#541: Eric Schmidt — The Promises and Perils of AI, the Future of Warfare, Profound Revolutions on the Horizon, and Exploring the Meaning of Life

Eric Schmidt — The Promises and Perils of AI, the Future of Warfare, Profound Revolutions on the Horizon, and Exploring the Meaning of Life | Brought to you by ShipStation https://shipstation.com/tim shipping software, ButcherBox http://butcherbox.com/tim premium meats delivered to your door, and Pique Tea http://piquetea.com/Tim premium tea crystals (pu’er, etc.). More on all three below. Eric Schmidt (@ericschmidt https://twitter.com/ericschmidt) is a technologist, entrepreneur, and philanthropist. He joined Google in 2001, helping the company grow from a Silicon Valley startup to a global technological leader. He served as chief executive officer and chairman from 2001 to 2011 and as executive chairman and technical advisor thereafter. Under his leadership, Google dramatically scaled its infrastructure and diversified its product offerings while maintaining a culture of innovation. In 2017, he co-founded Schmidt Futures http://www.schmidtfutures.com/, a philanthropic initiative that bets early on exceptional people making the world better. He serves as chair of the Broad Institute https://www.broadinstitute.org/ and formerly served as chair of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence. He is the host of Reimagine with Eric Schmidt https://www.reimaginepod.org/, a podcast exploring how society can build a brighter future after the COVID-19 pandemic. Eric has a new book out titled The Age of AI: And Our Human Future https://www.amazon.com/Age-I-Our-Human-Future/dp/0316273805/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, which he coauthored with Henry A. Kissinger and Daniel Huttenlocher. Please enjoy! This episode is brought to you by ButcherBox http://butcherbox.com/Tim! ButcherBox http://butcherbox.com/Tim makes it easy for you to get high-quality, humanely raised meat that you can trust. They deliver delicious, 100% grass-fed, grass-finished beef; free-range organic chicken; heritage-breed pork; and wild-caught seafood directly to your door. Skip the lines for your Thanksgiving turkey. This holiday, ButcherBox http://butcherbox.com/Tim is proud to give new members a free turkey. Go to ButcherBox.com/Tim to receive a free 10–14 pound turkey in your first box http://butcherbox.com/Tim. * This episode is also brought to you by Pique Tea http://piquetea.com/Tim! I first learned about Pique through my friends Dr. Peter Attia and Kevin Rose, and now Pique http://piquetea.com/Tim’s fermented pu’er tea crystals have become my daily go-to. I often kickstart my mornings with their Pu’er Green Tea and Pu’er Black Tea, and I alternate between the two. Their crystals are cold-extracted, using only wild-harvested leaves from 250-year-old tea trees. Plus, they triple toxin screen for heavy metals, pesticides, and toxic mold—contaminants commonly found in tea. I also use the crystals for iced tea, which saves a ton of time and hassle. Pique http://piquetea.com/Tim is offering 15% off of their pu’er teas http://piquetea.com/Tim, exclusively to my listeners. Simply visit PiqueTea.com/Tim http://piquetea.com/Tim, and the discount will be automatically applied. They also offer a 30-day satisfaction guarantee, so your purchase is completely risk free. Just go to PiqueTea.com/Tim http://piquetea.com/Tim to learn more. * This episode is also brought to you by ShipStation https://www.shipstation.com/tim. Do you sell stuff online? Then you know what a pain the shipping process is. ShipStation https://www.shipstation.com/tim was created to make your life easier. Whether you’re selling on eBay, Amazon, Shopify, or over 100 other popular selling channels, ShipStation lets you access all of your orders from one simple dashboard, and it works with all of the major shipping carriers, locally and globally, including FedEx, UPS, and USPS. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Peak Tea. That's P-I-Q-U-E. I have had so much tea in my life. I've been to China. I've lived in China and Japan. I've done tea tours. I drink a lot of tea. And 10 years plus of physical experimentation and tracking has shown me many things. Chief among them, that gut health is critical to just about everything. And you'll see where tea is going to tie into this. It affects immune function, weight management, mental performance, emotional health, you name it. I've been drinking fermented Pu'er tea specifically, pretty much every day for years now. Pu'er tea delivers more polyphenols and probiotics than you can shake a stick at. It's like providing the optimal fertilizer to your microbiome. The problem with good Pu'er is that it's hard to source.

• 0:44Tim Ferriss?

  It's hard to find real Pu'er that hasn't been exposed to pesticides and other nasties, which is super common. That's why Peak's fermented Pu'er tea crystals have become my daily go-to. It's so simple. They have so many benefits that I'm going to get into. And I first learned about them through my friends, Dr. Peter Attia and Kevin Rose. Peak Crystals are cold extracted using only wild harvested leaves from 250-year-old tea trees. I often kickstart my mornings with their Pu'er green tea, their Pu'er black tea, and I alternate between the two. The rich, earthy flavor of the black specifically is amazing. It's very, very, it's like a delicious barnyard. Very peaty, if you like whiskey and stuff like that.

• 1:26Tim Ferriss?

  They triple toxin screen all of their products for heavy metals, pesticides, and toxic mold contaminants commonly found in tea. There's also zero prep or brewing required as the crystals dissolve in seconds. So you can just drop it into your hot tea, or I also make iced tea, and that saves a ton of time and hassle. So Peak is offering 15% off their Pu'er teas for the very first time, exclusive to you, my listeners. This is a sweet offer. Simply visit peaktea.com/tim. That's P-I-Q-U-E-T-E-A.com/tim. This promotion is only available to listeners of this podcast. That's peaktea.com/tim. The discount is automatically applied when you use that URL. You also have a 30-day satisfaction guarantee, so your purchase is risk-free.

• 2:11Tim Ferriss?

  One more time, check it out. Peak Tea, that's P-I-Q-U-E-T-E-A.com/tim.

• 2:21Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by ButcherBox. ButcherBox makes it easy for you to get high-quality, humanely-raised meat that you can trust. They deliver delicious, 100% grass-fed, grass-finished beef, free-range organic chicken, heritage-breed pork, and wild-caught seafood directly to your door. For me, in the past few weeks, I've cooked a ton of their salmon, as well as two delicious barbecue rib racks in the oven. Super simple. They were the most delicious pork ribs I've ever prepared. And my freezer is full of ButcherBox. When you become a member, you're joining a community focused on doing what's better for all. That means caring about the lives of animals, the livelihoods of farmers, treating our planet with respect, and enjoying better meals together. ButcherBox partners with folks, small farmers included,

• 3:05Tim Ferriss?

  who believe in going above and beyond when it comes to caring for animals, the environment, and sustainability. And none of their meat is ever given antibiotics or added hormones. So how does it work? It's pretty simple. You choose your box and your delivery frequency. They offer five boxes, four curated box options, as well as the popular custom box. So you get exactly what you and/or your family love. Box options and delivery frequencies can be customized to fit your needs. You can cancel at any time with no penalty. ButcherBox ships your order frozen for freshness and packed in an eco-friendly, 100% recyclable box. It's easy, it's fast, it's convenient. I really, really enjoy it. And best of all, looking at the average cost, it works out to be less than $6 per meal. Skip the lines for your Thanksgiving turkey.

• 3:50Tim Ferriss?

  This holiday, ButcherBox is proud to give new members a free turkey. Just go to butcherbox.com/tim to sign up. That's butcherbox.com/tim to receive a free 10- to 14-pound turkey in your first box.

• 4:06Tim Ferriss?

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half-mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question?

• 4:12Speaker 01

  No, it is an inappropriate time.

• 4:16Speaker 02

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 4:29Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. My guest today is Eric Schmidt. Eric Schmidt, that's S-C-H-M-I-D-T on Twitter, at Eric Schmidt, is a technologist, entrepreneur, and philanthropist. He joined Google in 2001, helping the company grow from a Silicon Valley startup to a global technology leader. He served as chief executive officer and chairman from 2001 to 2011, and as executive chairman and technical advisor thereafter. Under his leadership, Google dramatically scaled its infrastructure and diversified its product offerings while maintaining a culture of innovation. In 2017, he co-founded Schmidt Futures, a philanthropic initiative that bets early on exceptional people making the world better.

• 5:11Tim Ferriss?

  He serves as chair of the Broad Institute and formerly served as chair of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence. He is the host of Reimagine with Eric Schmidt, a podcast exploring how society can build a brighter future after the COVID-19 pandemic. With co-authors Henry Kiseinger and Daniel Hutton-Locker, Eric has a new book out titled The Age of AI and Our Human Future. You can find him again on Twitter, at Eric Schmidt, and at ericschmidt.com. Eric, welcome back to the show.

