Are We Living in a Simulation? with George Hotz and Lex Fridman | AI Podcast Clips

Do you think we're living in a simulation? Yes, but it may be unfalsifiable. What do you mean by unfalsifiable? So if the simulation is designed in such a way that they did like a formal proof to show that no information can get in and out, and if their hardware is designed for anything in the simulation to always keep the hardware in spec, it may be impossible to prove whether we're in a simulation or not. So they've designed it such that it's a closed system, you can't get outside the system? Well maybe it's one of three worlds. We're either in a simulation which can be exploited, we're in a simulation which not only can't be exploited, but like the same thing is true about VMs. A really well designed VM, you can't even detect if you're in a VM or not. That's brilliant. So we're, yeah, so the simulation is running on a virtual machine. But now in reality, all VMs have ways to detect. That's the point. I mean, is it, you've done quite a bit of hacking yourself, and so you should know that really any complicated system will have ways in and out. So this isn't necessarily true going forward. I spent my time away from Kama, I learned Coq, it's a dependently typed, like, it's a language for writing math proofs. And if you write code that compiles in a language like that, it is correct by definition. The types check its correctness. So it's possible that the simulation is written in a language like this, in which case, you know. Yeah, but that can't be sufficiently expressive a language like that. Oh, it can. It can be? Oh, yeah. Okay. Well, so, all right, so. The simulation doesn't have to be Turing complete if it has a scheduled end date. Looks like it does, actually, with entropy. I mean, I don't think that a simulation that results in something as complicated as the universe would have a form of proof of correctness, right? It's possible, of course. We have no idea how good their tooling is, and we have no idea how complicated the universe computer really is. It may be quite simple. It's just very large, right? It's definitely very large. But the fundamental rules might be super simple. Yeah, Conway's Game of Life kind of stuff. So if you could hack, so imagine a simulation that is hackable, if you could hack it, what would you change about the universe? How would you approach hacking a simulation? The reason I gave that talk... By the way, I'm not familiar with the talk you gave. I just read that you talked about escaping the simulation or something like that. So maybe you can tell me a little bit about the theme and the message there, too. It wasn't a very practical talk about how to actually escape a simulation. It was more about a way of restructuring an us versus them narrative. If we continue on the path we're going with technology, I think we're in big trouble as a species, and not just as a species, but even as me as an individual member of the species. So if we could change rhetoric to be more like to think upwards, like to think about that we're in a simulation and how we could get out, already we'd be on the right path. What you actually do once you do that, well, I assume I would have acquired way more intelligence in the process of doing that. So I'll just ask that. So the thinking upwards, what kind of breakthrough ideas do you think thinking in that way could inspire? And why did you say upwards? Upwards. Into space? Are you thinking sort of exploration in all forms? The space narrative that held for the modernist generation doesn't hold as well for the post-modern generation. What's the space narrative? Are we talking about the same space? The three-dimensional space? No, no, space, like going up to space. Literally space, yeah. Like building, like Elon Musk, like we're going to build rockets, we're going to go to Mars, we're going to colonize the universe. And the narrative you're referring, I was born in the Soviet Union, you're referring to the race to space. The race to space, yes. The space to explore, okay. That was a great modernist narrative. It doesn't seem to hold the same weight in today's culture. I'm hoping for good post-modern narratives that replace it. So let's think, so you work a lot with AI. So AI is one formulation of that narrative. There could be also, I don't know how much you do in VR and AR. That's another, I know less about it, but every time I play with it in our research, it's fascinating, that virtual world. Are you interested in the virtual world? I would like to move to virtual reality. In terms of your work? No, I would like to physically move there. The apartment I can rent in the cloud is way better than the apartment I can rent in the real world. Well, it's all relative, isn't it? Because others will have very nice apartments too, so you'll be inferior in the virtual world as well. But that's not how I view the world, right? I don't view the world, I mean, that's a very like almost zero-sum-ish way to view the world. Say like my great apartment isn't great because my neighbor has one too. No, my great apartment is great because like, look at this dishwasher, man. You just touch the dish and it's washed, right? And that is great in and of itself if I have the only apartment or if everybody had the apartment, I don't care. So you have fundamental gratitude.


Simple Man (Lynyrd Skynyrd Cover)

♪ ♪ ♪ Mama told me when I was young Sit beside me, my only son Listen closely to what I say If you do this, it will help you some sunny day Be a simple kind of man Be a something you love and understand Be a simple kind of man Won't you do this for yourself if you can? ♪ Take your time, don't live too fast The trouble will come and it will pass Find a woman and you'll find love Don't forget son, there's someone up above Be a simple kind of man Be a something you love and understand Be a simple kind of man Won't you do this for yourself if you can? ♪ Get your luck, the rich man's gold That you need is in your soul You can do it if you try All I want for you my son is to be satisfied Be a simple kind of man Be a something you love and understand Be a simple kind of man Won't you do this for yourself If you can ♪


Joe Rogan recommends Lex Fridman: Neil deGrasse Tyson is having none of it

There it is, there's Lex. Oh, heh. That's pretty good. Lex can shred. Give me some of that. You gotta listen to this. Listen to this. Have you done Lex's podcast? No. I like him. He's an AI researcher from MIT originally, and now he's mostly doing independent work and doing his own podcast. Brilliant, brilliant guy. You would love him. And he's got an amazing podcast too. Okay, so here, it's gonna be in this section here. I don't think you're interested in Lex's podcast. Seems like he's not paying attention. What do you mean? No, hang on. I got this. No, thank you for the tip. I'm trying to get him on, buddy. I'm trying to get him in. Lex actually is one of the most brilliant people I know. I think you would love talking to him. An interesting quote here from Walter Badshot. One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea. Really? That guy's an idiot. That's not the greatest pain. Someone needs to kick him in the nuts.


Sleep and Burnout | AMA #2 - Ask Me Anything with Lex Fridman

Alona asks how many hours of sleep do you normally manage to get to your schedule? How do you avoid burning out? Well first Heaven is nine and a half hours On a day, maybe there's a little bit of rain for some reason even though you live in the city It's quiet an occasional car slowly driving by Heaven is getting those nine and a half. No, heaven is the first cup of coffee after the nine and a half hours of sleep Yeah Optimal performance wise I like to get seven or eight hours of sleep I don't often get that amount of sleep though, and I think the rest is just all mental I still often pull Nights where it's one two, three hours of sleep. I frequently pull all-nighters maybe an average of about 10 to 15 all-nighters a year All have to do with deadlines and just focus a few occasional rare beautiful all-nighters are Sort of you're so pat. I'm so passionate about a particular idea. They just can't wait Can't wait to see it work and I stay up all night, you know Through noon in the afternoon and then maybe go to bed early next night, you know Go to bed at like 9 p.m. Or something like that burnout to You know what I don't believe in burnout It's not like a I think I think there's just a voice of laziness that can be defeated that can be defeated with with a sword of focus perseverance determination and Passion I think I love everything I do. I could wash toilets. I could do manual labor anything. I just love it I love every moment of every day the sadness the fear all of that. That's a beautiful part of the journey I love it. So to me burnout doesn't even make sense. Like what are you burning out from? even the concept of burnout is Something that I love so like if you feel like you're burning out That that's beautiful too. That's part of the human experience. I love that whole thing And when you're passionate about everything, what the hell does anything? Burnout kind of says like I'm I think because I've known close close people to me that have suffered from depression. I think depression is Sort of actually like clinical depression is kind of the experience that I see as beyond The kind of thing that I'm talking about which is it's really you're in a place where nothing is meaning but to me I have never experienced a Moment where something is not rich of meaning and I think David first David Foster Wallace said you know the key to life is To be unboreable Meaning it's impossible to make you bored of anything you do and I'm unboreable of anything I do I love it. My face might not express it. I got a Russian sort of Sad suffering face most of the time but I'm actually happy on the inside. I'm like a like a kiwi Ugly on the outside Sweet and glorious on the inside again that that's one question. I'm not even answering it correctly. Okay You


Happiness is a cookie that your brain bakes for itself (Joscha Bach) | AI Podcast Clips

