AI researcher, author, and VP and Fellow at Google Research, Blaise Agüera y Arcas has contributed to research papers cited more than 20,000 times, including…
Transcript
0:00 · [Music] greetings I’m Josh Tyson co-author of the first bestselling book about conversational AI age of invisible machines the book explores the learnings of 20-year conversational AI veteran and one reach.
0:21 · CEO Rob Wilson each week Rob and I bring in a guest to continue the conversation we started in the pages of our book this week on The Invisible machines podcast we’re talking about the perforated line between human and machine intelligence our changing perception of identity and how AI might accelerate these shifts how the pandemic
0:42 · moved us further into a virtualized world the collective nature of human intelligence and how AI might create deeper connections between people that boost our understanding of the universe and the ways that AI might put us back into balance with nature Our Guest bla agua arus is is an AI researcher as well as a vice president and fellow at Google research he’s co-authored numerous influential papers including a seminal Lambda paper from 2022 his research has been cited more than 20,000 times and along with winning mit’s t35 prize Blaze
1:16 · is a frequent Ted speaker he’s also the author of an experimental Nolla ubis about an engineer training an llm during the co lockdown his new book who are we now is based on a set of surveys he conducted between 2016 and 2022 with
1:32 · more than 10,000 Anonymous Americans exploring identity and behavior especially relating to gender and sexuality who are we now investigates the ways biology ecology sexuality history and culture have intertwined to create a dynamic us that’s neither natural nor artificial both books are available through hat and beard press we’re excited to bring you this invigorating philosophical conversation with blae agua arus
2:05 · all right well blae welcome to the show great to have you and thanks for joining us thank you really my pleasure thanks for having me on yeah yeah absolutely and rob a pleasure to see you again as always yes blaz you read a lot I can see yes yes I do uh now nowadays a lot of a lot of Audi books as well um I find that that like increases the number of votes I can read a lot yeah yeah do you read do you you listen at like one time speed or do you are you one of those like three times speed in the middle 1.4 1.4
2:37 · above above like 1.6 it starts to sound a little a little chip monkey and and I have trouble got it got it well you know speaking of books Blaze our our mutual friend uh JC Gable runs hat and beard press and uh last time I was in Los Angeles he he gave me a copy of your first book ubis I think I’m saying that right yes okay great and uh you know I read it on the pl and ride home and I kind of deplaned having sort
3:04 · of this altered perception of technology I think uh partially because I’ve always really loved making mixtapes and collages uh you know ubis has that quality um totally it’s it’s a Nolla about an engineer kind of training an llm during the co lockdown but it’s sort of intertwined with fragments of Keynotes and Historical Notes and uh
3:24 · photos and etchings all sorts of cool stuff uh I think I really liked how how playful it was it was about AI but it was also somewhat irreverent so you know I was hoping just to start off we could talk a bit about how how that book came to be and if any of it kind of informed uh the ideas in your new book with hat and beard uh who are we now yeah that’s a great question I’m really I’m really glad you uh you’ve asked about ubby sun and and that you read it and uh and enjoyed it um yeah so uh it was my first
3:52 · project with hat and beard and uh it was a you know very non-traditional project of course like it’s it’s it’s fiction but it’s also kind of non-fiction in a way or metafiction I guess and um it’s uh it definitely has more than a little bit of autobiography in it I mean I’m not I’m not of course literally the character in it but um I wrote it in a kind of fever dream over a few weeks um
4:17 · near the beginning of the of the covid lockdown and and what it happened was that um you know this was around the same time that llms were um were first happening it was well before this was in I guess early 2021 so it was well before
4:32 · um no it could it have been 2020 uh no it must have been 2021 uh this was this was well before Chad GPT and all of this stuff so people were not familiar you know with what with what uh what llms really were by and large um but uh I was one of the authors on on the Lambda paper which was uh you know an early conversational uh llm that that we we made it at Google research and and the the um uh interacting with this thing was really kind of of uh amazing and uh
5:01 · and and spooky in a way that I think a lot of other people experienced you know around around the chat GPT moment just about a year ago now um and uh so that was all happening uh and I was sort of having a bunch of uh I guess Revelations about what the nature of intelligence might actually be like how is it that this autocomplete system essentially appears to actually be intelligent um you know it’s it’s a weird thing like we all knew that next word prediction was um AI complete in the sense that um you
5:30 · know correctly predicting the next word under General circumstances kind of requires you to pull in every possible thing about about intelligence but the shock was that literally just making a next word predictor seemed to produce artificial general intelligence although a lot of people I think remain in denial about that um so that was all happening and I was having a lot of a lot of conversations with with with the Lambda chatbot you know at at night um and at
5:54 · the same time you know the the world seemed to be ending uh you know in the middle of the whole sort of Co pandemic and um I I describe a scene you know near the beginning where like vaccines basically fall off the back of of a truck there’s a there’s a freezer failure and and and uh you know people have to have to like go into a medical center to you know to use the vaccines before they get before they they go off you know at midnight that actually happened so um my wife and I were among the first people to get those vaccines because of a freezer failure we all kind of lined up around the block the University of Washington um and I had a
6:26 · really a really bad reaction to that First Co shot so I was kind of in in bed uh you know with like a huge lump in my arm and uh you know this all of this llm stuff was was going around in in in my head and and Co was going on and um and at the same time I had also been reading this book called The Ruins Lesson by Susan Stewart which was about the uh
6:47 · about the end of Roman civilization and the beginnings of the English language so a lot of this focuses on things like very early translations of the or the very earliest English poetry uh a lot of which was about you know uh people living uh in in the ruins of Roman civilization they they talked about themselves as as living in the shadow of giants you know there there these Roman ruins they can’t even fathom that that they that that ordinary human-sized people could have made those um they’re