• 5:39Speaker 01

  Thank you. I really look forward to this conversation.

• 5:42Tim Ferriss?

  I have been looking forward to this, and I want to confess first and foremost that I have tremendous insecurity around my lack of clarity on AI. So I am really looking forward to digging into many facets. But before we get to that, I want to pick out Henry Kiseinger. How did you come to collaborate with Henry Kiseinger?

• 6:07Speaker 01

  About 12 years ago, I met him at a conference called Bilderberg. And my father worked for the Nixon administration when I was very young. And my father had Henry as a hero. He said he was the most brilliant, hardest working, and he was enigmatic because he has both a very favorable reputation, but also a very controversial reputation. So we chatted, and he said, "The only problem I have with Google is I think that you're going to destroy the world." And I thought, well, that's a challenge from Henry Kiseinger. So we invited him to Google, where he gave a speech. And he confronted the employees directly on the manipulation that Google was doing

• 6:52Speaker 01

  in his view of the public discourse. And his criticisms were so apt and the people enjoyed it so much that we struck up a friendship. And although we're politically very different with very different backgrounds, I've come to learn that working with someone this brilliant at any age is phenomenal. But when your co-author is 98, it's a special treat.

• 7:17Tim Ferriss?

  I looked up the age, I'm glad you mentioned it, 98. To what do you attribute him remaining cognitively sharp into his late 90s? Is that just good hardware out of the box? Is there more to it?

• 7:31Speaker 01

  He works harder than a 40-year-old. I can tell you that he gets up in the morning and he works all day. He has dinner with his wife and his family and then he works at night. And he keeps up that pace seven days a week at 98. I am convinced that the secret to longevity is being a workaholic.

• 7:53Tim Ferriss?

  [laughing]

• 7:56Speaker 01

  And, and the reason I say that is that Henry Kissinger, at the age of 90, knew nothing about the digital world, although he had a lot of opinions about it. But he has mastered the digital world and artificial intelligence with the alacrity and the speed of people who are just getting into it now. That's unique to him. That's a gift. And that's why his analysis of our world is so incredibly interesting to me.

• 8:27Tim Ferriss?

  All right, we're gonna spend a little more time on, on Henry because I must scratch this itch. So you are very good at systematizing, thinking from first principles, whether it's systematizing innovation or hiring, thinking of things at scale. There's a method to, not the madness, but the outcomes. Was Henry's ability to learn so quickly based on some approach that he has to first principles or a framework of any type that you've seen exhibited in him that he applies to new domains?

• 9:04Speaker 01

  There've been some studies about the age at which you are your most productive professionally. And as you know, in math and science, brilliance tends to show up young, in their 20s. They tend to get early awards. Historians, however, seem to get better with age. Maybe it's the accumulation of perspective and the accumulation of reasoning and the depth of wisdom that is represented by increasing age. And so Dr. Kissinger has both the benefit of being a brilliant historian and also having changed history and lived in the moment. And today, he spends a great deal of his time with people talking to him about current

• 9:49Speaker 01

  affairs and judging them with his historical principles in mind. It is from that basis of insight that when he looked at AI, he said, "This is a very much bigger thing than people think it is." And I said to him, "Why? I honestly didn't know." And he said, "Because we're discussing artificial intelligence as though it's a technology. This is like the beginning of the Renaissance." And I said, "Tell me about the Renaissance." What else do you say to a historian who's famous? And we started to talk about the Renaissance. And he said that the Renaissance is really about the age of reason.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  It's about individuals being able to think through their systems. It's about society allowing experts to criticize other people. Before the Renaissance, decision-making was essentially hierarchical and from a king or a religious leader. That change allowed us to develop intellectual thought. He is arguing that we're entering a new epoch, similar to the Renaissance, this age of artificial intelligence, because humanity has never had a competitive intelligence similar to itself, but not human.

• 11:09Tim Ferriss?

  I'd love to hear you elaborate just a bit, and then we're going to dig into a whole slew of questions that I have in front of me. How you thought about the...

• 11:20Tim Ferriss?

  Composition of the co-authors on this book. And certainly would love to learn more about Daniel. I know a little bit about Daniel Hutton-Locker, but I'd love to hear more. And we could start with Dr. Kissinger. I realize calling him Henry is probably gonna give me bad karma. So I'll start with Dr. Kissinger. Is it his broad familiarity with history as well as his knowledge of geopolitics and statecraft that you were hoping to augment everything else in the book? Maybe you could just speak to how you think about what each party brings to this project.

• 11:57Speaker 01

  In our collaboration, the book suggestion was actually from Dr. Kissinger. And what he basically said is that we have an opportunity to architect the questions that need to get answered in the next 10, 20, 30 years. I would parenthetically offer that we didn't understand when we invented social media 15 years ago or so, the extraordinary and compound benefits and costs of social media to our society, in particular, our political discourse. So armed with that knowledge, that the tech industry had invented a tool that outstripped the governance of it, at least initially, and maybe for a long time, Dr. Kissinger

• 12:41Speaker 01

  said, this is an opportunity to ask the right questions. We recruited Dan Hutton-Locker, who is the dean of MIT Computer Science, partly because he's a good friend and partly because he's such a good scientist, he will make sure that our claims are accurate. And Dan worked very hard to get the path of AI correct. Many of the books about artificial intelligence are speculative, but I'm not aware of any book that has both the geopolitical, social and historical context, but also has the technology correct.

• 13:21Tim Ferriss?

  Just to look at the opposite of speculative from a firsthand perspective, could you tell a story or two about what you've seen or experienced firsthand with AI?

• 13:36Speaker 01

  Well, you use AI today whenever you use Google Search, Google Ads, spelling correction, Google Translate. The story on AI that's not really well understood is that in the 1960s and 70s, when I started, AI was going to happen within a decade. And my friends who were AI obsessed got their PhDs in this area, and then everything stopped. It stopped working. And there was a period of about 20 years, which is known as the AI winter, where the systems didn't work. And then a series of mathematicians in the 80s and 90s invented what is today known as deep learning.

• 14:20Speaker 01

  I'll spare you the technical details. But the important thing about this deep learning is it allows the manipulation of patterns at scale that allowed these algorithms to work. And the big breakthrough was in 2011 with a process called ImageNet, where there was a contest to see if computers could see better than humans. And today, computers can see better than humans. Their vision is literally better. And I didn't realize at the time how important sight was for everything. A car should be driven by a computer. The doctor should use an AI system to examine you and then give him or her recommendations on your care.

• 15:05Speaker 01

  I'd much rather have the computer look at my skin rash or my retina in my eye, because we now know from many, many tests that humans make observational mistakes, even the best, but computers, when properly trained, don't. So it was from this insight that you could do vision at scale that you began to be able to do prediction at scale.

• 15:29Speaker 01

  And all of a sudden now, we're beginning to see systems that can predict the next thing. And computers have gotten very good at predicting what will happen next. The most recent, well, there are sort of three events in the last three years that really are the index points. The first is that, and Dr. Kissinger wrote an article after AlphaGo called "The End of History", basically, and inspired by the fact that Go, it was a game that humans had played for 2,500 years. It was thought to be incomputable. Not only did a computer solve the game, but it beat the top humans, both in Korea and China.

• 16:10Speaker 01

  I know because I was physically there, computer against human, and it was great fun. But in that process, the computer invented some new moves and strategies that had not been known to humans for 2,500 years. Now, that's a big deal. The next thing that happened was that at MIT, a set of synthetic biologists and computer scientists did a very complicated trick involving going through 100 million different compounds and figuring out which compounds would create a reaction for antibiotic use. And they came up with, using this technique, a new drug that could not be foreseen.

• 16:53Speaker 01

  It's called Halison, and it appears to be the next broad-scale antibiotic. We haven't had one in roughly 40 years. The third thing that happened was that a group called OpenAI built what are now called universal models, where they read everything they could find on the web into something called GPT-3. This is called basically a transformer, and these generative models can generate things.

• 17:23Speaker 01

  So all of a sudden, we have a computer that can speak what it knows. And these models are interesting because you train them and you don't know what they know. And furthermore, they can't tell you, you have to ask them. So it's like a teenager. And many people think that these universal models are going to profoundly change our understanding of language and thought, because they only get better with scale. So we've now got four or five companies, a couple of big ones, a couple of startups, that are building what are called trillion parameter models. These trillion parameter models cost a hundred million dollars or so to make.

