Max Tegmark: Life 3.0

A conversation with Max Tegmark as part of MIT course on Artificial General Intelligence. Video version is available on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gi8LUnhP5yU&list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4 He is a Physics Professor at MIT, co-founder of the Future of Life Institute, and author of “Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.” If you would like to get more information about this podcast go to https://lexfridman.com/ai or connect with @lexfridman on Twitter https://twitter.com/lexfridman, LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman/, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman, or YouTube https://www.youtube.com/lexfridman where you can watch the video versions of these conversations.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lex Fridman?

  Welcome to the Artificial Intelligence Podcast. My name is Lex Fridman. I'm a research scientist at MIT. This podcast is an extension of the courses on deep learning, autonomous vehicles, and artificial general intelligence that I've taught and organized. It is not only about machine learning, or robotics, or neuroscience, or philosophy, or any one technical field. It considers all of these avenues of thought in a way that is hopefully accessible to everyone. The aim here is to explore the nature of human and machine intelligence, the big picture of understanding the human mind and creating echoes of it in the machine.

• 0:44Lex Fridman?

  To me, that is one of our civilization's most challenging and exciting scientific journeys into the unknown. I will first repost parts of previous YouTube conversations and lecture Q and As that can be listened to without video. If you want to see the video version, please go to my YouTube channel. My username is Lex Fridman there and on Twitter. So, reach out and connect if you find these conversations interesting. Moving forward, this podcast will be long-form conversations with some of the most fascinating people in the world who are thinking about the nature of intelligence. But first, like I said, I will be posting old content, but now in audio form.

• 1:29Lex Fridman?

  For a little while, I'll probably repeat this intro for reposted YouTube content like this episode, and we'll try to keep it to what looks to be just over two minutes, maybe 2:30. So, in the future, if you want to skip this intro, just jump to the 2:30 minute mark. In this episode, I talk with Max Tegmark. He's a professor at MIT, a physicist who has spent much of his career studying and writing about the mysteries of our cosmological universe, and now thinking and writing about the beneficial possibilities and existential risks of artificial intelligence. He's the co-founder of the Future of Life Institute, author of two books, Our Mathematical Universe and Life 3.0.

• 2:13Lex Fridman?

  He is truly an out-of-the-box thinker, so I really enjoyed this conversation. I hope you do as well.

• 2:35Lex Fridman?

  Do you think there's intelligent life out there in the universe? Let's open up with an easy question.

• 2:41Max Tegmark?

  I have a minority of you here, actually. When I give public lectures, I often ask for a show of hands who thinks there's intelligent life out there somewhere else. And almost everyone put their hands up. And when I ask why, they'll be like, oh, there's so many galaxies out there. There's gotta be. But I'm a numbers nerd, right? So when you look more carefully at it, it's not so clear at all. The, when we talk about our universe, first of all, we don't mean all of space. We actually mean, I don't know, you can throw me the universe if you want, it's behind you there. It's, we simply mean the spherical region of space from which light has had time to

• 3:22Max Tegmark?

  reach us so far during the 14.8 billion year, 13.8 billion years since our big bang. There's more space here, but this is what we call a universe because that's all we have access to. So is there intelligent life here that's gotten to the point of building telescopes and computers? My guess is no, actually. The probability of it happening on any given planet is some number. We don't know what it is. And what we do know is that the number can't be super high because there's over a billion Earth-like planets in the Milky Way galaxy alone, many of which are billions of years older than Earth.

• 4:04Max Tegmark?

  And aside from some UFO believers, now there isn't much evidence that any super advanced civilization has come here at all. And so that's the famous Fermi paradox, right? And then if you, if you work the numbers, what you find is that if you have no clue what the probability is of getting life on a given planet, so it could be 10 to the minus 10, 10 to the minus 20, or 10 to the minus 2, or any power of 10 is sort of equally likely, if you want to be really open minded. That translates into it being equally likely that our nearest neighbor is 10 to the 16 meters away, 10 to the 17 meters away, 10 to the 18. Now, by the time you get

• 4:45Max Tegmark?

  Much less than than ten to sixteen already, we we pretty much know there is nothing else that's close. And when you get

• 4:54Lex Fridman?

  Because they would have discovered us.

• 4:56Max Tegmark?

  They, yeah, they would have discovered us long ago, or if they're really close, we would have probably noted some engineering projects that they're doing. And if it's beyond ten to twenty six meters, that's already outside of here.

• 5:07Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 5:07Max Tegmark?

  So my guess is actually that there are, we are the only life in here that's gotten to the point of building advanced tech, which I think is is very, um,

• 5:20Max Tegmark?

  puts a lot of responsibility on our shoulders not screw up, you know, I think people who take for granted that it's okay for us to screw up, have an accidental nuclear war or go extinct somehow because there's a sort of Star Trek like situation out there where some other life forms are going to come and bail us out and doesn't matter as much. I think they're lulling us into a false sense of security. I think it's much more prudent to say, you know, let's be really grateful for this amazing opportunity we've had and make the best of it, just in case it is down to us.

• 5:52Lex Fridman?

  So from a physics perspective, do you think intelligent life, so it's unique from a sort of statistical view of the size of the universe, but from the basic matter of the universe, how difficult is it for intelligent life to come about, the kind of advanced tech building life? Is implied in your statement that it's really difficult to create something like a human species?

• 6:15Max Tegmark?

  Well, I think I think what we know is that going from no life to having life that can do our level of tech, there's some sort of two going beyond that and actually settling our whole universe with life, there is some road major roadblock

• 6:33Max Tegmark?

  there, which is some great filter as, um, it's sometimes called, which which is tough to get through. It's either that that roadblock is either be behind us or in front of us. I'm hoping very much that it's behind us. I'm I'm super excited every time we get a new report from NASA saying they failed to find any life on Mars. Like, yes, awesome, because that suggests that the hard part maybe was maybe it was getting the first ribosome or some some very low level kind of. Stepping stone, so that we're home free. Because if that's true, then the future is really only limited by our own imagination.

• 7:13Max Tegmark?

  It would be much suckier if it turns out that this level of life is kind of a dime a dozen. But maybe there is some other problem, like as soon as civilization gets advanced technology, within a hundred years, they get into some stupid fight with themselves and poof.

• 7:27Lex Fridman?

  Yep.

• 7:27Max Tegmark?

  Now, that would be a bummer.

• 7:29Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, so you've explored the mysteries of the universe, the cosmological universe, the one that's between us today.

• 7:39Lex Fridman?

  I think you've also begun to explore the other universe, which is sort of the mystery, the mysterious universe of the mind, of intelligence, of intelligent life. So is there a common thread between your interests and the way you think about space and intelligence?

• 7:56Max Tegmark?

  Oh, yeah. When I was a teenager, I was already very fascinated by the biggest questions. And I felt that the two biggest mysteries of all in science were our universe out there and our universe in here.

• 8:12Lex Fridman?

  Yep.

• 8:12Max Tegmark?

  So it's quite natural after having spent a quarter of a century on my career, thinking a lot about this one, and now indulging in the luxury of doing research on this one. It's just so cool. I feel the time is ripe now for you, trans greatly deepening our understanding of this.

• 8:33Lex Fridman?

  Just start exploring this one.

• 8:34Max Tegmark?

  Yeah, because I think, I think a lot of people view intelligence as something mysterious that can only exist in biological organisms like us, and therefore dismiss, all talk about artificial general intelligence as science fiction. But from my perspective as a physicist, you know, I am a blob of quirks and electrons, moving around in a certain pattern and processing information in certain ways. And this is also a blob of quirks and electrons. I'm not smarter than the water bottle because I'm made of different kind of quirks. I'm made of up quirks and down quirks, the exact same kind as this. It's a, there's no secret sauce, I think, in me. It's, it's all about the pattern of the information processing.

• 9:16Max Tegmark?

  And this means that there's no law of physics saying that we, that we can't create technology. Which can help us by being incredibly intelligent and help us crack mysteries that we couldn't. In other words, I think we've really only seen the tip of the intelligence iceberg so far.

• 9:34Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, so the perceptronium.

• 9:37Max Tegmark?

  Yeah.

• 9:39Lex Fridman?

  So you coined this amazing term. It's a hypothetical state of matter, sort of thinking from a physics perspective, what is the kind of matter that can help, as you're saying, subjective experience emerge, consciousness emerge. So how do you think about consciousness from this physics perspective?

• 9:57Max Tegmark?

