#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe

Lee Cronin is a chemist at University of Glasgow. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: – NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/lex to get free product tour – BetterHelp: https://betterhelp.com/lex to get 10% off – Shopify: https://shopify.com/lex to get $1 per month trial – Eight Sleep: https://www.eightsleep.com/lex to get special savings – AG1: https://drinkag1.com/lex to get 1 month supply of fish oil Transcript: https://lexfridman.com/lee-cronin-3-transcript EPISODE LINKS: Lee’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/leecronin Lee’s Website: https://www.chem.gla.ac.uk/cronin/ Nature Paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06600-9 Chemify’s Website: https://chemify.io PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: – Check out the sponsors above, it’s the best way to support this podcast – Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman – Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman – Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman – LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman – Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman – Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) – Introduction (09:37) – Assembly theory paper (30:06) – Assembly equation (43:19) – Discovering alien life (1:01:38) – Evolution of life on Earth (1:09:34) – Response to criticism (1:27:12) – Kolmogorov complexity (1:39:02) – Nature review process (1:59:56) – Time and free will (2:06:21) – Communication with aliens (2:28:19) – Cellular automata (2:32:48) – AGI (2:49:36) – Nuclear weapons (2:55:22) – Chem Machina (3:08:16) – GPT for electron density (3:17:46) – God

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

• 0:00Lex Fridman?

  The following is a conversation with Lee Cronin, his third time on this podcast. He is a chemist from University of Glasgow, who is one of the most fascinating, brilliant, and fun to talk to scientists I've ever had the pleasure of getting to know.

• 0:15Lex Fridman?

  And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We've got NetSuite for business management software, BetterHelp for mental health, Shopify for e-commerce, Aidslee for naps, and AG1 for delicious, delicious health. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team, or if you're always hiring, go to lexfridman.com/hiring. You can also get in touch with me if you go to lexfridman.com/contact. There's so many more things I could say. Let me just keep going. Now, on to the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you must skip them, friends, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will, too.

• 0:59Lex Fridman?

  This show is brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system. I usually do these ad reads and say whatever the heck I want, but sometimes the sponsors ask politely, never required, but always politely, to mention a few things. Two things they asked me to mention. One is that NetSuite turned 25 years old this year. Congratulations. Happy birthday, NetSuite. And also, they want me to mention that 37,000 companies have upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle. 37,000 companies. I wonder how many companies are out there? Isn't that amazing? Just companies are amazing.

• 1:41Lex Fridman?

  A small, a medium, a large collection of humans get together, much as we did in the caveman days around the fire, but here on the office, and tied together with a mission to do something, to build something, but do so under the immense pressures of the capitalist system. Like you have to succeed. It's not zero sum, but it is a kind of game where there's competitors and you're always attention, but also a little bit of a collaboration. It's a dance and it's just a beautiful thing. A dance of humans inside the company, a dance of companies in the big capitalist system that are also interacting with the full human civilization, society.

• 2:24Lex Fridman?

  So it's a dance of humans and companies selling stuff, buying stuff, creating stuff. It's just all beautiful. Anyway, if you're one of those companies, you should use good tools to manage all of the stuff. And NetSuite is one such a good tool. You can download NetSuite's popular KPI checklist for free at netsuite.com/lex. That's netsuite.com/lex for your own KPI checklist. This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H E L P, help. I think whenever I mention BetterHelp, I have a lot of thoughts in my head. One of them is I believe a BetterHelp ad read that Tim Dillon has done.

• 3:07Lex Fridman?

  I think it goes on, if I remember correctly, for a very long period of time. And Tim Dillon is hilarious. So what can you say? But also there's a meta ironic absurd hilarious aspect to, of all people, Tim Dillon with the beautiful complexity of his mind and the beautiful complexities of his upbringing and family life, the dynamics of that, that he is doing an ad read for BetterHelp. I love it. I love it. I mean, there's an absurdity and an irony to me doing the same. But all of us need a bit of mental health assistance and BetterHelp is really good

• 3:52Lex Fridman?

  for that because it's accessible, affordable, all that kind of stuff. It's a good first step to take. And sometimes all you need is the first step. Check them out at betterhelp.com/lex and save on your first month. That's betterhelp.com/lex.

• 4:09Lex Fridman?

  This show is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store that brings your ideas to life and tools to manage day-to-day operations. Once the ideas are brought to life, ideas brought to life. That's a funny thing, given this conversation with Lee Cronin. Ideas brought to life. So we talk about the origin of life in the universe defined more generally, complexity, the emergence of complexity that forms life, the origin of life on Earth and the evolution of life as being part of the same system that integrates physics and chemistry and biology, all that kind of stuff. But ideas, ideas as organisms brought to life.

• 4:53Lex Fridman?

  It's interesting to think of ideas as organisms in the same way that all the other emergent, complex organisms come to be. It's interesting. And Shopify is a company, which is a complex organism of its own, that allows individual creators with an idea to bring their idea to life and manifest it into the physical world. So the imagination is a creative engine that starts from some kind of ethereal thing that's just inside our mind and projects out into the physical world and creates a thing, a store that can then interact with thousands, millions of people.

• 5:39Lex Fridman?

  It's fascinating. It's really fascinating to think of ideas as living organisms. Anyway, you can sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com/lex. Back to reality for Lex, all lowercase. Go to Shopify.com/lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is also brought to you by a source of a lot of happiness for me, Eight Sleep and the Pod 3 mattress. It cools the two sides of the bed separately. You can also heat them up. I don't know who does that. I do know people like that exist, but I judge them harshly. No, I like a really cold bed surface with a warm blanket for a power nap.

• 6:21Lex Fridman?

  You're talking about 15, 20 minutes or a full night's sleep. It's just heaven. It's the thing that makes me look forward to coming back home when I'm traveling. I should also mention that they currently ship to America, Canada, the UK, Australia. I need to go to Australia. I need to go to Australia and select countries in the European Union. I don't know why I just mentioned that. Again, I don't have to say anything that the sponsors asked me to say, but there was this list of countries I'm looking at and continents. And it just filled my mind with a kind of inspired energy to travel. You know, Paul Rossely has been on my case to travel with him in the Amazon.

• 7:05Lex Fridman?

  And I want to go, I want to go, I want to go. I want to turn off the devices and go with him. He's such an incredible human, such an incredible human. I'm really glad he exists. Paul is just a beautiful human being. The humor, the stories, the deep, deep gratitude and appreciation of nature, the fearlessness, but also the ability to feel fear and embrace it. And just this childlike sense of wonder. I mean, he's just such an incredible human. I'm glad he exists. As one of the people, when I think about him, just makes me happy to be alive on this earth together with folks like him. Anyway, check it out and get special savings.

• 7:50Lex Fridman?

  Well, we're talking about A sleep. Check, get special savings when you go to asleep.com/lex. This episode is also brought to you by the thing I'm drinking right now, AG1. It's a drink with a bunch of vitamins and minerals. It's basically like a delicious multivitamin, but it's green and delicious. And I think it has a lot more than any kind of multivitamin. I don't know. I don't know much in this world, friends, but I do know that a kind of peaceful feeling comes over me when I drink AG1, knowing that all the crazy stuff I'm going to do mentally or physically. I'm gonna be okay.

• 8:35Lex Fridman?

  When I have a nice cold bed where they sleep and a delicious AG1, everything's gonna be okay. So you should definitely try it. See if it's gonna give you the same kind of feeling. It is when I don't bring the travel packs. One of the things I miss when I'm traveling. To have a nice cold AG1 in the afternoon, especially after a long run. I love it. Life is beautiful, isn't it? Anyway, they'll give you a one month supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com/lex. This is the Lex Freedom Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

• 9:18Lex Fridman?

  And now, dear friends, here's Lee Cronin.

• 9:37Lex Fridman?

  So your big assembly theory paper was published in Nature. Congratulations. Thanks. It created, I think it's fair to say, a lot of controversy, but also a lot of interesting discussion. So maybe I can try to summarize assembly theory and you tell me if I'm wrong. Okay, for it. So assembly theory says that if we look at any object in the universe, any object, that we can quantify how complex it is by trying to find the number of steps it took to create it. And also, we can determine if it was built by a process akin to evolution by looking at how many copies of the object there are. Yep, that's spot on. Yep, spot on. I was not expecting that. Okay, so let's go through definitions.

• 10:25Lex Fridman?

  So there's a central equation I'd love to talk about, but definition wise, what is an object?

• 10:33Lee Cronin?

  Yeah, an object, so if I'm going to try to be as meticulous as possible, objects need to be finite and they need to be decomposable into subunits. All human made artifacts are objects. Is a planet an object? Probably yes, if you scale out. So an object is finite and countable and decomposable, I suppose mathematically. But yeah, I still, I still wake up some days and go to think to myself, what is an object? Because it's, it's, it's a non-trivial question.

• 11:12Lex Fridman?

  Persists over time. I'm quoting from the paper here. An object that's finite is distinguishable. So that's a weird adjective, distinguishable.

• 11:25Lee Cronin?

  We've had so many people offering to rewrite the paper after it came out. You wouldn't believe it's so funny.

• 11:31Lex Fridman?

  Persists over time and is breakable such that the set of constraints to construct it from elementary building blocks is quantifiable. Such that the set of constraints to construct it from elementary building blocks is quantifiable.

• 11:47Lee Cronin?

  The history is in the objects. It's kind of cool, right?

• 11:50Lex Fridman?

  So, okay, so what defines the object is its history or memory, whichever is the sexier word.

• 11:58Lee Cronin?

  I'm happy with both, depending on the day.

• 12:00Lex Fridman?

  Okay. So the set of steps it took to create the object. So there's a sense in which every object in the universe has a history.

• 12:10Lee Cronin?

  Yep.

• 12:11Lex Fridman?

  And that is part of the thing that is used to describe its complexity, how complicated it is. Okay. What is an assembly index?

• 12:21Lee Cronin?

  So the assembly index, if you're to take the object apart and be super lazy about it, or minimal, say, well, it could, you know, it's like you've got a really short term memory. So what you do is you lay all the parts on the path and you find the minimum number of steps you take on the path to add the parts together to reproduce the object. And that minimum number is the assembly index is a minimum bound. And it was always my intuition, the minimum bound in assembly theory was really important. And I only worked out why a few weeks ago, which is kind of funny because I was just like, no, this is sacrosanct. I don't know why it will come to me one day. And then when I was pushed by a bunch of mathematicians,

• 13:03Lee Cronin?

  we, we, we came up with the, the correct physical explanation, which I can get to. But it's the minimum and it's really important. It's the minimum. And the reason I knew the minimum was right is because we could measure it. So almost before this paper came out, we've, we'd published papers explain how you can measure the assembly index of molecules.

• 13:22Lex Fridman?

  Okay. So that's not so trivial to figure out. So when you look at an object, we can say a molecule, we can say object more generally, to figure out the minimum number of steps it takes to create that object. That doesn't seem like a trivial thing to do.

• 13:39Lee Cronin?

  So with molecules, it is, it's not trivial, but it is possible because what you can do, and because I'm, I'm a chemist, so I'm kind of like, I see the lens of the world through just chemistry. I break the molecule apart, break bonds. And if you break up, if you take a molecule and you break it all apart, you have a bunch of atoms. And then you say, okay, I'm going to then form bot, take the atoms and form bonds and go up the, the chain of events to make the molecule. And that's what made me realize, take a toy example, literally toy example, take a Lego object, which is broken up of Lego blocks. So you could do exactly the same thing. In this case, the Lego blocks are naturally the smallest, they're the atoms

• 14:22Lee Cronin?

  in the actual composite Lego architecture. But then if you maybe take, you know, a couple of blocks and put them together in a certain Way, maybe they have a their offset in some way. That offset is on the memory. You can use that offset again with only a penalty of one. And you can then make a square, triangle and keep going. And you remember those motifs on the chain. So you can then leap from the the start with all the Lego blocks or atoms just laid out in front of you. And say, right, I'll take you, you, you connect and do the least amount of work. So it's really like the the smallest um steps you can take on the graph to make the object. And so for molecules, it came relatively intuitively. And then we started to apply it to language.

• 15:07Lee Cronin?

  We've even started to apply it to mathematical theorems, but I'm so well out of my depth. But it looks like you can take minimum set of axioms and then start to build up kind of mathematical architectures in the same way. And then the shortest path to get there is something interesting that I don't yet understand.

• 15:23Lex Fridman?

  So what's the computational complexity of figuring out the shortest path in um with molecules, with language, with mathematical theorems? It seems like once you have the fully constructed Lego castle or whatever your favorite Lego world is, figuring out how to get there from the building, basic building blocks, isn't like a, is that an empty hard problem? It's a hard problem.

• 15:50Lee Cronin?

  It's a hard problem, but actually, if you look at it, so the best way to look at it, let's take a molecule. So if the molecule has thirteen bonds, first of all, take thirteen copies of the molecule and just cut all the bonds. So take cut twelve bonds and then you just put them in order.

• 16:03Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 16:04Lee Cronin?

  And then that's how it works. So you keep looking for symmetry or or copies. So you can then shorten it as you go down and that becomes commentorily quite hard. Um, for some natural product molecules, um, it comes very hard. It's not impossible, but we're looking at the bounds on that at the moment. But as the object gets bigger, it becomes really hard. And but that's the bad news, but the good news is there are shortcuts. And we might even be able to physically measure the complexity without computationally calculating it, which is kind of insane.

• 16:40Lex Fridman?

  Wait, how would you do that?

• 16:42Lee Cronin?

  Well, in the case of molecule, so if you shine light on a molecule, let's take it infrared. The molecule has, each of the bonds absorbs the infrared differently in what we call the fingerprint region. And so it's a bit like, and because it's quantized as well, you have all these discrete kind of absorbances. And my intuition, after we realized we could cut molecules up in mass spec, that was the first go at this. We did it with using infrared and the infrared gave us an even better correlation, assembly index, and we used another technique as well. In addition to infrared called NMR, nuclear magnetic resonance, which tells you about the number of different magnetic environments in a molecule. And that also worked out. So

• 17:24Lee Cronin?

  we have three techniques, which each of them independently gives us the same or tending towards the same assembly index for molecule that we can calculate mathematically.

• 17:34Lex Fridman?

  Okay, so these are all methods of mass spectrometry, mass spec. You scan a molecule, it gives you data in the form of a mass spectrum, and you're saying that the data correlates to the assembly index?

• 17:47Lee Cronin?

  Yeah.

• 17:48Lex Fridman?

  How generalizable is that shortcut, first of all, to chemistry, and second of all, beyond that? Because that seems like a nice hack. And you're extremely knowledgeable about various aspects of chemistry. So you can say, okay, it kind of correlates. But you know, the whole idea behind Assembly Theory paper, and perhaps why it's so controversial, is that it reaches bigger. It reaches for the bigger general theory of objects in the universe.

• 18:20Lee Cronin?

  Yeah, I'd say so. I'd agree. So I've started Assembly Theory of emoticons with my lab, believe it or not. So we take emojis.

• 18:27Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 18:28Lee Cronin?

  Pixelate them.

• 18:29Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 18:29Lee Cronin?

  And work out the assembly index of the emoji.

• 18:31Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 18:31Lee Cronin?

  And then work out how many emojis you can make on the path of emoji. So there's the uber emoji from which all other emojis emerge.

• 18:39Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 18:40Lee Cronin?

  And then you can, so you can then take a photograph and by looking at the shortest path on, or by reproducing the pixels to make the image you want, you can measure that. So then you start to be able to take spatial data. Now, there's some problems there. What is then the definition of the object? How many pixels? How do you break it down? And so we're just learning all this right now.

• 19:04Lex Fridman?

  So how do you compute this? How would you begin to compute the assembly index? Of a graphical, like, a set of pixels on a 2D plane that form a thing.

• 19:16Lee Cronin?

  So you would, first of all, determine the resolution. So then, what is your X, Y? And what are the number on the X and Y plane? And then look at the surface area. And then you take all your emojis and make sure they're all looked at the same resolution.

• 19:30Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 19:30Lee Cronin?

  And then we were basically then do the exactly the same thing we would do for cutting the bonds. You'd cut bits out of the emoji and look at the, you have a bag of pixels. So, and you would then add those pixels together to make the overall emoji.

• 19:48Lex Fridman?

  Wait, wait, but like, first of all, not every pixel's, I mean, this is at the core, sort of, machine learning, computer vision. Not every pixel is that important. And there's like macro features, there's micro features and all that kind of stuff.

• 20:02Lee Cronin?

  Exactly.

• 20:02Lex Fridman?

  What, like, you know, the eyes appear in a lot of them. The smile appears in a lot of them.

• 20:09Lee Cronin?

  So in the same way in chemistry, we assume the bond is fundamental. What we do in there here is we assume the resolution at the scale at which we do it is fundamental. And we're just working that out. And that, you're right, that will change, right? Because as you take your lens out a bit, you, it will change dramatically. But it, but it's just a new way of looking at not just compression, what we do right now in computer science and data. One big kind of, kind of misunderstanding is assembly theory is telling you about how compressed the object is. That's not right. It's a, how much information is required on a chain of events? Because the nice thing is if, when you do compression in computer science, we're wandering a bit here, but it's kind of worth wandering, I think.

• 20:54Lee Cronin?

  And you, you assume you have instantaneously access to all the information in the memory.

• 20:59Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 20:59Lee Cronin?

  In assembly theory, you say, no, you don't get access to that memory until you've done the work. And then when you've done access to that memory, you can have access, but not to the next one. And this is how in assembly theory, we talk about the four universes, the assembly universe, the assembly possible, and the assembly contingent, and then the assembly observed. And they're all, all scales in this conventorial universe.

• 21:20Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Can you explain each one of them?

• 21:22Lee Cronin?

  Yep. So the assembly universe is like anything goes, just it's just commentorial kind of explosion in everything.

• 21:29Lex Fridman?

  So that's the biggest one?

• 21:30Lee Cronin?

  That's the biggest one. It's massive.

• 21:31Lex Fridman?

  Assembly universe, assembly possible, assembly contingent, assembly observed. And on the Y axis is assembly steps in time.

• 21:42Lee Cronin?

  Yeah.

• 21:43Lex Fridman?

  And, you know, in the X axis, as the thing expands through time, more and more unique objects appear.

• 21:51Lee Cronin?

  So, yeah, so assembly universe, everything goes.

• 21:54Lex Fridman?

  Yep.

• 21:54Lee Cronin?

  Um, assembly possible laws of physics come in, in this case in chemistry bonds. In assembly, so that means.

• 22:00Lex Fridman?

  Those are actually constraints, I guess?

• 22:02Lee Cronin?

  Yes, and they're the only constraints. They're the constraints at the base. So the way to look at it, you've got all your atoms. They're quantized, you can just bung them together. So then you can become a kind of, so in the way in computer science speak, I suppose the assembly universe is just like no laws of physics. Things can fly through mountains beyond the speed of light. In, in the assembly possible, you have to apply the laws of physics, but you can get access to all the motifs instantaneously with no effort. So that means you could make anything. Then the assembly contingent says, no, you can't have access to the highly assembled object in the future until you've done the work in the past on the causal chain. And that's really, the really interesting shift where you go from assembly

• 22:46Lee Cronin?

  possible to assembly contingent. That is really the key thing in assembly theory that says you cannot just have instantaneous access to all those memories. You have to have done the work somehow. The universe has to have somehow built a, um, a system that allows you to select that path. Rather than other paths. And then the final thing, the assembly observed is basically you're saying, oh. These are the things we actually see. We can go backwards now and understand that they have been created by this causal process.

• 23:21Lex Fridman?

  Wait a minute. So when you say the universe has to construct the system that does the work, is that like the environment that allows for like selection?

• 23:30Lee Cronin?

  Yeah, yeah, yes.

• 23:31Lex Fridman?

  That's the thing that does the selection?

• 23:32Lee Cronin?

  You could think about in terms of a von Neumann constructor, first is a selection, a ribosome, a Tesla plant assembling Teslas. You know, the difference between the assembly universe in Tesla land and the Tesla factory is, everyone says, no, Teslas are just easy. They just spring out. You know how to make them. All the Tesla factory, you have to put things in sequence and out comes a Tesla.

• 23:54Lex Fridman?

  So you're talking about the factory?

• 23:55Lee Cronin?

  Yes, this is really nice. Super important point is that when I talk about the universe having a memory or there's some magic, it's not that. It's that tells you that there must be a process encoded somewhere in physical reality, be it a cell, a Tesla factory, or something else that is making that object. I'm not saying there's some kind of woo-woo memory in the universe, you know, morphic resonance or something. I'm saying that there is an actual causal process that is being directed, constrained in some way. So it's not kind of just making everything.

• 24:32Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but Lee, what's the factory? They made the factory?

• 24:38Lex Fridman?

  So what is the... So first of all, you assume the laws of physics has just sprung to existence at the beginning. Those are constraints. But what makes the factory the environment that does the selection?

• 24:51Lee Cronin?

  This is the question of... Well, it's the first interesting question that I want to answer out of four. I think the factory emerges in the interplay between the environment and the objects that are being built. And here, let me, I'll have a go at explaining to you the shortest path. So why is the shortest path important? Imagine you've got, I'm gonna have to go chemistry for a moment, then abstract it. So imagine you've got... An given environment that you have a budget of atoms, you're just flinging together.

• 25:25Lex Fridman?

  Yep.

• 25:25Lee Cronin?

  And the the objective of those atoms that are being flung together in, say, molecule A

• 25:32Lee Cronin?

  have to make, they decompose. So molecules decompose over time. So the molecules in this environment, in this magic environment, have to not die, but they do die. They have a half-life. So the only way the molecules can get through that environment out the other side, let's pretend the environment is a box, you can go in and out without dying. And there's just an infinite supply of atoms coming, or a large supply. The molecule gets built, but the molecule that is able to template itself being built

• 26:06Lee Cronin?

  and survives in the environment will basically reign supreme. Now, let's say that molecule takes 10 steps. Now, and it's using a finite set of atoms, right? Or now, let's say another molecule, smartass molecule, we'll call it, comes in.

• 26:22Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 26:23Lee Cronin?

  And can survive in that environment and can copy itself, but it only needs five steps. The molecule that only needs five steps, because both molecules are being destroyed, but they're creating themselves faster they can be destroyed. You can see that the shortest path reigns supreme. So the shortest path tells us something super interesting about the minimal amount of information required to propagate that motif in time and space.

• 26:53Lee Cronin?

  And it's just like a kind of, it seems to be like some kind of conservation law.

• 26:56Lex Fridman?

  So one of the intuitions you have is the propagation of motifs in time will be done by the things that can construct themselves in the shortest path.

• 27:08Lee Cronin?

  Yeah.

• 27:09Lex Fridman?

  So like, you can assume that most of the objects in the universe are built in the shortest, in the most efficient way.

• 27:16Lee Cronin?

  That the, so.

• 27:19Lex Fridman?

  Big leap I just took there.

• 27:20Lee Cronin?

  Yeah, no, ye- ye- ye- yes and no, because there are other things. So in the limit, yes, because you want to tell the difference between things that have required a factory to build them and just random processes. But you can find instances where the shortest path isn't taken for an individual object, an individual function. And people go, ah, that means the shortest path isn't right. And then I say, well, I don't know. I think it's right still because, so of course, because there are other driving forces. It's not just one molecule. Now, when you start to, now you start to consider two objects, you have a joint assembly space and it's not, now it's a compromise between not just making

• 28:03Lee Cronin?