• 18:07Speaker 01

  That's how exciting this new area is. So you've got strategy in the form of Go, you've got medicine and drug discovery, really scientific discovery in the form of Halison, and now you've got language models and learning models in, we believe collectively, that in the next 10 years, this is going to come together and transform everything.

• 18:29Tim Ferriss?

  I'm just taking a breath to let that settle in. GPT-3 really got my attention in part, and I want you to disabuse me of any misunderstandings, but I saw interviews generated between people who are no longer living. So I saw Marcus Aurelius interviewing, let's just call Mark Twain, Mark Twain interviewing Abraham Lincoln, and I thought to myself, once we have enough audio and video online, this will really simplify my guest recruitment for the podcast, because I won't actually need to reach out to the living human. It'll be great. I won't have to keep banging on the door of Oprah or anyone else. I'll just be able to generate an interview. It'll save me recording time, too.

• 19:14Speaker 01

  You say that in jest, but we're busy building that.

• 19:17Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 19:17Speaker 01

  And so let me just be clear how The Tim Ferriss Show would work. So you have an enormous amount of video and audio data.

• 19:27Speaker 01

  So there's enough to learn to build a Tim Ferriss question and answering thing, where you would have not only your tone and your, the fun that you represent, but it would also represent the sum of your insight. So we would say, "I was speaking with so-and-so, and he or she said this, what do you think?" Now, in this particular scenario, this is long after your own passing and all your guests' passing, too. There's every reason to think that we'll be able to mimic your intelligence and charm and wit, and that of your family, your parents, your grandparents, historical figures. That will be fun.

• 20:12Speaker 01

  The question is, will it really change society?

• 20:15Tim Ferriss?

  Or how will it change society? I recall being in a small meeting, private meeting, but the content I'm going to mention is public, and the discussion centered on the legal cases that will be forthcoming, related to a lot of this technology. And there was, at the time, something related to, now, I should be clear, I want to take a back step in a minute and define artificial intelligence and what that is, so that it doesn't get conflated with other things. But in terms of developing technology, deepfakes, copyright, defamation, there's been a lot in the news, at least in the last few years, related to deepfakes of Taylor Swift and lawsuits. And we are all going to have to contend with

• 20:58Tim Ferriss?

  entirely new breeds of legal cases, I would imagine. So that's another facet of this that is going to be incredibly fascinating, terrifying, and complex, possibly. I would love for you, if you don't mind, to just define for me, quite frankly, artificial intelligence, because as I'm sure you have seen and can imagine, there are a lot of terms that kind of get copy and pasted into startup decks whenever they're hot. That would be deep learning, machine learning, AI. What is AI and what is it not?

• 21:30Speaker 01

  The simplest explanation for AI is it's a system that gets better through learning, that it's busy learning something. And that's probably the easiest and current definition of it. When I say AI to my non-technical friends, they typically think of a movie that they saw. And the movie always has a robot, and the robot goes awry. And that robot is slain by a female scientist who triumphs. And I propose a variant of that movie where the computers all conspire against humans and start killing humans. The humans notice this. The computers run away from the humans.

• 22:14Speaker 01

  And a female scientist figures out how to unplug the computers one by one by one. That's not what AI is. That's a movie fiction. And it'll be a very long time. Hopefully, never they will have to deal with that. What AI really is, is a system of knowledge that is implemented inside the cloud, so it's around you all the time. And it's very good at looking at large data sets and predicting things. It's very good at looking and finding patterns that humans can't see. I mentioned earlier that computers were very good at vision. That was the first breakthrough. But what they're now doing is looking for patterns of correlation

• 22:58Speaker 01

  that humans can't see. So let's imagine that on Tuesday, you do something, and on Friday, someone else does something. And it turns out that you're magically linked in the universe such that Tuesday causes Friday. But it's not a pattern that's apparent. Computers can discover that pattern, that needle in a haystack, particularly well. When you operate this stuff at scale, you end up with systems that look human-like because they can aggregate data and they can think what you think. They can generate a solution. There's a technology called GANs, Generative Adversarial Networks, where the computer can generate candidates. And another network says, "Not good enough, not good enough, not good enough", until they find it.

• 23:43Speaker 01

  GANs have been used, for example, to build pictures of actresses and actors that are fake, but look so real you're sure you know them. So one of the concerns, one of the real concerns about AI is that it's going to be very difficult to tell the difference between information and misinformation. And I'll give you an example. Let's assume that all of your readers and listeners are obviously human and that the standard rules of humans apply to all of us. There's something called anchoring bias. There's something called recency bias. You know, people aren't completely rational computers, nor should they. We don't want them to be. We love humans. But let's imagine the computer gets enough of such people and it figures out

• 24:26Speaker 01

  that if I say the following outrageous thing first, you'll always believe me. And the computer discovers this, and so all of a sudden, everything it does, boom, boom, boom. I've thought a lot about the way politicians speak. If you watch carefully, they take a set of phrases and they repeat them over and over again. They're simple phrases. That's anchoring. They're trying to get the audience, their voters, to start with this fact and then judge past it. Well, computers will be incredibly good at exploiting them. That means that the world, our social world around us within the next decade, will become impossibly confusing because there's so many actors that will want to misinform us.

• 25:10Speaker 01

  Businesses, politicians, our opponents, for fun, God knows. We don't know how to manage that.

• 25:17Tim Ferriss?

  When you mention things coming together in some fashion in the next 10 years, could you speak to if and how generalized or general artificial intelligence fits into that? Because I know that's a big question for a lot of people, including those who don't really understand the technology. When generalized artificial intelligence will arrive, so to speak.

• 25:41Speaker 01

  I think it's important to establish some of these terms. AGI stands for artificial general intelligence. And AGI refers to computers that are human-like in their strategic and capability. Today's algorithms are extraordinarily good at generating content, misinformation, guidance, helping you with science, and so forth. But they're not self-determinative. They don't actually have the notion of who am I and what do I do next? If you ask GPT-3 who it is, GPT-3 will say, I'm a computer.

• 26:17Speaker 01

  But it won't give you a philosophical basis for its existence, its purpose, and how it's determining where it goes. That is the distinction between AI and AGI, in my view. Now, within the community, the AGI optimists think that within 10 years, we will have such computers. The pessimists think that it will be far longer, if ever. So, let's say 15 years from now. It may be possible to have computers that have a sense of self-determination, that they know roughly what they're trying to achieve against a broader objective.

• 26:58Speaker 01

  Many people think that this will become an enormous competition between humans. Because remember that those computers will be faster learners than humans. They'll have access to more data than humans. Other people believe that they'll be fundamentally flawed, because they won't have the nuance, they won't have the background, they won't have the cultural background of the countries that we all grew up in and the cultures we grow in. We don't really know. My own view is that this will occur, but that the amount of computation required to do this will be so great that there'll only be a few of them. And furthermore, they'll become so important that they'll be like nuclear weapons.

• 27:43Speaker 01

  And let me tell you why. Let's imagine you have a truly evil person who encounters this AGI. What's the first question they'll ask them? "Tell me how to kill a million people."

• 27:54Speaker 01

  Obviously, a terrible thing to ask and answer. And the AGI, because it doesn't have morals, could actually answer. It could actually say, "Well, do this, this, this, and this." And furthermore, it could articulate something that's not generally known, because it knows everything.

• 28:11Speaker 01

  So I think a fair reading of these AGIs is that in the most extreme form, they're going to be so powerful that they're going to have to be protected. We don't want them broadly used. They're going to have to be used in specialized scenarios. Now, such an intelligence will be enormously valuable for drug discovery, material science, climate change, making the world more efficient, making people more educated. And imagine with an AGI, you could say, "Tell me how to teach a million children English better." And he could figure that out. Because it could, in its own thinking, to the degree it's thinking, it could look at all the patterns, figure out how to do it,

• 28:53Speaker 01

  and you could actually ask it to write the program. The beginning of this is today, there are companies that are offering tools which will help you write code. They don't know what code you're trying to write, but once you start, it can fill in a bunch of it for you. That's the beginning of this phenomenon. In the extreme case, there are scientists and basically science fiction around the future that could use something called the singularity, which is the point where the computer evolution is so much faster than humans. Now, that's speculation. When you talk to people in my world, most people think the singularity will occur

• 29:36Speaker 01

  20 years from whenever you ask them that question. So that would say 2041.