7:16 · like dormit you know living sort of in a post-apocalyptic world so uh so all of that was the kind of the mulch pile that that recent grew out of over the course of about three weeks of fish writing wow I can’t I can’t get past this the idea right now that it’s not a coincidence that you’re you’re sitting there on the sort of bleeding edge of let’s say human intelligence uh you know done by or you
7:44 · know experienced by us through machines and also one of the first people willing to go get the CO like there’s obviously a huge explore gene or explore behavior and and you’re like right there at the front of whatever whatever the next big thing is ready ready to jump on board like um obviously I admire that and I think the world like thanks as thankful for
8:13 · people like you that are so I would call it Brave right to just jump in there some would call it crazy some will call it Brave I’m gonna call it Brave um most that’s that’s really that’s really kind I mean obviously a lot of this is situational though you know it’s it’s like being being in a you know in in the right place at the right time right right but there’s a lot that would say way I’m getting the first one um and how do how do how do you
8:40 · surround yourself with people that and this is going to sound weird but tolerate that or actually support that because I know you know a lot of people you know when you want to do something really Innovative like the world’s not really set up it’s a very risk adverse place um yeah how are you able to surround yourself in an environment that’s supportive of that kind of um
9:04 · exploration that’s an interesting question um I feel like in in a lot of ways the world has become much more risk averse in recent years uh and and maybe maybe recent decades even than it used to be um you know and and a part of that I guess is like a dividend a pece dividend of some kind you know a sort of product of of our success as a as a
9:25 · species uh I mean back in back in our hunter gatherer scavenger days uh you know every day really was an adventure right right and like you you might or might not survive it I mean you know life expectancy even in 1900 life expectancy was 35 on average in the world and a lot of that was you know was of course due to child childhood mortality but but also you know even if you survived the rigors of childhood yes there were a lot of people who lived to be old but you know also you know any infectious disease could take you out uh you know any any travel was you know an adventure um and and I feel like we’ve
9:58 · we’ve lost a lot of that Spirit of Adventure partly because you know life is frankly a lot safer and a lot cushier than than it used to be I think about what we uh yeah moreal lose I mean I mean think about like what we did you know going to the Moon uh you know and and on what a Sho string in a weird way or with with such you know how we did that with so little technology and and in such radically unsafe circumstances both the Soviets and the Americans I I feel like that would never happen now um
10:26 · you know so so I guess um I guess part of you know part of my answer is uh you know I I think our current sort of um uh sense of fragility or of extreme risk is is is is a little is kind of the anomaly you know relative to to humans historically but I would also say that um you know when we talk about risk uh I mean the risks the risks that I’ve taken I guess professionally or personally or whatever are are kind of small fry in the sense that um my my needs are are
10:55 · taken care of you know I’m not I’m not worried about um about our family uh you know eating or or you know being physically safe um you know so so a lot of these intellectual risks and so on you know they feel to me like they have they have a a um uh in a way a low
11:12 · stakes quality you know like we’re we’re we’re happy to take the risks because the upsides are potentially large and the downsides are actually usually quite small yeah it’s interesting too thinking in terms of like Co and and being kind of isolated and alone which you know I don’t I don’t know if those same measures would have been you know 100 years ago when I guess life was weirdly like cheaper and also more precious I guess in certain ways as well yeah but there there you are kind of I guess we all sort of were like isolated but you’re you’re there speaking with
11:44 · you know an llm which you know years later everyone would kind of get that experience but was that strange at all kind of being somewhat isolated and alone but then having conversations with this sort of new entity yeah it was utterly weird um you you know in many
11:59 · ways it was sort of the realization of the touring test so you know as as I’m sure you both are very you know very aware uh when Allen touring was thinking in in the mid 20th century about how you would recognize an intelligence when it comes along uh you know in a way that’s sort of platform neutral that doesn’t rely on it looking like us or you know having the the particular biological platform that we do he envisioned a chatbot essentially envisioned having a chat with something and and susing out in that way whether you’re talking with a human or or or a machine the original formulation was actually a little different but never mind um but uh you
12:32 · know that so the real touring test was kind of happening uh you know and we’re all in that in that touring test now and at the same time uh the fact that we were all physically isolated from each other was um I don’t know it felt almost as if as if we were all living in a virtual world uh you know there was this there was this weird uh there’s this kind of meme that went around I guess around the time the Matrix movies were being made of like are we living in a simulation you know is this is this all real and um uh the fact that all of our
13:01 · interactions with each other were digitally mediated uh and and you could imagine you know simulations of at the other ends of all of these kind of things there are simulations of people simulations of of intelligences actual intelligences is there a difference that that all definitely you know was part of the weirdness the fact that we were all virtual to each other at the same time by the way that um yeah it it is interesting timing and and that when you were asking about connections with the new book that is definitely a connection with the new book as well when I think about human identity and how it’s uh
13:31 · evolving uh the fact that that our identities have become in many ways so disembodied and so virtual is was definitely one of the things that went into the new stuff too as being like an engineer in mind um
13:47 · you know I I think it’s fair to say you spent most of your career putting things together and knowing what the outputs would be within a fair range of certainty and predictability what was the feeling of putting something together and its output being completely outside of your
14:09 · predict prediction I guess yeah yeah it’s a great question uh we’re used to engineering things and understanding what we engineer uh not to Growing them or having them learn right in ways that we have to then figure out afterward um and I think in many ways that’s the difference between um between engineering that looks like um I