So do you think suffering is fundamental to happiness along these lines? Suffering is the result of caring about things that you cannot change. And if you are able to change what you care about to those things that you can change, you will not suffer. But would you then be able to experience happiness? Yes, but happiness itself is not important. Happiness is like a cookie. When you are a child, you think cookies are very important and you want to have all the cookies in the world and you look forward to being an adult because then you have as many cookies as you want, right? Yes. But as an adult, you realize a cookie is a tool. It's a tool to make you eat vegetables. And once you eat your vegetables anyway, you stop eating cookies for the most part because otherwise you will get diabetes and will not be around for your kids. Yes, but then the cookie, the scarcity of a cookie, if scarcity is enforced, nevertheless, so like the pleasure comes from the scarcity. Yes, but the happiness is a cookie that your brain bakes for itself. It's not made by the environment. The environment cannot make you happy. It's your appraisal of the environment that makes you happy. And if you can change the appraisal of the environment, which you can learn to, then you can create arbitrary states of happiness. And some meditators fall into this trap. So they discover the womb, this basement womb in their brain where the cookies are made, and they indulge in stuff themselves. And after a few months, it gets really old and the big crisis of meaning comes because they thought before that their unhappiness was the result of not being happy enough. So they fixed this, right? They can release the neurotransmitters at will if they train. And then the crisis of meaning pops up in a deeper layer. And the question is, why do I live? How can I make a sustainable civilization that is meaningful to me? How can I insert myself into this? And this was the problem that you couldn't solve in the first place. But at the end of all this, let me then ask that same question. What is the answer to that? What could the possible answer be of the meaning of life? What could an answer be? What is it to you? I think that if you look at the meaning of life, you look at what the cell is. Life is the cell, right? The original cell. Yes, or this principle, the cell. It's this self-organizing thing that can participate in evolution. In order to make it work, it's a molecular machine. It needs a self-replicator, a neck entropy extractor, and a Turing machine. If any of these parts is missing, you don't have a cell and it is not living, right? And life is basically the emergent complexity over that principle. Once you have this intelligent super molecule, the cell, there is very little that you cannot make it do. It's probably the optimal computronium, especially in terms of resilience. It's very hard to sterilize a planet once it's infected with life. So it's active function of these three components of the super cell, a cell is present in a cell, it's present in us, and it's just- We are just an expression of the cell. It's a certain layer of complexity in the organization of cells. So in a way, it's tempting to think of the cell as a von Neumann probe. If you want to build intelligence on other planets, the best way to do this is to infect them with cells. And wait for long enough, and there's a reasonable chance the stuff is going to evolve into an information processing principle that is general enough to become sentient. Well, that idea is very akin to sort of the same dream and beautiful ideas that are expressed in cellular automata in their most simple mathematical form. You just inject the system with some basic mechanisms of replication, so on, basic rules, amazing things would emerge. And the cell is able to do something that James Hardy calls existential design. He points out that in technical design, we go from the outside in. We work in a highly controlled environment in which everything is deterministic, like our computers, our labs, or our engineering workshops. And then we use this determinism to implement a particular kind of function that we dream up and that seamlessly interfaces with all the other deterministic functions that we already have in our world. So it's basically from the outside in. And biological systems designed from the inside out, as seed, will become a seedling by taking some of the relatively unorganized matter around it and turn it into its own structure, and thereby subdue the environment. And cells can cooperate if they can rely on other cells having a similar organization that is already compatible. But unless that's there, the cell needs to divide, to create that structure by itself. So it's a self-organizing principle that works on a somewhat chaotic environment. And the purpose of life, in a sense, is to produce complexity. And the complexity allows you to harvest negentropy gradients that you couldn't harvest without the complexity. And in this sense, intelligence and life are very strongly connected, because the purpose of intelligence is to allow control under conditions of complexity. So basically, you shift the boundary between the ordered systems into the realm of chaos. You build bridge heads into chaos with complexity. And this is what we are doing. This is not necessarily a deeper meaning. I think the meaning that we have priors for, that we are evolved for, outside of the priors, there is no meaning. Meaning only exists if the mind projects it, right? That is probably civilization. I think that what feels most meaningful to me is to try to build and maintain a sustainable civilization. And taking a slight step outside of that, we talked about a man with a beard and God, but something, some mechanism, perhaps must have planted the seed, the initial seed of the cell. Do you think there is a God? What is a God? And what would that look like? So if there was no spontaneous abiogenesis, in the sense that the first cell formed by some happy random accidents where the molecules just happen to be in the right constellation to each other. But there could also be the mechanism that allows for the random. I mean, there's like turtles all the way down. There seems to be, there has to be a head turtle at the bottom. Let's consider something really wild. Imagine, is it possible that a gas giant could become intelligent? What would that involve? So imagine you have vortices that spontaneously emerge on the gas giants, like big storm systems that endure for thousands of years. And some of these storm systems produce electromagnetic fields because some of the clouds are ferromagnetic or something. And as a result, they can change how certain clouds react rather than other clouds and thereby produce some self-stabilizing patterns that eventually to regulation feedback loops, nested feedback loops and control. So imagine you have such a thing that basically has emergent, self-sustaining, self-organizing complexity. And at some point this wakes up and realizes, I'm basically LEM Solaris. I am a thinking planet, but I will not replicate because I cannot recreate the conditions of my own existence somewhere else. I'm just basically an intelligence that has spontaneously formed because it could. And now it builds a von Neumann probe. And the best von Neumann probe for such a thing might be the cell. So maybe it, because it's very, very clever and very enduring, creates cells and sends them out. And one of them has infected our planet. And I'm not suggesting that this is the case, but it would be compatible with the Prince Bermion hypothesis and with my intuition that abiogenesis is very unlikely. It's possible, but you probably need to roll the cosmic dice very often, maybe more often than there are planetary surfaces. I don't know. So God is just a large enough, a system that's large enough that allows randomness. No, I don't think that God has anything to do with creation. I think it's a mistranslation of the Talmud into the Catholic mythology. I think that Genesis is actually the childhood memories of a God. So the, when- Sorry, that Genesis is the- The childhood memories of a God. It's basically a mind that is remembering how it came into being. And we typically interpret Genesis as the creation of a physical universe by a supernatural being. Yes. And I think when you'll read it, there is light and darkness that is being created. And then you discover sky and ground, create them. You construct the plants and the animals, and you give everything their names and so on. That's basically cognitive development. It's a sequence of steps that every mind has to go through when it makes sense of the world. And when you have children, you can see how initially they distinguish light and darkness. And then they make out directions in it, and they discover sky and ground, and they discover the plants and the animals, and they give everything their name. And it's a creative process that happens in every mind, because it's not given, right? Your mind has to invent these structures to make sense of the patterns on your retina. Also, if there was some big nerd who set up a server and runs this world on it, this would not create a special relationship between us and the nerd. This nerd would not have the magical power to give meaning to our existence, right? Right. So this equation of a creator God with the God of meaning is a slate of hand. You shouldn't do it. The other one that is done in Catholicism is the equation of the first mover, the prime mover of Aristotle, which is basically the automaton that runs the universe. Aristotle says, if things are moving and things seem to be moving here, something must move them, right? If something moves them, something must move the thing that is moving it. So there must be a prime mover. This idea to say that this prime mover is a supernatural being is complete nonsense, right? It's an automaton in the simplest case. So we have to explain the enormity that this automaton exists at all. But again, we don't have any possibility to infer anything about its properties except that it's able to produce change in information. Right? So there needs to be some kind of computational principle. This is all there is. But to say this automaton is identical, again, with the creator of first cause or with the thing that gives meaning to our life is confusion. No, I think that what we perceive is the higher being that we are part of. And the higher being that we are part of is the civilization. It's the thing in which we have a similar relationship as the cell has to our body. And we have this prior because we have evolved to organize in these structures. So basically, the Christian God in its natural form, without the mythology, if you undress it, is basically the platonic form of a civilization. Is the ideal. Yes, it's this ideal that you try to approximate when you interact with others, not based on your incentives, but on what you think is right. Wow, we covered a lot of ground. And we're left with one of my favorite lines, and there's many, which is, "'Happiness is a cookie that the brain bakes itself.'" It's been a huge honor and a pleasure to talk to you. I'm sure our paths will cross many times again. Joshua, thank you so much for talking today. Really appreciate it. Thank you, Lex. It was so much fun. I enjoyed it. Awesome.