• 29:45Tim Ferriss?

  Where do you fall? If I may ask your personal opinion, assuming, and this is a big assumption, that there are people on the techno-optimist and pessimist side who are very technically sophisticated. What is your current best guess or intuitive feel, however you want to answer it, on the arrival of something we would consider AGI?

• 30:06Speaker 01

  The top scientists, the greatest inventors in this area, collectively believe that we need one or two more breakthroughs. To get to volition, to get to consciousness in the way that humans do it. When you wake up in the morning, you have so many choices of how to spend your time. How do you choose? How do you handle unplanned situations and all of that? Most people believe that the computers that I'm talking about will become enormously valuable partners. My physicist friend, I said to him, what would you like the computer to do? And he says, it's really simple. There are so much physics being written about now that I don't have time to read it all.

• 30:50Speaker 01

  And I want the physics assistant to go and read everything, figure out what disagrees with each other, suggest things for me to think about while I'm sleeping. The biologists have similar questions. People who are philosophers want new insights. Read everything, help me think through this. I believe that in the next decade, that will be the primary achievement in AI. And that is extraordinary. Because it means, for example, that we can answer questions in physics, math, medicine, so forth, that have been unanswerable. We've not been able to understand the behavior of subatomic particles. We can do it now.

• 31:34Speaker 01

  Enormous breakthroughs. But that's not the same thing as real human intelligence. I think it's going to take another breakthrough or two.

• 31:43Tim Ferriss?

  I know this is maybe a trend to look into the crystal ball with too much intensity. But could you elaborate on if those breakthroughs are known, what they are? What like what the problems are that need to be solved? Are they known problems?

• 31:56Speaker 01

  There are people who are working really hard on the question of goals. And the computer systems have knowledge that they cannot explain, which we can think of as intuition. So the system gets trained and it knows things. But if you ask it why it knows it, it can't tell you. That's intuition. So the question here is how much more computational power and scenario planning do you have to do to look at all the different choices that you have every day? There are people who believe that it's perhaps 100 times more computing power. And computing power goes up, it doubles every two to three years right now.

• 32:39Speaker 01

  And so that gives you a sense that within 15 years, it's possible to imagine that amount of computing power required to do this. And the reason we use computing power is, one, we don't have a better metric, but also because the computer doesn't think the way humans do. The computer looks at scenarios and eliminates them. It says, "Well, what if this, and what if this, and what if this?" And the computer itself is eliminating this choice, this choice, this choice, this choice, and finally settles on a good choice. So many people believe that the compounding of knowledge will take, what we say, a couple of orders of more magnitude, which is why these computers are likely, at least initially,

• 33:22Speaker 01

  to be few, extremely expensive, and very, very large.

• 33:27Tim Ferriss?

  Does the 15-year hypothetical time horizon factor in, and this is me getting into very slippery territory since I'm non-technical, but does that factor in the potential applications of quantum computing?

• 33:43Speaker 01

  For at least 20 years, people have been focusing on this notion of a different kind of computer called a quantum computer. And quantum computers are hard to explain, but basically, think of them as they do all the computations at the same time. So instead of going ka-chunk, ka-chunk, ka-chunk, all the ka-chunks go at the same time. And the term "quantum supremacy" means that everything occurs at once, rather than taking the computer time to go through each of the mathematical calculations. The reason that this is of such great interest is that one of the core aspects of security in the computer age is the difference between multiplication and division. And with quantum computers, you could break all of the codes, and all of the secrets, and

• 34:28Speaker 01

  all of the keys, and all of that, that we all use every day.

• 34:33Speaker 01

  So a lot of people think that national security groups are busy working hard to do that. The consensus in the industry is that we are eight to 10 years away from that. And the way they get there is that the current quantum computers have an error rate because it's not perfect when they operate. They're essentially mimicking a natural process digitally. And Google showed last year that they could do this on a computer that would have taken a million years that took roughly 10 seconds because of it. So we know it's possible. The question now is how do you actually build a real one that's useful? If you had a real one, you could, instead of simulating a physical process, the typical

• 35:18Speaker 01

  one is called annealing, where two metals basically merge. And this is crucial for high strength steel and titanium and things like this, and is of great business interest. But the same thing would apply to AI if it worked, because the algorithm, instead of looking at all these different scenarios, would examine them all at the same time and pick the best one, technically the one with the lowest energy state. The current quantum learning is not proceeding very quickly. It's a very hard problem. My assumption is that quantum learning will occur in our lifetimes, but not very soon.

• 35:53Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you. And for people listening who want to do a real deep dive on quantum learning, quantum computing, I have a conversation with Steve Jervisson that goes very deeply into this subject matter. And it really does start to be a mind bender when you get into the details. It is quite something. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by ShipStation. The holiday season is fast approaching and we know that people will be buying more stuff online than ever before. All of these trends to e-commerce have been accelerated due to COVID and much more. If you're an e-commerce seller, are you ready to meet the demands of record-breaking online shopping season?

• 36:38Tim Ferriss?

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• 37:22Tim Ferriss?

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• 37:49Tim Ferriss?

  I want to ask you, you mentioned what the philosophers might ask for in terms of augmentation or help. You mentioned the biologists, the physicists. I am going to ask you, I'm just planting a seed, what Eric Schmidt might use AI technology for in the future. But before I get there, I want to just look at a snapshot of current day. What are some of the coolest or most impressive things that you've seen AI figure out on its own?

• 38:21Speaker 01

  I mentioned this new drug, and the new drug and drug discovery will accelerate the combination of the mRNA achievements, plus the ability now to essentially replace the way the drug lab works. My sort of stereotype is the chemist wakes up in the morning and says, let's try the following seven compounds. They try the seven compounds, none of them work, and at 5 o'clock they go home to have dinner and think, watch television, and the next morning they think of another seven. Well, the computer can do, as I mentioned, 100 million in a day. That's a huge accelerant in what they're doing. I'm very interested in the development of humans.

• 39:07Speaker 01

  Together with AI systems. And the example I would offer is you have a two-year-old. And the two-year-old gets a plush toy. It happens to have AI inside of it. And by agreement, as this child ages every year, they get a better toy. And of course, the toy gets smarter. We don't know at all. What happens when a child's best friend is not a human? Or a dog? We don't know what that does to the child's bonding to other children? To their parents? I mean, you know frustrated parents and the kid is busy and they give them a computer? And do whatever you want.

• 39:51Speaker 01

  But imagine if that computer is learning, talking, thinking? Educating at the same time? It's a godsend, right? But what is it teaching? What is it teaching? What are its norms? What are its values? Will such a child end up being very stulted with real humans? And really comfortable with digital? We honestly just don't know. We know that people get attached to inanimate objects. There are many religions where inanimate objects have what we would think of as a bit of a soul. We mentioned this in the book. But we don't know. I'll give you another example with elderly. A lot of studies indicate that the elderly are very lonely. Just sort of sad.

• 40:36Speaker 01

  And imagine if their best friend is a digital friend? What does that do? Does that extend their lives? Does it make them crankier? Does it make their loneliness more perverse? I don't think we know yet.

• 40:51Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, or is that digital friend an emulation of a relative?

• 40:56Speaker 01

  That's right. So now we get our grandmother as an example. We recreate her husband. And what does it do when she can chat with her husband who's now passed away? We honestly don't know. When I go through and I look at these technologies, there are really four qualities in AI that are different. The first is it's imprecise. It's imprecise in that it can't tell you exactly what it's doing and it makes mistakes. Don't use it for life critical decisions. You want a human who can make mistakes consulting a computer. You don't want the computer flying the airplane and maybe never, but certainly not for a long time.

• 41:38Speaker 01

  It's dynamic in the sense that it's changing. It can learn, it can assess the situation around it and change its behavior. This is the AI now. It has emergent behavior. Emergent means things that come out that we don't expect. Strange things. Now, we've seen this a bit with social media. I don't think anyone expected the government interference in the elections in 2016. That was an emergent behavior. It was unexpected by humanity using these tools and those were not AI powered. The final point is it's capable of learning. So you've got a system using the child scenario. You've got a child that's got a teddy bear that looks like a teddy bear,

• 42:23Speaker 01

  but it's imprecise, dynamic, emergent and capable of learning. What's the teddy bear learning? So the teddy bear is watching TV too. And the teddy bear says, look, I think this show sucks. And the kid says, I agree with you. Again, we don't understand the implication, especially on formative behaviors. There's a whole nother set of arguments about national security and how governments will work and how dominance games will play and who will be winners and losers from this technology that we don't really understand and we talk about that.

