Max Tegmark

It's a fair one.

It's tough.

I think given that I'm a really, really curious person, that's really the defining part of who I am.

I'm so curious.

I have some physics questions.

I love to understand.

I have some questions about consciousness, about the nature of reality.

I would just really, really love to understand also.

I could tell you one, for example, that I've been obsessing about a lot recently.

So I believe that, so suppose Tononi is right.

Suppose there are some information processing systems that are conscious and some that are not.

Suppose you can even make reasonably smart things like GPT-4 that are not conscious, but you can also make them conscious.

Here's the question that keeps me awake at night.

is it the case that the unconscious zombie systems that are really intelligent are also really efficient?

So they're really inefficient?

So that when you try to make things more efficient, which there'll naturally be a pressure to do, they become conscious.

I'm kind of hoping that that's correct.

And do you want me to give you a hand-wavy argument for it?

You know, like,

In my lab, every time we look at how these large language models do something, we see that they do it in really dumb ways and you could make it better.