  A and B in the shortest path, you want to make A and B in the shortest path, which might mean that A is slightly longer, you have a compromise. So when you see slightly more nesting in the construction, when you take a given object, that can look longer, but that's because the overall function is the object is still trying to be efficient.

• 28:23Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 28:23Lee Cronin?

  And this is still very hand wavy and maybe have no lick to stand on. But we think we're getting somewhere with that.

• 28:31Lex Fridman?

  And there's probably some parallelization.

• 28:33Lee Cronin?

  Yeah.

• 28:34Lex Fridman?

  Right? So this is all, this is not sequential. The building is, I guess.

• 28:39Lee Cronin?

  No, you're right.

• 28:39Lex Fridman?

  When you're, when you're talking about complex objects, you, you don't have to work sequentially. You can work in parallel. You can get your friends together and they can.

• 28:47Lee Cronin?

  Yeah. These, and the, the, the thing we're working on right now is how to understand these parallel processes. Now there's a, in a new thing we've introduced called assembly depth. And the sen- assembly depth can be lower than the assembly index for a molecule when they're cooperating together, because exactly this parallel processing is going on. And my team have been working this out in the last few weeks because we're looking at what compromises does nature need to make when it's making molecules in a cell? And I, I wonder if, you know, I, I'm maybe like, well, I'm always leaping out of my competence.

• 29:26Lee Cronin?

  But in economics, I'm just wondering if you could apply this in economic processes. It seems like capitalism is very good at finding the shortest path. You know, every time, and there are ludicrous things that happen because actually the cost function has been minimized. And so I keep seeing parallels everywhere where there are complex nested systems where if you give it enough time and you introduce a bit of heterogeneity, the system readjusts and finds a new shortest path. But the shortest path isn't fixed on just one molecule now. It's in the actual existence of the object over time. And that object could be a city, it could be a cell, it could be a factory. But I think we're going way beyond molecules and my competence probably should go back to molecules. But hey.

• 30:06Lex Fridman?

  All right, before we get too far, let's talk about the assembly equation. Okay, how should we do this? Now, let me just even read that part of the paper. We define assembly as the total amount of selection necessary to produce an ensemble of observed objects, quantified using equation one. The equation basically has A on one side, which is the assembly of the ensemble. And then a sum from one to N, where N is the total number of unique objects. And then there is a few variables in there that include the assembly index, the copy number, which we'll talk about.

• 30:50Lex Fridman?

  That's an interesting, I don't remember you talking about that. That's an interesting addition, and I think a powerful one. It has to do with what? That you can create pretty complex objects randomly. And in order to know that they're not random, that there's a factory involved, you need to see a bunch of them.

• 31:07Lee Cronin?

  Yeah.

• 31:08Lex Fridman?

  That's, that's the intuition there. It's an interesting intuition. And then some normalization. What else is in?

• 31:15Lee Cronin?

  In minus one, just to make sure that more than one object, one object could be a one-off and random.

• 31:20Lex Fridman?

  Yep.

• 31:21Lee Cronin?

  And then you have more than one identical object. That's interesting.

• 31:24Lex Fridman?

  When there's, when there's two of a thing.

• 31:26Lee Cronin?

  Two of a thing is super important, especially if the index, assembly index is high.

• 31:31Lex Fridman?

  So we could say several questions here. One, let's talk about selection. What is this term selection? What is this term evolution that we're referring to? Which, which aspect of Darwinian evolution are we referring to that's interesting here?

• 31:45Lee Cronin?

  So.

• 31:48Lee Cronin?

  Yeah, so this is probably what, you know, the paper, we should talk about the paper a second. The paper did, what it did is it kind of annoyed, um, we didn't know, I mean, it got intention. And obviously angry people, the angry people were annoyed.

• 32:01Lex Fridman?

  There's angry people in the world. That's good.

• 32:03Lee Cronin?

  So what happened is evolutionary biologists got angry. We were not expecting that because we thought evolutionary biology would be cool. I knew that some, not many computational complexity people would get angry because I've kind of been poking them. And maybe I deserved it, but I was trying to poke them in a productive way. And then the physicists kind of got grumpy because the initial conditions tell everything. The prebiotic chemists got slightly grumpy because there's not enough chemistry in there. And then finally, when the creationists said it wasn't creationist enough, I was like, I've done my job.

• 32:34Lex Fridman?

  The physi-, well, you say in the physics, they say, because you're basically saying that physics is not enough to tell the story of how biology emerges.

• 32:43Lee Cronin?

  I think so.

• 32:44Lex Fridman?

  And then they said, a few physics is the beginning and the end of the story.

• 32:50Lee Cronin?

  Yeah. So what happened is the reason why people put the phone down on the call of the paper. If you, if you view the, reading the paper like a phone call, they got to the abstract.

• 32:59Lex Fridman?

  Yep.

• 32:59Lee Cronin?

  And in the abstract, it's-

• 33:01Lex Fridman?

  Her sentence is pretty strong.

• 33:02Lee Cronin?

  The first two sentences caused everybody-

• 33:04Lex Fridman?

  Scientists have grappled with reconciling biological evolution with the immutable laws of the universe defined by physics.

• 33:12Lee Cronin?

  True, right? There's nothing wrong with that statement. Totally true.

• 33:17Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. These laws underpin life's origin, evolution and the development of human culture and technology. Yet they do not predict the emergence of these phenomena. Wow. First of all, we should say the title of the paper, this is paper was accepted and published in Nature. The title is Assembly Theory Explains and Quantifies Selection and Evolution, very humble title. And, and the, the entirety of the paper, I think, presents interesting ideas, but reaches high.

• 33:48Lee Cronin?

  I am not-

• 33:51Lee Cronin?

  I would do it all again. This paper was actually on the pre-print server for over a year.

• 33:55Lex Fridman?

  You regret nothing.

• 33:56Lee Cronin?

  Yeah, I, I, I think, yeah, I don't regret anything.

• 33:58Lex Fridman?

  You and Frank Sinatra did it your way.

• 34:01Lee Cronin?

  What I love about being a scientist is kind of sometimes I'm, because I'm a bit dim, I'm like, and I don't understand what people are telling me. I want to get to the point. This paper says, hey, laws of physics are really cool. The universe is great. But they don't really, it's not intuitive that you just run the standard model and get life out. I think most physicists might go, yeah, there's, this, you know, it's not just, we can't just go back and say that's what happened because physics can't explain the origin of life. Yet, that doesn't mean it won't or can't. Okay. Just to be clear. Sorry, intelligent designers. We are going to get there.

• 34:38Lee Cronin?

  Second point, we say that evolution works, but we don't know how evolution got going. So biological evolution and biological selection. So for me, this seems like a simple continuum. So when I mentioned selection and evolution in the title, I think, and in the abstract, we should have maybe prefaced that and said, non-biological selection and non-biological evolution.

• 35:00Lex Fridman?

  Sure.

• 35:01Lee Cronin?

  And then that might have made it even more crystal clear, but I didn't think that biology, evolutionary biology should be so bold to claim ownership of selection and evolution. And secondly, a lot of evolutionary biologists seem to dismiss the origin of life question as, say, as obvious. And, and that causes a real problem scientifically because when two different, when the physicists are like, we own the universe, universe is good, we explain all of it, look at us. And even biologists say we can explain biology and the poor chemist in the, in the, in the middle going, but hang on.

• 35:34Lee Cronin?

  And this paper kind of says, hey, there is an interesting

• 35:40Lee Cronin?

  disconnect between physics and biology. And that's at the point at which memories get made in chemistry through bonds. And hey, let's look at this closeness if we can quantify it. So, yeah, I mean, I never expected the paper to, to, to kind of get that much interest. And still, I mean, it's only been published just over a month ago now.

• 35:59Lex Fridman?

  So just to linger on the selection. What is the? Broader sense of what selection means.

• 36:08Lee Cronin?

  Yeah, that's really good for selection. Selection. So I think for selection, you need. So this is where for me, the concept of an object is something that can persist in time and not die, but basically can be broken up. So if I was going to kind of bolster the definition of an object. So, so if, and if something can form and persist for a long period of time under an existent environment that could destroy other, and I'm going to use anthropomorphic terms, I apologize, that weaker objects or less robust, then the environment could have selected that.

• 36:52Lee Cronin?

  So good chemistry examples, if you took some carbon and you made a chain of carbon atoms. Whereas if you took some, I don't know, some carbon, nitrogen and oxygen and made chains from those, you start to get different reactions and rearrangements. So a carb, a chain of carbon atoms might be more resistant to falling apart under acidic or basic conditions versus another set of molecules. So it survives in that environment. So the acid pond, the molecule, the molecule, the resistant molecule can get through. And, and then, then that molecule goes into another environment. So that environment now maybe being an acid pond is a basic pond, or maybe it's an oxidizing pond.

• 37:36Lee Cronin?

  And so if you've got carbon and it goes in oxidizing pond, maybe the carbon starts to oxidize and break apart. So you go through all these kind of obstacle courses, if you like, given by reality. So selection is the ability happens when object survives in the environment for some time. But, and this is the thing that's super.

• 37:59Lee Cronin?

  Subtle, the object has to be continually being destroyed and made by process. So it's not just about the process, the object now is about the process and time that makes it. Because a rock could just stand on the mountainside for four billion years and nothing happened to it. And that's not necessarily really advanced selection. So for selection to get really interesting, you need to have a turnover in time. You need to be continually creating objects, producing them, what we call discovery time. So there's a discovery time for an object. When that object is discovered, if it's a molecule that can then act on itself, or the chain of events that caused itself to bolster its formation, then you go from discovery time to production time. And suddenly you have more of it in the universe.

• 38:44Lee Cronin?

  So it could be a self-replicating molecule. And the interaction of the molecule in the environment, in the warm little pond, or in the sea, or wherever, in the bubble, could then start to build a proto-factory, the environment. So really, to answer your question, what the factory is, the factory is the environment, but it's not very autonomous, it's not very redundant. There's lots of things that could go wrong. So once you get high enough up the hierarchy of networks of interactions, something needs to happen that needs to be compressed into a smaller volume and made resistant, robust. Because in biology, selection and evolution is robust. You have error correction built in. You have really, you know, there's good ways of basically making sure propagation goes on.

• 39:29Lee Cronin?

  So really, the difference between inorganic, abiotic selection and evolution, and evolution and stuff in biology is robustness.

• 39:39Lee Cronin?

  The ability to propagate over, in, the ability to survive in lots of different environments. Whereas our poor little inorganic sole molecule, whatever, just dies in lots of different environments. So there's something super special that happens from the inorganic molecule in the environment that kills it, to where you've got evolution and cells can survive everywhere.

• 40:06Lex Fridman?

  How special is that? How do you know those kinds of evolution factors are everywhere in the universe?

• 40:12Lee Cronin?

  I, I don't. And I'm excited because I think selection isn't special at all. I think what is special is the history of the environments on Earth that gave rise to the first cell that now has, you know, has taken all those environments and is now more autonomous. And I would like to think that, you know, this paper could be very wrong. But I don't think it's very wrong. I mean, it's certainly wrong, but it's less wrong than some other ideas, I hope. Right? And if this allow inspires us to go and look for selection in the universe, because we now have an equation where we can say, we can look for selection going on and say,

• 40:56Lee Cronin?

  oh, that's interesting. We seem to have a process that's giving us high copy number objects that also are highly complex, but that doesn't look like life as we know it. And we use that and say, oh, there's a hydrothermal vent. Oh, there's a process going on. There's molecular networks because the assembly equation is not only meant to identify at the higher end, advanced selection, what you get, I would call in biology, you super advanced selection. And even, I mean, you could use the assembly equation to look for technology and God forbid, we could talk about consciousness and abstraction, but let's keep it primitive, molecules and biology. So I think the real power of the assembly equation is to, is to say how much selection

• 41:40Lee Cronin?

  is going on in this space. And there's, there's a really simple thought experiment I could do is you, you know, have a little petri dish and on that petri dish, you put some simple food. So the assembly index of all the sugars and everything is quite low. So then, and you put a single cell of E. coli cell. And then you say, I'm gonna, I'm gonna measure the assembly in this amount of assembly in the box. So it's quite low, but.

• 42:06Lee Cronin?

  The rate of change of assembly, D A D T, will go vum sigmoidl as it eats all the food. And the number of E. coli cells will replicate because they take all the food. They copy themselves, the assembly index of all the molecules goes up, up, up and up until the food is exhausted in the box. So now the E. coli's stop, I mean, die is probably a strong word. They stop respiring because all the food is gone. But suddenly, the amount of assembly in the box has gone up gigantically because of that one E. coli factory has just eaten through, milled lots of other E. coli factories, run out of food and stopped. And so that, looking at that, so in the initial box, although the amount of assembly was really small, it was able to replicate and use all the food and go up.

• 42:51Lee Cronin?

  And that's what we're trying to do in the lab, actually, is kind of make those kind of experiments and see if we can spot the emergence of molecular networks that are producing complexity as we feed in raw materials and we feed a challenge, an environment. You know, we try and kill the molecules. And really, that's the main kind of idea for the entire paper.

• 43:14Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, and see if you can measure the changes in the assembly index throughout the whole system. Okay, what about, if I show up to a new planet, we go to Mars or some other planet from a different solar system, and how do we use assembly index there to discover alien life?

• 43:32Lee Cronin?

  In, very simply, actually, if we, let's say we'll go to Mars with a mass spectrometer with a sufficiently high resolution. So what you have to be able to do, so a good thing about mass spec is that you can select a molecule from the mass, and then if it's high enough resolution, you can be more and more sure that you're just seeing identical copies, you can count them. And then you fragment them and you count the number of fragments and look at the molecular weight. And the higher the molecular weight and the higher the number of fragments, the higher the assembly index. So if you go to Mars and you take a mass spec with a high enough resolution and you can find molecules, and I'll give a guide on Earth, if you could find molecules, say,

• 44:14Lee Cronin?

  greater than 350 molecular weight with more than 15 fragments, you have found artifacts that can only be produced, at least on Earth, by life. Now you would say, oh, maybe the geological process. I would argue very vehemently that that is not the case. But we can say, look, if you don't like the cutoff on earth, go up higher, thirty, a hundred, right? Because there's going to be a point where you'll find a molecule with so many different parts. The chances of you getting a molecule that has a hundred different parts and finding a million identical copies, you know, that's just impossible. That could never happen in an infinite set of universes.

• 44:59Lex Fridman?

  Can you just linger on this copy number thing? A million different copies.

• 45:06Lex Fridman?

  What do you mean by copies? And why is the number of copies important?

• 45:11Lee Cronin?

  Yeah, that was so interesting. And I always understood the copy number is really important, but I never explained it properly for ages. And I kept having this. It goes back to this. If I give you a, I don't know, a really complicated molecule, and I say it's complicated, you could say, hey, that's really complicated. But is it just really random? And so I realized that ultimate randomness and ultimate complexity are indistinguishable until you can see a structure in the randomness. So you can see copies.

• 45:48Lex Fridman?

  So copies implies structure?

• 45:53Lee Cronin?

  Yeah.

• 45:55Lee Cronin?

  The factory.

• 45:55Lex Fridman?

  I mean, there's a deep, profound thing in there. Because if you just have a random

• 46:03Lex Fridman?

  random process, you're going to get a lot of complex, beautiful, sophisticated things. What makes them

• 46:12Lex Fridman?

  complex in the way we think life is complex? Or, yeah, something like a factory that's operating under a selection process. There should be copies. Is there like some looseness about copies? Like?

• 46:26Lex Fridman?

  What does it mean for two objects to be equal?

• 46:28Lee Cronin?

  It's all to do with the telescope or the microscope you're using. And so at the maximum resolution, so in the nice thing about the nice thing about chemists is they have this concept of the molecule and they're all familiar with a molecule. And molecules you can hold, you know, in your hand, lots of them, identical copies. A molecule is actually a super important thing in chemistry to say, look, you can have a mole of a molecule, an Avogadro's number of molecules, and they're identical. What does that mean? That means that the molecular composition, the bonding and so on, the configuration is all is indistinguishable. You can hold them together. You can overlay them. So the way I do it is if I say, here's a bag of 10 identical molecules. Let's prove they're identical.

• 47:11Lee Cronin?

  You pick one out of the out of the bag and you basically observe it using some technique. And then you put it, you take it away and then you take another one out. If you observe it using technique, you see no differences. They're identical. It's really interesting to get right because if you take, say, two molecules, molecules can be in different vibrational rotational states. They're moving all the time. So with this respect, identical molecules have identical bonding. In this case, we don't even talk about chirality because we don't have a chirality detector. So two identical molecules in one conception, assembly theory, basically considers both hands as being the same. But of but of course, they're not. They're different. As soon as you have a chiral distinguisher, detect detect the left and the right hand, they become different.

• 47:56Lee Cronin?

  And so it's to do with the detection system that you have and the resolution.

• 48:01Lex Fridman?

  So I wonder if there's an art and science to the which detection system is used when you show up to a new planet?

• 48:10Lee Cronin?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 48:11Lex Fridman?

  So like you're talking about chemistry a lot today. We have kind of standardized detection systems, right? Of how to compare molecules. So, you know, when you start to talk about emojis and language and mathematical theorems and

• 48:29Lex Fridman?

  I don't know, more sophisticated things at a different scale, at a smaller scale than molecules, at a larger scale than molecules. Like what detection? Like if if we look at the difference in you and me, Lex and Lee, are we the same? Are we different?

• 48:46Lee Cronin?

  Sure, I mean, of course, we're different close up. But if you zoom out a little bit, we'll morphologically look the same.

• 48:52Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 48:52Lee Cronin?

  Nor nor, you know, height and characteristics, hair length, stuff like that.

• 48:57Lex Fridman?

  Well, also like the species and.

• 48:59Lee Cronin?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 49:00Lex Fridman?

  And and also, there's a sense why we're both from Earth.

• 49:04Lee Cronin?

  Yeah, I I agree. I mean, this is the power of assembly theory in that regard that you if if you so if everything so the way to look at it, if you have a box of objects, if they're all if they're all indistinguishable,

• 49:19Lee Cronin?

  then using your technique, you then you what you then do is you then look at the assembly index. Now, if the assembly index of them is really low, right, and they're all they're all indistinguishable, then you've then it's telling you that you have to go to another resolution. So that would be, you know, it's kind of a sliding scale. It's kind of nice.

• 49:37Lex Fridman?

  So you got it. So those two kind of are attention with each other.

• 49:40Lee Cronin?

  Yeah.

• 49:40Lex Fridman?

  The the number of copies and the assembly index.

• 49:42Lee Cronin?

  Yeah.

• 49:44Lex Fridman?

  That's really, really interesting. So, OK, so you show up to a new planet, you'll be doing what?

• 49:50Lee Cronin?

  I would do mass spec, I would bring.

• 49:52Lex Fridman?

  On a sample of what? Like, first of all, like, how big of a scoop do you take? Did you just take a scoop? Like, what? Like, uh, so we're looking for primitive life.

• 50:03Lee Cronin?

  I would I would look, yeah. So if we're just going to Mars or Titan or Enceladus or somewhere. So a number of ways of doing it. So you could take a large scoop or you go for the atmosphere and detect stuff. So and you could make a li- um, a life meter, right? So, um, one of Sarah's colleagues at ASU, Paul Davies, keeps calling it a life meter, a life meter, which is quite a nice idea because you think about it. If you've got a living system that's producing these highly complex molecules and they drift away and they're in a highly kind of. Demanding environment, they could be burnt, right? So they could just be falling apart. So you want to sniff a little bit of complexity and say warmer, warmer, warmer.

• 50:48Lee Cronin?

  Oh, we've found life. We've found the alien. We've found, we've found the alien Elon Musk smoking a joint in the bottom of the cave on Mars. Or Elon himself, whatever, right? You say, okay, found it. So what you can do is a mass spectrometer.

• 51:01Lee Cronin?

  You could just look for things in the gas phase. Or you go on the surface, drill down, because you want to find molecules that are, you've either got to find the source, living system, because the problem with just looking for complexity is it gets burnt away. So in a harsh environment on, on, on, say, on the surface of Mars, there's a very low probability that you're going to find really complex molecules because of all the radiation and so on. If you drill down a little bit, you could drill down a bit into, into soil that's billions of years old. Then I would put in some solvent, water, alcohol or something, or take a scoop, put it, make it volatile, put it into the mass spectrometer and just try and detect

• 51:45Lee Cronin?

  high complexity, high abundant molecules. And if you get them, hey presto, you can have evidence of life.

• 51:52Lee Cronin?

  Wouldn't that then be great if you could say, okay, we've found evidence of life. Now we want to keep, keep the life meter, keep searching for more and more complexity until you actually find living cells. You can get those new living cells and then, and then you could bring them back to earth or you could try and sequence them. You could see that they have different DNA and proteins.

• 52:10Lex Fridman?

  Go along the gradient of the life meter. How would you build a life meter? Let's say we're together, starting a new company, launching a life meter.

• 52:18Lee Cronin?

  Mass spectrometer would be the first way of doing it.

• 52:20Lex Fridman?

  No, no, but that's, that's, that's one of the major components of it. But I'm talking about like, if it's a device, we've got it and branding logo, we've got to talk about that. That's later. But what's the input? What's the, like, how do you get to the, a metered output?

• 52:37Lee Cronin?

  So I would, I would take a life, so my, my life meter, our life meter.

• 52:42Lex Fridman?

  Thank you.

• 52:43Lee Cronin?

  Yeah, you're welcome.

• 52:47Lee Cronin?

  Would have both infrared and mass spec, so it would have two ports, so it could shine a light. And so what it would do is you would have a vacuum chamber and you would have an electrostatic analyzer and you'd have a monochromator to producing infrared. You'd add the some, so you'd take a scoop of the sample, put it in the life meter, it would then add a solvent or heat up the sample. So some volatiles come off. The volatiles would then be put into the into the mass spectrum, into electrostatic trap, and you'd weigh the molecules and fragment them. Alternatively, you'd shine infrared light on them, you'd count the number of bands, but you'd have to, in that case, do some separation because you want to separate. And so in mass spec, it's really nice and convenient because you can separate electrostatically,

• 53:31Lee Cronin?

  but you need to have that.

• 53:33Lex Fridman?

  Can you do it in real time?

• 53:35Lee Cronin?

  Yeah, pretty much. Pretty much. Yeah. So let's go all the way back. So this, okay, we're really going to get this. The Lex's life meat, Lex and Lee's.

• 53:43Lex Fridman?

  No, no, Lex and Lee. It's a good, good ring to it.

• 53:47Lee Cronin?

  All right. So you have a, you have a vacuum chamber, you have a little nose, the nose would have some, a packing material. So you would take your, your sample, add it onto the nose, add a solvent or a gas, it would then be sucked up the nose, and that would be separated using chrom, what we call chromatography. And then as each band comes off the nose, we would then do mass spec and infrared. And in the, in the case of the infrared, count the number of bands, in the case of the mass spec, count the number of fragments and weigh it. And then the further up in molecular weight range for the mass spec and the number of bands, you go up and up and up from the, you know, dead, interesting, interesting, over the threshold, oh my gosh, Earth life. And then right up to batshit crazy, this is

• 54:32Lee Cronin?

  definitely, you know, alien intelligence that's made this life, right? You could almost go all the way there. Same in the infrared. And it's pretty simple. The thing that is really problematical is that for many years, decades.