14:33 · guess between engineering of a thing that that um that you have the the fully thought out model of in mind uh you know to to begin with you understand what it’s going to do how it’s going to slot in to the world what its inputs and outputs are how to model what goes on in the middle versus um machine learning uh
14:51 · you know for me machine learning is actually very similar to life uh in in the sense that uh you know evolution is a form of learning too and when you have a system that is learning and especially a system that is learning in conjunction with us and we’re learning too you know that that sort of interplay is not deterministic in the same way as as a conventional machine or conventional piece of engineering so it’s closer I think in some ways to biology yeah yeah it’s like fractal really right like like as in fractals and biology you can understand
15:21 · the fractal nature and the reasoning in that Simplicity but the unpredictable complexity or the merging complexity is what kind of blows your mind you’re like what totally what what is this going to become and totally the limitation of our brains to ever predict what it’s going to become to ever understand I think is what I struggle with is when I don’t understand something I always have confidence that I will and if I pursue it I will and
15:54 · this is one of the first times where I’m I’ll understand it it better but I won’t fully understand it and I’m trying to get my head around that um that then again we don’t fully understand ourselves either fun right that we get to that we get to do this to understand ourselves better that’s kind where it’s going to come next is it’s the best part of this is is the mirror that it puts up like
16:21 · are we studying AI or are we studing ourselves yeah and is there a difference between those two right right yeah I I kind of I kind of think there isn’t a difference I think it’s both um you know I have to say like one of the as as you were talking the thing that was coming to mind for me also was uh was some of the classic theorems from the middle of the 20th century and the early 20th century actually about about um about
16:47 · unpredictability and un and non-comp computability so the moment you have a system that can compute you know one of the really classic uh sort of uh results from the theory of computing uh is that for instance uh if you have some arbitrary program it’s not possible to write another program that will tell whether the first program will ever end or will kind of be an infinite right uh that’s that’s called the stopping problem you know again like toing wrote All About This the moment things compute they’re not like screwdrivers anymore you know or like wrenches or something that you can just fully understand there’s there’s there’s an inherent um
17:20 · open-endedness I guess yeah to systems like that what’s I this is me getting out there now so I’m preparing you um the I I I think historically we can look back and say that as humans we’re we’re unsettled with not understanding and we continue to pursue some feeling of
17:43 · understanding and so we kind of come up with things like religion um ways to feel like we understand the things we can’t understand and I start to wonder what will emerge here with AI will they become Gods to some groups of people that that worship them and try to
18:06 · understand them in that same way we’ve kind of UND stood ourselves through religion like you know where these things become where we seek to explain them in ways that maybe follow more of a theater than they follow fact that makesense
18:29 · it does I I I worry I worry about that kind of thing too um but you know I guess my my my feeling about it is that um unexplainable ility uh or opacity is
18:45 · also uh it kind of goes along with with um a bunch of fundamental ideas that we have about each other uh as well uh like Free Will for instance right or the idea of having agency uh you know I mean we uh those of us who are not religious and and who you know who are sort of trained in computational neuroscience and so on you know I think the great majority of us believe that the actual operations going on inside your neurons are not you
19:11 · know are not fundamentally Supernatural you know or or or mysterious and yeah actually we’ve had models for how neurons work mathematical models for that again since the mid 20th century so it’s not like at the bottom layer there’s a there’s a mystery there but there is a mystery when you get up to the level of of psychology essal it’s the fractal thing right right and and we wouldn’t think of ourselves as people you know without that upper level right we’d be just a bunch of Adams uh doing stuff uh but but our
19:40 · world is a world of people it’s a world of agents and and the fact that we have free will even for instance um I think is a function of the fact that we can’t model ourselves perfectly you know when I when I think like what will I do next week you know I’m making a psychological model of myself that model is necessarily not complete and the gap between reality and that model is kind of what we call Free Will you know and
20:03 · and what we call agency so for me we’re playing in that space that we’ve been playing in forever and uh you know demanding that we explain all of the details of a system mechanistically is kind of asking for the wrong thing and that’s not new that’s not new with AI I mean you know I think it’s true of Finance it’s true of politics it’s true of every complex system we can’t we can’t understand it in all of its details our brains I mean it’s you know
20:27 · it’s I don’t of it’s common knowledge yet but it’s it’s certainly acknowledged in the Neuroscience world that our brains aren’t that different from other animals other than it grew longer right right essentially as a fractal it just got more complex because because it developed it had a longer time to develop and and then we certain areas of it had
20:50 · longer time to develop right in certain areas and we can think about you know what the Explorer in US wants to say but what if it got even bigger like what what would it look like what would what would that complexity be what would that complexity look like and
21:09 · and maybe now we get to see because yeah because we see what does a bigger brain look like without mutating a human being you know uh so although I agree and I do think that we get to see this uh I think that there’s also another way of looking at it which is that um I mean you said you know you mentioned the way the fact that our brains are not that different from the brains of bobos or chimps and um you know I talked quite a lot about about this in the introduction to the to the the new book um basically one of the
21:42 · things I’m trying to do is explode the idea that intelligence exists only in the brain of an individual you know if you took one human genetic human you know and and did the Casper Houser trick you know and and had that person you know raised among Among Wolves or or among chimpanzees or B noos or something uh you know let’s assume that that that they figure out how to you know how to survive um that that person will not be