Andrew Huberman's first jiu jitsu class with Lex Fridman

This video is of Andrew Huberman taking his first Jiu-Jitsu class with me at 10th Planet in Austin, Texas. Gabe Tuttle, who you see explaining the techniques, is a head instructor there. Jiu-Jitsu is a martial art and a fascinating game of human chess. Sometimes it is practiced with a gi, sometimes without the gi, like in this case. It involves using detailed techniques to attain dominant positions that allow you to control your opponent's body and then to apply submissions, like breaking their arm or choking them unconscious, but stopping right before that as your opponent taps twice to designate that they give up. This double tap, performed thousands of times in a Jiu-Jitsu journey, is the dismantling of the ego that I think is a very powerful tool for the development of the human mind, scientific and otherwise. Here, Andrew learns how to take his opponents back with an arm drag and submit them with a choke. I wanted to capture this moment because hopefully it's inspiring to see a world-class scientist like Andrew take on something new and difficult with a beginner's mind. Maybe this will inspire you to try Jiu-Jitsu as well. I honestly have no idea what I'm doing, Lex. Zero. Fortune favors the bold, so good luck. So we're going to start off in the butterfly position. First of all, we're going to be working is our dominant arm here. Okay, we're going to be working to the back first. Attach your chest to that shoulder. Now we can move. And I can either come to him or pull down into me. So watch this. Let's move real quick. So I can hit my arm drag here. Look at his lap control. And here I want to actually mirror my hand. So I just scoot out here and I'm keeping good tension with my elbow here as I pull Lex down. And then I can set my bottom hook. I come right in to attack my seat belt. Sometimes we can attack the net straight away from here. Is he going to try and stand up or it's always... Because with the arm drag, I still work from standing. Even if Lex pops up and he's like in a standing position, I can still... This is this claw. He swims the other one over. And it's this squeeze, but he also brings out his chest like that, right? So then you tap on me twice. Okay, I forgot the one on the tab. So this is the universal sign. Twice. I'm screwed. I had enough. Okay, one more time. He's swimming this through. And it's choked like this. He's also saying if your chin is all the way down, this is also... Do you feel the crush? I have a lot more crush work that can either break the jaw or still choke you. Off to the side. Yeah. Boom. Perfect. So this is the claw. That's perfect right there. And swim that through. Squeeze and expand your chest. Yeah. Nice. Was that... That's perfect. You're building this joke. Okay. So rather than try and flip him on his back... Yeah, I'm going under the armpit now and reach for the far side of the neck. So now from here, once I get control of the neck, I can let the arm drag out. That arm comes all the way around. And I'm just pinching the back of his head with my elbow. This guy's going to just go straight, turn your elbow up, find your... Now you can kind of ratchet your grip in deeper. Feel that? So just turn that elbow back up. This guy comes around this way. Okay. There it is. Yeah. I see. So there's a logic there. Basically, you're trying to get into a place where you can use your own... Your own muscle maturity. Yeah. Rather than just battle him. This arm and choke will work on a blood choke also. So my forearm is going to be cropped on the far side. I'm pushing your shoulder into the neck joint. You hear me? Yeah. I like it. I can see how this will become addicting. Yeah. Oh yeah. It's just because there's so many... Especially if you're a very cerebral guy. Like you have like... This one's going to shoot underneath. Yeah. You got it. There we go. And then curl your left arm. Yeah. Just... You just boa constrictor him. Yeah. Boa constrictor. I mean, you're right. When you get... Maybe you know about this. Actually, I don't know what the visual... Why is there butterflies? When you start to choke out? Yeah. Because your eyes are part of your brain and they get... They demand so much blood and glucose all the time. You're cutting off blood supply to the eye. But why the visual artifacts? So why do you get the little... Oh, just spontaneous transmission of neurons in the eye. Oh, cool. Yeah. Just... Yeah. It's cool. When you see stars, like if you get hit hard and you see stars, it's because you're spontaneous firing of cells. Yeah. I get that with the choke. Like I just got that now. Oh, really? Yeah. The stars. In there. So it's this shoulder going in there. That's the one blood. My hand on the other side. Yeah. You can feel the blood. It just starts to tunnel up. Is that too fast? Did I cinch in too fast? No, that was perfect. That's just really tight. Okay. Sorry. Sorry. I don't know. This is what I was saying. Like, if you're sparring with somebody who knows how to do it because they can... The butterflies are back. Yeah. I mean... He's being kind. Lex Friedman is strong. I was worried I'd be going to sleep. It's like, you're strong. That Russian grip is insane. So yeah, if you stand up, that's exactly the game that we... the other side of the game that we looked at today. So we looked at arm drags, but those only work when you're coming in. If you're going away, I'm going to threaten you by... I'm going to threaten you by coming up and then you're going to want to push him down. That down. And you'll be a little bit more nervous about me coming up, so you're going to pressure yourself into me. I see. And that leads to arm drag. Got it. So like, that's the yin and yang, the push and pull. This is where the choke position is. Here. And we're pressuring this way. Yep. That's called head and arm choke. That's Rogan's favorite choke. So it's this, this. Yeah, that feels very helpless. Yeah. And I could just like sit here, relax for a while and just make it very unpleasant for you. When you talk about relinquishing the ego, it's like, yeah, you have to be willing to let somebody get real close to you, like mount you, flip you. It's not something I'm used to on any basis. It's really a beautiful sport. How do you feel? First class in jiu jitsu. Love it. It's amazing. I think I'm hooked.


Sean Carroll: The Nature of the Universe, Life, and Intelligence | Lex Fridman Podcast #26