• 42:56Tim Ferriss?

  Well, let's actually touch on that for a second. And this is something on the minds of a lot of folks. Certainly, I know a lot of investors who are trying to understand AI in the capacity of acting as an investor. I'm not saying we go there, but you have spoken to Congress about, say, China's announced ambitions with AI. 10 to 15 years isn't that far away. It's really close and certain things move very slowly. Certain facets of, say, government move quite slowly, regulation. What types of corners are most important to look around?

• 43:37Tim Ferriss?

  And I'd love to hear you speak a little bit more about the geopolitical components.

• 43:42Speaker 01

  I was fortunate to be the chairman of an AI commission for Congress. We just released our report, very proud of it. And we studied a lot about where the world is in AI, not so much on these AGI questions, but the more tactical things that I've been discussing. We concluded that the United States is slightly ahead of China in these areas, that China has a national program to focus on this. They're pouring literally billions and billions of dollar equivalents into this. They generate four times more engineers than we do just because of population size. And they're extremely focused on dominance of AI by 2030, which is soon. In our report, we speak a great deal about what the government needs to do to help.

• 44:27Speaker 01

  It starts with more research, access to more data, making sure our values are represented so we don't end up with systems that have prejudice and so forth and violate both our laws as well as our morals. We talk about partnerships and all of this kind of stuff. The reason this is so important is that pretty much every national security issue will be tainted or controlled by AI in the future. If you think about cyber attacks, the most obvious war scenario in the future is the following: North Korea decides to attack the United States. It begins its attack. China decides this is a bad idea and blocks the attack. America's defenses are awake, alert.

• 45:11Speaker 01

  America announces a counterattack which stops this. The entire war that I just described took about 10 milliseconds. I'll give you another example. In the military, there's a presumption of human control, which is very important. I was part of a team that wrote some of the AI ethics that are now used by the US military, which I obviously strongly support. And they say, "We want the principle of human control, human authorization." So let me give you an example. You're on a ship, and a new kind of missile, let's say a very fast hypersonic missile, is coming in, which people are developing, countries are.

• 45:54Speaker 01

  And it's coming in so fast that the ship can't see it, the humans can't see it, but the AI has figured it out. So the AI says to the commander...

• 46:05Speaker 01

  In 15 seconds, a missile is going to be showing up and it's going to destroy you and your entire crew. I recommend that you press this button to launch the counterattack. And the human says, 14, 13, 12, 10, what do I do? And at 3 seconds, that human's going to press that button. So the compression of time, the amount of data, and the potential for error creates a whole set of problems around military doctrine. Now, everything that we live in today, deterrence, all of the other things that we are, all

• 46:47Speaker 01

  of us are familiar with, great power competition, are concepts that were invented over the last 100 years ago. And Dr. Kissinger actually invented much of the containment strategy in the 50s and 60s before he was in government as part of a team that sort of invented all this work. So I asked him, what does this look like now? How would you address this now? And his answer is, let's get an equivalent team of people and try to figure these things out. Containment, for example, doesn't work. Containment is about keeping another country from getting something because these algorithms and this software is pervasive.

• 47:28Speaker 01

  It leaks, and it leaks through ideas and through discovery, not just from criminal leaking. It's not like Los Alamos where you could keep a secret. So the way to maintain competitive dominance, that is national security, is to invest in these areas, both in terms of data and algorithms, and to be excellent, but also to begin some kind of dialogue about what the limitations of automatic war are. So another example, and I'll make one up now. So the scenario I described of the 10 millisecond war...

• 48:06Speaker 01

  So let's say that China, in this case, develops an AGI ahead of everyone else. And this AGI is thought to be so powerful that it could defeat any of our defenses. Then the logic on the American side would be to do a preemptive attack to prevent that possibility. And that's destabilizing of great power competition. So you want to avoid an arms race. And an arms race in AI could look a lot like the arms race that we went through in the 50s and 60s. And people have forgotten how much of our military industrial complex, how much money

• 48:47Speaker 01

  and so forth, was devoted to build more than 30,000 nuclear weapons, all of which could destroy the world many, many times over. Many, many rounds of negotiation got those numbers down to 3,000, 4,000 such weapons, which are still plenty to destroy everything. It's an example of overreach. And so I worry that because we don't have an agreement on even what the rules are, what the landscape of limitations are, we don't have diplomats who can have the conversations. And no single national security group, no single country is going to self-limit and say, "Oh, we're not going to do that. This is not Costa Rica, which doesn't have a military."

• 49:29Speaker 01

  So the natural course of logic will be the development of these incredibly fast and potentially destabilizing weapons, for which we don't have a language.

• 49:39Tim Ferriss?

  I think I'll just act as a stand-in for listeners. That sounds very terrifying. It does sound, not just terrifying, but challenging to address. And I may come back to that and questions of policy and geopolitics. I want to ask you the personal question that I alluded to earlier before I let that go, which is, what could you achieve or what would you want to achieve or ask of AI in the future that would allow you to do things you cannot do today?

• 50:14Speaker 01

  Almost every hard problem in our society is based on either the computers can't figure it out, we don't have enough data. We honestly don't know how to solve it. I'd like to get some breakthroughs. So I'd like, for example, to get better climate models. In my philanthropy, I funded a group at Caltech, which figured out a way to predict climate better using an AI system that would model clouds. I didn't know this, but it turns out clouds are really complicated. And so they used an AI system to approximate how clouds would behave, which allowed them to solve the prediction problem.

• 50:58Speaker 01

  It's called CLIMA. Over and over again, I would like the AI system to educate me and entertain me and keep me curious about the dynamism of the world. Speaking personally, when I look at the news feeds, we're obsessed about politics and President Trump and so forth, to the point where you get the impression that there's nothing else going on. But one of the great things about humanity and our world is it's incredibly dynamic. We never hear what those people are doing. I'd like to see if we could figure out a way to advance against these really hard problems. Let's get some solutions around mental health. Let's get some solutions around drug abuse.

• 51:42Speaker 01

  Let's get some solutions around the rise of inequality. And let's have our computers help us with those solutions.

• 51:49Tim Ferriss?

  I'd love to talk about, this is something you know a lot more about than I do, but how programming may be able or incapable of addressing morals and ethics. And I'll give an example, probably a bad example and not technically accurate, but it seems like we're already at a point with, say, the development of autonomous vehicles, where questions that might have been presented in a freshman philosophy class, like the trolley problem, actually need to be programmed on some level in the sense that cars need to make decisions if there is an accident and they need to, say,

• 52:33Tim Ferriss?

  choose between going on the sidewalk at high speed and hitting three elderly or swerving right and hitting one child, let's just say. Not that we would ever want to be in that type of situation, but these things happen. How do you foresee computer scientists attempting to, if this is even going to be an objective, instill ethics and morals into AI? And does it just require a level of self-awareness that perhaps we don't have? I'm curious how you might think about that.

• 53:07Speaker 01

  There are many, many computer scientists working on this. Every major computer science program I'm aware of has a computer science and ethics research project. There are a lot of problems. One of the first problems is that computer science and AI are based on learning data, literally learning, and therefore the information that they're learning has biases. So whatever prejudice and bias and religious problems that society has around it, the computer will absorb. So the research is how to identify those biases, because remember, in many cases, these systems cannot tell you what they know, and how to mediate them.

• 53:47Speaker 01

  It's pretty clear to me that there's going to end up being the system that knows everything, and then there's going to be a supervisory system that limits it. So two different systems. One will be the knowledge system, and another one which will keep it within some guardrails. So the question that was asked is not a permissible question. Don't send it to the system. And you're going to have all sorts of problems. My favorite self-driving car problem is here in New York, eventually, all the cars are self-driving, because it's such a crowded grid, and traffic moves perfectly. The engineers at Google and everywhere else have figured out exactly how to optimize,

• 54:31Speaker 01

  under a set of assumptions, the aggregate and average delivery time of a human from place to place. It's a perfect computer science solution. So now we've got a woman who's going into labor, who needs to get there faster. Is there a button in the car that says, "I'm pregnant, I'm about to give birth, and I need to get there faster"? Okay, so she presses the button, and somehow it works. How do we make sure that a gentleman who's lying cannot press the same button?

