Gustav Söderström
speaker
294 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Gustav Söderström’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
So I both subscribe to the product overhang idea, that there's a huge product overhang. And if we froze, I think we would see products shipped that look amazing for several years before we exhausted what we have. So I subscribe to that. But I also subscribe to that there is no limit for compute. Eventually, you get to Computronium.
But if you look at just the physics of Computronium... What's Computronium? It's the most computational universe could do, theoretically. We're very far from that limit. So I think we're going to go all the way there before we stop. And I think we're going to be very inventive. There is a nice analogy. I don't know who came up with it, but I think Ben Evans talks about it quite often.
You know, when the spreadsheet came along, the idea was the same. Now all accountants are going to go out of business. What happened was we could just not imagine if calculation cost went to zero. What's going to happen is you could imagine that the value of doing that is going to go to zero because there were so many accountants in the world.
So what happened was we just started doing massively more accounting. When there's no cost to spreadsheeting, you're going to start to do models to predict the futures of this asset or good or something into the future forever. We just came up with so much more spreadsheeting that you could do. And it's bigger than ever.
I think from a financial point of view, when the cost of something drops, the demand usually increases more than the drop. And I think that's bound to happen with intelligence. It is the ultimate thing. And to say like, no, I have enough intelligence. It's not interesting. I think we're going to be ashamed of how mundane things we spend inference on. Could my coffee be one degree warmer tomorrow?
If it's truly no cost asking the questions, I think people will.
Maybe now's the time to ask you about sitting in the back garden with David Deutsch and talking to him about this concept of the beginning of infinity. Computronium made me think of your interest in this topic and your answer there that there's no endpoint here. It's just going to keep going. We're going to keep learning, keep deploying our new technology.
Can you talk about that book, why it influenced you, your conversation with him?
Yeah, so David Deutsch has been a hero of mine since I read the beginning of infinity. And then he wrote another book called The Fabric of Reality. He's considered the father of quantum computing. Obviously, quantum computing is one of these gifts that technology is going to give us, and it's about to get very real, I think, very soon.
So I've always been interested in it because quantum mechanics is the most insane thing on this planet. We live in what we consider this reality, but if you go to the bottom layer, this is not reality. It's just some three-dimensional projection that we live in. The Fabric of Reality had a big impact on me. Isn't Everettian, he believes in multiple worlds scenario.
I read that book and it blew my mind. Then Beginning of Infinity is maybe his most famous book, whereas Fabric of Reality is really about quantum computing and how quantum computer works. The Beginning of Infinity is very philosophical, and he has a bunch of big ideas there. He's a very positive person. And now at 70 plus, I finally got to interview him in his garden in Oxford.
He's not of great health, so he had to be outdoors, you know, distanced. And everyone is very negative on the future. There's so many problems, AI could go wrong, and all things could go wrong, climate. He's actually very positive about the future. He's clear that there are risks. But he sees us going out there into the stars. I asked him, where do you think we are in a million years?
And he's like, well, maybe we're this far outside of the solar system, but not quite there. He's very certain we're going to get there. He's a very positive person. And when I asked him about his life, he's very content with his life. He's very happy. So he's just an inspiring person still at this age. I wish I would be like him in that age.
But this book has a few concepts that I've tried to apply at Spotify. And one of them is he talks about the power of explanations. And he thinks the human mind is infinitely scalable. He does not think there's a limit to what we can understand because of explanations. And I think this is something that a lot of people, I agree with that, but a lot of people disagree.
Certainly there are things we could never understand. His view is no. There is no limit to what we can understand. We are the only species who broke that barrier because we have explanations. Other species have pattern recognition. They can do things and learn the pattern that this works. There's some cultural transfer maybe of looking at someone else doing that pattern.
A bird can see another bird. Some species can teach their kids, but they never produce explanations. He has a definition of a good explanation. He's very inspired by Karl Popper as a philosopher. It's his house god. So he takes a bit from Popper. He takes a bit from science. So he says, obviously, that a good explanation has to be falsifiable.
But he says a few other things that I think are obvious in retrospect, but not before. He says that a good explanation has to scale. has to have reach. What does he mean with that? He says that some explanations explain something quite locally. You can have an explanation about, for example, the Sun revolving around the Earth, which explains a bunch of stuff, but it doesn't scale to other planets.
A better explanation is to have the Earth revolving around the Sun. It just scales better to different scales. So a good explanation has to scale up and down. A good explanation has to be compatible with all previous explanations, But most interestingly, he says that a good explanation has to be hard to vary. This I find very obvious, but also very non-obvious to people.
So what does he mean with a good explanation has to be hard to vary? He means that, for example, if your explanation for the weather on the planet is that now Thor is angry, so there's thunder there. It's an explanation, but it's too easy to vary. You can say, well, now someone else is angry. They also had a hammer. It's too easy to vary and get the same result.
A good explanation, if you move one of the parameters, the entire thing is not predictive anymore. Then you're probably close to the truth. I think this is so interesting because the problem with most conspiracy theories that people love is they're so easy to vary. You can just exchange that character for some other crazy person who did something crazy and still going to produce the same thing.
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