The following is a conversation with Sean Carroll. He's a theoretical physicist at Caltech specializing in quantum mechanics, gravity, and cosmology. He's the author of several popular books. One on the arrow of time called From Eternity to Here, one on the Higgs boson called Particle at the End of the Universe, and one on science and philosophy called The Big Picture on the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself. He has an upcoming book on quantum mechanics that you can pre-order now called Something Deeply Hidden. He writes one of my favorite blogs on his website preposterousuniverse.com. I recommend clicking on the greatest hits link that lists accessible interesting posts on the arrow of time, dark matter, dark energy, the big bang, general relativity, string theory, quantum mechanics, and the big meta questions about the philosophy of science, god, ethics, politics, academia, and much much more. Finally, and perhaps most famously, he's the host of a podcast called Mindscape that you should subscribe to and support on Patreon. Along with the Joe Rogan experience, Sam Harris's Making Sense, and Dan Carlin's Hardcore History, Sean's Mindscape podcast is one of my favorite ways to learn new ideas or explore different perspectives and ideas that I thought I understood. It was truly an honor to meet and spend a couple hours with Sean. It's a bit heartbreaking to say that for the first time ever, the audio recorder for this podcast died in the middle of our conversation. There are technical reasons for this having to do with phantom power that I now understand and will avoid. It took me one hour to notice and fix the problem. So, much like the universe is 68% dark energy, roughly the same amount from this conversation was lost, except in the memories of the two people involved and in my notes. I'm sure we'll talk again and continue this conversation on this podcast or on Sean's, and of course I look forward to it. This is the Artificial Intelligence Podcast. If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, iTunes, support it on Patreon, or simply connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now, here's my conversation with Sean Carroll. SEAN What do you think is more interesting and impactful, understanding how the universe works at a fundamental level or understanding how the human mind works? LEX You know, of course this is a crazy, meaningless, unanswerable question in some sense because they're both very interesting and there's no absolute scale of interestingness that we can rate them on. There's the glib answer that says the human brain is part of the universe, right? And therefore, understanding the universe is more fundamental than understanding the human brain. SEAN But do you really believe that once we understand the fundamental way the universe works at the particle level, the forces, we would be able to understand how the mind works? LEX No, certainly not. We cannot understand how ice cream works just from understanding how particles work, right? So, I'm a big believer in emergence. I'm a big believer that there are different ways of talking about the world beyond just the most fundamental microscopic one. You know, when we talk about tables and chairs and planets and people, we're not talking the language of particle physics and cosmology. So, but understanding the universe, you didn't say just at the most fundamental level, right? So, understanding the universe at all levels is part of that. I do think, you know, to be a little bit more fair to the question, there probably are general principles of complexity, biology, information processing, memory, knowledge, creativity that go beyond just the human brain, right? And maybe one could count understanding those as part of understanding the universe. The human brain, as far as we know, is the most complex thing in the universe. So, it's certainly absurd to think that by understanding the fundamental laws of particle physics, you get any direct insight on how the brain works. But then there's this step from the fundamentals of particle physics to information processing, which a lot of physicists and philosophers maybe a little bit carelessly take when they talk about artificial intelligence. Do you think of the universe as a kind of a computational device? No. To be like, the honest answer there is no. There's a sense in which the universe processes information clearly. There's a sense in which the universe is like a computer clearly. But in some sense, I think I tried to say this once on my blog and no one agreed with me, but the universe is more like a computation than a computer because the universe happens once. A computer is a general purpose machine, right? That you can ask it different questions, even a pocket calculator, right? And it's set up to answer certain kinds of questions. The universe isn't that. So, information processing happens in the universe, but it's not what the universe is. And I know your MIT colleague Seth Lloyd feels very differently about this, right? Well, you're thinking of the universe as a closed system. I am. So, what makes a computer more like a PC, like a computing machine, is that there's a human that everyone's comes up to it and moves the mouse around. So, input- Gives it input. Gives it input. And that's why you're saying it's just a computation, a deterministic thing that's just unrolling. But the immense complexity of it is nevertheless like processing. There's a state and then it changes with rules. And there's a sense for a lot of people that if the brain operates, the human brain operates within that world, then it's simply just a small subset of that. And so, there's no reason we can't build arbitrarily great intelligences. Yeah. Do you think of intelligence in this way? Intelligence is tricky. I don't have a definition of it offhand. So, I remember this panel discussion that I saw on YouTube. I wasn't there, but Seth Lloyd was on the panel. And so, it was Martin Rees, the famous astrophysicist. And Seth gave his shtick for why the universe is a computer and explained this. And Martin Rees said, so, what is not a computer? And Seth was like, oh, that's a good question. I'm not sure. Because if you have a sufficiently broad definition of what a computer is, then everything is, right? And the simile or the analogy gains force when it excludes some things. Is the moon going around the Earth performing a computation? I can come up with definitions in which the answer is yes, but it's not a very useful computation. I think that it's absolutely helpful to think about the universe in certain situations, certain contexts as an information processing device. I'm even guilty of writing a paper called Quantum Circuit Cosmology, where we modeled the whole universe as a quantum circuit. As a circuit. As a circuit, yeah. And- With qubits kind of thing? With qubits basically, right. Yeah. So, and qubits becoming more and more entangled. So, do we want to digress a little bit? Because it's- Let's do it. Kind of fun. So, here's a mystery about the universe that is so deep and profound that nobody talks about it. Space expands, right? And we talk about in a certain region of space, a certain number of degrees of freedom, a certain number of ways that the quantum fields and the particles in that region can arrange themselves. That number of degrees of freedom in a region of space is arguably finite. We actually don't know how many there are, but there's a very good argument that says it's a finite number. So, as the universe expands and space gets bigger, are there more degrees of freedom? If it's an infinite number, it doesn't really matter. Infinity times two is still infinity. But if it's a finite number, then there's more space, so there's more degrees of freedom. So, where did they come from? That would mean the universe is not a closed system. There's more degrees of freedom popping into existence. So, what we suggested was that there are more degrees of freedom, and it's not that they're not there to start, but they're not entangled to start. So, the universe that you and I know of, the three dimensions around us that we see, we said those are the entangled degrees of freedom making up space-time. And as the universe expands, there are a whole bunch of qubits in their zero state that become entangled with the rest of space-time through the action of these quantum circuits. LRW So, what does it mean that there's now more degrees of freedom as they become more entangled? As the universe expands. JF That's right. So, there's more and more degrees of freedom that are entangled, that are playing the role of part of the entangled space-time structure. So, the underlying philosophy is that space-time itself arises from the entanglement of some fundamental quantum degrees of freedom. LRW Wow. Okay. So, at which point is most of the entanglement happening? Are we talking about close to the Big Bang? Are we talking about throughout the time of the life of the universe? JF Throughout history. Yeah. So, the idea is that at the Big Bang, almost all the degrees of freedom that the universe could have were there, but they were unentangled with anything else. And that's a reflection of the fact that the Big Bang had a low entropy. It was a very simple, very small place. And as space expands, more and more degrees of freedom become entangled with the rest of the world. LRW Well, I have to ask John Carroll, what do you think of the thought experiment from Nick Bostrom that we're living in a simulation? So, I think, let me contextualize that a little bit more. I think people don't actually take this thought experiments. I think it's quite interesting. It's not very useful, but it's quite interesting. From the perspective of AI, a lot of the learning that can be done usually happens in simulation, artificial examples. And so, it's a constructive question to ask, how difficult is our real world to simulate? Which is kind of a dual part of, if we're living in a simulation and somebody built that simulation, if you were to try to do it yourself, how hard would it be? CB So, obviously, we could be living in a simulation. If you just want the physical possibility, then I completely agree that it's physically possible. I don't think that we actually are. So, take this one piece of data into consideration. We live in a big universe. There's 2 trillion galaxies in our observable universe with 200 billion stars in each galaxy, etc. It would seem to be a waste of resources to have a universe that big going on just to do a simulation. So, in other words, I want to be a good Bayesian. I want to ask, under this hypothesis, what do I expect to see? So, the first thing I would say is I wouldn't expect to see a universe that was that big. The second thing is I wouldn't expect the resolution of the universe to be as good as it is. So, it's always possible that if our superhuman simulators only have finite resources that they don't render the entire universe, that the part that is out there, the 2 trillion galaxies, isn't actually being simulated fully. But then the obvious extrapolation of that is that only I am being simulated fully. The rest of you are just non-player characters. I'm the only thing that is real. The rest of you are just chatbots. Beyond this wall, I see the wall, but there is literally nothing on the other side of the wall. That is the Bayesian prediction. That's what it would be like to do an efficient simulation of me. So, none of that seems quite realistic. I hear the argument that it's just possible and easy to simulate lots of things. I don't see any evidence from what we know about our universe that we look like a simulated universe. Now, maybe you can say, well, we don't know what it would look like, but that's just abandoning your Bayesian responsibilities. Your job is to say, under this theory, here's what you would expect to see. LRW3 Yeah. So, certainly, if you think about simulation as a thing that's like a video game where only a small subset is being rendered. But say all the laws of physics, the entire closed system of the quote-unquote universe, it had a creator. LRW3 Yeah. It's always possible. LRW3 Right. So, that's not useful to think about when you're thinking about physics. The way Nick Bostrom phrases it, if it's possible to simulate a universe, eventually we'll do it. You can use that, by the way, for a lot of things. LRW3 Well, yeah. LRW3 But I guess the question is, how hard is it to create a universe? LRW3 I wrote a little blog post about this, and maybe I'm missing something. But there's an argument that says not only that it might be possible to simulate a universe, but probably, if you imagine that you actually attribute consciousness and agency to the little things that we're simulating, to our little artificial beings, there's probably a lot more of them than there are ordinary organic beings in the universe, or there will be in the future. So, there's an argument that not only is being a simulation possible, it's probable because in the space of all living consciousnesses, most of them are being simulated. Most of them are not at the top level. I think that argument must be wrong because it follows from that argument that if we're simulated, but we can also simulate other things. But if we can simulate other things, they can simulate other things if we give them enough power and resolution. And ultimately, we'll reach a bottom because the laws of physics in our universe have a bottom, made of atoms and so forth. So, there will be the cheapest possible simulations. And if you believe the original argument, you should conclude that we should be in the cheapest possible simulation because that's where most people are. But we don't look like that. It doesn't look at all like we're at the edge of resolution, that we're 16-bit things. It seems much easier to make much lower level things than we are. And also, I question the whole approach to the anthropic principle that says we are typical observers in the universe. I think that that's not actually... I think that there's a lot of selection that we can do that we're typical within things we already know, but not typical within all the universe. LUIS So, do you think there's intelligent life, however you would like to define intelligent life, out there in the universe? CB My guess is that there is not intelligent life in the observable universe other than us, simply on the basis of the fact that the likely number of other intelligent species in the observable universe, there's two likely numbers, zero or billions. And if there had been billions, you would have noticed already. For there to be literally a small number, like Star Trek, there's a dozen intelligent civilizations in our galaxy, but not a billion. That's weird. That's sort of bizarre to me. It's easy for me to imagine that there are zero others because there's just a big bottleneck to making multicellular life or technological life or whatever. It's very hard for me to imagine that there's a whole bunch out there that have somehow remained hidden from us. LUIS The question I'd like to ask is, what would intelligent life look like? What I mean by that question and where it's going is, what if intelligent life is just in some very big ways different than the one that is on Earth? That there's all kinds of intelligent life that operates at different scales of both size and temporal. CB That's a great possibility because I think we should be humble about what intelligence is, what life is. We don't even agree on what life is, much less what intelligent life is. So that's an argument for humility saying there could be intelligent life of a very different character. You could imagine the dolphins are intelligent but never invent space travel because they live in the ocean and they don't have thumbs. So they never invent technology, they never invent smelting. Maybe the universe is full of intelligent species that just don't make technology. That's compatible with the data, I think. And I think maybe what you're pointing at is even more out there versions of intelligence, intelligence in intermolecular clouds or on the surface of a neutron star or in between the galaxies in giant things where the equivalent of a heartbeat is 100 million years. On the one hand, yes, we should be very open-minded about those things. On the other hand, all of us share the same laws of physics. There might be something about the laws of physics, even though we don't currently know exactly what that thing would be, that makes meters and years the right length and time scales for intelligent life. Maybe not, but we're made of atoms, atoms have a certain size, we orbit stars, stars have a certain lifetime. It's