Michael Levin

You know, we're very bad at.

predicting uh attractors in the space of complex systems generally speaking right we don't know so may so maybe evolution on earth has these deep attractors that no matter what has happened it pretty much would likely to end up there or maybe not i don't know what's a really difficult idea to imagine that if you ran earth a million times 500 000 times you would get hitler

Yeah, maybe, maybe.

It's difficult.

I think one of the things that's important about chimeric bioengineering technologies, all of those things, are that we have to start developing a better science of

predicting the cognitive goals of composite systems.

So we're just not very good at it, right?

We don't know if I create a composite system and this could be Internet of Things or swarm robotics or a cellular swarm or whatever,

What is the emergent intelligence of this thing?

First of all, what level is it going to be at?

And if it has goal-directed capacity, what are the goals going to be?

We are just not very good at predicting that yet.

And I think that it's an existential-level need for us to be able to... Because we're building these things all the time, right?

We're building...

Both physical structures like swarm robotics and we're building social financial structures and so on with very little ability to predict what sort of autonomous goals that system is going to have, of which we are now cogs.

And so learning to predict and control those things is going to be critical.

So if you're right and there is some kind of attractor to evolution, it would be nice to know what that is and then to make a rational decision of whether we're going to go along or we're going to pop out of it or try to pop out of it.

because there's no guarantee i mean that's that's that's the other you know kind of important thing a lot of people i get a lot of complaints uh from from people email me and say uh you know what you're doing uh it isn't natural you know and i'll say look natural that that'd be nice if if somebody was making sure that natural was was was matched up to our values but no one's doing that by you know evolution optimizes for biomass that's it

Nobody's optimizing.

It's not optimizing for your happiness.