Michael Levin
speaker
450 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Michael Levin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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So observ so observers that um where where their various um components are about something, you know, that that that have that reference.
And one of the things that we're finding is that, and this this gets to to the distinction that you just made around uh, you know, there are goals that you give a system when you create the thermostat, and then there are sort of intrinsic goals that evolve and and things like that.
One of the things that we're finding and and there's not time to go into all the details, but um
I'll send you some of this stuff after uh we're finding that there are very minimal systems, very minimal systems, deter in fact deterministic minimal systems where
There is n there there is no magic in the sense that there is no you know, in biology there's always some mechanisms you just haven't found yet.
You can say, Well, there must be something that you just haven't so these things there's the we we can simulate them, uh we on the computer, we know exactly what all the ingredients are.
And what we see is that
There are the things that it's doing because you made it do that, because the algorithm says to do that.
But then there are also these weird side quests that the thing is doing that are nowhere in the algorithm.
And these additional sort of intrinsic, these these weird some of them are um what you would immediately recognize as competencies, things like goal uh um.
Um
Delay gratification and things like that.
But but others are just are just new sort of new goals that the thing obviously pursues that are not specified in the algorithm at all.
So I I I I I'm starting to think that that ability to um to have its own goals that are not nailed down by the mechanisms or the algorithms or the materials or all the stuff that we're used to.
Is really pretty baked into the world.
And I mean, I think evolution does an amazing job at scaling that up to the point where we start, you know, where it becomes obvious to us and that everybody can see that the that this is what this thing is doing, or or even to the point where it can self-report like us.
Um
But my at this point, my view is that that's actually um I and in fact, Josh and I are writing a paper called It Doesn't Take Much, which is basically all about these very basic, like very minimal systems that are already doing things that nobody told it to do.
So um yeah, I think I think it it it permeates uh the the world that we live in.
Please, Terry.
Showing 421–440 of 450 · page 22 of 23
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