not impossible to me that there's a sweet spot for intelligent life that we find ourselves in. So I'm open-minded either way. I'm open-minded either being humble and there's all sorts of different kinds of life or no, there's a reason we just don't know it yet why life like ours is the kind of life that's out there. Yeah, I'm of two minds too, but I often wonder if our brains is just designed to quite obviously to operate and see the world in these time scales and we're almost blind and the tools we've created for detecting things are blind to the kind of observation needed to see intelligent life at other scales. Well, I'm totally open to that. So here's another argument I would make. We have looked for intelligent life, but we've looked at for it in the dumbest way we can, right? By turning radio telescopes to the sky. And why in the world would a super advanced civilization randomly beam out radio signals wastefully in all directions into the universe? That just doesn't make any sense, especially because in order to think that you would actually contact another civilization, you would have to do it forever. You have to keep doing it for millions of years. That sounds like a waste of resources. If you thought that there were other solar systems with planets around them where maybe intelligent life didn't yet exist, but might someday, you wouldn't try to talk to it with radio waves. You would send a spacecraft out there and you would park it around there. And it would be like from our point of view, be like 2001 where there's a monolith. So there could be an artifact. In fact, the other way works also, right? There could be artifacts in our solar system that have been put there by other technologically advanced civilizations. And that's how we will eventually contact them. We just haven't explored the solar system well enough yet to find them. The reason why we don't think about that is because we're young and impatient, right? It would take more than my lifetime to actually send something to another star system and wait for it and then come back. But if we start thinking on hundreds of thousands of years or million year timescales, that's clearly the right thing to do. Are you excited by the thing that Elon Musk is doing with SpaceX in general, but the idea of space exploration, even though your species is young and impatient? Yeah. No, I do think that space travel is crucially important long-term, even to other star systems. And I think that many people overestimate the difficulty because they say, look, if you travel 1% the speed of light to another star system, we'll be dead before we get there. And I think that it's much easier. And therefore, when they write their science fiction stories, they imagine we could go faster than the speed of light because otherwise they're too impatient. We're not going to go faster than the speed of light, but we could easily imagine that the human lifespan gets extended to thousands of years. And once you do that, then the stars are much closer effectively. What's a hundred year trip? So I think that that's going to be the future, the far future, not my lifetime once again, but baby steps. Unless your lifetime gets extended. Well, it's in a race against time, right? A friend of mine who actually thinks about these things said, you know, you and I are going to die, but I don't know about our grandchildren. I don't know, predicting the future is hard, but that's at least a plausible scenario. And so, yeah, no, I think that as we discussed earlier, there are threats to the Earth, known and unknown, right? Having spread humanity and biology elsewhere is a really important long term goal. What kind of questions can science not currently answer, but might soon? When you think about the problems and the mysteries before us that may be within reach of science? I think an obvious one is the origin of life. We don't know how that happened. There's a difficulty in knowing how it happened historically, actually, literally on Earth, but starting life from non-life is something I kind of think we're close to, right? We're really think so. How difficult is it to start life? I do. Well, I've talked to people, including on the podcast about this. Life requires three things. Life as we know it. So there's a difference with life, who knows what it is, and life as we know it, which we can talk about with some intelligence. So life as we know it requires compartmentalization. You need like a little membrane around your cell. Metabolism, you need to take in food and eat it and let that make you do things. And then replication. Okay, so you need to have some information about who you are that you pass down to future generations. In the lab, compartmentalization seems pretty easy, not hard to make lipid bilayers that come into little cellular walls pretty easily. Metabolism and replication are hard, but replication we're close to. People have made RNA-like molecules in the lab that I think the state of the art is they're not able to make one molecule that reproduces itself, but they're able to make two molecules that reproduce each other. So that's okay. That's pretty close. Metabolism is harder, believe it or not, even though it's sort of the most obvious thing, but you want some sort of chemical metabolism. And the actual cellular machinery in our bodies is quite complicated. It's hard to see it just popping into existence all by itself. It probably took a while, but we're making progress. And in fact, I don't think we're spending nearly enough money on it. If I were the NSF, I would flood this area with money because it would change our view of the world if we could actually make life in the lab and understand how it was made originally here on Earth. And I'm sure you'd have some ripples effects that help cure diseases and so on. I mean, just that understanding. So synthetic biology is a wonderful big frontier where we're making cells. Right now, the best way to do that is to borrow heavily from existing biology, right? Craig Ventner, several years ago, created an artificial cell, but all he did was not all he did. It was a tremendous accomplishment, but all he did was take out the DNA from a cell and put in entirely new DNA and let it boot up and go. And so I think that's a really good point. What about the leap to creating intelligent life on Earth? However, again, we define intelligence, of course, but let's just even say homo sapiens, the modern intelligence in our human brain. Do you have a sense of what's involved in that leap and how big of a leap that is? So AI would count in this or you really want life? You want really an organism in some sense? AI would count, I think. Yeah, of course, AI would count. Well, let's say artificial consciousness, right? So I do not think we are on the threshold of creating artificial consciousness. I think it's possible. I'm not, again, very educated about how close we are, but my impression is not that we're really close because we understand how little we understand of consciousness and what it is. So if we don't have any idea what it is, it's hard to imagine we're on the threshold of making it ourselves. But it's doable, it's possible. I don't see any obstacles in principle. So yeah, I would hold out some interest in that happening eventually. I think in general consciousness, I think we'll be just surprised how easy consciousness is once we create intelligence. I think consciousness is a thing that's just something we all fake. Well, good. No, actually, I like this idea that in fact, consciousness is way less mysterious than we think because we're all at every time, at every moment, less conscious than we think we are, right? We can fool things. And I think that plus the idea that you not only have artificial intelligent systems, but you put them in a body, right? Give them a robot body. That will help the faking a lot. Yeah, I think creating consciousness in artificial consciousness is as simple as asking a Roomba to say, I'm conscious and refusing to be talked out of it. It could be, it could be. And I mean, I'm almost being silly, but that's what we do. That's what we do with each other. This is the kind of, that consciousness is also a social construct. And a lot of our ideas of intelligence is a social construct. And so reaching that bar involves something that's beyond, that's not necessarily, doesn't necessarily involve the fundamental understanding of how you go from electrons to neurons to cognition. No, actually, I think that is a extremely good point. And in fact, what it suggests is, you know, so yeah, you referred to Kate, Kate Darling, who I had on the podcast, and who does these experiments with very simple robots, but they look like animals and they can look like they're experiencing pain. And we human beings react very negatively to these little robots looking like they're experiencing pain. And what you want to say is, yeah, but they're just robots. It's not really pain, right? It's just some electrons going around. But then you realize, you know, you and I are just electrons going around and that's what pain is also. And so what I would have an easy time imagining is that there is a spectrum between the simple little robots that Kate works with and a human being, where there are things that sort of by some strict definition, Turing test level thing are not conscious, but nevertheless, walk and talk like they're conscious. And it could be that the future is, I mean, Siri is close, right? And so it might be the future has a lot more agents like that. And in fact, rather than someday going, aha, we have consciousness, we'll just creep up on it with more and more accurate reflections of what we expect. And in the future, maybe the present, for example, we haven't met before. And you're basically assuming that I'm human. I get a high probability. At this time, because the, yeah, but in the future, there might be question marks around that, right? Yeah, no, absolutely. Certainly videos are almost to the point where you shouldn't trust them already. Photos, you can't trust, right? Videos is easier to trust, but we're getting worse. We're getting better at faking them, right? Getting better at faking. Yeah, so physical embodied people, what's so hard about faking that? So this is very depressing, this conversation we're having right now. So, to me, it's exciting. To me, you're doing it. So it's exciting to you, but it's a sobering thought. We're very bad, right? At imagining what the next 50 years are going to be like when we're in the middle of a phase transition as we are right now. Yeah, and I, in general, I'm not blind to all the threats. I am excited by the power of technology to solve, to protect us against the threats as they evolve. I'm not as much as Steven Pinker, optimistic about the world, but in everything I've seen, all the brilliant people in the world that I've met are good people. So the army of the good in terms of the development of technology is large. Okay, you're way more optimistic than I am. I think that goodness and badness are equally distributed among intelligent and unintelligent people. I don't see much of a correlation there. Interesting. Neither of us have proof. Yeah, exactly. Again, opinions are free, right? Nor definitions of good and evil. We come without definitions or without data opinions. So what kind of questions can science not currently answer may never be able to answer, in your view? Well, the obvious one is what is good and bad? What is right and wrong? I think that there are questions that science tells us what happens, what the world is and what it does. It doesn't say what the world should do or what we should do because we're part of the world. But we are part of the world and we have the ability to feel like something's right, something's wrong. And to make a very long story very short, I think that the idea of moral philosophy is systematizing our intuitions of what is right and what is wrong. And science might be able to predict ahead of time what we will do, but it won't ever be able to judge whether we should have done it or not. So, you know, you're kind of unique in terms of scientists. It doesn't have to do with podcasts, but even just reaching out, I think you referred to as sort of doing interdisciplinary science. So you reach out and talk to people that are outside of your discipline, which I always hope that's what science was for. In fact, I was a little disillusioned when I realized that academia is very siloed. And so the question is, at your own level, how do you prepare for these conversations? How do you think about these conversations? How do you open your mind enough to have these conversations? And maybe a little bit broader, how can you advise other scientists to have these kinds of conversations? Not at the podcast, the fact that you're doing a podcast is awesome, other people get to hear them, but it's also good to have it without mics in general. It's a good question, but a tough one to answer. I think about, you know, a guy I know is a personal trainer and he was asked on a podcast, how do we, you know, psych ourselves up to do a workout? How do we make that discipline to go and work out? And he's like, why are you asking me? Like, I can't stop working out. Like, I don't need to psych myself up. So, and likewise, you know, he asked me, like, how do you get to like have interdisciplinary conversations and all sorts of different things with all sorts of different people? I'm like, that's what makes me go, right? Like, I couldn't stop doing that. I did that long before any of them were recorded. In fact, a lot of the motivation for starting recording it was making sure I would read all these books that I had purchased, right? Like all these books I wanted to read, not enough time to read them. And now if I have the motivation, because I'm going to, you know, interview Pat Churchland, I'm going to finally read her book, you know? And it's absolutely true that academia is extraordinarily siloed, right? We don't talk to people, we rarely do. And in fact, when we do, it's punished, you know, like the people who do it successfully generally first became very successful within their little siloed discipline. And only then did they start expanding out. If you're a young person, you know, I have graduate students, I try to be very, very candid with them about this, that it's, you know, most graduate students do not become faculty members, right? It's a tough road. And so live the life you want to live, but do it with your eyes open about what it does to your job chances. And the more broad you are, and the less time you spend hyper specializing in your field, the lower your job chances are. That's just an academic reality. It's terrible, I don't like it, but it's a reality. And for some people, that's fine. Like there's plenty of people who are wonderful scientists who have zero interest in branching out and talking to things to anyone outside their field. But it is disillusioning to me some of the, you know, romantic notion I had of the intellectual academic life is belied by the reality of it. The idea that we should reach out beyond our discipline, and that is a positive good, is just so rare in universities that it may as well not exist at all. But that said, even though you're saying you're doing it, like the personal trainer, because you just can't help it, you're also an inspiration to others. Like I could speak for myself, you know, I also have a career I'm thinking about, right? And without your podcast, I may not have been doing this at all, right? So it makes me realize that these kinds of conversations is kind of what science is about in many ways. The reason we write papers, this exchange of ideas, it's much harder to do interdisciplinary papers, I would say. Yeah, right. Right. And conversations are easier. So conversations is a beginning. And in the field of AI, it's obvious that we should think outside of pure computer vision competitions and a particular data sets. We should think about the broader impact of how this can be, you know, reaching out to physics, to psychology, to neuroscience, and having these conversations. So you're an inspiration. And so- Well, thank you very much. That's very sweet. Never know how the world changes. I mean, the fact that this stuff is out there, and I've, a huge number of people come up to me, grad students, really loving the podcast, inspired by it, and they will probably have that, there'll be ripple effects when they become faculty and so on. So we can end on a balance between pessimism and optimism. And Sean, thank you so much for talking to me. It was awesome. No, Lex, thank you very much for this conversation. It was great.