• 55:03Speaker 01

  In the trolley problem, all of these are of the form, how do you choose one life or the other? The correct answer is, don't kill anything. And so, we're gonna have to find ways to avoid being in the situation where you have to choose between three old people and one child. And these are the great debates of philosophers, and how do we value life and so forth. But I think we should start with the premise that the system should be designed such that it optimizes overall happiness and overall wealth, in the societal sense of wealth. As an example, we tolerate double parking. We tolerate people speeding. We don't track every car and give them an automatic ticket every

• 55:46Speaker 01

  time they go above the 30 mile an hour speed limit by one mile. But technically, that would be easy. If you want to eliminate the vast majority of crime in our society, put cameras in every public space with face recognition. It's, by the way, illegal to do so. But if you really care about crime to the exclusion of personal freedom and the freedom of not being surveilled, then we could do it. So the technology gives you these choices, and those are not choices that computer scientists should make. Those are choices for society. I use the surveillance cameras as an example to say that in Britain, they're very widely accepted. When you're in Britain on a street, you're on camera.

• 56:29Speaker 01

  In the United States, it's partial, sometimes you are, sometimes you're not. But in Germany, with a long history of the Stasi, they are very violently opposed to such surveillance. These are three different democracies that have made the choices in different ways. So I don't think that computer scientists and the tech industry should make these decisions. But I do think what we should tell people is, our tools give you this range of choices. If you look at leadership in China, China is a couple generations ahead in surveillance. They can actually spot you in your gait now, the way you walk, not just your face recognition. This is not something we want to lead in.

• 57:06Tim Ferriss?

  I'm just letting that all sink in for a second. This is one of those conversations for me. It's great. There's so much to chew on and I'm gonna take a 90-degree turn back to the physicist and the biologist and others who will be able to consult AI in the way, I think it was presented, to help assimilate new information, new developments, get up to speed. They can't possibly, even with physical constraints, keep up or digest the amount they would like to digest. Now, many people, Dr. Kissinger certainly over decades and many, many others, spend

• 57:49Tim Ferriss?

  a lot of their time ingesting information and that could be in the form of reading, it could be in the form of conversations like this. I suppose there are two questions. One is, how do you think thought workers or humans will spend their time once that ingestion is dramatically reduced or removed? And along with that, if we get to the point where that is possible, and there's a question of how it will be conveyed to the human, how far are we from there simply being a direct brain-computer interface where that information is somehow seamlessly integrated

• 58:34Tim Ferriss?

  into our consciousness without being spoken or imparted to us externally?

• 58:39Speaker 01

  To answer the last part first, we are, in our industry, we're working on direct brain connections of one kind or another. They're all in startups. They're all speculative at this point. They've shown some gains. If you think about 200 years from now, to pick a random number, it's probable that we'll know the complete details of the human brain, how it's wired, how it works. So if you think far enough in advance, well past our lifetimes, it's probable that we'll know a great deal about how to manipulate the brain externally to the brain. We'll understand how it works, we'll understand the wiring, maybe there'll be some attachment and so forth.

• 59:24Speaker 01

  Most people think that that will occur, no one has any idea when. When you go back to the gains, you want to get the basis of what the next 20 years look like. And I think it's fair to say that we're going to be awash in information and misinformation at a scale that is overwhelming, and it's already overwhelming. So the most likely scenario is that each of us will have the equivalent of an AI communications assistant

• 59:54Speaker 01

  that will watch, like while you and I are speaking, my AI assistant is watching what's going on. And it knows my preferences, it knows what I care about, and it has a good sense of judgment.

• 1:00:06Speaker 01

  And when we're finished speaking, it'll say, by the way, over here in Arkansas, the following thing happened that you might want to check out. More importantly, this AI assistant will battle with the misinformation assistants. And it'll say, prove to me that you're a human before I expose you to my human. And so you can imagine a scenario where the solution to the misinformation problem and the solution to this information space problem is that each of us has our own AI assistant that, think of it as the equivalent of a phone, although in practice it's a supercomputer that's accessed through your phone or equivalent, that sort of keeps you sane.

• 1:00:49Speaker 01

  If you go back to my earlier comments about children, we have no idea what the rules should be for that assistant. So let me give you an example. We've learned unfortunately in the last few years that there are still horrific racial prejudice, horrifically hateful people. Well, they get an assistant too.

• 1:01:11Speaker 01

  Is their assistant going to pattern their racism? Or their misogyny? Or their violence against children, or all these sort of hateful behaviors? Because these are part of humanity too. Or will there be some regulation that says that your assistant has to be politically correct? It has to say, are you a he, a she? Or, you know, in other words, how will society resolve that? And my prediction will be that each government and each culture will adopt different rules about them. But they're not going to be unregulated. What we've learned, and I've learned really the hard way, is that the technology that I helped work on and that is being invented now is no longer optional.

• 1:01:55Speaker 01

  Fifteen years ago, I used to give this speech saying, "Look, you hate the internet, turn your phone off. Have dinner with your family. Do whatever you're gonna do, but get off." And that's not a practical answer today. The internet is no longer optional. It's essential, partly because of the pandemic, but because of e-commerce and business and knowledge and so forth. So it's going to get regulated, and the question is how and under what terms?

• 1:02:26Tim Ferriss?

  I believe Red, you use the analogy of the telephone. Maybe I'm making that up, but in the sense that just because there are bad actors who can use the telephone for wrongdoing, for crime, et cetera, it doesn't mean we eliminate the telephone. It means that we have means of regulation and enforcement and so on. I guess the telephone, by comparison, seems to be such a clean, although increasingly maybe not, discreet system. What are the most important next steps from your perspective with respect to even thinking about regulation? The best questions to ask, or just concrete steps?

• 1:03:11Speaker 01

  I always like to use self-driving cars because everyone can relate to this. So in California, there's a concept called a rolling stop.

• 1:03:21Speaker 01

  Where you The California roll, yes. And when you come to the stop sign, you sort of forget to fully stop, you roll through. So the policeman comes over and says, you did the rolling stop. And I say to the policeman, sir, I did not. And then it said, who did? And then the car says, I did, sir. And the policeman says, why? And the car says, I don't know. Now, very frustrating for the police officer. Yeah, so, so who gets the ticket? So your choices are the human, the car itself, the manufacturer of the car, or the data that the car was trained with. So that's the debate to have. Give you another example.

• 1:04:04Speaker 01

  I feel very strongly in favor of free speech for humans. But I don't feel very strongly for amplification by computers. And so what we're seeing now is we're seeing humans who have wacky, false conspiratorial ideas, what have you, get picked up and amplified in these systems.

• 1:04:25Speaker 01

  That drives everyone crazy because we can't tell the difference between a genuine social movement and concern versus a single crazy person who has an amplified idea that seems plausible, but is basically false. We have no way of falsifying such things. That's something that's got to get sorted out. We can't live in an information space that is so full of misinformation and manipulation that we can't get through the day. When we go back in the book to talk about the Renaissance, we say this is a new epoch. Because in addition to this misinformation that we've been speaking about, we also have never had a situation in our human experience where there was

• 1:05:09Speaker 01

  an intelligence that was similar to ours, but not the same, that was non-human. Imagine a situation where these intelligences exist and they can be consulted. Well, who gets to consult them? What happens to their answers? So, for example, if it's an oracle, do you have a rule that every answer from the oracle is published to the world? Because it's presumably beneficial. But what if it's a private question or a secret? What if it's being used in national security? Again, these are questions that we have not resolved. So what we say is, these are really hard questions. What happens when the AI perceives aspects of reality that humans do not? That it sees a connection?

• 1:05:51Speaker 01

  There are physicists who talk about new universes and new worlds. And you can imagine a situation where there is some thing that we as humans cannot conceive of because of our limited intelligence, but the computer detects it and then we say, "Oh, my God." In math, there is a long story about an object that lives in a two-dimensional world, and the third dimension appears, but if you're in a two-dimensional world, you never see the third dimension, so you're always confused. So what if this AI can find a dimensionality of the world that we as humans, not a single one of us, can understand? And we're now confused. We don't know how to handle that.

• 1:06:36Speaker 01

  What happens? Another example is Dr. Kissinger believes that, I'll paraphrase, "When something is not understandable by humans, they will perceive it as an act of God, or they will resist it." And you can imagine a situation where you end up with nativists who decide that this world that I'm describing is so impossibly unpleasant that they turn it all off and they go to the equivalent of the woods of Pennsylvania and they say, "Leave me alone." And you have other people who learn to drive it and manipulate it for good and evil.