  Very good question. Again, I think many people have underestimated our ability to make progress on this by convincing themselves it's hopeless because somehow we're missing some ingredient that we need, or some new consciousness particle or whatever. I happen to think that we're not missing anything and that it's not... The interesting thing about consciousness, it gives us this amazing subjective experience of colors and sounds and emotions and so on, is rather something at the higher level about the patterns of

• 10:39Max Tegmark?

  information processing. And that's why I like to think about this idea of perceptronium. What does it mean for an arbitrary physical system to be conscious in terms of what its particles are doing or its information is doing? I don't think... I hate the carbon chauvinism, you know, this attitude you have to be made of carbon atoms to be smart or conscious.

• 11:01Lex Fridman?

  So something about the information processing that this kind of matter performs.

• 11:06Max Tegmark?

  Yeah, and you know, you can see I have my favorite equations here describing various fundamental aspects of the world. I feel that, I think, one day, maybe someone who's watching this will come up with the equations that information processing has to satisfy to be conscious. I'm quite convinced there is big discovery to be made there, because let's face it, we know that some information processing is conscious, because...

• 11:31Max Tegmark?

  We are

• 11:32Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 11:32Max Tegmark?

  Conscious, but we also know that a lot of information processing is not conscious. Like, most of the information processing happening in your brain right now is not conscious. There are like ten megabytes per second coming in, even just through your visual system. You're not conscious about your heartbeat regulation or most things. Even if I just ask you to like read what it says here, you look at it and then, oh, now you know what it said. You're not aware of how the computation actually happened. You're like, your consciousness is like the CEO that got an email at the end with the final answer. So, uh, what is it that makes a difference? I think that's a, both a great science mystery. We're actually studying it a little bit in my lab here at MIT.

• 12:16Max Tegmark?

  But I also think it's just a really urgent question to answer. For starters, I mean, if you're an emergency room doctor and you have an unresponsive patient coming in, wouldn't it be great if in addition to having

• 12:30Max Tegmark?

  a CT scanner, you had a consciousness scanner that could figure out whether this person is actually having locked in syndrome or is actually comatose. And in the future, imagine if we build robots or the machine that we could have really good conversations with. I think it's very likely to happen, right? Wouldn't you want to know, like, if your home helper robot is actually experiencing anything? Or just like a zombie? I mean, would you prefer, what would you prefer? Would you prefer that it's actually unconscious so that you don't have to feel guilty about switching it off or giving boring chores? Or what would you prefer?

• 13:10Lex Fridman?

  Well, the, certainly, we would prefer, I would prefer the appearance of consciousness. But the question is whether the appearance of consciousness is different than consciousness itself. And sort of to ask that as a question, do you think we need to, you know, understand what consciousness is? Solve the hard problem of consciousness in order to build something like an AGI system?

• 13:36Max Tegmark?

  No, I don't think that. And I think we would probably be able to build things, even if we don't answer that question. But if we want to make sure that what happens is a good thing, we better solve it first. So it's a wonderful controversy you're raising there, where you have basically three points of view about the hard problems.

• 13:58Max Tegmark?

  There are two different points of view that both conclude that the hard problem of consciousness is BS. On one hand, you have some people like Daniel Dennett, who say consciousness is just BS, because consciousness is the same thing as intelligence. There's no difference. So, anything which acts conscious is conscious, just like we are. And then there are also a lot of people, including many top AI researchers I know, who say, "Oh, consciousness is just bullshit," because, of course, machines can never be conscious.

• 14:29Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 14:30Max Tegmark?

  They're always gonna be zombies, never have to feel guilty about how you treat them. And then there's a third group of people, including Giulio Tononi, for example, and another, and Christoph Koch and the brothers. I would put myself also on this middle camp, who say that actually, some information processing is conscious and some is not. So, let's find the equation which can be used to determine which it is. And I think we've just been a little bit lazy, kind of running away from this problem for a long time. It's been almost taboo to even mention the C-word in a lot of circles. Because, but we should stop making excuses.

• 15:11Max Tegmark?

  This is a science question, and there are ways we can even test, test any theory that makes predictions for this. And coming back to this helper robot, I mean, so you said you'd want your helper robot to certainly act conscious and treat you like, have conversations with you and stuff.

• 15:28Lex Fridman?

  I think so.

• 15:29Max Tegmark?

  But wouldn't you, would you feel, would you feel a little bit creeped out if you realized that it was just, glossed up tape recorder, you know, that was just zombie and it's a faking emotion? Would you prefer that it actually had an experience? Or would you prefer that it's actually not experiencing anything? So, you feel, you don't have to feel guilty about what you do to it?

• 15:49Lex Fridman?

  It's such a difficult question, because, you know, it's like when you're in a relationship and you say, "Well, I love you," and the other person says, "I love you back." It's like asking, "Well, do they really love you back? Or are they just saying they love you back? Don't you really want them to actually love you?"

• 16:07Lex Fridman?

  It's hard to, it's hard to really know the difference between...

• 16:14Lex Fridman?

  Everything seeming like there's consciousness present, there's intelligence present, there's affection, passion, love, and it actually being there, I'm not sure. Do you have?

• 16:25Max Tegmark?

  But like, can I ask you a question about this? Like, to make it a bit more pointed. So Mass General Hospital is right across the river, right?

• 16:30Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 16:31Max Tegmark?

  Suppose you're going in for a medical procedure, and they're like, you know, for anesthesia, what we're gonna do is we're gonna give you muscle relaxants so you won't be able to move, and you're gonna feel excruciating pain during the whole surgery, but you won't be able to do anything about it. But then we're gonna give you this drug that erases your memory of it. Would you be cool about that?

• 16:52Max Tegmark?

  What's the difference that you're conscious about it or not, if there's no behavioral change, right?

• 16:59Lex Fridman?

  Right. That's a really, that's a really clear way to put it. That's, yeah, it feels like in that sense, experiencing it is a valuable quality. So actually being able to have subjective experiences, at least in that case, is valuable.

• 17:16Max Tegmark?

  And I think we humans have a little bit of a bad track record also of making these self-serving arguments that other entities aren't conscious. You know, people often say, oh, these animals can't feel pain.

• 17:28Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 17:29Max Tegmark?

  It's okay to boil lobsters because we asked them if it hurt and they didn't say anything. And now there was just a paper out saying lobsters did do feel pain when you boil them, and they're banning it in Switzerland. And we did this with slaves too often and said, oh, they don't mind. They don't maybe aren't conscious, or women don't have souls or whatever. So I'm a little bit nervous when I hear people just take as an axiom that machines can't have experience ever. I think this is just a really fascinating science question is what it is. Let's research it and try to figure out what it is that makes the difference between unconscious intelligent behavior and conscious intelligent behavior.

• 18:09Lex Fridman?

  So in terms of, so if you think of a Boston Dynamics humanoid robot being sort of with a broom being pushed around, it starts pushing on this consciousness question. So let me ask, do you think an AGI system, like a few neuroscientists believe, needs to have a physical embodiment, needs to have a body or something like a body?

• 18:33Max Tegmark?

  No. I don't think so. You mean to have a conscious experience?

• 18:38Lex Fridman?

  To have consciousness.

• 18:41Max Tegmark?

  I do think it helps a lot to have a physical embodiment to learn the kind of things about the world that are important to us humans, for sure. But I don't think the physical embodiment is necessary after you've learned it to just have the experience. Think about it, when you're dreaming, right? Your eyes are closed, you're not getting any sensory input, you're not behaving or moving in any way, but there's still an experience there, right?

• 19:07Max Tegmark?

  And so clearly, the experience that you have when you see something cool in your dreams isn't coming from your eyes, it's just the information processing itself in your brain, which is that experience, right?

• 19:18Lex Fridman?

  But if I put it another way, I'll say because it comes from neuroscience is the reason you want to have a body and a physical, something like a physical, like, you know, a physical system, is because you want to be able to preserve something. In order to have a self, you could argue, would, you'd need to have some kind of embodiment of self to want to preserve.

• 19:46Max Tegmark?

  Well, now we're getting a little bit anthropomorphic, anthropomorphizing things, maybe talking about self-preservation instincts. I mean, we are evolved organisms, right?

• 19:57Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 19:58Max Tegmark?

  So Darwinian evolution endowed us and other evolved organisms with a self-preservation instinct, because those that didn't have those self-preservation genes got cleaned out of the gene pool.

• 20:09Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 20:09Max Tegmark?

  Right? But if you build an artificial general intelligence, the mind space that you can design is much, much larger than just the specific subset of minds that can evolve, that have... So they, so an AGI mind doesn't necessarily have to have any self-preservation instinct. It also doesn't necessarily have to be so individualistic as us. Like, imagine if you could just, first of all, or we're also very afraid of death, you know, suppose you could back yourself up every five minutes, and then your airplane is about to crash, you're like, shucks, I'm just, I'm gonna lose the last five minutes of experiences since my last cloud backup. Dang, you know, it's not as big a deal.