Lex Fridman: Recipe for Progress in AI (Hard Work)

I mentioned soup in terms of progress. There's been a little bit of tension, a little bit of love online in terms of deep learning. So I just wanted to say that the kind of criticism and skepticism about the limitations of deep learning are really healthy in moderation. Jeff Hinton, one of the three people to receive the Turing Award, as many people know, has said that the future depends on some graduate student who is deeply suspicious of everything I have said. So that suspicion, skepticism is essential, but in moderation, just a little bit. The more important thing is perseverance, which is what Jeffrey Hinton and the others have had through the winters of believing in neural nets and an open-mindedness for returning to the world of symbolic AI, of expert systems, of complexity and cellular automata, of old ideas in AI and bringing them back and see if there's ideas there. And of course, you have to have a little bit of crazy. Nobody ever achieves something brilliant without being a little bit of crazy. And the most important thing is a lot of hard work. It's not the cool thing these days, but hard work is everything. I like what JFK said about us going to the moon, us. I was born in the Soviet Union. See how I conveniently just said us? Going to the moon is, we do these things, not because they're easy, but because they're hard. And I think that artificial intelligence is one of the hardest and most exciting problems that are before us. So with that, I'd like to thank you and see if there's any questions. Thank you.


Lex Fridman plays chess with Demis Hassabis

you probably need to have multiple agents running in your head. So one agent is how do I play good chess? Yeah. Second agent, how do I play not too good of chess? And third agent is how do I help Lex move correctly? Correctly, sure. Okay, we have five minutes each. It looks like I've got, you've given me white Lex, which is nice of you. We will start the clock. So my clock's counting down. Okay. Non-standard. Yeah, the English opening, you know, I'm English, so I have to do that. So, you know, you press the clock when you're, when you've done your move. That's a good starting move. Very solid Lex. Oh, that's not good. Yeah, no, this is good. This is very solid. Okay. We're quite far away from the, from the board. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I'll press your clock for you. Don't worry. I'm getting used to it. All right. Are we far away from the English opening at this point? No, this is a, this is a good line. You're playing very, very standard. You have to get used to it. They always do the funny thing where. Very nice. Pinning me. You have to take notes of actually what move you've taken. Yes. Yeah, that's a good, always a good plan. Keeping the King safe. I'm going to do the same. Play very well so far. We just, we just say, yeah, you made your mistakes at this point. Nothing so far. This is what I'm not going to, I'm going to play. Oh, here's the Bishop Knight swap that we were talking about earlier, right? The tension you're creating the tension in the created tension in the game. Relieving the tension. Relieving the tension. Exactly. All right. Now it gets harder. Now you have to come up with your middle game plan. Would you say. You did a very good opening. So you're in a, you're in a, you're in a fine position so far. Yeah. Very nice. Very nice. What's your strongest opener opening game or end game? Well, I would say probably the middle game middle game. So this kind of, this kind of point. Very good. Very good. Very aggressive. Very aggressive. Lex. If I could sacrifice pieces, I really would. That's not a good move. Is it? No, that's a good move. That's a very nice move. Are you afraid of using the queen? Uh, yeah, the queen, you know, you've got to be careful when you use the queen. I need to complicate the game a little bit for you. You're doing too well. Like, so am I losing a piece here? No, you're not losing a piece. You're doing okay. Actually. I'm going to take it anyway. It's only a pawn. How's the, how's the, how's the, how's the, how's the, how's the, how's the, how's the, that's how it starts. That's how it starts, but it's only a pawn. Very good. This is not. Still a pawn, only a pawn. Sorry, I have to, uh, I don't feel comfortable with you having a queen on the board. Takes the queens off, less dangerous. Makes you feel much safer. Yeah, so now we're in the end game now. So you're, you're on better territory. What's the definition of an end game? Well, the queen's coming off is usually the beginning of the end game. It's not the only part of the end game, but it's, it's one bit of the end game. See, that's a pretty cool idea what you've done there. I'll take off your knight now. I think the internet's going to disagree with that. Now, I'm going to see this is an interesting dynamic position with your bishop and my knight, but my, my knight's in a good, good, strong spot there. Uh, so you're attacking the bishop, my, my, oh, the bishop is not. So what do I do with this bishop? Yeah. Maybe I should use some other kind of way. All right. Yeah. But then you're going to attack there. I don't know. I think I'm just running scared. You're running scared now. Fear can't run. You can't run it. Um, okay. Yeah. That's not, is that? Oh, that's fine. That's the only move actually. It's the only one. All right. It feels like there's not much to do here. Well, you've got to, you have to have to come at something good here. Oh boy. And the time is running out. And time's running out. Escape. That's a good escape for your king. I'm going to come here now. Yeah. There's nothing else. There's nothing else. Take another, get another one of your pawns. I feel like there's some smart move that I'm totally missing. Yeah. That seems reasonable. I'm not going to take a second pawn. Okay. That's what you mean. Yeah. I'm going to go here. Maybe just eat away at the, Eat away at your stuff. All right. Yeah. Uh, this is not, this is Slowly, slowly constricting you. Yeah. Slowly going to take all your pawns. You've played very well though, Lex. You haven't made any major mistakes. It's just slow, slow, slow death. The internet, honestly, will very much disagree, but, um, let's see this. A slow death is better than, than a fast death. Embarrassing in the beginning. This, I didn't get checkmate in the first few minutes. This feels very constraining. Yeah. You're very uncomfortable. Constrained. I feel like alpha zero. Um, is that, that would be the defining? Yeah. Kind of controlled, uh, controlled end. You know, the interesting thing is the willingness to sacrifice pieces. But yeah, that's so beautiful. It is beautiful. See, so now I'm going to make use of all these pawns I've taken. Um, Would you say your alpha zero is much better than you at sacrificing pieces? Oh yeah. Intentionally. I sometimes, you know, lose them by mistake, but alpha zero is planning to lose them. It feels extremely constraining. Yeah. How close are you to checkmate? Is there any way for me out of this? Not really. No. So these pieces can't. Yeah. I'm getting basically all your pieces are getting constrained. I'm just going to march these pawns down here or bring this rook to help out. Okay. So if I take this knight with the rook. Yeah, you could do that. That would be a final sort of, um, hope. My knights, you see how strong my knight's been in this game compared to your bishop. Yeah. As we were talking earlier, he's already done the damage. Yeah. It's done all the damage. Yeah. You can get rid of him now, but I think he's already, it's already. Oh, and my time ran out. And your time ran out. We're going to finish this anyway. Finish the game anyway. It's time ran out. So you've lost once, but we can, we can lose two times. Um, yeah. Take that. And then I'm going to get a few back rank weakness. Right. And, uh, right. And then this pawn structure, you're going to bring out the other rook. Yeah. I'm going to bring the other rook. Finally going to swing the other rook into the game. Check. And I'm just going to keep writing. How many moves would you estimate here? Uh, it's going to be about 10 from here. I'm going to swap your rook off. Your final defensive piece. I'm going to take. Is that? No, that's, that's fine. Well, you can, I'll check here. Oh, yeah. And he's just marched that. Yeah, I'm going to march this pawn to the end now. Well, I think this is a good, you played well. Honor to have been defeated so gracefully. You played very, very well. I was impressed. I was impressed. You, you did, you did great. I didn't ask you, what do you think is the most beautiful thing you've seen AlphaZero do? Oh, yes. Personally. Yes. So there was actually the most beautiful game that I've seen AlphaZero plays is being dubbed the Immortal Zogzwang game by, uh, uh, Agathamata on the one of YouTube, brilliant YouTube, uh, commentators. Uh, uh, and he, it was, uh, AlphaZero playing Stockfish and, um, sacrificing a load of pieces to, uh, get Stockfish, all of the Stockfish's major pieces, Queen and Two Rooks stuck in the corner, basically sealed them up like in a two. And Zogzwang means, uh, that, uh, any move that the player makes will make their position worse. And, um, it's never been done to Stockfish before and AlphaZero did it super elegantly. Through sacrificing. Sacrificing pieces. Yeah. It's a beautiful video online on it. And thank you for giving me and signing this book, Game Changer. You're welcome. Uh, what's, what is the book? The book was written by, um, the British chess champion and, uh, and, uh, woman international master, Natasha Reagan and Matthew Sadler. Uh, and we get, I known them both for years from my chess days as a kid. And, um, when they heard about AlphaZero, uh, before we released it, they, they, they wanted to come in and try it out. We gave them full behind the scenes access to it. And then, um, Matthew Sadler said to me, it's like discovering the notebooks of a, of a, of a hidden champion that no one knew about. And he then wrote this book about all of the different ideas that AlphaZero had. And the cool thing is in there, in that book. So this is, it's a chess book, but also the first few chapters about, about how we built AlphaZero, our journey towards it. And then Magnus Carlsen was one of the first people we gave the book to. And he, uh, he sort of publicly said it was very useful to him and he's incorporated a lot of the ideas into his own play. The new ideas, you could say created by AlphaZero. To Lex, a fellow explorer of the mysteries of the universe. Demis, that, thank you so much. Thank you very much. Thank you for everything you do.