• 54:47Lee Cronin?

  What people have done, and I can't blame them, is they've rather they've been obsessing about small biomarkers on that we find on Earth, amino acids, like single amino acids, or evidence of small molecules and these things, and looking for those rather than looking for complexity. The beautiful thing about this is you can look for complexity without Earth chemistry bias or Earth biology bias. So, assembly theory is just a way of saying, hey, complexity and abundance is evidence of selection. That's how our universal life meter will work.

• 55:20Lex Fridman?

  Complexity in abundance is evidence of selection. Okay, so let's apply our life meter to Earth. So, what, you know, if we were just to apply Assembly Index measurements to Earth, what kind of stuff are going to be get, are going to get, what's impressive about some of the complexity on Earth?

• 55:50Lee Cronin?

  So, we did this a few years ago, in that when I was trying to convince NASA and colleagues that this technique could work. And honestly, it's so funny, because everyone's like, no, it ain't gonna work. And I was just like, because the chemist was saying, of course, there are complicated molecules out there you can detect that just form randomly. I was like, really? That's like, that was like, you know, it's a bit like a, I don't know, someone saying, of course, Darwin textbook was just written randomly by some monkeys in a typewriter. It was just for me, it was like, really? And I pushed a lot on the chemist now, and I think most of them are on board, but not totally. I really had some big arguments, but the copy number caught there, because I think I confused

• 56:32Lee Cronin?

  the chemist by saying one off. And then when I made clear about the copy number, I think that made it a little bit easier.

• 56:37Lex Fridman?

  Just to clarify, a chemist might say that, of course, out there outside of Earth, there's complex molecules.

• 56:45Lee Cronin?

  Yes.

• 56:46Lex Fridman?

  Okay. And then you're saying, wait a minute, that's like saying, of course, there's aliens out there.

• 56:52Lee Cronin?

  Yeah, exactly that.

• 56:54Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 56:54Lee Cronin?

  Exactly.

• 56:55Lex Fridman?

  But you're saying, you clarified that.

• 56:59Lex Fridman?

  That's actually a very interesting question, and we should be looking for complex molecules of which the copy number is two or greater.

• 57:07Lee Cronin?

  Yeah, exactly. So on Earth, so coming back to Earth, what we did is we took a whole bunch of samples, and we were running prebiotic chemistry experiments in the lab. We took various inorganic minerals and extracted them. Look at the volatile, because there's a special way of treating minerals and polymers in assembly theory. Where what in this, in our life machine, we're looking at molecules. We don't care about polymers because they don't, they're not volatile, you can't hold them, they're not, how, how can you make, if you can't discern that they're identical, then it's very difficult for you to, to, to work out if this undergone selection or they're just a random mess. Same with some minerals, but we can come back to that. So basically, what

• 57:51Lee Cronin?

  you do, we got a whole load of samples, inorganic ones, we got a load of, we got Scotch whisky, and also got, took Ardbeg, which is one of my favorite whiskies, which is very peaty, and another whisky.

• 58:03Lex Fridman?

  What does peaty mean?

• 58:04Lee Cronin?

  Is like, so the way that on, on, in Scotland, in Isla, which is Little Island, the, the, the Scotch, the Scotch, the whisky is let to mature in barrels, and the, the, it's said that the peat, you know, the, the, the, the complex molecules in the peat might find their way through into the whisky, and that's what gives it this intense brown color and really complex flavor. It's literally molecular complexity that does that. And so, you know, vodka is the complete opposite, it's just pure, right?

• 58:38Lex Fridman?

  The better the whisky, the higher the assembly index? The higher the assembly index, the better the whisky?

• 58:42Lee Cronin?

  That's what, I mean, I really love deep peaty Scottish whiskies. Near my house, there is a, one of the Lowland distilleries called Glen Goin, it's still beautiful whisky, but not as complex. So for fun, I took some Glen Goin whisky in our bag and put them into the mass spec and measured the assembly index. I also got E. coli, so the way we do it, take the E. coli, break the cell apart, take it all apart, and also got some beer. And, and people were ridiculing us, saying, oh, beer is evidence of complexity. One of the, one of the computational complexity people was just throwing.

• 59:20Lee Cronin?

  Yeah, we kind of, kind of is very vigorous in his disagreement of assembly theory was just saying, you know, you don't know what you're doing, even beer is more complicated than human. We didn't realize is that it's not beer per se, it's taking the yeast extract, taking the extract, breaking the cells, extracting the molecules and just looking at the profile of the molecules, see if there's anything over the threshold. And we also put in a really complex molecule taxol. So we took all of these, but also NASA gave us, I think, five samples. And they wouldn't tell us what they are. They said, no, we don't believe you're going to get this to work. And they really, you know, they gave us some super complex samples. And they gave us two fossils, one that was a million years old and one was at 10,000 years old.

• 1:00:04Lee Cronin?

  Something from Antarctica, seabed. They gave us a Murchison meteorite and a few others. Put them through the system. So I, we, we took all the samples, treated them all identically, put them into mass spec, fragmented them, counted, and in this case, implicit in the measurement was we, you, in mass spec, you only detect peaks when you've got more than, say, let's say 10,000 identical molecules. So the copy number is already baked in, but wasn't quantified, which is super important there. This is in the first paper, because I was like, it's abundant, of course.

• 1:00:39Lee Cronin?

  And when you then took it all out, we found that the biological samples gave you molecules that had an assembly index greater than 15. And all the Abatic samples were less than 15. And then we took the NASA samples and we looked at the ones that were more than 15, less than 15. And we gave them back to NASA and they're like, oh, gosh, yep, dead, living, dead, living. You got it. And, and that's what we found on Earth.

• 1:01:06Lex Fridman?

  That's a success.

• 1:01:07Lee Cronin?

  Yeah, oh yeah, resounding success.

• 1:01:10Lex Fridman?

  Can you, can you just go back to the beer and the E. coli? So what's the assembly index on those?

• 1:01:16Lee Cronin?

  So what you were able to do is like the Assembly Index of we found high Assembly Index molecules originating from the beer sample and the E. coli sample. So I mean, I didn't know which one was higher. We wouldn't really do any detail there because now we are doing that because one of the things we've done, it's a secret, but I can tell you.

• 1:01:45Lex Fridman?

  No, nobody's listening.

• 1:01:47Lee Cronin?

  Well, is that we've just mapped the Tree of Life using assembly theory because everyone said, oh, that you can't do it from biology. And what we were able to do is so you, I think there's three ways, well, two ways of doing Tree of Life, well, three ways, actually.

• 1:01:59Lex Fridman?

  What's the Tree of Life?

• 1:02:00Lee Cronin?

  So the Tree of Life is basically tracing back the history of life on Earth for all the different species, going back what, who evolved from what. And it all goes all the way back to the first kind of life forms and they branch off. And like you have plant kingdom, the animal kingdom, the fungi kingdom, you know, and different, and different branches all the way up. And the way this was classically done, and I'm no evolutionary biologist, evolutionary biologist, very, tell me every day, at least 10 times. I want to be one, though. I kind of like biology. It's kind of cool.

• 1:02:34Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's very cool.

• 1:02:35Lee Cronin?

  But basically, what Darwin and Mendeleev and all these people do is just they draw pictures, right? And they tax it. They just, they were able to draw pictures and say, and say, oh, these look like common classes.

• 1:02:48Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:48Lee Cronin?

  Then.

• 1:02:51Lex Fridman?

  They're artists, really. They're just, you know.

• 1:02:53Lee Cronin?

  But they're, but they're, they were able to find out a lot, right? And looking at verberates, inverberates, camera and explosion, all this stuff. And then, then came the genomic revolution. And suddenly everyone used gene sequencing. And Craig Venter is a good example. I think he's gone around the world in his yacht, just taking up samples, looking for new species, where he's just found new species of life just from sequencing. It's amazing. So you have taxonomy, you have sequencing, and then you can also do a little bit of kind of molecular kind of archaeology, like, you know, measure the samples and and kind of form some inference. What we did is we were able to fingerprint, so we took a load

• 1:03:35Lee Cronin?

  of random samples from all of biology, and we use mass spectrometry. And what we did now is not just look for individual molecules, but we looked for coexisting molecules, where they had to look at their joint assembly space, and where we were able to cut them apart and undergo recursion in the mass spec and infer some relationships, and were able to recapitulate the tree of life using mass spectroscopy. No sequencing and no drawing.

• 1:04:01Lex Fridman?

  All right. Can you try to say that again with a little more detail? So recreating, what does it take to recreate the tree of life? What does the reverse engineering process look like here?

• 1:04:14Lee Cronin?

  So what you do is you take an unknown sample, you pump it into the mass spec, you get a, because this comes from what you're asking, like, what do you see in E. coli? And so in E. coli, you don't just see, it's not, it's not, it's not that the most sophisticated cells on on Earth make the most sophisticated molecules. It is the coexistence of lots of complex molecules above a threshold. And so what we realized is you could fingerprint different life forms. So fungi make really complicated molecules. Why? Because they can't move. They have to make everything on site. Whereas, you know, some animals are like lazy. They can just go eat the fungi. They don't need to make very much. And I, and so what you do is you look at the, so you take, I don't know, the fingerprint, maybe

• 1:04:59Lee Cronin?

  the top number of high molecular weight molecules you find in the sample, you fragment them to get their assembly indices. And then what you can do is you can infer common origins of molecules. You can do a kind of molecular.

• 1:05:16Lee Cronin?

  When the reverse engineering of the assembly space, you can infer common roots and look at what's called the joint assembly space. But let's translate that into the experiment. Take a sample, bang it in the mass spec, take the top, say, 10 molecules, fragment them, and then, and that gives you one fingerprint. Then you do it for another sample, you get another fingerprint. Now, the question is, you say, hey, are these samples the same or different? And that's what we've been able to do. And by basically looking at the assembly space that these molecules create, without any knowledge of assembly theory, you are unable to do it. With a knowledge of assembly theory, you can reconstruct the tree.

• 1:05:57Lex Fridman?

  How does, how does knowing if they're the same or different give you the tree?

• 1:06:00Lee Cronin?

  Let's go to two leaves on different branches on the tree, right? What you can do by counting the number of differences, you can estimate how far away their origin was.

• 1:06:10Lex Fridman?

  Got it.

• 1:06:11Lee Cronin?

  And that's all we do. And it just works. But when we realized you could even use assembly theory to recapitulate the tree of life with no gene sequencing, we were like, huh?

• 1:06:19Lex Fridman?

  So this, this is looking at samples that exist today in the world. What about like, things that are no longer exist? I mean, the tree contains information about the past.

• 1:06:30Lee Cronin?

  I would.

• 1:06:31Lex Fridman?

  Some of it is gone.

• 1:06:32Lee Cronin?

  Yeah, absolutely. I would love to get old fossil samples and apply assembly theory, mass spec, and see if we can find new forms of life that have, that are no longer amenable to gene sequencing because the DNA is all gone. Because DNA, DNA and RNA is quite unstable, but some of them were complex molecules, might be there, might give you a hint, something new. Or wouldn't it be great if you, if you find a sample that's worth really persevering and doing, you know, doing the proper extraction to re, to, you know, PCR and so on, and then sequence it and then put it together.

• 1:07:08Lex Fridman?

  So when a thing dies, you can still get some information about its complexity?

• 1:07:12Lee Cronin?

  Yeah. And we can, and it appears that you can do some dating. Now, there are really good techniques. There's radiocarbon dating, there is longer dating, go and looking at radioactive minerals and so on. And you can also, in bone, you can look at the. What happens in after something dies is the you get what's called rastomization, where the chirality in the polymers basically changes and you just get you get decomposition. And the rate of the deviation from the pure enantima to the mixture, you can have a time you gives you a time, time scale on it, half-life.

• 1:07:57Lee Cronin?

  So you can date when it died. I want to use assembly theory to see if I can date, use it, date death and things and, and trace the tree of life and also decomposition of molecules.

• 1:08:07Lex Fridman?

  You think it's possible?

• 1:08:08Lee Cronin?

  Oh, yeah, without doubt. It may not be better than what, because like the, I was just at a conference where some brilliant people were looking at isotope enrichment and, and looking at how life enriches isotopes. And they're really sophisticated stuff that they're doing. But I think there's some fun to be had there because it gives you another dimension of dating. How old is this molecule? In terms of, or more importantly, how long ago was this molecule produced by life? The more complex a molecule, the more prospect for decomposition, oxidation, reorganization, loss of chirality and all that jazz. But what life also does is it enriches as you get older, the amount of carbon 13 in you goes up.

• 1:08:51Lee Cronin?

  Because of, because of the way the metabolite, because of the way the bonding is in, in carbon 13. So it has a slightly different strength, bond strength than you. It's called a kinetic isotope effect. So you can literally date how old you are, you know, or when you stop metabolizing. So you could date someone's death, how old they are, I think. I'm making this up, this might be right. But I think it's roughly right. The amount of carbon 13 you have in you, you can kind of estimate how, how old you are.

• 1:09:18Lex Fridman?

  How old living organs, humans are?

• 1:09:21Lee Cronin?

  Yeah, yeah, like you could say, oh, this person is 10 years old and this person 30 years old because they've been metabolizing more carbon and they've accumulated it. That's the basic idea. It's probably completely wrong time scale.

• 1:09:32Lex Fridman?

  Signatures of chemistry are fascinating. So you've been saying a lot of chemistry examples for assembly theory. What if we zoom out and look at a bigger scale of an object? You know, like really complex objects, like humans?

• 1:09:50Lex Fridman?

  Or living organisms that are made up of, you know, millions or billions of other organisms. How do you?

• 1:09:58Lex Fridman?

  Try to apply some theory to that.

• 1:10:00Lee Cronin?

  At the moment, we're with, we should be able to do this to morphology in cells. So we're looking at cell surfaces and really I'm trying to extend further. It's just that, you know, we work so hard to get this paper out and people to start discussing the ideas. And I was, but, but it's kind of funny because I think the, the penny is falling on this. So, yeah, so.

• 1:10:25Lex Fridman?

  What's that even, what, what, what's it mean for a penny?

• 1:10:27Lee Cronin?

  Oh, I mean, the, the penny's dropped, right? Cause a lot of people were like, it's rubbish, it's rubbish, you've insulted me, it's wrong. And I'm, and then, you know, I mean, the paper got published on the fourth of October. It had 2.3 million engagements on Twitter, right? And it's been downloaded over a few hundred thousand times. And someone actually said to me, wrote to me and said, this is an example of really bad writing and what not to do. And I was like, if all of my papers got read this much, because that's the objective of I have a publishing a paper and people to read it. I want to write that badly again.

• 1:10:58Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I don't know what's the deep insight here about the negativity in the space. I think it's probably the immune system of the scientific community, making sure that there's no bullshit that gets published. That's, and then it can overfire, it can do a lot of damage, it can shut down conversations in a way that's not productive.

• 1:11:15Lee Cronin?

  We, and I go back, I mean, I'll answer your question about the hierarchy and assembly, but let's go back to the reception. People saying that paper was badly written. I mean, of course we could improve it, we could always improve the clarity.

• 1:11:26Lex Fridman?

  Let's go there before we go to the hierarchy.

• 1:11:28Lee Cronin?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:30Lex Fridman?

  You know, it has been criticized quite a bit, the paper. What has been some criticism that you've found most powerful? Like, that you can understand and can you explain it?

• 1:11:44Lee Cronin?

  The, yes, the most exciting criticism came from the evolutionary biologist telling me that they thought that, that, uh, it would, origin of life was a solved problem. And I was like, whoa, we're really on to something because it's clearly not. And when you poked them on that, they just said, no, you don't understand evolution. And I said, no, no, I don't think you understand that evolution had to occur before biology and we need, there's a gap. That was really for me. That misunderstanding and that that did cause an immune response, which was really interesting.

• 1:12:18Lee Cronin?

  The second thing was the fact that physicists, well, the physicists were actually really polite, right? Really nice about it, but they just said, huh, we're not really sure about the initial conditions thing, but this is a really big debate that we should certainly get into because, you know, the the emergence of life was not encoded in the initial conditions of the universe.

• 1:12:40Lee Cronin?

  And it can't, and I think assembly theory shows why it can't be.

• 1:12:45Lee Cronin?

  Okay, sure. If you could say that again. The the origin of the emergence of life was not and cannot in principle be encoded in the initial conditions of the universe. Just to clarify what I mean by life is like, what, high assembly index objects? Yeah. And this goes back to your favorite subject. What's that? Time.

• 1:13:09Lee Cronin?

  Right. So why? So why? What does time have to do with it? We, I mean, probably we can come back to it later, but I I think it might be if we have time. But I think that I've I think I now understand how to explain how, you know, lots of people got angry with the assembly paper, but also the ramifications of this is how time is fundamental in the universe and and this notion of commentorial spaces. And there are so many layers on this, but you have to become an intuitive, I think you have to become an intuitionist mathematician, and you have to abandon platonic mathematics. And

• 1:13:50Lee Cronin?

  also platonic mathematics has left physics astray, but there's a lot to unpack there. So we can go to the. Platonic mathematics. Okay, there's a, it's okay. The evolutionary biologist criticized because.

• 1:14:03Lex Fridman?

  The origin of life is understood and not, it doesn't require an explanation that involves physics.

• 1:14:13Lee Cronin?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:13Lex Fridman?

  That's their statement.

• 1:14:14Lee Cronin?

  Well, I mean, it was, I think they said lots of confusing statements. Basically, I realized the evolutionary biology community that were vocal, and some of them were really rude, really spiteful, and needlessly so, right? Because, look, you know, I didn't, people misunderstand publication as well. Some of the peoples have said, how dare this be published in Nature? This is, you know, what a terrible journal. And, and I, and it really, and I watched, said to people, look, this is a brand new idea that's not only potentially going to change the way we look at biology, it's going to change the way we look at the universe. And everyone's like saying, how dare you?

• 1:14:59Lee Cronin?

  How dare you be so grandiose? I'm like, no, no, no, this is not hype. We're not, we're not like saying we've invented some, I don't know, we've discovered an alien in a closet somewhere just for hype. We've genuinely mean this to genuinely have the impact or ask the question. And the way people jumped on that was a really bad precedent for young people who want to actually do something new, because this makes a bold claim. And the chances are that it's not correct. But what I wanted to do is a couple of things, is I wanted to make a bold claim that was precise and testable and correctable, not a woolly, another woolly

• 1:15:41Lee Cronin?

  information in biology argument, information Turing machine, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. A concrete series of statements that can be falsified and explored, and either the theory could be destroyed or built upon.

• 1:15:54Lex Fridman?

  Well, what about the criticism of you're just putting a bunch of sexy names on something that's already obvious?

• 1:16:04Lee Cronin?

  Yeah, that's really good. So the Assembly Index of a molecule is not obvious. No one had measured it before, and no one has thought to quantify selection, complexity, and copy number before in such a primitive, quantifiable way. I think the nice thing about this paper, this paper is a tribute to all the people that understand that biology does something very interesting. Some people call it neg-entropy, some people call it, think about organizational principles. Lots of people were not shocked by the paper because they'd done it before. A lot of the arguments we got, some people said, "Oh, it's rubbish.

• 1:16:48Lee Cronin?

  Oh, by the way, I had this idea 20 years before." I was like, "Which one? Is it the rubbish part or the really revolutionary part?" So this kind of plucked two strings at once. It plucked the, "There is something interesting that biology does, we can see around this, but we haven't quantified yet." And what this is, a first stab at quantifying that. So the fact that people said, "This is obvious, but it's also..." So if it's obvious, why have you not done it?

• 1:17:20Lex Fridman?

  Sure, but there's a few things to say there. One is, you know, this is in part a philosophical framework because, you know, it's not like you can apply this generally to any object in the universe. It's very chemistry focused.

• 1:17:37Lee Cronin?

  Yeah, well, I think you will be able to. We just haven't got there robustly. So we can say, "Let's go up a level." So if we go up from level, let's go up from molecules to cells because you jump to people, and I jumped to moticons, and both are good, and they will be assembled.

• 1:17:52Lex Fridman?

  Let's stick with cells, yeah.

• 1:17:53Lee Cronin?

  If we go from... So if we go from molecules to assemblies, and let's take a cellular assembly. A nice thing about a cell is you can tell the difference between a eukaryote and a prokaryote. Right? The organelles are specialized differently. When they look at the cell surface, and the cell surface has different glycosylation patterns, and these cells will stick together. Now let's go up a level with multicellular creatures. You have cellular differentiation. Now, if you think about how embryos develop, you go all the way back. Those cells undergo a differentiation in a causal way that's biomechanically a feedback between the genetics and biomechanics. I think we can use assembly theory to apply to tissue types. We can even apply it to different cell disease types. So that's what we're doing next.

• 1:18:38Lee Cronin?

  But we're trying to walk, you know, the thing is, I'm trying to leap ahead. I want to leap ahead to go, whoa, we apply it to culture. But clearly, you can apply it to memes and culture. And we've also applied assembly theory to CAs. And not as you think.

• 1:18:55Lex Fridman?

  Cellular automata, by the way.

• 1:18:56Lee Cronin?

  Yeah, yeah, to cellular automata, not just as you think. Different CA rules were invented by different people at different times. And one of my, one of my coworkers, very talented chap, basically was like, oh, I can realize that different people had different ideas or different rules, and they copied each other and made slightly different bit, but different cellular automata rules and they, and looked at them online. And so he was able to infer an assembly index and copy number of rule whatever doing this thing. But I digress. But it does show you can apply it at a higher scale. So what do we need to do to apply assembly theory to things? We need to agree there's a common set of building blocks. So in a cell, well, in a, in a multicellular creature, you need to look back in time.

• 1:19:41Lee Cronin?

  So there is the initial cell, which the creature is fertilized and then starts to grow. And then there is cell differentiation, and you have to then make that causal chain both on those. So that requires development of the organism in time. Or if you look at the cell surfaces and the cell types, they've got different

• 1:20:04Lee Cronin?

  features on the cell, what's the walls and inside the cell. So we're building up. But obviously, I want to leap to things like emoticons, language, mathematical theorems.

• 1:20:15Lex Fridman?

  But that's a very large number of steps to get from a molecule. To the human brain.

• 1:20:23Lee Cronin?

  Yeah, and I think they are related, but in hierarchies of emergence, right? So you shouldn't compare them. I mean, the assembly index of a human brain, what does that even mean? Well, maybe we can look at the morphology of the human brain, say, all human brains have these number of features in common. If they have those numbers, and then let's look at a brain in a whale, or a dolphin, or a chimpanzee, or a bird. Say, OK, let's look at the assembly indices, number of features in these. And now the copy number is just a number of how many birds are there? How many chimpanzees are there? How many humans are there?

• 1:20:56Lex Fridman?

  Then you have to discover for that, the features that you would be looking for.

• 1:21:01Lee Cronin?