22:05 · behaviorally like us um our intelligence is very very deeply Collective uh you know it’s about it’s about all of us interacting with each other having language and culture and building on on things that have you know that have a many generations long history um we know
22:22 · from a lot of experiments and natural experiments that you know when when things happen like islanding uh you know a population gets isolated from the mainland it’s a small population the level of Technology declines dramatically in those isolated populations and it kind of shows you that people are a little bit like neurons in a bigger brain you know so so
22:39 · this is why my my take on AI is a little different maybe from the one where it’s like oh you know we were the King of the Hill and now there’s going to be a bigger King of the Hill and it’s going to dominate us I I think about the whole thing more ecologically uh you know their intelligence is our intelligence the way we’ve arrived at at at at AI is literally by you know by training it on corpuses of human interaction and their interaction with us is very very humanlike I I I would argue it is human
23:05 · right uh right in the sense that it’s not different I mean it may be different from us in its implementation but it’s not different from us in its culture right or in its intelligence so I think it’s just a matter of of of of more you know it’s it’s uh you know in the same way that that a big city you know has more intelligence in it than a tiny Island uh you know we’re we’re just about to add a bunch more volume to that right right so actually wrote down a a
23:29 · line from who are we now that I think kind of touches on that you wrote uh I believe that that we ought to expand to include only the non-human life not only the non-human life on our planet but also all of its factories tools and robots that they are no less natural than the farm or the forest or our own human bodies uh and for some reason my mind first went to like forever chemicals like posos yeah which seems
23:53 · like you know at first glance like the most unnatural thing you can conce of but it’s it was made from you know chemicals found on the planet it is natural and then now posos along with microplastics are part of our internal uh biology like our each our individual ecosystems are now kind of like cohabitating with our with our Creations or fragments of them and I was wondering if like that if that kind of idea of a broader sense of we uh you know might
24:25 · change the way we perceive reality but also if like if AI might start accelerating these changes in perception that we’re having I hope and imagine that it will uh you know and I guess part of my bigger project here is to um have us as
24:40 · much as possible think about the entire planet as one thing you know which includes includes you know the supposed natural and and the supposed not natural I mean I don’t I don’t see those distinctions as being so clear um as as you as you say and um you know what what is a what is a problem of course is when uh development when Evolution happens so quickly uh that um that the system can’t
25:06 · rebalance can’t catch up and that’s that’s kind of the the uh the crisis that we’re in at the moment we’ve changed the Ecology of the planet so quickly that um all of the moving parts are lagging uh behind and and we’re at risk of throwing the entire thing out of balance and and the only way to reestablish that kind of balance is to you know to have greater solidarity in effect so you know um the non
25:32 · non-degradability you know things like like posos you know are a function of the fact that there hasn’t been time uh to evolve ways to degrade those kinds of chemicals yeah or our brain is not big enough yeah and and you know and with with with AI could we engineer uh you know artificial microbes that degrade P I’m sure we can uh so I see I see that
25:52 · as part of the response if you like it’s not just that we’re an insult to Earth you know we are it’s more like a pharmacon you know where both the disease and the cure all at once just like all of evolution has been its own disease and cure yeah U there’s two things I want to touch on one this concept of seeing there this one somehow I just immediately thought that’s how LMS see the Earth they’ve sucked in all the information globally right um and
26:22 · and well a lot of text on the web I there’s a lot more information there is um um and I but I always think about this as like some alien with a giant brain that’s just tapped into our internet studied all of this text and has now come down to speak to us um in our language and we’re having conversations with it and it’s and it’s assimilating very well um and then it
26:48 · has something to teach us right at least we think it might we want to learn from it and so we’re all talking to it now trying to learn what it knows but it’s really just regurgitating what we already know back to us um in new ways and sharing and kind of maybe in a way making us more one um maybe that’s like a positive way of thinking about it um the other way to think about it is that you know maybe
27:17 · maybe most of us think that a bigger brain is a better brain a smarter brain is a better brain but there’s maybe another way to say that you know nature may not think that M nature may not think that we’re the top of the mountain nature may think that brains are right sized there’s a right size for an
27:40 · environment and that sometimes less complex is actually better and that those creatures will live longer and it sort of depends on the rules in which you decide what makes a species the top of you know like we’re making the rules for what determines what the top of the
27:59 · you know of the of the chain of the pyramid is and then we’re declaring ourselves the winner but what if what if complexity and more complexity is not the dominant Force what if there’s a Tipping Point and there’s a right sizing of intelligence um I know that gets kind of weird but uh no no not weird at all um I
28:22 · I mean I I’ve definitely thought quite a lot about about the issues that you’re raising as well um and have a few observations um one of them is that the idea that um well first of all our our brains have been shrinking for the last few hundred thousand years yeah neanderthals had had bigger brains than we did by by about the size of a baby’s fist um and there are a lot of theories about why that might be uh one of them that I’m kind of partial to is that they kind of had to
28:52 · be jacksol traits they had to be Geniuses at a lot of things in order to get by because everybody was a generalist um and in our specialization uh we actually need less individual intelligence than they did uh you know because we are relying much more on division of labor in other words we we’ve traded off um you know individual
29:12 · competency for a collective competency and of course that Collective competency is way greater than what the than what the meanderthals had this gets back to population size being at least as important in terms of scaling intelligence as you know how many neurons an individual brain has got a bigger brain then is isn’t isn’t the point a bigger