• 20:49Max Tegmark?

  Or if we could just copy experiences between our minds easily, like, which we could easily do if we were silicon-based, right? Then...

• 21:00Max Tegmark?

  Maybe we would feel a little bit more like a hive mind, actually. Maybe it's the so so there's a so I don't think we should take for granted at all that AGI will have to have any of those sort of competitive as alpha male instincts. Right. On the other hand, you know, this is really interesting because I think some people go too far and say, of course, we don't have to have any concerns either that advanced AI will have those instincts because we can build anything we want. That there's there's a very nice set of arguments going back to Steve Omohundro and Nick Bostrom and others just pointing out that when we build machines, we normally build them with

• 21:41Max Tegmark?

  some kind of goal, you know, win this chess game, drive this car safely or whatever. And as soon as you put in a goal into machine, especially if it's kind of open ended goal and the machine is very intelligent, it'll break that down into a bunch of sub goals.

• 21:56Max Tegmark?

  And one of those goals will almost always be self preservation because if it breaks or dies in the process, it's not going to accomplish the goal, right? Like, suppose you just build a little, you have a little robot and you tell it to go down the star market here and and get you some food, make you cook an Italian dinner, you know, and then someone mugs it and tries to break it on the way. That robot has an incentive to not get destroyed and defend itself or run away because otherwise it's going to fail in cooking your dinner. It's not afraid of death, but it really wants to complete the dinner cooking goal. So it will have a self preservation instinct. Continue being a functional agent. Yeah.

• 22:35Max Tegmark?

  And and similarly, if you give any kind of more ambitious goal to an AGI, it's very likely they want to acquire more resources so it can do that better. And it's exactly from those sort of sub goals that we might not have intended that some of the concerns about AGI safety come. You give it some goal which seems completely harmless. And then, before you realize it, it's also trying to do these other things which you didn't want it to do, and it's maybe smarter than us. So fascinating.

• 23:08Lex Fridman?

  And let me pause just because I am, in a very kind of human-centric way, see fear of death as a valuable motivator.

• 23:18Max Tegmark?

  Uh huh.

• 23:19Lex Fridman?

  So you don't think, you think that's an artifact of evolution, so that's the kind of mind space evolution created that were sort of almost obsessed about self-preservation, some kind of genetic well. You don't think that's necessary to be afraid of death, so not just a kind of sub-goal of self-preservation, just so you can keep doing the thing, but more fundamentally sort of have the finite thing, like this ends for you at some point?

• 23:50Max Tegmark?

  Interesting. Do I think it's necessary for what precisely?

• 23:54Lex Fridman?

  For intelligence, but also for consciousness. So for those, for both, do you think really, like a finite death and the fear of it is important?

• 24:06Max Tegmark?

  So, before I can answer, before we can agree on whether it's necessary for intelligence or for consciousness, we should be clear on how we define those two words, because a lot of really smart people define them in very different ways.

• 24:20Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 24:21Max Tegmark?

  I was in this, on this panel with AI experts, and they couldn't, they couldn't agree on how to define intelligence even. So I define intelligence simply as the ability to accomplish complex goals. I like your broad definition, because again, I don't want to be a carbon chauvinist.

• 24:36Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 24:37Max Tegmark?

  And in that case, no, certainly it doesn't require fear of death. I would say AlphaGo, AlphaZero is quite intelligent. I don't think AlphaZero has any fear of being turned off, because it doesn't understand the concept of it even. And similarly, consciousness, I mean, you can certainly imagine a very simple kind of experience, if certain plants have any kind of experience, I don't think they're very afraid of dying, or there's nothing they can do about it anyway, much so, so there wasn't much value. And, but more seriously, I think, if you ask not just about being conscious, but maybe having

• 25:20Max Tegmark?

  What you would, we might call an exciting life for you feel passion and really appreciate the things. Maybe there somehow, maybe there perhaps it does help having, having that backdrop that, hey, it's finite. You know, let's, let's make the most of this, let's live to the fullest. So if you, if you, if you knew you were going to live forever, do you feel, think you would change your?

• 25:45Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I mean, in some perspective, it would be an incredibly boring life, living forever. So in the sort of loose, subjective terms that you said of something exciting and something in this, that other humans would understand, I think, is yeah, it seems that the, the finiteness of it is important.

• 26:05Max Tegmark?

  Well, the good news I have for you then is, based on what we understand about cosmology, everything is, our universe is probably, ultimately, probably finite, although, although.

• 26:15Lex Fridman?

  Big crunch or, or big, what's the, the infinite?

• 26:19Max Tegmark?

  Yeah, we could have a big chill, or a big crunch, or a big rip, or the big snap, or death bubbles. All of them are more than a billion years away. So we, we should, we certainly have vastly more time than our ancestors thought. But there is still, it's still pretty hard to squeeze in an infinite number of compute cycles, even though there are some loophole that just might be possible. But I, I think, you know, some people like to say that you should live as if you're about, you're going to die in five years or so, and that's sort of optimal. Maybe it's a good assumption, we should build our civilization as if it's all finite, to be on the safe side.

• 27:03Lex Fridman?

  Right, exactly. So you, you mentioned in defining intelligence as the ability to solve complex goals. Where would you draw a line? Or how would you try to define human level intelligence and superhuman level intelligence? Where is consciousness as part of that definition?

• 27:21Max Tegmark?

  No, consciousness does not come into this definition. So, so I think of intelligence as, it's a spectrum, and there are very many different kinds of goals you can have. You can have a goal to be a good chess player, a good go player, a good car driver. A good investor, good poet, et cetera. So intelligence that by its very nature isn't something you can measure by just one number, some overall goodness. No, no, there are some people who are more better at this, some people are better at that. Right now, we have machines that are much better than us at some very narrow tasks, like multiplying large numbers fast, memorizing large databases, playing chess, playing Go, and soon, driving cars.

• 28:05Max Tegmark?

  But there's still no machine that can match a human child in general intelligence. But artificial general intelligence, AGI, the name of your course, of course, that is, by its very definition, the quest to build a machine that can do everything as well as we can, up to the old Holy Grail of AI from back to its inception in the 60s. If that ever happens, of course, I think it's going to be the biggest transition in the history of life on Earth. But it doesn't necessarily have to wait the big impact until machines are better than us at knitting. The really big change doesn't come exactly at the moment they're better than us at everything.

• 28:49Max Tegmark?

  The really big change comes, first, their big change is when they start becoming better at us at doing most of the jobs that we do, because that takes away much of the demand for human labor. And then the really whopping change comes when they become better than us at AI research.

• 29:08Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 29:09Max Tegmark?

  Because right now, the timescale of AI research is limited by the human research and development cycle of years typically, you know, how long does it take from one release of some software or iPhone or whatever to the next? But once, once we have, once Google can replace 40,000 engineers by 40,000 equivalent.

• 29:32Max Tegmark?

  Pieces of software or whatever, but then that doesn't, there's no reason that has to be years. It can be in principle much faster. And the time scale of future progress in AI and all of science and technology will be driven by machines, not humans. So it's this point, simple point, which gives right to this incredibly fun controversy about whether there can be intelligence explosion, so-called singularity, as Werner Vinge called it. The idea is articulated by IJ Good, is obviously way back 50s, but you can see Alan Turing and others

• 30:09Max Tegmark?

  thought about it even earlier. You asked me what exactly would I define human level at?

• 30:20Max Tegmark?

  So the glib answer is to say something which is better than us at all cognitive tasks, or better than any human at all cognitive tasks. But the really interesting bar, I think, goes a little bit lower than that, actually. It's when they can, when they're better than us at AI programming and general learning, so that they can, can, if they want to, get better than us at anything by just studying up.

• 30:45Lex Fridman?

  So they're better is a key word, and better is towards this kind of spectrum of the complexity of goals it's able to accomplish. So another way to, so, and that's certainly a very clear definition of human love. So there's, it's almost like a sea that's rising, and you could do more and more and more things. It's that graphic that you show, it's a really nice way to put it. So there's some peaks that, and there's an ocean level elevating, and you solve more and more problems. But, you know, just kind of to take a pause, and we took a bunch of questions in a lot of social networks, and a bunch of people asked sort of a slightly different direction on creativity, on things that perhaps aren't a peak?

• 31:28Lex Fridman?