  Yeah, and that means you need to have, you need to have some idea of the anatomy.

• 1:21:05Lex Fridman?

  Is there an automated way to discover features?

• 1:21:07Lee Cronin?

  Um, I, I guess so. I mean, and I think this is a good way to apply machine learning and image recognition, just to basically characterize things.

• 1:21:17Lex Fridman?

  Apply compression to it to see what emerges and then use the thing. The features used as part of the compression as the measurement of, as the thing that is searched for when you're measuring assembly index and copy number.

• 1:21:31Lee Cronin?

  And, and the compression has to be, remember the assembly universe, which is you have to go from assembly possible to assembly contingent. And that jump from, because assembly possible, all possible brains, all possible features all the time. But we know that on the tree of life, and also on the lineage of life, going back to Luca, the human brain just didn't spring into existence yesterday. It is a long lineage of brains going all the way back. And so if we could do assembly theory to understand the development, not just in evolutionary history, but in biological development as you grow. We are going to learn something more.

• 1:22:06Lex Fridman?

  What would be amazing is if you can use assembly theory, this framework to show the increase in the assembly index.

• 1:22:17Lex Fridman?

  Associated with, I don't know, cultures or pieces of text like language or images and so on and illustrate without knowing the data ahead of time, just kind of like you did with NASA, that you're able to demonstrate that it applies in those other contexts. I mean, and that, you know, probably wouldn't at first and you have to evolve the theory somehow. You have to change it, you have to expand it, you know.

• 1:22:43Lee Cronin?

  I think so.

• 1:22:44Lex Fridman?

  But like that, I guess this is as a paper, a first step in saying, okay, can we create a general framework for measuring complexity of objects? For measuring life, the complexity of living organisms.

• 1:23:01Lee Cronin?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:01Lex Fridman?

  That's, that's what this is reaching for.

• 1:23:03Lee Cronin?

  That is the first step and also to say, look, we have a way of quantifying selection and evolution in a, in a fairly, in a fairly, not mundane, but a fairly mechanical way. Because before now is, you know, this, it wasn't very, the ground truth for it was very subjective. Whereas here we're talking about clean observables and there's going to be layers on that. I mean, with collaborators right now, we already think we can do assembly theory on language. And not only that, wouldn't it be great if we can, so the, if we can figure out how under pressure language is going to evolve and be more efficient because you're going to want to transmit things. And again, it's not just about compression.

• 1:23:45Lee Cronin?

  It is about understanding how you can make the most of the, in the architecture you've already built. And I think this is something beautiful that evolution does. We're reusing those architectures. We can't just abandon our evolutionary history. And if you don't want to abandon your evolutionary history and you, and you know that evolution has been happening, then assembly theory works. And I think that's, that's a key comment I want to make is that assembly theory is great for understanding where evolution has been used. The next jump is when we go to technology. Because of course, if you take the M3 processor, I want to buy, I haven't bought one yet. I can't justify it, but I want it at some point. The M3 processor arguably is, there's quite a lot of features, a quite large number.

• 1:24:29Lee Cronin?

  The M2 came before it, then the M1, all the way back. You can apply assembly theory to microprocessor architecture. It doesn't take a huge leap to see that.

• 1:24:37Lex Fridman?

  I'm a Linux guy, by the way, so your examples go way over my head.

• 1:24:40Lee Cronin?

  Yeah, well, whatever.

• 1:24:41Lex Fridman?

  Is that, is that like a, is that a fruit company of some sort? I don't even know. Yeah, there's a lot of interesting stuff to ask about language like you could look at. How would that work? You could look at GPT one, GPT two, GPT three, three, five, four. And try to analyze the kind of language it produces. I mean, that's almost trying to look at Assembly Index of Intelligent Systems.

• 1:25:07Lee Cronin?

  Yeah, I mean, I think the thing about large language models. And this is a whole hobby horse I have at the moment.

• 1:25:16Lee Cronin?

  Is that obviously they're they're all about the.

• 1:25:23Lee Cronin?

  The evidence of evolution in the in the in the large language model comes from all the people that produced all the language. And that's really interesting and all the corrections in the in the in the mechanical Turk. Right?

• 1:25:36Lex Fridman?

  Sure.

• 1:25:38Lee Cronin?

  And and so.

• 1:25:39Lex Fridman?

  That's part of the history, part of the memory of the system.

• 1:25:41Lee Cronin?

  Exactly. So you can you so so it would be really interesting to basically use an assembly based approach to. To making language in a hierarchy, right? I think my guess is that you could, we might be able to build a new type of large language model. That uses assembly theory that it has more understanding of the past and how things were created. Well, basically, the thing with LLMs is they're like everything, everywhere, all at once, splat. And make the user happy. There's not much intelligence in the model. The model is how the human interacts with the model. But wouldn't it be great if we could understand how to embed more intelligence in them in the system?

• 1:26:25Lex Fridman?

  What do you mean by intelligence there? Like, you seem to associate intelligence with history.

• 1:26:32Lee Cronin?

  Yeah, well, I.

• 1:26:33Lex Fridman?

  Memory.

• 1:26:34Lee Cronin?

  I think selection produces intelligence.

• 1:26:37Lex Fridman?

  Wait, you're almost implying that selection is.

• 1:26:41Lex Fridman?

  Intelligence, no.

• 1:26:42Lee Cronin?

  Yeah, kind of. I would go that. I would go out on a limb and say that, but I think it's a little bit more. Human beings have the ability to abstract and they can break beyond selection. And this is what like Darwinian selection. Um, because a human being doesn't have to basically do trial and error. Like, but they can think about, they say, oh, that's a bad idea. I won't do that. And then technologies and so on.

• 1:27:01Lex Fridman?

  So we escaped Darwinian evolution and now we're on to some other kind of evolution, I guess.

• 1:27:06Lee Cronin?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:06Lex Fridman?

  Higher, higher level evolution.

• 1:27:08Lee Cronin?

  And that, and that will, will, assembly theory will measure that as well, right? Because it's all a lineage.

• 1:27:12Lex Fridman?

  Okay, another piece of criticism or by way of question is, how's assembly theory or maybe assembly index different from Kolmogorov complexity? So for people who don't know, Kolmogorov complexity of an object is the length of a shortest computer program that produces the object as output.

• 1:27:32Lee Cronin?

  Yeah, I'm, I, I seem to, there seems to be a disconnect between the computational approaches. So, yeah, so Kolmogorov measure requires a Turing machine, requires a computer. Um, and that's one thing. And the other thing is,

• 1:27:54Lee Cronin?

  um, assembly theory is supposed to trace the process by which life, evolution emerged. Right? There's a main thing there. There are lots of other layers. So, so Kolmogorov complexity, you can, you can approximate Kolmogorov complexity, but it's not really telling you very much about the actual,

• 1:28:18Lee Cronin?

  um, it, it's really telling you about like your data, your data set, compression of your data set.

• 1:28:21Lex Fridman?

  Sure.

• 1:28:22Lee Cronin?

  And so that doesn't really help you identify the, the turtle in this case is the computer. And so what assembly theory does is I, I'm gonna say. It's a trigger warning for anyone listening who loves complexity theory. I think that we're going to show that A I T is a very important subset of assembly theory, because here's what happens. That I think that assembly theory allows us to build, go understand when with selections occurring. Selection produces factories and things. Factories in the end produce computers and you can get then algorithmic information theory comes out of that.

• 1:29:04Lee Cronin?

  The frustration I've had with with looking at life through this kind of information theory is it doesn't take into account causation. So the main difference between assembly theory and all these complexity measures is there's no causal chain.

• 1:29:20Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:21Lee Cronin?

  And I think that's the main.

• 1:29:22Lex Fridman?

  That's the causal chain is at the at the core of assembly theory.

• 1:29:28Lee Cronin?

  Exactly. And if you're in, if you've got all your data in a computer memory, all the data is the same. You can access it in the same way. There's you don't care. You just compress it and and you either look at the program runtime or the shortest program. And that for me, it is absolutely not capturing what it is, what its selection does.

• 1:29:50Lex Fridman?

  But assembly theory looks at objects. It doesn't have information about the object history. It's going to try to infer that history by looking for the shortest history. Right. The object, the object doesn't like have a Wikipedia page that goes with it about its history.

• 1:30:11Lee Cronin?

  I would say it does in a way, and it is fascinating to look at. So you've just got the objects and you have no other information about the object. What assembly theory allows you to do with just with the object is to, and the word infer is correct, I agree with infer. There's you like say, well, that's not the, that's not the history, but but something really interesting comes from this. The shortest path is inferred from the object. That is the worst case scenario if you have no machine to make it. So that tells you about the depth of that object in time. And so what assembly theory allows you to do is without considering any other circumstances to say from this object, how deep is this object in time?

• 1:30:54Lee Cronin?

  If we just treat the object as itself without any other, any other constraints. And that's super powerful because the shortest path then says, allows you to say, oh, this object wasn't just created randomly, there was a process. And so, assembly theory is not meant to, you know, one up A I T or to ignore the factory. It's just to say, it's just to say, hey, there was a factory. That's, and how big was that factory and how deep in time is it?

• 1:31:23Lex Fridman?

  But it's still computationally very difficult to compute that history, right, for complex objects.

• 1:31:33Lee Cronin?

  It is, it becomes harder. But one of the things that's super nice is that it constrains your initial conditions, right? It constrains where you're going to be. So if you take, say, imagine, so one of the things we're doing right now is applying assembly theory to drug discovery. Now, what everyone's doing right now is taking all the proteins and looking at the proteins and, and looking at molecules, doctor proteins. Why not instead take the, look at the molecules that are involved in interacting with the receptors over time, rather than thinking about and use the molecules evolve over time as a proxy for how the proteins evolved over time? And then use that to constrain your drug discovery process.

• 1:32:13Lee Cronin?

  You flip the problem one A E and focus on the molecule evolution rather than the protein. And so you can guess in the future what might happen. So that, so that, so you, rather than having to consider all possible molecules, you know where to focus. And that's the same thing if you're looking at in assembly spaces for an object where you don't know the entire history, but you know that, you know, in the history of this object, it's not going to have some other motif that there that it doesn't apply, it doesn't appear in the past.

• 1:32:43Lex Fridman?

  But just even for the drug discovery point you made, isn't, don't you have to simulate all of chemistry for, uh, to figure out how to come up with constraints?

• 1:32:54Lee Cronin?

  No.

• 1:32:54Lex Fridman?

  The molecules and the?

• 1:32:56Lee Cronin?

  No.

• 1:32:56Lex Fridman?

  I mean, I don't, I don't know enough about protein.

• 1:32:58Lee Cronin?

  Well, this is another thing that I think causes, because this paper goes across so many boundaries. So chemists have looked at this and said, um, this is not a, this is not a react, this is not correct reaction. It's like, no, it's a graph.

• 1:33:14Lex Fridman?

  Sure, there's, there's a Assembly Index and Shortest Path examples here on chemistry.

• 1:33:20Lee Cronin?

  Yeah. And so, and what you do is you look at the minimal constraints on that graph. Of course, it has some mapping to the synthesis, but actually, you don't have to know all of chemistry. You just have to under, you can build up the constraint space rather nicely.

• 1:33:37Lee Cronin?

  But this is just at the beginning, right? There are so many directions this could go in. And as I said, it, it could all be wrong, but hopefully it's less wrong.

• 1:33:44Lex Fridman?

  What about the little criticism I saw of do you,

• 1:33:50Lex Fridman?

  by way of question, do you consider the different probabilities of each reaction in the chain? So like that there could be different.

• 1:33:59Lex Fridman?

  When you look at a chain of events that led up to the creation of an object, doesn't it matter that some parts in the chain are less likely than others?

• 1:34:08Lee Cronin?

  No.

• 1:34:09Lex Fridman?

  It doesn't matter?

• 1:34:10Lee Cronin?

  No, no. Well, let's go back. So no, not less likely, but react, so. So, so no. So let's go back to what we're talking, looking at. So the Assembly Index is the minimal path that could have created that object probabilistically. So imagine you have all your atoms in a plasma, you've got enough energy, you've got enough, yeah, um, there's collisions. What is the quickest way you could zip out that molecule with no reaction constraints?

• 1:34:34Lex Fridman?

  How do you define quickest there then?

• 1:34:36Lee Cronin?

  It's just basically what walk on a random graph. So you, so we make an assumption that basically the time scale for forming the bonds. So no, I don't want to say that because it's going to have people getting obsessing about this point. And your criticism is a really good one. What we're trying to say is like, this is, this puts a lower bound on something. Of course, um, some reactions are less possible than others, but actually, I don't think chemical reactions exist.

• 1:35:01Lex Fridman?

  Oh, boy. What does that mean? Why don't chemical reactions exist?

• 1:35:06Lee Cronin?

  I'm writing a paper right now that, that I keep being told I have to finish. And it's called the origin of chemical reactions. And it merely says that reactivity exists as controlled by the laws of quantum mechanics. And reactions, we put names, chemists put names on reactions, like, so you could have like, I don't know, the Wittic reaction, which is by, you know, Wittic. You could have the Suzuki reaction, which is by Suzuki. Now, what are these reactions? So these reactions are constrained by the following. They're constrained by the fact they're on planet Earth, 1G.

• 1:35:39Lee Cronin?

  Two nine eight Kelvin, one bar. So these are constraints. They're also constrained by the chemical composition of Earth. Oxygen, availability, all this stuff. And that then allows us to focus in our chemistry. So when a chemist does a reaction, that's a really nice compressed shorthand for constraint application. Glass flask, pure reagent, temperature, pressure, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, control, control, control, control, control. So of course, we have bond energies. This, so the bond energies are kind of intrinsic in a vacuum. If you say that, so the bond energy, you have to have a bond. And so for assembly theory to work, you have to have a bond, which means that bond has

• 1:36:23Lee Cronin?

  to give the molecule certain life, a half life. So you're probably going to find later on that some bonds are weaker and that you are going to miss in mass spectrum. When you count, look at the assembly of some molecules, you're going to miscount the assembly of the molecule because it falls apart too quickly because the bonds just form. But you can solve that with looking at infrared. So, so when people think about the probability, they're kind of misunderstanding. Assembly theory says nothing about the chemistry because chemistry is chemistry and their constraints are put in by biology. There was no chemist in the origin of life, unless you believe in the chemist in the sky and they were, you know, it's like Santa Claus, they had a lot of work to do.

• 1:37:04Lee Cronin?

  But, but chemical reactions do not exist in the constraints that allow chemical transformations to occur do exist.

• 1:37:14Lex Fridman?

  Okay, okay. So it's constraint application. So there's no chemical reactions. It's all constraint application.

• 1:37:22Lee Cronin?

  Yep.

• 1:37:23Lex Fridman?

  Which enables the emergence of react.

• 1:37:29Lex Fridman?

  Of, what's a different word for a chemical reaction?

• 1:37:32Lee Cronin?

  Transformation.

• 1:37:32Lex Fridman?

  Transformation.

• 1:37:33Lee Cronin?

  Yeah, like a function. It's a function. But no, but I love chemical reactions as a shorthand. And, and so the chemists don't all go mad. I mean, of course, chemical reactions exist on Earth.

• 1:37:42Lex Fridman?

  shorthand.

• 1:37:43Lee Cronin?

  It's a shorthand for these constraints.

• 1:37:45Lex Fridman?

  For, for, right. So assuming all these constraints that we've been using for so long, we just assume that that's always the case.

• 1:37:50Lee Cronin?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:51Lex Fridman?

  In natural language conversation.

• 1:37:52Lee Cronin?

  Exactly. The grammar of chemistry, of course, emerges in reactions and we can use them reliably. But I do not think the vitic reaction is accessible on Venus.

• 1:38:02Lex Fridman?

  Right, and this is useful to remember, you know, to to to frame it as constraint application is useful for when you zoom out to the bigger picture of the universe and looking at the chemistry of the universe and then starting to apply assembly theory. That's interesting. That's really interesting.

• 1:38:21Lex Fridman?

  But we've also pissed off the chemists now.

• 1:38:23Lee Cronin?

  Oh, they're they're pretty happy, but well, most of them.

• 1:38:26Lex Fridman?

  No, I

• 1:38:28Lex Fridman?

  everybody, everybody deep down is happy, I think. There's just sometimes feisty. That's how they show. That's how they have fun.

• 1:38:35Lee Cronin?

  Everyone is grumpy on some days when they when you challenge. The problem with this paper is you what is like, it's almost like I went to a part. It's like you I do used to do this occasionally when I was young is go to a meeting and and just find a way to find find offend everyone at the meeting simultaneously, even the even the factions that don't like each other. They're all unified in their hatred of you just offending them. This paper, it feels like the the person that went to the party and offended everyone simultaneously. So stop fighting with themselves and just focus on this paper.

• 1:39:03Lex Fridman?

  Maybe just a little insider interesting information. What were the editors of nature like what the reviews and so on? How difficult was that process? Because this is a pretty like big paper.

• 1:39:15Lee Cronin?

  Yeah, I mean, the so we when we originally sent the paper, we sent the paper and the editor said that, you know, this was like this is a quite a long process. We sent the paper and the editor gave us some feedback and said, you know, I don't think is that interesting. It's not, you know, or it's hard. It's it's a it's hard concept. And we asked and the editor gave us some feedback. And we and Sarah and I took a year to rewrite the paper.

• 1:39:48Lex Fridman?

  Was the nature of the feedback very specific on like this part, this part? Or was it like, like, what are you guys smoking? What kind of?

• 1:39:55Lee Cronin?

  Yeah, it was kind of the latter. What are you smoking?

• 1:39:57Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 1:39:58Lee Cronin?

  And you know.

• 1:40:01Lex Fridman?

  But polite and there's promise.

• 1:40:03Lee Cronin?

  Yeah, well, the thing is, the editor was really critical, but in a, but in a really professional way.

• 1:40:09Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:09Lee Cronin?

  And I mean, for me, this was the way science should happen. So when it came back, you know, we had too many equations in the paper. If you look at the preprint, they're just equations everywhere, like 23 equations. And when I said to Abhishek, who was the first author, we've got to remove all the equations. But my assembly equation staying in, Abhishek was like, you know, no, we can't. I said, well, look, if we want to explain this to people, it's a real challenge. And so Sarah and I went through the, I think it was actually 160 versions of the paper. But we basically, we got to version 40 or something. We said, right, zero it, start again. So we wrote the whole paper again. We knew the entire.

• 1:40:43Lex Fridman?

  Amazing.

• 1:40:44Lee Cronin?

  And we just went bit by bit by bit and said, what is it we want to say? And then we sent the paper in. And to us, we expected it to be rejected and not even go to review. And then the, we got notification back, it had gone to review and we were like, oh my God, it's so going to get rejected. How is it going to get rejected? Cause your first assembly paper that on the mass spec we sent to Nature got, went through six rounds of review and rejected. Right. And this biochemist just said, I don't believe you. You must be committing fraud. And a long story, probably a boring story, but in this case, it went out to review. The comments came back and the comments were incredibly.

• 1:41:28Lee Cronin?

  No, they were very, they were very deep comments from all the reviewers. There were, and but the, but the, none of the, but the nice thing was the reviewers were kind of very critical, but not dismissive. They were like, oh, really? Explain this, explain this, explain this, explain this. Are you sure it's not Komagolov? Are you sure it's not this? And we went through, I think, three rounds of review, pretty quick. And, and the editor went, yeah, it's in.

• 1:42:01Lex Fridman?

  But maybe you could just comment on the whole process. You've published some pretty huge papers on all kinds of topics within chemistry and beyond. Some of them have some little spice in them, a little spice of crazy. Like Tom Waits says, I like my town with a little drop of poison. There's, you know, it's not a mundane paper. So. Where, what's it like psychologically to go through all this process to keep getting rejected, to get reviews from people that don't get the paper or all that kind of stuff? Just from a question of a scientist, like what is that like?

• 1:42:37Lee Cronin?

  It's, I think it's, I mean, this paper for me, kind of, because this wasn't the first time we tried to publish Assembly Theory at the highest level. The Nature Communications paper, we, on the mass spec, on the, on the idea, went through, went to Nature and got rejected, went through six rounds of review and got rejected. And, and it, and it's, and I, I just was so confused when the, when the chemist said, this can't be possible. I do not believe you can measure complexity using mass spec. And also, by the way, molecules, molecules, complex molecules can randomly form. And well, I, but look at the data. The data says, and they said, no, no, we don't believe you.

• 1:43:23Lee Cronin?

  And, and we went and I just wouldn't give up.

• 1:43:27Lee Cronin?

  The edit, and the edit in the end was just like, the different editors, actually, right?

• 1:43:32Lex Fridman?

  What's behind that never giving up? Is it like, where you're sitting there, 10 o'clock in the evening, there's a melancholy feeling that comes over you, and you're like, okay, this is rejection number five.

• 1:43:45Lex Fridman?

  Or it's not rejection, but maybe it feels like a rejection because the, you know, the comments are, you totally don't get it. Like, what gives you strength to keep going there?

• 1:43:54Lee Cronin?

  Nah, I don't know.

• 1:44:02Lee Cronin?

  I don't normally get emotional about papers, but.

• 1:44:18Lee Cronin?

  It's not about giving up because we want to get it published because we want the glory or anything. It's just like, why don't you understand? And so, um, so what I did, so what I would just is try to be as, as, as, um, as rational as possible and say, yeah, you didn't like it. Um, tell me why. And then, um, sorry.

• 1:44:51Lee Cronin?

  Silly.

• 1:44:51Lex Fridman?

  Any part.

• 1:44:52Lee Cronin?

  Never get emotional about papers normally, but, but you, but I think what we did, you just compressed like five years of angst from this.

• 1:45:00Lex Fridman?

  So it's been, it's been rough.

• 1:45:01Lee Cronin?

  It's not just rough. It's like, it happened, you know, I came up with the assembly equation, you know, remote from Sarah in Arizona and the people SFI. I felt like I was a mad person, like, you know, the guy in depicted in, in a, in a beautiful mind. He was just like, not, not the actual genius part, but just the, just the gibberish, gibberish.

• 1:45:23Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:24Lee Cronin?

  Because I kept writing expanded and I have no mathematical ability at all. And I was expand, I was making these mathematical expansions where I kept seeing the same motif again. I was like, oh, I think this is a copy number, the same string is carrying again, again, again. I kept, I couldn't do the math. And then I realized the copy number fell out of the equation and everything collapsed down. I was like, oh, that works kind of. So we submitted the paper and then when it was almost accepted, right, the mass spec one, and there was astrobiologists said great, um, you know, mass spectroscopists said great, and the chemists went nonsense, like biggest pile of nonsense ever fraud, you know? And I was like, but why fraud? And they just said, just because. And I was like, well,

• 1:46:05Lee Cronin?

  and so, so, and the, and I could not convince the editor in this case. The editor was just so pissed off because they see it as like a kind of a, you know, uh, you're wasting my time. And I would not give up. I wrote, I went and dissected, you know, all the parts. And I think, although, I mean, I got upset about it, you know, it was kind of embarrassing actually, but, but I guess.

• 1:46:27Lex Fridman?

  Beautiful.

• 1:46:30Lee Cronin?