29:31 · brain through connectivity yeah is the point yeah because then you get exponential growth then you get right then you get you don’t have to you know walk around the earth not fitting through doorways right because we’re just all connected um that’s an interesting concept so then how would you measure the degree of our connectivity since neanderthals and and you go well look at look at our
29:59 · technology and what that’s done to our connectivity look at us right now connecting exactly so so maybe the growth that connectivity is better not the size of your brain or complexity of the individual brain but the connectivity of it and then seeing how AI plays into facilitating that connectivity is where we start to realize that it itself is not
30:28 · the amazing thing and it having a huge brain is not the amazing thing but its capability to use that brain to connect us better with each other and how can we focus on those use cases Us in the AI world how can we tap into that um and you know in a in a beneficial way
30:51 · uh it we do have to understand what what the substance of connectivity is then you know I have this opin opinion that creativity and co-creation is is the substance or the you know that’s L of talking is a creative exercise and us not being repetitive and reading from a
31:09 · script over and over again but us riffing off each other is co-creation and that this is what Conn ACC us whether we’re drawing together talking together um what are your thoughts around around what is the connectivity what is the thing like we talk about connection but what is that if you were to measure that or or see it or describe it what is that I mean I I agree with
31:33 · everything you’ve just said it’s really about our relationships uh you know when we think about connectivity today we think about the internet and what what we’re doing right now which is basically making a little a bigger brain you know out of the four of us right um but but long before we had the internet um we had urbanization uh you know and urbanization brought a lot of people together uh at densities far higher than
31:55 · than they had been able to exist before which in turn created Technologies which in turn allowed much much larger numbers of people to live on earth than could live before in and it’s a loop it’s a positive feedback loop so that’s that exponential growth you know in in not only in human numbers but in intelligence uh in that in that Collective sense um and you know if you start to analyze you know what are the um what does it mean to be creative for instance or you know how does how does that work um you know especially in in
32:23 · modern Western thought I think we’re very used to the idea that it’s all individual you know like there’s there’s an individual creative genius and they come up with stuff but um in reality uh I think that you know this maybe comes back to your very first question like you know I I read a lot you know and in so far as I come up with ideas a lot of it has to do with the people that I talk to and the books that I read um you know every idea is sort of a remix of things
32:48 · that uh that that a person has experienced already and this is why you get the weird phenomenon of multiple simultaneous Discovery uh you know like take any invention any artistic movement uh you know any any any Discovery and and if you dig into it you realize that a dozen people invented the same thing around the same time like the light bulb is a classic example I there were a couple of dozen people who all invented the light bulb why why then why at that moment it’s almost like everybody was telepathically connected yeah but the reason is that you can’t have a light bulb if you can’t blow glass make a
33:20 · vacuum draw filaments have electricity you know and once all of those things are there then you know it’s just like putting another Jenga piece you know on top and and and in a way all of our brains are just the crucibles where those ingredients combin right it’s like mathematics we don’t invent mathematics we discover it and we discover it based on mathematics before it exactly the building blocks it’s the next natural thing someone was going to discover the light bulb there was no totally it was the next step it it was inevitable
33:50 · that’s right and L that doesn’t mean um ‘s are next step to it and and they’re doing the same thing by the way I should say you know this doesn’t what I’m saying doesn’t imply that people don’t matter or that the individual doesn’t matter you know I mean even Tak something stupid like the light bulb you know you ask a seemingly trivial question like well how many volts does it run up you know are the threads clockwise or counterclockwise are there prongs you know and so on U you know the
34:11 · particular invention that one out you know which was one person’s decisions end up having this long long effect through history so it doesn’t mean that individuals don’t matter right but it does mean that it was bound to happen to they they matter in terms of the timeline you know in terms of how quickly when detail yeah and the details y y right but but yeah LMS are doing
34:31 · this now too I mean they you know we say like oh they’re they’re just regurgitating stuff um uh it’s it’s not quite true uh you know there there was actually just a paper uh published a couple of days ago about uh you know llm that had a bunch of genomic information uh you know you just ask it about uh you know about some some genetic disease or correlation that came it came up with a connection that had not been uh noticed before so like you know this an early um biomedical Discovery you know done by a chatbot I oversimplify this to say words
35:03 · have purpose and the purpose is to describe ideas so behind words are ideas especially groups of words right and so if you regurgitate our words you are regurgitating our ideas if you jumble up our words using temperature and you and you create some randomization but within a narrow scope of randomization not too random not not full mutations but just
35:29 · iterative mutations like within that range then what you’re doing is you’re coming up with new ideas because you’re coming up with new combinations of ideas and chaining them together and so of course if you’re going to if you’re going to increase the temperature and you’re going to randomize to some degree
35:46 · the ideas and the chain of ideas you’re going to those chains make up other ideas and of course we’re going to discover new ideas some of them bad some of them good just like evolution exactly and then we’ll decide the more the more there are the faster the faster it goes because there’s an exponential process implied by them right there more materials around to recom so if we’re looking at llms as another stair in the staircase right somewhere below that’s the light bulb and you know um the next step in the staircase what’s
36:18 · the next obvious I now obviously we would have discovered it already but do you have any hypothesis as to what is the next step in that staircase the next obvious thing that’s not so obvious o I really don’t know you know I I think that I think that being able to base intelligence in Silicon is such a huge