  It's, you know, human beings are flawed and perhaps better means having, being, uh, having contradiction, being flawed in some way. So let me sort of, yeah, start and start easy, first of all. Uh, so you have a lot of cool equations. Let me ask, what's your favorite equation, first of all? I know they're all like your children, but like, which one is that?

• 31:51Max Tegmark?

  The shredding your equation is the master key of quantum mechanics of the micro world. This equation, we can calculate everything to do with atoms, molecules, and all the way up to them.

• 32:04Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. So, okay. So quantum mechanics is certainly a beautiful, mysterious formulation of our world. So I'd like to sort of ask you, just as an example, it perhaps doesn't have the same beauty as physics does, but in mathematics, abstract, the Andrew Wiles, who proved the Fermat's Last Theorem. So he, I just saw this recently and it kind of caught my eye a little bit. This is 358 years after it was conjectured. So this very simple formulation, everybody tried to prove it, everybody failed. And so here's this guy comes along and eventually proves it and then fails to prove it and then proves it again in 94. And he said, like,

• 32:49Lex Fridman?

  the moment when everything connected into place, that in an interview, he said, it was so indescribably beautiful. That moment when you finally realized the connecting piece of two conjectures, he said, it was so indescribably beautiful. It was so simple and so elegant. I couldn't understand how I'd missed it and I just stared at it in disbelief for 20 minutes. Then, then during the day, I walked around the department and I keep coming back to my desk, looking to see if it was still there. It was still there. I couldn't contain myself. I was so excited. It was the most important moment of my working life. Nothing I ever do again will mean as much. So that particular moment, and it kind of made me think of,

• 33:31Lex Fridman?

  what would it take? And I think you, we have all been there at small levels. Um, maybe let me ask, have you had a moment like that in your life? Where you just had an idea? It's like, wow, yes.

• 33:48Max Tegmark?

  I wouldn't mix myself in the same breath as Andrew Wiles, but I've certainly had a number of aha moments when I realized something very cool about physics. This has completely made my head explode. In fact, some of my favorite discoveries I made, I later realized that had been discovered earlier by someone who sometimes got quite famous for it. So it's too late for me to even publish it, but that doesn't diminish in any way the emotional experience you have when you realize it like,

• 34:17Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 34:18Max Tegmark?

  Wow.

• 34:19Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. So what would it take in that moment, that wow, that was yours in that moment? So what do you think it takes for an intelligent system, an AGI system, an AI system to have a moment like that?

• 34:33Max Tegmark?

  It's a tricky question because there are actually two parts to it, right? One of them is can it accomplish that proof? Can it prove that you can never write A to the N plus B to the N equals three to equals Z to the N for all integers, et cetera, et cetera, when N is bigger than two? That was simply a question about intelligence. Can you build machines that are that intelligent? And I think by the time we get a machine that can independently come up with that level of proofs, probably quite close to AGI. The second question is a question about consciousness.

• 35:15Max Tegmark?

  When will we, will, will, how likely is it that such a machine will actually have any experience at all? As opposed to just being like a zombie? And would we expect it to have some sort of emotional response to this or anything at all akin to human emotion? Where, you know, when it accomplishes its machine goal, it views it as somehow something very positive and

• 35:40Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 35:40Max Tegmark?

  and sublime and deeply meaningful? I would certainly hope that if in the future we do create machines that are our peers or even our descendants,

• 35:56Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 35:56Max Tegmark?

  that I would certainly hope that they do have this sort of sublime appreciation of life. In a way, my absolutely worst nightmare would be that

• 36:10Max Tegmark?

  At some point in the future, the distant future, maybe our cosmos is teeming with all this post-biological life, doing all the seemingly cool stuff. And maybe the last humans, by the time our species eventually fizzles out, will be like, "Well, that's okay, because we're so proud of our descendants here." And look what all the... My worst nightmare is that we haven't solved the consciousness problem, and we haven't realized that these are all the zombies. They're not aware of anything, any more than a tape recorder has any kind of experience. So the whole thing has just become a play for empty benches. That would be like the ultimate zombie apocalypse. So I would much rather, in that case, that

• 36:57Max Tegmark?

  we have these beings which can really appreciate how amazing it is.

• 37:04Lex Fridman?

  And in that picture, what would be the role of creativity? A lot of people ask about creativity. Do you think, when you think about intelligence, I mean, certainly, the story you told at the beginning of your book involved, you know, creating movies and so on.

• 37:19Max Tegmark?

  Yeah.

• 37:20Lex Fridman?

  Sort of making money. You know, you can make a lot of money in our modern world with music and movies. So if you are an intelligent system, you may want to get good at that.

• 37:30Max Tegmark?

  Yeah.

• 37:30Lex Fridman?

  But that's not necessarily what I mean by creativity. Is it important, on that complex goals where the sea is rising, for there to be something creative? Or am I being very human-centric and thinking creativity is somehow special relative to intelligence?

• 37:49Max Tegmark?

  My hunch is that we should think of creativity simply as an aspect of intelligence. And we have to be very careful with human vanity. We have this tendency to very often want to say, as soon as machines can do something, we try to diminish it and say, "Oh, but that's not like real intelligence, you know, because they're not creative," or this or that. The other thing...

• 38:19Max Tegmark?

  If we ask ourselves to write down a definition of what we actually mean by being creative, what we mean by Andrew Wiles, what he did there, for example, don't we often mean that someone takes a very unexpected leap? It's not like taking 573 and multiplying it by 224 by just a step of straightforward cookbook-like rules, right? It's you can maybe make you make a connection between two things that people had never thought was connected.

• 38:49Lex Fridman?

  Very surprising.

• 38:50Max Tegmark?

  Or something like that. I think I think this is an aspect of intelligence and this is actually one of the most important aspects of it. Maybe the reason we humans are tend to be better at it than traditional computers is because it's something that comes more naturally if you're a neural network than if you're a traditional logic gate-based computer machine. You know, we physically have all these connections and if you activate here, activate here, activate here. Bing, you know, my hunch is that if we ever build a machine where you could just give

• 39:29Max Tegmark?

  it the task, hey, hey, you say, hey, you know, I just realized I have, I want to travel around the world instead this month. Can you teach my AGI course for me? And it's like, okay, I'll do it. And it does everything that you would have done and improvises and stuff.

• 39:47Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 39:47Max Tegmark?

  That would in my mind involve a lot of creativity.

• 39:50Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, so it's actually a beautiful way to put it. I think we do try to grab grasp at the, you know, the definition of intelligence is everything we don't understand how to build. So like, so we as humans try to find things well that we have and machines don't have. And maybe creativity is just one of the things, one of the words we use to describe that. That's a really interesting way to put it.

• 40:14Max Tegmark?

  I don't think we need to be that defensive. I don't think anything good comes out of saying, oh, we're somehow special, you know? It's.

• 40:25Max Tegmark?

  Contrariwise, there are many examples in history of where

• 40:31Max Tegmark?

  trying to pretend that we're somehow superior to all other intelligent beings has led to pretty bad results, right?

• 40:43Max Tegmark?

  In Nazi Germany, they said that they were somehow superior to other people. Today, we still do a lot of cruelty to animals by saying that we're so superior somehow and they can't feel pain. Slavery was justified by the same kind of really weak arguments. And I don't think if we actually go ahead and build artificial general intelligence, it can do things better than us. I don't think we should try to found our self-worth on some sort of bogus claims of superiority in terms of our intelligence.

• 41:19Max Tegmark?

  I think we should instead find our calling and the meaning of life from experiences that we have. I can have, I can have very meaningful experiences, even if there are other people who are smarter than me, you know? When I go to faculty meeting here and I was talking about something and then I suddenly realize, oh, he has an old prize, he has an old prize, he has an old prize. I don't have one. Does that make me enjoy life any less or enjoy talking to those people less? Of course not. And contrariwise, I feel very honored and privileged to get to interact with, with

• 42:05Max Tegmark?

  other very intelligent beings that are better than me at a lot of stuff. So I don't think there's any reason why we can't have the same approach with intelligent machines.

• 42:13Lex Fridman?

  That's a really interesting. So people don't often think about that. They think about when there's going, if there's machines that are more intelligent, you naturally think that that's not going to be a beneficial type of intelligence. You don't realize it could be. You know, like peers with Nobel prizes that that would be just fun to talk with. And they might be clever about certain topics and you can have fun having a few drinks with them.

• 42:39Max Tegmark?

  So. Well, also, you know, another example that we can all relate to it of why it doesn't have to be a terrible thing to be in presence of people who are even smarter than us all around is when when you and I were both two years old. I mean, our parents were much more intelligent than us, right? Worked out okay.