  But it was just trying to understand why they didn't like it. So they were part of me was like really devastated. And a part of me was super excited because I'm like, huh. They can't tell me why I'm wrong. And this kind of goes back to, you know, um. When I was at school, I was in a kind of learning difficulties class and I kept going to the teacher and say, you know. You know, how, what do I do today to prove I'm smart? And they were like, nothing, you can't. I was like, give me a job, you know, give me something to do. Give me a job to do, something to do as we. And I kind of felt like that a bit when I was arguing with the. And not arguing, there's no ad hominem, I wasn't telling the editor they were idiots or anything like this, or the reviewers, I kept it strictly like factual.

• 1:47:13Lee Cronin?

  And all I did is I just kept knocking it down bit by bit by bit by bit by bit. It was ultimately rejected and it got published elsewhere. And then um, the actual experimental data. So this is kind of in this paper, the experimental justification was already published. So when we did this one and we went through the versions and and then we sent it in. And in the end, it just got accepted. We were like, well, that's kind of cool, right? This is kind of like, you know, some days you had, you know, the the student, sorry, the. The the first author was like, I can't believe it got accepted, like, nor am I. But it's great. It's like, it's good. And then when the paper was published, I was not expecting the backlash. I was expecting computational.

• 1:47:59Lee Cronin?

  Well, what, no, actually, I was just expecting one person who'd been trolling me for a while about it, just to carry on trolling. But I didn't expect the backlash. And then I I wrote, wrote to the editor and apologized. And the editor was like, what are you apologizing for? It was a great paper. Of course it's going to get backlash. You said some controversial stuff, but it's awesome. And so.

• 1:48:18Lex Fridman?

  Well, it's, I think it's a beautiful story of perseverance. And the backlash is just a negative word for discourse, which I think is beautiful.

• 1:48:28Lee Cronin?

  I think you, as I said to, you know, when it got accepted. And people were saying, we're kind of like hacking on it. I was like. Papers are not gold medals. The reason I wanted to publish that paper in Nature is because it says, hey, there's something before biological evolution. You have to have that if you're not a creationist, by the way. This is an approach. First time someone has put a concrete mechanism, or sorry, a concrete quantification. And what comes next, you're pushing on is a mechanism. And that's what we need to get to is auto-catalytic sets, self-replicating molecules, some other features that come in.

• 1:49:11Lee Cronin?

  And the fact that this paper has been so discussed, for me is a dream come true. Like, it doesn't get better than that. If you can't accept a few people hating it. And the nice thing is, the thing that really makes me happy is that no one has attacked the actual physical content. Like, you can measure the assembly index, you can measure selection now. So either that's right, or it's, well, either that's helpful or unhelpful. If it's unhelpful, this paper will sink down and no one will use it again. If it's helpful, it'll help people build scaffold on it and we'll start to converge to a new paradigm. So I think that that's the thing that I wanted to see, you know, my colleagues,

• 1:49:56Lee Cronin?

  authors, collaborators, and people who were like, you've just published this paper. You're a chemist. Why have you done this? Like, who are you to be doing evolutionary theory? Like, well, I don't know. I mean, sorry, did I need to?

• 1:50:09Lex Fridman?

  Who was anyone to do anything? Well, I'm glad you did. Let me just, before coming back to origin of life and these kinds of questions, you mentioned learning difficulties. I didn't know about this. So what was it like?

• 1:50:22Lee Cronin?

  I wasn't very good at school, right?

• 1:50:26Lex Fridman?

  This is when you were very young?

• 1:50:28Lee Cronin?

  Yeah, yeah, but in primary school. I, my handwriting was really poor. And apparently I couldn't read and um and I and my mathematics was very poor. So they just said, this is a problem. They identified it. My parents kind of at the time were confused because I was busy taking things apart, buying electronic junk from the shop, trying to build computers and things. Um, and then once I got out of, when I was, I think about the major transition in my stupidity. Like, you know, I, everyone thought I wasn't that stupid when I was, basically everyone thought I was faking. I like stuff and I was faking wanting to be it. So I always wanted to be a scientist. So five, six, seven years old, be a scientist, take things apart. And everyone's like, yeah, this guy wants to be a scientist, but he's an idiot.

• 1:51:12Lee Cronin?

  And so, and so, so everyone was really confused, I think, at first that I wasn't smarter than I, you know, was claiming to be. And then I just basically didn't do well in the test. I went down and down and down and down. And then, um, and I was kind of like, huh, this is really embarrassing. I really like maths and everyone says I can't do it. I really like kind of, you know, physics and chemistry and all that and science. And people say, you're not, you can't, you can't read and write. And so I found myself in a learning difficulties class at the end of primary school and the beginning of secondary school. In the UK, secondary school is like eleven, twelve years old. And I remember being put in the, in the remedial class.

• 1:51:54Lee Cronin?

  And the remedial class was basically full of, um, well, two types, three types of people. There were um, people that had quite violent, right? You know, and there were people who couldn't speak English. And there were people that really had learning difficulties. So, um.

• 1:52:23Lee Cronin?

  The one thing I can objectively remember um was, I mean, I could read.

• 1:52:32Lee Cronin?

  I like reading. I read a lot. Um, but something in me, I was, I'm a bit of a rebel. I refused to read what I was told to read. Um, and I found it difficult to read individual words in the way that were told. But anyway, the, I got caught one day teaching someone else to read. Um, uh, and they said, okay, there, we don't understand this. I, I always knew what to be a scientist, but didn't really know what that meant. And I realized you had to go to university. And I thought, I can just go to university. It's like curious people like, no, no, no. You need to have these, you have to be able to enter these exams to get this grade point average. And the fact is the exams you've been entered into,

• 1:53:14Lee Cronin?

  you're not, you, you, you're just going to get C, D or E. You can't even get A, B or C, right? This is the UK GCSEs. I was like, oh shit. And I said, can you just put me into the, the high exam? I said, no, no, you're going to fail. There's no chance. So my, my father kind of intervened and said, you know, just let him go in the exams. And they said, he's definitely going to fail. It's a waste of time, waste of money. And he said, well, what if we paid? So they said, well, okay. So you didn't actually have to pay. I had to pay if I failed. So I took the exams and passed them, fortunately. I didn't get the top grades, but I, you know, I got into A levels. But then that also kind of limited what I could do at A levels. I wasn't allowed to do A level maths.

• 1:53:57Lex Fridman?

  What do you mean you weren't allowed to?

• 1:53:58Lee Cronin?

  Because I, I had such a bad math grade from my GCSE. I only had a C. But I, they wouldn't let me go into the ABC for maths because of some kind of coursework requirement back then. So the top grade I could have got was a C, so C deal E. So I got a C. And they let me do, um, uh, kind of AS level maths, which is this half intermediate, but and get to go to university. But then the, I liked chemistry. I had a good chemistry teacher. So in the end I got to university to, to chemistry.

• 1:54:23Lex Fridman?

  So through that kind of process, I think for kids in that situation, it's, it's easy to start believing that you're not, uh, well, how do I put it? That you're stupid. And basically give up that you're just not good at math. You're not good at school. So this is by way of advice for people, for interesting people, for interesting young kids right now, experiencing the same thing. Where was the place? What was the source of you not giving up there?

• 1:54:55Lee Cronin?

  I have no idea, other than um I I was really, I really like not understanding stuff. For me, when I not understand something, um I didn't understand, feel like I don't understand anything. But but now, but back then, I was so, I remember when I was like, I don't know, I I tried to, I tried to build a laser when I was like eight. And I thought, how hard could it be like?

• 1:55:23Lee Cronin?

  And I basically, I was gonna build a CO, I was gonna build a CO two laser. And I was like, right, I think I need some partially um coated mirrors and need some carbon dioxide. And I need a high, high, high, high voltage. So I kind of, and I was like, I didn't have a, and I was so stupid, right? I was kind of so embarrassed. I to make enough CO two, I actually set a fire and try to filter the flame.

• 1:55:49Lex Fridman?

  Oh, nice.

• 1:55:49Lee Cronin?

  To crap enough CO two.

• 1:55:51Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:52Lee Cronin?

  And I was like, it completely, completely failed and I bent, burnt half the the garage down. So my parents were not very happy about that. But so that was one thing, I was like, I really like first principle thinking. And so, you know, um, so I'm, I remember being super curious and being determined to find answers. And so the the kind of, when people do give advice about this, well, I ask for advice about this. I don't really have that much advice other than don't give up. And one of the things I try to do um as a, as a chemistry professor in my group is I, I don't, I hire people that I think that, you know, I'm kind of, who am I, if they're persistent enough, um, who am I to deny them the chance?

• 1:56:35Lee Cronin?

  Because, you know, people gave me a chance and I was able to do stuff.

• 1:56:40Lex Fridman?

  Do you believe in yourself, essentially?

• 1:56:42Lee Cronin?

  I'm, I like, so I love being around smart people and I love confusing smart people. And when I'm confusing smart people, and you know, not by stealing their wallets and hiding it somewhere. But if I can confuse smart people, that is the one piece of hope that I might be doing something interesting.

• 1:56:59Lex Fridman?

  Wow, that's quite brilliant, like as a gradient to optimize.

• 1:57:03Lee Cronin?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:03Lex Fridman?

  Hang out with smart people and confuse them.

• 1:57:05Lee Cronin?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:06Lex Fridman?

  And the more confusing it is, the more there's something there.

• 1:57:09Lee Cronin?

  And as long as they're not telling you just a complete idiot and and they give you different reasons.

• 1:57:13Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:14Lee Cronin?

  And I mean, I'm, you know, if everyone, because like with assembly theory and people said, oh, it's wrong. And I was like, why? And they're like, and no one could give me a consistent reason. They said, oh, because it's been done before, or it's just comma Golarov, or it's just there, that and the other. So I think the the the thing that I like to do is, and in academia, it's hard, right? Because people are critical. But I mean, you know, the criticism, I mean, although I got kind of upset about it earlier, which is kind of silly, but not silly, because obviously it's hard work. Being on your own or with a team spatially separated like during lockdown and and try to keep everyone on board and and and be, and have some faith that.

• 1:57:55Lee Cronin?

  I've always wanted to have a new idea. And so, you know, I like a new idea and I want to, I don't want, I want to nurture it as long as possible. And if someone can give me actionable criticism, that's why I think I was trying to say earlier, when I was kind of like stuck for words. Give me actionable criticism, you know, it's wrong. Okay, why is it wrong? Say, oh, it doesn't, your equation's incorrect for this, or your method is wrong. And then so if, and so what I try and do is get enough criticism from people to then triangulate and go back. And I've been very fortunate in my life that I've got great colleagues, great collaborators, funders, mentors, and people that will take the time to say, you're wrong because.

• 1:58:38Lee Cronin?

  And then what I have to do is integrate the wrongness and go, oh, cool, maybe I can fix that. And I think criticism is really good. People have a go at me because I'm really critical. And like, but I'm not criticizing, you know, you as a person. I'm just criticizing the idea and trying to make it better and say, well, what about this? And, you know, and sometimes I'm kind of, you know, my filters are kind of, you know, truncated in some ways. I'm just like, that's wrong, that's wrong, that's wrong. Want to do this? And people are like, oh, my God, you just told me you destroyed my life's work. I'm like, relax. No, I'm just like, let's make it better. And I think that we don't do that enough because we're, we're, you know, we, we're, we're, we're either personally critical, which isn't helpful.

• 1:59:21Lee Cronin?

  Or we don't give any criticism at all because we're too scared.

• 1:59:25Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, yeah, the I've seen you be pretty aggressively critical, but it's every time I've seen it's the idea, not the person.

• 1:59:37Lee Cronin?

  I'm sure I make mistakes in that. I mean, I, you know, I argue, I argue lots with,

• 1:59:43Lee Cronin?

  I mean, I argue lots with Sarah and she's like kind of shocked. I've argued with Yash there in the past and he's like, you're just making, Yashabak, and you're like, you're just making that up. I'm like, no, not, not quite, but kind of.

• 1:59:54Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:56Lee Cronin?

  You know, I had a big argument with Sarah about time. She's like, no, time, time doesn't exist. I'm like, no, no, time does exist. And now, and as she realized that her conception of assembly theory and my conception of assembly theory was the same thing, necessitated us to abandon the fact that time is eternal, to actually really fundamentally question how the universe produces commentarial novelty.

• 2:00:20Lex Fridman?

  So, so time is fundamental for some of their. So I'm just trying to figure out where you and Sarah converge.

• 2:00:27Lee Cronin?

  So I, I think assembly theory is fine in this time right now, but I think it helps us understand that something interesting is going on. So there's, and I've been really inspired by a guy called Nick Gizen. I'm going to butcher his argument, but I love his argument a lot. So I hope he forgives me if he hears about it. But basically, if you want free will, time has to be fundamental.

• 2:00:52Lee Cronin?

  And we can go, and if you want time to be fundamental,

• 2:01:01Lee Cronin?

  you have to give up on platonic mathematics.

• 2:01:05Lee Cronin?

  And you have to use intuition as mathematics. By the, by the way, and again, I'm going to butcher this, but basically Hilbert said that, you know, infinite numbers are allowed. And I think it was Brower said, no, you can't, all numbers are finite. So kind of like with, so let's go back a step because it was like people can say, assembly theory seems to explain that commentary, large commentarial space.

• 2:01:33Lee Cronin?

  Allows you to produce things like life and technology. And that large commentorial space is so big, it's not even accessible to a Sean Carroll, David Deutsch multiverse. The physicist saying that all of the universe already exists in time is probably, provably, that's a strong word, not correct. That we are going to know that the universe as it stands, the present, the way the present builds the future, so big, the universe can't ever contain the future. And this is a really interesting thing.

• 2:02:18Lee Cronin?

  I think Max Tegmark has this mathematical universe. He says, you know, the universe is kind of like a block universe. I apologize to Max if I'm getting it wrong, but people think you can just move, you have the stat, you have the initial conditions and you can run the universe right to the end and go backwards and forwards in that universe. That is not correct.

• 2:02:39Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, let me load that in. The universe is not big enough to contain the future.

• 2:02:42Lee Cronin?

  Yeah, that's why.

• 2:02:44Lex Fridman?

  So that's another, that's a beautiful way of saying that time is fundamental.

• 2:02:48Lee Cronin?

  Yes, and that you can have, and that's what, this is why the law of the excluded middle, something is true or false, only works in the past.

• 2:03:02Lee Cronin?

  Is it going to snow in New York next week or in Austin? You might in Austin say probably not. In New York, you might say, yeah. If you go forward to next week and say, did it snow in New York last week? True or false? You can answer that question. The fact that the law of the excluded middle cannot apply to the future explains why time is fundamental.

• 2:03:22Lex Fridman?

  Well, I mean, that's a good example, intuitive example, but it's possible that we might be able to predict, you know, whether it's going to snow if we had perfect information.

• 2:03:32Lee Cronin?

  I think it's.

• 2:03:33Lex Fridman?

  You're saying it not.

• 2:03:35Lee Cronin?

  Impossible.

• 2:03:37Lee Cronin?

  Impossible. So here's why. I'll make a really quick argument. And this argument isn't mine. It's it's Nick's and and a few other people.

• 2:03:45Lex Fridman?

  Can you can you explain his view on fundamental on time being fundamental?

• 2:03:49Lee Cronin?

  Yeah, so I'll give my view, which kind of resonates with his. But basically, it's very simple, actually. He would say that free will, that your ability to design and do an experiment is exercising free will. So he used that thought process. Well, I never really thought about it that way. And that you actively make decisions. I do think that I used to think that free will was a kind of kind of consequence of just selection. But I'm kind of understanding that human free will is something really interesting. And he very much inspired me. But I think that what Sarah Walker said that inspired me as well, that

• 2:04:28Lee Cronin?

  these will converge is that I think that the universe in the universe is very big, huge. But actually, the own the place is largest in the universe right now, the largest place in the universe is Earth.

• 2:04:42Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I've seen you say that. And boy, does that

• 2:04:48Lex Fridman?

  that's a that's an interesting one to process. What do you mean by that? Earth is the biggest place in the universe?

• 2:04:53Lee Cronin?

  Because we have this commentorial scaffolding going all the way back from Luca. So you've you've got cells that can self replicate. And then you go all the way to terraforming the Earth. You've got all these architectures, the amount of selection that's going on, biological selection, just to be clear, biological evolution. And then you have multi cellularity, then animals and abstraction. And with abstraction, there was another kick, because you can then build architectures and computers and cultures and language. And these things are the biggest things that exist in the universe. Because we can just build architectures that couldn't naturally arise anywhere. And the further that distance goes in time, and this kind of is just is gigantic.

• 2:05:36Lex Fridman?

  And From a complexity perspective?

• 2:05:39Lee Cronin?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:39Lex Fridman?

  Okay, wait a minute. But I mean, I know you're being poetic, but how do you know there's not other Earth like? Like, how do you know, you're, you're basically saying Earth is really special. It's awesome stuff as far as we look out, there's nothing like it going on. But how do you know there's not nearly infinite number of places where cool stuff like this is going on?

• 2:06:02Lee Cronin?

  I agree, and I would say, I'll, I'll say again, that Earth is the most gigantic thing we know in the universe commentary, we know.

• 2:06:11Lex Fridman?

  We know.

• 2:06:12Lee Cronin?

  Now, now, I guess, this is just purely a guess, I have no data, but other than hope, well, maybe not hope, maybe, no, I have some data. That every star in the sky probably has planets.

• 2:06:25Lex Fridman?

  Yep.

• 2:06:26Lee Cronin?

  And life is probably emerging on these planets, but this, the amount of contingency that is associated with life. Is I think the commentorial space associated to these planets is so different. We are never gonna, our causal cones are never gonna overlap, or not easily. And this is the thing that makes me sad about alien life, why, it's why we have to create alien life in the lab as quickly as possible. Because I don't know if we are gonna be able to, be able to build.

• 2:06:58Lee Cronin?

  Architectures that will intersect with alien intelligence and architectures.

• 2:07:04Lex Fridman?

  And intersect, you, you don't mean in time or space?

• 2:07:08Lee Cronin?

  Time and the ability to communicate.

• 2:07:09Lex Fridman?

  The ability to communicate.

• 2:07:11Lee Cronin?

  Yeah, my biggest fear in a way is that life is everywhere. But we become infinitely more lonely because of our scaffolding in that commentorial space. Because it's so big and.

• 2:07:22Lex Fridman?

  So you're saying the, the constraints created by the environment that led to the factory of Darwinian evolution. Are just like, list a little tiny cone in a nearly infinite commentorial space.

• 2:07:36Lee Cronin?

  Exactly.

• 2:07:36Lex Fridman?

  There's other cones like it and, and why, why can't we communicate with other, like, just because we can't create it.

• 2:07:46Lex Fridman?

  Doesn't mean we can't appreciate the creation, right? Like that, uh, sorry, detect the creation.

• 2:07:51Lee Cronin?

  I, I, I truly don't know, but I, it's an excuse for me to ask for people to give me money to make a planet simulator.

• 2:07:58Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, right.

• 2:07:58Lee Cronin?

  If I can make.

• 2:08:00Lex Fridman?

  With a different, a different kind of.

• 2:08:01Lee Cronin?

  Like another shameless say, it's like, give me money, I need.

• 2:08:04Lex Fridman?

  This was all a long plug for a planet simulator.

• 2:08:07Lee Cronin?

  It's like, you know.

• 2:08:08Lex Fridman?

  Hey, I'll be the first in line to donate.

• 2:08:10Lee Cronin?

  My, my, my, uh, my Rick, my Rick garage has run out of room, you know?

• 2:08:15Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:15Lee Cronin?

  No, um.

• 2:08:17Lex Fridman?

  And is this is a planet simulator, you mean like a different kind of planet?

• 2:08:20Lee Cronin?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:21Lex Fridman?

  Well, different sets of environments and pressures.

• 2:08:23Lee Cronin?

  Exactly. If we could basically recreate the selection before biology as we know it, that gives rise to a different biology, we should be able to put the constraints on where I look in the universe. So here's the thing, here's my, here's my dream. My dream is that by creating life in the lab, based upon constraints we understand, like this, like go for Venus type life or Earth type life or something, again, do Earth 2.0, screw it, let's do Earth 2.0. And Earth 2.0 has a different genetic alphabet, fine, that's fine, different protein alphabet, fine. Have cells and evolution, all that stuff. We will then be able to say, okay, life is a more general phenomenon. Selection is more general than the, what we think is the chemical constraints on life.

• 2:09:09Lee Cronin?

  And we can point the James Webb and other telescopes at other planets that we are in that zone. We are most likely to con- conventorially overlap with, right? So, cause you know, we, but basically, so there are chemistry.

• 2:09:23Lex Fridman?

  You're looking for some overlap.

• 2:09:24Lee Cronin?

  And then we can then basically shine light on them literally and white, look at light coming back and apply advanced assembly theory to lang- general theory of language that we will get and say, huh. We, in that signal, it looks random, but there's a copy number. Oh. This random set of things that shouldn't be, that looks like a true random number generator has structure as a, not comagolorov A I T type structure, but evolutionary structure given by assembly theory. And we start to, but I would say that because I'm a shameless assembly theorist.

• 2:10:02Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. It just feels like the cone, I might be misusing the word cone here, but the width of the cone is growing faster, is growing really fast to where eventually all the cones overlap.

• 2:10:17Lee Cronin?

  I.

• 2:10:19Lex Fridman?

  Even in a very, very, very large combinatorial space.

• 2:10:25Lex Fridman?

  It just, but then again, if you're saying the universe is also growing very quickly in terms of possibilities.

• 2:10:35Lee Cronin?

  That's really, I hope that as we build, as we build abstractions, the main, I mean, one, one idea is that as we go to intelligence, intelligence allows us to look at the regularities around us in the universe. And that gives us some common grounding to discuss with aliens. And, and you might be right that, that we will overlap there, even though we have completely different chemistry, literally completely different chemistry, that we will be at a past information from one another. But it's not a given.

• 2:11:12Lee Cronin?

  And, you know, I have to kind of try and divorce hope and emotion, you know, away from what I can logically justify.

• 2:11:24Lex Fridman?

  But it's just hard to intuit a world, a universe where there's nearly infinite complexity objects and they somehow can't detect each other.

• 2:11:34Lee Cronin?

  But the universe is expanding, but the nice thing is that I would say, I would look, you see, I think Carl Sagan did the wrong thing. Well, not the wrong thing. He flicked the Voyager probe around in a pale blue dot. He said, look how big the universe is. I would have done it the other way around. So look at the Voyager probe that came from the planet Earth that came from Luca. Look at how big Earth is.

• 2:11:53Lex Fridman?

  That it produced that.

• 2:11:54Lee Cronin?

  It produced that.

• 2:11:55Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:56Lee Cronin?

  And that I think is like completely amazing. And then that should allow people enough to think about, well, probably we should try and get causal chains off Earth, onto Mars, onto the moon, wherever. Well, it's human life or Martian life that we create, it doesn't matter. But, but I think this commentorial space tells us something very important about the universe. And that I realized in assembly theory that the universe is too big to contain itself. And, and I think this is, and now coming back and I want to, I want to kind of change your mind about time. Cause I'm, I'm guessing that your time is just a coordinate.

• 2:12:36Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:37Lee Cronin?

  So I'm, I'm going to change.

• 2:12:39Lex Fridman?