DeepMind cube

I got a nice little present from CheapMind. What if solving one problem could unlock solutions to thousands more? The immortal Zixuang The strange castle Lisa Doll's move 78 and And there we go alpha goes move 37 All moments and games played by AI systems That marked the milestone in the history of artificial intelligence Started with board games went on to protein folding And maybe solves the rest of this puzzle after all with the same kind of ideas with the same kind of methods Life after all folks is just a game Thank you, DeepMind. This was a fun visit fun a couple of conversations Thank you for the work you do.


Michio Kaku: Would Aliens Destroy Us? | AI Podcast Clips

So, if aliens do, alien species were to make contact, forgive me for staying on aliens for a bit longer, do you think they're more likely to be friendly, to befriend us, or to destroy us? Well, I think for the most part, they'll pretty much ignore us. If you were a deer in the forest, who do you fear the most? Do you fear the hunter with his gigantic 16-gauge shotgun? Or do you fear the guy with the briefcase and glasses? Well, the guy with the briefcase could be a developer, about to basically flatten the entire forest, destroying your livelihood. So instinctively, you may be afraid of the hunter. But actually, the problem with deers in the forest is that they should fear developers, because developers look at deer as simply getting in the way. I mean, in War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells, the aliens did not hate us. If you read the book, the aliens did not have evil intentions toward homo sapiens. No, we were in the way. So I think we have to realize that alien civilizations may view us quite differently than in science fiction novels. However, I personally believe, and I cannot prove any of this, I personally believe that they're probably going to be peaceful, because there's nothing that they want from our world. I mean, what are they going to take us? What are they going to take us for? Gold? No. Gold is a useless metal for the most part. It's silver, I mean, it's gold in color, but that only affects homo sapiens. Squirrels don't care about gold. And so gold is a rather useless element. Rare earths, maybe. Platinum-based elements, rare earths for their electronics, yeah, maybe. But other than that, we have nothing to offer them. I mean, think about it for a moment. People love Shakespeare, and they love the arts and poetry, but outside of the earth, they mean nothing. Absolutely nothing. I mean, when I write down an equation in string theory, I would hope that on the other side of the galaxy, there's an alien writing down that very same equation in different notation, but that alien on the other side of the galaxy, Shakespeare, poetry, Hemingway, it would mean nothing to him. Or her. Or it.


Sean Carroll: Hilbert Space and Infinity

What is Hilbert space and Euclidean space? Yeah, you know, I think that people are very welcome to go through their lives not knowing what Hilbert space is, but if you, when I dig in a little bit more into quantum mechanics, it becomes necessary. You know, the English language was invented long before quantum mechanics, or various forms of higher mathematics were invented. So we use the word space to mean different things. Of course, most of us think of space as this three-dimensional world in which we live, right? I mean, some of us just think of it as outer space. But okay, but space around us, it gives us the three-dimensional location of things and objects. But mathematicians use any generic, abstract collection of elements as a space, okay? A space of possibilities, you know, momentum space, et cetera. So Hilbert space is the space of all possible quantum wave functions, either for the universe or for some specific system. And it could be an infinite dimensional space, or it could be just really, really large dimensional, but finite, we don't know, because we don't know the final theory of everything. But this abstract Hilbert space is really, really, really big, and has no immediate connection to the three-dimensional space in which we live. What do dimensions in Hilbert space mean? You know, it's just a way of mathematically representing how much information is contained in the state of the system. How many numbers do you have to give me to specify what the thing is doing? So in classical mechanics, I give you the location of something by giving you three numbers, right? Up, down, left, X, Y, Z coordinates. But then I might wanna give you its entire state, physical state, which means both its position and also its velocity. The velocity also has three components. So its state lives in something called phase space, which is six-dimensional. Three dimensions of position, three dimensions of velocity. And then if it also has an orientation in space, that's another three dimensions and so forth. So as you describe more and more information about the system, you have an abstract mathematical space that has more and more numbers that you need to give, and each one of those numbers corresponds to a dimension in that space. So in terms of the amount of information, what is entropy, this mystical word that's overused in math and physics, but has a very specific meaning in this context? Sadly, it has more than one very specific meaning. This is the reason why it is hard. Entropy means different things even to different physicists. But one way of thinking about it is a measure of how much we don't know about the state of a system. So if I have a bottle of water molecules, and I know that, okay, there's a certain number of water molecules, I could weigh it and figure it out. I know the volume of it, and I know the temperature and pressure and things like that. I certainly don't know the exact position and velocity of every water molecule. So there's a certain amount of information I know, a certain amount that I don't know that is part of the complete state of the system. And that's what the entropy characterizes, how much unknown information there is, the difference between what I do know about the system and its full exact microscopic state. So when we try to describe a quantum mechanical system, is it infinite or finite but very large? Yeah, we don't know. That depends on the system. You know, it's easy to mathematically write down a system that would have a potentially infinite entropy, an infinite dimensional Hilbert space. So let's go back a little bit. We said that the Hilbert space was the space in which quantum wave functions lived. For different systems, there will be different sizes. They could be infinite or finite. So that's the number of numbers, the number of pieces of information you could potentially give me about the system. So the bigger Hilbert space is, the bigger the entropy of that system could be, depending on what I know about it. If I don't know anything about it, then it has a huge entropy, right? But only up to the size of its Hilbert space. So we don't know in the real physical world whether or not this region of space that contains that water bottle has potentially an infinite entropy or just a finite entropy. We have different arguments on different sides. So if it's infinite, how do you think about infinity? Is this something you can, your cognitive abilities are able to process? Or is it just a mathematical tool? It's somewhere in between, right? I mean, we can say things about it. We can use mathematical tools to manipulate infinity very, very accurately. We can define what we mean. For any number n, there's a number bigger than it. So there's no biggest number, right? So there's something called the total number of all numbers, that's infinite. But it is hard to wrap your brain around that. And I think that gives people pause because we talk about infinity as if it's a number, but it has plenty of properties that real numbers don't have. If you multiply infinity by two, you get infinity again. Right? That's a little bit different than what we're used to. Okay, but are you comfortable with the idea that in thinking of what the real world actually is, that infinity could be part of that world? Are you comfortable that a world in some dimension, in some aspect? I'm comfortable with lots of things. I mean, I don't want my level of comfort to affect what I think about the world. I'm pretty open-minded about what the world could be at a fundamental level. Yeah, but infinity is a tricky one. It's not almost a question of comfort. It's a question of, is it an overreach of our intuition? Sort of, it could be a convenient, almost like when you add a constant to an equation, just because it'll help. It just feels like it's useful to at least be able to imagine a concept, not directly, but in some kind of way that this feels like it's a description of the real world. Think of it this way. There's only three numbers that are simple. There's zero, there's one, and there's infinity. A number like 318 is just bizarre. Like, you need a lot of bits to give me what that number is. But zero and one and infinity, like once you have 300 things, you might as well have infinity things, right? Otherwise you have to say when to stop making the things. So there's a sense in which infinity is a very natural number of things to exist. I was never comfortable with infinity because it's just such a, it was too good to be true. Because in math, it just helps make things work out. When things get very, when things get very large, close to infinity, things seem to work out nicely. It's kind of like, because my deepest passion is probably psychology. And I'm uncomfortable how, in the average, the beauty of the very, how much we vary is lost. In that same kind of sense, infinity seems like a convenient way to erase the details. But the thing about infinity is it seems to pop up whether we like it or not, right? Like, you're trying to be a computer scientist, you ask yourself, well, how long will it take this program to run? And you realize, well, for some of them, the answer is infinitely long. It's not because you tried to get there. You wrote a five-line computer program. It doesn't halt.