• 42:57Lex Fridman?

  Yep.

• 42:58Max Tegmark?

  Because their goals were aligned with our goals.

• 43:01Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 43:01Max Tegmark?

  And that, I think, is really the number one key issue we have to solve.

• 43:07Lex Fridman?

  Value line.

• 43:08Max Tegmark?

  Value line, the value alignment problem, exactly. Because people who see too many Hollywood movies with lousy science fiction plotlines, they worry about the wrong thing, right? They worry about some machine suddenly turning evil.

• 43:24Max Tegmark?

  It's not malice that we should that the issue, the concern, it's competence. By definition, intelligent makes you makes you very competent. If you have a more intelligent goal playing, this computer playing as a less intelligent one. And when we define intelligence as the ability to accomplish goal winning, right? It's going to be the more intelligent one that wins.

• 43:48Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 43:48Max Tegmark?

  And if you have a human and then you have an AGI that's more intelligent in all ways, and they have different goals, guess who's going to get their way, right? So I was just reading about, I was just reading about this particular rhinoceros species that was driven extinct just a few years ago. Kind of a bummer. I was looking at this cute picture of a mommy rhinoceros with its its child, you know. And why did we humans drive it to extinction? Wasn't because we were evil rhino haters.

• 44:19Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 44:20Max Tegmark?

  As a whole, it was just because we our goals weren't aligned with those of the rhinoceros. And it didn't work out so well for the rhinoceros because we were more intelligent, right? So I think it's just so important that if we ever do build AGI.

• 44:33Max Tegmark?

  Before we unleash anything, we have to make sure that it learns to understand our goals, that it adopts our goals, and it retains those goals.

• 44:45Lex Fridman?

  So the cool, interesting problem there is being able, us as human beings, trying to formulate our values. So, you know, you could think of the United States Constitution as a way that people sat down, at the time, a bunch of white men, but, which is a good example, I should, we should say. They formulated the goals for this country, and a lot of people agreed that those goals actually held up pretty well. It's an interesting formulation of values, and failed miserably in other ways. So, for the value alignment problem and the solution to it, we have to be able to put on paper, or in a program, human values. How difficult do you think that is?

• 45:30Max Tegmark?

  Very. But it's so important. We really have to give it our best. And it's difficult for two separate reasons. There's the technical value alignment problem of figuring out just how to make machines understand their goals, adopt them and retain them. And then there's this separate part about the philosophical part, whose values anyway? And since we, it's not like we have any great consensus on this planet on values, how, what mechanism should we create then to aggregate and decide, okay, what's a good compromise?

• 46:03Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 46:04Max Tegmark?

  That second discussion can't just be left to tech nerds like myself, right?

• 46:09Lex Fridman?

  That's right.

• 46:10Max Tegmark?

  And if we refuse to talk about it, and then AGI gets built, who's going to be actually making the decision about whose values? It's going to be a bunch of dudes in some tech company, right? And are they necessarily?

• 46:23Max Tegmark?

  So representative of all of humankind that we want to just entrust it to them? Are they even uniquely qualified to speak to future human happiness just because they're good at programming AI? I'd much rather have this be a really inclusive conversation.

• 46:37Lex Fridman?

  But do you think it's possible sort of, so you create a beautiful vision that includes sort of the diversity, cultural diversity and various perspectives on discussing rights, freedoms, human dignity. But how hard is it to come to that consensus? Do you think it's certainly a really important thing that we should all try to do, but do you think it's feasible?

• 47:01Max Tegmark?

  I think there's no better way to guarantee failure than to refuse to talk about it or refuse to try. And I also think it's a really bad strategy to say, okay, let's first have a discussion for a long time and then once we reach complete consensus, then we'll try to load it into some machine. No, we shouldn't let perfect be the enemy of good. Instead, we should start with the kindergarten ethics that pretty much everybody agrees on and put that into machines now. We're not doing that even. Look at, you know, anyone who builds a passenger aircraft wants it to never, under any circumstances, fly into a building or a mountain, right? Yet the September 11 hijackers were able to do that.

• 47:46Max Tegmark?

  And even more embarrassingly, you know, Andreas Lubitz, this depressed German Wings pilot, when he flew his passenger jet into the Alps, killing over 100 people, he just told the autopilot to do it. He told the freaking computer to change the altitude to 100 meters. And even though it had the GPS maps, everything, the computer was like, okay. So we should, we should take those very basic values, where the problem is not that we don't agree, the problem is just we've been too lazy to try to put it into our machines and make sure that from now on airplanes will just, which all have computers in them, we just refuse to do something like that. Go into safe mode, maybe lock the cockpit door, go to the airport.

• 48:31Max Tegmark?

  And and there's so much other technology in in our world as well now where it's really quite beginning coming quite timely to put in some sort of very basic values like this, even in cars. We were have we've had enough vehicle terrorism attacks by now, where people have driven trucks and vans into pedestrians, that it's not at all a crazy idea to just have that hardwired into the car. Because, yeah, there are a lot of, there's always going to be people who, for some reason, want to harm others, but most of those people don't have the technical expertise to figure out how to work around something like that. So if the car just won't do it, it helps. So let's start there.

• 49:10Lex Fridman?

  So there's a lot of, that's a, that's a great point. So not, not chasing perfect. There's a lot of things that a lot, that most of the world agrees on.

• 49:18Max Tegmark?

  Yeah, and let's start there.

• 49:19Lex Fridman?

  Let's start there.

• 49:20Max Tegmark?

  And then, and then, and then, once we start there, we'll also get into the habit of, of having these kind of conversations about, okay, what else should we put in here? And have these discussions. This should be a gradual process, then.

• 49:31Lex Fridman?

  Great. So, but that also means describing these things and describing it to a machine. So one thing, we had a few conversations with Stephen Wolfram. I'm not sure if you're familiar with Stephen.

• 49:44Max Tegmark?

  Oh, yeah, I know him quite well.

• 49:46Lex Fridman?

  So he is, you know, he play, you know, works with a bunch of things, but, you know, cellular automata, these simple computable things, these computation systems. And he kind of mentioned that, you know, we probably have already, within these systems, already something that's AGI, meaning like, we just don't know it because we can't talk to it. So if you give me this chance to try, to try to at least form a question out of this, is, I think it's an interesting idea to think that we can have intelligent systems, but we don't know how to describe something to them, and they can't communicate with us. I know you're doing a little bit of work in explainable AI, trying to get AI to explain itself.

• 50:30Lex Fridman?

  So what are your thoughts of natural language processing or some kind of other communication? How, how does the AI explain something to us? How do we explain something to it, to machines? Or you think of it differently?

• 50:42Max Tegmark?

  So there are two separate parts to your question there. One of them has to do with communication, which is super interesting, and we'll get to that in a sec. The, the, the other is whether we already have AGI, but we just haven't noticed it there.

• 50:57Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 50:59Max Tegmark?

  There, I beg to differ. I don't think there's anything in any cellular automaton or anything, or the internet itself, or whatever, that has

• 51:10Max Tegmark?

  artificial general intelligence in that it can really do exactly everything we humans can do better. I think the day, if the day that happens, when that happens, we will very soon notice, we'll probably notice even before, and because in a very, very big way. But for the, for the second part, though.

• 51:26Lex Fridman?

  Wait, can I, can I, can I, sorry. So, uh, the, because you, you have this beautiful way to formulate in consciousness as, uh, as, um, you know, as information processing, and you can think of intelligence as information processing. And this, you can think of the entire universe as these particles and these systems roaming around that have this information processing power. You, you don't, you don't think there is something with the power to process information in the way that we human beings do that's out there? That

• 52:00Lex Fridman?

  uh, that needs to be sort of connected to? It seems a little bit philosophical, perhaps, but there's something compelling to the idea that the power is already there. Would you, it's the, the focus should be more on the, on being able to communicate with it.

• 52:15Max Tegmark?

  Well, I agree that the, in some, in a certain sense, the hardware processing power is already out there. Because our universe itself

• 52:26Max Tegmark?

  can think of it as being a computer already, right? It's constantly computing what water waves, how to evolve the water waves and the river Charles, and how to move the air molecules around. And Seth Lloyd has pointed out, my colleague here, that you can even in a very rigorous way, think of our entire universe as being a quantum computer. It's pretty clear that our universe supports this amazing processing power because you can even, within this physics computer that we live in, right? We can even build actually laptops and stuff. So clearly the power is there. It's just that most of the compute power that nature has, it's, in my opinion, kind of wasting on boring stuff like simulating yet another ocean wave somewhere where no one is even looking, right? So in a sense, what life does, what we are doing when we build computers is we're

• 53:10Max Tegmark?

  re-channeling all this compute that nature is doing anyway, into doing things that are more interesting than just yet another ocean wave, you know, and let's do something cool here. So the raw hardware power is there, for sure, but and. And even just like computing what's gonna happen for the next five seconds in this water ball, you know, it takes a ridiculous amount of compute if you do it on a human computer.