  I'm guessing you're one of those.

• 2:12:40Lee Cronin?

  I'm going to change your mind, one of those. I'm going to change your mind in real time, or at least attempt.

• 2:12:44Lex Fridman?

  Oh, in real time. There you go. I already got the tattoo, so this is going to be embarrassing if you change my mind.

• 2:12:49Lee Cronin?

  But you can just add, you can just add an arrow, arrow of time onto it, right?

• 2:12:53Lex Fridman?

  True.

• 2:12:54Lee Cronin?

  Or erase it a bit. So, and the argument that I think that is really most interesting is like, people say the initial conditions specify the future of the universe. Okay, fine, let's say that's the case for a moment. Now let's go back to Newtonian mechanics. Now, the uncertainty principle in Newtonian mechanics is this. If I give you the coordinates of your, of an object moving in space, and the coordinates of another object, and they collide in space, and you know those initial conditions, you should know exactly what's going to happen. However, you cannot specify these coordinates to infinite precision.

• 2:13:36Lee Cronin?

  Now everyone said, you know, oh, this is kind of like, you know, the chaos theory argument. No, no, it's deeper than that. Here's a problem with numbers is how, this is where Hilbert and Brauer fell out.

• 2:13:49Lee Cronin?

  To have the coordinates of this object, a given object as they're colliding, you have to have them to infinite precision. That's what Hilbert says. He says, no problem, infinite precision is fine. Let's just take that for granted. But when the object is finite and it can't store its own coordinates, what do you do?

• 2:14:10Lee Cronin?

  So in principle, if a finite object cannot be specified to infinite precision, in principle, the initial conditions don't apply.

• 2:14:20Lex Fridman?

  Well, how do you know it can't store its?

• 2:14:23Lee Cronin?

  Well, how do you store an infinitely long number in a finite size?

• 2:14:27Lex Fridman?

  Well.

• 2:14:31Lex Fridman?

  We're using infinity very loosely here.

• 2:14:33Lee Cronin?

  No, no.

• 2:14:34Lex Fridman?

  We're using. Infinite precision, I mean, not loosely, but.

• 2:14:36Lee Cronin?

  Very precisely.

• 2:14:37Lex Fridman?

  So you think infinite precision is required?

• 2:14:40Lee Cronin?

  Well, let's let's take the object, let's say the object is a golf ball. Golf ball is a few centimeters in diameter, we can work out how many atoms are on the golf ball, and let's say we can store numbers down to atomic dislocations. So we can work out how many atoms there are in the golf ball, and we can store the coordinates in that golf ball down to that number, but beyond that, we can't. Let's make the golf ball smaller. And and this is where I think that we think that we get randomness in quantum mechanics. And some people say you can't get randomness, quantum mechanics is deterministic. But aha, this is where this is where we realize that classical mechanics and quantum mechanics suffer from the same uncertainty principle.

• 2:15:21Lee Cronin?

  And that is the inability to specify the initial conditions to a precise enough degree to give you determinism. The universe is intrinsically too big, and that's why time exists. It's non deterministic. Looking back into the past, you can look at the you can use logical arguments because you could say, was it true or false? You already know. But this is the fact we are unable to predict the future with the precision is not evidence of lack of knowledge. It's evidence the universe is generating new things.

• 2:16:00Lex Fridman?

  Okay, so to you, first of all, quantum mechanics, you could just say statistically what's going to happen when two golf balls hit each other.

• 2:16:06Lee Cronin?

  Statistically, but that but but sure, I can say statistically what's going to happen, but then when they do happen.

• 2:16:11Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:12Lee Cronin?

  And and you keep nesting it together. You can't, I mean, it goes almost back to look at, look at, look at, um, let's think about entropy in the universe. So how do you, what, how do we, how do we understand entropy change? Well, we could do the, look at, or process, we can use the Aguerdick hypothesis. We can also have, um, um, we can also have the counterfactuals where we have all the different states and we could even put that in the multiverse, right? But both those are kind of, they, they, they're, they're non-physical. The multiverse kind of collapses back to the same problem about the precision.

• 2:16:54Lee Cronin?

  So all the, the, what you, if you accept, you don't have to have true and false going forward into the future, um, the, the real numbers are real. They're just, they're, they're, they're, they're observables.

• 2:17:09Lex Fridman?

  We're trying to see exactly where time being fundamental sneaks in. In this difference between the, the golf ball can't contain its own position perfectly, precisely.

• 2:17:23Lee Cronin?

  If.

• 2:17:23Lex Fridman?

  How that leads to time needing to be fundamental.

• 2:17:27Lee Cronin?

  Let me, I have, what, uh, do you believe, do you believe or do you accept you have free will?

• 2:17:34Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I think at this moment in time, I believe that I have free will.

• 2:17:39Lee Cronin?

  So then you are, then you have to believe that time is fundamental.

• 2:17:45Lex Fridman?

  I understand that's a statement you've made.

• 2:17:47Lee Cronin?

  Well, no, that we can logically follows because if you don't have free will, so like, if you're in a, if you're in a universe that has no time, the universe is deterministic. If it's deterministic, then you have no free will.

• 2:17:59Lex Fridman?

  I think the space of how much we don't know is so vast that saying the universe is deterministic and from that jumping, there's no free will is just too difficult of a leap.

• 2:18:10Lee Cronin?

  No, I logically follows. No, no, I don't disagree. It's not, I'm not saying any, I mean, it's deep. And it's important, all I'm, all I'm saying, and it's the difference of, it's actually different to what I've said before, is that if you don't require platonistic mathematics and accept that, that non-determinism is how the universe looks, and that gives us our creativity and the way the universe is getting novelty, it's kind of really deeply important in assembly theory, because assembly theory starts to actually give you a mechanism why you go from boring time, which is basically initial conditions specify everything, to a mismatch in creative time. And I hope we'll do experiments. I think it's really important

• 2:18:52Lee Cronin?

  to, I would love to do an experiment that prove that time is fundamental and the universe is generating novelty. I don't know all the features of that experiment yet, but by, you know, having these conversations openly and getting people to think about the problems in a new way, better people, more intelligent people with good mathematical backgrounds can say, oh, hey, I've got an idea. I would love to do an experiment that, that shows that the universe, I mean, universe is too, too big for itself going forward in time. And, and I really, you know, this is why I, I really hate the idea of the Boltzmann brain. The Boltzmann brain makes me super, kind of like, you know, everyone's having

• 2:19:36Lee Cronin?

  a free lunch. It's like saying, it's like, let's break all the laws of physics. So Boltzmann brain is this idea that in a long enough universe, a brain will just emerge in the universe as conscious without, and that neglects the causal chain of evolution required to produce that brain. And this is where the computational argument really falls down because the computational is could say, I can calculate probability of a Boltzmann brain. And I can, and they'll give you a probability, but I can calculate probability of Boltzmann brain, zero.

• 2:20:02Lex Fridman?

  Just because the, the, the space of possibilities is so large?

• 2:20:05Lee Cronin?

  Yeah, it's like when we start falling ourselves with numbers that we can't actually measure, and we can't ever conceive of, I think, I think it, it, it, it doesn't give us a good explanation. And I've become, I want to explain that why life is in the universe. I think life is actually novelty miner, not, I mean, life basically minds novelty almost from the future and makes it, actualizes in the present.

• 2:20:33Lex Fridman?

  Okay, life is a novelty miner from the future that is actualized in the present?

• 2:20:42Lee Cronin?

  Yep.

• 2:20:45Lee Cronin?

  I think so.

• 2:20:46Lex Fridman?

  Novelty minor. First of all, novelty. What's the origin of novelty? When you go from boring time to creative time. Where's that? Is it as simple as randomness? Like you're referring to?

• 2:21:00Lee Cronin?

  I'm really struggling with randomness because I had a really good argument with Yasha Bark about randomness. And he said randomness doesn't give you free will. That's insane because you'd just be random. But I think, and I think he's right at that level. But I don't think we, I don't think he is right on another level. And it's not about randomness. It's about, it's about constrained. I'm going to sound like constrained opportunity. I'm making this up as I go along. So making this up. Constrained opportunity. So what I mean is like, so you have to have, so that the novelty, what is novelty? You know, this is why I think is the funny thing. You ever want to discuss AI? Why I think everyone's kind of gone AI mad?

• 2:21:44Lee Cronin?

  Is that they're misunderstanding novelty. But let's think about novelty. You ask, what is novelty? So I think novelty is a genuinely new configuration that is not predicted by the past, right? And that you discover in the present, right? And that is truly different, right? Now, everyone says that, some people say that novelty doesn't exist. It's always with precedent. I want to do experiments that show that that is not the case. And it goes back to a question you asked me a few moments ago, which is, where is the factory?

• 2:22:19Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:19Lee Cronin?

  Right? Because I think the same mechanism that gives us a factory gives us novelty. And I think that that is, that is why I'm so deeply hung up on time. I mean, of course, I'm wrong. But how wrong? And I, and I think that, that life opens up that commentorial space in a way that, that. Our current laws of physics, although as contrived, in a deterministic initial condition universe, even with the get out of the multiverse, David Deutsch style, which I love, by the way, but I don't think is correct. But it's it's it's really beautiful.

• 2:22:58Lex Fridman?

  Multiverse.

• 2:22:59Lee Cronin?

  The David Deutsch's conception of the multiverse is kind of like given. But I think that the problem with wave particle duality in quantum mechanics is not about the multiverse, it's about understanding how determined the past is. Well, I don't just think that, actually, this is a discussion I was having with Sarah about that, right, where she was like, oh, I think we'd been debating this for a long time now about how we how do we reconcile novelty determinism in determinism.

• 2:23:34Lex Fridman?

  So just to clarify, you both you and Sarah think the universe is not deterministic.

• 2:23:39Lee Cronin?

  I won't speak for Sarah, but I roughly I think that the universe I think the universe is deterministic, looking back in the back in the past.

• 2:23:53Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 2:23:53Lee Cronin?

  But undetermined going forward in the future. So I'm kind of having my cake and eat it, eating it here. This is because I fundamentally don't understand randomness, right? As Yasha told me or other people told me. But if I adopt a new view now, which the new view is the universe is just non deterministic, but I'd like to refine that and say, the universe appears deterministic going back in the past, but it's undetermined going forward in the future. So how can we have a determinist, a universe that has deterministically looking rules that's non determined going in the future?

• 2:24:26Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:27Lee Cronin?

  It's this breakdown in precision in the initial conditions. And we have to just stop using initial conditions and start looking at trajectories and how the commentorial space behaves in the expanding universe in time and space. And assembly theory helps us quantify the transition to biology, and biology appears to be novelty mining because it's making crazy stuff. You know, that we are unique to Earth, right? That there are objects on Earth that are unique to Earth that will not be found anywhere else because you can do the commentorial math.

• 2:25:03Lex Fridman?

  What was that statement you made about life is novelty mining from the future?

• 2:25:09Lee Cronin?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:10Lex Fridman?

  What's the little element of time that you're introducing?

• 2:25:13Lee Cronin?

  So what I'm kind of meaning is because the future is bigger than the present.

• 2:25:16Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:17Lee Cronin?

  In a deterministic universe, how do you go from the, how do the, how do the states go from one to another? I mean, there's a mismatch, right?

• 2:25:24Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:25Lee Cronin?

  So, so that must mean that you have a little bit of indeterminism, whether that's randomness or something else. I don't understand. I want to do experiments to formulate a theory to refine that as we go forward. That might help us explain that. And, and I think that's why I'm so determined to try and crack the, the non-life to life transition, looking at networks and molecules, and that might help us think about it, the mechanism. But certainly the future is bigger than the past in, in my conception of the universe and some conception of the universe.

• 2:25:57Lex Fridman?

  And By the way, that's not obvious, right? That's what was just kind of, the future being bigger than the past. Well, that, that's one statement. And the statement that the universe is not big enough to contain the future is another statement.

• 2:26:10Lee Cronin?

  Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:26:12Lex Fridman?

  That one is a big one. That was a really big one.

• 2:26:14Lee Cronin?

  I think so. I think, but I think it's entirely, because look, we have the second law. And right now, I mean, I'm, we don't need the second law if the future is bigger than the past. It follows naturally.

• 2:26:27Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 2:26:27Lee Cronin?

  So why are we retrofitting all these, these sticking plasters onto our reality to hold on to a timeless universe?

• 2:26:35Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but that's because it's kind of difficult to imagine the universe that's, that can't contain the future.

• 2:26:43Lee Cronin?

  But isn't that really exciting?

• 2:26:45Lex Fridman?

  It's very exciting, but it's, it's hard. I mean, we're, we're humans on earth and we have a very kind of four dimensional conception of the world of three D plus time. It's just hard to intuit a world where, what does that even mean? A universe that can't contain the future.

• 2:27:09Lee Cronin?

  Yeah, it's kind of, it's kind of crazy, but obvious.

• 2:27:12Lex Fridman?

  Weird. I mean, I suppose it sounds obvious. Yeah, if it's true.

• 2:27:16Lee Cronin?

  But the nice thing is you can, so why, I mean, so the reason why assembly theory turned me on to that was that you, let's, let's just start in the present and look at all the complex molecules and go backwards in time and understand how evolutionary processes go, gave rise to them. It's not, it's not at all obvious. The taxol, which is a complex, one of the most complex natural products produced by biology, was going to be invented by biology. It's an accident. You know, taxol is unique to Earth. There's no taxol elsewhere in the universe. And taxol was not decided by the initial conditions.

• 2:27:55Lee Cronin?

  It was decided by this kind of, this interplay between the, so the past simply is embedded in the present. It gives some features, but why the past doesn't map to the future one to one is because the universe is too big to contain itself. That gives space for creativity, novelty, and, and some things which are unpredictable.

• 2:28:19Lex Fridman?

  Well, okay, so given that you're disrespecting the power of the initial conditions, let me ask you about, so how do you explain that cellular automata are able to produce such incredible complexity, given just basic rules and basic initial conditions?

• 2:28:34Lee Cronin?

  I think that this falls into the Brower Hilbert trap. So how do you get a cellular automata producing a complexity? You have a computer, you generate a display and you map the change of that in time. There are some CAs repeat, like functions, like it's fascinating to me that for pi, there is a, there is a formula where you can go to the, the millionth decimal place of pi and read out the, the number without having to go there. But there are some numbers where you can't do that. You have to just crank through this, whether it's Wolframian computational irreducibility

• 2:29:13Lee Cronin?

  or some other thing, it doesn't matter. But these CAs, that complexity, is that just complexity or a number that is basically you're mining that number in time? You know, is that just a display screen for that number, that function?

• 2:29:30Lex Fridman?

  Well, can't you say the same thing about the complexity on Earth then?

• 2:29:33Lee Cronin?

  No, because the complexity on Earth. Has a copy number and an assembly index associated with that. That CA is just a number running.

• 2:29:42Lex Fridman?

  You don't think it has a copy number? Wait, wait a minute.

• 2:29:44Lee Cronin?

  Well, it does in the human, where we're looking at humans producing different rules, but then it's nested on selection. So those CAs are produced by selection.

• 2:29:52Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:53Lee Cronin?

  I mean, the CA is such a fascinating pseudo-complexity generator. What I would love to do is understand, quantify the degree of surprise in a CA, and run it long enough. But what that, I guess that means is we have to instantiate, we have to have a number of experiments where we're generating different rules and running them time steps. But, oh, got it. CAs are mining novelty in the future, from the, you know, in the future by iteration, right? And you're like, oh, that's great. That's great. You didn't predict it. Some rules you can predict that what's going to happen, other rules you can't. So for me, if anything, CAs are evidence that the universe is too big to contain itself. Because otherwise, you'd know what the rules are going to do forever, more.

• 2:30:36Lex Fridman?

  Right. I guess you were saying that the physicist saying that all you need is the initial conditions and the rules of physics

• 2:30:45Lex Fridman?

  is somehow missing the bigger picture.

• 2:30:48Lee Cronin?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:48Lex Fridman?

  And, you know, if you look at CAs, all you need is the initial condition and the, and the rules, and then run the thing.

• 2:30:55Lee Cronin?

  You need

• 2:30:58Lee Cronin?

  three things. You need the initial conditions, you need the rules, and you need time iteration to mine it out. Without the coordinate, you can't get it out.

• 2:31:06Lex Fridman?

  Sure. And that's, that, that is fundamental.

• 2:31:09Lee Cronin?

  And you can't predict it from the initial conditions.

• 2:31:10Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:11Lee Cronin?

  If you could, then it'd be fine.

• 2:31:13Lex Fridman?

  And that time is

• 2:31:15Lee Cronin?

  A resource.

• 2:31:16Lex Fridman?

  The foundation of, this is the history, the memory of each of the things that created it. Has to have that memory of all the things that led up to it.

• 2:31:26Lee Cronin?

  I think it's, yeah, you have to have the resource.

• 2:31:29Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:29Lee Cronin?

  Because time is a fundamental resource and, and, yeah, I'm becoming, I think I had a major.

• 2:31:41Lee Cronin?

  Epiphany about randomness, but I keep doing that every two days and then it goes away again. It's random.

• 2:31:46Lex Fridman?

  You're a time fundamentalist.

• 2:31:48Lee Cronin?

  You should be as well. If you believe in free will, the only conclusion is there is time is fundamental. Otherwise you cannot have free will. It logically follows.

• 2:31:59Lex Fridman?

  Well, my, my, the foundation of my belief in free will is just, uh, is, is observation driven.

• 2:32:09Lee Cronin?

  But that's.

• 2:32:10Lex Fridman?

  I think if you use logic, it's like logically it seems like the universe is deterministic.

• 2:32:17Lee Cronin?

  Looking backwards in time, and that's correct. The universe is.

• 2:32:21Lex Fridman?

  And then everything else is, is a, is a kind of leap. It requires a leap.

• 2:32:26Lee Cronin?

  I mean, I, I, I think that, um,

• 2:32:31Lee Cronin?

  it's kind of, this is what I think machine learning is going to provide a big, a chunk of that. Right. Cause it, it helps us explain this. So the way I'd say, if you take.

• 2:32:41Lex Fridman?

  That's interesting. Why?

• 2:32:43Lee Cronin?

  Well, let's, let's, let's just, um, my favorite one is because I'm, I'm the AI doomers are driving me mad. And AI, the fact that we don't have any intelligence yet. I call AI autonomous informatics just to make people grumpy.

• 2:32:56Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:57Lee Cronin?

  Um, and then.

• 2:32:57Lex Fridman?

  You, you're saying we're quite far away from AGI.

• 2:33:01Lee Cronin?

  I think that we have no conception of intelligence. And I think that we don't understand how the human brain does what it does. I think that we are, neuroscience is making great advances, but I think that we have no idea about AGI. So I am a technological, I guess, optimist. I believe we should do everything. The whole regulation of AI is nonsensical. I mean, why would you regulate Excel other than the fact that Clippy should come back? And I love Excel 97 because we can play, um, you know, we can do the flight simulator.

• 2:33:33Lex Fridman?

  I'm sorry, in Excel?

• 2:33:34Lee Cronin?

  Yeah. Have you not played the flight simulator in 99?

• 2:33:36Lex Fridman?

  In Excel 97?

• 2:33:38Lee Cronin?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:39Lex Fridman?

  What does that look like?

• 2:33:41Lee Cronin?

  It's like wireframe, very, very basic, but basically I think it's X zero, Y zero shift, and it opens up and you can play the fight simulator.

• 2:33:50Lex Fridman?

  Oh, wow. Wait, wait. Is it using Excel?

• 2:33:53Lee Cronin?

  Excel, Excel ninety seven.

• 2:33:55Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 2:33:56Lee Cronin?

  I resurrected it the other day and saw Clippy again for the first time in a long time.

• 2:33:59Lex Fridman?

  Well, Clippy is definitely coming back, but you're saying we don't have a great understanding of what is intelligence, what is the intelligence?

• 2:34:08Lee Cronin?

  I am very frustrated.

• 2:34:10Lex Fridman?

  Underpinning the human mind.

• 2:34:12Lee Cronin?

  I'm very frustrated by the way that we're AI dooming right now and people are bestowing some kind of magic. Now, let's go back a bit. So you said AGI, are we far away from AGI? Yes, I do not think we're going to get to AGI anytime soon. I've seen no evidence of it. And the AI doom scenario is nonsensical in the extreme.

• 2:34:33Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:33Lee Cronin?

  And the reason why I think it's nonsensical, but it's not nonsensical.

• 2:34:39Lee Cronin?

  And I don't think there isn't things we should do and be very worried about, right? I mean, there are things we need to worry about right now, what AI are doing, whether it's fake data, fake users, right? I want authentic people, authentic data. I don't want everything to be faked. And I think it's a really big problem. And I absolutely want to go on the record to say I really worry about that. What I'm not worried about is that some fictitious entity is going to turn us all to paperclips or detonate nuclear bombs. I don't know. Maybe, I don't know, anything you can't think of. Why is this? Is a, and I'll, I'll take a very simple series of logical arguments. And, and this is the, the, the

• 2:35:20Lee Cronin?

  AI doomers are, have not had the correct, and this is, had not had the correct, they do not have the correct epistemology. They do not understand what knowledge is. And until we understand what knowledge is, they're not going to get anywhere because they're applying things falsely. So let me give you a very simple argument. People talk about the probability, P doom, AI. I can, we can work out the probability of an asteroid hitting the planet. Why? Because it's happened before. We know the mechanism. We know that there's a gravity well, or that, you know, spacetime is bent and stuff falls in. We don't know the probability of AGI because we have no mechanism. So let me give you the another one, which is like, I'm really worried about AG. What's AG? AG is anti-gravity.

• 2:36:05Lee Cronin?

  One day, we could wake up and anti-gravity, you know, is discovered. We're all gonna die. The atmosphere is gonna float away. We're gonna float away. We're all doomed. What is the probability of AG? We don't know because there's no mechanism for AG. Do we worry about it? No. And I don't understand the current reason for the for the for certain people in certain areas to be generating this nonsense. I think they're not doing it maliciously. I think we're observing the emergence of new religions, how religions come, because religions are about kind of some control. So you've got the optimist saying, AI is gonna cure us all and AI is gonna kill us all. What's the reality? Well, we don't have AI.

• 2:36:48Lee Cronin?

  We have really powerful machine learning tools. And they will allow us to do interesting things. And we need to be careful about how we use those tools in terms of manipulating human beings and faking stuff, right?

• 2:37:00Lex Fridman?

  Right, well, let me. Let me try to sort of steel man the AI doomers argument. Actually, I don't know. Are AI doomers in the Yudkowsky camp saying it's definitely gonna kill us? Because there's a spectrum.

• 2:37:13Lee Cronin?

  Ninety-five percent, I think, is the limit.

• 2:37:15Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, ninety-five percent plus.

• 2:37:17Lee Cronin?

  No, not not plus. I think, I don't know. I was seeing on Twitter today various things, but I think Yudkowsky is at ninety-five percent.

• 2:37:24Lex Fridman?

  But to belong to the AI doomer club, is there a threshold? I don't know what the membership is.

• 2:37:28Lee Cronin?

  Maybe.

• 2:37:29Lex Fridman?

  And what are the fees?

• 2:37:30Lee Cronin?