• 1:07:21Speaker 01

  You'll have a choice. And then one final scenario to think about goes like this. Let's say you're older, kids are grown, and it's time for you to take a break from the world. So you put on headphones and VR glasses. And in those VR glasses and headphones, you have a life of you as a much younger person, a much more beautiful, handsome, wealthier, stronger, whatever, with the friends that you remember of the time recreated, even though they may have passed away. That might be a more fun life for you every day than the life that you have in this scenario. What happens when we lose people? I call that crossing to the other side.

• 1:08:06Speaker 01

  When they wake up in the morning, they just want to be over there. That will happen too.

• 1:08:11Tim Ferriss?

  It strikes me that science fiction can be prescient in some instances, and it doesn't make it future fiction, it just makes it current day fiction. But there's, I don't want to say predictive power, but I think of really good science fiction, of course, subjective, but Snow Crash, The Description of the Metaverse, or you have some of William Gibson's work. I'm just curious, do you or have you read science fiction much yourself?

• 1:08:40Speaker 01

  Well, Neuromancer is particularly good. If you look at Seven Eves, a recent book, it's an extraordinary composition of the importance of humanity surviving the destruction of the earth. In Seven Eves, toward the end, in their science fiction, they have assistants that have a funny name that serve this function that I'm describing. So as usual, science fiction anticipates many of the things in technology. But if you think about it, we believe today, from the Reformation, that we have the sole power of understanding reality.

• 1:09:23Speaker 01

  But at some point, that's not going to be true. When that happens, what will our self-conception look like?

• 1:09:33Speaker 01

  How will we conceive of ourselves? How will we organize ourselves?

• 1:09:38Tim Ferriss?

  How will we value ourselves? Let me ask you some follow up questions on this word, reality and perception, because it makes me think, this conversation makes me think of, and maybe getting the full name wrong, so I'll, I'll correct it in the show notes if I do, but I believe his name is Donald Hoffman, who is a cognitive scientist, also a computer scientist at UC Irvine. And he has a book that's called, I believe, The Case Against Reality, and also a TED Talk. And the general exploration focuses on how easy it is to prove and demonstrate that

• 1:10:18Tim Ferriss?

  we are optimized for very few things, reproduction principle among them, and that what we perceive is not some objective reality. And that if you were a mantis shrimp, for instance, you would see things very differently. They have these incredible optic systems and so on and so forth. What does the word reality mean to you? And how do you think personally that might change once we are deeper into the era of well-developed AI?

• 1:10:48Speaker 01

  Fifty years ago, reality was television and normal life. Today, reality is this online world that is constantly demanding attention, constantly full of stressors of one kind or another, constantly demanding your engagement, because that's the way it's built. The engagement is around monetization, spreading information and misinformation and so forth. Everyone I know is being driven crazy by the explosion of that. I think that in the next decade, the explosion will continue and the solutions will need to be developed, because more and more, the digital world becomes the real world.

• 1:11:34Speaker 01

  An example that I used, which is, for example, you can see it in the movie Ready Player One, where people cross over and they spend most of their time in a virtual world, is true for many, many teenagers. And there's every reason to believe in the next 10 or 20 years, those worlds will become extraordinarily sophisticated. So, I'll give you a simple example. At Google, because there was so much going on, we developed a pattern where people would be in meetings, but they would also be doing their email at the same time. And we became very good at doing two things at once, and this was a cultural norm. But I had to put in a rule that when you had outsiders in the room, you couldn't do

• 1:12:14Speaker 01

  this, because it was seen as so incredibly rude, which it is, but it was a cultural norm that we adopted and invented and worked well. So, you can see that the addiction cycle, and our world is largely now locked into addiction cycles, whether it's drug-related, or whether it's technology-related, or it's attention-related. I mean, again, humans are like this. I am very, very concerned that we will lose perspective on what reality really is. Humans are not built for the kind of stressors that occur every day. We just aren't organized. We're organized around the campfire and the lion and that sort of thing, which didn't

• 1:12:58Speaker 01

  occur at warp speed. And so, I'm assuming that this pressure on human development, this sort of craziness, this constant anxiety, will lead to more neuroses, more paranoia, not less. And that people will then have to figure out a way, just in the same way that parents are trying to keep their kids offline some of the time, because kids are online from the moment they wake up to the moment they go to sleep, kids want them, "Go play ball for an hour, I'm taking your phone away." We're gonna have to do the same thing for adults.

• 1:13:32Tim Ferriss?

  What rules or constraints do you have for yourself around social media or other types of digital stimuli?

• 1:13:44Speaker 01

  One of my friends said that he stopped watching television, because he reads all his news online. And I thought, okay, well, that's a reasonable time trade-off. Of course, you're changing one stressor for another, but that says, "I only have time for one, I've chosen the online world."

• 1:14:03Speaker 01

  And so I think the first question is, there's limited time. And then the second thing is, you've got to have some rules. So for me, I'm online all the time, but I try to turn it off during dinner. I can usually get it done for about an hour. So the question is, when you go without it for a while, I'll give you another example. In 2012, a group of us went to North Korea and we went from Beijing. And this was at a time it was legal to do so as an American. And we left our phones in the Beijing airport in a trusted person. And we sat in the lounge as the plane was about to take us to Pyongyang without our phones, and it's the strangest feeling.

• 1:14:47Speaker 01

  And by the time we got there and got settled in the hotel, it's a group of maybe 10, we started talking to each other, which we would never have done. And within three days, we were best friends. The moment we got back to Beijing and got our phones, we were on them. We lost all context of what we were doing and we were back in the soup. So there's going to be some, in the same sense that people go to spa vacations, there's going to have to be some equivalent of a spa vacation from your devices.

• 1:15:21Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I'm wondering what, what type of agency humans will be able to harness to position themselves competitively in the world of AI. It brings up so many questions, I mean, such as the AI assistant. Will there be tiered assistants? And will the well-off be able to afford better assistance? I mean, certainly the better off have different types of access now that help them to separate signal from noise better than the majority. So that will probably continue to be the case. Do you think there, and there's no right answer here, by the way. Do you think there is anything uniquely human that ultimately

• 1:16:01Tim Ferriss?

  we will be able to find value in, in a world of, of AGI, for instance?

• 1:16:09Speaker 01

  A lot of people are speculating. That the eventual future is a much richer world, where people are largely idle, and that the units of production are so efficient, this is food production, buildings, and so forth, that everyone can live like a millionaire, which means they don't have to work. And a lot of people would prefer not to work. Many of their jobs, they find not that interesting, and they have hobbies that are more interesting to them, and so forth. It's possible that will be true. It's also possible that that world is dystopian, because humans need meaning. So I think the answer to your question has a lot to do with whether the systems produce more meaning for humans,

• 1:16:54Speaker 01

  or less meaning. If the computer replaces me, that's less meaning. If the computer augments me, it's more meaning. This is true at every level of society. So there will be a small number of countries. The US will be one, China will be another, there will be others, which will be the leaders in these technologies. And because the way network platforms work, those leaders will get far ahead of the other countries. So there is going to be a division between the AI-enabled powerhouse countries and the following countries, who are using it, but not inventing it.

• 1:17:35Speaker 01

  That divide will lead to enormous societal and economic changes, which we don't fully understand. Put another way, if you don't have a leading university in your country that's doing this kind of stuff, you're going to be left out. And so, at the human level, some people will be comfortable in this new and very, very curiosity-driven, very interesting age, but an awful lot of people will feel displaced. Will they be less motivated or more motivated? Another example. We should be able, using these tools, to build learning systems that teach in the most efficient way possible, each and every person.

• 1:18:16Speaker 01

  We know people learn differently, but the old rear ends in seats, thirty people in front of a chalkboard, is an outmoded concept. So, there will be a completely different way for kids to learn and grow up, which has got to be good, because it'll maximize their potential. So you've got a person who's been maximizing their potential, will the economic system give them opportunity to be maximally potentialized? Give you another example. I use science examples, but let's imagine that you really want to be a painter or a musician. Well, in the future, you'll say to the AI system, "I'm imagining a song about a woman and a riverboat in New Orleans, and it's a sad song, but it has willows in the background." Or something like that, and the computer will generate a song for you, which won't

• 1:19:01Speaker 01

  be as good as what you can do. But you'll listen to it, and you'll say, "Oh, that then stimulates your idea." So, "I want to invent a form of cubism that's different from Picasso." So the computer will then go through a series of scenarios of cubism that doesn't look like Picasso, and I'll say, "I can do better," and then I'll be stimulated. So, the people who can engage in that, I used musicians, and painters, and scientists, and thinkers, and writers, are going to be the economic winners. But what about everyone else?