• 53:35Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 53:35Max Tegmark?

  This water ball just did it. But that does not mean that this water ball has AGI and this because AGI means it should also be able to like have written my book, done this interview.

• 53:47Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 53:48Max Tegmark?

  And I don't think it's just communication problems.

• 53:50Lex Fridman?

  As far as we know.

• 53:50Max Tegmark?

  Don't think it

• 53:53Max Tegmark?

  it can do it and.

• 53:54Lex Fridman?

  Although Buddhists say when they watch the water and that that there is some beauty, that there's some depth and beauty and nature that they can communicate with.

• 54:02Max Tegmark?

  Communication is also very important though, because I mean, look, um, uh, part of my job is being a teacher. And I know some very intelligent professors even who just have a bit of hard time communicating. They come up with all these brilliant ideas, but but to communicate with somebody else, you have to also be able to simulate their own mind.

• 54:24Lex Fridman?

  Yes, empathy.

• 54:26Max Tegmark?

  But build well enough and understand model of their mind that you can say things that they will understand. And that's quite difficult. And that's why today it's so frustrating if if you have a computer that's makes some cancer diagnosis and you ask it, well, why are you saying I should have a surgery? If and if it can only reply, I was trained on five terabytes of data and this is my diagnosis, boop, boop, beep, beep.

• 54:52Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 54:53Max Tegmark?

  And then doesn't really instill a lot of confidence, right?

• 54:56Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 54:57Max Tegmark?

  So I think we have a lot of work to do on them. On communication there.

• 55:02Lex Fridman?

  So what kind of, what kind of, um, I think you're doing a little bit of work in explainable AI.

• 55:06Max Tegmark?

  Yeah.

• 55:07Lex Fridman?

  What do you think are the most promising avenues? Is it mostly about sort of the Alexa problem of natural language processing of being able to actually use human interpretable methods of communication? So being able to talk to a system and it talk back to you, or is there some more fundamental problems to be solved?

• 55:26Max Tegmark?

  I think it's all of the above. Human, the natural language processing is obviously important, but there are also more nerdy fundamental problems, like if you, if you take. You play chess? Of course, I'm Russian. I have to. А ты говоришь по-русски? Да, по-русски говорю. Отлично, я не знал! When did you learn Russian? Я говорю очень плохо по-русски, я только автодедакт. Но я купил книгу Teach Yourself Russian, читал очень много, но было совсем трудно. Wow! Поэтому я говорю так плохо. How many languages do you know? Wow, that's really impressive. I don't know, my wife has some calculations. But my point was, if you play chess, have you looked at the AlphaZero games? Ah, the actual games, no.

• 56:10Max Tegmark?

  Check it out, some of them are just mind-blowing.

• 56:14Max Tegmark?

  Really beautiful. And if you ask, "How did it do that?", you talk to them, Isabelle, others from DeepMind, all they'll ultimately be able to give you is big tables of numbers, matrices, that define the neural network. And you can stare at these tables of numbers till your face turns blue. And you're not going to understand much about why it made that move. And even if you have natural language processing, they can tell you in human language about, "Oh, 5, 7, .28", still not going to really help. So I think there's a whole spectrum of fun challenges there, involved in taking a computation that does intelligent things

• 57:00Max Tegmark?

  and transforming it into something equally good, equally intelligent, but that's more understandable. And I think that's really valuable, because I think

• 57:13Max Tegmark?

  as we put machines in charge of ever more infrastructure in our world, the power grid, the trading on the stock market, weapon systems and so on, it's absolutely crucial that we can trust these AIs that do all they want. And trust really comes from understanding in a very fundamental way. And that's why I'm working on this. Because I think the more, if we're going to have some hope of ensuring that machines have adopted our goals and that they're going to retain them, that kind of trust, I think, needs to be based on things you can actually understand, preferably even make, preferably improve theorems on. Even with a self-driving car, right?

• 57:55Max Tegmark?

  If someone just tells you it's been trained on tons of data and it never crashed, it's less reassuring than if someone actually has a proof. Maybe it's a computer verified proof, but still it says that under no circumstances is this car just gonna swerve into oncoming traffic.

• 58:09Lex Fridman?

  And that kind of information helps to build trust and helps build the alignment of goals, at least awareness that your goals, your values are aligned.

• 58:20Max Tegmark?

  And I think even in the very short term, if you look at how, you know, today, right, this absolutely pathetic state of cybersecurity that we have, where it's three billion Yahoo accounts we can't pack, almost every American's credit card and so on, you know, why is this happening? It's ultimately happening because we have software that nobody fully understood how it worked. That's why the bugs hadn't been found, right? And I think AI can be used very effectively for offense, for hacking, but it can also

• 58:58Max Tegmark?

  be used for defense, hopefully automating verifiability and creating systems that are built in different ways so you can actually prove things about them. And it's important.

• 59:12Lex Fridman?

  So, speaking of software that nobody understands how it works, of course, a bunch of people ask about your paper, about your thoughts of why does deep and cheap learning work so well? That's the paper, but what are your thoughts on deep learning? These kind of simplified models of our own brains have been able to do some successful perception work, pattern recognition work, and now with AlphaZero and so on, do some clever things. What are your thoughts about the promise limitations of this piece?

• 59:43Max Tegmark?

  Great. I think there are a number of very important insights, very important lessons we can all withdraw from these kind of successes. One of them is when you look at the human brain, you see it's very complicated, 10 to the 11 neurons, and there are all these different kinds of neurons and yada, yada, and there's been this long debate about whether the fact that we have dozens of different kinds is actually necessary for intelligence.

• 1:00:09Max Tegmark?

  We can now, I think, quite convincingly answer that question of no. It's enough to have just one kind. If you look under the hood of Alpha Zero, there's only one kind of neuron, and it's ridiculously simple, a simple mathematical thing. So it's not the, it's just like in physics. It's not the, if you have a gas with waves in it, it's not the detailed nature of the molecule that matter. It's the collective behavior somehow. Similarly, it's, it's, it's this higher level structure of the network matter is not that you have 20 kinds of neurons. I think our brain is such a complicated mess because it wasn't evolved, just to be intelligent, it was evolved to also be self-assembling.

• 1:00:53Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 1:00:54Max Tegmark?

  And self-repairing, right? And evolutionarily attainable.

• 1:00:59Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, and patches and so on.

• 1:01:01Max Tegmark?

  Yeah, so I, I think it's pretty, my, my hunch is that we're going to understand how to build AGI before we fully understand how our brains work. Just like we, we understood how to build flying machines long before we were able to build a mechanical bird.

• 1:01:15Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's right. You've given the, you've given the, the example exactly of mechanical birds and airplanes. And airplanes do a pretty good job of flying without really mimicking bird flight.

• 1:01:26Max Tegmark?

  And even now, after 100, 100 years later, did you see the TED Talk with this German group of mechanical birds?

• 1:01:31Lex Fridman?

  I did not. I've heard you mention it.

• 1:01:32Max Tegmark?

  Check it out. It's amazing. But even after that, right, we still don't fly a mechanical bird because it turned out that the way we came up with was simpler and it's better for our purposes, and I think it might be the same there. That's one lesson. And another lesson, which is more what, what our paper was about. First, I, I, as a physicist, thought it was fascinating how there's a very close mathematical relationship, actually, between our artificial neural networks and a lot of things that we've studied for in physics. Go by nerdy names like the renormalization group equation and Hamiltonians and yada, yada, yada. And when you look a little more closely at this, you have.

• 1:02:17Max Tegmark?

  At first, I was like, whoa, there's something crazy here that doesn't make sense. Because we know that if you even want to build a super simple neural network to tell apart cat pictures and dog pictures, right, that you can do that very, very well now. But if you think about it a little bit, you convince yourself it must be impossible. Because if I have one megapixel, even if each pixel is just black or white, there's two to the power of one million possible images, which is way more than the atoms in our universe, right? So in order to... And then for each one of those, I have to assign a number, which is the probability that it's a dog. Right.

• 1:02:57Max Tegmark?