  I think. Well, I saw, I think Scott Aronson, like, I was quite surprised had put two. I saw this online, so it could be wrong. So sorry if it's wrong. Says two percent. But the thing is, if you were to, if you, if someone said, there's a two percent chance you're gonna die going into the lift. Would you go into the lift?

• 2:37:46Lex Fridman?

  In the elevator for the

• 2:37:47Lee Cronin?

  Yeah, elevator.

• 2:37:47Lex Fridman?

  American, English speaking audience. Well, no, not for the elevator.

• 2:37:52Lee Cronin?

  So I would say anyone higher than two percent. I mean, like, I, I mean, I think there's a zero percent chance of AGI doom. Zero.

• 2:37:59Lex Fridman?

  Just to push back on the on the argument where the N of zero on the AGI. We could see on Earth that there is increasing levels of intelligence of organisms. We could see what humans with extra intelligence were able to do to the other species. So that. Is a lot of samples of data, what a delta in intelligence gives you. When you have an increase in intelligence, how you're able to dominate a species on Earth. And so the idea there is that if you have a being that's 10x smarter than humans,

• 2:38:39Lex Fridman?

  we're not going to be able to predict what that's going to, what that being is going to be able to do, especially if it has the power to hurt humans, which you can imagine a lot of trajectories in which the more benefit AI systems give, the more control we give to those AI systems over our power grid, over our nuclear weapons, or weapons of any sort. And then it's hard to know what an ultra-intelligent system would be able to do in that case. You don't find that convincing?

• 2:39:11Lee Cronin?

  I think this is, I would, I would fail that argument 100%. Here's a number of reasons to fail it on. First of all, we don't know where the intention comes from. The problem is that people think, they keep, you know, I've been watching all the hucksters online with the prompt engineering and all this stuff. Where, when I talk to a typical AI computer scientist, they keep talking about the AIs having some kind of decision-making ability. That is a category error. The decision-making ability comes from human beings. We have no understanding of how humans make decisions. We've just been discussing free will for the last half an hour, right? We don't even know what that is. So the intention, I totally agree with you.

• 2:39:53Lee Cronin?

  People who intend to do bad things can do bad things and we should not let that risk go. That's totally here and now. I do not want that to happen and I'm happy to be regulated to make sure that systems I generate, whether they're like computer systems or, you know, I'm working on a new project called Chem-Machina.

• 2:40:14Lex Fridman?

  Nice. Well done.

• 2:40:16Lee Cronin?

  Yeah, yeah, which is basically a...

• 2:40:19Lex Fridman?

  For people who don't understand the point, the X mark has a great film about, I guess, AGI embodied and chemistry version of that.

• 2:40:29Lee Cronin?

  And I only know one way to embody intelligence, that's in chemistry and human brains. So category error number one is agents, they have agency. Category error number two is saying that assuming that anything we make is going to be more intelligent. Now, you didn't say super intelligent. I'll put the words into our mouths here, super intelligent. That, I think that there is no, no reason to expect that we are going to make systems that are more intelligent, more capable. You know, when people play chess computers, they don't expect to win now, right? They just, the chess computer is very good at chess. That doesn't mean it's super intelligent. So I think that super intelligence, I mean, I think even Nick Bostrom is pulling back on this now.

• 2:41:14Lee Cronin?

  Cause he invented this. So I see this a lot. When did this first happen? Eric Drexler, Neo-technology, atomically precise machines. He came up with a world where we had these atom cogs everywhere. They were gonna, we're gonna make self-replicating nanobots. Not possible. Why? Because there's no resources to build these self-replicating nanobots. You can't get the precision. It doesn't work. It was a major category error in taking engineering principles down to the molecular level. The only functioning molecular technology we know, sorry, the only functioning nano molecular technology we know, produced by evolution. There. So now let's go forward to AGI. What is AGI? We don't know. It's super, it can do this, or humans can't think.

• 2:41:55Lee Cronin?

  That, I would argue, the only AGIs that exist in the universe are produced by evolution. And sure, we may be able to make our working memory better. We might be able to do more things. The human brain is the most compact computing unit in the universe. Uses 20 watts. It's a, uses a really limited volume. It's not like a chat GPT cluster, which has to have thousands of watts, a model that's generated and has to be corrected by human beings. You are autonomous and embodied intelligence. So I think that there are so many levels that we're missing out. We've just kind of went, oh, we've discovered fire. Oh gosh, the planet's just gonna burn one day randomly. I mean, I just don't understand that leap.

• 2:42:39Lee Cronin?

  There are bigger problems we need to worry about. So what is the motivation? Why are these people? Let's assume they have their earnest have this conviction. Well, I think it's just it's kind of they're making leaps that they're trapped in a virtual reality that isn't reality.

• 2:42:56Lex Fridman?

  Well, I mean, I can continue a set of arguments here, but also it is true that ideologies that fear monger are dangerous.

• 2:43:07Lex Fridman?

  Because you can then use it to control, to to regulate in a way that halts progress, to control people and to to cancel people, all that kind of stuff. So you have to be careful because reason ultimately wins, right? But there is a lot of concerns with super intelligent systems, very capable systems. I think when I when you hear the word super intelligence, you're hearing like it's smarter than humans in every way that humans are smart. But the paperclip manufacturing system doesn't need to be smart in every way, just need to be smart in a set of specific ways.

• 2:43:50Lex Fridman?

  And the more capable the AI systems become, the more you could see us giving them control over, like I said, our power grid, a lot of aspects of human life. And then that means they will be able to do more and more damage when there's unintended consequences that come to life.

• 2:44:08Lee Cronin?

  I I think that that's right, that unintended consequences we have to think about. And I'm that I fully I fully agree with. But let's go back a bit. Sentient, I mean, I'm getting on far away from my comfort zone and all this stuff. But hey, let's talk about it because I give myself a qualification.

• 2:44:24Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, we're both qualified and sentient, I think.

• 2:44:27Lee Cronin?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:27Lex Fridman?

  As much as anyone else.

• 2:44:29Lee Cronin?

  I think the paperclip scenario is just such a poor one because let's think about how that would happen. And also, let's think about we are being so.

• 2:44:39Lee Cronin?

  Unrealistic about how much of the Earth's surface we have commandeered. I, you know, for paperclip manufacturing to really happen, I mean, do the math. It's like, it's, it's not gonna happen. There's not enough energy. There's not enough resource. Where are they all gonna come from? I think that what happens in evolution is really, it, why is, why is a killer virus not killed out all of, not killed all life on Earth? What happens is, sure, super killer viruses that kill the ribosome have emerged. But you know what happens? They nuke a small space because they can't propagate. They all die. So there's this interplay between evolution and propagation, right? And death. And so.

• 2:45:18Lex Fridman?

  In evolution? You don't think it's possible to engineer, for example, sorry to interrupt, but like a perfect virus?

• 2:45:24Lee Cronin?

  No.

• 2:45:24Lex Fridman?

  That's deadly enough?

• 2:45:25Lee Cronin?

  No, it's nonsensical.

• 2:45:27Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 2:45:28Lee Cronin?

  I think that just wouldn't, again, it wouldn't work. It was too deadly. It would just kill the radius and not replicate.

• 2:45:32Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. I mean, you don't think it's possible to get a?

• 2:45:36Lee Cronin?

  I mean, if you were, I mean, I, if you were.

• 2:45:41Lex Fridman?

  Not kill all of life on Earth, but kill all humans. There's not many of us. There's only like eight billion.

• 2:45:48Lex Fridman?

  There's, there's so much more ants.

• 2:45:49Lee Cronin?

  I mean, I don't, I.

• 2:45:50Lex Fridman?

  So many more ants.

• 2:45:53Lex Fridman?

  And they're pretty smart.

• 2:45:54Lee Cronin?

  I think we, the nice thing about what we're, where we are, I would love for the AI crowd to take a leaf out of the book of the bio warfare, chemical warfare crowd.

• 2:46:07Lee Cronin?

  I mean, not love, because actually people have been killed with chemical weapons in the First and Second World War. And people, and bioweapons have been made and, you know, we can argue about COVID-19 and all this stuff. Let's not go there just now. But I think there is a consensus that some certain things are bad and we shouldn't do them, right? And, and sure, it would be possible for a bad actor to, to engineer something bad. But the, the damage would be, we would see it coming and we would be able to do something about it.

• 2:46:38Lee Cronin?

  Now. I guess what I'm trying to say is when people talk about doom and they just when you ask them for the mechanism, they just say, you know, they just make something up. I'm, I mean, in this case, I'm with Jan LeCoon. I think he put out a very good point about trying to regulate jet engines before we've even invented them.

• 2:46:59Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:59Lee Cronin?

  And I think that's what I'm saying. I'm not saying we should, I just don't understand why these guys are going around making, literally making stuff up about us all dying.

• 2:47:08Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:08Lee Cronin?

  When basically we need to actually really focus on. Now, let's say there's some actors are earnest. All right, let's say Yudakowski is being earnest, right? And he really cares, but he loves it. It goes, and then you're all gonna die. It's like, you know, why don't we try and do the same thing, say, you could do this, and then you're all gonna be happy forever after.

• 2:47:28Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:29Lee Cronin?

  You know?

• 2:47:29Lex Fridman?

  Well, I think there's several things to say there. One, I think there is a role in society for people that say, we're all gonna die. Because I think it filters through as a message, as a viral message that gives us the proper amount of concern.

• 2:47:45Lee Cronin?

  Okay, all right.

• 2:47:46Lex Fridman?

  Meaning not the, it's not 95%, but when you say 95% and it filters through society, it'll give an average of like a 0.03% an average. So it's nice to have people that are like, we're all gonna die, then we'll have a proper concern. Like, for example, I do believe we're not properly concerned about the threat of nuclear weapons currently. Like that, it just seems like people have forgotten that that's a thing. And, you know, there's a war in Ukraine with the nuclear power involved. There's nuclear power throughout the world, and it just feels like we're on the brink of a potential world war to a percentage that I don't think people are properly calibrating.

• 2:48:28Lex Fridman?

  Like in their head, we're all thinking it's a Twitter battle as opposed to like actual threat. So like, it's nice to have that kind of level of concern. But to me, like what I, when I hear AI doomers, what I'm imagining is with unintended consequences, a potential situation where.

• 2:48:47Lex Fridman?

  Let's say 5% of the world suffers deeply because of a mistake made of unintended consequences. I don't want to imagine the entirety of human civilization dying, but there's could be a lot of suffering if this is done poorly.

• 2:49:01Lee Cronin?

  I understand that. And I'm, I kind of, I guess, I mean, I'm involved in the whole hype cycle, like why, what, I would like us to, I don't want us to, so what's happening right now is there seems to be, so let me, let's say, having some people saying AI doom is a worry, fine, let's give them that. But what seems to be happening is there seems to be people who don't think AI is doing, they're trying to use that to control regulation and to push people to regulate where, which, which stops humans generating knowledge. And I am an advocate for generating as much knowledge as possible. When it comes to nuclear weapons, I grew up in the seventies and eighties where the nuclear doom, a lot of adults really

• 2:49:45Lee Cronin?

  had existential threat, almost as bad as now with AI doom. They were really worried, right? There was some great, well, not great, there was some horrific documentaries. I think there's one called Fred's that was generated in the UK, which was like, it was terrible. It was like so scary. And I think that the correct thing to do is obviously get rid of nuclear weapons, but let's think about unintended consequences. We've got rid of, this is such a non sequitur, we got rid of all the sulfur particles in the atmosphere, right? All the, all the soot. And what's happened in the last couple of years is global warming has accelerated because we've cleaned up the atmosphere too much. So.

• 2:50:24Lex Fridman?

  Sure. I mean, the same thing, if you get rid of nuclear weapons, you're gonna.

• 2:50:27Lee Cronin?

  Exactly. That's my point. So what we could do is if we actually started to put the AI in charge, which is I really like an AI to be in charge of all world politics. And this just sounds ridiculous for a second, hang on. But if we could all agree on the.

• 2:50:41Lex Fridman?

  AI doomers just woke up.

• 2:50:42Lee Cronin?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:50:43Lex Fridman?

  On that statement.

• 2:50:44Lee Cronin?

  But I really don't like politicians who are basically just looking at local sampling. But if you could say globally, look, here's some game theory here. There's, what is the minimum number of nuclear weapons we need to distribute around the night, the world to everybody to basically reduce war to zero?

• 2:51:01Lex Fridman?

  I mean, just this thought experiment of the United States and China and Russia and major nuclear powers get together and say, all right, we're going to distribute nuclear weapons.

• 2:51:12Lee Cronin?

  To everybody.

• 2:51:13Lex Fridman?

  Every single nation on earth.

• 2:51:14Lee Cronin?

  Yep.

• 2:51:16Lex Fridman?

  Oh, boy. I mean, that has a probably greater than 50% chance of eliminating major military conflict.

• 2:51:26Lee Cronin?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:27Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but it's not 100%.

• 2:51:29Lee Cronin?

  But I don't think anyone will use them because I think, and look, what you've got to try and do is like to qualify for these nuclear weapons. I can't, this is a great idea. The game theorists could do this, right? I think the question is this. I really buy your question. We have too many nukes.

• 2:51:47Lee Cronin?

  From just from a feeling point of view that we've got too many of them. So let's reduce the number, but not get rid of them because we'll have too much conventional warfare. So then what is the minimum number of nuclear weapons we can just shoot around to remove? Humans hurting each other is something we should stop doing. It's in, it's not out with our conceptual capability. But right now, what about nations, certain nations that are being exploited for their natural resources in the future? Because for a short term gain, because we don't want to generate knowledge. And so if everybody had an equal doomsday switch, I predict the quality of life of the average human will go up faster. I am an optimist and I believe that humanity is going to get better and better and better,

• 2:52:31Lee Cronin?

  that we're going to eliminate more problems. But I think, yeah.

• 2:52:35Lex Fridman?

  But the probability of a bad actor, of one of the nations setting off a nuclear weapon.

• 2:52:44Lex Fridman?

  I mean, you have to, you have to integrate that into the.

• 2:52:47Lee Cronin?

  But we just give the nukes like population, right? We give, what we do is we.

• 2:52:55Lee Cronin?

  But anyway, let's just go there. Let's say, so if a, if a small nation with a couple of nukes uses one because they're a bit bored or annoyed, they're gonna, the likelihood that they are going to be pummeled out of existence immediately is 100%. And yet they've only, they've only nuked one other city. I know this is crazy and I apologize for.

• 2:53:13Lex Fridman?

  Well, no, no, I think it's just to be clear, we're just having a thought experiment that's interesting, but.

• 2:53:19Lex Fridman?

  You know, there's terrorist organizations that would take that, would take, would take that trade.

• 2:53:24Lee Cronin?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:25Lex Fridman?

  And that, and we have to ask ourselves the question of how many, which percentage of humans would be suicide bombers, essentially, where they would sacrifice their own life to, to, because they hate another group of people. And that, I believe it's a very small fraction, but is it large enough to, if you give out nuclear weapons?

• 2:53:46Lee Cronin?

  I can predict a future where we take all nuclear material and we burn it for energy, right? As well, because we're getting there. And the other thing you could do is say, look, there's a gap. So if we got all the countries to sign up to the virtual nuclear agreement where we all exist, we have a simulation.

• 2:54:00Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:00Lee Cronin?

  Where we can nuke each other in the simulation and the, and the economic consequences are catastrophic.

• 2:54:05Lex Fridman?

  Sure. In the simulation, I love it. It's not going to kill all humans, it's just going to have economic consequences.

• 2:54:10Lee Cronin?

  Yeah. I don't know, I just made it up. It seems like a cool idea.

• 2:54:13Lex Fridman?

  No, it's interesting. I mean, but it's interesting whether that would have as much power on human psychology as actual physical nuclear.

• 2:54:21Lee Cronin?

  I think so.

• 2:54:22Lex Fridman?

  It's possible, but people don't take economic consequences as seriously, I think, as actual nuclear weapons.

• 2:54:28Lee Cronin?

  I think they do in Argentina, and they do in Somalia, and they're doing a lot of these places where, no, I, I think this is a great idea. I'm a strong advocate now for, so what have we come up with? Burning, burning all the nuclear material to have energy. And before we do that, because MAD is good, mutually assured destruction is very powerful, let's take it into the metaverse and then get people to kind of subscribe to that. And if they actually nuke each other, even for fun in the metaverse, there are dire consequences.

• 2:54:58Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Yeah. So it's like a video game. We all have to join this metaverse video game.

• 2:55:03Lee Cronin?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:04Lex Fridman?

  And then there's dire economic consequences. I don't know how, and it's all run by AI, as you mentioned, where, so the AI doomers is, are really terrified at this point.

• 2:55:14Lee Cronin?

  No, they're happy to have a job for another 20 years, right?

• 2:55:17Lex Fridman?

  Oh, fear mongering.

• 2:55:18Lee Cronin?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. We got, I'm a believer in equal employment.

• 2:55:22Lex Fridman?

  You've mentioned that, what you call it? Chemokina?

• 2:55:28Lee Cronin?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:29Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. So you've mentioned that a, a chemical brain is something you're interested in creating. And that's the way to get conscious AI soon.

• 2:55:41Lex Fridman?

  Can you explain what a chemical brain is?

• 2:55:44Lee Cronin?

  I want to understand the mechanism of intelligence that's gone through evolution, right? Because the way that the way that intelligence was produced by evolution appears to be the following. Origin of life, multi solidarity, locomotion, senses. Once you can start to see things coming towards you and you can remember the past and interrogate the present and imagine the future, you can do something amazing, right? So, and I think only in recent years did humans become Turing complete, right?

• 2:56:18Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:56:20Lee Cronin?

  Right, we'll go, and so that Turing completeness kind of gave us another kick up. But our ability to process that information is produced in a wet brain. And, and I think that we are not getting, gonna, we do not have the correct hardware architectures to have the domain flexibility and the, the ability to integrate information. I think intelligence also comes at a massive compromise of data. Right now, we're obsessing about getting more and more data, more and more processing, more and more tricks to get dopamine hits. So we're gonna, when we look back on this going, oh yeah, that was really cool.

• 2:57:02Lee Cronin?

  Because when I've chat, I'll chat GPT, it made me, it made me really feel really happy. I got a hit from it, but actually it just exposed how little intelligence I use in a, in every moment, because I'm easily fooled. So what I would like to do is to say, well, hey, hang on, what is it about the brain? So the brain has this incredible connectivity and it has the ability to, you know, as I said earlier about my nephew, you know, I just, I went from Bill to Billy and he went, all right, Leroy, like, how did he make that leap? That he was able to basically, without any training, I extended his name, he went gay, and he doesn't like, he wants to be called Bill.

• 2:57:46Lee Cronin?

  He went back and said, you like to be called Lee, I'm gonna call you Leroy. So human beings have a brilliant ability, or intelligent beings appear to have a brilliant ability to integrate across all domains all at once and to synthesize something which allows us to generate knowledge and, and becoming Turing complete.

• 2:58:08Lee Cronin?

  On our own, I don't, although AIs are built ensuring complete things, their thinking is not true and complete in that they are not able to build universal explanations. And that lack of universal explanation means that they're just inductivists. Inductivism doesn't get you anywhere in not, it's just basically a party trick. It's like, you know, the, I like the, I think it's in The Fabric of Reality from David Deutsch, where basically, you know, the farmer is feeding the chicken every day and the chicken's getting fat and happy and the chicken's like, I'm really happy every time the farmer comes in and feeds me. And then one day the farmer comes in and doesn't, instead of feeding the chicken, just wrings its neck.

• 2:58:51Lee Cronin?

  You know, and that's kind of, and had the chicken had an alternative understanding of why the farmer was feeding it.

• 2:58:58Lex Fridman?

  It's interesting though, because we all know what's special about the human mind that's able to come up with these kind of generalities, this universal theories of things and will come up with novelty. I can imagine, because you gave an example, you know, about William and Leroy, I feel like example like that will be able to see in future versions of large language models, will be really, really, really impressed by the humor, the insights, all of it, because it's fundamentally trained on all the incredible humor and insights that's available out there on the internet, right? So we'll be impressed. I think we'll

• 2:59:43Lex Fridman?

  be impressed.

• 2:59:44Lee Cronin?

  Oh, I'm impressed.

• 2:59:45Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 2:59:46Lee Cronin?

  I'm impressed.

• 2:59:47Lex Fridman?

  Increasingly so.

• 2:59:48Lee Cronin?

  But we're mining the past.

• 2:59:49Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 2:59:50Lee Cronin?

  And what the human brain appears to be able to do is mine the future.

• 2:59:53Lex Fridman?

  Yes. So novelty, it is interesting whether these large language models.

• 3:00:00Lex Fridman?

  Will ever be able to come up with something truly novel.

• 3:00:03Lee Cronin?

  I can show on the back of a piece of paper why that's impossible. And it's like, the problem is that, and again, there's a domain experts kind of bullshitting each other. The term generative.

• 3:00:14Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 3:00:15Lee Cronin?

  Right? Average person think, oh, it's generative. No, no, no. If, look, if I take the numbers between zero and 1,000 and I train a model to pick out the prime numbers by giving them all the prime numbers between zero and 1,000. He doesn't know what prime number is. Occasionally, if I can cheat a bit, it will start to guess. It never will produce anything out with the data set because you mind the past. The thing that I'm getting to is I think that actually current machine learning technologies might actually help reveal why time is fundamental. It's like kind of insane because they tell you about what's happened in the past, but they can never help you understand what's happening in the future without training examples. Sure, if that thing happens again.

• 3:00:59Lee Cronin?

  It's like, so I think, so let's think about what large language models are doing. We have the, we have the, we have all the internet as we know it, you know, language, but also they're doing something else. We're having human beings correcting it all the time. Those models are being corrected.

• 3:01:16Lex Fridman?

  Steered.

• 3:01:18Lee Cronin?

  Corrected. Modified, tweaked.

• 3:01:23Lex Fridman?

  Well, yeah, but I mean.

• 3:01:24Lee Cronin?

  Cheating.

• 3:01:26Lex Fridman?

  Well, you could say that training on human data in the first place is cheating.

• 3:01:29Lee Cronin?

  Well, let me, the human is in the loop. Sorry to interrupt.

• 3:01:32Lex Fridman?

  Yes, so human is definitely in the loop. But it's not just human is in the loop. A very large collection of humans is in the loop.

• 3:01:42Lee Cronin?

  Look, I totally.

• 3:01:42Lex Fridman?

  And that could be. I mean, to me, it's not intuitive that you said prime numbers, that the system can't generate an algorithm. Right? That.

• 3:01:54Lex Fridman?

  The algorithm that can generate prime numbers, or the algorithm that can tell you if a number is prime and so on, and generate algorithms that generate algorithms that generate algorithms that

• 3:02:04Lee Cronin?

  I can

• 3:02:04Lex Fridman?

  that start to look a lot like human reasoning, you know?

• 3:02:08Lee Cronin?

  I don't thi- I think, again, we can show that on a piece of paper, that's sure. I think there has, you have to have, so this is the failure in epistemology. Like, I'm glad I even can say that word, let them know what it means.

• 3:02:21Lex Fridman?

  It's impressive. You've said it multiple times.

• 3:02:22Lee Cronin?

  I know, it's like, three times now.

• 3:02:23Lex Fridman?