36:39 · one yeah uh you know that that it’s a little hard to see past in the sense that I think it I think it really changes a lot of things um uh you know about about our our Collective inventive capacity and creative capacity and so on so this one is just like it’s a really big change um there’s certainly a lot of a lot of practical problems um you know some of
37:02 · which are pretty existentially important for us and some of which just afford wonderful new opportunities that more intelligence can really crack uh I’m talking about things like uh for instance uh you know the opportunities in medicine right medicine you know our bodies are very very complex systems uh you know AI is really good at uh at at um at sort of uh understanding complex systems and and and postulating engineering Solutions and so on that we wouldn’t have come up with hence the discovery you know that I just mentioned um so you know medicine Material Science
37:35 · uh things like uh you know uh new metabolisms breaking down posos you know other other contaminants Plastics um or for that matter making new materials um you know those are pretty obvious uh applications that I’m sure we’re going to see uh you know sci-fi writers have been writing for a long time about um you know what what would what would happen if we had a space elevator if we had you know like a really strong material that would allow you to just you know literally build a uh you know
37:59 · build an elevator that goes into space I mean the only reason that that is a a pipe dream is because we don’t have the right material uh does that mean the right material doesn’t exist probably the right material does exist and we may be able to make such materials in not very long so you know the possibilities are pretty are pretty huge yeah and um
38:16 · and and we’re going to have to live you know live through the next years to see what they what they are because I think they’re very hard to well that’s interesting I I think that that almost makes it feel like you’re your your new book who are we now is is especially timely right because not only are we kind of culturally at a moment where people’s identities are being sort of
38:35 · attacked and questioned uh we’re also in this moment where we’re we’re seeing people react to this to generative AI a new technology as like a replacement right like it’s like threatening my identity as a worker as someone who’s productive and then we’re also kind of to go back I guess to ubis where even those of us who kind of know how they work we can’t help some but sometimes project an identity onto these systems so so maybe this is important work right like I think you said that your book was designed to kind of blow up thetion of identity like does getting close to that
39:05 · or doing that kind of free us to make some of the kind of discoveries that you’re talking about now yeah I desperately hope so um because I I feel like uh you know we we have now um you know we’re in the anthropos scene right we’re in an era where our actions are affecting everything uh in our in our biological environment uh the Earth is finite and without the kind of solidarity where we start to think about the whole thing as our body as it were
39:32 · uh we’re kind of screwed uh you know and I I think that’s and and and it’s it’s the thing that really worries me about the moment that we’re in uh and the kind of identity politics that I that I’ve been seeing playing out increasingly is that because of that sense of threat and that threat could be about AI the threat could be about um about political others it could be about migrants it could be about people whose sexualities we don’t understand you know whatever it is like we period of rising U xenophobia uh and
39:59 · Rising identity politics and ins insularity about you know who who we are and who they are we are other and that feels like really the wrong direction to go uh if if we’re going to thrive together uh you know a cancer is what happens in the body when a group of cells uh you know decide that they’re not in solidarity with the rest of the cells in your body and and and that’s that’s where I fear we are uh you know in danger of of becoming yeah it’s um
40:26 · it’s interesting it’s it’s a connectivity challenge I we might look back in history and think that the llm and AI was accelerated due to covid because like that moment of disconnection and then this this amazing Discovery happens that hopefully in the future becomes the biggest asset towards
40:52 · bringing us together and connecting humans to each other in a way that me maybe he’s never been seen in history maybe in such a way that’s that’s just unprecedented um but I can’t think I can’t help but think that like and to your point Josh and and and what you were talking about earlier this idea of climbing the ladder to the next invention to the next invention and looking Upward at the next thing and
41:17 · that we’re looking upward and I’m and I’ve asked a number of people what’s the next thing and a lot of people are like I’m not sure and I either because the next thing’s not obvious because we’re maybe we’re entering the world of productivity abundance and that you got to look sideways now like it’s not it’s not up anymore it’s over there and over there might be not being more productive as humans but being better connected and being you know happier and I use that
41:47 · word as knowing it’s a super complex word not in a simple term but us just being more fulfilled in life and that’s that’s a sideways look like because the next thing isn’t up it’s over um and yeah like maybe in the future the question someone asked the questions who invented the light bulb the answer is like well there were a lot of people working on at the same time here’s how they each contributed it’s not Thomas Edison because I think now our compulsion maybe it’s a a capitalistic thing is to like liiz the individual who
42:17 · conquers everything right like right and and you know if you if Drunk History is to be believed Edison was like kind of a dick right so it’s like like why are we elevating these sort of mon a lot of the reason that we know about the invention about these you know the multiple inventions of the light bulb because of the patent battles that that uh you know that ensued right yeah right right and of course it’s Humanity that invented the light bulb right that’s we invented the light bulb right yeah I I I really like both of your comments about this and you know to to me um the end of
42:45 · growth is sort of uh you know one of the underlying Concepts there uh and and I I mean that in a couple of ways uh I guess we could talk about demographic growth and we could talk about economic growth you know as far as demographics you know up until very very recently um the total
43:01 · fertility rate of humanity which you know a lot a lot of the the new book you know is all about sort of the connection between reproductive futurism and sexuality and and and you know population growth and so on you know we’ve been in this kind of exponential and super exponential rise in human numbers and um you know basically we were trying to reproduce as fast as we could and our numbers were being kept in check by mortality you know by by by