  So an arbitrary function of images is a list of more numbers than the atoms in our universe. So clearly, I can't store that under the hood of my GPU or my computer. Yeah, somehow works. So what does that mean? Well, it means that out of all of the problems that you could try to solve with a neural network, almost all of them are impossible to solve with a reasonably sized one. But then what we showed in our paper was that the kind of problems, the fraction of all the problems that you could possibly pose, that we actually care about, given the laws of physics, is also an infinitesimally tiny little part.

• 1:03:42Max Tegmark?

  And amazingly, they're basically the same part. Yeah, it's almost like our world was created for... I mean, they kind of come together. Yeah, but you could say, maybe where the world created, the world was created for us. But I have a more modest interpretation, which is that instead, evolution endowed us with neural networks, precisely for that reason. Right. Because this particular architecture, as opposed to the one on your laptop, is very, very well...

• 1:04:08Max Tegmark?

  Adapted to solving the kind of problems that nature kept presenting our ancestors with, right? So it makes sense that why do we have a brain in the first place? It's to be able to make predictions about the future and so on. So if we had a sucky system, which could never solve it, it wouldn't have evolved. So, but it's, so this is, this is, uh, I think a very beautiful fact.

• 1:04:31Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:31Max Tegmark?

  We also, we also realize that there's, uh, there that we, there have been, it's been earlier work on, on why deeper networks are good, but we were able to show an additional cool fact there, which is that even incredibly simple problems, like suppose I give you a thousand numbers and ask you to multiply them together, you know? You can write a few lines of code, boom, done, trivial. If you just try to do that with a neural network that has only one single hidden layer in it, you can do it, but you're going to need two to the power of a thousand neurons to multiply a thousand numbers, which is again, more neurons than there are atoms in our universe.

• 1:05:11Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 1:05:12Max Tegmark?

  That's fascinating. But if you're allowed, if you allow yourself, make it a deep network with many layers, you only need 4,000 neurons. It's perfectly feasible. So.

• 1:05:24Lex Fridman?

  That's really interesting.

• 1:05:25Max Tegmark?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:25Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. So on another architecture type, I mean, you mentioned Schrödinger's equation and what, what are your thoughts about quantum computing and the role of this kind of computational unit in creating an intelligent system?

• 1:05:42Max Tegmark?

  In some Hollywood movies that are a lot mentioned by name, because I don't want to spoil them, the way they get AGI is building a quantum computer.

• 1:05:52Lex Fridman?

  Was, yeah.

• 1:05:53Max Tegmark?

  Because the word quantum sounds cool and so on.

• 1:05:55Lex Fridman?

  That's right.

• 1:05:57Max Tegmark?

  First of all, I think we don't need quantum computers to build AGI. I suspect your brain is not quantum computer in any profound sense.

• 1:06:09Lex Fridman?

  So you don't?

• 1:06:10Max Tegmark?

  Even wrote a paper about that a lot many years ago. I calculated the decoherence, so-called decoherence time, that how long it takes until the quantum computer-ness of what your neurons are doing gets erased.

• 1:06:23Max Tegmark?

  By just random noise from the environment and it's about 10 to the minus 21 seconds. So as cool as it would be to have a quantum computer in my head, I don't think that fast.

• 1:06:34Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:34Max Tegmark?

  On the other hand, there are

• 1:06:39Max Tegmark?

  very cool things you could do with quantum computers. Or I think we'll be able to do soon when we get bigger ones. That might actually help machine learning do even better than the brain. So, for example,

• 1:06:55Max Tegmark?

  one, this is just a moonshot, but hey, you know, the learning is very much same thing as search. If you have a, if you're trying to train a neural network to get really learned, to do something really well. You have some loss function, you have some, you have a bunch of knobs you can turn, represented by a bunch of numbers. And you're trying to tweak them so that it becomes as good as possible at this thing. So if you think of a landscape with some valley, where each dimension of the landscape corresponds to some number you can change. You're trying to find the minimum. And it's well known that if you have a very high dimensional landscape, complicated things, it's super hard to find the minimum, right?

• 1:07:41Max Tegmark?

  Quantum mechanics is amazingly good at this.

• 1:07:44Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 1:07:44Max Tegmark?

  If I want to know what's the lowest energy state this water can possibly have,

• 1:07:50Max Tegmark?

  incredibly hard to compute, but we can, but nature will happily figure this out for you if you just cool it down, make it very, very cold.

• 1:07:58Max Tegmark?

  If you put a ball somewhere, it'll roll down to its minimum and this happens metaphorically at the energy landscape too. And quantum mechanics even uses some little clever tricks, which today's machine learning systems don't like. If you're trying to find the minimum and you get stuck in the little local minimum here. In quantum mechanics, you can actually tunnel through the barrier and get unstuck again and.

• 1:08:21Lex Fridman?

  That's really interesting.

• 1:08:23Max Tegmark?

  Yeah, so maybe for example, we'll one day use quantum computers that to help train neural networks better.

• 1:08:31Lex Fridman?

  That's really interesting. Okay. So as a component of kind of the learning process, for example.

• 1:08:36Max Tegmark?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:37Lex Fridman?

  Let me ask, sort of wrapping up here a little bit, let me, let me return to the questions of our human nature and and love, as I mentioned. So do you think?

• 1:08:51Lex Fridman?

  You mentioned sort of a helper robot, but you could think of also personal robots. Do you think the way we human beings fall in love and get connected to each other is possible to achieve in an AI system, in human-level AI intelligence system? Do you think we would ever see that kind of connection? Or, you know, in all this discussion about solving complex goals,

• 1:09:15Max Tegmark?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:16Lex Fridman?

  is this kind of human social connection? Do you think that's one of the goals on the peaks and valleys that with the raising sea levels that we'll be able to achieve? Or do you think that's something that's ultimately, or at least in the short term, relative to the other goals is not achievable?

• 1:09:31Max Tegmark?

  I think it's all possible. And I mean, in recent, there's a, there's a very wide range of guesses, as you know, among AI researchers, when we're going to get AGI. Some people, you know, like our friend Rodney Brooks says it's going to be hundreds, hundreds of years at least. And then there are many others who think it's going to happen much sooner. And recent polls, maybe half or so of AI researchers think it's, we're going to get AGI within decades. So if that happens, of course, then I think these things are all possible. But in terms of whether it will happen, I know, I think we shouldn't spend so much time asking, what do we think will happen in the future? As if we are just some sort of pathetic, passive bystanders, you know,

• 1:10:15Max Tegmark?

  waiting for the future to happen to us. Hey, we're the ones creating this future, right? So we should be proactive about it and ask ourselves what sort of future we would like to have happen.

• 1:10:27Lex Fridman?

  That's right.

• 1:10:27Max Tegmark?

  Trying to make it like that. Well, what I prefer is to some sort of incredibly boring zombie-like future, where there's all these mechanical things happening, there's no passion, no emotion, no experience, maybe even. No, I would of course much rather prefer it if all the things that we find that we value the most about humanity are our subjective experience, passion, inspiration, our love, you know? If, if, if we can create a future where those are, where those things do exist, you know? I think ultimately, it's not our universe giving meaning to us, it's us giving meaning to our universe. And if we build more advanced intelligence, let's, let's make sure we build it in such a way that...

• 1:11:13Max Tegmark?

  Meaning is part of it.

• 1:11:16Lex Fridman?

  A lot of people that seriously study this problem and think of it from different angles have trouble in the majority of cases, if they think through, that happen

• 1:11:26Max Tegmark?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:27Lex Fridman?

  are the ones that are not beneficial to humanity.

• 1:11:30Max Tegmark?

  Right.

• 1:11:30Lex Fridman?

  And so, yeah, so what are your thoughts? What's an inch? What's, what should people, you know, I really don't like people to be terrified.

• 1:11:39Max Tegmark?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:40Lex Fridman?

  You should, what's a way for people to think about it in a way that, in a way we can solve it? And we can make it better.

• 1:11:46Max Tegmark?

  Yeah. No, I don't think panicking is gonna help in any way. It's not gonna increase chances of things going well either. Even if you are in a situation where there is a real threat, does it help if everybody just freaks out?

• 1:11:58Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 1:11:59Max Tegmark?

  No, of course, of course not. I, I think, yeah, there are, of course, ways in which things can go horribly wrong. First of all, it's important when we think about this thing, this, about the problems and risks, to also remember how huge the upsides can be if we get it right. Right? Everything, everything we love about society and civilization is a product of intelligence. So if we can amplify our intelligence with machine intelligence and not anymore lose our loved ones to what we're told is an uncurable disease and things like this, of course, we should aspire to that. So that can be a motivator, I think, reminding ourselves that the reason we try to solve problems is not just because we're trying to avoid gloom, but because we're trying to do something great.