  Without failure. Quit while you're ahead. Just don't say it again, because you did really well.

• 3:02:29Lee Cronin?

  Thanks. So I, but I, I think the, so what is reasoning? So coming back to the chemical brain, if I could basically, if I could show that in a, because I mean, I'm never going to make an intelligence in Cam Machina, because we don't have brain cells, they don't have glial cells, they don't have neurons. But if I can make, if I can take a matrix, a gel, and engineer the gel to have it be a hybrid hardware for reprogramming, which I think I know how to do, I will be able to process a lot more information and train, train models billions of times cheaper and use cross-domain knowledge. And there's certain techniques I think we can do.

• 3:03:08Lee Cronin?

  But there's still missing, though, the, the abilities of human beings have had to become true and complete. And so, I guess the question to give back at you, and I, is like, how do you tell the difference between trial and error? And the generation of new knowledge? I think the way you can do it is this, is that you come up with a, a theory, an explanation, inspiration comes from out, yeah, and then, you then test that, and then you, you see that's going towards a truth. And human beings are very good at doing that, in, and the transition between philosophy, mathematics, physics, and natural sciences, where, and I think that we, we can see that.

• 3:03:50Lee Cronin?

  Where I get confused is why people misappropriate the term artificial intelligence to say, hey, there's something else going on here, because I think you and I both agree, machine learning's really good. It's only going to get better, we're going to get happier with the outcome. But why would you ever think the model was thinking? Or reasoning? Reasoning requires intention.

• 3:04:16Lee Cronin?

  And the intention, if the model isn't reasoning, the intentions come from the prompter. And the intention has come from the person who programmed it to do it. So I, I.

• 3:04:28Lex Fridman?

  Um, but don't you think you can prompt it to have intention? Basically, start with the initial conditions and get it going. Where the, you know, currently, large language models, chat G P T, only talks to you when you talk to it. There's no reason why you can't just start it talking.

• 3:04:52Lee Cronin?

  But, but those initial addition, conditions came from someone starting it.

• 3:04:56Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 3:04:57Lee Cronin?

  And that causal chain in there. So that intention comes from the outside. I think that there is something in that causal chain of intention that's super important. I, I don't disagree. We're going to get to A G I. It's a matter of when and what hardware. I think we're not going to do it in this hardware. And I think we're unnecessarily fetishizing really cool outputs and dopamine hits. Because obviously that's what people want to sell us.

• 3:05:19Lex Fridman?

  Well, but there could be, I mean, A G I is a loaded term, but there could be incredibly super

• 3:05:27Lex Fridman?

  impressive intelligent systems on the way to A G I. So these large language models, I mean, if it appears conscious, if it appears super intelligent,

• 3:05:41Lex Fridman?

  who are we to say it's not?

• 3:05:43Lee Cronin?

  I agree, but I, the super intelligence I want, I want to, I want to be able to have a discussion with it about coming up with fundamental new ideas that generate knowledge. And if the, if the super intelligence we generate can mine novelty from the future that I didn't see in its training set in the past, I would agree that something really interesting is coming on. I'll say that again, if the, if the intelligent system, be it a human being, a chat, chatbot, something else, is able to produce something truly novel that we, I could not predict, even having full audit trail from the past, then I would be sold.

• 3:06:20Lex Fridman?

  Well, so we should be clear that it can currently produce, it can currently produce things that are in a shallow sense, novel, that are not in the training set. But you're saying truly novel.

• 3:06:33Lee Cronin?

  I think they are in the training set. I think everything it produces comes through a training set. There might be, there's a difference between novelty and interpolation. We do not understand where these leaps come from yet. That is what intelligence is, I would argue. Those leaps. And some people say, no, it's actually just what will happen if you just do cross domain training and all that stuff. And that may be true. And I may be completely wrong. But right now, the human mind is able to mine novelty. In a way that artificial intelligence systems cannot. And this is why we still have a job and we're still doing stuff. And, you know, I use chat G P T for a few weeks. Well, this is cool. And then it took me too, I had to, well, what happened is it took me too much time to correct it. Then it got really good. And now they've, they've done something to it. It's not actually that good.

• 3:07:17Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, right.

• 3:07:18Lee Cronin?

  I don't know what's going on.

• 3:07:19Lex Fridman?

  Censorship, yeah.

• 3:07:20Lee Cronin?

  And so.

• 3:07:21Lex Fridman?

  I mean, that's interesting, but it will push us humans to characterize novelty better, like characterize the novel, like what is novel? What is truly novel? What's the difference between novelty and interpolation?

• 3:07:32Lee Cronin?

  I think that this, this is the thing that makes me most excited about these technologies. Is they're going to help me demonstrate to you that time is fundamental and the future is bigger than the, than the, than the present. Which is why we, we are, human beings are quite good at generating novelty because we have to expand our data set. And to cope with unexpected things in our environment. Our environment throws them all at us. Again, we have to survive in that environment. And I mean, I, I never say never. I would be very interested in how we can get cross domain training cheaply in chemical systems. Cause I'm a chemist and the brain, the only sent in thing I know of is a human brain, but maybe that's just me being boring and predictable and not novel.

• 3:08:16Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, you mentioned G P T for electron density. So a G P T like system for generating molecules. That can bind to host automatically. I mean, that's, that's interesting. That's really interesting. Applying this same kind of transformer mechanism.

• 3:08:32Lee Cronin?

  Yeah, I mean, this is one, it goes, my team, I try and do things that are non-obvious, but non-obvious in certain areas. And one of the things I was always asking about in chemistry, people like to represent molecules as graphs. And it's quite difficult, it's really hard. If you're doing AI in chemistry, you really want to basically have good representations. You can generate new molecules that are interesting. And I was thinking, well, molecules aren't really graphs, and they're not continuously differentiable. Could I do something that was continuously differentiable? And I was like, well, molecules are actually made up of electron density. So then I got thinking, say, well, okay, could there be a way where we could just

• 3:09:11Lee Cronin?

  basically take a, take a database of readily solved electron densities for millions of molecules? So we took the electron density for millions of molecules and just trained the model to learn what electron density is. And so what we built was a system that you literally could give it a, let's say you could take a protein that has a particular active site, or, you know, a cup with a certain hole in it, you pour noise into it, and with a GPT, you turn the noise into electron density. And then, in this case, it hallucinates, like all of them do. But the hallucinations are good, because it means I don't have to train on such a large number, such a huge data set. Because these data sets are very expensive.

• 3:09:55Lee Cronin?

  Because how do you produce it? So, so go back a step. So you've got all these molecules in this data set, but what you've literally done is a quantum mechanical calculation, we produce electron densities for each molecule. So you say, oh, this representation of this molecule has these electron densities associated with it. So you know what the representation is, and you train the neural network to know what electron density is. So then you give it an unknown pocket, you pour in noise, and you say, right, produce me electron density. It produces electron density that doesn't look ridiculous. And what we did in this case is we produced electron density that maximizes the electrostatic potential, so the stickiness, but minimizes what we call the sterile hindrance. So the overlap, so

• 3:10:36Lee Cronin?

  it's repulsive. So, you know, make the perfect fit. And then, we then use the kind of, kind of like a chat GPT type thing to turn that electron density into what's called a smile. A smile string is a, is a, is a way of representing a molecule in letters. And then we can then

• 3:10:54Lex Fridman?

  So it just generates them.

• 3:10:55Lee Cronin?

  Just generates them. And then the other thing is then we bung that into the computer and then it just makes it.

• 3:10:59Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, the the computer being the thing that, right.

• 3:11:03Lee Cronin?

  The robot that we've got that can basically just do chemistry.

• 3:11:06Lex Fridman?

  Creating.

• 3:11:06Lee Cronin?

  Yeah. So kind of, we've kind of got this end to end drug discovery machine where you can say, oh, you want to bind to this active site? Here you go. I mean, it's a bit leaky and things kind of break, but it's the it's a proof of principle.

• 3:11:18Lex Fridman?

  Well, were the hallucinations, what are those still accurate?

• 3:11:23Lee Cronin?

  Well, the hallucinations are really great in this case because in the case of a large language model, the hallucinations just like just make everything up to when it doesn't just make everything up, but it gives you an output that you're plausibly comfortable with and thinks you're doing probabilistically. The problem on these electron density models is it's very expensive to solve a shredding equation going up to many heavy atoms and and large molecules. And so we wondered if we trained the the the system on up to nine heavy atoms, whether it would go beyond nine. And it did. It started to generate molecules with 12. No problem. They look pretty good. And I was like, well, this hallucination I will take for free. Thank you very much because it just basically.

• 3:12:05Lee Cronin?

  This is a case where interpolation extrapolation worked relatively well. And we were able to generate the really good molecules. And then what we were able to do here is, and this is a really good point, what I was trying to say earlier, that we were able to generate new molecules from the known data set that would bind to the the host. So a new guest would bind. Were these truly novel? Not really, because they that they were constrained by the host. Were they new to us? Yes. So I do understand, well, understand, I can concede that machine learning systems,

• 3:12:45Lee Cronin?

  artificial intelligence systems can generate new entities, but how novel are they? It remains to be seen.

• 3:12:53Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. And how novel the things that humans generate is also difficult to quantify. They seem novel.

• 3:13:02Lee Cronin?

  That's what a lot of people say, like, you know. So the way to really get to genuine novelty and assembly theory shows you the way is to have different causal chains overlap. And this really resonates with the time is fundamental argument. And if you're bringing together a couple of objects with different initial conditions coming together, when they interact, the more different their histories, the more novelty they generate in time going forward. And so it could be that genuine novelty is basically about mix it up a little and the

• 3:13:44Lee Cronin?

  human brain is able to mix it up a little and all that stimulus comes from the environment. But all I think I'm saying is the universe is deterministic going back in time, non deterministic going forward in time because the future is too, the universe is too big in the future to contain in the present. Therefore, these collisions of known things generate unknown things that then become part of your data set and don't appear weird. That's how we give ourselves comfort. The past looks consistent with this initial condition hypothesis, but actually we're generating more and more novelty. And that's how it works. Simple.

• 3:14:19Lex Fridman?

  So it's hard to quantify novelty looking backwards. I mean, the present and the future are the novelty generators.

• 3:14:27Lee Cronin?

  But I like this whole idea of mining novelty. I think it is, it is going to reveal why the limitations of current AI is a bit like a printing press, right? Everyone thought that when the printing press came, that writing books is going to be terrible, that you had evil spirits and all this, they were just books.

• 3:14:46Lex Fridman?

  And same with AI. But I think there just a scale you can achieve in terms of impact with AI systems is pretty nerve wracking.

• 3:14:57Lee Cronin?

  But that's what the big companies want you to think.

• 3:15:00Lex Fridman?

  But not like in terms of destroy all humans, but you could have major.

• 3:15:06Lex Fridman?

  Consequences and the way social media has had major consequences, both positive and negative. And so you have to kind of think about and worry about it. But yeah, people that fear monger, you know.

• 3:15:16Lee Cronin?

  My pet theory?

• 3:15:18Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:15:18Lee Cronin?

  For this, you want to know?

• 3:15:20Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:15:20Lee Cronin?

  Is I think that a lot of, and maybe I'm being, and I think, I really do respect, you know, a lot of the people out there who are trying to have discourse about the positive future. So OpenAI guys, Meta guys and all this. And what I wonder if they're trying to cover up for the fact that social media has had a pretty disastrous effect at some level.

• 3:15:40Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:15:40Lee Cronin?

  And they're just trying to say, oh, yeah, we should do this. Cause and covering up for the fact that we have got some problems with, you know, teenagers and Instagram and Snapchat and, you know, all this stuff. And maybe they're just overreacting now.

• 3:15:54Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:15:54Lee Cronin?

  It's like, oh yeah, sorry. We made the bubonic plague and gave it to you all and you're all dying. And oh yeah, but look at this over here. It's even worse.

• 3:16:02Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, there's a, there's a little bit of that, but there's also not enough celebration of the positive impact that all these technologies have had. We tend to focus on the negative and tend to forget that in part because it's hard to measure, like it's very hard to measure the positive impact social media had on the world.

• 3:16:20Lee Cronin?

  Yeah, I agree. But if, what I worry about right now is like, I'm really, I do care about the ethics of what we're doing. And one of the reasons why I'm so open about the things we're trying to do in the lab, make life, look at intelligence, all this is so people say, what are the consequences of this? And you say, what are the consequences of not doing it? And I think that what worries me right now in the present is lack of authenticated users and authenticated data and.

• 3:16:47Lex Fridman?

  Human users.

• 3:16:48Lee Cronin?

  Yeah, human.

• 3:16:50Lex Fridman?

  I still think that there will be AI agents that appear to be conscious, but they would have to be also authenticated and labeled as such. There's too much, there's too much value in that, you know, like friendships with AI systems. There's too much meaningful human experiences to have with AI systems that I just.

• 3:17:10Lee Cronin?

  But that's like a tool, right? It's a bit like a meditation tool, right? Some people have a meditation tool, makes them feel better. But I'm not sure you can ascribe sentience and legal rights to a chatbot that makes you feel less lonely.

• 3:17:22Lex Fridman?

  Sentience, yes. I think legal rights, no. I think it's the same. You can have a really deep, meaningful relationship with a dog.

• 3:17:30Lee Cronin?

  With a dog sentient?

• 3:17:32Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 3:17:34Lee Cronin?

  The chatbots, right now, using the technology we use, it's not going to be sent in.

• 3:17:38Lex Fridman?

  Ah, this is going to be a fun, continued conversation on Twitter that I look forward to.

• 3:17:46Lex Fridman?

  Since you've had also, from another place, some debates that were inspired by the assembly theory paper. Let me ask you about God. Is there any room for notions of God in assembly theory?

• 3:18:03Lex Fridman?

  Of God?

• 3:18:04Lee Cronin?

  Yeah, I don't know what God is a, I mean, so God exists in our minds, created by selection.

• 3:18:13Lee Cronin?

  So the human beings have created the concept of God in the same way that human beings have created the concept of superintelligence.

• 3:18:19Lex Fridman?

  Sure, but does it, does it mean, does it not?

• 3:18:24Lex Fridman?

  It still could mean that that's a projection from the real world, where like we're just assigning words and concepts to a thing that is fundamental to the real world, that there is something out there that is a creative force underlying the universe?

• 3:18:44Lee Cronin?

  I think the universe, there is a creative force in the universe, but I don't think it's, it's sent in. I mean, I think the, so I do not understand the universe, so who am I to say, you know,

• 3:18:59Lee Cronin?

  that, that God doesn't exist? I am an atheist, but I'm not an angry atheist, right? I have lots of, I have lots of, there are some people I know that are angry atheists and say, you know, say that religious people are stupid. I don't think that's the case. I have faith in some things, because I don't, I mean, when I was a kid, I kept like, you know, it's like, I need to know what the charge of electron is. And I'm like, I can't measure the charge of electron. That was, you know, I was just gave up and had faith, okay? You know, resistors work. So when it comes to, I want to know why the universe is growing in the future and what humanity is going to become.

• 3:19:37Lee Cronin?

  And I've seen that the, the acquisition of knowledge via the generation of novelty to produce technology has uniformly made humans' lives better. I would love to continue that tradition.

• 3:19:53Lex Fridman?

  You said that there's that creative force. Do you think, just to think on that point, do you think there's a creative force?

• 3:19:59Lee Cronin?

  Well, I

• 3:20:00Lex Fridman?

  Is there like a thing, like a driver that's like, that's creating stuff?

• 3:20:07Lee Cronin?

  Yeah, I think that, so I think that

• 3:20:10Lex Fridman?

  And where?

• 3:20:11Lee Cronin?

  What is it?

• 3:20:12Lex Fridman?

  Can you describe it like mathematically?

• 3:20:13Lee Cronin?

  Well, I think selection. I think selection

• 3:20:15Lex Fridman?

  Selection is the force.

• 3:20:16Lee Cronin?

  Selection is the force in the universe that creates novelty.

• 3:20:20Lex Fridman?

  So is selection somehow fundamental, like what?

• 3:20:23Lee Cronin?

  Yeah. Yeah, I think persistence of objects that could decay into nothing through operations that maintain that structure. I mean, think about it. If, it's amazing that things exist at all, that we're just not a big commentorial mess.

• 3:20:39Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 3:20:40Lee Cronin?

  So the fact

• 3:20:40Lex Fridman?

  And they exist, and they, a thing that exists persists in time.

• 3:20:45Lee Cronin?

  Yeah. Let's think, maybe the universe is actually, in the present, the things, everything that can exist in the present does exist.

• 3:21:01Lex Fridman?

  Well, that would mean it's deterministic, right?

• 3:21:04Lee Cronin?

  No, I think the universe is might, so the universe started super small. The past was deterministic, there wasn't much going on, and it was able to mine, mine, mine, mine, mine. And so the process, I mean, is somehow generating, the universe is basically, I can't, I'm trying to put this into

• 3:21:23Lex Fridman?

  Did you just say there's no free will, though?

• 3:21:26Lee Cronin?

  No, I didn't say that.

• 3:21:27Lex Fridman?

  As if

• 3:21:28Lee Cronin?

  I'm sorry, I'm sorry, sorry. I said there is free will. I think, I think, I, I'm saying that free will occurs at the boundary between the

• 3:21:39Lex Fridman?

  Past and future?

• 3:21:40Lee Cronin?

  The past and the future.

• 3:21:41Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I got you. But everything that can exist does exist.

• 3:21:45Lee Cronin?

  Everything that is, so, everything that's possible to exist at this, so no, I'm really putting

• 3:21:52Lex Fridman?

  There's a lot of loaded words there.

• 3:21:54Lee Cronin?

  So what I mean

• 3:21:55Lex Fridman?

  There's a time element loaded into that.

• 3:21:57Lee Cronin?

  I, I think that the universe is able to do what it can in the present, right?

• 3:22:01Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:22:02Lee Cronin?

  And then I think in the future, there are other things that could be possible. We can imagine lots of things, but they don't all happen.

• 3:22:07Lex Fridman?

  Sure.

• 3:22:08Lee Cronin?

  So what, that's what I guess I'm getting to.

• 3:22:10Lex Fridman?

  Sneak in free will right there.

• 3:22:12Lee Cronin?

  Yeah. So I guess what I'm saying is what, what exists is a Com is a convolution of the past with the present and the free will going into the future.

• 3:22:22Lex Fridman?

  But we can still imagine stuff, right? We can imagine stuff that will never happen.

• 3:22:25Lee Cronin?

  And it's amazing force, because you're imagining. This is the most important thing that we don't understand is our imaginations can actually change the future in a tangible way, which is what the initial conditions and physics cannot predict. Like, your imagination has a causal consequence in the future.

• 3:22:46Lex Fridman?

  Isn't that weird to you?

• 3:22:48Lee Cronin?

  Yeah.

• 3:22:54Lee Cronin?

  It breaks the laws of physics as we know them right now.

• 3:22:58Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, so you think the imagination has a causal effect on the future?

• 3:23:03Lee Cronin?

  Yeah.

• 3:23:03Lex Fridman?

  But it does exist in there, in the head. And there must be a lot of power in whatever's going on. There could be a lot of power, whatever's going on in there.

• 3:23:12Lee Cronin?

  If we then go back to the initial conditions, and that is simply not possible that can happen. But if we go into a, if we go into a universe where we accept that there is a finite ability to represent numbers and you have rounding, well, not rounding errors, you have some, that some, what happens, the, your ability to make decisions, imagine and do stuff, is that that interface between the certain and the uncertain, it's not, as Yasha was saying to me, randomness goes and you just, you know, randomly do random stuff. It is that you are set free a little on your trajectory. Free will is about being able to explore on this narrow trajectory that allows you to build, you have a choice about what you build, or that choice is you interacting with a

• 3:23:57Lee Cronin?

  future in the present.

• 3:24:01Lex Fridman?

  What to you is most beautiful about this whole thing?

• 3:24:06Lex Fridman?

  The universe.

• 3:24:08Lee Cronin?

  The, the, the fact it seems to be very undecided, very open, and the fact that

• 3:24:17Lee Cronin?

  every time I think I'm getting towards an answer to a question, there are so many more questions that make the, the chase, you know.

• 3:24:25Lex Fridman?

  Do you hate that it's gonna be over at some point?

• 3:24:27Lee Cronin?

  No, I, well, for me, I don't, so I, I, I think if you think about it, is it over for Newton now?

• 3:24:37Lee Cronin?

  Newton has had causal consequences in the future. We discuss him all the time.

• 3:24:40Lex Fridman?

  His ideas, but not the person.

• 3:24:43Lee Cronin?

  The person just had a lot of causal power when he was alive, but oh my God. One of the things I want to do is leave as many Easter eggs in the future when I'm gone to go, oh, that's cool.

• 3:24:51Lex Fridman?

  Would you be very upset if somebody made like a good large language model that's fine tuned to Lee Connor?

• 3:24:59Lee Cronin?

  It would be quite boring because I mean, I mean, I'm.

• 3:25:02Lex Fridman?

  No novelty generation?

• 3:25:03Lee Cronin?

  I would, I mean, if it's a faithful representation of what I've done in my life, that's great. That's, that's an interesting artifact, but I think the most, most interesting thing about knowing each other is we don't know what we're going to do next.

• 3:25:15Lex Fridman?

  Sure.

• 3:25:18Lex Fridman?

  Sure.

• 3:25:18Lee Cronin?

  I mean, within some constraints, I've got, you know, you might, I can predict some things about you, you can predict some things about me, but we can't predict everything.

• 3:25:26Lex Fridman?

  Everything.

• 3:25:27Lee Cronin?

  And it's because we can't predict everything is why we're excited to come back and discuss and see it's. So yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm kind of, I'm happy that it'll be interesting that some things that I've done can be captured. But I'm pretty sure that my

• 3:25:45Lee Cronin?

  angle on mining novelty from the future will not be captured.

• 3:25:49Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Yeah. That's what life is, is just some novelty generation and then you're done.

• 3:26:00Lex Fridman?

  Each one of us just generate a little bit, or have the capacity to at least.

• 3:26:05Lee Cronin?

  I think life is a selection produces life and life affects a universe. And universes with life in them are materially, physically fundamentally different than universes without life. And that's super interesting and I have no beginnings of understanding. I think maybe this is like in a thousand years, there'll be a new discipline in the humans. We are, yeah, of course, this is how it all works, right? And.

• 3:26:32Lex Fridman?

  In retrospect, it will all be obvious, I think.

• 3:26:35Lee Cronin?

  I think assembly theory is obvious. That's why a lot of people got angry, right? They were like, oh my God, this is such nonsense, you know, and like, oh, you know, actually it's not quite, but the, the writing's really bad.

• 3:26:47Lex Fridman?

  Well, I can't wait to see where it evolves. Lee, and I'm glad I get to exist in this universe with you. You're a fascinating human. This is always a pleasure. I hope to talk to you many more, many more times. And I'm a huge fan of just watching you create stuff in this world. And thank you for talking today.

• 3:27:06Lee Cronin?

  It's a pleasure as always, Lex. Thanks for having me on.

• 3:27:09Lex Fridman?

  Thanks for listening to this conversation with Lee Cronin. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Carl Sagan. "We can judge our progress by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers, our willingness to embrace what is true rather than what feels good." Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.