43:24 · getting by by dying childbirth and and and of other causes and uh and then suddenly the lid lifted on that it’s like we escaped Planet Darwin and and suddenly our numbers were unchecked and our growth was unchecked and and it looked for a little while in the 20th century like we were headed for a huge crisis in which we would uh you know overpopulate the Earth and and die off in a dramatic way but what we’ve actually seen happen is that fertility rates go down a lot you know now in the
43:51 · developed world the fertility rates are so low that we’re seeing a dramatic population exponential population decline which is great news in terms of you know of of survivability on Earth but it also means that a lot of the assumptions about unchecked growth change and and the same is true in the economic regime this this is something that uh that that ke the the economists like in the in the 20s and 30s understood really well he was talking about post scarcity you know long before
44:18 · you know this century and saying like yeah we’ll all be working you know um three-day work weeks and uh you know we’ll just have this Leisure and we’ll become artists and we’ll be able to spend time with our friends and instead uh what What’s happened is that our obsession with economic growth has meant that we’ve created what David Graber called a bunch of jobs for each other and immiserated each other but in fact we have enough right we have we
44:41 · have everything that we need uh and there are still people who are who are poor and who are struggling and there are still people who are who are who are wasteful and want more and more and you know at some level like if what we don’t if we don’t realize that this is a reg this is a a metabolism problem right and that and that just like any organism you know it’s about how to achieve um uh how
45:01 · to achieve balance regula I I think we’re really in trouble regulating not maximizing yeah yeah like any organism after it’s after it grows right there’s a growth phase and then there’s a steady state that comes after that yeah yeah it’s true it’s not a new idea but we’ve never faced it so imminently like the opportunity for abundance in a way that
45:25 · is inarguable like it’s it’s clear that at least for a large population of people abundance is is on the horizon yes yes and if we were if we were more Equitable about about Distributing it forone the games it would be for everybody easily already today so I this comes into contrast for me with an idea and I haven’t reconciled this fully but you know you always look at a tree that grows grows to a certain
45:53 · point now granted it’s got an optimal stopping Sy so perhaps I’m answering my own question here but um it fractals its way up and it doesn’t care about the plants down below that die in the shade right it’s going to take as much of the resources as it can and it doesn’t care
46:11 · what the consequences to any other living creature is um Now sort of The anti-g Giving Tree now this is me oversimplifying because there’s mycelium and then there’s a whole another layer to talk about but right right but let’s let’s just entertain me for a second here and say that as humans we tend to try to use up as much resources as we can as a way to Peacock ourselves around
46:37 · and I guess what reproduce like is that like look how many resources I use don’t you want to have babies with me um and your point is but we’re not having more babies but we’re still wanting to
46:54 · be wanted it’s like I want you to want to have a baby with me but I don’t want to actually have a right but I don’t want to change the nappes right right right so at some point you’re like well then what’s the resource thing all about yeah yeah um
47:11 · you know it’s it’s funny like I I think that we we tend to view Evolution through a very um not just through Darwin’s perspective because Darwin you know was was a lot richer in his thinking than I think is generally assumed more like Spencer almost social Darwinism kind of thing everything is selfish everything is about you know survival of the fittest and death to everything else but that’s actually not how things work um Peter kotkin wrote a
47:35 · book called Mutual Aid uh which was an alternative take on Darwinism in like 1902 or so and he really emphasized the cooperative and mutualistic aspects of evolution which are just as important you know um we we only Survive by virtue of many many other things on earth surviving right um you know for you know it doesn’t matter how selfish you are uh you know if you if you deplete your ecosystems the point where um where you can’t survive you’re screwed right um so you know we we Thrive precisely by um by
48:06 · sharing right you know you you give to get and you get more than you give when you give this is yeah I I think that that actually a lot of indigenous people you know have understood this for a long time this is why um uh you know book books like um uh um braiding sweet grass
48:22 · Robin W Kimmer and so on are so powerful they really you know describe a different way of thinking about eological relationships that is frankly more accurate than uh you know that that kind of like endless accumulation Winner Takes all you know just harvest the whole thing um you know that that that a lot of people have intuitively understood for a really long time you think yeah it seems like there a compulsion to like we don’t we don’t want like AGI to emerge and necessarily
48:48 · I guess now I’m seeing that it could be a reflection of the natural world but we certainly wouldn’t want it to be reflective of our understanding of the Natural World Through The Eyes of Darwin right like we don’t want it to be that competitive and that resource hungry like you’d want the converse right you’d want it to be extremely cooperative and and plugged into sort of this greater yeah it’s like now now we have to bring melium into the conversation right because it’s about time because you have to know that these trees and other
49:16 · organisms do communicate and are connected and our coordinating and they too and even even with each other by the way not just right even even with the same species they they cooperate as well as competing right and and that we we see that connectivity is really the future of thought here um totally and and by the
49:36 · way uh cooperate cooperation and uh and and competition they’re not really distinct right you know like we our our neurons compete to form wiring in the brain and and then a bunch of connections and neurons die you know early early on in development and yet of course at the same time they’re cooperating to make something big right so those things I think that we draw a distinction more on emotional grounds than on mathematical grounds they actually look very similar when you when you look at what’s going on everything comes back to Buddhism doesn’t it it’s like the it’s like you know healthy
50:07 · competition not any like not the not just competition but healthy balanced competition healthy balanced human beings healthy balanced connectivity um but it does I agree with you in that what the world’s deficient of right