• 1:12:42Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 1:12:43Max Tegmark?

  But then in terms of the risks, I think

• 1:12:49Max Tegmark?

  the really important question is to ask, what can we do today that will actually help?

• 1:12:53Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:12:53Max Tegmark?

  Make the outcome good, right? And dismissing the risk is not one of them, you know. I find it quite funny often when I'm in, on discussion panels about these things, how The people who who work for companies always say, oh, nothing to worry about, nothing to worry about, nothing to worry about. And it's always, it's only academics sometimes express concerns. That's not surprising at all, if you think about it. Right. Upton Sinclair quips, right, that it's hard to make a man believe in something when his income depends on not believing in it. And frankly, we know a lot of these people in companies that they're just as concerned as anyone else.

• 1:13:34Max Tegmark?

  But if you're the CEO of a company, that's not something you want to go on record saying when you have silly journalists who are going to put a picture of a Terminator robot when they quote you. So the issues are real. And the way I, the way I think about what the issue is, is basically, you know, the, the, the real choice we have is,

• 1:13:56Max Tegmark?

  first of all, are we going to just dismiss this, the risks and say, well, you know, let's just go ahead and build machines that can do everything, we can do better and cheaper, you know? Let's just make ourselves obsolete as fast as possible. What could possibly go wrong? Right. That's one attitude. The opposite attitude, I think, is to say, here is incredible potential, you know? Let, let's think about what kind of future we're really, really excited about. What are the shared goals that we can really aspire towards? And then let's think really hard on how, about how we can actually get there. And so start with, not, don't start thinking about the risks, start thinking about the goals. Goals, yeah. And then when you do that, then you can think about the obstacles you want to avoid, right? I often get students coming in right here into my office for career advice.

• 1:14:42Max Tegmark?

  I always ask them this very question, where do you want to be in the future? Right. If all she can say is, oh, maybe I'll have cancer, maybe I'll get run over by a truck. Focus on the obstacles instead of the goal. She's just going to end up a hypochondriac paranoid. Whereas if she comes in and fire in her eyes and is like, I want to be there. And then we can talk about the obstacles and see how we can circumvent them. That's, I think, a much, much healthier attitude. And That's really well put. And I, I feel it's, it's very challenging to come up with a vision for the future, which we're, which we are unequivocally excited about. I'm not just talking now in the vague terms like, yeah, let's cure cancer, fine. Talking about what kind of society do we want to create?

• 1:15:26Max Tegmark?

  What do we want it to mean, you know, to be human in the age of AI, when we have, in the age of AGI? So if we can have this conversation, broad, inclusive conversation, and gradually start converging towards some future that with some direction at least that we want to steer towards, right? Then then we'll be much more motivated to constructively take on the obstacles. And I think if I had if I had to, if you make if I try to wrap this up in a more succinct way, I think I think we can all agree already now that we should aspire to build AGI that doesn't overpower us,

• 1:16:10Max Tegmark?

  but that empowers us.

• 1:16:13Lex Fridman?

  And think of the many various ways that can do that, whether that's from my side of the world of autonomous vehicles. I I'm personally actually from the camp that believes this human level intelligence is required to to achieve something like vehicles that would actually be something we would enjoy using and being part of. So that's one example. And certainly, there's a lot of other types of robots in medicine and so on. So focusing on those and then and then coming up with the obstacles, coming up with the ways that that can go wrong and solving those one at a time.

• 1:16:46Max Tegmark?

  And just because you can build an autonomous vehicle, even if you could build one that would drive this final life, you know, maybe there are some things in life that we would actually want to do ourselves.

• 1:16:56Lex Fridman?

  That's right.

• 1:16:56Max Tegmark?

  Right? Like, for example, if you think of our society as a whole, there are some things that we find very meaningful to do. And that doesn't mean we have to stop doing them just because machines can do them better. You know, I'm not going to stop playing tennis just the day someone builds a tennis robot.

• 1:17:14Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:14Max Tegmark?

  And beat me.

• 1:17:15Lex Fridman?

  People are still playing chess and even go.

• 1:17:17Max Tegmark?

  Yeah. And I in this in the very near term even, some people are advocating basic income, replace jobs. But if you if the government is going to be willing to just hand out cash to people for doing nothing, then one should also seriously consider whether the government should also hire a lot more teachers and nurses and the kind of jobs which people often find great fulfillment in doing, right? I get very tired of hearing politicians saying, oh, we can't afford hiring more teachers, but we're going to maybe have basic income. If we can have more and more serious research and thought into what gives meaning to our lives, the jobs give so much more than income, right?

• 1:17:58Max Tegmark?

  And then thinking about in the future, what are the roles that?

• 1:18:04Max Tegmark?

  Yeah, what are the roles that we wanna? Have people continually feeling empowered by machines?

• 1:18:11Lex Fridman?

  And I think sort of I come from the Russia, from the Soviet Union. And I think for a lot of people in the 20th century, going to the moon, going to space was an inspiring thing. I feel like the the the the universe of the mind, so AI, understanding, creating intelligence is that for the 21st century. So it's really surprising, and I've heard you mention this, it's really surprising to me, both on the research funding side, that it's not funded as greatly as it could be. But most importantly, on the politician's side, that it's not part of the public discourse, except in the killer bots, Terminator kind of view, that people are not yet, I think, perhaps excited by the possible positive future that we can build together.

• 1:18:56Max Tegmark?

  And we should be, because politicians usually just focus on the next election cycle, right? The single most important thing I feel we humans have learned in the entire history of science is they were the masters of underestimation. We underestimated the size of of of our cosmos again and again, realizing that everything we thought existed was just a small part of something grander, right? Planet, solar system, the galaxy, you know, clusters of galaxies, universe. And we now know that we have that the future has just so much more potential than our ancestors could ever have dreamt of. This cosmos.

• 1:19:38Max Tegmark?

  Imagine if all of Earth was completely devoid of life, except for Cambridge, Massachusetts. Wouldn't it be kind of lame? If all we ever aspired to was to stay in Cambridge, Massachusetts forever? And then go extinct in one week, even though Earth was gonna continue on for longer? That that that's sort of attitude, I think, we we have now

• 1:20:02Max Tegmark?

  on the cosmic scale. We can life can flourish on Earth, not for for four years, but for billions of years.

• 1:20:08Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:20:08Max Tegmark?

  I can even tell you about how to move it out of harm's way when the sun gets too hot. And and then we have so much more resources out here, which today, yeah, maybe there are a lot of other planets with bacteria or cow-like life on them, but I.

• 1:20:25Max Tegmark?

  Most of this, all this opportunity seems, as far as we can tell, to be largely dead, like the Sahara Desert, and yet we have the opportunity to help life flourish around this for billions of years. And so like, let's quit squabbling about whether some little border should be drawn one mile to the left or right, and look up into the skies and you realize, hey, you know, we can do such incredible things.

• 1:20:51Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, and that's, I think, why it's really exciting that, yeah, you and others are connected with some of the work Elon Musk is doing, because he's literally going out into that space, really exploring our universe, and it's wonderful.

• 1:21:04Max Tegmark?

  That is exactly why Elon Musk is so misunderstood, right? Misconstrue him as some kind of pessimistic doomsayer. The reason he cares so much about AI safety is because he, more than almost anyone else, appreciates these amazing opportunities. It will squander if we wipe out here on Earth. We're not just gonna wipe out the next generation, but all generations, and this incredible opportunity that's out there, and that would be really be a waste. And AI, for people who think that it would be better to do without technology, let me just mention that if we don't improve our technology, the question isn't whether humanity is gonna go extinct. The question is just whether we're gonna

• 1:21:48Max Tegmark?

  get taken out by the next big asteroid, or the next supervolcano, or something else dumb that we could easily prevent with more tech, right? And if we want life to flourish throughout the cosmos, AI is the key to it. As I mentioned in a lot of detail in my book, right there, even many of the most inspired sci-fi writers, I feel, have totally underestimated the opportunities for space travel, especially to other galaxies, because they weren't thinking about the possibility of AGI, which just makes it so much easier.

• 1:22:25Lex Fridman?

  Right, yeah. So that goes to your view of AGI that enables our progress, that enables a better life. So that's a beautiful, that's a beautiful way to put it, and it's something to strive for. So Max, thank you so much. Thank you for your time today. It's been awesome.

• 1:22:41Max Tegmark?

  Thank you so much.

• 1:22:42Lex Fridman?

  Thanks.

• 1:22:42Max Tegmark?

  Pasibo boshroy.