• 1:19:33Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's a really great question. I also immediately start thinking, this just shows you how boring I am, but about questions of copyright and intellectual property, you know, will you have some type of blockchain identified and verified assistant who is kind of one-to-one correlated with your, your identity and social security number, therefore you can copyright and own anything the AI helps you to generate, or generates itself for that matter? It's gonna raise all sorts of questions.

• 1:20:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think we should build that company immediately, you and I, let's found it right now.

• 1:20:11Speaker 01

  The use of blockchain to do authentication is going to be central in this world because otherwise, where do you know the source? Who invented this? How did it actually happen?

• 1:20:22Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, well, we should talk about it.

• 1:20:25Speaker 01

  We're going to need source authentication very, very much in this.

• 1:20:30Tim Ferriss?

  I was looking back at my notes from our last conversation. We covered a lot of ground. I recommend everyone also listen to the last conversation because we went so deeply into your background, your history, the trajectory, different mentors. It was a great conversation. I really enjoyed it. And we spoke a lot about Bill Joy. And when, in the notes at least, if I'm remembering correctly, once he became a venture capitalist, he would read research papers, figure out who the best authors or participants were, and then call them and ask, what's the most interesting thing in your field? And I would love to hear any examples of startups, bigger companies, academics, particular teams at universities, any one

• 1:21:13Tim Ferriss?

  or any groups that stand out to you as doing very, very interesting things in the sphere of AI.

• 1:21:20Speaker 01

  There are two well-known examples in AGI. One is called DeepMind, which is in the UK. It's owned by Google. I've been heavily involved with them. And another one is OpenAI, which is the inventor of GPT-3, which has a big partnership with Microsoft. Those two are probably the largest focuses in these new areas, so-called reinforcement learning, so-called generative learning. And there are a couple of other labs. There's a series of university projects. I've been funding AI applied science in the leading universities. And the AI science goes something like this. The physicists know how something works,

• 1:22:03Speaker 01

  but our computers can't calculate it. It's too complicated a calculation. But they can make an approximation. So often in science, a AI system is used to approximate something good enough. So that we can understand how the system works. The most obvious area where this will play out will be in biology. Another friend of mine said that math is to physics what AI will be to biology. You needed math to understand how physics worked. You'll need AI to understand how biology works because it's so incredibly complicated. We still don't understand how to model a cell. We still don't understand how the brain is organized. There are so many basic things that you would think as humans we would want to know

• 1:22:47Speaker 01

  that have not been calculable for us. And that's where all the great discoveries will be.

• 1:22:52Tim Ferriss?

  You know, I have to share something just because it's on this topic in a sense. I have a set of papers from the late Richard Feynman on which he drew the Kreb cycle. And I just found that crossover, so to speak, so fascinating. And we don't have to go deeply into Feynman, but certainly one of the people I've paid a lot of attention to. Biology is incredibly complex and I was thinking of the examples you've given and thinking of, say, protein folding or trying to identify receptors and the shapes of receptors or even structure the and modify the shapes of receptors.

• 1:23:33Tim Ferriss?

  The process, as you've already said, is so incredibly labor intensive and we've tried all sorts of things to try to pick up the slack using idle computers in a distributed fashion. But once you have AI as a player on the field, I mean, that could change things so fundamentally as you mentioned with that one example, I think Hallison was the example that you mentioned. It's a big, big deal. I wonder how AI may augment natural prospecting since nature oftentimes, the molecules we identify in nature are just so beyond the wildest imaginations of anyone who would start from scratch with a, say, ground up synthetic approach. It raises so many interesting questions.

• 1:24:16Speaker 01

  It's worth noting that there was a competition between two groups. One, a group called Rosetta at the University of Washington, and another one in Deep Mind to develop proteins, protein folding algorithms. And this year, both have reported their results in the open source and they've published how proteins, the most common proteins that are part of biology, fold. The reason this is important is the way that they full determines the way they interact with other cells. And it is the basis, again, of drug discovery, medicine, how our bodies work, genetic expression, and so forth. These proteins are super important.

• 1:24:57Speaker 01

  These are the kinds of discoveries that, if they were done by humans, would merit Nobel Prizes. And this is happening right now. The way they do them is the same as I described, which is they generate many, many different candidates, and they evaluate them using AI, and then they choose the one that has the best fit, most optimal outcome, and then they release it, and then that technology will be used for the next ones, and so forth.

• 1:25:25Tim Ferriss?

  What do you hope the impact of this book will be? It's so all-encompassing in some respects, this topic. What is the hope with this book in terms of impact, or what people will do, or how they will change their assumptions or beliefs after being exposed to it?

• 1:25:46Speaker 01

  Twenty years ago, when we started the Internet as you currently know it, the social media world, many of the other tools, no one debated what the impact on society would be. We were way busy building these systems to great success without understanding the impact. Artificial intelligence is much more powerful than any of the technologies up till now, because, as I mentioned, it's imprecise, it's emergent, it's learning, and insightful. We need to understand how we're going to deal with these things ahead of their development. Over and over again, technologists build these technologies without understanding how

• 1:26:30Speaker 01

  they'll be used and misused. The goal of the book is to lay out the fundamental questions that society has to decide around these emergent technologies, which will happen, and they will happen over the next five to 10 years. If our book turns out to be the index case, where after reading this book and after its publication, people say, "Holy crap, I've got to get ahead of this, I've got to figure out a philosophy..."

• 1:27:03Speaker 01

  Around this, I have to figure out a way where humans can coexist with these new systems that doesn't drive humans crazy and makes the world better, not worse. That's a great outcome from our book.

• 1:27:15Tim Ferriss?

  The Age of AI and what a powerhouse of the trio, the co-authors involved. It's tremendously important and I'm thrilled that we've had a chance to deep dive into so many facets of this subject that has been of great interest to me, but has come along with great insecurity because I come at it from a lay perspective. Before we go, I must ask, how has it been to start your own podcast?

• 1:27:45Speaker 01

  I enjoyed it. It turns out to be harder than I thought because I actually had to prepare and I had to get context and so forth, but it has had enough of an impact that I will continue.

• 1:27:55Tim Ferriss?

  Reimagine with Eric Schmidt. You're an excellent conversationalist. I am continually impressed. I don't need to do much. That's the key to good interviewing is pick your subject.

• 1:28:05Speaker 01

  That's right. It's all about the subject. I think it's all about the, it's a dual, dual process. But I think it's worth, it's worth thinking about in terms of what you and I do, you're a fan of Richard Feynman. When will there be a computer as smart as Richard Feynman? And the answer is a very long time from now. And so we always like to focus on the lawyers who will lose their jobs and the politicians who will lose their jobs, but that's not how it actually works. What really happens is AI is going to be used to eliminate repetitive jobs, jobs which are boring and so forth. I mentioned vision. Most of the military's activities are watching things. I'd much rather have the computer watching and then

• 1:28:50Speaker 01

  when there's an exception, say, hey, something happened and alert a human to take a look at. It's a better use of both the human and the computer. And so the good news is that what you do and what I do is not going to be replaced by computers soon.

• 1:29:06Tim Ferriss?

  I'll take it. I will absolutely take it. And I encourage people to read this book, The Age of AI. Pick it up. You can find Eric on Twitter at Eric Schmidt and then certainly at EricSchmidt.com. We'll link to everything, including the book and all resources, companies, technologies mentioned in the show notes at tim.blog/podcast. Eric, thank you so much. This has been extremely, extremely enjoyable and educational for me. So I appreciate you taking the time. Thank you, Tim.

• 1:29:39Tim Ferriss?

  Hey, guys. This is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric

• 1:30:24Tim Ferriss?

  things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog/friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog/friday, drop in your email, and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by ButcherBox. ButcherBox makes it easy for you to get high-quality, humanely-raised meat that you can trust. They deliver delicious, 100% grass-fed, grass-finished beef, free-range organic chicken, heritage-breed pork, and wild-caught seafood directly to your door. For me, in the past few weeks, I cooked a ton of their salmon,

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• 1:32:38Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:33:23Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:34:05Tim Ferriss?

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