate some small fraction of resources to addressing these really fundamental questions because I place them on the same footing as religious questions, and they overlap a lot. You might say, well, you know, why does society allocate all these resources to build churches and temples and so on, what does that do for the GDP? You know, isn't this just using valuable time and resources for something that's completely irrelevant to the economy but, nevertheless, it fulfills a human need, to try to understand what their place is in the great scheme of things and sort of look beyond and to try to have some appreciation of reality that is beyond just the daily round. And these deep questions in science, I think we do them for the same reasons. We'd like to know how the universe is put together and what our place is in that. I'm sure that quest will continue because we haven't got there yet. We haven't solved all the problems. We solve one problem then another pops up. During my career we've made enormous progress and it's easy to enumerate the sort of things that have been discovered, and just in the last year gravitational wave, the Higgs Boson, these well known discoveries, but we go on asking more and more questions. Will be still be doing this in 1,000 years, 10,000 years? I think that there is a problem the trap has made and one is that if every time we answer a question another one just pops up to replace it, there will probably come a time when society will think, well, these scientists, you know, it's a bottomless pit and they're never going to sort of finally get there and give us this ultimate theory of everything. On the other hand, if they do get there and we have an ultimate theory of everything then the job is over. And so there has been a golden age. Feynman commented on this, but we've had these many, many discoveries which have changed our world view but also changed society in, like, the technological innovations. We can't go on piling up those discoveries at the same pace forever and ever. It's going to tail off at some stage and I don't know when. You say 1,000 years in the future, I don't know whether by then we'd have run out of steam or run out of problems or answered all the problems. But probably, this thing we call science will be replaced by something a bit different, a different mode of thought, and part of that is surely that we're going to be accompanied in this quest by what some people call artificial intelligence. I think we lack the term to describe designed intellectual systems. And, at that final time, that asymptote of knowledge and science, will we feel confident that we've described all of the fundamental issues of why the universe exists and why is there anything at all, or where do the laws of physics come from, or what's the nature of our own consciousness? There will be different criteria. Different people will have different levels of satisfaction. There will always be philosophers. -That are unsatisfied. - That's right. Who will pull apart our wonderful theories and explanations and say, well, this wasn't defined and that doesn't mean anything and so on, so I suspect that there will always be people that will extol the mystery. And so do you think that there is an ultimate mystery? I've written, over the years, with great confidence that, in principle, we could come to understand everything about existence. But I have to say that probably in the last 10 years I have come around to think that that is an unachievable goal, probably even in principle. There will always be somehow a mystery at the end of the universe. [music] Science will determine the future in two big ways. The first is via advanced technology, especially artificial intelligence and genetic engineering, changing human society and perhaps altering the human species. Utopian benefits and doomsday risks. The second way is via foundational questions. Time and space, energy and matter, universe and multiple universes, brain mind consciousness... will these questions become, over time, more central to humanity? I suspect so. Is the human species, perhaps with other sentient creatures, if such exist, the universe waking up and becoming aware of itself? A nice metaphor but is it [inaudible]. I am amazed how much we've learned in such a short sliver of cosmic time. Amidst almost 14 billion years of cosmic history, only a few thousand years of human history, only a few hundred years of real science, and only about a century of modern science. Humanity penetrates the foundations of cosmos and consciousness. Is there deep meaning and profound purpose in our stunning and sudden understanding? That's the question. That's the probe to get closer to truth.

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Channel: Closer To Truth

Views: 33,182

Rating: 4.8737998 out of 5

Keywords: closer to truth, deepest questions, life's big questions, pbs science show, robert lawrence kuhn, stem education channel, vital ideas, Max Tegmark, Anthony Aguirre, Seth Lloyd, Paul Davies, scientific knowledge, Science and the Future of Humanity, Future of Humanity, Artificial intelligence, Genetic engineering, Futurism, closer to truth full episodes, closer to the truth, closer to truth season 17 episode 13, closer to truth season 17, Robert Kuhn, CTT 1713, CTT s17 e13

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Length: 26min 47sec (1607 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 04 2020