50:24 · now is not not so much and of course I’m speaking broadly but not so much the scarcity of of our basic needs but the scarcity of our connectivity that’s and not just that we’re not connected but the quality of that it’s the it’s the it’s the health food of connectivity not the junk food of connectivity right right I’ve used the
50:48 · word often solidarity for thatan meaning that you feel you feel for others and you’re out you’re you’re kind of un one you’re you’re on team them right you know as well as well as just you know out for yourself so there’s this world of coopertition I think you know that yeah that is that right place and do you
51:09 · do you think I’m trying to go to like how AI our new God that we will worship is going to is going to um is going to help us connect better on that it’s like be more Cooperative in how how we do business how we live how we
51:29 · coexist as countries with each other with everything that’s going on right now in the world it’s hard it it really is it does live in contrast of this coopertition mentality right there’s and then maybe it’s it’s that you have to break things to heal things right so let’s set that complexity aside for a second and say maybe that’s what’s happening um maybe we’re resolving sores that just have been festering but um but
51:58 · how what do you make of that that that in some ways connectivity is is is as bad as it’s always been yeah I I mean it’s a it’s a high stakes gamble if we say like oh you’ve got to break it to fix it I mean I I know you know um I think xek like was you know basically prot Trump because he was like yeah he’ll break it and then and then we can fix it I don’t know it’s it’s a little bit of a scary road to go yeah I agree cuz you don’t know if you can it’s like lighting up for you don’t know if you can put it’s easy to light it right exactly um so so I don’t know
52:31 · but um I I I guess um I will so I mean as as far as concrete examples go of like you know how can how can AI help with connectivity well um I mean at at risk of going too much into like literal-minded you know sort of product thinking uh if you imagine that we all have um a eyes that you know that are augmenting our ability to communicate with each other and connect and so on um think about the number of um I guess
52:58 · win-win situations that um that could obtain if you and the and the needs of all of the people around you in your immediate vicinity you know uh could somehow be matchmade a little better uh you know oh like you know you two are both are both single like literally matchmaking right or or like you know you two should really meet or you should discuss this thing or you know like you need a job and and this person has got you know has got the right thing or you know this one needs help you know with
53:27 · her like morning shift at the at the at the bakery oh this one like you know really like needs a little bit of you know so think about that right like the wingman people to like like for me right if I’m if I’m in a party situation I’m pretty quiet like it takes someone to break the ice maybe an AI is there to to to connect me with someone that I would have a good conversation with if I could just you know relax be a little more exted yeah and so it’ll just wingman and go over there say hey you guys should
53:57 · chat about feels like in that sense in that sense too they could almost be like little empathy engines too right like they don’t exist just to like I mean they could help you navigate a party but they could also like help you form better connections with the people at that party and in that sense it might kind of open a new paradigm for experiencing the
54:18 · world and I wonder like what would even happen to like we we cling mightily I think to the IDE of individuality and yeah and you know you can point to all your achievements and this and that but does that I mean it feels like that has a bit of currency to it now but I wonder if that then starts to diminish too is you just it becomes less important what
54:37 · you achieved on your own when you’re connected to this Matrix of like not only understanding how you’ve contributed to other people’s lives but how you’ve made them feel better right help them through certain problems and how they’ve actually reciprocated exactly of of mutual Care mutual Aid
54:53 · effectively and I I know I sound a little a little communist when I talk about these things but I I mean it in a way that is as that is inclusive right of of both of both cooperation and competition yeah but in a in a way that in a way that that that doesn’t leave uh doesn’t leave people behind that doesn’t that has like these these baselines of care um and um and yeah I think that’s
55:14 · all within reach that’s all possible and yes intelligence uh you know can absolutely help to to bring that about so you know I I don’t feel like um like AI is is uh is a problem I think it’s a potential massive solution right I do think that the way we’ve organized capitalism uh is is likely a problem uh
55:32 · you know it’s sometimes been talked about the same way as democracy is like a terrible idea but it’s better than the alternative well maybe there are more Alternatives you know maybe maybe there there’s the design space is bigger than we’ve allowed ourselves there’s a coopertition component it’s it’s not black or white it’s not it’s not communism or or capitalism it’s it’s it’s coopertition it’s a middle ground um and there’s yeah I’m I’m I’m still
55:58 · digging out of this that AI is the melium for humans I’m I’m I’m in love with this idea because I think people in the world could start to see it behave towards humanity and serve Us in that way I think they would be as optimistic as I am about it um yeah well yeah they’re feeling that connection too the way you’d imagine like a tree into like innately sense that connection to
56:27 · all the fungal bodies and all the you know the other plant life in the forest like we maybe maybe we have that capacity but we’re certainly don’t always seem to be tapped into it no we’re very spotty about how we about how we use it how we tap into it right yeah yeah so yeah AI kind of bringing us to that place well this was a great
56:48 · chat yeah I really I really enjoyed myself what a wonderful conversation what what great what great questions observations awesome awesome thank you so much for sharing your time with this place this was really fun my pleasure this great hey thanks again for tuning in to Invisible machines don’t forget to follow invisible machines wherever you get your podcasts so that you can hear new episodes as soon as they drop you can also watch this podcast on the invisible machines YouTube channel thank
57:16 · you so much to everyone who listens to this podcast and especially to those of you who leave comments because we’ve received a lot of really useful commentary that has helped us shape this podcast as we move forward with it thank you as always to our producers Elias Parker Kate timchenko and our video editor Michael litvinoff for making this podcast look and sound wonderful we look forward to catching up with you again next week right here on invisible
57:51 · machines