Black Belt Speech | Lex Fridman

So I've learned more in these maths than I have in all my years. I'm a nerd, I got a PhD. I've learned more about life, about the mind, in these maths than I have in all the years of school. And I think two things, two of the biggest things I took away is the humbling reality that I'm not special. And if you want to be good at anything, you have to work really hard. And if you want to be the best in the world at something, like I do, I want to build robots better than anybody else in the world. Or whether that's knitting or yodeling, anything, you have to work harder than anyone else in the world. And the second lesson I learned, I used to compete a lot, I used to lose a lot, and I used to hurt to lose. And I remember, I don't know if Phil remembers this conversation, but I think at Lake Blue Belt, I was going to a big competition and I said, you know, I don't know how I'm going to win, it's like 50 people division. And he said, well give everything you can to win, but whether you win or lose, you're still going to have a home here, still going to love you. So the two things I'd like to say thank you for is the pain and the love.


Jim Keller: Most People Don't Think Simple Enough | AI Podcast Clips

So what have you learned about the human abstractions from individual functional human units to the broader organization? What does it take to create something special? Well, most people don't think simple enough. All right, so do you know the difference between a recipe and the understanding? There's probably a philosophical description of this. So imagine you're going to make a loaf of bread. The recipe says, get some flour, add some water, add some yeast, mix it up, let it rise, put it in a pan, put it in the oven. It's a recipe. Understanding bread, you can understand biology, supply chains, grain grinders, yeast, physics, thermodynamics, there's so many levels of understanding there. And then when people build and design things, they frequently are executing some stack of recipes. And the problem with that is the recipes all have limited scope. Like if you have a really good recipe book for making bread, it won't tell you anything about how to make an omelet. But if you have a deep understanding of cooking, then bread, omelets, sandwich, there's a different way of viewing everything. And most people, when you get to be an expert at something, you're hoping to achieve deeper understanding, not just a large set of recipes to go execute. And it's interesting to walk groups of people because executing recipes is unbelievably efficient if it's what you want to do. If it's not what you want to do, you're really stuck. And that difference is crucial. And everybody has a balance of, let's say, deeper understanding of recipes. And some people are really good at recognizing when the problem is to understand something deeply. Does that make sense? It totally makes sense. Does every stage of development, deep understanding on the team needed? Oh, this goes back to the art versus science question. If you constantly unpack everything for deeper understanding, you never get anything done. And if you don't unpack understanding when you need to, you'll do the wrong thing. And then at every juncture, like human beings are these really weird things because everything you tell them has a million possible outputs. And then they all interact in a hilarious way. And then having some intuition about what you tell them, what you do, when do you intervene, when do you not, it's complicated. It's essentially computationally unsolvable. Yeah, it's an intractable problem, sure. Humans are a mess. But with deep understanding, do you mean also sort of fundamental questions of things like what is a computer? Or why? Like the why question is why are we even building this? Of purpose? Or do you mean more like going towards the fundamental limits of physics, sort of really getting into the core of the science? Well, in terms of building a computer, think a little simpler. So common practice is you build a computer, and then when somebody says, I want to make it 10% faster, you'll go in and say, all right, I need to make this buffer bigger, and maybe I'll add an add unit. Or I have this thing that's three instructions wide, I'm going to make it four instructions wide. And what you see is each piece gets incrementally more complicated. And then at some point you hit this limit, like adding another feature or buffer doesn't seem to make it any faster. And then people say, well, that's because it's a fundamental limit. And then somebody else will look at it and say, well, actually, the way you divided the problem up and the way that different features are interacting is limiting you, and it has to be rethought, rewritten. And then you refactor it and rewrite it. And what people commonly find is the rewrite is not only faster, but half as complicated. From scratch? Yes. So how often in your career, but just have you seen as needed, maybe more generally, to just throw the whole thing out and start over? This is where I'm on one end of it, every three to five years. Which end are you on? Rewrite more often. Rewrite, and three to five years is? If you want to really make a lot of progress on computer architecture, every five years you should do one from scratch. So where does the x86-64 standard come in? How often do you? I was the co-author of that spec in 98. That's 20 years ago. Yeah. So that's still around. The instruction set itself has been extended quite a few times. And instruction sets are less interesting than the implementation underneath. There's been, on x86 architecture, Intel's designed a few, AMD's designed a few, very different architectures. And I don't want to go into too much of the detail about how often, but there's a tendency to rewrite it every 10 years, and it really should be every five. So you're saying you're an outlier in that sense in the- Rewrite more often. Rewrite more often. Isn't that scary? Yeah, of course. Well, scary to who? To everybody involved, because like you said, repeating the recipe is efficient. Companies want to make money, no, individual engineers want to succeed, so you want to incrementally improve, increase the buffer from three to four. Well, increase performance. Yeah, so this is where you get into diminishing return curves. I think Steve Jobs said this, right? So you have a project, and you start here, and it goes up, and they have diminishing return. And to get to the next level, you have to do a new one, and the initial starting point will be lower than the old optimization point, but it'll get higher. So now you have two kinds of fear, short-term disaster and long-term disaster. And you're- So grown-ups, right? Yes. Like, you know, people with a quarter-by-quarter business objective are terrified about changing everything, and people who are trying to run a business or build a computer for a long-term objective know that the short-term limitations block them from the long-term success. So if you look at leaders of companies that had really good long-term success, every time they saw that they had to redo something, they did. And so somebody has to speak up. Or you do multiple projects in parallel. Like, you optimize the old one while you build a new one, but the marketing guys are always like, promise me that the new computer is faster on every single thing. And the computer architect says, well, the new computer will be faster on the average. But there's a distribution of results and performance, and you'll have some outliers that are slower. And that's very hard because they have one customer who cares about that one.


Measure passion not progress

Advice number three is to measure passion, not progress. So most of us get an average of about 27,000 days of life. I think a good metric by which you should live is to maximize the number of those days that are filled with a passionate pursuit of something, not by how much you've progressed towards a particular goal. Because goals are grounded in your comparison to other human beings, to something that's already been done before. Passionate pursuit of something is the way you achieve something totally new. And a quick warning about passion. Again, I'm a little bit of Russian, so maybe I romanticize this whole suffering and passion thing. But the people who love you, the people who care for you, like I mentioned, your friends, your family, should not be trusted. Accept their love, but not their advice. Parents and significant others will tell you to find a secure job because passion looks dangerous. It looks insecure. Advisors, colleagues will tell you to be pragmatic because passion looks like a distraction from the main effort that you should be focusing on. And society will tell you to find balance, work-life balance in your life because passion looks unhealthy.